CompFAQs from CompPile | WritingCenters-Mainstreaming / History of WC Theory browse

The Basic Evolution of Writing Center Theory and Practice:Setting the Stage for Supporting a Mainstreamed Student

Writing Centers have been present on campuses of higher education since the early 1900s in the form of the writing lab. These labs employed the classroom format of the laboratory method. By the 1930s, institutions began to establish separate sites for the writing lab that operated independently from the classroom instruction to accommodate the increasing numbers of first-generation college students who were appearing on public state universities seemingly underprepared for college level coursework (Carino 13–14).

Through the next few decades, writing centers would continue to create a place for themselves within their institutions. According to Peter Carino’s “Early Writing Centers: Toward a History,” “By 1950, although their identities were not clear, writing centers were beginning to establish themselves as part of writing programs” (15). With the open admissions initiatives of the 1960s, writing centers became an increasingly necessary and valuable resource for all types of college students.

The writing center’s early incarnations often took the form of a lab filled with grammar activity drill sheets, tables for working on assignments and shelves of textbooks and handbooks, “Working within an objectivist epistemology, where truth was knowable , neutral, and prescribable, some writing labs had students work on grammar exercises designated to . . . [the] master rules” ( Hobson 1). The theoretical underpinnings for these early days of the writing center were situated in Current Traditional Theory. While there is evidence that collaboration in tutoring session was implemented, the early center’s approach still focused on “fixing” problems in student texts.

Writing Center practice slowly began to move away from the Current Traditional theories that had influenced its operations for so many years. As the composition studies curriculum began to reflect the process movement of the 1970s and 80s, the writing center redefined itself to deal with the tensions developing between the process movement in composition classes and the current traditional pedagogy. Eric Hobson recounts this evolution, “Because writing had been demonstrated to be an activity controlled not as much by concrete rules as by the context in which the communicative event takes place, writing centers had to alter their instruction. Instead of having students do workbook exercises, writing centers now had students talk to and work with trained writing tutors in understanding that together these writers could use the generative power of conversation to discover ways to improve their writing”(“Writing Center Practice Counters Theory” 3)¹. This marked the shift to the absorption and implementation of Social Contructionist, Collaborative, and Whole Language theories in writing centers and set the stage for writing centers to support mainstreamed basic writers.

 ¹. Bruffee 1984, Harris 1986