Re: confidentiality -Reply

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

I have to say that I'm disturbed by the tone of many of the messages
on this thread.  Probably my own messages should be included here.
But it seems, as other people have pointed out, that we're at
risk of falling into an unhelpful binary way of thinking.  

For example, many people have stated flatly that to send reports to
faculty shows that a wctr is the "handmaiden" of faculty, or "serving
faculty, not students." Or that this practice "infantalizes" students
or "treats them like children."

Setting aside the fact that these claims are awfully insulting
to those of us who do send notes to faculty (good grief, what do you
take us for? <g>), I'm not sure that any single practice, taken by
itself, reveals much about how students are treated, or how writing
centers are positioned within the university.

We could just as easily claim that NOT sending notes to faculty means
that we're opposed to collaboration, or that students/faculty/writing
center are on different "sides," or that we "own" students & don't
want to share, or that the writing center doesn't see itself as
sharing the university mission.  We could say, "No wonder faculty are
suspicious of writing centers!  Look how writing centers hide what
they do!" That would be equally silly.  (Particularly since so many of
us are also faculty.)

(This is sort of like the directive/nondirective comments on papers
debate.  Very specific or directive feedback can be easier for
writers to use, not in a prescriptive sense, but in the sense of
providing a springboard or model which the writer then can take as her
own.  Sue Dinitz and Jean Kiedaisch have done some fascinating
research in this area.  Yet the wctr truism still insists "no
directive comments.")

In actuality, most of what we do has several purposes.  We design
publicity materials to let people know about our wctr--but we also
hope to educate people about writing (that writing is a process, that
talking about writing is helpful, etc.)  We hope our centers will help
students become better writers, but we also want to create an
intellectual writers community, and support helpful writing practices 
on campus. We keep records not just for our own future planning, but
also for accountability, pedagogy (both of consultants and
clients--maybe faculty, too), and, perhaps, publicity.  And we
"serve," if you want to put it that way, not only student writers, but
the entire university. Not that we can't set priorities and determine 
practices accordingly, but we aren't playing some kind of zero-sum
game.  Students, and faculty, and writing centers, can all "win"--but
it'll be harder to achieve that if we cling to a black/white
worldview.

I was very intrigued by Joan's question: At what point do we think we
_must_ contact faculty?  (That was _your_ question, right Joan?)  

One possible answer: We must violate confidentiality when a client
is planning to involve the teacher (or other students, or us) in
something unethical.  

I can think of a situation that happened in our wctr not long ago,
when a student was told to write a letter of complaint.  The teacher
planned to mail all the student letters (as a way of broadening the
audience).  One student concocted a fraudulent story in the hopes of
getting some compensation from a manufacturer--first admitting to the 
fraud, and then, when the consultant questioned his ethics, insisting
that his story was true.  

What if the student had said _not_ to let the teacher know he'd been
to the wctr? Would you warn the teacher not to mail _any_ complaint
letters, thus depriving everyone of the wider audience?  If the
teacher asked for more information, would you give only the bare
outlines so as to protect the student's identity?  Or would you say
that if the student decides to commit fraud with an assignment, it
isn't up to us to stop him?  And what does that say about our own
ethics?  

I spoke with consultants about it, and we decided that if we didn't
speak up, we'd be partly responsible for fraud.  So I did talk to the
teacher, in general terms, being careful not to identify the student.
She figured out who it was--but I don't think she would have done so
if I hadn't alerted her to the problem.  And I think she decided to
let students mail their own letters (thereby giving them more
responsibility for their own writing, perhaps?) In a sense, we
violated that client's confidentiality, and I'm not 100% comfortable
with that.  On the other hand, if I had to do it over again, I'd
probably do the same thing.

Beth Young

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