Cooper,+Marilyn.++Really+Useful+Knowledge..+A+Cultural+Studies+Agenda+for+Writing+Centers

Cooper, Marilyn M. “Really Useful Knowledge: A Cultural Studies Agenda for Writing Centers.” In Barnett. 335-349.

Suggests taking a ‘cultural studies’ stance on the writing center as a space where institutional critique can happen due to the unique position of writing tutors (peers) as organic intellectuals. Cooper critiques Brooks’ minimalist tutoring in his insistance that students gain agency only through taking sole responsibility for their text, and critiques North’s idea that the WC should never critique an instructor’s assignment or grading, etc. Cooper believes that we should instead see the tutorial as a place where we can engage students in a negotiation between their private subjectivities and the public subjectivities being offered to them and imagined by the instructors. This will allow students to approach these assignments with an awareness of the institutional nature of writing instruction while also working within their own base of ‘really useful knowledge’ which comes out of their place as organic (as opposed to traditional) intellectuals. Further, WC research should involve a bridging between student tutors and grad students/faculty in order to bring that unique knowledge to bear in our own writing pedagogy.

“What I want to do here is to develop a rationale for thinking of writing centers as having the essential function of critiquing institutions and creating knowledge about writing, a rationale that will make clear the politics of such a belief and that will connect the goal of inquiry with the daily practice of writing center tutors” (336).

“… writing center [peer] tutors, by virtue of their constant contact with institutional constraints and with students’ lived experiences, are best positioned to serve as what Trimbur calls radical intellectuals, or what Gramsci calls organic intellectuals” (341).

“We need to make better use of these ‘border’ spaces within our institutions, spaces where the lines of power blur and the demands of discipline and evaluation weaken in ways that allow us to create together better ways of writing and of teaching writing” (348).