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Writing
Labs: On Campus and Online
Muriel
Harris |
more |
If there's a Writing Center (or Writing
Lab or Writing Room or Write Place, etc.) down the hall at your institution,
I have some suggestions for how you and your students can make use of its
services and resources. But if you don't have access to a writing center to
add individualized instruction, consider integrating some of the writing center's
one-to-one tutorial pedagogy in your classroom teaching or conferencing, and
do consider using some of the online resources for writers that writing centers
offer.
WHAT IS A WRITING CENTER?
Writing centers exist in physical places, and many also have a virtual entity-a website usually called an OWL (Online Writing Lab). The physical writing center is staffed with tutors who offer one-to-one help. This help may be with writing processes; with questions about assignments, organization, the use of sources, or grammar; or whether the paper "makes sense" or "flows." Sometimes teachers have specific suggestions when they refer students, sometimes students come in on their own, and sometimes they need help with writing done for other courses on campus. Students also come in because of cases of writing apprehension or lack of confidence about their writing skills. The tutor's job is to work with the whole person - her abilities, concerns, and writing history, as well as her paper - to establish a comfortable interaction within which the student and tutor can work productively together. The all-important collaborative relationship a tutor aims to create permits students to learn more effectively, to take a more active role in the conversation, and to ask the kinds of questions they hesitate to ask teachers for fear of appearing inept or just plain stupid. (Usually, those questions are important ones that any teacher would be pleased to respond to, but students too often persist in assuming they will be dismissed as total incompetents or air-heads for asking about matters they assume everyone else learned before they entered high school.)
In tutorial dialogue, the pedagogical tool is talk. The student is encouraged to do most of the talking, sometimes responding to questions the tutor asks, sometimes explaining what the tutor doesn't understand, or sometimes working through something the tutor suggests. This generative conversation helps the student formulate a better paper and often results in student evaluations that state something like "The tutor didn't tell me what to write. She just helped me clarify what I want to write about." Because the conversation at the beginning stages of a paper is more useful to the student than trying later on to work with a paper that has not turned out well, tutors suggest coming to the writing center early, as writers choose a topic or start to plan the paper. The tutor's role is to be a facilitator, a counselor, a coach, a listener. In addition, sometimes a tutor is an informant, explaining a point of grammar, showing a student how to proofread or set up a bibliography, or explaining genre conventions. For ESL students, tutors can also be cultural informants, clarifying the conventions of American academic prose or defining idioms and connotations of words the student has chosen to use. The goal of a writing center tutor, as Stephen North so aptly put it, is "to produce better writers, not better writing." (438).
A
writing center's virtual entity or OWL may provide online tutoring, information
about the physical center, links to useful resources for writers, and handouts
on various aspects of grammar, writing skills, and types of documents (such
as resumes). Our OWL in the Purdue University Writing Lab (<http://owl.english.purdue.edu>)
also has hypertext tutorials and PowerPoint workshops that any teacher who
has access to the Internet can download and use in class. Like most other
OWLs, we share our resources with any writer or teacher anywhere, and each
OWL determines its own policies about downloading and distributing its materials.
( For a comprehensive list of OWLs, see
<http://iwca.syr.edu>.)
HOW CAN YOU USE A WRITING CENTER?
The writing lab is there to assist writers, to accompany the large group instruction offered in writing classes. To use the lab effectively, you can integrate it into your syllabus. Recommend the service, explain that it's a useful resource that helps writers, and for motivation, offer extra credit to students who use it. But try not to require it. That results in students who march in, hostile to the idea of having to be there, and often resilient to getting any help. Defuse the myth that writing centers are for poor writers. Most often, it's the better writers who are motivated to work on their communication skills who find their way to the door. And see what writing lab services are available to assist you in your teaching and your own professional development:
- Workshops on writing topics
- Handouts in cabinets in the center or on OWL (to download)
- Faculty development session
- Brochures to distribute to your classes, explaining the services
- Newsletters and announcements to keep you informed about the center's activities
- Tutoring jobs (Your conferencing skills and classroom pedagogy will benefit from having worked as a tutor!)
WHAT ARE SOME CONFERENCING TECHNIQUES YOU CAN USE?
Tutors have the advantage of not issuing grades, thus putting students at ease about talking with them. But, while you cannot shed your identity as a teacher who, after all, gives the grade, you can incorporate some writing lab strategies to help your students learn more effectively:
- When conferencing with students, start by establishing a comfortable interaction. Put the writer at ease by chatting a few moments and by starting the work session on a positive note (perhaps by identifying something about a draft that works well; perhaps commending the student on an interesting choice of topic).
- If possible, try not to set up a hierarchical or confrontational seating arrangement such as having the student sit on the other side of the desk. Try sitting next to each other so that you both can look at a paper.
- In any conversation with students, monitor your vocabulary so that you don't use rhetorical jargon that may be familiar to you but not to most students. (If they don't understand "focus" or "coherence" or "comma splice," they are not likely to let you know.)
- Ask open-ended questions and be sure to allow the student plenty of time to answer instead of quickly jumping in to answer your own question or relieve what seems to you like an awkward silence.
- Let the student do at least 50 percent of the talking. Articulating her concern or working through a muddy idea by herself will help the student figure out what she wants to write.
- Work with the whole student, not just the paper, and remember that writers are individuals who differ in many ways, including their writing processes.
- Ask the student to explain to you what her main idea is or what she thinks the assignment is asking her to do. Sometimes, a student is not aware of a misapprehension about what to write or doesn't realize that he has not yet focused sufficiently on a topic or narrowed it to a reasonable size.
- Use every opportunity (such as not writing too much on the paper) to let the student know he's the writer and he's in charge of deciding what to write.
- Don't try to accomplish too much in a conference or when grading the paper. Choose a few topics and quit before the student goes into information overload.
- Bring closure to a conference by asking the writer what she's planning to do next with the paper. Or summarize the content of what you both have talked about. Be sure to ask if there are any remaining unanswered questions relating to what you were talking about.
RESOURCES
Coulbrooke, Star. "When the
Teacher is Also the Tutor." Writing Lab Newsletter 24.2 (Oct.
1999): 10-12.
Harris, Muriel. "Collaboration Is Not Collaboration Is Not Collaboration:
Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer Response Groups." College Composition
and Communication 43 (1992): 369-83.
- - - . "Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors."
College English 57.1 (1995): 27-42.
- - - . "Teacher/Student Talk: The Collaborative Conference." Perspectives
on Talk and Learning. Ed. Susan Hynds and Donald Rubin. Urbana, Illinois:
National Council of Teachers of English, 1990. 149-61.
- - - . Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference. Urbana, Illinois:
National Council of Teachers of English, 1986.
- - - . "'What Would You Like to Work on Today?': The Writing Center
as a Site for Teacher Training." Preparing College Teachers of Writing:
Histories, Theories, Programs, and Practices. Ed. Betty Pytlik and Sarah
Liggett. Oxford UP, forthcoming.
North, Stephen. "The Idea of a Writing Center." College English
46 (1984): 433-446.
Van Dyke, Christina. "From Tutor to TA: Transferring Pedagogy from the
Writing Center to the Composition Classroom." Writing Lab Newsletter
21.8 (April 1997): 1-3, 10.
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