Response to “From Silence to Noise: The Writing Center as Critical Exile” by Nancy Welch

This post is somewhat delayed, but I wanted to share this article with all of you. Rather than summarize it again, I’ll share a few of my favorite sections so you can get the basic idea of the piece without reading the whole thing. However, if any of you get the chance, the article is definitely worth the time it takes to read. It can be found here.

In the article, Welch uses narrative of her personal experiences advising one particular student to emphasize the value of her modified collaborative model—a model presented in response to the earlier one described in an article by Andrea Lunsford. It’s referred to as “The Writing Center as Critical Exile,” as one may see from the title. Basically, the center as a place of critical exile is intended to serve as a place for students to escape the many “off-stage voices” that attempt to control their thoughts and opinions—a place that provides “critical distance from, rather than immersion in, those social conversations” that structure one’s life in society. Welch explains that this idea comes from Julia Kristeva’s assertion that “writing arises as much from a sense of exile as from a sense of participating in social conversation”:

For Kristeva, “exile” doesn’t mean retreat into a silent tower room or banishment or alienation … Instead, some kind of exile means the creation of a space in which we can reflect on and intervene in the languages, conventions, and belief systems that constitute our texts, our sense of self, our notions of what is “common sense.” The writer as exile, Kristeva writes, seeks to form, scrutinize, and remake meaning ceaselessly … Through this process, the writer not only questions received knowledge and social norms but transforms them. Exile or the role of the stranger … is not an escape; it’s a means for one to write and act in the world rather than be written and acted upon.

Here and elsewhere, Kriteva helps me to think of the writing center where I work as, potentially, just this kind of critical exile. That center is located on the boundaries of the university where it is vulnerable to the yearly rounds of budget cuts but where it is also freed from the constraints of a pre-determined curriculum and the normative force of grades …

… the writing center asks both students and teachers to view writing as a means to examine, as well as participate in, that “living conversation” that … forms our writing and our lives. The writing center as critical exile offers time, space, and (yes) quiet that enables a student … to become a stranger to and collaborator with her writing … such a center also challenges teachers to become stranger to, rather than representatives of, the social conversations and conventions that students are struggling to locate themselves within.

…

… the writing center is not an escape from the social realm, a silent and isolated garret room. It’s also not a place where they are assisted by a teacher or a tutor toward uncritically joining and reproducing the norms of a particular discourse community … Instead, the writing center as critical exile is a place where these students converse with, question, and rework the conflicting often unsettling, always potentially creative other voices that populate their words. By turning into this collaborative conversation between writers and their texts, writing-center teachers can also enter into exile, call into question their ‘common-sensical” teaching practices, and become more reflective and aware collaborators with students and their writing. (Welch)

If you want to get a sense of this model in action, check out the article. I think I have quoted enough of it already for one blog post.

As a philosophy major, I enjoy critically examining nearly all aspects of life, so this article was definitely interesting to me. In my opinion, writing center advisors should try to be especially aware of all the discreet “voices” that influence both our advising pedagogies and writing itself. We’re in a position that allows us to guide the writing process of others, and having such an influence makes the awareness that results from a critical examination of the reasoning behind our actions and words an absolute necessity.