Undergraduates as Writing Center Administrators

At a small liberal arts college in Texas, they are pioneering a new model for administrative staff at their Writing Center: peer tutors who show passion and initiative can become one of two Assistant Directors. 

Larger colleges and universities usually use graduate students for this role, but at this small institution they do not have access to a population like that. So instead, the Director used the International Writing Center Association (IWCA) position statement for graduate-level administrators and crafted her own for undergrads. The current draft is:

1. Undergraduate Administrators (UA) should not hold the top or sole position in the Writing Center that is affiliated with the institution they attend.

2. UA should work in pairs or small teams.

3. UA should be selected personally by the Director with input from current or outgoing UA.

4. UA should collaborate with the Director and other UA to write the job description and establish goals for the position.

5. In absence of other staff, contribute to clerical work to maintain smooth functioning of the Writing Center.

6. Receive adequate training from the Director and past UA.

7. Receive funding for travel and research publication.

8. There is no formal evaluation process, but letters of recommendation and networking for successful UA.

9. UA receive higher compensation than the rest of the undergraduate staff. 

Essentially, this position should place an UA as a current Writing Center professional. They have the opportunity to work on projects that they specify, and should contribute to Writing Center study in some way.  

The Writing Center and Creative Writers

This semester I've been able to experience first hand what a Writing Center tutorial can do for creative writing as well as academic. It's like having a 40 minute long,  hyper focused editorial workshop. You have more opportunity to talk about what you're trying to do with the piece, how your characters are being set up, language and tone, and so on. Unlike a small group workshop, you are able to really focus on just your writing for 40 minutes, and on the specific aspects of it that you want to touch on.

However, in their panel on Writing Centers and Creative Writers, this group of students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln were struggling with how Writing Center tutors could best serve creative writers. They didn't know how to balance letting the writer maintain ownership over the piece while also working to motivate the writer to make changes. They noted how much more personal creative writing feels from academic writing, and that these tutees were much more invested in their pieces emotionally.

What they decided on was twofold. First they would work as individual tutors to establish a higher level of trust and rapport with these tutees before the actual tutoring session. That way, if constructive criticism was offered it wouldn't be taken personally by the student. They also established genre specific writing groups where tutors acted more as the facilitators than actual members. They noted that this kept the students writing, because they were accountable to another group of people that would expect them to share come meeting time. This established a separate community of writers that they could gain suggestions from, but it did not have the authoritative feel that the tutees felt was present in a formal writing center session.  

A cute tutoring poem I found for the holidays :)

Making Good Observations

"Good observations = Good tutoring"

This was what Mark Hall, Director of the University Writing Center at the University of Central Florida, told us in his session at the IWCA. When he came in as the Director a short while ago, he was experiencing some drastic pedagogical differences between himself and his professional tutors. In order to remedy this, he had the tutors first make a list "best practices" that they all agreed upon. Then he asked them all to observe each other in order to see if they were actually carrying out these practices. What the tutors found was that their words did not match their actions.

Formally, Hall called it Espoused Theory vs. Theory-in-Use. The tutors may all agree that something should be done (ex: Prioritize student learning above fixing papers), but what they are actually practicing does not match up. This lead them to evaluate why their actions and best practices didn't match up, and how they could combat it.

This is a central part of making good observations. As an observer, you need to be aware of what you're looking for, so that you can analyze that one aspect. During an observation, Hall noted how you'll never really catch everything, and having this focused view on an observation allows you more time to look for that specific action and how it's being performed or not performed. 

Making the Writing Center a Welcoming Home

Several sessions at the International Writing Center Association Conference focused on rhetorically establishing the physical space of the Writing Center as welcoming and open. It's a main reason that it's common practice to use circle tables just like ours in Writing Centers across the country.

In one of the sessions I attended, the speaker talked about the Ancient Greek tradition of hospitality, and how Writing Centers can use this time-honored tradition and bend it into creating a welcoming space. There are three essential roles in Ancient Greek hospitality:
1. Guest
2. Preparer: This person sets up the home to welcome the guest. Traditionally, this was the wife who cooked, cleaned, and made sure there was plenty of wine to go around.
3. Host: He was the man of the household (this is patriarchal Ancient Greece after all). He welcomed the guest in, made sure their needs were met during their stay, and entertained them.


In Writing Center practice, here's how we could transform those same roles into Writing Center staff and visitors:
1. Guest: The tutee.
1. Preparer: The Writing Center director. They have the most say in how the Center is decorated, be it by adding a couch, painting a couple of walls green, or both. They can also control how private each session will feel by how close the tables are to each other, or if they want to add dividers.
2. Host: This is where us tutors come in. We are the bright, shining faces that our guests, the tutees, will see and associate with during their time in the Writing Center. It is up to us to be sure their writing needs are met, and that they walk away feeling more confident and comfortable about their writing process.

Transitioning from Tutor to Composition Teacher

I've always known I was going to go to graduate school. I also knew that I'd help pay my way through it by, hopefully, securing a teaching position and teaching Freshman composition courses. Then I stopped and thought about it, would I really be qualified? Could I ruin some poor freshman's first semester because I didn't really know what I was doing, and just pushed through teaching without any kind of skills or training?

Then at the IWCA, Kathy Hansler and Maggie Cecil hosted a workshop all about transferring the skills you develop as a Writing Center tutor into real life composition classroom pedagogy. With that hypothetical and devastated future Freshman in mind, I went.

They had us do an exercise to put us into our "tutor" mode vs. our "teacher" mode: We read two different excerpts, but while we were reading we were either a "tutor" or a "teacher". I started as a tutor. I went through the small excerpt, noticed that the sentence level problems I was seeing probably pointed to this student being ELL, but stopped their. When I wrote down some questions I'd ask, I found that they were still focused HOC, and how we could re-direct the paper on more of a global level. Then I was a teacher. Somehow, I didn't even write on the excerpt. I was quicker to jump to those sentence-level problems, and to dismiss the disorganization of the excerpt, rather than ask questions that could lead to its improvement. During our discussion I realized this was probably related to grades. In my teacher brain, all I could think about (even if it was subconsciously) was what grade I was going to give this at the end. That made the writing feel more final to me, and that if these types of errors still existed at this stage then the student wasn't putting any work in.

When I was a tutor, my mind was already framed to accept that this writing was a work in progress. With my teacher brain, it just wanted to pass judgement.

This made me look back at that rhetorical Freshman from earlier. How could I help evaluate them, while also maintaining my "work-in-progress" mentality towards the writing? One example we came up with as a workshop is to have rough drafts that get an "in progress" grade. This grade serves to show the student what they'd get on the paper if they did absolutely nothing else to it. It would also allow me as the teacher to point out some more global issues I'm noticing, and then for the students to find ways to improve upon them.

Writing Center Dialogue: Moving from "thinking alone" to "thinking together"

At the IWCA, I attended a workshop given by Kristen Garrison, Heidi Hakimi-Hood, Anna Lerew-Phillips, and Brittany Norman from Midwestern State University about how tutors can utilize the principles in William Issacs' Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together.

Their main take away from the book was the concept of "thinking together" behaviors. Some of those skills inclue:

• Listening: Allow the tutee to talk for an extended period of time without interrupting them. You may find that they hit on a key part of their writing process that you wouldn't have known about if you'd interrupted that stream of consciousness.
• Respecting: Issacs described this as "as sense of honoring or deferring to someone" according to their handout. If you get that stressed out student, acknowledge where they are. Ask them why they're stressed, or how you think this Writing Center session could help them alleviate some of that pressure.  
• Suspending: One way they described this was to acknowledge that the tutee probably does not have a through understanding of Writing Center tutorial pedagogy. If they don't know why you want to do something or seem hesitant, describe to them the purpose behind creating that web or outline, or why you won't just proofread their paper for them. You need to "suspend" your own thinking process for just a second so that you and the tutee can both be on the same page. 
• Voicing: This part is more on the tutee than the tutor. The tutee has to be willing to engage in a dialogue with the tutor if they are going to be able to work on the writing together. This actually made me think back to ENG 3670 when Liz kept telling us, "You can't be afraid of silence. What may seem like an eternity to you, may be the tutee thinking through something. If you start talking to fill up the space, you could disrupt that."

Thinking together behaviors are some key aspects to how a tutor can build rapport with a student, and not loom over them like an authority figure. 

Emergency Response in the Writing Center: Too Much EMO

I  feel the anxiety running high this week-one week before finals. Students are running late or no-showing.  When they do show up they are generally stressed, overwhelmed, and a bit desperate for help. The article "Preparing for Emotional Sessions" by Gayla Mills seems timely and appropriate for my weekly blog.

There are 5 points Mills discusses in her article:

Being Evaluated: Remind students not to take their Professor's comments too personally.  If a teacher tells the student, "don't write like you talk" it means to make a paper more formal, not that they are stupid or the paper is terrible.  Remind the student that a teacher has the difficult position to "instruct and to critique." Remind the student that academic papers should not be "casual." 

When the Paper is Personal:  Writing assignments can be personal, which can bring out the emotionalism in the writer. Be professional and detached (but sensitive and understanding). Remember to have clear goals and stay focused on them. This minimizes emotionalism-from both parties.

Guys, Gals, and Tears: Women are more likely to cry during sessions, and women tutors may be more comfortable responding to these types of situations. Generalities aside, stress can reduce students to tears.  Assess whether the tutee needs a few minutes "to be heard,"or if they need to step outside to gather themselves. Sometimes people just need a  release before they can focus on the writing task. 

Learning Together: Staff preparation is a good way to learn to handle emotional situations. The 3 main emotions seen in Gayla Mill's Writing Center are anger, stress and anxiety. Staff meetings are a good place to discuss emotional situations. Research on issues and role playing are helpful tools.

Ways to Respond: If the student arrives in an emotional state- Assess the strength of the emotion. Ask questions. How are you? Have you had this problem before? Active listening and sharing a similar personal problem with an assignment or professor builds understanding and trust. Use judgment "about a light touch to the hand" but hugging is "too intimate." It is also appropriate to suggest rescheduling the session if the the student can't focus. If things deteriorate, they may need to be referred to the counseling department.

Remember that extreme emotions are rare in the writing center, however, its always a good reminder to remain calm and caring.  Try to combine the "brain" with the "heart," remembering that as tutors, we try to make a positive difference in the lives our students.

https://writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v35/35.5-6.pdf

Prattle of the Sexes: A Debated Regarding the Differences Between Male and Female Writing Center Tutors

How could this not catch my eye?! 

The MSUDenver Writing Center has a pretty balanced number of female and male tutors, all of which seem to work together just fine. But how does gender diversity effect the writing center? It's not something I've naturally thought about until now. 

This article takes a female and male perspective (as written and researched by a female tutor, Lauren Gillispie, and male tutor, Alexander Olden), but enhances the gender stereotypes in order to assess the possible differences in the tutoring sessions:

Ben Rafoth, in his article entitled “Sex in the Center: Gender Differences in Tutorial Interactions,” mentions the fact that a female “wants to build rapport or get emotionally closer to the person she is talking with” (Rafoth 2). 

So women are more likely to greet the student with a 2-5 minute introductory conversation about their day or such before jumping into the assignment. It shows the student that the tutor is more of a peer than an upper hand. Males on the other hand tend to be plain, simple, and straight to the point, simply introducing themselves then beginning with the paper.

In a study comparing ten male and female graduate student writing tutors, researcher and professor of linguistics Therese Thonus found that “Female tutors...favored first- and second-person modal strategies (such as, approaching a correction by saying, “I think you should”) rather than the imperatives chosen by male tutors” (1). 

Thonus’s study also notes that “male tutors were more likely to select the most forceful suggestion type, imperatives” (Thonus 15). 

According to Thonus, “females were more likely to resort to interruptions than were their male colleagues” (6). Lauren (the female author of the article) believes females interrupt more because "we are either: a) eager to point out something you did correctly and sounds fantastic in the paper or b) excited to share with you a fabulous suggestion for your assignment"(16). As Ben Rafoth states so accurately, “a common female conversation style is to maintain equality and to avoid any obvious show of power” (2).

Lauren and Alexander both agree that "when it comes to tutoring writers, both male and female, tutors place improving your writing process first. While it would be impossible to completely change an individual tutor’s style, it’s both necessary and beneficial for each gender to be aware and respectful of the typical habits of the other sex. This general understanding will be beneficial not only to the tutors, but their tutees as well" (16).

Lauren and Alexander's Works Cited (as other references)

Rafoth, Ben, et al. “Sex in the center: Gender Differences in Tutorial Interactions.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 24.3 (1999): 1-5.
Thonus, Terese. “Tutors as Male and Female: Gender Language in Writing Conferences.” American Association for Applied Linguistics. March 23-
26, 1996. Chicago, IL.

ARTICLE (pg. 15-16):

https://writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v31/31.2.pdf

    

Minority status and the writing center

In the back of my mind, I've always held a tiny vision of me tutoring or teaching in another land far from home.  My children are adopted from China, and as I've come closer to fulfilling my dream of earning my degree, I sometimes let my mind wander to the idea of taking my family there-- teaching English and learning about the culture--from a minority point of view.  That's why "The sense of we within the I" caught my eye.  It's an essay on the culture shock and learning opportunities of a young woman far from home. Sayantani Dasgupta's (from India) experiences as a tutor in the writing center focus on her idea that "everyone should be a minority at least once in their  life." She discusses the importance of creating community on a campus that is diverse.  At the University of Idaho at Moscow, there are over 90 countries represented. Many of these students meet at the writing center.  From this place, many connections can be made, and stereotypes and biases can be eradicated. Listening to a different perspective, and from a different point of view, gives everyone, tutor and tutee, an opportunity to grow.  With the world becoming more global, it is imperative to  realize that "borders and boundaries are constantly created and dissolved."  With this idea in mind, the writing center should be a place to share culture, language and values.  As well as helping with that thesis sentence:)
http://emil.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis/?q=node/179

Audience: Getting student writers to see past the professor

While browsing the archives the other day, I found this article, "Audience: Getting student writers to see past the professor," by peer tutor Bryan Householder from the Writing Center Lab Newsletter to be quite relevant. The article expresses a very familiar aspect of tutoring; it examines the way that students write specifically for their professor and have a hard time applying their writing to a larger or different audience (something instilled in them from the "5-paragraph essay" in high school). 

Bryan believes that: "If we, as tutors, can encourage students to view their writing as a form of communication and show them that they are not just writing to the professor but also to a larger group, students will become more impassioned about their writing and, therefore, their writing will be of a much higher quality."

He goes on to explain some steps that tutors can take to help develop their students' perception of intended audience:

- showing students that their writing can be influential and important is to show students the value of making the work their own
- be willing to work with the student and determine what they want to say
- it is necessary that an intended audience be discovered
- either the student could revise the paper to fit his audience or he could focus more on what audience his paper was for

- discuss the different types of papers and forms of writing that may be most accepted by different groups of people

I get a student almost each day that I tutor that mentions what they think "the professor wants to hear." I constantly find myself having to remind or ask a student who their audience is, so this article offers a more direct way to get student to "think beyond their professor." 

https://writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v26/26.8.pdf

Freudian Concepts in the Writing Center

“Anybody there?”: A Comparison of Writing-Center Coaching and Crisis Counseling

My minor is in psychology, so I found this article interesting.  Maybe some people would not see the similarities between crisis counseling and Writing Center tutoring, but Virginia Poon of Virginia Tech does. She knows that bonding and empathy are very important in both situations.  Like the therapist and client relationship, the tutor/tutee relationship mirrors many of the aspects of  a psychotherapy session.  In terms of human development, students who come to the writing center realize their limitations, and are seeking support and betterment and growth as a writer.  A tutor has the ability to use their own interpersonal skills toward building trust, then using their expertise and experience to "demystify the assignment and implement steps for improvement." I see it as behavior therapy for the writer. We give them tools (resources, ideas, show and tell), and they use their new found knowledge to become a better writer.  Ultimately, Poon states, the most important similarity between the role of tutor and counselor is "the art of allowing clients and callers to think for themselves."  That's what we try to teach our students at the MSU-Denver Writing Center.

.http://emil.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis/?q=node/338

What Does "Helping" Mean

As I was sitting on the light rail heading home this afternoon, I was thinking about how the reality of my internship differed from my expectations.  I am considered a tutor, but honestly, sometimes I feel more like a counselor.  So many of my sessions with students are focused on giving them confidence: confidence to succeed.  It appears that my simple acts of empathizing and having faith in them allows them to move past their writer's block and/or anxiety, or whatever it is that discourages them. With this idea in mind, I found the article "Mapping the Meaning of "Help": Tutor Training and the Sense of Self-Efficacy." Essentially, it's about "the need to raise students’ expectation that they will be able to complete a writing task."

There are four components: 1)  Success through effort (getting better-mastery)
                                             2)  Modeling (showing not just telling)
                                             3)  Persuasion and encouragement (moving students away from self-                                                 defeating thoughts)          
                                             4)  Reducing anxiety (sharing concerns and empathizing)

Another idea is to make sure students leave with something: a renewed sense of confidence in their writing ability, a strong thesis sentence or  a even just "a plan."  Any of these "somethings" allow the student to move forward as a writer; moving forward equates to becoming a better writer.  The article states that "faith is an important component." This article is helpful to those of us who wonder "Did I really help my student today?" After reading this article I can honestly say YES.

http://emil.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis/?q=node/336

How Did You Learn to Write?: Making WAC/WID A Reality Through Casual Faculty Lunches

Leigh Ryan and Heather Lindenman,"It's Just Lunch, but in our Burkean Parlor," University of Maryland- IWCA 2012 Workshop

At the University of Maryland Writing Center, they were suffering from an English and Humanities bias. The other disciplines thought that the Writing Center was not for them, and that their services would not be able to help them with their own writing.  In order to remedy this, the staff began to organize some casual lunches between a faculty member in another department and themselves. Those in attendance were usually the faculty member, one of the faculty member's graduate students, the Writing Center Director Leigh Ryan, the Writing Center Assistant Director Heather Lindenman, some tutors, and, interestingly, a student in the tutor training course (our equivalent is ENG 3670). The training tutor's role was to take notes, and report back during the next class on what they noticed.

Their main goal was simple: finding out how each discipline specifically uses writing. In order to do this, the Writing Center staff developed a series of questions that they could ask the faculty member about how they use writing as a professional, and how they teach writing to their students. The questions could be put into 5 general categories, and here are some of the examples:

1. Content: What are the disciplinary conventions in these fields? What are the epistemologies behind the conventions that students need to observe?

2. Common Pitfalls: What are typical errors that students make when writing in your discipline? What should we in the writing center be on the lookout for as issues students tend to struggle with?

3. Faculty Outlooks: What do our faculty members think about student writing? What prior beliefs do faculty hold that influence their approaches to teaching writing?

4. Underlying Uncertainty: What do faculty admit that they do not know? What do they ask us for advice on?

5. Disciplinary Instability:  What happens when a discipline itself is constantly changing or in flux? How might we account for variety in professors' individual understandings of disciplinary goals?

The most intriguing question, Ryan and Lindenman say, is simple: "How did you learn to write?" The professors are often dumbstruck for a while. They often say that all they could do was read articles in their field and copy the stylistic qualities and voice. Others noted that it was just a trial and error system for much of their early writing. Then they often reflect on how this relates to their current students, and the struggles they may be seeing. 

This not only established a connection between the writing center and that faculty member, but that department as a whole. After these lunches, Ryan and Lindenman reported that they were beginning to see more writers from outside of the Humanities.

Book Review Gives Good Insights

  The Review of ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors by Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth is full of good information.  Reading the review was enlightening and made me want to buy the book or suggest to Liz we should have it as required reading for new tutors.  It explains how cultures write differently, "how each culture has its own way of organizing an essay." This information can help the tutor explain the why's more fully: Why we are taught to pattern our essays the way we do.  Standard American English essays follow a very linear pattern.  We like to know in the very first sentence what the essay is about (thesis).  From there it should transition nicely to the other themes or ideas.  Americans don't want to get lost in their reading. These lessons may help an ESL or ELL student remember to write from this perspective, to keep them focused on the idea or  point they are trying to explain.  America is also highly individualistic.  We value independence.  This idea can help explain why institutions are so tough on plagiarism. The book suggests that some countries may not even be aware of what plagiarism is-- explaining why a student may have lots of uncited quotes in their essay.  With these concepts in mind,  the tutor can more fully realize that the student is not "deficient, just different." The culture they come from may value interdependence and time may be less linear. Therefore their essays may be completely wrong from our perspective.  But it's not!
Tutoring an ESL and ELL does have its added challenges. Not only do we have to help with pronunciation and spelling we need to have a sensitivity to their cultural experiences and our expectations.

 http://emil.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis/?q=node/24

Ask not what you can do for the Writing Center, but what the Writing Center can do for you!

I found this interesting article by Teagan Decker (University of Washington, Seattle) called, Academic (Un)Seriousness: How tutor talk plays with academic discourse (p.11). Decker interviewed the tutors in her writing center to find out "What besides a good resume line does a writing center work do for the tutors?"

What she found is that "a narrative of academic socialization emerged" from tutors' developing conversations within the writing center that was not found amongst their friends outside of the writing center.

"Over time, what was once a superficial academic connection grows, with the fertilization of the personal connection, into a vigorous academic connection, making way for an academic discourse community in the writing center."

This was very interesting and has piqued my interest of how strong of an academic discourse the MSUD Writing Center has. I won't be able to help myself but observe.

Difficulties in the Writing Center

I read an article by John Blazina, "What Does Difficulty Mean in the Writing Tutorial". I chose to research about difficult students because in the midst of midterms, our writing center has been full of all types of students who may or may not have been required to come in. I've had quite a few passive or rushed students in the last couple weeks (mostly students that are required to visit) and as a result I've been feeling really dissatisfied with my sessions so I wanted to explore other "bad" sessions that tutors might have experienced. 

The very first quote I'd like to draw from Blazina's article is "talking about our difficulties [in writing tutorials] can be good". Blazina goes through many different types of students that present difficult situations for tutors but in his conclusion he brings up a very interesting point: 
"Very difficult students are rare. Our problems often arise from our own inexperience and error. We expect too much or too little from the student; we are inattentive or thoughtless; we resort too easily and frequently to “strategies” that scarcely rise beyond cliché. We should also be aware of our own proneness to shame. We too may fear incompetence or failure, have sessions with students with whom we cannot but fail". 

Blazina's gives examples on how to deal with an array of difficulties that students might present in a session but also focuses on how the tutor might reassess their expectations of a student as to avoid reacting in an unaccommodating way. Though I believe what I've quoted from Blazina above is quite harsh, I do think it's important to stand back and put yourself in the students' shoes if need be. 

http://emil.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis/?q=node/56

"Brainstorming" Tutoring Tools

I've had at least three sessions this so far this semester where the students came in without anything but their assignment sheet and a "combobulated" brain. For two of the students, they were looking to brainstorm and come up with a topic to research (usually for the 1010 or 1020 research assignment).
I was able to break down some brainstorming techniques that I use (which was interesting to have to put into words because by now my brainstorming comes fast and easily) and help the students organize what they were interested in researching. I mentioned the 2-part thesis, and the "research question" and how to develop these by asking specific questions and doing "pre-research". But for one student in particular the tools I offered didn't seem to work.
So, I looked up what other writing centers had to say about brainstorming with a student and I found the article, "Brainstorming" Tutoring Tools by Dawn Johnson (Vol. 24 No. 4, December 2002 Writing Lab Newsletter).
"Sometimes we must show students how to extract themselves and their theses from the creative swamp"(11).
Dawn explains that sometimes the terms "brainstorm" and "freewrite" to a student can by interpreted as to following their own stream of consciousness - which might look like a linear process in which the student would expect to follow certain steps of creative thinking. But we know that's not true. The term "brainstorm" doesn't really do anything to direct a student's focus.
Dawn explained a method that she uses when brainstorming with students: 7 Questions. For example, What is this paper about?; What are you trying to say?; What is your point?
By asking the specific directing questions that Dawn proposes, it forces the student to focus their ideas cohesively. She explains that the students must "look up from the page to find the words". 

The Challenging Student

Today I worked with a student who used Fox News.com as a source of information for an MLA academic paper.  This concerned me.  Not one of my Literature/English Professors would have allowed this as a credible source.  She also didn't understand the word efficacy--a problem because she had to compare and verify efficacy in the product she was researching.  I learned today that I can only help a student as much as they want to be helped. 

The article "What Does Difficulty Mean  in the Writing Center Tutorial" lists the challenging types of students a tutor may encounter.  The list includes the student who is: passive, angry, egotistical, learning disabled (but unknown to tutor), has weak writing skills as well as underdeveloped critical thinking skills, to name a few.  The tutor has a big job.  Sometimes it's not the student, but the instructions or the professor.  And sometimes, the author states, "it's the tutor."  The author of the article, John Blazina,  says that everyone makes mistakes--including tutors.  For example, when trying to help a student who had an unknown learning disability, he was brusque and made her cry. Ultimately he learned that she seemed passive because "everything came hard to her." She truly had a hard time getting started and understanding the material.  This wasn't the case with my student today.  She was just lazy.  But the article points out that we can only do so much for students, and that ultimately it's important for tutors to consult with one another.  And realize that all of us have much to learn.


http://emil.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis/?q=node/56

But...I don't know either! :Discipline-Specific Lessons: What Tutoring Reports Taught Us

I've noticed lately that there have been a lot of Philosophy papers coming through our writing center. I have worked on two in the last week myself.
My Philosophy background consists of Intro to Philosophy (taken three years ago) and Art Theory (which sometimes includes a wider range of philosophers) so when a student wants to make sure that they are fully answering their teacher's prompts and proving that they understand the content, I'm not very confident in helping them because I'm unfamiliar with most of the material.
So I researched tips and common trends in working with different disciplines and I found a really great article by a writing center group who studied their tutoring reports and found common trends amongst students with Literature, History, and Philosophy papers.

They found 2 major areas of concern for these assignments:
1. Understanding how students imagine they are addressing an assignment (What elements of the assignment are they addressing? How are they attempting to tailor their response to discipline specific demands? How is their knowledge of the subject shaping their response to the assignment?)
2. Understanding students' expectations regarding a tutor's knowledge across disciplines

In both Literature and History assignments the most common concerns the tutors found amongst their sessions were: organization, revision, and getting started. The most common difficulty stemmed from the writer's dependence on summarizing the text or historical facts. The article gives a couple strategies on how to help the student differentiate between summarizing and their own analyzing and interpreting.

Most relavent to my last few sessions, the article also discusses the difficulties in working with Philosophy assignments:
"We’ve seen a few who do provide some assignment guidelines, but students are so overwhelmed with the foreign nature and difficulty of the subject that they don’t make much use of them. We’ve also seen that, while tutors generally feel confident enough as writers to tackle philosophy tutorials, it is one area where tutors do express a certain frustration with their perceived lack of expertise with the subject and texts". (p 4)
The text also gives suggestions on how to approach Philosophy papers even though as a tutor, you may not have an expert knowledge of the content in front of you. 

Now I could have just written out all of the suggestions the article presents but that would be too easy for you! Read the article, it's very helpful.

https://writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v26/26.5.pdf
The article begins on page 1 of the January 2002 issue of Writing Lab Newsletter

HOC, LOC, and ELL

            This semester I have been encountering two issues over and over again with tutees: lack of prewriting and ELL difficulties.

            A lack of prewriting is usually caused by a time crunch on the student’s part. They are expecting the session to cover low order concerns (LOC), such as sentence structure and citation formatting. What I’ve found over the course of the semester is that these students are often in need of much more higher order concern (HOC) help, especially in organization. What they’ve brought to the Writing Center is a sloppy first draft, and when a time crunch is involved, students often don’t want to hear that they have a lot more work ahead of them if they want this to be a great paper. My challenge as a tutor has been to honor both the HOC and time constraints of the student. What I have been doing pedagogically is to help the student make an outline for their paper. I assure them that they have their ideas, now they just need to be polished and ordered logically. Having something tangible to walk away with seems to make the tutee feel more at ease, and like they have a clear direction to take their paper in.

            My struggles with English Language Learners (ELL) has also been balancing HOC and LOC. Many ELL students want to focus on correcting their grammar, but often times lose focus on the actual content of their paper. In order to balance the agenda the tutee has set, and what HOCs I would like to focus on. Overall, having the student read his/her paper aloud has been the most successful. Most tutees have been able to self-identify a grammar mistake, and may only need me to model the correct grammatical structure once. After that, we are usually able to discuss the HOCs that I have noted during the reading.

            As my internship continues, I would like to find some other pedagogical techniques for working with ELL students, and some other multimodal strategies for prewriting. 

Writer Based or Text Based: Conflicting Goals

MSU--Denver's WC  approach to writing is writer based, meaning we as tutors try to help the student become a better writer.  Most times, though, the student comes in to the writing center with one goal: to get a good grade on their paper or essay.  How do tutors choose to help balance these needs and goals?  In Matthew Ortoleva's article, "Centering the Writer or Centering the Text: A Meditation on a Shifting Practice in Writing Center Consultation" he addresses the sometimes conflicting goals of the tutor and student.  He gives several examples of helping students as a writer centered tutor, and addresses the times he's tutored as a text centered tutor. For example: his goal of helping a bright ESL student  get into grad school.  Yes, there are times when we tutor with the big questions in mind: audience, genre, purpose, why?...but there are times when a text centered session is appropriate. I found this article helpful because sometimes a paper is so well written, it's not a question of the student becoming a better writer; I am another set of eyes on the text to further refine an already great essay.

http://emil.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis/?q=node/209

 

How do I help with a student's resume when mine is nonexistent?

Next week I have an appointment with a student who wants to go over a cover letter and resume. I realized that I don't even have a nice looking resume so I should probably figure out what that would be before I try and help another student with theirs.
So I researched how tutors can help with resumes (also for my own benefit in writing mine) and I found a great article from: https://writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v27/27.8.pdf

It's called, "To Whom it May Concern" and Beyond: Equipping Students to Write for Employers" by Angela Laflen.

This article was helpful by giving specific things to look for in a resume: the audience and the purpose (of cover letters and resumes). It describe 2 types of "Business Readers" in which the student would want to tailor their resumes to, skimmers and skeptics. It gave pointers on how to tailor to each type of reader.
The most important part of writing a resume is to make sure the student's claim is stated clearly (and the article gives good and bad examples of a claim).
The article also offers "tests" to use in making sure the resume is effective. There is the 35 second test and the assertion test. Each are described at the end of the article.

I hope this helps everyone else as much as it's helped me.


**Liz has awesome examples of good-looking resumes! I'm sure she'd be more than willing to show you if you asked :)

"Not Playing it Safe: Tutoring an Ethic of Diversity within a Non-Diverse Environment"

  In Rihn's article, "Not Playing it Safe: Tutoring an Ethic of Diversity within a Non-Diverse Environment" he tackles the difficult subject of racism as well as discussing two central goals of the writing center: being a "contact zone" and a "safe house."
The conceptual idea behind the "contact zone" is that the WC should be a socially safe or neutral space where "meaning and risk-free learning" can occur. It should be a place where the minority or oppressed groups can go; institutions, as a rule, impose the dominant culture's view and rigorous standards on all its students, making some students feel "not normal." In other words, being a safe zone means to "comfort the afflicted."
The idea behind the "contact zone" is one in which opposes the comfort zone.  The contact zone should be a place where the privileged should be able to explore risk in learning; a place to question the comforts of their status, a place to "afflict the comfortable."  For the privileged student it should be a place to grapple with gender, class, race, and the ways in which power works in our society.  Rihn suggests that we use the tutoring session as an opportunity to stretch all of the students, whether oppressed or privileged, to question audience, institutions and ourselves. 

Andrew Rihn is a tutor at Kent State University where the majority of students are white and middle class. It is mostly an environment of privilege.


http://emil.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis/?q=node/178
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Another ESL source: Reassessing the "Proofreading Trap": ESL Tutoring & Writing Center Instruction by Sharon A. Myers

Funny that when as I was reading this article, I realized that I had read it before in ENG 3670!
Anyway, the reason why I wanted to look up information about ESL is because my first two sessions in the writing center as an intern were with ESL students. It wasn't the easiest transition into tutoring and I didn't feel 100% about working with them so I wanted to find more information about, as Sharon Myers refers to it, the "Proofreading Trap".

This article is helpful because it humanizes us as tutors, expressing that working with an ESL student is no easy feat. It gives great suggestions on how to approach ESL works: Learner's Dictionary, Minimal Marking, Error Log Bogs, and Self-Editing Checklists.

A line of Myers' that stuck with me most in speaking about the difference between ESL "errors" and native English speaker "errors" was our mistake in seeing "...errors as something to be eliminated instead of artifacts of processing".

Since I was feeling a little overwhelmed after working with the ESL students on my first day, this article has really helped me figure out ways to approach ESL papers without feeling the need to just correct everything.

http://karen.stanley.people.cpcc.edu/docs%20for%20Tips%20for%20Writing%20Center/Proofreading%20Trap%20-%20Myers.pdf

"ESL and LD students: Diverse Populations, Common Concerns"

"ESL and LD students: Diverse Populations, Common Concerns" by Jane Hirschorn discusses the challenges ESL and LD (learning disabled) students face.  In this sensitive article, Hirschorn uses several examples of her own ESL and LD tutoring sessions to remind us that tutors must tailor their teaching/tutoring strategies to support these students.  Examples of this include scheduling longer appointment times (1 hour vs. 40 min.), as well as meeting with these students on a weekly basis to continue building upon the foundations they are learning: internalizing metacognitive processes such as prewriting and comprehension, which take more time to learn with ESL and LD students.

After reading this article I am reminded how difficult writing can be for me, and I intuitively know the rhetorical patterns of English which "are shaped by the politics and values of our western culture" (Hirschorn). I can only imagine how challenging and frustrating it must be for ESL and LD students to write academically.

To read the full article click on the link below:

http://emil.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis/?q=node/175

ELL Students and Special Considerations

In Rebecca Taylor Fremo's "'Unlearning Habits, Customs, And Character': Changing the Ethos Of Our Writing Center," she discusses her efforts to recruit both international and domestic students of color to her writing center (she is the director).  Fremo seeks to provide a welcoming ambiance, where ELL or ESL students who may feel marginalized and disconnected from the dominant culture, feel understood. Fremo addresses the importance of understanding the "culturally, racially, or linguistically diverse writers" who may be timid of seeking help. She goes about this by educating her tutors in cultural considerations and by training her staff to empower people of color to find their authentic cultural voice in writing academically. Ideally, the tutoring staff should reflect this diversity as well. It is an interesting article and anyone interested in expanding their understanding of the challenges that ELL/ESL students face should check it out at: https://writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v34/34.8.pdf

I chose this article because MSU-Denver has a diverse student body.  I am also helping to create a local ELL resource website for our students seeking to improve their English and writing skills.