Minimalism.
I don't like it in my art or my furniture, and I'm not sure I like it in my tutoring style.
Jeff Brooks commented that "when you 'improve' a student's paper, you haven't been a tutor at all; you've been an editor" (168). Brooks then goes on to explain a method of tutoring that puts all of the work into the student's hands. I guess the problem I have with this method is that if your approach to tutoring is that minimalistic...why bother to have a writing consultant in the first place?
I understand the idea to which Brooks speaks, the adage around which the Writing Center is structured: North’s “We don’t make better papers, we make better writers.” When going over a paper with a fine-toothed comb and highlighting grammatical mistakes here, digressions there, it’s very easy to lose teaching to simply editing.
But that’s not to say that there isn’t a role for tutor-directed work. Just last week, I had a writing conference for my first year seminar, and I met with my class’s fellow to discuss a comparison paper I had written. After watching far too many comparison pieces fall into the infamous “Two Essay Trap,” I was actually quite worried about spending too much of my time summarizing the works that I was comparing and not enough time actually relating the two (http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/organize.html). The fact of the matter is, though, that I made another mistake, which my tutor pointed out to me. In trying so hard to focus on comparing the two works, I’d missed something really important – an actual thesis that made some coherent point.
I needed my writing consultant to not be minimal with me, to sit me down and point out that I wasn’t really saying anything, or at least not saying anything clearly. And that did teach me something which applied to more than just one essay: to make sure that I never get so caught up in an individual aspect of an assignment that I forget to consider the assignment as a whole.
Sure, in certain cases, it makes sense to use a minimalist approach. For a truly engaged student, a lot of the issues with a given essay can be fixed with introspection and self-correction. But if a student isn’t engaged or doesn’t understand the material or, like in my case, is so wrapped up in some smaller aspect of their work, minimalist tutoring will not do them any good. At that point, not only are you not being an editor…you’re also not being helpful.
Don't become Peter Elbow. And at our center or WAC program, you need not. Your commentary for the midterm really did a nice job of providing directive response that invites the writer to reply.
ReplyDeleteThis is the sort of European writing-center pedagogy I have been studying. One asks for more, and points out what options might exist, without doing it for the writer.
It sounds like you learned a valuable lesson from working on your own paper not only about your own writing but also about what kind of tutoring style you will likely adopt in the future. I agree it seems somewhat unlikely that a student would learn anything from a consultant who only helps them minimally.
ReplyDeleteYou have now learned something about your own work and I imagine that will help you help a student in the future who runs into a similar issue. As we have discussed primary knowledge can be an extremely useful thing.