The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento
The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento
The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento
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Avoiding the Risky Business of Text Appropriation<br />
36<br />
Anne Temblador<br />
Spring 2009<br />
My semester working in the writing center has been filled with numerous and often surprising<br />
experiences that have enabled me to critically self reflect on my own abilities as a writing center tutor.<br />
Besides learning to listen to the tutee more, and talking less, attempts (not always successful) at putting<br />
theory into practice, and trying to explain grammar rules I don’t always understand, I have noted the<br />
challenge of not appropriating the tutee’s text as one of the most significant and ongoing issues a tutor can<br />
face particularly while tutoring during the constraints of a thirty- minute or drop-in session. In an effort to<br />
maximize the time working with your tutee, it is all too easy to commandeer a student’s text by making<br />
overreaching recommendations about the paper’s organization, over editing mechanical errors, or<br />
suggesting a more prescriptive way to re-word a particular sentence. Finding a balance between making<br />
suggestions on ways in which the tutee can strengthen their paper must be moderated with a collaborative<br />
dialogue that emphasizes the process of writing and learning over the product the student is creating.<br />
How do we as tutors, particularly new tutors with little to no experience mentoring avoid<br />
appropriating a student’s paper during the constraints of a short tutoring session, difficult student writing<br />
assignments, or during the tutee’s last push of revising for portfolio deadlines? Some potential answers<br />
can be found with a multi-faceted approach that utilizes aspects from theories on problem posing, group<br />
collaboration, minimalist tutoring, and reading out loud, supplemented with my own experiences of<br />
avoiding the trap of appropriating a text during a session. By being aware of the signs of potential text<br />
appropriation coupled with critical self reflection, tutors can better prepare themselves to ensure that the<br />
student writer remains the primary agent in the tutoring session.<br />
Signs of text appropriation:<br />
During my semester of tutoring, I began to notice specific signs that would often lead to a session<br />
where I started to slip into text appropriation. Often, such sessions would begin with a lack of focus,<br />
where I had failed to ask the student to be very specific about what they wanted to work on that day. In<br />
the case of large papers and a short half hour session, it became obvious that I would often take over a<br />
student’s text when I tried to tackle the paper as a whole in an effort to cover as much of the paper as<br />
possible within the limited time constraints. This type of situation often led me to dominate the session<br />
verbally, making overreaching suggestions on as many issues as I could find in an effort to help the<br />
student “fix” their paper. Other instances that led to taking over agency of a text began with a student’s<br />
persistent urging to simply have their text edited, or their sentence structure analyzed. In circumstances<br />
like these, I found myself in a situation where I was asked to be an editor, and no interaction between me<br />
and the tutee was occurring because I was asked only to make grammatical corrections throughout the<br />
student’s paper. In all of these cases, a similar pattern seemed to emerge: the lack of a student determined<br />
and student led focus for that tutoring session that centered on important aspects of writing such as<br />
organization, structure, or creating a strong thesis statement.<br />
Starting off a session: Problem-Posing and the rewards of open ended questions:<br />
In order to combat a session that could easily slip into tutor led decision making, I suggest<br />
beginning each session with some problem posing questions. Problem-posing is a method developed by<br />
the theorist Paolo Freire that enables a teacher to ask open ended questions of their students using who,<br />
what, when, where, why, and how as the starting point to the question. This type of open ended<br />
questioning becomes a means of enabling the student to learn through creating their own answers through