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!”
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