Gathering of Minds

Joyce Kinkead, Elizabeth Boquet, and Stephen North
The very last words of Judith Summerfield’s article “Writing Centers: A Long View” seem to be the theme of the articles we have been reading: “the gathering of minds” (28). Joyce Kinkead speaks about the minds of the past and how important remembering the past helps us not to repeat it and helps to inform us about ourselves. She relates how writing center associations became a meeting place for “the gathering of minds” and how the NWCA became “a stable mooring, a place to anchor” (38). Elizabeth Boquet in “A History of Writing Centers, Pre- to Post-Open Admissions” relates the emergence of writing centers from clinics and labs. She distinguishes between site and method and discusses the tension that emerged “between the institutional space of the writing center and the individual pedagogies enacted in that space” before and after open admissions (45). The emergence of peer tutors contributed to the concept of the writing center as a place of learning instead of instruction. Stephen North in “‘The Idea of a Writing Center’: building a Theoretical Foundation” speaks to “those not involved with writing centers” to explain its purpose: “for the most part we have always been open to anybody in the university community, worked with writing at any time during the compositing of a given piece of writing, and dealt with pieces of discourse, and not exercises on what might be construed as ‘sub-skills’ (spelling, punctuation, etc.) outside of the content of the writer’s work” (64). The writing center is a community of writers talking about writing, not a laboratory where writing problems are fixed. The “aim [is] to make better writers, not necessarily – or immediately – better texts” (73). Just as in writing centers, the gathering of minds discuss writing center development, emergence, and purpose.