18.3 Attention and Awareness in the Writing Center

PR AXIS a writing center journal

18.3 Attention and Awareness in the Writing Center

VOL. 18, NO. 3 (2021): ATTENTION AND AWARENESS IN THE WRITING CENTER TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS COLUMNS From the Editors: Attention and Awareness in the Writing Center Kiara Walker and Kaitlin Passafiume

FOCUS ARTICLES The ‘Ghost’ in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback?

Bruce Bowles Jr. Productive Disruptions: Moving from Empathy to Invitation in the Struggle Towards Equity in Writing Center Work Tyler Thier, Aisha Wilson-Carter, Marilyn Buono-Magri, Jennifer Marx, Joseph Chilman, and Andrea Rosso Efthymiou Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study Kelsey Hixson-Bowles, Hayden Berg, Jessica Wallace, and Konnor McIntire Writing Center Ambassadors: Engaging Campus Organizations through Embedded Consultants Joseph Cheatle and Cristian Lambaren Sanchez Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey Christine Modey, Genie Giaimo, and Joseph Cheatle Metacognition and Transfer: A Cross-Institutional Study of Writing Center Clients and Non-Clients Jared Featherstone

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Hayden Berg is the Assistant Coordinator at the Utah Valley University Writing Center where he's worked as a tutor and a writing fellow for three years. He earned two Bachelor's degrees from Utah Valley University in Philosophy and Behavioral Science. He'll be applying to earn a PhD in Philosophy later this year.

Bruce Bowles Jr., Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of the University Writing Center at Texas A&M University–Central Texas. His research interests focus on how we evaluate and make judgments across a multitude of contexts including writing assessment, public discourse, and writing center administration. You can find his work in journals such as Composition Studies; enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture; Journal of Response to Writing; and WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship.

Marilyn Buono-Magri, Ph.D. is Assistant Director of the Writing Center and adjunct associate professor of writing in the Writing Studies and Rhetoric Department at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Dr. Buono-Magri received her PhD in Literacy Studies and her MA in English Literature from Hofstra University.

Her theoretical framework embraces a sociocultural perspective and relational notions of identity and is consistent with the work of the New London Group (1996) in its emphasis on multimodal social semiotics. Dr. Buono-Magri’s multimodal approach to college writing has produced data that serves to expand the learning process, documents the ways in which student identities shift and change, and supports the disruption of literacy practices that are autonomous and fixed.

Joseph Cheatle, Ph.D. is the Director of the Writing and Media Center at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He has previously worked as a professional consultant at Case Western Reserve University and graduate consultant at Miami University. His current research projects focus on organization, assessment, and onboarding in writing centers. He has been published in Praxis, Kairos, The Writing Center Journal, and the Journal of College Student Development. As an administrator, he is interested in how to provide professional development opportunities for consultants as well as in how to provide holistic support for student success. He is a current At-Large Representative on the IWCA Board, former member of the ECWCA Board, and former co-leader of the IWCA Collaborative @ 4Cs. Joseph Chilman, M.F.A. is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Hofstra University, where he has also been a writing tutor since 2008. He received his MFA, with a focus in poetry writing, from Hofstra in 2013. In recent years, Joseph has published numerous poems in journals, and has also taught various courses/programs at Hofstra, such as General Creative Writing, Fantastic Fiction, and internships for AMP magazine.

Jared Featherstone, M.F.A is the Writing Center Director and an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University. His research focuses on cognition, writing, and mindfulness. He has an MFA in Creative Writing and a BA in Journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park. Jared has completed Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach's Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, and he is a member of the International Mindfulness Meditation Teachers Association.

Genie Nicole Giaimo, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor and Director of the Writing Center at Middlebury College.

She is editor of Wellness and Care in Writing Center Work: A WLN Digital Collection (2021). Along with Yanar Hashlamon, she is the special editor of a WLN special issue on wellness and care in writing center work. Her

work has been published in Praxis, Journal of Writing Research, The Journal of Writing Analytics, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Research in Online Literacy Education, Kairos, Across the Disciplines, as well as several edited collections (Utah State University Press, Parlor Press, Emerald). She is current co-president of NEWCA, past vice president of ECWCA, and past co-chair of the IWCA Collaborative @ CCCC. Her current research utilizes quantitative and qualitative models to answer a range of questions about behaviors and practices in and around writing centers and writing programs, such as tutor attitudes towards wellness and self-care practices, students’ perceptions of writing centers, outcomes from STEM-specific writing curricula interventions, as well as the impact of directed self-placement on first-year writers.

Kelsey Hixson-Bowles, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literacies & Composition and the Faculty Director of the Writing Center at Utah Valley University. She has worked in the writing center community since 2010, holding positions on the MAWCA and RMWCA regional boards, serving as graduate co-editor of The Peer Review, and serving as co-chair of the IWCA Summer Institute. Kelsey’s research interests include dispositions’ role in writing transfer, writing center studies, and the intersection of social justice and writing education. She earned her doctorate from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Cristian Alejandro Lambaren Sanchez, M.A. is an Academic Specialist – Advisor in the College of Social Science at Michigan State University (MSU). He graduated with a Master of Arts from the Student Affairs Administration program in the College of Education in 2017. Throughout graduate school, Cristian worked as Neighborhood Coordinator for the Writing Center at MSU. Assuming a critical social justice approach, Cristian holds a deep commitment to serving underrepresented student populations, especially first-generation college students, multilingual writers and students from migrant families. Currently, he teaches a Service Learning and Community Engagement course, coordinates internship study away and service learning study abroad programs, and advises undergraduate students in experiential learning opportunities.

Jennifer Marx, M.A. is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Writing Studies in the Department of Writing Studies and Rhetoric at Hofstra University, where she is a faculty tutor at the Writing Center and where she earned her MA and BA in English and American Literature. She is also an Adjunct Professor of English in the English Department at Adelphi University, and she works as a freelance writer and editor for both web and print publications. She enjoys creative writing, particularly short stories and poetry, as well, and seasonally teaches a creative writing class at the Bryant Library.

Konnor McIntire is an Adjunct Instructor in the Biology Department at Utah Valley University, where he received a B.S. in Exercise Science. He worked as a tutor and writing fellow in the University’s Writing Center for two years. He will pursue a graduate degree in Occupational Therapy later this year.

Christine Modey, Ph.D. directs the Michigan Community Scholars Program at the University of Michigan.

From 2015 to 2020, she also directed the Peer Writing Consultant Program at the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan and taught courses in the theory and practice of peer writing tutoring, new media writing for nonprofit organizations, and first year composition. She has published articles about universitysecondary school writing center partnerships, data visualization and corpus analysis of writing center session notes, and nineteenth-century literature, and has an abiding interest in networks, collaboration, and community building. She is the co-editor with David Schoem and Edward St. John of Teaching the Whole Student: Engaged Learning with Heart, Mind, and Spirit.

Andrea Rosso Efthymiou, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Writing Studies and Rhetoric and the Writing Center Director at Hofstra University. Andrea chaired the 2017 National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing (NCPTW) and currently serves as NCPTW Treasurer. Andrea’s scholarship has appeared in WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal and various edited collections. Her current research measures the impact of writing center tutors’ extended work beyond tutoring sessions, assessing tutors’ writing center research, conference presentations, and publications.

Tyler Thier, M.F.A. is an Adjunct Professor of Writing Studies at Hofstra University, where he also serves as a faculty tutor in the Writing Center and Special Guest Editor for AMP Magazine. His publications include poetry, film criticism, and scholarly literature, along with performances of his play in Toronto and NYC (so far). His current research involves rhetorical analysis of problematic factions, such as hate groups and authoritarian regimes, and his ongoing interests lie primarily in experimental and revolutionary art.

Jessica Wallace received a B.A. in English, Writing Studies from Utah Valley University and is currently enrolled in Brigham Young University’s English M.A. program. Her course of study is primarily rooted in the field of rhetoric and composition. She previously worked at the Utah Valley University Writing Center as both a tutor and writing fellow.

Aisha Wilson-Carter, M.F.A. is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Writing Studies in the department of Writing Studies & Rhetoric and a faculty tutor in the writing center at Hofstra University, where she serves on the faculty advisory board for the Center for "Race," Culture & Social Justice and as co-chair of the Black Faculty Council. She is also a lecturer and course co-director for Undergraduate Writing: Readings in Human Rights at Columbia University. Aisha is a doctoral candidate in Administrative Leadership at St. John’s University; her research centers on anti-oppressive education, including issues of organizational culture, equity, access, assessment, anti-bias curriculum, and antiracist pedagogy.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18 No 3 (2021)

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: ATTENTION AND AWARENESS IN THE WRITING CENTER Kiara Walker University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com We here at Praxis are pleased to bring you our Summer 2021 issue, “Attention and Awareness in the Writing Center.” This issue brings together research that emphasizes how writing center practitioners and consultees are attuned to the work that occurs within writing centers and the influence of this work beyond writing centers. In our writing centers, attention and awareness are crucial practices. This is evident when consultants attentively engage with consultee’s work; when we use consultant feedback to become more aware of their skills and needs; when we develop programs to better serve and reach consultees; and, finally, when we engage in self-reflective practices to understand our own approaches to writing center work.

The pieces collected in this issue ask us to consider the ways we can cultivate our awareness toward actions that can influence the practices within our writing centers and influence how our centers engage with our institutions of higher education.

In our opening focus article, “The ‘Ghost’ in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback?,” Bruce Bowles Jr. examines how the presence of faculty feedback influences writing center sessions. In response to a dearth of research on these types of sessions, Bowles offers a study of sessions involving faculty feedback and finds insights about the significance of external documents to sessions, the consultants’ approach to reading and addressing faculty feedback, and the emotional response of students in these sessions. Arguing that sessions with faculty feedback present “are different in kind rather than degree” (10), the author recommends pedagogical, collaborative, and empirical research responsive to said differences.

Next, Tyler Thier, Aisha Wilson-Carter, Marilyn Buono-Magri, Jennifer Marx, Joseph Chilman, and Andrea Rooso Efthymiou conjure Romeo Garcia’s theory of transformative listening in their article entitled “Productive Disruptions: The Struggle Towards Equity in Writing Center Work.” In the context of Hofstra University’s writing center, the authors ask how enacting transformative listening can reveal institutional structures that privilege some and marginalize others.

Responding to Laura Greenfield’s theorizing of power and privilege and harnessing Audre Lorde’s productive uses of anger, the article’s authors confront the language

Kaitlin Passafiume University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com of identity markers, asking how empathy itself denotes privilege. Finally, this piece “considers how privilege around such categories operationalizes oppression,” signaling to “how mindful, individual reflections about privilege are part of the messy process towards collective action and greater equity” (14).

In “Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Disposition Awareness Study,” Kelsey Hixson-Bowles, Hayden Berg, Jessica Wallace, and Konnor McIntire shift our focus to student perceptions of their own writing experiences and processes. Building on writing center scholarship about students’ ability to transfer writing from one context to another, the authors study the efficacy of one strategy for “raising students’ metacognitive awareness of their dispositions toward writing”—micro-coaching (23). Hixson-Bowles et al.'s study approaches micro-coaching as a possible intervention to address students’ self-efficacy and selfregulation, ultimately concluding that the possible benefit of this strategy warrants further research into and practice with micro-coaching.

Joseph Cheatle and Cristian Lambaren Sanchez’s “Writing Center Ambassadors: Engaging Campus Organizations through Embedded Consultants” presents results from their pilot writing center Ambassador Program. To improve the outreach of their center, Cheatle and Sanchez decided to embed a consultant within a campus organization. Based on their mixed-methods assessment of their program, the authors argue that embedding tutors in campus organizations is one approach that can foster connections and understanding between centers and students, especially between centers and diverse and underrepresented students.

Following this is the cross-institutional study entitled “Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey. Authors Christine Modey, Genie Giamo, and Joseph Cheatle explore the use of session notes across sixty-one distinct writing centers.

They painstakingly outline how session notes are employed across the writing center discipline, focusing on form, content, records, and assessment of these notes. A rich discussion results, wherein this study’s authors denote implications of session notes’ historical uses, along with resources for putting their study’s

Attention and Awareness in the Writing Center • 2 findings into practice. Finally, this article argues “for the importance of developing an open-access, evolving repository for this type of data in writing center studies” (52). These authors’ work values transparency across session notes’ usefulness across writing center work, volleying for resources which can help us build upon each others’ experiences in this area.

We close this issue with Jared Featherstone’s “Metacognition and Transfer: A Cross-Institutional Study of Writing Center Clients and Non-Clients.”

Featherstone examines students’ awareness of metacognition and transfer across two contexts—the writing center and classrooms. Following from Gorzelsky et al. 's taxonomy for metacognition, Featherstone performs a cross-institutional study keyed into three areas of student metacognition: monitoring, control, and constructive metacognition. From his research, Featherstone finds how different aspects of metacognition are facilitated in the two different contexts of the center and the classroom. Notably, Featherstone argues that there exists a difference in perception of metacognition and transfer for students who visit the writing center, as these students “gain awareness of genre, rhetorical situation, and process, which allows them to see opportunities for transfer in their classroom experiences” (82).

Finally, we here at Praxis want to take a moment to formally welcome our new Assistant Editor, Kaitlin Passafiume. She is a fifth-year PhD Candidate of UT Austin’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese, specializing in performance and decolonizing studies in Mexico, Chile, and Brazil. Kaitlin strives to produce scholarship which improves practices around multilingual and multidialectal writing consulting across writing center methodology. Furthermore, she aims to contribute to the decolonial writing center through her work as Assistant Editor at Praxis.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 17, No 1 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18, No 3 (2021)

THE “GHOST” IN THE TUTORIAL: HOW DO TUTORS AND STUDENTS ENGAGE WITH FACULTY FEEDBACK? Bruce Bowles Jr. Texas A&M University—Central Texas bruce.bowles@tamuct.edu Abstract

Although the presence of faculty members’ feedback is a common occurrence in tutorials, such sessions have not garnered significant attention in either writing center or response scholarship.

Nevertheless, the presence of faculty member commentary in a tutorial can have a profound effect on student interpretations of commentary, agenda setting, revision tasks, and on the emotions of the participants. This article examines a study of nine tutorials in which tutors and students worked with feedback from faculty members. Key findings from the study are discussed pertaining to how tutors and students interpret and apply commentary from faculty members as well as the affective dimensions that frequently arise in such tutorials. Chief among these findings are the heavy reliance tutors and students place on external documents and the students’ own texts to interpret feedback, the manner in which tutors approach feedback in a linear fashion and assume absence of feedback as approval, the ability of faculty members’ commentary to dictate tutorial agendas, and the benefits of dealing with students’ texts and offering coping strategies in lieu of dwelling on emotions. Predicated on these findings, recommendations are made for improving pedagogy and for improving collaborations between faculty and tutors as well as for engaging in more empirical examinations of such tutorials. Overall, this article seeks to demonstrate the unique complexities the presence of commentary from faculty members adds to tutorials, arguing that such tutorials are different in kind rather than degree and need to be treated as such in practice and in scholarship.

The “Ghost” in the Tutorial

Throughout writing center scholarship, tutoring is frequently referred to as one-to-one. A tutor and student work together with a text in order to improve the student’s writing process and the text under discussion. The process, typically, is a collaborative endeavor between two people. This one-to-one, peerto-peer nature of tutorials is seen as a foundation of writing center pedagogy, allowing for additional attention to students’ particular needs that can oftentimes be missing in a traditional classroom setting.

Yet, a certain type of tutorial tends to significantly complicate such a utopian vision of writing center work—tutorials in which a student has brought commentary from a faculty member.

The scene is all too familiar. A student walks into the writing center, pleasantries are exchanged, and the tutor and student begin to set an agenda. Rather quickly, the student pulls out a text and the tutor notices that it has faculty commentary on it. For tutors, this usually results in mixed, quite contradictory feelings. On one hand, the faculty member’s feedback

can offer tremendous insight on how to work with the student and revise the text; on the other hand, the tutor now has to work with the student to interpret the commentary as well as contend with any areas where the student, the tutor, or both do not necessarily agree with the faculty member’s feedback. The tutorial is not completely in the hands of the tutor and student anymore. Tensions can begin to arise as the tutor and student navigate the conflicting goals of trying to improve the student’s writing knowledge and processes while also revising in a fashion to conform to the faculty member’s expectations. As Janet Auten and Melissa Pasterkiewicz observe, such tutorials can “involve a struggle with that ‘third person in the session,’ the classroom teacher” (1). In a sense, the faculty member is manifested; they become an “apparition” of sorts, not entirely visible yet a felt presence that hovers over a tutorial, an ominous reminder of the hierarchies of the classroom and the academy. The direction and tone of the conversations in the tutorial are frequently responding, to one degree or another, to this faculty member.

For those who work in writing centers, these types of tutorials are commonplace, a part of the day-to-day routine. Oddly, though, tutorials featuring faculty members’ commentary are not addressed empirically in writing center scholarship; the majority of scholarship pertaining to them is anecdotal and theoretical. These types of tutorials tend to be treated as an extension of standard tutorials rather than their own unique entity, with reflections on how they change the nature of the tutorial, and best pedagogical practices in these instances, predicated on past experiences. In order to contribute a more empirical approach to this area of scholarship, this article presents research from a study of nine such tutorials. First, scholarship on both response and writing center tutorials—and the ways in which they intersect—will be explored. After, the methodology of the study will be provided. The findings of the study will then be presented across three main categories: interpreting, applying, and affective. Following the presentation of the findings, implications for tutor training and writing center pedagogy will be examined along with recommendations for faculty workshops. Lastly, the conclusion will argue that these tutorials present

The “Ghost” in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback? • unique challenges; the contextual intricacies introduced via faculty commentary transform a tutorial in meaningful ways that require alterations to pedagogy.

Response and Writing Center Pedagogy: A Reciprocal, Yet Distant, Relationship While often seen as discreet activities, responding to student writing and writing center pedagogy share a lot in common. Both endeavors attempt to offer feedback to students on their writing in order to help them grow and mature as writers; each is an attempt at one-to-one instruction for students. Writing centers feature direct conversation; response, as Richard Straub suggests, is—at its best—conversational in nature (“Teacher Response”). Intriguingly, though, in recent years scholars have also become interested in the manner in which writing center pedagogy can inform response practices.

Both Elizabeth Busekrus and Andrea Scott contend that the scholarship, and practices, of teacher response and writing center pedagogy have valuable connections and can inform one another in productive ways. Busekrus notes that, “Writing center feedback includes principles central to commenting for transfer: intentionality and specificity through goal setting and metacognition through a conversational dynamic” (104). She contends that the student-centered, conversational approach of writing center tutorials can translate to faculty members’ feedback, allowing for writing goals to be established between faculty members and students and then addressed via commentary. Furthermore, Scott advocates that tutors can offer insights to faculty members across the disciplines when it comes to response practices and encourages collaborations between tutors and faculty in the Princeton Writing Program. For Scott, these collaborations are beneficial as a result of “tutors’ double experience as tutors in the writing center and students in the classroom” which allows access “to perspectives often unavailable to faculty because of their more hierarchical positions as teachers” (81). As the scholarship on response indicates, student perspectives are vital to understanding response practices yet are oftentimes given tangential attention (Bowden; Murphy; O’Neill and Mathison-Fife; Straub “Students’ Reactions”). However, in workshops such as Scott’s, the normal hierarchy is inverted, with tutors serving as experts from both a tutoring and student perspective.

This dual nature of tutors is also rather beneficial for students when it comes to interpreting the feedback they receive from faculty. Muriel Harris views tutors as exceptionally well positioned to interpret

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faculty commentary; they can oftentimes bridge the gap between faculty members and students. As Harris observes, “Tutors are thus other than teachers in that they inhabit a middle ground where their role is that of translator or interpreter, turning teacher language into student language” (37). As successful students, tutors are impressive in their ability to aid students in these interpretive processes associated with faculty commentary, processes that—as Nancy Sommers discovered—can be vital to students’ future success in academia. They can help to clarify commentary that is confusing and vague while aiding students dealing with the difficulties of revising in accordance with the feedback received.

This feedback, however, can make such tutorials complex, adding complicated power dynamics that are not present in many other instances. Patricia Dunn views these tutorials as having a certain political dimension since the tutor and the student might be collaborators and equals, but the faculty member and the tutor most definitely are not. The desire to follow the faculty member’s directives and preferences is strong. As Dunn argues, “The sometimes unequal status of classroom professor and writing center tutor (whether student or faculty) sets up, by unspoken decree, a situation in which it is assumed that the tutor will unquestionably support the marginal comments of the classroom instructor” (36-37). Once the faculty member’s commentary is engaged, the most common outcome in these asymmetrical situations tends to be adherence.

These inequities can be further compounded by the reliance many smaller writing centers have on particular faculty members. Jennifer Jefferson observes how at smaller institutions, where the relationship with faculty is commonly more intimate, tutors can become fixated on faculty expectations rather than the goals and needs of students. She equates such tutorials to those in which the tutor knows the student’s topic well, observing how both types of tutorials can lead tutors to be overly directive and product-based. In the end, both the tutor and the student are trying to please the faculty member, albeit for differing reasons.

Faculty commentary can cause pedagogical conflicts as well. Auten and Pasterkiewicz draw on the work of Peter Elbow to discuss how faculty members are many times emphasizing ranking and evaluating in their commenting practices, while tutors are more concerned with liking—finding what is working well with a piece of writing in order to improve it. Faculty commentary also tends to be more focused on change and revisions to the text than on improving the writing process. These issues wind up having a profound

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The “Ghost” in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback? • impact on agenda-setting; since the faculty member has already identified what needs to be “fixed,” tutors and students can become fixated on addressing the core concerns of the faculty member rather than negotiating a collaborative agenda as best practices suggest (Bruce; Macauley; Newkirk).

These power dynamics and conflicts can be further exacerbated by the emotional responses of students.

Students are—in many instances—hurt by the commentary they have received and can be focused on these emotions excessively. If these emotions are strong enough, they can impede a session, shifting conversation away from students’ writing and fixating primarily on the emotions involved (Agostinelli et al.; Haen). Advice on how to deal with such strong emotions in a tutorial is mixed. Corinne Agostinelli, Helena Poch, and Elizabeth Santoro offer several pieces of advice, with one of their primary suggestions being to attempt to turn the tutorial toward what the writer wants to achieve. As they note, “This is not callous and insensitive when you remember that a tutor is not a therapist; we are limited to offering a tissue, a glass of water, and compassion” (Agostinelli et al 36).

Mike Haen also supports moving the focus of the session in the direction of writing concerns.

Gayla Mills is more skeptical of this position, though. Mills believes that emotions are not necessarily impediments to strong writing, arguing that Agostinelli et al.’s approach “assumes a writer can’t be both emotional and rational about his work. Yet some of our best writing comes from a position of intense feeling” (3). She suggests that tutors can do research on emotions they commonly encounter in the writing center to better inform one another; additionally, she advises assessing the strength of the emotion in order to determine how to properly approach the student.

Mills believes tutors should help the student in the best way possible, whether that means focusing on the text under discussion or shifting attention toward the person behind the writing.

Students can bring a complex array of emotions to sessions, and scholars disagree as to how to best handle such situations. Nevertheless, students might be more comfortable attempting to make sense of the commentary with a peer rather than returning to an asymmetrical power dynamic with the faculty member.

Thus, tutors can serve as important mediators in these instances. As a result, dealing with emotions in some capacity will be critical to the success of such tutorials.

In spite of these difficulties, such tutorials are often phenomenal opportunities for students to grow and develop as writers and scholars alongside their peers. Tutors can be excellent allies for students as they

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wrestle with the feedback they receive and attempt to translate it into meaningful revisions. To maximize the success of such sessions, we need to better understand the issues that arise in regard to interpreting faculty commentary, the power struggles—especially in relation to agenda setting—that emerge due to the presence of faculty commentary, and the frequent emotional nature of such tutorials. Writing center scholarship has provided a theoretical understanding of such tutorials while offering pragmatic advice from experience. Nevertheless, an empirical examination affords the opportunity to discover hidden issues that reside in such tutorials in order to better understand the nuances and intricacies with which tutors have to struggle.

A Methodology for Examining Tutorials Addressing Faculty Members’ Commentary Intrigued by tutorials in which faculty commentary is a primary emphasis of the session, I devised a study driven by the research question—How do tutors and students interpret and apply faculty members' written commentary within the context of tutorials in order to revise texts and/or improve on future assignments? As the research question indicates, the study is primarily concerned with how tutors and students engage with faculty members’ commentary. This became a driving force behind the coding scheme; while the coding scheme was inductive, as the transcripts were coded, codes were ascribed to actions performed by the tutors and students in order to address the research question directly. The focus was on tutors’ and students’ engagement with the commentary within sessions, on the actions they performed to interpret and apply the commentary, not on the commentary itself. A key to the coding scheme was to capture the work that was taking place in such sessions.

As a result, three over-arching coding categories became the focal point of the data analysis: interpreting, applying, and affective. The interpreting category referred to actions that were performed by tutors and students in order to understand what the faculty commentary meant. In these instances, tutors and students were not focused on revising the students’ texts in any particular fashion but were instead concentrating on what message the faculty member was specifically conveying through the commentary. In regard to the applying category, this referred to actions that attempted to use the messages received in the commentary in order to revise the text that was commented on, improve on future writing tasks, or improve upon a key concept that was the focus of the commentary. As far as the

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The “Ghost” in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback? • affective category was concerned, this referred to moments in the tutorials where the tutor and student were attempting to deal with student emotions arising from the commentary. These moments were woven into both the interpreting and applying work, and the tutors demonstrated an array of strategies for dealing with these emotions.

Overall, the methodology by which the data was collected and analyzed was rather straight forward.

First and foremost, IRB approval was sought and obtained (IRB Protocol #2018040001). Afterward, a question was added to the WCOnline appointment form: “Do you have specific written commentary from your instructor that you wish to work on interpreting and applying during your session?” Whenever a student indicated “Yes” to this question, and the principal investigator was available to record the session, consent was obtained from the student (tutors willing to participate in the study had already signed consent forms) and any texts with faculty members’ commentary were collected and scanned, if only a print version existed. The session was then audio-recorded.

After the session, the principal investigator would obtain consent from the faculty member to use their commentary as well as ask for any supporting documents (assignment prompts, rubrics, syllabi, etc.) that pertained to the assignment. Overall, the study featured nine students, seven faculty members, and five tutors. The seven faculty members were from a variety of disciplines including accounting, criminal justice, history, psychology, and social work.

Once the transcriptions were completed, an inductive coding scheme was devised. First pass coding was done using latent codes in order to get a sense of the themes and patterns emerging in the data. The functional unit of analysis was a conversational turn.

Each conversational turn could, however, have multiple codes ascribed if it fit the parameters for each code. After analyzing the data from the first pass coding, codes were removed if they were not present across multiple tutorials. Furthermore, various codes were combined if they were reflective of similar phenomenon. Second pass coding was then done with the coding scheme in place. Overall, there are 20 codes divided across the aforementioned three main categories: interpreting, applying, and affective. While most codes are attributed to one category, three codes—Asking Questions, Examining Student’s Text, and Referring to External Documents/Information— were relevant to both the interpreting and applying category since, while they emerged most prominently in the interpreting category, they were also found when tutors and students were applying the written feedback

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from faculty members and, in rare instances, when dealing with affective concerns (see Table 1 in Appendix A).

Analysis and interpretation of the data demonstrated several prominent themes that emerged within each category. While each tutorial was unique in its own way, the manner in which tutors and students engaged with faculty members’ written commentary demonstrated several commonalities and patterns.

These commonalities and patterns are instructive as to how such tutorials frequently play out as well as the common pitfalls that occur throughout tutorials in which tutors and students engage with faculty members’ commentary. In the next section, these findings will be discussed in relation to the three overarching types of work tutors and students were accomplishing.

Key Findings in Regard to Tutor and Student Engagement with Faculty Members’ Commentary The tutorials in this study tended to move in a somewhat predictable pattern. Earlier in the session, tutors and students would focus on interpreting the commentary the student had received. Once the commentary was interpreted, the tutors and students would then set to work on applying the commentary in some fashion, whether it was revising the text which had received commentary, working on the next writing task moving forward, or gaining a firmer grasp of a concept the student had yet to master. Throughout these two stages, an affective dimension emerged as students wrestled with emotions in relation to the commentary they received along with the tasks they had to complete. Although these stages were often recursive, with discussions of applications leading to further need for interpretations, and either task leading to conversations about emotions, they each presented distinct findings in regard to how tutors and students deal with faculty commentary. Not surprisingly, many of these intriguing findings dealt with the manner in which the faculty members’ commentary was interpreted.

What does this mean?

As Harris suggests, a primary role for tutors is to serve as translator and interpreter. The findings of this study support this assertion, with interpreting faculty members’ commentary being the most prominent task tutors and students undertook, accounting for 47.57% of the codes applied. While this was not an unexpected finding, the manner in which the tutors and students approached this interpretation was rather surprising. It

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The “Ghost” in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback? • might be assumed that tutors and students would place an extraordinary amount of emphasis on the actual words faculty members composed on students’ texts.

Nevertheless, the two most common moves tutors and students made when interpreting faculty members’ commentary were to refer to external documents and examine the students’ texts in relation to those comments.

In regard to referring to external documents, both tutors and students relied heavily on assignment sheets, rubrics, classroom notes, style manuals, and Purdue OWL in order to decipher commentary. The tutors in this study, as well as the students, valued external documents when interpreting commentary, seeing them as interconnected, as part of the genre systems surrounding the commentary. Rather than fixating on what the faculty member wrote exclusively, tutors and students—but especially tutors—would quickly seek out these external documents in order to gain a better sense of the genre system in which the faculty members’ commentary was operating. The tutors seemed quite aware that these external documents frequently possessed pivotal clues that would help the student and them to decipher the meaning of the commentary. Moreover, they often used these opportunities to demonstrate how to engage with the genre system surrounding the commentary, modeling productive habits for students.

For example, when Jill struggled to make sense of a particular faculty member’s commentary, she immediately seized upon the student mentioning that the class had been sent a supplementary text on academic paragraphs.

Jill: Yeah, ok. So he’s sending you the outline for basically an academic paragraph.

Mariana: Yes. I believe so. So, I guess he wants us to follow that.

Jill had been struggling to understand what the faculty member was attempting to communicate to this student early in the tutorial. With this additional component of the genre system, though, Jill was immediately able to convey to the student what the faculty member was seeking, drawing on a metaphor to help the student understand better what the commentary meant.

Jill: Ok, so treat it like a mathematical formula.

Here’s the first variable. Plug in the topic sentence for it. Here’s the second variable. Plug in your evidence. Third and fourth, right.

The external document the faculty member had sent the class allowed Jill to interpret what the faculty member was precisely after. In this instance, and many others, the commentary only made sense to the tutors

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and students when placed in relation to other documents in the class or other external resources; it was difficult to interpret in isolation. Once they engaged with these supplementary classroom materials, style manuals, and online resources, they were able to determine what issues the faculty members’ commentary was specifically referencing.

As far as examining the student’s text is concerned, its prevalence was a rather unexpected development.

Nonetheless, this strategy made sense for both tutors and students, especially when the commentary was vague. Rather than focusing solely on what the faculty members wrote, the tutor would frequently work with the student to discern what the comment meant by reading the student’s text surrounding the comment.

Essentially, they analyzed what was working or not working with the text in order to deduce the meaning behind the comment. This was especially contingent on the focus of faculty members’ commentary.

In Twelve Readers Reading: Responding to College Student Writing, Richard Straub and Ronald Lunsford create a methodology for analyzing written comments predicated on focus and mode. They divide the focus of commentary into three categories: global (content, organization, development, etc.), local (sentence structure, word choice, grammar, etc.), or extra-textual (referring to the rhetorical context of the writing). Both global and extra-textual comments tended to require further analysis of the students’ text in order to interpret them during these tutorials. Since these comments were often found in a faculty member’s end comment, they required tutors and students to venture back into the text to understand the precise meaning.

This interpretative move was on display in a session between Dorothy and Linda. Dorothy is an adjunct faculty member who also tutors in the University Writing Center (UWC). When working with Linda, a graduate student, Dorothy and Linda were confused by two comments she received at the end of certain sections: More detailed findings are needed and In the future, provide more detail. The comments were referring to particular sections of the essay, not to any specific passage. Unsure what the comments were referencing, Dorothy delved into Linda’s text and read aloud until they came across the passages they believed were the cause of the issue.

Dorothy: (reading from Dr. Morrison’s commentary) “More detailed findings are needed.”

Linda: Ok. Dorothy: (Reading from Linda’s text) “Accountability through regulation increases ethical behavior.” Again, give an example. Tell how.

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The “Ghost” in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback? • Linda: Ok. Implications for practice.

Dorothy: (Reading from Dr. Morrison’s commentary) “In the future, provide more detail.”

Yeah.

Linda: Ok. “Regulation.” (Linda continues reading her text softly to herself.)

Dorothy: Do not assume your reader knows anything.

Linda: Ok. And I know I have this space.

In this passage, Dorothy and Linda finally discovered the issues to which Dr. Morrison was referring. However, it was not when Dorothy read Dr. Morrison’s commentary; rather, Dorothy came to understand what he was referring to when she read Linda’s text and Linda only understood the second comment when she revisited her own text, realizing she had more space to develop her points about regulation.

The comments were global comments referring to issues with entire sections; to decipher them, it was critical for Dorothy and Linda to revisit the sections to discover what the comments were truly conveying.

Such interpretations could be complicated, however, by another tutor tendency found in the study—reading commentary in a linear fashion. In many sessions, the tutor and student would agree to approach the text in a linear fashion, moving through page-by-page, comment-by-comment. This caused a particular problem when faculty members’ gave summative comments at the end of the text. For instance, in a session between Joe (tutor) and Paul (student), one of the main issues the faculty member was concerned with did not emerge until more than halfway through the session, when there was limited time to address it. After focusing on the many sentence-level issues that had been addressed in the marginal comments, Paul finally addressed the end comment.

Paul: So, also, at the end, on one of his comments, was that it does not contain elements of a review.

Joe: Yeah.

Paul: But (flipping pages) I was just trying to figure out how to get my paper up to a passing grade.

Here, Paul is referencing the faculty member’s end comment: A good start but needs work on writing and does not contain elements of a review. This was the main core of the faculty member’s critique; additionally, he provides the UWC with a detailed outline of how students should approach journal and book reviews. Joe and Paul proceeded in a linear fashion, though, and potentially the most important issue to address during revision—the conventions of the genre—was not a focal point of the session, and they were never able to

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engage with the valuable supplementary document either. Had the end comment been addressed earlier, Joe and Paul could have focused more on content and working within the expectations of the genre, changing the emphasis of the entire session from local to more global concerns. Yet, they remained focused on sentence-level and formatting concerns because of this linear approach.

And Joe’s and Paul’s session was not an isolated instance. This approach happened across multiple tutorials as well. As will be discussed later, the faculty members’ commentary tended to set the entire agenda for sessions. Tutors and students would immediately dive for the commentary and—in a predictable way— would start to address the commentary in a linear fashion. Rarely did the tutor and student attempt to digest the commentary as a whole before proceeding.

Similarly, another problematic approach to interpreting faculty members’ commentary emerged from the data. Quite often, tutors would take the absence of faculty members’ commentary as an indication that nothing was wrong with that particular area of the text. For example, in one session, Margaret repeatedly made this move as she assisted Carrie in interpreting the commentary she received.

Margaret: He isn’t saying this is too wordy, even though you might think it is, you know?

Carrie: Um hmm.

Margaret: So, I would caution you not to second guess something that he hasn’t, he obviously doesn’t have a problem with.

Here, Margaret assumed there was no issue with wordiness (although the student believed there might be) merely because the faculty member did not comment on this in his feedback. However, I know this particular faculty member’s response style well. He frequently uses minimal marking, where he will address an issue only once. Furthermore, his commentary becomes more minimal with each subsequent draft.

As a result, when Margaret—and other tutors— assumed no commentary made was an indication that nothing was wrong, they were oftentimes operating under a false assumption. And yet, this is quite an easy assumption to make. Overall, when commentary is not present, tutors and students are inclined to assume the text is operating smoothly and no attention is needed.

Furthermore, they sometimes view comments as only referring to specific areas of text rather than being global critiques. This is quite problematic when the faculty members’ response styles do not operate by the same logic or when the comments are not meant to merely address a specific portion of the text but rather to serve as a demonstration of a recurring issue. By

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The “Ghost” in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback? • assuming absence as approval, the tutors and students were missing key information faculty members’ commentary was conveying and were also ignoring opportunities to extend beyond the commentary and collaboratively discover other areas for improvement.

What do I do now?

Although interpreting faculty members’ commentary was where tutors and students spent the majority of their time, 35.17% of the codes actually referenced applying the commentary. The agenda for the nine tutorials studied was commonly prescribed by the class structure of the faculty member providing the commentary. If the class allowed for revision, revision became the main task for the session; if the class relied on sequenced assignments, working on future writing tasks became the main goal. This, in and of itself, is not entirely problematic. In fact, this is an inherently logical way to approach agenda-setting. Yet, the focus of the session was also time and again dictated by the faculty members’ commentary. When the commentary focused on higher-order concerns, higher-order concerns took center stage during the tutorial. In instances where the faculty members’ commentary focused on citations, formatting, and/or proofreading issues, these would become the focal point. This tended to be problematic as it stripped the agency for negotiating the agenda away from the tutors and students; in the end, the agenda was set for them, with the students’ concerns mainly tethered to meeting faculty members’ expectations.

For example, in a session between Joe and Aaliyah, Ms. Lopez’s commentary was primarily focused on formatting and grammar issues; as a result, no matter what Joe tried, Aaliyah remained focused on lowerorder concerns. In the aforementioned session between Dorothy and Linda, the agenda seemed to oscillate depending on whichever comment they were addressing. If the comment dealt with a development issue, development became the focus; when the next comment was grammatical, grammar became the top priority. In essence, the only agenda was the commentary itself.

Overall, the hierarchical relationship between faculty member and student tended to transfer into the tutorial.

Still, revising the student’s text and working on future assignments were not the most prominent tasks when it came to applying faculty members’ commentary. That distinction was reserved for working to improve students’ understanding of certain key concepts in writing. In one particular session, the student was struggling immensely with paraphrasing.

As a result, Jill spent the second half of the session

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improving her understanding of this concept. Rather than fixating on revising or working on future assignments, Jill and Mariana discussed and practiced paraphrasing in a few instances from the previous draft for which Mariana had received commentary.

Jill: So a really great way to practice paraphrasing, which I learned here, actually, is to read something…

Mariana: …um hmm…

Jill: …such as our little paragraph, close the book, and just write. And don’t worry about is my sentence matching up with this sentence. Just write something. Write an entire paragraph about what you just read. Because, that way, what you’re writing truly is a paraphrase. Because you’re not worried about matching it up…

Mariana: …matching it up…

Jill: …word for word, phrase for phrase. Right.

In this example, Jill took time to go over a strategy she learned for how to paraphrase without mimicking the language of the original text. After she discussed this, she had Mariana practice the same approach in her own writing multiple times. This practice greatly improved Mariana’s confidence by the end of the session, making her more comfortable with discussing others’ work without using the original language.

Thus, the main focus was not on fixing the text or working on the next one; rather, Jill and Mariana worked toward improving a particular skill— paraphrasing—that could be used throughout Mariana’s writing. In many cases throughout the study, moving away from the text and focusing on the underlying issues with students’ writing proved more beneficial than fixating on revising or working on future assignments in relation to the commentary provided. The tutorials were more productive when the tutor and student responded to the messages the commentary conveyed rather than responding directly to the commentary. Fixation on individual comments proved problematic; understanding the commentary in relation to the entire text—and the entire classroom context—proved much more beneficial.

How do I deal with this?

Although interpreting and applying were logical categories to emerge from analysis of the data, the affective category was not as easily anticipated and accounted for 17.26% of the codes applied. Even though the presence of emotion to this extent was surprising in some ways, the manner in which the tutors chose to deal with emotions was even more unexpected. When students expressed emotions, the tutors were less likely to provide empathy or validate

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The “Ghost” in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback? • those emotions. Instead, they focused on thinking critically about the student’s writing and coping strategies.

One of the tutors—Jackie—proved exceptional at dealing with the affective dimension of tutorials.

Although Jackie is quite friendly with students, she is also a former drill sergeant in the United States Army.

As such, she is inclined to not let students get hung up on emotions for too long. One of her more common strategies for doing so is to ask students questions about their texts when they complain about the faculty member and the commentary they receive. This strategy was on display in a tutorial she had with Tommy, a graduate student with whom Jackie frequently works.

Jackie: Did you include how your study was going to improve some of those gaps? Or what you would like?

Tommy: Ok, I think I actually bring it up right here. (Reads from his text.) I need to add that.

(Reads from his text.) Now, whether she wants me to actually include a little more. Whether, you know, how I am filling the gaps with my measure.

What am I planning on measuring? I can add that, too. If that’s something that…

Jackie: …I think that’d be important…

Tommy: …should be in there.

In this session, Tommy was becoming frustrated with the commentary he received. Rather than allowing Tommy to continue to vent, Jackie asked two quick questions that directed him back to the text. As a result, Tommy gained a better understanding of not only what the faculty member was looking for but of how to improve his text as well. Jackie accomplished this expertly by prompting Tommy to reexamine his work rather than focus on his frustrations. This move was a staple of many of the tutors in this study. If a student got frustrated with their commentary, the tutor had them examine their writing more closely and asked them whether they had accomplished what the faculty member was critiquing. Almost instantaneously, the student would immediately calm down and comprehend the validity of the critique the faculty member provided. Their emotions would subside, and they would focus on responding to the commentary analytically rather than emotionally.

Many of the tutors also demonstrated a great ability to build rapport with clients and help them discover coping strategies when they become emotional. In Margaret’s tutorial with Carrie, Carrie confessed that she oftentimes struggles with being a perfectionist, obsessing over improving her texts and, in her opinion, sometimes making them worse as a

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result. In this passage, Margaret offers her a coping strategy—embracing the benefit of time.

Margaret: Step back for a minute and let it breathe.

Carrie: Ok. Margaret And maybe sit on it for a little while…

Carrie: …a few days.

Margaret: Yeah.

Carrie: Well, I have three weeks. I’ll, you know what I’m going to do is, I’m going to go home right now. (Both Carrie and Margaret laugh). I just can’t help it because I don’t like to see things sit because then, I’ll have my notes and everything…

Margaret: …and it’s fresh.

Carrie: And it’s fresh. So I want to do that. And then let it sit for a little bit. And then come back to it to then put my primary sources in there. I’ll do the stuff here that I have here, let it sit, and then I’ll pull primary sources.

Margaret: Yeah, I think that’s a really good move for you to make.

Here, Margaret offers a coping strategy to Carrie, one that Carrie is initially reluctant to embrace. However, Margaret lets her think this through on her own until she finally arrives at a plan of action that immediately calms her anxiety. While it can be easy for tutors to provide a sympathetic ear and empathy for students, Margaret demonstrated that offering suggestions for dealing with affective concerns can be just as important, if not more important. Rather calmly, Margaret provided a solution in lieu of a sounding board.

Implications for Pedagogy, Development, and Scholarship

Staff

The findings of this study suggest certain approaches and practices that are valuable in tutorials dealing with faculty members’ commentary as well as areas where pedagogy, staff development practices, and scholarship pertaining to such tutorials can be improved. These types of tutorials definitely complicate tutoring practices, alter power dynamics, and encourage greater collaboration between tutors and faculty members. The differences they present also warrant further scholarly discussion.

Improving Pedagogical Practices, Training, and Staff Development When it comes to interpreting faculty members’ commentary, tutors in this study demonstrated two effective methods: examining other documents in the genre system and focusing on students’ texts. For Charles Bazerman, genre systems are “interrelated

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The “Ghost” in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback? • genres that interact with each other in specific settings” (97). These genres are interlocking and interdependent on one another. Each genre coalesces with the other to make meaning. The results from this study support Paul Prior’s and Samantha Looker’s belief that response needs to be viewed as part of genre systems and that the various components of these genre systems are crucial to understanding response.

Faculty members’ commentary exists as part of a larger genre system, a system which includes assignment sheets, rubrics, in-class activities, style guides, etc. as well as students’ actual texts. This commentary is always in relation to these other components of the genre system. As such, the tutors and students in this study relied heavily on such documents and were oftentimes the most successful at interpreting faculty commentary when they viewed it as part of a larger genre system and used these other genres to inform their interpretations. The key to deciphering the messages the faculty members were sending oftentimes resided outside of the words they actually wrote.

A crucial strategy for interpreting faculty commentary in such tutorials, then, is to move beyond the written commentary and look at that commentary in relation to the rest of the classroom and other available resources. Tutors should be encouraged to draw upon these documents while interpreting faculty members’ commentary, not as a secondary option.

Since commentary operates within these larger genre systems, and cannot be isolated from them, the commentary and the other documents within the genre system need to be engaged with in unison; they are interdependent on one another for their meaning.

Another key component of the genre system that proved beneficial for tutors and students was the students’ texts themselves. Time and again, students were able to gain a better understanding of the commentary only when they were encouraged to look closer at their own writing rather than fixating on the comments they were provided. This also proved crucial when students were having negative emotional reactions to the comments they received. In essence, closely examining their own work allowed students to clearly understand the critiques the faculty members were making, which tended to alleviate negative emotions. Once the students understood what was not working in their writing, they became focused on improving their texts. This supports Haen’s assertion that “We can strengthen our pedagogy by helping tutors see writers’ negative stances not just as opportunities for digressing into extensive affiliative

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talk, but also as opportunities for helping writers think critically about their writing choices” (3).

Sometimes the best strategy for handling these emotions is to focus on solutions rather than discussing these emotions extensively. The words faculty members compose can seem hurtful at first glance, yet in many instances they are intended as supportive critiques to help students understand what can be improved in their own writing. Having students focus on their words—rather than the faculty members’ words—can help students to see areas for improvement along with the positive intentions that often accompany even supposedly harsh commentary.

Such a move can be problematic if these emotions are too strong, though. As Mills suggests, tutors need to assess the strength of the emotions before acting. If the student appears to be merely frustrated as a result of misinterpretation, redirecting them is the right move; if the student is dealing with more profound emotions or an intensely antagonistic relationship with the faculty member, redirection is probably ill-advised.

However, this research also demonstrates some problematic tendencies of tutors when interpreting faculty members’ commentary. The tendency to address commentary in a linear fashion suggests that tutors may not be familiar with various response styles and practices, especially the generalized nature of end comments. As Summer Smith shows, a common feature of this genre is that it is comprehensive—it addresses the text as a whole. Tutors, though, might not understand these generic tendencies. As a result, they can have a habit of beginning with the marginal comments, which are usually specific to particular facets of the text, rather than reading the commentary as a cohesive whole. During tutor training, and in staff development, it is important to emphasize reading the commentary in its entirety before setting an agenda and, quite possibly, to recommend reading the end comment first since it is often more indicative of the overall message the faculty member is trying to convey.

This will give tutors and students the opportunity to digest the commentary in its entirety before prioritizing tasks for the tutorial and setting an agenda.

Directors can have tutors read example student papers with faculty commentary in practice tutorials.

Tutors can use multiple strategies in order to illustrate how the manner in which the commentary is approached can alter its meaning. In these mock tutorials, tutors would first address the commentary in a more linear fashion, beginning the tutorial by working through the commentary page-by-page.

Afterward, they would conduct a tutorial by reading the commentary in its entirety and then setting an

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The “Ghost” in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback? • agenda. At the conclusion of both tutorials, the tutors would be given the opportunity to reflect on the different meanings they took from the commentary as well as the manner in which their tutorials were altered contingent on their approach to the commentary.

Difficulties interpreting faculty members’ commentary also extend to what is not there. As previously mentioned, throughout this study, tutors at times viewed comments as responding directly to the text immediately surrounding the comment. In these instances, they would often miss that an issue pointed out in one section of a text might be reoccurring throughout the text. Additionally, they would fail to see other issues that might be problematic but were not a focal point of the faculty members’ commentary.

Tutors need to be made aware of different response styles and the fact that faculty commentary is not exhaustive. Directors can have them read a collection of faculty commentary with various response styles during training and staff development. Through engaging with differing approaches to response, tutors can gain a greater sense of how faculty members communicate their messages in a variety of ways and how to adjust accordingly. Furthermore, although faculty commentary should be an emphasis in a session, tutors need to understand that it should not dictate the agenda entirely. Other issues may be valuable to discuss in students’ writing, even if they fall outside the purview of faculty members’ critiques.

Directors should remind tutors to be cognizant of this and to take a step back from the faculty commentary when setting agendas with students, perhaps even physically placing the commentary aside during the agenda setting portion of the tutorial.

Faculty/Tutor Development Workshops Beyond better training, staff development, and pedagogical practices by tutors, one of the most apt solutions for these issues is to have tutors and faculty members engage each other more directly. The workshops Scott advocates for can move beyond improving faculty members’ commentary; ideally, they can also serve as a venue for improving tutors’ and students’ interpretations of such commentary. As Scott mentions, while tutors and faculty members are oftentimes trying to accomplish the same goals, “the two groups work in relative isolation, missing an opportunity to learn from each other’s expertise” (78).

In spite of this, faculty and tutors have much to offer one another.

The key here is learning from each other. While issues with interpreting commentary and the negative emotions that can arise are usually seen as solely faculty

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issues, this research demonstrates that tutors and students can also improve on their approaches, especially if they are better informed on the pedagogical aims and strategies of faculty members’ commentary. A productive way to approach this may be to have faculty members read their own commentary with tutors and discuss their intentions while tutors offer their interpretations, with both groups analyzing the multitude of discrepancies that are likely to emerge between the two. In this fashion, faculty can gain a better sense of how tutors and students interpret their feedback but—just as importantly—tutors improve upon their knowledge of faculty response styles and the rationales for why faculty provide feedback in the manner that they do.

This can help, in a sense, to remove the veil of secrecy that oftentimes unnecessarily accompanies faculty commentary.

Dunn’s concern about the power dynamics of tutorials featuring commentary were on display in this study as well. The faculty members’ commentary frequently set the agenda for the tutorials as the tutors and students worked to conform to the faculty members’ expectations. As Dunn observes, though, asymmetrical power dynamics will inherently lead to such adherence to a degree; this phenomenon may not be entirely avoidable. Ideally, collaboration between faculty members and tutors can help to alleviate this asymmetry. Such dialogue can allow for discussions of how to read commentary, the intentions and goals of faculty commentary, and the practices and values both faculty members and tutors wish to promote. Rather than negotiating agendas through faculty members’ commentary, tutors can begin negotiating agendas in the presence of the actual faculty and take what they learn into their future collaborative negotiations with students.

Limitations and Possible Directions for Future Scholarship Since this study only examined nine tutorials in which a tutor and student interpreted and applied a faculty member’s commentary, generalizations from the results are beneficial but limited. A larger sample size would produce more reliable data. Moreover, each of these tutorials occurred in the context of a specific institution. The institution where this research occurred is smaller and the relationships between the primary investigator and the faculty are more intimate and interactive. The primary investigator had knowledge of the faculty in the study that other researchers may not have. Different institutional contexts could—and most likely will—render varying results.

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The “Ghost” in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback? • 10 Hopefully, though, this research will serve as a beginning for more empirical studies of such tutorials.

Although these tutorials are quite common in writing centers, there is currently limited research exploring the impact of tutorials that address faculty members’ commentary in an empirical fashion. While this study examined such tutorials from the perspective of the types of work being accomplished, there are plenty of more questions to explore in regard to the intricacies of such sessions. What specific types of commentary tend to present the most difficulty for tutors and students? Do certain types of comments tend to cause more misinterpretations than others? What classroom texts help to clarify faculty commentary best? Why do certain comments cause such emotional reactions?

In order to address them, the focus of this study can be modified in order to direct attention to various facets of these tutorials. Focusing on the types of commentary that tend to be the most difficult and cause misinterpretations could draw upon a similar structure but emphasize coding the faculty commentary, perhaps in a manner similar to Straub’s and Lunsford’s work in Twelve Readers Reading: Responding to College Student Writing. Discourse analysis could be applied to other classroom texts in order to see how they connect with the commentary being interpreted in certain tutorials. Student surveys could be incorporated to better enable an understanding of why certain comments evoke such emotional reactions.

These types of questions present a rather intriguing avenue of research to explore through a variety of methodologies, an area of writing center and response scholarship that remains relatively uncharted empirically.

At What Point Does the “Ghost” in the Tutorial Become Visible?

When contemplating the effectiveness of response practices, Chris Anson reflects on the manner in which “Teacher response, in other words, gets filtered, interpreted, remixed, and repurposed among students, influencing their decisions and their own responses to tasks and evaluations” (196-197). Although it is tempting to believe that the effectiveness of feedback resides solely in the words composed on students’ texts, the truth is these words only gain meaning in the contexts in which they are read and engaged. Writing centers are pivotal sites for this filtering work, key places where students interpret, remix, and repurpose the commentary they receive with their peers, free from the traditional hierarchies of the classroom.

And yet, such interpretive work is never truly peerto-peer, never solely an endeavor among tutors and

students alone. In many ways, faculty members are always a presence in tutorials. The majority of the work that students bring to writing centers is responding to an assignment prompt or another form of a classroom exigency. As a result, in one way or another, the faculty member is always a “ghost in the tutorial.” In certain situations, their presence is merely a sudden cold spot in the room, and awareness that the student writer has a faculty member as an audience. In other instances— required appointments, for example—that presence is even more pronounced, and tutors and students may feel as if someone is watching them.

Yet when their commentary is present is when the presence of faculty members is at its most pronounced.

Their words constantly remind the participants in these tutorials that they are not alone. They remain and exert influence. They make demands in both explicit and implicit ways. Faculty members may not physically be present, but they become more than a felt presence.

While it may be easy to assume that such tutorials are only slightly different from more traditional ones, I contend these tutorials are a difference of kind rather than degree, and that there is one prominent reason for it.

Tutorials of this nature are not one-to-one.

Through the words they write and the relationships they have with writing centers, the faculty members become a visible apparition within such tutorials, a third person to contend with, a highly influential contributor to the conversation. Nonetheless, this third person cannot speak directly for themselves but only through past words and traces of their classroom. The success of these tutorials, then, resides in gaining a better understanding of how tutors and students can have a three-person conversation between only two people.

Works Cited Agostinelli, Corinne, et al. “Tutoring in Emotionally Charged Sessions.” A Tutor’s Guide: Helping Writers One to One, 2nd Edition, edited by Ben Rafoth, Heinemann, 2005, pp. 34-40.

Anson, Chris. “What Good is It?: The Effects of Teacher Response on Students’ Development.” Writing Assessment in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Edward M. White, edited by Norbert Elliot and Les Pereleman, Hampton Press, 2012, pp. 187-202.

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Bazerman, Charles. (1994). “Systems of Genres and the Enactment of Social Intentions. Genre and the New Rhetoric, edited by Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway, Taylor & Francis, Inc., 1994, pp. 79-101.

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1, 2018, http://journalofwritingassessment.org/article.php?artic le=121. Accessed 15 Feb. 2020.

Bruce, Shanti. “Breaking Ice and Setting Goals: Tips for Getting Started.” ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors, 2nd Edition, edited by Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth Heinemann, 2009, pp. 33-41.

Busekrus, Elizabeth. “A Conversational Approach: Using Writing Center Pedagogy in Commenting for Transfer in the Classroom.” Journal of Response to Writing, vol. 4, no. 1, 2018, pp. 100-116. https://journalrw.org/index.php/jrw/article/view/75.

Dunn, Patricia. “Marginal Comments on Writers' Texts: The Status of the Commenter as a Factor in Writing Center Tutorials.” Stories from the Center: Connecting Narrative and Theory in the Writing Center, edited by Lynn Craigue Briggs and Meg Woolbright, NCTE, 2000, pp.

31-42.

Haen, Mike. “The Affective Dimension of Writing Center Talk: Insights from Conversation Analysis.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 42, no. 9-10, 2018, pp. 2- 9. https://wlnjournal.org/archives/v42/42.9-10.pdf.

Harris, Muriel. “Talking in the middle: Why writers need writing tutors.” College English, vol. 57, no. 1, 1995, pp.

27–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/378348.

Jefferson, Jennifer. “Knowing the Faculty (Too?) Well: An Advantage or Disadvantage for Small College Writing Centers?” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 33, no. 7, 2009, pp. 1-5. https://wlnjournal.org/archives/v33/33.7.pdf.

Macauley, William J. “Setting the Agenda for the Next 30 Minutes.” A Tutor’s Guide: Helping Writers One to One, 2nd Edition, edited by Ben Rafoth Heinemann, 2005, pp. 1-8.

Mills, Gayla. “Preparing for Emotional Sessions.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 35, no. 5-6, 2011, pp. 1-5. https://wlnjournal.org/archives/v35/35.5-6.pdf.

Murphy, Sandra. “A Sociocultural Perspective on Teacher Response: Is There a Student in the Room?” Assessing Writing, vol. 7, no. 1, 2000, pp. 79-90. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1075-2935(00)00019-2.

Newkirk, Thomas. “The First Five Minutes: Setting the Agenda in a Writing Conference.” The Longman Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice, edited by Robert

Barnett and Jacob Blumner, Pearson, 2008, pp. 302315.

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39-51. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43501433.

Prior, Paul, and Samantha Looker. “Anticipatory Response and Genre Systems: Rethinking Response Research, Pedagogy, and Practice.” Making Waves, Conference on College Composition and Communication, 13 March 2009, San Francisco, CA. Conference Presentation.

Scott, Andrea. “Commenting Across the Disciplines: Partnering with Writing Centers to Train Faculty to Respond Effectively to Student Writing.” Journal of Response to Writing, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 77-88. https://journalrw.org/index.php/jrw/article/view/24.

Smith, Summer. “The Genre of the End Comment.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 48, no. 2, 1997, pp.

249-268. https://www.jstor.org/stable/358669.

Sommers, Nancy. “Across the Drafts.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 58, no. 2, 2006, pp. 248-257. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20456939.

Straub, Richard. “Students’ Reactions to Teacher Comments: An Exploratory Study.” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 31, no. 1, 1997, pp. 91-119. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40171265.

---. “Teacher Response as Conversation: More Than Casual Talk, an Exploration.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 14, no. 2, 1996, pp. 374-399. https://www.jstor.org/stable/465862.

Straub, Richard, and Ronald Lunsford. Twelve Readers Reading: Responding to College Student Writing. Hampton Press, 1995.

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The “Ghost” in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback? • 12 Appendix A: Table Table 1: Coding Scheme for “The ‘Ghost’ in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback?”

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Table 1: Coding Scheme for “The ‘Ghost’ in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback?”

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PRODUCTIVE DISRUPTIONS: THE STRUGGLE TOWARDS EQUITY IN WRITING CENTER WORK Tyler Thier Hofstra University Tyler.Thier@hofstra.edu Aisha Wilson-Carter Hofstra University Aisha.M.WilsonCarter@hofstra.edu Marilyn Buono-Magri Hofstra University Marilyn.F.Buono@hofstra.edu Abstract

This article responds to Laura Greenfield’s theorizing of the power and privilege inherent in writing center work. We draw on Romeo Garcia’s theory of transformative listening that defines the way bodies understand and are understood within a particular sociohistorical context to anticipate ways those bodies can exist in the future. Through enacting transformative listening, the authors theorize how privilege circulates at Hofstra University’s writing center, revealing how privilege protects some and makes others vulnerable to multiple manifestations of institutional oppression.

Further, the authors engage with Audre Lorde’s understanding of productive uses of anger to identify a range of responses to oppression. While empathy is often a response to the discomfort that results from the disruption of privileged positions, this article identifies the limitations of empathy, highlighting how empathy does not imply action; rather, it is a comfort experienced by white people in a writing center at a predominantly white institution. The authors explore the language that writing center administrators and faculty tutors use to mark a range of identity categories: race, gender, body difference, and mental illness. The piece further considers how privilege around such categories operationalizes oppression and models how mindful, individual reflections about privilege are part of the messy process towards collective action and greater equity.

Introduction As writing center practitioners, we experience and witness many of the ways our institutions duplicate systems of privilege and oppression that exist beyond our walls. In response to institutional oppression, our field has moved towards greater inclusivity through expanding our consideration of identity categories that are implicated in these systems of power. For example, in his call for “transformative listening,” in “Unmaking Gringo Centers” Romeo Garcia identifies that “writing centers function within a tapestry of social structures, reproducing and generating systems of privilege” (32), and Garcia goes on to ask those of us within these systems to practice mindfulness of difference. The author theorizes transformative listening as a kind of checkpoint that both defines the way bodies understand and are understood within a particular socio-historical context, as well as anticipates ways those bodies can

Jennifer Marx Hofstra University Jennifer.Marx@hofstra.edu Joseph Chilman Hofstra University Joseph.Chilman@hofstra.edu Andrea Rosso Efthymiou Hofstra University Andrea.R.Efthymiou@hofstra.ed exist in the future. To engage in transformative listening, then, implies that we are mindful of how we define and are defined, while anticipating growth. Our work here performs such mindfulness, making visible the distinct racial identities of the people who move through our spaces, complicating the black-white racial binary that pervades much of writing center work on racial difference. While black people are the most visible recipients of trauma in American culture, trauma manifests based on any markers that identify the self as other. In this piece, we explore the language that we, as writing center administrators and faculty tutors, use to mark a range of identity categories: race, gender, body difference, and mental illness. We further consider how privilege around such categories operationalizes oppression in ways that we work to be mindful of and ultimately resist.

But to be mindful is not a passive act. It requires conversations with others, and active collective and individual reflection. The authors of this piece work through such reflection here in an attempt to model this individual and collective work of developing awareness of how privilege and oppression exercise power. This piece does not serve as a how-to guide on enacting social justice in the writing center, but rather a documentation of the process of grappling with how we are all implicated within these systems of oppression. After all, such oppression is built into the very foundations of the institutions where our writing centers exist. As Laura Greenfield notes in Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement, “[i]ndependent of the personal feelings or values of individual people, the discrepancies in power among different populations are maintained through everyone’s participation in the normalized activities of the institution” (21). While we move through our writing center spaces and larger institutions, the demands and pressures of our daily work lives allow oppression to appear as business-as-

Productive Disruptions: The Struggle towards Equity in Writing Center Work • 15 usual, so much so that we are hardly aware of its workings. Ultimately, this facade of institutional neutrality enacts a particular kind of replicable violence that writing centers are positioned to extend, if unchecked.

A regional writing center conference call for proposals allowed us to see these theories in practice in our own center. Our center is located at a predominantly white, private, four-year university thirty miles east of New York City. While current and past directors have worked intentionally in the service of diversity and inclusion in our center, we still struggle to have meaningful and sustained conversations about difference in our writing center. The 2020 Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association (MAWCA) call for “Decolonizing Writing Center Practice: A New Vision for a New Decade” initiated a much-needed dialogue between writing center administrators and faculty tutors in our center, as the call drew on the scholarship of Greenfield and conference keynote speaker Garcia to frame writing center work as implicated in a system of violence characterized by whiteness and race-based oppression. This call for proposals served as a call-toaction for the six authors of this piece during a staff meeting in Fall 2019 dedicated to conference preparation. As we shared our individual responses to the MAWCA call, our exchange highlighted the ways systemic oppression was at work in our institutional space and the extent to which we were willing to engage in transformative listening. Through enacting transformative listening, we heard the experiences of some colleagues in our own center, discovering truths that helped us see how privilege protected some of us and made others vulnerable to multiple manifestations of institutional oppression. Thus, our reflections were our actions. What we offer, then, is a model for reflecting collectively and moving from individual responses and thoughts to communication and inclusivity. The sections that follow represent what we shared at MAWCA 2020, and are an invitation to our audience to consider the questions we had been asking each other in our own center in an effort to dismantle oppression. Often, conversations about social justice focus on the final product; however, our intent was to reveal the inherent messiness of the process. As a result, our presentation was well received for its raw glimpse into the process of transformative listening.

Although the MAWCA conference focused on oppression within writing centers, the work we started there coincided with systemic injustices in society beyond the institution. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we moved into conducting remote staff meetings via Zoom later in Spring 2020 and

conversations about the pandemic and injustices intersected. Less than two weeks before our presentation, Ahmaud Arbery, a young black man jogging through his suburban Atlanta neighborhood, was gunned down by a white father and son. Within days of our presentation, Breonna Taylor, a young black woman and EMT in Louisville, was murdered in her home by police officers who mistook her residence as a drug den. These crimes and others like them surged to the fore of American consciousness with the murder of George Floyd at the hand of police officers in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.

In order to better understand oppression, we move through considerations of racial violence, as well as marginalization that is not racialized, to explore the various ways in which privilege circulates. In her essay “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” Audre Lorde identifies how anger can work in the service of change, for “anger is loaded with information and energy” (8). Lorde’s work, in conversation with Garcia’s and Greenfield’s, initiated disruption in our comfortable writing center, and our article represents how we engaged in a kind of transformative listening.

Each individually-authored section herein attempts to understand the self in relation to the other, as we begin to move forward to a future where we are all agents of change. In an effort to sustain the work we start here, we consider how invitational rhetoric (Foss & Griffin) might facilitate future conversations and we understand how empathy—for any marker of difference—is only a beginning. We are cautious of the limitations of empathy, since empathy is a feeling, a state of being, and not an action. We highlight how comfort is a privilege experienced by white people in a writing center at a predominantly white institution, we reflect on moments where we were silent in the face of oppression, we struggle to keep moments of violence alive in public memory for the very reason that we do not want to forget the oppression we have experienced nor dismiss the oppression of others, and we share our distinct and collective relationships to privilege as a hopeful prelude to many more productive and disruptive conversations that will yield not only transformative listening, but also transformative action.

If We Don’t Get It, Shut Us Down: Theorizing Disturbance in a Writing Center

Tyler Thier Laura Greenfield argues that “despite our many successes, the collective influence writing centers are having on the world is simultaneously violent” (9). As

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Productive Disruptions: The Struggle towards Equity in Writing Center Work • 16 we drafted our collective response to Greenfield and the 2020 MAWCA conference call, the six co-authors of this piece were far from unified in their reactions. In fact, Greenfield’s use of the term violent resulted in fractured interpretations and plausibility among our staff. How could we—faculty tutors, administrators, people in a university space who talk and consult about writing for a living—possibly enact violence? When terminology arises that implicates our work in a violent context, we will inevitably be jolted into a sense of critical distance, whether in a curious and concerned way, in a perplexed way, or in an aggravated way.

From our privileged positions—as writing center practitioners who have enough institutional support to engage in intellectually stimulating conversations during paid hours—we run the risk of growing too comfortable with a pedagogical framework.

Perhaps that framework is beneficial to some still, but to others (i.e., marginalized or underserved students) it has failed or proven to further alienate. So, considering these factors, it is required that we be alienated from what we do in order to approach that work with a more critical and discerning lens. It is therefore necessary to deem such an exclusionary or complacent pedagogy “violent” even if no physical violence has yet occurred.

Destabilizing our comfort in such a way distances us to the extent that we have no choice but to look on from an “outsider” perspective.

Greenfield’s accusation of violence is a healthy form of disturbance; it opens us up to something that needs to be talked about, no matter how reluctant or offended one might be to that something at first. Rasha Diab, Thomas Ferrel, and Beth Godbee build on this initial provocation with the notion of “a willingness to be disturbed—that is, a willingness to cultivate a tireless investment in reflection, openness, and hope for a better, more fulfilling future for us all” (20). By embracing difficult discussions concerning our own positions of privilege, we push our personal narratives of what we thought (or failed to think) about in our writing center work ever so slightly closer to “collective, transpersonal, and resistive knowledge. [...] Collective interpretation of narratives—that is, testifying and processing together—is crucial to collective recognition of our problems, our commitments to counter them, and our efforts toward making commitments actionable” (24). Our work here, at a place of critical distance, puts our varied reactions to the disruption of Greenfield’s statement into conflict and conversation, gauging how they differ or compare, and reassessing or recontextualizing for the sake of a wider audience. These difficult, turbulent, even messy conversations among colleagues might be a long way from attaining a

collectively inclusive pedagogy, and from decolonizing the institutional organs we represent, but they are a necessary starting point.

In the vast shadow of systemic oppression, an isolated moment of critical insight is not enough to dismantle much of anything. After all, “the political is always experienced on a personal level when people feel that their aspirations are undermined, stifled, or thwarted by political formulations that reproduce specific power articulations” (Diab et al. 24). We can share our confessional accounts and pause and reflect, striving to be more aware and to serve with a more racially conscious engagement from that point onward, but this conversational work cannot remain a one-time reassessment. To the theorists mentioned here and the current antiracism movement worldwide, this is a longterm, deep-rooted struggle. Similar to how our tutoring pedagogy embraces transfer of rhetorical skills, confidence in voice, and agency of authorship, we must embrace being estranged from our comfort zones and sustain empathy, on an exhaustive basis, for as long as systemic violence might permeate or even inform that very pedagogy.

To draw an analogy directly to the streets, a prolific demand of Black Lives Matter activists is “What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now. If we don’t get it, shut it down.” Justice might be defunding the police or arresting the officers who murdered Breonna Taylor, for instance. If those demands are not met by the system, the system must be dismantled for justice to be attainable. We, here in the writing center, are a system ourselves; we are a resource of an institution, an extension of its values, and therefore complicit in racial bias, microaggressions, and discriminatory practices embedded and replicated within. If we are failing to see how the term “violent” can hold us accountable when that privilege goes unchecked, or to acknowledge that our silence feeds injustice, then shut us down until we do.

Black Trauma: Moving Past Empathy to Productive Disruption

Aisha Wilson-Carter As a black woman, I know that rhetoric has to disrupt and disturb an audience in order to provoke discussion and hopefully change. On the one hand, I understand how discomfort, language, and delivery can lead to withdrawal and barriers to conversation. My colleague will further define this discomfort in the next section of this piece. Yet on the other hand, changing systemic inequalities necessitates people being uncomfortable while remaining open enough to have

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Productive Disruptions: The Struggle towards Equity in Writing Center Work • 17 meaningful dialogue. However, as the previous section identifies, Greenfield’s language defining violence in our centers—disruptions that we’ve collectively encountered—can lead to feelings of being “called-out” and offended. Such disruptions sometimes cause defensive behavior, where participants are no longer willing to listen. This leads me to wonder: how can this disruption be more productive?

In our own center, as I shared my personal experiences with oppression, microaggressions, and frankly the trauma that comes with being Black in America, my colleague's reaction to Greenfield’s argument began to shift. Initially, I questioned why my narrative caused a change of heart, these were of course the same experiences BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) have been recounting for hundreds of years.

As a black scholar discussing race within the confines of inherently oppressive institutional spaces, determining how disturbed or “called-out” the privileged are willing to be before they retreat, ignore, and shut down is a means of survival. In 2020, are the marginalized and the oppressed still expected to soften the blow when educating audiences on social injustices, advocacy, and systemic racism? The answers to these questions are not black and white; rather, they are layered in emotional complexities. It takes practice and consistency to “hold each other accountable while doing extremely difficult and risky social justice work” (Ross). I appreciate the empathy shown to me and my family by my colleagues and am happy to make the data tangible with personal narrative, but I also resent the dance of making others comfortable during these discussions. Performing this dance contributes to Black trauma. Black trauma can be unequivocally seen in the totality of nuanced ways Black Americans respond to, cope with, and survive the lie of inferiority: a lie that has internalized feelings of inferiority at its source. Although working through productive disruption can be problematic, I remained focused on the goal; the goal in the writing center is to unify our social justice work and not to have it splintered by defensiveness and embarrassment (Ross). As I asked my white colleagues to put aside their offense and discomfort, I had to decide to put aside my trauma, at least for the moment. The action, in this case, was to acknowledge their empathy, but also make clear that the dance I had to perform to elicit such empathy overall contributes to black trauma.

Thankfully, in our writing center, we all have the space to inquire and engage, and productive disruptions are encouraged. Once we discussed the ways we all benefit from unearned privilege and suffer from unmerited oppression, we were able to have an open dialogue, which allowed us to empathize with each

other. Empathy is needed for action to take place; however, empathy is just a step. Many programs, workshops, and training labeled with the moniker “Diversity and Inclusion” aim to create empathy in participants, but do not foster change or a commitment to becoming antiracist. As one of only three black voices in the writing center, I deemed it necessary to be honest about black trauma, the dance of comfort, and the historic challenges with an approach that elevates empathy over action.

To BIPOC, empathy alone can feel cheap and even further perpetuate feelings of inferiority. The breakdown or inadequacy of these discussions can be traumatic—even violent; at best, empathy can be a form of validation, while at worst, empathy can increase feelings of Black inferiority and White superiority. The idea that empathy alone is sufficient is undone within Critical Race Theory. The empathetic fallacy supposes one can affect a dominant narrative by offering an alternative narrative, expecting that the listener's empathy will override hundreds of years of systemic racist ideology (Delgado and Stefancic 34). Feelings of empathy are not enough to generate transformation without a deliberate focus on antiracist action.

Therefore, it is important to encourage participants during difficult discussions to move past empathy by acknowledging their privilege and oppression, then depersonalize the violation by personalizing the solution.

If writing center practitioners are presented with rhetoric that accuses them of violence and racism, they may personalize a claim like Greenfield’s argument, responding with “I don't have a racist BONE in my body” or “our writing center is not violent.” Yet, implicit in these statements is the idea that a reaction to a conversation about race in America can be neutral. As Ibram X. Kendi illustrates, claiming “‘I am not a racist,’ is akin to claiming, ‘neither am I aggressively against racism.’ But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle.

The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist’” (19). Thus, it is imperative to confront racism as an idea, not a physical trait. This would entail discussing institutionalized oppression as a history lesson, as just a fact that we have all inherited but will continue to exist if we don't actively work to dismantle it. Advancing a social justice agenda sometimes looks like a moment of awakening, but more often it looks like progress from empathy to action. What follows are examples of how we worked through these discussions in our center.

An Invitation to Transformative Listening Marilyn Buono-Magri

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Productive Disruptions: The Struggle towards Equity in Writing Center Work • 18 Greenfield’s claim that writing centers, as centers of privilege, contribute to the perpetuation of institutional violence initially provoked feelings of anger and resentment at what I felt were unthinkable and unsubstantiated claims. Moreover, the thought that privilege—white privilege—existed, or was even subtly displayed in our writing center or that I, myself, might be a recipient of this oppressive mantle, shook my being to its core. I was deeply disturbed and felt that I, as well as our writing center, was doing a very good job of being woke, in terms of awareness and sensitivity toward one another as well as the writers who visit our space.

Our first conversations about Greenfield’s work led me to begin to engage in what Garcia calls transformative listening. Some shared my feelings of disturbance, while others aligned themselves with Greenfield’s claim. As the conversation in our center proceeded, and because we are all friends, I began to understand the meaning behind Greenfield’s use of the terms “violence” and “privilege” in a less personal and more informed way. While I maintained my stance that the language was provocative, others pointed out that the phrase was intended to provoke—to disturb— perhaps because many of us are unaware of privileges that we take for granted, that we consider to be the norm.

My colleague’s invitation to discuss and engage productively with my discomfort paved the way for deep reflection on my own part, reflection that I might not have done had I not been disturbed. I came to realize that, despite my liberal leanings and a belief that I was not part of the problem, rather an advocate for the solution, there were quite a few factors I had never taken into consideration; foremost among these was history.

Because I am a second generation American of European ancestry, I certainly knew the story of America’s beleaguered past, but I had never truly embraced it as something for which I, myself, was accountable. Then, the Aha! moment came. I have never embraced the negatives of my gratefully adopted American heritage, but I have surely benefited from its positives—for white people.

Developing my understanding of my own whiteness has forced me to become aware of what Diangelo calls white fragility and, consequently, reevaluate my own personal narrative (2). While my grandparents faced persecution and oppression when they first landed in America from Italy in the early part of the twentieth century, the oppression that they faced was based on language and cultural differences, not on the color of their skin. Their assimilation took time, but was able to be accomplished within a generation or less.

Their ultimate acceptance was in large part due to

gatekeepers accepting them as white. I now have a better understanding of what it means to embody white privilege. I know that this issue goes beyond race; it goes to identity and all that that embodies. Honestly, for all my white privilege, as a woman, as a mother, as one who chose to marry young without a career, then as a single mother, and as an older woman entering into the realm of academia, I too have felt forms of oppression, and admittedly, did not like the feeling at all. If these few oppressive moments in my life had caused me pain, I could not begin to imagine what a lifetime of oppression must feel like. Then again, there is a lot that I could not or did not begin to imagine until I was disturbed. As Lorde notes, “it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman’s voice delineate an agony I do not share, or even one in which I myself may have participated” (8). The willingness to stand still and to listen, to no longer be a silent witness to my colleague’s “dance of comfort,” to no longer hear a call-out in their speech but rather a call-to-action, is a personal and powerful moment of growth engendered by the invitational rhetoric of colleagues invested in change.

Ultimately, I am truly grateful for the wake-up call, and while I initially found the call-out to be delivered in an aggressive way, I came to understand that this language was borne of an inchoate anger that Lorde deems necessary and whose “object is change” (Lorde 8). As she asserts, “any discussion among women about racism must include the recognition and the use of anger. It must be direct and creative, because it is crucial.

We cannot allow our fear and anger to deflect us nor to seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty” (Lorde 8).

Truthful awakenings rarely come to us in daydreams. I had to be shaken from my reverie by voices loud, strong, and yes, angry, in order to move beyond my empathetic somnolence. I have learned that it is only by unflinchingly hearing these voices that we can remain in that initial place of discomfort long enough to move toward not “privileging the comfort of white people over [the violence of systemic oppression], and to move past guilt into action” (Diangelo 150).

What It’s Like to Literally Not FIT in

Jennifer Marx I am seriously disturbed by the violence constantly enacted against marginalized individuals. I have no doubt that this violence exists, and I have no hesitation that we must fight it. Imagining the writing center at which I work, however, as a place capable of enacting such violence provoked a jarring reaction in me: a defensive one even. I could not picture this space as one

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Productive Disruptions: The Struggle towards Equity in Writing Center Work • 19 that produced violence. My coauthor’s consideration, in the previous section, of her identity as a white, middleclass, straight woman with a graduate degree echoes my own process of understanding here. I know that I have privilege, and I do not feel it is my place to speak as though I know what it is like to not have privilege. Yet as I considered further, I recognized another layer of identity for myself: I realized that our conceptions of body difference are so severely limited that I had not even recognized my own body difference as a lack of privilege prior to our conversations in the center. In fact, I wonder if this exact type of marginalization even has a specific name—evidence of how little it is seemingly acknowledged. I have been mistaken for other people, inside and outside of our center, with whom I share no other physical similarities aside from our weight: to be precise, that would equate to a size 28 dress. “[Engaging] in reflection and reflexivity” (Garcia 50) allowed me to reach this recognition and to begin working through the aforementioned obstacles.

It is easy to pretend that a mix-up of names neither stings nor silences. It is more difficult to hide the fact that you cannot fit in a chair. Walking into an unknown office space, theater, or classroom regularly raises this dilemma. I once worked in a space where I did not fit in the chairs, and I had to lug out a beaten up, half broken chair from another room every day. Perhaps even more awkward is the fact onlookers will ask why I am switching chairs. Are society’s perceptions so limited that they truly do not know my answer? This reason is a major indication of why we must disrupt and disturb.

Thus, it is crucial that we seriously consider how accessible our spaces are and how in line they are with the ideas of Universal Design for Learning, for example.

Something so simple that many people do not have to think about—such as arms on or the weight capacity of a chair—could change whether or not students make inperson appointments with us. In order to accomplish this task, we must consider how we currently define accessibility: Are we comprehensively accounting for all body differences?

People will say marginalization based on body difference is not the same as others because they will state, “Well, it’s your own fault.” My challenge for these critics is the following: Take your greatest flaw. Write it all over your body, your clothes, your face, and your shoes. Wear that word, whether it is “jealous,” “greedy,” “gossip,” “liar,” “vengeful,” or “procrastinator,” every day, all day, and watch the reactions of others. The punishments are far greater than the crime. Speaking much more specifically about body difference, instead of continuing to ignore the topic, is crucial in moving beyond these harmful claims based on visible factors.

Despite my recognitions, I still could not see how such marginalization fit the definition of violence. What was it about violence that was so off-putting to me? Why was my reaction so visceral? I needed to ask myself how I connect violence with education, and that was when I found my answer. When I think of violence and education as connected, I think of myself at 12 years-old learning that two students across the country murdered their classmates and a teacher at Columbine—the day when school became a place in which you could die suddenly and violently. When I think of violence and education as connected, I think of myself at 15 years-old seeing smoke come out of the Twin Towers from an upper floor of my high school 25 miles away from Manhattan.

Notice the past tense here as I describe myself grappling with the use of the word violence. I needed the disruption to confront my own obstacles on the path to understanding; I needed to reflect. I needed to absorb what Lorde means when she writes: “My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also” (7). What I see now is that any act or word of aggression, marginalization, or oppression invites violence. It is not that I didn’t understand violence when I began my own examination of the issues: it is that I forgot. I forgot just like society does after every major event: after we stop posting on social media and go back to our daily lives, forgetting that our private and public lives need to match if we want to make real change, forgetting that something seemingly so simple as where we choose to live shapes our perceptions of what the world looks like and how we contribute to segregation, oppression, and marginalization.

I have promised myself not to forget again.

The In/Visibility of Mental Illness Joseph Chilman As evidenced in the previous sections, violence often results from identity markers that are visible on the body. And while our identities are, in so many ways, perceived by how we physically present and move through our institutional spaces, those of us with mental illness endure oppression in our writing centers differently: not only do some superficially attribute various markers as indicators of mental illness, but they also then marginalize both those with perceived and actual mental illness.

The ambiguity of distinguishable mental illness symptoms can and does lead to the complexity of what constitutes violence in our writing centers. Such uncertainty led me to recall one September morning as I read previous client reports in our online scheduling

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Productive Disruptions: The Struggle towards Equity in Writing Center Work • 20 system to prepare for my afternoon appointment.

Another tutor came up behind me and noticed the name of the client on my computer screen. Without much hesitation, and maybe a hint of concern for my wellbeing, she simply said, “Oh, you have an appointment with him. All’s I’m gonna say is ‘school shooter.’” My initial reaction was to try to shrug it off as just another label thrown around these days. Yet, after my session with the student, my nonchalance shifted to disturbance, and my perspective drastically changed.

Throughout the fifty-minute appointment, it became clear to me that the person I was sitting across from was suffering with some form of mental illness. In various ways, his symptoms halted his writing process; it was also difficult for him to hold a conversation with me because of his illness. There were times where he would come to a full stop in the middle of a sentence, fail to make eye contact, and then start on a new tangent.

Other times, he was obsessively quiet, never truly displaying what he was thinking. Yet, despite all of this behavior, not once did I feel in danger or threatened by the client during our session. In fact, the student was overall rather pleasant to work with, many times saying “thank you,” and appearing eager, when he was able, to receive any writing advice I could offer him.

It was only after the client left the writing center that I remembered the comment made by the other tutor earlier in the day. I felt obliged to say something back to her. I should tell her how such phrases and labels cannot be used lightly. I needed to inform her that the student I just worked with was one of the marginalized, not a threat, and deserving of proper language to describe him. However, I ultimately said nothing.

In many ways, I related to the student suffering from mental illness. I have been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and major depression.

Often, my symptoms get in the way of how I want to present myself to others and conduct my work. I have been where that student is in his life. Therefore, if that client is a school shooter, then so am I. Facing such labels and language—perhaps violent language—as “school shooter,” I said nothing. Lorde theorizes the pain of so many marginalized people who “remain silent because they are afraid” (8). Another tutor’s narrative of one student’s mental illness silenced me that day. It paralyzed me. I know I should not have remained silent, but calling out —or simply speaking up —is difficult when the language of others inflicts wounds.

Silence as Oppressing Others: Failures of a Writing Center Director Andrea Rosso Efthymiou

As evidenced by my co-author’s consideration of silence in the previous section, calling out problematic language, language that indeed may enact a kind of violence, is fraught with feelings of risk, shame, and, quite simply, not always knowing the words to offer in response to feeling discomfort. Loretta Ross has problematized call-out culture, showing how it can involve the mentorship of elders but also the viciousness of bullying and hatred. In short, calling someone out is uncomfortable, and the balance between a productive call-out and an unproductive one is difficult to strike.

In an effort to make my ideological commitments to racial justice actionable, I claim to embrace Diab et al.’s “willingness to be disturbed” (20), believing (on most days) that I am open to disruption and devoted to speaking out against oppression. I preach this willingness, encouraging my writing center colleagues— undergraduate, graduate, and faculty alike—likewise to view disturbance and disruption as a path towards growth.

But, I must also come to terms with the reality that I regularly do not practice what I preach.

Echoing the reflections of some of my co-authors here, I am coming to terms with the problematic reality of my whiteness. My whiteness—and my womenness and my age—means that I move through the world with relative ease; not only is my body not viewed as threatening in our society, but I have the option to disregard the everyday racism around me with little consequence. In our writing center, as the center’s director—and as a white, cis-gendered, tenure-track faculty member—I am possibly the most privileged person in our space, yet I struggle to leverage my privilege productively. Being merely aware of how my privilege operates, at best, means that I tacitly participate in systems of institutional oppression, rather than act to dismantle these systems in any way. An example of such tacit participation on my part happened at a previous writing center staff meeting.

At this staff meeting, tutors had prepared for a discussion about better supporting multilingual students by reading Bobbi Olson’s “Rethinking Our Work with Multilingual Writers: The Ethics and Responsibility of Language Teaching in the Writing Center.” With our discussion underway, one tutor described their own time learning a foreign language and mimicked a south Asian accent when trying to describe their own languagelearning. This moment was awkward to be sure; I felt a twinge of discomfort upon hearing a white person perform an accent intended to represent the students we are charged to support, but I also defaulted to a position of neutrality, thinking to myself, “That’s ok. They didn’t mean anything by it.” Then it happened again; as the

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Productive Disruptions: The Struggle towards Equity in Writing Center Work • 21 tutor continued to describe their own challenges learning a language that was new to them, they performed the accent a second time. I perceived a palpable tension in the room and viscerally felt the discomfort grow, my own face getting hot with confusion and anger. Possibilities flashed through my head during what was perhaps five minutes that felt like thirty.: I could call the tutor out as racist and insensitive—an accusation that would surely heighten the discomfort in the room—or I could gather the wherewithal and words to say, “Hey, I’m uncomfortable by the way you’re describing language-learning and by hearing you perform an accent. What exactly are you trying to say because I’m not getting the point?”

Instead, I did nothing, remaining silent as this discomfort grew to the point of staring me—and most importantly my undergraduate staff—straight in the face. In a moment when I, the most privileged person in the writing center, could have modeled invitational rhetoric, I stayed silent.

As we move daily through an American culture bent on the high stakes of persuasion, invitational rhetoric can help us create more reasonable expectations of ourselves and others. “Invitational rhetoric constitutes an invitation to the audience to enter the rhetor’s world and to see it as the rhetor does” (Foss and Griffin 5).

Practicing invitational rhetoric, then, de-emphasizes persuasion as a goal, thus moving towards mutual understanding. The writing center is a space where the subjectivity of the rhetor is in constant flux, moving among tutor, writer, administrator, and various other identities represented by the bodies that move through our spaces. At this staff meeting where my silence felt deafening to me, I know now that I could have harnessed my own agency as rhetor in the service of equity and antiracism. The shame I felt in the immediate wake of my silence intensified my commitment to “engage in self-work” (Condon and Young 8), and also illuminates why empathy, as my colleague noted earlier, is not enough. The feeling of empathy—my anger that arose at the possibility that words were devaluing another human—paralyzed me. The theory of invitational rhetoric reframes that paralysis I felt under pressure to call-out, to persuade the tutor that their words were racist. I know now that I should have moved forward by asking the tutor to understand my perception of their words, offering the tutor a space to (hopefully) clarify their intent. Modeling invitational rhetoric in our centers may be one step towards antiracist writing center practice.

Conclusion: Disruption

Enacting

Productive

For us to be antiracist—or to work against oppression and marginalization in any form—we must first be open to discomfort and disruption. Again, our conversations are actions. A dialogue, like the one represented here, in which we acknowledge the necessity of taking a position and avoiding political neutrality, is critical. We, administrators and faculty tutors, provide snapshots of positions we asserted in our own writing center and of growth we made in our dialogue. The glimpses we offer here are partial. We are but six people who work in a center with twenty-five writing center colleagues, two-thirds of whom are undergraduate student tutors. It is incumbent upon our director to extend this reflective practice, inviting undergraduate tutors into sustainable conversations about institutional oppression and writing center work.

This article offers a model for faculty, graduate, and undergraduate tutors to have honest discussions in the face of disturbing structural biases across our institutions. To adapt this model in other centers, we encourage our colleagues to bring in texts—perhaps this text—that make them uncomfortable, to share experiences of when writing center practitioners have felt marginalized or marginalized someone else, either intentionally or not. These conversations should invite questioning and sharing, regardless of rank, race, gender, ableism, and body differences. Collaboratively acknowledging privilege and oppression allows us to begin enacting Garcia’s call for transformative listening.

Our conversations represented here helped us conceptualize violence, privilege, and oppression through different lenses, and opened up space in our center to model a way to move past empathy towards action.

Works Cited Condon, Frankie, and Vershawn Ashanti Young, editors. Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication. WAC Clearinghouse, 2017.

Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. Critical America. 2nd ed., New York UP, 2012.

Diangelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Beacon Press, 2018.

Diab, Rasha et al., “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable.” Condon and Young,

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Productive Disruptions: The Struggle towards Equity in Writing Center Work • 22 pp. 19-40.

Foss, Sonja K. and Cindy L. Griffin. “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric.” Communication Monographs, vol. 62, 1995.

Garcia, Romeo. “Unmaking Gringo Centers.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, 2017, pp. 29-60.

Geller, Anne Ellen et al. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Utah State UP, 2007.

Greenfield, Laura. Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement. Utah State UP, 2019.

Kendi, Ibram X. How to be an Antiracist. Penguin Random House, 2019.

Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 3, 1981.

Olson, Bobbi. “Rethinking Our Work with Multilingual Writers.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 2013.

Ross, Loretta. “I’m a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture is Toxic.” The New York Times. 17 Aug. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/ opinion/sunday/cancel-culture-call-out.html.

Accessed 9 June 2021

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18 No 3 (2021)

DEVELOPING GENERATIVE DISPOSITIONS TOWARDS WRITING THROUGH MICRO-COACHING: RESULTS FROM A DISPOSITIONS AWARENESS STUDY Kelsey Hixson-Bowles Utah Valley University Kelsey.Hixson-Bowles@uvu.edu

Jessica Wallace Brigham Young University 10685203@uvu.edu

Hayden Berg Utah Valley University Hayden.Berg@uvu.edu

Konnor McIntire Utah Valley University Konnor.mcintire@gmail.com

Abstract

a writer comes to their first tutorial and opens by saying “I’m a terrible writer.” We’ve all experienced this. How did you respond? How do your tutors respond? It’s likely you, like us, work on building the writer’s selfefficacy.

In the current study, we focus on self-efficacy and self-regulation, in part due to the advice Driscoll et al. offer in “Down the Rabbit Hole: Challenges and Methodological Recommendations in Researching Writing-Related Student Dispositions.” They suggest focusing on one or two dispositions at a time in research design and/or in data analysis. We also chose to focus on self-efficacy and self-regulation because of their interwoven nature. Albert Bandura defines selfefficacy as “people’s beliefs in their abilities to produce given attainments” (307). In the context of learning to write, self-efficacy can be understood as a writer’s belief that they can engage in the process of writing and produce a composition. Self-regulation, on the other hand, “refers to the process by which learners personally activate and sustain cognitions, affects, and behaviors that are systematically oriented toward the attainment of learning goals” (Schunk and Zimmerman, vii). In the context of learning to write, self-regulation can be understood as the choices writers make to ensure that writing happens. These choices include everything from managing distractions to strategically choosing a topic they’re interested in to engaging in healthy work habits. Frank Pajares, in “Motivational Role of SelfEfficacy Beliefs in Self-Regulated Learning,” synthesizes the research on the interconnectedness of self-efficacy and self-regulation: “Students who believe they are capable of performing academic tasks use more cognitive and metacognitive strategies, and, regardless of previous achievement or ability, they work harder, persist longer, and persevere in the face of adversity” (119-120). In other words, a student who believes they can successfully write a paper for class will have more motivation to try different strategies to complete the paper than a student who doubts that they can successfully write.

Building off of scholarship on transfer in writing centers, this study aims to determine whether raising students’ metacognitive awareness of their dispositions towards writing through a strategy we’ve named, micro-coaching, would affect those dispositions. This article reports on the survey, interview and coaching processes we utilized in working with students enrolled in a pre-core composition course. Findings suggest that coaches used a simple four-step process to infuse conversations with micro-coaching and that student participants utilized the strategies coaches suggested.

Additionally, participants’ self-efficacy in writing increased by the end of the semester. Our discussion highlights moments where this method yielded positive results and suggests ways micro-coaching could be utilized in and out of writing center contexts. Ultimately, we conclude that the micro-coaching methodology used in our study has wide-reaching potential to help students in various environments develop more generative dispositions towards writing.

Writing center scholars have become increasingly interested in the intersection of writing transfer studies and writing center programs, pedagogy, and research, especially in the last five years (Bromley, Northway, and Schonberg; Devet; Devet and Driscoll; Hill, “Tutoring for Transfer,” “Transfer Theory”). We (your coauthors) agree that writing centers have a lot to offer and learn from writing transfer studies. Of the complex factors that contribute to students’ ability to successfully transfer, we are most interested in how writing support programs can foster students’ dispositions towards writing. 1 Dispositions, as defined by Dana Lynn Driscoll and Jennifer Wells are “individual, internal [psychological] characteristic[s]” such as self-efficacy, self-regulation, attribution, and value.2 Both Driscoll and Wells’ “Beyond Knowledge and Skills: Writing Transfer and the Role of Student Dispositions” and Neil Baird and Bradley Dilger’s “How Students Perceive Transitions: Dispositions and Transfer in Internships,” found that students’ dispositions impacted their ability to transfer writing from one context to another. In our own experience, though we think many of you will agree, tutors often counsel writers in ways that could impact their dispositions towards writing. Take this classic scenario, for instance:

Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 24 As we noted above, tutors often play a key role in helping students build self-efficacy and self-regulation.

However, the research about the specific strategies tutors use and their measurable outcomes is still nascent, though growing. In “Transfer and Dispositions in Writing Centers: A Cross-Institutional, Mixed-Methods Study,” Pam Bromley, Kara Northway, and Eliana Schonberg focused on measuring outcomes by asking students to complete exit surveys and participate in focus groups about students’ perceptions and experiences of transfer. They found that students at three institutions gained self-efficacy and “metacognitive awareness of their abilities as writers” in their learning and writing development as a result of tutoring. Another study found that students with lower self-efficacy were more likely to visit the Writing Center and students who visited the Writing Center were more likely to earn a higher grade in their writing class (Williams and Takaku). These studies brilliantly demonstrate the efficacy of tutoring and even offer some evidence in its ability to positively impact transfer; and at the same time, they focus on outcomes of tutoring, broadly, rather than specific tutoring strategies.

Writing center scholars have studied specific tutoring strategies. Perhaps most well-known is Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson’s, Talk about Writing, in which they systematically studied the discourse of writing center tutorials. Their three broad coding categories—instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding—can be can be taught as strategies in tutor education. In her earlier article, “Scaffolding in the Writing Center: A Microanalysis of an Experienced Tutor’s Verbal and Nonverbal Tutoring Strategies,” Thompson examines the efficacy of tutoring strategies and their effect on student writers.

Thompson suggests that the way tutors implement directive, motivational, and cognitive scaffolding during tutoring sessions can increase students’ metacognitive awareness and engagement with their writing. Rebecca Block’s “Disruptive Design: An Empirical Study of Reading Aloud in the Writing Center'' is another wellknown piece that explores specific tutoring strategies and their outcomes. In this article, Block utilizes empirical research strategies to analyze the efficacy of having students read their papers aloud, a widelybelieved best practice that has long been part of writing center lore. Block posits a tutoring method she names “point-predict” wherein tutors take the role of reader and attempt to clarify to the author how meaning is understood and interpreted from a reader’s perspective.

Though Block urges scholars to replicate the study to further test the effectiveness of the point-predict

tutoring strategy, this study is a helpful example of how a tutoring strategy can be measured. While these studies are careful not to claim that the strategies tested absolutely lead to the outcomes observed, they do demonstrate ways scholars have tested tutoring strategies.

Similarly, the current study seeks to identify if one intervention might have a positive effect on students’ self-efficacy and self-regulation. The encouraging results of the studies cited above make us wonder which parts of tutoring are key to boosting writers’ selfefficacy. Though it’s difficult to isolate just one part of tutoring, we attempt to do just that by taking the writing out of the interaction and focusing the interaction on students’ dispositions. Metacognition—or a learner’s awareness of their thinking—about writing dispositions is an understudied corner of transfer studies.

Preliminary evidence from Kelsey Hixson-Bowles’ Laying the Groundwork for Transfer: A Case Study Exploring the Impact of Strengths-Based Pedagogy on Students’ WritingRelated Dispositions indicated that increasing students’ metacognitive awareness of qualities that contribute to success and thinking strategically about how to apply those qualities may help develop students’ generative dispositions3 towards writing. Though Hixson-Bowles observed students being coached with Gallup’s Strengths program, it is possible that writing center pedagogy could also help writers become more aware of their dispositions towards writing.

Another study that helps us understand how metacognition of dispositions works is Driscoll and Roger Powell’s “States, Traits, and Dispositions: The Impact of Emotion on Writing Development and Writing Transfer Across College Courses and Beyond,” which explored writers’ emotions and emotional dispositions. Driscoll and Powell found that some participants managed the emotions stirred up by the writing process better than others. They called this group “emotional managers.” Emotional managers demonstrated metacognition about their emotions and emotional dispositions, helping them better manage disruptive emotions that occurred during the writing process. It is likely that tutors intuitively help writers learn and practice emotional management around writing when using motivational scaffolding strategies, such as the ones identified in Mackiewicz and Thompson’s Talk about Writing. But what about other dispositions such as self-efficacy and self-regulation?

Do tutors help writers build metacognition of other dispositions towards writing? To begin to answer these questions, we tested an intervention designed to help writers become more aware of their self-efficacy and self-regulation to see if this awareness helped improve

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 25 their dispositions towards writing over the course of a semester. The following research question guided our study: What impact does metacognitive awareness of and peer-coaching around students’ self-regulation and self-efficacy in writing have on students taking precore English courses?

In addition to reporting our findings in this article, we’ll also share our experience of conducting the study as an admin/undergraduate research team. At the start of the study, Kelsey was the Writing Center Coordinator (a full-time, staff position) and moved into a tenure-track professor position during the study. Led

by Kelsey, Hayden, Jessica, and Konnor acted in the dual roles of undergraduate researcher and peer coach throughout the study. Though all three were tutors at the start of the study, they each graduated while we worked to complete our analysis and write-up. We have learned a great deal about how to collaborate on a research project together and believe that our experiences in designing and enacting the study could serve as a useful model for other administrator/tutor research teams. In what follows, we describe how our research team formed, how we recruited students for the study, the survey they took, the interviews we conducted, how we analyzed the data, and the relevant context for the study.

Methodology This project grew out of Kelsey’s dissertation research as well as writing fellow program assessment based on students’ self-efficacy in writing. Hayden, Jessica, and Konnor were writing fellows in the program Kelsey directed and tutors in the writing center. Kelsey sought out these three because they were highly engaged in staff education meetings about transfer and dispositions towards writing, expressed interest or were in the process of applying to graduate programs and wanted research experience, and were exceptionally reliable employees. In short, they had the interest, motivation, and skill set to participate in a collaborative research project. Readers interested in collaborating with tutors on research projects might also consider putting out a general call to their staff (a more democratic process) or facilitate an inquiry-based invention activity in a staff meeting to see what research questions tutors are most interested in pursuing and build from there (a more student-centered process).

The nature of the mentoring and collaboration will shift depending on how the project originates. The dynamics of our team were impacted by the fact that the project originated with Kelsey, and she sought the help of

Hayden, Jessica, and Konnor. Whereas in a student-led research project, the priority would likely be the student’s growth as a researcher, our project prioritized conducting sound research, and the tutors’ growth as researchers was a means to that end.

Utilizing a qualitative case study methodology, we collected survey responses from our participants and conducted interviews/coaching sessions with them at the beginning and end of a semester. We determined that a case study methodology was appropriate to our study as it would allow us to observe the efficacy of our intervention and coaching strategies. Not only did we use multiple data collection tools (survey and interview), we also analyzed the data from the perspective of the student-participants as well as the research assistants. Furthermore, we knew that recruiting and retaining pre-core writing students in a semester-long study would be challenging. The case study methodology allowed for us to focus on the few individuals we recruited, seeking in-depth understanding of the students’ experiences of our intervention. Our goal was not to make broad generalizations about the impact of our intervention on this population. Rather, our case study approach allowed us to explore the potential of our proposed intervention, learning what—if anything—might be transferable to other contexts.

Similarly, we hope this study serves as a model for other writing center professionals and tutors to use when embarking on collaborative research together.

Though Kelsey initially recruited Hayden, Jessica, and Konnor to collaborate, they were highly involved in the design, implementation, analysis, and reporting.

Research assistants completed CITI training alongside drafting the IRB (#418). The research team met weekly prior to collecting data to learn key research skills like ethical recruitment, interviewing and communication strategies as well as helping to produce documents like a grant proposal, interview scripts, etc. In between meetings, research assistants read scholarship on writing dispositions and methodology. It is important to note that this was a relatively resource-intensive process. We were able to complete this work with the support of our colleagues and a grant that compensated research assistants and participants. For folks interested in pursuing collaborative research like this, we recommend finding resources like grant money, utilizing independent studies, and/or strategically planning for specific research activities to take place during less-demanding times of the academic year.

In what follows, we describe the study’s context, participants, intervention, survey instrument,

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 26 procedure, data analysis, and limitations with enough detail to support replication.

Context and Participants This study was conducted at an open-enrollment university located in the Western United States during the Spring 2020 semester. At the outset of the study, recruitment and initial interviews were conducted faceto-face. Following the COVID-19 outbreak, however, university and study activities transitioned to an online format. Participants were recruited from two sections of one of the University’s4 pre-core writing courses.

Participants Two participants completed the study, though more initially signed up. Research assistants recruited individuals by visiting the class and explaining the study.

Those who completed the study were offered a $25 gift card for their participation. Initially, nine students expressed interest in participating in the study. Three students completed the first interview, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic and an inability to contact one participant (whose data has been excluded), only two participants completed the entirety of the study.

Unfortunately, low participation rates are common in this particular student population.

Both participants are single males attending college in pursuit of undergraduate degrees and have been given pseudonyms. At the time of the study, Colton was a single, 5 white male between the ages of 23-27. He was in the second semester of his first year at the University with plans to pursue a degree in sports medicine. In addition to attending school full-time, Colton indicated that he worked part-time (11-20 hours per week) and was on the University’s lacrosse team. Colton decided to attend the University because of its status as an openenrollment university. In his pre- and post-surveys, Colton reported that both of his parents had received a degree/certificate beyond a high school diploma/GED; though, due to a discrepancy between Colton’s pre- and post- survey responses, we are unsure if his parents both earned bachelor’s degrees or career/technical certificates.

Nathan was also a college student in the second semester of his first year at the time of the study.

According to the demographic information from his pre-survey, he is a single, Mexican male between the ages of 18-22. Both of his parents possess Bachelor’s degrees, and one of them went on to get their Master’s degree. Nathan chose to attend the University primarily because of their architecture program, which he hopes to participate in after earning his Bachelor's degree.

Intervention and Survey Instrument The intervention consisted of a two-step process repeated once towards the beginning of the semester and once towards the end of the semester. The study participants were both asked to take a 5-minute survey which utilized an amended version of the self-efficacy scale Katherine Schmidt and Joel Alexander developed in “The Empirical Development of an Instrument to Measure Writerly Self-Efficacy in Writing Centers”—as well as demographic information (see Appendix B). We amended the scale by shortening it from 20 questions to the 16 that focused on self-regulation tasks as well as other dispositions (such as attribution and value).

Students rated on a scale of 0-10 how confident they felt in their abilities to complete 16 writing-related tasks such as: ● I can articulate my strengths and challenges as a writer. ● I can invest a great deal of effort and time in writing a paper when I know the paper will not be graded.

Students completed this survey on their own before meeting with a research assistant for an interview.

To observe the impact of increasing students' awareness of their dispositions toward writing, we infused the interview format with elements of coaching.

This hybrid approach was important to gather the context necessary to best inform the research assistants’ coaching decisions while also allowing the students to reflect on some of their dispositions towards writing (see Appendix C). The interview/coaching sessions were scheduled after the participants had taken the selfefficacy survey so that research assistants could review participants’ responses and chose three items from the scale to bring up in the session. In addition to the interview scripts, which included guidance for how to approach talking about low and high self-efficacy scores, each research assistant formulated their own method for choosing which responses to focus on and both determined the responses prior to each meeting.

Jessica’s methodology in selecting responses was to find three categories in which Colton rated himself the lowest. Since there were multiple responses with the same lowest rating, Jessica selected questions that covered a wide range of subject matter. Hayden’s methodology for determining responses for discussion in the first interview involved choosing a spread of survey responses from the high, low, and middle scores.

Hayden decided to focus on three questions in the initial interview: one among the highest scores, one among the lowest, and one in the middle. For the

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 27 middle score, Hayden chose a response to a question covering a topic different from the high and low score responses that had already been chosen.

When selecting responses to discuss from the postsurveys, both Hayden and Jessica chose three responses where the most change could be seen between the preand post-surveys. Jessica, however, also prioritized responses revisiting topics discussed in the first interview, where Colton had also made significant improvements in terms of self-efficacy scores.

In addition to the interview scripts, research assistants also prepared through a series of training sessions and practice interviews. Training sessions consisted of reading scholarship on dispositions towards writing, sound methodology practices, and possible responses to low, medium, and high selfefficacy to the various tasks on the survey. Research assistants also practiced the interview/coaching sessions with colleagues in the Writing Center who offered to take the survey and be interviewed.

Procedure To address the imbalance of power between staff/faculty researcher and student participants, the research assistants recruited, maintained contact with, and interviewed the participants. Towards the beginning of the semester, research assistants visited two pre-core writing courses at the University to explain the purpose of the research, what participation entailed, how the data would be handled, and how participants would be compensated. The professors were asked to step outside of the room so students could ask questions freely and choose to participate or not without the perceived influence of their professor.

Students who opted into the study signed consent forms and were later contacted by a research assistant.

Participants were then guided to complete the first survey and schedule a 30-minute interview/coachingsession combo with a research assistant. The earlysemester interviews took place in a study room in the University library. In these one-on-one interviews, students were asked questions about their attitudes and past experiences with formal and informal writing education. Then, the research assistant shared the results of the student’s self-regulation and self-efficacy in writing scale and explained that these results are not fixed and do not predict their overall writing abilities.

Rather, the results offer a snapshot of where the student was when they took the survey. The research assistants then offered strategies for feeling more confident in writing and with managing their writing processes, among other things related to self-regulation. In cases

where a student exhibited high confidence in an area, the research assistant and student discussed what factors and/or strategies bolstered their confidence and self-efficacy as well as discussed strategies for maintaining them.

After completing the first interview, participants were not tracked or contacted until the end of the semester to complete the second survey and interview.

Upon completing the second survey, student participants arranged another corresponding interview/coaching-session combo. Due to policy changes related to COVID-19, interviews took place via Google Voice. During this second interview, the research assistants asked how the students felt about their semester overall and again discussed survey results, this time comparing them to the previous survey. Participants were also asked to reflect on what learning and writing strategies they utilized throughout the semester and how those impacted their confidence and success in the class. All interviews were audiorecorded and transcribed for coding.

Data Analysis

Interviews were transcribed using an AI-powered tool first, and later verified by the research assistants.

Following the transcription process, we each completed several read-throughs of the interviews in order to conduct a thematic analysis. During these preliminary read-throughs, we sought to familiarize ourselves with the content of the interviews as well as note salient patterns. Each of us made notes of what we noticed in the four interviews before meeting to compare notes.

When we met, we discussed our individual observations, noting when they overlapped. Using the collective patterns that emerged, we collaboratively wrote rich descriptions of each participants’ trajectory through the semester. Maintaining a holistic overview of the emerging in-case and cross-case themes was prioritized to allow for a comprehensive understanding.

Additionally, we analyzed the coaching strategies Hayden and Jessica implemented throughout their interviews and the effectiveness of those strategies.

Patterns ultimately emerged that allowed us to create a method that may be useful in other contexts where writing instruction takes place.

Limitations

Our study was limited by both internal and external factors. Our positionalities limited the research. For instance, none of us took pre-core writing courses in our undergraduate education. Though we had some gender diversity on our team, we are all white in a

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 28 predominantly white institution. While Konnor is bilingual, Kelsey, Hayden, and Jessica are monolingual.

These identity factors likely shaped our assumptions throughout the research process. For instance, if we were to replicate this study, we would ask participants more about their language practices outside of the context of formal education.

Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic created unexpected challenges in the design, facilitation, and analysis of the study. Study participants may have experienced stressors outside of the ordinary, which may have affected study results. In mid-March of 2020 (a period between the pre- and post-interviews), the University transitioned face-to-face classes into an online format. As such, researchers and participants alike had to adjust to remotely conducting the research.

Final interviews were conducted remotely, using Google Voice. We completed the study analysis remotely, using video conferencing technology.

Even outside the conditions of the pandemic, recruitment and retention of students in pre-core writing courses is challenging. This population is absolutely worth learning more about, which is why we chose to keep the study participants limited to pre-core writing students, despite the challenges and likelihood of low participation and completion. This study could easily be replicated with different populations with higher participation and completion rates.

Results

This section covers three elements of our results: Colton’s and Nathan’s cases and patterns we observed in the research assistants’ coaching methods. We begin by describing Colton’s and Nathan’s cases by discussing their pre- and post-survey results as well as the salient themes from their interviews.

Colton When responding to the sixteen self-efficacy questions on the pre-survey, Colton had an overall average of 6.44 and a median score of 6. The first interview was scheduled for a week after Colton responded to the pre-survey and took place in a study room in the University library. During the interview, Jessica and Colton discussed Colton’s previous experiences with writing and various strengths and challenges he had experienced and/or was currently experiencing. They also delved further into four subtopics from the survey: 1. I can articulate my strengths and weaknesses as a writer (6/10)

2. I can usually find something that interests me in my writing assignments (7/10) 3. I can map out the structure and main sections of an essay before writing the first draft (6/10) 4. I can find ways to concentrate even when there are distractions around me (6/10) In the interview, Colton mentioned that he is more aware of what his weaknesses are when it comes to writing but has difficulty identifying his strengths.

Colton admitted, “... I know everything I, I struggle with. I just don’t know what my strengths are yet.”6 When Jessica asked Colton if he has received a lot of feedback on his writing, Colton explained that he has not. One strategy Jessica offered here is for Colton to be proactive and ask for feedback from peer reviewers, writing tutors, and professors, especially to help him determine what he is doing well in his writing.

When discussing his pre-writing strategies, Colton explained that he maps everything out in his mind before committing his idea to paper but has never had much success with outlining. He further explained, “...it’s just not as good when I [outline]... if I write an outline, it doesn’t really head the way I want it, but if it’s up in, in my mind, I can just, I can just have it go off.”

In response, Jessica did not offer any particular strategy but validated Colton’s approach and encouraged him to use the strategies that work best for him.

In terms of minimizing distraction, Colton talked about several strategies he adopted to stay focused on his schoolwork, including doing homework in a quiet, secluded area of the University library. He noted, “Because I'm one of those guys who just kind of gets distracted easily. Like when someone is walking by I'm like, ‘Oh, okay, who's that?’ You know, or ‘what's he doing?’ I just get distracted in that way.” Jessica validated Colton’s strategy of minimizing distraction and reiterated the importance of intentionally doing so.

Lastly, when talking about finding interest in writing, Colton cited only one experience where he liked writing and chose to do so out of personal interest rather than obligation. While serving a religious mission, Colton explained that he kept a daily journal and liked to write because he enjoyed the experiences he was writing about. However, he explained that he has not kept up the habit since returning home and also added, “I don’t just go write for fun.” When asked if he had ever enjoyed writing in an academic context, Colton hesitated and responded by saying, “I would just say, like, okay, I haven't thought about that before. I would just say just, yeah...I don't know. I, I've never thought about that before.” To help increase Colton’s self-efficacy in this area, Jessica recommended that

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 29 Colton write about topics he is interested in whenever possible and that he continue his practice of journaling.

Colton took the post-survey approximately two months after the pre-survey, close to the final week of the semester. This time, his overall average was 7.38 (a .94 increase from the previous survey), and his median score was 7 (a 1-point increase from the previous survey). Table 1 in Appendix A illustrates the pre- and post-survey responses that were discussed in one or both of the interviews.

The second interview with Colton also took place roughly one week after he took the post-survey, but this time it was conducted via Google Voice. In this interview, Jessica began by asking Colton how he felt about the semester overall, including how he felt about the transition to online classes during the pandemic.

Because he had taken online courses previously, Colton said the transition was smooth for him and he felt the semester went well. They continued the interview by discussing strategies Colton learned and implemented throughout the semester.

During the second part of the interview, Jessica and Colton again discussed results from the survey. Colton was shocked to learn that his overall average had increased by almost a full point, and they focused on three areas where his score had increased significantly, which corresponded with topics they had discussed in the first interview: 1. I can articulate my strengths and weaknesses as a writer.

2. I can usually find something that interests me in my writing assignments 3. I can map out the structure and main sections of an essay before writing the first draft.

In terms of being able to better articulate his strengths and weaknesses, Colton mentioned that reading and studying materials that interest him has helped significantly, especially in terms of improving his spelling abilities. He also mentioned that his writing instructor showed him how to outline effectively, which helped Colton better understand both general organization and terminology that is used in writing courses. In Colton’s own words, his instructor “basically just like made me like an outline of what I can do every single time on like every single essay that I have. And so I, and so I don't get like off, off, off track.”

Having this model to work from seems to have helped Colton know where he needs to focus his attention when writing.

In the conversation about finding greater interest in writing assignments, Colton mentioned that approaching his assignments with a more positive attitude has made a difference. He also observed that as

he has gained more writing-related skills and confidence, he has become more excited to write. In the first interview, Colton had never considered writing as “enjoyable;” however, during the second interview, he mentioned turning to writing as an outlet to process events and emotions. During the second interview, when asked what role he thinks writing will play in his life in future contexts, Colton responded, “Well, um, I guess just choosing it as like an outlet … And so I've noticed when, when, you know, things aren't heading in the way I want to, just like, you know, writing down things that I'm having issues with. And then just having those things and just, um, expanding on it just really helps out a bunch.” Colton notably had an increased interest in both academic and personal writing.

Regarding pre-writing, Colton again returned to the topic of outlining. Though Colton expressed a negative view on outlining in the first interview, he mentioned having used them with success since then. Colton noted that this change in practice is primarily due to his teacher taking the time to break down the organization of an essay, as previously mentioned.

Nathan Nathan’s first interview took place about a week after he initially took the survey. Like Colton’s results, Nathan’s pre-survey results show an average score of 5.88 and a median score of 6.

During the initial interview, Nathan and Hayden discussed a wide range of topics including Nathan’s academic experiences at the University, his interest in pursuing a career in architecture, and his relationship with writing. When asked about his academic journey so far, Nathan said, “I took an English class but it was a little bit too advanced for me, so I had to lower, so I lowered down.” He names his dyslexia as one of his biggest challenges when it comes to writing, along with navigating grammar expectations, which causes him to lean heavily on tools like Grammarly when writing. He explained, “I'm not that great with grammar or punctuation so I will write out a paper but then I need something to help me like Grammarly. Or something to help me with proper, to proper it up. Cause I just struggle with punctuation, grammar, spelling. I just struggle with all that.”

When it came to discussing aspects of writing he felt confident in, Nathan expressed that he enjoys writing book reports more than creative writing or writing about topics he does not care for. He indicated confidence in his ability to outline and structure papers but has difficulty with other aspects of the writing process such as getting motivated and writing with

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 30 correct grammar. His primary motivation for writing is based on whether the assignment in question is being graded, though this only motivates him enough to complete the assignment “as best as [he] can.”

Many of these insights were brought to the surface when Nathan and Hayden discussed three specific statements from the initial survey and Nathan’s selfassigned score for them. They were: 1. I can invest a great deal of effort and time in writing a paper when I know the paper will earn a grade (5/10) 2. I can map out the structure and main sections of an essay before writing the first draft (7/10, one of his highest scores overall) 3. I can attribute my success on writing projects to my writing abilities more than to luck or external forces (4/10, one of his lowest scores overall) Throughout their discussion, Hayden made an effort to relate to Nathan’s struggles and praise his accomplishments, also making time to suggest specific strategies for Nathan to implement in the future. For example, as they discussed Nathan’s difficulty motivating himself to put more effort into work he wasn’t passionate about, Hayden suggested creating an external reward system. Specifically, he suggested that Nathan create some milestones he’d like to achieve with a given project and then set rewards for himself along the way when he meets those milestones. Similarly, as they discussed Nathan’s insecurities about relying on Grammarly, Hayden reminded Nathan that learning English and writing skills is an ongoing process that takes a lot of time and energy. Additionally, Hayden pointed him to other on-campus resources that might be more instructional than Grammarly.

When Nathan took the survey again on April 23, 2020, his overall scores increased to an average of 7.25 and a median score of 7 (an increase of 1.37 in the overall average, and 1 in the median score), again like Colton. A second interview took place on the same day via Google Voice.

During this second meeting, Nathan and Hayden discussed Nathan’s academic performance during the semester, his development of various writing skills, and how he handled the abrupt transition to online learning in the final weeks of the semester. Nathan explained that the transition to online learning was not too difficult for him because so many of the writing-related tasks he worked on were already being done on computers. He did express some trouble with a math class that was moved online, though he took the initiative to reach out to his professor as well as some

friends to help him when he was struggling with certain assignments.

He also mentioned having some difficulty with a writing assignment in his English class. “The aspect that was the most challenging I'd have to say was the research...I spent like five hours researching stuff” Nathan explained. He then detailed his process of reaching out to a family member who had knowledge on his research topic to get some help. When asked about what he had learned this semester that he could transfer to later semesters, Nathan identified having gained the ability to motivate himself to work on assignments that did not interest him initially and put genuine effort into those projects, stating, “even though if I don't like it, but it's still being graded, I want to put my best work into it...even if I did hate the subject, I'll put in as much time as I need so I can make this as good of a paper as I possibly can.”

Hayden and Nathan discussed three specific survey responses (see Table 2 in Appendix A), two of which were follow ups from the first interview.

Hayden and Nathan discussed the reasons for these increases and, overall, Nathan attributes the helpful feedback from his professor throughout the semester, his newfound ability to put his best effort into projects that will be graded, and his decreased usage of tools like Grammarly as the main reasons for these increases. He noted, ...beforehand I would use Grammarly a lot for grammar errors and punctuation, but this time I went and did as much as I could fix, all that I could find and everything, before I used any external sources for my paper...I realized that I don't really need external supports that much and I can actually put down something good and I put down stuff that's good.

Lastly, Nathan also suggested that his earlysemester interview helped him pinpoint changes to make in his approach to writing and schooling. He indicated having taken Hayden’s advice and implemented a reward system to motivate himself to complete projects he wasn’t initially inspired by.

Additionally, he took advantage of on-campus resources when he encountered difficulties in his studies, as well as experts in his own family and circle of friends.

Between Nathan and Colton, we noticed three commonalities. While both students were required to transition to a fully remote, online learning setting (as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic), each had previous online education experiences. Having previous experiences made the transition less stressful, and both students adjusted well to it. Another commonality was

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 31 that both students increased their utilization of in-class and out-of-class resources. Finally, both students increased their overall enjoyment of writing, which may have contributed to the upward trend observed in their self-efficacy scores. These commonalities will be analyzed in more detail throughout the discussion section.

Research Assistants’ Coaching Methods Coaching strategies were employed in both the first and second interviews, however, the research assistants coached more heavily in the first interviews. The research assistants used overlapping strategies. For instance, both Hayden and Jessica validated students’ current strategies with quick affirmations such as, “awesome” and “cool.” Additionally, they both related to student-participants by sharing that they also employ similar strategies, though Hayden did this more often than Jessica. Jessica, on the other hand, asked more questions than Hayden to investigate the details of the student-participant’s writing strategies. Of course, Hayden also asked questions; Jessica relied more heavily on them. Only after identifying the details of the students’ current practices, would Jessica share additional strategies. By asking so many questions, though, Jessica was able to individualize strategies to the student’s particular circumstances. Hayden also shared strategies with his student-participant. Hayden’s style of coaching included more mindset coaching woven into the writing strategies (ex. Grammarly conversation).

Both Hayden and Jessica’s coaching reveal a pattern that other tutors can follow to infuse “microcoaching” into their tutorials: 1. Ask questions to gain a better understanding of students’ current practices and mindsets 2. Validate what the student is currently doing 3. Relate, if possible 4. Share strategies To illustrate this method, consider the following examples from Nathan and Colton’s first interviews.

Jessica: Okay. When you're given a writing assignment, what steps do you take to complete it?

So what does that process look like for you?

Colton: Well I was just like have with, have with the, um, the introduction and then, and then all the things I want to speak about. And then the ending part and then ending. Basically we're talking this cause it's not like that's like having like an introduction, having all the things I want to speak about and then, and then, and then having an ending part and ending my essay.

Jessica: Okay. What's kind of your brainstorming process?

Colton: Brainstorming process...

Jessica: How do you come up with what you want to write about?

Jessica could have chosen to stop asking clarification questions after Colton answered the first question about his process. However, by continuing to pursue this line of questioning, Jessica ended up learning about Colton’s choice not to outline his papers. At that point, Jessica chose to move on to validation: Jessica: How do you come up with what you want to write about?

Colton: I don't know...I do it all my head and so it was kind of just as I write, it just, it just comes out...Cause it's weird cause like when I, when I write out an outline, it's not as good. But when I have it in my mind and as I write, as, as, as, as it's in my head, it just does better. And just like flows a lot easier. I don't know. I don't know if that makes any sense.

Jessica: Yeah it does. Yeah. But whatever works for you.

By validating Colton’s preference for writing without an outline, Jessica may have increased Colton’s selfefficacy in his ability to make sound decisions about his writing process. By the second interview, Colton had learned an outlining strategy from his professor and was practicing it with success. We cannot say for sure, but Jessica’s validation in this moment may have contributed to Colton’s openness to learning this outlining strategy.

In the following exchange from their first interview, Hayden practices “relate” as well as “share strategies” with Nathan: Nathan: Yeah, so like I said already, so when it's something that's being graded, I will do my best and make it sound as good as it can. But if it's just something that I didn't care for, I will just make it as moderately best as I can. So just to get a good grade, I don't, I didn't care for it.

Hayden: Okay, cool. I get that. Like, we kind of talked a little bit earlier about like, I find myself having a hard time writing stuff that I'm not interested in and stuff too...Like one thing that's worked for me with that is like trying to find some sort of motivation outside of the actual writing. So sometimes I'll set up a sort of like reward system for myself where I'll have, you know, like if I write this...not just to get it done, but if I can really like focus and work on this, if, you know, if I get a certain amount done, then you know, I'll let myself go get like a, a Snickers or something like that....Or

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 32 I'll let myself like watch a movie tonight instead of doing, you know, next week's homework or something, you know, like, so I think there's a way to kind of create motivation for us sometimes when it's not just naturally there.

As we know from their second interview, this is a strategy Nathan implemented. Having Hayden relate to and normalize the challenge Nathan faced and then share a strategy that was successful for him seems to have helped encourage Nathan to try the strategy, which he ended up finding success with.

Micro-coaching in the interviews took no more than 2 minutes, and often only 10-30 seconds. Though more research is needed, the data suggests that these interactions impacted students in a positive way, helping them build generative dispositions towards writing and learning, and setting them up for successful transfer.

Discussion The aim of this research was to better understand if increasing a student’s metacognitive awareness of their dispositions would significantly impact those dispositions. More specifically, we were interested in the impact of peer-coaching on students’ self-regulation and self-efficacy in writing. Overall, the students we observed experienced an increase in self-efficacy in writing, discovered new ways to motivate themselves, and expanded their self-regulation strategies by utilizing resources and trying new writing processes. They also indicated experiencing more joy in their writing, taking more ownership of their education, and making a relatively easy transition to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, when Jessica pointed out to Colton that he might benefit from journaling like he did on his religious mission, she was helping him transfer between contexts. This ended up helping Colton reconnect to a writing practice he enjoyed and incorporate it into his current writing context.

Our findings suggest that micro-coaching could potentially be effective in writing centers and other areas of academia as a means of increasing students’ metacognitive awareness of their self-regulation and self-efficacy in writing. One major advantage of our micro-coaching method is that it serves as a quick and effective intervention, making it a valuable tool for writing center tutors to make use of in tutorials. Our study indicates that micro-coaching was effective for students who only met with our coaches once during the duration of the semester, suggesting that this strategy would be useful in a single tutorial. This

coaching strategy, already deeply informed by writing center pedagogy, is simple for tutors to learn and apply.

Additionally, the skills necessary to execute this microcoaching approach could be easily taught in a single staff education meeting.

As discussed above, the methods the research assistants utilized in micro-coaching are informed by the writing center pedagogy they had already learned.

Specifically, the research assistants utilized some aspects of motivational scaffolding as defined by Mackiewicz and Thompson’s Talking about Writing. The coaches intuitively praised the students they worked with, used humor to connect with them, and reassured students of their ownership of their own work. These strategies are among those discussed by Mackiewicz and Thompson, and we found them to be similarly effective as a means of scaffolding and building rapport with students. While motivational scaffolding is an effective strategy, Mackiewicz and Thompson only discuss its efficacy in terms of the standard tutorial taking place in the writing center, while we suggest that the methodology has a much larger scope. Writing support programs utilizing a variety of models (i.e., the traditional writing center, the studio-based learning model—see Kjesrud, embedded tutoring models, etc.) could all apply our process of making students more aware of their dispositions towards writing paired with micro-coaching strategies.

We also anticipate that this would be an effective method for professors, mentor programs, academic coaches, and other types of support roles as they work one-on-one with students. Furthermore, this coaching method would be effective for students at various levels of education. Our study focused on students in a precore composition course, but we believe tutors working with students further along in an undergraduate or graduate program would also benefit from this method.

Though our findings are promising, more research into the effects of the coaching method, especially within different populations, is needed.

Conclusion

Given the small sample size of our study, we cannot definitively claim that an awareness of dispositions universally impacts those dispositions in students who receive micro-coaching. Our results indicated as much, but there is a need for further research in this area. In conducting further research, it would be beneficial to explore the efficacy of micro-coaching within different populations in and out of writing centers. We believe the method would be useful in most pedagogical situations where one-on-one mentoring is the norm.

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 33 Duplicating the same research environment on a larger scale with a larger sample size would also produce useful findings. If verified by further research, these findings would provide writing centers, and other writing support programs, with a valuable and relatively simple pedagogical tool to utilize while working with students and affect positive changes in their dispositions. For those interested in pursuing research along these lines, one thing to factor in is additional training for tutors/coaches on transfer and related writing concepts. Similar to Heather Hill’s "Tutoring for Transfer: The Benefits of Teaching Writing Center Tutors about Transfer Theory," we found that the research assistants had some gaps in knowledge, despite having been exposed to transfer, dispositions, and related concepts in tutor education settings. We believe giving more coaching to the coaches involved, specifically more direct information about which tasks and student responses to focus on in the session, would also lead to even more promising results. Despite the challenges, expanding on this research could help scholars better understand how to incorporate microcoaching into key educational experiences to help students develop more generative dispositions towards writing.

Notes 1. Of course, writing support programs can also impact other factors, such as helping students activate prior knowledge, build metacognition about writing concepts, etc. See Bromley, Northway, and Schonberg; Reiff and Bawarshi, and Wardle for more.

2. Others have identified ownership (Baird and Dilger), Dweck’s concept of fixed and growth mindsets (Hixson-Bowles) and emotions (Driscoll and Powell) as other dispositions relevant to writing.

3. Driscoll and Wells identified dispositions as either generative or disruptive. Generative dispositions help facilitate learning while disruptive dispositions interrupt learning.

4. To protect participants’ identities, we will simply refer to the research site as the “University.”

5. We asked about relationship status because almost half of the students at the University are married or in a partnership, significantly contributing to their responsibilities outside of school.

6. Colton had a stutter that we have chosen to retain in his direct quotes.

Acknowledgments

We thank Leigh Ann Copas for supporting us throughout the research process. We are also grateful to the University College Student Engagement, Retention, and Success Grant that made the project this research is based off of possible.

Works Cited Baird, Neil, and Bradley Dilger. “How Students Perceive Transitions: Dispositions and Transfer in Internships.”

College Composition and Communication, vol. 68, no. 4, 2017, pp. 684-712. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44783589 Bandura, Albert. “Guide for Constructing Self-Efficacy Scales.” Self-Efficacy Beliefs of Adolescents, edited by Frank Pajares & Tim Urdan, Information Age Publishing, 2006, pp. 307-337.

Bromley, Pam, et al. “Transfer and Dispositions in Writing Centers: A Cross-Institutional, Mixed-Methods Study.” Across the Disciplines, vol. 13, no. 1, 2016, pp. 115. www.wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/articles/bromleyetal 2016.pdf Devet, Bonnie. “The Writing Center and Transfer of Learning: A Primer for Directors.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, 2015, pp. 119-151. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43673621 Devet, Bonnie, and Dana Lynn Driscoll, editors. Transfer of Learning in the Writing Center: A WLN Digital Edited Collection. 2020, www.wlnjournal.org/digitaleditedcollection2/.

Driscoll, Dana L., et al. "Down the Rabbit Hole: Challenges and Methodological Recommendations in Researching Writing-Related Student Dispositions."

Composition Forum, vol. 35, 2017. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1137810.pdf Driscoll, Dana L., and Roger Powell. “States, Traits, and Dispositions: The Impact of Emotion on Writing Development and Writing Transfer Across College Courses and Beyond.” Composition Forum, vol. 34, no.

1, 2016. www.files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1113424.pdf.

Driscoll, Dana. L., and Jenn Wells. “Beyond Knowledge and Skills: Writing transfer and the Role of Student Dispositions.” Composition Forum, vol. 26, no. 15, 2012. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ985815.pdf Hill, Heather N. "Tutoring for transfer: The benefits of teaching writing center tutors about transfer theory."

The Writing Center Journal, vol. 35, no. 3, 2016, pp. 77102. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43965691 ---. "Transfer theory: A guide to transfer-focused writing center research." Theories and Methods of Writing Center

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Hixson-Bowles, Kelsey. Laying the Groundwork for Transfer: A Case Study Exploring the Impact of Strengths-Based Pedagogy on Students’ Writing-Related Dispositions. 2019.

Indiana University of Pennsylvania, PhD dissertation.

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Mackiewicz, Jo and Isabelle K. Thompson. Talk about Writing: the Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Writing Center Tutors. Routledge, 2018.

Pajares, Frank. “Motivational Role of Self-Efficacy Beliefs in Self-Regulated Learning.” Motivation and SelfRegulated Learning: Theory, Research, and Applications, edited by Dale H. Schunk and Barry J. Zimmerman, Routledge, 2012, 111-139.

Reiff, Mary J., and Anis Bawarshi. “Tracing discursive resources: How students use prior genre knowledge to negotiate new writing contexts in first-year composition.” Written Communication, vol. 28, no. 3, 2011, pp. 312-337. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088311410183.

Schmidt, Katherine M., and Joel E. Alexander. “The Empirical Development of an Instrument to Measure Writerly Self-Efficacy in Writing Centers.” The Journal of Writing Assessment vol. 5, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-10.

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Wardle, Elizabeth. (2012). “Creative repurposing for expansive-learning: Considering ‘problem-exploring’ and ‘answer-getting’ dispositions in individuals and field”. Composition Forum, vol. 26, 2012. www.compositionforum.com/issue/26/creativerepurposing.php.

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 35 Appendix A: Tables Table 1: A Selection of Colton’s Pre- and Post-Survey Results

Table 2: A Selection of Nathan’s Pre- and Post-Survey Results

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 36 Appendix B: Pre- and Post-Survey Self-Efficacy in Writing Survey Confidence Questions As part of the study, we measure students' confidence in various aspects of writing and being a student. Please answer the following questions.

Using a 0-10 scale, please indicate your confidence in your ability to do the following: Cannot do at all (0) Moderately certain can do (5) Highly certain can do (10) 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

I can invest a great deal of effort and time in writing a paper when I know the paper will earn a grade.

I can articulate my strengths and challenges as a writer.

When I read a rough draft, I can identify gaps when they are present in the paper.

I can write a paper without feeling physical discomfort (e.g., headaches, stomach-aches, back-aches, insomnia, muscle tension, nausea, and/or crying).

When I have a pressing deadline for a paper, I can manage my time efficiently.

I can attribute my success on writing projects to my writing abilities more than to luck or external forces.

When a student who is similar to me receives praise and/or a good grade on a paper, I know I can write a paper worthy of praise and/or a good grade.

Once I have completed a draft, I can eliminate both small and large sections that are no longer necessary.

I can write a paper without experiencing overwhelming feelings of fear, distress, or anxiety.

I can map out the structure and main sections of an essay before writing the first draft.

I can find ways to concentrate when I am writing, even when there are many distractions around me.

I can invest a great deal of effort and time in writing a paper when I know the paper will not be graded.

I can identify when I need help on my writing.

I can evaluate the usefulness of others' feedback on my drafts when revising.

I can usually find something that interests me in my writing assignments.

I can improve my writing abilities.

Demographic Questions 1. What is your student ID? [Note: We ask for this only to link your first survey to the last. All identifying information will be removed in data analysis.]

2. Please select your age range. a. 18-22 b. 23-27 c. 28-32 d. 33-37 e. 38-42 f. 43-47 g. 48-52 h. 53-57 i. 58-62 j. 63-67 k. 68+ 3. What is your gender?

4. What is your race/ethnicity?

5. How many hours per week do you spend earning income? a. 0 b. 1-10 c. 11-20 d. 21-30 e. 31-40 f. 40+ Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18, No 3 (2021) www.praxisuwc.com

Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 37 6. Please check all that apply: a. I am single b. I am in a romantic relationship c. I am married d. I am divorced e. I am a widow/widower f. I have 1-3 children or dependents g. I have 4 or more children or dependents 7. What's the highest level of education your mother (or primary guardian) earned? a. Some high school-level coursework b. High school diploma c. Career or Technical certification d. Some undergraduate-level coursework e. Associate's degree f. Bachelor's degree g. Some graduate-level coursework h. Master's degree i. Doctorate degree j. None of the above 8. What's the highest level of education your father (or secondary guardian) earned? a. Some high school-level coursework b. High school diploma c. Career or Technical certification d. Some undergraduate-level coursework e. Associate's degree f. Bachelor's degree g. Some graduate-level coursework h. Master's degree i. Doctorate degree

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 38 Appendix C: Interview Scripts Sample Interview Scripts Please note: Interview questions may vary depending on the students’ survey results and previous interviews. The following is an outline of the expected interview scripts for January and April.

January Student Interview Script Script: Thank you for agreeing to participate in this study! In today’s meeting, we will discuss the results from your survey, talk about your experiences with writing education as well as answer any questions you have. At the end, we will schedule your final meeting, where you will get the $25 Amazon gift card.

Before I begin, do you have any questions for me?

As a reminder, please refrain from using the names of faculty and staff during this interview.

1. Tell me a little bit about your academic journey so far. a. What made you choose the University? b. How have you liked it here so far?

2. Tell me about your experiences with writing for school. a. Potential follow ups: i. Has it been challenging? If so, how? ii. What has come easy for you? iii. What kinds of assignments did you have to write? iv. What were the teachers like? v. Did you like the way they taught? Why/why not?

3. When you’re writing for school, when do you feel most confident?

4. When you’re writing for school, when do you feel least confident?

5. When you’re given a writing assignment, what steps do you take to complete it?

6. What motivates you to write?

7. If you could change one thing about your relationship with writing, what would it be?

Survey script: Now we are going to talk about the results of your survey. It’s important to keep in mind that this is just a snap shot of where you were the day you took the survey—not a fixed evaluation of you as a writer. In other words, you can change.

The survey asked you to rate your confidence in 16 different writing-related tasks on a scale of 0-10 (10 being most confident). Your average score was X. Does that feel accurate? [[If score was on the lower end, the research assistant will explain that many people at all levels of education have lower confidence in their writing abilities. And there are concrete things people can do to feel more confident in their writing, which will help them have less anxiety around writing assignments. Example strategies: free writing, journaling, etc.]] [[If score was on the higher end, the research assistant will explain that high confidence in writing is a useful thing—as long as the writer can back up that confidence with skill. High confidence usually helps people be more successful at the task they feel confident in. At the same time, it’s important to be ready for a challenge that might shake their confidence. The research assistant should ask how they have handled moments of feeling a lack of confidence in the past. Example strategies: Go see a tutor, write yourself reminders such as: challenges help us grow, failing is part of getting better.]] [[At this point, the research assistant can look more closely at the specific answers to each question and offer tailored strategies for the student to try out this semester. Example: If the student struggles with motivation, the research assistant might suggest that they choose a topic they care about for their papers, even if it seems like it’s not “scholarly” enough.]]

8. Do you have any questions about the survey results, strategies, or anything else we talked about today?

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 39 Closing script: Thank you for your time today. Do you mind if we go ahead and schedule your final interview?

Schedule interview for second or third week of April. Remind student to watch for your email at the beginning of April that prompts them to take the survey again.

April Student Interview Script Script: Welcome! Today's interview will be similar to our last interview. We will talk about how your semester has gone, your attitudes towards writing, and the results from your most recent survey. As a reminder, please refrain from using the names of faculty and staff during this interview.

1. What was the transition to online classes like for you? a. What aspect of it was challenging? b. How did you navigate this challenge?

2. Tell me about how your classes are going. a. What was the most enjoyable project you worked on? b. What was the most challenging project/assignment you worked on? i. What aspect of it was challenging? ii. How did you navigate this challenge?

3. Last time we talked about some strategies around writing. Did you have a chance to try those out this semester? If so, how did it go? a. If need be, remind them of some of the strategies you talked about last time.

4. What have you learned this semester that you hope to apply to future semesters or life, more broadly?

5. Is there anything else about how your writing class has gone that you want to talk about?

6. In the last interview, we talked about past writing contexts. Now, I want to ask about future writing contexts.

What role do you see writing playing in your life? a. How do you expect to use writing in your career? b. How do you expect to use writing in your personal life?

7. Are you planning to enroll in classes next semester? If so, which classes? a. If yes, what are your hopes and goals for next semester? b. If no, what are your hopes and goals for the next few months?

Survey script: Now we are going to talk about the results of your survey. It’s important to keep in mind that this is just a snap shot of where you were the day you took the survey—not a fixed evaluation of you as a writer. In other words, you can change.

The survey asked you to rate your confidence in 16 different writing-related tasks on a scale of 0-10 (10 being most confident). Your average score was X. Does that feel accurate? [[If score decreased, the research assistant will explain that this may reflect the challenges they faced this semester.

Remind them that confidence is only as good as the skills that back it up. It may be that they better understand the realities of different kinds of writing assignments now and have a more realistic view of their abilities. This is a good thing!]] [[If score increased, the research assistant will explain that high confidence in writing is a useful thing—as long as the writer can back up that confidence with skill. High confidence usually helps people be more successful at the task they feel confident in. At the same time, it’s important to be ready for a challenge that might shake their confidence. The research assistant should ask how they have handled moments of feeling a lack of confidence in the past. Example strategies: Go see a tutor, write yourself reminders such as: challenges help us grow, failing is part of getting better.]] [[At this point, the research assistant can look more closely at the specific answers to each question and ask tailored questions about the results. Example: It looks like you feel more confident in your ability to manage your time when given a writing assignment. Tell me about how you managed your time with your writing assignments this semester.]]

9. What do you think about these results in comparison with your first set of results?

10. Do you have any questions about the survey results, strategies, or anything else we talked about today?

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Developing Generative Dispositions Towards Writing Through Micro-Coaching: Results from a Dispositions Awareness Study • 40 Closing script: Thank you for your time today and this semester. Good luck on your finals and in your future plans!

Confirm student’s email for the $25 Amazon gift card.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18 No 3 (2021)

WRITING CENTER AMBASSADORS: ENGAGING CAMPUS ORGANIZATIONS THROUGH EMBEDDED CONSULTANTS Joseph Cheatle Iowa State University jcheatle@iastate.edu Abstract

This work examines a program developed by the Michigan State University Writing Center to embed consultants within existing programs and organizations at the institution. Specifically, a writing center consultant was embedded in the College Assistance Migrant Program, an educational program for individuals with migrant or seasonal farm work backgrounds. Drawing on the theoretical framework of embedded tutoring, this program successfully fostered improved relationships and understanding between the writing center and faculty, staff, and students in the student organization.

Both CAMP administrators and students found benefits from the program. Administrators became more thoughtful as they interacted with the center, an important student service, as well as giving them a better idea of the services that the center provides. Students, meanwhile, were more comfortable using the center’s services because those services were identified with the Ambassador, someone that they were able to get to know well because of their frequent presence in the CAMP offices. And the writing center benefits as well – the Ambassador Program is a way to reach out with and connect with groups of students who may be “non-visitors” in order to turn them into “visitors.” Included as part of this work is the mixed-methods assessment to determine the success of the program as well as recommendations for other writing centers who may want to utilize this type of programming.

Writing centers often struggle with the question of how to reach new audiences; particularly, writing centers can have difficulties reaching diverse and underrepresented groups of students – exactly those that most need, and could benefit from, the center’s services. Many of these students are offered additional support (like academic assistance, advising, mentoring, etc.) but can still feel isolated on campus. Additionally, some student services may not know what other services are offered on campus or know how to best help students navigate a large ecosystem – even if that ecosystem is united in helping students succeed at the institution. As one of these services, The Writing Center at Michigan State University has experienced difficulties reaching diverse and underrepresented students on campus despite using numerous marketing strategies, classroom visits, and increased outreach by administrators. Realizing that the outreach we were doing (most often administrative meetings and traditional advertising) was not necessarily working because it was not tailored to the specific group of students, we developed and implemented a new approach.

Cristian Lambaren Sanchez Michigan State University lambaren@msu.edu

During the Fall 2017 semester, we piloted a program that embedded a Writing Center consultant within a campus organization that serves, advocates for, and works with students. We define a campus organization broadly to include programs (e.g., programs for low-income students, first-generation students, commuter students, etc.) as well as centers (e.g., centers for LGBTQ students, women students, multicultural students, etc.). The embedded consultant was called an “Ambassador” because they, as Teagan Decker says, act as an emissary from the writing center to the organization (Decker). We chose to situate an Ambassador consultant in an organization that works with students because we wanted to go to where students are at (rather than waiting for students to come to the writing center). Additionally, these other spaces are often more familiar and comfortable for many students. By embedding a consultant within an organization on campus, we hoped to do the following: ● Strengthen the relationship between the campus organization’s students, administrators, and staff with The Writing Center ● Demystify the center for the organization’s students ● Increase the use of the writing center’s resources by the organization’s students A key aspect of this program is negotiation between the Ambassador and the campus organization.

Together, they can establish the ground rules for the Ambassador, including what activities the Ambassador can participate in, what kind of role they can take in the organization, and a time commitment. By embedding a consultant within an organization on campus, the consultant can potentially attend meetings or events, and just generally be in the space. And this agreement can be written and agreed to by all parties in order to ensure communication and understanding.

In choosing an organization for this pilot program, we wanted to respond to Lori Salem’s call to investigate non-visitors to the writing center and provide “accounting of the needs and experiences of students who do not come to the writing center, who are, after all, the majority of students at most colleges and universities” (161). This program also responds to the commitment of The Writing Center to provide services

Writing Center Ambassadors: Engaging Campus Organizations Through Embedded Consultants • 42 for all students. We chose the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) at Michigan State University as the first campus organization for the Ambassador Program because few students who participated in this program used writing center services, previous outreach attempts to create a stronger partnership had been made without much success, and CAMP features underrepresented students. More broadly, part of Migrant Student Services, CAMP “is an educational program that offers individuals with migrant or seasonal farm work backgrounds, a unique opportunity to begin an undergraduate program at MSU. This program provides the best conditions to help CAMP Scholars succeed in University life” (“Migrant Student Services”).

In order to be eligible for CAMP, a student or an immediate family member must have spent a minimum of 75 days during the past 24 months as a migrant or seasonal farmworker as well as have participated (or be eligible to participate) under the Migrant Education Programs or Employment and Training Administration, Department of Labor-Migrant and Seasonal Farmworks Programs. CAMP scholars are enrolled in a first-year course together, participate in the International Engagement in Mexico (a study abroad program), receive assistance navigating the institution, and peer mentoring.

We argue that embedding peer consultants, as Ambassadors, in campus organizations can foster improved relationships and understanding between writing centers and faculty, staff, and students in the organization. Our work here includes a brief overview of embedded tutoring, which provides the theoretical and practical foundation for our project. After the theoretical and practical foundation, we provide our plan of action for the campus organization negotiated between the Ambassador and the organization’s administrators. At the time of the pilot, Cristian, the Ambassador, was a second-year Master’s student in Student Affairs and Administration completing a required practicum as part of his studies. Because this was a pilot program, we wanted to assess the success of the program; therefore, we are including results from our mixed-methods assessment conducted after the end of the program. Lastly, we provide recommendations for other writing centers considering implementing an Ambassador Program.

Embedded Course Tutoring and the Ambassador Program

The Ambassador Program is built upon the foundation of embedded tutoring programs and scholarship. While embedded tutoring in organizations

and groups within an institution is not well documented, the practice of embedded tutoring in the classroom has a long history and has gained increased attention from writing center scholars and in the writing center community, as demonstrated by the 2005 publication of Candace Spigelman and Laurie Grobman’s On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring and the 2014 special issue of Praxis titled “CourseEmbedded Writing Support Programs in Writing Centers”, edited by Russell Carpenter, Scott Whiddon, and Kevin Dvorak. Both point out that courseembedded tutoring is a distinct form of writing support from that done by a teacher (or, for that matter, the support available within a center during one-on-one consultations). In the introduction to their Praxis issue, Carpenter, Whiddon, and Dvorak note that classrooms and writing centers are viewed as distinct spaces, “Classrooms are often viewed as the spaces where writing instruction takes place, while writing centers are spaces where writers receive assistance, not instruction” (3). They point out that course-embedded tutoring can bridge that gap between classroom and writing center spaces.

There are also many advantages to a courseembedded tutoring program which might lead writing centers to develop them. First, and foremost, they can create important and meaningful partnerships with faculty members (Carpenter, Whiddon, and Dvorak); furthermore, these partnerships can be healthy and supportive for both groups (Decker). Creating stronger relationships between writing centers and faculty members can positively shape the perception of faculty members towards writing centers; and faculty perception is instrumental in shaping students’ views of the center (Cheatle and Bullerjahn). Programmatically, this structure also bridges the gap between the classroom and the writing center while decreasing any sense of isolation for the center. And, as Spigelman and Grobman point out, “these programs can decrease any potential isolation of the center and brings the center into the mainstream institutional culture” (Spigelman and Grobman 11); rather than exist outside of the classroom and on institutional margins, embedded tutoring programs move writing centers into the heart of the institution (Severino and Knight 30).

Classroom-based tutoring is also beneficial to students because it “brings together diverse cultures and perspectives, it creates new opportunities for productive dialogue and relationships among sponsoring units within the university” (Spigelman and Groman 7). While students may be familiar with the services and organizations that they use and are a part of, they might not know much about other services on campus; in

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Writing Center Ambassadors: Engaging Campus Organizations Through Embedded Consultants • 43 effect, they might not know what they don’t know. It also gives people “a taste of what the Writing Center offers, which may encourage them to make use of the center” (Severino and Knight 27). Embedded tutoring can also create direct relationships between peer consultants and students, rather than a relationship mediated by instructors or administrators.

There are also advantages to faculty members who participate in these programs. Faculty members can add a new perspective to their class in the form of a peer tutor (Carpenter, Whiddon, and Dvorak). Peer tutors can also develop connections with the students in the class that may be more informal than that of the instructor’s. Additionally, knowing the course and the assignments allows the tutor to provide better feedback to students. It also brings writing support to where students are located and where they are composing, providing an immediacy for students needing writing assistance (Spigelman and Grobman 7). According to Teagan Decker, “until they [faculty members] see for themselves what goes on in the writing center, instructors will never really understand what we are doing” (Decker 18). By showing faculty members what writing centers do, as opposed to just telling them, embedded tutoring can demystify the center and create additional buy-in from faculty. While much is known about embedded tutoring in courses, what is less known are the outcomes of embedded tutoring in organizations and groups within an institution.

Ambassador Program The Ambassador Program that we piloted is very similar, in terms of theory and desired outcomes, to course embedded tutoring. It is similar to embedded tutoring in that it seeks to expand the way the writing center engages with different stakeholders, it seeks to strengthen relationships between clients and peer consultants, and it seeks to disrupt the traditional classroom by moving learning outside of the classroom.

However, this program is also different from courseembedded tutoring in that it does not feature classrooms or faculty, but administrators and organizations. And, campus organizations (with our broad definition), are often focused on more than just the classroom but on the personal, professional, and academic success of students.

There are potential barriers to the use of this model, particularly in the levels of buy-in, support, and high levels of communication that it requires. Additionally, administrators must want the Ambassador to be present within their organization; the entire idea does not work without the willing consent of administrators, leaders,

and program directors. There also needs to be support for the Ambassador from both the organization and the writing center. The center needs to provide the Ambassador time for them to effectively engage with the organization, and the organization needs to welcome the Ambassador, introduce them to the students, and facilitate positive interactions. Lastly, effective communication takes a lot of time, effort, and patience; not all consultants are going to be willing to put in this effort, and not all organizations are willing to do so either.

Pre-assessment and Plan of Action The pre-assessment was used to determine whether the Ambassador Program would be useful for an organization, and then how the Ambassador Program might be useful. The pre-assessment included three interviews with CAMP administrators that lasted between thirty minutes to one hour and three focus groups with 14 CAMP students. The focus groups asked CAMP students questions about their use of the writing center, perceptions of the writing center, and their level of interest in different services the writing center offers.

Meanwhile, the interviews with CAMP administrators asked how they would describe the writing center to their students, the feedback they hear from students about the writing center, areas of collaboration, and the best ways to connect with their organization.

Both CAMP administrators and students highlighted the fact that students were not utilizing writing center services. They both noted students were not familiar with the services or, if they were familiar with the services, had either not heard positive experiences from other students or did not know the best way of taking advantage of writing center services.

Both also indicated how appreciative they would be to have someone work closely with the program and CAMP students. The results of the pre-assessment served as a guide to inform the plan of action, the programmatic learning outcomes for students, and the activities that the Ambassador would complete. Most importantly, the pre-assessment allowed the CAMP program to convey their needs, deepened the Ambassador’s understanding of the CAMP program itself, and helped to develop the personal relationship between the Ambassador and the CAMP Program.

The plan of action, based on the pre-assessment, was developed in consultation and negotiation between Cristian (the Ambassador) and CAMP administrators.

Cristian was able to determine what CAMP needed and how the Ambassador could best address those needs. In particular, CAMP wanted to make it a norm for students

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Writing Center Ambassadors: Engaging Campus Organizations Through Embedded Consultants • 44 to ask either the Ambassador for writing and communication help, or to utilize The Writing Center’s services. CAMP staff and administrators discussed how students would constantly approach them for help in their writing assignments. They also mentioned how students would share stories about having negative experiences when trying to utilize different services because they either did not know anyone staffing the service or were not sure how to take advantage of such services. As such, CAMP administrators hoped that the Ambassador would become a familiar face who CAMP students could approach, schedule consultations with, and help improve their confidence in their ability to write analytically.

The collaboratively created plan of action consisted of three main components: 1. Being present at programs and events. Cristian committed to attending a number of events put on by CAMP, including MSU CAMP Roundtables, weekly staff meetings, monthly group meetings, and visiting the first-year class.

2. Weekly office hours. Cristian wanted to have weekly office hours held in the main area of the CAMP offices in order to build a rapport with students, provide them with a chance to ask questions of the Ambassador or Writing Center, and have them become more comfortable with both in a more informal setting.

3. Workshops. Cristian was able to utilize existing workshops, as well as create new workshops, for CAMP. These introduced The Writing Center, and its services, to the organization while providing information based on specific student needs. CAMP mentors collaborated in these workshops and co-presented with Cristian.

Cristian did have other activities that he wanted to accomplish, like writing groups or even an advisory board, but realized that they may not be the most effective use of time or that there was not necessarily a need expressed for them by the students in the organization. Cristian’s flexibility and ability to adapt to the needs of CAMP positioned him to succeed as an Ambassador while also creating important connections between CAMP and The Writing Center.

Assessment Methods

Because this was a pilot program, it was important to assess the program and the results. All forms of preand post-assessment were IRB approved by the institution. We included both qualitative and

quantitative assessment because we wanted to provide a more complete understanding of the Ambassador Program than what one form of assessment could provide. There were four forms of assessment that, when combined, provide a clear picture of the success of the Ambassador Program: 1. Ambassador Narrative by Cristian Lambaren Sanchez – Cristian’s narrative, as the first Ambassador, describes his experiences with the Ambassador Program. He discusses why he helped to create this program, the benefits to those involved, and the hurdles that he faced in his role.

2. Interview with CAMP Administrator – The interview was conducted with Elias Lopez, the Associate Director of the CAMP Scholars Initiative program at Michigan State University.

He was interviewed for twenty minutes on his experiences with the Ambassador Program, his experiences with Cristian, and his perceptions of The Writing Center.

3. Focus groups with CAMP students – Cristian conducted two focus groups with CAMP students who volunteered to participate in the focus groups. Both groups consisted of three students, for six total participants. Each group was asked a total of fourteen questions on four topics: one-on-one consultations, workshops, office hours, and miscellaneous.

The focus groups lasted between twenty and thirty minutes.

4. Survey of CAMP students – The survey was distributed to members of CAMP in order to receive student feedback about the Ambassador Program. Respondents were asked nineteen multiple choice questions and one open-ended question. For seventeen of the multiple choice questions, respondents were asked to rank their response on a Likert scale or to choose “does not apply.” These questions focused on the comfort level of respondents to utilize Writing Center services or approach Cristian for help. The questions were all phrased as “Due to Cristian’s presence in the office, workshops, or writing one-on-one consultations…”. Two of the other questions asked respondents to indicate “yes” or “no” about whether they have recommended a peer to utilize The Writing Center services or to talk to the Ambassador. Respondents could skip or choose not to answer each of the questions and could stop the survey at any point. 19 students

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Writing Center Ambassadors: Engaging Campus Organizations Through Embedded Consultants • 45 completed the survey out of 56 total students enrolled in the program.

Assessment Results First-Person Ambassador Narrative by Cristian Lambaren Sanchez As a graduate student in a Student Affairs Administration program, I often heard about the challenges tied to coordinating and implementing collaborative programs tailored to supporting students from underrepresented backgrounds. My goal, as part of this program, was to help develop a cross-campus collaboration that is intentional in its design and implementation given the population being served: firstyear, low-income students from migrant families. I wanted this program to be both sustainable (so it could continue after I graduated) and mutually beneficial to all parties involved: The Writing Center, CAMP administrators/staff, CAMP scholars and me.

I decided to work with CAMP because I felt this would be a space where I could capitalize on my unique upbringing to connect and develop rapport with these students. Growing up, my experiences paralleled those of most CAMP scholars: constantly moving from school to school, coping with not always seeing parents as often as peers, and being first in the family with the privilege of having college as an option after high school. I knew my dedication and passion for this project was not going to be scarce; I was committed not only to the objectives of the Ambassador Program but also to the CAMP scholars’ experiences. While the work to guarantee the success of this pilot program was challenging, there were many positive outcomes for every member involved.

Any program, especially in its first run, will run into some hurdles. As the first Ambassador, I faced two key obstacles: time and student buy-in. In regard to time, I am specifically referring to the amount of time it took to plan the program, develop a relationship with CAMP administrators and students, and assess the program’s success. We (Joseph and I) took a well-rounded and comprehensive approach; that is, in addition to the administrative interview, survey and focus groups, I drafted weekly personal notes about the first three weeks of the project and my experience with it. After realizing how much time this extra process was taking, I redirected my energy and focused on the other areas that also took a long time. For instance, while building rapport with CAMP scholars was not necessarily a difficult process, the challenge was finding enough time to participate in, be present, and organize different opportunities for them to become comfortable with and

look forward to working with me. Because this was a pilot program, we did not know which activities were going to benefit the organization and the students the most, so I decided to try as many as possible and adjust accordingly given the amount of student buy-in.

Student buy-in was the most difficult part of this program because I believe all students in CAMP could have greatly benefited from being more involved. In order to incentivize CAMP scholars to take advantage of the Ambassador program, I had to find out what was the best way to articulate how taking advantage of the activities would benefit them. The way I had to approach this was by not making it seem like a transactional experience, rather this was an opportunity to develop a new culture within CAMP. One that motivates students to take advantage of support services such as the Writing Center. To guarantee the success of this approach, I had to gain the trust of these students; they needed to feel I genuinely cared about them and their experiences in college. That way, they could believe that the objectives of the program were designed to support them and improve their experiences with the Writing Center. After a couple weeks of meeting with a few CAMP mentors, most of whom were recommended by the CAMP staff/administrators, they agreed to collaborate with me in the workshop series. They were all about to graduate and wanted to gain more experience with public speaking, workshop planning and presenting skills. In short, I had to take the time to develop some credibility among the CAMP scholars for them to trust my advice on how the Ambassador Program can help them hone their skills in writing and communication. The CAMP mentors also agreed to participate in the advisory board but given the differences in schedules, hosting a group meeting was a fail two different times. I decided to meet with the mentors individually and adjust their responsibilities as part of the advisory board, hence why this became an activity I did not invest as much time in comparison to the others.

Despite the challenges we faced, all parties involved, as intended, benefited from this pilot program. The Writing Center strengthened its relationship with CAMP (another important student support service), opening up the opportunity for more collaborations across campus, and it became a resource that students encouraged each other to utilize. In terms of CAMP, the administration and staff members benefited from having someone who they can specifically refer students to so that those students can get the support they need with their writing assignments and communication skills; being present at their site lifted the pressure they felt as administrators to always be the support for the

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Writing Center Ambassadors: Engaging Campus Organizations Through Embedded Consultants • 46 CAMP scholars. The CAMP scholars benefited from having someone there from the time they first arrive at college, who specifically focused on supporting them in these areas, to the end of their first year (and possibly longer depending on the relationships that were developed). Lastly, the Ambassador (me) benefited from program development and implementation practice. This provided me the first-hand experience to demonstrate how intentional collaborations need to be to ensure student success and growth; offered an understanding about how imperative experience with assessment, evaluation, and research is relevant to special student populations. Another outcome of personal privilege was the sole opportunity to be in a position where I feel like I could start giving back and passing the knowledge and advice that was shared with me and be critical and creative in developing opportunities for students to apply this knowledge and hone particular skills.

Interview with CAMP Administrator We interviewed Elias Lopez, an administrator in the CAMP program, to get a sense of the success of the pilot program from an administrator’s perspective. During the interview, he noted that while he did not know if there had been an increase in the number of students scheduling consultations with the center, he did note an increase in the number of students looking for Cristian.

He pointed out a number of advantages for students in his organization, including a basic understanding of how to make the best use of a student resource, like The Writing Center. There was also a sense that the information about the center, for students, was better received from Cristian because he was closer to a peer (rather than an instructor, administrator, or staff member); Cristian took the time to get to know many of the students on a more personal level. As Elias says, Cristian—because he is a student—is able to explain The Writing Center in a way that other students will understand. More broadly, Elias says that the program helped the CAMP administrators to think about how they interact with other resources on campus, something that they may not have addressed without the Ambassador Program. Elias expressed his general appreciation for the program, stating that “The sole purpose that the writing center is even interested in learning ways to make the writing center, I guess, more exposed to students who don’t use it but also to find ways to reach out to our students is, I think, a huge plus, a huge benefit.” At the end of our discussion, Elias said that he would “absolutely” recommend this program in the future and recommend it to other programs.

Focus groups with CAMP students Cristian conducted two focus groups with six CAMP students. During the focus group, participants were asked questions about whether they used The Writing Center’s consultation services (either with Cristian or another consultant) during the semester; whether those consultations were successful and why (or why not); whether they had attended workshops conducted by Cristian and their experiences at those workshops; whether they had attended Cristian’s office hours in CAMP and their experiences attending them; if they feel different about The Writing Center because of Cristian’s presence in their organization; and any feedback for future improvement of the program.

The CAMP students who participated in the focus groups conducted by Cristian all had positive viewpoints of The Writing Center, and all had used it for individual one-on-one consultations for their work. Students found the writing workshops Cristian conducted particularly helpful. Four students participated in workshops conducted by Cristian. One said that “The workshops have been really helpful especially on the analyzing and writing because these were the ones that I had more trouble on.” Another said, “Yes, these workshops have been amazing! Thanks to these workshops I am now more confident when I write.” As indicated by these comments, and other responses, the workshops were memorable and helpful for CAMP students.

Many of the focus group students indicated that they appreciated Cristian’s presence as part of the Ambassador Program or that they recommended their fellow CAMP participants to him for writing help.

Cristian’s office hours (held in the CAMP office) were particularly effective in engaging with CAMP students.

According to one student, the office hours were “the most helpful, especially as they were available at times the WC was not open” while another student stated that “Office hours has helped me improve so much that I even like writing now! I am now confident when I have to write papers!”. Additionally, CAMP students indicated that they either referred their fellow CAMP students to Cristian’s office hours or to work with him through The Writing Center. One referred peers to Cristian’s office hours, “I’ve told many people about his office hours,” while a few referred peers to make writing center appointments with Cristian, “I told my friends to make appointments with Cristian” and “As other students needed help, I would always reference them to Cristian. Especially at times the WC was not available, for example on Friday’s.”

Lastly, Cristian’s frequent presence had the positive effect of making CAMP students more comfortable

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Writing Center Ambassadors: Engaging Campus Organizations Through Embedded Consultants • 47 working on their writing as well as a positive effect on CAMP student’s perceptions of The Writing Center.

According to one participant, “I felt comfortable [with Cristian’s presence] because he had a background in CLS [Chicano/Latino Studies Program] so when I went to my session with him at the WC he knew the background and was able to understand what I was trying to say. Seeing him in other areas made me familiarize myself with him so it would be more easier to ask him for help if I needed it.” Because Cristian had areas in common with the CAMP students, they were able to more easily relate to, and connect with, him.

Another student noted that “I [...] felt more comfortable going to the WC because I saw a familiar face.” By knowing that there was someone they knew working in the center, CAMP students were more comfortable using the center’s services.

Survey of CAMP students After the semester-long Ambassador Program pilot, CAMP students were given a survey that asked about their experiences with the Ambassador and The Writing Center. 19 students completed the survey out of 53 currently enrolled in the program. Overall, respondents indicated high satisfaction with the Ambassador and an improved relationship with The Writing Center because of the Ambassador. The results were divided into those that focus on the Ambassador and those that focus on The Writing Center. Figures 1-3 (See Appendix A) are a select set of data that is representative of CAMP students’ responses specifically to Cristian. The majority of respondents indicated either “strongly agree” or “agree” for all categories in Figure 1 and Figure 2 (See Appendix A). Notably, 94.45% of respondents indicated “strongly agree” or “agree” for “I feel more confident in my writing skills”; and 88.24% indicated that they either “agree” or “strongly agree” that they feel comfortable approaching Cristian for writing assistance during his hours at the CAMP offices. Additionally, 13 respondents (64.71%), specifically recommended a peer talk to Cristian for assistance (Figure 3).

While these results are focused on Cristian and his success within the program, the results in Figures 4 and 5 (See Appendix A) focus on the relationship between CAMP students and The Writing Center. As indicated in Figure 4 (See Appendix A), CAMP participants noted that they “strongly agree” or “agree” that they felt comfortable utilizing the writing center services (94.11%), felt comfortable explaining to their peers how to use the center (76.47%), and felt comfortable recommending The Writing Center to their peers (94.12%). Additionally, over three-quarters of

respondents actually recommended a peer to use The Writing Center.

Discussion

The results section highlights three themes from the Ambassador Program. The first is that Cristian’s presence in the CAMP offices was central to the success of the program. This type of program is time intensive, but there are potentially high returns for the trust and personal relationships that the Ambassador can create with a program and its participants. According to Cristian, “[…] I had to gain the trust from these students; they needed to feel I genuinely cared about them and their experiences in college.” CAMP students were not necessarily pre-disposed to use the center’s services and were wary of services outside of the CAMP offices; but, due to Cristian’s presence, students were more comfortable with the center. As one student noted in the focus group, “I […] felt more comfortable going to the WC because I saw a familiar face” while another noted “[…] when I went to my [writing center] session with him at the WC he knew the background and was able to understand what I was trying to say.” The CAMP administrator we interviewed also noted how Cristian, as a student, was better able to explain The Writing Center in a way that other students understood. For both administrators and students, Cristian was able to interact with them in ways that other members of the institution were not; this building of trust translated into a better understanding of services, perception of services, and willingness to use the center’s services.

The second theme is that, due to the program, CAMP students have a better understanding of the services that The Writing Center offers. Because Cristian was also able to tailor the message of the center for a specific student population, he was able to highlight how the center can specifically help them. As students indicated in the survey results, Cristian was able to explain what services were offered, helped students feel more comfortable utilizing writing center services, and helped students feel more able to explain writing center services to their peers. Increased understanding of the center was not limited to students; Elias Lopez, an administrator in the CAMP organization, noted that one of the advantages of the Ambassador Program is that it provides both students and administrators with a basic understanding of how to use a student resource like The Writing Center. The result is that, in the future, administrators are more likely to recommend students use The Writing Center while students are more likely to actually utilize the center’s services.

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Writing Center Ambassadors: Engaging Campus Organizations Through Embedded Consultants • 48 The third theme is that CAMP students were more likely to utilize Writing Center services and recommend Writing Center services to their peers because of the Ambassador Program. 94.11% of CAMP students who responded to the survey indicated that they either strongly agreed or agreed that, because of Cristian’s presence, when they had difficulties with writing, they felt comfortable utilizing The Writing Center’s services to help them move forward. Additionally, because of Cristian, 76.47% felt comfortable explaining the center’s services to their peers and 94.12% felt comfortable recommending Writing Center services to their peers.

Lastly, 76.47% actually recommended The Writing Center to their peers during the semester that Cristian served as the Ambassador to the CAMP program.

Recommendations Drawing on the experiences of Cristian and our mixed methods assessment, we have created a number of recommendations for the Ambassador Program, both here and at other institutions, based on aspects that went well and things that can be improved: 1. Have a good understanding of the organization before the start of the program. It was important for the Ambassador to have an understanding of the organization, including important personnel, its mission, and the services that it provides. This familiarity ensures that the Ambassador can best match the needs of the organization with the capabilities of the center.

2. Introduce the writing center, its services, and the Ambassador early on. This can happen in a variety of ways, like during an orientation, event, training, or meeting. How this occurs can be different for each program but, for us, it was clear that if an early opportunity is missed to provide this information then the program will be less successful. An introduction early on creates transparency about the role of the Ambassador and the goals of the program. This is also a good opportunity to create buy-in from stakeholders and to begin creating the rapport that is necessary for the success of this program.

3. Have clear goals. These goals are agreed upon by the organization, the Ambassador, and by the center in order to have measurable outcomes. By having clear goals for the program, there is a measure of accountability that can be tracked and assessed; furthermore,

clear goals ensure that the Ambassador is accountable to the center and the organization while making sure that there are not drastic changes to the program throughout the year.

4. Utilize a variety of activities designed for the organization. It is important to recognize that each organization may require different activities or interactions to meet their needs.

For example, some organizations may want a more informal relationship that involves mostly office hours; meanwhile, others may want customized workshops or an advisory council.

And others may want an open mic night or even guest speakers. Each organization will provide unique opportunities for the Ambassador to address the specific needs of the organization.

5. Have “office hours”. The most basic, and one of the most effective, activities that an Ambassador can do is to introduce the writing center during an organizational meeting and be in the space of the organization. The organizations targeted for the program often have a physical space that students congregate in and use. By having “office hours”, the Ambassador can ensure that students know who they are, create informal encounters, and serve as a reminder that the center cares about reaching out to them.

6. Plan for the entire academic year. It is important to complete the planning work at the beginning of the year in order to determine how much time commitment is needed for the program. This can also help space out the Ambassador’s activities so that the Ambassador is present throughout the year rather than just at the beginning of the year.

Conclusion Lori Salem, in her work “Decisions...Decisions: Who Chooses to Use the Writing Center?”, explores who does not come to the center and why. She believes that our attempts to “correct” people’s views of the center is misguided and not practical because most people’s view of the center is shaped before clients reach college. And yet, there must be ways to educate people about center services, create partnerships, and disseminate knowledge in productive and effective ways. We believe that the Ambassador Program is one way to do this while also answering Lori’s call to “expand the writing center research and assessment agenda to investigate ‘non visits’ and ‘non-visitors’” (161). We chose CAMP, and they wanted to partner

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Writing Center Ambassadors: Engaging Campus Organizations Through Embedded Consultants • 49 with us, because students in them are often “nonvisitors” that we want to become “visitors.”

The Ambassador Program model was successful with both administrators and students in the organization while, importantly, furthering the goal of the center to reach populations on campus that do not always use the center. As the CAMP administrator pointed out, it was important for students to hear about services that can assist them from other students; additionally, the administrator noted that he learned how to better interact with, and recommend students to, the writing center because of the Ambassador. Students also benefited from the presence of the Ambassador because they felt more confident in their writing skills and were likely to utilize the Ambassador’s help in their work. The writing center also benefited from the Ambassador Program’s ability to connect with students who may not always utilize the center’s services. And, because of their comfort level with the Ambassador, there was a more positive perception of the center. Also, they were likely to either recommend their peers to talk to the Ambassador or to utilize writing center services.

The program, and its success, has been helpful for The Writing Center at Michigan State University in shaping future policies and ideas. This past year we partnered with five campus organizations on campus, each with their own embedded Writing Center Ambassador, and are building upon an apparatus of student services and organizations designed to promote student success. We have also formalized the structure of the program with an online intake form, required and suggested activities, guidelines, and assessment measures. For the future, the program has been renamed the Writing Engagement Liaison Program Fellowship that creates a more formalized structure for the program and includes a stipend. As this program continues to expand, the center hopes to partner with additional organizations on campus. The Writing Center also hopes to show the continued success of this program in the future as a way to create a sustainable model of collaboration and outreach for the center.

Writing Center.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship 40.1-2: 1926.https://go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?p=AONE &sw=w&issn=&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA43 0210776&sid=googleScholar&linkaccess=fulltext.

Course-Embedded Tutoring Facilitated by Writing Centers, special issue of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. Ed. Rusty Carpenter, Scott Whiddon, and Kevin Dvorak.

12.2 (2014).

Decker, Teagan. “Diplomatic Relations; Peer Tutors in the Writing Classroom.” On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-based Writing Tutoring. Utah State UP. 17-30.

Migrant Student Services. Migrant Student Services. Michigan State Universtiy, https://mss.msu.edu/.

Accessed 25 April 2018.

Salem, Lori. “Decisions...Decisions: Who Chooses to Use the Writing Center?” The Writing Center Journal 35.2 (Spring/Summer 2016): 147-171 JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43824060.

Severino, Carol, and Megan Knight. “Exporting Writing Center Pedagogy: Writing Fellows Programs as Ambassadors for the Writing Center.” Marginal Words, Marginal Works? Tutoring the Academy in the Work of Writing Centers. Ed. William J. Macauley, Jr. and Nicholas Mauriello. Hampton Press, 2007. 19 34.

Spigelman, Candace and Laurie Grobman. On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring.

Utah State University Press, 2005.

Works Cited Carpenter, Russell, Kevin Dvorak, and Scott Whiddon.

“Guest Editor Introduction: Revisiting and Revising Course-Embedded Tutoring Facilitated by Writing Centers.” Course-Embedded Writing Support Programs in Writing Centers. Special issue of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. 12.2 (2014).

Chealte, Joseph, and Margaret Bullerjahn.

“Undergraduate Student Perceptions and the Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18, No 3 (2021) www.praxisuwc.com

Writing Center Ambassadors: Engaging Campus Organizations Through Embedded Consultants • 50 Appendix A: Figures Figure 1: Representative Sample of CAMP Students’ Responses to Cristian Due to Cristian’s presence in the office, workshops, or writing one-on-one consultations...

Question

Strongly agree

Agree

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

Does Not Apply

Total

I feel more confident in my reading skills

41.18% (7)

52.94% (9)

5.88% (1)

0.00% (0)

0.00% (0)

17

I feel more confident in my researching skills

37.50% (6)

62.50% (10)

0.00% (0)

0.00% (0)

0.00% (0)

16

I feel more confident in my analyzing skills

35.29% (6)

58.82% (10)

0.00% (0)

5.88% (1)

0.00% (0)

17

I feel more confident in my writing skills

38.89% (7)

55.56% (10)

0.00% (0)

5.56% (1)

0.00% (0)

18

Figure 2: Representative Sample of CAMP Students’ Responses to Cristian

Question

Strongly agree

Agree

Does Not Know

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

Does Not Apply

Total

I feel comfortable approaching Cristian during his office hours at the CAMP office for any part of my writing process for any assignment

41.18% (7)

47.06% (8)

5.88% (1)

5.88% (1)

0.00% (0)

0.00% (0)

17

Figure 3: Representative Sample of CAMP Students’ Responses to Cristian Sometime this semester, I have recommended my peers to approach Cristian during his office hours at the CAMP offices.

Yes 64.71% (13) No

35.29% (6)

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Writing Center Ambassadors: Engaging Campus Organizations Through Embedded Consultants • 51 Figure 4: Representative Sample of CAMP Students’ Responses to The Writing Center Due to Cristian’s presence in the office, workshops, or writing one-on-one consultations...

Strongly Agree

Agree

Do Not Know

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

Does Not Apply

Total

35.29% (6)

58.82% (10)

5.88% (1)

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

17

I feel comfortable explaining to my peers how to utilize the Writing Center services (i.e., how to make an appointment, what locations and services are available, etc.)

35.29% (6)

41.18% (7)

17.65% (3)

5.88% (1)

0.00%

0.00%

17

I feel comfortable recommending my peers to utilize the Writing Center services

41.18% (7)

52.94% (9)

5.88% (1)

0.00%

0.00%

0.00%

17

Question

When I had difficulties with writing, I felt comfortable utilizing the Writing Center services to help me move forward

Figure 5: Representative Sample of CAMP Students’ Responses to The Writing Center Sometime this semester, I have recommended my peers to utilize the Writing Center services.

Yes

76.47% (13)

No

23.53% (4)

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18, No 3 (2021)

SESSION NOTES: PRELIMINARY RESULTS FROM A CROSS-INSTITUTIONAL SURVEY Christine Modey University of Michigan cmodey@umich.edu

Genie Giaimo Middlebury College ggiaimo@middlebury.edu Joseph Cheatle Iowa State University jcheatle@iastate.edu

Abstract

In this article, we report on the results of a cross-institutional survey of sixty-one writing centers regarding their use of session notes, describing the nature of the forms used to record session notes, and also identifying and cataloging the various motivations and interests that seem to drive our field’s collection of session notes and the institutional and scholarly uses to which notes are put. Our project collected two types of data—survey data (about individual institutions’ use of session notes) and artifact data (blank session note forms and session note datasets). We begin by providing an overview of our methods and share our findings from responses to the survey and our analysis of the blank forms that institutions shared. We then discuss our findings, including implications and resources for developing and revising session notes as well as sample questions that indicate the range and the possibilities for session note use in writing center practice and research/assessment. Lastly, we argue for the importance of developing an open-access, evolving repository for this type of data in writing center studies. Following the publication of this article, we intend to make available the data we have collected and update it annually, providing new and increased opportunities for practitioners, scholars, and students to access and study this information.

Session notes are the forms that tutors (and sometimes clients, and sometimes both) complete at the end of a writing center session; these documents are also called “Client Report Forms” in the widelyused writing center appointment software, WCOnline.

Session notes can fulfill many purposes, such as providing summative, descriptive, and/or reflective reports about individual tutorials. Though nearly every center creates them, session notes have not been the subject of extensive research. There were early debates about whether to share the documents internally or externally (Carino et al.; Pemberton; Crump; Jackson; Conway); and more recent research empirical approaches surveyed stakeholders about session notes’ utility or conducted discourse analysis on the notes themselves (Malenczyk; Bugdal et al.; Hall; Giaimo and Turner). But before we published our article “It’s All in the Notes: What Session Notes Can Tell Us About the Work of Writing Centers” (Giaimo et al.) based on analysis of a two-million word corpus of session notes from our four universities, studies had not analyzed sets of session notes from a multi-institutional

perspective as a source of insight about our field, rather than a snapshot of the work of a particular writing center.

As Gofine argues, citing Jones and Harris, writing center practitioners and scholars have long pointed out that what one center produces, records, or chronicles is not the same for the next writing center; however, Gofine makes an argument for standardized assessment, particularly around data that is collected and reported for three common institutional and pedagogical reasons: to provide institutional accountability in the form of annual reports; to understand tutorials’ effect on students’ writing development; and to gauge writer satisfaction after tutorials (47). So while there might be institutional differences in writing centers—size, location, staff and student demographics, services, mission, etc.—writing centers do collect strikingly similar data for similar reasons. Nevertheless, acknowledging these similarities does not necessarily allow writing centers to learn from each other and replicate evidence-based practices.

Rather, comparing and aggregating this data provides us new opportunities to think about the shared work of writing centers.

The research presented in this article is our initial attempt to analyze some preliminary cross-institutional data about session notes that we have collected on our way toward building a session note repository, supported by an IWCA research grant, which can be accessed by a broad group of practitioners and researchers. We are sharing the findings from the initial round of our survey in an attempt to initiate a fieldwide opportunity to review and share data about session notes (forms and questions, datasets, and center metadata) that we hope can more robustly respond to questions that hitherto have seemed only answerable by “lore” (Gillespie). In this article, we describe the nature of the forms used to record session notes, and also identify and catalogue the various motivations and interests that seem to drive our field’s collection of session notes and the institutional and scholarly uses to which notes are put. Following the

Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 53 publication of this article, we intend to make available the data we have collected and update it annually, providing new and increased opportunities for practitioners, scholars, and students to access and study this information.

We begin by providing an overview of our methods and sharing our findings from responses to the survey and blank forms that institutions shared. We then discuss our findings, including implications and resources for developing and revising session notes as well as sample questions. Lastly, we point to the implications of our work and the importance of developing a repository for this type of data.

Methods In preparation for the development of an openaccess session note repository, we created and circulated the survey whose findings we report here.

The survey gathered information about how (rather than why) writing centers conceive of, and use, session notes. Our survey collected two types of data—survey data (about individual institutions’ use of session notes) and artifact data (blank session note forms and session note datasets).

Because the student data from completed session note forms are aggregated and de-identified, and are currently collected for non-research purposes at many writing centers, the IRBs at our institutions determined that this project does not qualify as human subjects research and therefore no IRB approval was required.

Blank session note forms/questions can be shared as these do not involve human subjects but are artifacts.

Study Participants Writing Center Administrators (WCAs) from sixtyone institutions responded to the survey with fifty-two fully completing the survey, four indicating they did not use session notes (and therefore skipping the majority of the survey questions), and five filling out demographic questions—but few of the Likert scale questions. Fifty-seven respondents reported working with undergraduate students (among other groups) and forty-eight reported staffing with undergraduate tutors (among other groups). About a third of respondents (n=23) reported working at Liberal Arts institutions, fifteen at regional comprehensive institutions, eleven at research intensive universities, nine at two-year colleges, seven at Hispanic serving institutions, one at an historic black college and university, and eight indicating “other” (including schools with religious affiliation, secondary schools, technological institutes, and international universities). Some respondents

reported two or more institutional types (e.g., liberal arts and regional comprehensive university), so the breakdown is not equal to the total number of respondents.

Forty-one respondents provided their blank session note form(s) and five respondents shared completed session note datasets. Those who shared their notes included a Hispanic-serving community college, a small national university, a research intensive university, and two small liberal arts colleges.

Survey

We developed a survey that included a range of demographic, open-ended, and Likert scale questions (Appendix C) that asked respondents about their engagement with session notes. Questions ranged from user-specific (open-ended response regarding session note training practices) to attitudinal (regarding session notes’ importance to tutor professional development).

The survey also prompted respondents to share their blank session note forms and their session note datasets.

The survey was circulated through professional listservs, the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) members’ listserv, the WCenter listserv, regional writing center listservs, and the Small Liberal Arts Colleges-Writing Program Administrators (SLAC WPA) listserv in the winter of 2020. Four schools reported not using session notes and, because of the way the survey was created, their surveys were largely blank. Additionally, another five respondents did not complete the survey so their responses were included only in the demographic responses and excluded from the Likert scale question results.

Because our study is an exploratory one that examines how our field engages with and thinks about session notes, our data analysis is descriptive, rather than correlative. At this moment, our field knows relatively little about the commonalities and differences in how and why writing centers use session notes. In the future, we hope to collect enough attitudinal, demographic, and artifact data for other researchers in our field to apply correlative statistics to the shared dataset. For now, however, descriptive statistics were compiled for the Likert scale questions and demographic data was aggregated from the survey. All numeric data was coded, analyzed, and formatted in Excel.

Session Note Forms Respondents to our survey were invited to upload documents containing their blank session note forms

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 54 in a variety of file types. The blank session notes were downloaded and examined individually and a list of distinct elements on the forms was developed (see Appendix D). New items were added to the list when items on a form didn’t clearly correspond to previously listed items. In the first pass-through of the forms, seventy-seven distinct items were identified, which covered most of the various forms’ components with some overlap and duplication. To simplify the lists and to make the forms more easily comparable, related sets of items were consolidated into single codes. For example, some forms allowed for both the writer and the tutor to indicate the focus of the session and the type of project that was brought in. In the refined set of items, two codes were created to indicate whether a particular form captured this kind of information about the appointment, whether from tutor or writer: “project info” and “appointment type.” In addition, many unique codes which applied to features appearing on only one session note form were eliminated in the refined list. For example, only one form inquired about writer gender and first-generation status; these items were not included in the final list. Notes about these unique features were instead included in a new “form description” field. After item consolidation, thirtyseven items remained.

While the submitted files capture the range of session note forms, analyzing and categorizing the variety of forms and file types poses challenges. For instance, a screenshot sometimes cuts off relevant information. Moreover, a screenshot does not capture options hidden in dropdown menus unless, as one thoughtful director did, the research participant video records the opening of each dropdown menu. Also, there is a fair amount of idiosyncrasy in how session notes are formatted and what is included in them, particularly at institutions that use “homegrown” systems. More than half of the respondents use WCOnline, which offers customizable session note form templates (called “client report forms” or CRFs).

While CRFs can be downloaded from WCOnline with appointment data attached (such data often contains demographic information as well as information about the nature of the assignment, the name of the class, the type of appointment, and so forth), the WCOnline client report form alone does not provide this information. For this reason, in our analysis and discussion of the forms, we focus on the session note fields completed by tutors.

Study Limitations

As noted above, the overwhelming majority of survey respondents (93%) currently use session notes in their writing centers. And, as we discuss below, roughly a third of respondents currently engage in research and assessment of these documents.

Therefore, this study skews towards practitioners who currently use session notes in their writing centers and who robustly—though unevenly—engage in research about these documents. Additionally, the majority of respondents reported working at liberal arts institutions with more limited survey engagement from people at two-year colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Hispanic-Serving Institutions, though we did have respondents from all of these institutional types in additional to research intensive institutions, etc. (see above for responses by institutional types).

Rather than providing an accurate representation of the field, then, with regards to uncovering who does and does not use session notes, our findings provide a more detailed—and limited—snapshot of our field’s engagement with session notes.

Results

Survey Findings From our survey’s respondents, we notice that those respondents who report engagement with these forms do so robustly. These institutions also share commonalities in how they collect session notes and other writing center data and records (Table 1 & Figure 1). Of the sixty-one respondents to the survey, the majority (93%) report utilizing session notes (Table 1).

The majority (n=36), or 59%, report using WCOnline as their scheduling software, with Tutortrac, homegrown systems, Google forms, and paper evenly spread out among institutions (two to three each) and the “Other” category comprising the rest of the responses (n=12) (Figure 1).

Survey respondents responded affirmatively to many practices regarding session notes. For example, the majority (83%) provide session note training to their staff and roughly the same number (80%) share their session notes with populations within and/or outside of the writing center (Table 1). Respondents also largely believe that session notes are an important part of tutor training and professional development (Figure 3), with 75% of respondents who use session notes in their writing center (n=43) responding very favorably or favorably to the statement that session notes are an important element of tutor development.

While most respondents responded positively to questions about the administrative elements of session notes, such as engaging in tutor training, or believing

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 55 that session notes support tutor development, the majority (64%) do not conduct research and/or assessment on their notes (Table 1). Of the minority (36%) of respondents who conduct research and/or assessment, fewer still (32%) described their research projects. Those who did reported engaging in a range of projects from informal review of notes to identify tone and emergent patterns in tutor practices, to comparing and correlating session notes to intake forms, to conducting discourse analysis on session notes. Of course, these approaches to session note research need not be mutually exclusive: many respondents reported trying to achieve multiple goals through their assessment of session notes while others reported struggling to find the time to conduct such research.

While only about a third of respondents currently conduct research on their session notes, the majority of respondents (59%) have very strong or strong interest in doing this kind of work (Figure 4). A similar cohort of respondents (57%) also responded very favorably or favorably to joining a multi-institutional research project, such as the one the authors of this paper are conducting (Figure 5).

Session Note Findings

The session note forms themselves range from very basic (for example, writer name, tutor name, and focus of the session) to complex (for example, requiring three screens to display, and including thirtyeight separate items). Fifteen of the forms were paper, while twenty-six were electronic. Most forms appear to be completed by the tutor after the session, although some have parts of the form completed by the writer before or after the session, a couple are clearly intended to be completed by the tutor and the writer together, and at least one form appears to be completed entirely by the writer, with the tutor simply signing off at the bottom.

Apart from collecting personal information, such as writer and tutor names, session note forms most frequently collect information about the focus of the session. For assessment and institutional accountability purposes, respondents indicated a strong interest in knowing what people bring to the writing center. For instance, twenty-two of the session note forms include some kind of open text field for “type of assignment” or “type of project,” while six forms include a checklist (two forms include both an open text box and a checklist). Additionally, twenty-six of the forty-one forms submitted include a checklist of items for the tutor focus. These checklists range from a short list of

five items only, to an elaborate list of twenty-seven items divided into six categories such as “stage of the writing process,” “rhetorical choices,” and “language, grammar, usage, and mechanics.” About half of the forms (n=22) use open text boxes with minimal guidance (such as “describe the session” or “summarize the session”) to collect information about what happened in the session, while nineteen provide open text fields with more directive questions asking the tutor to identify areas on which the writer needs additional work, areas in which the tutor saw improvement, the strengths and weaknesses of the session, an assessment of the quality of the paper, the tutoring strategies used, and so forth. In all, thirty-nine of the forty-one session note forms include at least one open text box to collect information about the session, with a total number of open text boxes on any given form ranging from one to four.

In addition to these commonalities, there are notable shared absences among the forms as well. For example, the forms shared by respondents do not pay special attention to multilingual issues; only three ask about the writer’s first or home language and only two provide a specific “ESL issues” focus checklist of some sort. One session note form allows the tutor to record whether it had been a multilingual session - in other words, whether multiple languages were spoken by the writer and tutor in the session itself. Given that at many writing centers multilingual writers make up a substantial number of the total appointments, it is perhaps surprising that multilingual issues are not more deeply examined via session note forms.

Most respondents’ session notes record no information about tutoring strategies or about referrals to outside resources. Only one form explicitly asks about tutoring strategies, while four ask about use of or referral to additional resources. Tutoring strategies no doubt get recorded in other ways (for instance in open text responses) but the fact that strategies are not explicitly called out may suggest that many directors think of session note forms as a way to learn about the writer and the session, not the tutor. More session note forms record information about resources used or referrals made than about tutoring strategies employed, but these are still a small proportion of the overall number of forms submitted.

Only three respondents’ forms record whether the tutor recommended a follow up session for the writer, which is notable if we conceptualize writing centers as places of process-oriented instruction where a writer might make a sequence of appointments, perhaps to work on different aspects of a writing project. From a different perspective, writing centers eager to boost

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 56 their numbers and demonstrate their utility to administrators might encourage tutors to suggest follow-up appointments. It is worth noting that WCOnline, the appointment system used by more than half of the writing centers surveyed, allows automatic tracking of return visits. Eight forms allowed a tutor or writer to indicate directly that they had previously visited the writing center. Ultimately, however, few centers appear to use the notes explicitly to track “continuity of care,” including considering when tutors cross-refer students and/or encourage them to return to the writing center.

A Note on Respondent Outliers

Although many session notes shared common features, some forms or questions were so unusual that they are worth mentioning here. Writing centers are very much creatures of their institutions, driven by local population needs and institutional interests. As a result, there is a lot of variation within the session note forms, both in the complexity of the session note forms and also in kinds of information they collect.

Six forms, for example, provide opportunities for the tutor to evaluate the session while three others ask the tutor to comment directly on the writer’s behavior; for instance, whether they were prepared for the session and engaged in the tutoring process. While the evaluation questions can raise the question of whether the tutor thought their work was effective, other questions seem to serve a regulatory purpose, monitoring student behavior, perhaps with the intention of reporting that behavior to the faculty member or including it as an aspect of the student’s evaluation in a writing course. One form, for instance, provided three Likert-scale questions about how often a writer used a laptop or writing utensil, took notes, and asked questions. Given the form’s overall orientation toward the student, these questions may also have the effect of communicating expectations about student engagement.

In addition, a few forms solicit specific demographic information about student writers that reflects ongoing conversations in our field and in our institutions about how well we serve writers from a variety of backgrounds (see, for example, Salem; Denny et al.). For instance, one form asks about a writer’s first and additional languages as well as asks the writer to identify their gender by providing a space for self-defined gender (with the option to decline to answer the question). Another form provides opportunities for the writer to disclose whether they are beyond traditional college age (over twenty-four

years) and whether they are the first in their family to attend college, as well as their first language.

While most session note forms are clearly oriented to the tutor and the writing center, a few recruit the writer to reflect on the session or encourage the writer and the tutor to work together to summarize the session and identify next steps. One, for instance, in addition to asking the tutor to reflect on the session also asks the writer to identify areas in which they made progress during the session and helpful strategies or advice provided by the tutor, and to rate the overall effectiveness of the session and explain their rating.

Another form, written in the first-person plural, asks the tutor and writer to identify areas worked on and to prioritize next steps. Yet another form asks the writer to identify up to three specific areas they worked on and also to identify corresponding next steps and strategies that might be transferable to future writing assignments. On this form, the tutor provides only a signature.

Discussion As noted in the results, the majority of survey respondents indicated fairly robust engagement with session notes in their centers, insofar as the majority of centers use session notes, train their tutors to fill out session notes, and share their notes with internal and/or external audiences. They also responded with high agreement that session notes are an important element of tutor professional development.

However, while 70 - 90% of institutions that responded to the survey reported in-depth administrative engagement with session notes, only 36% of respondents currently conduct research on session notes (Table 1) while 59% of respondents are interested in engaging in such research (Figure 4).

Additionally, while over forty institutions shared their blank session note forms with the researchers, only five institutions shared their actual notes. This suggests that, while there is deep and abiding interest in session notes among this cohort of institutional respondents, research and assessment are more difficult to engage with than training and other elements related to the administrative and day-to-day use of session notes in writing center work. Considering the dearth of research on session notes—even the praxis oriented topics of session note tutor training and professional development via session notes—the researchers note that there are some barriers (which we posit might be related to labor and compensation concerns) to creating multi-institutional and large-scale research and assessment projects on session notes. So, while our

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 57 survey respondents report incredibly thoughtful praxisoriented engagement with session notes, there appear to be opportunities for translating practice into research and assessment practices that have impact beyond individual centers.

After analyzing the blank forms/artifacts that centers provided, we argue that the number of open text fields regarding session focus is a tantalizing opportunity for research—and also a challenge. On the one hand, these open text fields provide abundant linguistic data that can be analyzed using corpus techniques. This strategy seems useful especially for the fields that ask tutors, broadly, to “describe the session” or something similar. Analyzing such data will reveal much about the language tutors use to describe their work in a wide variety of writing center settings. On the other hand, using corpus analysis techniques on the open text generated in response to the narrower questions may create some strange irregularities in the data, especially with a relatively small corpus.

Moreover, for any individual writing center director or coordinator, a survey of the session note forms offers food for thought in terms of their own center and their own tutor training process. Session note forms, as indicated above, can take on various perspectives: some administrative, some reflective, some evaluative. The questions they ask, the emphasis they place, shapes the uses to which they can be put, and their limitations. Writing center directors looking to update their session note form could do worse than reflect on their own goals for those forms—do they want to use them to communicate within the center?

To demonstrate efficacy for faculty and administrators?

To promote effective writing and revision processes?

To improve tutor performance? To deepen tutor reflective practice? —and then to examine the variety of questions their colleagues are asking, in various unique writing center settings around the world, and identify some that, if used, would help them to revise their forms to align with their centers’ priorities.

A final note indicates how our field might be moving into more standardized practice due to shared technology platforms: the researchers found that the majority of institutions (59%) use WCOnline for scheduling, record keeping, and most pertinent to this study, session notes (Figure 1). Nearly all of those who submitted session note forms from the WCOnline platform adapted the template in some way; nevertheless, it is clear that the WCOnline template influences the structure and content of session notes.

Similarly, about half of the respondents reported inheriting their session note forms and language from their predecessors (Table 1). Forms themselves,

however, are amended over a variety of time periods with 33% amending their forms every two to five years and 17% never amending their forms, with a set of other revision periods (every other year, once a year, and one a semester) comprising the rest of the responses (Figure 2). Therefore, while there is more standardization in how these forms are collected, there is less continuity in how often they are revised and how they are developed in the first place. This suggests we need to do more, as a field, to implement best and potentially standard practices regarding these valuable administrative and scholarly artifacts of tutor and writer work.

The extensive use of WCOnline by survey respondents points to an opportunity to develop aggregable session note data. Use of a “standard” commercial platform can be good insofar as it allows busy directors to immediately implement data collection and tether many of the commonly collected records around the work of writing centers in a single place. In addition, the widespread use of WCOnline likely affects how session notes are developed, disseminated, and used across many writing centers in unforeseen and hitherto under-examined ways.

WCOnline provides a template for session note form questions, which the researchers observed were used unaltered by only two of the twenty-three respondents who shared their session note forms from WCOnline.

Nevertheless, most adaptations to the WCOnline template were minimal – such as the addition of a checklist for the focus of the session, customized language for an open text box, or the addition of another text box.

We posit that direct use or minimal adaptation of the WCOnline template might contribute to a flattening of both the language that session notes contain (i.e., the kinds of questions and prompts it asks of tutors) but, also, because of how the program makes session notes accessible (i.e., they are more easily accessed by writer rather than individual tutor), it also limits engagement with session notes to largely administrative functions. In other words, because session notes are tethered primarily to sessions and unique clients, and it is more complicated and time intensive for tutors to access their own aggregated notes, a culture around session notes as largely administrative, rather than research or assessment focused, might be developing in our field. So, while WCOnline offers convenience for time strapped WCAs, it also might be contributing to a homogenization in our record keeping practices that shapes and drives why we collect these artifacts in the first place.

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 58

Implications and Resources for Developing and Revising Session Notes For WCAs who are interested in revising their session notes, as well as those who seek resources to support tutor training on completing session notes, we reviewed hundreds of session note questions and observed that the most effective notes were the ones that have clear goals in mind. We identified three key considerations for session notes, including audience(s) of the form, author(s) of the form, and goal(s) of the session note form. For each consideration we explain why it is important, identify variables that may affect it, and provide guidance on implementation.

I. Who is the audience of the session note form?

Session notes can have multiple audiences: ● writer ● tutor ● faculty members ● writing center administrators ● college or university administrators Each audience has different concerns and interests and these must be taken into consideration when developing session note forms and when training tutors on their completion.

Implementation: For those WCAs developing questions for session notes, it might make sense to chart the audience(s) for each specific question before determining whether or not the question is effective.

For those generating new questions, mapping out the audiences by the number of questions can help the WCA to get a clearer sense of what specific functions they want their questions to perform. For example, if you want tutors to reflect more carefully on their tutoring practices, you will want to explicitly identify tutors as the audience for any questions on tutoring practice.

II. Who completes the session note form?

Most session note forms were completed by tutors; however, forms may also be completed solely by the writer or by the tutor and the writer in collaboration with one another. In developing or revising session note questions, then, it makes sense to consider who is completing the form, as the goals of the question vary depending on the author(s) of the form.

Implementation: If the tutor and the writer complete the report form, then it should include both of their

viewpoints. Questions should aim to capture whether or not the session was collaborative and how engagement/authority were negotiated in the consultation. However, both tutor and writer may not feel they can be honest about the consultation; therefore, a separate section where the tutor and the writer can respond individually may also be warranted.

A form that is meant to be shared with faculty members should look different from a form that is intended solely for writing center administrators and tutors.

III. What is your goal for specific questions in the session note form?

We observed that most questions on session note forms fell into one of the following categories: description/summary, evaluation, reflection, or assessment/research. Single questions may address multiple goals, but it is more typical for most questions to fall into one of the first three distinct categories, while all questions are potentially useful in research and assessment.

Implementation: Pedagogical and administrative goals for each center vary, as do the kinds of research and assessment, so amend specific questions to address your center’s needs. Research goals might include understanding whether tutors and writers differ in their articulation of outcomes for the session, or it might be to analyze what kinds of rhetorical moves tutors make when describing their tutoring practice. In addition, alignment of different data collection forms—such as session notes with client intake forms and student satisfaction forms—also helps in developing robust assessment projects.

Sample Questions

Question content and structure profoundly affect the responses tutors generate. While open-ended questions asking the tutor to summarize the session offer endless opportunities for reflection and response (see, for example, Hall, pp. 87-89), more targeted questions can better address research or pedagogical goals. For example, if a WCA is interested in tutors’ inclusive practices, it makes sense to incorporate key terms such as “inclusion,” or “anti-racist,” in the question. Of course, for tutors to engage thoughtfully with this kind of a question, training also needs to be provided. As WCAs develop their questions, it is important to determine if tutors/writers have the necessary vocabulary (and knowledge) to respond in thoughtful and specific ways.

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 59 Each question in a session note form serves a different purpose. To that end, we provide two lists of questions—the first (Table 2) provides a set of sample questions that reflect some of the most common questions asked, and the second (Table 3) provides a set of more unusual questions that offer alternative ways to prompt tutor and writer reflection.

Some of the unusual questions are situated in the local context of a writing center and reference specific priorities or training initiatives; considering a center’s training initiatives, values, and practices is a good way to help to develop questions that may help an administrator evaluate the effectiveness of a session in light of a center’s goals.

Conclusion

Session notes are a critical component of writing center consultations, yet they are underused in institutional research and assessment. While some centers attempt to maximize their usage and effectiveness, others may not revisit their session notes regularly or may use outdated session note forms.

Though we do not advocate that every writing center turn its session notes into materials for research or assessment, we do argue that writing centers approach their session notes with purpose.

Moreover, we believe that session notes are a rich source of data about how the theories and commitments of our field (to inclusive and anti-racist practices, for instance, or to supporting disciplinary literacies and writing development, or to better understanding the labor of writing tutors) are enacted in writing center sessions. Like writing center observations, session notes provide direct insight into the experience of writing center work from the perspective of the worker. While collecting detailed demographic information about writers provides insight about whom we serve, studying session notes can reveal much about whether and how our shared theories about writing center work are put into practice. Cross-institutional research on session notes, in particular, can aid in this endeavor.

Building on our work in this article, we are developing a repository to house session notes as well as the metadata that we are collecting from individual institutions regarding their engagement with session notes. We are responding to Joyce Kinkead’s work that calls for making writing center work more visible and repositories to house work documents are needed for future researchers (10, 15). Brad Peters, likewise, argues for the importance of documents as a way for writing centers to show “how socialization patterns have come

to define the writing center’s institutional position in the past, how they presently define it, and how they might help to redefine it” (104). Peters focuses on the power of narratives to “help writing center directors identify and understand local strategies that reflect and lead to future, rhetorically effective decision making and problem solving” (104). Both Kinkead and Peters recognize the value of creating, using, and storing documents as central to writing center research.

Readers interested in sharing their session note forms and texts in the repository are invited to complete the survey: http://middlebury.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3abD YMB4ewHthSR. We want to note that what we advocate for, and are creating, is a repository and not an archive. The “Archives and Records Management Resources” page of the National Archives helps explain why archives don’t necessarily perform the function of a document repository: namely, archives are organizational records that are considered “permanently valuable” and are typically deposited “when the organization that created them no longer needs them in the course of business.”

By contrast, the evolving document repository we propose will be built through the contributions of writing centers administrators and used in their day-today work. Administrators and practitioners alike can find examples of session note forms, learn how session notes are used by other centers, and conduct research on session notes. We plan to continue our research into session notes and also to broaden our scope of research to consider other documents (such as registration forms, intake forms, and client surveys) that we frequently use in writing centers but don’t always use effectively. Our work here, and the future data repository, bring together practitioners and researchers while serving practical purposes and providing important insights to the field of writing center studies.

Works Cited Archives and Records Management Resources. National Archives, 15 August 2016, https://www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/arc hives-resources. Accessed 8 July 2019.

Bugdal, Melissa, et al. “Summing Up the Session: A Study of Student, Faculty, and Tutor Attitudes Toward Tutor Notes .” Writing Center Journal, vol. 35, no. 3, 2016, pp.

13–36.

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 60 Carino, Peter, et al. “Empowering a Writing Center: The Faculty Meets the Tutors.” Writing Lab Newsletter, vol.

16, no. 2, 1991, pp. 1-5.

Conway, Glenda. “Reporting Writing Center Sessions to Faculty: Pedagogical and Ethical Considerations.”

Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 22, no. 8, 1998, pp. 9–12.

Crump, Eric. “Voices from the net: Sharing records: Student Confidentiality and Faculty Relations.” Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 18, no. 2, 1993, pp. 8–9.

Denny, Harry, et al. “‘Tell Me Exactly What It Was That I Was Doing That Was so Bad’: Understanding the Needs and Expectations of Working-Class Students in Writing Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 37, no.

1, 2018, pp. 67–100. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26537363. Accessed 13 Aug. 2020.

Giaimo, Genie, et al. “It’s All in the Notes: What Session Notes can tell us About the Work of Writing Centers.”

The Journal of Writing Analytics, vol. 2, 2018, pp. 225– 256.

Giaimo, Genie, and Samantha Turner. “Session Notes as a Professionalization Tool for Writing Center Staff: Conducting Discourse Analysis to Determine Training Efficacy and Tutor Growth.” Journal of Writing, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 131-162.

Gillespie, Paula. “Beyond the House of Lore: WCenter as Research Site.” Writing Center Research: Extending the Conversation. Routledge, 2002, pp. 39-51.

Gofine, Miriam. “How are we Doing? A Review of Assessments Within Writing Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 32, no. 1, 2012, pp. 39-49.

Hall, R. Mark. Around the Texts of Writing Center Work: An Inquiry-Based Approach to Tutor Education. Utah State University Press, 2017.

Harris, Muriel. “The Concept of a Writing Center.”

National Writing Project. 1988, https://archive.nwp.org/cs/public/download/nwp_fil e/15402/Writing_Center_Concept.pdf?x-r=pcfile_d.

Accessed 8 July 2019.

Jackson, Kim. “Beyond Record-Keeping: Session Reports and Tutor Education. Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 20, no. 6, 1996, pp. 11–13.

Jones, Casey. “The Relationship Between Writing Centers and Improvement in Writing Ability: An Assessment of the Literature.” Education, vol. 122, no. 1, 2001.

Kinkead, Joyce. “The Writing Center Director as Archivist: The Documentation Imperative.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 41, no. 9-10, 2017, pp. 1017.

Malenczyk, Rita. “‘I Thought I'd Put That in to Amuse You’: Tutor Reports as Organizational Narrative.”

Writing Center Journal, vol. 33, 2013, pp. 74–95.

Pemberton, Michael. “Writing Center Ethics: Sharers and Seclusionists.” Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 20, no. 3, 1995, pp. 13-14.

Peters, Brad. “Documentation Strategies and the Institutional Socialization of Writing Centers.” The Writing Center Director’s Resource Book, edited by Christina Murphy and Byron Stay. Routledge, 2012, pp. 103-113.

Salem, Lori. “Decisions...Decisions: Who Chooses to Use the Writing Center and Why.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 35, 2016, pp. 147-171.

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 61 Appendix A: Tables Table 1: Responses to questions about how session notes are used by individual institutions broken down by number of respondents and percentage of responses to questions.

Question

Yes

%

No

%

We use session notes in our writing center

57

93%

4

7%

We provide training on session notes

51

83%

10

17%

We share our session notes

49

80%

12

29%

We currently conduct research/assessment on session notes

22

36%

39

64%

We inherited session note form/questions from previous administrator

28

49%

29

51%

Table 2: Table showing sample questions and directions that are commonly used in session notes across writing centers.

Common questions in session note forms Briefly describe the session.

What is the action plan for the writer?

Do you believe the session was successful? Why or why not.

What do you think went well during the session?

What would you improve in future sessions?

What would be helpful for other tutors to know when working with this writer?

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 62 Table 3: Table showing sample questions and directions that are less commonly used in session notes across writing centers.

Uncommon questions in session note forms How did you and the student balance your participation?

Describe the tutoring decisions you made and why you made those decisions.

If you’ve worked with this writer before, did you notice changes in any areas since the previous session?

Did you use more than one language in the session? If so, why? (for writer): How might you apply what you learned in today’s session to future assignments? (for writer): Of the areas we covered today, which was most important and needs attention first? (for writer): In what ways do you feel you made the most progress as a writer during this session?

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 63 Appendix B: Figures Figure 1: Breakdown of the scheduling and note taking methods used by individual writing centers.

Figure 2: Breakdown of individual writing centers and how often they amend the language within session note forms.

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 64 Figure 3: Figure showing breakdown of respondents by their agreement to statement that session notes are an important element of tutor development.

Figure 4: Figure showing respondents’ desire to conduct research or assessment on session notes with the majority (n= 36) indicating very strong or strong agreement.

Figure 5: Figure showing respondents’ desire to join a multi institutional research project on session notes, with the majority (n= 35) indicating very strong or strong agreement.

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 65

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 66

Appendix C: Session Note Data and Information Collection Survey As part of an IWCA-funded research project, we are creating a shared repository for writing center session notes and the forms that individual writing centers use. This repository will allow writing center administrators to engage with a large and multi-institutional set of data that includes both completed session note forms and the attendant questions that these forms ask. These data are useful for conducting assessment, for pedagogical purposes, and for re-envisioning individual center's session note practices.

Because these data are aggregated and de-identified, and are currently collected for non-research purposes at many writing centers, our IRBs said that this project does not qualify as human subjects research and therefore no IRB approval is required. Indeed, BLANK session note forms/questions can be shared, as these do not involve human subjects but are artifacts. HOWEVER, please check with your individual IRBs before sharing completed session note forms. While we have been given a confirmed response that these data do not fall under human subjects research from our institutions, this may not be the case at other institutions. So, please share this information, as well as the Qualtrics survey with your IRBs before participating.

For questions, please contact the researchers: Genie Giaimo (Middlebury College): ggiaimo@middlebury.edu Christine Modey (University of Michigan): cmodey@umich.edu Joseph Cheatle (Iowa State University): jcheatle@iastate.edu Demographic and Institutional Questions Q1. Title of Institution and Name of Writing Center: Q2. Primary Contact name: Q3. Primary Contact Email Address: Q4. Primary Contact Phone Number: Q5. Secondary Contact Name: Q6. Secondary Contact Phone Number: Q7. Writing Center Website Link: Q8. Institutional Type (check all that apply): ●

Two-Year College

●

Four-Year Liberal Arts College

●

Regional/comprehensive university with Master's or specialist degree programs

●

Research intensive or extensive (Research I) university

●

Historically black college/university

●

Tribal College

●

Hispanic Serving Institution Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18, No 3 (2021) www.praxisuwc.com

Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 67 ●

Other

Q9. If Other, can you please list your institutional type?

Q10. Client Population Served (check all that apply): ●

Undergraduate Students

●

Graduate Students

●

Professional Students (Medical School, Law School, etc.)

●

Faculty/Staff

●

Community members

●

High School/Secondary School Students

●

Alumni

●

Other

Q11. What kinds of tutors/consultants do you employ in your writing center? (check all that apply) ●

Professional Staff Tutors

●

Faculty Tutors

●

Graduate Student Tutors

●

Undergraduate Student Tutors

●

Other

Q12. What kind of scheduling system do you use in your writing center? ●

WCOnline

●

Home grown online system

●

Tutor Track

●

Google Forms

●

Paper forms

●

Other

Session note/client report form use Q13. Do you use session notes/client report forms (summative notes describing each writing center session) in your writing center?

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 68 ●

Yes

●

No Condition: If No is selected. Skip To: End of Survey.

Q14. Do you share your session notes internally (with your staff) or externally (outside of the center)? ●

Yes, we share our session notes

●

No, we do not share our session notes Condition: If No is selected. Skip To: Do you conduct training on session notes?

Q15. If you share your session notes/Client Report Forms externally (outside your center), whom do you share them with? (check all that apply) ●

Students/clients

●

Instructors

●

Other external stakeholders (Deans, RAs, Counseling etc.)

●

By student/client request

●

Other

Q16. If you share your session notes/client report forms internally (with your staff), how do you do this? (check all that apply) ●

Tutors can review previous notes from other sessions

●

We share representative notes among tutors

●

The Director/Administrator reviews notes and reports out findings to staff

●

Other

Q17. Do you conduct training on session note completion for tutors? ●

Yes

●

No

Q18. If you conduct training on session note completion for tutors, please describe the training and its aims: Q19. I inherited my session note form/questions from a previous administrator ●

Yes

●

No Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18, No 3 (2021) www.praxisuwc.com

Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 69 Q20. I amend the session note form questions/language: ●

Once a semester

●

Once a year

●

Once every other year

●

Once every 2 - 5 years

●

Never

Session note research and assessment Please identify to what extent you agree or disagree with the following statement about session note use in your center: Q21. Though session notes are used in my writing center, I have not examined the process closely.

Strongly Agree

Agree

Neutral

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

Q22. I currently do research/assessment on my session notes ●

Yes

●

No Condition: If No is selected. Skip To: I would like to do research or assessment on session notes.

Q23. Please describe your research/assessment on session notes.

Q24. I would like to do research or assessment with session notes. ●

Strongly agree

●

Agree

●

Somewhat agree

●

Neither agree nor disagree

●

Somewhat disagree

Q25. Session notes are an important element of tutor development. ●

Strongly agree

●

Agree

●

Somewhat agree

●

Neither agree nor disagree Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18, No 3 (2021) www.praxisuwc.com

Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 70 ●

Somewhat disagree

Q26. I am unsure of how to use session notes effectively in research/assessment. ●

Strongly agree

●

Agree

●

Somewhat agree

●

Neither agree nor disagree

●

Somewhat disagree

Q27. I would like to join a multi-institutional research project on session notes. If so, we would love to contact you! ●

Definitely yes

●

Probably yes

●

Might or might not

●

Probably not

●

Definitely not

Institutional data collection Q28. For our grant, we are collecting artifacts related to the practice of using session notes. Here, please attach a BLANK session note form, as a screen shot, or share the questions on your session note form in a .doc or .docx file.

Q29. If you have a second form only, please attach a BLANK session note form, as a screen shot, or share the questions on your session note form in a .doc or .docx file.

Q30. I certify that I have the authority to upload these writing center session notes. ●

Yes

●

No

Q31. We are also collecting session notes from writing centers in Higher Education Institutions. Attach a single file (.csv or .xls) with all session notes from your institution. All identifying information must be redacted prior to upload.

Q32. I certify that I have redacted identifying information in these writing center session notes. ●

Yes

●

No

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 71

Appendix D: Codes

Original codes

Count

Revised codes

Count

Institution name

41

Institution name

41

Paper/electronic/unknown

15/25/1

Paper/Electronic/Unknown

15/25/1

Single/combined

35/6

Session Note Only/Combined Intake and Session Note

35/6

Client Name

33

Client name

33

Client Email

4

Client email

4

Client ID

6

Client ID #

6

Date

36

Date

36

Time

28

Time

28

Length

25

Session Length

25

Previous visits

9

Previous visits

9

Writing only

15

REMOVED

Writer and tutor complete

1

REMOVED

Reason for visit

1

REMOVED

Email opt in

1

REMOVED

Publicity

2

REMOVED

Ferpa

1

REMOVED

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Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 72 Language

3

Client Language

Gender

1

REMOVED

Age

1

REMOVED

First Generation

1

REMOVED

Client year

6

Client Year

6

Client major

7

Client Major

7

Classification

1

REMOVED

Additional programs

1

REMOVED

Course name or number

21

Course name or number

Writing intensive?

1

REMOVED

Professor name

18

Professor name

Referral

2

REMOVED

Copy of notification

5

Notification option

23

Topic

5

Project info

29

Type of project (open)

21

Type of project (checklist)

6

Due date

9

Due date

9

Copy of assignment?

7

Copy of assignment sheet?

7

Writing stage

5

Writing stage

5

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3

21

18

Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey • 73 Length of paper

1

REMOVED

Matched consultation?

1

REMOVED

Client focus open text

5

Client focus

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METACOGNITION AND TRANSFER: A CROSS-INSTITUTIONAL STUDY OF WRITING CENTER CLIENTS AND NON-CLIENTS Jared Featherstone James Madison University feathejj@jmu.edu Abstract

Building upon the research on metacognition and transfer in the fields of writing studies and writing centers, the following crossinstitutional study examines the relationships among writing center experiences, classroom experiences, and student perception of transfer. The study focuses on three particular classifications of metacognition, as developed in Gorzelsky et al.’s taxonomy: monitoring, control, and constructive metacognition. The central research questions framing the current study are as follows: 1) Do university students perceive themselves as engaging in transfer of metacognitive skills across writing contexts? 2) Is there a difference in students' perception of transfer facilitated by classroom experiences in comparison with writing center experiences? The study confirms some of the findings of prior research (Bromley et al.) that indicate university students are engaging in multiple forms of transfer but offers some distinctions and variations among sites, contexts, and types of metacognitive transfer. The data indicates that writing centers might be sites that facilitate more monitoring and control of revision-related transfer and foster the cumulative, encompassing phenomenon of constructive transfer more than classroom activity alone. However, students perceive classrooms to be the primary source of transfer related to assignment requirements. The largest difference in student perception across all types of transfer was that writing center clients more strongly perceived themselves to engage in classroom-related transfer than non-clients.

Introduction One of the most fundamental institutional pressures on writing centers is the need to provide evidence to show that the work they do in writing center sessions has an effect on the students who visit.

In the most general sense, administrators and leaders want the student to learn a writing-related skill during the session and be able to apply that skill later while working on their writing task. Even better, they will learn skills they can apply to various future writing tasks. To put this another way, institutions and writing centers themselves hope that their student clients will engage in transfer. The problem with assessing writing center interactions for transfer is that student writing processes are complicated by numerous variables that are difficult to track. Writing takes place under varying conditions with varying levels of preparation and expertise. It is very difficult, under typical student writing conditions, to capture a student in the act of transfer. On the other hand, efforts to study writing phenomena under controlled experimental conditions are faced with the objection that students placed under

such atypical writing conditions do not yield authentic writing performances.

In the university context, transfer has been studied in relation to classrooms and writing centers (Devet).

Although we cannot control the innumerable variables that influence student writing processes, it is important to understand whether students are engaging in transfer. In addition, in the age of rigorous assessment and constrained budgets, it is critical to know whether particular university contexts, such as writing classrooms or writing centers, are more likely to facilitate transfer among students.

Writing centers have only begun formal study of transfer relatively recently in writing center history, though a range of scholars are demonstrating that writing centers are a fruitful setting in which to study and promote writing transfer. In this literature, the concept of metacognition, the ability to be consciously aware of one’s thinking and choices, emerges as a key component of transfer, one that scholars are beginning to analyze and operationalize in the teaching of writing.

Although the field of composition did not gain momentum in studying transfer until the first decade of the 2000s (Carillo), they drew upon the foundational research of David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon from educational psychology (Devet). The bridge between composition’s work on transfer and writing center scholarship was Rebecca Nowacek’s influential Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act, in which she includes a section of a chapter noting the potential for writing centers to build students’ capacity for transfer. In that section, she identifies two roles for writing center consultants. She sees them as “handlers,” who assist students in becoming agents of integration in a variety of ways, including helping them activate existing genre knowledge (137-138). Nowacek also sees the consultants as agents of integration in their own right in that, “the work of helping tutors to become effective handlers may also help tutors become more effective agents in their own writing” (138).

Given the mounting interest from composition studies and the identifying of writing centers as transfer sites by Nowacek and others, Bonnie Devet published a comprehensive “primer” to inform writing center directors of the important work being done on transfer

Metacognition and Transfer: A Cross-Institutional Study of Writing Center Clients and Non-Clients • 78 and the relevance of that work for writing centers.

Devet traces the history of transfer theory and research, describing two influential lineages: educational psychology and composition studies.

Overall, Devet assesses educational psychology’s contribution to be its thorough analysis of “the cognitive nature of transfer” (128) and the establishment of terminology to understand the various shades of transfer (122-126). In shifting to the later contributions of composition scholars to the study of transfer, Devet notes groups of scholars working on particular aspects of writing transfer, including writer dispositions, process, rhetorical concepts, and genre.

From composition, Devet moves to writing centers, and, like Nowacek, advocates strongly for writing centers as transfer sites, asserting, “transfer studies and writing centers are made for each other” (138).

Susan Hanh and Margaret Stahr studied transfer performed by clients by adding a question to their writing centers’ client intake forms, a question that would prime clients to consider transfer and potentially make them more receptive to transfer talk during the session: “Does the assignment you want to work on remind you of any other assignments you’ve ever written? Be as specific as you can be.” The question was designed to initiate some backward transfer, transfer from past writing situations to the present situation, before the start of the session, reframing the way students are looking at the assignment and, perhaps, themselves as writers. The central findings from analyzing client responses aligned with Elizabeth Wardle’s foundational transfer study of first-year writers in that students were typically unaware of the ways in which aspects of one writing task can be applied in another writing context. A majority of respondents in Hanh and Stahr’s study left the transfer question blank or simply answered “no.” Even among assignments for the same course, Hanh and Stahr conclude, “instructors’ assignment sequencing is not always visible to our students” (13). Because of this finding and findings indicating transfer can increase when prompted (Nowacek), they argue that tutors need specific training in transfer. Like Jody Cardinal, Hanh and Stahr argue for “bookending” writing center sessions, prompting for backward transfer at the beginning and prompting for forward transfer, transfer from the present situation to a future writing situation, at the close. Another distinction, one that resonates with the link Devet and Dana Lynn Driscoll and Jennifer Wells make between transfer and student dispositions, is that writers have varying receptivity to transfer.

Driscoll and Wells define dispositions as “individual, internal qualities that may impact transfer” (para. 1). The link between transfer and dispositions in writing center work is also the focus of a mixedmethods study by Pam Bromley, Kara Northway, and Eliana Schonberg, who used 2270 exit surveys and 37 focus groups to conduct an in-depth analysis of how students engage in transfer after writing center sessions. By having a larger data set and focusing on client perceptions of transfer, Bromley et al. present more convincing evidence that the writing tutors who worked with these clients were successfully filling the “handler” role described by Nowacek. Specifically, the client data showed evidence of near transfer (transfer that happens in a similar context), far transfer (transfer that happens in a different context), and high-road transfer (transfer that is fully conscious). In addition, clients indicated that they were “transferring knowledge to their general writing practices” (1).

Significantly, the instances of high-road transfer, the most deliberate and metacognitive form of transfer, were common in Bromley et al.’s data. This trend, along with explicit discussion in the focus groups, led them to consider the importance of metacognitive awareness, confidence, and dispositions in transfer research. In the focus group data, the researchers found strong evidence for the development of metacognitive awareness by clients, newfound awareness that was directly attributed to writing center sessions. They make the link from these breakthroughs and the development of metacognitive awareness to the dispositions of student writers, as defined by Driscoll and Wells. This finding is also significant in light of the 2011 Framework for Postsecondary Success in Writing, a set of recommendations developed by the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and National Writing Project (NWP) that highlight the importance of eight habits of mind, one of which is metacognition, in the teaching of writing. More recently, Kathy Rose and Jillian Grauman, through their study of the role of motivational scaffolding and transfer in writing center sessions, found that writing tutors can influence aspects of a writer’s dispositions, such as self-efficacy and self-regulation.

Although writing center scholarship has not fully explored this link between transfer and metacognition, recent work in composition studies is finding the connection productive. Dianna Winslow and Phil Shaw conducted a qualitative study of students in linked firstyear courses that assigned writing. Winslow and Shaw’s study is in some ways parallel to the Bromley et al.

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Metacognition and Transfer: A Cross-Institutional Study of Writing Center Clients and Non-Clients • 79 study except that the classroom faculty were acting as “handlers” instead of the writing tutors. The courses included writing, reflection, and discussion tasks to enhance metacognition in students. In addition, explicit discussion of metacognition “practices and concepts,” specifically those elucidated by Raffaella Negretti (2012) in her longitudinal study of metacognitive awareness in student writers, took place in the classrooms during Winslow and Shaw’s study. As in Bromley et al.’s writing center study, Winslow and Shaw’s study of students in first-year writing courses also found a correlation between metacognition and high-road transfer. In addition, they found that metacognition cultivates “interdisciplinary thinking” and an increased sense of agency among student writers.

The work of Gwen Gorzelsky, Dana Lynn Driscoll, Joe Paszek, Ed Jones, and Carol Hayes also supports the strong link between metacognitive awareness and transfer in college student writers.

Through studying student papers and reflective writing, and by interviewing 123 students from four universities, Gorzelsky et al. created a “taxonomy” of the various subcomponents of metacognition, in order to understand how it is developed and practiced. The subcomponents identified were person, task, strategy, planning, monitoring, control, and evaluation. In recognizing a “cumulative” development of metacognition over time, Gorzelsky et al. introduces the term “constructive metacognition” to describe an advanced level of metacognition in which students exhibit metacognition explicitly across a variety of writing tasks and contexts (233-234). As they explain, constructive metacognition “unites most of the other metacognitive components and subcomponents” (234).

In their recommendations for teachers and writing program administrators, Gorzelsky et al. offer suggestions that can be directly applied in writing centers. They encourage teachers to “model and elicit the metacognitive moves described in our taxonomy” (Gorzelsky et al. 238), a role that writing consultants, with the necessary training, could take in writing center sessions.

Although Bromley et al., Hanh and Stahr, and Cardinal make moves in the directions recommended

by Gorzelsky et al., there is a need for more systematic and specific research exploring the specific mechanisms of metacognition and how they support transfer in writing centers. Responding to this need and building upon my previous research studying the connections among writing, metacognition, tutoring, and mindfulness (Featherstone, Barrett, and Chandler), the current study examines transfer in writing centers

through the particular subcomponents of metacognition. Specifically, I explored three particular classifications of metacognition, as developed in Gorzelsky et al.’s taxonomy: monitoring, control, and constructive metacognition. Because transfer research is happening in both classroom and writing center contexts, my questionnaire attempts to differentiate between students’ classroom and writing center transfer experiences, a comparison that has not yet emerged in the transfer research literature. The research questions framing the current study are as follows: 1. Is there a difference in students' perception of transfer facilitated by classroom experiences in comparison with writing center experiences?

2. How do student perceptions of transfer vary according to particular components of metacognition (monitoring, control, constructive metacognition)?

Methods With Institutional Review Board approval, I administered a questionnaire to 1241 university students at two large state universities during the spring semester of 2019. One of the institutions is in an urban setting, has more commuter students, and offers more distance programs. The other institution is in a rural/suburban setting, has more on-campus students, and offers fewer distance programs. Both institutions have writing centers that offer both online and face-toface appointments. One writing center is entirely staffed by graduate students and the other staffed mostly by undergraduates.

Participants in the study were self-selected, as the recruitment email was sent to the entire student populations of both institutions. The academic year of the respondents was approximately 27% freshman, 21% sophomore, 21% junior, 21% senior, 5% master’s level graduate student, and less than 1% doctoral level graduate student. Approximately 85% of respondents identified as female, 13% as male, and 1% as gender variant/non-conforming. In terms of race and ethnicity, approximately 64% of respondents identified as White, 15% as Black, 8% as Asian, and 7% as Hispanic.

The voluntary, anonymous digital recruitment emails and questionnaire links were distributed to students via two means. First, a bulk email message was sent out to all undergraduate students through official message distribution channels. Because it is statistically possible to have a proportionally low number of student respondents who have not visited

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Metacognition and Transfer: A Cross-Institutional Study of Writing Center Clients and Non-Clients • 80 the writing center at their institution, a second wave of recruitment emails went out through the respective universities’ WC Online database client email function.

This database allows users to make writing center appointments and stores session data for writing center use. By sending an additional recruitment email through WC Online, the research study data would have more of a balance between writing center clients and non-clients.

In both distribution methods, therefore, a voluntary response sampling method was used, which creates a biased sample because the self-selecting participants may have been motivated by strong feelings about the subject matter. This non-probability sampling is not likely to produce results generalizable to the population (Dwyer and Bernauer). This is a clear limitation of the study. However, potential biases related to the subject matter itself were perhaps mediated by the fact that many participants were likely motivated by the advertised chance to enter a drawing to win a gift card by completing the questionnaire.

The questionnaires were distributed during the second half of the spring 2019 semester because most courses that require writing would have assigned the projects by that point. In addition, that point in the semester also gives more time for students to have visited the writing center. Because the current study is comparing student perceptions of both of these contexts, this timing was important.

The questionnaires were designed using the Qualtrics survey system, as it is available to faculty at my institution and is capable of storing, analyzing, and visualizing data. Using plain language to avoid confusion or leading, the questionnaire contained questions asking students to self-assess their experience of the three chosen subcategories of metacognition identified in Gorzelsky et al.’s taxonomy using 4-point Likert Scale responses about their experiences in writing classrooms and writing centers. The Likert Scale used strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree as options. The questionnaire also asked for basic demographic information about academic standing, gender identification, race/ethnicity, and linguistic background. No pre-test was conducted to validate the questionnaire. However, the questionnaire was evaluated by a university research design consultant and revised before distribution.

The questionnaire items were designed to measure student’s perception of three chosen aspects of metacognition from Gorzelsky et al.’s taxonomy: monitoring, control, and constructive metacognition.

Gorzelsky et al. define monitoring as “evaluating one’s cognition and efforts toward a project,” control as “the

choices one makes as the result of monitoring,” and constructive metacognition as “reflection across writing tasks and contexts, using writing and rhetorical concepts to explain choices and evaluations and to construct a writerly identity” (226). These three subcomponents of metacognition were chosen from the eight identified by Gorzelsky et. al. for three reasons. The first was simplification. Attempting to study all of the metacognitive subcomponents in a single questionnaire might overburden both the participants and the research. A second reason was that constructive metacognition is a “cumulative process” (232) that “emerges from student’s integration of other metacognitive subcomponents” (232). As for monitoring and control, those interrelated aspects of metacognition mirror the two major components of self-regulated learning (Nilson; Zimmerman), which has been identified as a strong indicator of academic success (Nilson).

The following items from the questionnaire prompt the participants to consider their experiences with the subcomponents of monitoring and control.

The same questions were asked about writing center experiences. The pairs of questions were meant to tease out the distinction between these two related components.

In one or more of my classes, I learned to become more aware of how I write. monitoring I was able to use this awareness in a different writing context, such as an assignment for another class or a workplace writing task. control In one or more of my classes, I learned how to determine whether my writing met the requirements of the writing assignment. monitoring I was able to use this method of evaluating my work against the writing requirements in a different writing context, such as an assignment for another class or a workplace writing task. control In one or more of my classes, I learned how to make revisions to my writing on my own.

(Revision includes actions such as organizing, adding support, removing unnecessary content, adding transitions.) monitoring I was able to use one or more revision approaches in a different writing context, such as an assignment for another class or a workplace writing task. control

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Metacognition and Transfer: A Cross-Institutional Study of Writing Center Clients and Non-Clients • 81 The following items from the questionnaire prompt the participants to consider their experiences with the concept of constructive metacognition: Because of my writing experiences in one of my classes, I am generally able to approach new writing tasks effectively.

Because of my writing experiences in one of my classes, I generally think of myself as a capable writer who can adapt to new writing situations.

Because the student participants’ interpretation of the questions and writing experiences were likely to vary, the questionnaire items were pointing toward different ways in which students might experience monitoring, control, and constructive metacognition. In addition, when terms like “context” or “revision” were used, examples were given to reduce the chances of participants working from vague or faulty understandings of the terms, since both of these terms are subject to varying interpretation and misunderstanding among students.

Results The data in Table 1 (Appendix A) shows the questions about monitoring, control, and constructive metacognition down the left column. Under context, there are three variations. The first context, “Class + WC,” consists of writing center clients rating their classroom experience with these indicators of metacognitive transfer. The second context, “Class,” consists of non-clients of the writing center rating their classroom experience with these indicators of metacognitive transfer. The third context, “WC,” consists of writing center clients rating their experience of metacognitive transfer indicators in connection with writing center sessions. Following the contexts are the percentages and numbers for each of the choices in the 4-point Likert Scale.

Students perceived themselves to be engaging in transfer as a result of classroom and writing center experiences. Across the categories, approximately 85%95% of participants chose Strongly Agree or Agree in ranking their experience of the metacognitive transfer components. Most students surveyed do perceive themselves as engaging in the metacognitive transfer components of monitoring, control, and constructive metacognition. The data indicate trends of perceived differences among the writing center and classroom contexts and among the metacognitive components within and across contexts.

For the monitoring and control questions about awareness of process, there was minimal difference

between participant ratings of the classroom and the writing center. However, in the monitoring question about assignment requirements, participants rated the classroom experience about 4% higher in the Strongly Agree category. Another difference can be seen in participant ratings of monitoring and control questions about revision, where the participant rankings of writing center experiences were approximately 3-4% higher in the Strongly Agree choice. A similar difference can be seen in participant rankings of the questions about constructive metacognition, where students rated the writing center approximately 3% higher than classroom experiences in the Strongly Agree choice.

In terms of comparing the student perception of the three components of metacognition, additional patterns emerge. In the Strongly Agree category, students always rate the monitoring experiences higher than the control experiences.

The largest difference in student ratings was not between writing center and classroom transfer experiences but between the classroom experiences of students who had been to the writing center and those who had not been to the writing center. Across the metacognitive transfer questions, students who visited the writing center rated their classroom transfer experiences 11% higher on average in the Strongly Agree category than students who had not visited the writing center. The widest difference was in the monitoring question about awareness of process, in which writing center clients rated their classroom transfer experiences 15% higher than non-clients in the Strongly Agree category.

Discussion

The data indicating that students perceive themselves engaging in the metacognitive transfer components of monitoring, control, and constructive metacognition, in both writing classrooms and writing centers, is encouraging. It suggests that faculty, writing tutors, and, perhaps, peers are facilitating rhetorical and genre awareness in students, acting as “agents of integration” (Nowacek), and the findings are consistent with Bromley et al.’s cross-institutional study of writing center clients, who perceived themselves engaging in multiple types of transfer.

Importantly, the students rated the writing center higher than the classroom for monitoring and control questions about revision. In many ways, writing centers are revision centers, because, more often than not, students arrive with a working draft of their assignment. Many classroom writing assignments do not permit revisions once the writing is submitted, so

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Metacognition and Transfer: A Cross-Institutional Study of Writing Center Clients and Non-Clients • 82 the writing center is a student's chance to get feedback and implement changes based on that feedback before submitting the finished product to their professor.

Without a history of revision instruction from their high school teachers or college professors, the writing center might be the primary place for students to understand revision beyond surface edits and to learn transferrable strategies for approaching revision.

Although many writing centers might offer help with brainstorming and prewriting, our primary work seems to be in the business of revision. To cast writing centers as revision centers draws emphasis to the gap we fill in the lives of student writers and also to the fact that most of writing is, in fact, revision, an emphasis that might help communicate the message that writing is not over when the first draft is complete.

As with revision, the writing center might also be a logical place for students to gain the perspective needed for constructive metacognition, a component of metacognition for which participants also rated the writing center higher in the Strongly Agree category.

Because constructive metacognition involves the conscious application of skills across contexts, it is significant that the writing center is physically and ideologically positioned outside of a particular classroom or course. In addition, most writing tutors are generalists, meaning that they are not required to have specific course or disciplinary knowledge. Their approach is to begin from basic genre and rhetorical awareness. In modeling these approaches and guiding students, the tutors are, in many ways, scaffolding the development of constructive metacognition. This would be especially true for repeat clients of the writing center. Considering that constructive metacognition is held as an advanced level of metacognition, one that enables student writers to reflect upon “their texts, strategies, and sense of writerly identity across a series of writing tasks and contexts” (Gorzelsky et al., 216), this finding can inform tutor education and the ways in which we explain our role within the university.

Considering the students’ higher rating of monitoring experiences over control experiences, across contexts, Wardle’s findings about transfer in First-Year Composition are reinforced. Wardle noted that although the students were able to see “generalizable” aspects of their first-year writing course, they did not identify opportunities to apply them in other courses. In the current study, we see a similar difference play out. Students might become aware of issues or skills because of interactions with a professor or writing tutor but, because most of the work of writing inevitably occurs when the student is

alone and without resources, the control or implementation may often suffer. This finding helps to explain why writing tutors should emphasize “next steps” and revision plans for student writers.

The most striking finding of the study is that students who visit the writing center perceive themselves as engaging in more classroom transfer of writing skills. This speaks to the complementary nature of classroom and writing centers in the teaching of writing, but it also reveals that writing centers may have more indirect influence or “side effects” on student writers than we realize. This finding suggests that students think differently about their classroom experience after writing center encounters. They see opportunities for transfer. This kind of indirect effect of writing center use might be difficult to assess, but it puts writing center work into the wider context of student learning. It suggests that we should be looking at the role of writing centers in the broader ecology of student writing development.

One explanation for writing center clients rating their classroom transfer experiences on average 11% higher than non-clients, is that students who visit the writing center gain awareness of genre, rhetorical situation, and process, which allows them to see opportunities for transfer in their classroom experiences. Students who visit the writing center are already more conscientious about their writing and the need to improve it, so they are alert to opportunities for improvement in both settings. Importantly, the widest margin of difference, 15% on the monitoring question, for students who visited the writing center, is connected to process. As noted, writing centers, being mostly revision centers, focus on process and revision, so this trend may be a reflection of the influence that writing center encounters have on the ways students think about writing. Again, we have a compelling indirect effect of writing center encounters on student writers. This finding warrants additional research about the impact of writing centers on students’ perceptions of their classroom experiences.

The findings of this study also raise a number of questions. The first question is whether the students’ perceptions are accurate. Without seeing the writing tasks and knowing more about the individual writers’ choice, we cannot be certain that they are indeed engaging in transfer. Also, because the study does not distinguish between positive transfer and negative transfer, it is possible that some of the transfer students are perceiving is problematic. For example, a student might transfer a stylistic feature learned in a creative writing course to a research paper for a biology course where it is not appropriate.

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Metacognition and Transfer: A Cross-Institutional Study of Writing Center Clients and Non-Clients • 83 As noted in the results, there was minimal difference between participant ratings of the classroom and writing center for the monitoring and control questions about awareness of process. Writing centers typically engage with student writers in process, so this is not surprising. In terms of the classroom, the clash between expectations of one professor and another, or high school writing standards with college writing standards, might force a student into a sudden awareness of their process. Professor expectations might also play a role in the students’ monitoring of assignment expectations, as they rated their classroom experiences about 4% higher in the Strongly Agree category. Students often view assignments as a matter of pleasing the professor by catering to their personal preferences about writing. It makes sense that they might think of the classroom first. However, the small 4% difference also indicates that students might consider the writing center as a place that helps with “translating” the professor’s requirements (Harris).

Conclusion The current study confirms some of the findings of prior research (Bromley et al.) that indicate university students are engaging in multiple forms of transfer but offers some distinctions and variations among sites, contexts, and types of metacognitive transfer. The data indicates that writing centers as revision centers are sites that facilitate more monitoring and control of revision-related transfer and foster the cumulative, encompassing phenomenon of constructive transfer more than classroom activity alone. However, students perceive classrooms to be the primary source of transfer related to assignment requirements. The largest difference in student perception across all types of transfer was that writing center clients more strongly perceived themselves to engage in classroom-related transfer than non-clients.

This suggests that writing centers are influencing the ways student writers think about their classroom experiences. In considering differences among the transfer components studied, monitoring was consistently rated higher than control, indicating the potential need for additional instruction or tutoring to facilitate the application of transfer for students, a finding and recommendation similar to those found in Wardle’s study.

The study raises several important considerations for future research. Due to the voluntary response sample and the self-reported nature of the data, this study needs to be triangulated with qualitative and nonself-reported data. In addition, because this study only focused on three of the eight components of

metacognition, a more comprehensive study might compare student perceptions of those additional components in writing centers and classrooms, perhaps gaining some understanding of the ways in which they are interrelated. Because the variation between classroom transfer experiences of writing center clients and non-clients was the widest in the data set, this seems like a promising avenue for future transfer research. Both writing centers and classroom instructors could benefit from understanding more about the perspectives students may be gaining from writing center encounters and how those perspectives enable them to understand their classroom experiences differently.

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Carillo, Ellen. C. “The Evolving Relationship Between Composition and Cognitive Studies: Gaining Some Historical Perspective on Our Contemporary Moment.” Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing, edited by Patricia Portanova et al., The WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado, 2017, pp. 39-55. https://doi.org/10.37514/PERB.2017.0032.2.02.

Devet, Bonnie. “The Writing Center and Transfer of Learning: A Primer for Directors.” The Writing Center Journal, vol 35, no 1, 2015, pp. 119-151. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43673621.

Driscoll, Dana Lynn., and Jennifer Wells. “Beyond Knowledge and Skills.” Composition Forum, 26, 2012. http://compositionforum.com/issue/26/beyondknowledge-skills.php Featherstone, Jared., et al. “The Mindful Tutor.” How We Teach Writing Tutors, edited by Karen Johnson and Ted Roggenbuck, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, 2019. https://wlnjournal.org/digitaleditedcollection1/Feathe rstoneetal.html Gorzelsky, Gwen., et al. “Cultivating Constructive Metacognition: A New Taxonomy for Writing Studies.” Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer, edited by Chris Anson and Jessie Moore, The

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Hanh, Susan., and Margaret Stahr, “Some of These Things ARE Like the Others: Lessons Learned from StudentInspired Research About Transfer.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol 43, no 1-2, 2018, pp. 1017. https://wlnjournal.org/archives/v43/43.1-2.pdf.

Harris, Muriel. “Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors.” College English, vol 57, no 1, 1995, pp.

27-42. https://doi.org/10.2307/378348 Negretti, Raffaella. “Metacognition in Student Academic Writing: A Longitudinal Study of Metacognitive Awareness and Its Relation to Task Perception, SelfRegulation, and Evaluation of Performance.” Written Communication, vol 29, no 2, 2012, pp. 142–179. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088312438529 Nowacek, Rebecca S. Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act (1st edition). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011.

O’Dwyer, Laura., and James Bernauer. Quantitative Research for the Qualitative Researcher. Sage Publications, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781506335674 Perkins, David., and Gavriel Salomon. “Transfer Of Learning.” In International Encyclopedia of Education.

Oxford, England: Pergamon Press, 1992. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2402396_T ransfer_Of_Learning Rose, Kathy and Jillian Grauman. “Motivational Scaffolding's Potential for Inviting Transfer in Writing Center Collaborations.” Transfer of Learning in the Writing Center: A WLN Digital Edited Collection, edited by Bonnie Devet and Dana Lynn Driscoll., 2020. https://wlnjournal.org/digitaleditedcollection2/Rosea ndGrauman.html Wardle, Elizabeth. “Understanding ‘Transfer’ from FYC: Preliminary Results of a Longitudinal Study.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol 31, no 1-2, 2007, pp.

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Winslow, Dianna., and Phil Shaw. “Teaching Metacognition to Reinforce Agency and Transfer in Course-Linked First-Year Courses.” Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing, edited by Patricia Portanova et al., Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado, 2017, pp. 191–209.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18, No 3 (2021) www.praxisuwc.com

Metacognition and Transfer: A Cross-Institutional Study of Writing Center Clients and Non-Clients • 85 Appendix A: Table Table 1: Comparison of student rankings of transfer components in classroom and writing center contexts Transfer Components

Context

Strongly Agree

Agree

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

I learned to become more aware of how I write.

Monitoring

Class+WC

61.25%

34.25%

3.5%

1.00%

Class

46.32%

47.07%

5.41%

1.20%

WC

46.47%

45.92%

5.16%

2.45%

Class+WC

53.75%

39.00%

5.00%

2.25%

Class

43.01%

48.12%

7.52%

1.35%

WC

43.75%

45.92%

8.42%

1.90%

Class+WC

54.50%

34.75%

8.50%

2.25%

Class

42.56%

44.51%

11.13%

1.80%

WC

45.78%

45.78%

5.99%

2.45%

I was able to use one or more revision approaches in a different writing context. Control

Class+WC

48.75%

38.50%

2.50%

Class

37.14%

47.67%

10.25% 12.78%

WC

41.69%

48.50%

I learned how to determine whether my writing met the requirements of the writing assignment.

Monitoring

Class+WC

51.63%

39.85%

7.02%

1.50%

Class

44.13%

48.34%

6.63%

0.90%

WC

40.44%

47.27%

9.29%

3.01%

I was able to use this method of evaluating my work against the writing requirements in a different writing context. Control

Class+WC

49.37%

39.60%

10.03%

1.00%

Class

39.46%

48.64%

10.24%

1.66%

WC

39.34%

47.81%

9.56%

3.28%

Because of these writing experiences, I am generally able to approach new

Class+WC

48.12%

40.85%

9.27%

1.75%

I was able to use this awareness in a different writing context. Control

I learned how to make revisions to my writing on my own. Monitoring

7.369%

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18, No 3 (2021) www.praxisuwc.com

2.41% 2.45%

Metacognition and Transfer: A Cross-Institutional Study of Writing Center Clients and Non-Clients • 86 writing tasks effectively.

Constructive

Class

38.40%

47.44%

12.05%

2.11%

WC

41.10%

45.75%

9.59%

3.56%

Because of these writing experiences, I generally think of myself as a capable writer who can adapt to new writing situations.

Constructive

Class+WC

49.50%

38.50%

10.75%

1.25%

Class

39.97%

48.72%

9.50%

1.81%

WC

42.23%

44.96%

10.08%

2.72%

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18, No 3 (2021) www.praxisuwc.com