Rhetorical Media and the Twenty First Century Open-Access Writing Center: Predictions, Predilections, and Realities

“Two-year colleges, whose mission is to serve as a gateway for nontraditional students, must not allow themselves to become, by default, the new gatekeepers for the [under-served]” --Jodi Millward

About the Author
Clint Gardner directs the Salt Lake Community College Student Writing Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. He currently serves as Secretary of the Two-year College Association of the National Council of Teachers of English. He also served as President of the International Writing Centers Association. His writing center research and development include the work of peer writing tutors in a community college writing center and the use of online resources to bring writing center services who cannot attend the Student Writing Center in person. One the most important aspects of his writing center work is to support and offer feedback to the student writers who come to the SLCC Student Writing Center, as well as to the SLCC Students who work as peer writing consultants in the Center.

 

Conclusion

We have to wonder at these disparities and possible causes.  Given that roughly 46% of the open-access respondents indicated that they see multimodal documents in their centers or 27% work with students and their web pages, where are writing tutors learning about such new media?  Surely some of them are learning in their course work, and perhaps 19% are learning about responding in writing center staff education programs, but what about the others?  Are they just picking it up on their own, or is the assumption that responding to any text is the same as responding to all texts?  In other words, is it the assumption that a writing tutor who can respond to a traditional academic essay is well-prepared to respond to a web text, multimodal document, or, in the terms of this collection, rhetorical media?  I would counter that a tutor who is not educated in offering a fuller response to rhetorical media is likely to become the techno-wonk who just provides technological answers (as a person untrained in rhetorical response may only respond to grammar issues) or, perhaps worse, just does the difficult technological work for the student or, perhaps worst of all, throws up her hands with no response at all.

Given how writing centers work and their commitment to respond to writers on whatever type of text they are writing, I don’t believe that we will leave writers with the “nothing at all” option.  Writing centers are also very resistant to anything that smacks of “doing it for” the writer, so that response would also not sit well.  Writing centers will take up this rhetorical media work eventually (perhaps unwillingly as my survey suggests), with the changing nature of writing and how it is produced.  When more high stakes assignments (such as e-Portfolios) are given to students, we will face an undeniable demand.  In the best tradition of writing center work, we will respond to what writers bring to us and what they want to talk about.  In other words, we must necessarily include a response methodology to rhetorical media into our writing center staff education curriculum.

Nevertheless, with the problems and complexity of responding to a media or genre without specific staff education and taking into consideration the effect that genre or media has on the writing of any alphabetic or rhetorical media text, many writing centers may make the mistake of focusing only on alphabetic texts.  I think, however, that we run the risk of becoming isolated into a alphabetic gulag of our own making, and will be come less-relevant to writers working on texts that actively engage in rhetorical media.  

We are treading on some very unstable ground here that may simply be the fault of the rather sudden changes that have occurred in not only the delivery of writing itself, but also in how writing is taught.  As writing center professionals I think we need to better prepare ourselves and our centers to meet the demands that will be placed on student writers, or we run the risk of being seen as “old-fashioned” and out of step with the realities that students face.  We can do this, as Sheridan suggests, by seeking out partnerships on our campuses with programs that teach rhetorical media, and seek out tutors who have taken such courses.  We can also encourage peer tutors to take such courses, and actively engage in thinking about rhetorical media in the context of their tutoring.  Such an action is really no different than what writing centers currently do when recruiting peer tutors, since we often seek students who have achieved success in traditional academic writing courses.  We also need to include attention to how responding to rhetorical media differs from and is similar to responding to other texts in our training curricula.

While some writing center directors may exclaim that they don’t have time or capacity to take on responding to rhetorical media, it is clear that such responses set us up for a failure to respond to student needs.  We cannot afford not to prepare our centers for work with rhetorical media.  If we maintain a static sense of writing and how writers write, or if we refuse to acknowledge differences in responding to technology-based rhetorical media, we and the students who seek out our writing centers will be left in the past.   As Kathleen Blake Yancey (2004) states, the types of writing that students do has changed, is changing, and will be changing yet.  The time when the standard academic term paper is the only type of writing a student engages is quickly drawing to a close--even more so at the open-access writing center where student writers will be challenged to produce different kinds of text than those expected in standard academic settings.

Furthermore, it would seem that writing centers at closed-access institutions are providing wider-range of support for writers in various types of rhetorical media (chart 4/table 1). Are we at open-access institutions, quite literally, disabling our students by not providing them with adequate response to non-traditional types of texts?  Millward (2008) states, “Two-year colleges, whose mission is to serve as a gateway for nontraditional students, must not allow themselves to become, by default, the new gatekeepers for the [under-served]” or, what Cynthia Selfe (1999) bluntly calls a new illiterate class (423).  As individual writing center professionals at open-access institutions, we have to decide if it is worth while to keep our writing centers relevant to this change, or whether we will focus solely on the alphabetic text.  Deciding to do the latter may not immediately imperil our centers, but it does a disservice to students who face an increasingly multimodal future.  

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