Evan: Is there anything else you would like people to know about the WA program?
Logan: I mean, I think that we exist is a big one.
Dana: Yes.
Genevieve: Always important.
Evan: We’re going to record for...we’re calling it Write.Think.Teach., right?
Genevieve: I think that’s the right order.
Evan: Yeah, okay.
Genevieve: Hello and welcome. I’m Genevieve Ritchie-Ewing.
Nora: And I’m Nora McCook.
Genevieve: We are listening to an interview with undergraduate Writing Associates from the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing. And we’re going to get back to that interview in a minute.
Nora: In this interview, you’ll hear from three undergraduates who have been placed in writing- intensive courses from different disciplines during the 2016 and 2017 semesters. They share thoughts and reflections about working with writers and instructors in these diverse settings. And they talk about their experiences contributing writing expertise in the courses and with the instructors that they worked with. They also discuss their role as expert outsiders, a term writing center scholars Brad Hughes and Rebecca Nowacek use to describe how peer consultants can help writers navigate unfamiliar writing situations from their position as rhetorically observant non-experts.
Genevieve: We want listeners to know that Writing Associates are available to you as an instructor of a writing-intensive course at Ohio State. If you want to learn more about Writing Associates, visit cstw.osu.edu or contact Chris Manion at manion.12@osu.edu. Let’s hear the rest of our edited interview with the ‘Spies in the Classroom’, Ohio State University’s 2016-2017 Writing Associates.
Evan: Hi, you’re listening to Write.Think.Teach. I’m Evan Thomas.
Dana: I’m Dana Ferbrache-Darr.
Logan: And I’m Logan Householder.
Clara: I’m Clara Wruck.
Genevieve: And I’m Genevieve Ritchie-Ewing.
Evan: Awesome. So we’re here today to talk about the Writing Associates Program.
Genevieve: So Dana, Logan, and Clara are Writing Associates. So I just want to start with what is a Writing Associate?
Dana: There’s sort of a range of things that we do for instructors and within classes. And that can be anything from presenting a workshop on an aspect of writing to simply being there for student support during a group activity as well as meeting with students individually and in small groups. So we’re there to help an instructor implement whatever their writing goals are.
Evan: In what ways has being a Writing Associate changed the way you think about writing and learning in the classroom?
Clara: For me personally, I think it’s made me more conscientious of the things I do when I start to write a paper. So a lot of times when I help students who are maybe struggling to write a paper, I’ll help them write an outline or I’ll help them brainstorm. But I personally, prior to being a Writing Associate, I personally didn’t really do an outline or brainstorm on my own. And I think that’s, being able to practice what I preach has been cool because I can relate to like okay, well you’re struggling brainstorming, I have to, so let’s try something else. And another thing that I think I internalized as a Writing Associate is the idea that there’s not like one way to tell a specific story that or like to write an assignment.
Logan: I wholeheartedly agree with that. I think one of the biggest things that I took away from working with the Writing Associates is to kind of dispel this notion of like good versus bad writing. And I think that really what you recognize as a Writing Associate is that different assignments and different audiences and different purposes of assignments all correspond to different kinds of writing that on their surface may not look like what I’ve come to know as pretty writing, but they accomplish a purpose. You know, for example, in a public health class you might have an assignment to write an op-ed and the type of language you use and the way you construct that is very different than if you were given the assignment to, in the same public health class, write a scholarly research paper. And those are two assignments that could very well show up on the same syllabus, but are handled very differently. And to look at the writing in one and say this is good writing and look at the writing in the other and say this is bad writing, well you are missing something really crucial. And I think that’s something you really pick up as a Writing Associate.
Dana: I think one of the biggest things that I’ve found is how much it alters your perception of the dynamics in a classroom. When you’re the student and you’re sitting there, you kind of envision that everybody else is having the same experience. Whereas when you take one step back and you’re not the instructor at the same time so you’re much more objective, you can see more of where, okay this is making sense to people or that’s not really making sense. How can I help, you know, put this into the next, better context or better understanding for the individual?
Evan: Before we move on to the next question, I just want to say that all this reminds me of a concept that we talk about sometimes in Writing Across the Curriculum called ‘expert blindness’. That is if you are an expert in some field in a way you become blind to your own expertise. You become so used to thinking about really deep, compelling issues about a really narrow set of things that when you go to talk to an undergrad about those same issues, you sometimes forget to set up what are some of the baseline terms, what are some of the baseline concepts, what are some of the baseline values of your field. And it sounds like in all of your examples that’s what you help these experts build up again. You help remind them of all the levels of things that they’ve built up in their knowledge.
Logan: Oh, absolutely. And I think, too, that it doesn’t just go that one way between instructors and students, but also I’ve always considered a big part of my job being that expert outsider to students as well. One thing that I’ve done a lot of in my work as a Writing Associate is work with high-level capstone courses or you know students writing senior theses, stuff like that. And it’s the same kind of problems. When you get so invested in one particular topic. You know, one of classes I was in, they wrote about one thing for an entire semester. When you get so invested in that one topic, it’s very easy to forget that your reader isn’t an expert like you are. And so I think that yes, we definitely have a role mediating that expert blindness between instructors and students, but also we have a role in mediating the expert blindness between the students and the paper. You know, and I’ve always in those high-level courses pitched myself as someone that could be that expert outsider. Someone that you know if we were in a real job world, for example, and you were in a Public Policy class writing a policy recommendation, someone that is not an expert in school bus safety, which was one of the ones that I dealt with, but that owns the rubber stamp, you know. And so that’s something that I think is very important to our role, for sure.
Genevieve: Have any of you run into difficulties in your role as a Writing Associate?
Clara: Absolutely. So I had...was working with an like engineering class last semester as we talked about how the students don’t understand the audience that their final presentation is targeted towards. So, the main point of this engineering capstone class for this professor was to convey the design process and how that kind of intersects with engineering. And so they have a lot of like steps, like mechanically, of how to build this project, but he was trying to get them to incorporate like analysis and thought into why they make the choices that they do. And they didn’t understand that the audience would really appreciate that reasoning and that thought. They just felt that they should just explain what exactly they did so it was a struggle communicating the value of explaining yourself.
Genevieve: How might an instructor get a Writing Associate into their classroom?
Dana: From the practical standpoint, contacting Chris Manion is you know a good first step. We do send out informational emails to prospective departments and instructors who we think might benefit from our services from the standpoint of they’re teaching writing-intensive courses. But that’s not our personal judgement, hey you know we thought you might need our help. And in some cases I know that word-of-mouth between instructors has helped promote our program. So that’s always a good thing. And I think Logan hit it right on the head where depending on what kind of classroom you’re going into what you do becomes very different.
Genevieve: Okay.
Evan: Awesome. Thanks so much for being here.
Dana: Thank you for inviting us.
Clara: Thank you.
Logan: Thank you.
Nora: And thank you all for tuning in to Write.Think.Teach. We are a production of the Writing Across the Curriculum Program at the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing at the Ohio State University. If you want to learn more about the Writing Associates Program, contact Chris Manion or visit cstw.osu.edu.
Genevieve: While you’re there, be sure to check out Part 2 of our ‘Spies in the Classroom’ interview with another Writing Associate who has some suggestions for all instructors at OSU about incorporating digital media projects into undergraduate courses. So stay tuned.