The Undersea World of Clint Gardner

I’ve been attending the annual TYCA-West at Clarkdale, Arizona campus of Yavapai College. Yesterday I attended various sessions on assessment of composition classes. The first one focussed on retention of students and the reasons why students drop. I shall be exploring the findings more later, I think. I also attended a session on student anxiety with the same course. I am particularly interested in this because we in the writing center world seem particularly obsessed with student comfort and their has been a great deal of scholarly work on the implications of being “comfortable” in the center.

To be succint, the WC discussion centers around whether or not it is the writing centers place to make students comfortable, particularly since learning can be an uncomfortable thing. I won’t be writing on that issue further today, as I am currently in a session on RSS, and it seems quite rude to be writing this and listening to the presenter.

More later, plus pictures!

My colleagues Tiffany Rousculp, Melissa Helquist and I have been working on a new writing-center related course here at SLCC–English 1810:  Writing Center Theory and Practice.  We struggled for some time with the name of the course, given that we wanted to emphasize the notion of pedagogy and that tutoring work is not only a great lead-in to a teaching carreer, but also is a different way to work with students.  The influence that one-to-one writing center work can have on instructors is profound.  Just the other day, a colleague asked it if would be possible to have adjunct faculty take our Student Writing Center education program (aka training) and to work as consultants in the Center.  Although our budget wouldn’t allow for that, it is an intriguing idea.  I can see that it would have positive influence on the teaching of adjunct faculty.

In any case, the biggest difference in 1810 and our regular staff education program is that the students enrolled in it will not be employed by either the Student Writing Center or the Community Writing Center.  They will, in fact, be Service Learning students, required to work for 20 hours in either Center during the semester.  I’m interested to see how such a volunteer program will work.

UPDATE (10/11/2008):  Our proposal seems to have cause problems with Internet Explorer.  I shall post it back when I get a change.

Given that the new SLCC Student Writing Center(SWC) Peer Writing Advisors have been attending staff education classes for about a month now; have completed their observations and tag-team tutoring; and have started to work on their own with student writers; it has come the time when I stick my big nose into their tutoring reports for assessment purposes.  Ok, I’m casting this “intrusion” rather negatively, but that is simply to flip the notion around on you and explain why this is not intrusion but instruction.

We have a handy-dandy online reporting system here that allows writing advisors to not only collect data about student writers, but also to reflect upon the sessions they conduct.  To me that is the most important element in the report system.  Writing advisors have the opportunity to reflect on their work and to improve upon it.  It is so much ingrained in my notion of writing center work, in fact, that I kind of get the willies when I think about a writing center that wouldn’t have its tutors reflect on their work, and/or such reports are only aimed at an external audience (such as instructors.)  To me the reflection is essential to writing center work.  It helps us grow as tutors and respondents to other’s writing.

As the supervisor of the reporting system, I can go into any report in the system and read it.  Very rarely am I required to review a report in order to settle some issue that has arisen because of a session gone wrong. Mostly I stay out of the reports and only look at the broad data–unless I am conducting evaluations of the writing advisors’ work.  In general I believe the reports are the tutors’ and she or he should feel comfortable reflecting on in peace, as it were.  We cannot, however, fool ourselves into thinking these reports are private.  They are not.  They are very much a document of the SWC and should be treated as such.

Ultimately, I don’t see this as a huge conflict of interest for me:  yes, indeed, a tutor should have her space to reflect on her work, but she should also be open for feedback from someone else.  This is why I don’t see such evaluative/instructive work as “spying on someone.”  It is no more spying on a tutor than giving feedback on writing is spying on a student writer.  The new tutors need such feedback, and need develop the sense that they are a part of a community that takes practice seriously and carries on a discussion about it, either in-person or online.

Mike Mattison wrote about this issue in his article “Someone to Watch Over me:  Reflection and Authority in the Writing Center” (Writing Center Journal, Vol. 27, No. 1).   Although Mike’s situation was different (his new staff members were actively in the the Boise State Writing Center taking notes about sessions, which, apparently was seen as “spying” by some veteran members of the staff), the notion is the same:  we learn by reflecting on our work and getting feed back on it.

In any case, my concerns about this issue are a tempest in my own teapot, as it were.  The new tutors enjoy getting my feedback, and like talking about what I observe.  They will, in fact, ask why I didn’t happen to comment on a particular session they conducted.

It seems proper to bookend my rather sporadic blogging by posting a binary title for you. In any case, as you might imagine, I’ve been rather busy this first month-and-a-half of spring semester 2008. Mostly I’ve been dealing a great deal with class stuff. I’ve been out of the classroom for nearly two years due to professional, campus, and Student Writing Center commitments, save working with tutor education, and I was feeling a bit rusty at first. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was doing–I am pretty diligent, some might say obsessive about class planning, but I did feel a bit out-of-sorts since it seemed all new to me again. In all I was a bit nervous about that feeling, but then I fell into enjoying it again. I also realized I needed to review my teaching style to reach this particular group of students. They are a bright group who have an interesting perspective on things.

In any case, that’s why the long silence.

In other news, I’ve gone all out, and in true fashion, completely contradicted myself about the facebook.com issue. I’ve found that there are literally thousands of SLCC students active on facebook, and many, many peer writing tutors in writing centers. I have, therefore, created a facebook group for PeerCentered. It already has quite a few members, although there is not much activity. We’ll see. It is, however, the most interest the PeerCentered concept has ever received in its many permutations.

I don’t feel too badly in taking this thing to facebook: if that is where people are, then so be it.

Well I feel compelled to write something, given that it is the end of the semester. I will, therefore, make notes:

1. One can tell the student who has been working on her or his paper for a long time by the state of their attire. Sweats and bad-hair-day beanies mean the student is pulling an all-nighter to hopefully get the paper done. The well-dressed student who does not have that desperate look in her or his eye is the one who took more time or (I hope this is not the case) such students just don’t care.
2. Something or someone must be trying to hack WordPress, as my administrator account was deleted. Time to upgrade, I suppose.
3. The end of the semester is notoriously unpredictable. Our rush days came early this week. Now it is relatively quiet.
4. I am looking forward to getting back into the classroom next semester.
5. I feel scatter-shot at the moment.
6. I have a peer review to write that I thought I had finished. I understand why the editors want more now, but at the time I was under the happy delusion that my enthusiastic acceptance of the piece in question was enough.

Random notes on a random day.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a conference concerning ESL issues (I’ve appropriated the title as the title of this post) sponsored by the University of Utah University Writing Program. Unfortunately due to prior commitments I could not attend the entire day, and will be unable to attend the sessions at all today. Diane Belcher was the keynote speaker, and gave a fine, practical, yet theoretically-based presentation on common ESL issues. Her presentation inspired me to talk to the chair of the English department here at SLCC in perhaps having English or the Writing Program Council invite her to SLCC to carry forward the work we’ve been doing for that last few years in having our colleagues from across the campus in non-writing fields to understand that we are all, indeed, teachers of language, and we all have a responsibility to respond adequately and fairly to those less-experienced in the English language than native speakers.

I was also very impressed at the conference with the panel of L2 graduate students who spoke about their experiences in American academia as non-native speakers/writers of English. I think I took them off-guard a bit with this question: “What kind of feedback on your writing do you find useful, and what kind do you find useless or even harmful.” Their answers were quite revealing. One stated that a lack of cultural sensitivity on the part of an instructor was harmful. Another stated that he found general comments useless, and liked it when someone pointed out a pattern of error, and explained what was going on. Another pointed out that she liked to receive possible options for recasting sentence-level issues. Finally they all agreed that they found comments that caused them to think more to be the most useful.

Overall I was struck by the important point that Belcher and the panel of students made by echoing Bruffee: all students (even if they are non-native speakers) are new to academic uses of language. It is our job to bring them into that language group. I would go further to say that it is our job and it is also important to encourage students to explore and expand that discourse community.

Ah beginnings. I wrote this on PeerCentered moments ago:

It has always struck me as ironic that fall is the time when school traditionally starts given that fall is the time for crops to be harvested, the hard freeze to hit, and the squaring away of everything for a long winter. Even if late August feels nothing like fall, I still sense the hint of autumn in the way the light plays out over the land and the distinct chill in the early morning air as I hurry off to the bus stop to start up yet another school year.

Fall is, of course, spring for education. It is when students start anew and hope abounds.

It would be interesting to explore the opposition that academia (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) creates between itself and nature. Beginnings for academia, as I noted above, are traditionally in the fall and endings are in the spring. One could argue, of course, that traditional academia is quite in tune with nature in that it takes inside activities at a time when nature is least hospitable to being outside or growing things.

Anyway, just wandering around my mind on this fine pre-fall morning, full of new students looking for their classes.

Summer is a great season in the Student Writing Center, but not because it is a “less busy” time of the year. While there are proportionally fewer students taking summer classes, and SLCC is only open 4 days a week, we have a considerably smaller staff of writing advisers and student writers are often working fast and furious to complete their assignments on the compressed 11 or 8 week syllabus. One could argue (and I could research this statistically) that we are busier than a normal semester in the Student Writing Center.

The fact that we’re busy, however, doesn’t deter from the fact that we get more non-tutoring work (thinking about the Center, developing programs, creating advertising, etc.) done in the summer time than any other. Part of me wants to attribute this productivity to peer writing advisers being so busy that the energy from that work spills over into a desire to do more. I believe that may be the case for some of the work, but I must admit that I think the real cause of this productivity is that usually none of the staff are taking classes during the summer. The lack-of-class thing includes me as well, since I rarely teach during the summer (although I’ve been known to do it.) What I’m getting to is that taking classes and teaching them does take away from the work that one can give to a Center.

There is a discussion going on about teaching, load, and community college writing center directors on WCENTER. I am surprised at the loads that some folk’s carry. For example, one person stated that she teaches something like 15 hours instead of the normal 18 hour load. 18 hours! Oy vey!

I hold firm in the belief that load can make or break a writing center and a writing center director. While I don’t hold that a writing center should orbit around a director, I do assert that the type of collaborative leadership a writing center director should provide is severely hampered by being overloaded with traditional classes. A writing center is an alternative learning environment from the classroom. It is also a place where peer tutors can and do learn. Writing center work should be counted as teaching load for the director, not just some side-line (but necessary) administrative duty like doing the scheduling for a department. Directing a writing center is teaching.

Load is probably just as important a concern for peer tutors given that they are uber productive on other projects in the summer simply because they are no mired in their own course work, but I’ll save that meditation for another time.