Beyond Tutoring: Mapping The Invisible Landscape of Writing Center Work
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Date
2012
Authors
Jackson, Rebecca
McKinney, Grutsch Jackie
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In their call for papers for this special issue of
Praxis, the editors speculate that most writing centers
assume various roles beyond those implied by the
triage model of fix-it consultations. We agree. As the
call suggests, writing centers have long sought to
“carve out a broader purview” for themselves—to
extend writing center efforts both beyond the center’s
physical space and beyond enduring writing center
master narratives about the primacy of individual
instruction. Still, much of the writing center’s extra
curriculum, or what we call here non-tutoring work,
remains hidden: for example, writing center
scholarship provides anecdotal evidence of writing
centers’ work with faculty, but the scholarship rarely
tells us just how prevalent such efforts are across the
board or what other kinds of non-tutoring work we
are engaged in. To borrow from the field of landscape
architecture, what our field lacks is an aerial—and
ultimately generative—vision of our non-tutoring
activities, one that would “reveal aspects of the
landscape that are invisible from the ground and offer
an alternative to pictorial [read “local”] practices so
common in landscape representation” (Czerniak 111).
There are consequences to invisibility. We cannot
theorize what we cannot see, although theories are
always already there, shaping our identities and
practices in ways that might or might not be
acceptable to us if only we could see and name their
contours. Viewing the writing center landscape from a
different vantage point, then, gives us much more than
an updated map: it challenges us to re-theorize who
we are and what makes our work valuable.