Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 20, No 2 (2023)
READING THE ONLINE WRITING CENTER: THE AFFORDANCES AND CONSTRAINTS OF WCONLINE Pratistha Bhattarai Duke University pratistha.bhattarai@duke.edu
Aaron Colton Duke University aaron.colton@duke.edu
Eun-hae Kim Duke University eunhae.kim@duke.edu
Amber Manning Duke University amber.manning@duke.edu
Eliana Schonberg Duke University eliana.schonberg@duke.edu
Xuanyu Zhou Stanford University xz277@stanford.edu
Abstract
While online synchronous writing consultations predate the COVID-19 pandemic by at least a decade, the contingencies of the pandemic have left many writing centers scrambling to shift to online-only or hybrid formats. Amid such sudden changes in operations, center administrators and consultants often miss the opportunity to examine the tools that facilitate digital consultations. After analyzing trends in the foci of consultations at the Duke University Thompson Writing Program (TWP) Writing Studio prepandemic, early-, and mid-pandemic, this article offers a “critical digital pedagogy” reading of one the most popular online writingconsultation platforms, WCOnline. Close reading the aesthetics and features of WCOnline—such as the whiteboard, LiveChat, and video windows—we highlight the software’s implicit pedagogical biases. In response to these close readings, we offer a set of best practices for maximizing the pedagogical affordances of WCOnline, paying particular attention to rapport building, gestural language, written chat and notetaking, and textual annotations.
Like many writing centers, the Duke University TWP Writing Studio found itself forced to shift entirely online in spring 2020, and the emergency switch led us to stick, operationally speaking, with what we knew: WCOnline’s text-chat platform, already in place for the 10% of our appointments that occurred synchronously online pre-pandemic. With breathing space over the summer—and with half a semester of Zooming under our collective belts—writing-center consultants and administrators subsequently decided to incorporate WCOnline’s audio-video functions for the 2020-2021 academic year. When rushed, without prior training, to transpose consultations onto digital platforms like WCOnline, the specific affordances, limitations, and assumptions (pedagogical and otherwise) of those platforms can go under-examined. This is not only to suggest that synchronous online consultations will not replicate faceto-face consultations—neither better nor worse, just different—it is also to say that the tools consultants rely on for virtual consultations come loaded with values that themselves merit substantial analysis. What does it mean for consulting pedagogy, for example, that
WCOnline provides a chat-box next to the writer’s document (see Appendix A, Figure 4)? How might the mere presence of the chat-box affect a writer’s expectations for a consultation? In this article, therefore, we examine Writing Studio usage data to determine whether the layout and functions of WCOnline may correlate with trends in the main foci of writing consultations. We pair this examination with an interpretation of WCOnline from the perspective of “critical digital pedagogy”: a method of “looking under the hood of edtech tools” to identify the aspects of those tools that bolster, modify, or “wor[k] directly at odds with our pedagogies” (Morris and Stommel). To do so, we close read not only the functions but also the aesthetics of WCOnline, interpreting how features such as visual layout and relative element size (e.g., the size of the live-video window vs. the size of the whiteboard) may implicitly privilege certain pedagogies. And in describing and evaluating the affordances and limitations of WCOnline—and modeling how consultants may undertake such work themselves—we hope to make possible rich and necessarily complex considerations of how writing centers and consultants can best integrate, or limit the use of, WCOnline’s digital consultation platform in their daily operations and consulting practices. To understand how WCOnline tacitly encodes pedagogic biases in its various features, we turn to the heuristic of framing. The term was first coined by Gregory Bateson in his seminal work on metacommunication, where he argued that any act of communication entails the passing of a message and of an interpretive framework (67). In a media-theoretic sense, one can consider a frame as a window, and our consultation practices frame the learning situation much in the same way that windows frame a view, bringing certain aspects of a writer’s practice into focus while cutting out others.