Praxis: Online Publishing and Writing Center Pedagogy

Author: James Jesson

Date: 6 May 2008

White Paper Series Number: 080506-01

Keywords: publishing, editing, Praxis, UWC, space, project groups, Internet

Abstract: This paper considers how the Undergraduate Writing Center's (UWC) online journal, Praxis, supplements the UWC’s work by applying writing center philosophy to the process of online publishing, offering a valuable professional development opportunity for consultants, and providing resources for authors and consultants beyond the UWC. The paper also suggests possibilities for expanding Praxis’s role (and the role of online publishing in general) in the writing center.

Overview: What is Praxis?

PRAXIS: A Writing Center Journal is a biannual online journal published by The Undergraduate Writing Center (UWC) devoted to topics of interest to writing center consultants and administrators. The journal is edited by UWC consultants. Because these consultants take time off from their consulting to produce the journal, Praxis can seem like a side project secondary to the writing center’s primary task of working with student writers. Moreover, while the UWC’s mission is to serve undergraduates at The University of Texas (UT), most articles published in Praxis are written by graduate students, professors, and writing center administrators at other institutions. This fact, too, might seem to place Praxis far from the primary, day-to-day functioning of the UWC. In this white paper, however, I will examine Praxis as an extension of the UWC’s mission and philosophy. I will do so by proposing that the journal’s physical separation from the UWC’s consulting work masks significant overlap between Praxis’s publishing practices and the UWC’s values of collaborative, non-directive education. With Praxis, the publishing of academic writing follows processes modeled on writing-center methodology and informed by cooperative attitudes familiar from writing-center pedagogy. Ultimately, this paper proposes that the UWC can mine Praxis and the lessons it offers for untapped benefits by using its archives in consultant training and by considering initiatives that employ Praxis’s editorial procedures in publishing undergraduate writing.

Administrative Structure: A Separate Space

Examining Praxis’s editorial structure can reveal the journal’s apparent separation from other aspects of the UWC’s work. The two managing editors at the center of this editorial structure make executive decisions about the journal’s daily operation and plan its direction for the future. They also handle most communications with authors and other correspondents; coordinate the efforts of other project group members; and do much of the work to publish the journal, publicize new issues, and solicit submissions. The managing editors are graduate students with ten-hour-per-week paid appointments to work on Praxis. Except during especially busy times in the UWC, the managing editors do not spend any of these ten hours consulting. In recent years managing editors have devoted a small number of additional hours at the UWC (two to three hours per week) to regular consulting shifts. That these editors are paid by the UWC for work with no direct connection to consultations (as opposed to, say, an Assistant Director [AD] who runs the presentations group, which publicizes the UWC’s consulting services to undergraduates) suggests the journal’s separation from the UWC’s “regular” work.

This impression of separation is amplified by the physical center of Praxis’s operations, which is a peripheral space in the writing center. Located at the project group workspaces in the back corner of the UWC, separated from the consultations happening on the other side of a cubical wall, the managing editors hear, but are separated from, the consulting floor. This spatial arrangement symbolizes the managing editors’ roles in the writing center, at least from a certain perspective: they are experienced writing consultants, but they have moved from a hands-on involvement with student writers to thinking about writing center work from a different, more removed perspective.

Project Group Members: Spatial and Conceptual Links

The next administrative level below the managing editors is the editorial committee, comprised of graduate and undergraduate student consultants who take off a few consulting hours (at most one or two hours per week) to work on Praxis. These duties primarily consist of editing articles and then sending requests for revision to authors. Some editors also assist with HTML coding when it is time to publish an issue on the journal’s website. The editorial committee is one of the most important parts of Praxis’s editorial structure. These editors, who spend most of their time in the Writing Center consulting, symbolically connect Praxis’s peripheral workspace within the UWC and the writing center’s central space where consultations occur. The members of the editorial board move between these two locations, and their negotiation of physical space in the writing center also involves transfers of ideas and practices from one functional space to another. Editors who are working regularly as consultants naturally transfer their consulting practices and strategies to their editorial work. Whether these consultants are helping an undergraduate student with a rhetoric paper or suggesting revisions to a professor’s article, they view their work as collaborative, non-directive, and supportive. Authors frequently praise the editors for being both thorough and respectful of their intentions, and their appreciation indicates the value of extending writing center practices to the editorial field.

Writing Center Pedagogy: Its Incorporation and Benefits

Benefits for Authors

Since Praxis is dedicated to topics affecting all types of writing center staff, the journal’s authors fit a number of classifications: English or rhetoric professors, writing center administrators, graduate student consultants, and even some undergraduate authors. Like those at any journal, Praxis’s editors like to receive and publish submissions from people who are prominent in their field, whose names our readers will recognize, and whose articles will inform readers about the latest thinking, practices, and technologies in the writing center world. For all the talk of decentered learning and the writing center as a place of loosened hierarchies, in writing center scholarship certain names carry more weight than others. In keeping with writing-center philosophy, however, Praxis tries to approach the evaluation and editing of articles from the belief that even the strongest writer can still improve his or her writing. Regardless of who wrote an article or how strong the managing editors felt it was on a first review, each manuscript accepted for publication is always read by two members of the editorial committee, who leave comments for the author, typically in an encouraging, non-directive tone.

Different authors benefit from this process in different ways. More experienced and meticulous authors find ways to make their already well-formed thoughts come across more clearly to an audience of writing-center consultants and administrators. Less experienced authors probably benefit most by gaining a greater understanding of their work’s place within the professional conversation for which Praxis is a venue. Communication within the editing process becomes novice authors’ first entry into this conversation. Using Microsoft Word’s Track Changes and Comment functions, Praxis editors initiate a dialog with authors, asking questions, registering their personal reactions to passages, and offering suggestions for developing the author’s ideas. These tactics mimic those used in face-to-face consultations with students, and they initiate a conversation around a piece of writing. Such conversations are often the goal of writing center consultations, which seek to help students see academic assignments as acts of communication rather than arbitrary exercises. In the context of publishing, helping writers see their writing as acts of communication is particularly important for the success of both author and journal. Above all else, the journal seeks to present material that contributes to ongoing conversations. For Praxis to succeed, articles must connect with one or more of our target audiences: consultants, administrators, and scholars. Authors, therefore, must have in mind an audience who will benefit from their insights and an ongoing conversation to which their writing will contribute.

Novice authors can benefit from the editorial process when it helps them see their work’s place within ongoing conversations in the writing center field. One of the recent issues of Praxis features an article written by an undergraduate consultant at another university. Her initial submission was well written and would have succeeded in response to a class assignment. The managing editors saw potential in the submission, but it seemed more like a student essay than an entry in a professional journal; it described problems faced by consultants and proposed solutions, but there was little attempt to aim these ideas to a specific audience or define the conversation in which the article was taking part.

A member of Praxis’s editorial committee corresponded with the author, giving her suggestions that a rhetoric instructor might give a student: focus your argument; define your audience more clearly. These produced little improvement. After more correspondence, the editor suggested that the author consider her submission from a different perspective: Rather than an essay, this piece of writing should be an article, part of a professional conversation involving people with specific stakes in its subject matter. Rather than merely displaying good writing, this article should contribute to a discussion. This advice worked. The author successfully revised the piece, and she learned a valuable lesson as a student about writing for a public venue.

Benefits for Editors

Working on Praxis offers editors a range of benefits. Managing editors gain administrative experience as they oversee the members of a project group, coordinate that group’s activities with the UWC’s administrative staff, guide the journal’s direction, perform “business” functions like advertising and carrying out other publicity, and write regular “From the Editors” columns and other articles as needed. Graduate student editorial committee members, who often join the journal out of an understandable interest in the mechanics of academic publishing, gain insight into this world, which may help demystify the often intimidating publishing process for them. Graduate students who will move into the Computer Writing and Research Lab (CWRL) in future semesters can learn how to use the Drupal content-management platform, which is used for publishing both Praxis and CWRL instructors’ websites.[1] Undergraduate editors can apply their writing-center-developed consulting skills to professional, public writing situations and gain excellent preparation for graduate school or post-collegiate careers. Finally, undergraduates and graduate students alike can add an impressive line to their résumés or CVs.

Challenges and Opportunities

While this white paper has posited a close relationship between Praxis’s work and the UWC’s mission and philosophy, there are still many opportunities to integrate Praxis further into activities related to the UWC’s primary mission of improving undergraduate writing.

Increasing Praxis’s Visibility and Use among Consultants

Praxis offers a wealth of information and ideas that can help UWC consultants in their consulting work, from articles about ESL consulting and working with non-traditional students to advice on sentence-level editing and dealing with difficult people in the writing center. While Praxis is fairly visible to consultants (with a link to the journal on the UWC’s homepage and with publication announcements and calls for articles sent to the UWC-staff listserv) Praxis editors and UWC ADs can more actively promote the journal as a useful resource for consultants by recommending particular articles for specific lessons. At least one tutor training program has used Praxis articles regularly to anchor discussions of various writing center topics: The writing center at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh has used a blog (http://wcaip.wordpress.com) with links to articles and online discussions of the articles by consultants, highlighting Praxis’s potential applications in consultant training. The UWC can similarly use Praxis as an educational resource by identifying specific articles related to topics being discussed in orientation, training sessions, and meetings of consulting groups (groups of three to six consultants who meet several times per semester for informal training and support). Articles could be read in advance of, or distributed during, these events. The Writing Center Internship class for undergraduates might also use Praxis articles linked to specific lessons. And ADs can help consultants improve their consulting by directing them to articles related to questions or problems arising from their consultations. Taking these steps to incorporate Praxis into consultations would require cooperation between Praxis’s managing editors (who would be familiar with past articles) and the UWC’s administrative staff. This cooperation would reduce any separation, actual or perceived, between the journal and the greater writing center.

Increasing readership among consultants would encourage them to submit articles to Praxis. Increased submissions from UWC consultants should, in turn, increase research into the UWC’s practices—assuming that many consultants would write about subjects close to home—and greater commitment to writing center work among the consultant-authors.

Increasing the UWC’s Visibility in Praxis

While Praxis has widely expanded the UWC’s influence by establishing a national (and even, to some extent, an international) readership, the UWC’s sponsorship should be made more apparent to outside readers. Recent issues have included a regular column written by members of the UWC’s Research Group, which helps remind readers of the journal’s links to the UWC. Increased contributions from UWC consultants and staff can also help increase the UWC’s visibility, as long as these “insider” articles do not overwhelm the diversity of submissions from other institutions and diminish the journal’s general appeal beyond UT. Praxis can also consider wording or design changes on its website that might make the UWC connection clearer to readers.

Publishing Student Writing: A Possible Extension

The application of writing center methodology to Praxis’s editorial process, which this white paper has discussed, might be extended to an initiative to publish writing by UT undergraduates online. Such a project would apply the knowledge and practices developed at Praxis to a project that more directly fulfills the UWC’s mission to improve undergraduate writing at UT. This project could provide an online venue for student writing and offer undergraduates the same benefits that Praxis authors receive: focused attention and guidance from consultant-editors and an introduction to writing for a public audience. The last of these benefits is perhaps the greatest; from a typical academic situation of writing for a single reader (the instructor or TA)—a situation that can produce writing designed to display the student’s intelligence rather than participate in a conversation—students can progress to a situation that gives them a greater personal stake in their writing.

The UWC could publish student writing by using a process similar to the one that Praxis currently employs. Two consultants would each spend an average of forty-five minutes to an hour making comments on a 1500-2000 word essay. This editing and the correspondence between editors and authors would take place over several weeks—an extended interaction that would ease the author into the public conversation that is publication. A revised article could be formatted and uploaded to the UWC’s website in an hour or two, which is much faster than the process involved with printing a paper-based publication.

Through outreach, the UWC could build awareness of this initiative among faculty, beginning with English and rhetoric instructors and then expanding to other departments and colleges. This outreach would further awareness of the UWC around campus and increase cooperation with faculty. The end result would be a network of instructors who could encourage students to submit writing for publication by the UWC.

Conclusion

Praxis is produced within the particular spatial, philosophic, and cultural conditions of the UWC. These conditions have shaped the journal so that its editors do not merely publish a journal but also extend the UWC’s principles and methods to their work with authors from within and beyond our writing center. Future work by editors, ADs, and others can do more to turn the direction of influence around somewhat, allowing Praxis to contribute productively to the UWC’s daily operations. Over five years, Praxis has had increasing success in publishing strong articles and expanding its audience. The journal has also benefitted its editors and authors. The future may see the journal benefit the UWC in ever-greater ways.

[1] The Computer Writing and Research Lab is a division of UT’s Department of Rhetoric and Writing. It operates several classrooms equipped with a computer for each student. Instructors in these classrooms, who primarily teach rhetoric and English courses, have course websites hosted on the CWRL’s website and are encouraged to incorporate in their courses the use and discussion of software and networked environments. See http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu.

Computer Writing and Research Lab. Web. 4 May 2009.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. Web. 4 May 2009.

“Writers’ Center @ AIP: Consultants’ Blog.” The Art Institute of Pittsburgh’s Writers’ Center. Web. 4 May 2009.