Noise from the Writing Center

Rating:
Summary: Making a joyful noise
Review: This book is most insightful when it looks back over the evolution of university writing centers and considers the implications of the various metaphors used to name them (e.g., writing labs) and to describe what goes on in them. Also instructive is a brief literature review that summarizes a range of perspectives on writing centers that have been articulated by practitioners over the past couple of decades.

The book's central idea is that the writing center should be "noisy" (open to the unplanned and unexpected, as an appropriate environment for learning), rather than methodical and harmonious, or quiet. It even discusses at length the physics of feedback, using Jimi Hendrix' trademark style as an example of how noise can open up a kind of internal creative space.

There are also long sections of the book describing the personalities of various tutors who have worked in the author's own writing center at Fairfield University in Connecticut, as well as the writing center of a colleague at Rhode Island College. We get transcriptions of exchanges between them at meetings and long excerpts from log entries and papers written by them. As well as this can be done in print, there is a sense conveyed of earnest young minds trying to make a difference in the educational lives of other students.

I recommend this book to anyone who is as much a romantic about education as Boquet seems to be. If you believe that the institution of higher education needs a revolution; that learning should bring liberation and empowerment to the marginalized and disenfranchised; that too many faculty members do not "get it"; that education should redress social injustices and bring healing, then you'll find this book about university writing tutors of interest and even entertaining.