-
3. Writing Centers Are Cozy Homes
- Utah State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
3 W r i t i n g C e n t e r s a r e C o z y h o M e s To the extent that writing centers believe not only in the neutrality of their work, but also take comfort in the worn couches and homelike ambiance of their work sites, to the extent that they theorize themselves as institutionalized sites of service and individualized instruction, they are participating in the regulatory uses of literacy. —Nancy Grimm (1996), “The Regulatory Role of the Writing Center” Every story needs a setting, a place for the action to happen. Part of what distinguishes writing center work from composition more generally is the site; writing can happen anywhere, but writing center work implies a set location—a writing center. This chapter is about the setting for the writing center grand narrative: the physical centers we inhabit and the ways in which we discourse or narrate them. Of all the pieces of the writing center grand narrative, I think the idea that a writing center is—and should be—a cozy, homey, comfortable, family-like place is perhaps most firmly entrenched. As I wrote in the introduction, the argument in this book is that writing center work is complex, although the storying of it often is not. The same issue holds true for writing center spaces: many stories could be told of our spaces, yet predominately, one story is told. In this chapter then, I discuss how the storying of writing centers as cozy places came to be. Using Bruner’s ideas of constructivist narrative , I show how past stories direct more recent ones and how composing the “writing center space as cozy home” narrative is a culturally conforming act even as it defies local, material conditions. In the last part of this chapter, I discuss how the lenses of critical geography and cultural materialism help produce stories with more dissonance, which is another way for us to move away from our conditioned patterns of seeing and not seeing. To begin, consider this thread on the WCENTER listserv. A new director described her somewhat fortunate problem of having to design a writing center from scratch. She ended her post with these questions: Writing Centers Are Cozy Homes 21 “If you could have anything you wanted in a Writing Center facility, what would it be? And what could you not live without?” (England 2005). She received several similar replies, such as this one: Indispensable things in my humble opinion are • Round tables • Art • Plants • A window to stare out • Bookshelves • Coffee pot • Decent chairs • Couches (Gardner 2005) Other replies listed some of the same “indispensable things.” Reading this discussion, I was reminded how many of these objects are familiar to writing center professionals as “must haves.” Specifically, descriptions of writing center spaces often mention round tables, art, plants, couches, and coffee pots with such frequency that these objects almost become iconic. In fact, in Joyce Kinkead and Jeanette Harris’s collection of twelve writing center “case studies,” the closest thing to a common denominator connecting the diverse centers is the coffee pot—not philosophies of writing, not methods for tutor training, but the presence of a coffee pot. They note: “As we read these descriptions, every once in a while we think we come across a characteristic that crosses the board. Coffee—instant, brewed, or café latte—seems almost universal” (Kinkead and Harris 1993, 236). What is it about coffee pots and these other objects? How have they become so intertwined with writing center identity? To be legible, indeed, to be read as a writing center, a space needs to have a particular array of objects. Most spaces are like this. Users have expectations about what a space will have in it and what it won’t have. For instance, we expect a waiting room at the doctor’s office or at the auto shop will have uncomfortable chairs very close together and pushed against the walls, magazines, a few toys, and perhaps a TV on a news channel with the volume low. When we see a space like this, its arrangement tells us we can wait there. Through their arrangements and objects, spaces communicate to us; we could even say that spaces tell us a story about what they are and how we may use them. Or as Harry Denny puts it, spaces perform (Denny 2010, 153). Having couches or [44.200.82.195] Project MUSE (2024-03...