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.