Review: A Synthesis of Qualitative Studies of Writing Center Tutoring

A Synthesis of Qualitative Studies of Writing Center Tutoring is refreshingly direct about a regrettable fact concerning writing center tutoring and tutor training: established best practices are difficult to quantify. Before reaching the end of the first page, Rebecca Day Babcock, Kellye Manning, and Travis Rogers outline the impetus of their research, relating Babcock’s difficulty in synthesizing information on the ideologies of writing centers when preparing for her doctoral comprehensive exams. That difficulty prompts the authors to admit that “there was no one common writing center theory, but rather a set of practices and a pattern of taking theories from other disciplines and applying them to writing centers” (1). Babcock, Manning, and Rogers then call upon Linda Shamoon and Deborah Burns’ infamous 1995 essay, “A Critique of Pure Tutoring,” referencing its indictment that writing center research does little to critically examine its preferred tutoring practices, reducing appraisal efforts to little more than hunches. On generally accepted techniques and strategies, Shamoon and Burns write that “these codes and appeals seem less the product of research or examined practice and more like articles of faith that serve to validate a tutoring approach which ‘feels right’” (135). Nearly two decades later, writing center research has arguably diminished old preferences for hands-off, minimalist tutoring. The message of A Synthesis is immediately clear: a unified theory of tutoring practice must prefer researched, verifiable practice and eschew unsubstantiated beliefUniversity Writing Cente

The Reifying Center Archive Process: Sustainable Writing Center Archive Practice for Praxis, Research, And Continuity

A structured process to capture, sort, digitize, and curate a researchable history of a writing center has the potential to improve writing center administration with greater recall at both the local and global level. Maintaining a standard of practice from year to year with effective training, stable institutional partnerships, and evidence-based practice is already challenging. This is compounded by the continual erosion of accumulated memory and context for numerous administrative choices through the regular departure of tutors and administrators, posing further challenge to consistent practice, pedagogy, and policy. To preserve the programmatic memory informing countless decisions, relationships, and administrative expediencies, writing center administrators must establish a regular process to curate a researchable archive of the history produced by a center’s operation. Failure to do so risks the atrophy of critical memory every time a staff member leaves the writing center. Adoption of the proposed Reifying Center Archive Process, or ReCAP, provides a robust archive for programmatic recall. Creating an archive will enable writing center administrators to delve into the history of how a center has operated in the past; as a result, the center is better insulated against operational missteps or retreading in the future. Beyond the clear benefit to individual centers, the eventual standardization of such an archive process has long-term potential to improve historically challenging efforts to collect and synthesize the work done in centers across multiple institutions at the regional, national, and global levels. To promote the necessity of the ReCAP, this dissertation: reviews the scholarship that establishes the necessity of an archive-supported writing center; presents a case study of a large public university writing center; prescribes the literature-based archivist practices that will best sustain a writing center’s materials for future research; outlines the ReCAP as a tool to digitally present the physical holdings of the writing center’s archive; establishes a new standard for the organization of writing center materials within the ReCAP; and finally, tests these proposed practices by creating a prototype ReCAP archive for the case study center, the Georgia State University Writing Studio

Getting Started Right: Writing the Literature Review

In this presentation, students learn about the purpose of literature reviews and how to get started. We will discuss how to read papers critically and how to organize materials before writing. Students will understand the importance of annotating information correctly, comparing & contrasting the literature gathered and integrating & synthesizing the information. Session moderated by Maggie Shawcross, University Libraries

A Comparative Study Of The Training, Experience, Duties, And Responsibilities Of East Texas Negro School Principals

The principalship of a modern school represents a vital place in the machinery of present-day education. To have in charge of the ship of education a captain trained for his work, experienced in the field, and cognisant of his duties and responsibilities, is as important as to have an experienced and capable skipper in control of a ship in a stormy sea. With present-day education in a highly changeable state, it Is fundamental that there be a steady aiding hand to direct the activities in the scheme of education. The troubled sea of learning for the great masses cannot be navigated by novices in the art of educational strategy

Wiki\u27d Transformations: Technology Supporting Collaborative Learning

This paper examines the uses of wikis in teaching in higher education. It was developed in support of a workshop offered at the Higher Education in Transformation conference in Dublin, Ireland, in March, 2015. The paper describes one author’s use of a wiki over a period of five years to support graduate students in their study of principles of learning, reviews some of the literature on educational applications of wikis and suggests directions for future research

Disorderly Differences: Recognition, Accommodation, and American Law

In January 1992, People magazine ran a story entitled Die, My Daughter, Die! \u27 describing the murder of sixteen-year-old Tina Isa, the daughter of Zein and Maria Isa, Palestinians who emigrated with their seven children to the United States from the West Bank in 1985. Opposite a half-page photo of Zein in a bloodstained sweater, the People article explained that he had hoped to arrange a marriage for Tina, as he had for her three older sisters. He wanted Tina to return to his native village and marry a relative of one of his sons-in-law. Tina resented and resisted her father\u27s plans concerning her marriage and defied the strict, traditional values of her parents by taking a job and dating an African-American schoolmate. As a result, Tina and her father had frequent fights during which he warned her about her offensive behavior (e.g., allowing herself to be seen in public with her boyfriend) and threatened to vindicate the family\u27s damaged honor. On the night of Tina\u27s death, Zein again confronted her and accused her of shaming the family by virtue of her allegedly promiscuous behavior. Then, while Tina\u27s mother held her down, Zein stabbed Tina to death with a seven-inch knife. Charged with first-degree murder, the Isas presented a cultural defense. They claimed that they should not be found guilty since what they did to Tina would not have been treated as a serious crime in their homeland. They maintained that they were obeying the law as they (and Tina) knew and understood it, and that Tina\u27s disobedience called for her punishment. The Isas\u27 cultural defense failed, as it generally does, and they were each convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death

Paleobotany Supports the Floating Mat Model for the Origin of Carboniferous Coal Beds

A review of the history of the debate on origin of Carboniferous coal shows the priority that autochthonists have placed on paleobotanical data and interpretation. New data and methodology are offered here for interpreting the paleobotany and paleoecology of dominant Carboniferous coal plants: tree lycopsids and the tree-fern Psaronius. Lycopsid and tree-fern anatomies are characterized by air-filled chambers for buoyancy with rooting structures that are not suited for growth into and through terrestrial soil. Lycopsid development included boat-like dispersing spores, establishment of abundant buoyant, photosynthetic, branching and radiating rhizomorphs prior to upright stem growth, and prolonged life of the unbranched trunk prior to abrupt terminating growth of reproductive branches. The tree fern Psaronius is now understood better than previously to have had a much thicker, more flaring, and further spreading outer root mantle that formed a buoyant raft. Its increasingly heavy leaf crown was counterbalanced by forcing the basally rotting cane-like trunk and attached inner portion of the root mantle continually deeper underwater. Lycopsids and tree-ferns formed living floating mats capable of supporting the trunks. Paleobotany of coal plants should now be best understood as supporting a floating raft that deposited the detritus that now forms Carboniferous coal beds