English 339 | Vangeli Hadjimichael

Hitt talks about how to make accessibility better in writing centers. A few methods proposed are working to make the design layout work for universal accessibility, in terms of physical disability, and also making it work in terms of mental disability. O'Leary talks about gender in the writing center. It focused on knowing which interactions worked where, and how gender can come into play when trying to tutor in the writing center. Nan focusses on how to tutor better with the English learners. Being direct, noticing body language, and other non verbal cues, and being transparent are all suggestions about how to improve tutoring with ELL students. I think it's fascinating to think about how different cultures use non verbal cues, like hand gestures, to communicate, and seeing that implemented in the writing center would be cool. Would it require extra training on the consultants' behalf to learn these new skills? Or is it something they just pick up over time working?

 BF talks about the different curriculums and how to help with them. it mentions lab reports, research papers, scientific papers, argument and position papers, literature papers, and more. Johnson et al was a study done to see how cross discipline writers tutored. This was done by using engineering majors and English majors and having the English majors tutor the engineering majors and compare that to English majors tutoring English majors. Bishops paper was about creativity, and different ways to foster it by engaging the writer and making them more interested in the work. I'm like the idea of tutoring cross discipline because I want to be able to broaden my horizons outside of the specific major and minor I'm working on. How do you guide conversations without imposing your ideas too much onto the writer?