"Writing Center Pedagogy" Response

One-to-one: yes. Individualized/Personalized: I think not. Writing centers do provide the opportunity for students to work with peers on a one-to-one basis, but they in no way provide individualized instruction for writing. The writing center tutors all attend a course that provides them with a specific hierarchy of needs students will face. Thus, the tutors come to the writing center equipped with a "grocery list" of ways to help help students fix their papers. They follow specific directions and offer only prescriptive (i.e., universal) help to the tutee. What happens when the writing tutors encounter a text a student produces for Shipka’s course? They are not trianed to handle such a situation.

I suppose that my inability to see any benefit from writing centers stems from my own writing ego. The idea that someone my age with no more training than I other than a course that gave them a list of questions to ask me is absurd. Why not just give me a printout of the formula those students follow. I have used the writing center at my own school, and quite frankly I found it useless. The students could help me no more than a fellow student could have helped me in one of my courses during a peer editing session.

The worst part is the fact that these tutors are acting as instructors of writing. How can they do that? They have not read the book from which this article came. They have not studied what pedagogies work best. They are simply minions doling out the same pedagogical methods of their writing center course instructor.

The one benefit I find in writing center pedagogy is for the purposes of WAC. I think that a writing center has the potential to benefit students who are not English majors practicing writing day in and day out. However, for this to work effectively, tutors need to take a course that helps them master the many academic discourses. Perhaps each tutor could be the master of a different discipline’s verbal discourse. We could not expect one student to master how one speaks as a psychologist, a physicist, a mathematician, an art historian, etc., but asking them to learn just one of these might be attainable. Even this idea is quite implausible I think. Within the writing tutors’ own discipline, I an English major, bring a piece of work, and their methods do not work to help me. I am told I repeated a word too many times. If they understood the work, they would see that repetition is the only possibility. The tutors have not experienced the same assignments as the tutees, so how can they ever offer any help better than their prescriptive understanding of the discursive community?