The Undersea World of Clint Gardner

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.

Pardon my silence, but this has been a rather busy semester. It is sad when I can’t even make time to write.

I recently returned from CCCC at New Orleans. The conference was excellent, and I was lucky to attend some very good sessions. I also had the opportunity to be at the IWCA booth with Michele Eodice, as well as to attend the IWCA SIG on Friday evening. I did break away from the conference a couple of times to indulge my passion for photography. I did record a session with Andrea Lunsford, Lisa Ede, Michele Eodice, Kami Day, Michael Spooner, and Kathy Yancey about collaborative writing. It was one of those sessions that gets you thinking, and I’ve been thinking about what it is we mean by “collaboration” in writing. The idea behind the session was to hear what authors who write together think about collaboration, but, of course, this quickly branched into the notion of what collaborative learning and writing are for our students. I’m hoping to do some writing on the topic (yeah right!) In any case, I recorded the session. I don’t think, however, that I’ll ask permission to post it on PeerCentered since it doesn’t really relate to peer tutoring–or maybe it does.

Hmm.

This weekend, some of the SLCC Peer Writing Advisors and I are headed off to Boise State University for the Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference. We are taking our iPod recorders, so we will be recording various sessions for PeerCentered.

The second “season” of the PeerCentered podcast begins with where we started, at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing (NCPTW). NCPTW 2007 was held at Penn State and was hosted by the Penn State Center for Excellence in Writing.

I hope that this season will feature more contributors. Harry Denny from St. John’s University Writing Center in New York expressed interest in the podcast, and perhaps some of the people now contributing to the PeerCentered blog from the Boise State Writing Center will want to participate.

There is a lot of potential for PeerCentered either as a blog or a podcast. I think I am going to make it my priority after I finish up as IWCA President this November.

The new writing tutors at the Boise State University Writing Center are carrying on quite the dialog over at PeerCentered. It has been a few years since PeerCentered has been as active as this, and I’m not sure it ever had such a cogent discussion of peer tutoring before. I hope that it will keep up for the whole academic year and that more folks get involved.

Given that I’m working on a couple of video projects (one currently in production with my colleague Tiffany Rousculp and one in pre-planning stage), I’ve been interested in what others have done related to writing centers. Most of the videos found on Youtube are advertisements for writing center work. There are a couple of humorous ones out there (1, and 2) but one serious one stands out in that it seems to define writing center work quite well is from Evergreeen State:

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I like how they’ve taken the voice and integrated it with the image.

My colleague Tiffany Rousculp (of the SLCC Community Writing Center) and I are making a short video of our tutor alumni. We got it down to the 5 minutes we’re seeking today and I’m quite pleased with the results. The movie will be shown to the SLCC Board of Trustees because we want to show them that the work that goes on in a writing center has a broader impact than just on the student or community writers who go to our respective centers. Our purpose is to demonstrate that peer writing consultants learn a great deal and are, indeed, shaped by their writing center experiences.

I will probably post the final version of the video on PeerCentered, since it is about peer tutoring.