This research examines the use of writing resources in tutoring sessions, which is considered one of the valued tutoring practices at the University Writing Center (UWC) at the University of Central Florida (UCF). This research explains the methodology and presents the findings of a study that serves as a partial answer to the call for more evidence-based research in the field of writing center studies. There is scholarship that explains the importance of using resources to facilitate learning, but there is a lack of empirical research that explores the patterns and variations in the resources that writing tutors use, the ways they are implemented in tutoring sessions, and the effects of the moves tutors and writers make involving resources. To address this gap in the research, the researcher developed a study of tutoring sessions in the UCF UWC to explore the role of writing resources as they are used to mediate activity in tutoring sessions. This research investigates the relationship between the use of resources by the tutor and/or the writer and the impact this has on the facilitation of the writer's learning during the consultation. To gain insight into these areas of interest, tutoring sessions were video recorded and follow-up interviews were conducted with the participants to gain insight into the choices made involving resources and the resultant consequences. This research demonstrates the potential of writing resources to contribute to the collaborative knowledge development processes that happen in tutoring sessions to address writing concerns. This study also provides insight into the control that tutors have over the distribution of knowledge in the way that they implement resources into the tutoring session. What we can learn from these findings is a step toward developing a more evidence-based practice in the writing center.

This project questions a core value that writing center workers have long held about tutoring writing: that we change writers. Applying sociocognitive and Bakhtinian lenses, I was able to complicate theory-practice connections. Tutor-tutee negotiations during tutorials, tutees' perceived learning outcomes, and their revisions were compared with their reasons for revising so that I could investigate what tutees potentially learn from their tutors, how, and why. Data indicated if tutors' information/advice became, in Bakhtin's terms, internally persuasive to tutees. When the authoritative discourses tutors represent or endorse converge with students' internally persuasive discourses, they converge in students' revision choices as tutor-tutee interdiscursivity. I proposed that such a convergence can lead to "changed" writers, writers who alter their understanding of themselves as writers and/or modify their thinking about a given paper, concept, or process. Even though students granted their tutors considerable authority, most tutees examined their tutors' comments to see if they made sense and were worthy of internalizing as generalized concepts to help them meet current writing goals. In short, tutors do indeed change writers, as I have defined change in the context of this study. Work with specific papers can impact students in terms of their larger process and development as writers; tutors' strategies/concepts can become writers' strategies/concepts to be applied again in new contexts. However, even when tutees were internally persuaded and appeared to have changed as writers, analyses into their tutorials, revisions, perceived learning outcomes, and reasons for revising showed that some students took up their tutors' information/advice in ways beyond their tutor's control. What some students internalize can be situation-specific and may not necessarily translate to other writing projects, can be significant yet limited understandings of rhetorical concepts, and may not appear in their revised drafts. Students can also be resistant to rhetorical concepts and revision strategies, especially those they perceive as antithetical to their ideological views about process, content, or structure. Given the variety of reasons students revise, the multiple contexts and influences affecting tutorials, and the ensuing challenges inherent in assessing tutorials, I recommend that tutors do not measure their success based on the Northian idea of a writing center. Though we do change writers, I recommend writing center workers think about successful tutorials in more complex ways than our Northian goal might imply. Tutors' successes are not dependent on changes to writers but on their ability to collaboratively negotiate with writers. Instead of trying to prove the efficacy of writing center tutorials as direct cause and effect relationship, I recommend that writing center administrators try to demonstrate how tutorials foster several habits of mind that college students need to cultivate to become successful writers.

Transfer, a highly researched topic in composition studies, is a topic of increasing interest to those in writing center studies. Writing centers are an ideal location for the application of transfer because tutors can provide more opportunities for guided practice, application, reflection, and metacognition in a one-on-one setting; thus, students may learn more effectively, through application, the writing skills they may receive via instruction in their classrooms. Previous writing center studies have implemented transfer-focused curricula to help tutors better facilitate transfer in their tutorials. These curricula have focused on training tutors to understand and apply transfer to their tutorials, but they have not invited tutors to assess how transfer has impacted or influenced their previously learned tutoring strategies. Though researchers have lectured on transfer, incorporated activities to increase understanding of transfer, and required readings on transfer, we have not yet understood how tutors understand and value transfer in relation to their tutoring strategies and, more importantly, meeting student needs. The curriculum presented here builds on tutors’ prior knowledge about tutoring and builds in ample opportunities for tutors to engage with transfer theory, adapt their understanding into their tutoring, and reflect regularly on and assess their application of understanding transfer. This study examines tutors’ responses to the curriculum, one tutor’s tutorials throughout the duration of the curriculum, and one tutor’s discourse-based interview responses. The results of this study indicate that tutor involvement is vital to understanding what transfer looks like in the writing center and that writing centers will benefit from providing tutors with a broad understanding of transfer that tutors can then incorporate into their understanding of effective tutoring practices.

No description available.

This study seeks to explore ideas about learning and how it happens in writing center tutorials. The questions posed for this research are the following: 1) What does learning look like in writing center consultations? and 2) What moves do tutors make to prompt learning moments? The study was created by video recording nine writing center consultations over the course of a single semester. The researcher conducted the sessions herself and worked with the same writer each time. Segments of sessions were transcribed to reveal patterns of learning at work. Reflective memos were also collected, as well as a final retrospective interview. The results of the study showed that learning happens when tutors and writers create learning moments both together and independently of each other. Tutors and writers prompt learning by addressing four elements of writing center sessions: session activities, writer moves with the text at hand, writing processes, and learning processes. Addressing these elements in sessions leads to conversations about learning, which leads to learning taking place. This research is useful for further developing the identity of the writing center as a space that values and strives for authentic learning to occur.

No description available.

No description available.

While much attention has been paid to the borders between those within and beyond the discipline of composition, the primary goal of this project is to examine the discourses which exist within composition and, subsequently, how these discourses might work to undermine pedagogy and scholarship. I take the position that even those working directly in composition do not offer clear, consistent consensus regarding concepts which are fundamental to the legitimacy of composition as a discipline. Thus, as we strive to meaningfully frame our work for our students and stakeholders, it is imperative that we confront the ambivalences in our own discussions. Throughout this project I use critical disability theory to reconcile underlying concepts of composition, such as instability and the contextual nature of language, with competing concepts that often undermine effective pedagogy. Addressing these gaps via disability theory illustrates various conceptual similarities between the two disciplines and highlights the problematic tensions found in composition. Chapters two, three, and four here confront gaps between composition theory and practice and offer ideas from disability studies as a means of exploration and potential resolution. I first examine the specific notion that writing centers are intended to foster student autonomy through a long-term focus on creating better writers, rather than better writing. By exploring the deeper theoretical implications of the writer versus writing dichotomy, I hope to expose as destructive one of its key assumptions—the possibility of writerly autonomy—and consider its effects on writing center work and composition practice more generally. From here, disability theory offers a means to decentralize autonomy as a defining term, via specific theories of representation and dependence. I then focus on what we can accomplish, given this rejection of autonomy, and how to most effectively share and build knowledge with students. I explore the relationship between knowledge transfer and narratives of overcoming disability through analysis of scholarship on first-year writing courses. I argue that a belief in easily generalizable knowledge, like a belief in autonomy, manifests in misconceptions of the successful first-year writing course and thus that knowledge transfer should be reconceptualized as agency, and offer a brief discussion of threshold concepts as one potential source for transfer-as-agency pedagogy. Building on these concepts, I then consider how to most effectively locate composition within the university structure, focusing specifically on WAC/WID programs and the disability concepts of accommodation and universal design. Theories of universal design illustrate that composition must be integrated into the curricula beyond first-year writing; this sort of comprehensive curricula is not without complication, however, so I also explore issues of authority which arise out of universal design perspectives. Finally, I offer three imagined scenarios meant to illustrate how individuals working within this disability theory-based framework might address different challenges related to writing instruction and to reinforce the enormous value of a disability studies approach to the work of composition. / English

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Six weeks in to my position as assistant director of the writing center and suddenly I was confronted by a cluster bombing of issues and concerns – microaggressions, depression, confusion, suspicion – each one separate but related, and threatening to tear a new hole in the already fragile foundation of community in my writing center. How do we feel, what do we do, how does a community survive when the story we’re experiencing isn’t the story we want or expected - when it is, in a word, terrible? After McKinney’s Peripheral Visions, we know our labor and our centers do not look, act, and feel cozy, iconoclastic, or focused on one-on-one tutoring all of the time. And yet, if we are going to continue to move beyond the grand narrative, a deep and meaningful understanding of community is essential. When we put our story in relation to our communities, then our story becomes just one thread in a much more complex tapestry. We cannot separate one person’s story from the story of the writing center. Each person, each story, is a stitch in the rhetorical fabric of community. Using critically reflexive stories to change and shape practice, this thesis highlights the grand narrative of community and shows how that narrative serves to stymie community growth. These stories resist boundaries. They are wayward. They are counter to the narratives around which we construct our lives. When we share stories and write together, we begin to understand the threads we’re all weaving into the tapestry – our community, stitched together through shared practice; a process that will never end, as each person comes and goes. The community will never be resolved, and in the ambiguity of boundlessness, comes a new way of seeing the world - through constellations and the dwelling in inbetween.

<p>  </p> <p>Empathy is a complex emotional response to others’ experiences that can both advance and obstruct mutual understanding. Many fields in the humanities and social sciences have their own theories of empathy, including recent advances in rhetoric and composition. However, writing center studies have not yet arrived at a theory of empathy despite a body of scholarship that invokes empathy as a necessary skill or disposition in writing center praxis. This dissertation argues that empathic dispositions can be evoked and tempered in staff education classrooms through assignments that facilitate critical self-reflection on one’s positionality. The present pilot study describes four aspects of empathic dispositions that can be tempered in a writing center curriculum. The first chapter categorizes different concepts of empathy in writing centers and theorizes four aspects of empathic dispositions that align with theories on rhetoric, affect, and feminist approaches to empathic, critical engagement with others. The second chapter outlines the feminist methodologies and methods that were used to collect and analyze interviews with research participants. The third chapter describes a sixteen-week staff education course that was oriented to evoking and developing students’ empathic dispositions. The fourth chapter shares interviews with new consultants who reflect on their first semester in our writing center and how their work was influenced by their assignments and experiences in our curriculum. The final chapter concludes the study by outlining its limitations, charting a path forward for future research, and offering a pedagogical approach to cultivating empathic dispositions that I call resonant reflection. The results of this study indicate that consultants draw from their own experiences and values when they imagine a writer’s circumstances. They can access their rich, yet tacit, experiences through deliberative reflection, a necessary component of developing empathic dispositions that advance mutual understanding. These findings implicate that a stronger theoretical framework for empathy in writing centers can advance not only writing center research and pedagogy but also our commitments to social justice in our centers. </p>