Where am I? Who am I?

This week was filled with a multi-faceted understanding of peer-tutoring, identity, and writing center theory.  I felt that I was tested this week; I have to have a firm grasp on who I am—as a person, a peer, a representative of academic support, in the lives of my family—and each of these roles requires a steadfast conviction that there is a purpose to my being where I’m at during this stage in my life.

All too often I believe that guilt keeps me from providing one hundred percent of myself to the task at hand.  What I mean by this is I felt like I was shortchanging all that interacted with me this week; the responsibilities that I had in my academic life never garnered my full attention because I was too busy focusing on all of them at once rather than prioritizing or managing my time toward each task.  I felt like a hypocrite in that I was demonstrating the very mindset that we’re advised to tell our clients NOT to have. 

My stumbling block has always been that I tend to take on more responsibility than I am ultimately capable of handling—but my desire to help others, to expand my learning, or even break free from this character flaw overrides all other thoughts.  Regardless, I do feel that this week offered my so much in the way of practical experience—I was able to share my new writing consultant experiences with high school students embarking on the same journey.  Witnessing the passion I feel for helping peers become better writers was inspiring—I actually believe that my participation in this panel gave me the strength  needed, knowing that there is a reason for creating the chaos that resulted over the last 10 days.

 It is often very difficult for me to put into words, a verbal explanation, what it is I offer the academic community at Boise State.  This bumps heads with the difficulties many clients that seek our help at the Writing Center--with articulating their ideas into words on the page.  I don’t think that enough has been said about the identities of peer consultants that pour their blood, sweat, and tears into their work with student writers. 

Researching writing center pedagogy plus working on how to provide feedback on writing through the email service this week allowed me to see that identity shapes every aspect of what it is we offer as writing consultants.  Who am I-- to my fellow consultants? To the student writers?  How does what I feel about myself within the various roles that I play contribute to the responses I deliver through email? Then, to take this even further… what do my feelings do in regard to my relationship with loved ones that don’t seem to share the same connection with writing that I have?

I struggled a bit with making sure that the response I crafted for our mock email consultation came across as authentic—I made sure that I gave myself only the one hour to complete the response so that I had a realistic understanding of the pressure to prioritize.  But I also wanted to convey to the writer that what I had to offer was beneficial to them—that there is a passion for teaching them to be better writers, and all that I was offering were ways in which they could strengthen their craft not merely critiquing their paper.  I think that in a way I was trying to reaffirm my feelings toward writing and sharing my love for it with others through peer tutoring.  Demonstrating this through the mock email consult somehow served as a catharsis—a release of all the pent up frustration I feel when my family questions what it is that I want to do with my life, or degree. 

It seems really overdramatic, but the act of drafting my response helped me clarify who I am and what it is I want to offer the literary/academic worlds.  But I still am unsure of how to approach my analysis of a WCJ article…perhaps if I found something that demystifies the concept of writing center identity from the perspective of the consultants I could be surer of what it is I want to talk about.  So far, I have enjoyed the scavenger hunt through scholarship pertaining to the non-traditional student and have downloaded a few ancillary articles from Glaskow and Fulwiler about the inner-workings of the writing center/W.A.C relationship.  I promise that I will narrow this down as I continue to dig. 

For now, I’m enjoying the process of finding my identity within the BSU Writing Center Community…..