Christine Neuman
Emilie DeFazio
Since March 13, 2020, the Sacramento State University Reading and Writing Center has lived in one Microsoft Outlook inbox. Every student-tutee interaction begins at our coordinator “front desk” email and whoever is logged in at that moment will schedule them for a remote tutoring appointment, either synchronous or asynchronous. So far, we’ve used Google Documents, Google Sheets, Google Video Player, OneDrive, Video Player, Zoom, and unfortunately, even Facetime to get our students the tutoring they need in the third semester of their virtual learning experience. What used to be a constructive and collaborative learning environment has now turned into a struggle between student, coordinator, and technology—a struggle with what seems, in our most frustrated moments, to have no end.
The problems we, as graduate associate coordinators, experience are showing the faults in our system, and they’re showing them fast. This online experience will, eventually, improve our writing center in numerous ways in terms of accessibility and outreach. But since these changes were imposed upon us, not only were we unprepared, but our priorities were put to the test. When we are distracted by technology, we forget about the individual student, sitting at their laptop on an unstable wifi network waiting for an email scheduling their appointment with the first peer they will have seen in over a year.
Virtual appointments don’t allow the tutoring session to remain a discussion-based engagement between tutor and writer. A 2020 study of online feedback tools showed not only that limited in-person interaction lead to irregular communication, but that the “rapport between student and tutor makes it more likely for student writers to ask clarifying questions on the feedback provided to them—again, a difficult feat if students and tutors are exchanging information in a linear, asynchronous fashion” (Wetzl and Leiske). The training our tutors get in face-to-face instruction is no longer in practice. This can cause students to need more help, because the tutor doesn’t meet the student and won’t know if the student is a multilingual learner or if they have learning disabilities just by looking at their draft. This can also cause the tutor or tutee to misinterpret each other without this engagement. Lisa Bell puts it this way: “Whether in-person or online, tutors do not dispense knowledge on writers in static moments and spaces. Instead tutors and learners use strategies to increase the effectiveness of their interactions and co-constructed learning.” With this at the back of our minds, we recognize moments when we’ve lost something that could have grounded us in “these uncertain times” as educators.
Our Writing Center’s faculty coordinator created an asynchronous guide for email-to-email feedback. This has helped students learn higher order concerns but still feels like a form of editing student’s work. As the tutor fills out the form, they make sure the student knows the “strengths” and “weaknesses” of their paper. Citing Gotti et al.’s definitions of content growth, Wetzl and Leiske found that their peer tutors’ comments “focused on mechanics, with only a smattering of comments focused on content and argument development.” The same thing happened in our center. Not only does this online interface prevent our tutors from getting to know and creating a constructive relationship with their tutees, but it reverts them back to the editing strategies they recognize as a purely technological form. When students send us their work, they expect proofreading edits in return, as if we were Grammarly or Turnitin.com. Online, we may never know the context in which our students write (Wetzel and Leiske), and it’s even harder to approach a problem within a student’s writing process when that writing process may not be fully developed. If we have had to adjust our approach to our own assignments with little success, what could our students be going through?
Like Wetzl and Leiske found, the complication of email addresses, online submissions, tutoring guidelines and online connection gets in the way of the learning experience for all. All of these pedagogical challenges came about the week in which we had to quickly devise new processes that had no choice but to be beta-tested in real time. Even before our use of the recurring student attendance logs and the asynchronous feedback form (and during, let’s be honest), this has caused serious communication problems. While we nag our tutors to turn these in after each appointment, some just forget, or take a screen break at just the wrong time, or ghost the coordinators for hours until it’s too late. But our technological stalking isn’t limited to our paid student assistants, but to the students themselves, who email us for an appointment and fail to connect with their tutor but then email thirty minutes later explaining that they “couldn’t find the link, can you send it to me?” And after all that, they only have 20 minutes left of the session, causing the tutor to rush through the appointment in hopes of still being able to help their tutee.
Although synchronous appointments are closer to f2f interaction, they still lack some benefits of in-person tutoring. Synchronous appointments allow the tutor and writer to meet with the paper in front of them, through Zoom’s “share screen” option or a Google Doc, and appear as if they are sitting across from one another. But sometimes with bad internet connection or the specific challenges that come with internet device options, they may not be able to have their camera on. There are also moments when the tutor has to ask the student to “Scroll up a little more,” “Wait, no, go back,” “No, scroll back down,” when trying to navigate the student within their draft. There are times when bad internet connection makes audio cut out, which frustrates the student, and even more the tutor. Social interaction, in these times, is heartily missed by those who could be working together side-by-side exchanging ideas around a table. We miss the simple joys of just pointing at a piece of paper.
Despite our frustrations—and even because of them—we have empathy for our students and tutors. It’s all about how we’re showing this empathy virtually. These students come from backgrounds and contexts of which we aren’t remotely aware. And while we have issues coordinating how students access remote feedback, when done correctly asynchronous tutoring can help writers by giving them the space to process the suggestions and respond within their paper, rather that struggling to understand within an hour time frame of a f2f session (Bell citing Hamper, 2018; Ries, 2015; Camarillo, 2020). We were given a gift by moving online. But that gift, like any other superpower, comes with a responsibility to revise our practices through trial and error and push through the challenges with the individual student in mind. The student who contacts us in a politely desperate need for writing assistance, asking for help “whenever there’s time for me,” deserves the best from us, and so do all the rest.
We are writing center coordinators and we are tired. But we aren’t tired of our students. We are in awe of them and their ability to even open another email, in their free time, and ask us for help. What could be more dope than that.
Works Cited
Wetzl, Ann, and Pam Lieske. “The Benefits and Limitations of Online Peer Feedback: Instructors’ Perception of a Regional Campus Online Writing Lab .” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 18, no. 1, 2020, www.praxisuwc.com/181-wetzl-lieske. Accessed 2021.
Bell, Lisa. “Rethinking What to Preserve as Writing Centers Move Online.” Connecting Writing Centers Across Borders, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, 2020, www.wlnjournal.org/blog/2020/07/rethinking-what-to-preserve-as-writing-centers-move-online/.
About the Authors
Emilie DeFazio is a writer, editor, and instructor from Sacramento, California. She graduated in May 2021 with her Master’s in English Composition and Rhetoric from Sacramento State University, specializing in professional writing, new media composition, and writing instruction. In Spring of 2021, Emilie served as a graduate coordinator at the Sacramento State University Reading and Writing Center and as an instructor of Accelerated Academic Literacies in the English department’s writing program. She also finished her master’s thesis project, titled “Show Yourself: Post-Technofeminist Habits of Mind in YouTube Video Essays.” Emilie has been published in the online magazine Screen Queens and UC Davis’ Prized Writing 2017 and has forthcoming fiction and non-fiction publications in TWENTY TWENTY: A Stories on Stage Anthology.
Christine Neuman is a graduate student in the creative writing program at Sacramento State University and is working towards completing her teaching composition certificate. She is a graduate coordinator for the Reading and Writing Center and an instructor for Accelerated Academic Literacies, English 5 at Sacramento State University. She also has a few poems published within various online journals, most recently: Cough Syrup issue #4 and İPalante! issue #2.