Deirdre Vinyard is the Deputy Director of the UMass Writing Program. She teaches the first-year writing courses (College and Basic Writing) and directs the Basic Writing Program.
Last fall I started tutoring at the Writing Center here at UMass. I’ve always been a fan of Writing Centers—I know what they have done for my students and their writing—but I had never been at a Writing Center, either as a writer or as a tutor. I figured after 30 years of teaching, it was time to learn about this wonderful resource for myself.
Tutoring in the Writing Center context is very different from conferencing with students in my class—and this is something I hadn’t realized. When I conference with my students, I know a lot about them and a lot about the writing they are doing. I often have a sense of the strengths and challenges they bring to the writing task we are working on and of course I wrote the assignment—I know the teacher’s expectations!
In the Writing Center, I am faced with writers whom I do not know, writing in disciplines distant from my own and for professors whose expectations I can sometimes only guess at. At times, I feel at sea.
My mentors in the Writing Center have reminded me that I am a guide, not a guru, in these sessions. I am there to help students figure out their intentions in their writing and to think about the ways their ideas are presented. Sometimes we explore the expectations of the teacher or the genre together, by carefully reading the assignment sheet, by looking at other requirements in the course, or by looking for models. I have learned a lot about how writing happens across campus, across disciplines.
As a teacher, I think my background as an ESL teacher—with its focus on language—has made me want to jump into my students’ papers. I love the idea of the rolling up my sleeves and plunging into the “verbal clay,” to borrow Patrick Hartwell’s term. I want to get my hands into the paper. And of course, when I know what we are trying to make from the clay (because I wrote the assignment), it’s easy to jump in. One of the things I have learned at the Writing Center is to roll my sleeves back down, edge my chair a bit from the table, and lean back.
And of course, there is a connection to my teaching. Let me tell you a story. Last semester in my Basic Writing class, one of my students came to me for some feedback on his essay. Harvey had a draft, but he felt it didn’t quite say what he wanted—he told me he was having trouble connecting the ideas. I read it, and I could see his frustration. I couldn’t really tell what the main point was—it was a collection of different, seemingly unrelated ideas from the reading and his experience. I was tempted to go through the essay with Harvey, talking about each paragraph and how they related to my assignment and to each other—to see how we together could better connect his ideas. I wanted to roll up my sleeves. But for some reason, I didn’t.
Instead, I sat back in my chair (and without realizing it, put on my WC hat) and asked him just to tell me what he wanted to talk about in the essay. He then beautifully articulated a great idea, bringing together these disparate points–into a really cool theme that connected to the course readings in a fresh and personal (for him) way. I was so excited. More importantly, Harvey was now excited and no longer frustrated.
What I take away from this experience is that Writing Center work has taught me to be a bit more observational, in a positive way, with my students’ writing. As Leslie Bradshaw told us in our last training session, we are working with writers—more than we are working with writing. I think my conference with Harvey was so successful because I sat back and worked with him and then let him work with his writing.
I continue to tutor at the Writing Center every week. I am learning. I am loving it.