Session 1G: Challenges of Incorporating Student-Athletes into the Writing Center
This session was mostly applicable to Division I large universities, but it raised some interesting questions. The speakers reflected on the divide in the student-athlete identity between athlete and student and also on how to bridge that gap. They discussed the sense of “otherness” that other students in the university considered the athletes with; that because athletes received scholarships and sometimes were admitted on the basis of strong athletics rather than strong academic work, other college students and professors sometimes dismissed their academic. The University of Nebraska at Lincoln has two separate writing centers. One is for student athletes. I found this concept interesting in light of the divide they discussed. I asked if they didn’t think having separate facilities for students and athletes was perpetuating the divide in identities and the perception of athletes as “other”. They said that because the athlete has so much pressure to perform athletically—whole livelihoods of coaches and athletic directors rest on the labor of these athletes—it was necessary to provide these students with special alleviation of academic pressure. At Coe, maybe because so much of the student population is student athletes, we don’t have this divide. I wonder too if that’s because we don’t make extra provisions for the athletes. It’s not that I disagree with what was said in the session. But I am glad that our writing center is an all-encompassing, all-accessible, all-similar provider of services to the student body.
Session 2H: Ethical Dilemmas: Generosity, Reciprocity, and Gifting in the Writing Center
In this session they discussed the concept of the Writing Center as a gift economy. Essentially, that both consultant and writer provide gifts for one another with the expectation of a gift in return. Frankie said several things in this session that I thought of as especially valuable—the idea that failed consultant sessions result in part from the consultant attempting to raise their own status in the eyes of the writer, rather than saying things to benefit the writer. That failed conference sessions are a result of the conferencer misusing the gift economy and attempting to give gifts to themselves. There was also a discussion of feminist ethics in the Writing Center, a look at how the Writing Center operates with concern for the whole community in mind rather than just the individual. The professor giving this particular talk discussed how feminism impacts the Writing Center with a concern for interpersonal relationships rather than just a mere checklist of goals. The third component to this talk included a discussion of trauma’s role in the Writing Center. This professor suggested that a Writing Consultant’s role is to relieve the trauma of writing by allowing the writer to reconstruct a meta-narrative of the process of writing for them—that the consultant is in fact not responsible for the writing, but instead for the process of writing and improving upon that process.
Session 3E: Erasing Lines of White Privilege in Writing Center Work
In this poorly moderated session, the presenters talked about the difficulty of working through white privilege. The presenters asked us to think about whether teaching someone to speak academically was in fact supporting white cultural imperialism, as the divides between “white” language and academic language were much thinner than those between academic language and other dialects. This was a thought-provoking session. We discussed whether it was an act of imposition to do this, as ESL students often come to the Center specifically asking to speak like native English speakers. It seemed to me that teaching ESL students the tools with which to break the rules of academic language with intention was the solution—that dialect itself could be a harnessed tool, as long as ESL students are informed enough to make the choice to use it. It is also seems to me that to directly correlate “white language” with that of academia’s is a false equivalency. Though academic culture is permeated with white cultural values and language, it is quite possible to be white and not be academic, just as it is possible to be white and an ESL student. I think that to enter into a conference is somewhat like entering into a social contract. It seems to me that to ignore an ESL student’s request purely on the basis of the different culture that they come from is another form of cultural imperialism; to assume that their separate culture should be prized over their individual needs and desires seems arrogant and similarly enforcing my particular principles over their own.
Session 4J: Responding to a Changing Population of Multilingual Writers
This was by far the dullest session I attended. Kim Ballard began by explaining very simple tenets of conferences with ESL students and defining the ESL student, how big the populations of ESL students were and what the concerns of an ESL student generally are. It was all information that felt very unnecessary to anyone who has given an ESL conference already. As any kind of practiced consultant, I’m unsure how you could be unaware to the fact that ESL students often need help with surface-level issues in their paper, and this was the fact the session brought to our attention. Linda Bergman was a less animated version of Kim Ballard. The session provoked very little thought or discussion. Both presentations depended on very boring PowerPoints. 2/10. Would not recommend.
Session 5J: Antiracist Hope and Tutor Education
This was an inspiring session just on a personal level. We were asked by the panel at the front of the room to write down a memory we had with race that made us uncomfortable. The panelists first talked about how the uncomfortableness surrounding race issues allowed us to deflect conversation about it, how often the narratives we tell about race are meant to provide closure and answers. They began with telling their own personal stories about race and detailing their emotional responses, ending with further questions provoked by their own narratives. They then asked us to reflect on and tell a narrative about a time we felt uncomfortable with race that opened up questions rather than answering them. We were then meant to gather in groups and discuss the narratives—our initial responses and then our reactions to that initial response. Our group found that our initial responses to an uncomfortable racial situation were to reframe the narrative in terms of our own feelings, for example: “I hope he knows I’m not that kind of white person” or “How can I seem not racist”? It was interesting to me, to reflect on the fact that often, I deflect conversations or experiences that could be learning experiences in order to seem “not racist” or “so I don’t offend anybody”. But I realized that “not wanting to offend anybody” and holding belief systems that are in and of themselves inoffensive are not the same thing. It is the equivalent of remaining racist without allowing anyone else to bring this issue to my attention. This session was a powerful tool to awaken participants’ eyes to their own deflection behaviors. Coe is a predominantly white population. I wonder whether we utilize the structure of this workshop to create some sort of Writing Center event focused on a discussion of race? We serve as a forum of conversation, after all. I wonder if we couldn’t utilize that role in order to become conduits of social reform and reflection.
Session 6E: Ancient Innovations: Greek and Roman Rhetoric in the Writing Center
Maureen Clark talked about harnessing the unconscious mind while writing, allowing oneself to increase creative output by writing in stream-of-consciousness and allowing personality to come through. I asked her if she didn’t feel as though attaching large portions of the self to creative writing might actually destroy the writing process, for fear of reflecting poorly on the actual self. The famous quote by Oscar Wilde, “Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth” seemed especially pertinent, so I shared it. Her colleague agreed with me. Maureen, though, had to disagree. She felt that the sharing of the self, the specific personal tweaks that we give to archetypes, was the main advantage of the creative process. After the presentation, we talked some about the writing process for poetry and how we could teach other people (and ourselves) to access our creativity and fight writer’s block.
Christopher LeCluyse talked instead about successful writing center conferences as a Socratic discussion. He talked about the Roman view of translation and how that mirrored writing conferences in some ways; that the Romans often translated Greek works not with original authorial intent in mind, but instead with the purpose of making them “better” and more “Roman”. He said that unsuccessful writing conferences often take on this Roman imperialism, the conferencer trying not to translate the paper into more precise terms that express the ideas of the writer, but instead trying to impose their own values and ideas on the paper. I thought this was a valuable analogy. Sometimes, my unsuccessful writing conferences are colored by my own interpretation of how an idea could be more profound, rather than allowing the idea to remain its author’s. I will work on how to be a better bouncing-off point, a better translator, and less of an idea-imperialist.
Session 7F: Space, Race, and Saving Face: What Writing Centers Can Do to Minimize Division
We ended up missing the first part of this session because we were attempting to attend a session not actually about race for once. But I was glad that we did attend, because the session, instead of being a similar rehash to what I had heard about white privilege in the sessions previous, was about how to arrange space in a way that doesn’t intimidate possible conferencees. The presenter discussed the effect of food smells in the Writing Center, and how those food smells and food exclusive to members of the Writing Center served to immediately alienate non-members of the Writing Center when they came in for conferences. This got me thinking about the role meals play in our Writing Center. Our feeling of hominess at times contributes to a feeling of intimidation on the part of our clientele, precisely because the home belongs to consultants and not to the clientele. We could expand and advertise Tuesday Tea so that it included more regularly parts of the campus that do not participate in the Writing Center. Meals are often an important part of fostering community. This is evident in our own Sunday dinners at the Writing Center. But the problem of these meals is that, if not marketed enough to the outside campus, establish a feeling almost of cultic rituals. Meals are very important in many religious practices, precisely because of the community-feeling they create. So how could we make these meals a more effective route to integration into the rest of campus culture? This is something I have been thinking on and will continue to think on.
Session 8E: The Shifting Sands of Creative and Academic Vision: Helping Writers to Think (and Compose) like Artists
In this session, the presenters discussed the possible applications of techniques to create creative writing pieces in more formal creations, like essays. They discussed the concept of “beading”, one in which an idea appears again and again to create some sort of thematic string to tie the structure together. Having a conferencee identify the beads of a piece and having him insert them in the places where they are missing can create a thematic structure similar to that of a creative piece where themes organically appear again and again. We also talked about the value of a first sentence in establishing the beads that will appear throughout the piece. We then were expected to create a first sentence of a creative piece that contained a bead, and then shared them. This was a fun session which helped me to think about how I could allow my backgrounds in creative writing and religious philosophy to influence one another.
Session 9D: The Plagiarism Paradigm
In this session we discussed the ethical dilemmas surrounding the job of Writing Center Consultant. The boundary line between our work and plagiarism is nebulous at best, as evidenced by the story one consultant presented in the session. She told a story about how a woman once came to her with an application to a teacher’s college and asked her to proofread it. The consultant felt uncomfortable proofreading the application as a majority of acceptance into teachers’ college is founded upon the proper usage of grammar and syntax, and so she refused to do so in the explicit way for which the writer had asked. As a result, both conferencer and conferencee went away dissatisfied with the conference. We discussed whether this was the right decision and what we would do in that person’s place. I have to admit I still don’t know the answer. We also discussed the ease with which a consultant can fall into plagiarism territory when attempting to help an ESL student. It’s easy to simply give an ESL student a rephrase of a sentence they have worded imprecisely. But is it ethical? We discussed how to deconstruct the default authority ESL students give to the conferencer and how to create a more even field for collaboration, one in which the ESL student contributes equally to the conference session.
In the poster session I presented at, the one concerning E-Portfolios, plenty of people were interested in the possible application of E-Portfolios to their own Writing Centers. As we were talking, it seemed as though the focus on Google Sites vs. Mahara was slightly irrelevant—a lot of people instead wanted to know the purpose of E-Portfolios as a whole. I ad-libbed a fair amount about the E-Portfolio as an encyclopedia of Writing Center activity, one in which each consultant’s page was an individualized entry. Several people wanted to know if there was a tutorial available for how to create an E-Portfolio. This is a project I am confident the Coe Writing Center could undertake in the future.
-Chloe Reichelt
