April 24, 2016: Week 5 reading reflections

The readings for this week—the Hume Center's philosophy statement about multingual language learners (MLLs) and Sarah Blazer's article on linguistic inclusivity in writing centers—caution against imposing linguistic homogeneity and emphasize helping multilingual students develop their own voice in their writing. Blazer encourages tutors to think of the different Englishes that we all use in different contexts to help them connect with students' experience as language learners. This reminds me of my own experience in a French-language immersion program at Middlebury College, where students pledge, for the duration of their six- or seven-week stay on this isolated campus in rural Vermont, only to read and communicate in the language they are studying. I remember how psychologically taxing the experience was, as I had to accept that my personality in French was, in many ways, different and less developed than my personality in English, but I was only able to learn by throwing myself into a lot of situations that were potentially uncomfortable and embarrassing. I ended up, for instance, participating in the school play as a comic character—a drunken department store Santa Claus—probably not the role I would have ended up with had I auditioned in English.

The Blazer article prompted me to realize that this experience is a bit like everyone's experience in higher education of learning to write in the new language of a discipline. Graduate students especially are prompted to develop a new, research identity in this language, and your scholarly identity as a graduate student could very well end up different than the one you expected or projected for yourself, depending on who your advisors are and the course of your learning and research. Certainly, a lot of the same humility is required of all Ph.D. students, though I can imagine that for MLLs this process must sometimes be especially stressful. The attitude that we are all language learners—that much disciplinary learning is, in fact, a form of language learning—seems like a helpful frame of mind to maintain in these instances of cultural exchange. Still, I wish the Blazer article had offered more specific examples of how the inclusive ethos that her center fosters behind the scenes among its tutors actually plays out in one-to-one sessions with MLL students. Perhaps we can talk more in class about how to practice this philosophy on the ground.

April 20, 2016: Week 4 reading response

The readings that we were asked to write about for this week—Walker, Savini, and Clark—all offer genre theory as a solution for the writing tutor who needs to work with students from different, sometimes unfamiliar, disciplines. A tutor who is not familiar with, say, a lab report or a scientific paper, can coach a student writing one to identify, read, and imitate generic models from within her discipline—this is the hope. The concept of "genre" at play here is, significantly, an idea of genre from rhetorical rather than literary theory. Irene Clark thus describes genre as a mode of address within a discourse community. As a mode of address, a genre has certain formal features, but what students really need to understand are the purpose those features serve. In some cases—like a dissertation prospectus—a literature review section may be there to validate your choice of a topic, and may function principally to indicate that an issue is complicated, people are interested in it, and there are various conflicting positions one could group in certain ways. The literature review in a published paper, however, serves a different function; here it would be more important to validate and contextualize your results than to demonstrate to the readers of a journal that you've done your homework and that people care about the topic.

Catherine Savini's advice about helping students search out and identify model texts resonated very strongly with my own experience as a graduate student. I could place a journal article because I read journal articles. I struggled mightily with the first chapter of my dissertation, though, until I began reading other dissertations in my field. This makes sense. Research requires me to read published books in my field constantly, so book chapters were the closest models that I had to dissertation chapters in length and scope. As I realized, though, book chapters in my field make bigger claims and synthesize far more material than dissertation chapters. At least in my own case, I had ways of finding good model dissertations, and conducted a smaller version of Kristin Walker's experiment: I looked for dissertations that my advisors had been involved with and, among those, prioritized dissertations that had won department prizes. I therefore feel pretty comfortable with Savini's recommendation that writing tutors help students find and read other model texts. I do have one reservation about this: I hesitate about spending a lot of time close-reading a single example that a student could follow as a template, because, really, immersion in examples should be the goal. I know it's no accident that I placed a piece in a journal that I already read regularly, not in a journal that I picked up and read one sample article from. Similarly, I read a few dissertations, not just one, before the act of reading them became really helpful. To some degree, I think the tutor should be encouraging the student to seek out examples, perhaps by brainstorming ways to find them, rather than offering any single example as a blueprint.

April 20, 2016: Tutoring observation #2

For my second tutoring observation, I sat in on a session yesterday afternoon between PWR lecturer Erik Ellis and a student working on a research proposal for a PWR 2 course. The session began with the student orienting Erik E. to his topic and to the broad categories in which he had grouped the sources listed in his research proposal. Importantly, the student already had instructor comments on the proposal and was thinking about next steps. I noted that Erik E. registered these as something to look at when he asked the student what other specific aspects of the proposal he wanted feedback about. The student's proposed topic, the philosophical implications of a particular videogame, sounded very expansive, and the instructor comments suggested some concern about scope. I noted, however, Erik E. did not follow up on this concern in a critical or negative way. He let the student talk, sometimes at length, and occasionally interjected with questions along the lines of "How many sources do you have?", "How much can you cover in the scope of this proposal?", "Is that the aspect that interests you?", and "How much of the rest of it do you think you'd change if you wanted to emphasize that aspect more?" These questions were effective in guiding the student toward doing the limiting work himself. In the course of the session, the student moved from expressing a very general interest in philosophy and humanity as expressed in the videogame to a more specific interest in agency and the freedom the player had or didn't have to act in the game.

Erik E. maintained a personally reserved but intellectually engaged demeanor throughout the session, and I noted several techniques that he used to encourage active participation on the student's part in addition to asking open-ended questions. When he asked, for instance, "How many sources do you have?", this functioned as a prompt for the student to count, although Erik E. could have counted sources listed in the proposal himself. The student's answers to questions were sometimes involved, and Erik E. used engaged body language, nodding and leaning forward while always looking either at the student or his writing, as well as verbal cues registering engagement or understanding to indicate that he was following along as the student spoke (e.g. "Sounds interesting," "Yeah," "Hmmm," and "Great topic"). About 10 minutes into the session, after the project had been laid out and the central issues seemed relatively clear, Erik E. paused to read the student's conclusion, which the student had expressed concern about at the start, more carefully, in addition to reviewing the instructor comments. I note that before doing this he indicated to the student that he was going to take a few minutes to read the material.

April 14, 2016: Week 3 reading response

The readings for this week—Brooks on minimalist tutoring, Corbett on tutoring ethics, and Chi et al. on tutoring research into effective tutoring—tilt on the whole toward favoring a non-directive style of tutoring. Corbett makes an important modification to Brooks' method by pointing out that tutoring styles should adapt to different phases of composition. At the brainstorming stage, a truly Socratic, non-directive approach focused entirely on eliciting the student's own ideas makes good intuitive sense. Leaving aside issues of ethics, a student thesis statement, topic, or argument must be one in which the student feels invested. Personally, I would rephrase Corbett's opening question ("what stage is the draft at?") slightly and instead ask when the essay is due, so that I know how realistic it is to focus on questions that might require wholesale revision. If a piece is due the next day, it may well be more realistic to focus on concerns such as answering a substantive counterargument than raising lines of inquiry that might necessitate extra student research. It's unclear to me what Brooks would say about this, because he seems so interested in defining tutoring by what it shouldn't be. The Chi et al. piece was more helpful and concrete in quantifying what these interactions may look like. I appreciated Chi et al.'s metrics—in particular the data that students in a successful tutoring session ask 8 "deep" questions an hour and that a productive scaffolding exchange commonly consists of 5 to 10 successive questions from the tutor.

I guess my lingering question would be whether or not tutors should articulate their tutoring philosophy to the students. As a classroom instructor, I have always been encouraged to articulate clearly the purpose of each assignment or exercise. I don't think I have seen or participated in a tutoring session, though, where the tutor began, after assessing the state of the assignment, by explaining, "Okay, so this tutoring session will be more helpful to you if you do most of the work; you should consider yourself in a safe space, but 'on,' right now." I tend to think this kind of transparency might help to head off some of the defensive and resistant encounters that Brooks describes. It also might prompt the student to be forthright if she wants something different; direct engagement with pages she has brought, for instance. There is a lot of slipperiness in these readings about the terms editing (by which I think Brooks means line-editing), proofreading, and copy-editing—all very distinct functions in a publishing context, and all skills that people can learn. If a student truly wants help editing her paper line by line (and the work seems appropriately developed), I think it is possible to offer advice about how to do this and to walk her through a part of the process using the same non-directive, question-based approach that works for brainstorming—even though the task might not seem as much fun.

April 6, 2016: Tutoring observation #1

Earlier this evening I observed graduate tutor Mark Gardiner in a half-hour appointment with a freshman student working on a rhetorical analysis for PWR 1. The student reported that she was having a hard time starting her assignment and wanted to run her thoughts and a tentative thesis by someone. I noted that Mark's first question was to ask when the assignment was due. The fact that the student had several days allowed the conversation to take a more exploratory direction. Mark asked her about the piece she had chosen and to walk him through the elements of it that she wanted to discuss. As they fleshed out the students' observations, I noted that Mark wanted to confirm that her set of terms was the same as his (ethos, pathos, logos, rhetorical triangle) and encouraged her to ask the instructor in class whether there was an expectation that all these terms be used in the essay. In the last few minutes of the session, I noted that Mark redirected conversation to the student's thesis statement and encouraged the student to connect it to an observation that she had seemed particularly excited about, about the emotional appeal of a particular anecdote from the piece that she discussed in detail. This final exchange seemed effective in encouraging the student to think about a thesis that would make a more specific point about the particular piece being discussed.

Throughout the session, Mark appeared very in control of his body language, using hand gestures effectively and judiciously for emphasis, especially using them to punctuate or enumerate when he was making multiple points or offering a suggestion with multiple parts. The physical configuration gradually shifted from, in the beginning, the student and Mark each looking at and talking about the piece of writing on her computer, to, toward the conclusion, the student and Mark speaking directly to one another, with the student breaking away occasionally to type out a note. I noted that very close to the halfway point of the session, Mark checked with the student to see if she was finding what they were doing helpful, or if there were other things she wanted to discuss. At this point, the student indicated the approach was helpful and stated she would probably seek another appointment once she had more written; this information seemed helpful in pacing the rest of the session. I also note that Mark framed statements about confusion as queries and, in these queries, cast himself rather than the student as the subject, for instance, "Am I off base in thinking that these three things are mixed up here?" (rather than, for instance, "You seem to have mixed up these three things a bit").

April 3, 2016: Week 2 reading response

The readings for this week—the Hume Center's philosophy statement, Andrea Lunsford's piece on collaboration, and Stephen North's two articles on the idea of a writing center—all make a strong case for a view of the writing center as a place where knowledge is socially constructed. Indeed, the North and Lunsford pieces put the writing center in something of an evangelical role for social constructivism, and at times explicitly discuss writing center pedagogy as functioning potentially in tension with the pedagogy of other university departments. In part, I think this is a reflection of when they were written, and perhaps of the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s, when much of the public discussion about English departments was about matters of content—the propriety of teaching, for instance, minority literatures or gender theory—and this likely did contribute to a focus on content at the expense of skills in discussions of English curricula. Assuming, perhaps optimistically, that we are a different moment now, I want to push back slightly against the notion that social constructivism must be represented as quite so at odds with other pedagogical paradigms—that, to take an example from the first North article, the professor who assigns her students to visit the writing center, instead of leaving them to find it on their own, is doing them a disservice.

I think there are ways that behaviorism and cognitive constructivism, which often do, almost necessarily, figure into a relationship with an instructor or advisor who is tasked with evaluating your work, can be used in tandem with other methods to encourage students to engage in social and collaborative acts of knowledge-building. What I found most compelling in the initial North piece is the vision of the instructor conference and writing tutor conference as serving different, but complementary, roles—an instructor conference may be more regimented and may focus on the evaluation of some mandated piece of work, like a paper draft, an outline, or a research plan, and may focus more on content. I don't really have any issue with instructors suggesting students visit the writing center for further process support, although of course such referral can certainly be done more or less gracefully and shouldn't be presented as remedial, or as a substitute for students learning to copy-edit their own work. I feel that what is often missing in the modern university environment is clarification from the instructor or advisor that their own (perhaps behaviorist) role is part of a larger ecosystem—that, as an evaluator of your final work, they can help you in certain ways, but that interaction with classmates, writing tutors, and the broader environment of the university can help you in others.

April 1, 2016: What is Writing?

Writing, to me, is a means of recording thought that is also a means of thinking. Specifically in the context of the modern university, I think writing can serve a crucial role in the curriculum when conceived of as a multi-stage process that moves students away from reliance on authority and toward being self-directed learners. The stages in such a process might include, first, students understanding the ideas presented by others (be those ideas expressed in a primary or secondary source text, a piece of art, or as an argument); second, students articulating their their own reactions to those ideas; next, students reflecting on the implications of their own reactions; and, finally, students developing their reactions and reflections into an argument. Writing can help to structure a course or a curriculum when we break it into these sort of steps, and ask if we are teaching students to perform each one of them.

The explosion of different digital tools and platforms in the last three decades has changed the shape of writing a great deal—from word processors like Microsoft Word to blog platforms like this one to tweets, text messages, and IMs. Anyone who uses the Internet or a smartphone to communicate today is writing, and reading, almost constantly. The educational risk that concerns me is that these tools, especially those whose chief appeal is near-instantaneous publication, can obscure the view of writing as a multi-stage process. Even conventional word processors invite us—even challenge us—to fill a blank page with pristine final content poured out from the brain in a linear order. This makes it all the more important, I think, for university instructors to show students a process mindset that includes steps like outlining, drafting, and revision (acknowledging these stages are to some degree fluid), so they can be mindful about the media and tools they are using. Short-form posts are great for certain kinds of communication. A multi-stage workflow, which might begin with something as simple as structured brainstorming or mapping concepts on paper, instead of opening a Word file and writing cold, can help students develop a multi-stage thought process useful for approaching more complex tasks.