ENGL 339 Blog Post 5: Bedford Guide Chapter 4 & Bruffee's Essay

     Chapter 4 of the Bedford Guide discusses the types of writers you may encounter during a tutoring session. Writers have different learning styles, skills, and concerns, and it’s important to know how to navigate them. Presenting yourself as a sympathetic ally and giving specific, manageable tasks may be more helpful to a writer who is experiencing a lot of anxiety about their assignment than it would be for a writer who only needs help with sentence-level suggestions. The chapter also discusses the importance of cultural sensitivity when it comes to working with multilingual writers. Cultural differences often influence the rhetorical choices multilingual writers make when they are writing in English, so it’s important to listen to what writers are trying to say on paper and help them make sense of it. Bruffee’s article discusses the importance of collaboration during a tutoring session. He argues that thoughts often originate during conversation, and conversation flows best between peers. Educators are seen as the ones who hold all the knowledge, so an academic discussion with them can seem daunting. 

     I particularly enjoyed the section in Bruffee’s article about how discussion based learning doesn’t always work the way it should.  A discussion will often turn into one person speaking for long periods of time, rather than actually having a conversation with others and considering other perspectives. I find this to be true in a lot of my classes (not this one), where class “discussions” are just the smartest students in the room showing off what they know for those sweet participation points. 

   My question is how might class discussions be made more equal and collaborative? Should professors stop grading participation in this way to encourage students to speak when they actually have something meaningful to say?