Teaching in a Writing Center Fall 2020

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...

 One of my writing center students is in a psychology and a Greek mythology class. I don't know much about either subjects, so like the Bedford guide suggests I mostly look for clarity, cohesiveness, and to make sure she's answering all questions the paper asks. One of the psychology papers asked for a bit of a creative angle--the assignment said to imagine she was a witness to a crime and needed to convert the details to long-term memory for a trial, and to write a paper about how one could could do that. I was a little unsure how academic or creative the paper should lean, and so was the student, and we straddled a sort of middle ground. I recommended that she ask her professor what if she's produced so far is the sort of tone she's looking for.  I have a student in my Gen Ed Lit class who's asked me for help with her med school personal statement and I've worked on that with her in office hours. I believe she's also submitting it to document review throug...

Most of my work in the writing center has been on papers for English and Rhetoric classes, rather than the sciences. I find it rather refreshing when I am able to call back upon my experience in the field of biology, which is not often. This does not mean I can't provide assistance, but the assistance often calls back on basic education rather than the things I have gained after my Bachelor's Degree.  That said, there are still moments that stumped me. A memorable appointment had a graduate student approach me about her project. She was conducting a survey on education, and she needed to answer questions about the project to get approval. So the format here was not a long paper, but just providing adequate and professional answers about the survey's scope and intentions. Critique was difficult because the purpose wasn't to build an argument. I tried to approach the problem by putting myself in the audience role: If I were asking these questions, what would I be looking ...

 Since starting at the Writing Center, I have had a plethora of topics outside my discipline. To be fair, though, I expect that -- not because I think Cinema majors wouldn't utilize the Writing Center (though something tells me they'd be less likely to), but rather because they're rather few and far between, and even fewer that would have writing to submit. Actually, come to think of it, I might be more intimidated by reading work and offering suggestions within my discipline.  So far, I have worked with students on music (through a scientific angle), Chinese literature, archaeology, rhetoric, bioethics, economics, and 19th century literature. All of these induce some level of panic due to my lack of familiarity (STEM fields, looking at you), especially when the science/music paper is a dissertation. Honestly, I felt a bit thrown into the fire. But my tutees have largely seemed grateful for the assistance I've given them, especially the two which I've worked with si...

My experience reviewing work outside my discipline is somewhat limited. I can, however, recall a few clear examples: giving feedback on a sample essay for a friend’s application to a philosophy program, or reading over a legal memo for another friend in law school. In each instance I felt much less confident in reviewing the content of the essay, since I knew next to nothing about audience expectations. Is this philosophical concept commonplace or does it need to be explained? Is it part of conventional legal language to drop articles or is that a mistake? Thus many of my comments were posed as questions. But in each instance, I found something critical and productive to discuss. However, most often these issues were at the local level: a sentence fragment, pronoun confusion, bloated construction, needless use of passive voice, or monotonous, choppy sentences. Luckily, these kinds of observations were exactly what the authors were looking for from me, so I did not gravely disappoint ...

One of my regulars in the Writing Center is a student who is working on his dissertation in some type of medical research. His research has something to do with the way the ratio between intracellular and extracellular water in the body affects cognition in older and younger patients. I am not exactly sure what he does beyond that, mostly because I do not understand 25% of the technical jargon he uses to describe his work, yet he continues to schedule appointments with me to discuss his writing and the research he is doing to advance his own learning. It has been a learning experience for me as well. Something I have appreciated about working with this student is that he is a competent writer, for the most part, and our sessions are usually an exchange of ideas between him (the author) and me (the audience). It has tested me as a reader and a writer because I do not usually know a lot about the subjects of his papers, especially when they get technical and specific to his research whic...

The first thing that comes to mind is the recent document review that I did for the writing center. An undergraduate senior submitted their personal statement for an application to a Biology (I think?) graduate program. The bulk of the statement was explaining the research she had done but despite this (or perhaps because of this..) it felt easy to help advise her on how to turn in into a stronger piece of writing. While I couldn't possibly have helped her with the parts that were about her research, it felt obvious that it was lacking a clear narrative. It made me feel confident that I kinda know what I'm doing when it comes to essays or writing in general and was honestly quite an enjoyable experience. I also am reminded of a side job I've been doing for some time as a freelance editor for a Portuguese fashion-blogger based in Amsterdam (I know, I know). I have a feeling that he uses Google Translate to get the English draft to send me, meaning that oftentimes they are in...

I think it is very important for writing center staff to pursue writing center research. The only way that any discipline can move forward on a broad level is if people talk to each other about what they are doing, and research is one of the best ways for that conversation to happen in academia. One potential writing center research topic I would be interested in knowing more about is how common it is for university/college writing centers to offer their services to their neighboring, non-academic communities, and how those communities use those services. As a librarian I have noticed that you can find many, many services offered to the public through libraries and other public-serving organizations, but writing and editing help, especially in a one-on-one context, is exceedingly rare. I just recently looked for such efforts, and I was unable to find any major initiatives for offering free writing help or editing services to the non-student public apart from the National Institute ...

 It seems important for someone in a writing center to be engaging in research to understand how tutors can reach more students and improve writing on a greater scale. I imagine someone should be spreading the word and educating tutors on new knowledge and findings. I browsed some of the research reports in the Writing Center Journal and found an interesting one about how students come to writing centers to fix their papers, but really the student's problem is reading comprehension, and the paper talks about various theories of reading etc., but ultimately it supports the notion that reading comprehension and writing ability go hand in hand, and writing centers should be more reading tutor focused as well as writing.  I've never been great at research papers, or research in general. So thinking of a research question that's not too broad or specific is tough. I think my research question would be something along the lines of, "Are students who are concurrently enrolled...

 On the surface, I think that research would be vital for a writing center to function. But that's also because I think that most disciplines, organizations, systems, etc. should have some solid research so that they can mature and develop into something that remains useful. Without said research, they fail to really learn.  Now, that also brings up the question of "What is research?" But my response is, "Why limit it?" Research covers many different aspects including the work that we've done for this course or the material we've covered through now. Isn't that all a kind of research to make us better tutors? Or to engage with concepts that allow us to discern our strengths and weaknesses? Places for us to develop? As far as The Bedford Guide is concerned, research might be a bit more formal than I make it sound here. While informal research has its value, I do think that the more formal research described would be highly beneficial.  I would also mo...

  I don't believe research is the path for every tutor, but I do believe that research is important for writing centers. I think quantifying what works and what doesn't is important and sharing that information is valuable for other centers. The research I have studies has helped me prepare for tutoring situations I haven't personally encountered. I think a balance of instruction focused educators and research focused professionals is an ideal combination. As an MFA in the painting/drawing program I am interested in researching how students in the visual arts use the writing center and what specific needs they have. In my undergrad I noticed than many visual arts students had a lot of writing anxiety, but very few used the writing center unless a professor required it or offered some sort of bonus points. I know many students have writing anxiety, but it was pronounced in the visual arts. Writing in the fine arts usually incorporates research papers in ...

I’m of two minds on the importance of writing centers conducting original research. For smaller writing centers with fewer resources, I would argue conducting research feels optional. However, the faculty and tutors operating that smaller writing center would be wise to keep abreast of the research on writing centers and tutoring being published. On the other hand, someone needs to be providing the latest research for the benefit of all writing centers, and I think that role falls to writing centers housed at R1 universities.  My graduate program (I won’t name which one *wink*) didn’t strongly emphasize pedagogy, and so while I was attending that program--and for a long time afterward--I had the attitude that pedagogy was some sort of highfalutin buzzword with no real significance outside of sounding very learned and serious. But, since starting work in the Rhetoric department (first as an adjunct), I’ve become more acculturated into the importance of reading pedagogical scholarshi...

 I am conflicted about the importance of writing center research—largely I feel that research is vital and important for the flourishing of various communities and our communal intellectual health. Yet, I don’t find myself personally very compelled by most of the research surrounding writing centers, which is particularly strange because I enjoy tutoring and helping students with their writing. I do think, overall, that research should be pursued by writing centers, though perhaps some of my reluctance is over the ways in which I feel like I am turning the students that I tutor into lab rats of some kind, when I conduct research in tutoring, even if I am not directly using them or their work.  I am interested broadly in questions of teaching analysis and critical thinking, as well as transfer—that is, I am intrigued by thoughts on how to make skills transfer from one context to another (be that one paper to the next, one class to the next, school to ‘the real world’, etc.). I’...

While on the one hand I think it is of the utmost importance for all students, tutors, teachers, and professors to be conducting research that pushes their world view in new and different ways, I think it is a little complicated to expect this of everyone all the time. I think this gets especially complicated when thinking about the transient nature of writing center staff, something I had never thought much of until my time in the practicum. While I think it is sort of a big ask to have writing center staff pursue writing center research as they are often also students pursuing and trying to prioritize their own academic pursuits, I think that having a mandatory practicum class (like this one!) is a good practice. Not only does it help students learn how to tutor a variety of students, but it gives them an opportunity to contribute and really think about writing center research.  In terms of my own students, I have been struck a bit by those who don't seem to like writing, or want...