While reading the article “Writing Center Ethics & Non-traditional Students” I find myself disagreeing with Gardner and the other contributors and even feeling almost annoyed that such an article exists. McLean and Lyman occasionally make worthwhile comments but Gardner is objectionable and poses irritating questions. At the start of the article Gardner asks “Is it fair to make assumptions based on a student’s age?” (7). I wonder instead if there is any point to making assumptions based on a student’s age or any other criteria for that matter.
Every student that comes into the Writing Center is at a different stage in their writing and has different needs. A student may arrive with a paper that needs significant amounts of work or they may show up with a strong paper. They may show up with 25 minutes to work and a paper due the next day or they may have plenty of time and a paper that is not due for another week. They may be a student highly motivated to improve their work or they may be an apathetic student that is only there because they are required to be. These are the kinds of factors that are important in a tutoring session, not how old the student is or how long it has been since they last wrote an analytical essay.
It seems to me it would be much more effective to pay attention to each student’s specific needs than to try to guess at what the session will be like based on some kind of stereotype or category the tutor thinks the student can be placed in. There is no reason to assume that an older student is especially busy and will try to rush the session when the tutor could simply ask the student how much time they have to work and make a list of priorities based on the student’s answer. It is entirely possible to encounter a “traditional” student with only half an hour to dedicate to the session or a “non-traditional” student who can stay for a whole hour. In fact I have encountered both of these types of students, so what is the point of the labels?
Gardner seems particularly caught up with what kind of ethics and strategies should be used on these so-called non-traditional students. I would argue that these students are no different than their so-called traditional counterparts except in the sense that all students are different. It would be better if Gardner stopped worrying so much about the labels and what goes along with them and instead approached each session as a separate case rather than a category. The better tutor is the one with good people skills in all situations, not the tutor that can classify students as part of some group.
Lyman, and especially McLean, do come closer to this idea near the end of the article. McLean states, “I think that tutors, as well as anyone else, should struggle to avoid stereotyping students…However, I do believe that students need individual strategies adapted to their needs” (10). Here, McLean gets at the real point, each student needs to be worked with individually, not as a member of a certain group of students.
Works cited: “Writing Center Ethics & Non-traditional Students” by Gardner, E. et. al.
There is a big difference you don't address: many of the non-traditional writers in their initial classes have not written analytical prose for many years.
ReplyDeleteOur day students come from a high-school background where we can assume that sort of practice.
While I agree that it's offensive to stereotype, and we need to reach each writer at her point of need, you may find that many first-year SCS students face some enormous challenges based on their lack of recent practice in writing for the Academy.
My point is not that we should not help SCS students who have not written academic prose in a long time but rather that we should not assume that we know what a writer's needs are before talking to them simply because we think they fit in some category. Certainly if we find that a student's needs fit those of the stereotypical "non-trad" student then the suggestions for tutoring such a student could be helpful. However, I think it is important to make sure we address what a student's needs actually are not what we assume they will be.
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