Category: Writing Center Research

It Has Been a Year Like No Other – Yet Some Things Have Not Changed

Bronwyn T. Williams, Director

This is the time of year, when the dogwoods are in bloom and classes are drawing to a close, that I usually draft up a blog post to look back on our University Writing Center accomplishments over the previous year. If you read over those posts from the past, you’ll find some common threads about what we value and what we’ve done. This year, however, though the dogwood in front of my house is reliably spectacular, this end-of-year blog post is unlike any of the others I have done in the past decade. As with all of us, the COVID-19 pandemic turned our world upside down – or at least sideways – in the middle of the spring semester. In two days we had to turn our entire University Writing Center operation, with two physical locations and one virtual schedule providing hundreds of appointments each week, into one, large integrated online Writing Center. What’s more, we had to develop a system to coordinate the daily work of a staff of almost 20 people who would now all be working at home. At the same time, our consultants, all students themselves, and our writers were all scrambling to adjust to a new environment of online learning and sheltering in place.

Staff copy 1 — University Writing Center Staff, 2019-20

Yet, when people ask why I say we have the best Writing Center staff in the business, it is for moments like these. Cassie Book, our associate director, and Amber Yocum, our administrative associate, worked fast and flawlessly to make the transition to the online schedule made for writers making appointments and for our tutoring staff. We didn’t miss a single appointment in the transition to the online schedule. Since that transition, our consultants, all working from home and balancing family and their own courses, have continued to provide exceptional feedback to writers from across multiple departments and disciplines. I am always proud of the people who work in the University Writing Center, but this year’s staff has been something special. I feel so fortunate to have been able to work with them and the University community has been fortunate to have them to help support and strengthen writing at UofL.

Even with the disruptions that have affected all of us in the past six weeks, however, much of what we have done, and continue to do, has not changed. Our consultants have continued to offer insightful advice about writing, as well as thoughtful support and suggestions about how to navigate the challenges of writing in such a rapidly changing and deeply unsettling time. We continued to believe that not only is every person who writes a “writer,” but that careful listening, thoughtful response, and creative collaboration can make everyone a more effective and confident writer. And, as always, we appreciate the trust that writers from across the UofL community display in letting us work with them.

We will be open during the summer, starting May 11, from 9-4 every weekday. You can find out more on our website. You can also follow us on our blog and on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Beyond Tutoring – Events and Community Writing

Before the pandemic, we once again worked to fulfill our commitment to supporting a culture of writing on campus and in the community.

Writing Groups, and Dissertation Writing Retreats: Our popular Creative Writing, LGBTQ+ and Faculty and Graduate Student Writing Groups continued to give UofL writers supportive communities through which they could create and talk about writing. We again held our annual spring Dissertation Writing Retreat in May. We will be holding the Retreat next month as a fully virtual Retreat. We plan next year to continue all of these groups, so be sure to check our website for information and dates.

Writing Events: Once again we hosted or took part in a range of writing-related events, including our Halloween Scary Stories Open Mic Night, Kick Back in the Stacks, a

IMG_20200221_121150 — International Mother Language Day Celebration

Valentine’s Day Open Mic and International Mother Language Day. The open mic nights were thanks to our ongoing partnership with the Miracle Monocle Literary Magazine.

Community Writing: We also continued our work with our community partners, the Western Branch of the Louisville Free Public Library and Family Scholar House. Once again we are grateful for the participatory and collaborative partnerships with these organizations. You can find out more about these community writing projects, including how to get involved with them, on our website.

The Best Writing Center Staff in the Business

I am proud of our staff every day. They work consistently with care and intellectual insight to support the work of writers in the University. They also make me laugh and enjoy coming to work each day. Thanks go to Associate Director Cassie Book, Administrative Associate Amber Yocum, and Assistant Directors, Megen Boyett, Aubrie Cox, Edward English, and Rachel Rodriguez. Also special thanks go to Writing Center Intern and HSC Consultant Liz Soule. Our consultants this year have been Olalekan Adepoju, Ash Bittner, Michelle Buntain, Tristan DeWitt, Rose Dyar, Kendyl Harmeling, Kelby Gibson, Catherine Lange, Shiva Mainaly, Lauren Plumlee, Hayley Salo, Cat Sar, and Kayla Sweeney. Our student workers were and Milaela Smith and Jency Trejo.

Writing Center Staff Achievements

The University Writing Center is also an active site of scholarship about the teaching of writing. Staff from the Writing Center were engaged in a number of scholarly projects during the past year in rhetoric and composition, literature, and creative writing.

Cassandra Book, Associate Director, is now Dr. Cassandra Book after defending her dissertation “Students at a Crossroads: TA Development Across Pedagogical and Curricular Contexts” from Old Dominion University. In addition she was awarded the 2020 UofL College of Arts & Sciences Outstanding Performance Award for Staff. She presented at the International Writing Centers Association Conference and was accepted for the College Conference on Composition and Communication (which was cancelled because of the pandemic).

Megen Boyett, Assistant Director for Graduate Student Writing, was accepted at the Conference on Community Writing and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (that were cancelled because of the pandemic).

Aubrie Cox, Assistant Director for the Virtual Writing Center published “Reparative Leanings of Haiku Aesthetics: Ways of Knowing and Reading in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love,” Juxtapositions: A Journal of Haiku Research and Scholarship Issue 5, December 2019. Two poems in ANOTHER TRIP AROUND THE SUN: 365 Days of Haiku for Children Young and Old. Brooks Books, 2019. Three poems in All the Way Home: Aging in Haiku. Middle Island Press, 2019.

Edward English, Assistant Director of the University Writing Center was accepted at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (cancelled because of the pandemic).

Rachel Rodriguez, Assistant Director of the University Writing Center presented at the IWCA Ideas Exchange and was accepted to present at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Rhetoric Society of America (both canceled due to COVID19). She co-authored a CompPile WPA Bibliography on Translingualism and published “The Unique Affordances of Plainness in George Eliot’s Silas Marner and Middlemarch,” in the forthcoming volume 72, no. 1 of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies.

Consultants

Ash Bittner, defended his MA Thesis Long for Death will enter the UofL Humanities Ph.D. program in the fall on a University Fellowship.

Michelle Buntain, did a reading of her poetry at the Bard’s Town in Louisville.

Tristan DeWitt, chaired a panel at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture.

Rose Dyar, was accepted to present at the AEPL’s summer conference.

Catherine Lange presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication Virtual Conference.

Hayley Salo, will be the Morton Chair Research Assistant for Dr. Deborah Lutz next year.

Cat Sar, was awarded a Department of English Creative Writing Scholarship

Liz Soule, presented at the International Writing Centers Association Conference in October and will enter the UofL Rhetoric and Composition Ph.D. Program next year on a University Fellowship.

Jency Trejo, one of our student workers, also passed her U.S. Citizenship Exam.

Rethinking Writing in the Digital Age: Implications for Writing Center Tutoring

Olalekan Adepoju, Writing Consultant

The boom in digital technologies continues to challenge our basic understanding of writing and literacy practices. Which, for the most part, is a good thing. This is because these technologies provide genuine platforms for improvement to our information and literacy practices in terms of what is learned, how it is learned, where it is learned and when it is learned. In fact, these available digital devices enable students to learn at their own pace and develop skills needed in a modern society.

It is evident that, nowadays, technological tools are ubiquitous and widely accessible to all categories of people, thereby aiding teaching and learning. This has no doubt contributed to the disruption to literacy practices, especially writing, in that information used to be conveyed mainly through two modes, namely alphabets and visual elements such as white space, margins and font size. But this has now been extended to include multiple modes such as visual images, video, color, and sound among others. Social media has also helped a great deal to extend the impact of writing practices beyond pen/pencil and paper to creating a wide space and opportunity for writing to occur beyond the pages of a book.

These forms of writing, thus, necessitate that we, as writing center consultants, re-consider our tutoring strategies to achieve our objective of making a better writer instead of simply making a better text. One of the crucial reasons for rethinking writing in this digital age is because of its implication for knowledge transfer. The proliferation of digital technologies has accentuated the need for creative thinking in all aspects of our lives, and has also provided tools that can help us improve and transfer important skills for knowledge production.

Although writing center consultants’ familiarity with different modes of communication is generally important during tutoring sessions, it is nevertheless not necessary for the tutors to possess expertise in the use of technologies or a genre-specific knowledge of how these modes work in their entirety. However, discussing the thinking and production processes of the digital text constitutes an important aspect of the tutoring; this inevitably helps writers in transferring relevant skills and knowledge garnered through the production stages of the digital texts into other aspects of life.

In addition, since writers, wittingly or unwittingly, approach their writing practices using “all available means of communication” (Takayoshi and Selfe, 2007) at the disposal to express their intentions to the audience, tutoring sessions should also include an examination of the effectiveness of the rhetorical choices and moves made by the writer to achieve this goal.

Rethinking writing practices in this digital age also has an implication for collaboration between the writing center and the digital media centers. Such partnerships, it is believed, will foster efforts on helping students who are struggling with the production of their digital writing practices as well as open a line of communication and exchange of information on the progress and improvements of writers’ digital texts.

To conclude, I would echo Takayoshi and Selfe’s (2007) notion that, if the writing center is to foster the goal of making a better writer, who can both “create meaning in texts and interpret meaning from text within a dynamic and increasingly technological world”, we need to rethink our approaches in order to enable a tutoring session that accommodates the affordances of writing in the digital age.

Source

Takayoshi, Pamela and Cynthia L., Selfe. “Thinking about Multimodality.” Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers . Ed. Cynthia L., Selfe, Cresskill: Hampton P, 2007, pp 1-12.

The Inclusive Tutor: Addressing and Redressing Diversity in the Writing Center

Shiva Mainaly, Writing Consultant

What are the attributes and traits of an inclusive tutor? Why do we need an inclusive tutor?
How does an inclusive tutor differ from a non-inclusive tutor? Why is the question of inclusion so important to writing centers?

These are the questions that have compelled me to ponder.

We have sufficient records that our writing center has been visited by a large number of students year by year. Among those students who have visited our writing center, a considerable number of them are non-American, non-native speakers of English, resident students, visa students, students belonging to 1.5 generation, students on F1 and J 1 status. Some of these students are enrolled in undergraduate classes whereas others are enrolled in graduate level courses. These students embody different socio-cultural, linguistic, historical, and continent specific experiences.

The number of those students having unique cultural differences is on the rise. To provide care, support and guidelines, the writing center has been widening its scope. Since the writing center has already taken constructive steps to include students regardless of caste, creed, convention, color, disability and gender, it has been hailed as the hub where diversity, the differential, and disability are carefully accepted and constructive counseling is given keeping in mind the unique nuance, agency and concern of student writers.

To address constructively all those voices, expectations, dignity, agency and sensibilities of students, writing center needs inclusive tutors. Only inclusive tutors can handle with dignity the longings, concerns and curiosities of student writers. In the present time in which writing centers have been witnessing the flow of students both native and nonnative speakers of English, what writing centers need is inclusive tutors.

By an inclusive tutor, I mean the sort of tutor who demonstrates tremendous patience and a sense of acceptance when it comes to looking into the student drafts. Only those tutors who have the capacity to say ‘yes’ to their own weaknesses, frailties, flaws, feet of clay, shortcoming and limitations can accept the others as they really are. Here I am reminded of what Francis Fukuyama in his book Identity says “the longing to get recognition from others is the universal longing everyone is endowed with. It is this longing for recognition from others that drives us to forge and foment the question of identity”.

Below I have presented some attributes and traits of an inclusive tutor:

• The inclusive tutor does not get stuck on any identity category rooted in caste, creed, convention, color and gender when he or she starts tutoring in writing center.

• An inclusive tutor possesses tremendous power of acceptance. In no way, he or she deviates from the centrality of his or her power of accepting difference in any form.

• Language has the power to influence thought and vice versa. So, the inclusive tutor does not believe in the dichotomy of lower order concern and higher order concern.

• The inclusive tutor is always ready to address any concern of students be it grammar and punctuation or structural chronology of ideas without compromising with the foundational belief that writing center is not a grammar fixing center.

• The inclusive tutor acts in an innovative way. Labels, categories, stereotypes and banal modes of expressions are simply rejected by an inclusive tutor.

• The inclusive tutor knows when and how to switch deftly and smartly from non-directive modes of tutoring to directive modes of tutoring.

• The inclusive tutor believes and acts on the assumption that every student writer is a world in himself or herself. And the tutor navigates this world with consciousness.

• The inclusive tutor is driven by the belief that all forms of literacy are interrelated, supplementary, complementary, correlative, and symbiotically linked. Alphabetic literacy, visual literacy, digital literacy, community literacy, twitteracy etc. are all important in knowledge making process. The inclusive tutor makes use of anything that serves the best goal of tutor and boosts the institutional prestige and standing of writing center.

• An inclusive tutor forcibly believes that after each interaction with student writer, a new self is born in the life of inclusive tutor.

• The inclusive tutor is a mirror on which student writer finds the reflection of his or her own image, face.

• Writing is not a product of solitary endeavor. It is a product of collective efforts. This is the quintessence of inclusive tutoring.

The Writer’s Notebook: Building Your Toolkit

Quaid Adams, Consultant

Writing is hard and can be daunting. Let’s get that out of the way first and foremost. Just like with math or science, some people excel at writing and can pump out dissertation length pieces with ease. Quaid Adams While there are others who find themselves barely being able to string words together to make what they think is a “good” sentence, let alone, a longer piece of writing. I get it. Truly, I do.

Even though I am a graduate student in English, there are days that I struggle to write. Whether that is due to me not really having a direction to go in a new piece or hitting the dreaded wall of writer’s block in the middle of something I have already started. Or even not really feeling like writing that day because there is so many other things going on in my life that I cannot focus long enough to write something well.
Everyone’s story with writing is different and there can be real beauty in that. However, there is one thing I am sure of, there is no such thing as a bad writer.

Regardless of what former teachers, family, or friends have said in the past, you are a writer, neither good nor bad, but a writer who is ever changing and learning. We all are. We can all bring different things to the table and can share amazing stories given the opportunity, some of us are just a bit more reserved about it than others. Writing, whether academic or creative can be an outlet for so many things and can not only serve as a form of expression, but also as a form of therapy and a way to bring clarity to this crazy world. One tool that I have found that incorporates all of this is by beginning to keep a writer’s notebook.

What is a writer’s notebook? The answer to that is simple; it can be whatever you want. However, you may think this freedom makes it sound like a journal or a diary in its makeup. While it does share similarities, the writer’s notebook functions as more of a reactionary platform versus one of description. In his book, A Writer’s Notebook, author Ralph Fletcher describes the writer as someone who reacts to their world and differentiates them from ordinary people who notice things but do nothing about it. He goes on to describe the writer’s notebook as, “a place to write down what makes you angry or sad or amazed, to write down what you noticed and don’t want to forget, to record exactly what your grandmother whispered in your ear before she said good-bye for the last time” (4).

The writer’s notebook is a sanctuary for the writer and its pages are there for them to explore and express themselves through. Writing a paper for class and having too many ideas? Make a list or a web to get your thoughts organized. Lost in a daydream about some far-off fantastical place? Write it down in detail as a starting point for a larger piece of writing. Walk up on one of those campus protest about something you are feeling strongly about but can’t express yourself out loud, write about those feelings. It is your notebook to do with as you please. You can write pages on a single topic or just scribble an idea or something you overheard in the margins of the page to come back to later. Make it look professional with hard-leather backing or make it bright and colorful. Whatever reflects you as a person and whatever is going to make you use it.

I know, I know. It sounds kind of hokey and like just another piece of writing you have to keep up with in your already busy schedule, but hear me out. Writers get better at writing by doing it. Using the writer’s notebook to do this in an environment where you are not being graded or judged allows you to write without fear of repercussions or without an impending deadline looming. It also allows you to have complete creative control of whatever goes into your notebook. Not unlike a tradition journal in this sense, it also allows to you observe and react to the world around you, and as a way to channel your emotions into your writing.

However, the difference here is that while you may be using it as a means of therapy, these feelings and thought are also neatly tucked away into your writer’s notebook, ready for you to pull inspiration from someday down the line. So while you are benefiting from it now by relieving stress or the emotional trauma of Qdoba being out of steak for the burrito you’ve been craving since noon, you may also benefit from it in the future when you need inspiration for another project. The notebook can utilized in terms of academic and creative writing as well. Say an idea pops into your head about a story you might like to write or a topic for a research paper miraculously appears, write it down. Even if you don’t return to it anytime soon, its still written down and ready for you to pull from whenever you need it.

This brings up another important use for the writer’s notebook; reflection and editing. Your notebook is a glimpse inside your mind, spilled out onto a piece of paper. The only difference is that while thoughts are fleeting and can be easily forgotten, what your write in your journal is a tangible representation of your feelings and thoughts which can be visited whenever necessary. Reflection and editing is a vital step in any writer’s journey through a piece. It allows us to better understand ourselves and the work we have done to actually sit back and reflect on its importance to us and to whatever it is we are working on at the time. Through your writer’s notebook you can do just that, without constantly worrying about grammar or spelling errors. You can write what you are experiencing or whatever jumbled thought flits through your mind. Just write it, let it stew, and come back to it on a rainy day, or never again if you don’t want to. Sometimes it is good to get things out of our head and it is ok to never look back at it again. However, it is there should you want to.

The writer’s notebook is a multi-faceted tool for any and all writers, be they from academia, or just the poets and writers that wander the world making it a little better with each written word. It has something for everyone to benefit from regardless if you think you are a good writer or a bad one. Through the use of this resource, we as writers can have safe place to store our ideas, our feelings, and musings, if for no one else but ourselves. So pick up an empty notebook today and just start writing, it doesn’t matter about what, just write. You may be amazed at what actually comes out on the page.

Works Cited

Fletcher, Ralph. A Writer’s Notebook. HarperTrophy, 2006

If interested in further reading on the topic, I highly suggest picking up a copy of the work cited above, Ralph Fletcher’s, A Writer’s Notebook. Below is the link from Amazon:

Get Babashook: Finding Inspiration in the Mundane

Catherine Lange, Consultant

Have you ever found yourself doing something mundane and relating it to something you just learned in class? Maybe you kick a soccer ball in an arc and then consider the algebra of soccer. Or perhaps you watch a movie and think it has some interesting perspectives on an issue. Catherine Lange

Inspiration can come from any number of completely mundane places, as it did for me while watching The Babadook. For those of you unfamiliar with the film, it follows the development of a monster that correlates to the mental break of the main character. As I watched The Babadook, I found myself considering the implications of the monster. If he is an entity dependent on the mother, is he a projection of her anxieties? And, if he is, what anxieties is she projecting through the monster? This horror film offered me a means of recreation and fodder for a possible analytical essay. What would my thesis be? Could the monster be the mother’s projection of her sexual anxieties?

All of these questions inform my writing potential and would make for a creative but academic essay. So, as you go about your day, look for the connections you can make between your everyday life and your coursework; sometimes inspiration is closer than it seems…

Finding the Strategies, and Confidence, to be Stronger Writers

Bronwyn T. Williams, Director

If you’ve ever heard someone from the University Writing Center talk about what we do here you’ve likely heard them say that our goal is to do more than help a writer simply “fix” a current draft. We also want to provide ideas and strategies to help that person become a stronger writer in the future. Some of these suggestions are nuts and bolts dscn2185 suggestions about organization or revision or grammar and usage. Yet we also believe that writing well involves more than just mastering a set of skills. The writing processes we use, as well as how confident and motivated we feel to work on a piece of writing, can be crucial to how successfully any writer navigates new writing challenges.

Talk to many university students – or, quite frankly, most people in the culture – and you will hear people say things such as “I just can’t write,” or “I’m not a born writer.” After years of unproductively harsh criticism, rather than constructive instruction, they have internalized a belief that there is some kind of hidden magic to being a good writer, and that they don’t have it. The truth is, that writing well takes time, practice, failure, revision, advice, and is an ongoing, life-long learning process for all of us. There are simply no “born writers.”

In recent research of mine, I have been focusing on what makes people feel anxious about, or confident in, their reading and writing abilities at a given moment. Put more simply, what makes a person feel literate at one time and not another. Many factors facilitate or obstruct such a feeling of agency for people. A new technology can make writing suddenly much easier, or can make previously simple actions complicated and confusing. A teacher’s response to a writing assignment can be dismissive and discouraging, or offer encouraging suggestions for revision that make a writer feel that success is possible.

Culture, material conditions, language, and many other factors shape all writers’ perceptions of agency. All of these external influences result in experiences, emotions, and memories that also shape such perceptions. My research on how these factors influence student writers took place in part at the UofL University Writing Center as well as with students in the United Kingdom and Kazakhstan, (the book is titled Literacy Practices and Perceptions of Agency: Composing Identities). In this research, I drew on research in psychology and neuroscience, as well as other fields, to understand how writers’ sense of confidence could vary dramatically from one context to another and how that affected their abilities to write successfully. A student could write well in one course, and struggle in a new course, even in the same major, when facing a new genre. Another student could excel at writing at work, but not at school. Each experience creates a different emotional memory that will influence how that student both thinks and feels about a similar writing situation the next time it comes up. Research in psychology on emotion, memory, and motivation, illustrates how important the kinds of response we provide as writing consultants and teachers is to the ways in which students approach their writing.

At the University Writing Center, we have incorporated some of the ideas from this research into the ways we work with writers. We are developing strategies that help writers approach revision, even substantial revision that will require a great deal of work, with more confidence in their abilities to do such difficult work, and more internal motivation to complete the work. One key part of this approach is helping writers understand that their struggles and anxieties are not unique to them, but typical of all writers, from first-year students to famous novelists. We sometimes take the time to talk about how learning anything is first a struggle, but one that they can work through. Writing is not an innate gift, but a learned activity that gets better with practice. That knowledge alone, research has shown, can result in significant changes in how willing student writers may be to put in the hours and effort to improve their work. We both give students strategies for improving as well as talk to them about how, like all writers, they have strengths, challenges, and the abilities to keep learning.

My research is just one example of the ongoing research about writing and the teaching of writing that takes place at the University Writing Center. We are, as our mission statement points out, “committed to being part of ongoing scholarly conversations about the teaching of writing.” You can see this research reflected in work that Cassandra Book, our Associate Director, did on our Virtual Writing Center, or by the publications and graduate student projects that you can find listed on our website, or the conferences at which our staff present each year. An essential part of being a research university is the idea that we should use our research to contribute to knowledge in our field and enhance the educational experiences of our students. We’re looking forward to the start of the spring semester and to helping all writers find the strategies, and confidence, that will offer them the chance to express their ideas as clearly and creatively as possible.

Behind the Scenes at the Virtual Writing Center

Cassie Book, Associate Director

DSCN3703

As the University Writing Center’s (UWC) Associate Director, I’m always interested in ways to move from practice-based questions to research and practical improvements. The goal of a recent research project was to improve the overall Virtual Writing Center experience for both writers and consultants. During my day-to-day experience in the UWC, I noticed that some writers (the students, faculty, and staff who use our services) had difficulty locating Virtual Writing Center appointments on our online schedule. The “Virtual Writing Center” broadly encompass our website and synchronous (live chat) and asynchronous (written feedback) online tutoring. We offer both forms of Virtual appointments to Distance Education students and those who cannot visit for a face-to-face appointment. In addition to noting that some writers couldn’t find the Virtual Writing Center appointments on our online schedule, other writers accidentally scheduled a live online chat session when they really wanted asynchronous written feedback on their draft. These were not trivial issues. If not corrected, they result in a writer not getting the help they wanted or losing valuable appointment time.

I developed a research project based on “user-experience” (UX) methodologies that would allow me to investigate where the breakdown in usability and/or communication occurred. The most important reason why it is important for writers to be able to successfully use the technology writing centers employ is accessibility. For instance, in physical writing center spaces, stairs leading to an entrance could be a barrier for a writer using a wheelchair or crutches. In online spaces, the clunky setup of online scheduling systems could create barriers to accessing writing centers. Understanding how writers use our UWC’s online scheduling system would help us redesign elements of the system to make it as welcoming and usable as possible for all potential users.

To understand how our website and schedule confused writers, I recruited six UofL students who have never used the Virtual Writing Center and conducted usability tests and interviews. A “usability test” is not really a “test;” it simply provides scenarios for study participants to undertake (such as, “schedule an appointment in the Writing Center; you want the kind of appointment where you do not physically have to go to the Writing Center”) while a researcher (me) observes them. My follow-up interviews asked the students to discuss their perceptions of the scheduling process and the website. Finally, also I observed three Virtual Writing Center consultants as they worked and conducted a focus group about their use and perceptions of the technology. I collected and analyzed the data on the usability tests, interviews, observations, and focus group to create a picture of what was happening “behind the scenes” of the Virtual Writing Center. For example, to analyze the usability test data and interviews, I simply looked for patterns. One pattern I noticed was that most participants did not stop to read the instructions on our website before attempting to schedule an appointment. My data overall showed me how consultants and writers used the technology, which was valuable for me as an administrator wanting to improve their online experiences.

After I analyzed the data, I developed a list of recommendations for changes to the website and scheduling system based on my findings. We’ve already put in place several improvements! These include: redesigning the Appointments webpage using icons and new resources, such as a new Frequently Asked Questions about the Virtual Writing Center. We also added disclaimers and visual clues on the Appointment page and online schedule to grab writers’ attention to let them know where to find the Virtual Writing Center schedule (see below). We changed the names of the Virtual appointment types to more logically descriptive names. Now the choice between “Written Feedback” and “Live Video Chat” in the Virtual Writing Center is, we hope, clearer. We also revised some of the training for our Virtual Writing Center consultants to ease their anxieties about using technology to communicate about writing. If our consultants aren’t 100% comfortable with it, we can’t expect the writers to be.

announcement uwc wconline — The revised announcement on our Ekstrom Library location schedule, which uses visuals to capture users’ attention.

I would like to make two points to conclude. First, I believe that integrating user-experience perspectives into writing center practices benefits both writing center administrators, to make more informed design decisions, and writers, to more easily access centers. Writing centers (alongside other entities in education) can get easily excited about a new innovation or tool, but we need to also think critically about the impact on students, especially in terms of accessibility. Writing center theory already values writer-centered practices and user-experience studies build on that foundation. Second, a major tenant of user-experience research is that it should be ongoing, so our work is not done! We will continue to collect data on how our writers and consultants use our technology and use those insights to make adjustments to practice.

This research was funded by the Christine Cozzens Research Grant from the Southeastern Writing Center Association and will likely appear in more detail in a future publication.

Writing Centers Look Back: A Focus on Methodologies and Institutional History

Cassie Book, Associate Director

Last week I attended the annual International Writing Centers Association conference in Denver, Colorado. In 1983, the first ever conference for the organization was held in Denver (pro tip: it used to be the National Writing Centers Association). Fittingly, this year’s theme was “frontiers,” which allowed writing center scholars and practitioners a moment to consider connections to our past. Conference organizers, including conference chair John Nordlof, also asked participants to question new territories and critically reflect upon colonial, capitalist, racist ideologies that persist in writing centers and institutional spaces. As Shannon Carter has argued, writing centers are paradoxically caught between institutional priorities and our educational commitments to literacy.

Everyone experiences a conference individually— through sessions selected, dinner conversations, tweets (#iwca2016), and scribbled notes in the program’s margins. As I followed the crumbs of my own writing center interests, a theme emerged. I noticed the complexity in looking to the future when we’re in a field saturated with the richness of situated and lived experiences of teacher-scholar-practitioners. I saw this in both explicit critical reflections on research methodologies and implicit acknowledgements of the effects of local institutional histories on current and future practices.

More than last year, I noticed presenters thoroughly engaging with and reflecting on methodologies for creating knowledge in writing center studies. For instance, Holly Ryan’s survey results seem to indicate that a video demo compared to an in-person demo of a tutorial have equally positive effects on students’ intentions to visit the writing center. Yet, Ryan didn’t stop with results and implications. She encouraged the audience to both follow our intuitions and consider the limitations of survey research; she even provided examples from other disciplines. Steve Sherwood took a wider view in his reflection on scholarship and research trends. Though he was generally supportive of the current landscape, he admitted his unease with the current push toward valuing replicable, aggregable, data-driven (RAD) studies. Sherwood said he certainly sees the value, but wonders: what is lost? What happens to our practitioners’ knowledge? Building on the notion of questioning RAD, Rebecca Hallman proposed that qualitative writing center researchers, in order to account for local situations, cannot neatly or ethically replicate methods of past studies. Again, using the opportunity to “look back,” presenters turned a critically reflective lens onto their and the fields’ methodologies.

I also noticed the pull of the past in presentations focused on new initiatives. For instance, I presented with a panel analyzing writing centers’ move into learning commons. Both of my co-panelists, Mary Beth Simmons and Melissa Manchester, included how their institutional histories affected their current situation. I’m reminded that I too should more thoroughly consider institutional history as I research how UofL’s University Writing Center can best collaborate with our new neighbors in Ekstrom Library’s Learning Commons. In the digital realm, Megan Boeshart reminded her audience that digital technologies have institutional histories too—online tutoring must be developed and maintained within the affordances and constraints of available campus technology, student familiarity, and tutor expertise. If not, online tutoring, though available, might not be accessible. Finally, I noticed attention to graduate student consultants. Like UofL’s University Writing Center, many centers employ graduate students. However, as presenters such as Deanna Babcock, Molly Tetreault, Bradfield Dittrich, and Bridget Carlson argued, graduate student consultants bring with them their developing disciplinary identities, and varied goals for themselves as teachers and professionals. The writing center may or may not play a significant role in their teacherly identity. Yet, graduate student consultants are built into the very foundations of many writing centers, like UofL’s, and rightly so. My point is, when looking to the future, we must take into consideration our local institutional histories. I appreciated the presentations that attended to the messiness of their local situations.

For writing center scholars, writing centers are both our subjective daily lived experiences and an object of our scholarly attention. IWCA’s exercise in variations on “frontiers” has allowed me to see that writing centers studies may be in a formative space as we begin to question the strengths and weaknesses of methodologies, such as RAD, and look to how our local institutional histories affect current and future practices.

Works Cited

Carter, Shannon. “The Writing Center Paradox: Talk about Legitimacy and the Problem of Institutional Change.” College Composition and Communication 61.1 (2009): W133-W152. Print.

International Writing Centers Association Annual Conference, Denver, CO, October 2016. Conference program. 19 October 2016. Web.

Jessica Newman, Lorraine Savage, Bradfield Dittrich, and Molly Tetreault, panel on graduate student identities

Cassie Book, Deanna Babcock, and Alex Wasson, UofL

Rebecca Hallman, “Extending Peripheral Visions: A Quest for Qual-RAD WC Research”

Holly Ryan, “Using Video to Promote the Writing Center: An Empirical Research Study”

What does OWL mean to you?: Creating New Web-Based Resources for the Writing Center

Cassie Book, Associate Director

The University Writing Center is always open to improving our online resources and services for on campus and at-a-distance students, faculty, and staff. Currently, we offer virtual tutoring, a robust website, social media, (this) blog, and several online resources such as our Writing FAQs, but we understand that technology and student-needs push us to revise and add. I recently had an opportunity to research Online Writing Labs (OWLs) and reflect on our center’s online resources for a graduate course in Online Writing Instruction (OWI). Moreover, as a project for the course, I developed a new resource, a video workshop, “Writing a Literature Review,” to add to our current collection of six video workshops. This blog describes my development process and briefly connects it to research on OWI and OWLs.

I choose to create a video workshop on literature reviews because it is a logical need for graduate students. Moreover, the Writing Center already has an established in-person workshop on Literature Reviews, co-hosted with the School of Interdisciplinary and Graduate Studies (SIGS). While we (humbly) think our in-person workshops are great, it is inevitable that some students are unable to attend due to timing or access to campus. Some students’ learning styles may also be better suited to a video with pause, rewind, and captioning tools. So, it makes sense to create online, access-anytime video workshops. However, creating online resources that also are accessible and not just a one-way stream of information (imagine: videos with talking heads or a 100% lecture-based course), is not the easiest task. I’d like to share how pedagogical goals, technology, and accessibility needs shaped the final product of the video workshop I created.

The original workshop I created used Zaption (an open access video platform, which is now defunct); the video is now on YouTube. The video is approximately ten minutes of video-recorded PowerPoint slides defining a literature review and offering strategies for research and writing. As you might expect, it has an audio voice-over. The visual components are are text, images, animation, and captioning. An interactive component is multiple-choice and open-ended questions that appear on the screen periodically. These questions do not have correct answers; instead, they ask the audience to connect a concept to their own context, provide customized suggestions, or jump to a more relevant section of the video. I also created a text-only script to accompany the video link on our website.

Though the learning outcome for the workshop is fairly straightforward, that the audience understand the conventions and components of a literature review as part of a larger project, simply presenting decontextualized information is not a good teaching strategy, regardless of the setting—an on campus or online classroom. Kelli Cargile-Cook, professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech, argues for pedagogy-driven online education in contrast to technology-driven. Even in an online space, content delivery should be more interactive, “similar to dialogic onsite classrooms” where “instructor and students provide course content” (59). Our Writing Center staff present in-person workshops with interactive delivery, but the nature of the online, accessible by anyone at any time, video workshops makes the issue of real-time response, impossible for the medium. Originally, hosting the video on Zaption allowed us to insert interactive questions into the video. Although Zaption was intended as a venue for self-paced quiz-based courses, I created more of an interactive space by creating questions without “correct” answers.

Because it was important to have a script as a component of my final project, I began drafting and story-boarding in a Google Doc. After I completed a draft, I moved to PowerPoint because I was preparing to create the video with audio voice-over. I thought I had a good script draft before moving to PowerPoint, but I encountered issues such as repetition and text-heavy explanations. I wrote as I would informally speak, not as I would present key words and concepts on slides, ideally using movement, images, and figures to demonstrate concepts. I moved back and forth between the PowerPoint and the script, making sure that both covered the same material. For example, the description of the purpose of literature reviews, in the script was: “A literature review has two related purposes. First, to evaluate existing research related to your topic and second to position your argument within the existing research.” Adapting this to PowerPoint, I employed a “SmartArt” graphic and an animation to show the relationship between the two purposes. A balance with several citations appears with the first purpose as the slide’s title. Then, the second purpose appears in the gap between citations (fig. 1).

slide owl

Figure 1. PowerPoint slide four. The slide first appears without the box “2. To position your argument within the existing research.” The arrow indicates how the text moves onto the screen.

I tried to build in access into the design from the beginning, as Sushil Oswal, in “Physical and Learning Disabilities in OWI,” recommends. Oswal directs teachers and course designers to, “Always place accessibility at the beginning of all planning; it should remain an integral part of all subsequent course design and delivery processes” (282). I created a text-only script to include as a link next to the link to the Zaption video on our website, but I adapted the text script to exclude references to what the audience might be “seeing” on screen. I also used YouTube’s closed captioning feature, which allows me to type the audio and auto-sync the timing. For the ten minute video, it took me about 45 minutes to create captions. I also had multilingual users in mind because there are many international graduate students at the University of Louisville who visit the Writing Center. In “Multilingual Writers and OWI,” Susan Miller-Cochran recommends “that instruction in writing should be clear, and that oral and/or video supplements also should be provided” (298). I explained the purpose and objectives clearly at the beginning and summarized them at the end, which should be helpful to most all learners.

Although I designed my video workshop, “Writing a Literature Review,” with the tools and intentions I outlined here, that does not mean that the outcomes will be as I anticipated and carefully planned. Usability studies with OWLs, such as Allen Brizee, Morgan Sousa, and Dana Driscoll’s in their research with the well-liked Purdue OWL, remind OWL developers that users are the ultimate authority to the effectiveness of a learning object, tool, or lesson. To complicate matters further right after I completed the project, Zaption announced that it was bought out and was shutting down. The availability of tools, especially free open-access tools, is a reality for OWI and OWL. Losing Zaption is not good news for us if it happens that the Writing a Literature Review workshop is well-liked, but, as I mentioned, we now host it on You Tube and preserve most of the dialogic nature of the video.

So, what do you think? Do you like the interactive questions? Do they get you thinking? Or are they distracting? Your recommendations can be helpful to us as we move forward with refining our online resources, so please comment here or email writing@louisville.edu with suggestions!

Update September 30, 2016: The Zaption workshop was moved to You Tube. The blog as been updated to reflect this change.

Update November 1, 2017: The YouTube video now has over 11,000 views!

Works Cited

Brizee, Allen, Morgan Sousa, Dana Lynn Driscoll. “Writing Centers and Students with Disabilities: The User-centered Approach, Participatory Design, and Empirical Research as Collaborative Methodologies” Computers and Composition 26 (2009): 107-121. Print.

Cargile-Cook, Kelli. “An Argument for Pedagogy-Driven Online Education.” Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers. Eds. Kelli Cargile Cook and Keith Grant-Davie. Farmingdale, NY: Baywood. 49-66. Print.

“FAQ: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions.” Zaption. Zaption, 2016. Web. 16 May 2016. (https://www.zaption.com/faq)

Oswal, Sushil K. “Physical and Learning Disabilities in OWI.” Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction. Eds. Beth Hewett and Kevin Eric Depew. Fort Collins, CO: WAC
Clearinghouse and Parlor Press, 2015. 253-289. Web.

Miller-Cochran, Susan. “Multilingual Writers and OWI.” Foundational Practices of Online
Writing Instruction. Eds. Beth Hewett and Kevin Eric DePew. Fort Collins, CO: WAC
Clearinghouse and Parlor Press, 2015. 253-289. Web.

You Can’t Teach That: Facilitating Discussion on Tutor-Writer Rapport?

Amy Nichols, Assistant Director

As one of the assistant directors at the writing center, I have the opportunity to teach two lessons in Bronwyn’s “Writing Center Theory and Practice” course, where our graduate consultants receive training during the fall semester. Recently, I facilitated one of our class discussions around “Student-tutor relations in the Writing Center.” Writing center sessions can include wildly varying levels of language and disciplinary expertise between both tutors and writers, making relationship-building critical to successful communication. In addition, rapport is also a crucial (and under-discussed) part of being a successful student, employee, or person generally.

Building individual relationships, particularly in professional settings, is a complex and deeply contextualized activity, and most of what I know about it is instinctive, built on trial and error over time. Because of this, I had a difficult time planning our lesson. For our discussion, I ended up choosing two recent articles from the journal Language and Education: Cynthia Lee’s (2015) “More than Just Language Advising: Rapport in University English Writing Consultations and Implications for Tutor Training” and Innhwa Park’s (2014) “Stepwise Advice Negotiation in Writing Center Peer Tutoring.” Lee’s focus on individual elements that go into building a relationship and Park’s discussion on how to deal with minor disagreements helped us find a way in to this difficult-to-teach subject.

Lee’s framework pulled from discourse and rapport scholarship to detail descriptions of the kinds of behaviors that we often take for granted: greetings, small talk, qualifiers/mitigation devices, open-ended questions, first-person plural pronoun use, and praises/related forms of encouragement (436). Saying hello and chatting about unrelated matters tend to be givens in social interaction, but they can also help ease the tension when two people don’t know one another well. Qualifiers such as “maybe” or “perhaps” and open-ended questions such as “Can you tell me more about your goals for this project/assignment?” help build understanding and ease discussions around disagreements. First-person plural pronouns like “we” and “us” are helpful in creating a more team-oriented work environment during sessions, while encouragement and praise help build confidence.

I don’t know about the consultants (feel free to comment!), but it was really helpful for me to have a conversation about those elements of a writing center session that often go unrecognized and (seemingly) unnoticed, but which can make a real difference to the success or failure of a session. For example, a few of our consultants shared that small talk tends to make them uncomfortable, particularly if students responded to small talk by discussing their frustration with particular assignment or situation, while another shared that she sees such situations as an emotional opening to help writers address their concerns. Understanding a variety of approaches to such small interactions and the rationale beneath them gave me more resources for interacting with a variety of personalities.

Park’s article details the ways in which advice resistance is a negotiated construction for both the tutor and the writer. She discusses the steps that resistance, acknowledgment, and resolution move through within sessions, and I thought her work might prove a helpful springboard for discussing the ways in which we negotiate advice resistance in our own sessions. We did discuss ways that we tend to navigate through (or around) resistance during our discussion. One of our consultants commented that, while she was aware of her own intentional practices in navigating resistance, she had not thought about the fact that writers might also follow certain linguistic formulations in constructing their resistance, such as saying “Yes, but what I was really trying to do there was….”. We also discussed the ways in which people from different classes and cultures might navigate resistance more or less directly than the examples in the article, which led one of our consultants to ask a very helpful question about balancing a knowledge of intersectionality (every person is different) with strategic approaches to consulting (we have to apply concrete strategies to our work).

Ultimately, I enjoyed our discussion, but I would love to hear some comments. Consultants, how did the session go from your perspective? Colleagues (and that includes you, too, consultants), how would you/do you encourage productive discussion on building relationships/rapport during writing center sessions? Writers, what kinds of discussions have been most helpful to you in moving your writing forward?