Re/Writing the Center
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Re/Writing the Center

Approaches to Supporting Graduate Students in the Writing Center

Susan Lawrence, Terry Myers Zawacki

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Re/Writing the Center

Approaches to Supporting Graduate Students in the Writing Center

Susan Lawrence, Terry Myers Zawacki

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Re/Writing the Center illuminates how core writing center pedagogies and institutional arrangements are complicated by the need to create intentional, targeted support for advanced graduate writers. Most writing center tutors are undergraduates, whose lack of familiarity with the genres, preparatory knowledge, and research processes integral to graduate-level writing can leave them underprepared to assist graduate students. Complicating the issue is that many of the graduate students who take advantage of writing center support are international students.The essays in this volume show how to navigate the divide between traditional writing center theory and practices, developed to support undergraduate writers, and the growing demand for writing centers to meet the needs of advanced graduate writers. Contributors address core assumptions of writing center pedagogy, such as the concept of peers and peer tutoring, the emphasis on one-to-one tutorials, the positioning of tutors as generalists rather than specialists, and even the notion of the writing center as the primary location or center of the tutoring process. Re/Writing the Center offers an imaginative perspective on the benefits writing centers can offer to graduate students and on the new possibilities for inquiry and practice graduate students can inspire in the writing center. Contributors: Laura Brady, Michelle Cox, Thomas Deans, Paula Gillespie?, Mary Glavan, Marilyn Gray?, James Holsinger?, Elena Kallestinova, Tika Lamsal?, Patrick S. Lawrence, Elizabeth Lenaghan, Michael A. Pemberton?, Sherry Wynn Perdue?, Doug Phillips, Juliann Reineke?, Adam Robinson?, Steve Simpson, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran?, Ashly BenderSmith, Sarah Summers?, Molly Tetreault?, Joan Turner, Bronwyn T. Williams, Joanna Wolfe

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Year
2019
ISBN
9781607327516

Part I

Revising Our Core Assumptions

1

Rethinking the WAC/Writing Center/Graduate Student Connection

Michael A. Pemberton
DOI: 10.7330/9781607327516.c001
Questions about whether tutoring sessions are enhanced when tutors and students share disciplinary expertise have long troubled writing center praxis and have usually been described as the core of the “generalist/specialist” debate. Some scholars, particularly those in centers staffed by undergraduate peer tutors who are not routinely matched with students by major or discipline, have made a strong case for the value of non-disciplinary, generalist readers. On the one hand, they say, disciplinary “outsiders” can sometimes provide insights into texts that “insiders” might overlook; on the other hand, a tutor’s lack of disciplinary expertise can also help to balance the power dynamics in a conference, investing authority in student writers as “content experts” and thereby enhancing the possibilities for true collaboration in tutoring sessions (Bruffee 1984; Hubbuch 1988; Healy 1993; Adler-Kassner and Wardle 2015). Other scholars, though, have argued that familiarity with field-specific genres and disciplinary discourse can be extremely useful in tutorial conferences, especially when writing centers are housed in institutions with strong WAC/WID programs that promote the use of writing as a tool for disciplinary enculturation (Kiedaisch and Dinitz 1993; Shamoon and Burns 1995; Dinitz and Harrington 2014).
In my 1995 Writing Center Journal article, “Rethinking the WAC/Writing Center Connection,” I argued that writing centers need not trouble themselves overmuch about hiring undergraduate tutors with expertise in a broad spectrum of majors to work with students from WAC/WID courses. Aside from the practical problems of staffing and scheduling qualified tutors this approach would require, some interesting research (Geisler 19941) suggested that most assignments in most departments, even within nascent WAC programs, did not ask undergraduate students to write or think like experts, so writing centers could continue their pre-disciplinary “generic” conferencing pedagogies relatively guilt-free. What my article failed to consider, however, were the needs and interests of graduate students—students who make frequent use of writing centers; who are working on long-term, lengthy projects like theses and dissertations; who need assistance and advice that neither pre-disciplinary undergraduates nor generic tutorial strategies can adequately provide; who generally write well but are not yet fluent in specialized discourses; and whose lives, communities, contexts, and learning styles may require flexible tutoring opportunities that go well beyond the standard single-visit, thirty- to sixty-minute conference that randomly pairs them with an undergraduate tutor.
Before I move on, it is worth noting the difficulty of making clear-cut distinctions between undergraduate and graduate tutors, particularly with regard to disciplinary expertise. Undergraduate tutors may range from those completing general education requirements to those enrolled in upper-division courses in their majors while graduate students may display a similar range with some doing coursework and others working independently on lengthy long-term projects such as theses or dissertations. In our research, we often elide these important distinctions, discussing them as if they were homogeneous groups except when describing research on department-embedded centers, discipline-embedded tutors and writing fellows, or “major-matching” scheduling.
In this chapter, I will examine the relationship between writing centers and graduate student writing somewhat more deeply than was possible in 1995, incorporating recent research into graduate student writing processes, expectations, networks of disciplinary enculturation, liminality, and rhetorical demands, and then discussing some of the ways writing centers have used this research to better meet graduate student needs. I will begin with a brief overview of writing center scholarship about disciplinarity and address the specific question of whether our strategies for working with undergraduates are equally efficacious with graduate students and, if they are not, what should be done instead. Lastly, I discuss a number of initiatives at writing centers around the country that are striving to meet advanced graduate students’ distinct writing needs.

Deconstructing Generic/Generalist Tutoring

In retrospect, overlooking graduate student needs in a 1995 article about WAC/Writing Center connections is unsurprising, as nearly all postsecondary WAC initiatives at the time were focused on changes to the undergraduate curriculum, the need for ongoing faculty development, and strategies for negotiating faculty resistance. In two of the most significant WAC collections in this early period, Strengthening Programs for Writing across the Curriculum (McLeod, 1988) and Writing across the Curriculum: A Guide to Developing Programs (McLeod and Soven, 1992) graduate students and graduate programs are not referred to at all, and nine years later, in WAC for the New Millennium (McLeod et al., 2001), contributors’ chapters continue to focus on undergraduate initiatives exclusively
A few years after my 1995 WAC/Writing Center article saw print, I published a short chapter in the Writing Center Resource Guide on “Working with Graduate Students in the Writing Center” (1998), in which I extended my earlier argument about undergraduate peer tutors, generalist tutoring, and WAC. I asserted that graduate students could still benefit from a “naïve” reading of their texts because the difference in academic positions (undergraduate tutor/graduate student writer) and complementary skill sets (writing expert/content expert) could balance power relationships and make the conferencing experience more collaborative and equitable. I also argued that questions asked by a disciplinary outsider could often help writers discover new connections and encourage them to reflect on their audience and rhetorical stance more carefully. Admittedly, these arguments were as much an expression of pragmatism as pedagogy because it was far easier to rationalize the value of the field’s current practices than to grapple with the thorny issue of disciplinarity in graduate student writing and the level of tutor expertise necessary to engage with complex, context- and content-specific rhetorical needs. Talinn Phillips (2016) has recently critiqued my position in that chapter, saying that while my advice “isn’t false . . . it does belie important differences in the role of writing for graduates versus undergraduates as well as differences in the complexity of their respective writing tasks. It also masks the limitations that even excellent and well-trained undergraduate tutors face in working with graduate writers” (160).
To be fair (to myself), there was relatively little research into the specifics of graduate student writing and writing processes available in the early to mid-1990s, and even less about the possible contributions of undergraduate tutors to that process (Farrell 1994). A few early studies of graduate students’ writing and learning practices (Berkenkotter, Huckin, and Ackerman 1988, 1991; Torrance, Thomas, and Robinson 1992) identified some significant differences between undergraduate and graduate students’ understanding of disciplinary discourse conventions, but the general consensus among writing center scholars in the mid-1990s was that undergraduate student tutors could work productively with graduate students despite their lack of disciplinary expertise.
In large measure, this position was an extension of the argument about whether or not tutors needed to be familiar with the “subject area” of the paper they were working on. Susan Hubbuch (1988) and Bonnie Devet et al. (1995), for example, both maintained that tutors frequently did their “best work” when they responded to discipline-specific writing as non-experts. And though Hubbuch and Devet et al. were careful to acknowledge that there were some content-related aspects of writing that tutors could not help with, they felt that tutors could still address rhetorical matters such as organization, development, use of evidence, and tone.2 This is not to say that there weren’t dissenting voices in this debate, however. In “Look Back and Say, ‘So What?’: The Limitations of the Generalist Tutor,” Jean Kiedaisch and Sue Dinitz argued that tutorial strategies which addressed only generic rhetorical issues operated under the assumption that all academic papers shared a set of common features (Kiedaisch and Dinitz 1993). Given the variety of genres and discipline-specific conventions that inflected and sometimes violated these generic structures, they claimed that it was possible that non-expert tutors could provide ineffective or inaccurate advice.
Kiedaisch and Dinitz’s critique of generic tutorial strategies seems to be even more pertinent with regard to graduate students who are generally expected to write like disciplinary professionals. And while it might be true that graduate student writers, even those working on lengthy research projects that demand fluency with disciplinary genres and conventions, could profit from a “naïve” reading of their texts and generic tutoring strategies employed by an undergraduate writing tutor, it also seems likely that the benefits they derive would be of limited value, inadequate for the rhetorical and discourse needs that accompany their specialized texts.

Graduate Student Writing and Disciplinary Enculturation

So what are the rhetorical and discourse needs that might distinguish graduate student writers from undergraduates and that could also be used to reframe writing center pedagogy to address them? Perhaps one way to begin answering that question is to consider the role writing plays as a part of graduate study—not just in terms of the texts that must be produced, but in terms of their larger educational and professional purpose. One of the distinct differences between graduate student writing and undergraduate writing is the degree to which texts are used both as tools for disciplinary enculturation and as the bases for assessing writers’ qualifications to become members of a professional discourse community.
Early studies of graduate student writers highlighted the complex nature of such professional enculturation, which spanned not only the development and production of written texts, but the rich network of relationships, conversations, histories, and negotiations with peers and experts that shape graduate students’ professional identities. Among these relationships are understandings of foundational knowledge structures (Berkenkotter, Huckin, Ackerman 1991);3 appropriate discourse conventions and methodologies (Parry 1998); issues and conflicts that appear in disciplinary “microsocieties” (Prior 1991);4 and new, sometimes conflicting, audiences for their work, such as departments and advisors (Lundell and Beach 2003; Starke-Meyerring 2011). It is not hard to imagine that writing centers in their traditional configurations—typically staffed by undergraduate peer tutors and typically offering thirty- to sixty-minute conferences on an ad hoc rather than ongoing basis—would be ill-suited for the kinds of writing assistance that graduate students require at the thesis- or dissertation-writing stage of their academic careers. This is not to say that traditional writing centers are superfluous to graduate education. Feedback from many different readers and audiences can be valuable to writers as they compose and revise drafts. But these readers may not be well positioned to provide the most beneficial feedback to pre-professional writers whose primary goal is to become active, participating members of a disciplinary discourse community.

Graduate Studies as a Liminal, Yet Inadequately Supported, Experience

Unlike undergraduate students, whose programs of study are for the most part introductory to the field, graduate students occupy a transitional, liminal space between disciplinary novice and disciplinary professional. Though a portion of their studies will incorporate seminars and short papers, the crux of their work as graduate students will hinge on a single written product—the thesis or dissertation, which, along with the composing contexts in which it is written, is likely to be unfamiliar and daunting to most graduate students. In addition to program- and institution-based demands around length, form, and format, the scholarly goals embodied by theses and dissertations are also quite different from those required in typical undergraduate research papers. The writer is expected (a) to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the chosen topic, largely through an extensive literature review that synthesizes research from a wide range of relevant sources, and (b) to make an original contribution to the field that is reflective of, but clearly distinct from, the published work that has come before. Understanding these goals and achieving them is at the core of most graduate programs of study, and the process of conducting independent research and writing about that research for a disciplinary audience is, largely, what helps graduate students begin to develop their own sense of professional identity.
And yet, because that identity is still developing, they often find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to act like experts without the requisite writing knowledge or resources that would enable them to do so with confidence. Some graduate students, in fact, “may not [have been] exposed to the scholarly writing process until the dissertation” (39), according to Rosemary Caffarella and Bruce Barnett, which, in many cases, may lead to their feeling a profound sense of anxiety about their ability to provide helpful writing feedback as disciplinary experts to their peers (Caffarella and Barnett 2000, 43), a finding that has clear implications for writing centers and the presumed benefits of generic peer tutoring strategies employed by generalist tutors. If graduate students are anxious and uncertain about their ability to critique written work by students in their own programs, even when they are collectively engaged in advanced study in a shared disciplinary field, it is not hard to see why they would be skeptical about the quality and utility of advice offered by generalist tutors, especially when those tutors are undergraduates. Recent research confirms, in fact, that graduate students generally want to work with more “expert” tutors than undergraduate writing centers can normally provide (Phillips 2016, 162).
And here is the crux of the problem for both graduate students and writing centers: the need for writing assistance is crucial, particularly given the liminal, transitional space that advanced graduate students occupy; however, most writing centers—in particular those staffed by undergraduate tutors and designed to address the writing and rhetorical needs of students in an undergraduate curriculum—are not structured or staffed in ways that will allow them to provide discipline-specific writing assistance relevant to advanced graduate students in a wide variety of professional discourse communities. Even more problematic is the fact that a great many graduate programs have, historically, failed to provide a systematic support structure for graduate student writing assistance, though the need for such support has been recognized for many years. Indeed, as early as 2001, Mike Rose and Karen McClafferty made “A Call for the Teaching of Writing in Graduate Education,” arguing that although some research had been done investigating the connections between graduate student writing and disciplinary e...

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