Thursday, October 1, 2015

Muriel Harris--"Why Writers Need Writing Tutors"

The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing. Cheryl Glenn and Melissa A. Goldthwaite. Eds. Bedford/St. Martin's: New York, NY. 2014

In the beginning, Harris lays out the responsibilities and benefits of a well-run writing center. At the writing center's core, she argues, is student tutoring. At writing centers, "writers gain kinds of knowledge about their writing and about themselves that are not possible in other institutionalized settings."

Harris argues that the tutor occupies a middle ground that the teacher cannot. The tutor, whose role is explicitly to help the student overcome teacher-made obstacles, can develop a strong rapport with the student. The tutor can help the student "talk more freely and honestly because they are not in the confines of a teacher/student relationship where there are penalties for asking what they perceive as 'dumb' questions...Moreover, students realize that they don't have to listen passively and accept what is 'told' to them by an authoritative speaker."

Harris also states that a tutor "is able to work primarily with the writer as a person" (I guess teachers can't?), which allows them to go more deeply into the students writing, clarifying the prose and asking questions that lead to the stimulation of new ideas.

"As tutors we are there to help reduce the stress, to overcome the hurdles set up by others, and to know more about writing than a roommate or friend, maybe even as much as their teachers."

Harris then goes on to provide quotes from students that express and support her view about the importance and role of the tutor in the writing center. Students who visit the writing center enjoy being allowed to discuss their ideas. The tutors don't dominate the session and prescribe how they should write. Tutorial conversation is different and empowering because students don't feel the need to perform in front of their tutor like they would a professor.

Assisting with Acquisition of Student Knowledge 

Writing center tutors help students exercise a secondary form of practical knowledge that they don't receive in the formal classroom. "This second kind of practical knowledge is knowing from personal experience how to act, in the sense of possessing a habit or skill for performing an activity."

Assisting with Affective Concerns

In this section, Harris gushes even more about how incredible writing tutors are in the face of anxiety-producing teachers of writing. The writing center tutorials allow students to boost their confidence about their writing and overcome fears of writing and having their writing assessed.

Harris acknowledges that some teachers may not uphold the authoritarian style that students may perceive, but students perceptions drive how they expect the teacher to act whether or not the teacher is actually performing those behaviors. Essentially, teachers, no matter how they posture themselves, are either authoritarians who belittles students or non-authoritarians whose non-belittling behavior is seen by students to be belittling anyway.

Interpreting the Meaning of Academic Language

Harris argues that the diverging discourse communities of teachers and students prevents students from fully understanding what their teacher wants or how to articulate what their writing needs. She supports this argument by detailing the process by which one group (teachers) dominate another group (students) and through this domination and distinction the two groups define themselves in relation to one another. "Dominant and dominated groups are not comprehensible apart from each other, for their speech practices are organized to enact these differences and their hierarchy. Any dominated group is required simultaneously to identify with and disassociate itself from the dominant group."

Since tutors occupy the middles ground between the dominator and the dominated, they can better explain the language and intent of the teacher.


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