The tutor\u27s audience is always a fiction: The construction of authority in writing center conferences

This ethnographic study of a peer tutor staffed writing center investigated how undergraduate tutors and writers construct authority in their talk about text. Two assumptions guided the design of the study: (1) that writing center conferences cannot be understood apart from the layers of institutional context in which they are embedded, and (2) that the poststructural notion of subject positions can productively inform the sociolinguistic methods often used to study conference talk. Data included videotapes of forty conferences; interviews with participants; tutors\u27 journals; students\u27 texts; and field notes and documents containing representations of writing in the Writing Center, the English Department, and the College. Using methods derived from microethnography and grounded theory, I identified three main discourses organizing conference talk: a discourse of proficiency emphasizing the authority of teachers, canons of knowledge and fixed rules for writing; a discourse of craft emphasizing the authority of student-writers to make formal choices; and a discourse of construction emphasizing the authority of student-writers to make informed choices, shape knowledge and influence readers. I demonstrate that tutors negotiated a powerful set of tensions both between the institutional emphasis on proficiency in a set of discrete skills and tutor training\u27s emphasis on higher order concerns and also between opposing mandates advocated in tutor preparation. In response to these ideological dilemmas, tutors created ideal texts for conferences that cast tutors in the contradictory role of hunched-shouldered authority and demanded of student-writers an equally paradoxical stance of active compliance. Descriptive case studies illustrated a pattern of differential instruction. When there was a strong match between the tutor\u27s and writer\u27s conference texts, a discourse of construction was likely to be dominant. When participants experienced more dissonance, a discourse of proficiency tended to dominate. I conclude that tutor preparation will be most effective when it examines the ideological conflicts tutors encounter and problematizes the assumption that writing centers are institutionally autonomous. By highlighting tensions present elsewhere in contemporary writing pedagogy, this study argues for more clearly articulated theories of construction and collaboration and for continued investigation into the ways that students are positioned in instructional discourse