What’s Wrong With Writing Centers

Writing centers are de rigueur features of the college landscape, but how much do we know about what happens there? A few years ago, Lori Salem embarked on a quantitative analysis of Temple University’s writing center, which she has directed since 1999. The assistant vice provost wanted to understand its role by investigating who doesn’t visit as well as who does.

But once Salem collected and crunched the data, she stopped in her tracks for the better part of a year. It wasn’t writer’s block holding her back — that’s an ailment she is well trained to treat. Rather, she was stalled by the implications of her work.

She found that practices that are near-orthodoxy in writing centers — such as nondirective instruction, in which tutors prompt students to come up with the right answers themselves; and a resistance to focusing on grammatical errors — are most effective for privileged students in good academic standing, the sorts who are least likely to turn up. Those methods, meanwhile, poorly serve the most frequent visitors: female students, minority students, those with low academic standing, and those who grew up speaking a language other than English at home.

In the writing-center world, Salem’s conclusions are radical. She calls for “completely rethinking what we do and why we do it.” Her paper won the International Writing Centers Association’s 2017 Best Article Award.

Salem spoke with The Chronicle about the ways writing centers are tone-deaf, how working-class students perceive them, and why she’s something of a heretic in her field.

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Your study found that the writing center attracts students of lower social privilege. Is there anything wrong with that?

It’s a neutral fact. But writing centers are very much in the business of trying to not be perceived as remedial. The early developers in our field had the idea that you have to reject that if you want to preserve any status for yourself. And if that’s the goal, then we can’t but interpret the fact that we attract low-privilege students as a bad thing. To me that interpretation is horrifying.

What does it mean for the low-privilege students?

Two co-authors and I have a paper coming out soon that is a qualitative study of working-class students’ experiences in writing centers. We found that one favorite writing-center question baffles them: “What would you like to work on today?” It’s connected to a method that you see all the time at writing centers — nondirective tutoring, where you elicit correct responses through questions. But these students are like, “What do you think we should work on?”

The other method that’s often writing-center policy is that you focus on “higher order” issues over problems like grammar. Time and efficiency are overarching issues for these students, and the writing center will be like, “La, la, la, we’ll give you a really slow and inefficient process for a half an hour and we won’t even answer your grammar questions.”

So they’re not getting much out of the experience?

They see the writing center sort of like the five-dollar bill your grandmother stuffs in your pocket at Thanksgiving. It’s a very nice gesture, but it’s not going to change anything. Meanwhile, they each told stories about absolutely fundamental transformations that happened to them while they were in college, where they made the kind of identity-transforming moves that we imagine college helps you make. None of that was even remotely connected to the writing center.

Maybe that’s just a tall order for writing centers.

There are plenty of other services that don’t do it, either — recreation services and parking don’t do it. But writing centers have the idea that they are transformative. And it was almost embarrassing to raise that idea with these students, because they so saw it so differently. This is not a place where transformation is likely to happen. It’s very nice, but it’s just a tiny little bit of help along the way.

You cite research showing that students with greater educational privilege make decisions that increase their privilege, and students with lower privilege do the opposite. Is going to the writing center harmful in some way?

We have to grapple with that. I mean, is it standing in for people you’d rather go to? A parent, a family member? Raising children myself gave me an understanding that I hadn’t had. You see a version of education at home that really is totally transformative, formative, identity-building. And you wonder: How could you make the writing center experience more meaningfully engaged?

Any ideas?

We could celebrate the work that we do helping students integrate into the university, and maybe especially the students who are struggling to be at the university. The thing that drives me absolutely crazy is that we are, in fact, doing that, but because we do not acknowledge that we are doing it, we have not built a pedagogy that actually serves it. We should be a laboratory for understanding the kinds of pedagogies that would work for these students. Instead we’re busily denying that they’re there, and then applying pedagogies that work really well for privileged students. That’s not helpful.

You describe the problem as stemming from the early history of writing centers, where people were highly concerned with status and prestige. Why hasn’t the writing-center community moved on?

Writing centers are not unique here. Universities are so status-conscious. Are we ever going to escape the feeling of a status assault? No. But I feel like we could get out in front of how we respond to that.

The question that’s underneath this whole thing is, What is it we’re trying to do? I want the answer to be to provide meaningful opportunities for students to really make good on the promise of getting an education — for whatever it is that they want it to be. If that means they fast-track their way into a job they really want, beautiful. If that means they embrace liberal learning, democratic learning, and all of that, beautiful. They can do both those things. But how are we actually contributing to that in a realistic way?

Why are you convinced that traditional writing-center practices are the problem?

The language of nondirectiveness is the language of access and empowerment. It sounds good. It’s just that it turns out it’s not true. When I became director of the tutor program here, I invited a faculty member from TESOL to give a presentation because everyone was struggling with tutoring language learners, and they weren’t coming to the center, because we were doing such a lousy job of helping them.

He started asking questions about what our tutoring looked like. And the look on his face — I mean, his response was like, “If you’re going to do stuff like that, of course they’re not going to come here, and of course you’re not helping. This is not a way to teach.”

Those are strong words.

Language learning is one place out there with fairly empirical research showing what works and what doesn’t, and nondirective tutoring does not come out as an effective method for teaching language learners in any way. You can’t teach genre that way, you can’t teach prose style that way, it’s just not effective. And the lower the proficiency of the learner, the more directive feedback they need.

And yet if nondirective tutoring is such a widespread, standard practice at writing centers, you must get pushback.

I feel it all the time in presentations, at meetings of the International Writing Centers Association, any place like that.

Your research techniques also put you in a somewhat lonely position in your field: The 2017 study uses sophisticated data-mining techniques like chi-square analysis, cross tabulation, and t-tests to measure statistical significance. How do colleagues react?

I see either outright rejection for anything statistical or a lack of feedback that really engages with methods, even if there are holes to poke. For us to develop as a field, in quantitative studies, we need a lot more people doing it and a lot more people willing to engage with it — the kind of collegial dialogue that helps us all get better. That’s normal in a lot of places but not normal for us.

Where would you poke holes in your own work?

This is a study of one institution. You don’t know if the factors you’re seeing here would be correlations in any other setting. And it comes down to the quality of the data you have and the data that is missing. There’s the potential that there’s a variable out there that just isn’t in my data set that is actually the explanatory variable of why people come to the writing center or don’t come. You just don’t know what it is.

You admit you don’t know what should take the place of the writing-center practices you criticize. Are any techniques more promising than others?

Partly it’s about acknowledging that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. But as for specific practices, at our writing center we do minimal marking. It’s a way of helping students when they have diffuse grammar issues in their writing. Outside of that, we’ve created services that are not tutoring and are not totally writing-related. We offer academic coaching. We offer retreats for writers. There’s something about having people together writing quietly for long periods of time that has a lot of value to it. There’s a lot of learning that happens in that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Clarification (2/12/2018, 12:15 p.m.): In the introduction to the interview, a description of students who use the writing center has been changed slightly to make clear that while privileged students do visit, less-privileged students are more frequent visitors. Also, the subject of this interview has written a letter to the editor.