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. 

Thoughts on Today's Session

I know I briefly mentioned a bit of these ideas in our discussion at the end of the class period, but I figured I could elaborate on them here.

Until today’s session, I had a slight preference for the paragraph-by-paragraph approach when reading through a paper with a writer. This preference was largely based on theory and imagined scenarios, but most of my own visits to the writing center have involved advisors who also follow this approach, and their generally consistent ability to provide helpful feedback has made it somewhat natural for me to drift toward a similar method. I really liked how the paragraph-by-paragraph approach allows the advisor to provide feedback to the writer by re-stating what is understood to be the paper’s points and predicting where the paper seems to be headed, but after today’s session, I am starting to reconsider this preference.

The writer I advised today had been to the writing center many times in the past, and because of this, he knew what he preferred. After the pre-textual stage, he very willingly volunteered to read through his paper so that he could look for errors and awkwardly-worded sentences. He was definitely interested in revising his writing, so I was able to let the session flow very naturally. Even as he continued reading at the end of the introduction, I didn’t find it necessary to stop him, so it wasn’t until the end of the paper that we began the most significant part of our discussion. I was a little surprised at how easy it was for me to follow along with his argument as he read it aloud—I wasn’t worried about examining the text itself because it was out of my sight, so I simply listened and took mental notes as we went along. Then, in our discussion afterward, I found myself remembering almost his entire paper, which made it very easy for me to point out places that worked well already as well as places that needed further clarification. Because I understood what he was trying to say in his essay (as a result of the complete read-through of the paper and some of our pre-textual discussion), I think my advice was much more meaningful than it would have been if we had taken a paragraph-by-paragraph approach. I was able to help him improve the clarity and flow of the paper in certain places because I had the complete image of it in my mind, whereas the paragraph-by-paragraph method I used in my previous session with a 101 student seemed to force me into giving potentially-awkward feedback when I really just wanted to see how the rest of the paper played out. I know this is only my second session with a student outside of our class, but I would definitely consider it to be more of a success than my first, and I have the somewhat unexpected change in direction to thank for that.

Thinking back over it all now, I have come to some general conclusions. First of all, I definitely think sessions should be allowed to flow as naturally as possible according to the writer’s direction, only to be altered by the advisor when it is absolutely necessary. I know this is not always possible, especially when working with writers who are less interested in their session and/or paper, but I still think it is my ideal approach when possible. Even for these less-interested writers, we can perhaps try to encourage them to share their thoughts by finding discreet ways to reinforce the value of their ideas. (That statement reminds me of the article I chose to summarize—I’ll have to write a post about it in the next day or so.) This writer-directed session concept is also tied into my newfound appreciation for the whole-paper approach—instead of attempting to force sessions into a paragraph-by-paragraph reading, I think it may be best to find a sort of natural flow here as well. To state all of these ideas simply, I guess I now have further solidified my belief that sessions should be conducted in a very personal, flexible manner—I don’t think there is any one approach that could consistently succeed in all sessions without a willingness to adapt.

Mock Sessions, Fake Sessions, Real Sessions...

I know several people in our class have claimed that the sessions we had with each other about our summaries were not “real” because we already know each other and are on the same level as advisors-in-training. Personally, though, I wouldn’t consider the session I had with Kari to be fake. Yes, I do know Kari, but we will have sessions with people we know in the writing center—Wittenberg’s campus is small enough to practically guarantee that—and I know some current advisors come in for sessions with other advisors as well.

Some people seemed to emphasize that there was an unrealistic balance in perceived authority in the summary sessions because both participants were capable of conducting a session on their own. However, after contemplating this claim, I cannot help but think that our work as advisors isn’t really about being expert writers who advise those with less skill/experience, which would therefore place us in a position of authority as the statement implies. Instead, I see advisors as experienced readers. We all have our flaws when it comes to writing. We’re not perfect, and I think I can safely say that perfected writing ability is not a required trait for advisors. In contrast, our strongest trait—out greatest power in a session—is simply that of our own perspective as readers. When we lend this perspective to writers by reading through their work and providing honest feedback, we allow the writers to get a sense of their audience—a chance to see how others are understanding what they are writing. Our knowledge of academic writing conventions is certainly a plus when we’re helping writers revise their papers, but I think someone lacking this knowledge that provides an honest reader’s response to a writer’s piece could help improve the quality and clarity of the paper quite significantly, too.

In my opinion, these sorts of sessions are a good introduction to writing center work. When we’re comfortable around the person we’re advising, we are able to focus less on finding the right words to say to avoid sounding overly critical, and focus more on the writer and his or her paper—the heart of a session. These sessions allow us to begin advising without having to focus on all aspects of the session at once—in a way, starting here allows us to divide up our concerns in order to learn how to handle the core of sessions instead of being overwhelmed as we attempt to consciously think through all aspects of what may be deemed “real” sessions that we will soon face in the writing center.