Interview: Dr. Susan "George" Schorn

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Interview: Dr. Susan "George" Schorn

This week, we interviewed Dr. Susan "George" Schorn. Dr. Schorn is the Senior Program Coordinator and Curriculum Specialist for Writing at the Center for Skills and Experience Flags at UT Austin, where she works with faculty across campus to strengthen undergraduate writing instruction. She is also a writer, martial artist, self-defense advocate, and author of the book "Smile at Strangers and Other Lessons in the Art of Living Fearlessly."

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Axis Returns: Spring 2015

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Axis Returns: Spring 2015

Today in the academy we are writing lesson plans and finalizing syllabi, writing e-mails to students and finishing novels and bracing ourselves for the start of the spring semester, which at UT Austin begins tomorrow.

Today in the United States, we honor the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, and we think seriously about their legacy. In what ways is the current moment a continuation of slavery and colonialism, of civil war and civil rights? In what ways have we broken with that history, and to what ends

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Writing Consultant/Fellow Expertise: Particle, Wave, and Field

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Writing Consultant/Fellow Expertise: Particle, Wave, and Field

I am just finishing the semester with ENG 408B: Tutoring Student Writers. In that class, I try to not only provide students with sound theoretical footing and practical experience but also engagement with real discussions within the field. Early on, when we were working to get a handle on the broad-stroke roles and practices of writing center consultants, I asked them to read Trimbur’s “Peer Tutoring: A Contradiction in Terms?” paired with Brooks’ “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work” because, together, these pieces provoke questions about writing consultant authority, which I played against nondirectivity and Socratic dialogue. These have been consistently provocative and engaging conversations with these concepts and sources because there is no simple or single right answer.

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Disrupting Authority: Reflections on co-authoring

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Disrupting Authority: Reflections on co-authoring

Our work in “Disrupting Authority: Writing Mentors and Code-Meshing Pedagogy” describes the idea behind—and the plans for—combining a course-embedded writing tutors program and code-meshing pedagogy at our small, private Historically Black College (HBCU) in order to challenge language hegemony in the writing classroom. The article was the first time either of us had attempted co-authoring. Writing in the plural “we” felt a little strange, especially at first. We wrote most of the paper side-by-side in Cecilia’s office, alternately talking or typing. Because identity (and identity in language) is such an important part of our topic, we wanted to discuss our experiences in co-authoring in a way that let our individual voices be heard. We thought a chat might do the trick. 

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Guest Post: After Writing Fellows Become Reading Fellows

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Guest Post: After Writing Fellows Become Reading Fellows

In our article, “When Writing Fellows Become Reading Fellows:  Creative Strategies for Critical Reading and Writing in a Course-Based Tutoring Program,” we discuss methods for engaging First Year Writing students in critical reading and writing practices through a series of small group session plans we called pivot points. Reflecting upon this work pushed us to develop new ways to engage students, led to two regional conference presentations, and ultimately, the writing of this piece.

As we were writing, we found ourselves thinking about ways to sustain the collaborative and reflective aspects of our fellows' work. For Melissa, this meant continuing to use the momentum from the five fellows (all graduating seniors) from the fall 2013 semester into the summer and fall 2014 semesters. For Ricky, this meant applying fellows' practices during his own transition to a graduate program in information management and systems.

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Guest Post: Introducing the new special double issue of Praxis!

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pairs of people looking at computers

[Accompanying image by Jay Farris]

By Scott Whiddon, Rusty Carpenter, and Kevin Dvorak, the co-editors of the Praxis Special Double Issue on Course-Embedded Writing Support Programs in Writing Centers, which was released today.

Our collective story started as a conversation: three directors talking about the work of their centers, their tutors, and developments on their respective campuses. Like the work that takes place in many of our writing centers, we began to see the intersections and gaps of our work and the potential for our programs to make meaningful impacts on our campuses.  

Through this early conversation, we saw that we were at three distinct yet related places in our own conversations on our own campuses: a campus where course-embedded tutoring is a central part of the culture of the writing center, a campus that is piloting a course-embedded program, and a campus that could benefit a great deal from course-embedded work. The conversations continued and grew into pilots, studies, and continued conversation, converging through conversations via email and meetings at conferences, and then diverging productively when we implemented the programs on our campuses. Through this process, we realized there was so much more to be said and we set out to include more voices, along with our own, in the conversation. Thus, we proposed a guest-edited special issue of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and what an honor and joy it has been to be part of this chapter in the journal’s history!

Each of us came to the project with shared questions: How do we define “course-embedded peer-to-peer writing support programs?”  How do we best prepare such staffers for collaboration and creativity? How do we justify such programs to our administrators -- as well as to faculty? And, perhaps most importantly: how have such programs developed since On Location was published in 2005? We were incredibly impressed with the response to our call, the quality of proposals we received, and the quality of articles published in this issue. This issue includes case studies as well as theoretical queries. It includes a range of locations: community colleges, small liberal arts schools, regional comprehensives, and research institutions -- with contributions from top-flight graduate students as well as seasoned professionals.

What’s perhaps most exciting, though, is this: like writing center work at large, this story is far from complete. Through reading the set of essays contained in this special (double) issue of Praxis, we encourage others to weave their own narratives, looking for the intersections like we did, and adding to it in productive ways that further the conversation. We hope you enjoy both the issue and the blog contributions here from select contributors over the next few weeks.  

 

Praxis: Statement after the Ferguson Grand Jury Verdict

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Praxis: Statement after the Ferguson Grand Jury Verdict

This week, as the national conversation about systemic racial violence continues, we think about what it means for our institution and for our work.

At his 2005 keynote address at the IWCA/NCPTW conference, Victor Villanueva earned a standing ovation for his call for increased attention to race in the writing center. Within weeks, as Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan report in Writing Centers and the New Racism, the conversation was reduced to silence. 

Racism, write Greenfield and Rowan, is shaped by silence. As Villanueva remarked, "if we no longer speak of 'racism,' racism gets ignored." There are many appropriate responses to the events in Ferguson and Staten Island, but silence, we think, is not one of them.

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Case Study: Teaching What You (Don't) Know

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Case Study: Teaching What You (Don't) Know

The Scenario:  Antoine came in to the writing center with a scholarly essay on cinema. He needed to write a two page summary of the article's main points, and was having trouble organizing his thoughts.

Bourdieu! I cried. Barthes! I'd be happy to help. 

One hour later, Kendra came into the writing center with a 350-word abstract the she was submitting to an undergraduate conference in biochemistry. She wanted help with concision and flow.

Reagent? I asked. RNA sequence? I leaned back in dismay.

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The Heart of our Meaning

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The Heart of our Meaning

I've always had a theory that the rhetorics of science and religion have more in common than they let on. Call it confirmation bias, but Courtney Bailey Parker's article on "spiritualized language" in the most recent issue of Praxis highlights some of these parallels. 

Parker's article describes spiritualized language as a kind of jargon with unstable meaning that is frequently used by students in religious communities: phrases like "house of god"; "biblical attitude"; or the "spirit of god" appear as examples.

Parker identifies two problems with this discourse. First, it may provoke unintended responses from "readers who are not familiar or not complicit with [religious] language." Second, it may lack the nuance of a more sophisticated engagement with faith. 

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IWCA 2014, “Wonderful World of Writing Centers,” Redux

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IWCA 2014, “Wonderful World of Writing Centers,” Redux

Building off Mary’s metaphor, I can say that my time at the International Writing Center Association conference brought me in contact with different, equally fascinating writing center kingdoms.

One was the kingdom of writing center outreach to underserved high schools. In a session entitled “It’s a Small World: Creating Collaborative Communities,” Denise Stephenson spoke about the challenges involved in setting up effective collaborations across institutions. High schools have different structures than colleges, different professional jargon, different pressures on teachers (think mandated testing), and different points of entry. This last difference was particularly challenging for Denise, who found herself directed to talk to administrators instead of teachers about the kind of support her consultants could provide. The message got lost along the communication chain, and her first tutors found themselves underutilized—a situation she has since corrected by insisting on meeting with the teachers well before the start of the academic year.

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Back to the Writing Center: Greetings from Trish Roberts-Miller

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Back to the Writing Center: Greetings from Trish Roberts-Miller

It’s five o’clock on a Monday afternoon, and, while much of campus is shutting down, the Writing Center is buzzing with conversation: there are eight consultations going on, two students checking in, one student filling out an evaluation, a consultant writing a note. Walking through, you hear, over and over, the same thing: consultants asking students about their papers.

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