Dylan Nice: Number 9

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 scholarship and considering it against your own practices. I don’t see why teaching in the writing center would be exempt from research-based considerations. 

I’m interested in learning more about the teaching of multimodal and digital materials, both in the classroom and in the writing center. Since more and more information is coming at us via formats which are not traditional texts, I think it is worthwhile to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of multimodal media in academic contexts. For instance, if students are assigned a multimodal assignment, does the format come at the expense of something important, like the depth of their understanding on the topic? Perhaps it is a trade-off and the loss of depth makes for gains in the student’s breadth of understanding? While measuring such gains or losses might be tricky, I think useful data might be derived from a study involving a large sample of students completing projects on identical topics but in different formats then responding to detailed and probing questionnaires. 

 Lastly, I’ve finally learned from the Bedford reading the difference between Quantitative and Qualitative research, terms that up until now I used interchangeably without correction.

Comments

  1. Sean TylerNovember 2, 2020 at 5:54 PM

    I think the point you make about the size of writing centers is a good one. I cam from a writing center that had about 8 tutors at its largest, so trying to conduct research would have been nearly impossible. I think that research is probably also of more interest to graduate tutors than undergraduates in many cases. We did use Bedford guide, publications from other writing centers, and journal articles for training so having research available was valuable.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Carol SeverinoNovember 4, 2020 at 1:08 PM

    Your question, Dylan, is one of the reasons older faculty are skeptical about multimodal assignments--they suspect that because they appeal to more of the senses, are easier to comprehend, and sometimes feature technological bells and whistles that they may lack depth or at least the opportunity and challenge of putting together whole sentences and discourses (e.g. a ppt vs. an essay).

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Andrew post 9

I think it's vitally important for writing center staff to keep abreast of writing center scholarship. Because students who visit writing centers vary widely in their proficiency, their motivations for seeking help, and economic/identity categories, and bring in work from disparate disciplines, staff need to be adaptable to multitudinous tutoring relationships and scenarios. Requiring staff to go through practicum courses (held on maybe a biennial basis) and holding regular department forums where tutors can present research or seek counsel would help keep everyone on the same page with regard to the latest findings and debates in writing center theory and practice. However, I don't think that it's reasonable expect that each member regularly conduct their own research, since many tutors are graduate students or full time instructors whose resources are often already stretched thin on account of pressures to produce writing/research in their own field of study. Asking too m...
Read more

Andrew blog post #10

 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...
Read more

Andrew blog post 4

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...
Read more