Chapter 2. Story-Changing Work for Studio Activists: Finding Points of Convergence

Abstract

Writing Studio is a methodology articulated by Rhonda Grego and Nancy Thompson (1995Thompson ( , 1996Thompson ( , 2008) ) which enables writers to develop proficiency in the use and critique of discourses that constitute and surround the academy.Studio approaches have existed in both the fine and the practical arts, including rhetoric, since ancient times (Macauley, 1999).While studios differ widely by context, both in terms of the skills they model and the products they create, a defining feature has always been their emphasis on mentored learning-through-doing.In studios, apprentice learners master their craft through directed group participation.In Grego and Thompson's model for Writing Studios, learning-through-doing involves working on writing in small, facilitated groups.Participants in these mentored groups engage in collaborative reflection and interactional inquiry about writing and how writing is taught at their institution.Writing Studio's position in a thirdspace, outside-alongside the institutions and programs they serve, is a third feature of Writing Studies' version of studio.The Writing Studio Sampler is a collection of essays about Writing Studio.These essays are, among other things, "I was there" stories: narratives told by individuals who designed, worked in, or administered a studio; or who used their studio's outside-alongside position to challenge and transform the institutional structures which framed it.Individual essays tell the story of a particular Studio: how it emerged at a specific institution; how it grappled with local economic, political, and social contexts; how it strove to meet the needs and purposes of its (varied!) stakeholders.Taken together, these essays illustrate the myriad ways collective reflection and interactional inquiry function to create what is most powerful about Studio: its ability to initiate change.The fact that Writing Studio is a methodology-not simply a way to do things but a process for reflecting on, critiquing, and re-envisioning the way things are done-means that studios can serve many different pedagogical and administrative purposes.Studios described in this collection function outside-alongside community colleges (Leach and Kuhne), small liberal arts colleges (Fraizer), small urban universities (Cardinal and Keown), state colleges (Matzke Writing Studios and Change on discursive structures which make certain patterns inevitable and block others.Grego and Thompson called this process interactional inquiry.Interactional inquiry has roots in feminist discourses and action research.It comes into being when "group participants (whether students or staff) engage in regular sessions in which they share, largely through talk and stories, their experiences, letting the life of their weekly everyday work gather force by finding similarities and common ground through a cross-sectional analysis" (Grego & Thompson, 2008, p. 175).Interactional inquiry's reflection on and analysis of structures permeating participants' experiences with the academy takes place primarily through talk.This talk, however, was supplemented by writing: writing produced for assignments, writing reflecting on assignments, and writing prompted by experiences surrounding both the assignments and life within academic culture.Ideas raised in all these different forms of writing are discussed and revisited, accepted and challenged, combined and recombined, discarded and picked up again over weeks of studio meetings by all participants, both students and staff.New experiences provide more data and refine the group's analysis.This process of mining group experience for patterns, trying those patterns in the fire of group reflection and critique, and then re-casting them in light of group identities, questions, and interests is the heart of interactional inquiry.More in-depth discussion of interactional inquiry and thirdspace can be found in the "Theoretical Roots" section of this introduction.Studio's positioning outside but alongside traditional academic structures and its use of interactional inquiry laid the ground for the success.From 1992 to 2001 (the program's last year), at least eighty percent of students who regularly attended studio meetings in Grego and Thompson's program passed their firstyear composition courses.These pass rates either matched or slightly exceeded passing rates for all first-year composition students (Thompson & Fosen, 2002).Grego and Thompson continued to develop the studio model in their on-going work as compositionists.When Grego joined the faculty at Benedict College in 1997, she developed the Bridges Writing Program, a version of Studio for Benedict's first-year writing program.The Bridges' program lasted a little longer than the original Studio, persisting in a limited form from 2002 through 2005.Thompson also expanded on the original project, designing a studio for the University of South

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