Second Language Writers, Writing Centers, and Reflection

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BEN RAFOTH

Tutoring involves multiple responsibilities. Tutors must ask the right questions and listen carefully when writers respond. They are expected to read critically, explain clearly, motivate, and empathize. As they work with writers from different backgrounds and abilities on assignments from an array of disciplines, they are also expected to know their limits and reach beyond them. Tutors are asked to do many things, but it is hard to imagine any writing center where the expectations for tutors' responsibilities do not begin with understanding the purpose of education because understanding education's purpose shapes the meaning and practice of tutoring.

Philosopher John Dewey believed that the purpose of education is to foster a love of learning and a desire for more education. For Dewey (1920), education is an end in itself because openness to learning leads to greater social cohesion, democracy, and equality. These ideals were not idle abstractions in the first half of twentieth-century America when Dewey's writings were taking shape against a backdrop of grinding automation, income inequality, and child labor. Dewey's ideas were born in an American context of swelling immigration, crowded schools, and racial and ethnic tensions that were no less severe than the ones we face today. Dewey believed education was the lever that would move the United States and the world to a better place. It still holds that promise.

For tutors reading this book — from those who have little experience to those with a lot, and from undergraduate to graduate tutors — it is worth taking a moment to understand why Dewey's vision of progressive education provides a foundation for the work of writing centers. I believe it does so for three reasons: Dewey's vision is grounded in real-world experience, it looks toward the future, and it is embedded in a robust philosophical tradition. When learning is grounded in experience, it is driven by curiosity and the desire to discover new things through research and inquiry. When it looks to the future, learning is ambitious and hopeful; it tries to make a positive difference. And when learning is embedded in a robust philosophy of life, like Dewey's pragmatism, it helps us to think about teaching and writing in the context of broad philosophical perspectives that include epistemology, politics, and aesthetics.

When L2 writers striving to develop advanced literacy step into a campus writing center in the United States, they put more on the table, figuratively speaking, than drafts of their papers. They carry with them a history of their experiences with English, when and how they learned it, the values they associate it with, and the parts of their lives it displaces. They carry with them the struggles and rewards that are part of the experience of learning English. More important, they come to the table optimistic about their future and the role that education plays in it. If they seem intensely focused on their papers, it may be because they know the stakes are high. Second language writers want for themselves and the world they inhabit many of the same things almost everyone does, and they see learning to write well, in English or some variety of it, as a way up, and perhaps out. Coming as they often do from rich traditions of literacy in their homelands, they are also familiar with the aesthetic and intellectual rewards of writing and reading. They seek tutors who can help them attain whatever goals they have for writing.

Aspirations such as these find their way to writing centers because tutoring is transformative, as a number of writing center scholars have shown: Condon (2012); Fels and Wells (2011); Greenfield and Rowan (2011); Grimm (1999); Harris (1995); Kail and Trimbur (1987); and Grutsch McKinney (2013). Each of these works has its own philosophical grounding, and it is not necessarily in Dewey's pragmatism. As a whole, however, writing center scholarship devoted to bringing about greater justice in the world through education builds, at least in part, on Dewey's legacy.

I have been a writing center director and tutor for twenty-five years, and it is still remarkable to me how much knowledge, skill, and understanding it takes to be a writing tutor. Compared to a lecturer who stands before a room full of students and imagines everyone in the room to be smart, eager, and appreciative, tutoring is personal. Each session is unique, and a tutor needs to think about a lot more than the talking points in a lecture. This is the case for all of the writers we work with, but it is particularly true for L2 students. More than twenty years ago, Harris and Silva (1993) observed, "We should recognize that along with different linguistic backgrounds, ESL students have a diversity of concerns that can only be dealt with in the one-to-one setting where the focus of attention is on that particular student and his or her questions, concerns, cultural presuppositions, writing processes, language learning experiences, and conceptions of what writing English is all about" (525). Tutors must contend with learning as it unfolds in the ways Muriel Harris and Tony Silva describe, and when they falter, they must come up with something else. They also must deal with a broad range of individual differences because each student's approach to writing and learning is different, some proceeding methodically and efficiently as they navigate their boat down the middle of the river...