My Doctoral Research Journey for Graduate Writing Communities

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.