Spring 2019 Writing Center Class

Post #11- Consuelo Some questions about multimodal assignments: How can faculty members already engaged with multimodal assignments (and more so WC tutors) develop skills on for design and video composition before students undertake these types of assignments? Is it feasible for IDEAL to create a workshop for Instructors? Based on your experience, is it helpful to provide the basics of research in social sciences before the students start these projects so some level of quality is achieved?

What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of the various multi-modal formats (Powerpoint, podcast, etc.). Do students have a particular fondness or distaste for certain formats? What are the common issues/problems that arise in these types of mediums?

1.      What do students typically need help with when putting together their multimodal assignments? 2.      What are the typical problems and questions that students have when constructing their multimodal projects? 3.      Do I need to be a tech whizz?

The audio essay sounds wonderfully creative, and I would love to see some of the student essays created for this class. A couple of questions come to mind. How do we make sure all students are sufficiently tech savvy to complete these assignments? Current debates around the so-called "digital divide" suggest that not all societal groups have equal access to communication technologies and the internet. Have you encountered such challenges in your classroom? If so, how did you address them? I was also wondering how we might want to handle various ethical issues raised by multimodal assignments. For instance, how do we ensure interviewee anonymity? The interviewees' voices (coupled with the personal stories they choose to tell) may be recognizable. Of course, this would be more of a concern with video essays, but audio podcasts may raise challenges in this regard as well. These innovative projects are fascinating, and I look forward to our conversation tomorrow!

I really like how this assignment calls the "podcast" an audio essay and seems like a wonderful and challenging alternative to the usual analytical essay. I wonder, though, for what type of class would this be an ideal project? It seems to me that because of the highly communicative nature of the assignment, it would best suit those students majoring in a field that requires this kind of interaction--mass communications and journalism are two that come immediately to mind. I worry about how this would go over in a general education course where the student mix includes some very shy students (those who rarely participate in class discussions) who would be petrified at the thought of engaging in a recorded conversation with their peers, let alone having to interview strangers. So, for whom would you recommend this assignment? And, if one were to use this in a gen ed classroom, how would you recommend encouraging students who might not be comfortable fulfilling the requirements

Blog Post #10 Consuelo Helping writers from disciplines outside mine has been less challenging than I expected.  Even, I would say that it is rewarding to work particularly with graduate students from unfamiliar disciplines to me. As I expected, they know their subjects well so the content becomes a given.  The focus of the tutoring then centers on the writing per se. Here it becomes relevant what Ryan and Zimmerelli (2016, 72) point out, “[r]egardless of a paper’s topic, you can determine whether the ideas are presented in a cohesive and persuasive manner.  You can look at larger issues—like organization, style, and tone—or at smaller issues—like grammar and mechanics—and determine whether the writing is effective.”    This semester, I have been working with graduate students from different fields. Regardless of the field (e.g., marketing, statistics, language acquisition) the experiences have been gratifying. However, helping writers, in particular, undergraduate students, a

Most of the papers "outside my discipline" that I have read as a tutor have been online papers. I have dealt with a few applications to the College of Nursing and a paper on cancer research. As a tutor offering feedback on these essays and papers, I did not feel that they required much prior knowledge of nursing or medical scholarship. The application essay prompts invited prospective nursing students to reflect on their experiences with diversity and community service, so these were pretty easy to go through and comment on. I mostly encouraged students to be as specific as possible and describe in detail particular events or activities they had been involved in. The paper on cancer research was a review of the scholarly literature on the association between consumption of smokeless non-tobacco products and oral cancer, and it was meant for publication. This paper seemed to be a very early draft; it had many problems with organization, presentation of findings, grammar, and s

The few times I've had to work with students outside of my discipline there have been no major hiccups. As I am reading, if I don't understand a concept that is discipline specific, I will ask the student for clarity. Usually, that will prompt a conversation about whether the concept needs to be clearer in the paper. I've yet to have a student feel like I couldn't help them because I wasn't in their discipline. Though I am a creative writer, I have experienced the most pushback from students that bring in creative pieces. Students seem to think that creative writing means that you write whatever you want with no regard for conventions. I have experienced two students that had abrupt endings to their stories. The endings had no lead-up or development, they were just tacked onto the end. When I tried to explain how you can add details throughout the essay that make an ending feel well earned but still surprising they were resistant. I don't tell students I am a

I find it challenging to work with writers from other disciplines. I had one geology graduate student who was preparing for his comps and had some writing he'd done for it, but it was difficult for me to help--particularly within half an hour--because 1) I wasn't familiar with the procedures of his discipline, i.e. what comps even mean for him and 2) His language was often very technical. This can be helpful, like with the linguistics student I saw yesterday who needed help because she understood her subject so well she could no longer see the actual logic of the paper (she could only see the logic of events/facts as they appeared in her mind.) I was able to help her because I wasn't in her discipline--I was able to detect where her thinking interrupted itself or went on tangents. But for my geology student, we spent much of our time covering basic geological principles because I needed to understand them to move forward in his writing. I have to say I prefer working with h

A week or so ago I had a Ph.D. student (who was also ESL) come in for help writing his comps in public health. He had to respond to a series of case studies and I recall he had to be very specific about his responses. For instance, one of the questions asked him to respond to how well a  study about a food-borne illness that affected people's gastrointestinal system was conducted. Much of the language he used was extremely esoteric and his answers were lengthy. Brevity, apparently, isn't rewarded in his field. That proved somewhat problematic in the beginning since I had to determine when he was extraneous and when he wasn't. Eventually, by asking questions whenever the language tripped me up, his clarifications often revealed areas that could be cut because it was superfluous or he had incorrectly articulated a point. Of course, reading out loud also revealed organizational or grammatical hiccups. So, ironically enough, my unfamiliarity with his field is what allowed us to

I tutor two graduate students in marketing, which is not my field of study. I know virtually nothing about marketing. However, this has mattered very little in our tutoring sessions, which have progressed very well in my opinion. My students have mainly needed help with things like organization, clarity, and word choice. These are all things that I, as a writing center tutor, am equipped to assist them with. My background in religious studies has not been completely irrelevant, however. Religious studies methodologies and theories are different than marketing, but the basic research processes and patterns are not completely dissimilar. My students, like me, still need to read many books and articles, collect data, synthesize their data, and write a clear narrative about their data. I have been able to utilize my knowledge about conducting research and writing about research to assist my students with various writing issues. That said, I spent a significant portion of

The most outside of my wheelhouse I have ever been is when proofing/giving feedback for an artist statement. My wife is a local artist and I have often given my two-cents on her statements. There is nothing more polar opposite than any type of writing I have ever had to asses than an artist statement. There are no hard and fast guidelines (scary) and it is convention to write in the third person (weird). It is also not necessarily beneficial for the text to be perfectly clear; vagueness can be used as a technique to supplement the theme of a particular exhibit. My comments used to be, "Not clear enough!", but I have tried to pivot my thinking and ignore the clarity demon on my shoulder. Instead I try to get all Zen-like and focus more on the sensations/emotions that arise when reading her statement and look for instances where, for example, convoluted sentence structure gets in the way of the feeling she is trying to put forth. An artist's statement is also something deep

Show me a paper with integers and I will show you the fear and cluelessness that comes with having taken my final math class at age 17. While most of my friends spent their senior year of high school toiling through calculus, I opted to drop the subject altogether to read Pinocchio in Italian. I then matriculated to a liberal arts college that had zero gen ed requirements (proudly touted by admins as the "Open Curriculum" but widely understood by students as a way to escape having a curriculum at all) during which the closest I came to taking anything remotely quantitative was my slightly misguided and extremely anxiety-inducing foray into the world of Economics. Needless to say I now feel somewhat out of my depth whenever I work with students who regard statistical analysis as anything but utter torture, as is the case with one of my Enrollment students this semester, Siyuan. On exchange from Tsinghua University in China this year, Siyuan is interested in quantifying the e

I have read the chapter "Research in the Writing Center" with a great deal of interest. I think that conducting research on a variety of topics relevant to writing centers is essential to these institutions and to the profession as a whole. For one thing, research enables writing center professionals to acquire a better understanding of the students they work with and attempt to help. For instance, first-generation students may have different writing needs compared to students whose parents are college graduates. Or, international students may benefit from particular tutoring strategies that are not entirely helpful to other groups of U.S.-born students. Research also helps writing center professionals connect with their colleagues and share ideas, useful strategies, or concerns. Conferences and journal publications help cement the profession and make it visible to the academic community and beyond. Lively debates are important ways of keeping abreast of new developments in a

I absolutely think that research should be incorporated into any writing center's program. I also think that writing center research is far more difficult than, for example, biological research. In biology we have experimental controls that are used to account for the effect of multiple variables/drivers. This type of accountability is extremely difficult when using human subjects "in the wild" primarily because, in most cases, we are limited to observational analysis as opposed to experimental. The chapter we read distinguishes between quantitative and qualitative research and both of these types of data are sensitive to the type of data and the way in which the data was collected. If I was to do a rigorous research project on a writing center issue I think I would aim to do a quantitative analysis (which has problems such as - how to distill categorical data to numerical values in an unbiased fashion, for example). A goal I would have would be to maximize sample size as

Writing center research is important because as the years go on new research is shared about how we can better help minority students and other underserved populations. Perhaps it already exists,  but I would like to see research on how to help underserved students that had elementary/high school educations that did prepare them for college-level reading and writing because they went to unfunded schools in neighborhoods populated by minorities. Of course, much of what we already know can apply to helping these students, but I'm interested in thinking about how to approach these students in a way that embraces the rhythm with which they speak and the way they process language, a way that embraces that without telling them it's wrong while demonstrating the "official way" to write a paper.   I am thinking of a text along the lines of Reclaiming Composition for Chicano/as and Other Ethnic Minorities but centered on writing centers. 

I think it is imperative that writing center staff pursue writing center-specific research, and that writing centers prioritize and encourage their tutors to engage in research. The way we learn what works, across a broad field, is by asking questions about specific processes and then examining them more closely. For me, the idea of considering how incarcerated students interact in and benefit from a writing center environment is a fascinating one. Resources are sorely limited and there are many challenges when offering access to higher education in a carceral setting: no access to email or other modes of communication, few settings in which to have a private conversation or consultation, and students are often required to wait significant amounts of time in order to ask clarifying questions or get feedback from an instructor.  The ability to work with a writing center tutor can yield substantial gains for an incarcerated student. Asking questions about the positioning of tutors in col