Writing Center Class Spring 2018

While Learning to Write (LW), Writing to Learn Content (WLC) and Writing to Learn Language (WLL) are all useful and valid in particular contexts and under particular conditions, I agree with Ortega when she says that these divisions often create "misalignments" between teacher and student understandings. This is particularly problematic in the context of second language writing.  In the context of ELL in higher education, the WLL approach and LW dominate.  However, if one subscribes to the ideas that writing/composing is a form of learning (which I do), exclusive adherence to the WLL and LW approaches are limiting at best (although I would argue they are restrictive, prescriptive and unjust).  At the early stages of language learning there is always some degree of WLL and LW, but if the goals of instruction includes engaging students in making meaning, there must be a shift to  Writing to Learn (not specific content necessarily, but writing itself as an act throu...

I'm familiar with different approaches in different contexts. As an instructor, I'm most familiar with learning to write, because even my content-based assignments receive extensive writing attention. As a student, though, I was and am more familiar with writing to learn. But I'm still displeased that as a student in English at the undergraduate, MA, and PhD levels, there was/is not more attention placed on learning to write. At this stage, this seems to be something professors take for granted. (I was recently told: "That's not how you title a dissertation chapter." And I responded: "Can you please tell me how you title a book chapter? I have never done this.") I think also in liberal arts required courses, writing to learn is prioritized in many (most?) disciplines. I'm not particularly persuaded by one form over another, though I have never succeeded in writing to learn language models. But I am partial to the idea that learning to write sho...

I'm more familiar with the LW approach to teaching writing, especially in the writing center when I am working with students whose content areas I'm unfamiliar with. Since I don't know anything about the TV show "Making a Murderer" or how spinal chord injuries affect heart rate variation, the only way I can help is making sure the words are doing what the author wants them to do. I try to understand the content mainly in vague, large ideas. By abstracting what the students tell me about the content they are trying to convey, I can help them structure the smaller, important words around the content words so that the writing supports the ideas. I often find myself saying things like "THIS concept x IS BASED ON concept w WHICH WE KNOW BECAUSE concept y AND THEREFOR concept p IS TRUE." So, I'm certainly not teaching WLC. I do think that the categories could do with some blurring. I liked the idea of the genre approach to writing, as Ortega outlines on ...

In my tutoring sessions, I've been most familiar with the 'learning to write' paradigm. I felt Ortega's statement that "...LW places at the center of attention the cognitive activity of the writer and her or his authorial voice" encapsulates the work my students have called on me to do. Whether they're working on a Peace Corps application, a psychology paper, a global health paper or a speech for Rhetoric, I've found my work can be described in Ortega's twofold statement: helping students put in writing first, their cognitive activity (their opinions, arguments, and questions) and second, their authorial voice (by airing confusions, doubts, and identifying needs for further research). In class, I'm wondering if we can have a discussion about the overlap between LW and WLL when it comes to students picking up specific language necessary for academic assignments. As Ortega writes, there is a difference between students "learning to write abo...

I would say right now I am most familiar with WLC. It’s pretty much what you do when you are in the process of writing a dissertation. However, it was not always like this. Before I came to the US, I did a lot of WLL. I used to go to the Language Center in my university in Spain. The language center felt more like a library, but you could write an essay, leave it in a mail box, and the language specialist would put it back in a different mail box with all the mistakes corrected. You never talked to the person who corrected your essay though. So I guess it was a very interesting version of a Writing Center? At that time, however, I found it fascinating J In addition, I would also facebooked a friend in Russia on a weekly basis and we would just write long letters to each other for the sake of practicing English. All this contributed to my WLL, and it all took place in Spain. Then, when I came to the States and started to take university courses, everything shifted to a LW per...

As an ESL teacher, most of my experience has been with Learning to Write and Writing to Learn Language. All the writing done in my grammar classes focuses on eliciting specific forms.   It’s necessary to evaluate their language proficiency, but in the real world they’re never going to have to write a paragraph focusing on relative clauses and passives, hypothetical conditionals, or deliberately switching between perfect, progressive, and progressive perfect aspects.   In my undergrad writing classes, the focus was partially on WLL (using vocabulary skills, reporting verbs, academic language etc.) but mostly it was learning to write especially for American academia.   I once taught a graduate writing course which focused on all aspects. They learned the way to write a research paper and wrote one in their field.   The challenge for me is that although I was grading their work, I wasn’t actually a part of their audience in regard to content.   I remember one pap...

I'm definitely most familiar with WLC in my own work. My undergrad in Philosophy emphasized this approach, often outright saying that grammatical accuracy is unimportant. The ideas took precedent over any thing else. My work in English has followed along these lines, though, notably, with much greater  emphasis on the grammar side (WLL? Kinda?). Poli sci also worked with LW because the form is so specific, frustratingly so. In my teaching, this semester is almost exclusively LW (specifically close readings). I have been essentially ignoring content in the papers they produce to see if they have figured out the structure of the close reading. Some WLL and WLC is a necessary (and happy) byproduct, but it is certainly not the main focus. I think incorporating all of these together will synthesize the learning process in a positive way for students, but it might overwhelm them to focus on so many things (especially if they are unfamiliar with one aspect, like how to write a close rea...

                As a Rhetoric instructor, I think that I am most familiar with the Learning to Write (LW) paradigm. My course is designed to help students understands the various social demands they will write in, as well as why it is so important that they know who they are writing for (their audience). However, as a tool to improve LW skills I often make my students write about something – Maus , an interview they conducted, a news article. In this way, I also emphasize Writing to Learn Content (LWC). My students practice their critical reading skills when they decide what is the most important or noteworthy feature of what they read. Writing to Learn Language (WLL) is probably the category I work least with, mostly because my students already have a basic knowledge of grammar and vocabulary. We still do work on passive voice, word choice, and grammar rules – but only if I notice it becoming a problem in thei...

When I tutor students in math and engineering specifically, but other STEM fields also, I find that even on a semantic and syntactic level I have a hard time understanding what's happening. If something seems unfamiliar, I'll ask the (grad) student "is this a phrase in your field?" and if it is, I just leave it alone completely. But these papers are especially hard because it's difficult to know what's not written well (that is, conveying meaning), and what is discipline-specific. Sometimes students don't know either. Assignments in my Rhetoric class tend to be both learning to write and writing to learn. Especially my last project, which is a proposal, encourages them to pick something they care about (and they have to pick something local) so that they can see their projects as impactful. But of course the written and verbal presentation of the material is the majority of the grade. Sometimes when students visit the Writing Center, I can't tell wha...

I am not sure if I ever had the experience of reviewing a paper that is totally different from my or and that is extraneous to me. Probably the maximum I’ve done is when I volunteered in the Travel Grants Committee and we had to rate abstract proposals based on general criteria like clarity and significance. To me, this was extremely difficult to do because some of the abstracts were so technical and complex that I could barely understand what they were trying to do or to demonstrate. This, in turn, complicated a lot the rating process and the inter-reliability scores. As for the writing to learn approach, I would say that anything my students write for class correspond this category. So in the Spanish writing course, students write to both, learn the different types of essay (description, narration, exposition and argumentation) and more importantly, learn and improve their Spanish writing skills, so that they are better prepared to for future linguistics or literature courses in...

UW-Stevens Point, where I worked in the writing center before coming here, has a very strong Natural Resources emphasis (so much so they're planning on cutting just about every humanities major they currently offer). In the writing center, I was often faced with papers for classes I knew nothing  about. Waste management (solid, liquid, and landfill) was a very popular program while I was there and I could barely wrap my head around what they were talking about. But, like any other assignment, we went back to the assignment description and always made sure they checked those boxes. When reading through the paper, it was always helpful to have students explain things to me that I didn't understand. In (roughly) every other session this would lead to a writing break through; as they explained it to me, they worked out on their own how to explain it to others.  TA-ing Foundations of the English Major right now, I can say their close reading assignments are both writing to learn...

I found the different breakdowns of writing assignment types in the Bedford Guide and the Severino and Gilchrist paper really helpful, especially after spending a great deal of time this semester explaining to my students the expectations unique to specific assignments. I know they found particularly helpful my description of different assignments-- for example, if they were working on a speech for Rhetoric, they found it helpful when I explained how a speech was not like a personal essay/ op-ed/ argumentative paper that they’d written or were more familiar with. I’m looking forward to using some of the descriptions from both texts to help ground my students like this now and in the future. A Learning to Write assignment I’ve worked on as a tutor is a “motivation statement” for an application to the Peace Corp. A Writing to Learn assignment is an analysis of text for a Global Health course (in which the professor had students curate and argue a specific position based on a number o...

                The main take home from Bedford about the importance of pursuing research in the writing center for me is the idea of research as functioning as a vehicle for change or challenging the status quo. I think it would be easy to conduct a writing center and get stuck in a bit of a rut – or to engage in the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality. In advocating for writing center research and the publication or presentation of that research at conferences, Bedford stresses the ways in which research can produce change in the field. Maybe some tried and true methods aren’t so tried and true – and we need quantitative and qualitative research to better understand what is not working so that we can make the changes necessary and adapt. Thinking about the Fei piece from last week, the research reveals that quite a bit of our feedback doesn’t always manifest itself in improved student writing. The next...

It's interesting to think about a research study in the writing center because I still feel so new to it. I'm curious to know more about the writing center research out there, and what sorts of things can in fact be measured. For example, would it be possible to discover how effective different tutor strategies are? I know we have learned about different techniques tutors can use--asking questions, explaining, motivational language and so on. But what about the use of silence? Sometimes in tutoring sessions I am very conscious of how long I am waiting in silence, for instance, after I ask a question. It's a tough game between giving the student sufficient time to think about the question and respond and worrying that my question was not clear enough, and then breaking the silence to either rephrase (and run the risk of confusing the student more) or to provide the answer. So, I wonder if there is an ideal amount of time to let the silence play out. Because often I get to th...

Research is an essential tool in hoping for change, improvement, or better knowledge or awareness about an issue. Making connections between my specialization (L2 online peer review) and the Writing Center, I am very interested in online tutoring, and in particular, the affordances that different software, platforms, or perspective may provide to the writers.  For example, I found very inspiring the article we read from Tim Remington about how online feedback can be extremely rich when taken from a different perspective, and Deidre too had really good insights on this topic. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an open bank where you can find these issues explained and exemplified, so other people can use them too? Another idea I had was combining the medium of interaction. Research in peer review has shown how students’ performance is maximized when we combine different forms of feedback (face-to-face, online, oral, written). How would it be if students had the option/motivation t...