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

Using Kairos to Mediate

by Serena Heath , Eastern Illinois University 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). Carolyn Miller offers another definition. We use kairos “to invent, within a set of unfolding and unprecedented circumstances, an action (rhetorical or otherwise) that will be understood as uniquely meaningful within those circumstances. The timely action will be understood as adaptive, as appropriate, only in retrospect” (xiii).

For the past two semesters, I have only worked part-time in the writing center.

As such, I felt like an outsider observing an environment I was not as familiar with as my co-consultants were, even during our semester of practicum.

Although I sometimes felt that this was to my disadvantage, I found I had an opportunity to learn.

We welcome students who are really excited about what they are writing about but cannot focus on a topic, as well as students who are irritable with their assignments or with life in general. For the purposes here, I will focus on what can happen in a really good session.

As an outsider, I noticed several things that threw off the time schedule on days when I was in the writing center but not working. When students come in having procrastinated or with only one hour before their papers are due, those situations throw off the schedule even more. But when these often-unashamed students tell us their dilemmas, we don’t have to turn them away coldly. We tell them that we will focus on only the most significant issues in the papers. In other words, we cannot make any promises that they will have stellar papers after seeing us. This is not the result we want, obviously, but I have seen consultants take these situations from bad to good very quickly by focusing on higher-order concerns in the time available. After those less-productive sessions, it is the consultants’ turn to look back retrospectively to see what they could have done better. As our directors did for us in our practicum sessions, we can guide these students, showing them more specifically in that moment that their procrastination–not the lack of time we have with them–is what is going to hurt them. As Klein mentioned, a combination of guidance and learning helps develop good writing habits for student-writers. We welcome students who are really excited about what they are writing about but cannot focus on a topic, as well as students who are irritable with their assignments or with life in general. For the purposes here, I will focus on what can happen in a really good session.

I have found from my observations that it is essential for a writing center consultant to try to build a strong teacherly ethos with students. They want to know they are working with a knowledgeable professional, or they might get

turned off. Students are in the writing center because they recognize they need help, and I am there to let them know I sympathize and I genuinely care about their papers. But even that empathetic stance is challenging.

Such was the case in my encounter with a student–I will call her “Julie”–who swore her professor did not “get her” and was grading her down because of mutual dislike. As tutors, we deal with that kind of issue quite a bit. As a professor once told me, students are “complicated human beings,” and conflicts often happen when students and teachers don’t see eye-to-eye. Encouraging students to come to a certain understanding, without having the teacher there to mediate that conversation, is quite difficult. The challenge of mediating an understanding also comes into play when we receive graded papers such as Julie’s. Unfortunately, Julie didn’t have an assignment sheet, so she could not tell me what her professor expected her to write about when I asked her at the beginning of the session. Regardless, she thought the teacher’s expectations were just, as she put it, “too much.”

In that moment, I had to deal with this issue diplomatically by addressing Julie’s concern without vilifying the professor. I decided to start with the professor’s comments and then go back to her paper. This spur-of-the moment choice turned out to be the best idea for that session. Since Julie had to include the source article with the assignment, it was immediately clear to me, as it was to her professor, that she did not understand how to paraphrase and summarize, as indicated by large swaths of the paper being circled and long marginal comments indicating that the writer needed to do something to avoid plagiarism. Her reaction to my suggestion that she paraphrase was less than positive, as I could see her attention or interest in the session was waning. She muttered something about nothing being wrong with the way she had written the paper and did not want to go through the entire thing herself to change it.

This is where I took interruptive action. Personally, I think taking a break from the table and introducing something different can be constructive when I reach the end of a student’s attention span in a writing center conference. The last thing we want student-writers to do, aside from walking out, is lose interest. I grabbed two or three of our citation handouts, so we could go over how to work with sources one-on-one. Some students appreciate the handouts because they are more visual learners, but, mostly, giving the students handouts is part of our practice of providing them something their professors often do not – oneon-one attention. In this case, the handout I gave her involved MLA citations and preventing plagiarism. Giving her a handout allowed me to direct Julie’s attention back to her original crisis. Each time I came to one of her teacher’s comments, I referred to the user-friendly handout in front of her. She had a series of “ah-ha!” moments and started writing furiously on scratch paper everything she had originally wanted to write. This time she paraphrased and cited her source material correctly with guidance from the handout and me.

Afterwards, Julie commented that her teacher’s comments weren’t “so bad after all” now that she knew that the professor’s intentions were not only to improve paper but to improve her writing overall. When I helped her decipher her teacher’s objective commentary in a way that helped her understand how to improve her writing, I made Julie realize that the person she previously viewed as an enemy was her ally. That lesson, above all, is one I hope sticks with her.

[To continue reading "Kairotic Moments in the Writing Center," please click on the links below]

Situating Our Rhetorical Practice–Tim Taylor ‹ Tutors Teaching Directors about Professionalism

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Spring 2009 (Volume 6 Issue 2) - Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Centers ›