The Pedagogical Ethic: A Qualitative Study of Undergraduate Writing Consultant Practice

The purpose of this qualitative research study is to understand the ethical principles that inform undergraduate writing consultant (tutor) pedagogy. Focusing on the pedagogies of a small group of consultant participants, this dissertation specifically examines the ethical values and principles that have been prioritized by writing center studies as a field. Understanding the motivations, purposes, values, and ideologies of undergraduate tutors can help writing center administrators to interrogate and develop training curriculums that account for how consultants practice and experience their work in the center, in addition to supporting tutors in pursuing pedagogically-sound and socially-just engagements with writers. This study included two rounds of interviews with undergraduate tutors, a focus group discussion, and audio-recordings of writing consultations. Data from the field is set into conversation with scholarship from writing center studies, ultimately revealing, and critically assessing, the influence of an ethic of individual care on theory and practice. This dissertation suggests that writing center pedagogies that conform to the ethic of individual care foreclose opportunities for the kind of learning that entails risk, engages difference, and promotes relationships characterized by genuine care.The first findings chapter argues that conversation, a method preferred in scholarship and by the participants of this study, has been under-theorized, leading consultants to understand their work with particular groups of writers as “good” and their work with others—particularly multilingual writers—as “less-good.” The second chapter examines how consultants’ representations and perceptions of the writer can lead, problematically, to the enactment of safety work, or the attempt to care for, comfort, and safeguard certain writers. The third findings chapter considers the role of the consultant in writing center relationships, arguing that the ethic of individual care leads consultants to mask or attempt to erase their identities and subjectivities, and/or to mythologize or make assumptions about the writer (Innes, 2006), in the attempt to create a safe/r context for the writer and for themselves, especially in the felt presence of difference. This chapter provides examples of such masking, erasure, and mythologizing, with a particular focus on cross-racial tutoring encounters. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates the quiet, complicating, and even harmful power of implicit ethical codes, and invites scholars to (re)engage the concept of ethics in pursuit of carefully-theorized, explicitly defined code for the writing center.PhDEnglish & EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151507/1/mbparson_1.pd