PWR Instructors Discuss Issues in Writing Tutoring at the NCWCA

How can writing instructors learn to teach writing by tutoring in the writing center? And how can writing centers tailor their tutoring to specific student populations like first-year students, honors students, and graduate students writing across the disciplines? Writing instructors and lecturers from the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) and the Hume Writing Center at Stanford shared their experiences with colleagues from other universities at the Northern California Writing Center Association's 15th annual conference, "Writing Selves in the Center," held at Santa Rosa Junior College on Saturday, March 1, 2008.

The PWR instructors participated in two panels. In the morning session, participants in "Tutoring Specific Populations" described how standard tutoring pedagogy can be customized to better serve students such as those enrolled in a required writing-intensive “great books” course or Writing across the Curriculum courses, along with ESL students, honors students writing theses, and graduate students writing theses and dissertations.

Sohui Lee, Assistant Director of the Hume Writing Center, talked about how tutoring graduate students might be different from tutoring undergraduates, identified how the Hume Writing Center serves the graduate population at Stanford in tutoring, and presented a future initiative to serve them better.

A particular problem for graduate students, Lee explained, is that professors in the U.S. tend not to think about teaching specialized writing in the disciplines. What this means for writing centers is that graduate students want a range of help for writing in and outside the discipline but come in confused about what writing centers can offer.

The Hume Writing Center can help graduate students reconceptualize their specialized writing to take advantage of general writing strategies and theory outside their discipline. At the same time, Lee maintained, the Center recognizes the need to define what tutors can offer in general writing advice and strategies, and what graduate students need to request from their professors and advisers about conventions of writing in their discipline.

Lee concluded her talk by describing a new collaborative initiative being planned with the Vice Provost of Graduate Education (VPGE) to develop a group of writing center-trained graduate tutors whose objective will be to fill the writing gap for specialized disciplinary writing.

Other members of the panel included Hilton Obenzinger, Associate Director of the Hume Writing Center and Director of Honors Writing at Stanford, and Kristi Wilson, Assistant Director of the Hume Writing Center.

In the afternoon session, PWR instructors addressed the question of how writing center work improves classroom pedagogy for a panel called “Centered Teaching: Or, How I Learned to Teach Writing at the Writing Center.” They testified to the direct and positive effects of writing center work, especially tutoring, on classroom teaching as well as composition scholarship.

Helle Rytkønen, in particular, reflected on a recent debate in the September 2007 issue of College Composition and Communication that highlighted the limitations of using only written work to assess students' critical thinking.  Rytkønen suggested that face–to–face tutoring sessions in the writing center can serve as models for how to conduct conferences in the writing classroom and better equip writing teachers to stimulate intellectual growth in students.

Writing center tutors, Rytkønen argued, are trained to cultivate an approach to writing that emphasizes the inventive rather than the judicial (grading) mode. The focus is therefore on writing as creation, not only on mechanics, and the chances of acknowledging a students’ critical thinking and intellectual growth may therefore be higher.

Furthermore, since writing center tutors are often not experts in the tutees' field, Rytkønen believes that tutors are forced to refrain from focusing on "right answers" and instead encourage students to step back from the written work and explain, discuss, and explore their topics. Rytkønen argued that this approach has enabled her to pay better attention to her classroom students' indicators that they had more complex thoughts about their projects than they were (yet) able to articulate in a written argument.

Other members of the panel included Arturo Heredia, Jonathan Hunt, Sangeeta Mediratta, and John Peterson.  Both panels were organized by Clyde Moneyhun, Director of the Hume Writing Center.