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Response to “WhatKnowledge is Most WorthKnowing?”Toni-Lee CaposselaPublished online: 08 Jul 2014.

To cite this article: Toni-Lee Capossela (2001) Response to “What Knowledgeis Most Worth Knowing?”, Journal of College Reading and Learning, 32:1,106-111, DOI: 10.1080/10790195.2001.10850131

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10790195.2001.10850131

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Thni-Lee CaposselaResponse to"What KnowledgeIs Most WorthKnowing?"

Jim Bell and Pam Flagel's fascinating case study, "What Knowledge Is MostWorth Knowing? Grammar; Critical Thinking, and Revision in WritingConferences," casts a raking light over some of our most cherished beliefsabout peer tutoring. I say "casts light" rather than "sheds light" because thecase puts me in a scrutinizing frame of mind rather than reassuring methat I have achieved enlightenment. Sometimes Bell and Flagel's study showsthat our beliefs pull us in opposite directions, recommending contradictoryexclusive paths ofaction. At other times the study suggests our beliefs needsome qualification, or at least tweaking, if they are to serve as effectivetutoring guidelines. In my response, I would like to examine several ways inwhich the study has challenged me to think more deeply about these beliefs.

Dueling BeliefsCherished Belief #1: The writer should set the agenda of the session.versusCherished Belief #2: Discussion of a draft should begin with largerissues, then proceed to localized issues.Julia, the tutor, faces this quandary when Koji suggests they begin their3D-minute session by working on grammar. Koji may even be implyingthat he wishes to devote the entire session to grammar, since Juliacomments that they sometimes schedule longer sessions to allow timefor discussing content (as well as doing grammar exercises). So if Juliawants to make Koji feel he is in control of the session-desirable out­come which is the rationale behind Belief #l-she is going to have to

Dr. Capossela serves as director of the Writing Program at Stonehill College and is

coordinator of the Writing Center. She holds the rank of full professor. She is theauthor of three books' The Critical Writing Workshop: Designing WritingAssignments to Foster Critical Thinking, Language Matters: Readings forCollege Writers, and The Harcourt Brace Guide to Tutor Training.

106 Case Study Response

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Case Study Response 107

violate Belief #2, which is backed up by logic and common sense: Whyspend time and effort correcting a sentence, only to delete it duringholistic evaluation?

With little apparent hesitation, Julia chooses Belief #1, putting asidethe holistic aspects of the draft until surface errors have been cleanedup. In her half-time analysis, she explains her reasons, which are basedon experience with Koji and a sophisticated understanding of his needsas a writer: "I know that with Koji the grammar mistakes have to befixed before he feels comfortable working on other aspects of the pa­per" (p. 96).

Sure enough, after working on the grammar, they still have time tostrengthen Koji's introduction. Julia's encouraging comment, "The the­sis statement's good," smoothly shifts the focus from surface featuresto conceptual analysis. Then she promptly puts the ball back in Koji'scourt with the question, "Was there anything else that you?" [p. 96]).By privileging Belief #1 and ignoring Belief #2, Julia is able to honorKoji's priorities, then move on to the aspect of the draft she finds mostbothersome: the skimpy introduction.

In view of the draft's serious organizational problems and superficialanalysis, Julia's decision to devote the rest of the session to expandingthe introduction may strike one as odd. Her explanation is pragmatic:"[T]his was a weak area that any reader would notice" (p. 99). Giventhe fact that Koji received an A- on the final draft, her pragmatismseems to have paid off.

Questions: Open-ended, Pseudo, and SocraticCherished Belief #3: The tutor should ask questions rather thangiving answers.This belief is intended to keep the writer in charge of the draft, pre­venting the tutor from co-opting it in a frenzy of well-intentioned en­thusiasm over its potential. From beginning to end the case study showshow difficult it is to honor this belief, and how unreliable questioningis as a method of preserving the writer's control.

Julia starts the session with a series of genuinely open-ended ques­tions, placing Koji in the role of expert as he provides her with infor­mation she does not have: what the assignment is, what class it is con­nected to, what he wants to work on. (I wish she had also asked himwhen the essay was due, since an additional session might improvethe essay's organization and development, using the expanded intro­duction as a starting point.) However, once they begin to correct sur­face errors, her questions devolve into perfunctory, brief interruptionsof what is essentially a copy-editing session.

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108 Journal ofCollege Reading and Learning, 32 (1), Fall 2001

When the session at mid-point shifts to a holistic approach, Juliatries to return control to Koji; on page 97 she asks three open-endedquestions in an attempt to get him to expand his introduction. Whenhe cannot provide a useful answer to any ofthem, Julia-to her credit­does not answer her own questions. Instead, she acts as his scribe,breaking the existing introduction into parts, then asking specific butstill open-ended questions about each part as she transcribes it. Thisworks better: in his replies, Koji begins exploring the implications ofhis brief introduction.

However, once they move to generating text, Julia again takes over,as she did with the grammar corrections, asking a pseudo-question("How do you think this sounds?") that Koji is bound to answer in theaffirmative. Understanding the shift that has occurred, Koji adroitlybecomes the questioner: "OK, what can I say?" Even when he donatesa word to the expanded introduction, tacking on a question mark tohedge his bets ("Manipulating"?), Julia ignores it and steamrolls pasthim, reading aloud her own version of what Koji wants to say, "Bymatching advertising to TV programs?" (p. 99). Now it is Julia whoasks the pseudo-question, attaching a token question mark to a phraseKoji will surely incorporate into his introduction. The blurring betweengenuine and rhetorical questions signals the equally blurred lines ofownership: Whose paper is this anyway?

If questioning sometimes works to keep Koji in charge of the tutor­ing session, it fails almost totally during the follow-up interview, a text­book example ofSocratic dialogue. In spite of the interviewer's attemptsto establish rapport with a pop culture allusion to Smashing Pumpkins,the overall tone of the exchange is hierarchical rather than horizontalrelationship, with the interviewer calling the shots. From the first ques­tion, "How many arguments do you have in that paragraph?" (p. 100),the interviewer obviously has a "correct" answer in mind and means todraw it out of Koji. At its most democratic, the interview resembles adebate, with the two sides arguing for the superiority of their posi­tions. More often it feels like a cross-examination, particularly whenthe interviewer asks questions like, "What percent ofhomes in Canadaand the United States have TVs?" and "What is the average number ofhours per day that a TV is on in the home?" When Koji attempts ananswer to the second question, the interviewer cuts him off with hisown statistics, reinforcing the feeling of cross-examination.

The interviewer probably hopes that questioning will challenge Kojito think more critically about his original claim concerning TV in pub­lic places. However, this goal is not accomplished, even in the short­term. When asked, "Do you think TV might be more valuable because

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Case Study Response 109

it is so common?" Koji concedes, "Umm, in some cases" (p. 100), butrather than reflecting on this possibility, he re-states his original posi­tion, then begins defending his essay's final point: how competingsources of information such as the internet further devalue TV.

Even after the interviewer has volunteered statistics and presentedhis counterargument on a platter, Koji is not motivated to incorporatethe counterargument into his essay. The presentation is followed bythe highly disingenuous question, "What do you think of mycounterargument? Do you agree with any of it?" to which Koji replies,not surprising, "Yup" (p. 103). When asked what he might include in arevision, he says he would "research more and rethink [his] arguments,"but all of the specific steps he lists are related to TV viewing vs. internetuse rather than to the issue ofTV in public places. It is fascinating thatKoji thus asserts control of his essay, in the aftermath of an interviewthat has been so implacably controlled by someone else. At the veryleast, the wildly divergent ways in which questions add, subtract, andcomplicate Koji's ownership ofhis text suggest that questioning, ratherthan being the key to successful tutoring, is merely another tool in thetutor's kit, just as susceptible to misuse as any other.

What's the Big Deal?Cherished Belief #4: The writer should hold the pen (or mouse).Like Belief #3, this belief aims to ensure that the text remains the writ­er's property, mandating that the writer generate the physical text in asymbolic representation of ownership. 'Teachers are rightly concernedthat a student whose errors are expunged by a more advanced writercould very well graduate without having learned to write error-freeprose. This possibility is taken so seriously that many Writing Centerpolicies expressly forbid proofreading. Julia is probably more active,and Koji more passive, in the first half of the session than most of uswould like. The summary account of their error-correcting activitiesreports, "Julia read the paper aloud and made 31 grammar changes asshe went through the paper. Most often she simply made the change"(p. 95). Only "sometimes" does she explain the corrections she is mak­ing, and only twice do she and Koji discuss rewording.

In her analysis, Julia describes the ways in which she and Koji col­laborate to correct errors: she reads the paper aloud because "some­times he can hear the mistakes," then she reads the corrected versionaloud "Alsohe can hear how it sounds," and she provides "an explana­tion for mistakes that he usually doesn't make or an explanation for afew mistakes that I have seen him make frequently" (p. 96). She alsotakes the time to explain puzzling idioms, such as "in favor" rather

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110 Journal of College Reading and Learning, 32 (1), Fall 2001

than "a favor." But she also says-twice-"f fix" the errors (italics mine).So although Julia is not just running a fix-it shop and is working hardto help Koji write more correctly, the central issue-can a writer learnto write more correctly by observing annotated corrections of his er­ror?-remains a thorny one.

Another violation ofBelief#4 occurs on page 97, when Koji and Juliagenerate the expanded introduction. As described above, Julia holdsthe pen, breaking the introduction into its component parts, askingKoji questions and incorporating his answers into a fuller introduc­tion. Was this a good decision, since it allowed Koji to concentrate onproblem-solving and answering Julia's questions more fully? Or was ita bad decision, which resulted in Julia's co-opting the essay and com­posing the revised introduction herself? Would it have been easier forher to ask genuine questions, and for Koji to build on his own answersand suggestions, if he had been holding the pen? This is an issue thatwould be extremely useful for tutors and writing center directors toexplore together.

A Belief That Holds UpBelief #5: ESL writers need tutors who are also cultural informants.In "Rethinking Writing Center Conferencing: Strategies for theESLWriter," Judith Powers (1997) tries to account for the fact that thenon-directive tutoring style she has been encouraged to make, one ofher cherished beliefs, does not work well in sessions with ESL writers.She concludes that ESL students require more information about writ­ing in academe than native speakers do. Although supplying this infor­mation may at first feel overly directive, she claims it is actually cru­cial in helping ESL writers deal effectively with an academic audience:

Part of what they need from us is knowledge of what that unknownaudience will expect, need, and find convincing. Thus ESL writersare asking us to become audiences for their work in a broader waythan native speakers are; they view us as cultural informants aboutAmerican academic expectations (p. 238).

This cherished belief is strongly reinforced throughout the case study.Koji is on the prowl for cultural informants, and he has already de­cided that teachers are particularly valuable informants. Several timeshe asks Julia to reinforce or explain teachers' advice. For instance, hequestions Julia's suggestion that the introduction include the word "to­day," because his writing teacher has told him to avoid the cliche "intoday's world" (p. 98). This gives Julia the opportunity to explain thepuzzling phenomenon of the part being less cliched than the whole.Koji also understands the importance of register, asking Julia whether"you" or "people" is preferable in his essay (p. 98). In the same vein,

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Case Study Response 111

when he explains that TV once had value because it was "precious," heobjects to using the word in his essay, but is not sure whether it's inap­propriate because of its register or for some other reason.

Julia does not refer to herself as a cultural informant, but she as­sumes the role comfortably and competently. She willingly embarkson lengthy discussions of individual word choice, and when Koji raisesthe puzzling issue of "precious" being unacceptable in his essay, shegamely gives him as much information as she can: "It's a formal word.It means extreme value or extreme personal value." Then she hazardsa guess about why Koji may have been warned against it, "So it mighthave been misused" (p. 97).

Another reason for her willingness to discuss word choice is her ownapparent interest in what Nancy Sommers (1982) calls lexical, as op­posed to conceptual, revision. For instance, when their work on theintroduction generates a lexically repetitious sentence ("making themmore effective and making them louder and more frequent"), she warns,"Oh, you might have to do something there" (p. 99).

Using the Case Study in Tutor TrairringFor me, the case study's most compelling implication is the impor­tance of context. When tutors become sensitive to context, they aremore likely to treat each writer as an individual, and less likely to seeeach writer as just another instantiation of a generic "student writer"or even "ESL student writer" profile. Th allow this point to make itself,I would have students digest the case study in chunks, so that as thecontext emerged, their ideas about the session would evolve into some­thing more complex and nuanced. First I would have them read Koji'sdraft, prefaced by the brief background information, then share ideasfor how to conduct a session with Koji. Then I would have them readthe tutoring session, with Julia's two analyses deleted, and ask them toevaluate her tutoring strategies. Then I would have them read her analy­sis and reflect on any changes in their evaluation of the session. Fi­nally, I would distribute the interview, asking them whether it affectedtheir attitudes about effective tutoring in general or Koji's case in par­ticular.

ReferencesPowers, J. (1997) Rethinking writing center conferencing: Strategies for the ESL writer.

In T. Capossela (Ed.), The Harcourt Brace Guide to Peer Tutoring (pp. 236-243). New

York: Harcourt, 1998.

Sommers, N. (1982). Revision strategies of student writers and experienced adult writ­

ers. In T. Capossela (Ed.), The Harcourt Brace Guide to Peer Tutoring (pp. 177-186).

New York: Harcourt, 1998.

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