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eBook details
- Title: From Design to Delivery: The Graduate Writing Consultant Course (Part 2)
- Author : Writing Lab Newsletter
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 71 KB
Description
Recent posts to WCenter make clear a new area of writing center demand: as word of the effectiveness of one-to-one work with writing spreads, graduate students seem increasingly to seek our services. Graduate schools, graduate directors, and thesis and dissertation advisors, increasingly aware of the good work of writing centers, play a role in this increasing demand. Those writing centers that lack graduate writing centers or professional tutors trained to work with graduate-level writing are asking themselves how best to meet this need. We have seen convincing proof that it's very good for undergraduates to work as peer tutors. (See the Peer Tutor Alumni Research Project at http://www.mu.edu/writingcenter/PeerTutorAlumniPage.htm.) We have also seen that our writing centers are enriched by undergraduate tutors from disciplines other than English, writing-intensive English, and English education. So now with the help of a grant from the Council of Graduate School's Completion Project (http://www.phdcompletion.org/), Marquette University has begun a program of training doctoral students from various disciplines to work in their programs as Graduate Writing Consultants (GWCs). This article will trace the steps of selecting a curriculum for the professional preparation of our graduate writing consultants and present the perspectives of the first two GWCs, Lorelle Lamascus of the Department of Philosophy, and Paul Heidebrecht, of Theology, as they took the course. It will also develop an argument for the delivery of a course-length GWC preparation program specifically for these specialist consultants that differs from a course that prepares generalist tutors. An October article also printed here lays out the steps we took to begin this project, and invites others to begin such initiatives. We hope that this article will make it easier for others to find the right syllabus and curriculum for their programs, should they want to initiate a graduate writing consultant (GWC) program. Paula spent a semester planning and researching the course, supported by a grant of released time from the Graduate School. We then began our pilot year in the summer of 2006 with a three- credit course. Paula knew that she wanted to incorporate some of the elements from Marquette's undergraduate tutor training course, which had been offered since 1990. Paula also looked for models of courses for graduate tutors. Those she could find, though, were geared towards rhetoric and composition or English graduate students, educating and preparing consultants to be tutors and eventually perhaps to direct a writing center. The GWCs who would be trained at Marquette would not work in a writing center but would be employed within their departments. Paula found two programs that used interdisciplinary tutors within a writing center (and has since found a third), but they did not offer a course; rather, the preparation for tutoring took place on the job and through ongoing staff development. A graduate model for our course did not exist. Because Paula felt strongly that good tutoring is a process that is learned well through reflective practice, the course would last for roughly a month of meetings, reading, reflection, writing, observation of tutoring, and the preparation of materials GWCs would share with their peers and department faculty. Paul and Lorelle were paid by the Graduate School for this time, and all material was supplied for them at no cost.
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