M. Scott Momaday spoke at San Diego City College to commemorate a year long series of events sponsored by the Fund for the Humanities. Momaday, a Kiowa Indian, has written many Indian folk tales and has won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection, House Made of Dawn. He is also an artist and his art work was exhibited last year at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe. When I took his literature seminar at UCSB, we read The Way to Rainy Mountain, which documents his pilgrimage reenacting the Kiowa's migration from Montana and Wyoming to the Southwest. In it, he describes with great power, the land and the American Indian's special relationship to the land. So, it wasn't surprising when Momaday spoke in San Diego on the topic, "A Sense of Place. " When he began his talk, he shared a personal anecdote. To honor him, for his accomplishments as an under represented person in the Hall of Accomplishments, a well meaning organization had just awarded him "The Ellis Island" award. The irony of such an award - and the accompanying offer to use the organization's computing network and data retrieval service to determine when his ancestors first arrived on the continental United States - was not lost in Momaday. It was from this strong sense of place, of belonging here, that this American Indian spoke.

After about 25 years of reading, writing, and thinking about learning centers, I believe it is a sense of place that's key to the definition of Learning Assistance Centers. When Frank Christ defined Learning Assistance Centers, he began his definition by saying first that the LAC was "a place. " (Christ, 197 1). When I borrowed Christ's definition in order to have a yardstick for tracing the origins of the Learning Assistance Center in 1975, 1 wrote that the LAC was "a place concerned with learning within and without, functioning primarily to enable students to learn more in less time with greater ease and confidence; offering tutorial help, study aids in the content areas and referrals to other helping agencies; serving as a testing ground for innovative machines, materials, and programs (Christ, p. 35) and acting as campus ombudsman. (Kersteins, p. 39.)" Thus, I think the territory or real estate itself is central to the Learning Assistance Center concept. It is the place and its ecology that distinguishes the Learning Assistance Center from the isolated reading improvement class, the study skills seminar, the sununer orientation, and the tutorial session.

Much has been written about the learning center client, the non traditional student. Troyka (1982) called the 1980s the decade of the Nontraditional Student and described the nontraditional student as one who is older, a first generation college attendee, single or married with children, a returning woman, foreign born, and/or a full time employee: "They work on construction crews, in restaurants, as practical nurses, on the police force; some are on welfare. Many nontraditional students barely finished high school and thus [40] were graduated without strong literacy skills. Some never finished high school and have been admitted to college on waivers. Others dropped out of high school but later decided to earn an equivalency diploma, a credential more difficult to acquire than a regular diploma" (p. 253). She continues, "Nontraditional students come to academe with resources not usually used or even recognized in college. " A decade earlier, in Beyond the Open Door, Pat Cross (1971) described the nontraditional student's background as both financially and educationally ilinpoverished. Nontraditional students have been described by Cross, Maxwell, Roueche and Snow, Mink, Rotter and others as having external locus of control and being field dependent - characteristics associated with poor academic performance. The nontraditional student is accustomed to academic failure. In Error and Expectations (1977), Mina Shaughnessy sunnnarized the predicament of the student caught in the catch 22 of a typical composition assignment. The student must explain something to someone who already knows it, so the student can find out what he or she said wrong: "...academic writing is a trap, not a way of saying something to someone. The spoken language, looping back and forth between speakers, offering chances for groping and backing up and even hiding, leaving room for the language of hands and face, of pitch and pauses, is generous and inviting. Next to this rich orchestration, writing is but a line that moves haltingly across the page, exposing as it goes all that the writer doesn't know, than passing into the hands of a stranger who reads it with a lawyer's eyes, searching for flaws" (Shaughnessy, p. 7). Mike Rose, in his autobiographical book, Lives on the Boundary (1989), may have described the nontraditional student most poignantly; the student is not at home in the academy. Without learning skills, knowledge of academic discourse, or academic etiquette, he or she feels on alien ground; the college or university is not his or her place and many faculty would agree that this student does not belong in their classes or on their campus.

Where can this student go? Obviously, he can leave, having given the college experience a try. Astin and his associates have established through their research and Rose demonstrates through his anecdotes that students might stay in college if they can affiliate with a campus organization or club, a campus job, or a professor. In a 1992 article in Research in Developmental Education, Suelia McCrimmon cites Vincent Tinto (1987, p. 184), "persistence arises from the social and intellectual rewards accruing to competent membership in the communities of the college and from the impact that membership has upon individual goals and commitments. " This connection to the institution bolsters retention. The learning center is the nontraditional students place. Here, he or she finds scholastic and affective support, a chair or sofa, and sometimes a cup of coffee.

Are all centers the same? Depending on the local origin of the Center, the campus politics and the tastes of the Center director, Centers will have a wide range of names. The number of these amusing titles have been documented elsewhere. But the two fundamentally distinct centers are the Learning Assistance Center and the Learning Resources Center. In a 1980 article included in the Jossey-Bass New Directions for College Learning Assistance, Enright and Kerstiens summarize the philosophical distinction. They write that the LAC is directed to helping students become successful learners while assuming modes of instruction will remain relatively constant. On the other hand, the LRC is dedicated to provided innovative instructional delivery systems in order to better accommodate nontraditional students. These two directions for trying to effect a better match between the nontraditional student and the established curriculum of the institution results in other differences. While the learning Assistance Center Director is more likely to report to a Dean of Counseling or Student Services, the Learning Resources Center Director probably reports to the Dean of Library Services. While one is housed in the student services, the other is located in the library. One is more likely to emphasize hardware, while the other is more likely to emphasize human ware. Workshops on time management can be found in or sponsored by the LAC; newly developed courseware offering students practice on needed math competencies can be found in the Learning Resource Center. Roughly - and perhaps unfairly - a LRC professional talks about things and an LAC professional talks about services. Typically neither offers credit classes or has departmental status. One characteristic both centers share (theoretically) is both are frequented by learners of all skill levels.

In 1975, two colleagues and I conducted a survey of all higher educational institutions in the United States (Devirian, Enright and Smith). We were interested in where and what we called "program-centers" were administratively and how extensively they had taken root. We found Learning Assistance Centers, located organizationally under student services and established on four year campuses. We found, at that time, four year campuses had fewer program/centers than two year institutions and that the program/centers on two year campuses were likely to have originated not in counseling centers like the LAC or in libraries like the LRC, but in Academic Departments. The Center was often called something like the Study Skills Center and it may have originated in the Psychology, Reading or English Department. The program/center might have been updated from the Reading Laboratory or the Writing Center. For example, on my campus, we now have a Writing, Critical Thinking, and English as A Second Language Center under the auspices of the English Department. These program/centers found in nearly all two year colleges tended to offer classes, often for credit. Since our survey, support services for nontraditional students have been found to be more equally distributed across two and four year institutions and, of course, the program/center names have undergone cross fertilization. But, the constant remains that the center is a place where nontraditional students are welcome. The extent to which the students feel they belong in the Center depends usually on factors like the personality and the philosophy of the director, the involvement of peer tutors and counselors, the procedures and the layout of the center itself.

Learning Assistance Centers and Learning Resource Centers differ from Developmental Education programs because Developmental Education programs often lack location. Most philosophically compatible to Learning Assistance Centers, the developmental education movement is rooted in developmental theory and its concomitant belief in personal and intellectual growth. McCrinnnon in "A Foundation for Developmental Education: Three Approaches," (1992) maintains developmental education is based on the humanism of Carl Rogers (1969) and Abraham Maslow (1967); the developmental theory of Erickson (1963), Chichering (1969) and Perry (1981); and the behaviorism of Skinner (1954) and Mager (1967). Hunter Boylan has pointed out that a comprehensive developmental education program includes classes plus support adjuncts for those classes. Thus tutoring or a lab might be part of the developmental program, but the thrust of the program will be classes the student takes to become more self actualized and a more competent learner. In books like Overcoming Learning Problems and A Modest Proposal: Students Can Learn, John Roueche and his colleagues outline principles compatible with developmental education: nontraditional students should not be thrown into the regular baccalaureate level college program without adequate preparation and should not take a full course load while they are struggling to improve their skills and to adapt to the college or university culture. Consequently, developmental education programs, despite their theoretical basis, often look like a series of interrelated skills classes comprising a separate department or unit administratively or curricularly isolated from the main educational enterprise. If LRC people talk in terms of things, and LAC people talk in terms of services, then developmental educators talk in terms of classes.

The multiplicity of names and structures of Learning Assistance Centers, Learning Resource Centers, and Developmental Education programs can be confusing, especially for someone new to the field of college reading and learning. For example, as a component of the overall administrative umbrella, Learning Resource Centers might offer short term classes in orientation to the library or in computer literacy while as a subordinate feature of the overall developmental education program, the department might include a learning skills center. In fact, Gary Peterson in his book, The Learning Center: A Sphere for Nontraditional Approaches to Education, conceptualizes the Learning Assistance Center as one necessary component of the Learning Resources Center - the component offering human help. Yet, elements found in most centers or desired by most centers are pretty consistent. Brinda Van (1992), listed features gleaned from successful college Learning Assistance Programs. The most important, according to Van, was systematic planning and clear goals compatible with the institutional needs (p. 29). She also included the following variables: written policies, procedures and goal statements indicating the institution's commitment to nontraditional students; administrative support; divisional or departmental status; a director and staff who have volunteered to work with nontraditional students; different instructional methodologies so students can work at their own pace; support services aimed to help students develop affective characteristics associated with student success; assessment to place students in the correct course level and finally evaluation which is both formative and summative. Marsha Odom in a 1992 presentation to the Fifth Annual Midwest Regional Reading and Study Skills Conference, described elements of a learning center. Her presentation was titled, "Incorporating New Technologies into an Academic Assistance Center." She included a mission statement, needs assessment, and literature review in formulating her plan. Features already in place included tutoring, courses, walk-in and referral services. Features on Odom's wish list for the future center included short term basic skills classes using interactive software; more uses for innovative technology; improved referral systems designed with the counseling center; supplementary activities to support courses like American History, Economics and Accounting; faculty and staff development; stronger campus relations and communications; improved data management systems and beefed up evaluation reports. For her doctoral dissertation, Elaine Bums did an extensive analysis of components and their characteristics in two year college learning assistance centers. From her analysis, she proposed a model Learning Assistance Center, which will be included in the 1992-93 Proceedings of the Annual Winter Institute for Learning Assistance. The components of the Learning Assistance Center model are testing, staff training, developmental laboratories, such as the math lab, reading lab, and writing lab; developmental courses; counseling; advisement; study skills; computer assisted instruction; multimedia delivery systems for learning; tutoring; on-going publicity and public relations; printed instructional programs and materials. Bums also includes supplemental instruction in the model along with study skills appointments and workshops and tutoring by appointment and/or drop in. When fleshed out the Public Relations component includes orientations, brochures, flyers, bookmarks, presentations, meetings, and campus publications. In addition to describing the components an idealized LAC should have, Bums also listed the attributes those components should exemplify; she called these "characteristics." They included individualized and self paced learning, learner centered envirorunent, centralized resources, diagnostic testing, perspective recommendations, administratively and faculty supported, readily accessible to learners, visible to the campus community, effective interrelationships with other programs, departments, services on campus, cybernetic, and open to all students. Of these thirteen characteristics, nine focus on the nature of the Learning Assistance Center as a place for students - especially the characteristic of " learner-centered environment."

In 1978, Sullivan published the results of a national survey of learning centers in A Guide, to Higher Education Learning Centers in the United States and Canada. Components he included in his definition were instructional resources, instructional media, learning skill development, tutoring and instructional development, (p. 104). In the first edition of Improving Student Learning Skills (1979), Martha Maxwell explains the learning center: "learning centers assist students in basic skills and learning beyond the assistance that faculty members have time for during their class sessions and office hours. " She goes on to explain, "Many learning centers offer students such multiple services as individual and group skills programs, tutoring, preparation for graduate and professional exams, media and materials for self paced instruction. Some concentrate their programs on special groups such as student athletes, the disadvantaged, or international students; others serve all students. Some offer credit for reading and other skill courses; others do not. Whatever the local title, learning centers are found in public and private colleges, two and four year institutions, universities, and graduate and professional schools" (p. 105). In her guidebook, Maxwell also lists components of effective learning centers. First is institutional commitment, which means adequate resources, program acceptance by the campus community, institutionalization so services are available to all students and a central location in a spacious and attractive facility. She also lists systematic data collection and evaluation; flexible scheduling and delivery systems; attention to staff/client compatibility and case load; and clear entrance and exit criteria. Staff should be trained, evaluated and resemble the ethnic proportions of the Center's clients. Materials should reflect student needs and faculty expectations. Finally, faculty acceptance and close working relations with faculty are crucial to the program's success. Thus, there are many components of learning centers; they offer students diagnostic and mastery testing as well [44] as test preparation. They offer content area and learning skills tutoring by appointment and by drop in, one on one and in small groups. They offer single concept and basic skills classes, workshops, presentations and handouts. They provide academic, career and sometimes personal counseling. They offer information and self instruction in a variety of multi-media and computer fonnats. Through a variety of delivery systems, learning centers offer adjunct and supplemental instruction to augment in-class learning. In addition, learning centers also include opportunities for staff and faculty development, for innovative programs, material, and equipment, for systematic management and communication systems and on going evaluation. But primarily, they offer the nontraditional student a sense of place. The importance of territory is illustrated when veteran Learning Center directors, such as Martha Maxwell, discuss where the learning center is housed; "Given the choice, I would select the facilities that are most conveniently located for students over a fancy suite of offices on the fifth floor of an office building on the periphery of the campus" (p. 133).

These LAC attributes were written about the programs of the 1970s and 1980s. What about the Learning Assistance Center and the Learning Resource Center of the 1990s? Programmed instruction has given way to collaborative groups. Individualized drill has bowed out to testing in which answers can be negotiated. Audio visual equipment has been replaced by microcomputers. The need for flexible space remains the same. In a quick review of articles in ERIC RIDE, JCRL, and the Journal of Developmental Education, I found several descriptions of and prescriptions for successful programs. Most assumed the availability of a flexible centrally located space. In her review of the professional literature, Brinda Van (1992) cities, "Ample facilities in a centralized location... communication with other departments... individualized instruction... and a highly visible facility for innovation and change" as ingredients for success. Kathleen McDermott Hannafin (1991) writes at risk students need to learn how to learn, how to adapt to the university, and they also need support in their content classes. She recommends using technology to implement self study courses in laboratory setting. "Electronic media offers portability, modularity, access, nonrecurring costs, logistical superiority, instructional quality control, automated management and optimization of facilities. " She goes on to describe computer based math and learning skills, mini lessons available to students at Florida State University . In RIDE, Hunter Boylan and his colleagues published "A Research Agenda for Developmental Education," which was based on a round table forum at the first National Conference on Research in Developmental Education. In his discussion of retention, Boylan cites the research of Boylan and Bonham (1992) which establishes the positive relationship between centralized programs and resources and both student retention and GPA. A flexible facility allows for centralization of programs and resources. Monica Wyatt (1992) traced the history of reading programs, concluding college reading programs were needed in the future to assist large numbers of minorities or non Anglos succeed in college. Wyatt mentions the failure of early developmental courses to retain open admissions students and notes as one exception the Higher Educational Opportunity Program (HEOP) in New York, which assists students through diagnostic testing, critical thinking and communications classes and learning centers (p. 18). In January the 1994 issue of the Journal of Reading, Jim Reynolds and Stuart Wemer propose more emphasis on individual learner styles in college reading and study skills courses. Justified by the diversity of students, this individually tailored approach to the learning process as opposed to the "one size fits all approach" can be best carried out in the learr-ung center. Several authors reconnnend interdisciplinary and integrated instruction for underprepared students; application and transfer is crucial to the student's goals. Again, I think it makes sense that these instructional elements come together in a place. One current model calls for team teaching augmented with small seminars for both students and participating faculty. Obviously, this cooperative learning model needs to happen in a learning center, not outside the English Department office or in the halls of the Biology or History Departments.

In Flippo and Caverly's monograph, Teaching Reading and Study Strategies at the College Level (1991), they share their struggle with the lack of uniformity in program titles: "These programs have a variety of labels, including college reading and study skills,college reading improvement, learning strategies, special studies, developmental or remedial instruction, basic skills instruction, and compensatory education" (p. viii). They decided to let their contributors use whatever program titles they wanted. Frank Christ put together several learning center definitions on Lindex; they all begin with establishing territory:

"Learning Assistance Center is any place where learners, learner data and learning facilitators are interwoven into a sequential, cybernetic, individualized, people oriented system to service all students (learners) and faculty (learning facilitators) of any institution for whom learning by its students is important" (Christ, 1971).

"Learning Assistance Center is a place concerned with learning environment within and without, functioning primarily to enable students to learn more in less time with greater ease and confidence; offering tutorial help, study aids in the content areas and referrals to other helping agencies; serving as a testing ground for innovative machines, materials, and acting as campus ombudsman..." (Enright, 1975)

"A center (learning skills center) as we use the term, is a special location where students can come, or be sent, for special instruction not usually included in 'regular' college classes. Centers can exist within traditional departments - often though not always English departments - or they can be entities unconnected to other divisions of the college. They can offer individualized instruction, special classes, tutoring, or something in between" (McPherson, 1976).

And Christ includes a minimal definition:

"A Learning Assistance Center, as defined minimalistically, is a space, 10' x 10', located on a college campus with visibility and accessibility to all students and teachers, that contains one desk or table, two chairs, a file cabinet, a telephone, a trained professional, a referral system, and information database of all available campus and community programs, services, personnel, and materials that can assist students and teachers to improve learning efficiency and effectiveness. " (Christ, 1988).

I predict that when non traditional students find that minimal piece of real estate and call it their own, that 10' x 10', space is going to get pretty crowded.