Writing centres and the idea of community outreach

Abstract

The writing centre's history has been eventful, all the more as its pedagogical innovations increasingly set it in opposition to standard curricular practice. As, on the one hand, classroom instructors absorbed the student-centred philosophy of the writing centre, and on the other, deans and management pressed tutors/mentors to justify their roles and methods vis. curricular outcomes, writing centres struggled to articulate why they matter, other than as a remedial service for poor student writers. Community outreach offers writing centres an opportunity to revive the spirit of discovery and innovation that drove the work and writings of Kenneth Bruffee, Stephen North and others in the 1970s and 80s. The innovations devised in outreach 'laboratories' have pragmatic implications for their primary student clientele. Furthermore, community service offers writing centre scholarship a quarry of research that could contribute to the development of an overarching theory of the writing centre, which some scholars say is the necessary next step, and which others warn may lead to the death of writing centres as we know them.