Eberly, Rosa. “From Writers, Audiences, and Communities to Publics: Writing Classrooms as Protopublic Spaces.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 18, no. 1, 1999, pp. 165-178.
Eberly theorizes publics, heavily and helpfully around Dewey, to define pedagogical approaches to defining publics in teaching. Through connecting rhetorical concepts–like audience, invention, stasis theory–with public address, Eberly identifies parallels between publics and writing processes: “indeed for a public to recognize itself, action is required” (169).
Drawing on Hannah Arendt and Habermas, Eberly highlights the fluid line between private and public, or rather the way we understand private conversations as drafts for public discourse. Eberly uses the term protopublic to name writing classrooms “because writing classrooms are in many sense prefab–the group has come together for institutional more than overtly political purposes–and because the instructor has a different position than the students vis a vis institutional power” (172). These protopublics are spaces for invention, process, drafting of publics because students think, write, and create drafts of public discourse but not for an authentic public.
I’ve been trying to make a similar case about the writing center with one difference. I see the writing center in very similar terms to Eberly’s it is a drafting/invention/practice space for public discourse, yet I’d extend beyond Eberly’s protopublic, as related to the writing classroom, to say that a writing center session is an actual public, as it involve a transaction between two people who are not “prefab” in the way a classroom is. I must come back here when I revise to help me distinguish between how writing centers constitute public more authentically than writing classrooms.
Rhetorical Notes 