Final trip to the Boys & Girls Club

This afternoon concluded our last trip the Boys & Girls club to help the kids on their digital story projects. The original student that my partner and I were assigned to the first visit to the club was absent last week as well as today. Instead, we were assigned to the student that Gyra and Allie had been previously working on. She already had a lot done--her interview had been completed and script had been written and recorded. The student brought her camera in and wanted help to upload the pictures and compile everything on the computer to produce the actual digital story. It was hard connecting with her and I am note sure why. I don't think it had anything to do with her interest in the project because she certainly was on a roll with getting stuff done and we could tell she was immediately ready for the next step. In contrast to the original student we had been assigned to work with, today's student had interviewed her father and uncle and I think that by having a personal connection, she definitely had much more of an incentive to complete the project. In comparison to working with the student this past Saturday for the CCE's college mentoring program, I think today's work with the student felt less like a type of "consultation" and more like a computer expert tutorial.

Reflections on Saturday's College Mentoring Experience

I would like to begin this post my sharing the one of the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me. I was at d-hall prior to having to be at the Commons to meet with the student again that I had met with earlier in the semester to consult with her on her college admissions essay. I had just filled a mug with steaming hot coffee and was taking my tray of eggs, bacon, and some other incredibly unhealthy breakfast food to sit back at my table. Before I knew it, I was on the FLOOR in front of what seemed to be a million people during prime d-hall time because I had slipped and fell, pouring my food and coffee ALL over myself and the floor with a lovely loud crashing noise to accompany my fall. About 5 people came over to see if I was okay and see if "needed any medical attention" but I told them I was fine minus the fact that I was thoroughly humiliated. So the point of this story is that I reeked of coffee and eggs during my session with the student but nevertheless, it still went very well!

We grabbed two chairs to sit down and discuss her essay and right away I began the session by telling her about my traumatic d-hall experience and warning her about my stench. At least as a positive to what had happened to me earlier that morning, it nice being able to easily have something to use to start things off and create a comfortable environment because I could tell she found the story pretty funny.

She took out a copy of her "main" essay that she wanted me to review. I don't quite remember exactly, but the topic was something along the lines of "write about an experience in which you've overcome an obstacle". Luckily, as I had learned the first time I worked with her, this student was not stumped with what to write about; she had plenty of valuable content to share because unfortunately, she had spent half of her life living in Afghanistan under harsh Taliban control. In this essay, she began with a very intriguing opening paragraph that described her limitations in life and later on in the essay, got more specific and connected her story with her future goals and aspirations. It was beautifully written so as a writing consultant, my job was easy for the most part. I asked her what she wanted to work on and she said that it was a little too long for the word limit so we decided to go paragraph by paragraph and find sentences that were either repetitive or too wordy. Working paragraph by paragraph was a great tactic to go about reviewing her paper with her and as we did, I read every sentence aloud. This helped us indicate areas or sentences that were a little unclear as well as places where she had conflicting verb tenses. Another thing I didn't even pay attention to until mid-way through writing this blog post was that she is an ESL student. The fact that she has gone to high school here is a possible explanation, but both times I was working with her I never really realized any struggles that arose from a language or culture barrier. At the end of the session, she expressed a lot gratitude and I could tell that she got a lot out of our 45 minute meeting which was a good feeling. I really enjoyed this experience because the student had a lot of interesting in working with me and I could truly sense the positive resulting benefits to both her and I. A final observation I'd like to note is that the last time I had worked with this young girl, another student from our class was working with me but this time it was only her and me and I could tell that by just having one person working with her, she felt less intimidated and more connected and engaged. To reiterate, I think this was a great opportunity and it really felt like a real consultation to me.

Consultation shadowing & Collaboration

Tonight's consultation shadowing was a little different in terms of environment because the session took place within the actual Writing Center room, whereas we usually meet in an office down the hall since another writing consultant has appointments at the same time. In addition, I was never introduced as a shadow this time so it led me to wonder whether or not that had any particular impact on the situation of the actual session. I think I've mentioned this in another blog post earlier in the year, but I have learned in my psychology about concept called the person-situation controversy which is basically concept that a particular situation has substantial influence in our reactions and interactions. This leads me to wonder—do various factors that are unique to each consultation session affect the outcome for the student? I think that this idea also ties into a lot of our class discussions and numerous readings on the atmosphere of the writing center being best when it is interpersonal and collaborative. I have come to see that this word, "collaborative", is a fundamental word in the rhetoric on writing centers. More specifically, our University's Writing Center is established on producing better writers, not better papers by consultant executing this technique of active conversation. Is active conversation a key component to interpersonal and collaborative environment of writing centers? I certainly think so because it requires individuals to collaborate with one another to strengthen and clarify ideas and knowledge. 

Furthermore on the note on collaboration, tonight's session definitely classifies as a collaborative effort. This evening, TWO students came in together to work on a research paper for their first-year seminar class. To be honest, I thought it was rather odd to assign a research paper to pairs of students. Through everything I have learned via the readings (specifically the Hull article if I remember correctly), class discussions, and shadowing a variety of different consultations, I am all in support of collaboration when it is done under the right circumstances. Nevertheless, the two students that sought the help of the writing center tonight had each written different sections of the paper and wanted to ensure they'd effectively merged the individual sections together. One thing that the writing consultant suggested was that their thesis was rather weak—perhaps (and most likely) due to the fact that they had written different parts separately. The writing consultant suggested they talk about it aloud in order to clarify and indicate a stronger, more concrete thesis. Another thing I have observed from this session is that with a research paper, there is more focus on making sure the information is being presented in clear and straightforward as well as carry significance. I also noticed an apparent struggle with research papers (as well as other types of papers) aiming to be informative to the reader without boring them with excessive summary. This also caused the two students to have issues with their paper being too long and which adjusting was actually more difficult than it would seem to be. On a final note, these two students were in their first semester of college and the writing consultant suggested that they try and eliminate areas where they tried to sound academic because it actually makes the sentences more vague and wordy. As soon as she said that, I could immediately relate because that was a major struggle for me when I first got to college and it continues to be. (Which is almost ironic that I include that in this blog because I'm sure some of my posts come across as unclear and confusing to a reader.)

Upon the focus of collaboration, I think there is definitely a correlation to the notion of community literacy. My blog post from November 3rd, titled "Tina article & the topic of Literacy" covers one of the readings about literacy. With these two major concepts at hand and the observations of this specific consultation session, I think another major question arises as to what degree can collaboration enhance literacy? Continuing with this idea, what is the most effective way of utilizing collaboration to improve literacy in the realm of education? The work we did at the Boys & Girls Club and the College Mentoring Program have both yielded different effects yet nonetheless at the core of both of these community projects is the use of collaboration as means of enhancing the literacy of others. Some researching on the University of Richmond's Library website lead me to the article "Helping Diverse Struggling Readers through Reflective Teaching and Coaching" which summarizes the work of improving students' poor literacy skills, highlighting coaching (in other words, a form of communication) as the main strategy used. This article is insightful but it's framework still prompts the question of how to use collaborative processes in their more effective and efficient ways. As writing consultants, it's crucial to broaden our knowledge of one of the fundamental practices of the Writing Center (collaboration)

Boys & Girls Club Round 2

Before heading over to the Boys & Girls Club, I was optimistic that the student my partner and I had worked with the last time would be prepared to share her experiences about her interview (since she loved to talk) and be ready to work on writing her script. When we arrived, we headed right to the Teen Room to meet the students and I did not see our student insight so I just assumed that perhaps she was just on the other bus on her way over. Unfortunately, she never showed up, along with another handful of students that were in the project. That said, surprisingly a few new students arrived but not enough for Julia and I, along with two other classmates, to have someone to work with. I think that perhaps since the project is drawn out over a longer time span, it's more difficult to keep the students from the Boys and Girls Club engaged and interested in completing their projects.

So instead we decided to explore the Boys & Girls club which turned out to be a lot of fun for not only us, but for the students. Julia and I first walked around the Media room were some students were working on their scripts. It nice to see that some students really did have a lot of information to work with and furthermore, it was interesting to observe how the dynamic varied in each group. Julia and I then decided to head down to the other side of the Club and see what some of the students were doing. A group of kids about 8 and 9 years old were preparing chicken with collard greens on plates for the other kids and they absolutely loved doing it and telling us all about it. As Julia was talking to them, I ventured to the side where I saw a bulletin board with a few report cards stapled up. A young boy came up to me and proudly pointed his out to me which showed how he had excellent grades and an excellent behavior report. He was so friendly and he ended up giving Julia and I a (requested) tour of the Boys and Girls Club. It was so nice to aimlessly interact with them and just see how they are both similar and different to us. It's also interesting to see how some are more outgoing and friendly than others. We met another young girl who had a little Step dance off with Julia (who just came in second place this past weekend at our school's step completion). Kids started crowding around and you could tell they were all enjoying the attention and seeing Julia step dance.

Overall, it was definitely not what I expected before arriving but I found today's experience to be enjoyable and lighthearted.

Week 13 readings--Where did the semester go?

Wow, I can't believe there is only one more "weekly folder" of readings after this week. This semester has gone by pretty quickly. I am currently in the process of doing my classmate consultation project as well as making my final revisions to my article response essay from last week. Along with the readings for this upcoming week from the St. Martin's Sourcebook, my brain is about to overflow with all the rhetoric on the writing process and its million of components. At first, I felt that Part I of the reading was a bit all over the place. Then I realized, it was more of a nice and broad overview about everything we have learned thus far about the role of being writing consultants. It emphasized the processes, practices, the technique of utilizing conversation; it talked about cultural differences and the non-traditional student; it also explained the theories and paradigms of the consulting process. To be honest, the first time I heard the word "paradigm" was my first semester of college in an article about leadership for one of my classes. Since then, I have found that many of my classes here love that word and love to apply it to their field of study. After exploring the different stages of writing tutoring, Murphy and Sherwood give specific examples of tutoring sessions. It's almost ironic that the first example, with Darren and Yaroslav, deals with the issue of working with ESL students. In doing my final draft of my article response essay, (which is about ESL students and the role of cultural differences), I have been having trouble taking a clear stance on what the author is saying. However, after reading this short little example, it really helped to clarify that it is indeed important to attribute cultural difference as a major factor of understanding how to best help ESL students with their writing.

The Shamoon and Burns article, "A Critique of Pure Tutoring" took me off guard because I was not expecting to find an article in this book that criticized the whole collaborative, interpersonal, nonauthoritative approach to writing tutoring. The example with one of the author's professors providing direct, blunt criticism to her masters thesis was used to illustrate the beneficial effects of the alternative type of approach--or as the authors would say, contrasting to "orthodox" tutoring practices. After reading this article, I am still unsure as to what to make of it so I guess I will wait until tomorrow's class discussion to weight the pros and cons. I can't tell if I agree or not about what they are saying, party because we have just spent a semester learning the ins and outs of the approach we use in our Writing Center.

ESL

After reading the 4 articles for this week on the topic of working with ESL students and writing an essay on of them for my article response paper, I'm still surprised on how overwhelming I find the subject to still be. I never realized how detailed, complex, and extensive the realm of working with ESL students to be. All four articles made it pretty clear that culture and background indeed plays a roll in the overall structure, composition, and patterns of writing. When writing my article response essay, I found myself to agree with most of what the author, Carol Severino, was saying but I was bothered on how much she attributed the existence of "contrastive rhetoric" to cultural differences. I mean aren't all writers writers? It was really the reading of the Moujtahid article that clarified how distinct differences in writing style exist by culture and I think that may perhaps change my original feelings on the Severino article. I think that because Moujtahid used three different culture to get the point across, it was easier to understand. The Moujahid article also left me to consider if our culture attributes too much of our own style as "the best"...What makes these other styles so "wrong"? Is it just because they're different? I wonder how accepting professors would be to the suggestion that international students adhere to their known style and inform the grader ahead of time about the style and that way they are simply graded by quality of their ideas? Afterall, in life, we always have proofreaders and spell-check but ideas and content is what takes skill, knowledge and practice to develop.

consultation shadowing: hard copy or no copy?

This evening I observed a Writing Center consultation in which a senior student came to the Writing Center to work on a 5-page paper for her a history class, more specifically wanting help with her sentence structure, phrasing, grammar, ect. She had e-mailed a copy of her paper to the writing consultant earlier but had since made changes. She also failed to bring a printed copy of her paper with her so they were forced to view it on a laptop computer. I can see where being a writing consultant can be rather frustrating when the student is less than prepared for the meeting because it does invest a great deal of time out of the session for the consultant to go back through and catch up with where the writer is. And from observing the given situation, I also think it can sort of make the session a bit awkward when the consultant is reading and reviewing for some amount of time while the student just sits there bored staring while they wait. A few weeks ago, I posted about how a student had come into the Writing Center to go over an outline that was on her computer and I mentioned that perhaps this is more useful than having a hard copy so that there is less of a distraction to hinder open conversation. However, after shadowing this specific instance where a student came to review a full-written paper without an actual copy of the paper, I have come to add to my opinion on the situation: I think that when it comes to brainstorming (or being in the very beginning stages of writing), it is more beneficial to not have a sheet of paper (such as an outline, ect.) to stare down at and force rigid structure which can inhibit the flow of new ideas. Thus, being able to have more open discussion to the get ideas flowing (writing or listing as you go so that they can be remembered later when it comes time to put the pieces of the puzzle together).

The writing consultant immediately handled the situation with her strategy of using the document-editing feature on Microsoft word.

Tina article & the topic of Literacy

Christie S. Johnsons article, "Tina: A Portrait of Literature Awareness" shares the authors account of working with a low-income, at-risk student though a program with the Community Literacy Center of Pittsburgh. Furthermore, the experience causes the author to question and explore the broad concept of literacy. I found it interesting how the author shares that the young student, Tina, writes within "two literate communities: that of her inner city hight school English class and that of the literacy program in which she writes with support from peers and writing mentors" (pg 2). I think that this says a lot about how influential  a given situation can toward a resulting outcome. I think I have mentioned this before in another blog post, but I think it's important that we better understand the power of context and recognize its existence because I think as individuals, we often tend to overgeneralize and form false attributions, simply because of our own unawareness.

In regard to this whole topic of literacy and what exactly it is, Johnson provides some applications of literacy such as "literacy as the ability to recite familiar texts", "literacy as performance", and "literacy as function". Of the explanations Johnson provides, I think they are more applications of or reasons for literacy, rather then definitions of literacy. That said, before the author even got into these various descriptions, I formed my opinion that literacy is indeed the bland definition of having "the ability read and write" but I also think the definition of literacy should also emphasize how literacy is the most basic form of communication beyond body language. Thinking back to young children--babies cannot talk but they scream, kick, grab, cry, ect. to communicate their needs but we spend YEARS of our lives in school in order to progress our communication skills and learn the best ways to read and write. Here at Richmond, we even have entire departments dedicated to "literacy" (or major aspects of literacy) such as Communications and Rhetoric, English, and Leadership Studies to name a new.

When Johnson expands on one her specific experiences working with Tina, she stresses how she really wanted to get Tina to make reflections and channel those reflections to find her own self-image as both a student and individual. She mentions how Tina shared a lot about her school and family, which made me think about my experience at the Boys and Girls Club on Monday. My partner and I could really tell that the student we were working with loved telling us all about her life. Johnson states in her article that "reflections are valuable because they give writers a change to explain themselves" (pg 9). I think that is a tactic Julia and I can really utilize when we actually start getting to work on helping the student produce her digital story because she loves to talk and share. Since content is also a crucial element to a digital story and she is only a 6th grade student, I think the use reflection as an approach will help to inspire her ideas and what she really wants to say about her "pearl of wisdom".

Post-Boys and Girls Club experience

When we first arrived to the Boys and Girls Club we headed into the "Teen Room" to first meet the kids we were going to be working with. When the students were asked about the project, a particular young girl seated in the front was clearly most vocal about what the project what about and what it was for. Little did I know at the time that Julia and I would be assinged to work with this particular student. It was nice being paired up to work with Julia because sometimes working with others can be a little awkward but since Julia and I know each other it was rather easy to bounce conversation off each other when we got to talking with the student. As I mentioned earlier, the student was definitely vocal and had a lot of knowledge about the assignment, but that said, she had yet to complete her interview. She informed us that she was suppose to interview a man who did not show up and she was waiting to be assigned another person. When we asked her if she knew anyone in her family she could interview, the conversation shifted pretty quickly into Julia and I learning some vivid and detailed descriptions about her school and her family (which includes a sister whom she has never met in California and a brother who is currently in New York City working to become a famous rapper with the guidance of his agent, Lady DoubleX). It was nice to get her talking (and talking openly) so she could feel comfortable with us, especially since we did not have much to really work with in regard to the project. We talked about some possible interview questions and showed her Ryan's digital story using the Netbook. It was hard to hear the narrative and music of the example we showed her and I honestly don't think she was very interested in watching it. That said, I'd also like to note that I really observed that she came across as a very assertive young women who seemed to have much more self confidence than the average 12-year old so I'm optimistic that working with her the next time will be non-problematic. 

Pre-Boys and Girls Club

This afternoon we are to head over to the Boys and Girls Club and help the students with their digital story projects. Some have done their interviews already--some have not. I am not really sure what to expect since I have never worked with a Boys and Girls club and although we have recently produced a digital stories, I know that the nature of these student's stories is much different than then natures of ours  (the writing process of a professor).

After producing a digital and some extensive class discussion on the new role of digital stories, I think what really makes a story is the presence of a "cohesive message". (If I remember correctly, Julia is the one who coined this term in class so I don't want to take credit for it.) Also, after viewing all of the digital stories in class, I think another important aspect to what makes a story is having a true connection with the audience. The most memorable stories are the ones that catch our attention. I mean think about the stories we remember from childhood books and movies--years and years have passed since we've read those books and seen those movies, yet we can vividly remember the stories they told because we connected deeply with them for some reason. That ties into the question of what makes it interesting? Again, I think a story becomes interesting when the audience is really appealed to that "cohesive message" and some emotion is evoked. (I know for some reason I reference psychology a lot in my blog haha, but there is a psychology concept called mood-congruent memory which basically is the tendency for people to better remember something that has happened when stronger emotions were present at the time it occurred). But that said, I think the digital story needs to also implement the technological features such as music, transition effects, photographs, ect. that contribute to making a strong final product.

So this afternoon, after meeting the student I am going to be working with, I think I'll start by just trying to get the student to talk about what they want to say in their story and maybe even why they chose the person they did. I bet a lot of the students chose someone close to them but haven't thought as to why that person was the one to focus on so maybe that can help generate ideas for an interview if they have yet to conduct their interview. From personal experience, I chose to take a central message and turn it into a digital story but after watching all of the other digital stories in class, I definitely think either strategy can produce a great digital story. As far as how to go about conveying the personality of the person interviewed, how to take lots of information and shape it into a story, and how to chose what central message to take across, and all that stuff--in my opinion, I really think it all just comes down to the actual process. I think as we get working, new ideas come about naturally. I am the kind of person who can make a plan and follow it but when making my digital story, I realized that doing that was actually hurting me. I think when working with the student this afternoon and allowing them an open opportunity to just brain storm will be most beneficial in the end for this type of project.