Blog 2: Lunsford's main points

In "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center", Andrea Lunsford promotes a particular type of writing center, one she refers to as the Burkean Parlor Center. In this type of writing center, the group works together to identify and to solve problems. The authority is shared amongst the members in the groups and control continually shifts within the group. Lunsford opposes the Burkean Parlor Center to two other types of models for writing centers, namely the Storehouse center and the Garret center. She argues that in the Storehouse model, knowledge is seen as exterior, as resting outside the student and within the teacher. Within this model, it is the teacher who hands "knowledge" (skills and strategies for writing) to the student. It is the teacher who has control. Conversely, the Garret center is student centered. In this model, the student has the wealth of knowledge and it is up to the writing center staff to help elicit from the student her inner voice. Both the Storehouse and Garret centers are focused on the individual, albeit different individuals.
Lunsford promotes the Brukean Parlor Center as the optimal model, for she says that this model serves democracy. This model requires both tutor and student to ask questions, to think critically about problems that arise, to work together, to acknowledge another's point of view, to form consensus, and even to agree to disagree at times (all skills, she adds, that are necessary for the "real world"). She asserts that practicing the collaboration that the Burkean model promotes in a subversive act, for it upsets the prevailing authoritarian view of education that contends that control must lie with someone, with an individual. She even cites examples of instances when collaborative learning was undervalued and dismissed.
Even though she contends that the collaborative model is the best for writing centers, Lunsford maintains that collaboration must be entered into cautiously, for she cites that collaborative work can go off course and become something entirely different, such as busy work for some participants or student/teacher centered learning environments. To prevent this from happening, Lunsford says that groups need to continually monitor themselves as well as develop a theory on which their work can be based.