Running  head:  Digital  Hats  

DIGITAL HATS: UNDERSTANDING THE ROLES WRITING CONSULTANTS

AND STUDENTS EMPLOY DURING ONLINE TUTORING SESSIONS

Chris Schott

Educ 7950

Dissertation Proposal

Final Draft

Dr. Kyle

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Contents

Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………….........3 Chapter One…………………………………………………………………………………………………..4

The Culture of Writing Consultation……………………………………………………………………..5 The Problem………………………………………………………………………………………………8 Purpose of the Study…………………………………………………………………………………….10 Research Questions……………………………………………………………………………………...11 Hypotheses………………………………………………………………………………………………11 Why Study Roles?.....................................................................................................................................12 Conceptual Framework………………………………………………………………………………….12 Delimitations/Scope of the Study………………………………………………………………………..15

E-Tutoring……………………………………………………………………………………………16 Live Chat……………………………………………………………………………………………..16 Second Life. …………………………………………………………………………………………16

Limitations. ……………………………………………………………………………………………..17 Methodology. …………………………………………………………………………………………...18 Significance of the Study………………………………………………………………………………..19

Chapter Two………………………………………………………………………………………………...21

Writing Center. …………………………………………………………………………………………22 Locating and defining the many identities of writing centers……………………………………….22 Defining the roles of writing centers and writing tutors……..……………………………………...24 The training of writing consultants……………………………..…………………………………...25

The Impact of Technology on Writing Instruction……………………………………………………...26 Online Writing Consultation………………………..……………………………………………….26

Chapter Three.. ……………………………………………………………………………………………..28

Research Design…………………………………………………………………………………………29 Genre………………………………………………………………………..……………………….30 Discourse……………………………………………………………………………………………..31 Style……………………………………………………………………………………………...…..31

Population and Sample………………………………………………………………………………….32 Writing Consultants……………………………………..…………………………………………..32 Writing Students……………………………………….………..…………………………………..33

Data Collection and Management………………………………………………………………………34 Writing Center Appointment Forms…………………………………………………………………34 Transcripts from Tutoring Sessions………………………………………………………………….35 Reflection freewrites from writing consultants and students………………………………………...35 Researcher Reflections……………………………………………………………………………….36 Benefits to Data Collection…………………………………………………………………………..36 Management of the Data……………………………………………………………………………..37

Instrumentation………………………………………………………………………………………….37 Data Analysis……………………………………………………………………………………………38 Limitations………………………………………………………………………………………………39 Research Site and Tutoring Technologies………………………………………………………………39 Sample Size and Tutoring Culture………………………………………………………………………39 Role of the Researcher…………………………………………………………………………………..40 Summary………………………………………………………………………………………………...40

References…………………………………………………………………………………………………..42

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Abstract

The majority of online writing consultation training literature focuses on

interacting with digital tutoring technologies and not the students on the other side. The

product of this training is writing consultation aimed at the writing and not the writer.

The purpose of this study is to discover and analyze the roles writing tutors and writing

students call upon and present in discourse during online writing consultation sessions.

The study will look at three different online tutoring environments utilized by one

research site, a writing center at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. By looking at the

discourse between tutors and students within each tutoring venue, the different roles that

tutors and students employ during their sessions can be revealed. From there, roles can

be understood within the rhetorical contexts and moments they occur. Along with an

understanding of discourse within various modes of online communication (e.g. text,

verbal communication, and visual means), better student-centered training for online

writing consultation can be developed and more effective online writing consultation can

be implemented.

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Chapter 1

“So what do you think happens online that is different from face-to-face?”

“Well, it’s harder to work with the writing because we don’t know what the student is thinking sometimes. We take on more responsibility. That can be dangerous.”

“Can’t we just keep the responsibility in the hands of the student?”

“Ideally, yes. But we’re working with a screen, not a person.”

I did not expect that response from Jane (a pseudonym), an experienced writing

consultant with over 1200 hours of tutoring experience. However, she offered a

revealing snapshot of how a very experienced writing tutor perceives online writing

consultation. In the Writing Center at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL), Jane

is a very effective and talented writing consultant. She has an impressive amount of

regular clients that specifically seek out her help in the Writing Center. Jane is patient

with her clients, makes sure they are comfortable when discussing their writing, and is

particularly skilled at fostering a sense of responsibility—in even the most hesitant

writing students. Almost all of Jane’s clients leave her sessions with a newfound sense of

agency.Jane’s personable nature is exactly why I found her comments about “working

with a screen, not a person” shocking. There are two very important ideas bound within

Jane’s words: 1) It is widely understood, within the academic community of writing

centers, that face-to-face writing consultation is very different than online writing

consultation, at least when it comes to tutors’ understanding of how the two operate, and

2) Jane felt less immersed in her online tutoring sessions—her response portrays her as

feeling disconnected from the student. In fact, Jane felt more as if she was tutoring the

document itself (what was represented on the screen), and not the student at all.

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It is exactly these concerns that react against what I call the culture of writing

consultation and provides the foundation and purpose for this study.

The Culture of Writing Consultation

The culture of writing consultation is one of carefulness. Murphy (1989) states

“the fact that students come to the writing center wanting help and assuming they will

receive it places those students in a different type of relationship with the tutor than with

the instructor in a traditional classroom setting” (p. 13). Essentially, writing tutors are

not the student and not the teacher; the writing tutor takes on a different kind of position

within the specialized context of the writing center. Ideally, the shifting and sometimes

ambiguous identity of writing consultants becomes an advantage when working with

students and their writing. North (1984) also situates writing centers and tutors through a

more via negativa approach, claiming, “we are not the teacher. We did not assign the

writing, and we will not grade it” (p. 442). Acting as a kind of third space, the writing

center, and the tutors working there, gain the ability to become situated in many useful

and flexible ways. It is this flexibility that allows for tutors to adopt many different roles

within tutoring sessions, offering the most appropriate help when needed most by

students

With the idea of roles in mind, it is still important to note that writing centers

understand very clearly that writing itself, even academic writing, is a very personal

act. Students may work on composing an essay for hours, days, or weeks. When

students bring their work into a writing center, tutors must respect the amount of time

invested in the writing. Because writing consultation is primarily conversation based,

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students may feel hesitant to discuss their writing at length. It’s almost an everyday

occurrence in a writing center that a student freezes up when talking about grammar or

why an idea might be underdeveloped in a paper. The perception in composition studies

is that these hesitations are rooted in socially constructed fears about writing being tied to

intelligence (Baker, 2006; Chandler, 2007). In some ways, this makes writing

consultation a therapeutic experience. Fox (2002) details well the complicated nature of

writing consultation when describing an interaction with a graduate student working on

her comprehensive exams.

After I assured her—no, guaranteed her—that she would not fail her

comprehensive exams if she came regularly, we started through her papers. I

would be the interested listener and she would translate, sentence by sentence,

from her tangled phrases into no-nonsense prose, with frequent asides to fill me in

on details she had left out. “Write that down!” I would say. “That’s interesting.

Why didn’t you put that in?” (p. 57)

Within Fox’s description of what can happen between a writing tutor and a student,

various roles take shape for both participants. Fox becomes, as she puts it, an “interested

listener” (p. 57), but she also becomes a writing expert, a verifier of proper academic

writing technique, and, perhaps most importantly, a system of support for her client. Fox,

as she presents herself in this situation, adopts many roles in order to help the student in a

variety of necessary ways (pedagogically, technically, and emotionally). However, the

student also develops some notable roles in this scenario. She reveals herself as the

frightened student, the unsure writer, and, through the encouragement of Fox, the

generator of meaningful content. Essentially, tutors have the opportunity to not just act as

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authority figures (writing experts), but also peers. Berkenkotter (1984) mentions “peers

can offer the writer additional perspectives, support, and, generally, less threatening

feedback than a teacher-evaluator” (p. 318). The presentation and negotiation of roles

that both writing consultants and students play, and how these roles interact with each

other, determine the success of a tutoring session.

Tutors can play numerous roles within even a single tutoring session. Over the

course of a conversation about writing, tutors can be the voice of the academic institution,

assuming the role of a writing expert, be a co-belligerent, an empathetic listener, a rule

enforcer, as well as many others roles, at any given point in a tutoring session. Like

tutors, students can also adopt many roles within a tutoring session, including, but not

limited to a confident writer, a victim, a confused student, a resistant learner, an eager

complainer, a passive participant.

When training writing tutors, instructing consultants to be cognizant of how roles

develop in tutoring sessions often leads to more well-rounded and student-centered

consultants.. Understanding that writing consulting has with people, and not to

documents, is vital to the culture of writing consultation.This mindset has even found its

way into the mission statement, a statement composed by writing consultants, of the

writing center I coordinate at the University of Missouri-St. Louis:

At the Writing Center, our goal as fellow writers and readers is to help our clients

communicate their ideas effectively through all forms of written, oral, and visual

rhetoric. Through active listening and discussion-based sessions, we aim to

promote the development of engaged, critical, and imaginative communicators.

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UMSL’S Writing Center philosophy is largely based on an epistemology of social

construction: Meaning is constructed dynamically within a community, with each

member having a voice. This often occurs seamlessly in face-to-face tutoring

environments. It is when tutoring shifts to online venues that the system begins to break

down.

The Problem

As online tutoring continues to advance from mere asynchronous email systems

to chat rooms to full blown virtual interactive environments, the ways in which writing

tutors have been trained has been primarily focused on the technologies with which they

interact and tutor through. Simply put, regarding online writing consultation, the

majority of scholarship and training available to writing consultants shifts the focus away

from the student and onto either technology or document management. The intention of

this training has always been admirable and easy to justify. As writing centers introduce

new technology into their practices, an understanding of how that technology impacts the

tutoring process must be established. Tutors must also know how to use technology

effectively. Without this baseline understanding, it’s difficult to move onto more

advanced concerns, such as how to foster a nurturing.progressive, and professional

relationship with clients while communicating through a digital interface

Accordingly, before moving onto matters of tutor-student interactions, tutor

attention is often streamlined to working with aspects of the technology. One major

problem with this approach for training writing tutors is that micromanaging the

technology can distract from the intended original purpose of writing consultation:

creating better writers. Sometimes, tutors working online don’t see writers at all—they

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see a screen—and interactions might be less directed at the student and more toward an

anonymous document.

This delay in understanding often accompanies any advancement in a technology

or process. Ogburn’s (1922) theory of Cultural Lag can help explain why people struggle

when new technologies are introduced into their day-to-day personal and professional

activities. For example, when the automobile was still a reasonably new piece of

technology, Ogburn began wondering why cars were frequently running off the road.

Ogburn decided not to look at the car, which was constantly developing and improving,

but instead the factors that were impacting the car’s ability to perform. He believed that

the answer lay in the development of roads When the automobile was first introduced,

roads were designed for horses and wagons and were narrow with sharp curves and

corners. As the technology of the car improved, and the speed of automobiles increased,

roads were not able to handle the advanced capability of automobiles. The culture of

road building had to change and drivers had to modify their driving. The period required

for society to adapt to the increased speed capability of the automobile was Ogburn's

classical description of technologically driven cultural lag.

The same can be said for the culture of writing consultation when put into an

online context. As Breuch and Racine (2000) note, “face-to-face and online

environments are different and that online tutoring requires procedures that differ from

face-to-face tutoring” (p. 254). Writing consultants not only need to adjust to a

procedural understanding of tutoring online (i.e. how to operate a digital tutoring

interface), but also need to adjust the ways in which they communicate and work with

students on an individual level. It is the latter that is currently largely absent from

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training literature. To address this lag in the culture of writing consultation training, I

believe that one of the more effective ways to address this problem is to look at what

roles tutors and students employ during their online writing center tutoring sessions. By

looking at these roles,and how they are implemented (or not) in online tutoring, more

productive training can be developed for online writing consultation and more effective

online writing tutoring can be implemented

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study is to discover and analyze the roles writing tutors and

writing students call upon and present during online writing consultation sessions. The

study will look at three different online tutoring environments utilized by the University

of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL). By looking at the discourse between tutors and students

within each tutoring venue, the different roles that tutors and students employ during their

sessions can be revealed. From there, roles can be understood within the rhetorical

contexts and moments they occur. Furthermore, it can be understood how these roles are

formed through various modes of online communication (e.g. text, verbal

communication, and visual means). By getting a deeper appreciation of the roles

between tutors and students online, better training techniques, which are currently lacking

in the field, can be conceived and implemented for institutions with online writing

consultation.

It must also be said that it is worthwhile to look at the roles that are not employed

during tutoring sessions. Much like when listening to music, listeners often hear the

notes being played by musicians. However, the notes not being played can also tell us a

lot about what’s not happening. The same can be applied to tutoring. These absent roles

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can be seen as moments of missed opportunity and can speak volumes about ways to

improve online writing consultation. It is my hope that this component will also be

included in this study.

Research Questions In this study, my aim is to answer the following research questions:

1. What roles appear (and do not appear) in the discourse between writing tutors and

student writers during online tutoring sessions?

2. How do these roles appear in discourse and under what rhetorical circumstances

do they appear?

3. How can understanding these online roles help improve tutor training and the

quality of online tutoring sessions?

Hypotheses

As this study unfolds, and the discourses of tutors and students becomes unpacked

from their digital spaces, I expect to see many roles appear (and not appear) that help

demonstrate what kinds of tutoring practices will best fit online writing consultation.

Within the discourse, I imagine to see roles that appear in face-to-face tutoring sessions

as well as new roles that are, perhaps, unique to online tutoring environments. From

there, I anticipate, after a careful analysis, that understanding these roles will lead to more

efficient and effective training for online writing consultation services and more

humanistic and beneficial online tutoring.

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Why Study Roles?

The most successful writing consultations happen when there is a dialogic

relationship between writing tutors and writing students. In order to avoid monologic

communication—where the writing consultant or student has sole authority during an

interaction—writing centers need to foster an environment where each communicator has

equal responsibility and stake in the discourse.

Therefore, in order to best understand how a dialogic relationship can be fruitful

for both the tutor and the student, the study of the roles each play can help contextualize

how writing progress is made.

Conceptual Framework

For this study, the aim is to develop a framework that allows me to look at

language from a socially constructed standpoint as well as one that looks at how power

structures formulate and fluctuate within moments of discourse. To do this, I am a

building a conceptual framework leaning upon the work of language theorist Bakhtin,

sociologist Erving Goffman, and the theory and method of Critical Discourse Analysis as

a way to understand how language operates within a particular social paradigm—in this

case, tutors and students in online tutoring environments. There are various

characteristics from each of these theorists and approaches that will help offer a lens in

which to best understand the data and offer an analytical procedure.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) provides a helpful approach for looking at

how language unfolds within social situations and surrounding issues of power and

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relationships. One of the co-founders of CDA, Fairclough (1992), asserts that discourse

is more than language use. It is language use embedded in a social practice. Van Dijk

(2003) aligns with this view, revealing that CDA, rather than merely describing discourse

structures, “tries to explain them in terms of properties of social interaction and especially

social structure” (p. 353). The relationship between tutors and students presents itself as

incredibly complex. At times, the university writing tutor is an authority—a

representative of acceptable writing practices or even as someone who is representing

the writing standards of higher education. For example, when projecting a role that

aligns with the voice of the university, a writing consultant may assert the following:

Your professor will most likely appreciate a more formal tone in a paper like this.

However, other times, the tutor may show more reflexivity in their role and become more

united with the student. For example, the tutor may position themselves as a

fellow student writer with the same struggles and perhaps show more empathy: I hate

citation, too—it always gets in the way of my thinking! All of these choices, as they are

made either consciously or unconsciously by the tutor, act as an exertion of power and

authority—a toolkit containing of various strategies to help students become better

writers. Van Dijk, when further defining how CDA operates, speaks to this power

structure, stating “groups have (more or less) power if they are able to (more or less)

control the acts and minds of (members of) other groups” (pp. 354-355).

Erving Goffman’s (1959) work with self-presentation and regional behavior

becomes useful for gaining an understanding of how participants of social situations

present themselves to each other and are perceived by an audience. Working literally with

dramaturgical terms, Goffman views the roles people adopt in their day-to-day lives as

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performative acts. Goffman (1959) is concerned with “participants’ dramaturgical

problems of presenting the activity before others. The issues dealt with by stagecraft and

stage management…occur everywhere in social life, providing a clear-cut dimension for

formal sociological analysis” (p.15). Mindful tutors, when speaking to students, often

choose their words and explanations wisely. Experienced tutors will be reflexive in

choosing what advice they give and how they deliver it, searching for ways to

communicate ideas and points that best fit the aesthetic of the student and the tutoring

situation. This process becomes an exercise in audience awareness, something Goffman

would attribute to the “front stage” (p. 22), a component of his concept of regional

behavior. The front stage refers to the “part of individual's performance which regularly

functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the

performance” (p. 22). Like tutors, students will also find ways to craft their responses to

either get more or clearer information from the tutor. In other words, the ways in which

tutors and students present themselves in language to each other shapes the success of the

writing consultation. Furthermore, not just how they represent themselves in language,

but how they are perceived in their presentations, is also fundamental to successful

writing consultation.

Bakhtin’s (1986) theory surrounding the nature of the utterance helps further

contextualize the complicated yet delicate nature of how language operates within the

context of a tutoring session. Utterances, Bakhtin (1986) claims, “are not indifferent to

one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one

another…Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances” (p.

91). Utterances, then, are linked together—present speech is influenced by past

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utterances and the future speech is influenced by present utterances. This idea gives the

simple act of communication within a tutoring context a lot of responsibility and weight

as each moment and turn in conversation shapes not only what immediately comes next,

but potentially in the future, even influencing writing that occurs after a tutoring session.

Equally important are Bakhtin’s idea of heteroglossia, the notion that

communication carries with it and incorporates the sounds of many-voices, appropriated

expressions, and references. As Donald Murray (1991) wrote about his literacy, “My

voice is the product of Scottish genes and a Yankee environment, of Baptist sermons and

the newspaper city room, of all the language I have heard and spoken” (p. 67).

Essentially, communicators can be understood as the products of their past experiences

and influences. Within writing consultations, advice given by tutors may be shaped by

pedagogical strategies learned in class, from tutoring methods learned form literature,

from past experiences when working with students, to even personal experiences.

Students may bring with them feelings about writing that stems from their educational

histories, their family histories, or from any number of places or people that have helped

shaped their identities and voices as student writers.

Delimitations/Scope of the Study This study will take place at one university writing center housed at the

University of Missouri-St. Louis. All writing consultants are graduate students in the

Department of English and are working at UMSL’s Writing Center per a tutoring

assistantship. It is planned that data will be gathered over the course of one academic

year (two full semesters).

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UMSL’s Writing Center uses third party appointment software called WCOnline

to allow students to set writing consultation appointments and meet online. This software

is vital to the operations of the Writing Center because it houses two online tutoring

venues for tutors and students to meet within. Later in this proposal, a more in-depth

explanation of WCOnline’s online tutoring capabilities will be discussed at length. This

study will look at three online tutoring venues:

E-tutoring. E-tutoring is an asynchronous system where students upload a

Microsoft Word document to the writing center’s appointment system, WCOnline. From

there, tutors download the document and work with it using Microsoft Word’s comment

feature. After the tutor has finished working with the paper, they re-upload it to

WCOnline where the student can download the new document.

Live chat. This is a synchronous option that is housed within the writing center’s

appointment software. After a student makes an appointment, they can log into a chat

room where they meet their tutor to discuss their writing in real time. With this venue,

the interface of the tutoring session is important to note. While tutors and students can

chat live, they also have the ability to post their writing to a whiteboard, interact with it,

and collaborate as well, making this type of tutoring explicitly multimodal.

Second Life. Second Life is a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) that exists

separately from the previously discussed tutoring options. Not originally intended to

serve as a tutoring venue, UMSL’s Writing Center has appropriated Second Life to act as

a virtual writing center setting. Tutors and students log into Second Life via avatars

(graphical representations of themselves on the computer) and interact in real time

through visual, verbal, and textual communication. A synchronous environment, tutors

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and students work on writing in real time within the virtual setting, making this venue

particularly fertile for multimodal research.

Limitations There are limitations that need to be addressed while conceiving and completing

this study. First, this study will only look at data gathered from one university writing

center. This limits the generalizability of the study. Not all writing centers offer the

same kind of online writing consultation and the student population at UMSL will

promote a certain brand of tutoring that may be different than other writing centers.

Additionally, because UMSL’s Writing Center is relatively small (only four or five tutors

are on staff each semester), the culture of the Center may be a bit more intimate than

larger writing centers that employ many more tutors.

While the research site might considered a limitation in terms of generalizability,

the online tutoring venues being studies may also be a limitation. While this study will

look at one kind of asynchronous and two synchronous kinds of online tutoring, there are

other tutoring methods out there that most likely yield different results (e.g. Skype).

Additionally, one of the tutoring environments being studied, Second Life, is not as

utilized by students as often as the other kinds of online writing consultation options.

This means that it may be necessary to filter students into the space in order to gather

data. This may skew the ways in which communication unfolds between tutor and

student.

Finally, my position as the UMSL Writing Center Coordinator may impact this

study in significant ways. As the Coordinator, I am responsible for training the writing

consultants, making sure the day-to-day tasks of the Writing Center are carried out,

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scheduling the tutors for work, and any other administrative duties involved in making

sure the Center is running smoothly. I also do writing consultation as well, working with

students in the same ways that other writing consultants do. Additionally, because of my

role as the Coordinator, I have become a known figure in the university community—

someone who represents the writing standards of UMSL. I have become, as one student

addressed me as I walked across campus, the “writing guy.” My status on campus and in

my position needs to taken seriously within the context of this study.

Methodology

This study will use qualitative research methods. The primary method for

research will be Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Multimodal Discourse Analysis

(MDA). Because CDA looks at the nature of power structures, it is effective for looking

at discourse between tutors and students. Gee (1990) mentions that all discourse is about

the establishment and dissemination of power. “Control over certain Discourses can lead

to the acquisition of social goods (money, power, status) in a society” (p. 144).

Furthermore, Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) will shape how discourse interacts

with the three technologies that tutors utilize during online writing consultations. MDA

is particularly useful when combining multiple modes of communication. Technology

itself changes the ways in which tutors and students communicate, including its impact

on the tutoring process. Using CDA and MDA, primarily through the approaches of

Fairclough (1992), Norris (2004), and Kress (2010), textual, verbal, and visual

communication will be analyzed to determine which roles are (and are not) appearing in

discourse.

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Finally, this study will rely on interviews and written reflections from both tutors

and students as they contextualize and describe on their thoughts about writing

consultation and their roles within tutoring sessions. These interviews and written

materials will also be analyzed using CDA and MDA. A more in-depth explanation of

how these methodologies will be incorporated and carried-out in the study appears in the

third chapter of this proposal.

Significance of the Study

There are three main benefits of this study that I see as contributing to the field of

writing center studies and writing consultation training. What follows is each perceived

point of significance along with a further explanation.

1. This study will strengthen training for online writing consultation.

Current training methods for online writing consultation largely focus on working

with tutoring technology or a written document and not a person. This study will refocus

the online tutoring experience back on the student by creating a sense of awareness, on

the part of the tutor, to understand how their roles are defined by the discourse they use as

well as how their roles impact student learning.

2. To create more efficient and effective online writing consultation experiences for both

tutors and students.

The culture of writing consultation is one of efficiency on top of effectiveness.

Often, students stop by writing centers in moments of need, many times, in the middle of

busy class days, while juggling lots of writing/homework, etc. Writing consultants need

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to be able to work efficiently and effectively in online environments much in the same

way they need to work in face-to-face environments. Understanding how roles work in

online discourse can help create more efficient and effective sessions for both tutors and

students.

3. To monitor and understand, through discourse, when and what tutoring roles become

most effective and why in online tutoring environments.

Just as face-to-face and online tutoring environments are different from each

other, online tutoring environments differ from each other. By looking at a typical

asynchronous e-tutoring environment, a synchronous chat room environment, and a

MUVE (multi-user virtual environment), multiple tutoring venues can be explored for

both overlapping qualities and differences. By looking at discourse in each of these

environments, more appropriate online tutoring practices can be established.

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Chapter Two Introduction

At the center of the theoretical interests and assumptions that generated this study

lie my own experiences as a writing center consultant and coordinator. Shaped by these

cumulative moments, and my continuing reflections on them, I have become increasingly

intrigued by the relationships that writing tutors and students cultivate in both face-to-

face and online tutoring environments. Much of my own interest developed when I was

first a tutor, working with students from backgrounds very different from my own. I

found myself attempting to bend myself—who I was in a particular moment—to fit their

needs as academic writers. I continuously located myself and attempted to communicate

ideas differently, depending upon the student. For example, with students who were

more confident, I often found myself being more direct, able to layout concerns with their

writing with more explicit explanations. With more hesitant writers, my approach would

likely be more strategic. I would choose my words carefully—my tone of voice would

become softer, and my mannerisms became more reserved. In online tutoring

environments, I found these roles to be presented differently when working with students

and their writing. Much like McLuhan’s (1964) idea of “the medium is the message,” the

ways I attempted to communicate had to take in to account the venue in which I was

communicating within (e.g. Microsoft Word, a chat room, or a virtual world). With

many variables present in this study, and in order to most effectively shape the context of

this research, this literature review must account for literature that involves writing center

history, pedagogy, theory, tutoring approaches, tutor training, how technology impacts

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writing instruction, and how the conceptual framework will distinctly shape this study.

Accordingly, these categories make up the following sections in this chapter.

Writing Centers

The field of writing center studies is broad. Covering anything from tutoring

theory and practice, training, student concerns, environmental impact on learning, and

more, when doing writing center research, precision in reviewing the literature is

imperative. Accordingly, this section focuses on tutoring training, the role(s) of the

writing consultant in the writing center, and the role(s) of the writing center in the larger

context of a university.

Locating and defining the many identities of writing centers. It has been

extensively documented by researchers that there are often misconceptions and myths

about writing centers embedded within academia. North’s (1984) essay, written “out of

frustration” (p. 433) from these misconceptions, set the tone in the composition field for

writing centers and the roles they play in university settings. Combating against the

widely accepted notion that writing centers primarily serve merely as fix-it shops for

remedial student writers’ papers, North (1984) proclaimed “the object is to make sure that

writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by instruction. In axiom

form it goes like this: Our job is to produce better writers, not better writing” (p. 438).

North’s pleas are situated in the year 1984, a few years after the widespread emergence of

writing centers in academic settings. Boquet (1999) notes the rise of the writing center as

an institutional entity in the 1970s alongside the Open Admissions movement, which

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brought large numbers of underprepared students into higher education. Boquet (1999)

says, “writing centers were created largely to fix problems that university officials had

difficulty even naming, things like increasing enrollment, larger minority populations,

and declining (according to the public) literacy skills” (p. 472). The early vision of

writing centers often focused on a perceived need to resolve an emergency in the literacy

of student writers. This supposed crisis was a popular notion, especially in the 1970s.

Rothman (1977) justifies the importance of writing centers by noting a college faculty’s

declaration in a decline in the quality of student writing. “One occasionally hears…the

older faculty reminisce about students who had mastered the rudiments of academic

prose. But almost everyone has acknowledged…that our students have changed; they

cannot write very well” (p. 484). In a now notorious Newsweek article, Sheils (1975)

wrote of supposed declining literacy skill in students attending college. “If your children

are attending college, the chances are that when they graduate they will be unable to write

ordinary, expository English with any real degree of structure and lucidity” (p. 58). The

role of writing centers, at least from those outside of the world of writing instruction, was

rather prescriptive—a learning facility to meet the needs of struggling writers. However,

when we look at the writer center within the context of those who teach writing and work

closely with writing students, a different perspective is established.

Kinkead & Harris (1993) emphasize the complexity and significance of context

for writing centers in general, suggesting that “in fact, it is their environment, academic

and otherwise, that most directly shapes them, giving them form and substance and the

impetus to define themselves in certain ways” (p. xv). The literature itself tracks a shift

from the construction of ideals that attempt to, through theory and exploration, rise above

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the misconceptions about writing centers (North, 1984; Harris, 1985) and towards

investigations into and theories constructed through those very attempts at making sense

of writing centers and their roles within academic settings (Grimm, 1996; Grimm, 1999;

Neuleib & Scharton, 1994; Yahner & Murdick, 1991).

Defining the roles of writing centers and writing tutors. Writing centers, and

the people who work in them, endlessly must define what it is they do (and don’t do) both

to themselves and for others. Simultaneously, there is a well-defined understanding in the

field that the perceptions of others (be they students, faculty, or administrators) of what a

writing center is and what tutors do can have a powerful effect on writing consultation

practices (North, 1984; Pemberton, 1992; Ede, 1996). From a historical perspective,

much can be understood when seeing the ways early writing center literature defines

what a writing center is and what happens there. Beck, Hawkins, and Silver (1978) speak

of the writing center as a casual learning environment for both tutors and students. “In

essence this is what the [writing center] really is—a place to talk informally about

writing. Frequently it is also a place to do some writing as well” (p. 434). Other scholars

speak about writing centers as more formal places for writing instruction, claiming that,

when tutoring is required, “tutors do the same thing teachers do, and have similar powers.

They are surrogate teachers who give individualized instruction” (Bruffee, 1980, p. 76).

However, it is important to carefully examine the role of tutors because tutors do not

assign grades to written academic work. This fact alone gives the tutor a more complex

position in relation to the student. Brannon and Knoblauch (1982) note that teachers

often “view themselves as the authorities, intellectually maturer, rhetorically more

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experienced, technically more expert than their apprentice writers” (p. 158). However,

the writing tutor, as Harris (1995) notes, “inhabits a world somewhere between student

and teacher. Because the tutor sits below the teacher on the academic ladder, the tutor can

work effectively with students in ways that teachers can not” (p 28). Writing tutors have

the ability to position themselves in ways that may eliminate the pressure of having

writing evaluated in any kind of formal fashion.

The training of writing consultants. Because of these various perspectives, the

training that writing tutors undergo before and as they work with students is essential to

recognize as it allows writing centers to develop a sense of agency when defining their

practices.

Beck, Hawkins, and Silver (1978) discuss a variety of training methods that range

from courses being taken by writing consultants on the processes of tutoring as well as

learning on the job, giving the chance for tutors to “learn by doing, but that while they are

tutoring they need support, encouragement, and resources” (p. 441). North (1982) takes a

more explanatory approach to the benefits of learning to tutor effectively:

“Prospective tutors learn…to deal with the social situation of tutoring: how to

behave in this very distinctive face-to-face interaction. At the same time, they

learn about the composing process-through introspection at first, and then from

the theoretical and practical accounts of other writers, teachers, and researchers”

(p. 436).

When North (1982) speaks about learning to “behave” (p. 436), he speaks directly about

the complicated nature of the roles tutors learn to employ during their tutoring sessions.

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It is this set of roles that other scholars also speak about more explicitly in their research.

Harris (1986) speaks of multiple roles writing consultants must adopt when tutoring by

proposing “tutors have a whole wardrobe of hats to put on, and that they may need to

change hats every few minutes” (p. 35). Staben (2005) extends these roles to include

“editor, voice of the institution, peer, and co-conspirator” (p. 20). Furthermore, I think it

is even more appropriate and useful to include the numerous roles the students play in

tutoring session as these roles end up defining and reshaping what hats tutors wear over

the course of a tutoring session. In correlation with the roles tutors adopt, this study will

be exploring student roles as well.

The Impact of Technology on Writing Instruction

When considering how people interact with technology, McLuhan (1964) claims,

“it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and

action” (p. 9). Because the proposed study focuses so much on writing consultation in

digital spaces, it becomes vital to seek information regarding how technology shifts the

understanding of writing instruction. Therefore, this section will look closely at online

writing consultation as a field of study as well as how writing instruction is impacted by

the use of digital tutoring technologies.

Online Writing Consultation. Bernhardt (1993) notes an obvious, but

importance, difference when interacting with print and digital text-based materials:

Readers of on-screen text interact physically with the text. Through the mouse,

the cursor, the touch screen, or voice activation, the text becomes a dynamic

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object, capable of being physically manipulated and transformed. The presence of

the text is heightened through the virtual reality of the screen world: readers

become participants, control outcomes, and shape the text itself. (p. 154)

While writing tutors can interact with print materials as well, there comes a special set of

abilities that accompany working with writing on a screen. For students, it can be a

different kind of learning experience to see their writing transform before their eyes.

Because of these interactions, tutors must become aware of their roles as tutors when

tutoring digitally. However, researchers have noted the differences between face-to-face

tutoring and online tutoring (Breuch & Racine, 2000; Rickly, 1998). Breuch and Racine

(2000) note that while the ways in which tutoring unfolds differs in online and face-to-

face the same pedagogical goals remain. Still, the methods tutoring happens changes.

“The very nature of online communication forces tutors to articulate clearly the content

of their suggestions, as well as pay attention to the style and delivery of such

information” (Breuch & Racine, 2000, p. 249).

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Chapter 3 This chapter aims to explain the research design, the population and sampling

procedures, collection and management of data, and data analysis processes that make up

this study. As this study continues to be shaped and refined, I suspect these methods will

need to be amended as data are collected and analyzed.

This research intends to discover and analyze the roles writing tutors and writing

students call upon and present in discourse during online writing consultation sessions.

By looking at the discourse between tutors and students within various online tutoring

venues, the different roles that tutors and students employ during their sessions can be

revealed and better understood in order to better train writing consultants to work in

online tutoring environments, as well as help writing center researchers appreciate how

communication and writing help unfolds in discourse in digital communication.

Furthermore, it can be understood how these roles are formed through various modes of

online communication (e.g. text, verbal communication, and visual means). By getting a

deeper appreciation of the roles between tutors and students online, better training

techniques, which are currently lacking in the field, can be conceived and implemented

for institutions with online writing consultation.

Therefore, this study aims to answer the following research questions:

1. What roles appear (and do not appear) in the discourse between writing tutors and

student writers during online tutoring sessions?

2. How do these roles appear in discourse and under what rhetorical circumstances

do they appear?

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3. How can understanding these online roles help improve tutor training and the

quality of online tutoring sessions?

Research Design

This study will primarily center around the discourse between tutors and students

as they collaborate and work on academic writing in various digital writing center

venues. The settings will include asynchronous communication in which writing

consultations provide comments to the student via track changes in word processing

software Microsoft Word, synchronous chat room text through the tutoring software

WCOnline, and synchronous chat and visual elements from the multimodal virtual

platform Second Life. To look at the discourse in each of these setting, Critical

Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992) and Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Kress, 2010;

Norris, 2004) will be utilized to look at what roles are showing up in text-based

discourse, along with any visual elements of the software used for student-tutor

interactions.

Wodak and Resiegl (2010) write that Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) “has

become an established discipline, institutionalized across the globe in many departments

and curricula” (p. 4). When situated into this study, Wodak and Meyer (2009) have

characterized CDA as featuring:

o An interest in the properties of real language by users in natural settings;

o A focus on texts, discourses, conversations, speech acts, or communicative

events;

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o A study of action and interaction;

o An interest in the nonverbal aspects of communication;

o A focus on the social and cognitive aspect of interaction;

o An investigation of the context of language use; and

o An analysis of the range of semantic-pragmatic-textual language use.

(p. 2)

Fairclough (1992) justifies the use of Critical Discourse Analysis by asserting it

involves an “interest in properties of texts, the production, distribution, and consumption

of texts, sociocognitive processes of producing and interpreting texts, social practice in

various institutions, the relationship of social practice to power relations, and hegemonic

projects at the societal level” (p. 226). As already noted, the tutoring process in itself is a

structure that involves exertions of power at various points by both writing consultants

and students, making CDA a method that is fitting for this research design.

In CDA, Chouliaraki and Fairclough's (1999) describe ways of interacting

(genre), ways of representing (discourse), and ways of being (style)—these become entry

points into the data and allow researchers to categorize, prioritize, and make sense of

discourse. As a systematic way of coding, interpreting, and analyzing data, further

explanation of each category is necessary.

Genre. Often referred to as “ways of interacting,” genre is a category that allows

researchers to make sense of data through the interactions between participants of a text.

Researchers may choose to look at the thematic structure of the text, cohesion devices

(such as parallel structure, repetition), wording, metaphors, politeness conventions, turn-

taking structures, and interactional patterns. For this study, while which ways of

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interacting have yet to be determined (I’ll let the data determine my direction), the

possibilities are interesting to consider.

Discourse. Often referred to as “ways of representing,” discourse gives

researchers of CDA the opportunity to look at chains of production, consumption, and

distribution of texts and talk. These moments in the text are often looked upon by CDA

researchers as discourse that embodies tensions, or reveal embedded power structures in

language.

Style. Often looked upon as “ways of being,” style allows CDA researchers to

analyze active/passive voice, modality (e.g., tense and affinity), transitivity (e.g., action,

affective, state, ability, cognitive statements), and pronoun use.

These three categories will give me, in my study, to consider both macro and

micro levels of understanding in my data. The macro level of understanding comes into

play when considering how meaning in made through language—how roles are being

presented through ideas and concepts being presented. The micro level of understanding

speaks more to how the mechanical structure of language—for example, what nouns,

verb, pronouns, and tenses are being used to formulate ideas and concepts. It is within

these categories that I hope to both discover and analyze roles that tutors and students

employ during their online writing consultations. From there, better training can be

created and better sessions can be envisioned.

As a qualitative research study, this research will, as Merriam (2009) states,

reveal how, through discourse, “people interpret their experiences, how they construct

their worlds, and what meaning they attribute to their experiences” (p. 5). Apart from

data gathered from tutoring sessions, writing consultants and students in this study will be

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contributing reflective data (in the form of freewrites) in which they attempt to make

sense of their tutoring experiences.

Population and Sample

This study centers around two populations: writing consultants and writing

students. The populations in this study both come from one university setting—therefore,

this study settles on purposeful sampling as a method in which to choose participants. As

purposeful sampling, it is important to note that the results of this study may be less

generalizable as they are situated within the context of the university in which the study

took place. Because the individuals within these two populations vary in many ways,

further explanation describing who they are, what they do, and why they are important to

this study will help provide further context for this research.

Writing consultants. The writing consultants who will take part in this study are

all graduate students in English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL). At

UMSL’s Writing Center, all working tutors are graduate students who have been awarded

a tutoring assistantship during their graduate studies. This assistantship requires writing

consultants to work twenty hours per week in the Writing Center, as well as perform

other duties (e.g. offer writing workshops, attend professional development training and

meetings). Writing consultants, even within the English Department, come from a

variety of disciplines in their graduate work. Tutors earning their M.A. degree in English

may be studying either literature or composition and rhetoric. Tutors earning their M.F.A

degrees may be studying either fiction or poetry. All tutors are required to attend an

intensive training seminar on writing consultation before beginning their assistantships,

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as well as take a graduate level course, Teaching College Writing, which further trains

them to work with college level writers on a variety of composition issues. In the

Writing Center at UMSL, there are generally four to five tutors on staff in any given

semester. I plan on including all staff in my study.

Writing students. The Writing Center at UMSL works with more than just

academic writing. Writing consultants have worked with faculty publishing papers,

resume writers, prospective employees working on letters of application, and other types

of writers and writing. However, for this study, the voices of four students, as they

navigate their journey through the waters of academic writing, become the focus.

Because the writing students in this study could effectively be any students seeking

assistance from the Writing Center, I had to develop a focus on how to both narrow my

student population but still get a representative sample from the entire university. I will

be seeking out students that have started their undergraduate career at UMSL. This is

because I prefer to students who have received all of their writing instruction through

UMSL (and not at other higher learning institutions) and are embedded closely with the

culture of writing on the campus. Accordingly, I will be seeking out the following

demographics of student writers and writing center clientele for my study:

• A student in First-Year Composition

• A student in a Junior level writing course

• A graduate student

• A nondescript writing student (i.e. a student writing a resume, application letter,

or other document not for a course)

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Furthermore, as this study centers around a particular university (UMSL), there is some

information that may help contextualize what kind of student writers UMSL typically

works with on a daily basis in the Writing Center.

There are two writing requirements that all students must satisfy in order to earn a

degree from UMSL. First, students must either take or transfer into the university with

First-Year Composition (FYC). From there, students are required to take a junior level

writing course of their choosing. There are many different types of writing courses

offered; for instance, nursing students may take a course geared at writing done in the

nursing field, engineering students may choose to take Technical Writing, biology majors

may choose to take Writing in the Sciences. While these courses may better prepare

students for the kinds of writing they will typically encounter on the job, it also gives

them further preparation to do the kinds of academic writing they will be asked to do in

their further coursework and major.

Data Collection and Management

The data for this study will include a variety of materials that will be useful in

determining and understanding what kinds of roles tutors and students enact during

online tutoring sessions. In order to better triangulate data that I feel best represents the

entire process of writing consultation at UMSL, I want to gather data that represents what

happens before, during, and after a tutoring session. What follows in this section will be

an explanation of each kind of data that will be collected for analysis.

Writing Center appointment forms. Before all Writing Center appointments

take place, students must complete an appointment form indicating what kind of writing

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they are working on, what class they are writing for (if applicable), what they want the

tutor to help with, what they do well in their writing, and what concerns they have about

their writing. Essentially, this is an early piece of communication from students directly

to tutors regarding the kinds of help he or she wants during the tutoring session. These

forms will be collected as they represent asynchronous discourse from the student to the

writing consultant. Furthermore, they help offer a sense of a writer’s role before the

session occurs. These forms represent, essentially, who the student is before the tutors

meets with them or works with their writing.

Transcripts from tutoring sessions. From all three online tutoring venues

studied in this research, tutoring transcripts will be gathered. These include track

changes and comments made by tutors to students within Microsoft Word. These

comments are asynchronous and the student sees them later. However, because the tutor

must consider strategic ways in which to communicate writing concepts, they often must

choose their ways of communicating (and therefore the role they play in the moment)

carefully. Another type of transcript will include synchronous chat room sessions

between tutors and students. These are live conversations that unfold in real time for the

participants. A third kind of transcript will include a multimodal transcript involving

both the text-based conversation as well as the visual modes available during tutoring

sessions in Second Life. Because the visual placement of avatars as well as other visual

components is important to how tutoring unfolds, it is imperative that it is included

alongside the conversations that occur during the tutoring session.

Reflection freewrites from writing consultants and students. Apart from

gathering transcripts for analysis, I will also be asking study participants to reflect on

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their tutoring sessions and practices. For tutors, I will be asking them to think and write

about their tutoring sessions, what roles they thought they were employing in various

tutoring moments, and how successful they think they were in projecting those roles

during the sessions. For students, I will ask them to think and write about how they felt

about themselves as writers before, during, and after the tutoring sessions. The

information in these freewrites will help triangulate the data collected from the

transcripts.

Researcher reflections. For this study, I am not just the researcher but a deeply

embedded participant. I am the coordinator for the Writing Center at UMSL. I am

responsible for training the tutors, making sure tutoring processes get enacted, and

handling any issues that tutors or students may have with the Writing Center and its

services. Therefore, I must keep notes and observations of how I am influencing the

tutoring environment and the participants involved in the study. I will keep a log of

observations and notes regarding each piece of data collected in this study. These may

take many forms—from brief notations to longer journal-like entries. However, the goal

is to further triangulate the data, while being as transparent as possible during the

research process.

Benefits to data collection. There are some benefits to collecting data in the

online tutoring environments utilized in this study. First, because the asynchronous and

synchronous chat room data can be collected retroactively (the information is

automatically saved after a session ends), I do not have to be present when the tutoring

session occurs. This means my physical presence may influence the ways in which

tutoring sessions unfold naturally between tutors and students.

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Management of the data. Since all of the transcripts taken from tutoring

sessions are already transcribed, there will be no transcription needed. All tutoring

discourse data gathered will be copied and pasted into a word document for analysis.

Reflection freewrites from participants will be kept in their original files. To keep data

secure, I will be placing all files worked with in this study in a password protected

external hard drive that only I will have access to. No files will be removed from the

hard drive while the study is being conducted.

I will also be carefully keeping track of my own observations and notes during the

entire data collection process. Because I am very much embedded in the study as the

coordinator of the Writing Center, my personal reflections on how I am impacting the

research environment will be important to follow. For every piece of data gathered, I will

keep notes and observations attached to each file in Dropbox.

Instrumentation

The data in this study will consist of transcripts from tutoring sessions, as well as

written reflections from both writing tutors and students. Because the transcripts are

coming from online sources that generate text-based conversation, and not from audio,

there is no need to transcribe the language used during the sessions using a typical

transcription method (e.g. Jeffersonian Transcription Method). The written reflections,

however, require a bit more explanation. Participants will be given a very loose structure

for their written reflections. While specific guiding questions may help orient a reader’s

thinking about their tutoring sessions, such questions may also limit thinking in ways that

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do not allow for deeper personal insights. Therefore, tutors and participants will be asked

the following questions for their reflections:

Tutors: How do you feel this

session went? How did you,

through your own practices, help

the student?

Students: Try to capture your

feelings about your tutoring

session before, during, and after

it occurred.

It is my hope, as a researcher, that these questions are open enough to encourage creative

and insightful comments but also actively gear the thinking of participants to the tutoring

sessions they work within.

Data Analysis

When discussing the analysis of qualitative data, Merriam (2009) says an

effective analytical approach

Involves consolidating, reducing, and interpreting what people have said and what

the researcher has seen and read—it is the process of making meaning. Data

analysis is a complex process that involves moving back and forth between

concrete bits of data and abstract concepts, between inductive and deductive

reasoning, between description and interpretation. (pp. 175-176)

The idea of moving back and forth between concrete bits of data is vital when

considering that different participants in this study may have very different experiences.

To comprehend the nuances between these experiences could help fill major gaps in

understanding how online tutoring operates in terms of roles being enacted.

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It is my hope that during data analysis I can identify patterns of roles that tutors

and students employ during their tutoring sessions. I hope to see these roles appear in the

discourse between tutors and students, but also within the reflection writings that are

composed outside the tutoring session. By constructing these categories, I hope to get a

sense of when these roles appear in conversational discourse, why they appear when they

do, and how they are constructed through text-based language. Through CDA, as

described earlier, this research can be completed in a systematic way to provide what I

hope is a complete picture of the kinds of roles that writing tutors and writing students

enact in their online tutoring sessions.

Limitations

Research site and tutoring technologies. This study will only look at data

gathered from one university writing center. One research site limits the generalizability

of the study. Not all writing centers offer the same kind of online writing consultation.

While this study will look at one kind of asynchronous and two synchronous kinds of

online tutoring, there are other tutoring methods out there that most likely yield different

findings (e.g. Skype). Additionally, one of the tutoring environments being studied,

Second Life, is not as utilized by students as often as the other kinds of online writing

consultation options. This means generating a sufficient amount of data may include

filtering students into the space in order to gather data. This may skew the ways in which

communication unfolds between tutor and student.

Sample size and tutoring culture. Another limitation of the study is that the

sample size is not a true representation of the writing consultants on a broader scale.

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UMSL’s Writing Center only employs five writing consultants during any semester.

Compared to writing centers at larger universities, which may employ 50 or more tutors,

the small staff at UMSL’s Writing Center may generate different results. With such a

small sample of writing tutors, it may be possible that findings will be contingent upon

the context of the study. This, in turn, could impact the generalizability of the study.

Role of the researcher. As the primary investigator of this study, my role as the

Writing Center coordinator will certainly play a significant role in the study. I am

responsible for training writing consultants, making sure day-to-day operations of the

writing center are carried out, and handling all concerns of students and tutors.

Essentially, because I am so closely embedded in the processes of the Writing Center, I

will undoubtedly have an effect on the data that is collected and even how it is analyzed

(as I cannot help but see data through the lens of the coordinator).

Throughout this study, I will be aware of these limitations and be as transparent as

possible in how they impact the analysis of data and the significance of the study in the

larger context of writing consultation studies.

Summary

This study will allow me to discover and analyze the roles that writing students

and writing consultants enact during online tutoring sessions. The participants in this

study will be, through the discourse they use to communicate, providing data before,

during, and after tutoring session where I will employ both Critical Discourse Analysis

and Multimodal Discourse Analysis to interpret and analyze roles. My hope is that by

analyzing the discourse between tutors and students, I can determine what roles they are

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playing at various points in writing consultations. By doing this, I plan on improving

current online writing consultation training methods and also create the opportunity for

more effective online tutoring sessions.

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