It took me a good few minutes to
think of the title for this blog post. And I have been thinking about writing
it for a while. It has been an incredibly busy semester for our small writing
centre, and more than 900 students saw us either in person at the Centre or in
workshops requested by their lecturers. And it is this number that got me
thinking about writing this post. I have been thinking, for a while now, what
is in a number? How can we justify the funding we receive and the number of
peer tutors we employ and our continued existence in the university at a time
when writing centres in other parts of the world, like the UK, are closing down
and their roles being diluted, challenged and changed into other kinds of work,
like staff development and learning and skills development for students?
This is, I think, a big and
pressing question for writing centres, and perhaps even for academic writing
development work more broadly. And I think it is hard to answer, because of the
nature of the work we do. It is fuzzy, often, and it is hard to show, in pass
rates, or throughput numbers, or even in student assignment scripts, exactly
what role our intervention has played in students’ ability to succeed (or not).
Our work is fuzzy at a time when higher education wants clarity. The managerial
or business model that is so pervasive in higher education globally that drives
us towards learning outcomes, and targets and a focus on universities as
service providers and students as consumers does not leave much room for fuzziness,
for not knowing, for exploration and for getting things wrong before we get
them right. We are, as a sector, required to train students to work in the
‘knowledge economy’ and this has moved higher education further along the path
of quality assurance, and quantification of impact and learning. Many
universities globally have graduate attributes and academics have to benchmark
their curricula against these to show how they are producing graduates with a
range of knowledge, skills and attitudes. Being clear about what you are
teaching students and for what purpose, and also being able to show students
what they are intended to learn and how they will be assessed, and why, is good
teaching practice. University education is often opaque and obscure to students,
and even to a lot of academics. Any moves that make transparency and clarity a
part of teaching practice are good ones, to my mind. I am not taking issues
with outcomes-based education here, or even taking the managerial model for HE
to task. What I am concerned about it what all these trends and requirements
mean for the kind of work that writing centres and academic developers do,
whether working with staff or students.
The concern comes back to the
question I asked at the beginning of this post: how do we (writing centres)
show what impact we are having on student success when so much of what we do
with students is ‘fuzzy’ and difficult to quantify in a pass mark or a certain
kind of essay response? I am not yet sure. One response might be to make our
work seem less fuzzy; to try and plan research projects that show that students
are improving directly because they have come to the writing centre for help.
But, as Archer (2010) points out, students do a lot of writing and reading and
talking about writing in and outside of class and tutorials and the writing
centre It is possible to show that students are improving in their written
work, and make a correlation between that and visits to the writing centre, but
we can only ever claim to be part of the improvement, rather than the cause of
the whole improvement, so we cannot put a number on it, like 8% or something
like that. Another response might be to try harder to get the work that we do
out of the ‘margins’ and into the mainstream, but creating co-teaching
partnerships with lecturers, or by inviting whole classes of students to come
to the writing centre and have their attendance recorded, so that a correlation
can be made between attendance and success. This is not a bad idea, and many
writing centres have had success working in classrooms with lecturers and
tutors. I do this, and I enjoy the variation it lends to the work I do, and the
opportunities it gives me to be creative and to highlight the importance of
thinking carefully about writing. But I am also persuaded by Terrance Riley’s
argument that writing centres should avoid mainstreaming their work and their
identity too much. In essence, he argues that writing centres, and this could
extend to any work done from a space outside of what is considered mainstream,
can speak with a different kind of authority, and with a different kind of
voice, from the less mainstreamed space. By keeping ourselves and our work
outside of the mainstream, we can carve out a different kind of space in which
to work, and perhaps can better resist the pushes and pulls that I am sure some
of us working in writing centres must feel to justify our work in ways that
move us towards discourses of quality assurance and quantification of impact.
Perhaps we can continue to make our work worthy of recognition, and the other
good things, like funding and praise, if we continue to construct our
identities as different from those of academic departments, for example. Not
just because we are quite obviously not an academic department, but also
because we have a very different and just as valuable role to play in creating
access to higher education that will hopefully lead many students towards
success as well.
I will close this brief musing
with a return to my original prompt. How does a writing centre justify its need
to work in fuzzy spaces in a time of increasing desire for clarity and
definite-ness? I am disinclined to use the numbers of students we see as a
source of evidence for the university’s continued investment in us. But having
said this, I do it (as part of a bigger picture of evidence, like student and
lecturer feedback and tutor development). Why? Because, I believe, like Shannon
Carter, that sometimes it is profitable to speak in the languages that are
understood and spoken by the people one is speaking to, rather than only in
one’s own language. I do not, in my academic work, speak the language of
numbers, and I don’t really think there are many writing centres that do. But
universities do. So, when I am asked what we have done all year, and what my
budget for the following year is, I am required to form a hybrid language to
report in, where I speak a more qualitative language of worth as defined by
what the peer tutors and students have gained from their many conversations and
debates about writing, and by what my colleagues have gained from partnering
with us to run writing workshops for their students. The other part of this hybrid
language is numbers, and speaking of our continued value in terms of how many
students we have worked with, and how many departments and lecturers have
sought our help, and what percentage of students thought we were great as
opposed to unhelpful. But I continue to wonder if there are different ways in
which to talk about being ‘worthy’ that I have not yet thought of. Thus, the
musing continues…
References
Archer,
A. 2008. Investigating the effect of Writing Centre
interventions on student writing. SAJHE
22(2): 248–264.
Riley, T. 1994. The unpromising future
of writing centers. The Writing Center
Journal, 15(1): 20-34
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