20 TALKING THE TALK AND WALKING THE WALK

415DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2011.2379.2.20

20 TALKING THE TALK AND

WALKING THE WALK:

ESTABLISHING THE

ACADEMIC ROLE OF WRITING

CENTRES

Margaret Procter

Writing centres ll a distinctive and essential role in the Canadian teach-

ing of writing at the university level, and their role is growing in importance

as writing gains recognition within university curricula as an engine for the

generation of knowledge and an important component in students’ matura-

tion as thinkers. e trend towards recognition of writing centres as drivers of

a broader view of writing is suggested by the contrasting titles of Roger Graves’

two books on the history of writing instruction in Canada. Graves’ seminal

1994 study outlines the historical development of writing courses using the

title Writing Instruction in Canadian Universities (Graves, 1994). His 2006 col-

lection with Heather Graves (Graves & Graves, 2006) divides its focus among

dierent types of instruction, and its title gives writing centres pride of place:

Writing Centres, Writing Seminars, Writing Culture: Writing Instruction in Anglo-

Canadian Universities. At least four of the 15 chapters concentrate on the work

done by specic writing centres, outlining their development into hubs of writ-

ing instruction in their universities.

And yet, writing centres are also key examples for Hunt’s (2006) assertion

in his “Afterword” to the same book that writing instruction in Canada has

merely “inltrated the cracks” in university structures without nding a home

in the traditional university departments and administrative structures ( p.

376). Published discussions of Canadian writing centres have tended to focus

on anxieties about positioning. e seminal study commissioned in the mid-

1970s by the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English (Priestley

Margaret Procter

416

& Kerpneck, 1976) recognized that the new generation of university students

needed “remedial” individual writing instruction, but reiterated emphatically

that responsibility for such instruction should not dilute the attention of English

Departments to the study and teaching of literature—or, one can infer, inu-

ence the allotment of the few English appointments then available in Canadian

universities. It remains true that in Canada, with its relative paucity of composi-

tion and rhetoric programs, and thus its lack of trainee instructors and of a clear

relationship to any one department, writing centres have no standard model of

institutional structure or employment. A 1996 survey of Canadian writing cen-

tres by Bell and Hubert recorded that half of its 33 respondents still had to “ght

for” their funding on a yearly basis; one-third held sta rather than faculty posi-

tions. Bell’s very useful article about a research method for self-study was titled

“Small-Scale Evaluations for Writing Centres in ese Times of Trouble” in its

Canadian publication (1996), though only “When Hard Questions Are Asked:

Evaluating Writing Centers” in its US publication (2000). A recent Master’s

thesis by Kraglund-Gauthier (2006) concludes that, although the 13 Atlantic

Canada writing centres in her study could measure local success in very posi-

tive terms, as units within their universities they still had to struggle for iden-

tity and frequently received only marginal support. Since its founding in early

2006, the listserv of the new Canadian Writing Centre Association (CWCA-L@

LISTSERV.UOTTAWA.CA) has also circled back obsessively to anxieties about

funding, employment status, and reporting structure.

is chapter will argue, nevertheless, that writing centres have helped create

a distinctive position for Writing Studies in the Canadian university culture, one

that does not necessarily depend on a departmental home. ey can raise aware-

ness of writing issues precisely because to sustain themselves as non-departmental

units, they need to argue publicly about the nature of writing as an intellectual

activity and to show how their writing instruction across the curriculum con-

tributes to the knowledge creation that is the core value of a university. Because

writing centres oer individual instruction to students without the structures

of class enrollments and grades that bring income and accrediting power to the

institution, they have to dene the reasons for their existence repeatedly and

progressively in the face of curricular and institutional changes. In this com-

petition for self-justication they have the advantage that their contact with

students across the curriculum gives them insights into the patterns of learning

for which universities purport to stand. Writing centre instructors know from

daily engagement with students how the process of writing generates and shapes

ideas, rather than simply transmitting or packaging them. Moreover, discussions

about the existence of specic writing centres—the crises, arguments, proposals,

and reports that have given them a continuing if not always stable footing in

417

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

their institutions—have often taken place in wide university forums rather than

in closed departmental meetings or specialized academic journals, and thus have

engaged public attention and open discussion. ough not always reected in

publicly available documents, these discussions have left textual traces in such

forms as letters, newspaper articles, internal proposals, and committee and indi-

vidual reports. ese traces oer a way to analyse the prolonged and often messy

discussions and an historical perspective on the directions they have taken and

the issues they have raised generation by generation.

e public discussions around writing centres at the University of To-

ronto in the 1990s exemplify the range of challenges, both intellectual and

practical, involved in the positioning of writing within a Canadian institu-

tion. Because of its size, diversity, and decentralized nature, the University of

Toronto has experimented with a range of models for writing centres. is

chapter oers some components of its history as a kind of display cabinet for

structural and theoretical issues likely to be shared by other writing centres

in Canada. My analysis will draw on documents that are part of my les as

University of Toronto Coordinator of Writing Support and some that are

Table 1. University of Toronto writing centres: Changes in stang, September

1991- September 2006.

Employment gures for September 1991 Employment Figures for September 2006

9 Writing Labs

(undergraduate colleges)

14 Writing Centres

(undergraduate colleges, professional fac-

ulties, graduate studies)

36 people in 34 positions

10 faculty appointments

4 full-time, 6 part-time / shared = 7 FTE

76 people in 85 positions

27 faculty appointments

22 full-time, 5 part-time / shared = 25

FTE

usually Tutor (short-term contract) or

Senior Tutor (renewable 5-year contracts)

22 full-time faculty, 5 part-time

12 Lecturers (renewable 1-3 year

contracts)

10 Senior Lecturers (continuing appoint-

ments = tenure)

36 Sessional Lecturers (short-term con-

tracts, usually part-time, with some secu-

rity and benets; CUPE 3902 since 2005)

10 hourly-paid part-timers (no rank)

15 graduate students

(mainly English/Drama)

18 graduate students

(10 in / from professional faculties)

Margaret Procter

418

publicly available. (e References list gives URLs for those that have been

archived online.) I will quote and comment on a selection of these documents

in order to identify some of the strengths that a writing-centre perspective

can bring to institutional awareness of writing as a knowledge-making prac-

tice and, therefore, as central to the university mission. My discussion will

also suggest some constraints and frustrations resulting from writing centre

instructors’ eorts to establish their work on a valid and stable footing in

challenging circumstances.

DEFINING WRITING CENTRE WORK:

FIRST STEPS, FIRST WORDS

e University of Toronto was among the earliest adopters of the writing-

centre model in Canada, and it faced, from the start, the full range of issues

in dening and defending that work. In 1964, the year of its founding, In-

nis College established a teaching operation oering individual instruction to

students working on papers in any of their courses (King & Cotter, 1970).

Similar “writing laboratories” were in place in several of the other constituent

undergraduate colleges by the mid-1970s. Unlike the writing labs also emerg-

ing in US universities (Grin, Keller, Pandey, Pedersen, & Skinner, 2006;

Kinkead & Harris, 1993; Murphy, 1996), these teaching units did not arise

from Composition or Rhetoric programs. e early instructors were often re-

cent Masters or PhD graduates in English or another humanities discipline.

eir students brought work predominantly, but not only, from humanities

departments, and predominantly, but not only, from undergraduate Arts and

Science courses. Departments in the humanities took a particular interest in

this teaching and sometimes supported it, but the interest was often tinged by

distrust and anxiety.

It was clear from the start, for instance, that the Department of English

would support the remedial function of writing centres and supply under-

employed graduates as instructors, but it was no more eager than its members

Priestley and Kerpneck in their 1976 report for ACUTE to let any kind of

writing instruction become part of the department. In a 1970 article for Eng-

lish Quarterly, the two original Innis College writing-centre instructors King

and Cotter note that some faculty members accuse them of “spoon-feeding

academic cripples” and assume that their work is a second-class occupation

that should be taken on only by “housewives and starving graduate students”

(King & Cotter, 1970, p. 56). Priestley and Kerpneck (1976) also use harsh

words to downgrade the work of writing centres, by then present in at least

419

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

four colleges on their own campus. ey assert, for instance, that “writing

clinics” should be tolerated only as long as they do not “doctor” the work

brought to them for “individual diagnosis and treatment” (pp. 32-5). ey as-

sume that English professors will supervise graduate students doing the teach-

ing, but do not consider the possibility of faculty appointments focussed on

writing, much less writing as a eld of inquiry within the department. ose

working in the new teaching operations are not expected to discuss their work

except to report on students’ progress in attaining “acceptable university-level

English,” and perhaps to supply gures to high schools about how many of

their graduates are “languishing in the laboratories” (p. 35). e professors

of English will decide what is acceptable as English and how much remedial

instruction can be tolerated; writing instructors will uphold the standards and

supply the teaching without having a voice of their own.

In practical terms, however, people working in writing centres at the Uni-

versity of Toronto have regularly had to raise their voices to dene what they do

and to defend the value of their teaching. In the 1990s, one of the must urgent

needs was to establish a dierent basis for their work than the one assumed by

the faculty members and administrators who might speak about them in the

terms noted above. eir employment in an institution dominated by depart-

mental power and with somewhat uid categories of faculty appointment (Nel-

son, 2007), left writing-centre instructors in a particularly vulnerable position.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the decentralized nature of the university could

generate teaching jobs without requiring a uniform type of contract. But with

budget retrenchment in the early 1990s, faculty status became a burning issue

for people who did not have “regular” appointments, and it has been closely

interwoven since then with other questions about the function and value of

writing centres and writing instruction. e success of writing-centre instruc-

tors’ arguments about their employment status can be seen in the following table

comparing data from the period of an employment crisis and the most recently

available gures.

e more than doubling of the number of people employed since 1991 tells

only part of the story. e rank of “Tutor” and the short-term contracts that ac-

companied it have been replaced by the term “Lecturer” and the establishment

of tenured status for Senior Lecturers. Many of the people in the lower left of the

table have become those in the upper right, as part-timers and graduate students

won full-time positions. Whereas there were once nine isolated teaching units,

each led by a single faculty member (with one spare) in a distinctly ambigu-

ous appointment category, now a set of teaching units constitutes a network

of colleagues who hold formally-dened faculty appointments. e 14 or so

writing centres are still separate entities reporting to deans and college princi-

Margaret Procter

420

pals rather than forming a single department or free-standing unit. As described

in two chapters of Graves and Graves’ recent collection (Irish, 2006; Procter,

2006), University of Toronto writing centres have capitalized on their indepen-

dent status to develop innovative programs of credit and non-credit courses,

collaborative instruction of disciplinary courses, and highly respected methods

of instruction. e range of work represented by the right-hand column is much

larger than that in the left-hand column. Writing labs were once marginal, but

the units now called writing centres are now indeed central to many areas of the

university.

DEFINING WRITING CENTRE WORK:

CRISIS AND RESPONSE

ese changes in size and status did not happen automatically or easily, even

though writing centres had the advantage of a relatively well resourced institu-

tion (well resourced in parts, at any rate) and a eld that very clearly needed

cultivating as the university grew in size and began to mirror the multicultural

nature of the Greater Toronto Area. e creation story for the current state of

writing centres at the University of Toronto took place in 1991 with an em-

ployment crisis at one of the suburban colleges. It was an event that turned the

spotlight on writing instructors’ terms of employment, but also reminded the

university community of the need to dene the role of writing in relation to

university learning.

On August 31, 1991, the Principal of Scarborough College called Adele

Fisher, the Senior Tutor who had directed the Scarborough College Writing Lab

for fteen years, to notify her that she should not come to work the next day

because she was going to be replaced by ve Mac computers equipped with

the new grammar-checking software Grammatik. She was told to serve out the

nal year of her third ve-year contract by staying at home and looking for em-

ployment elsewhere. e facts of this story have been narrated elsewhere (e.g.,

Procter, 2006), but its textual traces in the form of unpublished documents and

university records are worth examining further. e texts reecting this story

reveal the assumptions about power and about writing that governed the con-

ditions of writing-centre work in this period—assumptions that have changed

radically over the last fteen years because writing instructors and others have

challenged them by both words and deeds.

Here is a revealing passage from the rst public communication about this

administrative attack on the writing centre, now resting in my le as a sheet of

mimeographed paper. It consists of a memo on college letterhead that was du-

421

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

plicated and placed in the mailboxes of all Scarborough College faculty members

during Reading Week in the spring term of 1991:

18 February 1991

To Members of the College

You are all aware that the College is being required to meet an

overall budget reduction by 1995, 5% assigned by the Provost

and a further 1.45% to meet faculty renewal commitments.

Each budget head has been asked by the Principal to partici-

pate in developing a plan for meeting this reduction.

After long consideration and consultation with the Principal

and the Administrative Group at the College, I have proposed

meeting the reduction in my budget by replacing the present

Writing Lab with a Writing Centre, equipped with computers,

where students will be able to use various software programmes

to analyse and improve their English writing.

is administrator sees writing solely in terms of problems and decien-

cies—sometimes in students, sometimes in budgets. e assumption is that stu-

dents need only mechanical drill in language correctness in order to improve the

products of their writing, and that cost concerns are central; thus if machines are

cheaper than people in applying the required drill, it is logical to pay for them

rather than people. e tone of the memo is impersonal and managerial, relying

on passive verbs (“is being required” and “has been asked”), but it uses personal

pronouns to conrm power relationships. e “you” group of recipients is re-

minded in the letter’s rst words to keep economic considerations primary, and

then “I” speaks magisterially only after invoking the other top administrators.

ough the decision is called a proposal, this note is clearly an announcement

(“students will”), not an invitation to comment.

But those aected did comment, starting with students and faculty mem-

bers at Scarborough College. Here is a glimpse of the History Department, as

a group, writing to the Principal. By addressing the Principal by name, their

two-page letter went above the administrator who had written the memo.

It also went beyond the Principal by distributing copies to other faculty

members. As with other similar letters from members in other departments,

the authors signed their names individually but also invoked their academic

department.

Margaret Procter

422

2 March 1991

Dear [rst name],

... [expression of shock and dismay] ... Much language learning

derives from the home environment, which means that many

Scarborough students may be consequently disadvantaged in

their English communication skills. e Writing Lab is the last

chance these young people have of improving their skills before

seeking careers in an increasingly competitive workplace. As

Harvard University Business School Professor Michael Porter

points out, one must achieve lower-order skills before advanc-

ing to higher orders. If our students do not learn how to write

proper English before they leave the University, they never will,

and their future will be severely compromised.

In our capacity as Historians, we expect our students to be able

to express themselves clearly. When they cannot, we invariably

counsel them to seek assistance from the Writing Lab. It is our

experience that some students who do so have been able to

raise their marks by as much as two full grades (that is, for

example, from a ‘C’ to an ‘A’). Is it fair to deprive them of this

possibility?

... [call for faculty consultation on the decision about the Writing

Lab] We trust that you share our concern and that you will give

this subject the attention it deserves.

Respectfully submitted,

[individual signatures].

is letter adopts a dierent type of rhetoric from the managerial announce-

ment of the Vice-Principal’s letter. e signatories address the Principal directly,

presenting themselves as his colleagues (“Dear Paul”), and they express indigna-

tion at being excluded from the college’s decision. ough the letter does not

touch on the termination of the writing director, it speaks condently about the

place of writing in the university. e professors base their sweeping categorical

statements on presumptions of common knowledge about language learning

and “the home environment,” and then on a citation from an academic author-

423

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

ity (authoritative in being from Harvard, at least, though not from a eld one

might recognize as related to the issue). e expertise they claim as teachers

comes from being Historians representing an established discipline. ese pro-

fessors are clearly happy to leave the transmission of skills to others. eir lan-

guage displays the same set of assumptions about deciency (“improving”) and

gatekeeping (“proper English”) as those held by the rst administrator, though

writing tutors are shown as holding the gate open for students who acknowledge

their deciencies. e goodwill of this and other faculty letters was broad and

sincere, and in 1991, the public support for the Writing Lab was timely and

welcome. From the present perspective, however, the conception of writing and

writing instruction seems sadly limited.

Student journalists involved themselves even more publicly and heatedly

in the controversy. ey, too, noted that the administrator had made the an-

nouncement when people were generally o campus, and they, too, protested

the lack of consultation. Students were also much quicker than the professoriate

to protest the unsuitable use of technology. A story in one of the downtown

student newspapers used a picture of a computer monitor replacing the head of

a business-suited male, heading it “Professor IBM”—a picture that was copied

and posted in several other places around campus as summing up a general

problem of reliance on impersonal teaching methods. Within a week of the ad-

ministrator’s memo, the Scarborough College student paper published an edito-

rial protesting the proposed change:

16 February 1991, editorial

Welcome back from Reading Week! Oh, and by the way, while

you were gone the Administration has decided to “restructure”

the Writing Lab, restructure it right out of existence.

e Writing Lab has oered personal tutoring to students on

their writing and grammar at this campus for almost twenty

years. As of June 30, 1992, the Writing Lab will no longer exist

and in its place will be computers.

Computers may be great, but they can only do so much. ey

may be able to help with punctuation and other grammatical

errors but they are not able to help a student clarify ideas or

write an essay which ows properly. Computers fail to oer a

personal one-on-one conference, which many students desper-

ately need.

Margaret Procter

424

Scarborough Campus has many foreign students whose rst

language is not English. Such students may have trouble writ-

ing grammatically correct English, or, like many other stu-

dents, just have trouble expressing their ideas. It is not fair to

set them down in front of computers and wish them the best

of luck. In fact, it is downright cruel.

Speaking from experience and observation, and drawing on emotional terms

rather than intellectual generalizations to express their concerns about equity,

the students comment more pointedly on teaching methods than did the pro-

fessors. In mentioning students’ need to clarify ideas and to write essays that

“ow properly,” the editorial is reaching towards the recognition that writing

instruction involves idea-generation and logical organization as well as language

correctness. e list of those who need writing support includes both the out-

group labelled “foreign students” and also “many other students.” e editorial

rises to considerable eloquence in expressing a sense of violation and inequity

when students are given a technological substitute for personal instruction. It

sees writing instruction as part of university learning, not just as remedial activ-

ity to be administered on the margins of the institution.

DEVELOPING DISCOURSE ABOUT

WRITING AND WRITING CENTRES

e clear threat to their employment brought together the remaining writ-

ing-centre instructors across the university and impelled them to join in the

public uproar—and eventually to nd powerful ways to speak on behalf of writ-

ing instruction as a vital part of the academy. Because of the decentralization

of the various writing centres, writing instructors at this time barely knew each

other and had no ocial reason to work together. But in September 1991, the

University of Toronto Association of Writing Tutors came together and began

to act and speak collectively on behalf of their work—a group of more than 30

people who knew how to communicate and could call on the concern and out-

rage of both students and faculty members.

e following is a retrospective summary of what this group of writing in-

structors found they needed to say and do, in 1991 and over the next few years,

to dene a place for writing instruction within the university. Both practical and

political themes will be evident. So will the growing ability of writing-centre in-

structors to speak and write thoughtfully about the nature of writing and writing

instruction, and the growing acceptance of their views of writing.

425

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

First of all, writing instructors had to speak for themselves, and speak not

just as employees but as authorities on learning and teaching writing. ey had

to speak as faculty members to other faculty members, whether they held that

status or not. By mid-September of 2001, a group of a dozen or so people began

meeting regularly to think through the nature of the challenge. at involved

much discussion and hand-wringing, but it also required informed analysis of

what Grammatik actually did and reective investigation of writing-centre work

within the University of Toronto and other universities.

In early 1992, at the initiative of the graduate student Cynthia Messenger, the

group wrote to the Provost demanding a seat along with deans and department

chairs on a university-wide Steering Group on writing that had been set up to

quell the increasingly hysterical protests about betrayal of students and misuse

of technology. Gay MacDonald of New College, one of the three remaining full-

time writing-centre instructors, lled that seat very eectively over the next four

months, speaking condently from her 15 years of experience teaching writing

in the New College Writing Lab. e writing instructors in the new association

quickly learned the value of working with her as our spokesperson. ough most

of us lacked position titles and job security, we knew how to act like research-

ers, initiating, for instance, a critical analysis of the chosen software, a step that

the university administrators had neglected. We began by reviewing the literature

on grammar-checking software; then we tested Grammatik empirically on actual

student work and reported on its often absurd results. We analysed other types

of instructional technology in terms of the actual range of student needs, and we

summarized our ndings cogently in written reports that we sent to MacDonald

for distribution at meetings of the Steering Group. With our help, MacDonald

spoke knowledgeably to the committee on the primitive nature of Grammatik as

an editing tool and on its even more limited function as an instructional resource.

Her clear and well-grounded explanations faced down the enthusiasm of the com-

putational expert from English who also served on the committee and gradually

became accepted as key elements in the committee’s discussion. MacDonald also

kept insisting that the error-xing that Grammatik seemed to promise was not

the only or main function of writing centres. Starting with her reports on the

unsuitable technology, she made the most of her chances to outline the ways that

individualized writing-centre instruction helped students develop their ideas and

come to terms with larger issues of evidence, reasoning, and authority.

By the time the Steering Group wrote its report to the Provost, MacDonald’s

points were further supported by an eloquent collection of written statements from

other writing instructors about what they actually did in their work. e Writing

Tutors’ Association’s 14-page submission to the Steering Group answered a call for

public input and again made the most of the opportunity to speak authoritatively

Margaret Procter

426

from an informed and reasoned basis. e committee read and discussed this sub-

mission in detail and with considerable respect, eventually publishing it in full as

an Appendix to its 35-page report. e contributions to this submission displayed

dierent perspectives and voices, but were sent without individual names attached

because of concern about retribution by local supervisors. ree representative

excerpts suggest the range of topics raised and the level of discussion:

a. Because we are concerned to make students more aware

of the relation between language and thinking, we deal with

writing not just as product but also as process: with develop-

ing essays from the most preliminary stages of analysis to the

editing and polishing of the nal draft. While many of us of-

fer basic theoretical instruction in grammar and composition,

the main thrust of our approach is practical. Dealing primarily

with essays in progress, we show students, often over a number

of sessions, how to build on their strengths and how to identify

and overcome their characteristic problems. ese may involve

language errors, and are equally likely to include matters of fo-

cus and argumentation.... Our success comes from our unique

opportunity to combine basic pedagogic principles: practical

focus, interactive work, and a exible approach that changes

with the individual student’s development.

b. In the oral exchanges typical of writing lab appointments

the student’s thinking becomes subject to immediate critical

analysis—his own as well as that of the tutor—before it can be

returned to the page as writing. is kind of discourse amazes

students on their rst meetings with us: often they have not

previously realized the depth or closeness of attention that goes

into critical reading. ey emerge, however, with clearer expec-

tations both about how their papers will be read and about how

they themselves can exercise this kind of reading and analysis.

c. Our experience with such style-checking software as Gramma-

tik IV, Correct Grammar and Right Writer convinces us that its

relevance to teachers of writing is limited. Since we do not oer

proofreading services to students, such programmes cannot help

us directly in our work. eir method of attempting to comment

on every instance of possible stylistic weakness runs counter to

the pedagogic principle of concentrating on the most important

427

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

problems, seeing them in context, and working on them consul-

tatively. Because of the low reliability of the present generation of

programmes (an accuracy rate of well under 50%, according to

recent popular and scholarly reviews), we cannot yet recommend

their use even outside the writing lab.

ese voices make broad assertions about the nature of writing and of student

learning, mentioning both experience and pedagogical principle as the basis of

their statements. e various authors use personal pronouns condently (“we”

and “us”), asserting a collective identity even if individual names are not displayed.

e Steering Group’s report displays a remarkable transformation of the uni-

versity’s discourse about writing. After four months of intense discussion, includ-

ing the direct and indirect contributions of writing-centre instructors, the report

turned away from instant solutions, put the spotlight on the responsibility of

administrators and professors for oering appropriate instruction, and began to

frame the issues in terms of student needs rather than only budgetary problems.

e conclusions of the Steering Group Report of May 1992 show a much more

solid and inclusive understanding of the pedagogical and institutional issues un-

derlying academic writing than had been seen in any of the previous discussions.

ough the recommendations still refer to academic requirements as self-evident

monolithic standards and equate them with the conventions of the disciplines,

writing is no longer merely a matter of student deciency to be dealt with by

separately-delivered remediation. e following resolutions (from a list of 13) call

on the university as an institution to face up to its responsibilities for teaching

students writing:

6. at all divisions be required to concern themselves with

the quality of student writing and its improvement in meeting

their academic requirements.

7. at divisions be encouraged to provide opportunities in

credit courses for all their students to expand their writing

skills within the specic conventions of their disciplines.

8. at divisions and departments review the role of writing

in their academic programmes, with particular reference to the

types of assignments required, the services needed and avail-

able to students within the department, and the expressions

in calendars and brochures of the academic unit’s interest in

eective writing.

Margaret Procter

428

e two explicit references to writing labs in the recommendations sum up

their liminal position at this point in administrative awareness. Recommenda-

tion 11 asks that writing labs work with the college principals to consider “ways

to optimize the cost eectiveness of the services provided” (still services, not yet

teaching, and still distrusted in terms of their cost). en recommendation 12

gives writing labs a position on a Writing Board that will assist the divisions in

achieving their goals. Even if the value of their teaching needed more consider-

ation, the value of their voices was now clear.

e central Writing Board never did materialize, but writing instructors have

more than fullled its intended function through their own initiatives. When

I took on the new position of University of Toronto Coordinator of Writing

Support in 1994, I knew I would have to continue grounding discussion of

writing in references to research and explanations of the underlying pedagogi-

cal principles—in other words, to act as if I were a faculty member represent-

ing a coherent discipline. My rst eorts were to produce heavily documented

research reports, rst on writing software (Procter, 1994), and then on post-

admission testing (Procter, 1995), using academic weaponry to ward o the

most imminent threats. Other writing-centre directors have continued to do

the same, writing thoughtful reports to their deans and principals and oering

well-informed comments on divisional curricula and teaching even before they

are asked. Similarly, instead of merely following another of the Steering Group’s

recommendation to compile and disseminate existing departmental wisdom on

writing, writing instructors have created their own instructional material for

students and professional-development material for faculty. eir work now

takes the shape of Web sites used widely as course resources by students and in-

structors across the curriculum at the University of Toronto and elsewhere, this

time with each le displaying its author’s name (see the list of topics at http://

www.utoronto.ca/writing/advise.html). Several textbooks and handbooks have

also been published (e.g., Gilpin & Patchet-Golubev, 2000; Northey & Procter,

1998), with more forthcoming on specic areas of expertise (for instance on

proposals from Jane Freeman; on Engineering communication from Rob Irish

and Peter Weiss; on writing in the health sciences from Dena Taylor).

SHAPING THE PLACE OF WRITING IN

INSTITUTIONAL CULTURES

e 1991 crisis demonstrated unmistakeably to writing-centre instructors

that they should engage proactively in institutional planning processes rather

than being subject to others’ decisions about budget and pedagogy. Such par-

429

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

ticipation is not easy when writing centres lack the departmental status that

gives an automatic right to sit on committees and take part in ocial discus-

sions. Nevertheless, writing-centre instructors have managed to capitalize on

their understanding of curriculum and teaching processes in order to help steer

university change. eir knowledge and awareness of these topics give them an

advantage in institutional discussions, even if they have no more formal training

in educational theory or policy analysis than other academics. Again, this is evi-

dent in the textual traces of the discussions that founded at least six new writing

centres in the 1990s.

e four professional-faculty writing centres, which account for about half

of the growth in writing-centre employment shown in Table 1 above, sprang up

in the mid-1990s in response to overall curriculum changes and to new admin-

istrative awareness that writing centres had a record of achievement. Small-scale

pilot initiatives used both actions and words to demonstrate and document ways

that professors could teach their subjects more eectively when writing tutors

worked alongside them. Typically, writing tutors would rst give in-class presen-

tations to get students to do what the course instructors wanted them to, and

then take active roles in discussions about teaching methods and eventually in

collaborative teaching. Freeman’s (1997) account of her work in an Engineering

ermodynamics course encapsulates this development: she started by standing

at the back of the room in lab sessions and answering students’ questions about

spelling and format, but soon began to help the graduate student Teaching Assis-

tants answer more complex questions about sentences and wording that the stu-

dents brought them, followed up by talking to these TAs after class about their

own puzzlements as graduate writers and teachers. Within a few weeks she was

giving presentations on precision and logic in scientic writing from the front of

the room and eventually oering training sessions for the whole group of course

TAs (Freeman, 1997; Irish, 2006). Similar types of work in Engineering and

other professional faculties, including that of Andy Payne in Architecture and

Dena Taylor in several Health Science faculties, helped shape course assignments

and assessment methods, and, eventually, also inuenced divisional curriculum

reform (see Procter, 2006, for a fuller account).

e university’s budget planning cycle of 1995-2000 generated a number of

divisional reports that reected the newly recognized writing experts’ views about

teaching and learning—sometimes only as distant echoes, but eventually more

directly because writing instructors were members of the planning committees

and sometimes drafters of the reports. All of the following sentences are excerpted

from divisional proposals for funding of new or renewed writing centres from that

crucial planning cycle. (ese were once public documents within their academic

divisions, but only the 1998 University of Toronto at Scarborough report and the

Margaret Procter

430

1999 University of Toronto, Faculty of Arts and Science resolution are still recov-

erable as references, having been archived online for public access.)

Faculty of Pharmacy (1994). Subcommittee recommendation

to Curriculum Committee:

at undergraduate course coordinators be encouraged to re-

quire eective writing in their assessment of students. Writing-

intensive components of Pharmacy courses should be encour-

aged. In the senior years of the undergraduate curriculum,

attention to student writing should be continued through great-

er emphasis on writing assignments and the level of prociency

should be taken into account in establishing the nal grades.

Pharmacy and Nursing deans (1995). Proposal to Council of

Health Science deans:

e ideas in this report build on our self-analysis, suggesting

that cooperatively the Health-Science programs can achieve a

exible and practical solution to their acute need for writing

support. e writing-lab model, now available only to under-

graduate Arts and Science students, can with suitable adapta-

tions provide the specialist help needed to support the kinds of

teaching and learning done in the Health Sciences.

Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering (1995). Jane Gries-

dorf, Language across the curriculum: A proposal:

If the importance of literacy becomes a critical factor for all

aspects of the Engineering curriculum, our students will learn

to communicate more uently and have greater condence

to work with others. And with commitment from a range of

faculty and with support from specialized instructors, students

will come to see that good communication is a practical tool

for both academic work and future employment.

University of Toronto at Scarborough (1998). Final report of

task force on writing:

[after considering and rejecting post-admission testing] e

431

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

Task Force therefore turned its attention to what is often re-

ferred to as ‘writing across the curriculum’: the incorporation

of writing—its evaluation and improvement—into all pro-

grammes so that students have the opportunity to graduate as

competent writers. e major thrust of this report is that we

should focus our attention on the improvement of writing as

an integral part of the learning experience and develop a Col-

lege culture of good writing.

Faculty of Arts and Science, General Committee (1999). Reso-

lution on writing:

a) at every major and specialist program in the Faculty of

Arts and Science (FAS)integrate writing components into its

program requirements.

b) at the FAS assist in the re-design of key rst-year courses

so that they incorporate writing components.

c) at the FAS develop criteria by which to approve and eval-

uate existing or proposed writing components in programs.

d) at the above be implemented incrementally during the

period 1999-2004.

Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (2000). “Aims

of writing across the curriculum programme,” Academic plan:

• To use language as a way of learning Architecture and Land-

scape Architecture, not as a subsidiary subject or requirement.

• To prepare students for the professional life of architects and

landscape architects, especially the need to articulate visual ideas

in words.

• To counterbalance the tendency of visually oriented people to

neglect their capacity for using language.

• To pay special attention to the needs of students learning Eng-

lish as a second language.

Margaret Procter

432

• To maintain high standards of learning, and to monitor our

students’ progress.

• To support both students and faculty in this enterprise.

e sequence of excerpts here makes evident the shift in perspective since

1991 about writing as a topic in divisional planning. e new Provost, Adel

Sedra of Engineering, read the Steering-Group Report of 1992 with respect. At

the start of the 1995-2000 planning cycle he made it known that he intended

to fund initiatives demonstrating the commitment of professional faculties to

curricular change that included writing instruction. e discourse about writing

in the documents that responded to his invitation now uses the type of language

and approach introduced by writing centres in their discussions of their own

work. In their own ways, these documents all arm the value of writing as part

of learning. At rst relying on such general terms as “prociency” and focussing

on grading rather than instruction, the statements gradually become more pre-

cise about the position of writing as a means of knowledge generation in their

own disciplines. e University of Toronto at Scarborough report of 1998 is dra-

matically dierent from the 1991 memos quoted earlier in its condent asser-

tion that writing should be part of “all programmes.” Inuenced no doubt by the

Boyer Commission Report (1998) and the currents in US writing instruction

that it reects, Arts and Science and Architecture make sweeping promises about

integrating writing instruction across their curricula. All these documents now

specically position writing centres as the key resources for learning and teach-

ing writing, whether in terms of individual instruction or the “writing across the

curriculum” method cited in the later documents.

INFLUENCING APPOINTMENT POLICIES

At the same time that they began to participate in divisional planning and

its implementation, writing instructors also became active in another aspect of

university governance, the University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA).

e 1991 termination at Scarborough College was again the precipitating event.

e non-certied Faculty Association was not able to save Adele Fisher’s Senior

Tutor job in 1991 (she took up a tenure-stream position in the State University

of New York), but it was galvanized into attending to the insecure nature of its

other Tutor positions. In 1991 this group encompassed about 150 teaching-

specialized faculty across the university, including the three remaining full-time

Tutors and the six part-time Tutors in writing centres.

433

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

e major advances since that time in faculty appointments at writing centres

have been shaped by writing instructors’ strong record of speaking up and active

engagement in UTFA—the same combination of assertive talk and concerted

action that was also winning them their place in the curriculum. As in so many

other Canadian universities, writing instructors have played key roles in the Fac-

ulty Association Executive. Guy Allen (now director of the Professional Writing

and Communication Program at the University of Toronto Mississauga) was

chair of the Tutors’ Stream Committee in the early 1990s, using his eloquence

to inform and persuade other faculty members of the urgency of policy changes

for Tutors. I served from 2000 to 2005 as chair of what was by then called the

Teaching-Stream Committee, helping implement an arrangement in 2001 that

changed a further 100 positions (including those of at least 10 writing-centre in-

structors) from “casual” part-time jobs into Lecturer positions, mostly full-time.

Cynthia Messenger—in 1992 the Teaching Assistant who called for a writing-

centre representative on the Steering Group on Writing and now the director

of the Innis College program in Writing and Rhetoric—served for two years as

the chair of the UTFA Teaching-Stream Committee and is currently the Vice-

President of Grievances.

e main policy improvement aecting writing-centre instructors was a revi-

sion in 1999 to the Policy and Procedure on Academic Appointments (Univer-

sity of Toronto Governing Council, 1999/2003) that secured continuing status,

the equivalent of tenure, for Senior Lecturers. Promotion to that rank comes

after a rigorous review procedure parallel to the tenure review. Before 1999,

Senior Tutors had to undergo a review every ve years in order to obtain another

ve-year renewal, and even then there was no guarantee that a renewal would

result from a successful review. is crucial change came about only after UTFA

refused for nine years in a row to implement revisions in any negotiated policy

until the university administration agreed to improve the policy for Tutors.

e revised Appointments Policy was phrased carefully to include writing-

centre instructors, who by 1999 constituted about 20 of the 150 or so people

in the Tutor rank as well as an equal number working part-time without that

rank. Its wording recognizes that they contribute to students’ earning of degrees

whether or not they teach courses. e sti legal language and the careful choice

of “may” rather than “should” conceal the heated discussions within UTFA and

between UTFA and the administration that went into this formulation:

e ranks of Lecturer and Senior Lecturer are to be held by

faculty members whose duties normally consist of teaching

students who are in degree programs or the Transitional Year

Programme, and related professional and administrative activi-

Margaret Procter

434

ties. Lecturers may have independent responsibility for design-

ing and teaching courses or signicant components of courses

within their departmental and divisional curricula.

... Performance will be assessed on teaching eectiveness and

pedagogical / professional development related to teaching du-

ties, in accordance with approved divisional guidelines on the

assessment of teaching. Administrative service will be consid-

ered, where such service is related to teaching duties or to cur-

ricular and professional development.

ough this new policy provides the security and protections for academic free-

dom of a faculty position, not to mention entitlement to sabbaticals and recogni-

tion for good work in terms of merit pay, it is far from perfect in that it still divides

faculty members specializing in teaching from those specializing in research. In

stating the criteria for promotion and merit pay, the odd collocation “pedagogical

/ professional development related to teaching duties,” substitutes for references to

scholarship in the tenure-stream section of the document. e narrow interpreta-

tion of that language in some departments has been the subject of a group griev-

ance by the Faculty Association, still unresolved in some details. Research work

is not excluded from Lecturers’ activities, but it is not always mentioned in job

descriptions even as an option, and some contradictory language remains in the

reporting documents used to award merit pay and grant sabbatical leaves.

Despite such ambiguities, the new procedures have given writing instructors

more chances to demonstrate within the university what they do and how well

they do it. Hiring and promotion committees for the newly formalized proce-

dures, for instance, consist of divisional faculty members along with writing-

centre colleagues, meaning that many more people now see writing instructors’

application packages, annual activity reports, and teaching portfolios—genres

that give writing specialists a chance to show their achievements. Committees

repeatedly express surprise and admiration for what these documents reveal

about the quality of writing-centre work. Writing-centre instructors have thus

been able to raise the status of their type of teaching by demonstrating its high

quality through some of the key ritual displays of academic identity.

REMAINING CHALLENGES

At the University of Toronto, as in many other universities in Canada, then,

writing centres have clearly expanded and established their roles within the uni-

435

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

versity. We now have the critical mass to look after ourselves. But it is also clear

that by responding to crises and opportunities in the situations outlined above

we have accepted limitations on our roles as faculty members and perhaps even

distorted our development as teaching units. Here is a summary of the chal-

lenges that writing centres at this university are still facing. I suspect that similar

challenges also exist in other writing centres:

e Need to Maintain and Display Expertise in Recognizable Forms

Full-time writing-centre instructors hold faculty appointments now, but are

we real faculty in the terms of a research-intensive institution? e standard

teaching load of a Lecturer appointment (typically equivalent to three courses

a term, usually with summer work expected in addition) does not leave much

room for research, especially for large-scale funded projects with rigid reporting

schedules. Lecturers are eligible for SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council) and other external grants if they can produce an ocial let-

ter saying that their appointments allow time for research, but I can say from

experience and observation that it is nearly impossible to follow through large

research projects within a Lecturer’s usual workload. For writing-centre direc-

tors, the multiplication of administrative duties in the 14 decentralized units

also adds to the load. Writing-centre instructors occasionally brainstorm about

forming an institute or other loosely linked unit, but our relative lack of research

record makes that an unlikely outcome—a conning vicious circle of cause and

eect. Writing-centre instructors are active in internal professional-development

activities and in attending and presenting at conferences, and we have no lack

of interesting teaching experiences and questions to analyse and study. However,

in the absence of major crises such as the one that made us suddenly become

experts on Grammatik, much of our eort now goes into learning about the

disciplines in which we work rather than continuing to invent our own.

Temptations to Neglect the Unique Nature of Writing-Centre Instruction

Individual teaching is the root of all writing-centre work. But a large uni-

versity with a needy student population and limited funding requires many

branches of this work. All writing centres at the University of Toronto now of-

fer group instruction of some kind as well as individual student consultations.

Most full-time instructors in writing centres also teach courses of their own or

team-teach disciplinary courses, as well as managing complex administrative sys-

tems of scheduling, supervision, and reporting. ey also take part in committee

work and meetings like any other faculty member—or perhaps more so, since

Margaret Procter

436

their ability to speak and write clearly is much valued in these activities. Given

the intensity and personal demands of one-to-one teaching, this diversication

can be a welcome change of pace, but it also takes time and energy away from

individual instruction. Developing new courses and, perhaps, co-teaching them

with disciplinary faculty is stimulating and interesting in addition to carrying

traditional types of prestige, all powerful incentives to put energy into classroom

work. e cross-appointments to departments built into many new positions

capitalize on this incentive, oering potential hires the challenges and rewards

of classroom teaching and also some hope of continuing their discipline-based

scholarly work. All full-time instructors in writing centres still oer individual

instruction as part of their work. But one must now ask at what point the di-

versication from individual instruction will start to supplant or relegate to the

margins the core work of teaching students individually.

e Strain of Adapting to Constant Change

Writing centres now take part in curriculum reform and budget planning, but

they are not big enough to be the main players. ey need to speak and act in

terms of supporting their division’s overall aims rather than concentrating on their

own. Now that writing centres exist in all of the university’s divisions and colleges,

writing support can no longer be the rst planning priority for new funding, as it

was for many professional faculties in the 1995-2000 planning cycle. If the Boyer

Commission made “integration” a recognized term in the 1990s, government and

public pressure may do the same today for “measurable outcomes” and “account-

ability,” terms that tend to refer to short-term change in one or a few variables de-

livered cheaply, not to the long-term development of students and curricula that

writing centres aim at. Central planning documents raised alarm among writing

centres by using such terms as “delivery of services” and “co-curricular support,”

and by including writing along with computer literacy and time management as

one of the generic skills that students should be “given” in order to succeed. It was

probably more than just good fortune that the divisional faculties rejected many

of these ideas and retained the emphasis on student support and integrated in-

struction established and rearmed during the previous planning cycles. Univer-

sity of Toronto, Faculty of Arts and Science (2007) in particular has committed

itself in both words and action to a sequence of departmental initiatives that call

on writing centres as a source of teaching expertise. But worrisome terms recur in

other recent planning documents, especially those driven by the Ontario govern-

ment call for outcomes measures as a necessity for continued funding. Writing

centres and the curricular initiatives in which they take part face the new chal-

lenge of measuring instructional impact in ways that reect their own values,

437

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

and making sure that their colleagues and supervisors understand their methods

and results grounded in a research-based understanding of writing as central to

knowledge production and learning in the university.

e Need to Mature and Develop New Leaders

Writing centres and individual instructors have benetted greatly from the

expansion of the last 15 years, but the gures about writing-centre stang (Table

1, above) contain a problem for future planning. Although there are many more

faculty positions now than in 1991, the proportion of full-edged faculty mem-

bers to other types of positions within writing centres is only slightly higher than

in 1991 (28% of the total in 1991, 36% in 2006). More than half of writing-

centre instructors are still part-time and relatively insecure. Since 2005, most

instructors in this situation have been represented by a new unit of the public-

service union CUPE 3902, the same organization that represents Teaching As-

sistants. ese Sessional Lecturers continue to receive a good rate of pay and

have retained some access to benets, but their rst contracts contain almost no

mechanism for encouraging professional development or research of any kind.

Is this key group of writing-centre instructors still faculty? Do they have the

impetus and scope to develop their teaching and their ideas about teaching that

the earlier generation did? In a sense their representation by a dierent bargain-

ing unit makes the current writing-centre directors into management, requiring

them to use elaborate hiring and evaluation procedures designed by the union

with hiring preference as the reward. Besides ensuring fairness in these proce-

dures, writing-centre directors must also nd ways to ensure that their junior

and less privileged colleagues can develop into the next generation of leaders.

FURTHER DISCOURSE, NEXT STEPS

is chapter has been a partial account of opportunities taken and choices

made by writing centres at one university in a key time period. Under sometimes

dicult conditions, multiple and diverse writing centres have developed across

the university as participants in the university’s teaching mission. By consolidating

and capitalizing on their positions as faculty members, writing-centre instructors

have been able to inuence university discourse about the learning and teaching

of writing. We are not yet, however, in a position to create much new professional

discourse of our own, whether by investigating our own practices in more depth

or by moving out into community-based research or theoretical investigation of

the disciplinary practices which we now increasingly serve. One cannot wish for

Margaret Procter

438

another crisis to impel a sudden surge of self-awareness and daring leaps into new

elds of expertise, but writing-centre instructors at the University of Toronto as

elsewhere cannot rest on the facts of size and contract security. Both our history

and our current situation demand continuing reection and action on the large,

but sometimes conicting, potentials of writing-centre work as vital to both the

university mission and the disciplinary development of Writing Studies.

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