(Published in The Writing Lab Newsletter, June 2001)
Ó Copyrighted Material.

Pitching a Tent, Welcoming a Traveler, and Moving On:
Toward A Nomadic View of the Writing Center
by Jeffry C. Davis, Wheaton College

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,
and the true success is to labour.”

from “El Dorado,” by Robert Louis Stevenson

I was traveling across campus to my office when an administrator, going in the opposite direction, paused long enough to offer a greeting, pose a question, and present a surprising tidbit of news. “Are you ready to move?,” he asked with a grin. I must have looked somewhat bewildered, so he continued on, “You probably know that we’ve already started to implement the College’s five initiatives for the New Century Challenge.” I shook my head affirmatively, aware that the initiatives he referred to were part of a fundraising campaign to enhance Wheaton College’s educational effectiveness with regard to faculty, technology, library services, community, and student life. “The plan at this point is to link the writing center with the new computer research and instructional center,” he went on. “That means that you will be moving from the basement of the library to the first floor, near the main entrance.” Rushing on to a meeting, he shouted that he would get back to me to clarify the details, and he assured me that the move wouldn’t happen until sometime during the semester break. I thanked him for the good news, began walking again, and then thought to myself, “The semester break?”

Quickly I became overwhelmed by concurrent feelings of elation and anxiety. On the one hand, I did write a proposal requesting that the administration consider my ideas on how a new writing center could promote the New Century Challenge initiatives. Obviously they had reviewed my proposal and were ready to act on it. So, I couldn’t help but be pleased. Yet on the other hand, it seemed that I had recently finished the arduous task of getting the writing center up and running again after moving it from its previous quarters on the second floor of a building halfway across campus. The thought of packing up books, computers, equipment, and supplies, only to unpack them again and set up a new site, led me to view myself, my tutors, our work, and the writing center as downright nomadic.

As I continued the walk to my office, I recounted momentous events from our nomadic existence. My predecessor, now the chair of English and my boss, first put things in motion thirteen years ago with the help of a one-time grant. The early days were not easy: a case for institutional support had to be made and won, tutors had to be hired and given basic training, and some sort of space had to be found for our regular use. Wheaton’s center, like so many writing centers that start up at small liberal arts colleges, began on a meager budget in an unused classroom, where unseasoned tutors met with guinea-pig student writers during limited evening hours.

After our center became established, the main administrative building on campus underwent renovation, resulting in a spare office; it was offered to us for exclusive writing center use. Cramped but functional, the office became home, a place where tutors didn’t have to box everything up at the end of each long night, as they did in the classroom. And given its strategic location—near the main computer lab—we happily siphoned off a fair amount of daily, overflow business, which increased our numbers and lengthened our hours. We also purchased a computer and hooked up a printer, going from handwritten record keeping to an electronic database. My staff and I camped there comfortably, working contentedly and welcoming visitors to our congenial surroundings. Regularly we received compliments for the shaded blue lamps and the Monet reproductions on the walls, which had a calming effect on students. It was an easy place to tutor, and to learn, and to grow. But then, after several semesters, we were unexpectedly asked to move on to another area. Our space was needed for a new administrative office.

With the promise of a larger site to pitch our tent, we trekked across campus to our present location, the lower level of the library. It was a secluded place, and less visible and accessible to students, but it proved to be almost three times bigger. To enhance our new locale, we asked the College to outfit us with four additional computers (for student use), another printer, some furniture (including a sizable bookshelf and a comfortable chair), and some plants. We got what we asked for. Word got around about our “new and improved” writing center, and students came in greater numbers than before. All that took place less than three years ago.

Now, once again, the writing center needed to move, and I needed to start making plans to travel. As I arrived back at my office, in checklist fashion my mind was reviewing the sorts of things that I would soon have to do. Then, while reaching for the keys to open my door, something dawned on me: my reflections on the writing center’s nomadic existence had greater significance than I first realized. “What,” I wondered, “are some of the theoretical implications of a nomadic writing center?” Sitting at my desk, I let my thoughts wander from my head to the page in front of me.

One of my perennial challenges—as is the case for most directors—involves communicating to students, faculty, and administrators what the writing center is, and what it does. Many misperceptions abound. Consequently, I sometimes have struggled to know where to begin in providing an accurate explanation to others. Bonnie S. Sunstein offers helpful insight, here, recognizing that there is an inherent difficulty in coming up with a stable definition for “writing center”:

In my quandary to come up with a clear and honest definition, one thing I have come to believe is that a writing center must not be understood, first and foremost, as a place.

In reality, what has defined the writing center at our college has not been an area or region understood largely in spatial terms—a center. As Sunstein poignantly observes, “A writing center cannot define itself as a space—we’re often kicked out of our spaces” (8). Being “kicked out” of an old space may not be all bad, as I have discovered at Wheaton, especially if it is a kick in the right direction. Writing centers at colleges and universities—relatively recent on the academic landscape—tend to be unstable phenomena, spatially speaking; they follow a sort of archetypal path, journeying from one location to another, as they gain credibility and worth. For that reason, and others, what best characterizes our writing center is not a place—though place certainly has some significance—but praxis.

Praxis, simply put, is theory put into action. “Travel” represents a nomadic understanding of praxis. In one sense, travel can be understood as actual physical movement, the common understanding of the word; but it can also represent the intellectual process of attaining knowledge and consciously applying it to particular skills, like writing, in order to extend those skills. Travel, in this sense, rarely happens quickly, easily, or directly; yet, for the committed traveler, it ultimately becomes a meaningful and gratifying activity.

Knowledge is vital to travel. When students from diverse backgrounds and disciplinary interests sojourn to our tent, we first welcome them to our ground, briefly offering knowledge about our writing center’s approach and methods. Then we attempt to meet students on their own ground, asking questions to help us get to know them a little better and to understand what they are working on and how they think we might be able to help them. This preliminary interchange of knowledge is essential if we are going to travel well together; we have to know what to expect from each other. As tutors and writers speak and listen to each other, paying attention to their respective realms of discourse, they draw upon mutually disclosed knowledge. Often unpredictable and fascinating, the interaction is never static. Travel depends upon collaborative, sincere, energetic engagement.

With the forgoing views in mind, what, then, constitutes an honest description of our writing center? As the director of a writing center on the move, when I describe what our writing center is and what it does, I realize that I must attempt to represent the reality of tutors as they interact with writers. It starts with a fundamental narration. The action—the plot—which develops between these two people—the characters—must lead somewhere, as in any good narrative. Usually, however, this “somewhere” is an “unknown” for both characters, who, though they may have a sense of purpose and direction, seldom are sure exactly where they will travel; this is because, in part, the tutoring session cannot be reduced to a rigid set of interpersonal rules, followed to calculated ends. There is no universal map that consistently guides every tutor and every student writer as they attempt to move forward. In light of this truth, Joan Hawthorne explains the importance of “directive tutoring”:

Thus, the work of praxis depends upon negotiation. The tutors’ training—their theoretical knowledge gained through workshops, weekly memos, meetings, and required readings—finds expression in dialog, often intuitively and spontaneously generated, during the fleeting moments that make up a session.

Praxis depends upon writing-center dialog, which transports both tutor and student writer from one insight to another, leading to a clearer vision of the writer’s work and, ultimately, to a sensible strategy for revision. “Writing centers, then,” as Peter Carino states, “are social as well as linguistic, social in the sense of the praxis that goes on there, linguistic in the sense that all of that praxis is mediated by language both as it occurs and in any attempts we make to document it. As language, our documentation, our discourse, is always already interpretive” (32). Given that the language we use interprets what we do, the best linguistic descriptor to convey the kind of praxis that occurs in our writing center at Wheaton, naturally, is nomadic. Travel not only typifies our past and our future, with regard to physical movement from place to place, but it also characterizes the daily theoretical application that results from tutor-writer interaction. Tutors and writers are always coming and going, moving in a multitude of directions—bodily, verbally, textually. A nomadic view of the writing center not only accounts for this flux, but emphasizes that such action—such travel—is central to its identity and function.

Ironically, our writing center’s wandering in the wilderness has been due, in part, to our successful praxis: students have sought us out to dialog and seek direction, and we have grown. Despite the center’s precarious presence during the past decade—pitching a tent in one place, only to take it down and pitch it in another—students have continued to wander, as nomads, across campus to find us, coming in ever-increasing numbers. This is best illustrated by the fact that last year we provided more than four times as many tutorials as we did in our first year. The steadily increasing student influx has factored into our need to be nomadic, moving to an ever more accommodating place of praxis—a larger tent.

In thinking about students’ regular excursions to our tent, wherever it has been pitched, I sense that in several ways they see Wheaton’s Writing Center as sort of oasis in the midst of their own nomadic lives. From semester to semester, they move from one set of courses to another, from one classroom to the next, from one professor and disciplinary discourse to another, from one writing assignment to the one after. Exciting as these academic endeavors can be, they are rarely easy. As David Bartholomae argues, “Since students assume privilege by locating themselves [my emphasis], within the discourse of a particular community—within a set of specifically acceptable gestures and commonplaces—learning, at least as it is defined in the liberal arts curriculum, becomes more a matter of imitation or parody than a matter of invention and discovery” (278). This nomadic activity of “locating” oneself in discourse communities across the disciplines, of writing papers using “acceptable gestures and commonplaces”—a highly complex kind of travel—can tire even the most seasoned of student travelers. Thus, from time to time students long for a place where they can find refreshment and encouragement for their academic journey.

When a writing center serves as an oasis, it represents a safe environment where students can temporarily stop off to discuss their writing, tell tales of grief and triumph in learning, confide in another with their fears and frustrations, and attain a clearer sense of their own process of composing. An oasis, as it is commonly understood, functions as a refuge. In that sense, nomadic learners regularly come to us wanting to pull up a chair, slow down for a while, and share a bit of their written reflections with a fellow traveler—a tutor. Sadly, this sort of dynamic exchange of talk, tales and text between travelers happens too seldom.

Besides being a refuge, a writing center that operates as an oasis becomes known as a fertile spot in the midst of an arid region. Simply put, green things grow here despite adverse conditions. When students drop by our writing center feeling lost in their thoughts, meandering hopelessly, lacking confidence in their ability to create something lively and worth a reader’s time, only to leave thirty minutes later with a sprout, something green and full of possibility, then our center has accomplished something significant. Growth in writing results, in part, from three essential tutoring activities: watering, fertilizing, and pruning. When watering, the tutor provides a steady stream of verbal and non-verbal support to encourage and motivate the visiting writer. Fertilizing entails the tutor making suggestions for added nutrients that would enhance the growth of a given piece. And pruning involves the thorny work of the tutor offering advice on what to eliminate—unnecessary branches of discourse that may be twisted or broken, and therefore unfruitful. These skillful activities have the potential to develop vital habits of thought and practice for any nomad who desires to perform an amazing feat—make something grow in the desert.

Most importantly, those who support a nomadic view of the writing center accept the responsibility of guiding students, of showing them how to “travel hopefully.” Hope emerges, for the traveling student writer, with the knowledge that certain debilitating frames of mind and habits can be consciously avoided, and other more healthy ones adopted. Clearly, tutors serve as vital catalyzing agents in the process of promoting favorable writing behavior. To promote hope and health within students as they write, staff members must adopt an ethic, one that helps them recognize and challenge counterproductive tendencies, one that directs their words and their actions. A nomadic writing center ethic signifies an ought, a better way to think about and practice writing. Such an ethic principally challenges two unhealthy motivations: complacency and undeserved gratification.

More than ever before, students feel pressured by subtle and overt forces, both societal and personal, tempting them to want success without its substance. Many succumb to “just getting the paper done” and then “just wanting the good grade”; critically speaking, I describe this as “the drive to arrive,” a tendency to desire—even demand—the results of effective writing without the requisite process of travel. This attitude, needless to say, militates against learning to write well and represents a state of mind that the nomadic writing center attempts to change.

Based upon his research on brain-compatible learning, published recently in the Writing Lab Newsletter, James Upton discusses the need to help writers move toward better states of mind, particularly while being tutored at the writing center. “Brain-compatible learning strategies, the attempt to make formal school experiences reflect and utilize the brain’s natural ‘learning operations,’” Upton explains, “are the true keys to any meaningful educational change” (11). Upton reminds us that students bring emotions with them into writing center sessions, emotions reflecting their current struggles: “Writing center personnel are often in a ‘reactive’ mode to the actions and attitudes of others, and . . . we may find ourselves with less than receptive writers who are angry, frustrated, belligerent, and/or apathetic” (11). To facilitate change within writers, moving them into states of mind which are conducive to maximal learning, Upton provides several ideas. Among them, he suggests that tutors debrief with a writer before a session, help writers reduce unhealthy stress and fear, encourage writers to make time for reflection during learning, and provide honest feedback in a positive manner (11-12). Upton believes that these approaches, and others, appropriated from brain research for instruction purposes, “will create a positive change in school structures and education practices” (12).

Upton’s insights, besides being rooted in research, implicitly reveal ethical conviction: they advocate better ways for tutors to influence writers which prove to be in sync with a holistic understanding of the human body. Because these ways promote elevated states of conscious learning, which have many long-term returns for the writer, they are superior to less conscious learning behaviors. To change the inferior “drive to arrive” state of mind and its negative effects on writers, workers at a nomadic writing center try to implement ethically oriented tutoring, like Upton’s, to encourage writers to travel a better route as they compose and learn. Gently and consistently, tutors remind writers to see their work as an extension of themselves and to embrace the experience of learning as they go through the various steps of writing. These positive “state changes,” once accepted and embodied by students, facilitate healthy composing behaviors and enrich the writing experience.

The notion of tutors becoming “state change facilitators” in the writing center may, to some in our success-crazed culture, seem radical . . . and it is. But for the writer who adopts these sorts of attitude alterations, with the tutor’s help, “true success” in writing will no longer simply be measured by the end product alone or the final grade it receives, but also by the quality of the “labor” put forth to produce a paper. Appropriately, then, the process of writing itself becomes worthwhile, and the knowledge from writing satisfying. When the writer rejects “the drive to arrive” and adopts “the will to travel,” writing can become liberating, transforming, even exciting. The nomadic writing center empowers student writers to value and pursue travel benefits such as these, and ultimately, to discover, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, “a better thing than to arrive.”

 

 

Works Cited

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies in Writer’s Block and Other

Composing Process Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New York: Guilford, 1985. 273-85.

Carino, Peter. “What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Our Metaphors: A Cultural Critique of Clinic, Lab,

and Center.” The Writing Center Journal 13:1 (Fall 1992): 31-42.

Hawthorne, Joan. “’We don’t proofread here’: Re-visioning the writing center to better meet student needs.” The

Writing Lab Newsletter 23:8 (April 1999): 1-6.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. “El Dorado.” Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers. Project Gutenberg Page. 7 July

1999. <http://gutenberg.net/index.html

Sunstein, Bonnie S. “Moveable Feasts, Liminal Spaces: Writing Centers and the State of In-Betweenness.” The

Writing Center Journal 18:2 (Spring/Summer 1998): 7-26.

Upton, James. “Brain-compatible learning: The writing center connections.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 23:10 (June

1999): 11-12.