Blog Post (4/3)


                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 step would be to figure out what we can do differently.

                The research idea that’s been percolating around in my head isn’t related to pedagogy. The conversation we had in class about what constitutes a safe space – particularly the comment about the participant at the conference who lamented “what have you done to make me think this is a safe space?” – stuck with me. I know that in our online submissions that students can provide feedback on our feedback. Is there an equivalent evaluation in person-to-person tutoring? I wonder if it would be possible to add more questions to these feedback forms, specifically in relation to the students’ perception of our writing center as a “safe space”. These types of questions might require students to self-disclosed their marginal statuses – a potentially “unsafe” experience itself. But I figure the only way to determine if our writing center qualifies as a “safe space” is to listen to the experiences of others and alter our practices if necessary. Off the top of my head, I wonder if we could post some signage indicating our inclusivity of LGBT folks, non-native speakers, alternative students, PoC, etc.. We could use the responses to these surveys to gauge our writing center’s status as a “safe space”.

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