Re: wc's, faculty referral, student resposibility

[Twila.Yates.Papay@Rollins.Edu]

Hi, Deb.  It was nice seeing you in Oklahoma City.  Actually, what
troubled my 9 peer writing consultants as we listened to Christina was 
their worry over either/or thinking. 

But let me respond.  Of course peer tutors know things clients don't
assuming we've trained them.  This was Bruffee's point (still is--and 
appeared even in his speech at the National Peer Tutoring Conference at 
Penn State).  The peer tutor is "expert" in writing strategies--and
collaboration, as we can't teach Writing Center work without teaching
tutors to collaborate, a skill few students have been taught.  (Witness 
student attitudes toward "peer groups" before learning methods of making 
them work.  My peer writing consultants begin writing, "What's wrong with 
peer groups?"  After they share the horrors--no time, people don't show up,
1 person does all the work, my ideas disappear, etc.--I say these are all 
failures of collaboration, what happens when people aren't doing it.  Those 
who do all the work are as guilty as those who do none.  Seeing how reading, 
conversation, relationships--everything--may be defined as collaboration--
peer tutors are ready to learn skills needed on the job and in their lives.

But clients also know things peer writing consultants do not.  Writers 
know the assignment, course material, history of the draft in process, research
s/he has done, what other class members have said, etc.  The client may be the
expert between the two on the discourse of the particular discipline.  So what
happens here is an exchange between peers.

What troubled my peer writing consultants was that such conversations would 
never take place in unequal relationships.  Then they'd be mini-teachers, and 
the client would never experience what the professional writer always has.  
Nor would peer tutors get to learn new things from clients, something we prize 
highly in the many Writing Centers using nonhierarchical models. (Of course, 
this only works if peer tutors are taught how, since much of their educations 
have been based on hierarchy.  But we're trying for more active learning.)

To put it another way, Deb, if you were to share an article draft with me,
and I were to show you an article of mine in draft, I would not consider this
a hierarchical situation, though one of us may be older and more experienced,
the other have more recent training in some specific area.  I'd see us as 2
professional equals responding to each other to provide support in developing 
the writing.  Nor would we take each others' responses as the final word.  It
would just be more audience input.  My WAC colleagues & I do this when we 
share our writing in Workshops, respond as lay audience, & work on revision.
We practice what happens in the Writing Center--and some peer groups--receiving 
general audience feedback to consider as we continue to write.

To get back to the peer consultants' response to either/or thinking, every year
at the National Peer Tutoring Conference (since the first at Brown in 1984), 
we've discussed the Brown model of writing fellows attached to a particular 
class v. the Bruffee model of 2 peers interacting, each bringing a different
kind of knowledge to the encounter.  Most of us have drawn on both models, 
adding other options as they seem to fit our campuses.

While the Bruffee model works best generally at Rollins, it is important 
that we work closely with faculty (who, by the way, nominate the 150 or 
so students per year from across the curriculum who apply to become peer 
consultants).  So we have the Adopt-a-Faculty Program(discussed at length in 
several conference presentations) to gather materials on what various faculty 
hope students will achieve, as well as to help peer writing consultants work 
on their research in disciplinary discourse.  This more broad-based approach 
lets faculty know peer consultants understand the nature of discourse generally
and the varying expectations within divisions and disciplines.

At the same time, there are occasions when having a peer consultant 
familiar with the material is useful.  I do this myself in Methods of 
Literary Study when students are having so much trouble mastering the 
theoretical material that their writing gets garbled.  Having someone 
besides me "translate" content and writing interactively helps, as Christina 
pointed out so effectively in her speech.  In this case students like knowing
others who made it through the course and can testify to having had similar 
trouble.  Though Rollins clients & faculty usually prefer peer conversation 
with a lay peer consultant, those who sometimes want a content-knowledgeable 
person can find that choice among our 38 consultants.  (But then, peer consul-
tants prefer to avoid dangers of taking ownership away from clients, so they 
find consultations where they know too much very dangerous.  They want to be 
sure the client gets to develop her own ideas--not someone else's.)

This is a long way of saying the key point:  Celebrate the diversity 
of Writing Centers!  I'm delighted that we have so many models to draw 
upon --and this listserv where we can always get fresh ideas for all our 
new ventures.

Twila Papay
Rollins College
 typapay@rollins.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
>