For Wednesday's plenaries, we looked at assessment and research, areas of our work that the presenters encouraged us to think of as interrelated (assessment is research that stays at home). The assessment session got me thinking about how to figure out what consultants learn from working in the writing center. In our rush to demonstrate student learning—or just crunch the numbers to show that we're needed and useful—we tend to leave them out. That's odd since they spend more time in the writing center each week than any other student and stand to gain the most from it. One idea that came out of our brainstorming was to ask new consultants at our start-up meetings what their career goals are so that we can see how their plans develop over their time in the writing center. Others were a survey on consultants' perception of their own learning and a skills inventory asking consultants to reflect on their ability to conduct various aspects of the consultation--establishing rapport, identifying concerns, addressing issues at various levels, etc.
The research session impressed upon me the "social turn" in writing center scholarship. All of the research models we considered were drawn from social sciences, all about observing people in the world and representing those observations in quantitative, qualitative, and personal ways. Dyed-in-the-wool humanist that I am, this left me wondering where the good old read-lots-of-things-and-relate-them-to-each-other research model fit in. Any rhetoricians or historians in the house?
Indeed there were! Remember I am an 18th Century person at heart.
ReplyDeleteTruth is there are great histories of writing centers (like Learner) and some great theoretical work on WC's (Everyday WC or Harry's Book), but empirical research is dramatically underrepresented in the lit. of the field. Discourse analysis and rhetoric have a lot to learn from each other.
Until I started hanging out with the professional school crowd, I was a big skeptic regarding quantitative research. I think getting over that prejudice and understanding new ways to make knowledge has made me both better at talking to faculty and understanding more genres of student writing.
Still, I REALLY want to read your topoi piece!
As one of those advocating evidence-based/empirical research this week, I do wish I'd found a space to say that I certainly don't think such work is the *only* kind of research/scholarship we need. But Dan's point about the underrepresentation of empirical work is a good one and is perhaps why we stress the need for empirical research so strongly in these kinds of situations. FWIW, I think your topoi piece opens up space for work that blends historical/rhetorical/theoretical work with empirical work in really rich ways.
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