: More than you'd care to read...

After a long (and wonderful) day of running a faculty workshop, some tangled prose about my plans for the next few months...

My larger goal for sabbatical leave is to develop knowledge in scholarship concerning discipline-specific, classroom-based writing center practices.  Often dubbed “Writing Fellows” or “Writing Associate” programs, these initiatives build upon traditional writing center practices by pairing undergraduate consultants and individual courses – often selected because of scholarly interest and ability.  Brown was the first college to try out such a system in the early 1980s.  Many top-tier liberal arts colleges, such as Swarthmore, Pomona, Davidson, Carleton, and Berea use this system, in varying ways, in partnership with a traditional “walk-in” center to help students grow as writers, readers, and critical thinkers. These trained consultants serve as mediaries between professors and class participants; they aid in helping students use writing to learn course content and/or to understand disciplinary, genre-based strategies.  Over the past few years, these programs have become quite successful -- but very few folks, it seems, talk about assessment, etc.  More on that in a moment. 

I plan to travel to at least three well-established writing centers at liberal arts colleges that use a Writing Fellows/Associates model.  Observing practices and interviewing participants at all levels (fellows, patrons, directors, faculty-partners, administrators) will help me extend my own work as both a scholar and a writing center director.  Most of this time will be spent at a nearby liberal arts college - 2 to 3 visits a week.  My other visits will serve more as "case studies" (2-3 day trips) rather than ethnography. But, in the end, I hope to use these observations and interviews to contexualize my reading and serve as the basis for a small pilot program at my own college.

To be sure, this sabbatical allows me to begin a project, albeit one that I am already well invested in pursuing.  I can envision a range of product-driven projects: a literature review or praxis-based article aimed at a liberal arts WPA readership; a series of conference presentations on building a new program, with emphasis on negotiated identities practiced by faculty and fellows; a textbook designed for Writing Fellows/WAC work, etc.  And, in the end, I'm most curious about this: given the complicated and politicized nature of "assessment"...how do you assess such programs?  In ways that reflect strong, pedagogically centered values?  

Writing fellows programs are often situated within traditional writing centers (with drop-in or scheduled appointments, helping with a range of writing and speaking tasks).  Their goals overlap: to help student writers understand the rhetorical needs of various writing tasks, and to aid at different moments in a writing process.  Writing fellows programs are often seen as a core component to writing-across-the-disciplines or writing-in-disciplines style programs.  In most programs, writing center staffers are placed within specific courses with rigorous writing tasks – for example, an Introduction to Sociology class, an English course in literary theory, or a methods course in Psychology.  In some programs, staffers attend each class session; in other models, staffers attend only a certain number of sessions, yet are still positioned as an integral part of the course structure.

                         

What’s crucial to understand here is that fellows are not “graders,” “junior graduate assistants,” or “grunt labor.”  We’ve already begun a culture of “student-as-course-based-scholar” at Transylvania, via programs such as August Term.  Like A-Term Scholars learned this past year, writing fellows negotiate complex identity roles: student, peer, mentor, partner, teacher.  A successful fellows program requires both faculty fellows and writing center staffers to see this whole endeavor as a partnership – with honest feedback, regularly scheduled meetings, and clear goals and responsibilities.  St. John’s, for example, spent significant effort and time crafting a handbook for faculty fellows that outlines requirements and expectations. 

As noted by Hughes and Hall, initial scholarship in Writing Fellows work began as explanatory and definitional pieces.  As case studies grew over time, scholars began to focus on how such arrangements both sustained and problematized the overall concerns of the Writing Across Curriculum movement.  Book length studies and collections such as Barnett and Blummer’s Writing Centers and Writing Across the Curriculum Program and Spigelman and Grobman’s On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring began to appear in the early 2000s.  Other pieces, such as the recent 2010 IWCA award winning article “What They Take With Them: Findings from the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project,” examine the long-term benefits of writing fellow program participation on the tutors themselves.  This work extends beyond institutional aims; for example, Jean Lutes explains how Writing Fellows work functions as a natural extension of feminist practice.  And more, and more.

All the while: I'm also chairing a conference for undergraduate writing tutors in my state, and presenting a paper with a colleague at a conference later this fall.  And playing some guitars, too.

More later.  Props to my friend Britt for getting the not-so-obscure indie rawk reference in the blog title.  You've got a mix tape in the making...

I'll open up comments soon.  Thanks to folks who sent me notes of encouragement.  Y'all rule.

To the soon.
scott