Databasing: Documenting and Assessing Students’ Existing Literate Activities
Conference on College Composition and Communication – March 2014, Indianapolis, IN
Moria Torrington
mtorrin@ilstu.edu
Intro
 As Joyce noted, this presentation focuses on the writing program’s experiments with our
Literate Activity Database
 Initially designed as a tool to support tutoring activity in a basic writing course, the goal
of the database was to allow students to create and then use information about their own
literate practices, while at the same time allowing for assessment of student learning in
tutoring sessions. The student-driven database allowed writers to observe, collect, search,
and index their own literate activities. Designed within the context of a genre studies
approach to tutoring, the database is intended to help students actively connect new
writing knowledge to prior experiences, thus helping them to metacognitively take up and
transfer their writing skills across different situations. In other words, the database
supported the goal that Joyce outlined—helping students become daily writing researches
by re-thinking what it means to use literate data in an integrated way.
Since this kind of individual tutoring had not been a focus for the Writing Program in the past, it
was necessary to develop a new training program that instructs these tutors in writing center
methods and theory, as well as helping them to understand how these theories and methods will
be shaped by the Writing Program’s overall focus on genre studies and cultural-historical activity
theory—here I’ll give a bit of background that explains what we determined as the key tenets of
a tutoring program based in cultural-historical activity theory.
A CHAT tutoring program is not necessarily anchored in a set “philosophy”; rather, in an
effort to help instructors, tutors, and students alike re-think the goals and practices of writing
research, it coalesces around certain questions about writing research:



How do tutoring practices impact student writers’ practices and perspectives about
writing/themselves as writers?
How do these practices and perspectives change as writers take up literate activities
that happen in the writing center?
What kinds of activities support writers working with dynamic literate practices as
they define and redefines themselves as writing researchers?
The tutoring program anchored in a CHAT/genre studies perspective focuses less on helping
writers with a particular product in various stages of completion (i.e., brainstorming, drafting,
revising, etc) and more on the research and writing activities undertaken by writers and the ways
those activities are deployed in their writing practices outside of the writing center space. This
focus answers the call made by Elizabeth Wardle and Kevin Roozen as they argue for the need
for writing assessments “[b]ased on a perspective that situates students’ writing development
across an expansive ecology of literate activities rather than within any single setting” (107).
Such an assessment “gathers data addressing students’ wide range of experiences with writing
and the impact those experiences have on their abilities to accomplish academic tasks” (107),
with the ultimate goal of “expand[ing] . . . notions of what writing is and how writing should be
assessed, taught, and supported” (118). This ideological expansion is key for our program: an
overall CHAT approach to writing research, at its very core, compels writers to recognize and
draw on the wide range of literate activities happening in any given writing situation.
Given this need, the tutors working within this approach primarily help students examine
the writing activities they are enacting when they are working in particular literate situations; it
also works to shape writers’ approaches to writing research by prompting them to uncover and
consciously take up the notion that writing is a dynamic, complex, situated, culturally and
historically conditioned set of activities. In such a model, the writing consultants become
particularly important because a student’s uptake of a particular writing activity necessarily
depends on, to paraphrase Paul Prior in Writing/Disciplinarity, the way that a writing task is
represented to him or her.
Ultimately, a tutoring program that takes CHAT as its primarily philosophy—much like
the writing program itself— is both grounded in innovative tutoring methods that, like writing,
are always shifting and changing based on a complex system of factors: the writer, the situation,
trajectories of product, distributed audiences, representations of the genre, etc. What such a
program ultimately aims to do is not simply account for or validate multiple student experiences
with literacies, but to use tutoring sessions to shape students’ ability to recognize and use these
experiences across different writing settings. This goal necessarily shifts the activities of tutoring
sessions from negotiating and discussing a writer’s literate experience in relation to a specific
writing task to a writer proving (to him/herself and other stakeholders) what he/she has learned
and how that knowledge gets taken up and transferred to new writing situations.
Given the goal of CHAT tutoring to shape students as writing researchers, the features of
our tutoring program this past spring included:





4-7 students per session with a regular consultant, offering (to quote Muriel
Harris) “writers the opportunity to write, think, and talk with someone who
through this collaborative talk and questioning helps the writer use language to
develop ideas, to test possibilities, to re-see and rethink in the light of feedback
from the tutor” and their peers (110).
Collaborative learning, which, as Kail and Trimbur note, “is an effort . . . to
mobilize the power of peer influence toward the intellectual activity of colearning” (9)
An invitation to students to bring in any kind of writing they were working on—
not just for their writing class
A mix of students from different sections of the 101.10 course, with the goal of
creating a community of writers across sections
Access to and in-session use of the Literate Activity Database, which asked
individual student writers to consider, define, and archive answers to/descriptions
of the following topics:
 What genres do you feel like an expert in?
 What genres do you have trouble with?
 What genres do you feel like are related to your work (as a student or
outside school)?
 What genres do you think you’ll need to know as a student and/or in your
future career?
Within these bullet points, students were asked to consider the following:
 Where/how did you learn this genre?
 How long did it take you to learn it?
 What are the activities that make up the production of this genre?





What research did you do/do you need to do in order to produce this
genre?
Who uses this genre? How?
Where does this genre go after it is written? How does this affect how it is
written or produced?
What norms or cultural expectations underlie this genre?
What are the physical tools or conditions needed to produce this genre?
After a semester of using the database (a simple google doc folder assigned to each
consultant, with individual folders for each student) in the tutoring sessions, we found that while
students and tutors saw it as a useful tool for generating conversations about writing in different
kinds of genres, it didn’t allow for the open-access nature of the kind of writing research space
we wanted to create. This fall, we’re revising and re-launching the tool as the Grassroots Literate
Activity Database (GLAD)—the purpose and design of which are detailed on pages 4-7 of your
handout. In brief, The purpose of this research is create an open database (a collection of stories
about the details of people’s writing experiences) that all kinds of researchers can use to better
understand what people actually do when they engage in different kinds of writing and
composing in their daily lives.
As tutors (new Master’s students) enter our program, they will receive training on how to
conduct GLAD interviews with students in their tutoring sessions, as well as how to guide the
students through making an entry in the GLAD. Additionally, we will also be training our new
ph.d graduate assistants to become GLAD research assistants, as well as select groups of students
in introductory and intermediate-level writing classes. This means that over the course of just
one year, we can gather a wide range of entries, and we can encourage both teacher and stutdents
in our program can gain experience with qualitative writing research methods.
Participants who consent to be interviewed or who create an entry in the database will be asked
to provide answers to the questions on pages 5 & 6 of your handout. As you can see from
looking at these questions, they ask authors to consider they type of text they are produce (or
have produced or helped to produce), but the questions also ask authors to consider the people
that were involved, the tools that were used, the contexts within which texts are produced, as
well as the antecedent genres and knowledge that were employed in the process. Ultimately, we
believe opening the database up to all writing researchers will help us achieve our goal of
immersing students in writing research as a daily, lived experience, and teaching writers to
identify and call upon situations in which their thinking and research skills (or the thinking and
research skills of other writers) can be used productively by equipping them with specific ways
of thinking about literate activity that will allow them to generate research plans for
investigating their own writing practices and productions.