I never imagined that my doctoral
research journey would be to raise voice about the research writing community
support for more future innovation and creativeness in the academia. I did not
realize how I became an active participant of a specific writing community of
practice before getting an admission at a specific PhD. Program in Language,
Literacy, and Technology (LLT), under the Department of Teaching and Learning,
College of Education. After getting a graduate admission offer, I have been
awarded as a research assistant at the WSU Graduate Writing Center under the
Writing Program. This scholarship opportunity opens a new door for me as a
graduate writing tutor to realize how badly every individual graduate writer
needs a safe space to brainstorm, talk, share, and ask questions for
participating in a graduate writing community and advancing basic professional
writing skills. To accommodate this space for every graduate writer, graduate
writing communities have the responsibilities to take initiatives to explore
and understand the need of supporting graduate writers on a continuous process.
The research is taking a collaborative research initiative to explore
perspectives of graduate writers and identify the best supporting strategies within
a writing practitioner’s framework. Graduate researchers will have the supports to
learn and share how to be active participants in a professional research
writing community.
Graduate
students often ask me how I was introduced myself with the disciplinary
research writing, publications, and reviewing opportunities. This reminds
me my talk and discussion about my writing assignments with my father, when I
was in the secondary high school. Now I realize that I created a safe space of
conversation about my writing with my father, when I was learning about an
article, parts of speech, tense, sentence structure, voice, comprehension,
phrases and idioms, and so on. Later on I created a conversation space for
talking about research with advisors, teachers, and peers during my Masters
program. That practice of talking and sharing about concepts provided me to be
fluent in English Language conversation. Ultimately this influenced me to
acquire many important research skills (i.e., experiences of researching,
publishing and reviewing writing) that are mandatory for facilitating graduate
writers’ research.
Sometimes I wondered how I did learn
about tutoring graduate research writing, writing center philosophy and how
potentially graduate tutors could facilitate students to notice their writing
focus, clarity, meaning, and message. During every day tutorial session, students’
questions, anxiety, and frustrations remind my professional research writing journey
of being familiar to be an active participant in a professional research
writing community. I realize that students
feel frustrated as most of them are not be aware of the different steps of writing
processes. They mostly skip the stage of
‘preparation’ before producing and publishing research writing papers. Most students don’t realize that they are
creating new knowledge through publishing their writing. Most of them come to
writing center for proofreading, but they return back home with different ideas
and concerns after the writing tutorial session.
Within a writing community of practice,
I had the opportunities to learn the differences between tutoring and teaching.
I realized that I was used to correct students’ paper, in the first few days of
my work at Graduate writing center, due to prior experiences as a teacher and
reviewer. I utilized my peer
collaboration experiences that I had been involved when I was an undergraduate
student. I had a lot of translating practice (i.e., from English to Bengali)
and writing tutoring with multidisciplinary undergraduate and graduate students
during that time. These volunteering efforts for them provided me an
opportunity of helping others to make clear points, logic, arguments, and
illustrations. That has been providing me for an immense confidence and
strength to make clear illustrations and logics of complex writing concepts with
graduate students during every day tutorial session. Students’ respect and
positive feedback inspired me to explore how I can do better during tutoring
with additional helpful writing examples and worksheets. I developed my
knowledge about writing center, writing center pedagogy, adult tutoring,
graduate writing support, and graduate writing communities of practice, through
reading and writing, during my graduate course works. In this way, I grounded a
foundation of the doctoral research processes of exploring the need of
supporting every graduate writer.
