Of Trickster Tutors

Every time I read Christina Murphy’s “Freud in the Writing Center,” my hackles go up. I hate the idea of looking at our clients as “broken.” I see this tendency in everyone whose work connects to developmental education, like the basic writing instructors I talk to: They see that their students lack confidence in their writing, that they dislike writing (for school, anyway), and that they mistrust writing teachers, and those qualities are interpreted as “brokenness.” Even though those attitudes have likely been engendered by some thoughtless (or, worse yet, well-meaning) English teacher, writing is not the sum of these students’ lives. They aren’t coming to our writing centers with the same problems that drive people to seek a therapist, a line Murphy seems all too willing to blur, suggesting at one point that we simply substitute “writer” for “client” and “tutor” for “therapist” when applying psychotherapy to the tutorial.

Our writing center clients come to us as highly-functioning, intelligent, capable individuals (they are in college, after all) who need help with their writing, and if we interpret their alienation from writing or even from learning as “brokenness,” we will never understand our clients well enough to help them. I think this is the lesson from Anne DiPardo’s “Whispers of Coming and Going,” which tells the story of a Navajo client, Fannie, and her consultant Morgan’s inability to really get to know her, to step outside of her own preconceived notions of a basic writer/writing center client and see Fannie for who she was.

I much prefer Murphy’s emphasis on the affective component of learning, for “learning is not simply a cognitive process” (97). From my own research on metacognition and self-regulation, I know learning involves much more than thought, and a writing center session involves much more than “a paper”: It involves two people, client and consultant, each of whom brings to the table personal, cultural, linguistic and educational histories that have shaped what Linda Flower calls their “personal theories of writing.” I find DiPardo gives a much more nuanced treatment of the interpersonal dynamics consultants have to navigate: “Often placed on the front lines of efforts to provide respectful, insightful attention to these students’ diverse struggles with academic discourse, writing tutors likewise occupy multiple roles, remaining learners even while emerging as teachers… - a stance existing somewhere along a continuum of detached toughness and warm empathy, and, which like all things ideal, can only be approximated, never definitively located” (101).

In The Everyday Writing Center, the editors (all writing center directors) talk about the value of a “trickster tutor,” one who, like a Hermes or a Loki, thrives in the unstable, shifting environment of the writing center tutorial. As a teacher, I don’t get to be a trickster very often. My emphasis is on curriculum, achieving goals I have established for entire courses and individual class periods, measuring my students’ success against standards I haven’t always determined for myself. As a tutor, I reveled in being a trickster. I had my fair share of frustrating moments, and I don’t pretend that I always “got it right” (whatever that is) with every client. But looking back on my work in the writing center, I see that I learned early on a lesson that DiPardo’s tutor Morgan never did: “More than specific instructional strategies, Morgan needed the conceptual grounding that would allow her to understand that authentic collaborative learning is predicated upon fine-grained insights into individual students” (114).

What I want my writing center consultants to understand is that we are not therapists, but we do have a responsibility to get to our know our clients as people, to have the patience, the interest, the empathy, and just as importantly, the techniques to get past shyness, reticence, apathy, disconnection, even belligerence. We can use the talk in the writing center tutorial to open clients up, to glimpse those individual histories that make this writer who she is. Murphy insists that we must always be warm and genuine; I like DiPardo’s take that we have to parry and joust, attack and retreat, morphing to meet this client where she is at this moment. Being a trickster only works if the trickster understands her moves. Tricksters are reflective. They step back, even in the moment, to evaluate what is happening, why it might be happening, and how it can be effectively addressed. That’s how they know what form to assume. That’s how they learn to approximate an ideal.

DiPardo, Anne. “Whispers of Coming and Going: Lessons from Fannie.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Tutors, 3rd ed. Ed. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 100-116.

Geller, Anne, Michele Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Carroll, and Elizabeth Boquet. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Logan Utah State UP, 2007.

Murphy, Christina. “Freud in the Writing Center: The Psychoanalytics of Tutoring Well.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Tutors, 3rd ed. Ed. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 95-100.