Renaissance and email...

I loved getting to visit Shawna's students at Renaissance! It was so exciting to see a high school Writing Center program, and I just cannot believe how invaluable the service is that they are providing. It is a very unique situation, though, as it is really due to the special nature of the school that it can make the program work. Firstly, the school is specifically a college-prep type institution that has incredibly high standards for students. Because of some of the specific programs that they are enrolled in, students are required to perform volunteer work. Thus, they are able to work as writing center consultants as a way to fulfill that requirement. This allows the program to have thoughtful, highly motivated and free consultants. Shawna mentioned that because the consultants are working for free, though, that they do not have a great deal of time to devote to training. Thus, they have completely a very comprehensive handbook that consultants are introduced to at the beginning of the year and that they can refer to throughout. Shawna noted that during the center's downtime the consultants are called upon to read articles on writing center practices, or to brush up on their grammar skills by reading one of the many grammar texts available in the space.

Overall, though Renaissance's program works only because of the nature of the institution, it works, and students are able to get great feedback from their peers on their writing, which helps them to grow as writers. What an amazing and unique program, and what a fantastic opportunity for enrichment of all at that school.

In meeting with the consultants, it was immediately clear that although their center was very different from ours at Boise State, like all writing centers, it had its key sticking points which seem to transcend all programs: multi-lingual writers and email consultations. It was crazy to think that these young consultants experienced the same issues as we do at the college level, but I think these complications just attest to the continuity of writing centers throughout the country.

As a note on email consultations, Sam's lesson went fabulously on Thursday. It was so good for each consultant to have to write a response to the same piece and then have an open forum (along with small group work) to identify what was said, what needed to be said, and how to go about doing it. I think it helped the 303ers to have a "game-real" experience to really see what doing an email consultation is like. Even more, I think it was valuable for them to see how others responded so that they could gauge how others responded to the piece, to see where their responses fit, and to see that they likely experienced the same challenges as did other consultants. On that note, I took mine to class in digital format, so I'm sending it your way this morning.

I hope you had a fabulous time in San Diego, Melissa! I can't wait to hear all about the conference, and especially about how Dory's presentation went. What a great opportunity for her and for the other consultants that went. Wahoo!

a little bit of this, and a little bit of that...

I really enjoyed this week’s focus on multi-lingual writers, but I think you already know that, so I’m sorry if the rest of this seems a little redundant.

As I have thought back on my consultations this semester, I feel like most have been with multi-lingual writers. Even though many can find these interactions more frustrating than consultations with native speakers, I just so enjoy them. I love getting the opportunity to help these hard-working students further their proficiency in English speaking, and it is so rewarding to feel like you’ve actually helped someone at the end of thirty, or even just twenty-five minutes.

I connected to the readings for this week in several different ways. First, I think we got to read about the snazzy language acquisition business this week, even if we read it last week, I’m still going to talk about it, because I was so excited to read about Krashen and Asher again. I think it has been five or six years since the last time I encountered their theories. Yet again, as I mentioned in last week’s blog, I think a lot of what these second-language acquisition theorists talk about is appropriate to most language learners/users in general. For instance, both the concepts of the “Monitor Model” and the “Affective Filter” are very important to bear in mind when working with writers in the center whose native language is not English. These concepts are the reason why it is so important to connect with multi-lingual writers on a personal level and to be extra sensitive to their needs: be supportive, be engaging, be kind… Yet these theoretical SLA concepts also inform other facets of writing center practice that have absolutely nothing to do with writers from other countries. For instance, the very intentional design of the Writing Center space is created as such to be inviting and to make writers feel comfortable so that they are not afraid to “expose” their writing to another human, to ask questions, and to take risks. This very much follows the idea of lowering the students’ affective filter to enable learning to take place. It also helps reduce the depth and frequency of students’ over-active monitors. Further, in the writing classroom, I think the goal of creating a community of writers is also born out of a desire to lower the affective filter so that students, again, are comfortable enough to ask questions and take risks to develop their writing skills.

On a totally different note, I so, so appreciate the conversation that we had last Thursday, Melissa. I finally added up where my hours were for the internship, and I’m actually sitting at eighty already. To earn three credits, I think I only need to have 120 hours by the end of the semester. So, I think that writing a shorter, more practical piece for my final paper will work beautifully, and I think we can chat later on in the semester about how things are shaking out time-wise, and as far as the contributions I’m making go. I know you had mentioned something about pay for the hours that accrue after meeting my internship requirements, and I think we can talk about that later, too. I am pretty flexible, so I’m not worried about where we’re going, but it is nice to know that I’m sitting on the fuller side of required hours at the moment.

As for the practical piece, I really want to do something on working with our multilingual writers. I think it would be fun to look at the kind of folks we have that fit into this “category”, and to come up with some good tools that our consultants could pull out of their toolkits to help them with the nuts and bolts associated with some of these interactions –how to explain pronoun issues/articles/ablout(strong) verbs– I will also look into our mission statement…More on these ideas later. Have a great weekend, Melissa!

Muriel Harris’s article offered some great insights into how we approach working with multilingual writers in the center. I was interested that most of the writers who participated in her study were male, and in addition, I felt that she highlighted the Asian demographic more than any other. I appreciated come of her commentary about the values and work habits of this group in particular, but that reaction makes me think about our discussion in class on Thursday about how important it is not to label members of a perceived group and just shove them in a corner.

 

I think the overall takeaway from Harris’s piece and from the others we encountered this last week on multilingual writers is just to be patient, empathetic, and kind. When I think about non-native English speakers in the classroom, I feel like I approach them as any other student, and I think this is true of my behavior with writers in the writing center. The only differences, though, are accommodations like allowance of more time (being realistic for assignment deadlines/being patient one-on-one) and in my mind, making a more concerted effort to perform with/for them the good things we already do, like providing clear and appropriate comments and explanations.

 

I really love working with non-native English speakers. I feel like I learn something new about their culture, about myself, and about both of our languages. Of course, it if frustrating to often end up working at the sentence level of writing, but despite that, there is always a greater depth that is being reached in those consultations. I still remember this little Hispanic gal that used to come into the center when I worked under Mike Mattison. She was a pretty classing generation 1.5/ English ear-learner. We would work together mostly on her organization, though. It was so rewarding as the year progressed to see the development of organizational processes in her texts. As you mentioned in class Thursday, so often it is the multilingual writer who returns to the center. I have seen this to be true, and in true teacher-lady fashion, I love being able to work with one person and then be able to track their progress over time, besides establishing some sort of relationship, too.    

 

On another relationship note: I think the MARTY was a huge success. Everyone was hanging out and having a good time!

Challenges of an Ideal: Theories of Learning and Teaching Documentation

I loved Carol J. Singley and Holly W. Boucher’s article, “Dialogue in Tutor Training: Creating the Essential Space For Learning”. The audience was more for Writing Center administrators than for me, per say, but Singley and Boucher brought to the fore some fascinating ideas on how to facilitate learning, which to my teacher brain, is great. Their focus on conversation as “the essence of peer tutoring” is so true, and I love how they support their position with the ideas of Paolo Freire, who discusses the typical power structure of education as “the banking model” in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. By making this move, and by adding support from Knoblauch and Brannon’s Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing, Singley and Boucher illustrate how crucial it is for learning participants to engage with one another outside of the classic, hierarchically structured teaching model. This allows them to interact more fully and collaboratively, “where the ‘class’ becomes a conversation, and teacher and learner cannot be distinguished” (14). I am not a student-centered kind of gal, neither am I a traditionalist-style writing instructor; and for these reasons, I like how the framework that Singley and Boucher argue for is one that masquerades as student-centered, but is still facilitated by the teacher. I think that whether in the Writing center, a writing classroom, or a in a tutor training course, this adept model can be applied. Nevertheless, there are always challenges, and one that arises to tug against the desire to be non-traditionalist is that of documentation in writing.

So many writers come into the center with no other purpose than to “fix” their citations, whether MLA, or APA. I think they believe that we consultants must know everything about these documentation styles, and yet, as they often change within a few short years, how could we? I think in many cases writers come to us expecting the storehouse-model of instruction to be laid upon their faulty citations, yet what they get is much closer to the interactive dance that Singley and Boucher offer in their article. Yet to the writer’s growth, I think this is no detriment, but rather an advantageous practice. In such a situation, Freire’s ideal learning situation is epitomized, that education is “‘problem posing,’ as a consideration of reality’s disjunctions in an attempt to overcome them” (Singly and Boucher 14).Here again, the lines between “teacher” and “learner” are blurred, as the consultant and the writer work collaboratively to figure something out with the resources at hand.

On another tangent, I did appreciate the handout that we received, which highlighted some of the key differences among the MLA and APA documentation styles. I think this reading did a nice job of calling attention to some of the delicate nuances between the two styles that are not always understood, if even noticed. Having some of the philosophical implications for each in the back of our tutoring heads may not turn us into storehouse consultants, but it will allow us to have more effective dances while we negotiate meaning with the handbooks and our writers on different kinds of documentation.