A sociocultural approach to facilitating online graduate student writing groups

Abstract

Using sociocultural learning theory, this comparative case study research and practitioner inquiry offers my account, as the researcher-facilitator, of organizing three, separate, semester-long writing groups (WG), providing insights into ways the peer facilitation scaffolded the peer review, in what ways is the facilitation different across the three groups, and what the main challenges are to facilitation in this space. As writing support for graduate students is diversifying, WGs have emerged as important liminal spaces where members learn how to participate in academic discourses through writing and especially learn about peer review. As the researcher-facilitator, I facilitated three groups where monolingual English and multilingual graduate students at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa met on Zoom to peer review each other’s drafts, shared through Google Docs. The first two groups were multidisciplinary, while the third was discipline-specific. Primary data included 26 screen-captured video recordings of the meetings and audio-recordings of nine retrospective participant interviews. Secondary data encompassed my reflection journals, email correspondence with participants, and shared Google Drive documents, which I utilized for triangulation purposes. Primary data was qualitatively analyzed in two phases through methods of open coding, constant comparative method of analysis, subsumption, feedback analysis, and comparative thematic analysis. Secondary data was analyzed through open coding. The findings suggest that the peer facilitation scaffolded the peer review in three main ways: setting the multimodal feedback format, imparting instruction on peer review, and participating in peer review. Further, differences were observed in facilitation, with particular reference to the facilitator utilizing some scaffolding strategies in the multidisciplinary groups, but not in Group 3, and imparting less instruction in Group 3, indicating that facilitation may be tied to disciplinarity. This finding also underscores the importance of members’ prior feedback literacy that appears underrepresented in the literature. In terms of challenge to facilitation, analysis uncovered graduate students’ exhaustion and one monolingual student’s deficit perception of L2 English speakers’ feedback. This practitioner inquiry proposes a socioculturally-informed model of peer facilitation, taking into consideration the disciplinary composition of the groups and mediated by members’ prior feedback literacy, their linguistic diversity, the online environment, and the process of peer review. The findings endorse a multifaceted research approach for broadening current understandings of facilitation by foregrounding disciplinarity and linguistic diversity, accompanied by the modes and modality of peer review in an online environment. Further, there is a need to cultivate more supportive, conscientious, responsible, and socially just ways to engage in WGs. Findings hold pedagogical implications for writing instructors and program administrators for creating online communities of writing in distance-based learning environments and better understanding multimodal feedback.