Volume Two, Issue Three, May 2016
News and Upcoming Events
Save the date! Crossings: Exploring Shared Work in Writing
March 31st and April 1st, 2017
University of Nevada, Reno
Reno, Nevada has witnessed significant crossings: pioneers traversing the Rockies and Great Basin; Pony Express riders galloping from Missouri to the west coast, prospectors carrying their picks and shovels into Nevada’s silver mines and California’s Gold Country, and the transcontinental railroad connecting the Great Plains to the Pacific. The University of Nevada, Reno, has also been blazing new trails for writing through its innovative competencies-based core, brand new state-of-the-art facilities for WID and its writing center, and writing experts collaborating across programs to support and graduate excellent writers. Located on the far western edge of the Rocky Mountain region and far eastern edge of northern California, UNR and Reno are the perfect place for a conference focused on crossing into new writing territories. Please join us for an invigorating conference on imagined, developing, and existing collaborations between writing centers, first-year and disciplinary writing programs.
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Looking at the Writing Center Through Coyote’s Eyes
By Jennie Wellman
A Memory
He was a PhD student in one of the hard sciences. I have long forgotten his name, but his story stays with me. “What brings you in today?” I asked; a typical way I would start a writing consultation in those days. “Grammar,” he replied, as most of the writers I worked with over the years would say. “My advisor sent me here: he says that I have a lot of work to do on grammar.” It was true that the abstracts he brought in were slashed with red pen: lines through words, squiggly marks here and there, and esoteric words like awk written under certain sentences. The paper looked like it had gone to war and came out the loser of the battle. As I read through I couldn’t help but notice that many of the advisor’s markings didn’t make sense to me. “Why did he cross this part out?” I asked the student. “I don’t really know,” he replied. I was perplexed; I couldn’t find any major trouble with grammar. Since his field of study was so different from mine, I asked questions about content, clarity and his intended audience. He said that what he had written was appropriate. After I had read over both abstracts and asked my novice questions I told him that I couldn’t find any issues with his writing. I apologized for not being helpful. He seemed strangely satisfied with our consultation. As he was packing his papers into his bag, he remarked that his advisor was really strict on grammar, and he was under the impression that the advisor didn’t like him much. I made some lame comment in commiseration, “Yeah, it must be tough to have to work with someone like that,” and he was on his way. It was after he left that I wondered, maybe it was the name attached to the student; maybe it was that he was an international student, a trace of a Korean accent to his English, but undeniably understandable to any who cared to listen first and judge based on name later.
This story happened while I was an undergraduate writing center tutor, and it was my first experience with an issue that Anne Geller et al. identify in their book, The Everyday Writing Center. In the chapter titled, “Everyday Racism,” the authors write how white tutors perceived another tutor of color: “The tutors…were unable to conceive of an African American woman who possessed the knowledge, abilities, and skills to be a tutor. She must, they thought, need help” (88). It seems to me that the writer from my story was in the difficult position of having to work with a faculty member who saw his name, noticed his accent, and thus marked him as deficient in grammar, finding mistakes where there were none. This makes me wonder about how the ways in which we look through our theories might undermine our work.
Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s book, Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, urges writing center scholars to look at the narratives we tell rather than through the lens themselves: “…many stories could be told of our spaces, yet predominately, one story is told” (21). In writing center scholarship, phrases such as Higher Order Concerns, Lower Order Concerns, non-directive tutoring, and minimalist tutoring are terms that we all know: “We say we want all students to come to our centers, to feel ‘comfortable’ in our ‘non-traditional’ setting, but when we narrate normal and abnormal tutoring scenarios in tutor training manuals, we reveal our unease with working with a vast array of students” (McKinney 70). McKinney is not the only one to notice this trend: Victor Villanueva makes an explicit call to scholars to consider rhetorics outside of the Greco-Roman tradition in his edited book, with Damian Baca, The Rhetoric of the Americas.Villanueva traces American Indian and Puerto Rican (and many other) ways of knowing that don't come from Aristotle or Plato. It is where Villanueva and McKinney leave off that I begin. What I offer up is a different theory on how to look at - rather than through - writing center theory.
Trickster and How Coyote Lost His Eyes
In the book, The Everyday Writing Center, by Anne Geller et al. the chapter that struck me most was “Trickster at Your Table.” The authors use one of the American Indian Trickster stories about Coyote to illustrate one way of knowing that can take place within the writing center. Coyote loses his eyes and now must look at the world through the eyes of a mouse and a buffalo (Geller et al. 16). It is worth noting how much help Coyote receives after losing his eyes, and the help Coyote receives from a mouse and buffalo give him new perspective. Lewis Hyde writes about how folklore is predicated on the idea of a gift: “In folk tales the person who tries to hold on to a gift usually dies…” (35). According to Hyde, in American Indian ideas of gift giving, “the only essential is this: the gift must always move” (35). Hyde goes on to explain how when a character in folklore keeps a gift - selfishly or not - then he is rewarded by devastation, death, or both (35). As I think through the story of Coyote, I count at least six gifts, which flow in this order: Rabbit to Coyote, Coyote to human, Coyote to Crow (in the form of food), Mouse to Coyote, Buffalo to Coyote, Coyote to us.
This Trickster story could easily be read as a cautionary tale; to be happy with what one already has and to not go poking around where one shouldn’t. After all, Coyote has humiliated himself in front of humans: his eyes are eaten, thus forever gone. But, Geller et al. have a different set of eyes in which they view this tale: “We live in an either/or world, a world that doesn’t offer much opportunity to be uncertain, or tickled, or puzzled. How much time do we leave… to be surprised, to try out different eyes…” (16). I wonder at how often we invite Coyote to our work. When moments of uncertainty crop up - moments where bluffing might seem like a good idea, and when we try to bluff our way through, people pick up on it. In the writing center I direct, I encourage tutors to beware the expert. Maybe it's okay when we tell a writer, "Gee I dunno what that means, but let's puzzle through this together..." Maybe Coyote's eyes can be a way for us to look at the gifts that tutors and writers bring to the writing center.
A Gift
Her name was Candi: a name I assume to be easier for English speakers to pronounce than her Korean name. Candi and I worked together frequently during her time at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I always enjoyed our consultations. It was during our first consultation where Candi gave me an unexpected gift, one that I have passed along as much as possible. Candi was taking an ELL version of English 101, and she wrote about her experiences in a classroom where she was one of the only non-native speakers of English. Candi wrote about how she rarely spoke up in class for fear that the American students wouldn’t understand her. Or worse - that other students would make fun of her accent.
That was my first time realizing that it's not so much the degree to which so-called foreigners need to assimilate to American culture, but how Americans need to be welcoming and embrace other cultures. Had Coyote not been in the room with us that day, I could have lost the meaning of Candi's words. Rather than having a conversation about organization and if the paper attends to the paper prompt (which, if you read tutor manuals, they will tell you to make sure this is discussed during a consultation), instead Candi and I talked about her experience being an international student at an American university. What seems like a consultation gone wrong was one in which the writer and tutor were able to puzzle through an issue together. The consultation shifted from looking through the paper as a text written for a class, to looking at the paper as a way of knowing - a way for the writer to express her fears about being at a university in which most people didn't speak her native language. What I hope sharing these stories will do is to open up more discourse about how we as writing center professionals can work beyond the binary. Coyote is calling; are you in?
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Works Cited
Baca, Damian, and Victor Villanueva. The Rhetorics of the Americas. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010.
Brooks, Jeff. “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood, ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
"Coyote’s Eyes: Native Cognition Styles." Journal of American Indian Education, Arizona State University. N.p., n.d. 12 Mar. 2015. <http://jaie.asu.edu/sp/V21S2coy.htm>.
Geller, Anne, et al. The Everyday Writing Center. Logan: Utah State UP, 2007.
Grutsch McKinney, Jackie. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers. Logan: Utah State UP, 2013.
Hyde, Lewis. “Some Food We Should Not Eat: Gift Exchange and the Imagination.” The Kenyon Review. Vol. 1.No. 4. 1979: 32-60.
Meyer, Emily, Louise Smith. The Practical Tutor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
Murphy, Christina, Steve Sherwood. The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
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Jennie Wellman is Director of the Writing Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. She can be contacted at: jwellman@bellarmine.edu
Brain Food: Breaking Bread during Writing Tutoring Sessions to Increase Engagement, Reduce Food Insecurity, and Improve Outcomes
California is a bountiful agricultural state inhabited by multiple urban and rural community colleges; Fresno City College represents a combination of these. The Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) Center at Fresno City College is currently implementing an innovative strategy called the Brain Food Project. PASS is an embedded tutoring program that focuses on reading and writing tutoring for English, ESL, linguistics, and literature classes at Fresno City College.
In the fall of 2014, PASS students indicated significantly higher success rates than non-PASS students in developmental English and ESL courses. Despite these successful outcomes, PASS attendance was only 26%. This number aligned with the 24% average attendance rate for tutoring, which was noted by the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) in 2012. While tutorial attendance was low, the coordinator noted a second problem: students were hungry. The challenge to increase student engagement paired with rampant food insecurity engendered the development of a needs-based program to provide food to students during writing tutoring.
A large number of Fresno City College students encounter some type of food insecurity on a regular basis. In response, the faculty coordinator for PASS, Jennifer Dorian, developed the Brain Food Project, which is informed by theoretical foundations, such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In the spring of 2015, Jennifer began providing food to students in the PASS Center. The 26% attendance rate in the fall of 2014 increased to an 85% attendance rate in the fall of 2015. In one year, PASS significantly increased student attendance for writing tutoring while supporting thousands of students in a holistic manner. For the first time, students from developmental to transfer level English and ESL who attended PASS performed significantly better than students who did not attend PASS. Focus groups and surveys further indicated the positive impact on student lives.
While food donations began with the coordinator, they quickly grew to include support from various faculty, tutors, and community members. College and community food banks now collaborate with PASS to provide large donations on a regular basis. The Brain Food Project is growing and has garnered recognition from various institutions, including the Golden Award from Georgia Southern University and the Stanback Stroud Diversity Award from the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. Brain Food is an implementation of an educational design that Jennifer calls the Pedagogy of Encouragement. In practice, students are provided with palatable and nutritious pre-packaged food items, such as super-food bars, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, string cheese, yogurt, granola, and rice treats. Upon entering the PASS Center, students receive writing tutoring on tables containing Brain Food stations; food is available throughout the writing center visit.
Currently, Jennifer visits institutions to share about the Brain Food Project, which she hopes will normalize holistic support and reach as many students as possible in higher education. Sharing food is one of the dearest expressions of humanity; it is much like sharing the written word. When students break bread while writing, everything changes for the better.
Works Cited
Center for Community College Student Engagement. (2012).
"A matter of degrees: Promising practices for community college student success (A first look)." Austin ,TX: University of Texas at Austin, Community College Leadership Program. Retrieved from http://www.wsac.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2014.ptw.(3).pdf
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Learn more about the Brain Food project and other programs by visiting:http://fccwise.fresnocitycollege.edu/fccwise2/pass.html
Author Contact: Jennifer Dorian, jennifer.dorian@fresnocitycollege.edu
The NCWCA newsletter is seeking submissions from writing center professionals — students, professors, staff, tutors, facilitators, coordinators, directors, etc. — in Northern California by October 3 for the fall 2016 issue of our web-based newsletter.
- Brief Articles (750-1,500 words)
We are seeking submissions about tutoring and writing center work regarding theory, practice, assessment, outreach, innovation, technology, etc. We welcome a broad range of genres: personal narratives, program descriptions, qualitative or quantitative research, etc.
- Writing Center Spotlights (250-500 words)
We are seeking to profile one centers in each issue to highlight the unique approaches of centers in our region. Let us know if you are interested and we will send guiding questions.
- News and Events (150 words or less)
We are seeking news and events of interest to the writing center community. For the fall issue, events should occur between December 2016 and May 2017.
Send articles, Writing Center Spotlight requests, or news and events to cwac@stmarys-ca.edu.
Read previous issues on the NCWCA website: https://norcalwca.org/newsletter/
The Northern California Writing Centers Association Newsletter is published two to three times a year by the Saint Mary's College of California Center for Writing Across the Curriculum.
Editorial staff: Taylor Goldstein, Annie Keig, and Suzanne Schmidt
NCWCA Advisory Board Members
Scott Miller, Co-President, Sonoma State University,
Loriann Negri, Co-President, Sonoma State University,
Sheryl Cavales Doolan, Secretary, Santa Rosa Junior College,
Tereza Joy Kramer, Treasurer, Saint Mary’s College,
Julia Bleakney, Stanford,
Kyra Mello, Yuba Community College,
Leslie Dennen, University of San Francisco,
Magda Gilewicz, Fresno State,
Meghan Facciuto, Sacramento City College,
Michelle Montoya, Truckee Meadows Community College,
Susan Griffin, Sacramento City College
Our NCWCA newsletter mailing address is:
cwac@stmarys-ca.edu
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Last updated by Joseph Zeccardi on September 12, 2016