Content area
Full Text
Scholarship on writing centers often relies on validation systems that reconcile tensions between equality and plurality by privileging one over the other. According to feminist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, neither absolute equality nor absolute plurality are possible in any democratic system, a conflict she calls "the democratic paradox" and insists is the essence of a "well-functioning democracy" that supports pluralistic goals. The following article argues that a similar logic shapes writing center work and, therefore, any attempt to promote change must likewise embrace the democratic paradox as it manifests itself in the writing center: "the writing center paradox."
Instead of helping students "improve" their five-paragraph themes according to their instructors' advice, we need to somehow voice our objections to the entire enterprise. The question is how to do this without jeopardizing our students' best interest as well as our own.
-Patricia A. Dunn, "Marginal Comments on Writers' Texts"
The university needs us, but we need the university as well.
-Timothy Donovan, "Professing Composition in the Academic Marketplace"
Writing from her precarious position as a writing center director without tenure, Patricia A. Dunn opens her essay with a tale familiar to many of us-not only those of us in writing center work but writing program administrators and composition instructors alike, virtually anyone trained to think of "grammar" in more productive ways.
Recently I heard through the grapevine that I am "too soft on grammar." It is said that as director of the writing center I do not insist enough on the eradication of comma splices, and that some of the peer tutors I've trained have occasionally failed to recognize several of these in the drafts of students who come to us for help. (31)
We are used to such problematic assumptions about what it means to teach writing and the role of an instructor, a tutor, a writing center, and a writing program in doing so. For more than forty years-at least since the publication of Research in Written Composition in 1963-we have been committed to representing literacy ("grammar") differently, generating countless arguments against persistant assumptions like those likely informing the accusations Dunn's colleague made. Like so many teachers upholding current-traditional representations of literacy education, this professor probably assumes that mastery of surface features (what...