The Cultures of Writing Centers
Tom GALLY

In this age of globalization, perhaps the second most controversial entity involved in the ever-increasing movement across borders, coming after only the migration of people, is culture. Whileinternational trade in physical goods has often been a ﬂashpoint
in globalization disputes, the most emotionally laden issues in
globalization have involved not commodities such as coal, corn,
or copper—bulk materials barely differentiable by whether they
originate in Argentina, Australia, or Aspen—but rather goods
with distinctive cultural origins, whether ﬁlms, fashion, or fast
food. Furthermore, except in cases where protectionist economic
interests come into play, it is not the acetate, ﬁbers, or ﬂour contained in those goods that engenders the most enmity. Rather, itis their cultural content—the assertions and assumptions about
sexual mores in the case of movies and clothing, for example, or
the threat to traditional culinary customs thought to be posed by
fast-food restaurants—that prompts resistance.
The university writing center would thus seem to be apotential target for similar resistance. Like Spiderman, bluejeans, and the hamburger, writing centers are a cultural entitythat originated in the United States, and, as described below,
they betray that origin in many of their characteristics. But perhaps because their spread beyond North America has barely
begun, they do not yet seem to have excited much, if any, controversy outside of the country of their birth. Nevertheless, thewriting center movement cannot be understood without considering its cultural origins, and such an understanding is essential
for those considering the establishment of writing centers outside the United States.
This paper will therefore examine writing centers from the61

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perspective of culture, with the word “culture” considered inseveral of its many senses. The purpose is neither to promote nor
to protest the establishment of writing centers at non-U.S. universities, nor is it to insist that non-American writing centerstake any particular form. Rather, I merely hope that a deeper
appreciation of how cultures have shaped writing centers andhow writing centers in turn create their own cultures will ensurethat writing centers are not established inappropriately and will,furthermore, enable the centers that are established to fulﬁll their
missions more effectively.

Attempts at Deﬁnitions
Both “writing center” and “culture” are difﬁcult to deﬁne,the former because there is no standards-setting or accrediting
body to prescribe what a writing center is or is not and because,even at similar institutions in the United States, every writing
center is different, and the latter because the word has been used
for centuries in a variety of senses, some quite nebulous. But as
the more recent term, and the one with more distinctly identiﬁable physical manifestations, “writing center” is perhaps easier
to pin down.
A typical writing center in the United States is an organizational unit within an educational institution that provides tutoring and other education-related services related to writing. The
tutoring is typically done peer-to-peer, meaning that students
who have been trained as tutors meet one-on-one with other students—sometimes called “clients”—to discuss the clients’ writing projects, although tutoring may be conducted by faculty or
by nonstudent tutors as well. While most writing projects
brought to writing centers are class assignments or theses, writing centers also welcome clients who want help with letters,
application essays, résumés, and other types of writing. Writing
centers might offer workshops to groups of students on topics
such as research skills and citation/referencing systems, but theyusually do not offer regular courses for credit. A writing center
might be afﬁliated with an English, composition, communication, or other academic department, or it might be part of an
administrative unit such as student services. Writing centers are
generally managed by professional administrators with62

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advanced degrees in ﬁelds such as English language or literature, composition studies, and communication, with assistancefrom clerical staff.
As related by Peter Carino (1995), today’s writing centers
have forebears dating back at least a century. In the early days
called “clinics” or “laboratories,” those efforts included many
aspects of current writing center pedagogy, including peer consultation and individual tutoring. During World War II, similar
techniques were adopted within the U.S. military to improve thewritten communication skills of ofﬁcer candidates, and communication remained an emphasis of writing labs in the early 1950s.
Carino reports an apparent dormancy of interest within the composition ﬁeld in such activities in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
perhaps because of overoptimism about the applicability ofrecently developed linguistic theories to writing education. The
turning point came in the late 1960s, when the open admissions
movement led to an inﬂux of minority and underprivileged students into American universities (Boquet, 1999/2001). Many of
those nontraditional students were seen as not having writing
skills adequate for college-level coursework, and writing centerswere established to provide remedial help to them.
An inﬂuential essay by Stephen M. North, titled “The Ideaof a Writing Center” (1984/2001), describes the dialectics of writing centers a decade and a half after open admissions. The fundamental conﬂict, as he relates it, is between faculty and students who perceive the role of the writing center as being tocorrect mistakes in student papers—in other words, to be a “ﬁxit shop,” a phrase often seen in the writing center literature—and the broader mission as perceived by writing center professionals:[I]n a writing center the object is to make sure that writers,
and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed byinstruction. In axiom form it goes like this: our job is to produce better writers, not better writing. Any given project—aclass assignment, a law school application letter, an encyclopedia entry, a dissertation proposal—is for the writer theprime, often the exclusive concern. That particular text, its
success or failure, is what brings them to talk to us in theﬁrst place. In the center, though, we look beyond or through63

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that particular project, that particular text, and see it as anoccasion for addressing our primary concern, that process bywhich it is produced. (p. 69)
In the quarter century since North’s essay, this statement continues to reﬂect the overall focus of most U.S. writing centers:emphasizing the writer and the writing process rather than the
product of that process.1 Writing centers thus usually do not provide editing or proofreading services. Other shared features ofAmerican writing centers include the promotion of broader writing-based initiatives such as “writing across the curriculum,” aneffort to incorporate signiﬁcant amounts of writing in all ornearly all classes (and thus, not incidentally, increase thedemand for writing center services) (see, for example, Blumner,
Eliason, & Fritz, 2001); a strong interest in responding appropriately to the diverse needs of their clientele in terms of race, ethnicity, age, class, national origin, disability status, etc.; and, perhaps most important for the purposes of this paper, an almost
exclusive focus on writing in English within an institutional context in which practically all academic and administrative communication takes place in English. These features of writing centers make up part of the writing center culture to be consideredbelow. But, ﬁrst, let us consider some deﬁnitions of “culture.”Intellectual, Social, and Organizational Culture
Among the many senses in which the word “culture” is used in
English, some, for the purposes of this study, can be safely
ignored, including “The cultivation of soil; tillage” and “Thegrowing of microorganisms, tissue cells, or other living matter ina specially prepared nutrient medium.” (These and the following
deﬁnitions are taken from the entry “culture” in the fourth edition of American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, with
the numbering changed.) Rather, the meanings of “culture” thatmight shed light on writing centers and the writing center movement are the following three:(1) Development of the intellect through training or education.
(2) a. The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns,
arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of64

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human work and thought.
b. These patterns, traits, and products considered as theexpression of a particular period, class, community, or
population.
(3) The predominating attitudes and behavior that characterize the functioning of a group or organization.
For the sake of convenience, let us refer to sense (1) of “culture”
as intellectual culture, to sense (2) as social culture, and to sense (3)as organizational culture. Examples of the use of “culture” would
thus be “He acquired culture from reading the classics” in theintellectual sense, “Anthropologists studied the culture of theindigenous peoples of New Guinea” in the social sense, and“The recently hired employees had difﬁculty adapting to the culture of their new company” in the organizational sense. Intellectual culture thus refers to the process of developing one’s intellect through study and practice. Besides literature, music,
religion, and much else, social culture includes spoken and written language, nonverbal communication, and the patterns of personal interactions. Finally, organizational culture refers to how aparticular organization differs in its operations from other organizations with similar missions, particularly in ways that are
uncodiﬁed but nevertheless understood, consciously or unconsciously, by the organization’s members; in addition to businesscorporations, a frequent subject for studies of organizational culture, such organizations might be government agencies, religious groups, volunteer organizations, universities as a whole, or
university units such as writing centers.

Intellectual Culture and Writing CentersIntellectual culture, as deﬁned above, is based on “training or
education,” in other words, on learning. The process of learninghas, throughout history, been implemented using two complementary and sometimes competing approaches, which might becalled atomistic learning and connective learning. In atomistic
learning, the learner is exposed to particular facts or skills thathave been distilled from a larger body of knowledge or practice.
A child learning how to write the letters of the alphabet, a novice
tennis player learning how to hit a serve, and a medical student
learning the names and functions of each organ in the human65

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body are all engaged in atomistic learning. The ultimate purposeof such learning, of course, is more than acquiring only thoseindividual “atoms”: the goal for the child is to be able to write
words and sentences, not merely isolated letters; the tennis player’s goal is to play and win games, not just serve well; and the
medical student’s goal is to treat and cure illnesses throughout
the body, not merely in individual organs. To make the learning
process more efﬁcient, though, the subject matter is divided into
discrete units that are studied and practiced separately. In connective learning, the focus is on becoming able to understandand apply knowledge in more holistic, integrated ways: the childis asked to write a letter to a friend, the tennis player to play acomplete game against another novice, the medical student toaccompany physicians on their hospital rounds and help diagnose and treat actual patients.
The atomistic and connective approaches are complementary because, in many cases, knowledge and skills can beacquired most effectively through a combination of the two
approaches. Overly atomistic learning is likely to leave thelearner without abilities that can be applied in a meaningful
way—all trees and no forest—while an excessive focus on connective learning can leave the learner with debilitating gaps—
poor spelling and grammatical skills, perhaps, in the case of achild asked only to write extended texts, or a weak backhand, inthe case of a tennis player who has never been drilled on thatspeciﬁc swing. Atomistic and connective learning can competewith each other because some educators tend to emphasize oneof the approaches over the other, even to the point of asserting
the exclusive value of one approach and denigrating the importance of the other. This conﬂict often has a political component,with more conservative educators favoring an emphasis on“basics” or “fundamentals” and progressive educators deriding
such approaches as “rote learning” and advocating integrative
pedagogies in their place.
In Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophyof Education (1916), the American educational philosopher John
Dewey made a similar distinction:
Philosophically, the difference [between “empirical andhigher rational knowing”] turns about the distinction of the66

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particular and universal. Experience is an aggregate of moreor less isolated particulars, acquaintance with each of whichmust be separately made. Reason deals with universals,with general principles, with laws, which lie above the welter of concrete details. In the educational precipitate, thepupil is supposed to have to learn, on one hand, a lot of
items of speciﬁc information, each standing by itself, andupon the other hand, to become familiar with a certain
number of laws and general relationships. Geography, as
often taught, illustrates the former; mathematics, beyond therudiments of ﬁguring, the latter. For all practical purposes,
they represent two independent worlds. (p. 389)
Dewey’s own bent, of course, was towards the connective
approach, and his progressive views of education had a strong, if
indirect, effect on the writing centers that emerged decades laterin the United States.
In the teaching and learning of writing skills, the conﬂicts
between the atomistic and connective approaches can be seen inboth public discourse and specialized research. In 2009, writingon his blog on the New York Times Web site, the scholar Stanley
Fish attacked progressive approaches to writing education at
American universities, speciﬁcally composition courses in which“students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies,
TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues—racism,sexism, immigration, globalization,” and declared that “allcourses listed as courses in composition [should] teach grammar
and rhetoric and nothing else.” He was spurred toward thisview, he wrote, when he found that graduate students in a literature course he was teaching could not write “a clean English sentence.” In the comments section of the blog, many people wrote
to support Fish’s atomistic emphasis, but connectivist
approaches were also advocated:
many composition courses include mechanical lessons—how to use parallel construction, for instance, or how to
avoid the passive voice—but these more pedestrian topics
are not as helpful in teaching students how to think. or,more precisely, these dry topics are not as engaging for theultimate purpose of “writing” courses in college: how to67

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think critically. (Gonzalez 2009; sic)
In the ﬁeld of second-language (L2) writing pedagogy, theatomistic/connectivist conﬂict has been mirrored in an ongoingdebate on the role of error correction in writing classes. The
usual practice of L2 writing teachers has been to correct grammatical mistakes on student-written papers—items such asincorrect article usage or faulty number agreement, in the case ofEnglish, or incorrect particles or faulty verb conjugations, in thecase of Japanese—and return the corrected papers to the students. This methodology was rarely questioned, and the correction of grammatical errors was assumed, by both teachers andstudents, to be an essential part of the teaching and learning ofwriting. In a review article published in the journal Language
Learning in 1996, however, John Truscott of National Tsing Hua
University in Taiwan challenged that assumption head-on,
asserting that “extensive research” on grammar correction “provides a great deal of evidence against correction’s effectivenessand no evidence for it” and that, therefore, “[g]rammar correction should be abandoned” (p. 360). In a later paper (2007), Truscott went even further, suggesting that grammar correction
might actually be “harmful” (p. 271). A number of rebuttals to
Truscott have appeared, including Ferris (1999), Chandler (2003),
Ferris (2004), and Bitchener (2008), prompting further replies by
Truscott (1999; 2004; 2007). The dispute has yet to be resolved.
Although Truscott has not advocated “connective” or holistic approaches to writing education—in his 1996 paper, he raised
the issue of “what teachers should do in writing classes” only torecommend “anything except grammar correction” (p. 360)—
this debate is nevertheless another example of the atomistic/
connectivist divide, as the correction of individual grammaticalerrors, like the teaching of grammar itself, falls squarely on theatomistic side of the language-learning scale, and any other classactivity would almost have to be at least somewhat more connective. The debate is germane to the concerns of this paper as
well, as grammatical correction is precisely the sort of thing that
North and others have stated that writing centers should avoid
lest they become the dreaded “ﬁx–it shops.”
While the grammar-correction debate has not been overtly
political, at least in the literature, in the writing center ﬁeld the68THE CULTURES OF WRITING CENTERS

political divide has been apparent. In her 1991/1995 paper“Writing Centers in Context: Responding to Current Educational
Theory,” for example, Christina Murphy examines how writing
center activities relate to conservative, liberal, and radical educational philosophies, stating that “[f]rom the conservative perspective, writing centers are effective when they advance a student’s mastery of skills—speciﬁcally, grammar, mechanics,
vocabulary, and sentence complexity and variety,” while in theliberal model, “[s]tudents [who use writing centers] learn how todevelop their analytical and critical thinking skills through dialogic exchanges with the tutor” (p. 118). Even a casual perusal of
the writing center literature from the United States makes clearthat the liberal model is dominant there, with strong strains ofradical (i.e., politically activist) views as well (see, for example,
Lutes, 2002; Denny, 2005; Condon, 2007). The writing center in its
original form, therefore, has as its primary mission the promotion of intellectual culture (“Development of the intellect”) in aconnective way, not the atomistic learning of speciﬁc facts or
skills.
When writing centers are established in other countries,
however, this mission can be problematic. Besides differences inculture in the social and organizational senses, discussed below,
the issue of language becomes central. Many American universities, of course, have large numbers of international students, andwriting centers have long dealt with the special issues that arise
when their clients are writing in English as a second language(see, for example, Powers 1993; Bruce & Rafoth 2004). However,American writing centers, almost without exception, exist in
educational institutions where instruction and other communication is conducted in English, the student writing brought tothe writing center is in English, and tutorials are conducted in
English. While there are writing centers in non-English-speaking
countries where the situation is parallel—at Seoul National University in Korea, for example, there is an Academic Writing Lab
where Korean students writing in Korean can obtain one-on-one
consultations about their writing in Korean (Center for Teachingand Learning, 2005)—most of the writing centers established so
far in Japan, at least, such as those in the ALESS Program at the
University of Tokyo (described below) and at Osaka Jogakuin
College (Johnston & Ochitani, 2008), provide tutoring to students
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writing in English as a foreign language within an institution
where the primary language of communication is Japanese.2
The question arises, therefore, whether the holistic, noncorrective approach to tutoring emphasized at American writing
centers is appropriate in contexts where essentially all students
are writing in a foreign language, including many intermediate
and even some beginning learners of that language. In otherwords, should tutors in foreign-language writing centers correct
students’ mistakes? Those imbued with the American writing
center tradition would respond “no” and reject error correction
in most cases, and Truscott’s arguments about the ineffectivenessof grammar correction in L2 writing classes could be harnessed
to discourage grammar correction in writing center tutorials as
well. But the exclusively foreign-language context of many writing centers outside the United States cannot be ignored. Students
writing in their ﬁrst language, even if they are unable to write a“clean” sentence (that is, one free of errors in the standard written form of that language), possess a vast passive awareness ofthe conventions of that standard language, and that awarenessmight very well be activated most effectively not through correction but through activities such as extended writing projects,
nonjudgmental peer review, and continued exposure to writingin the desired target style and register. Similarly, L2 writers
immersed in their second language, such as international students at American universities, while having had less passive
contact with the standard language than ﬁrst-language (L1) writers have had, are exposed to large amounts of that language
through study and daily life, and that exposure might obviate
the need for error correction in their cases as well. But most students writing in the language of a foreign country are exposed tothat language primarily in language classes, so they have little
past or current passive knowledge of the language to fall backon. In their case, adopting the American writing center focus on
intellectual culture—connective “development of the intellect”—
and discouraging atomistic error correction during writing center tutorials risks depriving of the students of the necessary“training or education” necessary for their intellectual development.

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Social Culture and Writing Centers
It is social culture, as deﬁned above, that attracts the most attention in the writing center ﬁeld in the United States. Not only areforeign students, who in many cases have different social-cultural characteristics from American students, present in large
numbers on many American campuses, but they also use writing
centers in large numbers (Powers & Nelson, 1995). Part of theattention directed on international students in the writing center
context focuses on linguistic issues. Most American writing-center tutors have little or no ﬁrst-hand experience with the issues
faced by someone writing in a second language, and they often
lack the vocabulary to explain English grammar even when such
explanations are acceptable and necessary; thus they struggle, atleast at ﬁrst, to respond adequately to their clients’ needs. The
clients, in turn, often “do not understand the specialized strategies and language that writing center tutors use when trying tohelp them succeed in their new academic environment” (Garner& Young, 2003). Other social-cultural issues that arise in tutorials
with international students are “the preference for or avoidanceof eye contact, . . . the amount of space that people expect tomaintain between themselves and others, the acceptability oftouching between strangers, and so on” (Harris & Silva, 1993)
and different standards of politeness (Nash, 2006).3
But social-cultural issues in American writing centers are
not limited to those involving students from other countries. The
United States itself is a diverse nation, and differences among
students from different cultural backgrounds are of major concern in the American writing center context. Such backgrounds
include not only ethnicities, such as native American, Vietnamese-American, and Hispanic, but also regional, class, and religious characteristics (working-class Appalachian, West Coast
Jewish, New England patrician), sexual orientation, disability
status, and race. Gender issues are considered in ways thatmight seem foreign from other cultural perspectives (Rafoth,Macauley, Stoltenberg, Housenick, Brown, & Baran, 1999; Gillispie & Olden, 2006). Age is also an important component; while
elite universities tend to serve mostly full-time undergraduatesin their late teens or early twenties, state and especially community colleges—which often have particularly strong writing cen71

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ter programs—educate large numbers of working and betweencareer students in their thirties, forties, and ﬁfties.
The issues that arise when working with a diverse clientele
are often discussed in the writing center literature and can leadto profound conclusions. Steve Accardi of DePaul University in
Chicago, for example, described his encounter with a Yoruban
student from Nigeria (2005) whose paper included the sentence“my parents went for vacation.” When Accardi discovered thatthe student, when the sentence was pointed out to him, did not
notice that it was unnatural in American English, Accardichanged his tutoring strategy with the student to a “more direct
style, informing [the student] that Americans say ‘on vacation’ or‘for a vacation’ rather than ‘for vacation’.” Thinking about theexperience later, he realized that “we as tutors, whether weknow it or not, are Americanizing our tutees, linguistically andperhaps culturally,” and he became concerned that students
from nonmainstream backgrounds were being “forced to giveup, lose, exchange their primary discourse for the academic discourse.” In response, he recommends that tutors “address multicultural assimilation in order to raise the consciousness of theirtutees so that they can both maintain their cultural identity andsucceed in the university.” In other words, Accardi felt that his
writing center should not only make students better writers but
also help them preserve their cultural identities. A similarly
forceful statement about the role of writing centers serving multicultural academic communities comes from Nancy Maloney
Grimm (1996): “The writing center could be a space in the university where students . . . discuss the possibilities and impossibilities of negotiating cultural and racial conﬂicts” (pp. 544–545).
This emphasis on diversity and multicultural acceptance in
the American writing center context raises important issues
when considering applying the American writing center modelin other countries. Those American concerns, after all, arise outof historical factors that are particularly signiﬁcant in the UnitedStates, including the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination,
the repeated waves of immigration and nativist backlash, andthe centrality of human rights to the country’s political discourse. Those factors have made American society what it istoday, and they have shaped many of the shared assumptions ofAmerican writing centers—the nonjudgmentality of tutorial ses72

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sions, the focus on the writer as an individual, and the emphasison collaboration over hierarchical control (as in Lunsford, 1991).
While the mere fact that those assumptions arose out of a peculiarly American context does not mean that they should be
rejected out of hand when establishing writing centers in othercountries, it also suggests that they should not be adopted
blindly. The social-cultural characteristics of the country of
establishment should be given equal or greater consideration.
One example of how the social culture of a country might
affect a writing center in ways not considered in the Americanmodel arose in 2007 when graduate students at the University ofTokyo were tutoring undergraduate students enrolled in English
academic writing classes. (The university’s ﬁrst writing center
would be established the following year.) Although the classes
were conducted primarily in English, the tutors and undergraduates were encouraged to speak whatever language was most
comfortable for them during their tutorial sessions. Most of thetutors and students were native speakers of Japanese, so most of
the tutorials were conducted in Japanese. One of the graduate
student tutors, Toru Oda, a scholar of comparative literature,described a difﬁculty he encountered during tutorial sessions
with regard to how he and his tutee should address each other.
People speaking Japanese choose from a variety of strategies
for addressing each other depending on their relative age, gender, social status, and familiarity. The use of given names andsecond-person pronouns is restricted to relationships of highfamiliarity, such as between family members or close friends; inwork and university contexts, surnames are the norm. Whencalling another person by his or her surname, one must choose
an appropriate sufﬁx. The surname followed by -san is suitable inmany cases, but if the person addressed is a younger malewithin the same group, -kun might be used instead. A teacher or
doctor is usually addressed with -sensei. Words designatingsocial status can sometimes be used in place of name-plus-sufﬁx.
Students, for example, can address their teacher just as sensei,
without the surname, and a younger student can address anolder student within the same school as senpai (“senior”). However, an older student would not normally address a younger
student with the counterpart to senpai, which is kōhai (“junior”).
In his tutorial sessions, Oda reported, some students
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assumed that he was a teacher of some sort and therefore
addressed him as sensei. Because he was not employed as ateacher, however, he felt that this form of address was inappropriate. He was also unsure whether to use -san or -kun whenaddressing his tutees, because -san might seem a bit too formal
but it wasn’t clear if the tutor-tutee relationship justiﬁed the useof -kun. In an e-mail to me (personal communication, July 12,
2007; quoted by permission), he wrote:
Thus we were forced, in a sense, to remain nameless. Of
course we were able to communicate without any problem
and make productive discussions; the purpose of the tutoring session is to let them understand that writing is a creative and conscious process. But it is true that I felt this situation was a bit troublesome when I wanted to persuade
them to change the general structure of their papers or to
reject their plans without imposing my opinion authoritatively. In order to solve this (trivial but fundamental) problem, we should make it clear before starting the very ﬁrst
tutorial, by what name we call each other.
His recommendation was that tutors call students by either -sanor -kun and that students be told to address tutors using -san.
This small example shows how a social-cultural issue not
relevant in the United States and therefore not considered in theAmerican writing center literature—forms of address in spoken
Japanese—can play a signiﬁcant role in tutorials in another cultural context. Similar issues that might arise, in Japan or elsewhere, include greater sensitivity to age differences between
tutor and tutee; the need to maintain status and hierarchy distinctions between tutor/teacher and student, thus rendering difﬁcult the dialogic, nonjudgmental style of American tutorials;
and a variety of factors related to gender, religion, social class,language, and nonverbal communication. When such factors areespecially important within the country in question, the socialcultural adaptations made by writing centers might end up rendering those centers unrecognizable to someone familiar onlywith American writing center practices.

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Organizational Culture and Writing Centers
When considering the relationship between writing centers andorganizational culture—“The predominating attitudes andbehavior that characterize the functioning of a group or organization,” as deﬁned above—two levels of organization deserve
the most attention. The ﬁrst is, of course, that of the writing center itself: how its operations are shaped by the shared attitudes of
its administrators, staff, and tutors. The second is the entire university or other educational institution to which the writing center belongs. While other levels might also be of interest, such as
the culture that forms among the student tutors working at aparticular writing center or the dynamics within a university
department that includes a writing center, the discussion here
will be limited to the two levels mentioned.
At the level of the writing center itself, the organizational
culture of writing centers in American universities is characterized overall by cooperation, nurturing, avoidance of confrontation, and a lack of overt competitiveness. Grimm (1996) locatesthat culture within a gendered framework, stating that writing
centers “are marked by social notions of what women provide—
refuge, nurturance, emotional support, personal guidance.”
These characteristics seem to spill over into other contexts inwhich writing center professionals are involved. For example, in2006 I attended a weeklong workshop for writing center directors held at Stanford University in California and sponsored by
the International Writing Centers Association. Upon my returnto the University of Tokyo, I wrote the following in a report on
the workshop:
Even though I was born and raised in California and shouldhave been completely at home at Stanford, I frequently felt
as though I were visiting an exotic land and had been suddenly immersed in a foreign culture. Upon reﬂection, I realized that this culture was not American or California culture
but the culture . . . of the writing center movement. Some
examples:• In the many discussions in which the participants
expressed their ideas directly and clearly, there was neverany disagreement or argument. Occasionally two people
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would express opposing ideas, but the session leader
would merely thank both of them and make no attempt toresolve the contradiction.
• Speakers rarely used the word “tell”; instead, they would
express the same meaning with the verb “share”: “I would
like to share my ideas with you”; “Thank you for sharingthat with us”; “Could you share what you have learned?”• During the Institute’s ﬁnal lunch on the last day, some ofthe organizers sang comical songs about writing center
activities, people hugged each other, and one participant
made an emotional, teary-eyed testimonial about how
much the ﬁve-day Institute had changed her life and herplans for her career.
The atmosphere, needless to say, was very different from asimilar gathering in Japan; it was also probably much different from that at a gathering of, say, American philosophersor physicists.
Within their larger organizations, however, writing center
administrators must often deal with a very different organizational culture, one that is not particularly nurturing or mutually
supportive, one in which competition for status, jobs, and budgets can be overt and intense. While other university units areengaged in the same competition, writing centers are in a particularly tenuous position. Because they do not offer classes for
credit or as prerequisites to degrees, and because they are often
perceived by faculty and administrators as providing primarily
remedial services (even though they usually serve students of allability levels), writing centers can be depicted as not essential tothe university’s educational mission and therefore expendable.
As a result, discussions among writing center personnel,
whether in person, online, or in the literature, return frequently
to the issue of how to navigate the shoals of the broader university culture (see, for example, Simpson et al., 1995; Harbord,2006).
The organizational culture of American writing centers at
the level of the writing centers themselves and among writing
center professionals seems to have been shaped by the writing
centers’ missions. Just as writing center tutors are trained topraise and be accepting of their tutees and not to scold them for76

THE CULTURES OF WRITING CENTERS

making mistakes, writing center professionals are generally supportive, enabling, and nurturing within their own organizations.
These characteristics seem to be common to American writing
centers because the writing centers’ missions are generally similar in all American institutions. But at the institutional level, missions can vary, and the organizational culture of an elite research
university is very different from that of a small liberal arts college, a large state university, or for-proﬁt vocational college. The
roles of writing centers within those institution-wide cultures,and the organizational-culture dynamics within those institutions, must necessarily change from place to place. The institution-speciﬁcity of this organizational culture is likely to apply inother countries as well.
When considering the adoption of the writing center modeloutside the United States, therefore, the organizational-culture
issue that deserves the most attention is at the level of the writing center itself. The American culture of nonevaluative nurturing arose out partly out of the original mission of writing centers
to serve underprivileged, minority, and other nontraditional students who began attending American universities in large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s—students often not yet sure of theirposition within the academic environment, students for whom astricter, more evaluative approach had been found to be discouraging and counterproductive. Whether that culture is still appropriate now that many American writing centers have moved
away from their original focus on remediation is a question for
those writing centers themselves to decide. But writing centers
newly established at universities in other countries need to consider carefully what “attitudes and behavior” are best encouraged as their own organizational cultures are being formed andnot attempt to replicate uncritically the patterns of Americanorganizational culture.

Writing Centers and Cultures
One criticism that has been leveled at the American writing center model from someone working outside that context came fromJohn Harbord of Central European University in Budapest, Hungary (2003). In response to writing-center literature promoting
nondirective tutoring, processed-based approaches, and a gen77

KOMABA JOURNAL OF ENGLISH EDUCATION

eral antipathy to classroom teaching, Harbord advocated insteada more text-focused, teacherly, and evaluative approach to client
writing. Although Harbord states that his position “better meetsthe needs of academic writer-learners in Europe,” it is not clear
from his paper that the European (as opposed to American) setting is in fact signiﬁcant in his case. Rather, because he is dealing
exclusively with graduate students writing extended research
papers and theses, often for publication, the short-term needs of
his students for improvement clearly take priority over his students’ “writing ability in some indistinct future,” which is theprimary focus of American writing centers that mainly serve students at earlier stages of their academic careers.
A more interesting example, from a cultural perspective, isthat presented by Adam Turner of Hanyang University in Korea(2006). The Hanyang English Writing Lab which he directs helps
clients “improve English journal articles for structure, organization, ﬂow, logic, and style” (Hanyang English Writing Lab, n.d.);this product-based focus, as in Harbord’s case, emerges mainly
from the speciﬁc needs of his clients, mostly graduate students inthe sciences, to produce papers in English suitable for publication. But Turner also notes a number of accommodations he has
made for the social and organizational cultures at his university.
For example, the Hanyang writing center provides expert consultations by faculty rather than relying on a peer-tutoringmodel because, he writes (2006), “[i]n Korean culture, which isstrongly inﬂuenced by Confucianism, age differences of even ayear must be respected, which makes a peer model of interaction
more difﬁcult to implement.” The organizational culture of hisuniversity, speciﬁcally the key role played by laboratories rather
than individuals in the production of scientiﬁc papers, also
affected his center’s operations, and he “came to see the lab,rather than the individual, as my essential writing center client.”
In the College of Arts and Sciences at the University ofTokyo, a pilot writing center was established in April 2008 as
part of the Active Learning of English for Science Students(ALESS) program, a one-semester course in English science writing and presentation required of all ﬁrst-year undergraduate science majors (Gally, 2009a, 2009b). The tutors in the ALESS Writing Center are graduate students who have taken a one-semester
course in writing pedagogy, and the clientele is, as of this writ78

THE CULTURES OF WRITING CENTERS

ing, restricted to students currently taking the ALESS course. As
it serves freshmen enrolled in a two-year liberal arts program
who are still years away from producing scientiﬁc writing in
English for publication, the ALESS Writing Center has remained
closer to the American model than have the Central European
University or Hanyang University centers, and the ALESS tutors
are encouraged to employ the dialogic, nondirective approach
used in mainstream American writing centers. The linguistic
context at the University of Tokyo is signiﬁcantly different fromthe American case, however, with all of the writing brought tothe center being in a foreign language (English) and the tutorials
usually conducted in the local language (Japanese). Partly
because all of the tutors (at the time of this writing) are native
speakers of Japanese, but also because the clients, being at the
beginning stage of their academic careers, are seen as beneﬁtting
more from a deeper understanding of the writing process (something that they are likely to retain for years) than from additional
absorption of lexical or grammatical “atoms” (which they arelikely to forget), the ALESS Writing Center adopts a processbased approach to tutoring. In the years ahead, if the center’s
mission expands to include graduate students writing for publication or undergraduates writing in Japanese as either a ﬁrst or asecond language, then changes to our approach will need to bemade as appropriate.
As noted above, a university unit does not need to meet any
ofﬁcial deﬁnitions to call itself a writing center. Even within the
United States, writing centers vary greatly—both between different institutions and within the same institution over time—as
they evolve to meet the needs of their clients, institutions, andcommunities. While some aspects of American writing centers
cannot or should not be applied to writing centers in other countries, this pragmatic ﬂexibility is one cultural export that should
be adopted without hesitation.

Notes
1. The overall tone of North’s essay as well—his plaint about being misunderstood, marginalized, even victimized—is seen occasionally inother writing center writing (for example, Summerﬁeld 1988 and79

KOMABA JOURNAL OF ENGLISH EDUCATION

Simpson, Braye, & Boquet, 1994/1995) and heard in discussions
among writing center professionals. Even milder, more constructive
accounts of the position of writing centers within their institutions
describe chronic conﬂicts, such as “the potential for misunderstanding
when both tutors and faculty work closely with the same group of students” (Jefferson 2009). Such feelings are not uncommon among otheruniversity people—literature scholars resenting the higher budgets ofscience departments, scientists questioning the prestige of literarystudies—but they may be particularly acute among writing center professionals because of the ambiguous status of writing centers in serving an educational purpose without being integrated in the formal
curriculum and their consequent inability to justify their budgets
based on student tuition payments (as writing centers nearly always
offer their services at no charge).
2. A noteworthy hybrid case is the writing center at Waseda University inTokyo (Sadoshima, n.d.). Established originally within the university’s
School of International Liberal Studies, in which classes are taught inEnglish, the center began very much in the American model, providing tutoring mostly in English to students writing in English. But thecenter also served international students within SILS learning Japanese as a second language, and in 2008 its mission was expanded sothat it could also serve students from other departments in the university who are writing in Japanese for classes conducted in Japanese.
3. Writing centers in the United States, when dealing with international
students, also have to deal with differences in textual organization andstorytelling patterns as reﬂected in client writing—the issue of “contrastive rhetoric,” as originally raised by Kaplan (1966/2001) andextended and critiqued by many others, including Silverman (2006) inthe writing center context and Kubota and Lehner (2004)—and withpurportedly different attitudes toward plagiarism in academic contexts (Currie, 1998; Pecorari, 2003) These issues, however, are notunique to writing centers and arise in composition classes and otheracademic contexts as well, so they are not discussed in this paper.

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