Composition Forum 49, Summer 2022
http://compositionforum.com/issue/49/

Discourse-Based Interviews in Institutional Ethnography: Uncovering the Tacit Knowledge of Peer Tutors in the Writing Center

Madeline Crozier and Erin Workman

Abstract: This article illustrates how we incorporated discourse-based interviews (DBIs) into a mixed-methods research study informed by the heuristics of institutional ethnography (IE). As the first stage of a longitudinal study designed to understand what, where, and how writing means across our university, our research used DBIs in a writing center to uncover peer tutors’ tacit personal knowledge about writing. In tandem with IE methodology, DBIs enabled us to understand how conceptions of writing shape peer tutors’ written work and tutoring practice in relation and/or resistance to the programmatic goals of the center. The study demonstrates how the use of DBIs within IE projects facilitates dynamic exploration of the co-constitutive and socially constructed nature of tacit writing knowledge and institutionally coordinated work processes. Our research design and methodological considerations generate strategies and approaches for incorporating variations of DBIs into mixed-methods research.

In the nearly 40 years since Odell, Goswami, and Herrington developed discourse-based interviews (DBIs) as an ethnographic method for “understand[ing] the tacit personal knowledge that writers bring to bear on their writing tasks” (222), writing studies researchers have continued to use and adapt DBIs to explore the role of prior knowledge in writing transfer. Seeking to discover “precisely how [writers] make use of... prior knowledge as they find themselves in new rhetorical situations” (Robertson et al.), writing transfer researchers have used DBIs to anchor interview questions in participants’ written texts and to triangulate self-reported data from surveys or retrospective interviews “buil[t] around objects” like texts and tools (Dippre 111). Integral to the writing transfer construct, prior knowledge is typically defined as knowledge that writers use as they respond to new rhetorical situations “in a routinized way” or “in new ways that entail change, transformation, repurposing, and expansive learning” (Anson and Moore 347). However, this construct of transfer has been challenged by scholars working within posthumanist and new materialist traditions who observe that the contextualist theories in which most transfer research is grounded “continue to privilege the human subject, assume a twentieth-century view of the social, and fail to account for writing studies’ evolving thinking about writing” (Ringer and Morey 290). Extending Latour’s argument for “taking ‘the social’ out of its black box to investigate just how it is constituted,” R. Mark Hall cautions writing center researchers that “[o]nly by examining this ‘assemblage’ of relations,” including non-humans, “can we posit a conceptual understanding of the social” (153). Sharpening our conceptual understanding of the social is crucial because “[t]he very definition of transfer takes the task (and the approach to the task) as socially set,” leaving the writer “with nothing to do but bring ‘previous knowledge, skills, strategies, and dispositions’ to bear in different ways” (Dippre 116).

Building on these critical insights from writing transfer and new materialism, we sought a methodology for studying writers’ tacit conceptions of writing that, when used with DBIs and other qualitative methods, could grant us insight into the complexity, contingency, and dynamism of a writer’s prior knowledge as operationalized through their embodied, distributed, technologically mediated, and material writing practices and processes. We were interested in (1) uncovering conceptions of writing held by differently positioned stakeholders at our university; (2) understanding whether, and how, stakeholders operationalized tacit conceptions of writing through work and writing practices; and (3) discovering how these tacit conceptions were (re)contoured through stakeholders’ activation of institutional documents coordinating their work with the work of other university stakeholders. Guided by these aims, we took up institutional ethnography (IE) for its efficacy with pursuing inquiry beyond the “individual-community binary” (Ringer and Morey 297). Our project has unfolded across three stages, moving from the writing center (Stage I) to our independent writing department (Stage II) to our university’s ten colleges (Stage III), but we focus in this article on Stage I, the writing center (WC), for the purpose of demonstrating how DBIs, specifically with peer tutors “enmeshed within larger writing ecologies” (Ringer and Morey 298), can surface tacit personal knowledge about writing and reveal how tutors’ conceptions of writing (re)shape and are (re)shaped by their writing and tutoring practices as well as organizational documents.

In what follows, we model how to craft a “variation of the discourse-based interview” (Yates et al. 52) for an IE project, demonstrating how writing studies researchers can integrate DBIs into mixed-methods research designs. We begin by reviewing scholarship on tacit and prior knowledge, focusing in particular on the ways in which writing center scholarship has engaged these constructs. We turn next to our methodology, defining core tenets and concepts of IE, outlining how these heuristics informed our research design and describing how we adapted DBIs for use with IE. To illustrate how our use of DBIs helped reveal tutors’ conceptions of writing even as these diffuse and fluid conceptions shifted through ongoing writing and tutoring practices, we share some findings from our study that show how tutors’ tacit conceptions of writing emerged through their written work in tutoring appointments. We conclude by considering the limitations of our study and reflecting on strategies for practice emerging from our work.

Defining and Studying Tacit and Prior Knowledge

As Neil Baird and Bradley Dilger observe in their introduction to this special issue, writing transfer research often figures tacit knowledge as prior knowledge even though the two are not synonymous. A writer’s prior knowledge is often–but not always–tacit, and other nonhuman sources of prior knowledge must be taken into account (Ringer and Morey 303). Responsive to Ringer and Morey’s critique of writing transfer scholarship that conceptualizes “prior knowledge” as a stable, static entity, we adopt their more expansive construct, which includes:

embedded assumptions within genres and discourses; digital tools such as databases, search engines, hard drives, the cloud, social media feeds, and the web; the kinetic memory of the embodied writer; material repositories of memory and knowledge such as books, notes, memos, and pre-existing writing; and language itself. (303)

Insofar as this posthumanist approach to writing transfer “emphasize[s] the role that genre and discourse play in perpetuating themselves” (Ringer and Morey 304), it resonates with conceptual frameworks that center social action, such as rhetorical genre studies (RGS) and methodologies adapted from sociology, like ethnomethodology (Dippre) and institutional ethnography (Smith).

Tapping into, and studying, different dimensions of tacit and prior knowledge has been a central focus for researchers interested in writing transfer and development, with lines of inquiry on genre knowledge and uptake (Reiff and Bawarshi; Robertson et al.; Rounsaville, Selecting Genres), conceptions of writing (Cozart et al.; Mateos and Solé; Workman), and lifespan writing development (Dippre). Reporting on a cross-institutional study of students’ use of prior genre knowledge and discursive resources in FYC courses, Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi draw on the affordances of DBIs to counter the limitations of “students’ reported cognitive processes and retrospective reflections,” describing how interviewers “ask[ed] students to identify specific places in their writing that supported and illustrated their retrospective accounts” and then inquired into “how they learned to use those conventions or why they made the choices that they made” (317, 319). From a posthumanist perspective, these interview questions “privilege the human subject” and “obscure the nonhuman actants that contribute to writing’s emergence” despite being grounded in RGS, one of the “established theories in the field [that] ascribe to genre and discourse a degree of agency over the emergence of writing” (Ringer and Morey 302, 290). Indirectly attributing agency to genre in her report on the same study, Angela Rounsaville focuses on the “micro-discursive space of uptake,” arguing that “​​it is partially through this process that prior genres meet, are transformed, rejected, or imported whole cloth into new rhetorical situations” (Selecting Genres). Although Rounsaville doesn’t engage genres as nonhuman actants, this glimmer of agency suggests generative possibilities for pursuing this line of research.

While DBIs are effective for studying tacit knowledge, using them in combination with other methods of data collection is crucial for exploring related constructs, such as prior knowledge and conceptions of writing. Considering the selection and use of methods for studying tacit knowledge, Erin Workman observes that writing studies researchers have “used stimulated recall techniques to prompt a writer’s articulation of tacit knowledge” in document-based or reflective interviews (e.g., Prior and Shipka; Roozen), while researchers in education have used “concept mapping to elicit a learner’s conceptual knowledge within a particular domain” (212). Blending stimulated recall with an adaptation of concept mapping, Workman outlines visual mapping as an efficacious method for eliciting, documenting, and studying writers’ representations of their conceptions of writing, demonstrating how visual maps, when used to anchor DBIs, can surface tacit knowledge and “reveal traces of a complex network of texts, people, locations, and concepts spanning time and space” (222). Similar uses of visual methods to elicit tacit knowledge have been reported by Rounsaville (Genre Repertoires), who couples writer-generated concept maps with interviewing to build an emic perspective of one writer’s tacit genre knowledge across their lifeworlds and lifespan; by Rosemary Wette, who uses mind mapping to study graduate student writers’ “conceptual knowledge development in a genre-based ESP [English for Specific Purposes] writing course” (59); by Patricia Dunn, who developed “juxtaposed visual representations” to tap into novice teachers’ tacit knowledge and unexamined ideological beliefs about writing; and by April Baker-Bell, who designed “an attitudinal assessment” activity that “invit[es] students to draw images to represent” samples of Black Language and White Mainstream English for the purpose of “get[ting] underneath [students’] language attitudes where their perceptions of their cultural, racial, and intellectual identities in the face of anti-blackness and white linguistic and cultural hegemony were buried” (43). Although these scholars take up visual methods for different pedagogical or research purposes, they all use writer-generated maps or sketches to elicit cultural, racial, linguistic, and embodied dimensions of writers’ tacit knowledge, finding the combination of visual and verbal modalities productive for surfacing “the foundational assumptions that determine how we act” (Hall 6). Because these assumptions “are always already there, whether we choose to investigate them or not,” rendering ideological dimensions of tacit knowledge visible is essential for “determin[ing] exactly how they organize and structure what we do” (Hall 6).

Connecting tacit writing knowledge to writing practices and processes, research into conceptions of writing explores how people come to define, understand, and conceive of writing, particularly in academic contexts. Mar Mateos and Isabel Solé found that research on conceptions of writing, with its origins in cognitive psychology, often focuses solely on individuals without taking into consideration “the social dimension of writing” (63). The authors call for more investigation into “personal conceptions and cultural practices of writing,” necessitating mixed-methods approaches that attend to the interface between individuals and institutions (64). In our study, integrating DBIs with IE opens up for analysis the co-emergence of tutors’ conceptions of writing as they activate and perpetuate writing center genres and discourses through the creation of conference records (written feedback and appointment letters). Just as posthumanizing writing transfer expands the transfer construct by considering the larger ecology within which transfer functions and through which agency is distributed, IE amplifies the DBI method by foregrounding the ways in which individuals activate the translocal texts that coordinate their work with the work of others.

Research Methods for Studying Writing Transfer in the Writing Center

The writing center, uniquely positioned within the university to collaborate with student writers across disciplines and programs of study, can support writers in transferring their knowledge, skills, and strategies between and across writing contexts (Crozier). Writing center researchers have taken up threads of inquiry from rhetoric and composition and educational psychology to study how student dispositions (Bromley et al.; Hixson-Bowles et al.), tutor skills and strategies (Hill, Tutoring for Transfer; Nowacek et al., ‘Transfer Talk’), and tutor education (Cardinal; Stock and Leichty) can facilitate the transfer of writing-related knowledge. Much of this research focuses on the broad construct of writing transfer rather than the specific dimensions of prior or tacit knowledge, even though most conceptions of transfer “involve... something learned in the past” (Driscoll and Wells). Writing centers can and do facilitate students’ transfer of learning—indeed, “centers already teach for transfer every day” (Devet 120)—but how, when, why, and to what extent transfer occurs remains under due investigation.

Writing center-writing transfer scholarship often divides its focus between how peer tutors can best support student writers to transfer their learning, with an emphasis on student writing transfer, and how writing center experience can benefit peer tutors as they transfer their own tutoring knowledge across contexts, with a focus on tutor writing transfer. Toward the latter, as Dana Lynn Driscoll and Bonnie Devet detail in their introduction to Transfer of Learning in the Writing Center, the most prominent questions pursued by transfer researchers in writing center contexts have asked how to develop tutors’ knowledge about writing transfer (e.g., Hill, Strategies), how to shape tutors’ dispositions toward writing transfer (e.g., Hastings), and how to create a writing center context that creates conditions to support writing transfer (e.g., Johnson). In the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Project, Bradley Hughes and colleagues developed a survey to understand what alumni peer tutors “take with them from their training and experience” (13) and how former peer tutors reuse their learning “in their lives beyond graduation” (17), ultimately finding that “from their education and experience as peer tutors, alumni developed a new relationship with writing,” “analytical power,” and “a deeper understanding of and commitment to collaborative learning,” among other values (24). By asking peer tutors to reflect on and articulate how they re-purpose skills, approaches, and knowledge from the writing center to the workplace, the survey guided participants to make their tacit tutoring knowledge more explicit.

The methods of writing center studies continue to expand from the foundation of personal narratives, “historical research, case studies, and rhetorical analysis” to incorporate innovative and mixed-methods approaches, with the empirical research tradition now including surveys, interviews, ethnographies, discourse analysis, and action research in both quantitative and qualitative methodologies (Mackiewicz and Babcock 3). Writing center researchers primarily use survey and interview methods to understand the lived experiences of tutors (Carillo; Driscoll), administrators (Driscoll and Perdue; Perdue and Driscoll), and student writers (Denny et al.). Although ethnographic research methods, particularly qualitative interviews, have figured centrally into efforts to document peer tutors’ “perceptions” of their work (Thonus 62), DBIs are far less common. One notable exception is Rebecca Nowacek and colleagues’ study of “everyday reflective writing,” which they situate “at the intersection of three ongoing areas of inquiry in writing center studies: conference records, reflection, and transfer of learning” (Everyday Reflective Writing, 95). As demonstrated in this study, DBIs can engage tutors in deep reflections on their work, uncovering and integrating their conceptual and practical writing knowledge.

A significant exigence for researching conceptual writing knowledge, including the ideologies, attitudes, and assumptions that surround writing work, is the ongoing effort to advance social justice and equity in and through writing centers. Nancy Grimm argues for “the importance of paying attention to the conceptual frames we use to understand the world, our work, and the impact of our work on the world” in writing centers (12). She writes that some of the most “powerful influences” on centers “are the unspoken assumptions that guide the practice—assumptions about students, about language, about literacy, and about learning” (12). Taking up Grimm’s call, Hall argues for “grounding the everyday documents we create [...] in conscious conceptual frameworks,” modeling how different frameworks embedded in focal documents such as mission statements, annual reports, and course syllabi “reflect and generate underlying assumptions about writing, teaching, and learning” (4). Writing center work is imbued with (often) tacit assumptions, ideologies, and conceptual frameworks that give administrators and tutors “reasons for working the way they do,” but, as both Dunn and Baker-Bell have observed in pedagogical contexts, “the challenge is to make those reasons conscious, explicit, to call them up for examination and, perhaps, revision” (Hall 14). Recognizing the critical area of writing center scholarship that responds to the pressing need to create anti-racist writing centers (Brooks-Gillies; Faison and Treviño; Greenfield and Rowan), promote linguistic justice (Blazer; Blazer and Fallon; Green), and support multiply marginalized tutors and writers (Hitt; Olson; Shelton and Howson), we hoped that our use of IE, combined with the methodological power of the DBI, would enable us to uncover, and open up for change, tutors’ tacit writing knowledge, ideological beliefs (Baker-Bell; Dunn), and language attitudes (Baird and Dilger).

Methodology: Institutional Ethnography

This project takes up institutional ethnography (IE){1} as a methodology for tracing conceptions of writing in our university, a mid-sized, private, Vincentian institution located in Chicago. We adopted IE for its demonstrated use in “uncover[ing] how things happen” (LaFrance and Nicolas 131) in contexts of critical value to writing studies researchers, including first-year writing programs (LaFrance, An Institutional) and writing centers (Miley). Articulating the value of IE “as a methodology [with] the potential to extend important conversations in writing studies, especially about how the hierarchical structure of the academy impacts our work and how the work of writing studies gets carried out” (31), LaFrance and Nicolas draw on the work of Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith, who developed IE as “an alternative sociology” and “method of inquiry” for understanding lived experiences “from people’s standpoint as contrasted with standpoint in a theory-governed discourse” (Smith 1). As Smith articulates it, IE “starts from where we are in our everyday lives and explores social relations and organization in which our everyday doings participate but which are not fully visible to us” (1). Focused on discovering “what practices constitute the institution as we think of it, how discourse may be understood to compel and shape those practices, and how norms of practice speak to, for, and over individuals,” IE begins from the standpoint of individuals, moving then to explore how people’s work is contoured by institutional relations and professional discourses (LaFrance and Nicolas 131).

Given our interest in tacit conceptions of writing, we took up IE to “reveal the deep and often hidden investments and experiences of [people],” hoping to use this “series of tools and heuristics” to “mak[e] visible the values, practices, beliefs, and belongings that circulate below more visible or dominant discourses” (LaFrance, Institutional Ethnography 29, 47)—much like Baker-Bell’s aim of getting underneath students’ attitudes to their underlying perceptions. While Baker-Bell uses student-generated sketches to ground inquiry, institutional ethnographers use a flexible framework guided by seven core concepts: ruling relations, standpoint, social coordination, problematic, work, work processes, and institutional circuits (LaFrance 60). While each of these concepts shaped our project in various ways, we limit our focus in this article to standpoint, ruling relations, and problematic.

Bringing together ethnomethodology with feminist and marxist sociological traditions, Smith centers standpoint, defining it as “a methodological starting point in the local particularities of bodily existence. Designed to establish a subject position from which to begin research—a site that is open to anyone—it furnishes an alternative starting point to the objectified subject of knowledge of social scientific discourse” (228). The standpoint construct emphasizes that individuals bring to their work their own unique stances that function like terministic screens, shaping what they see, what they can’t see, what they have the power to see, and what access they have to the translocal ruling relations coordinating their work. Individuals’ standpoints, which reflect their perspectives, beliefs, and possibilities for being, are always coordinated, constrained, and co-constructed within their institutions. In the present study, the site of the center begins to construct the roles of peer tutors and administrators, while individuals simultaneously bring to bear their own tacit perceptions, ideologies, and practices to their work. Despite the appearance of stability and uniformity implied by institutional roles and categories, each person within the WC community embodies their own standpoint that impacts how they approach their work and the extent to which they take up writing center discourses.

A second key construct, ruling relations coordinate work across space and time via the material, infinitely replicable texts in which they are encoded. Texts organize, construct, define, and mediate the work people do on an everyday basis, and it is through textual coordination that ruling relations are operationalized. Although this definition of text may appear to resonate with posthuman conceptions of nonhuman actants, from an IE perspective, a text on its own does not enact ruling relations; people enact ruling relations through activating the texts that coordinate their work. Smith, in her definition of IE, articulates the coordinating power of ruling relations:

Institutional ethnography explores the social relations organizing institutions as people participate in them and from their perspectives. People are the expert practitioners of their own lives, and the ethnographer’s work is to learn from them, to assemble what is learned from different perspectives, and to investigate how their activities are coordinated. It aims to go beyond what people know to find out how what they are doing is connected with others’ doings in ways they cannot see. The idea is to map the institutional aspects of the ruling relations so that people can expand their own knowledge of their everyday worlds by being able to see how what they are doing is coordinated with others’ doings elsewhere and elsewhen. (225)

Our research on conceptions of writing circulating in the WC focused on the ways in which peer tutors activated organizational texts, specifically the Mission Statement, Core Beliefs, and feedback genres. These materials function as “boss texts”—texts that reinforce ruling relations and carry significant rhetorical authority to shape possibilities for writing, knowing, and being (Griffith and Smith; LaFrance, Institutional Ethnography). While discourse analysis enabled us to “illuminate the why behind the what and the how of writing center work,” revealing the transactional conceptions of writing promoted through these organizational texts, IE’s focus on texts and the individuals who activate them led us to interview peer tutors, many of whom, as we share below, articulated self-expressive conceptions of writing (Hall 11). In this instance, IE allowed us to see how the ruling relations of the WC were enacted by peer tutors and the ways in which institutional discourses organized and re-developed peer tutors’ writing practices over time.

The final concept, problematic, is ultimately what guides the institutional ethnographer’s eye. As LaFrance and Nicolas have written in numerous venues, a problematic is not a “problem.” Rather, a problematic emerges from a disjuncture between lived experience and ruling relations. In the case of the peer tutors, the problematic emerged from the disjuncture between how peer tutors conceived of writing and how those conceptions guided their practices and the ways in which the WC’s organizational texts were designed to organize their work. The disjuncture we identified in the WC reveals a tension between theory and practice showing how tutors’ tacit knowledge may conflict with the “principles and propositions that underpin writing center work” (Hall 148). The exploration of a problematic is significant to IE because “situating ethnography within institutional settings as an exploration of a problematic (over a set of research questions) foregrounds the relational and material nature of institutional experience, a recognition that not all individuals will be oriented to a practice or experience the site in the same way” (LaFrance, Institutional Ethnography 101). For our study, discourse analysis revealed underlying assumptions embedded in organizational documents, and DBIs with tutors enabled us to discover their differing orientations to WC work.

As researchers, our own positionality and relationships to the project and participants illustrates the material intersections between the constructs of standpoint, ruling relations, and problematic. When we began our study, Erin, as an incoming WPA seeking information about her new institutional context and the ruling relations coordinating the work of writing at DePaul, took up IE because of its facility for uncovering how things are done. She was interested in both the official story—how constructs of writing were represented in institutional texts like the university’s strategic plan and mission statement—and the unofficial story—the ways in which faculty, staff, and ultimately students, activate these texts, perhaps taking up, resisting, or complicating how writing means. For Madeline, a problematic began to come into view when she looked up from her position as a first-year peer tutor and towards the different individuals, social organizations, and texts that coordinate the work of the center. Enrolled in a course Erin was teaching on genre and discourse, Madeline composed a discourse autoethnography, examining how her experiences of discourses circulating in the writing department and in the WC were in tension with each other. She carried this project forward by writing a critical genre analysis of the genre ecology of the WC, examining how the various genres composed by peer tutors conflicted with the values and beliefs about writing tutors were bringing to their sessions. Seeing the value of tracing tutors’ activation of writing center texts like the Tutoring Handbook, Core Beliefs, and guidelines for written commentary for her IE project, Erin invited Madeline to join the project as a co-researcher, thus providing two different standpoints from which to explore what writing means at our institution.

Methods and Interview Design

In this study, we set out to identify and understand the conceptions of writing held by WC administrators and peer tutors and to analyze whether and how these conceptions of writing shaped their writing and tutoring practices. Guided by these aims and the IE methodology, the methods designed for this study centered on conducting DBIs and collecting textual artifacts at the WC, staffed by 63 undergraduate and graduate peer tutors and four administrators at the time of the study. This study{2} took place at DePaul University in Spring 2018 and collected three types of data: survey responses, DBIs, and organizational documents. The study drew from an existing WC assessment team survey, which Madeline designed in her capacity as a peer tutor, that had been distributed to tutors earlier in the term (n=16). Madeline also interviewed three WC administrators and conducted DBIs with seven peer tutors, who brought self-selected conference records (written feedback and appointment letters) to the interviews. In addition to collecting tutors’ written work, we also gathered organizational documents, such as the Tutoring Handbook, Mission Statement, and Core Beliefs, “as focal points for listening to and excavating underlying values, assumptions, beliefs, and the habits of mind that guide what we do, how, and why” (Hall 152). This approach ultimately revealed how the WC officially portrayed writing, how peer tutors understood writing, and how these conceptions aligned or differed.

The semi-structured DBIs with peer tutors moved in two parts. The interviews began with questions about participants’ experiences and conceptions of writing. These questions focused on eliciting tacit conceptions of writing by first asking participants to define writing and then sequencing questions that opened space for them to further articulate these beliefs by considering what writing does and how they came to hold these beliefs. Building on these questions, the discourse-based portion of the interview explored participants’ self-selected written work. In addition to providing a means for participants to describe their writing processes for these texts, the DBI aimed to make tacit conceptions of writing even more salient as they materialized (or not) in the tutors’ written texts. Meaghan Brewer foregrounds tacit knowledge and experiences when she notes that “conceptions of literacy are so ingrained and so close that we often don’t see them until... they become a source of tension” (91; emphasis added). The DBI, therefore, aimed to make any tensions or disjunctures between participants’ beliefs about writing and their writing practices more visible.

Each tutor brought to the interview some of their conference records—one sample each of what our university’s center calls a “written feedback” and an “appointment letter,” representing two well-established genres in their tutoring work that “both reflect and reproduce the institutional cultures and values of which they are a part” (Hall 94). A written feedback appointment is an asynchronous session for which writers submit their work ahead of time and tutors read and respond to the composition by writing marginal comments and a summary letter about those comments; an appointment letter is a more informal written summary of any in-person or synchronous tutoring appointment.

As we developed the interview protocol through the lens of IE, we looked for ways to ask questions that could elicit participants’ tacit knowledge of writing. The semi-structured interview began with questions that invited participants to share their experiences, beliefs, and knowledge about writing, a discussion that we hoped would contextualize participants’ descriptions of their work and writing processes. The interview then transitioned to questions centered on the written texts that participants brought to the interview and the “writing decisions” participants made in composing them (Baird and Dilger). After asking tutors to describe their writing processes, the questions point to specific passages, sentences, and phrases in the text, inviting peer tutors to elaborate on what they wrote, why they wrote, and how they came to write in that way. The interview protocol uses a placeholder “it” to refer to specific moments in the text selected at the time of the interview and discussed between the interviewer and tutor. Below, we list the five core questions from the discourse-based portion of the interview (see Appendix for the full interview protocol):

Ask the following questions about the peer writing tutor’s written feedback.

Q16. Tell me about the writing process you used to give feedback to this writer.
Q16a. Why did you phrase it that way?
Q16b. Where did you learn to give feedback in that way?
Q16c. How often do you give feedback in this way?

Ask the following questions about the peer writing tutor’s face-to-face appointment letter.

Q17. Tell me about the writing process you used to give feedback to this writer.

Q17a. Why did you phrase it that way?
Q17b. Where did you learn to give feedback in that way?
Q17c. How often do you give feedback in this way?

Ask the following questions about the writing the peer writing tutor does in the writing center.

Q18. Do you write differently in the marginal comments than in the summary letter, and if so, in what ways?

Q19. Do you write differently in summary letters (after face-to-face appointments) than in appointment letters (after written feedback appointments), and if so, in what ways?

Q20. Do any of the writing center’s core practices, values, or beliefs guide or influence your work as a peer writing tutor? If so, which ones, and why?
Q20a. If not, what influences your work as a peer writing tutor?

The DBI in our study departs in two significant ways from Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s method—we elected to forego the providing of alternative rhetorical choices to writers, and we built on insights provided by IE to more purposefully reconcile the institutional and ecological influences that enhance or inhibit a writer’s agency in particular rhetorical contexts. At its inception, the DBI sought to explore how “rhetorical context influences writing” by systematically examining what choices writers do and do not make in particular writing contexts, as well as why, how, and toward what ends they make those choices (Odell et al. 222). The traditional DBI method calls for ethnographers to collect swaths of writing, engage in discourse analysis to identify textual and rhetorical features among the texts, and then use that analysis to develop alternative phrases and sentences writers use. Then, in a DBI, an ethnographer would present these alternative choices to writers and ask them what motivated a particular choice in the given text over another. In this way, the method offers a systematic, contextualized, and textually bounded approach for examining writers’ processes and perhaps tacit decision-making. However, we decided to forego suggesting alternative rhetorical choices altogether in order to decenter a writer and their writing, broadening instead to understand how a writer and their work are situated within broader institutions, cultures, and relations that impact their writing and writing processes. Informed by posthumanist conceptions of agency, the discourse-informed interview protocol “underscores that knowledge is not merely in the tutor as authoritative writing consultant; rather, it is distributed among a variety of tools, including various writing resources” (Hall 97). Instead of discussing alternative rhetorical choices, we followed Reiff and Bawarshi’s lead and asked peer tutors to describe why, where, and how they wrote feedback to the writers throughout each composition. These questions focused on the ways that tutors write (differently) across these writing center genres and situations and with and for different student writers. The protocol also left space to point to specific moments, phrases, or sentences in the texts and to discuss the participants’ processes, knowledge, and motivations, which we could later connect to institutional discourses. Our method also drew from IE’s attention to text activation and coordination to shape the DBI to “make visible the power of texts to organize what is getting done and how” (Turner 159). The DBI also offered a way to operationalize the methodological orientation of “looking up” by beginning with individuals’ experiences but then moving to see how those experiences coordinate with those of others.

Uncovering Tacit Writing Knowledge in the Writing Center

As a methodology, IE investigates the social coordination of lived realities forged at the intersections of institutions and individuals; as a method, DBIs can help make those intersections visible through stories of people’s writing. Recognizing the university writing center as an active institutional site that perpetuates particular discourses about writing, tutoring, and literacy, we set out to study how personal tacit writing knowledge emerges through writing center work. Our IE of the WC demonstrates how DBIs, specifically with peer tutors, can uncover tacit knowledge about writing that emerges in the written conference records produced through tutoring work.

Through our IE, we found that the institution of the WC, based on organizational materials and feedback genres, promotes a transactional understanding of writing as communication, while many peer tutors, as shown in interview responses, come into the center with a conception of writing as self-expression. The center’s “official” story of writing is perhaps best encapsulated by its Mission Statement, which begins:

The University Center for Writing-based Learning promotes the development of writers, writing instruction, written texts, and the use of writing as a powerful and ubiquitous modality of and for learning. Grounded in the belief that language in general, and writing specifically, shapes and sustains democratic processes, the members of the University Center for Writing-based Learning community believe writing is an important means for an individual’s participation in democracy in that writing promotes learning, critical inquiry, self-development, and reflection through continual revision. (“Our Mission”)

The Mission Statement is refracted in administrators’ definitions of writing, such as “using symbols that we agree represent language and using them for any reason to represent spoken language and to communicate across space and time” (Participant A). Differently, some peer tutors describe writing as self-expression, such as one tutor who said, “writing is a tangible expression of emotions. Of thoughts. Of feelings. Life. Writing makes something intangible tangible” (Participant J). The primary distinction between transaction and self-expression that emerged from our data analysis parallels influential education research on conceptions of writing that defines two implicit models of writing as transactional and transmissional (Mateos and Solé; White and Bruning) and distinguishes between reproductive and epistemic conceptions of academic writing (Villalón and Mateos).

IE simultaneously brought into view the discovery that many peer tutors’ understandings of writing shift between writing as self-expression and writing as transaction as they become enculturated into the center, as shown in definitions that reflect both conceptions of writing: “Writing is either an expression of what you’re feeling and how you understand things or it is used as a tool to educate and get ideas out there” (Participant G). Many first-year peer tutors occupy a liminal space where the official standpoint of the center meets their own conceptions of writing. The enculturation peer tutors experience through training, professional development, and tutoring significantly impacts how they conceptualize writing. The heuristics of IE recast enculturation as a function of ruling relations, accounting for the social contexts, institutional structures, and work processes that coordinate people’s work and shape writing practices. Ruling relations come into view when tutors write conference records, reproduce values and beliefs from organizational texts, and participate in the construction of social relations in the writing center. Through the “enactment” of writing center discourses, such as values, beliefs, and conceptions of writing, peer tutors “construct distinctive identities for themselves—and, by extension, the writing center as a campus institution,” both reproducing the institution of the center and filtering it through their own prior experiences and knowledge to stake their own claim in the center (Hall 89).

Seeking to understand particular ways that peer tutors enacted the ruling relations of the center, we found that the Core Beliefs of the center worked deliberately to move tutors toward a more transactional conception of writing, both explicitly and implicitly shaping tutors’ writing and tutoring practices. The six Core Beliefs are driving statements that articulate the ideas and assumptions that ground WC work. In addition to asking tutors whether any of the Center’s core practices, values, or beliefs guide their tutoring work, we looked for the imprint of the beliefs elsewhere. We found that most participants’ definitions of writing aligned with Core Belief #3, “writing facilitates learning and communication,” indicating how the organizational texts of the WC influence peer tutors’ conceptions of writing in relation to their tutoring work (Our Core Beliefs). Participant G’s definition of writing above incorporates ideals of self-expression and communication, aligning with the core belief’s emphasis on education and sharing knowledge. Their conception of writing may show an attempt to reconcile prior knowledge of writing for expression with writing for transactional purposes, perhaps revealing how this tutor works to make sense of writing by reconceptualizing her previous experiences within her current experiences in the center.

The DBIs further created the opportunity to constellate conceptions of writing with writing and tutoring practices. The conversations that emerged during the discourse-based portions of the interviews linked definitions of writing with conference records, which coordinated participants’ perceptions with their practices. The process of the DBI itself—the careful, collaborative, systematic review of written artifacts—enabled participants to articulate their writing knowledge, as seen in moments when participants made active realizations as they talked through their texts, recognizing “something that I notice that I didn’t know that I did” (Participant E). For instance, the DBI uncovered how the routinized, structured writing practices of conference records reinforce a transactional conception of writing. Participant J presents a conception of writing as self-expression; however, a more transactional, rhetorical representation of writing emerged when discussing and analyzing their written feedback. In their feedback to a student writer, the tutor focused their comments around content and word choice. The tutor wrote in their written feedback that they chose to focus on content because the writer’s ideas could be more clear to the audience. They chose word choice as a way to call the writer’s attention to the professor’s expectations and the peer tutor’s experiences as a reader. The text shows the tutor’s commitment to providing feedback in service of the writer’s larger purpose, audience, and context, primarily guided by an understanding of writing as transaction. Since the tutor said in the interview that they perceive written feedback as a writer’s “main source of getting information” about their writing, they write with a purpose of clear communication to the writer. Even though they defined writing from a perspective of self-expression, their own tutoring practices reflect a conception of writing as transaction, revealing the liminal position this tutor navigates between their conceptions of writing.

One of many stories that shows how DBIs make tacit knowledge visible—and especially how conceptions of writing (re)shape writing and tutoring practices—emerges from the conversation with Participant E, a graduate assistant and peer tutor. In the following excerpt, Madeline and Participant E discuss the tutor’s appointment letter, which they composed as a summary of an in-person face-to-face appointment. Participant E describes the process of writing the appointment letter, and then turns to look at specific sentences and components of the text. Through the back-and-forth conversation, prompted by the discourse-based line of questioning, the tutor comes to articulate how they decide to use different pronouns in their writing:

Madeline: One thing I noticed just going through is you use “I,” “you,” and “we” differently.

Participant E: Yeah.

Madeline: Is that something that you often do in your appointment letters?

E: Yeah. I think it’s like—I’m not super hyper-aware of it, but I want to be more hyper aware of how I say it. So, like, “we worked on this,” like, “you wanted to look for in-text citations.” So I feel like with using that “you” here, I wanted to say, this is what their requests were and then this is what we did together based on that. So I feel like that kind of makes it more like I was listening to what she was saying. And also, then, kind of making the “we” more collaborative of what we did in the appointment together. And usually, I think most of the “I”—and I’m not analyzing it too much—is what I felt about the appointment. So, like, “I thought it was great to meet you.” “It was great working with you.” So, yeah.

As the tutor talks through the rhetorical choices made in their writing, pointing to specific marginal comments to explain their response, they verbalize tacit writing knowledge that impacts how they address student writers in their appointment letters. The interview protocol, with questions that encourage tutors to explore the decisions and meanings behind their writing practices, helps tutors realize where they were previously “not super hyper-aware” of their writing, but more toward increasing their rhetorical awareness in a way only made possible through a discussion of their texts. DBIs, which explore the content, creation, and circulation of texts, “enable researchers to compare participants’ stated perspectives and beliefs about writing with actual discursive strategies evident in texts” (Lancaster 120). In concert with institutional documents from the WC and descriptions of participants’ beliefs about writing, the DBI-focused sections of the interviews made it possible to see more deeply and more completely the ways in which tacit writing knowledge shapes the composition of written texts within institutions.

Conclusion and Strategies for Practice

At the heart of the DBI and related research methods that seek to identify traces of written discourses are the individuals who participate in the communities of inquiry. The integration of DBIs with IE—the synthesis of method and methodology—shows how discourse-based interviews can reveal intersections between individuals and institutions, locating writers and their knowledge(s) within broader “institutional discourses” (Smith). The use of DBIs within an IE project enables dynamic exploration of the co-constitutive and socially constructed nature of tacit writing knowledge and institutionally coordinated work processes—making the DBI particularly generative within writing center communities. The heuristics of IE, such as ruling relations, also push DBIs beyond the realm of discourse analysis and toward a fuller understanding of the co-constitutive nature of discourse and knowledge.

Through DBIs, writers narrate their rhetorical choices and, in doing so, reveal intersections between the individual and the institution that the heuristics of IE prime researchers to recognize. While DBIs offer a method for eliciting individuals’ tacit knowledge, IE provides a methodology—an “epistemological and theoretical” grounding (Sheridan and Nickoson 2)—complete with “analytical tools” for “mak[ing] visible how things happen in organizations,” much of which is “coordinated [translocally] by texts” (DeVault 25). IE understands texts as “coordinating a work process” while also “produc[ing] the institutional observability of the work of those involved” (Smith 170), a conception differing from the construct of textual coordination familiar to technical communication researchers (Slattery). The interviews also stimulate writers to reveal tacit conceptions of writing that emerge through their writing practices. The methodological emphasis on textual activation and coordination, driven by individual insights into institutional discourses, expands the potential of DBIs for exploring individuals’ compositions and interactions with texts.

Reflecting on the study at hand generates some strategies for researchers who want to incorporate DBIs into an IE project or mixed-methods study. First, while this project only used DBIs with undergraduate and graduate writing tutors, such interviews would also be productive with administrators, faculty, and staff. Although this study focused on two writing samples, DBIs can generate deeper insights when participants bring larger collections of writing, whether with a greater quantity of texts or a set of written artifacts from a particular day, task, or role. We learned from developing our research methods and later analyzing our data that it is particularly generative to begin any document-based interview with broader questions about participants’ experiences, beliefs, and perspectives. A few carefully selected questions that ask participants to articulate their conceptual and practical knowledge can help prepare them to respond to more complex discourse-based questions. The development of our DBI also benefited from our familiarity with the texts, genres, and structures of the community under inquiry, making DBI methods particularly rich for studies in which the researchers are members of the population under inquiry. And while a traditional DBI presents alternative rhetorical choices to writers, DBIs can also forgo this approach and instead ask people to narrate their writing experiences to articulate what, how, why, and for whom they write. Adaptable within a range of research contexts, DBIs can pair questions about people’s beliefs and experiences with descriptions of their writing processes and practices. Such narratives of writing experience can illuminate previously tacit writing knowledge and also how such knowledge is always coordinated and co-constituted within institutions. Regardless of their proximity or membership to the community, researchers who look more closely at texts, genres, and writing as they develop the questions on the DBI protocol will be better prepared to participate in conversations with writers.

Extending the productive tradition of DBI methods in writing studies, researchers can adapt interview protocols to better uncover the interfaces between texts, contexts, writers, and writing. We heed Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s advice that “it is unlikely that a single methodology—in effect, a single perspective—will ever tell us all we need to know. Consequently, we think researchers should look for ways that several existing methodologies might be brought to bear on the same topic” (Odell et al. 234). Responsive to their caution, researchers can and should continue to seek the unexpected ways that DBIs can be adapted to different mixed methodologies and interview protocols for the benefit of participants, students, and writers in our research.

Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank co-researcher Peter Vandenberg for his invaluable wisdom, guidance, and collaboration during this research study. Additional thanks to co-researcher Deyana Atanasova, who joined the project for Stage III. We also express our gratitude to the writing center administrators and peer tutors who shared their experiences as participants in this project.

Appendix: Interview Protocol (Peer Writing Tutors)

Q1. How long have you worked at the writing center?

Q2. What leadership positions or teams are you involved with at the writing center?

Q3. What types of writing do you do in your work at the writing center?

Q4. What types of writing do you do outside of your work at the writing center?

Q5. How do you define writing?

Q6. Where does your definition of writing come from?

Q7. What does writing do or what is it for?

Q8. In what contexts do you talk about writing with others?

Q8a. In academic contexts? Non-academic contexts? Workplace contexts?

Q9. How does your understanding of writing influence your work at the writing center?

Q9a. Does it influence how you work with writers, and if so, how?

Q10. Did the writing center theory and pedagogy course influence your definition of writing and/or your writing practices?

Q11. What strategies from the writing center theory and pedagogy course do you use in your writing at the writing center?

Q12. What’s your perception of why most students visit the writing center?

Q13. How does that perception inform your work with writers?

Q14. What is the best outcome from a tutoring session?

Q15. What do you perceive as the work of the writing center?

Thank you. Now, we are going to transition to the document-based portion of our interview. Before the interview, I asked you to bring one sample of a written feedback, which includes a summary letter and marginal comments, and one sample of an appointment letter from a face-to-face appointment. The rest of the questions I have relate to these documents.

Ask the following questions about the peer writing tutor’s written feedback.

Q16. Tell me about the writing process you used to give feedback to this writer.

Q16a. Why did you phrase it that way?

Q16b. Where did you learn to give feedback in that way?

Q16c. How often do you give feedback in this way?

Ask the following questions about the peer writing tutor’s face-to-face appointment letter.

Q17. Tell me about the writing process you used to give feedback to this writer.

Q17a. Why did you phrase it that way?

Q17b. Where did you learn to give feedback in that way?

Q17c. How often do you give feedback in this way?

Ask the following questions about the writing the peer writing tutor does in the writing center.

Q18. Do you write differently in the marginal comments than in the summary letter, and if so, in what ways?

Q19. Do you write differently in summary letters (after face-to-face appointments) than in appointment letters (after written feedback appointments), and if so, in what ways?

Q20. Do any of the writing center’s core practices, values, or beliefs guide or influence your work as a peer writing tutor? If so, which ones, and why?

Q20a. If not, what influences your work as a peer writing tutor?

Notes

1. For a comprehensive guide to developing and conducting institutional ethnographic projects, see Campbell and Gregor’s Mapping Social Relations: A Primer in Doing Institutional Ethnography. To learn more about adapting IE for writing studies research, see LaFrance’s Institutional Ethnography. (Return to text.)

2. This study has been approved by DePaul University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) (Protocol #MC051718LAS). (Return to text.)

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