This week’s readings have served as a philosophical starting point for me. Stephen North’s impassioned “Idea of a Writing Center” excited me, Andrea Lunsford’s “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center” gave me some practical insight, and North’s “Revisiting” article pulled me back into the realm of reality. However, I think Lunsford’s piece is the one that has stuck with me throughout the week the most.
These first smatterings of week 1 readings have all somehow synthesized in my mind. I’ve decided that this semester can’t help but be one of self-discovery--who I am as a writer, who I am as a student, and who I am as an academic. Our 303 readings are helping me begin to build a framework around that last piece--who am I as a writing center consultant? Who will I be as (hopefully) a university professor in the future? Who will I be as a researcher, a writer, an idea-generating, journal-paper-producing “academic?”
Reflecting on Lunsford’s piece, I found myself resonating with ideas that she voiced--things I had felt but never consciously thought. The “epistemological shift” she discusses helped me identify the difference between teaching and tutoring styles (71). Every semester I experience the frustration that is a Current Traditionalist classroom--feeling disenfranchised, and feeling like I’m trying to learn in a vacuum with no interaction. Yeats (I believe) said, “Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.” Mentors and teachers in my life have lit a fire in me to learn and experience, so when a professor starts backing up a dump truck full of “knowledge” toward poor little student-receptacle me, I’m angry. Why can’t I question? Why can’t I conjecture? Why can’t I work this out with my fellow students? Who says you’re right? Why does my hand hurt from taking notes? Who says the reading is right? Why?
If I don’t want to be a glorified knowledge receptacle, I’m guessing writing center clients feel the same way (or perhaps would if they experience a genuine learning community). Lunsford’s metaphor of writing centers as Burkean Parlors has me beginning to see how collaboration is the answer to the question, “If not current traditionalism or expressivism, then what?” I’ve always gravitated to the idea of the Burkean Parlor--the unending conversation that we’re always trying to join in meaningful ways. Every student who will walk through the writing center’s door is in a conversation already--in fact, they’re entrenched in several rhetorical contexts. They have the rhetorical context of their classroom and assignment requirements, which serve as the constraints they’re working within. They are almost certainly writing on a topic that involves a field of research or study, and are thus seeking to join a larger conversation outside the classroom walls. Finally, they’re involved in that internal conversation of the writing process--the brainstorms, the mind-maps, the outlines, the free writes, the thinking they have done about their paper.
All of that being said, the challenge of the consultant is to join this conversation in a constructive and meaningful way. How will I collaborate with a student, and how will I join in on this multi-faceted conversation? I think this week’s reading helped me understand that the key difference between dump-truck “teaching” and fire-lighting is listening. Listening breaks down those barriers of power that separate learner from teacher, and invites a dialogue that constructs knowledge socially. Far from being the Storehouse model with empowered holders of knowledge presiding over powerless student buckets, the Burkean Parlor creates a space of discovery for all involved. My lofty far-away dream is that some student somewhere would leave a meeting with me with a fire lit in them, empowered in their writing and with new knowledge that we discovered together. I know for a fact that a session like that in the writing center would leave me inspired--and, to revisit good ol’ Professor Keating, ready to carpe diem. 
