Ecocomposition

Abstract: This essay sketches a theoretical rationale for a revived pedagogy and research program in environmental studies within the field of professional communication. The first wave of such studies drew upon themes established by environmental rhetoric and ecocriticism within the Cold War context of political environmentalism. The second wave might well look to ecocomposition and ecopoetics in developing a new kind of ecologically sensitive workplace study and a renewed interest in the language of space and place and the concepts of local and global in teaching and research.

Abstract: Writing centers are like organisms, performing in and living in an educational environment: evolving, altering, adapting. Given this organic quality, a key way to understand how writing centers handle the teaching of writing is to examine them through the lens of ecocomposition. Focusing on the organic nature of writing, ecocompositionists borrow the concept of ecology as a central metaphor, seeing writers and their environments as dynamically intertwined. Student writers, then, are part of a web of connections. Woven into the theory of ecocomposition are perceptions and ideas that explain the work of writing centers today. This paper applies to centers each of ecocompostion’s pivotal concepts—interrelationship, place, and voice—in order to provide new insight into the nature of centers as they help students and to show that centers are not colonialists, they are not outsiders, and they are very capable of adding to Composition Studies. As a long-time director of a writing center (twenty years and counting), I have constantly heard comments like the one a student once told me: “I’ll go the Writing Center before I turn this paper in so I can get it checked.” Or what I heard a professor mention over coffee at Starbucks: “As a director of a writing center, you must be making your fellow professors happy. Quality papers are a joy to grade when it is only content that must be scrutinized.” These remarks make any director cringe, but they no longer surprise me because I have encountered them (or their ilk) over and over again. Such comments indicate that writing centers and their missions are misconceived, with many students and faculty seeing centers as mere comma clinics or “grammar garages” (Waldo 450), where run-ons are repaired and comma splices drained like dirty oil. Granted, there is an historical reason for this misconception. Many centers originated during the Open Admissions of the 1960s and ‘70s, being established to assist first-generation, inexperienced students who, not being fully prepared, might have needed help with editing, such as for run-ons and comma splices. Although it is true some centers do pre-date the era of Open Admissions (Carino), many were started at that time because desperate administrators and frustrated faculty clamored for help. So, in assisting basic writers, these centers often began as fix-it shops, hence, the limited role often attached to centers. Of course, since the 1960s and 1970s, centers have expanded and matured far beyond being Jiffy Lubes. Rather than being static comma clinics, centers are dynamic organisms, performing and living in an educational environment: evolving, altering, adapting. Given this organic quality, how can students and faculty understand the true nature of writing centers? I believe a key way to grasp how centers handle the teaching of writing is to examine them through the lens of the latest theory of composition: ecocomposition. Woven into this theory are perceptions and ideas that explain the work of writing centers, today, readily dispelling lingering misconceptions about centers. First, let us examine key writing center scholarship in order to see that prominent scholars have already hinted at ecocomposition but have not applied it, yet, to describing the functions of writing Page 1 of 16 CF 23: “Redefining the Writing Center with Ecocomposition” by Bonnie D. Devet http://compositionforum.com/issue/23/redefine-wc-ecocomp.php centers. Then, this paper will do just that: apply ecocomposition to writing centers to show ecocompositon’s pivotal ideas of place, interrelationship, and voice make the theory a useful “conceptual tool” (Dobrin and Weisser, Natural 59), providing new insight into the nature of centers as they help students and establish their role in composition studies. Seeds of Ecocomposition in Writing Center Scholarship The majority of writing center scholarship began to appear in the 1980s, with several key articles attempting to explain how centers work. Many of these seminal pieces, written before ecocomposition arrived on the scene, nevertheless foreshadow basic concepts of ecocomposition, even if the ideas are not so fully developed as ecocomposition will describe them. For example, the two keystone articles of the 1980s Stephen North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center” and Muriel Harris’s “Talking in the Middle: Why Students Need Writing Tutors” stress, among other points, the idea of “place” as applied to centers. These articles argue that centers are special spaces which help students (often called clients) in ways not found elsewhere on campus so that, as it is so often cited from North, the writer and not just the writing is changed (69). Here, “place” seems to mean an alternative to formal, classroom education. More recently, Nancy Grimm also recognizes that centers embody a place or space that is unique, but she provides a slightly different perspective than do Harris or North. Seeing clients as travelers on a journey, assisted by consultants (tutors), Grimm believes a main tenet of any consultation is that consultants start wherever clients are in their journeys as writers, knowing students bring to the center’s space numerous experiences with writing, many of which may not be academic but, nonetheless, are valuable to consultants when helping clients. Over and over, consultants point out that while student writers may use contractions or even incomplete sentences in e-mails, or write short one-sentence paragraphs for a newspaper story, the new place (discourse) in which clients find themselves means changing in order to write a history term paper or a biology lab report. As consultants point out the alterations in the terrain, clients move into a new space. “Writing center coaches [consultants] are,” as Grimm succinctly states, “experienced travelers who can make explicit the often unspoken conventions, values, styles, and assumptions of competing discourses” (“New” 14). So, while North and Harris stress the center as a place offering a different education than one found in classrooms, Grimm describes centers as helping students move or negotiate through spaces. As we will see below, these views of centers as places are useful, but ecocomposition can add to North’s, Harris’s, and Grimm’s ideas about writing center spaces. Besides place, the scholarship also hints at another ecocomposition concept: “interaction.” Again, however, the interaction as described by the scholars will be just a beginning, with ecocomposition able to enlarge and expand on the concept. As early as 1991, Lisa Ede describes the special interaction between consultants and clients, an interaction showing clients a new view of themselves as writers. What does it mean to be a writer? Ede replaces the view of the isolated person in a garret with the image of a writer being engaged in an exchange where he or she is influenced by other texts, other authors, and ideology. As a result, consultants help clients understand that writing is not done in isolation, a central tenet of what Ede calls “the theoretical foundation for writing centers” (3). Her article points ahead to ecocomposition, which also emphasizes that no writer writes alone. In the same vein, Anne Johnstone’s 1991 article, “The Writing Tutorial as Ecology: A Case Study,” explains that readers and writers interact to elicit change in each other, in what may be called “collaborative learning.” As Johnstone writes, “The forms and purposes of texts and ideas informing them develop interactively” (55). Here, again, is emphasized the interaction of writers and readers. As it will be seen, such a relationship is a vital component of ecocomposition. Page 2 of 16 CF 23: “Redefining the Writing Center with Ecocomposition” by Bonnie D. Devet http://compositionforum.com/issue/23/redefine-wc-ecocomp.php But neither Ede nor Johnstone provides enough detail about the nature of this interaction. Alice Gillam does, though, even adding “voice” to the mix. She explores the forces pushing and shaping clients, forces arising from the academy itself (such as students being required to document with APA), from the inner voice of the writer, and from the dialogue between consultants and clients in the writing center, all shaping a consultation (“Writing Center Ecology”). In her influential essay “Writing Center Ecology: A Bakhtinian Perspective,” Gillam characterizes other influences on clients: the students’ idiosyncrasies of language and background (Gillam’s “centrifugal forces”) press up against the demands of university writing (“centripetal forces”) (5). Gillam’s emphasis on interaction and on the student’s having a voice points squarely ahead to ecocomposition, which will elaborate on this interaction to show how clients and even tutors are woven into a discourse linking them to all the other voices that have come before. So, scattered in the influential writing center scholarship from the 1980s to the first decade of the twentieth century are intimations of ecocomposition: North’s, Harris’s, and Grimm’s sense of place as well as Ede’s, Johnstone’s, and Gilliam’s description of voice and the interactions between clients/tutors and the academy’s demands. While these examinations of place and interplay are valuable, however, it must be acknowledged that these scholars have only laid a foundation, not yet providing a full, complete picture of the dynamic, organic (with emphasis on organic) nature of the work of writing centers. There is more to the center than is dreamt of in these scholars’ philosophies; ecocomposition provides this more encompassing way to describe centers. I will give a brief definition of this important theory and then provide concrete examples from my center to demonstrate how the key principles of ecocomposition (interaction, place, and voice) help explain a center to students and faculty alike. “Nature” of Ecocomposition Dating back at least to a panel at the 1998 Conference on College Compo