The Undersea World of Clint Gardner

I’ve been prepping for our regular before-the-semester staff meeting/discussion and was thinking of using “You Fix it For me: A Lesson in Women’s Work and Cultural Misunderstandings” by Kim Zabel in the latest Writing Lab Newsletter. In the article, Zabel describes a tutorial session in which she was the subject of sexist behavior in the writing center, and how she was verbally attacked by a male client for “shaming him” by not doing the work that he was demanding from her. Zabel then goes on to explore the cultural ramifications, as the student was a recent refugee to the United States from a culture that demands women take on certain roles and always defer to men.

Given that I’ve witnessed sexist behavior in the writing center before, and how tutors who are women deal with it, I thought this would be a good article to spur a beneficial conversation. I think it is important to discuss this matter, as well, since the majority of the tutors who work in the Student Writing Center are women and I believe they face challenges with sexist behavior from male students that our male tutors don’t necessarily face. (I might point out that sexist behavior knows no cultural bounds.)

With that, I started to dig around on Google scholar to find other articles to build a bibliography for the tutors should they wish to pursue the topic. I was actually a bit surprised by the lack of attention to the area. I know there are pieces in the Writing Center Resource Manual and a few others that I can think of (but can’t remember the titles of) in Writing Center Journal. I’m pretty sure if I keep digging around I will find a wealth of articles on the subject (perhaps not specifically related to writing center work, but tangentially so through subjects like sexist behavior in the classroom with female teachers).

In any case, this spurred an idea that I don’t think has been approached before in writing centers: a survey of tutors who work in writing centers about sexist behavior they’ve been subject to. I’m no sociologist, so I’d like to collaborate someone in gender studies or sociology to construct a suitable survey.

I’ll keep you posted.

I have sadly neglected The Undersea World for far too long. I promise to update soon, as I have many updates and many ideas to post.

I will say, however, that I’m honored now to serve as Secretary of TYCA. TYCA is a great organization and it will be great working with everyone for the next three years.

I am also am honored to be giving the keynote address at the upcoming Arizona Writing Centers Symposium sponsored by Arizona State University in February. I’m going to be talking about the benefits of peer tutoring.

Just wrote a long post over on PeerCentered about safety and the writing center and share governance:

I’ve been reading Mike Mattison’s new book Centered: A Year in the Life of a Writing Center Director (available from www.lulu.com) and came across the following passage:

“My first year here [Boise State], we had a student come in, demand for us to read a paper, and then say “I’ll shoot someone” if it doesn’t happen. Incredibly poor choice of words, and the student was immediately brought before the conduct officer (fortunately, the conduct officer and I knew one another from a committee, so we had a good rapport). The student wrote letters of apology to the consultants and was also barred from the Center. (25)”

Perhaps it is because of Phil’s post below about mental illness and the writing centers or just the mayhem generally busy-ness of our writing center here at SLCC, but I’ve been thinking a lot about writing center safety of late.

Like most writing centers out there, we’ve had our scrapes with people who misbehave, but have only had to call the campus police once in our entire 18 year history. In that case, the student wasn’t physically violent, but when a tutor attempted to end a session for what she perceived as an ethical violation (the student demanded, loudly I might add, that the tutor write a passage for her instead of the writer doing it herself), the writer became verbally abusive. When I intervened the writer turned on me and then everyone in the room. At that point, I asked her to leave the Center immediately. She refused, so I informed her that if she didn’t leave, I would call campus police to remove her. She apparently thought I was bluffing, and continued to harrangue us. I then walked over to the phone and started to dial. She beat a hasty retreat out of the Center.
Later she accosted me as I was walking to class. No doubt I probably should have reported her for that incident as well, but I let it drop, figuring that she must have had enough problems with her mental health than to be hassled by the campus police. I later found that she had been thrown out of every institution of higher learning in Northern Utah for inappropriate behavior.

There have, of course, been other less disruptive events in the Center, and sometimes some rather scary situations that take place not in the Center but in the classrooms/halls around us. (A student wandering the halls with a machete looking for his teacher is not a nice way to start the day, and hearing of a colleague assaulted by an angry student while in class with a skateboard does make one slightly paranoid about the skater punks who wander into the Center with their long boards in tow, worked up about a teacher and how “unfair” he or she is.) Ultimately we do have emergency procedures to fall back on. Eric Hobson has an excellent primer for developing such procedures in the Writing Center Resource Manual (”Safety in the Writing Center.”

In all this may seem like an issue for directors, and you may ask why am I posting it to PeerCentered? I think everyone who works in a writing center should participate in discussions of safety. In the spirit of shared governance, and in the belief that the writing center really is a student place, we all need to figure out ways to best respond to disturbances, of whatever level of danger they might be.

Two steadfast rules that we developed early on here at the SLCC Student Writing Center are

• If you perceive a threat or are uncomfortable in any way, it is your right to end a session with a student writer immediately.

and

• You and other people are much more important than anything else in the room. If you are in danger leave the situation.

These, of course, are not our only emergency procedures since we adhere diligently to our College’s comprehensive Emergency Procedures Manual, but they do express concisely the purpose of such emergency procedures. They also fit rather nicely with our College’s Student Code of Conduct. The first policy mentioned covers quite a range: from an angry or abusive student writer to one who is, as it were, becoming over-affectionate. In all they’ve served us quite well over the years and were developed by the peer tutors and I way back in 1992.

I am curious what safety policies other centers have.

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.

I am helping to conduct a workshop for the upcoming International Writing Centers Association Conference in Las Vegas (woo hoo!) along with WC megastars Jill Pennington and Neal Lerner. While we haven’t worked out the session completely yet, I’d really like to pursue alternative assessment models/methods. I’m thinking of methods such as recorded exit interviews, focus groups, recorded discussions with students etc. I’ve done quite a lot of this assessment over the past few years with peer tutors in particular, and I would like to expand it to talking with student writers. Basically it would allow the student writer to speak out on her writing center work, and provide our writing center with valuable feedback. The questions I would ask them, of course, would have a purpose in mind.

As I have started to think about this, however, I begin to wonder if this is really assessment at all. I suppose I am informally coding the responses when I analyze them and put them together to build a “report” video. It isn’t, however, a quantitative thing. I’m not putting stats to it. I realize, of course, that assessment doesn’t necessarily have to be quantitative, but in order to find some respect as a “real study” it seems it has to be.

For example, there was a recent post on WCENTER asking about studies that explore faculty in two-year college writing centers. Since I’ve written on the subject and presented at various conferences, I was initially keen to write a response on the subject. The word “quantitative study” appeared (I believe, I can’t seem to find the post right now) so I backed away from the keyboard. Yeah, my work was in no way a quantitative study. It was observational. My perception of their work as well as feedback that I’ve received from students, peer writing tutors, and the faculty themselves. Is that quantitative? Does that meet muster?

So here I sit, for the moment, wondering if the assessment work I entertain talking to others about is really even assessment work at all. What are the parameters that define assessment? Is it what we do with the outcome and not the outcome itself?

The IWCA Summer Institute (an annual gathering of writing center professionals from around the world which focuses on writing centers and writing center development) will conduct a live webcast this year:

How Did We Get Here? Finding and Mapping Writing Center Literature
Presenter(s): Neal Lerner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, Southwestern University
Status: Not Started

During this interactive webcast session, originating from the 2008 IWCA Writing Center Summer Institute, we’ll survey the field of writing center literature, identifying and discussing key texts and ideas that helped define and continue to shape the field. We’ll do this, in part, with game playing to examine participants’ knowledge of writing center literature. Next, we’ll move beyond surveys and games to take a critical look at writing center literature and consider such questions as, have some of our founding texts become codifying and limiting, and how can our scholarship reach wider audiences? Finally, we’ll walk-through the process of using search engines to locate relevant literature that you’ll need either to support the claims you make to colleagues about your work or to pursue your own research. For more information about the 2008 IWCA Writing Center Summer Institute, please visit http://www.wisc.edu/writing/institute/.

Here’s a link to the webcast: How Did We Get Here? Finding and Mapping Writing Center Literature.

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.