Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 2 (2022)
Anna Rollins
Marshall University
jones453@marshall.edu
In the February 2018 interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education “What’s Wrong with Writing Centers,” a tutoring strategy utilized frequently in the writing center setting was problematized: nondirective tutoring (Jacobs). Much writing center tutoring pedagogy advocates for a tutoring session to function as a conversation, with the tutor posing open-ended questions about a student’s writing and the student writer revising her own writing based upon answers formulated in response to the tutor’s particular, probing questions (Ryan and Zimmerelli). Nondirection as a tutoring strategy, though, has received pushback, and some argue that direct tutoring that provides students with explicit models to emulate is a more effective way to conduct a tutoring session (Barnett and Blumner). In asynchronous online sessions, where tutors provide feedback to student writing in the form of marginalia and endnotes, the conversations that often occur in face-to-face and synchronous online sessions are not achieved in the usual way due to constraints of digital modality, medium, and student audience. Still, tutors aim to enact pedagogy that incorporates feedback that resists copyediting while incorporating a conversational style of response.
Beth Hewett noted that online conferencing (both synchronous and asynchronous) is hard to do well because it requires “quick thinking and clear, purposeful communication” (The Online Writing Conference 22). Hewett then elaborated upon what “clear, purposeful communication” is comprised of; she noted that indirect speech (not to be conflated with nondirection as a tutoring strategy), while often utilized as a way to mitigate power dynamics in the tutoring session and as a politeness strategy, often leads to student confusion in online conferencing (The Online Writing Conference 116-118).
The use of nondirection and its effectiveness is debated in face-to-face tutoring sessions; this strategy, then, becomes all the more complicated when utilized in online sessions. Principles 13 and 14 of the CCCC Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction (OWI) directly reference online writing tutoring. While the CCCC OWI Committee stated that there is no evidence that synchronous online tutorials are superior to asynchronous online sessions, they noted that “online tutoring differs drastically from onsite tutoring; using asynchronous text to explain and intervene, for example, is quite different from orally talking a student through writing strengths and weaknesses or encouraging change while never touching the students’ paper with a pen” (Hewett, Foundational Practices 85). This committee also noted that “published literature often does not address the specific differences between online and onsite strategies for tutoring” (Hewett, Foundational Practices 84).
In fact, after finding that student tutors often reverted to copyediting when tutoring in the online format, Kelly Shea postulated that it may be ideal to train online writing tutors in face-to-face practices so that these online sessions would better resemble the pedagogy that prizes writing as a conversation. This directive aligns with principle 4 of the CCC OWI Committee for Effective Practices in OWI which stated that “appropriate onsite composition theories, pedagogies, and strategies should be migrated and adapted to the online instructional environment” (Hewett, “Fully Online” 52). One major pedagogical hurdle that online teachers/tutors must creatively address is the lack of connection via facial expressions and body language. The conversation about writing in the asynchronous online format requires tutors to use writing to communicate about writing; this distinction necessarily requires a revision in pedagogy and praxis.
Writing center tutors must consider the pedagogical purposes that guide their interactions with students in tutoring sessions. As Hewett noted, “an eclectic theoretical approach to the OWI seems best because online writing teachers need to use any and all effective strategies from any and all epistemologies” (“Fully Online” 197). Our tutors are instructed to evaluate a student’s level of knowledge about a particular part of the writing process, and they are then encouraged to utilize a combination of directive and nondirective strategies based upon the student’s needs. This evaluation becomes less straightforward in an asynchronous tutoring session; because a tutor cannot converse in real time with a student about his or her current level of knowledge about various components of the writing process, the tutor must infer this information from the student’s writing. Directiveness, therefore, may be utilized more frequently and necessarily in asynchronous tutoring sessions. Beth Hewett provided a process for providing feedback in asynchronous writing pedagogy. This process involved asking and directing the following: “what is the problem?”; “why is it a problem?”; “how can this problem be revised and avoided?”; “do these steps to address the problem” (Reading to Learn 197). This heuristic took into account the writing process and required specificity from the individual providing written feedback, but it still allowed tutors to utilize strategies that are often characterized as nondirective.
Our writing center offers tutoring sessions in two separate digital modalities – asynchronous and synchronous – but for the purposes of this research, I have analyzed and discussed tutoring feedback in the asynchronous modality. In our asynchronous appointments, students are directed to upload a written document to an online scheduling system; our tutors provide feedback to students within 24 hours of their scheduled appointment time. The medium of communication in this modality is entirely text-based, and students at all levels (both undergraduate and graduate), in all disciplines, and at all stages of the writing process utilize this tutoring service. On Marshall University’s campus during the Fall 2017 semester, nearly 20 percent of all tutoring sessions were held asynchronously online; in these sessions, tutors provide feedback to students in the form of marginal comments and endnotes. A conversation, with both individuals giving and taking information, is not present in this type of session.
Because a significant number of sessions are conducted in this manner, I decided to look at the specific feedback that tutors on our campus provide to students in these asynchronous sessions. Utilizing a framework developed by Ahmar Mahboob and Devo Yilmaz Devrim, I classified each comment under one of four descriptors: handholding, carrying, bridging, and basejumping. These feedback classifications were developed as a means to avoid feedback that was simply corrective or signaling an error in a student’s language usage. These classifications are rooted in the Teaching-Learning cycle and therefore privilege the notion of scaffolding (Vygotsky). These descriptors relate to the presence of a rationale and the level of explicitness in feedback.
These categorizations allow an individual to evaluate the language utilized in essays commented upon by tutors. The two criteria – explicitness and rationale – can also be correlated with feedback that is linguistically direct (explanations and commands, for instance) or linguistically indirect (rhetorical questions, for instance). By categorizing and analyzing specific language features present in our writing center tutor’s comments, I aim to gain insight into linguistic patterns that are present in our tutors’ feedback. From this analysis, I make the claim that good tutoring pedagogy can incorporate strategies of both direction and nondirection depending upon situation and context; however, linguistic indirectness is a feature that should be avoided by tutors in their feedback. Basejumping feedback is by definition linguistically indirect and is often utilized as a politeness strategy and as a way of avoiding hierarchical linguistic moves. This type of feedback, though used most infrequently by our tutors, should be reconsidered and revised in order to keep students from interpreting valuable feedback as suggestive rather than directive.
During Fall 2017, five tutors in Marshall University’s writing center agreed to participate in an IRB-approved study. Tutors who agreed to participate in the study had asynchronous feedback collected and de-identified. I then analyzed and classified comments based upon Mahboob and Devrim’s aforementioned categories. After documenting feedback types, I analyzed the comments and looked for trends related to the presence of explicitness and rationale. Over the semester, 115 de-identified student papers submitted for asynchronous tutoring sessions were collected. In these student papers, I analyzed tutor feedback to see how tutoring practices are made manifest in the grammar of the feedback given to students.
Based upon this comment analysis, our tutors often (73 percent of the time) provided explicit feedback to students – feedback that told the students precisely what they should do in order to improve (or “fix”) their work. Our tutors’ feedback often provided a rationale for their suggestions (52 percent of the time), but a rationale was given less frequently than explicit direction.
Perhaps most interesting to me was that of the tutors who provided the most online feedback to students (tutors A, B, and C provided 1,301 out of the 1,399 comments), each had similar percentages of carrying, handholding, bridging, and basejumping feedback. No single tutor provided just carrying feedback or just basejumping feedback; the type of feedback given was evenly distributed amongst tutors. This means that tutors were not relying on just one pedagogical method for providing feedback; tutors varied their approach depending upon situation and context.
Of the 1,399 comments given by tutors to students, 271 of those comments (or 19 percent of feedback) were crafted as interrogatives. The presence of questioning is a key feature of nondirective tutoring and can be used productively to guide students toward thinking about larger issues in their writing that need to be developed for the sake of cohesion or clarity. These interrogatives were not always utilized to invoke brainstorming or conversation, though this was the intent in some instances. In many other instances, however, tutors would provide carrying feedback and then conclude that feedback with a question mark. Tutors, in these instances, seemed to know precisely how a student should edit a paper; the use of the question mark, however, was a way that tutors seemed to soften their feedback, or decrease the perception that he/she was explicitly copyediting a student’s paper. For instance, one tutor would often comment, “in text citation?” in places of a student’s paper where an in-text citation was needed. This feedback was classified as carrying feedback – the tutor was providing explicit instruction that an in-text citation was needed in the paper – but the tutor was softening his/her approach with the presence of a question mark. This type of feedback happened frequently, and while this phenomenon could be interpreted multiple ways, it seemed that this was the tutor’s attempt to avoid explicitly copy-editing the student’s paper or to avoid feedback that could be interpreted as hierarchical or impolite.
Another observation I made while categorizing tutor feedback was that, most frequently, the interrogatives utilized outside of the “carrying” feedback occurred in basejumping feedback. These interrogatives were likely tutors’ attempts at nondirective, “conversational,” feedback. An example of this type of feedback is as follows: “What do you mean by this? Do you mean that this is the best explanation that you have? Do you mean that this explanation is the most correct?” In this feedback, the tutor is not providing explicit instruction, nor is the tutor necessarily giving a rationale for questioning the student about his/her explanation. This comment, though lacking explicitness and a rationale, is not devoid of helpful feedback; rather, these interrogatives function to engage the student in the type of conversation that could lead to productive revision. However, this feedback can still lead to problems with student interpretation and implementation.
Not all basejumping feedback was always as focused and clear as the aforementioned example. A piece of feedback that I classified as basejumping that read to me as less clear was as follows: “What is this type of data?” This question was posed in response to a term that was utilized in the student’s paper, monotonous data. The tutor was asking for additional clarity in their question, but the tutor’s lack of content knowledge was made apparent by the construction of a question surrounding a discipline-specific term.
Based upon my analysis, it became clear to me that, as I revised my future units on online instruction, I needed to focus specifically on pedagogical practices regarding feedback that utilizes interrogatives. This was particularly crucial because, in my analysis, interrogatives were frequently classified as basejumping feedback, and this feedback most frequently included linguistic indirection. While this feedback, from my perspective as the director, often came from a place of empathy for students, it did not take into account the nuances present in student interpretation and implementation of commentary. For instance, one tutor’s basejumping comment read as follows: “What do you mean by this? Do you mean that this is the best explanation that you have? Do you mean that this explanation is the most correct?” From my vantage point, I knew that the tutor was indirectly telling a student that there was lack of clarity in a portion of the paper. The tutor was utilizing interrogatives as a means to simulate a conversation and to soften what could be interpreted as harsh criticism. From a student’s perspective, though, this feedback could easily be misinterpreted as a tutor’s genuine misunderstanding of the content of the paper. This interpretation could then lead to an evaluation of the tutor as ignorant, and that piece of feedback – along with others – could be dismissed due to this appraisal.
I realized when analyzing feedback that the use of the interrogative can accomplish many different and often divergent purposes, and at times, the use of this grammatical construction can impede readability of feedback. Because interrogatives were often utilized to invoke a more conversational tone, future training of asynchronous writing tutors at our institution needs to incorporate a discussion of ways to invoke a conversational, accessible tone in feedback without impeding the clarity of that feedback.
Whether tutors choose to utilize directive or nondirective strategies in asynchronous sessions, tutors need to be reminded that their decisions should be based upon analysis of student understanding and pedagogical appropriateness. By looking at the language features present in the feedback that my tutors are currently providing, I am now better equipped to revise asynchronous tutor feedback training based upon current comment patterns.
Works cited
Hewett, Beth. "Fully Online and Hybrid Writing Instruction." A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, edited by Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper Taggart, Kurt Schick, and H. Brooke Hessler, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 194-211.
Hewett, Beth, and Kevin Eric DePew, editors. Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2015, pp. 33-92, www.wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/owi/front.pdf.
Hewett, Beth. Reading to Learn and Writing to Teach: Literacy Strategies for Online Writing Instruction. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2015.
Hewett, Beth. The Online Writing Conference: A Guide for Teachers and Tutors. Macmillan, 2015, www.community.macmillan.com/docs/DOC-1474.
Jacobs, Rose. "What's Wrong with Writing Centers." The Chronicle, 5 Feb. 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/What-s-Wrong-With-Writing/242414.
Mahboob, Ahmar, and Devo Yilmaz Devrim. "Supporting Independent Construction Online: Feedback in the SLATE Project." Linguistic and the Human Sciences, vol. 7, 2013, p. 23-101, doi:10.1558/lhs.v7i1-3.101.
Ryan, Leigh, and Lisa Zimmerelli. The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors. 6th ed., Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016.
Barnett, Robert W., and Jacob S. Blumner, editors. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Center Theory. Allyn and Bacon, 2001, pp. 225-41.
Thompson, Isabelle, et al. "Examining Our Lore: A Survey of Students' and Tutors' Satisfaction with Writing Center Conferences." Writing Center Journal, vol. 29, no. 1, 2009, pp. 78-105.
Vygotsky, Lev. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press, 1978.
