Exploring Composition Studies: Sites, Issues, Perspectives

4. Writing Center Scholarship: A “Big Cross-Disciplinary Tent”

4 w r i t i n g C E n t E r s C H o l a r s H i p A “Big Cross-Disciplinary Tent” Lauren Fitzgerald Writing centers are complex places, and, as such, bring forth a wide variety of questions for us to explore. And those questions, in turn, give rise to a wide variety of research methods, a sort of big cross-disciplinary tent, equally comfortable for the linguist, the historian, the anthropologist , and the compositionist, as well as others. Neal Lerner In his keynote address at the 2004 Thomas R. Watson Conference, Neal Lerner captured an essential quality of research and scholarship on writing centers. Because writing centers are “complex places,” offering both sites of and methods for writing instruction to writers from a range of discourse communities within and beyond educational settings , writing center scholarship calls for an array of research methods. If smaller in scale, writing center studies’ “big cross-disciplinary tent” bears a striking resemblance to the heterogeneity of composition studies (“Seeking” 55). Recent writing center scholars have addressed, for example, history (Boquet, “‘Our’”; Lerner, Idea), basic writing (Bawarshi and Pelkowski), second language writers (Williams and Severino, Second), WAC (Mullin), writing program administration (Ianetta et al.), assessment (Lerner, “Writing”), technology (Neaderhiser and Wolfe), new media (McKinney), and mentoring graduate assistants (Rowan). As a result, this chapter intersects with a number of other chapters in this volume. Unlike composition studies, however, writing center scholarship gained prominence only recently, around the turn of the twenty-first century. But this is not to say that there was an absence of scholarship beforehand. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the founding of the field’s two major periodicals—the Writing Lab Newsletter and the 74 Ex P LORI N G C OM P OSI T I ON ST U D I ES Writing Center Journal—soon followed by national (now international) organizations, conferences, and a scholarly press, and paralleled by a steadily increasing stream of dissertations and master’s theses (Lerner, “Introduction”). Yet when writing center scholars cast their gaze across the field in the late 1990s, many seemed disappointed. In a 1997 National Writing Centers Association conference keynote, Christina Murphy infamously derided the “absolute bankruptcy of writing center scholarship” (qtd. in Gillam, “Call” 3). Three years later, writing for the twentieth-anniversary issue of the Writing Center Journal, Joyce Kinkead and Jeannette Harris were at best guardedly optimistic: “At this point in their history, writing centers have not realized their potential as sites of research” (23). Just a year later, the scene changed dramatically. In a 2001 College English review of several writing center titles, Jeannette Harris seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when she declared that “for a while it looked as if the term writing center scholarship might be an oxymoron” (662). The most tangible indication that scholarship in this field was no longer a contradiction in terms was the publication, in 1999, 2000, and 2002, of three single-authored books on or closely related to writing centers: Nancy Maloney Grimm’s Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times (which emerged as the most influential of the books Harris reviewed), Cindy Johanek’s Composing Research: A Contextualist Paradigm for Rhetoric and Composition (which, like Grimm’s Good Intentions, won the National Writing Center Association’s Outstanding Scholarship Award), and Elizabeth Boquet’s important contribution Noise from the Writing Center. Like composition studies, the writing center field is not one that overprivileges books, but as a coin of the academic realm, books can go a long way toward legitimizing a marginalized field, not least because they are expansive enough to provide an overview and critique of previous research and scholarship—and therefore to establish that there is a field to view and critique. Following quickly on the heels of these publications were two edited collections that made similar claims for the field’s legitimacy : Writing Center Research: Extending the Conversation (Gillespie et al.) and The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship (Pemberton and Kinkead). Likewise, the number of theses and dissertations produced after 2000 showed “remarkable growth,” exceeding the number of those from all previous decades combined (Lerner, “Introduction” 6). Summing up the current state of the field, Melissa Nicolas finds that “writing center scholarship is on the cusp of a new Writing Center Scholarship 75 generation.” What is needed, as a...