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Tutee confidentiality
Saturday mornings inspire long answers. This thread has come up before and I'm
sure the same arguments will be raised on both sides, mostly revolving around
the question of whether the Center is an advocate for students or an advocate
for faculty. I generally think that's a false binary distinction since I believe
that Centers are advocates for good *writing*, and that one of our jobs is to
foster exchanges between students and faculty about writing. I believe our form
helps us do that.
At Winthrop we have a three-part carbonless form for session reports. The client
always gets a copy and we always file one copy; we ask the client if he/she
wants to send the third copy [what we call the "brownie point copy"] to the
instructor and in probably 95% of cases he/she does. Otherwise, we file two
copies of the form, both marked "Don't send"--and the client sees us do this so
knows the session is confidential.
We don't ever tell a professor who calls whether a particular student has
visited us or not. We believe it is up to the client to decide who should know
s/he has visited us.
But one thing that we have had great success with in the last year or so is
adding a section to this form. After the description of the session "We worked
on....", we added a section called "objectives." Here the tutor and client craft
a sentence that describes the work the client still has to (or wants to) do on
that piece of writing; e.g., "Chris will add examples to each claim that support
the thesis". We added this not only so that clients could refresh their memories
of the session when revising the paper but also so that the professors receiving
the brownie point copies would know that the writer didn't leave the Center with
a guaranteed perfect paper but with a work in progress.
We have gotten a great deal of positive feedback from both clients and faculty
on adding this section, and we have seen the number of "don't send" requests
decline because students know that their professors will be told that their
paper is still not perfect but that they *are* making an effort. To us this is a
step in encouraging that conversation about writing that we see as central to
our efforts. In the assessment that we've begun to undertake we have also seen
positive responses to this policy. Also, in our institutional senior
satisfaction exit survey thi year, the Writing Center received one of the
highest increases in positive ratings among the seniors surveyed--and that
objectives section on the form is one of the few major changes we've made. So we
believe that there's a correlation.
So that's why we have the form but leave the option of sending it in the
client's hands. We feel it protects their autonomy but gives them the chance to
initiate dialogue with their instructors in ways they might not be able to
otherwise.
FWIW.
Jo
Jo Koster Tarvers, Assistant Professor
Department of English
Winthrop University
Rock Hill, SC 29733 USA
(803-323-4557 voice) (803-323-4837 fax)
tarversj@winthrop.edu; for attachments, use inscribe@cetlink.net
http://www.birdnest.org/tarversj
"Libraries have been the death of many great men, particularly
the Bodleian."--Humfrey Wanley, c. 1731