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VOL 13, NO 2 (2016): NEW APPROACHES TO OLD IDEAS TABLE OF CONTENTS COLUMNS From the Editors James Garner and Thomas Spitzer-Hanks The Dangerous Method, or “Can Procrastination Ever Be a Good Thing?”

Sunny Hawkins

FOCUS ARTICLES Disclosure Concerns: The Stigma of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Writing Centers Savannah Stark and Julie Wilson (Re)Examining the Socratic Method: A Lesson in Tutoring Gary Jaeger When “Editing” Becomes “Educating” in ESL Tutoring Sessions Young-Kyung Min Generation 1.5 Writing Center Practice: Problems with Multilingualism and Possibilities via Hybridity Liliana M. Naydan Are Our Workshops Working? Assessing Assessment as Research Justin B. Hopkins The Peer Perspective and Undergraduate Research Christopher Ervin Using Citation Analysis in Writing Center Tutorials to Encourage Deeper Engagement with Sources Elizabeth Kleinfeld What do Graduate Students Want from the Writing Center? Tutoring Practices to Support Dissertation and Thesis Writers Bethany Ober Mannon

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 13, No 2 (2016)

FROM THE EDITORS James Garner & Thomas Spitzer-Hanks The University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com

It is with great pride that we present to you our Spring 2016 issue of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, in which we have had the privilege of publishing what we feel are a number of vital contributions to the field of writing center scholarship. The title of this collection is “New Approaches to Old Ideas,” and we think you’ll find that the articles in this issue provide some exciting and innovative ways to rethink and address preexisting writing center dilemmas, as well as invisible questions that have lurked in the background unanswered. From how best to assist Generation 1.5 writers to reimagining the usefulness of assessment, a number of articles that ask how we as writing center directors and consultants might address a number of concerns that directly affect our clients and staff.

In this issue’s column, Sunny Hawkins reconsiders the familiar and age-old problem of procrastination.

Where we tend to think of procrastination as a negative behavior, leading to furious, Red Bull-fueled writing binges and self-loathing, Hawkins claims instead that for some writers, it is a useful work habit.

Hawkins looks to Peter Elbow’s notion of The Dangerous Method—exhaustively thinking through an essay well ahead of time and then producing one draft—as a useful way to approach composition for those unable to write before the last minute arrives.

The first focus article of this present issue looks back to our previous issue on dis/ability in the writing center. Savannah Stark and Julie Wilson address the dearth of research on and stigmatization of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) in writing center studies. By applying disability scholarship to this important issue, Stark and Wilson hope to draw attention to questions of disclosure and stigmatization in order to encourage disability literacy in the writing center and open a more welcoming space for a wider variety of students.

Gary Jaeger’s article goes back to two foundational texts of both writing center scholarship and the humanities in general: Stephen North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center” and the dialogues of Plato.

North claims that the writing center consultation should involve “a continuous dialectic that is, finally, its own end,” and Jaeger uses this as a starting point to contend that certain aspects of Socratic dialogue,

particularly the ways we ask questions and enlarge upon our clients’ responses, to achieve greater clarity and efficacy in our consultations.

Two articles this month consider how we might better meet the needs of multilingual writers, a community of writers that writing center scholarship has in recent years done increasingly more to serve.

Young-Kyung Min questions the value of the old adage that writing centers are not editing services, insisting that editing can be a valuable strategy for modeling composition strategies for multilingual writers. By providing our tutors with a lexical grammar approach and practical strategies to take sentence-level writing consultations from an “editor-dynamic” to an “educator-dynamic,” Min proposes that we would be able to better serve our multilingual writers whose main concern is writing in English. Likewise, Liliana M. Naydan considers how Generation 1.5 writers exist in our writing centers not only as clients but as consultants and administrators. Working against monolingual hegemony, these “hybridized” writers can act as a subversive force to “re-member” the writing center’s “dismembered past” in order to “create a writing center future that recognizes, values, and promotes hybridity.”

As writing center scholarship has moved toward an emphasis on RAD research, Justin Hopkins calls for a reconsideration of the recent antipathy toward local level research and questions the distinction often made between research and assessment. Tracing the evolution of his own writing center’s student evaluation form over several years, Hopkins argues that what might be most useful (and what we as writing center administrators might actually want) is constructive assessment that improves our writing centers at an individual level, rather than large-scale, generalizable research. Christopher Ervin’s article also considers research and how we as writing center directors might better begin to make use of the peer perspective in our research. Ultimately, Ervin hopes that peer tutors, who have much to teach us with their “insider-outsider” perspective, will begin to be recognized as a valuable resource for research into the theory and practice of writing centers.

From the Editors • 2 Elizabeth Kleinfeld calls for greater attention to analysis of source selection and integration in writing center consultations as a means of helping student writers develop. After observing that students often cite incorrectly from less than useful sources, Kleinfeld began to emphasize citation analysis in her consultants’ training. Making citation analysis a key implement in our consultants’ toolboxes can, Kleinfeld contends, “be a powerful way to focus students’ attention on the ways they and the sources they cite are in conversation.”

While our first focus article looked backward to our last issue, the final article of this issue looks forward to our Fall 2016 issue on graduate student writing support. Bethany Ober Mannon approaches the question of how best to serve graduate student writers by proposing that writing centers can better address the unique challenges that graduate student writers face if we begin to teach graduate students how to incorporate tutoring into the writing process. Her article outlines four strategies for accomplishing this, as well as providing ways to help undergraduate tutors effectively consult with graduate students by expanding the range of techniques used.

In concluding this issue’s Letter from the Editor, I (James) would like to share some important announcements. First, as mentioned above, look forward to our special issue on graduate student writing support, guest-edited by Shannon Madden and Michele Eodice and coming in December Finally, I want to express my gratitude for and wish all the best to Thomas Spitzer-Hanks, whose tenure as Managing Editor for Praxis is coming to an end. Thomas has been an exemplary co-editor and wise mentor as he has guided me through my first year on the Praxis staff, and without him, I would have been adrift in a sea of emails and Google Drive spreadsheets. As Thomas exits, I would also like to take this opportunity to introduce and welcome Casey Sloan, who will be taking over my role as incoming Managing Editor as I assume senior editorial duties. As I take the helm, I am grateful for the opportunity to continue publishing high quality and exciting work on writing centers and writing center pedagogy through Praxis.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 13, No 2 (2016)

THE DANGEROUS METHOD, OR “CAN PROCRASTINATION EVER BE A GOOD THING?” Sunny Hawkins Texas A&M University-Kingsville Sunny.Hawkins@tamuk.edu

We tell it to our clients all the time: Don't keep putting that project off! You need to get started on it now! That essay you slap-dash together at the last minute, literally printing off your first (and final) draft as you're rushing to class on the morning the project is due, will, nine times out of ten, not make the grade in any sense of the word.

We've all been there. Peter Elbow even has a word for this last-minute process - he calls it "The Dangerous Method": Rather than writing a rough draft, then revising, then editing - a process that can take days, weeks, months, or years, depending on the scope of your project - when writers write by the "dangerous method," we try to get our drafts right on the first try. We want our ideas to magically come together, free of problems with organization, development, spelling, or mechanics; thus, there is no need to move ideas around, to dive back into our research to find more support for our claims, or to do more with proofreading than running a spell-check.

It actually is possible to write this way. But before you throw your hands up and cry "hallelujah," thinking you never again need to get started on a writing project weeks in advance, let's look at what Elbow says makes The Dangerous Method work (and then consider why it is "dangerous"): There are obvious attractions to a writing process where you...try to get your piece right the first time. You don't have to make such a mess with raw writing, you don't have to write in the dark without knowing where you are going, you don't have to engage in extensive revising -- just a little tidying up, perhaps, at the end... If you want to use this one-step writing process, the main thing you must learn to do is what writers have traditionally been advised to do: get your meaning clear in your head before you start writing. (In effect you are stuck with two steps again: figure out your meaning, then write.) 39 In other words, making your first draft your final draft is not an invitation to put off doing anything with your !

writing project until the last minute. The Dangerous Method is dangerous because it demands you be clear enough about what you want to say that you can in one draft convey your meaning clearly. Anyone who has ever written a single page, only to discover that the well of words has dried up and you have no idea where you want to go from here, will understand the "danger" of such a one-shot writing process.

But let's consider the value of The Dangerous Method, now that we have acknowledged its risks and the caveat that it is not permission to be a slacker.

Imagine your instructor assigns a 10-page research paper due at the end of the semester. During the first few weeks of class, you start perusing the library databases for books and articles. As midterm approaches, you start blocking out a few hours each week to read the research you've collected. You aren't trying to draft yet, although you might be taking a few notes, perhaps cutting-and-pasting interesting sections of the articles into a Word document to refer back to later, when you do start writing and need evidence to support your claims.

Strangely, you find yourself thinking about your paper at odd times. When you're in the shower. When you're out for a run. Maybe you have a commute into campus in the mornings, and you start shutting off the radio as sentences and paragraphs seem to write themselves in your mind. You don't put pen to paper (or hands to keyboard) yet, but you're starting to feel ready - a little nudge in the back of your mind that's pushing you to start writing. You resist - except for the ten minutes you spend jotting down a rough outline of how you think your ideas might come together.

By now, the end of the semester is rapidly approaching, and you have less than a week before this paper is due. At long last, you sit down; you take out your notes and outline; you begin writing. You jump into the middle of what you think you want to say; halfway through that, you think of a terrific introduction; as soon as that's finished, you refer back to your rough outline and see a section you've completely forgotten about, but now remember is pivotal to the argument you want to make; you write

The Dangerous Method • 4 that section, and it seems to flow right into the conclusion you could not have imagined until you sat down and started writing, yet now seems to obviously be the point you were all along hoping to make. You type the last word. It's two o'clock in the morning, but you decide to stay up just a little longer to read back through what you've written. You fix a comma here, change passive to active voice there.

Boom. You're finished. The draft is done, and it is good.

The danger of The Dangerous Method, again, is that this doesn't happen - that you become tangled in your own ideas, and having left yourself so little time to complete the project, do not have the luxury of walking away from a draft and coming back to it with fresh eyes, to engage in global re-visioning ("vision" meaning to see, "re" meaning to "see again").

Nevertheless, let's suppose the scenario I outlined above plays out perfectly. How is that possible? Can procrastination on a writing project ever be a good thing? Could we teach our clients to make it a good thing?

The answer is simply: yes. It comes back to creativity theory. Ronda Leathers Dively relates the four steps in the creative process, first identified by the creativity theorist Mihaly Csikszentmijalyi, as: • Preparation. The writer begins to explore ideas, through research and/or conversation, gathering facts, considering viewpoints, defining concepts, etc.; • Incubation. The writer's unconscious mind begins to operate upon the research gathered during preparation, making connections between ideas the conscious mind would not be capable of; • Insight. Also known as the "Eureka!" moment, the writer becomes consciously aware of the connections between her or his ideas, and suddenly knows what she or he wants to say; • Verification. The writer begins to write, and discovers that some of her ideas can be defended and developed, while others need to be discarded or revised; depending on how successful the initial insight proves, the writer may cycle back through the entire process for instance, when you realize your argument makes no sense, or you disagree with what you at first thought you agreed with, cannot find enough evidence to support your claims, etc.

What Dively's research tells us is that sometimes, avoiding writing can be exactly what our brains need to chew over what we have been feeding them via

research. "By defining incubation as 'the passage of time that results in progression toward creative vision or the solution to a problem,'” Dively says, “we leave ourselves and our students open to the possibility of subconscious or peripherally conscious cognition" to stimulate creativity (39).

For those writers who cannot break the habit of writing only under a tight deadline, Elbow and Dively's work taken together offers a strategy for making The Dangerous Method work. The trick is not to avoid thinking about your writing even if you are avoiding the writing itself. Simply put, you have to fill your brain up with good stuff if you want good stuff to come out once you do start writing - and the more time you give yourself to puzzle over your research before you start writing, the more likely it is that you will be able to synthesize what Bradford Berry calls "old viewpoints, familiar strategies, and common techniques" (Dively 45) into something creative and original that you want to say. Moreover, saying it may not feel nearly as laborious as it can when slogging through draft after draft, revision after revision. In other words, the “freshness” of our ideas, before we have wrestled and re-wrestled with them on the page, is a joy all writers can appreciate, a feeling creativity theorists call “flow,” or, as Dively describes it, “that feeling of lost time, of being utterly lost in one’s work” (45).

Tutors are also writers. We know that to be in "flow" is a goal all writers set for themselves. The truth is no paper ever writes itself, but if we teach our clients to start reading and researching early; to think about what they are reading and researching often, even if that thinking happens on a walk, or in the car, or in bed late at night; to jot down ideas and roughly plan out organization before they start writing, the paper may feel like it writes itself. And The Dangerous Method may turn out to be not so dangerous after all.

Works Cited Dively, Ronda Leathers. Preludes to Insight: Creativity, Incubation, and Expository Writing. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2006. Print.

Elbow, Peter. Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. New York: Oxford U.P., 1998. Print.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 13, No 2 (2016)

DISCLOSURE CONCERNS: THE STIGMA OF ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER IN WRITING CENTERS Savannah Stark Warren Wilson College sstark.f12@warren-wilson.edu

Introduction Despite widespread research regarding Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in general education, little research exists connecting this medical phenomenon to writing center pedagogy. A 2008 report by the United States Government Accountability Office found that “the most commonly reported type of disability among US college students was mental, emotional, or psychiatric illness or depression (24%). The second most common was Attention Deficit Disorder (19%), with mobility impairment coming in third (15%)” (qtd. in Babcock 39). Thus, writing centers can expect to encounter writers with ADHD, but the diagnosis remains unexplored when it comes to tutoring situations and how we might best support writers with ADHD. We address this absence in the research by applying disability studies scholarship to an exploration of disclosure concerns and stigma.

Many writers with ADHD bring numerous strengths to their writing (Lewis and Alden 116-117).

We do not argue that all writers with ADHD should attend writing centers, but that the increase in students with ADHD on college campuses means we will encounter students with a diagnosis whether individuals choose to disclose or not. Additionally, our focus on ADHD is rooted in Savannah’s experiences as a peer tutor with ADHD assisting writers who have disclosed a diagnosis over the course of a one-hour session or a semester of weekly consultations. From this experience, we acknowledge that tutors with ADHD may also be affected by stigma. However, accommodating writers is our primary focus, so we must educate ourselves on ADHD discourse, as well as other disabilities, so we avoid misperceptions and support our writers as much as possible.

ADHD and Disability Studies To avoid misperceptions, the medical definition outlined by the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) defines ADHD as a neurobiological disorder manifested by inattention and/or hyperactivity/impulsivity that is often associated with poor performance in school or work !

Julie Wilson Warren Wilson College jwilson@warren-wilson.edu and difficulty maintaining continuous effort toward a certain task. Individuals receive the diagnosis after displaying the symptoms listed in the DSM-5 for more than six months and experiencing impairment in daily activities. Individuals with ADHD frequently experience anxiety and depression (65). This definition provides insight into how psychologists view ADHD as a medical condition with a biological basis.

This medical definition is useful for understanding the validity of the diagnosis, but is not useful in the educational sense because we are not approaching ADHD from a medical standpoint. Some argue the DSM medical perspective transforms certain, other than “normal,” thought processes and differences in learning into symptoms (Rinaldi 9), which demonstrates a societal perspective for approaching ability. Analyzing the social and medical perspective is the basis of Disability Studies (DS), a discourse holding multiple insights for the writing center. The discourse of DS focuses on how disability was originally constructed as an institutionalized category displacing people with disabilities to the margins of society. In addition, DS aims to “weave disabled people back into the fabric of society, thread by thread, theory by theory” (Linton 518).

Karen Rowan urges us toward a new understanding of disability in the writing center with her review article on “Disability Literacy” (DL). She defines DL as: The ability to read the narratives and rhetorics of disability critically, informed by Disability Studies (DS); to discern the ethics of representation embedded in such narratives and rhetorics; to read physical spaces, material realities, and the actions of self and others for the ways that they (dis)able access to individuals with diverse bodies and abilities; and to identify, name, and counter ableist ideologies, semantics, and practices. (176) This understanding of DL approaches the foundation of DS pedagogy, where disability is not viewed as an individual issue, but a societal construct of ableist ideologies. In this way, writing centers can work towards an inclusive philosophy of welcoming all

The Stigma of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Writing Centers • 6 individuals, while challenging social norms and systematic -isms (Daniels, Babcock, & Daniels 20-26), including ableism, racism, sexism, classism, and more.

Thus, “this [social] model puts pressure on the university to effect structural and cultural changes that will ultimately make it more accessible and inclusive” (Daniels, Babcock, & Daniels 21), rather than putting pressure on the student to change.

Disclosure, the Effects of Stigma, and Strategies Disability Studies also complicates our understanding of disclosure in the writing center.

Whether or not a writer should disclose a disability to a tutor is highly debated in current literature on disability. Babcock (“Disabilities in the Writing Center”) and Daniels, Babcock, and Daniels (“Writing Centers and Disability”) suggest that frustration results from lack of disclosure. Alternatively, Rinaldi argues that disclosure is not necessary, but sessions should encourage the writer and the tutor to assert their needs (“Disability and the Writing Center” 8-13). She emphasizes that a writing center session is a meeting between two people, “each with their own individual preferences and ability levels” (“Navigating Disability Disclosure”). Disclosure is not essential and should always be up to the person with the disability.

Many factors influence whether or not an individual discloses, where choosing not to disclose may result from the fear of stigma, prejudice, or misperceptions from the tutor (Waite and Tran 247259). The sociologist Erving Goffman describes stigma as a personal attribute that may be described as a “failing” or “handicap.” As a result, the individual is “reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” (3). Fuermaier et al. infer that the public sometimes perceives the typical manifestations of ADHD as deviant behavior, a behavior or condition that violates social norms (1).

Students visiting the writing center bring expectations of educational and behavioral standards from other educational settings, similar to the expectations tutors may have for writing center sessions (Lerner & Gillespie; Daniels, Babcock, & Daniels). Any difficulties may be perceived as personal for the individual to manage and change, rather than as the result of how society disadvantages that individual (Linton). Skepticism of ADHD includes the perceived misuse of medication and a denial of the validity of the condition in its entirety (Bussing and Mehta 18). We argue this concept of stigma must be considered as an aspect influencing disclosure.

We are not arguing whether or not a writer should disclose, but that tutors need to be trained on how to respond to disclosure in a way that does not reinforce

stigma. Daniels, Babcock, and Daniels suggest disclosure is necessary to develop accommodations for a writer despite the discomfort tutors may feel surrounding the information (22). In contrast, Rinaldi argues that accommodations or strategies in response to disclosure is the wrong approach because the focus is placed on the actions of the tutor, rather than the writer (11). She claims responding to disclosure with pre-determined strategies places too much focus on overcoming a disability, rather than acknowledging disability as just an aspect of identity (10). She recommends letting the writer distinguish their needs (11-12), but what if writers do not know what they need in a session? Rinaldi’s recommendation expects a large amount of agency from the writer, despite differences in educational backgrounds. Her approach works for writers previously equipped with the skills and language necessary to communicate their specific needs, but what about writers without such background who may already feel disadvantaged?

With the stated prevalence of ADHD on college campuses, we must analyze how the social and medical perspectives of disability influence our work in the writing center. Disability studies provides a framework for this analysis that takes the “difference” off of an individual, and places pressure on challenging institutional disability models. In a collegiate setting, a novel aspect of disclosure and stigma research could provide conclusions on how to promote “disability literacy” in tutor training, potentially improving the quality and benefit of tutoring for students with ADHD.

Exploratory Study Methods This exploratory study uses interviews with student writers diagnosed with ADHD and writing center peer tutors at a small liberal arts college. This study was approved by the college’s Institutional Review Board, and signed consent was obtained prior to all interviews with an understanding of potential risks and zero compensation. Some interview questions were developed from Lewis and Alden (141146), but other study-specific questions were added. In all interviews, pre-listed questions were used and the term “stigma” was avoided to discourage bias in responses. Out of the nine peer tutors working at the writing center, Savannah interviewed seven. Student interviewees were recruited by a campus-wide email.

From the responses, interviews were conducted by Savannah with four students diagnosed with ADHD. Tutor interviews lasted approximately 10-20 minutes, while interviews with students with ADHD were approximately 40-60 minutes. The interviews were

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The Stigma of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Writing Centers • 7 recorded on a smartphone app and deleted after being transferred to a password-protected computer for storage and transcription.

The small sample size of student interviews does not provide conclusive evidence about the effects of perceived ADHD stigma on disclosure concerns in tutoring. However, on a small campus, we can begin to explore the potential and importance of future research on this topic. The seven tutors interviewed provide a more representative sample of the writing center tutoring staff. The interviews were transcribed and coded for themes of definition of ADHD, disclosure concerns, stigma, and tutor strategies according to methods described by Schutt (320-355).

Pseudonyms are used for all of the interviewees. The writing center director and a psychology professor provided inter-rater reliability. For the purpose of this study, all interviews will be framed as exploratory. We chose to include some discussion alongside our results, following the ethnographic technique of analytic commentary using interview excerpts to investigate the common themes.

Writer Interviews Definitions of ADHD Writer interviews focused on personal definitions of ADHD by those with a diagnosis, awareness of stigma, and decisions to disclose. In defining ADHD, one writer spoke of an inability to focus, while the three other writers said ADHD meant they had the ability to focus on multiple things at once. An excerpt from Chris’ interview demonstrates this theme of extended ability: When I was younger… and I probably got this because people always say train of thought, I had this idea of all these trains going on tracks that were all parallel to each other. I had this idea that most people had one train, you know, and their train would go in a path and everything led to one another. Whereas I felt like I had five trains going at one time, and I could just jump from one train to the other, like I was on top of the train and I would just like jump over... I jump really quickly and I make a lot of connections to things that other people don’t… So I have trouble staying in the topic as it’s defined by the people around me.

Similar to Chris’ five trains, Ricky describes his ADHD as “constant and spontaneous, but relevant thought processes,” while Joseph does not think of ADHD as a deficit for similar reasons. These

definitions show the potential strengths in ADHD, while also acknowledging that often a certain topic or singular focus is expected in a classroom situation.

Stigma and Disclosure A writer’s sense of positive manifestations of ADHD did not preclude experiences with stigma around their diagnosis. One writer, Elizabeth, indicated that she had not experienced negative connotations about ADHD on campus, while the other three writers indicated the opposite. They perceived over-diagnosis and misuse of medications as prevalent stigma. Another theme related to ADHD as an excuse for laziness as Ricky states: I mean a lot people think [the diagnosis] is a way of letting lazy kids get away with being lazy. I have always felt embarrassed about it [ADHD]… [Stigma] definitely affected me in high school; it still affects me. I’m embarrassed to ask professors for more time. I feel guilty, like I should be able to finish the assignment faster… But if I don't speak of [my struggling], no one knows.

This excerpt speaks to a common perception of ADHD as laziness, but Ricky still feels “guilty” about asking for and receiving accommodations. The expectation that he needs to finish assignments faster is representative of the perception of ADHD as a personal problem up to the individual to overcome.

This “guilty” sentiment is echoed by Chris when he states, “I feel like it’s my fault if I can’t get something done on time.” Taking this self-blame into account, writers’ perceptions of stigma may influence their decision to disclose in a tutoring situation.

None of the writers had disclosed their diagnosis to writing tutors; specifically, Chris connected the influence of stigma with disclosure. When asked about disclosing, Chris responded, “I’ve definitely gotten ‘[ADHD] is not a real thing’ or the ‘you don’t have ADHD’ before, so I usually don’t tell people just because of that.” Chris also experienced a lot of discomfort with tutoring in general. He states: I’m really bad at being tutored… [the tutor] is like, what do you need help on? I’m like, I don’t know. I feel pretty solid, but I don’t know half the material. I can’t point out, this is what I need to work on. Sometimes I can, but it’s not a usual thing.

This excerpt demonstrates that Chris does not always know how to communicate to the tutor where he is struggling. He indicates there is an expected way to be tutored that he does not meet.

Similar to Chris, Ricky experienced some discomfort when coming to the writing center:

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The Stigma of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Writing Centers • 8 I was nervous the first time I came to the writing center and just because help writing has always been a touchy subject for me, because I feel like I’m a good writer, in terms of free writing and expressing myself.

I feel like I have a lot of trouble with structured writing.

While nervousness may be typical on a first visit, Ricky’s anxiety reflects his own self-expectations of good writing, that he should not need tutoring. When asked if he disclosed his diagnosis to tutors, Ricky responded: Generally, I don’t. I like to make light of all of the things that are different with my brain chemistry and things like that, and I sometimes casually mention that I have trouble writing and I have trouble turning things in on time. I mention that pretty frequently but I don't necessarily say, "Hey, I have ADD" because I feel like it's not necessary to the specific assignment.

Ricky thinks his specific writing struggles are more relevant than disclosure, unlike Chris who did not know how to explain where he needed assistance. The term “generally” allows us to infer that sometimes he does disclose his diagnosis. His statement, “if I don't speak of [my struggles], no one knows” reflects how receiving accommodations is up to the agency of the writer. Different experiences may influence how much agency a writer feels comfortable taking, whether that occurs on campus or in the writing center.

Tutor Interview Results Definitions of ADHD Tutor interviews also focused on defining ADHD, stigma, and disclosure, with additional questions about tutoring methods for writers with ADHD. In asking tutors to define ADHD, all seven tutors included that people with ADHD have difficulty focusing or paying attention; none mentioned the idea of multiple focus or “trains of thought” that came up in writer interviews. As Xena states, “I do know that it's characterized by a sort of inability to focus on stuff.”

Derrick was one of several who focused on the medical side: “ADHD is a recognized medical condition that people are diagnosed with and get treated for.” Three of the tutors mentioned hyperactivity, and another three acknowledged that they could not define ADHD because they lack the medical expertise.

Stigma and Disclosure

Like writers, tutors spoke of the common stigmatizing perception that ADHD is over-diagnosed and over-medicated. According to Rosalind: There is a louder voice of people saying that [ADHD] is being over-diagnosed now, and that kids are just being kids, and there's no need to shove medicine down their throat.

The “louder voice” seems to refer to a collective public outwardly opposing the prevalence of ADHD diagnoses. The medicinal aspect signifies the negative perception of medication, specifically in children. The idea that ADHD is primarily a childhood disorder is another misperception of ADHD. Similarly, four tutors perceived that some people do not always think ADHD is a real condition or diagnosis. One tutor described an experience in a high school course where a student disclosed an ADHD diagnosis in front of her class and teacher. As Xena communicated, “our English teacher said [ADHD] doesn't exist, that's not a real thing.” She continues with her experience at this college: I think that the mentally ill community [at this college] is pretty open and pretty straightforward. I think you would be less likely to be told that ADHD isn't real.

Coming from her experience in high school, Xena thinks that this college has a more accepting view of the diagnosis.

These prevalent forms of stigma may influence an individual’s decision to disclose. When asked about the perceptions of ADHD, Carole responded: I feel like maybe the perception is that [ADHD] is not a problem, or that if students have it, then they have found ways to correct it and it doesn’t need to be accommodated and it’s kind of on the student to take care of it by themselves.

Carole senses that public attitudes about ADHD place the responsibility of receiving accommodations on the individual rather than having institutions approach education with an inclusive model that provides more freedom and support for individuals with learning differences. This stigma can be connected to an individual’s decision to disclose when necessary to receive accommodations.

Tutor interviews indicated that disclosure of ADHD was uncommon in the writing center.

Corroborating the rareness with which writers expressed disclosing to tutors, only two of the seven tutors interviewed for this study had worked with writers who disclosed. One tutor mentioned that the disclosure made them anxious about being able to help the writer with their paper sufficiently.

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The Stigma of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Writing Centers • 9 I remember that maybe 2-3 people told me they had ADD or ADHD. I remember feeling nervous that I wasn’t going to help them well enough. I definitely think that information did make me more nervous, but I think that also I was new to the [writing center staff], and every session was making me nervous anyway. I don’t remember ever having a session where someone disclosed something that went terribly afterwards.

Kai’s anxiety surrounding a session where a writer disclosed indicates how first-year tutors may be more nervous about working with writers with a learning difference. Kai’s anxiety surrounding their own ability to sufficiently help the individual signifies the belief that writers with ADHD need more, or different, help.

This belief may stem from the literature on learning difference and the lack of literature on ADHD used in tutor training.

The other tutor who had worked with writers who disclosed seemed to have the most experience with working with writers with ADHD. Over the course of the interview, Claire discussed working with a writer who had disclosed a diagnosis to her and was coming in for a session once a week. On the general topic of disclosure, Claire stated: I think there are a few different people who have told me that they have ADHD. And usually it’s like someone will come in and will just kind of be like, “Oh I have ADHD….” I feel like a lot of the time, they are apologizing for stuff at the beginning of the session that they don’t need to apologize for. Or that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise. It’s just like one of those things that people say before we get started like, “I want to tell you now,” and I am like "it's fine.”

Here, Claire identifies how she responds to writers who apologize for their ADHD even before she notices anything to be concerned about; she attempts to calm their anxieties, as she would if they were apologizing for any other perceived weakness.

Tutoring Methods Tutors were asked how they had tutored or would tutor a writer with ADHD, and if they had not tutored anyone who had disclosed, they were asked how they would tutor someone who seemed to have attentional difficulties. They responded in line with their primary definition of ADHD as involving difficulty focusing.

However, there was a range of responses--from the majority who would support writers to maintain a singular focus to a minority who were open to what

one tutor called “indulging in tangents.” The majority response is best seen in Joan’s explanation of how she would approach such a session: Joan: I guess it would just be having to kind of like reign them in every now and again, and sometimes when I’m listening to them speak, it's like they're not finishing full sentences. It’s like they'll get excited by another subject or topic, and then they'll kind of abandon that thought process and go to another one, but I feel like I have to stop them in the middle to fully develop the first one.

Savannah: So how would you describe how you stop them?

Joan: I guess just acknowledge when they're on another kind of tangent or just another thought process politely interrupting them and then asking if we could return to the first one and finish that thought out before we move on because I don't think it's beneficial to jump around. So just being polite about it and recognizing that these are really great ideas but let's just focus on the first one for now. I will write the idea down and then fully explore that next.

Joan’s response that she would “reign in” the writer suggests that she sees her role as a tutor to help the writer focus on one idea at a time, a stance consistent with tutors’ general awareness of the attention-deficit aspect of ADHD. She also suggests that her approach is to keep a fair amount of control over the content of the session and to keep track of ideas for the writer.

Claire, who had worked with writers who had disclosed, expresses a somewhat looser response.

Claire also mentions the prevalence of “tangents” in these sessions, but explores how a tangent might benefit a session.

With [one of my weekly writers who has ADHD] I've found some of my challenges of working with her include returning to the subject we were originally talking about. We just have a very conversational relationship so we can kind of get off on tangents. If we go off on a tangent, I don't try to shut it off right away. I try to indulge it so that she feels comfortable and then return back because I don't want to be like ‘hey, you made a joke, you shouldn't do that when we're talking about your paper.’ But it's that balance of being conversational and making people feel comfortable with you, but also

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The Stigma of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Writing Centers • 10 finding a way to return to whatever topic you're working on.

Like Joan, Claire sees her role as restoring focus to the session; however, she also “indulges” tangents as a way of making the session more comfortable-attending to the emotional content of a session as well as the ideas.

Carole had a unique approach to tutoring methods among the tutors. Her positionality to the topic was also unique in that she expressed she thought she had ADHD but had never been diagnosed, and had close family members with ADHD. Whereas the other tutors spoke of tutoring as guiding the writer’s focus among topics, Carole spoke of guiding the writer’s focus to the session at hand, or keeping the writer from “zoning out.”

I think I would try to pay close attention to whether or not they were feeling focused, and not try to come on too strong… because I know some people with ADHD if you over stress something, it can be really hard for them to engage. So I would kind of try to maybe fall back a little bit, and pay close attention to when I felt like they were engaging and when they were zoning out, and try to bring them back, but not coming on too strong…. If you provide too much structure…. it can kind of cause the student to zone out, and not pay as close attention, cause it’s a lot of pressure.

Where Joan reigned in and Claire indulged tangents before returning to the topic at hand, Carole indicates a comfort level with letting go some control of the session. She “falls back a little bit” when she sees a writer’s attention stray, and she explains she does this because of her knowledge of what people with ADHD find helpful.

Discussion of Findings and Implications for Tutor Education Starting with different definitions of ADHD between writers and tutors, we begin to see some of the contrasting conceptualizations from this exploratory study. While tutors defined ADHD based on the inability to focus, three of the writers defined ADHD around the ability to focus on multiple “trains of thought,” or “constant and spontaneous, but relevant thought processes.” This finding is consistent with a social perspective on disability, which reminds us that conditions are disabling in a particular social context, in this case the context of US college writing, which prioritizes focus through the requirement of a linear, thesis-driven argument. At the same time, we

must also consider the perspective of the writer with ADHD who saw the condition in terms of its negative impact on her studies, as well as the perspective of experienced peer tutors who seek to support writers in argumentative writing by working with them to complete their sentences and keep track of their ideas.

For these participants in the Writing Studio, a deficit in attention appears to interfere with desired success.

If ADHD were just seen in terms of trouble focusing, then writers and tutors might make quick work of choosing tutoring methods; they could openly discuss the options of “reigning in,” “indulging in tangents,” or “falling back a bit,” and see what works best in any given session. They could work together to name the advantages and disadvantages of each strategy, and deploy them accordingly--perhaps reigning in when the due date is rapidly approaching or the writer seems overwhelmed, indulging in tangents when the assignment demands creative thinking and time allows, or falling back a bit when the writer stops engaging.

However, the prevalence of stigma around ADHD means successful tutoring does not simply come down to finding strategies to manage attention.

Stigma interferes with tutoring because it paints some writing and thinking tendencies as flawed, and some writers as “not good at being tutored,” to use Chris’ words. Students with ADHD and their tutors have been exposed to people, including teachers, thinking the condition is not real, that it is over-diagnosed, and that it is over-medicated. Though some felt that their college campus was more accepting of ADHD than previous environments, others felt that medication was more stigmatized on campus. Interviews also revealed a misperception that ADHD is primarily a childhood diagnosis. All participants framed ADHD as an individual matter, and both a writer and a tutor mentioned that the common expectation is that people with ADHD will take care of it themselves.

These ideas about ADHD appear to create a climate in which disclosure in tutoring is uncommon-why disclose something whose existence you may have to defend, to a peer or teacher who may react by advising you to go take care of it and then come back?

While several writers had disclosed to faculty members, none remembered disclosing to tutors, and only two of the seven tutors remembered having writers disclose to them. Perhaps disclosure is not necessary; Rinaldi argues that instead of recommending disclosure we should focus on the whole writer and what they communicate as their specific needs. In this way Ricky approached tutoring; he let the tutor know he had trouble writing and

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The Stigma of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Writing Centers • 11 turning things in on time, but did not feel it was relevant to say he had ADHD. On the other hand, in our experiences many writers, especially those who are new to college writing or new to the writing center, struggle to communicate their specific needs in sessions, and we believe more knowledge and open communication about ADHD could make a difference. When asked, “What do you need help with?” Chris explains, “I can’t point out, this is what I need to work on; sometimes I can, but it’s not usual.” What if Chris was able to share with his tutor his experience with “trains of thought” and they were able to make intentional decisions together about how to deal with those trains of thought in the session? Such a productive path would be more possible in a writing center where disability literacy is a focus of tutor education. In our view, ADHD literacy would include the following: an array of definitions-medical, social, deficit-focused, and ability-focused; examination of associated stigma and the effects of stigma; an exploration into why some people choose to disclose and some do not; guidance and practice in creating conditions where students with ADHD can be successful, regardless of whether they disclose; and guidance and practice in responding to disclosure.

Education in tutoring methods could include how habits related to ADHD can both enhance and hinder a writing process. In an ideal tutor education program, ADHD literacy would be one piece of a larger curriculum focused on identity and intersectionality, and tutoring methods for ADHD would be consistent with an overall focus on dialogue and flexibility within the tutoring relationship.

Our hope is that tutor education around disability literacy can lead to successful writing center sessions for both tutors and tutees, as well as a writing center space that is overall more validating of a range of students’ experiences. We hope students become more confident and secure in advocating for themselves to other educators on campus, possibly challenging stigma and ableism in their institution. In our view, an important goal of education is to move people toward a larger, more nuanced, connected perspective with a variety of viewpoints. If a writer has an aptitude for making connections, we can find ways to direct this skill toward what they want to communicate in their writing. Then, as a range of writers feel that their strengths are validated in the writing center, as they disclose and are met with understanding and support instead of stigma, they will spread the word.

Appendix A Interview Questions for Writing Center Tutors

Have you been diagnosed with ADHD, identify as having ADHD, or think you have ADHD? Yes____No_____ 1. Definition a. How would you describe Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder? b. Could you describe how you think the public, specifically at this college, perceives ADHD? 2. Tutoring Sessions a. Has any writer ever disclosed their ADHD diagnosis before a tutoring session? Or have you ever worked with a writer you know has ADHD? i. If yes, could you please describe an experience or experiences? b. How do you think you might approach tutoring a writer with ADHD? What tutoring strategies might be beneficial? (i.e. explicit teaching, structured sessions, splitting up tasks…) c. Have you ever expected that a writer might have attentional difficulties?

Could you describe the experience or experiences? d. Have you ever used end of session reflection as a method for determining what tutoring strategies work with a returning writer?

Appendix B Interview Questions for Student Diagnosed with ADHD Have you been diagnosed with ADHD, identify as having ADHD, or think you have ADHD? Yes____No_____ 1. History a. Have you ever been to the Writing Center on Campus? b. If so, could you please describe the experience? c. Have you found academic support from places on campus and could you describe some similarities and differences between them? d. Could you describe the role ADHD has played in your education?

2. Stigmatization a. How would you define Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder?

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The Stigma of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Writing Centers • 12

3.

4.

b. Describe how you think the public typically views ADHD. c. Describe how you think your peers typically view ADHD? d. Describe how you think teachers or professors typically view ADHD? e. Could you describe any positive and/or negative connotations? [Note: our findings about writers who defined ADHD in a positive light were based on responses to 2a, prior to this question.]

Personal Experience at this College a. What kind of role does writing have in your life? b. If you have had tutors in the past, was there a tutoring structure that you found particularly beneficial?

What kind of approaches did the tutor take that you found beneficial? c. How comfortable or uncomfortable are you with writing? d. Could you come up with a metaphor that describes your experience with writing? e. What teaching or tutoring methods have helped or been ineffective? f. Do deadlines help or hinder? g. How conscious are you of your patterns, the process that worked or did not last time you worked on a paper? h. Can you count on pressure and hyper-focusing to produce?

Additional Questions a. Do you have professors aware of the diagnosis? If so, how did you disclose that information? b. With professors who are aware, have you ever had a negative and/or positive experience that stands out in particular? c. Have you ever had an experience where you feel like others have treated you differently because of your ADHD diagnosis? This might include positive and or negative differential treatment. d. If you have had negative experiences, how did the experiences affect your willingness to tell teachers, professors, and tutors? How you view yourself?

Works Cited American Psychiatric Association. “AttentionDeficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.” Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5.

Washington, D.C: American Psychiatric Association, 2013. 59-66. Print.

Babcock, Rebecca. “Disabilities in the Writing Center.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 13.1 (2015): 38–49. Web. 21 Mar. 2016.

Bussing, Regina, and Anuja S Mehta. "Stigmatization and Self-Perception of Youth with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder." Patient Intelligence 5 (2013): 15-27. DovePress. Web. 12 Nov. 2014. <http://www.dovepress.com/stigmatization-andself-perception-of-youth-with-attentiondeficithype-peer-reviewed-article-PI>.

Daniels, Sharifa, Rebecca Day Babcock, and Doria Daniels. “Writing Centers and Disability: Enabling Writers Through An Inclusive Philosophy.”

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 13.1 (2015): 20–26.

Print.

Fuermaier, Anselm B. M., Lara Tucha, Janneke Koerts, Anna K. Mueller, Klaus W. Lange, Oliver Tucha, and Efthimios M. C. Skoulakis.

"Measurement of Stigmatization towards Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder."

PLoS ONE 7.12 (2012): e51755. Web. 2014.

Gillespie, Paula, and Neal Lerner. The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008.

Print.

Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963. Print.

Grimm, Nancy M. Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times. Portsmouth: Boynton/CookHeinemann, 1999. Print.

---. “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform a System of Advantage Based on Race.” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change. Ed. Lauren Greenfield and Karen Rowan. Logan: Utah State UP, 2011. 75-99. Print.

Lewis, Lesle, and Peg Alden. "What We Can Learn about Writing Blocks from College Students with Output Problems, Strong Writing Skills, and Attentional Difficulties." Journal of Teaching Writing 23.1 (2007): 115-146. Print.

Linton, Simi. “What Is Disability Studies?” PMLA 120.2 (2005): 518–522. Web. Neff, Julie. "Learning Disabilities and the Writing Center." Intersections: Theory-Practice in theWriting Center. Ed. Joan A. Mullin and Ray Wallace.

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The Stigma of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Writing Centers • 13 Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994. 81-95. Print.

Rinaldi, Kerri. “Disability in the Writing Center: A New Approach (That’s Not so New).” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 13.1 (2015): 8–13. Print.

---. “Navigating Disability Disclosure in the Writing Center!: The Other Side of the Table.” Axis @ South Central Writing Center Association. N.p., 2015.

Web. Rowan, Karen. “Review Essay: Towards a Disability Literacy in Writing Center Studies.” The Writing Center Journal 34.2 (2015): 175–190. Print.

Schutt, Russell K. "Qualitative Data Analysis."

Investigating the Social World: The Process and Practice of Research. 7th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2011. 320-355. Print.

Waite, Roberta, and Mary Tran. "Explanatory Models and Help-Seeking Behavior for AttentionDeficit/Hyperactivity Disorder among a Cohort of Postsecondary Students." Archives of Psychiatric Nursing 24.4 (2010): 247-259. Web. 2010.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 13, No 2 (2016)

(RE)EXAMINING THE SOCRATIC METHOD: A LESSON IN TUTORING Gary Jaeger Vanderbilt University gary.a.jaeger@vanderbilt.edu

Introduction In a recent blog post on the University of Wisconsin writing center’s webpage, Matthew Capdevielle asserts that it has become common to describe writing center methods as Socratic. In fact, writing center professionals have embraced the Socratic Method for quite some time. In his classic and agenda-setting article, “The Idea of a Writing Center,” North writes: If writing centers are going to finally be accepted, surely they must be accepted on their own terms as places whose primary responsibility, whose only reason for being, is to talk to writers. That is their heritage, and it stretches… back, in fact, to Athens where in a busy marketplace a tutor called Socrates set up the same kind of shop: open to all comers, no fees charged, offering, on whatever subject a visitor might propose, a continuous dialectic that is, finally, its own end. (North 46) While Capdevielle and North are right to make some connections between writing center practices and the Socratic Method, I nevertheless wonder just how Socratic our methods are or should be.

North does not explain what he means by the phrase, “continuous dialectic that is… its own end.”

He could mean that writing tutors should be Socratic only in the sense that they ask questions without ever answering them. This interpretation would fit some writing center practices well, and is consonant with the advice given by Jeff Brooks in “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Students Do All the Work.” In addition to the pedagogical value of making clients answer questions for themselves, there are good reasons for adopting a minimalist approach that proceeds by asking questions. For instance, since we are called on to be generalists and to consult in disciplines with which we are unfamiliar, asking questions is sometimes the only available approach, as we otherwise would have no expertise from which to speak.

Socrates, especially in the early dialogues, knowingly capitalizes on the virtue of ignorance (Grano). In Plato’s Apology, he explains that he has !

received a prophecy from the oracle at Delphi who has told him that he is the wisest of all Athenians because he knows of himself one precious thing that no other Athenian knows of him or herself; he knows that he knows nothing. Because he is not blinded by commitment to doctrinaire teachings, like the Sophists of his day were, he can see more clearly and discover the truth more completely (20c-24e). If ever there were a mascot for a minimalist approach to conversation that requires nothing more than genuine curiosity, it is Socrates. If we only take Socrates to be a mascot, however, we might end up with a distorted caricature of the minimalist tutor. Just as being too directive in one’s intent to lead one’s interlocutor to a predetermined answer can be dangerous, so too can being insufficiently directive. If we take North’s call to pursue “a continuous dialectic that is its own end” as an invitation to ask open-ended questions with the intent to continue conversation indefinitely, then we run the risk of facilitating an unfocused discussion that unhelpfully widens the scope of a client’s paper. It would seem, then, that a more structured adoption of the Socratic Method is in order.

Being selective in how to construct our Socratic practices will also allow us to reject those aspects of Socrates’ own method that could be detrimental to tutoring sessions. Socrates’ approach often resembles a competitive debate and his interlocutors often leave their discussions with him feeling defeated and frustrated. In the dialogues, he often engages in an elenchus, an argumentative exchange that leads his interlocutors to discover the inconsistency of their own claims. In so doing, he is not just asking questions indefinitely. He has an end in sight: pressing his interlocutors to revise or abandon their claims as needed. While this end is noble, it can be taken too far. In her Socrates in Chains, Sarah Viehman has recently cautioned writing center professionals against the troubling power dynamic that can emerge from deploying the Socratic Method. Certainly, in adopting the Socratic Method, we do not mean to endorse an approach that undermines our clients.

Indeed, we ought to temper the Socratic Method, but in doing so, we need not strip it of those aspects of Socratic practice that could make writing

(Re)Examining the Socratic Method • 15 consultations richer and more productive. A reexamination of the master himself, as we find him in Plato’s dialogues, might give us some clues on how to engage clients in ways that are constructively Socratic.

In particular, it can model how to argumentatively engage our clients in three ways: by destabilizing commonplaces, by charitably rehearsing arguments before pointing out inconsistencies, and by developing inchoate claims with focused examples. In order to ensure that writing center practitioners have the most constructively Socratic practices in mind when they describe writing center methods as being Socratic, a nuanced analysis of the Socratic Method is in order.

II.1

Destabilizing Commonplaces

In the Meno, Socrates gives us reasons to think that his method is indeed quite minimalist, but a closer look reveals that he has more ambitious intentions.

Here we find Socrates giving a geometry lesson to an uneducated slave-boy. Rather than show the boy how to double the area of a square, he asks a number of questions until the boy arrives at the correct answer.

After doing so, he proudly tells Meno, with whom he has been discussing the nature of learning, “You see, Meno? I’m not teaching him anything. All I’m doing is asking questions. And now he thinks he knows which line will get us an area of eight square feet” (82e).

Now if Socrates’ claim were an accurate description of what he was up to, then it might seem like the Socratic Method really is only a matter of asking questions for the sake of asking questions. However, Socrates, who is not merely asking questions, is trying to prove to Meno that the form of the square is something that everyone, including this uneducated slave, knows intuitively, and so learning is merely a matter of recollecting what we already know by way of systematic reasoning. Whether or not Socrates is helping the boy recollect the form of the square, he is certainly helping the boy to arrive at the correct answer by guiding him through the reasoning required to do so. This modeling would not be possible if Socrates did not already know the correct answer.

Just as the geometry lesson takes us away from a minimalist depiction by demonstrating the ways in which the Socratic Method is more about engaging in systematic reasoning than it is about asking openended questions, it also seems to take us away from a model of what we want to be doing in writing centers.

The presumption that tutors must know the answers sets before us an impossible task. It presumes that the point of a client’s paper is to find the right answer, as if writing a paper were like solving a geometry problem.

Although the Socrates we see in the Meno knows many of the answers to the questions he asks, this is only common in Plato’s middle dialogues, where the character of Socrates serves as a mouthpiece for Plato’s own theories. These middle dialogues present a Socrates who comes to a number of his own conclusions associated with Plato’s mature views, which are only fully expounded in the late dialogues, where Socrates does not even appear as a character.

In opposition to these middle dialogues, the early dialogues present a Socrates who comes to no conclusions of his own (Cooper xii-xviii; Vlastos 4647). For a better look at the Socratic Method as the actual Socrates used it, we are better off consulting one of Plato’s early dialogues, like the Euthyphro, where we find Socrates deploying systematic reasoning to help his interlocutor answer a question to which Socrates does not know the answer.

Socrates meets his interlocutor Euthyphro, for whom the dialogue is named, on his way to court where he is being indicted on charges that include impiety. Euthyphro is on his way out, having just indicted his own father on the very same charge.

Socrates is hoping that he has found in Euthyphro an expert on all matters of piety. After all, only someone truly confident in his knowledge about the matter would be brazen enough to indict his own father, knowing that such an act could itself be seen as filial impiety. Socrates asks, “do you think that you have such exact knowledge of religion, of things holy and unholy? Is it so exact that in the circumstances you describe, you aren’t afraid that, by bringing your father to trial, you might prove guilty of unholy conduct yourself?” (5e). Euthyphro assures him that he really is an expert. Here we have a case of an ignorant Socrates who has nothing but genuine questions for his interlocutor. Notice, however, that even here, Socrates is not simply asking questions for the sake of asking questions. He desperately wants Euthyphro to tell him

Modeling Systematic Reasoning in the Platonic Dialogues

Moreover, even if we did have all the right answers, we would still have to encourage our clients to think through matters for themselves. Simply giving them answers would not allow them to grow as writers and thinkers. Nevertheless, we must not ask our questions for the mere sake of asking them. Our questions should lead our clients to some end. This is why the first step of guiding our clients through systematic reasoning must be helping them understand the point of their papers. This does not mean that we must know what that point is, but rather that we be willing to discover it alongside them.

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(Re)Examining the Socratic Method • 16 what piety is so that he may use this knowledge in his own defense. As it turns out, Euthyphro knows much less than he thinks he does and so it is up to Socrates to help Euthyphro reason his way towards a more complete understanding of what piety is. He does this by way of an elenchus.

The most typical Socratic elenchus begins with some commonly held beliefs. These beliefs are what in “Inventing the University” David Bartholomae calls a commonplace, defined as “A culturally or institutionally authorized concept or statement that carries with it its own necessary elaboration… (commonplaces) provide points of reference and a set of ‘pre-articulated’ explorations that are readily available to organize and interpret experience” (137-8).

Here we begin with Euthyphro’s belief that something is pious just so long as the gods love it. Socrates has two goals. First, he questions whether Euthyphro really knows what the gods love. Second, he questions Euthyphro’s claim that the gods’ love for an action makes that action pious. As Socrates sees it, the trouble with Euthyphro’s reasoning is that he relies too heavily on commonplaces without questioning the ways in which those commonplaces might be misguided or limited.

Often writers struggle not because they rely too heavily on commonplaces, but because they fail to properly situate their work within and against a commonplace. Sometimes students fail to do this because they do not know what the accepted academic commonplaces are in a given discipline. Received views held widely across society are too broad for work that seeks to make a focused contribution to a particular field. Other times, students understand what the received view in their field is, but fail to explicitly articulate the ways in which their work departs from that commonplace. One such writer, falling into this latter category, a graduate student from the Epidemiology Department, came into our writing center to discuss a presentation he was writing about his research on cancer diagnosis. Although he was quite able to discuss the causes of tumors and to provide statistics about the prevalence of such tumors, he was having difficulty gaining traction from all those facts and statistics. In order to figure out the contribution of this research, the tutor asked this student to explain what other researchers in the field have already accomplished and to provide an argument for why this research would add something to that field. Their conversation ended like this: TUTOR. You say, your research helps surgeons diagnose lung cancer and avoid unnecessary surgeries and that no model exists for surgeons to estimate lung cancer

risk… Okay, this is one of the key flaws, I take it?

CLIENT. Right!

TUTOR. So you’re saying in the most basic terms, there is a research gap here... Saying something to that effect, like I found a research gap, can really help locate the listener.

CLIENT. Yes! A research gap that no model exists.

What this student began to realize is that presenting one’s research requires commonplaces that make a claim for the novelty and importance of that research.

Rather than just providing information, the student could now begin to structure that information in a way that was clearly organized into distinct parts. He was able to lay out the state of the field, destabilize it by pointing to a research gap in that field, and then explain how his research would begin to fill in that gap.

Charitably Rehearsing Arguments before Pointing Out Inconsistencies Guiding an interlocutor through systematic reasoning need not begin with criticism. In order to help Euthyphro, Socrates first charitably rehearses the inchoate argument that Euthyphro offers: Come then, let us examine what we mean. An action or man dear to the gods is pious, but an action or a man hated by the gods is impious. They are not the same, but quite opposite, the pious and the impious is not that so?… We have also stated that the gods are in a state of discord, that they are at odds with each other, Euthyphro, and that they are at enmity with each other. (7a-b) After Euthyprho agrees to this rendering of his argument, Socrates moves on to point out an inconsistency in the argument. “Then according to your argument, my good Euthyphro, different gods consider different things to be just….The same things then are loved by the gods and hated by the gods…

And the same things would be both pious and impious according to this argument” (7e-8a). In other words, because Euthyphro holds both that the pious is what the gods love and that the gods disagree, he is committed to the contradictory conclusion that the very same thing can be pious and impious.

Represented schematically, Euthyphro’s argument looks like this: 1. X is pious if and only if the gods love it (6e-7a).

2. There are many gods and they disagree (7b).

3. What some gods love, other gods hate (8a).

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(Re)Examining the Socratic Method • 17 4. Some things are both pious and not pious (8a).

Premise one is Euthyphro’s main claim. Premises two and three are claims that Euthyphro readily agrees to.

Premise four follows from the first three, but is a contradiction revealing a flaw in Euthyphro’s reasoning. By the end of the elenchus, Socrates has revealed this contradiction and in doing so, he has made Euthyphro realize that his beliefs about the gods and about what they love, when taken together, are inconsistent.

Clearly Euthyphro needs to revise his argument, which is exactly what Socrates presses him to do. All of his attempts to revise, however, lead back to contradictions. After several rounds with Socrates, Euthyphro appears to be at wit’s end, remarking, “But Socrates, I have no way of telling you what I have in mind, for whatever proposition we put forward goes around and refuses to stay put where we establish it” (11b). But even at this point, Socrates does not relent; he seems committed to make Euthyphro fully admit his own hubris. The two never do settle on a definition of piety and their entire discussion appears to destroy Euthyphro’s beliefs on the matter without constructing any new ones. If we were to proceed this way with our clients, we would only undermine what confidence they have. One might wonder why writing center practitioners ever thought it a good idea to coopt the Socratic Method in the first place.

Pointing out the inconsistencies in a client’s argument might lead him or her to want to abandon that argument entirely. If done well, however, helping a client see those inconsistencies can be a great boon as he or she moves towards revision. To see how it can go well, consider the following series of exchanges from a consultation on a paper arguing that antiquities should not be returned to their country of origin if they can be seen and appreciated by more visitors in more prominent locations: CLIENT. [reading from the penultimate paragraph of the paper] The key to preserving ancient societies is the sense of awareness among the general public. Taking coveted artifacts out of the limelight and placing them in relatively obscure museums is counter-productive to this aim. In essence, that is what is often achieved by the recovery efforts of less prosperous countries. Museums such as the British Museum and the Met simply possess better facilities to research, protect, and display artifacts of the ancient world. TUTOR: Why is perpetuating or augmenting awareness of an artifact the key to doing justice to its history?

CLIENT. Because, I mean, by putting these artifacts in other museums where no one is going to know about them, the artifacts become esoteric. No one will know about them but the core few who study Greek history.

TUTOR. So is your point then, that returning artifacts to smaller, lesser known museums actually causes the loss of history?

CLIENT. Yeah.

TUTOR. So that is something that you haven’t explicitly said in your paper.

As is common in undergraduate papers, the main thread of this argument only emerges towards the end of the paper. Here we see the tutor rehearsing this thread and emphasizing its importance in rebutting opposing views, much the way Socrates does when he charitably interprets his interlocutors’ claims.

With some appreciation of how important this thread is to the overall argument, the client and tutor are ready to move on to the last paragraph of the paper: CLIENT. In the age of globalization, the world is becoming an increasingly smaller place. By placing pieces of historical significance in museums that have the highest traffic, they are more likely to be observed and appreciated. It is detrimental to place artifacts of the ancient world on display in the current nation associated with that ancient society if that nation does not possess adequate resources needed to give these artifacts the justice they deserve.

TUTOR. My only question about this paragraph is why do we talk about globalization and a shrinking world? Because the one thing you don’t want to do is— CLIENT. --Yeah it is counterintuitive. If the world is a smaller place, then it shouldn’t really matter that these museums are remote.

Notice, the tutor refrains from telling the client that he contradicts himself. Rather, he invites the client to reflect on the reasoning behind his claim about globalization. We can see that with only the slightest bit of prodding, the client comes to his own conclusion about how troubling the inconsistency is.

Because he comes to this conclusion on his own, he does not feel defeated like Socrates’ interlocutors.

Making Focused Claims by Turning to Examples When even charitably rehearsing an argument leaves some claims obscure, Socrates helps his

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(Re)Examining the Socratic Method • 18 interlocutors focus those claims. To see this, let’s turn to an elenchus from Plato’s middle dialogue, the Protagoras. Here we find Socrates conversing with Protagoras, an old and renowned sophist. They have been discussing the nature of virtue and whether it can be taught when they get caught up in a debate about whether each virtue is a distinct entity, as Protagoras believes, or whether they are all unified, as Socrates believes.

They begin with Protagoras’ main claim that the virtues are distinct. To elaborate on this, Socrates focuses in on one example, namely stupidity, which he sees as being an opposite of virtue. Focusing on an example is an excellent way to help our clients see more precisely what they mean when they are prevented from doing so by the vagueness of their own claims. Socrates has chosen stupidity as their example because Protagoras has previously mentioned it. Although Protagoras thinks that the definition of stupidity is clear enough, Socrates is not sure. To get Protagoras to see just how ambiguous the term is, he encourages Protagoras to develop his definition. And perhaps it goes without saying that getting our clients to define their terms is a great way to help them to be more precise as well. The elenchus begins like this: 1. There is such a thing as being stupid (332a).

2. Wisdom is its opposite (332a).

3. When people act in a beneficial way, they are acting temperately (332a).

4. When people act stupidly, they are acting intemperately (332b).

From this it appears that stupidity can actually be the opposite of two different virtues: wisdom and temperance. The issue that remains is whether wisdom and temperance are the same or distinct. Socrates decides to press his own agenda and make a case for them being the same.

He gets Protagoras to consider not just stupidity and its opposites, but several other examples of qualities and their opposites: 5. Strength is the opposite of weakness (332b).

6. Speed is the opposite of slowness (332b).

7. Ugliness is the only opposite of beauty (332c).

8. Bad is the opposite of good (332c).

9. High pitch is the only opposite of low pitch (332c).

10. Everything has only one opposite (332d).

Here, Socrates gets Protagoras to elaborate on his initial claim by pressing him to define his terms, focusing him in on concrete examples, and drawing general inferences from those claims. All of these are good strategies when deployed with one’s interlocutor’s well-being in mind, but in this case,

Socrates deploys them to undermine the hubris of Protagoras’ sophistry. He notes: 11. Either stupidity has 2 opposites, which contradicts premise ten, or temperance and wisdom are the same things, which contradicts Protagoras’ main point that the virtues are distinct (333a).

He then asks, “Then which of these propositions should we abandon, Protagoras? The proposition that for one thing there is only one opposite, or the one stating that wisdom is different from temperance…The two statements are dissonant; they are not in harmony with one another” (333a-b).

Protagoras does not know how to resolve the contradiction and so his conversation with Socrates only ends when they run out of time and Protagoras must be on his way—a scenario that is probably all too familiar to those of us who have tutored writers.

Perhaps their time together would have been more productive if Socrates were less intent on pressing his own agenda and proving the shortcoming of Protagoras’ wisdom.

Helping clients to sharpen their arguments need not end in such consternation as long as we remain sensitive to our clients’ feelings and remind them of how we are trying to help them when they get frustrated. To see how this can go, consider the following session with an undergraduate client, who, like Protagoras, gets frustrated when pressed to make her abstract claims more concrete: CLIENT. [reading from the introduction to her paper] Through a series of metaphors the speaker of A. E. Stallings “Sine Qua Non” provides her father with a definition of his absence. The speaker defines the many facets of her father’s absence by comparing his absence to a number of objects and ideas, each of which works towards clarifying a different element of his absence.

The speaker’s multiple comparisons suggest that her father’s absence affected her in a number of ways. A. E. Stallings suggests that absence or nothingness is an element with profound implications upon people’s feelings.

Clearly this student could benefit from being more specific. Her mention of the “many facets of her father’s absence“ and “a number of objects and ideas” is vague and does little to help her readers understand what she has in mind.

A good first step might be to ask her to specify.

Let us see what happens when her tutor does just this: TUTOR. Within this introductory paragraph you say the speaker works through many

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(Re)Examining the Socratic Method • 19 metaphors, the speaker works through a number of objects, there are multiple implications, and there are profound implications. So if we were to go through these, piece by piece, how could you clarify some of these things? For instance, when you say that there are a number of metaphors, what metaphors are there and how are you going to show them?

CLIENT. Well the thing is, I think I am going to show a lot of different metaphors and the one thing they have in common is that they are all a part of the definition of her father’s absence. But I cannot think of anything else that they have in common and I don’t want to list out all ten of the metaphors.

The client does have her finger on a problem faced by many writers when they attempt to author the introductions to their papers. If she discusses all of the specific elements of her paper at the beginning, then her introduction will be weighed down by lists. Her tutor can see that this is indeed a problem and suggests that instead of getting bogged down by all of the items on the list, the writer might do better to generalize, as Socrates does in the Protagoras, and say something concrete about how all of the items are related. As he presses her to do this, she has the following to say: CLIENT. Like absence and nothingness are something.

TUTOR. And what do you mean by that?

CLIENT. --Emptiness still connects things.

TUTOR. What are they connecting? How are they doing so? How do they persist?

CLIENT. They persist by being in between things.

TUTOR. What do we mean by being in between things?

CLIENT. Like… Um… can you help me here?

Here we can see that the client is beginning to get frustrated with the tutor’s line of questioning. Even though pressing her to generalize could have been a good strategy to pursue, the prospect of doing so overwhelms her. Each answer she gives shifts her claim in a new direction rather than tying up the loose ends. If the tutor were simply to continue asking questions as Socrates does, then the client would likely become as confused as Socrates’ interlocutors. Luckily the tutor senses this and proceeds by reminding the client what all the questioning is for: TUTOR. I’m trying to help you think through the most explicit form of your

claim. I’m looking to help you get out the thesis of your paper so that all your terms are defined.

CLIENT. Maybe I should say that A.E. Stallings defines absence, emptiness, and nothingness as substantive elements.

TUTOR. Good. Can you give me an example?

The client is back on board. Rather than continue to press his client to articulate the relationship between these vague concepts, the tutor takes a different approach and encourages her to move from the general to the particular: CLIENT. So like the interstices of lace. The actual lace is something and the interstices are nothing, but the interstices are what make lace look like lace. So the interstices have a profound implication on the lace.

The speaker’s identity, which is held together by the interstices of her father’s absence, makes her look the way that she does.

By focusing on an example, she has now arrived at a much more coherent and interesting claim.

Conclusion Our survey of the Platonic dialogues has demonstrated that there are aspects of the Socratic Method that can help us guide our clients to reason systematically. Capdevielle and North are right to describe writing center methods as being Socratic. Our survey, however, has also shown us that we should qualify that description to avoid those aggressive aspects of Socratic practice that could overwhelm or undermine our clients. While we should encourage our clients to rigorously think through their arguments, we need to be heed Viehman’s warning, and be more sensitive to our clients than Socrates is to his interlocutors.

In order to do this, we can selectively turn to the dialogues to learn how to model and engage our clients in systematic reasoning. This might include showing our clients how academic arguments often begin by destabilizing commonplaces.

When appropriate, this might even include destabilizing our clients’ own unfounded beliefs and positions. In so far as our clients are already making arguments, we can charitably rehearse them before pointing out inconsistencies, as Socrates does, but always with the sympathetic aim of building our clients up. If we offer our questions and promptings with the aim of helping

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(Re)Examining the Socratic Method • 20 our clients see the best versions of their own arguments, then it will be less likely that we undermine or overwhelm them, and it will be more likely that we enable them to improve their writing on their own terms.

With this richer notion of Socratic practice at our disposal, we might also be better able to attend to the concern that led North to invoke Socrates in the first place: the concern that many university administrators and instructors think that, “what writing centers actually do—talking to writers—is not enough” (46).

If administrators and instructors could see all the ways in which these Socratic tools can transform writers, surely their own misconceptions about writing centers would be as destabilized as those held by Socrates’ own interlocutors.

----. Protagoras. Trans. Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell. Plato: Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper.

Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. 746-91. Print.

Viehman, Sarah. Socrates in Chains: Questioning the Socratic Method in the Writing Center. MA thesis. Missouri State University, 2010. Web.

Works Cited Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” When a Writer Can’t Write: Writer’s Block and Other Composing-Process Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New York: Guilford, 1985. 134-65. Print.

Brooks, Jeff. “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Students do all the Work.” St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors third edition. Eds. Christina Murphy and Steven Sherwood. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2008. 168-72. Print.

Capdevielle, Matthew. “‘Why Do You Ask?’ Questioning the Question in the Writing Center.”

Another Word. University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center, March 26, 2012. Web. June 19, 2013.

Cooper, John M. Introduction. Plato: Complete Works.

Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

Print.

Grano, Daniel A. “Wise Ignorance and Socratic Interiority: Recovering a Dialogic Rhetoric.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37.1 (2007): 118. Print.

North, Stephen. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors 3rd ed. Christina Murphy and Steven Sherwood.

Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2008. 32-46. Print.

Plato. Apology. Tran. G. M. A. Grube. Plato: Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper.

Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. 17-36. Print.

----. Euthyphro. Tran. G. M. A. Grube. Plato: Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper.

Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. 1-16. Print.

----. Meno. Tran. G. M. A. Grube. Plato: Complete Works.

Ed. John M. Cooper.

Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. 870-97. Print.

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WHEN “EDITING” BECOMES “EDUCATING” IN ESL TUTORING SESSIONS Young-Kyung Min University of Colorado - Boulder young.min@colorado.edu

Introduction ESL writing is complex because it involves both a language acquisition process and a composing process.

Although the development of good language skills is essential for ESL writers, the importance of guiding them in their language acquisition process is not clearly reflected in writing center pedagogy and tutor training (Leki; Myers; Nowacki; Powers; Williams & Severino).

Writing center pedagogy tends to prioritize higher order concerns over lower order concerns by separating writing issues from language issues. This separation is problematic for ESL writers because ESL writing can never be broken down neatly into writing issues and language issues (Blau and Hall; Cogie et al.; Myers; Powers).

In order to develop more culturally responsive tutoring practices for ESL writers, I argue that we must reflect on the good intentions behind the “NoEditing” policy at many writing centers. The idea of “editing” tends to be criticized at writing centers; it projects an image of the tutor holding the red pen and correcting all the grammatical mistakes for the writer while the writer simply observes. This practice is against the philosophy of the writing center, which is to produce better writers, not better writing (North 438). The “No-Editing” policy should be re-examined when it comes to ESL tutoring sessions because ESL writers are “not engaged merely in “editing” but in learning a new language,” and their errors are persistent evidence of normal second language learning and processing, not some failure on the part of students (Myers, “Reassessing” 52). It is crucial to guide ESL students in their language acquisition process because it is “indeed the linguistic component (vocabulary and syntax) as much or more than what is considered the writing (rhetorical) component that ESL students need most” (ibid).

In order to provide more effective guidance in ESL students’ language acquisition process, I argue that we should combine instruction in grammar with vocabulary. As much as it is problematic to separate writing issues from language issues, the separation of grammar from vocabulary is also problematic. In most writing centers, tutors are trained to guide students to recognize how the grammatical aspects of their writing change depending on the audience, purpose, genre, and !

topic of the assignment. The so-called “rhetorical grammar approach” (Kolln and Gray) may not work effectively for ESL writers simply because, in order to discuss writing at the rhetorical level, the writer must have the language to be able to do so. I argue that it is a lexical grammar approach that combines instruction in grammar with vocabulary—rather than a strict rhetorical grammar approach—that can more effectively assist ESL writers in their language acquisition process.

This paper discusses practical strategies that tutors can use to facilitate ESL writers’ language acquisition process at writing centers by employing a lexical grammar approach that combines instruction in grammar with vocabulary. It illustrates how to move a sentence-level tutoring process from an editor-dynamic to an educator-dynamic, which can ultimately enhance ESL students’ self-editing skills. The target audience that this approach aims to assist includes both international and Generation 1.5 students. The term “1.5” is a designator that points out the in-between identities of immigrant students even if they are fourth or fifth generation in terms of the immigrant histories of their families. They are the so-called “ear learners” (Reid), having grown up speaking and listening to English.

Although they are familiar with some aspects of American culture and language, they often struggle with sentence structure since they have not been trained in the formal rules of the English language.

Thus, the lexical grammar approach explained in this paper can be useful for Generation 1.5 students as well.

Lexical Grammar: Beyond a Grammar and Vocabulary Dichotomy Research has continuously shown that some aspects of language that have been dealt with under grammar in the area of second language (L2) acquisition are actually lexical in nature (Myers; Nakamaru; Nation). Language is a grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar (Lewis). It is thus inappropriate to divide a language into grammar and vocabulary (Folse; McCarthy and O’Dell). Lexis plays a much more prominent role in the student’s second language learning because “lexical learning drives grammatical learning” (Tschirner 120). Developing students’ vocabulary skills ultimately facilitates richer

When “Editing” Becomes “Educating” • 22 listening, speaking, reading, and writing abilities (Hennings; Hinkel; Laufer and Yano).

The significance of enhancing ESL students’ awareness of the fundamental interdependence between grammar and lexis is widely recognized in the field of TESOL (Carter; Folse; McCarthy and O’Dell; Nation). However, very little research looks into how writing center tutors can facilitate ESL students’ language acquisition process by guiding them to become more aware of the fundamental connection between lexis and grammar. Although tutors actually work on lexical issues in their sessions with ESL writers, they often characterize their feedback on L2 writers’ papers as “grammar” and “content” (Nakamaru). Tutors do not need to spend a lot of time to develop strategies to increase students’ awareness of their errors because “most student errors are actually lexical, and if they don’t have the appropriate word or lexical phrase, no editing will provide it. A great many tangles in ‘syntax’ are a result of circumlocutions— vocabulary problems, not grammar problems” (Myers, “Reassessing” 58).

Thus, it is important to help ESL students become more aware of the interconnection between lexis and grammar. By combining instruction in grammar with vocabulary, tutors can more effectively guide students to learn how semantically similar words have different syntactic and pragmatic usages. In this regard, it is essential to help students learn the collocational partnerships of words. As the word parts “co” and “location” suggest, a collocation is a word or phrase that is frequently used near the target word. The three conditions for learners to be able to say they know a word are: which words it is usually associated with (lexical collocation); what grammatical characteristics it has (grammatical collocation); and how it is pronounced and spelled (McCarthy). The most important aspect of knowing a word is its collocational partnerships (Carter; Folse; McCarthy and O’Dell; Myers; Nation). Learning chunks and groups of words that go together is a very effective way to expand a student’s vocabulary power (ibid.). In essence, a student’s communicative competence goes hand in hand with vocabulary competence, and vocabulary competence goes hand in hand with collocational competence.

Dictionary Potential and Dictionary Training One of the most essential resources to help students enhance their knowledge of the collocational partnerships of words is the monolingual English dictionary. Numerous studies indicate that increasing recognition of the importance of explicit vocabulary

training in second language (L2) learning should be accompanied by a greater awareness of the dictionary’s potential (Cogie et al.; Linville). Monolingual dictionaries can help learners develop a more solid awareness of the collocational partnerships of words since meaning and other information are provided in the same language as the target word (Knight; Luppescu & Day). Bilingual dictionaries do help learners quickly grasp the meanings of words, especially for words that are difficult to translate into English. The immediate semantic association between the L2 word and the L1 word can help learners reinforce the meanings of words and retain them in long-term memory. However, the constant use of a bilingual dictionary holds learners back from developing both a feel or intuition for words and the skill of paraphrasing to make up for words they do not know. Using bilingual dictionaries as the only reference source may hinder students from developing a sufficient writing vocabulary because, as noted earlier, bilingual dictionaries focus on the translations of words rather than usages. Let me explain this point further through the following common ESL writing errors: • The management team consists with John, Mary, and Benjamin.

• The United Nations is made up with more than 200 individual nations.

• The human body comprises of billions of tiny cells.

• The house is comprised two bedrooms, one kitchen, one bathroom, and one living room.

ESL students tend to make these errors in writing because they directly translate from their native languages to English using bilingual dictionaries. The syntactic and pragmatic differences between words that have similar meanings are not clearly explained in most bilingual dictionaries. In other words, the collocational partnerships of “consist,” “comprise,” “constitute,” and “make up” are not readily available. When students see that “consist” has the same meaning as “comprise,” “constitute,” and “make up” in their bilingual dictionaries, they use these words interchangeably.

Thus, it is crucial for ESL students to learn the collocational partnerships of words by using monolingual English dictionaries.

Encoding/Production Dictionary Based on my experience of learning English as a foreign language and teaching ESL writing courses for over 18 years, a very useful resource that can help L2 writers effectively learn the collocational partnerships of words is an “encoding” dictionary, also known as a “production” dictionary. It is a monolingual dictionary,

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When “Editing” Becomes “Educating” • 23 but it is not a typical dictionary. As the name “encoding” suggests, in the encoding dictionary words are organized (systematically grouped together) by meaning not by alphabetical order. It shows how semantically similar words have different syntactic and pragmatic usages. The dictionary can promote a deeper level of processing words and can more effectively help learners increase their knowledge of collocational partnerships by comparing differences in word usages based on specific examples. The most common encoding/production dictionary available on the market is the Longman Language Activator: Helps You Write and Speak Natural English. The following is an example from the dictionary for the entry “consist of/be made of”: Consist of: Bolognaise sauce consists of minced beef, onion, tomatoes, mushrooms, garlic and seasoning. / Lorna’s whole wardrobe consisted of jeans, tee shirts and sweaters. / The senior management team consists of John, Betty, and Ken. / He mixed a special drink, consisting of gin, vodka, and cherry brandy.

Be made of: The candlesticks are made of brass. / She mixed a batter made of flour, eggs and water. / What’s this carpet made of?

Be made up of: The US government is made up of two legislative assemblies – Congress and the Senate. / The United Nations is made up of more than 200 individual nations. / The jury was mostly made up of women.

Be composed of: The earth’s atmosphere is composed mainly of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. / The human body is composed of billions of tiny cells.

Comprise: The house comprises 2 bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. / The city’s population comprises mainly Asians and Europeans.

As illustrated in the examples, the encoding/production dictionary can promote a deeper level of processing words by presenting how semantically similar words have different syntactic and pragmatic usages, a feature missing from dictionaries designed for native speakers. By comparing differences in word usages with specific examples, students can more effectively increase their knowledge of collocational partnerships. Students can learn the fundamental connection between grammar and vocabulary. They can also learn that they do not need

to depend solely on grammar books; they can enhance their grammatical knowledge through the dictionary.

As the name Longman Language Activator: Helps You Write and Speak Natural English suggests, the dictionary can expand learners’ reading (receptive) vocabulary to a more accurate writing (productive) vocabulary. It is crucial that vocabulary is learned not only receptively but also productively for the learner’s academic literacy development (Folse; Nation).

This kind of encoding/production dictionary can also be a useful resource for ESL tutoring sessions at writing centers. It is not easy for ESL students to understand why the expression “is consisted of” is not grammatically correct when “is comprised of” and “is made up of” are (e.g. “The human body is comprised of billions of tiny cells” and “The human body is made up of billions of tiny cells”). Thus, instead of simply crossing out “is” when tutors see the sentence “The human body is consisted of billions of tiny cells” in an ESL student’s paper, they should guide the student to learn the grammatical collocations of the word “consist” by comparing its syntactic and pragmatic differences with words that that have similar meaning such as “comprise,” “compose,” and “make up.”

Tutors should provide further guidance when ESL writers still have difficulty understanding the syntactic and pragmatic differences between the words by presenting specific examples such as the following: • Water consists of Hydrogen and Oxygen.

• Water is made up of Hydrogen and Oxygen.

• Water is comprised of Hydrogen and Oxygen.

• Water comprises Hydrogen and Oxygen.

This way, students can see more clearly the syntactic and pragmatic differences of the expressions “consist of,” “be made up of,” “be comprised of,” and “comprise.” The process of helping ESL students learn how semantically similar words have different syntactic and pragmatic usages can ultimately help them develop self-editing strategies. As tutors lead students to develop their self-editing strategies by utilizing this type of dictionary, they become “educators” rather than just “editors.” As the very word suggests, “editing” is a short-term fix, but “educating” is a long term process.

Guiding students to develop self-editing skills is essential for fulfilling the mission of a writing center: to help students become better writers. Thus, in order to turn an “editing” moment into an “educating” moment, it is crucial that tutors be equipped with a good knowledge of how the English language works and to recognize the depth of the sentence level problems involved in the second language acquisition process.

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When “Editing” Becomes “Educating” • 24 Editing vs. Educating The strategy of organizing words in a systematic manner and reviewing them at regular intervals is very important for both word retention and facilitation of the student’s later production (Folse; Matsuda; McCarthy). Thus, as students learn collocational partnerships of words, tutors should foster their systematic reflection on their language acquisition process by guiding them to recognize the patterns of errors in their papers, to correct them, and to document them.

Many ESL students may feel quite embarrassed about errors in their writing and want to clean up all the errors that their instructors or writing center tutors point out. They correct simple errors, such as awkward sentence construction or word choices, and then they put away their paper. However, students may make the same mistakes over and over again if they just put away their paper after inserting other people’s feedback.

Often, students do not even realize that they make the same mistake over and over. If they are not aware of the problem, they won’t be able to fix it.

Thus, in order to help them become better writers, tutors should cultivate students’ ability to learn from the revision process and to more fully incorporate their reflective thinking into their writing process. As students reflect on their most frequent errors with guidance from tutors, they become more aware of their strengths and weaknesses as writers. And if the feedback they receive guides them to identify and document their errors under the guidance of a tutor, they can also develop self-editing skills. Research has shown that ESL students can become proficient selfeditors if they are provided with the necessary guidance and training (Cogie et al.; Ferris; Linville). Students can also realize that visiting the writing center is not just a one-time event. As noted earlier, “editing” is a shortterm fix, but “educating” is a long term process. Thus, it is important for tutors to foster students’ systematic reflection on their language acquisition process.

A pedagogical strategy that tutors can use to effectively cultivate students’ systematic reflection on their language acquisition process is to guide them to keep a vocabulary journal. Numerous studies indicate that reviewing vocabulary at regular intervals is a very effective technique for learners to develop a feel for their learned vocabulary and to enhance their learning of English (Carter; Roberts). Learners acquire new lexical items by meeting them at least seven times (Huizenga & Huizenga), and a minimum of 12 exposures to a word is needed for them to develop solid vocabulary knowledge of it (Meara). And overall, it takes at least seven years to acquire an academic vocabulary (Collier).

A vocabulary journal is more than just an error log or a feedback log. A vocabulary journal is a space where students can practice words and expand their meaning while they are acquiring new vocabulary. In their journals, students identify the patterns of errors in their papers, correct them, and document them by including personal examples (anecdotes, memories, or feelings) that can help them develop a feel for the target word and retrieve the word later. In order to increase their ability to use and retain the word, students should include a synonym or antonym of the word in their vocabulary journals (Nation). They should also document various pieces of information about the target word such as lexical and grammatical patterns, register, pronunciation, part of speech (e.g. noun, verb, adjective), etc. Keeping a vocabulary journal ultimately helps them develop receptive (reading) vocabulary into productive (writing) vocabulary. It can prevent students from being preoccupied with grammatical rules: they become more aware of the interdependence between lexis and grammar. Keeping a vocabulary journal can also help facilitate students’ metalinguistic awareness, which is crucial for their second language development.

Writing Center Tutors as Language Informants The main difference between the native and nonnative student conferences at writing centers is the increased emphasis on the tutor’s role as “an informant in the second language conference” (Powers 45). The concept of “informant”—rather than “facilitator” or “collaborator”—indicates the importance of providing clear, effective guidance for ESL writers. It points out that a more direct approach (rather than a dialectic approach) and a hands-on approach (rather than a hands-off approach) is needed when it comes to assisting ESL writers in their language acquisition process. The writing center tutor in an ESL session should not simply be “a living human body who is willing to sit patiently and help the student spend time with her paper” (Brooks 2). It is well known that the so-called minimalist approach is not effective when it comes to ESL tutoring sessions (Bruce and Rafoth; Cooper). In order to become an effective informant for ESL writers, tutors should take a more active approach—an approach that can have a long-term influence on their language acquisition and composing processes.

In reality, good grammar is often included as part of the intended outcomes for many writing courses.

The Writing Program Administration Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition clearly states the control of grammar and syntax as part of the intended outcomes. However, the teaching of grammar as a

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When “Editing” Becomes “Educating” • 25 primary focus of writing instruction is often perceived as “diminishing the importance of other levels of discourse” (Myers, “ReMembering” 610). Grammar teaching has a “negligible” and “harmful effect on writing” because it takes time away from other important rhetorical aspects of writing (Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer 37-38), and the knowledge of grammar is too complex for teachers and students to teach and learn (Hartwell). Indeed, many writing center tutors find that they are not “familiar enough with linguistic concepts to be able to answer ESL students’ questions” (Rafoth 213). Tutors do not make earnest efforts to improve their understanding of how the English language works because “English is made up of random rules and no real explanation is possible or that grammar is logical” (ibid). Tracing a decline in the Conference on College Composition and Communication sessions on “language” Susan MacDonald states in her article “the Erasure of Language” that “our difficulties in consistently naming and categorizing our relation to language study are signs of a professional weakness” (619). She argues: We have spent too much time on fruitless, reductive arguments and straw men and not enough time either on basic understanding of the English language or on sorting out, evaluating, and revisiting the arguments that have ended in the current impasse and the neglect of language. (618) Encouraging tutors to improve their understanding of how the English language works will benefit not only our ESL writers but also the professional discussions we have in writing centers, English departments, and on campus. With the number of international and immigrant students on university campuses rapidly growing, it is crucial for writing center tutors to have a good understanding of pedagogic grammar—grammar as “a set of teachable and learnable rules that are informed by usage-based descriptive grammars” (Matsuda 151). Various types of pedagogic grammar books are available on the market, but the pedagogic grammar books that I recommend for tutors are Michael Swan’s Practical English Usage (2005), Azar and Hagen’s Understanding and Using English Grammar (2009), Scott Thornbuy’s How to Teach Grammar (2000), and Celce-Murcia, Freeman, and Williams’s The Grammar Book: An ESL/EFL Teacher’s Course (1999).

Conclusion The demographics of US institutions of higher education have greatly changed over the last four decades with an increasing enrollment of international and immigrant students in writing courses and their

subsequent usage of writing centers across the nation.

Given the rapidly growing number of L2 students on university campuses, it is increasingly important for writing centers to develop effective tutoring strategies for ESL students’ second language acquisition process.

In order to develop more culturally responsive tutoring practices for ESL writers at writing centers, I argue that we must reflect on the good intentions behind the “NoEditing” policy and recognize the unrealistic expectations for language learning and academic literacy development embedded in it.

The writing center is a meeting point between languages, literacies, cultures, and learning styles.

Institutionally, the writing center is a meeting point between the English Department and the Linguistics Department on campus. It is indeed the “contact zone” (Pratt) on campus. When writing center pedagogy prioritizes higher order concerns over lower order concerns by separating language issues from writing issues (as if a “Language Skills Center” should be established to address only “lower order concerns”), the writing center is no longer the contact zone. The “No-Editing” policy reinforces the division of labor between ESL writing teachers and composition teachers, and the institutional boundary that separates the English Department from the Linguistics Department.

These days, the new term “multiliteracy center” is used to re-define the work of the writing center as a multimodal activity in the oral, written, visual, and auditory dimensions (Trimbur 29). In order for a writing center to become a multiliteracy center in a true sense, it is crucial to embrace the actual needs of ESL writers by providing assistance in the oral, written, visual, and auditory dimensions. A writing center cannot become a true multiliteracy center, if it evades the responsibility to guide students in their language acquisition process by separating language issues from writing issues; ESL writers’ language acquisition process is an integral part of their composing process.

In this paper, I have discussed practical strategies that tutors can use to move a sentence-level tutoring process from an editor-dynamic to an educator-dynamic.

In order to facilitate ESL writers’ language acquisition process at writing centers, tutors should employ a lexical grammar approach that combines instruction in grammar with vocabulary. Thus, writing center administrators should provide the needed training in lexical grammar for their tutors to enhance tutors’ basic understanding of how the English language works. As illustrated in the paper, in order to turn an “editing” moment into an “educating” moment in ESL sessions, it is essential for tutors to have a good

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When “Editing” Becomes “Educating” • 26 knowledge of the pedagogical grammar of English as a second/foreign language.

Works Cited Azar, Betty Schrampfer, and Stacy A. Hagen.

Understanding and Using English Grammar. 4th ed.

White Plains: Pearson Longman, 2009. Print.

Blau, Susan R., and John Hall. “Guilt Free Tutoring: Rethinking How we Tutor Non-Native- English– Speaking Students." The Writing Center Journal 23.1 (2002): 23-44. Print.

Braddock Richard, Richard Lloyd-Jones and Lowell Schoer. Research in Written Composition. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1963.

Print.

Brooks, Jeff. “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work.” Writing Lab Newsletter 15.6 (1991): 1-4. Print.

Bruce, Shanti, and Ben Rafoth, eds. ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton/Cook, 2009. Print.

Carter, Ronald. Vocabulary: Applied Linguistic Perspectives.

London: Routledge, 1998. Print.

Celce-Murcia, Marianne, Diane Larsen-Freeman, and Howard Alan Williams. The Grammar Book: An ESL/EFL Teacher’s Course. 2nd ed. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1999. Print.

Connors, Robert. “The Erasure of the Sentence.”

College Composition and Communication 52 (2000): 96128. Print.

Cogie, Jane, Kimberly Strain, and Sharon Lorinskas.

“Avoiding the Proofreading Trap: The Value of Error Correction Strategies.” The Writing Center Journal 19.2 (1999): 19-39. Print.

Collier, Virginia. “Age and Rate of Acquisition of Second Language for Academic Purposes.”

TESOL Quarterly 21.4 (1987): 617-41. Print.

Cooper, Marylin. “Really Useful Knowledge: A Cultural Studies Agenda for Writing Centers.” The Writing Center Journal 14.2 (1994): 97-111. Print.

Ferris, Dana. “Can Advanced ESL Students Become Effective Self-Editors?” CATESOL Journal 8.1 (1995): 41–62. Print.

—————. Response to Student Writing: Implications for Second Language Students. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. Print.

Folse, Keith. Vocabulary Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Print.

Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” College English 47.2 (1985): 105-127. Print.

Hennings, Dorothy. “Contextually Relevant Word Study: Adolescent Vocabulary Development across the Curriculum.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 44.3 (2000): 268-279. Print.

Hinkel, Eli. Teaching Academic ESL Writing: Practical Techniques in Vocabulary and Grammar. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. Print.

Huizenga, Jan, and Linda Huizenga. Can You Believe It? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.

Knight, Susan. “Dictionary Use While Reading: The Effects on Comprehension and Vocabulary Acquisition for Students of Different Verbal Abilities.” Modern Language Journal 78.3 (1994): 285299. Print.

Kolln, Martha. and Gray, Loretta. Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects. Pearson Education, Inc., 2012. Print Laufer, Batia, and Yasukata Yano. “Understanding Unfamiliar Words in a Text: Do L2 Learners Understand How Much They Don’t Understand?”

Reading in a Foreign Language 13.2 (2001): 539-566.

Print.

Leki, Ilona. “Before the Conversation: A Sketch of Some Possible Backgrounds, Experiences, and Attitudes Among ESL Students Visiting the Writing Center.” ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors, 2nd edition. Eds. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2009. 1-17.

Print.

Lewis, Michael. The Lexical Approach. Hove, UK: Language Teaching Publications, 1993. Print.

Linville, Cynthia. “Editing Line by Line.” ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors, 2nd edition. Eds. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Portsmouth. NH: Heinemann, 2009. 116-131. Print.

Longman Language Activator: Helps You Write and Speak Natural English. Longman UK, 2002. Print.

Luppescu, Stuart, and Day, Richard. “Reading, Dictionaries, and Vocabulary Learning.” Language Learning 43.2 (1993): 263-287. Print.

MacDonald, Susan Peck. “The Erasure of Language.”

College Composition and Communication 58.4 (2007): 585-625. Print.

Matsuda, Paul. “Let’s Face It: Language Issues and the Writing Program Administrator.” WPA: Writing Program Administration 36.1 (2012): 141-163. Print.

McCarthy, Michael. Vocabulary. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996. Print.

McCarthy, Michael, and O’Dell, Felicity. English Collocations in Use. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.

Meara, Paul. Vocabulary in a Second Language. London: Center for Information on Language Teaching & Research, 1987. Print.

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When “Editing” Becomes “Educating” • 27 —————. “ReMembering the Sentence” College Composition and Computers 54.4 (2003a): 610-628.

Print.

Myers, Sharon. “Reassessing the ‘Proofreading Trap’: ESL Tutoring and Writing Instruction.” The Writing Center Journal 24.1 (2003b): 51-70. Print.

Nakamaru, Sarah. “Lexical Issues in Writing Center Tutorials with International and US- Educated Multilingual Writers.” Journal of Second Language Writing 19.2 (2010): 95-113. Print.

Nation, Paul. Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing.

New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.

North, Stephen. “The Idea of a Writing Center.”

College English 46 (1984): 433-46. Print.

Nowacki, Jessica. “An Ongoing ESL Training Program in the Writing Center.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 9.2 (2012): 1-4. Print.

Powers, Judith K. “Rethinking Writing Center Conferencing Strategies for the ESL Writer.” The Writing Center Journal 13.2 (1993): 39-47. Print.

Rafoth, B. “English for Those Who (Think They) Already Know It.” ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. 2nd ed. Eds. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Portsmouth. NH: Heinemann, 2009. 208216. Print.

Reid, Joy. “‘Eye’ Learners and ‘Ear’ Learners: Identifying the Language Needs of International Students and U.S. Resident Writers.” Grammar and the Composition Classroom: Essays on Teaching ESL for College-Bound Students. Eds. Patricia Byrd and Joy Reid. New York: Heinle and Heinle, 1998. 3-17.

Print.

Pratt, Mary. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91 (1991): 33-40. Print.

Roberts, Elaine. “Critical Teacher Thinking and Imaginations: Uncovering Two Vocabulary Strategies to Increase Comprehension.” Reading Horizons 4.1 (1999): 65-77. Print.

Swan, Michael. Practical English Usage. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.

Thornbury, Scott. How to Teach Grammar. Harlow: Pearson ESL, 2000. Print.

Trimbur, John. “Multiliteracies, Social Futures, and Writing Centers." The Writing Center Journal 20. 2 (2000): 29-32. Print.

Tschirner, Erwin. “From Grammar to Lexicon.” The Coming Age of the Profession. Ed. Jane Harper, Madeleine Lively, and Mary Williams. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle (1998): 113-28. Print.

Williams, Jessica, and Severino, Carol. “The Writing Center & Second Language Writers,” Journal of Second Language Writing. 13 (2004): 165-172. Print.

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GENERATION 1.5 WRITING CENTER PRACTICE: PROBLEMS WITH MULTILINGUALISM AND POSSIBILITIES VIA HYBRIDITY Liliana M. Naydan Penn State Abington lmn122@psu.edu In much writing center theory and practice, conversations about multilingual writers have tended to involve L2 writers. Often international students, these writers speak at least one language other than English, but they perhaps speak more than just one other language despite their L2 designation. They do not speak English as their first language, and when they come to English-language-based institutions of higher education, they find themselves needing to learn and learning English. More recently, however, the field of writing center scholarship has recognized complexity in the category of multilingualism.

Especially following the publication of Terese Thonus’s “Serving Generation 1.5 Learners in the University Writing Center,” Generation 1.5 or L1.5 writers have emerged as part and parcel of writing center practitioners’ and scholars’ conversations.

Neither L1 speakers and writers nor L2 necessarily, Generation 1.5 writers exist in a linguistic liminal space. Although much variation exists among Generation 1.5 writers and although Generation 1.5 writers do not inherently represent a single, transitional generation in a family’s immigrant history,1 Linda Harklau, K. M. Losey, and Meryl Seigal define them as writers with “backgrounds in US culture and schooling” who sustain identities that are “distinct from international students or other newcomers who have been the subject of most ESL writing literature” (vii). They differ from English as a Second Language (ESL) students in that they “are primarily ear learners,” and they may “have lost, or are in the process of losing, their home language(s) without having learned their writing systems or academic registers” (Thonus 18). They are neither here nor there in terms of their linguistic identities. Or, perhaps, they are both here and there.

In this essay, I build on Thonus’s efforts to include Generation 1.5 writers in writing center conversations by beginning the process of unOthering them. I underscore the fact that they exist not only as writers who inhabit writing centers as clients, as Thonus predominantly describes them, but as a relatively invisible population of consultants and administrators whose pedagogies and practices inevitably reflect their unique multilingual identities. I !

likewise build on Harry C. Denny’s work on writing centers and identity politics by considering the identity politics involved in Generation 1.5 writing center practitioner identity from the perspective of a Generation 1.5 writing center practitioner and scholar who in many ways identifies with Harklau, Losey, and Seigal’s definition. I argue that Generation 1.5 consultants and administrators exist as hybridized in accord with Homi Bhabha’s use of the term, and I examine ways in which they encounter opportunities to counter hegemonic thinking about English by engaging in the rhetorical practice of delivery. They can deliver different or, ideally, both aspects of their hybridized linguistic identities in the rhetorical situations that they encounter.2 And they, along with all writing center administrators who come to value hybridity, can thereby transform writing centers into hybrid Third Spaces of the sort that Bhabha theorizes.

They can populate their centers with consultants who feel prepared to counter monolingual hegemony; they can push the bounds of conversations involving identity politics and writing centers; they can change the physical and digital faces of their centers; and they can develop the services that they offer in order to promote a hybrid identity for the writing center. As a result, they can, to appropriate Bhabha’s words, engage in “a strategy of subversion” (89) that involves rhetorical “re-membering” or “putting together” a “dismembered past” to create a writing center future that recognizes, values, and promotes hybridity and counter-hegemonic social transformation (90).

“Well, We All Speak English as a First Language”: Hegemonic Writing Center Assumptions and a Counter-Hegemonic Theory of Generation 1.5 Identity as Hybrid “Well, we all speak English as a first language,” said a seasoned peer tutor whom I’d just recently met.

We were at a writing center staff meeting—one of my first as the director of this particular staff of predominantly L1-English-speaking writing center tutors at this particular predominantly L1-Englishspeaking American university. We had been talking

Generation 1.5 Writing Center Practice • 29 about our consultations with multilingual writers, a subject that soon emerged as a staple of our meetings, and a subject that so many writing-center-staffmeeting conversations across the U.S. center on. And then this tutor—so smart and so engaging in my experience with him thus far—had piped up over the slight yet comfortable hum of conversation to articulate this unsettling point. I watched his body language and could see that he planned to say more: he planned to continue this unsettling line of thought to the subtle nods of many around him. But before he could get his next words out, I intervened, still feeling jolted, and feeling quite different from the apparent, clearly defined L1-English-speaking insiders in this room. “I don’t,” I said, and all eyes turned to me, the newest member of this community. Silence replaced the comfort of the hum.

To this staff, I had clearly—albeit not intentionally—masqueraded as an L1 speaker of English. I could tell by the way they were looking at me. The assumption was that I, a young, white American woman, holder of an English Ph.D., and speaker of English without any accent that Othered me too radically if at all, spoke English as my first language. “I don’t,” I repeated into the silence, realizing that I didn’t quite yet know what to do other than to repeat myself since my remark was an eyebrow-raising conversation stopper. Then I continued: “I learned Ukrainian and English together.

Really, more Ukrainian first.” Others’ eyes still on me, I remember escaping for a moment into memory. I thought of my grandmother and mother in my Irvington, New-Jersey-based youth, each harping on any friend or family member who spoke English in my presence. “По якому?” they’d exclaim with a sense of urgency, meaning “In what language?” But beyond the bounds of my memory and within this silent room, eyes were still on me, and so I said more: “I’m basically something called a Generation 1.5 writer. I was born in the U.S., and so were my parents, but English wasn’t really their first language and it isn’t really mine, either.” I had learned this rough term for myself, Generation 1.5, only recently, so I imagined it was new to others, too, unless they’d read Thonus’s advice to tutors. I paused, then asked a question to make myself feel a bit less alone: “Is anybody else in here a Gen. 1.5?” A hand or two or maybe three crept toward visibility, making our heretofore invisible and quite small population of writing center practitioners, not clients, suddenly visible. Those few hands deconstructed the we/they, us/them binary that had instigated the at-this-point cautious exchange.

The hegemonic narrative that gets passed down among many L1 speakers of English—be they undergraduate students, consultants, faculty, or staff— and hence the narrative that functioned tacitly to start this staff meeting conversation goes something like this: we speak English, and that’s why we work in the writing center; they need to learn English, and they come to us so they can learn our insider English ropes.

This narrative creates no space for Generation 1.5 individuals as writing center professionals or faculty members, and it functions as part of the dark underbelly of the sort of master narrative of writing centers that Jackie Grutsch McKinney describes in Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers (2013).3 It casts its shadow on tidy conversations about multiliteracy as the future of writing centers.4 It likewise exposes the sort of deep tensions that surround the teaching of multilingual writers and their experiences in the U.S. As Bruce Horner et al. suggest in a commentary on the U.S educational system, “[t]raditional approaches to writing in the United States […] take as the norm a linguistically homogenous situation: one where writers, speakers, and readers are expected to use Standard English or Edited American English—imagined ideally as uniform—to the exclusion of other languages and language variations” (303). And this exclusion as hegemonic thinking creates it—one that Paul Kei Matsuda theorizes as “[t]he policy of containment and the continuing dominance of the myth of linguistic homogeneity”—in turn has “serious implications not only for international second language writers but also for resident second language writers as well as for native speakers of unprivileged varieties of English” (Matsuda 93). As Matsuda explains, “[m]any institutions place students into basic writing classes without distinguishing writing issues and language issues” even though “many basic writing courses […] are often designed for U.S. citizens who are native speakers of a variety of English” (Matsuda 93). Other and arguably more serious problems that hegemonic thinking about English creates may at least to some degree involve retention and success of nonL1 speakers of English enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities, as recent articles in Inside Higher Ed5 and The New York Times6 have intimated.

Generation 1.5 writers and writing center practitioners may not always recognize the ways in which their identities counter assumptions about L1 and L2 speakers of English because the monolingual hegemony that is inherently at play works to colonize everything, perhaps even the Generation 1.5 mind. But self-aware and supported Generation 1.5 writers and writing center practitioners can potentially function to deconstruct the us/them binary that perpetuates the

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Generation 1.5 Writing Center Practice • 30 kind of monolingual hegemony toward which my story and Horner et al.’s essay point. They can realize Denny’s vision of writing center environments in which “languages transform one another” and “possibilit[ies] for hybridity and L1 and L2 ways of knowing” exist (Denny 135). They can consciously come to inhabit a middle space that they always already inhabit whether they realize it or not: a space between L1 and L2 designations that foster mainstream perceptions of multilingualism. Hence they can refashion conceptions of multilingualism and emerge in and of themselves as what Bhabha might characterize and celebrate as hybridized.7 To be hybrid, writes Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994), is to be “neither the one thing nor the other” (49).

Hence L1 or L2 identities both emerge as possibilities along a continuum, not as definitive of linguistic identity. They emerge as relative poles on that continuum because of the existence of Generation 1.5s and because hybridity as it characterizes Generation 1.5s allows for “temporal movement and passage” that “prevents identities […] from settling into primordial polarities,” to appropriate Bhabha’s words (Bhabha 5).

Rhetorical situations, I suggest, inevitably influence the temporal movement of multilingualism and multilingual identity, especially as Generation 1.5s sustain it. To exist as “neither the one thing nor the other” does not inherently mean to always publically or simultaneously identify as both the one thing and the other (Bhabha 49). And in writing center practice, Generation 1.5 practitioners, like the writers who visit writing centers, may opt to remember, claim, andII.1 thereby deliver8 one identity over another based on a given rhetorical situation. In accord with conceptions of delivery as late-twentieth and early twenty-first century scholars have developed them, delivery of identity may emerge in spoken, written, visual, electronic, or multimodal form,9 and delivery of identity involves a conception of the self as an argument. To appropriate Erving Goffman’s theory of the performance of identity to my discussion of delivering identity,10 Generation 1.5 individuals who deliver their identities can “mobilize […] activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in [their] interests to convey” (Goffman 4). In other words, they can and perhaps inherently do have rhetorical intentions in mind as they deliver their monolingual selves, their multilingual selves, or their whole hybridized selves.

In everyday writing center practice and professional development, hybrid linguistic identity as I theorize it manifests in different ways and for different reasons, yet it typically manifests as

simplified. When rhetorical situations in writing centers involve multilingual individuals as writers or as colleagues, they may invite Generation 1.5 writing consultants or administrators to reveal their multilingual identities, albeit perhaps in simplified ways—ways that negate the complex reality of hybridity and the dramatically different language acquisition experiences and identities of Generation 1.5s and L2 international individuals. By contrast, rhetorical writing center situations that involve writers or other consultants who appear as overtly monolingual may prompt Generation 1.5 consultants to opt against explaining their unique forms of multilingualism and the upbringings that shaped them—even if there exists a problem with the hegemonic circumstances that ever make the performance of monolingual identity advantageous for a multilingual individual. Perhaps Generation 1.5 consultants and administrators feel that no clear kairos presents itself for the delivery of hybrid identity, perhaps explaining a complex sort of identity feels exhausting, or perhaps apparent risks even manifest for Generation 1.5 consultants or administrators, for instance the risk of showcasing a diminished knowledge of the non-English language or the risk of losing some semblance of English language ethos and hence insider status. Likewise, there exists the risk that opportunities for countering monolingual hegemonic thinking come to feel for some members of writing center communities like off-track and irrelevant digressions.

Theory as Practice: Hybrid Conceptions of Multilingualism as Multiliteracy in Everyday Twenty-First Century Writing Center Work If writing centers and the practitioners that comprise them are to avoid buttressing monolingual hegemony through inaction and non-articulation of hybrid realities, they must explore possibilities for making Generation 1.5 consultants feel comfortable enough to recognize, own, and reveal their complex and hybridized selves and engage in collaborative reflection as part of the very purpose of writing center work. These consultants can and should deliver in all rhetorical situations their nuanced, hybrid selves as opposed to selves that fit more neatly into the binaries that form a monolingual hegemony. Instead of working toward totalizing ends or seeing through the lens that a totalizing tradition bolsters, writing center practitioners who work as administrators or consultants might, in Bhabha’s terms, “remember that it is the ‘inter’—the cutting edge of translation and

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Generation 1.5 Writing Center Practice • 31 negotiation, the inbetween space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture” (56). They might engage in the complicated and messy work of positioning the sort of hybridity that characterizes Generation 1.5 identity as the philosophical center of their writing center missions and reflective actions in order to move Generation 1.5 writers, consultants, and the liminality that they represent from the metaphorical margins that have ignored their existence to the metaphorical center. They might thereby showcase means by which to move from theoretical conversations about the delivery of identity to practical knowledge—knowledge that helps to ward off uninformed or under-informed assumptions about Generation 1.5 and all multilingual writers. These kinds of conditions foster and respect that which is inter as opposed to that which is total. And they might, too, enable revelations about hybridized and thereby complex linguistic identities that both writers and consultants hold.

Writing centers might move hybridity to the metaphorical center by way of more nuanced and reflective discussions about multiliteracy that happen in staff meetings and activities that foster professional development. Characterized by the New London Group as involving “a multiplicity of discourses,” multiliteracy might take shape, on the one hand and in its most commonly discussed form, around “the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies” of the sort that David Sheridan theorizes in Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric (2010) (New London Group 61). On the other hand, multiliteracy of another and less prevalent variety—yet still a variety that the New London Group theorizes— might also make its way into writing center conversations. According to the New London Group, this type of multiliteracy speaks to “our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalized societies,” and it is multiliteracy of this sort in particular that I argue is poised to break new ground in writing center conversations (New London Group 61). As the New London Group explains, [d]ealing with linguistic differences and cultural difference has now become central to the pragmatics of our working, civic, and private lives.

Effective citizenship and productive work now require that we interact effectively using multiple languages, multiple Englishes, and communication patterns that more frequently cross cultural, community, and national boundaries. (64)

Certainly, writing consultants must prepare themselves to help multilingual writers recognize, develop, and deliver their own linguistic multiliteracies, but they must, too, look inward to unearth the languages that they speak and the means by which those languages position them as prospective agents of change who can work to counter monolingual hegemonic thinking.

And if writing center practitioners engaged in professional development activities examine their own linguistic multiliteracies as they might always already exist, a term such as multilingual might continue to stretch beyond just the recognition and inclusion of Generation 1.5 writers. It might stretch, for better and for worse in ways but undoubtedly to counterOthering ends, to recognize and more readily include a still more diverse array of individuals, for instance L1 speakers of English who learn languages as part of their academic or other life experiences.

Writing center administrators and consultants who come to unearth their own multilingual multiliteracies via reflection might come to engage in reflective action by way of delivering their hybrid linguistic identities in everyday conversations with writers who visit the center. A full writing center staff’s commitment to drawing attention to multiliteracy as it exists in a wider array of writing center conversations with writers can help to create the sort of space that Generation 1.5 writing center practitioners need in order to feel comfortable recognizing, revealing, and delivering their identities as hybrid. This kind of commitment creates conditions for Generation 1.5s to showcase, to appropriate Bhabha’s words, the “depth” that exists “in the representation of a unified image of the self” (69).

Moreover, this kind of commitment allows them to escape juxtaposed rhetorical situations that do or do not prompt them to share their linguistic heritage.

Indeed, this kind of commitment helps to foster a third sort of rhetorical situation that speaks to the “Third Space” as Bhabha theorizes it (56): a space in which, to use Bhabha’s words, “we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves” (56). This space, therefore, is one in which the us/them binary that forms hegemonic thinking about language in writing centers in predominantly Englishspeaking countries begins to dissipate. It exists as a space in which hybridity is or can be the norm.

Beyond dialogue that all consultants might begin to incorporate into conversations with writers, the means by which writing centers showcase their multiliterate institutional identities in digital and physical environments might help to foster the writing center as the kind of Third Space that Bhabha envisions; it might help to foster the sort of space in which Generation 1.5 consultants will thrive. At the

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Generation 1.5 Writing Center Practice • 32 center that I formerly directed and a couple of years following the tense staff meeting exchange that I narrate, we worked to develop ourselves as a Third Space by showcasing our multilingual multiliteracies via digital multiliteracy on our online scheduling system. On our scheduler, which both consultants and writers could and would see, we showcased the fact of any writing consultant’s multilingualism, albeit not necessarily the language that writers spoke. And by representing the fact of any consultant’s multilingualism, we created an opportunity for digital multiliteracy to influence non-digital conversation between the writer and the consultant. We created a rhetorical situation that might prompt a consultant or a writer to ask a question or begin a quite relevant conversation about multilingualism as an ever-thorny albeit invaluable feature of identity. This sort of digital representation of collective writing center identity as counter-monolingual in many ways spoke and continues to speak to Theresa Sauter’s understanding of the interface between digital-age social media and identity. As Sauter suggests, social media creates the opportunity for people “to form understandings of themselves and their existence in complex, multinetworked modern realities” (836). And, to build on Sauter’s point, social or digital media representations of identity as multilingual might function as a means by which to revise perceptions of writing center identity.

Likewise, at this center, we developed our center’s identity as a Third Space via non-digital, physical representations of ourselves. Most notably, via a remodel into which I had input, we provided greetings in multiple languages on the front of a door leading to the writing center. Among our Generation 1.5 consultants, consultants who were L1 speakers of languages other than English, and consultants who were L2 or L3 speakers of languages other than English, we had, for instance, speakers of Arabic, French, Modern Hebrew, and Korean. And hence our door read, for example, “!"#$ !"#%&,” “Bienvenue,” “‫הבאים ברוכים‬,” and “ .” I even included a Ukrainian language greeting on the door to reflect my own Generation 1.5 Ukrainian-American heritage. As a result, consultants, writers, and other employees of our institution alike saw that our writing center and writing centers in general can and do exist as multilingual and multiliterate spaces. Multilingual writers and consultants felt welcome if their language or one akin to it appeared on the door. By contrast, monolingual writers were confronted with the reality of multilingualism as multiliteracy as a thing to be celebrated, not buried or denied. Although I left my

position at this center soon after its remodel, I highly doubt that staff members who attend staff meetings that take place in this center now will be likely to characterize our center’s inhabitants as monolingual with any degree of ease. Indeed, the whole of our university community, not just our writing center, emerged as a recognized multilingual and hybrid community via our remodel.

Revealing and coming to position as central to writing center identity the multilingual multiliteracies of writing center practitioners might in turn lead to developments in everyday writing center services, as it did at the center I formerly directed. Multiliteracy positions rhetoric as central to communication in different modes of discourse, and writing centers functioning as multiliteracy centers might complement their work with writers and writing with work with conversationalists engaging in conversations.

Consultants at the center I formerly directed took a course that I helped to develop: a course that prepared them to facilitate conversation circles for multilingual language learners of English. These conversation circles allowed international English language learners to put English into dialogue with their home language or languages, and it thereby provided some semblance of validation for their identities as hybrid. In turn, monolingual and multilingual consultants alike had opportunities to reflect on what they learned from engaging in dialogue with international students.

Perhaps, too, writing centers will also see conversation circle opportunities arise to support learners of other languages. In other words, writing centers might have conversation circles, for instance, for speakers of Spanish, Mandarin, or other languages that L1 English speaking members of the university community need to learn and are learning. English might reemerge as just one of an array of useful languages to know instead of existing as central to the propagation of a monolingual hegemony in the U.S. Moreover, writing center administrators could work to foster the emergence of consultations about English-language writing that happen in multiple languages or in languages other than English to make visible the contact zone that exists as invisible within any multilingual writer, but especially within Generation 1.5 writers. At the center I formerly directed, we certainly strived to hire multilingual consultants in order to counter the expectations of monolingualism that Helena Wahlstrom asserts “students and scholars” have about writing centers (10),11 yet we also attempted to build on the means by which we already existed as multilingual. I encouraged consultants who had listed themselves on our scheduling system as multilingual to converse with

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Generation 1.5 Writing Center Practice • 33 writers in a language other than English if they shared such a language or to move between languages in accord with the sort of translingual approach that Horner et al. describe.12 If consultants and writers did not share a language other than English, I encouraged them to introduce one another to their respective nonEnglish tongues and deliver their respective linguistic identities to showcases the existence of hybridity in our interfaces with one another. I encouraged them to counter monolingual hegemonic thinking and foster hybridity through their everyday attention to multilingualisms that always already exist among them.

Hence, with my own Generation 1.5 hybrid identity at the center of my administrative thinking, I encouraged them to recognize that they can exist as an in-largepart de facto version of what Noreen G. Lape calls “a truly Multilingual Writing Center (MWC)”: a center in which “tutors who are literate in multiple languages and skilled as global citizens can work with writers as they construct their voices—linguistically, rhetorically, and discursively—in order to participate in the global exchange of ideas” (1-2).

Subverting the Narrative of Old and ReMembering the Writing Center as a Multilingual Multiliteracy Center Envisioning writing center futures that shape themselves around conversations involving Generation 1.5 identity, hybridity, translinguality, multilingualism, and multiliteracy is never idealistic or tidy work. It’s messy and it’s challenging despite the marketable sort of picture that it presents in an everglobalizing twenty-first century. Perhaps inevitably, this work gets its thorny aura because it involves revisiting and rethinking the ways in which we have come to frame and propagate our writing center past—the heroic master narrative that has come to shape our field’s identity and that some of us may continue to deliver when we explain who we are and what we do. Envisioning and delivering writing center futures in less idealized terms involves exposing the connection between memory and delivery and hence the notion that delivery at any given moment necessitates memory in some mode or medium.13 It involves seeing that memory and delivery “work in synergistic relation with the other rhetorical canons” of invention, arrangement, and style (Horner x).

Given the failure of the us/them binary that falsely positions Generation 1.5 writers among other multilingual writers as outside of the writing center as opposed to the consultants and administrators who shape its identity from the inside, any theoretical or practical everyday work that attempts to rewrite the

narrative of old functions, to appropriate Bhabha’s words, as “a strategy of subversion” (89). Similarly, Denny expresses writing center theory and practice of this nature as inevitably subversive. As he explains, subversion as everyday actions manifest it involves “an awareness of one’s environment, a sort of street savvy applied to spaces of domination. Subversion also involves performing in ways that are consistent with the mainstream, in ways that disguise challenges or knowledge being shared among confederates” (79).

Subversion thereby involves relative insiders working as allies to outsiders. It involves insiders and outsiders moving together between metaphorical social and academic insides and outsides in order to deliver subversive ideas that call into question existing hegemonic order as it exists in ever-corporatizing universities. It involves a celebration of thorny and messy realities for their counter-idealistic, countercorporate possibilities in everyday work.

To recover, or, to use language employed by Bhabha, to “re-member” a new narrative in our own subversion’s wake is far from an easy or painless task (90). As Bhabha explains, “[r]emembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present” (90). And, much like identity itself, which, for Bhabha, “is never a priori, nor a finished product” and “only ever the problematic process of access to an image of totality,” the new narrative that emerges in the wake of re-membering must shake totalizing pressures to exist first and foremost as part of a process rather than a finished a product (73). It must remain open to continually re-membering itself as new generations of writing center inhabitants actively interrogate their own identities in staff meetings, in consultations, and in the scholarship they produce. It must remain open to the new realizations to which these hybrid inhabitants come, be those realization about themselves, their centers, or their field, and it must deliver that hybridized identity to institutional powers in strategic ways. Moreover, this new narrative that recognizes the hybridity that resides within must remain open to embracing the array of hybridities that exist beyond its bounds in order to position itself as a change agent that can give voice and ascribe greater value in general to liminal ways of thinking and working in the world.

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Notes

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Generation 1.5 Writing Center Practice • 34 1. For instance, even third generation Americans might have a non-English language of the home.

2. Thanks to Ana Guay for conceiving of the idea for and organizing the 2014 NCPTW/IWCA panel, “Performing Our Selves in the Writing Center: Writing Center Practice as the Rhetorical Delivery of Identity.”

My conversations with Guay and my participation in her panel very much helped me to write this essay.

3. As McKinney explains, the master narrative that shapes writing center practice portrays writing centers as “comfortable, yet iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” (3).

4. See Liliana M. Naydan’s “Just Writing Center Work in the Digital Age: De Facto Multiliteracy Centers in Dialogue with Questions of Social Justice.”

5. According to Elizabeth Redden, in a “survey of international education professionals, respondents identified top reasons for student attrition as being transfer to a ‘better fit’ institution (67 percent chose this option), followed by financial difficulties (64 percent), academic difficulties (62 percent), inadequate English language skills (40 percent) and dissatisfaction with location (34 percent).”

6. As Karin Fischer reports, results from C.K. Kwai’s recent study suggest “that English-language skill was not a significant factor in foreign-student retention, at least as measured by performance on standardized English-proficiency examinations.” But Fischer points out that after the session Mr. Kwai cautioned that educators ought not to read too much into the seeming lack of connection between performance on English-language exams and retention. He noted a complaint by both international administrators and classroom teachers that such exams were often a better measure of test-taking ability than English skill, especially in countries with traditions of strong test preparation.

7. It is important to note that in conversations about postcolonialism, hybridity isn’t always considered as a positive force, nor should it be considered as inherently positive. As Anjali Prabhu suggests, hybridity is “an enticing idea in current postcolonial studies. In its dominant form, it is claimed that it can provide a way out of binary thinking, allow the inscription of agency of the subaltern, and even permit a restructuring and destabilizing of power” (1). But “[t]hese assertions need to be tested” (1).

8. As Aristotle puts it in On Rhetoric, delivery, one of the five canons of classical rhetoric, involves “the style of expression” of a piece of rhetoric (3.1). And as he continues, “delivery has just as much to do with

oratory as with poetry,” and it, too “found a way into the arts of tragic drama and epic recitation” (3.1).

9. For instance, as John Frederick Reynolds explains, by the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the classical notion of delivery comes to involve “equivalences between oral, written and electronic pronunciatio and actio” (4).

10. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), sociologist Erving Goffman theorizes identity as involving performance. Goffman observes that [s]ometimes the individual will act in a thoroughly calculating manner, expressing himself in a given way solely in order to give the kind of impression to others that is likely to evoke from them a specific response he is concerned to obtain. Sometimes the individual will be calculating in his activity but be relatively unaware that this is the case. Sometimes he will intentionally and consciously express himself in a particular way, but chiefly because the tradition of his group or social status require this kind of expression [...]. Sometimes the traditions of an individual's role will lead him to give a well-designed impression of a particular kind and yet he may be neither consciously nor unconsciously disposed to create such an impression. (6) According to Ana Guay, Goffman’s work speaks to writing center practice in that writing center practitioners consistently perform their identities.

11. As Wahlstrom explains, “[a]s both an ‘ESL’ student and a tutor in the English language, [she] not only represents a group that writing center theory views as problematic, but [she is] also someone whom both students and scholars rarely expect to find in the writing center” (10). She continues, suggesting that she, “[a]s a multilingual writing tutor who came to the United States to study as an undergraduate” is at a peculiar crossroads: Students come to [her] expecting a native speaker, while [her] background places [her] in the writing center’s most archetypal customer group.

[She] urge[s] students to write candidly, to cut unnecessary hedging and hesitation, to jump right in and write boldly from the heart—while simultaneously concealing [her] true identity as best [she] can. (10) 12. As Horner et al. explain, [i]n short, a translingual approach argues for (1) honoring the power of all language users to shape language to specific ends; (2) recognizing the linguistic heterogeneity of all users of language both within the United States and globally; and (3) directly confronting English monolingualist

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Generation 1.5 Writing Center Practice • 35 expectations by researching and teaching how writers can work with and against, not simply within, those expectations. Viewing differences not as a problem but as a resource, the translingual approach promises to revitalize the teaching of writing and language. By addressing how language norms are actually heterogeneous, fluid, and negotiable, a translingual approach directly counters demands that writers must conform to fixed, uniform standards. (305) 13. For instance, Reynolds suggests that memory transcends memorization in that it exists as mnemonics, memorableness, databases, and psychology (4-12).

Works Cited Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans.

George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Print.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. 1994.

London: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Denny, Harry C. Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-To-One Mentoring. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2010. Print.

Fischer, Karin. “Helping Foreign Students Thrive on U.S. Campuses.” New York Times. New York Times, 3 Mar. 2014. Web. 17 Aug. 2015.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959. Print.

Guay, Ana, Stacy Lecznar, Liliana M. Naydan, and Penny Savryn. “Performing Our Selves in the Writing Center: Writing Center Practice as the Rhetorical Delivery of Identity.” National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing / International Writing Centers Association Conference, Orlando. 2014. Panel.

Harklau, Linda, Kay M. Losey, and Meryl Siegal, eds. Generation 1.5 Meets College Composition: Issues in the Teaching of Writing to U.S.-Educated Learners of ESL. Mahwah, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1999.

Print.

Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur. “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach.”

College English 73.3 (2011): 303-21. Print.

Horner, Winifred Bryan. “Introduction.” Rhetorical Memory and Delivery: Classical Concepts for Contemporary Composition and Communication. Ed. John Frederick Reynolds. Hillsdale, New Jersey: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1993. ix-xii. Print.

Lape, Noreen G. “Going Global, Becoming Translingual: The Development of a Multilingual

Writing Center.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 38.3-4 (2013): 1-6. Print.

Matsuda, Paul Kei. “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition.” Cross Language Relations in Composition. Ed. Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2010. Print.

McKinney, Jackie Grutsch. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2013. Print.

Naydan, Liliana M. “Just Writing Center Work in the Digital Age: De Facto Multiliteracy Centers in Dialogue with Questions of Social Justice.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 11.1 (2013). Web. <http://praxis.uwc.utexas.edu/index.php/praxis/ article/view/146/html> The New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Harvard Educational Review 66.1 (1996): 60-92. Print.

Prabhu, Anjali. Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects. Albany: State U of New York P, 2007.

Print.

Redden, Elizabeth. “Why They Stay or Leave.” Inside Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed, 28 May 2014. Web. 17 Aug. 2015.

Reynolds, John Frederick. “Memory Issues in Composition Studies.” Rhetorical Memory and Delivery: Classical Concepts for Contemporary Composition and Communication. Ed. John Frederick Reynolds. Hillsdale, New Jersey: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1993. 1-15. Print.

Sauter, Theresa. “‘What’s on your mind?’ Writing on Facebook as a tool for self-formation.” New Media & Society 16.5 (2014): 823-39. Print.

Thonus, Terese. “Serving Generation 1.5 Learners in the University Writing Center.” TESOL Journal 12.1 (2003): 17-24. Print.

Wahlstrom, Helena. “Imposter in the Writing Center—Trials of a Non-Native Tutor.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 38.3-4 (2013): 10-13. Print.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 13, No 2 (2016)

ARE OUR WORKSHOPS WORKING? ASSESSING ASSESSMENT AS RESEARCH Justin B. Hopkins Franklin & Marshall College justin.hopkins@fandm.edu I’m not alone when I say I’ve spent time grappling with assessment. The final issue of Writing Lab Newsletter includes a series of reflections on the topic, responding specifically to Neil Lerner’s seminal 1997 article on assessment, “Counting Beans and Making Beans Count.” Even more pertinent to my purposes is Holly Ryan and Danielle Kane’s contribution to Writing Center Journal, “Evaluating the Effectiveness of Writing Center Classroom Visits: An Evidence-Based Approach.” Similar to Ryan and Kane, I’ve been evaluating writing center classroom visits. More specifically, I’ve been evaluating Franklin and Marshall College’s writing center’s in-class workshop program.

Ten years ago, we began offering workshops on topics with which faculty members felt their students struggled, ranging from higher-order, macro-concerns like constructing a strong thesis statement to lowerorder, micro-concerns like correctly using commas.

Now I direct the program, preparing presentations with examples and exercises, and turning the materials over to the Center’s undergraduate tutors, who lead the sessions.

Guiding Questions I feel fairly confident of the program’s overall success just by looking at some simple numbers. In 2015/16, faculty requested over 170 in-class writing workshops, compared to sixty-five in 2005/06, the first full year of the program. We’ve more than doubled our output in a decade, which means we must be doing something right. But what, precisely? More important, how might we yet improve the service? Ellen Schendel and William J. Macauley, Jr. insist in Building Writing Center Assessments that Matter, “Good assessment drives positive change” (xx). We want positive change, so how can we demonstrate our accomplishments while still soliciting constructive criticism to achieve that change? Simply put, how do we use assessment to get better?

Ideally, we would run an extensive experiment, empirically demonstrating that the workshops dramatically improve students’ actual writing skills, but such a study would prove too big a bite to chew at the moment. However, we can evaluate the impact of the workshops more generally, and still usefully. Did the students think and feel the workshops were !

worthwhile, and if so, how and why, and if not, how and why not? And again, what can we do to improve?

The most obvious way to answer those questions is to ask those who participate in the workshops what works and what doesn’t. We’ve done that. But I’m not convinced we’ve always done that as well as we could.

Hence this essay, in which I’ll explore the evolution of our student evaluation form and, in particular, how the different versions of the form have navigated the channel between qualitative and quantitative assessment, as well as showing how my project reflects bigger issues regarding assessment and research.

Dichotomy?

I will examine how assessment relates to research.

In their recent Researching the Writing Center, Rebecca Day Babcock and Terese Thonus draw a definite distinction between the two practices, though they note, “assessment can easily pave the way to research” (5). They also acknowledge that research and assessment share such key characteristics as a common goal—inquiry and scholarly problem-solving—and methods of data collection (4). Given Babcock and Thonus’s insistence on a separation of terms alongside observations of their similarities, I remain confused, and a bit concerned, about how to discern the dividing line.

Apparently, according to Dana Lynn Driscoll and Sherry Wynn Perdue’s even more recent “RAD Research as a Framework for Writing Center Inquiry,” I’m not alone in my uncertainty. Their study of Writing Center Administrators reveals a considerable lack of consensus when it comes to distinguishing the two phenomena: 18% of those surveyed indicated “Research is assessment” (113), and one interviewee, Dara, went further: “Research is assessment; assessment is research” (118). With these perspectives proliferating, perhaps it is no surprise that my other guiding questions in this essay include: what is the difference between research and assessment, and which am I performing?

Definitions For now, I will continue with the assumption that I am involved in research, based on an Oxford English Dictionary definition: “Systematic investigation or

Are Our Workshops Working? • 37 inquiry aimed at contributing to knowledge of a theory, topic, etc., by careful consideration, observation, or study of a subject” (2a). I claim that my consideration was careful and my investigation systematic, and it is certainly “presented in written (esp. published) form” (2c). On the other hand, to support their contention (and relying on the American Heritage Dictionary rather than the OED), Babcock and Thonus provide a comparative etymological breakdown of the words “assess” and “research” and interpret their findings: “Research, then, does not necessarily involve evaluation or judgment” (4, emphasis mine). Fair enough. But must research by nature reject evaluation? I find nothing in the OED (or their reading of the AHD, for that matter) to preclude the possibility of research involving judgment.

Furthermore, Babcock and Thonus conclude, “Nor does [research] seek immediate application to a local context; rather, it opens inquiry beyond the local context (the individual writing center) to global contexts and applications” (4). Again, I see no reason research must refrain from engagement with the local, though I certainly acknowledge the value of its connection with the global. I will return to this issue after describing my project because the automatic assumption of research as exclusively global (and greater in value?) and assessment as local (and lesser in value?) concerns me. Along the way, I request that the reader reflect on whether or not and how the assessment project I describe conforms to his or her, Babcock and Thonus’s, Driscoll and Perdue’s, Dara’s, the OED’s, the AHD’s, or any other definition of research.

Methodological Approach My methodological approach, as mentioned above, included collecting both quantitative and qualitative data. Though there is a history of tension, if not of conflict, between these methods (see Doug Enders’s “Assessing the Writing Center” and Cindy Johanek’s Composing Research), the two can certainly and comfortably coexist. In an interchapter contributed to Schendel and Macauley’s book, longtime assessment scholar Neal Lerner explains the subtleties of the separate strategies and ultimately reminds us, “qualitative and quantitative research need not be mutually exclusive (or hostile camps)” (112). Rather than picking one side, or pitting the two against each other, we should—and I have tried to—approach research/assessment from both angles.

First Attempt at Assessment

Any assessment is better than what our workshop program started with, which was nothing more than the simplest tally. Merely counting did show good things happening. By the end of 2006/07, the number of workshops had risen to just under one hundred—a growth of 50%. However, as happily as we watched the numbers climb, we knew, as Schendel and Macauley observe (paraphrasing Isabelle Thompson), “counting visits simply won’t be enough” (13). We welcomed, therefore, the administration’s request for more detailed assessment procedures. We designed a feedback form (Figure 1) that tutors distributed at the end of each workshop. The form asked students four questions regarding what I’ll call clarity, novelty, engagement, and response. Students could answer each question on a 4-point scale: quite negative, somewhat negative, somewhat positive, extremely positive.

Clearly, quantitative questions dominated the form, but we solicited qualitative responses too, by prompting students to provide “Additional comments” below or on the back of the half-sheet of paper. This is the form we used for four semesters: Fall 2007, Spring 2009, and academic year 2010-2011. (The several semesters unassessed were due to changing leadership models, during which evaluation went by the wayside.)

Table 1 shows our quantitative results. Clarity consistently scored the highest, with less than 10% marking less than a 3 in any given period. Novelty scored much lower, with at least 75% marking less than a 3 each period. Engagement and response were more balanced, marked mostly with 2s and 3s, though both categories noticeably improved from 2007 to 2011/12.

From these numbers I could conclude the workshops clearly presented material with which students (thought they) were already familiar, with which they were moderately engaged, and to which they might respond, “meh.”

Comments on the First Form Actually, they did respond more articulately, if not always less ambiguously. Over the three years, we received additional comments on an average of about 22% of the forms returned. These comments ranged widely in usefulness. About half contained praise.

Praise is nice. But does it help? Schendel and Macauley say maybe not: Many WCDs use satisfaction surveys, and when the data comes back consistently high, the[y] accept that their centers are succeeding. However, these kinds of results, though useful and appreciated, don’t allow the directors to continue to develop the writing center from those data. (20).

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Are Our Workshops Working? • 38 I was happy to pass along compliments like “Judith is awesome! She should just teach the class because of her vitality and [British] accent!” But these kind words did not concretely benefit either Judith or the program.

On the other hand, neither did unconstructive criticism like “Condescendingly trivial information. Please teach at a level relevant to college students.” We know we often enter classes that include different levels of development, and we try to present ideas that can

challenge and support everyone, but we also know that some seniors don’t need what some first-years do, and there’s not a lot we can do about that. (Then again, some seniors might need more than they think they do, and some students surveyed gratefully acknowledge the pedagogical usefulness of repetition: “Good reinforcements of ideas that had already been taught but never put to use.”)

Some comments confirmed the philosophy behind the program and undergraduate tutoring in general.

Our center operates on the assumption that students value peer (in addition to professional) support, and when we hear “I liked that they related the points to their own writing—one of the perks of having students help students” we can reaffirm our approach. Perhaps best of all, we often read some variation of “I’ll definitely make an appointment” meaning we’re achieving one of the workshop program’s main goals: encouraging students to visit the center.

However, even more useful was the constructive criticism we occasionally found. We welcomed complaints that led to improvement. For instance, we

were informed our examples were “fantastically boring.

Please pick an example essay about something a bit more exhilarating than transcendentalism.” So we threw that essay out. We were discouraged from flat delivery: “It is hard to engage students by just reading from a packet of handouts.” So we worked harder training tutors to interact more with the audience. We were chided for rushing: “Slow down on the slides; taking notes was not feasible.” So we told tutors to take their time, talking at a reasonable pace.

Second Attempt at Assessment These suggestions were invaluable, but by the end of spring semester 2012, I realized I just wasn’t

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Are Our Workshops Working? • 39 satisfied with the form. Some of the numbers seemed redundant. Did we need to measure both engagement and response? And why waste space measuring novelty when we knew the majority of students would score it negatively? Also, the balance between qualitative and quantitative reporting was off: there simply were not enough stories.

I decided to put together a new form (Figure 2), fulfilling Schendel and Mcauley’s exhortation: “who wants to do assessment that is not as useful as it can be?” (20). I wanted to keep some numbers, but I condensed quantitative response to just two questions reflecting clarity and engagement, following a five-

point Likert scale. Two new questions required written, qualitative replies. The first asked students to compare the workshop to others they may have participated in.

The second asked if students would want to participate in another workshop in the future.

Table 2 shows the new form’s quantitative results for 2012/13. Clarity remained high, with over 97% marking a 4 or a 5. Likewise engagement, with less than 5% marking a 1 or a 2. Over 70% said yes, they would like to attend another workshop, and of those who said no or maybe, many indicated that their reluctance was due to lack of time, not interest. These were good—both positive and useful—numbers.

Comments on the Second Form

As hoped, however, some specific suggestions revealed real (and familiar) needs. We still needed to slow down: “The only thing I didn’t like was how fast we went through each exercise.” We still needed more interaction: “It helped, but it could have been more useful to look at other student’s writing to see how to improve it.” We still needed fresh examples: “Example for thesis statement about Catholicism is used again!?”

Some comments cast welcome, albeit conflicting, light on a particular aspect of the program. For example, we were (and are) experimenting with workshops without PowerPoint presentations, depending more on handouts and discussion.

Feedback on this issue split fairly evenly. Some liked it:

But what about the qualitative results? With nearly every form offering some kind of story, what do we learn from them? Some comments were inscrutable: “Learning writing in a class is more rhythmical than from books.” Some were positively impertinent: “Writing Center helpers are attractive.” Some were belligerent and rude: “No. I know how to write. I passed the 3rd grade.” A few were over-the-top enthusiastic: “Yes Yes Yes!!!!! I never learned how to formally write in high school—thank you. Please more!!!!”

Gratifying, grating, irritating, or incomprehensible, none of these narratives proves particularly useful.

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Are Our Workshops Working? • 40 “Most [workshops] have boring powerpoints. Using a good interesting [sic] paper [to guide discussion] was a good choice and kept me engaged.” Some did not: “I liked the power point workshops better. It got people way more engaged.” On another occasion, comments conflicted regarding a session in which we used magazine articles to demonstrate the effect of strong openings lines.

“Good magazine exercise” congratulated one. Another retorted: “I found the magazines distracting.” Apparently the cliché is correct: you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

Third Attempt at Assessment For my part, I was not completely pleased with the new forms. I did like the consolidation of the quantitative reporting, and I did value the additional comments, though they took an awful lot longer to process thoroughly. In “Approaching Assessment as if It Matters” Jean Hawthorne warns, “it’s important to do more than browse through the data and pull out interesting but anecdotal examples” (243), and with so many anecdotes, that temptation was certainly strong.

Comments on the Third Form Qualitatively, we seem to be finding our feet as well, as we find that, finally, the stories students tell are more useful than not. While randomly selecting the forms from one workshop, sure, we will still hear the

Furthermore, while I certainly didn’t think the comments were any less useful, I also didn’t think they were that much more useful than those from previous years.

Another round of revising the forms seemed necessary. After presenting my assessment project at MAWCA 2013, and having received excellent recommendations, I made several changes (Figure 3). I adapted the “Yes/No” binary options of whether or not students would want to participate in another workshop into a Likert scale, leaving room for more direct questions as to what was working and what was not.

Table 3 shows how little the numbers have changed from the previous year. Clarity has changed barely at all. Slightly more people remain neutral when it comes to engagement, 5% more marking a 3. For the most part, people still wanted to participate in another workshop, over 65% marking a 4 or a 5. Given the relative consistency of the numerical results, it seems safe to say we stand on increasingly solid ground, quantitatively.

occasional impertinent catcall: “[one of the presenting tutors] should pop out of a cake!” However, the majority of the sample gives good, helpful feedback. In answer to the question about what works best, we know that “the delivery” stands out—a common

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Are Our Workshops Working? • 41 theme, echoed by several: “She was very friendly” and “Loved her enthusiasm,” plus three mentions of how “straightforward” everything was. When it come to suggesting changes, some said, “Nothing” or “not much,” but others said “More examples” or “more individual time with the presenter.” Two called for shorter overall sessions, and three others for improvements to our PowerPoint presentations. And this is only a small selection of the roughly one thousand (very) short stories told in this year’s comment forms. With the combination of questions explicitly identifying our strengths and directly requesting recommendations for improvement, we may have finally hit on an ideal assessment tool. To me, at least, it is a satisfactory one with which to proceed. It seems appropriate to close this section with a comment answering the survey question of whether or not the student would like to participate in another workshop: “It would appear as though I cannot avoid them” followed by an emoticon—“!”—and parenthetical explanation: “(But I do always learn, so yes.)” Our workshop program isn’t going away, and neither is the need for assessment. Where exactly we do go with the workshops, and how we get there, depends on the assessment we perform.

Back to Definitions But what of Babcock and Thonus’s fine line between research and assessment? Which have I been doing all this while? I am reminded of Driscoll and Perdue’s initial championing of RAD (replicable, aggregable, and data-driven) research as opposed to “little more than anecdotal evidence, one person’s experience” (“Theory” 16). Is the latter all that this project represents? I hope not. I collected a lot of data, and I imagine others could replicate and aggregate the study, at least to some extent, adapting my methods and building on my findings. But perhaps I’m among the many who don’t fully understand, much less rigorously apply, the RAD model (Driscoll and Perdue “RAD Research” 123-125)? I’m convinced our assessment is no longer bad, but is it really RAD research? Babcock and Thonus would probably say no, arguing, “what [Muriel] Harris described as local research is better termed assessment” (4), but I’m not so sure of the sharp distinction. I tend to take Harris’s term more for face value: maybe research and assessment should not be differentiated so definitely. I have suggested that my project is both, but I leave that to the reader’s judgment.

However, I remain concerned by what seems an attempt to remove writing center research from the realm of the local. Yes, we need more research, ideally

including RAD, but does that paradigm threaten to overwhelm what has arguably worked for writing centers for a long time, and what might continue to work if we let it? I am speaking, of course, of lore. I realize that the analogy is not perfect, but I perceive a relationship between lore and local assessment, just as I (and others) perceive a relationship between data and global research. For example, Roberta Kjesrud, in her Writing Center Journal article “Lessons from Data: Avoiding Lore Bias in Research Paradigms,” pits Lore against Data, showing how limited and limiting the former can be: “I am now silencing Lore to let Data speak” (40). I take the lesson, but why must we set the two against each so antagonistically? It is a binary battle even Kjesrud “so wish[es] to avoid” (40), yet she engages in it all the same, and with results potentially if not probably damaging to Lore’s reputation. Surely difference need not lead to disagreement and destruction of one or the other? Just as qualitative and quantitative methodologies are compatible, surely local Lore (and assessment) and global Data (and research) can coexist, cooperate, and even collaborate, even if they aren’t the same to begin with?

Dichotomous Coexistence?

Some say no. Granted, Kjesrud attempts to soften her criticism of Lore: “Lore isn’t a villain. As a community of practice, we value our Lore for good reasons” (51). True, Driscoll and Perdue “stress that by conducting RAD research in writing centers, we are…not devaluing other paradigms and frameworks that have served and will continue to serve the WC community” (“RAD Research” 107). But I fear Kjesrud and Driscoll and Perdue’s and others’ arguments might have just that effect, eliminating or at least marginalizing lore and the local (and assessment).

For example, Driscoll and Perdue urge moving beyond the local “Uniqueness” factor that seemingly hinders RAD research, insisting that contrary to popular perception, “a great deal of similarity exists in the practices and procedures of [writing] centers” and recommending that research focus on the similarities rather than the differences (“RAD Research” 121). I might balk at this notion—do the similarities outweigh the differences between individual writing centers’ practices and procedures?—but even if I did concede, they further differentiate between “Unique Assessment Data” and “Reconceptualiz[ed] ‘Local’ Data.” The first they indicate is genuinely local (associated with assessment), the second more global (i.e., research).

Then they assert, “not all data are created equally” and their preference for the latter is plain (“RAD Research” 122). And they are not alone in that preference.

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Are Our Workshops Working? • 42 I do not disparage Kjesrud’s, Driscoll and Perdue’s, and Babcock and Thonus’s, and others’ efforts to bring writing center research into a bigger, more global conversation. I applaud those efforts, and I have made an effort to conform to RAD standards in my own assessment project. Yet I still believe there remains an important place for a focus on the local in writing center research, as in writing center assessment.

In a (global) world increasingly dominated by data, embracing RAD research without reservation risks reducing the local to “just” lore (or assessment)— un(der)appreciated, and un(der)used.

Let me provide an example to illustrate my point. I return to my initial comparison of my project with Ryan and Kane’s, which is presented as (RAD?) research. I have no wish at all to detract from their accomplishment—their study is admirable—but I must point out that in their “Limitations” section, they acknowledge one of the challenges facing many if not any writing center researchers wanting to conduct (RAD) research: “other types of institutions may experience different dynamics” (162). Despite Driscoll and Perdue’s assertion to the contrary (“RAD Research” 121), I suspect dynamics at other institutions of any type most likely differ quite a bit, which indeed limits the claims of universality for much, if not at all writing center research. Once more, I do not intend to reject RAD research, merely to challenge some of its assumptions, and to defend the kind of local lore that some would say is typical of assessment.

“We can and should use assessment to define what we are” [12].) Much as we all may want to conduct RAD research, much as we all want to contribute to the larger writing center community, must we not keep returning to the goal of local positive change in our own centers? Really, I suspect, more than an attempt at the comprehensive and global, much less the universal, what we actually crave at the most practical level is truly constructive assessment—assessment for us, not just of us.

Doing Our Best Rather than debate about binaries, though, maybe we had better just do what Scott Pleasant suggests in his Writing Lab Newsletter article, “It’s Not Just Beans Anymore; It’s Our Bread and Butter.” Pleasant reviews Neal Lerner’s work, describes his own assessment project, and offers advice for others: embrace the scientific method; work with experts whose knowledge can supplement your own; trust the data; and fit your project to the local assumptions about assessment (1011). Pleasant does distinguish between “writing center quantitative assessment or research” (11), but his emphasis throughout is on doing (whatever you call) what you’re doing well, rigorously, scientifically. I am convinced that such an approach to assessment elevates it to the level of research, even if it is not there to begin with.

In closing, I remember Neal Lerner’s advice about assessment in “Choosing Beans Wisely.” For me, the key to counting the right beans is his phrase “on our own terms” (1). (Frances Crawford calls Lerner’s advice “timeless and still relevant today” and insists, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 13, No 2 (2016) www.praxisuwc.com!

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Are Our Workshops Working? • 43 !

Figures

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Works Cited Babcock, Rebecca Day and Terese Thonus. Researching the Writing Center. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2012. Print.

Crawford, Frances. “Reflection on Lerner’s Bean Counting.” Writing Lab Newsletter 39.9-10 (2015): 12. Print.

Driscoll, Dana Lynn and Sherry Wynn Perdue. “RAD Research as a Framework for Writing Center Inquiry: Survey and Interview Data on Writing Center Administrators’ Beliefs about Research and Research Practices.” Writing Center Journal 34.1 (2014): 105-134. Print.

---. “Theory, Lore, and More: An Analysis of RAD Research in Writing Center Journal, 1980-2009.”

Writing Center Journal 32.2 (2012): 11-39. Print.

Enders, Doug. “Assessing the Writing Center: A Qualitative Tale of a Quantitative Study.” Writing Lab Newsletter 29.10 (2005): 6-9. Print.

Hawthorne, Jean. “Approaching Assessment as if It Matters.” The Writing Center Director’s Resource Book.

Ed. Christina Murphy and Byron L. Stay. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2006.

Print. Johanek, Cindy. Composing Research: A Contextualist Paradigm for Rhetoric and Composition.

Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2000. Print.

Kjesrud, Roberta D. “Lessons from Data: Avoiding Lore Bias in Research Paradigms.” Writing Center Journal 34.2 (2015): 33-58. Print.

Lerner, Neal. “Choosing Beans Wisely.” Writing Lab Newsletter 26.1 (2001): 1-5. Print.

---. “Of Numbers and Stories: Quantitative and Qualitative Assessment Research in the Writing Center.” Building Writing Center Assessments that Matter. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2012. 108-114. Print.

Pleasant, Scott. “It’s Not Just Beans Anymore; It’s Our Bread and Butter.” Writing Lab Newsletter 39.9-10 (2015): 7-11. Print.

“Research.” Oxford English Dictionary Online Edition.

2015. Web. Ryan, Holly and Danielle Kane. “Evaluating the Effectiveness of Writing Center Classroom Visits: An Evidence-Based Approach.” Writing Center Journal 34.2 (2015): 145-172. Print.

Schendel, Ellen and William J. Macauley, Jr. Building Writing Center Assessments that Matter. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2012. Print.

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THE PEER PERSPECTIVE AND UNDERGRADUATE WRITING TUTOR RESEARCH Christopher Ervin Western Kentucky University christopher.ervin@wku.edu As a tutor, you are now engaged in this professional activity.

Happily, it is a collaborative and friendly profession, one that welcomes members at all levels—peer, graduate, professional, administrative. –Ryan and Zimmerelli (102) As I considered how to open this essay, I was rereading Ryan and Zimmerelli’s Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors and came across the passage above, which prompted me to think about how my “membership” in this profession has moved through three of the four “levels” they refer to (peer, graduate, and administrative) and has positioned me differently each time in relation to student writers. As a graduate student, I was growing into the role of writing instructor that allowed me an insider’s perspective into “what teachers want” from student writing, a perspective I gladly shared with student writers, hoping that my emerging expertise would add to my existing toolbox of tutoring techniques. Later, as a director, my relationship with students shifted; my focus became the “bigger picture” issues—recruiting thoughtful, responsible consultants, making the writing center more accessible to students who historically would not have sought help in the center, and so on. Gone was the hybrid insider/outsider perspective that I had enjoyed as a graduate consultant. But before I worked in the center during my graduate years, and before I held administrative positions as a doctoral student and later as a faculty member, I was an undergraduate peer tutor, and my relationship with students was that of a fellow student writer, nothing more. Or at least that’s how I described myself to student writers.

Because of the nature of my position as a Writing Tutor, I was some kind of authority in the eyes of the first-year writers who were required to spend three hours per week in the Developmental Studies Writing Lab where I worked. International students might even have called me a “teacher,” a misunderstanding I dutifully corrected. But even at that time, when I claimed no more expertise in writing except the expertise that comes to any writer who practices the craft, I knew I was developing a perspective that was unique among undergraduates, a “peer-but-more-thanpeer” perspective. Years later, as a director, I began to wonder how much we cultivate, with intent, the !

unique perspective of our undergraduate peer tutors.

To what degree do we enable tutors to take advantage of the peer perspective in ways that contribute to their own tutoring practice, to their local writing centers, and to the discipline as a whole? In this essay I argue that not only are peer writing tutors professionals, but they are uniquely-positioned professionals in writing centers who inhabit an ephemeral “peer perspective” that has the potential to contribute much to undergraduate writing tutor research and to the body of writing center scholarship. To illustrate, I end the essay with examples of tutor research that show the peer perspective serving as a unique lens through which tutors identify opportunities for interesting writing center research, follow through with that research, and enact change in local tutoring practices and centers.

A Brief Overview of Tutor Research and Scholarship about Tutor Research While undergraduate peer writing tutors have been publishing in Writing Lab Newsletter’s Tutor’s Column and presenting their research at conferences such as the Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference and the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing for thirty years (see Fitzgerald for a useful history), only recently has the discipline recognized in peer writing tutor research (just “tutor research” from this point forward) how very unique and valuable tutor research is in higher education. Perhaps the relatively recent emergence of additional national venues for publication and presentation of tutor research— including the journal Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric, the special undergraduate research issue of The Writing Center Journal in 2012, and, beginning in 2010, the undergraduate research poster venues along with undergraduate research panels at the Conference on College Composition and Communication—has focused the profession’s attention on tutor research as a legitimate and valuable contribution to knowledgemaking in composition and rhetoric. Tutor researchers are moving beyond the reflective essays that are common in Writing Lab Newsletter’s “Tutor’s Column,” which historically have served as a valuable entry into scholarly publication for peer tutors.

The Peer Perspective and Undergraduate Writing Tutor Research • 47 Particularly impressive are tutor researchers who keep pace with their graduate student and professional colleagues and publish either independently or in collaboration with more experienced scholars. Tutor researchers present and publish on an array of topics that are comparable to the topics investigated by established writing center scholars: efficacy of peer writing tutor pedagogy (Raymond and Quinn), writing centers as contact zones (Baker), the intersection of race/ethnicity and tutor identity (Varma), the disconnect between tutoring practice and big-t Theory (Doucette; Reger), challenges of tutoring multilingual writers (Nan), writing centers and assessment (Gofine; Konicki), and more. Methodologies employed by tutor researchers also unsurprisingly mirror the variety of methodologies employed by their mentors: survey research (Nicklay), case study (Brendel), and linguistic analysis (Wilder) are three examples.

Tutor research is published, without apology or qualification, in journals relevant to writing center work such as The Writing Center Journal, whose 2012 special issue featured only tutor research, with seven superior examples of undergraduate-authored articles.

And lest we assume that peer tutors see their work through to publication only when afforded an opportunity to publish in “special” issues or undergraduate-only journals like Young Scholars, a quick dip into The Writing Center Journal issue 27.1 says otherwise: Beginning on page 7, we find one of two IWCA Outstanding Articles for 2008, “Taking on Turnitin: Tutors Advocating Change,” authored collaboratively by undergraduate and graduate student tutors. (More on this later.)

Writing center scholars have begun to pay attention to how tutor research happens, as well.

Several recent key publications and keynote addresses illustrates how leaders in the discipline are investigating undergraduate research in composition and rhetoric, in particular in writing centers. Grobman and Kinkead’s work has led the way, in particular the edited collection Undergraduate Research in English Studies (2010) and Rose and Grobman’s 2010 Writing Lab Newsletter article “Scholarship Reconsidered: TutorScholars as Undergraduate Researchers.” Two keynote addresses at recent conferences highlighted tutor research (Lauren Fitzgerald’s at the 2012 IWCA Conference and Melissa Ianetta’s at the SWCA Conference in 2013), and an edited version of Fitzgerald’s keynote was published later in The Writing Center Journal. And the same team recently published The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research, whose Section III instructs peer tutors about pedagogical, theoretical, and historical writing center research (Fitzgerald and Ianetta). In this context, in

which we are seeing a surge of superior peer tutor research and the additional layer of scholarship about tutor research and the mentoring of tutor researchers, it makes sense to begin investigating the unique feature of peer tutoring that makes undergraduate research an inherent component and a logical extension of the peer tutor’s work. To that end, I encourage directors to ask undergraduate tutors to think about their work through an investigative lens, to encourage growth along what DelliCarpini and Crimmins describe as a continuum from praxis (teaching and tutoring practice) to thinking about how praxis informs gnosis (knowledge/theory) and vice versa.

Peer Tutors Are Disciplinary Professionals A challenge faced by many faculty mentors of undergraduate researchers across the disciplines is that the faculty mentor is assumed to be the research and disciplinary expert, and the undergraduate researcher is the novice. The transmission of research knowledge is generally one-way: Faculty teach undergraduates how to conduct a research study. Peer writing tutors, unlike most other undergraduate researchers, are in a good position to develop their own researchable questions and, with mentoring or through research partnerships with faculty/directors, to design projects to answer those questions. In a very real sense, peer writing tutors are the disciplinary experts alongside their faculty/directors, so it makes sense that writing center directors look to undergraduate peer tutors for expertise about peer tutoring and encourage them to initiate or participate in writing center research.

Not all writing center scholars agree that undergraduate peer writing tutors are disciplinary “professionals”—or that they should be considered “professionals.” Kenneth Bruffee observed that “[s]ome institutions even regard ‘peer tutors’ as ‘professionalized’ ” and, in those institutions, “the tutors do not regard themselves, and their tutees do not regard them, as sharing fully in the vicissitudes, burdens, and constraints of normal student life” (97).

Bruffee concludes that these tutors’ peer status is “thoroughly compromised” (97). By contrast, those institutions that consider undergraduate peer writing tutors primarily as collaborative learners encourage tutors to “see the institution from the same place their tutees see it, from the bottom. That is, collaborative peer tutors work within the institutional constraints that their tutees experience” (Bruffee 97). Bruffee sets up an either/or dichotomy: Either peer tutors must be complicit in wielding institutional authority and power, which precludes collaboration with student writers, or

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The Peer Perspective and Undergraduate Writing Tutor Research • 48 they must exist outside of the institutional power structure and gaze upward from the bottom, alongside the students they tutor. Attempts to professionalize peer tutors, Bruffee implies, place them squarely in the former camp.

I offer an alternative to Bruffee’s either/or dichotomy: Undergraduate peer writing tutors are neither looking up at the academic ivory towers from the bottom of the academic trenches, nor are they cogs in the wheels of the academic institutional machinery. Their professional position emerges from their unique institutional position: They are students and tutors, at once aligned with peers and set apart from them.

The Peer Perspective as Research Tool Tutors exist in a liminal space, one that places them squarely among peers and professionals simultaneously, giving them the tools necessary to carry out the unique work of peer tutoring in writing, to act as both peer and tutor and to move between those two roles or frames of mind. It is their position in this liminal space that produces the peer relationships that can serve them in their investigations of peer tutoring and writing centers generally.

Undergraduate peer tutors develop trust and camaraderie with student writers and with their faculty/directors and in some ways serve as cultural informants for both. In the same way peer writing tutors help student writers “rehearse being insiders” (Hawkins 67), peer tutors can also serve as insiders to student culture for their faculty/directors. In the context of an undergraduate research partnership, such insider status is worth gold for a faculty researcher interested investigating student learning.

The liminal social-academic space between student and faculty, between learner and educator, helps undergraduate peer tutors identify researchable problems that their faculty/directors might not consider. The examples that follow illustrate how undergraduate peer tutors can bring a unique perspective to a research partnership with a faculty mentor.

Example 1: Peer Perspective Leads to Plagiarism Research at Indiana University of Pennsylvania One has to look no further than a 2007 Writing Center Journal article by Renee Brown, Brian Fallon, Jessica Lott, Elizabeth Matthews, and Elizabeth Mintie entitled “Taking on Turnitin: Tutors Advocate Change” to see the role of peer tutor expertise in identifying and investigating a researchable problem.

Four undergraduate peer tutors and a PhD student at

Indiana University of Pennsylvania, under the guidance of their director Ben Rafoth, authored this IWCA award-winning article. The groundbreaking article eventually saw publication and became a common text used by writing center professionals across the country because a group of undergraduate peer tutors-turned-researchers identified meaningful researchable problems that emerged from their peer interactions with IUP undergraduate students. Brown et al. explain: “As tutors, we see a lot that other people at our institutions either take for granted or barely recognize, but we do have the ability and opportunity to speak up on those often glanced over issues and to reach out to fellow students and our faculty” (26-27).

Brown et al. make it clear that they exist in the liminal space I described earlier, and such an existence led directly to their research.

In this case, IUP students shared their concerns with peer writing tutors about how Turnitin was being used by their teachers to flag supposedly “plagiarized” text. With support from their director, Ben Rafoth, the tutors began to research Turnitin in order to answer two questions: “What did our writing center staff need to know about Turnitin? And, How could tutors help students who must deal with Turnitin and the professors who require it?” (Brown et al. 8). As soon as they began to answer those “tutor-focused” questions, prompted by “peer-focused” interactions with students, they found themselves swimming around in the liminal space in which peer writing tutors work every day. They consulted writing center and composition scholarship that helped them to develop nuanced understandings of plagiarism, which complicated what they understood plagiarism to be— academic dishonesty—from their perspectives as students (9). From some of their research emerged culturally-sensitive notions of plagiarism not shared by many faculty. And they began to understand “the writing center’s tempestuous past and present relationship to plagiarism” (10)—the tendency for writing centers to guard against accusations that tutors offer too much help on student writing. Finally, they concluded that “there was, or at least should be, an arena for tutors to discuss campus-wide issues that affect tutoring” (12), and they had “found it necessary to step outside the traditional roles of writing center tutors in order to make claims about how Turnitin was influencing teaching on” at IUP (11-12).

IUP students might never have voiced their concerns about Turnitin had it not been for their comfort level with the peer tutors whom they trusted because they were peers. In turn, Brown et al. (2007) would likely have never published “Taking on Turnitin,” nor shared their findings with other writing

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The Peer Perspective and Undergraduate Writing Tutor Research • 49 center professionals, nor shaped the attitudes and understanding about Turnitin at campuses across the country, had Director Rafoth never encouraged the tutors, along with graduate student tutor Brian Fallon, to pursue this line of research. In other words, Rafoth’s tutors worked within a writing center whose culture supported an ethos of inquiry that encouraged peer tutors to investigate their praxis and theorize their work.

Example 2: Peer Tutor-International Student Friendships at the University of South Dakota A second illustration from my own experience— in fact, my first experience—with undergraduate research will, I hope, drive my point home. In my second year as Writing Center Director at the University of South Dakota, I was asked by one of my undergraduate tutors to direct her writing centerfocused Honors thesis. Amber wanted to study how the relationships between ESL students and consultants affected teaching and learning in the Center. Over a six-month period, I guided her through methodological decisions, human subjects training, interviewing and observing students and consultants, presentation of her findings at the 2005 IWCANCPTW Conference, and finally drafting, revising, and defending her thesis.

Amber’s thesis investigated the interpersonal relationship building that occurs when non-native speakers of English work repeatedly with the same tutor over the course of several semesters. She employed qualitative research methods—interviews and observations of ESL conversation sessions—and arrived at a new understanding about how international students utilize our center: They sought out conversation tutoring both to improve their listening and speaking skills and to build friendships with our undergraduate writing consultants. Before Amber conducted her research, we understood relationship building as “value added” for these tutoring sessions; however, after her investigation we understood that a large part of the appeal of the center to international students was the opportunity to “make friends,” a finding we were unsure at first how to apply to the teaching and learning in our center but that we were eventually able to utilize in a restructuring of our ESL tutoring, with a renewed focus on group conversations (1-2 tutors and 2-3 ESL students) that emphasized social interaction, current events, and other engaging topics for both tutors and students. It did not hurt that these “conversation sessions” almost always paved the way for writing sessions, a development I used to market the writing

center to faculty and students involved in our international programming.

In the end, Amber not only taught me something about interpersonal relationships between ESL students and their English-speaking consultants, but she also taught me about the potential of undergraduate research to help me better understand how teaching and learning were taking place in my writing center in ways that escaped my notice because, simply put, she was a peer, an “insider-outsider,” who noticed things that I did not.

Amber’s Honors thesis began with a simple question about the development of friendships between ESL students and their English-speaking consultants.

My observant Honors student had noted that many ESL students continued their associations with peer tutors outside the writing center, even going so far as to open their homes to the peer tutors when they traveled to those students’ home countries. While in the writing center, the peer tutor clearly enacted the tutor role, but outside the writing center, the peer role led to further interaction and the development of friendships. My observations, of course, were limited to what I observed in the center, and what I observed as a director. As a director, I had never developed friendships with the students who utilized the writing center and failed to see this development between our international students and some of the peer tutors. In fact, had I known about how some tutors’ relationships with international students had moved beyond the walls of the writing center, I might have viewed the development with a director’s blinders on: I might have worried whether the international students’ expectation that the tutors interact with them outside the writing center was an intrusion on tutor privacy, or blurred some boundary between professional work and private life. I might never have become curious about the nature of or the development of these friendships like Amber did simply because I was not viewing the development through the eyes of the peer tutor. In short, I learned the same lesson from Amber that is implicit in the Brown et al. article about Turnitin: Peer tutors can bring to research partnerships an expertise that emerges from their institutional position as peers.

Conclusion: Peer Tutors and Professional Research Although my argument will not satisfy everyone, I believe writing center directors should redefine what it means to be a peer writing tutor so that peer writing tutors regularly involve themselves in research and scholarly activity about their own and their colleagues’

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The Peer Perspective and Undergraduate Writing Tutor Research • 50 peer tutoring practices, regardless of whether that research is pedagogical, theoretical, or historical. As Fitzgerald argues, “Peer writing tutoring is the site of Practitioner Inquiry, offering exigencies for research” (22). The undergraduate peer writing tutor, who is positioned uniquely in the academy compared to other disciplines’ undergraduate researchers, can identify research opportunities in writing centers, opportunities that professionals (the faculty and other administrative staff) often miss. Konicki, in the 2011 issue of Young Scholars in Writing, puts it this way: “Peer tutors . . . need to realize our scholarly position in relation to writing programs and understand that our insideroutsider status gives us unique knowledge that can shape writing programs in ways that benefit our peers and future students” (85). I agree; tutor researchers, with mentoring from either their directors or other experienced tutor researchers, can cultivate this “insider-outsider status” in ways that benefit tutoring through research. When writing centers were mostly called “writing labs” and the NCPTW was in its infancy, notes of caution like those from Bruffee were based on a notion of peer tutoring of writing that the discipline has in some ways outgrown. In the context of an academic culture that seeks to bring undergraduate research into all undergraduates’ educational experiences, writing centers are rich with potential for undergraduate/faculty research partnerships. And when their directors allow it, they can teach us important things like Brown et al. and Amber have. The responsibility falls to us as writing center directors, though, to create environments in which undergraduate tutor research is encouraged and rewarded, and to ensure that the tutoring of writing in the researchers’ home writing centers benefits from tutors’ research. Our discipline’s professional organizations, like IWCA, NCPTW, and CCCC, have led the way at the national level, and individual writing centers and directors would do well to follow that lead at the local.

Works Cited Baker, Brooke. “Safe Houses and Contact Zones: Reconsidering the Basic Writing Tutorial.” Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric 4 (2006): 64-72. Web. 6 Sept. 2014. http://cas.umkc.edu/english/publications/young scholarsinwriting/vol4.asp Brendel, Christian. “Tutoring between Language with Comparative Multilingual Tutoring.” The Writing Center Journal 32.1 (2012): 78-91. Print.

Brown, Renee, Brian Fallon, Jessica Lott, Elizabeth Matthews, and Elizabeth Mintie. “Taking on

Turnitin: Tutors Advocating Change.” The Writing Center Journal 27.1 (2007): 7-28. Print.

Bruffee, Kenneth. Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.

Print.

DelliCarpini, Dominic, and Cynthia Crimmins. “The Writing Center as a Space for Undergraduate Research.” In Undergraduate Research in English Studies. Ed. Laurie Grobman and Joyce Kinkead.

Urbana: NCTE, 2010. 191-211. Print.

Doucette, Jonathan. “Composing Queers: The Subversive Potential of the Writing Center.”

Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric 8 (2011): 5-15. Web. 4 Sept.

2014. http://cas.umkc.edu/english/publications/young scholarsinwriting/vol8.asp Fitzgerald, Lauren. “Undergraduate Writing Tutors as Researchers: Redrawing Boundaries.” The Writing Center Journal 33.2 (2014): 17-35. Print.

Fitzgerald, Lauren, and Melissa Ianetta. The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research. New York: Oxford UP, 2016. Print.

Gofine, Miriam. “How Are We Doing? A Review of Assessments within Writing Centers.” The Writing Center Journal 32.1 (2012): 39-49. Print.

Grobman, Laurie, and Joyce Kinkead, eds.

Undergraduate Research in English Studies. Urbana: NCTE, 2010. Print.

Hawkins, Thom. “Intimacy and Audience: The Relationship between Revision and the Social Dimension of Peer Tutoring.” College English 42.1 (1980): 64-68. JSTOR. Web. 1 Sept. 2014.

Ianetta, Melissa. “Caution! Students . . . Working?”

Keynote Address Presented at the Southeastern Writing Center Association Conference, Ft. Lauderdale, FL. 22 Feb. 2013. Speech.

Kail, Harvey. “Experiencing Collaborative Learning.”

Closing Plenary Address Presented at the Joined International Writing Centers AssociationNational Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing Conference, Las Vegas, NV. 1 Nov. 2008.

Speech.

Konicki, Skyler. “De-Centering Peer Tutors: Research Applications for Undergraduates in the Writing Program.” Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric 9 (2011): 77-86.

Web. 4 Sept.

2014. http://cas.umkc.edu/english/publications/young scholarsinwriting/vol9.asp Nan, Frances. “Bridging the Gap: Essential Issues to Address in Recurring Writing Center

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The Peer Perspective and Undergraduate Writing Tutor Research • 51 Appointments with Chinese ELL Students.” The Writing Center Journal 32.1 (2012): 50-63. Print.

Nicklay, Jennifer. “Got Guilt? Consultant Guilt in the Writing Center Community.” The Writing Center Journal 32.1 (2012): 14-27. Print.

Raymond, Laurel, and Zarah Quinn. “What a Writer Wants: Assessing Fulfillment of Student Goals in Writing Center Tutoring Sessions.” The Writing Center Journal 32.1 (2012): 64-77. Print.

Reger, Jeff. “Postcolonialism, Acculturation, and the Writing Center.” Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric 6 (2008): 39-46.

Web. 4 Sept.

2014. http://cas.umkc.edu/english/publications/young scholarsinwriting/vol6.asp Rose, Jeanne Marie, and Laurie Grobman.

“Scholarship Reconsidered: Tutor-Scholars as Undergraduate Researchers.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 34.8 (2010): 10-13. Web. 8 Sept. 2014. http://www.writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v 34/34.8.pdf Ryan, Leigh, and Lisa Zimmerelli. The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors. 4th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. Print.

Trimbur, John. “Peer Tutoring: A Contradiction in Terms?” The Writing Center Journal 7.2 (1987): 2129. Print.

Varma, Anita. “Politics of Difference in the Writing Center.” Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric 6 (2008): 30-38.

Web. 4 Sept.

2014. http://cas.umkc.edu/english/publications/young scholarsinwriting/vol6.asp Wegehaupt, Amber. “Making Connections and Feeling Connected: Implications of English as a Second Language Conversation Sessions in the University of South Dakota Writing Center. Honors Thesis.

University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, 2005. Print.

Wilder, Molly. “A Quest for Student Engagement: A Linguistic Analysis of Writing Conference Discourse.” Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric 7 (2009): 94-105.

Web. 4 Sept.

2014. http://cas.umkc.edu/english/publications/young scholarsinwriting/vol7.asp

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USING CITATION ANALYSIS IN WRITING CENTER TUTORIALS TO ENCOURAGE DEEPER ENGAGEMENT WITH SOURCES Elizabeth Kleinfeld Metropolitan State University of Denver ekleinfe@msudenver.edu Before I became a writing center director, I remember in my own work as a tutor feeling frustrated when students brought in research papers. Most of the students’ questions had to do with formatting the bibliographic entries or parenthetical notes, but I would often notice that the sources used to support thesis statements were seemingly arbitrarily chosen (perhaps an encyclopedia entry, two news stories from questionable news outlets, and a couple of other random web sources, such as a blog entry and an organization’s website) and often not used effectively to support points. For example, it was not unusual to see very lengthy blocked quotations and quotations dropped into paragraphs with no signal phrases and no interpretation or analysis. I would try to steer sessions toward discussion of more scholarly ways to use source material, but I seldom felt that those discussions went anywhere. When I asked about the high proportion of quoted material, most students told me something along the lines of, “My professor said quoting is good“ or “I don’t have time to write a good paraphrase—my paper is due in an hour. Can you just check my MLA format?” On the odd occasion when a student did seem interested in working with their source integration, I was at a loss for strategies to use and often resorted to lecturing the student on how to paraphrase. My fellow tutors had no suggestions, and the standard tutoring guides of the time didn’t address helping students with research.1 I also wondered if it was within my purview as a writing tutor to talk with students about their source choices and their source use. None of my training or reading about tutoring had dealt with how to help students with their source use.

Given that much research indicates that students need help finding and using quality academic sources, intervening in students’ source selection and integration is important. In their study of how students select and use library and internet sources, researchers Vicki Burton and Scott Chadwick found that students’ top priorities when looking at online sources were how easy the source was to find and understand, while whether or not a source was peerreviewed was thirteenth and “has been cited by !

others” came in last of all criteria, at twenty-third. In another study of how students select sources, Randall McClure and Kelliann Clink found that students often prioritize the usefulness of quotations to make a point over the level of authority or credibility of the source.

Most recently, the Citation Project, a study of student source use strategies in first-year writing courses, reported that students tend to use reference sources rather than sources that present original research, that students don’t seem to read those sources deeply enough to summarize them (relying instead on quoting, patchwriting, and paraphrasing of largely cherry-picked sentences), and that students seem to have little of their own to say (Jamieson and Howard).

Danielle DeVoss asks, “Is a writing center doing too much by attempting to address issues related to internet research . . . ? Is it a writing center’s responsibility to teach the computer skills often required before rhetorical writing-related issues can be addressed?” (183). I want to take up a slight variation on that question: Is it a writing center’s responsibility to address matters related to source selection and integration often required to address writing-fromsources issues? In this essay, I explore briefly why the answer should be yes2 and then discuss how citation analysis, the methodology of the Citation Project, has been used in the writing center I direct to do this.

Student Research as Writing Center Territory Luckily, several things happened that made me feel more comfortable with claiming students’ research practices as legitimate writing center territory. A number of librarians and writing center professionals began pioneering collaborations between libraries and writing centers, and in 2005, an entire collection about these collaborations came out: Elmborg and Hook’s Centers for Learning: Writing Centers and Libraries in Collaboration. A steady trickle of articles on writing center/library collaborations and writing center approaches to information literacy began appearing in The Writing Lab Newsletter.3 As I wrote my dissertation in 2006, I noticed that my own research and writing practices were inextricably connected. I wasn’t simply

Using Citation Analysis in Writing Center Tutorials • 53 “writing up” my research; rather, I was finding what Colleen Boff and Barbara Toth assert to be true: “research and writing processes are better treated as consciously related” (148). In fact, I couldn’t say exactly where my research “ended” and my “writing” began. Just as we now tend to see writing as a meaning-making endeavor (Berthoff), library professionals are viewing information literacy as part of a knowledge-making process (Elmborg). It seems to be a commonplace now that writing is recursive rather than linear. We know that writing informs research and research informs writing. To artificially delineate a research process that is detached from a writing process denies this. To separate research from writing and declare that librarians and professors can help students with their research but the writing center can’t seems counterproductive.

Rebecca Moore Howard uses the term “writing from sources” to describe writing that draws on source material. I prefer this term to the more widely used—at least on my campus—“research paper” because it acknowledges that not all writing that grows out of research becomes a “paper,” but more importantly, because it emphasizes writing. As a writing center director, my goal is to have my tutors facilitating students’ writing processes and their metacognitive awareness of those processes above all else. When students are writing from sources, the selection, comprehension, and integration of those sources is part of their writing processes as much as experiences that shape a students’ opinions are part of their discovery processes, which we routinely assume to be part of writing processes. We cannot separate source gathering, selection, reading and understanding, analyzing, and synthesizing practices from writing practices in any meaningful way.

One obstacle to claiming students’ research processes as part of writing center territory is that students don’t think of the writing center as a place to go for help with source selection or citation. Mardi Mahaffy’s 2008 study of students’ likelihood of working with a writing tutor in the library versus working with a librarian in the writing center found that students are much more likely to ask for writing help in the library. In fact, Mahaffy notes that students were so unlikely to seek out library help in the writing center that the number of students the librarian [in the writing center] assisted averaged about two per week, with several weeks resulting in no traffic whatsoever. Changing the times the librarian was available did not improve matters. When students had the opportunity to sign up for appointments, few people chose to do so. [italics mine] (176)

Mahaffy’s study had librarians in the writing center, while I am suggesting that writing center tutors themselves should be prepared to help students with some research concerns, but the fact that students are so unlikely to think of asking for research help in the writing center remains an obstacle regardless. In fact, faculty and tutors at my university, too, were at first skeptical about whether students’ source selection is legitimate territory for writing center work.

Interestingly, our library staff had no reservations at all about the writing center working with students on source concerns and generously provided several trainings for my tutors and me on library resources and research strategies. These trainings sparked conversations among the tutors about how many aspects of writing involve research, such as topic selection and development. In discussing her writing center’s taking on technology issues, DeVoss points out that “writers and writing are our focus . . . not computers” (181), and I would make the same point about our taking on of students’ research practices.

The writer and his or her development remains our focus, and in as far as the writer must also be a researcher to write effectively, we work with the student on research concerns.

The question, then, is how can writing center tutors work productively with students who are writing from sources? When I was introduced to the methodology of the Citation Project in 2010, I immediately saw applications for writing center work.

Citation Analysis At the 2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication, I attended an all-day workshop facilitated by Sandra Jamieson, Rebecca Moore Howard, and several of the contributing researchers on the Citation Project. In their study of student source citation practices, the Citation Project researchers gathered research papers written by students in first-year writing courses at 16 institutions and described the source-citation moves the students made in those papers. Comparing the source material cited with the students’ papers, researchers coded each of the 1911 citations found in the 174 papers that were studied, highlighting material that was copied verbatim, summarized, paraphrased, and patchwritten (the term Howard coined for an attempt at paraphrase that stays too close to the original wording and syntax), in different colors. The purpose of the workshop was to train participants in this methodology, citation analysis. As used in the Citation Project, citation analysis involves four steps:

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Using Citation Analysis in Writing Center Tutorials • 54 1. Identifying source citations in the student’s draft (the “boxing” I refer to below, as researchers draw a “box” around citations in students’ drafts to set that text apart from other text).

2. Reading the source material and describing the strategies used by the student in citing the source: copying, either marked as quotation or not; patchwriting; paraphrasing; or summarizing.

3. Highlighting the cited material to indicate the strategy used: blue for copying, yellow for patchwriting, green for paraphrasing, pink for summarizing.

4. Recording on a spreadsheet the source name, the page of the source where the cited material is, and whether copying/quoting, patchwriting, paraphrasing, or summarizing was used.

The resulting coded and highlighted paper shows at a glance the proportion of cited material to original material.4 The spreadsheet clearly indicates how many times each citation move was utilized, how much each individual source was relied upon, and how many pages into each source citations go.

I realized that writing center consultants could use boxing and highlighting to help students better understand their own source usage. But I quickly became bogged down in practicalities: I wondered how to teach students in a 40 minute tutorial to do what it was taking the workshop facilitators all day to teach me how to do. I wondered how I could possibly get anything in place before “research paper season”—the last four weeks of every semester—hit, as it was already late March. And I wondered how my tutors—a mix of professional tutors and peer-tutors— would react to my suggestion that we, in effect, code student papers with them.

Implementation In the airport waiting for my flight home, I hastily planned a training session for my tutoring staff for the following week. The training was chaotic but productive. After demonstrating the techniques and giving tutors time to practice and talk with each other about whether something was patchwriting or summarizing or paraphrasing, I asked them to play with the ideas in small groups, either directly discussing ideas they had for integrating the techniques into tutorials or simply sharing concerns, thoughts, and ideas about citation analysis. Several tutors thought that simply having a student box all his or her citations would give the student an instant picture of what proportion of a draft was his or her voice and

what percentage was from sources. Others thought that having students highlight a few pages’ worth of citations would help them see how much paraphrase, patchwriting, summarizing, and copying they were using. Others thought that keeping a log sheet, similar to the Citation Project spreadsheet, in which students recorded how long their sources were and which page of the source their citation came from would help students see how their reading habits and levels of critical reading might be undermining their ethos.

Tutors began slowly integrating citation analysis strategies and ideas into their tutoring in their own ways, some more than others. Some tutors immediately began looking for opportunities to integrate citation analysis, while others were much more tentative. In my observations and discussions with tutors, an interesting problem became apparent.

As tutors reported back to me on how citation analysis was working in their sessions and how they were incorporating it, we began to recognize the problem I had experienced myself as a tutor so many years before: students don’t ask for help with their source integration; they ask for help with formatting bibliographic entries and parenthetical notes. This puts all the pressure on the tutor to bring up sources and their integration.

About 40% of our sessions are “research writing tutorial” sessions. The students requesting these sessions typically want help with bibliographic entries and then other general writing issues. Almost never do they ask specifically for help with how they selected or used a source. They often assume one source is as valuable as the next, so it doesn’t make sense to them to ask for feedback on source selection; and as the Citation Project findings show, students tend to rely on quotation over more complex forms of source use, and they don’t usually reflect upon this practice, so again, it makes no sense to them to ask for feedback on that (Jamieson and Howard).

As in most writing centers, tutors and students negotiate an agenda for their tutorial, usually based first on what motivated the student to come to the writing center and then by concerns raised for the tutor during a quick perusal of the draft or brainstorming or other writing the student has brought. Because students do not typically think to ask questions about their source usage and don’t seem to have concerns about their citations beyond the formatting, when the agenda is being negotiated, students don’t bring up their source selection or use.

Tutors admitted they often forget to bring it up because the student doesn’t mention it or ask about it.

As one tutor explained, “I start sessions by asking, ‘What would you like to look at today?’ They never

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Using Citation Analysis in Writing Center Tutorials • 55 say, ‘How I used my sources.’ Maybe they want help with the bibliographic entries. It’s up to me to say, ‘Why don’t we look at how you’ve used those sources in your draft?’”

In year-end conversations with me, about a year after I first introduced citation analysis to the tutors, several tutors said they still needed help simply talking with the students who came in about source material.

That led to me writing a set of questions over the summer that tutors could integrate into tutorials. The questions relate to source selection, such as “Why did you choose this source?”, and engagement with sources, such as “What argument does this source make?”5 In our most recent year-end meeting, five years after first integrating citation analysis into tutorials, tutors reported that it’s becoming more second-nature to them to ask students about their sources, and that occasionally a student will even ask about source selection or integration—usually a student who has had a productive writing center session using citation analysis in the past, or, as happened recently, a student who heard from a friend who had used the writing center that we had “a really cool way to help [with source use].” Most of the time, however, the pressure is still on the tutor to raise the issues of source selection and integration. We talked about the importance of having visual cues in the writing center to remind tutors to bring it up. We joked about having the tutors wear buttons saying, “Ask me to ask you about your sources,” but settled on the more conservative approach of printing some prompts for the tutors onto fluorescent paper and taping those to the tables where tutoring takes place.

While we continue to look for ways to discuss source selection and integration with students, our practice has shifted noticeably toward treating source use beyond the formatting of bibliographic entries and parenthetical notes.

What Citation Analysis as a Tutoring Technique Looks Like Different tutors have operationalized citation analysis in different ways, with some having students highlight their own citations, others focusing on helping students track which page of their sources their citations are from, and many feeling most comfortable simply engaging students in conversations about how they selected, evaluated, and documented their sources. Because of the broad range of ways citation analysis has been implemented in the writing center, I have come to call any technique that results in close readings of source citations, whether in the

student’s own writing or in the source material the student is working with, “citation analysis.” Every table in our writing center has a set of highlighters with labels that correspond to the Citation Project terms: pink for summary, green for paraphrase, yellow for patchwriting, and blue for copying and quotation.

While the highlighters serve as a visual cue to remind tutors to consider bringing up a students’ sources, the use of highlighters is certainly not a mandatory element for something to be considered citation analysis. Much of what occurs in the writing center that I consider to be citation analysis relies on discussion and close reading and may or may not result in a color-coded draft.

Applying citation analysis to the source material students are using—that is, when students identify, describe, and highlight source citations in their sources rather than in their own writing—facilitates close readings of source material, using source material as models, and sometimes, fairly nuanced discussions of how source citation contributes to a writer’s ethos.

Applying citation analysis to a student’s draft allows the student and tutor to see in a very concrete and visual way what percentage of the draft is in the student’s voice and whether one particular citation strategy, such as copying marked as quotation, is used significantly more than others. This, in turn, can lead to better understanding of sources, better source selection, and better source integration; however, it can also lead to more traditional writing center concerns, as the following example shows.

In a tutorial shortly after the first citation analysis training, a tutor worked with a student who was writing an expository research paper for his juniorlevel oceanography class. He came in with a ten-page draft and told his tutor he felt something was missing from his paper. He didn’t know if he needed more information, a different organizational structure, or something else, but he felt that somehow, he wasn’t conveying his enthusiasm for the topic. The tutor began reading the paper aloud and at the end of page three, she asked him to rate his level of captivation as a reader. He said it was low and at that point, the tutor worked with him on boxing and highlighting the citations on those three pages. The paper was a riot of color at that point, green for paraphrase and blue for copying predominating. The tutor remarked that she saw lots of “other voices here” but not his. She suggested that his voice was what was missing. The student explained that he wanted to come across as scholarly, and he thought that to do that, he needed to minimize his voice. The tutor asked him to begin boxing and highlighting the one source he had brought with him. They then compared the amount of

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Using Citation Analysis in Writing Center Tutorials • 56 highlighted material in the source to the amount in the student’s draft and the student immediately saw that the source had much more original material in it. The close reading forced by the highlighting also prompted the student to notice that the source used some descriptive language to create a picture in the reader’s mind. He left determined to revise substantially, making his own voice the prominent voice in the paper and adding more descriptive language, which he had shied away from, thinking it “not academic enough.”

In a more recent tutorial, a student needed help writing a one-page summary of a single article. As part of the assignment, the student was required to come to the writing center, but she wasn’t particularly interested in revising her summary because she felt that it already did what the assignment required. After glancing over the article and the student’s draft, the tutor asked the student to explain what a summary is and the student mentioned that it should be in her own words. The tutor asked the student if she thought her summary was in her own words and the student hesitated. At that point, the tutor asked the student to look at the source article and her own summary side by side and highlight every single word in her summary that also appeared in the source. When she finished and looked at her mostly-highlighted draft, the student was visibly shocked. She thanked the tutor profusely and said she knew exactly how she needed to revise her summary.

The final example I want to share gets specifically at one of the Citation Project findings that my tutors and I found particularly distressing: students do not seem to be reading entire sources. In fact, the first three pages of a source seem to be cited much more heavily than pages deeper in a source. Aware of this finding, one tutor worked with a student who was writing a brief position paper for his political science class. The draft was just shy of being three pages long and had three lengthy blocked quotations as well as several other shorter quotations, all from the same source. The tutor asked a few questions about the source and learned it was an article from a peerreviewed journal. In examining the citations a little more closely, she and the student realized all of the quotations were from the first two pages of the 27page article. The tutor asked the student about the other 25 pages of the article and the student admitted he had only read the first two pages and then skimmed the rest, which was “just examples and stuff.” The tutor asked the student why the author of the article might think those examples are important. Eventually the student got to the idea that if the examples and development are weak, the findings stated in the first

two pages that were quoted might not be legitimate.

The session ended with the student deciding to read the entire article closely and come back for another session in two days. When the student came back, he had actually shifted the position he took on the subject and his draft was much more exploratory. In other words, the tutorial had prompted the student to engage in what Nancy Welch calls “excessive revision,” emphasizing reflection, fairly radical revision, engaged reading, and dialogue.

These examples show how citation analysis is being used in the writing center to help students, as David Bartholomae would say, invent the university— that is, learn to “speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community” (624)—and recognize places for themselves and their voices in it. As Gwendolyn Pough said in her Chair’s Address at the 2011 Conference on College Composition and Communication, “We have to teach [students] to think about what they hear. To listen, really listen” (309).

Using citation analysis as a teaching and tutoring tool is one way to do this. Citation analysis can force a deeper, more meaningful engagement with sources, helping students see them as voices they are in conversation with, rather than voices they are reporting on, and also as models for their own work.

Implications Clearly, integrating citation analysis, whether boxing, highlighting, or simply doing a close examination of source material, into tutorials can be a powerful way to focus students' attention on the ways they and the sources they cite are in conversation.

Despite the growing number of collaborations between libraries and writing centers, students themselves generally do not see their source use as part of their writing process, so writing centers that choose to intervene in students' research processes will need to provide plenty of training for tutors in how to do this. I want to conclude then by sharing suggestions for training that can be integrated into tutor preparation courses or professional development: • Schedule a session in which a librarian discusses how to help students decide which data bases to use for their research and how to identify keywords to use in data base searches.

• Share the results of the Citation Project with tutoring staff to familiarize them with typical student information behavior, such as not

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Using Citation Analysis in Writing Center Tutorials • 57 reading an entire source. The Citation Project's website includes helpful graphics that visually convey findings. The Citation Project's findings are particular compelling because the general trends--not reading entire sources, quoting much more than summarizing, etc.--were seen across institutions, regardless of whether the school was an Ivy League or a community college.

• Teach tutors how to use citation analysis (boxing; identifying and highlighting copying, quoting, patchwriting, paraphrasing, and summarizing; completing a spreadsheet to record the source use moves noted and the page number for the source citation).

• Have tutors box and code their own writing from sources and then reflect on their findings to help them understand how powerful the experience is.

• Either provide tutors with a list of questions they can ask students about their source use or facilitate a brainstorming session in which tutors come up with questions they might ask, and then give tutors practice through role playing in integrating these questions into sessions.

Finally, let your library staff and instructors of courses that involve writing from sources know that the writing center will be working with students on their source use. The more often librarians and faculty remind students that the writing center can help them with their source use, the more likely it is that students will ask writing tutors for help with source use.

As information literacy gets more attention from faculty across the disciplines, writing centers must be equipped to help students with every aspect of their writing processes, including the selection, comprehension, and integration of sources into their writing.

Notes 1. This remains true today. Ryan and Zimmerelli’s The

Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, now in its fifth edition, has one page on working with students who are writing from sources. Gillespie and Lerner’s Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring, in its second edition, does not have any explicit treatment of working with students who are writing from sources. Rafoth’s A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One, in its second edition, has five pages focused on helping students summarize, paraphrase, and document sources. These are all excellent books that I’ve either used myself as a tutor,

used in training tutors, or both; however, their lack of coverage of working with students who are writing from sources is indicative of how difficult it is for tutors to find resources on this subject.

2. I discuss this issue more fully in “Writing Centers, Ethics, and Excessive Research” in the Fall 2011 issue of Computers & Composition Online.

3. See, for example, James Elmborg’s February 2006 “Locating the Center: Libraries, Writing Centers, and Information Literacy” and Sam Van Horne’s April 2009 “Teaching Information Literacy in the Writing Center.”

4. More information about the Citation Project is available at http://site.citationproject.net/. The homepage includes an image of a boxed and coded paper.

5. A complete list of the questions is available in “Writing Centers, Ethics, and Excessive Research” in the Fall 2011 issue of Computers & Composition Online.

Works Cited Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” CrossTalk in Composition Theory: A Reader. Victor Villanueva, Jr. (Ed.) Urbana: NCTE, 1997: 623-54.

Print.

Berthoff, Ann. The Making of Meaning: Metaphors, Models, and Maxims for Writing. Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1981. Print.

Boff, Colleen, and Barbara Toth. “Better-Connected Student Learning: Research and Writing Project Clinics at Bowling Green State University. Centers for Learning: Writing Centers and Libraries in Collaboration: A Basis in Theory. Elmborg, James, and Sherril Hook. (Eds). Chicago: Publications in Librarianship, 2005: 148-157. Print.

Burton, Vicki, and Scott Chadwick. “Investigating the Practices of Student Researchers: Patterns of Use and Criteria for Use of Internet and Library Sources. Computers and Composition, 17 (2000), 309328. Print.

DeVoss, Danielle. “Computer Literacies and the Roles of the Writing Center.” Writing Center Research: Extending the Conversation. Gillespie, Paula, et. al.

(Eds). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002: 167-186. Print.

Elmborg, James K. “Libraries and Writing Centers in Collaboration: A Basis in Theory.” Centers for Learning: Writing Centers and Libraries in Collaboration: A Basis in Theory. Elmborg, James, and Sherril Hook (Eds). Chicago: Publications in Librarianship, 2005: 1-20. Print.

Elmborg, James K, and Sherril Hook (Eds). Centers for Learning: Writing Centers and Libraries in

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Using Citation Analysis in Writing Center Tutorials • 58 Collaboration: A Basis in Theory. Chicago: Publications in Librarianship, 2005. Print.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Forget about Policing Plagiarism; Just Teach.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 2001, Nov. 16: B24. Print.

Jamieson, Sandra, and Rebecca Moore Howard.

“Phase I Data.” The Citation Project. 2011. Web. Retrieved from http://site.citationproject.net/.

Mahaffy, Mardi. “Exploring Common Ground: U.S. Writing Center/Library Collaboration.” New Library World 109 (2008): 173-181. Print.

McClure, Randall, and Kelliann Clink. “How Do You Know That? An Investigation of Student Research Practices in the Digital Age.” Libraries and the Academy 9 (2009): 115-132. Print.

Pough, Gwendolyn. “It’s Bigger Than Comp/Rhet: Contested and Undisciplined.” College Composition and Communication 63 (2011), 301-313. Print.

Welch, Nancy. Getting Restless: Rethinking Revision in Writing Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997. Print.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 13, No 2 (2016)

WHAT DO GRADUATE STUDENTS WANT FROM THE WRITING CENTER? TUTORING PRACTICES TO SUPPORT DISSERTATION AND THESIS WRITERS Bethany Ober Mannon Penn State University bgo104@psu.edu Graduate writers—who are experienced students and emerging experts in their fields—face a range of challenges in academic writing, including finding the confidence to write, integrating relevant literature, and interpreting data (Kamler and Thomson 1). Graduate programs require students to produce a large quantity of high-quality, varied writing, and without focused support, developing “these skills may be a function of chance rather than design” (Aitchison 907). Addressing this gap between preparation and expected performance, the Council of Graduate Schools Ph.D. Completion Project recommends writing support as a way to shorten doctoral degree completion time and improve retention. The project calls for writing assistance “through trained writing coaches or writing consultants,” ideally senior-level graduate students, and advises universities to create opportunities for students to “focus on the dissertation . . . receive feedback, and build peer support” (“Executive Summary” 4). Since a lack of help and peer interaction contributes to high attrition rates from doctoral programs, particularly among students in marginalized positions, the stakes of this discussion are high.

I follow previous scholars in citing The Ph.D. Completion Project because writing centers are so well positioned to address the discrepancy between graduate writing requirements and graduate students’ actual writing abilities. Several universities have established graduate writing centers (GWCs) staffed by PhD student consultants (a term I use to distinguish between graduate students and undergraduate tutors).

These writing centers offer graduate students opportunities to collaborate with peers who write at the same level, though not always in the same discipline. Writing workshops, Dissertation Boot Camps, and smaller writing groups also take place at many universities. In this study, I examine graduate writers’ understandings of the specific role writing tutorials play within this network of other available resources. After surveying and interviewing graduate writers who used one-on-one tutoring, I found that graduate writers have sophisticated understandings of their own writing processes and assemble resources from their departments and social networks that they use alongside—but differently than—writing tutorials. !

Their specific goals and preferences for GWC consultations depend on several factors, including their disciplines, perceptions of their abilities, and stages in the writing process. For example, one writer explained to me that her advisor saw early and late drafts, but GWC consultants advised her on intermediate stages. I contend that by recognizing graduate student writers’ strategies for situating tutoring within an interrelated network of formal and informal writing support, writing center staff can better assist them.

Tutoring Graduate Writers: Perceived Obstacles and Limitations This study builds upon research by Claire Aitchison, Tallin Phillips, Paula Gillespie, and Steve Simpson, who propose best practices for graduate schools and writing centers, and examine the ways graduate students learn advanced academic literacies.

These scholars identify two obstacles that inhibit the tutorial format’s success with this population. First, several argue that “traditional tutoring can’t always provide the long-term, extensive support that graduate writers need” to write seminar papers or theses (Phillips, “Graduate Writing Groups,” np). Other scholars point to the disciplinarity of graduate writing as a second obstacle. Gillespie prefers to employ consultants to advise others who share “a common disciplinary framework” and can therefore “see themselves as part of a shared community of thinkers and writers” (“From Design to Delivery” 1). Phillips concurs, stating that graduate writers prefer insiders’ perspectives, and multilingual graduate writers “may have already determined that [generalist feedback] is ineffective” (“Tutor Training and Services” np). In particular, my study builds upon Simpson’s argument that “Graduate-level writing programs must be strategic, balancing students’ short-term needs while building infrastructure within campus departments for sustainable graduate support” (np). While Simpson explores avenues that add tiers of support to complement individual tutoring, I consider graduate students’ perceptions of the relationships between those tiers and the purposes they attribute to one-onone consultations. With a clearer sense of graduate

What Do Graduate Students Want from the Writing Center? • 60 writers’ strategies for using tutoring, consultants can expand the approaches that they use in their appointments. As a result, my research has implications for the practices of writing centers staffed by graduate students and recent PhDs, and also for centers staffed by undergraduate tutors whose training and experience emphasized collaboration with their peers.

In Their Own Words: Studying Graduate Writers’ Strategies My interest in studying graduate students’ use of tutorials developed from my experience as a consultant in the Penn State Graduate Writing Center (hereafter “GWC”). Clients occasionally volunteered their reasons for making appointments with me. One said he made appointments because he knew of no native English speakers in his lab and wanted help with sentence-level concerns that his colleagues were unable to provide. A postdoctoral researcher explained that consultations forced him to dedicate an hour each week to polishing grant proposals and conference papers (he reassured me that my feedback sometimes helped). After my GWC assistantship concluded, I made appointments to work on my own projects with a consultant. These included article drafts and fellowship applications, but never my dissertation, which I brought to my writing group and my advisor instead. I unconsciously developed a system where I used the GWC to make progress on short-term projects that paralleled my dissertation. I wondered how fellow clients envisioned their consultations, and how writing centers could tap into clients’ selfawareness.

During the Spring 2015 semester, I received IRB approval for this research, distributed a survey among graduate students using the Penn State GWC, and interviewed twelve clients who indicated their availability. Three consultants—usually graduate students and post-graduate lecturers in the English Department—staff this GWC and receive training through meetings with the director and former consultants. Appointments are a sought-after resource, and clients report that the consultation schedule fills quickly each week. GWC reports from three semesters prior to my study confirm this popularity: in Fall 2013, 351 in-person appointments were offered (85% filled); in Spring 2014, 377 appointments were offered (94% filled); and in Fall 2014, 347 appointments were offered (85% filled).1 In those semesters, the GWC recorded 121, 120, and 131 clients respectively, and many clients are “frequent fliers.” The GWC drew clients from over fifty departments, and reached an even wider population through evening writing

workshops. Clients may choose to submit anonymous evaluations that consultants hand to them as they leave. These evaluations are nearly all positive. Ratings of overall quality, on a scale from 1 to 7 (7 being highest), averaged above 6.90 during the three semesters I examined. Written comments that accompany these ratings express thanks for help with sentence-level matters, and for consultants’ work on developing and clarifying ideas.

To gather information on graduate writers’ strategies for incorporating tutoring into their writing processes, I invited students who attended workshops and consultations to complete an online Google Forms survey. In this survey, I asked for subjects’ demographic information, departments, and degree programs, and whether they identified as native English speakers. I then posed the following openended questions: How often do you complete appointments with the Penn State Graduate Writing Center (GWC) in a semester?

• What types of writing do you (or would you) bring to meetings with a GWC consultant?

• Describe the ways that GWC consultations help you (or would help you) as a writer.

• What forms of feedback are you looking for (or would you look for) when you make an appointment at the GWC? • What other resources do you use to help you in writing?

• Are there differences between the help you receive from GWC consultations and from these other resources?

These questions are similar to those that writing centers might use for assessment, and they elicited responses that demonstrate the need for greater attention to graduate writers navigating writing support in the university. Beyond assessing the effectiveness of GWC services, however, responses to these questions illuminate the feedback ecosystems that graduate writers access while they learn to write in their disciplines. Furthermore, I asked participants how often they completed consultations in order to distinguish between those whose perception was based in past experience, and those whose responses reflect the ways they hoped tutoring could be useful. Both sets of responses provide insight into graduate writers’ needs and experiences, but I chose to interview writers who could discuss ways that the GWC had already become part of their writing processes.

Forty graduate students completed the survey in the three months after I obtained IRB approval and •

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What Do Graduate Students Want from the Writing Center? • 61 began recruiting. Eighteen indicated their willingness to participate in interviews, and I spoke in person or by Skype with the twelve whose schedules allowed for meetings. My interview questions expanded upon the survey by asking about the timing of appointments, the affective components of composing and discussing writing, and the limitations of individual consultations.

Most crucially, these interviews created opportunities for writers to narrate their writing processes and tutorial experiences. This approach, informed by Life Story research (Atkinson) and Narrative Research (Andrews), emphasizes the stories that participants tell and the highly subjective ways that they articulate their abilities, goals, habits, and achievements. Because writers’ self-perceptions play such large roles in their decisions to seek out tutoring (or not), and the values they attribute to consultations with a peer, consultants, tutors, and writing center administrators can incorporate these perspectives into their practices.

Results Survey responses clarify the role of the GWC by gauging graduate students’ other writing support.

When asked “What other resources do you use to help you in writing?” twenty-eight (70%) respondents said they discuss writing with their advisors, and twentynine (73%) discuss research with their advisors; twentythree use informal conversations with colleagues.

Other resources include writing groups (mentioned by six), dissertation boot camp (five) and GWC writing workshops (nine). One benefited from a graduate-level writing course, and another said that exchanging writing within a research group “ends up significantly improving the quality of writing as people from different backgrounds notice different issues in the text.” Susan,2 a regular client, implies that an ability to discuss writing, not research processes or disciplinary conventions, is most useful. Two other responses concur, stating, “GWC Consultants talk to people from diverse backgrounds so their experience should be a unique one, very different from someone who already is familiar with the field” and “it helped my scientific writing to turn more accessible to readers from out of my field.” Two responses identified the “one-on-one” nature of tutoring and “objective” or “honest” feedback as valuable aspects of appointments. The only constraint that survey participants raise is the limited number of appointments. As one wrote, “There are not enough graduate writing center appointment slots for it to be a reliable resource.”

The sample size of forty does limit the knowledge these surveys provide, and because I recruited subjects through the GWC, I contacted writers who had largely

found consultations with the generalists there useful. I did interview two writers who never returned after a first appointment, and their recollections and the alternative strategies they developed are also relevant to this study. Moreover, two subjects had experiences by which to compare generalist tutors against tutors who specialize in their discipline, (suggesting a way that further research on the roles of tutors’ disciplinary backgrounds might be structured). However, these surveys usefully name the resources that writers recognize in their social and academic networks, and combine with writing center consultations.

Interviews added detailed personal narratives from writers, in which they discuss their abilities, expectations, and resources as they negotiate tiers of support available in the university. Graduate student writers described the following four strategies: First, many writers decide to bring certain projects to the writing center but not others. Their reasons differ. Susan brings grant and fellowship applications to her appointments, and described her reasoning to me: “there are other things higher on my priority list that I need to show to my advisor and my committee, given their limited time.” Because of this, she reserves what she calls “academic writing” for meetings with her advisor. Susan feels no need to have consultations for articles and dissertation chapters, which she explained with the remarkable assertion “I’m in my dissertation stage and I know what I’m doing.” MJ, a client who attended one appointment, has an accessible advisor who reviews his writing. He came to the GWC with an article draft in which he reported research from his previous degree program. MJ felt that it would have been inappropriate to consult with his current advisor on that earlier project. In her interview, Ima reflected, “my purely academic writing, no one has any problem with,” but explained that she began working with the GWC when a clinic supervisor told her to review “semantics” in the educational evaluations she wrote. One-on-one tutoring, therefore, helps students to balance their work on multiple projects with different audiences and requirements.

Second, several interviewees regard the GWC as their chief resource for assistance with sentence-level concerns. This was true for writers who described themselves as monolingual or native English speakers, and a number who did not. Susan worried that misspellings or grammatical errors would disqualify her funding applications. Jordan spoke at length about a similar need. She sought consultants’ perspectives while writing grant applications because of the pressure she experienced from knowing that “a typo or grammar error would be the first thing that would make [a reviewer] say ‘I won’t keep reading.’” Ima also

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What Do Graduate Students Want from the Writing Center? • 62 expressed a need for her writing to be “impeccable.”

Despite her confidence, she was aware that she had learned “British English,” and American readers (including her supervisor) thought she made frequent mistakes. Many writing centers focus on global concerns and work to counter perceptions of tutoring as a proofreading service, but this philosophy does not always match the needs graduate writers bring.

Third, graduate writers use GWC appointments when they prepare to meet with advisors, when they question the quality of their work, or when they cannot access faculty. That is, consultations bridge a gap between drafting and submitting a piece for evaluation by an advisor or reviewer. Jordan recalled that she “felt very ashamed” of her writing before appointments, but viewed meetings as a preliminary stage preparing her to show projects to department colleagues. Aileen described her advisor and research group as involved “at major milestones like my proposal and defense,” and consultants as involved when she “was getting over that hump of ‘I know what I’m going to talk about but I don’t know how to talk about it.’” Susan spoke of feeling confident after consultations when she received concrete, even directive advice on “re-writing a sentence or rearranging a paragraph.” After developing a rapport with a female consultant, one of her strategies is to work on personal statements in the GWC, rather than show these documents—which she perceives as sensitive—to people she sees regularly and who are in a position to evaluate her. Consultants do not always recognize the emotional labor of tutoring (and might perform it unconsciously), but many clients appreciate this service.

Most surprisingly, many interviewees’ strategies specifically depend on meeting with generalist consultants; others perceive generalists to be as helpful as consultants from their disciplines. Without prompting, interviewees praised feedback from readers outside their departments. Susan reflected that academics outside of her specific field help to make her applications easy to read and jargon-free. When I asked Aileen if she would prefer a consultant who knew her field, she replied “Not necessarily. Not for the questions I’m asking.” I asked if she might raise different questions, and she underscored her previous answer with an unqualified “no.” Xuan, likewise, told me that her writing was “not just being seen by the people in [her] major,” and stated the purpose of her consultations: to identify when “the language I use works for me but does not work for the reader.” Susan finds “ample opportunities to get feedback from people in [her] discipline.” The ability to discuss writing, rather than research or disciplinary

conventions, is the quality she and others seek in a tutor.

One graduate student, Ava, offered a contrasting perspective on consultants’ disciplines. After one satisfying consultation early in her graduate program, Ava attended GWC writing workshops but never returned for individual appointments. She attributes this to having “access to really involved advisors who read [her] things and are really good writers.” Ava confirmed that she passed over tutoring because she did not lack writing support (available resources include an English faculty member, her advisor’s wife, who reads Ava’s grant proposals). However, when I asked if she might see consultants from her field, Ava mused, “If I felt like they knew what I was talking about, that might be more intriguing to me.” I interpret Ava’s ambivalence about consultations with generalists or specialists as stemming from her lack of need for feedback on her discipline-specific writing, which she receives elsewhere. While consultants in her discipline might give the GWC a new relevance to writers like Ava, this added service would not necessarily mean the GWC would meet a need that it currently fails to address. Taken as a whole, I interpret these responses as evidence that graduate writers gather advice from several sources and perspectives, and need generalist advice at particular times in the writing process.

Discussion I began this research with the question of what role graduate writers see the writing center consultation taking in a larger feedback ecosystem. Interviews revealed four primary strategies: clients identify certain types of writing for tutorials, address sentence-level concerns, meet a gap between their ability and the expectations of evaluators, and obtain feedback from academics outside their disciplines. Two additional questions emerged as pressing and significant from these interviews, and I now turn to these.

First, graduate writers’ emphasis on accuracy and clarity suggests that work on sentence-level error drives visits. While this is not exclusively the case, grammar and other sentence-level concerns weigh heavily on many graduate writers who complete consultations.

Notably, native English speakers and English language learners both identified this aspect of writing as a critical need for their visits. Writers including Susan, Ima, and MJ gave additional information that clarified their confidence writing in English in certain contexts (like a dissertation or “purely” academic writing). All three perceived their writing as very similar to that of native English speakers—MJ shared that he had once taught English language and literature in a high school.

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What Do Graduate Students Want from the Writing Center? • 63 Their focus on sentence-level corrections reflects their anxiety with this stage more than their ability or fluency. The distinction is significant for consultants to realize. In attending to grammar and punctuation, they perform vital emotional labor that they may not acknowledge as part of the position, and which is neither reliably taught in training courses nor rewarded.3 Here I join Phillips in making a case for “offering true support for sentence-level correction and style instead of discounting those issues as lower-order concerns” (“Multilingual Graduate Writers” np). Her explanation focuses on multilingual writers, but resonates with the needs of the graduate population as a whole: “Even if a writer’s sentence-level mistakes do not create comprehension barriers for the reader, they may still represent legitimate global concerns.

Correctness is tremendously important for MGWs, who are composing projects for fields where competition is high and correctness plays a larger gatekeeping role” (np). Since “critical writing is intertwined with performances of professional identity, voice, and persona,” writers understand correctness in writing to be a marker of professional identity (Micchiche 478). Surely anxiety over correctness, with its strong connection to professionalism, gives rise to much of this emotion. When consultants linger over prepositions with clients, they support those writers in learning to perform professional identities and voices—processes of learning that are all the more frustrating when done in solitude.

Second, interviews raised the question of whether graduate students perceive undergraduates as competent consultants. Interviewees’ affirmation of generalists’ helpfulness indicates that writers might likewise incorporate consultations with undergraduate tutors—well-versed in writing, though not in the discipline—into their writing strategies. I discussed this possibility with clients who had completed appointments at Penn State Learning, a separate physical space where tutors are not specifically trained to work with graduate-level writing. Their responses were guardedly optimistic and suggested that undergraduate tutors could be beneficial, with some requirements. These should be experienced tutors; Jordan surmised that age differences could be a barrier, and wondered if she could trust an undergraduate who seemed immature.

Aileen suggested that undergraduates might not understand “graduate school culture” or “the stakes” of her work. Undergraduate tutors would need to recognize the performances of professional identities and voices in graduate writing.

Implications and Recommendations Participants’ responses demonstrate that writing center clients consciously use tutoring in specific ways that help them make progress. Many writers expressed greater concern with increasing the number of available appointments than with consultants’ disciplines. Their responses support the creation of new graduate consultant positions. Writing centers can also support graduate students by creating and sustaining writing groups, which often require a dedicated space and an individual committed to organizing meetings. Writing centers are ideally suited to house writing groups, and consultants are positioned to facilitate groups because of the academic and emotional labor that they perform in one-on-one appointments. Interview subjects’ reflections on their strategies suggested to me that writing groups serve many of the same purposes of facilitating exchanges of ideas and recommendations between peers. Certainly, forming and sustaining writing groups would address shortages of appointments by extending resources to a larger population. Approaching the formal curricular space of a writing course, but without the additional pressures of evaluation, writing groups “create space, community, and rhetorical awareness/flexibility to brainstorm, create, and sustain a wide variety of critical writing projects” (Micciche and Carr 478). My interviews reveal that those who benefit from reliable writing groups would incorporate these meetings as another strategy for making progress in their writing projects.

Do these writers’ enthusiastic uses for generalist consultants mean they would also include undergraduate tutors in their network for writing support? Since participants use one-on-one tutoring to improve clarity and hear perspectives from outside their field, I argue that they would. Preparing tutors for appointments with graduate students, therefore, means addressing differences between graduate and undergraduate education, and differences in writers’ goals. Popular tutoring handbooks like The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring, edited by Lerner and Gillespie, and The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors, edited

by Murphy and Sherwood, say little about working with graduate writers. Discussions of graduate-level writing in a tutoring practicum course or a staff meeting could do much to demystify the needs of this population and their writing projects.

I have outlined four strategies that graduate students have for including tutoring in their writing processes, and I hope these might provide a basis for preparing undergraduate tutors to work with thesis and dissertation writers. A tutoring course could ask

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What Do Graduate Students Want from the Writing Center? • 64 members to interview graduate students and faculty, and, where possible, observe seminars or research.

Tutors might explore the structures of graduate programs at their university, and read samples of graduate writing—research that prepares them to discuss (in Aileen’s words), “not what to write, but how to write it.” Such work could contribute to the tutors’ own preparation for graduate or professional school, and might prove a pedagogical tool for discussing the discourses that shape writing and learning at all levels. These exchanges also have the potential to promote relationships between the writing center and academic departments. Most significantly, tutors who collaborate with graduate writers should begin a meeting with dialogue. Along with creating a better draft of the writing project and creating a better writer, the tutor and client might set a third goal: determining what advice and support the writer carries to this conversation, and what resources they will access to continue the project after the appointment concludes. Graduate writers are self-aware and strategic, and eager to engage tutors in these conversations.

Notes 1. These numbers exclude online consultations with graduate students in distance learning programs, a population who merit attention in a separate study.

2. All names used in this article are pseudonyms selected by the interview participants.

3. Consultants suppress any frustration or boredom they feel, and “invoke or display” enthusiasm that builds the writer’s confidence (Guy and Newman 290).

However, the work of managing emotions is frequently regarded as part of the worker’s personalities, neglecting the fact that such relational work is a practiced skill. As a result, emotional labor that furthers writing center goals of creating supportive, collaborative environments and lively cultures of writing may be neither taught nor rewarded (295).

Works Cited

“Ava.” Personal Interview. 12 June 2015.

“Executive Summary, Ph.D. Completion Project: Policies and Practices to Promote Student Success.” Council of Graduate Schools Ph.D. Completion Project. March 2010. 4 March 2015. Web. Gillespie, Paula. “Graduate Writing Consultants for Ph.D. Programs Part 1: Using What we Know: Networking and Planning.” Writing Lab Newsletter 32.2 (2007): 1-6. Web. Gillespie, Paula, Paul Heidelbrecht, and Lorelle Lamascus. “From Design to Delivery: The Graduate Writing Consultant Course (Part 2).”

Writing Lab Newsletter 32.8 (2008): 8-11. Web. Guy, Mary Ellen and Meredith A. Newman. “Women’s Jobs, Men’s Jobs: Sex Segregation and Emotional Labor.” Public Administration Review 64.3 (2004): 289-298. Web. “Ima.” Personal Interview. 20 May 2015.

“Jordan.” Personal Interview. 1 April 2015.

Kamler, Barbara, and Pat Thomson. Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.

“MJ.” Personal Interview. 11 June 2015.

Micciche, Laura R., and Allison D. Carr. “Toward Graduate-Level Writing Instruction.” College Composition and Communication 62.3 (2011): 477-501.

Web. Phillips, Tallin. “Graduate Writing Groups: Shaping Writing and Writers from Student to Scholar.”

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 10.1 (2012): n. pag.

Web. ---. “Tutor Training and Services for Multilingual Graduate Writers: A Reconsideration.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 10.2 (2013): n. pag. Web. Powers, Judith K. “Assisting the Graduate Thesis Writer Through Faculty and Writing Center Collaboration.” Writing Lab Newsletter 20.1 (1995): 13-16. Web. Simpson, Steve. “Building for Sustainability: Dissertation Boot Camp as a Nexus of Graduate Writing Support.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 10.2 (2013): n. pag. Web. “Susan.” Personal Interview. 22 March 2015.

“Xuan.” Personal Interview. 16 June 2015.

“Aileen.” Personal Interview. 9 April 2015.

Aitchison, Claire. “Writing Groups for Doctoral Education.” Studies in Higher Education 34.8 (2009): 905–916. Web. Andrews, Molly, Corinne Squire, and Maria Tamboukou. Doing Narrative Research. London: Sage Publications. 2008. Web. Atkinson, Robert. The Life Story Interview. London: Sage Publications. 1998. Web. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 13, No 2 (2016) www.praxisuwc.com!

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