Co-Editors

15 September, for 1 October	1 February, for 15 February
15 November, for 1 December	1 April, for 15 April
Post-Conference: May-June

This newsletter is supported financially by the various Writing Programmes at York University, and by its subscribers. Make cheques for $27.50 payable to Inkshed at NSCAD, c/o Kenna Manos, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 5163 Duke Street, Halifax, N.S. B3J 3J6

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Canadian Caucus at CCCC in Washington

All those heading to Washington for the CCCC-don't forget to come to the Wilson Room of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, from 6:45 - 7:45 on Thursday March 23. What follows is a brief description of the Canadian Caucus sessions submitted by Anthony ParŽ:

1. CC at CCCC I'll report on result of a "paired" course, in which I taught a section of first-year comp to students all registered in a European history course. I hope to compare results of history students registered in both classes with results of students registered in history alone.
   
   Henry Hubert
   University College of the Cariboo

2. Twice now I have taught "Advanced Composition" in a language laboratory, using a system of networked computers linked to a central console, and individual electronic mail accounts. The experience has significant differences in set-up and results from those reported of other computer writing classrooms, but is still worth doing.
   
   Susan Drain
   Mount Saint Vincent University

3. When the College's Art Education Division was threatened with closure last spring, we mounted a two-day letter writing campaign. Over 300 letters, as well as hundreds of postcards, were hand delivered by human chain from the College to the Legislature. The project connected the writing programme with the College as a whole, and successfully merged art and writing--together with a good bit of lunacy--with political action. I shall, of course, come with pictures. (The performance artist, dressed as Queen Elizabeth, who declaims the importance of the arts from the steps of the Legislature is splendid.)
   
   Kenna Manos
   Nova Scotia College of Art and Design

4. The teaching idea I would like to describe is, in fact, conservative(in the non- political sense of that word). It involves preserving the dialectic between spoken and written discourse. When a student who is contemplating a writing assignment comes into the Writing Lab, our conversation begins with connecting ourselves to the subject matter on the human level of memory and experience. Then I begin a more structured Socratic type of questioning to lead the student's mind towards a focused and logical approach to the subject. I usually take notes on the student's responses and give him/her these notes at the end of the conference. The same process can be used in small groups in the writing classroom. When students are at the prewriting stage, they can question one another in this same matter and take notes on responses(after some instruction on how to do it and why). Finally, having students read their finished essays aloud to the class with no ulterior motive--simply for enjoyment--can further maintain the balance between the oral and the written.
   
   Roberta Lee
   University of New Brunswick - St. John

5. Recent calls within the field of professional and organizational writing have argued for the need to include political and cultural critique within ethnographic and "on-site" research and pedagogy. This presentation responds to that call by arguing that the not-for- profit sector, as a dynamic mix of ideological and political action and everyday business practices, can offer teachers and researchers of "workplace writing" a rich and provocative ethnographic resource. By recognizing the unique and diverse organizational contexts not-for-profits work within, we can begin to develop important ways of integrating and addressing cultural and political issues within our composition scholarship.
   
   Brenton Faber
   University of Utah

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Inkshed Publications

As you know, membership in CASLL allows you to receive, each year, the Inkshed Newsletter and two volumes put out by Inkshed Publications. We've had quite a number of requests for information on how to order individualcopies of the monographs for friends, libraries, research associates, andothers interested in the series.

The following monographs are currently available:

WRITING INSTRUCTION IN CANADIAN UNIVERSITIES, by Roger Graves

CONTEXTUAL LITERACY: WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM, edited by Catherine Schryer and Laurence Steven

Individual copies of these books can be ordered from the Canadian Council of Teachers of English Language Arts (CCTELA) at the following address:

The Canadian Council of Teachers of English Language Arts (CCTELA)
c/o Ray Lavery and Marita Watson
340 Education Bldg.
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, MB
R3T 2N2

The cost for each volume is $16.95.

Libraries may purchase the books either from CCTELA or from John Coutts Library Services. Your library probably subscribes to their catalogue. Libraries may get the books at a slightly discounted rate from Coutts. The address is:

John Coutts Library Services Ltd.
6900 Kinsmen Court
P.O. Box 1000
Niagara Falls, Ontario
L2E 7E7

Your library can also set up a standing order with John Coutts Library Services for all Inkshed Publications' books. This year's monographs will include a book on gender and academic writing and a book on the rhetoric of Kenneth Burke.

We hope that you have found these books useful in your own work. Please support the continued publication of these monographs by encouraging your library to purchase them.

If you would like any more information concerning Inkshed Publications, contact any member of the editorial committee listed below. Also, for anyone on the list who is not a CASLL member and who has not seen the books, I would be happy to forward a table of contents for each of them to you upon request.

Inkshed Publications Editors:
Stan Straw, Neil Besner, Pat Sadowy, Laura Atkinson, Sandy
Baardman

340 Education Bldg.
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Manitoba
R3T 2N2
Phone: 204-474-9034
FAX: 204-275-5962
baardmn@ccm.umanitoba.ca

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CASLL LISTSERV

(to get a recent listing of all CASLL members and their email addresses:

email listserv@unb.ca

In the message type: REVIEW CASLL

If you want to subscribe to CASLL:

email listserv@unb.ca

In the message type:

subscribe CASLL your real name


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What Happens After You Say, "Please Go to the Writing Centre."

Jan Rehner, Centre for Academic Writing

Dear Inkshedders,

A few months ago, a colleague at York who teaches history and is very supportive of writing programmes confessed that he had no clear idea of what students actually do, or of what instructors actually do during one-to-one tutoring sessions. I wrote the following article in an effort to answer his questions--I hope you might find it interesting to read my response, perhaps to add to it, compare it to your own approach, or pass it on to your own colleagues who are curious about how some of us, some of the time, teach the writing process. . . . . .

First, let me try to anticipate a few basic questions you might have about how the Arts Centre for Academic Writing is structured. CAW is an autonomous teaching unit within the Faculty of Arts with its own tenure stream. Our mandate is to teach writing across the curriculum to students who enroll voluntarily. Faculty may recommend--even urge--that their students attend, but enrolment is not mandatory, nor does CAW report back to faculty on a student's progress in any formal way. Students improve their writing skills by working on papers assigned to them in their Arts courses. Although the Arts writing programme is varied, our main form of instruction is one-to-one. Finally, the CAW faculty is a mix of full and part-time instructors, the majority of whom have been with the Centre for at least ten years and most of whom also teach discipline-based courses in the Faculty. We do not use peer tutors, though each year we do have a professional development programme for about a dozen Teaching Assistants who are assigned to CAW from a range of academic departments.

Many of my colleagues outside the Arts Centre for Academic Writing sometimes confess that they have no clear image of what happens once their students enroll for one-to-one writing instruction. How, they ask, does one-to-one teaching differ from the individual conferences they often hold with students during office hours? Why, they wonder, do some students already enrolled at the Centre still hand in flawed assignments and how can course directors and writing instructors work together to help students articulate their ideas in clear and persuasive ways?

Perhaps context is the most significant difference between one-to-one tutoring sessions and the individual conferences which many faculty have with students in their discipline courses. While instructors and students in the latter instance share a frame of reference grounded in the content of a particular course, the context of the writing instructor is grounded in the writing process as it applies to all of the student's courses. For example, while students in my own Arts courses will often use office hours to ask me to clarify a particular assignment or read an initial thesis, their questions are invariably focused on how to express the content of the single course we share and on determining what I will be looking for when I evaluate their papers. In the Centre for Academic Writing, however, I am very seldom dealing with my own assignments and I am not likely to be grading the final essay produced. Thus students can be much freer in expressing their concerns about writing for a particular course (or instructor), about the differences between writing a history paper and an English paper, and about the individualized process they actually engage in when they write.

The foregrounding of the writing process is also, I think, vital to the special context provided by one-to-one tutoring. Students who come to me in the Centre expect me to be an expert in writing; they do not expect me to necessarily be an expert in sociology or philosophy or geography. In other words, I can help the student learn strategies for generating ideas, for developing their ideas in analytical ways and for communicating their ideas clearly, but the student is essentially the "expert" in terms of content. This shift in status can be extremely empowering for students, but while it happens often and almost necessarily in one-to-one tutoring, it seldom happens during individual conferences with students in my own course. I teach the course; I grade their papers. No matter how earnestly I try to empower them, to convince them that I know the content of the course but not their interpretations of it, that structural reality is still there.

It is much more difficult to foreground process when I am dealing with students in my own course, because they know that I know what might be missing in terms of content. So, if one of those students brings me a draft and I suggest that the thesis is not clear, the student is often in some doubt as to what that suggestion might mean. Is this a writing problem, or a content problem? Do I have problems with how the thesis is phrased or with the argument of the thesis? We all know, of course, how closely form and content overlap, but I find myself inevitably teaching content when I have conferences with the students in my course. In the Centre, the student and I still talk about what the student wants to write, but how to write it, or discover it, or organize it takes precedence more easily because I am not perceived by the student as having a dual and potentially confusing role. In other words, my responsibility, clearly seen I think by both participants, is to teach a range of writing, reading, and thinking strategies that will help the student not only with the assignment at hand but also with future assignments and assignments in other courses and disciplines.

In the Centre, I need to diagnose the particular process a student engages in when she writes, make that process, with its strengths and weaknesses, explicit to the student, and determine with her a set of writing priorities and strategies that will help her gain more control over or at least comfort with that process as it is applied to a range of academic disciplines over a period of time. It would be nice if the writing process were simple or if every student wrote the same way or if every discipline had the same methodology. Then I could be relatively assured that the advice I give to students writing assignments in my own discipline course could be generalized to all their other courses. Since none of this is so, one-to-one instruction tailors writing priorities and problem-solving strategies to individual student needs. This strikes me as a very different teaching task than giving the same general advice about, say, developing a thesis to large numbers of students. What works for one student may not work for another. There are just too many kinds of theses and too many styles for developing one. To help students write clearly and critically in the short time allowed between all their assignments in all their courses during an academic year, I have to know what strategies they are already using, what is working and what is not working in the writing process, what strategies may need to be learned or altered, which strategies can be transferred across disciplines, and whether the student understands differences in methodology across disciplines.

If I am doing my job and all of this exciting stuff is being communicated, how is it that students enrolled in the Centre might still be submitting flawed papers to their course instructors? Well, first, and most obviously, it takes time to master the complexities of the writing process. There are no quick fixes. Secondly, in our teaching at the Centre, my colleagues and I usually give priority to high level thinking tasks such as analysis and organization before discussing patterns of error at the sentence level. For this reason, grammar is usually not a central concern until an individual has satisfactorily completed the larger tasks of an assignment. It would be easy for us to edit such essays but then we would not be teaching students how to write independently nor would we be ensuring that the ownership of the paper remain with the student. Further, in setting writing priorities, it would be irresponsible of me to spend an hour on teaching subject/verb agreement if the larger problem experienced by the student was failure to understand the assignment task or an inability to develop an argument. The key point, here, is not to assume that a student's writing is not improving on the evidence of a single paper. It may well be that the essay you are asked to grade, however flawed, is still much better than the first draft seen by the writing instructor.

Finally, remember that students write to learn even though it sometimes seems they write only so we can measure learning. Students write economics papers to learn how to think like an economist, or philosophy papers to learn about how philosophy works. Course directors and writing instructors are partners in this learning process, each with a particular expertise. Our intentions and our pedagogy should as clear as possible to each other and to the students. So, if you really want to know what happens after you send your students to the writing centre, feel free to drop by, meet some of the instructors, and perhaps arrange to observe a few tutoring sessions.

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