Critiquing the Center: The Role of Tutor Evaluations in an Open Admissions Writing Center
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Date
2014
Authors
Burns, William
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Though created to give its inhabitants the feeling of comfort, structure, and control, suburbia has been co-opted by postmodernists seeking to crack its modernist façade to reveal the hybridity, fragmentation, and hegemony at its commodified heart (Silverstone). The in-between-ness of suburbia, that liminal zone between the country and the city, has its academic counterpart in the writing center, a complex site of social, material, and discursive relations that construct experiences on all levels of academic life. Like the suburb, a writing center can be seen as an example of Edward Soja’s “third space,” a part of institutional geography, yet located at a crossroads of many different, overlapping, and conflicting rhetorical and ideological ecosystems. Long Island, New York is the birthplace of the suburb and so its promises of luxury, centrality, and ease inform the lives of Long Islanders, young and old. The Suffolk County Community College Writing Center services the biggest community college on Long Island, with 25,000 students enrolled; the Writing Center sees about 2,000 of these students every semester.