Some Supplementary Thoughts on Moore's Clinics and Labs

Just finished a few supplementary articles on the history of Writing Centers. In Katherine Fischer and Muriel Harris' article "Fill 'er Up, Pass the Band-Aids, Center the Margin, and Praise the Lord," they mention Michael Pemberton's call for redressing the more malignant writing center metaphors (i.e. military, medical, penal) with ones that are benign. He suggests "workshops" and "studios" to accentuate the more artistic and craftlike nature of tutoring and writing. Vanderbilt University, I believe, refers to their center in "studio" terms.

According to Carino, in "Writing Centers and Writing Programs: Local and Communal Politics," present-day writing centers develop out of Clinics and labs which were conceived of as remedial "supplements" to composition programs, charged with providing "first aid to students" and assigned current-traditional pedagogy with its exclusive emphasis on grammar drills and (s)kills and product-based instruction.

If your interested, these articles appear in Nelson and Evertz's The Politics of Writing Centers.

In the opening chapter of Noise from the Writing Center, Bouquet (echoing Carino's article for class tomorrow) acknowledges the tendency for scholars to oversimplify Writing Clinics and Writing Laboratories and present them as monolithic emblems of the dark ages of writing centers. A more accurate picture is complicated. Yes, generally Writing Clinics functioned under a deficit, medical model: students are afflicted with sick literacies, need diagnosis and treatment. Yet the example of the Writing Clinic at the University of Denver (in the 1940s)employed graduate students who were advised to question and students out with "nondirective counseling," a progressive practice that mirrors methods advocated today. And the laboratory method of instruction advocated by Philo Buck in 1904 foreshadows the process-based approach to writing and tutoring that we still value today. The lab method sought to create a space where students were encouraged "to experiment, to pose questions, and to seek solutions."

The way any history is framed depends on the intentions and purposes of the framer, and as Carino points out, those who cast writing center history in the dim light of deficiency typically do so out of a desire to demonstrate dramatic progress. While the early configurations of writing centers and writing tutorials may have fallen short of our current ideals, they were not all together lacking some of the key characteristics we value.