Maintaining Our Balance: Walking the Tightrope of Competing Epistemologies

Abstract

Writing center people prefer to use words like "teaching" instead of "pedagogy"; "tutoring," not "individualized instructional session"; "what works," rather than "effective educative strategies."This simple diction is one feature of our linguistic practice we have celebrated across the writing center community.However, behind this facade of pragmatism, of action over theory, we have been actively involved in debates concerning the epistemologies to which we as a community should pledge our allegiance and on which we should build our instruction.We have been involved because, as James Berlin reminds us in Rhetoric and Reality, "every rhetorical system is based on epistemological assumptions about the nature of reality, the nature of the knower, and the rules governing the discovery and communication of the known" (4).While the academy has argued vehemendy about ways of knowing, with factions taking stands under such banners as structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, pragmatism, neo-pragmatism, postmodernism, we too have been involved in much the same inquiry.Unlike the majority of the academic community, however, the writing center community debates questions of epistemology without making a production of it; often, we do so without being too aware of the nature or implications of our theoretical stance.For instance, I was not drawn into this investigation because I have an unfulfilled love for philosophical argument.Rather, this investigation began when I was forced to think through the differences between the tenets on which a writing lab and a writing center are

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