 |
 |
Judy, Just a quick response to your query. Speaking from our experience here at McGill, where the Writing Centre works out of the Faculty of Educatio n, I would say there are several advantages to our arrangement here. One is that pedagogical issues are right up front and centre. How does one develop as a writer and how do we create the contexts within which that happens? A perennial and ongoing question, one that makes instructors researcher/questioners, therefore always questing in a like-minded community and generally respecting students as co-inquirers. I don't mea n this cannot happen in an English Dept, but that there is just too muc h baggage from the Freshman English histories that most people bring with them, and the rites of passage burden attached to teaching writing. The foreward and upward movement is naturally in the direction of teach- ing literature. I can see how the situation I used to work out of can an d does happen elsewhere, as for instance at SFU. So maybe you need some degree of autonomy, and an orientation that is far more pedagogically an d socio-rhetorically (don't ask me what I mean) inclined than would "naturally" occur within a traditional EnglishDept. Patrick Patrick Dias McGill University Home address: 518 Montford Drive Dollard des Ormeaux, QC Canada H9G 1M8 Telephone: Home: 514 626-3605 McGill: 514 398-6960 FAX: (McGill) 514 398-4529 E-Mail: [log in to unmask]