Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 18, No. 3 (2021)

The ‘Ghost’ in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback?

Bruce Bowles Jr.
Texas A&M University—Central Texas
bruce.bowles@tamuct.edu

Abstract

Although the presence of faculty members’ feedback is a common occurrence in tutorials, such sessions have not garnered significant attention in either writing center or response scholarship. Nevertheless, the presence of faculty member commentary in a tutorial can have a profound effect on student interpretations of commentary, agenda setting, revision tasks, and on the emotions of the participants. This article examines a study of nine tutorials in which tutors and students worked with feedback from faculty members. Key findings from the study are discussed pertaining to how tutors and students interpret and apply commentary from faculty members as well as the affective dimensions that frequently arise in such tutorials. Chief among these findings are the heavy reliance tutors and students place on external documents and the students’ own texts to interpret feedback, the manner in which tutors approach feedback in a linear fashion and assume absence of feedback as approval, the ability of faculty members’ commentary to dictate tutorial agendas, and the benefits of dealing with students’ texts and offering coping strategies in lieu of dwelling on emotions. Predicated on these findings, recommendations are made for improving pedagogy and for improving collaborations between faculty and tutors as well as for engaging in more empirical examinations of such tutorials. Overall, this article seeks to demonstrate the unique complexities the presence of commentary from faculty members adds to tutorials, arguing that such tutorials are different in kind rather than degree and need to be treated as such in practice and in scholarship.

The “Ghost” in the Tutorial

Throughout writing center scholarship, tutoring is frequently referred to as one-to-one. A tutor and student work together with a text in order to improve the student’s writing process and the text under discussion. The process, typically, is a collaborative endeavor between two people. This one-to-one, peer-to-peer nature of tutorials is seen as a foundation of writing center pedagogy, allowing for additional attention to students’ particular needs that can oftentimes be missing in a traditional classroom setting. Yet, a certain type of tutorial tends to significantly complicate such a utopian vision of writing center work—tutorials in which a student has brought commentary from a faculty member.

The scene is all too familiar. A student walks into the writing center, pleasantries are exchanged, and the tutor and student begin to set an agenda. Rather quickly, the student pulls out a text and the tutor notices that it has faculty commentary on it. For tutors, this usually results in mixed, quite contradictory feelings. On one hand, the faculty member’s feedback can offer tremendous insight on how to work with the student and revise the text; on the other hand, the tutor now has to work with the student to interpret the commentary as well as contend with any areas where the student, the tutor, or both do not necessarily agree with the faculty member’s feedback. The tutorial is not completely in the hands of the tutor and student anymore. Tensions can begin to arise as the tutor and student navigate the conflicting goals of trying to improve the student’s writing knowledge and processes while also revising in a fashion to conform to the faculty member’s expectations. As Janet Auten and Melissa Pasterkiewicz observe, such tutorials can “involve a struggle with that ‘third person in the session,’ the classroom teacher” (1). In a sense, the faculty member is manifested; they become an “apparition” of sorts, not entirely visible yet a felt presence that hovers over a tutorial, an ominous reminder of the hierarchies of the classroom and the academy. The direction and tone of the conversations in the tutorial are frequently responding, to one degree or another, to this faculty member.

For those who work in writing centers, these types of tutorials are commonplace, a part of the day-to-day routine. Oddly, though, tutorials featuring faculty members’ commentary are not addressed empirically in writing center scholarship; the majority of scholarship pertaining to them is anecdotal and theoretical. These types of tutorials tend to be treated as an extension of standard tutorials rather than their own unique entity, with reflections on how they change the nature of the tutorial, and best pedagogical practices in these instances, predicated on past experiences. In order to contribute a more empirical approach to this area of scholarship, this article presents research from a study of nine such tutorials. First, scholarship on both response and writing center tutorials—and the ways in which they intersect—will be explored. After, the methodology of the study will be provided. The findings of the study will then be presented across three main categories: interpreting, applying, and affective. Following the presentation of the findings, implications for tutor training and writing center pedagogy will be examined along with recommendations for faculty workshops. Lastly, the conclusion will argue that these tutorials present unique challenges; the contextual intricacies introduced via faculty commentary transform a tutorial in meaningful ways that require alterations to pedagogy.

Response and Writing Center Pedagogy: A Reciprocal, Yet Distant, Relationship

While often seen as discreet activities, responding to student writing and writing center pedagogy share a lot in common. Both endeavors attempt to offer feedback to students on their writing in order to help them grow and mature as writers; each is an attempt at one-to-one instruction for students. Writing centers feature direct conversation; response, as Richard Straub suggests, is—at its best—conversational in nature (“Teacher Response”). Intriguingly, though, in recent years scholars have also become interested in the manner in which writing center pedagogy can inform response practices.

Both Elizabeth Busekrus and Andrea Scott contend that the scholarship, and practices, of teacher response and writing center pedagogy have valuable connections and can inform one another in productive ways. Busekrus notes that, “Writing center feedback includes principles central to commenting for transfer: intentionality and specificity through goal setting and metacognition through a conversational dynamic” (104). She contends that the student-centered, conversational approach of writing center tutorials can translate to faculty members’ feedback, allowing for writing goals to be established between faculty members and students and then addressed via commentary. Furthermore, Scott advocates that tutors can offer insights to faculty members across the disciplines when it comes to response practices and encourages collaborations between tutors and faculty in the Princeton Writing Program. For Scott, these collaborations are beneficial as a result of “tutors’ double experience as tutors in the writing center and students in the classroom” which allows access “to perspectives often unavailable to faculty because of their more hierarchical positions as teachers” (81). As the scholarship on response indicates, student perspectives are vital to understanding response practices yet are oftentimes given tangential attention (Bowden; Murphy; O’Neill and Mathison-Fife; Straub “Students’ Reactions”). However, in workshops such as Scott’s, the normal hierarchy is inverted, with tutors serving as experts from both a tutoring and student perspective.

This dual nature of tutors is also rather beneficial for students when it comes to interpreting the feedback they receive from faculty. Muriel Harris views tutors as exceptionally well positioned to interpret faculty commentary; they can oftentimes bridge the gap between faculty members and students. As Harris observes, “Tutors are thus other than teachers in that they inhabit a middle ground where their role is that of translator or interpreter, turning teacher language into student language” (37). As successful students, tutors are impressive in their ability to aid students in these interpretive processes associated with faculty commentary, processes that—as Nancy Sommers discovered—can be vital to students’ future success in academia. They can help to clarify commentary that is confusing and vague while aiding students dealing with the difficulties of revising in accordance with the feedback received.  

This feedback, however, can make such tutorials complex, adding complicated power dynamics that are not present in many other instances. Patricia Dunn views these tutorials as having a certain political dimension since the tutor and the student might be collaborators and equals, but the faculty member and the tutor most definitely are not. The desire to follow the faculty member’s directives and preferences is strong. As Dunn argues, “The sometimes unequal status of classroom professor and writing center tutor (whether student or faculty) sets up, by unspoken decree, a situation in which it is assumed that the tutor will unquestionably support the marginal comments of the classroom instructor” (36-37). Once the faculty member’s commentary is engaged, the most common outcome in these asymmetrical situations tends to be adherence.

These inequities can be further compounded by the reliance many smaller writing centers have on particular faculty members. Jennifer Jefferson observes how at smaller institutions, where the relationship with faculty is commonly more intimate, tutors can become fixated on faculty expectations rather than the goals and needs of students. She equates such tutorials to those in which the tutor knows the student’s topic well, observing how both types of tutorials can lead tutors to be overly directive and product-based. In the end, both the tutor and the student are trying to please the faculty member, albeit for differing reasons.

Faculty commentary can cause pedagogical conflicts as well. Auten and Pasterkiewicz draw on the work of Peter Elbow to discuss how faculty members are many times emphasizing ranking and evaluating in their commenting practices, while tutors are more concerned with liking—finding what is working well with a piece of writing in order to improve it. Faculty commentary also tends to be more focused on change and revisions to the text than on improving the writing process. These issues wind up having a profound impact on agenda-setting; since the faculty member has already identified what needs to be “fixed,” tutors and students can become fixated on addressing the core concerns of the faculty member rather than negotiating a collaborative agenda as best practices suggest (Bruce; Macauley; Newkirk).

These power dynamics and conflicts can be further exacerbated by the emotional responses of students. Students are—in many instances—hurt by the commentary they have received and can be focused on these emotions excessively. If these emotions are strong enough, they can impede a session, shifting conversation away from students’ writing and fixating primarily on the emotions involved (Agostinelli et al.; Haen). Advice on how to deal with such strong emotions in a tutorial is mixed. Corinne Agostinelli, Helena Poch, and Elizabeth Santoro offer several pieces of advice, with one of their primary suggestions being to attempt to turn the tutorial toward what the writer wants to achieve. As they note, “This is not callous and insensitive when you remember that a tutor is not a therapist; we are limited to offering a tissue, a glass of water, and compassion” (Agostinelli et al 36). Mike Haen also supports moving the focus of the session in the direction of writing concerns.

Gayla Mills is more skeptical of this position, though. Mills believes that emotions are not necessarily impediments to strong writing, arguing that Agostinelli et al.’s approach “assumes a writer can’t be both emotional and rational about his work. Yet some of our best writing comes from a position of intense feeling” (3). She suggests that tutors can do research on emotions they commonly encounter in the writing center to better inform one another; additionally, she advises assessing the strength of the emotion in order to determine how to properly approach the student. Mills believes tutors should help the student in the best way possible, whether that means focusing on the text under discussion or shifting attention toward the person behind the writing.

Students can bring a complex array of emotions to sessions, and scholars disagree as to how to best handle such situations. Nevertheless, students might be more comfortable attempting to make sense of the commentary with a peer rather than returning to an asymmetrical power dynamic with the faculty member. Thus, tutors can serve as important mediators in these instances. As a result, dealing with emotions in some capacity will be critical to the success of such tutorials.

In spite of these difficulties, such tutorials are often phenomenal opportunities for students to grow and develop as writers and scholars alongside their peers. Tutors can be excellent allies for students as they wrestle with the feedback they receive and attempt to translate it into meaningful revisions. To maximize the success of such sessions, we need to better understand the issues that arise in regard to interpreting faculty commentary, the power struggles—especially in relation to agenda setting—that emerge due to the presence of faculty commentary, and the frequent emotional nature of such tutorials. Writing center scholarship has provided a theoretical understanding of such tutorials while offering pragmatic advice from experience. Nevertheless, an empirical examination affords the opportunity to discover hidden issues that reside in such tutorials in order to better understand the nuances and intricacies with which tutors have to struggle.

A Methodology for Examining Tutorials Addressing Faculty Members’ Commentary

Intrigued by tutorials in which faculty commentary is a primary emphasis of the session, I devised a study driven by the research question—How do tutors and students interpret and apply faculty members' written commentary within the context of tutorials in order to revise texts and/or improve on future assignments? As the research question indicates, the study is primarily concerned with how tutors and students engage with faculty members’ commentary. This became a driving force behind the coding scheme; while the coding scheme was inductive, as the transcripts were coded, codes were ascribed to actions performed by the tutors and students in order to address the research question directly. The focus was on tutors’ and students’ engagement with the commentary within sessions, on the actions they performed to interpret and apply the commentary, not on the commentary itself. A key to the coding scheme was to capture the work that was taking place in such sessions.

As a result, three over-arching coding categories became the focal point of the data analysis: interpreting, applying, and affective. The interpreting category referred to actions that were performed by tutors and students in order to understand what the faculty commentary meant. In these instances, tutors and students were not focused on revising the students’ texts in any particular fashion but were instead concentrating on what message the faculty member was specifically conveying through the commentary. In regard to the applying category, this referred to actions that attempted to use the messages received in the commentary in order to revise the text that was commented on, improve on future writing tasks, or improve upon a key concept that was the focus of the commentary. As far as the affective category was concerned, this referred to moments in the tutorials where the tutor and student were attempting to deal with student emotions arising from the commentary. These moments were woven into both the interpreting and applying work, and the tutors demonstrated an array of strategies for dealing with these emotions.

Overall, the methodology by which the data was collected and analyzed was rather straight forward. First and foremost, IRB approval was sought and obtained (IRB Protocol #2018040001). Afterward, a question was added to the WCOnline appointment form: “Do you have specific written commentary from your instructor that you wish to work on interpreting and applying during your session?” Whenever a student indicated “Yes” to this question, and the principal investigator was available to record the session, consent was obtained from the student (tutors willing to participate in the study had already signed consent forms) and any texts with faculty members’ commentary were collected and scanned, if only a print version existed. The session was then audio-recorded. After the session, the principal investigator would obtain consent from the faculty member to use their commentary as well as ask for any supporting documents (assignment prompts, rubrics, syllabi, etc.) that pertained to the assignment. Overall, the study featured nine students, seven faculty members, and five tutors. The seven faculty members were from a variety of disciplines including accounting, criminal justice, history, psychology, and social work.

Once the transcriptions were completed, an inductive coding scheme was devised. First pass coding was done using latent codes in order to get a sense of the themes and patterns emerging in the data. The functional unit of analysis was a conversational turn. Each conversational turn could, however, have multiple codes ascribed if it fit the parameters for each code. After analyzing the data from the first pass coding, codes were removed if they were not present across multiple tutorials. Furthermore, various codes were combined if they were reflective of similar phenomenon. Second pass coding was then done with the coding scheme in place. Overall, there are 20 codes divided across the aforementioned three main categories: interpreting, applying, and affective. While most codes are attributed to one category, three codes—Asking Questions, Examining Student’s Text, and Referring to External Documents/Information—were relevant to both the interpreting and applying category since, while they emerged most prominently in the interpreting category, they were also found when tutors and students were applying the written feedback from faculty members and, in rare instances, when dealing with affective concerns (see Table 1 in Appendix A).

Analysis and interpretation of the data demonstrated several prominent themes that emerged within each category. While each tutorial was unique in its own way, the manner in which tutors and students engaged with faculty members’ written commentary demonstrated several commonalities and patterns. These commonalities and patterns are instructive as to how such tutorials frequently play out as well as the common pitfalls that occur throughout tutorials in which tutors and students engage with faculty members’ commentary. In the next section, these findings will be discussed in relation to the three over-arching types of work tutors and students were accomplishing.

Key Findings in Regard to Tutor and Student Engagement with Faculty Members’ Commentary

The tutorials in this study tended to move in a somewhat predictable pattern. Earlier in the session, tutors and students would focus on interpreting the commentary the student had received. Once the commentary was interpreted, the tutors and students would then set to work on applying the commentary in some fashion, whether it was revising the text which had received commentary, working on the next writing task moving forward, or gaining a firmer grasp of a concept the student had yet to master. Throughout these two stages, an affective dimension emerged as students wrestled with emotions in relation to the commentary they received along with the tasks they had to complete. Although these stages were often recursive, with discussions of applications leading to further need for interpretations, and either task leading to conversations about emotions, they each presented distinct findings in regard to how tutors and students deal with faculty commentary. Not surprisingly, many of these intriguing findings dealt with the manner in which the faculty members’ commentary was interpreted.

What does this mean?

As Harris suggests, a primary role for tutors is to serve as translator and interpreter. The findings of this study support this assertion, with interpreting faculty members’ commentary being the most prominent task tutors and students undertook, accounting for 47.57% of the codes applied. While this was not an unexpected finding, the manner in which the tutors and students approached this interpretation was rather surprising. It might be assumed that tutors and students would place an extraordinary amount of emphasis on the actual words faculty members composed on students’ texts. Nevertheless, the two most common moves tutors and students made when interpreting faculty members’ commentary were to refer to external documents and examine the students’ texts in relation to those comments.

In regard to referring to external documents, both tutors and students relied heavily on assignment sheets, rubrics, classroom notes, style manuals, and Purdue OWL in order to decipher commentary. The tutors in this study, as well as the students, valued external documents when interpreting commentary, seeing them as interconnected, as part of the genre systems surrounding the commentary. Rather than fixating on what the faculty member wrote exclusively, tutors and students—but especially tutors—would quickly seek out these external documents in order to gain a better sense of the genre system in which the faculty members’ commentary was operating. The tutors seemed quite aware that these external documents frequently possessed pivotal clues that would help the student and them to decipher the meaning of the commentary. Moreover, they often used these opportunities to demonstrate how to engage with the genre system surrounding the commentary, modeling productive habits for students.

For example, when Jill struggled to make sense of a particular faculty member’s commentary, she immediately seized upon the student mentioning that the class had been sent a supplementary text on academic paragraphs.

Jill: Yeah, ok. So he’s sending you the outline for basically an academic paragraph. 

Mariana: Yes. I believe so. So, I guess he wants us to follow that.

Jill had been struggling to understand what the faculty member was attempting to communicate to this student early in the tutorial. With this additional component of the genre system, though, Jill was immediately able to convey to the student what the faculty member was seeking, drawing on a metaphor to help the student understand better what the commentary meant.

Jill: Ok, so treat it like a mathematical formula. Here’s the first variable. Plug in the topic sentence for it. Here’s the second variable. Plug in your evidence. Third and fourth, right.

The external document the faculty member had sent the class allowed Jill to interpret what the faculty member was precisely after. In this instance, and many others, the commentary only made sense to the tutors and students when placed in relation to other documents in the class or other external resources; it was difficult to interpret in isolation. Once they engaged with these supplementary classroom materials, style manuals, and online resources, they were able to determine what issues the faculty members’ commentary was specifically referencing.

As far as examining the student’s text is concerned, its prevalence was a rather unexpected development. Nonetheless, this strategy made sense for both tutors and students, especially when the commentary was vague. Rather than focusing solely on what the faculty members wrote, the tutor would frequently work with the student to discern what the comment meant by reading the student’s text surrounding the comment. Essentially, they analyzed what was working or not working with the text in order to deduce the meaning behind the comment. This was especially contingent on the focus of faculty members’ commentary.

In Twelve Readers Reading: Responding to College Student Writing, Richard Straub and Ronald Lunsford create a methodology for analyzing written comments predicated on focus and mode. They divide the focus of commentary into three categories: global (content, organization, development, etc.), local (sentence structure, word choice, grammar, etc.), or extra-textual (referring to the rhetorical context of the writing). Both global and extra-textual comments tended to require further analysis of the students’ text in order to interpret them during these tutorials. Since these comments were often found in a faculty member’s end comment, they required tutors and students to venture back into the text to understand the precise meaning.

This interpretative move was on display in a session between Dorothy and Linda. Dorothy is an adjunct faculty member who also tutors in the University Writing Center (UWC). When working with Linda, a graduate student, Dorothy and Linda were confused by two comments she received at the end of certain sections: More detailed findings are needed and In the future, provide more detail. The comments were referring to particular sections of the essay, not to any specific passage. Unsure what the comments were referencing, Dorothy delved into Linda’s text and read aloud until they came across the passages they believed were the cause of the issue.

Dorothy: (reading from Dr. Morrison’s commentary) “More detailed findings are needed.”

Linda: Ok.

Dorothy: (Reading from Linda’s text) “Accountability through regulation increases ethical behavior.” Again, give an example. Tell how.

Linda: Ok. Implications for practice.

Dorothy: (Reading from Dr. Morrison’s commentary) “In the future, provide more detail.” Yeah.

Linda: Ok. “Regulation.” (Linda continues reading her text softly to herself.)

Dorothy: Do not assume your reader knows anything.

Linda: Ok. And I know I have this space.

In this passage, Dorothy and Linda finally discovered the issues to which Dr. Morrison was referring. However, it was not when Dorothy read Dr. Morrison’s commentary; rather, Dorothy came to understand what he was referring to when she read Linda’s text and Linda only understood the second comment when she revisited her own text, realizing she had more space to develop her points about regulation. The comments were global comments referring to issues with entire sections; to decipher them, it was critical for Dorothy and Linda to revisit the sections to discover what the comments were truly conveying.

Such interpretations could be complicated, however, by another tutor tendency found in the study—reading commentary in a linear fashion. In many sessions, the tutor and student would agree to approach the text in a linear fashion, moving through page-by-page, comment-by-comment. This caused a particular problem when faculty members’ gave summative comments at the end of the text. For instance, in a session between Joe (tutor) and Paul (student), one of the main issues the faculty member was concerned with did not emerge until more than halfway through the session, when there was limited time to address it. After focusing on the many sentence-level issues that had been addressed in the marginal comments, Paul finally addressed the end comment.

Paul: So, also, at the end, on one of his comments, was that it does not contain elements of a review. 

Joe: Yeah.

Paul: But (flipping pages) I was just trying to figure out how to get my paper up to a passing grade.

Here, Paul is referencing the faculty member’s end comment: A good start but needs work on writing and does not contain elements of a review. This was the main core of the faculty member’s critique; additionally, he provides the UWC with a detailed outline of how students should approach journal and book reviews. Joe and Paul proceeded in a linear fashion, though, and potentially the most important issue to address during revision—the conventions of the genre—was not a focal point of the session, and they were never able to engage with the valuable supplementary document either. Had the end comment been addressed earlier, Joe and Paul could have focused more on content and working within the expectations of the genre, changing the emphasis of the entire session from local to more global concerns. Yet, they remained focused on sentence-level and formatting concerns because of this linear approach.

And Joe’s and Paul’s session was not an isolated instance. This approach happened across multiple tutorials as well. As will be discussed later, the faculty members’ commentary tended to set the entire agenda for sessions. Tutors and students would immediately dive for the commentary and—in a predictable way—would start to address the commentary in a linear fashion. Rarely did the tutor and student attempt to digest the commentary as a whole before proceeding.

Similarly, another problematic approach to interpreting faculty members’ commentary emerged from the data. Quite often, tutors would take the absence of faculty members’ commentary as an indication that nothing was wrong with that particular area of the text. For example, in one session, Margaret repeatedly made this move as she assisted Carrie in interpreting the commentary she received.

Margaret: He isn’t saying this is too wordy, even though you might think it is, you know?

Carrie: Um hmm.

Margaret: So, I would caution you not to second guess something that he hasn’t, he obviously doesn’t have a problem with.

Here, Margaret assumed there was no issue with wordiness (although the student believed there might be) merely because the faculty member did not comment on this in his feedback. However, I know this particular faculty member’s response style well. He frequently uses minimal marking, where he will address an issue only once. Furthermore, his commentary becomes more minimal with each subsequent draft.

As a result, when Margaret—and other tutors—assumed no commentary made was an indication that nothing was wrong, they were oftentimes operating under a false assumption. And yet, this is quite an easy assumption to make. Overall, when commentary is not present, tutors and students are inclined to assume the text is operating smoothly and no attention is needed. Furthermore, they sometimes view comments as only referring to specific areas of text rather than being global critiques. This is quite problematic when the faculty members’ response styles do not operate by the same logic or when the comments are not meant to merely address a specific portion of the text but rather to serve as a demonstration of a recurring issue. By assuming absence as approval, the tutors and students were missing key information faculty members’ commentary was conveying and were also ignoring opportunities to extend beyond the commentary and collaboratively discover other areas for improvement.

What do I do now?

Although interpreting faculty members’ commentary was where tutors and students spent the majority of their time, 35.17% of the codes actually referenced applying the commentary. The agenda for the nine tutorials studied was commonly prescribed by the class structure of the faculty member providing the commentary. If the class allowed for revision, revision became the main task for the session; if the class relied on sequenced assignments, working on future writing tasks became the main goal. This, in and of itself, is not entirely problematic. In fact, this is an inherently logical way to approach agenda-setting. Yet, the focus of the session was also time and again dictated by the faculty members’ commentary. When the commentary focused on higher-order concerns, higher-order concerns took center stage during the tutorial. In instances where the faculty members’ commentary focused on citations, formatting, and/or proofreading issues, these would become the focal point. This tended to be problematic as it stripped the agency for negotiating the agenda away from the tutors and students; in the end, the agenda was set for them, with the students’ concerns mainly tethered to meeting faculty members’ expectations.

For example, in a session between Joe and Aaliyah, Ms. Lopez’s commentary was primarily focused on formatting and grammar issues; as a result, no matter what Joe tried, Aaliyah remained focused on lower-order concerns. In the aforementioned session between Dorothy and Linda, the agenda seemed to oscillate depending on whichever comment they were addressing. If the comment dealt with a development issue, development became the focus; when the next comment was grammatical, grammar became the top priority. In essence, the only agenda was the commentary itself.  Overall, the hierarchical relationship between faculty member and student tended to transfer into the tutorial.

Still, revising the student’s text and working on future assignments were not the most prominent tasks when it came to applying faculty members’ commentary. That distinction was reserved for working to improve students’ understanding of certain key concepts in writing. In one particular session, the student was struggling immensely with paraphrasing. As a result, Jill spent the second half of the session improving her understanding of this concept. Rather than fixating on revising or working on future assignments, Jill and Mariana discussed and practiced paraphrasing in a few instances from the previous draft for which Mariana had received commentary.

Jill: So a really great way to practice paraphrasing, which I learned here, actually, is to read something…

Mariana: …um hmm…

Jill: …such as our little paragraph, close the book, and just write. And don’t worry about is my sentence matching up with this sentence. Just write something. Write an entire paragraph about what you just read. Because, that way, what you’re writing truly is a paraphrase. Because you’re not worried about matching it up…

Mariana: …matching it up…

Jill: …word for word, phrase for phrase. Right.

In this example, Jill took time to go over a strategy she learned for how to paraphrase without mimicking the language of the original text. After she discussed this, she had Mariana practice the same approach in her own writing multiple times. This practice greatly improved Mariana’s confidence by the end of the session, making her more comfortable with discussing others’ work without using the original language.

Thus, the main focus was not on fixing the text or working on the next one; rather, Jill and Mariana worked toward improving a particular skill—paraphrasing—that could be used throughout Mariana’s writing. In many cases throughout the study, moving away from the text and focusing on the underlying issues with students’ writing proved more beneficial than fixating on revising or working on future assignments in relation to the commentary provided. The tutorials were more productive when the tutor and student responded to the messages the commentary conveyed rather than responding directly to the commentary. Fixation on individual comments proved problematic; understanding the commentary in relation to the entire text—and the entire classroom context—proved much more beneficial.

How do I deal with this?

Although interpreting and applying were logical categories to emerge from analysis of the data, the affective category was not as easily anticipated and accounted for 17.26% of the codes applied. Even though the presence of emotion to this extent was surprising in some ways, the manner in which the tutors chose to deal with emotions was even more unexpected. When students expressed emotions, the tutors were less likely to provide empathy or validate those emotions. Instead, they focused on thinking critically about the student’s writing and coping strategies.

One of the tutors—Jackie—proved exceptional at dealing with the affective dimension of tutorials. Although Jackie is quite friendly with students, she is also a former drill sergeant in the United States Army. As such, she is inclined to not let students get hung up on emotions for too long. One of her more common strategies for doing so is to ask students questions about their texts when they complain about the faculty member and the commentary they receive. This strategy was on display in a tutorial she had with Tommy, a graduate student with whom Jackie frequently works.

Jackie: Did you include how your study was going to improve some of those gaps? Or what you would like?

Tommy: Ok, I think I actually bring it up right here. (Reads from his text.) I need to add that. (Reads from his text.) Now, whether she wants me to actually include a little more. Whether, you know, how I am filling the gaps with my measure. What am I planning on measuring? I can add that, too. If that’s something that…

Jackie: …I think that’d be important…

Tommy: …should be in there.

In this session, Tommy was becoming frustrated with the commentary he received. Rather than allowing Tommy to continue to vent, Jackie asked two quick questions that directed him back to the text. As a result, Tommy gained a better understanding of not only what the faculty member was looking for but of how to improve his text as well. Jackie accomplished this expertly by prompting Tommy to reexamine his work rather than focus on his frustrations. This move was a staple of many of the tutors in this study. If a student got frustrated with their commentary, the tutor had them examine their writing more closely and asked them whether they had accomplished what the faculty member was critiquing. Almost instantaneously, the student would immediately calm down and comprehend the validity of the critique the faculty member provided. Their emotions would subside, and they would focus on responding to the commentary analytically rather than emotionally.

Many of the tutors also demonstrated a great ability to build rapport with clients and help them discover coping strategies when they become emotional. In Margaret’s tutorial with Carrie, Carrie confessed that she oftentimes struggles with being a perfectionist, obsessing over improving her texts and, in her opinion, sometimes making them worse as a result. In this passage, Margaret offers her a coping strategy—embracing the benefit of time.

Margaret: Step back for a minute and let it breathe.

Carrie: Ok.

Margaret And maybe sit on it for a little while…

Carrie: …a few days.

Margaret: Yeah.

Carrie: Well, I have three weeks. I’ll, you know what I’m going to do is, I’m going to go home right now. (Both Carrie and Margaret laugh). I just can’t help it because I don’t like to see things sit because then, I’ll have my notes and everything…

Margaret: …and it’s fresh.

Carrie: And it’s fresh. So I want to do that. And then let it sit for a little bit. And then come back to it to then put my primary sources in there. I’ll do the stuff here that I have here, let it sit, and then I’ll pull primary sources.

Margaret: Yeah, I think that’s a really good move for you to make.

Here, Margaret offers a coping strategy to Carrie, one that Carrie is initially reluctant to embrace. However, Margaret lets her think this through on her own until she finally arrives at a plan of action that immediately calms her anxiety. While it can be easy for tutors to provide a sympathetic ear and empathy for students, Margaret demonstrated that offering suggestions for dealing with affective concerns can be just as important, if not more important. Rather calmly, Margaret provided a solution in lieu of a sounding board.        

Implications for Pedagogy, Staff Development, and Scholarship

The findings of this study suggest certain approaches and practices that are valuable in tutorials dealing with faculty members’ commentary as well as areas where pedagogy, staff development practices, and scholarship pertaining to such tutorials can be improved. These types of tutorials definitely complicate tutoring practices, alter power dynamics, and encourage greater collaboration between tutors and faculty members. The differences they present also warrant further scholarly discussion. 

Improving Pedagogical Practices, Training, and Staff Development

When it comes to interpreting faculty members’ commentary, tutors in this study demonstrated two effective methods: examining other documents in the genre system and focusing on students’ texts. For Charles Bazerman, genre systems are “interrelated genres that interact with each other in specific settings” (97). These genres are interlocking and interdependent on one another. Each genre coalesces with the other to make meaning. The results from this study support Paul Prior’s and Samantha Looker’s belief that response needs to be viewed as part of genre systems and that the various components of these genre systems are crucial to understanding response.

Faculty members’ commentary exists as part of a larger genre system, a system which includes assignment sheets, rubrics, in-class activities, style guides, etc. as well as students’ actual texts. This commentary is always in relation to these other components of the genre system. As such, the tutors and students in this study relied heavily on such documents and were oftentimes the most successful at interpreting faculty commentary when they viewed it as part of a larger genre system and used these other genres to inform their interpretations. The key to deciphering the messages the faculty members were sending oftentimes resided outside of the words they actually wrote.

A crucial strategy for interpreting faculty commentary in such tutorials, then, is to move beyond the written commentary and look at that commentary in relation to the rest of the classroom and other available resources. Tutors should be encouraged to draw upon these documents while interpreting faculty members’ commentary, not as a secondary option. Since commentary operates within these larger genre systems, and cannot be isolated from them, the commentary and the other documents within the genre system need to be engaged with in unison; they are interdependent on one another for their meaning.

Another key component of the genre system that proved beneficial for tutors and students was the students’ texts themselves. Time and again, students were able to gain a better understanding of the commentary only when they were encouraged to look closer at their own writing rather than fixating on the comments they were provided. This also proved crucial when students were having negative emotional reactions to the comments they received. In essence, closely examining their own work allowed students to clearly understand the critiques the faculty members were making, which tended to alleviate negative emotions. Once the students understood what was not working in their writing, they became focused on improving their texts. This supports Haen’s assertion that “We can strengthen our pedagogy by helping tutors see writers’ negative stances not just as opportunities for digressing into extensive affiliative talk, but also as opportunities for helping writers think critically about their writing choices” (3).

Sometimes the best strategy for handling these emotions is to focus on solutions rather than discussing these emotions extensively. The words faculty members compose can seem hurtful at first glance, yet in many instances they are intended as supportive critiques to help students understand what can be improved in their own writing. Having students focus on their words—rather than the faculty members’ words—can help students to see areas for improvement along with the positive intentions that often accompany even supposedly harsh commentary. Such a move can be problematic if these emotions are too strong, though. As Mills suggests, tutors need to assess the strength of the emotions before acting. If the student appears to be merely frustrated as a result of misinterpretation, redirecting them is the right move; if the student is dealing with more profound emotions or an intensely antagonistic relationship with the faculty member, redirection is probably ill-advised.

However, this research also demonstrates some problematic tendencies of tutors when interpreting faculty members’ commentary. The tendency to address commentary in a linear fashion suggests that tutors may not be familiar with various response styles and practices, especially the generalized nature of end comments. As Summer Smith shows, a common feature of this genre is that it is comprehensive—it addresses the text as a whole. Tutors, though, might not understand these generic tendencies. As a result, they can have a habit of beginning with the marginal comments, which are usually specific to particular facets of the text, rather than reading the commentary as a cohesive whole. During tutor training, and in staff development, it is important to emphasize reading the commentary in its entirety before setting an agenda and, quite possibly, to recommend reading the end comment first since it is often more indicative of the overall message the faculty member is trying to convey. This will give tutors and students the opportunity to digest the commentary in its entirety before prioritizing tasks for the tutorial and setting an agenda.

Directors can have tutors read example student papers with faculty commentary in practice tutorials. Tutors can use multiple strategies in order to illustrate how the manner in which the commentary is approached can alter its meaning. In these mock tutorials, tutors would first address the commentary in a more linear fashion, beginning the tutorial by working through the commentary page-by-page. Afterward, they would conduct a tutorial by reading the commentary in its entirety and then setting an agenda. At the conclusion of both tutorials, the tutors would be given the opportunity to reflect on the different meanings they took from the commentary as well as the manner in which their tutorials were altered contingent on their approach to the commentary.

Difficulties interpreting faculty members’ commentary also extend to what is not there. As previously mentioned, throughout this study, tutors at times viewed comments as responding directly to the text immediately surrounding the comment. In these instances, they would often miss that an issue pointed out in one section of a text might be reoccurring throughout the text. Additionally, they would fail to see other issues that might be problematic but were not a focal point of the faculty members’ commentary.

Tutors need to be made aware of different response styles and the fact that faculty commentary is not exhaustive. Directors can have them read a collection of faculty commentary with various response styles during training and staff development. Through engaging with differing approaches to response, tutors can gain a greater sense of how faculty members communicate their messages in a variety of ways and how to adjust accordingly. Furthermore, although faculty commentary should be an emphasis in a session, tutors need to understand that it should not dictate the agenda entirely. Other issues may be valuable to discuss in students’ writing, even if they fall outside the purview of faculty members’ critiques. Directors should remind tutors to be cognizant of this and to take a step back from the faculty commentary when setting agendas with students, perhaps even physically placing the commentary aside during the agenda setting portion of the tutorial.

 Faculty/Tutor Development Workshops

Beyond better training, staff development, and pedagogical practices by tutors, one of the most apt solutions for these issues is to have tutors and faculty members engage each other more directly. The workshops Scott advocates for can move beyond improving faculty members’ commentary; ideally, they can also serve as a venue for improving tutors’ and students’ interpretations of such commentary. As Scott mentions, while tutors and faculty members are oftentimes trying to accomplish the same goals, “the two groups work in relative isolation, missing an opportunity to learn from each other’s expertise” (78). In spite of this, faculty and tutors have much to offer one another.

The key here is learning from each other. While issues with interpreting commentary and the negative emotions that can arise are usually seen as solely faculty issues, this research demonstrates that tutors and students can also improve on their approaches, especially if they are better informed on the pedagogical aims and strategies of faculty members’ commentary. A productive way to approach this may be to have faculty members read their own commentary with tutors and discuss their intentions while tutors offer their interpretations, with both groups analyzing the multitude of discrepancies that are likely to emerge between the two. In this fashion, faculty can gain a better sense of how tutors and students interpret their feedback but—just as importantly—tutors improve upon their knowledge of faculty response styles and the rationales for why faculty provide feedback in the manner that they do. This can help, in a sense, to remove the veil of secrecy that oftentimes unnecessarily accompanies faculty commentary.

Dunn’s concern about the power dynamics of tutorials featuring commentary were on display in this study as well. The faculty members’ commentary frequently set the agenda for the tutorials as the tutors and students worked to conform to the faculty members’ expectations. As Dunn observes, though, asymmetrical power dynamics will inherently lead to such adherence to a degree; this phenomenon may not be entirely avoidable. Ideally, collaboration between faculty members and tutors can help to alleviate this asymmetry. Such dialogue can allow for discussions of how to read commentary, the intentions and goals of faculty commentary, and the practices and values both faculty members and tutors wish to promote. Rather than negotiating agendas through faculty members’ commentary, tutors can begin negotiating agendas in the presence of the actual faculty and take what they learn into their future collaborative negotiations with students.

 Limitations and Possible Directions for Future Scholarship

Since this study only examined nine tutorials in which a tutor and student interpreted and applied a faculty member’s commentary, generalizations from the results are beneficial but limited. A larger sample size would produce more reliable data. Moreover, each of these tutorials occurred in the context of a specific institution. The institution where this research occurred is smaller and the relationships between the primary investigator and the faculty are more intimate and interactive. The primary investigator had knowledge of the faculty in the study that other researchers may not have. Different institutional contexts could—and most likely will—render varying results.

Hopefully, though, this research will serve as a beginning for more empirical studies of such tutorials. Although these tutorials are quite common in writing centers, there is currently limited research exploring the impact of tutorials that address faculty members’ commentary in an empirical fashion. While this study examined such tutorials from the perspective of the types of work being accomplished, there are plenty of more questions to explore in regard to the intricacies of such sessions. What specific types of commentary tend to present the most difficulty for tutors and students? Do certain types of comments tend to cause more misinterpretations than others? What classroom texts help to clarify faculty commentary best? Why do certain comments cause such emotional reactions?

In order to address them, the focus of this study can be modified in order to direct attention to various facets of these tutorials. Focusing on the types of commentary that tend to be the most difficult and cause misinterpretations could draw upon a similar structure but emphasize coding the faculty commentary, perhaps in a manner similar to Straub’s and Lunsford’s work in Twelve Readers Reading: Responding to College Student Writing. Discourse analysis could be applied to other classroom texts in order to see how they connect with the commentary being interpreted in certain tutorials. Student surveys could be incorporated to better enable an understanding of why certain comments evoke such emotional reactions. These types of questions present a rather intriguing avenue of research to explore through a variety of methodologies, an area of writing center and response scholarship that remains relatively uncharted empirically.

At What Point Does the “Ghost” in the Tutorial Become Visible?

When contemplating the effectiveness of response practices, Chris Anson reflects on the manner in which “Teacher response, in other words, gets filtered, interpreted, remixed, and repurposed among students, influencing their decisions and their own responses to tasks and evaluations” (196-197). Although it is tempting to believe that the effectiveness of feedback resides solely in the words composed on students’ texts, the truth is these words only gain meaning in the contexts in which they are read and engaged. Writing centers are pivotal sites for this filtering work, key places where students interpret, remix, and repurpose the commentary they receive with their peers, free from the traditional hierarchies of the classroom.

And yet, such interpretive work is never truly peer-to-peer, never solely an endeavor among tutors and students alone. In many ways, faculty members are always a presence in tutorials. The majority of the work that students bring to writing centers is responding to an assignment prompt or another form of a classroom exigency. As a result, in one way or another, the faculty member is always a “ghost in the tutorial.” In certain situations, their presence is merely a sudden cold spot in the room, and awareness that the student writer has a faculty member as an audience. In other instances—required appointments, for example—that presence is even more pronounced, and tutors and students may feel as if someone is watching them.  

Yet when their commentary is present is when the presence of faculty members is at its most pronounced. Their words constantly remind the participants in these tutorials that they are not alone. They remain and exert influence. They make demands in both explicit and implicit ways. Faculty members may not physically be present, but they become more than a felt presence. While it may be easy to assume that such tutorials are only slightly different from more traditional ones, I contend these tutorials are a difference of kind rather than degree, and that there is one prominent reason for it.

Tutorials of this nature are not one-to-one. Through the words they write and the relationships they have with writing centers, the faculty members become a visible apparition within such tutorials, a third person to contend with, a highly influential contributor to the conversation. Nonetheless, this third person cannot speak directly for themselves but only through past words and traces of their classroom. The success of these tutorials, then, resides in gaining a better understanding of how tutors and students can have a three-person conversation between only two people.

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Appendix A: Table

Table 1: Coding Scheme for “The ‘Ghost’ in the Tutorial: How Do Tutors and Students Engage with Faculty Feedback?”