Issue 2: Tutoring with Linguistic Justice Mindfulness and Tutoring Citation Formatting
message from editor
Our second issue invited submissions on bringing tutors’ attention to enacting linguistic justice in consultations and training tutors to teach citation formatting. As with the first issue, one topic deals with broad systems and contexts that tutors navigate while the other addresses particular writing elements that we often view as late-stage proofreading concerns, but that challenge many writers. Administrators can find it difficult to create trainings for widely global as well as narrowly local issues, and tutors often struggle to find successful strategies for those without explicit guidance. Thankfully, we have three lesson plans here that can be adapted to aid that work.
Writing center staff have been interested in language from the creation of the first writing labs. We are currently in a moment in which language and identity are considered together to push policies, procedures, spaces, training, materials, and staff to be as equitable and accessible as possible for everyone who visits and works in our centers. To promote that, Beardsley offers an adaptable reading group lesson plan that invites tutors to read, discuss, and create a collaborative annotated bibliography of a variety of anti-racist texts. Whether held as a two-part training or a semester-long series of meetings, administrators can guide tutors as they apply content from the readings to their own consulting practices and save that knowledge in a permanent resource.
If other writing centers are like mine, most of the questions that tutors field and resources they hand out explain or illustrate source citation. When faced with formatting questions, tutors sometimes struggle to guide writers through the learning process of proper citation and instead simply tell writers what to fix. To help tutors find entry points to that instruction, Forcier & Denny offer activities for tutors to reflect on, analyze, and discuss citation style use in academic writing to cement their understanding of disciplinary values and expectations for guiding citation conversations with writers. Fisher & Gingerich further break down the importance and difficulty of citing sources so that tutors can generate a shared resource of strategies to navigate the challenges that writers typically face.
We hope to continue to publish similarly robust examples of scholarly and administrative work. We know that valuable training is happening in all writing centers, no matter the institution types, locations, staff demographics, and administrators’ backgrounds. We invite anyone – tutors included – to propose to our future issues and share the training lessons that the staff in your center have found beneficial.
Erin Zimmerman University of Nevada, Las Vegas
lesson plans
Click on the titles of the lesson plans below to reach the lesson plan overview page and complete lesson plan materials.
Topic: Linguistic Justice Mindfulness
Submissions for this theme must be designed to prepare tutors to honor the voice and language choices that writers make. Proposals might discuss how tutors learn about the history and formation of standard language ideology, are trained to be conscious of and perhaps work to dismantle the belief that there is one correct version of standard academic English, and/or create space in consultations for dialogue about multilingual writers’ experiences in their institutional contexts.
This lesson plan includes instructions for using reading groups for writing tutor training. I discuss setting up reading groups, assigning readings, and sharing content that introduces tutors to an anti-racist approach to tutoring. Discussion questions, the list of tutor-selected readings, and sample materials demonstrating how we implemented concepts from the readings are included to show how to design similar training sessions or share with consultants.
Topic: Citation Formatting
Submissions for this theme must be designed to prepare tutors to work with writers who want help with citation concerns. Proposals might discuss how to train tutors to work with common citation formatting issues, how to guide tutors' knowledge of working with style guides and resources, and/or how to help tutors make use of style guides and resources in consultations to support learning.
This lesson on citation starts with the concepts of disciplinary values and the ways that disciplines create and build knowledge, including how they use citation. The lesson begins with asking tutors to reflect on their own experiences in classes and within their majors when working with source material and citations. After that paired work, tutors then complete an annotation activity with two articles, written in different citation styles, looking at how the authors of those pieces used citation and where. The lesson concludes with a large group discussion of what tutors know from experience, what they learned from the annotation activity, and how they can apply disciplinary knowledge in tutoring sessions to demystify citation and guide students to understanding its purpose.
This training plan sets a foundation in preparing tutors to assist writers with citation concerns by encouraging open conversation about the difficulties of tutoring citation and generating strategies for moving forward. The opening activity encourages tutors to share their experiences and emotions related to tutoring citation, aiming to create an open and supportive training environment; facilitators are given multiple interactive options for approaching this task. A presentation portion explores the importance of citation pragmatically, rhetorically, and theoretically before exploring elements that make citation challenging, including the interpretive nature of documentation, information literacy, tech literacy, container collapse, and vague source type classification. Facilitators are then provided with activities to encourage tutors to generate strategies for tutoring through these various challenges, empowering them to move forward with more confidence in their tutoring sessions. The plan provides several options for activities for appropriate adaptation, presentation materials, and a handout regarding documentation.
