Friends of Writing Center Journal

tutor training textbooks

2005-11-30T12:45:00.000-08:00

I'm here to discuss my review of the tutor-training textbooks The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring, ESL Writers, and The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors in WCJ. I'll touch on a couple of issues raised in the review today and write about a couple others later this week and see if there's any response to this blog.
I was particularly struck in reviewing these books by the desire to introduce tutors to the field of writing center theory and research and to some of the critical debates of the field. I take this as a sign of how important disciplinarity has become in our field that tutor-training books, like introductory textbooks in psychology, economics, sociology, and many other fields, function partly as an introduction to the discipline. Tutors are represented not just as students working a part-time job but as novices in a larger community who should be interested in its conversations and invited to participate in the discussions and research of writing center scholars and directors. That's unusual for textbooks in English. Although some schools now have courses that introduce students to English studies or literary studies, first- and second-year composition and literature courses in English departments traditionally have never functioned like an intro to psychology course. Only linguistics and sometimes folklore in English have typically offered intro courses like this, although the situation is changing. This development is also intriguing given the tutor's ambiguous position as a professional and some ambivalence about disciplinarity in writing centers, expressed most memorably by Richard Riley. Tutors are instructed to resist responding to papers and talking to writers as a teacher would, to avoid teacher talk and not view themselves as "paraprofessionals," to use John Trimbur's term.
Because I raised the issue of how textbooks in general tend to regulate instruction, promoting some theories and pedagogies while ignoring others, I want to mention that Toni-Lee Capossela's Harcourt Brace Guide to Peer Tutoring has gone out of print. I don't know the reason for this, maybe Harcourt didn't find enough interest in the book or didn't promote the book enough (Longman and St. Martin's are much more active about developing and promoting books for writing instructors) or maybe Capossela decided she wasn't interested in doing a second edition. Hers is the only tutor-training book that combines a manual and an anthology of readings, and, more importantly, Capossela includes far more discussion about writing than any other book for tutors. The other books take little responsibility for teaching students much about writing processes. Although the Harcourt Brace Guide needs revising and updating, it's a real loss that it's no longer available, and this loss raises a question about why tutor-training books don't cover much about theories and research on composition in general.

Closing thoughts about OWC

2005-11-17T09:06:00.000-08:00

As I close my comments this week about the usefulness of metaphors and conceptual models for online writing centers, I want to say that if nothing else, brainstorming metaphors for online tutoring is a fun, creative way to think productively about how students can receive tutoring online. Even if a metaphor doesn't make it to the final web design, it's a great first place to start drafting designs and ideas.

But, if you are serious about going through this process, I would recommend that you follow steps outlined by Jeffrey Rubin on the use of conceptual models. (See Rubin, Jeff. "Conceptual Design: Cornerstone of Usability." Technical Communication 43.2 (1996): 130- 138.) Here are the steps I think are most pertinent to designing online writing centers:

1. Analyze your audience. Get information about who your potential online clients would be: traditional students? non-traditional students? commuters? resident students? undergrad or grads? tech-savvy? non-native speakers of English? Gather as much information as possible about your pool of students that might use your OWC. This step is absolutely critical, for you could come up with a great design that doesn't make sense at all to your target users.

2. Identify your technological capabilites. Ask what kind of technology supports your online writing center (Web? Email? Database?). Write down what kind of technological support you have in terms of web site design, maintenance, and troubleshooting. After doing this homework, with questions 1 and 2, you'll have a better idea of what metaphors might work best with your audience and technology capabilities.

3. Brainstorm metaphors that might describe how your writing center works, or how you’d like it to work. Example: “My online writing center works like telephone conference. Students can dial in and chat synchronously with a tutor online during open tutoring hours.” Brainstorm as many metaphors as possible in a 5 minute period.

4. Pick one metaphor you brainstormed that you’d like to develop that seems most promising.
5. Draw a “paper prototype,” or a simple sketch, of the critical web page(s) of your site that would relate best to your selected metaphor. Take a piece of 81/2 x 11 inch paper, draw a screen, and then sketch out visuals or links that might appear on that web page. You might narrow this exercise to just one web page of your online writing center site. For instance you might pick your home page, or a page just beyond the home page that goes into more depth about your online writing center service. On your sketch, draw buttons, lines, or images where users can “click.” Use visuals and words to guide your users.

6. Give your paper prototype to another person to examine. Ask them to walk through the sketch much as they would on screen (ask them literally to point to or press the links you've drawn).

Going through these exercises can really stimulate your ideas for an online writing center. If you do this exercise with your entire staff, you could generate a lot of ideas and even come to an agreement about which one is best or deserves further exploration and development. It's productive, fun, and guarantees that you will carefully think through your students' experience online.

Well, I hope these have been useful thoughts and ideas about online writing center design. It's been fun to blog here. Good bye!

Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch

Rockclimbing

2005-11-17T08:44:00.000-08:00

So in this post I'm going to talk about another idea for a conceptual model that emerged from the IWCA workshop I gave in November about designing online writing centers.

One of the participants came up with the idea of ROCKCLIMBING as a metaphor for an online tutorial. She explained that writing and rockclimbing had much in common, and that it would be fitting for tutoring as well. For example, she said that when you rockclimb, you have a guide who is with you every step of the way, offering help when needed. However, the guide can't climb the rock for you--(much like writing, you have to do the writing yourself). She added that, like rockclimbing, writing is risky to a lot of people--it takes them out of their comfort zone. It stretches them, requires concentration and hard work, and discipline. Like rockclimbing, writing also requires that you set goals and reach for them. I thought rockclimbing was a beautiful metaphor not only for writing but for writing tutors/consultants. I'm sorry that I can't recall the name of the participant who offered the suggestion, but I know she is from the southwest. Anyway, it's a great metaphor. What's also nice about it is that you don't need to be a rockclimber to understand the metaphor; however, in her particular case, the rockclimbing metaphor would be especially useful since there probably are more rockclimbers in the southwest.

Now, how would this metaphor fit for an online writing center? You see, the importance of a metaphor for online design is that it helps people understand what actions might occur, and how those actions manifest in online spaces. In the case of the rockclimbing metaphor, we might explain the connections between rockclimbing and writing in a small paragraph (much like I did above). This explanation might help students understand that they need to submit their own writing online (a tutor won't write for them); they might expect to get paired with an online tutor who would be their "guide"; they might expect this tutor to point out problem areas in their writing and offer suggestions for further revision.

Then, we might select certain key words from that description to pull out for functions of the web site. These key words could serve as links or visuals to guide the user's online experience. For example, I could imagine tabs or links that say "step 1" and "step 2" with a picture of a rock step in the background. Actually you could have a rock mountain in the background, with links at various points around the moutain outline (not necessarily linear!). You could use the word "guide" to designate the tutor, and have a tab or link that said "guide"; you could also have a link that said "troublespots" with information about common writing "pitfalls" to avoid (handouts on usage, mechanics, grammar, process, revision, etc.).

It's really fun to think about the possibilities, and what's so useful about a metaphor/conceptual model is that it pulls the whole online experience together. Users "climb" into a world and the metaphor/conceptual model helps them understand how to navigate in that online space.

Here ends my example of the rockclimbing metaphor. In the next post I'll offer some closing thoughts about metaphors and conceptual models for online writing center design.

Lee-Ann

OWC Models

2005-11-15T19:34:00.000-08:00

So to continue my thoughts about OWCs and conceptual models. . . in this post I'll talk about some other conceptual models that I've encountered as ways to structure online writing centers. At the recent IWCA conference, I gave a workshop on how to use conceptual models to structure an online writing center. One of the exercises we did was to brainstorm as many metaphors as possible that would describe their online writing center. Not surprisingly, at this point, one of the participants raised her hand and said "how do you define an online writing center?" A good question. So, step one is to define/describe your OWC. For help doing this, check out an article in Kairos by Jane Lasarenko , who describes different levels of writing center service. Is your online writing center simply a web site that announces your f2f service? is your online writing center an asynchronous tutoring service? synchronous? both? Once you have a good understanding of the level of your service, you can begin thinking about metaphors that might describe your online service.

At the IWCA workshop, several good examples were given by participants. One woman suggested that their online writing center could be best represented by a subway map. Visually, there were different "trains" that students could get on. The "red train" might be a series of links related to asynchronous tutoring. The "blue train" might be a series of links related to synchronous conferencing. The "green train" might be a series of links with writing resources, and so on. The subway map was a compelling visual, as well. I think it's a wonderful example of how an online writing center can be represented conceptually. One of the things we need to remember about OWCs is the visual component is as much a part of the experience as the verbal component. If we can help students visualize the services we are offering online, students are more likely to use the service--and come back again.

Lee-Ann

Thoughts about OWCs

2005-11-14T19:33:00.000-08:00

This week I'll be writing some thoughts about online writing centers (OWCs) as a follow up to my article "The Idea(s) of an Online Writing Center: In Search of a Conceptual Model" which was in the last issue of Writing Center Journal. I'm rather new to blogging and I must admit it feels a bit weird to share my thoughts so publicly, but I also think it will be fun. Here goes!

Today I'm thinking about online writing centers and the connections they have with online education, usability of web sites, and writing workshops. Notice that I did not say "f2f tutoring." I think one of the toughest things about online writing centers is the pressure they experience to be just like a f2f center. In my experience directing an online writing center, training online tutors, and tutoring online, I just came to believe that it was very unlikely that online tutoring could be just like f2f tutoring. It seemed to me, in fact, that making that constant comparison was damaging--online tutoring is often described as "cold" and something "less" than f2f tutoring. I frankly got tired of hearing those arguments. I've seen many wonderful things happen in online tutoring. I've seen many students grateful for the help and advice. And surprisingly, I've seen many repeat visits in online writing centers from students that really take to the medium. There are plenty of good things about online writing centers--but they don't always fit into the "Idea of a Writing Center" ala Stephen North.

What I'm reacting to here is the idea that all writing centers must fit the mold of f2f, non-directive, 30- or 50-minute tutoring session. When you take tutoring online, it just doesn't fit in that mold unless you try really hard--with cameras, synchronous spaces, etc. Most online writing centers are asynchronous, and that conflicts with North's idea. How do you focus on developing "the writer" (not the "writing") online when all you've got online is the student's writing, delivered asynchronously? I think that is a really interesting question that needs much more exploration.

My first shot at answering that question is that in order to "develop the writer" online, online writing centers first need to create a learning environment that is welcoming to the writer. A good online learning environment also needs structure, and context to tell the writer what they can expect during an online tutorial. Context can be created by words, certainly, but it can also communicated through visuals. In addition, it can be communicated through a conceptual model or metaphor. A conceptual model is a mental map that explains how something works. Conceptual models are often communicated through a metaphor that describes how something works: "this [item/product/website] works like a [blank]." Conceptual models are often used in website design, and it makes sense to bring this concept to online writing centers.

Designing online writing centers is hard work. OWCs often start out with the burden of trying to work like a f2f writing center--but then figure out that a f2f writing center is not the right conceptual model for an online writing center. As I wrote in the WCJ article, I explored several online writing centers. But my favorite examples of OWCs are those that are designed around a strong conceptual model. University of Missouri-Columbia's OWC is built around the model of a cafe. There are visuals and even sounds that create the image of a cafe, and these effects set the expectation that students can talk informally with a tutor about their writing, either synchronously or asynchronously. I also like the conceptual model of a studio, which Colorado State uses for its OWC. The studio allows for lots of flexibility: students can post work (like artists post their work in a studio) and receive commentary from lots of people. There are separate "rooms" with different emphases. . . the studio model welcomes constructive critique with a sense of respect for individual and collaborative contributions.

In the remainder of my posts this week, I'll talk about some other models I have been exploring lately. As luck would have it, I'm on sabbatical this year, studying online writers workshops. There are some fabulous models out there that I think apply well to online writing centers. More later!

Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch

Lab Writing/Writing Lab

2005-11-04T19:17:00.000-08:00

Sorry to skip a day there, but I wanted to get back to the premise I was working on earlier this week: the ways that writing labs and science labs share a great deal of challenge and promise. As Moira commented on the last post (go KU!), it's easy to be jealous of the ways that graduate students, post-docs, and the occasional undergraduate get to learn in the activity of a science lab. It surely contains the elements of "cognitive apprenticeship" and "situated learning" that's theorized by folks such as James P. Gee, Jean Lave, and John Seeley Brown. At MIT, all undergraduates have the opportunity to work in research labs, either for credit or not, and there's hot competition to get into labs early and often. A resume builder, for sure, but also the kind of hands-on experience that simply doesn't come from classroom learning.

I also wrote in an earlier posting that many of MIT's communication-intensive classes were labs in which students have opportunities for writing and speaking about the problems they're trying to solve in lab. Seemed like a good idea to me, but when I was looking more deeply into the origins of the word "laboratory" as applied to the teaching of writing, I began to find many parallel histories. Teaching science in the laboratory became widespread much later than most folks would guess; it wasn't until the late 19th century/early 20th century that chemistry, biology, and physics were commonplace as laboratory subjects, right around the same time that writing was seen best taught and learned in contexts in which practice was key (rather than elements to be lectured by faculty and recited from memory by students).

Well, just as writing as a laboratory subject became contested in the 20s and 30s, mainly because of the workload involved when overburdened faculty were responding to the writing of 90 to 100 students, laboratory science faced a similar crisis. One point of scrutiny was that science educators were slow to get their heads around how they might assess the more abstract elements of lab science instruction. It was far easier to test for mastery of scientific concepts. And it was far less expensive to have the instructor demonstrate the lab work than to have a room full of butter-fingered students pouring out those dangerous chemicals. Thus, there was a backlash to lab science, particularly in high schools, but in higher ed as well. Still, lab science endured as world events fueled the importance of learning science, whether the atomic bomb, Sputnik, or the Cold War.

Unfortunately, what also endured was a sort of cookbook approach to learning science in the lab that is a distortion of original intent, just as the five-paragraph theme is a distortion of what probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Noticably absent throughout the teaching of laboratory science, and still pretty much absent, was attention to the writing of students' scientific work. In other words, science educators never quite saw students' opportunities to write to learn and to communicate science. One of my particular research interests is tracking down examples of students writing in science labs in the early 20th century and what I have found looks a lot like grammar/usage worksheets in English classrooms: fill in the blank with protocol and some results. Dull stuff.

Ultimately, then, I see terrific opportunities for science and writing educators to work together and provide opportunities for students to learn. We have a common history, and I suppose I'm calling for a common future.

By the way, the photo I show at the top is an Arts Laboratory at the University of Minnesota General College circa 1932. Cool outfits!

Enjoy your weekends,

Neal

Writing Centers in Unlikely Places

2005-11-02T11:11:00.000-08:00

One of the sessions I went to at the IWCA/NCPTW conference in Minneapolis featured Carol-Ann Farkas of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and Susan Mueller of the St. Louis College of Pharmacy talking about the writing centers they direct in the relatively unusual setting of pharmacy education. I feel an allegiance to this topic because Carol-Ann is my successor at MCPHS, and the six years I spent there certainly taught me a great deal about writing across the health-care curriculum, about being a liberal arts faculty member at a non-liberal-arts institution, and about starting a writing center from scratch.

I've had the opportunity to write some about my experiences at MCPHS, including a piece on the history of writing at that institution, which you can find here at the LLAD archives. That was also my first foray into archival work, a kind of research that has pretty much taken over much of what I do for scholarship, whether that's tracing the history of particular writing centers or of students' use of writing to learn laboratory science. At the time of my research into MCPHS's history with writing, I was newly hired and wanted to get some grounding in the institution itself (you can see a timeline of writing at MCP here), as well as some idea of the precedent for work that looked like writing center work. That college has been graduating students since 1869, and I figured somewhere along the line someone made the move to help students become better writers through one-to-one tutoring. Thus, this piece of institutional history, which I initially wanted to use to broaden my knowledge and to communicate to faculty who were responsive to precedents, became more than a public relations ploy. I like to think of writing center research that way: what might start as a fairly simple attempt to answer a practical question or come up with some strategy can broaden into a piece of writing that's of interest to a wide audience. Another variation on this strategy is how much of my current research on the history of writing centers has broadended to encompass the history of the concept of laboratory methods of teaching, whether that means teacher-student conferences, science laboratories, or any other "experimental" approaches to teaching and learning. It all starts with writing centers, for me, one of the most enduring experiments in teaching at any educational level.

Tomorrow I'll end this week's blog entries with some idea of what I have learned about the history of teaching science in laboratory settings and how strikingly parallel that history is to the teaching of writing one-to-one. It all adds up to the idea of a writing center/writing lab in some places we wouldn't normally associate with those practices.

Neal Lerner

Coming Clean in Cambridge

2005-11-01T12:03:00.000-08:00

Okay, I have to admit it: I'm not currently engaged in writing center work on a day-to-day basis. MIT does have a Writing and Communications Center, directed by Steve Strang, but I work as a lecturer for the Writing Across the Curriculum Program, a job I was hired to do in fall of 2002. In this blog entry I want to describe this work, something folks sometimes have a hard time getting their heads around (probably due to the prevalent images circulating about MIT, such as theMIT nerd test).

Starting in 2001, MIT instituted a communications requirement for all undergraduates. This far more extensive writing requirement than had been in place previously largely came about as a result of surveys of alumni, who reported that MIT had taught them to be terrific engineers and scientists but not-so-terrific communicators. As a result, their career advancement was less than ideal (following the adage I heard earlier this semester, "Engineers who can't write work for engineers who can.").

Now, each undergraduate needs to take four total classes designated as "communications intensive" or CI. Two of those CIs are in the humanities, arts, or social sciences cluster, and two are within students' major departments. The primary class I was hired to work with is a sophomore-level molecular biology lab class, affectionately known as "7.02" (numbers are big around here). My colleague Marilee Ogren (who has a PhD in neurobiology and lots of experience as a scientific journal edtior and writer) and I designed "7.02 SciComm," a stand-alone scientific communications class in which we help students read and write research articles. You can learn more about SciComm at our website for the current semester or at the version of our class that's been put on MIT's Open Courseware site.

The communication requirement as applied to students' majors has largely been applied to existing lab classes. The thinking was that these were already sites in which students were doing some writing and were organized into smaller sections, even if the larger lecture was hundreds of students. In other words, the infrastructure was largely present, and it was a much easier sell to departments concerned about squeezing in yet another requirement.

In addition to SciComm, I also regularly work with a junior-level biology lab class and have worked with CI classes in political science, management, electrical engineering, chemistry, and architecture. That sometimes means offering writing workshops throughout the semester and conferencing with students, akin to writing fellows programs or it might mean only responding to students' writing, never actually meeting with them. Our level of involvement in any individual class varies according to the department, the class, and our time available. It's a very flexible and often funky job.

I do like this work a great deal and have learned tremendously about WAC in the last three and a half years. MIT undergraduates are remarkable folks, many destined to do great things, all very committed to working hard and solving problems for the greater good. Given that as an undergraduate I never took a science course (except for computer science), one would think my background would be limiting. However, I use my skills as a rhetorician to understand how a scientific article in any field manages to do its work, and I use my skills as a teacher to help students acquire and demonstrate that understanding. I also find it fascintating and ironic that the knowledge in science and engineering is socially constructed in ways that the humanities with its continued glorification of single-authored works sure has not achieved in practice, despite frequent lip-service and theorizing. The model of the research lab as a forum for teaching and learning is one I'm hoping will influence the work we do in writing classrooms. It's the writing laboratory reconsidered, and that's laboratory in the best experimental intent of the word.

So you see, I really often feel like I am doing writing center work here, but not in the conventional sense. That says something quite powerful to me about the ways writing centers and their ideals can transform the teaching and learning at our institutions.

Neal

A Few More IWCA/NCPTW Conference Thoughts

2005-10-31T13:30:00.000-08:00

Michele Eodice shared some of her IWCA/NCPTW conference thoughts and photos last week in the WCJ blog, and the conference onversation on WCenter--particularly about Victor Villanueva's electrifying keynote--has been rich. I wanted to add a few thoughts/observations in today's blog entry.

On the whole, I thought the conference was meticulously planned, invigorating, and, of course, fun. One of my favorite features was the research fair, one during breakfast and one during lunch. These were terrific opportunities for writing center folks to show off their research while the rest of us walked around talking and listening with our mouths full. I wished I had had a chance to see every one of the posters, but the crowds around several of them were simply too large! I did see, however, research on gender and writing centers, on attitudes toward the writing center, on patterns of interaction when tutor and student are in front of a computer, on the concept of community and the writing center, and several others. Good stuff.

I also want to offer praise for the first featured session. Chris Anson and Paula Gillespie offered their views and experiences on what "globalization" of education, generally, and our writing centers, specifically, might mean.

Here's what else I saw:
--Brad Peters, Rebecca Rine, and Harvey Kail described how each uses the written word to communicate with faculty (Rine) and administration (Peters) or as the focus of staff education (Kail).
--Matt Berg, Kyle Oliver, and Jason Rozumalski of the Univ of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Fellows program described their individual research into practice, whether using metaphors to reach science students in humanities classes (Kyle), the efficacy of online tutoring (Matt), or the muddiness of higher-order/lower-order distinctions (Jason). Awesome research by talented undergrads.
--Disciplinary and intellectual boundaries were complicated when Deb Burns and Kathryn Nielsen-Dube of Merrimack College described their writing fellows experiences with students from business-oriented classes. And then Carol-Ann Farkas of the Mass College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences (my previous employer!) and Susan Mueller of the St. Louis College of Pharmacy presented their thoughts on working in the unique (and sometimes, odd) environment of pharmacy education.
--Beth Boquet, Michele Eodice, and Anne Ellen Geller offered a rotating workshop on strategies they and their staffs use as learning situations for each other and for helping students. I made a cool Cootie Catcher. Thanks, Michele!
--Dan Gallegher and Lori Salem of Temple University offered the extensive work they've done on statistically analyzing students at their university who they can target for writing center services. The math nerd in me was allowed to come out! Thanks, Lori and Dan!

Finally, the conference was wrapped up by a featured session with Lil Brannon of the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, Derek Owens of St. John's University, and Dan Mahala of the Univ of Missouri-KC. They offered a terrific balance of history, vision, and caution as writing centers move into the challenges of the 21st century.

Then, of course, there were the chance encounters with old friends, the Summer Institute reunion, the coffee breaks to plan future projects, the fine eating that downtown Minneapolis had to offer. I have to say that I came to the conference feeling somewhat adrift in my professional life as I try to figure out just what it is that I want to do from this point on, but I came away renewed with confidence about the importance and opportunity of writing center work. Thanks to all who contributed to that effect.

Finally, the added spooky bonus for Halloween at the start of this entry is a picture of the front door of my house, fully decorated by my 7-year-old daughter, Hannah.

Neal

Sound Bytes You Back

2005-10-26T06:36:00.000-07:00

With the speaker's consent, Clint Gardner offers a very short but powerful sample of Victor Villanueva's keynote at the IWCA/NCPTW conference in Minneapolis.

The editors of Writing Center Journal (Beth & Neal, above) have invited V.V. to publish the keynote in an upcoming issue.

The discussion on WCenter since the conference ended on Sunday has been thick and rich and risky, and looks as if it might just take us to a new level of conversation--a good first step.

More conference pics:

The UNC crew presenting their findings at the Research Fair

Janet Swenson (Michigan State) & Michele Eodice (KU)

Four authors in search of a writing center - Darwin, Amelia Bloomer, Roland Barthes, & Bakhtin

SI Reunion

2005-10-25T14:37:00.000-07:00

We found about 40 Summer Institute participants and leaders hanging around the lobby on Saturday--a happy hour was had by all!

This is the SI 03 group . . . the first voyage out

SI 04 (oddly, the participants were missing, making us wonder if we have run them out of the profession!)

SI 05 - a wild bunch . . .

My Dogs Are Yappin'

2005-10-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

I arrived home on Sunday-- with that "good tired" feeling . . . but my feet still hurt!

As a member of the IWCA/NCPTW 2005 conference committee, I roamed around, actively soliciting feedback (and we hope all who attended will submit their feedback form as well); I heard some amazing assessments of the conference. Peer tutor-led sessions were stronger than ever-a testament to the students' preparation and to the commitment and mentoring of the directors. The energy and quality offered in sessions was way way up there and the keynote took us to an important place for thinking about our work. I'd like to hear others chime in with thoughts on what Victor Villanueva's talk meant to them.

More later . . . including photos of the Summer Institute Alums Reunion!

M.

The Mauling of America

2005-10-20T20:10:00.000-07:00

How do you get this software to work anyway, Michele?

Just point and click, Neal, point and click.

Oh, okay, I think I've got it. At first I thought it was drag and drop.

We're blogging live from the IWCA/NCPTW conference in Minneapolis. How has the conference been so far for you, Michele?

Pretty darn good, Neal. I've been meeting and greeting. Saw some good sessions, too.

Me, too, Michele. But we shouldn't talk about sessions. Clint Gardner is covering that in his blog. Let's talk about the important issues here. For instance, who gets in a photo. Michele, I heard your batteries gave out taking pictures.

True that.

KU tutors Mark Anderson & Dan Watson
flanking assistant director, Moira Ozias

Swarthmore tutors with Kate (right) from
Portland State!

Folks out there reading this: you are missing some good stuff. Good sandwiches in the box lunch today too. You bethca.

You know, I heard about the newest conference hazard.

What's that Michele?

The shawl. And the name tag loss due to hugging.

Wha???

The shawl is the latest conference accoutrement. Most of them look dangerous --fears abound of getting the fringe caught in elevators, escalators, zippers and whatnot.

The name tag loss due to hugging is a true henom. Many folks told me that they lost the hanging name tag after the first signficant hug of the conference. You all, go to the registration desk to retrieve lost name tags.

I found several name tags, Michele. For awhile today I was Harvey Kail. Then, Jon Olson. Finally, Paula Gillespie. How about you, Michele?

I picked up Brad Peters' tag. It was a good catch.

That's a lot of hugging, Michele.

You betcha.

Well, I think we had better sign off and rest up for tomorrow, Michele. Big day ahead for the IWCA/NCPTW conference. All day fundraiser for Hurricane Relief with magnet poetry. Tstaskelehs, the all-girl Klezmer band tomorrow night. Sessions, of course.

Looking forward to it, Neal.

Me, too, Michele.

You betcha.

The Problems with “Peerness”; Or, When Who Your Are Limits What You Do

2005-10-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

But first, something completely different . . . .

"Neal Lerner, Wearing a Baseball Cap & Hanging Out In A Bar At South Park"

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"Melissa Ianetta, if she was made out of Legos"

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I’ve really enjoyed my “blogging my way to IWCA” for you all this week, and I think this experience has helped me push my thinking on the WPA / WCD relationship in new ways. Some of those ways are the subject of my ruminations today, gentle reader, so please excuse me if some of these ideas are undigested, half-baked, or positively raw.

As our postings yesterday suggested, Neal and I are pretty close together on the notion that there’s something disturbing about the manner in which directing the writing center is often treated as a “junior” wpa gig. But I’m wondering how much of that is a result of the poor fit between our pedagogies and those of our colleagues:

Think about our defining philosophy: In direct opposition to the “Boss Compositionist” model, the writing center is a place of “peerness;” we talk about the ways in which students can help one another, the ways in which all writers need readers. We talk about how every writing center is different and requires different preparation for its administrators. I believe this mantra; in fact, it’s one of the things I love about the field. However, the bread-and-butter of our colleagues across the disciplines is expertise. From this vantage point, the “peerness” of writing center appears a place prior to disciplinary knowledge. If we position ourselves as the administrators of “peerness,” a field with (as recent discussion on WCENTER has shown) no set of best practices or outcomes, it can appear that we are positioning ourselves in a place prior to disciplinary knowledge.

Think about teaching and tutoring, too: there’s a whole body of research out there (to which your humble narrator blushingly admits she has contributed) on the benefits of tutor experience for teachers of writing. While I firmly believe such benefits are real; what are their implications for the disciplinary positioning of the writing center? That is, if we position the writing center in a role where we prepare teachers of writing, are we again locating our administrative selves in a place prior to the administrators “real” writing program? Tutoring isn’t teaching, tutoring is prior to teaching?

Now think about numbers: many many many many of my friends in writing center studies resist any kinds of numbers to do with budgets or statistics. And they certainly resist any numbers that demonstrate any changes may be necessary in the writing center. Rather, they want to argue that “there are things that you just can’t quantify.” I believe this also, but I also believe that such resistance makes a writing center director look less like someone in charge of a program – who can explicitly argue from the precise workings of her program -- and more like “the nice lady in the basement” who’s a bit vauge. Admittedly, we can get away with this innumeracy – often we are far enough under the administration’s radar and so ill-funded that there is no great exigency to stay on top of this data. But poor funding and low visibility don’t seem to me the best basis for an administrative approach. By contrast, if I didn’t keep track of numbers related to the writing programs – projected course enrollments, courses needing staffing, monies to staff courses – the writing program would derail in a highly-visible train wreck that smashes on a grand scale. And, of course, stakeholders across campus want to know what the writing program thinks its doing. In other words, my course-based WPA role forces me to greater numeracy and to greater external accountability than does my writing center work.

Some of these are grim thoughts for a grey day her in DE. But I do wonder if we, as a field, pay enough attention to the costs of some our most entrenched ideologies.

That's all folks. Thanks for listening.

2005-10-13T03:36:00.000-07:00

No Penguins Were Injured
In the Creation of this Blog Entry

As promised in my last entry, today I’m going to review some of the scholarship of the field to see if I can work towards a better understanding of the relationship between the writing center director and the writing program administrator. I’m really not sure how well this is going to work out, but I promise there will be penguins and a link to a page guaranteed to lift you out of the doldrums on those days when misconceptions described in North’s “Idea of a Writing Center” seems like a best-case scenario.

But first, what I’ve found so far. In a nutshell, I am apparently way more obsessed with the conceptual relationship between the WPA and WCD (Writing Center Director) than most folks. That is, I didn’t find much on this topic. The most notable exception to this claim is Carol Haviland and Denise Stephenson’s “Writing Centers, Writing Programs and WPAs” (The Writing Program Administrator's Resource: A Guide to Reflective Institutional Practice, 377-92). As part of their analysis, Haviland and Stephens forward the notion that “being a writing center WPA means setting aside the comfort of staying small and insular and working to see/know/create contexts for writing programs on specific campuses” (382). The do suggest, however, “directors who are not tenure track faculty may feel marginalized because of their lack of faculty status” (381), both on campus, and in one anecdote included in the story, by other WPAs. We may define ourselves as WPAs, then, but do others? This story also got me wondering: is “WPA” as a potential term of higher prestige in some circles? And, if so, is the WPA assignation constructed in an exchange between two individuals, who either confer expertise by naming / being named as a writing center director AND a WPA? By contrast, can it be used as a marker of lesser prestige to define another as a writing center director, but not a WPA? Hmmmm . . .. . .

Such would seem to be the case if we look to two other sources of information: job ads and James McDonald and Valerie Balester’s essay “A View of Status and Working Conditions: Relations between Writing Programs and Center Directors” (WPA 24.3 59-82). In the former case, I’ve seen (and I know that discussed with some of you) those writing center director ads that suggest these jobs for individuals who would “like to get a few years under their belt” before moving to the work of administering a course-based writing program. Such suggestions position writing center work as previous to (and presumably requiring less expertise than) administering course-based programs. In the case of McDonald and Balester’s essay, the data they gathered again suggests that the WPA designator affixes itself to the higher-paid, higher prestige position. And don’t I remember reading something somewhere (aside: you gotta love this blog thing – where else can I publicly cite a source as “something somewhere”) critiquing a CWPA statement for omitting writing center directors from the statement’s definition of “WPA”? Hmmm . . . gotta find time to look that up . . . .

Finally – and I admit this ruefully – but my own experience reflects these omissions, trends and biases. For my first TT job out of graduate school, I was hired as a writing center director at a Research II. I didn’t have any pubs or experience directing a center. Admittedly, I had been a tutor since Hector was a pup and had served as a graduate-student composition program WPA. But I wonder, would I have gotten that first job if the position was reversed: if I had administered a writing center as a graduate student and it was a job for a Director of Composition? I really don’t know, but I think it’s an interesting question to ask.

Four years later, I’m a Director of Writing (still TT – someday real soon I’m going to successfully track that tenure, I swear), in a job that includes administrating the writing center, but also the writing programs and WAC. (Aside: Who was it, anyway that said you know you’ve been a WPA too long when you’ve taken over the writing center, the writing program and you’re just about to invade Poland?). I have a much better budget and access to the senior administration than when I was “just” a writing center director (and, yes, I’m using “just” ironically). I find myself wondering how much of my enhanced say so-is institutional and how much is related to the fact that I’m “more of an administrator.” Another interesting question, I think.

Now that I’ve provided the questions, I’m sure you, gentle reader, can give me the answer, no?

Okay, that’s enough text for one day. Now for that fun website I promised:

***********************************************************************
Site of the Day:
Did the Dean turn down your budget request?
Did faculty send students to you for spelling help and oral hygiene remediation?
Time to do a little penguin whacking.
http://www.birdcheck.co.uk/whackthepenguin.htm

(be sure to have your volume on so that you can hear it say "wheee!")

Don’t get an ulcer, take it out on the penguin.
************************************************************************

2005-10-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

Would all the WPAs in the room please raise their hands?

Yesterday I mentioned a few reasons for blogging, including Clancy Ratcliffe’s discussion of blogging as “management of sources” and Scribbingwoman’s notion that blogging is somewhere prior to drafting in the writing process. Both of these sounded good to me, but I don’t have enough experience in this genre to know if “sounds good” equals “works for me” in this situation. So, in the name of science (and by “science” I mean trying to get my paper started), today, I’m going to try this notion of blogging as part of the writing process out for myself on my IWCA paper.

What I’m think/reading/writing about is the definition of the writing center director as writing program administrator. That is, are all directors WPAs? If so, why don’t there seem to be more cross conversation between all sorts of writing program directors? I know I’ve learned an awful lot from the director of technical writing at my last institution (some of the technical writing stuff can really come in handy when you’re writing an annual report or strategic plan) and of course the administrator of the Comp program was a partner in crime and is still a fast friend. It would be nice if there could be more cross-disciplinary conversation than currently exists, I think.

-- More to the point, though, I’m wondering if writing center director is a subset of the category WPA? Or two distinct categories with overlap.

I have a sneaking suspicion that many of my friends and admirers in writing center studies would choose option “B” to preserves the distinctness of what we do, but that sort of begs the definitional questions

When is a writing center director a WPA?
Are all directors WPA sometimes?
When we perform certain roles?
Is it a matter of self-definition?
Is it structured into our jobs – are we a WPA if we have duties that can be identified with a writing program as it is traditionally defined?

Those are the questions that currently concern my and I’d love it if y’all would help me write my paper – er – I mean – share your insights . . .. Next entry, I’ll look at some of the scholarship on writing centers and writing programs to see if *those* scholars can write my paper – er – I mean enrich my thinking . . . .

Today’s link:
Assessment got you down? Looking for a message statement that will tie into the corporate university? Let the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator lend a hand:

***********************************************************************
The (Dilbert) Mission for the University of Delaware Writing Center

We exist to assertively simplify diverse meta-services.
***********************************************************************

2005-10-10T07:17:00.000-07:00

Trying Not to Sit Around Like a Bump on a Blog

Hello, all . . ..

It’s me again – last time I was you heard from me, your “humble narrator” (or humble blogger), I was in Alaska for the 2005 WPA conference. I’ve made it back to the lower 48 – Delaware, to be exact – and now I’m taking another crack at this whole blogging thing.

This morning I turned to my old posts for inspiration (and, yes, I often turn to my own self for inspiration, thank you very much). I can’t say I was entirely impressed with my prior efforts– when I read blogs like Nels Highberg’s A Delicate Boy or Samantha Blackmon’s Dr. B’s Blog, or John Lovas’ Jocalo’s Blog, I think you get a sense of the author’s personality. In fact, in the case of Lovas' blog, I think it gives those of us who didn't know him a sense of his gifts and what he brought to the field.

I’m not sure that personality came across the first time I tried this genre. So I’m trying to rethink this whole thing (Maybe that’s why Neil and Beth offered me this gig again – a move in the tradition of writing centers everywhere – “Not better blogposts, better bloggers? ). So my question today: why blog? And why blog the Writing Center Journal?”

Like many of my students, my initial answer this question was “Well, because the teacher/editors sez so.” Not a great reason, so I’ve gone looking in the blogosphere for better ones; one’s that seem particularly suited to the work we do in the writing center.

Nil’s entry “Why I Blog” seems to me to have some reasons that blogging might be particularly suited for writing center folks. He argues that his blogging is an extension his work in autobiographical studies; his study of “the writing process and how people create texts about their lives.” This idea reminds me of what we do in the center – we help writers see writing as part of life, and, in some senses, about their life. So maybe the writing center blog provides us a space to look at they symbiotic relationship between what we do in the center and the rest of our lives.

On a different note, Clancy Ratcliffe, who writes one of my favorite blogs, Culture Cat, has an article in Lore we about blogging as “knowledge management.” I think this is one of the things I find the most attractive about a writing center blog: unlike WCENTER, where many of the threads tend to be cyclical (as in “Yay! WCENTER is talking about annual reports! That must mean its almost the end of the school year!”) the goal of a blog, like the IWCA discussion board allow us to preserve the conversation, in order to critique and revise it. (Yeah, I know, I could just go the WCENTER archives if I wanted to see the conversation preserved, but I always have problems getting on and figuring out what search terms to use. I guess I’m archivally-challenged, which is a bit of a bummer for a historian of rhetoric).

Last fall, Scribbingwoman shared with her readers “What I told the tenure committee” about blogging. If you’re interested in this topic, and haven’t read her post, go check it out. Particularly if you’re starting from square one on this whole bloggin thing, as I am. Go on, I’ll wait here.

What interests me in this post is the way it links blogging to the writing process – something that happens before we label something “product,” to be sent out to an external audience for acceptance or evaluation. This notion of writing before writing, is also something I think of as intrinsic to the writing center.

I’m going to try to end each day this week with something on the web entirely unrelated but still fun. So today, I ask you, Which Peanuts character are you?

Melissa aka “Snoopy”

You are Snoopy!

Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

N Train from Brooklyn

2005-10-07T06:37:00.000-07:00

It's a rainy, muggy morning here in NYC, and we're back at Def Con Vertiginous--Be Afraid! Don't Worry, Be Happy! Well one upside: Now moms won't be using strollers as battering rams when the trains are crowded. I'm off to Western Mass for the weekend and I don't think there's a subway system up there...

WCenter has had a recent thread about cultural diversity that's really rich. The topics and directions perfectly dovetail with the conversations we have at Stony Brook all the time. Like the listserv discussion, most of the talk centers on how to best tutor to linguistic difference, be it for second language learners or non-majority students among American students. Some folks advocate an awareness of contrastive forms of expression and rhetoric, and other warn of that mindset's intrinsic essentialism. Other folks renew calls to drill folks on certain markers of linguistic fluency, and another camp intones an appreciation for students' right to their own language. Our writing center has those very positions too, and I've tried to get folks to think about the politics of accent and dialect.

To me, a certain identity politics is at play in these conversations, and they tie back to my initial reflections on the Queering article. At the core of this talk about the linguistic features of student writing and the sort of cultural capital on display, there's assumptions about discourse practices that are privileged and those that are marginalized. This play of the marked and unmarked is interesting to me; the other in this talk seems to have an abundance of signifiers, and the unmarked center appears to lack the same level of interrogation. Of course, that's not the case on closer examination: in our continual encoding of folks as Other, we map on to them ways of recognizing not just nationality and race but also more subtly class, gender, and other forms of difference in our culture. I doubt any of us would deny the "reality" of these dynamics; the more important issues involve the material and pedagogical implications of difference.

How do we train tutors to deal with difference that's neither colonialist nor reductionist? How do we help students feel empowered and invited to join in an enigmatic academic discourse community? I don't know that I articulated it very well, but the liminal spaces that arise in conferences are fine occasions for folks to explore similarities and differences in cultural capital. That is, pedagogy doesn't necessarily require the transmission of rules and forms, but a dialogue that fosters inclusion and mutual learning. Not internalizing or owning the codes of linguistic privilege, particularly for someone who is already marked as other, is not a realistic option, but having the agency to invoke those codes or knowing that they are arbitrary and contingent are imperative and ethical information for students to know. Still how do we have those conversations without being ham-handed?

In staff meetings, we talk about the center or privileged discourse in the academy. I've tried to get tutors to be more aware that people's historical and physical proximity to that center isn't innocent, but that all of us have learned some level of codeswitching. However the gap between dialects or vernaculars differs based on a wide set of variables. So then conversations turn to reflecting on the tutors own experiences with struggling to learn those rules to the academic game. I'm lucky in that my staff shares similar forms of diversity as the students who come for tutoring. A number of the Stony Brook tutors are second language learners or first or second generation immigrants, so they connect with the backgrounds that the center's students bring. Of course that's not to say a predominately white, middle class majoritarian staff couldn't tutor to a diverse population, but our critical mass forces folks to question their assumptions. I guess the center is decentered to some degree in our space.

Being gay and working in a writing center has helped me appreciate this complicated play of margin and center in tutorials. I won't go into a personal narrative on that because I'm not really sure that the queer variable is the most crucial. I also come from a solidly working class background, and I'm generally a loner. So being uncomfortable with/at the center comes natural for me. Still, I've learned to be very aware of the dynamic at play in assuming those positions--of being at the center and on the margin, and they seem to depend on one another in a foundational way. I guess it's symptomatic of our society and culture--we mobilize around "us" versus "them," but we also repelled by that mindset. We rally and shore up "us" identity formations, and we have more or less ambivalent or hostile attitudes and perceptions of "them." I don't know that we can ever break from the cycle of othering or whether we even want to on some level, but fostering knowledge of it might transform folks learning experiences. That is, actively fostering such critical interrogation might just be smart pedagogy. Going back to the assessment talk that we're always talking about, awareness of audience and critical thinking seem to be prioritized in most outcomes studies. Hopefully these conversations will continue.

Well I'm off to Costco to buy munchies for the writing center. Thanks for reading this week, and I hope you enjoy Melissa next...

Harry

Towards Organic Tutor Training...

2005-10-06T13:57:00.000-07:00

Okay, after an hour of running, stairmaster, and elliptical trainer, I’m recharging in my friendly, Bay Ridge Brooklyn Starbucks. But oddly I want to take a nap despite the java in me.... What does it mean that Dylan and Crowe have exclusive CD offers here? Had a lovely tuna-salad on sunflower seed bagel that likely killed any benefit from the exercise… but I digress…

In spite of the flux that the larger writing program finds itself in, the writing center seems to be in a very different space. Thankfully, for the tutors, conferences don't have the same stakes that lecturers find themselves contending with. Still, we've tried to take up the data coming out of the larger assessment project as a way to collectively self-assess the direction of sessions and what the staff wants to focus learning on. Readers might remember that the Stony Brook assessment looked at writing captured a four different moments. Two of them don't intersect easily with what we do in the center--the "timed" essays performed during summer placement and the closing weekend of 102. The other moments--thesis-driven essays in 101 and 102--are the focus of many conferences (44% to be exact), so knowing how students "perform" was valuable information.

The assessment indicated that, as a group, students struggled the most with critical thinking and genre knowledge, and they did the best with rhetorical skills and mechanics. Put another way, the assessment found that students didn’t so well with their own engagement of texts, argumentation, sense of audience and perception of essay conventions, but they had greater competency controlling paragraphs, transitions, and sentence-level prose. Those “outcomes” shouldn’t be surprising to people familiar with novice writers. In staff meetings, I shared the data with the tutors and asked them to think about what it suggested to them. They had been reading Paula and Neal's Guide for Peer Tutors, Christina Murphy's source book, and selections from Landmark Essays. I'd either brainwashed them well, or they're just all brilliant and well-read: if given the opportunity to negotiate a focus for a session, the tutors agreed that the data seemed to support continued work on content, thinking, argumentation--high-order concerns.

But the tutors were quick to point out that our demographic is often caught in a bind--L2 writers often battle self-imposed and professor pressure to eradicate "accent" in their prose (about 60-70% of our students are L2). The tutors rightfully asked how they're supposed to reconcile competing sets of information--professors and students obsessed with correctness and writing program/comp studies scholarship making sentence-level instruction a dubious, uphill battle. Great question, one we're struggling to answer. Ultimately, we agreed to resist the binary nature of that thinking, to encourage students to move forward on parallel fronts and to foster awareness that no amount of prose polish will obscure a lack of substance.

At the IWCA Summer Institute I shared another couple ways we use data collection to drive staff education and training at Stony Brook. When students sign up for sessions, they complete an online registration that captures the usual essentials--course info, major, assignment information, goals for the session, due dates, etc., but we also ask for optional demographic information about language background. That information has been useful for documenting the wide reach of the center, but also the sheer diversity of our user base. After sessions, tutors also go online to do a formal conference reflection. The information gets dumped into a database and printed out for student’s files. Tutors use past reports as a guide for current and future sessions, and we code and analysis the information that the group produces. In some staff meetings, we'll use this data to workshop and problem solves difficult sessions but also as fodder for the tutors themselves to agenda set what they we need to be working on as a center. My associate and assistant directors and I also write back to the tutors about their conference reports as a way to mentor them and do outreach. With so many tutors and students, it's hard for us to come together and literally share the same page, so we hope that doing it virtually can be a provision substitute until face-to-face discussions and meetings can happen.

harry

Assessing Assessment

2005-10-05T19:41:00.000-07:00

Neal, you're right on about those suggestions and questions. The “standards” came about as the product of a long set of negotiations with the faculty, but with a good deal of prodding from our WPAs. The lecturers would say at some point they resigned themselves to a rubric imposed from above, and the WPAs would say the lecturers had a voice in the process. At any rate, the rubric eventually was folded into portfolio assessment, as the most convenient occasion to capture and sample student writing at the close of 102. Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff have written pretty extensively about the history of assessment at Stony Brook in the days before the Writing Program became separate from English (that's a whole other story), and they didn't have a role in the current iteration of the program. Our portfolio system required students to produce a researched-argument (an essay in which academic research is used to support a thesis driven-argument), a textual analysis essay, and a "timed" iMoat essay that was thesis-driven. Instructors could follow any curriculum or method to get students to those portfolio materials, and they could have their students produce more writing. At some point, instructors were allowed to include an informal essay (but that element didn’t count toward the assessment), which could mean a personal narrative or in-class impromptu writing. Somehow--between all the talk about assessment and outcomes expectations and student/instructor pressure to pass portfolio review--the portfolio became very high stakes—granted, it was the linchpin for completion of the writing requirement, so many instructors focused much of the semester on teaching to the portfolio, rather than having the portfolio become a pedagogical means to a curricular end. On one level, the portfolio got equated with assessment and that got conflated with teaching. Of course, to anyone teaching in K-12 No Child Left Behind America, this situation isn't surprising.

As many might imagine, when the faculty learned about the numbers coming out of the assessment pilot, its later implementation, and subsequent communication to administration (locally and state-wide), there was a perfect storm as the fury over the politics of the data met the clash over job security and debate over professional trajectories. At Stony Brook, our faculty is mainly comprised of 23 full-time lecturers who teach 4/4 loads (with one-course offloads to mentor graduate student teaching assists). Besides low pay, their job security has been subject to ever-changing winds of funding for higher ed in New York State. For example, in year two of our assessment, half of them worked under the threat of losing their jobs as a way to close a budget gap in the college.

Beyond the financial crisis, the lecturers face uncertain prospects for the future: they work under three-year renewable contracts with no possibility for tenure. One option that has been floated is for folks to become "senior lecturers," but the positions are for people with terminal degrees in their teaching fields. Alas, most of our people are MFAs or MAs or PhDs in literature. As the senior positions are defined, someone would need a doctorate in rhet/comp or some related field, none of which we currently offer. Short of spending nights at CUNY or traveling to IUP to do its summer program, the lecturers are caught in a bind. We do offer a graduate certificate, but pushing folks to take those courses creates ethical dilemmas on a host of fronts. Some of our folks have been teaching writing, granted without official education and credentials in comp/rhet, for years. What does it mean to tell someone who has been teaching writing for 10 (even 20) years that they lack sufficient experience and training, particularly when they've been mentoring and working with novice teachers all along? On the flip side, why have an disciplinary identity if comp studies really doesn’t matter to teach writing? Of course, these are perennial issues.

When our seemingly innocent assessment project started to yield results, people can imagine the reaction. The lecturers felt betrayed and used. A major part of that feeling came from the realization that they had participated in the assessment project as scorers and scoring leaders; they had, in effect, become complicit in the production of information that was used to suggest that they were ineffective instructors. Ouch! And they're right. Still as Neal's response suggests, how do we measure efficacy? What variables are operative? Can we flatten down the value that composition adds to looking at the two moments in time in student writing early on in their career? Neal's variables are crucial--sense of belonging, retention, critical thinking--and those are being looked at too. Interestingly--they're even harder to tie to a one to two semester experience with writing.

The whole situation leaves me wondering, what then is the place of a writing program? Being someone with one foot in a writing center and another in a writing program, I feel much more confident about what our center contributes than what our program adds. Part of my uncertainty with the program doesn't rest with what it does or doesn't do, but with what the larger institution understanding of writing and the place of it (or lack thereof) across the curriculum. I often tell people about friends in the Women's Studies program who want to use writing in their classes, but feel dissuaded when they have 75 students per section and 3 sections to teach. Then I hear of a history professor with a class of 150 who actually does peer response in her lecture hall. Lacking a coherent and dynamic process for WAC or WID, I really wonder how a writing program can flourish? Beyond that, should the project of a writing program be to inoculate a student for future writing? Are writing programs purely service centers? And if a writing program is going to be a one-size-fits-all preparatory program for college-writing, how do we develop a workable curriculum and pedagogy, and who will teach it under what conditions? And those questions get me thinking: gosh, has the vocational and pragmatic imperative overtaken higher-ed? Has writing for the sake of writing, writing to explore, writing across modes/genres/occasions disappeared? I guess that's why I feel at home in the center where collaboration and dialog and critical dialogue dominate, and when we’re lucky, we can stave off the utilitarian.

The most chilling moment so far in the assessment experience came in a quote the WPA placed in a memo in a binder for the external review of the program. The dean of our college was quoted saying that in light of the assessment numbers that suggest that the writing program produces little value for the money the institution puts into it, he frequently has faculty from other departments ask why the program isn't dissolved and the money re-distributed around the college. Talk about demoralizing, huh? I wonder if other disciplines are subjected to that kind of scrutiny. Or better, is it because many would argue we're not a content-specialty that we are held as suspect?

Alright enough already. Tomorrow I'll talk about how we're taking up this assessment data in the writing center to guide and affirm what we're doing. Maybe before the week’s end I’ll figure out how this all ties back to being queer and queering the writing center.

Later! Harry

Day Two of Rosh Hashanah Break

2005-10-04T06:11:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I did two laps on the Shore Parkway, from the 68th St Pier that looks across to Staten Island, the Statue of Liberty, and Manhattan out to Bay Parkway, the other end of the park that looks out to the ocean and Coney Island. All in all, sore thighs and a sun burn on my thighs—at least I remembered to cover my head. I took a pit-stop at Starbucks to do some writing—I’ve been working on this project about contemporary rhetoric about civil rights. More specifically, I’m interested in the clash between the New Right (typically understood as a coalition of Evangelical Christians and neoconservatives) and the gay community over a series of issues. The larger book will map out their debates and fights over language, but I’m trying to argue that as the queer community follows the precedents of earlier New Left extensions of civil rights, the right simultaneously works to beat back that movement and to change the foundational concept of what civil rights mean. I hope to focus on campaign rhetoric from both movements, media representations (or framing) of the issues and movements, and governmental response. At any rate, I know what I doing in the body of the text, but I’ve been stumped on the introductory chapters and keep spinning my wheels. One day, I want to play off of current events, another day I want to open with a personal narrative, and still another day I think vignettes might be another way in.

After I got frustrated with that, I came home to work on another on-going project at Stony Brook. As some of you may know, assessment has consumed more and more of my energies as my program tries to come to terms with all the data we produced from our SUNY-Central mandated assessment. Our campus-based assessment protocol involved collecting four writing samples (placement, thesis-driven essay from WRT 101 [if placed in that course], thesis-driven essay from WRT 102 [most students, except honors students, cycle through this course], and exit essay) and scoring them for four primary traits (critical thinking, genre knowledge, rhetorical knowledge and mechanics & usage). The placement and exit essays are produced through MIT’s iMoat software; students go on to the system at a pre-determined date, read a prompt, and then have 72 hours to produce an essay. The system is nice because it doesn’t penalize L2 writers and enables students to produce more coherent, cogent responses without as much time pressure, but we don’t have a sense of performance differences between students who wrote in an impromptu manner (before iMoat) and after until this “standardized” form but loose timing. The data we’ve produced is compelling, and our students’ performances generally confirm those that can be seen in national tests like the CAAP or Academic Profile. Aside from the percentages that the state asks from us (how many students don’t meet, approach, meet and exceed standards/expectations), we also needed to show what value was added by the writing program’s instruction.

Cynical readers like me will have their ears prick up on that note: How do you prove value-added? Isn’t that just a euphemism for change and causality? Well, yes and no. So in an earlier cranking of the numbers through my lovely SPSS software, I did discover significant change between placement and exit essays and to a lesser a degree for the subpopulation who took 101 and 102 (thereby having two time-separated essays). More importantly, the 2-semester students came in generally weaker than the 1-semester students, but the 101/102 left showing far more improvement or growth than the 102-only. Nevertheless, the one-semester students still out performed the 101/102 students, even though the former showed marginal value added to their experiences. That’s one of the things I’m trying to get my head around—what’s the significance of stronger students, at least by our measure, not getting value added? Is that the case? Is there value that these students gain that our protocol doesn’t capture? If so, what is it? At any rate, these insights on data representing group performance or changes in statistics that capture the whole cohort, and it doesn’t really look to individual change. On another run on the data, we did that, and then calculated the percentage of students who have value-added (or lack or lose value). Looking at the data this way, 2/3 of our students either stay the same or lose ground—that is, their scores stay the same or drop. To my chagrin, when a binder was compiled for our recent external review, my WPA took this data up with the dean, advisory board, and review team to suggest our full-time instructors weren’t having an impact on student learning. Mind you, the dean and advisory board were suspicious of our numbers—what did it mean to lose value in instruction? Was that possible? Going by our number, at least, it was… and so goes the old adage about being skeptical of stats…

So yesterday, I went back and looked at our raw data after meeting last week with a mathematics expert in our institutional research office. She helped me understand that our rubric and representations were biased against the students who come in and leave performing well. In other words, the scale is not set up to measure changes for students at the ceiling of our rubric, so she looks at the data and said that we’d probably get more interesting information looking at shifts for particular scores. I spent a good part of the day tracking students who came in with X score and left with Y score. In our previous take on the data, 33% lost ground, 33% stayed the same, and 33 showed improvement (that’s a rough generalization across semesters). Looking at the data another way, students who came in (or on the placement essay) scored as:
• not meeting our standards showed 100% improvement (50% moving up to the approaching standards category, and 50% moving up 2 levels to meeting standards)
• approaching standards—63% showed improvement (52% moving up 1 level to meeting standards, and 11% up to exceeding), but 41% showed now change or didn’t move out of that category
• meeting standards—80% showed no change, but 4% moved up to exceeding standards (and 4% moved down one level to approaching standards, and 4% moved two level to not meeting standards)
Now begins the analysis—is this representation of how students performed better or just more complicated and accurate? To what degree is it encouraging? What does it say to whether we ought to have a two-semester or one-semester sequence? Are 14-28 weeks really enough to certify a student’s college-long experience with writing?

Most important to me, how can I make this information useful for staff education in the writing center. We’ve used other profile information from the assessment, particularly from the primary traits, to support our focus on HOCs over LOCs, but this recent data has left me perplexed…

Still all this number talk makes me want to re-read Neal’s bean-counting article.

Stay tuned… harry

First Monday in October

2005-10-03T07:01:00.000-07:00

Morning all,
It's a nice cool, clear morning here in Brooklyn. MTA buses are screeching by about every ten minutes, relieving my coffee of some of the burden of helping me wake up. I've transitioned from lying on the couch listening to NPR to switching between Good Day New York (cute weather guy) and CNN.

On Friday, some local writing center folks and I met to talk about WCJ's last issue. Our conversation focused on Gardner and Ramsey's "Polyvalent Mission." A number of their points bothered us, but the framing of oppositionality and marginality struck many of us. All the participants in our group happened to be marked as Other by either gender or sexuality, so being marginal(-ized) is not theoretical or speculative for us. In our discussions, we spoke to the value and costs of maintaining oppositional identities, and we were struck by how dissidence is often framed as naive, immature, and idealistic (and assimilation as reasonable, wise, and pragmatic). Despite Gardner and Ramsey's problematic binary, we appreciated their use of the Carnegie Foundation's call to expand what scholarship means in college and university discourse communities. The authors suggest that the day-to-day performances/work of writing center professional constitutes a sort of organic scholarship that must be celebrated as on par with theoretical, experimental and observational research.

At any rate, the article spurred a good deal of talk that eventually moved from the play of identity in the article to the role of identity among our group. We found ourselves debating what kinds of conversations do we need to have to keep our group growing, and we wondered what constitutes needs for folks that don't come to our meetings like this one where we explore readings and where we discuss (research and writing) projects in progress and reading discussions. This turn in talk got us wondering about professional tracks and professional development for people in writing centers in the area. As Lauren Fitzgerald has discovered, the NYC metro area has more than 100 writing centers, so fit stands to reason many people are doing WC work, often without a whole lot of institutional support or training. We wondered: how do we grow our community and maintain our emphasis on a writing and research collective? Do these imperatives need to be competing imperatives?

All this talk about identity, the politics of margin and center, and outreach made me hopeful. I was worried about my article how might come off to the pool of readers. If it fires up folks like Gardner and Ramsey did for us, then I'll feel good. Already one director has used it as an occasion to come out to her staff--I don't know a better honor to bestow. I love to be subversive, but I tend to prefer to do it from the shadows. So all this talk is very public for me…

At any rate, I remain a strong believer in writing centers as communities, complete with all the baggage that the concept carries. My faith in that term comes from my own experiences at WCs through the years. From Temple to LIU and now Stony Brook, writing centers have been these complicated spaces where the teaching/mentoring/tutoring of writing (process) never just involved helping people understand and do better planning, drafting, revising and editing. In almost every session, the politics of race, ethnicity, sex, class, and language culture have been important, even crucial, variables to engaging in dialogue. It seems axiomatic to me to assume these variables affect us, so in writing centers with diverse constituencies, it seems natural to factor them into interaction. As a field, writing center theory has considered all these variables and refined pedagogy to account for them, or at least to acknowledge them as affecting pedagogy. In all these rich discussions about diversity in the writing center, the perspectives of sexual minorities and our identities have never been a part of the conversation. Part of that oversight has to do with the legibility of our identity--not knowing or seeing queer folks allows for a certain degree of avoidance. Another part, however, is a certain degree of institutional homophobia, or better compulsory heterosexism... I doubt many people are uncomfortable with LGBT people; it's more likely that folks assume a heterosexual mindset in most matters until contested.

So my article, in part, was about bringing those voices out into the public talk. I've been struck by how invisible in official conversation and research sexual minority perspectives are, yet queer folks are very much at home in the field. We're like the lesbian and gay aunts, uncles, or cousins that every family has but rarely talks about. But in my book, it's not enough to know the homos in our midst. I knew that queer theory, like Aftrocentric, feminist, critical, and postmodern theories, provides another lens through which to view our world, but also our pedagogy and perspective on interaction in sessions.

Another motivation for me to press the issue--although I don't talk about it in the piece--is the homophobia I continually encounter through student writing as a teacher and writing center staffer. We talk a good deal about the politics of message and language in this profession, but (sexual) minority perspectives often are not foregrounded outside of SIGs at our conferences. Just this summer, I had a student write up an ethnography in which she talks about the gay folks that come into her Greenwich village laundry. She spoke about how they disgusted her, how she wondered why god let "them" exist, how she pitied them and wondered why they all dressed like women. The venom of the article threw me for a loop and hurt--I thought I had developed a pretty thick skin and good radar for such folks that I could usually avoid them. I had a hard time reconciling this sweet woman in class with the thoughts and language in her paper. But then I remembered when I worked against anti-gay activists in Colorado; these folks were always wonderful and sweet, particularly when they assumed no "gays" were in their presence. Even when we were around, they would be unfailingly polite because they loved us, not our sin. Back to my student... I realized, or assumed, that she must not know I was gay... She didn't cross me as the type to be an in-your-face homophobe, so she must have assumed I was a safe person to use that rhetoric on, that I was a part of her discourse community that wouldn't challenge or question her. There was also this odd point where I found myself wanting to challenge her perception of the queer community--that we're not all like "that." This internalized homophobia of my own bothered me too--I ought to be challenging or pushing her to critically explore her sense of audience, not turning towards an apology for my community -- to performing an act of self-policing. This is one among many stories I could tell--from tutors coming to me for advice when they've encountered such rhetoric to tutors being torn over whether they could ethically refuse help to folks whose thoughts they found offensive. In each case, I advise them and myself to engage the student, to validate their thoughts, and to push their students to interrogate what they may safely assume about the present and assumed audiences.

Alright, time to head out for my morning work-out. Instead of NYSC, I'm going to get the bike out to the harbor and enjoy time away from school. More tomorrow... Harriet Mier and the Supreme Court have my head spinning at the moment.

Harry Denny

have truck, will haul

2005-09-29T19:36:00.000-07:00

Sorry, Clint, but I found a taker on the recliner of note. No more lazy boy for us. Or is it LaZboy? I guess I'm not an admirer of the fine art of reclining furniture.

This week I'm working on my annual P & T stuff. Here at Ball State, we submit our file each year pre-tenure, which is good because then we get feedback each year. Still, in the midst of putting it together, it doesn't seem like a blessing. To make my Writing Center work count, I compose and include an annual report. Last year, several members of the committee who read all the gigantic files mentioned this report & were surprised by how much work directing a writing center is. I think it is an effective piece of rhetoric since there's no way to squeeze in the various things I and we (my staff) do in the official form.

Anyway, now that I'm done patting myself on the back (!), what I wanted to note was that I included in the report the changes we've made in decor in the center. A letter from a colleague on my work as director also mentions this. Even though I find this immensely important to our mission--like wearing the right clothes to a particular function--I wonder if this will sound silly or unimportant to others. [Well, isn't that sweet? You put up some posters.] I wonder if there's a way to convey that the writing center is a text which we're continually revising to meet the purposes we wish to achieve and the audience we wish to attract or keep, that what we do in the space requires research, rhetorical savvy, style, vision--just like academic writing. I think this is a hard sell.

jrgm

A virtual identity crisis

2005-09-28T12:31:00.000-07:00

So, today I’m wondering about our virtual presence. We’ve got a website www.bsu.edu/web/wcenter but it is terribly out of date. It hasn’t been touched since our webspinner/tutor graduated last December. Despite this, students often say they heard about us from our website. We don’t have an OWL and no funds, personnel, or energy to start one in the near future. So what is the purpose of our website? Will students really go there for writing help instead of a handbook site or a more comprehensive site (like Purdue's)? How do we find out about our web users? Does anyone visit our website and decide from that not to use our services? Basically, right now, we could tell students about our services on one page and not sink a lot of time or energy into our site. If that’s our purpose then why do more than that?

Yet, I wonder if I should really consider the tutors the main audience. I could include more things that matter to them—schedules, the tutor manual, announcements, and sites to show students while tutoring. Would any of this need to be password protected? They seem like the most likely users.

Anyone know about who visits their websites and why? Is there a way to track this—maybe with a pop-up survey or something? Or, I suppose, we could do a focus group of writing center clients and see which of them have been to the site. That wouldn’t give us faculty or tutor users though. Hmm…

jrgm

PS: I just read the comment from "anonymous" about the metaphors for online tutoring--see last post; good questions, anonymous. I think we can think about that in terms of online spaces in general. Not only who uses my space (my questions above) but what do I want them to feel in this space. I guess my missing metaphor for the physical space carries over to the virtual one, too. I guess I'm just as nervous about a webspace looking ragged, amateur, unkempt as I am about the physical writing center. What's the virtual equivalent of a shockingly ugly lazy boy?

slo mo

2005-09-27T09:47:00.000-07:00

One of the few things I remember clearly from my readings list for my comps was Mary Daly's term ACADEMENTIA. It's a particular type of craziness that increases the longer one is in academia. I think this can be sparked by the incredibly slow pace at which the machine chugs along. Chug chug chug sputter sputter sputter.

Last week, we got some new "waiting room" furniture for our writing center. It was a last minute purchase; the department had extra funds that it had to use or lose at the end of the fiscal year. (I learned to have a wish list handy around June 1 in case the opportunity arises again.) So, we ordered the furniture mid-June. It arrived mid-September, and I actually thought to myself, "Wow. That was fast." Ahh...academentia already.

In my first look at the WC three years ago, I noticed it suffered from a typical WC problem--hand-me-down everything: desks, dictionaries, computers, furniture. We had (have) a lazy-boy recliner and a futon which particularly annoyed on me. So ugly! So old! I know some folks would like how worn, comfy furniture might make the WC feel, but it didn't work for me. I felt it spoke of the neglect of the WC instead. So now, we got this new modular furniture which is sort of modern, sort of officey. I like it, but I'm curious to hear what my tutors will say about it at our meeting on Thursday. I was in the WC minutes ago and asked if we should ditch the futon. Two votes for "no." Much of my article for WCJ was about what we want our centers to say or how we want users to feel in the space. I think what I want the WC to say is different from how my tutors want to feel in the space. But I still can't put my finger on what I want it to say exactly. What is this space?! I wonder at times if my wishes for the space are based on how I want my colleagues to read the space. Do I put that need of mine above that of tutors and users? And, so what if I do?

jrgm

Lesson from Leaving

2005-09-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

I’ve just returned to my job as writing center director at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. I was on maternity leave for the first month of the semester. (BTW, a big URRRGGG to colleagues who called my leave “a nice little vacation”.) I think I learned more about my job while I was gone than I do when I’m there. Maybe that’s overstating it, but it was good to get some perspective on it.

First, I realized that I’ve got to make some changes in how I do things. When I was preparing for my leave, the assistant chair of the department said there was money to pay someone to help out in the writing center. I thought about this for a while and realized that it would be more work for me to have someone there than not. This is because I have not done a good job of keeping operating notes on what I do. [Does anyone do this—if so, tell me about it.] Having someone else in there would mean creating these notes in a short period of time and being on call when questions arose—neither things I wanted to do at the end of my pregnancy or during my leave. So I decided to delegate the things that had to be done before my return (training the new tutors, leading a staff meeting) to my assistant director and do other things myself before the leave (make the fall schedule, enter this into TutorTrac). Other things, I decided, would just have to wait (scheduling class intros, putting together a new training manual).

And, it all went fine. However, I see now that had I better notes about what gets done when, if I trained others to use TutorTrac, and if I had the writing center files not only on my mac but also saved on one of our writing center computers, it would be much easier to delegate more tasks. [How many of us have an office, desk, or computer in the WC? My office is down the hall, an arrangement I like, but it does mean that many writing center files are not in the WC.]

The other thing I saw when I stopped in towards the end of my leave was that the day-to-day operations in the WC were going just fine. In fact, I was floored overhearing one of the brand new tutors working with a difficult regular client of ours. The client, an ESL graduate student, is working on his master’s thesis, bit by bit. He can be rather pushy and passive at the same time—have you worked with this type? I worked with him a little this summer and found it really difficult. (OK, and I was put off when he scoffed at my decision not to stay home fulltime with the new bambino.) Yet this new tutor was really pushing him hard and he was responding to it. She got him engaged by asking questions and not doing the work for him. I saw her hand him a dictionary to look up past tense verbs when he didn’t know them, which he did. I mean, this client who has been in numerous times still has to be given a pencil to remind him of his role and he still tells the tutor--"you can just fix it." Yet, this tutor, in one of her first sessions ever, was doing some really assertive things to get him involved. At the end of the session, the client made another appointment to work with this tutor. Perhaps she gave him what he needed all along.

I guess, if I’m leading towards a clichéd, FYC what-I-learned ending here, it’s this: I need to let a little. (I like how Mary Rose O’Reilley talks about classrooms. She says we need silence sometimes, we need margins. We need to let as often as we do.) Training obviously went well during my absence. The students still came to the center; the tutors still tutored. I think I need to think in practical terms about how to make the writing center work better with and without me.

Jackie Grutsch McKinney

Blogs for issue 25.2 are coming!

2005-09-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

Watch this space for authors and editors from Writing Center Journal issue 25.2 to share their thoughts with you (as well as reporting from the IWCA/NCPTW conference in Minneapolis later in October).

In the meantime, here's the table of contents of WCJ 25.2:

From the Editors
Neal Lerner and Elizabeth Boquet

Special Feature
Whatever Happened to . . . Jeff Brooks?

Articles
Leaving Home Sweet Home: Towards Critical Readings of Writing Center Spaces
Jackie Grutsch McKinney

The Idea of an Online Writing Center: In Search of a Conceptual Model
Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch

Queering the Writing Center
Harry Denny

Reviews
Dealing with Diversity: A Review Essay of Recent Tutor-Training Books
James C. McDonald

The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring

The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors

ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors

On Location: Theory and Practice in Classoom-Based Tutoring
Candace Spigelman and Laurie Grobman, eds.
Melissa Ianetta

Tutoring and Teaching Academic Writing: Proceedings of the Second Conference of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW)
Gerd Bräuer

Remembrances of Candace Spigelman
Laurie Grobman, David Ackerman, Jayne Brown, Jeanne Rose, Melissa Nicolas

KU Reception

2005-07-14T05:35:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday we were all treated to a Tea Reception sponsored by the Vice Provost for Student Success at KU. We met in the Oread bookstore on campus.

Clint with finger puppets

Brian & Ben

Greg & Mary

KU Writing Center

2005-07-13T12:36:00.001-07:00

Hi I'm Verlinda Washburn from Dickinson State University (DSU) in Dickinson, North Dakota. I'm attending the IWCA summer writing institute and having both a fun and edifying time.

DSU has never had a writing center, but I will be creating one that is due to open August 23, by presidential command. Thus, I'm here in Lawrence absorbing all the information I can. I really appreciate our esteemed education staff headed by Michele. I think they are not only well versed in the knowledge of Writing Center theory and practice, but they are congenial, inclusive, and very lively presenters and facilitators. I have gained a wealth of knowledge in a very short timeframe.

Today we had a great discussion facilitated by Clint and Harry on the hierarchy in institutions as related to Writing Center Directors.
The question: If we see WC Director as an in-depth, academic career, where do the hierarchies of degrees, of faculty/staff, and of respect come in? Masters or Ph.D.?

- Realize that they exist, and deal with them from that perspective
- Frankie - Ph.D.'s don't necessarily know more than MA's. There are a number of ways to acquire knowledge.
- Nevertheless within an institution, it can make a difference according to the environment on campus.
- Investing in a Ph.D. may not be cost effective for some.
- There is no Ph.D. in Writing Center Academics.
- There are other pressures on directors to have a Ph.D. besides peer pressure within the institution and within the WC community. Accreditation and university prestige are two.
- Must not only be critical of self (choices, position, degrees, etc.) but also be critical of the institutional/cultural/social forces that are requiring you to exhibit certain defenses/behaviors/responses.
- One must always push him/herself to grow in whatever way; we can never be static. Getting a Ph.D. is only one way to grow.
- What about the logistics of the future of the WC Director? Will a time come when one must have a Ph.D. to get the job? Is that a good thing?
- Jeanne: Some of the frustrations that we feel are imbedded in the contradictions, and they are not going to go away. Experience vs. degree; tenure and degree vs. effectiveness of ones work and contribution to the student and university
- Writing centers serves all disciplines not just comp/rhet

In closing:

A Michelism for the day: We can all be the CVO, the Chief Visionary Officer, for our campus!

Later,

Verlinda

Intersections

2005-07-13T12:36:00.000-07:00

It is "Writing Time" on Wednesday at the Summer Institute. Our day today has been rich with possibilities--as always, most of those unforeseen before we came here to Lawrence. We visited the KU Writing Center today, as well as one of the many Writers' Roosts, which are satellite writing centers. The center is lovely, well-lit and modern, but the Writers' Roost is amazing. In a corner of the library by a coffee stand, there are three round picnic tables (indoors) with umbrellas that say "KU Writing Center." Like many things we have encountered this week, it is an amalgam of vision and possibility, one which takes the Writing Center to the students rather than the other way around.

That's the thing about the Summer Institute: the intersections are what makes this such an incredible experience, intersections with people and intersections with ideas. I have spent time with friends from Kansas City and Chicago. I have made new friends from California, North Carolina, and North Dakota.

We have had discussions about ESL learners, faculty relationships, professional qualifications, and more. While each has been thought-provoking on its own, taken altogether they explode with possibilities. And this is only Wednesday! We can only imagine what we will be envisioning by the end of the week.

Susan Mueller
More photos below!

IWCA Summer Institute - Day One

2005-07-11T20:35:00.000-07:00

Sure, there may be hours of sun in Alaska, but in Kansas there's prairie heat and barbeque.

We can hardly believe it, but Day One of the Summer Institute is over. The walls of the room are covered with posters of participants' and leaders' writing center spaces, we've thought about the intersections between staff education, being activists for our campuses, and how the pedagogical models we use impact our work.

Tomorrow...look for photos of the fifty six of us working hard at learning more about our administrative roles.

Anne Ellen & Michele

Tiffany, nothing about assessment or budgets here, I promise

2005-07-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

I attended a couple of great sessions today. The day started out with a great session on WAC led by Richard Jewell (Inver Hills Community College) and Melissa Faulkner and Paul Anderson, both from Miami University’s Center for Writing Excellence. This combination of papers helped audience members see the commonalities and specifics of WAC work at institutions with different missions.

Whenever I go to a conference, I try to go to a session or two that’s completely unrelated to my own research in order to find out what’s going on in other parts of the profession. In this spirit, I went to a session on “Composing Multimedia Public Relations” which focused on designing public service announcements on writing related issues. While I may have chosen this session because it seemed unrelated to my work, it nevertheless got me thinking about writing center PSAs for local consumption through campus media. Wouldn’t it be cool to have as 15-30 television short that we could use on campus networks to advertise the writing center? Or to broadcast radio PSAs to advertise our services on the student station. I’ve tried the latter, but somehow it never worked out. Now I’m thinking I should’ve tried harder to get this going.

In the afternoon, an assistant professor administrator (APA) special interest session met. We discussed ways in which APAs might work use the CWPA resources in our quests for tenure. This was a great session and I’m hoping to get a similar group together at IWCA this fall. So stay tuned.

Now, gentle readers I’m off to see a little of this very big state. Somewhere in the next few days I’ll try to post my “Springer’s Final Thoughts” on this mad week.

Later, administrators! Melissa

Can it really be DAY ONE of the conference?

2005-07-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

Well, gentle reader, after the workshop and the assessment institute, we’ve finally arrived at the first day of the conference. The first panel I went to today focused on honors composition (btw, thanks for a great panel, Barbara, Jeanne Marie, and Greg). We had some discussion here of positioning honors composition in such a way as to counter the deficit quality that dogs first year writing. In other words, honors comp allows us to argue that FYW isn’t about getting students ready to do “real” college work; rather, it’s an opportunity for all writers to improve. Such lines of argument, recollected strongly for me the reoccurring argument that writing centers are for all writers, not just those needing “remediation.”

However, the panel most directly oriented towards the writing center was “Writing Center Directors as WPAs: Rethinking Roles, Territories, Writing and Mentoring.” Here, a group of writing center directors spoke about the issues and opportunities that arise when writing center directors interrogate the intersection of the writing center and the WPA. During their talks, the presenters raised such issues as:

• Who is a WPA?
• When one individual holds both roles, where does their identity as director of Composition stop and Director of the Writing Center begin?
• Why -- when we all are involved in teaching, administration, research and service -- is the writing center so central to our professional identities?
• On your campus, are you *a* WPA or the WPA? What’s the difference?
• What should the relationship between the writing center and the writing program be (with a nod to Mark Waldo, of course!)?

While I have no definitive answers to offer, I think the questions themselves are something all writing center directors should consider . . . but now, it’s time to get off to my next session.

More later!

WARNING: YET MORE ASSESSMENT DISCUSSED AHEAD!!!!!!

2005-07-08T07:53:00.000-07:00

Although yesterday, I left the WPA workshop with sad steps (and thanks, Bud and Lauren for a great time), but today your humble narrator headed for the assessment institute led by George Meese and Meg Morgan. And sadly, I consider this an important topic. Why sadly, you may ask? Because it was a beautiful, sunny 71 degrees out, and since it was important, I couldn’t play hooky! Grrrrr . . ..

Luckily Meg and George had lots of good ideas to share with us, which they used to lead us through a daylong reflection on the hows, whys and wherefores of program assessment. We talked about first establishing program outcomes and then creating definitions and measures for these outcomes. I’ve started thinking about what kinds of outcomes one might establish for a writing center, how we could define these outcomes and what methods might assess them. I’ve got some ideas for my center, but right now I’m wondering if there are any generalizable outcomes for writing centers? That is, is there anything like the WPA Outcomes Statement that would apply to the center? While I don’t want to be the one to propose a document, I think there probably is, although I’m not sure we’ll ever see such a document written.

In addition to a head stuffed with assessment related ideas, I also came away with *more* stuff to read:

Program Assessment

The Outcomes Book

Developing Sucessful College Writing Programs

And totally unrelated to administrative work:
The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

A workshop-buddy recommended this last one – apparently, it makes the argument that PowerPoint is the devil. And not only because people seem unable to use it appropriately but because it is fundamentally evil. Sounds like a good read to me.

Somehow, it's morning already. I guess I'd better sign off so I can get some breakfast before the first plenary session begins.

More later, Melissa

Numbers as a way of knowing

2005-07-07T00:12:00.000-07:00

Today was the last day I’ll attend the WPA workshop for new writing program administrators (*sigh*). Today we talked about staffing issues, understanding budgets, and time management issues. While all of these are important, I think that understanding budget issues generally and numerical data specifically is useful for all writing center directors. One of the workshop participants pointed out that quantitative data is often used to shut out (or shut up) those of us trained in the humanities – which is ironic, considering that citing numbers is really just another form of rhetorical evidence, that stuff with which we’re generally pretty savvy. But if we don’t understand the relationship between a standard deviation and a mean, for example, how can we argue against the claims that this information represents? A pretty compelling argument, if you ask me . . .

Same thing with budgets, really: sometimes it seems like budgets are constructed to obscure our understanding of the information they contain (what is the capital fund? Something in Washington D.C. maybe?) Even if we don’t control budgets, just understanding them is terribly useful – otherwise we don’t really know what resources our programs are even using – which makes it pretty difficult to know if they’re efficient!

Speaking of numbers, it’s 11:10PM here. And while it’s still light out, I should probably go get some sleep – I have an assessment workshop tomorrow.

More tomorrow, dear readers

Assessing Assessment . . .

2005-07-05T23:19:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of today’s workshop session, I polled the group to see how many people were writing center directors. Of the 22 people present, about 7 people identified as writing center directors. I guess I’m not the only one who thinks there’s something for writing center folks here . . .

One of the big issues we discussed today, for example, was assessment, a necessary if not always beloved issue in writing center administration. We discussed Brain Huot and Ellen Schendel’s "A Working Methodology of Assessment for Writing Program Administrators,” an essay I recommend to anyone looking for an entry point into assessment conversations (it’s included in The Allyn and Bacon Sourcebook for Writing Program Administrators). This resource nicely supplements the writing center-specific essays given to us by WPA workshop leaders Bud Weiser and Lauren Fitzgerald. This latter group includes copies of Jeanne Simpson’s “What Lies Ahead for Writing Centers: Position Statement on Professional Concerns,” and Mickey Harris’ “SLATE (Support for the Learning and Teaching of English) Statement: The Concept of a Writing Center.” Less particular to writing centers – but no less interesting to a director, I think, was the NCTE’s documents “Writing Assessment: A Position Statement” and “Scholarship in Composition: Guidelines for Faculty, Deans and Department Chairs.” And, of course, let us forget WPA’s own “Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition” and their “Evaluating the Intellectual Work of Writing Administration.”

If you’ve missed any of these documents, I highly recommend them as ways of thinking our work and explaining it to others. Particularly if you’ve got twenty hours of daylight, as we have here in Anchorage!

a rose is a rose is a . . .WPA?

2005-07-04T17:23:00.000-07:00

Quote of the day:"Administration: Think Globally, Act Locally"

What a great first day for the WPA workshop: the discussions were interesting, the material useful and the chocolate-chip and Macadamiaia nut cookies were tasty! Also, I think I've adjusted to the Alaskan time zone and the twenty hours of daylight.

As I hope to photodocument later this week, there's several of writing center directors in the workshop as well as FYW and advanced composition directors. As you'd probably expect, then, the conversations have focused on issues of common interest. Today, for example, we talked quite a bit about the question "What is a WPA?"

Some of the answers that have stuck with me: a "pope" of writing, a translator, a godparent, and the person who *always* has to be the grown up.

This questions is actually something I've thought about quite a bit in relation to writing center work: is a writing center director always a WPA? If so, what do we gain/lose by identifying as such? If not, what's the difference? Is WPA a more privileged term than writing center director? Or is it a larger concept for which writing center director serves as a subcategory? I suppose there's different answers for this question, but I wonder about the implications of our answers to these question; how our self-definitions effect our self-presentations and how we construct our work for others.

Deep thoughts, no doubt. . . . .but, there's been too much thinking today already, and I've got homework to do, so, reader, I'll leave this issue for you decide for yourself.

Tomorrow we're discussing curriculum and trends, technology and assessment, so I'd better stop writing now and get reading!

More later, Melissa

WPA???? I thought the program said IWCA!!!!!

2005-07-03T13:55:00.000-07:00

Just kidding, folks . . . your humble narrator did indeed knowingly come to Anchorage Alaska for the WPA workshop/conference. My reasons for coming to WPA this particular year have to do with my move to the University of Delaware, where I’ll be starting this fall as a Director of Writing and member of the English faculty. (This position includes directing the writing center, so don’t think the writing center community is getting rid of me that easily! I’ll still be at IWCA this fall.)

While I’ve waited a whiles, I’ve wanted to come to the WPA conference in the past, but never found the time (and by “time,” I mean money). I’ve wondered how the “other half lived” at WPA, but the travel money attached to my administrative work sent me to the Cs and to IWCA, the conferences most directly related to my position as a writing center director.

I wonder how many of us find ourselves in this position: we’d like to broaden our participation in the varieties writing program conferences (WAC, Comp, TechWriting) but lack the time or other resources to do so? What opportunities we (I) miss by going to the same conferences every year? I think the support offered by our most immediate professional community at these conferences is crucial, but so is the cross-pollination of ideas available in a broader community of scholars. Maybe we’d benefit from something the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies, which promotes interdisciplinary work among rhetoric scholars? Or maybe not?

But, in reality, many of us are lucky if we get funded to see our colleagues at a single regional or national conference each year. Accordingly, my goal this week is to impart some sense of WPA from a writing center p.o.v . . . now, I'm off for a quick nap before things start up!

Until later, Melissa

Whoops! Wrong conference photo!

What Women Want - New York Times

2005-05-24T17:08:00.000-07:00

What Women Want - New York Times

A Quasi-Found-Poem Conclusion

2005-05-13T16:20:00.000-07:00

This has been so much fun! I'd like to thank everyone everywhere, but there's not enough space for that, not even in cyberville. I do have to give some specific "Praise Be's!" to all of you who have directly contribut'd to the WCJ blogversation this semester. (The whole "Praise Be!" thing, for me, start'd when I heard Kerouac-ian "Praise Be!" of Allen Ginsberg.)

So, here goes (in no particular order): Praise Be... Tamara, Neal, Dawn (#12), Michele (a.k.a. "M."), Beth, Phil here & Bill here, Roberta (a.k.a. "gigglepuss"), julie, /WCJ/, Mary W., su, Rebecca F., shady, Lisa E., Melissa I., Melissa S., Lauren, Susan M., Nick, gad, Joanna, Clint, spiral, Sherri W., &, of course, Anonymous, for all of those wonderful posts. You rule.

And Praise Be to you, the reader!

Now, to end, my quasi-found-poem conclusion:

WCJ 25.1

“Our polyvalent mission...”
time & space,
listen &
hear,
in
& out--
virtual
peer.

enjoy.

-kd

From Perfect Strangers to Role Players

2005-05-12T16:20:00.000-07:00

So, what else does one do during a time when he is writing his dissertation?

He tutors someone who ask’d him for help on a project. Only, this isn’t just any project. This project is what is otherwise known to the layman as a “dissertation.” Yep. & the guy who is writing the dissertation is writing it in English—which is his 2nd language. & he wants to defend this dissertation @ the end of June or early July so… I’m the final line of offense/defense b4 he brings it to his committee.

Flashback: Does anyone remember the board game Stratego? It’s still sold in stores (well, the last time I was in a game store Stratego was there… musta been about ’82.

Oh, please, it wasn’t ’82. Though, if I remember correctly, back then I was going through a mid-life crisis—something about seeing the end of my single-digit years approach’g along the distant horizon—or was that just a booze-cruise on the Atlantic head’g down to Atlantic City? I dunno.)

Well, Stratego is a board game where “each side of the battlefield (composed of ten squares by ten squares) is populated by an army consisting of quasi-European military units circa 1820” (http://boardgamecentral.com/games/stratego.html). Each army had ten types of soldiers, from the lieutenant to scouts. The goal: move the pieces accordingly until you captured the enemy’s flag. (Yes, it was a very original idea.)

Each soldier had a number from 1 to 9, 9 being the least powerful. So, every time two soldiers touch pieces, the lower score won. (You mov’d pieces from square to square, kinda like checkers, but you didn’t have always go diagonal.) And there were bombs! Wow! Only the Miners, #8, could safely remove your opponents bombs. Miners weren’t a “strong” fight’g/attack’g piece, but they were the only ones that could remove bombs that usually surround’d the opponent’s flag. Great team players. Not Jason Giambi.

(At this point, I’m feel’g slightly embarras’d by this: partly because it’s really turn’g into an odd metaphor for tutor’g; 2ndly, because I’ve been in-and-out of read’g “Metaphors We Live By” by Johnson & Lakoff I’m realiz’g this is really, really is a bizarre metaphor [tutor’g as war?]; 3rdly, because… I’m writing about Stratego.)

But this is what I thought about today while I was think’g about the tutor’g session I had this morn’g. You see, I felt like a miner.

I felt like this dude who is writing the dissertation is in this battlefield, trying to move about, get through some difficulties, and capture the flag (er, piece of paper that screams, “PH.D.!!”) & I’m a role player in this process, trying to help remove the “bombs” in his way, & clear his path to the golden highway. (Not a direct reference to Highway 101.) And if I don’t @ least (help him) remove some of the bombs, well… mulligan, anyone?

He’s really a fine writer—especially for writing in a 2nd language, & his study is amazing. & I have the absolute highest respect not only for people who live/study in a country where they speak the language as a 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th (oh, c’mon, more than 5th? Talk about put’g others to shame!), but for someone to write a dissertation in a 2nd language—they get major props!

Don’t Be Ridiculous

Speak’g of ridiculousness, I’d like to end today w/ a short slice o’ life.

Ben Rafoth and I were talk’g one time (about a year ago) about how ridiculous something was. It was a fun(ny) conversation & I don’t know how it came about, but we realiz’d that Google is ridiculous. Honestly. It is. In a good way, of course. (Okay, all search engines are ridiculous, but it just so happen'd that we had the internet up & were using Google @ the time. We were probably look’g up Shanti Bruce or someone else we need’d background info on.) :)

But Google is ridiculous. Check this out: I typed in the word “mulligan” & w/in .22 seconds, Google provid’d me w/ more than 1.8 million references. In approximately one-fifth of 1 second, almost 2 million links were made available to me, including the exact one I was hoping for (see it above). Can you imagine say'g "pizza" or "rice, bean, and cheese burrito" & having 22 million made available to yr door in less than 1 second?

That’s ridiculous. & so is (hold on a second... delivery guy's here.)...

& so is think’g of myself as a miner.

One more blog to go!

(Sniff.)

“made up my mind to make a new start,
going to California with an aching in my heart…”

-kd

Summer Time--Time to Sit Back and Unwind... and Write!

2005-05-11T17:45:00.000-07:00

To everyone who is still in the midst of finals, portfolio evals, & other dubious end-of-the-semester activities, think this: it’s almost over!! Woohoo! (No one is around right now, so I can, once again, get away with doing that.)

I’m writing (parts of) my dissertation this week. Actually, I’m writing my dissertation over the course of the entire summer. I don’t expect it to take that long—it’s been a work-in-progress for a while, & all of the information is there, sit’g on my desk, on my bookshelf, in little binders & word documents, just wait’g to be thrust onto a computer screen. Actually, much of it is already written.

But, there are so many other things one can do while writing a dissertation. This shd be obvious though. For example, we can look back at what Beth discuss’d earlier this semester in her blog “19 Things to Do When You Should Be Grading Student Essays.” Dissertations, Grading Papers, Creating Syllabi, Writing Anything (but blogs)… these are a few of my favorite things (to avoid doing until I actually “have” to do them.)

So here’s my new secret obsession: reply’g to blogs. Well, not just any blog, of course, but to the blogs of Jacob Luft, a baseball writer for SportsIllustrated.cnn.com. In the past week, I’ve gone 3 for 6 in get’g my replies post’d to his blog site—that’s a .500 average for you stats people! (Yes, I’m a life-long Yankee fan. If anyone wants to make fun of them, you better do it now while they are still three games below .500, because it’s not going to last for long.)

Here's a link to the latest blog I replied to:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/writers/jacob_luft/05/11/may11.
chatter/index.html

(I had to cut this address after the "may11." part, so, if you choose to go to this site, you will have to copy-and-paste the entire things, from both lines, into the URL box. It took up too much space as one long address & wdn't fit into the blog correctly. Sorry. If you do go, you'll will se my posts; I use either my first or last name--usually latter--but I am always the dude from Indiana, PA.) :)

So, to answer Roberta’s earlier blogs about what is the one best thing, I say it is this: the end of the semester. And I don’t say that b/c it represents a time when our work “stops,” because, as you all know, our work never stops. I like the end of the semester—actually, more like the end of the academic year—because it’s warm again. (And when you are living in Western PA, any day of warmth & sunshine is enthusiastically welcom’d.) It’s warm out, often sunny, & I feel that this “rebirth” parallels a rebirth of the work that I really really want to do. It’s a time when I can get back to my own bookshelf (see Tamara’s blogs) & pull down things w/o feel’g as if I am taking time away from meet’g w/ a student, or plan’g a lesson, or read’g & comment’g on someone else’s writing.

Hmm, as we learn’d from Anne Geller, I am exist’g more in epochal time right now. (Or, a time that suspiciously appears more epochal. Maybe it’s epochal time fram’d by a larger fungible clock than a semester usually permits.)

And, would you believe I still have the infamous roll of TP that Joey B so heroically pack’d into the backseat of The Brown Hornet? It’s hid’g inside an end table in my living room. I remember repack’g it into the Blue Bronco as I prepar’d to drive back across the country, only to stop short this time in PA. I thought it was funny—still do. Someday I’ll mail it to him.

-kd

Pass'g Kerouac On The Road... or Highway

2005-05-10T16:45:00.000-07:00

It was the Spring of Love. It was New Jersey; Brick, New Jersey; the Jersey Shore, just a few dunes away from the beach & I left work, ready to go home &… sit there? I’d been work’g as a forklift operator/truck (un)loader @ a Belmar-based warehouse that sold snack foods to local elementary, middle, & high schools. Sometimes I even got to make deliveries. Sometimes I got to drive the box-trucks down to Jiffy Lube to get their oil chang'd. I even got to shovel snow off the roof of the build’g once (for fear that if it turn’d to ice, the roof might collapse).

Heck, it paid more than my previous job: teach’g English & Art to middle schoolers @ a private school.

I arriv’d home & check’d my email. To my surprise, there was one from Dr. Helen Dunn, director of graduate studies at Sonoma State University. I think it read: “Good News from SSU.”

Yep, I was in! I yelled, “Woohoo!” (There was no one else there, so I felt I could get away w/ that one.) I print’d out the email & went to go tell someone--but no one was around. So I sat there & read it over & over. I was going to get an MA in English and become a Creative Writer!!! Finally, I start’d tell’g people: family, friends, girlfriend, anyone who wd listen. & I don’t think anyone was genuinely very excited. Everyone, for the most part, was like “You’re leaving?” (Sniff.)

I think the only person who was as genuinely thrill’d as I was was my friend Me. (At this time I’d like to give a shout out to Me, for being there @ this exciting time.)

So, a few days later, the big “official” envelope arriv’d in the mail. (A few not-big envelopes had already arriv’d. Not-big envelopes = “not-so-great.”) Inside the big envelope was an application to work as a tutor @ the SSU Writing Center.

“Writing Center?” I thought. “I wonder what that’s like?” My undergrad university had a Learning Center, which was mainly a computer lab everyone avoid’d b/c of the folks who work’d there. Not social, not fun—and most certainly, it was not the on-campus pub. (Yep, that’s where I work’d part-time. I was Mr. Boston.)

So, in just a few weeks, I pack’d the backseat & trunk of my brown ’82 Honda Accord (The Brown Hornet), pick’d up my old roommate Joey B (who was collect’g unemployment), & we were head’d to California. Only we had to pack his things, too, into the Hornet. He was most excited @ the fact that he had plann’d ahead by bring’g an extra roll of toilet paper just in case.

Yeah, in case Texas had a TP shortage, I suppose. Or, if we got stuck in the desert.

We got everything in, includ'g his case of Gatorade (for those all-day jogs we’d be going on while driving) & set out on the NJ Turnpike. First stop, North Carolina.

My dad had decid’d to buy me a new car as a reward for get’g out of NJ. The only thing: it was @ his house in NC. So… Joey B & I head’d South before West. We got there & saw my new Dream Mobile: a blue ’89 Ford Bronco II with two hole-creating rust spots on the driver door, a fad’d paint job on the hood (quickly rust’g, too), two ripp’d seats (around the shoulder areas) & only one work’g seatbelt up front—driver’s side. Cost: $1000.

My dad beam’d proudly while stand’g in his driveway w/ Joey B & me. “This is a great deal, boys,” he chirped.

Yep. A great deal. Watch out California!

Caveat: it was a stick shift. And, yep, good ole Capt. Cross-Country Driver did not know how to drive a stick shift. The Brown Hornet was automatic. But Joey B cd do it! Joey B saved the day!

The next day, Joey B & I spent a few hours stop’g, stall’g, shift’g, pull’g, prod’g, push’g & scream’g, step’g, stop’g, stall’g, shift’g, etc. in a school park’g lot down the road from my Dad’s. I cdn’t do it… yet. We went out for dinner that evening & everything was pleasant.

The follow’g morn’g, Joey B & I pack’d the truck, hopp’d in, waved goodbye & were off on Route 40—a straight highway from NC to CA. Four hours later, around lunch time, we drove through Knoxville, TN… & the truck broke down.

So, a tow truck came & pick’d us up & brought us to a small, independent mechanic’s shop where we encountered our first group of Tennesseans. “So, where are the two of you head’d?” the owner asked.

“California,” I replied. The group of men around him laughed.

“California!? What!?! Nuttin’ out there but fruits an’ nuts! Why’re you goin’ there? Place’s is just gonna fall off into the ocean any day now!”

(Sigh.)

My first reaction was to (unfortunately) stereotype this group, but I realiz’d something: people in Jersey said the same things to me. (Double Sigh.) These dudes were quality people, though, I learn’d, because they understood my situation & had my truck ready the next morn’g: and it only cost $450. So, the truck was now worth $1450. Great deal getting not-so-great. I call’d my dad just to let him know.

“Okay,” he said, “well, this is only one thing. Everything else is fine, though, right?”

“Well, no, the stereo and cassette player don’t work.” He didn’t know that. Great deal even less-so-great. (please, be assur’d though, that I did—and still do—appreciate his generosity regard’g the truck. I just think it’s comedy.)

Joey B & I drove right along Route 40 for the next few days: Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. I learn’d to drive a stick-shift in Oklahoma & we even made it to the Canyon. Everything was grand.

Until the desert. We broke down for the 2nd time in a matter of 4 days in Needles, CA. If you are not familiar w/ Needles, CA in early July, well, … it’s hot. Very hot. Not the kind of hot that warrants TP as your savior, either. But the TP was there in the back seat, crush’d under a bag of food. Phew!

All was not awful, though. Our destination was Santa Barbara, where my good friend, Boo 409, work’d & lived @ UCSB. We were only a few hours way from there—and our Knoxville buddies had told us a secret about the truck’s “problem.” If the CV shaft broke again, we cd drive the truck in 4-wheel drive—but not for too long, especially on a highway.

So, we drove in 4-wheel drive on the highway for the next 5 hours, inch’g along @ 55 mph. It was Friday, July 2nd, I believe. Joey B’s plane from SF to NJ was Wednesday, July 7th. We got into SB @ 5pm—the Ford dealership was closed—until Tuesday because of the holiday wknd. So, we brought the truck in Tuesday morn’g & it was fix’d by Wednesday morn’g: $770.

Great deal! (Truck now @ $2220 w/ no radio. It would also cost an extra $330 to get it through CA’s “smog inspection,” money I eventually got back for some reason.)

Joey B & I drove up Highway 101 Wednesday morn’g, got to my new “house” in Petaluma late in the afternoon & got him on a bus back down to SFO by 7pm for a red-eye back to Newark. I was now living w/ two people I’d never met. I answer’d their online advertisement that read “roommate need’d, Petaluma area, close to SSU.” They wd turn out to be a nightmare—a story for another day.

The next week, my 1st full week in CA, I stop’d by the SSU Writing Center (after stall’g a few times on Petaluma Hill Road). I met Scott Miller, the director, briefly, fill’d out a new application & went back a few days later for an interview w/ Scott & Drea Moore, his assistant director. I never felt so at-home on a job interview. I was hired (of course) & wd quickly b/c best friends w/ Drea—who is currently try’g to b/c Sonoma County’s premier female jazz drummer. I had also taken a job @ a natural foods store as a cashier. But I was really exict’d about the prospect of tutor’g. That’s what I really want’d to do @ that time. And I did. And I've enjoy'd writing center work ever since.

So, I guess, Route 40 is my road to the Writing Center. Or maybe the Jersey Turnpike. Or Highway 101. I don’t know. Maybe it’s all three. That’s a great deal.

-kd

Creativity on the Brain

2005-05-09T19:50:00.000-07:00

I think this may be the last week of blog’g for the semester. :( So, what I’m going to try to do is occasionally dip back into this semester’s archives & continue previous blog-versations, while blog’g some of my own thoughts/experiences of the last 14-15 weeks.

Courtroom Rhetoric

Okay, so I’m coffee-caffeinated, in a fabulous mood, done w/ grad’g portfolios, & ready to blog in a giddy way… & then I read Dawn Fels’s blog from Friday & thought… “Wow, that’s a heck of a lot better than any blog I will write today… or any time this week!” :)

If you’ve not read Dawn’s blog yet, please do. It’s just below this one & it’s fantastic.

MultiCreativity

So… anyone feel’g creative?

Creativity has been on my brain for a while now. A long, long while, but even more so recently. I read through my ENG 101’s final portfolios last week & thought… “Wow!” I was blown away by some of the work these people produced this semester. You see, my ENG 101ers produce multigenre portfolios. Each student @ the start of the semester begins work’g on Writing #1. This Writing lasts for the entire semester. & from this writing, they produce 6 other writings, along w/ a reflective preface to their work. Students are allow’d to choose what they want to write about & the genres they want to explore.

Quick explanation: each of the ensuing six writings are “branches” off their 1st writing. For example, Ryan’s semester-long writing was a story/narrative about his life & music. His next writing was an essay about childhood & music. Writing #3 was a magazine article about “The Corporatization of Music”; Writing #4 was a flyer advertising a concert; Writing #5 was a story about a fictional band; Writing #6 was a four-cd compilation of the music that represent’d his freshman year (complete w/ stories that went along w/ each song); & Writing #7 was an album of music & lyrics he wrote about his freshman year. (For the cyber-lover, think of it this way: each writing is a hyperlink from the original text.)

The question I’m oft ask’d about this: but how does this relate to ENG 101: College Writing?

& I say… “this is College Writing! Woohoo!”

Ok, I might drop the “Woohoo” depending on who is ask’g.

Ryan is a Communications major who is very interest’d in music & creative writing. So, here’s the breakdown of his writings & how they tie to his college writing experience:
#1: it’s narrative/descriptive/expository-ish, (oh, those modes!);
#2: expository essay (another mode!);
#3: journalism students practice writing magazine articles, no?;
#4: marketing! advertising! (ever walk’d around a college campus & not seen a flyer?)
#5: creative writing!
#6: marketing! advertising! (it’s a part of communications studies)
#7: creative writing!
Reflective Preface: a thorough examination of the writing process that went into creating each piece. In this preface, writers discuss how each writing is shaped by the elements of the rhetorical triangle (writer, reader/audience, text/language, & context).

Each of Ryan’s writings not only tie back into his semester-long piece, but also his major. & when someone like Ryan, who was in an ENG 100: Basic Writing course I taught last Fall, produces two 40+ page writings (#1 & #5), I’d like to think that there is an element to multigenre writing that works for everyone. (A surprising number of students produced @ least one writing that exceeded 20 pages; & one student even did a 30-minute documentary to accompany his work).

(& now, my feeble attempt to mirror Dawn’s message)
Sometimes, from my experiences watching students work/write in ways they want to explore, I have thought that this is one way of breaking down the racist rhetoric that exists in so many places on campus. I think this type of genre exposure allows students to see HOW MANY types of writings are out there, & how they may be proficient at one, but not in another—& how it takes practice to be proficient in any of them. I also think that this is more college writing, than, say, a traditional academic essay.

(My eyes burn from the scowls I see from many who oppose this idea!)

Many students this past year have walk'd out of ENG 101 know'g how to create web pages, write essays, design advertisements, construct business letters/proposals, etc. But, most importantly, they’ve learn’d to explore writing from multiple perspectives. And, from what I’ve seen, they’ve had FUN doing this. Writing can be FUN!!?!?!

(I must note one thing: here at IUP, we also have ENG 202: Research Writing that follows ENG 101: College Writing. Therefore, I do not feel obliged to teach quoting, etc. I prefer this class to be entirely about them as adults learn'g different styles of writing.)

The amazing thing is how many genres get explored each semester. I’ve read in various prefaces about how students have enjoyed reading their writing group member’s works because they never thought they’d have to critique “that” kind of writing.

The hardest thing, from my stance, is trying to not only “teach” or “comment about” each of these genres, but evaluate them. One student, Annika, wrote an amazing semester-long essay that explored hearing-loss in children (this is her concentration). Now, I know zero about this—& I admitt'd this to her—but I went along w/ it, believing that what she was writing was “true” &, most importantly, encourag'g her along the way.

I bring this back to writing center work: how do we manage to work w/ students who write in so many different genres? Many of my students would go to the WC & work w/ tutors—& most of the tutors I spoke w/ about this loved it (especially Lindsey H., a journalism major who really got to put her experience to use!). Where is our creative space? Our place where we get to act like kindergarteners once again--& relearn everything we need to know?

Ok. Enough for now. More tomorrow.

Anyone feel’g creative?

-kd

Courtroom Rhetoric Fit for a Stage

2005-05-06T17:27:00.000-07:00

Pals, Centurions, and Yokels:

My apologies for the late post. Wednesday afternoon, I completed 13 days of jury duty on a federal criminal case that involved conspiracy, intrigue, and more courtroom drama than Judge Judy offers the casual couch potato viewer. Now, I know that jury duty is our responsibility as citizens, and I do not wish to imply at any point during this post that I didn't take my responsibility seriously. In fact, I and my fellow jurors took our roles very seriously; the defendants' lives were going to be greatly affected by the outcome of our deliberations. These men had families who would smile at us from the courtroom pews. Their children took a day off from school to attend one day of testimony. The defendants, themselves -- save for one -- appeared beaten down, tired, resigned to losing.

Amidst the hefty gravity were moments of absolute hilarity caused by the rhetorical choices of a few of the attorneys.
At one point during a cross examination that lasted ... oh, about 7 hours ... the attorney who obviously had a "past" with a particular law enforcement officer -- er, uh, detective -- tried his darndest to discredit the detective's ability to decipher some financial statements. Things got ugly. The attorney hurled questions at the detective faster than a pitching machine gone wild. But the detective was ready. Somehow, he managed to juggle the attorney's questions without losing face or his composure. In fact, he even smiled a couple of times. The attorney didn't appreciate these gestures, and eventually, he lost his stamina to continue the line of questioning, which ended shortly after the attorney pointed to the word "assets" on a tax return and "inadvertently" called the detective "a--h---." 'Twas an accident, n'est-ce pas? Haven't we all, especially in times of great stress, slipped and said a word that sort of sounded like the word we really wanted to use? In any event, the attorney's word choice made us all laugh. It was the only time everyone was on the same side.

Which brings me to a more serious observation about what I saw. As I sat and listened to the cross examinations by both the defense and prosecuting attorneys, I reminded myself that their jobs were to discredit the other side's witnesses. In some cases, I found the dialectic fascinating. But at times, I clearly saw attorneys -- white and black attorneys -- using the language of "privilege and power" to intimidate and mock a few witnesses -- all black -- whose life experiences were never marked by any sort of privilege. I wasn't impressed. In fact, I thought about how illegitimate and illogical the whole process seemed to be. How demeaning and, well, racist it clearly was. I reached my fill of some of the attorney's rhetorical mishmashing before the closing arguments even began. There was so much said that didn't have a thing to do with the evidence of the case.

Colleagues, I have friends who are attorneys, and I value the work they do. All of them do their jobs with integrity, carrying out their responsibilities with respect for the law and their clients. Not all of the attorneys on the case I observed used the courtroom as their stage. But those who did should be ashamed of themselves. I wonder. How many innocent people go to jail because they can't answer the rapid-fire-meant-to-confuse questions asked by prosecutors? How many criminals dodge the bullet because their defense attorneys know how to "talk the talk"? How many jurors draw conclusions based on eloquent or firey (or firey but eloquent) opening and closing arguments rather than the strength of the evidence between them?

For many reasons, I'm glad I did my civic duty, but I'm especially glad I served as a juror because it opened my eyes to a type of rhetoric far different than what I expected in a court of law and far different than the type of argument and philosophical dialectic I enjoy reading and teaching. My job in the writing center or the classroom has, indeed, been enriched by this experience, but if I may borrow a few of the words of one of the attorneys, I'd rather eat a flaming porcupine than witness a criminal trial again.

Dawn Fels
Juror No. 12

Path-a-logical

2005-04-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

Once I finished my doctoral program in the spring of 1996, I figured I'd be settling in to another phase of adjunct work while I recovered from the dissertating process. I had lined up a couple of sections of composition for the fall and would continue tutoring in the Writing Center at MIT. However, over the summer I spotted a job ad in the Boston Globe. The Massachusetts College of Pharmacy was hiring someone half-time to start a writing center. Hmm. I polished up my CV, dropped a note to my reference writers, and mailed my stuff in. By the next month, I was starting in my role as a writing center director. Amazing.

I've written about my first year at MCP in a WCJ article that's here . That half-time position plus a section teaching first-year composition at MCP meant I could jettison the other adjunct work I had lined up and only work in two places: MCP and the MIT Writing Center. By the next year, I was a full-time faculty member at MCP, a position I would hold for another five years until I left three years ago for my current job teaching in the WAC program at MIT.

As I think about the path I've described this week--from a reluctant undergraduate to a doctorate in education, from a fiction writer to an "academic" writer (whatever that means), from a writer to a teacher, from a tentative graduate student writing tutor to a writing center director--it seems meandering (and I haven't added in the side trips to have two kids, interview for other full-time jobs, write a lot, teach a lot, find a support network within the writing center field). Yet I don't think that lack of a direct line is unusual. I frequently get emails from folks brand new to writing center work, folks who have suddenly been asked to direct their college's writing center and who have very little background in the field. That's likely changing as more and more graduate students turn to the possibilities of writing center work and pursue more traditional paths to the field (and as more and more writing center jobs are defined in traditional, faculty-line ways). Still, our field is a relatively young one, and its inclusiveness is certainly one of its best features. We have yet to be lampooned in the ways that English departments have been for their politics in books such as Richard Russo's Straight Man, David Lodge's Small World, or James Hyne's The Lecturer's Tale.

(Actually, back in 1958, James Ruoff write a hilarious satire in College English on “The English Clinic at Flounder College.” vol. 19, pp. 348-51.)

I'm really happy to be associated with writing center work and am psyched to discover the potential future paths I might follow. Shout a hello when you see me.

Neal Lerner

Professional Trudge

2005-04-28T12:05:00.000-07:00

As I think back on the many institutions at which I taught composition as an adjunct--from community colleges to small private colleges to large public universities--I actually do not remember any contact with the writing centers at almost all of those places. I know now that many of those institutions had writing centers, but at the time I don't recall receiving flyers or promotional materials, arranging class visits, or even hearing from my students who visited the writing center with an assignment I had given. Perhaps the issue was that I was a part-time, temporary faculty member. Rarely would I have office space and even more rarely would I be invited to a department faculty meeting where I might have heard mention of the writing center. I was out of the loop, assuming that such a loop existed.

By the second year in my doctoral program, an extremely fortunate event changed the path I was heading towards: I found out that I had received a full scholarship that year (something I hadn't actually applied for or knew existed but that my advisor had nominated me for). Thus, I could take a break from being a teaching assistant for the Introduction to Education class that I had worked with my first year, and I could take a full load of classwork to fulfill my residency requirement. More important, with a little more money in my pocket I could take a semester off from adjuncting. Still, I wanted some work teaching writing, so when I came across an job ad from the university's writing center looking for graduate student tutors, I applied. With my experiences as a classroom teacher and, yes, even my knowledge of English grammar, I was a much more viable candidate than I had been seven years earlier as an MA student, and I was hired.

Early that first semester in the writing center, when traffic was light and I had time on my hands, I started investigating the center's resources. Way in the back room was a collection of Writing Lab Newsletter issues, and as I read these article and others required for our staff orientation (particularly Stephen North's "The Idea of a Writing Center"), many things clicked. Here, it seemed, was my dissertation topic. I would study the writing center; after all, what better place to combine my interests in the opportunities and barriers that higher education presents before students. My reading of writing center literature had begun to show me just how seemingly caught writing centers were in this conflict between access and success. Studying one particular writing center in depth seemed like the obvious path to investigate this conflict.

So that's what I did. At the same time, Internet listservs were becoming a larger and larger venue for discussions about a wide range of academic issues, and somehow I found my way to WCenter. For a long time, I just read or lurked, feeling quite intimidated by the expertise and authority of these authors. Heck, Muriel Harris was a frequent contributor, and her publications (and her editing of the WLN) put her on a high pedestal in my mind. I was also reading WCenter on the university's antiquated email system, one that didn't have any fancy features such as word wrap or spell check. When I made my first tentative contributions to this list, my pulse raced at the thought of these people reading my words.

Around that same time (1994), I attended my first 4C's conference in Nashville, TN, and I probably went to every session on writing centers that I could (including a pre-conference workshop on Writing Center Research). I saw from my seat in the audience folks such as Mickey Harris, Eric Hobson, Pete Carino, Dave Healy, and Christina Murphy. It was difficult to imagine joining this professional world, particularly as I trudged back and forth between my cheap motel and the conference center, but the work being discussed and the possibilities for my work were invigorating.

I make no claims to the uniqueness of the acculturation process I describe here. It's certainly different than the path of graduate students in large rhetoric and composition programs being closely mentored into the field by their advisors and forming key networks with their fellow students (my advisor was/is an elementary school reading specialist). My path to writing center work, to imagining myself as part of a research and teaching field, to contributing my ideas in ways to advance that field, was more circuitous. Most first-time 4C's attendees feel as I did, I'd imagine, and I was lucky to be interested in a field that is as welcoming and as opportunity filled as is writing center work.

My professional identity, then, was being formed in my interactions with others in the field, whether through reading, writing, research, or conferences. It wasn't quite clear to me what I would do once I graduated, but writing center work was certainly in the mix. First I had to contend with making the margins of my dissertation conform exactly to the specifications of the university's enforces of such standards. That was exhausting. Writing center work could wait, and my account of joining the ranks of "those who direct" will be the subject of tomorrow's entry.

Neal Lerner

The Heart of Darkness

2005-04-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

Oh, Friends of Writing Center Journal, down that path did I go after finishing my MA and my high-school teaching credential, straight into the heart of darkness, directly into . . . retail!

Well, actually, I had worked in a bike shop throughout grad school, so it wasn't a leap to go into that line of work despite the educational path I was pursuing. I knew I'd be heading east before long, and a full-time job with a salary and benefits was hard to pass up.

So there I was, two weeks into my job fixing and selling bicycles in Palo Alto, CA, when someone from Evergreen Valley College in San Jose, CA, called me at work. We have a couple of sections of composition open, he told me, and someone at San Jose State gave me your number.

I just started a new job, I told him, I can't quit now.

We ended our conversation. A few minutes later, the person called back, offering that I could teach a Saturday section so as not to conflict with my day job. But I work here on Saturdays, I told him, it's a bike shop. Still, in those couple of minutes between phone calls, the primary thought that ran through my mind was how ridiculous it was for me to be working in a bike shop when it was teaching that I really wanted to do. In fact, I was a fairly mediocre bike shop service manager, without the passion I had for teaching. I told my Evergreen College contact to give me 24 hours to make up my mind.

That evening, my soon-to-be wife and I weighed the pros and cons of the decision in pencil on a napkin at a local Japanese restaurant. It seemed the biggest reason not to leave the bike shop was my own sense of loyalty and reluctance to tell my boss I was leaving so soon after I had accepted the job. The pros far outweighed the cons, so the next day I called the college back, accepted two sections of first-year composition, gave two weeks notice at the bike shop, picked up a section of basic writing at SJSU, and my 7-year career as an adjunct faculty member (and "freeway flier" in California parlance) had begun.

Teaching three classes at two different colleges while working full-time for two weeks at the bike shop prepared me well for the multi-tasking ahead. I would end up teaching first-year composition, basic writing, creative writing, and business communication at 11 different institutions in three states. I would teach in rural and urban community colleges, in a small all-women's private college, and sprawling urban universities. I would teach in a program for Ford Automotive Technicians, on-site at several nuclear power plants, in a program for learning-disabled adults, and GRE preparation (mostly math, actually). I taught in formats ranging from completely on-line, to contact solely by sending student drafts back and forth via US mail, to workshops for one or two after those students have worked a 12-hour overnight shift. I taught as many as six classes a semester, and the day before I got married, I was sequestered in my basement responding to student writing while my wife and mother-in-law got the house ready for our post-ceremony party. I learned a great deal over that time, developing flexibility as a teacher and a range of skills. I particularly relished opportunities to work with basic writing students and returning adults, both groups often damaged by legacies of tracking, racism, and lost opportunities. I also learned that this life would burn me out as a teacher in a hurry. By the time my wife and I were getting ready to leave Maryland for Boston (where my wife had a faculty position), I was ready to go back to graduate school for the 'ol terminal degree.

Now this narrative might seem like a wide detour from writing center work, but certainly one-to-one tutoring was never far from my mind. I tutored for a couple of different private agencies while living in Maryland, and teaching students at a distance (whether via electronic technologies or the USPS) made me think a great deal about the nature and function of response, a key element of writing center work. But it wouldn't be for another year that writing centers, Stephen North, and WCenter would come calling. All I knew at this time was that I was heading to Boston to start a doctorate in education at Boston University.

And that's where this story continues tomorrow.

Neal Lerner

Tutoring as Teaching

2005-04-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

When I started working as a writing center tutor while in the fall of 1986 while pursuing my MA in English, I really liked what I was doing, and I particularly liked working with basic writing students, many of whom were non-native English speakers and writers. These students were working hard to get a handle on much of what I took for granted, and any small progress was very satisfying for me. I also saw quickly how the university seemed to be working at cross purposes. Basic writing students were assigned essay prompts by their classroom teacher to which they were to draft a one-paragraph response and bring that piece of writing to the writing center for their tutoring sessions. Several parts of that process immediately struck me as odd: Why only one paragraph? Many of the students I was working with were bursting with ideas, and the constraint of one paragraph seemed ridiculous. What did this paragraph have to do with the work they were already doing in class? In most cases, very little. How could I account for the fact that most students could breeze throught the grammar workbooks (which had an answer key in the back, anyway), but couldn't carry those skills over to their essays? It was all very odd.

I would like to say that these experiences filled me with passion to direct a writing center of my own, but I don't think that crossed my mind at the time. Instead, by the second year of my MA program, I had the good fortune to take a class offered by the San Jose Area Writing Project. By this point, the "oh-I-can-always-teach" part of my original intent had become primary. Writing center work certainly helped spark that desire, but I became more and more focused on high school English teaching as a potential career. My work with the Writing Project further committed me to that idea. My mentors there, Jonathan Lovell and Charlene Delfino, still the co-directors of the SJAWP, were doing such interesting work and worked so well with others to pass along their passion that I was hooked. Shortly thereafter, I enrolled in the secondary-ed credential program at SJSU, and found myself immersed in reading work by Ira Shor, Henry Giroux, Paolo Freire, and Michael Appel, among others. These authors and their sense of "liberatory pedagogy" resonated strongly with my own sense of social justice and helped me understand the conflict between schooling as a path toward societal reform and schooling as a mechanism to reinforce status quo power relations. I continued tutoring in the writing center while enrolled in this program (and still completing work toward my MA), but now I was also student teaching, first for six weeks in two ESL classrooms at a high school in San Jose's eastside, where my mentor teacher had these eager and hormonal high school students reciting nursery rhymes in order to learn English and who told me after seeing my lesson plan, "Don't ask them to write more than a paragraph; they won't be able to do it." (By the end of my student-teaching the students were reciting popular song lyrics and writing complete essays). My second semester-long teaching experience was in a middle-class high school in Cupertino, CA, in which one of my responsibilities was an SAT Prep class for college-bound juniors. From that class, I received perhaps my all-time favorite student evaluation response: "School is not a democracy; you should lecture more."

By this point, spring 1989, my wife-to-be had taken a post-doctoral position at the NIH in Bethesda, MD, so my shiny new California Secondary-Education Teaching Credential would have to sit unused. I knew I'd be heading east shortly and didn't want to take a high school job that I would leave after a year. Instead, I took advantage of the first job that was offered to me: I became a service manager in a bicycle shop.

The path from bikes back to classrooms and, then, to writing centers, will be the next blog well traveled.

Neal Lerner

Square Roots

2005-04-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

A few years back at a 4C's conference, Michele Eodice talked about the geneology of our composition/writing center lives--many of us are linked in ways we do and don't know to those who came before. Then, not long ago Joan Hawthorne asked on the WCenter list for stories of how we started in writing center work so as to show those new to the field the potential paths. So here's mine:

I spent a reluctant four years as an undergraduate at two different institutions: reluctant in that I never could quite settle on what I wanted to study, never developed a passion for a major, until I started writing fiction, and by then I only wanted to take fiction-writing workshops and wasn't interested in coursework outside of that path (in fact, I never took an undergraduate science course, quite ironic as most of my time now is spent helping biology undergrads at MIT learn the conventions of scientific writing).

Fast forward three-and-a-half years to the San Francisco Bay area: After lots of cross-country driving, a mini-career buying and selling computer parts, and a year spent writing a novel, I was broke and faced with a career dilemma--I could try to get a job in the computer industry or I could go get a graduate degree and live off of student loans. The latter was clearly the more tenable choice. I applied to an MFA program at San Francisco State, but didn't get in. I instead opted for an MA in Creative Writing program at San Jose State University. I figured the coursework would give me some structured ways to continue fiction writing, and if that career didn't work out, I could always teach! My first semester in that program (spring semester 1986--I didn't even know enough about how universities work to enter at the start of an academic year), I took a class with Hans Guth called "Practical Approaches to Composition." I really had no idea what I was getting into, but Dr. Guth, much to his credit, treated all of his students as burdgeoning rhetoricians, as up-and-coming members of the discipline. That class really clicked for me, particularly in its emphasis on our own writing processes and on writing essays, a form I never really knew much about (another irony, I suppose).

By the fall semester, I was itching to put into practice what I had learned in Dr. Guth's class, so I applied to be a Teaching Assistant and be one of many grad. students and part-timers at SJSU teaching first-year composition. Well, I didn't get hired. I was disappointed but not too surprised; many of my fellow grad students had a great deal of teaching experience, and I had none. I also have vague memories of the interview itself and the moment when I was asked how I would reconcile grading for "content" versus grading for "mechanics." I believe I gave some lame answer about a split grade (something to give WPAs nightmares), so my classroom teaching career would have to wait. Instead, I applied to tutor at the SJSU writing center after seeing a poster advertising such opportunities. That application process I remember well--I had to take a grammar/usage exam and to respond to a sample student essay. I did well with the latter task, but bombed the mechanics exam (I didn't know my absolute phrase from my Peter Elbow), so I was hired to tutor at the writing center contingent on taking an English Grammar class that fall semester. Well, that's what I did; after a few terrifying quizzes, I got the hang of understanding English grammar, and quickly that semester was immersed in tutoring writing.

At the time, the Writing Center was directed by Scott Rice, best known for the annual Edward Bulwer-Lytton contest for bad writing. The next semester, it changed considerably and went from open to all university students to working only with basic writing students who were required to come to the center as an entire class and work with tutors for one hour in addition to classroom instruction. That setup was a sort of three-ring circus: some students would be meeting one-to-one with tutors, going over the writing that had been assigned specifically for the writing center session; some students were working away on grammar/usage workbooks (we used Teresa Glazier's The Least You Should Know About English); and some students were meeting in small groups with tutors to get lectured about some general writing issue. I never was crazy about this setup, particuarly when it seemed that it was only in the one-to-one tutoring that any real teaching and learning was taking place and that the other activities had more to do with the number of staff on hand available for one-to-one tutoring than anything else. But that was just my perspective as a would-be fiction writer now finding a new identity as a writing center tutor.

More tomorrow on the paths/opportunities that those experiences led to.

Neal Lerner

One Best Thing: Leisure

2005-04-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

They say that academia moves at a glacial pace. So how come life directing a writing center can get so crazed? I often resent the way urgency seems to tyrannize my life at work. Urgent? What’s so darn urgent? Yesterday one of my tutors came screeching into my cubicle, completely panicked about some homework related to our staff development. I calmed her down with these word: There are few life and death emergencies in writing center work.

The truth is that writing center work affords much more leisure than classroom teaching. For center directing, I have very little homework: just a few lessons to plan and papers to read, but, mercifully, no papers to grade. Theoretically, I should just be able to show up with my brain and my heart and little else. And I shouldn’t forget the tangible bennies. Compared to many professions, I have ample time off.

Today I’m wondering if the pressure I feel to work faster, better, and longer isn’t largely self imposed. So today I’m taking drastic corrective measures: I’m taking the day off. I wish you could join me in the tulip fields of Mount Vernon, Washington, on this perfect 70 degree spring day. Since I know you can’t, I wish you may find in your day the softness of petals, the vitality of spring, and the majesty of mountains - and all of life's Best Things.

Roberta

P.S. I tried to post a picture--I guess this link will have to do: http://www.edoghouse.com/cbishop/4_10_04/

One Best Thing: Learning

2005-04-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

Did you know that post-operative patients who administer their own pain medications take less overall than those whose meds are controlled by nurses? Or that a society that views corpses as unhygienic and disgusting very likely manifests a strong fear or avoidance of death and aging? How about this: oceans may help with global warming if they are harnessed as storehouses for carbon dioxide gas emissions. Did you also know that if you wanted to recreate Thoreau’s living arrangement at Walden Pond, you can do so for about the same cost (in today’s dollars), using recycled building materials?

Yeah, I didn’t know either.

I admit I may never use this information (I just did!), but for some reason, I’m tickled to know these and all the other tidbits I learn everyday from the writers I meet. But many things I learn in my work I do use every day. For instance, I’m a much better listener than I used to be - mostly. Last night my partner caught me out. He was trying to explain his feelings while I was busy doing something else. I cut him off, saying I understood. When he got miffed over not being heard, I had to back up and practice what I’ve learned at work: listen till I hear.

But I haven’t just learned relational strategies through my work; I’ve also learned a new approach to life. I’m a recovering perfectionist. Okay, I’m not recovering very fast. Hm, maybe that judgment is just me being perfectionist about my recovery. Oops, tangent. Anyhoo, this year I’ve discovered the value of play in life and work. Now play may sound like an activity, but it’s really an attitude. I’m just now learning that play and playfulness make everything – scholarship, relationship, leadership – everything in our lives and work both more fun and more effective.

I hear skeptics in the room. That’s okay. You may be learning entirely different lessons from your writing center work. But I’ll bet you’re learning. As a library cataloguer, I spent twelve years learning the Dewey Decimal system. I may never again use my knowledge of pain meds and Thoreau’s cottage or even the next gem I learn. But after Dewey, I quiver in anticipation of the next thing, the Best Thing, I’ll learn today.

Roberta

One Best Thing: Variety

2005-04-20T09:38:00.000-07:00

In my pre-centered life, I was a library cataloger. With apologies to library folk who find such work fascinating, I have just one word - painfully tedious. (Okay, I needed two words.) Writing center work, in contrast, just quacks my duck. Sure, there’s a common thread that runs through our work - teaching, but each day’s tasks to that end remain richly varied.

Take Monday, for example. In the morning, I spend my first thirty minutes reflecting on the weekend’s PNWCA conference for the WCJ blog. Then I turn my attention to the Aardvarks. Hunh? Well, we are facilitating write-to-learn online learning communities for a large, lecture GER course, Asian Art History. My learning community, called the Aardvarks, had posted over the weekend about the way the Indian philosophy of darśan affects worship and art. Fascinating stuff!

Approaching my noon nosh, I am surprised with a visit from a student I had worked with extensively three years back. With just one quarter left to graduate, he dropped off the face of the earth. He’s back, he’s dealt with his Issues, and he’s ready to finish. However, despite his incredible talent with words, he is totally blocked. In the three years he’s been gone, he’s written just one email, period. We catch up. Then we devise a plan to get him unstuck.

In the GPB meeting with our three student coordinators (Grand Pooh Bahs), we discuss our recruiting process and debrief about their conference presentations. Next, I take a phone call from an alumna writing a 75-page paper. She’s in a panic. While I talk her down, I hold a few side conversations, mostly gestured, with writing assistants posing the odd question. Just as Outlook reminds me to work on my proposal for a larger budget, the phone rings again. This time it’s a parent wondering what accommodations Western has for her high school senior with dyslexia and ADHD.

By now it’s time for me to join my cross-town colleague, Sherri Winans, for some eats and an invigorating conversation about our lives and work. We’re writing both a session proposal a pre-conference workshop proposal for next year’s Cs. We have so many interests that we pursue three or four rabbit trails before settling on the one that intrigues us most.

Sadly, I remember feeling annoyed a lot of Monday because so many of the day’s events were unplanned. I never did get to work on that proposal (due today). But today my annoyance embarrasses me. If I wanted predictable, I could have stuck with cataloging. Instead, I inhabit a world bursting with surprise and serendipity - today’s One Best Thing.

Roberta Kjesrud

One Best Thing: Community

2005-04-18T19:28:00.000-07:00

We’ve all had them – distasteful jobs we’ve done just for the money. My last such gig was fifteen years ago, but it’s still vivid. I cluck regretfully over lost years of mind-numbing work, but there’s fresh trauma in the flashbacks of cranky customers, underhanded managers, and back-stabbing co-workers. To these who are best forgotten, I say, “Azoy fil ritzinoyl zol er oystrinkn!” (He should drink too much castor oil.)

Writing center folk make me wonder what took me so long to get here. What a remarkable bunch! Take the group of 140 I was with last weekend at the PNWCA conference. We come from K-12 schools, small academies, two year schools, and universities. We are administrators, alums, authors, deans, directors, faculty, grads, rhetoricians, and undergrads. And some of us are, blessedly, Canadian. Despite our differences, we are a cohort of colleagues who share common values – learning, listening, literacy – and a sense of wonder that we get to do what we do with whom we do it.

Daughter of a carpenter and a store clerk, college drop-out, skeptical of hierarchy and politics, I came late to the academy. I chafe here. I’m neither properly credentialed nor respectably published, neither faculty nor tenured. Being with the usual academics makes me a sweaty-palmed blitherer. But being with writing centered people feels like a Kjesrud family reunion. I may not know them all (Kjesruds number in the hundreds), but I know we are all related. We share a bloodline, a heritage, a pedagogy, a vision, and a future. These are not just good people; these are my people. I’m grateful to and for them, my community, today’s One Best Thing.

One Best Thing

2005-04-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

One Best Thing

Since the close of the Pacific Northwest Writing Centers Conference held over the weekend, I’ve been trying to decide the one Best Thing about writing center work. I’m bumfuzzled. In so many areas of my life, I can decide the best thing. The best spouse — mine, of course. The best parents — again, mine. The best guinea pig —also mine! The best food — well, this is harder, but as long as I narrow to a genre (Thai, Italian, etc.), I can choose. Since I can’t pick one best thing about our work, I’m going to cheat. Every day, I’m going to pick a new Best Thing. And I invite you to do the same.

Today’s best thing — Western Washington University’s Writing Center Assistants. Two teams of three assistants presented at the weekend conference, and three gave closing remarks to the entire crowd. Wow! These guys are good. I remember when they first started, two of them 3-4 years ago. Then they were bundles of raw talent, but they didn’t know it. Suffering from low writing center scholar esteem, they really couldn’t have done what they did this weekend — not because they were incapable, but because they didn’t believe they were. Now these months and years later, these folks are bundles of sophisticated competence. They listen well, think thoroughly, adjust to on-the-spot challenges, and exude a confidence that just makes you know that the world is going to be okay if these folks get to run it. They are truly prepared for what Nancy Grimm calls The New Work Order.

As much as I may want to be proprietary — these are my tutors, mine — I can’t, darn it. They get to claim the fruits of their own learning. But I got to watch. And today that seems like a bigger and better Best Thing than I deserve.

Roberta Kjesrud
Western Washington University

You say you want an evolution . . .

2005-04-15T06:32:00.000-07:00

From Inside Higher Ed:

Evolution and science are under attack again in Kansas, and academics there and around the country are refusing to participate in state Board of Education hearings designed to debate the concepts.

Read the article:

Inside Higher Ed :: Standing Up by Sitting Out

MIT Mischief

2005-04-15T05:54:00.000-07:00

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

MIT Students' Program for Generating Phony Computer-Science Papers Produces a Winner
By ANDREA L. FOSTER

Fill a paper with gobbledygook, add some fake charts, slap on a title dense with highfalutin scientific jargon, and -- voilà! --- a highfalutin conference may actually accept it.

That's what happened when three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology submitted a nonsensical research paper to the ninth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics, scheduled to be held in Orlando, Fla., in July.

SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator--Try it today!

To Blog or Not to Blog . . .

2005-04-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

Blog, in verb and noun form, seems an unfortunate word. It just kind of falls from your mouth. Having said it, done it, leaves your tongue hanging out with a bad taste, as if you have just licked a dozen envelopes (envelopes that hold letters that are strangely both very private and very public). I remain ambivalent about the act of Blogging.

But I like to read about things that attract and repel me at the same time, so I will tell you what I am finding out.

I was struggling with the idea of audience. Is it imagined, invisible, hostile, limited to friends of WCJ, etc? Sending my words out makes me uncomfortable, but is it is the same uncomfortable that I have with writing any old thing (because I do still have that uncomfortable) or is it a new uncomfortable, squarely fixed on this new technology and task? Most of what I am reading about Blogs recognizes this schism: Bloggers operate in a very public and networked world of words, but even with all that stimulation zooming to and from us, we remain in a cocoon of individuality and ego. I had been thinking of this act as very public, very outwardly focused, but Rebecca Blood claims otherwise.

From Rebecca Blood's book: The Weblog Handbook

The audience of one is the single most important principle behind creating [a Blog, Web site, etc] that is fresh, interesting and compelling. There are half a million weblogs; yours will be compelling only to the extent that it reflects your unique way of looking at the world. Your perspective is the point. It is the only reason to read a weblog at all.

It seems to me this is also something we try to convince developing writers of: contrary to what some teachers or their methods say, we really do want students to write about something that holds meaning for them and to think about what they like to read and why as a way to understand how writing works for readers. Right?

While I read Blood's handbook I wished that students had this handbook as their required first-year writing handbook:

If you allow yourself to begin posting entries based on what you think someone else wants you to write, you are missing the point . . .

Your weblog is your playground. Keep it fun for yourself.

Use whatever tools you have to let readers know exactly what you think about current foreign policy, your favorite brand of tofu, or your new haircut.

If a friend mentions one of your entries and you find yourself telling her why you felt that link was interesting or describing the details of the incident you wrote about, you can be sure that you aren't doing your best work.

Having to produce something for your weblog several times a week will force you - or give you an excuse - to practice your craft.

Writing short is hard, and the daily practice of having to summarize or analyze an article with concision will make you a clearer writer and a better thinker.

The initial Blog bug bite let me be silly or let me cheat you of my own writing by allowing me to easily link to other things. Now I am starting to rethink this medium, or genre, or indulgence--whatever it might be functioning as for me at this moment. I am rethinking Blogging in terms of personal and public writing, what writing means to me, what I think I might have to say to an unknown audience.

Holy Hannah, this Blog thing has me writing poems!

A Poem About Blogging

Note it: the giddiness and dread as you press send, submit, or print.
Making public your typeface of selected thoughts
just ain't right somehow or
it is what it is
for now

Taps in Kansas

2005-04-11T19:20:00.000-07:00

A Tuesday Evening

Day is done. Sitting on my patio, my pre-dusk cocktail in hand, I wonder if my Adirondack chair feels as out of place as I do sometimes out here on the praire. We just had a vote in the Wheat State that swung far to the right, affirming a ban on any type of marriage other than, well, you know, the kind between the pimply boy you were forced to square dance with and the prom queen. Now, the winners in this state sense the time is right to forge ahead and overturn abortion rights and evolution too. I sigh and am gifted with a drop of bird poop on my lap.

A Wednesday Morning

Today is a day designated for silence - if you register for it.
day of silence

The thought of asking students to remain silent in support of Gay and Lesbian rights is strange to me. I'd like to believe we are all just seeking gestures and signs to exhibit or recognize as reaching out for alliance? But here in the middle, we don't really need a day of silence . . . most folks never did want to talk about it anyway.

Last week one of our writing consultants, Noel, presented her mini-research project at practicum. It was on silence. Her review of dozens of articles, found with keyword searching of silence and teaching, led to this conclusion: k-12 writing about silence and teaching was focused on the uses of silence; post-secondary writing about silence and teaching focused on how not to silence others, how classrooms operate to silence students, how silencing is violence.

M.

More on MS WORD Grammar Check (or is it bounced check?)

2005-04-11T19:05:00.000-07:00

From Professor Steven D. Krause's Official Blog:

"MS Word grammar check works poorly (or tell me something I didn't know...) This is the first in a couple of posts I meant to make earlier-- I was delayed by work, life, and some sort of weird blogger glitch that I think (I hope) has been solved. Anyway....

See this article Bradley Bleck forwarded to tech-rhet, 'A Word to the unwise -- program's grammar check isn't so smart,' published on March 28, 2005 online and presumably in print by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The opening paragraphs give an idea about what it's about:

Microsoft the company should big improve Word grammar check. No, your eyes aren't deceiving you. That sentence is a confusing jumble. However, it is perfectly fine in the assessment of Microsoft Word's built-in grammar checker, which detects no problem with the prose. Sandeep Krishnamurthy thinks Microsoft can do a lot better.

The University of Washington associate professor has embarked on a one-man mission to persuade the Redmond company to improve the grammar-checking function in its popular word-processing program. Krishnamurthy is also trying to raise public awareness of the issue.

This might be a good article to include the next time I teach 'Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice,' though I already assign a couple of good articles about the problems of MS Word as a 'writerly tool:' Alex Vernon, 'Computerized Grammar Checkers 2000: Capabilities, Limitations, and Pedagogical Possibilities,' and Tim McGee and PatriciaEricsson, 'The Politics of the Program: MS Word as the Invisible Grammarian,' both of which were published in Computers and Composition a few years back. "

'Tutoring' Rich Kids Cost Me My Dreams - Newsweek Columnists - MSNBC.com

2005-04-11T12:40:00.000-07:00

'Tutoring' Rich Kids Cost Me My Dreams - Newsweek Columnists - MSNBC.com

Spring Ain't Sprung

2005-04-11T08:46:00.000-07:00

If you teach a course on peer tutoring, you might have a crew of future tutors with spring fever--eager to practice with students, chomping to work in the writing center. Students in my course start their internships this week and last week we talked about their concerns and their anxieties--their perception of readiness; a few worried about not knowing enough.

It seems a comfort to them to know that one of the richest men in world, Bill Gates, doesn't know enough either. From today's Chronicle of Higher Education:

AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR of marketing and e-commerce at the University of Washington has dedicated himself to chronicling the blind spots of the grammar checker in Microsoft Word, and to persuading the software company to improve the tool.

"But how much good does the grammar checker actually do? Precious little, according to Sandeep Krishnamurthy, an associate professor of marketing and e-commerce at the University of Washington. After experimenting with the tool, Mr. Krishnamurthy concluded that it cannot identify many basic grammatical faux pas -- like errors in capitalization, punctuation, and verb tense."

See the professor's web page dedicated to this critique.
http://faculty.washington.edu/sandeep/check

What do you think about grammar check? Machine scoring? Machine teaching? See the WPA archive to read a recent discussion on this: http://lists.asu.edu/archives/wpa-l.html

More later . . .

M.

Talking Trash

2005-04-08T04:58:00.000-07:00

I failed to blog yesterday (sorry!) My day was full, and I was having an allergy attack. Today's writing will be piecemeal, so I think I'll just let it flow. Right now, I'm about to meet with a student to work on a paper about Kate Chopin's The Awakening and "Story of an Hour." I think this is our third or fourth meeting, and the student has made significant progress with organization and development that supports a specific thesis. I'll be back to report how it went today.

I'm back, and I'm pleased to tell you that the student brought a complete draft with the exception of an unfinished conclusion. The clearest evidence of her progress was revealed by the clarity of her writing --- deliberate, straightforward sentences and a logical organizational pattern.

Now, I had planned to write about Dorothy Allison's short story collection, Trash --- so let me go ahead and do that --- and then I'm getting out of here! It's Friday, and the staff and I are going to lunch at Shoney's to have our weekly staff meeting.

You will remember, gentle reader, my previous references to the element of fire as an ongoing theme in my current literature class. Well, Allison's story "Gospel Song" contains another compelling scene that relates to what we've been discussing. In this case, a young girl faces a common challenge: whether or not to associate with (befriend) someone who has been rejected by others. The rejected girl is an albino, treated unkindly by schoolchildren on the bus because of the way she looks.

"I watched her face --- impassive, contemptuous, and stubborn. Sweat was showing on her dress but nothing showed in her face except for the eyes. There was fire in those pink eyes, a deep fire I recognized, banked and raging. Before I knew it I was on my feet and leaning forward to catch her arm. I pulled her into our row without a word. Reese stared at me like I was crazy, but Shannon settled herself and started cleaning her bottleglass lenses as if nothing at all was happening" (47).

What strikes me about this passage is that the writer identified with the rejected girl because of the fire they both had inside. It's a beautiful gesture of friendship, of course, but it's more than that. It's an example of how we can identify with the writers we are tutoring in our centers. Find something in the student that says, "You know me." Target that something, and it will be easier to see our way to what needs to happen next.

Blessings to all of you, and a happy weekend! I'm going camping, so I'll be sitting around a fire contemplating.

A Word in an Index or a Greater Blessing?

2005-04-06T05:40:00.000-07:00

To a Minor Poet of the Greek Anthology

"Where now is the memory
of the days that were yours on earth, and wove
joy with sorrow, and made a universe that was your own?

The river of years has lost them
from its numbered current; you are a word in an index."

Thus writes Jorge Luis Borges, bringing us all to that fearful recognition of our smallness in the universe. We can do little to remain other than to leave our names on something.

"To others the gods gave glory that has no end:
inscriptions, names on coins, monuments, conscientious historians;
all that we know of you, eclipsed friend,
is that you heard the nightingale one evening."

(shift to another eavesdropping session on a student consultation) --- you'll see how this relates in a minute)

The consultant: "What I was trying to get you to see was ... the other reasons that you gave me either fit into a moral or logical category of your argument. First of all, you have the "murder/Bible/human being/duty to protect the unborn" argument; then you have medical reasons --- health risks, depression, etc. You will want separate paragraphs that show this organizational principle. So, there it is. That's your outline. Now, what you have to go home and do is to read these sources and while you read, highlight. Okay, this is information about the health risks, and this is a moral concern. You pull these things out to put into your paper. Also I think it's a good idea to mention your own personal opinion and experiences (a personal case study). You could say, "My friend X. ... (and describe her experience to back your opinion, to provide proof for your argument). Use only the first initial, however."

The student is writing about abortion. This is her view, written and signed to stand for posterity. But I doubt that she thinks about it that way. It's just an English paper, after all. What will it mean, in ten years, that she wrote a paper claiming abortion is wrong and why? Let's go back to Borges.

"Among the asphodels of the Shadow, your shade, in its vanity,
must consider the gods ungenerous.

But the days are a web of small troubles,
and is there a greater blessing
than to be the ash of which oblivion is made?"

Here's the good part. In my literature class this semester, there has been a sustained visual image of fire: smoke, burning, suffering, ceremony, and rising from the ashes. Examples of texts we've studied that contain these elements: Hamlet; "A Worn Path" (Welty); "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona" (Alexie); "Smoke Signals" (Alexie); and "Buddha" (Melville). My students and I have explored some of the principles of faith across different religions (Christian, Native American, and Buddhism) and in particular the concept of nirvana (Borges' "oblivion") --- not heaven but the cessation of suffering (burning). All these words, these writings, celebrate the ash of which oblivion is made.

Back to the student who is thinking and writing about abortion, a painful (burning) topic. Isn't the act of writing about it ceremonial? We lay the subject on the fire and turn up the heat (add fuel, breath, an audience).

Borges:

"Above other heads the gods kindled
the inexorable light of glory, which peers into the secret parts and discovers
each separate fault"

Yesterday I wrote about the writing campfire circle and invited you to see yourselves (as I do) as explorers in the wild west of writing. Above our heads the gods are kindling the fires. Let's keep stirring up the ashes, weaving joy with sorrow, and making the universe by writing it down.

Tomorrow: Trash: Stories by Dorothy Allison

Eavesdropping and Exploring

2005-04-05T06:44:00.000-07:00

It's quiet in the Studio this morning, and I'm listening in on a consultant's session with a student as I type this.

"What's the significance of this sentence?" she asks.

I hear only a murmur from the student. The topic is Emily Dickinson's "I Could Not Stop for Death."

"What's the feeling you get when you read this line about her gossamer gown?" continues the consultant ("C"), her soft voice barely audible from here. I miss the next exchange and then hear, "And then she actually sees the grave, and realizes that death is forever. It's like she didn't realize it until then."

C. continues to read the rest of the poem aloud, placing emphasize on key expressions.

"What you need to do, she says, "is to write an introductory paragraph, and you might --- did your instructor give you any instructions/suggestions about how to ...?

"No," replies the student.

"Did he approve your choosing this topic?"

"No, this is just one of the poems that he assigned."

"What made you choose this poem?" (She doesn't wait for an answer). "The thing is ... if you choose to write about this, you are going to have to take one view of death and go through each stanza and show how this view is revealed. Do you think you can do that?"

Student: "I'll try."

"See, you jump right into the content without any introduction that gradually narrows down to your specific thesis."

"Even though she was unprepared, she went willingly because it seemed a good thing to do. But by the end of the poem, she realizes that she wasn't prepared. There is a coldness, a darkness, at the end, though earlier she seems very positive. If you are going to focus on the irony, you are going to have to focus on what she says about death at the beginning and what she says about death later in the poem. If I were you, I would ... your thesis statement needs to be in the form of a sentence. It needs to make a statement."

What is so pleasing to me about listening to this particular consultation is that I find I am not listening to evaluate; I am listening to encounter a learning experience and slipping into my researcher mode. I have complete confidence in the consultant and in her methods. I see that she is intuitively following the steps recommended for peer readers in The Writing Circle, by Dick Harrington by touching on the following topics.

Strategies for Exploring
Topic
Intention (Focus)
Voice (Persona)
Audience
Information
Ideas

She does this without announcing her strategy. Her consistent, persuasive, muted tone is reassuring and meditative --- two responses that a nervous student writer will appreciate. This consultant is paying attention, as Harrington recommends, --- "selective, focused attention --- to ... information and ideas, to people and behavior, to language. In other words, to explore means to open yourself to possibilities of meaning in virtually any experience" (45).

"C" and I are explorers, crossing the wild west of writing, packing our pencils instead of pistols --- wiping the sweat of concentration from our brows in the desert of writer's block, cutting open the word-cacti for refreshment, and saddling up a horse-thesis for a clear path to the homefront. We eavesdrop around writing campfires at night and see what we can learn from the sentence pioneers, paragraph miners, point preachers, organization sheriffs, and time thieves. I hope you can visualize this extended metaphor. It's a Writing Circle, you see.

Tomorrow: Jorge Luis Borges on life as a writer.

Things My Bookshelf Might Say

2005-04-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

Gentle WCJ Friends and Bloggers,

I greet you with clean hands, thanks to AB6 6 Hour Antibacterial Care Cold & Flu Cozy Mint Waterless Hand Gel. In my days of recovery on the couch (in between glances --- okay, overt and bewildered stares) at Court TV, I took another look at my bookshelf to see what it would reveal about my personality to a complete stranger. Would it suggest anything about my interest in writing, for instance? Surely it would. If so, what?

The first books I pulled off the shelf were these:

Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself, (The Groundbreaking New York Times Bestseller), by Melody Beattie

The Writing Circle: A Guide for Writers and Peer Readers (2nd edition), by Dick Harrington

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman

Trash: Stories by Dorothy Allison

And (of course), The Writing Center Journal (for this I expect Brownie Points)

So, dear readers, let's look at Chapter 7 of Beattie's slant on the Twelve Step program. Not that any of YOU are codependents, but you might know somebody who is.

"People say codependents are controllers. We nag; lecture; scream; holler; cry; beg; bribe; coerce; hover over; protect; accuse; chase after; run away from; try to talk into; try to talk out of; attempt to induce guilt in; seduce; entrap; check on; demonstrate how much we've been hurt; hurt people in return so they'll know how it feels, threaten to hurt ourselves; whip power plays on; deliver ultimatums to; do things for; refuse to do things for; stomp out on; get even with; whine; vent fury on; act helpless; suffer in loud silence; try to please; lie; do sneaky little things; do sneaky big things; clutch at our hearts and threaten to die; grab our heads and threaten to go crazy; beat on our chests and threaten to kill; enlist the aid of supporters; gauge our words carefully ..." (this list goes on for quite a while). I'm stopping with "gauge our words carefully" because I want to explore what it means to "gauge" our words.

According to Wikipedia (the FREE encyclopedia), there are many different uses of gauge. It might mean, for example, "the size of the conductors used to carry electric current" or "any of a variety of measurement devices in engineering." It is also the stage name of an actress in adult films. I'll leave it up to you to investigate that one. In regard to jewelry, "gauge refers to the thickness of the metal that penetrates the body tissue." In mechanics, "a pressure gauge is a device for indicating liquid or gas pressure." Three more usages relate to railways, shotguns, and ships, respectively --- the first, track or rail gauge, "means the distance between the inside edges of the two rails forming the track;" the second, (shotgun) gauge refers to "the diameter or caliber of the barrel," and the nautical reference is "the position of a vessel in relation to another vessel and the wind." There are more, believe it or not.

Clearly, when we gauge our words, we mean to measure them or test them against some standard. I lay before you the question: Which standard? What are its dimensions? How can we conform to its specifications or limits? Isn't this the very thing we are trying to teach students about academic writing --- how to gauge their words? Also, should we keep a copy of the codependency book in the writing center? A few of us might need an occasional reminder that we are not responsible for the ultimate well-being of every person, including our baby writers.

Tomorrow we'll look at The Writing Circle.

Tamara Miles

The Light We See By, The Thing We See

2005-04-01T05:52:00.000-08:00

“When you think like a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” – My dad.

In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor says, “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.” Her comment refers of course to religious ideology, but I believe her claim applies to any ideology, including writing center ideology.

The light we see by is theory. A theory gives us questions to ask, privileges certain questions over others, and intentionally or not obscures other questions. One unfortunate result of prevailing writing center theory, to my mind, is that it has not made the distinction between the light we see by and the thing we see; we have confused the two, and at times asserted that the two are one and the same. What I mean is that contrarian theory, the light of the past twenty years, fails to acknowledge (let alone embrace) that we often work toward uncertain ends, that our liberator inclinations are mixed with our deeply held values of sociality, and that in this soup there are likely regulatory beans and broth. The result, at least for me, has been a feeling of disconnection between what I read and what I see in our own writing center and other centers in the southeast.

In Elizabeth Boquet’s history, she describes how writing center work over the years was appropriated by folks in the content disciplines, from Psychology to Composition Studies. In recent years, I’ve read more than one writing center article that--however satisfying as a product of the academic mind--seemed to display a greater understanding of Critical Theory than of writing center reality. I am not advocating a theory that privileges nuts and bolts over the theoretical, though I would say that theory ought to illuminate our everyday practices. To return to O’Connor, I believe the light we see by, our theory, is not a substitute for what we see every day in our writing centers.

Bill and I are interested in what questions we might ask when we see by a different light. To define the work of writing centers as mind work, we believe, gives us new ways of seeing, and, we believe, new things to see. I’ll play around here with the questions we’ve been asking for years:

What are we?
We are a discipline. A discipline is defined as a body of knowledge or a set of methodologies. Both do mind work, but the content disciplines are unique in the first; writing centers are unique in the second. Both serve the tutorial, an event in critical inquiry.

Why do we belong?
First because we contribute in powerful ways to the intellectual and personal growth of students, the core aims of the educative process.

How do we do it?
Though dialogic efforts, the tutee and tutor cooperate in processes that develop those sensibilities required to think with clarity and to write with precision and skill. These efforts are deeply rooted in values of sociality that focus on the whole person, thus the aim is to produce better writers, not better pieces of writing.

What is the role of peer tutors?
Peer tutors have the capacity to positively influence other students’ disposition toward learning in ways that teachers cannot. Their ability to help students shift personas, negotiate the landscape of college life, and perceive themselves as writers are vital, largely unexamined, contributions. Also often overlooked are the reciprocal benefits of these peer experiences for student tutors, adding further to the intellectual and personal life of a campus.

How do we assess what we do?
Because our work is mind work and the way we carry it out aids students’ disposition toward learning, we look to the fields of Psychology and Sociology for assessment tools. We need not reinvent the hammer. Accepted methods, industry standards if you like, already exist.

What about research?
Readers of “The Polyvalent Mission of Writing Centers” will find that research has been redefined to serve writing centers in multiple ways.

What about the future?
When Riley published “The Unpromising Future of Writing Centers,” he was right about a lot of things. First, that our movement is an evolving one. Second, that at the time it was written we were in a period of frustration. He was exceedingly astute in seeing the parallels between writing centers and the birth and growth of American Lit,. composition studies, and literary theory. But I think he (like the rest of us) made a critical mistake in not distinguishing between a content discipline and a discipline of methodologies. How can we attempt to claim purity of content and at the same time claim to be cross-disciplinary? If our status is second class, we share some of the blame because we have not reminded others that we are a discipline equal to and working in tandem with the content disciplines.

There were things Riley could not know at the time. First is that technology would so profoundly alter the profession. When the professor is no longer the repository of knowledge, things change. He could not know that research would come to be more broadly defined. And finally, he couldn’t know that educational methods would actually take a turn in our direction, that things like problem-based learning and learning communities, the stock and trade of writing center work, would come to define new and innovative trends.

Bill and I believe that a new light gives us new ways of seeing and new things to see--like a new future. What do you think?

Phil here

Why Theory Failed Me Personally

2005-03-31T11:24:00.000-08:00

I entered the world of writing center work in the fall of 1988. Newly hired to teach African-American and American literature at Francis Marion University, where English and the writing center were integrated operations, I gave director Philip Gardner six weekly hours of my service to complement nine hours of comp and lit duties.

Briefly, my career seemed integrated.

But my position had me straddling two disciplinary areas. One was my traditional career in teaching literature and freshman composition. The other was the world of writing center work, a world at that time beginning to define itself in strong contradistinction to my English teaching.

According to the writing center theory, my classroom practices in composition instruction were everything the writing center community should be resisting. In some very provocative rhetoric, theory asserted that in my teaching I was enforcing the university’s most regulatory, hierarchical, and oppressively mass template form of education. Only in the writing center, where one-to-one encounters could be intensively dialogic, could I be truly educating my students—liberating them from institutional assaults on their minds and selves.

Where did that leave me? In effect, theory was defining me as a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll, Ph.D., that benign, professionally certified, classroom teacher, was actually Mr. Hyde—a morally twisted monster who, allegedly, through deposition of facts by directive teaching, was snuffing out the life of the mind.

So not only was my dedicated career a delusion, it was a snuff film.

I am sure you see my point. By virtue of my being both a classroom teacher and a writing center tutor, theory was branding one half of me a villain and the other half an angel.

As Philip Gardner likes to insist, theory must explain all of what one does, not part of it. Yet, the last twenty-five years of theory has foregrounded the more resistant, counter-hierarchical impulses in our work while obscuring the educative mission that we have in common with the larger academy.

In short, theory did not work for me because it failed to describe me coherently. It made me an enemy to myself, labeling more than one half my work duties as something educationally shameful. It suggested that, while walking from my composition classroom to the writing center, I should be preparing to undo all that I had just accomplished in my classroom session.

Worse, theory was needlessly marginalizing the writing center profession. True, the material circumstances of writing center professionals in the academy were at times truly abysmal and marginal; but that was no need to base theory predominately on such negatives. What Phillip and I argue is that for twenty-five years writing center theory has driven a wedge between our work and the academy, dividing instead of joining, thus contributing to a deep, self-willed professional marginality. In our embrace of a sometimes doctrinaire discourse laden with what we term “values of autonomy,” we have ascribed to a metanarrative that suppresses some important “values of sociality”—by which we can be seen as vital contributors to legitimate social reproduction.

“Polyvalence” is our way of conjoining these mutually excluding valences into a discourse of professional wholeness.

For no matter how one may try to define the writing center’s “essential” mission, there is no such pure essence. The “contrarian model” of the last two to three decades purports to articulate a foundational, revolutionary purity of mission that actually was socially constructed out of ideologies as well as institutional and cultural conditions of the 1970s and 1980s. Philip and I do not reject that noble effort. It has yielded magnificent results. We wish, however, to explain and participate in equally important, collective practices of the wider institutional setting.

My hunch is that you might as well.

Bill here

Spies Coming In from the Cold

2005-03-31T05:18:00.000-08:00

In a tensely weary, jaded style of gritty alienation, Richard Burton gave perhaps his most convincing performance in John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a film astutely made in the bleakest black and white during the reign of gaudily saturated Technicolor. I recommend the film to anyone in the writing center movement itching to come in from the cold of our professional margin. Over in Berlin, at least, the Wall has come down.

This film connection struck me one day as Philip Gardner and I were collaborating on our essay “The Polyvalent Mission of Writing Centers.” We had finished our year-long discussion of writing theory, much of it saturated with a rhetoric of alienation and marginality that we saw as expressive of the profession’s determined refusal to feel at home in the big, bad cold war of institutional instructional practices.

“Phil,” I observed, “what we’re saying seems to be that it’s time—really time—for spies like us to come in from the cold.”

I still feel that way. Moreover, I think a great many of us have reached a point of exhaustion. Because it’s tough—really tough—to spend a whole career resisting the institutionalized practice of writing; subverting the academy’s hierarchical, hegemonic will to coerce and inscribe upon its clients; and relentlessly opposing the efforts of classroom professors whose hope, like ours, is to help young people toward productive futures. All while casting ourselves into monochromatic, rain-drenched exile.

The appeal we make in our essay is for professional assimilation. The way we see it, we work in the academy, we are paid by the academy, and we enable both students and professors in the academy. So inescapably we belong in their enterprise. Theory, however, has been telling us otherwise, insisting that the mission of writing centers is to create an alternate and oppositional anti-space, to favor contrarian identities, and to fear that dreaded bugaboo—cooption by the academy. Resistance is as sacred as free-world democracy, says theory, because the mainstream is tyranny.

In the concept of “polyvalence” we have tried to find room for both resistant and assimilative impulses of the writing center movement, room where we may embrace without guilt the hybridity of a more central presence in the academy. It is untenable, we think, to regard ourselves as perennial, underground double agents in the academy’s intellectual enterprise. Many things that the academy values are things that we too value and practice. Our essay therefore urges a broadening of theory, arguing that the wondrous critical inquiry occurring in a writing center’s “quality-time” sessions (bowing here to Anne Ellen Geller) binds us to, rather than separating us from, the curriculum and thus the academy.

Have you, too, felt an itch to come in from the cold?

Bill here

“Tastes Great! Less Filling!”

2005-03-30T13:11:00.000-08:00

What we do is mind work. And mind work can build a bridge as well as take one down. It can regulate. It can liberate. Harvard University produced a JFK and a Ted Kaczynski, The Unabomber. A writing center session may be wave; it may be particle; it may be “tastes great!”or it may be “less filling!”

Bill and I call this polyvalence.

We believe that the regulation/liberation question that has dominated the writing center conversation for so many years has worn out its usefulness, has trapped us, and that we have to get unstuck. In earlier times when we were finding ourselves, articulating our feelings of dislocation and isolation was a natural part of our discipline’s development. That period that Terrance Riley accurately labeled “frustration” gave us reason to vent and represents a predictable phase in our growth.

But how we feel is not the same as what we do. And let’s face it, outside our community, nobody cares how we feel. And they shouldn’t. (Do we really care how car mechanics as a group really feel? Or accountants? Or, you name it.) We can’t define ourselves for others (who want and need to know what we do) by saying how we feel.

My guess is that nothing of this comes as a great surprise to most of you, but my guess, too, is that we have not replaced most prevailing, oppositional theory because we haven’t had anything to replace it with. Bill and I argue that writing center work is rooted in critical inquiry, that ours is a discipline of methodologies, and that our work in the academy is equivalent to the plaster that holds together a mosaic’s tiles. That’s our perspective (both less filling and great taste!).

Every theory is a work in progress, a part of an evolving conversation, so rather than write about what our theory is (We hope you’ve read it) I want to propose criteria for a useful theory, yours or ours. We’re interested in what you think.

I truly feel that we are on the cusp of a very promising future. But that future begins with a theory that we can turn to when we get stuck.

That theory in my mind must do these things. First, it must be comprehensive; it
must serve the need we’ve not been able to fill: It must give us a framework for the argument that we have to make, that every academic constituent player on a campus is asked to make. To do so, it must break down the binaries that characterize prevailing theory, the us-against-them framework that unifies most of the past twenty years. In other words, we have to accept the obvious—that we can’t continue defining ourselves by what we are not.

Second, theory must embrace the polyvalence of what we do, acknowledge that at times we serve the powers that be and at other times we liberate students from those same powers. We have to accept and explain in logical terms that we often work toward uncertain ends. If physicists can accept the uncertainty that light is sometimes wave and sometime particles, I think we ought to be able to accept that the work we do might serve the status quo or it might help to one day overthrow the status quo.

That theory must be a descriptive discourse, not an expressive discourse. We have to, as Jo Koster from Winthrope University has written, find a way to describe what we do and how and why we do it to those people and agencies that need to know, whose job it is to administer to the whole of campus life.

On a day-to-day basis, that theory should guide and reflect our everyday practices by describing those things we know work for students and by feeding our imaginations to discover new methods.

What I’m getting at here is a unified theory that is consistent, one that holds things together and guides us, one that describes a tutorial event, one that explains why we use the methods we use and why those methods work, a comprehensive theory that provides us with inventive and useful assessment devices that accurately describe what we do and that are relatively easy to present to faculty and administrators.

In the end, our theory should give us a way to openly and honestly display our very important contributions to the collective endeavors of the institution, principally the intellectual and personal growth of the students it exists to serve. Hopefully that theory would embrace the skeptical sensibilities of the outsider and retain the revolutionary spirit that nurtures creative thinking.

Finally, I would say a new theory must also account for the theory it replaces, taking preceding theory into the fold of the new and retaining what it has given us that is useful and sustaining. For like Terrance Riley, I do believe that we have to look at our past and our future by way of a developmental model.

Isn’t writing center work essentially “mind work”? Isn’t a tutorial event essentially an exercise in “critical inquiry”?

On Friday, I’ll play around with some possibilities for how a shift in perspectives might help us get unstuck.

Phil

Some Like It Hot

2005-03-29T05:43:00.000-08:00

I’ve had a bitterly cold winter this year. First, there was an electric power loss about a month ago, which only a kerosene heater made bearable. Second, I must teach a MWF morning literature class in dreaded Leatherman Science Facility 107, the most frigid classroom on campus. Third is the circulation in my legs—it ain’t what it used to be. Even on warm June days, at home, I wrap a blanket around my legs to keep them from turning blue. In short, unequivocally and emphatically, I am tired of being COLD.
So imagine my surprise yesterday evening when a little green alien from Neptune stopped by for a visit. It was below freezing outside and I hastened to invite him in from the porch. “Hey, man,” he said in a tremulous, counter-tenor squeal, his breath condensing into a visible stream of vapor as soon it touched the cold air; “it’s bloomin’ HOT here on earth.”

Just as hot and cold are not fixed essences but slipping and sliding terms relative to each other, writing centers are neither this nor that.
First the hot and cold. They are poles of the same binary construction, not separate essences. Other than absolute zero, I suppose, there is nothing that, in its “essential nature,” is definitively (and fixedly) cold or hot. To communicate the idea of cold, one must construct the idea of hot, and if you lack one term you lose the other. The linked concepts cold and hot are socially constructed, produced in a signification system that defines through binary differentiation.
Now on to neither this nor that. Is the writing center’s high mission this: to be contrarian and liberatory, enabling students to maintain subject positions vis-à-vis the regulating academy? Or is it that: to legitimate and transfer the culture’s values through social reproduction? The former view has received extraordinary emphasis during the last twenty-five years. The latter (a traditional view that colleges exist to help shape citizens) is reconsidered by Philip Gardner and me in our article “The Polyvalent Mission of the Writing Center” and found to have vital relevance to our deeply marginalized professional situation.
We conclude that these two apparently incompatible perspectives are linked valences in the binary of writing center work. Our mission is not foundationally pure but unavoidably mixed—neither this nor that, yet actually both. As my friend from Neptune illustrates, 30 degrees Fahrenheit can partake of both hotness and coldness.

That is good news.

Writing centers, by engaging clients in critical inquiry through their texts-in-progress, elicit “mind work.” Such work is compatible with the academy at large. We therefore belong, unavoidably, in the Academic Country Club. Indeed the work performed by writing center workers is a form of scholarship—it is both an enacting and eliciting of intellectual inquiry.
Polyvalently, therefore, the “mind work” that writing center workers induce always has liberatory potential, even if rooted in the authority of an institution. In conferring with our tutees, we unavoidably enforce the regulatory constrictions of an assignment, and thus are complicit with a professor’s projection of institutional authority. Yet, we ask questions. Good probative questions. These, we hope, stimulate the tutee’s perspective and thought. Small cognitive shifts (even very small ones) may happen, carrying the writer forward to a new cognitive stance. We might not see the final paper, but in our best moments we sense that the tutee has experienced a useful critical inquiry.

Phillip and I are now curious. What sorts of questions do you ask, either intentionally or in free play, that sometimes shift a tutee’s thought or affective disposition?

Bill here

Free Play: Bouncing the Ball in WC Sessions

2005-03-28T05:28:00.000-08:00

In the two pleasant years that Phillip Gardner and I spent collaborating on “The Polyvalent Mission of Writing Centers,” the best moments were sitting together just to bounce ideas back and forth with unguarded abandon. It was in much the same spirit of free play that I had known way back in grade-school days, when I liked to stand in the parking lot throwing a blue rubber ball at the gymnasium wall. I could hardly miss that huge brick wall, and the ball always came conveniently back—though at times with perversely odd bounces. Snagging it in shortstop style was fun and, as a boyhood Brooklyn Dodgers fan, I fancied myself the next scrappy little Pee Wee Reese.

In my chats with Phil, some of our ideas had lots of bounce, and that felt great. If others did not, it hardly mattered. The fun with Phil was in throwing the ball, in the spontaneity. If ideas came out only half-formed and tentative, or if they died, or if they morphed into curious new shapes, our egos hardly suffered. Gradually and subtly, our collaborative perspective shifted, grew, and matured. And to Phil I say, “Thanks for the ride, my friend.”

Of course, what I describe here also describes what can happen in writing center sessions—free-flow dialogue, unpredictable bounces, serendipity, and spontaneous discovery. Indeed I’ve never found a protocol, template, or fixed heuristic schema that survives more than a minute of writing center work. What little I can predict of a session might take this shape: (1) The client asks questions prompting the session’s agenda; (2) There is some probing, some getting onto the other’s wave-length, some settling into personas that will socially guide the interaction; and (3) Then—well, things start moving, trundling, stumbling, creaking, or zigzagging along in no way I could have foreseen. The sum total of what I know about writing center sessions is this: when the ball bounces—one goes for it.

Writing center theory in the last twenty-five years has strongly implied that writing instruction in the academy denies students their autonomy and freedom. Students are perceived as being written or inscribed upon by the very texts they write, these reflecting the institution’s hierarchical, top-down will to suppress individual agency. Through the written discourse required of them, students are victims of systems, ideologies, and other incursions into the unitary self. For such reasons, it therefore is argued, writing centers must take the contrarian way, helping to emancipate writers from the negative, regulatory forces of social reproduction.

Phillip and I believe that freedom and spontaneity occur in not just the writing center but the academy as well, happening any time that students are asked to think for themselves, or to perform critical inquiry. We do not want to sound Pollyannaish about this. We concede that all individuals express their will through socially mediated contexts, and that a student’s desire often is in tension with institutional forces. Yet, within our many constrictions there are freedoms. How do we know this? From how, in any good interchange of thought, even if the ball bounces within gravity’s constraints—it also happens with serendipity.

Because critical inquiry in the academy is a shared ideal, this value should link writing centers at the hip to their universities. For too long the writing center profession has been trying to construct an anti-curriculum or academic anti-space, to develop exile into an art form. Though some of our practices may differ from classroom teaching (one-to-one exchanges are inherently more dialogic than any other kind of teaching), the educative mission of writing centers and the general academy are vitally connected.

One way to see our shared educative mission better might be to analyze the writing center session as an event in critical inquiry. Is not the unpredictable train of questions popping up during a session a free, spontaneous give-and-take of thought? Are not the tutor and the tutee creatively adopting for that session personas and social roles? (True, these roles may have implicit, socially determined rules, but can’t such codes be chosen, improvised with, and discarded by the players?) And does not a tutee’s affective disposition sometimes shift unexpectedly with the impact of a positive writing center session? Looked at holistically, isn’t good, hard critical thinking in any context an unpredictable course of discovery?

Bill here

The Darker Side

2005-03-25T07:15:00.000-08:00

While the two examples of historical precedent for writing center work that I brought up in my previous two entries seem well worth emulating, not all early writing centers were so enlightened. One of the more frightening places was the Writing Clinic at Dartmouth College, which was created in 1939 and existed until 1960. Here's the 1939 college catalog description of the Writing Clinic, a description that wouldn't change for twenty years:

Remedial work for students whose writing in any College course is seriously deficient either in organization and sentence-structure or in such matters of usage as spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Any student in the College may apply to the Clinic of his own initiative or at the suggestion of any instructor. Individual conferences and exercises. No credit.

The Writing Clinic was created by Peter Cardoza, a fairly recent graduate of Dartmouth and an aspiring writer. Cardoza lasted only one year in his post, starting a trend that would continue throughout the life of the Writing Clinic. No director lasted more than three consecutive years on the job (many were English faculty members with half-time release to run the Clinic), and by 1958, the Clinic was run by a faculty member with a full-time appointment in another department and who thus could only devote one-sixth of his time to Clinic duties (essentially one afternoon a week).

The Dartmouth Writing Clinic was offered as an unfortunate, but necessary element in the messy business of ensuring high standards. As described in a 1954 report, “students prone through ignorance to write badly, illiterately, can have their ignorance dispelled by the Writing Clinic." How about that line for your next PR campaign!

By 1960, the Writing Clinic seemed to have outlived its usefulness. That year, Albert Kitzhaber was in the midst of a three-year, Carnegie Foundation-funded study of the Dartmouth Writing Program, and for Kitzhaber the Clinic represented an identity that would potentially tarnish the reputation of an elite college like Dartmouth. In his final report, Kitzhaber concluded that “it seemed clear that the great majority of students referred to the Clinic for poor writing were quite capable of remedying their own deficiencies without special help from the Clinic. All that was needed was to convince them that they had to.”

In the work I've done on writing center history, I often try to dispel contemporary notions that our historical past was a dark time of basement locales and drill-and-kill worksheets. Still, some of those places certainly did exist--just as they exist now. That, too, is our history.

Neal Lerner

A Writing Lab I Like

2005-03-24T07:07:00.000-08:00

Clint in a comment to one of my posts made reference to my upcoming research at the University of Minnesota. That project, partially funded by an IWCA grant, is to delve into the archives of the University of Minnesota General College Writing Laboratory, which was created in 1932. I know a fair amount about this place based on some of the research I've done so far, and I'm eager to know more. Here's the scoop:

The General College was started in 1932 as means to provide two years of college education for students who didn't make it in or dropped out of the four-year system. The purpose of the General College, according to its first dean, Malcolm MacLean, was

not to “eliminate the unfit,” not to “divide the sheep from the goats, the dumb from the bright, the college material from the non-college material,” but instead to direct each student, so far as we were able, to that curriculum, that job, that other training institution, wherein he would find the most use for his powers, whatever they might be, and the deepest personal satisfactions and social usefulness.

This populist mindset extended easily to what the founders of the General College had in mind for teaching students to write. Rather than create a required composition course, they created a Writing Laboratory, a voluntary class that provided a mix of one-to-one tutoring, peer feedback, and whole-class instruction. More important, the Writing Laboratory wasn't established as only for the least-prepared writers, the kind of house o' remediation that has haunted us all. Instead, the first director of the Writing Laboratory, Francis Appel, took exception to the idea of creating a remedial lab:

We have no “remedial” English because we feel that if there be such a thing, then from the common-sense point of view people from the most illiterate to industrial or university administrators and many authors would need some so-called “remedial” English.

Another of my favorite quotes from Francis Appel is his position on teaching grammar through the use of the ubiquitous workbook. Here's what he said:

At first, feeling that good writing depended largely upon a knowledge of grammar, we assigned a self-instructing, self-testing manual of grammar; but when it became apparent that there was but little demonstrable correlation between a knowledge of grammar and the ability to write, the manual was discarded.

And that was in 1932! Was that a cool place, or what?

Well, not all was perfect for the General College Writing Laboratory. It was usually staffed by just Appel and his assistant, and with as many as 35 students showing up at the lab at a time, it's hard to imagine lots of one-to-one interaction. Structurally, then, the Writing Laboratory was operating at cross purposes to its purpose and intent. Now that seems like a familiar story.

Still, I'm fascinated by the ideals of the General College Writing Laboratory. It's a place that could teach us all a great deal about how to align our work with a larger social purpose. As Malcolm MacLean described, the General College strove “to awaken in its students a social and civic consciousness, a sense of community responsibility, and a willingness to participate actively in the solution of common problems for the common good."

How's that for a noble purpose?

Neal Lerner

Picture This

2005-03-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

Writing center history truly intrigues me. I feel compelled to know where and how the first writing center was created. Part of this compulsion is simply my need to draw connections, to show that writing centers have long been part of conversations about teaching and learning, even if those were just muttered asides.

One of the first mentions of a true writing center--outside of class writing support--comes from a national survey completed by Warner Taylor of the University of Wisconsin in 1929. Near the end of his report, Taylor briefly lists a series of "innovations" in the teaching of writing, including the creation of "Writing Clinics" at six institutions (he unfortunately didn't identify those places). Taylor, however, noted that “in theory the project is excellent; in practice it may prove of little value through the lack of cooperation accorded by departments other than English.”

Hmm. That might sound familiar to many contemporary writing center directors (though the cooperation from English departments themselves isn't necessarily guaranteed at many places).

As I muck around in writing center history, I've begun to collect photographs that were printed with an occasional article. Here's one from a 1914 book on The Batavia System of Individual Instruction, a method of classroom organization that put in the classroom an extra teacher who would conference individually with students while the "regular" teacher conducted lectures and recitations.

You can see the conferencing teacher on the left, meeting with one student while the rest of her charges revise their essays. On the right, the regular classroom teacher drones on and on, pointer in hand. Somebody tell her to be quiet; I'm trying to write here!

These next two pictures come from a 1935 article by Frances Ross Hicks, “Laboratory-Recitations in English Composition,” which appeared in The Nation’s Schools, and described the English laboratory at Murray State Teachers College in Murray, KY.

Here's a student diligently working away in the English Laboratory. I'm concerned about the distinct lack of books on the shelf behind her.

The next image from that same article is certainly more vibrant, kind of a train station approach to tutoring writing. Is that guy in the back smoking a cigarette?

Finally, I'll jump ahead three decades to offer a picture from a 1952 NCTE publication.

It's not necessarily from a writing center, but the older tweedy professor with pen poised over the younger female student's paper seems particularly emblematic, if not problematic. And what's with that stain on the wall?

Have any pictures of writing conferencing back in the day? I'd love to see them.

Neal Lerner

Searching for Search

2005-03-22T08:13:00.000-08:00

On the Friday of the C’s, I escaped the 20-ring circus for a short while by making my way over on the BART train to UC Berkeley. My interest was in two boxes of archival materials held in the UC Berkeley Music Library: the papers of Preston W. Search.

Here’s a picture of Search from his career as a public speaker:

Search was the Superintendent of Schools in Pueblo, CO, Holyoke, MA, and Los Angeles, CA, from around 1888 to shortly past the turn of the 20th century, and, as far as I can tell, was one of the first proponents of the idea of classroom as laboratory. Here how Search described the Pueblo, CO, schools:

The work is now conducted largely by what may be called laboratory methods. . . . Every room is a true studio or workshop, in which the pupils work as individuals. The province of the teacher is not to line up the pupils and to consume time by entertainment, lecturing, and development of subjects; but to pass from desk to desk as the inspiring director and pupil’s assistant.

I’m intrigued by Search because of his writing-centered way of thinking about teaching and learning all the way back in the late 19th century. He was part of a general movement that criticized “mass instruction”—namely the same old lecture and recitation to numbed students—as completely bankrupt, if not harmful. Here’s another quote:

Man’s highest possibilities in achievement must demand individual opportunity. There must be elimination of much of class method, the passivity of the many while listening to the few, the marking of time, and the substitution of the teacher’s effort for the child’s. The greatest thing a child gets from his teacher is not subject matter, but contact with a great personality.

I think if Search were alive today he’d be directing a writing center or a writing program. Instead, few have heard of him, an all-too-familiar story in our educational system that looks ahead far more often than it looks back.

After the C's

2005-03-21T07:00:00.000-08:00

Well, friends of Writing Center Journal, another CCCC has come and gone, and it's my opportunity to add some context to those photos from Michele that fill her last entry. Let this year's 4C's be known as the "Year of the Circus." Yes, my friends, it was a veritable three-ring affair at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

Here's a shot of the arrangements:

Well, actually, I understate the scene. In reality, around 20 rings were operating simultaneously, each surrounded by tasteful curtains in white and purple alternating panels. The overall effect was akin to listening to someone shouting from the back of an airplane hanger while a 757 was revving its engines. Or perhaps like listening the public address announcements at one of Boston's underground MBTA stops. Whatever the analogy, after a day of such joy, I was sapped.

Things weren't made any better by the relative crowds who turned out to hear my talk and Michele's talk.

Here's Michele's audience:

Here's mine:

Hmm. And you would have thought that my title, "A Post-Hermeneutic Alternative to Hegemonic Practices, Colon, Taking the Shake out of Shakespeare," would have generated some excitement. Apparently not.

Well, friends, there's always next year.

Neal Lerner

X-Citing Times in Frisco

2005-03-18T09:19:00.000-08:00

View from the cable car running up Powell St.

Wednesday night, very late for those of us from other time zones. The games had not offically yet begin, but we had two comp celebrity citings at the pre-game show, sponsored by Maker's Mark.

Kirk Branch, Montana State University (Michele has cited Kirk)

Michael Spooner, Director, Utath State University Press
(Michele has cited him too)

The breakfast joint your correspondents wished we had gone to.

On Thursday, our man in San Fran, whose initials are Neal Lerner, made his way through the crowds in search of wireless coffee.

Waiting for the blog to upload . . .

We almost knocked Carol Mattingly over when we cited her on the streets. (Neal, only three points because you hugged Carol.)

And again, lost points because Neal and Michael Pemberton hugged.

Yes, Michele was nearly crushed in the hug from Melissa Iannetta. Michele and Melissa cancel each other out on points: they have cited each other.

With Deb Burns in the thick of the 4Cs floor show.

International Writing Centers Association board members, Frankie Condon and Paula Gillespie. They are not playing the game. They just like each other.

IWCA board member, Allison Holland taking pics while board member Clint Gardner mugs it up.

IWCA pres Jon Olson, signing autographs.

Meg Carroll and Carol Haviland showing off their shoes.

This correspondent claims: "There is nothing like a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, on tap, in California."

The annual writing center breakfast hosts, John Tinker and Wendy Goldberg, from Stanford.

Here, now, is the comp celebrity citings score update:

How many points do you have, Michele?

Well, the scoring system is getting very complicated. We failed to account for the variety of physical manifestations of greeting. For instance, how many points for air kisses as opposed to real hugs? How about teepee hugs? How about if you shake hands with someone whom you've cited but they don't know who you are? And, finally, how about escalator citings (we have, after all, accounted for elevators)?

But, Michele, how many points do you have?

6805. How about you, Neal?

I think I'm in the negative, Michele. Too many hugs and too many handshakes with people who had to stare long and hard at my nametag. I think I have three points.

The contest ends tomorrow at noon, so get your scores in, notarized by your hotel concierge. See you at the Rock and Roll Dance tonight, Neal.

Rock on, Michele.

The San Francisco Treat

2005-03-17T08:50:00.000-08:00

Here we are in Starbucks, your Friends of the Writing Center Journal 4Cs correspondents.

Neal, you aren't doing any wearin'of the green, lad. Well Michele, I have a green backpack.

Listen here about the real lasting contribution of the Irish.

So Neal, should we tell our readers about the new special feature? Sure, Michele.

Comp Celebrity Citings!

Whoa! There goes Harvey Kail just outside our window!

What are the rules again, Michele?

You can build a portfolio of points based on multiple genres of comp celebrity citings. If you have cited someone in your work and see them from a distance, that gets you five points. If you hug the person you cited it only gets you three points. Finding yourself in an elevator with someone you cited gets you 20 points--no eye contact, sweaty palms, and no verbal exchange gets you a bonus 50 points.

Ok, any points for you yet, Neal?

I hugged you Michele, but I have never cited you...
But I did see David Russell, said hello.

Good start. Five points.

I saw John Bean, Michele!

Wow! A full 20 points.

And I hugged Joan Mullin and I also have cited her.

Ok, Neal. That looks like about 28 points so far.

I don't have as many points. I did too much hugging with those I have cited. But I did see Chuck Schuster on the airplane. We did very minimal eye contact since we have met before and I have cited him.

That's okay Michele, take the full 20 points on that one. And let's split the points on citing Harvey Kail.

Thanks, Neal. You are a pal.

-------------------------------to be continued---------------------------

Yet knowing how way leads on to way

2005-03-16T08:02:00.000-08:00

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco.

Arrived Tuesday in California and did a little road too much traveled by thousands of SUVs to visit family. Driving back into San Fran today. When I travel, I tend to think about writers who lived where I am visiting. I like knowing the regional ties to writers dead or alive. I know we won’t make to Big Sur, but the California writer I thought of as we landed was Henry Miller.

“In Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, Miller treats his years living on the California coast as a sage of human liberation, expressed in a combination of anecdotes and ruminations.”

Written in 1957 (the year I was born).

Even though we flew to California from Kansas, most trips I take still feel like road trips. While living back east I took many road trips, a few deliberately to see as many of Robert Frost’s homes as possible. In my town now, we have the house that William S. Burroughs lived in for many years before he died in 1997.

One year before we moved to Lawrence Kansas, Burroughs died.

From the Web memorial for Burroughs:

Although Burroughs first struck my consciousness through Kerouac's writing, it was in 1980 that I first met him -- he was sitting on my couch smoking a thick joint, wearing suit and hat and holding cane -- I was startled to see this elderly man smoking pot, but he introduced himself and shook my hand as a friend...

Burroughs made Lawrence his home. I remember him walking at
dawn in the Mass. St. Dillon's grocery store parking lot
as I drove to work...him waving at me from a car downtown...
him reading from his books at the Kansas Union and at Beat literary
fests at the Lawrence Opera House.

S.Arthur Kelly

And speaking of road trips, I am amazed by the magnetic ribbons on all the cars. I heard someone on the radio joking that he was worried about getting pulled over, fined, or possibly arrested for not having a magnetic ribbon on his vehicle.

I went out and bought a ribbon that says GO JAYHAWKS

“Audrey” will sit for days at the 6,000 acre economy parking at the Kansas City airport. Home on the range.

Need more ribbons? Want to mix it up a bit, try new ribbon messages? Please don’t write and tell me I am not being patriotic. The ribbons themselves need support since they were once yellow and belonged to Tony Orlando and Dawn.

M.

The Streets of San Francisco

2005-03-14T22:40:00.000-08:00

Does anyone else remember that TV show?

While I am supposed to be doing the final fussing on my 4Cs presentation I am thinking about which flavor toothpaste I will pack and of course I am looking ahead, via the World Wide Web, for fun in San Francisco. The TechRhet listers have it going on: those high tech types were talking about "geeky fun" things to do in San Fran.

Since I am a fan of all things two-wheeled (see my scooter on another blog), I might have to check out the Segway, although they do make you wear a helmet.

"Training takes about 25 minutes. The Segway tour starts at the Wharf then moves out to Fort Mason and the marina. Stops for a warm coffee.You can take great pics from all along the bay. They had to pry me off the Segway at the end – it was too much fun. My kids had a blast, too. Our guide, Carla, was great. It was worth the tour price of $65. You get to play on a Segway for 3 hours and learn a lot about San Francisco."

Segway in the City by the Bay

Bracketology: Ranking, Evaluating, Liking

2005-03-14T15:10:00.000-08:00

The seeds are set; the bracket announced. Kansas at #3 seed. Those OK Cowboys at #2. Congrats to Melissa Iannetta at Oklahoma State. Rival writing centers? NCAA and IWCA rankings?

The Bully Bracelet: LiveStrong to make it to the final four

Yes, bracketology is on the minds of college basketball fans today. What does this have to to with teaching writing? Do we imagine we don't rank, evaluate, and like? Even with a complex formula for determining the seeds in the bracket, after all the mathematics it comes down to the subjective. If you listen this week to sports pundits, you will hear it: "You know, I like Vermont." "Yeah, I really like Gonzaga in this match up." "I can't believe she likes Wisconsin for the final dance."

Tamara Miles wrote a comment to this blog just this morning: "Will it come as a big surprise to anyone to hear that I HATE GRADING PAPERS? Looking at the papers, talking about them, offering help, teaching --- I like that part --- but the grading I can do without, not just because of the work but because of the emotional entanglement."

Look at and possibily like: Elbow, Peter. "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking," College English 55 (1993)

And "Should Teachers Comment on Drafts of Student Essays? or Making Time for Peer Review" by Michael Kischner

M.

Sincerely Yours

2005-03-11T13:43:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I mentioned that I am an advocate of “sincerity in teaching.” What I mean by that (not that anyone asked) is that I tend to acknowledge a political position during a class discussion or openly identify as a feminist, for example. I’ve also admitted to my classes that grading writing can be quite subjective. This last statement probably causes more trouble than any of the more overtly political stuff. Because once I'm out about the grading topic, I inevitably get evaluations that say things like, “Her grading is too subjective” or “She only wants students to write what she agrees with” (this is so far from the truth). I was having lunch with a colleague recently and complaining about this. I started to articulate an explanation I can give to students about how grading as an act is subjective, that teachers can often agree on a grade but will have different rationales for that same grade, and that the subjective nature of grading doesn’t mean I’m only approving positions I like. My thoughts were that if I am even more "sincere" and up front about my beliefs it might help keep these complaints at bay.

My friend interrupted me and said, “No, Julie, you’ve got it all wrong. They don’t want to hear that. You’re not going to like this, but what you need to do is invent a scheme of grading that looks objective, so they feel like there’s a science to what you’re doing. Then they’ll feel good about it. They crave authority and direction. They don’t want to think anything is ever subjective. Never say that!”

She’s right--I don't like it, but I think she's also right about the emotional message students crave. Well, if you read Cicero, you see that students have always craved clarity over ambiguity. But how do others handle this? Is there a groupthink at your school that leans toward authority? Does anyone work some place where students exhibit other groupthinks? What schemes, scientific or otherwise, have worked for your grading activities?

The week is almost done and I am tired. It has been a long one and I didn't get to nearly half the things I intended. I did, however, have a conversation about caskets today.

Peace,
jb

Blogchore

2005-03-10T09:16:00.000-08:00

Well, I am humbled by Rosie O'Donnell's blog, featured in the NY Times
today. I only read the most recent entry, but it was actually touching.
I love that she loves her shrink, and I really like the image of being
in the therapist's office while she takes calls from her kids, and
instead of being annoyed Rosie feels priveleged to watch her mothering
her child.

I have been mulling over this genre, this blog thing, and struggling
with its odd sense of audience. Who am I writing to? Only one official
comment, one additional one came directly to me, yet I'd guess at least
three other people are reading. But for once the question of who is
listening is not the one gnawing me. Instead, it's why am I writing. And
I confess I have treated these entries like a chore. Dare I say it: an
assignment. I was assigned. I like the idea of having a forum to talk
about a journal and having the authors pitch in. Journals are such dead
entities, often, and it's a wonderful gesture to make it more alive. I
like the idea a lot. But I'm not sure the blog genre can withstand
assignments. The writer has to really want to express, like Rosie does.
It's "just another totally artistic thing," she is quoted as saying.

I have been trying hard to stay "on topic" when what's really been on my
mind this week is my nanny. I continue to struggle with how to be in a
role I hate--an employer of someone in my home, a participant in an
employer/employee relationship that cannot gloss over America's (and my
own) classed condition. I am an employer of an immigrant resident who
wants more money after only two months, even though we both
acknowledge she is getting market rate. And we both know market rate
is unfair, inadequate. She wants to be taken care of by me, her
employer whom she wants to see as "family," from whom she wants an
emotional, financial, paternalistic caretaking. I want boundaries and a
businesslike relationship. This all surfaced when I handed her a written
document of our agreement--a crisis triggered by a literacy "event."
The very act of writing our relationship, which I saw as a stabilizing
relief, made her shiver with discomfort.

As a member of our profession committed to promoting literacy and social
justice, and as someone who writes about and teaches people like her
daughter, how do I deal with her requests, her desires? How do I treat
her equitably but not submit to manipulation? How do I treat her
equitably and hear what she has to say but not feed a class system I
abhor and roles that make me enormously uncomfortable? I've wandered far
afield in order to place this back in the center of my thoughts.

jb

Listening--Awkward? Glib? Other?

2005-03-08T19:00:00.000-08:00

In my tutor training course syllabus I write about how I anticipate that my assignments in which tutors listen to one another’s sessions will be awkward: “Over time we’ll get better at listening to listening and talking, and perhaps even learn to do it gracefully at times. But I’m pretty sure we should also all expect—and accept—some awkward moments.” A few years ago I wrote about how Tom Snyder (remember him?) epitomized the awkward listening rhetor. As talk show host—another professional listener—he would stumble over his delivery, make it very apparent that he was telling jokes to an empty studio, for example, not allowing his viewers to forget they were listening to spontaneous, live discourse. (See: http://www.sla.purdue.edu/people/engl/dblakesley/burke/bokser.html)

I confess I’m enamored with the awkward rhetor. And yet, Frank Abnegale makes himself strategically naïve in order to soon become seductively glib. What other stances can the listener take? What kind of listener is most appealing to most of our students/tutors? Have you labeled your listening today?

jb

Faking It

2005-03-07T10:25:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about listening for quite some time, and I’m always excited to find a new way to think about listening in rhetorical contexts. In the November 2004 College English, Julie Lindquist writes about the impostor Frank Abnegale from the book (and movie) Catch Me If You Can, and how he learned by listening. (I should confess right here that Julie Lindquist and I went to grad school together, though we didn’t know each other well.) Abnegale was so successful at faking people out because he was able to listen to the people whose groups he was trying to join and quickly learn how they spoke and what he needed to know. “In essence, he convinces others to teach him things by listening to them,” Lindquist says (199). His listening led to such persuasive rhetorical performances that people believed he was whoever he said he was (an airline pilot, a physician, a sociology professor, etc.). Lindquist writes about listening as a kind of performance, and suggests that we don’t need to be impostors like this guy, but that we might benefit by doing some faked listening, becoming “strategically naïve” in order to learn from students by more effectively hearing what they have to say.

I really like this idea of faking for some reason. Which is funny because I’ve been a big advocate of sincerity in teaching. But, to be perfectly honest, sometimes I find it so hard to listen sincerely to some of my students. And they always seem to know this. Maybe if I went into the exchange openly (to myself) knowing I was faking my interest, I’d more consciously try to hear what was being said instead of silently and huffily dismissing it. Perhaps, if I fake it, then I won’t have to mentally spar with it.

Sidebar note:
One of my favorite student quotes ever: An undergraduate tutor
summarized David Bartholomae's message in "Inventing the University" as "Fake it, and fake it good."

-Julie Bokser

Chamber of Laughter

2005-03-03T15:44:00.000-08:00

Does laughter fill the hallowed halls of your institution? It certainly doesn’t at mine. In fact, I suspect the evolutionary process amongst academics has all but eliminated the giggle gene. Here, faculty governance bodies soberly debate the minutia of, well, everything that doesn’t really matter. One department on our campus is so divided that some faculty members haven’t talked to others for thirty years. Literally haven’t spoken. That’s just pathologically humorless.

But I guess it’s not just academics who are too serious. Today ABC radio announced the increasing popularity of laughter clubs. Laughter clubs? For real? For real! In fact, if you Google the World Laughter Tour, you’ll see them in most states and several countries. In fact, the WLT even has a certification process for leaders (only $319—also available by e-learning). I guess I shouldn’t be startled. Given the studies showing laughter’s role in reducing stress and extending health benefits, it’s not surprising that guffawing goes the capitalist way of Jenny Craig, yoga, Pilates, and oxygen. Next stop—infomercials.

Needing a certified laughter leader to help us laugh—how have we ended up in such a predicament? My mom and dad always jollied me out of my sulks. They would taunt, “You’re going to crack!” until I caved in, grinning. While their laugh tactics were strictly amateur, I’m tempted to try something equally unschooled on my campus. What would happen if I sent flowers from the Capulets to the Montagues? What if I staged a TP shortage when the Cs were in the bathroom with the Ms? Or what if I wore my PJs to a meeting of higher admins?

Are faculty and students on your campus cloaked with the same somber fatigue that they are on mine? Learning is FUN, dang it. Where’s the noise, the whimsy, the laughter in our classrooms?

What do you do to nourish the imp in your colleagues and your students?

Gigglepuss Kjesrud

Enough Fun, Enough

2005-03-02T19:46:00.000-08:00

When I was little, my mom regularly used to say, “Young lady, you’ve had entirely too much fun for one day. Get busy on X (insert name of repellant chore here)!” As an adult, I’ve come to question her philosophy. Even though I know that unremitting joy ceases to be joy at all, I don’t want to think it’s possible to have too much fun, too much play, too much flow. And yet, there are times when Life just says, “Enough fun, enough.”

Today my beloved Izzie, the sweetest guinea pig ever, passed away.

As Izzie began to fail earlier this week, I was grieved by the shit life shovels. Absorbed in my own misery, I looked down the block to see my neighbor’s car in the driveway even though it was during her normal work hours. I realized that she wasn’t feeling well enough to work. Now that she’s in her third recurrence of cancer, each day she struggles with the ill effects of chemo and radiation. I can’t miss the significance of her opting to stay home; since her husband is in the advanced stages of multiple sclerosis, she’s the sole support for her family. There’s just plenty of misery to go around in this life.

As I’ve been publicly struggling with end of life decisions for my pet, I’ve acknowledged more deeply to myself that my students battle their own griefs. Seeing as little of theirs as they usually do of mine, I often forget that. So even though I know it's right and good for me to have high expectations of them, I want to be sure those expectations don't amount to extra shit. Though it’s still too fresh to say where this line of reflection will take me, I do know that I feel a new determination to make sure my expectations are as fair, ethical, and pleasurable as I can make them. If I can help it, I do not want to be the person through which Life says “enough fun.”

In what ways can we, in our writing centered lives, be the ones who say, “More! More fun!”?

Roberta, Izzie's Slave

Got Flow?

2005-03-01T22:14:00.000-08:00

“Would you just check the flow?” We probably hear this request more than any other in our writing center. Do writers really know what “flow” means? Do I? I’ve always translated it as transparent logical connections that lead readers along and make the writing hang together as if sown through with a thread. But these days I’m wondering if the psychological term “flow” shouldn’t also be part of my consideration.

Even though I read Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi’s book _Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience_ about three years ago, I hadn’t till recently connected the writing term with the psychological one. For those unfamiliar, Csikzentmihalyi defines “flow” as the unconscious state of mind in which an individual’s talents are in perfect balance with the demands of the task being performed. If the task is too complex? Frustration. Too easy? Boredom. Sports players are said to be “in the zone” when they achieve flow. Artists find themselves at peak creativity. Chess players achieve focused absorption. Rock climbers are one with the mountain. In flow, time is not fungible nor is it truly epochal. Flow suspends time in pure, effortless enjoyment.

Although humans can achieve flow in a limitless variety of tasks including learning and work, I’m aware that, as much as I enjoy my work, I’m often too stressed to flow. I’m much more likely to flow while I play (especially with a kite), but, even in play, I can easily become consumed with my own performance. And sadly, I seldom achieve flow when I write (hence my venture into play/writing). I doubt I’m unique - I’ll bet most writers who visit the writing center don’t flow either. But when I conference with writers who need flow (both kinds!), I’m content to interpret the word in textual terms. Why?

How do you cultivate flow - in yourself and your students?

Floberta Kjesrud

The Wind is Out There!

2005-02-28T22:16:00.000-08:00

Zippity do zest!
Sprightly flightly joy!
Wind flavor up my nose—
Kite spice grins my soul.

About 18 months ago, I took up stunt kiting. Me! I can’t sing and clap at the same time. My most athletic event is walking, and I often trip myself even doing that. While I can’t articulate all the reasons I’m attracted to kiting, I can say that I took it up as a deliberate move to do something for which success depends upon shutting down my mind. To good flying, analysis is anathema. I took up flying because it relies on intuition, muscle memory, and creativity. Oh, yeah—it’s also great fun!

I’m an over-thinker.

Roberta’s monologue: “Should I submit this blog post — naw, it could be better. Good gad, I’m including a poem. I can’t write poetry. Heck, I don’t even like poetry. Nobody else posts such drivel. They all sound intelligent. I should have forty references and observe something profound. How could I express my thoughts better? Speaking of what could have gone better, what about yesterday’s tutor seminar. What should I have done differently? I bet if I had Xed, Y would have turned out better. Maybe next time I should Z."

Windpixie’s monologue: “Hm, there’s a slight gust! The wind window has shifted! Should I try a double axel or practice my flic flacs? I want to do both! Oooh, look at that — what do they call that move? I’ve never done that before. Dang! I crashed. But cool! Now I can practice my edge launch! Ooops, crashed again. Sokay. I wanted to look at the bay anyway. Whoa, get a load of that sunset. Yipes, is it sunset already? Heehaw, this is fun!"

How do you cultivate kite spice in your writing and teaching?

“Windpixie” Kjesrud

Say Yes to Writi...erm... Play Groups!

2005-02-27T20:54:00.000-08:00

Goofmongers alert! Female academic of uncertain age seeks other adult kids who will whimsy at a moment’s notice. Slumguzzlers, gollygatherers, and weazelsniffers preferred. If interested, timber me shivers — I’ll find you!

I have always felt odd about declaring in writing centered company that I hate writing. But I do. And I especially hate my process. I’m so bound up in perfection that I just can’t commit to words on a page. Daniel Lochman, in the F/W 1986 issue of WCJ, sheds light on my problem. In his article exhorting writing centers to restore play to writers, Lochman distinguishes between games and play — games are rule governed; play has no rules. As children, we play — no rules, unhampered learning. But in a bluster of sophistication, adults abandon play and invent games. Obese with intricate “shoulds,” my writing mind becomes too fettered to start. So it is with many students in our writing centers.

Coincidentally (not!), in the weeks since my WCJ review of _Writing Groups_, some staff in our writing center joined forces in a group that reflects Lochman’s recommendation. Okay, we’re probably technically still a writing group, but we’ve abandoned their rules — we don’t necessarily write; we don’t necessarily share what we do write. Rather, we share process. We play.

In one session, I, The Boggle Queen (yes, I’m throwing down the gauntlet!), brought my game. After a three minute round of word-making, we used the collective word list as a springboard for composing gibberish. In another session, we each free-wrote for fifteen minutes about a burning question. Afterward, we each drew each other’s drafts to convey our Elbow-esque “movies of the mind.” Last week, we composed to music, switching often the musical genre — from Chopin to Dylan, country to show tunes. Always we reflect on how play frees our creative selves to explore, to laugh, to learn.

What do you play?

Roberta Kjesrud

Last night at around midnight,

2005-02-24T16:42:00.000-08:00

I raced up the bedroom stairs and flung myself into the bed and under the covers, where my husband was hovering in that zone between sleep and waking, trying to finish just one more page (you know that feeling) before calling it a night. He eyed me sideways with a smirk. “You know there’s nothing down there,” he said. He knows—I’m scared of our basement. Ah, the tension, the tug. Our home computer is down there and lots of lounge space—the nice stereo, the DVD player, a great sectional. But no matter what we do to it, it is still a basement. I love to stay up until all hours of the night. There’s something compelling about the deep, deep dark. And then, all of a sudden, unexplainably, the chill, the shiver—“Someone just walked over your grave,” my dad says to me, and I pop out crying—and I am up the stairs like a shot.

Growing up in Louisiana, I never knew from basements, you know? Hell, we bury people above ground. All I knew of basements, I learned from the movies. And when do you ever see basements in the movies? That’s right—when there are ghosts in them. Now, for the first time ever, I have a basement of my own, and I can’t say it’s a terribly comforting thought.

I will admit that I come by these fears quite honestly. My mother, for her part, played musical beds with her five siblings for the better part of a decade, all because she was too scared to sleep alone once the nuns told her she had a guardian angel. Sounds like your own personal ghost, doesn’t it? I can relate.

I bring this up because, as I read Susan’s note about her professor committing suicide and as I linked to the NPR piece Tamara suggested, I also clicked on a link about an attorney’s old “haunt” being renovated to house the writing center at ASU. (As it turns out, it’s really going to house the creative writing program’s events, but you take my point.) It set me to thinking about the ghosts that inhabit our own writing centers. The student I wrote about—the one who committed suicide--is certainly one of our writing center’s spectral presences. To return to teaching after his death, I had to commit on some level (though I couldn’t have quite articulated it then) to a pedagogy of hope at least parallel to, if not wholly in place of, a pedagogy of critique. I came to see the culture of critique as more than just an academic exercise, to see it instead as a pedagogical practice in need of an exorcism.

Ghosts are culturally complicated figures. They guard and protect. They strike fear in our hearts and yet they bring us together in ritual celebration. This is the appeal of the extracurriculum. Let it permeate the boundaries of the discipline as ghosts transgress the here and beyond. Inside-outside binaries be damned.

Beth Boquet

An Ode to Tamara

2005-02-23T20:26:00.000-08:00

Having successfully completed all 19 items on my response-avoidance list (and #20, posted by our anonymous blogger), I turned today to my student essays, refreshed and invigorated.

I opened them randomly (#2 on the list of 19) and read the first line of essay #1: "If you really wanna please me, you've only got to cheese me."

As Devin writes his Ode to Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, ostensibly for an Anonymous reader but really with one reader in mind—that is, me or She-Who-Must-Grade—so too I write An Ode to Tamara, a blog ostensibly for my Anonymous readers but really with one reader in mind—that is, Tamara or apeppermintygirl. (See profile.)

Yes, that’s right, I dedicate today's blog to Tamara, who is well in the running for the WCJ Blogger of the Year award. (I know, I know, we hadn't technically announced that award yet; we're currently in talks with Development about endowment money.) And so, today, I resolve to respond to all the questions Tamara has posed over the past couple of weeks that have not yet been answered. (Several questions did receive responses, so I am omitting those.)

I do this in recognition that Tamara, dear reader, you are my audience. So I write to you. And to whoever else may be reading, of course—but not directly, since I don't technically know you're there, Anonymous, or what your questions or observations might be.

So, play theory, from a post way back in the days of Kevin Dvorak. I'm assuming Roberta is referring to some manifestations of activity theory and, while I have some ideas about activity theory, I won't venture them here, since I know other readers, who shall remain Anonymous but whose initials (as Pat Hartwell used to say) are Neal Lerner, could answer this question better than I.

Next, the observation that writing centers might be "parentheses in the academic sentence." What a cool way to think about it, especially if you're a parenthetical lover (and by that I mean a person who loves parentheses and not the other kind of parenthetical lover; for having been both kinds, I have to say I prefer the former and don't have much good to say about the latter.) But, Tamara, I want to spend some time with your concern that Gardner and Ramsey's extracurricular learning places certain kinds of student populations in parentheses—a potentially problematic placement, as you point out. Specifically I’m going to wonder why we value the curricular so much and why we would presume the extracurricular represents some sort of demotion. Anne Ruggles Gere published a terrific piece in CCC a few years ago entitled “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: An Extracurriculum for Composition” (or something very close to that). (Pretend to insert hyperlink here.) In it, she briefly traces the history of women’s literacy groups and, in so doing, she reclaims this term “extracurriculum,” wresting it from the patriarchal grip that until recently left the term synonymous with fraternities and secret societies and the like. She basically says, what happens when the extracurriculum exits Harvard Square and hits the streets? Or, even more to her point, when it winds up around the kitchen table? It’s pretty powerful to think about. Claiming an extracurriculum for writing centers may potentially be a way to think again about the central/marginal tension that has taken up so much discursive energy in writing centers.

Finally, to the questions posed to my own President’s Day post: censorship and troubling student writing. A little truth-telling here: I worry. . .

. . .about figuring out how to talk with my students about Nabokov’s Lolita. Half-assed solution: We read Gatsby together as a class. Lolita becomes one of several options for novels they can read on their own and discuss in small groups as part of their final anthology projects.

. . .about a freshman student I taught years and years and years ago, who committed suicide shortly after the end of our semester together and whose writing assignments were gathered as evidence/explanation. Of what, I still don’t know. Half-assed solution: I hand over every scrap of paper he ever turned in to me and leave teaching altogether, albeit briefly and for more reasons than just that one, but that is a big one. I miss teaching and return a couple of years later. (Anybody else read Nancy Welch’s article in the new CCC yet?)

. . .about a recent student of mine, a guy who sounds very similar to the one you describe in your post, to whom I never quite had the presence of mind to say, Speak. I will listen, even when we don’t agree. And I am sorry you are so angry/sad/frightened. Half-assed solution: Still pending.

Beth Boquet

19 Things to Do When You Should Be Grading Student Essays:

2005-02-22T17:18:00.000-08:00

1. Read the Blog
2. Check on the tutors. (They're fine.)
3. Open your favorite student's essay and read it, but don't write any comments yet.
4. Close the essay and remind yourself that you're always sorry when you read your favorite student's essay first.
5. Try to write a response to Tamara's post on censorship and responding to student writing, which was really interesting and posed an important question.
6. Check email.
7. Check regular mail.
8. Go to www.cremaster.net
9. Answer the phone. Every time it rings.
10. Put the finishing touches on that article that's due by February 28th and send it off. Yay!
11. Check on the tutors again. (Still fine.)
12. Call maintenance about the really annoying buzz coming from the heating vent in your ceiling.
13. Check email. Respond to several that are decidedly not time-sensitive.
14. Check out www.christojeanneclaude.net
15. Consult with several people who have been to see The Gates recently to determine whether it makes sense to try to go on Sunday, the last day of the exhibit, when there will surely be hoards of people and it will no doubt be ridiculously cold.
16. Meet with the tutors about the upcoming NEWCA presentation.
17. Check email. Yes, again.
18. Finish up the five letters of recommendation that are sitting, in various stages of completion, in your inbox.
19. Go home. It's late. You're hungry, you're tired, the ceiling buzz has left you with a headache and it really wouldn't be fair to try to grade any essays in this state of mind.

Beth Boquet

Reading Lolita in Tehran on President's Day

2005-02-21T12:53:00.000-08:00

In her Wednesday, February 16 entry, Anne writes of attending the Muslim wedding of one of her work-study students and coming to understand the way time unfolds at that event.

Today we have a snow day. Technically it was a holiday anyway (President’s Day), so I had already planned to stay home. But the snow changes the pace even more. I padded downstairs later than usual this morning, my copy of Reading Lolita in Tehran tucked under my arm. We begin discussing it in my Intro to Lit course next week. I have been frustrated at times by how slowly the book proceeds. Nafisi lingers for paragraph upon paragraph on small points about The Great Gatsby and quotes extended passages by Henry James. I lose patience. But I love the moments Nafisi brings readers into her living room to meet Mahshid, Manna, Mitra, Azin and Nassrin. I follow along as she prepares the tea, sets out the creampuffs, and peels the oranges in chapter after chapter.

There’s a sense in which, as I read Reading Lolita, I begin to understand that some of what I appreciate about the book is its recognition of the value of epochal time, particularly in learning to be with others whose politics, backgrounds, and beliefs challenge our own. It is in this sense that Neal and I saw Anne’s article and Julie Bokser’s article (on pedagogies of belonging) speaking to each other, and we were intrigued.

Nafisi seems less successful in capitalizing on epochal time in her classrooms, at least as they are portrayed in the book. I find myself looking for points of entry as I consider how to access epochal time with my own students in our discussions of this book. I grinned as I flipped to the last few pages of the Random House edition, which contain “A Reader’s Guide” with “Questions for Discussion.” Take question 2, for example: “Yassi adores playing with words, particularly with Nabokov’s fanciful linguistic creation upsilamba (18). What does the word upsilambamean to you?”

What must Nafisi think when she sees her memoir--about the power of literature to transform and transgress, to subvert and affirm, to comfort and to displace—stripped down to these twelve essential Random House questions. What kind of statement is this about the power of imagination that is at the heart of her own experiences? And what does it say about our own readiness to listen—really listen—to each other?

Beth Boquet

2005-02-17T07:40:00.000-08:00

Oh, no wonder we see so many last minute writers!

“We're better at allotting money than time”

Lee Bowman’s article summarizes “Resource Slack and Propensity to Discount Delayed Investments of Time Versus Money,” by Gal Zauberman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and John G. Lynch, Jr., Duke University, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (February 2005).

Bowman notes: “The researchers probed people's expectations with a series of seven questionnaire-style experiments involving groups of graduate and undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina and Duke. They found that respondents generally had more expectation of time ‘slack’ to complete a task down the road than an expectation of money. Participants believed that both time and money would be more available ‘in a month’ than ‘today,’ but believed this more strongly for time than money.”

And, Bowman also adds: “In other words, people optimistically see their time pressures working out better tomorrow or next week than they have today, no matter what the demands that might intrude on their time later on. Even with a constant stream of evidence that overly optimistic schedules won't work, ‘it is difficult to learn from feedback that time will not be more abundant in the future,’ Zauberman and Lynch write.”

What do these findings mean for us, the people most likely to complain about last minute student writers, the people who tell student writers (over and over again) that they should come to the writing center earlier in their writing process and not the day before the paper is due?

The final paragraph before the “Conclusion” of the article raises a point writing center directors should think about (especially those of us who take on everything we’re asked to do). Zauberman and Lynch note “We may curse ourselves in the long run for saying yes to many small professional services that provide momentary approval from those who ask us to undertake some task but provide no particular satisfaction in long-term retrospect. This is a fascinating issue for future research on self-control” (36).

The article is available on-line here. See “Articles in the News.”

2005-02-16T06:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I spent an hour with my friend and colleague Sarah Michaels. Watching video of her newest research -- elementary school students in the South Bronx studying the Junior Great Books -- what struck me was how squirmy and full of movement the students were and how slowly the shared inquiry and discussion moved. The two classroom teachers featured had so much patience. They listened so carefully and so thoughtfully, ignored all the wiggling, and waited to speak until they could say something that would encourage the students to talk to one another in meaningful ways or could push the class’s thinking about the text forward.

I am a rusher, a New Yorker. A whole part of what was first my Cs talk and then my essay considered that, but much was later cut out. Originally, I told stories about IWCA in Savannah, where Jon Olson and I talked about what it is like for people who like to move fast and talk fast to live with people who move slowly and talk slowly. I wrote about the time three of the female grad tutors and I went to a work-study’s wedding (the only-women party of the Muslim wedding), and after drinking fruit juice and waiting hours for anything at all to happen, Rita finally said, “Oh, I understand, this is like weddings in Uganda. Everything will be late. Hours late. Like Africa time.” Suddenly we understood why no one seemed bothered by the wait. The wait was an integral part of the party. If you expected the party to pay off quickly, and you were hungry, you were disappointed. If you knew the party had not yet begun hours after the time the invitation said to be there, you were filled with the very best kind of anticipation.

I’ve been reading In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed. In a way, it’s not a very satisfying book. It’s too easy, too easy to accept that slow food, slow interactions with doctors, slower work and slow sex are answers to our fast lives. And yet yesterday, as I watched the fourth graders sit patiently and listen deeply to their peers struggle through the text, I came up with a new interpretation of why students crave more time in the writing center. Do we underestimate how few chances students have for sustained conversation, how seldom they have the opportunity to think their way through their thoughts without the pressure of all the other raised hands in the classroom? How seldom they get to say to a classmate, "I don't know what you mean, can you explain?"

Sarah's edited research video had captions pasted between sections. I noticed that again and again, those captions said “And this discussion goes on for twenty-five more minutes,” as if she herself couldn’t believe how much those fourth graders had to say. My friend Heather Roberts recently sent me to Thoreau’s “Walking.” I need to think about the way he resists the commodification of time, she says, the way he embraces the luxury of wandering.

2005-02-15T04:50:00.000-08:00

I forget that one of the best side effects of publishing an essay (knowing it's really finished is, of course, the best side effect of all) is hearing from those who read it -- on this blog, through WCenter and in email. Thanks all. This morning I woke to an email from a colleague. She had attached a paper written by a student who brings "Tick-Tock, Next" together with Nancy Atwell's "Making Time," a connection I wouldn't have thought of and am thrilled to see. The student writer quotes Atwell, who writes "I’ve made some discoveries too. I have learned that by giving students more time to learn reading, I’ve given myself more time to teach reading."

Yesterday, on WCenter, Karl Fornes posted the blog where he and his staff write. I loved looking at that blog which is more like a discussion or a journal with occaisonal pleas for help to nobody in particular (but obviously to everyone else in the writing center). The tutors describe great writing center rhythms from right within them -- being the only tutor on with a number of waiting students or being in the midst of a conference that will likely be long. I'm intrigued most of all by its Seinfeld-esque not much is happening but everything is happening feel. What would we all write about, I wonder, if we took the time to think about those periods when nothing at all seems to happen in the writing center? What's happening, I might ask in that open-ended qualitative way, over these first weeks of the writing center when almost no names fill the appointments? Something, but what?

Anne

Here are two "time" journals I've learned about:

Kronoscope
Time and Society

Mondays

2005-02-14T07:44:00.000-08:00

Mondays are often busy; today is no exception. This morning, the high school literacy coaches. Today we meet at VOKE (the Worcester Vocational High School). Always good because the restaurant/hotel program has a restaurant where we eat lunch. This afternoon, class -- three hours (in a room that I've noticed has a wall clock with no hands). It's tough teaching a three hour class. In fact, I never have before this semester, but my co-teacher and I decided to teach this writing class, Writing Out Loud, as a studio course. We "teach" for a bit at the beginning of class, and then students read their work out loud. Takes a lot of time (and energy) to listen. We never hear as many aloud as we'd like to.

On Monday mornings I'm always left thinking about unresolved questions from the week before. Here's one of this morning's. Last week, I was in a meeting where someone from information technology services talked about "just-in-time information," the information you get, I assume, right when you need it. Researching it, I got as far as "just-in-time learning"and "just-in-time" teaching, which seem intriguing. But last Monday morning, when I got to my office, I found a note one of the grad writing consultants had left for me. It was a handscrawled thesis sentence, and on a yellow Post-It note stuck to it was another note. It said "Anne, thought you might enjoy this. Out on Saturday night and drunk and talking about my thesis, a friend asked what my thesis for my thesis was, and I thought, why not try writing it? A drunken burst of inspiration? I thought we might use this in the writing center meeting to talk about process."

Was that "just-in-time learning"? "Just-in-time teaching" on his friend's part? I'm still trying to think it through. Anne

Happy Valentines Day

2005-02-14T07:42:00.000-08:00

The past, my past and my present. This is an Esther Howland valentine. Esther Howland went to my alma mater, Mount Holyoke, when it was Mount Holyoke Seminary (class of '47, 1847). But only recently did I learn that she was originally from Worcester, MA where I now teach. After the seminary, she returned home to Worcester, where her family owned a stationary goods business. The story says that when a family business associate sent a valentine from abroad, Esther decided she, too, could make and sell valentines. Enterprising women's college graduate! Anne