Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 1 (2022)
Counterstory in the Center: Replacing Privileged Pedagogy with Brave Teaching of Writing
Beatrice Mendez Newman
The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
beatrice.newman@utrgv.edu
When students walk into a writing center—online or onsite—they reverse the dynamics and politics of traditional pedagogy. Drafts in hand, whether confident or confused about their writing tasks, the second they set foot in writing center space, students seize agency for their success as writers. That matters tremendously because it disrupts the story of how writing instruction should happen. As writing center workers, we know a big unspoken truth that forms a conundrum of institutional life: that the instructors who are nominally responsible for teaching writing, whether in English classes or other disciplines, often ignore, renege on, or simply reject the responsibility of teaching writing. In other words, the story of teaching writing in institutional settings often turns into a counterstory where the writing center becomes the site of instruction not just a site of support.
Recently, Olga, a student in my Composition Theory and Pedagogy class, wrote about negotiating a writing task assigned in another class. The task was to write a reflective essay on a class reading, but, in the absence of instructional guidance, she had to figure out how to tackle the task on her own. Here’s how she explained her initial thinking about the task:
“How am I going to write this essay?” I have experience writing analytical essays and research papers, but I have no experience in writing reflection essays. . . . A part of me thought of reaching out to my professor, explaining that I didn’t have experience in writing a reflective essay, and asking her to show me an example of one. But I stopped myself because I didn’t want her to think I was trying to cheat on the final exam.
I was stunned when I read this, equally because Olga assumed that asking a question meant cheating, but also because the professor had failed to explain what was required.
In an edifying instructional framework, Olga should have been able to count on her instructor for guidance. Instead, Olga went to the writing center—which was a really good thing! As Olga’s “after story” shows, the tutors stepped up and filled the instructional role:
information . . . in my introduction, . . . to discuss three main topics for my body paragraphs discussing the chapters from the textbook. In another tutoring session, I was told to move information from one body paragraph to another and to briefly list what I learned in the class. In those first two tutoring sessions, I was given a lot of suggestions in how to improve my paper. And in my final tutoring session, the tutor and I went over grammatical errors in my paper. During those tutoring sessions, I started to feel more and more confident as I was given suggestions on how to revise my paper. When I turned in my final, I was proud of my work.
Olga’s expression of pride exemplifies Stephen North’s oft-quoted mantra: “in a writing center the object is to make sure that writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by instruction. . . . [O]ur job is to produce better writers, not better writing” (438). That her session at the writing center strengthened her as a writer is demonstrated in Olga’s reflective comments about her essay: “Despite getting an A on my reflective essay, I felt unsatisfied with the way my paper turned out.” She explained that she could have had a more assertive voice, a more fluid approach, more trust in her abilities as a writer. Olga was a changed writer, a writer with critical awareness of having written a paper she felt was flawed but that the instructor, who never explained what a reflective essay is, “rewarded” with an A. The tutor’s work led to a positive affective outcome: the tutor bolstered Olga’s confidence as a writer by showing her how to complete the writing task.
Writing centers, whether we want to see it this way or not, fill gaps created when instructors fail to mentor students in processes that lead to writing success. The traditional narrative about the function of writing centers is that they support what happens in the classroom. Olga’s confidence was forged not as an outcome in a student-instructor interaction but as the result of competent, directive tutoring in the writing center. The counterstory¹ in writing centers is that a good bit of writing instruction happens in the center, not because it is the job of the center to teach but because those who should be teaching writing are not.
Privileged Pedagogy
Traditionally writing center pedagogies, grounded on the work of greats like North, Irene Clark, Muriel Harris, Beth Bouquet, Nancy Grimm, and so many others, established the center as safe spaces where students could grow as writers. In recent years, writing center pedagogy has integrated much-needed work in social justice, translanguaging, disciplinary literacy, antiracist pedagogies, LGBTQ inclusivity, accessibility, and disability, transforming writing centers to sites of cutting-edge pedagogies for all learners. This integration reflects the understanding that difference—whether physical, cognitive, ethnic, sexual, gender-based, neurological, social, racial—profoundly shapes the psyche of the writer. Traditional approaches to teaching writing, like so much of what happens in classrooms from pre-school through graduate school, have been aimed at mainstream, white/middle class students, who fit a narrative of privilege, a story of undifferentiated teaching. Writing centers, on the other hand, recognize difference and operationalize real adjustments in pedagogies of accessibility.
I want to take a brave step back to encourage writing centers to seize an even more assertive claim to their role as de facto teachers of writing in institutional settings. Let’s start by acknowledging fundamental problems that bring students to the center, problems I refer to as “privileged pedagogy,” the unreflective teaching that happens in classrooms and that leaves writers needing more instruction.
Writing is often assigned but not taught. This pedagogical failure results in writing insecurity and a concomitant negative view of writing (Gallagher, 9, 52-53).
A culture of continuous improvement through formative feedback is not embraced throughout campus communities. Instead, assignments are made, students often bumble through the processes of writing, summative grades are given, and students learn on their own how to respond to failure in writing, which often leads to holistic failure in a class or perhaps even in the institution.
Instructors and professors see the work of teaching writing as the job of the English department. Disciplinary literacy (Shanahan and Shanahan), the mindset that recognizes distinctions in learning, researching, writing, expression, and conversation for individual disciplines, is rarely integrated into teaching in college classes.
Instructors and professors in college classrooms, by and large, have had no training in general classroom pedagogy or in discipline-specific pedagogy. If we think about this, this is an egregious situation. In colleges and universities, professional development in pedagogy is optional or even unnecessary. Recently, in pragmatic but unfortunate acknowledgement of writing instructors’ lack of professional readiness to teach writing, colleges and universities have resorted to predesigned writing courses that package instructional materials and activities that can be used by anyone teaching the course (Tspetsura; Mitchum and Winet).
There are many more problems, but these are sufficient for scaffolding some brave truths as a counterstory of real teaching in the writing center.
Brave Teaching: Owning the Privilege of Teaching Writing
Let’s attend to North’s words again: in writing centers we work to change the writer not the writing. I interpret this as knowing how to show student writers what to do when they are faced with a writing task that they may not quite understand, how to take risks that help them create writing that stands out, how to do the hard work of just writing and then revising. I offer some principles and powerful teaching practices drawn from a diverse assortment of resources for teaching writing in secondary schools. Yes . . . much of the best practices are presented and demonstrated in books for writers younger than college students, but those practices transfer prolifically and reliably for college writers who are writing apprentices, still learning the art and craft of writing.
“[A] good writer recognizes that a lot of lousy first-draft writing must be done before better writing can occur” (Gallagher, 50). My students love this comment; they embrace it joyfully, finding validation in their efforts to just write and then worry about revision later. They love even more Anne Lamott’s much more straightforward comment that “all good writers write [shitty first drafts]. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts” (Ch. 3). The truth that students need to learn is that first drafts often are completely off target, but if they’ve taken the initiative to come to the writing center, then there’s time and space for productive revision.
Revision is extremely challenging, tedious work. Gallagher’s STAR approach to revision (Substitute, Take things out, Add, Rearrange) (59-62) gives writers a playbook for confident revision. Imagine a tutoring session with a student writer who has a good draft but could use some syntactic tinkering. The STAR approach is perfect. Harry Noden’s image grammar strategies are similarly transformational. Tutors should take a look at least at the first chapter of Noden’s Image Grammar: Teaching Grammar as Part of the Writing Process to learn how participles, absolutes, adjectives out of order, appositives, and vivid verbs can turn lifeless writing, in any genre in any discipline, into writing that pulls readers into the writing, and, as Noden puts it, eliminates “image blanks”) (4-13, 29).
The thinking backward strategy explained in Writing on Demand: Best Practices and Strategies for Success by Anne Ruggles Gere, Leila Christenbury, and Kelly Sassi shows students how to extrapolate effective writing practices from writing models (11-27). Let’s go back to Olga’s example. Using the thinking backward strategy, a tutor could have shown Olga a sample reflective essay, a mentor essay from which she could have deductively identified what works and how she could adapt those strategies for her own writing. Models are invaluable teaching tools in writing because, as Lynne R. Dorfman and Rose Cappelli explain, mentor texts inspire writers to take risks, “to learn how to do what they may not yet be able to do on their own” (3).
Feedback, even the worst feedback, should be interpreted as a route to improvement. This is a tough lesson for writing center tutors to teach because feedback, especially in summative assessment, is often not offered as a catalyst for improvement. Additionally, feedback can set back a writer if it is misinterpreted by the student or ineptly constructed by the instructor. In an insightful essay on how students process feedback, Kelly Blewett focuses on students’ affective and then operational response to feedback. Blewett inventively shows how students can use emojis to process their reaction to feedback (66-70). Writing center tutors can be valuable “translators” of feedback, helping students find direction and guidance in even the most ineptly constructed feedback.
I know these strategies work because I used them daily in the years that I served as writing center director—and I use them in my classrooms. Students like Olga, however, show that in a lot of classrooms throughout our institutions, good teaching of writing is not happening. In the absence of firm, reliable writing instruction in the classroom, tutors must teach bravely, boldly, and directly.
Counterstory in the Center
If the writing center could be kept functionally in support service status, there would be no need for a counterstory. The tough truth is that writing centers perform much of the real writing instruction in institutions, especially at institutions with large populations of marginalized students. Privileged pedagogy elides difference, eschews hard teaching in favor of completion, coverage, and syllabus-driven instruction, and outsources to the writing center the challenging work of teaching writing. Brave teaching in the center seizes advantage of counterstory to create agency, empowerment, and writing success for students who, like Olga, had to find edifying, productive instruction when classroom teaching failed.
Notes
I want to recognize the inspiration I drew from Aya Y. Martinez’s Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory (2020). Though not focused on CRT, I strive to reflect her spirit of questioning, challenging, and reconstructing things as they are to shape new ways of being and acting in our worlds.
Works Cited
Blewett, Kelly. “FYC Students’ Emotional Labor in the Feedback Cycle.” JAEPL: The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives in Learning, vol. 20, 2020, pp. 60-78.
Cantu, Olga. “The reflective essay.” Essay written in English 4343, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Summer 2021.
Dorfman, Lynne R., and Rose Cappelli.. Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature, K-6, 2nd ed. Stenhouse, 2017.
Gallagher, Kelly. Teaching Adolescent Writers. Stenhouse, 2006.
Gere, Anne Ruggles, Leila Christenbury, and Kelly Sassi. Writing on Demand: Best Practices and Strategies for Success. Heinemann, 2005.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life. Anchor Books, 1994. Kindle e-book.
Martinez, Aya Y. Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. National Council of Teachers of English, 2020.
Mitchum, Catrina, and Kristen Winet. “The Potential of Pre-Designed Online Writing Courses as Instructor Training in Multimodality.” Global Society of Online Literacy Educators Annual Conference. 28 Jan. 2022. online.
Noden, Harry. Image grammar: Teaching Grammar as Part of the Writing Process. 2nd ed., Heinemann, 2011.
North, Stephen M. “The idea of a writing center.” College English, vol. 46, no. 5, 1984, pp. 433-446.
Shanahan, Timothy, and Cynthia Shanahan, C. “What Is Disciplinary Literacy and Why Does It Matter? Topics in Language Disorders, vol. 32, no. 1, 2012, pp. 7-18.
Tseptsura, Mariya. “Flexibility and Autonomy in Predesigned Composition Courses: In Search of a Solution for Post-COVID Online Instruction.” Global Society of Online Literacy Educators Annual Conference. 28 Jan. 2022. online.