Hemenway, Stephen I Oral History Interview: History of the Hope College English Department

The Hope College Oral History Project was designed to record and transcribe for permanent collection the living heritage of Holland, Michigan

Huttar, Charles A Oral History Interview: History of the Hope College English Department

The Hope College Oral History Project was designed to record and transcribe for permanent collection the living heritage of Holland, Michigan

Schakel, Peter J Oral History Interview: History of the Hope College English Department

The Hope College Oral History Project was designed to record and transcribe for permanent collection the living heritage of Holland, Michigan

Session Notes: Preliminary Results from a Cross-Institutional Survey

University Writing Cente

ten Hoor, Henry Oral History Interview: History of the Hope College English Department

The Hope College Oral History Project was designed to record and transcribe for permanent collection the living heritage of Holland, Michigan

Reynolds, William Oral History Interview: History of the Hope College English Department

The Hope College Oral History Project was designed to record and transcribe for permanent collection the living heritage of Holland, Michigan

“So what would you say your thesis is so far?” - Tutor Questions in Writing Tutorials

Two long-standing assumptions on which writing centers operate are that individual tutoring helps students’ writing development and that the actual talk of such tutoring enables such development (Bruffee, 1984; Lunsford, 1991; Gillespie & Lerner, 2008; Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2015). Questions, long thought of as one of the most important pedagogical tools, enable writing tutors to tap into students’ knowledge of writing, help them clarify the writing task, advance their thoughts, and advise them indirectly on how to proceed further. Whereas writing center lore has emphasized the importance of questioning in non-directive tutorials, scholars have only recently begun to explore empirically tutors’ actual use of questions more generally in tutorials, the differentiated functions of questions, and the strategic use of questions in tutorial discourse (Thompson & Mackiewicz, 2014). In this study we present an original, empirical scheme for coding question types in writing tutorials derived from 15 writing tutorial sessions in our own corpus of the genre. We apply this functionally oriented scheme to one typical session to show how questions operate locally, how they are distributed across a session, as well as how they achieve both pedagogical and organizational goals within such interactions. The use of questions in this tutorial is compared with question use in 14 other sessions to discover patterns in tutors’ questioning behavior. Our findings provide insight into how tutors’ strategic use of particular question types can empower students to become more active participants in the tutorial

What We Can Learn From Secondary School Writing Centers

Most of the documented interactions between secondary and post-secondary writing centers tend to be situated in the context of “service learning.” In “service learning” contexts, the former is the primary beneficiary of the expertise and outreach of the latter, as college and university directors and consultants may train local middle and high school students to open their own writing centers (e.g., Hutchinson & Gillespie, 2015), provide supplemental tutoring support or enrichment services (e.g, Tinker, 2006), or engage teachers in professional development on postsecondary expectations for disciplinary writing (e.g., Blumner & Childers, 2011). While service-oriented frameworks can be useful and important in expanding teacher and student capacity and closing achievement and opportunity gaps (Eby, 1998), they often fail to account for substantial benefits accrued by postsecondary writing centers, their directors, and their consultants in their interactions with their secondary school counterparts. As secondary school writing centers continue to grow into powerful engines of scholarship and pedagogical innovation, radical sites of spirited inquiry, and hubs for social justice and activism, more substantive professional dialogue about how stakeholders in postsecondary writing centers learn and benefit from their secondary school counterparts is required. To begin this dialogue, representatives from university writing centers, a secondary school writing center, and a professional writing center organization will contextualize how the work of middle and high school writing centers is pushing pedagogy and practice in writing centers writ large before breaking attendees into smaller hosted discussion groups for further collaborative learning