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Rating: 
Summary: Read, and let the lightbulb go off!
Review: If you are involved with student writers, you must read this book! Multicultural classrooms, reluctant student writers, uncertainty of how to tutor students with their writing . . . whatever the writing-related problem you bring to the reading, Grimm will give you insight and a desire to deal with it! An great read . . . many applicable anecdotes and a fabulous afterword. If you are thinking there must be something more for teaching writing, training tutors, or supporting student writers, this is it!
Rating:
Summary: Writing centers: service or disservice?
Review: This is one of those ground-breaking books that are also exasperating, because you know the author is right at least half of the time, but you don't know which half is right. Grimm's overall objective is to find a way to make higher education "fairer" for students who lack the advantages of most mainstream students who grow up in white, middle-class households, and she has written a thoughtful analysis based on wide reading across several disciplines (there are well over 100 items in the Works Cited). From the perspective of the Writing Center, which originated at the same time that growing numbers of nontraditional students began flooding American colleges and universities, she has a first-hand perspective of the mismatch between these students and the expectations of their professors.Although political, the book is not a polemic so much as an academic inquiry into time-honored values of liberal education. And she uses postmodern thought as a basis for asking questions that get at long-held assumptions about what students should learn and how they should learn it. She articulates well how discourse (the conversation that takes place among people creating knowledge) locks its participants into certain viewpoints that make it hard for them to see the perspectives ot those outside the discourse itself. But the drawback of postmodernism is that it is yet another form of discourse, with its own assumptions, and that's where a reader of the book can begin to experience it as a kind of hall of mirrors, where everything is called into question, including the author's own argument. The subject of literacy, which may seem to be a simple concept, becomes far more complex than you may have ever imagined. Fewer than 150 pages in length, the book has more packed into it than many others on similar subjects. It handles complex ideas clearly and is quite readable, with a minimum of postmodern jargon. It comes to life especially when Grimm uses the examples of actual students and tutors in her Writing Lab at Michigan Technical University in the Upper Pennisula. I strongly recommend her book to anyone looking for fresh perspectives on education and new ways of understanding literacy.
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