16.1 Efficacy in the Writing Center

PR AXIS

a writing center journal

16.1: Efficacy in the Writing Center

VOL 16, NO 1 (2018): EFFICACY IN THE WRITING CENTER TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS COLUMNS From the Editors: Efficacy in the Writing Center Sarah Riddick & Tristin Hooker Elastic English: A Mission for Writing Centers Sidney Thompson FOCUS ARTICLES Aligning with the Center: How We Elicit Tutee Perspectives in Writing Center Scholarship Yanar Hashlamon L2 Student Satisfaction in the Writing Center: A Cross-Institutional Study of L1 and L2 Students Pam Bromley, Kara Northway, and Eliana Schonberg Too Confident or Not Confident Enough?: Designing Tutor Professional Development with Tutors’ Writing and Tutoring Self Efficacies Roger Powell and Kelsey Hixson-Bowles Tutors as Readers: Reprising the Role of Reading in the Writing Center Carolyne King Mapping Boundedness and Articulating Interdependence between Writing Centers and Writing Programs Michelle Miley Workshops on Real World Writing Genres: Writing, Career, and the Trouble with Contemporary Genre Theory Jerry Plotnick BOOK REVIEWS Review of The Writing Center as Cultural and Interdisciplinary Contact Zone by Randall W. Monty Stephen K. Dadugblor Review of “They’re All Writers”: Teaching Peer Tutoring in the Elementary Writing Center by Jennifer Sanders and Rebecca L. Damron Havva Zorluel Ozer

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Pam Bromley, Ph.D. is Assistant Director of College Writing and Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at Pomona College. In addition to her cross-institutional research, she is interested in work of writing centers outside the United States. With her co-authors, she currently co-edits The Writing Center Journal.

Stephen K. Dadugblor, M.A. is a third-year doctoral student at The University of Texas at Austin.

His research interests are in writing center studies and rhetorical deliberation around divisive public policy issues.

Yanar Hashlamon is an MA/PhD student at The Ohio State University, working as a graduate consultant at the OSU Writing Center. His research interests lie in critical pedagogy, the evidencebased practices of writing centers, and how both are brought to bear upon professionalization and institutional assessment. He is currently a graduate co-editor of The Peer Review and has a co-authored article forthcoming in Computers and Composition.

Kelsey Hixson-Bowles, M.A. is the writing center coordinator at Utah Valley University and a doctoral candidate at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses primarily on writing transfer, dispositions, and social justice.

Carolyne King, M.A. is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware, where she has also tutored and administrated in the writing center. Her research interests include reading theory and practice, disability studies, research methods, and composition pedagogy. King teaches first year writing and advanced composition classes, where she particularly enjoys bringing a focus to writing through undergraduate research.

Michelle Miley, Ph.D. is Director of the Writing Center and Assistant Professor of English at Montana University. Her research focuses on how institutional relationships shape Writing Center work, and what those relationships can reveal about the teaching and learning of writing. She is currently conducting an institutional ethnography of writing center work from the standpoint of students.

Kara Northway, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of English at Kansas State University. Aside from her interest in writing centers, her research includes the practices of writers in the early modern period.

Havva Zorluel Ozer, M.A. earned her B.A. and M.A. in English Language Teaching from Turkey. She is currently a Ph.D. student in Composition and Applied Linguistics program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include writing center studies and second language writing.

Jerry Plotnick, M. Sc., M.A. has been director of the University College Writing Centre at the University of Toronto since 2000. He studied physics and mathematics as an undergraduate and computer science and then English literature as a graduate student. His current research interests

include the unsettled history of passive voice in the sciences and the logical and epistemological underpinnings of evidence-based medicine.

Roger Powell, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of English and writing coordinator for the Center of Academic Excellence at Buena Vista University. His research explores composition pedagogy and theory, writing centers, responding to student writing, dispositions, and learning transfer.

Elaina Schonberg, Ph.D. is Director of the Duke Writing Studio, where she is also Assistant Professor of the Practice in the Thompson Writing Program. She is currently researching knowledge transfer in various contexts and also consultants’ use of writing center key terms, specifically collaboration. At the time of the data collection for this project, she was Director of the University Writing Center at the University of Denver.

Sidney Thompson, Ph.D. holds an MFA in creative writing and a Ph.D. in American literature. He is the author of the short story collection Sideshow, winner of Foreword Magazine’s Silver Award for Short Story Collection of the Year (2006). His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous anthologies and in such literary journals as American Literary Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Cleaver Magazine, The Cortland Review, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine (UK), Grey Sparrow Journal, The Human Journal, Paste Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, Rhino, The Southern Review, storySouth, and Waxwing Literary Journal. He serves as a Writing Consultant for the William L. Adams Center for Writing at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16 No 1 (2018)

FROM THE EDITORS: EFFICACY IN THE WRITING CENTER Sarah Riddick and Tristin Hooker University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com We here at Praxis are pleased to bring you our Fall 2018 issue, “Efficacy in the Writing Center.” This issue brings together perspectives on how we measure and think about satisfaction and efficacy in our centers, as well as how we position ourselves within our institutions and their missions. Whether we are processing feedback from consultants, developing the self-efficacy of our tutors, or designing missions and curricula that connect us to our colleagues, the writing center continues to be a nexus between institutional aims, student needs, and professional growth. The pieces collected in this issue ask us to consider the ways that the writing center can serve as a place where productive relationships and confidence in writing and learning are cultivated.

In our opening column, “Elastic English: A Mission for Writing Centers,” Sidney Thompson considers the connection between the practices of successful consulting, the practices of mindfulness, and readings in American Renaissance literature.

Ultimately, “Elastic English” urges that what consultants “must become mindful of is our need to be ‘elastic’ in each step of the tutoring process so we find, through trial and error, an approach that is ever more effective than our last effort and invites relaxed openness and positivity” (3).

Yanar Hashlamon surveys existing scholarship that accounts for the perspectives of those who visit the writing center in “Aligning with the Center: How We Elicit Tutee Perspectives in Writing Center Scholarship.” From a meta-analysis of studies across The Writing Center Journal (WCJ), WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship (WLN), and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal., Hashlamon identifies “a tripartite taxonomy” that generally characterizes these studies’ approaches to soliciting and examining tutee perspectives: tutee-satisfaction research, tuteeperipheral research, and tutee-central research (6).

Hashlamon shows the strengths of each and offers suggestions for future research so that writing center scholars can continue “incorporating perspectives of those we claim to centralize or empower in our pedagogy” (6).

In “A Cross-Institutional Study Demonstrating L2 Student Satisfaction in the Writing Center,” Pam Bromley, Kara Northway, and Eliana Schonberg argue that a “lack of scholarly work on L2 perceptions has

enabled lore-based thinking to persist among studenttutors” (21). In response, the authors offer a crossinstitutional study of “L1 and L2 student experiences, particularly about satisfaction and intellectual engagement” (21). Analyzing quantitative exit surveys from both groups across three institutions, the authors find “that L1 and L2 students, in their writing center visits, were equally satisfied, likely to return, and intellectually engaged,” and they reflect on other factors that may suggest otherwise to directors and tutors (23).

In “Too Confident or Not Confident Enough?: Designing Tutor Professional Development with Tutors’ Writing and Tutoring Self Efficacies,” Roger Powell and Kelsey Hixson-Bowles shift our focus from the perspectives of consultees to the perspectives of consultants. Although writing center scholarship and administration reflects an understanding of the relationship between self-efficacy and writing success in consultees, Powell and Hixson-Bowles point out a lack of scholarship that addresses this relationship in terms of consultants. They introduce the “Tutoring Writing and Academic Writing Self-Efficacy Scale (TWAWSES)” as a framework for research in this area, as demonstrated by analyzing responses to a survey they distributed across several writing center listservs and Facebook groups.

Carolyne King continues to focus on self-efficacy in tutor training and development in “Tutors as Readers: Reprising the Role of Reading in the Writing Center.” In her research, she finds that proficiency and confidence in reading are often taken for granted in writing center consultants, when reading is addressed at all. Through her study of tutor perceptions at a large, public university, she makes a case for incorporating more attention to reading skills in tutor training, arguing that, “If tutors are to successfully perform as readers, they need the same meta-awareness of themselves as successful readers that we have fostered when encouraging their understanding of themselves as writers” (64).

In “Mapping Boundedness and Articulating Interdependence between Writing Centers and Writing Programs,” Michelle Miley utilizes institutional ethnography to “creat[e] a more intricate map of the how writing center work coordinates within our institutions, and, more specifically, how we can

From the Editors • 2 develop interdependence with our institutions and with the other writing programs at our institutions” (74).

Miley begins with “looking up,” as she has in her previous studies, mapping the work of her own institution and then extending her process to other institutions, as well. Ultimately, Miley argues that through institutional ethnography and creating these maps, “we can better articulate what writing center work is and what it is not, advocating for an institutional culture of interdependence” (84).

Jerry Plotnick also addresses concerns of interdisciplinarity and the relationship of the writing center to institutional goals in “Workshops on Real World Writing Genres: Writing, Career, and the Trouble with Contemporary Genre Theory.”

Reflecting on a series of writing workshops delivered in his own writing center, Plotnick considers a problem of practice for the work of the writing center as a whole: “The notion of writing as radically situated has always posed a problem for writing centers, since we do not typically find ourselves situated in the same communities of practice as our students” (88).

Drawing on studies of transfer and a critique of the way contemporary genre theory is often applied, Plotnick makes a case for incorporating genre awareness based on future communities of practice in writing within writing center practice.

We close this issue with two book reviews.

First, Stephen K. Dadugblor reviews Randall W. Monty’s The Writing Center as Cultural and Interdisciplinary Contact Zone (2016), in which Monty draws methodologically from critical discourse analysis and theoretically from cell theory to argue for writing centers’ role as a “contact zone” amongst an interdisciplinary, multicultural network. Second, Havva Zorluel Ozer reviews “They’re All Writers”: Teaching Peer Tutoring in the Elementary Writing Center by Jennifer Sanders and Rebecca L. Damron (2016), which reflects on the operation of an elementary writing center, as well as provides administrators and educators with a range of resources for creating and operating their own writing centers for this or similar age groups.

Here at Praxis, we are proud to present this issue, and to continue the ongoing conversations that the writing center community has been having for decades about how to best serve our students, our colleagues, our institutions, and our fields. To that end, we are also looking forward to our Spring 2019 special issue, “Race & The Writing Center,” where we will focus our attention on the way matters of race and racial justice affect and interact with our work. We are especially excited to be joined in this venture by Dr. Karen Keaton Jackson of North Carolina University and Dr. Mick Howard of Langston University, who

will be guest-editing a special section on writing centers in Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority Serving Institutions. We are so looking forward to this collaboration, and, to echo Sarah’s announcement of our CFP for the special issue from Praxis’ Spring 2018 issue, “it has been a joy as managing editors of Praxis to support those who believe so deeply in the work that writing centers do, and we look forward to continuing to serve this community in the coming year.”

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16 No 1 (2018)

ELASTIC ENGLISH: A MISSION FOR WRITING CENTERS Sidney Thompson Texas Christian University s.r.thompson@tcu.edu According to Jordan Bates’ “The 14 Mindfulness Teachings of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Zen Buddhist Order,” to be an engaged Buddhist, one must first be mindful of the suffering that fanaticism and intolerance create and, therefore, be determined not to hold idolatrous attachment to any doctrine, theory, or ideology. Jared Featherstone, among other writing center scholars, has explored the relationships between mindfulness practice and higher learning, primarily as a means of reducing anxiety and depression, though what this paper will focus on is mindfulness’s relationship to “attention” (300), the guide by which I recommend writing consultants determine which techniques to employ in any given consultation, as opposed to the reliance on “any routine or ‘typical tutorial’ model” (Gamache 2). In other words, the consultant should be attentive, or mindful, of the suffering his or her views and methods can cause the student writer when the consultant imposes idolatrous or habitual views or methods or assumptions on another. Put another way, what we writing consultants must become mindful of is our need to be “elastic” in each step of the tutoring process so we find, through trial and error, an approach that is ever more effective than our last effort and invites relaxed openness and positivity. Ralph Waldo Emerson implies elasticity when he states, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment” (“Circles” 238). Henry David Thoreau concurs with Emerson’s notion of “abandonment”: “To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning” (134). With similar enthusiasm for crucial mindfulness and adaptability, Walt Whitman sings in “Song of Myself,” “O span of youth! Ever-push’d elasticity ” (45.1). Not even gothic Edgar Allan Poe can disagree when isolating the foremost quality of postmortem femininity: “ . . . the majesty, the quiet ease . . . the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of [Ligeia’s] footfall” (2). And if the object of one’s monomaniacal obsession is instead a whale, the quality deserving the greatest celebration remains the same: the “subtle elasticity” of its tail, as Herman Melville professes, “Therein no fairy’s arm can transcend it” (411).

Writers of the American Renaissance remind us that to achieve transcendence—empowerment of the self, in the context of the writing center—we must begin with an elastic self, by exercising the mind critically and creatively in every possible way around the perplexities inherent in rhetoric and writing. We improve the odds of communication when the avenues are mutually open; the same is true of learning and mindfulness. When consultants are mindful, open, and communicative and the breadth of our repertoire of rhetorical writing strategies—our “morning,” our “youth”—is on display, student writers will potentially be mindful, open, and communicative in response.

Potentially they will, as another likely consequence, acquire an enhanced awareness and understanding of, if not an appreciation for, the myriad strategies for revision, in addition to specific rules and conventions. I propose then that “Elastic English” become our common mission, if not ministry, as we consultants seek to improve the writer’s ability “to build out of” the binding perplexities that Peter Elbow, in “The Music of Form,” argues writing entails (638). All of us, to some degree, already practice Elastic English to enhance mindfulness in tutorials. Nevertheless, I wish to name it our mission to urge elasticity, not only for the purpose of reducing suffering for the writer and the consultant collectively, but also for increasing communication and reciprocal learning. The rewards help both of us to remain motivated, focused, and positive.

I look to the Transcendentalists for my conceptual understanding of “elasticity,” for I find their respect for nature (or our surrounding elements) and the transcendent relationship a person potentially has with it (or them) actually approximate what the consultant and student writer experience in a tutorial, even if the “woods” of the writing center are merely metaphorical.

We consultants and our writers always have the potential to experience the ideal transcendental state of “inspiration” and “ecstasy” (“The Transcendentalist” 243) as Emerson describes the positive ideal of nature, just as we often experience its “noxious” (“Experience” 298) and “tyrannous” (“Fate” 369) state—when tutorials fail to benefit both parties. “In the woods,” Emerson writes in his essay “Nature,” “we return to reason and faith . . . . Standing on the bare

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student writer into unattached oblivion. I am mindful now of Jeff Brooks’ point of purpose in “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work” that “students write to learn, not to make perfect papers” (130). For the tutorial to succeed then, the student must become mindful, too.

Elastic English •

ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God . . . I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty” (39). This passage seems a fair depiction of the commonly experienced reality a consultant and a writer share—when the consultant’s nonjudgmental editorial eye becomes a transparent eyeball and connects with the nature of a paper and with the writer’s divine intentions for it.

When the consultant sees into the page, or beyond it.

When she has that equally divine insight and offers recommendations that are closer to prophecies they so well solve riddles. When the experience becomes a spiritual reward to both by honoring the goal and vehicle of language equally and so honoring both the consultant and the writer equally, if not for that moment preserving their highest hopes.

Thoreau posits that “Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system” (141), and I posit that the environment of the writing center rests, too, in the “outskirts of the system.” What we typically have, essentially, is a meeting, a happening, of two minds between virtual strangers outside the bounds of the classroom. The first mind, that of the pilgrim student, has heard the details and models and cautions of an assignment directly from a professor, while the other mind, in the role of mentor, if not prophet, must direct a Socratic dialogue to ascertain enough of that exclusive knowledge and then must, on a good day, intuit the rest. This meeting of minds in effect occurs where “Two roads diverged in a wood” (Frost, “The Road Not Taken” 18), so does the consultant view the student writer in the way Thoreau “caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across [his] path, [when he] . . . felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw” (257)? Or does the consultant rather ensure that the two of them together, “knowing how way leads on to way,” take the road “less traveled by”—the one “that will make all the difference” (Frost 14, 19)? It’s quite an intellectual and spiritual meeting, a joint venture in trust and trade, an intimate dependence on the kindness of strangers that includes a campsite dance, maybe even a feast, so that the dialogue is purposeful but lively and, therefore, satisfies, proves helpful, and even enlightens. To keep the ideal path directed toward “the difference,” consultants must continuously be attentive with that transparent eyeball, ever vigilant, ever mindful of the signs of connection and disconnection in the smoke of entrails.

Consultants who adopt Elastic English remain mindful of the need to guard against spoon-feeding the

Works Cited Bates, Jordan. “The 14 Mindfulness Teachings of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Zen Buddhist Order.” Refine the Mind, 7 May 2014, www.refinethemind.com/14mindfulnessteachingszen-buddhism/. Accessed 10 August 2018.

Brooks, Jeff. “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors, edited by Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp.

128-132.

Elbow, Peter. “The Music of Form.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 57, no. 4, 2006, pp. 620666.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Circles.” Nature and Selected Essays. Viking Penguin, 1982, pp. 225-238.

---. “Experience.” Nature and Selected Essays. Viking Penguin, pp. 285-311.

---. “Fate.” Nature and Selected Essays. Viking Penguin, pp. 361-391.

---. “Nature.” Nature and Selected Essays. Viking Penguin, pp. 35-82.

---. “The Transcendentalist.” Nature and Selected Essays.

Viking Penguin, pp. 239-258.

Featherstone, Jared. “Mindfulness Meditation and Service Learning: Complementary Ways of Knowing.” Re-Envisioning Higher Education: Embodied Paths to Wisdom and Social Transformation.

Information Age Publishing, 2013, pp. 299-315.

Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/theroad-not-taken. Accessed 10 August 2018.

Gamache, Paul. Zen and the Art of the Writing Tutorial. The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 28, no. 2, 2003, pp. 1-5.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Penguin Books, 1992.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Ligeia.” The Gold-bug and Other Tales.

Dover, 1991, pp. 1-13.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience.

Viking Penguin, 1983.

Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” Leaves of Grass. New American Library, 1980, pp. 49-96.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16 No 1 (2018)

ALIGNING WITH THE CENTER: HOW WE ELICIT TUTEE PERSPECTIVES IN WRITING CENTER SCHOLARSHIP Yanar Hashlamon The Ohio State University hashlamon.1@osu.edu Abstract This meta-analysis of writing center scholarship surveys the last twenty years of empirical work from The Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. Writing centers are traditionally predicated on treating writers as both beneficiaries of tutoring and active collaborators in its success. Our pedagogy is tutee-centered in its practice and the benefits it produces, and although we pride ourselves in acting as team players in tutoring sessions, does the same quality emerge in existing research? This paper finds writing center scholarship is rife with studies where the writer-as-beneficiary takes precedence over the often-absent writer-as-collaborator. Put another way, we often attend to writers as recipients of tutoring, but we rarely address their perspectives as active participants in testing our pedagogical assumptions. This paper demonstrates historical trends in scholarship and recent moves to center writers in rigorous, participatory roles in evidence-based inquiry. By engaging with tendencies in data collection in writing center research, this project addresses an unconsidered gap between existing principles and the role of tutees in our evolving research practices. This project offers a custom taxonomy for tutee-based studies, and a thematically organized table of findings.

It’s safe to say that every writing center tutor fears an unhappy student. While directors and administrators carry the weight of institutional expectation on their shoulders, a tutor’s success is often an affective one.

We tell ourselves everything’s okay even if a writer leaves without that smile on their face—we give them what they need, not just what they want, after all.

Phillip J. Sloan aptly describes this attitude, a kind of tutor’s hubris, as a “relationship with students, far from an equal collaboration, [that] is predicated on what we believe they need” (4). At the same time, our student-focused practices are ingrained adages that are taught, reinforced, and reflected on; how many studies open with near-compulsory reference to Stephen North and the importance of “student centeredness”?

But how many open with those students’ words instead? Their thoughts? Their experiences? Our pedagogy is writer-centered in its practice and the benefits it produces, so to what degree, if at all, have we been eliciting tutee1 perspectives in writing center research?

In this article, I systematically examine the apparent gap between principles and practice by conducting a meta-analysis of the last thirty years of writing center scholarship concerning tutee participants. Although tutee perspectives may be an under-represented focus of study, writing center

studies as a whole have spent the last two decades calling attention to the need to confirm untested orthodoxy—what Shamoon and Burns label the “writing center bible” (135). Our proverbial bible includes the commandments of non-directive tutoring, prioritizing collaboration, and producing better writers over better papers (Shamoon and Burns 139; Lunsford 9; North 438). These foundational tenets may vary in their use from center to center, but they all prioritize the role of tutees in the practice of tutoring. As North himself reflects on the “validation and growth” of writing centers, he writes that we “quite naturally rely on the writer, who is, in turn, a willing collaborator inand, usually, beneficiary-of the entire process” (439).

However, the double role tutees have in the writing center is unevenly reflected in writing center scholarship, with the tutee-as-beneficiary taking precedence over the often-absent tutee-as-collaborator.

Our scholarship is rife with studies that address tutees as recipients of tutoring, but we rarely elicit their perspectives as active participants in testing pedagogical assumptions.

Foundational tenets have become the subject of increased critical attention for empirical research that could corroborate or complicate their cogency. Our field’s collective realization that our assumptions need evidence is palpable in the first sentences of any recent article on writing center research. How many begin by referencing the field-wide trend towards self-reflection with talk like, “The subject is research in Writing Center Studies . . . again” (Liggett et al. 50)? This penchant for reflection, along with the field’s diverse methods, creates a unique problem in scholarship.

Tutees’ perspectives are clearly valued by writing centers’ disciplinary foundations, but the methods of engaging those same tutees in research are not so well dictated. The assertions that form the writing center’s body of knowledge, as Jeanne Simpson writes, “have been filtered through our own value systems, fears, lore, and aspirations” (1). Empirical research is a relatively recent addition to this list—and although writing center scholarship has a history of empirical study, this work has been largely naturalistic and interpretative while inquiry into lore-based assumptions has accompanied a field-wide push to include more planned, systematic modes of inquiry.

Aligning with the Center: How We Elicit Tutee Perspectives in Writing Center Scholarship • The trend towards greater methodological diversity is interwoven with efforts to include tutee perspectives in contemporary work.

This study finds that writing center scholarship engages tutee perspectives within a tripartite taxonomy.

First are satisfaction studies that characterize writing center program evaluation since the early 1980s.

Second are studies beginning in the mid-to-late nineties in which research shifted to include tutee perspectives in a peripheral capacity—incorporated in a given study, but not the priority of its inquiry or methods that focus on other participant-perspectives, like those of tutors.

Third are recent empirical studies that incorporate substantial tutee perspectives at the center of their work. Each study gathered here engages in participant inquiry, so my meta-analysis sub-categorizes research via its positioning of tutees as practitioners of writing center work. This tripartite taxonomy does not suggest a hierarchy of importance; nor does it imply that studies lacking tutee perspectives are in any way deficient. Rather, the meta-analytical schema shows possibility in writing center studies for incorporating perspectives of those we claim to centralize or empower in our pedagogy.

Methods This project will engage with three main academic journals in writing center talk: The Writing Center Journal (WCJ), WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship (WLN), and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. I examined each journal from its founding issue and determined which research studies incorporated tutee perspectives via a systematic approach. A meta-analysis was conducted on these journals utilizing keyword searches and controlling for disqualifying variables with the following protocols: 1. Used keywords: tutee; client; writer; student; satisfaction; assessment; empirical; evidence; experimental; quasi-experimental; study.

Searched online databases for WCJ and manually searched in Praxis and WLN online archives.

2. Read abstracts or introductions to determine eligibility for inclusion. Only sources that referenced tutee/writers AND established evidence-based practice (claimed empiricism, or otherwise declared their methods) moved to step 3.

3. Read and analyzed sources, examining the role of tutees in research inquiry. Took notes on tutee relationship to research (see Table 1 “tutee role”), forming general descriptions that

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and

later informed the meta-analysis taxonomization of findings.

4. Catalogued discursive markers, methods, tutee role, research cohort, subject cohort, sample size, and artifacts (see Table 1).

My corpus does include some edited collections and texts from non-writing-center-focused journals where appropriate to my efforts of tracking the history of tutee-focused research. These studies emerged from keyword database searches, as well as a manual search of the online bibliography Undergraduate Research Articles in Writing Center Studies: An Incomplete List. All sources fit the same inclusionary criteria as those from WCJ, WLN, and Praxis. Said criteria, detailed in step 2, were primarily set to omit lore-based and anecdotal sources, but they also speak to the sampling method of this study.

Past meta-analyses have inductively reviewed writing center scholarship, broadly sampling a body of research to address methodological trends in rigor and RAD classification (Lerner; Driscoll and Perdue).

Following this tradition, I posit that empirical projects lack ideological consistency in how they position tutees—inquiring about tutee perspectives but eliciting them to varying degrees in scholarship. The theory that tutees occupy a variable position as knowledge-creators in writing center studies compels strict participatory and methodological criteria that are necessary constraints on the sample group. Thus, this study samples from each journal to deliver a focused corpus (n=33) that solely relates to the participant-beneficiary status of tutees in question. I observe tendencies in method and inquiry within my sample in order to inductively produce a taxonomy that scales research studies by the degree to which they centralize tutee perspective.

Results & Discussion Across my corpus (see Table 1), I identify a wide breadth of methods, demonstrating the diversity of evidence-based practice in writing center studies.4 The table catalogues the publication year of each study as well as their main inquiries, participants and subject cohorts, how they collect data, and the perspectives they elicit. The breadth of findings in Table 1 are presented in the tradition set by Rebecca Day Babcock, who publishes her own findings as a “quick ready resource” to make our research more accessible (39).

Initial examination of the findings table suggests the affordances and constraints of each research type. The satisfaction approach to inquiry does elicit tutee perspectives and produce knowledge, but without addressing tutees as reflective, collaborative

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findings to describe how the three research trajectories are separated by the degree to which they prioritize— or more accurately, centralize—tutee perspectives.

Each section provides a comprehensive analysis of how tutee perspectives have been elicited, and for which purposes, in writing center scholarship over the last twenty years. Though they follow a chronological structure, research types have not linearly progressed from satisfaction to tutee-peripheral to tutee-central; instead, they fit a concurrent staging where the first is ongoing as the second starts, and so on for the third.

At present, all three types of research are active in writing center publications. The tripartite structure of the following discussion addresses the chronological trends of this concurrent linear progression in each research type.

Aligning with the Center: How We Elicit Tutee Perspectives in Writing Center Scholarship • participants in tutoring. This positioning is apparent in how tutee-satisfaction studies signal their inquiry. In six out of eleven studies, the discursive markers referenced tutees in yes-or-no research questions (see Table 1).

Although these six have methods that allow for negative feedback, the polar form of questions and the delivery of surveys immediately following a writing center session can bias research questions and goals for positive feedback. In contrast to these limits on perspective, assessment invites large subject cohorts and rigorous sampling. This layer of taxonomy has an average sample size of n=703. Compared to the averages2 of tutee-peripheral and central studies— n=40 and n=580, respectively—satisfaction research benefits from consistent methods of exit survey data collection. Assessment and satisfaction encourage strict research practices, producing knowledge about the beneficiary status of tutees often at the expense of their critical perspectives on writing center practice.

Tutee-peripheral studies recognize tutees as active participants in sessions, but not always in shaping knowledge about writing centers. A common tutee role in this layer of taxonomy is simply “to be present in writing center practice” (see Table 1; Niiler, Severino et al.; Decheck; Raymond and Quinn; White-Farnham et al.). Discursive markers grammatically cue tutees as objects in research questions and goals, with tutors or even the session itself taking the subject position of the sentence. Tutees indirectly collaborate with inquiry by their presence in taped and transcribed sessions, positioning their perspectives at the periphery of these scholarly projects.

Discursive markers in tutee-central studies signal centrality as tutees are grammatical subjects of research questions or have ownership over their writing and tutoring sessions, indicated by possessive forms (Table 1; Winder et al.). Tutee roles emphasize active, participatory, and collaborative perspectives in inquiries that favor a diverse range of subject cohorts and methods. There are seven different methods used in nine tutee-central studies, a majority of which employ both quantitative and qualitative design elements (see table 1). Where writing center talk overall is characterized by methodological diversity illustrated in this meta-analysis, tutee-central studies include the most varied set of methods. The participant cohorts of tutees at this layer of taxonomy are equally diverse.

Multilingual students, graduate writers, and writers with ADHD, just to name a few, take to the forefront of scholarship.

What the findings table does not show are the themes that run through each stage, suggesting a narrative of evolving research tendencies in the writing center research. In what follows, I will explicate my

Tutee-Satisfaction Research When writing center scholars do include tutee perspectives, they historically tend to do so with a satisfaction survey. This method permeates our scholarship’s past and present (see Table 1), stemming from the larger tradition of program evaluation from the early stages of research in writing centers.

Satisfaction surveys generally track writers’ approval of tutoring, and under the category of “satisfaction scholarship,” tutees are framed as beneficiaries. As such, surveys ask if tutees find tutoring sessions helpful and how they could be more effective, often in mixed method or purely quantitative terms.

Satisfaction surveys provide a key insight into the affordances and constraints of tutee perspectives in assessment-based writing center scholarship. As early as the 1980s, articles in the WCJ presented results from tutee surveys to determine satisfaction along with larger implications for writing centers’ assertions. Irene Lurkis Clark’s 1985 study “Leading the Horse: The Writing Center and Required Visits” questions the factors that motivate writers who seek or are instructed to have a tutoring session. This question is framed on an institutional level, asking “whether or not students ought to be required to visit the Writing Center”; however, Clark also frames her inquiry against North’s foundational assertion of the difficulty of converting required visits to desired ones (31). The perspectives of writers—both those who have and have not visited the writing center—are elicited, but in a way that doesn’t match up to the sophisticated pedagogical discussion of Clark’s inquiry.

The study’s titular and sustained metaphor of writers as horses to be led and watered portrays writers in limited terms; they are present in the writing center, but as passive recipients of tutoring, to put it

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push towards more rigorous evidence-based practice in early writing center research.

Jean Kiedaisch and Sue Dinitz’s inquiry in “Learning More from the Students” adds pedagogical importance to the survey they conduct, reflecting that “no one had asked not only whether clients were satisfied but also what factors affected the degree of their satisfaction,” and asking questions like, “Did clients prefer tutors of the opposite sex? Were ESL students or students with learning disabilities less satisfied than others?” (90). The authors go on to theorize that “if we could answer such questions, we could not only demonstrate our effectiveness but also identify which students we work with best and areas in which our tutors need more training” (90). Though not framed as an examination into writing center pedagogy, as early as 1991 Kiedaisch and Dinitz clearly demonstrate their research’s capacity to elicit tutee perspectives that challenge lore assumptions and produce knowledge that could improve tutoring pedagogy in writing centers. By including both tutee and tutor input, their study highlights how satisfaction surveys can provide rich and meaningful results under the bridle of program assessment.

Kiedaisch and Dinitz’s satisfaction work questions the actual circumstances of sessions and calls for tutee perspectives to test persistent lore assumptions. As with prior surveys, they also ask that other writing centers reproduce their inquiry at their own institutions. Despite sharing their survey construction, no published scholarship has followed on the call to replicate, placing the study in the unfortunate tradition of Neal Lerner’s proverbial unpromising present.

Kiedaisch and Dinitz’s article is distinct, however, in two ways that reflect the growth of empirical writing center research. First, they employ a statistician in their research cohort to ensure their correlations are properly drawn in contrast to the limitations of past designs (Kiedaisch and Dinitz 99). Second, their methods incorporate tutor input in direct correlation to tutee input (Kiedaisch and Dinitz 90). Both participants in the tutoring session are surveyed regarding the quality of the session, prioritizing tutee input in an egalitarian methodological approach more aligned with writing center’s student-centered pedagogies. Although the questions are the same for both tutor and tutee, they remain general in their inquiry for satisfaction—a point that changes in more contemporary studies.

Balancing tutor and tutee input is a methodological quality shared in more recent satisfaction surveys such as Thompson et al.’s 2009 article “Examining Our Lore: A Survey of Students' and Tutors' Satisfaction with Writing Center Conferences.” The study provides

Aligning with the Center: How We Elicit Tutee Perspectives in Writing Center Scholarship • generously. This restriction is apparent in the study’s discursive marker, which signals tutees as objects in a polar question: “whether or not students ought . . . .” (see Table 1). The design of Clark’s study, a Likertscale format, is defined by questions that gauge tutees’ sources of motivation to consult with a tutor. This method draws feedback in sole regards to satisfaction such as, “The Writing Center is valuable to my overall writing improvement” and “The tutors in the Writing Center are not helpful” (Clark 32). This general phrasing allows tutees’ perspectives to emerge in controlled ways that do not risk the articulation of any larger critique of tutoring philosophy. Clark’s early study sets up what will become a common habit of research design regarding participant inquiry in satisfaction surveys. That is, following Clark, many studies demonstrate a tendency to privilege their inquiry over the affordances of their method.

Scholarship at this level of taxonomy asks far-reaching questions of writing center effectiveness for tutees through methods that limit the types of feedback those same tutees can provide.

Clark’s multifaceted use of the satisfaction survey is indicative of a trend shared by other studies that use assessment research to examine writing center pedagogy, but produce knowledge constrained by methods of program evaluation. For example, survey questions that frame all responses through approval lock tutees into the role of beneficiary. This trend is visible in satisfaction studies through the 1990s, illustrated by WCJ articles that sustain the same divide between inquiry and method. These articles also build on Clark’s work by recognizing the need for field-wide discussion of research. Wendy Bishop’s study in 1990 is purposely akin to Clark’s, to the point that Bishop quotes the same line from North in her introduction that Clark cites in her own article (Bishop 32). Bishop’s exploration of student referral and tutoring satisfaction employs a survey format lacking a Likert scale; instead, her work relies on polar and short answer questions— some of which share phrasing with Clark’s survey for the explicit purpose of comparison (34). Bishop concedes that she is “not a master survey maker,” and as such her study is methodologically limited in its design and is illustrative of the budding research branch of writing center epistemology in 1990 (34).

Despite its marks as an early effort, Bishop’s survey instigates a larger frame of inquiry by responding to Clark, replicating her methods, and calling for other writing centers to follow suit (40). By expanding the scope of her findings from an individual institution to one that includes other writing centers and by enacting field-wide discussion about empirical research, Bishop demonstrates ways that satisfaction studies began the

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tutoring pedagogy, and, as such, writing centers began to speak with their tutees in greater nuance.

Aligning with the Center: How We Elicit Tutee Perspectives in Writing Center Scholarship • a table comparing lore assumptions and applicable research findings, reaffirming that the push to question foundational tenets is embedded in all our research efforts—even when those efforts are limited to assess satisfaction and don’t elicit any active, participatory or collaborative perspectives (83). “Examining Our Lore” also draws from both tutors and tutees, though with one exception: the two parties are not given the same survey (Thompson et al. 86). General questions, like those from Kiedaisch and Dinitz, for rating the “success” of the session are constant for both tutees and tutors whereas other questions are separated by the depth of their vocabulary: “To what extent do you intend to incorporate the results of this conference in your writing? [Student survey] / To what extent do you think that this conference will influence the student beginning or revising his or her writing? [Tutor survey]” (86). Whereas tutors are surveyed with vocabulary coded for process writing such as “beginning” and “revising,” tutees are addressed in terms of writing as a product that simply “incorporates results,” bearing no indication of how writing center tutoring fits into a revision process (86). In questioning lore mandates, Thompson et al. elicit tutee perspectives, but only in terms of satisfaction, whereas tutor perspectives are prioritized in methods that engage with their reflections. This survey closely approaches a peripheral or even central focus in eliciting tutee perspectives; however, its inquiry in satisfaction and methodological hobbling of tutee participation in the language of pedagogy helps define the affordances of research at this level of taxonomy.

That is to say, tutees are not afforded a participatory or collaborative role in research concerned solely with their satisfaction.

The tendency to open broad channels of discussion in inquiry and use methods that limit tutee input define the satisfaction survey as a key starting point for the presence of tutee perspectives in writing center literature. Not simply means of evaluation, the lines of inquiry these studies invite speak to larger goals of knowledge production despite the limited perspective historically elicited by their methods of data collection. Satisfaction surveys give us certain types of knowledge, namely for program evaluation, but preclude others from forming. Even as tutee perspectives are included, they are not necessarily prioritized in revisions of pedagogy or writing center practice. As these studies are often not replicated, tutee perspectives in satisfaction have no real role in the epistemological debates of program assessment. As research methods expanded into greater diversity in the 1990s, they accompanied a greater desire to question

Tutee-Peripheral Research The development of writing center scholarship includes a body of work that incorporates tutee perspectives to a much greater degree than satisfaction studies, albeit, in a secondary role to concerns of tutoring practice. Where satisfaction studies often question foundational assertions in addition to surveying approval, research that elicits a peripheral focus on tutee perspectives does so with greater diversity in methods. This isn’t to say satisfaction surveys lack the field’s trademark sense of variety— especially in those from the last fifteen years such as Peter Carino’s statistical correlation study and Cushman et al.’s work with focus groups; however, a greater degree of methodological diversity comes to fruition in the studies that hold a peripheral focus of tutee perspectives.

Illustrating diversity of methods at this level of taxonomy is White-Farnham et al.’s 2012 article “Mapping Tutorial Interactions” where tutoring sessions are coded for shifting tutor-tutee interactions and visually mapped on a quadrant. The methods are directly related to pedagogical assertions regarding facilitative/directive and writer/writing-centered interactions, suggesting that the degree to which tutee perspectives are elicited may depend on the centrality of the tutee in the particular foundational assertion being tested. In the case of “Mapping Tutorial Interactions,” White-Farnham et al. ask, “What are the qualities of the interactions that result from oscillations between facilitative and directive strategies?” (WhiteFarnham et al. 2). This line of inquiry is predicated on the tenet of non-directive tutoring, but as the mapping process only analyzes what is said in a session and not what comes before or after for the tutee, their perspectives are incidental to the purpose of empirically gauging conversation flow.

Similar in purpose to White-Farnham et al. is Blau, Hall, and Strauss’ 1998 study “Exploring the Tutor/Client Conversation,” which employs discourse analysis more familiar to the humanities discipline. The study collected session transcriptions that identify linguistic trends, satisfaction surveys for tutees and tutors, and tutors’ long-form self-reflections (Blau et al.

21). White-Farnham et al. cite this study as it led them to design their own mapping method (1). As with past research into satisfaction like that of Thompson et al., surveys are worded differently for tutees than for tutors, though in Blau’s work there is the additional effort to elicit tutors’ reflections on pedagogy. Though

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tutee perspectives are methodologically represented in identities. This quality exists in both older and newer the session transcripts and the short-form surveys, tutee-peripheral studies and is reflected in the way that priority is given to the ways that tutors experience and diverse methods suggest the ways that tutees have the reflect pedagogy in sessions. The purpose of study is to potential to be centrally positioned in research. Carol determine “the nature of the tutor/client Severino’s 1992 study “Rhetorically Analyzing relationship”—a line of inquiry framed by the assertion Collaborations” and Severino et al.’s article “A that collaboration is a sharing of authority and Comparison of Online Feedback Requests by Nonperspective (Blau et al. 21). The study demonstrates a Native English-Speaking and Native English-Speaking methodological tendency to include tutee perspectives Writers,” published seventeen years later, both insofar as they reflect satisfaction. illustrate the varied modality of research inquiry that Some studies break from the tendency to position elicits tutee perspectives in a peripheral capacity. The tutees solely as beneficiaries of knowledge production. older study utilizes rhetorical analysis to show different Even when research design is fairly split in its collaborative methods within sessions to reflect on and methodological prioritization of tutee and tutor input, improve tutor training (63). The more recent work, such inquiry doesn’t necessarily access tutee with its emphasis on multilingual tutees and their perspectives in their full potential or capacity. Laurel desired feedback versus that of native speakers in Raymond and Zarah Quinn’s 2012 article “What a online sessions, is a very different study, though it also Writer Wants: Assessing Fulfillment of Student Goals relies on rhetorical coding of tutee input—session in Writing Center Tutoring Sessions” is notable as one request forms, rather than transcripts (116). Both of three undergraduate research projects analyzed in pieces bear similar methods in their rhetorical this study. Tutee-satisfaction study cohorts included approaches, though the studies’ purposes are notably either lone faculty, or faculty working with tutors to distinct despite the common goal in challenging gather data, with few exceptions (see Table 1). pedagogical tenets. As such, research challenges Conversely, tutee-peripheral scholarship is the only assertions that non-directive tutoring is best or that type in this study that includes undergraduate multilingual writers disproportionality prioritize lowerresearcher cohorts.3 Raymond and Quinn’s work codes order concerns. On both subjects, tutees should be and analyzes session report forms to “discover how able to contribute their perspective as participants, well writers’ concerns matched up with the concerns rather than simply as the subjects of tutoring; however, tutors addressed” in the actual sessions (Raymond and neither study elicits direct perspectives on tutoring Quinn 66). The methods of inquiry include pre- and pedagogies. In the newer study, Severino calls for post-session input from tutees and tutors respectively, tutees’ voices to be heard in future research, referring so the experience of tutoring isn’t studied in any to a hypothetical “brief survey that online students fill capacity. Lacking the negotiation of expectation out after they receive their feedback” to ask, “Did they between tutees and tutors that goes on in sessions use feedback on bigger issues, smaller issues or both?” shows not only the boundaries of an undergraduate and to perform longitudinal case studies on revised study with limited resources, but also the way that papers (125-126). Although the older study only inquiry confines tutee perspectives where they could suggests additional research to aid tutor development, provide a deeper understanding of research findings.

Severino shows that peripheral studies can be Lacking post-session reflection from tutees, the study considered as necessary steps towards prioritizing tutee clearly prioritizes tutor input; however, unlike other perspectives, and their experience of tutoring within tutee-peripheral studies, Raymond and Quinn their individual writing processes.

Greater demonstrate an appreciation of tutees’ role in the methodological diversity in research can help writing tutoring process as they set goals that are “honored by centers make this epistemological shift, and it has their tutors” (76). This added priority doesn’t result in a already done so in the tutee-central work reviewed in central study, but it does show that research questions the following section. and inquiry can fall upon a spectrum. The degree to The placement of these writing center studies in which a study values tutees as active participants the tutee-peripheral group demonstrates the role of a beyond their roles as beneficiaries reflects recognition study’s purpose and methods in determining one of their significance in inquiry. another and eliciting tutee perspectives. Where the Just as satisfaction surveys punch above their methods of satisfaction studies limited the extent and weight, so to speak, in questioning tutoring pedagogies complexity of tutee input, peripheral studies are where their purposes are evaluation-based, peripheral marked by methods that could elicit said input; however, studies can elicit tutee perspectives even when their their purposes prioritize tutor reflection instead. The goals are focused more on tutors’ experiences and methodological diversity of writing center research Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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means that research questions can take many shapes in complex realities of individual writing processes. producing knowledge that challenges or affirms loreWhere Hopkins suggests the possibilities of research, based tenets. It also means that there is no reason not Bethany Mannon delivers only a few pages later in the to elicit tutee perspectives and to adjust our methods same journal. Her work with graduate tutees isn’t to allow for such inquiry when our pedagogies call for predicated on satisfaction; instead, she seeks to its prioritization in discourse. Studies that centralize describe the ways that sessions help tutees in terms of tutee perspectives of writing center pedagogies are their larger writing practices. She writes that her methodologically similar to their peripheral “questions are similar to those that writing centers counterparts, though with adjustments to their lines of might use for assessment”; however, Mannon’s design inquiry that queue tutee input as an explicit priority. opens the limits of satisfaction inquiry to elicit tutee perspectives in greater nuance (Mannon 60). She asks about the “types of writing” tutees bring in, the “forms Tutee-Central Research of feedback” they desire, and the differences between Satisfaction and tutee-peripheral research have writing center tutoring and the help provided by “other been published since the 1980s, and tutee-centered resources” they use for writing (Mannon 60). Each studies make up the newest type, only appearing in our question provides tutees with a space to articulate their three major journals within the last five years. These expectations for the writing center, and its place in studies not only incorporate tutee perspectives to a their compositional processes. Hopkins’ two open great degree, but also prioritize tutees as active questions—“what did you like best about the collaborators in producing knowledge about writing workshop?” and “what would you suggest changing for centers. Satisfaction surveys often ask much more future workshops?”—are far more confining in daring questions than their purpose of program comparison (Hopkins 44). Despite sharing the basic evaluation would imply, so it can be useful to compare goal of improving writing centers’ interactions with such studies to tutee-central publications that ask tutees, Mannon’s effort is situated in the wider similar questions but use methods that allow for rich language of process writing and in the pedagogical participant responses, given the nature of their inquiry. conceptions of writing centers. Exploring the “role Justin Hopkins and Bethany Mannon’s program graduate writers see the writing center consultation evaluations appear in the same 2016 edition of Praxis, taking in a larger feedback ecosystem,” Mannon elicits yet both writers illustrate very different types of tutee perspectives as a central concern of research with knowledge and elicit tutee perspectives to varying minor adjustments to the methods of satisfaction degrees. Hopkins’ goal is to evaluate workshops, surveys (62). asking, “Did the students think and feel the workshops Tutee-central research demonstrates strong were worthwhile, and if so, how and why, and if not, plurality in perspectives that lead researchers down how and why not?” (Hopkins 36). His methodological new and diverse lines of inquiry—contrary to loredevelopment, however, is intentionally kept narrow— based assertions that tend to generalize tutees and their never expanding in scope beyond local implications. desired feedback. Mannon’s focus on graduate students Hopkins’ reflection that satisfaction surveys often lack in particular speaks to the tendency of central studies complexity rings true of the common gap between to engage with the diverse backgrounds and interests inquiry and approach outlined in this meta-analysis, but of tutees. Further illustrating this tendency, Savannah his intentionally localized approach seem to overlook Stark and Julie Wilson’s 2016 article “Disclosure the greater possibilities of inquiry. He argues that Concerns: The Stigma of Attention Deficit program-evaluation research doesn’t need field-wide Hyperactivity Disorder in Writing Centers” prioritizes implications to be effective, yet the most constructive ADHD writers’ experience of tutoring. Similarly to aspects of Hopkins’ study are arguably the opinions Mannon’s, this study deploys interviews to elicit tutees provide on survey forms—“short stories” that perspectives, though with an added layer as “interviews provide “good, helpful feedback” (Hopkins 41). In were coded for themes of definition of ADHD” (Stark methodologically limiting tutees to respond only in and Wilson 6). In marked contrast to tutee-peripheral terms of the immediate workshops they attend, studies that include both tutor and tutee input with Hopkins’ study ironically emphasizes the value of greater attention paid to the former, Stark and Wilson’s engaging tutees as active, collaborative agents in tuteedesign weighs more heavily on the latter to guide their central studies. inquiry. The researchers held 10-20 minute interviews By situating tutees as active participants in for tutors, whereas writer interviews were 40-60 producing knowledge about tutoring, central studies minutes long (Stark and Wilson 6). The study is meant illustrate the writing center’s role in facilitating the to increase understanding of ADHD, so tutor Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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interviews respond to tutee input and the issues of Bromley et al. used focus groups to elicit tutee stigmatization that writers have in visiting the writing perspectives “to discover how students were defining center (Stark and Wilson 8). The way that tutee identity ‘intellectual engagement’ and to probe students’ guides design and reflection in this study is indicative perceptions of their visits” (2). Tutees are not just of consistency in this mode of research between the subjects of study, but participants in defining methods affordances of method and goals of inquiry. By and determining scope. Knowledge creation is addressing tutee identity as central, the diversity of collaborative where tutee perspectives are prioritized, those who use the writing center is brought to the and the study’s findings further support this priority as forefront of the field’s discussion. “students who used our writing centers have a more Multilingual students were paid some attention in nuanced understanding and appreciation of their own, peripheral studies like Severino’s, but tutee-central and of their tutors’, intellectual engagement” (Bromley work with the same groups captures the writing et al. 5). Unlike past studies, Bromley et al. do not center’s perceived place in language acquisition with respond to engrained pedagogical assertions and greater attunement to the perspectives of writers therefore divorce their inquiry from lore-based history. themselves. Appearing in Educational Studies in 2016, In allowing tutees to define intellectual inquiry and Roger Winder et al.’s article “Writing Centre Tutoring respond to it in an empirical study, Bromley et al.’s Sessions: Addressing Students’ Concerns” is most research forms new ways of knowing or understanding similar to Raymond and Quinn’s research as it too tutoring that couldn’t have occurred otherwise. It’s explores a “correlation between students’ and peerclear from this study that tutees can articulate aspects tutors’ perceptions of help received/provided” (325). of writing center pedagogy when their perspectives are Winder et al. are unique in how they elicit tutee centralized. Bromley et al. show how responding to perspectives in terms of coded metalanguage. Before lore-assertions isn’t the sole catalyst for effective and after sessions, tutees express their desires and the knowledge production. In contrast, Rebecca Block’s feedback they received through language of higher2016 study of reading aloud in tutoring returns to the and lower-order concerns and are actively engaged by first point of inquiry that began this meta-analysis and surveys that ask them not to assess, but to reflect on thus provides a fitting ending—our lore-wariness tutoring by sharing their perception of the help they merits and even compels investigation and received (Winder et al. 332). Tutors receive the same reexamination of writing center orthodoxy. survey, and though Winder et al. admit that Tutee-centrality appears in the degree to which multilingual tutees may not be acclimated to tutees are prioritized as active participants in an compositional metalanguage and that this may account empirical study’s inquiry and methods. Block’s work for some limitations in the study, they nonetheless with reading practices engages both tutee and tutor maintain an egalitarian methodology (335). Some perspectives in methodological similarity to peripheral studies dilute their metalanguage for surveys, but studies like that of Blau et al. with its use of coded Winder et al. centralize tutee input by maintaining the transcripts and post-session surveys. On the level of same codes for all participants in the tutoring session purpose, Block also shares in the field-wide and framing their talk in terms of larger vocabularies of understanding that “empirical research can prompt us composition and writing center pedagogy. In addition, to re-examine the assumptions that underlie truisms” their sample size of 743 recalls the rigorous sampling (35). All these similarities beg the question: why does of satisfaction studies without that category’s tendency Block’s inquiry result in a tutee-central study where she to restrict tutee input. Pamela Bromley et al.’s awarddoesn’t have any explicit concern to prioritize tutee winning 2015 study deploys the same framing mode of perspective? Block doesn’t actively engage tutees in the “perception” to discuss their key concern: intellectual manner of Bromley et al.’s design; however, as Block engagement. and previously reviewed studies illustrate, egalitarian The tutee-central study by Bromley et al. is fairly design and inquiry elicits tutee-central perspectives unique even among the wide-ranging body of writing with or without the researcher’s intention. Coded center literature for its design and abstract inquiry. The transcripts are fairly even representations of the two “empirical, multi-institutional study uncovers and parties involved in session talk, and subsequent surveys evaluates students’ definitions of intellectual elicit perspectives of both participants without engagement in their writing center sessions” (Bromley weighing one over another (Block 41). Block’s research et al. 1). The study’s purpose is rooted in tutee design facilitates tutee engagement, as the only perspectives, and as with Winder et al. the mode of transcripts coded for analysis were those whose data collection involves surveys; however, unique to surveys overlapped in the reflections of both tutor and this study is the way that these surveys developed. tutee input (Block 41). In the history of writing center Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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study, Block’s study is a key example not just for its should serve its full purpose and produce knowledge tutee-central findings, but for the way in which it that reflects all of our values as a pedagogical vehicle. illustrates that methods and inquiry don’t have to overtly draw out tutee perspectives on pedagogy; given Acknowledgments the space to speak, tutees will do so on their own. All we have to do is listen.

Thank you to Drs. Susan Lawrence, Genie Giaimo, and Christa Teston for their kind mentorship, feedback, and guidance through this project.

Conclusion The role of tutees in writing center research is as Notes varied and recent as the field’s foray into new methods 1.

Writing center studies employ a variety of terms to of empirical study and discussion. Within this metarefer to those we work with. “Tutee” is a passive analysis’ taxonomy, it’s clear that tutees’ perspectives designation, and “writer” is preferable for its active are elicited mostly in the way that they can assess connotation; however, some studies cited in this article writing center effectiveness or give context to tutor refer to writers and students who do not visit writing perspectives, as in tutee-peripheral work. Satisfaction centers. For clarity’s sake, in this meta-analysis “writer” surveys have been essential institutional tools; is a blanket term, and “tutee” specifies those who however, they historically measure effectiveness in engage in tutoring within writing centers. metrics that limit tutee perspectives and potential 2. See Liggett et al. for discussion of writing center critiques of writing center practice. It’s telling that the scholarship’s tendency towards an immense variety of most recent satisfaction studies, those by Cheatle and methods this article further demonstrates.

Hedengren and Lockerd, break from these tendencies.

3. All three averages exclude studies that lack explicit They more closely resemble their contemporaries in sample sizes. This note speaks to a larger problem in tutee-central research, rather than their predecessors in writing center studies that has been covered by Lerner satisfaction work. The swell of tutee-central studies in and that my meta-analysis corroborates. At least one the last five years suggests an epistemological shift that source in all three layers of taxonomy lack clearly is just beginning to hit its stride—though it has done defined research questions, subject cohorts, methods so below the radar of writing center talk. sections, or even sample sizes—the last of which This moment presents an opportunity to honor would be unheard of in any other evidence-based field and connect with those we serve on a daily basis. In (Cushman et al.; White-Farnham et al.; Hug; Leary). pursuing this shift, the field must accept the risk of 4. I’d like to note here that undergraduate and graduate unsettling some of our most foundational practices and scholar interests tend towards more critical lines of beliefs. The question in the end, then, isn’t just which inquiry relative to satisfaction surveys. Where the latter types of research we should do and which types of are almost entirely institutionally focused in design, the knowledge we produce, but to which degree we are former are often more field-oriented. Theses and prepared to open ourselves up to such risk in our dissertations are outside the scope of this study, but tumultuous economic and educational atmosphere. they strongly illustrate the diversity of topics and Roberta Kjesrud articulates a call to embrace this subject cohorts in writing center studies. See Rebecca uncertainty. In preemptively defending our pedagogy, Ryan Block’s tutee-peripheral dissertation (which sets she writes, “[W]e miss the opportunity to describe, to the foundations for her later work reviewed in this explain, to explore, to predict—we miss all the study), Joy Neaves’ tutee-central master’s thesis, complications that tell us we don't really know what Alexandra Valerio tutee-peripheral bachelor’s thesis, works and why” (Kjesrud 44). Here I cosign her call and Qianshan Chen’s tutee-central master’s thesis. for an exploratory paradigm, and I offer this metaanalysis to illustrate the value of the perspectives Works Cited reflected by tutee-central research. I propose we ask how tutees experience and articulate tutoring pedagogy Babcock, Rebecca Day. “Disabilities in the Writing for all assertions writing centers hold and reinforce Center.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 13, without their feedback. The studies I’ve taxonomized no. 1, 2015. pp. 38-49. show that tutee perspectives may be closer to the Bishop, Wendy. “Bringing Writers to the Center: Some center than they appear, as even when they are in the Survey Results, Surmises, and Suggestions.” The periphery, tutees can drive critical insight into tutoring.

Writing Center Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 1990, pp. 31Writing centers have always regarded writers as active 44. participants in day-to-day sessions. Our research Blau, Susan R. et al. “Exploring the Tutor/Client Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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Tutor Evaluations in an Open Admissions Writing Hug, Alyssa-Rae. “Two’s Company, Three’s a Center.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 11, Conversation: A Study of Dialogue Among a no. 2, 2014.

Professor, a Peer-Writing Fellow, and Carino, Peter, and Doug Enders. “Does Frequency of Undergraduates Around Feedback and Visits to the Writing Center Increase Student Writing.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 11, Satisfaction? A Statistical Correlation Study—or no. 1, 2013.

Story.” The Writing Center Journal vol. 22, no. 1, Kiedaisch, Jean, and Sue Dinitz. “Learning More from 2001, pp. 83-103. the Students.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 12, Cheatle, Joseph, and Margaret Bullerjahn. no. 1, 1991, pp. 90–100.

“Undergraduate Student Perceptions and the Kjesrud, Roberta D. “Lessons from Data: Avoiding Writing Center.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 40, Lore Bias in Research Paradigms.” The Writing no. 1-2, 2015, pp. 19–27.

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Cheatle, Joseph. “Challenging Perceptions: Exploring Leary, Chris. “Eavesdropping Twitter: What Students the Relationship between ELL Students and Really Think About Writing Centers.” Praxis: A Writing Centers.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, Writing Center Journal, vol. 14, no. 3, 2017, pp. 63– vol. 14, no. 3, 2017, pp. 21–31/ 67.

Lerner, Neal. “The Unpromising Present of Writing Chen, Qianshan. [陈倩珊]. Tutor-Tutee Interactions in Center Studies: Author and Citation Patterns in the Writing Center: A Case Study at a College in ‘The Writing Center Journal’, 1980 to 2009.” The South China. Thesis, University of Hong Kong, Writing Center Journal, vol. 34, no. 1, 2014, pp. 67– Pokfulam, Hong Kong SAR, 2012.

102. JSTOR. Clark, Irene Lurkis. “Leading the Horse: The Writing Liggett, Sarah et al. “Mapping Knowledge-Making in Center and Required Visits.” The Writing Center Writing Center Research: A Taxonomy of Journal vol. 5/6, no. 2/1, 1985, pp. 31–35.

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Mannon, Bethany. “What Do Graduate Students Want Cushman, Tara, et al. “Using Focus Groups to Assess From The Writing Center? Tutoring Practices to Writing Center Effectiveness.” The Writing Lab Support Dissertation and Thesis Writers.” Praxis: Newsletter, vol. 29, no. 7, 2005, pp. 1-5.

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23, no. 2, 2003, pp. 25–42.

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Neaves, Joy. Meaningful Assessment for Improving Writing Tutor, Tutee, and Instructor Perceptions of the Center Consultations. Thesis, Western Carolina Tutor’s Role.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 22, University, 2011. no. 1, 2001, pp. 59–82.

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Appendix: Tables

Table 1.

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L2 STUDENT SATISFACTION IN THE WRITING CENTER: A CROSS-INSTITUTIONAL STUDY OF L1 AND L2 STUDENTS Pam Bromley Pomona College pamela.bromley@pomona.edu

Kara Northway Kansas State University northway@ksu.edu

Eliana Schonberg Duke University eliana.schonberg@duke.edu Abstract International and multilingual student enrollments are growing around the world. Because 73% of international students in the United States come from countries where English is not an official language, the number of L2 students is likewise growing. Writing centers are on the frontlines in academically supporting L2 students, but tutor anxiety in sessions with L2 students is apparent. Empirical research on L2 student satisfaction with writing centers is only slowly emerging. Our quantitative study compares satisfaction of English-L2 students to those of English-L1 students through a common exit survey of student perceptions of writing center visits; perceptions are essential as they connect to achievement and learning outcomes. Overall, we find both groups are equally satisfied with their writing center visits, equally likely to return to the writing center, and have equally intellectually engaging sessions.

Adding greater resonance, this study was conducted at three different types of institutions in the United States—a small liberal arts college; a medium, private, doctoral university; and a large, public land-grant university. Our study directly points to tutor-training strategies, including sharing empirical studies about satisfaction, increasing a focus on intellectual engagement for students and tutors, and incorporating global English strategies into sessions.

Despite 2018 headlines about new government immigration policies affecting international students in the United States, universities worldwide continue to experience ever-increasing enrollments of international students. Around the world, four million students studied outside their home countries in 2012, up from two million in 2000 (UNESCO). The United States hosts the largest number of international students (UNESCO), with well over a million in 2016-17, an almost 100% increase since 2000; international students currently comprise over 5% of all US enrolled students (Institute of International Education, “International Student Enrollment”).1 Multilingual student enrollments are also growing, as more students from diverse backgrounds attend university, both in the United States and around the world (Rafoth 20; Altbach et al. 47-49). International and multilingual students often pursue higher education in non-native languages, most notably in English.2 For decades, scholars and administrators have identified university writing centers as important sites for international and multilingual students to learn about and be supported in writing (e.g., Bruce and Rafoth 7; Lape 1; Powers

and Nelson 113; Rafoth 39; Williams and Severino 165-66)—and, furthermore, increasing numbers of L2 students visit these centers (e.g., Hall 5; Nakamaru 96).

It is important, then, to learn more about these students’ experiences. Two types of studies have been done about L2 students who visit writing centers: one type focusing on L2 students exclusively and one comparing them to L1 students. While singlepopulation studies allow for a deeper interrogation of L2 students’ experiences, comparative studies can usefully pinpoint potential disparities between L1 and L2 student experiences and can suggest solutions. Of the non-comparative studies, several provide useful guidelines for working productively with L2 students (e.g., Min 24-27; Williams and Severino).

Only a handful of studies explicitly makes comparisons between L1 and L2 students. Using linguistic methodologies in a series of studies, Terese Thonus has done the most comprehensive—and significant—comparisons, with fewer than sixty participants and hundreds of interactions per session.

She found that L2 students laugh and speak less (“Tutor” 122); tutors were more uncertain with L2 tutees, who consider their tutors to be authority figures (“What” 235); and L2 students had fewer complete closings (i.e., dropped conversational turn-taking), an important feature of appointments (“Time” 51). Jessica Williams’ linguistic study, with ten sessions and hundreds of utterances per session, found that with L2 students, the diagnosis phase was longer (44) and tutors took longer turns (45), made fewer but more direct suggestions (58), and took on authority more readily (59). Exploring student expectations, Carol Severino et al. examined 170 student requests for feedback, determining that although most requests by L1 and L2 students were similar, L2 students were statistically more likely to request feedback on grammar and punctuation, whereas L1 students were more likely to request feedback on argument and ideas

(119-20). Grant Eckstein’s survey of 487 students, which examined their expectations and experiences with grammar feedback in sessions, found that although all students wanted grammar assistance, L1 writers reported that they received more grammar support than they expected whereas L2 writers sought—and received—as much support as they expected (376-77). Mary Gallagher et al.’s survey of over four hundred students working with writing fellows in twenty-three writing-intensive courses found that L2 writers were statistically more likely to begin with positive writing-related attitudes (9) and achieved greater overall gains in writing processes and purpose than their L1 peers (11-12). Together, these comparative studies uncover some important differences both in L1 and L2 writers’ experiences and the ways tutors interact with these writers—particularly with respect to authority, attitudes, and grammar—and they also indicate that L2 students’ experiences can sometimes be more positive than those of their L1 peers.

Although the scholarly conversation has examined how to work more effectively with L2 students, these students’ perceptions have been under-theorized and under-researched, and L2 satisfaction has not been studied on its own (Carino and Enders 101, 86-87). As we’ll discuss in our conclusion, we believe that this lack of scholarly work on L2 perceptions has enabled lorebased thinking to persist among student-tutors, a phenomenon that is especially reflected in writing center tutor-training handbooks.3 Research on the perceptions of L2 students can expose and change lore-based approaches in tutor pedagogy and thereby reduce tutor anxiety. Although some might argue that students’ perceptions alone cannot demonstrate much, if anything, about what students are actually learning, researchers have determined that student perceptions are connected to achievement (Pajares 141); this connection was also demonstrated by a 2016 study about L2 students’ positive perceptions of writingfellow meetings and improved grades (O’Meara 77).

Perhaps more important for our study, student perceptions of satisfaction have been shown to be an important predictor of learning outcomes (Abdous and Yen 248-49). Even though student satisfaction is connected to achievement and learning outcomes, we believe that tutor training should be aimed towards not only student-writer satisfaction, but also other essential questions of writing center work, such as intellectual engagement (Bromley et al.).

Our multi-institution, quantitative study relies on a shared exit survey comparing L1 and L2 student perceptions of satisfaction and intellectual engagement.

Our study was conducted on three campuses in the United States—a large public university, a medium

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private university, and a small liberal arts college (SLAC). A multi-institution project like ours aligns with the recommendation of research methodologists, who note that cross-institutional studies are “valuable on the ground that this [approach] would decrease the likelihood that findings were idiosyncratic to a particular institution” (Raidal and Volet 579). Our large and diverse study determined that • L1 and L2 students were equally satisfied with their writing center visits; • L1 and L2 students had equally intellectually engaging sessions; and • L2 students tended to return more frequently than their L1 peers.

Despite our findings that L1 and L2 students have similar, positive experiences in the writing center, studies report that tutors are often more uncertain in their work with L2 students (e.g., Bell and Elledge 1718; Powers and Nelson 124; Thonus, “What” 227), even as a large majority of writing tutoring programs provide support for ELL students.4 If we know more about L1 and L2 student experiences, particularly about satisfaction and intellectual engagement, then we can make research-based suggestions about writing center practices, pointing to the importance of reorienting scholarly conversations about tutor pedagogy.

Methodology Our cross-institutional, IRB-approved survey asked students about what they believe they took away from their writing center sessions (see Appendix B).

The researchers spent several weeks drafting the survey questions after meeting at the 2009 IWCA Summer Institute and discovering a shared interest in learning more about what makes writing center sessions successful. Although we did not pre-test the survey to assure validity, we did ask our staffs informally about the questions, and student-tutors thought that the questions were addressing the issues being investigated.

Most questions were quantitative; several were yes/no questions, whereas others were answered on a 5-point Likert scale, with “5” being strongly agree and “1” being strongly disagree. During the 2009-10 academic year, we placed online survey links in all three centers, asking every consultant to invite every student after each appointment to complete the survey. We note potential selection bias resulting from the initiative of the tutor and the desire of the student to take the survey. Because students generally signed up for appointments online without any information about their tutor, we believe that students were selected more or less at random to complete the survey. The nature

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of the appointment might have influenced whether or not a tutor asked a student to complete the survey; from conversations with our tutors, we know that some tutors asked all students to complete the survey, yet some tutors never asked any.

We recorded 2262 responses to the survey. Of respondents, 58% (n=1309) responded that English was their only first language (L1), 35% (n=785) responded that English was not their first language (L2), and 7% (n=168) responded that English was one of their first languages. We look here at the responses to four quantitative exit-survey questions, comparing the answers of students who reported that English was their only first language (L1) to those from students who reported that English was not one of their first languages (L2). Because students were not required to answer all questions, there is some variability in the number of responses to each survey question. We evaluated differences in L1 and L2 student survey responses at each institution using paired t-tests, a statistical test that evaluates whether responses differ by group. We examined our data at the 0.05 level of significance. By comparing L1 and L2 student responses at three diverse institutions, we are more likely to see if a pattern exists. If responses at all three schools are different, that indicates that the situation may be more complicated. However, if responses at all three schools are the same, that possibly indicates a more common trend.

Results and Discussion Our study compares L1 and L2 student responses to a quantitative exit survey. Below, we compare these responses to questions about overall satisfaction and intellectual engagement. The prompts we examined were the following: • Would you recommend the writing center to a friend?

• During the consultation, I felt intellectually engaged.

• Do you plan to return to the writing center?

• Have you visited the writing center before?

For each question, we compared the responses of L1 and L2 students at each school. We found that L1 and L2 students are equally satisfied with their writing center visits, as shown by their recommendations to friends and plans for return visits, with L2 students at one school even more likely to recommend and plan to return. In addition, we determined that L1 and L2 students at all three campuses perceive equal intellectual engagement. We also observed that although L1 and L2 students were equally likely to report that they plan to return to the writing center, L2

L2 Student Satisfaction in the Writing Center • 22

students at two campuses were statistically more likely, in fact, to return than their L1 peers. Therefore, we can state with confidence that L1 and L2 students’ responses at all three schools were the same, and L2 students, at two campuses, were even more likely to return to their campus writing centers.

Satisfaction We focus first on students’ overall satisfaction with their writing center sessions, examining L1 and L2 student responses to this question: would you recommend the writing center to a friend? We used recommendations to friends as indicators of satisfaction; willingness to recommend is a key marker of loyalty and potential impact on others (Farris et al.

57). We determined, across all three institutions, that L1 and L2 students were strongly and equally satisfied with their writing center visits (see Table 1 in Appendix A).

Over 97% of L1 students at all schools would recommend the writing center to a friend, and over 98% of L2 students at all schools would recommend the writing center to a friend. We investigated statistically whether or not there were differences between L1 and L2 students at each school using paired t-tests. At the Large Public and the SLAC, we saw no difference between L1 and L2 students’ responses. At the Medium Private, we did see a statistically significant difference, with L2 students more likely to recommend the writing center to a friend than L1 students (p≤0.05). From our study, then, we can demonstrate statistically that L1 and L2 students were equally likely to recommend the writing center to a friend, and L2 students at one school were even more likely to recommend.

Intellectual Engagement We asked another, more pointed question strongly connected to overall satisfaction: whether students felt intellectually engaged in their sessions. Our earlier mixed-method study at these same three institutions found that the vast majority of students are intellectually engaged in their sessions (Bromley et al.

3), and we wondered whether this relationship would still hold if we drilled deeper into the quantitative data on this important issue. From this previous study, we know that, when completing the exit survey, students understood “intellectual engagement” as cognitive challenge and tutor involvement with students’ concerns (Bromley et al. 3). This understanding is quite similar to the definition of intellectual engagement used by the National Survey of Student Engagement.

Intellectual engagement is both central to learning

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(NSSE 14-15) and connected to student satisfaction in higher education (Krause and Coates 502).

The majority (at least 80%) of L2 students at all three schools agreed that they were intellectually engaged in their sessions (see Table 2 in Appendix A).

Although we did see a difference in responses to this question across our campuses, t-tests showed no statistically significant difference in students’ responses to the question of intellectual engagement based on language background. That we did not see a statistically significant difference here is intriguing, as it demonstrates that students were equally intellectually engaged regardless of their language background.

Return Visits Return visits are another indication of satisfaction, but one with more diverse responses. Two survey questions asked students about plans to return and about past visits; the first question asked whether students planned to return to the writing center, and the second asked whether students were actually returning visitors. We first examine students’ responses about planning to return (see Table 3 in Appendix A).

We observed that over 99% of L2 students at all three schools reported that they plan to return to the writing center. When comparing L2 and L1 students’ responses at each school, we found a statistically significant difference at the Medium Private, with L2 writers more likely than L1 writers to note that they plan to return (p≤0.005). Results from the Large Public and the SLAC showed no statistically significant difference.

These data demonstrate that, compared to their L1 peers, L2 students were as likely, and at the Medium Private more likely, to report they plan to return to the writing center.

In addition to anticipating future visits, students were also asked about previous visits. Over 71% of L2 students reported that they had already visited their writing center (see Table 4 in Appendix 4). Looking at whether students were repeat writing center visitors, we found that L2 students were, indeed, more likely to return to the writing center than L1 students, with this difference statistically significant at two schools, the Large Public and the Medium Private (p≤0.001). This trend was present at the SLAC but was not statistically significant. This finding is intriguing, as it means that the writing center may be an even more important location for L2 students improving writing processes than for L1 students, as scholars have suggested (Fitzgerald and Ianetta 119; Moussu 64).

L2 Student Satisfaction in the Writing Center • 23

Conclusions

The foreword to the most recent writing center L2 tutoring handbook celebrates “how far writing center scholarship on second language writing has come . . . even in the last decade,” noting in particular “less and less do we regard them [L2 students] as a challenge” (Severino vii). We agree and support this optimistic stance. Our study provides empirical, independent evidence demonstrating that L1 and L2 students, in their writing center visits, were equally satisfied, likely to return, and intellectually engaged—and even at some institutions, more likely to return—thus perhaps manifesting the benefits of the writing center field’s sustained attention to L2 issues.

Yet we find other evidence that the changes Severino observes are only slowly taking root in the writing center field’s discourse about practice. The overarching narrative of the L2 sections of recent general tutoring handbooks is one of director and tutor anxiety. For example, the 2011 St. Martin’s Guide encourages tutors to be “nonjudgmental and nonthreatening” (Murphy and Sherwood 14). The 2008 Longman Guide comments on tutors’ inexperience, noting that “a large source of anxiety of new tutors surrounds the work that they will do with ESL writers” (Gillespie and Lerner 117). The 2015 Oxford Guide, while noting that tutors might also be multilingual and “aware of language diversity,” explicitly says, “[Y]ou might be nervous about the prospect of working with someone with a different cultural background from your own who is still learning English. But there’s little reason to worry, because . . . .” (Fitzgerald and Ianetta 119). The most recent general handbook, the 2016 Bedford Guide, seems to anticipate and counter this narrative when it refers to working with multilingual writers as a “privilege” and in its eager imperative for tutors to “Learn from them and enjoy doing so!” (Ryan and Zimmerelli 60, 64). The latest L2 guidebook, published in 2016, likewise “highlight[s] the excitement and challenge” of working with L2 students (Bruce and Rafoth 3).

Of course, we endorse the idea that tutors should be well-informed culturally, linguistically, and rhetorically, especially considering the power dynamics inherent in and around sessions (Lape 5; Condon and Olson 31; Hutchinson and Gillespie 135). In addition, as other scholars have well established, writing center staffs should represent the diversity of the campuses on which centers are located, including hiring tutors who themselves are multilingual and/or L2 (Diab et al.; Grimm 17-18; Rafoth 123). Multilingual tutors “add value to our ongoing tutor education . . . as they

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contribute insights unique to them as language learners” (Hutchinson and Gillespie 132).

We also believe that tutors’ anxiety about working with L2 students is not a fiction. Thonus, as we noted above, has empirically demonstrated that tutors are uncertain in sessions with L2 students. However, we think that tutors may base this real anxiety in lore. We argue that handbooks’ combinations of cautions and self-conscious enthusiasm, although well-intentioned, might actually be reinforcing these lore-based beliefs.

In other words, student-tutors may believe that working with L2 students is harder than working with L1 students because of handed-down practice (Thompson et al. 79) and assumptions of one-way learning. This anxiety may also add to tutors’ fears about tutors’ own limited knowledge about the English language; when engaging with students on a topic like grammar, tutors’ anxieties may move to the foreground. However, our research shows that even as tutors may lack formal training in certain areas, student-tutors’ concerns are unnecessary because L2 students, as we have shown, are actually just as satisfied with, and intellectually engaged in, their sessions as L1 students. One of our study’s applications is that our empirical findings and those of other researchers be used in tutor training to counter these L2 anxiety narratives—ideally alongside data from writing center administrators’ own exit surveys.

Administrators can also help tutors develop strategies for becoming aware of and for increasing intellectual engagement in students—and in tutors themselves—through questioning and challenging ideas, rather than relying on lore. A recent approach to addressing this issue in tutor pedagogy is integrating concepts from the growing work on global Englishes.

Suresh Canagarajah has argued that “the dominant approaches to studying multilingual writing have been hampered by monolingualist assumptions that conceive of literacy as unidirectional acquisition of competence, preventing us from fully understanding the resources multilinguals bring to their texts” (“Toward” 589; see also Canagarajah, “Translingual Writing” 270). Writing centers have just begun to experiment with such training, aligning with the movement in composition studies toward codemeshing (Young) and translingualism (Lu and Horner). This shift is exemplified by Kevin Dvorak’s 2016 handbook chapter, in which Spanish-speaking students in one writing center found social and learning benefits through tutor-prompted codemeshing—a type of study we would like to see more of.

Our study has been framed by observing two related phenomena that stand in tension with one another in existing literature: increased numbers of L2

L2 Student Satisfaction in the Writing Center • 24

students on campus and high levels of tutor anxiety about working with L2 students. We find these trends especially curious in relation to our own findings that L1 and L2 students are equally highly satisfied and intellectually engaged during writing center sessions.

Based on our study we make three suggestions for tutor training: share empirical satisfaction data; encourage and teach strategies for sustained, focused, two-way intellectual engagement; and incorporate global English concepts. We hope these changes will help address tutor anxiety and promote deeper engagement with the growing numbers of L2 and multilingual student-writers visiting writing centers.

Acknowledgments We thank the International Writing Centers Association for two research grants that supported some of the statistical analysis in this piece. We also thank attendees at the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing conference in Budapest in 2013 and the NYU Abu Dhabi Writing Studies Working Group in 2016 for their feedback on this project.

Notes 1. In its annual Open Doors report, the Institute of International Education compiles information on the countries of origin of international students in the United States. The CIA World Factbook gathers information on countries’ official and most commonly used languages. Merging this data together, we find that 73% of international students in the US come from countries where English is neither typically used nor one of the official languages (Central Intelligence Agency; Institute of International Education, “International Students by Place of Origin”). We note that English is either an official or typically used language in 68 of 219 countries, although the percentages of English “first language” speakers in countries where English is an official language vary radically (e.g., Belize, 62.9%; Canada, 58.7%; Hong Kong, 4.3%; Liberia, 20%; Malta, 6%; Namibia, 3.4%; Singapore, 36.9%: Central Intelligence Agency), so the percentage of international students for whom English is not a first language may be higher than 73%. We note that although international student enrollment in the US in 2016-17 continued to grow, data from the International Institute of Education showed this was the smallest percentage increase since 2006-07, and enrollments of new international students have decreased (“International Student Enrollment”), due both to tighter governmental evaluation of student visa applications and increased student concern stemming

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from stronger rhetoric and stricter, changing governmental policies (Saul).

2. Students may be pursuing studies in English in a non-English speaking country (e.g., Han and Hyland 33; Reichelt et al. 278). However, English is by no means the only non-native language in which students study (Voigt and Girgensohn 65; Heinonen and Lennartson-Hokkanen 42). Our work here focuses on students studying in English and for whom English is not a home or native language. There is debate about the appropriate terms used to describe these diverse students: multilingual writers, translingual writers, English as a Second Language (ESL), English as a Foreign Language (EFL), English as an Additional Language (EAL), English-Language Learners (ELL), English-L2 writers, and non-native English speakers (NNES). Throughout this piece, we use L2 students to refer to students for whom English is not a first or home language and L1 students to refer to students for whom English is their only first or home language.

3. Scholarly work should—and often does—inform handbooks. The conventional wisdom expressed in handbooks notes that tutors should work with L2 students in the following ways: consider the writer and the whole text; focus on higher-order concerns, not grammar; and treat L2 students as individuals, being sensitive to cultural differences.

4. Eighty-six percent of four-year institutions provide support for English Language Learners, with 63% of institutions offering peer tutoring and 30% of institutions offering tutoring by professional staff (National Census of Writing; see also Canavan 2).

Works Cited Abdous, M’hammed, and Cherng-Jyh Yen. “A Predictive Study of Learner Satisfaction and Outcomes in Face-to-Face, Satellite Broadcast, and Live Video-Streaming Learning Environments.”

Internet and Higher Education, vol. 13, no. 4, 2010, pp. 248-257.

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Appendix A: Tables

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L2 Student Satisfaction in the Writing Center • 30

Appendix B: Writing Center Student Exit Survey 1. What was the name of your consultant today? (for internal use) 2. Have you visited the Writing Center before?

• •

Yes No

3. How did you originally learn about the Writing Center? Check all that apply.

• • • • • • •

From an instructor From another student From a class visit by a Writing Center Representative From a brochure (for those institutions that have them) From a resource fair or other student event From our web site or online schedule Other (please specify)

4. Why did you decide to come to the Writing Center for feedback on this particular assignment?

Check all that apply.

• • • • • • • •

My instructor recommended it for this assignment A friend recommended it for this assignment It is a particularly challenging assignment and I thought I could use additional feedback I thought visiting the writing center might help me get a better grade I thought visiting the writing center might help me improve my writing in general I just wanted someone to read through what I had to make sure I am on the right track Visiting the Writing Center is a regular part of my writing process/routine Other (please specify)

The following questions ask students whether they strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree with each of these statements, or if the question does not apply.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

The consultant made me feel welcome.

During the consultation, the consultant acknowledged and focused on my concerns.

My consultant and I worked well together.

I feel that my consultation was productive.

During the consultation, I felt intellectually engaged.

During the consultation, I made a significant discovery or felt I had a breakthrough about my text.

7. During the consultation, I made a significant discovery or felt I had a breakthrough about myself as a writer.

8. During the consultation, the consultant and I shared equally our perspectives and experience as writers and students.

9. After hearing the consultant's feedback or questions, my writing priorities for this project changed.

10. Because of the consultation, I have a clearer sense of the next steps for my current writing project than I did before I came.

11. Because of the consultation, I feel better prepared to handle a similar assignment in the future.

12. Because of the consultation, I feel like my writing project better reflect my identity as a writer.

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The following questions have different possible responses.

1. I plan to return to the writing center.

• •

Yes No

2. I would recommend the writing center to a friend.

• •

Yes No

3. Please comment on any aspect of your consultation. If you found anything particularly helpful or unhelpful, please let us know. (Students were able to type a personal comment.)

4. What is your class year?

• • • • • • •

First year Sophomore Junior Senior Graduate student (for those institutions with graduate students who use their writing center) Other Prefer not to specify

5. What is your ethnic origin? Check all that apply.

• • • • • • •

White/Caucasian Black/African-American Hispanic/Latino(a) Asian/Pacific Islander Arab/Middle Eastern or American Indian/Alaskan Native (depending on institutional demographics) Other Prefer not to specify

6. Is English your first or home language? (Students selected one response.)

• • • •

Yes, English is my only first language Yes, English is one of my first languages No, English is not one of my first languages Prefer not to specify

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TOO CONFIDENT OR NOT CONFIDENT ENOUGH?: A QUANTITATIVE SNAPSHOT OF WRITING TUTORS’ WRITING AND TUTORING SELF-EFFICACIES Roger Powell Buena Vista University powell@bvu.edu Abstract When writing center administrators (WCAs) consider educating tutors, they do so with a range of perspectives in mind.

Tutors need to first be confident in both their tutoring and writing abilities. However, new tutors must also be able to put themselves in the perspective of a struggling student writer who they may work with in a tutoring session. In this article, we conceptualize this issue dealing with self-efficacy or “people’s beliefs in their abilities to produce given attainments” (Bandura 307). Research has begun to explore this topic (Nowacek and Hughes), but has not specifically called this “self-efficacy.” Composition research has a long history of examining self-efficacy, but little research has explored tutors’ self-efficacy. This research has not examined the relationship between tutoring and writing self-efficacies, nor has previously research considered how tutoring experience may impact selfefficacy. To extend this conversation, we developed and administered a survey to writing center tutors across the US to answer the following research questions: What are tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies? Do tutors’ writing and tutoring selfefficacies correlate? Do experienced tutors have different writing and tutoring self-efficacies than new tutors? Results indicated that tutors had high writing and tutoring self-efficacies (mean scores were from 80-100), but the range varied pretty significantly (ranges for writing were 40-100 and ranges for tutoring were 49-100).

Writing and tutoring self-efficacy scores were strongly correlated (r=.815 and p =.001). Finally, tutoring self-efficacy and tutoring experience were weakly correlated (r=.186 and p =.025). These results suggest that tutoring and writing self-efficacies inform one another and that tutors have different experiences with developing self-efficacy with their tutoring and writing, which suggests that tutoring and writing self-efficacy is very individualized.

When writing center administrators (WCAs) set about educating new tutors, they do so with a range of perspectives in mind. Tutors must be prepared to help students who struggle with writing, to push students who succeed with writing, and to work with all those in between. Ideally, WCAs want tutors to be confident in their writing abilities as well as their tutoring abilities in order to navigate the variety of situations they will encounter. At the same time, we—at least, your authors—do not want tutors who are overly confident; we hope tutors maintain an understanding of what it is like to struggle with writing. This is a complex issue that WCAs must consider when educating tutors. As WCAs ourselves, we conceptualize this complex skillset as pertaining to self-efficacy, or “people’s beliefs in their abilities to produce given attainments” (Bandura 307). Self-efficacy, especially tutors’ self-

Kelsey Hixson-Bowles Utah Valley University kelsey.hixson-bowles@uvu.edu efficacy in writing and tutoring, can present challenges in the ways tutors develop.

To illustrate, we offer the following stories gathered from colleagues at conferences about how self-efficacy may impact new writing tutors. Although most tutors experience some level of anxiety when they start to tutor, one was nearly paralyzed by fear. The tutor was worried about questions she could not answer and felt a deep responsibility to know everything about writing and tutoring. Despite reassurance that the tutor could reference resources as needed, the tutor’s self-imposed, high expectations mixed with a lack of self-efficacy in her writing knowledge manifested in panic attacks before sessions, an over-reliance on team tutoring, and an avoidance of tutoring independently.

The other new tutor had the opposite problem— too much self-efficacy in writing. In fact, this tutor’s confidence seemed to block him from being open to learning new things about writing and tutoring writing.

When new concepts or strategies were presented to this tutor, he would shoot them down as subpar to his own knowledge. The problem became especially clear at a staff meeting when the new tutor asked why they should continue tutoring people who “just can’t learn how to write”—a sentiment that stands in direct opposition to the pedagogy of his and many writing centers. It appeared as if this tutor’s self-efficacy in his writing knowledge left him unable to imagine ways of tutoring people who struggle with writing. Ultimately, both tutors’ writing self-efficacy impacted their tutoring self-efficacy and vice versa.

While these anecdotes may seem familiar to many WCAs, little research has examined writing and tutoring self-efficacy and how it might impact both new and experienced tutors. However, a recent chapter in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies begins to move writing center research in this direction. In that chapter, Rebecca Nowacek and Brad Hughes claim that tutors should be prepared to take on the role of “expert-outsiders” (181). By expertoutsider, the authors mean tutors who are confident in both tutoring and producing quality writing but also humbled by unfamiliar writing and/or tutoring situations. Nowacek and Hughes’ advice seems to

articulate the exact conundrum our anecdotes raise.

However, Nowacek and Hughes speak towards the idea of “confidence” which varies from self-efficacy.

Identifying this issue as self-efficacy has a dual purpose: 1) it communicates that in order to tutor/write, tutors need confidence in tutoring/writing and in themselves, and 2) it allows us to draw on the broader conversations in composition and writing center studies related to self-efficacy. And while Nowacek and Hughes’ chapter is very useful, it does not examine tutors’ tutoring and writing self-efficacies in empirical, RAD-based ways that may provide deeper understandings of how tutors’ tutoring and writing self-efficacies work and inform (or don’t inform) one another.

Prior self-efficacy research in composition and writing center studies has discovered that the concept is vital for student success. For example, Frank Parajes and Margaret Johnsons’ study uncovered that when students had high writing self-efficacy they also experienced lower writing apprehension. In this study, students who had lower writing apprehension also produced higher quality writing. Further affirming this claim, Parajes’ extensive literature review on selfefficacy in writing found that self-efficacy in writing impacted writing performance. Similarly, through data from two empirical studies on writing transfer, Dana Driscoll and Jennifer Wells argued that higher selfefficacy can promote the transfer of writing knowledge and skills.

Writing center studies articles on the concept of writing self-efficacy provide further evidence for its impact on writing and student success. Several strong practitioner pieces in WLN offer advice on how tutors might help students with writing self-efficacy (Hawkins, Lape, and Lawson). Beyond this theoretical work, empirical, RAD-based research in writing center studies has highlighted the benefits of writing center visits on student writing self-efficacy. For example, James Williams and Seiji Takakus’ study examined how writing center visits impacted students’ self-efficacy and found that the more a student visits the writing center, the higher their self-efficacy in writing. In their study “Transfer and Dispositions in Writing Centers: A Cross-Institutional Mixed-Methods Study,” Pamela Bromley et al. discovered that repeated writing center visits increased students’ self-efficacy but also found that the more visits that a student makes to the writing center, the more likely they would be to transfer their writing knowledge and skills from composition courses to other courses that required writing and even to professional contexts. The writing center therefore helped facilitate writing transfer when students gained more writing self-efficacy from their visits.

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 33

Although this research is important and useful to composition classrooms and writing centers, it does not specifically focus on tutors. Combing the literature on self-efficacy in tutoring revealed that less knowledge exists on tutors’ tutoring self-efficacy. Though, two pieces stand out. Margaret Bartelt offers a useful approach to helping tutors develop higher self-efficacy in tutoring by reflecting on their past tutoring experiences. Furthermore, Shaun T. White’s master’s thesis examines how a six-week tutor training program might increase tutoring self-efficacy. The results of this project indicated that tutors’ self-efficacy in tutoring did increase as a result of this training program. These studies again show that self-efficacy in tutoring is important to tutors’ success.

However, to our knowledge there exist no studies that try to determine what exactly tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies are, or in other words, which levels of self-efficacy they might have. And although we can assume that tutoring and writing self-efficacies inform each other based on anecdotal evidence, there exist no empirical, RAD-based studies that show this relationship. Finally, we also do not know if this relationship changes over time as tutors gain experience and adopt the “expert-outsider” perspective discussed in Nowacek and Hughes’ chapter. Testing these assumptions can inform current tutor education best practices. Learning about tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies, their relationship, and if they change over time, can help us to better understand and educate tutors like the ones we described above. Our study aims to begin this exploration through a quantitative survey. We pursued the following research questions: 1. What are tutors’ writing and tutoring selfefficacies?

2. Do tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies correlate?

3. Do experienced tutors have different writing and tutoring self-efficacies than new tutors?

Methodology To answer our research questions, we created a survey that adapted two existing scales measuring selfefficacy in writing and tutoring, which we describe in the following section. Also in the next section, we describe data analysis and participant demographics.

Survey Design and Distribution In order to study tutors’ writing and tutoring selfefficacies, we developed the Tutoring Writing and Academic Writing Self-Efficacy Scale (TWAWSES).

The instrument to measure writerly self-efficacy was

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adapted from Katherine M. Schmidt and Joel E. Alexander’s Post Secondary Writerly Self-Efficacy Scale. Though Schmidt and Alexander created this scale with the intention of tracking writing center patrons’ writerly self-efficacies, we felt it was the most appropriate writing self-efficacy scale for writing tutors because its design was explicitly focused on a writing center context. Furthermore, Schmidt and Alexander’s scale does not include questions about specific disciplines’ writing conventions or specific genres1; it includes a mix of higher-order and later-order concerns; and it uses “I can” statements, which focus the participants’ attention on “future ability belief” (“Need and Development of a New Scale”).

The instrument to measure tutoring self-efficacy was adapted from White’s Perceived Self-Efficacy Survey. Similar to Schmidt and Alexander’s scale, White’s scale used “I can” statements. White’s scale is fairly unique in its sole focus on tutoring writing selfefficacy—it provides an array of tutoring work tasks.

Our survey asked tutors to rate their confidence in their abilities to do twenty-one writing tasks related to writing for academic purposes as well as twenty-four tutoring tasks. Participating tutors used a sliding scale of 0 to 100 to report their confidence in each writing and tutoring task (see Appendix B for TWAWSES).

We used Qualtrics as the platform to administer the survey. Additionally, our survey collected demographic information about tutors’ year in school, gender affiliation, number of semesters they have tutored, and their institution classification.

This instrument was first validated through a recursive revision process in which we asked a few volunteers to take the survey and give us feedback.

Following validation and IRB approval, the survey was distributed to the WCenter listserv, WPA listserv, and the following Facebook groups: Directors of Writing Centers, International Writing Centers Association Summer Institute 2014, Sigma Tau Delta Midwestern Region, Sigma Tau Delta High Plains Region, PeerCentered, and CCCCs Graduate Student Special Interest Group in Spring of 2016. Members of each listserv and Facebook group were encouraged to distribute this survey to tutors they knew. Because these listservs and Facebook groups are used quite frequently to exchange ideas about writing center tutoring and administration, we administer our survey in this manner because we aimed to reach more participants and because we felt the members of these groups would be interested in our results.

Analysis

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 34

The results of the survey were analyzed using SPSS 23 statistical software. First, we analyzed the demographic information of our participants by finding percentages of year in school, numbers of semesters tutoring, and the Carnegie classification of the institution that tutors worked for (see Tables 1 and 2 in Appendix A). Next, we ran descriptive statistics to determine if the data was normally distributed and to determine the means, medians, and ranges for the tutoring self-efficacy scores and the writing selfefficacy scores.

After descriptive statistics, we ran tests of correlation between each writing self-efficacy score and each tutoring self-efficacy score. Given that all individual, writing self-efficacy scores correlated with all individual, tutoring self-efficacy scores, we combined all writing self-efficacy scores into one variable and all tutoring self-efficacy scores into one variable. After making the variables all writing selfefficacy and all tutoring self-efficacy, we ran correlations again. Finally, we tested the correlations between number of semesters tutoring and all writing self-efficacy scores as well as number of semesters tutoring and tutoring self-efficacy scores. Because the data was not normally distributed, we ran the Spearman-Rho test of correlation between all of the scores to determine their statistical relationship.

Participants We also collected demographic information from all of our participants (n=146). Table 1 reports how many years our participants had been in school (see Table 1 in Appendix A). As Table 1 displays, many of our participants were more advanced students, such as juniors (29.5%), seniors (19.9%), master’s students (17.8%), and PhD students (10.3%). However, we also received responses from first years (2.7%) and sophomores (13%). The 6.8% who did not answer this question were likely professional tutors who were not enrolled in a program; however, our survey did not explicitly ask tutors to report this demographic. We did, however, find that tutors identified as 73.3% female; 24% male; and 9% unspecified or preferred not to answer.

Table 2 displays how many semesters participants have been tutors (see Table 2 in Appendix A). The majority of participants reported having 1-2 semesters of experience (45.2%) or 3-4 semesters of experience (23.2%). 14.4% of tutors reported having 5-6 semesters of experience, 4.1% reported having 7-8 semesters of experience, 2.7% reported having 9-10 semesters of

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experience, 9.6% reported having 11 or more semesters of experience, and .7% did not answer.

In collecting this information, we asked participants to report the institution they currently attend and/or work for. Using the Carnegie classifications, we categorized each institution for the following criteria: private not-for-profit or public, highest degree granted, primary enrollment, and size and setting. We collapsed some of Carnegie’s categories because we did not need their level of specificity. For instance, under enrollment, we collapsed “very high undergraduate,” “high undergraduate,” and “majority undergraduate” into “primarily undergraduate.”

Tutors who took our survey came from a range of institutions, including institutions outside of the United States (4.1%). Within the United States, institutions ranged from small, private, and not-for-profit to large, public, and doctoral. The most prevalent institution types include: public, doctoral, primarily undergraduate, four-year, large institutions (35.6%); private not-for-profit, baccalaureate, primarily undergraduate, four-year, small schools (10.2%); private, not-for-profit, doctoral, primarily undergraduate, four-year large institutions (9.6%); and private not-for-profit, master’s, primarily undergraduate, four-year, medium institutions (8.2%).

Results of Tutoring and Writing SelfEfficacy In this section, we provide results about descriptive statistics of our survey and statistically significant correlations between writing and tutoring self-efficacy. We use our research questions to organize these statistics in the following subsections.

Research Question 1: What are tutors’ writing and tutoring selfefficacies?

Table 3 reports the average scores for all writing self-efficacy scale items (see Table 3 in Appendix A).

Nearly all averages fell between 80 and 100, and tutors’ writing self-efficacy in the ability to concentrate on writing tasks was the lowest average score of 77.14. On the opposite end of the spectrum, tutors’ self-efficacy in the ability to recognize incomplete sentences had the highest average score of 96.12.

Because averages were high, we also examined range and median, revealing more variation between the scores. Table 4 represents the range and median for each score (see Table 4 in Appendix A).

Medians were also between 80-100, which again indicates that participants rated their writing selfefficacy high. However, the range varied greatly from

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 35

40-100, depending on the task. This means that some participants scored their writing self-efficacy as low as 0 and as high as 100. The writing self-efficacy items with the highest ranges include: • I can attribute my own success rather than to luck with external forces.

• I can write a paper worthy of praise.

• I can write a paper without experiencing overwhelming feelings of fear or distress.

• I can find ways to concentrate when I am writing, even when there are many distractions around me.

The tutoring self-efficacy means, medians, and ranges all seemed to follow a similar pattern. The means are displayed in Table 5 (see Table 5 in Appendix A).

Again, the mean scores fall between 80-100, but there was some variation between the highest and lowest mean scores. Tutors’ self-efficacy with the ability to provide helpful feedback in online sessions received the lowest mean score of 76.78 and tutors’ self-efficacy with their ability to work with writers of the opposite sex received the highest mean score of 96.25.

Table 6 highlights the medians and ranges for tutoring self-efficacy scores (see Table 6 in Appendix A). With the tutoring self-efficacy scores, medians again fell between 80-100. But, ranges were anywhere between 49-100, which also means that some scale items received scores of 0-100. Specifically, the following tutoring self-efficacy scores showed the most range: • I can positively influence fellow writing consultants.

• I can establish positive relationships with directors and graduate assistants.

• I can consistently and correctly file and complete writing center forms and paperwork.

• I can comfortably work with writers of the opposite sex.

• I can provide helpful feedback in online tutoring sessions.

Research Question 2: Do tutors’ writing and tutoring selfefficacies correlate?

To find correlations, we took each individual scaleitem score and ran correlations. What we found was that every writing self-efficacy score correlated with each tutoring self-efficacy score. We then combined all writing scale items and tutoring scale items to create two new variables: all writing self-efficacy and all tutoring self efficacy. Next, we ran correlations between those new variables. Table 7 highlights the

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statistically significant correlations for all writing and tutoring self-efficacy scores (see Table 7 in Appendix A).

As Table 7 indicates, as tutors report high selfefficacy in tutoring tasks, they also report high selfefficacy in writing tasks. The scores showed a positive, strong, statistically significant correlation between participants’ tutoring self-efficacy and writing selfefficacy scores (r=.815 and p =.001). This means that as participants’ tutoring self-efficacy scores increased, so too did their writing self-efficacy scores.

Research Question 3: Do experienced tutors have different writing and tutoring self-efficacies than new tutors?

As we mentioned in the introduction, little research has examined how writing and tutoring experience may impact tutoring and writing selfefficacy, and we therefore decided to see if there was any correlation between tutoring experience and writing and tutoring self-efficacy. In this study “tutoring experience” meant numbers of semesters tutored. Table 8 highlights the tutoring self-efficacy scores that were statistically, significantly correlated (see Table 8 in Appendix A).

As Table 8 indicates, as tutors’ experience tutoring increased, their tutoring self-efficacy scores increased.

There was a positive, weak, statistically significant correlation between participants’ semesters tutoring and their tutoring self-efficacy (r=.186 and p =.025).

However, the weak correlation indicates that there were some outliers, which means that there were some reported scores that decreased as tutors gained more experience. Essentially, there was always a consistent increase or decrease in self-efficacy scores as tutors gained experience.

When we examined writing self-efficacy and numbers of semesters tutoring, there was surprisingly no statistically significant correlation between number of semesters tutoring and the writing self-efficacy scale items.

Limitations This study had several limitations. Because this study is quantitative in nature, it was not our goal to gain in-depth understandings of how tutors had certain levels of self-efficacy and/or why they reported selfefficacy in the way they did. Instead, we hoped to gain an understanding of the general patterns of tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies.

However, the tutors in our study reported rather high self-efficacy scores. Although this initially surprised us, this may be because of limitations to the survey dissemination, design, and analysis. For one, tutors

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 36

who volunteered to do this survey may already be very confident tutors. Second, our scale design might have had an impact on the tutors’ self-efficacy scores. It was set up on a 0-100 scale, and this might have caused participants to think of traditional grading scales. This choice had the potential to shape tutors scores to resemble A, B, C, etcetera grades, which may account for their scores being in the 80-100 or A-B range.

However, and as Albert Bandura claims, the 0-100 scale also allows researchers to capture greater nuances in self-efficacy than a smaller Likert scale of 1-5. This does not negate the limitation; rather, we’d like to specifically mention why we chose to utilize 0-100 scales. Further research with a similar survey design would help determine if the high scores were a limitation of the survey design, a problem with dissemination of the survey, an issue with survey analysis, or that the tutors who volunteer for a study just naturally have high self-efficacy with writing and tutoring.

Discussion and Implications Overall, participants in this study reported high self-efficacy in both writing and tutoring. However, certain tasks, such as the ability to concentrate on a writing task and the ability to give feedback in online sessions, had notably lower mean scores. Although the mean scores were high, there was a large range between the lowest and highest scores with most of the data. In regards to the correlations, writing and tutoring self-efficacies are strongly correlated and tutoring self-efficacy and experience tutoring are weakly correlated. In what remains of this article, we discuss the results and discuss directions for future research.

High Self-efficacy but Wide Ranges in Scores We believe the high self-efficacy scores in both writing and tutoring may be the result of a few key factors. First, and as mentioned above in the limitations, our survey mirrored a traditional grading scale. Tutors may be rating their tutoring and writing self-efficacy as if it were a grade. Furthermore, there were both peer and professional tutors in the study, which might account for the higher scores in tutoring and writing. With professional tutors in the mix, it makes sense that the scores were higher.

What we find most interesting, as WCAs, is the range of scores for both writing and tutoring selfefficacies varied greatly. We feel this reflects the very individualized way that tutors experience their selfefficacy in both tutoring and writing. No one tutor will have the exact same self-efficacy in each writing or

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tutoring task. Therefore, the range shows us the diversity amongst tutors. A similar explanation to the variation in the ranges for tutoring and writing selfefficacy scores might also be the different paths tutors might take in professional development. Like writers in a composition course, tutors develop at different rates, and it may take more or less time for particular tutors to develop their tutoring and writing abilities. In this development, tutors might be learning, and as they learn something new their self-efficacy may be temporarily lower with that tutoring or writing task than with something already familiar.2 Along similar lines, tutors also reported much lower self-efficacy with particular writing and tutoring tasks, and we feel that these may be areas that should be addressed in tutor training. For example, tutors reported the lowest mean scores with the writing selfefficacy scale item, I am able to concentrate on writing when there are distractions. This is a skill that tutors may want to invest time in as many writing centers are noisy and full of distractions. On top of this, some students also struggle with concentration and may need help from tutors to learn how to overcome this. WCAs could work with tutors on strategies for both removing one’s self from a noisy and distracting area and learning how to deal with other distractions that may come up.

Tutors also reported a lower tutoring self-efficacy mean score on giving feedback online. Although this may be because a tutor lacks experience with giving feedback in an online context, it may also indicate that this is an area where tutors need more training as more and more writing centers add online tutoring. Not only could additional training for online tutoring be effective, but perhaps further research on why tutors lack self-efficacy in online tutoring sessions would give WCAs and writing center scholars more answers as to why tutors lack self-efficacy in this setting.

Correlations, Reaffirming Relationships, and Complex Experience Our correlations between writing and tutoring selfefficacies seemed to reaffirm our anecdotal evidence that writing self-efficacy impacts tutoring self-efficacy and vice versa, especially given that the correlation was strong. This finding offers empirical evidence that selfefficacy (in writing and tutoring) is an important concept for tutor development.

Although our correlation findings support the relationships that many WCAs may already see in their centers, when we examined tutors’ experience alongside writing self-efficacy and tutoring selfefficacy, there appeared to be something more complex happening. Our assumption at the beginning of this investigation was that tutors’ self-efficacies in

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 37

writing and tutoring would be higher the longer they had been tutoring. That is not what we found. First, there was no correlation between writing self-efficacy and the number of semesters tutoring. Second, there was only a weak correlation between tutoring selfefficacy and the number of semesters tutoring. Though there may be many explanations, we believe this indicates a humbling process for some tutors. What we mean by this is that as tutors gain more experience they, in theory, learn more about both tutoring and writing. As one learns more, one realizes how much more there is to learn and as we inhabit the beginner role by learning those new things we may not be fully confident.

Besides this humbling process, the lack of a correlation between writing self-efficacy and tutoring experience might result because we are dealing with tutors who have diverse experiences. Because tutors have diverse experiences, we think our results suggest that self-efficacy in writing is individually paced. Some may take more time to develop writing self-efficacy than others. There may be other identity/contextual factors, such as age, gender, socioeconomic backgrounds, university make-up, geographical region, preparation for college, and many others that may impact each individual’s writing self-efficacy to the point where no correlations would appear. It may also be that tutors are experiencing writing or writing situations that are brand new to them, and therefore we see a dip in writing self-efficacy.

Although there was a weak correlation between tutoring self-efficacy and tutoring experience, there may also be very individually, paced experiences shaping tutors’ tutoring self-efficacy as well. A tutor may not experience all tutoring tasks in the first year or even second year. Therefore, self-efficacy may shift depending on the tutor and what they have experienced. For example, maybe a tutor goes a whole semester and never tutors a student on a paper about a controversial subject. They may feel confident in this task because they believe they will be able to handle such a situation when it arises. However, another tutor might have tutored a student on a paper about a controversial subject and had a bad experience and perhaps feels less confident about that now. Two other tutors might have the same experiences and have the totally opposite self-efficacy scores. Other factors, such as the contextual or identity factors mentioned above, may play into the weak pattern that formed in tutors’ self-efficacy over time. Lastly, it might mean that as tutors gain experience, they are exposed to new tutoring situations, such as tutoring a graduate student in an online context or working with a faculty member with an article for publication.

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All of this is to say that tutors are realizing there is more to learn about writing and tutoring, and as a result we would expect self-efficacy numbers to decrease, if only temporarily. Given the snapshot nature of our quantitative data, we cannot know which learning experiences participants were experiencing at the time they took the survey. Furthermore, the participants were a mix of both peer and professional tutors, so although this humbling process may be happening for peer tutors, it might not be occurring for professional tutors. Therefore, we see a weak correlation or no correlation at all.

Future Research Our quantitative study has affirmed some beliefs about writing and tutoring self-efficacy but also raised some new areas for exploration. In concluding this article, we suggest future research that might build on the results of this study. This future work might include both quantitative or qualitative approaches.

In terms of quantitative approaches, we first suggest several ideas to reconsider the survey design.

Instead of the 0-100 scale, researchers might employ a 0-10 scale instead. This scale could still capture the nuances of self-efficacy but wouldn’t mirror traditional grading methods. In further designing the survey, one might also revise the scale items to include tutoring or writing tasks that are specific to the individual tutors at a specific writing center. This may capture the individual and contextual influences on tutoring or writing self-efficacy. In the spirit of accounting for tutoring experience, the survey might be administered multiple times with a semester or two in-between each attempt at the survey. All of these approaches may improve how self-efficacy is being captured in all its complex ways.

A general qualitative design that uses interviews and/or focus groups to hone in on individual tutors, their perceptions of their writing and tutoring selfefficacies, and how the two inform one another may be another promising direction for future research. We suggest such a research design for several reasons.

First, our quantitative design was meant to capture a broad view of tutors’ writing and tutoring selfefficacies. The range in scores amongst tutors generated more questions. The qualitative follow-up could explore in-depth understandings of how individual tutors experience their tutoring and writing self-efficacies and how this might impact them as a tutor.

The qualitative follow-up would also present the opportunity for tutor participants to elaborate on why they have more or less self-efficacy with particular tutoring or writing tasks. For example, a qualitative

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 38

study could explore why some tutors have lower selfefficacy in online tutoring or working with multilingual students. An interview may very well reveal other aspects of writing and tutoring related to tutors’ selfefficacies in writing and tutoring. This exploration might provide more insights into why tutoring and writing self-efficacies are so strongly correlated and might describe tutors’ experiences that demonstrate the correlation in specific, concrete ways. Overall, tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies are an important, complex, and understudied aspect of tutoring writing.

Further research can help WCAs and WC scholars understand the complex nature of tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies as well as the applications of such knowledge to tutor education.

Notes 1. We felt this statement was important because we wanted a writing self-efficacy scale that could be used by tutors from a variety of disciplines.

2. For a more in-depth discussion of this, see the follow-up qualitative portion of this study forthcoming in a digital edited collection of WLN. Works Cited Bandura, Albert. “Guide for Constructing Self-Efficacy Scales.” Self-Efficacy Beliefs of Adolescents, edited by Frank Pajares & Tim Urdan, Information Age Publishing, 2006, pp. 307-337.

Bartlet, Margaret. “Am I a Good Tutor?” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 19, no. 6, 1995, p. 8.

Bromley, Pamela, et al. “Student Perceptions of Intellectual Engagement in the Writing Center: Cognitive Challenge, Tutor Involvement, and Productive Sessions.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 39, no. 7-8, 2015, pp. 1-6.

Bromley, Pam, et al. “Transfer and Dispositions in Writing Centers: A Cross-Institutional MixedMethods Study.” Across the Disciplines, vol. 13, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1-15.

Driscoll, Dana Lynn, and Jennifer Wells. “Beyond Knowledge and Skills: Writing Transfer and the Role of Student Dispositions.” Composition Forum, vol. 26, 2012.

Hawkins, R. Evon. “’From Interest and Expertise’: Improving Student Writers' Working Authorial Identities.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 32, no.

6, 2008, pp. 1-5.

Lape, Noreen. “Training Tutors in Emotional Intelligence: Toward a Pedagogy of Empathy.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 33, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1-6.

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Lawson, Daniel. “Metaphors and Ambivalence: Affective Dimensions in Writing Center Studies.”

WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 40, no. 3-4, 2015, pp. 20-27.

Nowacek, Rebecca S., and Bradley Hughes. “Threshold Concepts in the Writing Center: Scaffolding the Development of Tutor Expertise.” Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, edited

by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, Utah State UP, 2015, pp. 171-185.

Pajares, Frank. “Self-Efficacy Beliefs, Motivation, and Achievement in Writing: A Review of the Literature.” Reading & Writing Quarterly, vol. 19, 2003, pp. 139-158.

Pajares, Frank, and Margaret J. Johnson. “Confidence and Competence in Writing: The Role of SelfEfficacy, Outcome Expectancy, and Apprehension.” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 28, no. 3, 1994, pp. 313-331.

Schimdt, Katherine M., and Joel E. Alexander. “The Empirical Development of an Instrument to Measure Writerly Self-Efficacy in Writing Centers.” The Journal of Writing Assessment, vol. 5, no. 1, 2012.

White, Shaun T. A Case Study of Perceived Self-Efficacy in Writing Center Peer Tutor Training, master’s thesis, Boise State University, 2014.

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 39

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Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 50

Appendix A: Tables

Table 1. Year in School. Valid percentage refers to the participants who filled out the entire survey. If they left information blank, then we removed their responses from the overall percentage.

Year in School 50

43

45 40 35

29.5

30 25

26 17.8

13

15 5

19.9

19

20 10

29

15 10.3

4 2.7

Frequency 10

Valid Percent 6.8

0

Table 2. Number of Semesters Tutoring

Number of Semesters Tutoring 70

66

60 50 40 30 20 10

45.2 34 23.3

Frequency

21 14.4

14 6 4.1

4 2.7

Valid Percent

9.6 1 0.7

0

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Table 3. Means for All Writing Self-Efficacy Scores

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 51

Writing Self-Efficacy Scale Item

Mean

1

I can identify incomplete, or fragment, sentences

96.12

2

I can invest a great deal of effort and time in writing a paper when I know the paper will earn a grade

93.66

3

I can articulate my strengths and challenges as a writer

85.82

4

I can find and incorporate appropriate evidence to support important points in my papers

92.95

5

I can be recognized by others as a strong writer

89.22

6

When I read a rough draft, I can identify gaps when they are present in the paper

88.24

7

I can maintain a sense of who my audience is as I am writing a paper

90.16

8

I can write a paper without feeling physical discomfort (e.g., headaches, stomach-aches, backaches, insomnia, muscle tension, nausea, and/or crying)

85.77

9

When I read drafts written by classmates, I can provide them with valuable feedback

93.48

10

When I have a pressing deadline for a paper, I can manage my time efficiently

82.03

11

I can attribute my success on writing projects to my writing abilities more than to luck or external forces

90.43

12

When a student who is similar to me receives praise and/or a good grade on a paper, I know I can write a paper worthy of praise and/or a good grade

85.42

13

Once I have completed a draft, I can eliminate both small and large sections that are no longer necessary

86.84

14

I can write a paper without experiencing overwhelming feelings of fear or distress

82.94

15

When writing papers for different courses (for example, Biology, English, and Philosophy classes), I can adjust my writing to meet the expectations of each discipline

88.9

16

I can map out the structure and main sections of an essay before writing the first draft

86.14

17

I can find ways to concentrate when I am writing, even when there are many distractions around me

77.14

18

I can find and correct my grammatical errors

90.51

19

I can invest a great deal of effort and time in writing a paper when I know the paper will not be graded

80.4

20

I can identify when I need help on my writing

87.9

21

I can evaluate the usefulness of others' feedback on my drafts when revising

89.95

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Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 52

Table 4. Medians and Ranges for All Writing Self-Efficacy Scores Writing Self-Efficacy Scale Item

Median

Range

1

I can identify incomplete, or fragment, sentences

100

40

2

I can invest a great deal of effort and time in writing a paper when I know the paper will earn a grade

100

53

3

I can articulate my strengths and challenges as a writer

90

99

4

I can find and incorporate appropriate evidence to support important points in my papers

94

40

5

I can be recognized by others as a strong writer

95

99

6

When I read a rough draft, I can identify gaps when they are present in the paper

90

60

7

I can maintain a sense of who my audience is as I am writing a paper

91

55

8

I can write a paper without feeling physical discomfort (e.g., headaches, stomach-aches, backaches, insomnia, muscle tension, nausea, and/or crying)

96

80

9

When I read drafts written by classmates, I can provide them with valuable feedback

97.5

50

10

When I have a pressing deadline for a paper, I can manage my time efficiently

89.5

85

11

I can attribute my success on writing projects to my writing abilities more than to luck or external forces

95

100

12

When a student who is similar to me receives praise and/or a good grade on a paper, I know I can write a paper worthy of praise and/or a good grade

90.5

100

13

Once I have completed a draft, I can eliminate both small and large sections that are no longer necessary

90

81

14

I can write a paper without experiencing overwhelming feelings of fear or distress

92

100

15

When writing papers for different courses (for example, Biology, English, and Philosophy classes), I can adjust my writing to meet the expectations of each discipline

92

80

16

I can map out the structure and main sections of an essay before writing the first draft

95

99

17

I can find ways to concentrate when I am writing, even when there are many distractions around me

83.5

100

18

I can find and correct my grammatical errors

95

70

19

I can invest a great deal of effort and time in writing a paper when I know the paper will not be graded

88

99

20

I can identify when I need help on my writing

93.5

95

21

I can evaluate the usefulness of others' feedback on my drafts when revising

95.00

88.00

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Table 5. Means for All Tutoring Self-Efficacy Scores

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 53

Tutoring Self-Efficacy Scales

Mean

1

I can positively influence fellow writing consultants

87.66

2

I can influence a writer to become involved and engaged in their writing assignment

82.28

3

I can influence a writer to stay on task with a challenging writing assignment

83.23

4

I can reduce a writer's writing anxiety

82.34

5

I can influence a writer to believe they can do well on a writing assignment

83.95

6

I can perceive failures as challenges rather than problems

85.23

7

I can navigate a session where the writer is writing about a controversial subject

89.76

8

I can draw on my strengths when faced with challenges

91.35

9

I can identify resources that would benefit the writer

91.34

10

I can establish positive relationships with directors and graduate assistants

91.45

11

I can consistently demonstrate a professional attitude with colleagues and writers

92.64

12

I can participate in extracurricular writing center activities (i.e. complete wc forms/paperwork)

91.27

13

I can consistently and correctly file and complete writing center forms and paperwork

91.34

14

I can discern what non-consulting tasks need to be done in the writing center independently

83.10

15

I can provide writers with details that support my feedback

92.63

16

I can direct and maintain a focus on Higher Order Concerns (aka global Issues, such as developing ideas, organization, etc)

89.45

17

I can establish a rapport with writers during a consultation

91.24

18

I can comfortably work with writers of the opposite sex

96.25

19

I can request advice from writing consultants with more experience

95.03

20

I can complete a tutoring session in the time allotted

95.02

21

I can be flexible and receptive to the writer's needs and inquiries

93.52

22

I can comfortably work with writers that have physical or learning disabilities

86.79

23

I can provide helpful feedback in online tutoring sessions

76.78

24

I can proficiently discuss grammar and sentence structure with writers

87.79

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Table 6. Medians and Ranges for All Tutoring Self-Efficacy Scores

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 54

Tutoring Self-Efficacy Scales

Median

Range

1

I can positively influence fellow writing consultants

90

100

2

I can influence a writer to become involved and engaged in their writing assignment

85

60

3

I can influence a writer to stay on task with a challenging writing assignment

85

70

4

I can reduce a writer's writing anxiety

85

52

5

I can influence a writer to believe they can do well on a writing assignment

85

61

6

I can perceive failures as challenges rather than problems

90

72

7

I can navigate a session where the writer is writing about a controversial subject

94.5

60

8

I can draw on my strengths when faced with challenges

95

67

9

I can identify resources that would benefit the writer

95

90

10

I can establish positive relationships with directors and graduate assistants

96

100

11

I can consistently demonstrate a professional attitude with colleagues and writers

96

50

12

I can participate in extracurricular writing center activities (i.e. complete wc forms/paperwork)

98

80

13

I can consistently and correctly file and complete writing center forms and paperwork

100

100

14

I can discern what non-consulting tasks need to be done in the writing center independently

90

99

15

I can provide writers with details that support my feedback

95.5

60

16

I can direct and maintain a focus on Higher Order Concerns (aka global Issues, such as developing ideas, organization, etc)

93

70

17

I can establish a rapport with writers during a consultation

95

49

18

I can comfortably work with writers of the opposite sex

100

100

19

I can request advice from writing consultants with more experience

100

70

20

I can complete a tutoring session in the time allotted

95

93

21

I can be flexible and receptive to the writer's needs and inquiries

97

49

22

I can comfortably work with writers that have physical or learning disabilities

91

80

23

I can provide helpful feedback in online tutoring sessions

88

100

24

I can proficiently discuss grammar and sentence structure with writers

95

83

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Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 55

Table 7. Correlation and Significance for All Writing Self-Efficacy Scores and All Tutoring Self-Efficacy Scores Correlations Spearman’s Rho N=146 Combined Tutoring SelfEfficacy

Combined Writing Self-Efficacy Correlation Coefficient

.815**

Sig. (2-tailed)

.000

**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). *. Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).

Table 8. Correlation and Significance for All Tutoring Self-Efficacy Scores and Experience Tutoring Correlations Spearman’s Rho N=146 Combined Tutoring SelfEfficacy

How long have you been a tutor? (Ex. four semesters) Correlation Coefficient

.186*

Sig. (2-tailed)

.025

**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). *. Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).

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Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 56

Appendix B: Tutors’ Self-Efficacy Start of Block: Consent

Q1 <p>We are conducting research on tutor's self-efficacy (confidence within their self) with their writing and tutoring. You are eligible for this study because you are currently a writing center tutor and are currently tutoring college-level students. For this study you will be asked a short questionnaire to obtain your demographic information and your ratings of your own self-efficacy with writing and with tutoring. You will be asked 12 questions and this survey should take about 10 minutes to complete.

Risks are minimal for your involvement with this study. If you choose to participate in this study, you will not experience any risks that are greater than the ones you might experience in your everyday life. This survey should benefit your future professional lives.

Participation in this research study is completely voluntary. You have the right to withdraw at anytime or refuse to participate entirely without jeopardy to your academic status or standing with the university. You may choose to skip a question if it makes you feel uncomfortable. You may also withdraw from the study at any time by simply closing the browser during the survey. Your identities and responses to the survey will remain confidential and only the researchers will know your identity You may be selected to partake in a 30-40 minute interview following your responses on this survey. This interview is voluntary and you may choose to not participate in this interview. If you choose to participate in the interview, there is a portion of the survey that asks for your name and institution. This institutional name will remain confidential. If you do not wish to participate in the interview, you will not write your name in the portion of the survey that asks for your name.

If you have any questions about the survey, please contact us: Author at_________ Author 2 or via email at as well as the faculty sponsor, __________Also, this study is under the supervision of the IUP Institutional Review Board. If you have any questions regarding this IRB protocol or the rights of research participants, you can contact the Institutional Review Board at ___________ Q2 I have read and understood this consent form and desire of my own free will to participate in this study. By clicking on the “yes” button below, I show that I am 18 years or older, I am a tutor who works with college level writers at a writing center, and I indicate my consent to participate in this study.

o Yes, I am 18 and I consent o No, I withdraw End of Block: Consent

Start of Block: Demographics Q3 How long have you been a tutor? (Ex. four semesters) Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? • 57

________________________________________________________________

Q4 List where you have been a tutor (Language Institute, writing center, student support services, etc): ________________________________________________________________

Q5 What is the name of your institution? (ex: Pennsylvania State University, Coe College, Johnson County Community College). ________________________________________________________________

Q6 What is your major/program? ________________________________________________________________

Q7 What year are you? ▼ Freshman ... PhD Student

Q8 What gender do you identify with?

o Male o Female o Other o Prefer not to answer End of Block: Demographics

Start of Block: Writerly Self-Efficacy

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Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? â&#x20AC;˘ 58

Q9 The following will ask you questions about your writing for academic purposes (ex writing a course paper). Please use the slider scale to rate your confidence in your ability to do the following: Know I cannot do it Completely sure I can do it 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

I can identify incomplete, or fragment, sentences.

I can invest a great deal of effort and time in writing a paper when I know the paper will earn a grade.

I can articulate my strengths and challenges as a writer.

I can find and incorporate appropriate evidence to support important points in my papers.

I can be recognized by others as a strong writer.

When I read a rough draft, I can identify gaps when they are present in the paper.

I can maintain a sense of who my audience is as I am writing a paper.

I can write a paper without feeling physical discomfort (e.g., headaches, stomach-aches, back-aches, insomnia, muscle tension, nausea, and/or crying).

When I read drafts written by classmates, I can provide them with valuable feedback.

When I have a pressing deadline for a paper, I can manage my time efficiently.

I can attribute my success on writing projects to my writing abilities more than to luck or external forces.

When a student who is similar to me receives praise and/or a good grade on a paper, I know I can write a paper worthy of praise and/or a good grade.

Once I have completed a draft, I can eliminate both small and large sections that are no longer necessary.

I can write a paper without experiencing overwhelming feelings of fear or distress.

When writing papers for different courses (for example, Biology, English, and Philosophy classes), I can adjust my writing to meet the expectations of each discipline.

I can map out the structure and main sections of an essay before writing the first draft.

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I can find ways to concentrate when I am writing, even when there are many distractions around me.

I can find and correct my grammatical errors.

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? â&#x20AC;˘ 59

I can invest a great deal of effort and time in writing a paper when I know the paper will not be graded.

I can identify when I need help on my writing.

I can evaluate the usefulness of others' feedback on my drafts when revising.

End of Block: Writerly Self-Efficacy

Start of Block: Tutoring Self-Efficacy Praxis: A Writing Center Journal â&#x20AC;˘ Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? â&#x20AC;˘ 60

Q10 The following will ask you questions about you as a tutor. Please use the slider scale to rate your confidence in your ability to do the following: 0

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I can positively influence fellow writing consultants.

I can influence a writer to become involved and engaged in their writing assignment.

I can influence a writer to stay on task with a challenging writing assignment.

I can influence a writer to stay on task with a challenging writing assignment.

I can reduce a writer's writing anxiety.

I can influence a writer to believe they can do well on a writing assignment.

I can perceive failures as challenges rather than problems.

I can navigate a session where the writer is writing about a controversial subject.

I can draw on my strengths when faced with challenges.

I can identify resources that would benefit the writer.

I can establish positive relationships with directors and graduate assistants.

I can consistently demonstrate a professional attitude with colleagues and writers I can participate in extracurricular writing center activities (i.e. complete writing center forms and paperwork).

I can consistently and correctly file and complete writing center forms and paperwork.

I can discern what non-consulting tasks need to be done in the writing center independently.

I can provide writers with details that support my feedback.

I can direct and maintain a focus on Higher Order Concerns (AKA Global Issues, such as developing ideas, organization, etc).

I can establish a rapport with writers during a consultation.

I can comfortably work with writers of the opposite sex.

I can request advice from writing consultants with more experience.

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I can complete a tutoring session in the tie allotted.

Too Confident or Not Confident Enough? â&#x20AC;˘ 61

I can be flexible and receptive to the writer's needs and inquires.

I can comfortably work with writers that have physical or learning disabilities.

I can provide helpful feedback in online tutoring sessions.

I can proficiently discuss grammar and sentence structure with writers.

Q11 Do you think there is a relationship between yourself as a writer and yourself as a tutor? If so what is the nature of that relationship? ________________________________________________________________

Q12 Do you think that tutoring has made you a more confidence or less confident writer? Why? ________________________________________________________________

Q13 What benefits (if any) have you gained from tutoring? ________________________________________________________________ End of Block: Tutoring Self-Efficacy

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Start of Block: Block 4 Q18 Do you have any additional comments you'd like to share? ________________________________________________________________

Q19 Would you be willing to participate in a 30-40 minute follow up interview?

o Yes o Maybe o No Q20 Please provide your name and email address so that we can contact you to set up a follow up interview. We will keep your name and contact information confidential.

o First Name ________________________________________________ o Last Name ________________________________________________ o Email ________________________________________________ End of Block: Block 4

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal â&#x20AC;˘ Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16 No 1 (2018)

TUTORS AS READERS: REPRISING THE ROLE OF READING IN THE WRITING CENTER Carolyne M. King University of Delaware cmking@udel.edu If the two of you are sitting there together, your reading silently squanders the interaction time on something that is very onesided. If you respond to the text as a reader, as you proceed, the writer can get a better sense of what happens for a reader as the text unfolds. When you read aloud, the student can hear how the writing will sound to someone else (1-2).

--William J. Macauley “Paying Attention to Learning Styles in Writing Center Epistemology, Tutor Training, and Writing Tutorials.”

[W]hile tutors had been trained to consider and discuss the intersections among audience, genre, and discipline with their students, their working understanding of the role of audience in this relationship seemed to operate on a global level with only fleeting or intuitive (and therefore inaccessible) considerations at the local level. Thus, while tutors had a conceptual understanding of readerly dynamics. . . they had less practice articulating the impact that discrete elements of a text have on a reader (14).

--Amanda M. Greenwell “Rhetorical Reading Guides, Readerly Experiences, and WID in the Writing Center.”

William J. Macauley opens with a scenario familiar to many of us as a tutor reads a paper in preparation for collaborating with a writer. The mundane nature of this scene, however, illustrates a prevailing attitude towards reading within the writing center community: reading serves writing. Further, the anecdote characterizes the nature of this neglect, for here reading is branded as the means for learning “how the writing will sound to someone else” (1-2). While Macauley’s story illustrates an inattention to reading unless it contributes to solving writing problems in some way, it also reveals a deep, albeit implicit, belief in our tutors’ performances as “readers.” However, Amanda Greenwell’s more recent recounting of working with tutors to create rhetorical reading guides puts pressure on Macauley’s confidence in tutors’ abilities to “respond to the text as a reader” (1).

Greenwell points out that while tutors may understand that they are to act as audience members, they lack “practice” in “articulating” the “readerly” experience.

Taken together, then, Macauley and Greenwell illustrate the importance of explicitly addressing

reading with our tutors. If tutors are to successfully perform as readers, they need the same meta-awareness of themselves as successful readers that we have fostered when encouraging their understanding of themselves as writers.

Perhaps part of the confusion over what it means for our tutors to act as successful readers stems from the multiplicity of definitions that surround reading.

Ellen C. Carillo recently attended to this issue, charting a history of reading and attempting to open up a place for research on reading in writing center scholarship.

In particular, Carillo describes a difference in the way that various fields define reading. While disciplines like psychology and educational psychology define reading “as a complex cognitive process that involves decoding symbols (i.e., letters) to create meaning” (“Reading and Writing Centers” 119), writing studies largely ignores the process of alphabetic decoding, instead exploring reading as a meaning-making activity. Sharing an emphasis on how students compose, writing center work represents the same understanding of reading as does composition—as a transactional process of meaning making and interpretation. Our current scholarly attention to tutors’ practices showcases the manner in which writing center scholarship builds from a view of reading as a form of interpretation and meaning-making. For example, the common writing center practice of focusing upon students’ ideas rather than sentence-level errors illustrates this perspective: it positions tutors as creating meaning from the students’ text rather than as incapable of thinking past grammatical miscues. Basically, then, in writing center studies, tutors are positioned as meaning-makers whose agency extends across all acts of composing, including both reading and writing.

Despite the confidence in tutors’ reading abilities that Macauley describes, recent scholarship points to a gap in our knowledge about tutors’ awareness of reading practices. Over thirty years ago, James Sollisch argued that writing centers should embrace reading as part of writing, recommending that tutors position writers as readers of their own texts. Examining tutorials, Sollisch concluded that consultations “too heavily” relied upon the “role [of] writer,” and as a consequence, both tutors and students failed to “act as

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readers” when jointly responding to a text (10). Yet “Reading”; Carillo, “Reading”; Adams; Morgan). In a little attention has been given to tutors’ roles as readers recent article, Alice Horning offers persuasive statistics in the intervening years. In fact, W. Gary Griswold’s illustrating the potential lack of reading skills that many 2006 study of eleven tutors and their reading students coming into the center may have, postulating knowledge and beliefs remains the only empirical that students may need help with comprehending texts investigation into tutors’ preparation to act as reading (“Reading”). Current attention to reading often focuses coaches. Despite the gap in our scholarship regarding on students’ use of sources, and on helping students tutor pedagogy, recent scholarly attention offers understand and avoid plagiarism. While both topics are important insights into reading activities’ impact upon important, each primarily focuses on student writing— tutorials. For example, Rebecca Block’s 2016 study of rather than reading—practices. Furthermore, because tutors examines reading aloud using point-predict current writing center practice fails to engage student response during consultations. Similarly, Diana writers in thinking through their reading strategies and Scrocco’s 2017 examination of the read-ahead model processes, students may fail to understand how reading offers insight into another method of reading that and writing are connected and how their reading tutors can utilize. While such studies offer new processes may impact the ideas they seek to direction for writing center scholarship about reading, communicate in their writing. greater attention is needed, particularly in regard to the We particularly can see this trend in the way that interplay between writing center reading pedagogy and reading is addressed within current peer tutor training writer growth. As G. Travis Adams writes, “[w]e do materials. Leigh Ryan’s and Lisa Zimmerelli’s The not yet have a full picture of how much tutors know Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors only briefly describes about reading theory and pedagogy” (76).

“Reacting as a Reader” (25), and their emphasis on In sum, extant scholarship points to the way in reading practices focuses upon how to talk about the which recent reading theory and pedagogy has been writer’s text. In a series of short sections, they describe overlooked in writing center scholarship. Accordingly, how tutors can “Reques[t] Clarification” about the we have failed to prepare and support our tutors as ideas in an essay or help students “Develo[p] Critical they act as “expert readers” when working with writers.

Awareness” about the intended audience or purpose of Responding to this oversight, I argue that we must a source text. Yet, this brief attention to the way that more thoroughly incorporate reading into the work we readers work with texts is quickly superseded by do in the writing center, particularly through attending strategies for helping to “Refocu[s]” writers on their to the training our tutors receive. To this end, I offer compositions or to “Promp[t]” writers to further both a description of a tutor training intervention in develop a “line of thinking.” Other texts, like Paula reading strategy awareness and the results of a pilot Gillespie and Neal Lerner’s popular The Longman Guide study of change in tutors’ confidence and awareness to Peer Tutoring, address reading in a single, discrete when this intervention was offered. The preliminary chapter. Gillespie and Lerner primarily advise tutors to data yielded by this study suggests that discussing make use of their current abilities as good readers— reading practices with our tutors can enrich the writing once again reinforcing the belief that because our work undertaken in our centers every day. Ultimately, tutors are good writers, they will necessarily be good then, I argue that we must reprise the role of reading in readers. Throughout the chapter, Gillespie and Lerner the writing center, and we must work to make explicit recommend tutors model their own strategies with both tutors’ and writers’ rhetorical knowledge of students or encourage students to reread, annotate reading as well as writing. texts, and otherwise engage in slow, active reading.

Gillespie and Lerner offer a useful beginning to think about the reading knowledge that tutors need when Overlooking Reading: Tutor Preparation working with students. Yet, as Adams points out, they and Reading focus primarily upon literary interpretation, even As one might suspect, the neglect of reading in though students most commonly read and work with writing center scholarship carries over into tutor nonliterary texts (76-8). Thus, tutor training materials preparation, much to the detriment of all involved. may not adequately prepare our tutors for the range of Because “we do not see reading” (Scholes 166), we disciplinary reading expectations they face during often look past the reading practices that inform consultations. Just as students learn to write in students’ writing. Yet, as many scholars continue to discipline-specific manners, so too are they expected to point out, students’ reading difficulties impact their read (Geisler; Greenwell). If tutor training materials are ability to write about the complex texts they are to better represent the kinds of reading that students assigned in college (cf. Horning, “Trouble” and are bringing to the center, they need to address reading Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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in a more comprehensive fashion that accounts for the reversed if we make visible the manner in which the variety of genres that students utilize. Doing so will writing center’s collaborative framework already prepare tutors to work with students on a variety of inclines towards many tenets of reading scholarship. As texts.

Carillo points out, tutors are “positioned well” to work As illustrated by Lerner and Gillespie, current with students on their reading difficulties: as peers, attention to reading in tutor preparation materials fails they may be able to address many of the reasons for to introduce tutors to the rich scholarship of reading. reading difficulties that students face, including a lack Often omitted from consideration in writing center of motivation, the sophistication of the text, or an research, recent writing studies scholarship has objection to the subject or to the author’s perspective reiterated the importance of the reading-writing (Carillo, “Reading” 18). Yet, as the following pilot connection and addressed several methods for helping study shows, tutors may be less confident in their students to concretize this knowledge. Michael Bunn’s abilities to address reading difficulties than we would theory of “reading like a writer” asks us to help expect, and they are certainly less confident than we students unpack readings by encouraging them to think they should be. We can only evidence how understand the way in which the writer created the reading enriches writing by reclaiming reading in our text; his framework asks students to imagine the text’s scholarship and by specifically training our tutors on creation and, in this imaginative modeling, to recognize how to address reading practices in their tutorials. the many decisions made by the author with the aim of Doing so will instate a more visibly entwined literacy replicating useful decisions in their own writing. Bunn process where writing and reading work together. lays out a practice of reading that encourages students to be aware of the rhetorical moves they encounter in A Study of Tutor Perceptions of Reading all texts. Further, he helps students to see the readingThe following study explores the impact of one writing connection as all texts become possible models intervention in tutor training on tutors’ perspectives of for their own writing, and thus, all writing necessarily the role of reading in the writing center. For, in any emerges out of reading. This emphasis on making session, we have at least two sets of reading practices: students more aware of the actions behind the texts those of the writer and those of the tutor. The present that they encounter complements the “mindful” study works to improve the former by focusing upon framework offered by Ellen Carillo, who calls students the latter. By drawing attention to the relative to be “attent[ive] to the present moment, its context, sophistication of their own reading practices via a trio and [their] perspective” (“Mindful” 11) as they read. In of surveys and a workshop, this project builds on a recent Writing Lab Newsletter article, Carillo moves tutors’ writing expertise by foregrounding their reading forward the values behind this reading model when she expertise in a similarly reflective manner. More describes “reading with purpose” as a particular specifically, during the Spring 2016 semester, tutoring practice for working with reading in the undergraduate peer tutors from a variety of home writing center (“Reading With Purpose”). “Reading disciplines who were working in a writing center at a with purpose” asks tutors and students to recognize large, public, mid-Atlantic university were surveyed the context and their own agenda when reading, and as concerning their perception of the role of reading in such, it is particularly attentive to the importance of the writing center and how they saw their roles as context for the reading experience. Carillo lists three tutors impacted by students’ reading practices. Thirtygenerative stances that tutors can take in tutorials: two responses were recorded. Following this survey, “ask[ing] students what the reading has to do with the the researcher led a forty-minute workshop about the written component of the assignment” in order to role of reading (see Appendix. A); twenty-two students understand “why” and “what” they are reading (19); attended the training and responded to a post-training “draw[ing] students’ attention to genre” and its survey. Approximately three weeks after the training, a influence on reading and writing purposes (20); and final survey asking tutors about applying the training in “think[ing] beyond the immediate session” so that their work was distributed and eleven tutors replied to reading instruction is not just about a text, but also this survey. By examining the tutors’ responses over about reading (22). Attending to reading in these ways this time period, the researcher observed the way a suggests that the work we do with our students on single training on reading dramatically improved tutors’ reading is more about making them aware of who they awareness of reading and perception of the readingare as readers, rather than simply gifting them with a writing connection. Further, the results of this study better understanding of a single reading. suggest the large gains that can be made through even Drawing from this recent reading scholarship, we the smallest attention to reading practice: explicit come to realize that the neglect of reading can only be Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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instruction on reading practices increased tutors’ “important to their writing center work,” yet they often confidence in bringing their own reading practices into “lacked specific knowledge of how reading can be tutorials. learned” (61). Similarly, the surveyed tutors in this Broadly speaking, this study’s findings show that study, while confident that reading is valuable, were reading can be profitably and explicitly addressed much less certain about their relationship to teaching through tutor training. Increasing tutors’ awareness of reading. When asked if they “believe[d] that their work the reading-writing connection and instructing tutors as a Writing Tutor includes helping students with their about a range of reading habits and practices, such as reading,” 34% responded “yes,” 31% thought that they those suggested by Bunn and Carillo, will enrich the were “somewhat” responsible for teaching reading, and writing practices of tutors and students alike. More 28% had “never thought about it” as part of their work specifically, the results from this study can be as tutors. While the survey results indicate that tutors organized around three findings that are indicative of generally hold a positive view towards reading, the potential impact and suggestive of future research. As uncertainty over how reading impacts their sessions described below, the study first found that tutors need reveals that tutors need explicit knowledge of the explicit knowledge of the reading-writing connection reading-writing connection and how to apply this and how to apply it in their work. Second, because this knowledge in their role as consultants. knowledge is so often overlooked in current Tutors’ literacy backgrounds shed further light on instruction, even brief but direct attention to reading their tendency to overlook reading in writing tutorials. makes a large impact on tutors. Third, the common While we may believe that our tutors are good writers writing center practice of encouraging tutors to share and good readers, tutors’ own educations have not “what they do” with students is only effective when provided them with explicit models of reading tutors are prepared and confident in their own instruction upon which they could rely when working strategies and practices; thus, if tutors are going to with students. When asked, “Have you, as a student, describe or even model their own reading practices, received explicit explanation in any of your courses, they need to be confident in those practices and they including in the tutor training or preparation, about need to understand what it means to model being a how to read?” 40% of respondents reported “no” and reader. Ultimately, this study found that our tutors 43% stated that only “sometimes” did they receive need the same kinds of knowledge and instruction instruction. There are many reasons that students may about reading as our students—their tutees—do. not realize that they are being instructed in reading. As Because so much of reading instruction in the college Cheryl Geisler points out, students—especially K-12 curriculum remains implicit, tutors continue to ascribe students—most frequently read textbooks. to a myth of a good reader, and they often fail to see Problematically, though, textbooks emphasize reading themselves as good readers with useful reading in relationship to mastering content knowledge (32-6). practices that can be applicable to their work as writing In turn, this preparation may cause students to tutors. In my discussion of each of the findings below, approach texts as “autonomous” and as explicit I first contextualize the data to the extant conversation sources of knowledge rather than as objects to be and then offer analysis of how this data might be used critiqued or interpreted. Yet research on how experts to improve writing center preparation and practice. read reveals that “expert readers” view texts as rhetorical and interact with texts based upon understanding the genre-features and their purpose in The Presurvey: Sounding Out Tutors’ guiding the reading experience (cf. Geisler; Haas and Explicit Reading Knowledge Flower). However, especially in college classes, when Tutors believe in the value of reading. When tutors—as students themselves—are being instructed examining the thirty-two responses from the prein reading, their focus upon content mastery may training survey, two things became clear immediately: impede their recognition of the rhetorical ways in first, tutors recognize the importance of reading to the which their professors structure such knowledge. work of the writing center and second, they are Although any reading students are required to do for a ambivalent about their own role in the reading aspects course or an assignment ostensibly can help them of the writing process. When asked if they believe that understand what it means to read in a discipline, “reading is a teachable skill,” 72% of tutors affirmed students rarely understand that they are being taught to that reading is teachable. This response is consistent read or that process-based work—required with what Griswold found in his own survey of tutors annotations, summaries, or source bibliographies—is on reading in 2006. Griswold reported that writing assigned to help students to read in the proscribed center staff generally believed that reading theory was discipline-specific manner. Perhaps because of such Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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elision of purpose, a recent turn in reading scholarship and to more readily draw upon their literacy encourages teachers to engage students’ reading backgrounds in their work with students. practices through reflective and context-specific frameworks that help students to recognize the The Workshop: Raising Our Tutors’ inherent choices they are always already engaged in Awareness of Reading making as they approach a text (cf. Helmers; Carillo, Survey results demonstrate that the brief workshop “Mindful” and “Reading”; Bunn, “Motivation”). on the role of reading in the writing center offered as Because this attention emphasizes making students’ part of this study dramatically impacted tutors’ views. recognition of reading instruction explicit, this The workshop took place during the recurrent weekly scholarship also responds to an inherent problem in tutor meeting that occurs on Wednesdays at 8 a.m. in current pedagogical practice. In order to help our the writing center. We began with a discussion of tutors recognize the ways that their teachers have in tutors’ current perceptions of reading and its impact on fact instructed them in disciplinary-specific methods of their work. Tutors described common issues in reading, we can help tutors to reflect upon how they tutorials like working on quotation and paraphrase or have learned the current range of practices that they needing to clarify the relationship between a source utilize when reading. Moreover, this attention may help text and the writer’s own ideas, i.e. plagiarism. This tutors to better recognize, and so employ, the discussion was used as a springboard for pointing out instructional guidance in reading that they have the way that reading was often addressed as a problem received in their own work with students. rather than as a learning opportunity or point of The lack of explicit attention to reading instruction collaboration between consultant and student. Notably, in the tutors’ development speaks to the importance of in describing their work, tutors did not mention arguments like those of Bunn and Carillo, just as much engaging a text with a student or collaboratively for the writing center as in the composition classroom. reading and discussing a source as part of a joint effort As we move towards better incorporating reading into to better understand it and its influence on students’ writing center scholarship, we must be explicit with the writing. Rather, tutors reported acting as instructors on range of strategies available to students and tutors alike what to do (or not to do) when it comes to source use. and work with our tutors to make reading knowledge Tutors’ responses thus reflected what tutor Amanda unambiguous. However, students do fail to recognize Fontaine-Iskra also writes about in her recent tutor instruction, especially when it may involve activities column in Writing Lab Newsletter. Describing being learned by doing rather than by explicit direction. As trained in using rhetorical reading response during Ira James Allen recounts, students often learn what to consultations, Fontaine-Iskra reflects, “[T]he task of do during reading and how to read in the disciplinarybecoming a reader is difficult even for tutors. While sanctioned practices of a discourse community through creating my first [Rhetorical Reading Guide], I tended trial and error (97-8); but such spurious attention can to slip into ‘instructional’ comments rather than cause students to fail to understand that trying out a ‘readerly’ ones. Now I'm able to see the distinction reading practice is indeed learning to read. As Allen between a ‘how-to’ comment and a ‘this is what your argues, reading is a slippery subject, and academics, like writing did for me’ comment” (27). In that the tutors the faculty he surveyed, often fail to have an in this study shared a starting perspective similar to established language to describe the expected ways for Fontaine-Iskra’s, it becomes apparent how an emphasis students to work with texts in their classroom. In turn, on writing instruction has overshadowed the if descriptions vary not only among classrooms but importance of reading for writing center work. also within them, students may struggle to recognize a Moving forward from this discussion, the systematic attention to a text and thus fail to realize workshop focused upon developing tutors’ explicit that they are being taught a type of reading in their knowledge of reading. While there is much relevant classes. While the vast majority of tutors may currently scholarship that tutors would benefit from discussing, fail to appreciate the ways in which they’ve been Joseph Harris’ description of the moves involved with instructed in reading, writing center preparation can “coming to terms” with a text (13) and Michael Bunn’s respond to this deficiency by explicitly addressing “reading like a writer” framework were chosen for this reading knowledge in ways that help tutors to training session. Tutors were not asked to read this recognize reading as disciplinary, as complex, and as an scholarship prior to the workshop. Rather, the “interlocking set of practices” (Allen 98). In doing so, principles Harris and Bunn explain were outlined writing center preparation can help tutors to revise during the training, and tutors were encouraged to their understanding of their own reading instruction discuss and to make connections between the practices Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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described and their own reading habits and knowledge. terms (each were selected by 59% of respondents), Following this discussion, tutors completed a quickclose reading (53%), finding or looking for information write where they reflected upon the question, (50%), searching for sources (47%) and re-writing “How/when might you incorporate reading more quotations (47%). Clearly, tutors recognize variety in obviously into your tutorials?” Throughout the the ways that readers can respond to texts and the way training, tutors engaged enthusiastically in the that this response is important to written work as well. discussion about reading and about the ways that Writing center training can capitalize on this familiarity students’ reading practices impacted their writing. and help tutors to better understand the practices that Once tutors focused upon seeing the reading-writing they already recognize. Under the collaborative, peerconnection, they revised many of their stories about to-peer model we prize in writing center work, tutors tutorials to explain the manner in which some of the should feel empowered to share their own issues they faced may have related to reading, rather backgrounds and model how they do these practices, than seeing these stories as being about common collaborating with the student and adjusting their writing concerns. Tutors were easily engaged in version of the activity to meet the student’s learning thinking about ways to draw out discussion of style. Yet, tutors needed the explicit instruction in students’ reading and understanding of the texts with reading to help them understand the reading-writing which they wrote. Indeed, tutors recognized that connection and to make them more confident to act as merely focusing upon what the student had written the “expert readers” that we—and the students we about a text—for example, in quotations or by use of tutor—expect them to be. paraphrase—was only half the landscape, and tutors were enthusiastic about the idea of incorporating a Tutors Modeling Reading deeper engagement with students about both reading While tutors are sensitive and flexible readers, they and writing in their tutoring practices. nevertheless resist seeing themselves as models of Despite its seeming simplicity, this training offered reading practices. During the workshop, this resistance large gains to tutors in terms of their recognition and was made visible when the tutors overlooked reading confidence about addressing reading during tutorials. the prompt as a form of reading that tutors and When surveyed immediately after this training, 91% of students share and collaborate upon. This oversight tutors reported that the training had changed their view occurred early in the training, which started with a of reading in the writing center. Furthermore, 85% of common activity—a quick-write—that tutors tutors reported that because of the training, they now participated in by using a shared Google doc (see had better strategies in mind for working with students Appendix A for lesson plan). Brainstorming ways that on reading-related issues. The final survey that took reading occurred in tutorials, tutors quickly listed place more than three weeks after the training things like reading aloud, understanding sources, or suggested longer-term impact: 69% of respondents using the library databases to search for sources. agreed that in tutorials following the training, they However, tutors did not include reading the “noticed the reading-writing connection more,” and assignment prompt—a normal activity during the 61% reported that they had applied “skills or strategies beginning portion of a tutorial and one that tutors in discussed at the training” in subsequent sessions. These this center are explicitly trained to perform as part of results suggest that explicit instruction dramatically setting an agenda with the writer. In particular, in not affects tutors’ awareness of the reading-writing describing reading the prompt with the student, tutors connection and allows them to express this awareness also failed to account for a moment where explicit in their work with student writers. model reading occurs—for, in reading the prompt for Tutors already have experience—through their the first time, tutors can demonstrate to students how own writing and reading habits if nothing else—of a they make sense of the instructions and values revealed variety of reading strategies and practices. Even prior in the prompt. Although the tutors are exemplary to the training provided as part of this study, tutors students in their own right—and so should trust their recognized a great number of reading practices. When, own skills when it comes to understanding general in the initial survey, students were given a list of academic genres and discourse—they were notably twenty-two different activities and asked to select all suspicious of their own skills in interpreting a prompt, that “reflect topics which you have discussed or even though it is something that they do everyday as worked with students in the writing center upon” the both students and tutors. What this finding suggests is average response was 10.45 selections, or roughly 45% that our tutors neither see themselves as expert-student of listed activities. The most commonly selected readers nor their reading practices as potential models activities were summarizing and defining words or Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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that can be leveraged in the writing center peer-peer reading practices during tutorials. Moreover, when interaction. When thinking about this in terms of tutors reject the role of models, such long-standing Bunn’s “reading like a writer” model of reading practices like reading student texts aloud may lack practices, then, we can see the manner in which this efficacy by extension. If tutors lack confidence about lack of attention to reading in the writing center has narrating and drawing attention to what meaning they also left a gap in terms of considering models for the are constructing when reading a text, their performance act of reading. If tutors don’t feel comfortable thinking may not help the writer to imagine revisions that better of their own practices as examples to be shared, they accommodate their audience. In other words, the may feel uncomfortable reading a source with a student neglect of reading creates problems with tutoring and helping the student note the ways that sources writing as well as tutoring reading. Only by explicitly integrate quotations or successfully anticipates readers’ instructing tutors in reading practices can we help need for forecasting. In short, if tutors do not “read tutors claim their roles as models and learn how to use like writers” themselves, they can’t model this for their own habits as excellent resources that can help students in a consultation, and furthermore, they can’t students recognize and improve upon the way that they help the student understand the ways that their reading read and write. practices impact their writing process.

In tutor preparation and in the resources we offer De-Myth-ifying Reading: Tutors and tutors for use during consultations, we can work on Students as Readers helping tutors to feel more comfortable acting as Ultimately, this study suggests some valuable models. Greenwell offers one such activity as she practices that can help to overcome the culture of describes using prepared, rhetorical reading guides as neglect currently marking the role of reading in writing tutors work with students in her center. These center scholarship and practices. We need, most rhetorical reading guides “can function as stand-alone urgently, to more carefully attend to the training our resources, tutor training activities, and tutorial and staffs receive about the place of reading in the writing workshop materials” (9). By engaging tutors in creating center. We must not only foreground the readingthese models, tutors gain experience with narrating the writing connection (perhaps borrowing from the reader role. They learn to act as readers by explaining scholarship of writing studies as we do so), but we how a piece of writing addresses the implicit audience. must also specifically train our tutors in a variety of Doing so acts out Bunn’s “reading like a writer” strategies and reading practices to ensure that they are pedagogy, but, as Greenwell points out, it also reflects comfortable engaging this connection. To this end, we long-standing values of reading instruction and can introduce our tutors to scholarship on reading like rhetorical analysis. Citing Ellen Carillo’s and Catherine Bunn’s “reading like a writer” framework and help Savini’s work on the importance of rhetorical reading, them understand the use of this work for their tutoring Greenwell describes how these reading guides practices. Second, we need to help our tutors reflect highlight[t] the way a text orchestrates a reader’s upon their own reading practices and to gain experience of its content involves making a conscious confidence in acting as reading models. Training effort to couch description of a text in the language of activities—like creating rhetorical reading guides or readerly moves” (10). The reading guides highlight the practice tutorials where tutors can experience narrating complex, inter-related aspects of reading because a text as a reader, rather than as a writer—are crucial to incorporates expectations of the reader that are based increasing tutors’ confidence with engaging readings. upon “genre, form, types of evidence, scope of Through such training, we can recover the “readanalysis, and even syntactical constructions” (11). In aloud” portion of a tutorial as an instance of modeling doing so, these guides achieve multiple outcomes for behavior where tutors can and should express to emphasizing reading as important to writing center students how they read the student’s paper and work. Tutors gain familiarity with giving reader-based connect these reading practices to the strategies they comments while preparing the guides; such practice is enact when they read for academic purposes. Whereas necessary if tutors are to feel comfortable with Macauley’s opening words touched upon the way that modeling reading and responding to texts. Further, this may help a student in their writing, this is also an these guides also concretize reading response and offer opportunity to return focus to students’ reading instruction during tutorials that can usefully help tutors practices, and we can use such attention to build up the and students to notice reading in new ways. reading-writing connection from the very first If our tutors don’t see themselves as model moments of the tutor-student collaboration. readers—as “good readers” who should be imitated in their practices—they will struggle to bring attention to Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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What becomes most clear through this study, understanding of the ways that students write—and however, is that we need sustained attention to tutors’ also read. knowledge of reading and their perceptions of its impact upon their writing center work. We should be concerned by the results reported in this study, Works Cited especially in the tutors’ inability to count themselves as models of good reading practices and in their general Adams, G. Travis. “The Line That Should Not Be Drawn: disregard as to the ways that reading impacts their Writing Centers as Reading Centered.” Pedagogy: Critical writing center work. Tutors’ responses also reflect the Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, impact of the pervasive myth of what “good reading” and Culture, vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 73-90. is and who “does it.” As Allen points out in his survey Allen, Ira James. “Reprivileging Reading: The Negotiation of faculty reading practices, there is a belief, “naturally, of Uncertainty.” Pedagogy, vol. 12, no. 1, 2012, pp. 97that there is such a thing as good reading” (109) and 120. that “good” reading practices grace the reader with Bell, James H. "When Hard Questions Are Asked: speed and with a quality performance (111). Yet, Allen Evaluating Writing Centers." Writing Center Journal, vol. also found that faculty members simultaneously 21, no. 1, 2000, pp. 57-78. acknowledge great flexibility in the practices of “good Block, Rebecca. “Disruptive Design: An Empirical Study reading” and that there is no “single way to read well” of Reading Aloud in the Writing Center.” Writing Center (qtd. in Allen 111). These findings reveal a Journal, vol. 35, no. 2, 2016, pp. 33-59. contradiction in the way that reading is viewed: “good Bunn, Michael. “Motivation and Connection: Teaching reading” cannot be simultaneously well-defined and yet Reading (and Writing) in the Composition Classroom.” also disparate. However, if faculty express such College Composition and Communication, vol. 64, no. 3, contradicting stances upon reading, it is hardly 2013, pp. 496-516. surprising that our tutors view being “good readers” as ---. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on something unattainable. For, in order to reflect what it Writing, vol. 2. Edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel means to be a “good reader,” a student or tutor would Zemliansky. Parlor Press, 2011. have to demonstrate qualities—in their normative and Carillo, Ellen C. “Creating Mindful Readers in First-Year ephemeral applications—that cannot possibly be Composition Courses: A Strategy to Facilitate reconciled with the quotidian characteristics of their Transfer.” Pedagogy, vol. 16, no. 1, 2015, pp. 9-22. own reading practices. What the writing center can do ---. “Reading with Purpose in the Writing Center.” Writing to intercept this myth, and to reground our sense of Lab Newsletter, vol. 41, no. 7/8, 2017, pp. 17-24. reading in the everyday practices and conversations of ---. “Reading and Writing Centers: A Primer for Writing our tutors and students, is to encourage our tutors to Center Professionals.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. both see what they do as “reading practices” (and good 2, 2017, pp. 117-145. ones!) and to share their practices with their students.

Fallon, Brian J. The Perceived, Conceived, and Lived Experiences For, as Allen goes on to point out, it’s the “real of 21st Century Peer Writing Tutors. 2010. Indiana U of reading” that is happening and present with every Pennsylvania, PhD dissertation. conversation about a text and what we can do with that Fontaine-Iskra, Amanda. “Tutor’s Column: Making text that is most important to our mission of learning Audience Visible: Readership and Audience in Writing with our students (116-7).

Centers.” Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 41, no. 7/8, 2017, We need to know more about how our tutors pp. 25-8. think of themselves and their tutees as readers, and Geisler, Cheryl. Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise: how they define being a “good reader” in relationship Reading, Writing, and Knowing in Academic Philosophy. to their work. As Brian Fallon writes, “By seeing our Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994. field through the eyes of peer tutors, we stand a better Gillespie, Paula and Neal Lerner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide chance of understanding the future contributions of to Peer Tutoring. Pearson/Longman, 2nd ed., 2006. peer tutoring to teaching and learning” (236). Indeed, ---. The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring. Longman, 2nd ed., we will only truly understand the way that the reading2007. writing connection manifests in tutorials when our Greenwell, Amanda M. “Rhetorical Reading Guides, tutors are confident and comfortable in both aspects of Readerly Experiences, and WID in the Writing literacy and see their role as necessarily responding to Center.” Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 41, no. 7/8, 2017, both reading and writing. Doing so, peer tutoring may 9-16. offer new avenues of exploration to deepen our Griswold, W. Gary. “Post-Secondary Reading: What Writing Center Tutors Need to Know.” Journal of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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College Reading and Learning, vol. 37, no. 1, 2006, pp. 6172.

Haas, Christina and Linda Flower. “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning. College Composition and Communication, vol. 39, no. 2, 1988, pp.

167-183.

Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts. Utah State UP, 2006.

Helmers, Marguerite, editor. Intertexts: Reading Pedagogy in College Writing Classrooms. Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, 2003.

Horning, Alice. “The Trouble with Reading is the Trouble with Writing.” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 6, no. 1, 1987, pp. 36-47.

---. “Reading: Securing its Place in the Writing Center.”

Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 41, no. 7/8, 2017, pp. 2-8.

Macauley, William J., Jr. et al. “Paying Attention to Learning Styles in Writing Center Epistemology, Tutor Training, and Writing Tutorials.” Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 28, no. 9, 2004.

Morgan, William M. “Critical Reading, Intellectual writing, and the Rhythm of Tutoring in the Writing Center.”

Reader, vol. 57, 2007, pp. 39-61.

Rafoth, Ben, editor. A Tutor’s Guide: Helping Writers One on One. 2nd ed., Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2005.

Ryan, Leigh and Lisa Zimmerelli. The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors. 5th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010.

Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi and Patricia Donahue. “Stories About Reading: Appearance, Disappearance, Morphing, and Revival.” College English, vol. 75, no. 2, 2012, pp. 199-217.

Scholes, Robert. “The Transition to College Reading.”

Pedagogy, vol. 2, no. 2, 2002, pp. 165-172.

Scrocco, Diana Awad. “Reconsidering Reading Models in Writing Center Consultations: When is the ReadAhead Method Appropriate?” Praxis, vol. 14, no. 3, 2017, pp. 10-20.

Sollisch, James. “From Fellow Writer to Reading Coach: The Peer Tutor’s Role in Collaboration.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 5/6, no. 2/1, 1985, pp. 10-14.

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Appendix A Lesson Plan for Tutor Workshop on Reading Outcomes for Workshop: • Tutors will develop ideas about how reading is taught and learned • Tutors will develop knowledge of some specific strategies that can help to increase student’s reading abilities a. Particularly, to develop Harris’ “Coming to Terms with the Text” and Bunn’s “Reading like a Writer” framework as useful reading instructional guides Workshop Training Outline: 1. Explanation of Workshop and Rationale a. (For this study: an explanation and plea for survey completion was also made) 2. Quick Write (typed to shared Google doc) & Discussion of Quick Write a. “Describe how you think about reading in relationship to the writing center. Use the three prompts below to shape your answer: • How does reading impact your tutorials?

• Describe situations where you might discuss reading during consultations.

• What types of things have come up in your tutorials and what kinds of help/collaboration have you offered your tutees?”

3. Explicit Purpose of Training (Rationale): why we are talking about reading and its impact on your work as tutors. a. Situate reading-writing as connected activities and the benefits of growing tutor’s explicit reading knowledge 4. Set Agenda/Outcomes for Workshop 5. Discussion—The Reading-Writing Connection: Reading and Writing as Parallel Processes: a. Discussion of prior literacy experiences, learning to read in their majors and in different classes 6. Reading in WC Tutorials: When working with students, we may need to discuss how they read and understood a task and a text, in order to help them develop their ideas for their writing project. Some common issues are: i. Comprehension 1. lack of understanding of a source; students don’t understand what the source is about, its project and aims ii. Context-specific gap 1. The assignment, or disciplinary expectations of what is desired of reading and responding to the assigned text, is not understood by student iii. Anger/Emotion by student 1. May be about content of a text, class, or assignment iv. Frustration/Confusion by student 1. Usually in response to ‘what is expected’ of the assignment v. Plagiarism/patch-writing (see Rebecca Moore-Howard) Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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1. If students can’t comprehend the text, they can’t paraphrase or put it in their own words.

2. May also be intimidated by jargon, and so replicate it 7. Explicit Strategies for Teaching Reading: a. From Harris, Rewriting: i. “Coming to Terms” with a text ii. Having students define their relationship to the text material (extending, forwarding, countering, Authorizing, borrowing…) b. “Reading like a Writer” (Bunn) i. Forecasting: ii. Model how you read their paper, forecasting your expectations/assumptions iii. Questioning 1. Model questioning when reading their paper, 2. Ask about how they questioned source—for clarity, for bias, for contextspecificity of argument 8.

Tutors Teaching Reading: Implementing Strategies a. Build tutors’ confidence: Tutors are ALREADY readers with valuable information and strategies to share b. Discuss the reading/writing connection and emphasize reading as integral to writing c. Describe reader-based composing: reading skills are necessary for self-assessment of writing (reading your own work as a reader would) d. Encourage tutors to vocalize the strategies of comprehension and instruction they use when reading students’ work; emphasize the cues they use as a reader (like forecasting and structural language, genre-features, etc) that facilitate their movement through the text

9. Why the Writing Center is a great place to work on Reading with students: a. We are always one-one b. Our “imagined” audience is really a system of narrowing in on the needs of our writer (as reader) c. Questioning = testing out the purposes with which they are reading (for their writing) 10. Four Specific Strategies for Tutors to Start using Now a. Open Up Space in the tutorial for them to talk about their reading: i. “Is there anything else I should know before we get started?” à Is there anything I should know about how you read or selected texts for this essay? b. Discuss the context and how it impacts the expectations of interacting with a text: i. “Tell me about…” à We are used to asking more about the class and the professor and what the student needs. Now, ask more about the texts students are reading, about how the professor runs discussion of assigned texts, and how the student understands disciplinary/teacher expectations of reading. ii. Return to description about how something is read, how they read, how they learned to read, and their reading-writing connection c. Share your Background! Build a Community of learners i. Just as tutors’ backgrounds (prior literacy experiences) shape their preferences, so to do students.

1. Encourage tutors to share their backgrounds/how they learned to do things, and ask about students’ experiences as well.

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2. Connect this discussion to reading as an umbrella-description/term for interacting with a text. “reading” can look very different in different circumstances and contexts! d. Learn about the Students’ Practices and Preferences i. What kinds of reading-oriented approaches are already parts of our repertoires?

11. Reflection/Google-Doc Writing a. “What do you already do that might be fall under the reading/writing connection for reading?

How/when might you incorporate Reading more obviously into your tutorials?”

12. Wrapping it up a. Exit Survey b. Post Survey in a few weeks!

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MAPPING BOUNDEDNESS AND ARTICULATING INTERDEPENDENCE BETWEEN WRITING CENTERS AND WRITING PROGRAMS Michelle Miley Montana State University michelle.miley@montana.edu

Abstract This essay argues that institutional ethnography, a methodology LaFrance and Nicolas (2012) describe and advocate for in writing studies, provides a means by which writing center scholars can add to their maps of how their writing center programs coordinate with other writing programs at their institutions. From these maps, we can better articulate what writing center work is and what it is not, advocating for an institutional culture of interdependence. The essay extends the findings from a local institutional ethnography to add insights from multiple institutions. The findings suggest that writing center administrators may advocate for our work not only by arguing for parity with other writing programs, but also by communicating with others within the institution to align our internal narratives with external images. In addition, the findings imply that methodologies such as institutional ethnography are critical for examining the radical relationality central to writing center work.

In their 2012 College Composition and Communication’s (CCC) article arguing for institutional ethnography in writing studies, Michelle LaFrance and Melissa Nicolas speak to the way that all writing programs are “intricately bound up with institutions” (130). Despite this boundedness, they note “few researchers have explicitly examined how our most common practices emerge in relationship to the institutional locations that situate, compel, and organize them” (130). They challenge those of us in writing studies to begin to study our programs in relation to our institutions, specifically through the systematic method of institutional ethnography (IE). IE, they argue, not only adds “to the sophisticated toolkit available to researchers in writing studies,” (143), but also, because of its grounding in standpoint theory and its concern with understanding, “[has] the potential to shine a light on how our institutional realities shape what we do and how we do it, as we seek out possibilities for reinvention, intervention, and reform” (144).

Specifically, LaFrance and Nicolas note that IE “resonate[s] with other active conversations in the field,” including “attempts to understand the ways that writing studies research and writing instruction continue to be situated within and against traditional English departments and curricula” (144).

My foray into IE, which began in 2014 with a local study, began with such a question about how my writing center was “situated within and against” our

English department, and more specifically the first year writing program at my institution. I had become aware of a disconnect between the way I understood the work of the writing center in relationship to our firstyear writing program and how some of those teaching in the first-year writing program understood our work.

My use of IE to understand the situatedness of the writing center with the first-year writing program heightened my understanding of how our boundedness occurs not just at the macrolevel of our institutions (for example, with the mission of our institution or with upper administration or legislative bodies), but also at the microlevel (for example with other sites/programs of writing on our campuses). I knew, however, because of my experience at my previous institution where the Writing Center and Department of English acted independently from one another, that other institutions might perceive the boundedness and coordination of work between sites of writing differently.

LaFrance and Nicolas liken the effects of IE, which, despite always being situated in the local, can inform the greater conversation of writing studies, to skipping stones, noting that IE has offered us multiple ways to understand the connections between work practice and the conditions that relate to those practices. Each point of contact with IE creates its own series of ripples, some overlapping and encircling the first, others forming new patterns, just as our institutional situations, while always highly personal, also exist in relationship to a broader and shifting array of discourse. (“Institutional Ethnography” 145) I understood that expanding my study to focus on the relationships of writing programs at multiple insitutions could provide a deepened understanding of the coordination of writing programs within an institution. Such a study would deepen my understanding of how work is coordinated between the writing center and other writing sites at my institution, and strengthen my ability to advocate for my own local writing center. In addition, broadening the study would

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contribute to the larger conversation: writing centers studying both the “shared positions” that exist across working to understand and advocate within their own writing centers (qtd. in Caswell 169), as well as institutional situatedness. In the following essay, I offer positions that are not shared. They argue that finding my findings from an institutional ethnography, in both similarities and differences helps us to “move which I began to map local writing centers and their toward disciplinarity” (169), and to advocate more relationships to other writing programs at their effectively for our writing center programs. I believe insitutions. My hope is that my “point of contact” with IE, what Smith describes as “a method of inquiry” IE will create “a series of ripples,” adding to the (Institutional Ethnography 10), that “does not. . . depend broader discourse of and advocacy for institutional on large-scale projects” but rather “as it describes and relatedness of writing centers for writing center analyzes the workings of one aspect. . . extends its administrators. This research serves those advocating capacity to see and go further” (219), provides a for writing centers and for writing programs at valuable means for finding both the shared and the insitutions of higher education, acknowledging that unique positions in which writing centers exist within none of us work in isolation from others. institutions. Smith (qtd. in Smith) argues that rather The relationship between writing centers and other than replicating one another, each IE study adds to our writing programs as a topic of study is not a new one.1 knowledge: Many times, however, we look at each individual site as [S]tudies that appear to be dispersed and unique rather than at the effects of the coordination fragmented can be seen as focused on a between the two. Michelle Miley and Doug Downs use common object. . . . Generalization from a the metaphor of force fields to describe how writing particular study is not a matter of centers and writing programs exert influence upon one populations or even just the forms of another. In physics, multiple force fields may exist standardization and generalization that within a given space. Although each of these force institutions themselves produce and fields are separate entities, when they come into reproduce; it is more important, an effect contact with one another, they “resonat[e] or of the phenomenon of the ruling relations harmoniz[e]” with those other fields (27). As they themselves – that they are interconnected come into contact, they necessarily shape the others. in multiple ways as well as deeply Like force fields, writing centers and the other writing informed by the dynamic of capital programs at an institution (first-year writing, Writing accumulation” (219).

Across the Curriculum, other writing centers) have As we add to our knowledge through examining both unique influences and forces that they exert within our shared and local practices, we begin to better their institutional space (40). IE, with its specific focus articulate our discipline to ourselves and to others. on the materiality of work, provides a productive lens This article extends my local institutional through which to add to our understanding of how ethnography (Miley, “Looking Up”), in which I writing centers coordinate their work with the other became more aware of the boundedness of my writing writing programs within their institutions. Doing this center with the other writing programs at my will allow us to map how the relationships between institution. With internal grant funding, I visited three sites of writing produce the work of teaching and additional institutions, focusing my study on how these learning writing.2 Dorothy E. Smith, the founder of IE, writing centers coordinate their work with the other argues that each institutional ethnographic study can writing programs at their institutions. In the following add to the “maps” created by previous studies sections, I give a brief overview of this multi(Institutional Ethnography 219). In addition, IE adds to institutional IE. I then articulate my findings from other studies of work cultures both within writing those studies, specifically focusing on findings that center research and within professional and technical provide insights into how those of us in writing centers communication.3 As I worked through this research, can advocate for a culture of “interdependence,” which for example, my findings corroborated with, added to, I define as a recognition of both the boundedness and and were enhanced by studies like Lori Salem’s; Harry need for coordination of work with the unique purpose Denny and Anne Geller’s; Nicole Caswell, Jackie of work that each site for writing provides. I argue that Grutsch Mckinney and Rebecca Jackson’s; and interdependent programs value reciprocal relationality LaFrance and Nicolas’s own institutional ethnography and a recognition of equal value. I contrast of writing center directors (“What’s Your Frequency”). “interdependence” with “dependence,” acting under In The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors, the belief that one’s work exists only because of Nicole I. Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and another’s, without recognition of the unique purpose Rebecca Jackson speak to the value of identifying and of each, and “independence”—a lack of recognition of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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how one’s work coordinates with (affects or is affected institutional orders in which we by) others within the institution.4 I conclude with the participate. (Institutional Ethnography 43) mapping of my own institution as an example of Rather than drawing specific conclusions, the overall articulating boundedness of writing centers to other aims of institutional ethnography are to produce writing programs within our institutions as a means of “maps” of the complex relationships that constitute creating a culture of writing and a recognition of and are constituted by our institutions, thus building interdependence within our institutions. knowledge of how work is articulated by, with and within institutions (51). Institutional ethnography does Using Institutional Ethnography to Add to the not seek to find a “monologic interpretive scheme” Maps of Writing Center Work (160), or come to a universal theory. Rather, Institutional Ethnography, a methodology institutional ethnography embraces the dialogic and the developed by Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith, multiple experiences and knowledges that may exist seeks to uncover within an organization. LaFrance and Nicolas frame how things happen—what practices institutional ethnography in this way: constitute the institution as we think of it, As a form of critical ethnography, IE does how discourse may be understood to not seek to generalize about or to compel and shape those practices, and understand the “structures” commonly how the norms of practice speak to, for, found at similar institutional locations. and over individuals. (LaFrance and Rather IE asks ethnographers to focus on Nicolas, “Institutional Ethnography” 131) individuals and to understand their Institutional placement of writing center administrators personal experiences as uniquely responsive to and of writing centers themselves have been a topic of the social organization of institutions. great interest in writing center scholarship,5 but (“Institutional Ethnography” 134) LaFrance and Nicolas note a gap in our scholarship’s The findings of an institutional ethnographic study understanding of “how our most common practices do not necessarily reveal “truths.” Rather, they allow us emerge in relationship to the institutional locations that to draw maps, maps of the intricate relationships that situate, compel and organize them” (130), how both define our work in our universities. These maps can the material work that we do and our understanding of then guide us as we advocate for writing centers as that work is shaped by our institutional relationships sites of research and learning. with other people, other programs, other institutions Although the design of an institutional within the academy.6 Smith’s definition of “institution” ethnographic study may differ according to the as “those complexes of relations and hierarchical resources of the researcher, the study often begins in organization that organize distinct functions— identifying an experience in an individual’s everyday hospitals or, more generally, health care; universities; practice (the standpoint). From this standpoint, the welfare; corporations; and so on and so on” researcher begins to identify and explore “some of the (Institutional Ethnography 206) is an important one, as the institutional processes that are shaping the experience,” institutional influences that act upon us are not always and then “investigate[s] those processes in order to readily apparent. Rather, they are often hidden forces describe analytically how they operate as the grounds existing within the complex web of those working of the experience” (DeVault and McCoy 20). The within what we often define as a static “institution.” methods or tools of investigation that institutional Institutional ethnography provides a “theory” of “how ethnographers typically rely on—methods like research does or should proceed” (Liggett et al. 51). interviews, observations, surveys, focus groups and As I have experienced it, institutional ethnography textual analysis—explore the language of the institution comes close to what Theresa Lillis, drawing from and those doing the work of the institution. Smith Blommaert, terms “deep theorizing” (355). Unlike argues that in the language of these work documents, other forms of ethnography, Smith notes that IE the coordination of the embodied work of the begins in the local, material actualities of the work individual in relation to the institution becomes visible. people are doing, and then looks “upward” It is in the “talk” and the “texts,” the products of to realize an alternative form of language, that people can coordinate activity knowledge of the social in which people’s (“Incorporating Texts,” 65-68, 79-86). own knowledge of the world of their Since all IEs, even a cross-institutional one, start everyday practices is systematically from a particular standpoint, I started my local study extended to the social relations and from the standpoint of my position as a writing center director. From that position, I began reaching outward Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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to the perceptions of writing center work that other Administrators (WPAs), the Director and Assistant faculty and administrators have in my own institution, Director of WAC, and the Associate Provost over and how those perceptions articulated with the actual WAC and the Writing Center. texts defining what I understood my work to be. I The second institution I visited was quite different conducted interviews with administrators, colleagues, from the first: a community college with a strong and former writing center employees. I began each student writing center, a strong community writing interview with the question (or a close variation of the center, and a developing writing across the community question), “What do you perceive as the work of the program. While the Community Writing Center is Writing Center?” I also analyzed the “work texts” of housed under the Provost’s Office, the Writing Center, the writing center: job ads, grant proposals, external an older entity, is under the Department of English. I review documents, and articles published about the chose this institution because I was interested in how work of the writing center at my institution. A central the culture of a Community College might shape the finding from that study was that the Writing Center I work of the Writing Center and because several people now directed, a Writing Center I had been hired to at my institution have an interest in developing a provide a new vision for, had begun as a central Community Writing Center at our institution. Again, I component to a first-year writing program that was interested in how the different writing programs included large lecture classes and individual meetings shaped the work of one another. What does it mean to with writing center tutors. One interviewee even have a university writing center and a community described the Writing Center as the “composition writing center in the same institution? How does the program.” work of one writing center shape the perception of the From this original inquiry, and because of my work of the additional writing centers specifically previous experience with a writing center that among staff, faculty, and administrators? Here, I functioned as a Writing in the Disciplines program, I interviewed the Writing Center Administrator, the began to develop a deeper awareness of the importance Community Writing Center Director, and the of the relationships between writing programs at Associate Dean over the writing programs. institutions. With funding from an internal grant, I had Finally, I chose an institution similar to my own, the resources to add to my original institutional both in location, in mission (land grant universities), ethnographic mapping of my local institution. I had and in population. This writing center is located within funding to travel to three additional institutions and, the English Department, and although it is a university because of my interest in how the writing center writing center, it serves primarily the first-year writing coordinates with other writing programs, decided to program.7 I was interested in this writing center choose institutions with writing center ties to Writing because of the similarities it has to the original Across the Curriculum (WAC), ties to other writing conception of my own center. I had some idea of how centers within the institution, and ties to first-year my writing center was shaped by its relationship to first writing. My goal was to explore, through IE, the year writing. I wondered how the understanding of the relationship between writing programs at institutions work of the writing center I visited was shaped by its beginning from the standpoint of those in the writing relationship to its first-year writing program. Because center. of the timing of my visit, I was unable to interview any The first institution visited was an R-1 institution faculty or administrators other than the Writing Center well-known for its writing across the curriculum Administrator and tutors. Although this site did add to program. I chose to visit this institution because of the my mapping of writing center work, I focus in this strength of its WAC program, as one of the job duties article on findings from the first two sites.

I had received upon my hire was to develop a writing I began all of the interviews with the same across the curriculum program at my institution. question I used to begin the interviews at my own Having come from a previous institution where the institution: What do you understand as the work of the Writing in the Disciplines program was housed in the Writing Center? In addition, I asked the interviewees Writing Center, I was interested to see how an how they understood the work of the other writing institution with two separate programs understood the programs within their institutions and how that work work of each. Specifically, how did a strong WAC intersected with their writing centers. Since IE program within the institution shape the perception of recognizes the importance of texts in coordinating our the work of the Writing Center both within and work with others, I gathered the textual documents outside the Center? At this site as with all, I began my available to me: marketing materials, mission interviews with the Writing Center Administrator. I statements, and administrative handbooks. also interviewed the former Writing Program Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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As one might expect, I found that the actual work work included helping faculty across the university of the writing centers I visited varied across provide effective writing instruction. Because the institutions, shaped by institutional placement (under Writing Center was the only writing program that the English Department versus under the Provost’s served the entire university, and because the Writing Office, for example), by job classification (faculty or Center was not only physically and institutionally professional staff), and by institutional classification outside the English Department but also politically (R-1, community college, land grant). In three of the distanced from the work of the Department, I four institutions (including my own), the work of the understood our work to be that of partnering with writing center was also articulated as a direct response faculty to further the writing development of students to its origins or to the story of how it was created. As in departments across the university almost in exclusion Lori Salem notes, writing centers do not get created from English. just because a band of faculty argue for its existence; At my new institution, however, my home “broader forces’’ at work “shap[e] how the institution department as a faculty member and as the Writing respond[s] to their efforts” (16).8 Despite the Center Director is the English Department. Still, my articulation of writing center work being strongly understanding when I began my position was that the situated in the local contexts and institutions, shared Writing Center’s work centered on supporting student patterns of how those of us in writing center work can writers from all areas of campus. The description of begin to coordinate our work within/with our the work I would be doing included developing a peer institutions, began to emerge, as did insights into how tutor program and working with writers across campus. writing center administrators can begin to understand, The list also included developing a WAC initiative. articulate, and coordinate their work as interdependent What it did not include was specifically supporting with other writing programs. first-year writing courses. I soon learned that some of the non-tenure track faculty teaching first-year writing Intricately Bound: Insights for Developing understood writing center work differently. Based on Interdependence an institutional writing center design from the 1980s, When Miley and Downs use the metaphor of force they understood the writing center as specifically fields to describe the relationship between writing supporting first-year writing, as I found in my previous centers and writing programs, they acknowledge both study (“Looking Up”). In fact, one former Writing the boundedness of our programs and the unique work Center staff member I interviewed described the each site performs, arguing for a recognition of the writing center as it began as equated with first-year interdependence of our programs. Each of us writing: “[T]he idea was that this one-on-one work that necessarily affects the other. Recognizing that in would happen with your teacher. . . would happen in “collaboration,” often times one entity is subsumed by the Writing Center. . . it was composition. It was the the other, and that in “reciprocity” the Center for Composition” (personal interview). interdependence of programs may not be recognized, Although the institutional mandates for each of the Miley and Downs argue for a recognition of both the writing programs have shifted the coordination of this “independen[ce] and interdependen[ce]” of writing work over time (for example, the Writing Center’s programs (40). I, however—and I cannot assume I am mission to serve an experimental writing program has alone—have not experienced the recognition of now shifted to serving student writers university-wide), interdependence of writing programs as the norm the perceptions of other laborers within the institution within our academic institutions. The metaphor of the of what each program does and how those programs academic silo more accurately reflects what I have relate to one another are shaped by both past and heard articulated. In my writing center work, I have present institutional structuring. This experience led to been at institutions both where the writing programs my definition of “dependence”: acting as though one’s assume complete independence and where one work exists only because of another’s without program has become completely dependent on another recognition of the unique purpose of each. for its survival.

When I turned my study to the institutions beyond Here, I define “independence” as acting my own, my map of writing center work had been independently without a recognition of how one’s informed by my work experiences. I had experienced work coordinates with (affects or is affected by) others how the work of the writing center can both be within the institution. Prior to joining my current understood by a lack of coordination with other institution, I was the Assistant Director of Writing in writing programs (a sense that the writing center works the Disciplines, a program housed in the Writing independently and is not influenced by the other Center. The rest of the staff and I understood our writing programs), and by a total dependence on or Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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serving of the other writing programs (a sense that the Across the Curriculum program described the writing writing center exists to serve the other writing center work as “enmeshed” with her work (personal programs rather than offering value apart from those interview). Her use of that word stood out to me. programs). Having seen how the work of the writing “Enmeshed” indicates an entanglement of programs, center shifts with what I am calling independent and an inability of one program to extract itself from the dependent models of writing program coordination, I other, a lack of boundaries indicating where one specifically wanted to understand how the perception program begins and another ends. Miley and Downs of the work of their writing center coordinated with warn against ignoring the boundaries between the other writing programs at the institutions I visited. programs: I had seen how the force fields of each program Without recognition of the unique and intersected with the others, but I had not yet individual fields both partners bring, the experienced them harmonizing. Could writing centers collaborative possibilities can quickly develop interdependence with other writing programs move from two working together to an on campus, each recognizing both their own purpose unequal power relationship, like that of and their mutual reliance on one another to develop buyer to seller, or academic unit to student cultures of teaching and writing on campus, neither service. (36) totally dependent on the other for their existence?

The same assistant director later noted, with gratitude, that the Writing Center could do the “grunt work” of Finding Balance: The Importance of Parity writing (personal interview). Her comment reminded Amongst Administrators me of Michael Pemberton’s metaphor of the “arranged Two of the sites I visited articulated a conscious marriage” between writing centers and WAC programs knowledge of the boundedness of the sites of writing (117). I wondered how others on campus could at their institutions. At both, I heard from writing understand the two programs as equal and center administrators and writing program interdependent if one of the assistant directors within administrators a desire for interdependence. One the WAC program did not. How else was this writing program administrator described the necessity inequality communicated in institutional for the writing programs (first-year writing, WAC, and understandings? writing center) to be able to act as a “unified political One indication that the Writing Center was not entity,” educating the institution about writing understood as “equal” program to the other writing collectively rather than separately (personal interview). programs was the status of the Writing Center She argued that when sites of writing work together Director.9 Despite the clear delineation of labor that with purpose, they can better advocate for the both each of the directors of the programs articulated, a funding and the expertise that they need, strategically delineation that was echoed by the other administrators planning and developing a “system” of writing at the and faculty with whom I talked, the writing center was institution. She noted that as institutions grow and as the one writing program at each of the institutions not they become more dependent on external funding, directed by tenure-line faculty members. At the fourdeveloped systems of writing with coordination of year institutions I visited, in fact, the status of the writing directors become more necessary. At her directors of each program seemed to reflect the status institution, sudden growth and change in faculty and of the programs within the institution and the personnel had created instability within the system, an perception of the work of the writing center among the instability that had affected the balance of the writing other administrators with whom I spoke to. As Harry programs. One imbalance I noted was in the difficulty Denny and Anne Geller note in their study of in differentiating the work of the WAC program and positionality of writing center professionals, “how one the Writing Center amongst those outside writing. might gain disciplinary identity and status through Although the administrators of the WAC and work in writing centers remains a question almost no Writing Centers both articulated their division of labor one seems to be able to answer” (99). At the as WAC serving the faculty and the Writing Center institution described above, the other writing program serving the students, both also communicated overlap administrators noted this disparity (including the in their programs that often led to confusion amongst writing center director). As one administrator noted, faculty. One assistant director noted that faculty on the lack of parity amongst writing program campus could not tell the difference between the administrators and writing center directors had led to a Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum, so lack of stability in the writing center directorship. This requests for one program often landed in the other’s lack of stability had led to difficulty creating the office. This same assistant director within the Writing “unified political entity” the writing program Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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administrators hoped for. And yet, studies like Denny he had narrowed the mission of his writing center, he and Geller’s and Caswell, Grutsch McKinney’s, and stated, Jackson’s suggest job titles (staff or faculty, tenured or I like very specific missions. I see it all the non-tenured) do not always indicate satisfaction with time. . . . You get somebody where they work, nor does job title indicate intellectual labor. really, really—they want to be all things to Something more than job title parity was at work. all people, and it makes sense because it attracts money, it looks cool, but it just Articulating to One Another What Our Work Is— becomes unwieldy. Where you are trying and Is Not to run WAC through a Writing Center, Despite the lack of institutional parity amongst trying to run a Writing Fellows program administrators (the Student Writing Center through a Writing Center—I can see the administrator holds the title of “coordinator,” while Writing Center, a Student Writing Center the Community Writing Center has the title or what we do, as a place where “director”), a “unified political entity” was a visible something like that can start, but it reality at the second institution I visited. Here the work shouldn’t stay there, it should be split off, of the Student Writing Center was understood as because the mission gets too [messed up]. interdependent with the work of the other writing . . . So that’s what I always have to keep programs, including the Community Writing Center, that focus. . . to say ok, how does this on campus. The lack of parity within the job titles, relate to our primary purpose because it’s although creating some imbalance higher up in the way too easy to get lost off in the institution (noted by the Associate Dean), was offset neverneverland. . . . [W]hat does the by the constant communication and respect between Writing Center really do? What are we the writing program administrators and upper doing here? Why are we doing this? administration directly over writing. Specifically, the (personal interview) administrators communicated a clear understanding of Communicating the purpose of each writing site their force fields—both the uniqueness of each and making sure that each stayed focused on its program and the interdependence on one another. The mission was a central component in developing specific purpose and worth of each writing program interdependence of the writing programs at the was clearly articulated by all administrators. In fact, the universities. That communication of purpose was Associate Dean over all of these programs took time to important not only to upper administrators but also to note the importance of each writing program the directors of the various writing programs. When a articulating with the others, but having separate, program loses sight of its primary mission, one particular missions and purposes. When asked about administrator noted, that program loses track of its the relationship between the Student Writing Center purpose (personal interview). It is in the lack of and Community Writing Center, both with one another specific purpose that perceptions of writing center and with the institution, he noted, “[B]oth developed work become misaligned with others in the institution. conceptually out of our thinking about the function of I find the wisdom in these administrators’ writing or various forms of literate practice for acknowledgements of communicating both what the individuals and groups of people. . . both emerged out writing center is and what it is not to be particularly of certain conceptual understandings that we have valuable as we coordinate our work with others. In been developing over quite a long period of time” Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, Grutsch McKinney (personal interview). Because the writing programs asks us to think more widely about the possibilities for came out of the articulation of the institution’s vision writing center work than what she calls the “grand for writing and literacy, the intellectual work of both narrative” of writing centers, that “writing centers are Centers emerged from their mission. And because comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go those in the institution continually shared this mission to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” (11). with one another, they each understood how the work Grutsch McKinney argues that the “inflexibility” of of their own programs coordinated with the work of our grand narrative “obfuscated[s] material realities, others on campus. In the sharing and theorizing perpetuated[s] subpar conditions for writing centers together came clarification of work. and writing center professionals, and restricted[s] the The Student Writing Center administrator stated subject of writing center theory and research too the importance of remembering each specific mission narrowly” (91). Using narrative theory, Grutsch for each program very wisely. After commenting that McKinney argues that what we tell about our work Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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matters in the understanding of writing center work and learning within the institution, a placement that is both within our centers and within our institutions. important in understanding writing center work not as My findings corroborate Grutsch McKinney’s serving other writing programs but as working with claim. I was surprised by the number of interviewees other writing programs on campus to produce who were not writing center scholars (or even within knowledge about writing and writing processes. In writing studies) across all institutions who attributed addition, the research and learning occurs not just in their understanding of writing center work to their the scholarship of the writing center professionals, nor conversations with specific writing center scholars. For just in the learning that occurs for the students who example, at my own institution, the Strategic Proposal use the center. Rather, the narrative writing center grant out of which grew the possibility for my faculty professionals tell that others within the institution line, as well as the development of a peer tutor understand, the one that shapes perceptions of our program, was authored by my colleague who, before work, is one that includes the scholarship and the my hire, had acted as both the WPA and Writing learning of the peer tutors. I heard this same narrative Center Director. When I asked him what he from the coordinator of the writing center at the understood the work of the writing center to be, work community college. He noted the importance of peer that he also believed was not happening in the Writing tutor programs not simply for the writers with whom Center in place at the time, he attributed his perception they worked but also for the “long term impacts on of work to Michele Eodice. Both my colleague and their education and careers” (personal interview). My Michele had been at Kansas State University at the colleague’s narrative of the writing center as a place of same time. My colleague noted, learning also tied directly to the work of the peer I learned from Michele about the tutors: professionalization of the field. . . about When the Writing Center turned into an the scholarship, about the ways that educational space for everyone who was in someone trained in the discipline could it, for me mentally, I realized that this was really affect an interesting place, really one of the primary arguments that create an interesting space that was Michele Eodice had made about Writing dynamic and exciting. (personal interview) Centers: It was the tutors, the students, From the narrative Michele told of the potential of the director who inhabited this as an writing center work, he began the process of changing educational space. . . it was a place where the narrative and the institutional structures of the learning was going in all sorts of Writing Center at our institution. directions. (personal interview) At another institution, a faculty member in the Department of English attributed her understanding of Implications writing center work to Melissa Ianetta. She stated that Implication 1: Advocating for Parity Between Administrators because of Ianetta, she knew that writing centers were and Programs not just the “dumping ground” for first-year From the IE study of these institutions, I have composition, nor were they the purview of first-year come away with findings that speak to how those of us composition. “The Writing Center,” she said, “isn’t just in writing center work can advocate for greater outsourcing for what we can’t do in the classroom” interdependence with other sites of writing at our (personal interview). Like my colleague, this faculty institutions. From these findings, I offer three member understood the intellectual work that can implications for writing center administrators and occur in the writing center because of the narratives of scholars. My first implication corroborates LaFrance writing center scholars and because of those writing and Nicolas’s findings from their IE of writing center center scholars doing the work of that narrative. administrators and job titles. I did find that lack of At the Community College I visited, the Associate parity in the job status of directors of various writing Dean talked extensively about how the directors of programs across institutions does lead to different both writing centers had shaped the culture of writing understandings of what work is valued, and can at the institution through conversations both within indicate a lack of understanding of these writing sites the English Department and beyond. He noted that as interdependent. This finding will not surprise together they “attempt to address and promote the way anyone, and those of us advocating for writing center we think about writing in matters such as agency and work should continue to advocate for parity with other so forth—across the institution” (personal interview). writing program administrators. As we advocate for These faculty and administrators tell a narrative of parity amongst administrators, we advocate for parity writing center work that places it as a site for research between our programs.

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coordinates with others in the institution. The Implication 2: Communicating Our Work Outside Writing document lists the following principles: Centers • [B]ecause all writing is, at some point, a The second implication corroborates both with collaborative act, the CWC is a collaborative Grutsch McKinney’s findings (Peripheral Visions), and environment on all levels. with Brenton D. Faber’s. Grutsch McKinney argues • [C]ollaborations should always be guided by that writing center administrators should critically our partner in learning and focused on examine the “grand narrative” that we tell of our work. developing new writing knowledges.

Faber notes that when the internal narratives within an • [O]ur programming should be responsive to organization do not align with external images, community requests and inquiries; the CWC organizations become distressed. He argues that does not determine what the community’s “organizational change is the communicative process writing needs and desires are. of realigning the organization’s discourdant narratives • [W]e should not take any political or and images” (39). Advocating for writing centers philosophical position in a writing partnership; depends not only on the internal narratives we tell, but rather we focus on writing instruction only. also our communicating those narratives to those The principles listed above are in a document given to outside of writing center work so that our perceptions all collaborators entering into partnership with the can come into alignment with the perceptions of Community Writing Center. These include those in the others. The work of the writing centers at our larger community who come to the CWC asking to institutions is impacted by the communication of our partner with them to develop new literacy programs work—and by the lack of our communication. The for high school students, for marginalized populations, interviews I conducted across a variety of institutions for the elderly, and for others. The director of the revealed that our telling of what we perceive our work CWC mentioned several times how important it is to to be, and then exemplifying that work through our provide those documents that define our work in own scholarship, is essential to changing the writing for the institution and for those with whom we perceptions of others at our institutions. are collaborating. By doing so, we not only At the same time, coordinating our work with and communicate our understanding of work to others, but alongside others at our institutions means that we must we also keep our purpose/mission/understanding of always listen to what work our institutions need for us work in focus. to do. We must then communicate what we can do, what we cannot do, and what might be done better in Implication 3: Valuing IE as a Methodology for Critically coordination with other writing programs. The wisdom Examining Relationality of the Coordinator of the Student Writing Center The third implication from this study corroborates sticks with me: as I think about the narratives these LaFrance and Nicolas’s (“Institutional Ethnography”) scholars tell of writing center work, I note that those and Miley’s (“Looking Up”) call for adding IE to our who develop interdependence are explicit in stating toolkit for writing center research. Because of its what work the writing center does, and what work grounding in standpoint theory, beginning with the other writing programs are better equipped to do. understanding of those doing the material work of Developing interdependence means acknowledging writing centers and mapping “up,” IE provides a when something is outside of our field of influence. critical lens through which we can understand our Because of the mindset institutional ethnography has radical relationality and boundedness to other given me, I find myself testing my perceptions of work worksites within our institutions. As we “shine a light against other narratives to ask, “What does the on how our institutional realities shape what we do and institution needs from us? Is this something the how we do it, as we seek out possibilities for Writing Center can or should provide? How can our reinvention, intervention, and reform” (“Institutional work better coordinate with other programs? Is my Ethnography” 144), we actively lay our maps, one on vision the best vision for supporting students?” top of the other, letting our local maps add to the The Director of the Community Writing Center I greater landscapes of our discipline, to create new ways visited gave me a document that guides her work as of seeing and to develop interdependence with others she collaborates across communities. I believe these within our communities. principles articulate well the need for writing center By nature, writing centers are radically relational, professionals to not only tell our narrative of writing interdependent sites, intricately bound to those with center work, but also to listen to how our work whom we work and to our institutions. Although Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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institutional ethnography begins in the individual and better articulate our programs as interdependent. I material experience of work—because it asks the end this article with a personal application of how I researcher to understand how that individual’s work have used this mapping at my own institution. Last coordinates with other work within the institution— year, I was contacted by our development office. They the researcher can map the perceptions of work as a had a potential donor interested in helping STEM wider landscape than the individual perspective. This is students become better writers at our institution. perhaps the greatest benefit I see for those of us in Because of my IE research, because I had seen the writing center work. Although our work is relational importance of recognizing the boundedness with other work, our narratives of how the institution writing programs, I knew that ultimately, for the misperceives us, how others just do not understand Writing Center to better support STEM students, our what we do—thinking that we are a “fix-it shop” or institution needed to better support writing in the only work with developmental students, for example— STEM curriculum. I created a map of the programs for can lead to a victim narrative. As a methodology, the donor to illustrate how I envisioned the different institutional ethnography insists on radical relationality, writing sites on campus working together to create a an awareness that our work exists interdependently culture of writing for our STEM students (See Fig. 1 in with others. Through the coordination of our Appendix). narratives, we resist falling into the victim role and I wish I could tell you we received a donation to better advocate for ourselves and for others. support a full-fledged Writing Across the University program as I hoped for. We did not. I wish I could tell Conclusion you everyone I speak to now understands the In her 2015 National Conference on Peer Tutoring interdependence of writing programs. They do not. and Writing keynote, Jackie Grutsch McKinney More do than previously, however, and we did receive challenged those of us in writing center work to do funding for an Assistant Director in the Writing Center more qualitative research. Qualitative research, she to assist me in building relationship with STEM says, provides the “best methods to study writing faculty, faculty grants for those willing to work with us ecologies” and to uncover “the messy realities” of our to begin developing upper division writing intensive work, allowing them to be “captured and documented” courses, and funding for technical writing, which is a (“On Elephants”). Institutional ethnography, a part of our General Education program. These are methodology that asks us to imagine the radical steps. I hope they are steps toward a recognition of the relationality of our work, to begin in the material importance of the different writing sites in supporting experiences of labor, and to “look up,” provides the writing throughout our students’ experiences. As I deep thinking necessary to begin systematically continue to use the maps in conversations with our mapping those ecologies. My research study began President, Provost, Deans, and faculty, narrating how with my own “looking up” to realize that my the work of writing sites coordinate with one another perception of writing center work, shaped both by my and with the institution to create a culture of writing at own knowledge and experience and by the work our institution, I am narrating our boundedness, our documents I had been given, did not match the interdependence. And I am listening. Through these perceptions of others within my institution. Through maps, my hope is that those of us within writing and interview and textual analysis, I was able to map how within our institution become a “unified political those perceptions came into existence. I then extended entity,” “promoting the way we think about writing in my study to additional institutions, creating a more matters such as agency. . . across the institution” intricate map of the how writing center work (personal interviews). coordinates within our institutions, and, more specifically, how we can develop interdependence with Notes our institutions and with the other writing programs at our institutions.

1. For example, see Alice Myatt and Lynée Gaillet’s Throughout my study, over and over, I heard the (2017) Writing Program and Writing Center Collaborations: importance of telling our narrative of what writing Transcending Boundaries, Jane Nelson and Garner, M. center work is and what it is not. In addition, our (2001). “Horizontal structures for learning,” or Michael narratives of the actual work we do must be Pemberton’s (1995) “Rethinking the WAC/Writing coordinated with the needs of our institutions and Center Connection.” must be coordinated with other narratives of work at 2. For a more in-depth overview of institutional our institutions. By using IE to map our work, we can ethnography as methodology, including how it differs better articulate what we understand our purpose to be Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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from other forms of ethnography, see LaFrance and about creating a tenure line for the Director when the Nicolas’s (2012) “Institutional Ethnography as previous administrator left, they had decided against it.

Materialist Framework for Writing Program Research The Director was therefore in a professional rather and the Faculty-Staff Work Standpoints Project,” or than faculty position.

Michelle Miley’s (2017) “Looking Up: Mapping Writing Center Work through Institutional Ethnography.”

Works Cited 3. For ethnographic studies of workplace culture in professional and technical writing, see Jim Henry’s Caswell, Nicole I., et al. The Working Lives of New Writing Workplace Cultures: An Archaeology of Professional Writing Center Directors. Utah State UP, 2016.

Writing (2000), and Brenton D. Faber’s Community DeVault, Marjorie L. and Liza McCoy. “Institutional Action and Organizational Change: Image, Narrative, Identity Ethnography: Using Interviews to Investigate (2002).

Ruling Relations.” Institutional Ethnography as 4. In an early draft of this article, one reviewer noted a Practice, edited by Dorothy E. Smith, Rowman hesitancy in using the terms dependent, independent, and interdependent, noting that in reality, programs and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006, pp. 15most likely continually shift through these positions. I 44. appreciate their comment. It is right to acknowledge Faber, Brenton D. Community Action and Organizational that these positions are rarely static. I believe, however, Change: Image, Narrative Identity. Southern that by acknowledging how our work coordinates Illinois UP, 2002. across programs, and by advocating for Geller, Anne Ellen and Harry Denny. “Of Ladybugs, interdependence, we move towards a more conscious Low Status, and Loving the Job: Writing articulation of what each program offers, towards greater reciprocity, and towards better advocacy for all Center Professionals Navigating Their writing sites at our institutions.

Careers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 33, no.

5. Recent examples of studies examining institutional 1, 2013, pp. 96-129. placement of writing centers and/or writing center Grutsch McKinney, Jackie. Peripheral Visions for Writing professionals include Harry Denny and Anne Geller’s Centers. Utah State UP, 2013.

(2013) “Of Ladybugs, Low Status, and Loving the Job: ---. “On Elephants, Writing Center Tutors, and Other Writing Center Professionals Navigating Their Careers,” Michelle LaFrance and Melissa Nicolas’s Misunderstood Creatures.” National Conference (2013) “What’s Your Frequency?: Preliminary Results on Peer Tutoring in Writing, 6 November 2015, of a Survey on Faculty and Staff Perspectives on Little Americas Hotel, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Writing Center Work,” and Lori Salem’s (2015) Keynote Address.

“Opportunity and Transformation: How Writing Henry, Jim. Writing Workplace Cutlures: An Archaeology of Centers are Positioned in the United States.”

Professional Writing. Southern Illinois UP, 2000.

6. Writing centers, with their roots in social Isaacs, Emily and Melinda Knight. “A Bird’s Eye View constructivism, are particularly attuned to our boundedness with institutions and individuals. IE of Writing Centers: Institutional provides a methodology for us to study a particular Infrastructure, Scope and Programmatic aspect, how work gets done within our social webs.

Issues, Reported Practices.” WPA, vol. 37, no.

7. All interviews and campus visits were conducted 2, 2014, pp. 36-67. between October 2014 and May 2015.

LaFrance, Michelle and Melissa Nicolas. “Institutional 8. The creation story of one of writing centers I visited Ethnography as Materialist Framework for is that one individual, still directing the Center twenty Writing Program Research and the Facultyplus years later, went to the then Chair of English and simply said, “We need a writing center.”

The Staff Work Standpoints Project.” College interviews from this institution, however, revealed a Composition and Communication, vol. 64, no. 1, much more complex origin, one that situates the 2012, pp. 130-150. student writing center emerging “out of [the ---. “What’s Your Frequency?: Preliminary Results of a institution’s] thinking about the function of writing or Survey on Faculty and Staff Perspectives on various forms of literate practice for individuals and Writing Center Work.” The Writing Lab groups of people” (personal interview).

9. At the time I visited, the Writing Center Director Newsletter, vol. 37, no. 5-6, 2013, pp. 10-13. was relatively new. Although the institution had talked Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

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Liggett, Sarah, et al. “Mapping Knowledge-Making in Writing Center Research: A Taxonomy of Methodologies.” The Writing Center Journal, vol.

31, no. 2, 2011, pp. 50-88.

Lillis, Theresa. “Ethnography as Method, Methodology, and ‘Deep Theorizing’: Closing the Gap Between Text and Context in Academic Writing Research.” Written Communication, vol. 25, no. 3, 2008, pp. 353388.

Myatt, Alice Johnston and Lynée Lewis Gaillet, editors.

Writing Program and Writing Center Collaborations: Transcending Boundaries, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Miley, Michelle. “Looking Up: Mapping Writing Center Work through Institutional Ethnography.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, 2017, pp.

103-129.

Miley, Michelle and Doug Downs. “Crafting Collaboricity: Harmonizing the Force Fields of Writing Program and Writing Center Work.”

Writing Program and Writing Center Collaborations: Transcending Boundaries, edited by Alice Johnston Myatt and Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 25-45.

Nelson, Jane and Garner, Margaret. “Horizontal Structures for Learning.” Before and After the Tutorial: Writing Centers and Institutional Relationships, edited by Nicholas Mauriello, William J. Macauley, Jr., and Robert T. Koch, Jr., Hampton Press, 2001, pp. 7-27.

Pemberton, Michael A. “Rethinking the WAC/Writing Center Connection.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 15, no. 2, 1995, pp. 116-133.

Salem, Lori. “Opportunity and Transformation: How Writing Centers are Positioned in the Political Landscape of Higher Education in the United States.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 34, no.

1, 2014, pp. 15-43.

Smith, Dorothy E. “Incorporating Texts into Ethnographic Practice.” Institutional Ethnography as Practice, edited by Dorothy E. Smith, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006, pp. 65-88.

---. Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People.

AltaMira Press, 2005.

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Appendix A

Figure 1: Map of Writing Programs Developed for Donor

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WORKSHOPS ON REAL WORLD WRITING GENRES: WRITING, CAREER, AND THE TROUBLE WITH CONTEMPORARY GENRE THEORY Jerry Plotnick University of Toronto jerry.plotnick@utoronto.ca Abstract My article reports on an annual series of workshops I launched as director of my writing center. This ongoing initiative, titled Workshops on Real World Writing Genres, aims to introduce undergraduates to genres they will practice in their prospective careers. It is part of a larger effort at the University of Toronto to support students as they think ahead to life beyond their degrees.

Drawing on material from workshops covering print journalism, law, public policy, medicine, and fiction, the article reflects on how well our theoretical presuppositions about genre help us prepare students to apply in their professional lives those critical thinking skills we seek to foster in our teaching. By regarding all knowledge as socially situated, contemporary genre theory has raised doubts about the capacity of our students to transfer even knowledge from one context to another. Insofar as genre theorists focus on the social creation of meaning, their account of genre, like their account of knowledge, must, I argue, remain incomplete. An exclusive focus on writing as social practice reflects a problematic division of labor in the academy between the sciences on the one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other. The notion of writing as radically situated has always posed a problem for writing centers, since we do not typically find ourselves situated in the same communities of practice as our students. The recent interest in transfer in writing center scholarship reflects a promising shift towards a vision of the disciplines as interconnected.

In 2013-14, I introduced a series of workshops at my college writing center as part of a larger initiative that the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto introduced that year. The title of the series is Workshops on Real World Writing Genres. In the first three years, I mounted workshops on six topics: Writing and Print Journalism, Writing and the Law, Writing in Public Policy, Writing in Medicine and Health Sciences, Writing and Publishing Fiction, and Writing for Business Professionals. This paper focuses on the first five. I invited academics and professionals from the broader writing community to lead the workshops, and I worked with them to ensure that their material was relevant to the aims of the faculty initiative: to help students think ahead to their lives outside their undergraduate degrees, and to encourage reflection. Although the series stood apart from my center’s day-to-day routine of teaching individually and in groups, I saw the workshops as extending our reach and thereby expanding our pedagogical role. To teach our students to write well, we need to teach them to be supple. The ability, however, to adapt gracefully to new genres depends on exposure and practice, and students

get to try out very few genres in their undergraduate degrees. So many of their assignments represent variations on a single genre—the academic essay—that they may never see again once they complete their degrees. By prompting reflection on the differences between the genres they learn in their courses and those covered in the workshops, the initiative sought to cultivate the kind of self-awareness that I see as essential not only to learning new forms but also to achieving proficiency in one’s habitual form.

The workshops stimulated my own reflection on the two themes that came together in my series: genre and career. My article has two overlapping aims: one practical, the other theoretical. I report on an initiative that other writing instructors might want to introduce into their own centers, and I reflect on how writing centers have come to think, or not think, about genre.

It may well be that we don’t need a theory of genre to teach students how to use genres. No theory of genre might be better than a flawed one. Yet theory can shape pedagogy. We can also exert a deep influence on students merely through attitudes that may have their source in our settled acceptance of a theoretical position. My article critically examines the foundational literature in genre theory. What does contemporary genre theory try to tell us about the role of genre in the pursuit of knowledge? About the relationship of writing communities to each other and to the larger world? The workshop series offers a rich source of material for exploring such questions: it seeks to bridge the divide between academy and world, and it showcases a wider range of genres than we ourselves will likely encounter in our teaching roles. The scholarship on genre and the related question of transfer raises doubts about how well our field’s conceptualization of genre prepares us to send our students out into the world, and especially about how well-equipped they will be to engage critically with that world. I argue that our theoretical presuppositions about the social nature of genre unnecessarily constrain our thinking about genre. In particular, they do not equip us to help students carry into their professional lives the critical thinking skills we seek to foster in our teaching.

My exploration of genre theory and transfer will, in the first part of my paper, draw largely on the broader field of writing studies. Despite the obvious centrality of genre to the work we perform in our centers, there is relatively little writing center scholarship that focuses directly on genre theory (Clark; Walker; Gordon). To the best of my knowledge, there is none on transfer from university to the workplace. Nevertheless, writing centers have, for better or worse, inherited an understanding of genre from the fields of writing and rhetoric as part and parcel of their participation in the epistemological turn in the humanities and social sciences that was gathering force in the mid-nineteeneighties. In the central part of my paper, I will explore material from the workshops, both for what they may suggest about the practical benefits of introducing students to writing in their future disciplines and for what light they shed on the vexed relation of genre theory to critical thinking in the workplace. I conclude the paper with an analysis of the writing center community’s distinct historical relationship to a social view of discourse and knowledge—a relationship that persists even as our commitment to evidence-based research grows. The lack of close attention to genre theory in writing center scholarship reflects a conflict we haven’t adequately faced: between a commitment to a social view of discourse that sees discourse communities as deeply situated and our experience as generalists of reaching across the disciplines to help our students. I suggest that the field might benefit from a re-evaluation of basic assumptions already perceptible in its recent attention to transfer.

Genre Theory and the Transfer of Critical Skills The central, inescapable theoretical document on genre in writing studies is Carolyn Miller’s 1984 article “Genre as Social Action.”1 Miller, a rhetorician, locates genre in typified actions arising in response to recurring situations. Her article had two key antecedents. From Lloyd Bitzer’s seminal 1976 article, “The Rhetorical Situation,” she drew on the proposition that rhetorical discourse should be studied as a response to an exigence created by a situation.

This idea may, in hindsight, appear self-evident, but it signalled a deep shift of focus in rhetorical studies, from object to context and from the study of immutable principles residing in speeches and texts to the study of historical circumstances. From Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Miller drew on the premise that the study of genre is a legitimate, even central, part of rhetorical studies (13– 14) and that genres cannot be reduced to their formal

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characteristics (18–25). Miller reshaped and synthesized these ideas in a pithy set of formulations that clearly struck a chord with the academic writing community.

Her essay invariably serves as the starting point for all further discussion in our field about genre. Miller’s signal contribution to genre theory, however, is her insistence that we consider not only genre but all its relevant components—the people who contribute to a genre, the motives upon which they act, the situations they respond to, indeed the world in which they move—only in their social aspect. Exigence is a “conventionalized social purpose” (162). It must be “located in the social world” and seen as “social motive” (158). Recurrence itself is “a social occurrence” (156). This insistence is, I believe, the chief reason for her theory’s uptake in writing studies at a particular historical moment, the mid to late 1980s.

Many of those who accepted Bitzer’s core idea, Miller among them, criticized him for his belief that the situation had an objective existence. Unlike these earlier critics, however, Miller does not see his problem as a failure to account sufficiently either for perception (A. B. Miller; Consigny; Hunsaker and Smith) or for the creative acts of individuals (Vatz). Her definition of genre enacts the transition to the third stage of what Martin Nystrand et al. identified as the evolution of writing studies “from text to individual/cognitive to social” (271). “Situations,” Miller writes, “are social constructs that are the result, not of ‘perception,’ but of ‘definition.’”

Miller’s understanding of genre as social action has supported a view of writing as not just situated but radically situated. While a reconceptualization of rhetorical studies as situational helped provide a theoretical framework for the growth of writing across the curriculum, Miller’s theory of genre makes it much harder to see the disciplines as connected to each other, let alone to the world outside the university. My one reservation about launching my initiative was that the university’s increasing role in preparing students for their careers may be contributing to an ongoing erosion of the idea of a liberal arts education. Much of the literature in writing studies on transfer theory, however, questions whether we can even prepare students for their future professions. In “Do As I Say: The Relationship Between Teaching and Learning New Genres,” Aviva Freedman asks, “can the complex web of largely tacitly understood social, cultural and rhetorical features to which genres respond ever be explicated fully, or in such a way that can be useful to learners?” (164). The existing empirical research into transfer of professional writing skills from university to workplace (see, e.g., Anson and Forsberg; Freedman and Adam; Dias et al.; Smart and Brown; Schneider

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and Andre) often follows a pattern: a review of the relevant theory; evidence of a sharp divide between the rhetorical contexts of the two domains; empirical evidence for the very real challenges that students face in adjusting to their new work environment and the new writing tasks; and an acknowledgement that, after a greater or lesser struggle, most new hires, typically interns, eventually adapt to the new circumstances. The studies, while often skeptical about the possibility of transfer, do not definitively establish whether prior learning is a hindrance or a help. Doug Brent, classifying the existing research as being either glass half empty or glass half full, sees writing studies research into transfer as reflecting a disagreement not so much about outcomes as about perception.

My primary concern in this paper, however, is not whether students are capable of transferring their writing skills to the workplace but whether they are able to transfer their critical skills—specifically, the capacity to reflect critically on workplace genres and practices using criteria from outside those genres and practices. This question is not often raised in the field of writing studies. But the real-world dilemmas the question might help address do arise in case studies.

Jo-Anne Andre and Barbara Schneider relate the experience of three interns caught in a moral bind: a political science student who was told to look not for facts but for arguments in supporting the federal government’s position in litigation; another who was expected to protect the reputation of the federal government in choosing what to release in response to freedom of information requests; and a communication studies student who was made to replace what she considered factual material in a conference report with a “certain organizational version of reality” (50). All three students felt they had no choice but to act as their superiors expected.

Certainly Patrick Dias et al. are right to point out that “most workplace authors follow a host of implicit and explicit rhetorical rules; successful compliance marks membership, failure may mean career stagnation or job loss” (109). Yet by restricting genre to the social world and the participants to their roles as social actors, contemporary genre theory cannot, for example, provide a satisfactory account of the phenomenon of the whistleblower. If the social rules of the workplace dictate that the truth is what a supervisor says it is, how can potential whistleblowers feel justified in asserting moral agency and contesting what they believe to be a falsification of reality? Only by acting on motives that cannot strictly be called social and by denying the power of social practices such as genre to define what is real. To be sure, efforts to extend and complicate Miller’s theory by situating social actors at the nexus of

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multiple genres—be it by way of activity theory (Russell) or genre systems (Bazerman, “Systems”) or genre sets (Devitt) or genre repertoires (Yates and Orlikowski)—do allow for the experience of having to negotiate conflicting loyalties. But ultimately they, too, fail to provide a fully compelling theoretical ground for the actions of whistleblowers. Truth-telling in the face of institutionally sanctioned deception loses its requisite moral and epistemological status if the act of gathering evidence and going public is reduced to just one social practice among others. There are other— less stark but no less important—occasions for the exercise of critical thinking in the workplace. Indeed, a capacity for the exercise of thoughtful contrarianism in professional life is one of the obvious justifications for continuing to stream large numbers of students through post-secondary institutions even though they could quite arguably learn the necessary career skills more efficiently by performing tasks in context.

We might, as a thought experiment, divide genre theorists into two distinct categories. That theorists gravitating toward either of the two categories reach mostly the same conclusions helps shed light on why the social has come to occupy such a central place in writing studies. The first type of theorist sees genre as instrumental and the creation of meaning as therefore subservient to the aims of the discourse communities whose genres they study. Such theorists generally do not see it as their responsibility to question the fitness of the genres they study. The second type sees practices such as genre as constitutive of what we, as members of discourse communities, can and can't say, can and can't think, do and don’t perceive, and thus of what we come to accept as true. If those who take the first approach choose not to judge, those who take the second eliminate the grounds for judging.

A constitutive view of genres—that, as social practices, they create the very world in which they act—cannot do justice to our ability to make critical judgements about the genres themselves, whether from the outside or from within. It offers no way of judging how well or poorly genres facilitate our ability to do things in the world or to better understand the world.

A premise of this paper is that genres, like other social practices, are not fundamentally constitutive of our perception of the world, though of course they may shape and limit the way we view the world. But insofar as the academic culture of the humanities and social sciences remains under the shadow of postmodernism, I cannot necessarily assume that this premise is widely shared.2 I recognize that a constitutive view of social practices can offer a trenchant form of critique, in particular a critique of power. But that critique can so easily be applied to the critic, and so on in an infinite

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regression that leads ultimately to epistemological stalemate. A former professor and mentor told me back when deconstruction was in vogue that deconstruction and poststructuralism are essentially conservative movements of thought.3 I believe he was right. By conservative, I refer here not to the ideology of the Republican Party, whatever exactly that may be at this historical moment, but simply to the preservation of the status quo. Any extreme form of epistemological skepticism leads to an acceptance of the status quo because we lose the basis for choosing one way of interpreting the world over another. As the historian Jill Lepore observed in a New Yorker article about evidence, "Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, fundamentalism and postmodernism, the religious right and the academic left, met up: either the only truth is the truth of the divine or there is no truth; for both, empiricism is an error. That epistemological havoc has never ended" (93).

I take some comfort in the fact that two of the preeminent theorists of genre in writing studies do not see genres or discourse communities more generally as constitutive. John Swales writes, "the extent to which discourse is constitutive of world view would seem to be a matter of investigation rather than assumption" (31). And Charles Bazerman observes, "Perceiving statements only within the process of social negotiation of a socially constructed reality ignores the individual’s powers of observation and language’s ability to adjust to observed reality" (“What Written Knowledge Does” 364). Yet even as the influence of postmodernism recedes, the line between those who see genre as constitutive and those who see it as instrumental remains blurred. Thus Bazerman the instrumentalist states early on in Shaping Written Knowledge that throughout the book he follows Miller (17), whom Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway, unapologetic believers in the power of genre to constitute reality (13), claim as one of their own: “The notion of a socially constructed reality,” they write, “is at the heart of her definition of genre” (10). In fact, Miller is somewhat cagey on the constitutive power of genre.

Human nature and experience do make an appearance in her proposed hierarchy of meaning (162), albeit at several levels removed from genre. The physical world makes no appearance at all.

This blurring of epistemologies is largely a consequence, as I see it, of a disciplinary division of labor in our universities between, on the one hand, the sciences, which assume responsibility for unravelling the physical laws of the universe, and, on the other, the social sciences and humanities, which focus on society, culture, and the creation of meaning. Insofar as we in

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the social sciences and humanities limit our domain of inquiry to the creation of meaning within discourse communities, we risk recreating what looks like a social constructionist view of the world even when we don't accept the premises of social constructionism in its most radically skeptical form. This narrow focus on discourse and meaning in our own community helps explain why it can be so hard to distinguish between self-evident uses of the term social construction (social practices as constructions) and radical uses that challenge the very possibility of truth (the world as social construction). Consider Carolyn Miller’s definition of exigence: "If rhetorical situation is not material and objective, but a social construct, or semiotic structure, how are we to understand exigence, which is at the core of situation? Exigence must be located in the social world, neither in a private perception nor in material circumstance" (157). Does Miller use "social construct" in the constitutive sense?

Probably, but it's hard to be sure. The If of her question points to the elective disciplinary move of isolating genre within the realm of the social, in which case the statement that exigence is social becomes all but unarguable: it becomes a matter of definition.

If genres have no obligation to the world outside their discourse communities but rather create their own worlds with their own inner consistency whose logic users must accept once they enter the communities, then our students will be predisposed to mastering but not thinking critically about the genres and practices they learn in their chosen professions, and they will feel no sense of accountability to those outside their professions. In other words, we will help produce careerists.

Print Journalism I don't want to suggest that there's anything necessarily wrong with focusing our work in writing centers on teaching our students the ropes: that is, explaining to them how the genres in their disciplines work. It's certainly not usually our role to do anything more than that. In that sense, we have to recognize that our role in writing centers is fundamentally conservative. One of the things I learned from offering these workshops is that students want above all to be told, "this is how things will work in your chosen profession." They aren't looking to hear that the way their intended profession works is going to confront them with difficult choices they will have to negotiate throughout their careers. My sense that students prefer an unambiguous road map to the future was confirmed in the student feedback for the two workshops I offered in the first year of our initiative. The most

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enthusiastically received workshop that year was Writing and Print Journalism. It devoted itself to explaining to students in a clear, methodical, and unambiguous way: if you choose journalism, this is how it will be. The workshop leader, Diane,4 was an accomplished journalist and editor. At the time of the workshop, one of her articles, on sex education for boys, was singled out as the most popular story in the history of the magazine. While she was preparing for her workshop, she lost her post as editor of a local Toronto arts and news weekly when the parent company closed it down. Yet Diane, while acknowledging the precariousness of the medium in the age of the internet, was surprisingly optimistic about the future of print journalism, and she didn't try to discourage students from pursuing a career in journalism. In her workshop, Diane assumed that students would want to know the basics, which she dutifully provided. Stories can be categorized according to whether they provide data or opinion. In between, you have the feature story, which involves research, imparts information, but also provides a take. She also provided practical information about how to break into the profession: how to conduct yourself during an interview, how to address the interviewer. Diane's workshop performed the useful function of reminding me what I sometimes forget with students: What they want may be more basic and even informational, less sophisticated, than what we are inclined to give them.

At the same time, we should, I believe, be willing not always to give our students what they want and occasionally to raise rather than ease discomfort.

Law Hermione, the presenter for the workshop on writing and the law and a professor of law at my university, did not aim to create discomfort in her audience members, but the advice she offered might inevitably put them in some conflict with their profession. In her workshop, she drew on her considerable practical work advocating for privacy. She played a key role in a decision that made it impossible for the police to request subscriber information from Canadian internet service providers without a warrant.

Her account of that role makes a good case for fluency in multiple genres. She and her colleague Arthur were actively involved in the case of R. v. Spencer, which went before the Canadian Supreme Court in 2013. It centered on the right of the police to ask internet service providers for the identity of a person attached to an IP address when they don’t have a warrant. The lower courts had ruled that the police had been within their rights to seek subscriber information from the

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internet provider of the appellant, Matthew David Spencer, without first seeking a warrant. The police had used that information to obtain a warrant to search his premises for child pornography, which they had suspected him of sharing on the internet. The question that Hermione and Arthur kept asking themselves was, “Why did the police not get a search warrant before going to Spencer's internet service provider?” There were no time constraints, and it was pretty clear that a judge would have provided one had the police simply asked. Hermione and Arthur concluded that the police wanted to establish a general right to demand subscriber information without a warrant. If that right were to be challenged, what better case for having public opinion on one’s side than one involving child pornography? Now, Hermione and Arthur knew that the justices on the Supreme Court read the papers every morning, particularly when they happen to be covering Supreme Court cases—Hermione had clerked for a Supreme Court justice—so just prior to the hearing, they hit some of the major newspapers with opinion pieces raising the question, Why didn’t the police seek a warrant? Their rhetorical strategy may have made a difference: again and again during the Supreme Court hearing, the question came up: Why didn't the police just get a warrant? The Supreme Court ruled that while Spencer would not get off—the case would have to go again to trial—the warrantless search was unreasonable.

The first half of Hermione's workshop focussed on style. For example, she said lawyers tend to use the passive voice around 75 percent of the time, with law professors often coming in at close to 90 percent. Yet she stated quite plainly: "Use active voice as much as possible.” “Law is full of terrible jargon" she said.

When I invite Hermione to repeat this workshop, I will ask her whether she can say more about how students can negotiate the institutional obstacles to writing against the prevailing style.

Hermione, quoting Justice John Laskin, said that good writing is good writing, but in fact the greater part of her workshop was devoted to demonstrating how one's approach to writing depends on rhetorical situation. For example, she distinguished broadly between writing as understanding and writing as doing—a distinction that genre theorists frequently make. Writing as understanding is what we do in university. Writing as doing is largely what lawyers do when they write factums or serve, as Hermione has, as advocates. Both rhetorical situations lead to different choices. I see tension, certainly, but no real contradiction between the view that good writing is good writing across disciplines and fields and that writing is inflected by genre and rhetorical situation. In

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any case, Hermione's insistence that students cultivate a direct, unpretentious style is much more than a matter of clarity. Hermione clearly sees law as a part of the public realm. I would like to suggest that an insistence on clarity and transparency in our students' writing is one of the ways we can keep discourse communities from becoming walled off from the public realm and therefore immune to criticism from outside. Each gentle push in the direction of greater transparency amounts to a vote of confidence in the permeability of boundaries between disciplines and world, each acceptance of the dense jargon of a discipline a nod to the principle that genres operate according to their own socially defined rules.

Contemporary genre theory offers no cogent reason for ever rejecting those rules.

Public Policy The third workshop, on public policy, complicated Hermione's advice and my usual insistence as a writing instructor on the virtues of a clearer and more accessible style. It had two leaders: Rhianna and Irene.

Rhianna is a consultant who has trained thousands of public service employees and has helped government to modernize communications. Irene works directly in government on communication. Both speakers have worked at the highest level of the provincial government, right up to the cabinet.

Most of the prose that I see in my one-on-one sessions does not suffer from an excess of simplicity or clarity. More often than not I find that the greatest challenge is to help students simplify their tangle of ideas and their tangled sentences into a form that their readers can understand. Can a writing practice, however, place too much emphasis on simplicity in the service of transparency? As I discovered in the workshop, there has, in the last decade or so, been a revolution in communications within government. In the mid-2000s, the Ontario government began its program to modernize communications, something that had not happened since it started issuing news releases in 1946. A government video in 2008 justified the modernization to public service employees in terms of the shorter attention span of a public subject to the onslaught of new media. Without any irony, it compared this revolution in communications to the fast food revolution that hit the restaurant industry in the 1970s and 1980s. The changes that the workshop leaders talked about applied not only to the way in which government communicates with the public but also to the way in which politicians, public servants, and consultants communicate with each other. As the examples made clear, the main casualty of this program

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was the very tools of the trade that students of political science, for example, will spend four years mastering: the standard paragraph, the carefully reasoned argument based on thorough analysis and context. One student said she was worried she would lose all the writing skills she learned in university.

In their often-cited study of workplace genres, Worlds Apart, Dias et al. argue that we frequently fail in our attempts to prepare students for the professional workplace because our simulations “cannot adequately replicate the local rhetorical complexity of workplace contexts” (175). However, in the case of the transition from writing in a political science degree program to writing in public policy, the reverse appears to be true: the workplace fails to replicate the complexity of university writing. And that is not because political science essays are impenetrably complex; on the contrary, political science is arguably the most outward looking and concrete of the social sciences. The plain writing movement is, on the whole, no doubt a force for the good, but it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Sometimes, complexity needs to be respected. The university must shoulder much of the responsibility for the growing gulf between academic and public discourse, but the workshop on Public Policy suggests that insofar as the survival of a robust public intellectual life—already seriously compromised—matters, the public and professional spheres must also share in the burden.

Medicine and Health Sciences There is no denying that disciplinary and professional practices can limit what those practices ideally should serve: our ability to represent accurately and insightfully the world and human experience or to act in the world based on a clear-sighted understanding of it. When practices begin to take on a life of their own, they may sometimes need to be rethought, revised, even reinvented. A considerable virtue of the fourth workshop in our series, Writing in Medicine and Health Science, was the window it opened onto an attempt to reshape a genre, the controlled study, in response to a deficiency in its ability to represent the world of the sufferer. The workshop leader, Serena, is a physical therapist and social scientist who serves as a research scientist at the University of Toronto and one of its affiliated hospitals. Serena's specialty is narrative and visual methods. In her research, she attempts to incorporate the experience of patients into the study of medicine.

Since the workshop series aims to introduce students to the genres they will likely encounter in their lives beyond their undergraduate degrees, I asked

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Serena to talk about her research and the more traditional—that is quantitative—ways of doing research. Students would already be familiar with the more traditional methods, though even her qualitative research follows closely the IMRD structure that students learn in undergraduate science courses.

Indeed, a common template cuts across the social sciences and the "hard" sciences such as chemistry, physics, and biology, and in introducing qualitative methods into the health sciences, Serena does remain faithful to traditional social science methodology.

Serena's work speaks to a growing sense in the health sciences of a deficit of attention to the experience of illness. Hence the attempt to find a place for patient narrative in medical science generally and even within the culture of clinical trials. Probably the most well-known proponent of narrative medicine is Rita Charon, who has both an M.D. and a Ph.D. in English (“Narrative Medicine”). Yet this change in culture, which still remains marginal to the practice of clinical trials, is, in my view, fraught. The obvious practical difficulty is that of assessing patient experience in trials committed to providing outcomes: how does one avoid reducing that experience to tenpoint scales? Despite Charon's position that the "emotional and psychological aspects of clinical cases . . . are not separable . . . from physiological or structural or historical or economic or moral ones" (Charon, “Author Replies” 7), the current medical model is driven by a belief that human experience and consciousness, along with biology, are reducible to fundamental laws of physics. Any attempt to introduce lived experience into medicine comes into conflict with that underlying belief, exemplified in our time by the larger culture's fascination with the science of the brain and the belief that it will solve the problem of consciousness (see Dehaene for an argument from neuroscience; see Dennett for the argument from natural selection; see Weinberg for a physicist’s case for the reduction of all sciences to particle physics).

Still, the stubborn irreducibility of our experience of illness, which is never purely mental or physical, remains the often unacknowledged bedrock of medicine. Witness the fact that attempts to replace that experience by objective biological markers measurable only by instruments so often fail to produce the expected results. Symptoms that correlate well with these markers in an untreated population often move in the opposite direction under treatment (see Gøtzsche 123–26). For example, low bone density is a good predictor of bone fractures. In a four-year trial of fluoride treatment in post-menopausal women, bone density increased significantly overall in the treatment versus the control group, but the number of vertebral

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fractures was 20% higher among those who received fluoride, and the number of non-vertebral fractures 200% higher (Riggs et al. 806–07).

It is not likely that these deeply rooted philosophical and methodological problems will be sorted out any time soon. Insofar as they are addressed, the locus of change will be ideas, not genre.

Changes to genre do not generally drive changes to models of the world. But the pressure to modify or reinvent a genre can itself be symptomatic of a felt need to rethink such a model. A paradox of the form of genre theory that Carolyn Miller helped bring into being is its inadequacy as a source of insight into why genres change. It rightly posits change as an essential feature of genres—in contrast to the post-Aristotelian view of genres as a priori and unchanging. Yet by circumscribing genre within the social realm and shifting "emphasis away from discourse as representation" (Artemeva 7), genre theory inevitably loses sight of one of the primary motives for change: the friction that is generated when social conventions and practices come into conflict with actuality. This is not to say that genres typically serve a directly representational need; most do not. But the activities of practitioners of all genres are underwritten by their participation in a world that, at some basic level, cannot properly be called social except in the obvious sense that we communicate about it in symbolic forms such as language. In what way can the comparatively large number of bone fractures experienced by those who received treatment in the fluoride study be usefully understood as a product of social activity when it so stubbornly defied the expectations of its discourse community? Our understanding of the genre of the controlled trial will be incomplete unless we acknowledge that, much as it may try to channel experience in ways that fit a preconceived view of the world, this genre, like others, is in dialogue with nature, external reality, the actual—call it what you like.

The biologist, physician, and early sociologist of science Ludwick Fleck referred to the inevitable incursions of the unexpected into the collective activity of science as the "passive elements" of knowledge. The historically contingent "thought styles" that scientists use to organize their investigations of nature he referred to as the "active elements" of knowledge. That biological markers, despite their manifest unreliability, continue to find their way into controlled studies as substitutes for direct clinical data offers but one small example of the stubbornness of Fleck's thought styles in the face of countervailing evidence. However, the fact that biological markers so often do not behave as expected attests to the inability of those thought styles to bend their objects of study to their will. We ignore

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both Fleck's active and passive elements of knowledge at our own peril.

Fiction The fiction event took a different form than the other five workshops. It was publicized and staged as a “conversation” between three Toronto writers—André Alexis, Miriam Toews, and Anne Michaels—who have, over the last three years, taught one-on-one at my writing center in their role as the Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor (UC Alumni). Undergraduates, alumni, graduate students and faculty in the university’s English department, and students in my campus's two creative writing programs were all invited. The event, in my college’s 150-seat auditorium, was waiting list only just a few days after it was announced. That three writers talking about the craft of fiction would be such a draw needs little explanation. Nevertheless, the reverence still accorded to novelists serves as a reminder that, for many, art, in particular the art of fiction, is one of the few vocations that offers the prospect of an uncompromised engagement of self with self and with world. How many forms of writing, let alone of earning a living, meet Toews's impromptu definition: "If living is a problem, and if writing is working out problems, and if from writing we want to know how to live, then writing is trying to figure out the problem of life and how to live it" (UC Alumni)?

Genres, ideally, should be enabling—they should act in the service of argument or expression rather than impede it. In the words of the literary critic Alastair Fowler, they "offer room" to "move in" (31).

The more specialized our work, however, the less of our being we bring into play, and the more we may feel constrained by the genre. Many of our students will cease to write essays when they complete their degrees. My encounters with real-world genres reminded me just how much freedom and scope for expression the essay form offers, even if I sometimes wish the academic argumentative essay could be less rigid than it often is and rediscover its roots in the open-ended explorations of Montaigne. But as the fiction event also made clear, the relative freedom to explore offered by both the novel and essay forms can place demands on the self that many will not mind relinquishing at the end of their degrees. After all, one of the functions of genres is to limit possibility and the need for invention and thus to make the task of writing more tractable, even bearable. The more open-ended the task, the higher the demands placed on the writer.

Asked by the moderator what compels her to start writing, Toews answered, "Oh, everything. Did you say start? I thought you said stop" (UC Alumni).

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Writing Centers and Theory

There are some encouraging signs in the writing center community of a readiness to let go of some of the theoretical constraints imposed by a purely social view of discourse. In our practical work, we have never adhered to a very strict reading of genre as social action. That is true of necessity, because a social theory of discourse does not in fact provide a very hospitable framework for the work we do. To the extent that writing is socially situated, writing center instructors are not well positioned to provide the kind of teaching that students need, for we do not typically find ourselves firmly situated in the same communities of practice— that is, disciplines—as our students. In the generalist/specialist debate, there should be little question of where contemporary genre theory stands: on the side of the specialists. Kristen Walker might argue, as she did in her 1998 article “The Debate over Generalist and Specialist Tutors: Genre Theory's Contribution,” that “genre theory, as it has evolved from social constructionism, provides ‘generalists’ and ‘specialists’ with a tool to analyze discipline-specific discourse” (28), but she can do so only by stripping genre theory in its still social constructionist phase of most of its intended force. Similarly, Layne Gordon’s recent “Addressing Genre in the Writing Center” states that “Miller's theory illustrates the potential that genre theory holds for increasing students' sense of ownership over their writing” (1). If anything, Miller’s social theory of genre does the opposite. As Eric Hobson—with Christine Murphy, one of the few outspoken critics over the last few decades of the epistemological turn in writing center scholarship— notes, although we in the writing center community debate “questions of epistemology without making a production of it,” often “we do so without being too aware of the nature or implications of our theoretical stance” (65).

The relative paucity of writing center scholarship devoted specifically to genre theory speaks to the poor fit between writing centers and contemporary genre theory. The notion of writing as a social activity played out differently in the writing center community than it did in writing studies per se. Partaking in the growing interest in poststructuralist thought in the humanities and social sciences of the 1980s, writing center administrators such as Kenneth Bruffee and Lisa Ede focussed primarily on the idea of writing as a collaborative activity, not on the situated nature of writing. Their work from that period has a heady quality that derives from their sense of placing writing and discourse at the very center of a significant new movement of thought. Both were eager to explore

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ideas they recognized as “subversive” of common sense (Ede 9), “exotic and perhaps downright nonsensical and dangerous” to many (Bruffee 775).

Ede’s 1989 paper “Writing As a Social Process” insists not so much that we make writing more collaborative in our teaching practices as that we see it as collaborative even when it appears to be solitary.

Bruffee made the case for the social constructionist position that “the matrix of thought is not the individual self but some community of knowledgeable peers” and that knowledge “is by its nature inaccessible” (775). The virtue of these polemical articles is that they do not shy away from the implications of a social constructionist view of reality.

One of their problems, however, is a reliance on either/or thinking. Either writing is collaborative or solitary. Either knowledge is social or it accumulates as inventory in a storehouse. As always, such thinking relies on mischaracterization of the wrong side of the either/or. For example, resistance to the idea of collaborative learning, according to Ede, came from English departments immersed in the romantic and post-romantic literary traditions (9). Yet literature departments became immersed in poststructuralist theory and postmodernism before writing centers did, and the isolation of the writer, for many, remains an unromantic but inescapable fact in spite of whatever conscious or unconscious dialogue may be going on in our heads when we compose.

Inasmuch as we are willing to acknowledge that postmodernism may be playing itself out (has even, in its subordination of truth to discourse, become singularly irrelevant as a form of critique in the age of Trump if not intellectually complicit in the public devaluation of factual truth)5 then the way to extricate ourselves from a theory of the social nature of discourse and knowledge turned problematic is not to reject all of its claims out of hand. Rather, it is to recognize that the theory’s inadequacies stem from the attempt to turn what should have been a valuable corrective into a theory of everything. Doing so would mean ceding the pride of place that some in the profession believe a social theory of discourse holds in the academy. Rather than continuing to insist, as Anthony Paré says we must in “The Once and Future Writing Centre,” “on the foundational role of discourse in any reasonable theory of learning and knowing” (6), we need to acknowledge that discourse is just one player in the pursuit of knowledge. The way to resolve the quandaries posed by a social theory of genre is assuredly not to return to a neo-Aristotelian theory of genres as formal in nature and fixed. Rather, it is to recognize that genres are indeed mediated socially but only in part. They are shaped by other

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forces as well, and the actors who work within and occasionally help change genres act on motives and a perception of the world that often transcend the merely social.

I believe a recognition of this kind lies behind the recent flurry of interest in transfer within the writing center community (Hagemann; Hughes et al.; Driscoll and Harcourt; Devet, “Using Metagenre”; Zimmerelli; Devet, “Writing Center and Transfer”; Driscoll; Hill).

An ability to move—sometimes with ease, sometimes with effort—between discourse communities forms the basis of our ability to uncover relationships between disparate fields and to learn from the connections we make. As Bonnie Devet has so eloquently put it, “Transfer can, in fact, be considered the heart of a college education because students' ability to connect and link ideas is central to what a higher degree should teach” (“Writing Center and Transfer” 121). Much of this recent writing center scholarship is premised on a growing consensus within the fields of cognitive education and psychology that transfer of knowledge from one domain to the other does indeed occur under the proper conditions.

Teaching for transfer is most likely to occur, according to a 2007 review article in Higher Education, when it emphasizes “deep understanding of principles and meta-cognitive strategies” (Billing 512). In a recent study of the effects of teaching tutors about transfer, Heather Hill draws on the notion of metacognition, which she describes as “an awareness and understanding of one's own learning and thought processes” (82). Michael Carter’s metagenre offers a counterpart within writing studies. Though Carter’s metagenre—which he describes as a “genre of genres” (393)—tries to remain true to Miller’s social understanding of genre, it does propose a shift within writing studies away from the view that learning is radically situated and towards a vision of the disciplines as interconnected.

Writing Centers and the Turn to EvidenceBased Research The principal pedagogical aim of my initiative—to increase awareness of the genres in which the students now write—dovetails with the recent writing center scholarship on transfer. My assumption is that exposure to multiple genres will help produce more proficient writers. I doubt, however, whether the assumption could ever be validated empirically in a suitably rigorous long-term trial. Such a trial would no doubt be impracticable. But all studies, even the most expensive, carefully planned ones, necessarily reduce messy real-world conditions to the clean lines of a

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protocol that will produce results amenable to analysis.

All make assumptions; all inescapably simplify.

Hill’s study on preparing tutors for transfer offers a case in point. It tested whether teaching transfer to tutors enhances their “ability to facilitate the transfer of writing-related knowledge” by conducting a one-hour session aiming to educate three tutors on the theory of transfer (77). This was a modest study that aimed to confirm something fairly simple: that training tutors about transfer concepts would cause those topics to emerge in the tutors’ subsequent teaching. Though the study cannot say much about the longer-term effects of the training session, that is a drawback of any study, albeit one that is often ignored: the longstanding practices of drug-regulating agencies in effect assume that short-term trials predict long-term outcomes.

Hill’s study also says nothing about actual learning outcomes. I am more concerned, however, with the ways in which Hill’s application of a still somewhat controversial finding from other studies—that abstract understanding facilitates successful transfer—may compromise her analysis. Tutors, she points out, never mentioned abstract concepts such as “discourse community” or “rhetorical community,” and they “missed opportunities to engage students in more complex discussions of the genre-specific nature of writing conventions” (94). Unless, however, it leads to a deeper understanding of genre, exposure to the jargon of our field may not actually serve students. And is it even clear all would benefit from help at so abstract a level of thought? One of the problems with evidence-based research is that it generally aggregates its data in order to form conclusions. An outcomesbased study that concluded slightly in favour of metacognition as a precondition for transfer may have had 53 student participants who benefited greatly from higher-level reasoning and 47 who did substantially worse. It would be a mistake to conclude that all students need to be taught to engage in higher-level reasoning based on the mean of an outcome. The more focussed on outcomes our writing center research becomes, the more likely we are to do a disservice to perhaps the greatest strength of the work we perform: its attention to the individual.

I raise these issues because as our profession continues to move towards evidence-based research as a way to define and assess what we do, no doubt in part a response to larger institutional pressures and expectations, we should be cautious of the false promise sometimes offered by such research and conscious of what we may stand to lose when we reduce the day-to-day craft of teaching writing to data.

To be sure, the data we collect, particularly when the voices of instructor and student are preserved, can

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open a valuable window onto the teaching practices of our profession. (For a survey of qualitative writing center research, see Babcock et al.; for a discussion of the dangers of reductionism in our adoption of evidence-based research, see Littlejohn.) Though the move toward empiricism is welcome, we risk, in our simultaneous commitment to theories that insulate us from the empirical world and research protocols that claim to capture it, straddling two incompatible epistemologies that reproduce the mind-body dualism both aim to rise above. That is, we can still be Foucauldians in the way we theorize and positivists in the way we justify our work to ourselves and others.

Between social constructionism on the one side and scientism on the other lies the cumulative and shared experience of helping students weigh evidence in a variety of shapes; reflect on the role of culture and society in shaping our understanding of the world; achieve insight; and form compelling arguments that aspire to an approximation of truth. Continuing to do that work means learning to live with a modest amount of uncertainty.

Notes 1. Hyon identifies the school of genre analysis that has dominated writing and rhetorical studies as the New Rhetoric, in contradistinction to English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and the Australian school of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). There has been crossfertilization between the New Rhetoric and ESP. Since the three schools share the premise that participation in a genre is a fundamentally social act, my critique of Miller should apply broadly to all three.

2. By postmodernism, I refer broadly to the turn to skepticism about the foundations of knowledge and truth embodied in movements of thought as various as deconstruction, semiotics, social constructionism, antifoundationalism, the strong program in sociology, and the sociology of scientific knowledge.

3. The term poststructuralism has been applied both narrowly to practices and ideas inspired by the French thinkers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and— like “postmodernism”—more widely to the general turn to skepticism in the academy beginning in the late1960s. Derrida, the founder of deconstruction, was a philosophy professor whose greatest impact was on literature departments, no doubt because of the honorific role that literature and the free play of language assumed in his subversions of the hierarchies of the Western tradition. Foucault, whose work was centered not on language but on culture and society, has had an arguably much greater impact on writing

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studies, if only indirectly through social constructionism.

4. I use pseudonyms for the leaders of the first four workshops.

5. While the profession has shifted considerably in the last decade or so, the extent to which the writing studies community remains committed to social constructionism is, as I suggest in the concluding pages of this article, less clear. Philosophical skepticism in one shape or another will likely remain with us forever.

There is no grand consensus among philosophers on the nature of reality. The position that the world is real and that we have access to it may ultimately depend on an act of faith, though I believe there are empirical grounds for accepting such a position over skepticism or social constructionism in their more unalloyed forms. But my brief against social constructionism here is primarily pragmatic. For a pragmatic critique of the social construction of knowledge, see Patricia RobertsMiller’s “Post-Contemporary Composition: Social Constructivism and Its Alternatives” (100–04).

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REVIEW OF THE WRITING CENTER AS CULTURAL AND INTERDISCIPLINARY CONTACT ZONE BY RANDALL W. MONTY Stephen K. Dadugblor University of Texas at Austin steve.dadugblor@utexas.edu Monty, Randall, W. The Writing Center as Cultural and Interdisciplinary Contact Zone.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Hardcover. $69.99.

In the decades since the publication of Stephen North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center,” scholars in writing center studies (WCS) have examined the question of disciplinary identity and the place of WCS within the academy. Research in this line of inquiry has yielded productive insights into the nature and work of writing centers. Yet, the increasing interdisciplinary contact engendered by the proliferation of writing centers across our colleges and universities makes exigent the need to define the contours of writing center (inter)disciplinarity across a wide range of spaces.

In The Writing Center as Cultural and Interdisciplinary Contact Zone, Randall W. Monty takes up this task by investigating a comprehensive disciplinary identity for WCS amidst the context of interdisciplinarity. Drawing on the contact phenomenon of cells in biological organisms, Monty argues for a re-visioning of writing centers as epicenters of “cultural and disciplinary contact zones” (1). The book is structured in seven self-contained but related chapters, and is “designed to be read, consulted, analyzed, critiqued, and otherwise consumed achronologically according to the needs and local contexts of the reader” (9).

In the introductory chapter, Monty begins by situating the discussion within the ambit of cell theory, the utility of which derives from the etymology of a cell as a small room, a reference to the physical space occupied by most writing centers. Monty explains that, like cells, WCS is better understood as a separate but interconnected system in which the discipline acts as a contact zone in relation to other disciplines, and reveals fissures, tensions, and commonalities. While Monty recognizes that the human agency that drives change in academic disciplines renders the analogy between cells and academic disciplines inexact, rethinking WCS as cells reveals their “more unified disciplinary identification” (3).

To explicate aspects of this disciplinary identification, in Chapter 2, “Discourse as Framework,” Monty reviews the historical

controversies surrounding the place of WCS within the academy. He looks to the suitability of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for its theoretical orientation toward critiquing texts and, in this case, WCS practices. In terms of practices, CDA offers a way of opening up WCS’s connection to other disciplines within the academy, in the process revealing how its place and space as a discipline are shaped by prevailing capitalist logics governing the work of the academy. Because CDA shares with WCS a “liberatory ethos, necessary interdisciplinarity, methodological malleability, and participatory nature” (22), analyzing WCS practices through a CDA lens more clearly exposes writing centers as triangulated contact zones of tutor, student, and content area discipline. A CDA approach further unknots WCS from its binary connections to rhetoric and composition, and ultimately establishes its disciplinary identities in relation to other disciplines.

In Chapter 3, “Discursively Constructing the Session,” Monty attends to ways that writing center practices can “reproduce and challenge institutional power” (39). In this regard, he analyzes Electronic Tutor Response Forms (ETRF) as sites of disciplinarity, focusing on the ways that these forms construct tutorial sessions. Monty demonstrates that the prevailing narratives of “help” and “collaboration” that guide much writing center work may not always be true given the “inconsistent power” (57) between tutors and tutees. In order to challenge this power, Monty suggests the triangulated contact zone consisting of tutor, student, and contacted discipline, with the goal of creating knowledge with the contacted discipline. The triangulated contact zone would “make the generalist interaction a more disciplinary one” (57).

Without this disciplinary grounding, Monty believes “generalist tutoring sessions can become less predictable, less trackable, and less in line with disciplinary objectives” (59).

Aside from tutorial sessions, Monty investigates a Writing Fellows Initiative (WFI). The data set drawn on for this fourth chapter, “Decentering Writing in the Institution,” is impressively wide-ranging: a “series of surveys completed by the fellows, students, and instructors” (70), information from blog posts,

Review of The Writing Center as Cultural and Interdisciplinary Contact Zone • 102 observations, and discussions with stakeholders.

Monty asserts here that writing fellows both challenge and reinforce institutional power in the academy.

Through their engagement with contacted disciplines, writing fellows—and disciplinary practices that surround their work—help to redistribute “some of the inherent institutional power” (71). Not only fellows’ work of advancing interdisciplinarity, but their engagement with both instructors and students holds enormous academic and interpersonal benefits for stakeholders.

Chapter 5, “Disciplinarity through Discourse,” shifts attention to sites of scholarly activities— academic journals, organizational websites, and blogs.

Here, too, the list is comprehensive: the International Writing Center Association (IWCA), the Writing Center Journal, the Writing Lab Newsletter, Praxis, and a host of websites of local writing centers. If the WFI established a contact zone between the writing center, students, and their instructors, the sites of scholarly activities analyzed in this chapter reveal the ways that WCS (re)presents itself vis-a-vis the larger academic community. Not unlike the cells that are the overarching frames of his argument, Monty conceives of these sites of disciplinary work and scholarly fashioning as part of a “disciplinary ecosystem” (85), wherein local writing centers can sustain their work by the identifications that workers establish through networked associations.

It is in Chapter 6, “Writing Center Webspaces as Ecosystem” that Monty more extensively examines the ways in which writing center disciplinarity is fashioned in webspaces. Using a corpus linguistics-based CDA approach, he identifies three types of writing center webspaces— “informational hubs,” “online writing labs,” and “sites of praxis” (103), all three exhibiting to varying degrees naming practices that expose writing center beliefs and commitments. Essentially, local writing centers’ underlying assumptions are undergirded by their naming practices in relation to tasks (e.g., “consultation” or “tutoring session”), stakeholders (e.g. “tutor” or “coach”) and space (e.g., “writing center” or “learning center”). Monty finds through these disciplinary naming practices that only “few writing center webspaces include official statements of diversity[. . .] accessibility [. . .], or non-discrimination [. . .]” (117). Whereas this crucial finding would seem to belie the widely-accepted lore that writing centers are “safe spaces” committed to social justice, it opens up space for more conscious self-referential practices as writing centers continue to forge disciplinary identifications. Again, the naming practices and disciplinary identifications are further enhanced by

local writing centers’ interconnectedness—through transcultural flows—to other centers and disciplinary associations like the IWCA. Indeed, while the connectivities ensured by transcultural flows hold enormous benefits for writing centers, Monty rightly points out the danger of linking knowledges, practices, and beliefs intertextually across writing centers, for he fears that certain epistemologies and pedagogies may, unwittingly, be privileged.

In the final chapter, “Discourse as Heuristic,” Monty ties back disciplinary identifications to place and space to argue that while there may be no ideal writing center, “there are many approachable ideals” (133) that encompass a variety of things: a broadened notion of sites where disciplinarity is nurtured and performed, and triangulated methodological approaches comprising multiple data sets and analytical lenses; Monty is here referring to qualitative and quantitative approaches to Student Satisfaction Surveys, Tutor Response Forms, and observations, all geared toward painting a more holistic picture of writing center disciplinary identifications. All told, Monty believes an understanding of writing centers as networked and as contact zones fostering interdisciplinarity would “resituate the field of WCS as a discipline within the discipline of rhetoric and composition” (139).

Although the book’s proposals for resolving the power imbalance between tutors and tutees are wellintended, some readers might find it impractical and counterintuitive that “grounding the consultation with subject area knowledge” (57) would be a corrective to the “inconsistent power” (57) between tutor and tutee.

Aside from the obvious logistical challenges that Monty rightly acknowledges, the book provides little information on why specialist, rather than generalist, tutoring sessions necessarily upset the tutor-tutee hierarchy. This limitation opens up a productive line of inquiry for researchers. Given the debate over generalist versus specialist tutoring, and the associated concerns of directiveness that may potentially entrench tutor power over tutee, administrators seeking to implement either approach in specific local writing centers may need to consider an expanded discussion of the relative merits and shortcomings of both approaches.

Overall, Monty’s book offers a fresh, new perspective to the analysis of writing center discourses.

Not only does his careful attention to the multiple places and spaces of writing center work offer scholars an expansive view of disciplinary identifications, but his application of different strands of Critical Discourse Analysis to a broadened sense of texts

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

Review of The Writing Center as Cultural and Interdisciplinary Contact Zone • 103 provides useful heuristics for scholars interested in research that exposes the power structures which enable and constrain WCS. Furthermore, Monty’s mixed methodology comprising quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as his corpus-based linguistic lens, demonstrates the utility of such approaches for writing center scholarship that other researchers would find particularly useful. Finally, tutors, instructors, administrators, and students would find the book an invaluable resource on the nature and work of writing centers within today’s academy.

Works Cited Monty, Randall W. The Writing Center as Cultural and Interdisciplinary Contact Zone. Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.

North, Stephen M. "The Idea of a Writing Center."

College English, vol. 46, no. 5, 1984, pp. 433-446.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16 No 1 (2018)

REVIEW OF “THEY’RE ALL WRITERS”: TEACHING PEER TUTORING IN THE ELEMENTARY WRITING CENTER,

BY JENNIFER SANDERS AND REBECCA L. DAMRON Havva Zorluel Ozer Indiana University of Pennsylvania h.zorluel@iup.edu Sanders, Jennifer, and Rebecca L. Damron.

“They’re All W riters”: Teaching Peer Tutoring in the Elementary W riting Center. Teachers College Press, 2016. $32.95.

“They’re All Writers”: Teaching Peer Tutoring in the Elementary Writing Center by Jennifer Sanders and Rebecca L. Damron is a significant contribution to writing center scholarship considering the dearth of publications on K-12 writing centers. Specifically, although some book-length works are available for writing centers at middle and secondary levels (Farrell; Fells and Wells; Horan; Kent), They’re All Writers might be the first publication on elementary writing centers.

It tells the story of the Skyline Elementary School Writing Center that opened in January 2011. The book’s stated aim is to “provide elementary classroom teachers with the background knowledge and practical instructional materials needed to implement a writing center curriculum” (8). Teachers designing—or desiring to design—a new writing center at elementary level will be interested in Sanders and Damron’s latest work, as would writing center directors, tutors, researchers, and anyone involved in writing center scholarship. In seven chapters, the authors move from the historical and theoretical background of writing centers to practical and pedagogical implications for establishing and managing an elementary writing center by drawing on experiences from such a center. Useful resources in the book that readers will appreciate contain books, websites, appendices with supporting materials for tutoring lessons, and student writing samples for tutoring practices, as well as an index of the key concepts for locating information.

They’re All Writers begins with an introductory chapter titled, “Writing Centers in the Elementary School.” Here, Sanders and Damron introduce the Skyline Elementary School to readers. They describe the demographics of Skyline Elementary students, the challenges teachers experience in teaching writing, and the story of how Skyline got its writing center. The chapter also summarizes the goals and overall organization of the book, and it ends with operational definitions for the concepts of peer conferencing, peer

tutoring, and coaching, with the last two being used synonymously throughout the book. What I like most about reading this chapter is seeing how Skyline Writing Center became an example for another elementary school that implemented the idea of an elementary writing center by modifying and adapting the Skyline Writing Center model. By providing a guide to developing a framework of peer tutoring for elementary writing centers in They’re All Writers, Sanders and Damron have made a big step towards spreading tutoring practices to other elementary schools.

In chapters two and three, Sanders and Damron set the theoretical framework for They’re All Writers, and they provide a history of writing centers in the United States. Drawing on research that informs process theory of composition, the authors present a set of tenets of writing process theory and pedagogy with the purpose of developing teachers’ theoretical understandings of writing. The authors integrate these tenets of the writing process theory and pedagogy in developing lesson plans for training and guiding the writing tutors. After building a framework from the writing process theory and providing the historical background of writing centers, the authors summarize the core principles of writing centers. These core principles are drawn from the International Writing Center Association’s position statements on writing centers (“IWCA Position Statement on Secondary School Writing Centers”), and they provide the authors with solid foundations to create a guideline for the task of elementary peer tutoring.

In the next two chapters, Sanders and Damron move into the basics of establishing and maintaining an elementary writing center, and they report the findings from a conversation analysis of the recorded and transcribed tutoring sessions that took place in the Skyline Writing Center. The authors first provide useful information about the basics that need to be considered when starting a new writing center—from decisions about the physical space and staffing to keeping records—and then they document student learning in Skyline Writing Center by describing what students talked about in peer tutoring sessions and

Review of “They’re All Writers”: Teaching Peer Tutoring in the Elementary Writing Center • 105

which type of knowledge they constructed during these skills. The act of peer tutoring at Skyline also shifts the sessions. Analysis of student dialogues in tutorials passive role of students in the learning process to one showed that the students spent most of their time on in which students take initiative in the process of discussing the content of the writing and ideas. Writers knowledge construction. engaged in deep conversation with tutors about issues They’re All Writers gives teachers myriad resources of content, organization, structure, and formatting, as and ideas for how to establish and operate an well as grammar and conventions. In light of empirical elementary writing center. The book’s reader-friendly, findings revealing that successful peer tutoring can take conversational tone, and positivity about elementary place in elementary levels, the authors evince the writing centers are among its greatest strengths. significance and power of elementary writing center Another strength is that the lessons and ideas shared practices. here can also be applied at the middle-school level Chapter 6, “Teaching Children to Become Writing because the framework of peer tutoring for elementary Coaches,” includes the most direct pedagogical grades might meet the CCSS for writing in the middle implications for training tutors in an elementary writing grades. Teachers designing elementary- and middlecenter. The chapter guides readers through designing school writing centers will be inspired by Sanders and tutoring lessons. It contains eight-week lesson plans Damron’s book, which will serve as a helpful guide for that Skyline Elementary teachers used to train students establishing, running and sustaining an elementary- or for how to talk to their peers in tutoring sessions. Each middle-school writing center. I believe that this book lesson plan follows a certain format that includes will encourage many teachers to start their own writing length of the lesson, description of writing component, centers in response to the specific needs of their own learning objectives, the Anchor Standards addressed, institutions. resources and materials, lesson overview, the engagement, student practice, and teachers’ reflections Acknowledgments (if any). Each lesson plan addresses one or more of 10 Anchor Standards for Writing designed by Common I would like to thank Dr. Ben Rafoth for his Core State Standards (CCSS) for English Language guidance and encouragement to publish this review.

Arts for students at elementary level (“English Language Arts Standards”). Resources and materials Works Cited for classroom activities—pencil, paper, charts, drafts, books, etcetera—are described in each lesson plan, and “English Language Arts Standards.” Common Core copiable handouts are included at the end of the State Standards Initiative, 2018, chapter. These resources and materials might be used www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy. with minimal preparation to support teaching tutoring.

Farrell, Pamela B., editor. The High School Writing Center: Readers are often reminded to adapt these lessons to Establishing and Maintaining One. National Council meet the needs of their own students, rather than to of Teachers of English, 1989. strictly follow them without modifications. This Fels, Dawn, and Jennifer Wells, editors. The Successful chapter might have been better placed preceding the High School Writing Center: Building the Best Program previous chapter on peer tutoring sessions because with Your Students. Teachers College, 2011. readers might first wish to understand the foundations Horan, Timothy. Create Your School Library Writing of Skyline Writing Center tutorials and the expectations Center: Grades 7-12. Libraries Unlimited, 2016. from Skyline Writing Center tutors before hearing “International Writing Centers Association Position about how effective Skyline Writing Center tutorials Statement on Secondary School Writing Centers.” were.

International Writing Centers Association, 22 Apr. 2015, The final chapter, “The End of the Beginning,” www.writingcenters.org/position-statements/. reports three major themes related to elementary Kent, Richard. A Guide to Creating Student-Staffed Writing writing centers: 1) the democratizing power of peer Centers: Grades 6-12. Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. tutoring, 2) the function of peer tutoring as a socialization process, and 3) the student-centered approach in writing center practices. Sanders and Damron discuss each theme in light of examples from Skyline Writing Center. They suggest that peer tutoring at Skyline is a democratizing and socializing process by which students are provided with equal educational opportunity to develop leadership and interactional Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 1 (2018) www.praxisuwc.com