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The Space Between Teacher and Tutor: Embodying Graduate Student Pedagogical and
Professional Reflexive Reflection
Juliette Kitchens
Dissertation Prospectus
GSU Department of English
Committee: Dr. Elizabeth Burmester,
Dr. Mary Hocks and Dr. Marti Singer
Beginning scholarship with even the most gentle of admonitions is dangerous. It is a
practice that I have been steered from as a scholar and a writer. After all, who am I to play with
my authority in a manner so fast and loose as to adjudicate scholarship I have yet to explicate,
correlate, and integrate? I am a graduate student, a writer, a writing tutor, a Composition teacher.
I do not take authority lightly; in fact, I often struggle with its very existence. With this, however,
I must begin this conversation with a recognition that there is very little discussion among the
texts that serve as the foundation for my dissertation, my student opus. While the scholarship included in the following bibliography represents the connective notes, it fails to provide a substantive composition or, perhaps more appropriately, conversation.
Scholarship focusing on graduate teacher professionalization and pedagogy is vast, so too
is that dealing with tutor practice and writing center pedagogy. However, much of this work is
scattered in focus and perspective, with the former primarily speaking to administrative concerns
and the latter situating graduate students within a chorus of experiences and expressions as we
endeavor to discover our identities and locations. In my research, I have found voices dissonantly
seeking a conversation about graduate student pedagogical and professional development yet
failing to invite their muse-epistemes1 to the concert as little more than passive audience mem-
1
I am troubled by the lack of language to simplify the denotation of an object that serves as the inspiration,
impetus, and subject of a single creation. In my quest for the perfect word to describe the graduate student's position
in this context, I have briefly explored Louis Althousser’s “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus” and Judith
Butler’s Undoing Gender in search of a deeper understanding of “subject” and “object,” respectively. Further complicating this is the notion of inspiration--muses serve primarily to inspire but also as subjects of the creation (more
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bers. It’s as if we’ve entered the concert hall while everyone is warming up, stretching their intellectual vocal chords in a cacophony of articles, monographs, and narratives. To this “noise” I add
my voice as I question what happens when graduate students inhabit multiple pedagogical and
professional spaces in serving as classroom teachers and writing tutors as they develop their
“teacher self” (Rankin, Skorczewski), and perhaps their “scholarly self,” and the practices that
will serve as the staves on which they will place their notes and discover the sounds of their
unique voices. By focusing on existing scholarship exploring the points of praxis and identity of
both teachers and tutors, I situate my study to explore the reflexive reflective space afforded to
the pedagogical and professional development of those of us who have participated in and served
our academic communities as both tutors and teachers.
Reflective and reflexive practice have been discussed at length in pedagogical scholarship in relation to both teaching and tutoring (Bartholomae; Bishop; Clark; Geller et al; Grimm;
Hillocks; Lerner2). While “reflective practice” is generally agreed to be constructivist teaching
that is informed by practitioner experience and knowledge and is motived by a desire for change
(Hillocks 127-31), our definition of “reflexive practice” is more complicated, if only due to various framework and positioning within scholarship. Certainly a denotation of “reflexive” speaks
to a state of being or action that is conditioned to the extent that it may become part of one’s self,
a conditioned naturality. Louise Wetherbee Phelps states that those engaging reflexive action “attend directly and critically to their own performance and develop a self-consciousness about
so in a classical than in popular notion, thus complicating my task). I am uncomfortable with the gender privileging
this term connotes, yet find it inescapable and incomplete. Additionally, I include “episteme,” denoting scientific
knowledge and arguably a masculinized term, to represent the ideas carried in “impetus” and “subject.” I hope to
unpack “muse-episteme” more completely in my dissertation as I believe my freedom to explore is somewhat limited by the convention of the text in hand.
2
This is a drastically truncated citation. As reflexive reflection is merely one aspect of my study, I offer that
I do not have an exhaustive collection of references in my bibliography. For a more thorough compilation, I point to
Rebecca Moore Howard’s online bibliography, “Reflexivity and Reflection: Some Sources for composition and
rhetoric” (http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Bibs/Reflexivity.htm).
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technique and impact that may sometimes disturb [the] ability to act spontaneously and fluently”
(182). Approximately twenty years later, Cressey, Boud, and Docherty turn to the works of John
Dewey, Donald Schön, and Anthony Giddens for a historically situated definition of reflexivity,
declaring it “a consciousness about consciousness, an awareness about positioning, a turning
back to look at oneself and events rather than simply proceeding with action” (19). Katherine Allen and Elizabeth Farnsworth, in “Reflexivity in Teaching about Families,” define this notion as
the “critical process of increasing self-awareness and sensitivity to the experiences of others,”
expanding the notion from the internal and personal to the external and public (351). The extension offered to reflexivity and reflexive practice in the latter article is pivotal to the use of “reflexive reflection” in this study. I am intrigued by the shift that occurs to our general understanding of reflective practice when we add as its counter tempo community, therefore creating a flexible continuity. Interacting in a community provides the extended conversations that promote
harmony within and from the dissonance created by enacting the roles of graduate-student-inthe-classroom, graduate-tutor-in-the-tutorial-space, and graduate-teacher-in-the-classroom. In
this study, “reflexive reflection” denotes the internal active desire to create pedagogical change
using personal knowledge and experience and shared knowledge and experience, gained through
multiple types of interactions (conversation, impromptu and on-going observation, variety of
learning scenarios, etc.) in an effort to promote more meaningful exchanges, in the classroom or
in conferences, with our students, our peers, and/or our colleagues. With the inclusion of community, a practice we consider internal, individual, and potentially isolated, becomes more socially constructed, more public. Touching on post-process theory, just as writing acts do not occur without other language users, reflexive reflection, I contend, does not occur without other
practitioners, a community.
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Our field has been exploring the impact and nuances of discourse communities for over
three decades; the idea of community membership is not lost on us. The concept of discourse
community has served our field for years as an indicator of our polyphonic connections3 and the
knowledge created therein. A discourse community, as the name suggests, focuses primarily on
the knowledge exchanged and created through a shared language within a social group, or community.4 A community of practice, however, serves as a more inclusive identifier as it denotes
both discourse and practice. As Wenger states, inclusion in communities of practice requires mutuality of engagement, accountability to the enterprise, and negotiability of the repertoire5 (137).
He then posits that “it is by its very practice--not by other criteria--that a community establishes
what it is to be a competent participant, an outsider, or somewhere in between. In this regard, a
community of practice acts as a locally negotiated regime of competence” (137). While writing
center scholarship has suffered accusations of localizing sites and practice, and therefore isolating or limiting its scholarship and the application thereof, Wenger’s notion of communities of
practice actually expands our ability to conceptualize our practices and locations beyond the lo3
While I am not subscribing to Mikhail Bahktin’s notion absolutely, his employment of the term is appropriate to this context considering the “plurality of unmerged voices” that he contends are “fully valid” and foundational to the existence of polyphony (6).
4
Bartholomae, Bizell, Bruffee, and J. Harris, among others both in and beyond Composition Studies, speak
to various ways of defining “discourse community.” For simplicity, I have attempted to find the common thread
within their ideas and present it here as a foundational definition.
5
Given that Wenger’s scholarship is not yet popularly read in the fields of Composition and Writing Centers, I present a thorough explication of his terms, in his words. In defining “engagement,” Wenger states, “The first
characteristic of practice as the source of coherence of a community is the mutual engagement of participants. Practice does not exist in the abstract. It exists because people are engaged in actions whose meanings they negotiate
with one another. In this sense, practice does not reside in books or in tools, though it may involve all kinds of artifacts. It does not reside in a structure that precedes it, though it does not start in a historical vacuum. [...] Practice
resides in a community of people and the relations of mutual engagement by which they can do whatever they do”
(73). He then explains, “Defining a joint enterprise is a process, not a static agreement. It produces relations of accountability that are not just fixed constraints or norms. These relations are manifested not as conformity but as the
ability to negotiate actions as accountable to an enterprise. The whole process is as generative as it is constraining.
[...] It invites new ideas as much as it sorts them out. As enterprise is a resource of coordination, of sense making, of
mutual engagement; it is like rhythm to music” (82). Finally, Wenger tells us, “The repertoire of a community of
practice includes routines, words, tools, ways of doing things, stories, gestures, symbols, genres, actions, or concepts
that the community has produced or adopted in the course of its existence, and which have become part of its practice. [...] It includes the discourse by which members create meaningful statements about the world, as well as the
styles by which they express their forms of membership and their identities as members” (83).
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cal, and arguably beyond the global, in that it seeks “to see the processes [of negotiation, learning, meaning, and identity]...as involving complex interactions between the local and the global”
(133). Again, this concept may sound questionably similar to our notion of discourse community;
however, rather than seeking out specific goals, discourse communities exist within teleological
frameworks and are created more directly from the existence of those serendipitous groupings
occurring when multiple people share specific identifying elements. Further separating these
concepts, the writers of The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice suggest that, “If
we accept [writing centers as communities of practice],... then we have to consider a philosophy
of writing center work which is designed for learning.... [This] design must be based on something other than the familiar stratification between directors and tutors, tutors and writers, directors and professors, peer tutors and professional instructors” (7). Essentially, this new moniker
for writing centers--their spaces, practitioners, scholarship and communities--rests in a more
complete notion of common ground in which all members are seen as learners, peers. Further,
the last pairing that Geller, Eodice, Condon, Carroll, and Boquet note strikes me as the most resonant in their list of relationships in that tutors and teachers function within overlapping spaces
of praxis but are socially and culturally separated by an artificial hierarchical structure suggesting that authority and expertise carry more weight in front of a classroom of students than at the
table with a single writer.
This notion that one role is more important than the other or that one carries more
knowledge, expertise, or authority serves as one of my primary motivations for composing this
project. Societal and cultural framing of tutors often leads to miseducated assumptions that tutors
serve only the under- or unprepared student, that tutors function within a liminal space that is
neither teacher nor peer nor student, that tutors marginal members, at best, of the institution.
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Conversely, teachers are often framed as omniscient experts who intrinsically “know what to do”
with a classroom of students. Both of these representations are problematic for many reasons,
particularly for graduate students preparing to enter the professional space. We do not have all
the answers; in fact, we have very few. We are not comfortable with our expertise because we
have yet to identify ourselves within it (Rankin, Skorczewski); that is, we have idealized notions
of what teachers are and how they behave but have not realized ourselves in relation to those notions (Tompkins). As tutors, we recognize the students we work with daily as developing thinkers, similar to our own position within the academy, and seek to find answers collaboratively and
cooperatively. As writing tutors, graduate students participate in conversation with the very students we teach as well as with our peers, those seeking a life as scholar, teacher, and writer. Examination of the impact these conversations have on us, as well as the effect community membership has as we develop our identities in the classroom and the profession, is essentially missing from available scholarship.
For this, a single extensive review of literature is virtually impossible, if not entirely impractical. The concepts working to form this study, such as “reflexive reflection” and “community of practice,” will appear throughout the chapters; however, for my sanity and that of my readers, the conversational threads will be parsed throughout the body of my dissertation, allowing
for multiple contextualized conversations that will, theoretically, find a point of harmony.
Writing Center scholarship concerning graduate students, of which there is very little
compared to that on undergraduate students, primarily focuses on how tutoring makes these students better [professional] writers or future administrators (Conroy and Lerner; Jackson, Leverenz, and Law; Jukuri; Leverenz; Mick; Pemberton). Scholarship concerning graduate students’
pedagogical and professional development and what writing centers can potentially offer these
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students is nearly non-existent. This lack of scholarship plausibly indicates an underlying fear
that our spaces and practices will be seen as a “training ground,” positioning us to face similar
struggles as we have in the past with our marginalization concerns throughout the 1980s and
1990s. In addition, the pedagogical concerns surrounding our metaphors (lab, center, clinic) in
the 1970s and arguably continuing today also speak to our apparent hesitancy to explore our
communities as locations for “teacher training.” However, acknowledging that tutoring and writing center spaces provide graduate students with professional and pedagogical experiences that
encourage development through reflexive reflection opens new avenues of research and inquiry
for us as a field and places new value on our sites in relation to our institutions, to the profession
of teaching, and to the act of learning. Recognizing, embracing, and exploring the potential our
spaces hold for fledgling teachers does not regulate writing centers or tutors into “lesser” spaces,
giving life to our fears and reconstituting previously addressed problems; rather, it reinforces the
notions we have long considered in our conversations--that writing centers and the practice of
tutoring have seemingly endless potential and application for teachers and students, professionally and pedagogically.
Scholars such as Muriel Harris, Irene Clark, Neal Lerner, and Nancy Welch exist among
the passersby, the outsiders, of Burke’s Parlor, not having been heard as they voiced their contributions. While they are members, they exist as outsiders in the conversations of composition
professionalization and pedagogy, reifying the existence of an unnecessary hierarchy we, as a
discipline, place on the knowledge and scholarship created by, within, and from writing centers.
For instance, Harris, Clark, and Conroy, Lerner and Siska specifically address the value of the
development opportunities writing centers offer future Composition teachers, yet these scholars
have not been contextualized—utilized—by scholars such as Wendy Bishop, Elizabeth Rankin,
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and Christine Farris, all of whom have monographs speaking to the heart of professionalization
and pedagogical maturation of graduate students. Bishop is perhaps a shocking inclusion here
because she is closely tied to the writing center community, but her separation of center and
classroom practices (particularly as it applies to Something Old, Something New) serves to illustrate the palpable need we have to bring these voices together in a melodic contrapuntal interaction6.
While minimal scholarship exists exploring graduate student tutors or the connection between teaching and tutoring, there are ample sources investigating the development of new
teachers. Multiple scholars have addressed the concerns of new and developing teachers, exploring and analyzing issues of authority, gender, performativity, and identity (Bishop; Black; Blazer;
Farris; Hillocks; Lieberman and Miller; Pytlik; Rankin; Skorczewski; Snider; Tompkins; Welch;
Williams; Yancey). However, the notion of community, moreover community of practice and its
influence, has suffered neglect. For this reason, I frame this project through a lens focusing on
the effect that community-building and communities of practice have on identity construction. I
contend that by balancing the acoustics of writing center scholarship and that of teacher research,
or pedagogical scholarship, the resonance of community’s effects will promote harmony from the
existing dissonance.
The polyvalence of writing centers allows a number of experiences to take place for any
tutor on any given day. Tutors are consistently tasked with opening a dialog with writers who
have a variety of issues and concerns (often initially unknown to the tutor), diverse experiences,
and ranging comprehension and writing abilities. Further, tutors open this dialog in a public
6
Musically, “counterpoint” is defined as multiple voices, independent in rhythm (and lyric; i.e. melody), yet
interdependent in harmony. Each point serves to create both structures, simultaneously. Regarding the conversation
in which my dissertation seeks inclusion and expansion, Composition scholarship and Writing Center scholarship
currently rest as independent melodies. The harmony within the voices is present, we simply need to begin listening
for and playing the chords, or the “melodic contrapuntal interactions.”
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space, in front of fellow tutors, other student writers, faculty members, or whomever happens to
be in the area. When positioned as “tutor,” new and upcoming teachers expose their practice to
an “open-door” policy that is not often available in the classroom setting simply due to the nature
of the space. That is, impromptu and consistent observation by multiple parties in a classroom is
rather rare, if not unheard of, as a result of the impracticality presented by the time and space
classrooms exist within. The primary benefit of this open practice is that graduate students receive feedback that is immediate and two-fold. Tutor/teachers gather feedback from the studentwriter with whom they are working and from peers who witness the exchange first-hand. Often,
the peer-to-peer impromptu and, I would argue, improvisational observations not only spark
conversation that provides this immediate feedback to the tutor, but also provided in these exchanges is a foundation of sharing and reflecting on practices and collaboratively educating fellow tutor/teachers. Ultimately, these peer-to-peer interactions become “teachable moments.”
Thus, tutoring provides a space for burgeoning teachers to begin playing with their pedagogies
and practices, learning what works for them, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what
fits their personality or style. In short, membership in this community of practice facilitates,
through action and discourse, a continuously growing awareness of professional and pedagogical
development that is both social and independent.
While teaching and tutoring are situated as equals, this study does not seek to conflate
tutoring and teaching, nor is the goal to create a hierarchical structure in which one practice is
favored over the other. The goal of this project is to discover the pedagogical possibilities that
present themselves when students are provided a polyvalent environment, often afforded in writing center situations, as part of their teacher and professional training. Moreover, when engaged
in the community of practice created and facilitated by the collaborative nature of writing centers
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and the academic communities they serve, developing teachers reap a variety of rewards encompassed by an improved understanding of multiple pedagogies.
Tutor/teachers are confronted with pedagogies in volume in writing centers as well as duration in the classroom. We learn to quickly gauge what works and fails, explore how to improve
our weaknesses and how to emphasize our strengths. More importantly, many new tutors and
teachers confront issues of authority and isolation.7 In listening to my peers recount their experiences as they entered the classroom for the first time as “teacher” or those who have yet to take
that long walk from the door to the front of the class, I have found that our fears do not completely dissipate in the face of our tutoring experience but they do seem abated compared to my
peers without tutoring experience. Additionally, tutors who are preparing to enter the classroom
have a ready-made community they may turn to with questions or for support. Participation in a
community of practice that engages regularly provides an environment that actively collectively
cultivates knowledge based in experience and scholarship, expanding new teachers’ perceived
limitations and expectations.
While Bruffee does not directly speak of communities of practice, he defines peer tutoring as “part of the craft and essential characteristics of human interdependence” (8). He continues to identify “interdependence” as the inclusive counterpart to its exclusive extensions “dependence” and “independence.” To this, I argue that tutoring has been too long incorrectly considered “dependent” and teaching, “independent.” In re-conceptualizing teacher education and
development within an interdependent social act, graduate students and new teachers learn
through communities in and of practice, communities determined by mutual engagement, joint
enterprise, and a shared repertoire.
7
Rankin and Tompkins point to these concerns , with Tompkins focusing on the potential catalyst resting in
the unique position of graduate student teachers within the institutional system.
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Further, I intend to argue that writing centers provide spaces for developing a practice of
inherent, continuing teacher education. Learning that teachers do not stop working on our practices and abilities, approaches and techniques, and that teaching is not a static profession, early in
the graduate student’s career promotes the ability to engage teaching practice in critical, evolutionary ways as students continue on their paths toward the “professional.” Teachers are not
forced to self-educate, nor is it a formalized act that is expected of us. It becomes organic, natural, to interrogate our practices and (re)examine our motives, methods, and meanings as we move
through various experiences and moments as tutor/teachers.
METHODOLOGY
The authors of The Everyday Writing Center point to Kurt Spellmeyer’s request for a
shift in focus from “our scramble for sophistication and prestige” to “ordinary sensuous life,” or
the everyday of our practice, theory, and locations, as we seek new avenues in scholarship (6;
893-894). Arguably, Spellmeyer, along with Geller and her co-authors, is asking for a return to
lore. While these scholars are not directly discussing the use of lore, conducting us in the tempo
of our “mundane” is encouraging us to see lore not merely as a method but as a methodological
foundation on which to rest critical and valid engagement with our communities in our scholarship. However, the use of lore as a grounding methodology within the field of Composition has
been discussed and disputed for nearly two decades. Our accepted definition of lore states,
Composition’s lore is a body of knowledge very much like those accumulated
among practitioners of other arts [...]. And while [these bodies of knowledge can]
be informed by other kinds of inquiry, including those of the various sciences,
they cannot be supplanted by them. [...] It is driven first by pragmatic logic: It is
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concerned with what has worked, is working, or might work in teaching, doing, or
learning writing. Second, its structure is essentially experiential. (North 23)
The publication of Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition Studies indeed
offered our field a definition of lore but, as scholars have gleefully pointed out, failed to articulate its ultimate place and value. For that, we must turn to scholarship throughout the 1990s and
into the twenty-first century. As Alice Gillam notes in Writing Center Research: Extending the
Conversation, “North tries to legitimize lore as driven by pragmatic logic and verified by experience; on the other hand, he argues that ‘writing is, by definition, the medium least amenable to
representing the results of Practitioner inquiry’ (52)” (xix). North’s ambivalence has not only
brought the value of lore as a valid methodology into question but complicated our understanding of lore’s ability to serve as a foundational methodology.
Given that North believed lore to be best communicated orally, he notes that “when Practitioners report on their inquiry in writing, they tend to misrepresent both its nature and authority,
moving farther and farther from their pragmatic and experiential power base” (54). If lore is best
told, rather than read, its position as a valid method of scholarly inquiry is questionable at best.
However, during the early to mid 1990s, scholars such as Gary Olsen and Patricia Harkin defended and legitimized lore’s position as a method of knowledge-making claiming, “Lore procedurally and pragmatically blurs relations of cause and effect [and therefore] is able to deal more
effectively than traditional science with ‘overdetermined’ situations” (Harkin 134). Later, Eric
Hobson states, “The unique circumstances of every instance of application [or practice] require a
unique appropriation and implementation of theory into practice” (8), positioning lore, as Gillam
notes, to be “situated, contradictory, and eclectic” (xxi). As the field moved into the understanding that theory and practice often contradicts one another (see Hobson, “Writing Center Theory
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Often Counters Its Practice. So What?”) while simultaneously overlapping as well, we begin to
see the flexibility and complexity lore offers as validation for its use as a foundational methodology. As Cindy Johanek points out, by its very nature, lore is mutable and therefore must be treated as flexible knowledge, changing with the discipline rather than remaining static (184-185).
This reinforces Harkin’s belief that teaching produces knowledge, lore serves to identify and situate that knowledge into practical constructs, helping “us see ways of construing relations of relatedness to which our ideology has made us blind” (135).
Gillam, in her rather astute account of lore’s history and place in Writing Center research,
states the major opponents of lore, Nancy Grimm and Christina Murphy and Joe Law, reduce it
to a “parochial and less sophisticated” methodology (xxii). Grimm, in “Contesting ‘The Idea of a
Writing Center’: The Politics of Writing Center Research,” posits, “writing center work is much
more politically and ideologically charged than [“The Idea of a Writing Center”] indicates. [...]
writing centers have much to teach the profession about how difference is managed in the academy and about how students’ subjectivities are constructed by educational discourse” (5). She
further notes that while North declares writing centers as teacher-support locations that are not
determined by the curriculum, centers are, to some unavoidable degree, contextualized by the
curriculum, and therefore by the institution (5). She suggests that writing center research is limited, arguably by our use of lore, because while writing center research is positioned to “explore
[students’] struggles [with connecting multiple discourse communities and conventions] and
emerge with a more critical sense of the effect of our curriculum and teaching practices,” but we
don’t (5). Grimm’s ideal goal for writing center research does not seem to be improving practices
and institutions, but challenging them in the interest of uncovering subjectivity and identity in
relation to our existing practices. Grimm is, I believe, short-changing lore’s ability to reflect the
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effects our constructive practices produce; she is blind to the idea that our narratives--our experience and our knowledge--can and do indicate key movements in identity construction, institutional ideology and, speaking more directly to my purposes, praxis.
Murphy and Law argue that “the emphases have changed [...] from narratives of a fledgling discipline to rigorous, scholarly investigations of that discipline’s contributions to the
knowledge structures of the academy,” thus relegating the shift “from practitioner lore to a
broader understanding of the social influences upon knowledge production within a culture”
(xv). As with Grimm, the resistance to accept the notion that lore is valid rests in the refusal to
see its application beyond simply “story-telling.” Murphy and Law continue, citing that writing
center scholars have moved toward an interdisciplinary approach to both theory and practice in
order to more effectively situate among “the academy at large” the work done in theses spaces.
My question is why does an interdisciplinary approach negate the validity or the need for lore? I
don’t think it does; certainly, it shouldn’t.
Sue MacNealy discusses the problematic issue lore inherent carries, its lack of empirical
data to support the generational wisdom it represents and propagates, but is quick to identify it as
a “valuable resource,” particularly for new teachers (8). She insists that lore not be “valorize[d]
or denigrate[d]” for the sake of our discipline’s integrity, rather that we see it for what it is and
can be, a contribution “to the building of coherent theory in [our] discipline” (10). While MacNealy asserts that lore should be considered a starting point to be reified through empirical research, I contend that lore is capable of standing on its own when contextualized as concrete abstractions. That is, when we recognize that lore functions as a method in which we can begin to
extract the similarities and differences of experience in an effort to contextualize the knowledge
we create, develop, and disseminate, we are simultaneously admitting that lore inherently in-
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cludes the additional frameworks (such as other methodologies and theories; feminist methodology or speech act theory, for example) carried within the knowledge of the narrator, or practitioner. To illustrate, a tutor sits down at a table and begins explaining his practice to me. He recounts a tutorial that took place the previous day. Within his account, I can identify his
knowledge of peer tutoring, performativity, and, as he recounts the session and his hypothesis of
the effect on the student writer, case study. He creates his narrative, a lore artifact, using practice,
theory, and method. If we are created within the knowledge we accumulate and identified by
how we use or engage this within ourselves and our environment, then it stands to reason that our
lore is merely an extension of us, a reflexive reflection of our being.
With this, lore is no longer looked at as a partial methodology or a supplemental method;
rather, we can contextualize lore, its strengths and its weaknesses, as a stabilized approach for
grounding research that is continually in a fluid state of reflecting the practitioner, the practice,
the institution, and the discipline within their individual, collective, and collaborative current
moments or states of existence.
METHOD
After obtaining IRB approval, data on graduate student tutor-teacher experience, pedagogy, professionalization, and community membership will be collected through four types of
research tools: surveys, interviews, teaching portfolios and observations. The triangulation created by the use of these tools promotes a deeper understanding of the participants in relation to
identity construction and development while minimizing researcher bias.
The initial survey will gather general information and be distributed to all graduate students at Georgia State University’s English Department. While the survey is still in a draft stage,
I plan to ask graduate students what program they are in (M.A., M.F.A., Ph.D), past tutoring ex-
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perience (private, writing centers, professional tutoring services [such as Sylvan Learning Centers], or other academic tutoring services [such as Write Right, WAC, or the athletic tutoring services offered at GSU]), teaching experience, and a chronology to determine when they were (are)
teaching and tutoring. This survey will help to identify participants I will use and the category in
which to place them.
After collecting and analyzing the background survey and obtaining permission from
each participant, a different survey will be provided to each of the following categories: GTAs
with tutoring experience (who are not currently tutoring), GTAs who currently tutor (not in the
Writing Studio), and GTAs who tutor in the Writing Studio. The second survey will attempt to
identify more specifically what types of experiences the participants have engaged and the intersections of their collective experiences so that I can better place interview groups and also ask
guided interview questions. That is, the second survey will help generate the interview questions
I ask in both individual and group settings.
Interviews will be held with individual tutor-teachers as well as groups to promote the
conversation that often becomes the foundation of lore (as North defines it). Interview questions
will be informed by survey responses and will focus on pedagogical and professional development as well as the impact (or awareness) of communities of practice and community membership. As this study ultimately seeks to explore how teaching identities are created in light of
community participation, I will also ask all participants to describe their “teacher self” and their
“tutor self,” whether these identities shift in various spaces, and if these constructions inform
each other. Group interviews will also be guided by information obtained in the initial surveys,
however I expect to ask far fewer questions in this setting than in the individual interviews. It is
my hypothesis that group interviews will become more conversational and thus require less di-
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rection from me. All interviews will be videotaped to ensure accuracy in both verbal and nonverbal interactions.
Portfolios will be collected if the participant agrees to submit his or her work. Inclusion
in my study is not contingent on sharing this work as I expect to use it to gain insight into the
participant’s philosophy, pedagogy, classroom experience, and general attitude toward the profession of teaching. Understanding how a participant frames the profession, students, the academy, I believe, is crucial to gaining insight to identity. Should I find use for passages from various
artifacts in the portfolios, I will obtain separate permission through an IRB approved release
form.
Observations will be held in both classrooms and tutoring spaces, focusing on a select
group of tutor-teachers with a variety of tutoring and teaching experiences. I will not observe
participants who are not currently tutoring and teaching because, in order to validate use of this
research data, a participant should be observed in both locations to fully understand his or her
practice. I am in the process of determining the most appropriate observation report tool to use;
however, I believe I will likely use the GSU Department of English Observation Report Form
(used for teaching assistant portfolios) as a basic frame to work within. I will alter the form, adding questions and observational elements that pertain more closely to the needs of this study, but
find that many of the questions posed generate reported information that will likely prove useful
in this study.
Once data has been collected, compiling and analyzing the information will begin. Data
will be sorted into appropriate categories (see chapter descriptions below) and compiled to provide a greater understanding of the impact tutoring and teaching has on graduate students as
teachers, researchers, and students. Interviews will be transcribed and observation reports will be
Kitchens 18
written for each observation. All surveys and interview questions will be provided in an appendix
to the dissertation as well as necessary or relevant interview transcripts and observation reports.
PROPOSED CHAPTER OUTLINE
Introduction: Here, I define the focus and research questions, necessary foundational background (the majority of the review of scholarship will be parsed throughout the chapters), methodology (approach to gathering data, data compiling/review and analysis), and the significant
contribution to the fields of Writing Center Scholarship and Composition Pedagogy Scholarship
that this project confronts, explores, and seeks to establish. The following constitute the primary
research questions that will ground the chapters of this dissertation:
• What connections exist between teaching writing in a writing center setting and a classroom
(for graduate students)? [This will be predominantly addressed in the review of lit]
• How does a background in writing center scholarship impact a graduate student’s teaching
practices? How does writing center (tutoring) experience impact a graduate student’s teaching
practices? [survey and interview]
• How does a background in writing center scholarship inform a graduate student’s understanding of composition theory and pedagogy? How does this impact a graduate student’s “teacher
education”? [survey and interview]
• How does experience in a writing center contribute to the professional development of graduate students? [survey and interview]
• How does this experience and background knowledge affect reflective teaching practices in
developing teachers (graduate students)? [survey and interview]
Kitchens 19
• What connections exist in the practice of graduate students who perform both as tutor and as
teacher? (How does one pedagogy inform the other? Can this be seen in the student’s practice
in either/both space(s)?)
I believe these questions will lead me to find that graduate students develop the ability to
reflexively reflect on teaching practices when they have a tutoring background and that teaching
informs tutoring practices as tutoring informs teaching practices. Further, this study seeks to establish that a greater depth of professional development occurs when graduate students embody
spaces of teaching and tutoring, as opposed to embodying one or the other throughout their graduate experience. Finally, the data collected will, theoretically, illustrate that a greater understanding of composition theory and pedagogy occurs when graduate students also act as tutors and
also that a greater understanding of practitioner-researcher methodology occurs when graduate
students function as both teacher and tutor during the graduate experience.
Chapter 1: Impacting Teacher Education
Chapter One will incorporate elements of the review of literature that are not included in
the Introduction and build on what has been included. This expansion of Composition scholarship on teacher education and Writing Center scholarship on tutor education will serve to begin
making connections between the two bodies of research as well as incorporate graduate students’
responses to survey and interview questions focusing on the impact that having these knowledges creates on their educational development. Further, this chapter will discuss possible ways of
integrating teacher education and tutor education, working from the assumption that many universities are moving toward a structured tutor education class paralleling the structured teacher
education classes (Composition Theory, Composition Pedagogy, Literature Pedagogy, etc.). This
Kitchens 20
chapter will utilize information gathered from both surveys and interviews to either reinforce or
uproot the minimal existing scholarship grappling with issues of teacher/tutor education.
The primary research questions guiding this chapter are:
--How does a background in writing center scholarship inform a graduate student’s understanding of composition theory and pedagogy?
--How does this impact a graduate student’s “teacher education”?
Chapter 2: Informing Teaching and Tutoring Practices
This chapter will build on the scholarship presented and created in Chapter One, situating
the theoretical elements within practice and pedagogy. Shifting the focus from education (theory)
to practice provides a space to explore the praxis of graduate students who inhabit both tutor and
teacher roles separately and simultaneously. Here, the review of lit will again be built on to expand the theoretical notions presented in either the Introduction or in Chapter One to create a
more complete notion of what a graduate student teacher gains from the experience, including
reflexivity in reflection practices, recursiveness in tutoring and teaching practices, and the layering of pedagogical notions and actions. Included in this chapter will be the information gathered
and analyzed from surveys, interviews, and most importantly tutoring and teaching portfolios.
The primary research questions guiding this chapter are:
--How does a background in writing center scholarship impact a graduate student’s teaching practices? How does writing center (tutoring) experience impact a graduate student’s
teaching practices? [survey and interview]
--How does this experience and background knowledge affect reflective teaching practices in developing teachers (graduate students)? [survey and interview]
Kitchens 21
--How does classroom teaching experience inform tutoring practices? How does one
strengthen and/or complicate the other?
Chapter 3: Promoting Professional Development
With the foundation of tutor/teacher praxis established in Chapters One and Two, Chapter
Three seeks to explore the impact that education (theory) and practice have on professional development. Concepts that may be discussed here include ways of interpreting authority or understanding peerness, social knowledge created within writing center and classroom spaces that impacts the shift from student to academic, the organic communities (as opposed to structurally imposed communities) that develop within one or both of these settings, and the implications for
sustained teacher education once a student has matriculated. While the shift will not turn entirely
to administration, this will necessarily become part of the conversation of the text at this point.
The primary research questions guiding this chapter are:
--How does experience in a writing center contribute to the professional development of
graduate students? [survey and interview]
--How does tutoring/teaching alter a student’s sense of peerness and authority? [survey
and interview]
--What benefits to professional development do students see in embodying both tutoring
and teaching spaces? (this may shift to Chpt 4) [survey and interview]
Chapter 4: Embodying Multiple Teaching Spaces
This chapter takes the concepts presented and discussed throughout the previous chapters
and seeks to make them a “reality”--to put these ideas into a realistic, practical implementation or
enactment. The focus is on the graduate student as he or she moves away from the role of student
Kitchens 22
and toward the role of professional (teacher, lecturer, instructor, professor, researcher, administrator, etc.).
-- What connections exist in the practice of graduate students who perform both as tutor and as
teacher? (How does one pedagogy inform the other? Can this be seen in the student’s practice in
either/both space(s)?) [survey, interview, observation]
Conclusion: Review of findings and significance of contribution to the field.
PROPOSED TIMELINE
1/8/2009: Provide Methodology, Organization, Bibliography and timeline to BB for review and
comments
1/29/2009: BB returns first draft of Prospectus (no Lit Review) for revision
2/23/2009: Draft with Review of Lit submitted to BB for review/comments
3/16/2009: BB returns Draft with Review of Lit with comments
3/23/2009: Last non-committee Prospectus draft submitted to BB for review/comments
4/6-4/17/2009: Develop Surveys and Interview Questions
4/20/2009: BB returns last non-committee draft of Prospectus with comments
4/27/2009: Provide committee with final Prospectus
5/11-5/15/2009: Defend Prospectus; file necessary paperwork with IRB
6/1-7/16: Collect teaching and tutoring portfolios; conduct surveys and interviews; conduct
classroom and tutoring observations
8/1-9/21/2009: distribute remaining surveys and compile; Conduct remaining interviews and
compile; collect remaining portfolios and compile data; conduct remaining classroom and tutoring observations
11/9/2009: Provide Chapter 3 to BB for review/comments
11/16-12/4/2009: Finish Chapter 1
12/7/2009: Provide Chapter 1 to BB for review/comments; BB returns Chapter 3 with comments
Kitchens 23
12/14/2009- 1/16/2010: Revise Chapter 3; Finish writing Chapter 2
1/18/2010: Provide Chapter 2 to BB for review/comments; BB returns Chapter 4 with comments
1/25-2/12/2010: Write Introduction and Conclusion; revise Chapter 4
2/15/2010: Provide Introduction and Conclusion to BB for review/comments; BB returns Chapter 2 with comments
3/8/2010: Receive Introduction and Conclusion w/ comments from BB; final revision
3/15/2010: Provide last non-committee draft to BB for review/comments
4/5/2010: Receive last comments for revision from BB before submitting committee copy
4/19/2010: Provide “final” draft to committee for review and defense prep
5/17-5/21/2010: Defense of dissertation
6/29/2010: *approximate* deadline for submission
Kitchens 24
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