One of the questions that has followed me throughout my time at the DePaul University Writing Center is the following: What is the difference between teaching and tutoring writing? My experience as a peer tutor at the Writing Center has been heavily influenced by my work as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Philosophy. The latter position precedes the former by two full academic years, which is significant if only because the two hold vastly different relationships to the problems of discipline and power. It has been an adjustment deactivating the instructor role to make way for a more collaborative, community-oriented position; and the dialectical relationship between these two educational masks will undoubtedly shape my approaches to both in the future. Nevertheless, my main motivation to pursue a job at the Writing Center was actually to provide myself with a structured opportunity to approach writing from a pedagogical standpoint.
Teaching philosophy poses unique problems for teaching writing because, more often than not, the focal point of a given class session is the content of the text as opposed to its form. Put differently, the emphasis falls on what a particular philosopher says and not necessarily how they go about saying it. This is not to imply that these two domains are mutually exclusive—the relationship between philosophy, rhetoric, and language has proven a perennial problem for the discipline from Plato to Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, we spend the vast majority of in-class time disentangling the claims and arguments from a given philosophical text because they are not necessarily laid out in some clean, clear-cut linear fashion. In fact, I constantly tell my students not to write like the philosophers we read in class. This isn’t always true: Nietzsche was a praiseworthy stylist, and, frankly, Plato’s dialogic style is as compulsively readable as it gets for being one of the incipient styles of the Western philosophical tradition. But, overall, philosophers tend to shy away from intelligibility-for-intelligibility’s-sake toward the realm of neologisms, run-on sentences, and dialectical formulations of our deepest intellectual conundrums. Indeed, this is where teaching writing kicks in: focusing on the how or the mechanics behind the communication of ideas.
Perhaps this is taboo to disclose, but it has been my experience that doctoral candidates in philosophy do not receive much instruction on how to actually teach writing. We spend plenty of time trying to make particular philosophers and texts intelligible to ourselves; naturally, our courses take on the task of making these ideas graspable at the undergraduate level. On the one hand, this makes plenty of sense: philosophy is a discipline with its own set of objects and problems that define it, and there is nothing beyond its textuality that tethers it to writing any more than the other humanities. That being said, most philosophy courses heavily utilize writing assignments, which account for a significant portion of a student’s grade. In my own classes, this is certainly true; assignments typically consist of periodic discussion posts throughout the quarter, in addition to midterm and final essays. After reflecting upon this apparent gulf between my knowledge about teaching writing and my actual teaching of writing itself, I figured it was time to dirty my hands a bit with writing pedagogy in general—and what better way to do this than in the trenches of my local writing center!
Tutors assemble sites of learning for writers that are tailored specifically to their questions and assignments. Though these sites often prove to be skills-based, another equally important aim is to instill confidence in visiting writers for future approaches to their work. In this way, my tutoring philosophy embraces many of the University Center for Writing-based Learning’s (UCWbL) core beliefs: that anyone who writes tout court is a writer; that there is no universal writing process that all writers should use; and that all writers, “no matter how accomplished, can improve their writing by sharing work in a progress and revising based on constructive criticism.” Indeed, these beliefs mark the distinguishing factor for me between teaching and tutoring, insofar as teaching entails an authoritative role that ultimately transforms the writer into a student.
I see the role of the tutor as, above all, that of an experimental facilitator. Our job is to help writers conduct experiments with the written word and expose them to its problematic field: the “law” of genre, the “rules” of grammar, and the normativity of academic style, to name a few elements that make up this field. To be clear, our job is by no means to enforce these, but rather to provide writers opportunities to encounter them in their own way. This approach is heavily influenced by what Gilles Deleuze calls an “apprenticeship in signs,” which grounds his theory of knowledge as one of experimental learning. Rather than framing the process of learning as one of hierarchy between educator and learner—in the sense that the ‘master’ sets the learning objectives and the student in turn ‘solves’ and internalizes them—Deleuze claims that the essence of learning consists of encounters with the problematic constitution of the world, as opposed to simply uncovering ready-made solutions. In the Writing Center, these encounters take the form of working through assignment prompts, understanding grammatical concepts, and uncovering effective ways for writers to communicate their ideas. The tutor provides the space for the writer to expose themselves to the problems that condition writing, and this exposure leads to learning that is a synthesis between receiving new information and applying that which the writer may implicitly already know.
Although teaching does not necessitate disciplinary thinking or hierarchical imparting of knowledge, the role of the tutor can be distinguished by explicitly embracing the communal, collaborative, and situational nature of writing appointments. Tutoring is a site where rules, genres, styles, and voices mix purposefully. It is a field of experimentation where there are no grades. It is a moment of clarification for each party involved, whether that moment be the understanding of a certain prescribed concept or the radical breaking with convention. The tutor promotes writing for writing’s sake, which may lead to “better” or “more effective” written assignments as a byproduct. But far more important than the improvement of grades is the demystification of the writing process. Everyone is a writer, and I take this seriously as the task of the tutor: awaken this in every writer you encounter—including yourself.
1 One of Deleuze’s favorite examples of learning is swimming: “To learn is to enter into the universal of the relations which constitute the Idea, and into their corresponding singularities. The idea of the sea, for example, as Leibniz showed, is a system of liaisons or differential relations between particulars and singularities corresponding to the degrees of variation among these relations—the totality of the system being incarnated in the real movement of the waves. To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic field.” Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 165.
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