Writing Commons Open Access Videos

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  Supporting the Growth of Graduate Writers: A Film

  Talinn Phillips and Rachael Ryerson

  Supporting the Growth of Graduate Writers: A Film offers short scenes to capture the work of real graduate writers and writing consultants. Each scene has been collaboratively written to represent common issues graduate student writers face. Each scene also includes specific strategies writing consultants can use to help graduate students grow as writers.

  Writing consultants will learn how to help writers adapt to the complex academic, psychological, and social demands of graduate writing. Supporting the Growth of Graduate Writers also helps consultants to use the demands of unfamiliar genres and disciplines to develop a posture of openness and humility.

  Scene topics include:

  • supporting novice graduate students
  • strategizing revisions
  • conducting literature reviews
  • developing genre knowledge across disciplinary boundaries

  These stand-alone scenes can be viewed in any order, making them adaptable to a variety of writing consultant training programs. Writing consultants can also watch the scenes independently to improve their practice.

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  Becoming an Ally: Tutoring Multilingual Writers

  Talinn Phillips, Rachael Ryerson, and Candace Stewart

  Becoming an Ally: Tutoring Multilingual Writers is a series of short training films for writing center tutors created by Dr. Candace Stewart, Dr. Rachael Ryerson, and Dr. Talinn Phillips. The film is a collaborative project of the Student Writing Center and the Graduate Writing and Research Center at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

  As we examined our decades of work with multilingual writers, we realized that allyship is the underlying goal of our tutoring practice. We want to come alongside writers, draw on their strengths, and then teach and support them as they work towards their goals. But what does it actually mean to be an ally? It can be difficult work and there are certainly times when we make mistakes. In these scenes we explore ways of being an ally for multilingual writers and some of the challenges that we face in that work. We examine the assumptions that tutors and writers may bring to the tutoring session and strategies for working through them. We struggle to avoid appropriating writers’ texts and we also explore the ways that speaking in home languages can benefit the writers we work with. And, while our focus here is on becoming allies for multilingual writers, we think you’ll find that many of the issues these scenes highlight apply to many different student populations. We also hope you'll identify more possibilities for allyship in your own work and with other subpopulations of multilingual writers.

  Note that these scenes feature real tutors from our writing centers working with real writers on their real texts. The tutors and writers are acting though. We worked carefully with our writers to identify past writing projects that could help us highlight important issues and challenges.

  Becoming an Ally: Tutoring Multilingual Writers is also available for viewing on Vimeo page. The film is comprised of seven scenes ranging from 10-20 minutes. We encourage you to view them in order or individually according to your needs. Total run time is 92 minutes.