Writing Center Philosophy and the End of Basic Writing: Motivation at the Site of Remediation and Discovery

At York College, many of the students fit the linguistic and educational profile of basic writers, and yet there is no remediation built into the curriculum. It falls to the writing center, then, to provide our students with the academic support that they need in order to move beyond being classified as developmental writers. In this article, I examine how our students are using the York College Writing Center, with a view to determining how a lower level of academic preparedness influences the kind of services that students seek and the kind of academic trajectory they follow. I suggest that the progress that we see these students making over the course of the semester can be best understood as a move from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation, rather than from lower- to higher-order concerns that is the professed goal of writing center philosophy. This article has implications for how writing centers can best serve less prepared students, especially in light of the national movement to end remediation, as well as for the ways in which we measure student success. (Contains 3 tables and 1 note.)