Geller, Anne Ellen, Michele Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Carroll, and Elizabeth H. Bouquet. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice.

Balester, Valerie ; Singh-Corcoran, Nathalie

Geller, Anne Ellen, Michele Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Carroll, and Elizabeth H. Bouquet. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Logan, UT: Utah State UP , 2007. $22.95

The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice has created a buzz among writing center professionals. Co-written by Anne Ellen Geller, Michelle Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Carroll, and Elizabeth H. Boquet, this recent Utah Press publication of 144 pages manages to address the topics we have most on our minds, while providing a fresh perspective on our work. Its writerly voice, which serves as a metaphor for the writing center community (diverse but with common goals), brings us together for soul-searching and, we hope, change. We read it together, and we found ourselves in agreement about its magic. The Everyday Writing Center has the effect, most desired in any book, to make us think more deeply about our own writing centers and interrogate our habits. We think it will result in little, everyday changes in writing centers and in institutions of higher learning across the nation, and that the cumulative effect will be both exhilarating and profound.

The writers stress that we should (as writing center practitioners) examine the hard stuff in our writing center work--the things we have questions about, the things that make us uncomfortable. Their challenge hearkens to Nancy Welch's Getting Restless: Rethinking Revision in Writing Instruction, in which she proposes a reconsideration of revision. She argues that when we approach revision and when we teach it, our goal is to seek out and eliminate the inconsistencies: the contradictions, the underdeveloped ideas, and those ideas that just don't fit. Instead of erasure, Welch asks that we explore the disorienting moments in our texts and we turn (and help our students turn) those "moments into productive sites for examining, questioning, and straying toward alternatives" (4). In the same way, the authors of The Everyday Writing Center believe that we should begin with dissonance. As center professionals, we need to work with discord and reposition our problems as challenges that yield infinite possibilities.

The writers also remind us that we all have times when everything runs according to plan, and we proceed by habit. We may be grateful for these everyday moments, our neatly scheduled appointments, our tutor training agendas, everything going smoothly and predictably. But, if we are lucky, "Trickster may, in a moment, flash before us some realization of the import and impact of an array of unconscious meanings embedded in our practices"(19). Writing center work can seem mundane and everyday to those who label it as mere service, but this book helps us see the inspiration in it. Using primarily Wenger, sometimes Lave or de Certeau, the co-authors show how we as a community reify the everyday and, then projecting our reifications into the world, trip over our "things" as we negotiate and participate on a moment-to-moment basis: "we may order our lives--and our work--around ideas that we would eschew if we were aware of them"(18-19). If we are mindful, the authors show, if we attend to our inner Tricksters, we can see through the reifications at opportune times, and see behind our practices so that we can interrogate them, maybe change things, maybe even revolutionize them.

Trickster, the subject of Chapter two ("Trickster at Your Table") occupies the margins and peeks around the pages throughout The Everyday Writing Center. Trickster, the liminal figure who occupies the border spaces betwixt and between, seems the perfect metaphor for our need to stop and reflect seriously on what we do in everyday practice. Trickster's skill as shape-shifter, joint-disturber, and bricoleur is emphasized, but Trickster is also evoked for a sense of humor, cleverness, and wit with words. Trickster is calling when we feel those moments of dissonance, inviting us to re-frame. Time becomes a prime example, in Chapter three, "Beat (Not) the Poor Clock," of a normalized and thus invisible practice that Trickster calls to our attention. As we read this chapter, we found ourselves interrogating our own practices and policies about time--how would a writing center without schedules work, what could we do to make time a centerpiece of training in a way that honored learning and teaching rather than parceling it out as a commodity, how might we change out policies to give writers better time? Conventional wisdom is being challenged in this chapter in ways that might affect the long-standing practice of our centers. What greater influence can a book engender?

The Everyday Writing Center reads like a series of overlapping waves. Each individual chapter builds on the other and adds something new. In Chapter four, "Origami Anyone: Tutors as Learners," the writers focus on communities of practice, a key term introduced very early in the text. They enhance their discussion with a new key concept: the learning community. "Origami Anyone" asks writing center workers to transform their centers with new perspectives and new frames. Here again, we see the familiar call to embrace ambiguity and cognitive dissonance. They ask that we, through staff education, "design activities and intellectual challenges that get tutors to look at their everyday experiences differently" (48). Through these various activities, tutors learn from and challenge one another. The writers offer heuristics and examples without being prescriptive. They are quick to point out that prescription leads to the five-paragraph-essay-writing-center-session: "rote, repetitive, with little room for fresh insight or complicated connections" (64). Staff education is a significant focus for the writing center administrator, and so we appreciated the chapter's discussion of multiple and diverse projects that promote a culture of learning.

In "Straighten Up and Fly Right: Writers as Tutors and Tutors as Writers" (Chapter five), the authors present a view of tutors as primarily writers, a role that we often undercut in the press of everyday concerns. We tend to stress their teaching roles and neglect nurturing their writerly habits. But it's important to highlight tutors as writers and creators: they are not just people who help with writing. The National Writing Project has advocated since its inception that the best teachers of writing are writers themselves. (Remember Donald Murray's A Writer Teaches Writing, which so influenced that movement?). While tutors are not teachers, they are nonetheless partners in writing instruction, and if the best teachers are writers it makes sense that the best tutors are as well. As chapter five emphasizes, the social nature of writing fosters a culture of learning and a community of practice in which tutors interrogate and discuss their everyday writing choices and how these choices are informed by and affect the world. If we make writing an explicit part of our staff education, our writing centers will be, as the co-authors attest, deeply affected.

Chapter six does a fine job of wedding the everyday to the abstract through the issue of "Everyday Racism," while making a courageous argument for us to act as institutional leaders. This is a prime example of how the book challenges us to confront the hard stuff. For those of us who work at colleges and universities where there are very few students and faculty of color, where race seems invisible, where no one has to directly confront it, the chapter boldly highlights the insidious nature of institutional racism. Even an apparently small step such as diversifying our staffs can be blocked by our attitudes, although we may not even recognize the racism inherent in our attempts to hire, for example, only Honors students. Yet the challenge can be daunting and the risks are greater than the chapter warns. For people of color and whites alike, challenging racism is often accompanied by name calling, anger, shunning. Before you make a public challenge, gather allies and be secure in your stand. It is worth it, but it can change your career, and not always in a way that will make you a hero.

Chapter seven, "Everyday Administration, or Are We Having Fun yet?" is perhaps the most fun chapter of all in its hopeful outlook and call to establish a "leaderful institutional culture." This is, in fact, a safer path to confronting racism, one more likely to be productive. Taking up the call for a "scholarship of administration" (115), they challenge us to bring our scholarship to the table, to act out as the leaders we are (not those we think administration wants us to be), and to be mindful of our power. In this challenge is an implicit undermining of how our educational institutions often position students as commodities, as powerless, as voiceless. While some of us believe we should use rhetoric to gain the resources we need from administration, even if that means translating our work into terms the institution understands (FTE's, retention, graduation rates), The Everyday Writing Center suggests this places us too near the role of traitor. Here is where Trickster breaks down for the authors--Trickster has no trouble with the traitor role and would embrace it to meet his/her ends, but our authors want Trickster to simply prick our conscience in this case, to remind us to speak up for our causes in our own voices. "Don't Be Afraid" (123), they say, to "enact our values across our institution" (124). Our leadership matters, and no one can marginalize the effect we can have if we embrace it.

The Everyday Writing Center addresses the many long-standing concerns of writing center professionals, but as we were reading together, some questions surfaced. While we appreciated the scholarship in the book, we wondered if readers will reify it--will know where those theorists from outside their discipline fit within their own disciplinary contexts and how those individual contexts affect the impact of The Everyday Writing Center. Indeed, is The Everyday Writing Center a book which can be appreciated by those who are brand new to writing centers? We think it might be a text more appreciated by the somewhat seasoned professional. Our community of practice does share many assumptions worth investigating, yet the very act of composing a book about it reifies it. We are not suggesting that we retreat into the too-often used mantra that all writing centers are unique and thus generalizations must be avoided. But we ought to remember as we read to apply the time-honored rule, "if the shoe fits, wear it." Is yours a writing center run by people who are worried about catering to those bean counters? Are the administrators at your institution bean counters who value something else over student learning? We daresay many of us, though we use tutor training books, don't live by them or run our writing centers too rigidly. While we admit we sometimes do get too caught up in the everyday to notice opportunity, and we are slow to change, and we do rely on established community practices, we also play, challenge, revise, and question. Now, thanks to this book, we'll do so with greater awareness of the value of disruption, greater joy in the process, and with more attention to the Trickster on our shoulder.

Works Cited

Murray, Donald. A Writer Teaches Writing. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

Welch, Nancy. Getting Restless: Rethinking Revision in Writing Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997.

Reviewed by:

* Valerie Balester, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX

* Nathalie Singh-Corcoran, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV