Tell Me How It Reads: Tutoring Deaf and Hearing Students in the Writing Center

Preface

vii Preface FOR SOME TIME now, I have been interested in how writing centers can help all students. I am always looking for issues that provoke interest, cause writing center people to reflect on tutorial practices, and lead to improvement. Tutoring deaf students is one such issue. Compositionists and writing center professionals are interested in learning more about this topic, as evidenced in posts and questions raised regularly on WCenter (a listserv for writing center professionals) and the attendance at sessions on deafness and writing at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Muriel Harris (pers. comm.), editor of the Writing Lab Newsletter, reports that people frequently inquire about articles on tutoring deaf students.The goal of my research is to raise awareness about providing quality tutoring services to all students who come into the writing center, beginning with this study of deafness and how it interacts with common tutoring practices. Ideally, the research as presented in this book will provide a model or at least describe practices for working with deaf students. Because of the need for published research studies on writing centers in general and tutoring deaf college students in particular, I am pleased to share my research with a wider audience through this book. I hope that what I have learned will improve tutoring for collge-level deaf students and that readers will be inspired to conduct their own studies. The overarching question that informs the entire study is, what happens in a tutoring session between a deaf tutee and a hearing tutor?This question has three subparts: viii Preface 1. What is the content of the tutorial (what material is covered) between a deaf tutee and a hearing tutor,and is it different from a tutorial between a hearing tutor and a hearing student? 2. How does the tutoring happen? What are the participants’ roles and behaviors? What techniques are used? 3. What are the contributing and complicating factors: communication, affect, others? The research goals and questions for this study evolved as I conducted it. In many qualitative studies, the research goals and questions evolve as the researcher learns more about the phenomenon at hand (Strauss and Corbin 1998). In this case, the goals remained stable while the research questions evolved. Even though the original questions are still valid, I learned while carrying out the research how to improve the arrangement and organization of the questions. Theoretical and Experiential Framework I offer this brief explanation of my personal beliefs and background to “come clean” as a biased, human, and fallible researcher. Positionality Statement I am a Caucasian, middle-class, hearing woman born in the 1960s. I have recently come to realize that I belong to a generation that is different from that of my own students and some of the participants in this study. I was raised in eastern Massachusetts and attended mostly public schools, up to and including university. I do not have any deaf people in my family, and my experience with and exposure to deaf people was limited before I engaged in this study.I have always been interested in linguistics, and it is that angle that most interests me in the study. I am also concerned with equality, social justice, and people’s rights. I believe strongly that all people have the same rights even if they are different physically or mentally or in the way they approach life tasks. Many people who work with deaf people may be exploiting them or paternalizing them for their Preface ix own gain (Lane 1992). I have examined myself and have not found any of the motives or feelings that Lane describes.I am grateful,however,that the participants have made it possible for me to complete this study.They have agreed to let me document them not just for me but for others who might be helped by this research. Foucault said, “[T]he turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection”(quoted in Lane 1992,81). I have done my best not to let this happen. By “member checking” (participant feedback), the participants let me know if they were not happy with the way they were portrayed, and I either changed the description or added their opinions as a form of polyvocality, so opinions and interpretations other than the author’s could be represented. Personal Beliefs and...