Blog Post #4 - Brittany Means


This week, as I was reading chapter 4 of Ryan Leigh and Liza Zimmereilli’s The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, I knew I wanted to focus on the following sentence: “As you work with individuals, your words and actions should convey sensitivity and understanding; each writer deserves to be treated fairly and with respect.” This feels like something that does not really not to be said, something that should be instinctual. But I am glad that it was included, and I think that it was necessary. Sometimes chapters like these can feel othering and like peering at people with experiences different from our own. So a bulleted list of ways to help writers who are visually and/or hearing impaired, or writers with learning disabilities or physical challenges, can carry a tone of, “This is how to deal with those people.” And that’s really uncomfortable to read or see published where you know other people will see and take it to heart. So a line reminding the reader of the respect they owe to every writer they work with really is necessary. I have a few students with learning disability who feel left behind in their courses, struggling to keep up. Knowing they and other students with similar struggles can come to this writing center where we’re all learning from this text, is comforting.

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 26, 2018 at 10:57 AM

    I had similar impulses when I read Chapter 4 on the Bedford Guide, Brittany. "The Writers *You* Tutor" can create a very us-versus-them mentality when thinking about the students across the table from us in the Writing Center. I was just diagnosed with combined-type ADHD last week (after feeling, for many years, that I was having a learning experience that was difficult but couldn't name), and it can feel very othering to encounter assessments of students with different disabilities/impairments that don't remember that those students are, in fact, people. I was glad to see that the Bedford Guide values respecting students through their difference.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ian Post #5

Maybe this is an odd tangent to pursue as a blog response, but one aspect of Phillip's writing that I wish Brice had gone into further detail about (assuming she had access to the information) was WHY Phillip got a B- on his assignment. From what I read, Phillip's personal story sounded endlessly interesting, and I thought his decision to structure this tale of his life using the narrative tradition (the four-act structure) of his culture was ingenious/appropriate, a merging of historical form with modern content. So, even if the writing of Phillip's piece wasn't perfect (Brice notes his control over the piece wasn't universal), it sounds both entertaining and heartfelt, and what's more, conceptually ambitious. Basically, knowing nothing about the professor in question, but given the loose, informal-seeming tone of this project, and given Phillip's obvious enthusiasm for the project (he wrote 12 pages when only five were expected), I was really surprised to ...
Read more

Ian Post #9

I think it's important for WC staff to perform research because, as Bedford points out, WC tutors have to compel their students to improve their writing even when we don't always know how best to compel them. Further research will hopefully continue to clarify how best to tailor a session to every student's individual needs, but for now I feel swaths of information are still missing. I feel this particularly acutely with my PhD statistics student. I've talked about the difficulties of working with a student who is producing a type of writing that feels fundamentally different to the writing I normally work with (so, writing that revolves around mathematical formulas instead of language analysis), and I'd be interested to see research conducted on how to best serve the writing of mathematicians. Although I'm trying my best with this student, in my heart of hearts, I cannot believe that I am truly helping her "grow" as a writer - each week I think I'...
Read more

Warren #9

Q: How important do you think it is for writing center staff to pursue writing center research? Why? What sorts of research could we propose for IWCC? I feel it's important for writing center staff to pursue research because research can be beneficial for tutors (and sometimes students). It has the potential to help tutors understand new pedagogical approaches and strategies, and develop ways to improve a writing center, to name a few. One of the challenges in conducting this research, particularly for those who are fairly new to writing centers, is to come to understand what areas of research are relevant. On the one hand, this can be accomplished by comparing the scholarship on writing centers with one's own tutoring experiences. On the other hand, tutors may want to come to their own understanding first of how a writing center functions (or doesn't function), and then search for those issues in the scholarship to see if they've been addressed. In either scenario, I...
Read more