Teaching in a Writing Center Fall 2019

Hello, everyone! While reading chapter 5 of the Bedford for this week, I was struck by just how useful this chapter would be for my students. I'm actually going to copy the "research paper checklist" for them and hand it out in class today! Still, while obviously each "genre" has different aspects going for it, it is quite useful to see it articulated in this manner, and this will definitely be a chapter that I go back to for future online tutoring or grading. My question is, what about creative critical projects, like "rewrite the ending of a work creatively as a form of critique"? I ask because it is missing from this chapter, but is a common kind of assignment in the English courses I've taken as an undergraduate at my old school.

This is something I've been thinking about recently as I just got a few new students in the Writing Center (relatively recently)-- one is a first year in Business/Economics, and the other is a Senior in Sports Management. There was a paper recently for Economics which was all about marginal analysis which I did not understand. I think it was especially hard because this student had a lot of questions about not understanding the prompt or what the professor was asking him to do with his analysis. I told him I didn't really know anything about marginal analysis but we could try to dissect the prompt together. This only went so far, and what I ended up doing is just asking him to the best of his ability to explain marginal analysis to me and what they were talking about in class. I think this turned out okay, because when he had to explain it, I could grasp more what it was about and I think it also helped him clarify what he knew so he felt a little more confident.  But I think ...

This is a timely subject for me this semester, as I've found myself tutoring students in the writing center whose instructors have each required them to utilize topics that interest them in their own disciplines in order to apply rhetorical analysis in ways that may be relevant to their broader academic careers and/or interests. Both of my students are in business/finance, and while one has been working on a research project which spans the entire semester, asking her to consider the ways in which researchers in her field apply rhetorical strategies to advocate for one investment method over another, my other student is often invited to frame individual assignments through the lens of economics if he can make a case for its relevance. This puts me, as a tutor, in a liminal space, trying at once to translate assignment for my students, and the conventions of their discipline through teh filter of rhetoric in order to be able to assess whether they've adequately offered the relev...

I have previously worked with writers of scientific papers and am currently working in the WC Enrollment Program with a PhD student in the music therapy department. Her papers and presentations are an interesting mix of both empirical research on the effectiveness and practices of music therapy and case studies / personal anecdotes of actually practicing it. At the same time, the student is sometimes worried that a true "research paper" shouldn't necessarily incorporate stories about actual humans (not even officially researched case studies); on the contrary, I encourage her to use these stories to explain/balance the research, as long as she does so professionally. Like we once talked about in class, the best academics are people who know how to seamlessly integrate rigorous abstract ideas / thoughts with concrete, intriguing storytelling--except burgeoning academics feel they must be overly formal and reliant on a stripped academic tone (the student is also an inter...

One of my students was recently tasked with writing a theater review for her Acting I class. The assignment asked her to focus specifically on tracing / evaluating the acting chops of one main character throughout the play, which she found difficult to do without also commenting on other aspects of the play (script, directing, set). Which is to say, it was hard for to separate the acting performance from the other aspects of the performance, and since I hadn't seen the play and she was working from memory, it was hard for me to figure out what kind of questions would tap into those distinctions. I also have NO experience doing anything in acting or theater. Like, I actively avoid those situations because I hate them. This student is passionate about theater (she previously wrote about a "Dear Evan Hansen" song for a rhetorical analysis assignment) and we have worked in previous sessions on developing a monologue that she performed for her class; this was easier for me t...

I wonder if, as writers, most of the writer tutors share the philosophy I clung to since I was a kid, dreaming of becoming a novelist since I was six years old: because writers write what they know (to some extent), it's critical to learn as much as possible about as many ideas and fields as possible to be a good writer. Because of this, I change my major three times as an undergraduate and ended up with 3 minor equivalences, plus I came to grad school for a holistic field that borrows shamelessly from every corner of the sciences and humanities to study a big topic, human beings. This experience in writing lab reports to critical literary essays boosts my confidence in the Writing Center and some of my most fruitful, rewarding repeat students at my old WC in Rhode Island were social workers and nurses. I know less than ever, but I can fake it through the basics of most disciplines. I've struggled with tutoring across the curriculum the few times I've hunkered down to do ...

Since I haven’t taught Rhetoric, I am helping almost all of my enrollment students with work in areas that are not within my discipline (I also tutor a Political Science major with work in his field). As described in chapter five of the Bedford Guide , I find myself helping them a lot with process. With my Rhetoric and Poli Sci students, we’ve spent sessions working on research techniques (What is JSTOR and how do you use it?), pre-writing activities (brainstorming and outlining), and grammatical/syntactic deep dives (How to know when to use a semi-colon or comma). One of my students is a Creative Writing major working on their fantasy novel which features a dense, complicated mythology and an invented language system. We began our work on it together with the third-to-last chapter. In a way, this text proved perhaps even more foreign than the Rhetoric or Poli Sci essays, and we even took one 25-minute session so they could outline for me all the major pieces of...

As a nonfiction writer, research is par for the course of the discipline, but we don't get very many opportunities within the program to discuss methods of research on an individual basis, which is an aspect of my undergraduate program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies that I find I miss more and more. I, like Elizabeth was saying, found the chapter to be helpful in regards to how to conduct research in general, though I'm still not completely sure I understand its specific application to the Writing Center in particular. That said, I'm interested in the concept of utilizing research in order to test writing center "lore," set forth by the Bedford guide--that research could be used as an instrument to gauge the actual effects of some of the practices we implement on a regular basis, but don't get to gauge the long-term effects of. For instance, I think often about how rapid the turnover is for the relationships cultivated within the writing center ...

I'm interested in how different kinds of student-tutee rapport can influence whether and to what extent a student decides to execute their tutor's recommendations. Rapport is obviously a tricky thing to measure, since it takes into account a lot of super vague, variable, qualitative factors, but on a basic level I imagine it could be student- and/or tutee-reported. Although, perhaps I am less interested in how "strong" the rapport is, and more interested in what type it is—and whether it influences students' likeliness to take your advice. For example, if the rapport feels friendlier/more informal, it seems to me that this could either make the student LESS likely to take their tutor's advice since they see the tutor as less of an authority figure, OR it could make the student MORE likely to take the advice since it is being presented to them in a way that doesn't make them feel quite so defensive or talked down to? (Perhaps it also depends on factors ...

Reading this week's chapter, what struck me was that... Well, the methodology suggested is pretty similar to research outside of a Writing Center. So, that part was a bit redundant. However, some of the suggestions are things that never occurred to me, such as "avoid vague titles" (117) and the "why research" section. My question to you all is, while obviously, we should be doing research here at the writing center, are there allocated grants to do so? How can we go about these grants? Also, is there any way these things that we research--such as discussions of new furniture's impact on students, so on--can be actively used to give us more opportunities to help students?

I felt this chapter was more of a crash course in how to do research on a basic level and less about why writing center research is important or what major shifts in thinking have happened out of writing center research. The latter is mentioned, but I felt like the chapter didn't really dive into that. For instance there is this rather tautological statement: "research offers you the opportunity to think through and research your ideas" (123). Research is a formalized conversation, and it is this conversation among writing centers (and libraries and counseling centers and probably all student-centered campus groups) that I'm most interested in right now. This overlaps with quantitative and qualtiative research but it is more a question of how to connect conversations happening at different universities or in different place in the university together. I'm most curious now to do a tour of some other university writing centers and see what they are doing well and ...

I do believe that research is necessary for any writing center (or academic program) to best serve its many populations and to thrive. I’ve been thinking a lot about how our writing center incorporates collaboration into its tutoring, not just between the WC tutors and their individual tutees, but also between tutees themselves. This is especially apparent in those enrollment situations in which two students have been paired together for their sessions. Since these students are often in different sections of Rhetoric and may be struggling with different aspects of their courses and writing more generally, it would be interesting to research how they actually teach one another during the semester. I’d be particularly curious to see what types of pedagogical tools they use with one another (consciously or unconsciously). I also wonder if it might be worthwhile to more transparently show these paired students how they can use pedagogical tools to help one another an...

I'm surprised the Bedford Guide doesn't make a distinction between research and evaluation activities, given the different audiences and purposes of each. From my time in each of these arenas (program evaluation at a family behavioral health clinic and health services research at the VA), I've learned the distinction refers to methods and application differences (i.e, evaluation doesn't need IRB approval and isn't generalizable.) Anyway, I think both are important. We've talked about the Writing Center as a contact zone for various [sub]cultures and as a vital university resource. Evaluation aims to find areas for improvement and the most successful organizations are always learning and adjusting. Research shares insights from a really rich environment. My research questions so far stem from pragmatic considerations of what data are available: 1. What fluctuations in usage of the Writing Center occur throughout the year? Are these related to more than midterm...

As someone interested in coaching/therapy/psychology, I can't help but link a lot of what we do in the Writing Center to psychotherapeutic methods, especially when dealing with anxious, overworked, or sometimes antagonistic or closed-minded students. I'd be curious in an interdisciplinary study researching a few groups over one semester: 1) control group of students working with WC tutors as usual, 2) group of students working with WC tutors who have had some kind of psychological/coaching training provided by the WC,* 3) group of students working with psychotherapy graduate students (who may or may not have any training in writing--would this make a difference?), 4) students who work in alternate sessions with both regular WC tutors (#1) & therapists-in-training (#3). What might be some differences in their takeaways? How would the psychotherapeutic approach be different for students who are particularly anxious about the writing process vs. a more general student loo...