Response+Paper+1

A lot of the reading that I've done so far has focused in on the question of "who should tutor?", the answer to which indicates a certain philosophy for writing centers. The belief in generalist tutoring tends to go along with beliefs in non-directive strategies and a rhetorical focus for WC sessions. There is also a strong sense that the majority of the knowledge comes from the student, almost in a Garret sense (see Lunsford), or an expressivist sense in which the goal is to validate and support the student voice above all else. It does seem to invalidate tutors' knowledge as it suggests that the only knowledge they bring to the session is what we can train them for (asking the right kind of questions) or else that the tutors' greatest strength is their 'ignorance.' On the other hand, an insistance on specialist tutors buys strongly into a philosophy of discourse conventions and focuses the WC strictly on academic writing (a science major would then only be effective for science writing). The specialist model puts an emphasis on the construction of knowledge through discourse communities (which goes along with WC self-conception), but simultaneously pushes a more traditional academic mode by situating the authority back on the tutor who is a "specialist" in that discourse community, who knows the standards, etc. Walker wants to negotiate between these positions by suggesting that both sides have their strengths and need to work together, using genre theory as a way to bring specialists and generalists together, but it seems a bit of a cop out.

Cooper takes a bit of a different track to this question, situating the question in terms of negotiating private and public subjectivities. While generalist tutors could do this work because of their knowledge as students, it also allows for disciplinary knowledge to come into play. As tutors and students work together, each brings their own 'organic' knowledge, a knowledge that comes out of their experience as subject existing within an institution. As you can probably tell, I find Cooper's position to be a fascinating one. It raises a lot of interesting questions about the role of the writing center in the institution. What really are the possibilities of the WC to be non-traditional, counter-institutional, etc. Quite a bit of WC scholarship rings of those battle cries--"we're not like a traditional classroom! we promote peerness and collaboration and challenge traditional authority!"-- but Riley claims that even in our insistence on collaboration and peer tutoring, WC theory has reached a point where that may simply be done because that's now the tradition, rather than because we want to break or shake up traditions. Cooper's theory is clearly trying to challenge a traditional model, allowing critique of the institution, of its power structures and poorly written assignments, but what then is the place for that within the institution for a center that challenges that institution? Can we effectively serve a student population without doing so? I think back to articles like Wallace's (especially) and several of the other WAC articles, and their emphasis on instructors, or working with specific departments, suggesting that its more important to serve the institution. This is, of course, working from a very binary model--its not just working for either the institution or the students and that their completely at odds with each other. Which, of course, is never how it really works. However, when Cooper writes that “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 my emphasis), she sets up a quite different sense of the WC than Wallace's claims that "The center is, and should always be, only a support service" (407).

Cooper's piece also makes me think of DiPardo's "Whispers of Coming and Going," and her opening claim that "We all negotiate among multiple identities" and that non-Anglo students "often describe a more radically chameleonic process, of living in non-contigious worlds, of navigating between competing identities, competing loyalties" (350). Supporting Cooper's notion that the writing tutorial should be about negotiating between private and public subjectivities. There does seem to be a difference between identities and subjectivities, though. Perhaps it would be a good idea to play out these differences.