Parmiter

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 12, No 1 (2014)

TRACTION AND TROUBLESOME LEARNING: A PRAXIS OF STUCK PLACES FOR COURSE-EMBEDDED TUTORING Tara K. Parmiter New York University tkp201@nyu.edu

William M. Morgan New York University bill.morgan@nyu.edu

While many composition theorists have tackled the question of how to encourage transfer beyond their introductory writing classes (see Perkins and Saloman; Wardle; Beaufort; Fallon, Lahar, and Susman; Blaauw-Hara), we also need to consider how embedded peer tutors develop their practices as they enter into disciplinary tutoring and, over time, gain traction while tutoring in different disciplines. Whereas in a first-year writing course we might gear our pedagogy to students’ development over a single semester but never fully know how they will transfer their learning into new disciplinary contexts, in an embedded tutoring program we mentor tutors who must transfer their learning and gain traction in new disciplines several different times during their semesters with us. Like Dara Rossman Regaignon, we define “traction” here as the process of engaging rigorously and in authentic ways, rather than passing smoothly over, the difficult analytic and rhetorical frameworks available in all disciplinary learning environments (121-22). We think that successful tutoring in an embedded tutoring program depends on such an engaged learning process. Not surprisingly, however, the experience of moving from class to class and gaining traction in the new one rarely happens smoothly for students or tutors. Instead, both frequently struggle as learning and practice become “troublesome,” and they get “stuck.” Building from the work of Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land on “troublesome knowledge” and Leslie Gourlay on “threshold practices,” we investigate how tutor development and student learning in an embedded tutoring program can be understood and cultivated in relation to the idea of liminality that shapes their paradigm for learning. In this context, we offer a rationale for and an analysis of “a praxis of stuck places” for tutor development and student learning in an embedded tutoring program (Lather qtd. in Meyer and Land 379).

When we work in the practicum that new tutors take upon joining our program, we aim—among other things—to help tutors become conscious of two contradictory aspects of university writing at once: the overarching shared features of academic writing and the specific requirements of disciplinary writing. That is, in some important ways, our praxis with new tutors confirms Bonnie D. Devet’s call to introduce writing center tutors to two theories—metagenres (Carter) and ecocomposition (Weisser and Dobrin)—that together enrich our understanding of university writing. Educating tutors about both metagenres and ecocomposition, Devet argues, can facilitate their movement across the disciplines and help tutors understand their own position as both rooted in particular fields and migrating between them. With metagenres, tutors learn to understand similarities between “ways of doing” in various disciplines. As Devet explains, “When directors use training [in metagenres] to point out overarching features inherent in writing for the academy, tutors and their . . . [students] both realize that disparate disciplines share ways of knowing; tutors can avoid panicking when students are writing a paper in a major that differs from their own field” (3). By contrast, ecocomposition draws tutors’ attention to how writing, as Sidney I. Dobrin puts it, “takes place” in specific environments (within a classroom, within a discipline, within a university) (11). In this paradigm, entering a discipline is conceived of as being akin to entering an ecosystem. A tutor, then, can help a “student [to] see that she is becoming an inhabitant of an ecosystem . . . ; she contributes to the system as the system molds her. When tutors give . . . [students] this important perspective, student writers feel less intimidated, more welcomed” (Devet 5). Both of these concepts can help writing center tutors eventually come to see themselves as intellectual “travelers,” learning to navigate from discipline to discipline and working to immerse themselves deeply into a new discourse community as soon as they arrive in it (see Drew 60). Devet’s call for dual awareness may not seem as applicable for course-embedded tutoring programs

Metagenres, Ecocomposition, and Stuck Places: Introducing Tutors to the Challenges of Writing and Learning in Disciplines