Abstract
“Critical friend” is a term widely used in professional development, teacher education, and evaluation contexts. It is defined by Costa and Kallick (1993) as a trusted person who asks the researcher provocative questions, provides an alternate point of view when needed, and critiques the researcher’s work as a friend rather than an antagonist. This theoretical paper aims to initiate a dialogue on how elaborating on the role of the writing consultant as a critical friend could open up university writing centres as spaces of exploration and empowerment for student writers, aiding them in nurturing their academic thinking and voice. The work of the writing consultant, primarily as a critical friend, would be to exercise active listening and pose questions while offering advice and reassurance on the student writer’s abilities, promoting trust while helping the student writer to develop the tools to reason, and therefore the freedom and confidence to articulate their arguments. I investigate how framing university writing centres as spaces for facilitating trusting dialogues with a critical friend can encourage student writers to think differently about their tasks, assisting them in overcoming hurdles to find their academic voices in order to succeed at university. By embracing the role of critical friends, writing consultants as advocates for the success of student writers’ work provide unusual opportunities to establish supportive relationships that take into account the individual student writer’s academic journey, promoting self-reflection rather than simply directing student writers through the task at hand. Additionally, this engagement as a critical friend has the potential to change perceptions of the nature of the support provided by writing centres, their value, and purpose.
Highlights
Academic writing is a daunting task for many, even more so for students who are embarking on their academic journeys at university
This article has opened up a discussion on the possible merits of conceptualising writing centres as spaces for critical friendship, where one-on-one writing consultations become engagements premised on trust and dialogue, facilitating self-reflection by student writers and a more organic way of approaching academic writing support
I think that a viable step http://spilplus.journals.ac.za towards this critical reflection would be considering what it means for writing consultants to position themselves as critical friends within our centres
Summary
Academic writing is a daunting task for many, even more so for students who are embarking on their academic journeys at university. The ideals of non-directive pedagogy, aimed at improving the writer not the writing, and a focus on “higher-order concerns” during the consultation engagement, are being questioned, especially in contexts that do not assume a homogenous (i.e. white, English-speaking, middle-class) student body Drawing on her personal experience of working in various writing centres, Grimm (2009) reflects on how the blind adoption of what was considered writing centre “best practice” in many instances led to the “persistent markers of racial and class identity, neighbourhoods, cultures, and languages other than English” being diminished to the status of lower-order concerns (Grimm 2009: 13). There is a danger in framing our interactions with student writers as primarily transactional, or as a means to an end, whether that end is to produce good writers or good writing, as it can be argued that in such an interaction the human element is sometimes lost
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