Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice

The Everyday Writing Center challenges some of the most comfortable traditions in its field, and it does so with a commitment and persuasiveness that one seldom sees in scholarly discussion. The book, at its core, is an argument for a new writing center consciousness--one that makes the most of the writing center's unique, and uniquely fluid, identity.

Writing center specialists live with a liminality that has been acknowledged but not fully explored in the literature. Their disciplinary identity is with the English department, but their mission is cross-disciplinary; their research is pedagogical, but they often report to central administration. Their education is in humanities, but their administrative role demands constant number-crunching. This fluid identity explains why Trickster--an icon of spontaneity, shape-shifting, and the creative potential of chaos--has come to be a favorite cultural figure for the authors of this book.

Adapting Lewis Hyde and others, these authors use Trickster to develop a theme of ordinary disruptions ("the everyday") as a source of provocative learning moments that can liberate both student writers and writing center staff. At the same time, the authors parlay Etienne Wenger's concept of "community of practice" into an ethos for a dynamic, learner-centered pedagogy that is especially well-suited to the peculiar teaching situation of the writing center.

Through Trickster, they question not only accepted approaches to writing center pedagogy, but conventional approaches to race, time, leadership, and collaboration as well. They encourage their field to exploit the creative potential in ordinary events that are normally seen as disruptive or defeating, and they challenge traditions in the field that tend to isolate a writing center director from the department and campus.

Yet all is not random, for the authors anchor this high-risk/high-yield approach in their commitment to a version of Wenger's community of practice. Conceiving of themselves, their colleagues, student writers, and student tutors as co-learners engaged together in a dynamic life of learning, the authors find a way to ground the excess and randomness of the everyday, while advancing an ethic of mutual respect and self-challenge.

Committed to testing a region beyond the edge of convention, the authors of The Everyday Writing Center constantly push themselves and their field toward deeper, more significant research, and more reflective, dynamic teaching.

Anne Ellen Geller is professor of English and director of Writing Across Communities at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. She is a coauthor of Working with Faculty Writers and The Everyday Writing Center.

Michele Eodice is emeritus director of the writing center at the University of Oklahoma and is currently in the role of Senior Writing Fellow for the Center for Faculty Excellence. She is a codirector of The Meaningful Writing Project (meaningfulwritingproject.net), a coauthor of The Meaningful Writing Project, Working with Faculty Writers, The Everyday Writing Center, and (First Person)², and a coeditor of Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers. With Shannon Madden, she also coedited a special issue of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal on access and equity for graduate-student writers. 

Frankie Condon is associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Her books include I Hope I Join the Band; Performing Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication, coedited with Vershawn Ashanti Young; and The Everyday Writing Center, coauthored with Michele Eodice, Elizabeth Boquet, Anne Ellen Geller, and Margaret Carroll. She is the recipient of the Federation of Students Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award (Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance) and the Outstanding Performance Award (for excellence in teaching and scholarship) from the University of Waterloo.

Meg Carroll is the director of the Rhode Island College Writing Center.

Elizabeth H. Boquet is professor of English and director of the Writing Center at Fairfield University. She is the coauthor of The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice and author of Noise from the Writing Center.