Around the Texts of Writing Center Work

An Inquiry-Based Approach to Tutor Education

R. Mark Hall

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781607325819
• eBook ISBN: 9781607325826
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Around the Texts of Writing Center Work reveals the conceptual frameworks found in and created by ordinary writing center documents. The values and beliefs underlying course syllabi, policy statements, website copy and comments, assessment plans, promotional flyers, and annual reports critically inform writing center practices, including the vital undertaking of tutor education.

In each chapter, author R. Mark Hall focuses on a particular document. He examines its origins, its use by writing center instructors and tutors, and its engagement with enduring disciplinary challenges in the field of composition, such as tutoring and program assessment. He then analyzes each document in the contexts of the conceptual framework at the heart of its creation and everyday application: activity theory, communities of practice, discourse analysis, reflective practice, and inquiry-based learning.

Around the Texts of Writing Center Work approaches the analysis of writing center documents with an inquiry stance—a call for curiosity and skepticism toward existing and proposed conceptual frameworks—in the hope that the theoretically conscious evaluation and revision of commonplace documents will lead to greater efficacy and more abundant research by writing center administrators and students.

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Introduction

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The Writing Center Journal’s feature “Theory in/to Practice” (T/P) offers writing center specialists a new venue for innovative work. Like the more traditional academic essays that comprise the bulk of the journal’s contents, these works demonstrate an engagement with recent research and contemporary scholarly debates. Unlike traditional scholarly essays, however, T/P showcases those primary documents that manifest the scholarship of our everyday practices—those syllabi, annual reports, and other writing center documents that translate our disciplinary expertise for an external audience.

—“Call for Submissions: Theory in/to Practice” (2010, Writing Center Journal)

Writing centers, by their very nature, experience high rates of turnover and, thus, are continually peopled by newcomers, both tutors and administrators. With so many novices cycling through, and relatively few long-time specialists with deep knowledge of the field, how does a writing center develop and sustain a robust community of learners? Through an analysis of an assemblage of everyday writing center documents and the activities that circulate around them, this book argues for a variety of practices that work to build and maintain a writing center learning community, firmly grounded in research and theory. Inspired by the Writing Center Journal’s feature “Theory in/to Practice,” this book, addressed to both writing center administrators and tutors, demonstrates engagement with contemporary research and theory by showcasing primary documents that manifest the scholarship of everyday practices. Documents include a list of twenty valued practices for tutoring writing, excerpts from transcripts of tutoring consultations, samples of session notes detailing the work of tutoring, posts and comments from a writing center blog, and an assignment description for a tutor-led inquiry project. The purpose is to illustrate the ways everyday documents both enact and forward writing center scholarship. Each chapter includes background on a specific document and the exigencies that led to its creation and surrounding activities. The centerpiece of each chapter is the document itself. Then each chapter offers an analysis of the document, exploring its innovations, showing how it engages current scholarship, as well as how it enhances practices and extends, complicates, and offers new approaches to longstanding disciplinary challenges. These challenges include various aspects of writing center work, from tutoring to program assessment, all converging around an overarching concern—the tie that binds these documents together—tutor education. In addition to their preoccupation with tutor education, these focal documents and the chapters that analyze them are linked by two more key concerns: (1) a set of conceptual frameworks, which adhere to advance related principles for writing center work, and (2) an inquiry-stance toward writing center work.

Conceptual Frameworks

With this text-based approach to writing center scholarship, I argue for grounding the everyday documents we create, whether policy statements, websites, course syllabi, assessment plans, promotional flyers, annual reports, or the many other genres we engage to do writing center work, in conscious conceptual frameworks. With each chapter, my goal is to show the ways focal documents reflect and generate underlying assumptions about writing, teaching, and learning. Examination of everyday documents, I argue, illuminates the theories that underpin and motivate writing centers. As Nancy Grimm (2009) puts it, we need “a willingness to question foundational assumptions that typically guide writing center practice.” Informed by George Lakoff, Grimm invites writing centers to examine the “unconscious cognitive models” we use to understand our work. This orientation is not mere navel-gazing. As Grimm points out, examining conceptual underpinnings invites change. “Significant change in any workplace occurs,” she writes, “when unconscious conceptual models are brought to the surface and replaced with conscious ones” (16). This book takes up Grimm’s invitation by applying a variety of theoretical lenses to everyday writing center documents to unearth the foundational principles that animate their creation and the activities that take place around them.

These theoretical lenses include the following: communities of practice, activity theory, discourse analysis, reflective practice, and inquiry-based learning. While these lenses are not new to writing center scholarship, bringing them together in this way sheds light on the ways these conceptual frameworks work as complimentary or adjacent theories to underpin tutor education. All the frameworks share fundamental understandings of teaching, learning, and writing as inherently social activities. All understand language use in terms of action. All are dynamic. In this way, the theories that animate each chapter do not operate together in absolute consistency, but they adhere to construct a consistent set of principles for writing center work, and tutor education in particular. To illustrate their usefulness for analyzing writing center documents, I’ve highlighted one as a primary analytical framework for each chapter. At the same time, I occasionally draw connections to one or more of the other theoretical perspectives. While one lens affords a certain view of a particular document, I encourage readers to explore ways that the other perspectives might also be applied in order to illuminate different aspects of a document and the activities that circulate around it.

Popular books for tutor training, such as Donald McAndrew and Thomas Reigstad’s (2001) Tutoring Writing: A Practical Guide for Conferences, Ben Rafoth’s (2005)A Tutor’s Guide: Helping Writers One to One, Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner’s (2007) The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring, and Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood’s (2011)The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors, tend to be practical rather than theoretical. Even texts that do address theory explicitly, such as Robert Barnett and Jacob Blumer’s (2007)The Longman Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice, do so narrowly, through the field of rhetoric and composition. With few exceptions, notably Nancy Grimm’s (1999) Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times, Elizabeth Boquet’s (2002) Noise from the Writing Center, Harry Denny’s (2010) Facing the Center, and Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s (2013) Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, writing center work remains under-theorized. For readers who ask, “Why this book now?” One answer is that there is a continued need in our field to theorize writing center work. That John Nordloff’s Writing Center Journal Article, “Vygotsky, Scaffolding, and the Role of Theory in Writing Center Work,” won the 2015 International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) Outstanding Article Award reflects this urgency. Nordlof (2014) addresses our field’s “resistance to systematic or theoretical thought” this way:

While our theories often lack empirical evidence to support them, they also do not function for us as theories should for a discipline. That is to say, the typical role of theory within a discipline is to provide a broad explanation of the processes that underlie the surface phenomenon that can be observed. In other words, theories provide the “why” to help us understand the “what.” (47–48; emphasis in original)

That’s my goal: to get at a broad explanation of the processes that underlie the surface phenomenon of the documents showcased in each chapter and the activities that surround them.

In my experience, however, many writing center professionals and peer tutors alike tend to resist “theory.” They see it as abstract, remote, and removed from the practical business of tutoring. But I’m not interested in theorizing for theory’s sake. Rather, as Nordlof (2014) suggests, theory is essential to understanding the “why” behind the “what” of our activities. Identifying the same aversion to theory in the wider field of composition, James Zebroski (1994) puts it this way in Thinking Through Theory: Vygotskian Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing:

Theory—the word too often conjures up notions of the impractical, the superfluous, even the sophistic. Too frequently, compositionists have opposed theory to practice and have opted for practice, for “what works.” But what do we mean when we assert that an activity “works”? How do we gauge apparent practicality? How do we evaluate the success or failure of a writing activity or our own teaching? The moment we begin to ask such questions, to reflect on our reflections, we are involved in theory. (15)

We can’t sidestep theory. The “why” is always already present, whether we’re conscious of it or not. My argument, to echo Grimm (1999), is to bring our “whys” to the surface for critical examination. To draw from Zebroski (1994) again:

Theory is not the opposite of practice; theory is not even a supplement to practice. Theory is practice, a practice of a particular kind, and practice is always theoretical. The question then is not whether we have a theory . . . that is, a view, or better, a vision of ourselves and our activity, but whether we are going to become conscious of our theory. (15)

When I use the word theory, then, throughout this book, I refer simultaneously to its multiple meanings and functions, which are entangled: first, as Nordlof (2014) puts it, theory is explanatory. Second, theory is a heuristic, a tool of discovery and invention. Third, theory includes the principles that guide practice. Fourth, theory is the unacknowledged or implicit values, assumptions, and beliefs that underlie everyday routines. This fourth meaning is closest to Grimm’s (1999) alternative term, “conceptual frameworks,” which I use interchangeably with theory. I prefer Grimm’s phrase because it forwards the image of underlying structural supports, like the beams that shore up a building. In this sense, conceptual frameworks are the foundational assumptions that determine how we act. Buried shallow or deep, again, they are always already there, whether we choose to investigate them or not. The challenge is to excavate our frameworks for careful examination to determine exactly how they organize and structure what we do. Conceptual frameworks also suggest a fifth function of theory, this time as a “frame” or “lens” through which to look. This metaphor draws our attention to both the affordances and the constraints of any framing device: none can encompass the entire picture. Rather, they all narrow and focus our attention to a particular view, allowing us to see some things while ignoring others. Conceptual frameworks, then, are tools for seeing and analyzing writing center work. Lauren Fitzgerald and Melissa Ianetta, in The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research, make a persuasive case for theorizing writing center work in their chapter “Looking Through Lenses: Theoretically Based Inquiry” (Fitzgerald and Ianetta 2015). Here they point out the ways that theorizing can provoke new questions and novel ways of re-seeing writing center work. For these authors, theorizing is not an end in itself. Rather, “we’re concerned with the verb theorizing,” they write, “the actions associated with using theory, rather than with the noun theory, which would entail focusing on and explaining previously existing theoretical constructs.” In this way, Fitzgerald and Ianetta argue, “interpreting and applying theoretical texts can be considered a research method” (212). This is the stance I take toward theorizing in this book, as a research method for unearthing the values, assumptions, and beliefs that inhabit and animate everyday writing center documents.

It’s their everydayness, I think, that makes the mundane documents of writing center work so inviting for theoretical inquiry. Their ordinariness and ubiquity make them easy to overlook. At the same time, the theories that underpin the creation of writing center documents are also easily neglected. In Science in Action, Bruno Latour (1987) shows how a hypothesis or speculation either becomes a fact or remains merely a curiosity. He calls fact “ready-made” s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Valued Practices for Building a Writing Center Culture of Observation
• 3 An Activity Theory Analysis of Transcripts of Tutoring
• 4 Commonplace Rhetorical Moves of Session Notes
• 5 Blogging as a Tool for Dialogic Reflection
• 6 Problems of Practice: Developing an Inquiry Stance toward Writing Center Work
• 7 Conclusions
• References
• About the Author
• Index