Spring 2019 Writing Center Class

I can relate to the topic of reading issues among undergraduates. One of the two students I am tutoring this semester has had difficulties reading complex conceptual texts. Recently, she has been working on an academic article about “doing gender.” She needs to use this article as a theoretical lens to explore a case study of transgender employees and the challenges they encounter in the workplace, as well as in their everyday lives more broadly. She brought a first draft of her paper to our tutoring session, and we read the prompt together. The prompt required that the introductory paragraph present the argument of the article and contrast the theory of gender as “accomplished” in everyday interactions to the theory of socialization into gender roles. I am deeply familiar with many bodies of scholarly literature in Gender Studies, so I was glad to read parts of this article together with my student. However, I noticed that while her introduction contained a few good point...

I find this chapter interesting in regards to my teaching, but am as of yet unsure as to how to apply it in my WC work. I have only tutored a few times, but each time my students have come in well past the stage of first reading. I have to admit I'm not quite sure what their reading process was like or where they had difficulties. I would assume that if I were to ask them to go back and reread or to explain to me how they read the source they would believe it was a waste of time. I'm also at a disadvantage in that I haven't read most of what they are reading for their writing, so I'm unsure of their levels of comprehension. Reading sounds like something we might talk about if the writing weren't a pressing issue, but students come in with writing assignments often due quite soon. Since reading is the foundation of writing we seem to skip over it, assuming it's there. But reading this chapter indicates to me that perhaps I should change my process to include mo...

The Bean chapter resonated strongly with me in relation to the incarcerated population of students with whom I work.  In weekly study halls I see students struggle not only to understand the readings they've been assigned, dating back from our preliminary Speaker Series offerings, which included separate reading assignments and lectures by individual faculty members over a 14 week abbreviated semester to students currently working in Jen Stone's 1030, but also to process and analyze them. Incarceration, especially for a long period of time, takes away a person's agency in ways that are not yet fully or well understood. People in prison only get to make about a third of the regular decisions that people on the "outside" do.  In fact it's been documented at 28,000 plus daily decisions for an outsider individual, and below 6,000 for someone who is incarcerated. That institutionalization sometimes damages students' ability to reach beyond what is obviously sta...

Blog Post #6 Consuelo Students’ reading problems vary widely ranging from not liking to read to having difficulties following basic instructions, and identifying main points of a text. As Bean points out, drawing on Sternberg (1987), one of the students’ reading difficulties stems from their lack of awareness regarding the connection between reading process variation and the reader’s purpose. Very often students apply the same reading speed to reading a newspaper sport section as to reading a difficult text where the goal is to identify main ideas. Failing to adapt their reading strategies to different purposes, students frequently complain about having difficulties understanding the text. In addition to this lack of adjustment of a reading process to its purpose, how students approach the reading process can be a source of reading difficulties, according to Bean. Thus, a difficult text should be approached by reading slowly, rereading, asking questions, and making connections w...

Too many fishing metaphors! I have observed many of the issues discussed in Bean’s chapter while teaching Rhetoric 1030. Many of the strategies mentioned in the chapter, I already implement in my course; however, it was very useful to examine the ten contributing causes for why students struggle with college reading. I don’t think it was until I got to graduate school that I actually mastered all ten of these issues. Hence, I can identify with undergraduate students who struggle with the ten factors. Quite often, no one instructs undergraduate students on all the reading tricks to help them avoid the ten factors. I recently had a student in my class demonstrate “Difficulty in Assimilating the Unfamiliar.” During class discussion, this student attributed a perspective that she had read in another class to the reading for that day. She attributed a perception that scholars can obtain scholarly objectivity to a scholar that was working against the idea of scholarly objec...

In general, I find the idea of online tutoring to be daunting. As an instructor, for example, I require my students to meet with me in person to discuss their papers because corresponding via countless emails is time-consuming and often ineffectual. Students don't get the immediacy of having my feedback relayed to them in person, nor the comfortability that comes with sharing physical space. There's also another consideration--one's tone can often be misread, which can pose more problems rather than deter them. Also, this mode of asynchronous tutoring--again, speaking as an instructor--requires both student and teacher to be constantly vigilant, participating in a form of email tag that even thinking of it now is exhausting. However, I'm aware that tutoring and teaching have different methods of instruction, I'm still not sure I notice any significant differences in how asynchronous tutoring can substitute for synchronous tutoring in a way that benefits both instruc...

I've devoted a number of sessions in the writing center this semester to simply reading together. This has been a new experience for me (before I'd say that the only shared reading I did in my previous writing center work was in trying to break apart the prompt) but I've found it to be just as instructive. For one thing, as the reading notes, "questions about student writing or critical thinking...inevitably turn also to problems of student reading." Though I tend to default to outline work because it allows me to engage with students BEFORE they've written anything - allowing me to first talk to them about their thinking rather than their writing - it's become clear that with some students outlining is still not foundational enough, and that to really help them organize their thinking I first need to help them understand the text (or texts) they've been assigned. Also, in a more basic way, I've also encountered a fair number of vocabulary/jargon-r...

My current ESL student and I spend ~half our time reading different types of passages together. We have read scientific articles, poems, and passages form several novels. She has trouble understanding the nuances of the readings and I have found that these troubles largely stem from #7 (lack of the "cultural literacy" assumed by the text's author) and #8 (inadequate vocabulary) of Engaging Ideas . The cultural literacy issues are, at least on the surface, easier to deal with ( e.g. , not understanding the Christ story) as I can summarize the high points. I find that vocabulary is a more pressing concern because sometimes it is not simply a matter of looking up a difficult word in the dictionary but knowing when to look up a word. For example, my student was confused about the word 'tempered' used in a poem. The way 'tempered; was used in the poem was meant to convey strengthening, however she only knew the definition of the emotion ( e.g. , a bad-tempered baby...

The topic of contrastive rhetoric has been of interest to me over the years. Indeed, I have experienced different writing styles myself. I have also taught and tutored speakers of English as a second language, many of whom have likely been exposed to different writing styles too. I would argue that while different "cultures" may encourage different writing styles during particular historical periods, these are not grounded in incommensurable linguistic differences. In other words, it is not the structure of a language that "leads to" or "causes" a particular writing style; rather, I believe that writing styles are grounded in writing traditions, which, in many cases, tend to vary over time and across disciplines. Let us take the U.S. as a cultural space (keeping in mind, of course, that this is not a homogenous "culture;" there are many intersecting and overlapping "cultures" and "subcultures" within the U.S.). We often thi...

What interests me most about this article and general ideas around non-native English speakers is this idea that "nonnative English speakers who write in English violate the norms of English rhetoric, that "each language and each culture has a paragraph order unique to itself, and that part of the learning of a particular language is the mastering of its logical system." Of course, different cultures structure papers differently, but as long as long as the argument of the essay is successfully relayed indentation and paragraph order don't matter much. Especially considering that most of my students (almost all of them white Americans) write as if no one ever taught them the five paragraph essay. Their arguments are muddled, there are no topic sentences, etc. So I don't really understand why this is an important disquisition between native and nonnative speakers. I have to each ALL of my students how to structure an academic paper proper within the context of th...

As I've said before, I have had relatively little experience either teaching or tutoring writers for whom English is not their first language.  Having acknowledged that, I am fascinated by the concept of Contrastive Rhetoric, and it's progeny, Intercultural Rhetoric.  The discussions in the text all resonate as logical when thinking about the ways in which research and pedagogies evolve.  I do also agree with the assertion that the idea of  "culture" cannot remain static and isolated, nor solely assigned to what the author identifies as either "large" or "small." I feel like this is probably an obvious point, but I think considering the ways we currently learn and grow, both within our own cultures as well as across cultures simply because we can now be effectively immersed in another culture without ever leaving our hometown, bears examination and reflection. I'm thinking specifically of my daughter's obsession with the K-Pop boy band BTS....

While I was reading “Contrastive and Intercultural Rhetoric,” I could not help but think about how much this subject matter applies to native speaking students. Some native speaking rhetoric students are unaware that writing is contextual or that academic writing tends to have an order of operations. Thus, in a classroom setting with both native and nonnative students it seems beneficial to discuss these aspects of writing with all students. Implementation of CR and IR insights and strategies can be seen as an opportunity to create an inclusive learning environment, instead of a troubling conundrum. Thus, I see CR and IR as being very useful within a classroom setting. I am concerned about bringing up CR and IR matters in a one-on-one tutoring session, however. I think the problems that could arise from this engagement are compounded when the ESL student is a graduate student. I worry about offending a student who feels that he is well studied in all things that ...