Julia #6

I really enjoyed reading the Bean chapter, not only for the methods of helping students work through difficult text, but also for the way it made me think about the difficult texts the students often seem bent on producing. So often in helping a student through a paper, I feel my job it to remind them that their ideas expressed clearly are what will make an successful paper. I assumed it was lack of confidence in those ideas that made them feel like they had to pad every sentence with erudite language. But, it makes sense that because they've spent so much time wading through texts that they may have never really digested, they would try to mirror that impermeability.

I'll definitely think about this chapter next time I'm helping a student through a difficult reading, but I'll also think about it when asking a student to read through their own writing. Creating a distance by asking them to engage in conversation with themselves could help them both improve their writing skills and help encourage confident reading of fellow writers. This makes me think of the Iowa Workshop method - we work through each other's writing largely to learn to be better readers of our own writing. This seems a small jump to the writing center.

Comments

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