English 690: Writing Center Theory

As I mentioned yesterday, I think it is strange that Nelson uses student success in the classroom as a way to demonstrate the efficacy of the WTC. Carmen’s 92 on a Russian History paper is a typical example. It seems that when a student struggles to meet the expectations of writing in the classroom it reflects poor teaching by the classroom instructor, but when a student succeeds classroom practice seems to be tacitly endorsed—or at least no longer worth bothering about. It may be, I suppose, that Nelson is only worried about the harm that composition instructors are inflicting on student writers, but her invective against the hierarchical structure and subtractive evaluation that are typical of universities suggests that she does not believe the problem to be limited to the English department. In her defense it may be worth noting that there is quite a bit of talk about the failures of the WTC tutors. On the other hand, all of their failures turn out not to be failures at all. And interestingly, it seems that when she writes about failures in the WTC those failures are always personified by the students (e.g., “she was ‘one of our failures’”), whereas when she writes about the failures of classroom instructors she names specific deficiencies.