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6 m a K e R s o f K n o w l e d g e i n w R i T i n g C e n T e R s practitioners, scholars, and Researchers at work Sarah Liggett Kerri Jordan Steve Price Stephen M. North’s greatest impact on writing center literature is not The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (MKC), published in 1987. Rather it is his 1984 College English article, “The Idea of a Writing Center,” which explains the purposes and workings of writing centers to faculty and administrators not directly involved with them. Grateful that North, viewed then by many as the “leader and spokesperson for writing center work” (Gillam 2002a, xix), had argued so passionately about the importance of writing centers, few writing center folks may recall that he concludes by urging writing center professionals to investigate “the dynamics of the tutorial,” taking our knowledge beyond practitioners’ anecdotes, to understand more fully how one talks about writing. North acknowledges that many writing center professionals have “neither the time, the training, nor the status to undertake any serious research” (1984, 444). Thus, his article targets a market for the forthcoming MKC, a text with potential to educate the writing center community on the kinds of inquiry by which to build a more solid knowledge base for writing centers. If North’s article encouraged its readers to imagine that writing centers could become “the centers of consciousness about writing on campuses ” (1984, 446), the opening sections in MKC may well have deflated any sense of importance.1 North discusses writing centers at length only 1. North addresses this quote in particular in his follow-up essay, “Revisiting ‘The Idea of a Writing Center,’” which appeared a decade later in The Writing Center Journal. He acknowledges that the earlier article may have been a “romantic idealization” (1994, 9) and that writing centers at best are likely to be an “institutional conscience, that small nagging voice that ostensibly reminds the institution of its duties regarding writing” (15). Makers of Knowledge in Writing Centers 103 in chapter 2, as a site for practitioner inquiry, the mode that receives his harshest criticism. In the bulk of MKC, North outlines methodologies that could “replace practice as the . . . dominant mode of inquiry,” describing a shift that had begun to transform composition (lowercase, writing course) to Composition (uppercase, academic field) (1987, 15). Scholars and researchers “make knowledge; Practitioners apply it” (21). Practitioners are “Composition’s rank and file” whose main concern is “what to do about the teaching of writing”; they draw upon “lore: the accumulated body of traditions, practices, and beliefs in terms of which Practitioners understand how writing is done, learned, and taught” (22). Because its properties are problematic—“anything can become part of lore, nothing can ever be dropped from it,” and practitioners adapt lore to fit their needs (24–25)— it is clear why “the academic reflex to hold lore in low regard represents a serious problem in Composition” (55). Most readers will gladly move on, hoping to find in the methodological communities of scholars and researchers a more engaging way to work, and perhaps a group of colleagues with more intellectual cachet. The questions at hand, then, are these: Through what modes of inquiry has writing center knowledge expanded since the publication of MKC? How closely have authors followed North’s outlines for conducting inquiry and to what ends? What new modes of inquiry have emerged? What do our findings suggest about knowledge making in writing center work? To answer these questions, we conduct a hermeneutical inquiry and go to work as critics. CRi T i Cs aT wo RK : aRT i CUlaT i ng q UesT i o ns and seleCT i ng T ex T s At the empirical stage in our inquiry, we selected, assembled, and validated as texts for analyses those articles that earned their authors Outstanding Scholarship Awards presented annually since 1985 by the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA).2 Ironically, the first 2. The IWCA website lists six criteria for its scholarship award: the publication addresses one or more issues of long-term interest to writing center administrators, theorists, and/or practitioners; discusses theories, practices, or policies that contribute to a richer understanding of writing center theory and practice; shows sensitivity toward the situated contexts of writing centers; significantly contributes to writing center scholarship and research; strongly represents writing center scholarship and research; and embodies...

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