The WAC Clearinghouse
supporting scholarly exchange about communication across the disciplines
supporting scholarly exchange about communication across the disciplines
By Steven J. Corbett
Copy edited by Don Donahue. Designed by Mike Palmquist.
How closely can or should writing centers and writing classrooms collaborate? Beyond Dichotomy explores how research on peer tutoring one-to-one and in small groups can inform our work with students in writing centers and other tutoring programs, as well as in writing courses and classrooms. These multi-method (including rhetorical and discourse analyses and ethnographic and case-study) investigations center on several course-based tutoring (CBT) partnerships at two universities. Rather than practice separately in the center or in the classroom, rather than seeing teacher here and tutor there and student over there, CBT asks all participants in the dynamic drama of teaching and learning to consider the many possible means of connecting synergistically.
This book offers the "more-is-more" value of designing more peer-to-peer learning situations for developmental and multicultural writers, and a more elaborate view of what happens in these peer-centered learning environments. It offers important implications—especially of directive and nondirective tutoring strategies and methods—for peer-to-peer learning and one-to-one tutoring and conferencing for all teachers and learners of writing.
Steven J. Corbett is Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University. He received his Ph.D. in English Language and Rhetoric from the University of Washington-Seattle in 2008, and he was assistant professor of English and co-coordinator of composition at Southern Connecticut State University-New Haven from 2008-2013. He is co-editor (with Michelle LaFrance and Teagan Decker) of the collection Peer Pressure, Peer Power: Theory and Practice in Peer Review and Response for the Writing Classroom (Fountainhead Press, 2014). His essays on teaching, writing, and rhetoric have appeared in The Writing Center Journal, Rhetoric Review, Pedagogy, Kairos, The Writing Lab Newsletter, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors 4th ed., On Location, Diversity in the Composition Classroom, ePortfolio Performance Support Systems, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. He is currently co-editing (with Michelle LaFrance) a forthcoming critical sourcebook on student peer review and response for Bedford/St. Martin's, co-editing (with Betsy Cooper) a special multimodal issue of the journal Across the Disciplines on writing in the performing and visual arts, and co-authoring a monograph (with Paul Rogers) on listening and responding to writers and writing.
Publication Information: Corbett, Steven J. (2015). Beyond Dichotomy: Synergizing Writing Center and Classroom Pedagogies. Perspectives on Writing. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. Available at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/dichotomy/
Publication Date: January 3, 2015.
Contact Information:
Steven J. Corbett: scorbet3@gmu.edu
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Chapter Two: Methods and Methodology: Locating Places, People, and Analytical Frames
Chapter Five: Conclusion: Toward Teacher/Student, Classroom/Center Hybrid Choices
Perspectives on Writing
Series Editor: Susan H. McLeod, University of California, Santa Barbara
This book is available in whole and in part in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). It is also available in print at Parlor Press.