ABSTRACT
Writing center workers often see the struggle and frustration of students whose educational histories and lived experiences have not prepared them for the literacy expectations of the university. Because these students do not seem to respond readily to conventional teaching or tutoring, teachers and tutors can too easily construct them as lacking in agency, skill, knowledge, work ethic, requisite attitudes, insight, or ability. Such constructions locate problems in students rather than in the practices of composition teaching, whether that teaching occurs in a classroom or in a writing center. The call to rethink the inadequate and disabling representations of composition students has become one of the most pressing issues in composition studies in the 1990s (DiPardo, Faigley, Helmers, Miller). Susan Miller, for example, suggests that replacing the standard representation of students as “children whose Victorian innocence retains a tainted need for ‘civilizing’” (196) with a conception of students as “responsible, participatory, and at least potentially influential in specific writing situations” (198) would not only alter teaching but also challenge the low status of the field of composition studies.
