Boquet,+Elizabeth.++Our+Little+Secret.+A+History+of+Writing+Centers,+Pre+to+Post+Open+Admissions

Boquet, Elizabeth. "'Our Little Secret:' A History of Writing Centers: Pre- to Post-Open Admissions." CCC 50.3 (1999): 463-482. Reprinted in Barnett, 41-60.

Boquet traces the history of writing centers by considering whether the various accounts focused on either the site of the Writing Center/Lab, or the method. She suggests that WC history has moved back and forth between site and method on its journey from classroom-based labs of direct correction to the rogerian psychological model to the auto-technological to peer tutoring and collaborative models. Rather than simply demarcating certain periods as being either/or site or method based, Boquet considers at multiple points how the WC might be both/and. Even as the WC was about a "method" of instruction in terms of one-on-one or direct assistance, this method then encouraged professors to view it as a "site" to send basic writers and thus to effect the tracking of students by ability. She notes how reliance on certain strategies, such as skills and technology-based instruction, diverts the responsibility of student writing onto the student rather than the education system. Contrasts this to the social construction of writing as seen in peer-tutoring models.

Ultimately, Boquet seems concerned with two questions - how might the writing center work as either/both counter-hegemonic or regulating, and how might WC scholarship turn towards questions that go beyond "just the facts."

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"... the site of the writing lab carries with it the politics of the writing lab" (46). "...the literature at this time offers the beginnings of an articulation of professionalism predicated on doctor-patient privilege bordering at times on the collusion of staff and students against administration, a familiar refrain in later writing center work" (48).