Boquet,+Elizabeth.++Noise+from+the+Writing+Center

Boquet, Elizabeth. Noise from the Writing Center. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2002.

Quick Overview: Boquet uses the metaphor of "noise" to examine the work that happens in the writing center, questioning some of the assumed values of WC scholarship. She encourages us to look at the excesses, the moments of squealing feedback, amplifications and reverberations that occur in the WC and in its relation to the larger institution. Boquet insists that we try to manage and control too many aspects of the writing center, mostly in the hope of creating a community, or a space that we feel embody the writing center ideals. However, in this over-management, we actually end up stifling the very things that we privilege. Rather, we need to revel in the uncontrollable, the noise, that which we have never focused on before but left to exist unheard in the background, in order to actually work toward a more productive writing center (though I'm not sure what counts as a productive center to Boquet... I'll have to go back and examine).

Chpt 1: Tutoring as (Hard) Labor: The Writing Clinic, The Writing Laboratory, The Writing Center Boquet suggests that looking at the various labels of previous centers doesn't tell us nearly as much as we imagine. She instead, utilizes her own metaphors: one being noise, the other being labor (as in pregnancy). She challenges the notion of the midwife, which is set up as a gentle and painless process, and instead insists on the difficulty and pain that often comes with writing and writing instruction. She fights against the idea of efficiency because it is steeped in a sense of the institution as clean, rather than messy, as quick rather than intensive, as controlled rather than connected. She highlights the non-neutrality of literacy, and questions the role that the WC should have in literacy instruction--should we allow for the administrative literacy requirements, or should we be willing to work with the excessive, the monstrous, that which does not belong, and celebrate in that rather than try to contain it?

Chpt 2: Channeling Jimi Hendrix, or Ghosts in the Feedback Machine Boquet argues in this chapter that we focus too much on giving institutions "what we think they want" (42), even if we're not right. Rather than channeling our work and our thinking toward what we believe the administration wants from us, Boquet suggests that we need to do what we think is best for the writing center, including working with the excesses, doing narrative scholarship that allows for the muckiness of WC work rather than statistical and "value-added' research. This, encourages Boquet, is how we can make changes to the educational system. She challenges the arguments of Richard Leahy, by suggesting that directors should have a life outside the center, should avoid seeing the center as their own, should stop trying to control and regulate what the center is/does, and instead be willing to take time for outside the center (for tenure applications, sabaticals, forming relationships, etc.) Finally, rather than trying to regulate student texts and the disharmonies that they can bring, but instead to move toward them, even if it makes us uncomfortable.

Chpt 3: Toward a Performative Pedagogy in the Writing Center In this chapter, Boquet describes the summer training at RIC and the methods that did and did not create community, did or did not prove to feel/be effective for tutors, ways that the center operates in terms of excess.

Chpt 4: Thanks for Listening Folks summaries in process. . ..

For Key Quotes, see Response Paper 2.