...FROM THE EDITOR...

Articles in this issue consider important but differing challenges in writing center tutoring, from working with learning disabled students to handling crisis tutorials. Yet, while all examine what we do, they also consider in thoughtful ways what we do not do.

As Jan Thompson shows us, we do not always need to respond to questions with answers. Instead, responding with our own questions can promote reflection. The reviewers of Weaving Knowledge Together remind us that there is no generalizable model of collaboration and that good books, such as this one, do not have to offer readers products or conclusions. Illustrating processes can be equally illuminating.

Our tutors’ columns focus in useful ways on how not to do the writer’s work for her; Pam Fox Kuhlken gives us a vivid example of why we ought not to do a student’s imagining; and Michael A. Pemberton challenges us to think about when not to act on information we hear from students.

But what we will be doing soon, as the winter thaws into spring (we hope), is begin meeting each other at regional and national conferences.

• Muriel Harris, editor

...INSIDE...

Beyond Fixing Today’s Paper: Promoting Metacognition and Writing Development in the Tutorial Through Self-Questioning

• Jan C. Thompson 1

Reviews of Weaving Knowledge Together, Eds.

C. Haviland,M. Notarangelo, L. Whitley-Putz, and T. Wolf

• Gerry Fisher and Gail Tubbs 7

• Jacob Blumner 8

• Sallyanne Fitzgerald 9

Telling Tales on a Desert Isle in the Writing Lab

• Pam Fox Kuhlken 13

Beyond fixing today’s paper: Promoting metacognition and writing development in the tutorial through self-questioning

At Landmark College, where I teach composition, literature, and tutorials, my colleagues and I have ongoing discussions about how to help our students become more self-sufficient writers, discussions that no doubt take place at colleges and universities across the country. But at Landmark, the only post-secondary institution solely for students with dyslexia, specific learning disabilities, or attention deficit disorder, we have a unique and challenging mission. My experience has been working one-to-one or in small groups with writers who struggle (and succeed) on a variety of levels.* Some may have language deficits or dyslexia; others have written output problems that may involve attentional or executive functioning difficulties. As part of ongoing training, professional development, and outreach, faculty at Landmark frequently share strategies with each other and with educators outside the college who work with LD students. Moreover, we believe that what works well for students with learning differences can also work well for other writers who lack the preparation or confidence to succeed on their own in college. In speaking with my colleagues about some of their favorite instructional techniques for writing tutorials, I found that a number of us use various questioning strategies, which we like because they seem to help students become more active learners and more independent writers.

I think most of us would agree that it would be hard to imagine a tutorial

The Writing Lab Newsletter, published in ten monthly issues from September to June by the Department of English, Purdue University, is a publication of the National Writing Centers Association, an NCTE Assembly, and is a member of the NCTE Information Exchange Agreement. ISSN 1040-3779. All Rights and Title reserved unless permission is granted by Purdue University. Material will not be reproduced in any form without express written permission.

Editor: Muriel Harris; Asst. to the Editor: Mary Jo Turley, English Dept., Purdue University, 1356 Heavilon, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1356 (765)494-7268. e-mail: harrism@cc.purdue.edu

mjturley@purdue.edu

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Studies show that effective writers are capable of strategizing in order to complete writing tasks; on the other hand, less effective writers may tend to take a less purposeful approach because they have not devised or learned sufficient rhetorical or writing process strategies. Individuals with learning difficulties often do not strategize without receiving direct, explicit instruction. In order to become more independent in using writing strategies purposefully, weaker writers need to practice them, understand their purposes and possible applications to other writing situations, and be able to self-monitor. In general, students without learning difficulties will have greater—or more immediate—success in becoming independent in these areas than students who have specific learning difficulties, who struggle to automatize skills and strategies. Nevertheless, we have seen students at Landmark make substantial gains.

When a student writer brings a writing assignment to the tutorial, the tutor can respond by asking questions that maximize the student’s level of control over his own work. As many people in the fields of composition and tutoring have pointed out, we want to ask open-ended questions, or at least start with these and, as my colleague Christina Arieta said, “lead the student to discover the meaning or the solution.” Of course, sometimes we have to narrow our questions or give direct suggestions, but we try first to inquire into the student’s thinking. I find that when time is running out in the tutorial and a student’s paper is due the next day, I become more directive. For example, in one tutorial session I had been giving cues such as “What is the relationship between the ideas in these two paragraphs?” which stimulated much deeper participation by the student than my cue toward the end of the session when time was running out and I directed, “You need a transition here.” Time and other factors enter in, and I am not trying to suggest that tutors should utter no declarative statements. But I have found it instructive to remind myself to focus on questioning that will serve the student beyond today’s paper. Maybe we won’t cover as much of the student’s paper today, but maybe that is okay.

We can also promote active learning by responding to students’ questions with questions. For example, when a student who was working on an analysis of Hamlet asked me if she should omit commentary on a particular type of imagery in her paper, I responded, “What would be an argument for leaving it out?” Then she reasoned through and verbalized why the material was tangential before deciding to leave it out. My hope was that this process of reflection would make a more lasting impression than if I had simply responded to her query by saying, “Yes, you should omit that material.”

Some of the tutors I surveyed mentioned Socratic questioning as a technique they employ to foster metacognition and independence in student writers. The Socratic method can be defined as a process of posing probing questions aimed at helping students find a meaning they wish to express or the language with which to express it. Each answer to a question provides the starting point for another question, which leads to another answer, and so on. We can introduce Socratic questioning explicitly as a strategy, that is, let students know what we are up to. Some tutors at Landmark College have even made a point to discuss Socrates and the Socratic method, helping the students make connections with their history, education, or English classes. One of my colleagues, Ricia Gordon, has made the art of Socratic questioning the foundation for her Exposition and Analysis writing class as well as her tutorials, and has inspired me and others to incorporate more persistent, logical questioning in our tutorials and classes. Ricia says that such questioning “becomes a chain that takes students deeper and deeper into the text or issue at hand.” With students who have difficulty verbalizing, focusing, or organizing their ideas, Socratic questioning breaks the thought process and the task into smaller questions that require smaller answers. For example, a student read me a definition of “cognition” that he had found as a starting point for his research paper on dolphin cognition: Cognition is “The act or process of knowing, including both awareness and judgment.” In response, I asked, “What does being aware mean?” The student replied, “Being able to react to your surroundings and how they affect you . . . and your internal self—being able to perceive and think.” I then responded, “What does it mean to think?” He answered, “We use thinking to solve problems. [It is] not instinct or natural reflex.” At the end of this tutorial session, after discussing a scholarly article on dolphins’ ability to learn an artificial language, the student posed the question, “How does the way it [the dolphin] thinks relate to its surroundings?” Ideas resulting from such a dialogue can be recorded in writing by the student or the tutor to build a collection of notes that the student can incorporate in his written composition.

Several other tutors say that they sometimes ask students to arrange their questions to form an outline for their papers, a question for each section or paragraph. While they are drafting or after they have completed a draft, they can refer to their questions and self-monitor: “Have I answered this question in this section? Does my essay answer the central question I have posed?” This approach can help students with a variety of writing problems, including difficulty developing and linking their ideas, labored or minimal written output, focusing difficulties, or organizational weaknesses. Furthermore, for those with overload or time management problems, such questioning can be a way of breaking an assignment into manageable steps: a student can plan to answer one or several of her questions each day until the draft is completed.

When cued to pose their own questions for writing, some students do not automatically ask provocative questions, and thus, may need additional cues. In my tutorials, I have observed marked differences between students in their ability to develop questions for writing. Learning heuristic questioning techniques can make a difference for students who need assistance in forming questions and who have difficulty generating and elaborating in their writing. One common approach to teaching questioning is to introduce the journalist’s five W’s and an H: who, what, where, when, why, and how, a strategy that appears in countless composition textbooks. This approach has brought results for several students with whom I have worked who could create cursory but fairly logical outlines for essays but then had difficulty filling in the discussion and detail. With one student I have tutored for two years, I have continually come back to this strategy, cueing him to ask himself these questions. His performance in his biology, film studies, and humanities classes improved as he expanded his writing, usually in response to my cueing him to ask himself these questions. The five W’s and one H strategy was reinforced in the student’s journalism and humanities classes, which both naturally emphasized people, dates, and events, and required causal analysis. Gradually, the student has begun to do more active self-cueing using these questions while pre-writing, drafting, and revising.

The five Ws and one H are just a start, of course. Students may need ongoing assistance in order to be able to pose provocative questions that will shape strong essays. We can let them know that questioning is a skill we are working on; that is, we are exploring the question: How can I formulate a question that will lead me somewhere worthwhile in my writing? Recently I asked the student with whom I have used the five W’s to generate ten questions from which he could then choose several of the best questions to frame his research paper. The next day he came in with a few fragmented statements rather than questions, though the heading at the top of his page said “Questions.” I pointed out the discrepancy, asking him again to pose questions, and he began doing so. Then we did some trouble-shooting of these questions: I asked him to attempt an answer for each one. In doing so, he discovered that some of his questions led to dead-ends. For example, the student wrote, “Does the brain structure of dolphins affect their cognition?” I cued him to answer, and he said the answer was “yes.” I cued him, “How can you rephrase the question to lead to a more in-depth answer?” In response, he simply added the magic word “how” ; thus, the question became “How does the brain structure of dolphins affect their cognition?” He was able to tell me how this question would lead to a more interesting discussion in his paper. Later, when the student was trying to formulate a question about memory in dolphins, he noted, without my cueing, that a question would be of little value for his paper if he could respond to it with just a short answer before even doing the research. The point here is that the student has begun to understand what constitutes a good question and how he can use questions to plan and organize his research, thinking, and writing on a topic.

Recently Karen Malley, a colleague at Landmark, demonstrated a highly visual and interactive method of promoting students’ use of questioning as a tool for revising sentences. Karen has used her laptop computer during tutorial sessions to engage in dialogues with the students about sentences that they have been composing. In one exercise, Karen had a student compose a sentence containing one of her vocabulary words, and then Karen responded by typing a question that was “intended to help her refine that sentence.” Karen explained the following to me:

I’d type the question, she’d revise, I’d type another question, and so on. When she had arrived at a pretty well-refined statement, we switched roles: I wrote a sentence, and she posed [and typed] the questions while I revised. And then we looked at the whole thing and recorded observations about the kinds of questions that were being asked, what their purpose was, and how they shaped the sentence. My hope is that eventually we’ll be able to observe a pattern and she’ll be able to recreate this pattern on her own.

In Karen’s approach, the tutor models for the student, encourages the student to pose questions, and captures the Socratic dialogue on the computer’s screen and memory so that the questioning strategy and its results can be examined and evaluated by both tutor and student.

As a metacognitive follow-up to our introduction of questioning strategies, we can engage in discussions with students in tutorials which lead them to reflect on the value of questioning and how they can implement self-questioning as a strategy. These dialogues can also help us as tutors reflect on our practices and learn to what extent a student is understanding or internalizing strategies. Sometimes students let tutors know that they are consciously engaging in self-cueing. Last year I worked with a talented student who had attentional problems and perfectionism which interfered with her completion of writing assignments. In a tutorial one day she told me, without being asked, what her next step would be in writing her paper on Hamlet; she prefaced this by saying, “I’m telling you because you always ask me what my next step is going to be.”

A self-cue is not necessarily going to be a question, but perhaps the initial impulse toward self-cueing for some student writers is inspired by the tutor’s questioning. Often it is hard to know whether a student actually asks himself questions while engaging in writing tasks. Nevertheless, we can still ask students to contemplate their thought processes and to report on them. Several months ago, I asked a student (the same one who was writing about cognition in dolphins) if he had found the questioning strategies I had introduced and periodically cued him to use to be helpful and if he knew whether he had internalized these. That is, when working on his writing assignments outside of tutorial, did he, in fact, ask himself questions? He responded that he did, in a sense, though not necessarily in the form of direct questions, more by thinking of the answers to those questions. During our discussion, without my cueing, he recalled papers he had written for various courses and recounted to me some of the key questions these papers answered. Such discussion can be especially helpful at the end of an exercise or tutorial session in which questioning or other self-cueing strategies have been used. It is also a good way to review at the end of a semester or school year.

ADD . . . provides me with the per

ception that everything is related

and no matter how thinly related,

information that should be covered.

I fight this problem mostly with will

power, [asking] What is the purpose

of the paper[?] . . . . I revise and re

vise, revise and revise . . . . In doing

this I keep checking with myself, Is

this what I want to say? What do I

Self-cueing systems can take many forms, depending on students’ academic and skill needs, and their learning styles. Students may want to make an index card that reminds them to try asking “Who, what, where, when, why, and how?” They might find useful a list of rhetorical patterns, or a copy of Berke’s list of Twenty Questions for the Writer. My colleague Ricia Gordon created a handout that takes students through a process of generating and refining questions for writing essays. Some tutors help their tutees create written protocols for composing and revising. One colleague, Sara Glennon, typed up a personalized guide for a student that she titled “Writing Strategies That Have Worked for You.” Another colleague, Lesle Lewis, worked with a tutee to create what they called “Andrea’s Customized Process for Paper Writing.” Such lists may contain questions (“What is unnecessary? What needs to be added? What’s out of order?”) or reminders (“Generate the questions your paper will answer”). Or they may be entirely in the form of imperative statements (“Freewrite on each chunk of the outline”). At Landmark students are often encouraged by their English teachers to develop with their tutors a revision and proofreading checklist. Some students put the checklist in the form of a series of questions for themselves (Is there a clear thesis statement? Does the body of my paper . . . back up my thesis? etc.); others simply make a list of what they need to look for (one main idea per paragraph, paragraph transitions, etc.). Tutors can help students organize the items on the list in a hierarchy that moves from overall essay content and structure to paragraph, sentence, and word issues.

Jan C. Thompson Landmark College Putney, VT

*At Landmark, part of each student’s program is an individualized skills tutorial that meets several times a week and is taught by a faculty member. Last year the college opened the Center for Teaching and Learning, which offers writing, reading, study skills, and content-area support for students who seek assistance with assignments. In addition, the Center, headed by Sara Glennon, is becoming a clearinghouse for pedagogical resources and workshops for faculty and students.

After working happily together for thirteen years, building our writing center, team-teaching courses, and cowriting articles, we looked forward to reviewing Weaving Knowledge Together, believing it would celebrate the virtues and pleasures of collaboration. In many ways the book did affirm our assumptions. But its benign title, which sounds so domestic and sociable, is deceptive, giving no hint of the provocative material inside. If not quite the stuff to make you start awake at 3:00

a.m. to question the meaning of your life, it does confront you with some soul-searching questions about practice, self-definition, even the possibility of collaboration itself. And just when you think, “oh, this isn’t about me, my writing center, my experience,” you find that it is.

Unsettling though it may be, this book deserves to be read. We’re glad to have read it, continue to reread it, and recommend it without reserve. Struggling with how to review nine disparate chapters, representing multiple voices and settings, we decided to examine the text in terms of its goals as stated in the conclusion. Briefly summarized, they are to produce a “generalizable model” for sites of collaboration; to highlight the value of dissensus in the collaborative act; to provide information about writing collaboratively; and to encourage the inclusion of students as genuine partners in constructing knowledge (232233). Though at times its tone is poignant, the book’s success in meeting the last three goals is readily apparent.

We discern a still darker cautionary tale in “The Butterfly Effect,” in which the authors explore the ways that lack of communication can sink a project, in this case coordinating a campus-wide portfolio assessment plan with the writing center. Initial optimism gives way to despair “not only that an exciting and innovative program would self-destruct but that friendships and good professional relationships would be destroyed as well” (73). Though the article repeatedly urges us to keep the channels of communication open (another piece of the model), that advice offers little assurance that the human tendency to resist change can be overcome, especially in an atmosphere of wariness and misunderstanding.

It takes time and repeated interaction to establish mutual trust, ingredients in short supply in writing centers, where people come and go, negotiating their multiple and diverse roles. Though we may chafe at tutoring’s being “characterized . . . as a low status activity that lends itself to alienation” (148), sooner or later, as chapter six pointedly reminds us, we writing center “folk” must confront the discrepancy between our perception of ourselves—as valuable alternative resources, utopian, idealistic, non-hierarchical, less authoritarian than other forms of education, more nurturing of the student’s ego and ability—and the institutional view of the center as supplementary to real teaching and “secondary to the central mission of the school” (141). Considering the myriad interactions among students, tutors, faculty, and administrators, all pursuing their own agendas and acting out their own convictions, no wonder we must “create and recreate ourselves” (126). And no wonder the “generalizable model” appears fluid and “damnably difficult” (231) to apply.

In the latest writing center book, Weaving Knowledge Together: Writing Centers and Collaboration, I felt like a fly on the wall listening to writing center directors, tutors, students, and faculty share experiences and debate. I read e-mail and letters and watched groups compose together and apart. And all the authors welcomed me to participate, collaborate if you will, as a reader.

The narratives woven in this book inform and entertain, with implications reaching beyond writing centers. Acting as a window into a clock, the authors show the inner workings of how they wrote their chapter. Each essay begins with a post-modern prologue, ranging from a short paragraph to most of a page, describing how the chapter was written. And, as the editors note in their introduction, each group collaborated differently, but they all “challenge overarching notions of collaboration and writing center theory.” The prologue does not block the inner workings of the clock; we get to see how things work throughout many of the pieces. Some chapters, such as “Erika and the Fish Lamps,” tick seamlessly like most traditional academic literature in our field with one voice, while others attempt to transparently show the collaborative process. Stuart Blythe and Muriel Harris with Suzanne Pollert and Amy Stellmach transcribed email messages they sent to each other, allowing the reader to see the discussion taking place. In fact, they include how the collaboration worked and failed within the piece. Readers may feel like academic voyeurs peering at the messy process of developing sound writing center pedagogy that serves students across a large campus and outside the traditional, physical academic walls. Their digitized discussion reflects how faculty collaborate in most fields, and I appreciate the conversational approach because it fits closely with their content, a discussion of developing an Online Writing Lab. Form follows function.

Looking specifically at some of the issues raised in Chapter 5, Thomas Michael Conroy and Neal D. Lerner with Pamela J Siska, present two distinct sections to examine expert knowledge and “whether the idea of tutor as professional can ever be obtained.” Lerner begins by arguing whether tutors should be generalists or experts, and Conroy builds upon that by applying Talcott Parsons’s definition of a profession to tutoring, thus complicating the issue. The conclusion’s title, “Authority, Anti-Authority, and Tutorial Utopianism,” points to the tension inherent in the issue, but their final words might be their most powerful: “we recognize that our students have insights worth stating and worth sharing.”

Paralleling the chapter on professionalism, Joan Mullin, Neil Reid, Doug Enders, and Jason Baldridge, authors of “Constructing Each Other,” generated my favorite format while uniquely presenting a quandary experienced in many WAC-based writing centers. Using italics, boxed text, and theatre-style dialogue, the authors present the complex nature of communicating collaboratively, in regard to both style and content. Because of the chapter’s unconventional appearance, the authors use a footnote to explain whose voice is represented and how, and the appearance serves as a constant reminder that the authors and the reader work within Pratt’s contact zone.

As a WAC director intimately involved in the workings of our Writing Center, I hear faculty talk about our Center and student writing. Weaving Knowledge Together: Writing Centers and Collaboration raises questions for me to consider when working with faculty and shares experiences I find interesting and sometimes similar to my own. But it offers something more to those involved with writing, no matter what the discipline. It shows the process of collaboration between faculty, administrators, tutors, and students. And, as the editors note, the work here represents how “messy” and “chaotic” collaboration can be, and “This chaos is at once alarming and reassuring– alarming because it is difficult to bundle into a book, but reassuring because it is consonant with writing center theory and practice.” When teaching composition, I tell my students that the process is as important as the product, and this book bears that out. It breaks new ground as an innovative model for academic writing and inclusion of traditionally underrepresented parties—tutors and students.

When Mickey Harris asked for volunteers to do a book review of the newest NWCA publication, Weaving Knowledge Together: Writing Centers and Collaboration, I offered to do one since I have been involved in writing centers since 1982, have administered two writing centers—one at a university and another at a community college—and have written about collaboration. I was excited about the topic and proud of the National Writing Centers Association’s efforts to publish important works about what we do. The book was both more than I expected and somewhat less as well.

Each chapter has both a report or analysis of a particular writing center and some aspect of its collaborative efforts and an explanation of the chapter’s authors’ attempts to write collaboratively. The authors’ honesty was encouraging even though I was disappointed that their collaborations generally were not so successful as they or the editors would have wished. For example, many student collaborators either did not continue until the final draft was submitted, or in some cases, only collaborated by editing drafts. This means that student voices are rarely included in the text even though this was one of the aims of the editors. An exception is the chapter about a high school writing center. On the other hand, teachers, whether as faculty or administrators, speak in every chapter.

Many of the faculty involved in the creation of this book mention the value writing collaboratively and working together on this and other projects had for their personal relationships. In one case, it enabled two faculty members to continue being friends in the midst of a very confrontational situation, and in other relationships, the attempt to explain working together was helpful in analyzing what they were doing and why in their center.

That the authors seem to have been primarily faculty raises another issue for me. The editors and the authors seem to assume that administrators are speaking in the chapters. Yet, they rarely speak in the role of administrators. Instead, references to administrators are usually negative, reflecting a sense that administrators either interfere with or manipulate writing center staffs. Those who list themselves as writing center directors do not speak in their administrative role, but address their issues as faculty members. While I have no problem with this approach, it does mean that the voice of administrators is not heard. I wanted to hear how administrators collaborate in their role as administrators. The issue of power is so important in this area, and while many of the authors do deal with power issues, they rarely do this in their administrative roles. Two exceptions are the comments in chapter two by Pam Childers and those by Lisa Johnson-Shull and Susan Wyche in chapter three. More typical of the other authors, however, were comments about administrators such as that in chapter six, “The bureaucracy seemed more a burden than a tool for the benefit of tutors and students; it also reflected a top-down style of management that was characteristic of our director” (145).

One other final caveat—the editors mention community colleges in their conclusion, but no where else in this text are community colleges mentioned or included. What is here is very valuable to all levels, however, and can certainly be applied to any level of education.

When I think of tutoring sessions in terms of the balance between the student-writer and the tutor at every stage of the tutoring session, I imagine a pyramid divided into three levels— listening, interacting, and guiding— that build on one another.

The base of my pyramid is listening because it is necessary to develop a good line of communication as the foundation for a productive tutoring session. The

Tutorial balance

For instance, I tutored a woman named Julie who constantly said “uh-huh” to me while I was explaining that connections within a paper needed to be specific. I kept on asking her if she understood, and she said she did. To my dismay, however, she did not understand what I was saying, but, in her mind, she was preventing herself from looking dumb. To get around this ploy, I should have asked her to tell me in her words what I had just explained.

tutor has to understand the concerns the _{tutor’s immediate judgments exclusively,} student-writer has, and the student-writer _{is not fully balanced because the student-}

^{needs to understand what the tutor is} writer is left out of the process. This robs suggesting; the only way to assure that _{student writers of their authority over}

this is accomplished is through listening _{their own work, and the writer may, then,}

^{to one another. The tutor has more re-}not be willing to work with the tutor. sponsibility to listen to the student-writer

The student-writer and tu-the support she wants. The opening

tor, together, set the agenda minutes of a session should estab

for a session by looking at lish a two-way conversation between

Listening is more than hearing the words the student-writer says; listening can take a variety of forms: paraphrasing, perception guessing (assuming what the student-writer is thinking), leading with questions (directly and indirectly), and interpreting what students say. These techniques are discussed by Muriel Harris in her book Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference (Urbana: NCTE, 1986) as methods that come from occupations where listening is pertinent to the success of the job; that is why these occupational fields have developed effective ways to listen. If tutors borrow these techniques, they can improve the quality of their tutoring sessions.

Balanced listening also works to shift the balance of the interaction from a tutor and student-writer to two writers discussing the needs of the text, the reader, and the subject. This validates the studifferent from basic listen

Even with an awareness of the need to set an appropriate pace, things can still go wrong. A student may be stressed or tired, or unhappy about not correcting everything. We may not have addressed all the points on his or her agenda. If I sense the student is not satisfied, I encourage the person to keep moving forward and come to the writing center frequently. Writing clearly, like any skill, re

“I realized I hadn’t set a realistic goal from the beginning.”

Telling tales on a desert isle in the writing lab

The paper was for my husband’s honor’s composition class. That weekend, I caught him grading papers. I interrupted because he was smirking and I needed a laugh. “What’s more engaging that talking with me on a balmy afternoon?”

“Profiles. This last one ended really well—vivid and unexpected, especially compared to the first draft that’s attached.”

I borrow the term “crisis tutorials”—at least in spirit—from the Educational Testing Service (ETS) which trains its readers to recognize the “crisis papers” that are sometimes written in response to standardized tests like the Advanced Placement Exam or the Test of Written English. Crisis papers, according to ETS, are those that describe plans to commit suicide, threaten violence, or discuss crimes such as spousal and/or parental abuse. These papers are immediately pulled and referred to ETS administrators for special handling, which typically means contacting the school system from which the student writer comes. The ethical line drawn in these cases is quite clear. When students reveal profound psychological or emotional problems, or when they discuss matters that have significant legal consequences, then the need to confront the matter directly is judged to be more important than the author’s right to privacy, and steps are taken to intervene directly in the student writer’s life.

Crisis tutorials are similar to crisis papers, though their scope and purview extend beyond the confines of the written text that students bring to conferences. They also include all of the conversation and discourse that emerges as a part of the tutorial session, whether that conversation is related to the topic of the student paper or not. Students often reveal some intensely personal—and occasionally disturbing—information in their papers and tutorial discussions, and most of the time these revelations present no ethical dilemmas for tutors. Private matters are kept pri-

vate, and confidentiality need not be violated. Still, on a few rare occasions, students may talk about things that raise bright red flags on tutors’ built-in warning systems. They may talk about complicity in crimes—most often minor, ranging from petty theft to vandalism—or they may talk about crimes that have been perpetrated against them. They may also talk about depression so severe and anxieties so intense that tutors will wonder if they plan to do themselves harm. Under such circumstances, the tacitly accepted sanctity of the tutorial conference and its attendant guarantees of privacy and confidentiality no longer seem quite so absolute.

What are the tutor’s responsibilities here? What should the tutor tell the student, and what should he/she tell to the writing center director (or the police)? Does it depend on the nature of the crime? Should a student who talks about pirating software from a local BBS be handled any differently than a student who talks about stealing tools from his workplace, for instance? Should a student who talks about being robbed three months ago (and not reporting it) be given any different advice than someone who talks about being raped three months ago (and not reporting it)? Federal, state, and institutional regulations may remove any illusion of choice in these matters. Just as public school teachers and physicians are required by law to report any suspicions of parental abuse to government authorities, writing center tutors may be required to divulge any knowledge they learn about certain kinds of crimes and/or behaviors. If a tutor senses, or is told directly, that a student is contemplating suicide and does not report it, then the institution may be legally liable if that student actually attempts to kill himself or herself. Features of the Institutional Context, then, may supersede other ethical considerations and mandate a particular response.

Calendar for Writing Center Associations

Feb. 3-6: Southeastern Writing Centers Association, in Little College, 270 Mohegan Avenue, Center Association, in Rock, AR New London, CT 06320. E-mail: Charleston, SC Contact: Sally Crisp, University tpamm@conncoll.edu. Contact: Tom Waldrep, Writing Center, Dept. of April 15-18: National Writing Centers Director, The Writing Center, Rhetoric and Writing, U. of Association, in Bloomington, IN The Medical University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 Contact: Ray Smith, Campus South Carolina, AA 113 S. University, Little Rock, AR Writing Program, Franklin 008, Harper Student Center, 45 72204; fax: 501-569-8279; e-Indiana University, Courtenay Street, Charleston, mail: sccrisp@ualr.edu Bloomington, IN 47405; phone: SC 29401. Fax: 843-792-March 20: Middle Atlantic Writing 812-855-4928; e-mail: 9179; e-mail: motenb@ Centers Association, in Dover, nwca99@indiana.edu; http:// musc.edu. DE www.indiana.edu/~nwca99.

Feb. 26: Northern California Writing Contact: Renee Young, English November 5-6: Pacific Coast Writing Centers Association, in Dept., Delaware State Univer-Centers Association, in San Redding, CA sity, N. DuPont Hwy. Dover, Bernardino, CA Contact: Maria Madruga, DE 19904. For further informa-Contact: Carol Peterson Writing Center Director, tion: http://www.english. Haviland, English Dept., Shasta College, P.O. Box udel.edu/wc/mawca (or) California State University, San 496006, Redding, CA 96049-ryoung@dsc.edu. Bernardino, 5500 Univ. Pkwy., 6009. Phone: 530-225-4689;April 10: Northeast Writing Centers San Bernardino, CA 92407; e-mail: mmadruga@ Association, in Lewiston, ME phone: 909- 880 5833; fax: shastacollege.edu. Contact: Theresa Ammirati, 909-880-7086; cph@csusb.edu

March 5-6: South Central Writing Dean of Freshmen, Connecticut

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