Making the Case for Writing Center Research
Neal Lerner
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Southeastern Writing Center Association Conference
February 17, 2006
Last year, I was shuttling my then six-year-old daughter Hannah to a play date when talk turned to the weather.
"Dad, do you know where wind comes from?" Hannah asked in a tone I knew meant that she was about to tell me something she had recently learned.
"No, from where?"
"From trees."
"From trees?"
"Yeah, from trees. Some third graders did a lot of research on it. Wind comes from trees."
Putting aside for now the translation of the ways that plants process CO2 to the ways that wind might be generated by that process (some of you in this room might be reminded of Ronald Reagan's assertion that trees were the greatest polluters on earth, a belief likely supported by the very same third-grade research report), I was struck then and now by the power of "research" for my daughter and, as attested to by the theme of this conference, the power for the rest of us, too. Research carries authority, produces evidence, offers meaning for us to figure out in large or small ways how our worlds work. Yet research can also separate us, divide those who know from those who don't, for whenever power and authority are involved, there'll be those who'll want to horde it all themselves.
When it comes to writing centers and research, my stance has long been that all of us involved in writing center work-whether primarily tutors, administrators, or scholars-are researchers. Teaching writing in one-to-one settings involves a complicated series of problem identification and problem solving that's at the heart of any research endeavor. And who better to conduct that research than those folks on the ground, or in the basement in some cases, those who are in most immediate need of solutions and of understanding. My message here is that we can create our own authority through research, through systematic study of what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. In short, we can become the third graders who produced the research that so convinced my daughter (and Ronald Reagan). In what follows, I offer my take on writing center research, and I do that in three parts. First, I offer some definitions key to research, then I point to some possible directions for research, and finally I talk about how we might publish our research.
It's important that I first clarify some of the terms that I've been throwing out, for conceiving of research in educational settings can often seem like a semantic struggle, a wrestling match between practice and theory or process and product or tutors and writers. To start, I'll tackle the big word-research: I've always found guidance for this endeavor in the concept of teacher-research popularized by National Writing Project folks. Ruth Ray describes teacher research as "an emancipation proclamation that results in new ownership--teachers own research into their own problems that results in modification of their own behaviors and theories" (174). In the context of public schooling with its long history of pressure to reform coming from above-think No Students Left Behind-coupled with the gap between university faculty who do the research and classroom teachers who are supposed to put that research into practice along the lines of following a recipe, the notion that change might come from within a teacher's own classroom is indeed revolutionary. But those of us in classrooms and writing centers know that change can come from within, from our careful reflection on what works and what does not, in short, from research.
Now there's that sticky separation between theory and practice. Intertwined with notions of who has the authority to theorize, the theory-practice split often results in both theory in search of evidence and practice in search of theoretical grounding. It's the academic in his armchair reading obscure European continental philosophy versus the undergraduate tutor, sleeves rolled up, wondering how she'll make it through a four-hour shift filled with desperate student writers arriving the day (or the hour) before their major paper is due. That's a caricature, for sure, but just as public school teachers might resent the abstract theorizing of university researchers, writing center tutors can often feel disconnected from the seemingly abstract knowledge making that gets printed in journals and anthologies. Here's an example of that level of abstraction from a 1991 Writing Center Journal article:
Does "minimal-input tutoring" allow students to place their texts in a larger process of deliberation, to partake in the play of intertextuality, or does it offer them a narrow and fettered conception of the text as a self-generated, autonomous piece of work which has its genesis in the central, individual consciousness of a determined self that functions outside the dominant ideology of the scene of writing?
Here's another:
Based on these data, the most frequently occurring interaction pattern was for Robert to suggest a change followed by the student evaluating Robert's suggestion. This can be considered a "correction routine" in that the goal for these interactions was to correct some portion of the student's written text (see Appendix B for example). This dominant interaction pattern is also prevalent in the fact that 74% of all coded turns by both participants deal with 10 total sentences of the student's text (11.6 turns per sentence).
Well, that second one never made it into a journal; that's from a research paper I wrote in graduate school. What was I thinking?!
While many writers have amply demonstrated that the theory-practice binary is a false one (for example, Gardner and Ramsey), the perception of that rift persists. Theorizing connotes time, distance, and abstraction, three qualities that are often in short supply in the day-to-day life of anyone involved in writing centers. And there's also a subversiveness inherent to the stance that those people theorize while we get the real work done. Here's one of my favorite quotes on the topic, from an article by Al DeCiccio, Mike Rossi, and Kathy Cain: "While writing center theorists debate with one another, a parallel conversation among tutors and tutees is constructing real theory" (26).
But let's reclaim the notion of theory here, for theory is essential to any research. Theory, in my mind, is an explanation for how some aspect of the world works. It's not set in stone, but is instead a synthesis of the available evidence, and it is essential to continually test theory against further evidence. Theories, thankfully, can change. Required reading in the current test-obsessed climate is Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, in which Gould traces how the long-standing application of the theory of "intelligence" by scientists such as H. H. Goddard and Lewis Terman represented, in Gould's words, "a deep prejudice with an ancient pedigree." Here's what H. H. Goddard offered in 1919 as his motivation to use intelligence testing, the IQ test, to sort the American people:
Democracy means that the people rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent and most human to tell them what do to be happy. Thus Democracy is a method for arriving at a truly benevolent aristocracy. (qtd. in Gould 161)
Well, given current efforts at "domestic surveillance," perhaps some theories don't change. I think one problem is that theory often gets confused with ideology. Think evolution versus so-called "Intelligent Design." More immediate to writing center work, think of the stubbornly persistent idea that students best learn to write by systematic formal study of the basics of grammar and usage, that if they could simply fill out enough grammar/usage worksheets, their prose will sing like Pavarotti. The evidence is surely stacked against this idea. As far back as 1947, Porter Perrin, then president of the NCTE, noted that "even though there is a growing body of data that points to the ineffectiveness of the workbook method in furthering actual communication, workbooks continue to be used at all levels, principally because they are easy for the teacher" (359). Nearly sixty years later, workbooks come in even-easier computer-based formats, but their effectiveness has never been proven. The persistence of this belief has nothing to do with theory, but with the power of reductive notions that learning to write means mastering discrete skills and that such mastery comes from a repetitive conditioned response. Think Pavlov's dog drooling all over those drill-and-kill worksheets. Building "mental discipline" has long been seen as the goal of education and that idea comes from notions that any person is essentially "undisciplined" or little more than a wild child resistant to the finer things that high culture has to offer. It doesn't take much to see how classist these arguments have always been, that purveyors of these ideas see the goal of education to inculcate the swarthy masses into more refined cultural habits of mind. Back in 1936 Burges Johnson and Helene Hartley of Syracuse University described composition classes as "flooded with hordes who come from high schools overcrowded with students lacking the background of cultured homes and the tradition of good English speech" (i).
In teaching writing, these mental habits have long been associated with the mastery of privileged dialects, of standard academic English, and it's a very short route from asserting this goal to castigating the linguistically deficient into remedial writing classes and writing centers. To this legacy, we owe much of our current struggle for legitimacy.
Now part 2, what to research:
What I want to stress here is the need for creative thinking, for research truly can be a creative act, applying smart thinking to a problem of sorts, whether that's a problem of method (how best to capture some phenomenon) or a problem of practice (how to improve writing center services in some way) or a problem of theory (how to understand some phenomenon). Writing center tutoring usually starts with tutor and writer sitting side by side (whether in a physical space or in their imaginations if the session takes place online), the writer's text occupying a central position. I see numerous opportunities for research here, for both participants bring histories, realities, and aspirations to that conference, all of which get translated into some stated or implicit goals, usually expressed in the opening moments, usually expressed in language. So a research project that involves understanding as deeply as possible what each participant brings to a session, what they hope to achieve and why, begins to get at larger questions of the ways writing centers function in the writing lives of students and how the goals and expectations of both participants might match or not. Researching the lives of writers who come to the writing center could also mean tapping into the myriad ways that our institutions gather data on students. Many colleges and universities ask their students to fill out an entry survey at the start of their first year and then some sort of end-of-first-year survey, to track how students' representation of their experiences has changed. Collaborations with offices of institutional research or whoever might be collecting these data can mean plugging the writing center directly into the lifeblood of an institution as we explore the ways writing centers contribute to student retention, satisfaction, and learning.
Researching the lives of our staffs can also yield important findings. Paula Gillespie, Harvey Kail, and Brad Hughes have created the Peer Tutor Alumni Project, a research effort that involves surveying the many peer tutors who have worked in their writing centers at Marquette, the University of Maine, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their findings tell us a great deal about the ways that working in a writing center contributes to one's intellectual and personal growth.
Focusing research on a single writing center session can also yield rich results. How do tutor and writer use language to achieve their goals? Several researchers have applied sociolinguistic theories of politeness or turn-taking or conversation to begin to map the language terrain of a writing center session. When tutor and writer are from different cultures or language groups or worlds, the smooth functioning of everyday language might be broken down, offering researchers many opportunities to track those breakages and offer some ideas as to what powerful roles culture and language play in the ways we interact in writing center settings.
Looking at the language of a session can also offer insight into many of the touchstones basic to writing center work. Consider authority, for one. What would authority look like in a writing center session? Is this tutor's question authoritative?
Okay, let's start from the top here and kind of work our way down. So we've taken care of the problem with the thesis statement. Any particular reason why you use a semi-colon here?
Or how about this piece of advice, from a different tutor?
Another thing is when you have two clauses, you have if "X" comma then "Y" you want to make sure you have that comma for separation. Or if you have "A" equals 1 comma and "B" equals 2, I'm just giving these as general kind of standards for types of sentences, or "A" equals 1 but "B" equals 2, you want to have a comma for separation. So when you have, "if something comma then something"; "A equals 1 comma and B equals 2"; "A equals 1 comma but B equals 2." So you want to make sure you use those commas. And you have it here: "If comma, then this." If you have this condition, then you have this result.
Or how about this one, from another tutor:
And when you say "never," we need to do something with the verb, but I'm not sure if it should be past tense or present-"never matches" or "never matched." What do you think?Certainly, each of these moments from actual sessions could be seen as a tutor directly pushing the conference and the student in a particular direction, whether with a question, a mini-lecture, or, simply, a particular focus on some aspect of the writer's text that needs to be changed. Whether these moments are wanton abuses of authority is a different matter and that gets at how one defines authority in the first place and what examples of discourse in a session would fit that definition. This kind of research, even if focused intensively on a single session, gets at the essential nature of writing center work and can challenge notions of tutor and writer roles that we hold in our heads but do not necessarily investigate in sustained ways.
Research on the language of individual sessions could then be broadened across several sessions, whether with different students or different tutors, each addition adding a layer of complexity to what we might observe. Or that research could span several writing centers, beginning to uncover how important local context is to the intent of tutors and writers and on the very language patterns each participant uses. Cross-institutional research taps into the collaborative ethos essential to writing center work and offers strength in numbers. How many occurrences do you need to see before you can declare a trend?
Any single session is also governed by a host of external factors. Anne Ellen Geller has recently shown us in a Writing Center Journal article how time is one key player in a session and urges us to resist the tendency to watch the clock and instead to become truly lost in time. While the natural world influences any single session, so do the worlds we create in our writing centers, particularly through the symbols of "comfort" we drag into our centers (think couches, bean bag chairs, minifridges, and the like). Jackie Grutsch McKinney in her recent WCJ article calls for us to question the assumptions that these symbols hold, for what might seem like a warm symbol of "home" to a tutor or director can simply disorient a student from a non-privileged background, creating a level of dissonance that will disrupt the work of a session.
Another key player in any conference is the classroom teacher. The often-ghost presence of that ultimate evaluator directs writing center sessions in many ways that need to be uncovered by systematic research. Consider this student's reply to her tutor's query of "Why don't you tell me what you're working on?":
Well, I'm doing this paper on the construction of the pyramids for my archeology class, and basically I wrote it, and I guess my grammar and my word structure is not good enough. So I need a proofreader, and they advised me to come [here].
They? Somehow I imagine an archeology professor talking about himself with the royal "we": "We believe that thou art need to get thyself to the Writing Center!"
Stereotypes aside, researching the ways that faculty conceive of the writing center is necessary not only for public relations but also for establishing the kinds of relationships essential for our health and, ultimately, for student learning. Deeply examining the role that faculty play in a writing center session could mean a close examination of the writing assignment and of the faculty member's instructional goals, as well as the ways that the faculty member's academic discipline shapes her expectations for student learning. Faculty members, too, have long histories as writers, not necessarily simple trajectories of success, and these narratives as subject of research can tell us a great deal about how the "culture of writing" on a campus might be created and fostered.
Research beyond the sphere of tutors, writers, and faculty members gets at a rich vein of possibilities. Perhaps it's the history of your particular writing center you want to explore, uncovering the original idea that came to be dressed up with cheerful signage and worn couches. I guarantee that one-to-one writing instruction has existed in various forms at each of your institutions, whether called an English Clinic, a Writing Laboratory, or, simply, an informal meeting between some faculty and students. After all, the notions that writing is best taught one-to-one or is best understood as a process are not new ones.
Consider, for example, this quote:
Composition work is much like modeling in clay. There must be the raw material, properly mixed, deposited on the board, roughly pinched, pounded, and thumbed here and there before the finer work begins. First knowledge; then careful selection of topics of individual interest, the rough sketching of the first draft; and then frequent revision, improvement, and finally achievement. (251)
That was written in 1917 by Alfred Hall-Quest, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Virginia (and undoubtedly a member of the SWCA). Our histories, then, can tell us a great deal about our institutions and the choices they've made to include writing instruction in one form or another. Those histories, in turn, offer us guidance as we move ahead, trying not to repeat past mistakes and capitalizing on what has worked well. Broadening our research can also push us to think of writing center work as part of larger educational efforts. My current research is to look at the ways that the history of teaching writing and the history of teaching science are intertwined in laboratory settings. Writing and science share roots in the recognition that learning is best enacted one-to-one or in small groups and that hands-on student activity is essential. Learning to write in the classroom or writing center and learning science in the laboratory have also long shared challenges ranging from ensuring adequate working conditions to calculating faculty full-time equivalents to relying on less-expensive student and part-time labor. However, I believe that experimentation, the essence of the "scientific method," offers both fields opportunities to enact significant reform and overcome the limits of long-established practices. It is in the idea of writing laboratory that learning science and learning writing can together be dynamic and meaningful. A big idea, for sure, but it starts with writing center research. And now Part 3: Publishing our writing is certainly a higher-order concern. Now, I don't just say that because for the faculty among us it's publish or perish. The 2000-year-old rhetorical tradition of which we are a part assumes that our words will be heard. How else to seek out that audience than to publish? Writing up our research and seeking a wider audience, then, is an essential step in the research process. I'll offer three pieces of advice on this topic: I urge you to think rhetorically, to think collaboratively, and, finally, to think selfishly.
First, the rhetorical angle: One challenge to writing up and publishing our research is that it might seem far too local, only of use and of interest by our tutoring staffs or our writing center director or our institutional colleagues. Perhaps that's true for the first version of what you write, but I urge you to think of the ways you can interest a wider audience in that research. Let me give you an example. Quite a few years ago, I published an article in The Writing Lab Newsletter titled "Counting Beans and Making Beans Count."
Here's the opening paragraph to that piece:
One question that constantly swirls around our work in writing centers is, Are we helping to improve student writing? While this is simple to pose, finding answers seems fraught with logistical and political dilemmas. How can we assess this improvement? Should we? Isn't the writing center only one among the many influences that shape student learning, some of which might undermine the help we offer? And if we try to articulate our effects, what happens if we find we aren't making that much of a difference? (Lerner 1)
While that article began with some writing center research I had done on the relationship between writing center usage and students' grades in first-year composition, my initial motivation wasn't to help WLN reader's with outcomes assessment. Instead, I had a much more immediate need: I was on a one-year, part-time contract as a new writing center director, and I had to prove to my administration that extending my contract (as well as making me full time) was a good idea. And these ends would depend on the need for a writing center, thus my foray into statistical evidence of "effectiveness." One aspect of my rhetorical thinking here was that the administration at the college of pharmacy and health science where I worked would be best persuaded by numbers and that I would be best off if I could show writing center effects with concrete and multiple forms of evidence.
Here's how I started the report to present the results of this research to the larger college:
This report reviews student usage of the Writing Center during the fall 1996 semester. I also compare these figures to several other institutions, summarize students' survey responses assessing their satisfaction with our services, and analyze the Writing Center's contribution to LIB111 (Expository Writing I) students' academic performance.
I've italicized the last phrase to show the kernel of the report that became the WLN article. That report, however, actually wasn't my first "published" version of this research. Initially, I wrote a memo to my department chair, the person who'd be making the case to administration to create a funding line for the writing center.
Here's how I started that memo:
As you know, George, I collected data from the fall semester to examine the relationship between students' use of the Writing Center and their LIB111 grades. The tables and figures that follow summarize the results.
So it's a very long way from this last version to the one published in the WLN. At each point, my audience changed, sometimes drastically, the ways my audience might find interest in my topic changed as well, and the knowledge of either the statistical methods or the context for writing center work was different for each audience. I offer this example not as a model of wonderful writing (if anything, the progression shows how much I needed to learn about the memo genre), but to show that local research on local practices can be published for a wider audience once you've figured out the angle of interest, the answer to "Why should my reader care?" And readers do care about the work going on in writing centers as attested to by the growing number of international and regional conferences, edited collections, single- and multiple-authored books, and referred and non-refereed journals and newsletters. Publication venues are many, particularly when you begin to think collaboratively, as I next describe.
As I noted earlier, collaboration is the foundation upon which writing centers are built. Tutors, writers, directors, and faculty are all potential collaborators in furthering the mission of teaching and learning at our institutions. When it comes to choosing research topics and publishing that research, collaboration with other institutional partners can offer key opportunities. I mentioned offices of institutional research as one partner, and student affairs is certainly another with multiple publication venues. Rich potential lies with our faculty colleagues, each of whom have peer-reviewed pedagogical journals in their fields. At many institutions where the imperative for faculty is primarily to teach (as opposed to primarily conduct research) promotion and tenure are still dependent upon a publication record. Conducting research on the ways that they use writing in their classes or on other innovative teaching methods means collaborating with those of us who have expertise in these matters. And wouldn't it be cool to have on your CV a publication that appeared in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education?
The coolness factor brings me to my third piece of advice-to think selfishly. There is an undeniable thrill to having your work published and, hopefully, read. And that thrill is surely addictive as we strive to publish even more, to contribute and shape the conversations that swirl around our work. My advice is to do it for others, but also to do it for yourselves. We all can be writing center researchers, and it is through such research that our field will be strengthened and that students will have the opportunities to learn to write, to find meaning in that writing, and to remind us that teaching and learning in writing center settings can represent education at its very best. I'll end here with my quote that appeared on this conference's call for proposals: It's a terrific time to be a writing center researcher, and I invite you all to join me in that work.
Works Cited
DeCiccio, Albert C., Michael J. Rossi, and Kathleen Shine Cain. "Walking the Tightrope: Negotiating Between the Ideal and the Practical in the Writing Center." Writing Center Perspectives. Ed. Byron L. Stay, Christina Murphy, and Eric H. Hobson. Emmitsburg, MD: NWCA Press, 1995. 26-37.
Gardner, Phillip, and William Ramsey. "The Polyvalent Mission of Writing Centers." Writing Center Journal 25.1 (2005): 25-42.
Geller, Anne Ellen. "Tick-Tock, Next: Finding Epochal Time in the Writing Center." Writing Center Journal 25.1 (2005): 5-24.
Gillespie, Paula, Harvey Kail, and Brad Hughes. "The Peer Tutor Alumni Project." http://www.mu.edu/writingcenter/PeerTutorAlumniPage.htm.
Gould, Stephen J. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.
Hall-Quest, Alfred. Supervised Study: A Discussion of the Study Lesson in High School. New York: MacMillan, 1917.
Johnson, Burges, and Helene Hartley. Written Composition in American Colleges. Schenectady, NY: Union College, 1936.
Lerner, Neal. "Counting Beans and Making Beans Count." Writing Lab Newsletter 23.1 (1997): 1-4.
McKinney, Jackie Grutsch. "Leaving Home Sweet Home: Towards Critical Readings of Writing Center Spaces." Writing Center Journal 25.2 (2005): 6-20.
Perrin, Porter G. "Maximum Essentials in Composition." College English 8 (1947): 352-60.
Ray, Ruth. "Composition from the Teacher-Research Point of View." Methods and Methodology in Composition Research. Ed. Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan. Carbondale: SIU Press, 1992. 172-189.