Minor Assignments
Tutoring Observations and Tutoring Journal
Throughout the semester, you will be expected to attend 1 tutoring session as a student, and to observe 2 tutoring sessions in the Collaboratory. You will also be expected to act as a co-tutor in 1 session, working with a current Collaboratory tutor as a partner, and 1 solo session while being observed by a current tutor. These sessions can be completed at your convenience, as long as you meet the required deadlines (see the course schedule).
- As part of these observations, you will need to compose tutoring journal entries for our course website. Journal entries can be short – around 400 words is just fine. They should act as reflections on your own experiences, and should offer helpful insights for your fellow trainees this semester. Some questions to consider might be: What stands out for you during formal tutoring sessions in the Collaboratory? Where do you see connections to our readings? How is this course, and your experiences in the Collaboratory, affecting the way you approach collaborative writing outside of our time together?
- EXTRA CREDIT: Observe one or more group workshops in the Collaboratory. What differences do you notice between the group dynamic and that of one-on-one sessions? Reflect on this in your tutoring journal.
Reading Responses and Discussion Leading
Each week, in addition to our readings from the Fitzgerald and Ianetta textbook, we will be reading articles and book chapters from writing center scholarship. You will be assigned an article each week, and will be responsible for leading a discussion about the article during class.
- Everyone will be responsible for writing one 600-700 word blog post on our course website responding to our readings this semester. Your blog post will need to address at least three readings assigned that week, and will need to pose a question for your peers that connects those readings to larger course concepts.
- You can find your blog post date here.
- Need an example of good blog posts? Take a look at two of my favorite teaching blogs, The Tattooed Professor and Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions. Note that both blogs do a nice job of featuring a casual, personal tone while remaining professional. Sources are cited (sometimes using parenthetical citations, sometimes using hyperlinks), but the center of the posts’ arguments come from the authors’ opinions about a particular topic. The posts featured on these blogs are much longer than those I’m asking you to compose for this class, but they hopefully give you some insight into what constitutes good blogging practices.
- EXTRA CREDIT: Comment on at least 5 of your peers’ posts throughout the semester as a way of extending the conversations we have in class.
Citation Quizzes
Source integration and citation formatting are two of the top concerns students bring into the Collaboratory. To help prepare you for working with multiple citation styles and formats, we’ll have two in-class, low-stakes quizzes.
- Quiz #1, Citation Basics: This online quiz will test your knowledge of basic formatting rules in MLA and APA.
- Quiz #2, Source Integration In Context: This quiz will ask you to look over a short student paper and to correct the source integration and citation errors.
Presentation Components:
Please choose ONE of the following two presentation assignments. You can find your presentation date here.
Style Handouts and Exercises
While a writing tutor does much more than check for mechanical errors in student papers, a good peer tutor still has a working knowledge of traditional conventions of Standard Vernacular English, or SVE, that many professors expect their students to use in writing assignments. (We’ll talk about some of the many problems with SVE throughout the semester!) To help us establish (or perhaps re-establish) this working knowledge, you will each take on a chapter of our secondary textbook by Williams and Bizzup and teach it to our class in a brief lesson. Additionally, you will need to develop 3 handouts focused on concepts from your chapter for use in the Collaboratory based on the element of style you choose to teach the class.
Group Project: Workshop Lesson Plan and Handouts
In addition to tutoring on a one-on-one basis, peer tutors are also expected to run group workshops for students. For this assignment, you will work in pairs to develop a lesson plan for a one-hour workshop. You will need to develop original activities and materials for participants, and you will do a test run of the workshop in class.
For examples of presentation projects, please see this post.
Major Assignments
Research Project
After doing our class readings for the semester, it should be apparent that both tutors and administrators in writing centers are pursuing a distinct field of study. As such, your major project this semester will be to compose a piece of writing center scholarship – a research paper. In the tradition of writing center scholarship, this project will need to rely on primary, IRB-approved research. (Don’t worry – we’ll go through the IRB process together!) We will meet for individual conferences to discuss your research question and proposed methods, and will peer review both informal proposals and early drafts of the paper in class together.
- A great deal of scholarship in composition and rhetoric is written collaboratively. Therefore, this project can be co-written with someone else in the class as long as you both meet with me to discuss how you will share the workload fairly.
- Here are the guidelines for the Annotated Bibliography component of the project (due 3/5)
- Here are the guidelines for the Research Proposal component of the project (due 3/7)
- Here is the information and example for the IRB application.
- Here are guidelines for composing the introduction, literature review, and methods sections of the paper.
- Here are some updated guidelines for the project after the first round of IRB review (from 4/9/19)
- EXTRA CREDIT: Frequently, the research projects that come out of tutor training courses make excellent conference presentations. There are also several journals in writing center studies that accept pieces from undergraduate peer tutors. If you are interested in pursuing either of these avenues, I’m happy to help.
Tutoring Philosophy
This assignment asks you to synthesize your experiences as readers, researchers, and tutors this semester in the form of a philosophy statement. The idea of this philosophy statement is to explain your personal approach to tutoring using examples of personal experiences in the Collaboratory while pointing to theoretical evidence from scholarly sources. How have your experiences, readings, and discussions this semester come helped you establish a specific approach to tutoring? If you were to speak with someone outside of the Collab community about what “writing tutoring” means to you, what would you say?
- Here are more detailed guidelines for the Tutoring Philosophy assignment.
