Lucie Berjoan - Blog Post 9

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 to be in the writing center at all, and definitely don't want to do the work on their own. Basically, if someone is coming just to help with a grade and has no real commitment to writing, how do we get them to open up to it? While I have a hunch that it mostly just takes time, oftentimes these students aren't in it for the long haul and once they get what they need, they won't come back (or at least, I would imagine that'd be the case). How do we teach students who seem indifferent to writing the importance of writing? Is it possible to do this in the amount of time that we have with them? I'm not fully sure how to go about answering this, but I think spending time working with different students in this situation (perhaps in the drop-in appointments rather than the weekly meetings?) would be a start. Another question that comes to mind are the benefits of Zoom tutoring rather than in an actual writing center. I've been thinking a lot in particular of my student who has cerebral palsy and have felt that having the option to Zoom allows for a more physically comfortable environment. I'd be curious about whether this extends to other students (for example– my baseball player student often has roommates wandering in the background of his meetings, does this make him more self-conscious and less likely to open up about how he is struggling?). So, I guess my question is how has Zooming benefitted and inhibited writing center meetings? What will it look like moving forward?

Comments

  1. ConorNovember 2, 2020 at 3:18 PM

    Lots of great questions here, Lucie. I wonder about the ways that teaching writing/rhetoric pedagogy and the surrounding body of research about it, is mappable onto tutoring, specifically in regards to the online/in-person question. If teaching online is found to be largely effective/ineffective, does that mean necessarily that tutoring online is largely effective/ineffective as well? Or is there something different about the tutoring relationship and dynamic that changes what makes it effective or ineffective?

    I feel like generally I'm able to tutor much more effectively via Zoom than I am to teach, but I'm very interested in what, if anything, the research says about that!

    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