Time. Of course it's on my mind because this is final exam week, a week when "time" is a precious and hard-to-find commodity. Time is also on my mind because an email from a Modern Sophist follower finally reminded me that it has been more than four months (!) since my last post. That's an eternity in cyber-time.
Time has become an issue in the university right now as the governor of Indiana presses colleges and universities to consider offering three-year bachelor's degrees. The benefits, of course, are (a) less student loan debt (fewer years of tuition to pay) and (b) faster entry into the workforce (thus increasing how much money you can earn before retirement). But already the familiar refrain of negativity has begun: How can we provide quality education with less quantity? Where do we slash the core curriculum; how much general education do students need? Does reducing the time it takes to complete an undergraduate degree necessarily mean lowering our standards?
In Time for Life, John Robinson and Geofrey Godbey tell us that we need "time-savoring skills": "To be happier and wiser, it is easier to increase appreciation levels more than efficiency levels. Only by appreciating more can we hope to have a sustainable society" (316). If we apply this to the teaching that takes place in the university, the prospect of a three-year bachelor's degree becomes less scary - but also revolutionary. What if we stepped back as a society and reevaluated what college really needs to teach people? More and more I'm convinced that bachelor's degrees are not vocational training; whatever degree you leave college with, you will learn your profession in OJT (on the job training). Every employer out there knows this: No college grad is ready to hit the ground running; college and career are separate entities.
Here is a synopsis of the current approach to undergraduate education in the U.S.: We shuttle college students into "majors" that help them specialize in preparation for a career, and then we pack their schedules with "gen eds" that supposedly give them a well-rounded education. The "core curriculum," as those general education classes are often known, is intended to provide an interdisciplinary education, and the intention here is commendable. But in practice, students spend two years (at my institution, the core curriculum is almost half the required number of credit hours for a bachelor's degree) taking classes which they perceive as having little relevance to their career goals as well as having little connection to one another; the effect is frustrated and fragmented educational experience, wherein students may enjoy individual classes but still seem to feel, on the whole, that the university is quite literally wasting their time.
I propose a different method for improving the time students spend in college. In our information-saturated, technology-wired, global-spanning society, what people really need to learn in college is how to learn. Most adults will change their careers - not just jobs, but actual careers - at least once in their lives; I can't tell you how many English majors I've met who are now in business, medicine, or the law, though they started out thinking they wanted to be teachers. (In fact, I'm married to one!) The great benefit of a major like the English major is the flexible, analytical thinking it teaches students. English majors are a versatile bunch because they know how to reflect, how to read closely, how to write well, how to communicate effectively, how to analyze. Other majors teach this, too, but the point is, shouldn't that be the point of a college education - to learn how to learn for the rest of your life, rather than trying to prepare, outside of the workplace, for a career?
What if we took the time students spend in college and made it less about teaching - the curriculum, the standards, the outcomes - and more abut learning? What if we offered two degrees: a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science? What if students didn't declare "majors" and "minors" but decided on one of these two degrees and then spent three years immersed in classes that taught them how to read, write, research, theorize, explore, question, communicate? I'm not advocating doing away with Biology or Chemistry or Political Science or Literature. I'm simply suggesting that, as highly educated individuals, university professors could put our heads together and come up with a dynamic, truly interdisciplinary, highly individualized program of study for students that would prepare them for the complex, ever-evolving work of our global economy - and for being responsible citizens in a globalized world.
Robinson and Godfrey tell us that Americans tend to interpret efficiency as "always...wanting more," yet "appreciating may start both with valuing more about what is already here and with wanting less" (316). I posit that we should value what we already have in the American university system - faculty in many different specialty areas who are poised to provide a rich educational experience to some of the most highly literate and well-educated young people to ever step onto college campuses - but want less: less specialization amongst students (who don't really know what they want to do with their careers at 18), less focus on what comes after college (let the workforce prepare its own, as they already do), less insistence on compartmentalizing knowledge within academic departments (even as we preach interdisciplinary learning). If we take time for teaching what really matters, we can make the most of the time we do have with students - even if that time is three years instead of four.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Monday, December 7, 2009
Where Do We Go From Here?
I hope everyone enjoys the Buffy, the Vampire Slayer reference of this post's title. The song is now running through my head.
While I don't foresee my tutors-in-training and I joining hands and bursting into song (and if you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out Once More With Feeling), I do find myself considering the future of our writing center. I've been working this week on an article about my experience teaching the tutor training course, reflecting on the lessons I've learned - most of them the hard way - about putting into practice the collaboration we aspire to in the writing center. We still have a long, uphill road for successful institutional collaboration here at our writing center, and certainly the 6% cut to the higher education budget in the state of Indiana won't help. But I feel like we've started down a good path this semester. And I'm thinking about ways we can keep moving in the right direction.
In the latest issue of The Writing Center Journal, Nancy Grimm describes her writing center's evolution into a place of "productive and flexible engagement with linguistic, social, racial, and cultural diversity" (15), a place recognized and financially supported by a corporate sponsor for its emphasis on the diversity that matters most in the modern, global workforce. Grimm writes:
"In fact, all of us, the old-timers like myself as well as the novice coaches, were learning and changing in this environment and fundamentally shifting our focus from an academic skills/writing process version of literacy to a consideration of epistemologies, power relations, identities, and ideologies that circulate in different discourses...The current version of the writing center I describe here developed from a process of asking questions about clientele, staffing, and institutional identity along with a willingness to question foundational assumptions that typically guide writing center practices." (16)
To end this semester's blog posts, I want to recap Grimm's three "frameworks" for modern, diverse writing centers. I hope my tutors-in-training will consider ways they can help our writing center progress in these directions, in terms of faculty education, marketing of the writing center, tutor recruitment, and tutor training.
1. Global Englishes: Grimm doesn't argue that writing centers should stop working with English as a primary language, but she does argue that writing centers need to promote "multilingualism rather than monolingualism as a conceptual norm" (17). I think of my tutors struggling with concerns about what professors would say to their ESL clients if their papers didn't read exactly like an NES student's; I remember Crystal's very pointed question: "How much can we expect professors to really change?"
I think Grimm offers us an intelligent way to address this problem by putting it in terms of the world's work: "The challenges encountered in today's workplaces often result from strained communication between people from diverse cultures, disciplines, languages, backgrounds, and perspectives...[Professionals] make connections across cultures and train themselves to listen harder because people's lives depend on it. That's the reality of globalized work, not the theme-park fantasy of multicultural menus, music, and costumes" (19).
Writing centers can and should hire tutors with diverse linguistic backgrounds, even if, as Grimm says, those tutors haven't always made As in English. Tutors need to be trained in the latest SLA theory, and they need to critique the culture of monolingualism that pervades the academy. Writing center directors need to recruit linguistically, culturally, and racially diverse tutors, and we need to educate university administrators and our faculty colleagues in the importance of respect for linguistic diversity.
2. Multiliteracy. Quoting the New London Group, an international literacy scholarship consortium, Grimm writes: "[T]here can no longer be one set of standards or skills that constitutes the ends of literacy learning. In fact, within a multiliteracies framework, there can no longer be an end of literacy learning but rather an ongoing effort to navigate a multiplicity of discourses" (20).
In the context of a multiliterate society, the students who need writing centers may no longer be those seen as "deficient" in academic discourse. Even those students we traditionally consider "good writers" will likely need help composing multimodal and multigenre texts, working with unfamiliar software, researching in digital forums, publishing in online communities, and communicating across cultures and languages. Writing centers that promote multiliteracy are no longer dealing only with basic writing or first-year writing students upset over a bad grade and looking for somebody to explain the rules of comma usage; multiliteracy writing centers offer assistance to students across the curriculum, at all grade levels, which means we need to market our writing centers to these students, remove the stigma of remediation and the conception of the grammar fix-it-shop all too often attached to writing centers, and train writing tutors to work with multiliteracies.
3. Designers of Social Futures. I find Grimm's third and final framework the most exciting for writing center work: "The New London Group...introduce[s] the notion that literacy education is not about having students learn to reproduce and recognize available designs but about having students enact the transformative possibilities in design. Within this conception of literacy education, students are not simply passive bearers of culture but...are understood as participating in social transformation. They are not waiting on the sidelines for adulthood and/or an institutional certification of having mastered a dominant literacy" (21-22).
This excites me because it is exactly the way I like to look at students - as active agents in their own intellectual, professional, and cultural development, not as empty vessels waiting to be filled or unmolded clay waiting to be shaped - and because it bodes well for our university's writing center. I have often lamented (as I have my tutors-in-training) that our writing center is primarily run by the tutors. But Grimm's framework puts a different spin on that set-up. If students are designers of social futures, and if writing centers exist to place peers (tutor/client) in conversation about writers and about writing, then who better to design a writing center for the future than our tutors?
That last point doesn't let writing center directors off the hook, of course. But one thing I have learned this semester is that my passion, my vision, and my dedication are not enough. Nor should they be. Wherever we go from here (and this again is a lesson from Grimm, taking her lesson from Toni Morrison), we can only get there together.
Grimm, Nancy. "New Conceptual Frameworks for Writing Center Work." The Writing Center Journal 29.2 (2009): 11-27. Print.
While I don't foresee my tutors-in-training and I joining hands and bursting into song (and if you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out Once More With Feeling), I do find myself considering the future of our writing center. I've been working this week on an article about my experience teaching the tutor training course, reflecting on the lessons I've learned - most of them the hard way - about putting into practice the collaboration we aspire to in the writing center. We still have a long, uphill road for successful institutional collaboration here at our writing center, and certainly the 6% cut to the higher education budget in the state of Indiana won't help. But I feel like we've started down a good path this semester. And I'm thinking about ways we can keep moving in the right direction.
In the latest issue of The Writing Center Journal, Nancy Grimm describes her writing center's evolution into a place of "productive and flexible engagement with linguistic, social, racial, and cultural diversity" (15), a place recognized and financially supported by a corporate sponsor for its emphasis on the diversity that matters most in the modern, global workforce. Grimm writes:
"In fact, all of us, the old-timers like myself as well as the novice coaches, were learning and changing in this environment and fundamentally shifting our focus from an academic skills/writing process version of literacy to a consideration of epistemologies, power relations, identities, and ideologies that circulate in different discourses...The current version of the writing center I describe here developed from a process of asking questions about clientele, staffing, and institutional identity along with a willingness to question foundational assumptions that typically guide writing center practices." (16)
To end this semester's blog posts, I want to recap Grimm's three "frameworks" for modern, diverse writing centers. I hope my tutors-in-training will consider ways they can help our writing center progress in these directions, in terms of faculty education, marketing of the writing center, tutor recruitment, and tutor training.
1. Global Englishes: Grimm doesn't argue that writing centers should stop working with English as a primary language, but she does argue that writing centers need to promote "multilingualism rather than monolingualism as a conceptual norm" (17). I think of my tutors struggling with concerns about what professors would say to their ESL clients if their papers didn't read exactly like an NES student's; I remember Crystal's very pointed question: "How much can we expect professors to really change?"
I think Grimm offers us an intelligent way to address this problem by putting it in terms of the world's work: "The challenges encountered in today's workplaces often result from strained communication between people from diverse cultures, disciplines, languages, backgrounds, and perspectives...[Professionals] make connections across cultures and train themselves to listen harder because people's lives depend on it. That's the reality of globalized work, not the theme-park fantasy of multicultural menus, music, and costumes" (19).
Writing centers can and should hire tutors with diverse linguistic backgrounds, even if, as Grimm says, those tutors haven't always made As in English. Tutors need to be trained in the latest SLA theory, and they need to critique the culture of monolingualism that pervades the academy. Writing center directors need to recruit linguistically, culturally, and racially diverse tutors, and we need to educate university administrators and our faculty colleagues in the importance of respect for linguistic diversity.
2. Multiliteracy. Quoting the New London Group, an international literacy scholarship consortium, Grimm writes: "[T]here can no longer be one set of standards or skills that constitutes the ends of literacy learning. In fact, within a multiliteracies framework, there can no longer be an end of literacy learning but rather an ongoing effort to navigate a multiplicity of discourses" (20).
In the context of a multiliterate society, the students who need writing centers may no longer be those seen as "deficient" in academic discourse. Even those students we traditionally consider "good writers" will likely need help composing multimodal and multigenre texts, working with unfamiliar software, researching in digital forums, publishing in online communities, and communicating across cultures and languages. Writing centers that promote multiliteracy are no longer dealing only with basic writing or first-year writing students upset over a bad grade and looking for somebody to explain the rules of comma usage; multiliteracy writing centers offer assistance to students across the curriculum, at all grade levels, which means we need to market our writing centers to these students, remove the stigma of remediation and the conception of the grammar fix-it-shop all too often attached to writing centers, and train writing tutors to work with multiliteracies.
3. Designers of Social Futures. I find Grimm's third and final framework the most exciting for writing center work: "The New London Group...introduce[s] the notion that literacy education is not about having students learn to reproduce and recognize available designs but about having students enact the transformative possibilities in design. Within this conception of literacy education, students are not simply passive bearers of culture but...are understood as participating in social transformation. They are not waiting on the sidelines for adulthood and/or an institutional certification of having mastered a dominant literacy" (21-22).
This excites me because it is exactly the way I like to look at students - as active agents in their own intellectual, professional, and cultural development, not as empty vessels waiting to be filled or unmolded clay waiting to be shaped - and because it bodes well for our university's writing center. I have often lamented (as I have my tutors-in-training) that our writing center is primarily run by the tutors. But Grimm's framework puts a different spin on that set-up. If students are designers of social futures, and if writing centers exist to place peers (tutor/client) in conversation about writers and about writing, then who better to design a writing center for the future than our tutors?
That last point doesn't let writing center directors off the hook, of course. But one thing I have learned this semester is that my passion, my vision, and my dedication are not enough. Nor should they be. Wherever we go from here (and this again is a lesson from Grimm, taking her lesson from Toni Morrison), we can only get there together.
Grimm, Nancy. "New Conceptual Frameworks for Writing Center Work." The Writing Center Journal 29.2 (2009): 11-27. Print.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Connection Failed
I had to laugh this morning as I tried to respond to several of my tutors'-in-training blogs, and each time I would hit "post comment," my laptop would tell me: Connection Failed. My comments were lost, and after a few such occurrences, I gave up and stopped trying to comment. (Sorry, tutors!)
The irony, of course, is that my tutors-in-training this past week read about and then practiced online tutoring. Our readings concerned the "Anxieties of Distance" (Carlson and Apperson-Williams) and the unique challenges of "Responding Online" (Rafoth). In my tutors' blogs, I see a range of positions toward online tutoring, from C.'s wholehearted support of the online tutorial to Z.'s adamant denial that online tutoring can be as valuable as the face-to-face tutorial.
My own position falls somewhere in the middle. The greatest danger of online tutoring, of course, is that the connection will faill - not just in the sense that the technology goes wonky on us (although this does happen, I'm sure) but in the sense that we, as tutors, will fail to connect with our clients.
The writing center tutorial is all about connections, I would argue; the interpersonal relationship between tutor and client facilitates the verbal give-and-take that makes the writing center tutorial so valuable. If that connection fails in the online environment, especially in asynchronous tutorials like the "email tutorial" (which is all our writing center currently offers), what is the effect on the client?
I know some writing center directors see the online tutorial as a means of inviting clients into the face-to-face tutorial. The logic, simply, is that if the client has a good online experience, s/he will be less intimidated about coming to the face-to-face center. I'm sure this is true to some extent, that some clients choose online tutoring for its convenience ("You mean I can just email my paper to a tutor instead of spending 30 minutes in the writing center? Sweet!") or because it means they don't have to "face" their writing problems ("You mean I don't have to admit to another human being, face to face, that my writing sucks? Sweet!"). But in our technology-saturated world, I think many clients choose online tutoring because they have seen first-hand that excellent collaborations can take place online.
That is, many of our clients are fully immersed in online worlds like Second Life or MMORPGs like Halo; some of them no doubt blog or follow blogs; most of them probably use social networking sites like Facebook not just to keep up with old friends but to make new ones; a few of them may even contribute actively to messageboards on fansites or activist organizations, or possibly even compose and/or read fanfiction, a highly collaborative online activity, as I know from personal experience. Such techno-savvy clients come to the online tutorial with an expectation for how productive the online collaboration can be. But that doesn't mean that they are prepared to "connect" with a writing tutor.
How do we, as tutors, captialize on the willingness of our online clients to move the tutorial into a new, virtual realm, while also realizing that their online experiences may not have prepared them for the online tutorial anymore than being a student in a writing class has prepared them for the face-to-face tutorial? How do we ensure that the client-to-tutor connection that makes a good tutorial in any environment doesn't fail online?
I don't have an answer to this question. I think online tutoring is an area ripe for research; certainly The Writing Lab Newsletter devotes more and more of its pages to the online writing center these days, and we need even more formal research (my tutors rightly pointed out how dated the articles we read for class were - and I shudder at how quickly 1998 has become dated!).
In the meantime, my advice to my tutors-in-training would be to avoid the extremes of "technological determinism" - it will be a good tutorial because it is on the computer, as if the technology itself makes for a successful encounter - or "technophobia" - the online tutorial is always already inferior to the face-to-face tutorial because it takes place through technology. We need to recognize the online writing center as a REAL space; we need to take it seriously as writing center professionals, whether we are tutors and directors, by training our tutors to use the space effectively and by researching the problems and the potential of online tutorials.
Of course, the connection sometimes fails in face-to-face tutorials, too. But when it fails online, does it fail for the same reasons? And what can we do to make sure the connection does not fail in the online environment? These are the questions I leave my tutors-in-training with this week. I look forward to hearing (and reading) their ideas.
The irony, of course, is that my tutors-in-training this past week read about and then practiced online tutoring. Our readings concerned the "Anxieties of Distance" (Carlson and Apperson-Williams) and the unique challenges of "Responding Online" (Rafoth). In my tutors' blogs, I see a range of positions toward online tutoring, from C.'s wholehearted support of the online tutorial to Z.'s adamant denial that online tutoring can be as valuable as the face-to-face tutorial.
My own position falls somewhere in the middle. The greatest danger of online tutoring, of course, is that the connection will faill - not just in the sense that the technology goes wonky on us (although this does happen, I'm sure) but in the sense that we, as tutors, will fail to connect with our clients.
The writing center tutorial is all about connections, I would argue; the interpersonal relationship between tutor and client facilitates the verbal give-and-take that makes the writing center tutorial so valuable. If that connection fails in the online environment, especially in asynchronous tutorials like the "email tutorial" (which is all our writing center currently offers), what is the effect on the client?
I know some writing center directors see the online tutorial as a means of inviting clients into the face-to-face tutorial. The logic, simply, is that if the client has a good online experience, s/he will be less intimidated about coming to the face-to-face center. I'm sure this is true to some extent, that some clients choose online tutoring for its convenience ("You mean I can just email my paper to a tutor instead of spending 30 minutes in the writing center? Sweet!") or because it means they don't have to "face" their writing problems ("You mean I don't have to admit to another human being, face to face, that my writing sucks? Sweet!"). But in our technology-saturated world, I think many clients choose online tutoring because they have seen first-hand that excellent collaborations can take place online.
That is, many of our clients are fully immersed in online worlds like Second Life or MMORPGs like Halo; some of them no doubt blog or follow blogs; most of them probably use social networking sites like Facebook not just to keep up with old friends but to make new ones; a few of them may even contribute actively to messageboards on fansites or activist organizations, or possibly even compose and/or read fanfiction, a highly collaborative online activity, as I know from personal experience. Such techno-savvy clients come to the online tutorial with an expectation for how productive the online collaboration can be. But that doesn't mean that they are prepared to "connect" with a writing tutor.
How do we, as tutors, captialize on the willingness of our online clients to move the tutorial into a new, virtual realm, while also realizing that their online experiences may not have prepared them for the online tutorial anymore than being a student in a writing class has prepared them for the face-to-face tutorial? How do we ensure that the client-to-tutor connection that makes a good tutorial in any environment doesn't fail online?
I don't have an answer to this question. I think online tutoring is an area ripe for research; certainly The Writing Lab Newsletter devotes more and more of its pages to the online writing center these days, and we need even more formal research (my tutors rightly pointed out how dated the articles we read for class were - and I shudder at how quickly 1998 has become dated!).
In the meantime, my advice to my tutors-in-training would be to avoid the extremes of "technological determinism" - it will be a good tutorial because it is on the computer, as if the technology itself makes for a successful encounter - or "technophobia" - the online tutorial is always already inferior to the face-to-face tutorial because it takes place through technology. We need to recognize the online writing center as a REAL space; we need to take it seriously as writing center professionals, whether we are tutors and directors, by training our tutors to use the space effectively and by researching the problems and the potential of online tutorials.
Of course, the connection sometimes fails in face-to-face tutorials, too. But when it fails online, does it fail for the same reasons? And what can we do to make sure the connection does not fail in the online environment? These are the questions I leave my tutors-in-training with this week. I look forward to hearing (and reading) their ideas.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
When the center doesn't hold
I began my tutor training practicum this semester with the penultimate comment on writing center ideology: Stephen North's "The Idea of a Writing Center." I did this with the best of intentions, believing it was absolutely essential to take this group of English majors - all good writers themselves, many of whom expressed a desire to tutor based on the irritation they felt when reading classmates' or friends' "crappy papers" - from a text-centered focus to a writer-centered focus. What I didn't appreciate at the time, despite my immersion in postmodern theory, was that in presenting my tutors-in-training with the "idea" of a writing center, I was asking them to create a center: one focused on the writer vs. one focused on the text.
Matthew Ortoleva's "Centering the Writer or Centering the Text: A Meditation on a Shifting Practice in Writing Center Consultation" offers a series of real-life tutoring vignettes that cause me to question how strictly we should adhere to North's idea of a writing center. Jacques Derrida once wrote that "the center" (by which he meant, to be incredibly reductive, an essential "truth" or core ideology that determines our thoughts, beliefs, and actions) may not be a reality - no Truth exists - but it is nevertheless an essential function: Before we can decide what we think or believe, before we can decide how to act, we have to establish for ourselves a "center" that will guide us. In the writing conference, we ask tutors to choose between one of two "centers." On the one hand, a tutor can "center" the writer; in this case, the tutor believes that the essential function of the writing center tutorial is to improve a writer, not to improve the writer's text. On the other hand, a tutor can "center" the text; in this case, the tutor believes the essential function of the tutorial is to improve the paper the client has brought to the center.
North's "Idea of a Writing Center" clearly locates a text-centered tutorial as outside the "ideal" of a writing center tutorial. However, as Ortoleva so aptly points out, and as my tutors have certainly experienced time and again this semester, clients quite often come to the writing center with a determined text-centered focus: The client has a text due in a few hours/days/weeks, and s/he wants a good grade on that paper/graduate school admissions essay/resume/etc. to be as good as it can possibly be. And as Ortoleva points out, a very unproductive session can ensue when the writer-centered tutor runs headlong into the text-centered client. In this situation, does the center hold?
Or, to pose a less existential question, who decides where the center should be - the client or the tutor?
Without promising that this will work in every case, Ortoleva offers some good advice: "We must realize that the text the student carries into the writing center is always the student's primary concern. As writing consultants, we must balance the student's desire to leave with an improved text and our desire to help students internalize the lessons learned during the improvement of that text...It may not always seem practical, but collaboration between writing consultant and student should start with a discussion and mutual agreement about the goals of a session" (4).
I want to suggest a way tutors can approach this "discussion and mutual agreement." Of course clients are always going to be concerned about their grades, but one thing we as tutors can do is point out to clients that, when they are writing for a class, the purpose of the writing assignment is both for them to demonstrate their knowledge and writing capabilities to their professors AND - this is the part clients often overlook - to learn about the subject of their writing and to improve as writers. The writing center tutorial cannot produce a perfect paper for clients while remaining writing-centered. But it can help the client realize the learning goals of academic writing assignments - and in so doing, prepare the client to do well on future writing tasks, in school and out.
When clients are writing for real-world purposes, however, such as the graduate school admissions essay or the professional resume for a job, I believe Ortoleva is right in pointing out that a text-centered focus may be appropriate. It is still important that we discuss this with the client; we need to be sure they understand that, given the real-life implications of this writing task, we are willing to focus more on the text, but that the writing center can be most helpful to them on their school-based writing tasks by working with them on their writing processes.
A successful writing center tutorial engages both tutor and client equally in a collaborative process. Whether that collaboration takes place on "the writer" or on "the text" may require negotiation - more negotiation that North's "Idea of a Writing Center" allows for. At the end of the day, it comes back to what I've been saying to my tutors-in-training all along: The value of the writing center tutorial is that it is individualized. That ultimately means we create "the center" anew with every client, in every session, every day.
Ortoleva, Matthew. "Centering the Writer or Centering the Text: A Meditation on a Shifting Practice in Writing Center Consultation." Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. http://projects.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis?q=book/print/209
Matthew Ortoleva's "Centering the Writer or Centering the Text: A Meditation on a Shifting Practice in Writing Center Consultation" offers a series of real-life tutoring vignettes that cause me to question how strictly we should adhere to North's idea of a writing center. Jacques Derrida once wrote that "the center" (by which he meant, to be incredibly reductive, an essential "truth" or core ideology that determines our thoughts, beliefs, and actions) may not be a reality - no Truth exists - but it is nevertheless an essential function: Before we can decide what we think or believe, before we can decide how to act, we have to establish for ourselves a "center" that will guide us. In the writing conference, we ask tutors to choose between one of two "centers." On the one hand, a tutor can "center" the writer; in this case, the tutor believes that the essential function of the writing center tutorial is to improve a writer, not to improve the writer's text. On the other hand, a tutor can "center" the text; in this case, the tutor believes the essential function of the tutorial is to improve the paper the client has brought to the center.
North's "Idea of a Writing Center" clearly locates a text-centered tutorial as outside the "ideal" of a writing center tutorial. However, as Ortoleva so aptly points out, and as my tutors have certainly experienced time and again this semester, clients quite often come to the writing center with a determined text-centered focus: The client has a text due in a few hours/days/weeks, and s/he wants a good grade on that paper/graduate school admissions essay/resume/etc. to be as good as it can possibly be. And as Ortoleva points out, a very unproductive session can ensue when the writer-centered tutor runs headlong into the text-centered client. In this situation, does the center hold?
Or, to pose a less existential question, who decides where the center should be - the client or the tutor?
Without promising that this will work in every case, Ortoleva offers some good advice: "We must realize that the text the student carries into the writing center is always the student's primary concern. As writing consultants, we must balance the student's desire to leave with an improved text and our desire to help students internalize the lessons learned during the improvement of that text...It may not always seem practical, but collaboration between writing consultant and student should start with a discussion and mutual agreement about the goals of a session" (4).
I want to suggest a way tutors can approach this "discussion and mutual agreement." Of course clients are always going to be concerned about their grades, but one thing we as tutors can do is point out to clients that, when they are writing for a class, the purpose of the writing assignment is both for them to demonstrate their knowledge and writing capabilities to their professors AND - this is the part clients often overlook - to learn about the subject of their writing and to improve as writers. The writing center tutorial cannot produce a perfect paper for clients while remaining writing-centered. But it can help the client realize the learning goals of academic writing assignments - and in so doing, prepare the client to do well on future writing tasks, in school and out.
When clients are writing for real-world purposes, however, such as the graduate school admissions essay or the professional resume for a job, I believe Ortoleva is right in pointing out that a text-centered focus may be appropriate. It is still important that we discuss this with the client; we need to be sure they understand that, given the real-life implications of this writing task, we are willing to focus more on the text, but that the writing center can be most helpful to them on their school-based writing tasks by working with them on their writing processes.
A successful writing center tutorial engages both tutor and client equally in a collaborative process. Whether that collaboration takes place on "the writer" or on "the text" may require negotiation - more negotiation that North's "Idea of a Writing Center" allows for. At the end of the day, it comes back to what I've been saying to my tutors-in-training all along: The value of the writing center tutorial is that it is individualized. That ultimately means we create "the center" anew with every client, in every session, every day.
Ortoleva, Matthew. "Centering the Writer or Centering the Text: A Meditation on a Shifting Practice in Writing Center Consultation." Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. http://projects.uwc.utexas.edu/praxis?q=book/print/209
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Distinguishing difference
Reading through my tutors-in-training blogs this week, I notice that the overwhelming response to Julie Neff's article on clients with learning disabilities is: "We shouldn't be labeling people as disabled; we should be looking for ways these clients are (a) extraordinary or (b) not so different from our other clients."
I understand this impulse. Honestly, I even share it. Learning disabilities come with such a stigma in our society. I remember the Special Ed room at my junior high: It was in the same hallway as the cafeteria, which always reeked of grease and garbage, and as we all filed down to lunch every day, we would see the LD kids in there behind a big red door with a small square window, eating their brown bag lunches at long wooden tables. They weren't even allowed to eat with the rest of us. I remember the jokes the boys in my grade would make: "Oh, look, it's the retard room!"
Reading my tutors' blogs, I get the sense that what we want to do is protect our clients from this stigma. Being dyslexic certainly does not make a person stupid, but it DOES make that client different from the student who simply doesn't like to read. More importantly, dyslexia requires a different approach from the tutor: We need to understand what strategies could help a dyslexic student manage the reading and writing process more effectively and efficiently, because when working one-on-one with students, understanding their learning styles - including their learning disabilities - is crucial.
In other words, recognizing the disability allows us to tailor education to that student's particular needs. Now, again, tutors should be doing that with all clients; the individualized instruction is what makes a writing center so valuable, at least in part. But working with a client with a learning disability requires different strategies than working with a client who is not learning disabled. The difference doesn't imply deficiency; the difference is, simply, difference.
I believe tutors need to know more about learning disabilities and how to work effectively with clients who have a wide array of learning disabilities. I would like to see this be one "tier" of the training for the writing center at our university. I want us, as Neff says, to approach every client with respect and sensitivity. That doesn't mean denying that learning disabilities exist. It doesn't mean valorizing a client with a learning disability to the point that we say, "Oh, they don't need special help - look at how extraordinary this person is, to have been able to overcome so much!" Yes, being in college with a learning disability is a challenge, and we should praise our clients for their hard work and perseverance. But our job doesn't stop there. The fact of the client's hard work doesn't mean she or he won't need a different kind of help than our other clients.
The best way to advocate for fair, equitable treatment of clients with learning disabilities isn't too pretend that the disability doesn't exist or that it doesn't affect the way they learn. The best way to help them is, simply, to help them.
I understand this impulse. Honestly, I even share it. Learning disabilities come with such a stigma in our society. I remember the Special Ed room at my junior high: It was in the same hallway as the cafeteria, which always reeked of grease and garbage, and as we all filed down to lunch every day, we would see the LD kids in there behind a big red door with a small square window, eating their brown bag lunches at long wooden tables. They weren't even allowed to eat with the rest of us. I remember the jokes the boys in my grade would make: "Oh, look, it's the retard room!"
Reading my tutors' blogs, I get the sense that what we want to do is protect our clients from this stigma. Being dyslexic certainly does not make a person stupid, but it DOES make that client different from the student who simply doesn't like to read. More importantly, dyslexia requires a different approach from the tutor: We need to understand what strategies could help a dyslexic student manage the reading and writing process more effectively and efficiently, because when working one-on-one with students, understanding their learning styles - including their learning disabilities - is crucial.
In other words, recognizing the disability allows us to tailor education to that student's particular needs. Now, again, tutors should be doing that with all clients; the individualized instruction is what makes a writing center so valuable, at least in part. But working with a client with a learning disability requires different strategies than working with a client who is not learning disabled. The difference doesn't imply deficiency; the difference is, simply, difference.
I believe tutors need to know more about learning disabilities and how to work effectively with clients who have a wide array of learning disabilities. I would like to see this be one "tier" of the training for the writing center at our university. I want us, as Neff says, to approach every client with respect and sensitivity. That doesn't mean denying that learning disabilities exist. It doesn't mean valorizing a client with a learning disability to the point that we say, "Oh, they don't need special help - look at how extraordinary this person is, to have been able to overcome so much!" Yes, being in college with a learning disability is a challenge, and we should praise our clients for their hard work and perseverance. But our job doesn't stop there. The fact of the client's hard work doesn't mean she or he won't need a different kind of help than our other clients.
The best way to advocate for fair, equitable treatment of clients with learning disabilities isn't too pretend that the disability doesn't exist or that it doesn't affect the way they learn. The best way to help them is, simply, to help them.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
On focusing on "The Writer"
I know my tutors-in-training must find me a broken record, but I think they're finally starting to recognize the nuances inherent in what seemed a simple dictum when we read it in Stephen North back in August: Writing centers are there to help writers, not necessarily to improve a piece of writing.
This discussion was raised on P.'s blog last week and again in class yesterday. I hear it not only in the tutors' agony that their clients are still making Cs - shouldn't the writing center be able to get them to an A? what are we doing wrong? - but also in C.'s question: How much change can tutors really affect in the academy when it comes to things like convincing instructors that ESL writing doesn't have to sound like Native English Speaker (NES) writing in order to be effective?
Lying awake last night, puzzling over why yesterday's class felt like it fell so flat to me (aside from the fact that students are exhausted and living for Thanksgiving break at this point), I thought of all the points I really wanted to make but, stupidly, I thought were implicit in my simple repetition of "focus on the writer, guys, not the writing." So here's another try, which will bring me back to ESL writers in the end.
What does it mean to focus on the writer? A client comes to a session with an essay for Professor X's literature class. The essay clearly has no focus; the client has good ideas about "Why the Caged Bird Sings," but the essay is a mishmash of thoughts and insights without a controlling, overarching idea. The essay is due the next day, so the client has time for significant revision. As a tutor, what do we focus on? The fact that without a clear, recognizable thesis and substantial revision to connect relevant details back to that thesis (and to cut those that are irrelevant), Professor X is going to murder this essay? In a way, yes. But when we focus on the writer, we get beyond this essay, this professor, this assignment. As we patiently question the writer about what she really wants to say about Maya Angelou's work, we stress to her, "Ok, this sounds to me like your main idea. Do you understand that essays operate from controlling ideas, what we often call a 'thesis'?"
In that moment, we step back from this essay - and by extension, from the grade the writer will receive on this essay - and push outward to the writer herself. Does she understand what a 'thesis' is? Can we help her understand how to write one that a reader can recognize, and that will assist her in organizing her essays and choosing evidence that's appropriate for her overall purpose? If this writer can begin to learn that lesson (and in one session, she will probably only begin to learn it; she will still need practice), then she can apply it in her future essays, and abracadabra, we have focused on the writer, not the text.
Ideally, that tutoring session would also help this student get a good grade (or at least a better grade) on the essay. But let's say that in working with this client on her thesis and development, we realize we aren't addressing much about her grammar, and the essay she submits is still going to have some awkward phrasings, inelegant integration of quotes, and comma splices. Professor X marks down quite a lot for grammar. As tutors, have we not done our jobs because we didn't see to it that this client's text was absolutely, spot-on, just-the-way-Professor-X-likes-it perfect?
NO, IT DOES NOT. We worked with a writer; we focused on helping that client learn important lessons about academic writing - and, hopefully, about the writing process, as we should have made time to talk to her about strategies for finding, refining, and focusing a thesis at the end of our session. The client may be devastated that she didn't get an A on the essay. She may come back to us and cry on our shoulders about how unfair Professor X is. At that point, we pull out our interpersonal techniques, like the ones Christina Murphy describes, and we help the client overcome her emotional baggage so she can keep going on that arduous road to becoming a successful writer.
When we look at tutoring this way, we don't have to worry that we can't know every professor's expectations, or that some professors don't even seem to know their own expectations for student writing. It's a tall order in our product-driven society, but in the writing center, we are not interested in texts; we are interested in writers. (Gasp! I just used an idiomatic phrase. Hint-hint, nudge-nudge, wink-wink to my tutors-in-training.)
Now, how does this relate back to my less-than-stimulating presentation on cultural preferences in writing and ESL writers yesterday? Actually, I think this may be at the core of what made the lecture so...well, I'm not sure I really have words for how anti-climactic that discussion felt. But here's what came to me last night. When we work with ESL writers, we are still working with writers, not with their texts. A whole other dimension is added because we are also helping them to acquire a new language, and thus the tendency to focus exclusively on the text is perhaps even greater than it is with NES clients. I mean, ESL clients' essays just have so many errors sometimes, and we know Professor X's red pen is going to bleed all over that paper. What do we do? Where do we begin? How can we make Professor X and Company respect linguistic and cultural diversity so this student doesn't have to cast off her/his home culture and become just like every other Standard Edited American English academic automaton?
Well, what we do is what we do with every other client: We begin with the writer. Instead of worrying over the split between Higher Order Concerns and Lower Order Concerns, we try to figure out what would most help this client progress as a writer - not what would most benefit this particular text, but what this client doesn't seem to know, understand, or be able to control about her/his writing. No thesis? Let's talk about what a thesis statement is. Circular organization? Let's discuss American preferences for linearity, make sure the client understands our thousand-year-old rhetorical tradition "arrangement" (nod to J.). Missing articles? Let's explain to the client, in our own words, why non-count nouns (i.e., advice) don't get articles, but count nouns (i.e., the buses) do. Will this ESL client leave the writing center with an essay guaranteed to get an A? No. In fact, s/he may leave the writing center and turn that essay in to a professor who calls up the writing center director and fumes, "I thought your tutors were supposed to help ESL writers be able to sound more like American students! This kid can't even speak English! How am I supposed to read this?"
And the writing center director (or, in this case, the tutor-training professor) calmly replies, "First of all, my tutors are there to work with writers, not necessarily to improve their texts. And secondly, would you like me to send you some interesting articles about second language acquisition?"
And that's what it's all about.
This discussion was raised on P.'s blog last week and again in class yesterday. I hear it not only in the tutors' agony that their clients are still making Cs - shouldn't the writing center be able to get them to an A? what are we doing wrong? - but also in C.'s question: How much change can tutors really affect in the academy when it comes to things like convincing instructors that ESL writing doesn't have to sound like Native English Speaker (NES) writing in order to be effective?
Lying awake last night, puzzling over why yesterday's class felt like it fell so flat to me (aside from the fact that students are exhausted and living for Thanksgiving break at this point), I thought of all the points I really wanted to make but, stupidly, I thought were implicit in my simple repetition of "focus on the writer, guys, not the writing." So here's another try, which will bring me back to ESL writers in the end.
What does it mean to focus on the writer? A client comes to a session with an essay for Professor X's literature class. The essay clearly has no focus; the client has good ideas about "Why the Caged Bird Sings," but the essay is a mishmash of thoughts and insights without a controlling, overarching idea. The essay is due the next day, so the client has time for significant revision. As a tutor, what do we focus on? The fact that without a clear, recognizable thesis and substantial revision to connect relevant details back to that thesis (and to cut those that are irrelevant), Professor X is going to murder this essay? In a way, yes. But when we focus on the writer, we get beyond this essay, this professor, this assignment. As we patiently question the writer about what she really wants to say about Maya Angelou's work, we stress to her, "Ok, this sounds to me like your main idea. Do you understand that essays operate from controlling ideas, what we often call a 'thesis'?"
In that moment, we step back from this essay - and by extension, from the grade the writer will receive on this essay - and push outward to the writer herself. Does she understand what a 'thesis' is? Can we help her understand how to write one that a reader can recognize, and that will assist her in organizing her essays and choosing evidence that's appropriate for her overall purpose? If this writer can begin to learn that lesson (and in one session, she will probably only begin to learn it; she will still need practice), then she can apply it in her future essays, and abracadabra, we have focused on the writer, not the text.
Ideally, that tutoring session would also help this student get a good grade (or at least a better grade) on the essay. But let's say that in working with this client on her thesis and development, we realize we aren't addressing much about her grammar, and the essay she submits is still going to have some awkward phrasings, inelegant integration of quotes, and comma splices. Professor X marks down quite a lot for grammar. As tutors, have we not done our jobs because we didn't see to it that this client's text was absolutely, spot-on, just-the-way-Professor-X-likes-it perfect?
NO, IT DOES NOT. We worked with a writer; we focused on helping that client learn important lessons about academic writing - and, hopefully, about the writing process, as we should have made time to talk to her about strategies for finding, refining, and focusing a thesis at the end of our session. The client may be devastated that she didn't get an A on the essay. She may come back to us and cry on our shoulders about how unfair Professor X is. At that point, we pull out our interpersonal techniques, like the ones Christina Murphy describes, and we help the client overcome her emotional baggage so she can keep going on that arduous road to becoming a successful writer.
When we look at tutoring this way, we don't have to worry that we can't know every professor's expectations, or that some professors don't even seem to know their own expectations for student writing. It's a tall order in our product-driven society, but in the writing center, we are not interested in texts; we are interested in writers. (Gasp! I just used an idiomatic phrase. Hint-hint, nudge-nudge, wink-wink to my tutors-in-training.)
Now, how does this relate back to my less-than-stimulating presentation on cultural preferences in writing and ESL writers yesterday? Actually, I think this may be at the core of what made the lecture so...well, I'm not sure I really have words for how anti-climactic that discussion felt. But here's what came to me last night. When we work with ESL writers, we are still working with writers, not with their texts. A whole other dimension is added because we are also helping them to acquire a new language, and thus the tendency to focus exclusively on the text is perhaps even greater than it is with NES clients. I mean, ESL clients' essays just have so many errors sometimes, and we know Professor X's red pen is going to bleed all over that paper. What do we do? Where do we begin? How can we make Professor X and Company respect linguistic and cultural diversity so this student doesn't have to cast off her/his home culture and become just like every other Standard Edited American English academic automaton?
Well, what we do is what we do with every other client: We begin with the writer. Instead of worrying over the split between Higher Order Concerns and Lower Order Concerns, we try to figure out what would most help this client progress as a writer - not what would most benefit this particular text, but what this client doesn't seem to know, understand, or be able to control about her/his writing. No thesis? Let's talk about what a thesis statement is. Circular organization? Let's discuss American preferences for linearity, make sure the client understands our thousand-year-old rhetorical tradition "arrangement" (nod to J.). Missing articles? Let's explain to the client, in our own words, why non-count nouns (i.e., advice) don't get articles, but count nouns (i.e., the buses) do. Will this ESL client leave the writing center with an essay guaranteed to get an A? No. In fact, s/he may leave the writing center and turn that essay in to a professor who calls up the writing center director and fumes, "I thought your tutors were supposed to help ESL writers be able to sound more like American students! This kid can't even speak English! How am I supposed to read this?"
And the writing center director (or, in this case, the tutor-training professor) calmly replies, "First of all, my tutors are there to work with writers, not necessarily to improve their texts. And secondly, would you like me to send you some interesting articles about second language acquisition?"
And that's what it's all about.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Examining cultural assumptions in the writing center
For this week's class, I asked my tutors-in-training to respond to two discussion questions:
1. What kinds of cultural preferences do you think you have as a writer? Where did those preferences come from?
2. What do you do when you notice a cultural difference in how a student is writing or responding to an assignment? What kinds of things do you need to be aware of?
I want to take a shot at answering these myself, and also think through what I'm hoping students will get out of our assigned readings for this week, especially Jennifer Staben and Kathryn Dempsey Nordhaus' "Looking at the Whole Text" and the documentary "Writing Across Borders." So, here goes:
My cultural preferences as a writer run toward linearity, clarity, coherence, and concision. Or, it might be more accurate to say, I perceive linearity as clear, coherent, and concise. Years of training in reading, writing, and teaching academic prose in the field of rhetoric and composition have taught me to define "good writing" as that which quickly and clearly gets to the point and that which clearly and concisely connects all supporting material to a larger, controlling idea (or ideas). I suppose some of these preferences are personal, but in terms of cultural expectations, I suppose our Western culture's idea that "time is money" and "less is more" influence the ways I think about the work writers should do for readers. A writer who doesn't seem to know what s/he is saying, or doesn't seem able to convey that meaning quickly and clearly to readers, is wasting her/his time and her/his readers' time.
Staben and Nordhaus discuss the importance of connecting the process of writing to the product of writing, and I find this essential advice both for writing center tutors and future writing teachers. You see, although I have this cultural preference for linearity, coherence, concision, and clarity, I know that my writing process is anything but neat and orderly - which, I hope, my written products would suggest, in their neatness and orderliness. My writing process begins many times with lists, cluster diagrams, fastwrites, scraps of notes on napkins, bursts of dialogue or intuition scribbled in a notebook or journal, annotations in the margins of journal articles or textbooks. In teaching writing and working with writing center clients, one of my primary jobs is to make visible that process which leads, eventually, to a neat and orderly written product.
I find this an invaluable strategy for NES and ESL writers, but specifically when I encounter a cultural difference between an ESL client's written product and my own cultural expectations for good writing, I think it is essential to "make visible" the cultural expectations American academic readers bring to American academic prose. As Staben and Nordhaus say, this may translate into explaining (and modeling) the process of literary analysis to ESL clients, but I find it also means examining cultural assumptions about what it means to analyze, synthesize, argue, persuade, and respond. Some of my most productive ESL tutorial sessions happened when we pushed aside the text and discussed the cultural expectations my client and I brought to a seemingly innocent, simple assignment; when I engaged in a truly interactive session, as Staben and Nordhaus say, I learned a lot about what American academic readers believe it means to "analyze" or "respond" by contrasting my naturalized assumption (read: American analysis IS analysis) with the assumptions and definitions of another culture.
So what do I hope my students take away from our upcoming class and from their blog posts for this week? Most simply, I hope they take away the realization that writing is a cultural construct, and part of teaching writing, in a classroom or one-to-one, means examining and making visible those cultural assumptions. More importantly, however, I hope that examining cultural differences will help my tutors understand their own writing processes better, that they may begin to pay attention to what they are doing when they analyze, summarize, paraphrase, respond, or argue; I believe being a writing teacher or a writing tutor should always involve growing as a writer oneself.
Furthermore, I hope that this week and next we'll be able to start discussing the false binary of global, higher-order concerns and local, lower-order concerns. I want my tutors-in-training, like the field of rhetoric and composition, to start seeing writing as a whole package: What we say and how we say it should be intrinsically connected concepts, not separated along the artificial line of "meaning" and "grammar." Perhaps by examining our cultural assumptions about good writing, we can begin to see the breakdown of this binary - realizing, for instance, that as a college professor, my definition of "good writing" implies correctness in the seemingly innocent, unloaded terms "clarity" and "concision," and yet I see this surface-level, supposedly lower-order concern as integral to a successful academic product. Hmm.
1. What kinds of cultural preferences do you think you have as a writer? Where did those preferences come from?
2. What do you do when you notice a cultural difference in how a student is writing or responding to an assignment? What kinds of things do you need to be aware of?
I want to take a shot at answering these myself, and also think through what I'm hoping students will get out of our assigned readings for this week, especially Jennifer Staben and Kathryn Dempsey Nordhaus' "Looking at the Whole Text" and the documentary "Writing Across Borders." So, here goes:
My cultural preferences as a writer run toward linearity, clarity, coherence, and concision. Or, it might be more accurate to say, I perceive linearity as clear, coherent, and concise. Years of training in reading, writing, and teaching academic prose in the field of rhetoric and composition have taught me to define "good writing" as that which quickly and clearly gets to the point and that which clearly and concisely connects all supporting material to a larger, controlling idea (or ideas). I suppose some of these preferences are personal, but in terms of cultural expectations, I suppose our Western culture's idea that "time is money" and "less is more" influence the ways I think about the work writers should do for readers. A writer who doesn't seem to know what s/he is saying, or doesn't seem able to convey that meaning quickly and clearly to readers, is wasting her/his time and her/his readers' time.
Staben and Nordhaus discuss the importance of connecting the process of writing to the product of writing, and I find this essential advice both for writing center tutors and future writing teachers. You see, although I have this cultural preference for linearity, coherence, concision, and clarity, I know that my writing process is anything but neat and orderly - which, I hope, my written products would suggest, in their neatness and orderliness. My writing process begins many times with lists, cluster diagrams, fastwrites, scraps of notes on napkins, bursts of dialogue or intuition scribbled in a notebook or journal, annotations in the margins of journal articles or textbooks. In teaching writing and working with writing center clients, one of my primary jobs is to make visible that process which leads, eventually, to a neat and orderly written product.
I find this an invaluable strategy for NES and ESL writers, but specifically when I encounter a cultural difference between an ESL client's written product and my own cultural expectations for good writing, I think it is essential to "make visible" the cultural expectations American academic readers bring to American academic prose. As Staben and Nordhaus say, this may translate into explaining (and modeling) the process of literary analysis to ESL clients, but I find it also means examining cultural assumptions about what it means to analyze, synthesize, argue, persuade, and respond. Some of my most productive ESL tutorial sessions happened when we pushed aside the text and discussed the cultural expectations my client and I brought to a seemingly innocent, simple assignment; when I engaged in a truly interactive session, as Staben and Nordhaus say, I learned a lot about what American academic readers believe it means to "analyze" or "respond" by contrasting my naturalized assumption (read: American analysis IS analysis) with the assumptions and definitions of another culture.
So what do I hope my students take away from our upcoming class and from their blog posts for this week? Most simply, I hope they take away the realization that writing is a cultural construct, and part of teaching writing, in a classroom or one-to-one, means examining and making visible those cultural assumptions. More importantly, however, I hope that examining cultural differences will help my tutors understand their own writing processes better, that they may begin to pay attention to what they are doing when they analyze, summarize, paraphrase, respond, or argue; I believe being a writing teacher or a writing tutor should always involve growing as a writer oneself.
Furthermore, I hope that this week and next we'll be able to start discussing the false binary of global, higher-order concerns and local, lower-order concerns. I want my tutors-in-training, like the field of rhetoric and composition, to start seeing writing as a whole package: What we say and how we say it should be intrinsically connected concepts, not separated along the artificial line of "meaning" and "grammar." Perhaps by examining our cultural assumptions about good writing, we can begin to see the breakdown of this binary - realizing, for instance, that as a college professor, my definition of "good writing" implies correctness in the seemingly innocent, unloaded terms "clarity" and "concision," and yet I see this surface-level, supposedly lower-order concern as integral to a successful academic product. Hmm.
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