Building professional scholars: the writing center at the graduate level.

Vorhies, Heather Blain

Few writing center directors would be surprised to hear that "explicit [writing] instruction for graduate students remains a rarity" (Micciche 47) or that "Most academic departments assume that their graduate students possess basic writing competency when they are admitted" (Snively, Freeman, and Prentice 154). Nor would they be surprised by panicked graduate students pleading for writing help. A lack of graduate writing instruction, compounded by an assumption of writing mastery, can place writing centers in a difficult position. Graduate faculty may resist classroom writing instruction, feeling that it is or should be unnecessary. And with little or no explicit instruction for graduate students, writing centers may be one of only a few resources or the only available resource for writing instruction. Thus, as populations of graduate students, especially international graduate students, grow, and as job markets become ever more competitive, writing centers are called to aid and adapt for this underserved population. In response to this need, the University of Maryland (UMD) Graduate School launched the Graduate Writing Initiatives, a set of initiatives which includes a graduate writing center, departmental workshops, language learner support, faculty support, and classroom instruction.

For many graduate students, the heart of these writing initiatives--the place where students get direct, one-to-one support--is the Graduate School Writing Center (GSWC). The GSWC is largely based on Northwestern University's Graduate Writing Place. This model uses a select group of writing consultants, who, in addition to consulting, complete writing-in-the-disciplines projects for their own departments. At UMD, for example, consultants are Writing Fellows as they receive a research fellowship, rather than an hourly wage or stipend. The Graduate School supplies Fellows with funding for conference and research travel, equipment, books, or even software. Additionally, like University of California, Los Angeles's Graduate Writing Center, which recruits consultants from across disciplines, the GSWC wanted Fellows to represent a wide disciplinary range. (1) Although about half of the Fellows come from the Humanities, the other represented disciplines are equally spread across the Social Sciences and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. The GSWC follows a peer-tutoring model, using graduate students (typically Ph.D. and post-candidacy) as Fellows. The GSWC director selects the Fellows from faculty nominations based on exceptional disciplinary performance, eloquent writing, and an enthusiasm for working with other graduate students. In addition, the director chooses Fellows with their roles as emissaries to their own departments and disciplines in mind. During the semesters in which they consult, Fellows hold one-to-one writing consultations, co-facilitate workshops, and develop a writing-in-the-disciplines project. Based on the GSWC's experiences, and my role as former director, I have three key suggestions for graduate writing centers:

1. Graduate writing centers must treat graduate writers as professionals.

2. Tutors should have disciplinary genre expertise.

3. Graduate students benefit from alternative consulting models.

GRADUATE WRITING CENTERS MUST TREAT GRADUATE WRITERS AS PROFESSIONALS

During graduate programs, students transition from "student" to "professional scholar." This transition is a bumpy and difficult road, as Paul Prior and others (Casanave; Berkenkotter and Huckin; Phillips) have demonstrated. To aid this transition, the GSWC is designed as a professional space. The first step towards this professional design was locating a space physically separate from the areas that undergraduates generally traffic. Luckily, the Graduate School and the UMD Libraries were able to place the GSWC on the fifth floor of the main library, a quiet floor with little traffic and three floors up from the busy and boisterous Terrapin Learning Commons. Next, it was essential to create a professional feel with the furnishings, as, after all, it can be difficult to conceive of yourself as a professional when you are sitting in classroom-style chairs. For this reason, the GSWC's furniture reflects the design of the Administration Building and the Robert H. Smith Business School, using flex-use furniture with warm woods and simple fabrics. In addition, the GSWC offers a single-serve pod coffee machine, an admittedly small touch that changes the feel of the space significantly. With this design, the GSWC's goal is to impress upon clients as they walk in the door that they are more than graduate students: they are professional scholars, and their writing needs to reflect this. In addition to providing a professional space, graduate writing centers coach graduate students in what it means to be a professional scholar. When the Fellows work with clients, they come armed with lists of online reference managers, draft managers, time managers, and organization managers. (2) Early on it became clear that graduate writing in great part wasn't about writing: graduate students need to know how to effectively manage long-term projects, large amounts of data, and motivation. And while these problems are similar to those facing undergraduates, the larger scale of graduate projects, combined with a lack of guidance and supervision, makes for an entirely different experience. Fellows also know that a certain portion of consultation time, or in some cases, all of it, will inevitably be spent coaching clients in containing the anxiety and the desire to procrastinate. Another significant part of professionalism for graduate students is navigating complex student-faculty relationships. What should a client do, for example, when disagreements between members of the committee are delaying dissertation completion? Graduate writing centers must be prepared to coach clients through such problems, ideally in conjunction with other graduate student services (UMD, for example, has an excellent dissertation support group). Many times this coaching simply means providing a safe space for clients to talk about these problems, but it can also mean helping clients understand faculty comments and helping clients brainstorm better ways to communicate with committee members. In such situations, the director might meet with the student before the consultant does. These meetings are useful in gauging which consultant might work best with the client and can be followed by a discussion of possible consultation techniques with the client's assigned Fellow. For instance, when a client was having difficulty moving from reporting to engaging in the scholarly conversation, the Fellow devised staggered writing tasks that moved from analyzing one article to analyzing how a group of articles were speaking to each other.

TUTORS SHOULD HAVE DISCIPLINARY GENRE EXPERTISE

With 288 graduate programs at UMD, each with their own disciplinary expectations, the Fellows' training needed to address writing in the disciplines (WID). This is no small task considering the countless specialties within disciplines; indeed, it would be impossible to supply Fellows with content expertise in every discipline and sub-discipline. For this reason, the GSWC uses a genre-based approach to help Fellows gain disciplinary writing expertise for themselves. Just as essential, this genre-based approach to tutoring provides Fellows with a way to make implicit writing expectations explicit to their clients. As Catherine Savini notes, consultants "can best serve their students by showing them how to gain access to new disciplines" (3) Sue Dinitz and Susanmarie Harrington support this viewpoint as they distinguish between disciplinary expertise (knowing what a chemistry article looks like and does) and content knowledge (knowing the structure of gold nanoparticles). Dinitz and Harrington found that tutors with disciplinary expertise were able focus on global, rather than local concerns; in contrast, "Many of the limitations we noted in sessions related to directiveness, with the tutor's lack of disciplinary expertise causing them not to be directive enough or the tutor's content knowledge causing them to be too directive" (94). Dinitz's and Harrington's research mirrors daily experience within the GSWC. While a Fellow within the discipline may be able to highlight inaccuracies and provide more insight into the discipline's writing, working with a Fellow from outside the discipline ensures that the client will be required to discuss how the writing is working conceptually. In following a genre-based approach, consultants seek to understand how academic disciplines think and write. While consultants should be able to analyze a genre, consultants do not necessarily need to know the discipline intimately. In other words, a consultant should be aware that conventions exist (for example, the many variations of the IMRAD structure in the sciences which generally includes the abstract, introduction, methods, results, and discussions), but a consultant does not need to be a chemist in order to work with someone in chemistry. As Pemberton notes, "a writing tutor's unfamiliarity with discourse conventions can be seen as one of his or her greatest strengths" (376). In fact, when offered the choice of working with a Fellow from the same discipline or a Fellow from outside the discipline, clients frequently prefer a Fellow from outside. (3) Choosing a Fellow outside the discipline can be a social issue (clients may prefer not to work with Fellows from their cohort), or it may be related to the need to protect a certain formula or technical design. Again, while content knowledge can sometimes be helpful in consultations, what is most important is that consultants have disciplinary genre expertise.

Promoting disciplinary genre expertise for consultants means that the Fellows' discipline-specific projects are as important as one-to-one consultation. These projects help the Fellows build genre knowledge within the GSWC writing center and they help individual departments better understand the writing in their fields. As part of their service, Fellows independently design WID projects for their departments, from a workshop on grant writing for public health, to a website on getting an article published for Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, and to a pamphlet on writing a phenomenological dissertation for Education. Many of these WID projects have arisen out of the Fellows' consultation work. In addition, Fellows created the website, designed the logo, and developed materials for an online self-study course.

GRADUATE STUDENTS BENEFIT FROM ALTERNATIVE CONSULTING MODELS

GSWC consultations differ significantly from much of writing center practice in two ways. First, Fellows comment directly on the draft (clients receive an electronic copy of this commented draft at the end of the appointment, along with a short note of what was discussed). Particularly useful at the graduate level, written comments allow Fellows to shape the consultation around global concerns while respecting clients' sentence-level concerns. I have observed that when clients know they will receive a commented-on document at the end of the session, Fellows can more easily guide clients who fixate again and again on individual sentences into broader discussions of the document and the client's research. Indeed, written comments seem to relieve a great deal of anxiety on the part of the client. In any case, when commenting, Fellows follow the same guidelines for written comments as those they use for consultation. The Fellows ask many questions and respond as a reader, but also model sentence structure or wording when appropriate, or explain article use, subject-verb agreement, or vocabulary.

Written comments also reflect the GSWC's commitment to its language learner clients, for whom written comments supplement oral comments. Whether in written comments or in face-to-face consultation, Fellows act as cultural informants for international students and language learners, checking for meaning and suggesting alternate wordings. Fellows may adjust their tutoring style to be more directive at certain points when open-ended questions and comments may be troublesome for a language learner client. As Frances Nan points out, "Tutors must be prepared to first make direct changes for writers while modeling specific examples before expecting them to flourish under the usual indirection" (56). Thus, when Fellows provide a few options of how a sentence might be structured, clients find it much easier to try out new sentence patterns and suggest wordings of their own. Here, I agree with Clark and Healy that forbidding imitation within consultations limits learning (251). I also agree with the sage advice of Sarah Nakamaru that when working with language learners, "It's OK to tell them"(106). Second, longer, more complex writing means that the traditional appointment time of forty-five minutes or fifty minutes is often inadequate, as Summers notes (204). For this reason, GSWC blocks two hours for every appointment, with the first hour allotted to the Fellow for reading the client's draft and commenting on it (up to fifteen pages) and the second hour allotted for consultation. While this is a time-intensive model, this system works well with the GSWC's client population and with these clients' texts, the majority of which are articles for publication and dissertation chapters--long, dense texts which present complicated, layered arguments and precise methods and data analysis. Additionally, although sessions themselves are generally one-hour in length, clients have the option to book back-to-back appointments for a two-hour session. And while some graduate writing centers, such as Northwestern University's Graduate Writing Place, provide clients with the option of having tutors read the work before the consultation, it is the GSWC's standard practice for Fellows to read the work beforehand.

This process, with time allotted before the consultation for Fellows to read, comment, and explore writing samples in the client's discipline, is time-intensive. In the same window that other writing centers may see ten clients, the GSWC sees five. Consultation capacity is certainly diminished because of this, but in the long run I believe this system is more efficient for small centers and for graduate writers. To discuss fifteen pages in a forty-five or fifty-minute session without the tutor reading the dissertation chapter beforehand would likely mean at the least three appointments. This means that a client must visit the center two more times; always a difficult task for tightly scheduled graduate students.

CONCLUSION

No writing center model is without its limitations. The current funding system (small research fellowships for a two- or four-hour per week tutoring commitment) and subsequent training (six hours, plus monthly professional development) fits well with graduate students' schedules, but leaves much to be desired in terms of the GSWC's available tutoring hours and in terms of training. Unfortunately, a semester-long tutoring course is too great a commitment for many graduate students ("Graduate Writing Place")

Another challenge is recruitment across disciplines. The GSWC's emphasis on WID means there is a continual search for Fellows from fields under-represented in the center, namely Business and STEM fields. In part, the difficulty of recruiting from these fields has to do with an emphasis on time in the lab; while graduate students in the Humanities may be encouraged to seek out teaching opportunities, graduate students in other fields may be encouraged to keep to lab work. In addition, while small research fellowships let the GSWC recruit across disciplines, this funding also means that the majority of Fellows only do one consultation per week. Having some form of graduate assistantship would mean fewer Fellows, but more consultations. Moving toward graduate assistantships or toward a mix of research funding and graduate assistantships may be an option. However, who will fund such assistantships, remains to be seen. Finally, the GSWC might more effectively schedule drop-in hours and consultation times for short documents, such as policy memos or grant proposals, alongside the standard, two-hour blocked consultations. Yet, as the Fellows frequently note, both they and the clients benefit from reading even short texts before the consultation, as even texts of a page or two can be highly complicated. As always, the goal for directors and consultants is easing the difficult transition from student to professional scholar. A writing center based on the GSWC model serves graduate students by supporting disciplinary instruction and also by imbuing a sense of professionalism within the center.

Works Cited

Berkenkotter, Carol, and Thomas N. Huckin. Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. Print.

Casanave, Christine P. Writing Games: Multicultural Case Studies of Academic Literacy Practices in Higher Education. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. Print.

Clark, Irene L., and Dave Healy. "Are Writing Centers Ethical?" The Longman Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. Ed. Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S. Blumner. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008. 242-259. Print.

Dinitz, Sue, and Susanmarie Harrington. "The Role of Disciplinary Expertise in Shaping Writing Tutorials." Writing Center Journal 33-2 (2014): 73-98. Print.

Gillespie, Paula, Paul Heidebrecht, and Lorelle Lamascus. "From Design to Delivery: The Graduate Writing Consultant Course (Part 2)." Writing Lab Newsletter 32.8 (2008): 8-11. Print.

"Graduate Writing Place." The Writing Place. Northwestern University, n.d. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.

Micciche, Laura. "Rhetorics of Critical Writing: Implications for Graduate Writing Instruction." College Composition and Communication 60.3 (2009): 35-48. Print.

Nakamaru, Sarah. "Theory In/To Practice: A Tale of Two Multilingual Writers: A Case-Study Approach to Tutor Education." Writing Center Journal 30.2 (2010): 100-124. Print.

Nan, Frances. "Bridging the Gap: Essential Issues to Address in Recurring Writing Center Appointments with Chinese ELL Students." Writing CenterJournal 32.1 (2012): 50-64. Print.

Pemberton, Michael A. "Rethinking the WAC/ Writing Center Connection." Longman Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. Ed. Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S. Blumner. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008. 260-271. Print.

Phillips, Tallin. "Graduate Writing Groups: Shaping Writing and Writers From Student to Scholar." Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 10.1 (2012): 1-7. Web. 6 Aug. 2013.

Prior, Paul. Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity in the Academy. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998. Print.

Savini, Catherine. "An Alternative Approach to Bridging Disciplinary Divides." Writing Lab Newsletter 35.7-8 (2011): 2-5. Print.

Snively, Helen, Traci Freeman, and Cheryl Prentice. "Writing Centers for Graduate Students." Writing Center Director's Resource Book. Ed. Christina Murphy and Byron L. Stay. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006. 153-163. Print.

Summers, Sarah. "Graduate Writing Centers: Programs, Practices, Possibilities." Diss. Pennsylvania State University, 2014. Web. 27 May 2014.

Heather Blain Vorhies

University of Maryland, College Park, MD (former university)

University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC (current university)

Notes

(1.) I would like to thank Marilyn Gray, Brad Hughes, and Leigh Ryan for their conversations and insight.

(2.) Such as Mendelay or Zotero (citation and PDF managers), Scrivener (draft manager), The Pomodoro Technique (time manager), 750words.com (productivity), or Evemote (organization manager).

(3.) As Gillespie, Heidebrecht, and Lamascus state, "tutoring peers from within the same graduate discipline can also involve some unique challenges, interesting dynamics, and choppy waters to navigate" (10).