Challenging the Narrative of Tutoring One-to-One

The effect of the writing center grand narrative can be a sort of collective tunnel vision. The story has focused our attention so narrowly that we already no longer see the range and variety of activities that make up writing center work or the potential ways in which writing center work could evolve.
—Jackie Grutsch McKinney, Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers


As a linguist, I've often felt like a bit of an outsider in the field of writing center studies. Writing for me has always been a tool for organizing my thinking, rather than a tool of personal inquiry. I've struggled with the idea of a theory as a critical lens rather than as a framework for making hypotheses related to data. The writing conventions of the field are very different from the dry, wordy, data-driven, and eminently (to me, anyhow!) comfortable style of theoretical linguistics. Even the very "hominess" cultivated in the vast majority of university writing centers, developing naturally from a humanities-oriented view of writing as an artistic and personal activity, is a bit alien to my sciences-based sensibilities towards writing. I think these things can be difficult to see for those whose education took place within the tradition that gave birth to the field, and which supplies the vast majority of its professionals and academics--this in the same way that, for example, speakers tend not to recognize their own dialects. Jackie Grutsch McKinney's recent book Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers was a refreshing read for me, in that it highlighted some of these central, unconscious, and often unchallenged assumptions of writing center work. Grutsch McKinney, drawing on the scholarship of narratology (Berlin 1992; Penner 1998; Royster and Williams 1999) describes these assumptions in terms of cultural narratives that reflect our unconscious, culturally predicated understanding of complex and cohesive wholes. Grutsch McKinney identifies three core aspects of the writing center grand narrative: that writing centers are cozy homes (characterized by comfortable conversations and the trappings of living spaces), that writing centers are iconoclastic (defining themselves in opposition to the norms and accepted practices of the academy), and that writing centers tutor (i.e., that the central, defining activity of writing centers is the verbal interaction between tutor and student writer, and furthermore that tutoring means one-to-one interactions). Grutsch McKinney argues that the danger of shared narratives lies in how they can act as a basis for rejecting new ideas, new ways of thinking, that don't fit in to the accepted story told by the group. Nowhere, I believe, is this more true than in the case of her third point, relating to the twin assumptions that the work of writing centers is tutoring, and that tutoring means one-to-one interactions.