Read Tutoring Second Language Writers Online
Authors: Shanti Bruce
Tutoring Second Language Writers (25 page)
Investigating Social Justice in the Writing Center
ELIZABETH (ADELAY) WITHERITE
As an elementary English teacher in South Korea, I took satisfaction in knowing that my students participated cheerfully and did well on their assignments. After a while, however, I began to doubt. Was I unknowingly exercising favoritism or discrimination in the classroom? Had I fallen into habits I was only vaguely aware of and could not fully identify? My interest in such questions led me to my graduate program and, eventually, to my MA thesis. What I had not foreseen at that time in Korea, however, was that a writing center would be the context of my study.
My interests (and passion) led me to develop a thesis proposal focused on tutors’ perceptions of social justice issues. Though I knew incidents involving social injustices could arise in tutoring sessions, I wanted to test my intuitions by exploring how other tutors perceived and reflected on these incidents. My research question was, how do peer tutors experience and conceptualize social justice issues within the context of tutoring sessions in the writing center? Broadly speaking, the process involved drafting a review of the literature, writing a chapter on my methodology, and submitting my research plan to the university’s IRB. I collected data from eight participants using semistructured interviews and two tasks: concept mapping and category ranking. I analyzed and systematically condensed the data, wrote the results chapter, and then critically examined what I had found as I wrote the final discussion and conclusions chapter.
If this sounds like smooth sailing, it wasn’t. I encountered the usual obstacles—conflicting advice, drama at the defense, and panic attacks. Nevertheless, what has really challenged me is the reflection I’ve been doing in the weeks following graduation. As I prepare to reenter an EFL teaching career, I am just beginning to appreciate the interdisciplinary skills I have gained. Writing the thesis was as complex as any
life-changing experience. I had tutored students from all over the world and felt they had made a real difference in who I was and might become. International students taught me more about my own attitudes as their perspectives highlighted alternatives to my own; in that way, my tutoring experience complemented the lessons I learned in coursework. I saw my master’s degree, and specifically my thesis, as an important step into my future, and I am still excited by what I learned from it.
Perhaps the main finding of my thesis was that tutors experience social justice issues as obstructions that sometimes make the goal of the session difficult or impossible to achieve. In addition, after analyzing my data, I concluded that
• tutors tend to acknowledge some forms of injustices more than others,
• they see oppression as manifesting in language,
• some tutors seek causal explanations for injustices, and
• most tutors view their roles as submissive in a larger academic context.
My first conclusion resulted from category-ranking data. I presented each participant with category cards: race/ethnicity; gender; sexual orientation; class/economic status; nationality; language; religion; physical or mental abilities; age; weight; and [blank] (for participants’ suggestions) (
Witherite 2014
, 148). I randomly selected each card and read it aloud as I placed it among the other cards scattered on the table. I then asked the participant to “organize the cards in order of how often the topic has been relevant in tutoring sessions that [he or she] experienced” (
Witherite 2014
, 41).
Based on the average results of the ranking task, I found that the most common form of social injustice tutors had noticed in tutoring sessions was, by far, discrimination based on race and ethnicity. Participants tended to recognize issues related to gender and class/economic status second and third most often. In comparison, participants considered discrimination based on weight, religion, and physical/mental abilities to be less relevant than the other given categories; some participants made it clear they felt these categories were not relevant at all to social injustices they experienced in tutoring sessions. Finally, most tutors rated the categories of language, nationality, sexual orientation, and age to be moderately relevant in tutoring sessions they had experienced. These results are associated with tutors’ perceptions of working with second language writers, as the categories of language and nationality may be viewed as less likely to involve social justice issues than race or ethnicity. However, I also found that participants’ stories about social injustices did not correspond to the
categories they considered most relevant. While a tutor may be on guard for issues involving race or gender, for example, social injustices often arise in unforeseen circumstances involving multiple interrelated identity categories.
Second, because they indicated examples of social injustice as it emerges in statements or written sentences, I found that participants see oppression as manifesting via language in their tutoring sessions. For example, on Julia’s concept map, she indicated in quotes, “Asians are the hardest to understand” (
Witherite 2014
, 112). She explained that she intended to illustrate the kinds of things she might hear or read in a student’s paper in a session, and each of the other participants offered similarly spoken or written examples. This finding is consistent with
Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s (2011)
study, in which the authors explore “the everyday language of oppression” in sessions.
Half the tutors in my study speculated about the causes of social injustices in tutoring sessions. Elliot noted circumstances that “influence . . . demonstrate . . . [and] complicate” social injustices; Lucy offered environmental factors, “such as university culture, social backgrounds, media, and peers”; Syd traced injustices to “overgeneralizations”; and Claudia considered “power dynamics and consequent text negotiation” (
Witherite 2014
, 114). In my thesis, I posited that tutors’ explanations indicate their understandings of social injustices as systematic effects of social norms rather than spontaneous and individual phenomena.
My last finding, that tutors view their roles in terms of submission, is based on participants’ allusions to the assignment, the required format style, and the professor’s preferences as being, most often, the highest priorities of the session. Tutors see their own concerns, including a sense of being discriminated against, as secondary. When tutors’ uneasiness coincides with a professor’s expectations, as in the case of perceived injustice, tutors tend to cite the professor’s possible reaction as a reason the student may want to revise, but when the tutors perceive an injustice not directly related to the assignment (such as a stereotype), they often just try to forget about it.
These findings have shaped the way I understand tutoring and tutors’ roles in relation to social justice issues in sessions, but my thesis conclusions were only part of the knowledge I gained through my experience. In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to share with readers some of the things I learned about doing research on a topic that required me, sometimes, to step back from it.
One of the most challenging and rewarding undertakings of my academic career, writing my thesis led me to reconceptualize my assumptions about tutoring and its broader academic context. This outcome was not something I had foreseen while I was busy taking classes, learning theories, reading journal articles, and getting too little sleep. The changes in my assumptions occurred slowly and often as a result of the mundane aspects of conducting empirical research. They happened as I struggled to effectively and justifiably reduce large amounts of information, to create conceptual “anchors,” to maintain focus, and to meet unexpected challenges with innovation.
Condensing Information. In many parts of the thesis, I had to take an overwhelming amount of information, whether literature or data, and systematically narrow it into more practical, workable abstractions. As I brainstormed the first draft of my literature review, for example, I was daunted by the number of topics that related to my study, including hundreds of social justice research articles. My colleague Jocelyn suggested that I draw a diagram with three circles. “Your research question,” she said, “should be in the center of all three.” Based on this visualization, my three foci were tutoring, social justice, and writing centers. I wasn’t doing a study
on
research, for example, so I decided to exclude literature on social justice research. Small decisions like this added up and helped me to move things along.
Jocelyn’s recommendation allowed me to choose the main subheadings of my literature review, but another problem remained. I still had hundreds of books, articles, and other sources I needed to organize in a cohesive way. While cutting up a printed list of journal abstracts, I realized that organizing small pieces of paper was much easier than trying to shuffle piles of books and articles, so I printed and cut up my entire references list. On many of the paper slips, the title was enough to jog my memory, but I wrote brief notes on the ones that seemed obscure. I sorted piles according to the three main topics, and consequently, it was easier to find subthemes. With my references on a more manageable scale, it was much easier to envision how themes and subthemes related to one another.
After I had met each of my participants, I had to turn eight and one-half hours of audio-recorded interviews into a written source. To transcribe the data, I found a Chrome browser add-on, aptly named
Transcribe
, which allowed me to use keyboard shortcuts to manipulate the audio as I composed my transcriptions. When I was finished, I had 145 pages, including too many details about participants’ experiences.
As a systematic means of reducing data, I established clear parameters for what would be included.
First, data were drastically reduced by excluding generalized impressions or examples (e.g., “Lots of white males come in who . . .”) and examples outside the one-on-one tutoring session (e.g., instances before or after sessions). At this point, 34 total anecdotes remained, which concerned only singular, specific experiences (e.g., “I worked with one particular student who . . .”). (
Witherite 2014
, 43)
When I attempted to code the remaining thirty-four anecdotes, however, not all the content helped to answer my research question. To be sure the results could provide insight on how tutors experience social justice issues, I developed a second parameter: only anecdotes in which “the tutor mentioned how the social justice issue affected that particular session” would be included (
Witherite, 2014
, 43). In the end, I retained eleven anecdotes, which appropriately paralleled my research goals. Reducing information made it possible to manage a long list of sources and a novel’s length of transcribed data, but several sources and most of the data I gathered didn’t make the final cut. What was included in the final draft of my thesis depended on whether it fit the study’s focus.
Conceptual Anchors for Maintaining Focus. While writing my thesis, I didn’t fully realize the importance of the research question and the interview protocol script. In hindsight, these were landmarks by which I could have measured the usefulness of data and ideas swirling around me. Though the research question evolved as I further understood what and how I wanted to explore, it was a constant means of evaluating my decisions. For example, when I revised the interview questions, I considered whether they would help answer my research question or were merely interesting. In my MA classes, I had heard conflicting perspectives on research questions. Some professors said determining research questions from the start is too constricting, while others contended research questions are important to keep a researcher on the right track. As I was conducting empirical research for the first time, the research question reminded me of the main goal while I navigated toward countless secondary goals.
Along with the research question, what I was learning about characteristics and sources of social injustice helped me to compose my interview questions. For example, I came to realize favorable discrimination is also injustice. When it came to the interview script, I knew it had to be reviewed by the IRB, but I didn’t realize how indispensable it was until I met my participants. Social justice issues such as racism, sexism, and other discriminations based on identity categories are inherently charged
topics, and though I tried to respond evenly to participants’ responses, my mind occasionally reacted to their statements with judgment, vindication, or even self-righteousness. Ironically, my own presumptions could have gotten in the way of studying tutors’ ideas about presumptions; for example, I caught myself thinking that one participant was oversimplifying race by speaking only of black and white people. With a set script, I was able to ask each participant the same questions, using the same phrasing and often in the same tone of voice. Glancing at the script recentered me in my role as an investigator. If I had not prepared the interview protocol to keep me centered, the resulting data would have been less valid, as I would have revealed my reactions to each participant. If they had felt I judged their responses, participants might have become defensive or apologetic, and this would have changed the dynamics of our communication and their subsequent responses.
Challenge as Opportunity for Innovation. When I chose to study matters of social justice, there was one obstacle I didn’t anticipate. Although I had been aware of emergent
forms
of social injustices, such as racism and sexism, prior to my graduate studies, social justice and its inverse, social injustice, are abstract umbrella
concepts
that extend far beyond my own experiences. As I compiled sources for my literature review, I found there is not a single accepted definition of social justice; the boundaries of this ethical notion can change as much as the experiential phenomena it describes.
I managed to sidestep most of the problems caused by the ambiguousness of the term until I created the interview questions. At that point, I required a clear definition for the prompt. As I searched again through my sources, I noted recurring terms used to describe social justice issues, and I synthesized these existing classifications to construct a comprehensive idea that worked for my purpose. Social injustices, in my synthesized definition, were “oppressive, unfair, or offensive issues . . . [that] could include stereotyping, discrimination, or prejudices” (
Witherite 2014
, 39). I couldn’t find any sources that contained a usable definition; therefore, I drew from reliable, recent, and seminal sources to construct my own.
When I shared the first draft of my interview questions with my advisor, he warned me that my questions might reflect answers I expected to hear. In the questions, he was able to see my personal opinions about social injustices, which would hinder my chance to learn about my participants’ attitudes and beliefs by constricting their answers to coincide with my own. To step outside of my own biases, including my persistent sense of righteous indignation, I asked for recommendations from my advisor and several colleagues who were also developing their own
studies. It was a lesson in rhetorical precision as I began to see how the wording of a question might affect the response. With the help of several mentors, I gradually developed questions that welcomed responses I could not foresee. One of my participants, Lucy, suggested that people tend to make immediate character judgments based on predominantly visible characteristics. Her statement intrigued me, but she could not have said it if my questions had been limited to what I had expected. Around the same time, I began listing categories I encountered in the literature review since I would need to approach the abstract idea of social justice indirectly through participants’ specific experiences.
At the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing in 2013, I presented my research proposal, and I asked for attendees’ feedback on the nine categories I had identified to create the category-ranking task. The response was positive; the audience agreed that these categories encompassed nearly any social injustice they could envision. Moreover, I sensed that by placing equal emphasis on each category, I was creating a means for social injustices to be conceptualized collectively and thereby collectively challenged (
Bell 2007
).
These events expanded my viewpoint, but another issue remained. If I presented categories in a certain sequence, the order could affect participants’ responses. The first draft of my questions would have either led participants to give particular answers or constricted their responses according to what
I
perceived to be the most relevant social justice issues in tutoring sessions. When I brought this concern to Becky, a volunteer tutor in the writing center, she suggested I invite the participants to choose the order themselves. I initially flinched at the idea of a significant change to the methodology, but I realized the benefits outweighed my hesitations. In the exchange, I not only ended up with a more innovative methodology that yielded numerical rank-order data, I was able to recognize my own preconceptions that may have weakened the study.
My last major challenge arose while I drafted the results chapter. Each of my participants created a concept map, so it seemed natural that I should present each participant’s data separately. However, the second part of my research question corresponded to the participants’ reported experiences. I reduced the data to eleven anecdotes, but they did not proportionately represent the participants. I therefore decided to present my results chapter in two main sections. The first section detailed each participant’s conceptualizations of social justice issues based on their concept maps, and the second section presented themes from their combined anecdotes. It seemed to me to be an unusual approach compared to most theses I was familiar with, but it worked.