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September 13, 2006
methodology | wide-angle
Denzin, Norman K. and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Eds. Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 2003.
zoom lens: "In North America, qualitative research operates in a complex historical field that crosscuts seven historical moments…[that] overlap and simultaneously operate in the present. We define them as the traditional (1900-1950); the modernist or golden age (1950-1970); blurred genres (1970-1986); the crisis of representation (1986-1990); the postmodern, a period of experimental and new ethnographies (1990-1995); postexperimental inquiry (1995-2000); and the future, which is now (2000-). The future, the seventh moment, is concerned with moral discourse, with the development of sacred textualities" (3). <--each category gets shorter-lived than the ones before, & how much of a trend can 4 or 5 years really involve—it takes that long to get something published for others to even *see*.
qualitative research as bricolage: "The interpretive bricoleur produces a bricolage--that is, a pieced-together set of representations that are fitted to the specifics of a complex situation" to create an "'[emergent] construction'…that changes and takes new forms as different tools, methods, and techniques of representation and interpretation are added to the puzzle" (5-6). "The qualitative researcher as bricoleur or maker of quilts uses the aesthetic and material tools of his or her craft, deploying whatever strategies, methods, or empirical materials are at hand" (6).
in critique: "Positivists…allege that the so-called new experimental qualitative researchers write fiction, not science, and that these researchers have no way of verifying their truth statements. Ethnographic poetry and fiction signal the death of empirical science, and there is little to be gained by attempting to engage in moral criticism. These critics presume a stable, unchanging reality that can be studied using the empirical methods of objective social science….The province of qualitative research, accordingly, is the world of lived experience, for this is where individual belief and action intersect with culture" (12).
in theoretically-grounding explanation: "Poststructuralists and postmodernists have contributed to the understanding that there is no clear window into the inner life of an individual. Any gaze is always filtered through the lenses of language, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity. There are no objective observations, only observations socially situated in the worlds of—and between—the observer and the observed. Subjects, or individuals, are seldom able to give full explanations of their actions or intentions; all they can offer are accounts, or stories, about what they did and why. No single method can grasp all of the subtle variations in ongoing human experience. Consequently, qualitative researchers deploy a wide range of interconnected interpretive methods, always seeking better ways to make more understandable the worlds of experience they have studied" (31).
"Qualitative research is endlessly creative and interpretive" and "The interpretive practice of making sense of one's findings is both artistic and political" (37)
"The interview is negotiated text….is a conversation, the art of asking questions and listening. It is not a neutral tool, for at least two people create the reality of the interview situation. In this situation answers are given. Thus the interview produces situated understandings grounded in specific interactional episodes" (48).
on text: "Mute evidence—that is, written texts and cultural artifacts—endures physically and leaves its traces on the material past. It is impossible to talk to and with these materials. Researchers must interpret them, for in them are found important meanings about the human shape of lived culture" (50).
reality check: "We cannot study lived experience directly, because language, speech, and systems of discourse mediate and define the very experience we attempt to describe. We study the representations of experience, not experience itself. We examine the stories people tell one another about the experiences they have had. These stories may be personal experience narratives of self-stories, interpretations made up as the person goes along" (51).
the U.S. as "'the interview society' (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997; Silverman 1993). Both qualitative and quantitative researchers tend to rely on the interview as the basic method of data gathering, whether the purpose is to obtain a rich, in-depth experiential account of an event or episode in the life of the respondent or to garner a simple point on a scale of 2 to 10 dimensions. There is inherent faith that the results are trustworthy and accurate….One cannot escape being interviewed; interviews are everywhere, in the forms of political polls, questionnaires about doctor's visits, housing applications, forms regarding social service eligibility, college applications, talk shows, news programs—the list goes on and on….It seems that almost any question—personal, sensitive, probing, upsetting, accusatory—is fair game and permissible in the interview setting….the interview has become a means of contemporary storytelling, where persons divulge life accounts in response to interview inquiries" (63).
nonverbal techniques: "Proxemic communication is the use of interpersonal space to communicate attitudes, chronemics communication is the use of pacing of speech and length of silence in conversation, kinesic communication includes any body movements or postures, and paralinguistic communication includes all the variations in volume, pitch and quality of voice. (Gorden, 1980, p. 335)" (87).
feminist research: "The feminist, communitarian researcher does not invade the privacy of others, use informed consent forms, select subjects randomly, or measure research designs in terms of their validity. This framework presumes a researchers who builds collaborative, reciprocal, trusting, and friendly relations with those studied….It is also understood that those studied have claims of ownership over any material that are produced in the research process, icnluding field notes" (96). (denzin 1989a)
Chp 4 (Ian Hodder, "The Interpretation of Documents and Material Culture"; pp. 155-75): "This chapter is concerned with the interpretation of mute evidence—that is, with written texts and artifacts. Such evidence, unlike the spoken word, endures physically and thus can be separated across space and time from its author, producer, or user. Material traces thus often have to be interpreted without the benefit of indigenous commentary. There is often no possibility of interaction with spoken emic 'insider' as opposed to 'outsider' perspectives. Even when such interaction is possible, actors often seem curiously inarticulate about the reasons they dress in particular ways, choose particular pottery designs, or discard dung in particular locations. Material traces and residues thus post sepcial problems for qualitative research" (155).
"Writing is not an innocent practice" (459). (Denzin, "The Practices and Politics of Interpretation"; 458-98)
Posted by ttobryan at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)
September 02, 2006
so far, part 2
below is the draft as it's been sent off, in accordance w/promises, to my esteemed advisor so that she may begin the process of telling me why it's all wrong so that i may begin the subsequent process of righting it.
introduction/abstract? (in some examples this is the same section; in others it's not)
In this dissertation, I allow more- and less-experienced academic writers to give voice to their differing ideas about and attitudes toward the inclusion of both direct and indirect references to and/or evidence of influence by outside writers and thinkers in the research-based academic writing they do. As much as possible, while I situate them theoretically among scholarly conversations about authorship, collaboration, and intertextuality, writers' ideas, explanations, and observations are recounted descriptively and presented in writers' terms so that this study can offer a grounding look at the rationales guiding the ongoing practices of writers in the real academic work they are already doing—a vital but often neglected component of any larger disciplinary conversation.
theoretical & disciplinary contexts
Although the motivations for this study are primarily pragmatic and pedagogical in nature, and as such arise from the intersection of my classroom experiences with such broad disciplinary concerns as the nature of academic writing and the degree to which academic writing is teachable vs. an aptitude some possess and others lack, and such culturally-specific influences as the current media hysteria about plagiarism, the primary theoretical influence on this work comes from authorship studies, particularly its demonstration of the discrepancies between how we as a field conceptualize the author and how writers'—particularly our students'—understandings of themselves as authors (or non-authors) play out in their authoring of texts.
In authorship studies, scholars have for a few decades now been gradually recognizing that our theoretical and cultural definitions of what an author is are inconsistent, outdated, and at times almost precisely antithetical to one another; theorists like Terry Eagleton observe that writing, like any art, is no miracle born from nothing but is a produced, social commodity, while we cajole our students to produce "original" works and continue to romanticize notions of the author as a solitary genius and writing as a task of isolation. In field studies of collaborative writing and the inherently social nature of written communication, a number of projects have variously examined how writers work together with other writers in school and workplace settings to solve problems and create text. Few, however, at least outside the specific contexts of seeking cures to plagiarism—commonly conceived of contemporarily as some sort of moral disease—have looked closely at what I consider the pivot-point of writers' authorial coming-out: the points in their texts where they share authorial voice with other thinkers and writers, where they position themselves in relation to those other voices, as framers and re-staters of others' words, as co-representers to their audiences of ideas they need the work of others to completely convey.
methodology
In this dissertation, I will investigate these notions of authorship, textual ownership, and authorial intent by examining the current practices of varyingly experienced writers authoring texts in collaboration with the spoken ideas and existing texts of other authors. Believing that these are common cultural challenges among academic writers, challenges that these writers confront regularly in their own work and attempt to overcome using a variety of strategies, some more successful than others, some the result of deliberate instruction but many the product of writers' interpretation of cultural expectations, I will call upon writers within the academy, both more and less experienced at integrating the ideas and words of others into their own prose, to consider and describe their own actions and rationale. To that end, I will conduct and analyze the results of conversational, semi-structured interviews with writers and collaborative examination of writers' sample texts. This project will draw on both interview methodology, such as is explicated by Steiner Kvale and by James Spradley, and one-on-one text-based conference strategies such as those practiced in the writing center pedagogy of such authors as Murphy and Sherwood or Gillespie and Lerner.
projected chapter breakdown
1. (Guiding metaphors—autonomy vs. participatory authority) [introduce/rationale for project (major claims/argument)]
This chapter will propose that the ways inexperienced and experienced academic writers percieve their authorial roles are different, and that those different perceptions directly influence the way these writers approach textual tasks involving the collaborative interaction of their words and ideas with those of others (as in the production of researched texts and research-based arguments). To this end, this chapter will review studies of student authorship and student interaction in authorial roles, including Amy Robillard's 2004 dissertation, Mary J. Fuller and Jean Anne Lutz's 2002 discourse study, Susan Miller's Textual Carnivals, Bruce Horner's 1997 study in College English, and contemporary impressions made by participants in current plagiarism debates; the examination of these and other sources will demonstrate that the moves student authors make to establish and demonstrate their authority in academic writing—particularly as regards writers' use of sources as claims to wider authority and support for their own—are doomed to insufficiency by the inconsistent expectations and theoretically confusing pedagogy that initiates them.
2. what current work does & falls short of (lit review: authorship theories etc.)
Chapter 2 will examine contemporary theoretical depictions of authorship and their foundational predecessors, with an eye toward the imapact of these theories on the policies and practices of law and pedagogy in common practice today. The chapter will also look closely at the way these theories influence the field's treatment, both theoretically and pedagogically, of collaborative writing, a variously-defined array of practices and skills increasingly deemed relevant in workplace studies. Of particular interest is the common move among collaborative writing scholars of framing their projects in such terms as "In a sense, all writing is collaborative," then going on to interogate some specific practice of coauthoring without engaging with the cultural relevance of their initial pronouncement; it is within this neglected area of study that I position my examination of the beliefs and understandings guiding writers' incorporation of others' ideas and texts into their own commonly-conceived-of-as-solitary creation of what are always, due to the inclusion of these influences, collaboratively generated texts.
3. design/explication of the study (methodologies)
This chapter will introduce the elements of interview methodology and best-practices writing center processes this study will make use of, theorizing and detailing in particular the deviations from more traditional interviewing procedures required to allow writers' descriptions of their process to be recorded and analyzed alongside writers'-and-researchers' collaborative coexamination of writers' previously constructed texts. Additionally, this chapter will discuss technology used to allow the researcher and each studied writer to review the writer's text collaboratively, making and recording both more traditional question-and-answer exchanges and conversational descriptions and analyses of writers' described processes and demonstrated products.
4. data/descriptions/results (interview transc. & analysis)
Chapter 4 will include: samples of writers' texts and their descriptions of the processes and rationales prompting the creation of those texts; writers' and researcher's collaborative analyses of those textual practices; transcriptions of conversational elements from writers' and researcher's examination and discussion of both included samples and larger-scale textual works; a comparison-based examination of the differences apparent in the processes described & products created by different writers working from different levels of experience in the particular situation of creating researched academic texts.
5. from theory into the classroom (changes in attitudes (yes i have jimmy buffet on the brain & wish i were somewhere tropical)
This chapter will consider the implications for both scholars and educators of the practices described and trends suggested by writers'-and-researcher's conversational interviews and collaborative textual analyses. It will include recommendations for reconsidering some current approaches to introducing inexperienced academic writers to the academy's expectations for intertextual work in research-based writing, and will contextualize these recommendations in light of contemporary concerns conflating questions about students' citation practices with the cultural stigmas of cheating and plagiarism.
bibliography
Barnett, Robert W. and Jacob S. Blumner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 2001.
Barthes, Roland. "Authors and Writers." A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill, 1982. 185-93.
Bazerman, Charles. "Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts." What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul A. Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. 83-96.
Berkenkotter, Carol, Thomas N. Hucken, & John Ackerman. "Social Context and Socially Constructed Texts." in Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities. Ed. Charles Bazerman and James Paradis. Madison, WN: U Wisconsin P. 1991. 191-215. (is it wrong to put in your bib works you specifically want NOT to emulate?)
Brandt, Deborah Text and context: How writers come to mean1986In Couture, Barbara (Ed.), Functional approaches to writing research perspectives; Norwood, NJ: Ablex 93-107.
Brannon, Lil and C. B. Knoblauch. "On Students' Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response." College Composition and Communication. 33.2 (May 1982) 157-66. (to me this is actually about/influential of methodology rather than content)
Brodkey, Linda. Academic writing as social practice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1987.
Brown, J. and D. Canter. "The Uses of Explanation in the Research Interview." The Research Interview: Uses and Approaches. Ed. M. Brenner, J. Brown, and D. Canter. New York: Academic P, 1985. 217-245.
Buranen, Lise and Alice M. Roy, eds. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: SU of New York P, 1999.
Corbett, Edward P.J. "The Theory and Practice of Imitation in Classical Rhetoric." College Composition and Communication 22 (1971): 243-50.
Day, Kami, and Michele Eodice. (First Person)2: A Study of Co-Authoring in the Academy. Logan: Utah State UP, 2001.
Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. "Beyond 'The Subject': Individuality in the Discursive Condition." New Literary History 31.3 (Summer 2000).
Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." 1917. Selected Essays, 1917-1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932. 3-11. Rpt. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern. Ed. Seán Burke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995. 73-80.
Freedman, Sarah Warshauer, and A.M. Katz. "Pedagogical Interaction During the Composing Process: The Writing Conference." Writing in Real Time: Modeling Production Processes. Ed. Ann Matsuhashi. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1987. 58-80.
Foddy, William. Constructing Questions for Interviews and Questionnaires: Theory and Practice in Social Research. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1993.
Fontana, Andrea, and James Frey. "Interviewing: The Art of Science." Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. Ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998. 47-78.
Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Donald Bouchard, Ed. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Trans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977.
Fuller, Mary J., and Jean Ann Lutz. "Constructing Authority: Student Responses and Classroom Discourse." Discourse Studies in Composition. Eds. Ellen L. Barton and Gail Stygall. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2002.
Gray-Rosendale, Laura. Rethinking Basic Writing: Exploring Identity, Politics, and Community in Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ. 2000.
Gillespie, Paula and Neal Lerner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring. 2nd ed. New York: Pearson Longman. 2004.
Greene, Stuart. "Making Sense of My Own Ideas: The Problems of Authorship in a Beginning Writing Classroom." Written Communication 12.2 (April 1995): 186-218.
Harris, Joseph. "From the Editor: The Work of Others." College Composition and Communication. 45.4 (Dec. 1994) 439-41.
Herrington, Anne J. "Teaching, Writing, and Learning: a Naturalistic Study of Writing in an Undergraduate Literature Course." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 133-66.
Horner, Bruce. "Students, Authorship, and the Work of Composition." College English 59.5 (1997): 505-29.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Perspectives on Writing: Theory, Research, Practice. Ser. 2. Stamford, CT: 1999.
Kvale, Steinar. Interviews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996.
LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.
Lunsford, Andrea A., and Lisa Ede. "Collaborative Authorship and the Teaching of Writing." The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 417-38.
McAndrew, Donald A. and Thomas J. Reigstad. Tutoring Writing: A Practical Guide for Conferences. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook. 2001.
Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.
Mortensen, Peter, and Gesa E. Kirsch. "On Authority in the Study of Writing." College Composition and Communication. 44.4 (1993): 556-572.
Murphy, Christina and Steve Sherwood. The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. 2003.
Newkirk, Thomas. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. 1997.
Odell, Lee and Dixie Goswami "Writing in a Nonacademic Setting" Ed. Richard Beach and Lillian S. Bridwell. New Directions in Composition Research. Guilford P. New York: 1984. 225-258.
Odell, Lee, Dixie Goswami, and Anne Herrington. "The Discourse-Based Interview: A Procedure for Exploring the Tacit Knowledge of Writers in Nonacademic Settings." Research on Writing: Principles and Methods. Ed. P. Mosenthal, L. Tamor, and S. Walmsley. New York: Longman, 1983. 221-235.
Pecorari, Diane. "Good and Original: Plagiarism and Patchwriting in Academic Second-Language Writing." Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 317-345.
Peters, John Durham. "John Locke, the individual, and the origin of communication." Quarterly Journal of Speech. 75.4 (1989) 387-399.
Porter, James E. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review 5 (1986): 34-47.
Rafoth, Ben. Ed. A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One. 2nd ed. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook. 2005.
Reither, James and Douglas Vipond. "Writing as Collaboration." College English. 51.8 (Dec 1989) 855-67.
Robillard, Amy E. Reimagining Students' Writerly Authority: Co-Investigation and Representations of Student Writers in Composition Studies. Diss. Syracuse University, 2004.
Rymer, Jone. "Scientific Composing Processes: How Eminent Scientists Write Journal Articles." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 211-50.
Scollon, Ron. "Plagiarism and Ideology: Identity in Intercultural Discourse." Language in Society 24.1 (March 1995): 1-28.
Spellmeyer, Kurt. "Inventing the University Student." Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. 39-44.
Spradley, James P. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, 1979.
[Thompson, Celia Helen. Plagiarism or intertextuality? A study of the politics of knowledge, identity and textual ownership in undergraduate student writing. Thesis. U of Technology, Sydney. 2006.] c'mon, CHT, publish this already!
Williamson, Micheal M. "A Model for Investigating the Functions of Written Language in Different Disciplines." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 89-132.
Woodmansee, Martha. "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author.'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984): 425-48.
Woodmansee, Martha. "On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity." The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 15-28.
Posted by ttobryan at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)
writing center processes & practices
Barnett, Robert W. and Jacob S. Blumner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 2001.
Gillespie, Paula and Neal Lerner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring. 2nd ed. New York: Pearson Longman. 2004.
McAndrew, Donald A. and Thomas J. Reigstad. Tutoring Writing: A Practical Guide for Conferences. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook. 2001.
Murphy, Christina and Steve Sherwood. The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. 2003.
Rafoth, Ben. Ed. A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One. 2nd ed. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook. 2005.
(Murphy/Sherwood)
"generally, tutor and student must first establish a working relationship or mutual understanding, as a basis for collaboration on improving the student's text"--stages of this process are "pretextual, textual, and posttextual" (8)
on developing that (pretextual) relationship, from meyer & smith: "tutors 'must listen carefully to distinguish underlying meanings in a writer's comments' (9)"; "the ways in which individuals process information must always be taken into account, too, since people tend to interpret, understand, and evaluate ideas in diverse ways. consequently, tutors need to engage in what harris calls 'perception checking' or 'guessing the student's basic message and asking for affirmation of that guess' (57)"; doing all of this empathetically & nonjudgmentally "will go a long way toward forming a special trust" <--an unexamined but apparently key component to a successful session (9)
"a good question for tutors to ask ourselves is, 'who has the power in the collaboration and how is that power used' as we, for example, truly interested in what the student has to say, or are we too quick to announce our opinions? are we acting as collaborators or authority figures? do our comments invite responses and show respect for the student's ideas, or do they foreclose further interaction and leave the student feeling intimidated?" (10)
on the textual part of sessions: "to find solutions that remain true to a student's writing style and intent, a tutor must learn to address the student's needs while also creating a collaborative space within which confidence and skills can flourish" (17)
on the posttextual: (like in interviewing) you want to wrap up by sending them forth w/a sense of what's been accomplished
on tutoring online: (according to joanna castner) "synchronous online tutoring offers opportunities for dialogue between tutors and writers, allowing them to build a relationship, clarify misunderstandings, and collaboratively create knowledge (124-7)"; also working online "allows a tutor and writer to keep a record of their conversations"; notes eric crump, in "at home in the MUD: writing centers learn to wallow" (on p. 242) "what is often lost, in the time between the conversation and the inscription, is the rich immersion in detail and nuance" taking place interactionally, which is recorded in online transcriptions (23-4)
(McAndrew & Reigstad)
according to reigstad (1980) conferences follow 3 models: student-centered, collaborative, & teacher-centered (25); being totally student-centered is often idealized but each has its benefits for different kinds of tutoring problem/situation.
tutoring in the real world is characterized by "chaos, complexity, & fuzziness," & while that makes it hard to offer definitive blanket-advice on how to do it, these are good things we shouldn't try to overcome (27)
body language and the tutoring environment: "polished tutors are aware of the messages given by their posture, gestures, and tone of voice, and they learn to manipulate those three areas to ensure the messages are positive. posture, because it is often seen and assessed from a distance, is the first message the tutor sends to the writer. the tutor should adopt a posture that is alert but relaxed. if the tutor is overly attentive, the writer may perceive it as nervousness, insecurity, or even anger; if the tutor is too relaxed, the writer may take it as indifference or fatigue....the rule for posture is: look available. once the tutoring session is underway, the tutor can lean in a bit to show interest and connection."
"the tutor's gestures are constantly assessed by the writer. at the first moment of interaction, the tutor should establish eye contact and smile....once tutoring is underway, the tutor can nod and use back-channel vocalizations like 'yeah' and 'uh-huh' to reinforce the nod, showing attention and interest."
"the writer reads the tutor's tone of voice, so the tutor should strive for a tone that is both friendly and professional, approachable and efficient. if the tutor sounds harsh, the writer may be intimidated or put off. if the tutor is too warm, the writer may assume that nothing directly useful will happen" (28-9)
(Gillespie & Lerner) (chp. 3 "The Tutoring Process")
26. "as a tutor, you don't have to be an expert on the subject matter of the paper the writer is working on" [and i'm not the expert on what they wrote or how/why they did it--they're the expert. i'm the one coming to them for demonstrations of the workings of their expertise]
29. "start with questions": "what was the assignment? what is your central point or main argument?" [& from there, "what kinds of influences/resources did you decide you needed in order to make that argument" or "...did you draw upon when designing your argument?"]
30. the writer-reads-aloud part--[this is why i want to pre-read work sent to me electronically, b/c it's done to fill time/space while the tutor becomes familiar w/the work, & to reduce awkwardness, & i don't want to have to use their time that way, plus i want to be more familiar with their texts than such an introduction would allow]
35. "higher-order concerns come first" & lower-order concerns later if the session's long enough for both [they mean structure, assignment-appropriateness, etc. as opposed to grammar details, but it's applicable too to questions like "what do you neeed other sources/influences in this paper for?" as opposed to questions like "how did you go about it--what does this inclusion look like in the text?" <--citations, allusions, etc.]
37. ideals for the session: "would look like two peers having a conversation about writing, where each is equally likely to ask a question, move forward or point out his or her confusion"; "right and wrong ways of asking questions"--"you may ask, 'why did you choose to put this section here?' the writer is still going to hear this question as 'this doesn't belong here'" (37).
contrastingly w/spradley, at least in the 1st example [(but this is for tutoring, not interviewing, although his concerns would likely apply here as well)] "content-clarifying questions can be important. 'what does this term mean?' 'what is this paragraph's function?' overall, avoid questions that put the writer in the position of trying to guess the answer that's in your head" (38). [how about "can you describe the reasoning you used when you put this together this way?"; can i ask "what do you mean" if i package it as "i want to make sure i'm hearing this the way you mean it" & then try a rephrase?]
100. ways to get more writer-talk inc. "descriptive meta-analysis questions" s.a. "what have you done when you've encountered this problem in the past?"
101. the classic wait time: "when you ask questions, wait for the answer. be patient. when you think you've waited long enough, wait that amount of time again."
(in Radforth: "Tutoring in Unfamiliar Subjects" by Alexis Greiner p. 115-20)
suggested approaches to not being sure you get what they're doing on the page, w/o losing their confidence in your knowledgeability, when you need to get it in order to see if it's working.
117. "it sounds like 'affected' is a key term. would you agree? [ann agrees] what exactly do you mean by 'affected?' i ask because its meaning might be the focus of your paper" <--"notice how the tutor depends on ann to confirm what the tutor thinks ann is getting at"
118. "this is hard for me to understand. it seems like you are putting forth a formula and then you explain why it works in those reactions. is that right?" ann: "close, but not really. i was trying to illustrate a flaw in a fairly well-known theorum as it applies to intercellular interactions"
119. "your client probably has a better sense of the writing in her discipline than you do"
(in Barnett & Blumner: Kenneth Bruffee and "Peer Tutoring and the 'Conversation of Mankind'" p. 206-18)
[he's not talking about exactly what i'm talking about, but his observations nevertheless defend it:] "if we accept the premise that knowledge is an artifact created by a community of knowledgeable peers and that learning is a social process not an individual one, then learning is not assimilating information...learning is an activity in which people work collaboratively to create knowledge among themselves by socially justifying belief. we create knowledge or justify belief collaboratively by cancelling each other's biases and presuppositions; by negotiating collectively toward new paradigms of perception, thought, feeling, and expression; and by joining larger, more experienced communities of knowledgeable peers through assenting to those communities' interests, values, language, and paradigm of perception and thought" (214); "peer tutoring is not, after all, something new under the sun. however we may explore its conceptual ramifications, the fact is that people have always learned from their peers and doggedly persist in doing so" (216).
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