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?
Friday, July 30, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Diverse Leadership
On Tuesday the institute took a more reflective and collaborative turn as we engaged with diversity and considered our own roles as leaders. Nathalie Singh-Corcoran and Karen Rowan invited us to consider what diversity looks like on our campuses and in our writing centers, to identify the various discourses that make up our "identity kits," and to determine how those identities interact. A series of cases really turned on our brains and mouths: an African American tutor who has decided not to return to the staff because her fellow tutors keep mistaking her for a client, a gay tutor confronted with a paper against legalizing same-sex marriage, a partially deaf tutor who uses ASL in the writing center.
Thinking about the discourses that make up my own identities, I realized the conflict between the things I am generally asked to say, do, value, and believe as a man and writing center practice. Since I've never been terribly into maleness, I wondered if that's what drew me to writing center work in the first place. We talk quite a bit about writing centers as "feminized spaces" (here's an interesting study from The University of Texas at Austin), but oftentimes that just means that more women come to or work in the writing center than men—not that the writing center embodies feminist principles. A more interesting question is to what extent writing center praxis intersects with our culture's discourse of womanhood.
Returning to diversity in general, our centers no doubt benefit from staffing tutors that reflect the diversity of the institution as a whole (an issue much on my mind as I anticipate a school year in which 11 of my 13 consultants are women and 11 of 13 are white). I wonder, though, if employing a truly diverse staff doesn't let us off the hook a bit. If we are to work as true allies, then we need to identify with and advocate for people from groups that we don't belong to. That work can't be "outsourced" to consultants who do belong to those groups.
Acknowledging such issues and taking action requires courage and leadership. Michele invited us to identify situations in which do and do not take a leadership role. Many of us agreed that we are not leaders when we see something that can be changed and fail to change it. A quote from John Tagg that Michele shared with us expresses how we can act for change: "Functional leaders extend their assigned role to move their mission and passion deliberately to new challenges; they look for expanded responsibilities and collaborative opportunities to partner outside of their defined status." Collaborative, moving beyond hierarchies—sounds like a writing center.
Thinking about the discourses that make up my own identities, I realized the conflict between the things I am generally asked to say, do, value, and believe as a man and writing center practice. Since I've never been terribly into maleness, I wondered if that's what drew me to writing center work in the first place. We talk quite a bit about writing centers as "feminized spaces" (here's an interesting study from The University of Texas at Austin), but oftentimes that just means that more women come to or work in the writing center than men—not that the writing center embodies feminist principles. A more interesting question is to what extent writing center praxis intersects with our culture's discourse of womanhood.
Returning to diversity in general, our centers no doubt benefit from staffing tutors that reflect the diversity of the institution as a whole (an issue much on my mind as I anticipate a school year in which 11 of my 13 consultants are women and 11 of 13 are white). I wonder, though, if employing a truly diverse staff doesn't let us off the hook a bit. If we are to work as true allies, then we need to identify with and advocate for people from groups that we don't belong to. That work can't be "outsourced" to consultants who do belong to those groups.
Acknowledging such issues and taking action requires courage and leadership. Michele invited us to identify situations in which do and do not take a leadership role. Many of us agreed that we are not leaders when we see something that can be changed and fail to change it. A quote from John Tagg that Michele shared with us expresses how we can act for change: "Functional leaders extend their assigned role to move their mission and passion deliberately to new challenges; they look for expanded responsibilities and collaborative opportunities to partner outside of their defined status." Collaborative, moving beyond hierarchies—sounds like a writing center.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Academic Writing as a Second Language
Before coming to the IWCA Summer Institute, I attended a workshop offered by Westminster ESL Director Jennifer Ritter, herself a former writing center director, on understanding language learning and working with non-native speakers. Among the popular ideas about language learning that Jen challenged are that most second-language errors are due to interference from one's native language and—most provocatively—that students learn what they are taught. As Jen explained, the kinds of advanced English language learners we see at the college level have acquired sufficient proficiency in English that most of the mistakes they make are in fact processing errors: it's not that they don't know the construction; they just don't produce it in the moment of speaking or writing. The second point addresses the difference between being told something and being able to do it. The teacher may explain a concept, but "getting it" takes plenty of practice over time. Both of these points made me wonder if teaching academic writing to native speakers of English didn't involve the same issues.
In yesterday's presentations on foundational ideas in teaching writing, Ben Rafoth, Dawn Mendzona, Michele Eodice, and Lori Salem raised points that cemented these connections for me. Reviewing longitudinal studies of writing development, Dawn mentioned the Pepperdine Study, which concluded that text is not the only indication of learning—a student could have learned the most from writing a paper that on the surface did not seem to be his or her best work—and that acquiring proficiency in writing a particular genre took about two years. Lori asked whether the whole concept of academic writing is a necessary fiction, a label of convenience that we place on a range of genres in different disciplines and at various education levels that on closer scrutiny bear more differences than similarities, much as we group mutually unintelligible dialects into the same language.
Let's think of our work with student writers, then, as teaching them a second language (and I'm not being metaphorical here as many English studies scholars are when they call something a "language"). We see that many of the problems students encounter are not because they don't understand an aspect of writing as a concept—the need to introduce a topic, for example, or the boundary between one sentence and another. Instead, they've hit a problem in the moment of performance—that real indication of whether they know something.* Those problems with performance will persist until writing in a particular way has become not something they think about but something they do. The Pepperdine Study says that will require around two years of effort.
So where does that leave those of us working with one student on one paper for thirty, forty-five minutes or a generous hour? Is our job, to return to Jen's presentation, to teach something students may not yet learn?
*I wish English still had different verbs to indicate knowing intellectually vs. knowing by experience.
In yesterday's presentations on foundational ideas in teaching writing, Ben Rafoth, Dawn Mendzona, Michele Eodice, and Lori Salem raised points that cemented these connections for me. Reviewing longitudinal studies of writing development, Dawn mentioned the Pepperdine Study, which concluded that text is not the only indication of learning—a student could have learned the most from writing a paper that on the surface did not seem to be his or her best work—and that acquiring proficiency in writing a particular genre took about two years. Lori asked whether the whole concept of academic writing is a necessary fiction, a label of convenience that we place on a range of genres in different disciplines and at various education levels that on closer scrutiny bear more differences than similarities, much as we group mutually unintelligible dialects into the same language.
Let's think of our work with student writers, then, as teaching them a second language (and I'm not being metaphorical here as many English studies scholars are when they call something a "language"). We see that many of the problems students encounter are not because they don't understand an aspect of writing as a concept—the need to introduce a topic, for example, or the boundary between one sentence and another. Instead, they've hit a problem in the moment of performance—that real indication of whether they know something.* Those problems with performance will persist until writing in a particular way has become not something they think about but something they do. The Pepperdine Study says that will require around two years of effort.
So where does that leave those of us working with one student on one paper for thirty, forty-five minutes or a generous hour? Is our job, to return to Jen's presentation, to teach something students may not yet learn?
*I wish English still had different verbs to indicate knowing intellectually vs. knowing by experience.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Deep Ranges
The IWCA Summer Institute has gotten off to a heady start, heightened by the sense of pilgrimage in getting here. Andrea Malouf of the Salt Lake Community College Community Writing Center and I flew into DFW, took a puddle-jumper from there to Lawton, Oklahoma, discovered a good Thai and Vietnamese restaurant amid the pawn shops and tire stores of Lawton, and then drove from there about sixty miles to the Quartz Mountain Resort and Conference Center. The center is a pretty remarkable place to hold an event like this, located by a lake in the Wichita Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma—unexpected natural beauty for those not familiar with this part of the state.
Our dinner gathering tonight was entertained by M. C. Gilbert, professor emeritus of geology at the University of Oklahoma, who told us the story of the mountains around us. As he explained, the Wichitas are old mountains (over five hundred million years) covered up by the sediments of ancient seas and now being uncovered as the surrounding plains weather away. What we see are just the tops—another fifteen hundred feet of mountain extends underground, waiting to be brought to light. That seems to be a fitting metaphor for our time here as we think about our work, our ideas, our careers, wondering what lies hidden beneath the surface and, for those of us new to the world of writing centers, how deep our roots in it go.
Introductions revealed that the International Writing Centers Association is truly living up to its name. Besides concentrations of participants from New York and Philadelphia, the Upper Midwest, the Southeast, Texas, California, and Utah (of all places), we have two from different universities in Turkey, one from Saudi Arabia, one from Qatar, and two Canadians. Our careers are at every imaginable stage, from doctoral students preparing for qualifying exams to twenty-year veterans of writing centers and comp classrooms. Multimodal literacies, issues of race, and developmental writing are shared research interests among the participants (my own interest in applying ancient and medieval rhetoric to writing center practice got a good chuckle).
I suppose all gatherings of any group that shares interests, from medievalists to Shriners, are fueled by that desire for kindred spirits and the relief of not feeling like the only one of your species. Here, though, the intimacy of the gathering, the freedom from outside distractions, and the sense that we're going to get some serious working and thinking done add to the spark. Many of us voiced surprise, relief, delight, or consternation at finding ourselves in the world of writing centers. The treat is being able to voice such revelations together.
Our dinner gathering tonight was entertained by M. C. Gilbert, professor emeritus of geology at the University of Oklahoma, who told us the story of the mountains around us. As he explained, the Wichitas are old mountains (over five hundred million years) covered up by the sediments of ancient seas and now being uncovered as the surrounding plains weather away. What we see are just the tops—another fifteen hundred feet of mountain extends underground, waiting to be brought to light. That seems to be a fitting metaphor for our time here as we think about our work, our ideas, our careers, wondering what lies hidden beneath the surface and, for those of us new to the world of writing centers, how deep our roots in it go.
Introductions revealed that the International Writing Centers Association is truly living up to its name. Besides concentrations of participants from New York and Philadelphia, the Upper Midwest, the Southeast, Texas, California, and Utah (of all places), we have two from different universities in Turkey, one from Saudi Arabia, one from Qatar, and two Canadians. Our careers are at every imaginable stage, from doctoral students preparing for qualifying exams to twenty-year veterans of writing centers and comp classrooms. Multimodal literacies, issues of race, and developmental writing are shared research interests among the participants (my own interest in applying ancient and medieval rhetoric to writing center practice got a good chuckle).
I suppose all gatherings of any group that shares interests, from medievalists to Shriners, are fueled by that desire for kindred spirits and the relief of not feeling like the only one of your species. Here, though, the intimacy of the gathering, the freedom from outside distractions, and the sense that we're going to get some serious working and thinking done add to the spark. Many of us voiced surprise, relief, delight, or consternation at finding ourselves in the world of writing centers. The treat is being able to voice such revelations together.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Welcome!
I've created this blog to track and share my thoughts as I attend the International Writing Centers Association Summer Institute at Quartz Mountain Resort in Lone Wolf, Oklahoma. I direct the Writing Center at Westminster College, a comprehensive liberal arts college in Salt Lake City, Utah, and am involved in the Rocky Mountain Writing Centers Association and the Utah Community Literacy and Writing Consortium. If any of these postings make you think about your own writing center practice, I invite you to share you reflections.
In planning to attend the IWCA Summer Institute, I set the following goals for myself. Forgive the administrator speak.
In planning to attend the IWCA Summer Institute, I set the following goals for myself. Forgive the administrator speak.
- Maximizing the time available to me in my position. (I teach two courses per semester and have a one-course release to administer the writing center.
- Further involving my student assistant directors in shaping Writing Center policy, overseeing projects, and mentoring consultants
- Empowering consultants to take a more active role in Writing Center projects and training
- Capitalizing on the Westminster Writing Center’s membership in the Utah Community Literacy and Writing Consortium to involve Westminster students in civic engagement and research
- Planning for my term as president of the Rocky Mountain Writing Centers Association, especially in spreading the organization’s reach and involvement beyond Utah and Idaho and in hosting the Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference at Westminster
- Identifying opportunities to conduct and involve students in research using the Westminster College writing center as a source of data
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