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.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
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.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
For Clarification
Reading over my tutors-in-training blog posts this week, it strikes me that they're getting the wrong impression from our readings out of ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors that I or the authors we're reading somehow want to paint ESL clients as "lacking." I want to work against this assumption; I want my tutors to understand that ESL clients have many of the same needs and problems as NES clients, but because ESL clients are acquiring a second language and, in the case of international students, coming from a different culture, they're going to face challenges - and present challenges to their tutors - that NES clients don't.
In class, we're watching the documentary "Writing Across Borders." What I'd like my tutors to take away from class next week, and from their assigned blog posts this week, is the realization that our assumptions about what good writing is are culturally-constructed. I think this is an essential component of effective ESL tutoring. It takes us beyond the assimilationist/accomodationist/separatist stance and pushes us to recognize the inherently social nature of genre. Our conventions for organization, development, focus, syntax, even metaphor and argument are not "innocent" or "natural." They are shaped by social conventions, by cultural expectations, not only American but also academic and discipline-specific.
Just as we, as tutors, come to the writing center session with cultural expectations for what good writing is, so too do our clients. In knowing more about our own cultural construction of writing, we are better placed to figure out where/when an ESL client may be bringing cultural assumptions to her or his writing, and that gives us a place to intervene - not by insisting that the client "Americanize" her or his writing, but by talking with the client about the cultural expectations that contribute to the way she or he writes.
In class, we're watching the documentary "Writing Across Borders." What I'd like my tutors to take away from class next week, and from their assigned blog posts this week, is the realization that our assumptions about what good writing is are culturally-constructed. I think this is an essential component of effective ESL tutoring. It takes us beyond the assimilationist/accomodationist/separatist stance and pushes us to recognize the inherently social nature of genre. Our conventions for organization, development, focus, syntax, even metaphor and argument are not "innocent" or "natural." They are shaped by social conventions, by cultural expectations, not only American but also academic and discipline-specific.
Just as we, as tutors, come to the writing center session with cultural expectations for what good writing is, so too do our clients. In knowing more about our own cultural construction of writing, we are better placed to figure out where/when an ESL client may be bringing cultural assumptions to her or his writing, and that gives us a place to intervene - not by insisting that the client "Americanize" her or his writing, but by talking with the client about the cultural expectations that contribute to the way she or he writes.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Accomodating Difference, Acknowledging Reality
In recent discussions about ESL writing center clients with my tutors-in-training, I've noticed a variety of responses ranging from the somewhat panicked, "there's just too much to deal with here," to the easy-going, "multicultural writing is just another tutoring challenge." By the end of the semester, I'd be thrilled if my tutors all fell closer to the latter end of the spectrum, but at the same time, I know that getting there means confronting not just our practices but the ideology that underlies our practices.
Paul Kei Matsuda and Michelle Cox hint at these ideological perspectives in describing three approaches to ESL writing, first defined by Carol Severino: assimilationist, accomodationist, separatist. Matsuda and Cox relate that while some writing center tutors "may note the richness of ESL writer's texts that come from their hybridity and alternativeness...not all encounters with ESL texts produce such generous responses. Readers with little or no experience in working with ESL writers may be drawn to surface-level errors and differences that they see as problematic...Because of these and other differences, ESL writing is sometimes seen as 'deficient,' especially when it is evaluated in comparison with texts produced by NES writers" (42, 43).
We are fortunate in our tutor training practicum to have an ESL writer amongst our tutors. I'm grateful that S. is already pointing out to us how she perceives NES writers' texts as more difficult to read than ESL writers' text - not only on a linguistic level, but on a conceptual or global level, as ESL writers tend to avoid the cultural references that often pervade NES writing, making it inaccessible to anyone not immersed in American culture. The ethnocentrism S. perceives in her American clients' writing - American students automatically assume an American audience, regardless of the fact that many of their professors and classmates come from other countries and other cultures - bleeds out into how many NES readers perceive ESL texts. "Difference," whether in syntax, phrasing, organization, or argumentative strategies, becomes "deficiency"; hybridity and alternativeness are not marks of sophistication and intelligence but evidence of the Other, and an ethnocentric perspective on knowledge and expression causes many NES readers to shudder at the "lack of Americanness" in an ESL text.
So you see the problem I anticipate my tutors-in-training having with ESL clients. On the one hand, we have to overcome the initial reaction Matsuda and Cox describe as a kind of well-meaning horror: "(Serverino) felt tempted to take [the assimilationist] stance after first reading Michael's writing because she felt 'stunned' by the number of errors in the text" (45-46). I've heard this echoed already in some of my students' questions ("How do you tutor someone when you can't even figure out what they're trying to say?"). The assimilationist stance is tempting to us as Americans because we see our culture and our language as The Way, and writing that violates our cultural expectations must, by definition, be wrong, deficient.
But even if we can overcome this perspective as tutors, learning to appreciate the richness of difference, are we doing our ESL clients a disservice if we avoid an assimilationist approach? After all, as Matsuda and Cox say, "the assimilationist stance may be an attempt to protect the ESL writer from other readers...Tutors...may try to represent what they consider to be the possible response from the intended audience of the ESL writer's text: the professor" (46). In other words, a writing center tutor who allows ESL "errors" to remain may feel that she or he is ultimately setting that client up to fail, because the text's ultimate audience - the professor - may penalize the writer for those differences the tutor has come to appreciate.
There is no easy answer to this problem, of course. (And I know none of my tutors-in-training are surprised by that by this point in the semester, though I imagine they're still frustrated by it.) But I do think it helps us to do our jobs as tutors effectively by remembering that ESL clients are no different from NES clients in that our goals for their tutorial sessions should not be to fix their texts but to help them improve as writers. To my mind, the accomodationist stance is best suited to achieving this goal: "The accomodationist, then, reads differences as, well, differences, explaining to the writer how some differences may be seen as deficiencies by some readers; it is up to the writer 'how much like a native speaker' she wants to sound" (Matsuda and Cox 45).
The accomodationist stance strikes a balance between ethnocentricism (which I believe the assimilationist stance reflects) and a fairytale world in which we pretend to our ESL clients that all readers will be actualized enough to appreciate difference as evidence of multicultural richness (which I think the separatist stance does). More importantly, the accomodationist stance gives us concrete strategies that harken back to best practices for working with NES clients: setting an agenda for what issues to focus on in the tutorial; encouraging active, collaborative learning in the writing center tutorial; keeping the client in control of her/his writing and ideas; focusing on long-term improvement of writing ability, not short-term improvement as a text, as the accomodationist tutor emphasizes the client's understanding of differences between L1 and L2 writing and allows the client to decide how, when, or if to make the text more like a native speaker's.
As my tutors-in-training learn more about ESL clients, I hope they come to advocate for a separatist stance, because I believe our world will be a much brighter place when we stop seeing difference as deficiency. But when it comes to acknowledging the reality of our current society, I think the accomodationist stance is the most ethical for dealing with ESL clients - and the most productive.
Matsuda, Paul Kei and Michelle Cox. "Reading an ESL Writer's Text." ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. 2nd ed. Eds. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2009. 42-50.
Paul Kei Matsuda and Michelle Cox hint at these ideological perspectives in describing three approaches to ESL writing, first defined by Carol Severino: assimilationist, accomodationist, separatist. Matsuda and Cox relate that while some writing center tutors "may note the richness of ESL writer's texts that come from their hybridity and alternativeness...not all encounters with ESL texts produce such generous responses. Readers with little or no experience in working with ESL writers may be drawn to surface-level errors and differences that they see as problematic...Because of these and other differences, ESL writing is sometimes seen as 'deficient,' especially when it is evaluated in comparison with texts produced by NES writers" (42, 43).
We are fortunate in our tutor training practicum to have an ESL writer amongst our tutors. I'm grateful that S. is already pointing out to us how she perceives NES writers' texts as more difficult to read than ESL writers' text - not only on a linguistic level, but on a conceptual or global level, as ESL writers tend to avoid the cultural references that often pervade NES writing, making it inaccessible to anyone not immersed in American culture. The ethnocentrism S. perceives in her American clients' writing - American students automatically assume an American audience, regardless of the fact that many of their professors and classmates come from other countries and other cultures - bleeds out into how many NES readers perceive ESL texts. "Difference," whether in syntax, phrasing, organization, or argumentative strategies, becomes "deficiency"; hybridity and alternativeness are not marks of sophistication and intelligence but evidence of the Other, and an ethnocentric perspective on knowledge and expression causes many NES readers to shudder at the "lack of Americanness" in an ESL text.
So you see the problem I anticipate my tutors-in-training having with ESL clients. On the one hand, we have to overcome the initial reaction Matsuda and Cox describe as a kind of well-meaning horror: "(Serverino) felt tempted to take [the assimilationist] stance after first reading Michael's writing because she felt 'stunned' by the number of errors in the text" (45-46). I've heard this echoed already in some of my students' questions ("How do you tutor someone when you can't even figure out what they're trying to say?"). The assimilationist stance is tempting to us as Americans because we see our culture and our language as The Way, and writing that violates our cultural expectations must, by definition, be wrong, deficient.
But even if we can overcome this perspective as tutors, learning to appreciate the richness of difference, are we doing our ESL clients a disservice if we avoid an assimilationist approach? After all, as Matsuda and Cox say, "the assimilationist stance may be an attempt to protect the ESL writer from other readers...Tutors...may try to represent what they consider to be the possible response from the intended audience of the ESL writer's text: the professor" (46). In other words, a writing center tutor who allows ESL "errors" to remain may feel that she or he is ultimately setting that client up to fail, because the text's ultimate audience - the professor - may penalize the writer for those differences the tutor has come to appreciate.
There is no easy answer to this problem, of course. (And I know none of my tutors-in-training are surprised by that by this point in the semester, though I imagine they're still frustrated by it.) But I do think it helps us to do our jobs as tutors effectively by remembering that ESL clients are no different from NES clients in that our goals for their tutorial sessions should not be to fix their texts but to help them improve as writers. To my mind, the accomodationist stance is best suited to achieving this goal: "The accomodationist, then, reads differences as, well, differences, explaining to the writer how some differences may be seen as deficiencies by some readers; it is up to the writer 'how much like a native speaker' she wants to sound" (Matsuda and Cox 45).
The accomodationist stance strikes a balance between ethnocentricism (which I believe the assimilationist stance reflects) and a fairytale world in which we pretend to our ESL clients that all readers will be actualized enough to appreciate difference as evidence of multicultural richness (which I think the separatist stance does). More importantly, the accomodationist stance gives us concrete strategies that harken back to best practices for working with NES clients: setting an agenda for what issues to focus on in the tutorial; encouraging active, collaborative learning in the writing center tutorial; keeping the client in control of her/his writing and ideas; focusing on long-term improvement of writing ability, not short-term improvement as a text, as the accomodationist tutor emphasizes the client's understanding of differences between L1 and L2 writing and allows the client to decide how, when, or if to make the text more like a native speaker's.
As my tutors-in-training learn more about ESL clients, I hope they come to advocate for a separatist stance, because I believe our world will be a much brighter place when we stop seeing difference as deficiency. But when it comes to acknowledging the reality of our current society, I think the accomodationist stance is the most ethical for dealing with ESL clients - and the most productive.
Matsuda, Paul Kei and Michelle Cox. "Reading an ESL Writer's Text." ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. 2nd ed. Eds. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2009. 42-50.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Interlanguage (or, What We Can Learn from our ESL Clients)
I remember the first time I sat down with an ESL client in the writing center. I had finished my tutoring observations just a few days before, and I felt like I was still learning the ropes of tutoring native speakers. So when our receptionist walked over to my desk to ask if I was available for an ESL client who wanted a drop-in appointment, I remember waffling. Our writing center director had encouraged us not to take on clients we felt we weren't prepared to help, but in addition to feeling sorry for the young man (he looked really desperate, I recall, standing by the front desk rolling his essay into a long tube, flattening it out, rolling it up again), I figured, Hey, I've got to start sometime, right?
The client (I'll call him Samir) was from Saudi Arabia, and clearly as nervous as I was. I remember how he hesitated when I asked him to read his paper aloud. "I'm not so good at English," he said, in a heavily-accented voice. "Maybe you should read it."
My non-directive tutoring instincts kicked in: Did this client want me to take responsibility for his paper? I looked around the room, hoping a more experienced tutor would be free and could step in, but everyone was busy.
So I took a deep breath and pushed the paper aside. I asked Samir to tell me about where he was from. He was hesitant at first; he kept looking down at the paper, obviously wondering why we weren't getting on with things, but he trusted me, the tutor, enough to play along. He told me that this was his first semester in the U.S. He was an undergraduate, a freshman. He'd studied English in Saudi Arabia, he said, but his exam scores hadn't been high enough to place him into the mainstream first-year writing class, English 101, so he was in English 100, our university's basic writing class.
My tutor-senses tingled as Samir mentioned his basic writing class. It seemed to me that his self-esteem had taken quite a blow by being placed in what he no doubt perceived as a remedial course. "Were you a good student in Saudi Arabia?" I asked, and Samir nodded, smiling for the first time as he told me about how proud his family was that he'd graduated with nearly perfect marks and had been accepted to a university in the U.S.
"So tell me what this paper is about," I remember saying to Samir then. He explained that the essay (which was for English 100) was supposed to be about an important event in his life. He'd chosen to write about his father's death, from cancer, two years earlier.
I could see how much Samir cared about his topic as he described the experience to me: Clearly, this was not a disenfranchised student looking for a tutor to edit and proofread his paper. This was someone who really wanted to tell readers about his father and what it was like to lose a parent at such a young age.
After about ten minutes of talking, I slid the paper back toward Samir. "Why don't you read this to me?" I asked again. "Go as slow as you need to. I really want to hear this, in your voice."
And Samir started to read.
I tell this story because it gave me my first inkling that I'd been thinking about ESL clients in the wrong way. Even though Samir was from another country and English was not his first language, he'd come to the writing center with many of the same anxieties and emotional hang-ups as native-speaking American students: He was embarrassed by being labeled a "bad writer," even more embarrassed to need a tutor, and afraid both of those things meant he wasn't really cut out for college. What Samir needed wasn't so terribly different from what any other writing center client needed. He needed a tutor who would get to know him as a person, who would take the time to draw him out, who would work to create a friendly environment, and who would patiently support him in his development as a writer.
This is the point Ilona Leki makes in "Before the Conversation," when she reminds us that we do ESL students a disservice as tutors if we paint them all with a broad brush. Leki overviews some categories of ESL writers, pointing out the different challenges faced by, say, an ESL student who has grown up in the U.S. and a student like Samir who has only recently come here for college, but more importantly to my mind is her emphasis on the individuality of ESL clients, which our ethnocentric worldview may cause us to overlook:
"There is also a tendency among humans to see their own social and cultural group as highly nuanced and differentiated but to be less able to fully grasp that all social and cultural groups are equally nuanced and differentiated...[T]he most effective way for writing center tutors to experience these nuances firsthand is to take advantage of the visits of these multilingual, multicultural individuals to the writing center and show interest in their home language, country, or culture by engaging them in the kind of small talk that usually accompanies tutoring sessions, and so get to know them one by one" (13).
Too often as tutors (and writing center directors), we see the ESL tutoring session as a wholly different beast from a native-speaker session. We take the time to get to know our native-speaking clients; we don't automatically assume that their reticence to read their papers aloud signals a desire to push the work of writing or editing off onto us, the tutor. ESL clients become one homogeneous group, characterized primarily by their linguistic Otherness.
As the tutors in my practicum course begin to study theories of ESL tutoring, what I want most to convey to them, beyond theories of SLA (which I think our incredibly valuable and worth learning for any writing teacher, by the way), is the importance of treating ESL clients as clients.
I want my tutors-in-training not to Other ESL clients to the point that they see the tutoring session as a one-way exchange. That was how I looked at Samir in our first encounter: Not only was he a writing center client, which likely meant I knew more about writing than he did, he was also an international student and a non-native speaker, which meant he needed my understanding of American culture and the English language. And of course Samir did need those things from me. Yet over time, as Samir came back to the writing center each week that fall semester and through the spring term as well, I began to see that he had a lot to teach me, too. He had been places and experienced cultures that were as foreign to me as the United States was to him.
Looking back, I think some of the most valuable learning that took place during my sessions with Samir really didn't have much to do with writing at all. It had a lot more to do with two people from different parts of the globe sitting down, one-on-one, and sharing their stories.
Leki, Ilona. "Before the Conversation: A Sketch of Some Possible Backgrounds, Experiences, and Attitudes Among ESL Students Visiting a Writing Center." ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. 2nd ed. Eds. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Boynton/Cook: Portsmouth, NH, 2009. 1-17.
The client (I'll call him Samir) was from Saudi Arabia, and clearly as nervous as I was. I remember how he hesitated when I asked him to read his paper aloud. "I'm not so good at English," he said, in a heavily-accented voice. "Maybe you should read it."
My non-directive tutoring instincts kicked in: Did this client want me to take responsibility for his paper? I looked around the room, hoping a more experienced tutor would be free and could step in, but everyone was busy.
So I took a deep breath and pushed the paper aside. I asked Samir to tell me about where he was from. He was hesitant at first; he kept looking down at the paper, obviously wondering why we weren't getting on with things, but he trusted me, the tutor, enough to play along. He told me that this was his first semester in the U.S. He was an undergraduate, a freshman. He'd studied English in Saudi Arabia, he said, but his exam scores hadn't been high enough to place him into the mainstream first-year writing class, English 101, so he was in English 100, our university's basic writing class.
My tutor-senses tingled as Samir mentioned his basic writing class. It seemed to me that his self-esteem had taken quite a blow by being placed in what he no doubt perceived as a remedial course. "Were you a good student in Saudi Arabia?" I asked, and Samir nodded, smiling for the first time as he told me about how proud his family was that he'd graduated with nearly perfect marks and had been accepted to a university in the U.S.
"So tell me what this paper is about," I remember saying to Samir then. He explained that the essay (which was for English 100) was supposed to be about an important event in his life. He'd chosen to write about his father's death, from cancer, two years earlier.
I could see how much Samir cared about his topic as he described the experience to me: Clearly, this was not a disenfranchised student looking for a tutor to edit and proofread his paper. This was someone who really wanted to tell readers about his father and what it was like to lose a parent at such a young age.
After about ten minutes of talking, I slid the paper back toward Samir. "Why don't you read this to me?" I asked again. "Go as slow as you need to. I really want to hear this, in your voice."
And Samir started to read.
I tell this story because it gave me my first inkling that I'd been thinking about ESL clients in the wrong way. Even though Samir was from another country and English was not his first language, he'd come to the writing center with many of the same anxieties and emotional hang-ups as native-speaking American students: He was embarrassed by being labeled a "bad writer," even more embarrassed to need a tutor, and afraid both of those things meant he wasn't really cut out for college. What Samir needed wasn't so terribly different from what any other writing center client needed. He needed a tutor who would get to know him as a person, who would take the time to draw him out, who would work to create a friendly environment, and who would patiently support him in his development as a writer.
This is the point Ilona Leki makes in "Before the Conversation," when she reminds us that we do ESL students a disservice as tutors if we paint them all with a broad brush. Leki overviews some categories of ESL writers, pointing out the different challenges faced by, say, an ESL student who has grown up in the U.S. and a student like Samir who has only recently come here for college, but more importantly to my mind is her emphasis on the individuality of ESL clients, which our ethnocentric worldview may cause us to overlook:
"There is also a tendency among humans to see their own social and cultural group as highly nuanced and differentiated but to be less able to fully grasp that all social and cultural groups are equally nuanced and differentiated...[T]he most effective way for writing center tutors to experience these nuances firsthand is to take advantage of the visits of these multilingual, multicultural individuals to the writing center and show interest in their home language, country, or culture by engaging them in the kind of small talk that usually accompanies tutoring sessions, and so get to know them one by one" (13).
Too often as tutors (and writing center directors), we see the ESL tutoring session as a wholly different beast from a native-speaker session. We take the time to get to know our native-speaking clients; we don't automatically assume that their reticence to read their papers aloud signals a desire to push the work of writing or editing off onto us, the tutor. ESL clients become one homogeneous group, characterized primarily by their linguistic Otherness.
As the tutors in my practicum course begin to study theories of ESL tutoring, what I want most to convey to them, beyond theories of SLA (which I think our incredibly valuable and worth learning for any writing teacher, by the way), is the importance of treating ESL clients as clients.
I want my tutors-in-training not to Other ESL clients to the point that they see the tutoring session as a one-way exchange. That was how I looked at Samir in our first encounter: Not only was he a writing center client, which likely meant I knew more about writing than he did, he was also an international student and a non-native speaker, which meant he needed my understanding of American culture and the English language. And of course Samir did need those things from me. Yet over time, as Samir came back to the writing center each week that fall semester and through the spring term as well, I began to see that he had a lot to teach me, too. He had been places and experienced cultures that were as foreign to me as the United States was to him.
Looking back, I think some of the most valuable learning that took place during my sessions with Samir really didn't have much to do with writing at all. It had a lot more to do with two people from different parts of the globe sitting down, one-on-one, and sharing their stories.
Leki, Ilona. "Before the Conversation: A Sketch of Some Possible Backgrounds, Experiences, and Attitudes Among ESL Students Visiting a Writing Center." ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. 2nd ed. Eds. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Boynton/Cook: Portsmouth, NH, 2009. 1-17.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Working within The System
How apropos that we are reading Elizabeth Boquet's "Intellectual Tug of War: Snapshots of Life in the Center" this week for our tutor training practicum, when I feel that I've been engaged in such a tug-of-war over writing centers all semester.
I won't lie to you: This is a difficult blog post for me to write. I've been wrestling with it all weekend, and by yesterday morning, I'd convinced myself that I didn't need to write it. It might be professionally or politically dangerous; it might offend somebody, cross a line, step on toes. Then yesterday morning I spent 45 minutes talking to an incredibly frustrated tutor, and even though I feel like I turned the situation into a good teaching moment, I still feel like I "turned the situation." I came at it obliquely, afraid to address it head-on, constrained (like all professionals) by concerns about professionalism and decorum.
Imagine my chagrin when I found myself implicated in the "impression management" Boquet writes of: "Tutors are generally intelligent people who quickly learn that the reality of life in the center is much different from that most often depicted in journals...[T]utors learn that, when they applied for a job at the writing center, they agreed to join a team whose members are concerned with what Goffman calls 'impression management'...[where] secrets that could give the show away are shared and kept" (119, 120).
Our writing center is undergoing change right now. On the one hand, these changes are exciting: Thanks to an incredibly supportive Dean, who sees writing as a cornerstone of education (and I don't mean writing-as-a-skill, but real writing, the kind of writing I like to teach and that ought to bring students to a writing center), the English Department and Academic Skills are collaborating to develop a center with a university-wide mission. This center has the potential to be the bedrock upon which a much-needed writing across the curriculum program is built at our university. These talks are still very preliminary, but we are making steady progress, and I honestly believe everyone involved wants what is best for our center's clients, writing consultants, and students who might become clients.
On the other hand, my tutors have been cast into a situation over which they have very little control and which, at the moment, is fraught with contradiction. What we discuss in class is not what they feel they see going on at the writing center. I see troubling antagonism growing between my tutors-in-training and the tutors already working in the center. I see (and hear) frustration from my tutors about the logistics of sessions and appointments, the demeanor of co-workers toward other consultants and toward clients, the content and approach of tutoring sessions. My ability to intervene in these situations is limited because I am not the writing center director - and, frankly, because these are troubled waters I've entered. I don't want to jeopardize the potential for collaboration described above by offending or alienating those with whom I need an effective working relationship if that collaboration is to succeed.
And yet, I refuse to participate in impression management. I think our writing center has the potential to be a remarkable resource on this campus, a true center of writing, reading, thinking, and learning. Right now, it has problems. Somehow, admitting that feels like posting a best friend's dirty secret here for the world to see; at the same time, I realize how silly it is to feel that way. Of course our writing center has its problems. Even if we had the most wonderful writing center in the world, it would still have problems. The "ideal" writing center doesn't exist. It can't. We create the writing center everyday - those of us who work within it, who use its services, who train its tutors, who secure its funding, who promote it to faculty and administrators. We will never reach some glorious ideal state in which every tutor adopts an approach we find palatable, or no tutor ever has a disagreement or falling out with another tutor, or the director smooths over each problem before it reaches the ears of an instructor, a department chair, or a dean.
Boquet reminds me that "too often we teach with the goal of eliminating confusion, opposition, and discomfort when our goal should be to delve more deeply into these issues" (123). To my tutors-in-training, I don't mean to say that your frustrations are insignificant or that we just need to get on with it, managing the impression of the writing center so our problems, disagreements, and concerns are safely hidden from the eyes of the world, only whispered about in the corner of a classroom before the teacher walks in. But I do want to say that this is where we are. We're at the beginning of a new venture. Changing a system from the inside-out, advocating for the kind of center I am trying to convince our university administrators we should work toward building, is fraught with frustration, irritation, set-backs and disagreements at the same time it promises excitement, satisfaction, rewards and new partnerships.
I use the term "system" here in a very particular way, as Boquet does at the end of her article, which I want to quote at some length: "Our educational system, based as it is on the industrial model, has production as its ultimate goal. We might not change that. But we can control what we (re)produce. We can strive to produce better writers, better tutors, more humane working conditions for everyone involved (tutors and students alike). Then we can stand back and realize that we have a product we can all be proud of" (128).
My gut instinct as a teacher is to never allow my students to experience "confusion, opposition, or discomfort." Yet I know from long experience that this is not the last time my tutors-in-training will find themselves working within a system they perceive as flawed - a system which they can't simply sweep away, or wish into a different state. Change is hard. It requires people who are committed to seeing those changes happen and people who realize that even if they succeed in making those changes, the system will still have flaws. It requires people who recognize that change can't come from one person railing at the storm; it must come from people sitting down together and coming to new understandings for agreed-upon courses of action.
And in the writing center, change must come from tutors. So to my tutors-in-training, I say this: Stick it out. Not just this semester, but for the rest of your time at this university. Bring the best practices we are learning about in class and your own commitment to developing a reflective practice to the writing center, and don't let anybody tell you that you're taking this too seriously or that you don't make a difference. Tutoring is serious business, because it affects students who are trying to learn, and learning is serious business. Even if your influence over those clients is limited, it is still important, and it does make a difference. Don't give up. We need you.
In the end, it doesn't matter what kind of a writing center I or any other university administrator wants to create if we don't have tutors committed to the mission of that center. I say "in the end," but the truth is, the journey we've undertaken as writing center professionals has no "end" point. Creating the kind of center we want will, as I've stressed in this post and others, take place everyday, in every interaction between tutors and clients, between tutors and tutors, between tutors and directors, between tutors and instructors. We have to work within the system we have right now, yet in those daily interactions, we can all advocate for change, for a writing center that we can be proud of.
Boquet, Elizabeth. "Intellectual Tug-of-War: Snapshots of Life in the Center." The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors 3rd ed. Eds. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 116-129.
I won't lie to you: This is a difficult blog post for me to write. I've been wrestling with it all weekend, and by yesterday morning, I'd convinced myself that I didn't need to write it. It might be professionally or politically dangerous; it might offend somebody, cross a line, step on toes. Then yesterday morning I spent 45 minutes talking to an incredibly frustrated tutor, and even though I feel like I turned the situation into a good teaching moment, I still feel like I "turned the situation." I came at it obliquely, afraid to address it head-on, constrained (like all professionals) by concerns about professionalism and decorum.
Imagine my chagrin when I found myself implicated in the "impression management" Boquet writes of: "Tutors are generally intelligent people who quickly learn that the reality of life in the center is much different from that most often depicted in journals...[T]utors learn that, when they applied for a job at the writing center, they agreed to join a team whose members are concerned with what Goffman calls 'impression management'...[where] secrets that could give the show away are shared and kept" (119, 120).
Our writing center is undergoing change right now. On the one hand, these changes are exciting: Thanks to an incredibly supportive Dean, who sees writing as a cornerstone of education (and I don't mean writing-as-a-skill, but real writing, the kind of writing I like to teach and that ought to bring students to a writing center), the English Department and Academic Skills are collaborating to develop a center with a university-wide mission. This center has the potential to be the bedrock upon which a much-needed writing across the curriculum program is built at our university. These talks are still very preliminary, but we are making steady progress, and I honestly believe everyone involved wants what is best for our center's clients, writing consultants, and students who might become clients.
On the other hand, my tutors have been cast into a situation over which they have very little control and which, at the moment, is fraught with contradiction. What we discuss in class is not what they feel they see going on at the writing center. I see troubling antagonism growing between my tutors-in-training and the tutors already working in the center. I see (and hear) frustration from my tutors about the logistics of sessions and appointments, the demeanor of co-workers toward other consultants and toward clients, the content and approach of tutoring sessions. My ability to intervene in these situations is limited because I am not the writing center director - and, frankly, because these are troubled waters I've entered. I don't want to jeopardize the potential for collaboration described above by offending or alienating those with whom I need an effective working relationship if that collaboration is to succeed.
And yet, I refuse to participate in impression management. I think our writing center has the potential to be a remarkable resource on this campus, a true center of writing, reading, thinking, and learning. Right now, it has problems. Somehow, admitting that feels like posting a best friend's dirty secret here for the world to see; at the same time, I realize how silly it is to feel that way. Of course our writing center has its problems. Even if we had the most wonderful writing center in the world, it would still have problems. The "ideal" writing center doesn't exist. It can't. We create the writing center everyday - those of us who work within it, who use its services, who train its tutors, who secure its funding, who promote it to faculty and administrators. We will never reach some glorious ideal state in which every tutor adopts an approach we find palatable, or no tutor ever has a disagreement or falling out with another tutor, or the director smooths over each problem before it reaches the ears of an instructor, a department chair, or a dean.
Boquet reminds me that "too often we teach with the goal of eliminating confusion, opposition, and discomfort when our goal should be to delve more deeply into these issues" (123). To my tutors-in-training, I don't mean to say that your frustrations are insignificant or that we just need to get on with it, managing the impression of the writing center so our problems, disagreements, and concerns are safely hidden from the eyes of the world, only whispered about in the corner of a classroom before the teacher walks in. But I do want to say that this is where we are. We're at the beginning of a new venture. Changing a system from the inside-out, advocating for the kind of center I am trying to convince our university administrators we should work toward building, is fraught with frustration, irritation, set-backs and disagreements at the same time it promises excitement, satisfaction, rewards and new partnerships.
I use the term "system" here in a very particular way, as Boquet does at the end of her article, which I want to quote at some length: "Our educational system, based as it is on the industrial model, has production as its ultimate goal. We might not change that. But we can control what we (re)produce. We can strive to produce better writers, better tutors, more humane working conditions for everyone involved (tutors and students alike). Then we can stand back and realize that we have a product we can all be proud of" (128).
My gut instinct as a teacher is to never allow my students to experience "confusion, opposition, or discomfort." Yet I know from long experience that this is not the last time my tutors-in-training will find themselves working within a system they perceive as flawed - a system which they can't simply sweep away, or wish into a different state. Change is hard. It requires people who are committed to seeing those changes happen and people who realize that even if they succeed in making those changes, the system will still have flaws. It requires people who recognize that change can't come from one person railing at the storm; it must come from people sitting down together and coming to new understandings for agreed-upon courses of action.
And in the writing center, change must come from tutors. So to my tutors-in-training, I say this: Stick it out. Not just this semester, but for the rest of your time at this university. Bring the best practices we are learning about in class and your own commitment to developing a reflective practice to the writing center, and don't let anybody tell you that you're taking this too seriously or that you don't make a difference. Tutoring is serious business, because it affects students who are trying to learn, and learning is serious business. Even if your influence over those clients is limited, it is still important, and it does make a difference. Don't give up. We need you.
In the end, it doesn't matter what kind of a writing center I or any other university administrator wants to create if we don't have tutors committed to the mission of that center. I say "in the end," but the truth is, the journey we've undertaken as writing center professionals has no "end" point. Creating the kind of center we want will, as I've stressed in this post and others, take place everyday, in every interaction between tutors and clients, between tutors and tutors, between tutors and directors, between tutors and instructors. We have to work within the system we have right now, yet in those daily interactions, we can all advocate for change, for a writing center that we can be proud of.
Boquet, Elizabeth. "Intellectual Tug-of-War: Snapshots of Life in the Center." The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors 3rd ed. Eds. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 116-129.
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