Power Relations and Praise

As I think on Donald Daiker’s “Learning to Praise,” I am reminded of our recent class discussion about power relations, and our group editing sessions for our observation essay rough drafts last week. I grouped up with Matt and Tessa, and we dug in.

Now, I haven’t familiarized myself with specific rules of English in quite some time, and I had only skimmed over Muriel Harris’ “Strategies for Teaching One-on-One,” so I didn’t necessarily feel comfortable making surface-level suggestions for either of the papers, but I noticed that this was especially true for Matt’s. I deduced that my hesitance was likely a reaction to his grad-student status. And, in Matt’s case, and in direct contrast with how I approached Tessa’s essay, all I wound up doing was giving the draft praise. “Well done, Matt. This looks solid,” I offered, anticipating a groan or three, but he didn’t hold my effort against me, instead nodding in thanks. “This looks like the type of paper I want to hand in,” I added, nervous, “so I might have to steal your structure for my own paper.”

I attempted humor because I didn’t feel good about myself. I had failed in what I thought was my foremost capacity: to criticize constructively. I lavished praise on his draft because I didn’t find any instances where I thought I had the authority to make a case for edits, and it was good! — so why not? But this exchange left me questioning myself. Was I intimidated by his status as a graduate student? By the thought and effort he put into his paper? By what I perceived was its superiority to my own draft? Tessa’s draft was no slouch, either, and yet I had no problem giving her what I thought were fair points to improve on.

The power relations here remind me of when Rachel asserted in class that, in her mind, “there is no such thing as peer tutoring.” Her point: there is always a socially constructed hierarchy of power and knowledge. And though I obviously wasn’t working in a tutor/tutee capacity with Matt and his rough draft, still that power dynamic came into full play.

I want to draw from the experience. In the future, I hope I can better navigate working with someone whose knowledge trumps mine in a similar dialogical setting. After all, this is the reality of working in a writing center, as I observed first hand during sit-ins over the last few weeks — sometimes the tutor simply won’t have the requisite base of knowledge that the tutee does. But how the tutor treats that disparity in knowledge can make all the difference.

On this note, I think Muriel Harris’ concluding advice in “Strategies for Teaching One-on-One,” to, when nervous, remember “how can I help this student… become a writer?” provides a nexus from which a novice tutor such as myself can always remember to work. And I think that if I’m struggling with the minutiae of grammar rules or sentence construction, or if I’m struggling to find a way to accomplish the mission of positively impacting the writer I’m working with because of certain power dynamics, I can at least enable the comfort and ease of my tutee, much in the way Donald Daiker calls for in “Learning to Praise.” So, perhaps my praising Matt was not, in fact, the failure that I at first thought, especially if I can use our exchange as fodder for a positive change in my behavior.

Back to “Learning to Praise.” I don’t think it’s wise to liken praise to “a gimmick,” as Daiker does on page 157; rather, I hope to act in congruence with his method of allowing “nothing but positive comments during an initial reading,” or in this case, even the initial meeting with a tutee. In this way, I think praise will act like small talk — it will establish rapport, and allow for the tutee to ease comfortably into the space of the writing center, as well as into the space of looking at his or her writing from an objective — and, hopefully, more confident — viewpoint.