AN EXAMINATION OF A WAC PROGRAM OUTREACH EFFORT
Jason Lee Schilling
B.A., California State University, Sacramento, 2005
THESIS
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
The requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
ENGLISH
(Composition)
at
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO
SUMMER
2011
AN EXAMINATION OF A WAC PROGRAM OUTREACH EFFORT
A Thesis
by
Jason Lee Schilling
Approved by:
______________________________, Committee Chair
Daniel Melzer, Ph.D.
______________________________, Second Reader
Susan Howe, M.A.
________________________
Date
ii
Student: Jason Lee Schilling
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University
format manual and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be
awarded for the thesis.
__________________________, Graduate Coordinator
David Toise, Ph.D.
Department of English
iii
___________________
Date
Abstract
of
AN EXAMINATION OF A WAC PROGRAM OUTREACH EFFORT
by
Jason Lee Schilling
One of the ongoing issues with WAC programs is how to best utilize them. Most
programs are designed with instructors in mind. The need to assist instructors teaching in
a variety of disciplines with their writing assignments and how they approach writing in
the classroom has been an important aspect of how WAC programs are utilized, with
varying degrees of cooperation and participation from instructors. This thesis will focus
primarily on how one community college is utilizing its own WAC program and how the
needs of both its students and its faculty are influencing important and positive changes
that are changing both the dynamics and the perception of what a WAC program can
become. However, this thesis also criticizes the curriculum and how basic writing
students must traverse the seemingly insurmountable obstacles found to be formidable in
achieving success in the classroom. Most importantly, the utilization of a WID program
designed to specifically focus on beginning writing students who need support in specific
disciplines such as history and psychology are explored. The conception, utilization,
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problems and successes are explored regarding how this WID program, titled Learning
Groups, worked.
__________________________, Committee Chair
Daniel Melzer, Ph.D.
___________________________
Date
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
List of Tables ................................................................................................................... viii
Chapter
1 INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................1
Research Design and Questions. ..............................................................................5
Review of Related Literature .................................................................................11
Chapter Summaries ................................................................................................23
2 THE STUDENTS OF WAC TUTORING: A NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE ............27
3 HISTORY, DESCRIPTION AND ASSESSMENT OF THE WAC/WID
PROGRAM ...................................................................................................................36
WAC Program History ..........................................................................................36
Outreach Program Description ..............................................................................38
Description of the Program Assessment ................................................................42
4 EFFECT ON TEACHERS, TUTORS AND STUDENTS ...........................................46
Effect on Teachers and Tutors ...............................................................................47
Getting Buy-In ...........................................................................................49
Change in Faculty Attitudes and Pedagogy ...............................................53
Tutor Roles-An Uneasy Alliance ...............................................................56
Building Relationships with Students ....................................................................61
The WID Approach to Psychology Writing Assignments .....................................64
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How the Learning Group Program Helped Psychology 300 Students ......65
How the Learning Group Program Helped History 300 Students .........................71
5 CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................75
Summary of the Results of the Research ...............................................................75
Future of the WID Program at ARC ......................................................................80
Works Cited .......................................................................................................................83
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LIST OF TABLES
Page
1.
Table 1 WID Learning Group Survey ...................................................................74
viii
1
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
For years, discussions within the English Department at American River College
(ARC) were to make the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program less of a
tutorial program that is more traditionally a Writing Center venue and more of a writing
program that helps both students in their learning goals and faculty in their learning
practices. Unlike a traditional WAC faculty development program, the WAC program at
ARC has been almost exclusively a student tutoring center that helps students with
writing assignments from classes across the curriculum. The Writing Center, in contrast,
has primarily assigned writing lessons for students to complete. The conversation has for
years been essentially academic since the Writing Center helps students learn how to
write better through the use of “writing modules” that have been developed over the years
by Writing Center coordinators. These modules are “assigned” to students based on a
preliminary analysis of the student’s writing. Modules range from the basic writing level,
which focuses on sentence level development, to more advanced level modules which
continue with sentence-level writing but also include paragraph structure and essay
development and even critical analysis skills for students preparing to enroll (or are
currently enrolled) in Eng 300 courses and beyond. Faculty and student tutors help
students with their assigned modules. Outside work is not permitted to be brought into
the center or module work to be taken out.
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The WAC program at American River College was developed due to the fact that
there were many students who still needed help with their writing primarily because the
Writing Center’s policy was to assign, practice, test and correct specific “assigned”
student work, in contrast to the WAC program which assisted students with their writing
from other classes. The ongoing mission of the program, in fact, is to serve all students,
from those who have little or no experience in college writing to those who are more
advanced writers. In addition, WAC helps students who may not be native speakers of
English and who may have English as a Second Language issues involved in their
writing. The Writing Center, in contrast, is not set up to help these types of students.
WAC also has a drop-in center for enrolled students who need help with their writing but
do not have an appointment. As one can see, the WAC program is working almost like a
traditional writing center in that it exclusively maintains a writing tutoring center for all
students on campus. It should be noted that in addition to the Writing Center and WAC,
ARC also maintains a Reading Center and a Reading Across the Disciplines (RAD)
program. The Reading Center patterns its program similarly to the Writing Center and
assigns reading modules to students to work in the center facilities. The RAD program is
unique in that it works primarily with faculty from all disciplines and develops specific
modules that coincide with reading assignments that individual instructors assign in their
classes.
Each program is successful in meeting its mission of supporting and helping
students obtain better reading and writing skills. However, the integration of these
3
programs is difficult since each program is very independent, with each having its own
coordinators and with very specific learning outcomes that it requires for students.
The WAC program at ARC was developed to help support these students. A tutorial
program was developed to help any ARC student who needed help with their writing
from any class on campus. Over the years, however, it had become obvious that the
majority of students using the WAC program were students needing help with writing
assignments primarily from English courses. This, of course, is understandable for two
primary reasons:
1. WAC was a tutoring program exclusively overseen by English instructors.
2. No outreach was initiated to other faculty from other disciplines to work in the
program.
Due to these two reasons, WAC maintained its position as a writing tutoring program that
has, in other institutions, been the venue of writing centers. The ARC Writing Center
maintained its position as a non-lecture, module-driven writing instruction class with
tutorial components within its program.
My initial, personal history with the WAC program may also shed some light into
the background of how the ARC WAC program was run. I came as a student when I was
enrolled in what was then English 1B, Introduction to Literature and Composition (now
English 301). I made an appointment after I had completed a research paper on James
Joyce’s short story titled “The Dead.” I went to my appointment believing I had a
relatively good paper with strong analysis that supported my thesis that what Joyce was
4
trying to get across in his epiphany in “The Dead” was that none of us are really dead
until the last person who remembers us also dies. I soon learned through my tutoring
session that although it was an interesting thesis and overall a nice concept, in actuality, I
was not supporting it in my paper (I just liked the idea). Over the course of many months,
I became a “proficient” WAC student who saw the program as a necessity before I turned
in my papers. What would have been “B” papers became “A” papers after a session with
WAC. I became such an advocate for the program that I eventually was asked to
substitute for instructors who called in sick.
This, I believe, says a lot about how the program was run. There was one person
who made all of the decisions, including staffing the program to incorporating best
practices models that would eventually become part of how everyone tutored. It was the
way many types of student support programs initially get off the ground. Generally, there
are one or two people who generate a need for the program and then begin to put together
a structure of how the program will work best within the department. There are obvious
good points and bad points regarding this approach. As long as the program is allowed to
grow and change and adapt to the needs of its students, then the beginnings of any
program can be very exciting and fulfilling. Too often, however, some programs can
become an extension of a particular instructor, and change becomes very difficult (if not
impossible). Fortunately, the WAC program at American River College had more of the
former and less of the latter. However, it did finally require a new coordinator to take the
5
WAC program to a new level and to allow the new WID program (Writing in the
Disciplines) to emerge.
It is important to understand that this new WID program was conceptualized
primarily as a way to reach out to instructors outside of the English department. There
was already a pseudo- WID program taking place without a specific name. A handful of
history, anthropology and psychology instructors were having their students enroll in the
WAC program to get help with specific writing assignments. The new WID program was
put together to create a more organized and a more focused way of assisting these
students. However, what became quickly apparent was the large number of beginning
writing students who were seriously struggling to manage the writing requirements of
these transfer level courses which had no writing prerequisite. This caused the WID
program to reevaluate our purpose and goals, and the concept of the Learning Group
program was invented to attempt to help students within a group setting instead of oneon-one sessions exclusively.
Research Design and Questions
Transitioning the WAC program that reaches out to instructors in other disciplines
and developing lecture/module workshops that help large groups of students instead of
single, one-on-one tutoring is the ultimate goal of the American River College WAC
program. The idea of reaching out to history instructors came about from both a practical
level and a factor of convenience. It should be noted that the idea of creating a new
branch of the WAC program, because it was seen as such an essential accompaniment to
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the current, more Writing Center-based ARC program, initially sidestepped what Barbara
E. Walvoord, in Chapter 2 of Susan McLeod’s book, Writing Across the Curriculum: A
Guide to Developing Programs, emphasizes as some critical steps to take when starting a
program: incorporating faculty dialogue. We did not seek out, at least not initially,
English department faculty input regarding their ideas and/or concerns. As Walvoord
points out, it is essential to, of course, “[begin dialogue that] starts from needs and
concerns that the faculty perceives and to which the faculty is willing to dedicate time
and effort” (10). It must be stated that it was precisely the assumption that many faculty
members would not initially be willing to put in the time and effort necessary to build this
new WID program that the decision was made to begin small, create initial interest with a
handful of instructors in other disciplines that require English level 300 writing in their
assignments, and at least create a working model that could eventually, and relatively
slowly, begin to be exported to English instructors already working in the regular WAC
program. The idea was not to exclude outside dialogue. On the contrary, the idea was to
eventually present a successful working model to WAC faculty who would then have
ample opportunity to provide their input and advice on how to make this new model even
better, thereby creating a natural “buy in” of the new WAC branch, especially with
instructors who already have acknowledged the issue of basic writing skill students
failing in courses that require writing beyond their capabilities.
Practically speaking, it was known, through a long history of Social Science and
Humanities professors discussing the benefits of the WAC program to their students
7
(with even some instructors requiring that their students use the WAC program for
specific writing assignments) that there was a need for WAC to become more involved
with assisting these teachers. Also, it was believed that any initial pilot program would fit
nicely with history classes that required writing within their curriculum because it would
be easier to format a more specific tutorial program that current WAC English
Department faculty could be involved in rather than recruiting instructors from the hard
sciences such as biology, chemistry and even psychology (although, ultimately, this is the
goal) to work in WAC. In terms of convenience, the history instructors involved in this
pilot program had offices in the same building, on the same floor and in fact directly next
to the English department. This made communication and program development much
easier for everyone involved and created a more congenial environment of “face-to-face”
interaction that helped generate ideas with immediate feedback.
Designing tutoring materials for both students and WAC tutors required a clear
understanding of three things.
1. What each instructor’s student outcomes should be.
2. What students would need to know to successfully reach these
outcomes.
3. What WAC tutors needed to understand to be able to help these
students reach these outcomes.
From the very conception of formulating a cohesive plan of action, an awareness
of audience was always center stage. There was the audience of students who would be
8
receiving tutoring, there was the audience of instructors with whom WAC would be
working and, there was the audience of WAC instructors themselves who would need to
be guided on how to specifically tutor these “course specific” students who would be
enrolling and receiving help specifically on the writing assignments for their in-class
exams. All three of these audiences had to be given similar information so that all parties
were “on the same page,” but each different audience also had to be given specific
information that only applied to them. For example, obviously students would be given
the necessary information needed to understand the writing fundamentals applicable to
their assignments. Their instructors would be given information that was necessary to
understand exactly what approach WAC was taking to serve their students. It was also
important to have continuous meetings with these instructors so that, as WAC
“deconstructed” the writing assignments that the instructors were giving to their students,
important feedback from the instructors was necessary to make sure WAC was
emphasizing important aspects of the prompts given. The third audience that WAC had to
focus on were the instructors tutoring in the program and who would be called upon to
focus their tutoring on these specific students with their specific writing needs. Writing to
different audiences forced WAC staff to explore different ideas and approach each idea
with three audiences always in mind. This fact alone created an interesting perspective on
how to develop an outreach program that would serve multiple needs simultaneously.
The “deconstruction” of all of these writing assignments came primarily from psychology
and history classes, disciplines WAC was already addressing (to some extent).
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One important aspect that I have learned in the process of writing this thesis is
how the field that I work in, student support programs such as WAC, has many people
asking the same questions and coming up with similar answers. For instance, I recall how
concerned (bordering on being appalled), I was at the numbers of students at ARC who
were not adequately prepared to do the writing in transfer-level classes but were still
being allowed to enroll in these classes. That is one reason why I go into some depth as to
the morality of allowing people to spend money to register and enroll in courses that they
most likely will either be forced to drop or will inevitably fail. But as I read more and
more of the literature concerning this issue, not only does it seem to be an epidemic, but
it has been an ongoing problem for many, many years. Another question that I wanted to
examine was how in the process of structuring a WID program to fit the needs of
unprepared students, were we possibly ignoring the natural abilities of these types of
students to learn how to write better in their own way and in their time frame? From the
very beginning of structuring specific writing practices for these students to learn from,
one primary focus was to teach students quickly as we had very little time and
opportunity to bring these students up to speed with the writing assignments that their
instructors were assigning. Finally, because of these concerns, my ultimate question was
to examine exactly who was gaining the most from the program. Obviously many
students were gaining some immediate help in regards to the methods of writing that we
were teaching; methods such as breaking down the prompt, outlining, researching, taking
notes, prewriting, revising and final draft writing. But my research questions centered
10
primarily on the three audiences (which I examine in more detail in preceding chapters).
The audience of the students we were helping, the audience of the instructors we were
helping, and finally the audience of the entire English department who would eventually
judge for themselves whether or not the WID program (also titled the Learning Group
program) worked or needed more time to evolve. The program helped but also relied on
these three audiences. The final research questions would be connected to how the entire
program worked and, in the end, did it fail? Did it succumb to budgetary problems? Did it
try to do too much in too short a time period? Was it too successful to adequately handle
the ever growing enrollment with ever shrinking personnel? These are natural questions
to want to examine given the involvement that I had with constructing the WID program.
This thesis does not compare best practices in as much as it explains the issues
that instructors who were teaching transfer-level courses were having with students
unprepared to do the writing in order to successfully transfer. The scope of this thesis
stays within the parameters of the issue or the problem that beginning writing students
were having at ARC and how a WID program could be designed to give them immediate
help with their writing.
The scope of my research primarily included students who had not completed
English 300 and enrolled in transfer-level courses that recommended, but did not require,
English 300 (College Composition). The specific courses that I focused on were History
311 (American History), History 321 (American History with African-American
11
Influence), History 330 (Women’s History), History 327 (Hispanic History), Psychology
300 (Introduction to Psychology), and Anthropology 300 (Introduction to Anthropology).
During a span of four years, I co-coordinated A WID program that served
beginning writing students in these courses. For the purposes of this thesis, however, I
will go into detail as to how instructional assignments, tutoring sessions and final results
regarding pass/fail rates affected students in Psychology 300 and History 311 who
participated in this WID program. In addition to discussing student’s issues, this thesis
will also discuss issues that instructors had to deal with. The information that I compiled
regarding students was primarily through group tutoring sessions, one-on-one
discussions, and a final survey at the end of each fall semester. The information that I
compiled regarding instructors was from both one-on-one meetings and through emails.
Review of Related Literature
The types of literature that I am using for this thesis primarily includes WAC
books, journals and essays that deal with the problems of creating WAC programs and
the internal and external issues and problems that universally result within the college
institution. Although my focus is to show how one part of an already established WAC
program was initiated, grew and ultimately was dismantled, the literature incorporated
makes connections to both the history of WAC programs and the future of these
programs.
My research includes references to many journals printed in the WAC Clearing
House, established and maintained at Colorado State University. This clearinghouse of
12
important journals and books that give critical insight into WAC programs was the most
invaluable tool for my thesis. I have included literature on WAC programs’
vulnerabilities within the institution, the moral and civic responsibilities that WAC
programs generate due to their main goals towards helping students become better writers
(at least at American River College), and specific journals on writing in psychology and
history courses and the struggles both for instructors teaching those courses and the
students enrolled in them. And finally, I have included literature on the changing attitudes
about general education itself and the connection these attitudes have with WAC
programs.
The focus of this thesis is grounded on years of study and research of how WID
programs and how writing programs within community colleges have been created and
utilized. A comprehensive outlook on WID theory and how it ultimately helps both
students and faculty has been outlined in Michelle Pracht’s article “Overcoming
Obstacles: How WID Benefits Community College Students and Faculty.”
In it, she lays out the most obvious contributions of WID programs to community
colleges over the years. The focus on community colleges is because this thesis is about a
community college WID program and because the very nature of teaching within a
community college institution presents both students and instructors with very specific
problems and/or issues that are generally not found in four-year institutions. Pracht
underscores that the very concept of time and how it is utilized in community colleges
immediately situates the institution as being a different type of environment, especially
13
for instructors who seem to have to perform multiple tasks (not exclusively in the
classroom) within a short time frame. The concept of WID is to help instructors develop
more streamlined grading processes in regards to student writing. Many instructors
welcome the idea of low-stakes writing in combination with their high-stakes writing
exams and/or papers. WID allows for this type of “easy” writing to more easily initiate
students (especially beginning writing students) into the mainstream of academic culture.
WID, by its very nature, attempts to give instructors different strategies on how to
provide feedback on their students’ writing. This new technique, for many instructors,
gives them “permission” to look at how they grade writing in a different way. For many
instructors teaching in disciplines outside of English, this new outlook of writing in terms
of what they want their students to learn and what is the best way to reach that outcome
can almost be an epiphany.
Pracht also explains the theory behind the basic principles of WID programs with
community college as being a vehicle that gradually introduces students into academic
discourse and the “language” that specific disciplines use while also reinforcing the
importance of writing and critical thinking skills within those disciplines. Pracht states
that the cornerstone of WID practice is to instill in students the idea of moving from
being an inactive learner to an “active learner who understands writing as a process and
to [become] more engaged with course material.” She uses the term “insider” as a way of
defining students who enter community college with all of their personal baggage (much
of what I discuss in Chapter 2), and begin to shed a lot of their own insecurities as a
14
student to one of becoming an “insider” who begins to have a greater awareness and
understanding of what it means to be a college student and how to write within the
discipline that they are learning within. This “culture of learning” as Pracht explains is
new to many students and WID helps students to gradually learn how to write more
academically as college students and to ultimately believe that they can be successful as
college students.
This thesis is written for students and educators who want to begin or expand a
Writing in the Disciplines (WID) approach to help beginning writing students learn
specific writing skills for specific courses that require writing in the community college.
However, it should be noted at the onset that the criticism of how ARC approaches basic
writers in the classroom has some basis in the literature, at least for its prevailing attitude,
that, unfortunately, many other 2 year and four year colleges also have. Marc Tucker,
past president of the National Center on Education and the Economy in Reference Guide
to Rhetoric and Composition, makes an extremely valid point as he states:
Non-existent standards are a part of the problem, not the solution.
Colleges that take whomever they can get in order to fill seats are in no
position to complain about the schools. If some part of the current capacity
of higher education has to be shut down if we institute appropriate
standards, then so be it - (164).
This is the cornerstone of the argument made in this thesis regarding the attitudes
and frustrations of many faculty and administrators regarding the need to fill seats
15
without any prerequisite for English 300-College Composition. Karen Greenberg and
Trudy Smoke, editors of the Spring 1995 edition of JBW go so far as to say, “[s]ome have
characterized basic writing programs as tracking systems for…nontraditional students”
and brand them as “being different” and have asserted that basic writing courses
“ghettoize students” to such a degree that they feel the stigma pervasive throughout the
institution.
The questions should also be asked: how do instructors feel about remedial
students and even feel about themselves having to teach these types of students? It is a
question that underscores the feelings both outwardly and inwardly from perspectives of
all different types of instructors and even administrators. It is a prevailing attitude that
definitely opened the eyes of this graduate student working for years in the WAC
program trying to tackle these issues by instituting another type of program: a Learning
Group/ WID program within the WAC program. The WAC program at American River
College has always worked within the parameters of helping basic writers weed through
the daunting writing assignments that they are not prepared for. Given this, the WAC
program itself has initiated writing assignments that are adapted to meet the specific
needs of English departments and their respective writing centers. Because of these
adaptations, there is no one specific model that works entirely for all departments. In fact,
this thesis underscores how one WAC program has incorporated a WID model and has
adapted it to fit the needs of both kinds of students it is serving to fit within the current
“writing center” program with as little disruption as possible to the status quo. It should
16
also be noted that much of the literature pertaining to WID programs deals specifically
within the discipline in which writing takes place. This exclusive focus on different types
of writing such as ethnographic writing in anthropology disciplines, oral history writing
in social history disciplines, theory writing within the economics discipline, analytical
writing in the science disciplines, all contribute to the knowledge and understanding of
how to approach student writing within those forms specifically.
The added issue that the ARC WAC program dealt with, in fact the primary
reason for creating a WID program within the established WAC program, was to better
serve beginning writers and the very specific problems that these students deal with on a
daily basis and at the same time help support their writing skills within particular writing
disciplines and the requirement each discipline demanded. It must be noted that these are
two very distinct issues that the new WID program attempted to tackle. Regardless of
how one defines a WID program, whether it is, as Charles Bazerman, editor of Reference
Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum, states, “[t]hese inquiries have gone under
various names – Rhetoric of Science, Rhetoric of Inquiry, Writing in the Disciplines, and
English for Specific Purposes” (66), the point is that WID programs are designed, by
whatever name you want to give them, to help students within specific disciplines and not
necessarily help beginning writers. At the very least, it seems, the concept of WID
programs does help beginning writers in so much that it helps all students within the
discipline of anthropology if the writing assignments deal specifically with ethnographic
writing that relies on the student offering self-scrutiny or self awareness within the
17
constructs of the human condition. Sociology, too, can naturally tap into beginning
writers’ strengths since most people find it easier to write a narrative about themselves
and their environment. Narrative writing does not necessarily require heavy analysis of
one’s self of his/her personal history, a skill which many beginning writers lack, in order
to explain to their readers what conclusions they have made about themselves. The
dimension between what WID programs are designed to accomplish for all students and
the special needs of beginning writers, thrust into this scholarship of writing, is almost
unconnected to each other. The issues would seem separate to most people; however, the
problem, although distinct, is primary to the evolution of the Learning Group program at
ARC. It could be argued that even Bazerman’s article, “What Written Knowledge Does,”
reflects the primary scope of investigating “the character and role of disciplinary texts” in
order to better understand the rhetorical requirements that students would have to write
in. Bazerman focuses on “how [writers] argue within differing landscapes of authorial
role, audience stance, object studied, and disciplinary literatures” (80) to the extent to
how each text within each discipline is connected to these types of writing. What
continues to be absent is an identification of how the beginning writer fits within this
theory.
Susan Peek MacDonald, in her article “Professional Academic Writing in the
Humanities and Social Sciences,” asserts that even fewer studies have been done
regarding the humanities and social sciences, the two disciplines in which many
beginning writers in college seem to excel due to the standards (or requirements) of
18
introspective writing and how it pertains to themselves or society as a whole. MacDonald
“found that there were systematic relations between the grammatical and lexical features
of the texts to the motives and epistemologies” (83) within these two disciplines and how
the student “frames and investigates problems” at least in terms of how social sciences
are “conceptually driven.” Beginning writers rely on basic sentence-level writing
structure as opposed to the larger argumentative structures required by Humanities; these
argumentative structures are more complex than beginning writers are able to
comprehend. They require more analytical thinking and writing than a historical research
paper would demand.
It is within these different frames of writing that the WID program at ARC had to
concern itself when constructing a viable alternative from the current WAC program. The
question was asked: What can the new WID program provide its students that the current
WAC program cannot (or is not)? The answer was clear, at least to me and the WAC
coordinator, that the WAC program found it difficult to help beginning writing students
in various forms of writing disciplines. It simply was not designed to do that. Instructors
working in the WAC program were, of course, competent to help students with any type
of writing assignment, to an extent. But it would take a WID program to really focus on
the specific types of writing styles that students, whether proficient writers or not, would
have to perform in.
As stated earlier in regards to the different titles given to WID type programs,
English for Specific Purposes comes as close to any other types of theory models that the
19
ARC WID program designed itself around. This is only because ESP programs deal
specifically with English as a Second Language learners (whom ARC WAC also
assisted) in which these students were taking courses specifically designed for
professional interest such as nursing, home health care providers, even auto mechanics. J.
Swales, in the article “Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings,”
created the model known as Create A Research Space (CARS) which consists of three
sections: “establishing a territory; establishing a niche; occupying that niche” (84). In
simple terms, the model showed students how to make a claim regarding their subject
matter and the review of literature involved. Then, it showed them how to make a counter
claim and raise questions and finally give the principal findings of the research. These
three sections are exactly what the WID program at ARC designed for all of the
psychology assignments for which students were required to write analytical papers on.
Because the CARS model essentially dealt with beginning types of writers, this slow
progression into the scholarly world of scientific writing was very useful.
Bazerman, himself, asks the question as to “whether writing instruction as
commonly carried out in the university is equipping students with linguistic tools or
coercing them into accepting the dominant discourse” (100). This underscores one of the
most important concerns that I, myself, had in terms of tutoring beginning writers with
specific writing assignments within specific disciplines. Time is a factor. There is no
question that only so much time can be spent reviewing the prompt with students,
breaking down the prompts, outlining, writing rough drafts, and reviewing final drafts.
20
Because of the time limitations, the time we would have spent actually equipping
students with the tools they would normally strengthen as the semester progressed was
spent, for beginning writers, focusing more on sentence level errors rather than writing
concepts and analytical ideas.
L. Delpit, in her article, “The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse,” seems to
feel strongly that students should not be spoon fed any kind of dominant discourse within
any discipline, especially if it contradicts a student’s personal “language of their homes
and communities” (101). It is the same uncomfortable feeling that I get every time I
attempt to instruct a student on the writing performance requirements from a particular
assignment, knowing that the students writing abilities (or lack thereof) may be especially
connected to them being allowed to offer any personal narrative that may actually
strengthen their argument.
To really examine the ongoing argument regarding how WAC or WID programs
offer a genuine service to students just entering the academy, one can look at how Victor
Villanueva in his chapter “The Politics of Literacy Across the Curriculum” in WAC for
the New Millennium relates to how “students and everyone involved in WAC work on
discourse, work critically and consciously on conventions, and work on swapping what
other disciplines are discovering about economics and political power” (174) The real
crux of what Villanueva is getting at regards the very real question as to whether or not
we, as educators, are subverting the educational consciousness of the student? As I state
repeatedly in Chapter 2, the underlying issues that go along with and even beyond the
21
student’s ability to learn is many times ignored, and I would argue that we, especially
those working in community college, cannot afford to ignore how each student that we
come across got to where he or she is today in terms of their writing ability (or lack
thereof). Villanueva attempts to underscore the disservice we do to both students and
ourselves as teachers when we only start where students have left off. In other words, the
history and social background of a student is just as important as all the work that the
student will need to achieve from this point on to learn how to write within the academy
and be accepted by his or her peers within the college system. I express my concern about
these types of students in chapter two, and I discuss the social immorality of setting these
students up for failure if we, as an educational institution, dismiss the past and only focus
on the present. I address this issue not because it is a primary scope of this thesis, but
because one cannot research how these types of students are affected by a WID program
without addressing what Villanueva believes is essential to understanding the core issues
that each student brings into the classroom regarding their fears, trepidations and, in some
cases, unwillingness to examine their own deficiencies about writing. Villanueva so aptly
puts it when he states, “in remaining conscious of our own predisposition in early drafts
[of a student’s writing], to give free reign to cultural discourse, we stand a chance of
doing our job of assuring student’s access to the places they wish to go by way of the
academy without erasing where they’ve been” (175). This has been, and remains, a very
real concern of mine since, due to the very nature of working in a WAC and WID
program, I constantly see students who desperately need to learn the discourse of
22
academic language and to write within that discourse. But I fear, through the process of
the writing practices that we are attempting to instill in our students, that we are chipping
away, or maybe even tearing, large chunks of cultural organization that students have
already learned in order to get by. Yet I find myself in the middle of these concerns,
walking a thin line regarding both the responsibility and promise that I have made with
instructors who are expecting me to help their students learn the discourse of the
discipline that they are teaching. I also have a responsibility to help teach the first-year
and/or beginning writing student the conventions of academic discourse that he/she will
need to be successful. Both are relying on me. But at what cost do I offer my help?
As I write in a narrative structure in Chapter 2, it is this authentic voice that we, as
instructors, seem to want to keep hidden away almost as if it displays a lack of writing
aptitude. Delpit goes so far as to state that teaching students this way actually “furthers
their oppression” within the community of student writers. Obviously, there is resistance
to this notion of what some may say contributes to the non-mainstream student’s inability
to write academically, further disabling these types of student’s ability to succeed in the
classroom. But as I have contended from the beginning of my argument, these students
are already fractionalized. Any steps taken to embolden these students within their own
writing community can only be a good thing.
Similarly to Delpit, Halasek argues in her article, “A Pedagogy of Possibility:
Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies,” that we must “change the academy to
fit the student’s language uses, not change their language use to fit the academy” (101).
23
She does not go so far as to say that we should throw out current academic discourse,
however; her ideas regard a more focused approach to “conventions and form over that
which is generative and critical” (101). I have, nevertheless, come to understand that we
should embolden a student’s writing (especially beginning student writers) in terms of
focusing on their current form and approach to writing instead of simply overlooking it.
Focusing exclusively on what their instructor’s perspective on writing discourse does not
allow, and in some cases, destroys a student’s ability to understand other writing
conventions. It is a fine edged sword that WAC and WID tutors align themselves on
every time they help a student with his/her writing.
Chapter Summaries
Chapter 2 begins with a short narrative on my own personal point of view
regarding tutoring and the types of students who are being tutored. I did this because
although the focus of this thesis is to give some insight into how one college writing
tutoring program developed a whole new extension to their WAC program, the lives that
a writing tutoring program touches extend beyond just the students it serves, but includes
the tutors and instructors who also work, many behind the scenes, to support these types
of programs that affect everyone’s lives. If this particular chapter helps its reader to better
understand me as a teacher, then that is enough; however, writing about student/teacher
relationships in terms of writing has always been a fundamental reason that I have chosen
this profession. I believe that helping students become better writers also means
24
understanding and caring about their individual needs and problems beyond the
classroom.
Chapter 3 deals with the history of the WAC program that is discussed in this
thesis. The chapter gives a timeline approach that shows the conception, growing years
and the “leaving home” phase regarding how the newly developed “Learning Group” part
of WAC separated from its original configuration. I also include my own personal history
with the WAC program at American River College to give the reader a context regarding
my viewpoints based on my experience and history with WAC in terms of how my
specific work in the program initiated and helped in developing the new part of the
writing tutoring program. It is important to understand that this chapter in particular gives
the reader my own personal interpretation of how and why a writing center was
developed the way it was and how a WAC program was an “offshoot” to the writing
center. I give my own interpretations and opinions only because I have personally worked
in almost every writing program that has been offered at the school where I was
employed and experienced, first hand, the reasons behind the development of a writing
center that many in this field may not recognize as a traditional writing center. The same
is true regarding the development of the WAC program who many might (and have)
labeled as really being a writing center with a tutoring component. Hopefully, as this
thesis progresses, the understanding of these programs and how they work will also
enable the reader to have a good understanding as to why a WID program was put
together as one will see in Chapter 4.
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Chapter 4 discusses the impetus for a new program and explains how the need for
a new part of the WAC program, (WID), was necessary to serve the needs of students in
specific courses that required college level writing for tests and essays but did not require
a prerequisite for this level of writing. This chapter also includes a description of the new
program including some example modules that I developed for specific courses for
history, psychology and anthropology and the types of writing skills necessary for those
specific disciplines designed for students.
Finally, Chapter 5 draws in more literature regarding the disciplines of writing
and how this new program affected both students and faculty. In terms of faculty, this
project looks at both the instructors that WID helped and the instructors who worked in
the program to assist these instructor’s students. Because the dynamics are so completely
different, it is interesting to understand how instructors who are utilizing the WID
program interact with the WID staff and how the instructors who are already working and
tutoring in the program are asked to incorporate a new type of curriculum that is
completely different from what instructors have been asked to do in the past. Chapter 5
also discusses the future of the program. This section is definitely the most intriguing
since the last two years of putting together a WID component to the English department
has been extremely interesting. It really has been a work in progress with many
successful ideas and some ideas not so successful. Chapter 5 will also outline a very
specific structure that, through trial and error, has finally enabled the program to solidify
26
a specific curriculum that has also allowed the course to become a lecture class with
transferable units.
27
Chapter 2
THE STUDENTS OF WAC TUTORING – A NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE
I get in there, and everything seems okay.
But as soon as we start writing, I freeze up.
I’m a crummy writer, I know it.
I know I’m gonna make lots of mistakes and look stupid.
I panic.
And I stop coming.
-Mike Rose,
“Lives on the Boundary”
I am learning how to teach college students how to write better. I have taken
various courses in composition and rhetoric and have earned a degree in English. I am
employed at a community college and work in a student support services program called
Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC). Every day I come to work, unlock the door to my
rather nondescript office with its pale blue walls and generic office furniture. I turn on the
lights. I turn on my computer. I reposition the wastebasket that the custodian the night
before has emptied and put back in a different place that he seems to prefer. I check my
email. I check my calendar for today’s appointments and begin to go over in my brain
what the day will be like. Busy. Always busy. But this is where the consistency, alas,
drudgery of my job ends. This is because every day I see in students’ faces both the joy
of learning something new about themselves through their writing and the fear of
experiencing, once again, their perceived failures in their writing. I am learning how to
teach college students how to write better. However, I am doing so much more.
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I say “so much more” because I have realized, through years of tutoring students
in reading centers and writing centers, that one does not “teach” students how to write,
one helps provide them with the tools necessary to write better. In many cases, the most
important tool that I have given students is awareness. Students need to be made aware
that they have the ability to learn how to be successful in their writing. I say “made
aware” because so many students that I see come to me with preconceived beliefs about
their writing and have connected those beliefs with their own self-identity. As tutors and
teachers, we have all been there. Before even sitting down next to you, a student will
“warn” you that he or she is a terrible writer as they state “so don’t be shocked when you
see my writing.” I am never shocked. However, I immediately understand that my job
with this type of student will be much more then discussing writing content or sentence
structure or anything else that has to do with what is on the written page. My work, at
least initially, will be that of searching and probing and understanding the inner workings
of the student that sits before me. This, I believe, at the risk of over-stating, is the very
essence of helping students learn how to write better. You need to weed through many
years of “junk” before students will begin to allow awareness that they can learn how to
improve their writing. I say junk because a more eloquent word can only diminish the
reality of what has for years been learned, interpreted, thrown at, given, told, repeated,
and finally accepted as fact by a student who can sit down next to me and say, “don’t be
shocked when you see my writing.”
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This is actually a plea. That type of statement is a plea by the student to not be too
harshly judged. What they really mean is that: I know I am in college, and I know that I
should be writing better than this and I know that I should have gotten better grades in
high school and I know that I am not ready for school and I know that I probably don’t
belong here and I know that I probably won’t make it and I know that I’m not that smart
and I know that my writing sucks, I know, I know, I know…and now I want you to know
that I know so we both know. Junk!
My job begins with awareness. I am aware that this particular type of student has
already branded himself or herself as a bad writer. Moreover, if you think that you are a
bad writer, then you think that everyone else who reads your writing will think that you
are a bad writer. And if you are a bad writer, you must be a bad student. And if your
identity is that of a bad student, how can you possibly succeed in college? Why are you
here? The connections of negative self-image are endlessly cascading. So yes, I am more
than a tutor, learning how to be a teacher. To the students, I am risk. They will open the
door to themselves a crack and let you see their writing. As long as you don’t act too
shocked and don’t judge them as they have already judged themselves, they will open the
door a little wider. Then I realize, as my students realize, that the door opens both ways. I
want them to trust me, but I also have to trust them. I have to trust them to care enough
about themselves to want to do the hard work that will be necessary to become a better
writer. This thesis will discuss the relationship between me and students who want to
become better writers, but I will also discuss those students who do not want to open the
30
door both ways. After all, this is scary stuff to someone who has decided that he or she is
a poor writer. They have failed before, many, countless times, so why “go there” once
again. It is especially scary for students who have trouble breaking down the essay
prompt for their history essay or students who have never had to decipher the difference
between summarizing and analyzing for their psychology paper. Getting through the
“mental” junk is the essence of my job. Making a student aware of his/her potential to
learn and become a better writer is the essence of my job.
Writing is a reflection of one’s self-image. Our writing tells readers many things
about us. Many times it gives out clues as to where we live or our ethnicity, depending on
our word choices and slang. Sometimes our penmanship can divulge our gender. Our
writing can certainly help to disclose our education level. What we write and how we
write leaves all of us vulnerable to being judged, criticized and even rejected by people.
Writing is a risk that we all take every day. If we are confident in our writing, we our
confident in many other areas of our lives. If, however, we are not confident in our
writing, the basis of low self-esteem, doubt and fear of rejection by those around us can
be, in many respects, debilitating. Many times, we don’t come to realize this until after
we leave high school. We realize then that our options are limited in many respects. If we
are in the work force, any chance of promotion is directly tied, in many cases, to our level
of education. If we are fresh out of high school, our options become limited as to what
classes we can take or what classes we can succeed in. Both scenarios are directly related
to our ability to write at an academic level in order to succeed in college. It is this
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awareness of our writing that paints our life canvas. My life canvas, for example, has
always been partially unpainted. I like it that way. I hope that my canvas will always be a
little empty, leaving me room to continue painting my life through new experiences and
challenges. On the other side of the spectrum, however, are those who have completely
painted their own life canvas as being finished. There are no empty spaces to continue
painting because there are no other options left open to them. Sadly, many of the students
that I see come through my office have already painted their canvas. They see very little
empty space to fill because they believe their limitations in their writing skills have
created barriers that they cannot overcome. I suppose, in many ways, we all do this to
some extent. Moreover, maybe my metaphor of a life canvas would be better stated as
one’s life mural, because, to some extent, most of us learn how to overcome our own
barriers in life by simply changing our life murals. We adapt and reconsider our options
and simply redefine the barriers. I like this metaphor because I have seen with my own
eyes how many students become aware of their own abilities to learn how to become a
better writer. Through their awareness, they have begun to do the hard work that it takes
to write better. And at the other side of that door, they have become self-confident and
self-assured in their ability to succeed in college. They have thrown out their old life
canvas and created new life murals for them with a lot of empty space on it. The personal
satisfaction that I receive when I see these students redefine themselves is difficult to
describe. Nevertheless, I will try.
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Let me be clear; I am not a counselor, I am definitely not a psychiatrist, and I am
certainly not a priest. The role I play is much more limited. However, the role I play does
permit a special relationship to exist between a student and me. It is the role of writing
tutor that permits me to cultivate relationships with students that become, at times, quite
personal. There is, of course a balance that must be found between getting to the root of a
particular student’s issues with writing and listening to his/her personal adversities in life.
Nevertheless, the irony is that these two things are very much connected. The price that
many two-year (and four-year) college students pay to even be able to go to school (and I
am not talking about tuition) can seem incredible to the average person. New mothers
who can only spend a few minutes discussing their essay because they must pick up their
newborns from childcare or they will be charged for every minute that they are late.
Students who work an eight-hour shift until 2:00 am at Wal-mart, get four hours sleep so
they can study before they have to catch three buses just to get from their house to school
by 9 am. Handicapped individuals who use motorized wheelchairs to get around worried
that they will short out in the rain as they navigate down five blocks of street shoulders
with no sidewalks making every day an arduous task just to exist. Students who cannot
concentrate clearly in class because they have used up their medications that keep their
bipolar disorders in check. They sit, listless and apathetic, unable to comprehend their
writing assignments with any degree of clarity. Moreover, the homemakers who finish
their homework in the hallways and corridors of classrooms long after attending their
classes because their families do not support their educational endeavors. Middle-aged
33
men who have lost their jobs still angry and in shock over their plight in life attempting to
“relearn” how to write an essay in a history class filled with eighteen and nineteen year
olds. Russians, Hmongs, Mexicans, Koreans, Tanzanians, Filipinos, Cubans, Iranians,
Libyans, Indians - they sprout from all types of lifestyles, religions, and occupations, they
pay their tuition and register for classes, and find themselves immersed in an academic
language and curriculum expectations that are truly foreign to them. They become, as
Lad Tobin in his early writings, “Writing Relationships” so adeptly defines it,
“detach[ed] and confus[ed]” (24). Many of the students that pass through my door are
definitely detached from the expectations that their instructors have of them. Many
simply do not understand the writing requirements that teachers put upon them as I stated
earlier regarding the specific types of writing that a history instructor may demand such
as very short answer paragraphs that include specifically the 5 W’s (who, what where,
when and why) or anthropology instructors who many times require students to establish
a position on an issue, defend the issue and, propose a plan of action to deal with the
problem that the issue may be involved in, not to mention citing specific sources that, for
many students, is just as foreign an exercise as learning a mathematical equation.
Because of these types of obstacles, they begin to retreat and second-guess themselves.
They question their abilities that soon become proven as being inadequate when they are
faced with writing assignments that overwhelm them. These same students become
confused when they attempt to understand what it is they need to do and how to do it.
Many would suggest that these students are ill prepared to tackle college level courses,
34
and they might be right. However, the fact remains that they are here, they are going to
college, and they are taking courses that they are struggling in. They are here and they are
struggling.
In many ways, I see these students as the real heroes in the college where I tutor. I
listen to their stories and many of them let me into their little worlds of personal
adversities. It is true that we all have our stories to tell, and we all have had moments in
our lives that, at the time, seemed overwhelming or tragic. But I am talking about the
those who, on a daily basis, struggle and live through their personal demons and
handicaps and illnesses and rejections, and all the other baggage that they carry through
life and still continue to come to school and continue to keep trying to learn how to write
better so that, one day, they can reach a point in which they can enter the academy and
feel comfortable in it. They can participate in the dialogue in which those who have long
ago mastered academic writing have been sharing ideas and discussing interesting and
pertinent things. These students have become my heroes because, through their struggles
in learning how to become better writers, they have let me into their lives and have
trusted me not to judge them or have contempt for their inadequacies. These are the
relationships that I have valued with students over the years.
In 1993, Lad Tobin’s groundbreaking book “Writing Relationships – What Really
Happens in the Composition Class” opened up the dialogue regarding the roles that
student writers and teachers play and how these relationships manifest. The one point that
Tobin states which, for me, encapsulates a lot about the work that I have accomplished is
35
the fact that “there is just not much out there about interpersonal relationships and the
teaching of writing” (5). Tobin expresses an issue that I am pleased to contribute to
alleviating a little of the absence of discussion about the interpersonal relationships that
are created between the student writer and the teacher. It is the primary reason that I
made the decision to get a degree in composition and rhetoric. And every day that I read a
student’s writing and I help him/her improve his/her writing skills, it reinforces my
decision as being the right one. I get a lot of self-satisfaction from my work as an
Instructional Assistant at the WAC program where I work. The personal, human
connections that I make with almost every student I come in contact with are, for me, the
only reason to teach. Tobin expresses that “we have leapt over relationships to macro
theories about social construction, discourse communities, women’s ways of knowing,
sociocognitive theory, and cultural critique” (5) possibly at the expense of simply
examining and understanding what is really happening in regards to the relationship
between the student and the teacher. I would like to explore more fully this relationship
through my own experiences with the students that I teach at WAC. I know it is helping
me grow as a teacher of writing, and I hope it is helping the students that I tutor to
become better writers.
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Chapter 3
HISTORY, DESCRIPTION AND ASSESSMENT OF THE WAC/WID PROGRAM
Chapter 3 discusses the WAC outreach program by giving some context into the
history of the WAC program, a detailed description of the outreach program, and a
description of the program assessment as a whole. It is important to understand the roots
of the WAC program at ARC because without a specific course of events taking place,
the outreach program, titled the Learning Group program, would most likely have never
come to fruition. As with many types of student support programs, they are designed to
meet the specific needs of the English department and to make sure that they are
supported by administration. This was no different for the WAC program at ARC. This
was especially different for the Learning Group program, however.
WAC Program History
Because the WAC program has been a .5-unit class that students enrolled in, the
need to grow as a program became limited primarily to students who sought out and
actively registered in the program. The issue in regards to the program expanding has
also included how the program has been defined over the last two decades. The solution,
although discussed and debated for years, primarily by English faculty and
administration, has always included the obvious need to open up the WAC program to
more students across campus. Included in that scenario has been a need to define the
WAC program as more traditional in that it needed to include faculty from disciplines
other than English to help with tutoring students, but also for the WAC program to
37
eventually begin to help instructors design better writing assignments to use in their
classes. The result of this need for change came when the coordinatorship of the program
changed and a faculty member was hired to both run the current WAC program and at the
same time develop ways to reach out to instructors from other disciplines to help them
and their students with their writing assignments.
There were several reasons for the WAC program to take a new and different
approach in helping students to write. The fact that ARC is a community college which is
mandated by the state to accept any student who resides in California who wishes to
enroll has created some inherent problems with the additional non-English college
departmental policies of not requiring prerequisites for 300 college level courses. Many
students are simply unprepared and do not have the reading and writing skills necessary
to succeed in college. Because of this, ARC has focused huge amounts of resources to
student support programs to help these types of students learn the basic skills they need to
pass their classes. ARC statistics printed in the American River College Key Effectiveness
Indicators Five-Year Profile-KEI Report show that over 80% of first-year freshmen
enrolling in the WAC program pass all of their classes. The fact that the WAC program
tutors fewer than a thousand students each semester in a school who’s population exceeds
forty-thousand shows that many students who could benefit from any of the reading
and/or writing support programs at ARC are not. What should be recognized is that the
very concept of WAC at American River College was to primarily help students with
their writing. Traditionally, one might assume that many WAC programs are designed
38
primarily to help instructors put together better writing assignments for their classes. This
is true and the majority of WAC programs do believe helping instructors as being their
primary job, but it is important to understand that the needs at ARC determine how
student support service programs are constructed (as I would assume they are at every
college). Because ARC needed a one-on-one tutoring program that had not already been
designed within the structure of the ARC Writing Center, this program was developed
outside of the Writing Center and called “WAC” (Writing Across the Curriculum).
Outreach Program Description
Although I will focus in more detail as to how a WID program emerged, it is
important to realize, in a very real sense, how fundamental these changes helped to create
a whole new “branch” of the already established WAC program at ARC. The emphasis to
reach out to new and different instructors from disciplines other than English was the
basis for creating a WID program that would start small (only a few history classes,
psychology, and an anthropology class), but eventually open up the entire field of
tutoring to dozens of classes in which WAC tutors would be trained to help students with
the specific type of writing styles and the specific type of writing assignments that each
individual instructor and discipline required for their students.
Initially, this pilot program was set up in the Spring of 2008 to specifically target
students who were enrolled in 300 level college transfer classes that did not require any
English writing or reading courses as a prerequisite. The pilot program would be
coordinated by both the Reading Across the Discipline (RAD) program and the Writing
39
Across the Curriculum (WAC) program to “group” tutor students taking a social science
class that required college level reading and writing. The thrust of the RAD program
would be to focus on reading skills that would help these students learn how to annotate
and take notes, and organizational skills needed to complete reading assignments. The
WAC program would focus on writing skills that would help the same students learn how
to summarize, paraphrase, create a thesis, and outlining skills needed to complete writing
assignments. This would be the first time that the RAD and WAC programs would work
in conjunction with specific instructors in creating a group tutoring program that would
serve the specific needs of these students.
It is at this point that a design for more WAC outreach began. A relationship had
already been established with two instructors through the WAC interim coordinator, so a
continuation of that relationship seemed a natural progression for the WAC program to
initiate some new ways to help these instructors with their writing assignments. Instructor
“A” taught Women’s History and instructor “B” taught Basic Psychology, both 300transfer level courses. A third instructor, “C” who taught American History was also
added to the new WAC project, again, because of the relationship that was already
previously established within the WAC program.
All three of these instructors had been struggling with the ever increasing problem
of students enrolling in their courses without possessing the necessary writing skills to
accomplish the required writing assignments and/or writing exams that were assigned in
order to pass the class. The challenge in terms of coordinating a workable and organized
40
writing program for these three instructors was the fact that they were all teaching a
different course and they each had specific writing assignments that were unique to their
own teaching styles and student outcome requirements. For example, Instructor B
(Psychology) required students to complete a summary/ analysis paper based on a
scholarly article or journal material. Instructor A (Women’s History) required students to
prepare for in-class essay tests that answered the who, what, when, where, why and how
from the course text material. Instructor C (American History), also requiring an in-class
essay test, wanted students to examine the essay questions in more depth and in a more
traditional essay format.
A very important consideration regarding the best way to help students in all of
these different classes was how to put together a cohesive tutoring plan that was also
streamlined enough so that one was not “reinventing the wheel” when it came to teaching
basic writing skills for different types of writing and at the same time building a program
that was transparent and cohesive for new tutors to be added as student enrollment
increased. The first step was to determine all of the reading and writing commonalties
that students would experience in all three of these different classes.
Through brainstorming discussions, the first idea that came to mind was that
before any student could begin to tackle the writing requirements of his/her particular
class, a clear understanding of each test, assignment and writing prompt was necessary.
Again, this understanding is directly connected to the tutoring that WAC has been
administering from the very beginning. Before a student can understand how to approach
41
any writing assignment, he or she must have a clear understanding of the prompt.
Breaking down the prompt and putting it into language that the student can understand
became the first step of all of WAC’s tutorial sessions with each student. This became the
obvious beginning of all future tutorials, from workshops to modules. In regards to all of
the history courses that we were helping, in addition to the psychology and anthropology
classes, initial notes were taken during meetings with each instructor to determine what
were the main issues that students were having, at least from the instructor’s perspective.
What we finally came up with was a comprehensive course titled English 306.
Students would be required to enroll in the course from a ¼ unit up to a ½ unit depending
on the work that they accomplished. Each student would be required to attend one
orientation meeting and fill out an intake card that was color coded to his/her specific
class and instructor. For instance, Women’s History 300 students would receive pink
colored intake cards, Psychology 300 students would receive blue colored intake cards,
etc. It was essential for us to keep this information organized. The intake cards would
include basic information about the student: Name, course, units, phone number, email
address, etc. On the reverse side would be space for tutors to record information about
what the student accomplished and when, along with any important notes that would be
relevant for the following appointment. During the orientation, students would be
required to sign a contract that would specify exactly how much work the students would
be required to accomplish to receive credit. The contract was necessary because some
students would enroll in the WID program, do marginal work, and then argue at the end
42
of the semester that they should be given credit regardless. Students were also given a
follow-up appointment sheet that would list what they would have to do to be prepared
for that appointment. First appointments were always connected to a specific writing
assignment given to students by their psychology or history instructor. WID would put
together a “to do” list to get students started on a research paper or prepare for their next
in-class writing exam. Some students would return for this follow up appointment
completely prepared with a rough draft or an outline; others would be lacking in their
writing skills and come to this appointment with nothing done. It was at this first
appointment that a real assessment of what each student was capable of occurred.
Description of the Program Assessment
Program assessment is directly tied to student assessment with the WID program.
Once each student was assessed regarding his/her individual writing levels, he/she was
given a “Student Instructions” sheet which detailed what type of preparation each student
would have to do, such as write out an outline for a paper, or even to simply break down
the test prompt that his/her History instructor assigned. Assessment of the program was
done in three phases. The first phase was, within four weeks of each semester, to count
how many students had actually enrolled in Eng 306. This was important because the
WAC program had approximately 700-800 students enrolled each semester, and it was
important that the WID program had at least ten to twenty percent of that number. We
normally surpassed twenty percent, with approximately 160-180 students enrolling in
English 306. The second phase of assessment came in the middle of the semester when
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each tutor working in the WID program would evaluate the students that they had been
tutoring that semester. Was the student on track with his/her WID course work? Was the
student not coming to his/her appointments? How much time does the student have to
finish his/her WID course work before an important paper is due? These factors where
important enough for each tutor to contact students who were marginal and students who
needed to drop the program due to lack of performance. The third phase of assessment
was at the end of the semester when we simply listed how many students passed English
306 and how many did not. We recorded this into the school districts’ grading system via
computer and also gave instructors an Excel spread sheet of each student’s performance
so that they could give extra credit, if applicable.
It is important to repeat that the one primary focus was to teach students quickly
as we had very little time and opportunity to bring these students up to speed with the
writing assignments that their instructors were assigning. The program focused on
specific writing methods such as breaking down the prompt, outlining, researching,
taking notes, prewriting, revising and final draft writing in order to give students the basic
tools they would need to organize a first draft of their writing. Because I was also
concerned with all aspects of the program, my research questions focused primarily on
the three audiences. The audience of the students we were helping, the audience of the
instructors we were helping, and finally the audience of the entire English department
who would eventually judge for themselves whether or not the WID program (also titled
the Learning Group program) worked or needed more time to evolve. The program
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helped but also relied on these three audiences. The final research questions would be
connected to how the entire program worked and, in the end, whether or not it succeeded.
Did it succumb to budgetary problems? Did it try to do too much in too short a time
period? Was its success due to its small size and would it adequately handle the evergrowing enrollment with ever shrinking personnel? These are natural questions to want to
examine given the involvement that I had with co-coordinating the WID program.
Because the field of WAC and WID programs is so vast and continues to grow, I
limited my scope primarily with the problems that coordinators, or those putting together
WID programs seem to have and not so much with what types of writing practices are
being used. This thesis does not compare best practices in as much as it explains the
issues that instructors who were teaching transfer-level courses were having with students
unprepared to do the writing in order to successfully transfer. The scope of this thesis
stayed within the parameters of the issue or the problem that beginning writing students
were having at ARC and how a WID program could be designed to give them immediate
help with their writing.
The scope of my research primarily centered on students who had not completed
English 300 and enrolled in transfer-level courses that recommended English 300. The
specific courses that I focused on were History 311 (American History), History 321
(American History with African-American Influence), History 330 (Women’s History),
History 327 (Hispanic History), Psychology 300, and Anthropology 300.
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During a span of four years, I co-coordinated a WID program that served
beginning writing students in these courses. For the purposes of this thesis, however, I
will go into detail as to how instructional assignments, tutoring sessions and final results
regarding pass/fail rates affected students in Psychology 300 and History 311 who
participated in this WID program. In addition to discussing students’ issues, this thesis
will also discuss issues that instructors had to deal with. The information that I compiled
regarding students was primarily through group tutoring sessions, one-on-one discussions
and a final survey at the end of each fall semester. The information that I compiled
regarding instructors was from both one-on-one meetings and through emails.
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Chapter 4
EFFECT ON TEACHERS, TUTORS AND STUDENTS
This chapter puts into perspective how building a new student support writing
program effects everyone associated with it. By far, most of the effects were positive and
everyone associated with the WID program learned many new things about writing but
also about teaching and learning. The fact that I spent a good amount of time building
relationships and making important connections with both teachers and students
emphasized how the work that we do is very human. We are dealing with people’s
passions about teaching as well as people’s fears about learning. Chapter 4 focuses on
how building relationships ultimately creates an environment for teachers to trust tutors
to help them create better writing assignments and to encourage their students to enroll in
the new WID program. The chapter also delves into the moral issue of teaching college
students and discussing where the lines are drawn regarding faculty responsibility and
student responsibility regarding allowing people to enroll in courses that they are
academically unprepared for. At the very least, the new WID program created an
environment in which instructors were willing to try new things and revise old
assignments and course outlines. In this chapter, the need to “stay off the radar” when
creating a new program is also discussed. The ability for WID tutors to work with both
faculty and students without creating a lot of awareness from other people is explored. I
also look at the current literature to understand how curriculum-based tutoring is
changing and how it is being redefined depending on the needs of different academic
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institutions. Finally, I look at how curriculum-based tutoring also creates strong
relationships with students who utilize the WID program and show how the program was
used at ARC in psychology and history classes.
Effect on Teachers
Before discussing the effect that the new WID program had on teachers, tutors,
and students, it is important to define exactly what the WID program was, or at least what
it was trying to become. Those familiar with WID programs also understand that the
terminology, at least in regards to the type of WID program that American River College
was incorporating into its current WAC program, can also be known as CurriculumBased Tutoring. We were, after all, tutoring within the confines of specific types of
curriculum and focusing only on very specific writing assignments written by
psychology, history and anthropology instructors. The term “mentoring” would also be
appropriate in as much as we were seeing the same students each week and discussing the
assignments and how to approach the writing within the strengths that each particular
student felt comfortable with. In Terry Zawacki’s article, “Writing Fellows as WAC
Change Agents: Changing What? Changing Whom? Changing How?” she discusses how
Writing Fellow programs are a way for “the fellow's ability to negotiate both in response
to the teacher's and students' expectations” (116). This is a good definition of the type of
role that I and all of the other Learning Group tutors played as we traversed the different
landscapes of dealing with both instructors and their students on a regular basis. One of
the ongoing arguments, or at least issues, when discussing using Writing Fellows in a
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WAC program is whether or not the student tutor should only tutor within the scope of
his/her major or be allowed to be a “generalist tutor” who approaches any type of writing
assignment within the constructs of good practices in terms of writing. I can speak for the
Learning Group tutors at ARC that we were not a program, such as the one that Zawacki
had put together at George Mason University, in which they sought out specific students
who were good writers and were majoring in a particular field of study. We used our
current staff tutors, albeit the more adept ones, who already had proven themselves to be
experienced and who could also work with a variety of different instructors. The key to
the success of the program was our ability to interact with different instructors from a
variety of disciplines in a positive working environment. Unfortunately, we had no
specific WID training or Writing Fellow program of which tutors could take advantage.
The training that was incorporated included constant one-on-one and group meetings
with me and all of the tutors to discuss best writing practices and talk about what worked
and what did not work. We all had a steep learning curve in respect to understanding all
of the different types of writing assignments and becoming familiar with a certain amount
of content within each discipline in order to be able to assist each student. I suppose we
all eventually became somewhat specialized in terms of helping students with
psychology, history and/or anthropology writing assignments.
However, I return to my ongoing concern, and the primary goal of the new
Learning Group program, which was that we were creating inroads to helping instructors
just as much as we were helping students. Because many instructors are so aware of the
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challenges that their students have in regards to accomplishing real academic writing,
many tend to reflect this awareness in how they write their assignments in order to get
back some semblance of adequate student writing. Even with this said, it is rare for an
instructor to admit that his/her expectations of the assignment may be unrealistic due to
how the assignment was written, or worse, how the material is being taught. It takes a lot
of time to create a mutual understanding and trust in regards to the goals of both teacher
and WAC tutoring to work together for what is ultimately best for the student. When that
trust is reached, however, really good work can take place. The teacher realizes that
maybe his/her approach or how he/she write his/her prompts can be revised to help
students understand what exactly the instructor wants. The instructor realizes that just
because he/she have been using the same assignment for years doesn’t mean that revising
it is an admission that they have been doing it wrong for years. On the contrary,
instructors who invite outside assistance realize that their expectations regarding their
students writing are, indeed, correct, and that revising writing prompts or taking on a new
and fresh approach on how to initiate good writing from their students is necessary and
academically healthy.
Getting Buy-In
As with any new program, getting any type of buy-in requires trust. As faculty
members began to trust WAC tutors, they began to express more of their frustrations with
the type of writing they were getting back from their students. Trust is the beginning
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step, but ultimately the real gauge of a success requires strong enrollment and the
numbers, as they say, say it all.
It was always important to keep enrollment in the program as high as possible.
Again, we deal with another moral issue with this type of thinking regarding the front end
of any program that wants to start their semesters with high enrollment. But ultimately,
sustaining that enrollment and the final pass/fail rate at the end of the semester is an
important indicator of how well any student support program is really helping students
and meeting the needs of the community. This, I will admit, was a problem. The fact the
Learning Group program was an offshoot of the core WAC program gave it some cover,
so to speak. Initial success was established, at first, in getting a handful of history and
psychology instructors to “buy in” to it. It is important to understand the core impetus
that has really resulted in the WAC program at American River College to even want to
extend itself, even more so, to specific students who are literally swimming in a sea of
required writing in transfer-level courses that they are unprepared for. The dialogue
among many instructors regarding this issue at some point touches on the morality of
allowing unprepared students to enroll in these types of classes. This, I believe, is why
the WAC program becomes so crucial to this mindset of morality within the constructs of
writing. In John Pennington’s and Robert Boyer’s essay, “A Reflective Strategy for
Writing Across the Curriculum: Situating WAC as a Moral and Civic Duty,” the authors
focus on how WAC programs themselves should be looked at as being “integral to the
educational process” (89). There is no doubt among practically the entire faculty tutoring
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in the ARC WAC program and the history and psychology instructors who are requiring
their students to enroll in WAC that the program is vital to student success. This is not at
issue. What is at issue is the notion that students who are not prepared for transfer level
courses are allowed to enroll in them at their own peril.
Within this specific question lies the very real function of WAC as reforming, or
at the very least, giving light to this very real problem. If the idea of WAC at ARC is to
define itself as a movement to reform the way instructors present their writing
assignments to students unfamiliar with those kinds of writing prompts and, at the same
time, helping these same students understand how to approach these kinds of writing
assignments, then WAC can be considered a reform effort, at least in terms of finally
focusing its tutoring efforts to help these specific students with very specific writing
prompts. The morality question, however, still remains and will until fundamental
changes in course prerequisites are addressed.
Pennington and Boyle discuss how WAC programs situate themselves within an
“ethical space” (90) in terms of the help that they offer. This is quite obvious given the
issues I have presented. However, when presenting to specific instructors how WAC
might help their students with their writing assignments, it is not presented in terms of the
ethical response to an immoral problem. The irony is that many instructors realize the
problem, want to address the problem that students are having with writing, but stop short
of addressing the ethical issue of allowing unprepared students to enroll in courses they
will very likely fail or ultimately drop out of.
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This is the inevitable restraint that WAC programs come across and may be the
reason that WAC programs are viewed by many educators as the instigator of the
morality of teaching students how to write better. The history and science teachers who
have participated in the ARC Learning Groups program (WID), have definitely come to
view it not only as a very valuable tool that their students can utilize, but also, to a certain
extent, be used as a reasonable solution to any instructors struggling with their own issues
of conscious who may also be struggling with the reality that they are teaching a handful
of unprepared students whom they know will not succeed in their class.
It was the issue of the morality of teaching, if you will, that we used as a trump
card when addressing many instructors regarding the sheer numbers of students enrolling
in their classes completely unprepared to tackle the writing assignments. The discussions
that we were having with most instructors at times became very personal in regards to
this idea of morality. They knew the problems; and they were frustrated with a way to
address the problems. The new WID program was at least a possible answer to their
frustration of having to drop or fail so many of their students whose writing levels simply
were not high enough to do the work that was assigned. This was the initial buy-in that
inspired teachers to help us serve their students.
Surprisingly, this issue is discussed at every semester meeting that I have with
each individual instructor involved with the Learning Group program. And although it is
an issue that most instructors obviously recognize, even when the reality of the situation
is put before them, the ultimate responsibility, according to most faculty, rests with the
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student who is determined to enroll in his or her course without the writing skill set to
pass the course. That is why, when going to each class at the beginning of every
semester, I make an effort to emphasize to students who have not passed English 300,
that it is vital that they enroll in the WID Learning Group program. It is always surprising
to me and to other instructors that only a handful of their students ever take advantage of
the program. After speaking with many instructors regarding students who have not
passed English 300 and did not enroll in the Learning Group program, more than 90%
fail or drop out of the course. Again, I return to the idea of remaining stealthy within the
English department but maintaining a healthy, if not rigorous, relationship with other
faculty members so we could get the word out that there was this new part of WAC that
may interest some instructors. The effect was very positive and the buy-in from many
instructors became more solid.
Change in Faculty Attitudes and Pedagogy
We knew, as a new program, that it was essential for these instructors to want to
work with the program through providing writing exam prompts ahead of time, allowing
Learning Group tutors to come to their classrooms at the beginning of each semester and
discuss how we could help their students by tutoring them specifically on the writing
portion of their exams in addition to the essays that they would be writing. But, most
importantly, we knew that we needed each instructor to offer an incentive or extra credit
if their students enrolled in the Learning Group program. This was not as easy as it may
seem because many instructors, especially those who have been teaching for quite some
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time, have established long-serving syllabi’s and changing them would be difficult.
However, the problem that many of these instructors were dealing with regarding
student’s inability to write academically in their class seemed to overshadow any
disruption this caused in changing their course outlines. They were frustrated instructors
seeking help and we wanted to offer it to them.
In terms of instructors changing or at least revising their pedagogy in how they
taught their classes based on what the Learning Group program was doing, many
instructors began to literally request feedback from myself and other WID tutors on how
to improve the wording of their writing assignments. These same instructors, once they
became comfortable with what the WID program was trying to accomplish, began asking
for input on how to incorporate the Learning Group assignments into their own lectures.
This is not to say that instructors had changed their view on how they teach. On the
contrary, some instructors actually pointed out some problems with the way we were
approaching writing techniques that were not entirely conducive with the way they
wanted their assignments written. This give and take approach was a very successful part
of the WID program. I began to see, for the first time, that it was the creation of
relationships, not only with students, but especially with instructors--that would be the
linchpin to the success of any writing program, and especially the WID program.
Many times I would walk down the halls where instructors’ offices were located
and was asked for my opinion or advice on a new writing assignment that a particular
instructor was thinking about adding. Writing exams that instructors had been using for
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years were now being given to me to read and revise if needed. The WAC coordinator
and I even discussed and finally wrote an entire new final exam for a history teacher who
was frustrated with the prolific plagiarism that was taking place simply due to the overly
general prompt that she was using. The coordinator and I worked on putting together a
new type of take-home exam that required students to give their opinion on a particular
woman in history and then support that opinion with specific details. The breakdown of
the prompt began with a list of women’s names that the instructor had been discussing
throughout the semester. The student was to choose two names. Then, from a list of
approximately fifty attributes or characteristics such as “leadership,” “intelligence,” or
“provocative,” the student was to choose three. Breaking down the paragraphs through
each characteristic, the student had to write a compare/contrast essay by giving a specific
example of how each woman compares to each one of the characteristics but also explain
the contrast of how each woman uses the characteristic in a different way from her
counterpart. Students would have to find their own specific examples to show how each
woman compares and contrasts. The final conclusion paragraph asked students to explain
how each woman, because they had the attributes, for example, of being “brave,”
“organized” and “thoughtful” were able to make an important mark on women’s history
and finally make a connection and explain how this positive mark on history affected
people, especially women, to this day.
After rewriting this exam, the instructor emailed me stating how enthusiastic she
was about the prospect of reading fresh and different essays based on the new prompt;
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but more importantly, she was grateful to have a new take-home writing exam that would
be almost impossible for students to plagiarize and simply “copy and paste” content from
the internet (which was what many students had been doing for years).
One recurring issue that I noticed in many of the older writing prompts was that
instructors were asking students to write about content that was overly broad. Many
times, there was no requirement for students to give any real analysis about what they
were writing about or to simply explore content as to how it affects them personally. As
we worked with instructors, we reinforced the idea that, in the era of computers and the
internet, constructing writing prompts that require the student to give personal analysis or
to include a personal experience that must be connected to the overall content of the
essay and/or main point that the student is making, makes plagiarizing difficult.
Tutor Roles – An Uneasy Alliance
Martha Townsend, author of “WAC Program Vulnerability and What To Do
About It,” correctly emphasizes how “WAC programs are amorphous and open ended;
and evaluating successful WAC programs is as complicated as evaluating good teaching
or successful learning” (48). This was true at the initial stages of the WID program and
Townsend’s belief remained true throughout the program’s history. That is precisely why
we made the decision early on to keep this new Learning Group program very specific
within the constraints of using, at first, only one tutor in the WAC program to help
students (ultimately using up to four tutors as time went on) and to not advertise the new
program to other English instructors. We felt that a stealthy approach, at first, would at
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least give the program a fighting chance without too much scrutiny from other instructors
or administrators. Townsend goes on to say that “a great deal of any WAC program’s
success relies on the person directing it” (49). This was also a tricky maneuver to
navigate since I was not an instructor; I was an Instructional Assistant. I had absolutely
no power as to budgetary funds, could not schedule instructors, or even, supposedly,
write lesson plans (although I did do the latter). I worked within the supervision of a
WAC coordinator, who oversaw my work and was extremely helpful in paving the way
for the Learning Group program. Obviously, without my supervisor’s support and
guidance, the Learning Group program and my ability to direct it would not have been
possible. These factors led to the stealth atmosphere of the program. I would not be
surprised if many WAC programs, or student support programs, were headed by tenured
instructors who relied on Instructional Assistants to provide the real stewardship of the
program. Such was my role with the Learning Group program at ARC.
I was responsible for every aspect of the program and, with the supervision of the
WAC coordinator, wrote all of the program writing assignments and prompts for students
to complete. I scheduled my own students to tutor and had ultimate authority on how and
what each student was to focus on in regards to their writing homework in the program. I
checked in with all of the history and psychology instructors on a regular basis, and I was
the person that they contacted if they had any questions. At the very least, I was
performing beyond my official job description. However, I knew that my learning curve,
although steep in some areas, was invaluable experience for my future endeavors as a
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teacher and learning the fundamentals of running a student support writing program. As
Townsend also states, “[one] of the most important components of faculty development is
creating relationships between the WAC program and the faculty who are doing the
teaching” (53). My philosophy regarding this was not, at first, to create stronger
relationships with faculty who worked in WAC, but to create strong relationships with
instructors teaching history, psychology and even anthropology courses that required
extensive writing. It was important for me to become very familiar with each course and
the requirements of each course so as to customize writing assignments for Learning
Group students to work on that was directly linked to their course subjects. The effect on
many students was relief that they had found a tutoring program that was available to
them and would help them with the writing aspect of the course, at least at first.
I return to Pennington’s and Boyer’s article on how WAC programs are situated
as a moral and civic duty. This is important to realize because with this new Learning
Group program at ARC, we plunged ourselves into the morality question not only of a
WAC program’s responsibility towards students, but the moral disconnect between the
instructor and the student. The Learning Group program requires many conversations
with both students and instructors as to what our role should be. For example, how far do
we, as tutors, assist students with in-class essay test questions? Do we simply have
students practice breaking down the prompt (an extremely important part of the writing
process for these particular students), or do we concentrate on essay structure? Do we
emphasize time management? How much information do we instruct students regarding,
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for example, historical content within their writing? That clearly is not our role, but the
urge to help students to correct important facts and dates is, many times, irresistible.
Margot Soven, in her chapter “Curriculum-Based Peer Tutors and WAC” in WAC for the
New Millennium, focuses directly on the issue of the role of the tutor in WAC programs.
She states, “the most dramatic change in the role of the peer tutor vis-à-vis WAC is the
emergence of curriculum-based peer tutoring programs” (201). Soven acknowledges
how WAC programs, even entire departments, have, in a sense, reevaluated or simply
recognized how, as she describes, WAC Fellows, to be an integral necessity for faculty to
utilize in helping develop curriculum-based tutoring. For the purposes of this thesis, the
term WAC Fellow is more accurately described as an Instructional Assistant (I.A.) at
American River College. These are well paid positions and are classified as both
permanent and temporary staff and, in most cases, require a bachelor’s degree and
preferably a master’s degree to work in the WAC program. At ARC, my responsibilities
were vast and many times, such as working as the co-coordinator of the Learning Group
(WID) program, were definitely out of my job description title. Nevertheless, regardless
of the title being that of WAC Fellow or WAC I.A., the work and responsibilities were
very rewarding and very interesting.
But it is important to discuss the issue of working out of my job description (also
known as “working out of class”). It is a tricky situation for both the I.A. and the I.A.’s
supervisor when the work that is being performed is normally done by a faculty member.
It can be an unofficial understanding between both parties that, if necessary, an I.A. will,
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at times, write curriculum. During my time working on the Learning Group WID
program, I wrote curriculum myself. Students were required to work on the curriculumbased writing activities that I constructed. Of course, everything that I wrote was
reviewed and, many times, revised by my supervisor. We established a very collaborative
working relationship and helped each other with any curriculum that we were assembling
for the new program. Mary Soliday discusses this issue in her essay “Shifting Roles in
Classroom Tutoring,” when she states that “in the early stages of an experimental
program involving course-linked tutors, “students, teachers, and tutors alike had trouble
placing the tutor within a classroom’s hierarchy and defining the tutor’s role” (205).
Again, this issue is pertinent in as much as I would always introduce myself to instructors
as being a WAC I.A.; however, the working relationship that evolved over many
semesters created a trust and respect between one another in that my specific title was
basically forgotten and I was treated like a faculty member by most instructors. I say
“treated” like a faculty member to mean that my ideas and the work that I presented to
the instructors that were participating in the Learning Group program was accepted on its
own merits.
Unfortunately, this type of relationship with instructors does not necessarily make
it easier when dealing with students. In fact, as an I.A., I had to be particularly careful
how I was perceived by students based on the type of tutoring I gave them. Again, most
students believed I was an instructor. This perception makes it easier for students to
accept the tutoring advice that I gave them. They trusted my knowledge of writing and
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the material we were working on. As a group, however, we were constantly asking
ourselves how much help is too much help? Soven addresses this issue when she
discusses, “[w]hich tutoring approach better delivers the knowledge it takes to learn to
write well?” (207). We were all, as I.A.’s tutoring students in specific courses and trying
to figure out what is the best way to help students learn better writing practices without
going into too much specific content material that none of us were experts in. The issue is
that the new Learning Group program has forced all WAC tutors to navigate within
themselves how much help to give students and when too much help results in students
simply regurgitating what they are told and not really learning how to write better. Our
own moral obligation as a tutor and our own moral obligation as a program does not, as
Pennington and Boyer suggest in context to all programs, “guarantee that WAC will be
self-sustaining and fruitful” (97). And it should be clear that at the forefront of starting
this Learning Group program, being fruitful and multiplying was extremely important to
all of us.
Building Relationships With Students
In terms of how the Learning Group program at ARC has effected students, it has
been documented that every student who has participated and followed through with the
more writing intensive requirements that is specifically geared towards their writing
assignments have passed their respective courses. These outcomes, one could argue,
automatically categorizes WAC programs as being integral within the idea of addressing
the moral and civic duties of teaching students to write better. Again, the irony is not lost
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in that the success of the Learning Group program at ARC highlights the issue of no
prerequisite regarding writing level performance for students enrolling in many transferlevel history or science courses as what could be argued as being what is truly immoral.
The reasons for why more students do not take advantage of student support programs,
such as WAC, are varied; however, the disconnect between instructor responsibility and
student responsibility regarding where the line is drawn seems less of a line and more of a
“grayish” area. I have personally had many conversations with students who are
obviously in over their heads in regards to their writing aptitude and the requirements of
writing that they will have to perform if they are to succeed in the course they are taking.
I see in their eyes their fear and apprehension, but I also see a resolution on their part to
stay in the course regardless of the uphill battle they know they are facing.
Let me be clear that any resolute attitude on the part of these students is not drawn
purely from an inner desire to succeed in as much as many of these types of students do
not, at first, believe that the instructor, or even the institution itself, would allow them to
enroll in courses that they could not pass. And herein lies the problem and disconnect or
that “gray area” that leaves both students and their instructors many times frustrated as to
how to come to some sort of resolution. It is not a secret that the attitude among many
instructors who do not teach reading or writing is that they are not going to begin doing
so for their students lacking in the basic reading and writing skills necessary to pass their
class. Unfortunately, many students realize too late that they are not going to be given
alternative options to pass the course. These basic skill level students find themselves
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caught in a quagmire of required academic writing that is as foreign to them as non-math
majors required to take multiple calculus exams. Again, I return to my narrative in
Chapter 2. In it, I attempt to express the frustrations of the students and my own
frustrations. I can see in the eyes of many of the students that I tutor that are searching for
their own place in the classroom, searching for acceptance as a serious student at ARC.
The hurdle that these types of students are trying to overcome is mainly the
acknowledgement of being successful in writing an essay or taking an exam. Many times,
just sitting with these students and listening to them express their own insecurities about
writing underscores for me that these fears are in a very real sense connected to each
student’s perception of himself or herself. Just sitting and listening many times was
enough to build a good relationship with a student that enabled him or her to really work
on the problems associated with their writing skills.
Many of these students who have enrolled in transfer-level courses that really do
require academic level writing throughout the semester find themselves trapped between
the desire to succeed in the classroom but overwhelmed with their own insecurities that
will take more than a few WID tutoring sessions to overcome I try to have “heart-toheart” discussions about the root causes of a student grappling with writing, and most of
the time students will open up as to why they are struggling so much with their writing. It
is obvious that the student does not want to “give up.” I explain it is not an issue of giving
up, it is simply reevaluating one’s need for more ongoing support and enrolling in basic
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reading and writing classes to build a solid foundation of required education before
attempting to tackle a class that is beyond their current capabilities.
The WID Approach to Psychology Writing Assignments
The literature discussing the different ways that instructors teach beginning
psychology courses varies; however, many articles and journals do repeat many of the
same issues that students taking a psychology class must deal with. These issues deal
mainly with students’ initial approach to academic writing in psychology, which requires
critical thinking on their part. This alone can cause problems for students unfamiliar with
this type of writing. David Zehr, author of “Writing in Psychology Courses,” emphasizes
how many psychology instructors utilize writing in their classrooms as a way to use
“writing as a thinking tool as opposed to a means of formally presenting information” (9).
For beginning writing students, “thinking” about their writing, or “thinking” about what
they are actually writing about, requires a much more in-depth study from the writer to
both understand the subject they are writing about but to also examine, to some extent,
the issues behind the subject matter. The writer must ask themselves questions and form
possible hypotheses about those questions. This can be very difficult for beginning
writers. As Zehr explains, “[w]riting assignments can also be used to enhance students’
understanding of basic psychological concepts” (9). This statement may seem obvious to
most people. Of course writing about a psychology subject will enhance a person’s
understanding of basic concept ideas. However, for the beginning writer attempting to
traverse the formidable obstacles that critical thinking requires, any writing assignment
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that requires more than simply regurgitating a summary of an article, or paragraph for
that matter, is asking a lot. As Zehr describes in his article, psychology instructors have
different types of writing assignments as a way of forcing the student to critically think.
These assignments include “writ[ing] a paper on [a] disorder” (9) and then usually
discuss “information on symptoms/diagnostic criteria, etiology, and treatment” (9). If
done correctly, this will definitely help the psychology student have a better
understanding of the subject; however, for the beginning writer, an attempt to include
more information over and above a simple explanation of the subject can cause a great
deal of confusion and ultimately frustration.
How the Learning Group Program Helped Psychology 300 Students
The issue at ARC reflect the same issues that psychology instructors who teach
beginning psychology courses across the country deal with. They want to enhance
students’ awareness of psychology subjects through writing assignments that force
students to examine questions that they must invent, and then go beyond the examination
of their own questions regarding a specific psychology subject or area of interest and
include a hypotheses as to how to deal with or what will be the probable outcome of that
subject. Many psychology instructors at ARC have explained to me personally that their
main obstacle is trying to make their beginning writing students go beyond summarizing
and add analysis to their writing. These instructors showed the same frustration that many
instructors do who try and navigate their classrooms to deal with the proficient writer,
adequate writer, and the beginning writer. Many educators may think that that is the issue
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that most instructors have to deal with; however, I come back to my central theme
regarding the lack of a prerequisite that allows for students who have no concept of the
type of academic writing that is required even in an introductory psychology course.
Whose responsibility is it to ensure that the student is prepared to successfully
accomplish the writing assignments, to be able to read the material or to understand how
to take notes in class? Is it the instructor? Is it the student? Or, is it the student support
programs that are designed to help these types of students? I would suggest that it is a
combination of all three, although some instructors would vehemently argue with that
suggestion. Fortunately, the psychology instructors that the Learning Group program at
ARC dealt with had a clear understanding of the writing issues that many of their
students were dealing with and agreed to allow the WAC program to help these students.
The primary goal of the Learning Group program was, as stated, to focus on very
specific writing assignments and assist students with specific writing tools to help them
write their papers. In regards to Psychology 300 students, we focused on a centrally
themed assignment known as the Summary/Analysis paper. This writing assignment was
designed to help students gain a greater depth of knowledge in a specific area of their
choosing. Students were required to find a specific outside resource and provide a written
summary of it as well as a personal analysis of the issues and concepts involved. Their
resources could range from a relevant newspaper, magazine, or journal article, or a
relevant educational video presentation. Books, advertisements, pamphlets, films, or
personal experiences were not allowed as adequate resources. Although this was not a
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research paper, students were required to gain experience in thoroughly understanding
and analyzing a specific published piece of information. The paper was generally five
pages in length, divided into one-third comprehensive summary and two-thirds analysis
which shows evidence of considerable thinking about the article and the issues it raises.
At first read, the prompt does not seem overly extensive or too advanced for the first-year
college student to tackle. However, for the students who have not completed Collegelevel composition, English 300, and may, in fact, be enrolled in a basic writing skill
course at the same time they are enrolled in a Intro to Psychology 300 course, this writing
assignment becomes insurmountable to the extent that, even though the student may be
earning average or even above average scores in their multiple choice Psychology exams,
the required paper becomes the wall that they cannot climb over.
Upon reviewing the writing prompt, it was obvious that the first step was to
simply break down the required components so that students could have a firmer grasp as
to: 1) How to get started, and 2) How to finish. To do this, a one-sheet was provided to
students enrolled in the Learning Group program that concentrated on the most important
elements that the writing assignment required. Questions like: Do you have one
psychology topic source that is three-five pages in length? Is the summary in your own
words and style of writing? Does the analysis show considerable assessment of the topic
or issue? Have you related the topic to any personal experiences? To your textbook? To
class discussion? Have you posed any arguments or opinions with the source information
to show that you are engaged with the issue? Do you play devil’s advocate by including
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alternative points of view that may contradict your source? Do you conclude by stating
your position regarding the topic? Finally, is grammar and punctuation correct?
The program found this concentration of questions met all of the requirements from the
writing prompt but helped students have a much better understanding of how to write the
paper.
The next hurdle was to help students understand the difference between summary
writing and analytical writing and where to find source material that was adequate for the
assignment. Because some research was involved, I knew that I had to, at the very least,
show students who have never done any research for a paper how to navigate the ARC
library database. The other problem was how to do this with multiple students at the same
time and not have to repeat the same instruction to each individual student in a tutoring
session. The answer was a PowerPoint presentation in a classroom setting.
Upon having potential students who were interested in getting help with this
writing assignment, I had students, after enrolling in WAC, sign-up for a required
PowerPoint presentation. I scheduled four different times on four different days to allow
as many students to attend as possible. The presentation began with an explanation of a
summary explaining how it is a condensed version of an article written in the words of
the writer without giving any opinion. The presentation explained how to incorporate
quotes and the simple mechanics of using quotation marks. How to annotate was also an
important tool that was especially emphasized for summary writing. All of these basic
writing components were, for most of these students, the very first time they were
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exposed to academic writing. Regarding analysis, students learned that this was their
opportunity to examine the main points of an article and relate it to what they have been
studying in class. We explained that it was perfectly acceptable to both agree and
disagree with different parts of the article as long as the writer could give a valid
explanation. That the integration of personal examples, and the use of key words and
phrases, were also writing tools that should be incorporated into the analysis of their
papers was, for many students, very foreign and even difficult for some to comprehend.
Finally, the presentation ended with a comprehensive example of how to log in to the
library database and search for appropriate articles, which students could use as their
source material.
Students were now required to make a minimum of three follow-up tutoring
appointments in groups of up to three to four at a time. At the first appointment, students
were required to, at the very least, have their article chosen. However, it became apparent
very soon into these first appointments that many students still could not utilize the
library database, in which case time was spent literally going on line and helping each
student find an article that interested him/her and was appropriate to the assignment. The
follow-up appointment required students to bring in a draft of their summary so that a
WAC tutor could go over it with the student and make suggestions and comments that
would steer the student in the right direction. The next appointment was for the analysis
part of the paper in which students would bring in a draft of their analysis. This proved to
be a little more daunting for some students to handle, and we found that the best way for
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students to overcome their frustration of trying to analyze their article was for them to
actually work on it at a computer in the WAC center, thereby allowing WAC tutors to
repeat the elements of analysis as the student is writing. A final draft appointment was
mandatory so that the Learning Group program could verify which students successfully
completed the program, which students partially completed the program, and which
students did not follow the guidelines and could not receive credit. Upon receiving this
list, instructors began to see it as an invaluable tool for themselves when assigning final
grades to students who were having difficulty with the writing requirements of the
course. Students who actively enrolled and participated in the Learning Group program
were apparently weighted by the instructor in a much more favorable light than those
students who did not participate, even though they would have profited by becoming
better writers and writing better papers for their psychology class.
In regards to student feedback in response to the help they were being given from
the WID program, it was always verbal and usually at the end of the semester. It was
overwhelmingly positive. Many students would come to me and thank me for “saving
their lives.” I would always respond by saying nothing we do in college is usually a life
or death outcome, but that I was pleased that they were pleased. On a more serious note,
it should be mentioned that almost every student, whose work I evaluated for a particular
semester, stated that they had learned very specific writing skills that they would be able
to transfer to other courses in future classes. Many students also realized that they needed
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to enroll in basic writing and reading classes before attempting any more transfer level
classes that required extensive writing.
How the Learning Group Program Helped History 300 Students
We had many more students who enrolled in the history tutoring classes that the
Learning Group program provided simply because we had so many different types of
history courses that students could enroll in at ARC. We primarily helped students with
Women’s History, which required students to write three different types of writing for
each of the three exams; U.S. History, which required students to write one large in-class
essay for each exam; Hispanic History, which required students to write one large, tenpage oral history paper; and African-American History, which required students to write
one large, eight-page research paper during the semester.
One needs to keep in mind that students who had never had to write anything
longer than a paragraph in their entire lives were now thrust into a course (that they
chose) that was now requiring them to write large academic papers at home or in the
stressful environment of writing during class time. It is easy to understand how any
student who has never taken a basic English level course, let alone the required English
300, is being set up for failure. There is simply no possible way that these underprepared
writing students will be able to successfully accomplish this type of writing. From the
very beginning, I was skeptical as to how WAC could put together a program that could
help these students. In Elbow’s “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to
Freshmen and Colleagues,” he argues that “the way to develop student’s intellectual
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stance necessary for producing academic discourse is through doing non-academic
writing” (102). And there was extensive discussion between myself and the WAC
coordinator if we should, upon designing specific types of WID writing assignments, put
together writing prompts that were separate from the writing that the students’ instructors
wanted us to focus on. We came up with reflective types of writing assignments to give
students an opportunity to write about their own experiences with writing from past years
of being in elementary and high school. We adapted these assignments during the first
year of the WID Learning Group program and we did see a favorable response regarding
the type of free expression of writing that students were able to perform. The problem
was the time factor. These free expression types of writing assignments took away from
extremely valuable time that was needed to address their history instructor’s assignments
that we had agreed to focus on.
Unfortunately, we had to dispense from the reflection writing and focus
exclusively on preparing students with short-answer essay responses and larger, more
traditional five-paragraph essay formats that the instructor required. Each tutoring session
relied on the student to be prepared with content information so that we could then
breakdown the content into an answer format consisting of the “5 W’s”: Who, What,
Where, When, and Why. The students practiced writing very short answers that included
the 5 W’s. Even though many students found it difficult to keep their answers brief and
include the required information, multiple practice tutoring sessions helped almost every
student learn the format and also learn studying skills in which each student would have
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to complete a minimum of five short answers at home within a certain amount of time.
We required students to practice writing under timed conditions because each writing
exam was in class and students had approximately seventy minutes to create an outline,
write their essay and finally proofread their work before turning it in. We found from
interviewing students that finishing their essay exams on time was their biggest issue, so
we concentrated on teaching students how to take good notes in class and annotating
information from their textbooks. Next, taking that information and creating a sheet in
which students could list the 5 W’s with the information from their notes and textbooks.
Finally, using only the list of 5 W’s creating a short essay within an allotted amount of
time. Practicing these reading and writing skills enabled students to increase their exam
completion rates by almost 100%.
Beginning in 2008 until 2010, the Learning Group program had history students
conduct a survey at the end of the semester. The results were encouraging as students
were asked three specific questions and answering “Not Helpful” or “Very Helpful” to
each question. The results of the each fall semester of the new WID program are shown
in Table 1 (WID Learning Group Survey):
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Table 1 WID Learning Group Survey
WID – Learning Group Survey
Total students surveyed:
How helpful was this program over
all?
This program has helped you
prepare for writing exams?
Do you think the WID program
would help you in other courses?
Fall 2008
Fall 2009
Fall 2010
-108-
-111-
-121-
(106)
(110)
(115)
Not helpful
( 2)
(1)
(6)
Very helpful
(102)
(109)
(112)
No response
(1)
Not helpful
(5)
(2)
(3)
Very helpful
(105)
(107)
(118)
( 3)
(4)
(3)
Very helpful
No response
(6)
No response
Not helpful
The survey shows overwhelmingly that students participating in, and successfully
completing the WID Learning Group program, found that it helped them prepare for
writing exams and that they believed the program would help them in other courses.
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Chapter 5
CONCLUSION
The factors that go into deconstructing the performance of a program such as
WID at American River College requires knowledge of the initial idea, the outreaching to
faculty, the construction of material, the organizing of staff, the scheduling of tutoring
sessions with students, the performance of both the tutors and instructors involved in
helping students and finally the outcome of the program itself. I wrote this thesis because
I was there at every one of these stages. This final chapter attempts to summarize why the
WAC program felt there was a need for a more curriculum-based tutoring program that
focused on specific courses with specific writing assignments. We knew that there were
too many students falling through the cracks of the non-prerequisite system in certain
transfer-level classes and so was born the WID Learning Group program.
Summary of the Results of the Research
I begin the discussion of the assessment of the Learning Group program at
American River College by using the words from Christopher Thaiss in WAC for the New
Millennium. Everything that I have attempted to do in the program has been based on
“first principles: the assumptions behind the reasons- . . .” (299). This is so completely
true only for the reason that for every issue or problem that I came across when trying to
build the program, I always fell back on the first principles as to what the goal of WAC
was and what my goal as a tutor should be both for the students I was serving and the
instructors with whom I was collaborating. I had many assumptions as to how to
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approach problems, but in the back of my mind, I had to remind myself that what might
be the easiest solution for me might not be so for the students and the instructors. Thaiss
writes, “…the shape of WAC has undergone significant change” (299); he goes on to say
that, “It is therefore reasonable to define both (1) a core of consistent WAC principles
over the span, and (2) the theoretical influences that have worked changes on the
concept” (299). Thaiss correctly defines the issue of how WAC theory changes
depending on the concept. I have always grounded the Learning Group program with
WAC theory and ideas used from past years working in the WAC program at ARC.
However, I have learned that any new idea to help students write better has a parallel
construct that forces the new idea to rely on basic skills teaching or even best practices in
terms of how to tutor students. The learning curve can be quite steep when attempting to
construct a new model. Even if this model has been tried at other institutions, I realize
that each new attempt to try something different is purely customized for that institution
only. This, of course, is due to a number of factors, but the primary one being the
character and goals of that institution. At American River College, student learning
outcomes are always a guide that all instructors and administrators use to gauge what is
working and what needs refinement. However, the Learning Groups program did not
allow for outcome assessment in the beginning simply due to the fact that we were
navigating in somewhat foreign territory. Again, the foundation of the program was based
on valid and verified best practices on how to best help beginning writing students write
better. WAC at ARC has long excelled at that. The difference with the Learning Group
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program was that it was the first time that we outreached to instructors in other
disciplines to find out what their needs were, wrote curriculum that was directly
connected to these instructors courses and then invited students to enroll in a very well
defined WAC course that focused entirely on a single writing exam or a particular paper.
We would see these students both in groups and individually during multiple
appointments and slowly began a framework that we continued to build upon each
semester.
My biggest concern, other than getting students to buy in to the new WAC
program and show high enrollment, was to sustain the momentum by using the carrot on
a stick approach. For example, students understood that by completing the WAC
program, they would receive extra credit from their instructor and/or a higher grade at the
end of the semester. My ultimate goal for the student was to help the student understand
that having a better grasp on how to write more academically, students would naturally
construct their own self-motivation process because they would ultimately see a life path
for themselves. It is understandable that one may see this as being naïve or simply out of
touch with the reality and limitations of what academic writing proficiency can
accomplish, let alone a small writing support program. However, I make this broad
statement based solely on my experience in working with underprepared students and
watching their progression through weeks, months, and multiple semesters of learning
how to write better. I have witnessed many students have what some may define as an
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epiphany about their own accomplishments and transfer those successes to what they are
capable of in the future.
Having stated this, I return to my concern about fine tuning the Learning Group
curriculum to such an extent that we, as teachers and tutors, are focused primarily on a
specific writing exam or writing assignment and to help students learn the mechanics of
writing necessary to pass the exam or assignment. I fear that, because we are so focused
on one thing, we may be missing the bigger picture, which is to initiate these types of
students into the bigger world of professional writing that will serve them much better
after they graduate and move on into the working world that will require a variety of
writing styles.
However, my initial goal, and my understanding with the instructors that I was
working with, was that I was going to help create, within each student, a more involved
approach regarding the subject matter that was being taught in the course and through
that more involved approach, and hopefully more appreciative approach, the student
would be able to learn what the academic writing requirements were for that course and
from that instructor. David R. Russell, author of, “Where Do the Naturalistic Studies of
WAC/WID Point?,” has a very clear understanding of this issue in regards to using too
much of a tunnel-vision approach to tutoring students. He states, “[w]riting is not a
generalizable skill, then, learned once and for all at an early age, but a complex range of
accomplishments, variously tied to myriad human practices, which may develop over a
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lifetime (260). This underscores the need for students, especially beginning writers, to
develop their own writing skills through different genres of writing.
My concern was that, by focusing exclusively with one type of writing that was
required in one type of discipline, we were ultimately hampering students understanding
of the vast genres of different types of writing and the requirements that those different
genres required. As Russell suggests, “…writing is clearly not a single, autonomous skill,
learned once and for all, but a varied and developing accomplishment” (265). My
question regarding the Learning Group program continued to be that of development. Are
we helping students develop better writing skills that they can transfer to other types of
writing requirements? The obvious answer may be, yes. Because any help that you give a
student that enables them to write better, obviously makes them an overall better writer in
other classes and on into the writing requirements of the career path that each one has
chosen. The students that I see a semester, even years later, come to my office to let me
know what classes they are currently taking. They add to this the recognition that
receiving help in the WID program was the first time they really began to understand the
structure of writing and how grateful they were to the tutors for showing them basic
writing skills to successfully get through a difficult class. Many of these students have
continued on to enroll in additional writing and reading courses and are on track to
eventually transfer to a four-year college.
The rates of students who successfully finished the Learning Group program in
WAC was over 55% the first semester and climbed approximately 3-5% each semester
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after that. The enrollment rate remained, overall, the same each semester from 2008-2011
at about 125-180 students, depending on whether it was fall or spring (fall semester
having a higher enrollment). I return to Russell: “[w]riting is clearly not a single
autonomous skill, learned once and for all, but a varied and developing accomplishment”
(265). And I suppose this is what I have learned more than anything else. The “band aid”
that the Learning Group program provided was successful in providing immediate help
for many students unable to meet the basic writing requirements for a particular class, but
the weak part of the program was follow-up tutoring with these same students to continue
giving them the help they would need in future classes. Because we only provided help in
a very small handful of courses, these students could not receive intensive tutoring for
other courses. This, I could see, would be a problem for many of these students who did
not eventually take beginning writing courses at ARC before they continued to enroll in
transfer level courses that required academic writing. Of course, many of the Learning
Group students did learn some very valuable writing skills, as have been demonstrated;
however, as has also been demonstrated, these students needed to learn very specific
writing skills for very particular writing assignments. This, I knew, would be problematic
for students who were still learning the fundamentals of academic writing discourse.
Future of the WID Program at ARC
The year 2010 produced a new landscape for every teacher teaching, every
student attending, every class scheduled, and every program supporting the entire
structure of learning at American River College and the entire Los Rios School District.
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The budget hit academia very hard that year and rumors set about to produce the worst
case scenarios of layoffs and program cancellations. Fortunately, the worst did not take
place. Adjunct instructors and temporary and part-time classified staff members were
hugely cut, and many classes were temporarily cut; however, student support programs
such as WAC had only to cut back enrollment about 25%. The WID Learning Group
program, unfortunately, was discontinued. The only reason this happened was for the
very reason that has been explained at the very beginning of this thesis. The WID
program was an extension of WAC. It was not a newly allocated program with separate
funding. All of the support that the WID program had was taken from tutors and
instructors paid to work in the WAC program. Therefore, it is easy to justify that, even a
program that was as successful as the WID Learning Group was, ultimately, it must be
able to sustain itself and money apportioned to keep it running every year.
Some would argue that funding for the WID program would have eventually
happened given enough time and support to build a strong foundation and support within
the English department and the departments that the program was serving. Others would
argue that these budgetary issues are cyclical and funding will be restored and programs
like WID will have new life breathed into them.
I have stored all of the materials, the WID syllabus, WID course objectives, WID
Tutoring Manual and Instructor’s Manual. I have filed away all of the writing
assignments and student contracts. Everything has been securely stored away for use in
the future. The most difficult part of ending the WID program was informing all of the
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history, psychology and anthropology instructors that, although their students could
enroll in WAC, the Learning Group program had ended. I had many of these instructors
genuinely upset that the WID program that they had supported and had come to rely upon
was ending. This attitude from so many faculty members represented, for me, just how
much positive work we had accomplished for so many people, both instructors and
students. The entire four year experience for me taught me many things about writing
programs, curriculum, writing theory, and basically how to run a WID program from the
ground up. But most importantly, it proved to me that the work we all do as teachers and
tutors is important and essential to students and our entire community. The work we all
do in academia changes people’s lives, forever.
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