Academic Exchange Quarterly Winter 2011 ISSN
1096-1453 Volume 15, Issue 4
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AUTHOR & ACADEMIC EXCHANGE QUARTERLY |
Writing Center
Sustainability Through Research
Bryna Siegel Finer: Southern Vermont College
Jamie White-Farnham: University of Wisconsin-Superior
Jeremiah Dyehouse:
University of Rhode Island
with the URI Writing Center Research Group[1]
Siegel Finer,
PhD is Assistant Professor and Composition Coordinator at Southern Vermont
College. White-Farnham, PhD is an Assistant Professor
at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.
Dyehouse, PhD is Associate Professor and Director of the Writing Center at the University of Rhode Island.
Abstract
The article
describes ways in which a multi-year collaborative research project has
encouraged sustainability of the University’s Writing Center and empowered the
Center’s value as an important site for research and learning in the
University, particularly through staff development, shifts in hierarchy among
tutors and administrators, and considerations of research ethics. The authors
show how a research project extending over several years might encounter
challenges such as institutional constraints, and also provide opportunities
for sustaining the center as a site not just for tutoring but also for
research.
Writing
center research promises a rich and expanding set of understandings
for scholars in higher education: understandings about writing pedagogy,
about educational interactions, and about writing and rhetoric as activities,
to take the most obvious examples. In 2000, Kincaid and Harris described a
future in which “writing centers will assume a more prominent role in
researching [and will] increasingly be viewed and valued as sites for research”
(p. 24). Since then, writing center researchers such as Gogan,
Belanger, Patriarca, and O’Neill, (2010), Rose and Groban (2010), and Henson and Stephenson (2009) have
demonstrated the truth in Kincaid and Harris’ projection. Rose and Grobman describe writing center research as a “complex form
of inquiry,” one that “validat[es]
the intellectual work of tutoring” (p. 12). Noting that “writing centers […]
have a long history in the discipline as sites for research,” Gogan et al establish research as a way that writing
centers might sustain themselves in institutional cultures that often value
publishable research over pedagogy (p. 338-9), and Barnett (2007) suggests that
centers can make themselves sustainable by performing scientific research
(viii). Our own research project, “Mapping Tutorial Interactions” (MTI,
2007-2011), has provided an occasion to consider the roles research plays in
sustaining the development of a writing center.
Here we describe research under way at the University
of Rhode Island Writing Center. Using terms and distinctions drawn from
canonical writing center scholarship (e.g., Blau,
Hall, & Strauss, 1998; North, 1984), our MTI project seeks to describe how
sessions develop in time and across differing material situations for tutoring.
When it is complete (Summer 2011), we hope that our research will suggest
patterns in the temporal development of writing center sessions—from
predominantly "directive" to "facilitative" kinds of
interactions, for instance, or toward "writer-centered" from
"writing-centered" exchanges.
Here, instead of reporting the results of the study,
we describe how research complications have played an important part in the
continual development of our center. Meriting their own discussion, these
complications, rather than hinder our progress, extend opportunities and
challenges that we describe as “promises and perils.” By sharing them, we
encourage others to consider how the process of research, not just the
product(s), can aid sustainability in a site of higher education such as a
writing center.
MTI: A Brief
Description of the Project
MTI investigates several linked questions: (1) When do
tutors employ "directive" and "facilitative" tutoring
techniques in their sessions? (2) Can we characterize the tutoring interactions
resulting from these techniques as more "writer-centered" (that
is, focused on educating) or more "writing-centered"
(that is, focused on improving a writer's specific text)? Finally, (3) to the
degree that we can characterize different kinds of tutorial interactions, how
do they fit together, temporally, in particular tutoring sessions? In the short
term, we seek to understand how tutoring sessions characteristically proceed,
both in our center and more generally. In the longer term, we hope to use our
developing understanding of the "shape" of writing center sessions to
study how differing material situations for tutoring can affect tutoring and
learning dynamics.
To begin to answer the questions, we have developed
techniques for observing writing center sessions and for interpreting our
observational data. The procedures are as follows: randomly selected writers'
sessions are audio taped. Later, a center administrator uses a session
transcript to determine the temporal boundaries of particular interactions. These interactions are plotted on a standard
grid: facilitative or directive on one axis and writer- or writing-centered on
the other. When the points are connected, the resulting curve summarizes the
session's development with time. This "map," represents the unique
shape of a particular session, its tutor's techniques, and the qualities of its
interactions. In an interpretive comparison of several such maps, we hope to
identify repeating shapes (or pieces of shapes), which might suggest
generalizations about how different kinds of sessions characteristically proceed.
The main goals of our project are to strengthen
tutoring, create new knowledge to share with the larger writing center
community, and to extend our research methodology beyond practice as inquiry,
as Boquet and Lerner (2008) challenge writing center
researchers to do (p. 184). However, we also see our project as an opportunity
to reflect on the research process itself.
Particularly in its attempt to involve our center’s
whole staff in inquiry, our project has so far resulted in a unique set of implications
for our work as researchers. While the object of study in the research project
is the nature of tutoring interactions, by maintaining as a key value and
practicing reflection in both our writing center pedagogy and research, we have
also been studying our research paradigm, processes, and technologies. As such,
we explain some unexpected impasses imposed by the research technologies whose
use is mandated by the University and their effects on a collaborative research
paradigm such as ours.
Promises: Collaborative
Research as Staff Development
Our center has a tradition of shared research projects
and collaboration, as evidenced by the collaborative publications between
various directors and tutors in our center (e.g., Ortoleva
& Dyehouse, 2009; Miles, Gormley,
Fox Volpe, Roche, Hayes, & Amidon; Shamoon and Burns, 1995). This continuing commitment to
collaboration motivated one of our original research goals: to carry out the
research with as many members of the staff on board as possible. It seemed
natural to include the whole staff as a good opportunity to encourage all to
contribute and participate more fully in the sustainability of our center as a
community[2].
In this section, we describe the three main benefits
that the early phases of our study afforded for staff development: 1) the staff
has shown an increase in pedagogical knowledge and has engaged in new
professional development opportunities, 2) the hierarchy of power has been
productively challenged, and 3) we have operationalized
the study’s key terms, enhancing our study’s validity and our group identity.
Pedagogical Knowledge
The MTI project has provided several opportunities to
expand our staff’s pedagogical knowledge-base. For one, it has allowed us an
opportunity to implement a more formalized staff development program, making
use of our staff meetings to present and discuss readings in rhetoric and
composition and writing center scholarship. In fact, our research agenda stems
from the staff’s discussions of what we call “facilitative” versus “directive”
tutoring (Brooks, 1991; Shamoon & Burns, 1995; Blau, Hall, & Strauss, 1998 ). These terms serve as a
frame for discussions and problem-solving in nearly all our staff meetings. One
practical benefit of this new knowledge from shared readings has been the
implementation of several workshops on making tutoring sessions more dynamic
and interactive, which have provided tutors with a figurative toolbox of
accumulated practices with which to work when a session calls for facilitative
tutoring.
Staff knowledge has also been increased through
exposure to the larger writing center community. Members of our staff have
presented parts of this research at NEWCA, allowing opportunities for feedback
and enabling tutors to participate in disciplinary professionalization. Other
professional opportunities have included collaboration on this article (which
has been peer-reviewed by the entire staff), as well as work on a second
article to report the findings of the MTI research project.
Tipping the Hierarchy
This project’s second benefit concerns how our
Center’s institutional hierarchy has, several times, been tipped on its head. Since
we encourage all tutors with interest in the project to come aboard, regardless
of experience or department status, the roles of “principal investigator” or
“student investigator” have been significantly challenged. We think this
tipping means we’ve established productive relationships, a comfortable working
environment, and a mission mutually worth working toward. So, although our
Director and Assistant Director first developed the project and drafted the
Institutional Review Board proposal, an undergraduate designed the pilot study
and managed it. Eventually Matt and Jamie, two graduate tutors, took an
interest as well and led segments of the Research Group's second conference
panel on the project. More generally, each staff member contributed to the
project as it has developed; our center has often been abuzz with collaborative
mapping and transcribing activities happening at different tables.
While exciting, this tipping of our hierarchy comes
with particular challenges, including a potential threat to grades, credits,
scholarly reputations, and even interpersonal relationships. In the end, we’ve
ultimately embraced the hierarchical shifts as part of a progressive
educational tradition and as a byproduct of collaborative research worth
celebrating.
Sustainability of
Research and Center
The third benefit we have happily embraced came to us
through a test of our research instrument’s validity. In one especially
collaborative staff meeting, the staff practiced mapping tutoring interactions
as a group. Working from a page of writing center dialogue (from Blau, Hall, and Strauss’s “Exploring the Tutor/Client
Conversation”), each tutor applied the mapping method[3]. In particular, each
tutor tried to determine whether the tutoring interactions represented were
more “facilitative” or more “directive.” Do these interactions, we asked, focus
more on the writer, or more on the text?
When everyone finished their individual maps, we put
maps of a few of the interactions on our white board. To our surprise and
delight, our tutors’ maps were strikingly similar on almost every interaction. Our
staff members all understood the terms similarly, and we were able to recognize
kinds of interactions independently. This session had been designed to check
the validity of the study, but its result was a powerful demonstration of our
own, shared understandings. In short, this brief research-focused exercise
enhances our staff's group identity.
Finally, in terms of sustainability, since several
“generations” of assistant directors and tutors have passed through our center
since this research project began, we have ensured that the project won’t
merely disappear. The sustainability of MTI is at once extremely practical as
well as reflective of the continuity of our center’s research tradition. The
benefits to the staff have included new practices for tutoring, new knowledge,
a contribution to the writing center community, and an influence on our
research design itself. We see these implications of staff development, even
alongside tutor training, play out in various promising ways in our community
of practice and inquiry.
Perils: Institutional
Constraints on Collaborative Research
This section describes the effects of institutional
research technologies on our writing center’s research project. Initially, we
approached various research mechanisms with an instrumentalist view of
technology by simply following the required steps of research: submit documents
to the University office that reviews research involving human subjects and
then get on with the tape recording. However, as we formalized our research
project, submitting it within the ethical standards of the Institutional Review
Board (IRB), we grew aware of the complications that inquiry can occasion. At
the very least, storing transcripts in locked file cabinets and refraining from
photocopying session transcripts to guard participants’ privacy became
significant administrative obstacles, as did the graduation of research team
members who had undergone IRB training and earned the official credentials to
participate. More importantly, these measures threatened the project’s
coherence and continuity for us as a research community, even while they were
meant to maintain ethical standards for University research.
Research ethics remains, as it was for us, an
oft-neglected topic in the largely informal and naturalistic tradition of
writing center research (Henson and Stephenson, 2009, p. 2). However, in the
course of our project, we encountered the discourse of research ethics in two
main ways: first, though the University bureaucracy and second, through several
of our graduate tutors’ study of a primary source in research ethics, the 1978
Belmont Report. These two related bodies of discourse push us to consider the
ethical dimensions of our research beyond what was required by the IRB,
challenging us to account more fully for our projects’ “vulnerable
populations,” including our undergraduate co-researchers (“Belmont,”
1978).
In particular, the process of IRB review forced us to
reconsider some of our early ideas about the undergraduates selected as both
subjects and researchers, complicating our regular tutoring practices and our
research process. For instance, the IRB-approved procedures prohibit us from
recording sessions on a regular schedule or providing a posted, blanket
explanation of the project. The commitment to the selecting subjects randomly
and securing their informed consent necessitates complex arrangements (to avoid
bias of one tutors’ regulars over another’s, for instance). Additionally, the
whole process distracts time and attention away from the writer’s purpose for
visiting the center.
Of course, we do not require participation of either
tutees or tutors; we seek to make clear that refusing to participate will
negatively affect neither a tutee’s nor a tutor’s experience in the writing
center. Raising this question in terms of protecting vulnerable participants,
two of our then graduate student tutors, Matthew Ortoleva
and Matthew MacKnight, focused especially on justice for
undergraduate co-researchers, leading us to realize that the tutors, who work
for academic credit, cannot be required – or even strongly encouraged – to
participate in the project. To that end, the syllabus of the course in which
tutors are enrolled for credit, “Field Experience in Writing Consultancy,” was
revised to list participation as a suggestion, not a requirement. Tutors can
choose an alternative to satisfy the course’s learning outcomes, such as an
individual reflective project. We have sought, however, to emphasize the
potential benefits of participation in the research in terms of undergraduates’
educational experiences, and we have been fortunate in many semester of data
collection that at least a handful of tutors have willingly participated.
Conclusion
We’ve described the results of critical reflection on
our writing center’s research project in a comparative trope: promises and
perils. And, though few aspects of research can be so easily simplified, we
feel that in the areas of staff development and research ethics, our center’s
project poses an interesting case for researchers in higher education who are
interested in the sustainability of settings like writing centers. At present,
the main promises our project offers are the benefits to the staff. Also, and
significantly, however, we have become more conscious of the complexities of
administering a project in which different kinds of writing center staff
members participate as co-researchers. The “peril” here lies not only in the
difficulty of negotiating between the University’s research standards and a
main value of our discipline, collaboration. We also foresee “peril” for those
who do not critically examine institutional contexts for research or who end
their work instead of adapting it in the face of complications in order to
protect their center’s image as uncomplicated and hence sustain its value to
the university. We hope that reflecting on our own process will encourage
others to begin—or to continue—their own work to strengthen, expand, and
sustain writing center theory, practice, and especially inquiry.
Endnotes
[1] This research group has
changed over the course of several years, demonstrating one of the challenges
of collaborative research. However, the main participants of the pilot study in
2007-08 and our presentation at Northeast Writing Center Association annual
conference in Spring 2008 include: Patrick Baranski,
Tasha O’Hare, Cassie Feeney, Kim Dubois, Matthew MacKnight,
and Matthew Ortolvea, along with the three
co-authors.
[2] We are indebted to our
program director and former writing center director, Libby Miles, for her
emphasis on reflection as initial plans were laid for this project several
years ago, as well as her suggestion to use reflection as a foundation for
scholarly inquiry into our research.
[3] For a full explanation
of postmodern mapping as an instrument of critical research methodologies,
consult Opening Spaces by
Sullivan and Porter.
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