Research Paper

Charlene Cambridge
Eng. 5600
Writing Center Theory and Practice
Prof. Barbara Gleason
December 13, 2010

The Writing Center at BMCC: A Center in Transition

BMCC: A Brief History
BMCC is a part of the City University of New York system. It was founded in 1963 and opened in 1964 as a business college aimed primarily at the working business community of New York City. It was situated in two floors of a commercial office building on 51st Street in Midtown Manhattan and was originally called Manhattan Community College. The college began its life with 437 students and a faculty of 28. According to the 1964-1965 Freshman Handbook,
BMCC’s six curriculums were organized in three divisions in its first year – Liberal Arts, Business Administration and Public Health and Safety, which offered a degree in Correction Administration (housed on Rikers Island). A fourth division, Communications Technologies, would debut in 1965(BMCC News).
Open Enrollment, instituted in 1970, guaranteed admission to college to all New York City high-school graduates, this and free tuition meant that by 1971, MCC the small “experimental” college that started with 437 students had grown to the struggling, overburdened community college of 5,000 plus students enrolled in both day and night classes. This new student population came with more than just the issues of necessary remediation and social and educational justice. They brought with them the new political energy of the civil rights movement and Manhattan Community College, like so many colleges in the CUNY system and across the country became the focus of police action, faculty in-fighting, public scandal and academic vitriol spilled across the pages of newspapers and scholarly journals.
A political protest by students in May of 1970 shut the school down for two days and caused the resignation of Dr. Murray H. Block, the college president. The New York Times reported that the resignation was “related to the institution’s internal student and faculty’s strife”. The school was reopened under police guard a few days later and the Dean of the college, Dr. Edgar Draper was made the new president(College Head Here Quits After Strife). Within one year the college was once again being written about in the New York Times, this time a drug scandal with allegations that more than 30% of the student body was addicted to heroin (Maeroff 31). The campus was still in Midtown Manhattan at the time and its proximity to the notorious Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood and the prejudices against many of the new student body fanned the flames of negative expectations. In his 1976 article “On Remediation” for the scholarly journal College English, Prof. Goeffrey Wagner of CUNY’s City College described the college thus:
Manhattan Community College is one of ten two-year post-high-school institutions within the City University. It enrolls around ten thousand, whom it prepares for the four-year colleges, or to be our nurses, medical technicians, book- keepers and so on. Its premises consist of scattered buildings on the West Side of Manhattan between 48th and 70th Streets. Around the doors of these establishments, any evening, hookers push and pushers cruise, as in the infamous Alamac Hotel, a junkies' paradise foisted off on CCNY by the city fathers as a dormitory for remediants[sic] (Wagner 157).
The tone of this article defines the contentious nature of faculty relations during this time. Dr. Draper was eventually forced to resign amid allegations of malfeasance, although not before he successfully oversaw the college’s move from its less than salubrious location in Midtown Manhattan to its new main campus.
BMCC Today
Today, the main campus of the Borough of Manhattan Community College is located at 199 Chambers street in the Tribeca section of Manhattan and is spread across 4.28 acres of some of the most expensive real estate in the world. In the fall of 2009 the college enrolled 21,424 students. It currently ranks 2nd among community colleges in the country in granting Associate’s degrees in Information Technology and Support Services and 4th among community colleges in granting Associate’s degrees to minority students. Further demographic information is listed below on page 4, the demographic information in the table is from the BMCC website.

Women % Women # Men % Men #
Fall 2009 59.6% 12,773 40.4% 8,651
Fall 2008 59.8% 13,065 40.2% 8,793

Black Hispanic Asian White Amer. Indian
# % # % # % # % # %
Fall 2009 7,185 33.5% 7,853 36.7% 3,129 14.6% 3,216 15.0% 41 0.2%
Fall 2008 7,789 35.6% 7,483 34.2% 3,126 14.3% 3,452 15.7% 35 0.2%
The U.S. Department of Education and Community College Week rank BMCC as being No. 4 among all community colleges in awarding degrees to minority students; No. 4 in awarding degrees to African Americans; No. 1 for awarding associate degrees in business; No. 2 in awarding associate degrees in computer and information sciences; and No. 14 for awarding associate degrees in education.
2009 BMCC RANKS giving Associate's Degrees (Source: Community College Week Analysis of U.S. Department of Education Data)

Area Rank among ALL (2- and 4-year) institutions awarding Associate’s Degrees (with 2008 ranking) Rank among Community Colleges (with 2008 ranking)
Grand total of Associate's Degrees awarded No. 23 No. 12
Associate's Degrees awarded to minority students No. 9 No. 4
Associate's Degrees awarded to African Americans No. 9 No. 4
Associate's Degrees awarded to Hispanics No. 14 No. 10
Associates Degrees awarded to Asian-Americans No. 12 No. 11
Associate's Degrees awarded in Business, Management, Marketing & Related Support Services No. 5 No. 1
Associate's Degrees in Communication Technologies/Technicians & Support Services No. 23 No. 14
Associate's Degrees in Computer & Information Sciences & Support Services No. 11 No. 2
Associate's Degrees in Education No. 15 No. 14


The Writing Center at BMCC: A Brief History
But the “new” writing center has a somewhat shorter history. It is the result of a documentable resurgence, a renaissance if you will, that began in the early 1970s… the new writing center, far from marking the end of an era, is the embodiment, the epitome, of a new one. It represents the marriage of what are arguably the two most powerful contemporary perspectives on teaching and writing: First, that writing is most usefully viewed as a process; and second, that writing curricula need to be student-centered. This new writing center, then, defines its province not in terms of some curriculum, but in terms of the writers it serves. (North 69)
Like most if not all the writing centers in the CUNY system, the writing center at BMCC was born out of the university’s Open Enrollment policy. In a 1976 article for Improving College and University Teaching, James Schiavone, an Assistant Professor at BMCC out lined the concept of “Integrated Remediation” as it was conceived of and practiced at BMCC:
We have developed the following avenues of remediation for our integrated approach: (1) Remediation in the classroom, (2) Faculty office hours for remediation, (3) The College Media Center (4) The Reading Laboratories, (5) The Tutorial Program, (6) Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI). Remediation is therefore a part of the process of working toward and achieving an A.A degree (Schiavone 184).
Tutors were hired only with departmental approval; they were students at the college or other senior colleges and also college graduates. Faculty members were informed when their students applied for tutoring, and were encouraged to recommend their students for tutoring if needed. Faculty members volunteered at the Learning Centers not as tutors but as overseers and as instructors for the tutors in small groups on specific content areas. The majority of tutoring was done by scheduled appointment and tutoring was available from 9am to 9pm daily. In this six part integrated remediation program we can see the beginnings of the Learning Assistance Program offered to students at BMCC today.
In 1976, Schiavone was of the opinion that, “Of all the areas of remediation offered to the students, the Tutorial Program continues to be the strongest. It appears that the one to one tutoring relationship has significant implications (Schiavone 185).” The next decade would provide scholarship that would prove Schiavone and the other educators involved in collaborative learning at BMCC and other CUNY colleges to have been ahead of their time.
The minutes of an Instructional Support Services Meeting held on December 4th 1980 to discuss the move to the new campus refer to a Writing Lab run by Prof. Baxter as part of the Learning Centers, and indicate that its services at the time were limited to remedial writing students only (see attachment). These minutes also indicate that there was a staff of three tutors at the Writing Lab and 150-160 students were using the lab but not whether this was on a monthly basis. It also indicated that the college intended to make the lab available. The intention was to make the lab available to more non-remedial students in the next semester.
The Idea of a Writing Center
An undated letter to faculty announcing the opening of BMCC’s new Writing Center at 134 W 51st and including a description of the services provided are all that is left of the “idea” that Dr. Baxter, the first writing center director at BMCC, developed in the late 1970s (see attachment). These services are in keeping with the idea of integrated remediation only in so far as that the center was offering help to remedial as well as non- remedial students, and offering writing assistance in any subject. In this letter students requesting assistance from the lab were given a three-part diagnostic/screening test:
…part I assesses the student’s understanding of the standard conventions of writing; part II assesses the student’s knowledge of grammar; and part III assesses the student’s ability to write an extended, coherent and organized essay. Based on the performance on this diagnostic test, the student is placed in one of the six units where the student receives tutorial assistance that will enable him/her to acquire the skills needed to pass exit criteria given at the end of each unit… (Baxter, Short 1)
The first of the six units, Unit I, was designated to be for those students who have “writing blocks”. The students would do exercises like brainstorming and free writing and the exit criterion was a one and half page essay in which they “demonstrate their ability to state an idea clearly and discuss it in a coherent fashion.” Unit II was targeted at ESL students and no exit criteria are described for this unit. Unit III was designated to be for students whose problems involved the use of basic writing conventions such as “capitalization, abbreviations, paragraph indentation …etc.” The exit criterion was to identify and correct certain problems in a short passage. Unit IV addressed problems of grammar and mechanics. The exit criterion consisted of identifying and correcting ten sentences containing “grammatical and sentence boundary problems” and indentifying and correcting problems in an extended text. Unit V was for “students whose writing demonstrated a rudiamentary (sic) or monotonous sentence style and shows weakness in paragraph development.” The exit criterion was a two-paragraph theme demonstrating idea development and sentence style. Unit VI was CUNY Writing Assessment Test preparation, the exit criterion for which was a practice test scored by a faculty member (The Writing Center).
The letter explains that the units should not be viewed as hierarchical but as different parts of the composing process. They give units one and four as part of the composing process and units two, three, five and six as part of the editing process. Attached to this description was a referral form for instructors to fill out indicating what skills they needed their students to work on. The student would bring the form with them to the center. In reality this was never implemented. The pressures of open enrollment and the remediation needs of the new student body kept the Writing Center strictly a clinic for basic writing students in need of remediation.
The Writing Center at BMCC Today: The New “New” Writing Center
Today in 2010, we see the continued practice of what Schiavone described as integrated remediation in the college’s Learning Assistance Program (LAP). One of the things that means is that there are several writing centers or areas designated for one on one and group tutoring in writing. The LAP offers an array of programs and services including a Basic Skills/English Lab, College Discovery Tutoring, ESL tutoring, the Learning Resource Center, the Math Lab, the Nursing Tutoring Lab, the Science Learning Center, and the Writing Center.
Most of the centers are located on the fifth floor of the main campus building and can easily be reached by riding the escalators or through the A. Philip Randolph Memorial Library, which is one floor below. The entire floor that it is located is in the midst of being renovated and renovations during a fiscal crisis can move very slowly. There is an electronic cable hanging from the ceiling to the reception desk where the only phones are located. Waist high file cabinets delineate the different centers’ boundaries and separate them from the identical round tables and blue chairs of the other LA P tutoring centers that surround it. New blue chairs, still covered in the plastic sheeting they were delivered in are stacked against the far wall. But the view of the Hudson River is lovely, and the center is sunny and the open plan of the room and lack of walls or cubicles give the impression of being on the deck of a huge ship.

Which Writing Center is Which? or The Evolution of the BMCC Writing Center
Originally called the Writing Center, one of the longest running components of the BMCC Learning Assistance Program is now called the Basic Skills/ English Lab. It serves students currently enrolled in one of the two remedial writing classes offered at the college, English 088 and English 095. These students have scored lower than 5 on the CUNY/ACT writing exam. It corresponds most closely with Units III, IV and VI of Dr. Baxter’s original concept of the Writing Center. The coordinator of the Basic Skill/ English Lab is John Short. Mr. Short began working for BMCC as a tutor in the late 1970s when it was still Manhattan Community College and eventually became the coordinator of the first writing center.
Moore, in his essay “The Writing Clinic and the Writing Laboratory “gives a description of the writing lab that fits this lab perfectly:
The laboratory, in turn, is primarily concerned with the direct and continuing supervision of the remedial efforts of the individual student…The advantages of the formally established agency, then lies less in its possession of esoteric methods than in its ready accessibility, its concentration on the removal of specific deficiencies, and its development of instructors particularly skilled in remedial procedures (Moore 4).
The Basic Skills/English Lab uses the method of teaching basic writing that Mr. Short, himself, developed and trained his tutors in. At the lab, tutors work with students on reducing errors without talking about grammar. In an interview with Mr. Short on 12/13/10 he briefly outlined this method:
“We train students to read their writing and to listen to it and to listen for patterns of a certain kind. For us errors are one of three kinds: something’s missing from the page, the word is wrong, the period’s not in the right place and we deal with those errors without talking in the traditional language of grammar (John Short).”
On the first visit to the center students write about what they believe is wrong with their writing; on the student’s second visit they free-write; on the third visit they write a page and a half in response to a question asking for a description of a personal experience. In this session the students read their work out loud and begin the process of learning to proofread their own work and fix their own errors. Students do not work on homework or go over written assignments in the lab, for the rest of the semester they alternate between producing a piece of writing and proofreading it. The students are allowed to work on their writing skills in parallel with taking the required remedial writing classes before they retake the test. Although the name has been changed, the work being done in what was once called the Writing Center at BMCC for twenty-five has remained unchanged.
In 2002, the designation of Writing Center was given to a newly created center. This new center corresponds most closely to Units I, Unit II, and Unit V of Dr. Baxter’s concept and is the focus of most of my research. Its mission statement reads:
The Writing Center's mission is twofold: 1) to help students develop confidence as writers by learning to think critically, write actively, revise mindfully and proofread carefully, and 2) to provide support for faculty who are incorporating these writing skills and practices into their curricula (BMCC).
The Writing center is in transition. There have been four directors in the past six years with three of them coming and going in the last two years. Technically, the center does not have a director right now since, due to the hiring freeze imposed on CUNY, they were unable to hire a permanent director. Jason Schneiderman is the new acting director and has been on the job only since October 4th, 2010. Mr. Schneiderman is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center and came to the Writing Center after being a Writing Fellow in the Writing Across the Curriculum Program at BMCC.
The center sees approximately 350 students every month and employs seven tutors. It is open 52 hours a week including 5 hours on Saturday. Students work individually with professional writing assistants on assignments from various classes including understanding assignments, generating ideas, developing and organizing essays, identifying and documenting reliable sources, recognizing errors in logic, rhetoric and grammar and learning to correct errors in grammar and syntax. The tutors at the center do not proofread papers. The Writing Center also provides CPE preparation information and workshops (BMCC).

A Typical Day


Tutoring is offered on a scheduled, drop-in, or on-line basis but most of the tutoring is done face to face in the center. Students are encouraged to make appointments a week in advance. Usually they come up to the center and look at a bulletin board that is situated next to the reception desk. The board has the next week’s calendar with the appointments posted on it. Students sign in directly onto the board on the day and time that they want if it is available. When the student comes in for their session, a receptionist greets them and puts their information into the computer system and they meet with their tutor. The student fills out a session form describing what they want to work on, or they may have brought a form that their instructor downloaded off the center website and gave to them.

Students sit around circular tables with their tutors or sit and read or write while waiting for their sessions to begin. On the tops of the file cabinets that differentiate the Writing Center from the other centers is a large array of flyers and handouts about writing that they can take with them. Several of the flyers offer advice on how to do research papers. The center is not silent, but it is quiet. The tutors speak softly with the students and although there is coming and going along the sides of the room closest to the entrance, the only time sessions are interrupted is when the receptionist steps away and students wander into the tutoring session with questions.
Tutors
The center sees approximately 350 students per month and employs seven part time tutors, none of them working more than 19 hours per week, and pays them a top salary rate of $10.99 per hour. This is comparatively low wages for tutors, especially since they are not peer tutors but professional writing assistants. The work-study student who mans the front desk can make up to $9.00 per hour. Most of the tutors have been at the center for more than two years and come from diverse professions. Of the tutors that I interviewed during my research, one was a retired editor of a magazine for a professional association of teachers, and the other was a musician and audio engineer who was also an adjunct instructor at other colleges.
Michael
An older man was sitting with a copy of The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need by Susan Thurman. He has been at the center for five years and so has seen all of the directors. In a typical tutoring session Michael reads the students papers out loud to them. He said that he would like for the students to do most of the talking but since most of the student that used the Writing Center were non- native English speakers, it was often difficult to talk with them about writing. Michael believes in modeling and feels that technology, especially texting, is having a negative effect on students. He believes that the students’ spelling is affecting his because he sees the words incorrectly spelled so often that he finds himself spelling the same words incorrectly, and so the students must be affected the same way by the language of texting. He was trained for e-tutoring but did not like it because it felt like an editing service. The limited time with each paper led to greater brevity in the comments and did not address all the problems. He felt that e-tutoring was inappropriate for ESL students because there would be no way of knowing if the student understood the comments. Michael felt strongly that the only way for the ESL students to get better at reading and writing in English was to practice the language. “To learn the language the way we all did, and the way to learn any language is to speak it.”
Tutor Training
New tutors are given two training sessions their first semester. The College-wide Learning Assistance Training Committee is responsible for coordinating BMCC tutoring, tutorial policies and procedures. The committee is composed of tutorial coordinators, supervisors and faculty liaisons and is chaired by Dean Michael Gillespie and Dean Erwin Wong (BMCC ). According to one of the tutors interviewed and information gleaned from the BMCC’s Learning Assistance Program web page, the training session includes watching a training videotape entitled “The Role of a BMCC Tutor” which introduces the new tutors to roles and responsibilities of being a BMCC learning assistant. Experienced BMCC learning assistants are required to attend a three-hour workshop during their third semester of employment. In “Whispers of Coming and Going”: Lessons from Fannie, Anne Di Pardo suggests that:
Regardless of our crowded schedules and shrinking budgets, we must also think realistically about the sorts of guidance new tutors and teachers need if they are to confront these rigors effectively, guiding them towards practical strategies informed by understandings from theory and research, and offering compelling reminders of the need to monitor one’s ethnocentric [or idiosyncratic] biases and faulty assumptions (Di Pardo 366).
While John Short trains his tutors in his own method of teaching basic writing, the college training program has been the extent of the professional training for the tutors at the Writing Center. In an interview with the center’s new director, Mr. Schneiderman, he expressed the intention of doing paid training workshops for his tutors during the winter break.
Technology
The center has a Face book page, Twitter account, and offers Skype and e-tutoring services. There are five PCs with print capability along one wall behind the reception area. However, both tutors and acting director agree that technology plays very little part in the tutoring sessions that are regularly carried out at the center. One of the tutors I spoke with believed that technology such as e-tutoring would be an impediment to working with ESL students, since it removed the real time ability to clarify the students meaning. Both tutors felt that students expected to be able to use the e-tutoring as an editing service.

Looking to the Future
Because of the turnover in the administration at the Writing Center since its inception in 2002, we must look to the future. The acting director has been in his position for less than four months, the site of the writing center is under construction and the university system is not in a fiscal position to make sudden improvements. The new acting director of this relatively new writing center is just finding his feet. His Writing Across the Curriculum training and his experience as a creative writing and literature instructor give him insight into the importance of the practice and development of writing and composition.
He feels that since the center is now working within 20 tutoring hours of its capacity, his energy will be well spent on tutor training and faculty relations. Mr. Schneiderman feels that educating the faculty about the function of the writing center would be a good investment. He is also instituting a system where by the skills worked on in the tutoring session would be kept on file for professional training and a copy could be sent to the student’s instructor. He would also like to mandate on line tutoring and to create a non-intrusive, synchronous e-tutoring set up which would involve the tutors having the use of laptops. He would like to train his tutors to focus on a single skill during a tutoring session and by having more transparency with faculty through sending the instructor a copy of the session report that shows what skill the student and tutor worked on together, he could end the notion that the writing center could fix all of the students’ writing problems in one session. Mr. Shneiderman has his work cut out for him but he believes that he is up for the task.
Synthesis
In many ways BMCC is a CUNY success story, it has lived up to the open admission goal and now is the number 4 in the country in granting Associates degrees to minorities. BMCC’s history is fascinating. The rancor, scandal and scholarship that came with open enrollment could keep any researcher busy for years. One of the wonderful things about those Open Enrollment years is the amount of attention, both positive and negative, that was focused on adult learning and on helping students make the leap from “remediants” to legitimate members of the academic community. A generation has passed and many of those who were considered “remediants” (and I love that neologism for its connotations of deviant and repudiate) are now professors or administrators in the same university system.
Today things are very different at BMCC in terms of scholarship around remediation, at least at the writing centers I looked at. I found, at first, that the information I was getting and not getting about the centers at BMCC was creating confusion for me. When I discussed the writing center with both John Short and Jason Schneiderman, I didn’t always feel as if we were talking about the same thing. I attributed that to the fact that I was doing the scholarship and they were doing the work.
That neither tutors nor directors of the Writing Center or the Basic Skills/English Lab were aware of any kind of scholarship on writing centers or of writing center theory was the most surprising outcome of my research. In Mr. Schneiderman’s case it was somewhat understandable, he had been on the job for less than three months and writing center theory was outside his area of scholarship. Even John Short, who has been the coordinator of a writing center for more than twenty-five years and was part of the development of remediation practice at BMCC from the very beginning was surprised, as he flipped through my copy of The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, to find some of the same methods he had been using and had believed that he developed himself. When he saw the instructions listed in the chapter “Setting the Agenda”, he said, “I knew that I couldn’t be the only one, there had to be others out there doing the same thing.” This more than anything I saw at the centers confirmed the organic nature of the tutoring process. Mr. Short had come upon his teaching method through practice, while I have learned how to do it from reading books and taking classes.
Another surprising finding of my research was the high turnover of administrators in the Writing Center compared to the lengthy tenure of John Short in the Basic Skills/English Lab. It is possible that one reason for the high turnover in the Writing Center is that the college hires doctoral candidates, usually English literature majors whose professional goals are to teach or to write. The previous director left when she was offered a job ghost writing a book about wine in Tuscany, and who could blame her? When asked about his professional goals as a writing center director, Mr. Shneiderman would invariably, and likely unconsciously, slip into the benefits that he would get from having had the job after he had left it. I believe that if these scholars were encouraged to see the legitimacy and value of the scholarship and the opportunity to make contributions to that scholarship that exists around writing center theory and practice they might stay longer.
To his credit, Mr. Schneiderman, who I believe is a true scholar, asked for the reading list for this research class and had a copy of The Longman Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice on his desk when I last saw him.














Work Cited
Baxter, Milton and Short, John. “The Writing Center.” Memo to College fac. Borough Of
Manhattan Community College, New York. N.d. T.S
Borough of Manhattan Community College. Meeting of Instructional Support Services Committee. 4 Dec. 1980. T.S.
Maeroff, Gene I. New York Times 19 Apr. 1975: 31. Print.
Matsuda, Paul Kei and Michelle Cox. “Reading an ESL Writer’s Text.” ESL Writers. Ed. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Boynton/Cook publishers: 39-47.
Michael. Personal Interview. 18 Nov. 2010.
Moore, Robert H. "The Writing Clinic and The Writing Laboratory." The Longman Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. ed . Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S Blummner. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008. Print.
North, Stephen. "The Idea of a Writing Center." The Longman Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. ed . Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S Blummner. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008. Print.
Ryan, Leigh and Zimmerelli, Lisa. The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors. 5th ed.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010. Print.
Schneiderman, Jason. Personal Interview. 1 Nov. 2010.
Short, John. Personal Interview. 6 Dec. 2010.
Schiavone, James. "Integrated Remediation for the Community College." Imroving
College and University Teaching 24.3 (1976): 183-185.
“The Way We Were.” BMCC News 27Feb 2007: n pag. Web 12 Dec 2010.
http://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/news/news.jsp?id=4595.
Wagner, Goeffry. "On Remediation." College English 38.2 (1976): 153-158.