Friday, June 8, 2007

Compare and Contrast Presentation Discussion

Want to collaborate on a an MTA/MWCA panel/roundtable discussion by tutors from different specialities? You might present at both conferences, present a different panel at each conference, focus on one conference, or work out something else.

Starting Points For This Topic: This is the spot for your discussion about tutoring similarities and differences. Add a comment and review current comments. Consider how this panel might discuss best practices, goals, strategies, problems, issues, etc. that might be similar among all tutoring, how you've contrasted your area and tutoring in it with other disciplines, or how you think tutoring in your area differs from other tutoring situations.

Feel free to ignore the starting points sugggestions and to offer new topics.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I’m definitely interesting in this panel discussion idea. I really like the idea that rather than being a group of people talking to the audience about what we do, we’d be talking to each other about what we do, debating a bit, and including the audience in that discussion. I think that the idea of bringing in the theory is interesting—it would make me feel like a writing center scholar J. I also really like the idea of having the session be a discussion between people who probably have developed different practices and picked up on different ideas, yet all of us consider what we do to be what writing centers do. Kim mentioned that we should probably read some standard writing center texts and develop some core criteria that seem to make a writing center what it is in order to better inform our discussions. I think that starting off with Stephen North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center” and “Revisiting ‘The Idea of a Writing Center,’” in addition to Jeff Brook’s “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work” and Linda Shamoon and Deborah Burns’ “A Critique of Pure Tutoring,” would be good. Kim, I’ll make copies of these and give them to Jen, Kyle, and Melody. Any suggestions? Other texts? Let me know!

Kim Ballard said...

Elena,

Thanks for posting your ideas. I think the idea of people sharing a few text ahead of time could be very useful. Since all I tutor is writing, I can't suggest texts in other courses, but maybe some others will join in.