Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Classroom Connections?
Carino discusses, albeit briefly, the connection between the writing center (lab, clinic, etc) and the classroom. He suggests that proto-WCs were started in the classroom with the "lab approach" and then the pedagogy required a movement away from classroom teaching into its own space (17). I find it interesting that WCs started in the classroom, but now many question (or seem to) what the applicability of the work done in a WC to classroom issues. How are writing centers linked to classroom work? How do the two relate to each other? How should they relate?
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Good questions. When you say that some question the applicability of the WC to the classroom, what are you referring to?
Speaking from experience as a contract instructor, I wasn't even aware of the research that WCs were doing until I started my program here. Of course, I was aware of little research on composition till I came here, and I guess that's my point. If 80 percent of the composition courses are being taught by contract faculty like me -- who probably earned good grades in English and comp and therefore were not "remediated" to a WC, then the majority of instructors have no personal experience with the WC except as a remediation source. The idea that WCs are a source for research on comp and teaching never even occurs to us.
I'm referring more to a feeling I have gotten in my own work rather than anything in the articles we have read yet.
The questioning isn't so much whether or not WC work will help students improve classroom performance. Instead, it seems to be a questioning of how integral the work done in the WC is and what a classroom teacher could learn from WC practices. I know that there are some articles out there (I'm thinking of one by Muriel Harris, but I don't have a full citation) that discusses how tutoring can help improve teaching in graduate students. Still, many people question me personally when I insist that there is much for everyone to learn about teaching from tutoring.
I think I may have rambled there a bit more than I intended....
In my project on grading fall semester in 605, what most interested me was the conflict between responding and evaluating (the coach vs. referee metaphor). I think of Writing Centers as coaches. Teachers can coach, too, but at some point they have to be referee. It seems to me that the coaches would need to know what kinds of "calls" a referee makes in order to best help a student in a particular class, but that's where the metaphor starts to seem a little creepy. Still, I wish more students would go to the Writing Center because most likely they'll hear confirmation of what I'm already telling them or maybe get an explanation they can grasp better than what I'm telling them.
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