In Philip Gardener and William Ramsey's 2005 article, "The Polyvalent Mission of Writing Centers," the authors suggest that writing center theorists have established a false dichotomy between what they call "values of sociality," which include writing conventions like format, style, grammar, even basic organization, or institutional conventions and "values of autonomy," which focuses on how students can speak with their own voice or voices about issues that affect their lives (31). They also assert that "both polarities are present in learning situations" because "educational practice is...unavoidably polyvalent" (31-32). With Stanley Fish's (2009, 2010) much discussed, debated and responded to assertion that "unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham" and his insistence "that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else," it seems an appropriate time to do as Gardner and Ramsey do and suggest that the answer to what a composition classroom should be must involve both proficiency in using the tools ("values of sociality") and a safe space to explore agency ("values of autonomy") and that such a discussion might well start with an investigation into how writing center practice, which seeks to simultaneously encourage agency and proficiency, might inform practice in the composition classroom.
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