Although in writing about __________, many people have used a tutor’s loss as an example (?), no research has been done that specifically pays attention to why losses happen, what happens, and how the tutor gets out of them.  Elizabeth Boquet comes very close to talking about this in her article Intellectual Tug-of-War: Snapshots of Life in the Center where she looks at moments when tutors struggle.  She shows that sometimes, there is no recovery and tutors are left with an internal battle of perception, wondering if they seem like bad tutors because they did not resolve a conflict.  Another loss revolving around perception happens when a tutor must negotiate between her own goals and responsibilities, the student’s needs, a professor’s agenda, and to which expectation she wants to cater.  While a tutor can choose one role to play and thus recover from the loss in the session, she may not be personally satisfied and therefore still at an internal loss with herself.

draft: lit review, methods, data analysis (blog 19)

Parts I'm still missing:

One more lit review

2 or 3 more case study samples

I'm still trying to decide which sessions would be best.

And, um, if you can't tell... this is already really long.  I'm at 7 pages.  Seven.  And this probably isn't even half of the whole thing.  I'm an undergrad, so my requirement is 8 pages.  I think my last 2 lit reviews are too long... Maybe after looking at everybody else's I'll see how I can trim mine down.

Also, I'm wondering a little how much extra commentary goes in the data analysis section.  In my notes from that class, I see that I can include some supporting discussion and small observations.  I'm just eager to see what ya'll have done so I can know if I'm on the right track with that.

Literature Review

            Brooke Ann Smith’s The Socratic method: The answer for the new tutor was the first writing center discourse I ever read.  Smith, at the time of publication, was an English instructor and writing center tutor at Utah State University.  Her article describes one of her first sessions in which a girl brings in a fairly good paper, and Smith is at a loss as to what to say – after she read the paper aloud, the writer “looked… expectantly” at Smith, hoping she would “reveal the problems with her paper and correct them” (9).  She wanted to “move beyond the role of proofreader to that of facilitator, helping students… become fundamentally better writers,” but the writer clearly walked in with different expectations.

            At this point, Smith began to panic a little because of the high quality of the paper, and she reflects on her internal battle with perception, “Not only was my reputation as a tutor on the line… but my own self image as an ‘English person’” (15).  She settles on asking a leading question about what the writer’s thesis is and how she supports it.  The writer discusses these points, then says of one paragraph, “…it is kind of a tangent, now that you point it out,” though Smith said nothing at all about that (15).  For the rest of the session, Smith asked broad questions “prompting the observant writer to find opportunities for improvement on her own,” which the writer did (15).  So Smith concludes that “often a student knows what can be changed in her paper to make it stronger” (15).

When Elizabeth Boquet wrote Intellectual Tug-of-War: Snapshots of Life in the Center, she was a graduate student in a rhetoric and linguistics program, and she describes working in the writing center as her first “real” job.  In her essay, she uses personal “snapshots” to examine “moments when tutors are simply at a loss,” and to look at “those moments when tutors feel their own progress toward becoming the ‘ideal’ writing center tutor is jeopardized. 

            In her first mini snapshot, she describes a tiring day where one student ends up storming out of the center because she could not find her file on the computer, and then when an ESL writer comes in to get his grammar checked, Boquet fights the urge to be cynical.  In just this small picture, Boquet describes a situation where there is no recovery to the loss when the writer’s paper disappeared, and she touches on the internal conflict tutors often deal with in terms of perception, wondering if she seems like a bad tutor. 

            Boquet begins the bulk of her article by discussing the position of the tutor.  First of all, she claims, “Tutors are often objectified and essentialized in literature devoted to them” because most publications are about and for peer tutors, but rarely by peer tutors (118).  She also points out that “a peer is not a professional; a tutor is not a teacher,” so tutors have a confusing position of authority which affects writing sessions (118).  Boquet mentions Brooks’ article on minimalist tutoring and calls it “downright militant,” and while she “wouldn’t wrestle authority away from the writers themselves, [she] also [knows] that simply reflecting student concerns back to the student does not always foster the most productive tutorial environment” (118-19).  She also mentions she does not want to be perceived as having all the right answers (even if she does) because in an ideal session, she “would facilitate a student’s self-discover, [but she] also [knows] that real tutorial cases are not always as simple as that” (119).  This less than ideal situation can put a tutor at a loss where she battles the internal conflict of perception versus reality.

            In one session Boquet writes about, she had to negotiate between her goals and responsibilities as a tutor, the needs of a student, and that student’s professor’s agenda.  The tutee, Michael, brought in a work sheet packet with cryptic symbols and the professor’s assignment to write two sentences a night prescribed by a code that would ultimately yield a paper.  Michael asked for help deciphering the symbols, and Boquet “was astounded, speechless” (120).  Michael asked if all English classes were as troubling as his.  Boquet disagreed, to say the least, with the professor’s methods, and she writes, “I was caught between my knowledge as a professional, my responsibilities to students, and my precarious position as a graduate assistant in an ancillary university service” (121).  After some internal debating about all three arguments, Boquet decided to follow her center’s faculty-tutor-student protocol by keeping quiet and helping the student the best she could given the confining but required task.

            At the time, Boquet justified to herself that the “ideal” tutor is neutral and should help writers “operate within the constraints of his rhetorical context,” but later she was not so convinced by her justification (121).  She felt like she sided with the faculty because she did not “speak to the situation in any meaningful way,” yet she did not want to get involved in the politics of challenging a faculty member (121).  And ultimately she admits, “I don’t know how I would have done it differently…, [but] I never felt more acutely that I had fallen short of my own ‘ideal’” (121).  So while she did resolve her loss of how to respond to the student, she herself remains at a point of conflict.

Though her article Cultural Conflicts in the Writing Center: Expectations and Assumptions of ESL Students does no deal specifically with a tutor’s loss, Muriel Harris does point out key areas where tutors and writers have differing expectations of the session which can, certainly in my experience, cause a loss.  First of all, she notes that tutors are trained to expect or create a “collaborative, interactive, individualized setting” and to avoid taking control of the session in lieu of leading writers to internalize and adopt ways to become better writers (209). 

            To see what ESL writers expect from a session, Harris gave eighty-five international students a lengthy questionnaire.  In contrast to what tutors are trained to do, one ESL writers wrote, “Tutor works with you to fix your mistakes or solve your problems” (209).  Most other writers had the same perception that tutors work on specific errors rather than abstract writing skills and processes and tutors “deliver information” while controlling the session, “finding problems and offering solutions” (210).  Writers, in turn, say their role is to listen, so typical tutor questions like “How would you fix this paragraph” may be met with silence even if the writer has an answer; Harris explains, “For ESL students, finding their own answers rather than being told what the answer is or what they must learn can be a new process” (211).

            Harris briefly describes what happens in a writing session where both parties have these diverging preconceptions as a “cross-cultural…clash… [because] the two parties are acting out assumptions and expectations from very different worlds” (212).  This clash is where I see the loss, though the tutor may not recognize it. 

            Harris also discusses some ways a coach can deal with the discomfort created in the loss, which are possible ways to approach a recovery.  She mentions how some coaches can relate to being in a foreign country with limited linguistic knowledge, and she says, “It is our responsibility to be sensitive to their discomfort and to help them restore their sense of self-worth as they go through this process” (214).  In the questionnaire, the students themselves most often said they most appreciated American friendliness.  On the other hand, they impatience when they do not know answers annoys ESL writers.  And again, a coach’s lack of awareness of cultural differences may lead to other habits that annoy the writers.  In the advice to tutors section of the questionnaire, one writer wrote, “Try to understand how hard they have to work to study in the foreign country and language” (217).  The writers also said that if they respect writers, tutors will “be patient, polite, and helpful… [and] will make an effort to understand the student” (218).

Methods

            For my research, I conducted sessions in Kean University’s tutoring facilities.  I did nothing special to manipulate my sessions; I conducted them as I normally would.  I had some previous experience working part-time one semester a year ago at a writing center geared specifically for developmental writers at Charleston Southern University.  But I still consider myself a fairly novice tutor. 

            The sessions were an hour long each.  Four of my seven sessions were with the same student, and the remaining three were with ESL students with varying levels of proficiency.  Out of my seven sessions, I documented 10 cases where I was at a loss.  After each session, I used a series of prompts to reconstruct the loss.  The prompts were a chronological outline of what happened, noting any preceding signals to the loss, the tutor’s and writer’s verbal and nonverbal actions during the loss, the details of the recovery, and both party’s responses to the resolution.

            In my these notes, I wrote down nonverbal cues signaling emotions or thoughts, and I tried to be as specific as I could about the situation and what was said during the loss.

Data Analysis

Jen is an ESL writer who has been studying English for three semesters.  Her native language is Spanish.  In our session, she was not hesitant to talk, but she spoke quietly and with a heavy accent.  She brought in a graded midterm paper that was a response to a reading about obesity.  She wanted to correct the errors her professor marked, which were mainly sentence-level errors with some coherency problems from sentence to sentence as well as from paragraph to paragraph.

            I read the first paragraph of her paper and was immediately confused about what she was trying to convey.  I could tell she was thinking about how different sexes perceive obesity, but I could not understand any main idea beyond that.  So pointing to the page, I said, “I don’t understand what you mean here.  Can you explain it?”  Then she reread to me some of the phrases in the same paragraph without using any different words.  Back and forth we had an exchange where I would repeat back to her in my words what I understood her to be saying, and she would sigh, say, “No,” and re-explain herself, pointing to and repeating words from that paragraph.  Her sighs and firm pointing told me she was getting tired, and I was sending signals that I was also tired because my voice became more monotone.

            Finally she says, “Yes” to what I say about her point, but then I find myself at a second loss; I did not know how to begin helping her revise this paragraph.  I already concluded that open-ended questions would not work out well with her, so I sat holding her paper, squinting, saying, “Hmm” and “Umm,” and pausing before I finally decided to be directive.  I said, “Okay.  Well, this should be…,” and I proceeded to specifically walk her through the paper, telling her what to change. 

            After we revised the first paragraph, I sat back in my chair, took a big breath, and told her, “You’re doing a good job.  I know this is really confusing and sometimes I don’t even know the answers and you’re doing a good job.”  She smiled and laughed and thanked me.  I also told her, “I respect you a lot for learning another language because I’ve learned a little bit of other languages – even Spanish.”  She replied, “Oh, like, Hola?”  I laughed and said, “Oh, no!  I know a little more, um, like, [pause] Donde esta la puerta por la biblioteca?”  Later when we would come to a problem that I did not know how to answer, I would say, “Wow.  Okay this is tough.  I’m not sure.”  Then she laughed and said, “And you speak English!”

And it finally sinks in...

I just came across this article called Cultural Conflicts in the Writing Center: Expectations and Assumptions of ESL Students by Muriel Harris, and it is blowing my mind.  I know we've discussed this some, and we may have even read it, but it's just now really sinking in with me that ESL writers may not respond to open-ended and leading questions for cultural reasons!  A lot of times, I get frustrated, and wonder if the writer just doesn't... think on a higher level.  But no, Laura.  Oh no, no, no.  First of all, their perceptions of what a tutor does are flat out the opposite of what we're taught to do, and it's contra-cultural for them to be informal like we expect.  (Okay, yes, these are sweeping generalizations... but Harris gave a mass amount of ESL students a lengthy questionnaire, and these are the generalizations she's making from that.)
So, really, the problem has just been opposing perceptions of what the session should be like!  Aha!  And this is sort of the afterthought resolution to some of my losses... though it's not doing those writers any good.  But now I think I'll have more understanding in the future.


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And now the article right after that is calling my name, but I'll have to save it for later because I don't think I really need it for my project (and if I read everything that looked interesting when doing research.. well.. I may have completed very few projects).  But anyway, Sharon A. Myers' Reassessing The "Proofreading Trap": ESL Tutoring and Writing Instruction, and its abstract (or summary.. or something) says that helping students correct "sentence-level" errors (as opposed to focusing on those HOCs) is good and should be done because it's a huge part of learning the language.  And I always felt kinda.. guilty for just working on these kinds of errors.

research plan 2 (blog 18)

Statement of purpose: I hope to show mostly first-hand examples of a tutor being at a loss of what to do in a writing session.


Detailed statement of research question: What happens before, during and after the tutor's loss?  What are the signs she is at a loss, how does she handle it, and what are the writer's reactions?  


Information to gather: Other published examples/analysis of losses, observations of verbal and nonverbal cues of tutor and writer surrounding the loss, and, when possible, reactions/thoughts of tutor after session.


Preliminary list of sources: 
The Socratic Method: The Answer for the New Tutor by Brooke Ann Smith
"Whispers of Coming and Going": Lessons from Fannie by Anne Dipardo 
Intellectual Tug-of-War: Snapshots of Life in the Center by Elizabeth H. Boquet
* I still need to find more sources relating to my observations


Plan for gathering information: I will search through various writing center publications (books and journals), consult communication publications for interpretations of nonverbal cues, take notes on sessions I conduct, and take notes on sessions I observe.

draft o'research plan (blog 17)

Statement of purpose: I hope to show first- and second-hand examples of a tutor being at a loss of what to do in a writing session.


Detailed statement of research question: What happens before, during and after the tutor's loss?  What are the signs she is at a loss, how does she handle it, and what are the writer's reactions?  


Information to gather: Other published examples/analysis of losses, observations of verbal and nonverbal cues of tutor and writer surrounding the loss, and, when possible, reactions/thoughts of tutor after session.


Preliminary list of sources: 
The Socratic Method: The Answer for the New Tutor by Brooke Ann Smith
"Whispers of Coming and Going": Lessons from Fannie by Anne Dipardo 
Intellectual Tug-of-War: Snapshots of Life in the Center by Elizabeth H. Boquet


Plan for gathering information: I will search through various writing center publications (books and journals), consult communication publications for interpretations of nonverbal cues, take notes on sessions I conduct, and take notes on sessions I observe.

And you speak English! (blog 16)

For data collecting, specifics are key - they are the only true evidence because a summary much more interpretive, which isn't fact.  And research demands fact.


Notes from today when I was at a loss...


(This session is with an ESL student with somewhat low proficiency, and we are looking at a paper she wrote on obesity.  I get hung up with a paragraph that has several long, run-on, discombobulated sentences - I'm having a hard time figuring out which subject goes with which verb.)
Me: I don't understand what you mean here (pointing on page)


Writer: -explains, reading many of the same phrases from the paragraph that I don't understand-


We go back and forth... I'm repeating what I think she is saying, several times she says, "No.. [explains again]."  We shift between looking at each other and looking at/pointing to things on paper.  Finally I say what I think she is trying to say, and she agrees that I understand her correctly.  


Me: (looks back at paper, picks paper up, squints... trying to think of how to now help her write this idea more clearly).  Ummm.  (I'm trying to think how to help her see the problems, but it's so hard for me to identify what's going on that I don't know how to talk her through it.)  -pauses- Hmm.  -pauses-  Okay.  Well, this should be... (took directive approach, pretty specifically telling her what to do)


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I'm still not sure if this is specific enough - I can't remember exactly what we said as far as the content of the paper.  I think it's hard to remember because we really weren't communicating well.
When I was "umm"ing and stuff, I was thinking, "I have no idea what to do.  I can't just tell her she's on her own, but I really can't figure this out."  So I kind of came to the decision that I had to do something... I had to just plow through it and make some improvements, even if it wasn't going to be perfect.  That's when I became directive, justifying that's what she needed because of the situation.
I felt like I had been kind of negative during all that, so I tried to follow it up with some encouragement...


Me:  Okay, you're doing a good job.  I know this is really confusing, and even I don't know the right answers sometimes.  How long have you been studying English?
Writer: 3 semesters.
Me: Okay wow.  Yeah, you're doing a great job.  I really respect anyone who tries to learn English.. or any other language really.  I speak a little of some other languages, and I know it's tough.  But yeah, I definitely respect you for this.
Writer: (laughs) Thank you.


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Throughout the rest of the session I tried to keep up with the reinforcements -"Yeah, that's right!"  "Exactly."  "Oh, okay, that's a much better example than mine!"  I even said, "English is tricky.  I've been speaking it my whole life, and I still have problems, so don't worry too much."  And when I would say, "Oh man.  I'm not really sure...," she would laugh a little and say, "And you speak English!"
I wanted to let myself be a little more vulnerable than maybe I usually am because the opening was so rough -- I wanted to help her understand that it's hard to be perfect with English, and she shouldn't feel bad because even native speakers get it wrong.

discussion, reflections, notes.. (blog 15)

The class discussion was pretty interesting and helpful.  It helped me begin thinking about the different classes of losses, which I had not thought of before.  Two kinds were agenda-related:
- For the Dr. Chandler + Daria session, I wrote down "needs of situation vs. expectation."  I'm trying to remember what I meant by that... Daria didn't have her paper/couldn't revise it (Dr. Chandler's expectations weren't fulfilled), but Dr. Chandler still needed to have a tutoring session (needs of situation)... Okay.


- Then, in reference to a session I had with an ESL student, I wrote down "what I feel student wants vs. what I feel I 'should' do as a tutor."  I was having this internal conflict because the writer's paper was about three pages and was completely marked over in red, and the writer wanted to fix it all.  I knew that looking at just one kind of issue at a time is how I'm *supposed* to do it, but I also was getting the sense that the writer really wanted everything to be fixed, and I didn't think there was time to go through the essay multiple times.  (Plus, she already rewrote -or maybe recopied- the essay, so most of the mistakes were taken care of... and I think she did understand them... there's just a lot to remember when you're writing in another language.)  So I ended up going through the paper with her, looking at errors as we found them.


- And I think I wrote this third class down when we were discussing someone else's session... "how I want to be perceived vs. what I actually know."  I think that characterizes what it's like when there's a problem (or question or whatever) that the tutor doesn't know the answer to, but doesn't want the writer to lose confidence in her because isn't the tutor supposed to know all this stuff?!




So maybe the next step in my notetaking is to start classifying the losses.  That could really help organize everything.


Some other things from the class discussion~
The common thread in all losses is conflict, and I think it might most frequently be internal conflict in the tutor (and I have internal conflict all the time, so I guess this topic is quite fitting!).  Also, as Dr. Chandler put it, it's a "point of inaction."  And perhaps an element of the conflict is struggling to find action.


Time to do some more researching...

purpose and question and then messy thoughts (blog 14)

Purpose: to explore what happens, on both the student and tutor sides, when the tutor is at a loss and to compare my observations with what other research says.


Research Question: During a loss, what happens before, during, and after it; how do the writer and coach react; and how does all this compare with research?




What I will observe in sessions... I need to almost predict with a loss will happen since I'm aiming to note the "rising action," if you will.  I originally thought that would be fairly easy.. you know, I would be able to see the session's path was heading down one the tutor slowly feels uneasy about.  But from my experiences so far, I kind of just... hit this sudden wall of "oh man... what do I do now?!"  So at least for most of my sessions, that rising action may be very minimal - it may solely consist of one sentence the student utters.  But if that's what happens, then that's what happens!  
Okay so I also need to pay attention to body language because that may be my biggest indicator as to what both parties are feeling (unless I'm one of the parties cause then, well, I generally know how I'm feeling).
And then I guess I also need to try to determine what the tutor decides to do.. kind of interpret his actions and match them up with the closest method or action that the research talks about.. or doesn't talk about because, hey, we've got a unique bunch of tutors who may do something wild and crazy!  or the tutor may do something not wild and crazy but still something research doesn't mention.
what else what else what else... there's the evaluation forms that can give me student feedback... still thinkin about that one.  umm.
okay maybe the type of writing or assignment or problem will be significant.  because looking back on my sessions so far.. I think I've started out in each one of them not knowing exactly how to approach it.  I wonder if I do that every time and that's just my method of getting started.
well let me think back to last year when I was tutoring... I guess a lot of times I start off running through a lot of options in my head.. but sometimes I think I pretty much know where to go.  I may end up deciding that that initial period of figuring out what to do is a different kind of loss.. and I may not.

readings (blog 13)

Tentative Thesis:

What happens when the tutor is at a loss (of what to do)?

What I've been reading:

I have an article called "The Socratic method: The answer for the new tutor" by Brooke Ann Smith.  I don't, however, know where this article was published - the director at a WC in South Carolina used this article in our tutor training.  Smith retells a situation in which she didn't know what to do with a session because the writer's paper was "technically" correct, though the writer clearly wanted some instruction on how to improve it.  So Smith questioned her, and the writer pretty much came up with what to do all on her own.

This is kind of a... very pretty picture of a session.  This essay can be used to compare what I see happen in a similar situation (where a tutor's response to a loss is to ask questions).  

And this is all assuming I can figure out where this article was published, of course.

A second article I'm considering is "Intellectual Tug-of-War: Snapshots of Life in the Center" by Elizabeth H. Boquet.  Boquets article is, in my opinion, more realistic than a lot of other articles.  Here, she write about WC situations that aren't ideal; when tutors do something "wrong," and when they don't know what to do.  Two parts of her essay are unrelated to my topic (they're about tutor-tutor relationships), so I won't use those.  She addresses a tutor's internal struggle - doing what fits the moment/doing what is right.  She also presents situations where tutors have to deal with differing opinions - those of herself, the professor, and the writer.  She uses her own real life examples of these losses, which I can again use to compare with mine.