First, a quick peek into the Workshop Window:
(The following reflection is adapted from the Canvas email exchange between myself, a Writing Mentor, and an ASU undergraduate enrolled in my assigned section of ENG 102.)
Recently, I had an opportunity to assist an ENG 102 student with her writing project and had an opportunity to reflect on the importance of collaboration as a key factor in student participation and motivation.
Here's what happened:
I have now been a Writing Mentor at Arizona State University’s (ASU) Writers’ Studio for a semester. In other words, I have been part of the Studio just long enough to feel like I am becoming more steady and helpful with my feedback style, but not long enough to feel that I am consistently connecting to every student who reaches out to me for mentoring and guidance with their writing (does one ever get there?). Some days I feel like I am providing the right amount of info at the right time for the right situation (an approach I have discussed in another section of these reflections and that I model on Peter Elbow’s philosophy for responding to student writing in this moment; see Elbow, 2001). Other days, I respond to an email request for help…and wait in vain for the student to reply. Was it something I said…or didn’t say?
In the spirit of developing my skills in dialogic practice, I have tried becoming more mindful of how I am encouraging collaborative learning moments with my students. For example, I was recently approached by Student B to assist her with revisions for her first ENG 102 project. In the past, I have enthusiastically replied to such email requests with a very long list of “helpful” questions to guide our follow-up Zoom appointments. As I discuss in my reflection essay, “On dialogic practice,” this approach is problematic for several reasons, most notably for the fact that it puts me, the tutor, in the driver’s seat of this teachable moment, instead of the writer who rightfully belongs there.
In his keynote address at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication, Asao Inoue (2019) emphasized the importance of deep listening as a fundamental practice for “interrogating the paradox of judgement, how we see, hear, or feel, how we language the world into existence, how we are simultaneously right and wrong, and how that languaging makes and unmakes us simultaneously” (p. 13). Inoue’s address is focused on exposing the role of antiracist language in mitigating this paradox—and his argument has direct implications for tutors and instructors who jump in the driver’s seat to steer a learning experience, no matter how well-intentioned—but I think his observation about deep listening can also be applied from another angle as well.
When considering my students’ needs as we set up for and complete revision workshops, I commit to the fundamental process of “deep listening” to anchor my conference, and I have been pleasantly surprised to note how many additional doors this opens in my mentoring relationship with students. For example, I applied this approach recently with Student B. As we exchanged emails and she provided commentary and additional reflections in her draft for me to review, I refrained from bombarding her with questions and instead focused on probing for answers to questions like: Does the writer have deep connection to the example she is providing, a personally relevant reason for wanting to connect with an audience in this particular way? Why did she choose this piece of evidence—how does she want to relate this to her audience? In responding to her requests and commentary, I focused on creating meaningful back-and-forth dialogue to spiral into these questions. We ended up creating a collaborative list where Student B could reference various examples of statistics and graphics that might be useful to her—though ultimately, she was the one to decide when and how this would apply to her paper. The back-and-forth commentary we shared through Google Docs provided deeper insight into what Student B wanted to accomplish and why with her paper—both for explanatory purposes in our discussion of the writing process but also for her own self-reflection. Here, I include a sample of an email exchange with her and an example of our back-and-forth dialogue on Google Docs.
My mentoring experience with Student B. could surely be improved further. But importantly, I noticed that the collaborative nature of our dialogue and work together seemed to promote more frequent and more meaningful communication between us. And THIS is a factor I will return to for inspiration as I progress in my teaching and mentoring career—especially when considering those no-shows for revision workshops or when I am ghosted by previously frantic student.
References:
Elbow, P. (2001). About responding to student writing. Memo. Web, 13.
Inoue, A. B. (2019). How do we language so people stop killing each other, or what do we do about white language supremacy?. College Composition and Communication, 71(2), 352-369.
