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I'm not the nimblest programmer, and because I can count my successes with PHP on one hand, I feel compelled to document them, to extend and preserve them through self-congratulatory accounts like this one.
I am working this semester as a faculty consultant to the University Writing Center. I probably mentioned that before. Basically, my charge is to get online consulting systems up and running at EMU, provide a few months of support and training, and spread the word. The main piece here is asynchronous consulting via email. Much like what we built at Syracuse, this process relies on a form. The student fills it out, uploads an attachment, submits it. The submission calls a PHP script, which in turn displays a You did it! message, a readout of the form data fed to the screen (for saving, for verification), and an email message that routes the form data and the attachment to a listserv. The listserv consists of a handful of subscribers who will comment and send back the uploadeds in turn, in time.
The system works reasonably well, but managing the queue can become a headache. Whose turn is it? At Syracuse, the queue was filled in with four or five rotations, and then as form-fed drafts arrived, consultants would access a shared Google Spreadsheet and manually enter a few vital details: name, email address, time received, time returned, and turnaround (time returned minus time received). These few crumbs of data were helpful, but many of the trackable-sortable pieces of the form were not otherwise captured systematically.
Until Zend Gdata. With this installed, it's now possible to run a second PHP process that will push all of the form data into a shared Google Spreadsheet automatically. I puzzled over this on Friday, figured it out on Saturday. My initial stumble was that I was trying to integrate the new PHP code into the script that turned out the email and screen readout. Didn't work. But then I figured out that I could instead route the form to a relay file (I doubt this is what programmers would call it, but I don't have the vocabulary to name it anything else). The relay file was something like simple.php.
Simple.php is a script with a couple of lines: include formemail.php and include formtospreadsheet.php. Now, when the form gets submitted, both scripts run. The email routes the document like it should, and the Google Spreadsheet (queue) grabs a new line of data. The only element requiring manual entry is the time the consultant returned the commented draft. The shared spreadsheet does everything else: calls the list of consultant names from another page, calculates the turnaround, and records a comprehensive record of who is using the service, the classes they come from, etc. Over time, the comprehensive record will allow us to sort by different classes, different faculty, different colleges, which will help us identify patterns that might prove insightful for how writing is assigned and taught across the curriculum.
I should add that our recent launch of the service limits it to four targeted programs. This is necessary because we are not currently staffed to handle a deluge of submissions, and while we do want the service to get solidly off the ground this semester, we want foremost to extend it to a segment of the 17,000 students who are enrolled in some sort of online class.
Over at ReadWriteWeb today, I caught this entry about EtherPad, a collaborative text-authoring web app. One conspicuous difference between EtherPad and the other word processing web apps (Google Docs, Adobe Buzzword, Zoho Writer, etc.) is that the changes to the text are nearer to synchronous. Contributors see each other's writing almost immediately. Even better: EtherPad does not require an account; no sign-up is necessary. The site provides this demo.
It's easy to imagine using EtherPad for drafting a conference proposal or something, although Google Docs has proven adequate for that sort of thing. Where I see EtherPad's greatest immediate use (in my world, anyway) is in the online consultation appointments we've been offering lately in the Writing Center. Right now I use any number of chat clients (AIM, iChat, and Google Talk), but EtherPad features a chat module. I log on to the chat client, invite the student to a session, and we begin chatting about the work at hand. Usually it takes five minutes to gain access to a draft. Because the built-in file transfer processes get hung up far too often (resulting in further delays), I also have the students email their drafts to drop.io, where I can easily access the file. Even with all of this, commenting the text in real time can be a pain. Absent voice options and desktop sharing I still find it fairly difficult to identify the places in the text where I am focusing. Why not copy/paste the document (or a portion of it) into EtherPad and use the built-in chat module to discuss the passage?
EtherPad does not provide voice or video options, but it would serve as a terrific complement to Adobe Connect Now, which does offer voice, video, chat, and desktop sharing. For the WC technology audit I'm working on this semester, I've been thinking a lot about recommending two-app mash-ups as a kind of low-cost writing consultation-ware. EtherPad's usability threshold is so low (i.e., it's free to use, requires no sign up, and presents its options in a simple layout), it seems to me a strong choice for use alongside one of the other audio-video-chat applications. I would think Writing Centers would be all over this sort of web app for synchronous online consulting.
On the short list of drawbacks, there is the small matter of its ethereal quality. You can save the text, but you need to keep track of the URL because there is no other way to track down the saved file. As I was checking out the save function, I found that the chat transcript is not logged. When a saved version of the text is loaded, the chat transcript starts from scratch. It would be nice, however, if there were options for saving (and, thus, resuming) the chat transcript or for outputting the text file and the chat transcript (for my purposes, I'd even like to see a one-click option for saving these to a single file). Might also be nice to see a "scrub" option so that the document and chat transcript are cleared from the server following a session. But these are relatively minor concerns for what appears otherwise to be a promising new application.
In preparation for a Writing Center mini-seminar this Friday, I just finished reading the Yergeau et al. article, "Expanding the Space of f2f," from the latest Kairos (13.1). In this nodal hypertext, Yergeau, Wozniak, and Vandenberg suggest a few of the ways AVT (audio-visual-textual) platforms productively complicate face-to-face or "discontinuous email": two default modes of interaction in writing centers. They include several video clips from consulting sessions using Sight Speed, a cross-platform (and bandwidth heavy?) AVT application.
This is a pro-AVT account, with lots of examples to illustrate some of the challenges students and consultants faced. The authors offset the positive tenor of the article with grounding and caveats, noting, for example, that while "[they] revel in the recomposition of f2f via AVT, [they] want to avoid an attitude of naive nostalgia." Most accept that face-to-face consulting allows for communicative dimensions not neatly duplicated via distances, interfaces, and so on. But AVT consulting refreshes the debates between synchronous and asynchronous, conversation and response, f2f and online. The piece goes on to deal with the haunting of f2f genealogies of interaction, Bolter and Grusin's remediation (i.e., matters of transparency and opacity), the (unavoidable?) regulatory role writing centers play, the degree to which discontinuous email consulting undercuts much of what has motivated the growth of writing centers over the past 25 years, and the bricoleur spirit of online consulting initiatives. (I would link to the specific locations in the piece where this stuff comes up, but the nodes-as-frames presentation unfortunately does not provide identifiable URLs for any of the sub-content).
Computer technology's rapid half-life aside, we also realize that individual writing centers have their own specific needs, and any discussion concerning potential AVT technologies must consider that center's available resources, as well as its student requests.
This point about reckoning AVT possibilities with local considerations is, among other things, the purpose of Friday's meeting. We have been piloting online consulting sessions this summer, both by IM and by discontinuous email. I tend to cautiously embrace consulting by IM because I experience the conversational quality that makes writing center work worth doing. I have many concerns about the way our email model is set up right now, and I suppose I shouldn't air those out here.
Along with Yergeau et al., we're reading Ted Remington's "Reading, Writing, and the Role of the Online Tutor," (PDF) which argues that email consulting is potentially promising because it makes for a more text-focused experience. Interpersonal dynamics and conversation don't detract from the text-as-written in quite the same way as in f2f sessions. Also, he emphasizes that consultants, by writing, respond in kind, modeling the textual qualities they value by virtue of the response itself. I'm not convinced, at least not from this summer's pilot, that students regard the comments I make on their emailed drafts as any sort of model. But perhaps this is because our current set-up doesn't give us any way of knowing whether students ever even read the comments at all, much less whether they regard the writing the consultant does as exemplary. The time constraints (i.e., consultants are still paid hourly when responding via discontinuous email) also throw a wrench in the works: there is only so much fine-tuning the writer-consultant can do when dedicating one hour to a five-page draft.
Yergeau, Melanie, Kathryn Wozniak, and Peter Vandenberg. "Expanding the Space of f2f: Writing Centers and Audio-Visual-Textual Conferencing." Kairos 13.1 (Fall 2008). 17 Aug. 2008. <http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.1/topoi/ yergeau-et-al/index.html>.
Back to work: after last week's vacation in southern Pennsylvania, I've returned to the summer work regimen, earlier today holding five consultation hours in the Writing Center. It's just the second week of the Summer II session, so the scene was still. Two high school seniors-to-be came through mid-day working on one-page summaries for a Summer Bridge course they are taking on campus.
Now, again tonight I'm on the clock with a consulting experiment using iChat. Our Writing Center is pushing for a couple of online options by the fall. I'm on board with testing them out and fine-tuning them before the fall semester. Two-and-a-half hours on hand for drop-in IMing. Temporarily this is aimed at lending support to SU writing courses taught in Manhattan this term. Within a week or so, the IM consultations will be scheduled in advance, so the timing will be somewhat more structured. I'm on until 11:30 p.m., so while it is quiet, why not blog?
The other online offering through the Writing Center is asynchronous. Students complete a form and submit a work-in-progress to a list of consultants who respond in rotations. I responded to one last week while in PA. I have many more apprehensions about drop-off consultations, largely because the threshold for engagement drops away for the student (some have called this the dry cleaning model of WC work). The consultant addresses the student's questions or concerns with due diligence, but the dialogue is scaled way back. There is no conversation, usually, just more 'sending' an hour's worth of comments into the abyss.
I'm sure I will have more to say about how it goes in the weeks to come. My appointment runs another five weeks, two weeks longer than my other summer stints teaching an online intro to the humanities course and guiding four new online instructors through their first terms teaching via computer alone.
Your researched essay must incorporate at least three scholarly sources.
Just had a conversation about what "scholarly sources" might include, might refer to. I suppose it's important in the WC not to be too acrobatic with those high-load words and phrases in assignment prompts. Yet, something like "scholarly sources" does open onto a fairly loaded, dominoed set of issues. Just now: What makes a scholarly source? How do you know when you've found one? Where to look?
A clear author-institution tie is one indicator, no? Or the cast of the publication (i.e., an academic press for a monograph, or a journal, which will usually reflect specialization). But then there are all of the middled venues--journalism, business magazines, literary-styled periodicals--that confuse the category. Is an article in the Atlantic Monthly (e.g., "As We May Think") a scholarly source? What about something in Forbes? The Wall Street Journal? Does it depend more upon who wrote it or who reads it? The differences gray out; we need to consider style, citation practices, register (specialized vocabulary?), and so on. Too acrobatic?
I hope not. But this comes up fairly often. It is a commonplace in the researched essay assignment, which is featured in SU's WRT205 curriculum. I'm out of time (this small window within which to speed-blog), but the convention also calls up questions about the problem of non-scholarly sources--those surprising oddities that can add some snap and crackle to a possibly orderly (even tame) line-up of "scholarly" sources. And, granted, this is a false dichotomy, but one that is noticeably out of alignment in perhaps too many researched writing projects.
As expected, today's Writing Center work was the most demanding yet--eight appointments in seven hours (with a brief break for lunch). I don't mention it to complain. Rather, in those five-minute lapses between appointments I was thinking of the surprise and exhilaration in the unknown of what was to come. What is in store? How long will it take to get our bearings and decide what to do next?
Stacked appointments require a generalist's deftness (even if one is not steadily capable of this)--there are great leaps from this to that, from one thing to another. A first and second appointment do not make the third appointment easier. But the language from the previous hour re-surfaces again and again in subconscious performance residue: how many times did I say "prime" or "primes" between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.? Three? Four? Maybe too many, as if in caught in a strange loop, some phrase or concept pops up unexpectedly in fits of over-talking while searching for the elusive right words. Serial consulting: in certain ways it's like being locked in the media closet with a flickering television set all day, sometimes fancying coherence and intelligibility, sometimes doubting whether this or that thing fits with this or that other thing, and sometimes marveling at the great range of possible directions lurking everywhere in a draft.
Now I can't remember them all: a "professional statement" for a made-for-television movie production internship, an essay on music as argument, a comparison of Hindu epics, Rubin Carter as inspiration for law school, contending worldviews between Hmong Brahmanism and Western medicine, a close reading of Huck Finn (requiring specific references to 'semiotics', 'reader', and 'interpretation'), early planning and exploration on a five-page piece that will get at gender roles, mass media and the Cold War, and, finally, a discussion of Obama's vague references to "they" in the Iowa victory speech. At the end of it, two senses: one is a kind of merry-go-all-directions spinning around--the disorientation in rapid sequence conversations engaging all of this; the other is a (cloudy) surprise at the degree to which a long string of consulting appointments is like drilling a core sample of the curriculum (as if boring into a glacier).
I'm on a twenty-minute break before my final consulting appointment this Writing Center Friday No. 5. So far, five one-hour appointments and one half-hour appointment. Many of them have been in the early stages of drafting for papers due next week. Twice today I have heard the entry's title--and not only from students I worked with directly. Much apologizing is trafficked in the Writing Center for some reason or other: I'm sorry I was late. I'm sorry my draft is partial/messy/unfinished/gibberish/hackneyed/confusing/stained with coffee. I'm sorry I didn't bring my sources. I'm sorry I had a garlic bagel for lunch. I'm sorry my handwriting is illegible. And so on. Maybe this is cause enough for a gigantic vinyl banner at the front door that settles it from the outset: "All apologies accepted."
I don't begrudge anyone that felt need to level things up and make explicit one's own sense of the text (or situation) before sharing it with others. I am prone to it myself (Oh, here's a crude draft. Forgive me.) It's just a pattern that has started to stand out after five weeks of longish Fridays in the WC--a pattern I probably could have anticipated had I thought about it long enough, since it turns up in classes and other venues where writing is circulated--a graceful gesture of recovery from the mustard-stain quality of so much in-progress writing.
Back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back consulting appointments in the Writing Center today. Nine of them; every time slot filled between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., although my third appointment (slotted for a half hour) was a no-show. Just now I had to check my "tutor utilization" report in Tutortrac to make sure I had the count right. By about 3 p.m., I was beginning to feel a little over-utilized. Simple fatigue more than disappointment or dissatisfaction. I singed up for this, and longish Fridays keep a couple of other days of the week free (free-ish) for pure, uninterrupted work on the blissertation.
The conversations went as follows:
I was warned that Fridays might be light and breezy, with few students checking in because it's the spring semester and, well, it's Friday. Need more reason than that to steer clear of the Writing Center? The packed Friday doesn't leave any room at the end of my week for double-dipping (working while at work), but it definitely has its advantages. The conversations are focused and time-bound. Today someone suggested that my Friday hours were freakishly demanding, but I tend to think of it more along the lines of seven hours with an RSS reader, only the feeds are embodied differently; the writers of the works are sitting down with me and having a conversation: Writing Center work as a nine-scene Google Reader Live skit with a clearly defined "Mark all as read" at the end of the day.
To prepare for an orientation meeting in the Writing Center tomorrow, today I leafed back through North's "The Idea of a Writing Center," which is on the short list of recommended readings that will be used to prime the conversation in the meeting. I suppose this just proves what I'd already suspected: I haven't been reading nearly enough lately, but I find North's 1984 CE essay both funny and edgy in a drop-the-gauntlets sort of way. His intensity shows; he is not bored with what he is writing. Consider this passage:
People make similar remarks [about error] all of the time, stopping me or members of my [Writing Center] staff in the halls or calling us into offices, to discuss--in hushed tones, frequently--their current "impossible" or difficult students. There was a time, I will confess, when I let my frustration get the better of me. I would be more or less combative, confrontational, challenging the instructor's often well-intentioned but not very useful "diagnosis." We no longer bother with such confrontations; they never worked out very well, and they risk undermining the genuine compassion our teachers have for the students they single out. Nevertheless, their behavior makes it clear that for them, a writing center is to illiteracy what a cross between Lourdes and a hospice would be to serious illness: one goes there hoping for miracles, but ready to face the inevitable. In their minds, clearly, writers fall into three fairly distinct groups: the talented, the average, and the others; and the Writing Center's only logical raison d'etre must be to handle those others--those, as the flyer proclaims, with "special problems." (435)
North also spars with Maxine Hairston's off-handed remarks about writing centers in her "Winds of Change" essay, where she writes, "Among the first responses were the writing centers that sprang up about ten years ago [1972] to give first aid to students who seemed unable to function within the traditional paradigm. Those labs are still with us, but they're still only giving first aid and treating symptoms. They have not solved the problem" (82, qtd. in North). North calls this a "mistaken history" (among other things); he tells of the anger he felt in "read[ing] one's own professional obituary" (436), and adds that "her dismissal fails to lay the blame for these worst versions of writing centers on the right heads. According to her 'sprang up' historical sketch, these places simply appeared--like so many mushrooms?--to do battle with illiteracy" (437).
The second half of the essay is more constructive; he details his vision for the new writing centers and how they hinge on professionalism, a nuanced understanding of process (also processual complexity), and principles of writers rather than texts alone. I have a few more notes posted here, and it's possible (though not promised) that I will have more to blog in the months ahead about my appointment in the Writing Center this spring.
Reigstad, Thomas J. and Donald A. McAndrew. Tutoring Writing: A Practical Guide for Conferences. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2001. 1-30.
These four chapters work through general points related to writing center work. Each chapter consists of bullet-list-like entries, and, as such, the summary notes are best presented as follows:
Chapter One: Theories Underpinning Tutoring Writing
Chapter Two: Research Supporting Writing Groups
The second chapter is a brief bibliographic essay (only empirical studies, they
note), on peer response groups, conferences, and tutoring (in general, emph.
literacy, and emph. writing).
Chapter Three: What Tutoring Writing Isn't
A series of anti-examples:
Chapter Four: The Writing and Tutoring Processes
This chapter works to complicate processual neatness, and replaces it, instead,
with the senses of chaos and fuzziness that govern writing and tutoring.
The strong emphasis here is on recursivity, the braid of "generating,
translating, and reviewing" that goes on continuously. This complicates
the temporality of writing, and should be taken into account in the writing
center. Tutoring approaches break down into student-centered,
collaborative, and teacher-centered. Along with a final emphasis on chaos
and fuzziness, the chapter ends with a discussion of gesture and posture (sit at
corner so tutor and writer can see each other and the draft).
Rafoth, Ben. "Helping Writers to Write Analytically." A Tutor's Guide. 2nd ed. Ed. Ben Rafoth. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2005. 76-84.
This short article echoes many of the points made by Reigstad and McAndrew. Drawing on Bruffee, Rafoth begins by emphasizing conversation as a method for expanding a writer's sense of the possibilities for writing (this is a shift away from individualistic cognition or what he calls a "thinking problem"). Tutoring sessions should be structured around a "shared purpose," he contends, and he goes on to offer practices that will ground a productive session: the examination of perspective, the addition of complexity (viz., missed opportunities, counterpoints, or point of view), and the use of outside sources as "back-up singers" (80). He ends with a point about adding complexity through dialogue--complicating matters by probing more deeply with questions. Conversation is, for Raforth, crucial to analysis, but analysis is an underdeveloped method here--he never deals in much depth with what analysis is, what it does, or what are alternatives to analyzing.
"In most academic writing in the humanities and social sciences that calls for analysis of some issue or controversy, a key move is to define and explain problems, not to solve them" (79).
Gunner, Jeanne. "A Return to the Rhetoric of the Sentence." 11 Jan. 2008. MacGraw Hill Higher Education. Jan. 2002 <http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/english/tc/pt/gunner.htm>.
Gunner contends that students must be adept at sentence-level matters if they are to be successful with rhetorics of other scales. She refers to Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations and Lanham's Analyzing Prose as a pair of texts key to her premise in this piece: "the syntactic knowledge of basic writing combined with the purposes of rhetorical study" (para. 2). Gunner emphasizes variation, the placement of clauses that will enrich an otherwise linear style and effect different commands of a reader's attention. The essay includes examples of the effects brought about by participial phrases, adding appositives, and gaining proficiency with variations in punctuation. These techniques make the writing--on a sentence-level--recursive rather than linear.
Brooks, Jeff. "Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work." The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. 2nd ed. Eds. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003. 169-174.
Brooks elaborates North's contention that Writing Centers are concerned foremost with improving writers rather than refining the papers they carry in with them. He does so strongly and with conviction, opening with a "worst case scenario" in which the tutor points out mechanical errors and sends the student away with a better paper, having done little to teach the student. The breakdown parallels the advice expressed by Reigstad and McAndrew about the journalist-editor relationship. Brooks also argues that tutors are successful if they can persuade students to pay more careful attention to their writing (171).
The second half of the short piece introduces several maxims for "basic minimalist tutoring":
Brooks also includes numbered lists for "Advanced Minimalist Tutoring" and "Defensive Minimalist Tutoring":
If things are not going well, use Brooks' defensive strategies:
Severino, Carol. "Avoiding Appropriation." ESL Writers: A Guide For Writing Center Tutors. Eds. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2004. 48-59.
Severino's article addresses the problems involved with conversational "reformulation," the variety of appropriation in which a tutor can commandeer the language choices of an L2 writer. She opens by recounting an experience with a language teacher in Italy who effectively re-wrote her prose: "Almost every sentence was changed and elevated to a higher register" (49). For fairly obvious reasons, Severino thinks this can be damaging; appropriation obscures the language choices of the author, and this must be avoided. Taken to its extreme limits, the idea of avoiding appropriation is difficult to reconcile with teacherlessness or with an extreme hands-off approach to the interaction with the writer. The giving of subtle permission and encouragement can "interfere with students' control of their texts" (51). Of course, this isn't inherently bad; it's just that it has limits. Appropriation (or its less insidious partner, assimilation) is a regular, ongoing function of language use, isn't it? Severino ends her article with a list of 10 ideals to follow in an effort to avoid appropriation and, thereby, to respect "authentic" (i.e., unadulterated) voice:
These can become complicated and are contingent on a large number of factors that bear on any consultancy situation.
Staben, Jennifer and Kathryn Dempsey Nordhaus. "Looking at the Whole Text." ESL Writers: A Guide For Writing Center Tutors. Eds. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2004. 71-83.
Staben and Dempsey emphasize the relevance shared between lower-order concerns and higher-order concerns. In making a case for looking at the whole text, they urge dialogue that stirs up insights into knowledge and reasonable actions related to the writing. Their approach is derived from North's work in "The Idea of a Writing Center," which ranks the improvement of writers above the improvement of text (through Socratic dialogue, patterned questioning, a listening disposition, etc.). They also comment on the value of models (i.e., examples) and honest, candid responses to the text. Staben and Nordhaus contend that many L2 writers view the writing consultant as a "cultural informant" whose knowledge can rescue their texts as they "help them understand the assumptions and expectations of a U.S. academic audience, assumptions that are not usually directly addressed on the assignment sheet" (73). There is some disagreement about the role the tutor must occupy as a cultural informant; certainly, there is a degree to which the tutor helps demystify the process and make it seem more manageable in light of any (misguided) preconceptions about what is expected. The article offers a list of practical advice, from beginning to conversation to being "direct, not directive."
"These are students who often literally cannot see the forest for the trees.: They are so focused on language--on trying to wrestle their complicated thoughts onto paper using language abilities that are not yet sufficient to the task--that they may not realize that the change in language and in culture necessitates a different approach to communicating those thoughts to others" (74).
North, Stephen M. "The Idea of a Writing Center." College English 45.5 (1984): 433-446.
North writes out of frustration about widespread misconceptions about writing centers--their role and function in the scene of writing. His impatience is not so much with those who wouldn't have any reason to think twice about a writing center but instead with his colleagues in Composition Studies: "The source of my frustration? Ignorance: the members of my profession, my colleagues, people I might see at MLA or CCCC or read in the pages of College English, do not understand what I do" (433). North is motivated by this problem; he writes his way into it, blasting through specific references made by Maxine Hairston, who he says gets the history wrong in her "Winds of Change" address and even goes so far as to spell out North's "professional obituary" as a director of a writing center (436). North asserts agency; he argues that the writing centers and the principles they follow belong to "us"--an us he proudly claims. From disassembling claims leveled against writing centers, North shifts--in the second half of the piece--into a mode of positive redescription: "What should they be?" The new writing center focuses on "produc[ing] better writers, not better writing" (438), and this maxim rings through much of the writing center scholarship that follows this 1984 essay.
North characterizes the tutor as a researcher, in a move I think is due for more opening up: "I think probably the best way to describe a writing center tutor is a holist devoted to participant-observer methodology" (439). North explains holism, drawing on Diesing's Patterns of Discovery in the Social Sciences; he introduces a notion of process that is highly flexible and adaptive; and then he recoils a bit from the researcher comparison, commenting, "I do not want to push the participant-observer analogy too far" (439). He works--boldly in some places and tentatively in others--to correct misconceptions while not going too far to idealize the work done in writing centers.
He explains certain advantages held by the writing consultant: "we are here to talk to writers" (440); "we are not the teacher" [as the student seeks us out] (442), and "we can play with options" (443). He emphasizes that students come to the WC to write; they want to be there in almost every case. The WC can function to intensify classroom experiences (440). He also addresses matters of funding and scholarship, resolving that "[o]ne could...mount a pretty strong argument that things have never been better" (445). But the crux of North's "idea" is that we--in writing centers--are first and foremost professional, and that we take ownership of the space and the work done in it, resolving simply to guide and support writers as they write.
"As a profession I think we are holding on tightly to attitudes and beliefs about the teaching and learning of writing that we thought we had left behind" (434).