In this chapter, I particularly liked the emphasize on the act of oral and contingent speech as a large part of the knowledge process closely associated with writing. Our goal as writing tutors is hardly ever to create a better piece of writing, but to help students engage with ideas through talking, which can ultimately help them with their writing process. I am lucky in my current class assignment because I have had previous exposure to the readings and concepts because it is a basic English class. However, if next semester I am put into a class outside of my expertise, I can reflect back on this chapter to help guide me through a course I am unfamiliar with. I think working with students studying outside of your discipline is beneficial to the students themselves. Page 159 says, “Susan Hubbuch worries that the ‘expert’ or ‘knowledgeable tutor’ will be more likely to take an authorative stance and that students will perceive this stance as ‘being told what to do- and welcome that fact'” So by being unfamiliar with a topic, you can put the student into the expert role where they actually teach the tutor and become more invested in their own discipline, something we have discussed in previous chapters, and also actively learn how to be a better tutor through this process.
The concept of interdisciplinary writing is not new to me, as I have always been in writing intensive science and social science courses in college. Before this chapter I had only heard of WAC in passing specifically from my roommate taking education classes, but I did not have a clear idea of what it encompassed. I appreciated how the authors approached tutoring for writing in other disciplines. They focused on the balance of knowing too little and being caught up in the details or imposing your area of expertise if the writing was covering something familiar to them. I have had both these experiences this semester. One instance while tutoring for SASC, I gave feedback on an ENV104 essay that was providing a fast and loose explanation of the Gia Principle. I noticeably had to hold my tongue as to not impose my in-depth knowledge on a poor soul taking a mandatory freshman course. Again this chapter reiterates how writing in any discipline is about communicating ideas and knowledge, and this is what tutoring should be centered on. How can I best communicate the material I have learned about, researched, or only kind of understand? Even if writers come to us in the last category, it is important that we emphasize that writing is not just for the reader but for the writer themselves. I will definitely want to take this approach to writing and tutoring into my sessions coming up.
One of the first things that I liked in this chapter was the emphasis on not needing to be an expert on context to help someone with a paper. This is something I find myself struggling with and that I find to sometimes cause a mental block when I am working with students. However, since I have started tutoring I have seen an improvement as I now understand that there are still ways to help someone without being an expert in the subject of the class they are taking. A big way to this is by using the question approach that we talk about in nearly every class and I write about in nearly every journal. Another thing that stuck out to me in this chapter was the different ways of responding and leaving feedback on a paper. For me I feel like the first thing that comes to mind is always just leaving comments when I see somewhere that needs an edit, but just being college and seeing the different ways that professors leave feedback has changed my mindset towards that. Then this book emphasizes that there are other more efficient ways, such as leaving a blurb at the bottom of the paper or leaving voice memos kind of hammered the nail in for me. Leaving these kind of bigger more suggestive comments leave students to have to do a little work rather than just check off a meaningless edit.
3 thoughts on “JOURNAL # 8”
In this chapter, I particularly liked the emphasize on the act of oral and contingent speech as a large part of the knowledge process closely associated with writing. Our goal as writing tutors is hardly ever to create a better piece of writing, but to help students engage with ideas through talking, which can ultimately help them with their writing process. I am lucky in my current class assignment because I have had previous exposure to the readings and concepts because it is a basic English class. However, if next semester I am put into a class outside of my expertise, I can reflect back on this chapter to help guide me through a course I am unfamiliar with. I think working with students studying outside of your discipline is beneficial to the students themselves. Page 159 says, “Susan Hubbuch worries that the ‘expert’ or ‘knowledgeable tutor’ will be more likely to take an authorative stance and that students will perceive this stance as ‘being told what to do- and welcome that fact'” So by being unfamiliar with a topic, you can put the student into the expert role where they actually teach the tutor and become more invested in their own discipline, something we have discussed in previous chapters, and also actively learn how to be a better tutor through this process.
The concept of interdisciplinary writing is not new to me, as I have always been in writing intensive science and social science courses in college. Before this chapter I had only heard of WAC in passing specifically from my roommate taking education classes, but I did not have a clear idea of what it encompassed. I appreciated how the authors approached tutoring for writing in other disciplines. They focused on the balance of knowing too little and being caught up in the details or imposing your area of expertise if the writing was covering something familiar to them. I have had both these experiences this semester. One instance while tutoring for SASC, I gave feedback on an ENV104 essay that was providing a fast and loose explanation of the Gia Principle. I noticeably had to hold my tongue as to not impose my in-depth knowledge on a poor soul taking a mandatory freshman course. Again this chapter reiterates how writing in any discipline is about communicating ideas and knowledge, and this is what tutoring should be centered on. How can I best communicate the material I have learned about, researched, or only kind of understand? Even if writers come to us in the last category, it is important that we emphasize that writing is not just for the reader but for the writer themselves. I will definitely want to take this approach to writing and tutoring into my sessions coming up.
One of the first things that I liked in this chapter was the emphasis on not needing to be an expert on context to help someone with a paper. This is something I find myself struggling with and that I find to sometimes cause a mental block when I am working with students. However, since I have started tutoring I have seen an improvement as I now understand that there are still ways to help someone without being an expert in the subject of the class they are taking. A big way to this is by using the question approach that we talk about in nearly every class and I write about in nearly every journal. Another thing that stuck out to me in this chapter was the different ways of responding and leaving feedback on a paper. For me I feel like the first thing that comes to mind is always just leaving comments when I see somewhere that needs an edit, but just being college and seeing the different ways that professors leave feedback has changed my mindset towards that. Then this book emphasizes that there are other more efficient ways, such as leaving a blurb at the bottom of the paper or leaving voice memos kind of hammered the nail in for me. Leaving these kind of bigger more suggestive comments leave students to have to do a little work rather than just check off a meaningless edit.