Re: Extra-curricular consulting

["Don Perkins" <dperkins@cottey.edu>]

Ms. Edwards,

We have a similar situation at my campus.  We have 350 
residential students and a writing center that is open posted 
hours during the day, evenings, and weekends.  Our total 
scheduled availability is about 24 hour per week.  We have three 
student writing consultants.

These folks are often approached in their suites or by phone during 
their off hours for help.

Sometimes a particular consultant has trouble saying "no."  I 
encourage consultants who are approached for after-hours help to set 
up times during wc hours.  I also encourage consultants to decline to 
give such after-hours help if they are inconvenienced.  However, I 
have allowed them to give such help on a limited basis as part of 
their paid wc work if they document such help with the forms we use 
in the center.

I don't know to what degree this contributes to the dead times in the 
writing center (those times during which consultants are available 
but not seeing students).  These dead times do concern me.  We have 
conducted surveys to determine the hours that students would prefer 
the center to be open, but these have not solved the problem.

I hope this is of some help.

Don Perkins
Cottey College Writing Center

Date:          Thu, 03 Sep 1998 07:27:07 -0700 
From:          "Lynnell Edwards" <ledwards@cu-portland.edu> To:       
     wcenter@ttacs6.ttu.edu Subject:       Extra-curricular 
consulting Reply-to:      wcenter@ttacs6.ttu.edu


colleagues:

I have a curious situation that may or may not be a problem, but I would
like some responses from any of you who might have a similar situation.  I
have a slight suspicion that the writing consultants in our center may be
doing so much advising outside the time they spend in the center that it is
actually undermining use of the Center itself.  Let me explain:  Concordia
is a very small campus with a small residential population.  The students
who work in the writing center are well known, mostly live on campus and
want to work in the writing center partially because they like and have been
doing a lot of this business of helping people with their papers.  The
problem I'm concerned about is that students have been used to going to them
late at night, in the dorms, at their convenience, etc and so don't think
about the effort (and foresight) that might be involved in going to the
"official" writing center instead. On one hand, I'm not that territorial
about "forcing" people to only get help on their papers in a certain room at
a certain time, but it may be presenting some problems:

1. protecting the tutors' own time --- they run the risk of being
overwhelmed by requests for help at the expense of their own study time. 
They are generous, hard-working souls but may not know how to say "no." 
There is also no way to pay them for this kind of work.

2.   The "official" writing center is sometimes (too often) very, very slow
and it looks like we are paying tutors to "sit around".  

3.  We have no way to track or get credit for the work the tutors (via
their writing center training) are doing for the campus.


I think given our budget and the nature of the school, we are open at
optimal times, and, unfortunately, any move to hold "writing center" hours
in the dorms would come at the cost of a further reduction of regular hours
open to everyone.  Plus, I do think that if the tutors could somehow start
channeling this "extra curricular" consulting they're doing late night into
the regular hours, we'd be much busier.  On an institution-wide assessment
we did the number one reason why people didn't use the writing center was,
"I get help somewhere else."    I don't think most of this extra-curricular
consulting occurs because the student was legitimately unable to ever use
the center at a convenient time.  I'm still exploring creative solution for
delivering our services ---- and am not ruling out putting tutors in the
dorms at night (particularly on Sunday night). But, I would be really
interested on hearing any responses to the following:

1.  Peer tutors out there who are on this list:  How much "extra-curricular
consulting" (as described above) do you do?  Do you have trouble saying "no"
when you're really busy with your own work?  Do you do anything to encourage
people to use your campus writing center instead?

2.  Do any of you at small campuses percieve this as an issue at your
school? 

3.  Am I just being a control freak??

thanks!

Lynnell Edwards
Concordia University, Portland OR