"Problems in the Writing Center"
Although author Kathryn Evans addresses professors more than writing center personnel in this article, unclear writing assignments have plagued us all as tutors and students. Teachers (including me) are so familiar with certain concepts that we can easily forget that that these concepts are brand new to our students.
For example, in the Writing Center we see students who don't understand what a thesis statement or topic sentence is, or who don't bother with paragraph breaks. Many of our students don't understand that academic writing is almost a separate language, and that generally, slang, curse words, and sentence fragments are frowned upon. We may assume that because students were accepted into Madonna, they have some of these basics, but that's not always the case.
Jeri and I kind of laughed at the prospect of asking Madonna professors to modify their writing assignments to include more detailed criteria as well as many levels of scaffolding. Like so many educators across the country, much of our faculty feels overworked and frazzled--just as we often feel in the Writing Center.
Larger writing centers sometimes have a student liaison to work with a specific department. If we were a larger writing center, for example, John might work with Katie O'Dowd in Humanities and Holly might work with Dan McDougall in Sign Language Studies. This individual may help decode writing assignments or maybe even work with the instructor to create these assignments. Who knows? It may happen yet. (This means, of course, that John and Holly can never graduate.)
-- Frances
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supercanuck said...
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of a student liason, Frances. It sounds like a win-win situation for all involved - except for John and Holly. :-) How big of a writing center would we need to have in order for that to work?
I actually just experienced what this article was talking about a few days ago. A friend of mine asked me if I knew what her teacher wanted for a "critical analysis of a paper." Unfortunately,I wasn't able to give her much advice. When professor's are unclear, it can make it very difficult to help a student. Often professors assume that students will understand what they are asking for the assignment, but that is not always the case. As tutors, there is not much we can do. That is why students should ask their teachers if they don't understand. Unfortunately, students may feel too embarrassed to ask. If they come to us early in their assignment, we can send them back to their teacher, but if it is too close to the due date, they may not be able to get the information they need to understand and complete the assignment to the teacher's satisfaction. It's a bad situation for them, and it can make the tutor feel that they didn't really help.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, Frances, if I don't graduate after all of my painful efforts this year, I'll still be gone from Mad U, but for another whole set of reasons (AA comes to mind for some reason)...
ReplyDeleteHenyways, we've definitely had to deal with this type of problem before and, like Frances said, I don't know if it's practical to hope to get profs to (sometimes radically) change their syllabi and assignment language. I wonder if a possible "fix" is to ask profs to give some kind of promo speech at the beginning of the semester about how academic writing is different and they (and we tutors) all recognize that it's a bit arbitrary and overly restrictive at times, but it's just the nature of the beast. If it works for the student, we could use a sports analogy: when one first starts to learn a new sport, say hockey, he/she doesn't get out on the ice and start scoring goals. One first learns an arbitrary, seemingly pointless and even bizarre set of exercises and drills. For a while, several months, these activities will be difficult and the newbie won't be able to grasp the bigger picture. Eventually, the isolated movements will become more natural and fall into place and the individual will be able to see and apply the "awkward" skill in a constructive manner.
I remember feeling this way about the phrase "critical thinking." In every single first day of every single class, my professor would say something in the syllabus about how one or more of the class outcomes were "critical thinking skills." I had no idea what this "magical formula" was or how one obtained the necessary gnosis to wield this seemingly omnipotent power, but I sure as hell wasn't going to raise my hand and ask, "Professor, what is critical thinking?" It wasn't until sometime last year (my junior year of college) that something clicked and I understood what people meant by "critical thinking skills." I learned that, at some level, I already possessed this empowering set of talents, I learned how to better use them and I learned to recognize when I was thinking critically and when I wasn't. My point is, it would have been helpful for my professors to better explain what they meant by "critical thinking skills," but I also had to just muddle through for a while until the clouds broke. I think that's a message I would have benefited from hearing more often my first few years of college: "Don't worry, a lot of this won't make sense to you for a while, but you just have to keep on wading through it and trust that eventually you will understand--don't worry, this is how it is for everybody, it's just a part of college...and life."
Wow...that was an obscenely long post...sorry guys.
ReplyDeleteAs I read this article, I realized that this is a very difficult issue for the writing center, because it is largely out of our hands. There is nothing that we can do directly in order to fix this problem, other than communicate the issue to instructors. The liaison idea would be a great one; too bad we aren't a bigger writing center.
ReplyDeleteI think the key, for us, is experience, the more we work with deciphering different professors' assignments, the better we will become. If we encounter a student who we have a lot of trouble helping, as a result of an unclear prompt, perhaps we should encourage them to bring back their graded paper. By doing this, we can observe the teacher's comments and learn from them, so that we can better help future students.
I would say one of the mroe helpful tips in the article was the one about prfessers providing example papers. I know that if I have to do an assignment, it is most helpful to look at a paper that would get a good grade as opposed to one that would recieve a lower grade.
ReplyDeleteI would love for the instructors at MU to be more specific in their writing instructions. A lot of times I have students come in who want me to help them clarify their assignments, but the instructions were maybe given in class, and I defintely was not sitting in class with them. My favorite words are always, "You'll have to ask your instructor."