Chapter 5. Navigating Outside the Mainstream: Our Journey Sustaining Writing Studio

Abstract

Today, mainstreaming those labeled as basic writers into regular First-Year Composition (FYC) courses seems a mainstream practice itself. Increasingly, the question is not whether to mainstream but how. With its emphasis on “third spaces,” Writing Studio differs from other mainstreaming forms as it encourages student learning to take place outside, not only alongside, the regular FYC classroom. But we can also think of studios as opportunities for teachers and administrators to work out how to sustain and enrich all writing spaces, not live apart from them. In this chapter, I draw on one institution’s twenty year history of administering and teaching in a writing studio program to describe the dynamics of our process. Two key areas of engagement emerge. The first area is placement and enrollment. In our experience, placement strategies should take into consideration two realities. The first is the way students and their families make decisions about first-year schedules. The second is the management of studio enrollment over time. In our experience, test scores should be a tool to initiate placement, not define it. The second area is how teachers engage productively with studio students and each other. Studio teachers and students benefit most from clear lines of communication that lead to mutual respect and trust, and studio and FYC teachers should work together to identify and meet the needs of students as individuals. Productive collaboration may seem like a buzzword, but when a non-traditional “third space” becomes part of the curriculum, the quality of that collaboration may make or break a new studio program. My insights are based on my personal experience as a studio teacher and coordinator, and on survey data on placement, course content, and teaching strategies collected from FYC teachers, studio teachers, and studio students in 2007 and again in 2012.