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THE ACADEMIC year 1999–2000 was the inaugural year of the Spanish Writing Center (SWC) at the University of Minnesota. With generous support and insight from faculty members, the College of Liberal Arts, and the University of Minnesota as a whole, this project has met with overwhelming success. It is our purpose here to elucidate the details of this undertaking and to give an overview of why and how the SWC was established in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota. Our hope is that other foreign language departments may gain some insight into the many benefits such a center has to offer.
In response to the former University of Minnesota president Nils Hasselmo’s challenge to faculty members, students, and staff members to take part in an “initiative for excellence in undergraduate education” (Office of Planning and Analysis, ch. 6), the university’s Task Force on Liberal Education recommended the implementation of a writing-intensive requirement across the curriculum, which resulted in a proposal to change the way writing was to be taught at the university. Whereas in the past the primary responsibility for teaching writing had been borne by the English and rhetoric departments and the General College, beginning with the academic year 1999–2000 “every undergraduate department in the university [would] share in that responsibility” (Council on Liberal Education, par. 1).
Students entering the University of Minnesota in fall 1999 and thereafter would be required to take four writing-intensive courses, two of which should be at the upper-division level and at least one of which must be in the student’s major. The proposed change established that writing-intensive courses were to include an assigned total of ten to fifteen finalized pages of writing, aside from informal and in-class writing. Moreover, students were to be required to do a revision of a draft after receiving feedback from the instructor for at least one of these assignments.
In response to this initiative, as a means of meeting the writing needs of its students, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, which has upward of four hundred majors and some three hundred Spanish minors, chose to establish a departmental writing consultation center (initially known as the Spanish Writing Lab). Because all writing assignments in upper-division courses (including writing-intensive courses) are required to be written in Spanish (a second language for most of the department’s students), the need for such a resource was seen as both necessary and advantageous. Thus was born the Spanish Writing Center at the University of Minnesota, providing “for the first time in the history of this Department and perhaps the University of Minnesota, [. . .] support services at the advanced level in a target language other than English” (Demmessie 2).
In the summer of 1999, the department appointed two graduate student writing consultants who would staff the Spanish Writing Center during its inaugural semester. The two consultants were hired at 50% appointments, receiving salary and benefits equivalent to a half-time teaching assistantship (i.e., $10,858 salary plus $4,826.64 in fringe benefits for the academic year), and were expected to dedicate twenty hours a week to writing consultations and other relevant writing center activities (Klee). Although both appointees had had previous experience in the department as teaching assistants, their backgrounds in writing and editing were diverse. One had worked for more than a year as a translation editor, and the other had been employed for several years as a writing consultant at the General College Writing Center at the University of Minnesota. The first two consultants were selected in part because of this professional experience in editing and consulting. However, as an understanding of what the position entailed evolved during the academic year 1999–2000, a job description with more specific qualifications was developed.
The current position description states the following required qualifications for writing consultant candidates: teaching experience in third-year language courses, with excellent teaching evaluations; good writing and editing skills in Spanish; excellent Spanish- and English-language skills; basic computer skills; and good academic standing with a record of academic progress in the department. The preferred qualifications are that candidates have experience as writing consultants; experience teaching at the introductory upper-division level; experience in proposal writing and in development and direction of events; database and Web computer skills; and native or near-native proficiency in Spanish. As well, though the job description does not explicitly state so, preference has been given to advanced (i.e., at least finished with coursework) doctoral students, because these candidates generally have more flexible schedules and are therefore able to staff the writing center for a wider variety of hours and during the week of final exams. Also, mostly as a courtesy to writing consultants who may change their plans, the candidates are appointed on a semester-renewable basis.
Beyond their most basic job of helping students in the writing process, the original writing consultants were also charged by the director of undergraduate studies, Luis amos-García, with responsibility for attaining a level of what he called la profesionalización of the Spanish Writing Center.1 This admonition was more than an idle challenge, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies has provided enough material and conceptual support for this charge to come to fruition. Writing consultants have been encouraged to devote time to networking with other writing-support resources on campus, such as the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Writing, the English Writing Center, the General College Writing Center, and the Online Writing Center of the Department of Rhetoric. In addition, resources have been provided for consultants to attend helpful workshops on the teaching of writing or to receive training in computer skills (such as Web site development and database management). This important initiative to professionalize the SWC has not only aided in its smooth and effective administration but also helped magnify and refine the writing consultants’ abilities to support students in their writing.
In preparation for the opening of the Spanish Writing Center, two of the first steps were to submit a request for materials and to make location arrangements. The consultants began acquiring various resources to enhance consultations, such as a computer and reference materials, including style handbooks, monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, a thesaurus, and grammar texts. Everyone involved in the program saw the value in having the SWC strategically located in the department. A room with space and furniture appropriate for simultaneous writing consultations and computing resources, located in the heart of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, was designated. The centrality of the SWC in the department has played an important role in developing the feeling of community in the department.
Initially, it was decided that consultations in the Spanish Writing Center would be held by appointment only. Each appointment was limited to thirty minutes, and students were allowed no more than two consultations a week. However, an informal e-mail survey administered during the fall semester of 1999 revealed the need for more accessible hours. Hence, during the spring semester the SWC not only extended its weekly schedule from twenty-eight to thirty-four hours but also began to hold walk-in consultations throughout the morning hours. During walk-in hours, conferences were held to fifteen minutes when another student was waiting and otherwise were to last no longer than forty-five minutes.
Microstrategy
The most important work performed in the writing center is that done between the student and the consultant on an individual basis. Indeed, it has been the consultants’ experience, and current theory in second-language writing seems to accord, that the writing center, and specifically the writing consultant, has a particularly felicitous role in empowering students in their writing. Unlike instructors, writing consultants possess no significant evaluative authority over a student’s writing.
Numerous scholars have commented that instructors’ responsibility to assess students’ writing can have a problematic effect on attempts to coach students on their writing. For example, in discussing the instructor or teacher as an evaluator, Dave Healy mentions the importance of recognizing that the teacher’s authority as grader “is intrinsically neither good nor bad, but one danger posed by teachers’ authority is that it can breed passivity to the extent that students see themselves [and their writing] as acted upon rather than agents of their own destiny” (18). Ilona Leki states that as writing advisers, instructors face a profound schizophrenic split: that of “trying to be at the same time the coach and the evaluator of student writing” (60). She comments that this schizophrenia has a significant impact on students:
We teach our students that having a clear sense of audience helps the writer decide what to say and how to say it. As long as a teacher is evaluating a student’s performance, it does not matter how much we try to persuade ourselves and our students that the audience is their classmates or the university community; the students know very well that whoever gives the grade is the audience, an audience who will decide something very important about their futures. (60)
Thus any advice by the instructor during consultations with a student on a writing assignment can be perceived by the student as the so-called final word on the assignment, and this, unfortunately, may cause students to feel they have lost ownership of their writing.
Therefore, perhaps the most important benefit of the Spanish Writing Center has been that students have been able to receive department-sanctioned help on their writing in a less stressful environment than that of the teacher-student context. Muriel Harris has said that “the tutor has the unique advantage of being both a nonjudgmental, onevaluative helper—a collaborator in whom the writer can confide—and a skilled colleague, one whom the writer trusts as someone reasonably knowledgeable” (376).
Indeed, as Susan Blalock has noted, the neutral collaborative perspective of the writing consultant tends to empower students in their writing:
Despite twenty years of attempts to shift to an awareness of process and student-directed learning in the classroom, a hierarchy that places the teacher as grader and rule maker over student performance defeats collaborative learning [. . .]. Because the tutor is free from the formal classroom and from the responsibilities of designing the assignment and grading it, the tutor and the student can approach the writing project through the student’s skills and expectations rather than through the teacher’s. (79)
In the Spanish Writing Center, consultants have tried to take advantage of their relationship with students by encouraging them to take control in the writing process. Happily, many students have said that they are comfortable with this setting and that they are able to request, even direct, the help they need in the more neutral environment of the SWC (Fruth).
In this same spirit, an extremely important characteristic of one-on-one consultations in the Spanish Writing Center is the goal to work “collaboratively and interactively” with students: “A major goal of a tutor is to help students find their own solutions” (Harris and Silva 532). Indeed, conferences between student and consultant should “emphasize the student’s own discovery” (Harris 377).
Consultations in the Spanish Writing Center typically involve asking what students themselves hope to accomplish during the conference. Writing consultants may provide help on any of various aspects of students’ writing and at any stage of the writing process, from prewriting to the final revisions. This assistance could involve, for example, a discussion of the effectiveness of the introduction or conclusion of a paper or the need for more connectedness in the argument. However, the consultant always attempts to be respectful of what students themselves desire from the writing assignment. The consultant must avoid providing students with all the solutions and give them instead the opportunity to have a sense of autonomy and to find self-fulfillment in their writing.
In no instances will consultants deliberately proofread for grammar errors—writing consultants work with students on issues of grammar; they do not correct it. Clearly, a large part of what consultants in the writing center must do involves students’ issues with grammar. Nevertheless, rather than supply students with answers, consultants attempt to guide students gently, perhaps by asking appropriate questions, through a learning process of self-editing (see Harris 375). As Harris has stated:
Tutoring in writing is a collaborative effort in which the tutor listens, questions, and sometimes offers informed advice about all aspects of the student’s writing in order to help the writer become a better writer, not to fix whatever particular paper the student has brought to the center. (371).
Undoubtedly, this approach to writing consultation solidifies the writing consultant’s stance as “educators, not personal editors” (Harris and Silva 531).
Macrostrategy
The original writing consultants envisioned the Spanish Writing Center as a structure for building community within the department. They hoped to encourage students to take advantage of the SWC’s services and to become involved in a movement toward excellence in writing throughout the department. As such, an enormous amount of effort was concentrated in publicizing the SWC and in developing departmental activities that would not only help students with their writing but also increase the esprit de corps of the department.
A primary goal of the Spanish Writing Center was for consultants to establish close contact with the instructors and students of the upper-division courses whom they were meant to serve. Consistent with this goal, during the first week of the fall semester of 1999 the two writing consultants made arrangements with teachers to visit all upper-division undergraduate courses. Fliers were distributed throughout the department explaining the SWC’s mission and how to utilize its services.
Another very significant part of the Spanish Writing Center’s efforts to get the word out and encourage active participation in the department has been its sponsorship of extracurricular activities dedicated to increasing students’ interest in improved writing. For example, one of the most important accomplishments of the SWC’s inaugural year has been the establishment of an informational self-help Web site (accessible at http://spanishwritingcenter.cla.umn.edu). This home page allows students to obtain complete information on policies, scheduling, consultation services, and extracurricular events sponsored by the SWC. Students can also access and download self-help handouts that provide resources such as detailed information on particular grammar points or lists of useful connective phrases to help in the smooth development of a thesis. In addition, students can connect to various links that are relevant to both linguistic and content elements in their writing, including Spanish dictionaries and encyclopedias, style guidelines in both English and Spanish, and Web sites of various other writing centers both on and off campus.
Furthermore, during the spring semester of 2000, the Spanish Writing Center planned a writer’s workshop, which consisted of various miniworkshops on topics related to writing; developed an “Outstanding Undergraduate Paper” competition; and sponsored a series of presentations entitled “Senior Paper Works-in-Progress,” in which four outstanding students from the senior seminar course were selected by their instructor to discuss the thesis of their senior paper and to explain to future seniors the process they followed in selecting and developing their thesis.2 These extracurricular endeavors have proved an invaluable part of undergraduate education in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies. In short, they have epitomized what the SWC has aimed to achieve, namely, to increase student interest and abilities in writing while simultaneously kindling a spirit of community in the department.
In conclusion, we feel that the implementation of the Spanish Writing Center is proof of the commitment of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies and the College of Liberal Arts to both undergraduate and graduate education (see Ramos-García). During the 1999–2000 academic year in the Spanish Writing Center, some 350 writing consultations were held with majors and minors from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies. The students who have taken advantage of this service appear to be learning more from their writing and, as would be expected, to be getting better academic results from their work. By the same token, numerous faculty members have expressed their satisfaction in witnessing an improvement in the writing of their students. Moreover, a departmental secretary recently observed that the efforts of the SWC have created a greater sense of unity among undergraduate students in the department, no small feat in an institution of some forty thousand students. Observations such as these, while subjective, are evidence that the SWC, at least in part, is achieving its goals.
1The challenge to “professionalize” the Spanish Writing Center was part of a general movement in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, motivated by the department chair (Carol Klee), the director of undergraduate studies (Luis Ramos-García), the coordinator of undergraduate advising (Margaret Demmessie), and others, to renew the department’s commitment to undergraduate education (see Ramos-García).
2The senior seminar course (Spanish 3972) is one of four departmental courses specifically deemed writing intensive. In this course all seniors majoring in Spanish or Spanish and Portuguese in the department write a final senior paper, considered the culminating work of their undergraduate education.
Blalock, Susan. “Negotiating Authority through One-to-One Collaboration in the Multicultural Writing Center.” Writing in Multicultural Settings Ed. Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnnella E. Butler. New York: MLA, 1997. 79–93.
Council on Liberal Education. Writing Intensive Course Proposal. May 1998. U of Minnesota. 18 May 2000. http://www.semesters.umn.edu/students/wiprop.htm.
Demmessie, Margaret. “New Undergraduate Spanish Writing Center: First Mid-Year Report.” NEXO 17 Dec. 1999: 1–2. Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, U of Minnesota. http://www.folwell.umn.edu/span_port/NEXO/nexo15.pdf.
Fruth, Joseph K. “The Foreign Language Writing Center: An In-Depth Look at Feedback.” Unpublished essay. 2000.
Harris, Muriel. “Collaboration Is Not Collaboration Is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer-Response Groups.” College Composition and Communication 43.3 (1992): 369–83.
Harris, Muriel, and Tony Silva. “Tutoring ESL Students: Issues and Options. College Composition and Communication 44.4 (1993): 525–37.
Healy, Dave. “A Defense Dualism: The Writing Center and the Classroom.” Writing Center Journal 14.1 (1993): 16–29.
Klee, Carol A. Personal communication. 8 June 2000.
Leki, Ilona. “Coaching from the Margins: Issues in Written Response.” Second Language Writing: Research Insights for the Classroom. Ed. Barbara Kroll. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 57-68.
Office of Planning and Analysis in the Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. 1996 Accreditation Self-Study of the Twin Cities Campus: A Land-Grant University for the 21st Century. Apr. 1996. U of Minnesota. 23 May 2000. http://www.opa.pres.umn.edu/accred/study.htm.
Ramos-García, Luis. “Undergraduate Education: New Commitments.” NEXO 10 Dec. 1999: 1–2. Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, U of Minnesota. http://www.folwell.umn.edu/span_port/NEXO/nexo14.pdf
Task Force on Liberal Education. A Liberal Education Agenda for the 1990’s and Beyond on the Twin Cities Campus of the University of Minnesota: The Final Report of the Twin Cities Campus Task Force on Liberal Education. 6 May 1991. U of Minnesota. 23 May 2000. http://www1.umn.edu/usenate/cle/cletaskforce.html.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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