Ecwca Newsletter Fall 2012revised

7/31/2019 Ecwca Newsletter Fall 2012revised

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East Central Writing Centers Association Fall 2012

ECWCAOutreach: Expanding Writing Center

Third SpaceElizabeth Coughlin, Jennifer Finstrom,

Elizabeth Kerper, Kevin Lyon, and Sowmya Sastri

DePaul University

This issue is our biggest yet! With eight articles, two featured writing centers, andmany tutor voice pieces, there is plenty in this issue for everyone. Proving there aregreat things happening in our region, this issue (extended print versions ofpresentations from this years conference) presents a variety of ways to contextualizethe work we do in writing centers. As we push through our terms, quarters, blocks, orsemesters, these submissions should provide each of us with conversation/discussionmaterials for our WC meetings, scholarship, and training sessions.

If you like what you find in this issue, feel free to let us know. If you want to seesomething more from these newsletters, let us know. If you have something youd liketo contribute, see the last page of this newsletter and let us know. If you use thesenewsletters in creative ways in your centers, let us know.

We can be contacted at [email protected] Garrison

This Issue: A Note from the Editor

Fall 2012

In his review of Writing Center Research: Extending the Conversation,Harvey Kail placed the writing center at the busiest intersectionsof academic literacy work faculty lane here, student lane there,everyone moving at rush hour intensity . . . situated . . . right in the

middle of the exchange . . . The writing process, with all itsfreighted institutional context, walks daily in the writing centerdoor and makes itself available for discussion (315). At ourwriting center, as at many writing centers, we have taken thediscussion beyond our doors, and as we have extended our reach,we routinely reflect on outreachs role in our program and on theways that outreach can support our mission and constituencies.The 2012 ECWCA annual conference offered us an opportunity totalk with others about writing center outreach, theorize and reflecton our practices and their implications, and talk with fellowwriting center people about our research and experiences andtheirs. This paper is an expanded version of our presentation, andin it, we offer our thoughts about the ways that we have

conceptualized our outreach Continued on page 3

ARTICLES

1Outreach: Expanding Writing CenterThird Space

Reflection: A Messy but Vital Practicefor the Writing Center Tutor

9

The Rhetorical Triangle andPostmodernism Walk into a Contact

Zone

10

Technical Communication WritingCenter: A Snapshot

13

Renegotiating Nontraditional Identityin the Writing Center: What it Means toBe a Peer or the Center as Mentor

15

Supporting Second Language Writerswith Writing Groups

16

Relax and Energize: Tools to TransformWriters Anxiety into Positive Creativity

18

Writing Center Spotlights & Tutor Voices 24

2013 ECWCA CFP 31

Call for Papers 32

2A Letter from the President of ECWCA

ADDITIONAL CONTENT

Regional Announcements 30, 32

Facilitating Change: An Administrator'sAccount of Starting a Writing Lab

20

232012 Conference Report

Save the date!

2013 ECWCA ConferenceApril 12-13

Clarion University


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East Central Writing Centers Association

Preparing to write this letter caused me to think about whyI love my job and why I ended up running a writing centerinstead of being a veterinarian, the goal Id had since gradeschool.

One of the main reasons is that college classes for me werelike a big buffet full of tasty dishes. I wanted to samplesome of everything, a scoop of literature, a big helping ofscience, a dab of French for spice. I didnt want all ofanything; I craved a little bit of everything. Still, thats notthe whole reason.

The fact is that once I got to know the kind of people whowork in writing centers I was hooked. Finally, Id located abunch of people like me. Sure, each of them was studying aparticular discipline, but almost all of them dabbled in otherareas and reveled in learning about subjects outside theirfields of expertise. There was the tutor with a Ph.D. inbiology who could talk for hours about Shakespeare, hadread every interesting novel published since he was anundergrad, and knew all the Three Stooges movies by heart.Then there was the journalist with a degree in plantpathology who studied philosophy and religion in herspare time. From the moment I started tutoring amongthese people, I recognized that the variety of interests andskills among them was directly connected to their successas tutors.

That still isnt it entirely, though. The clincher is that thosetutors, the people I work with today, and the tutors,

administrators, and scholars I meet through ECWCA sharesome core values that unite us as a community of teachersand learners:

Letter from the President of ECWCA Jo Ann VogtIntellectual Curiosity

Each of us has a grounding discipline, but we are allvoracious readers who want to know more about almosteverything. As a result, whether students come to us with

a research paper about the foraging habits of urban deeror with a social policy paper focusing on early childhoodeducation, we are genuinely interested and ready not onlyto act as an engaged audience, but also eager to learn whatthe student and the assignment have to teach us.Whatever the subject, we want to know more, and thestudents and faculty who seek our help can sense that.

Respect and Empathy for Teachers and Students

All of us have been students, and whether we have beenteachers or not, we know from experience that both aredemanding roles. Looking at hundreds of student papers

has convinced us that most students are making an honesteffort to follow their assignments and produce papers thatare clear and logically organized. Weve also seen enoughassignment sheets to know that teachers dont set out toconfuse students. In fact, when confusion results, weunderstand that its often because a teacher has triedperhaps too hardto give students everything they needto succeed. Our steadfast respect and empathy forteachers and learners go a long way toward helping uswin the trust of faculty, of students, of each other.

Those two points may seem fairly simple, even obvious,but they have underpinned every hiring decision I havemade since 1987, and I believe they are the reason thatthose who meet through ECWCA seem to have a naturalaffinity, a tendency to talk easily even upon first meeting.We are inherently curious about how other centersoperate, and we trust one another to respond charitably toour inquiries and explanations.

I invite you to join the conversation about tutoring,teaching, and learning that is ongoing in the ECWCAnewsletter. If travel is an option, join us at our nextconference at Clarion University in April 2013. Youll findthere people eager to learn from you and delighted toshare what they know about a wide range of subjects,writing center work first among them.

Sincerely,Jo Ann Vogt

Meet the Associate EditorFranklin K.R. Cline

Franklin has been active in writing centers, on and off,for four years. He has worked for two years atTruman State Universitys Writing center and iscurrently employed by Western Michigan Universityas both a graduate teaching assistant and a writing

center consultant.

He has previous editing experience as an AssociateEditor of the student newspaper at Truman StateUniversity and has worked with print and electronicliterary journals as well as sports blogs. He recentlytaught a first-year writing course at WMU and wasmentored in writing pedagogy by WMUscomposition director. We welcome Franklin to theteam!


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initiatives, we describe some of our efforts and events,and we end with some thoughts about what all of thismight mean for now and for the future.

By way of introduction and context, our universitys26,000 students, like their counterparts at two and fouryear institutions throughout the US, come from all overthe world. Ours is a multi-campus institution, withmany physical and online courses and programs andmany transfer students. Our writing center is acomparatively old one, dating back to the mid-1970s,and we always have offered outreach of one sort oranother. Our program is comparatively large, as well,with two full-time offices, outposts and online services,and a sizeable staff of graduate and undergraduate peerwriting tutors who work on an array of projects inaddition to working with graduate and undergraduatestudents, faculty, staff, and alumni. In 2006 anadministrative restructuring moved us to AcademicAffairs (from the English department), and we becamethe University Center for Writing-based Learning(UCWbL) and participated in the formation of four otherUCWbL programs: Writing Groups, Writing Fellows,Faculty Development & Workshops, and theCollaborative for Multilingual Writing and Research.

As our center has grown, we have ratcheted up ouroutreach to offer a wider array of support for writers andwriting as well as our efforts to support the UCWbLs

mission to enlarge and enhance the role of writing in thegreater academic and professional conversations. As aresult of our internal and external focus, we initiate andrespond to requests for partnerships with otheruniversity offices and several nonprofit organizations inthe Chicago community. Our Outreach Team works witheach partner in a variety of ways and locations tocollaboratively assess and provide the resources neededto fit the missions of all. In reflecting on theseexperiences, we have seen that outreach can bridge andintegrate the many spaces that writers occupy andsupport their efforts to negotiate their way and find theirvoice.

Our theoretical approach to our outreach can be put intocontext by Jonathan Mauks 2003 article in CollegeEnglish, Location, Location, Location: The Real(E)states of Being, Writing, and Thinking inComposition. Mauks piece opens with a discussion thatcompares academia to the real estate industry in thesense that each community seeks to engage theirbuyers in a conceptualization of what their purchase

affords themmainly, what they can envisionthemselves being, doing, or becoming by investing inthat location. For real estate agents, this is done bydiscussing the physical amenities such as local schooldistricts and proximity to shopping and nightlife. Inacademia, university admissions brochures often

portray depictions of lush green quads filled withstudents playing games or book-filled libraries wherestudents are deep in conversation. In each scene, in eachmoment for investment, both the real estate andacademic promotions are not necessarily displaying aconnection to the physical spaces but rather are selling aconceptualization and ideology of those spaces.

But the reality that sets in after the deal has been closed,which Mauk points out and that we see, as well isthat instead of feeling part of the academic enterprise,many students feel a great sense of dislocation.Although students who squeeze classes into already

overcrowded lives certainly might feel that way,students across all demographic and academic profilescan experience this disconnection. Mauk follows hisopening real estate metaphors by arguing that inacademia, we are missing an opportunity to trulyengage students in the formation of conceptual spaces.He writes, In other words, the value of academia forstudents depends upon their interpretation or creationof academic space . . . As students enter into academicspace, they must, at the same time, enter into itsmaking. And succeeding at such a feat requiressignificant guidance (Mauk 368).

We view the significant guidance that Mauk refers toas a collaboration. We recognize the challenges ofdecoding and interpreting new spaces, for thosechallenges are universal and lifelong. They presentopportunities but also require accountability, whichAdrienne Rich captured so effectively in her famous1977 convocation speech at Douglass College,Claiming an Education, in which she calls forstudents to demand to be taken seriously so that youcan also go on taking yourself seriously and to[assume] your share of responsibility for what happensin the classroom (6). Essentially, Rich argues that

students must take part in their own trajectory withinacademiathat they must determine their path throughacademic space and work to give that space meaning.In our experience, we have seen that once students areable to find, own, and assert their voice, once they havea better sense of their intellectual surroundings andtheir ability to scope out the landscape, they are betterable to negotiate their way, make connections, carve outa space of their own, and claim their education. Wehave learned that if we reach out to students where they

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are, our conversations can engender powerfulconnections that in turn empower all of us. For theUCWbLs Outreach Team, this presents us with amoment of Kairos: this is our opportunity to invitestudents to connect with and begin to create their ownsense of academic space and to make it their own.

Mauk calls for rigorous exploration of the changingacademic space outside of our offices and off ourcampuses, arguing that it is appropriate for writingtheorists and teachers [ and, we would add, writingcenter practitioners ] to lead . . . this enterprise . . .because our field emerges from the study of classicalrhetoric (and its focus on situation or kairos) andbecause of the particular ways that students andacademia interface (369-370). Moving from the languageof real estate to that of critical geography, Mauk calls fora pedagogy and theoretical lens that accounts for andengages the spatial and material conditions that

constitute the everyday lives of students and towardthat end proposes a heuristic for orienting the acts ofteaching and learning writing in increasingly spaced-outcollege environments: third space, a concept [that]projects a "real and imagined" realm of intellectual-socialaction (370).

For this discussion, we have, in turn, examined thirdspace and its potential usefulness for theorizing andreflecting on writing center outreachs purpose andpotential. The term third space, derived from criticalgeography and post-colonial theory, has been used todescribe and conceptualize writing centers and writing

center work as well as composition for many years now.As Nedra Reynolds points out in CompositionsImagined Geographies (1998), Spatial metaphors havelong dominated our written discourse in the field ofComposition Studies (field being one of the first spatialreferences we can name) because, first, writing itself isspatial (14). The same certainly can be said of WritingCenter Studies. Witness its multitude of spatial imagery:liminal space, in-between-ness, border-crossing,intersections, interstices, hybrid discourse, Burkeanparlors, Pratts contact zones, Anzaldas mestizaconsciousness, Hannah Ashleys Literacy Dula, Nancy

Effinger Wilsons bodega, Vandenbergs and otherstheories of location, and so forth. Theories of thirdspace and its precursors can be traced far back incomposition and writing center theory, as well: MartinCarnoys Education as Cultural Imperialism (1974),Bruffees Collaborative Learning and the Conversationof Mankind (1984), Bartholomaes Inventing theUniversity (1986), James Paul Gees What is Literacy(1987), Berlins Rhetoric & Ideology in the WritingClass (1988), as well as Reynoldss CompositionsImagined Geographies: The Politics of Space in the

Frontier, City, and Cyberspace (1998) to list but onlya few notable publications.

As Angela Petit cautions us, however, both PeterCarino, in What Do We Talk About When We TalkAbout Our Metaphors and Thomas Hemmeter, in TheSmack of Difference: The Language of Writing CenterDiscourse suggest that only through continual self-reflection will we understand how [all of thesedefinitions and metaphors] influence our theorizingabout writing centers and our activities within centers(111). Undergraduate and graduate students areconstantly navigating in and out of a variety of thirdspaces. These interactions with other students, staff,faculty, and institutions might cause them to questiontheir own understanding and identity, and they maynot always be reminded of their agency: recognizingthis, writing center outreach seeks to lift the veil thatmay disguise the third space as simply guess what the

teacher is thinking exercises and instead invitesstudents to share their voices.

For us, outreach work is the creation or extension ofthird space in a writing center, and we define thirdspace as the location or ideology that is negotiatedand/or created when different identities or spaces comeinto discussion with one another. The first space of anindividual can be seen as the persons intimate identityas he or she perceives it. This includes elements of homelife, education, and life experience, not to mentionsocioeconomic status and sex/gender identity. Secondspace is the idea of an assumed or secondary identity

such as a persons broader home life, his or her job,office, or discipline. Third space can be created throughany interaction of first or second spaces. In the contextof writing center work, this could be a writers firstspace interacting with a tutors first space, a writersfirst space interacting with the second space of thewriting center, a writers first space interacting with atutors first space and the second space of the writingcenter, the course, the university, etc. Third space doesnot exist until two separate spaces come into contact orconversation with one another, and it is the interactionof individuals in the writing center where third space

happens. What is significant about third space for us inthe writing center is that it encourages and ensuresagency for the writer.

Outreach seeks to bring students from across theuniversity into the writing center to discuss the choicesthat they make in their writing and to question theclashes that they may have with subject matter (whentheir personal background or understandingfirstspacemight differ from the disciplines understandingor expectations second space). Students begin to


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interact with a tutor (thereby creating a third space) bybeing asked to explain their choices and terminology,who they perceive as their audience(s), and theirunderstanding about a piece of writing or a subject. Thisconversation is the creation of third space, and ouroutreach is deliberately designed to extend and promote

these conversations about writing as well as to promotethe UCWbL and raise awareness. Our university-basedoutreach includes National Day on Writing I writebecause __ activities and the Peer Tutor and MentorSummit, as well as Banned Book readings and an arrayof other undertakings and free-standing workshops.Each in its own way promotes and enables conversationsabout literacy, liberty, and writing. Their interactivestructures enable us to talk with constituents to learnand understand their interests and concerns. In sodoing, we demonstrate that we genuinely are interestedin their needs and what they have to say. Awareness-raising and promotional events seek to reinforce and

spread the mission of the center through the activeexperience of it rather than through the repetition of pre-packaged phrases and information. We extend the thirdspace of our center by intersecting with our constituentsto experience the work of the center on a personal level,and we extend the third space that we create daily in thecenter to members of the university community beyondthe writing center. Throughoutreach, we also are extending aninvitation for them to viewthemselves in a new conceptuallocationone that offersencouragement to voice theirthoughts, to ask questions, to eitherintersect or disagree with newideas. This extension of third spacehappens when we bring the ethosof the writing center to theuniversity beyond our physicaldoors.

As we visualize ways to bring ourconceptual space out of thephysical boundaries of our twowriting centers, we keep

perceptions of who writers are andwhy they write in mind, as part ofour ethos is that everyone is awriter and that academic writingand real world writing are not asalien in relation to each other as issometimes perceived. One example of these events is ourinvolvement in National Day on Writing. National Dayon Writing was created by the National Council ofTeachers of English in order to give attention to the daily

writing that almost everyone does. For this event, we setup tables in common areas on the two largest campusesand provide materials for members of the universitycommunity to create a poster where they fill in blanksregarding what, to them, writers are and how they self-identify as a writer. The response has been downrightthrilling; after glancing at the display, students stop toread the posters and then write up a poster of their own.Some students fill in the blanks spontaneously andimmediately; others take a little time. The responses havebeen thought-provoking and, in many cases, illuminating.Here are but a few examples:

Writers are: individuals, parents, creative,revolutionary, and even ridiculous

As a ___, I write [because or to]: get the job done, explorewhat I think, change the world

Some of the things I write are: position papers and reports,blogs, poetry, rap, code, in translation, formyself.

The event generates some lively discussions, and morethan a few students stop by later on, to see what others

have written and to show theirfriends. This pattern has attracted asteady stream of people, and by theend of the day, the tables at bothcampus locations have been covered.Many of those posters now hang in

our office, where they never fail todraw the attention of our visitorsand generate further conversation.

Among the people trying to findtheir way across their academic andprofessional landscapes are tutorsthemselves, and another event thattakes place in the university is thePeer Tutor and Mentor Summit.This day-long event reaches yetanother constituency: that of officesand programs that also offer

mentoring and/or tutoring servicesto the university community, suchas the Career Center, StudentSupport Services/TRiO (an officewhich works with low-income, first-generation students), the Center for

Students with Disabilities, Athletic Academic Advising,the Office of Veterans Affairs, the Office for InternationalStudents and Scholars, the departments of Chemistry,


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Mathematics, Psychology, and a growing list of others.Altogether, the Summit brings together approximately100 student, staff, and faculty participants. Exit surveysand personal testimonials indicate that all of thoseinvolved appreciated the opportunity to interact andshare best practices through small group conversation,round robin discussion, and share materials andseveral offices offered to partner with us for the nextevent. All of these interactions make each yearsSummit vital and evolving.

The changing nature of the Summit is apparent in thateach year it is centered around a different theme; a pasttheme, What They Take with Them, was inspired byHarvey Kail, Paula Gillespie, and Brad Hughess articleof the same name regardingthe Peer Writing Tutor AlumniResearch Project (PWTARP).This theme focused the

Summit on both what we hopeour target populations takefrom our work and also whatwe take from that work.Round Robin topics rangedfrom Common Ground:Minority Student Peer-Mentoring, by studentmentors in the McNairScholars Program, to WhatWe Bring with Us, from theOffice of Veterans Affairs, toBefore They Take it With

Them, They Have to Find It:Mentoring in the DePaulLibraries, by the UniversitysResearch Librarians. Thetheme for this years Summit isJourneys, which we hopewill lead participants to reflecton the journeys including thehigh roads and low roads they encounter in their peer tutoring and/or mentoringwork. We are able to discuss and learn from the waysin which other offices create and utilize third spacethrough their own interactions and practices. Throughevents like these, we are able to reach a greaterspectrum of the university community who are outsidethe scope of our more traditional writing centeroperations, increase awareness that everyone is awriter, and share best practices with other peer tutoringresources. In this sense, we create third space throughthe summit by inviting these offices on campus toconverse about their experiences and where theyconverge and diverge from one another, as offices orprograms and individuals within these spaces.

When outreach moves physically and conceptuallyoutside of the university, the conversation opens up evenfurther. As the constituency changes so do theinteractions of first, second, and third spaces. In effect, theintimate first space that the writers we work with bring tothe places (physical and conceptual) where we interactmight differ in significant ways, namely in age. One ofthe nonprofit community partners that we work with isOpen Books, an organization dedicated to promotingliteracy through a variety of programs for K-12 studentsin the greater Chicago area. Outreach has facilitated theinvolvement of peer writing tutors (from both our writingcenter and our Writing Fellows program) alongsidecommunity volunteers in one of these programs,Adventures in Creative Writing field trips, where we

have interacted with fourth andfifth graders as they learnedabout and wrote creative non-fiction and slam poetry. The

work we do here helps studentsconnect with writing in waysthey may not have thought of;these students are introduced topoetry as a way of viewing andresponding to the world aroundthem, and at the same time areexperiencing working with atutor in a mentoring relationshipwhere the student can askquestions about more than justpoetry. The students often askabout their other homework

projects, school life, college life,and other issues they may havequestions about but dont haveanyone to discuss them with. Inturn, our tutors learn abouttutoring younger students inwriting, and sometimes interactwith students from differentsocioeconomic and/or ethnic

backgrounds. For each group, this third space is madepossible only by expanding beyond our campus andexpected constituency.

Another community-based outreach activity showed usthe potential of a writing center alumnuss role inexpanding outreach-based third space. We worked withwriters from True Starmagazine, which is produced byhigh school students for high school students. Theinstructor who recruits and shepherds student writersthrough the process is a peer writing tutor alumnus ofours. In his work in our center, he drew from his ownexperiences decoding and creating academic space tosupport university writers as they created their own. He


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them to buy into the real estate, it is time for academiato embody and become embodied in the new spaces ofstudent life. Or perhaps we should avoid the idea ofbuying and selling altogether, and, as Robert Haightsuggests, approach the classroom community [...] as aclimate to be created (386). Throughout all of ouroutreach from the I write because ___ events, tothe sharing of mentoring practices with otheruniversity offices during the Summit, to the slampoetry workshops with fourth graders, to the resume-writing sessions with high school students and otherwriters we have seen how outreach stretches thethird space of the writing center and how this workcan motivate everyone involved to create new climatesand spaces. Having a greater awareness of bothphysical and conceptual space and how what we bringinteracts with what the writers that we work withbring, we also have become more aware of the creationof third space in ourselves, as together, we all

negotiate the complex, changing landscapes of ourpersonal, academic, and professional lives and enterinto the making of [those spaces] (Mauk 368).

In Collaborative Learning and the Conversation ofMankind, Kenneth Bruffee (1984) writes, To thinkwell as individuals we must learn to think wellcollectively that is, we must learn to converse well.The first steps to learning to think better, therefore, arelearning to converse better and learning to establishand maintain the sorts of social context, the sorts ofcommunity life, that foster the sorts of conversationmembers of the community value (640). At the most

basic level, what we hope for in our outreach work isthat our efforts will foster those sorts of conversations.Theorizing about third space has helped us not only tothink well, both individually and collaboratively (torepeat Bruffees words), but also to understand howour writing centers mission extends far beyondappointment-based work in our center and toappreciate that the energy in Kails busy intersections,the empowerment in Richs calls to claim aneducation, and the mutual learning, listening, andengagement that characterizes the most productiveoutreach efforts are both the stuff of third place

interactions and their most exhilarating effects.

Works Cited

Bruffee, Kenneth, Collaborative Learning and theConversation of Mankind. College English 46.7(Nov. 1984): 635-652.

Carino, Peter. What Do We Talk About When WeTalk About Our Metaphors: A Cultural

took the same collaborative approach with his highschool writers, and when he brought them to ourwriting center, though they initially masked theirwariness with silence, their conversations with ourtutors soon encompassed not only story development,research, and writing, but also their personal concerns,goals, and dreams.

Two other external outreach partners that we havebeen involved with are the Howard Area CommunityCenter and After School Matters. The way that weinteract with these groups differs, even though theconstituency, in both cases, is made up of Chicago-area high school students. In the case of the HowardArea Community Center, members of the OutreachTeam and other peer writing tutors from our centervolunteered at the Computer Clubhouse Arts andTechnology Center for teens in the Rogers Parkneighborhood on the north side of Chicago. In thatlocation, students are able to make use of computers,not only for their homework, but also for other realworld writing projects such as college applicationcover letters, which we can discuss with them as adocument belonging to a specific genre and for aspecific audience, but despite that, not altogetherdifferent from other academic persuasive writing.There we join other regular volunteers, bringing theethos of the UCWbL to another physical locationwhere we interact, not only with the high schoolstudents themselves, but with those other peer tutorsand mentors as well. After School Matters, on theother hand, brings high school students to our campus

where they work with the UCWbLs peer writingtutors on a different real world writing project, theirarticles for On the Money magazine, another magazinewritten by teens for teens, this one dealing withfinancial matters, such as saving money, finding a job,and making decisions about student loans. Eventhough the students dont come to the physicallocation of our writing center, they are on the samecampus in a computer lab. Over the course of all ofthese activities, participating tutors had theopportunity to reflect on their pedagogy in light ofthese experiences, while helping these groupsunderstand the communal and reflective benefits of

talking about their writing with others and see thatacademic writing and real world writing are notdiametrically opposed, that writing for a differentaudience helps us to understand communicating withothers and participating in the discourses of privateand public life, or first and second spaces.

Mauk ends his argument by positing, If we wantstudents to move into academic space, if we want


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Reflection: A Messy but Vital Practice forthe Writing Center Tutor

Dr. Krista Stonerock and Christine ZimmermanOhio Christian University

The anticipated moment has finally arrived. Weeks of tutortraining have prepared Kara for this moment, and she isready for the challengeher first Writing Center tutorial.As she looks over the writers paper, she is relieved, forthere are several higherorder concerns that she has beentrained to address, thus resisting the editing habit that she

has been urged to avoid. The tutor begins to speak to thewriter about the structure of the essay when, much to herdismay, the writer interrupts her.

I dont want to have to re-write the whole paper. Can youjust check my grammar and spelling?

And there it is. Tension!

Regardless of the quality of tutor training or the expertise ofthe tutor, tensions are bound to arise in the daily practice ofthe Writing Center tutortensions that develop from avariety of sources, such as clashes in expectations or valuesbetween the tutor and tutee. Though tensions are inevitable,a reflective approach to tutoring will help the tutorsuccessfully manage those tensions.

Expectations are also value-laden. Often the tutor and tuteedo not share similar values. For example, a tutor may valuethe tutees progress as a writer, while the tutee may be moreconcerned with getting a quick edit to result in a highergrade on the writing assignment. When values clash, itmay be difficult to resolve the resulting tension.

Consequently, the tutor questions his job performance,

and the tutee leaves the tutorial frustrated that herrequests for a quick edit have been ignored.

When tutors work with writersespecially inrecurring sessionsthey tend to develop a vestedinterest in their tutees. As tensions grow, tutors oftenseek validation that they are doing their job well.Sometimes the validation they seek is from theirdirector . . . sometimes from one another . . . andsometimes from the tutee. Some tutors feel suchresponsibility and obligation toward the success oftheir tutees that any tension seems like a failure ontheir part. They wrongly assume that their tutees

success or failure is a direct reflection of theirperformance or competency as a tutor.

Tensions that surface in the writing conference donot have to completely derail the tutorial. Honest,self reflection on the part of the tutor can effectivelysalvage a tutorial that seems to be heading towarddisaster.

A Reflective Approach to Tutoring

As directors of our universitys Writing Center andTutoring Center, we set a goal last year to empower

tutors to become intentional about three reflectiveprocesses which are integral to the appropriation oftheir role as tutors. We are now in our second year oftraining with the reflective emphasis: a training wecall ROC Reflection, Ownership, and Collaboration.In training and ongoing professional development, westress the importance of tutors reflecting on theirpracticeindividually and collaborativelyandowning their role. Several reflective practices havebecome key components of the reflective process of

was Coordinator of Writing Placement for WRD.

Jennifer Finstrom is a peer writing tutor for theUniversity Center for Writing-based Learning(UCWbL), a member of the UCWbLs Outreach Team,and in her role as a Graduate Assistant in the 2011-12academic year, the Assistant Coordinator for the

Outreach Team. Jennifer is a double alum of DePaul (BAin English 10, MA in Writing and Publishing 12), andshe is joining the WRD First Year Program as aninstructor this fall.

Elizabeth Kerperis a senior at DePaul and a member ofthe Honors Program with a major in English and aminor in Sociology. She writes for the HonorsNewsletter and has also presented papers at DePauls

English Graduate Student Association conference. Sheis both a Writing Center tutor and Writing Fellow forthe UCWbL.

Kevin Lyon is the UCWbL Coordinator for Outreachand Community Relations, an instructor in the WRDFirst Year Program, and a double alum of DePaul (BA

in English '09, MA in WRD '11). He has been with theUCWbL for five years this fall.

Sowmya Sastri graduated from DePaul University inJune, 2012 with a B.A. in Public Policy and a minor inSociology. Sowmya was a peer writing tutor for theUCWbL and a member of the UCWbLs OutreachTeam. She was a co-presenter for this panelpresentation for ECWCA 2012.


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tutoring and have helped our tutors begin to puttheir training into practice:

Reflective journals. Reflective journals give tutorsthe opportunity to think and write about theirtutoring experiences. They may write about aspecific situation, a particular student, a tutorial, or

their role as a tutor. This journal requirementprovides our tutors the opportunity to processcurrent or past tutorials and to make adjustments forfuture tutorials. These reflective writings aresometimes private; other pieces are shared withcolleagues and directors. We have found that someof our best tutors are those who are willing tohonestly reflect on their practice, including theemerging tensions in the tutorials.

Self-Assessments offer a more formalized evaluationprocess for reflection on the tutorial. For thisexercise, we ask tutors to choose one or two tutorials

during the semester for self-evaluation in the contextof an actual tutorial. With the permission of thetutee, tutors audio-record tutorials and, afterlistening to the recording, analyze and respond tospecific reflective questions. This exercise offerstutors a tool for a more objective and focusedresponse to the tutorial. Additionally, tutors canselect another peer tutor to sit in on a tutorial andcomplete an observation sheet. Later, the tutor canreflect on the outside response to the tutorial.

Online discussion forums provide tutors anotheropportunity for community reflection. Using ouruniversity learning management system, the WritingCenter and Tutoring Center directors post questionsor prompts in an online discussion forum to guide afocused conversation. These forums, which are onlyaccessible to tutors and directors of the WritingCenter and Tutoring Center, allow tutors the

opportunity to reflect together on their roles, practices,questions, and concerns. As tutors share ideas and learn fromothers tutoring experiences, they also bond as a team.

Professional reading responses, our final reflective exercise,expose tutors to larger conversations about tutoring in theprofessional literature and encourage their participation in

these professional conversations. All tutors are asked to readand respond to several professional pieces, which have beenselected from professional journals and tutor traininghandbooks. Professional reading can help tutors thinkthrough Writing Center theory and how they can put thoseideas into practice in their own tutorials. We have also takenat least half of our working tutors to attend and present inprofessional conferences each year. Tutors have grown inprofessionalism and improved practice as they haveembraced these opportunities to engage in reflective practiceand participate in the larger professional conversations aboutWriting Centers and peer tutoring.

In order for novice tutors to succeed in supporting theirtutees, they must be willing to reflect on their practice. Thisreflection must go beyond an evaluation of isolated strategiesthat combine to form a what-worked-for-me approach.Rather, tutors must be urged to resist the front of confidence,comfortability, and competence, and instead embrace theuncertainties that characterize their complex roles. Our goalis for tutors to strive for what Murphy and Sherwood (1995)describe as an informed practiceone marked by thedevelopment of a broad repertoire of tutoring strategies thatreach beyond tutoring rules to further refine the know-how of good tutors which only comes from a willingnessto reflect on their efforts and keep learning (p. 4).

Reference

Murphy, C., & Sherwood, S. (1995). The St. Martinssourcebook for writing tutors. New York: St. Martins Press.

The Rhetorical Triangle andPostmodernism Walk into a

Contact ZoneAndrew Magrath

Kent State University and Stark State College

Many writing centers advocate the use of therhetorical triangle as a way of assessing andunderstanding any potential rhetorical situation. Therhetorical triangle, as first proposed by Aristotle,identifies three concepts needed to understand any

rhetorical situation: (1) credibility of the speaker (ethos), (2)the speaker's ability to evoke the emotions of the intendedaudience (pathos), (3) the logical techniques employed by

the speaker (logos) (Aristotle, I.2, 1356a). In many sessions,tutors either explicitly or implicitly encourage their clientsto think about the rhetorical triangle by asking questionssuch as: Is this source credible? (ethos) How do you thinkthe audience will react to this paragraph? (pathos) Does thisargument make sense? (logos) etc. The universality of theseconsiderations allows tutors to be able to meaningfullyenter into conversations about client's papers regardless ofthe paper's topic. The strength of the tutor, it thereforeseems, is not that the tutor is intimately acquainted with all


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forms of knowledge within the academy, but rather thatthe tutor has knowledge of a universally applicableschema that explains all potential rhetorical situations.

Many writing centers and writing center theorists alsoadvocate some form of postmodernism. Providing aconcise and definitive definition of postmodernismwould be a contentious and laborious task, so I shallinstead choose to focus on one tenet common to mostdefinitions of postmodern thought: the rejection of themetanarrative. John Stephens, who uses the tools ofpostmodernism to critique children's literature, defines ametanarrative as "a global or totalizing cultural narrativeschema which orders and explains knowledge andexperience." (Stephens, 6). Thus, a metanarrative is anoverarching explanation of the motivations, actions,experience, and/or knowledge of a single or multiplecultures.1 The philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard sumsup the postmodern stance on metanarratives as, I definepostmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives

(Lyotard, xxiv). Thus, it can be understood thatpostmodern projects reject the possibility of a universalschema that explains knowledge and experience for allpotential culturesin other words, postmodernists holdthat are no true metanarratives. This proves problematic,as it therefore seems that the postmodernist must rejectthe rhetorical triangle as a true schema that governs andexplains any potential rhetorical situation.

In an attempt to accept both postmodernism and therhetorical triangle, a postmodernist may claim that everyculture has a unique worldview and the rhetoricaltriangle just so happens to work within that worldview,

but may not be applicable in another worldview. Inessence, each culture, while still grappling with logos,pathos, and ethos, nevertheless weighs the merits of eachdifferently. For example, culture B may place a greateremphasis onpathos than does culture A. Whileundoubtedly every culture has a unique take on rhetoric,the metanarrative I see emerging is not one of how ethos,pathos, and logos are weighed. The metanarrative ofconcern is that this sort of consideration is universallyapplicable. No serious advocate of the rhetorical trianglewould claim that there are fixed weights for all situationsand all cultures. Obviously weighting schema canchange even within a single culture. For example, anaudience that typically values logos may nevertheless finda command issued from an aggressive assailant with aweapon (ethos) far more persuasive than a similarcommand issued from an infirmed philosopher (logos).The fact that the weights may change (both inter- andintra-culturally) is not in dispute. What remainsproblematic is the claim that the rhetorical triangle can beused within any cultural reference frame, as this seems toestablish a metanarrative about all cultures: chiefly, allcultures' rhetoric is understandable based on some

assessment of the rhetorical triangle.

This incompatibility is most clear when considering aversion of Mary Louise Pratt's contact zones. Prattdefines a contact zone as "social spaces where culturesmeet, clash, and grapple with each other, often incontexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, suchas colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths." (Pratt, 34).Assume two cultures: A and B. Now let us place A and Binto the most extreme contact zone possible, such thatthese cultures have the minimal possible in common. Inother words, A and B are radically different culturesperhaps A is a culture of communal pacifists that hasbeen enslaved by B, who are a warmongeringindividualist society. Since a postmodernist must rejectthe possibility of any true metanarrative, the onlycommonality that can exist between A and B is cultural,but, by hypothesis, A and B have virtually nothing incommon. Since the postmodernist does not allow for thepossibility of a true metanarrative that can explain some

aspect of both cultures, there is no reason to assume thatA and B have enough in common to have a successfulrhetorical exchange of any kind. Thus, a postmodernistcannot hold that the rhetorical triangle is universallyapplicable. On the other hand, advocates of therhetorical triangle have cause for some optimism. If thetriangle is universally applicable, then it exists as ametanarrativeit is true regardless of culture. Giving onehope that a successful rhetorical exchangehoweverunlikelycould take place between A and B byconsidering ethos,pathos, and logos. Thus, if hope is toremain, advocates must double down on the universalnature of the rhetorical triangle, but in the process reject

postmodernism.

If the problem is to be resolved, then it seems some of ourcommitments to postmodernism, the rhetorical triangle,or both will have to be weakened. I am not sympatheticto many claims of postmodernism, particularly withregards to the stance on metanarratives. While it isundoubtedly the case that individuals' cultures colortheir worldviews, it seems too strong a conclusion thatthere are no external non-culturally dependent realities.In other words, just because there are some falsemetanarratives it does not seem to follow that allmetanarratives must necessarily be false.1 Once one

grants that there exist some true metanarratives, thetension between postmodernism and the rhetoricaltriangle potentially dissolves.

It seems too much to ask the postmodernist to merelyaccept as true the metanarrative that all rhetoricalsituations can be understood by considering therhetorical triangle. In addition, explicators of therhetorical triangle are not always clear on how muchweight culture plays in the consideration of the points of


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the triangle. Postmodernists may have it right when theyassert that ideas about ethos andpathos are deeplyorperhaps even whollydependent upon culture. Incomparison to a culture of slaves, it is very likely that aculture of slave owners will have vastly differentopinions about an abolitionist's credibility (ethos) andexperience vastly different emotions (pathos) upon

hearing the abolitionist's words. Since this discussion iscouched within an extreme contact zone thoughtexperiment, it is safe to assumeas the postmodernistdoesthat very little with regards to ethos andpathos canbe assumed to be held in common. This leaves only logosas a potential metanarrative.

The prominent logician and philosopher Rudolf Carnapnotes that, Logic . . . is concerned with relationsbetween factual sentences . . . If logic ever discusses thetruth of factual sentences it does so only conditionally . . . ifsuch-and-such a sentence is true, then such-and-suchanother sentence is true. Logic itself does not decide

whether the first sentence is true (Carnap, 110). This isencouraging because if logos is assumed to be a truemetanarrative, then claims are only being made about asystem of inferences: not about the world.1 This differencecan be understood as claims about the world take theform of declarative sentences: "x is true." "y is false." etc.On the other hand, claims about a system of inferencestake the form of conditional sentences: "Ifx is true, thenyou can derive y." Rather than make claims about what istrue, claims about systems of inferences (logos) makeclaims about how other statements fit together. Considerthe following argument:

It is always wrong to force others to take the life of ahuman being.

War forces individuals to take the lives of otherhuman beings.

Therefore, war is always wrong.

A pacifistic culture will likely agree with the aboveargumentwill likely treat it as a sound. Yet a non-pacifist culture will likely have a different reaction to theargument, and, in the case of the extreme contact zone, awarmongering culture is guaranteed to have a different

reaction still! This is because the three cultures'considerations of ethos andpathos are different. Eachculture cannot come to an agreement on the truth of thestatementscannot agree on a single true metanarrativeabout how the world actually is. Yet, if Carnap is correct,then logic can largely circumvent this debate. From alogos standpoint the argument becomes:

If it is true that it is always wrong to force others totake the life of a human being.

And if it is true that war forces individuals to takethe lives of other human beings.

Then it follows that war is always wrong.

Logos is silent on the actual truth of these claims. Logicasserts that these claims fit together a certain way,

compelling the speaker and the listeners to believesomething new. Logos leaves it up to the individualcultures to determine the truth of the premises.

This truth neutrality makes logos a powerful tool withinthe tutorial. While traditional tutoring methodsencourage the client to contemplate ethos,pathos, andlogos, if postmodernism is incompatible with therhetorical triangle, then there is no guarantee that theclient will be able to consider the ethos andpathos of theintended audience. While this incompatibility is mostapparent in the extreme contact zone, the motivatingthought experiment provides aprima facie reason to

believe that postmodernism eliminates the ability for aspeaker to meaningfully communicate with anotherculture. Put differently, for a listener to believe aspeaker is credible, the listener must actually believe thespeaker is credible. For example, if the speaker is aslave owner and the listener is an abolitionist, it isunlikely that the abolitionist will ever view the slaveowner as credible no matter how many times the tutorasks him to consider the ethos of the other. Yet,certainly the abolitionist can begin to enter into arhetorical situation by assuming ifthe slave owner wereto be taken as credible, then This shift to logosbecomes a useful pattern in the tutorial. Rather than

ask my clients to consider some potentially unknowableother, I ask them to think about the consequences oftheir own logic. For example, if a client makes a claimthat killing is wrong, I may point out that war oftenrequires soldiers to kill each other. The client'sstatement implies that soldiers are wrong and/or thereis no just war. The client may agree with thisconclusion, or the client may notwhich opens up anew conversation about how to better define 'killing' sothat it does not lead to undesired conclusions.Similarly, considerations about the credibility of sourcesbecome conversations about the source's logic in orderto show how that way of thinking leads to undesirableconclusions. At no point do we talk about truth, onlywhere ideas lead. In this way, sessions can still arrive atsimilar results as traditional sessions but do not directlyrely upon overt considerations of ethos andpathos.Nevertheless, content and effectiveness are likely lost byonly considering logos, but this loss seems to beattributable to the nature of the postmodern project.

Allowing logos to be a true metanarrative about how todraw conclusions seems to solve the original tension:


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Technical Communication WritingCenter: A Snapshot

Wanda L Worley, PhD, Ellen Harley,Jeff Russ, and Diana Poncar

Indiana University-Purdue University

Indianapolis

What is our story? What are the challenges andrewards of a small, self-contained, discipline-specificwriting center in a professional school on a largeurban campus? This brief snapshot takes you insidethe TCM (technical communication) Writing Centerlocated in the Purdue School of Engineering &Technology at IUPUI (Indiana University-PurdueUniversity Indianapolis).

Our History

Our writing center began in the early 1990s as acollaborative effort between the School of Liberal Artsand the School of Engineering and Technology. Atthe time, the Technical Communication Program(TCM) was jointly housed in the two Schools. TheDirector of the University Writing Center and theformer Director of TCM together decided thatengineering and technology students were more aptto use writing center services if a branch of thewriting center was located on site so the TCM

Writing Center began as a kind of satellite of theUniversity Writing Center. Several years ago, the TCMprogram was moved solely to the School of Engineeringand Technology.

When the TCM Writing Center was formed and for manyyears following, the University Writing Center shared itstutors with us. But as the years went by and theUniversity Writing Center grew, they needed their tutors.Today our tutors are recruited from recommendations byour TCM instructors and our own tutors.

Our Writing Center is completely supported financiallyby the School of Engineering and Technology. TheSchools Dean and other administrators fully believe inthe value of and support the needs of the Writing Center.

Our Clients

The Technical Communication (TCM) Program providesclasses for every student in the School, the second largestschool at IUPUI. The TCM Writing Center provides aservice to approximately 2400 undergraduate students,300 graduate students, and several hundred staff andfaculty. Our students, staff, and faculty come from threeengineering departments (Biomedical Engineering,Electrical and Computer Engineering, and MechanicalEngineering) and four technology departments(Computer Information and Leadership Technology,Design and Communication Technology, Engineering

Works Cited

Aristotle. The Rhetoric of Aristotle. Trans. RichardClaverouse Jebb. Ed. John Edwin Sandys.Cambridge: University Press, 1909. Print.

Carnap, Rudolf. "Logic." Factors Determining HumanBehavior. Ed. Robert Merton. Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1937. 107118. Print.

Lyotard, Jean-Franois. The Postmodern Condition: A Reporton Knowledge. Trans. G. Bennington and B.Massumi. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1984. Print.

Nolt, John. Logics. Belmont:Wadsworth PublishingCompany, 1997. Print.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Arts of the Contact Zone. Professions(1991): 33-40. Print.

Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense:Postmodern Intellectual's Abuse of Science. NewYork: Picador, 1998. Print.

Stephens, John and Robyn McCallum. Retelling Stories,Framing Culture: Traditional Story andMetanarratives in Children's Literature. New York:Garland Publishing, 1998. Print.

ethos andpathos are allowed to be wholly dependentupon cultureas a postmodernist would acceptbut the applicability of the triangle is allowed toremain universal by way of a logos metanarrative.By necessity, this leaves the rhetorical triangle quitestunted. The functional roles of ethos andpathos

have largely been replaced by logos. I fear a strongadvocate of the rhetorical triangle may reject thisproposal. Similarly, many postmodernists mayassert that this solution also goes too far.Historically, postmodernism arose in part as acritique to this kind of logical positivism. As such,an even casual postmodernist likely will not acceptlogos as a true metanarrative. Yet, if this is the case,we are merely left with the original tension. It seemsclear; additional scholarship should be done to betterunderstand and eliminate the tension between themetanarrative inherent in the rhetorical trianglemodel and postmodernism's rejection of

metanarratives.


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Renegotiating NontraditionalIdentity in the Writing Center: What it

Means to Be a Peer or the Center asMentor

Jennifer Finstrom and Lisa D. LenoirDePaul University

Nontraditional students who are also tutors in thesetting of a university writing center may findthemselves negotiating a plurality of identities:adults, students, peers, mentors, and mentees. Beforebeginning as peer writing tutors at our universityswriting center, we entered our respective programs ofstudy. At this point, we became aware that we carriedthe identity of nontraditional students, though we didnot fully understand what that definition entailed orthat it was actually a subject of some debate. One of

us entered the English undergraduate program witha large number of transfer credits, and, aftercompleting the degree, immediately began a mastersprogram in writing and publishing. The other hadalready received a bachelors degree in journalism,worked as a journalist at a prominent newspaper forseveral years, and finally entered a masters programin international public service as a returning student.But despite our different courses of study at our largeurban university, we both felt that somethingessential was missing from our experience. However,we were unable to articulate what that element mightbe until we began doing writing center work as peerwriting tutors.

After returning to academic life, we both felt thatsimply identifying as traditional or nontraditionalwas not only limiting, but also didnt tell the wholestory, and that this applied to other students, bothtraditionally aged and otherwise. When we enteredour programs, we identified both as adults in theworld outside of academia and as students in aspecific discipline. And later, when we entered thewriting center, we began to identify as peers. This lastidentification, though gradual, was a turning point.

As we continued negotiating our multiple identities,it was writing center work that showed us how thiscould be done.

First, we asked ourselves what exactly was meant bynontraditional. We wondered if graduate studentscould be considered nontraditional as well, and in thecourse of our research, we learned that they could be.In Teaching, Advising, and Mentoring theNontraditional Graduate Student by Benton H.Pierce and Melissa J. Hawthorne, the authors write

that, According to the Council of Graduate Schools (2009) . .. By 2018, approximately 3.4 million graduate students willbe age 35 and older. These students are likely to encounterdifferent obstacles in completing advanced degrees thantraditional students who move from undergraduateprograms directly into graduate school. While twenty-fouror twenty-five seems to be the age dividing traditional from

nontraditional undergraduates, thirty-five seems to be theage at which a graduate student is considered nontraditional.Laura J. Horn and C. Dennis Carroll in The National Centerfor Education Statisticsreport from November of 1996 definenontraditional students through any of the following criteria:delayed enrollment into postsecondary education, attendedpart time, financially independent, worked full time whileenrolled, had dependents other than a spouse, was a singleparent, or did not obtain a standard high school diploma(2). Horn and Carroll go on to explicate that these criteria fallinto a continuum of three categories: minimallynontraditional (one of the above mentioned criteria),

moderately nontraditional (two or three of these), or highlynontraditional (four or more) (2). What we took from thissystem of classification was that a student might be more orless nontraditional, and if that students circumstanceschange, the roles that he or she negotiates might change aswell. For example, transitioning from a part-timeundergraduate student to a full-time graduate student (asone of us did) effectively changes the status from moderatelyto minimally nontraditional. But an alteration in theseoutward factors isnt the only way that a change in self-perception can come aboutthe way that a student locateshim or herself in an academic setting is also of importance.

In his article Location, Location, Location: The "Real"(E)states of Being, Writing, and Thinking in Composition,Jonathan Mauk writes of the placelessness of many collegestudents, mentioning nontraditional students in particular,and proposes that what is needed is a new pedagogy thatwill connect the academic with the students everyday life(369). While we both had initially worked at reconciling ouracademic identities with real world identitiesMauksplacelessness did not last long. After beginning work aspeer writing tutors, we saw the connection between thissense of dislocation and Kenneth Bruffees ideas inCollaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind.Bruffee writes that, Students work tended to improve when

they got help from peers; peers offering help, furthermore,learned from the students they helped and from the activityof helping itself. Collaborative learning, it seemed, harnessedthe powerful educative force of peer influence (638).

At our university, there is an academic program specificallyfor adults, focusing on the idea of students utilizing theirabilities and experiences. Entering students are providedwith a faculty mentor who lends support as skills develop forboth academic and real world success. Conversely, a


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Recognizing the scarcity of writing resources for thesestudents, the Writers Workshop has increased efforts toaccommodate their needs. We consider our one-on-onetutoring the most effective way we support Englishlanguage learners. All of our consultants learn abouttutoring English language learners (ELL) writers in theirorientation and receive excellent ratings for their work.

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has increasedour funding somewhat so that we can hire additionalconsultants and provide an Assistant Director for ELLSupport. However, even with that assistance we struggleto meet the demand for our services. Additionally, ourinternational students often have anxiety and confusionon a larger level than the focus of each individualtutoring session. Beyond a particular text, understandingassignments, genres, and standards of University writingin general can be a hurdle.

This article highlights one cost effective way we have

supported these writers. For two years experiencedwriting center consultants have facilitated writing groupsfor graduate and undergraduate English languagelearners. Forming these groups demonstrates ourconviction that writing is a social practice strengthenedby guidance and support, as well as our commitment toencouraging and assisting students in their transition toAmerican academic writing.

Graduate-Level Groups: Finding Ones Rhetorical Place

The graduate-level groups led by Jessica addressed majorwriting issues through discussion and analysis of writing

resources with participants and focused on topicsemanating from participants interests, including: writingprocesses; audience and context; logical organization andstructure; and soliciting and applying feedback fromcolleagues and faculty. In addition, participants spentroughly half of each session reviewing one anothersscholarly and course-related writing.

Across all of the groups, one primary concern involvedaudience. Participants concerns ranged from how toconstruct an effective argument for an Americanacademic audience to how to write an effectiveconference proposal for an interdisciplinary audience andhow to write emails to their advisors and other scholars.Defining the American academic audience is no easytask, as that audience changes according to discipline,university/college, region, the genre in which one iswriting, and the many other factors contributing to agiven rhetorical context. This difficulty proved to be anarea of frustration for all participants, particularlyconsidering the additional challenges they facedaddressing diverse audiences consisting of people whosecultural backgrounds are quite different from their own.

Participants found it useful to learn about and adapt toaudience expectations not only by looking at examples ofwriting in a particular genre and field of study, but alsoby actively communicating with members of theiraudience. We discussed different ways to engage in thiscommunication, including emailing professors andadvisors, setting up meetings to discuss ones project,

asking questions during courses, and talking withcolleagues. Many of the participants indicated that thecultural conventions guiding communication andnetworking in the American context are far differentfrom those of their home cultures. Discovering that it isoften acceptable and even encouraged to assert oneself asan active and vocal participant in a scholarly community,helped participants gain a better sense of theirrelationship to their audiences.

Continued discussion with participants across all of thegroups indicated that international graduate students areconcerned with how to communicate in a differentcultural context, and that concern is deeply embedded inrhetorical awareness and the challenges of rhetoricaladaptation. This concern guided many of their otherconcerns with such issues as organization, coherence, andstructure. While participants were interested in how toadapt their writing to the rhetorical expectations of anAmerican academic audience, it became clear that thiswas no simple matter of applying a set of rules to oneswriting. Rather, it is a matter of negotiating ones place inoverlapping rhetorical contexts and understanding thesocial, cultural, and discursive practices expected in thosecontexts.

Undergraduate-Level Groups: Finding a Safe Place

The Writers Workshop held two series of ESL writinggroups for undergraduate students in both Fall 2010 andFall 2011. Each session was comprised of four 1.5 hourwriting group sessions preceded by an informationalsession. Like the graduate writing groups, each sessionwas organized around a topic of concern: WritingProcess; Genres and Audience, Logic & Structure;Plagiarism; Summarizing & Paraphrasing; Citation &Source Use. The participants also conducted peer reviewswith the assignment papers they brought in. Unlike the

graduate writing groups, however, the undergraduatewriting groups were more structured with lecture-typeinstructions and controlled practice tasks for the first halfof each session.

In Spring 2012, the Writers Workshop ran experimentalsingle-language writing groups for undergraduatewritersone for Koreans and the other for Chinesestudents. The facilitator, Yu-Kyung Kang led the Koreanwriting group in Korean while a Chinese consultant ledone in Chinese. The decision to hold only Chinese and


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(12). We will better serve the students who come to us ifwe exude a calm, positive energy. As we use thesepractices ourselves, we will have realistic tools to sharewith them. We guide writers with issues ranging fromgenerating ideas to repeated grammar mistakes by askingquestions and listening while offering suggestions andtools that empower students to find their writing voiceon their own. We create a safe space for students bybeing conscious of the silent messages of body languageand responding to nonverbal communication withcompassion in order to instill confidence, and gain thestudents trust (Amigone, 25). We are in a uniqueposition to consider the whole studentmind, body, andspiritsomething that is less likely to be addressed in theclassroom environment. We will be more comfortableoffering a workshop covering anxiety relief if we aretaught to use these tools ourselves first. Ideally, theworkshop would be offered in segments so tutors canbecome familiar with each practice, incorporating them

into their own lives so that when suggested, the studentfeels the sincerity that the tutor actually needs and usesthese tools themselves.

Mindful Breathing

Mindful breathing is an ancient yogic practice that isutilized by athletes, physicians, and corporate leadersalike to improve performance and promote health from aproactive perspective. In a study published in theJournalof Hypertension, Grossman, Grossman, Schein,Zimlichaman and Gavish found that blood pressure canbe significantly reduced with regular practice in as little

as eight weeks (263). Additional benefits are improvedoxygen saturation, which not only calms, but alsoenergizes, as more oxygen means more fuel for the bloodand the brain. Another benefit noted in the study iselevated heart rate variability, which is also a majorbenefit of re-visioning, the next practice on the agenda.

Re-Visioning

Re-visioning is the term I use for visualization in thewriting center context. Athletes have used visualizationfor years as a tool that enhances performance outcomesduring training and competition. Visualizing finishing a

race at a new personal best or nailing a basket from thefree throw line establishes neurological pathways thathelp the athlete make the goal a reality. Researchers atThe HeartMath Institute use a version of this tool calledFreeze-Frame (Childre and Martin, 72-79) which asks thepractitioner to not only envision in the mind, but to recalla positive emotion, such as gratefulness or caring feelingsfor someone we love, and feel those positive feelings inthe midst of a stressful situation. This changes the heart

rhythm and synchronizes the heart and brain to achieve abetter heart rate variability (HRV) in order to prevent orreduce the metabolic trauma when in a situation thatcauses anxiety. Childre and Martin explain that, Freeze-Framecreates a mood shift to harmonious feelingstateswhich helps to create and sustain entrainmentbetween heart and brain (77). This is an extremelyeffective tool and can be learned quickly and usedimmediately in the moment.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Most people have heard of Progressive MuscleRelaxation (PMR) but may not know much about it. InProgressive Muscle Relaxation, Breathing Exercises, andABC Relaxation Theory, Matsumoto and Smithdiscovered that while PMR and breathing exercises bothevoke relaxation and relief from stress, PMR results ingreater mental disengagement while breathing exercisesresult in greater energizing effects and increasedawareness (1551). Further, with regular practice, PMRhas a delayed benefit, resulting in increased MentalQuiet and Joy, which were sub-categories of relaxationused in the study (1551).

Tension Targeted Stretching

Simple stretches, targeted at areas where writers build upstress, can be done anywhere, anytime. The areas mostcommonly affected are the neck and shoulder blades.Taking five minutes at ones desk to stretch can releasepent up negative energy, which slowly builds and leadsto anxious feelings, headaches, or worse, constant pain.All of these are hindrances to a calm, peaceful, andcreative mind.

After participating in the Relax and Energize workshop,tutors will be better able to:

1) provide a more Zen environment which helps fostercreativity that enables generation of positive energy inorder to create a safe space for writes of all levels and,

2) utilize the tools in order to genuinely recommend themto others.

I welcome inquiries on presenting this workshop in yourwriting center, or providing materials to create your own.Contact me at [email protected].

*Presentation given at 2012 ECWCA conference withaffiliation with the Marion E. Wright Writing Center atUniversity of Michigan-Flint.


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Facilitating Change: AnAdministrator's Account of Starting a

Writing Lab

Alanna BitzelThe University of Texas

The practitioner allows himself to experience surprise,puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he findsuncertain or unique.-Donald Schon.

As a writing center administrator, I have approachedand examined my work in writing centers through thelens of Donald Schns Reflective Practitioner Theory.According to this theory, we become professionals inour field only by continuously reflecting in and on ourwork. In this piece, I describe scenarios from my first

year as an administrator that influenced myleadership style and afforded me opportunities tobecome a better leader. I describe challenges that Iencountered transitioning from being a peer to aleader, addressing staff resistance, implementing newtraining and policies, and adapting writing centerpractice for work with student-athletes. My aim is tocharacterize how change can happen in and impact awriting center and offer practical insights on how we,emerging and veteran writing center leaders alike, cannavigate change while being responsive to the uniqueneeds of our centers, staffs, and student populations.

Becoming an Academic Counselor

In 2008, representatives from the Football AcademicsCenter (Center) at The University of Texas at Austin(UT) approached the Universitys UndergraduateWriting Center (UWC) for help with training theirwriting tutors in keeping with contemporaryphilosophy and practices. Acting as CommunityOutreach Coordinator for the UWC, I co-organized(with then-fellow UWC consultant Collette Chapman)for the UWC a training session for IntercollegiateAthletics based on the design of UWC Director PegSyverson. Our Summer Institute consisted of anintroduction to writing center principles and anexamination of strategies and approaches for workingwith students throughout their writing processes.

After my work with the Summer Institute, I begantutoring at the Center, and, in July 2011, I became anacademic counselor responsible for overseeing theCenters reading program and Writing Lab. My initialtask for the Writing Lab was to ensure that we didthings by the bookin compliance with University

and NCAA guidelinesand in the writing center spirit.What I looked forward to most was the opportunity tocreate best practices for working with our student-athleteson writing and engage tutors in the practice of writingtutoring.

Grasping for the Tangible

My department and supervisor allowed me great freedomto develop reading and writing programs. As the only onein the Center with a writing center background, I wasresponsible in large part for answering questions like:What exactly was my role as a writing centeradministrator? What should I be doing, and how?Additionally, as a new full-time staff member, I wasunsure how to navigate the transition from tutor tosupervisor.

I decided to first focus on tangibles. I created a handbook,

largely based (with permission) on the UWCs handbook,to delineate practices for working with students onwriting. I also rearranged the physical space of the WritingLab to better suit our writing sessions. Previously, smalltables had been arranged as two long tables, which I feltcould impose undesired distance between tutors andstudents. I separated the tables to create four smallertables to accommodate more intimate, one-to-one writingsessions.

Reviewing the Handbook

The Summer Institute was a good start, but it was not

enough. It did not encourage continued dialogue,reflection, and self-improvement among writing staff.After becoming acquainted with writing center basics,staff members were on their own to negotiate questionsand issues that inevitably arise in working on writing anddevelop strategies in keeping with their understandings ofwriting center practices and philosophies and universityregulations.

I started off the fall semester with the goal of promotingconversation and so scheduled a meeting with the writingstaff to discuss the newly-distributed handbook. Therewere lots of questions, as I expected, for non-directiveand non-evaluative are not self-explanatory concepts.My staff voiced some concerns. For example, given thatwe have limited time to work with our student-athletes,they worried about how to effectively incorporatestrategies like asking students questions and modelingsentence-level revisions in writing sessions. This concernled to a productive conversation about working withstudents to prioritize and create timelines for startingwriting early to allow for more writing sessions.


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Moreover, the handbook introduced policies thatsome of the staff initially found problematic. A majorchange involved not sitting with a student for theduration of a writing session while he is writing at acomputer. I explained the reason for the new policyavoiding collusion. The staff wanted to preventcollusion and student over-dependence, but they felt

that struggling or insecure writers could benefit fromhaving someone next to them who could provideencouragement and serve as a sounding board forideas. As a group we brainstormed strategies forassisting such students, like challenging them to workfor set periods of time interspersed with writing tutorcheck-ins to build writing confidence.

In this meeting, I held firm on new policies butacknowledged that we were undertaking a shift andwould re-examine and perhaps adjust somepracticalities. I believe that the tutors appreciated thatI was willing to work with them along the way andengage in conversations about how to implementwriting center practices in the Center. I appreciatedtheir willingness to move forward as a team.

Conducting Training

In the fall, I implemented monthly training in whichvarious representatives from campusthe Departmentof Rhetoric and Writing and the School ofUndergraduate Studies (both of which have writing-intensive courses aimed at freshmen, a primarypopulation we serve), Services for Students with

Disabilities, and Student Judicial Servicescame tospeak with the writing staff. I asked tutors to let meknow in advance if they had scheduling conflicts. Noone responded, so I was surprised when a tutorwould tell me days before training that s/he would beabsent.

I hadnt considered how I would handle a staffmember missing training. Should I hold a make-upsession? Was I being too demanding of my staff byscheduling three training sessions in one semester?Even if I had only had one training session in the fall,some tutors may have resisted the additional

obligation.

I employed several strategies to facilitate tutorparticipation. I gave tutors multiple reminders, and,after each training, I asked what they thought of thespeaker, topic, as well as date and time. Theirresponses were useful to me in gauging interests andexperience levels and assisting in scheduling. I soonlearned that tutors did not like coming in on Fridays,and I agreed that we would schedule spring training

if possible on other weekdays. I wanted tutors to knowthat I respected their input.

Delivering Feedback

In addition to monthly trainings, I met with writing staffindividually or in small groups once a week and observed

all tutors during a writing session once that semester. Atthe UWC, where I consulted for four years and then actedas Assistant Director for two years, observations were anaccepted, albeit mildly stressful, part of the deal. I, andmany others in my cohort, looked forward to (or at leastdid not mind) the opportunity to learn how to becomebetter consultants.

A few tutors worried about the observations, feeling thatthey could impact job security. I explained why I wasdoing observations, assuring them that the goal was togain a better sense of individual tutoring methods, and I

gave them the observation form I would use to make theprocess transparent. Still, some staffers were anxious.Consequently, my supervisor wanted to be involved in thepost-observation feedback process.

Having my supervisor, someone with whom tutors werefamiliar as a supervisor figure, in the room versus just me,the new authority figure, alleviated concerns. Writing staffseemed to enjoy hearing about their strengths and foundthe target goals/areas for improvement helpful. Inreflecting on the arrangement, it reminded me of a UWCpractice. The Assistant Directors, instead of the ProgramCoordinator, gave feedback to veteran tutors, freeing up

the Coordinators time to focus on newer consultants andenabling veteran tutors to tweak their practices whileeliminating the stress of meeting with the boss.

Final Thoughts

By the end of the fall, I felt that having a mandatory thisor that each week was venturing into being overbearing. Iwanted to do enough training to ensure writing staff hadinformation they needed and felt supported, that theycould grapple with the gray areas inherent to writingcenter practice. I was also conscious of wanting to make animmediate and concrete impact in the Center and

distinguish my previous part-time, non-supervisory selffrom this new, full-time, and significantly empowered self.

But tutors needed to learn by doing, and, importantly,reflecting, as I was doing as a leader. I needed and wanteda motivating ethos surrounding writing center work, onethat would showcase the possibilities writing center workaffords and prompt excitement about new methods. But itwas too much too soon.


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I scaled back in the spring. In addition to monthlytraining, I made time to sit in the Writing Lab andcomputer labs to informally observe. I did a mid-semester group check-in with writing staffers andmaintained an open door policy, encouragingindividual discussions when questions arose. I alsoasked tutors to write process recordings, journal-like

entries in which tutors describe and analyze writingsessions with students to promote self-learning.

Reflecting on my first year has helped me gain a betterperspective on my assumptions and expectations. Ifound that the practices and training that work for onewriting center and culture do not necessarily work foranother. Clear and ongoing communication with mystaff, the ones who carry out the mission of a writingcenter on a daily basis, is crucial, and taking off my

leader cap and becoming a tutor periodically has allowedme to see what is coming up for them on the floor. Finally,taking advantage of resourcesasking other leaders andwriting center colleagues for advice and participating inprofessional development opportunitieshas helped melearn new ideas and conceive different approaches for thefuture. Change does not always happen quickly, and

leaders who praise good work, their own and others, anddemonstrate patience, with themselves and their tutors,can do a lot toward promoting change.

Work Cited

Schn, Donald. The Reflective Practitioner: How ProfessionalsThink in Action. London: Temple Smith, 1983.Print.

US Regional Writing Centers


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Three hundred nine registered participants gathered in

Indianapolis for the 2012 Conference hosted by theIndiana University-Purdue University IndianapolisUniversity Writing Center staff on the IUPUI campus.Consultants/tutors from Michigan, Indiana, Ohio andKentucky were joined by colleagues from as far awayas Oregon, Texas and New York to share ideas abouthow writing centers are coping with change in all itspermutations. Muriel Harris was coaxed out ofretirement to share her insights as our keynote speakerabout how writing centers have changed and theparticular pressures on us to change in ways we may

or may not prefer. Pat Harvey chaired the second annual

silent auction, which raised a little over $1,000 to be usedfor travel awards to future ECWCA conferences. Yourgenerosity was commendable.

On behalf of my co-chair, Frank Smith, and the IUPUIstaff, I want to thank all the people who made this yearsconference such a success. It was our first time hosting aconference, and we had a great time riffing on the Mayanapocalypse theme, decorating our space, greeting ourguests, and sharing our passion for writing centers. Ilook forward to seeing you all in 2013.

ECWCA 2012 Conference Review

Lynn A. Jettpace, IUPUI, 2012 Conference Co-Chair


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LEAH COMING,Undergraduate Tutor,

University of Notre DameWriting Center

When I gave a presentation for

our new tutors training thisyear, I almost made aterrifying statement that couldhave given the fledgling tutorsthe impression that our workis impossibly difficult. After

reflecting about the tutor-tutee relationship, I almosttold these tutors (who were eager for encouragementand concrete advice before they started their first weekon the job) that to approach their individual challenges,theyd have to keep in mind that developing into agood tutor is a process thats linked with developinginto a good human being.

Now, I didnt actually say this because I thought itd betoo intimidating to set such a monumental task asdeveloping into a good human being before them.However, once I think about it, I stand by this idea.Lets think about the picture of an effective tutor: she isperceptive of the tutees need (needs spoken andunspoken, the latter perceived through being open tothe tutees tone of voice or facial expression), she isgenial and warm enough to put the tutee at ease, andshe is mentally alert enough to respond and adapt tomake the session as productive as possible. Basically,the tutor is able to give of herself: and although we

usually think of self-gift as something that happens insustained friendships among compatible people whohave a level of intimacy, this self-gift happens withoutany of those favorable circumstances, between peoplewho were strangers an hour ago.

Now, if I had accidentally told the new tutors that theircapabilities as a tutor rested on becoming a more givinghuman being, I think their next question would havebeen how do I do that? And in this area, I do havesome advice from experience. Just as Im claiming thatdevelopment as a tutor is similar to development in life,

Id like to go one step farther and say that developing asa tutor is the same as personal development and happensin the sphere of life outside the Writing Center.

As a younger tutor, I thought that all of this self-gift wasan action that I could completely control in the moment.I thought that when I sat down in the tutoring session, Icould control my attention, flexibility of response, andwarmth to give the tutee everything he needed. But theproblem was, the more tha

Ecwca Newsletter Fall 2012revised

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