From: "Tarvers, Josephine K." <tarversj@exchange.winthrop.edu>To: "Writing Center Mailing List" <wcenter@lyris.acs.ttu.edu>
Subject: [wcenter] Re: Theorizing
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 09:26:06 -0500
It's amazing what happens when you get WCENTER on digest, as I do; discussions move at the speed of light before you see the first response to a post. I'm glad to have seen this take place with the "theorizing" thread that started yesterday. I wanted to put my oar in on a couple of points:
1. Neal, you're right that not all Centers (and maybe not any Centers) should be looking for recognition from MLA--but as Barry said, they're symptomatic of academe, which changes slowly. The fact that they actually have a couple of books under consideration means that, at least at some level, the profession is taking Writing Center work seriously--and that's really the kind of recognition I was talking about in that first post: that the organizations in whatever part of academe recognize us not just as a service but as contributing intellectual partners. (As I write this sentence I recall the Reagan-era Doonesbury cartoon in which an EPA employee threatens to jump out a window of the EPA building unless the administration acknowledges that the purpose of the EPA is to protect the environment....)
The article in last month's WLN about directors, especially in smaller institutions, being even more underpaid and professionally jeopardized than those in more 'stable' situations plays into this, I think--it's a question of self-fashioning, of how the Writing Center community presents itself to the larger community of academe (or as one of my colleagues calls it, acadumb) and how we get taken seriously.
2. I think Beth makes a really good point when she points out that the theory/praxis dichotomy is a false one--they (should) feed each other, and inspire each other. The references brought up in the last 24 hours here to so many newer theoretical positions should in a lot of ways be a wakeup call to us to start asking Neal's question: how much of this is affecting what we do and how much have our practices changed in the last two decades? As my therapist was fond of saying, "Self-examination starts with you." Is Joan right when she says that much of what we do is better than what we say we do? Or does thinking this keep us from examining what we do with different lenses and from different perspectives? (Again, Eric Hobson's presentation on VARK and why talking may not be the best way of helping the majority of writing center clients comes to my mind--his statistics showing that most academics tend to learn through talk/write strategies but the majority of students don't has started a huge chain of questions about my teaching for me...).
I'm learning a lot from reading everyone else's posts on this subject--I hope the thread will keep going for a while longer...
Jo