vol 9, no 2 (2012): multiliteracy in the writing center

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9.2 (2012): MULTILITERACY IN THE WRITING CENTER

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Andrea Saathoff

Managing Editor

Praxis is proud to announce the second edition as

a peer-reviewed journal. The theme for the Spring 2012 edition is multiliteracy and the writing center.

The New London Group (1996) uses the term multiliteracies to describe "two important arguments we might have with the emerging cultural, institutional, and global order: the multiplicity of communication channels and media, and the increasing saliency of cultural and linguistic diversity.” Additionally, the authors suggest that the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the world today call for a broader view of literacy than portrayed by traditional language-based approaches. Given the continued importance of multiliteracy in our education system, writing centers may need to reassess how multiliteracy impacts our field. With dwindling budgets and students’ increasing need for help, the featured articles and columns address how writing centers address the multiliteracy needs and how this may impact the future of writing center work. Praxis is enthusiastic about the contributing authors who share their own experience with the intersection of multiliteracy and writing

center administration, tutoring, training, theory, and initiatives.

On a personal note, as my position as managing editor for the 2011-2012 year comes to an end, I would like to extend my gratitude towards all those involved with assembling this spring edition. The featured authors worked tirelessly and efficiently to incorporate suggested edits and to make revisions. The individuals on the Praxis review board took time out of their busy schedules to offer the authors and editors valuable, supportive, and constructive feedback. The Undergraduate Writing Center (UWC) Praxis Editing Team also worked diligently between consultations and in the midst of their own teaching and work schedules to help create an outstanding issue. This edition is the product of a team effort, and one that cannot be done alone. I would also like to thank the UWC administrative staff. Peg Syverson, Alice Batt, Vince Lozano, and Michele Solberg are the most supportive and enthusiastic group of people with whom I have ever had the pleasure to work. We hope you enjoy the Spring 2012 issue!

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012)

AN ONGOING ESL TRAINING PROGRAM IN THE WRITING CENTER

Jessica Chainer Nowacki

Marietta College

[email protected]

Currently, nearly 130,000 Chinese students are studying at higher education institutions in America (Xueqin par. 1). In a case study of 13 student visits to the Rutgers University Writing Center, Renee Pistone observes that the five ESL students in this group “indicated a high level of frustration (by a perceived lack of caring on the part of their Professors) who made comments on their assignments” (10). The students visiting Pistone’s center were looking for more than just help with their papers; they were looking for reassurance, kindness, and a clearer understanding of their professors’ expectations (10). While Pistone’s study does not deal specifically with Chinese ESL students, her observations reflect the kinds of interactions consultants in the writing center at my small Midwestern liberal arts college have encountered with the Chinese students that rely on us for writing assistance since our school has not yet instituted any language-specific support after the ESL sequence—a choice entirely common in American higher education institutions. As a new writing center coordinator in the midst of a growing China-based International Program, I struggle to train my consultants to work with a population that, aside from the financial gain to the institutions they attend, is largely ignored in terms of support services and trained personnel that meet their specific linguistic and cultural needs.

Although the economic downturn has caused many academic departments and administrative offices to suffer significant cutbacks in their budgets, the failure of institutions to provide adequate academic support for Chinese students and staff training for employees who work with them undermines the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion that many institutions list as a core value. Chinese students are taught to respect professors and administrators; it seems unlikely that they would make demands for

additional support structures on their own behalf. However, in American culture, a predisposition not to speak up often results in the marginalization of that group and its concerns. Writing centers and writing center scholarship can play a key role in mitigating this marginalization by bringing cultural and linguistic issues to the forefront of research, training, and institutional dialogues on academic support.

Although language support for second-language learners (L2) is becoming a concern for writing centers that has grown exponentially over the past ten years, the scholarship has not kept pace. For example, in the 2001 edition of the Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice, only one of the 45 essays focuses solely on the issue of ESL instruction in the writing center—Judith K. Powers’s “Rethinking Writing Center Conferencing Strategies for the ESL Writer” (368-75). Powers describes the roadblocks her writing center encountered during conferences with ESL writers, issues she faces in adapting nondirective writing center pedagogy to an ESL context, and strategies to help writing centers refine their pedagogical approach during such sessions. However, no theorist in this comprehensive volume of scholarship mentions the phenomenon of writing centers becoming default ESL writing labs in the absence of other language or writing support services, nor do any of the authors address the issue of ESL conferencing in culturally or linguistically specific contexts. A number of Chronicle essays note the repercussions of growing international enrollment in the absence of adequate support services. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth’s highly readable collection of essays, ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors, addresses this need admirably. The essays cover topics such as helping second language learners clarify their ideas, working line-by-line on sentence structure, and overcoming cultural differences in communication

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 9, No 2 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu

style. Despite its generalist treatment of ESL populations, this resource is a boon to staff, faculty, administrators, and all those assisting students with college-level writing who do not possess the requisite facility in linguistics or second-language writing pedagogy which are becoming increasingly necessary to help the modern higher education population. However, Rafoth is correct in his assertion that this issue requires more concentrated—and I would argue culturally and linguistically specific—scholarly attention, especially given the rise of online writing consultations and administrative support of outsourcing writing assistance on some campuses. Available scholarship on the Chinese student experience, either in or outside the contents of academic support, is limited and does not address issues of training consultants and faculty to respond to this population’s writing.1 For instance, on our campus, e-feedback is not popular among the Chinese ESL cohort. A study on the ways in which e-feedback does not meet ESL student needs would not only help support the case for writing center positions within a campus community, but also provide much-needed insight into the complexities of responding to writing in cyberspace.

The population of Chinese students at my small liberal arts college has grown from 20 to 120, resulting in a 40% jump in ESL writing consultations over the past 10 years. At the moment of this writing, Chinese ESL students make up an astounding 601 of the 811 sessions our center has conducted since the beginning of September last year. For the most part, the writing center has in effect become the ESL lab. This change in our client base brought about a campus-wide shift in how the center is perceived, leading us to question our identity and role on campus in several ways. First, if the college continues to admit international students at ever-increasing rates, what entities should be designated as providing language support for L2 speakers of English; should it be the same entity that currently serves students in our first-year writing and general education courses? Second, if our writing center is designated as the primary support for our ESL populations, can we also live up to our promise

to help all students at all phases of the writing process, which our center has pledged to do by making one-to-one and online support available for campus-wide writing and communications courses? While many complicated issues are involved in answering these questions, our staff has chosen to focus on a combination of training and collaborative partnership to create tailored consultations for the diverse learners that visit us each semester. Our partnerships with the first-year, developmental writing, and ESL programs have improved the ways our staff conducts sessions with these students by providing communication and targeted feedback strategies to help students from each population gain comfort with sharing their writing, improve their writing skills, and increase their confidence and autonomy as writers.

In addition to these partnerships, we have updated the center’s consultant training program, adding an interactive online learning and support community to assist consultants with navigating the exponential growth in ESL demands. We have begun using Moodle, an open-source course management system, to deliver self-paced, ongoing training without additional coursework or expenditure. The program consists of two 10-week modules, the first of which introduces the fundamentals of writing center consultations and the second of which features seminal theoretical texts (e.g., Stephen North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center”) and advanced instruction in assisting ESL writers. For the ESL component of the program, I rely heavily on Bruce and Rafoth’s ESL Writers for general strategies and a partnership with the college’s ESL department for linguistic and culturally specific tools for responding to Chinese students’ writing. Bruce and Rafoth’s essay collection, used in conjunction with the training materials and coursework provided by our college’s linguist, has helped our staff grasp some of the roadblocks these second-language speakers tend to encounter when writing in English. Each week, consultants read one of the essays and post a response to the discussion board. They also respond to other consultant comments and share teaching aids or handouts for ESL consultations. Due to these new approaches, I have seen my



consultants go from isolated islands to a cohesive, excited, and engaged team interested in helping each other better assist the students that visit the center. For us, this represents the use of educational technology at its best.

In addition to these technological efforts, our center began an internal education initiative 18 months ago, which has been paying major dividends. As center coordinator, myself, and at least four consultants, began enrolling in TEFL courses each semester. This educational partnership with the ESL/Linguistics faculty has also been an important way for me, as a coordinator, to work with my consultants as a peer, and for my consultants to gain on-the-job experience working with Chinese L2 writers. Like most of the consultants at our center, I have a great deal of experience working with first-year and developmental writers, but lacked the tools to work effectively with any L2 speakers of English, let alone speakers of Chinese, a language that differs markedly from English. Without these tools I had difficulty helping my consultants feel at ease in sessions with L2 students. Personally, I felt I had nothing to offer them—a sense that left me frustrated and a little sad at the end of the day. However, taking TEFL courses alongside my staff members demonstrates to them that, as their supervisor, I am committed to refining my skills so I can more effectively support them and the students who visit the center.

As many faculty, consultants, and teachers of writing are likely aware, English presents a major obstacle to Chinese students’ academic success, and the level of English Asian students enter college with varies widely. Although our center works as hard as we can to train our staff to work with Chinese ESL students, our training program is only a small step in working toward the inclusion of Chinese students on American campuses. The development of good language skills is crucial to helping these students communicate with American scholars in their fields, make American friends, and succeed in their studies. In the academic world, language skills are not “soft skills.” They are of critical importance both to the student and the institution; without an understanding

of how to express themselves in writing, students who come from different national origins cannot fully share their unique ideas or experiences, a situation which severely hinders the kind of dialogues that lead to the innovations within, and across, national borders we all desire.

Notes

1. As far as I’m aware, the dissertations by Vallejo (2004) and Ritter (2002) are the only scholarly book-length studies devoted to the issue of tutoring ESL students in writing centers. Work on tutoring Chinese students, in particular, appears to be rather scarce. Carol Severino discusses Chinese students in the writing center in her article “The ‘Doodles’ in Context: Qualifying Claims about Contrastive Rhetoric.” Joel Bloch’s study focuses on the intersections between plagiarism and technology among ESL students. Yurong Zhao’s sociolinguistic analysis of ESL composing practices focuses on teaching English composition in China. However, none of these studies address the issue of writing consultant training in the context of Chinese L2 learners. Some excellent studies exist in the Linguistics and TESOL fields, but they are limited to teacher-student rather than writing consultant-student relationships.

Works Cited

Babcock, Rebecca Day. “An Interview with Ben Rafoth on Writing Center Research, Dissertations, and Job Opportunities.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 7.1 (2009). Web. 30 Jan. 2012. <http:// praxis.uwc.utexas.edu/index.php/praxis>.

Barnett, Robert W., and Jacob S. Blummer. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2001. Print.

Bloch, Joel. “Plagiarism and the ESL Student: From Printed to Electronic Texts.” Linking Literacies: Perspectives on L2 Reading-Writing Connections. Ed. Diane Belcher, Alan Hirvela, and John M. Swales. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 209-28. Print.!

Bruce, Shanti, and Ben Rafoth. ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2009. Print.

Jiang, Xueqin. “Thinking Right: Coaching a Wave of Chinese Students for College in America.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 11July 2011: n.pag. Web. 25 Jan. 2012. <http://chronicle.com/article/Thinking-Right-Coaching-a/128287/>.



Pexton, Valerie. “Sometimes It's Okay to Meddle: Or, How

to Encourage First-Year Writing Students to Visit the Writing Center.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 9.1 (2012): n.pag. Web. 30 Jan. 2012. <http://praxis.uwc.utexas.edu/index.php/praxis/ article/view/30/71>.

Powers, Judith K. “Rethinking Writing Center Conferencing Strategies for the ESL Writer.” The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. Eds. Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S. Blummer. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2001. 368-75. Print.

Read, Brock. “Understanding the New Crop of Chinese Students.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 3 Nov. 2011: n.pag. Web. 25 Jan. 2012. <http://chronicle.com /blogs/afterword/2011/11/03/understanding-the-new-crop-of-chinese-students/>.

Ritter, Jennifer Joy. “Negotiating the Center: An Analysis of Writing Tutorial Interactions between ESL Learners and Native-English Speaking Writing Center Consultants.” Diss. Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2002. Print.!

Severino, Carol. “‘Kaplan’s Doodles’ in Context: Qualifying Claims About Contrastive Rhetoric.” Writing Center Journal 14.1 (1993): 44-62. Print.

Vallejo, José F. “ESL Writing center Conferencing: A Study of One-on-One Tutoring Dynamics and the Writing Process.” Diss. Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2004. Print.

Zhao, Yurong. “Contrastive Analysis of the Employment of Pragmatic Markers in the English Compositions of Chinese and American College Students.” Teaching English in China: CELEA Journal 1 (2008): 61-68. Print.!


DEVELOPING TUTORS’ META-MULTILITERACIES THROUGH POETRY

Kathleen Vacek

University of North Dakota

[email protected]

In 1996, the New London Group introduced the

term “multiliteracies” to describe the ability to effectively communicate using multiple languages, multiple Englishes, and even multiple media. According to the New London Group, students who wish to succeed in the globalized world would be wise to develop some form of multiliteracy. Writing center scholar Nancy Grimm argues that adopting a multiliteracy approach in writing centers means, among other things, hiring multilingual tutors. While it seems obvious that multilingual tutors would be an asset to writing centers, Grimm points out that they also come with a built-in “metalinguistic ability” to talk about how they negotiate multiple discourses (18).

Grimm’s claim, however, becomes contestable when we consider the work of Suresh Canagarajah, who describes how a Sri Lankan scholar, regularly writing in Tamil and English for different audiences, was unable to explain how he negotiated those discourses. Canagarajah notes, “the lack of a conscious awareness of one’s writing strategies is not uncommon” (173). Thus writing centers should recruit multilingual tutors and offer professional development opportunities to help the tutors effectively leverage their language experience. The target of these potential professional development opportunities is building a tutor’s “meta-multiliteracies,” a term I propose to indicate one’s ability to explain strategies for communicating across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. Following the New London Group’s original emphasis on critical engagement, I argue that meta-multiliteracies could include the ability to talk about how these communication strategies are shaped by power and identity.

How might meta-multiliteracies be developed? In a Writing Center Journal article, Lynne Ronesi described her training course for multilingual writing tutors at the American University of Sharjah, in which students read and discuss the work of multilingual writers.

According to Ronesi, the discussions “elicit the vocabulary for and understanding of notions like additive and subtractive bilingualism and code switching as well as prestige, status, and identity with regard to first and second language use” (80). Students also write their own narratives, essays, short stories, or poetry about their identities as writers in English. Research on second language poetry writing shows why poetry about language and literacy can be an effective tool for developing multilingual writing tutors’ meta-multiliteracies.

Writing Poetry for Deep Understanding In his book, Poetry as Research: Exploring Second

Language Poetry Writing, David Hanauer describes how writing poetry can facilitate personal discovery. Hanauer studied the poetry writing of students in an ESL college composition course at an unnamed university in the United States. Through the revision process, the student poets discovered the essence of particular experiences. As shown by the sample poem below, even inexperienced poets and second language writers can tap into this discovery process through writing short, “image-driven and emotionally-laden” poetry (85). The following poem was written by a Chinese student in Hanauer’s study:

Untitled I’m using the language, I don’t know what I mean I’m thinking with a five thousand year language Translating them into a simple world language I’m writing poems It is me If you know what I am talking about (qtd. in Hanauer 102) The author of the poem was able to achieve a

deep understanding of language, identity, and power through her composition. As Hanauer puts it, “the development of self knowledge is a basic aspect of the process” (83). In the poem, the author articulates her

Deveoloping Tutors • 2


strategy of thinking in her first language and translating her thoughts into her second language. Identity is a point of tension in the poem; she obviously feels disconnected from English when she says, “I don’t know what I mean,” and yet while writing poetry in English she still finds a way to express her identity, saying “It is me.” In addition, she questions the relative power of English and Chinese. She presents English as “a simple world language,” lacking the prestige of her mother tongue, “a five thousand year language.” Yet she is compelled to learn English and write poetry in English.

Prior to writing this poem, the student might simply have said: “writing in English is hard.” However, after a rigorous process of drafting and revising her poem, her understanding was much more complex. According to Hanauer, the practice of working to distill an experience into its most important images is what makes a deeper understanding possible. Hanauer’s study helps explain why writing poetry about their own use of language helps Ronesi’s multilingual tutors become more conscious of the strategies they use as they negotiate multiple discourses.

Hanauer’s research suggests that a sufficient amount of time must be devoted to drafting, revision, and feedback for poets to achieve this deep understanding. Poetry writing can be incorporated into a tutor training course, but it might not be possible in centers without enough professional development time for ongoing engagement with the writing process. For those writing centers without tutor training courses, reading and discussing poetry about language and literacy can easily be added to staff development sessions.

Reading Poetry about Language and Literacy

Reading poetry about language and literacy, such as the poem quoted above, can stimulate a greater awareness of the issues writers face as they communicate across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. While visiting an Asian university where English is the official language of instruction, I was

able to discuss the poem quoted above with a group of multilingual writing tutors. The tutors could immediately relate to the poem and began to discuss their own feelings about writing in English.

I have also read the poem with a group of writing tutors in a North American university, most of whom are native English speakers with limited experience learning other languages. In the North American group, tutors first said the poem reminded them of second language writers they tutor. As the discussion continued, one of the tutors expressed a realization that, as a native English speaker, she has the privilege of choosing to learn another language, while the author of the poem is compelled to learn English. This tutor’s insight made me believe that even tutors who do not have first-hand experience with linguistic disadvantage can become more aware just by discussing second language poetry. The poems included in Hanauer’s book can help generate such a dialogue.

Reading and writing poetry about language and literacy could give multilingual tutors—and perhaps monolingual tutors, too—deeper insights into the multiliteracies they bring to their work, which could then in turn help the tutors talk about multiliteracies with their student writers. By participating in these activities, tutors can become aware of the choices they make as they negotiate different discourses. They can find a language to explain these choices and to present options to their peers, and they can talk about how different rhetorical moves are made within different contexts. In short, they can develop meta-multiliteracies.

Works Cited Canagarajah, A. Suresh. "A Rhetoric of Shuttling between

Languages." Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Eds. Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu and Paul Kei Matsuda. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. 158-82. Print.

Grimm, Nancy M. "New Conceptual Frameworks for Writing Center Work." Writing Center Journal 29 (2009): 11-27. Print.

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Hanauer, David Ian. Poetry as Research: Exploring Second Language Poetry Writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010. Print.

New London Group. "A Pedagogy Of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." Harvard Educational Review 66.1 (1996): 60. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 Apr. 2012.

Ronesi, Lynne. "Theory in/to Practice: Multilingual Tutors Supporting Multilingual Peers: A Peer-Tutor Training Course in the Arabian Gulf." Writing Center Journal 29.2 (2009): 75-94. Print.


TUTOR HANDBOOKS: HEURISTIC TEXTS FOR NEGOTIATING DIFFERENCE IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD

Steven K. Bailey

Central Michigan University [email protected]

I would like to begin this article by telling a true story. When I was a graduate student earning my doctoral degree, I worked in a writing center on a midsized and predominantly white university campus. Every week I attended and sometimes facilitated the writing center’s tutor education workshop. At one of these meetings, an undergraduate tutor from a Euro-American background said that one of the things she liked about working at the writing center was that if she had a question about grammar during a conference with a client, she could simply lean over to the next table and ask another tutor for advice. In response to this statement, an African-American tutor said that she would never ask another tutor for grammar help because she felt that doing so would undermine her authority and lead clients to question her competence in Standard American English. At this point a bilingual Asian-American tutor said that clients often doubted her ability to tutor based solely on her appearance. For many of her American clients she was too foreign, while for many of her international clients she was not American enough. This discussion was a revelation for many of the Euro-American tutors, since it had never occurred to them that one’s physical appearance could bring his or her linguistic competence into question. All of the tutors learned a great deal from this remarkable discussion, and the theory and practice of the writing center shifted in ways that more fully accounted for the experiences of tutors from diverse backgrounds.

I tell this story for two reasons. First, it focuses on the often-overlooked experiences of writing tutors from diverse cultural, linguistic, and national backgrounds. And second, this story illustrates what I mean by the phrase “negotiate with difference,” which I will use throughout this article. I borrow this phrase from the New London Group and loosely define it as

accepting and learning from cultural, linguistic, national, and other forms of difference. Twenty-first century linguistic and cultural realities require this kind of flexible negotiation with difference, and nowhere is this more true than in the multicultural and multilingual contexts where writing center work now takes place. Higher education has become a globalized enterprise, after all, with more than 700,000 international students attending U.S. colleges and universities during the 2010/11 academic year alone (“Open Doors”). Most of these students were non-native speakers of English, and I suspect that quite a few of them eventually made their way to the nearest writing center. Though writing centers might not conceptualize their work with these international ESL students as remedial, from an institutional standpoint the dominant assumption among administrators and faculty alike is that writing centers should perform remedial work with non-native speakers of English. This expectation that writing centers should “fix” the English of international ESL students ties in with broader assumptions that privilege monolingual Euro-American viewpoints. Rather than accepting institutional forces geared to the maintenance of these viewpoints, however, writing center specialists can take a leadership role in promoting a more multicultural and multilingual worldview. In doing so, writing centers can help prepare the academy for the complex cultural, linguistic, and national negotiations with difference that characterize our increasingly globalized world.

Before we begin shifting our writing centers to a more global orientation, however, it might be productive to reexamine our theory and practice, keeping a close watch for how we might be complicit in the maintenance of monocultural and monolingual power structures. Among other areas, this

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reexamination could focus on the tutor handbooks that we rely upon for tutor professional development. Though tutor handbooks have served the field well, they are nonetheless overdue for a comprehensive revision. What form this revision might take has yet to be articulated within the field of Writing Center Studies, however. Tutor handbooks have largely escaped critical scrutiny, in fact, and have received relatively little scholarly attention despite Harvey Kail’s observation that tutor handbooks have considerable “research value” as primary texts embodying our field’s theory and practice (“Separation” 74). A relatively small number of journal articles, anthologized essays, and book chapters have considered tutor handbooks, albeit as part of a larger interrogation of an entirely different topic.1 Book reviews, in fact, have long served as the primary location for conversations about tutor handbooks.2 These book reviews and other pieces do not collectively amount to an extended dialogue within the field about tutor handbooks, however. My point here is that while the field has devoted considerable attention to tutor education and professional development, it has not yet conducted a vigorous interrogation of the tutor handbooks utilized for this tutor education.

In an attempt to fill this gap in writing center scholarship, I seek in this article to extend the conversation begun in the book reviews and other pieces mentioned above. Specifically, I consider how contemporary tutor handbooks construct tutor identity as monolingual Euro-American and reinforce—however inadvertently—an array of dominant monocultural and monolingual assumptions that forestall productive negotiations with difference. This article then considers how the next generation of tutor handbooks can be designed to foster more inclusive multicultural and multilingual assumptions, such as the recognition and validation of diverse tutor identities. In doing so, redesigned tutor handbooks can facilitate productive negotiations with difference just like the negotiation that occurred during the tutor education workshop that I described at the start of this article. As a result of the negotiations that took place in that workshop, African-American and Asian-

American tutors helped Euro-American tutors to understand their own privileged position, recognize how it came at the expense of those not similarly privileged, and question the underlying monocultural and monolingual assumptions that facilitated this privileging. In the multicultural milieus characteristic of twenty-first century writing centers, these kinds of negotiation with difference are a prerequisite for productive tutoring. Ultimately, the redesign of tutor handbooks proposed in this article will align these texts with the writing center model advocated by Nancy Grimm, which is built around a “core value” of “productive and flexible engagement with linguistic, social, racial, and cultural diversity” (15). Such a model more fully accounts for the cultural and linguistic realities of the globalized contexts where writing center work now takes place.

Generation 2.0 Handbooks: Monocultural and Monolingual

The parameters of this article exclude what I term Generation 1.0 tutor handbooks, such as Muriel Harris’ Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference and Emily Meyer and Louise Smith’s The Practical Tutor. Though these early handbooks from the 1970s and 80s contain much of value, they are nonetheless no longer fully representative of writing center theory and practice. Moreover, relatively few writing centers now use these handbooks for tutor education. For these reasons, I have chosen to focus this article on what I term Generation 2.0 handbooks. These more recently published handbooks are authored by contemporary writing center specialists well known in the field, printed by major textbook publishers, and widely used in writing centers nationwide (Gill). Several of these Generation 2.0 handbooks have been updated in second, third, fourth or even fifth editions, which provides further evidence of their continued use in tutor education workshops. The six Generation 2.0 handbooks considered in this article include the following titles:

The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors (Ryan and Zimmerelli)

ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors (Bruce and Rafoth)



The Harcourt Brace Guide to Peer Tutoring (Capossela) The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring (Gillespie and

Lerner) A Tutor’s Guide: Helping Writers One to One (Rafoth)

What the Writing Tutor Needs to Know (Soven). Monocultural and monolingual assumptions

remain deeply embedded in the discourse of Generation 2.0 tutor handbooks, which implicitly assume a homogenous U.S. educational context while largely ignoring multicultural and multilingual educational contexts outside the United States. This mirrors larger trends in Writing Center Studies, which as Lynne Ronesi points out, is largely concerned with writing centers within the United States. For these reasons, monolingual Euro-American tutors from middle-class backgrounds remain the presumed readers of tutor handbooks. This assumption ignores the fact that writing centers are proliferating across the globe in a wide variety of academic contexts. As director of the writing center at the American University of Sharjah (AUS) in the Middle East, for example, Ronesi found that selecting tutor handbooks and similar educational materials for tutor education was a challenge, since writing center “training literature has yet to address contexts outside North America” (76). With its “US-centric” focus, tutor education materials are geared to a U.S. context and consequently to users who are assumed to be monocultural and monolingual U.S. tutors. At AUS, however, the student body is multicultural, multilingual, and multinational. In addition, relatively few students on this strikingly cosmopolitan campus come from Euro-American backgrounds. Though the tutors at the AUS Writing Center reflect the diversity of the larger student body, they do not reflect the cultural and linguistic identities of the tutors who are the target users of Generation 2.0 tutor handbooks. This led Ronesi to design a tutor education program that encouraged tutors to draw on their own experience and “establish a body of local understanding that would serve our purposes” as writing tutors from diverse cultural, linguistic, and national backgrounds who work with equally diverse clients in a context outside the United States (79).

While Generation 2.0 tutor handbooks typically assume a U.S. context for writing center work, they also position tutors as cultural and linguistic insiders who are native members of U.S. culture and native speakers of English. The handbooks present this insider knowledge as a tutoring strength, since as Judith Powers suggests, such knowledge can allow tutors to serve as cultural and linguistic “informants” when working with international clients. The unstated assumption is not only that tutors are cultural insiders and native speakers, but that this is the only possible identity for tutors to hold. Consequently, handbooks fail to make room for tutors from alternative cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring, for example, opens the chapter titled “Working with ESL Writers” with the following paragraph:

We have often found that a large source of anxiety for new tutors surrounds the work they will do with ESL writers. “Will my knowledge of grammatical terms and rules be adequate?” they wonder. “Will my session get bogged down in line-by-line identification and correction of error?” they fear. “Will I emerge from a session spent and bleary eyed, hoping to find someone to talk about big ideas and not the minutia of English mechanics?” they ask. “Will I be pushed into the role of editor instead of being a tutor?” they fear. Certainly, these concerns are understandable; after all, many of you have had little contact up to this point with ESL writers. (Gillespie and Lerner 117; emphasis added)

As this excerpt illustrates, the opening of the chapter explicitly foregrounds tutor identity as monolingual, and, by implicit extension, Euro-American. The chapter also foregrounds the tutoring of multilingual clients as a stressful exercise in error correction for native English-speaking tutors. To be fair, later material in the chapter describes tutoring multilingual clients as a “rewarding” experience, but the opening paragraph nonetheless sets a negative tone that the remainder of the chapter never fully escapes (118). This tone dovetails with broader trends in the field, since as Harry Denny reminds us, writing centers



frequently respond to ESL clients as “problems” to “fix” (122).

On the infrequent occasions when multilingual and/or international tutors appear in Generation 2.0 handbooks, they are also presented as tutoring problems, since many of the clients they work with consider them unreliable cultural and linguistic informants who are not sufficiently American in terms of culture or dialect of English. One of the few discussions of multilingual international tutors found in ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors, for example, centers on an international ESL client who does not believe such tutors are sufficiently skilled in English. The client defines a qualified tutor as a native speaker of English and admits a general unwillingness to work with multilingual international tutors (Bruce 221). As is true throughout ESL Writers, the focus in this chapter is on multilingual international clients rather than multilingual international tutors. This may be why the handbook misses an opportunity to problematize the common perception that multilingual international tutors lack sufficient tutoring expertise. As a result, the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of these tutors are positioned as problems that impede successful tutoring rather than productive resources for writing center work.

In most cases, however, multilingual tutors from diverse backgrounds are entirely absent from Generation 2.0 handbooks. This absence is facilitated by a false binary between two opposing identities—monolingual Euro-American tutor and multilingual international client. As a result, tutors holding alternative cultural and linguistic identities are simply erased. Though the binary between the monolingual Euro-American tutor and the multilingual international client is usually implicit in Generation 2.0 handbooks, the occasional explicit moments suggest that the binary is a dominant assumption underpinning the construction of tutor identity. ESL Writers, for example, includes several vignettes where the tutor has a name stereotypical of monolingual Euro-American consultants—Tina, Michelle, Beatrice—while the client has a name stereotypical of Asian international students—Ling, Reiko, Ji-Sook (21, 28, 97). The connotatively potent names used in these anecdotal

accounts of tutor-client interactions reinforce the unstated assumption that tutors are from monolingual Euro-American backgrounds. This assumption is further reinforced by handbook chapters and subsections with titles like “Working with ESL Writers,” “The Second Language Writer,” and even “Tutoring Special Students” (Capossela 92; Ryan and Zimmerelli 65; Soven 102). Such chapters enforce the binary and in the process, rule out the possibility of a multilingual international tutor who is also an ESL writer.

The use of the possessive adjective “our” to mark tutors as U.S. cultural natives provides yet another illustration of the binary in action. One chapter in A Tutor’s Guide: Helping Writers One to One, for example, explains that “the most rewarding way to cross cultures is to converse over time with international students about our perceptions of cultural differences and build toward a mutual understanding” (Severino 45; emphasis added). Similarly, The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors informs tutors that “you will need to explain our culture’s rules and customs about citing sources and doing one’s own work” (Ryan and Zimmerelli 62; emphasis added). As these examples illustrate, Generation 2.0 handbooks do recognize that international clients might be unfamiliar with U.S. culture and that this lack of familiarity can pose formidable challenges in an academic environment geared to U.S. cultural and historical knowledge. However, no handbook considers the possibility that tutors might also be unfamiliar with U.S. culture and history because they are citizens of another nation, recent immigrants to this country, or members of a U.S. cultural group that does not correspond to dominant cultural values. Any cross-cultural interaction is assumed to be a binary one of Euro-American tutor and international client, which leaves little room for tutors to hold alternative identities.

Though Generation 2.0 handbooks give some play to diverse client identities—albeit in ways that often reinforce monocultural and monolingual assumptions—they give little or no play to diverse tutor identities. The recently published second edition of ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors remains a partial exception to this trend, however, as it embraces



a broader sense of educational context and tutor identity. The introduction notes that the second edition “expands the definition of students and tutors with respect to their linguistic backgrounds” and “focuses greater attention on the diversity of cultural and literacy identities among students and tutors” (Bruce and Rafoth ix). That said, ESL Writers does not entirely escape traditional assumptions about tutor identity, as noted in the examples cited earlier in this article. However, in recognizing the diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds of writing tutors, ESL Writers points toward the next generation of tutor handbooks.

Generation 3.0 Handbooks: Multicultural and Multilingual

The next generation of tutor handbooks—Generation 3.0—should be designed to reflect the increasing cultural, linguistic, and geographic diversity of twenty-first century writing centers. This would align Generation 3.0 handbooks with scholars who argue that pedagogical theory and practice grounded in monocultural and monolingual assumptions must give way to multicultural and multilingual orientations that account for the cultural and linguistic diversity of contemporary educational contexts (Bawarshi; Canagarajah; Denny; Grimm; Horner and Trimbur; Lu, “An Essay,” “Living”; Matsuda; New London Group; Pratt). Tailoring Generation 3.0 handbooks to the multicultural and multilingual character of contemporary writing center work, however, will require a substantial redesign of the genre.

As a starting point, Generation 3.0 handbooks could position multilingualism as the norm rather than English monolingualism. Doing so would answer the call of Bruce Horner and John Trimbur, who believe U.S. educators must abandon the “tacit language policy of unidirectional English monolingualism” that underpins writing instruction in the United States today (594). Such an orientation would also align tutor handbooks with writing center specialists who call for positioning multilingualism as the “conceptual norm” in writing center work (Denny; Grimm 17). Ultimately, making multilingualism the default assumption in tutor

handbooks would normalize multilingual tutors and work to level unjust linguistic hierarchies.

Generation 3.0 handbooks could also work to make tutors from diverse backgrounds both visible and prominent. Furthermore, Generation 3.0 handbooks could position these tutors as skilled negotiators of cultural and linguistic difference who are remarkably well suited for working in twenty-first century writing centers. In other words, Generation 3.0 handbooks would position multilingual tutors from diverse cultural backgrounds as assets, not as problems. As numerous scholars have argued, such students are linguistically nimble, culturally sophisticated, and endowed with an intuitive understanding of how to negotiate difference (Canagarajah; Horner; Lu, “An Essay,” “Living”; Matsuda; Pratt; Trimbur). For these reasons, writing center specialists assert that multilingual tutors enrich the writing centers where they work, since they bring with them a cultural and linguistic sophistication well suited to negotiating the myriad forms of difference that are a constant, if often unacknowledged, feature of writing center work (Denny; Grimm). Current tutor handbooks make little space for such tutors, but Generation 3.0 handbooks can provide that space and foster inclusive notions of tutor identity.

However, this diverse sense of tutor identity cannot move beyond what Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope of the New London Group call superficial “spaghetti and polka multiculturalism” unless writing centers are reconceptualized as inclusive communities of practice (136). To put this in the terminology of social learning theorists Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave, writing centers should offer tutors the opportunity to advance from legitimate peripheral participation—i.e., participation as a newcomer, novice, or apprentice—to full participation in their communities of practice (Situated). All tutors should be offered this participation, not just the monolingual Euro-American tutors who fit dominant paradigms of tutor identity. Such participation will allow tutors to gain what Wenger calls “negotiability,” or the ability to make meaning within a community of practice (Communities 197). This negotiability can give all tutors a say in the ongoing evolution of writing center



knowledge, and the more diverse the tutors, the more likely this evolution will be characterized by the redesign, rather than just the reproduction, of existing theory and practice. The story that opens this article illustrates just this sort of productive redesign, with a diverse group of tutors collaboratively reexamining and reshaping the assumptions that underpinned the theory and practice of their work as writing tutors. Ultimately, all tutors should play a role in designing the social futures of not just their own individual writing center community of practice, but the broader community of practice that encompasses all writing centers worldwide.

Indeed, Generation 3.0 tutor handbooks could be specifically designed for the globalized contexts where contemporary writing centers are situated. Underpinning this design would be the assumption that globalization is an ongoing process of hybridization (Nederveen Pieterse). Recognizing the inherent hybridity of language and culture would work to disrupt the simplistic binaries that now pervade Generation 2.0 handbooks, such as the “our culture” versus “their culture” view of tutoring ESL clients that renders multilingual and/or international tutors a conceptual impossibility. This global focus also means that Generation 3.0 handbooks could look beyond the United States and incorporate a writing center theory and practice that stems from diverse contexts throughout the world, such as the American University of Sharjah. Incorporating such contexts into Generation 3.0 handbooks would allow these texts to better serve writing centers outside the United States, of course, but just as importantly, it would also allow writing centers inside the U.S. to benefit from the knowledge and experience of writing centers located in other countries. This incorporation of contexts outside the United States would also align with a focus on the inclusive communities of practice that should underpin the design of Generation 3.0 handbooks, since writing centers located abroad would become full participants in a broad community of practice that formerly consisted only of writing centers in the United States.

Tutor handbooks are powerful heuristic texts for undergraduate tutors, the frontline troops of writing

center work. For this reason, there are significant ethical responsibilities inherent to designing Generation 3.0 handbooks. First among these responsibilities is the obligation to design handbooks that foster writing center communities of practice where all tutors, no matter what their cultural, linguistic, and national background, can have a say in shaping the theory and practice of those communities. Only then can tutor handbooks reach their full potential as heuristic texts for the diverse tutors who will work in twenty-first century writing centers characterized by the continual, productive, and welcoming interplay of difference.3

Notes

1. For examples of scholarly texts that examine tutor handbooks to a greater or lesser degree, see Geller et al.; Gill; Kilborn; McKinney; Shamoon and Burns; Thonus, “Triangulation”; Vandenberg. 2. For reviews of tutor handbooks, see Braxley; Brown; Cella; Chapman; Denny, Day, and Fels; Donovan; Doolan; Hackworth and Johanek; Harris, J.; Kail, Rev. of The Practical; McDonald; Quintana; Scheer; Silk; Thonus, Rev. of ESL; Wingate. 3. I would like to thank Nancy Grimm for her encouragement, generosity, and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank two Praxis blind reviewers for their thoughtful and detailed feedback.

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THE IDEA OF A MULTILITERACY CENTER: SIX RESPONSES

Valerie Balester Texas A&M University [email protected]

Nancy Grimm Michigan Tech University

[email protected]

Jackie Grutsch McKinney Ball State University [email protected]

Sohui Lee Stanford University [email protected]

David M. Sheridan Michigan State University

[email protected]

Naomi Silver University of Michigan [email protected]

This essay—which began its life as a roundtable at the 2011 Computers and Writing Conference—juxtaposes six responses from different administrators and faculty engaged in the turn towards multiliteracy centers. Although our title invokes Stephen North’s 1984 essay in which he tried to assert an identity for the “new” writing center, ours is influenced in approach more by North’s 1994 follow-up article “Revisiting The Idea of the Writing Center” and Beth Boquet and Neal Lerner’s explication of the influence of North’s work in writing center studies. North’s reconsideration critiques his overly “romantic idealization” of writing centers and moves from global axioms to local action (10). Likewise, within this essay, the six authors grapple with local contexts and offer local solutions; none have tried to “romanticize” the difficult trade-offs involved in the changing identities of writing centers, and still none have dismissed the idea outright because it isn’t convenient.

While the authors’ experiences are varied, each response demonstrates a sense of responsibility on the part of writing centers to forge ahead within their institutional contexts toward a vision of multiliteracies that promotes access, awareness, connection, and currency. David Sheridan compares two models of multiliteracy centers in order to map anxieties that writing centers tend to experience as they broaden their missions to include multimodal compositions. Jackie Grutsch McKinney wonders if writing centers ought to call themselves multiliteracy centers. Nancy Grimm recounts the reactions as Michigan Tech’s

Writing Center was renamed the Michigan Tech Multiliteracy Center to better reflect their practices. Sohui Lee explores the question of how tutor training at her center might be adjusted to effectively engage undergraduate tutors in “multimodal thinking” through situated practice. Valerie Balester discusses how a move to communication-in-the-disciplines at her institution provided an opportunity to build a multiliteracy center with a focus on new media. Naomi Silver advocates that writing centers play a role in teaching new media writing via course offerings as well as tutor training and faculty outreach.

Boquet and Lerner suggest that the lesson to take from North and the cult-like (yet perhaps suffocating) success of his 1984 essay is that the field’s status “cannot be grounded in the words of one theorist, from one article, from one line; instead, it is represented in richly textured accounts that are concerned with the full scope of literacy studies, as befits the richness and complexity of writing center sites and the people who populate them” (185). To that end, the following accounts do not try to cohere to a common, seamless argument. At points, the various authors converge and diverge, agree and disagree, resulting in an essay that we hope gets at the “richly textured accounts” that Boquet and Lerner promote while engaging the key question of how writing centers can best address multiliteracies.

Multiliteracy Center • 2


“You Have Made Me Very Angry!”: Mapping Writing Center Anxieties about Multiliteracies David M. Sheridan

In 2002, I was working with colleagues at University of Michigan’s Sweetland Writing Center to establish something that we called the “Sweetland Multiliteracy Center" (SMC). Just as students had historically come to the Sweetland Writing Center to receive peer support for their writing projects, students would now be able to come to the Sweetland Multiliteracy Center to receive support for new media projects—including digital videos, websites, and desktop-published documents. The idea was that knowledgeable peers would engage student composers in conversations about all aspects of multimodal composing—including words, images, sounds, and other media components. Importantly, while the SMC was staffed by specially trained consultants, included new technologies, and required the reconfiguration of existing space, it was still part of the writing center. It was not a separate facility.

My presentation for the 2002 Computers and Writing Conference focused on this effort to establish a multiliteracy center. During the Q&A session, one of the folks in attendance raised her hand eagerly and announced that my presentation had made her very angry. The source of her anger was my brazen disregard for disciplinary boundaries. I was transgressing long-established divides between visual and written communication. Writing centers, she warned, should stick to writing.

That experience at Computers and Writing was not an isolated incident. As I have talked, over the past decade, to local and national audiences, about how writing centers might conceive of themselves as multiliteracy centers, anger was not an unusual response. I have frequently encountered warnings: You shouldn't do that! You can't do that! Writing centers should stick to writing!

For the past two years I have been the director of a different kind of multiliteracy center, a small technology-rich space called the Language and Media Center (LMC), located within Michigan State University’s Residential College in the Arts and

Humanities. At the LMC, we provide just-in-time peer support for a wide range of media, including digital video, web compositions, desktop publishing, and more.

I think it's productive to read these two kinds of multiliteracy centers against each other. On the one hand, we have multiliteracy centers (like the SMC) that begin with the writing center model. On the other hand, we have multiliteracy centers (like the LMC) that begin somewhere else, with the model of a media center or a digital studio or a digital humanities lab (Table 1 attempts to provide a point-by-point comparison of these two models). Comparing these two models reveals two broad sources of anxiety that writing centers tend to experience as they move toward a multiliteracy center model.

The first can be summed up with the accusation: That's not writing. Writing centers tend to get anxious and to make other people anxious as they explore forms of composing that don't involve writing in the narrow sense of the term. Q: Can you help me with my video? A: Can we call it a video essay? Can we call it a visual argument?

At the Language and Media Center, we don't use writing as the central reference point for our work. If you conceive of your video or photograph or sculpture in terms other than those privileged by the field of writing and rhetoric, no worries. No one will give you funny looks.

A second major kind of anxiety concerns the status of technologies. Writing centers, in my experience, still feel anxiety when conversation turns for long periods of time to technical instruction, to tool panels and pulldown menus, and all of those proper nouns (Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, etc.). This feels reductive — a low, non-intellectual, non-rhetorical kind of work (For critiques of what Haas and Neuwirth call a “computers are not our job” (325) attitude, see DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill; Haas and Neuwirth; Rice; Selber).

At the LMC, we are not embarrassed when we provide technical instruction to composers. Composers need support as they navigate the complex interfaces that enable digital composing. They need



help with software and hardware. And we provide that help with no apologies and no strings attached.

I feel a sense of relief and freedom at the LMC. No one gets angry if a media center supports “non-writing” forms like videos, digitized paintings, or 3D models made with our digital paper cutter. No one gets angry if we address the technological challenges associated with these forms of composing.

My colleagues at other institutions, who richly describe their experiences with writing-centers-as-multiliteracy-centers in the pieces that follow, reinforce for me the many ways that writing centers make excellent starting points for multiliteracy work. In fact, many of the assets that I took for granted in the writing center have proven difficult to reproduce in the LMC. I struggle to recover many facets of writing center practice, to get back the intellectual and infrastructural resources I once had (such as robust structures for training consultants).

At the same time, I think it is productive for writing centers to ask what might be gained by relinquishing some of their key anxieties about multiliteracy work. What might be gained, for instance, if writing centers didn’t tether their work to any form of alphabetic text and didn’t construct support for complex interfaces as beyond or beneath them. I think it is a real question as to whether or not those anxieties enforce important facets of writing center identity or whether they can be safely discarded as centers embrace twenty-first century composing practices. (see Table 1)

Tastes Change Jackie Grutsch McKinney

In the early 1980s, Coca-Cola was losing the cola wars to Pepsi. Coca-Cola researchers found that the American public favored the sweetness of Pepsi and in 1985 Coke reformulated their 100-year old soft-drink to appease the tastes of Americans, advertising their change as “new.” Quickly the formula became known as “New Coke,” and the fallout was immediate. Soda drinkers were angry—Southerners blamed the Northerners, Castro blamed capitalism, and groups like The Society for the Preservation of the Real Thing hoarded cans of “old coke.” Within 79 days Coca-Cola

reintroduced (almost) the original formula as Coca-Cola Classic.

I think of this New Coke moment when I think of the evolution of writing centers to multiliteracy centers. I wonder: Is this our New Coke moment? Coca-Cola was responding to a change in tastes, and so are writing centers. The change—in particular giving the product a “new” label—created controversy and anger for consumers, and multiliteracy centers, as David Sheridan has suggested, can bring up issues for writing center users, too. For years, I’ve advocated addressing multiliteracies in writing centers, yet I haven’t been willing to take the final plunge and rename our center. This decision may have kept the peace, but isn’t without consequences. I’ll briefly trace through the murky territory where I live—directing a writing center which aims to address multiliteracies without being a multiliteracy center.

I think a writing center can evolve its identity by pursuing four paths: (1) staff (re)education, (2) physical redesign, (3) user (re)education or rebranding, and (4) name change. In my time at Ball State University, I’ve done the first three of these: I’ve trained tutors to address multimodality; equipped the center with hardware, peripherals, and software to facilitate multimodal work; and have advertised formally and informally our ability to work with students on multimodal work. However, the number of students who actually bring in multimodal texts is quite small—despite the fact that all 7000 students (on paper at least) in first-year writing each year are required to do at least one project that incorporates multimodality.

Here’s where the name comes in—the Writing Center. Writing centers in higher education have been a success story. Though writing center insiders often feel misunderstood, I think the writing center story is actually fairly legible. Most higher education folks (faculty, students, and administrators) could tell you (or guess pretty accurately) what a writing center does. It is the legibility of the writing center name, I’d argue, that helps spread this story. Yet, so far, the name is inelastic—users can’t see how a writing center would be the place for feedback on poster presentations, storyboards, web portfolios, audio essays, or the like.



On the other hand, the name Multiliteracy Center, though it might communicate being a place for feedback on multimodal texts, seems to assert a break from the writing center tradition. Though writing centers often have various names—writing studios, centers for writing, writing labs—losing the word “writing” would be difficult for me. I’m not sure students would know they could get (alphabetic text) writing feedback, and it might complicate who is appointed to run and house such operations. Further, I’m afraid moving response to digital texts to multiliteracy centers allows writing centers to be off the hook, not responsible for multiliteracy.

In short, I have no answers, just nagging ambivalence: Can we have a multiliteracy center that isn’t called a multiliteracy center? The New Coke fiasco resulted in Coca-Cola Classic outselling both New Coke and its rival Pepsi. Flirting with reinvention of writing centers could bring to surface staunch loyalties as well.

Taking the Plunge: Renaming the Center Nancy Grimm

In the summer of 2010, I took the plunge that Jackie Grutsch McKinney writes about and renamed the former Michigan Tech Writing Center as the Michigan Tech Multiliteracies Center. Like the summer long ago when I finally made it off the high dive, the plunge was a long-considered, thoroughly debated, and highly collaborative decision.

The staff (professional, graduate, and undergraduate) advocated for the change because for years we had been doing “so much more than working on writing.”

Thus, our new name did not signal a sudden change in direction but a desire for a more apt designation of what we do in the Center. For years we had taken an approach to staff education that understood “writing” as moving among discourses, cultures, languages, modalities, and dialects, all with highly charged identities and communally recognized ways of making meaning and always situated within political and ideological contexts. More of our regular visitors brought fluency in languages other than English. The nature of the projects we consulted on

was increasingly diverse, ranging from Prezi slides to accompany an oral presentation to videotaped research interviews for a final project to job audit forms. Many of our regular visitors came to participate in study teams designed to develop information management literacies and deepen their learning in large general education lecture courses that ask students to synthesize material from oral presentations, films, novels, lectures, and traditional textbooks. These daily realities of practice had expanded our understandings of the situated and pluralized nature of literacy.

The term multiliteracies was hardly new to us. Many dog-eared copies of the New London Group’s book, Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, could be found around the Center. We reasoned that a name change would signal our allegiance to its expansive theoretical framework, particularly the way it

• Recognizes English as a world language that breaks into differentiated Englishes • Embraces the salience of linguistic and cultural diversity • Imagines students as active participants in social change • Reconceptualizes literacy from a singular noun promoting a ‘standard’ to a pluralized understanding that includes the metalinguistic and metacognitive competencies required to mediate varieties of English, discourses, modalities, and contexts of communication

The term ‘multiliteracies’ was, to borrow Grutsch McKinney’s term, far more elastic, and it suitably described the ways our practice had changed. The name change provided us with the opportunity to revise tired old brochures and posters and sparked creativity in a ‘rebranding’ exercise. For those of us inside the Center and for the students who use the Center, the name change was energizing. Not one student has questioned the relevance or even the meaning of the term: it assures them that the communication challenges they bring are ones we will engage with.

However, the legibility (again borrowing from Grutsch McKinney) of the term writing was one that



higher administration preferred. They expressed concern that the name change would

• Indicate mission creep • Confuse students • Place us out of sync with other state universities in Michigan • Employ a word that “didn’t exist” • Distance us from our “service mission”

Their responses made it uncomfortably clear that little has changed in what the New London Group calls the “restricted project” of teaching English as a formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed skill. From the administrators’ view, the Center had become uppity, claiming a name for itself rather than dutifully accepting a designation that no longer suited our practice. In terms of the administrative response, the name change was, and continues to be, a risky undertaking. As Matsuda and others have argued, the restricted project of literacy teaching is linked to strategies of containment that allow faculty and administrators to “send” students to a writing center rather than rethink the cultural and linguistic assumptions underlying approaches to teaching.

To complicate matters further, the term multiliteracies is sometimes reduced to multimodality. While the New London Group recognizes the growing multiplicity of communication channels, its primary argument focuses on the need to examine literacy teaching in terms of “the disparity of education outcomes” (6). Thus, the multiliteracies project is not simply about multimodality but also about access, about difference, about learning how texts of all kinds function in systems of power that both enable and constrain our choices.

The variety of responses to our name change signal a number of issues, many of which my collaborators here address. Some of the administrative responses show the enduring power of what Brian Street calls the autonomous model of literacy, a model that encourages us to act as though the acts of producing and interpreting texts are guided by rules that are obvious, culturally neutral, and correct. The responses also reveal a resistance to the idea of writing centers as innovators and the social anxieties that

circulate around literacy. But the impetus to take the plunge and embrace a term that more aptly describes what we do indicates the intellectual fertility of writing center work, its responsiveness to social change, its situated understandings of what it means to communicate in a global contexts, its embrace of emerging modalities, its awareness of students’ needs as 21st century communicators. I am pleased to be part of a conversation that is examining the tradeoffs.

“Multimodal Thinking” and New Media Tutor Training Practices Sohui Lee

When I proposed in 2010 that the Hume Writing Center offer digital media consultations, our university administrators were eager to make the shift. The need seemed obvious, and they acknowledged the increasing number of academic courses at Stanford University requiring videos, PowerPoint presentations, and other forms of multimodal communication. While political, financial, material, and even spatial hurdles were easily overcome, I’ve wondered how we’d train peer consultants to, as Grutsch McKinney notes, “address multiliteracies.” The consultants in our Writing Center’s core staff are lecturers in the writing program, some who teach visual and multimodal communication; hence, we focused on recruiting and training these select instructors to pilot our digital media program. Looking forward, though, the Hume Writing Center—and, I imagine, many writing centers adopting digital media—will need to consider how peer consultants will learn and practice multiliteracies. One means of introducing tutors to multiliteracies is by encouraging what I call “multimodal thinking.”

Multimodal thinking is the ability to read and to give expression to content through a palette of modes that mixes and blurs “monomodal” representational practices (Kress and Van Leeuwen 45). Those who adopt it recognize that twenty-first century communication involves the exploration of a range of modal and expressive possibilities. Here, I explain two approaches that support “multimodal thinking” in peer tutor training: (1) the notion that consultants are producers not just users or readers (they should be able to “produce” the modes they are analyzing); and



(2) the situated practice of multimodal text provides deeper learning. The first approach reflects the concept of learning by doing; the second approach emphasizes doing in context for a specific audience and purpose. The notion of “situated practice” comes from the New London Group, who pointed to studies in cognitive science and other fields suggesting that the mastery of knowledge requires the immersion of the community of learners in constant, contextualized practice. The New London Group’s point was not only that multimodal practice was evolving and shifting—but also that multiliteracies require practice through production.

For me, the implications for tutor training were twofold. First, the idea of “situated practice” would require that peer consultants perform their understanding of multimodal and visual texts. And while we (as other writing centers) apply situated practice in terms of traditional writing tutorials, I wondered how this would apply to our undergraduate tutor’s approach to multiliteracies. If administrators need to re-conceptualize “training” in multimodal texts, what would it be? At the Hume Writing Center, our professional staff of lecturers, not peer tutors, lead writing workshops: this is largely due to our access to lecturers with experience and expertise. However, we may need to see presentations as not only service but also training opportunities for all digital media tutors (professional and undergraduate tutors) to practice and expand their knowledge. Regardless, undergraduate consultants would need to continually “practice” their own multimodal communication skills—they could not simply observe others’ practice and comment on it during tutoring sessions. The second implication for tutor training is how situated practice can heighten our tutors’ awareness of new media’s kairotic instability due to variations in technology, audiences, and contexts. New media forms can change dramatically—and, in turn, change how we make arguments as well as how we use them to make arguments: websites in 2000 are visually and interactively distinct from websites of today. PowerPoint of 1990 is radically different from PowerPoint 2007. As Valerie Balester will argue next, there is fluidity in the rhetoric of different media, but

there is also fluidity in the media itself: tutors who “practice” making new media arguments themselves can greatly benefit writing centers by keeping administrators informed of the shifting cultural, technological, and social contexts of new media. This coming year, our Writing Center hopes to turn a small team of our undergraduate consultants into digital media consultants. In our plan for their training is a pedagogic practice that, I hope, invigorates their “multimodal thinking.”

The Multiliteracy Writing Center: Fostering Curricular Change Valerie Balester

In this story, a multiliteracy writing center has become the agent of curricular change. Like Nancy Grimm, I believe the writing center and the university must address multiliteracies. To achieve this goal, the center at my institution initiated curricular change, even though we retain the name of University Writing Center. The change involves three groups: (1) writing center tutors, (2) faculty, and (3) students. Tutors must revise their identities from experts in writing to experts in rhetoric; they must feel as confident advising about writing a script or editing a video as they do advising about writing papers. Faculty must be able to imagine literacy beyond traditional forms of paper and oral presentation and to understand how to assign and evaluate new media. They need to have a better sense of what learning outcomes can be addressed with new forms of literacy. Students need to understand the genres and composing processes for new media and know that they can get help from the writing center (or whatever we eventually decide to call ourselves). And all have to understand “writing” more broadly, as composing in different media.

Our changes began four years ago, when under my direction the University Writing Center spearheaded a move to communication-in-the-disciplines, requiring me to sponsor a motion through the faculty senate. The motion, which passed, gave students the opportunity to produce and present posters, podcasts, videos, speeches, and web pages in courses that count for a graduation requirement. Four years later, the courses are being proposed, although



most don’t venture beyond the oral presentation with slides. We have seen a marked increase in requests for help with oral presentations and slides at the center. Our next step, moving into audio/video and web-based genres, will require another push from us to educate faculty and tutors.

To provide some continuity for our tutors between their work with written academic genres and new media, we continue to invoke classical rhetorical principles such as audience, genre, and purpose. However, we also have to deftly explore and adapt to less-well defined genres. What are best practices for an academic video or blog? Does anyone use the terms “podcast” anymore, and how is it different from a “screencast”? The media we teach are not always set in stone. Changes over the past decade in how best to create oral presentation slides exemplifies how much fluidity exists in the rhetoric of many of these newer media, and disciplinary differences continue to be as salient with slides as they are with articles or essays. Writing about a topic in a handout or an article requires very different strategies from creating a screencast about it, even when the purpose and audience are the same. As a result, our tutors and our faculty have to learn to think rhetorically and strategically as they engage students in new media projects.

Creating curricular change that resonates with the whole campus requires that we develop the expertise and resources that will give faculty confidence in assigning new projects and that will give students confidence that they can get help composing them. The process is slow. We are incrementally changing the way we are perceived through our marketing and through the materials we offer for help. We are working with our library to expand our facilities to add a media studio and oral presentation practice rooms. As we generate possibilities, we also create change.

Scaling It Up Naomi Silver

Sohui Lee and Valerie Balester provide powerful examples of how training tutors to support multiliteracies and providing the resources students and faculty need for effective multiliteracy learning and

teaching can transform the work of writing centers, as well as broader understandings of writing at our universities. I want to take this focus on teaching new media one step further to describe what happens when writing centers themselves start teaching new media writing classes.

At the University of Michigan, the Sweetland Center for Writing began doing just that in Fall 2008. Our aim was to address the paucity of new media writing on our campus—both in first-year general composition classes and upper-level writing in the disciplines classes. We knew some students and faculty in a range of departments were working with PowerPoint, websites, and blogs, and that electronic portfolios were gaining ground in several professional schools and programs. We also knew the emphasis in these classes was primarily on technical matters, and that little attention was being paid to rhetorical principles of audience, genre, and purpose.

Our first course in 2008 focused on the “Rhetoric of Blogging,” and since then, we’ve offered multiple sections on fourteen different topics, in both 3-credit and 1-credit versions. The goals of this course, which does not fulfill any college requirement, are to provide a space where students analyze and apply rhetorical principles in their writing with new media, work with multimodal forms of communication, and become more informed and critical consumers of new media writing. Our enrollment has been quite diverse, ranging from first-year students to seniors in a wide variety of concentrations and disciplines. And interestingly, in entrance surveys a majority of students report they elected the class not for any particular academic purpose, but rather because it allowed them to further a personal interest of some kind—from gaming to political action to nonprofit work. And as it turns out, it also has fulfilled employment goals of several of our students who have taken what they’ve learned in these courses directly into the workplace.

We feel these courses have been quite effective, and that they meet an important need for our students, who come to the university with widely varying levels of experience and expertise with new media. A key component of their success, I would argue, stems from their location in the writing center:



• Writing centers operate according to an ethos of collaboration and process-oriented problem solving. This is the future of much new media writing, which is by necessity highly collaborative and distributed.

• Because writing centers work with writers from across the University, and at all levels, we have extensive practice with the rhetorical moves and genre expectations of many disciplines, which allows us to move nimbly into new media and new literacies as they arise.

• The authority structure of writing centers enables genuine questioning of genre and mode, allowing us to place critical rhetorical analysis at the center of our multiliteracies pedagogy, which in turn promotes genuine critical literacy and student ownership of the learning process. This is a political goal as much as an educational goal, as Nancy Grimm points out.

• Writing center pedagogy enables “coherence-within-diversity” (Thaiss & Zawacki 139) regarding new media genres, that is, it enables us to foster the self-reflection and confident flexibility that twenty-first century writers need to approach the varied writing tasks created by an ever-changing media landscape.

But as far as we know, we’re one of the few writing centers around engaged in teaching of this kind—for reasons of resources and institutional location, among others, to be sure. I’m interested in thinking about how writing centers elsewhere can take up this new challenge. As Valerie Balester suggests, we have a responsibility to shake things up, to go to our Dean or Provost to make the case that while we should certainly be training our tutors to work with new media writing and developing the infrastructure to help them do so, we should also be taking the lead in teaching these forms and in creating a spread of effect for multiliteracies within the university. The payoff for our students, our faculty, and our institutions is well worth the effort.

Closing Thoughts The goal of our essay was to explore and even

question the idea of multiliteracies in writing centers in a way that does not flatten out the discussion into useless binaries or unreflexive lore. As these accounts

suggest, writing centers are powerful because of how richly they conceive of tutors and tutor preparation, because of their deep connections to curricular structures, and because they adopt sophisticated models of composing and learning processes. In short, writing centers are powerful because, over the last thirty years or so, they have developed a rich tradition of praxis through self-critique, research, and theory-building.

We can gain important insights into many of the theoretical concerns explored here if we shift our perspective, for a moment, from the day-to-day concerns of operating a writing center to the broader project of envisioning a 21st century university. Universities need places where composers can come to access the infrastructural resources (intellectual, technological, and interpersonal) that enable 21st-century composing. These places will necessarily be multiliteracy centers.

Effective multiliteracy centers will require all of the resources that writing centers already have in place: structures for recruiting and training tutors, strong connections to the curriculum, and robust theories of communicating, composing, and learning. Writing centers already have these things. Starting a multiliteracy center from scratch amounts to re-inventing the wheel. The challenge, then, is not (only) to cram multiliteracy practices into an already overwhelmed learning ecology. Instead, the challenge is to convince stakeholders (including students, faculty, and administrators) that universities will serve learners more effectively if they establish multiliteracy centers.

These centers, in turn, can function most productively if they are strongly connected to existing writing centers and their traditions. In this way, despite our differences, our varied responses concur with the claim recently put forward by Christina Murphy and Lory Hawkes that “Writing Centers [...] are the academic units best positioned by their philosophies and histories to capitalize on the importance of e-literacies for the transformation of academics in the 21st century” (174). This claim is not “idealized romanticism” (North, “Revisiting” 10), but good pedagogy and good policy.



Table 1

Traditional Writing Center

Writing Center as Multiliteracy Center

RCAH Language & Media Center

Focuses on writing. Writing is assumed to be of primary importance to

mission.

Other media are supported, but this expansion is justified in terms of writing's

increasing connectedness with other media. Anxiety increases as writing is minimized.

Supports a wide variety of visual and multimodal forms of composing. Does

not theorize mission in terms of writing.

Invites composers to visit for short conversations

with consultants. Composing happens

elsewhere.

Anxiety increases when composers use the space for silent composing. This potentially

takes away space that could be used for having conversations with writers.

Invites composers to work for long stretches of time (many hours).

Composing happens in the LMC. Support is solicited as needed, if

needed. Some composers work silently and never talk to a peer consultant.

Provides limited technical instruction for word-

processing interfaces and technologies.

Anxiety increases the more conversation focuses on technical instruction instead of 'real' concerns like rhetorical context and

audience.

Helping composers negotiate complex interfaces and technologies is seen as a

central part of mission.

Provides few technological resources beyond tools

related to word-processing.

Anxiety increases when accessing technology becomes too central and/or technologies are

too far removed from writing. Desktop publishing makes sense, maybe video, but

midi keyboards and professional-grade microphones are worrisome.

The specialized hardware and software of media production is seen as essential, from midi keyboards to camcorders to

digital paper cutters.

Consultants are recruited for their ability to engage

student writers in productive conversations.

Anxiety increases as consultants are increasingly recruited for reasons other than

their ability to engage student writers in productive conversations (e.g., an advanced videographer with no interest in writing ).

Consultants are recruited for their expertise as media composers (video,

web, desktop-publishing, etc.).

Stakeholders (students, faculty, staff across

campus) expect that the focus of a "writing center"

is writing.

Stakeholders need to be convinced that something other than writing happens and

should happen in the "writing center."

Stakeholders expect that a variety of forms of media will be supported in a

"media center."



Works Cited Boquet, Elizabeth H. and Neal Learner. “After ‘The Idea of

a Writing Center’.” College English 71. 2 (2008): 170-189. Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. Multiliteracies: Literacy PDF.

Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.

DeVoss, Dànielle Nicole, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffery Grabill. “Infrastructure and Composing: The When of Infrastructure and Composing: The When of New-Media Writing.” CCC 57.1 (2005): 14-44. PDF.

Haas, Christina and Christine M. Neuwirth. "Writing the Technology That Writes Us: Research on Literacy and the Shape of Technology." Ed. Cynthia L. Selfe and Susan Hilligoss. Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology. New York: MLA, 1994. 319-335. Print.

Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Discourse. New York: Arnold, 2001. Print.

Murphy, Christina, and Lory Hawkes. "Future of Multiliteracies Centers in the E-World." Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric. Eds. David Sheridan and James Inman. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2010. 173-187. Print.

New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Harvard Educational Review 66 (Spring 1996): 60-92. PDF

North, Stephen. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English 46.5 (1984): 433-446. PDF.

—. “Revisiting ‘The Idea of a Writing Center.’” Writing Center Journal 15.1 (1994): 7-19. PDF.

Prensky, Marc. “Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives.” On the Horizon 9.5 (2001): 1-15. PDF.

Rice, Jenny Edbauer. "Rhetoric's Mechanics: Retooling the Equipment of Writing Production." College Composition and Communication 60:2 (2008): 366-387. PDF.

Selber, Stuart A. "Reimagining the Functional Side of Computer Literacy." College Composition and Communication 55 (2004): 470-503. PDF.

Street, Brian. 1995. Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education. London: Longman. Print.

Thaiss, Chris and Terri Myers Zawacki. Engaged Writers and Dynamic Disciplines. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2006. Print.


ACCESS FOR ALL: THE ROLE OF DIS/ABILITY IN MULTILITERACY CENTERS

Allison Hitt Syracuse University

[email protected] “Linked to the notion of multiliteracies is the challenge to develop more equitable social futures by redistributing the means of communication.”

– John Trimbur (30) “For all students to have access to those things composition has to offer—literate ‘skills,’ a voice, the words to write the world—we must ensure that disability is recognized and respected.”

– Jay Dolmage (15)

In David Sheridan and James Inman’s 2010 edited collection, Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric, Inman discusses designing a multiliteracy center.1 He writes, “A final, but vital, consideration should be the accessibility of any zoned space for individuals with disabilities. In this pursuit, the idea is not just to make spaces minimally accessible, but instead to consider how the disabled may be able to most fully participate in the uses for which the spaces were designed” (Inman 27). This comes as the last “special issue” of consideration for design (28). Though Inman highlights disability and access, these issues are not taken up further as pedagogical considerations. I believe that we need to explore and broaden our understandings of disability as more than a physical design issue and of accessibility as more than an issue for students with disabilities. The creation of multiliteracy centers, spaces “equal to the diversity of semiotic options composers have in the 21st century” (Sheridan 6), presents an opportunity to position disability within the larger context of diverse learners in order to better understand how we can create more accessible multiliterate spaces and pedagogies.

A writing pedagogy that supports multiliteracies must be spatially and pedagogically accessible to a diverse range of students. In many ways, a multimodal pedagogy2 supports accessible practices through its attention to multiplicity in various modes and media

and in its focus on flexibility in processes and products. Disability studies offers two lenses that are also valuable for supporting writing pedagogies: Universal Design (UD) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). UD is a spatial theory, articulated by architect Ronald Mace in 1988, which emphasizes the importance for all spaces to be physically accessible to all people. UDL, developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) in 1994, extends UD in order to create equitable and flexible pedagogies. A multiliteracy center that applies principles of UD and UDL can support students’ different physical abilities, modes of learning, types of knowledge, and literacies. Despite advances in accessibility, however, disability remains a troubling binary that creates an us/them framework, undermining the inclusive spirit of multiliteracy centers. I argue that we need to reposition representations of disability in both writing center scholarship and tutoring practices.

Including Disability in Scholarship One of the first steps in recognizing and

respecting disability is including it in writing center scholarship and dialogue. Despite several notable contributions to this dialogue (see, for example, Babcock, 2011; Babcock, 2008; Hamel, 2002; and Hewett, 2000), both disability and access are largely undertheorized with regard to composition. Often, disability is positioned as something that tutors must cope with and that sometimes cannot be helped at all. For example, in her anthologized essay, Julie Neff suggests practices that could help LD students but nevertheless positions such students as Other: “Although learning-disabled students come to the writing center with a variety of special needs, they have one thing in common: they need more specific help than other students” (382). This cues tutors that they need to treat students with disabilities differently than other writing center patrons, which can create frustrations that lead to failure. In a reflection of a

Access for All • 2


failed session, Steve Sherwood writes, “I had no training in helping students cope with learning disabilities, much less with the effects of a severe brain injury” (49), concluding that we will continue to encounter LD students who “despite our best efforts, we can’t help” (56). Sherwood makes the argument that tutors are not trained for working with LD students, while he simultaneously argues that writing centers are incapable of helping students with LD. Tanya Titchkosky identifies this impasse as a “You can’t accommodate everybody” attitude that identifies some students, particularly those with disabilities, as “‘naturally’ a problem for some spaces” (35).

All students who enter a writing center are treated individually and, thus, as different from one another in terms of what they bring to the center and how they learn and compose, so the issue is not seeing students with disabilities as different. Rather, the issue is to position students with disabilities as so radically different from other students that they are beyond help—that they require too much time, resources, or special knowledge. A disability studies perspective asks us to interrogate our centers and practices: What makes it culturally or pedagogically acceptable to say “no” to students with disabilities? Why would we, as people with a shared sense of social justice, contribute to the rhetoric that students with disabilities are beyond our help?

Turning to disability studies scholarship is critical as centers move toward multiliterate and multimodal practices that push against the “‘natural’ exclusion” (Titchkosky 6) of disability within academia. Jean Kiedaisch and Sue Dinitz borrow from disability studies in their article about Universal Design, which they describe as “an approach advocating for the design of products and services so that they are suited to a broad range of users” (50). They recall a moment in tutor training when a disabilities specialist came to talk to their tutors, “encourag[ing] tutors not to think of how they might adapt their tutoring for students with disabilities” because all students come to writing centers with different types of knowledge and abilities (50). Such a differentiation is an example of treating students as different, but not treating students with disabilities differently. Kiedaisch and Dinitz do not argue

that individual needs should not be met; rather, they advocate adjusting our assumptions about students’ particular abilities and engaging in more accessible practices. Rebecca Day Babcock similarly argues that meeting deaf students’ learning needs can help writing center tutors “rethink their practices in light of others who learn differently” (28). This shifting of assumptions and practices benefits students with disabilities, but it also accounts for any diverse, twenty-first-century learner who enters the multiliteracy center.

Shifting assumptions about disability is increasingly important as disability diagnoses rise.3 In a 2010 report, Melana Zyla Vickers claims that two percent of college students have a documented learning disability, not including students with intellectual disabilities, autism, or other “severe” diagnoses (3). It is estimated that only half of college students report their disabilities, and many forego accommodations for fear that they will be treated differently by their instructors and peers (Walters 427). These increases in disability, labeled or not, may indicate a larger problem. Cathy Davidson argues that we are more likely to label a student as LD if she fails to fit into our educational system or is unresponsive to our particular pedagogical practices (10). To address this, then, we need to evaluate our writing center practices: How do our current pedagogical practices exclude particular students? How can we make our writing pedagogies more inclusive to diverse student populations?

Creating Accessible Spaces and Practices More than a decade ago, the New London Group

recognized multiliteracies as an opportunity to move beyond the dominating limitations of print- and word-based literacies, to reach other modes of representation such as visual, aural, gestural, spatial, and multimodal (28). Gunther Kress argues that these other modes are embodied, that “[h]uman bodies have a wide range of means of engagement with the world” that occur in various and multiple ways (184). A multiliteracy pedagogy, then, encourages practices that relate to students’ different bodily experiences and promote student agency (New London Group 31). Similarly, a multimodal pedagogy recognizes students



as “agentive, resourceful and creative meaning-makers” (Stein 122). This agentive learning is valuable for students of all abilities to take control of what and how they best receive and create knowledge. And indeed, writing centers have traditionally been known for flexible pedagogies that support multimodal practices and active student-centered learning. A writing center reflects a different space than the classroom, one that both physically and pedagogically encourages alternative modes of communication and composition. Yet even as writing centers create these different spaces and practices, students with disabilities are still often treated differently. In order to truly support students’ different bodily experiences and embodied writing practices, multiliteracy centers must be both spatially and pedagogically accessible. Universal Design and Spatial Accessibility

Universal Design is useful for considering how to make multiliteracy center spaces more accessible to wider populations. Before a center can support accessible practices, it must be free of spatial features that could disable users from interacting within that space. Bertram Bruce and Maureen Hogan note that physical environments construct disability because, as tools and technologies become naturalized, people who cannot use them are positioned as disabled (297). If we think of chairs as a natural part of the writing center environment, then they disable students who are unable to use them. A universally designed chair has wheels to support mobility and flexibility, allowing students to more easily use the chair or to push it aside if it is a hindrance.

Stairs are one of the most common examples of inaccessible spatial features, for they construct disability by disempowering wheelchair users (Bruce and Hogan 297). However, adding a ramp just for these users would be a retrofit—the act of adding a component to an already-built space (Dolmage 20). Often, these retrofits are forced: they occur only after someone recognizes that the space does not meet standards or is inaccessible. Retrofits also force students to access spaces differently. Rarely do we see ramps at the entrances of buildings; rather, they are on the side or in the back, reinforcing the idea that

disability is an “afterthought” (21). UD encourages us to build writing center spaces that are accessible from the beginning, although many centers may retrofit because they lack the finances to design a new center. In this case, it is still beneficial to change inaccessible features. If we return to ramps, a universally designed approach to ramps helps everyone: wheelchair users, people who limited mobility, even strollers and rolling backpacks. The push toward multiliteracy centers provides opportunities for spatial reconsiderations of how well centers support accessible literacy practices.

Though some multiliteracy centers are completely redesigned to support multiple rooms and new technologies, a center does not need to change completely to implement accessible practices. This can be seen with the multiplicity and flexibility of different spatial configurations: long tables, clustered desks, overstuffed chairs, and computer stations. Even something as simple as furniture arrangement is multimodal. Stein writes, “The classroom is itself a multimodal place with visual displays and the arrangement of furniture in space that realizes particular discourses of English” and shapes the way students create meaning (122).4 Mobile furniture, technologies, houseplants, windows, and wall décor work to create an environment that is accessible, encouraging students to learn and compose in the ways that most benefit them.

While spatial elements are important, they cannot be separated from a multiliteracy center’s pedagogical goals. Inman writes, “Many centers appear to have been designed around furnishings and technologies, rather than what clients will actually be doing. This approach poses a problem because any center exists to provide effective services for clients, not to have the grandest furnishings and technologies” (20). As spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre argues, the physical spaces we inhabit affect our actions within those spaces; in turn, our actions and social practices impact those spaces. Thus, the material spaces of writing centers greatly impact what kind of pedagogy those spaces can enact.5

Even if a center is physically accessible, students cannot benefit from inaccessible pedagogy.



Universal Design for Learning and Pedagogical Accessibility UDL offers a way to apply the equitable and

flexible spatial principles of Universal Design to writing pedagogies. According to CAST, UDL pushes against a “single, one-size-fits-all solution,” advocating instead for approaches that are flexible, multiple, and adjustable. The principles of UDL—multiple means of representation, actions and expression, and engagement—can help expand our teaching, learning, and composing practices. They can also help us to configure multiliteracies more inclusively. Often, multiliteracies refer to the different technological abilities, or literacies, that a person has for communicating through electronic means. We see this wealth of abilities represented in centers that house computer labs, specialized video and editing software, and OWLs. However, if we conceive of multiliteracies more broadly, as embodied practices, we can engage with multiliterate practices that are more inclusive to students with a range of abilities.

A more accessible multiliteracy pedagogy provides multiple and flexible options for all students, including those who may be constrained to particular modalities or have preferred learning styles. Jody Shipka argues for a broader understanding of multimodal texts within our pedagogical frameworks, expanding the definition to include print and digital texts, embodied performances, photographs, videos, physical objects, and repurposed or remediated objects (300). This definition speaks to the multiplicity of UDL and allows for a richer understanding of pedagogical accessibility: if students want to compose essays, collages, videos, or webtexts, these all fit within multimodal pedagogies. Similarly, if students with disabilities are limited to particular modalities—e.g., a blind student who relies on auditory or sensory modes to write or a deaf student who relies more heavily on visual modes—a multimodal pedagogy more easily adapts to these needs, incorporating rather than accommodating them.6 Broader understandings of multimodality also extend to multiliteracies, encouraging students to engage with their various literacies, such as traditional writing, technology, music, and visual or studio art.

A typical writing center session inherently encourages a multiplicity of communicative and learning styles: students enter a center, meet with a tutor, and engage with texts in a variety of ways. These interactions could include engaging in verbal discussions, collaboratively drafting, looking up information in books, working on computers, and participating in online appointments. Still, working with such a diverse group of students on widely varying rhetorical projects can be difficult. Patricia Dunn and Kathleen Dunn De Mers admit, “Coming up with alternate strategies that simulate (and stimulate) the complex brain work involved in writing is very difficult—partly because we're so steeped in ‘writing’ as a heuristic for other writing, and partly because in this society we're so steeped in a narrow view of what is ‘normal.’” For a tutor or consultant, developing these strategies can be particularly difficult if they have never experienced similar pedagogies. Therefore, it is crucial for writing center tutors and workers to develop multimodal “toolkits”—multiple and flexible practices—that allow them to adapt to different communicative interactions.

Developing a multimodal toolkit involves developing rhetorical strategies that push against fixed communicative interactions and present more opportunities for students. The idea is not to max out all sensory options but to provide flexibility. Shoshona Beth Konstant suggests using multiple channels: “Use combinations of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic techniques—the multisensory approach. Say it and draw it; read text aloud; use color to illustrate things” (7). Konstant takes an early cue from UDL when she argues that everyone has learning practices that work best for them (6). Similarly, Dunn and Dunn De Mers promote using a “variety of visual, aural, spatial, and kinesthetic approaches to tap into the intellectual chaos that goes into writing.” This means pushing against singular notions of how to interact with both students and texts, and it requires a negotiation between tutor and student. In her work with deaf students, Babcock suggests explicit dialogue: “Most of all, try to find out what the deaf person needs and wants out of the session, and gear your tutoring toward that” (35). If students are unaware of what



they want or need, knowing some multimodal practices can be useful.

A multimodal toolkit does not eliminate the need to identify students’ individual needs, just as UDL does not eliminate the need for accommodations. Instead, both multimodality and UDL ask us to acknowledge that all students have multiple ways of learning and knowing and to be flexible to those different needs. If a student prefers drawing, tutors can adapt, asking the student to sketch an outline of their main ideas. Similarly, talking through a text could be more beneficial than reading it word for word. McKinney encourages talking—rather than reading—as a way to interact more holistically with all features of a multimodal text (“New Media Matters” 39). This practice is useful for texts that consist of more than just alphabetic text, but it could also benefit students with disabilities. For example, reading a paper aloud for errors may not be as effective when working with deaf students, students with ADHD, or students with pragmatic language impairment (PLI).7 By talking about a text, students have more opportunities to engage with the text in ways that reflect overall comprehension and understanding of their particular rhetorical choices.

To engage in accessible multiliterate practices, tutors must adapt to students’ different embodied practices, recognizing that all students who enter the multiliteracy center will learn and compose in different ways for different purposes. Tutors should not be expected to be technology experts to engage in these practices, but they should have basic understandings of different modes and media for rhetorical communication. Because many multiliteracy centers support various technologies, it is useful to know how to locate resources online, work with software to compose and edit multimedia texts—or to communicate with students who use assistive technologies—and even create audio recordings of sessions that students could replay once they leave the center. Beyond available technologies, however, Teddi Fishman reminds us that “the ability to adapt [is] more critical than any particular or specific accommodation” (65).

All students have a variety of rhetorical, intellectual, and physical abilities, and multiliteracy center spaces and practices must be ready to adapt to students’ various needs.

Access for All Writing centers need a new approach for working

with students of all abilities as we continue to see advances in technologies, changes in educational practices, and increases in disability diagnoses. I believe that implementing the principles of Universal Design and Universal Design for Learning can help make multiliteracy centers more accessible. Applying UD can create a physically accessible space for a diverse student population, establishing a foundation for flexible tutoring, learning, and composing practices. Similarly, UDL promotes the understanding that all students have diverse needs that writing pedagogies need to address. By applying UD and UDL to multiliteracy pedagogies, we incorporate the important work of disability studies and broaden our understandings of both disability and accessibility.

Providing students with the resources to communicate within different modes, to practice and learn new literacies, and to harness their rhetorical abilities should be the goal of all multiliteracy centers. When we adopt multilterate and multimodal pedagogies that support these resources, we acknowledge two things. First, all students have different abilities, types of knowledge, and literacies. Second, all students can benefit from engaging with texts in different ways—visually, aurally, and kinesthetically—and in different contexts. Applying the flexible principles of UD and UDL can make multiliteracy centers more accessible both spatially and pedagogically, allowing us to better prepare students to become effective twenty-first-century communicators.8

Notes

1. I use writing center and multiliteracy center almost interchangeably throughout this paper because, as I will argue, all writing centers support multiliterate practices.

2. The term “multiliteracies” refers, in part, to a multiplicity of communication modes and media (New



London Group 9). Similarly, multimodality refers to the multiple modes that we use to represent information, and as Kress reminds us, “textual objects—spoken, signed, written, drawn—always occur in a multiplicity of modes” (199). Because multiliteracies and multimodality are so interrelated, it is necessary to discuss both.

3. According to the CDC, one in six children has a developmental disability—e.g., autism, ADHD, cerebral palsy, or intellectual disabilities—a 12-15% increase from 1997 (Boyle et al.).

4. At my institution’s writing center, for example, there is a small room of cubicles at the center’s entrance that can be used for quieter sessions, which could benefit students with ADHD who may be more distracted in larger settings or students with autism-spectrum disorders who prefer to be in less populated areas. Students also have the option to work in a large open room where there are multiple tables, chairs, and computer stations arranged for tutoring.

5. For a more in-depth discussion of how writing center scholars engage with spatial theory and how space can affect pedagogy, see Fishman, 2010; Hadfield, 2003; Kinkead and Harris, 1993; and McKinney, 2005.

6. For example, Shannon Walters reminds us that technology can be harmful if it is positioned as an impairment-specific approach. Audio- or image-only accommodations not only exclude other audiences, they often oversimplify and generalize the person with the disability (439).

7. Students with PLI may struggle with reading and expressing themselves, which can affect listening comprehension (Babcock, “When Something Is Not Quite Right” 7).

8. I would like to thank Patrick Berry, Jay Dolmage, and Jason Luther for reading multiple drafts of this article and for providing invaluable feedback.

Works Cited

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Right: Pragmatic Impairment and Compensation in the College Writing Tutorial.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 35.5-6 (Jan/Feb 2011): 6-10. Print.

—. “Tutoring Deaf Students in the Writing Center.” Disability and the Teaching of Writing: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Jo Brueggemann. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 28-39. Print.

Boyle, Coleen A., et al. “Trends in the Prevalence of Developmental Disabilities in US Children, 1997-2008.” Pediatrics 127.6 (2011): 1034-42. Web. 19 Jan. 2012.

Bruce, Bertram C, and Maureen P. Hogan. “The Disappearance of Technology: Toward an Ecological Model of Literacy.” Handbook of Literacy and Technology: Transformations in a Post-Typographic World. Ed. David Reinking, Michael C. McKenna, Linda D. Labbo, and Ronald D. Kieffer. Florence, KY: Routledge, 1998. 269-82. Print.

CAST. The National Center of Universal Design for Learning. Center for Applied Special Technology, 2012. Web. 26 Oct. 2011.

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and The Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.

Davidson, Cathy N. Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. New York: Viking, 2011. Print.

Dolmage, Jay. “Mapping Composition: Inviting Disability in the Front Door.” Disability and the Teaching of Writing: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Jo Brueggemann. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 14-27. Print.

Dunn, Patricia A., and Kathleen Dunn De Mers. “Reversing Notions of Disability and Accommodation: Embracing Universal Design in Writing Pedagogy and Web Space.” Kairos 7.1 (2002). Web. 10 Oct. 2011.

Fishman, Teddi. “When It Isn’t Even on the Page: Peer Consulting in Multimedia Environments.” Sheridan and Inman 59-73.

Hamel, Christine M. “Learning Disabilities in the Writing Center: Challenging Our Perspectives?” The Writing Lab Newsletter 26.8 (2002): 1-5. Print.

Hewett, Beth L. “Helping Students with Learning Disabilities: Collaboration between Writing Centers and Special Services.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 25.3 (2000): 1-5. Print.

Inman, James. A. “Designing Multiliteracy Centers: A Zoning Approach.” Sheridan and Inman 19-32.

Kiedaisch, Jean, and Sue Dinitz. “Changing Notions of Difference in the Writing Center: The Possibilities of Universal Design.” The Writing Center Journal 27.2 (2007): 39-59. Print.

Konstant, Shoshona Beth. “Multi-Sensory Tutoring for Multi-Sensory Learners.” Writing Lab Newsletter 16.9-10 (1992): 6-8. Print.

Kress, Gunther. “Multimodality.” Cope and Kalantzis 179-99.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Print.

McKinney, Jackie Grutsch. “New Media Matters: Tutoring in the Late Age of Print.” The Writing Center Journal 29.2 (2009): 28-51. Print.

—. “Leaving Home Sweet Home: Towards Critical Readings of Writing Center Spaces.” The Writing Center Journal 25.2 (2005): 6-20. Print.

Neff, Julie. “Learning Disabilities and the Writing Center.” The Longman Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. Eds. Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S. Blumner. New York, NY: Pearson, 2008. 376-90. Print.

New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Cope and Kalantzis 9-37.

Sheridan, David M. “Introduction: Writing Centers and the Multimodal Turn.” Sheridan and Inman 1-16.

Sheridan, David M, and James A. Inman, eds. Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 2010. Print.



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Trimbur, John. “Multiliteracies, Social Futures, and Writing Centers.” The Writing Center Journal 20.2 (2000): 29-31. Print.

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MAPPING TUTORIAL INTERACTIONS: A REPORT ON RESULTS AND IMPLICATIONS

Jamie White-Farnham

University of Wisconsin - Superior

[email protected]

Jeremiah Dyehouse

University of Rhode Island

[email protected]

Bryna Siegel Finer

Southern Vermont College

[email protected]

At the University of Rhode Island (URI), we

believe that assessment of writing center interactions can be useful beyond conventional efforts to measure the effects and effectiveness of tutoring strategies in sessions with student writers. In fact, we believe that assessment may be useful for developing knowledge about tutoring interactions in ways far more general but no less applicable to our field. Elsewhere, we have argued that engaging groups of tutors in assessment of tutoring strategies can yield multiple benefits for writing centers as organizations, such as establishing a writing center as a center for research in the University and fostering the disciplinary knowledge of tutors (Siegel Finer, White-Farnham, and Dyehouse). As a second step in reporting on a multi-year writing center research project, this article shares some results using a new instrument for assessment: tutorial interaction maps. We offer our model of assessment as one that shows promise for facilitating tutors’ understanding and discovery of the work that happens in writing centers, and we suggest that such a model might form a basis for new kinds of tools for use in writing center assessment.

Towards Empiricism Writing center research has described the process of

tutoring—how tutoring sessions actually develop in

time—in both practical and theoretical terms. Writing center scholars like Thomas Newkirk and Kristin Walker have published advice for managing how sessions develop. In theoretical accounts, academics like Irene Clark and Dave Healy have suggested how basic facts about language and reality ought to shape how we see the tutoring process. Although both practical and theoretical accounts of tutoring processes identify techniques and interactions that tutors regularly encounter, they treat these complex processes mostly as means or ends. Brooks, for instance, identifies "minimalist tutoring" strategies as a means to better tutoring interactions (3). North, by contrast, offered the end of “produc[ing] better writers, not better writing” as the summum bonum for writing centers (69).

Some studies have sought to describe what occurs in tutoring interactions from an analytical (not merely practical or theoretical) perspective. Severino, for instance, has analyzed writing center collaborations using rhetorical analysis techniques. Blau, Hall, and Strauss, in another example, have applied linguistic analysis methods to what they call tutor-client conversations. Thonus’ study of conversational features and session success adds another dimension to rhetorical analysis of sessions by drawing on sociolinguistic terms and methods to describe in

Mapping Tutorial Interactions • 2


particular the temporal features of tutors’ and students’ conversation.

Our “Mapping Tutorial Interactions” (MTI) study, unlike these analytical examples, conforms to a more formal understanding of empirical inquiry as defined by MacNealy: “research that carefully describes and/or measures observable phenomena in a systematic way planned out in advance of the observation” (qtd. in Gillam xvi). With our sights set on systematizing a procedure for data collection, we have developed a research study that engages groups of tutors in mapping how tutoring sessions develop with time; we describe this method of mapping in the following section.

Mapping Tutorial Interactions Our MTI study derives in part from our

immersion in the writing center conversation regarding “directive” and “facilitative” tutoring practices. Following the trajectory of oft-cited scholarship on this topic (including work by North, Brooks, Harris, Shamoon and Burns), Steven Corbett has offered a brief history of the conversation that argues for its continuing relevance. In particular, Corbett calls on writing center practitioners to “keep our pedagogy flexible and attuned to one writer at a time”—a sentiment with which we agree (par. 10). In our Center, we feel a particular connection to this idea, which we think of as a rhetorical or situational approach to tutoring. Several previous directors and tutors from our Center have published scholarship on such approaches to tutoring. Linda Shamoon and Deborah Burns's “A Critique of Pure Tutoring” is a staple of our tutor training literature, and the debate to which it contributes has inspired our inquiry into the nuances of tutoring generally (and former Assistant Director Matthew Ortoleva's inquiry into the directive/facilitative continuum in particular). Having accepted, practiced, reflected, and discussed the topic through many tutor cohorts, we now want to know more about the basic categories of activity that we call "writing centered."

Derived from this conversation, the MTI study asks two questions:

What does oscillation between facilitative and directive tutoring strategies look like in particular sessions?

What are the qualities of the interactions that result from oscillations between facilitative and directive strategies?

To begin to answer these questions, members of our staff planned systematic data collection and data analysis techniques that focused on identifying directive or facilitative tutoring strategies and write r- or writing-centered tutoring interactions. Our project engaged tutors and administrators in the recording, transcription, and analysis of Writing Center sessions, culminating in a series of mapping activities carried out by the Writing Center's staff. In these mapping activities, we worked from transcriptions of recorded sessions to plot the facilitative or directive qualities of tutors' strategies and the writer- or writing-centered qualities of the resulting interactions. For each numbered segment of each transcript, tutors and administrators marked a point on a standard grid (see Fig. 1). By connecting these points in sequence, each participant produced a complex curve or “map” of each recorded session. We planned data collection and analysis to involve multiple (ideally all) members of our Center's tutoring staff to maximize the impact our Center’s research could have on staff development.

In the next section, we describe our attempts at piloting this research project, since we foresaw a problem that we wanted to address before formally collecting any data: we recognized that tutors' subjectivity and various understandings of the terms (writing-/writer-centered and facilitative/directive) would influence the outcomes of our attempts to “map” the qualities and characteristics of actual sessions' interactions. Addressing the influence of subjectivity was the main focus of our pilot study, which we describe in detail below. We go on to describe some results from the official study, followed by implications. Training and Pilot Study Our first goal for the research project was to operationalize the terms we planned to use in our assessment map (see Fig. 1). Initial steps of research participants' training each semester included the



following readings: Brannon and Knoblauch’s “On Students’ Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response,” Brooks’ “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student do all the Work,” North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center,” Harris’ “Talking in the Middle,” and others. These readings gave our group a common theoretical foundation and a language with which to discuss tutoring generally, solve occasional problems, and discuss this project in particular. Issues of facilitative versus directive tutoring often come up in our staff meetings and serve as a frame for our staff’s discussions and problem solving. We have tried to emphasize that, while the MTI project investigates binaries (i.e., facilitative vs. directive, writing vs. writer centered), we do not feel that one pole on either spectrum is ‘better’ than the other. We have learned from Ortoleva, “As writing consultants, we must balance the student’s desire to leave with an improved text and our desire to help students internalize the lessons learned during the improvement of that text” (par. 11). How to accomplish this balancing is frequently discussed in our staff meetings. The idea is not to privilege one type of tutoring, but rather to investigate when these types of tutoring happen and to think about why. However, the pilot phase of the mapping showed us that while we are seemingly good at determining when we are directive and how to be so, facilitative tutoring is harder to define and is ostensibly harder to ‘do.’ This caused us to pause in the research and focus more on tutoring practice; we implemented workshops for our tutors during weekly staff meetings. These workshops have given tutors practice in approaching common tutoring situations using a variety of facilitative materials such as markers, index cards, and post-it notes. This next step of the training, in which tutors practiced mapping—making a decision about the characteristics of a tutoring session’s interactions and physically plotting them on a quadrant of a paper map depicted in Fig. 1—was particularly productive toward the development of the project as a whole. During one of our weekly meetings, we discovered two major project-related concerns: 1) the tutoring staff had been

reading and learning about some of the theoretical foundations but had not actually seen the mapping in practice, and 2) the subjective nature of the mapping terminology was becoming clear.

Accordingly, we devised a way to address both concerns: staff mapping. We chose a random page of writing center dialogue and broke the dialogue down into interactions based on natural conversation cues; for instance, a tutor question and writer response was designated as an interaction, or a back-and-forth about a particular writer concern was designated as an interaction. The sample dialogue was distributed at a staff meeting, and everyone silently went to work plotting interactions on the poles, trying to answer questions like: is this interaction more facilitative or more directive? Does it focus more on the writer or more on the text?

When everyone finished their individual maps, we put entire staff maps of a few interactions up on the white board. To our surprise and delight, our tutors’ maps were strikingly similar on almost every interaction. This evidenced two exciting indications: 1) our staff all understood the terms similarly, and 2) our terms were operationalized in a formal way, a “frame,” as O’Neill suggests, was created (para. 9); we could more easily claim some meaning for our study because there was less subjectivity than we initially thought. To this day, and despite the much less satisfactory results of our subsequent mapping efforts, we believe that it is possible to map tutorial interactions in ways that generate meaningful agreement among groups of tutors. Official Data Collection

Student writers were selected randomly as they came in for appointments; writers are generally URI undergraduate or graduate students diverse in age, race, and gender. They signed IRB approved consent forms indicating they would be audio recorded; a tutor then had a session with a student. Later, that same tutor listened to the tape, transcribed his/her own session, and wrote a reflection on the session. A group of additional tutors then mapped the interactions using the instrument (see Fig. 1 below). All maps were



then discussed by the group of tutors in order to draw conclusions about our tutoring sessions.

In an interpretive comparison of several such maps, we hope eventually to identify repeating shapes (or pieces of shapes), which can suggest generalizations about how different kinds of sessions characteristically proceed. In the present report, however, we focus on the agreements and disagreements we found among our tutors' maps and on our mapping methodology's possible implications in future assessments of tutoring sessions.

Some Results In general, in the main phase of our “Mapping

Tutorial Interactions” project, the maps of sessions produced by tutors did not tend to agree on the qualities or characteristics of particular tutoring interactions. However, in the area of identifying "directive" tutoring strategies, our group mapping approach to the assessment of several sessions showed some promising agreements. In the two examples to follow, we first discuss agreements among tutors assessing directive tutoring strategies and, secondly, disagreements and/or confusion among different participants in our analysis sessions. Identifying directive techniques

Many practitioners can identify what constitutes a directive tutoring technique: it is one that clearly suggests a change in the writer’s text or offers concrete advice. Here, we offer two examples of the strength of our mapping approach in identifying directive tutoring approaches.

First, 85% of mappers plotted interaction 31 of Session 418 with Phil in quadrant 4 (directive/writing-centered). The interaction is comprised of the tutor offering one final idea for Phil to consider and take away with him for the assignment, an essay comparing two poetry-reading events:

Tutor: yeah, and space can really be an interesting aspect of [description], what was it like to see her in front of this auditorium versus this other guy in this very small space?

Phil: okay Tutor: like, even having the person appear, what kind of a distance was between you? Phil: okay Tutor: And it can also help to kind of set up that scene and get your reading into that poetry reading mind frame.

Fig. 2 below illustrates the clear position of interaction 31 in quadrant 4 and the sudden shift that occurs immediately afterwards during interactions 32 and 33, which are focused exclusively on planning another session and saying goodbye. In fact, 100% of the maps show 32 and 33 shooting up and/or to the left as the tutor and writer part ways (see Fig. 2). Barring the end-of-session farewells, this session ends on a directive note after a session in which the tutor uses a wide variety of techniques, including approximately 12 open-ended questions and sentences to facilitate Phil’s understanding of the assignment and the poetry readings. The tutor's reflection on this session corroborates this interpretation: “In wrapping up, I’m glad that I was able to get the student thinking about the arrangement again because it helped to keep the focus on what the next step of the writing process would be.”

A second example also suggests that a collaborative mapping approach can soundly identify directive tutoring strategies. In our analyses of Session 158 with Will, all mappers characterized it as a predominantly directive/writing-centered session. Fig. 3 illustrates the average number of points plotted in each quadrant. Mappers agreed that the most interactions fell into quadrant 4 (see Fig. 3). Will was an English major and brought to this session a literary essay covered in critical comments from the professor; as Will put it: “she sorta tore my paper apart.” In his/her reflection, the tutor acknowledges the heavy use of directive approaches such as ending sentences in “right?” to keep the student “on board.” An interaction that occurs a quarter of the way into the session as Will and the tutor are trying to translate Will’s instructor’s comments exemplifies the tutor’s approach; interaction 27 is plotted in Quadrant 4 by all mappers



as directive, and it is situated among Interactions 25, 26, 28, and 29, all plotted in a tight cluster in Quadrant 4.

Will: But, like, what about that, like what should I do about the end, cause that’s something that I normally have trouble with, I general[ly] like finding appropriate transition sentences. Tutor: Yeah. And, look at, she does say, this you need to avoid as openers. So, you mean when you get to the end of the paragraph, or do you mean, like, the end? Will: Uh, I mean, like the end of paragraphs, like doing those transitioning sentences and opening sentences for each paragraph, like your topic sentence that should be at the beginning of each paragraph, right? Or topical sentences? Tutor: She said she wants topical, well she calls them topical sentences, and then she says “Logical paragraphs,” and often, when teachers say that, they do mean to use transitions. You could say, “This second example comparing,” you know, you go on to other characters.

In a reflection, the tutor describes the directive techniques as a way to create a writer-centered session, explaining that the session was more about helping Will acclimatize to “academic discourse” than the assignment at hand. S/he says “I felt the need to try and teach the student about the purpose of his writing…and literature essays generally.” In this case too, our mapping approach showed promising reliability in identifying directive techniques. Trouble identifying writer- and writing-centered interactions

Although our mapping approach showed promise in identifying directive tutoring strategies, it was much less promising in its ability to identify more “facilitative” kinds of strategies. In addition, we discovered that we do not as clearly recognize or agree upon what constitutes writer- versus writing-centered interactions. For instance, in Session 353, the tutor helps Thelma organize an essay comparing two writers’ experiences in slavery. After the session gets underway with the tutor asking about the assignment and reading Thelma’s draft, Interaction 10 occurs:

Thelma: …I’m on the right track, because when I first start writing, I, I’m all over the place, I don’t know what I’m doing, but after a person tells me this is what you’re doing right, this is what you need to work on, this is what you need to take out of your essay, then after that I can still start writing. Tutor: So at this point I don’t really see anything that you should take out, let’s take a look at this [assignment] sheet here and see, so you have a thesis, and your argument is convincing so far, and that organization, and I guess you do a good job because you always mention Jacobs first and then Douglass and then you go into the arguments, but like I said, maybe like a bridging paragraph or something like that between the two of them would help the organization.

According to the maps, the characteristics of the interaction are less easily detectable in this case; although most of the mappers plotted the interaction as generally directive, among the eight maps of this session, interaction 10 is plotted in three out of four quadrants by a fairly equal number of mappers: two mappers in quadrant 1 (facilitative/writing-centered), two mappers in quadrant 3 (directive/writer-centered), one mapper on the line between quadrants 2 and 3, and three mappers in quadrant 4 (directive/writing-centered) (see Fig. 4). However, one should not dismiss this variation as a lack of reliability (to borrow a term from psychometric theory). When one considers the interaction, there appear to be arguments to be made to support each mapper’s plotting choices. For instance, while the tutor directly suggests adding a transition to this particular essay (writing-centered), Thelma is already aware that her writing begins “all over the place,” suggesting that this student and tutor are engaged in a conversation about her writing process (writer-centered?) as well as addressing a rhetorical device (transitions) the writer wants to master (writer-centered?). The tutor’s reflection is similarly ambivalent about the nature of the session. S/he writes: “Since I hadn’t read Harriet Jacob’s [sic] narrative, I was taking complete stabs in the dark. I



tried to ask questions, and offer suggestions that would hopefully allow [the student] to draw a conclusion from the books that she hadn’t before. I think I ended up accomplishing that, but all in all her paper was in pretty good shape before she even brought it to me. She seemed to benefit more from having me tell her what I felt she did well, and what I felt needed work. She bestowed this arbitrary authority on me, and wanted me to live up to it. Some people just need that.”

The possibilities inherent in Thelma’s tutor’s motives during interaction 10 also exist in interaction 13. Here too the interaction seems to have been difficult to characterize. As Fig. 5 illustrates, four mappers identify it as writer-centered and four as writing-centered (see Fig. 5).

Interaction 13 focuses on tense, a common ESOL concern:

Tutor: I think, um, you’re on the right track, you put up some good arguments, and you follow along with the theses you set up. And I don’t see too many problems, just a few things about staying in the same tense. You jump back and forth between past and present. Thelma: So, in this I should put it all in past tense? Tutor: Well usually when you talk about literature and stuff you want to stay in the present. Especially if you’re going on analysis on the texts themselves, and not so much the events that happened. Thelma: OK.

Mappers who identified this interaction as writer-centered no doubt believe that the tutor is sharing knowledge that Thelma can apply across her writing assignments in literature and beyond. On the other hand, those who plot the interaction as writing-centered seem to read the tutor’s words regarding tense as error-correction for use in this project only.

Since the maps disagree so significantly, they do not constitute a cohesive or successful reading of the trajectory of Session 353. While they offer us food for thought about individual tutors’ practices and the situations that tutors are facing, the mappers’

agreement (or lack thereof) forces us to wonder how meaningful our mapping method has actually turned out to be.

Reflection and Implications Given the mixed results of our project's main

mapping phase, we are left with questions about the significance and worth of our mapping activity as an assessment method. Writing center studies, as a field, is only beginning to explore the kinds of assessments we have undertaken here. We suspect that assessment tools developed out of mapping approaches like ours could be useful to tutors and administrators, especially insofar as they could advance discussion of techniques and interactions in many sessions by providing a physical and visual data set rather than only a narrative account of a particular session. Such data and discussions in our center, for instance, led us to explore further the directive-facilitative continuum and articulate the rhetorical approach described earlier.

We also wonder, however, if it would be possible to achieve better agreement among mappers’ interpretations. We suspect that techniques drawn from writing assessment projects might help us refine our analysis methods—and to more reliably map tutors' strategies and sessions' interactions (see Niiler; O'Neill; Shale). For instance, more elaborate norming or training sessions for mappers would almost certainly help us to achieve better agreement on our maps in future phases. Such agreement could set the stage for an ideal: the emergence of generalized, temporal patterns on maps that may help us understand, for one instance, facilitative tutoring not only in theory and training, but also in interactive, context-shifting practice.

Moreover, despite the complexity of the judgments involved in mapping tutorial interactions, advances in natural language processing and computerized assessment technologies might eventually make possible automatic forms of writing center assessment. Imagine tutors watching a session recording in which an assessment algorithm suggests likely interpretations of interactions and strategies.



With only a few first steps towards writing center assessments of this kind, and given the limited resources of most writing centers, such a scenario may seem mere fancy. Yet, we contend, such a scenario is not necessarily as improbable as many of us might assume.

Unlike early investigators into writing assessment, writing centers' administrators and tutors are not as intimately part of the terrain of educational testing and research in which large-scale, “holistic,” and even automated writing assessment has developed (White). As a field, we might prudently decide to abandon research into reliable assessments of tutoring strategies and interactions with little fear of reprisals to us or to the writers with whom we collaborate. However, such a decision probably merits more consideration than it has garnered. As a research team, we can attest to our own intellectual excitement over developing new knowledge about tutors’ professional development, the effects of collaborative research on a writing center staff, and the writing center’s role in the research University. These more immediate, practical results of MTI, while satisfying, have not addressed the remaining problem of developing knowledge about the ways in which writing center sessions may typically develop with replicable methods. Despite our project’s mixed success, we believe that such methods deserve discussion—and, we believe, such discussion ought to be augmented by a wide sense of the possibilities that methods like ours put in play.



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Works Cited

Blau, Susan R., John Hall, and Tracy Strauss. “Exploring the Tutor/Client Conversation: A Linguistic Analysis.” Writing Center Journal (1998): 19-48. Print.

Brannon, Lil, and C. H. Knoblauch. “On Students’ Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response.” College Composition and Communication 33 (1982): 157-66. Print.

Brooks, Jeff. “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work.” Writing Lab Newsletter 15.6 (1991): 1-4. Print.

Clark, Irene L., and Dave Healy. “Are Writing Centers Ethical?” WPA: Writing Program Administrator 20 (1996): 32-38. Print.

Corbett, Steven J. “Tutoring Style, Tutoring Ethics: The Continuing Relevance of the Directive/Nondirective Instructional Debate.” Praxis 5.2 (Spring 2008). Web. 3 Dec. 2011.

Gillam, Alice. “Introduction.” Writing Center Research: Extending the Conversation. Eds. Paula Gillespie, Alice Gillam, Lady Falls Brown, and Byron Stay. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Assoc, 2002: xv-xxix. Print.

Harris, Muriel. “Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors.” College English 57.1 (1995): 27-42. Print.

Miles, Libby, et al. “Exploring Multiple Intelligences in the Writing Center.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 26.2 (October 2001): 1-5. Print.

Newkirk, Thomas. “The First Five Minutes: Setting the Agenda in a Writing Conference.” Writing and Response: Theory, Practice, and Research. Ed. Chris Anson. Urbana, IL: NCTE Press: 1989. 317-31. Print.

Niiler, Luke. “The Numbers Speak: A Pre-Test of Writing Center Outcomes Using Statistical Analysis.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 27.7 (March 2003). Web. 29 March 2012.

North, Stephen. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English 46 (1984): 433-46.

O’Neill, Peggy. “Reframing Reliability for Writing Assessment.” Journal of Writing Assessment 4.1 (December 2011). Web. 29 March 2012.

Ortoleva, Matthew and Jeremiah Dyehouse. “SWOT Analysis: An Instrument for Writing Center Strategic Planning.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 32.10 (June 2008). Web. 1 Jan. 2009.

Ortoleva, Matthew. “Centering the Writer or Centering the Text: A Meditation on a Shifting Practice in Writing Center Consultation.” Praxis 5.2 (Spring 2008). Web. 1 Jan. 2009.

Severino, Carol. “Rhetorically Analyzing Collaborations.” Writing Center Journal 13.1 (1992): 53-64. Print.

Shale, Doug. “Essay Reliability: Form and Meaning.” Assessment of Writing. Eds. Edward M. White, William D. Lutz, and Sandra Kamusikiri. New York: Modern

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Language Association of America, 1996. 76-96. Print. Shamoon, Linda K. and Deborah H. Burns. “A Critique of

Pure Tutoring.” Writing Center Journal 15.2 (1995): 134-151. Print.

Siegel Finer, Bryna, Jamie White-Farnham, and Jeremiah Dyehouse. “Writing Center Sustainability Through Research.” Academic Exchange Quarterly. (Winter 2011). Web. 26 April 2012.

Thonus, Terese. “Tutor and Student Assessments of Academic Writing Tutorials: What is ‘Success’?” Assessing Writing 8 (2002): 110-134. Print.

Walker, Kristin. “Difficult Clients and Tutor Dependency: Helping Overly Dependent Clients Become More Independent Writers.” Writing Lab Newsletter 19.8 (1995): 10-14. Print.

White, Edward M. “Power and Agenda Setting in Writing Assessment.” Assessment of Writing. Eds. Edward M. White, William D. Lutz, and Sandra Kamusikiri. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 9-24. Print.

vol 9, no 2 (2012): multiliteracy in the writing center

Documents

writing centers

future of writing center

writing center journal

pistones center

center administration

editor praxis

intersection of multiliteracy

spring edition