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Home » Archives » Fall 2009 (Volume 7 Issue 1) - Professionalization and the Writing Center, Part I

Nurturing Kairos-Consciousness

by Fern Kory, Eastern Illinois University The process of becoming a better writing consultant is just as incremental and recursive as the process of becoming a better writer. For that matter, so is the process of becoming a better writing center administrator. As Assistant Director of the Writing Center, I occupy a space one level “up” from consultant, but what that means in practical terms is that I am one step removed from the action. Students who come to our writing center work with consultants that the Writing Center Director and I have oriented and trained. We supervise the work of these writing consultants, but supervision is not x-ray vision, and we have no reason to believe that our position gives us a superior view of the action. For that matter, since the directors of our center do not work as consultants, and I (unlike Taylor) have never held a position as a peer tutor, I do not have as much direct, situated experience as Klein and Heath do after one semester or Black and McDuffie after two, though I have been Assistant Director of the Writing Center for eleven years now. Still, I do not feel superfluous as I orbit around consulting sessions and consultants. I look for ways to increase the likelihood that students who visit the writing center are assisted by consultants who are increasingly able to recognize kairotic moments.

Right-minded consultants prepare themselves for this moment as McDuffie did: they do not rest until they are satisfied that their methods align with their goals.

I like Benedikt’s description of kairos as “the right person doing the right thing at the right time and for the right reasons” (233). A big part of my job is to help each consultant become the right person for this job, starting at Orientation during which Taylor and I focus as much on “right reasons” as on procedures. As this suggests, our ideal consultant is not someone who consistently works through a pre-determined sequence of right actions–though we do have standard practices, cherished principles, and a process-oriented “visitation sheet” we ask consultants to use during sessions. These are important components of the scaffolding we provide to tutors-in-training. But that is not all that they will need.

The right thing to do in a particular consulting session is going to emerge from the right reasons in an “unprecedented” moment (White qtd. in Hawhee 14).

Right-minded consultants prepare themselves for this moment as McDuffie did: they do not rest until they are satisfied that their methods align with their goals. From that principled position, and with “intense awareness of occasion, audience and situational context” (Sipiora 15), consultants can seize the kairotic moment by using methods that are “practical and expedient” (9) and perhaps even unorthodox. Klein’s decision to take that writer’s draft away from her and “set it upside down on the other side of the table” does not obviously align with the statement in our current handbook that it is the writer, not the consultant, who owns the writing, but it does align with the principle behind it:

Klein intuited that the best way to help this particular writer take ownership of her writing was to abduct the draft to which she was in thrall.

Kairos has been described as “the right or opportune time to do something, or right measure in doing something” (Kinneavy 58). This plays out differently for writing center administrators than it does for consultants. As the pronouns in my section imply, I do not make as many unilateral, spontaneous, intuitive decisions about what to do and when to do it. I am one member of an administrative team, so my part in these decisions is necessarily more collaborative, deliberative, and externalized. This is fine since Taylor and I meet with consultants in various configurations (one-to-one, two-to-one, in groups, as a group) at regular intervals throughout their first year in the writing center.

Chronos is on our side, and we each have the benefit of the others’ intuitions to guide us in making decisions or learning from the decisions we have made.

In practice I have found that that the right time to intervene in a consulting session is very seldom “now,” only occasionally “later,” and often “never”–at least in the early stages, when consultants are gaining the experience that will help them get a feel for what does and does not work, with whom, and under what circumstances.

Sometimes being one member of a team does complicate our ability to create or respond to kairotic moments. We are still trying to figure out how to coordinate our blog posts so that we are not confusing our staff or excessively appropriating the public space of the blog to reflect on our writing center practice. Talking through possible strategies has been valuable and interesting.

In classical rhetoric, kairos is not just a matter of seizing the moment but of biding your time, of “knowing when to speak and when to be silent and knowing how much to say or how little to say” (Glover 16). My experience suggests that both aspects of Socrates’ “concept of the propriety of time” (qtd. in Glover 15) are vital to tutor training, particularly in relation to the supervision of tutors-in-training.

In practice I have found that that the right time to intervene in a consulting session is very seldom “now,” only occasionally “later,” and often “never”–at least in the early stages, when consultants are gaining the experience that will help them get a feel for what does and does not work, with whom, and under what circumstances. Like Boquet, “I don’t want tutors to fear mistakes–because they will make them. The real skill lies in figuring out what to make of those mistakes” (81). For directors of writing centers, the trick is to create situations in which consultants can own their answers to this question.

Intervention by invitation–whether during an individual conference or a meeting of the collective–creates a potentially kairotic moment in which we can consider a variety of “right reasons” for taking different kinds of action. In our weekly practicum meetings during the first semester, but also in individual conferences, weekly blog posts, and informal discussions with peers, consultants select challenges or issues they want to discuss. They set the agenda for their own learning by identifying those moments that they are already thinking or worrying about. Because “tutors often have a hard time identifying moments when decisions get made,” Taylor and I push for metacognition in discussion and in assignments, which include reflection memos, observation memos, and a philosophy of writing center consulting (Geller 20).

Hawhee describes kairos as a “mode of intervention” characterized by “a simultaneously interruptive and connective hooking-in to circulating discourses” (24). As administrators, Taylor and I are responsible for adding to the circulating discourses available to consultants and for helping them make connections among theories, principles, and practices. We set the agenda for practicum so that, through assigned readings and presentations, consultants learn more about the choices writers and consultants have in the context of a consulting session, and we try to get that information to them in a timely manner. Because English Language Learners are among our earliest visitors each semester, we have moved ELL-related readings closer to the front of the syllabus. In the past these had appeared around mid-term, partly because we worried about introducing complications (especially those related to how directive a tutor should be) before our consultants had a grip on “the basics.” At one time this looked like a sensible pedagogical progression to me, but it now seems obvious that this linear (and chauvinistic) vision of tutor training did not equip consultants with the theory (the “right reasons”) or the menu of practical possibilities that these tutors-in-training needed to work–and play–with the individual student writers they would meet, and to begin to develop their kairos-consciousness.

[To continue reading "Kairotic Moments in the Writing Center," please click on the links below] Right Place, Wrong Timing–Devin Black Using Kairos to Mediate–Serena Heath Situating Our Rhetorical Practice–Tim Taylor ‹ Mentoring Students with Special Circumstances

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Professional Development at the UWC: Three Personal Experiences ›