{"id":4143,"date":"2013-10-28T18:35:12","date_gmt":"2013-10-28T23:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/?p=4143"},"modified":"2017-07-12T15:14:03","modified_gmt":"2017-07-12T20:14:03","slug":"toys-and-transformations-in-online-tutoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dept.writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/toys-and-transformations-in-online-tutoring\/","title":{"rendered":"Toys and Transformations in Online Tutoring"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"The<\/a>
The author, as illustrated by cartoonist Abby Howard<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Mike A. Shapiro, @mikeshapiro<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mike is a graduate student at UW\u2013Madison, where he is completing a Ph.D. on the modern novel and where he is a TA in the Writing Center.<\/em><\/p>\n

At last week\u2019s Midwest Writing Centers Association conference, we asked the folks who attended our panel whether their centers were tutoring online. Many of them said they were toying with the idea<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What a layered metaphor that is! Compared to the careful pedagogy, scholarship, and hard work of teaching students, one by one, how to become more effective writers, online instruction can feel like a kind of toy.<\/p>\n

Yet the superficial unseriousness and gadgetry of online instruction have given us permission to experiment online in a way we might not risk experimenting in our physical centers, and throughout the MWCA conference I heard dedicated, serious scholars speak with delight and energy about the ways they have been toying with online tutoring to reach new students and to improve the quality of all their tutoring.\u00a0The improvisations of our work online force us to invite the trickster not to our table, as Geller et al. have it, but to our screens.<\/p>\n

The conversations about online tutoring I heard and overheard at MWCA seemed to coalesce around 4 questions:<\/p>\n

1. What do we gain when we move beyond \u201ctalk\u201d as our conceptual model for writing center work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The handsome MWCA 2013 logo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My own presentation was inspired by the recent work of Jackie Grutsch McKinney, who argues that writing centers have limited themselves to a single grand narrative of what they do, and by Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch, who argues that writing centers adhere so exclusively to a single conceptual model of our pedagogy that we feel \u201cfrustration and disappointment when the model is not realized in online environments\u201d (29).<\/p>\n

In a quick survey of the language writing center websites use to describe email instruction, I saw that, as McKinney and Breuch predict, most centers characterize online work as a kind of talk.<\/p>\n

Our writing center at UW\u2013Madison tells students that \u201cThe instructor will read your work and begin an email exchange with you about your paper,\u201d even though few of our students have the time before their deadlines to engage in dialogue.<\/p>\n

As I argued last year<\/a>, the structure of the submission and reply suggest an authentic interaction of writer with reader. However, the language of “exchange” and the metaphor of talk do not adequately describe it. What email instruction resembles is not talk, but email<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A slide summarizing the rhetoric I saw in writing centers’ descriptions of email instruction<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Writing centers value talk in part because we rely on Stephen North\u2019s observation in \u201cThe Idea of a Writing Center\u201d that \u201cThe essence of the writing center method, then, is this talking\u201d (443).<\/p>\n

I like remembering that the idea of email rose at the same time as North\u2019s idea of a writing center. Like writing labs, electronic mail had been around for decades before someone\u2014in the case of email, it was this\u00a01982 Request For Comment by Jon Postel<\/a>\u2014standardized it by laying out the logic and systems we use to this day.<\/p>\n

But even as email has grown more prominent in the teaching we do, writing centers\u2019 focus on \u201ctalk\u201d has not changed. Because we privilege talk as method and metaphor of our work, writing center websites sometimes bluntly describe email tutoring as inferior to in-person tutoring, or will see the only real advantage of online instruction as its convenience.<\/p>\n

What if we examine not the methods of tutoring but its ends? North suggests the goal of a writing center is to produce better writers, not better papers. Can email instruction do that?<\/p>\n

\"Examples<\/a>
Examples of email tutoring from the UW\u2013Madison Writing Center<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So I spoke to several students who used our email instruction over the last year, and examined the revisions they made after working with our tutors. You can see some examples of their work in this PDF<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What I found from these interviews is that email instruction had two major effects:<\/p>\n