Week 13

I will be using mixed methods during my research about the use of business and marketing rhetoric and how it may or may not influence the domain of the Writing Center. One of the methods I would like to use is interview. Because I first experienced my “felt difficulty” while working at a university in Ohio, I decided to send some pilot questions to professionals intimately connected with that University's Writing Center and its functions. As I develop this project further to include more writing centers, if need be, I will interview additional directors and other staff members, particularly if they have been in the field for a long time. My conversations with these former directors are ongoing. I have submitted IRB materials, so until I receive approval, I cannot formally interview these professionals or use their responses in my research, but their answers to my pilot questions were interesting and helpful. Because the project itself is ongoing as well, I hope I will be able to continue to seek their guidance and expertise. To begin the conversation, I e-mailed them the following questions:

1. When you started your career directing the writing center, what were some of your educational goals and why?
2. According to your research interests included in your faculty profile, you're interested in critical pedagogy theory. Were the educational goals for the writing center shaped by certain pedagogical theories? If so, which ones? If not, why?
3. Have those goals changed during the course of your tenure? If they have, explain what changes took place and why.
4. In 2011, the president of the university started to use the term “customer” when referring to students in his weekly newsletter to the campus community. Has the rhetoric of the president changed your mission statement for the writing center? If so, in what ways? If not, have you considered employing similar terminology in the writing center? Why or why not?

Any feedback on these questions and/or potential additions would be helpful at this stage. I have not included the answers to these questions because I don't want to potentially conduct myself unethically. I have not gone through and edited, nor have I asked either of them to clarify or expand. I have only thanked them for offering their perspectives during the beginning stages of this project. I have been checking on my IRB status for about a week (as of 4/7/14). Until I receive approval, I will not proceed. In the mean time, I will continue to gather text-based data and go through secondary research. The text-based data will be analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis as a method. The pilot research I've undertaken has been the human subject part of the research.