Collaborator or Thief: Negotiating intellectual property in writing center sessions

Since taking the graduate seminar course on Writing Center Theory, I haven’t made an appointment with the WC as a client since my undergraduate days. Now, let me tell yawl! I’ve had my share of good/bad session even before coming to work at the writing center, but I believe I had forgotten how valuable and useful the sessions could be. I left this particular session-I will describe-ready to write and eager to move forward with my writing. I was working on a teaching reflection on the irony of teaching standardized English in the land of diversity and overwhelming cross-cultural abundance...

I set up an appointment with a graduate student that I knew, but had never had the opportunity to work with. This consultant was an African American-and yes, I choice him because he was an African American. I also chose this graduate student because I really wanted to share my writing with someone to who had a teaching background and to whom I believed I could be honest with regarding my frustrations in writing this reflection. Does this mean that I choice him because I knew I would have been comfortable discussing the contents of my draft, perhaps?

In the session I talked through my paper (I had one 2 pages and was really hoping to talk things through) I wanted the session to be a conversation, and I made that clear at the beginning of the session, and It was indeed a conversation. We talked about the issues that were surrounding my paper and the consultant gave great input and asked questions that forced me to see my writing objectives clearer. We also came up with some great ideals, I don’t want to go into the paper content in details, however one thing I noticed and I thought-man I wonder if my own consultants feel this way-I noticed that at times I felt like the consultants was talking too much, maybe even veering away from my paper contents-I wondered if this was apart of his own background or understanding of theory and practice, or perhaps the questions I was raising lead him to re-consider the work he was doing…I don’t know I just remember thinking-Man! This is great information, but I’m not sure I’m trying to go that route with my paper and my own research.

Additionally, At one point the consultant outlined an ideal on a the side of my paper, as he wrote it he said: “This is my ideal”, I though his chart was a great way of looking at my paper, but I was so afraid to even listen or look at the chart because I though that he might think that I was going to steal his ideal. At the end of the session he gently pushed the paper with the hand drawn chart and arrows on it near me, I politely looked at him; graduate student-to-graduate student and said, hey no, that’s your ideal-maybe you could use it, it’s a great one! I though to myself-this is an interesting interaction, as a graduate student-I for one have millions of great ideals-just like my peers I’m certain of it…but when do you share those ideals and when do you house them? I didn’t want to take his chart because I felt like it wasn’t mine on, I for damn sure wasn’t’ tryin’ to be an intellectual thief…Interesting I thought.

The Pot Calls the Kettle Black...

As I finished the readings for this week, I couldn't help but notice the repetition of some of the same concerns in comp/rhet that occur in WC work. Of course, I know this is no coincidence, as WCs are the child/adopted child/bastard child/stray cat of composition--and obviously we both deal with student writing, so there are going to be connections. What differs, though, is what I'm trying to cling to--because they are really not the same, again, for obvious reasons. Our main text this week (for those reading who are not in our class) was Nancy Grimm's Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times. I truly enjoyed this book and found it illuminating, frustrating, helpful, and unhelpful all at once. Page five gives a list of excellent questions that I think every WC should grapple with, questions I intend to bring up in my tutor training sessions. While I think Grimm answers many of these questions, she also created new ones for me.

My biggest question was about her anecdote about "Mary" starting on page 25. For one, I really felt the need to know what the assignment was. How can we understand the inappropriateness of Mary's response if we don't know what she was trying to accomplish? But my questions--or rather, my irritations--about the Mary anecdote didn't end, because Grimm referred back to this situation frequently. And this is what bugged me: whenever Grimm referred to Mary's situation, she made assumptions about her that I felt were biased and prejudiced--the exact opposite of the kind of WC she advocates throughout the entire book. Let me explain:

On page 32, Grimm says that Mary "appears to uncritically accept the wisdom of elders and ... holds some texts holy, appears to be wrong, naive, or at best unenlightened." Why? Because Mary was a devout Christian. Is Grimm saying that people of faith are uneducated? Are the Chinese, who revere the wisdom of their elders and their ancestors, "unenlightened"? Does holding a text as holy make half the population of the world (there are many holy texts) wrong? Doesn't the postmodern notion Grimm advocates reject the dichotomous ideas of right and wrong and encourage embracing difference? There was no evidence in Grimm's tale of Mary that indicated she was naive, wrong, or unenlightened at all. Grimm makes this assumption because (now I'm assuming) she has a bit of a problem with people of faith. Well, I tried to overlook this, because I know that many liberals have problems with fundamental Christianity and think they are all just brainwashed. But on page 49, Grimm says, "We need to learn to live with the paradox that Mary and many other students don't want to be like us..." Who is "us" in this scenario? All WC people? All in academia? All women? And all this because Mary wrote a paper about living under God with her soon-to-be husband? I couldn't get over this and it bothered me through the whole book.

The only reason I think it bothered me so much is that I highly doubt Grimm is aware of her own jaded language in this text, which makes it all the more important. And it illustrates just how difficult it is to adopt the kind of WC that she proposes. Because while Grimm's language concerning Mary was probably not so wisely chosen, the way she proposes working with students we see as being so different is admirable and makes excellent sense. If someone who has thought this through and researched it so much that she writes this excellent book about it can't even overcome her own prejudices, how can our undergrad tutors? I'd love to think that I can get my tutors to adopt this attitude of wonder, but prejudices run very deep.

One other thing I wanted to point out: there were two times that I had questions, explicit questions, that Grimm anticipated and answered. Although I'm still wrestling with her answers, i thought it said a lot about her text that she anticipated these questions. One was on page 97, where she said, "Skeptical readers may ask if writing centers, given that they are often staffed by undergraduates, are up to the transformative tasks I have outlined here." Yep. This (skeptical?) reader was asking just that. I know how difficult this can be for me--and I'm old, a teacher, a mother, have been working class, and (almost!) have a PhD. So my 20-year-old middle-class white tutor is going to be able to do this? Sounds nice. And I know we have to strive for the ideal, even if we don't reach it.

Back to my initial point: what is different between WC issues and comp/rhet? What I noticed most of all today is that WC administrators have to relinquish control, whereas what I learn and struggle with in comp/rhet I can take directly to my classroom and work through myself. In WC work, I have to train others to do this--a much more daunting task. I'm anxious to get working on my tutor training materials!