Ethical Dimensions of Tutoring

I'm so sorry this post is a couple hours late. There were technical difficulties (i.e. I'm horribly un-tech savvy and somehow never actually registered for our blog).

Wow. So, this week's readings are pretty intense. Interpreting our First Amendment rights as Americans and applying those not only to our government policies, but to our personal and professional lives is, without a doubt, a tremendous challenge. What are the limits of "freedom of speech"? Should there be limits? What about hate speech? Should people like Brother Jed be allowed to lecture and spread what many consider to be "inappropriate and offensive speech" on our college campus?

As Sherwood and Freed discuss, freedom of speech is incredibly relevant to tutoring in a writing center. When faced with confrontational, offensive, or possibly inappropriate writing, what is our job as tutors? Is it appropriate for us to "question a student's beliefs and move from objectivity to subjectivity?" (Freed, 39). Would we, as Freed also writes, "be doing students a disservice by not voicing our own opinions, forcing them to scrutinize their work" (40)? As tutors, we have an obligation to help our tutees become better writers. When that obligation is challenged by a clash of personal beliefs, is it our responsibility to question the beliefs of the writers that come to us for help? What about speech that could be construed as offensive to the writer's audience? Is it our job to impose some form of censorship?

Freed concludes her piece with this: "We won't be able to change students' minds in one tutorial session, but we can open them." Do you find her statement appropriate?

I've asked a lot of questions and this is definitely an issue that merits in-depth thought and discussion. Feel free to answer as many or as few of them as possible. And please feel free to include any personal experiences relating to sessions you might have had that challenged your notions of "ethical tutoring".

Tutoring In Unfamiliar Subjects

Business and Technical writing are two mediums that the majority of WC tutors are unfamiliar with. However, they share some of the fundamental ideas with the "normal" style of writing we encounter-- writing for a specific audience, keeping an appropriate voice, etc. We can indeed provide guidance in our own "technical side of English" way. Even though we cannot be expected to know the subject the student is writing about, can we take the writing in context of what the student tells us, and from there help them write a more concise and clear paper? How?

Which (pick one or a few) of the six "Basic Skills," as mentioned in Fearing's article, do you think a tutor should focus on in a session, if the paper badly needs help in every department? Should we treat a technical/business session similarly to, say, an ENGL 101 analytical paper session-- is it different at all, besides the writing (Does the author's creativity factor into it? Should we be addressing grammar "last" in our process, or do the symbols have more significance in technical writing?)?

Aside from the process of our tutoring, what do you think makes technical writing so difficult? How do we keep those science students who hate their lab reports motivated?



P.S. Did anyone catch the clever title sections of the Stone article? Funny how creativity *can* factor into (somewhat, in this case) technical writing...

Learning Diversity

Collins writes, "I have used the phrase 'learning disability' to talk about Asperger's, but that is probably not entirely accurate. My impression of the way in which my son learns is not that he has a disability--but rather he sees the world in a different way." Collins' claim for a different way of seeing the world, rather than a disability, can be applied to any sort of learning difference. How does rethinking disability as a different way of seeing the world change the way you think about learning diversity? How will looking at difference in this way translate into the way you approach a tutoring session?