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.
Writing Center/Writing Charlotte 