Tutors Take the Wheel: Facilitating Learning Relationships in a Gulf Coast Writing Center

Writing Center Tutors are positioned to redefine the ways in which writing is and should be taught and learned. During their sessions, tutors engage students as peers, and in what Brian Fallon calls “peer moments”—“moments when we find an opportunity to connect with a writer during a session” (Fallon 359)—are moments of human collaboration. Kail and Trimbur and Fallon all suggest that “peer tutors beg the academy to rethink how it manages information and knowledge” (Fallon 358). In the

Writing Center, teaching and learning happen in collaboration, and this work, argues Kail and Trimbur, “is not a supplement to the normal delivery system but an implicit critique of…the official structures of curriculum and instruction” (10). The success of writing center sessions suggests that writing can (and perhaps should) be taught through collaborative, learning relationships. If this is the case, then tutors have first-hand knowledge to share with the field about how these collaborations are possible and why they are successful.

Teaching writing to a class of 25 (if we’re lucky and have a cap) is a daunting task.

We try our best to address the needs of each individual writer while still offering lessons to the group as a whole. Some writers move beyond our lessons and others fall behind, but we do the best we can to teach to the middle, and supplement that instruction with our marginal feedback and response letters. But, with 50-125 students a semester, this task is patently unmanageable. Yet we find ways to manage it every semester.

1 Imagine the work load of meeting individually with all of those students. Well, that’s what our tutors do every day. They work one-on-one with our writing students.

And, it is in these sessions where students really learn how to develop and navigate their own processes. According to Kail and Trimbur, the success of Writing Center sessions is “an implicit critique of the official structures of curriculum and instruction”

(10). Said another way, the success of one-on-one collaboration between a writer and a reader implies that writing is best taught through these individual collaborations.

In my position as Writing Center Director at Brazosport College, I am tasked with facilitating the Writing Tutoring and Writing Across the Curriculum Initiatives. That means I am tasked with changing the way students, faculty, and staff view writing on campus. Instead of a linear process that can be taken step-by-step, writing is a recursive process that we move ourselves in and out of in order to communicate clearly. We draft, revise, vomit on the page, and then draft and revise some more. And all of this is done in communication with readers, people who we collaborate with to make sure our ideas are clear and what we have written is what we are actually intending to say. We are more than an editing shop; the Brazosport Writing Center is a place where all writers can come to work with a reader on becoming a more effective reader, writer, and speaker.

Lofty mission, right? Well, yeah. It is. Every day my tutors and I are approached in the halls with the same question: why don’t you proofread for students anymore?

2 They have gotten the message from their students that we view writing as a complex rhetorical process. And they have gotten the message from their students’ writing that errors are logical and take time to manage. Well, really, they have gotten the message that their students handed in work after visiting the WC with existing grammatical errors, and that made them upset. They prefer to read clean, polished prose. And I don’t blame them. It’s easier. For sure. But polishing students’ writing isn’t tutoring; That’s editing.

In order to help my tutors speak back to these misunderstandings and educate the community at BC, I wanted to open up the space for them to learn about the theories and scholarship dealing with tutoring and writing. Tutors bring with them practical experience of working everyday with writers. When viewed through the lens of seminal and current theories of tutoring writing, these tutors achieve praxis. And, when tutors take the wheel in educational conversations, directors like me can learn a great deal about what issues on which we should focus our training and scholarly energy.

Like Fallon, I believe “what … peer tutors bring … conversations about tutoring has the capability to dramatically change not only how tutors are educated but also how we teach writing” (Fallon 362). In my WC, I introduce my tutors to theory from field of

Writing Centers so that they have language through which to communicate their

3 practice. If I believe they have things to say, I want my tutor education program to give them the tools and sources to articulate these thoughts and beliefs.

Still in our first year, we have already read seminal and contemporary articles in

WC theory. The tutors read and discuss these articles between sessions in the Center, and they encapsulate their ideas in journal entries. We meet monthly to discuss tutoring practice and theory, and tutor reading and journaling is foundational to each monthly workshop. After six months together, the importance of learning relationships has risen to the forefront of our ongoing conversations.

Within the context of a Writing Center tutorial session, tutors and students can form learning relationships based on co-learning, mutual curiosity, empathy, friendship, and many other factors. In terms of co-learning, tutors are learning how to help people become stronger writers, and writers are learning how to communicate more clearly and powerfully. When these learning moments overlap, a relationship between the tutor and learner can take shape.

Our Writing Center serves many first generation college students who range in age from teenagers to senior citizens. Our tutors themselves are first generation college students, and they use their personal experience and knowledge from their practice as tutors to create meaningful relationships with their writers. These relationships, or

“peer moments” are essential to successful collaborations and tutorials.

4 In my experience, the peer moments I had with professors and tutors have been invaluable to my success as a student and now as a scholar. When I sat in my basic writing class as a first generation college student, I felt inadequate. I was sure everyone in the class had already thought what I was thinking, and I was positive that they had dismissed our shared idea as being too elementary. What I didn’t know was that I had a voice. I didn’t know that my perspective had value in academic conversations, but I had people who were willing to take the time to show me my ideas had value.

By bringing me into conversations in the Writing Center, in their offices, and in the smoking gazebo, these teachers and tutors were allowing me to bring my ideas into reality as part of my college experience. Just speaking my ideas in conversation with others allowed me to develop my positions into arguments that later became research projects. Without this conversation, without these peer moments, I can safely say that I would not be standing here today, doctoral degree in hand. These conversations were moments when my professors took off the regalia of their authority and spoke with me like a person, like a peer.

Now, I’ll turn things over to Christina and Haley who will discuss how they form personal, learning relationships with their writers, facilitating what Fallon calls “peer moments.”

5 After the sessions:

We would love to have a conversation about your questions and ideas for facilitating successful learning relationships and opening space for peer moments in your own tutoring centers.