University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 9-2011 "Whether Writers Themselves Have Been Changed": A Test of the Values Driving Writing Center Work Michelle Deal University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Deal, Michelle, ""Whether Writers Themselves Have Been Changed": A Test of the Values Driving Writing Center Work" (2011). Open Access Dissertations. 443. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/443 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “WHETHER WRITERS THEMSELVES HAVE BEEN CHANGED”: A TEST OF THE VALUES DRIVING WRITING CENTER WORK A Dissertation Presented by MICHELLE L. DEAL Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2011 Department of English © Copyright by Michelle L. Deal 2011 All Rights Reserved “WHETHER WRITERS THEMSELVES HAVE BEEN CHANGED”: A TEST OF THE VALUES DRIVING WRITING CENTER WORK A Dissertation Presented by MICHELLE L. DEAL Approved as to style and content by: _________________________________________________ Donna LeCourt, Chair _________________________________________________ Anne Herrington, Member _________________________________________________ Mathew Ouellett, Member _______________________________________________ Joseph Bartolomeo, Department Head Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Donna LeCourt, for her many years of support. Her writing, teaching, and mentoring have helped make me a better writer, reader, thinker, and educator. I also extend my gratitude to the members of my committee, Anne Herrington and Mathew Ouellett, for their helpful comments, questions, and patience throughout this project. I equally thank the students who volunteered to participate in this study. I am especially grateful for their openness. Their writing, tutoring, and reflections have complicated my understanding of changed writers. Many thanks go to the International Writing Centers Association for awarding me a dissertation research grant and to the staff at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Translation Center for their first-rate transcription services. Without grant funding, I would not have had the assistance of UMass transcriptionists, and without them, my data analyses would have taken significantly more time than I had to offer. Thanks also go to Neal Lerner for having read and responded to an early version of chapter 3, and to members of the NEWACC writers group who read and responded to a related conference paper/manuscript. I am also indebted to Patricia Zukowski, Haivan Hoang, and Lois Brown for having hired and mentored me as a tutor, administrator, and teacher. Their contributions to my professional development while researching and writing this dissertation have been invaluable. This project may never have been completed without the support of family and friends who helped me to stay focused on this project and provided encouragement to persist: a special thank you to Adam Barcroft, Hannelore Deal, James Deal, Vicki Hamill, and Carla English. iv ABSTRACT “WHETHER WRITERS THEMSELVES HAVE BEEN CHANGED”: A TEST OF THE VALUES DRIVING WRITING CENTER WORK SEPTEMBER 2011 MICHELLE L. DEAL, B.A., UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL M.A., UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT PH.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Donna LeCourt This project questions a core value that writing center workers have long held about tutoring writing: that we change writers. Applying sociocognitive and Bakhtinian lenses, I was able to complicate theory-practice connections. Tutor-tutee negotiations during tutorials, tutees’ perceived learning outcomes, and their revisions were compared with their reasons for revising so that I could investigate what tutees potentially learn from their tutors, how, and why. Data indicated if tutors’ information/advice became, in Bakhtin’s terms, internally persuasive to tutees. When the authoritative discourses tutors represent or endorse converge with students’ internally persuasive discourses, they converge in students’ revision choices as tutor-tutee interdiscursivity. I proposed that such a convergence can lead to “changed” writers, writers who alter their understanding of themselves as writers and/or modify their thinking about a given paper, concept, or process. v Even though students granted their tutors considerable authority, most tutees examined their tutors’ comments to see if they made sense and were worthy of internalizing as generalized concepts to help them meet current writing goals. In short, tutors do indeed change writers, as I have defined change in the context of this study. Work with specific papers can impact students in terms of their larger process and development as writers; tutors’ strategies/concepts can become writers’ strategies/concepts to be applied again in new contexts. However, even when tutees were internally persuaded and appeared to have changed as writers, analyses into their tutorials, revisions, perceived learning outcomes, and reasons for revising showed that some students took up their tutors’ information/advice in ways beyond their tutor’s control. What some students internalize can be situation-specific and may not necessarily translate to other writing projects, can be significant yet limited understandings of rhetorical concepts, and may not appear in their revised drafts. Students can also be resistant to rhetorical concepts and revision strategies, especially those they perceive as antithetical to their ideological views about process, content, or structure. Given the variety of reasons students revise, the multiple contexts and influences affecting tutorials, and the ensuing challenges inherent in assessing tutorials, I recommend that tutors do not measure their success based on the Northian idea of a writing center. Though we do change writers, I recommend writing center workers think about successful tutorials in more complex ways than our Northian goal might imply. Tutors’ successes are not dependent on changes to writers but on their ability to collaboratively negotiate with writers. Instead of trying to prove the efficacy of writing center tutorials as direct cause and effect relationship, I recommend that writing center administrators try to vi demonstrate how tutorials foster several habits of mind that college students need to cultivate to become successful writers. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ....................................................................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................................ v LIST OF TABLES .................................................................................................................................................. xii CHAPTER 1. EFFICACY IN WRITING CENTER TUTORIALS: IN SEARCH OF BETTER WRITERS ...1 Writing Center Research: What We Know and What We Don’t Know ...........................3 Success with Tutoring Strategies ....................................................................................................6 Success with Tutorials ...................................................................................................................... 13 Success with Writing ......................................................................................................................... 19 Success with Writers ......................................................................................................................... 21 Chapter Outline .................................................................................................................................... 27 2. RESEARCH METHODS ....................................................................................................................... 29 Site ............................................................................................................................................................ 31 Participants ........................................................................................................................................... 35 Student Writers .................................................................................................................... 36 Writing Center Tutors ....................................................................................................... 39 My Role as Researcher ...................................................................................................... 45 Data Collection ..................................................................................................................................... 49 Writer Information Forms ............................................................................................... 52 viii Audio-recorded Tutorials ...............................................................................................