Figure 22: Former graduate student directors and tutors reflect on their experience in the Studio
So I always like to think of Stewart Selber. He’s this scholar that furthered rhet comp. He’s got this really great book on multiliteracies, and he says you know, what we need to be teaching students now is, we talk about multiliteracies. It’s more than one, it’s not just reading and writing anymore, but what are they? So he says, it’s usually three literacies. It comes down to a functional literacy, whether you can use technology well or it’s do you know how to use it and navigate it, and then there’s a rhetorical literacy of how do you use this program to create with rhetorical intent or purpose, and there’s also a critical literacy and that’s realizing the impact that all these technologies have on the culture at large. The social, political, and economic consequences kind of tethered to these new technologies and the way they’re being used. We can’t give as much attention obviously to the critical literacy, but I think what we do is to help with those two other literacies. We could help them with the functional literacy with just learning how to use the program, and then with that how to use it well. How to use it to create text that are rhetorically effective. 
When the space was first opening, there was a lot, a lot of the cohort I came in with was working there, and there was a lot of talk that we would have about how it was a one to one tutoring space, but it was completely remediated, in that way you almost never worked with just one person. There were often multiple people that were in the studio with you. There were often multiple students working on one project together. So your attention was constantly divided in a way that was not like the classroom, but not like a traditional writing center. And I was fascinated by it. I loved the idea of one on one tutoring spaces in conjunction with a classroom, and I was intrigued by the way that, what kind of new questions students were bringing in. This was not the writing center anymore. This was a completely new set of exigencies that they were bringing in with them. A complete new set of pedagogically approaches that a tutor had to have. New type of management ideas. New scaffold approaches that they had to take with students, and I was intrigued by all of it. 
I also think that it, a lot of its location right now, the places that it is on campus, centrally located and branching out the way that it is. Beyond just the physical space of our English building is helping the English department gain more visibility in the general population. So a lot of times I will have students that will have heard of the studio and kind of know that it’s connected to the English department, and it gets them into oh well our people doing that in the English department, and then they get into the EWN program. So it’s another avenue, or another chain of visibility that it brings to the English department. 
Promoting the studio within the English department is a little bit easier because we have a major EWM (editing, writing media) that feeds into the studio and there’s a lot of teachers, faculty that draw on the studio to help their students. So that’s a little bit easier because that’s a need we know about. Getting outside of the English department, there’s sort of a myth I think that colleges use way more technology now or that everything is high tag or that everyone’s doing all these real cool multimodal compositions. Anecdotally, I’m not sure that’s the case. So, one we would love to do some research and find out what is actually being taught, and then in terms of promoting the center, you’re first trying to figure out what’s actually happening on campus and in different classrooms before you come in and sort of say okay here’s how we can support what you’re doing in the classroom. Or what we’re finding is that there’s actually a lot of non-classroom work that happens here. People bring projects that they just want to do. They want to make a gift. They want to set up a Tumbler. They want to you know work on Photoshop, and then it’s like how do you promote an outreach to groups of people that our just doing self-sponsored work. It’s really excited because it have to just figure out, I guess where you’re needed, or where you could be needed, or where you could create a need for yourself. Yourself being the studio. 
We also get some instances where people from outside the English department want digital studio interaction. So last fall, an instructor from the interior design department contacted me and they were doing an extra credit assignment. The students were making a video at the end of the semester to show the work they had done building these models on interior rooms. The project I think was specifically about lighting, but the bottom line is the instructor asked me to come talk to the class about using (iMovie). So, I talked to them about that program, and then they came, and the students would come on their own and make their projects, make their movie. At the end of the semester, after all the students who were going to create movies were finished, she invited me back to, for the viewing parties is what they called it. They showed all the videos during the last class of the semester, and I didn’t know that she was going to do this, but after each video she asked for my feedback. So you know it was good because it gave the students an opportunity to hear from someone who has some kind of expertise in this program. I don’t considered myself expert in iMovie, but I got to talk to them about some of the things that I see from my perspective, which is not interior design at all. 
The most important thing for me is to be welcoming to students, and make this an inviting place because without that, you know, we talk about the hardware the software and projects and the assignments, and we talk about all of that, but none of that really matters if the students aren’t coming in. 
First and foremost, I think that I’ve said this to a lot of tutors when we were first there, is be as friendly as you possibly can, and as non-stressed, and relaxing, and kind, and understanding because there’s a lot of anxiety that gets brought with them when they come in the door. There’s plenty of anxiety in just any kind writing center, but I think that it’s amplified in a digital space because there not only uncomfortable with their writing and the notion of composing, but their probably uncomfortable with the technology that they’re going to use. At least on some level. And I remember saying to TA’s in the very beginning be as nice as you can. Talk as slowly as you can, over emphasize that we can do this we’re just going to try it out. 
I wanted to see the studio and the writing center physically connected because I thought that would help us be pedagogically connected. And so, to our surprise found out that the wall in between the two rooms was concrete and it cost like eight times as much as we thought it was going to cost to cut a hole in that wall, but we did, and so now we have a conjoined space. While it still has its own identity, it’s connected, and that has brought up some benefits. It’s brought up some limitations. And so, part of the question that I’m asking in that space is can a writing center and a studio be conjoined and connected, or should they be or what does it look like or what happens in that space that doesn’t happen in this space because we are in this building, Johnston, we are separate. The digital studio is here. The writing center is moving even further away from where we currently are. So, it’s kind of fun because you have these two spaces that function differently based on what their next to or conjoined with. 
I don’t want to say it relegates it to go to the RWC, but you definitely see the art of RWC is maybe bigger than the digital studio. The digital studio is associated with it, it’s kind of a tag along. It’s definitely marked by its identity. It’s an English place in the sense that it’s in Williams, which is the English building. So it’s marked in that way, whereas I think the space in the Johnston is different in the sense that it’s more open. I mean there’s more space, there’s more computers. There’s just more space in general, which I think helps. The design with the windows open to look into the space. You can always see what’s going on here as opposed to Williams. You can kind of peak in a get a view, but it wasn’t as open. You know, and it’s in a location in Johnston that doesn’t have a disciplinary identity. It’s marked more as a tutoring space or a place where people go to get work, whereas Williams is marked as more of a place where you go to learn I think. So the fact that this is marked as a tutoring space rather than a learning space I think pulls in a more collective student population, and I think that’s reflective in the numbers you see. So, I think what you’re starting to see is that, and we’d have to wait and see the numbers reflected as well, but that the two spaces are starting to cater to two different clienteles, and I think for different reasons.   
I’d obviously like to see the studio continue to expand. I would really like to see this space become more popular with students from across campus, which I think is already happening. They’re building a Chick-Fil-A next door, which is very popular with the students. And so, I think once we have food options immediately next door to us I think this place is going explode because you can see into the studio from outside. And so, I think this coming up year is really going to be about sort of anticipating how we can really capitalize on that. 
Because I mean this type of composing isn’t going anywhere. I mean it’s the dominate way that we compose now. It’s everywhere in our culture. In other words this is something that’s going to go out of style. It’s only going to become more important. So I think that helps us, in the sense that we’re always going to be needed. So I think we’ll continue with that growth, and continuing to pull in tutors from other disciplines. I think it’s important to have that diversity, and to see the ways that other disciplines and other fields approach and view and understand these types of projects. The more perspectives we can get the better understanding we can have of this type of work, and what we need to do to help students do that type of work. 
I think such spaces can provide us opportunities for undergraduate internships, and I think that could be wonderful, and we have one in process here. We’ve got a digital archive of postcards here. Long story about how that came about, but the salient point at this moment is that Michael Neal has worked with 12 undergraduate interns. We have the infrastructure. The interns are learning about history. They’re learning about cataloging. They’re making available what they’ve learned for a real public. We’re hosting a workshop at Cs on this. I mean, this is also being published in Kairos. This is actually a pretty big, and pretty interesting effort that I’m hoping we will grow over time. And one of the interesting things to me is that when you don’t have something so thoroughly defined you basically have space to create something new. If in fact we thought of digital studio as all it could do would be to meet students, and various configurations, and that’s all it’s available for then the opportunity to work with the digital archive and to see that it could be a site for interns doing a different kind of composing, it’s composing, it’s just a different kind of composing, that wouldn’t of been possible. So, there’s this again, there’s a kind of creative tension between having enough of an identity and at the same time leaving some, leaving a little bit of it at least undefined so that when opportunities arrive you can actually take advantage of them and see what else they might teach them. 
We know remarkably little about how students compose. Truly. I mean if you ask me to cite studies that will tell us how students are composing, I can. It’s not going to take me very long. There’s not very much out there. And it seems to me that spaces like this are ideal in terms of helping us understand how students compose. Now you got to go through IRB and there are arrangements you have to make, but then again they’re only the moves you have to make. And it seems to me that they’re research questions that are alive and available that would find themselves very hospitably studied if we understood studios as this kind of space. That is a space for helping people learn but also a space for those of us helping people learn, learn about they’re composing.