Re: Liberatory Teaching and Writing Centers

[Beth Boquet <eboquet@FAIR1.FAIRFIELD.EDU>]

Glad to hear it was helpful, Ellen.

And, James, I suppose I wasn't as clear in my original post as I 
should have been.  The article actually gets at the issues you raise 
in your post, I think, but from a different angle.  Tassoni (and I'm 
recalling from memory as I don't have the text here) would call 
himself a liberatory teacher, I believe, and he finds himself 
confronted, unbeknownst to him, with a current-traditional, grammar 
fix-it shop writing center.  So the article is really about what he 
comes up against as he tries to encourage his students to view the 
writing center as a site of dialectical engagement while they come up 
against some very traditional instruction in their writing center.

As for the uphill battle part of your post, James, well, yeah.  And 
I'm feeling tired and not very articulate here today, so the best I 
can come up with is, so what?  I mean, we all know that we have 
colleagues who don't understand, will never understand, or at best 
could care less what we do in the writing center.  But to have a 
colleague like Tassoni--and I do have a few--is a real blessing, and 
I tend to pay more attention to them than to the legions of others.  
Because that is, I think, how good work gets done.  The rest is just 
a waste of energy, really.  And, as you can probably tell, I have 
little of that today.

--Beth


> Date:          Thu, 05 Mar 1998 14:00:49 -0600 (CST)
> From:          jwerchan@lima.ohio-state.edu (James E. Werchan)
> Subject:       Re: Liberatory Teaching and Writing Centers
> To:            Multiple recipients of list <wcenter@ttacs6.ttu.edu>
> Reply-to:      wcenter@ttacs6.ttu.edu

> >....... an 
> >interesting perspective--basically that writing _teachers_ have a 
> >responsibility to their writing _centers_--and I was wondering if 
> >others had seen it.  It seemed to me that most of what he said would 
> >apply across the board to writing centers, not only to teachers at 
> >two-year colleges, as the venue might suggest.
> >
> >--Beth
> ..................
> 
> hi beth,
>         Yes, it would seem applicable more widely.  Trouble is with a
> faculty that is ideologically non-(maybe even ANTI-) liberatory.  And then
> what if the community itself is, for the most part, ideologically non or anti?
> 
>         The old analogy-mill is twirling away in my head on this one.   
> 
>         Some associates work at a large factory, in the human resources
> development center, training and retraining strongly unionized line workers
> and skilled tradesfolks.  It is state of the art and the company has a
> reputation for fairly humane HRD.    Anyway, they have heard from the head
> office, out of state, that "all company factories will put into practice
> teamwork production paradigms, with distributed decision-making and flexible
> tasking."  That kind of teamwork entails lateral thinking and communicating.
> Heretofore, each line worker worked in metaphorical "silos" of
> communication, not trusting the other silos, and scapegoating them when work
> flow "accordioned" or stopped flowing completely.  Of course, accordioning
> meant some workers sat on their hands waiting on parts.  And so they "had"
> (actually "got") to work overtime.  
>         How will my HRD associates be able to convince them to use teamwork
> if doing so means less OT?  Will the warm fuzzy instrinsic rewards of
> teamwork be compelling?  How, when no one has seen them, and they don't
> recognize them when they're right in front of them?  The status quo always
> has a rationale, I guess.  
> 
>         Meanwhile, back to the ranch:  WC/WAC are lateral communication
> structures, but most departments/disciplines are silos.  The myth persists
> among students ( and sometimes even faculty) that writing instruction is the
> dirty business of the department named after the language, and that
> biologists that insist on clear, cogent prose are unreasonable and straying
> from their turf.  How can we hope to convince the sons and daughters of
> those unionized workers that lateral thinking, teamwork, distributed
> decisionmaking, and flexible tasking (i.e. the academic equivalents thereof)
> are worth learning, when lateral thinking is no more a part of faculty
> culture than among the bluecollar folks in the community?  
> 
>         So, anyway, Beth:  I applaude and bless anyone who talks about and
> advocates liberatory education, but it's a long, bloody, uphill battle and
> the ideological casualties are many.  Worse, I don't see any victory soon.
> As in WWI, we see one side and then the other sends waves of cannon-fodder
> students and teachers,  while the corrupt royal families, Windsor and
> Hanover, each uphold what they think is "the right way to educate."        
> 
>         Responsibility to the WC?  Yes, of course they _have_ that
> responsibility, but do they know or believe that it?  How do you convince a
> fish that it is wet?
> 
>         Wow.  I got kind of morose there.  I'll get over it.
> 
> FYI: check out this URL:
> 
> http://www.montyroberts.com
> 
> Browse generally, then look for "join-up explained."
> 
> later,
> james w
> """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
>                     Dr. James Werchan
> (or maybe it's just someone who kinda looks a lot like him)
>               Ohio State University at Lima
>                     4240 Campus Drive
>                      Reed Hall #135
>                      Lima, OH 45804
>                       419-995-8882
> 				
>                     werchan.1@osu.edu					jwerchan@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
> (for main campus biz)
> jwerchan@osulima1.lima.ohio-state.edu  (for local biz only)
> 								
>   Come and visit: "http://www.lima.ohio-state.edu/~WACC"    
> """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
> 
> 
> 
Elizabeth Boquet
Director, The Writing Center
DM 130
Fairfield University
Fairfield, CT  06430
Tel: 203/254-4000, ext. 2529
E-Mail:  eboquet@fair1.fairfield.edu