Tell Me How It Reads

Tutoring Deaf and Hearing Students in the Writing Center

Rebecca Day Babcock

• Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781563685484
• eBook ISBN: 9781563685477
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Deaf students are attending mainstream postsecondary institutions in increasing numbers, raising the stakes for the complicated and multifaceted task of tutoring deaf students at these schools. Common tutoring practices used with hearing students do not necessarily work for deaf people. Rebecca Day Babcock researched and wrote Tell Me How It Reads: Tutoring Deaf and Hearing Students in the Writing Center to supply writing instructors an effective set of methods for teaching Deaf and other students how to be better writers.

Babcock's book is based on the resulting study of tutoring writing in the college context with both deaf and hearing students and their tutors. She describes in detail sessions between deaf students, hearing tutors, and the interpreters that help them communicate, using a variety of English or contact signing rather than ASL in the tutorials. These experiences illustrate the key differences between deaf-hearing and hearing-hearing tutorials and suggest ways to modify tutoring and tutor-training practices accordingly. Although this study describes methods for tutoring deaf students, its focus on students who learn differently can apply to teaching writing to Learning Disabled students, ESL students, and other students with different learning styles. Ultimately, the well-grounded theory analysis within Tell Me How It Reads provides a complete paradigm for tutoring in all writing centers.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

SHORTLY AFTER I began directing the writing center at the University of Texas at Brownsville, two deaf students began coming in for tutoring. This event not only disrupted our routine but also sparked an ongoing interest in the complicated and multifaceted topic of tutoring deaf students at mainstream hearing postsecondary institutions. Common tutoring practices used with hearing students do not necessarily work for deaf people, and some of the tutors in this case actually shied away from and tried to avoid tutoring the deaf women. This exposure to deaf student writers clearly made the tutors uncomfortable. In Good Intentions, Nancy Grimm (1999) writes of a tutor whose discomfort with a student’s unconventional literacy practices inspired her dissertation research. Unease or embarrassment in a classroom or tutoring session may also serve as a prompt to work toward a better understanding of different ways to help student writers (Kirsch 1992).

This unease and desire to know more resulted in a naturalistic study of writing tutorials with deaf college students in both writing and learning centers. I observed tutorials and conducted interviews with d/Deaf and hearing students, their tutors, their interpreters, and the directors of the writing and learning centers where they were tutored.1 I conducted research at two different colleges: a four-year private college in a major Midwestern city that offers undergraduate and graduate majors in the visual, performing, media, and communications arts, which I call Davis College, and a suburban community college near this same Midwestern city, which I call Stanhope College. As I relate in more detail later, the choice of colleges was based on convenience factors such as proximity to my house, friendliness and helpfulness of staff and contact people, availability of deaf students being tutored, and willingness to participate.

This book is based on the resulting study of tutoring in writing in the college context with both deaf and hearing students and their tutors, describing in detail tutoring sessions between deaf students, hearing tutors, and the interpreters that help them communicate. Although a description of other methods of communication, such as written notes on paper (Schmitz 2008, 138) would be valuable, the deaf tutees I observed all chose to conduct their tutoring sessions through an interpreter. In addition, all of the tutees in this study chose to use a variety of English or contact signing rather than American Sign Language (ASL) in the tutorials.2 The ultimate goal of describing these tutorials is to illustrate the key differences between deafhearing and hearing-hearing tutorials and to suggest ways to modify tutoring and tutor-training practices accordingly. Although this study describes the tutoring of deaf students, the focus on students who learn differently can inform the tutoring of students with learning disabilities, English as a second language (ESL) students, and other nonmainstream students or students with different learning styles. In addition, through the results of grounded theory analysis, this book offers a complete paradigm for all tutoring of writing.

Deaf students are attending mainstream postsecondary institutions in increasing numbers. Seventy-three percent of all US institutions of higher education reported enrolling students who were deaf or hard of hearing. These students account for 4 percent of all students with disabilities at these institutions (Raue and Lewis 2011). According to Watson et al. (2007) there are 414,300 college students in the United States with some form of hearing loss, but not all these students disclose their condition, nor do they all ask for accommodation. However, current literature says little about tutoring this mainstream deaf population, and even less has been written about conducting tutoring sessions using sign language interpreters. Writing tutorials conducted through communication modes based on English, such as lipreading and speaking, as well as writing—both on paper and computer screens—have been documented, but these were mostly first-person narrative accounts of tutoring a single deaf student. Other than my work (Babcock 2008, 2011), no documentation exists of mainstream college writing tutorials conducted through an interpreter, although Roy (2000) studied an interpreted teacher-student conference with a graduate student, his professor, and an interpreter. Like Roy’s, this study is an outsider’s view of the process, but rather than being a case study of a single conference with a single student, this study is designed to expand the view on this subject by focusing on multiple conferences with multiple students that rely on the use of interpreters. Through interviews with all of the participants, this study attempts to show the perspectives of everyone involved (i.e., researcher, tutee, tutor, interpreter, and administrator) and how these perspectives illustrate the content and techniques of the tutoring sessions, as well as the interpersonal factors involved.

Today, more deaf students are attending mainstream programs than in the past, and there is little written in the tutoring literature about this population. For academic communities interested in helping all students, especially those with disabilities, a study of this type is a first step in understanding the complex situation of tutoring deaf college students in writing. In addition, of all the research articles in the writing center literature about tutoring deaf students, no other researcher mentions the use of an interpreter, which, according to my study participants, is an extremely effective way to tutor deaf students. This study details the use of an interpreter in tutorials with deaf students and hearing tutors.

The study data set consisted of a total of thirty-six interviews and nineteen tutoring sessions with sixteen participants, along with a collection of related documents and general observations. The participants included all of the stakeholders involved in tutoring deaf students in writing at two institutions where a minimum of two tutoring sessions between a deaf student and a hearing tutor could be observed. Interviews and observations at three other institutions were conducted; however, there was no opportunity to meet the two-tutoring-session minimum, so these data were not included in the main analysis, but the study refers to these sessions and interviews anecdotally where appropriate.

At Davis College I observed tutoring sessions with two different deaf writers and three different hearing writers working with the same two tutors. At Stanhope College I observed two tutoring sessions with a deaf student and a hearing tutor and had an additional session taped for me. In addition to interviewing the tutors, tutees, and interpreters involved in these sessions, I interviewed the director and the assistant director of the writing center at Davis and the director of the Academic Success Center and the director of Disabilities Services at Stanhope. The numbers of interviews varied at each place because I conducted a minimum of one interview with each participant and scheduled further interviews based on the participant’s availability and my need for more information (for full observation and interview data see table 1).

Tutoring Deaf Students

It is important to present the literature about tutoring in writing and the education of deaf students, especially the intersection of the two. Rather than covering all of the pertinent reading, I present here only the background information and more current scholarship immediately relevant to the ensuing discussion; in particular I do not cover older studies (e.g., Ameter and Dahl 1990) or literature that does not relate to the face-to-face tutoring of deaf college students. For instance, I do not include articles about elementary-level tutoring or computer-based tutoring. Other texts are discussed as needed throughout the chapters.

Current Writing Center Practice

Writing center practice has followed a narrative of progress from current traditional or positivist assumptions through expressivist tenets, to the recent trend toward social constructivism. Lunsford (1991) calls these practices the “Storehouse,” the “Garret,” and the “Burkean Parlor.” The storehouse refers to the distribution of accepted knowledge and the outcome of an improved paper. This is associated with a product-based approach and directive tutoring where the tutor has the answers and explicitly directs the writer on how to revise his or her paper. The garret center is based on a Romantic or an expressivist approach, in which all truth and creativity reside within the writer. In this approach the tutor’s job is to use Socratic questioning to allow the knowledge that is within the writer to emerge. The focus is on process rather than product, and the writer’s true voice and desire to communicate are valued rather than objective correctness. In the Burkean Parlor, collaboration reigns. The tutor and the tutee come together as equals to discuss a paper with the expectations of the discourse community never too far out of the picture.

TABLE 1. Observation and Interview Data

Tutoring Sessions
Deaf Tutees, Hearing Tutors, and Interpreters	Number of Observations
Rae, John, and Linda	3
Blue, Newby, and Linda	1
Blue, Newby, and Jay	4
Kali, Gustav, and Melissa	2
Hearing Tutees and Hearing Tutors	Number of Observations
Shareef and John	3
Herrodrick and John	3
Squirt and Newby	2
Interviews
Deaf Tutees	Number of Interviews
Rae	3
Blue	4
Kali	2
Hearing Tutees	Number of Interviews
Shareef	2
Herrodrick	1
Squirt	1
Tutors	Number of Interviews
John	6
Newby	6
Gustav	2
Interpreters	Number of Interviews
Linda	2
Jay	2
Melissa	1
Administrators	Number of Interviews
Ann	1
Brock	1
Ted	1
Daisy	1

Some common writing center practices are reading the paper aloud (either by the tutor or the tutee), the concepts that the student “owns” the paper and that the tutor should neither write on the paper nor offer words and language to the tutee, and the use of nondirective questioning techniques, sometimes known as “hands-off” or “minimalist” tutoring. A nondirective question might be “Why did you put a comma here?” rather than just telling the student the rule for using a comma. Several of these common practices become problematic when working with deaf tutees.

Tutor Training

Lennard Davis (1995) wrote that deafness—and disability in general— have been undertheorized. Fifteen percent of Americans have a disability, and 10 percent of the population has a hearing loss (881). Deafness is a unique situation in which many commonplace ideas about language become problematic, such as the way people may think of an author speaking through a text. Davis claims that this can cause writers who handle language differently to be left out of the metaphor. Commonly, writing and reading are referred to in analogies of hearing and speaking, and common tutoring practices depend on aural and oral processing of language. Deaf people, in contrast, process language primarily through the eyes and hands, not the ears and the mouth. For tutoring, an understanding of different modalities of language processing (e.g., visual) can help tutors assist students with learning disabilities and different learning styles. Tutor training sometimes focuses on helping students who learn differently, but a quick look at tutor guides reveals little emphasis on physical difference. According to my research, in the last twenty years only one general tutor training book (Arkin and Shollar 1982) has addressed more than a sentence or two to deafness until Murphy and Sherwood’s (2003) St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors included Margaret Weaver’s (1996) article about tutoring a deaf student in a writing center. Including a component on deaf students in tutor training is important, as common peer-tutoring practices such as reading papers aloud are effective for auditory learners, but as Weaver (1996) writes, they appear to exclude the deaf student and others who process language differently. Through this study of tutoring deaf students, which focuses on sites accessible to deaf students, writing center practitioners, classroom teachers, and compositionists can not only learn from the experience and expertise of those involved but also begin to include deafness as an important linguistic and cultural category for theorizing, teaching, and tutor training.

Perspective

Most of the articles in the writing center literature have been first-person accounts of tutoring a deaf student. Faerm (1992) wrote of her experience tutoring Anne, a student who, although deaf from birth, did not sign but rather voiced and read lips. Anne had trouble understanding poetry. Because of her deafness, she could not perceive rhythm, stress, and, of course, the sound of language, which is so important in poetry. Marron (1993) responded to Faerm with her experience of tutoring a deaf student, and Wood (1995) and Weaver (1996) also reported their experiences working one-on-one with deaf students. All of these articles provided a single perspective—that of the tutor, although Weaver did include interviews with Anissa, the deaf student whom she tutored. Nash (2008) also gives a first-person account from experience, and Schmitz (2008), who interviewed deaf college students about their literacy learning experiences, acknowledges that her study would have been enhanced had she interviewed teachers as well.

Communication

Lang (2002) mentions the need for research on the use of interpreters in higher education. Few articles in the writing center literature discuss the use of interpreters for communication. Articles in the deaf studies and deaf education literature display the same limitation (e.g., Lang et ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Research Context
• 3. Literacy Work in the Tutoring Session
• 4. How Tutoring Gets Done
• 5. Interpersonal Factors
• 6. Tutoring Deaf Students in the Writing Center
• Bibliography
• Index