The Undersea World of Clint Gardner

Tomorrow a couple of tutors and I are headed down to Cedar City, Utah, to attend the Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference. This small conference is dedicated to peer tutoring and has been a boon to the struggling Rocky Mountain Regional.

This years, as with years in the past, we will start with a director session on Friday afternoon. After our Regional Board meeting (lead by the fantastic Claire Hughes from Weber State University), we will have two presentations from directors. The first by Jonathan Balzotti of the University of Utah is intriguingly entitled “Tracking Discourse: How Tutors Can Teach Writing Centers.” The verb’s object is what intrigues me most. Writing centers in this becomes a concept to be taught to students at larg…interesting. Next we’ll hear from Star Coulbrooke and Susan Andersen of Utah State University with a presentation titled “How Collaborative Programs Redefine and Support Writing on the University Campus and Ripple Out to the surrounding Community.”

Following that, we directors go out to dinner while in the mean time the peer tutors we’ve brought have a chance to socialize on their own and meet their colleagues from around the region. I think it is a good idea for peer tutors to get away from their directors at such conferences. There is a tendency to stick to close to home, I think.

In any case, the conference starts full swing on Saturday morning. I’m still studying the program to see what I want to join in on. I am hoping to record some sessions as I’ve done in the past for PeerCentered podcasts. That reminds me–I still need to ask Neal if I can podcast his keynote address from last year’s excellent conference hosted by Boise State.

Oh and I’ll be tweeting the conference. Tweet on!

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!

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.

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.

English Department colleague Jason Pickavance recently had an article published on insidehighered.com where he explores the benefits of smaller conferences:

Here’s what you won’t find at TYCA-West or most other smaller, regional conferences. You won’t be subjected to the name-badge-glance-and-turn, a move I’ve always for some reason viewed as akin to a basketball player’s expert pivot. (If only the Utah Jazz center could pivot like that.) Instead, you will encounter colleagues at peer institutions genuinely interested to meet you and hear what you have to say.

I’ve found that this is true of the International Writing Centers Association Conference as well (to an extent.) When I first stated attending IWCA, I was pleased that there were folks there whom I had known online or (and this increased the gulp factor) people I admired for their published work. I had the opportunity to become a part of a community (or to use more academic parliance–a discourse community.) By allowing for such access, I believe we make our field stronger and more diverse, with scholars exploring a variety of matters from differeing perspectives.

Of course one must be careful not to confuse building a community with molly-coddling. Ideas must be callenged and tested in order to bear out. We must challenge each other in a community in order to grow (to use a over-used analogy.) Of course we also must consider old paradigms and how the dialectical model of confrontation might not necessarily be the best method for a field to grow. What I’m getting at, I guess, is that while we don’t have to always just affirm each other’s ideas (that can be damaging in the long run) I also don’t think we need to be constantly tearing each other’s ideas apart at the seams. Is there a third path?

In any case, I certainly hope that as IWCA grows we maintain the small conference feel that Pickavance mentions above.