{"id":5409,"date":"2015-01-19T15:41:45","date_gmt":"2015-01-19T20:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/?p=5409"},"modified":"2017-07-12T15:01:41","modified_gmt":"2017-07-12T20:01:41","slug":"inquiry-groups-as-tutor-education-writing-from-below","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dept.writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/inquiry-groups-as-tutor-education-writing-from-below\/","title":{"rendered":"Inquiry Groups as Tutor Education: Writing from Below"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"RLL<\/a>
Rebecca Lorimer Leonard and her handsome cat, Jon Snow.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Rebecca Lorimer Leonard<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rebecca Lorimer Leonard is an assistant professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a former UW-Madison Writing Center tutor\u00a0and Assistant Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum Program. You can read about her work at\u00a0http:\/\/blogs.umass.edu\/rlorimer\/<\/a>.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

In late November, CNN aired Ivory Tower<\/em><\/a>, a feature-length documentary that asks if college is \u201cworth it\u201d given the rising costs of higher education in the U.S. The film, which premiered at Sundance, is an accounting of dated and disruptive trends in college financing, teaching, and managing. As do many books and documentaries<\/a> that investigate crises in U.S. education, Ivory Tower<\/em> uses several campus cases\u2014Harvard, Spelman, Bunker Hill Community College, San Jose State, Deep Springs College, and Cooper Union\u2014to fill out something like a higher ed. balance sheet, weighing \u201cspiraling\u201d costs against \u201centrenched\u201d practices.<\/p>\n

I found it hard to watch, but also not to watch. Like good bad TV, crisis documentaries can be salacious with a good storyline. In this case the indecency on display was simply college these days, with a cast of greedy administrators, drunk students, and opportunistic tech consultants. I may be overstating things a bit, as scenes from Cooper Union, Deep Springs, and San Jose State are vivid in their decency, but I was still left with a mix of resignation (welp, there\u2019s another one) and indignation (it\u2019s actually way better than this). As I felt when I reviewed<\/a> Academically Adrift<\/em> on this blog (whose co-author is featured in Ivory Tower<\/em>), these narratives miss what many of us who work in writing centers see all day long: curiosity-driven students puzzling together over ideas that matter.<\/p>\n

While much in Ivory Tower<\/em> rings true\u2014college students do party, large lecture courses are temptingly cheap, student debt is scary, students should write and read more\u2014these crisis truisms often are strung together laterally without deep exploration of the day-to-day experience of what college could be<\/em> and what it already is<\/em> for the many, many students who don\u2019t attend the nearly-obsessively studied campuses used as representative cases.<\/p>\n

College from Below<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Education crisis narratives paint a picture of college from above: generalized, high-level administrative or curricular activity described by university managers, outside researchers, or disruptors from silicon valley. I\u2019d like to suggest that we could also see college from below: the ongoing responsive and reflective practices that students take up in and out of classrooms all the time. The idea of looking \u201cfrom below\u201d is one that historians use to understand vernacular writing in a given period (for example, Lyons\u2019 The Writing Culture of Ordinary People<\/em><\/a>) and that migration scholars use to study migrants\u2019 everyday activity (from below) versus NGO, military, or economic migrant management (from above) (for example, this work by\u00a0Alejandro Portes<\/a> or Michael Smith & Luis Guarnizo<\/a>). Analysis from below can reveal lived activity that is not only ordinary but also challenging to dominant or more powerful narratives.<\/p>\n

\"Write-in\"<\/a>
Writers at our UMass Amherst Graduate Student Write-In.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So college from below could be the accidental or not-always named learning experiences often missed in a crisis accounting of administrative or curricular activity. Looking at the underside of college will not show that all is well in higher ed. or that problems don\u2019t exist, but instead could offer a more intricate story about what else college students are doing these days. I want to think of college from below both as a point from which to see college activity and<\/em> a kind of college activity itself. This might muddle things, but I hope you will grant me the blogging luxury of playing a little loose with this idea to see what it gets us.<\/p>\n

I think writing centers are one site where college from below happens. To better explain what I mean by this, I\u2019d like to offer descriptions of and then tutor responses to one activity we\u2019ve taken up at the UMass Amherst Writing Center that show reflective, responsive, and often unpredictable college experiences.<\/p>\n

Inquiry from Below<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Our ongoing tutor education for experienced tutors, those who have completed their yearlong internship, has shifted in the last few years. What used to be several topical workshops each semester is now a connected series of inquiry group meetings. Tutors identify potential inquiry topics in their fall scheduling request, join a group that meets 3-4 times over the course of the semester, identify inquiry questions or problems, engage in reading and research during no-shows or slow shifts, and plan together the projects they create for the Center. The goals of the inquiry groups are, loosely: to develop tutor-defined questions and projects; to connect daily practice to current research and theory; and to equip tutors to shape their own writing center. Similarly to R. Mark Hall\u2019s \u201cProblems of Practice Inquiry\u201d\u00a0assignment<\/a>\u00a0for tutor education, in which Hall and his tutors examine \u201cthe rules and reasoning\u2014the habits of mind\u2014that govern what we do\u201d (2), our inquiry groups are meant to offer sustained and tutor-driven re-thinking of our habits.<\/p>\n

At the UMass Amherst Writing Center, inquiry is a positive disposition toward difficulties encountered in day-to-day practice, fueled by the curiosity to understand how we might re-approach them. When I made this change in tutor education, I had in mind\u00a0Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle\u2019s theory of \u201cinquiry as stance<\/a>\u201d in which inquiry is both affirmative and constructive, aiming to harness the \u201ccollective intellectual capacity of practitioners\u201d and align it with \u201csocial and political movements that aim for radical transformation of teaching, learning, and schooling\u201d (4). Cochrain-Smith and Lytle\u2019s stance authorizes practitioners\u00a0to pose their own questions and problems as a valuable mode of educational critique. With Cochrain-Smith and Lytle\u2019s stance, our tutor education follows a praxis model. But even more, inquiry groups pursue affirmative and constructive transformation, locating institutional critique inside everyday tutoring practices, from below.<\/p>\n

To make this a bit more concrete, here are three examples of inquiry groups that have taken place at UMass Amherst.<\/p>\n

Example 1: Inquiry into Writing Center Outreach<\/em><\/h4>\n

To align our existing outreach work\u2014class presentations, instructor collaboration, workshops\u2014with tutor concerns about disciplinary knowledge and genres, I led an inquiry group on outreach that also explored ideas from writing across the curriculum, writing to learn, and writing in the disciplines. We read about DePaul University\u2019s outreach activities in “Outreach: Expanding Writing Center Third Space<\/a>“; we read chapters on “Writing to Learn” and “Disciplinary Discourses” from Charles Bazerman’s Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum<\/em><\/a>. During inquiry meetings tutors asked, among other questions:<\/p>\n

\"UMass<\/a>
Tutors at our 2014 Open House.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n