"A Monster Without a Head"

Writing Center stuff is on my mind right now, and I figure the blog's as good a place as any to start sorting it out. (Well, actually, a better place, since I can get feedback.)

I just finished this book about writing-center and writing-program management. One recommendation that several of the contributors make--and it's pretty commonsensical--is that newbie coordinators/directors start by categorizing and prioritizing the various issues they face. So that's something I need to do.

It ain't pretty. In many ways, in fact, our writing center is kind of a mess. The comment I've heard most often from colleagues this summer: "Hey, I hear you're taking over the writing center. Good luck with that. I don't envy you at all."

Umm, thanks?

The mess isn't at all the fault of the previous coordinator. It's way more institutional than that. Just one "little" example: for almost the entire past academic year, full-time unionized faculty were operating under a "Work to the Rule" situation in protest of our administration's refusal to negotiate a new contract. That is, we stopped doing "extra" work--committee work, lead-instructor work, coordinator work, etc. So there was no writing center coordinator for almost a year. The center remained open, the tutors--all adjuncts teaching in our writing program--continued to tutor, and our department secretary handled the bare-minimum administrative tasks. The center survived, but it was, as one of the tutors described it to me recently, "a monster without a head."

Work to the Rule ended--unsuccessfully for us union folks--in June. My department chair retired that month, and all kinds of roles got shifted around. Hence, the writing center job opened up.

Anyway, I've spent the last couple of months talking informally with our tutors (and others)about our center: finding out what works, what could be improved, etc. I have WAY more to find out, but here's what I'm hearing so far:

Personnel

• There've been no training or professional-development opportunities for tutors for at least the past year.
• There've been no staff meetings for at least a year.
• We have no official receptionist. If a tutor happens to have an open slot, he/she helps students sign in, answers the phone, etc. But too often, all tutors are busy working with students.
• Many tutors don't know each other; they want a stronger sense of collegiality.
• Some tutors need to work on interpersonal skills (or, as several people termed it, "customer-care skills").

Record Keeping

• My (new) department chair wants better record keeping--more data about who visits the center, what skills they work on, what college division they're coming from, etc. (I should mention that my department chair served as writing center coordinator in the nineties, and she diligently gathered these kinds of statistics; apparently, they haven't been gathered in any useful way since then.)
• All record keeping--from sign-in forms to tutor-report forms, etc.--is done by paper. Last year, the school purchased and installed AccuTrack software so that we could keep records electronically, but nobody's figured out how to use the software yet. (See the Work to the Rule discussion above.)

Philosophy and Policies

• ESL issues: Huge, huge concern among many tutors and teachers. Most tutors feel woefully undertrained in dealing with ESL issues. To make matters worse, there've been major miscommunication problems between the writing center and the ESL tutoring center, often resulting in students getting shuffled back and forth between the two centers.
• Approaches to grammar instruction: Since its inception in the eighties, our center has had a clearly-advertised policy about not being a "proofreading service." Apparently, though, some tutors interpret the policy to mean that they're not supposed to help students with sentence-level concerns at all. Other tutors, according to some reports, do nothing but mark up errors on students' papers.

Technology

• The center has just two computers--one Mac and one PC. The PC doesn't have Word installed on it. (???!)
• See "record keeping" category above.

Space

• The center shares space with the Math Lab, the ESL Tutoring Center, and the Science Tutoring Center. It's LOUD in there.

Other
(These items haven't really come up in discussions, but they're things I'd love to see happen. Some day.)

• The addition of peer tutors. (Right now, all tutors are adjuncts teaching in our writing program.)
• Greater sense of the writing center as campus resource (e.g., offering workshops to faculty across disciplines, especially since we don't have a WAC program.)

Whew.

Okay, next up: prioritizing.

Any thoughts?