From: Muriel Harris <harrism@omni.cc.purdue.edu>Subject: [wcenter] Re: Theorizing
To: "Writing Center Mailing List" <wcenter@lyris.acs.ttu.edu>
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 12:16:57 -0500 (EST)
I too find this discussion moving along at warp speed, but as it does, I also hear a strain of dismissing Steve North's sound byte as oversimplified. But I wonder if we're the ones who have oversimplified it in that we've taken the statement at face value and not sufficiently unpacked the notion that we work with the writer not the writing. Isn't that one of the great differences in the tutorial...that we *can* work with the whole person, not merely the text he/she brings in. As a classroom teacher, I'd have to work mainly from the text and respond to that, but as a tutor, I can look at the person, her individual differences, what her intent was, what her writing processes are, what she needs to learn, etc., etc. That's what we have to explore more thoroughly. We're doing a great job of discussing practices that encourage that, but the theorizing behind it may lie in other fields that we haven't sufficiently explored. Or have we? Any suggestions? If we use language to talk about language, how does that work, both in practice and in theory?
Mickey