Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Revisiting the Idea
In North's second essay, "Revisiting the Idea of a Writing Center," he writes that he wants "a situation in which writers are, in fact, motivated above engaged in, their writing because they are self-selectively enrolled in a program –coherent, four year sequence of study –that values writing" (88) and that "the best way to create this situation is to tie the Center directly to our Writing Sequence through the English major: to make it the center of consciousness" (89). Um, this seems a bit exclusionary and snobbish. What about students who are really engaged in their writing and want to talk about it but are not English majors? Should they not be allowed to be apart of the Writing Center? And does tying it to the Writing Sequence imply that the Writing Center is there to "serve, supplement, back up, complement, reinforce, or otherwise be defined by external curriculum," something, according to his first essay, Writing Center's should avoid?
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2 comments:
I'm glad you brought this up because I'm not even sure what he means: He seems to suggest making the Writing Center an extension of the English Department, possibly even requiring the large number of English graduate and undergraduate students to work for credit. The reference to English majors confused me because when he mentions the self-selection of a program that valued writing, I thought he was referring to students in any discipline who self-selected this course of study.
He seems to be offering what he believes to be a more modest vision for the writing center—and whether or not it has been widely embraced it appears to me to have some merit. That it should be easiest to engender an extended conversation about writing where people participate in a community that values writing seems unproblematic. North is simply recommending that the writing center narrow further a vision that is already relatively narrow. The typical writing center, for instance, probably expends little of its meager budget advertising to the community that surrounds the university campus. Are there people in the community that would like to participate in the conversation about writing that takes place in the writing center? Of course there are. Is the concentration of such people as high in the community as on campus? Probably not.
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