Writing Center Shadow 6

Last week at the Writing Center, the fellow that I tutored strongly encouraged me to lead the consultation.  An international student from Singapore came in to brainstorm for his essay for his First Year Seminar class.  The class was about moral and economics in the United States, so his assignment was to compare Adam Smith's ideas with the current recession and the moral of people today and whether Smith's ideas applied.  I thought this consultation went very well for me because it was something that I was interested in and it was just a brainstorming phase.  Consultations that involve structure are the most difficult for me because I have difficulty with thesis statements and structure when writing my own papers.  The student brought in a page of notes he had written for this assignment and we discussed recent scandals in business and policies that have been made.  As a Business major, I found a lot of topics to discuss with him.  Because he is an international student, he was unsure of what was meant by aspects of the economy such as "Federal Reserve Bank" and "Fractional Reserve Banking System".  I was able to explain these topics to him to the best of my ability, but I also told him to consult his professor if he had more questions.  He took down notes of what he thought he could best explain in relation to moral and Adam Smith's ideas.  This consultation was exciting for me because we were discussing topics that interest the student and I and we were in the preliminary phases of planning so there were not specific issues to solve.

Cultural Barriers

For today's class, we read articles about working with ESL students in the Writing Center.  It seems as though the concept of international relations has been coming up in all of my class and that it is currently a very important topic.  Because countries interact regularly and are made up of many different nationalities and cultures, learning habits of different cultures can be beneficial to avoid disrespecting the person you are working with, particularly in the Writing Center.  In my Business Communications class, we focus a great deal on dealing with interpersonal communications abroad.  For instance, in Asia pauses between conversation are common in order to give the decision maker time to contemplate.  However, Americans see these pauses as a chance to provide more input to whatever idea they are trying to sell.  This can be seen as interruptive and rude in other cultures.

Mentoring with Tina

As mentioned in the article, the author is from a background in which her mother and father supported her strongly throughout her education and she never had a doubt in her mind that she would go to college.  This sounds very similar to the type of environment that I grew up in and the majority of students at my high school as well as at University of Richmond.  This article relates to the Boys and Girls Club because like the narrator, we do not know whether these students are engrained with the notion that you can't succeed if you don't go to college.  Although Tina did not have any desire to go to college or even try in high school, she still had powerful ideas.  Unfortunately, the teachers did not give her a chance to express her wisdom before they judged her.  This article exemplifies the old saying "you can't judge a book by its cover".  The teachers marked her down when they saw all the grammatical errors, but they did not understand the message that Tina was trying to convey about the courage in her father's death and his heroic actions.  Passengers on the bus held their belongings closer as she walked passed because they assumed she was mischievous based on her appearance.  Rather than getting to know Tina, the teachers and principal condemned her before getting to the root of the issue.  This story shows that although someone may act tough and as though he or she is not concerned with the future, it is possible that the behavior is a need for friendship.  At the Boys and Girls Club, although the students may seem uninterested with performing the work needed for a digital story, the fact of the matter is that they may just give off that appearance when in reality the new experience excites them.

Writing Center Shadow 5

It seems as though I tend to delay blogging about my Writing Center shadowing sessions until a week later, right before my next session.  Last week, the writing consultant and I discussed an essay with a student in a First Year Seminar class.  The assignment topic was to compare the ideas about racism between two black men.  The student was very confident about his work, which contained a great deal of well developed ideas.  However, some of his ideas did not flow together well and he was missing transitions at times.  In his conclusion, he discussed a point that would have added significance to one of the points he made earlier in the essay.  This student was very interested in why some suggestions made by the writing consultant would work better than what he had originally.  Also, he had his paper completed on the Monday evening, even though the paper was not due until Friday.  This allowed the writing consultant to offer assistance via email to him throughout the week if he wanted to revise sections that he noted had issues.  I thought this was a great way to create a bond with the student being consultant because it is a way to make the student feel confident about his or her writing because the consultant is looking forward to revisiting the piece.

Boys and Girls Club Visit

On Monday, we went to the Boys and Girls Club in Richmond to help the students there plan their digital stories to honor someone in the community and their "pearl of wisdom".  I worked with a 7th grade girl from the community.  She had done her interview and had the responses typed up.  However, to interview her mother's supervisor at the local church, she had simply emailed the questions that the Boys and Girls Club had given her and then the lady responded to each question.  We watched digital stories on YouTube and the one that I had created for class.  It was hard to hear the narrative, but she found the pictures interesting.  I explained to her how she could take pictures of different things to provide a visual for the story she was telling.  She had a digital camera, but I also explained to her that she could find images on Flickr as well by searching.  In regards to the narrative, she seemed wary about how she would create a story from the responses she received.  I explained how she could introduce the woman she interviewed and what meaningful aspects of her life coincided with her Pearl of Wisdom.  The Pearl of Wisdom was "if you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything", which I thought was a great piece of advice.  Between loading videos and the end of a discussion about a component of the digital story, I tried asking her questions about other things, but she would give me one word responses.  Throughout our time together, she seemed unmotivated about the narrative aspect, yet she liked seeing examples of digital stories on YouTube and about the idea of using a digital camera.  I look forward to meeting with her next time to see how she was able to incorporate her voice into what she learned from the woman she had interviewed and what types of images she chooses to support her narrative.

UR Downtown 1

For my meeting with a student at UR Downtown about Digital Stories, I am first going to present a Digital Story to him or her.    I found one on YouTube that I found interesting called Media Influence that a student created for her sociology class.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l-knO8zzmU . This digital story creates emotion, has effective images, and evokes a new perspective from the audience.  I'll explain my process to the student that I used to create my digital story for English 383 and English 103.  First gather information, then create a narrative, then cut it down so it contains the most important information.

Writing Center Shadow 4

Last Monday I went to shadow at the Writing Center.  There was a girl who came in with her paper about a woman rights activist exemplifying her qualities as a leader.  She had sent her essay to the consultant prior to the consultation, so we were able to read over it and discuss some of the issues with the organization of the essay.  The consultant asked me if I wanted to run the consultation.  I was hesitant because I had not seen many consultations, but she encouraged me to conduct the consultation.  Because the ideas of each paragraph were not clearly defined, we made an outline of the points the consultant was attempting to make.  The Writing Consultant ended up taking charge, which I was happy about because I was struggling with an innovative way to incorporate a different idea for a new paragraph.  It was a good experience for me to be more involved with conducting the consultation than I was at the previous one.