Rhetorical Media and the Twenty First Century Open-Access Writing Center: Predictions, Predilections, and Realities

"First, we need to recognize our role in helping students use—or learn to use—technology as part of their writing processes.  Students may come through our doors not yet adept at word processing or uncomfortable with composing online or discussing writing online, but as writing classrooms move into computer lab classrooms, they will come with questions about writing in that environment." --Muriel Harris

About the Author
Clint Gardner directs the Salt Lake Community College Student Writing Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. He currently serves as Secretary of the Two-year College Association of the National Council of Teachers of English. He also served as President of the International Writing Centers Association. His writing center research and development include the work of peer writing tutors in a community college writing center and the use of online resources to bring writing center services who cannot attend the Student Writing Center in person. One the most important aspects of his writing center work is to support and offer feedback to the student writers who come to the SLCC Student Writing Center, as well as to the SLCC Students who work as peer writing consultants in the Center.

 

Survey Results

With my own experience directing an open-access writing center at Salt Lake Community College in mind, and the reality of the types of assignments that we respond to with a somewhat progressive first year composition curriculum that includes both a focus on multimodal texts and visual rhetoric (Bickmore & Ruffus 2004; Bickmore & Christensen 2010), I was curious about the types of assignments that writing centers, a particularly writing centers at open-access institutions, are responding to on a regular basis. I queried both the WCENTER and WPA email lists to get their response to a rather unscientific study on tutoring and new media in writing centers.   

Chart 1:  Institution TypeChart 2:  Open accessChart 3:  Position Most of the respondents (n=117) were from writing center personnel at institutions of higher education (see chart 1).  This is no doubt due to the demography of the WCENTER and WPA-L listservs, and my request that only those directly involved in a writing center (such as a director or a tutor) respond to the survey (chart 3).  While the demography of either WPA-L or WCENTER is unclear (E. Bowen, personal communication February 25, 2011), another survey asking for institutional affiliation of WCENTER reflects nearly that same results:  not many non-higher education scholars actively participate in it (Gardner 2011).  It is not a stretch to make the same assumption about WPA-L.   What is clear, however, is that most of the respondents are from non-open access institutions with 49% of the respondents indicating that (see chart 2).  It is important to note, as well that nearly 20% of respondents did not know if their institution is open access or not (see chart 2).  For the sake of integrity, I have only included figures only from those respondents that indicated that they were at open-access institutions on charts or tables labled open-access only.  The revised count, therefore, is 37 (n=37) for the charts and tables that reflect findings from open-access institutions.

Tutoring for traditional academic texts is the norm for all institutions (see chart 4 and table 1). All respondents (save one) noted that writers bring traditional alphabetic texts in to sessions.  This holds true for both open-access too.  The sole respondent who did not mark traditional academic texts was from a community writing center which does not work with student writers working on academic assignments.

Chart 5:  Documents Tutored all

 

Traditional academic writing

Student web pages/sites or hypertexts

Multimodal documents

Video projects

Audio projects

Other web 2.0 applications

116

43

54

22

19

17

99.15%

36.75%

46.15%

18.80%

16.24%

14.53%

Table 1:  Types of documents tutored (All respondents)

 

Chart 4:  Docs tutored open access

 

Traditional academic writing

Student web pages/sites or hypertexts

Multimodal documents

Video projects

Audio projects

Other web 2.0 applications

37

10

17

5

6

2

100.00%

27.03%

45.95%

13.51%

16.22%

5.41%

Table 2:  Types of documents tutored (Open Access Only)

Tutoring multi-modal texts occurs for nearly half the respondents with 46% at all institutions and at open-access institutions only.  This finding at open-access institutions is supported by the 2005 Two-Year College Association (TYCA)-sponsored study that showed that over half of respondents to that survey assigned “multimodal essays” (Millward, 2008, 389).  With the notable exception of tutoring for audio projects, other types tutoring seem to mark a specific difference based upon institutional type.  Web page tutoring, for example, is 37% at all institutions and 27% at open-access institutions.  Tutoring for video projects is roughly 19% at all institutions and 14% at open-access only.  Tutoring for other web 2.0 applications marks the greatest difference between all institutions with 15% at all institutions and only 5% at open-access institutions.  As noted, however, an interesting commonality occurs with tutoring for audio projects with 16% for all and for open-access institutions.

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