Breaking Bad Boundaries in Writing Center Pedagogy
Carolyn Millar, PhD, Joy Bourne, MA, and Elena Powell, MA
Soka University Writing Center is located in a small four-year liberal arts college that utilizes modes of inquiry used within and across disciplines through a close reading of texts in a variety of genres. The college curriculum integrates diverse disciplinary perspectives to provide students with a broad and balanced academic foundation based on interdisciplinary concentrations rather than established disciplines. To create synergy with the university academic goals, we in the writing center explore differing theories and methodologies to develop and broaden students’ interpretative capacities and learning skills by utilizing a bricolage of perspectives.
As writing professionals, we refine meaning-making and narrative forms to facilitate insightful inquiry and add applicable disciplines to our toolkit. In our writing center, we developed a unique perspective that utilizes bricolage as the groundwork to explore and move beyond currently available theories and procedures. Bricolage views research methods actively to utilize the tools at hand by constructing research methods best suited to the student’s needs. To do this, we examine writing pedagogies from multiple and sometimes conflicting theoretical and methodological perspectives. The bricolage approach is grounded in a critical notion of hermeneutics, which gives consultants an opportunity to explore the boundaries of our own efforts to connect theory, technique, and experience. Professor Joe L. Kincheloe illustrates a synergy that emerges in the use of different methodological and interpretive perspectives:
The bricolage understands that the frontiers of knowledge work rest in the liminal zones where disciplines collide. Thus, in the deep interdisciplinarity of the bricolage, researchers learn to engage in a form of boundary work. Such scholarly labor involves establishing diverse networks and conferences where synergistic interactions can take place as proponents of different methodologies, students of divergent subject matters, and individuals confronted with different problems interact. In this context, scholars learn across these domains and educate intermediaries who can build bridges between various territories.
Our research has therefore focused on identifying and experimenting with the ever-shifting boundaries between empirical and philosophical inquiry, illustrating their interaction and inseparability. As intermediaries between disciplines, we operate as bricoleurs creating and developing conceptual links to help students navigate the boundaries. The cultivation and facilitation of boundary crossing are principal components in our process as writing consultants.
As bricoleurs, we recognize the limitations of a single knowledge production method, so we have extensively researched and embraced the pedagogical paradigm shifts that have influenced writing center practice in the last thirty years, including product, process, and post-process composition theories. Examining these methods has been an influence to engage in a bricolage of perspectives that honors and values each student’s individuality and creativity. Improvisation and experimentation over the past few years have led us to explore generative methodologies: Appreciative Inquiry, an emergent design that avoids a problem-solving approach; Reframing Critical Thinking into appreciative belief and its influence on writing tutoring; and Value Creation, the capacity for dialogue with students to expand and value their vision of what is possible. Our research on writing center theories and practices has resulted in the convergence of methods into a “collaborative knowledge cultivation” model. Our goal is to open unfamiliar frontiers and address the complexities of the writing center environment where the interdisciplinary perspectives emerge and intersect, and new strategies are explored.
Works Cited
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Cockell, Jeanie and Joan McArthur-Blair. Appreciative Inquiry in Higher Education: A Transformative Force, Jossey-Bass, 2012.
Cooperrider, David L., Whitney, Diana, and Jacqueline M. Stavros. Appreciative Inquiry Handbook: For Leaders of Change. 2nd ed., Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008.
Goulah, Jason. “Makiguchi Tsunesaburo and Language, Value-Creative Composition Instruction, and the Geography of Identity in Community Studies: A Response to Politicized Imagining and Ineffective Critical Approaches.” Journal of Language, Identity and Education, vol. 12, no.1, 2012, pp. 22-39.
Kincheloe, Joe. L. “Describing the Bricolage: Conceptualizing a New Rigor in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 6, 2001, pp. 679-692.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.
Author Biographies
Allana Joy Bourne is a Writing Specialist at Soka University of America, Aliso Viejo, CA. She earned a Master’s degree in Education with an emphasis in Curriculum and Instruction from Seattle University.
Carolyn Millar is a Writing Specialist at Soka University of America, Aliso Viejo, CA. She earned a PhD in Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara.
Elena Powell is a Writing Specialist at Soka University of America, Aliso Viejo, CA. She earned a Master’s degree in Teaching English Language and Literature from Lviv National University in Ukraine.