Journal #8
Chapter 12 of Gillespie and Lerner’s The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring, “Interdisciplinary and On-Line Tutoring”, nicely addressed the remaining questions I had about tutoring. The first few pages of the chapter on interdisciplinary writing helped me find answers to most of them. Especially poignant, were the ideas made on the page number 155, which talked about the field being studied affects one’s writing style (or misdirection within writing), as well as the utilization of writing as a tool for learning. I think this is a topic that has specific relevance to the writing experience at University of New England. As a university with such a heavily skewed array of studies- majorly consisting of life science and health professions majors- persuasive, creative, or analytical writing isn’t frequently employed as a method of learning. Or rather, writing isn’t utilized as much in the classes that directly pertain to such majors. I.e. biochemistry class for a biochem major, or anatomy and physiology for a nursing student. This lack of writing isn’t a sign that the classes are not effectively teaching, rather just that the students at this University tend to write less based on their specific field of interest. After coming to this conclusion, I began to ask the question ‘So how might one explain the value of writing, to a peer in a non-writing-intensive field?’.
Gillespie and Lerner’s assessment, later on page 155, answered this question with their own: “‘How do you get sociology majors to think and write like sociologists?”‘. This idea– that one must conform their writing style to the field of study that they are in– is imperative to demonstrating that writing is an intersectional web, which is occupied in various areas by all of the different bodies of knowledge. That may seem like a bit of a leap in logic. However, I think the sheer categorization of a sociological writer, or biological, or medical- should indicate that each field requires some extent of writing. After all, writing is the basis of how humans express complex and multi-faceted ideas to one another. This thought process has inspired the mentality I’ve been utilizing while reading some of peer’s writing.
For instance, I recently read an animal behavior major’s outline for a paper about an archeological artifact. My peer was specifically struggling with how to engage the subject, make the paper interesting, and writing in a persuasive style. The outline, originally, made the writer appear to have limited experience with writing. However, after discussing, I learned that she had written often, but in a very different and more scientific style. My peer was specifically having difficulty with writing like an archeologist, about archeology. This is an understandable issue to have because she is simply not an archeologist. Rather, she is an animal behaviorist. Utilizing Gillespie and Lerner’s information, I gave her some advice on how to be an animal behaviorist and write archeologically; primarily, I recommended that she relate back to what she knows: animals and psychology. When she began to draw on these bodies of knowledge, she began to feel more comfortable developing her thesis and researching her topic. It’s not that I gave her an extraordinary formula on how to write her paper- I simply told her that she didn’t have to become an expert in the field in order to have opinions on the topics. Ultimately, I wanted to express that an animal behaviorist’s perspective on archeology is just as important as an archeologist’s. This freedom to write from one’s own academic perspective within various fields of study, speaks to the interdisciplinary nature of writing, and I think especially, college writing.
