Shafer, "Negotiating Audience and Voice in the Writing Center"
Shafer critiques liberatory education as being frequently oppressive, citing for example, Batholomae’s argument that to enter the discourse community of the university, students must give up their own voices and mimic the accepted voices of the academy. “Should we feel surprised,” Shafer asks, “when our students crank out the plastic, apocryphal prose that is too often a part of first-year composition?” (222). He points out that in the name of liberating our students, we often merely force them to sound and think like us. He discusses two students he worked with in his writing center who were forced by their teachers to give up their own language and voices in their writing to adopt a “more appropriate” tone in their essays. Frustrated with classroom practices that discourage students from taking risks, he suggests that teachers, tutors, and students negotiate “what is essential in terms of diction, organization, … style, . . . goals of their writing, . . . integrity of voice” and all parties must compromise (225). In this way, no one party is oppressed and no one party is oppressor.
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