Part One: A Community of Practice—At a Military Academy?

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Vittoria S. Rubino, Ph.D.
Senior Postgraduate Writing Fellow
U.S. Military Academy-West Point

Too often in writing center studies, we focus our attention on how to increase the quantity of our sessions, and perhaps not often enough on how to increase the quality of our consultants—their confidence, agency, and professionalization. When our writing center work becomes transactional, the development of and investment in our consultants becomes transactional, too. Think for a minute on the initiation ritual of roleplaying a consultation—often, we ask an inexperienced undergraduate to “play” at being a knowledgeable consultant, and they either pass or fail (sometimes with a bit of isolated feedback, other times not). Unfortunately, this roleplay scenario can be the end of many undergraduate consultant’s professional development, as has been my overall experience working in writing centers these last ten years. But, as Etienne Wenger (1998) argues, “whereas training aims to create an inbound trajectory targeted at competence in a specific practice, education must strive to open new dimensions for the negotiation of self” (894). How do we get there?

For the past three years, I have served as the Senior Postgraduate Writing Fellow in the Mounger Writing Program, a subsection of the West Point Writing Program at the U.S. Military Academy. I joined the ranks, so to speak, of this writing center under the assumption that I would be entering a particular kind of Pratt-esque “contact zone” (or a combat zone) in the most traditional sense of it—one where the program tried to “militarize” writing and consulting in a formulaic, un-embodied way, and then the Cadet Writing Fellows would follow suit. What I mean here is that, as a civilian with no connection to the Academy, I assumed the larger writing program’s stated emphasis on “thoughtful, skilled communication [as] essential to officership” implied that writing and consulting could only happen uni-directionally, as is often assumed of officership generally, almost without the possibilities for collaboration and experimentation. As someone who earned a PhD in Comp/Rhet with a focus in arts-based pedagogies, you might say I deem these qualities rather important.

Needless to say, I found myself in an entirely different sort of contact zone. For these writing consultants, the knowledge they gain during their initiation into writing center work occurs both inside and outside the three-credit gateway seminar course in writing process and pedagogy required for Cadet Writing Fellows. Though together they read a collection of common texts for discussion and engage with writing assignments that ask them to think of “disruptive moments” or contemporary challenges in writing center work, you will still find them participating in collaborative thinking, also, within the writing center (among their peers like the Cadet Writing Fellows and the professional writing fellows, like me), and more interestingly, directly in the West Point Writing Program office with peers and administrators alike. I find this particularly interesting because, as Georganne Nordstrom (2019) rightly argues, “less attention . . . has been paid to the relationship between the administrator of the center and consultants . . . I am interested in reinforcing collaboration as part of the tutoring environment.”

Even within the scope of a military academy, where civilians (like myself) may have supposed Cadets were simply trained to “follow orders” and comply with commanding officers, I observed something else happening instead—a genuine community of practice, a real invocation of “the beginners mind” (Fontaine), had formed. The consultants and administrators work together to find ways to replace singular experiences with enduring action and reflection, which begins with the gateway seminar and continues with subsequent courses and writing center work. This foundation is strengthened with consultants’ evolving observations and hands-on experiences, moments of authentic role playing, room for experimentation in their practice, and other moments for reflective practice which the Cadet Writing Fellows take upon themselves. 

As I reach the end of my time in the program, I wonder: what is it about this particular program, within this particular context, that cultivates a kind of shared enthusiasm for learning composition pedagogy, the synergetic spirit for writing center work found amid even its junior members? What does it take for an undergraduate writing fellow, one imbued with confidence, agency, and professionalism, to happen?

Works cited

Fontaine, Sheryl. “Teaching with the Beginner's Mind: Notes from My Karate Journal.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 54, no. 2, 2002, pp. 208-221. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1512146

Geller, Anne et al. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Utah State UP, 2007.

Hall, R. Mark. “Theory In/To Practice: Using Dialogic Reflection to Develop a Writing Center Community of Practice.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, 2011, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43442358

Macauley, William. “Insiders, Outsiders, and Straddlers: A New Writing Fellows Program in Theory, Context, and Practice.” Praxis, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, http://www.praxisuwc.com/macauley-121

Nordstrom, Georganne. “A Practitioner’s Inquiry into Professionalization: When We Does Not Equal Collaboration.” Praxis, vol. 17, no. 1, 2019, http://www.praxisuwc.com/171-nordstrum.

Wegner, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge UP, 1998.