Working with Faculty Writers

6. Faculty Writing Groups: Writing Centers and Third Space Collaborations

DOI: 10.7330/9780874219029.c006 6 Fac u lt y W r i t i n g G r o u p s Writing Centers and Third Space Collaborations Angela Clark-Oates and Lisa Cahill This chapter explores the question of why university and college writing centers are well-positioned institutionally to facilitate and support faculty writers as they navigate the expected literacy events (Heath 1982; Barton and Hamilton 2000) of the academy, including the promotion and tenure process, publishing demands, discipline-specific writing pedagogies, and curriculum design. In contrast to some understandings of writing centers only as places that students are sent for remediation, writing centers more often serve as hubs for a variety of writing discussions on their campuses—as places where talk that evaluates writing and where dialogue that moves revision forward are common refrains; where books about writing and resources for writing are available to writers and readers from a variety of disciplines or experiences; where instructors visit to get feedback on assignments and student writing; and where the physical space is designed and organized to facilitate discussions and interactions between readers and writers. In other words, writing centers provide spaces and enact practices that construct literacy events in very particular ways. Drawing from Shirley Brice Heath’s (1983, 96) definition of literacy event as “any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretations of meaning,” and from Barton and Hamilton (2000, 8) who describe a literacy event as an observable activity where texts and talk around texts are shaped by the situated practices of a social context, this chapter focuses on the ways that writing centers can serve the needs of faculty writers as they refine their participation in the valued literacy events of the academy. Adding to an understanding of literacy events is Elmborg (2006, 195) who explains 112   Angel a Clark-Oates and Lisa Cahi ll the central function that texts play in literacy events: “the text provides an occasion for shared reading and interpretation. Literacy events allow community members to develop regular, recurring interpretive patterns over time. Being an insider to a community means recognizing and participating in literacy events—knowing the codes used by the community and the customs and conventions in play.” Much like literacy events elsewhere , we argue that the literacy events in two-year college and four-year university environments put many demands on faculty to communicate in specific ways that mark their membership in a postsecondary environment and that more specifically mark their membership in a particular community, a particular field of study or discipline. And although faculty typically are expected to meet the demands of their profession through more solitary means, we believe, like many (Elbow and Sorcinelli 2006; Schendel 2010), that faculty need opportunities to refine their literacy practices beyond the physical and discursive spaces of their departments and disciplines. To this end, we argue that regardless of where faculty are positioned—as senior or junior faculty, as tenured or clinical, or in the humanities or sciences—they can benefit from a more pan-institutional network that puts them in contact with other colleagues who are writing , a network that can be provided and facilitated by their campus writing centers. In fact, many of the literacy practices and events that faculty experience and develop within their discipline are commonly shared by other faculty colleagues: finding time to research and write, constructing an argument, finding disciplinarily appropriate sources to support an argument, analyzing and critiquing others’ writing, analyzing and revising one’s own writing, adjusting to a discipline’s style, and learning to take risks (Houfek et al. 2010). By expanding their disciplinary literacy practices to include the writing center, faculty have the opportunity to co-construct a new space for engaging in literacy events within the academy and, in these new spaces, can be reinvigorated by varied approaches to reading, writing, and teaching; interdisciplinary ideas; and opportunities to discuss writing -in-progress. Therefore, writing centers have a unique opportunity to expand their support to faculty by providing faculty with a social and collaborative practice of reading, writing, and teaching. By providing such opportunities to write with others, writing center expertise and faculty disciplinary expertise can converge to create opportunities that can disrupt the epistemological binaries that limit creativity and productivity in all intellectual spaces: writer/reader; expert/novice; faculty/ student; producer/consumer. Furthermore, when a writing center illustrates its capacity to address the needs of...