Jennings Collins and Abigail Anderson – Writing Consultants
Introduction
For those that aren’t aware, all Graduate Teaching Assistants undergo a multi-day training before each semester begins to prepare us for the new responsibility of teaching at the college level. Writing Center consultants go through a more specific orientation where we discuss our process, and the specifics of Writing Center pedagogy. We have a whole class about it, Writing Center Studies (ENGL 604), where we spend the whole semester asking important questions about pedagogy and the development of the Writing Center as a practice.
The unique perspective we both bring to this course, and to our work in the Writing Center overall, is our experiences working in the field of education, specifically early childhood education and secondary education. To borrow a common teacherly phrase, we have different tools in our toolbox than many of our peers, simply as a result of our work experiences and educational backgrounds. Learning how to be Writing Center consultants does not entail gaining the tools needed for the job, but rather learning how to use the tools we already have in a different setting. Alongside this period of adjustment, we also have to learn to balance our schoolwork as graduate students and the mental and emotional labor of our everyday jobs. Though our different backgrounds give us slightly different perspectives, we both try to be conscious, reflective, and constantly improving teachers, regardless of if our students are toddlers or undergraduates.
Reflections from a Middle & Upper Grade Educator (Jennings)
As consultants, we deal with a different workload and are in a different position in the web of university’s instructional design. We arrive somewhere in the middle as tutors. We do not get the opportunity to design the assignment any particular student is working on, or have the knowledge to bring the student towards the destination that someone in a teacher’s position would have designed. So in some scenarios, the consultant is in the awkward position of trying to deduce exactly what the writer’s instructor is asking for by parsing course directions and other course documents. We are still able to discuss writing skills and strategies in a manner that is beneficial to students across curriculum, which is a new angle for someone with an educational background.
The indirect university web also means we see students from a bevy of backgrounds, all with their own educational experiences which informs their own writing. Students have different levels of experience with things like MLA Style and academic research practices, things that we can interrogate during a session as part of getting to know a writer and what they need from a writing center session. One hour we are working with students who have just moved from high school to college working on a 500 word essay about their history with literacy, and the next hour we could be reading a 20 page study of the history of scientific literature around postpartum depression from a doctoral candidate.
I am much more comfortable with the former. In secondary education you are often the one shaping a person’s understanding of the English language as they enter adulthood. If a student is struggling, you have a whole year of lessons, lectures and assignments to reshape them to the best of your ability as an instructor. Often as a writing center consultant, we are asked to meet the writer where they are, and that comes with a new short-term approach to guidance. A student wanting to learn more about writing practices may do so at the Writing Center, but often our focus is directed towards the improvement of a piece, and not the student who wrote it.
Reflections from An Early Childhood Educator (Abigail)
Although my certification is in secondary education, and I student taught eighth graders for a semester during the pandemic, my work experience is mostly in the field of early childhood education. The majority of my childcare work was with two and three-year-olds, so the gap between my old students and my current clients might seem enormous. Certainly, working with young children requires a different form of emotional labor than working with other adults, but helping people is never an emotional-labor-free job. With my transition from teaching preschool to working with undergraduate and graduate students, I’m getting used to the shift in how much I have to do for someone else. My preschoolers required a lot of effort from me to help them manage their emotions, perform simple daily tasks, and grow into little, independent humans. My writers now need help gaining or refining an entirely different set of skills, though they might need just as much emotional support from me as a teacher or mentor in their writing process.
Indeed, my biggest takeaways from working with young children are that no two students learn exactly the same way and that progress is often non-linear. This term, I have seen many writers who come to the Writing Center for help, and sometimes feel discouraged or like they are “a bad writer” because of their past experiences with writing. In these sessions, I try to remind these writers that they are capable of developing their ideas and their skills, and that they have already begun that process by asking for help. It might take a variety of different strategies to learn what works for them, and that can be messy and difficult. However, I also try to emphasize that just because they have not achieved a goal yet, in their writing or in their personal lives, that does not mean they never will. This is a valuable lesson for learners of any age to remember, internalize, and carry with them throughout their education.
The main challenge of this work, for me, has been balancing when to “give people the answer” and when to step back and allow them to learn for themselves. And sometimes that means letting people make mistakes! Part of being an educator, regardless of the age of your students, means recognizing that you do not always have the answers and will not always do everything right. Again, in that way, working with adults is not so different from working with children; sometimes both need you to take a step back so they can learn to fly.
Conclusion
Teaching gave us a unique perspective on the way that the writing center operates, and the myriad of ways that students like us use campus resources. Our time as writing center consultants is a part of our educational journey, just as coming to the Writing Center is for any student. By next year we will be teaching courses as part of our graduate teaching assistantships, putting us at a different part of the institutional web than we are now. The biggest thing we hope to take from this experience is a nuanced perspective on the diversity that this university has in its student body, and how best to meet the needs of each student that comes to us as a part of their own journey.