As a tutor in a college Writing Center, I have often noted that it is my students who teach me, rather than the other way around. Prior to joining the center, I had worked as an educator in various classroom settings and grade levels. When asked to write a reflective piece on my first month as a tutor, I commented that I had spent the previous 10 years learning about teaching, but the last 30 days learning about learning.
Margaret Syverson, in her book The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition, offers one explanation for this reversal of the teacher-student dynamic. Syverson talks about writing as part of an ecological system. She explains that the processes involved in composing operate much like a biological ecosystem or the economic system in which the stock market operates. In these systems, “people, atoms, neurons, or molecules, for instance–act and interact in parallel with each other, simultaneously reacting to and co-constructing their own environment” (3). In writing, she notes, the same thing occurs. According to Syverson, “Writing, like other cognitive processes, occurs in ecological systems involving not only social but also environmental structures that both powerfully constrain and also enable what writes are able to think, feel, and write” (9).
Such is the case with the Writing Center. One way this happens is through what Syverson calls distribution. In complex systems, distribution refers to the way a cognitive process of writing is shared by both the people and the physical objects in the environment. In the Writing Center, the composing process is distributed among many such objects. The main tutoring room is composed of six square tables, each with four chairs. The table becomes an integral part of the composing process, a tutor and student sit adjacent at one. Both are equal partners. The paper sits between them, so as to retain ownership where it belongs. Last night’s tutoring session, a young student read aloud from her “cause-effect” paper about the effects of her father’s death last year. She started to cry. The paper lay between us as she read, and the composing process was distributed among the two of us, the paper, and the table, which seemed to absorb the student’s grief. It lay there as she finished her reading, as if to capture her sorrow in a concrete place where we could view it. As we gazed at the second paragraph of the paper, I commented, “Your pain is raw here.” She nodded in agreement. She took a pen and scratched out her introductory paragraph, a convention she realized was unnecessary and took away from her actual meaning.
Syverson speaks also of emergence, a term for “self-organization, order, and structure that emerge from simple components that might be expected to exhibit either random, chaotic behavior or stable, predictable behavior” (11). Ironically, the student who came in last night had no set appointment. She had never been to the Writing Center. We close at 8 p.m., she arrived at 7 p.m. announcing that she had to first write the draft before she could sit down with a tutor. She said she had missed her last two classes and was required to get feedback from the Writing Center because she had missed the peer review of her paper during class. I suggested she sign in on the drop-in list and that if she finished by 7:30, she might be able to achieve her goals in one evening. In a random occurrence of events, she ended up sitting down with me. As we discussed the paper, the typical chaos inherent in a revising session took place. “I know I was obsessed with the death,” she said. Again, we looked at the paper, which we now had neatly arranged in three separate sheets on the tutoring table. “Yes,” I agreed. There was a pause. “Is that bad?” I questioned. The page of narrative in which she discussed not the effects of her father’s death, but her obsession with its trauma, seemed to stare at us. We stared back, without a plan. Suddenly, from out of nothing, came organization. Between the lines that kept repeating how she couldn’t believe this had happened to her were glimpses of the legacy her father had left her in the philosophy she had come to use in healing from it. In such a shared cognitive activity, authorship is blurred.
Syverson’s ecological look at composing involves embodiment. Certainly, the student and I were contained by the physical spaces of our own bodies, but also by the Writing Center room itself, which contained our thought process in a certain space, as our half-hour session contained it in a certain place in time. In the middle of the table, slips of paper sat in a plastic container, reading to record our half-hour exchange.
Lastly, Syverson refers to the principle of enaction, “the principle that knowledge is the result of an ongoing interpretation that emerges through activities and experiences situated in specific environments” (13). She calls texts “paths laid down in walking. and and says that writing is something “about or directed toward something that is missing” (16). As the student in the Writing Center and I responded to and interacted with the text, our experiences talking and the activity of the tutoring session itself resulted in our “bringing forth” a new meaning to the experience she had written about. As we finished the session, it became clear to the writer that her father’s death had resulted in many changes to her family’s way of life, the most important of which was the way it had shaped her perception of death and her perspectives on life.
Syverson’s look at writing as part of an ecosystem helps describe the multiple interactions that come into play in a Writing Center environment much more than cognitive models that look at writing as taking place in isolation within one individual’s head. As Syverson points out, “Composing, like many other human cognitive processes, is irreducibly social and inextricably embedded in specific environments that are not merely supportive of but integral to the processes of thinking, writing, and reading” (25-26).
