Bridging the rural-urban gap: the University of Alaska writing tutor in Rural Student Services.

Carr, Richard

University of Alaska Fairbanks Writing Center outreach links our center to Rural Student Services (RSS), a program originally designed to address the needs of Alaska Native (1) students and now targeted for all rural students attending UAF. Eight hours each week we provide an on-site tutor for students connected to RSS. Kay Thomas, longtime academic advisor, articulates the purpose of the program by evoking the reality of the state: "Alaska has a significant rural-urban dichotomy." Even in 2003, only 20% of the state was accessible by roads, and a good portion of students labeled rural live in communities accessible only by air or by sea. Since its inception in 1969 as Student Orientation Services, RSS has served as a means to bridge the rural-urban gap. Program counselors work with incoming students from the pre-admissions stage onwards, starting with telephone contact while students are still living in their home village. They offer students a variety of services as they apply and once they arrive: linking them with the Financial Aid Office, offering registration and general academic advice, helping them feel at home. The writing tutor thus joins a staff of professionals dedicated to easing the transition from a rural to an urban environment and, in terms of the university, join one sort of community to another one governed by and operating under an often unfamiliar set of rules.

The mission of the original Student Orientation Services was "to provide services to Alaska Native students whose goal was to receive a college education" (RSS, par.1). The design of the original program followed the patterns of academic programs for Native American students then appearing on college and university campuses nationwide. In changing the name, the RSS program also expanded its mission to encompass all UAF students from a rural background. Yet the bulk of students who take advantage of program academic services and social offerings remain Alaska Natives, who currently comprise 9.6% of the UAF student population. In assessing the effectiveness of our on-site RSS tutorial service and exploring ways of making our work there more visibly successful, I am thinking of how well we serve our Native students.

My interest in this issue grows from an earlier frustration as a writing center administrator. As a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Minnesota, I directed the Writing Laboratory for nearly three years. I recall the occasions in which Native American students were referred to us for additional assistance and our continued ineffectiveness in providing that help. What appeared at issue then were intercultural communication problems. "She's going to fail this course if she refuses to talk," said one exasperated tutor assigned to direct a young Native American woman through a tutorial freshman composition course. What did that silence mean? Hostility? Lack of understanding? Indifference? At the time the rest of us could only share in her frustration, yet our particular failure to work effectively with that student represented a larger failure of the Writing Lab to serve our Native American patrons well. We provided assistance but only on our terms.

Ron Scollon and Suzanne B.K. Scollon, both formerly associated with the Alaska Native Language Center at UAF, explore the challenge of interethnic communication in a video and accompanying booklet of the same title. The Scollon project focused on communication issues involving English speakers (i.e. mainstream White Americans) and Athabaskans, and they are quick to advise their audience of the diversity encompassed by the term "Native": "We cannot make generalizations about 'Alaska Natives' and hope that they will be fair to many individuals" (17). At least twenty distinct Native languages are spoken throughout the state, representing at least twenty distinct cultural groups. Still, certain aspects of the Scollon study can serve as a window into the complexities of interethnic communication generally and the strong potential for miscommunication and thus misunderstanding between the English speaker and the Native student, especially in official settings. The Scollons identify the basis for frequent miscommunication: "The two groups have very different views of the purpose of talking and how their goals should be accomplished through talk" (25). The on-site writing tutor, though a lone, friendly individual, is a feature of an official setting.

As Writing Center administrators and tutors, we focus our energy so frequently on promoting our general ability to address all writing and writer concerns that we may miss the particular needs of a group or individual. Although my remarks here connect directly to Alaska Natives and by implication to the larger Native American community, I see that our experience tutoring in RSS could extend to a full range of intercultural communication dynamics. In developing this essay, I spoke to the tutors over the past two school years--all graduate teaching assistants in the English Department, several students, and the already identified advisor, Kay Thomas. I sought their perspectives on RSS, the tutoring service, and the value of our work there. After all, the UAF Writing Center is an all-campus service used by faculty, staff, and students from all over the University, including Alaska Native students. Does our outreach service in RSS serve an essential purpose?

UAF has funded a full program for Alaska's rural students, and that extended support indicates the University position that Rural Student Services fulfills a distinct campus need. Did tutors see their clients in RSS as "special needs" students? The tutors shared similar views on the challenges posed to many Native students enrolled at UAF. Students often showed unfamiliarity with the academic demands of college papers, and language issues that tutors frequently confronted with second language speakers of English appeared in the papers of those RSS students they tutored. Kasey, a tutor during the 2002-3 school year, commented on her RSS clients' struggle with writing for the academic audience: "In rural life they did not need to explain because everyone around them came from the same world." Yet most of the tutors expressed discomfort with the term "special needs." I spoke to Kay, herself a UAF graduate who as a student took advantage of the RSS program in its early years of operation, regarding this designation. For many rural Alaskans, according to Kay, "the concept of having community resources in health and education is new." Village residents are still slow to go outside the family for assistance. Because they are not used to community resources, students are unlikely to take advantage of them on their own. And if showing a piece of writing to an outsider--a tutor--causes anxiety in most of us, at least at first, the resistance to doing so will likely be even stronger among Native students. "It's not our way to ask for help," said a student to one of the tutors as way of explanation for his and his friends' reluctance to seek the writing advice they needed.

In my discussions with tutors I wanted especially to know what tutorial strategies worked with their RSS clients and why. "How was tutoring in RSS distinct from tutoring in the Writing Center?" I asked. "Did you take specific approaches to tutoring to address this distinct aspect?" Tutors used these questions as a springboard for discussing their experience as RSS tutors, their remarks falling into three general categories. I will use these categories as an organizing principle for the larger applicability of the lessons learned through our tutoring at RSS.

1. Be patient

The Scollon study noted the differences in pauses between utterances in the English speaker, who generally expects a response from the other speaker in one second, and the Athabaskan, who will frequently let a longer pause occur between utterances. The Scollons also comment on the distinct manner in which the disparate groups will handle communication with an unfamiliar person: "If they don't know each other well, the English speaker will start talking to find out what the Athabaskan is like, while the Athabaskan will wait to see what the other person is like" (26-7). Seven of the eight tutors remarked on the "shyness" of the students they helped, and all individually noted that they waited for students to speak before moving to a new question or a different tutorial approach. For Martha, a three-year veteran in RSS, the means of addressing that shyness lay in stressing the personal over the academic. Having grown up in Alaska and traveled though much of the state, Martha could occasionally link her experience and their background--their family or village. If the shared knowledge of people and place did not offer a way into discussion, Martha still sought to explore the personal as a potential for writing: "When we start talking about their work, I steer them toward something they know." For many students it was a revelation that their experience could form the basis or focus for academic papers; they then needed assistance--a tutor's assistance--in conveying that experience to an audience unfamiliar with their world and worldview.

Listening is a logical extension of this need to be patient. The video Interethnic Communication features Eliza Jones, an Athabaskan woman, and Ron Scollon roleplaying an encounter between Native and mainstream individuals in an official setting--here a job interview--and then discussing the larger meaning of that meeting. In their review of the interview Scollon, evaluating his role as prospective boss, notes his failing in the conversation: "I was interrupting you. How did you feel?" Jones replied, "That's what happens all the time ... [English speakers] say what they want to say, not hear what you want to say." The graduate students who volunteer to tutor in RSS presumably have a sensitivity to their clients that an office interviewer might not, and certainly the tutors remarked on "listening" as a key to their success. Said Ashley, a 2002-3 tutor, "Most students [in RSS] seemed shy and uncertain, and thus I was always careful to be patient with whatever they said or asked." In discussing that slowness to speak, Kasey remarked, "I tried not to be aggressive when helping them. I smiled at them and tried to make them feel comfortable.... I listened to their frustrations."

2. Present yourself appropriately

Scollon indicates "how people display or show themselves to others" as another key point of difference between English-speaking and Native cultures. In the Writing Center tutors approach our student-clients cheerfully and confidently, asking questions about the writing need and, possibly, related background details : "Why are you interested in this topic?," "What are you trying to say to your readers?" Eliza Jones notes that in her culture, "You don't ask questions.... When Natives meet, they don't start talking right away. [You] sit down, be quiet, start talking naturally after you've been around each other for a while." RSS advisors had told Ashley and Kasey that they would need to spend time getting to know the students, talking and eating with them, before the students would be comfortable bringing their writing to a tutor. Kasey recalled student laughter at her first effort to eat dried King salmon at a program gathering, but she saw the event and that moment as an icebreaker on both sides. Inessa, who tutored both writing and math for two years, remarked on the informal social environment as a factor in her feeling less businesslike in RSS and thus more approachable. In this more relaxed environment Inessa felt able to develop a deeper connection with students as she tutored them multiple times.

3. Encourage

All of the tutors showed reluctance in claiming that their tutoring style differed significantly between their work in the Writing Center and at RSS, yet just as most remarked on the "shyness" of their RSS patrons, most also acknowledged that their RSS clients often needed more direct encouragement. Martha spoke about a woman writing a paper for English 111, an argument about "how parents don't give their children the proper training in etiquette." Faced with a draft that was "a series of unsupported assertions," Martha urged the student to mine her own experience: "I steered her toward using examples from her own childhood and her own village to back up what she was saying." Other tutors remarked on the need to "encourage [students] on a personal as well as an academic level," but Martha expressed most succinctly the challenge inherent in tutoring insecure writers of any stamp and one means of meeting that challenge: "I think sometimes we overlook the value and learning potential offered by familiar topics. They can start in the village (or hometown) and springboard into the world."

Kay Thomas identified a serious challenge the program must face, one impacting the use of all RSS services: "Some say 'There shouldn't be an RSS,' and these remarks come from within the Native community." The paradox here, as Kay points out, is that at the same time that Alaska and other places in the nation have seen a resurgence in the tribal sovereignty movement, many Native students express a desire for a contemporary identity. Incoming students resist the "special needs" designation, just as the tutors did. For many Native students at UAF, bridging the rural-urban dichotomy entails struggling to reconcile the conflicting pulls of their wish to assimilate and their need to maintain a culturally distinct identity.

That desire for a contemporary identity leads me back to the question that guided my exploration: Does our outreach service in RSS serve an essential purpose? Do outreach or satellite tutoring programs achieve something distinct and necessary to the mission of a writing center? In our case we have plenty of Alaska Native students who take advantage of the many resources in the Writing Center--tutors, computers, reference texts, study space. My discussions with the tutors, with Kay Thomas, and with students showed me the value of the tutorial service provided in RSS by the UAF Writing Center. "I couldn't have gotten through school without [the RSS writing tutor]," a UAF graduate now living in Nome told me over the phone. Our outreach recognizes the reality that students from all over need and benefit from writing support, and for some, finding that support in the on-site tutor is the key. Students who spend time in RSS can see the tutors helping their friends, they can hear from their friends about the valuable writing guidance those friends have received, and they can try the services themselves. In so doing, they can learn more about their power to communicate and the benefits of tapping community resources. Berda Willson, longtime resident of Nome, wrote of her struggles to obtain a degree and the larger importance of her achievement: "I hope that by fulfilling [my dream] I can motivate others to continue with their educational goals in rural Alaska. I feel that education is the answer for Alaska Natives to meet the challenges of living in two worlds" (113). With writing an essential for all academic and professional success, RSS tutors can play a vital role in guiding their students toward fulfilling their dreams.

I would like to close with another applicable lesson from this experience, one that can apply to writing tutors anywhere who move away from the central Writing Center to apply their skills in a satellite or outreach program dedicated to meeting the writing needs of any specially defined group. At UAF the Writing Center beckons any campus writer, and many heed the call. We collaborate with writers on developmental English paragraphs, literary research papers, biology lab reports, business memos, and doctoral dissertations, and though we adapt our strategies to each writer and writing need, those who use our Center accept that it is our world as they seek our advice. An outreach program tutor enters another world--in RSS, a village substitute, a home away from home--and may discover that their usual tutoring strategies and conversational approaches need modification. We have entered their space. Outreach tutoring can thus translate into a greater empathy for students--in RSS, in the Writing Center, in their classroom, and beyond--as tutors bridge their own gaps. Eva Saulitis, a former graduate student, remarked near the end of her fourth and final semester as an RSS writing tutor: "It really is like going into a village." By that final term, Eva had become that "relaxed, comfortable, familiar individual" that Kay Thomas identified as a successful tutor. Having accepted her as part of their community, students brought their papers to her, sought her advice, and submitted more thoughtful, polished writing to their instructors all over campus.

Works Cited

Rural Student Services. "Historical Background." Rural Students home page. University of Alaska Fairbanks. 3 Apr. 2004 <http:// www.uaf.edu/Rurales/history. html>.

Scollon, Ron, and Eliza Jones, perf. Interethnic Communication. Prod. Irene Reed, Alaska Native Language

Center. Videocassette. U of Alaska Fairbanks, 1980.

--and Suzanne B.K. Scollon. Interethnic Communication. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center, 1980.

Thomas, Kay. Personal interview. 12 July 2004.

--. Personal interview. 22 Sept. 2003.

Willson, Berda. "Higher Education in Northwest Alaska: A Dream Realized." Authentic Alaska: Voices of Its Native Writers. Ed. Susan B. Andrews and John Creed. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988. 109-13.

Richard Carr

University of Alaska Fairbanks

Fairbanks, Alaska

Note

(1) 'Alaska Native' is a regional distinction within the Native American group.