English 12X

Joshua Geist - Fall 2024

Project 2

Resources
Session recorded by

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Transcript and Writeup Due

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Writeup Length

3-4 pages

Have you ever heard your own voice on a voicemail? It sounds funny. It always feels a bit embarrassing,1 to me, because it’s so not how I sound to myself. The reason all comes down to bones and spaces. Because your ears are inside your head, you hear all kinds of strange resonances—in your mouth, in you sinuses, all the little empty spaces in your skull—that nobody else does. When you just hear the vibrations that actually make it into the world, it sounds odd, because all the little shades and implications that things had inside your head are lost, and instead you just get this weird-sounding person reciting your words.

In working with students, the experience is often very similar. It’s almost impossible to listen to yourself as you work with a writer, because your attention is focused—rightly, I think—on listening to the writer. When we ask a question and the student doesn’t answer, we hear silence, and so we may try to rephrase or reconsider the question we’re asking. We may think the student doesn’t have an answer, and so we may present our own hypothetical responses. Or we may assume the student doesn’t want to talk, and decide to push forward. We’re thinking about the next step—but because we’re thinking of the next step, it’s really difficult to slow down and really listen to ourselves.

If you had a recording of that hypothetical session I described, and you listened to it, what do you think you might hear? Or, more specifically, how long do you think you waited for the student to respond before you rephrased, hypothesized, projected, moved on, or gave up? If you’re like most classroom teachers, the odds are that the answer is less than one second.2

It’s really hard to hear something like that when it’s happening. In order to notice that sort of thing, we need to step back and really listen to ourselves.

This is the goal of Project 2.

Your Task - 123

For Project 2, I’ll ask you to record a session in the Writing Center, listen to it, transcribe a section of that session, and analyze that transcript in a short paper.

  1. Record. This is the first step of the process, obviously. It doesn’t have to be a great session or a terrible one; the whole point of the activity is to look at ourselves, and in a way, I feel like introspection is really most useful when we’re at our most average.

    Make sure to have your student fill out the Informed Consent before you start recording. Both you and the student should remember that this project is about helping tutors help writers.

    After your session, write a bit about how you think it went. What stands out to you as you think about it? What do you wish you’d done differently? What do you think went well? What was the most interesting moment in the session?

  2. Listen. Before you start transcribing, listen to your recording, from beginning to end. Pay attention to yourself and to the student. What stands out to you now? What did you notice listening that you didn’t notice in the moment? What do you see differently, now that you’ve had a little bit of time?

    Most importantly, try to figure out where in this session is most interesting. This might mean the most important moment; it might mean the moment things went wrong; it might mean the moment the student figured everything else; it might mean the moment when you finally understood what it was you were trying to say. There are lots of reasons that you might choose to look at a particular section more closely, but bear in mind that what we’re thinking about here is which section you’re going to transcribe—so we’re trying to find a place where looking closely at the rhythm of conversation will help us see something differently.

    In the end, choose about five minutes of the session to transcribe. This can be five consecutive minutes, or five minutes spread throughout the session—for example, the two minutes before you read the paper and the three minutes after.

  3. Transcribe. For this assignment, we’ll be using the method of close vertical transcription developed by Gilewicz and Thonus for this purpose. (You’ll find a link to their article on the subject above.) For convenience, I’ve also put together a cheat-sheet for transcription conventions that will make the process of transcribing easier.

    This is not a particularly intuitive process, for sure, and so I’m not expecting that everybody get everything perfect. It’s a bit like MLA style: there are rules and conventions, sure, but at the same time, you will often have to make difficult choices in the space of those conventions. The point isn’t to transcribe everything beautifully, but to learn from the process of looking this closely at a moment in our tutoring.

  4. Write. Once you’ve transcribed your session, give it a little time. Take a day or two to let it fall out of your head, if you can, and then come back to it. Look at again through eyes less attuned to the technical fiddliness of the process, and see what you can learn from it.

    This, ultimately, is the question I’d like to see you answer: what does this session, and this transcription, tell you about yourself as a writing consultant? What can you learn, as a tutor, from this experience? What do you want to keep doing? What do you want to do differently?

    There’s enough to do in this process without research, that’s for darn sure, so I won’t be asking you to do any outside research as a part of this process. But do please use your transcription as a part of your writeup, as if the transcription itself were an outside source. Quote yourself, quote your student, refer to specific sections. The system includes a marker to identify specific lines in a transcription for analysis (⇒ — and if you can’t figure out how to make that sign, a good ol’ => works just as well). Use it.

    Just remember: you’re learning from your own experience, here, but you’re also sharing that learning with an audience that has not worked as intimately with your transcription as you have. Make sure to show us what you’re seeing.

Your Task - 124-6

For those of you who are in Engl 124-126, you’ve already transcribed one of your own sessions, and I won’t make you go through that again. Instead, I’ll invite you to pick on someone else. Your procedure will be more or less the same as the above, with the following modifications.

First, instead of recording your own session, I’ll ask you to choose from the library of preexisting recordings available on Canvas.3 (Click on Files, and then on Sample Recordings.)

Second, in your writeup and analysis, I’ll ask you to look at this recording through the lens of your focus area.

  • For those of you in 124, try to find a session where the writer is dealing with lower-order concerns. How does their approach to these issues jibe with what we’ve been learning about working with language?

  • For those of you in 125, try to talk about the pedagogy of the tutor. How do the tutors’ choices connect with the readings we’ve been doing about writing theory?

  • For those of you in 126, what does your research tell you about the tutor’s choices? While I’m not asking you to do new research for this, I would like to see you talk about the readings you’ve already done.

  1. When I was fourteen or so, it occurred to me that the etymology of the word “embarrassed” might be “to be made bare-assed.” This is clearly false, but I still somehow find it poignant. ↩

  2. Rowe, Mary Budd. “Wait Time: Slowing Down May Be A Way of Speeding Up!” Journal of Teacher Education 37.1 (1986): 43-50. Print. ↩

  3. Note: if you want to record your own session, you’re welcome to do so—especially useful for those of you in 126 whose research areas may not be well represented in the recordings. ↩