Re: wc's, faculty referral, student resposibility

["Dr. Beth Rapp Young" <youngbr@email.uah.edu>]

I found Christina Murphy's speech to be somewhat puzzling, in that her
assumptions didn't seem to lead to her conclusion.  She said (and this
is from memory--my notes are at work, so pls. correct any
inaccuracies):

1. There are two ways of measuring "peerness": by status (hierarchical
authority) and by knowledge.

2. People help each other more when they are not peers--when one has
either greater status or greater knowledge than the other.

3. Students learn more when they get to change roles, and not be stuck
in the "tutee" role.

These assumptions seem to support the Bruffee model for writing
centers (which Christina Murphy called the "writing as therapy model"
for some reason--not a phrase I'd heard applied to Bruffee before).  

In this kind of multidisciplinary center, it could be argued that peer
consultants have greater authority than the writers/clients by virtue
of their receiving training, getting paid, etc.  (Though these
consultants will not have as much authority over the writer as the
teacher who assigns the grade.)  However, in this writing center, both
the peer consultant and the client have specialized knowledge: the
consultant in writing, the client in the discipline for which the
paper is written.  So for the Bruffee center, these people have the
incentive to help each other that comes from unequal levels of
knowledge, and the client gets to change roles with the consultant and
teach the consultant about biology or philosophy or history or
whatever.

In the model which Christina Murphy called "the wave of the future"
(though I'm not clear on how it differs from the Brown model, which
has been debated for at least the last 12 years), tutors are assigned
to "cover" specific classes.  So tutors have the edge on the tutees
both in terms of status (they get a special title, pay, etc.) and in
terms of knowledge (tutors are assigned to work with classes 
in their own disciplines, so they know at least as much about the
subject as the tutee).  The tutee would rarely get to "change roles"
with the tutor, because the tutor knows the subject alcready (though
I suppose the tutor could pretend not to know something, so as to test
the tutee's grasp of a concept).  

So if we accept what Christina Murphy said about the need for
role changing and acceptance of difference between consultant
and client, what's the advantage of the Brown model?

Christina Murphy also said that writing center directors need to face
the fact that there is no "content" to writing outside of a
discipline; good writing is discipline-specific.  But again, it seems
students would best learn that when they have an opportunity to see
writing in different disciplines.  Otherwise, they fall prey to the
same misguided assumptions about writing that faculty do when they
boast that "Writing in history [philosophy, chemistry, business] is
not like writing in philosophy [history, chemistry, business] because
we have to [be precise, support our claims, avoid wordiness]."

The experience of working with writers in different disciplines,
rather than being stuck in one discipline, is what attracts many of us
(students and faculty) to work in writing centers to begin with.

Dr. Beth Rapp Young
U of Alabama in Huntsville
YoungBR@email.uah.edu


On Sat, 2 Nov 1996, Deborah Burns wrote:

> Dear Twila: I'd like to examine the assumption that writing center tutoring
> is non-hierarchical.  Christina Murphy, in her keynote speech at the
> National Peer Tutoring Conference last week in OK, suggested that we need
> to challenge this assumption. She suggests  that tutors do possess skills
> and knowledge that their "tutees" do not have (and I hope I'm paraphasing
> correctly here), and that if this is true than we just can no longer deny
> the inherent hierachy in the tutor/tutee relationship. Indeed, we need to
> build a stronger, more academically "centered" writing center by building
> on the strengths of our tutor's specialized skills. Christina, if you're
> online, I hope I've done an accurate job of summarizing your point here, and
> I'd like to see some reactions to this argument and applied practice, a
> 
> practice we have been building on in our Writing Fellows Program at
> Merrimack College. Deb Burns, Merrimack College
>