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DOI: 10.7330/9780874219029.c003 3 T h e I d e a o f a Fac u lt y W r i t i n g C e n t e r Moving from Troubling Deficiencies to Collaborative Engagement Lori Salem and Jennifer Follett In an open, sunny room with tables and comfortable chairs, people are writing and talking about writing. A small group of people is writing together; writers show up with questions (how to revise a section of their work, how to edit their prose, how to respond to feedback they’ve received) and peer writing advisors or writing coaches work with them to answer those questions. Special events in this space celebrate writers and writing; writers give presentations on what they are writing or about their own writing processes. Writing coaches eagerly describe how their work with other writers has led to reflection on their own writing processes or styles. To those of us in writing center administration, this scene is easy enough to imagine—in fact, it may be exactly how we see our own writing centers, or how we envision what we would like them to become. Now imagine that all of these people—writers, coaches, advisors , presenters—are not students, but university faculty. Imagine universities sponsoring and supporting faculty writers in ways that match the complexity and power of the writing they are producing, and that build upon what we have learned from student writing centers—that learning to write is an ongoing process; that mastery over particular writing practices takes time, practice, and feedback; and that the lived realities of writers’ lives have a profound effect on their writing practices. Imagine the kinds of spaces that universities might create for faculty writing, spaces that would allow for rich conversations, for exploration, for critique, and for community building around the role of writing in academia. How do we advocate for this kind of a space? The Idea of a Faculty Writing Center    51 In the past fifty years, American universities have slowly but surely embraced writing centers for students. Writing centers were relatively unknown until the 1960s, but currently, nearly all four-year colleges and universities have them. It is interesting to consider how this came about. Previously, the existence of a writing center was troubling for a university, as it seemed to indicate that something was wrong. University faculty and administrators believed that university students should already have mastered writing skills before coming to the university, thus the need for a writing center suggested that the university was having trouble attracting well-qualified students. A recent history of the development of writing centers (Lerner 2009) suggests that when mid-twentieth century universities formed writing centers (which were usually called writing labs or writing clinics), they explained them by pointing to new and unusual educational needs among their student body, typically needs created by forces beyond the universities’ control . For example, in the 1930s, the University of Minnesota General College articulated the need for its new writing laboratory in relation to a suddenly more diverse body of students (Lerner 2009, 76). In the same period, Dartmouth explained the creation of a writing clinic by saying that the new pedagogies of the Progressive movement had created a generation of students who were “ignor[ant] of civilized writing conventions” (Lerner 2009, 92). In contemporary universities, many faculty and administrators still understand the purpose of a writing center as fixing students’ “deficiencies ,” but the sense that students’ struggles are new or unusual has diminished. And at the same time, there has been a shift in how universities understand their responsibilities toward their students. In earlier decades, it might have seemed reasonable for universities to allow students with writing problems to fail out, or simply to refuse to admit such students in the first place. However, those attitudes don’t match the current academic climate, in which universities must compete for a declining number of students; in which retention rates are a closely watched index of a university’s performance; and in which students and their parents are encouraged to feel a greater sense of choice, control, and entitlement over their educational experiences (Thelin 2004). These new realities are reflected in the standards of regional accreditation agencies, which now require universities to demonstrate that they provide adequate support for student learners (see, for example, MSCHE 2006). Thus, for universities, having students who struggle with writing is a normal condition, and creating a writing center to support them...

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