Blog 3: My Writing Center Philosophy

A writing center should be grounded on the principle of empowering its student writers. A cornerstone of the writing center should be the belief that students learn best when they take charge of their learning. It should be a place where students know they are expected to actively participate and where they feel their insights are respected. It should be a place where students become stronger writers who grow into possessing more confidence about their abilities. At the writing center, students should develop and learn strategies that they can use beyond a specific assignment they may be working on at the writing center.

A writing center should be grounded on the recognition that students are diverse- with different modes of thinking, perspectives, experiences, language "dialects", and skill sets. A writing center should be grounded in respect for this diversity.

A writing center is dynamic. It should be a place where everyone (student/tutor/director) is engaged in deepening his/her understanding, where ideas are traded back and forth, rejected, accepted, altered, expanded, flipped upside down, reworked, and rewritten by both tutor and student. It should have computers, reference materials, and other objects that project the idea that the writing center is a place of serious learning and ready discovery.

A writing center should be a place of open dialogue, where the director holds frequent meetings with tutors to discuss the "highs" and "lows" of the work, to offer support and suggestions to one another, and to work to improve the experience for the students. It should also be a place where student feedback is frequently sought and just as frequently put to use.