Lunsford,+Andrea.++Collaboration,+Control,+and+the+Idea+of+a+Writing+Center

Lunsford, Andrea. "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center."

Lunsford present three models for the writing center--the storehouse, the garret, and the parlor. Storehouse: Center "operates as [an] information station or sotrehouse, prescribing and handing out skills and strategies to individual learners" (93). [This would go along with the idea that tutors need to be 'knowledgeable' or to some, professionals, so that they have the skills/information to dispense]. Garret: Center is focused on "individualism" (93) and views "knowledge as interior, as inside the student," simply helping students to discover their "unique voices, their individual and unique powers" (94). This model is tied to an expressivist view of writing. Burkean Parlor: Center believes that knowledge is "always contextually bound, as always socially constructed" (97) and relies on collaboration. However, Lunsford warns that collaboration can be tricky, and can be mucked up in lots of ways, and advocates that we be very explicit about how we handle "control" in our centers in order to keep it truly collaborative. Without constant work and reflection, collaboration can actually work against these aims.

$$ Quotes "...what I think of as successful collaboration (which I'll call Burkean Parlor Centers), collboration that is attuned to diversity, goes deeply against the grain of education in America" (96). "...used unreflectively or unconsciously--collaboration may harm professionally those who seek to use it and may as a result further reify a model of education as top-down transfer of information (back to the Storehouse) or a private search for Truth (back to The Garret)" (96).