Tutor Development Coordinator -- Miles

The Tutor Series -- Annie

MSU Student Research Celebration

   Fellow peer tutors, Kerry Byrnes and Brooke Hampton, agreed to a crazy idea I had about a month ago to present our writing center research at the MSU Student Research Celebration. Both Kerry and I had received College of Letters & Science Research Travel Grants to help fund our trip to Orlando last fall, where we had presented at the International Writing Centers Association / National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing joint conference. I was fortunate enough to receive a second grant from CLS to travel to Tampa for the Conference on College Composition and Communication. We were being funded by these MSU grants, as well as our MSU Writing Center, yet few people outside of our writing center community on campus had seen our research. For that reason, we decided to apply to a Flexible Format Session at the MSU Student Research Celebration.

   Once we were selected to present on April 9th, the three of us faced a new challenge in revisiting our research, and re-learning how to present it to a mixed audience. When we had presented this research in the fall, our audience had been comprised of individuals familiar with writing center pedagogy and practice. For our MSU audience, there would be people who hadn't visited the Writing Center before, people that didn't know what a tutoring session looked like, or what a Writing Group was defined as. This revision process was incredibly beneficial for me in reminding me of just how much I had learned in my last three semesters at the MSU Writing Center.

   If I had been attending this panel as a member of the audience a year and a half ago, I wouldn't have known any of the terminology, practices, or ideas we were now discussing. I would never have imagined the similarities between mapping and writing, or how a Geographic Information Sciences (GIS) Writing Group would influence me academically, personally, or creatively. My research on GIS Writing Groups has permeated nearly aspect of my life in some way or another. I'm thinking about geography and writing in new, weird, and exciting ways. It has influenced the way I approach photography, and the way I identify myself spatially.






 For our presentation, we discussed and questioned the relationship between new media and writing centers, and more specifically, how our MSU Writing Center is affected by these new forms of communication. Our first speaker, Kerry, reimagined peer tutoring pedagogies based on the presence of computers in a tutoring session. Brooke, our second speaker, focused on how our image as a writing center has changed through the use of Facebook, blogs, and newsletters. As the third speaker, I explored the role of new media as I have experienced it in writing groups. At the MSU Writing Center, we have developed writing groups for those in Geographic Information Sciences (GIS). Because those in GIS communicate with maps, images, and graphs as central parts of their writing, our role in facilitating discussion about, and response to, each member's writing must evolve to include an understanding beyond alphabetic text.

   Becoming a peer tutor at the Writing Center has enabled me the opportunity to question and challenge my preconceived notions on writing, and what it means to write. Being a peer tutor doesn't mean you spend all of your time tutoring. I am lucky to be a member of a writing center community that encourages and enables research and questioning in the realm of writing center work. After presenting this research for the fourth time yesterday, I am excited in the progress I made during that time period. I am also excited to get started on my next research project -- it's time for something new to question, research, discuss, and map. Here's to a wonderful past year of research, and the next year of research of work!

Tampa CCCC Poster

Tampa CCCC Handout

Conference on College Composition and Communication - Undergraduate Research Poster Session

Our Space

   Each time I walk into the Writing Center, I am greeted by the funniest situations. I am constantly reminded of how diverse our tutors are, and just how unique their talents are whenever I find the time to interact with them. Through the video-making I've been conducting (specifically "The Tutor Series" -- see posts below) I have been able to learn so much about these individuals that I had never known. Isaac (pictured above) is a Renaissance Man, always surprising me with new talents. Just this week, he was serenading me with his banjo after having learned my favorite song. When I walked into the Writing Center today, he was sewing at the front desk, fixing a rip in his sweatshirt.

  Sadie suffered from hydrophobia as a child, and often wishes she had a tarantula, so she could collect its exoskeletons to use for practical jokes. Annie loves to bake muffins, and manages to fit the terms "unicorn" and "rainbows" into just about every conversation she enters. Kerry dreams of becoming the next lead-singer of Fleetwood Mac, all while juggling her hatred for Disneyworld food and all ketchups other than Heinz. Brie can blow bubbles with mashed potatoes, and is awful at feeding her horses hay. The list goes on and on.


   I am constantly reminded of how very lucky I am to work in a space with these people. It absolutely blows my mind that we manage to come from so many different places, and have so many different interests and hobbies, yet all manage to sit down and enjoy conversations on writing and people and reading and cookies and dogs and... Well, we can hold a conversation on just about anything. Except cats. (That causes an awful lot of tension -- I speak from experience).
 
There are little moments like these that make me so excited to continue to pursue a future in this work. That may sound cliche, or maybe forced, to those that don't know me, but I can honestly say that I love this work. Each and every day, I wake up excited to spend time in the Writing Center. I am excited to meet new writers, and have a discussion with them on their writing. I am excited to drink coffee and listen to people's weekend plans. I am ecstatic to watch other tutors interact with people from all across campus. This is a unique space -- and exciting things are always happening here. I just hope that you (my readers) are fortunate enough to spend time here someday soon. There is always coffee on, mints on the counter, and a conversation occurring around the orange couches.

Come join us! 

The MSU Writing Center

The Tutor Series - Brie

The Tutor Series - Kerry

The Tutor Series -- Sadie

I Am a Peer Tutor.

Last week, while typing at a computer in the MSU Writing Center, our secretary, Kaity, turned to me and bluntly asked, "Kelsey, do you even work here anymore?"

At first, I think my eyebrows shot up. I was offended -- of course I still worked at the Writing Center -- I was there every day! But, then I realized what she was asking. She was asking whether I still tutored at the writing center. I laughed, explaining my rather minimal tutoring hours, on Monday nights and Wednesday mornings. My internship consumed the rest of my time spent there, and often meant I was sitting at my computer in the corner, working on studio group reminders for our facilitators, or trying to piece together a video for our media outreach plan.

---

After a few days, Kaity's comment still bothered me. I wasn't offended, or upset, but more just concerned with what my identity was at the writing center was now that I wasn't primarily acting as a peer tutor.

In my mind, my primary role at the writing center is still that of a peer tutor. Regardless of what I am doing -- whether it is a one-on-one tutoring appointment, facilitating a studio writing group, making a YouTube video, laughing with a writer in the hallway outside of our center, or making more coffee (sometimes I feel that is my primary task at the writing center...) -- I still consider myself a peer tutor. All of these different roles function for the purpose of improving my understanding of what it means to be a tutor. To me, this idea was plain as day, but to others, the definition of a peer tutor was very different.

Just this week, a group of tutors met at to discuss brainstorming ideas for conference proposals to present at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing. The prompt for this year's conference is (De)Center: Testing Assumptions about Peer Tutoring and Writing Centers. As a group, we tossed around ideas of what it meant to (de)center ourself as a writing center, but, I quickly began to situate myself in the understanding of (de)centering my role as a peer tutor.

In the last year, my roles at the writing center have changed drastically. My beginnings as a peer tutor were unique in that I began one-on-one tutoring at the same time that I began facilitating writing/studio groups. I started at the MSU Writing Center understanding these two roles to be somewhat synonymous. During my first semester, I also was thrown on board the newsletter train, learning what it was to view our writing center from an outside perspective. My second semester only exploded from there. I was a peer tutor, a facilitator, a newsletter organizer, a video maker, and resident flyer-maker extraordinaire. In October, I traveled with two other peer tutors and our administrators to Orlando for the IWCA/NCPTW  and began to understand myself as a hopeful writing center scholar.

During all of this -- I was still a peer tutor.

This semester, my tutoring hours are limited. I am facilitating six different studio groups from classes across campus. I am filming interviews, making videos, building our YouTube presence, scheduling studios, reminding facilitators, listening to tutors' successes and struggles, and still (perpetually) making more coffee. My roles have grown to include more jobs, tasks, and talents than I thought I would ever employ at the writing center, but I still consider myself a peer tutor. 

It seems to me that we, as a writing center community, need to (de)center ourselves in our definition of peer tutoring. I am lucky in my position to have a Director and Assistant Director who trust and encourage me to undertake new challenges and ideas. I am lucky to be situated in a community of tutors who listen and are constantly spouting new ideas. I am incredibly grateful for this internship opportunity to learn what it means to work in writing center administration.

But, I am still a peer tutor.

The Tutor Series - Isaac

YouTube!

We have a YouTube Channel! Follow us!

YouToo: Writing Centers and Media Outreach

   A large part of my internship for this semester is an attempt to keep our MSU Writing Center's media outreach current, as well as aesthetic. Being a double major in Photography and Writing at Montana State has helped immensely -- to say that I have experience with iMovie, Photoshop, and Microsoft Word's Publishing Layouts would be an understatement. However, a challenge I never anticipated was the amount of time and effort needed to promote a space like the MSU Writing Center.

   Our writing center helps so many students on campus that our outreach needs to be as diverse as the writers walking in our door. We've expanded immensely on social media in the last two years, with a Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger. During that time period, we pushed our Blogger aside after realizing that our audience consisted of our peer tutors, and no one else. Facebook and Twitter may not have reached the number of students we initially hoped for, but has come to be our primary campus networking.

   A newsletter (as shown in the image above) was started the semester before I came to the writing center, starting as a double-sided piece of paper, whose primary audience was yet again the tutors in our space. We began pushing our idea of audience, extending our next issue to reach across campus. This semester, our issue has been posted on our website, and the circulation around campus has increased yet again.

   These forms of outreach -- both social media and the newsletter -- are not unique to our writing center. We understood this from the beginning, and used other writing centers across the country to base our platform on, gaining inspiration from their successes (as well as failures). But, we wanted our space to be unique -- to use media outreach in a way that would demonstrate our uniqueness, as well as attract writers from parts of campus that we hadn't yet broken into. So, we've gone film-crazed.

   The most exciting part of our outreach (for me) has been the development of our video outreach. Last semester, I created a marketing video that was initially created as an assignment for my Digital Rhetorics course. After its success in multiple facets, our director, Dr. Michelle Miley, asked me to continue developing videos as part of this internship.

   I quickly realized that this would be the most time-consuming part of my internship. Video-editing is something I'm proficient in, but not fluent. It's takes ridiculous amounts of time, and is often more frustrating than satisfying. However, the end product is incredibly successful, especially in a context such as this. The next part of our efforts, however, came in realizing that we needed a new way to display our videos to our intended audience.

   Because of this, our technology crew has begun developing a YouTube channel for our writing center. Our hopes for this platform are that it will serve as a space for our videos to be launched, but also that we could use it to share educational resources for our writers and writing center community. By sharing other institution's work, we will not only expand our audience, but also gain useful insight into how our videos can continue to evolve.

   I guess this means that the iMovie application on my work computer needs to become my primary attention, and that the video camera I have needs to turn on more often... I'm excited to get started on this part of my internship, and look forward to sharing my creations with my readership here, as well as our YouTube community. Oh, the possibilities!

   Now, for brainstorming...
 

WRIT 101 Options

MSU Writing Center Newsletter: Spring 2015

Ebb and Flow

 

   Even in my eighth semester of my undergraduate degree, I find myself struggling to keep up with my schedule in the first weeks of class. This internship at the MSU Writing Center led me to hold back on my credits -- only taking 13 total this semester. (This, for me, is almost sloth-like.) My classes, as well as the Literary Arts Journal I have found myself to be the Editor-In-Chief of, have laid out a semester of long nights and busy weekends. I have my planner color-coded, my tests and papers scheduled out, my coffee supply well-stocked. 

   Why, then, am I still so stressed? I could give you a multitude of answers, but they would all boil down to something along the lines of:

           I can't say, "No."

   What does this have to do with Writing Center Conversations? It has to do with where I find myself running to when I am stressed -- when I am overwhelmed, emotionally exhausted, and ready to pull hair out. I go to the Writing Center -- and I seek out conversation. 

   When asked what "good" writing consists of, all too many of the incoming freshmen we see in the Writing Center answer with something like, "Good flow." This term -- flow -- is a strange term to process as a peer tutor. Of course, we can assume it has something to do with the organization of paragraphs, thoughts, and sentences in the paper. We can guess that it has something to do with the idea of "good" grammar and punctuation. But, as a peer tutor, what does flow mean in terms of what we do here at the Writing Center? 

   I started to think about the idea of good flow -- of people's fluidity in language and conversation -- of easy transitions and comfortable phrases. I began to think about how this abstract idea was much more than what we may preliminarily strive for in writing, but instead had to do with the environment of the Writing Center itself. 

   One of our past tutors left us at the Writing Center with a letter to future tutors, detailing her experience here, saying:

"There is an ebb and flow of amazing people [here]." 

                   

- E.J. Schwaller, Past Tutor

 

   The reason I find myself at the Writing Center, sitting on the orange couches, drinking tea, and laughing while in the midst of a conversation was because of this. There is an ebb and flow of people, thoughts, writing, and conversation. There is an energy that fizzles when you walk in the door, stemming from people eager to listen and learn. There is a group of people here that becomes a second family -- a group that challenges you, supports you, and would do anything to see you succeed.

   It overwhelms me to think about how I have only been at the MSU Writing Center for a year, but have already learned so much. It has even changed the course of my education -- pushing me to look at career opportunities in writing center work after my undergrad. Over the course of this semester, I hope to use this blog as an outlet for thoughts and ideas I stumble on here at our Writing Center. Whether it be about a peer tutoring session, or perhaps the incredible frustration that comes with organizing studio groups on a google spreadsheet, I hope this platform will serve as a learning tool for both myself, and others in our Writing Center community.