Revising the Writing Center: A Reconsideration of Writing Center Work

by Singh-Corcoran, Nathalie Usha.

This dissertation centers on the value of work in the institution and composition and rhetoric in the same vane as texts such as Evan Watkin’s Work Time and Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered. The major difference between this project and the others is that I choose the writing center as the site through which I examine academic work. The project is specifically attentive to the hierarchy of research, teaching, and service. It examines how the hierarchy plays out in the center and how writing center workers interpret and apply the hierarchy. While in many instances, the writing centers conform to it, they also resist it and revise it to suit their needs. The institution and composition and rhetoric can learn from and apply their acts of resistance to strengthen higher education as a whole. 7