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.