Teaching in a Writing Center Fall 2020

I think that teaching online has actually allowed me to implement practices that reward deep reading over surface reading. Each week I assign a reading and then ask students to respond to a few prompts related to it in that week's discussion board. Later in the week, they have to respond to two of their peers' posts, which they can't see until they've submitted their own posts (this prevents students from simply repeating the points others have already made in the discussion board). In the rubric I use for grading the posts, I establish that there are no "right" or "wrong" answers to the prompts, and that I reward original arguments supported by evidence, and responses to peers that elaborate on the original poster's argument in a meaningful way. I've found that this practice elicits a deeper engagement with the texts than in face-to-face instruction, where I usually break the class into small groups to discuss readings and often only one per...

Perhaps one way to promote appreciation of other "Englishes," as the CCCC statement (as much as they would disapprove of the use of the term) is to recalibrate considerations of style in writing pedagogy, one that demonstrates that what we call "standard English" is but one among many modes of expression that can be modulated according to varying purposes/audiences. Many people, I think, don't particularly enjoy reading academic English, which, besides imposing oppressive standards on marginalized people, is often a clumsy, bland, and inefficient means of expression; writing is most effective when it comes off as the work of a singular voice and intellect.  Students' general education in universities should also include critical studies of how languages are products of conquest. This, of course, has been a constant throughout history--consider how Spanish and Portuguese integrated Arabic vocabulary by virtue of Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula. However...

I think my writing process is somewhat unusual, in that the vast majority of it takes place off the page. A professor of mine once told me only 10% of the writing process takes place at the keyboard; the rest involves going about living your life, keeping in mind that all experience provide potential material for writing, even if that potential isn't revealed for months or years. What I've found to be an effective means of putting that into practice is, as soon as I think I have the "storm cloud" of an essay in my mind, starting up a conversation with someone about it. A conversation provides a space where you're immediately putting the idea before an audience before any writing has actually taken place, where the writer can rehearse presenting with clarity in mind and where someone else can ask questions and sometimes even contribute to the elaboration of the core idea, providing associative "rabbit holes" to go down. I really struggle with setting my s...

 Question 1) What are some strategies to quickly establish the boundaries of the tutoring situation, i.e., making it clear to students that the writing center is not a "fix-it" shop? Question 2) If a student comes in for a regular appointment without an assignment they are actively working on, what is the best use of that session? Are there exercises pre-prepared by the writing center regarding grammar, paragraph structure, constructing thesis/topic sentences that tutors can have students work through?

During the course of my time here as a tutor, I’ve mostly been helping people write academic essays. Due to their nature as academic assignments, the process of helping students always starts with looking at the prompt itself, or maybe a rubric, and branching off from there. That standardized process doesn’t really fit working with fiction, which is what a certain student of mine has brought to our sessions. They are writing adaptations of translated stories, and they didn’t ask me for ideas on how to best meet the notes of the assignment. Instead, they wanted to talk about the process of creating a good story and how they could do so.   To that end, we both spent the bulk of a session together just talking through their story and the many details they wanted to add to it, trying to see how everything would fit together. In another session, they brought their newly written story and we started to talk about how the story might impact readers. These were interesting sessions. ...

 I'm usually fairly confident working with writers outside my discipline. I think part of that has to do with my own experience as an undergraduate, where I switched majors from political science to literature to philosophy then, finally, to psychology. To my mind, basic critical thinking skills--the kind that I teach my students in my rhetoric classes--apply just as much to qualitative analyses as they do to quantitative/empirical analyses. Questions of audience and purpose factor into effective writing and communication--approaching any paper, regardless of the class that it's for, I always push writers to ask themselves how much information is necessary for them to provide to contextualize an argument, and remind them that each item of evidence they introduce has to be accompanied by an explanation of its relevance to their overarching thesis. One of my writing center students' first assignment for his rhetoric class was to write a paper about his major (bio-medical engi...