Blurring my boundaries: insights from tutoring a student with visual impairments.

Whitcomb, Amy

There exists an odd and special balance between a student's trust in her tutor and the tutor's quiet refusal to take responsibility for the student's writing. I feel this is especially so with a student who literally cannot see the pages that he or she is submitting for a grade or formal evaluation. When my supervisor, the director of the writing center at the University of Idaho, asked me to tutor a graduate student on a satellite campus who was visually impaired, I agreed--but with reservations. How could I maintain my personal imperative to concentrate on higher-order concerns with this student (I'll call her Susan) who needed, most immediately, a pair of eyes to check her document formatting? The rhetorical effects of presentation aside, I had considered formatting primarily outside of the writing process: a step done after the heavy lifting of thinking, drafting, thinking, revising. This perspective is more or less in keeping with conventional tutoring philosophy to focus on the process instead of the product. As I interpreted this philosophy, my objective as a tutor was to ask purposeful questions and model writerly practices, to expand students' thoughts about their writing choices. When students approached me with pleas (always pleas, last-minute panicked e-mails) for help with formatting, I routinely referred them to the Microsoft Word help toolbar and to the College of Graduate Studies Thesis Handbook. I wanted the final writing product to stay in the students' hands; besides, I reasoned, technical assistance was not my strength. But serving students was my task, and as my supervisor reminded me, Susan was trying to make the best use of the limited resources available to her.

I often asked students on satellite campuses to send me an introductory e-mail explaining their needs and timeline before I reviewed their writing. Susan and I did this initial "meeting" by phone. We determined that she would e-mail her documents to me with some explanation of the assignment and her concerns ahead of our next call, when we would discuss formatting and other writing issues. Susan seemed as overwhelmed as any graduate student I'd worked with in the writing center: there was so much reading, she told me, hours of reading each day. She thought probably her writing was too "flowery" for the social science articles expected of her. Her professor was a stickler about APA style. But she was giddy, too, thrilled to be on a new career path in her late 40s, eager to learn, supremely grateful for my attention to her work. I warmed to her instantly.

We couldn't have known that we'd speak every week for two semesters, working through multiple assignments for her four classes. In our conversations, I'd read problematic passages aloud and we'd discuss them--as in any other tutorial. Yet I often felt uncomfortable with my approach. When I introduced the passages so Susan could situate the sentences in her memory of the paper as a whole (and this, I learned quickly, was something she could do very well), I tended to mention what I saw as the writing problem within them. Here I had trouble with the word order, I might say, or I'm not sure I understand how the first part of this sentence fits with the second part. I worried that I wasn't allowing Susan the mental space to develop self-editing skills that she would need in her graduate and professional careers. But my anxieties about being too forward were usually unfounded. I'd say, "This sentence has a dangling modifier ...," and Susan would reply, "Oh, I had trouble with that one!" or, later in our work together, "I knew you were going to say something about that phrase!" I learned that Susan could easily identify when her writing was "off'; she had a perceptive ear for tone and rhythms in language and a knack for immediately supplying alternate phrasing or other revisions. Eventually, what surprised me about our tutorials wasn't how readily Susan revised her language over the phone, but how happily I typed her words into the document on my computer and formatted them in accordance with her assignment. In our months working together, we revised her weekly journal entries for class, a plethora of article reviews, some fictitious case reports, resumes, even a schematic of her life history as an Excel spreadsheet. The document was easier to read in landscape orientation than in the portrait orientation Susan's program had chosen by default, but how was she to know that? By this time in our relationship, I had no reservations about helping with document formatting and breaking my own tutoring "rule." I knew Susan was learning plenty about writing from our discussions.

And I was learning about writing from Susan, too. I thought I was a close reader and slow writer, but when Susan told me that she had to set her document reading program to speak each character on the screen in order to catch errors like for "and" or "Brian" for "Bryan" (her professor's name! She was mortified when I told her about that one), I reconsidered my writing process. What would it be like to hold a whole essay in my head, to lay it out slowly and clearly enough for a machine to get it right? Such details about the circumstances of Susan's writing were revelations to me. She's told me that the writing's perfection is largely from trial and error. Working with me has given her opportunities to make mistakes, test corrections, and get the detailed feedback that informs her where, exactly, she went wrong in her navigations through Microsoft Word functions. As evidence, she cites her ability to now independently insert running headers with page numbers, a process she and I tinkered with over several weeks by narrating our respective steps through Word to each other.

Recently I searched for articles about blindness and writing centers and found only one, "Assisting the Visually Impaired in the Writing Center," written by Karin Sisk and published in the Writing Lab Newsletter in 2001. (To be sure, other articles on similar subjects, mostly written about or for elementary education and literacy, appeared in the databases I searched.) If I had read Sisk's article before working with Susan, I might have been, or felt, better prepared for our meetings. For instance, Sisk describes the "duty" tutors feel to address both format and error in the writing of a student with impaired vision. She mentions JAWS, something Susan said a handful of times before I placed it as "Job Access With Speech," a document reading program. I realize now that my experience with Susan mirrors much of what Sisk described more than a decade ago about her tutors' work with students who have visual impairments. For example, Susan and I revised her writing in real time, on a screen. We kept a standing appointment, and Susan worked exclusively with me. I cringed every time I said, automatically, "See you later!" but such statements never seemed to bother her. Susan and I, like Sisk's tutors and students, were collaborators and friends.

Where did Susan's profound trust in me come from? I think of myself as a student meeting with professors, nodding at their suggestions and sensing the good intentions behind them. I'm grateful that Susan sensed my good intentions and that I, as a tutor, accepted the challenges her blindness presented--and the insights they offered. There are many: I shouldn't jump into and plow ahead in a tutorial based on what I see. I shouldn't skip the step of asking the student about her writing and listening closely to her answers. I may hear about what I already saw as the writing's weaknesses, but I will likely also hear what the student hopes and fears about the text and why.

Above all, conversations with Susan convinced me that document formatting was a meaningful issue to students and changed how I approach it in a tutorial. I realized that we tutors are positioned to help students uncover what it takes to get their thoughts into text and into a form that resonates with others. When we can focus on the connection between the students and their readers (and between us and the students), then we've effectively kept comprehensive, fundamental concerns about writing at the forefront of the tutorial. And we can assist in ways that seemed directive, perhaps, or superfluous before. Trust conversation and collaboration, tutors; trust engagement and adaptation; trust that the obstacles will be opportunities and that the written words generated from them will be correctly formatted; yes, and telling.

Works Cited

Sisk, Karin. "Assisting the Visually Impaired in the Writing Center." Writing Lab Newsletter 257 (2001): 6-9. Print.

Amy Whitcomb

University of Idaho, Moscow, ID (former university)

University of Washington Tacoma, Tacoma, WA (current university)