Teaching in a Writing Center Fall 2019

This chapter inspired some sympathy and patience for the students I TA (class: Anthropology & Contemporary World Problems), many of whom complained that there's "too much" reading (two articles, less than 30 pages, a week) or that they want me to "explain the reading more" during discussion section. I'm aghast. No textbook and so few pages-- I never had it so good! My indignation is chastened by Bean when I think of the multiple choice-only tests that reward "surface reading." While these are tied to an academic labor issue-- there's not time or money enough to pay qualified people to correct 300 short answer exams-- it's hurting the students. As much as I like many of Bean's suggestions for helping students, I'm afraid I don't have the resources to make writing guides as a humble TA. Are their any time-saving tricks that minimize lesson prep but add these strategies to any day? I will continue to refuse to "lecture o...

I think the benefit of Contrastive or Intercultural Rhetoric to writing tutoring is mainly as what Casanave calls "awareness building" (53). Particularly because if you are not a speaker of the L1 language, you cannot really assume that you understand the rhetorical structures that it may have that are different than your own language. All this would be need to be explored in conversation and relationship with the student, and even then, as the article points out, students don't fully understand the rhetoric of their native language, just like native English speakers don't.  Besides the critques of overgeneralizing culture, I certainly think it's a worthwhile endeavor to explore the biases and assumptions we may have about other "cultures" and also analyze various writing structures. That is fascinating! When it comes to it's use pedagogically, I echo Kyle's earlier statement that individualized approaches are best because every student (ELL or n...

The critique of contrastive rhetoric makes me think of one of the lesson plans I use to introduce the genre of creative nonfiction to my GEL students. We discuss Kiese Laymon's "Da Art of Storytellin,'" and in the essay Laymon talks about the expectation put on him as a Black man throughout his education that he adopt a formal, academic voice. In class my students and I talk about what the implicit, coded meanings are behind a voice, which as Laymon describes it, crosses its legs and reads the New York Times. The implication is, of course, that there is no singularly English way of constructing a paragraph, because American culture has not been conceived of nor inflicted in a vacuum. Once, the eradication of native languages in favor of mandatory English was a tactic of subjugation in our country, and it's still In many contexts a tool of assimilation. Particularly in an academic context when our conception of writing "correctly" in English is a coded wa...

This week's reading was very intriguing to me because of how, like others have mentioned in their posts, "intercultural" or "contrastive" rhetoric was something that I hadn't formally heard about. I've seen intercultural communication, and even have taken courses on it in terms of media. However, I've seen it in action, whether it is in talking with my international students, helping my friends in undergrad edit their papers, or working with students here at the writing center. This reminds me quite eerily of how an entire section of my Japanese language course so far has been devoted to navigating the roundabout nature of Japanese speech. One can't just say "No" to a plan, because that is considered to be too direct (いいえ - literally "no") ; they have to instead say, "Uh... well, that's a little.... [inconvenient]" （えと・・・。　それはちょっと・・・。). So, with that in mind, the kind of academic writing that American students ...

I hadn't heard the terms "contrastive/intercultural rhetoric" until Carol brought them up in our class last week. The writing center pedagogy class I took at Rhode Island College had a week on differences among English Language Learners with a heavy focus on how essay organization, particularly thesis placement, and understanding of citational practices, tends to vary, but we framed relevant examples as things we MIGHT see, not deterministic formulas of, for example, Chinese international students will all plagiarize because they are used to communism. This has never come up with any students of mine. Predicating this area of rhetoric studies on the culture concept means its boundaries will never be clear because even cultural anthropologists can't agree what exactly culture is and if it's a useful idea. I appreciate Kaplan's impulse to clearly define areas of the field, but I agree with his critics and have heard them applied to historical conceptions of an...

Contrastive rhetoric: It seems to me that the main advantage of contrastive/intercultural rhetoric is that it forces us to reconsider the ideas about writing, reading rhetoric that we take for granted because they've been ingrained in us. But I do think there are other ways of honing that awareness without getting into the extremely troubling territory of overgeneralizing different cultures/languages (especially ones we don't have a particular expertise in); attributing all of a student's rhetorical difficulties to culture, rather than considering more individual factors like educational background, socioeconomic factors, and the student's personal style of writing, thinking, and expressing ideas; and treating an American/Euro style of writing, reading, and thinking as inherently preferable/better — what to strive for, at the expense of the approaches that feel most natural to them. That last one is something I'm especially interested in addressing — both in my o...

The reading/criticism of Contrastive Rhetoric reminded me of this series of images: https://www.brainpickings.org/2009/10/29/east-vs-west-yang-liu-infographics/ The graphics are very stark in their minimalism, contrasting the differences between Eastern and Western cultures, though often based on cultural stereotypes. Example for self-expression with Western cultures represented by blue and Eastern by red: This discursive style seems to be precisely the argument that proponents of CR is making re: English's linearity, and yet this series of graphics is very popular all over the world and never spoken of as controversial! Is it because the author/designer Yang Liu is Chinese-German and thus bridges that gap within herself? Many people did indeed say these images helped them understand people in their lives better. I think as humans we are always looking for patterns, for what is clear-cut vs. ambiguous, perhaps especially in terms of self-improvement. It's not n...