Alex Crayon
Nomadic Pedagogy in the Writing Center
Brief Overview
I will be presenting “Nomadic Pedagogy and the Writing Center” at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing (NCPTW) on October 29th. My presentation centers around nomadism—movement, place, and place-making—in the writing center. I want to examine my pedagogical experiences across institutions and methodologies in order to deconstruct my individual palimpsest of tutorial experience. What can I and others learn from my movement across, adaptation to, and encounters with different places and methods of place-making in my writing center career?
My personal writing tutor experience indicates a unique lens through which to consider this dynamism: I worked in the Honors Writing Center at the University of Oklahoma before the university-wide OU Writing Center, each with their unique pedagogical foci; I taught first-year composition at the same time as I tutored in the OU Writing Center; and now, I have moved to the University of Kansas and work in their writing center while teaching first-year composition, as well. I mention these past and present tutoring/teaching experiences to underscore my movement between place, both physical and methodological, and to emphasize the palimpsestic overlaying and overwriting of my self as a writing tutor who, as a Graduate Teaching Assistant, has incontrovertibly added certain elements of classroom pedagogy to my approach to the writing tutorial.
This presentation, then, will be focused at graduate students who work in writing centers and bring a similar jumbled set of experiences to the tutorial table. The goal is to synthesize my experiences as a “writing center nomad” into a digestible template for other graduate consultants who might feel overwhelmed by their movement into a new place and new writing center, possibly for the second or third time. Also, the intersection of modalities—face-to-face, video conference, and written feedback—adds to the palimpsestic understanding of movement between pedagogies, as we all have been forced to adjust to new methods of delivering the tutorial during COVID-19. Therefore, my notion of place-making will be framed as DISplacement and REplacement across physical location, modality, and pedagogy. A larger pedagogical conclusion about nomadism and place in the writing center is the ultimate focus of this presentation.
There is not much, if any, scholarship in the field of writing center studies that addresses inter-center movement and transfer; most focuses on (1) intra-center concerns or (2) the transfer of tutorial skills between the classroom and writing center or (3) the potential for a writing consultant’s skills to manifest productively in a future career. I believe that there is a lot of value in examining the dynamics of moving between writing centers for writing tutors who are often graduate students with a diversity of pedagogical experiences and instruction. I hope to deliver a presentation with tangible benefits to the field of writing center studies and to my peers who might benefit from some guidance as “writing center nomads” themselves.
Bibliography
Chang, Heewon. Autoethnography as Method. Left Coast Press, 2008.
Dees, Sarah. “From Writing Center to Classroom and Back Again: Pursuing the Unknowns of Tutoring and Teaching.” Praxis, vol. 7, no. 2, 2010, pp. 62–66.
This article, though over ten years old, acts as a sort of introductory step in my research question about nomadic pedagogy and how I might define it. Dees acknowledges that “There are countless ways in which skills I have developed as a tutor have prepared me for teaching” (62) and moves to challenge the difference between these two—how much time do teachers and tutors, respectively, spend on student papers? She goes on to say that “Participating in these two roles, tutor and teacher, allows me to witness different phases in the students’ writing process” (64). This is the biggest takeaway for me: when I craft a theory of nomadic pedagogy in the writing center, acknowledging where the student is in the writing process is important, and it will be a matter of discerning where the pedagogue is in the instruction process, as tutor, teacher, or both.
Dewey, John. Experience and Education. Simon & Schuster, 1938.
hooks, bell. Teaching Critical Thinking. Routledge, 2010.
Hughes, Bradley, et al. “What They Take with Them: Findings from the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, 2010, pp. 12-46.
Lunsford, Andrea. “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors: Fourth Edition, edited by Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 70-77.
Peck, Kimberly Fahle, et al. “PROFESSIONAL TUTORS, SHIFTING IDENTITIES: Narratives from the Center.” Redefining Roles: The Professional, Faculty, and Graduate Consultant’s Guide to Writing Centers, edited by MEGAN SWIHART JEWELL and JOSEPH CHEATLE, University Press of Colorado, 2021, pp. 71–85.
This article talks about the challenges of professional tutors and their experiences reentering the writing center space and place as “outsiders” in contrast to their peers. The useful bit of this article is one of the three narratives: a creative writer reenters the writing center as a professional tutor, having worked before as a graduate consultant. She says, “Still, despite my work history, I felt disconnected from this new writing center” (76). This disconnect—though different than the undergraduate/graduate, temporal (surrounding the pandemic), and institutional divides that I want to mine in my paper—is a useful moment of cognitive dissonance, in narrative, from a creative writer like myself. Considering her movement between roles and identities (i.e., her nomadism) will be helpful as I construct my own theory of nomadic pedagogy in the writing center.
Van Dyke, Christina. “From Tutor to TA: Transferring Pedagogy from the Writing Center to the Composition Classroom.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 21, no. 8, Apr. 1997, pp. 1–3, 10.
This article discusses the different pedagogical approaches that tutors and teachers take—or, took in the late 90s—as the author sketches a suggestion for practical TA training: work in the writing center. It asserts that, with time as a tutor in a writing center, graduate students will “get” writing center work better, and will incorporate tutorial pedagogy while eschewing the notion of the writing center as “fix-it shop.” This is a bit of an assumption, but my use of this article will be this: how can a view that we should “use the writing center as a training facility for all future composition instructors” translate to considering one writing center as training for another? How can writing center nomads, like myself, consider the pedagogical implications of different centers, with their nuances and differing approaches, as positive and generative? This will be acknowledged as a sort of historical stepping stone.
Wisniewski, Carolyn, et al. “Questioning Assumptions About Online Tutoring: A Mixed-Method Study of Face-to-Face and Synchronous Online Writing Center Tutorials.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 38, no. 1/2, 2020, pp. 261–96.
This article is a comparative study of face-to-face (f2f) and synchronous online tutorial methods, and it is important in my forthcoming paper and presentation because it highlights some quantitative data about different modalities that will work in tandem with my personal narrative data about my experience switching between modalities during the pandemic (also the time during which this article was written, so it’s timely, too). Its results support a claim of difference between modalities that I can use to further mold my theory of nomadism, as “significant differences were found in the conversation content of online and face-to-face tutorials” (261-62). As my argument about a nomadic pedagogy hinges on moving between different, if somewhat congruous, places of pedagogical (en)action, this quantified difference between modalities during the pandemic will be useful.
Application
My application of this theory is difficult, as it is focused specifically at graduate consultants and their conceptions of self-as-pedagogue. However, the nomadism—and the self-narrative used to understand and contour their nomadic pedagogies—is an actionable idea that can be used in first-year composition by understanding students as nomads themselves, moving for the first time into the college environment and away from the security of home.
This essay assignment asks students to utilize self-narrative to examine their values. They can incorporate elements of the rhetorical situation to discuss important events in their lives, why those are important, and how their value changes for them because of those elements of rhetoric. Students can learn that rhetoric is not just in essays: rhetoric is everywhere, if in a significant Instagram post or an action taken by a friend.
Writing Project 1 Essay: Self-Narrative and The Nomadism of Values
Prompt
Write a self-narrative about a value that is important to you, explaining how it has evolved as you have moved through your life.
Project Description
For this project, you will explore the relationships between your personal journeys and values. To begin that investigation, you will choose a particular value that is important to you. Then, you will utilize self-narrative to trace the movement and evolution of this value throughout your personal history. Ultimately, you should establish a personal definition of that value; it won’t be enough to draw on a dictionary definition. How does this definition emerge from your self-narrative? In other words, how does your story—your unique experiences and movements through life—lead you to your current conception of your chosen value?
Conference Presentation Slides
View “Nomadic Pedagogy and the Writing Center” at this link.
Brief Overview
I will be presenting “Nomadic Pedagogy and the Writing Center” at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing (NCPTW) on October 29th. My presentation centers around nomadism—movement, place, and place-making—in the writing center. I want to examine my pedagogical experiences across institutions and methodologies in order to deconstruct my individual palimpsest of tutorial experience. What can I and others learn from my movement across, adaptation to, and encounters with different places and methods of place-making in my writing center career?
My personal writing tutor experience indicates a unique lens through which to consider this dynamism: I worked in the Honors Writing Center at the University of Oklahoma before the university-wide OU Writing Center, each with their unique pedagogical foci; I taught first-year composition at the same time as I tutored in the OU Writing Center; and now, I have moved to the University of Kansas and work in their writing center while teaching first-year composition, as well. I mention these past and present tutoring/teaching experiences to underscore my movement between place, both physical and methodological, and to emphasize the palimpsestic overlaying and overwriting of my self as a writing tutor who, as a Graduate Teaching Assistant, has incontrovertibly added certain elements of classroom pedagogy to my approach to the writing tutorial.
This presentation, then, will be focused at graduate students who work in writing centers and bring a similar jumbled set of experiences to the tutorial table. The goal is to synthesize my experiences as a “writing center nomad” into a digestible template for other graduate consultants who might feel overwhelmed by their movement into a new place and new writing center, possibly for the second or third time. Also, the intersection of modalities—face-to-face, video conference, and written feedback—adds to the palimpsestic understanding of movement between pedagogies, as we all have been forced to adjust to new methods of delivering the tutorial during COVID-19. Therefore, my notion of place-making will be framed as DISplacement and REplacement across physical location, modality, and pedagogy. A larger pedagogical conclusion about nomadism and place in the writing center is the ultimate focus of this presentation.
There is not much, if any, scholarship in the field of writing center studies that addresses inter-center movement and transfer; most focuses on (1) intra-center concerns or (2) the transfer of tutorial skills between the classroom and writing center or (3) the potential for a writing consultant’s skills to manifest productively in a future career. I believe that there is a lot of value in examining the dynamics of moving between writing centers for writing tutors who are often graduate students with a diversity of pedagogical experiences and instruction. I hope to deliver a presentation with tangible benefits to the field of writing center studies and to my peers who might benefit from some guidance as “writing center nomads” themselves.
Bibliography
Chang, Heewon. Autoethnography as Method. Left Coast Press, 2008.
Dees, Sarah. “From Writing Center to Classroom and Back Again: Pursuing the Unknowns of Tutoring and Teaching.” Praxis, vol. 7, no. 2, 2010, pp. 62–66.
This article, though over ten years old, acts as a sort of introductory step in my research question about nomadic pedagogy and how I might define it. Dees acknowledges that “There are countless ways in which skills I have developed as a tutor have prepared me for teaching” (62) and moves to challenge the difference between these two—how much time do teachers and tutors, respectively, spend on student papers? She goes on to say that “Participating in these two roles, tutor and teacher, allows me to witness different phases in the students’ writing process” (64). This is the biggest takeaway for me: when I craft a theory of nomadic pedagogy in the writing center, acknowledging where the student is in the writing process is important, and it will be a matter of discerning where the pedagogue is in the instruction process, as tutor, teacher, or both.
Dewey, John. Experience and Education. Simon & Schuster, 1938.
hooks, bell. Teaching Critical Thinking. Routledge, 2010.
Hughes, Bradley, et al. “What They Take with Them: Findings from the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, 2010, pp. 12-46.
Lunsford, Andrea. “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center.” The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors: Fourth Edition, edited by Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 70-77.
Peck, Kimberly Fahle, et al. “PROFESSIONAL TUTORS, SHIFTING IDENTITIES: Narratives from the Center.” Redefining Roles: The Professional, Faculty, and Graduate Consultant’s Guide to Writing Centers, edited by MEGAN SWIHART JEWELL and JOSEPH CHEATLE, University Press of Colorado, 2021, pp. 71–85.
This article talks about the challenges of professional tutors and their experiences reentering the writing center space and place as “outsiders” in contrast to their peers. The useful bit of this article is one of the three narratives: a creative writer reenters the writing center as a professional tutor, having worked before as a graduate consultant. She says, “Still, despite my work history, I felt disconnected from this new writing center” (76). This disconnect—though different than the undergraduate/graduate, temporal (surrounding the pandemic), and institutional divides that I want to mine in my paper—is a useful moment of cognitive dissonance, in narrative, from a creative writer like myself. Considering her movement between roles and identities (i.e., her nomadism) will be helpful as I construct my own theory of nomadic pedagogy in the writing center.
Van Dyke, Christina. “From Tutor to TA: Transferring Pedagogy from the Writing Center to the Composition Classroom.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 21, no. 8, Apr. 1997, pp. 1–3, 10.
This article discusses the different pedagogical approaches that tutors and teachers take—or, took in the late 90s—as the author sketches a suggestion for practical TA training: work in the writing center. It asserts that, with time as a tutor in a writing center, graduate students will “get” writing center work better, and will incorporate tutorial pedagogy while eschewing the notion of the writing center as “fix-it shop.” This is a bit of an assumption, but my use of this article will be this: how can a view that we should “use the writing center as a training facility for all future composition instructors” translate to considering one writing center as training for another? How can writing center nomads, like myself, consider the pedagogical implications of different centers, with their nuances and differing approaches, as positive and generative? This will be acknowledged as a sort of historical stepping stone.
Wisniewski, Carolyn, et al. “Questioning Assumptions About Online Tutoring: A Mixed-Method Study of Face-to-Face and Synchronous Online Writing Center Tutorials.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 38, no. 1/2, 2020, pp. 261–96.
This article is a comparative study of face-to-face (f2f) and synchronous online tutorial methods, and it is important in my forthcoming paper and presentation because it highlights some quantitative data about different modalities that will work in tandem with my personal narrative data about my experience switching between modalities during the pandemic (also the time during which this article was written, so it’s timely, too). Its results support a claim of difference between modalities that I can use to further mold my theory of nomadism, as “significant differences were found in the conversation content of online and face-to-face tutorials” (261-62). As my argument about a nomadic pedagogy hinges on moving between different, if somewhat congruous, places of pedagogical (en)action, this quantified difference between modalities during the pandemic will be useful.
Application
My application of this theory is difficult, as it is focused specifically at graduate consultants and their conceptions of self-as-pedagogue. However, the nomadism—and the self-narrative used to understand and contour their nomadic pedagogies—is an actionable idea that can be used in first-year composition by understanding students as nomads themselves, moving for the first time into the college environment and away from the security of home.
This essay assignment asks students to utilize self-narrative to examine their values. They can incorporate elements of the rhetorical situation to discuss important events in their lives, why those are important, and how their value changes for them because of those elements of rhetoric. Students can learn that rhetoric is not just in essays: rhetoric is everywhere, if in a significant Instagram post or an action taken by a friend.
Writing Project 1 Essay: Self-Narrative and The Nomadism of Values
Prompt
Write a self-narrative about a value that is important to you, explaining how it has evolved as you have moved through your life.
Project Description
For this project, you will explore the relationships between your personal journeys and values. To begin that investigation, you will choose a particular value that is important to you. Then, you will utilize self-narrative to trace the movement and evolution of this value throughout your personal history. Ultimately, you should establish a personal definition of that value; it won’t be enough to draw on a dictionary definition. How does this definition emerge from your self-narrative? In other words, how does your story—your unique experiences and movements through life—lead you to your current conception of your chosen value?
Conference Presentation Slides
View “Nomadic Pedagogy and the Writing Center” at this link.