Re: Tutor ethics

[tarversj@winthrop.edu (JO KOSTER TARVERS)]

WINTHROP UNIVERSITY                               Electronic Mail Message
                                        Date:     07-Nov-1996 08:40pm EDT
                                        From:     Josephine K. Tarvers
                                                  TARVERSJ
                                        Dept:     English
                                        Tel No:   (803) 323-4557

TO:  Remote Addressee                     ( _smtp%"wcenter@ttacs6.ttu.edu" )


Subject: Re: Tutor ethics

Glenda, I too recommend that my tutors push students a little, as Jeanne 
suggests. We have a little different situation than you seem to, since our 
tutors are split between graduate student assistants and part-time composition 
faculty (we used at one time to have fulltime faculty, but that was in the days 
before the Budget Crunch [kinda like a Nestle's Crunch, but ours has more 
nuts...:-)] So it's usually _older_ students coaching less experienced ones, and 
this has given us some persuasive leverage.

Our strategy is to say, "Well, when Dr. Wilcox's students have brought graded 
papers in here in past semesters, we've noticed that he always focuses on X, and 
your handling of X here isn't what he usually expects. What has he said about X 
in class to you?" And then we go from there. We do push, a little, and it helps 
that we're a smallish school and professors' reputations get around, so that 
even the freshmen quickly pick up some of the campus lore. For freshman comp 
papers, we have the resource of the comp program's grading rubric, and we can 
say to students, "Well, you know that the grading rubric your teacher uses says, 
"Y", and you haven't done that yet, so your teacher won't be able to give you 
higher than a C if you don't work on that. Do you want to talk about how you 
might do that?" 

Some students are resistant nonetheless, and we have a "Some fires can't be 
fought" philosophy about them. But we do conduct an editing session with the 
student. Our policy is then to write a conference note (a 3-part form) that 
says, "We discussed weaknessess in X and Y in this draft, but spent more time on 
editing for Z." Then, under the 'objectives' section on the note, we write, 
"Dana will decide what s/he wants to do about X and Y as well as addressing 
his/her editorial concerns before submitting the paper." This sometimes gets a 
little dicey since (following good advice from this list) we added a student's 
signature line at the bottom of the form, but only one student this entire term 
has refused to sign the form. [The student and teacher each get a copy of the 
form, while we retain one for our records.] 

Our experienced tutors particularly have had ethical concerns about these 
sessions--our compromise has been to staple a hand-written note to the teacher's  
copy from the tutor to the teacher saying in effect, "We know you're concerned 
about Y in your students' writing, but Johnny didn't seem convinced when we told 
him this. We would be happy to work with him further on this issue if you feel 
he needs more coaching." [It _was_ easier to write these notes when we had full 
faculty in the Center since it was a faculty-faculty conversation--no 
hierarchy.] We've had positive feedback from the several teachers we've needed 
to send such notes to, but we do feel guilty about going behind the student's 
back, so to speak. We decided after discussing the issue, however, that one of 
our missions is to help students and faculty communicate more effectively about 
what counts in writing, and we're going to keep writing our notes.

If anyone else has come up with a workable solution to this problem, there are 
at least nine of us here who would be happy to hear it!

Jo

-----------------
Jo Koster Tarvers
Department of English and Writing Center
Winthrop University
Rock Hill, SC 29733 USA
(803-323-4557 voice) (803-323-4837 fax)
tarversj@winthrop.edu
"Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday."