Case Study: Solid Example

Case Study

My name is AAA and I am a Childhood Education Major with a co-major in English at LaGuardia Community College.  I am currently in my last semester and as a requisite of the English co-major program I am taking Seminar in Teaching Writing with Dr. Justin Rogers-Cooper. What I have learned from this class is that tutoring is a set of strategies that like teaching you have to modify to fit student’s needs. Due to the fact that all students learn and comprehend differently, strategies have to vary depending on the student; but unlike teaching, tutoring gives you the opportunity to have a one to one interaction with the student and help that student with writing. My pedagogical philosophy focuses on collaborative tutoring as well as student center tutoring and specifically the strategies of talk and writing, conversation, and talk aloud. I also emphasize the idea of Sondra Perl of writing being a recursive process and where the felt sense is important in a writer’s process of writing a piece. At the beginning of the semester we were asked to make four tutoring observation to later put that knowledge into practice by tutoring students in an ENG099 and ENG101 classes. By having this hands-on experience I must say that I agree with Paulo Freire in the specific point that the purpose of education is the ‘practice of freedom,” where we provide students the knowledge necessary to look beyond conformity and participate in the transformation of the world. I will demonstrate my ideas here using course texts such as Tutoring Writing, by Donald A. McAndrew and Thomas J. Reigstad, Understanding Composing, by Sondra Perl, and Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire, and also explain them through my own experiences tutoring students here at LaGuardia Community College.

            Collaborative tutoring was very effective in my first, second and third tutoring sessions. Collaborative tutoring is based on the idea that knowledge can be created with active members equally participating to bring about a specific task, in this case writing. It also goes back to Vygotsky’s theory of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): where people learn better with the aid of an adult or a more experience peer. In the tutoring sessions I was considered the more experienced peer aiding a student to put his ideas on paper.  In my first tutoring session the student I tutored seem to know what he wanted to write but didn’t quite know how to put his ideas down on a piece of paper. They were asked to have a rough draft but he only had his introduction with two sentences and two body paragraphs. He said to me “I think I am going to change the whole thing.”  He wanted to do this because he didn’t like his Professor’s feedback, I told him not to all he needed to do was expand his ideas. With this student I used the strategy of talk aloud, which seem to be very effective. His topic was immigration, he wanted to discuss how immigrants contribute to the country and the benefits they can’t have. He was a little unfamiliar with this topic because he said he was American, but he said he had a friend who was an illegal immigrant and how his friend spoke to him about all the struggles he had to face due to the fact that he was an illegal immigrant. I went back and forth with him asking him questions and he would respond. He said “I am not an immigrant so I don’t know what to write” and I replied “well, think of the benefits you have that your friend didn’t or couldn’t have”, it was then that he started to recall his friend struggles and started to write his ideas down. By the end of the session he had completed the essay with a clear thesis, strong topic sentences and a conclusion but not only that, also, was a little more knowledgeable about this issue that till this day is a major issue in the country.

            My second tutoring session was similar to the first because I did collaborative tutoring, but used talk and writing instead of talk out loud, which are similar to an extent. This student didn’t have any draft at all because he said that he had been absent for a few days, therefore, he was behind on many things. He stated that he was a bit confused on what the professor wanted from him, luckily, I had read the assignment a day before and did a little research on the topics they were given. The topics were No Child Left Behind, Raise to the Top and Charter Schools. As we started the tutoring session, I asked what he knew about the topics since he already stated that he had been absent I assumed he didn’t have any idea. To my surprise he was pretty knowledgeable about the topics, which I thought made a turn to the tutoring because I had a different expectation. I asked him to brainstorm and write what he knew in his notebook, which is part of talk and write since it’s “writer’s internal process of reflective dialogue and an external act,” (McAndrew & Reigstad 4). After he was done we went back to talking again and discussing these issues as we discussed them, he would write down what we were saying. After we had finished discussing the topics, he had a page full of notes, so I told him that we will move on to the next step which was to write down complete sentences and create paragraphs. The strategy I used was effective and when I left he was satisfied with the result because I helped him fulfill his Professor’s requirement.  My third session was similar to both my first and second session.

            My fourth session I changed to student-centered tutoring. The reason I did this was because my student was done with his paper he just needed an extra push to polish it. He was asked to write about racial discrimination and he focused on African Americans, he based his arguments on society and how till this day African Americans are still discriminated, and also with a movie he saw and an article he read. I wanted him to be the main participant in this session by asking him to “pin point his weaknesses” and he did. When he pointed out his weakness which was a body paragraph I asked him “why is this paragraph your weak point” and he replied “I think I need to add more details.” We conversed about the movie he saw and then he was able to see what details he needed to add and he did. By the end of the session he was content with his paper and thanked me for giving him that extra push to polish his paper.

            In all the four tutoring sessions I saw Sandra Perl’s idea of writing being a recursive process taking place. She believed that writing is not only plan-write-revise, a linear pattern, but instead is a process of going back and forth from write to plan to revise etc. With the students I tutored we went back and forth, we will converse and start bringing ideas to the table, then they would write and revise or vice versa. With this being said her idea of felt sense also took place. I saw students writing down something while I just sat there waiting for them, at times they would stare at  me or at the ceiling and then out of nowhere they would give a weird look and start writing again. The felt sense comes from inside.

            In conclusion my overall pedagogy of education is that as future educators we have to provide our students with the tools necessary to bring upon a better tomorrow.  Paulo Freire stated in his “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, that we shouldn’t bank student, this came from the idea of the “banking concept” where students are viewed as an empty account and our job as teachers is to fill that account (Freire 72). By doing this, we help students escape reality and conform to society. I believe that what we have to do is to make our students knowledgeable by giving them the tools necessary to succeed in a world where an education is important and by doing this we create conscious beings (corpo consciente), as Paulo Freire stated Freire 74). . We have to give them these tools to help them think for themselves and don’t conform to society norms and use their knowledge to make a difference, a change in the world.