Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 23, No. 1 (2025)
Expertise Wielded; Expertise Yielded: An American Tries to Plant an Academic Writing Center in Post-Colonial Philippines
Richard Kahn
INSTITUTION??
rkahns22@gmail.com
Abstract
“Expertise Wielded; Expertise Yielded” follows an English Language Specialist in Manila, Philippines who was sent to provide expertise to a storied public university. It explores the privileges and responsibilities inherent in authority transfers between people or cultures, and for every clear assertion, there is a fuzzy doubt.
The project in Manila was to design training modules for the first cohort of peer tutors in the Philippines’ first academic writing center in a university where professors were both time and resource constrained. Their context pushed most, in spite of philosophical inclinations, towards more teacher-centered and low feedback practices. Though his stipend was provided by US State Department grants, this expert brought only fragmentary awareness of America’s role in Philippine history and a general ignorance of the existing academic culture. This paper is less a research document and more a narrative of both stumbles and dance moves through contradictions and complexity. It offers an analogy between these authority/empowerment tensions and the peer-tutoring dynamic that he was sent to introduce.
Keywords: peer tutoring, postcolonialism, process-writing, teacher training, academic culture
The US embassy had given me a two-month assignment, and the Philippine Normal University (PNU) was hoping for that new academic writing center. It would be the first AWC in the Philippines, and I did not want to bluster my way through a meaningful project. I had seen it too often: an expert brought in, waving around truly impressive credentials, but only giving what they had brought without asking what anyone needed, that is, failing to recognize how expertise must be contextualized. The embassy had gifted me status, and it could merely be a spotlight on me tapdancing to everyone’s admiration, or my visiting expert designation could give us all a two-month focus on a highly complex issue: how a writing intervention developed in the US might be adapted and appropriated, like the English language itself, to serve the needs of this former American colony. My questions and doubts should not undermine expertise, but rather parallel what happens in a writing center to cultivate and transfer authority.
My specific English Language Specialist project was only to design modules for peer tutor training, but other than the grant, a nearly bare room and the university’s still partially formed ideas of what a writing center is or can be, nothing was in place. With their plates ever-overflowing with other pressing needs, my new PNU colleagues had been waiting for their American expert to fill in the rest and import all necessary innovations.
This is a university devoted to teacher preparation. It is in their institutional DNA, founded as the Philippine Normal School in 1901 as part of the American colonial project preparing teachers to spread English and replace Spanish (Harrington). So, when a PNU self-assessment determined that the writing skills of their students were steadily deteriorating, the stakes were high: If these future teachers were poor writers who shied away from writing, they would pass their deficiencies and attitudes on to a generation of their students who would pass it on to the next in a death spiral of writing skills. Too dramatic? Perhaps, but there was a real sense of urgency.
Of course, a two-month timeline would be a stretch when founding any new center. At PNU, the labyrinth of bureaucracy had already been navigated for approvals, but there remained everything from staffing to furniture, from training to deliberating policies and procedures. More fundamentally, we were not only setting up a writing center from scratch, we would be setting one up where some staple ingredients, foundational assumptions of American writing centers, might not be found by merely scratching the surface. Though sometimes dust-covered, these core assumptions permeate American educational institutions. First among these is immersion in process-writing, that is, not as mere brainstorming games, but rather with all the spirals of reflection and revision that clarify thought and anticipate the needs of the reader’s understanding.
Second is that those spirals of writing revision are set in motion by readily available feedback, whether from instructor or peer or tutor. Third is general acceptance of peer tutoring and the overwhelming evidence of its efficacy that (mostly) quells concerns about the blind leading the blind.
Never having previously worked in the Philippines, I could not assume that these conceptual foundations of writing centers and their associated methodologies already permeated Philippine education. Certainly, many of my new Filipino colleagues were impressively credentialed and admittedly better educated than me, with doctorates in relevant fields and extensive research in teaching methodologies. Yet in spite of theoretical awareness of those underlying concepts, why had no writing centers spontaneously sprouted anywhere in the country? I could not be sure if, rather than offering bountiful blessing, I might instead blunder in and disrupt a sophisticated educational ecosystem with an invasive species.
Of course, due to international exchanges, many Filipino scholars have studied abroad, but I met just two who had ever been inside a writing center, one in Hong Kong and another in the US, and both but briefly. With not a single academic writing center in the country, I wondered what PNU envisioned when they asked for one [1]. If I asked anyone what they thought of when they heard ‘writing center’ (which I often asked as I tried to assess needs and expectations), the answer was always a logical supposition that a writing center was a place where struggling students were sent for extra help, or perhaps (as was the one in Hong Kong and others in Japan) where graduate students and faculty went for pre-publication editing and proofreading (Ubaldo). And when asked about peer editing, everyone (a word I do not use casually) assumed that was when an advanced student corrected freshman grammar and syntax mistakes. For the new PNU center, I hoped for something more than remedial and editing services, for something more aligned to the student-centered methods they taught at PNU but did not yet practice when it came to writing feedback. I was certainly willing to present the American model, not as the gold standard, but something to be adopted and adapted in whatever ways most useful to their students. PNU itself had identified the need for a center and then solicited technical support from the US Embassy, but it seemed to me that if this writing center was to last longer than my two-month presence, I needed to follow them to where they wanted me to lead. At this point, no one knew where that would be, navigating between the distracting glitter of American academic prestige and the ideological resistance to American hegemony. I would need to show the substance in writing center concepts that lay beyond any glitter, and that beneath the risk of cultural imperialism lay the possibility of improved academic writing through student empowerment.
Even back home in Pennsylvania while reading, researching and gathering energy for this project, I did not want to dismiss self-doubt, something I mine for intellectual honesty. Not a buzz-kill, but a dose of self-skepticism might be healthy. I therefore took and still take seriously the possibility that I was carpetbagging American writing centers to another culture. Certainly, though I was shipped to the Philippines as an expert, my credentials would not be held in very high esteem among US writing center experts. The US State Department counted me as qualified because 1) I had taught academic writing for many years and 2) because I had successfully designed and completed projects in several countries for the same agency that was funding the Philippine project. Neither of these count for much in the eyes of many writing center theorists, in fact, they might both count against me.
First, as for having taught academic writing both in the US and abroad, if that’s all I had going for me, it is a credential that makes some writing center administrators cringe. For some, this is analogous to hiring an ESL or EFL teacher just because she is a native English speaker. Clearly, one does not necessarily translate to another, and I have seen wonderful EFL teachers who were not native speakers and terrible ones who were; the native speaker who learnt nursery rhymes on a parent’s lap might sense the subtle cadences and music of the language, but the one who has had to assemble the language through study might better understand its structure (Elyas). The two sides of the same coin look in different directions.
In a common but cartoonish dichotomy, academic writing instructors act as gatekeepers for Club Academia, checking for passwords and shibboleths with a red pencil. On the flip side, at least for many writing center practitioners, a tutor walks with student writers for an hour or so while they navigate a squiggly path between the way they see things and the ways they must be seen by the institution, between what they have to say and how to be heard. I felt this conceptual split palpably when, while preparing for the Manila project, I sought out a well-respected writing center director and scholar, and he generously gave me an hour of his busy afternoon. The conflation of roles, that academic writing instruction qualified one to start or even work in a writing center, clearly exasperated him. It demonstrated a lack of understanding of what writing centers do along with lack of respect for writing center scholarship. I could only say that he was right, and that I had a lot of learning to do.
However, quibbling with my own concession, the divide between the two roles is far more porous than might first appear as evidenced by the frequent overlap between English department and writing center faculty. Straddling the two might actually be a healthy stretch. In my case, though I had begun my studies under qualified professors in an accredited program to teach secondary English, I really only learned to teach from my students at a juvenile treatment center (a euphemism used for this maximum-security prison for younger convicts). To teach, one needs to know what one’s students already know, and these students had learned from their schools that they could not learn, much less offer understanding to others. From them, I learned that I needed to listen so hard that they would speak up, and when they did, they found to their surprise that they had voices that could overleap social and personal divides. In many cases, they eventually wrote successful GED and SAT essays and gained entrance to trade schools and colleges and universities. Their court files were stuffed with writing about them; finally they were submitting texts written by themselves. This experience has informed all of my teaching of academic writing, often to first generation college students, and I know my efforts were not unique. Neither writing instructors nor writing tutors fall into the caricature some expect in the other, and many wear both hats. Nevertheless, in English department offices, I have heard snide comments about writing center advisers, shared with me as an English department colleague in the way a white male tells me misogynistic or racist jokes, assuming I agree because I look the part. As for that wonderful writing center director who I spoke with, I suspect that the respect he had been too often denied by the English department faculty club is what he turned into the generosity he showed towards me. I remain in his debt for the direction he offered [2].
There remained the other strike against me, one (perhaps an automatic three) for having been contracted for this work by an agency of the US government. The Regional English Language Office/Officer (RELO) in the US Embassy in Manila is a part of the public diplomacy section found in all US embassies, its ‘soft power’ arm. My first encounter with US embassies had been as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in Kazakhstan, and from there I started working directly through RELOs as an English Language Fellow for three years, initially in Algeria, then Morocco; and then for two stints as an English Language Specialist in Bolivia. These CV entries undoubtedly carried weight with the RELO in Manila who had designed and funded this writing center project, and who eventually interviewed and selected me.
I need to address my work through the RELO in part because, as writing centers have spread across the world, some see that as yet another instance of American imperialism. For a timely instance, a recent issue of the Writing Center Journal included “Writing Centers and Neocolonialism: How Writing Centers Are Being Commodified and Exported as U.S. Neocolonial Tools” (Holton and Bell). In it, RELO projects are specifically called out for their political agenda; for being tools of American power. I am not sure what the Canadian authors, Brian Hotson and Stevie Bell, know about being pawns in geopolitics, but I have played the pawn in multiple games (corrections education, comp instructor, adjunct, volunteer). In this resumé lies my authority to assert that, though the game defines a pawn as the one with the most paltry power, many pawns recognize that meaning little to knights and bishops and secretaries of state affords them some freedom; they can act more effectively while under the radar. Stealth in plain sight, they can establish ‘pawn-to-pawn’ (peer-to-peer) relations and better provide their counterpart pawns with methods for maximizing their own potential and power, and this sounds like what happens in many writing center consultations (Hughs, Bell). Certainly all undergraduate writers are pawn-level players in academia, and most academic writing instructors and writing center employees are too. I would go so far as to imagine that anyone who has worked in any educational institution can view that experience as a lesson in pawn power. Hotson and Bell, however, seem to see an open and shut case of neo-colonialism by simply pointing out where the funding comes from and who our nominal bosses are. The new PNU writing center was tainted and damned at the get-go by RELO support. As a teacher, I long ago realized that I must nod to the administrator and work for the student. Isn’t that one of the fundamental concepts of peer learning and tutoring?
Certainly, RELOs situate their projects within policy objectives, rationalizing their budgets by quantifying impact, and must describe how they further policy in terms that US senators can support. They need to market their work to maintain funding, and the reports I submit to them on the templates they provide are intended to bolster their case. I find, nonetheless, that I can be honest to that audience and also be honest to my students and colleagues. For instance, the opening sentence of my final report to my Manila RELO was, “Writing centers can play an important role in the kind of student-centered pedagogy that reflects democratic principles,” something the senators can get on board with. Peer tutors remind students that their own authority is situated, not merely by the grace of professors, but in the uniqueness of their perspective. That perspective might be a neophyte’s unsettling insight into old subjects, or that the view from the far side of the globe, from the Philippine archipelago, is a vital, even a privileged angle necessary to see the whole. Students are the best ones to remind teachers and institutions of how best to use our own, limited power.
Had I allayed my doubts with these thoughts/rationalization/rebuttals? Not really. Rather, I found ways to keep them in mind as I worked in the Philippines.
I arrived in Manila on a Saturday after a 24-hour trip. After a jet-lagged Sunday, on Monday (still jet-lagged) it was time to go to the university and get to work. For my introduction to the dean and university president, I wore a suit jacket for the first and last time. This was the tropics and people have ways to express professionalism that do not require excessive sweating.
I was escorted by the RELO, Dr. Carleen Curley Velas, whose PhD is from UCLA with a background in academic writing theory, and her assistant Connie Chico who has worked for the embassy for 34 years and has seen RELOs come and come and always go and is the one who knows how to put policy into practice. Both were treated as honored visitors. Everyone was introduced with a title and a first name: President Bert and Dean Ruth. After the rounds of introductions and welcome speeches, we had lunch in the office of Dean Ruth Alido with her ‘core writing center team,’ and that simple conference table in her office would become the first place I went every morning and the last before I left. It was the Office of Figuring Things Out.
On the second morning, I came in to find Ruth on an all-faculty Zoom call. Ruth rolled her eyes to me and signaled that we could talk later. When I came back from my cubicle in the crowded faculty office room, she explained that they had been discussing a collaboration with a Korean university, but one professor in her department, a man whose intellectual awakening dawned in the 1980s’ People Power resistance to the Marcos dictatorship, would always predictably complain about any international involvement. He was a professor of Filipino language and constantly advocated for national and cultural self-sufficiency. Ruth, who had also been part of the People Power uprising, sought out international collaboration and found his stance unrealistic. English is the nation-wide language of instruction and is the ticket for job advancement.
But this professor of Filipino certainly had a valid reason to be concerned; the history of PNU is tangled with colonialism. It had been founded in 1901 “for the education of natives of the Islands in the science of teaching” [3] as one of the first policy moves in the new American colony at the end of the Philippine-American war (a piece of US history that was swept under the rug with the ashes of shame [4]). English was an explicit tool of benevolent subjugation, of making the natives change who they were through how they spoke. The new teachers’ school had been chartered at the orders of William Taft, future president but, at the time, the first governor-general of the colony and who told then President McKinley, “Our little brown brothers would need fifty or one hundred years … to develop anything resembling Anglo-Saxon political principles and skills” (Miller). The first teachers at Philippine Normal School were all Americans, known as Thomasites (after the USAT Thomas, the ship they arrived in) and were part of a proto-Peace Corps of idealistic college graduates enlisted for the noble cause. Presently, as in many countries, the Philippines is engaged in an ongoing debate over how to both support its “mother tongues” (numbering more than 100) and also have a language of economic and political mobility. I had walked into these debates, and I needed to listen to the passionate conversations as closely as one could when only hearing the English translations.
My first opportunity to hear the conversations came three days later during the new academic year’s first department gathering. By virtue of being largely unused, it was held in the room designated to house the future writing center. This was not a department meeting so much as a lunch communion where everyone (except poor, clueless me) brought in some food to share and catch up on comradery. I was handed a plate and pushed to the front of the line and grazed on everything from pork adobo to jellied coffee desert. Filling my mouth with homemade food was easier than knowing what words should come out. Most everyone was speaking in Tagalog/Filipino, and though I did not want to make everyone shift to English for my benefit, anyone I turned to seemed happy to do so. [5]
At one point I turned and, seeing one man look me up and down, I went over and introduced myself. He returned my greetings at first haltingly, then with increasing warmth and, finally, after he discovered what songs we knew in common, we found ourselves singing an unlikely Simon and Garfunkel duet. The professor of Filipino, as he turned out be, was fond not only of the political rhetoric of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but also its folk and country music. Our harmonies did not, however, silence the challenging conversations we would continue to have during my time as his colleague. A few days later, I walked into the faculty office room and, seeing him there, asked what he was doing, to which he answered, “Waiting to sing a song with a foreigner,” and he went to the corner where his guitars leaned against the wall. He was an excellent musician and a compassionate teacher, but unlike his proudly radical political stances, he restricted most of his writing criticism to grammatical correction. When I tried to point out what I saw as a contradiction in having people-power politics but prescriptive grading, he nodded, thought a bit and said that he too found it a contradiction that this white, middle class American would connect academic writing to empowerment and consciousness raising. Then he suggested we sing a John Denver song.
One professor in Ruth’s core writing center team was charged with researching the effects of a center on student writing. As much as wanting to set up a writing center, everyone wanted data, and after a while I learned that the promotion system in the national educational sector prioritized research (service was a small factor, and there were no student evaluations to consider). That was fine with me because I needed as much data as I could find on writing and grading: what kinds of writing were students asked to produce, how often, what modes of feedback were offered and perhaps most important, were there opportunities for student writers to revise. In other words, what place could a writing center find in the normal flow of writing and evaluation at the university? So, I produced a questionnaire for professors based on these and other questions, many of them having weighed on my mind even before arrival.
Ruth arranged that a Google Doc form of the survey be sent to all faculty. Scanning over it before it was sent out, she told me she could already predict the answers with high confidence. She was spot on: results described a faculty too overloaded with students and courses (weekly class time loads of 21 hours) to do much more than assign the barest minimum of writing and, in most cases, limit feedback to a final, unelaborated numerical grade. Some professors used a rubric, but usually the same generalized one for all writing; a few felt the obligation, almost a sacred duty, to mark grammatical mistakes. Some, usually ones early in their career, hand wrote comments but, as Dean Ruth admitted had been the case with her, their gushing energy petered out over the years. Numbers left on the top of student papers were their once-vital feedback’s dry fossil remains. However, most everyone wanted to do more than the conditions allowed.
I realized that my survey questions should have been more precise. Nevertheless, I saw that I could present a writing center as a way to make the professors’ work more manageable. The center could offer feedback that instructors didn’t have the time to provide, and model effective feedback to students and efficient feedback for professors. That feedback could yield observable improvements in student writing and stay the lamentations about the erosion of skills. Instructors might even end up with a stack of more finished final drafts and, undistracted by mistakes, gain feedback on what is and isn’t working in their classes. If successful, student writing might evolve into work that professors might actually enjoy reading rather than dread assigning.
The assistant dean carved out a portion of the first official departmental meeting for me to present my project. My slot was at the end, right before lunch, after all the real business was finished. Until my turn came, I sat in the back and watched the discussions on issues ranging from course assignments to in-service projects. They toggled from English to Filipino so, for half the time, I relied on tone and body language. The discussions were sometimes impassioned with clear disagreement and forceful gesticulations, but though I have sat in on many faculty meetings in many institutions, this was unlike any other I ever encountered. No one’s ideas were dismissed, there was never condescension or biting sarcasm or one-upmanship, and after contentious exchange, I saw those who had just been in such disagreement go over to the other and engage in what were clearly warm exchanges. I mentioned this to a woman sitting in front of me and she said, “Of course, we may and must disagree, but in the end, before all else, we are all friends.” This might after all be fertile ground for the most principled of writing center principles: collaboration and respect (Lunsford).
And when I got up to speak, all I suggested was treated with careful consideration. I received thoughtful answers to my questions, and reached agreements without anyone rolling over to accommodate. It seemed that the general expectations had been for a writing center that served a remedial role, but since many thought that all their students needed remediation, and that would overwhelm our resources, my proposal for a center that focused on more global writing issues seemed worth trying. By the end, everyone agreed to begin by creating a solid core, a pilot center with face-to-face tutoring and, over time, to let it expand and adapt to serve all of PNU’s students.
I met the next morning with Dean Ruth and her core writing center team. I was once again impressed with Ruth, who had a gift of making everyone comfortable enough to offer ideas and doubts in a way that led to action. When one professor worried that she was overbooked, another instructor, Marla, took over the task of selecting tutor trainees. Since students would not be paid for their substantial commitment (the university is free and it is understood that service is partial repayment), I offered to create a document that enumerated some of the benefits that peer tutors gain from their work. We formulated a tentative schedule, and I went off to complete the first training modules.
I had thought of starting with 10 to 12 trainees, but the response to the call for volunteers was overwhelming, a hundred submitting their names. Marla suggested we do the trainings in a large hall, but I gently pushed back, pointing to the advantage of training in the space where the center would be. I wanted the new tutors to feel that this was their space, their center. I felt that without them developing a sense of ownership, the center might not be sustainable. We might not be able to rely on professors, who were already overextended, to provide continuity. The 100 was winnowed down to 16, the most that the room could accommodate in ways that allowed frequent movement into pair and group work.
Asking Marla how these 16 had been chosen from the 100, she told me that they were selected from future English teachers (PNU prepares teachers destined for all teaching specialties) and their professors had identified them as the best writers of their classes. The first session with the new tutors was a week later, and I wondered if ‘best’ and ‘good’ writers were designations that we needed to explore right off.
Our opening session was titled, “Your Writing Process May Not Be My Writing Process.” Knowing how important faculty support is for writing center attendance, I had hoped that several professors would attend (Baker). However, conflicting priorities arose and, one after another, all called off. Their reasons for canceling all made perfect sense, yet I wished they didn’t have so much confidence that they could defer to me, that I would make it all work out. Long term, the center needed widespread support, and I would be twelve time zones away.
We started this session by reading a paragraph that began with the sentence, “Imagine, English in the Philippines as an American-made train, its luggage racks and boxcars crammed with American baggage and American freight.” I asked everyone to read the full paragraph and first explain in writing, “How can a language be like a train,” and then write down their own analogy for English in the Philippines. [6] After five minutes of writing, they paired up and interviewed each other, not asking what they wrote, but what the steps or moves they made to get their words on the page. The interviewing partner took notes, then they swapped roles. Each one then reported to the full group what they had heard from their partner, and usually, but not always, got their partner’s affirmation that the report was accurate. A key audience, therefore, was the source who could judge if they were accurately interpreted. This was in part an introduction to the paraphrase of the student writer’s work that is often effective in sessions, both in allowing the writer to hear how she sounds to another, and as a way for the tutor to try to enter the writer’s point of view (Valentine, Harris).
I then asked what questions they might have asked in order to better understand this strange paragraph about trains and English. I was mindful that this was a gathering of PNU’s sharpest minds, and because, as it turned out, all were from working class families, school was the one place where they could be elite. So, hands went up as if spring loaded. Yet, I held them back, asking for a full minute before anyone shared, a minute to act as an equalizer that let all students think and formulate their words. As a matter of pedagogical policy, I always try to provide a pause between posing a question and fielding answers, but in this context, that was even more important. Though everyone’s English was very good, it was no one’s first language and second language processing is somewhat slower. More importantly, we were modelling that fast should not be conflated with best.
The questions they generated about the paragraph in turn generated more, ones about certain vocabulary, who wrote it, when, in what context and, since trains are now not common in the Philippines, how this could be apt. Though I had started it off, soon the conversation was ricocheting around the room, eventually bouncing off every one of the 16 students.
Eventually, I paused the discussion to step back and reflect on the nature and power of open-ended questions, and how these sessions were, fundamentally, training on becoming skillful questioners. This first hour of listening and noting down, questioning, waiting and reflection was their initial taste of the peer tutoring we would soon dive into.
To further widen awareness of the varied ways successful writers get started, we then listened to the first episode of Alice Batt’s wonderful How We Write podcast from The University of Texas, and it was received with both surprise and pleasure. Most everyone in our select group had assumed their personal writing processes were universal best practices, but this first session revealed the spectrum of approaches that can turn a prompt into sentences. I designed our initial session to open us all up for the unexpected. For them, I was certainly something different, as they were for me; but more importantly, it turned out that they were also different from each other in their composing approaches. We were becoming more aware of our own expectations and how narrow they can be, preparing these new tutors for the flexibility necessary to work productively with whoever might come to our new center.
After this and each module, we had lunch together. The PNU commissary is so well-regarded for their lunch spreads that the faculty tries to schedule all departmental meetings as lunch meetings so that they can eat well on the university tab. And Ruth had clearly requested their best efforts for these students. The trainees were not compensated for their time in any way other than a good lunch, but they seemed to feel such a meal was just recompense. Most of these 20-year-olds held up the flowers of their warm smiles and sharp eyes on very slender stems, but it was only during a casual lunchtime conversation two weeks later did it come out that not a single one had had any breakfast before our 3+ hour morning sessions. [7] And this unbroken fast in spite of some having to rise at 4 AM to take the long commute to central Manila via three separate legs on crowded jeepneys. [8] After that, I stopped being surprised when I saw lunch plates piled four inches high with rice and Filipino classic dishes such as adobo and kare kare, favorites for many that their families could no longer afford, what with the high prices for meat and for the peanut butter in the kare kare sauce. And then some would go back for a second mountain of savory foods followed by slices of orange papaya and red and yellow watermelon for dessert. It warmed my heart to see them enjoying their food. I loved joining everyone for these lunches, and while the others were just plain hungry, I feasted on their feedback about the just completed session that allowed me to make adjustments and adaptations in the next module.
The arc of the module series started conceptually (though even these were full of activities that practiced and challenged their applicability) and became steadily more practical. For example, the second and third modules were entitled, “So, I hear you will be working in a writing center…er, what is a writing center,” and “So, I hear you will be a peer writing tutor…er, what is a peer writing tutor?” The penultimate session was “Principles and Possibilities,” which assembled some core peer tutoring strategies (e.g. looking for what’s good and building out from that, active listening, and tried-and-true questions like ‘Can you tell me more about that?’ and ‘Is there a simpler way to say that?’). Squeezed into the final, double-length module were both sentence-level responses and how to find resources focused on these issues. We gathered and shared links to exercises and explanations that could be given like parting gifts to their tutees. A single session on local issues was clearly insufficient, especially for these ESL/EFL writers, but if their professors were going to provide that promised window for global revision earlier in the writing process, we needed to take that rare opening. In my survey of them, the professors had asked for more critical thinking, stronger thesis statements and greater coherence and, judging from our cohort of trainees, students were craving the chance to use higher level thinking. To balance that with the other priority of professors, grammatical correctness, we planned that tutors would collect examples of sentence-level errors from tutee papers and then, during proposed monthly tutor workshops, pool and collate them into a library of grammar and mechanics handouts. [9]
Usually, at the core of tutor training is observation, watching an experienced tutor at work, and then reflection and discussion to process the observation. Of course, that was not an option here with not a peer tutor to be found in any of the 7,431 islands of the Philippine archipelago. To partially compensate, we had carefully studied some video clips from American writing sessions, but to get any further, we would have to rely on simulated tutor sessions.
Before we transitioned to those, I gathered anonymous feedback from our 16 tutors in training about the sessions we had already held. 100% responded ‘yes’ to whether they would recommend the training to others. The comment section yielded statements like, “The workshops ignited something in me,” and “I’m pretty sad these are coming to an end.” As much as this feedback gratified me, I understood that they were not so much about my efforts as about a pleasurable dissonance that this experience had offered and they clearly welcomed. What we had spent these weeks exploring was the tension between skill and authority. An assumption, that authority must follow the mastery of skill, had been challenged, the sequence questioned. Instead, in order to fully develop some skills, perhaps student writers first needed to realize that they must claim the ultimate authority for their own unique angle of perspective. And it is through this authority that they might, with trial and many errors and mistakes, master some of the skills needed to transfer understanding. As Peter Elbow argued back in more revolutionary times, skill development grows more vigorously when fertilized by the sense of responsibility grounded in this authority, a responsibility to use whatever rhetorical resource increases understanding, clarifies communication, and perhaps even persuades a reader of its importance. The tutors needed to encourage both skill and authority and not wait for the former to confer the latter. For these tutor trainees, who had learned to defer authority, this was both novel and delightful. They were not, as initially assumed, merely role-playing the expert, the authority on how or what to write, rather, they were becoming skilled at leveraging better academic work by deferring to their tutees a rightful share of the authority. These future teachers were learning that, though standing before students can be gratifying, student learning might need less instructor tapdancing in the spotlight and a lighter hand, even if that means standing in the learner’s shadow. Learning takes priority over teaching.
The aspiring teachers who comprised this first tutor cohort were feeling their way in the blurry overlap of student and teacher. They had been recognized as high-achieving students, but were not yet teachers. Their limited authority had been lent to them by the professors who had nominated them, but that did not make them professors. However, the new less-directive tutor role they were practicing seemed to relieve them of the unease of being mere professor impersonators. The more effectively they collaborated with other students who came for guidance, the less they would feel like imposters. Perhaps some of this came as they sensed my own unease with being officially an expert, when I also needed to defer authority to those I was constantly trying to better understand.
So, from the module presentations and activities, we moved on to simulations of tutoring. For the first one, we used a student-written text that had been posted on Academia.edu with the seemingly perfect title, “Scrutinizing the State of Academic Writing in the Philippine Context.” I could not find any information about the author other than her name, but I gathered from the context that she was a Philippine high school student when she wrote this essay, one that she was evidently proud of enough to publish online (Pasia). However, the 400-word, two-paragraph essay is so difficult to follow that at first I wondered if it was a parody of academic writing. Sentences are long and tangled, larded with words that somehow seemed even longer as if the number of syllables were points in this game. In the end, I took it as it presented itself, an example of academic writing at its best, appropriately dense and expectedly opaque, then analyzing why it is lamentably underappreciated in the Philippines. Therefore, the writer had authority as one in the trenches, battling to master the genre, but I guessed she lacked the feedback to allow her ideas to become clear enough to be communicated. Perfect.
All of the prospective tutors received a copy in advance, a head start that would not be available in most tutoring situations, but this was the first dry run. We formed a ‘fishbowl’ in the class, a small desk in the center with two chairs, and the others all circling. As for who should play the writer, I felt it would be unfair to ask any of the trainees to productively embody such opaque writing, but because I had read and re-read and worked hard to tease out what might be the intended meaning of each sentence, I hoped I could play the student writer respectfully. The tutor-playing student had volunteered, much to the evident relief of the others. She cocked her head as I read the essay aloud to her, and nodded like a pro (we had discussed the importance of non and para-verbals). Then, she asked what I meant by certain words, helped clarify some areas that the student-writer had not considered problematic, and perhaps introduced the brand new concept, revision, to the student writer.
To all those who circled the fishbowl, I had assigned the role of observer, providing each an observation form, an early draft for the form we would use for subsequent simulations. On it, they were to write whatever in the exchange seemed to be working, and what did not, and to jot down at least one question or response of their own that they thought might yield results. During our modules, ‘good question’ had been defined as one ‘that yielded a good answer,’ and ‘good answer’ meant more than ‘correct’; it could mean surprising, insightful or whatever stirs a realization or new clarity. When their turn came, the observers’ questions were well phrased and they prodded, poked and gently encouraged me, as the writer, to realize what I knew and hadn’t written, and hadn’t fully understood yet wrote anyway. One asked if there were, perhaps, three ideas in this one sentence, and if I could separate them. Another asked what I wanted the reader to take away from a section, which was followed up by suggesting that I might replace what I had written with what I had just said. The post-mortem of the activity was enough to bring the corpse back to life, and nearly every student wanted to play the next tutor. I joined the observers, and we held two more simulations that morning.
My best-laid-plan was for a sequence of steadily more autonomous tutoring simulations, paring down the fishbowl and pulling myself back, but the continuity was interrupted twice by jeepney strikes. Without this cheap transportation for students, the university had to close in-person activities, at first for three days, and then again for a week. My schedule had been tight already, with a soft opening for the center scheduled for the final week of my contract. Fortunately, Dr. Carleen Velez, the RELO, was a fervent supporter of this project and requested and received approval from Washington for a two-week extension for me, so we moved forward.
The simulated sessions used writing assignments that the trainees or their friends had previously produced. We treated them as works still in progress. I wanted enough quantity to provide a good variety, and only asked that they be accompanied by an assignment description and, if one existed, an evaluation criteria. The latter often did not exist even when grades were a very specific number and indicated an implicit criteria. One student’s essay had earned 44 out of 50 possible points, but she had no idea why she had gained so many, or what she could have done to earn more. Another had 50 out of 50, but her simulated session made her aware of so much room for improvement that she assumed the instructor had saved time and graded it unread on the basis of his already high regard for her. In my casual conversations and two formal workshops/presentations with faculty, I had suggested that a powerful tool for writing improvement may be as simple as making evaluation criteria more specific, targeting and making explicit whatever needs they identified. [10] I wagered the professors that student writing would become more satisfying to read, and they would see writing skills improve. Without these and other adaptations in instruction, simply adding a writing center would be insufficient to stay the decline in student writing. Throughout our sessions, I urged the tutors to identify their own sets of effective questions and suggestions, but without clear goals prioritized by instructors and expressed in assignment descriptions, which direction should those questions and suggestions point? The tutor sessions were to help students look to their own compasses, but the professors needed to orient the magnet. Was it none of my business if professors declined to provide explicit criteria? Or did the success of my business depend upon their clarification, articulation and communication? My position as a temporary intrusion in the business of the university made me hesitant, but my status as an expert allowed me, perhaps made me responsible, to at least enter the conversation, and that is why I volunteered a talk via Zoom during the jeepney strike and a faculty workshop.
Once the strikes were over, we returned to our work in earnest, aware that our time together was limited and that the flexibility necessary to respond to diverse writing required broad experience. Drawing on a grant designated for improving English skills at PNU, Ruth and Marla arranged for a three-day trainee retreat at a hotel about two hours from Manila. There we could focus, and then decide on policy issues (e.g. can tutors switch from English to Filipino or other tongues?; how long will sessions be? how many hours would tutors work?). I could offer what I knew other centers were doing, but they knew better what might work at PNU. Our highest priority, however, was to hold as many simulated tutoring sessions as possible. In this, the students and Ruth and Marla and I were all in agreement, though the students were also hoping there would be a pool (there was!). Not one had ever spent a night in a hotel. Excitement was high.
The simulations were held in groups of three: one trainee playing the student writer, one the tutor and one sitting to the side, equipped with a revised observation form, acting as observer. In order to give time for a post session discussion between writer and tutor, and then observer feedback, the simulations were limited to 35 minutes, the post session conversation to 25 minutes for a total of one hour before swapping roles. After the cycle of three, I asked each triad to decide on the single most significant take-away and shared that with the whole group. [11] After a long, well-earned lunch break, new groups were formed for an afternoon round.
During these sessions, I circulated around, kneeling quietly, eavesdropping, jotting down snippets and patterns I found significant. By the end of each round, my knees ached, but I was nonetheless delighted to see how, with each session, the tutors were spiraling up and forward in both skill and confidence. During the early rounds, for example, I had often heard the tutor say, “Don’t you think…” but after group discussion and critiques of technique efficacy, I began to hear tutors use more “I” instead of “you” statements, a common counseling strategy well suited to writing consultations (Rogers, “Giving and Receiving”). Rather than filling silences with premature advice, I noticed more silent yet pregnant gaps as tutors gained the confidence to let the method work, showed the patience to allow the tutee wider quiet space where they could discover their own answers. Certainly, advice was offered, but by waiting, it became more specific, apt and absorbed.
Of course, the third day ended with speeches and certificates and lots of photos. I, along with every tutor, wore new shirts emblazoned with the student-designed PNU Academic Writing Center logo on the front and, on the back, the tag line, Peer-Powered Tutoring. The ceremony was full of warmth and optimism for the success of the new writing center.
And then it was over. The training completed, the semester over except for exams, and my cramped seat on the 24-hour flight back to the United States awaiting. There was talk of an open house in the room where the center would be housed, but conflicts with the exam schedule left that ill-advised. Maybe next semester, and maybe I would join via Zoom.
As I come to the end of this report, I do not know how things stand in Manila, so cannot tie a bow around it. I am like the peer tutor after the student writer has left the room. I know the session went well, but the rest is up to them. I leave the expertise where it now belongs. We let go of each other.
My experience in the Philippines has changed for me the tense of expert. The noun places that credential firmly in the past: in studies completed, articles published, territory claimed. Now, I think of an expert as one might think of a teacher, how no one is a teacher, no matter what one's certification, if no one is learning, that teaching and learning are like a rolling ball of yin and yang. In a similar way, to claim the role and responsibility of an expert, I needed to ask others—students, peer tutors, professors, and the institution of the university—to all shoulder yet more evenly share responsibility for the quality of student writing. The usual sequence is to identify the problem, bring in an expert, and let the expert solve the problem, but perhaps the strength of an expert is only manifested when she bends the sequence into a loop, leveraging the status of expert to give expertise away, letting it diffuse, by using expert in the present tense.
Notes
[1] De La Salle University, one of Philippines most highly rated and respected universities, does have an English Language Lab, something distinct from a writing center. According to an email from its director, Dr. Jennifer Tan-de Ramos, they have neither one-on-one tutorials with students nor any peer tutors; rather their lab follows a clinic model, providing faculty-led tutorials and review classes. Since my departure from the Philippines, Central Luzon State University has opened an academic writing center, though theirs is staffed by faculty members.
[2] Ted Roggenbuck of Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, a Co-Editor for WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, not only shared honest opinions and titles of articles and books, he also linked me into the Wcenter listserv where my queries and pleas were answered by so many who patiently walked me through my baby steps.
[3] Act No. 74 of the Philippine Commission, January 21, 1901 and found on a bronze plaque at the university gate.
[4] Though I thought I knew about the three-month long Spanish-American War, I had never even heard the name of the two-year war that followed where our Filipino allies in the fight against Spain had become our targets, and when at least 200,000 were killed by American forces (along with 4,200 Americans). Nor did I realize that Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” was not about British colonialism in India as I had assumed, but was written to encourage American annexation of the archipelago while warning the US of the manly cost of taming “Your new-caught, sullen peoples,/Half devil and half child.”
[5] Filipino is an official, standardized national language based upon Tagalog, the majority language of Luzon, so among these scholars of differing mother tongues, perhaps that was their medium, but I certainly could not differentiate.
[6] Though I did not share this with the students until after their ideas had been offered, the paragraph was by Filipino poet Luis H. Francia and published in 1989 in his introduction to Brown River, White Ocean: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Philippine Literature in English, Rutgers University Press.
[7] The day after I found out about the lack of breakfast, I put aside my hesitation at flaunting my ability to easily afford them, and brought in a big bag of breakfast cakes. I placed them on a desk before anyone arrived. Modestly and deferentially, no one touched any until I urged them on.
[8] Jeepney, a portmanteau word combining jeep and jitney, is the most common public transportation in the Philippines. They might be called a portmanteau vehicle, looking like a WWII jeep in the front and then a low bus in the back. Crowded and cheap, jeepneys are cultural icons, their sides often adorned with images fusing religious and pop culture, but their outsized contributions to air pollution might mean their days are numbered.
[9] Collecting errors and turning them into handouts was suggested by RELO, Dr. Carleen Curley Velez, who had used this method at the UCLA writing center.
[10] PNU is a teachers university, so professors are more than casually aware of aligning learning goals with evaluation and of the value of rubrics. However, the rubrics I was shown were generic, using abstract evaluation criteria (usually focus, content, organization and grammar/mechanics) for all assignments rather than using them to focus on the specific learning objective (e.g. clear examples from the reading, use of a particular concept) that the professor expected but never made explicit. A few instructors did tailor their rubrics, and therefore made the writer’s (and eventually the tutor’s) work more focused and effective.
[11] The critical thinking engaged to evaluate which-of-all-they-noticed-is-best appears to increase later application of that insight.
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