A Letter from the Editor... Writing Center Journal
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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012) THE IDEA OF A MULTILITERACY CENTER: SIX RESPONSES Valerie Balester Sohui Lee Texas A&M University Stanford University [email protected] [email protected] Nancy Grimm David M. Sheridan Michigan Tech University Michigan State University [email protected] [email protected] Jackie Grutsch McKinney Naomi Silver Ball State University University of Michigan [email protected] [email protected] This essay—which began its life as a roundtable at Writing Center was renamed the Michigan Tech the 2011 Computers and Writing Conference— Multiliteracy Center to better reflect their practices. juxtaposes six responses from different administrators Sohui Lee explores the question of how tutor training and faculty engaged in the turn towards multiliteracy at her center might be adjusted to effectively engage centers. Although our title invokes Stephen North’s undergraduate tutors in “multimodal thinking” 1984 essay in which he tried to assert an identity for through situated practice. Valerie Balester discusses the “new” writing center, ours is influenced in how a move to communication-in-the-disciplines at approach more by North’s 1994 follow-up article her institution provided an opportunity to build a “Revisiting The Idea of the Writing Center” and Beth multiliteracy center with a focus on new media. Naomi Boquet and Neal Lerner’s explication of the influence Silver advocates that writing centers play a role in of North’s work in writing center studies. North’s teaching new media writing via course offerings as well reconsideration critiques his overly “romantic as tutor training and faculty outreach. idealization” of writing centers and moves from global Boquet and Lerner suggest that the lesson to take axioms to local action (10). Likewise, within this essay, from North and the cult-like (yet perhaps suffocating) the six authors grapple with local contexts and offer success of his 1984 essay is that the field’s status local solutions; none have tried to “romanticize” the “cannot be grounded in the words of one theorist, difficult trade-offs involved in the changing identities from one article, from one line; instead, it is of writing centers, and still none have dismissed the represented in richly textured accounts that are idea outright because it isn’t convenient. concerned with the full scope of literacy studies, as While the authors’ experiences are varied, each befits the richness and complexity of writing center response demonstrates a sense of responsibility on the sites and the people who populate them” (185). To part of writing centers to forge ahead within their that end, the following accounts do not try to cohere institutional contexts toward a vision of multiliteracies to a common, seamless argument. At points, the that promotes access, awareness, connection, and various authors converge and diverge, agree and currency. David Sheridan compares two models of disagree, resulting in an essay that we hope gets at the multiliteracy centers in order to map anxieties that “richly textured accounts” that Boquet and Lerner writing centers tend to experience as they broaden promote while engaging the key question of how their missions to include multimodal compositions. writing centers can best address multiliteracies. Jackie Grutsch McKinney wonders if writing centers ought to call themselves multiliteracy centers. Nancy Grimm recounts the reactions as Michigan Tech’s Multiliteracy Center • 2 “You Have Made Me Very Angry!”: Humanities. At the LMC, we provide just-in-time peer Mapping Writing Center Anxieties about support for a wide range of media, including digital video, web compositions, desktop publishing, and Multiliteracies more. David M. Sheridan I think it's productive to read these two kinds of In 2002, I was working with colleagues at multiliteracy centers against each other. On the one University of Michigan’s Sweetland Writing Center to hand, we have multiliteracy centers (like the SMC) that establish something that we called the “Sweetland begin with the writing center model. On the other Multiliteracy Center" (SMC). Just as students had hand, we have multiliteracy centers (like the LMC) that historically come to the Sweetland Writing Center to begin somewhere else, with the model of a media receive peer support for their writing projects, center or a digital studio or a digital humanities lab students would now be able to come to the Sweetland (Table 1 attempts to provide a point-by-point Multiliteracy Center to receive support for new media comparison of these two models). Comparing these projects—including digital videos, websites, and two models reveals two broad sources of anxiety that desktop-published documents. The idea was that writing centers tend to experience as they move knowledgeable peers would engage student composers toward a multiliteracy center model. in conversations about all aspects of multimodal The first can be summed up with the accusation: composing—including words, images, sounds, and That's not writing. Writing centers tend to get anxious other media components. Importantly, while the SMC and to make other people anxious as they explore was staffed by specially trained consultants, included forms of composing that don't involve writing in the new technologies, and required the reconfiguration of narrow sense of the term. Q: Can you help me with existing space, it was still part of the writing center. It my video? A: Can we call it a video essay? Can we call was not a separate facility. it a visual argument? My presentation for the 2002 Computers and At the Language and Media Center, we don't use Writing Conference focused on this effort to establish writing as the central reference point for our work. If a multiliteracy center. During the Q&A session, one of you conceive of your video or photograph or sculpture the folks in attendance raised her hand eagerly and in terms other than those privileged by the field of announced that my presentation had made her very writing and rhetoric, no worries. No one will give you angry. The source of her anger was my brazen funny looks. disregard for disciplinary boundaries. I was A second major kind of anxiety concerns the transgressing long-established divides between visual status of technologies. Writing centers, in my and written communication. Writing centers, she experience, still feel anxiety when conversation turns warned, should stick to writing. for long periods of time to technical instruction, to That experience at Computers and Writing was tool panels and pulldown menus, and all of those not an isolated incident. As I have talked, over the past proper nouns (Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro, decade, to local and national audiences, about how Photoshop, etc.). This feels reductive — a low, non- writing centers might conceive of themselves as intellectual, non-rhetorical kind of work (For critiques multiliteracy centers, anger was not an unusual of what Haas and Neuwirth call a “computers are not response. I have frequently encountered warnings: our job” (325) attitude, see DeVoss, Cushman, and You shouldn't do that! You can't do that! Writing Grabill; Haas and Neuwirth; Rice; Selber). centers should stick to writing! At the LMC, we are not embarrassed when we For the past two years I have been the director of provide technical instruction to composers. a different kind of multiliteracy center, a small Composers need support as they navigate the complex technology-rich space called the Language and Media interfaces that enable digital composing. They need Center (LMC), located within Michigan State University’s Residential College in the Arts and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu Multiliteracy Center • 3 help with software and hardware. And we provide that reintroduced (almost) the original formula as Coca- help with no apologies and no strings attached. Cola Classic. I feel a sense of relief and freedom at the LMC. I think of this New Coke moment when I think of No one gets angry if a media center supports “non- the evolution of writing centers to multiliteracy writing” forms like videos, digitized paintings, or 3D centers. I wonder: Is this our New Coke moment? models made with our digital paper cutter. No one Coca-Cola was responding to a change in tastes, and gets angry if we address the technological challenges so are writing centers. The change—in particular associated with these forms of composing. giving the product a “new” label—created controversy My colleagues at other institutions, who richly and anger for consumers, and multiliteracy centers, as describe their experiences with writing-centers-as- David Sheridan has suggested, can bring up issues for multiliteracy-centers in the pieces that follow, reinforce writing center users, too. For years, I’ve advocated for me the many ways that writing centers make addressing multiliteracies in writing centers, yet I excellent starting points for multiliteracy work. In fact, haven’t been willing to take the final plunge and many of the assets that I took for granted in the rename our center. This decision may have kept the writing center have proven difficult to reproduce in peace, but isn’t without consequences. I’ll briefly trace the LMC. I struggle to recover many facets of writing through the murky territory where I live—directing a center practice, to get back the intellectual and writing center which aims to address multiliteracies infrastructural resources I once had (such as robust without being a multiliteracy center. structures for training consultants). I think a writing center can evolve its identity by At the same time, I think it is productive for pursuing four paths: (1) staff (re)education, (2) physical writing centers to ask what might be gained by redesign, (3) user (re)education or rebranding, and (4) relinquishing some of their key anxieties about name change.