I and others were wowed by the presentations of undergraduate
students who worked at tutors at the Centre. Here is Anthony's
description:
A "genre-centered" approach to writing instruction was
demonstrated by 5 undergraduate students working as
tutors in the Centre, each of whom reported in precisely two minutes on
research conducted with reading-aloud protocols: in an effort to uncover
the rhetorical conventions that govern disciplinary readings of
different academic genres, the tutors had asked readers from various
disciplines (TAs and profs) to read student papers aloud and comment on
aspects of the texts. It was a gutsy way to begin (the students were
very impressive) and a powerful example of the use of genre as a tool
for both research and pedagogy.
--What struck me most about these presentations was the emphasis on research at the Writing Centre. Obviously, all the tutors are trained, but they are trained by way of doing research themselves, and research specific to the multi-perspectival nature of writing conventions. This is Russ's description of another presentation that evening, by Wendy Strachan, a researcher (/professor?) associated with the Centre:
an illuminating presentation by Wendy Strachan of the "mistaking," both by the students and by the teaching assistants who marked the students' papers, of a clever and unconventional assignment by an English teacher. The situation -- even more, [Anne] Freadman would, I think, say, the _history_ of the situation -- pushed both students and markers into conventionalizing the assignment, so that although it was designed to create a different rhetorical situation and ask for something other than "poetic analysis," students showed in think-aloud protocols that they read the assignment as asking for analysis, and, worse, the TAs tended to mark it as though it were supposed to be that sort of paper. ----
Janet Giltrow, who is in charge of the center, teaches a course specifically for tutors, which is apparently a highly demanding course in reading protocol research. I have in the past been very suspicious of writer-based protocol research, which gives a pretty unreliable map of what a writer has actually done. But think-alouds seem a pretty good measure of reading values. And by directing tutors' to the contested nature of text conventions in the academy, it decouples their own implicit theories of "what counts" as writing a certain kind of text from the charged arena in which students actually write, opening a space for critically informed negotiations. The tutors work with students by way of their own readings of what the students have written: two of them re-enacted this process. The tutor "read back" the "I" of a student's introductory paragraph as the "I" of an everyday, not an authoritative self, leaving open the student writer's decision about whether to use or alter that use of "I" in that paragraph. A critically informed space for negotiation.
Judith Diamondstone (732) 932-7496 Ext. 352 Graduate School of Education Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey 10 Seminary Place New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183