As I read chapter 4 (“Facing Sex and Gender in the Writing Center”) of Harry Denny’s Facing the Center, I was thinking a lot about Meg Woolbright’s “The Politics of Tutoring: Feminism Within the Patriarchy,” which Denny cites.

I taught Woolbright to the undergrads in the writing center theory course at my master’s institution. As an English graduate student, I considered myself to already be fairly well-versed in feminist pedagogy; the idea that the writing center was a feminist space wasn’t new to me. But as I taught Woolbright, I realized that for many of the younger undergrads, this writing center course wasn’t just their first exposure to feminist pedagogy in the center; it was their first academic experience learning about feminism in general. To be honest, I wasn’t quite prepared for that–those ideas were so deeply ingrained in my own worldview that I hadn’t even thought about how my students’ experiences might be different.

I thought about this experience as I read Denny’s chapter on gender and sexuality because I think it follows what Denny says about the importance of making space for conversations and for consultants and writers to engage with difficult concept and learn to constantly consider the effects of their own perspectives. As Denny writes, the writing center is never a neutral or completely “safe” space; our identities and our reactions to others’ identities are always at play, no matter how much we wish that weren’t the case in the center.

There’s not really a way to avoid talking about these issues, and there’s not really a way to resolve them, either: “Sometimes,” as Denny says, “discomfort is going to exist regardless, irresolvable” (93). So, the writing center is a prime space to enter into these discussions. And for many consultants, it might be the only space in their academic lives where they get a chance to openly discuss and challenge their own perspectives on these issues.

I’m not sure if this chapter from Denny leaves me with any pressing questions, but I do think this book as a whole makes the strongest case for why writing centers need to embrace their place as inherently political spaces that are imbricated in ideology and identity.

I had an appointment in the UNL Writing Center on Monday, November 12th with Matt W. to work on a chapter from my MA thesis. The chapter is a creative nonfiction essay about rural migration, educational opportunities, and internet access, and I wanted to bring it in to the writing center because I’m working on revising it for publication. I also wanted to use this appointment as an excuse to actually have the time to talk about my creative work, because that’s something that gets shifted to the back burner when I’m not in creative writing classes.

Matt and I are friends, so we have an already-established rapport. This meant that we didn’t spend a lot of time chatting at the beginning of the session–we dove right it and started talking about the essay. I brought a list of areas I wanted to focus on, and I’d already made a reverse outline of the essay because I knew it was likely we wouldn’t be able to read through the entire thing in a one-hour appointment (it’s 20 pages). I think this preparatory work and our already-established mutual understand of what the session would entail helped things go smoothly.

Our prior relationship and the fact that we’re both graduate students in the same program meant, I think, that we could be a lot more honest and blunt in the session–for example, as the writer, I felt comfortable asking Matt to be honest and tell me whether the beginning of the essay was a little boring. In turn, I think he felt fairly comfortable responding honestly and talking with me about how “long of a leash” I think my audience will give me to introduce the topic (i.e., how long can you spend setting the scene with all this imagery before the audience will be like “I’m not gonna read anymore”).

What I wanted most out of the session was 1) feedback from a new audience, since I’d only previously shared the essay with a few friends, my thesis advisor, and some family, and 2) some help figuring out the pacing and organization of the piece. At various points in the session, I checked in with Matt about whether the content was holding his attention and felt relevant to someone with an outside perspective. We also talked about the flow of the essay, and Matt gave me feedback about what an outside reader might think the essay was about at certain points.

Overall, the session was really useful, and I felt that Matt’s feedback was helpful and valuable in two ways. First, he helped me work through the specific questions that I’d asked at the beginning of the session. Second, working with this essay again after 6+ months away from it helped me focus my attention on it again and motivated me to keep working on it alongside the work I’m currently doing as a teacher/academic at UNL. (It was also just very personally gratifying to be able to share this work with someone in my program!)

The one thing I wish could be different about writing center sessions is that they could be longer. I absolutely understand why they’re not and I agree with the reasoning behind that decision. However, for writers working with longer pieces that are further along in the drafting process, sometimes an hour isn’t enough to actually read the entire piece and consider larger structural questions. For example, in my case, my questions about pacing and organization involved the entire essay, but we were only able to go through about half of it (and I summarized the rest using my reverse outline). I know this is a less common situation, and again, I think the policies about appointment length make a lot of sense–this was just one situation where I experienced firsthand how those policies can also present problems for writers.

As I read chapter 6 of The Everyday Writing Center, I found myself agreeing with the points made by Geller, Eodice, Condon, Carroll, and Boquet but also thinking about how the chapter felt too simple.

I think the practical solutions make sense and it is important for leading writing center scholars to continue to push these issues to the forefront. However, at times I wondered whether Geller et al. were also putting a lot of the work onto people of color, particularly when they discuss asking tutors to educate others, share their experiences, or recommend texts for the class. They frame these ideas in a way that’s open to all tutors, but it’s easy to see how encouraging this kind of work amongst a staff might result in people from marginalized groups doing all the work–after all, they likely have thought about these issues more and have more to say. Geller et al. also do not explicitly warn readers about putting too much of a burden on students of color to be educators, which I wish they’d mentioned since it is such a likely possibility.

On a different note, I noticed a shift in the way I read this piece now, as a student at UNL, and the way I read it two years ago, as a student at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. About 14% of UNL’s student population in 2017 were “minorities”, compared to 9% of UWEC’s student population in 2017 (many of whom are international students). UNL also has a student body that’s almost 3 times the size of UWEC. That 5% difference doesn’t sound like much, but honestly, it’s something I notice every day–there are visibly more people of color at UNL than there were at UWEC. As I read Geller et al.’s suggestions for recruiting a diverse staff, all I could think about was how difficult that is on a campus like UWEC where I could literally go the entire day without seeing anyone who wasn’t white. Many of Geller et al.’s practical strategies for recruiting, training, and engaging in conversations about race seem to take for granted that there is enough institutional diversity that the writing center’s staff could include people of color. As I read, I wondered what writing centers at very white institutions like UWEC could do to apply these strategies even when their centers, like their institutions, are homogenous.

For class next week, I read chapter four of The Everyday Writing Center, titled “Origami, Anyone? Tutors As Learners.” The basic idea of this chapter is that writing center directors should strive to create a learning community in their centers, where tutors and administrators alike are in a continual process of learning and creating knowledge together. We should think about the small, chaotic, everyday moments in the writing center as opportunities for growth and expansion rather than moments in which we need to follow some kind of prescribed script. Getting totally lost, as Rebecca Solnit writes, can make our worlds “become larger than our knowledge” of them (qtd. in Greene 56).

Importantly, the community of learners must also be constantly engaged in a process in which everyone participates in contributing to collective knowledge. For example, instead of reading from a list of prescribed texts in the writing center theory course or in ongoing professional development, tutors might bring in texts to study from their own fields or areas of interest. Similarly, Greene introduces the idea of instilling a “beginner’s mindset” in tutors and administrators by introducing group and individual activities that are intentionally difficult or employ underused skillsets. The resulting frustration and challenge put tutors in the mindset of some of the writers who visit our centers. Those moments of difficulty also present opportunities for growth and new understanding.

Overall, I like the general ideas in this chapter and I also really like the rubrics that help writing center directors think about whether they are promoting a culture of learning in their center–those examples represent great, specific steps we can take to help change the culture in our centers. As I think of myself as a potential future writing center director, though, the idea seems so overwhelming. Critically, most of these ideas also hinge on 1) funding that allows for extra tutors and time to support this continual learning environment, and 2) a diverse, committed staff, which I think is so much easier said than found.

With that caveat, I really like the idea of promoting the “beginner’s mindset,” and I immediately started to think of ways I could apply this to my own teaching and writing center work. Let me give an example:

One thing that I absolutely have a beginner’s mindset about is ROCK CLIMBING. Or, actually, specifically, belaying someone else when they’re rock climbing. (In traditional rock climbing with ropes, one person stands on the ground and works the ropes while the other person climbs. If the climber slips, the person on the ground has the ropes so that the climber won’t actually fall–the person on the ground is the belayer.) I have wanted to get into rock climbing for years, but the belaying thing is really holding me back. Rock climbing is really a communal culture because you almost always need to have a partner to belay you, so if you go to the wall by yourself, you have to be willing to buddy up and belay someone in exchange for them belaying while you climb. I’m not great at belaying, and what makes matters even worse is that you usually have to pass a quick skills test in order to be belay certified. This is really embarrassing, but I have failed the belay test on multiple occasions. I’m honestly too embarrassed about it to even try to rock climb any more! It’s not even that hard, I know, but something about the rope and the way you have to hold it and understand how to move the lever and the rope at the same time just gets me.

So, when I was reading about beginner’s mindset, I immediately thought about how vulnerable and embarrassed I feel when I’m doing that stupid freaking belay test. Honestly, this is the best example anyone could give me–if I imagine that some of my students feel like they’re taking that belay test when they sit down to write a paper, I immediately respond differently to them. It gives me anxiety just thinking about doing that belay test, and letting myself sit with that anxiety for a while and understand those emotions makes me really aware of what some of my students might be going through.

In the writing center class, we’ve been talking a lot lately about social justice issues and when and how they come into play in the writing center. This is a subject that I think is critically important but also very complex. Social justice is an ongoing, dynamic process where more work can always be done, which makes it hard to draw lines about what any organization or person “should” do in the service of justice. Here, though, are my initial thoughts about things that writing centers absolutely must do to call themselves “socially just.”

1). At the most basic level, I think it is the responsibility of every writing center to talk about students’ rights to their own language and train their consultants about working with a variety of Englishes, a variety of standards, and a variety of people. I think that much of the social justice work writing centers can and should do begins with teaching consultants about the ways in which language can be an oppressive force. Consultants should be able to think critically about where their ideas of “right” and “wrong” come from, and they should constantly be reflecting on how their consulting and their views of language and communication might be culturally and politically shaped.  Of course, this is more complicated to do in practice than it is to just say here, but I think that at a bare minimum, every writing center has an obligation to work against the ways language is used to oppress.

2). On an overlapping note, the writing center should be an inclusive, accessible space where consultants and administrators work continually to ensure that they take into account the experiences and needs of a broad range of writers. This might take place on a macro level–e.g., changing a policy or standard, center-wide practice when we realize it is exclusionary–or on a micro, day-to-day level–e.g., pushing in chairs or providing a variety of options for each writer so that the space is physically accessible. The main idea here is that the center is always actively working to be better, and that change can come from any level. Social justice is a dynamic process, and so I think being a socially just center is not something that we just “achieve”–it’s a constant process of engaging and changing.

3). As much as possible (given the institutional hierarchy and structure), I think writing centers should be advocates for students’ rights to their own language in the rest of the institution, too. When possible, writing centers should work toward raising awareness about language, oppression, and the ways in which that oppression might play out in our writers’ classrooms and assignments. It is not always feasible for the writing center to cause trouble, but when we are in a position that allows us to do so, we should. In the most ideal situation, the writing center would play an active, visible role in promoting these ideas on campus. In perhaps more realistic situations, the writing center might do this in a more subtle way by helping consultants and writers alike understand how to navigate these situations and make small efforts to push back in classes and in other areas of student life that they’re involved with.

I have read Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English?” before, but I had never actually read the three-part New York Times piece by Fish that prompted Young’s piece, so this was a new experience for me.

First of all, I just have to be petty and say that I really don’t think this piece needed three parts. I rolled my eyes a lot at the second part–it’s mostly just clapping back at the comments section (which was a bad idea and a bad way to argue even in 2009, before clapping back was so big on Twitter). Fish has obviously lived his life as a white guy (see photographic evidence below), and you can tell it by the way he can’t take a second of criticism without immediately jumping to a response.

Anyway, what surprised me about Fish’s piece was how much of it I agreed with. I agree with a lot of the parts of the piece that Young also agrees with–namely, that some composition courses don’t focus enough on the actual act of writing and on the “conventions of public discourse” (Young 62). Like Young, I think Fish has a point when he bemoans the fact that some of the courses at his university focus on “everything under the sun” instead of “training in the craft of writing.”

As a new composition teacher, this is a fine line that I’m always trying to walk–I know my course might be the only time a student is exposed to the work of Roxane Gay, for example, and I really enjoy being able to help students navigate these new ideas. At the same time, though, I want to help my students grow as writers, and I don’t believe that they can do that simply by reading and discussing texts. Sometimes, when people outside the university ask me what my students read, it sparks an awkward discussion because I usually respond that we don’t do a ton of reading in the class. “It’s a writing class, not a reading class,” I respond. This invariably sparks an awkward conversation about how people actually “learn to write.” But in my mind, it’s very important that I know where the line is between a literature course and a writing course and that I keep my classroom very firmly on the writing side of that line. I think the best way to learn to write is by writing, and so that’s what we spend most of our time doing. We use outside texts to inform how we think about argument, another key component of the course, but my classroom is writing-saturated, not reading-saturated, and I’m quite comfortable with that.

So, in that sense, I think Fish has a point. However, as Young points out, Fish’s argument goes far beyond that basic critique. I agree completely with Young’s argument about standard language ideology, but there’s one more thing I want to point out, too.

“I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else,” Fish recounts, and that’s another place that his argument falls apart for me. It’s interesting that grammar is the first thing that comes to mind for Fish when he thinks about composition, and I think that choice of words says volumes about what’s important to him. What about the ideas underneath the grammar? What about things like organization, voice, and style? These elements are equally important to succeed in the workplace, which is what Fish claims composition courses should help students do. I think it’s true that reading-intensive courses don’t work at teaching students to write, but I also know there is more to writing than “grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.”

 

For my writing center research project, I’m considering two options. The first option is a mixed-methods qualitative and quantitative study that seeks to describe how writing centers portray their work with graduate students. I would gather data from a sample of writing center websites from across the country. Relevant data points might include whether they mention graduate students at all, how much of their website is devoted to graduate tutoring (e.g., an entire page, etc.), whether they explicitly mention graduate consultants, and whether they hold events for graduate students, such as dissertation boot camps. The project’s goal would be to describe how writing centers advertise to and talk about graduate students in public-facing materials, which would fit in larger conversations in the field about working with specialized writing and graduate students generally.

Overall, this first option is a little safer because it’s more straightforward and, honestly, easier to do. However, I’m also trying to think about whether I can incorporate my personal research interests into the project. Broadly, I am interested in place studies and how feelings of displacement can affect writers. I am not sure how I would transform this into a research project, but I think a theory-based approach would be the best bet. I still need to do more brainstorming, which is why this option is not as “safe” as the first option. Although it is deeply personally interesting, I don’t have a very strong background in place studies yet so I’m not sure I’d be able to incorporate theories (although I am in an independent study right now that is filling in the gaps in my knowledge).

“It seems clear that we have been better trained to spot comma splices and fragments and other syntactic slips than to notice when students take risks” (161).

For class this week, we read about working one-to-one with writers (Harris), setting an agenda early on to direct the conference (Newkirk), and the importance of offering praise (Daiker). I’m going to focus on the last point for this blog post because it can be a controversial (and yet often overlooked) method.

When I revisited Daiker’s piece, what really stood out to me was the idea that, ideologically, we view assessing writing as an act of identifying what’s missing rather than identifying what’s present (154).

https://giphy.com/embed/26ufdipQqU2lhNA4g

via GIPHY

 

This sounds simple, but it was (as Dr. Jimes Tooper suggests in that GIF) a pretty mind-blowing realization for me. I had never thought about the issue in terms that were so simple before.

When I think about my own method of assessing writing, whether for my students or in the writing center, I have to admit that I, too, focus on what’s missing. While I make a point to offer deliberate, specific praise (particularly for less-confident writers), I think I approach papers with a mindset that prioritizes focusing on what could be better. In the writing center, this comes in part from the situation: the writer is usually coming in to learn how to improve. But when I’m grading students in my own classes, is this mindset actually helping my students? Ideally, I think that I’m offering them strategies that will help them do better on future papers in my class and others. But if what Daiker quotes Diederich as saying is true and praising students does more to improve their writing than “any kind or amount of correction,” shouldn’t I be offering way more praise than correction (qtd. in Daiker 155)?

On the other hand, as I’m sure we’ll discuss in class, I also deeply feel that praise is entirely dependent on the writer’s abilities, confidence, and experience. (For example, when I think about the feedback I received from Dr. Azima on a recent rough draft, I appreciated the praise but I focused more on the suggestions because I wanted to improve the draft.) I think all writers benefit from at least a little bit of praise, but some writers are aware of what’s working well in the draft and need to have a conversation about what’s not working as well in order to understand what they can do to improve.

One of the really personally rewarding parts of being in this course thus far has been that I have the opportunity to reread some articles that I read during my MA when I first started working in writing centers. Even better, I’m using my old St. Martin’s Guide, which means that I get to revisit all my baby-writing center thoughts and reflect on how much I’ve learned.

When I first read “A Critique of Pure Tutoring,” I was really struck by Shamoon and Burns’s descriptions of the master classes. As I thought about how I had learned to write, I realized that in many cases, I’d gone through a similar process of imitating a master or having a teacher literally reword my writing. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this exact practice was what had pushed my writing further and taught me how to think critically about my own work. Eventually, I didn’t need that teacher to model better writing for me because I was able to do it myself.

(Here, I just have to add that this is a very precarious process, and while I do think this method worked for me, it really bothers me to think about the professor I had who did this because he did it for all writers–sometimes, I would read a revised piece in one of his creative writing workshops, and I would recognize lines that I could tell were his, not his student’s. It only works if the student fully grasps why the teaching is happening this way; if the student merely revises trying to do what the teacher wants, no learning happens.)

As I read Shamoon and Burns now, what strikes me most is how situational it all is. “How do you decide when to be directive vs nondirective??” I wrote in the margin after I finished reading the piece the first time. After a few years of experience, the answer is clear to me, as Peter Carino eventually concludes in “Power and Authority in Peer Tutoring:”

“…from session to session and moment to moment, tutorial methods shift from directive to nondirective” (125).

The answer to my former question is, like so many things in writing center studies, “It depends!”

Personally, as I’ve brought up in class before, I’ve noticed that the skill and power relationship between tutor and writer has a huge effect on how directive I am in a session–although not always in the way you’d expect. My tutoring sessions with writers who are graduate students are very different from sessions with first-year writers, particularly because in the past, many of my graduate student appointments in the center were with personal friends of mine. I actually feel comfortable being more directive with these friends because I trust them as writers and, as Carino would put it, I know that we truly share the power equally during those sessions: if I make a strongly-worded suggestion, my fellow graduate students will take it into consideration but ultimately, I know I can trust that they will view it only as a suggestion, not a directive.

I don’t want to get too long-winded here, but the conversations about directivity versus nondirectivity and power in writing center sessions keep bringing me back to my experiences tutoring graduate students, and I’m interested in pursuing this thread further. The sessions are just so radically different in terms of authority and control that I begin to wonder if these kinds of sessions could really be classified in the same way as my sessions with less experienced writers! This is an idea I’m kicking around for a conference paper or project in the near future, and I hope we get the chance to discuss it a bit more in later classes.

“The first steps to learning to think better are to learn to converse better and to learn to create and maintain the sort of social contexts, the sorts of community life, that foster the kinds of conversation we value” (90).

The first time I read “The Conversation of Mankind,” I was completely floored by this quotation (my marginalia from 2017 says “OH MY GOD”). I think it’s the best exemplification I’ve ever encountered of the idea that writing is a social act. For me, it’s easy to understand the idea that you need a community of like-minded peers to best foster the kind of thinking that community engages in. This is something that’s perhaps easiest to grasp if you can imagine someone trying to do this kind of thinking without having that community–the basic idea and the desire to engage are present, but the ideas can’t quite be fully developed without those critical social conversations. You can’t get there on your own; you need outside stimulation to stir up your thinking. For example, after I got my BA, I worked at a tech company for a few years and I wasn’t engaging much with academia. When I went back for my MA, being able to re-enter those sites of discourse was so overwhelmingly inspiring because the things that were going on in my own head changed immediately. I felt like I’d gotten a piece of myself back–but I could only have achieved it by re-entering those conversations.

To briefly summarize Bruffee’s essay: for Bruffee, knowledge is explicitly collaborative; even private thought is modeled on what we’ve experienced through conversation. All knowledge is a social act that takes place in tandem with one’s community of knowledgeable peers—it occurs in a specific context and arises out of a set of shared understandings, or “normal discourse.” Basic knowledge itself is created by consensus among these communities of knowledgeable peers. Thought, then, is an internalization of the conversations among these communities. Writing, in turn, is an externalization of those internalized conversations.

Bruffee’s essay emphasizes that writing is always completely dependent on its situation and social context; it does not exist in isolation. Therefore, the job of a peer tutor isn’t simply to help students to write well—it’s to help them understand the normal discourse and conventions of their various discourse communities. Together, student and tutor can model that normal discourse, which helps them understand how knowledge is created in those community conversations.

I find Bruffee’s emphasis on knowledge and writing as inherently social really compelling. However, as is often the case for me with theory-heavy essays, I left this essay wishing that Bruffee had gone further and provided some practical applications, too. So, here are some questions I am thinking about as I try to imagine how our writing centers can best foster socially situated writing:

• What can writing centers do in tutor training courses to establish the culture of collaborative learning and discourse that Bruffee describes on page 97? How can we better help tutors understand their role as a discourse-modeling partner?
• More specifically, what are some “best practices” of a session that promotes this theory? What moves occur during these sessions?
• Bruffee argues that rather than “the blind leading the blind,” peer tutoring allows tutor and writer to work together to master the normal discourse as long as “their conversation is structured indirectly by the task or problem that a member of that community (the teacher) provides” (94). As both a tutor and teacher, I want to know more about this! What are the features of an assignment that effectively scaffolds students’ participation in the normal discourse?