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Reports
from the 2003 IWCA/NCPTW Conference
In 2003, consultants and peer
tutors attended the IWCA/NCPTW conference in Hershey, PA. Each person
who attended the conference agreed to report on at least two panels. Below
you will find their observations.
Janine Carlock
One interesting presentation I went to was called “Undergraduate
and Graduate Writers with Learning Disablilites respond to WC practice.”
A woman who has had a lot of experience with Learning Disabled (LD) students
presented information about what an LD is, especially focusing on dyslexia.
Officially, a student has a learning disability when he/she has significant
difficulty in listening, speaking, reading, writing, reasoning and math.
She explained that dyslexia is neurologically based and affects the student’s
ability to learn, process, retain, retrieve, and express knowledge. Most
often affected are the skills of reading, spelling, writing, following
directions, memory, and organization. I found it helpful for my understanding
when she compared writing for these students to trying to grab lottery
balls out of the bin where they are flying. That’s what organizing
is like for them.
The result, of course, is a lowered self-esteem for these students and
a fear of being discovered/made fun of. The responses she received from
LD students included a sense of feeling dumb, feeling that they had nothing
to offer, that they had failed people, that they had lost childhood (teachers
were trying to catch them up while other children were playing). These
students asked for respect for their individuality, a welcoming attitude,
and kindness and patience. The presenter recommended having lots of patience,
helping with words and letting people with dyslexia come with ideas and
almost acting like a scribe to help them “catch” these ideas
on paper. She also mentioned that these types of students (people like
DaVinci, Edison and Einstein) are often kinesthetic learners, which should
be considered during a session. Three books which she recommended are
Faking It by Christopher Lee, The Secret Life of a Dyslexic Child
by Robert Frank and Learning Outside the Lines by Mooney and
Kohl.
The second presentation I would like to report on was from the people
at George Mason University. They talked about “Maximizing
Resources for ESL.” Mostly, it was a report about their
situation with respect to ESL clients. They seem pretty similar to our
WC size-wise with 28 people on staff, but they are primarily staffed by
first year grad students in the writing program. There are also 2 Linguistics
grad students who work there funded by George Mason’s ELI (English
Language Institute). This sounds similar to Pitt’s ELI, where I
also work. They have two ELI people (not sure if the same two, but I think
so) do two grammar workshops.
A couple of interesting things they mentioned were 1)they have a space
on their info sheet where they can check “Please feel free to discuss
this session with my instructor” and “I would rather you didn’t
talk about this session with my instructor” and 2)they use only
one info sheet/student, so each time a student comes in, he/she uses the
same sheet, though obviously needs to mark what is different about each
visit. They did this to make sure that ESL student were not coming in
more than the allotted 10 visits/semester that the WC has set as the limit.
They also recorded that 74% of the School of Management referrals were
ESL. Now the School of Management provides a satellite site where S. of
Management ESL students know they can come for help in their building.
One suggestion received was having certain sessions set aside specifically
for ESL students – similar to referring ESL students to Carol and
I , but more helpful, I think, as Carol and I are often so booked with
non-ESL students and CT’s, that the referral idea is often not practicable.
Liz Cowan
“New Collaborations” Agnes Scott College
This was a very small college, so I’m not sure how well their programs
would transfer to a place like Pitt, but they do some interesting things
with their first-years. Their chief WAC effort is a course called Freshman
Year Seminar (FYS), and is most closely comparable to our Seminar in Composition.
What is different though is that it is a discipline-based class. It is
writing intensive and considered to be an introduction to advanced thinking.
There is a peer writing tutor who is assigned to each YFS. This tutor
attends all classes and is the primary tutor for students in that class.
Additionally, the tutor gives faculty feedback on the writing assignments-this,
I think, is a particularly important part of the WAC program because the
faculty teaching FYS classes do not necessarily have an English background
and the experience can help them to better integrate writing into their
other classes in their discipline. Finally, the tutor participates in
class discussions (having completed all relevant readings) and in doing
so, acts as a model for intellectual inquiry. It is hoped that the freshman
students will follow the example of the tutor, elevating their own analysis
in class and in their writing. I think that the idea of having a peer
tutor act as an actual participant in freshman writing-intensive classes
is ripe with benefits--perhaps if Pitt’s peer tutoring program were
to expand enough, we could implement a similar program.
“Getting ‘Em While They’re Young” University
of Minnesota
I didn’t learn much new at this panel, mainly because Minnesota
is a university much like Pitt, with very similar approaches. Their writing
center, like ours, is staffed by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates.
The smaller schools that I saw present were all staffed exclusively by
peer writing tutors. Minnesota has just recently added satellites to their
writing center--in the library and the residence halls. They had a response
similar to ours: the residence hall attracted many freshman (in fact over
90% of their dorm students were freshman; however, non-residents could
not enter the dorm site) and the library attracted more graduate students.
Maybe freshman just don’t know about the library. The freshman outreach
program that they did have that was different took place during the summer.
The writing center had representatives giving flyers to parents of incoming
freshman during orientations. The hope, they claimed, was that when students
become bogged down with papers in their first semester, their parents
will recommend that they visit the writing center. However, they had no
way to test how often this actually happened. An interesting idea all
the same.
“Negotiating Pedagogical Differences in First-Year Seminar”
Muhlenberg College
This was another very small college with a peer tutor staffed writing
center. Their WA program was very much like Agnes Scott’s. The main
difference is that students in their FYS class were required to meet with
their tutor (called a Writing Assistant orWA) at least three times over
the course of the semester. The WA was a regular peer tutor in the writing
center but also had specific office hours devoted to meeting with students
from the FYS class to which they were assigned. The writing center director
trained all the WAs, who were upper-classmen nominated by faculty members
each year. The main problem they identified with the current program (which
had all the benefits of Agnes Scott’s) was that the FYS professors
wanted the course to be content-specific, something they felt was often
at the expense of basic writing skills. This problem I’m sure arises
for Agnes Scott and I suppose any WAC program trying to find the correct
balance.
Elizabeth DeLosa
During the second session on Thursday, I attended David M Sheridan and
Michael McLeod’s Presentation entitled "Writing Back
in Multimedia: Supporting Digital Communication in the Writing Center."
This presentation stressed the importance of writing center consultants
being knowledgeable about a student’s communication through digital
assignments. They discussed, for the majority of their presentation, how
messages are conveyed through words, images, colors, and sounds. David
Sheridan gave the example of a picture of a fighter jet. If this picture
was accompanied by the "Star Spangled Banner" and had a flag
as the background it would convey a message of patriotism. In contrast,
if the same fighter jet was accompanied by threatening music and had bombs
exploding in its wake, it would convey more of any anti-war message. Although
we do not receive many students working on digital projects here at the
University of Pittsburgh, it was interesting to think about the different
messages that could be conveyed digitally using images and sounds instead
of words.
The second presentation I attended was given by Tony Shaffer and it was
entitled, "Shiftless Paradigms: The Earth May be Round but
My World is Still Flat." Mr. Shaffer discussed how an online
tutoring session can be as fulfilling for the student and tutor as a face
to face session. He stressed the importance of using complete sentences
and a large number of examples while online tutoring. He also stressed
the point that to be a good tutor all you have to have is a place to sit,
something to teach, and a student who wants to learn, which can all be
done over the internet. Through my Freshmen Studies UTA position, I have
had lots of students email me their papers and ask for suggestions about
revision. I really liked this presentation because I was struggling to
communicate effectively over the internet. Mr. Shaffer used clear and
concise examples which I now use in my tutoring sessions with the students
from Freshmen Studies.
Barbara Edelman
Speaking up and Writing
Back: Tutoring as Political Act
Jaqueline Emery & Jennifer Sweda
Two writing center faculty members and administrators from the University
of Pennsylvania discussed ways to combat common misconceptions of the
writing center among prospective tutees (for example, that the WC is a
proofreading service) and within the university at large (for example,
that the WC is a place to fix grammar). Both presenters were articulate
and interesting but most of the strategies they offered are already in
place at Pitt, such as outreach programs, meetings with instructors, referrals
to freelance editors and proofreaders, and the inclusion of ESL experts
in the Writing Center.
Trading Spaces: Looking Out and Looking In on the Challenges of
the Writing Process
Haeli Colina
An undergraduate writing consultant discussed ways in which her experience
as an exchange student in Uruguay has affected her consultant work with
ESL students. The presentation was mostly anecdotal and presented the
basic message that both parties benefit if the consultant respects and
learns something about the student’s culture.
Ellen
Smith
"'The Most Important Stuff': How a Consultant Influences
the Revision Process" with Troy Hicks and Ramona Fuja.
This presentation was well-conducted by experienced Writing Center consultants
with intensive background in composition pedagogy. The panelists cited
certain key texts on writing process, revision, and literacy in order
to what kinds of dialogue are most effective in writing center work. These
included Emig's The Composition Process of Twelfth Graders and
Sommers' "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced
Writers." A more narrow question framing their inquiry was: Should
consulting sessions take a minimalist or directive approach? At the outset
of their research (which involved videotaped sessions as well as reviews
of student revisions following consulting sessions), the panelists expected
to find that consulting sessions with first-year students should be more
directive than those with other types of student writers. This expectation
was especially strong for Fuja, who had experience in working with multi-lingual
students from the former Soviet Union at the American University of Eastern
Europe; she suggested that American universities tend to assume that a
directive approach is somehow unethical in that it takes away a student's
agency. In the videotaped session presented on PowerPoint, it seemed that
Hicks's minimalist approach with a student more than sufficed in getting
her to begin to assess the places that were weak in her draft; as she
began to notice certain weaknesses, Hicks was able to find places for
more directive involvement (i.e., what he referred to as a "mini-lesson
on essay structure). Whereas Fuja was very interested in the cultural
and political assumptions informing the minimalist/directive issue, Hicks
was more concerned with how consultants can evaluate the effectiveness
of their work with students if we don't consciously follow up on and examine
the revisions that result from consulting sessions. How, for instance,
do the components of the dialogue between writer and consultant become
evident in a revised draft? The panel left room for discussion, and the
general consensus seemed to be that our assessments of our work will only
be enhanced by attention to the concrete outcomes of our work with writers
on revision in relation to accounts of what sort of dialogue went on in
the session.
"Extreme Sessions from the Writer's Point of View"
Bryon Grigsby, Jennifer Bubnick, Kristen Fitzgerald, Angie Frederick,
and Jessica Jansyn
This session proposed three "extreme" situations writing center
consultants may have to assist students with: researching with limited
library resources, overcoming a language barrier, and close reading. At
the outset, three groups were formed so that discussions could be devoted
to one of each "difficult" writing situation. I decided to be
in the ESL-related group. This group, led by undergraduate tutors from
Centenary College, fell short of addressing the situation from the writer's
point of view as suggested by the title. It seemed that the students presenting
the "problem" seemed mostly concerned with how difficult the
situation was for the tutor. There seemed, however, to be people in our
group who had more exposure to and experience with ESL students, and so
we were able to get the discussion beyond how hard it was and to concrete
practices and resources, such as learner's dictionaries. Very often in
these conversations, we dwell on the frequency of error in an ESL student's
work yet tend to underappreciate the degree of difficulty and accomplishment
ESL writing at the college level represents. Once we moved away from the
fear that seemed to surround this issue for the presenters, it was a very
helpful exchange.
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