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.

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?

So as I mentioned in my last post, I threw my hat in the ring for TYCA (Two-Year Colleague Association of the National Council of Teachers of English) Secretary. I was honored to actually win the election, even though I know my colleague Jeffrey Andelora of Mesa Community College would have been a fine selection as well. I know I will probably take guff on the matter, but I actually voted for Jeffrey. Now that is not because I don’t believe in myself, but simply because it seems extremely self-centered to vote for oneself in any election, and abstaining isn’t much better unless you know, for certain, that the other candidate would be harmful to the job. Jeffrey has some great ideas for the job, and has, in fact, inspired me to think about other things I could be doing as TYCA Secretary, by working on recruitment etc.

Ultimately, I want to “leverage” my position as TYCA Secretary to bring to the fore writing center issues, and to make more contact with writing center professionals at two-year colleges. I think that two-year writing center folks can benefit a lot by talking to each other and by being more aware of organizations such as IWCA that actively address their concerns. I also hope to make more folks in TYCA aware of writing centers and our perspective on things.

It should be a good three years!

Well the summer certain was interesting. Not only did I find out I was elected as TYCA National Secretary, but the building the SLCC Student Writing Center was subject to a reverse flood. In other words, the roof leaked. A leaky roof, however, sounds rather benign, like throwing now a few pans to catch errant drips. The flood we suffered, however, was more like the house in movie version of Fight Club.

Suffice it to say, I was rather busy with physical things to post any update here. Talk about an Undersea World! Perhaps I am prescient?

I’ll write more about the TYCA job later.