Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 2 (2022)
The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development: Enhancing Discourse Community Knowledge through Metacognitive Dialogue
Brendan T. McGovern
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
brendan.t.mcgovern@gmail.com
Abstract
This research contributes to our knowledge about writers’ acquisition of discourse community knowledge within tutorial sessions. This study examines the dialogue of writing center sessions focused on disciplinary writing by applying the coding schemas of discursive tutoring strategies (Mackiewicz and Thompson) and domains of discourse community knowledge (Beaufort). Drawing on data from coded session transcripts and post-session interviews with eight undergraduate students, this study sought to analyze how the co-occurrence of established tutoring practices and domains of discourse community knowledge contribute to writers’ disciplinary writing development. Trends in the results indicate that the metacognitive dialogue within tutorial sessions co-constructs discourse community knowledge through tutors explaining genre and rhetorical knowledge while writers contribute writing process and subject matter knowledge. Furthermore, the results from student interviews indicate that tutors take on the instructional role that professors and TAs of disciplinary courses cannot take on due to institutional constraints. Finally, the results of this research suggest that writing center practitioners can include existing frameworks of genre theory to situate the writer more clearly within the conventions of their discourse community.
“As we turn our attention to the work of the tutor, we become increasingly aware that writing instruction without a writing center is only a partial program, lacking essential activities students need in order to grow and mature as writers.” (40)
— Muriel Harris, “Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors”
Introduction
The writing center plays a salient yet understudied role in students’ disciplinary writing development. Increasingly, composition and writing center scholars have pointed to the role of writing centers within college students’ academic writing development, yet very few studies have examined student development in the context of disciplinary writing. Leading scholars of university writing development (Beaufort; Carroll; Flower; Harris; Sommers and Saltz) have pointed to the interactive nature between the writing center and freshman writing programs, writing-in-the-discipline programs, programs to train teaching assistants and tutors of writing, and writing center pedagogies, all of which begin to sketch a still-incomplete picture of writing development. This scholarship has identified key elements that contribute to student writing development, such as metacognition and acquisition of discourse community knowledge. With its emphasis on goal-setting and reflective dialogue among knowledgeable peers, the writing center may play a key role in how students develop metacognitive strategies and knowledge about writing.
As knowledge from the larger field of writing studies has informed the practice of writing center tutors, researchers have become increasingly interested in the role of metacognition in students’ development of writing knowledge. Conceptually, metacognition has long been understood as “thinking about thinking” (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking; Flavell) with the central goal of developing a writer’s awareness beyond the subject matter to the writer's own thinking, choices, and the outcomes of those choices. As a practice, metacognition allows students to “monitor one’s current level of understanding and decide when it is not adequate” (National Research Council, 47) and “reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge” (Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English and National Writing Project, 5). Metacognitive strategies include posing questions, problem-solving, and gaining rhetorical knowledge, terms, and concepts to use in assessing writing tasks (CWPA, NCTE, and NWP; Moore). In the writing center context, tutors use metacognitive strategies to develop a writer’s critical awareness of themselves as a thinker and writer in a variety of contexts (Devet). While a deepened understanding of metacognition has informed writing center practice, few studies have examined the intersection of tutorial metacognitive strategies and a writer’s disciplinary writing development.
Empirical and ethnographic research in the field of writing center studies has increased, yet we know little about the essential role campus writing centers play in the writing development of college students. Since her 1995 “Why Writers Need Tutors,” Muriel Harris and others have argued for a vision of student writing development that includes the writing center, claiming, “A writing center encourages and facilitates writing emphasis in courses in addition to those in an English Department’s composition program,” allowing “writers to gain kinds of knowledge about their writing and about themselves that are not possible in other institutionalized settings” (27). Harris’s arguments and those of others have uniquely situated the space of the writing center as a site of writing development in need of further examination.
Similarly, the role of tutors within the disciplinary writing development of college students is largely unknown. Several studies have examined how tutors support students’ writing within the discipline, finding that tutor expertise increased the session’s overall effectiveness (Dinitz and Harrington; Mackiewicz; Walker). While these studies have added significant insight into the generalist-specialist debate and tutor training, they do not provide an outlook into the broader development of disciplinary writers within writing centers. What is needed, therefore, is a more explicit examination of how these tutoring strategies contribute to students’ understanding of disciplinary writing.
This research aims to examine how the metacognitive tutorial strategies employed by writing center tutors contribute to students’ development of discourse community knowledge and disciplinary writing development. To do so, I bring together two frameworks that have been widely taken up in writing centers and composition studies: Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Kramer Thompson’s discursive tutoring strategies and Anne Beaufort’s conceptual model of writing expertise. In what follows, I will first review scholarship covering factors that contribute to undergraduate disciplinary writing development and the writing center’s role in supporting disciplinary writing development. I will share results from an IRB-approved study that analyzes tutorial observations and student interviews to examine how tutors use discursive strategies to engage writers within domains of discourse community knowledge. Specifically, I argue that discourse community knowledge is co-constructed within tutorial sessions through metacognition in which the tutor explains genre and rhetorical knowledge while the writer contributes writing process and subject matter knowledge. I suggest that writing center tutors can more strategically situate writers within the expectations of their discourse communities. Overall, my results illustrate how writing centers contribute to disciplinary writing development by offering a more robust examination of the ways in which this dialogue enhance students’ understanding of discourse community knowledge.
Review of Literature
Scholars have identified the writing center as an essential campus resource for students’ writing knowledge and skill (Beaufort; Carroll; Sommers), yet we know relatively little about the writing center’s role in disciplinary writing development. In particular, research falls short in articulating the means by which writing center practices contribute to students’ disciplinary writing skills. The following review of literature will first examine existing support structures within students’ disciplinary writing development and frameworks for conceptualizing disciplinary writing. Second, I will survey the writing center’s role in fostering metacognition and its relationship to disciplinary writing development.
Key Components of Disciplinary Writing Development
Few studies have explicitly examined the role of writing centers or tutors in how students develop disciplinary writing knowledge. Longitudinal studies of undergraduate writing development (e.g., Beaufort; Carroll; Sommers and Saltz) have examined major elements within students’ writing development, namely the role of faculty, teaching assistants, and writing intensive curricula. These studies have recommended that university students use the writing center, yet their discussion of writing tutors remains sparse, instead focusing on these other instructional interactions that affect writing development. For instance, while professors and teaching assistants are the primary individuals assigning and evaluating writing, these instructors of writing-intensive disciplinary courses often hold distorted views of student literacy and tend to view writing as “a unitary ability simply applied in a variety of different circumstances” (Carroll 5). Longitudinal studies have also found that instructors of writing-intensive disciplinary courses focus their attention on the most obvious features of students’ writing including word choice, sentence structure, usage, and punctuation and often assign only one to two writing assignments, which according to Lee Ann Carroll, “mistake a one-time performance constrained by time and circumstance for an abstract quality called writing ability” (5). Carroll makes clear that disciplinary writing classrooms often do not provide students with the necessary feedback or attention students need to develop within their discipline. Ultimately, the findings from these longitudinal studies have aided in understanding the complexities of student writing development; however, they have also raised significant questions surrounding the role of the tutor and how writing center practices enhance students’ disciplinary writing development in ways that other academic resources cannot.
Secondly, these longitudinal studies have provided frameworks for disciplinary writing instruction. For example, after interviewing students and examining over 600 writing samples, Nancy Sommers and Laura Saltz found that students’ disciplinary knowledge played a critical role in their ability to address an audience within their major. In addition to subject matter, Sommers found that student writers must also be provided with clear frameworks for the expectations of their discipline. Sommers explains, “We observe that when students do not know that there is a method in one discipline, they are less likely to look for disciplinary conventions elsewhere” (159). Her conclusions suggested more tangible ways for writing instructors to assist students in developing “audience awareness” (159) so that they can better use their subject matter knowledge to address an academic audience in their discipline. However, despite the influence of her study and its implications for writing center administrators and tutors, Sommers provides very few recommendations for writing center practice.
Beaufort’s work offers a useful framework for conceptualizing disciplinary writing development by defining “writing expertise” through overlapping but distinct domains of discourse community knowledge. After conducting a six-year study of a college writer named Tim from first-year composition into the first two years of his career as an engineer, Beaufort sought to build upon existing research of writing expertise (Bryson et al.; Carter; Smagorinsky and Smith) to create a more inclusive model, capturing the multiple knowledge domains activated during expert writing performances. Broadly, Beaufort defines discourse community as “a social group that communicates at least in part via written texts and shares common goals, values, and writing standards, a specialized vocabulary and specialized genres” (179). College writers must learn the “established norms for genres that may be unique to the community or shared with overlapping communities and roles and tasks for writers [that] are appropriated within this activity system” (19). From the data within her ethnographic study of Tim’s transition from academic to professional writing, Beaufort theorized that successful writing development within a student’s discourse community consists of four overlapping yet distinct domains of knowledge. First, a college writer must develop writing process knowledge, or knowledge of how to get discipline-specific writing tasks accomplished (meta-knowledge of cognitive processes in composing and phasing writing projects). Second, the students’ major coursework develops disciplinary subject matter knowledge consisting of specific topics, central concepts, and appropriate frames of analysis for documents, which includes critical thinking skills to apply, manipulate, and draw from subject-matter for rhetorical purposes. Third, writers’ texts must exhibit genre knowledge, including an understanding of standard genres used in the discipline and features of those genres: rhetorical aims, appropriate content, structure, and linguistic features. Finally, students must possess rhetorical knowledge: the needs of a specific audience and specific purposes(s) for a single text (148). Together, these domains capture the multitude of tasks and expectations a student must face if they are to be successful within advanced disciplinary writing. Beaufort’s research is central to the practice of writing center tutors, as the dialogue of writing center sessions engages students within all four domains of her conceptual model. While Beaufort included some recommendations for writing center practice, she did not examine how students acquire discourse community knowledge within the space of the writing center.
Finally, the role of metacognition is not only necessary to teaching students the domains of discourse community knowledge, but it further provides the greatest insight into how the writing center aids in students’ disciplinary writing development. Metacognition has become a focal point of writing instruction, and scholars have increasingly considered students’ meta-monitoring of composing processes, rhetorical situations, and genre knowledge in order to promote the positive transfer of learning into new contexts (Gorzelsky et al.; Negretti; Nowacek; Reiff and Bawarshi). Beaufort, in her recommendations for teaching students components of discourse community knowledge, argues that tutors and instructors can integrate a series of high-level questions within instruction in order to increase students’ ability to learn new writing skills and apply existing knowledge appropriately within new writing contexts. Very few studies, however, have examined how metacognitive strategies or domains of discourse community knowledge can aid in writers’ disciplinary writing development. The following section will consider existing scholarship examining how tutor talk and metacognitive strategies aid in students’ understanding of discourse community knowledge.
Tutor Talk and Tutoring Disciplinary Writing
Writing center scholarship has increasingly identified how tutor-writer dialogue promotes metacognition and rhetorical awareness. Rebecca Nowacek et al., for example, find that “transfer talk” or “the talk through which individuals make visible their prior learning” engages writers within a conversation that can facilitate transfer across multiple contexts. Nowacek et al.’s coding scheme identifies the many ways that writers and tutors make visible their prior learning and apply this understanding to new writing context. Nowacek et al.’s findings not only draw attention to the transfer of learning that routinely occurs in writing center sessions but also suggest that the process is much more collaborative than previously represented.
Among discursive writing center practices, perhaps no other work provides a clearer framework for studying tutorial talk than the work of Mackiewicz and Thompson. Quickly becoming a centerpiece of writing center administration and tutor training, their research examines the effectiveness of three categories of discursive tutoring strategies: instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and motivational scaffolding. Together, these three categories provide integrative practices that help students move forward in completing tasks and developing expertise. Considered alongside scholarship examining writing development, Mackiewicz and Thompson’s categorization of instructional strategies (telling, suggesting and explaining), cognitive scaffolding strategies (pumping, or asking open- or closed-ended questions; reading aloud; responding as a reader; etc.), and motivational scaffolding strategies (showing concern, praising, reinforcing ownership, etc.) gives substantial tutoring techniques to help students meet challenges writing within their discourse communities. Mackiewicz and Thompson’s framework captures the metacognitive conversation that takes place in tutorial sessions, as both the tutor and writer gain awareness beyond the subject matter into the writer's own thinking, choices, and the outcomes of those choices.
While many of these discursive tutoring strategies have been presented as having generalized use, writing center scholars have previously debated how tutors can best assist students’ disciplinary writing development. This conversation has been inherently tied to the debate over whether tutors should be generalists or specialists. Sue Dinitz and Susanmarie Harrington, for example, find that tutor expertise is related to directness and allows tutors to more fully access all discursive strategies at their disposal. From their data, tutors who held disciplinary expertise led more effective sessions compared to generalist tutors, as specialized tutors were able to identify students’ inaccurate assessments and opinions of the subject matter (93). Other studies, however, have found relatively little difference between the tutors’ expertise and session effectiveness. Kristin Walker for instance, argues that instead of focusing on the dichotomy between generalist/specialist, writing center staff can focus on genre theory as a broader theoretical framework for tutor training that prepares both generalist and specialist tutors to help in all disciplines. Walker explains that all genres are localized and that the set expectations and academic norms of the disciplines are their own cultures of “socially constructed environments” (35). The effective use of genre theory allows tutors to teach how disciplinary writing presents a “culture of a discipline” that all students become acclimated to through the tutor’s explanations of the conventions of genre and form within tutorial sessions (38). Similarly, Bonnie Devet argues that teaching frameworks such as Michael Carter’s theory of metagenre “demystifies” academic writing for students, “reveals how writings in the academy are not arbitrary and capricious,” and “extrapolates the common ways of thinking behind disciplines.” While Devet’s recommendations provide a plausible framework to tutoring writing in the discipline, Beaufort’s discourse community theory may provide a more comprehensive and replicable framework for tutoring students the conventions of advanced disciplinary writing.
Both composition studies and writing center studies have increasingly alluded to the intersection of metacognitive tutoring strategies and frameworks for conceptualizing disciplinary writing development within the space of the writing center. What is needed, therefore, is a more explicit examination of this intersection. Understanding how tutors use discursive strategies to promote metacognition and enhance students’ understanding of discourse community knowledge builds upon our limited understanding of the writing center’s role in students’ disciplinary writing development.
Methods
This study sought to better understand how students use the writing center to advance their disciplinary writing knowledge. Specifically, I asked: How do writing center tutors use metacognitive dialogue to help students develop discourse community knowledge? How do students describe what they gain through the dialogue with the tutor? To answer my research questions, I observed eight writing center conferences involving undergraduate writers seeking to improve a course paper within their major course of study and held post-session interviews with the writers. The tutorial sessions occurred within the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Writers Workshop, which conducts nearly 7,600 one-to-one tutorial sessions per year. The Writers Workshop employs about 50 tutors a semester, the majority of whom are graduate students; the tutors are from a range of disciplines.
I utilized the Writers Workshop scheduling interface to identify students who booked appointments for courses within their major. I then invited both the tutor and writer to participate and asked for permission to attend, record, and transcribe their consultations. Of the eight student participants, the majority frequently used the writing center, with only one being a first-time user. I selected students from a wide variety of majors and experience within disciplinary writing (see Table 1). All of the students who agreed to participate in the study were women, and their self-identified race/ethnicities are representative of demographics of users who visit the campus writing center. Finally, all tutors who participated in this study held at least one semester’s experience tutoring, and during their orientation and bi-weekly professional development meetings tutors learned instruction, cognitive scaffolding, and metacognitive scaffolding strategies (Mackiewicz and Thompson).
In order to better understand how discourse community knowledge is communicated within tutorial dialogue, I observed each of the eight sessions, which took place via WCOnline and Zoom and lasted 50 minutes on average. At the beginning of each session, I instructed the tutor to treat the consultation like they would any other session and asked the writer to share their text with me. During the sessions, I kept my audio and video off, read the entirety of students’ texts to understand their argument, and noted instances in which the writer and tutor communicated elements of discourse community knowledge. I then took note of the discursive strategies used by the tutor to later use within my student interviews.
After each session concluded, I conducted a 30–35-minute interview with each student. My interview script asked writers questions specific to Beaufort’s four domains of discourse community knowledge (subject matter, writing process, genre, and rhetorical situation), how the discursive strategies used by the tutor altered the understanding of their own argument, and what they gained from visiting the writing center for texts within their major. Writer feedback from these questions allowed me to better understand how tutorial dialogue contributes to their development of the four domains of discourse community knowledge. I referenced specific examples of when tutors had used techniques in order to prompt a better understanding of what I was asking. For example, some of the questions I asked included:
· How did your conversations with [Tutor] make you think about your own writing process, for instance brainstorming, editing, revising, re-writing in today’s session?
· How did [Tutor] help you think differently about [discourse community]? For instance, in your discussion you talked a lot about other instances and examples from your course even though this was not included in your paper. How do these other elements of subject matter play into the revisions you made today?
· How did [Tutor] help you think differently about how [major concept A] related to [major concept B]?
Both the consultations and student interviews were audio recorded and transcribed through an online transcription software. To analyze the session data, I first developed a three-part coding scheme (see Appendix A) to capture tutors’ and students’ discursive strategies and domains of discourse community knowledge. First, I used the tutor talk schema developed by Mackiewicz and Thompson in Talk About Writing, which captured the discursive practices tutors used to create metacognition. The second framework included student talk adopted from Nowacek et al.’s “Transfer Talk.” I added the code “student explaining” to this framework in order to identify types of student explanations within elements of discourse community knowledge. The third section captured how students respond to discursive practices within their discourse community by using Beaufort’s discourse community domains. Finally, once all eight sessions were coded, I identified the frequency of co-occurrences for discursive strategies and domains of discourse community knowledge. These included questions, comments, and responses used by the tutor that simultaneously engaged the writer within the domains of discourse community knowledge. A summary of the co-occurrences across the eight sessions can be found in Table 2.
Results
My analysis of writing center sessions and interviews with eight undergraduate student writers revealed three major findings: 1) Among the co-occurrences of discursive tutorial strategies and domains of discourse community knowledge, tutors did the most of explaining genre knowledge. 2) Writers contributed to metacognitive dialogue primarily by explaining elements of subject matter to the tutor. 3) Writers described the writing center as a space for specialized instruction within their discourse community that cannot be found elsewhere on campus.
Tutors’ Explanation of Genre Knowledge
Tutors most frequently contributed to students’ knowledge of writing in their disciplines by explaining genre knowledge. This co-occurrence provides the strongest response to the first research question of how do writing center tutors use discursive metacognitive strategies to help students develop discourse community knowledge. Explaining was the most frequently used discursive strategy employed by tutors, with explanations of genre knowledge occurring 71 times, explaining writing process and subject matter knowledge each occurring 34 times, and rhetorical knowledge being explained 28 times across the eight sessions (see Table 2). Tutors’ explanations of academic genre conventions included elements such as form, use of evidence, citation practices, structure, linguistic features, and academic tone. These co-occurrences of explaining genre knowledge frequently followed writers’ explanations of subject matter or requests for writing advice.
While tutor explanations of genre knowledge included a wide range of the conventions and expectations of advanced academic writing, the two most prevalent areas of explaining genre knowledge included purpose and citation integration. For instance, the dialogue within all eight sessions included a discussion of the strength of students’ thesis statements in relation to their draft essays, and several tutors explained the role of the thesis within the text as a whole. For example, within her draft senior economics thesis Writer 3 wrote that she “proposed hypotheses and influencing factors from three aspects.” In response, Tutor 3 engaged the writer within genre knowledge by explaining, “The hypothesis is specific within a research paper based on the data. So, you're taking the data, and your study considers the influencing factors from three aspects: personal, public, and social through the data processing.” After this explanation, the tutor and writer collectively produced a thesis statement that fit the described role, explained the trend within the data the student identified, and was specific, arguable, and defendable within the subject matter.
Aim and form was similarly explained to students whose texts did not match the conventions of MLA/APA/CMS style. After reading the initial pages of Writer 7’s political science paper, Tutor 7 discussed the purpose of using an abstract. Tutor 7 explained, “An abstract is a summary of the whole paper in around 200 words, including what the paper is about, your thesis, your findings and your conclusions. It is what you suggest in around 200 to 250 words.” The instances of explaining structure to students helped them understand the expectations of advanced disciplinary writing ubiquitous across all discourse communities. In explaining the role of the thesis, the purpose of the abstract and how the paper as a whole is structured, tutors better aligned students’ arguments with the expectations set forth by their professors and explained genre conventions that could be repeated in future writing contexts.
Secondly, citation use and source integration represented a significant portion of the co-occurrences of explaining genre knowledge. In all eight sessions, tutors explained how writers can better integrate the arguments of discipline-specific texts while simultaneously strengthening the papers’ structure and rhetorical aims, and several instances of explaining genre knowledge centered around the correct use of citations. Tutor 1, for example, explained, “So I saw in the rubric that you're supposed to be using APA, right? Right now, you're not citing any of your quotes. So, in APA you want to introduce the author and the title of the work and then the quote. From then on, if you're going to be referring to the same author you can just refer to them as their last name, and then [parentheses, last name, comma] year the article [was] published.” Following this explanation, the tutor and student worked together to correctly integrate the arguments of psychologists into the writer’s argument concerning poverty in urban African American communities. Explanations of citation use was consistent across all sessions, with every tutor explaining how to correctly format and integrate citations from prior research. Tutor 3, for instance explained, “And then if there is a page number that you want to cite, the page number goes at the end in APA” while Tutor 8 explained, “Okay, in the references list, you still alphabetize them and then just indicate whichever one comes first alphabetically by title.” Together, citation use presented a significant portion of tutors’ explanation of genre knowledge, expanding students’ understanding of the conventions of MLA, APA and CMS citations within their own writing.
Writers’ Explanation of Subject Matter Knowledge
Second, I found that writers contributed to the metacognitive conversation primarily by explaining subject matter knowledge to the tutor. In responding to the discursive strategies used by tutors, especially pumping (e.g., “What’s another possibility here?”), which prod and help students to think, and reader responses, the eight writers explained their subject matter knowledge a total of 54 times over eight sessions, with explaining writing process knowledge occurring 30 times, genre knowledge 14 times, and rhetorical knowledge only three times. In responding to tutors’ use of pumping, writers explained subject-specific terminology to the tutor and clarified the logical presentation of their argument.
During their conversations, tutors asked students to explain key terms that were unfamiliar to them. For instance, Tutor 3 asked questions in order to follow the student’s review of literature. In explaining how an H-index is calculated in macroeconomics, Writer 3 explained, “It is one aspect of the theory that income is not related to happiness. So, the second [graph] is showing that relative income is related to happiness and plays a very important role in deciding people's overall happiness. It's kind of like three different series.” Writers’ explanations of key concepts were necessary to the tutors’ comprehension of their texts, and oral explanations of the subject matter allowed students to explain how discipline-specific concepts relate to the larger argument within their paper.
Additionally, tutors’ use of pumping and reader responses allowed students to clarify the logical presentation of their arguments. For instance, Writer 8 brought to the session a comparative political science paper in which she argued in favor of a parliamentary system of government over a semi-presidential one. In responding to the questions of the tutor, Writer 8 explained that within a parliamentary system “the majority of representatives will pick the executive, and that's a good thing because then the majority opinion is consistently making the decisions, if that makes sense. Like, they control like the top of the government.” Having the tutor read the paper aloud and ask clarifying questions allowed Writer 8 to independently clarify her position to her audience. Explaining her reasoning to the tutor allowed Writer 8 to see connections between course concepts she did not see previously. Similarly, as Writer 3 explained in her interview, “I use different economical series and [Tutor] give me ideas about how to integrate them and elaborate on their difference and similarities. Because I just used examples but did not make connections, but really the idea of how to make them big being connected.” Often, these verbal explanations of subject matter allowed students to make changes to their texts independently, and students explained that having the ability to explain topics within their discipline to a new audience significantly helped in clarifying their own arguments.
The Writing Center’s Role in Disciplinary Writing Development
During their interviews, students discussed a multitude of ways the writing center aids their disciplinary writing development alongside classroom instruction. While writers described a number of benefits, three major themes arose in their discussions: 1) Institutionally, the writing center offers a space for specialized instruction within discourse community knowledge that cannot be found elsewhere on campus. 2) Writers’ metacognitive conversations with tutors resolved cognitive dissonance in the moment and gave them replicable strategies to use in similar writing contexts. 3) Students left the sessions feeling that the changes had strengthened the rhetorical appeal of their argument.
First, several students described that they sought out the writing center because it offers specialized instruction within discourse community knowledge that cannot be found elsewhere on campus. Recognizing the constraints placed upon professors and teaching assistants of large lectures, Writer 8 described how her conversations with writing tutors aids in her disciplinary writing development. She explained, “I think a lot of time professors, at least for political science, don't necessarily give you feedback on your writing. You know, they are like, ‘okay, yeah, you made a direct comparison; you used an example; I could read it; it wasn't a total mess.’ It's very basic. So, I think like coming to the writing center and having somebody else one-on-one, ask, ‘Okay, what do you want to focus on?’ ‘Let's go through it.’ ‘Let's read through the whole thing if that's what you want,’ and taking it step by step with you is like something that you don't necessarily get in class.” Writer 8 explained that while rhetorical and genre knowledge is expected within her course papers, neither her professors nor teaching assistants are able to provide the form of feedback or assistance that the writing center offers. She explains, the “TA is going to not really want to go through and talk about the mechanics of your argument. They're more there for just content. So, I think, you know, you're not really getting this type of in-depth analysis of your writing really anywhere else on campus.” Several other students had echoed this same thought, noting that they frequently bring course papers to the writing center for this very reason.
Second, several students described the ways in which the metacognitive conversations with tutors resolved cognitive dissonance in the moment and gave them replicable strategies to use in similar writing contexts. By using discursive tutoring strategies that engaged writers in dialogue and reflection, tutors deepened writers’ understanding of the domains of discourse community knowledge. In explaining the aims of their paper and their major writing concerns, students gained a much clearer sense of their own writing process for future writing contexts. Writer 7, for example, explained that her writing tutors “ask critical questions to help clear [her] own head.” She further explained, “Usually, before I was writing my paper, my brain inside my head is a huge mess. I don't even have a clear idea what exactly I want to write about. I bring a very general idea to the [writing center], like making this huge topic and we will help you to narrow down to more nitty gritty things of the topic, so that I will be able to just narrow down this huge general idea to something more specific that I can make an argument in my own writing.” The writer cited the tutors’ use of pumping such as “how do you feel about this paragraph” as a strategy she found helpful and had independently integrated into her own revision process for similar assignments.
Finally, all eight students described heightened awareness of rhetorical knowledge through a deeper understanding of audience, purpose, and genre, although these terms were not always invoked within tutorial sessions. Several students explained that the tutor presented the first audience that would critically evaluate the message of their writing. Writer 4 explained, “the session today strengthened my rhetorical appeals even by changing simple things such as sentence structure and how I was talking about transitioning from the information I'm providing and the information that I'm getting from the sources. So, I think that definitely strengthened the rhetorical appeal of my claim and the subject matter overall.” The response from writers that tutors had strengthened the rhetorical appeal of their text is consistent with the coding data for rhetorical knowledge. Writer explanation of rhetorical knowledge is largely absent (only 3 instances), yet tutors explained rhetorical knowledge to writers a total of 28 times.
Implications
This study attempted to identify how the metacognitive dialogue between a writing tutor and writer develops the writer’s discourse community knowledge. My analysis of the tutorial sessions and writer interviews revealed three major trends. The first was that between discursive strategies and domains of discourse community knowledge, tutors did the most of explaining components of genre knowledge to the writer. The second was that writers contributed to the metacognitive conversation primarily by explaining subject-matter knowledge in relation to their argument. The third was that writers identified the writing center as an important complement to classroom instruction because they gained replicable strategies, resolved cognitive dissonance, and strengthened their rhetorical knowledge. In the following, I offer implications from these results. Conceptually, students’ interviews suggest that the writing center holds a much larger role within their disciplinary writing development than composition scholars have previously thought. Further, the observed co-occurrences suggest that writing center tutors already engage writers within the overlapping domains of discourse community knowledge; however, I will demonstrate more specifically how these domains of knowledge are communicated and constructed through discursive metacognitive practices. Finally, I offer practical recommendations for tutors to build upon existing frameworks to more clearly situate the writer within the conventions of their discourse community.
First, participants’ interviews suggest that writing tutors play a larger role in some students’ disciplinary writing development than composition scholars have traditionally thought. Several longitudinal studies suggest that students may use campus writing centers to aid in their disciplinary writing development (Beaufort; Sommers and Saltz); however, the participants in this study explain that one-to-one tutor interaction was a necessary component of their university disciplinary writing development. Unlike other studies of writing development that recruited students from composition classrooms, I was able to capture a different perspective by recruiting students who have used the services offered by the writing center. In recruiting writing center users directly, I was able to examine the impact that writing center sessions currently have on students’ writing development. Although I selected eight students who visited the writing center with different frequencies, seven of the eight undergraduate students regularly returned to the writing center to improve texts within their major. Writer 7, for instance, had visited the writing center for each paper of first-year composition and her introductory major courses. In her interview, she explained that her visit to the writing center was one of the final steps in her own disciplinary writing process. “They ask me questions to look into a concept or idea more in depth,” she explains, “So they [writing consultants] are my test audience. If I can convince them successfully, I will be able to convince other audiences.” For Writer 7, the outcome of the “question asking,” or discursive metacognitive strategies, is a heightened sense of Sommers’s “audience awareness,” rhetorical knowledge that traditionally has been examined within the classroom. This response was echoed among other students who frequently visited the writing center and holds interesting implications for further research. Scholarship has focused on the role that assignments, curricula, and teaching practices play in student writing development, but has less often looked at out-of-classroom feedback or when, where, and why students receive feedback. The explanation from seven of the eight writers that visiting the writing center to review a major course paper before submission was a final step in their writing process raises further questions surrounding the institutional “place” of writing centers, highlighting Harris’s claim that writing centers are needed for the growth and maturity of college writers.
Second, the data from this study suggests that domains of discourse community knowledge are activated through tutorial dialogue; however, writers and tutors did not discuss each domain equally. One of the major findings from the data is that tutors contributed the most of genre knowledge while writers contributed subject matter knowledge to the tutorial conversation. Yet, in looking at all the co-occurrences collectively, it is clear that tutors provided through instructional and cognitive scaffolding strategies (telling, suggesting, explaining, and pumping) domains of discourse community knowledge that writers did not provide. Writers frequently engaged in writing process and subject matter knowledge but engaged very little in rhetorical knowledge or genre knowledge. In turn, tutors frequently engaged in explanations of genre knowledge and described rhetorical knowledge through a number of discursive strategies. This relationship between knowledge domains suggests that the students’ heighted discourse community knowledge is not simply taught directly by a tutor but rather is co-constructed within the session dialogue. Like Walker and Devet suggest, using the domains of discourse community knowledge as an introduction of genre theory proved effective; however, the data suggest that students develop disciplinary writing knowledge through collaboration and co-construction, rather than the direct instruction described by these researchers.
The results of this study further confirm Walker’s argument that writing tutors can employ a conceptual framework of “culture(s) of a discipline” in order to mediate the debate between generalist or specialist tutoring (38). Explicit instruction of the domains of discourse community knowledge can be used as the “broader theoretical framework” Walker suggests for writing center tutors (34). While two students (Writer 7 and 8) reported that tutor expertise within their discipline did lead to the more direct and in-depth instruction that Dinitz and Harrington identify, all students reported that they were satisfied with the instruction they received from their tutors. Using Beaufort’s model alongside discursive strategies allows tutors to effectively teach students the “culture of [their] discipline” while also focusing on the more sentence-level mechanics of their writing. Beaufort’s model accounts for linguistic and mechanical elements of students’ writing not explicitly captured within other models of genre theory, and this allows for more specialized instruction at both the global and local level.
Finally, for tutorial practice, the findings of this study underscores Beaufort’s recommendation that discourse community knowledge be taught and tutored to students through metacognitive strategies. The role of the tutor is to create a space for the writer to engage in practices of metacognition that work through their writing needs. Integrating more direct practices that focus on the balance of discourse community knowledge between a writer and tutor will aid in the “bridging” or “mediating process of abstraction and connection making” between students’ expressed intentions and their execution within writing (Perkins and Salomon 29). As writing studies continue to develop tutoring practices that support metacognitive conversation and frameworks, like that of Mackiewicz and Thompson’s, it is critical that researchers within writing center studies take a step back to consider how these refined practices aid writers in the larger developmental trajectory of college writing. For instance, writing tutors can integrate several of Beaufort’s recommended practices for teaching the concept of discourse community. At the beginning of discipline-specific sessions (course papers, capstones, senior theses) tutors can provide a brief definition of discourse communities and have students speculate on different features using the definition as a heuristic. Further, tutors can ask more general questions at the end of sessions to promote students’ mindful abstraction of knowledge. Questions might include the ones posed by Beaufort in her recommendation for writing instructors to have students keep a process journal:
· What do you want to remember to apply to the next writing project or situation?
· How did this assignment add to your understanding of the concepts of discourse community?
· Which knowledge domain did you struggle with the most in this writing assignment: discourse community knowledge? Subject matter knowledge? Genre knowledge? Rhetorical knowledge? Writing process knowledge? What could you do better in the next project in one of these knowledge domains? (Beaufort 183)
Through metacognitive reflection, tutors can use these end-of-session questions to promote high road transfer through the elements of discourse community knowledge. Finally, tutors can use the understanding that they will often engage much more within genre knowledge and rhetorical knowledge and prompt students to think about how they can apply their renewed understanding of these domains into future disciplinary writing contexts.
Conclusions
The results of this study demonstrate how writing tutors already engage writers within domains of discourse community knowledge. In tracing the co-occurrences of domains of discourse community knowledge and discursive tutoring strategies employed by tutors, this study sought to provide a more robust examination of how writing tutors help to develop students’ disciplinary writing ability.
This study was affected by limitations. COVID-19 made recruiting participants online especially challenging, affecting both the research timeline and sample size. The data was collected over a two-semester period and is therefore unable to fully capture the great variety of discourse communities on campus. In order to confirm that these suggested approaches would be beneficial for all students, a larger participant pool from a great variety of disciplines is needed, perhaps using a longitudinal design.
The trends revealed in my interviews and session data suggest that more writing center research should examine the intersection between tutoring strategies and frameworks for conceptualizing disciplinary writing development. In working to integrate more practices that student participants found helpful, this study identified a need for more metacognitive practices and tutorial techniques that allow students to practice mindful abstraction of knowledge. The explanation from student participants that visiting the writing center was a central part of their writing process for discipline-specific texts calls for a closer examination of the role of the writing center within the larger arc of students’ disciplinary writing development. Understanding the relationship between discourse community knowledge and metacognitive tutoring strategies will allow for tutors to better to “access the full range of tutoring strategies … at their disposal” (Dinitz and Harrington 93) and offer a clearer conceptualizing of the complexity of disciplinary writing development.
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