ON LOCATION
Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing TutoringUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2005 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-599-1Contents
Preface..........................................................................................................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments..................................................................................................................................................................................................xiIntroduction: On Location in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring Candace Spigelman and Laurie Grobman..............................................................................................................11 Diplomatic Relations: Peer Tutors in the Writing Classroom Teagan Decker......................................................................................................................................172 General Readers and Classroom Tutors across the Curriculum Mary Soliday.......................................................................................................................................313 Building Bridges to Academic Discourse: The Peer Group Leader in Basic Writing Peer Response Groups Laurie Grobman............................................................................................444 Writing and Reading Community Learning: Collaborative Learning among Writing Center Consultants, Students, and Teachers Jim Ottery, Jean Petrolle, Derek John Boczkowski, and Steve Mogge.....................605 Tutors' Voices-Building Trust and Community in Peer Writing Group Classrooms Casey You........................................................................................................................726 The Idea of a Writing Center Meets the Reality of Classroom-Based Tutoring Barbara Little Liu and Holly Mandes................................................................................................877 Bringing The Noise: Peer Power and Authority, On Location Steven J. Corbett...................................................................................................................................1018 A Cautionary Tale about "Tutoring" Peer Response Groups Melissa Nicolas.......................................................................................................................................1129 Tutors' Voices-Active Revision in a Peer Group: The Role of the Peer Group Leader Kelly Giger.................................................................................................................12610 Contextualizing Issues of Power and Promise: Classroom-based Tutoring in Writing across the Curriculum Marti Singer, Robin Breault, and Jennifer Wing........................................................13911 Classroom-Based Tutoring and the "Problem" of Tutor Identity: Highlighting the Shift from Writing Center to Classroom-Based Tutoring David Martins and Thia Wolf.............................................15712 "I've Got No Strings on Me": Avoiding Marionette Theater with Peer Consultants in the Classroom Susan Hrach Georgecink.......................................................................................17413 Reconstructing Authority: Negotiating Power in Democratic Learning Sites Candace Spigelman...................................................................................................................18514 Tutors' Voices-Institutional Change and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Fellows Program Jennifer Corroy..........................................................................................205Conclusion: Hybrid Matters: The Promise of Tutoring On Location Laurie Grobman and Candace Spigelman............................................................................................................219Notes............................................................................................................................................................................................................233References.......................................................................................................................................................................................................245Contributors.....................................................................................................................................................................................................256Index............................................................................................................................................................................................................259
Chapter One
DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS Peer Tutors in the Writing Classroom Teagan Decker
Of the many things that define a writing center, one of the most crucial is the relationship it has with those who assign the writing in the first place. Some centers, especially those connected with basic writing programs, are thoroughly intertwined with the classroom and may serve as labs that students attend as an extension of their composition classes. Others are more autonomous and may have spun away from their home departments altogether, housed in a central location such as a library or undergraduate center. Many are connected with a department, usually English, but are autonomous within that relationship, free to practice forms of pedagogy that diverge from the writing program they are associated with. This type of center attempts to provide students a place separate from the classroom, a place where they can find a different perspective, an interested audience, a place to be free from the authority of the instructor.
In 1984, Stephen North articulated the frustrations and desires of many writing centers by declaring independence from the writing classroom and the writing instructor: "In short, we are not here to serve, supplement, back up, complement, reinforce, or otherwise be defined by any external curriculum" (440). As directors of writing centers, those of us who share his views try to maintain a separateness from the classroom, which serves to strengthen our authority and allows us to offer an alternative learning experience to students. Writing centers don't want independence because of animosity toward instructors. Most writing center directors have been or are instructors, and many tutors plan on making a career in teaching. The real reason for our quest for autonomy has to do with our fundamental belief that students can become better writers and learn from writing better if they have a place to practice writing and share writing that is separate from a writing classroom.
DECLARATIONS OF INDEPENDENCE
For many centers, this desire for separateness has resulted in a place that is, in fact, separate. Far from being combative about autonomy, many writing center directors no longer have to think about these issues: others in the department, although they may not all fully understand or appreciate what goes on in the writing center, leave it alone. The writing center may even operate under a different pedagogical theory than the writing program. Writing centers have achieved an institutional independence that is no longer in need of defense-we are constantly fighting small battles, but the larger one has for the most part been won.
However much we value this independence, we must allow that a strict approach to autonomy can create a climate of poor communication between center and instructors. We lament on listservs, at conferences, and in print that some instructors don't understand what we do, send us their students for the wrong reasons, or don't recommend us to their students at all for equally wrong reasons. We must admit that this is partly due to our declarations of independence. We exist apart from the classroom, so we are misunderstood by instructors. We try to bridge this gulf with flyers, brochures, and presentations, but until they see for themselves what goes on in the writing center, instructors will never really understand what we are doing.
The writing center I work in is independent, autonomous, and has the freedom to experiment. The manner in which we are experimenting, however, seems at odds with the autonomy we have worked so hard to maintain. We have begun sending tutors into the writing classroom. The tutors are not simply visiting the classroom to give an informational speech about the writing center-they are becoming part of the instruction. This bringing together of the writing center and the classroom, on the instructor's turf, may cause writing center advocates to cringe. How can a writing center maintain its integrity when its tutors are being sent to the classroom to do the bidding of an instructor? Doesn't this compromise the autonomy, the separateness, of the writing center and do exactly the opposite of what North advocates: reinforce an external curriculum?
I believe that there is a way to send tutors into the classroom without compromising integrity. Further, I have found that far from compromising the writing center, peer tutoring in the classroom can forge a diplomatic partnership between the center and the instructors that is healthy and supportive. Inviting instructors to work with us allows for a dialogue between instructor and writing center director that is much richer than the usual exchange of information. Tutors visiting the classroom can act as emissaries, sharing their perspective on writing collaboration with instructors and students. If the relationship between the writing center and classroom is built upon a diplomatic model, with careful negotiation and a mindfulness of the role of the tutors, not only is the integrity of the writing center spared, the classroom becomes a fertile ground, with writing center theory infusing the curriculum and instructors witnessing collaboration in action.
THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON'S ENGLISH DEPARTMENT WRITING CENTER
The climate at the University of Washington is the epitome of autonomy: the UW has no central writing center; instead, various departments have created their own centers to serve their students exclusively. The English Department Writing Center, where I am the assistant director, is the only center open to anyone on campus. One main group of the students who visit us are taking lower-division English classes, another significant component consists of those seeking help as second-language students, and a heavy sprinkling come from departments that don't have writing centers of their own.
In short, we are a small center in a very large university. Ten to twelve tutors make up the staff, each working an average of fifteen hours per week. They are almost all undergraduate English majors in their third, fourth, or fifth year. We require all new tutors to enroll in a full-credit training course that provides plentiful theory and practice, preparing students for the complexity of their roles as tutors in the writing center and, more recently, as writing center tutors who occasionally visit classrooms. I try to engage tutors in some of the theoretical problems writing centers face, including the debate over definition. I feel it is especially important for tutors to have a sense of the complexity of their place in the university when they leave the writing center and visit the classroom. If they are able to define themselves as tutors, as opposed to helpers or preteachers, they are better able to maintain their roles as writing center representatives when they enter the classroom.
My motives for initiating a classroom-based tutoring service were twofold. Our relationship with the English department's expository writing program (which offers composition courses that fulfill general education requirements for undergraduates) is positive and complementary, but we operate independently of one another. Most of the composition instructors are graduate students, many of whom are teaching their first or second year. They are introduced to the writing center at their orientation and again through e-mails detailing our specific services. Part of my job description is to act as a liaison between the writing center and the teaching assistants (TAs), but one short presentation and a few e-mails never seem like enough to me. My social skills are simply not advanced enough to develop relationships and engage in fruitful professional dialogue with ninety busy graduate students, most of whom are studying literature and don't have a natural interest in writing center theory. Since there are few formal links between the classroom and the writing center, I began searching for a new way to connect with instructors.
Another goal of mine was to incorporate group tutoring into what we do at the writing center. As an undergraduate tutor, I worked in a curriculum-based lab connected to a basic writing program. One of the instructors occasionally used lab time for peer response groups with tutors as group facilitators. I always enjoyed these groups because I was able to encourage students to tutor each other, which gave them confidence in their own abilities as writers and critics. Although committed to this idea, I couldn't devise a way to bring groups of students into the writing center regularly enough for this new group tutoring program to work. So I decided instead to try sending tutors into the classroom. A group of two or three tutors would attend class during peer response group day and sit in on the groups, helping them respond to each other's work. Not only would students benefit from an experienced peer group facilitator, the TAs (especially the TAs new to teaching) could get help with conducting successful peer response groups, and we would be able to do all this during slow weeks (the first weeks of the quarter), when often tutors are underworked. As a purely practical matter, this idea seemed like it would benefit everyone, but I felt that we were wading into dangerous waters theoretically. How could I send tutors into the classroom without compromising our center's independence? What stakes are involved in such a venture?
THE DEBATE OVER CENTER/CLASSROOM RELATIONS
Since Stephen North's initial declaration of independence, many writing center theorists have engaged in the struggle to define a writing center's relationship with the classroom. As Thomas Hemmeter points out in his review of the literature, "These repeated calls for self-definition form a distinct segment of writing center discourse" (1990, 36). What he finds is that we routinely define ourselves in terms of difference: we are different from the classroom, different from the institution at large, different from expository writing programs. This habit of perception, he maintains, is to our detriment: "The metaphorical contrast of writing center with classroom has been expressed so literally as an environment that the discourse becomes constricted, inhibiting effective communication" (38). The communication he is addressing is that between composition instructors and writing center staff. When writing centers pursue the path of isolationism, setting up a polarity between center and classroom, communication and collegiality are put at risk. The real losers in this communication block are students: instructors may distrust a place they have no ties with, wondering just what goes on in there, and not recommend us to students. Alternatively, they may misunderstand us and misconstrue our agenda to students, who will either not visit or visit under false expectations.
In "Revisiting 'The Idea of a Writing Center,'" North agrees that his original polemic, while useful to writing centers as they have worked to define themselves over the years, is heavy-handed and "presents its own kind of jeopardy," limiting the role of writing centers with its polarized conception of the relationship between writing center and classroom (1994, 9). He now advocates a writing center that is more integrated with the instructional end of things: "I want a situation in which we are not required to sustain some delicate but carefully distanced relationship between classroom teachers and the writing center, not least because the classroom teachers are directly involved with, and therefore invested in, the functioning of that center" (16).
The notion of separation that North's 1984 article advocates has been revised and questioned by North himself and others, but its opposite, integration, has its own pitfalls. In an integrated, or curriculum-based, writing center, tutors are part of the classroom instruction for a full term. They are usually attached to a specific class and perform various duties, including one-to-one tutoring, group tutoring, responding to papers in writing, and even giving presentations to the class. The curriculum-based model has met with enthusiasm and success by writing center practitioners like Mary Soliday, who, although frank about problems she encountered and that may be looming in the future, considers her program beneficial to all involved and argues that it "popularize[s] the writing center's services ... so that classroom tutors also function as 'gateways' to the writing center" (1995, 70).
Although these curriculum-based programs may be effective in meeting certain pedagogical and practical goals, they undercut important aspects of writing center identity. As Harvey Kail and John Trimbur warn, "the curriculum-based model makes the peer tutors an extension of the faculty" (1987, 6). This violates one of the main tenants of writing center ideology: the absence of professorial authority. Although it is difficult for tutors to truly be peers, most of us can agree that a tutor should not serve as a teacher. When tutors do become teachers, they "suppress the crisis of authority precipitated when students work together, domesticate it, and channel the social forces released by collaboration into the established structures of teaching and learning" (11). In other words, the writing center is often conceived as (and this is true for my writing center) a site of liberation from the traditional regimes of the academy. It is a place to question and investigate the seemingly untouchable expectations, goals, and motivations of the power structures within which undergraduates (and those at all levels in the university) operate. Combining writing centers with classrooms retains the more obvious benefits of peer tutoring and provides much-needed help to overworked instructors, but leaves the political and social energy of the autonomous writing center behind.
Writing center theorists often position autonomy and integration at opposite ends of the pedagogical spectrum, each extreme having its costs and benefits. Writing centers like mine, which try to be what Kail and Trimbur advocate-a site of political awakening, a place where students can "remove themselves from the official structures" and "reengage the forms of authority in their lives by demystifying the authority of knowledge and its institutions" (1987, 11)-suffer from a loss of communication between center and classroom. Curriculum-based centers, however, lose the very "crises of authority" Kail and Trimbur describe by merging the writing center with the classroom, compromising the separateness that allows students to become aware of institutional assumptions about writing and learning in the academy.
Dave Healy, who, like Kail and Trimbur, argues for the political benefits of a separate classroom and center, nevertheless urges us to "recognize the fluidity of both classroom and center" (1993, 26). He suggests a solution much like the program my writing center has been experimenting with: "On writing workshop days, tutors could join the instructor in circulating around the room and doing short conferences." Even an advocate of dualism like Healy is comfortable with tutors in the classroom if the visits are isolated, not every day. With the instructor in the classroom, and the structures of the classroom in place, it is probably too much to expect that students will experience a "crisis of authority" when tutors visit the classroom, but if tutors are able to retain their identity, certainly students will experience something of what the writing center is able to offer them. Also, if tutors visit only once per term, the writing center itself remains the primary locus of the tutor. Handled properly, then, my program can bring instructors closer to the writing center and reach more students, while still retaining writing center integrity.
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