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.