Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 18, No 2 (2021)
It’s Crowded in Here: “Present Others” in Advanced Graduate Writers’ Sessions¹
Allison A. Kranek
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
allison.kranek@gmail.com
María Paz Carvajal Regidor
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
maria.carvajal.regidor@gmail.com
Abstract
As writing center scholars focus more attention on graduate writers, we suggest being attentive to who we call “present others,” individuals who are not physically present in writing center sessions but are part of writers’ feedback networks, such as advisors, committee members, and colleagues. We assert that present others are key to gaining a more nuanced understanding of graduate writers’ experiences in the writing center because they shape writers’ socialization into the academy and complicate the centrality of one-to-one work in writing center scholarship and practice. Using interviews and session recordings with two advanced graduate writers, we illuminate how present others influenced these writers’ sessions, their feedback networks, and their long-term writing center use. In doing so, our study widens the scope beyond the writer and the consultant, providing another avenue to work with the text and the emotions and relationships that surround graduate students’ writing processes and disciplinary identities. Finally, we provide strategies for tutor training and encourage writing centers to explore how to more holistically meet the complex needs of graduate writers.
“If I just got a big set of revisions from my advisor, I’ll probably go in [to my writing center session] and say ‘so I just heard from my advisor.’ And then sometimes if I haven’t heard from him, I’m doing lots of guessing as we’re reading through. I come across a sentence, and I’m not sure how he would want me to say it, so I say, ‘I think he would want me to say this.’ But I’ve been very bad about guessing how he would think. I still try because I think it streamlines the [feedback] process . . .”
--Jane, PhD candidate in Biology
“While I was writing my paper, my participants themselves were really important. And I actually spent a lot of time with [consultant] working on this. . . How do I make sure that I’m saying things that are clear and that are saying the things that [the participants] were saying, and not things that I would like them to have said? Or things that I thought that maybe made a more clear argument.”
--Jessica, PhD candidate in Geography
These excerpts,² taken from interviews with two graduate writers, exemplify the importance of those we name “present others” in writing center consultations, individuals who are part of writers’ feedback networks, such as teachers, friends, colleagues, editors, family members, advisors, committee members, and non-present writing center staff. As part of graduate writers’ feedback networks, and unlike imagined and actual audiences, these individuals provide feedback, discuss writing and writing processes, and set expectations for graduate writers. For our purposes, present others only include humans, particularly those who the writer or consultant know. While we acknowledge the importance and power of imagined audiences in shaping graduate writers’ practice, our definition of present others focuses on writers’ more immediate feedback networks, especially individuals who might provide direct feedback or otherwise influence their writing processes through social interaction. Although these individuals are not physically present, they nonetheless shape writing center sessions. As a result, these individuals are present for the writer, and should likewise be for the consultant.
Writing centers have the potential to play a more active role as writers become disciplinary experts and negotiate their relationships with their feedback networks. We contend that recognizing present others can help consultants support graduate writers in this process. Rather than assuming that these individuals’ feedback should primarily be addressed by the writer, we assert that writers benefit from consultants making a conscious and deliberate attempt to engage with present others because they are important to graduate students’ socialization process (Kim) and their identities as graduate students and scholars.
Writing center studies has witnessed a reinvigoration of research about graduate consultants and writers, as exemplified by special issues in Praxis and the Writing Lab Newsletter in 2016 and Susan Lawrence and Terry Myers Zawacki’s collection, Re/Writing the Center in 2019. However, even as scholars have focused more recently and empirically on the graduate writers who come to our centers, this population remains understudied. Our study responds to concerns that writing centers focus too much on decreasing time-to-degree and attrition when we frame support for graduate writers (Lenaghan) and builds on scholarship that explores how consultants and graduate writers negotiate authority (Welch) and advice (Waring) during writing center sessions. Most importantly, we expand discussions of how writing centers can provide holistic support that recognizes graduate students’ emotional well-being (Gray) and acknowledges the relationships in their feedback networks. This work is necessary as graduate writers must decide how to respond to competing advice and feedback as they are socialized into their disciplines. Finally, we complicate the notion that writing sessions are only one-to-one.
In fact, the field’s scholarship suggests that writing center sessions are not only influenced by the co-present consultant and writer; rather, other individuals and forces who are not physically present for the session can change its direction and influence the revision and feedback process (Briggs). Terese Thonus notes that instructors can be “silent participants” in writing center sessions with undergraduate writers—figures who are not co-present during the sessions but whose “voices” and feedback may nevertheless shape the feedback process and the session itself. Judith Powers likewise describes the practice of the “trialogue,” in which writing centers can solicit feedback directly from advisors (15). Though this concept opens up dialogue, it centers the advisor’s agency rather than the writer’s. These examples demonstrate how some scholars recognize the influences of individuals who are not present in the session. We extend their work by foregrounding how present others impact graduate writers’ sessions from the perspective of graduate writers.
We argue that present others deserve the attention of writing center scholars and consultants because they can shape writers’ sessions and writing processes in significant ways. Importantly, attention to present others means rethinking existing practices and our view of sessions as (only) one-to-one, which continues to be a defining feature of the writing center grand narrative (Grutsch McKinney) and remains central to most writing center scholarship and training. Critiques of the one-to-one model note that it places the responsibility for improving writing on students rather than on the academy, and it can lead to writing centers upholding rather than questioning the status quo, with particularly harmful consequences for writers who aren’t white and middle class (Grimm, “The Regulatory” and “Rethinking ”; Grutsch McKinney; Scharold). To this critique, we add that the myth of writing center sessions as solely between a writer and a consultant especially hinders our ability to recognize and support the complexity of graduate writers’ writing processes. Furthermore, it diminishes the roles of present others, which risks ignoring important relationships that comprise writers’ feedback networks. Engaging with graduate writers’ texts and the present others that surround them provides a valuable opportunity to support these writers more holistically by focusing both on the text and its context, including the emotional aspects of being graduate students and writers. Writing centers can also serve as safe spaces where graduate writers can engage, question, vent about, and even resist present others’ feedback or expectations, highlighting their agency in disciplinary writing and socialization.
As such, our larger study poses the following research questions:
● What present others appear in writing center sessions?
● How do these present others show up in writing sessions? Who invites them into the conversation?
● How do consultants and writers engage with present others when they arise in the session?
● What role(s) do these present others play in shaping the session?
In this article, we begin to answer these questions by analyzing sessions and interviews with two long-term graduate users of the writing center.
By understanding how present others shape writing tutorials, our study advances knowledge about writing center sessions and informs training and practice in order to better support graduate writers. Ultimately, we seek to move beyond the myth that individual sessions are only between the writer and the consultant, as the maintenance of this myth cleaves writing center sessions from other individuals who graduate writers turn to for feedback.
Writing Centers and Graduate Writers
Though graduate writers have been understudied in our scholarship, it is clear that they pose unique challenges that writing centers must grapple with, particularly as over two-thirds (68%) of respondents to the National Census of Writing report that their writing center serves graduate students. As Lawrence and Zawacki note, “advanced graduate writers present an exigence for writing centers that differs from that presented by undergraduate writers” (22). Given this exigency, graduate-focused writing centers are on the rise (Summers, “The Rise”), and scholars are urging writing centers to rethink their practices (Lawrence and Zawacki). Furthermore, graduate writers use the writing center for multiple reasons alongside other writing support and often benefit from feedback from someone outside of their discipline (Mannon). Graduate writers also experience a process of disciplinary socialization during graduate school, which requires them to learn discipline-specific ways of making knowledge, generic conventions that address multiple audiences, and how to take on a scholarly identity (Curry; Lawrence and Zawacki).The writing graduate students do—and the feedback they receive on that writing—is one way in which they develop and display their disciplinary expertise. As such, through the writing process, they also cultivate their scholarly identity, an identity that can be complicated by feelings of imposter syndrome, advisor dynamics, and an expectation that they already know how to write in occluded academic genres (Rogers et al.; Simpson, “New Frontiers”; Lawrence and Zawacki). As writing centers across the U.S. attend to the multifaceted needs of graduate writers, they have an opportunity to support graduate writers’ developing scholarly identities and disciplinary socialization.
Graduate writers’ emotional well-being is one complex need that writing centers must better understand. While writing centers have begun to consider the role that emotion plays in our work, these conversations have started at the level of the tutor (Nicklay) and of writing center directors (Caswell et al.; Green), highlighting the emotional toll and labor involved in writing center work. For example, Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson found that tutors use motivational scaffolding strategies to offer undergraduate writers encouragement as “signals that they care about students’ comprehension and well-being” (65). Being attentive to the affective components of writing is especially important as Harry Denny, John Nordlof, and Lori Salem acknowledge that the writers who come to our centers are navigating complex emotions in the academy. While their research focuses on working-class undergraduates, their findings could apply to graduate writers who “want relief from the stress of feeling like imposters” (Denny et al. 86). As we know, writing can play a key part in graduate students’ lack of confidence. Marilyn Gray found that “[w]hen given a self-assessment of skills, UCLA doctoral students rated themselves lower on a number of writing-related skills than on other types of skills” (228). Ultimately, there is much to be gained from building “intentional,” integrated writing center support for graduate students’ well-being (Gray 225). Although writing specifically of dissertation support programs, Gray notes that writing centers are poised to contribute positively to institutional support for graduate writers’ well-being (224).
Despite the potential writing centers have for holistically supporting graduate writers, Talinn Phillips (“Tutor Training”) and Sarah Summers (“Building Expertise”) found that tutor training handbooks and locally-developed tutor training often lack attention to graduate writers. As Lawrence and Zawacki suggest, “if we do not shape practices in response to graduate writers’ distinct circumstances, we risk alienating them in a context that may already have them feeling alienated as writers” (10–11). Part of this process of attending to graduate writers’ needs and of reevaluating our field’s practices, however, involves learning more about graduate writers’ experiences in general (Lawrence and Zawacki). Shannon Madden contends that “as a field, we don’t yet know enough about the lived experience of writing for graduate students.”³ Collectively, though this scholarly (re)attention to graduate students is promising, writing center studies still offers ample opportunities to expand our knowledge and rethink our praxis for working with graduate writers more effectively. Consequently, we prioritize how graduate writers strategically manage present others during their consultations, since much writing center scholarship understandably focuses on the perspective of the consultants in this relationship.
Methods and Methodology
Background and Motivations
The present study developed out of a prior collaborative study of online and face-to-face writing center consultations (forthcoming). As we coded, we were struck by moments when present others surfaced. Intrigued by these individuals, we conducted a small-scale analysis using the online study data. Although we found examples of present others in sessions with both undergraduate and graduate writers, we focused the current study on graduate writers, knowing that graduate writers remain understudied in writing center research.
Study Setting and Context
Our study took place at a public R1 university in the Midwest. Writers at this institution are served by one writing center that integrates support for and is staffed by undergraduate and graduate students. It also offers writing support for faculty, post-docs, and staff. Writers are allowed up to two 50-minute face-to-face or synchronous online consultations per week, as well as unlimited drop-in sessions. During the time of our data collection (spring, summer, and fall of 2019), the writing center provided 7,619 consultations, the majority of which were with multilingual writers. In the spring and fall semesters, graduate writers made up just under 30% of consultations; during the limited summer hours the center offers, graduate students comprised 75% of sessions. These graduate writers identified predominately as international, non-white, and female. In addition to individual consultations, the writing center supports graduate writers via writing productivity groups, week-long dissertation writing retreats, and workshops on various topics, such as preparing conference presentations, revising papers into articles for publication, and staying on track with long-term writing.
Data Collection: Session Recordings and Follow-up Interviews
After gaining IRB approval in February 2019, we recruited consultants via announcements at staff meetings, email, or in person before their sessions. We recruited writer participants by identifying returning graduate writers through our online scheduling system, then invited these potential participants using the same strategies we used with consultants, with the exception of staff meeting announcements. Participants were not monetarily compensated but writers could schedule an additional appointment for participating.
From February to December of 2019, we collected data from three sources: (1) face-to-face and online consultations with graduate writers, many of whom visited the writing center multiple times a semester/across semesters; (2) interviews with focal participants; and (3) writer data from our scheduling system, including their demographic data, appointment focus, and total number of sessions. With the consent of both the consultant and writer, we audio- and video-recorded twenty sessions with twelve experienced graduate consultants⁴ and eighteen graduate writers. While ten of the writer participants were multilingual writers, all but one of the consultants were native English speakers. Four consultants identified as male while only two of the writers did. Our writer and consultant participants represented a range of disciplines, including Education, English, Library and Information Sciences, Economics, Political Science, and Environmental Engineering. All of the writers were returning users of the writing center, and many of them used the center regularly over multiple semesters.
To triangulate our session data and to help us make meaning of these sessions from the writers’ perspectives, we invited writers to take part in follow-up interviews. In these 45-60-minute semi-structured interviews, we sought to contextualize the recorded session and learn more about participants’ writing and writing center experiences. We selectively transcribed the recorded sessions ahead of our interviews to guide our conversations. In our interviews, we used stimulated recall (Dempsey) by showing participants notable clips from the recording in which they mentioned present others in order to facilitate recall and gain further insight into present others mentioned during the session. First, we contextualized these sessions and clips for the participant (using the transcripts and the appointment notes from the scheduling system) and then prompted participants to tell us what was happening in these moments.
Our larger dataset shows that across our diverse participant pool, conversations about present others frequently occurred in writing sessions; however, they were most rich with long-term users who had developed relationships with consultants over time. As such, a level of comfort with the writing center and between particular writers and consultants seemed to facilitate conversations about present others as consultants “got to know” other individuals in writers’ feedback networks. Our interviews confirmed that these established writer-consultant relationships were central to how writers and consultants leveraged present others during sessions. Given these findings from our larger dataset, we were also interested in how consultants responded to instances of present others in sessions with graduate writers.
In this article, we focus on two advanced graduate writers, Jane and Jessica⁵ who were long-term and consistent users of our writing center. Jane and Jessica’s recorded sessions and interviews reflect illustrative trends that are visible in our larger dataset. At the time of this study, Jane and Jessica were both in the last year of their graduate programs and working on their dissertations and job market materials. They’re both white native English-speaking women. Although Jane and Jessica were not representative of our diverse writing center users, we believe that their close relationships with the writing center, their academic stage, and our follow-up interviews with them offer important insights regarding present others.
Data Analysis
We transcribed Jane’s and Jessica’s recorded sessions and interviews to facilitate our data analysis. Informed by our previous work in the online study, our coding revolved mainly around present others. First, we identified the present others who appeared in the sessions and interviews. We then focused on the discourse surrounding these sections so that we could begin to examine the roles of present others. At this stage, we asked questions such as: Did the writer or the consultant invoke this present other? How is this present other influencing the writer’s writing or revision processes? How is this present other shaping the session interaction? In our interviews, we asked similar questions and used clips from the sessions to understand present others from the writers’ perspectives. To contextualize sessions within participants’ feedback networks, we also asked writers when and who they turn to for feedback on their writing. Focusing on present others allowed us to see emerging themes, such as how they influenced the session focus and impacted graduate writers differently. Present others’ roles and influence varied according to components like the writer’s task, where they were in the process, the relationships surrounding their writing, and other factors that regularly shape writing processes.
Researcher Positionalities
We believe that researchers’ positionalities significantly influence methods, methodologies, and data; therefore, before discussing our findings, we first provide some background about ourselves. We are both women and were both graduate students in the same department at the time of our study. One of us is a Latina and a native Spanish speaker. The other is a white native English speaker. We both worked at writing centers as undergraduates and have been consultants or involved with our graduate institution’s writing center in some capacity since 2015. Together, we have 13 years of consulting experience. Our positionalities as graduate writers who were in the midst of writing our dissertations provided us with relatively easy access to writers who are in similar stages of their graduate careers and helps us see our data in ways that researchers with different positionalities might not. During our data collection process, we both served as consultants and in administrative capacities in the writing center, so we took care to design our study to mitigate the influence of our roles and avoid conflicts of interest. Our roles and identities ultimately shaped the decisions we made in our data design and strengthen our analysis.
Jane’s and Jessica’s Present Others
In this section, we turn to exemplifying the range of present others that appear in our larger dataset. We use interviews and session recordings from our focal participants to show how Jane’s and Jessica’s writing center sessions have overlapping and unique present others, as depicted in Figure 1. Next, we provide more background on Jane and Jessica and highlight present others who are particularly salient for them to show how these present others influenced their writing and consequently their writing center sessions.
“That Day… Was Him-Focused”: Jane’s Present Others
Jane, a PhD candidate in Biology, began using the writing center sporadically early in her graduate program, typically before an impending deadline. A few years later, a conversation with her advisor prompted her to realize that she needed additional support to make faster progress on her dissertation. Additionally, Jane sensed that her advisor disliked her writing and that “he just did not understand [her] writing style whatsoever at first.” Spurred by these conversations with her advisor and the encouragement of our writing center Director, Jane began using the writing center more consistently, making one or two appointments every week. By the time she graduated, Jane had attended over 100 sessions in addition to participating in writing groups and retreats. Jane generally worked with the same two consultants, so she developed a close working relationship with both of them. The session we recorded with Jane was with one of these two consultants.
Though Jane noted that her advisor influenced her writing the most, she also discussed during the interview many other individuals in her feedback network who impacted her writing and other sessions. For example, Jane explained that her committee members provided extensive feedback on her writing earlier in graduate school but less so during her dissertation process. Jane also frequently collaborated on research and co-wrote articles with friends, colleagues, and scholars outside of her department, where she navigated the messy process of co-writing and (co)ownership over writing.
While Jane described multiple individuals who influenced her writing in graduate school, her advisor was undoubtedly the most recurring present other across her writing center sessions and in her interview, as he influenced her decision to come to the writing center regularly and his feedback often seeped into these sessions. As Jane’s excerpt at the beginning of this article illustrates, her advisor’s feedback played an instrumental role in determining the focus of her writing center sessions. During her interview, for instance, when we asked Jane to review notable portions of the session we recorded, she described the session as very “him-focused” because she and her consultant were reviewing and navigating the feedback her advisor had recently given her. Throughout this session, which occurred near the end of her dissertation process, Jane expressed her struggle of responding to his feedback, mentioning for instance: “I was a little confused by his comment,” “I’m not exactly sure what he meant by that,” and “he changed it in a way that I didn’t expect.”
Given perceived differences in their writing styles, throughout her interview, Jane repeatedly characterized her advisor’s feedback as “cutting” through her work, making her text “bleed” with extensive comments. She elaborated:
He changes words, everything. I’ve decided that… he has ways he likes to say things, and he will go through and change it. Whereas when I’m reading somebody else’s stuff, I think “well that’s not how I would’ve written it but it’s technically correct, it’s clear.” I don’t touch it. What he sends me in the very beginning is just bleeding. Everything changing, whole sentences, so on and so forth… I don’t like it when he changes all of those first few sentences because it feels like it’s not mine then anymore. I like it to be my work.
As Jane noted in her interview, not only was her writing style markedly different from her advisor’s, their methods of giving feedback differed significantly as well, complicating Jane’s sense of ownership over her ideas and writing.
Consequently, these differences drove Jane to try to understand and imitate her advisor’s writing style over time to ameliorate tensions in her writing process, often turning to writing center consultants to aid in these efforts. Her advisor’s at-times confusing and “cutting” feedback influenced the work that Jane and her consultant did throughout the session we recorded. One such moment occurred when Jane was trying to understand whether she needed to keep a citation, based on her advisor’s feedback:
Jane: It’s just that (laughter) sometimes- like this is [author]’s paper that I’ve mentioned in every other chapter.
Consultant: I know.
Jane: And sometimes I throw it in there and [my advisor] cuts it out (C: I know. Yeah.) So (laughter) I think this time I was trying not to put it in so he wouldn’t cut it out and now he wants me to have it (both laugh). So. Whatever.
Consultant: It’s hard.
Here, Jane details her attempts to anticipate and preemptively address her advisor’s feedback. In this moment, Jane uses this session as a venue to express her frustration with her advisor’s conflicting feedback and her ultimately unsuccessful efforts to anticipate his comments. Her consultant, having worked with Jane for two years and being familiar with her advisor’s feedback, uses this moment to empathize with Jane, reinforcing that she understands Jane’s frustration and acknowledging Jane’s long-term efforts to make sense of her advisor’s feedback. During our interview, Jane observed that this consultant “[did] a pretty good job of interpreting what my advisor would probably want,” an effort that Jane continually made on her own and in the writing center. Because Jane’s advisor shaped so much of their sessions together, it’s significant that the consultant notes, “I’m also… trying to imagine what it is that he might be wanting, which is interesting because I don’t know him, but you and I have such a long relationship, and I’ve seen so many of his comments, so I have some idea.”
Jane’s advisor is so present during their sessions that both Jane and her consultant actively and repeatedly worked to anticipate Jane’s advisor’s preferences. Even as Jane was finishing her dissertation, she was still grappling with her advisor’s feedback, trying to figure out his scholarly style while also maintaining agency and ownership over her disciplinary identity and work. Ultimately, for Jane, it was nearly impossible to engage with her writing in consultations without also engaging with her advisor, his feedback, and the emotions surrounding that relationship. Jane used these sessions as a space where she could safely vent about and question her advisor’s feedback in the moment as informed by their past experiences, while also finding ways to move forward with or move past that feedback.
“They Were Very Present in the Writing Process:” Jessica’s Present Others
Our second focal participant, Jessica, was a PhD candidate in Geography. She had been using the writing center since her first year as a PhD student when she mostly took advantage of drop-in sessions shortly before due dates. Later in her graduate career, after attending a writing center-sponsored workshop focused on dissertation writing, Jessica concluded that she should be using sessions to her advantage and began making appointments more consistently. Like Jane, Jessica also attended some writing groups, but unlike Jane, Jessica rotated consultants quite often. In part because she had been using the writing center for many years, Jessica was a savvy user and knew she could take advantage of consultants’ diverse strengths. She used this knowledge to make decisions about who to work with based on her needs throughout her writing process. During our interview, Jessica provided insight into how she chose which consultant to work with:
Sometimes you want go to the [writing center] to get validation that your work is going well, and sometimes you want to go and get critiqued . . . And so, when you needed validation, you would go to the validation person, when you needed critique, you’d go to the critique person. . . When you’re feeling stuck, sometimes you’d go to a person who would talk most of the session, where you wouldn’t have to do a lot of work, but you’d leave with a lot of next steps. Or sometimes you’d go to one who would just listen to you the whole time, when you needed some serious writing therapy or some generative support.
The consultants Jessica regularly worked with became part of her feedback network. As her dissertation defense date drew closer and as job applications became due, Jessica began to use drop-in hours more regularly in addition to her regular sessions. By the time Jessica graduated, she had amassed over 75 appointments and countless drop-in sessions. Our dataset includes two of Jessica’s recorded sessions with consultants who were familiar with her dissertation project and worked with her often.
Like Jane, Jessica’s advisor and committee members are some of the present others visible in her recorded sessions and interview. Given that both of these writers were in the later stages of their PhD programs and that their recorded sessions were focused on their dissertations, this is to be expected. However, Jessica’s present others extended well beyond her advisor and committee and included her research participants, consultants, and peers. As a qualitative researcher, Jessica conducted interviews for her dissertation project, and, as she explained in the opening epigraph, those interview participants ultimately shaped her writing and sessions. Furthermore, Jessica saw her participants as potential readers of her dissertation, and she wanted to ethically represent what they shared with her. As a result of her participants expressing a desire to read her work, Jessica seemed to draft with participants and her relationship with them at the forefront of her mind. In Jessica’s words, “they were very present in the writing process.”
One of her recorded sessions exemplified this as Jessica worked with a consultant who was also a qualitative researcher finishing up her dissertation. Together they brainstormed how Jessica’s positionality overlapped with her participants’ and preemptively addressed Jessica’s committee’s critiques about her participant population. By doing so, Jessica worked to address two groups in her feedback network: her participants and her committee members. More specifically, this conversation resulted in Jessica composing a section of a chapter where she explained how her positionality provided her unique access to her participants. The consultant’s willingness to respond to Jessica’s relationships with her participants and her concerns about her committee’s feedback led to a productive engagement with present others who, although not physically there, had a significant impact on Jessica’s writing and the processes surrounding it.
In addition to her research participants, writing consultants were present others in Jessica’s writing sessions. Sometimes non-present consultants shaped the agenda setting of the current session as Jessica recapped what she and her previous consultant accomplished. Other times, present others were brought up because of Jessica’s familiarity with many of the consultants. For instance, late into a session, Jessica and her consultant discussed upcoming appointments and the fact that her current consultant was unavailable during a time they regularly worked together because of the consultant’s dissertation defense. They both shared their feelings about their upcoming defenses and agreed that Jessica would be okay even though she would be working with a different consultant:
Consultant: It’s going to be fine.
Jessica: I know.
Consultant: It’ll be fine. It’ll be great. They’re all amazing.
Jessica: I know. Everyone is amazing.
Although this exchange didn’t explicitly influence Jessica’s writing, it shaped at least part of the session by helping them to continue to build their relationship and empathize about their respective defenses. This conversation also allowed them to strategize future appointments and reinforced Jessica’s trust in the writing center. The consultant reassured Jessica, and they agreed that any consultant Jessica chose would be able to support her. The extent to which non-present consultants shape sessions and writers’ writing varies, but what is significant in these examples is that Jessica’s relationships with consultants were a part of her feedback network and important enough to be invoked in sessions when other consultants weren’t present.
As with Jane, Jessica also discussed others who comprised her larger feedback network, providing us with insight beyond the present others in her recorded sessions. Jessica’s feedback network is broad. When asked who she turned to for feedback on her writing, Jessica explained she had been using peer feedback to her advantage for years. She shared that “I’ve been turning to people my whole life. I turn to anyone who I think won’t be annoyed that I’m asking them for stuff. And this goes back to high school” when she “got all this feedback [from friends] over the course of the day as [she] was working on the paper.” As a graduate student, Jessica also counted on peer feedback. She explained in our interview that “I have some lawyer friends who copy edit my work.” The choice to turn to her peers for feedback was driven in part by past practices but was also influenced by her advisor’s preferences. Jessica noted: “my advisor would give me feedback once my work was done.” This meant that Jessica needed to turn to others earlier in her writing process and that her advisor was the last person to read her work. Another explanation for the breadth of Jessica’s feedback network is her belief that “fresh eyes are really important. So, you have to cycle through your readers.” Throughout the writing process, Jessica turned to the writing center and her feedback network for those fresh eyes and to help her make progress, revise her writing, and receive the type of support she needed at different stages in the process.
Discussion and Implications
Responding to growing attention to graduate writers in writing center scholarship, particularly to calls for supporting them holistically and emotionally, we sought to learn more about how present others shape writing consultations with graduate writers. Not surprisingly, advisors and committee members are recurring present others for Jane and Jessica and in our larger dataset. The writing center provided a supportive setting for Jane and Jessica to negotiate their disciplinary socialization and develop their scholarly identities through writing. They were able to do so by leveraging the low-stakes possibilities of sessions where they could safely contend with their advisors’ feedback (or lack thereof) without feeling like they needed to already be disciplinary experts. Jane and Jessica both noted that the writing center served as a useful third space where they could receive more personalized, clear feedback as they moved through their writing processes—something their advisors and committees couldn’t always provide. Their experiences also illustrate the diversity of present others and graduate writers’ feedback networks, which might shift throughout graduate school. As these feedback networks evolve, the writing center can remain a source of support capable of adapting to writers’ dynamic needs. Our findings provide insight into the lived experiences of graduate writers, as well as their evolving and affective relationships with those who provide feedback on their writing. These findings illuminate the potential writing centers have to intervene in graduate writers’ feedback networks.
In addition to capturing the complexity of the relationships that affect graduate writers’ processes, taking present others seriously also provides avenues to attend to graduate writers’ affective needs, such as by practicing motivational scaffolding (Mackiewicz and Thompson). Although it is common in writing center lore to acknowledge that we work with writers and not just writing, we feel it warrants repeating here, especially when it comes to writers who are navigating what are often complicated relationships with their feedback networks and the pressures of graduate school. Our findings underscore that writing centers should move away from thinking of sessions as exclusively one-to-one in our scholarship, practice, and tutor training. Instead, we call for writing centers (1) to acknowledge that multiple individuals influence writing sessions and (2) to collaborate proactively with writers so that they can better leverage their relationships with present others. To do so, consultants can work towards building strong relationships with graduate writers over time to help them navigate their feedback networks. Strong relationships between consultants and writers can build trust and empower writers to exert agency over their writing as they become disciplinary experts.
At our writing center, where we see many graduate writers over multiple sessions, our staff has benefited from training tailored to working with graduate writers. We have added present others to our “toolkit” as a means of supporting the unique needs of this population (Summers, “Building Expertise”). For instance, we have invited graduate writers to share their writing experiences during tutor training meetings to gain insight into advanced writers’ long-term writing processes. Our staff has also collaboratively analyzed scenarios based on recorded sessions with graduate writers at our center. Using these sample sessions, consultants identified how present others shaped the interaction and discussed how they could engage with present others in future sessions. Finally, our staff has brainstormed additional strategies for working with graduate writers, such as affirming that writers have agency over their writing and providing space for graduate writers to express themselves without feeling like they need to be experts. While these approaches worked for our center, each writing center should develop strategies that will be most useful for considering present others in their local contexts.
We have begun to partially answer our research questions, but we also acknowledge some of the limitations of this work and some questions that remain unanswered. For instance, although our larger dataset includes writers of diverse backgrounds, most of them identify as women, as do our focal participants. We sense that imposter syndrome might be playing a role in the number of female graduate students we see at our writing center, which may have influenced our participant demographics. At the time of this study, Jane and Jessica were both nearing the completion of their PhD programs, so we have more insight into these writers’ long-term relationships compared to writers who are beginning graduate school. Since Jane and Jessica observed that their feedback networks shifted over time, future work should explore how present others influence newer graduate writers’ sessions. Additionally, our larger dataset shows that for some writers, present others are an almost-constant presence during sessions, whereas sometimes present others only temporarily impact the session, suggesting the need for more research on why that might be.
Moreover, while our case studies demonstrate present others from the writers’ perspectives, our data show that consultants also mention present others during session conversations. At times, our graduate consultants invoked salient individuals in their own writing processes. This was the case with Jessica’s consultant, who mentioned her own committee members and shared how she has navigated her feedback relationships with them. In other words, both writers and consultants acknowledge present others during sessions, pointing to the need to also examine present others from consultants’ perspectives.
Conclusion
Present others have the potential to significantly impact writing center sessions, particularly with long-term and advanced writing center users. Consultants help writers navigate their relationships with their feedback networks as they discuss not only writing but also emotions surrounding feedback and their identities as graduate students and scholars. The relationships that consultants develop with writers can facilitate writers’ control over their writing process and the networks that shape it. To us, this emphasizes the need to think about writing center work more broadly as supporting all facets of graduate education so that we can support advanced writers who come to us seeking more than just feedback on their writing.
Working holistically with graduate writers is especially important, as Bruce Ballenger and Kelly Myers note that advanced writers often experience negative emotions, self-doubt, and fear around revising their writing. These emotions are understandable since graduate writers are learning to navigate academia, where imposter syndrome is prevalent⁶ (Clance and Imes; Parkman)and where mental health has been named a pressing issue for graduate students(Okahana). Ultimately, within this high-stakes context, by attending to present others and the complex, interpersonal circumstances of graduate students’ writing and graduate school, writing centers can begin to re-envision how we can more holistically support graduate writers.
Notes
1. We thank Harry Denny for inspiring this title.
2. Transcript excerpts have been edited for clarity and length.
3. Although multilingual writers aren’t the focus of this study, writing center scholarship has long recognized that multilingual and international students face complex challenges, particularly at the undergraduate level. Scholars are just now beginning to explore these challenges at the graduate level, where writers face higher stakes. See Powers and Nelson; Waring; Phillips, “Shifting, ” “Tutor,” and “Tutoring L2 ”; Madden; Severino and Prim; Simpson, “On the Distinct Needs.”
4. All of the consultants in our dataset had worked at this writing center for at least one year with the exception of one consultant who was an experienced teacher of writing and a Writing Studies PhD student. The majority of these consultants had been consulting for at least two years and a significant portion have worked at multiple writing centers. Additionally, some of the writers in our data pool were also graduate consultants at our writing center, meaning that a few of our participants inhabited both the roles of consultants and writers.
5. Participants were given the option of using their real names or pseudonyms, and we followed their preferences accordingly.
6. See Gibson-Beverly and Schwartz and Cope-Watson and Betts for how imposter syndrome affects graduate students.
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