Tutors Theorizing the Writing Center :: Education Learning Papers

Central to the theorizing that is current in make-up pertain scholarship is the concept of collaboration between double-deckers and students. Because of the overarching framework of social constructivism that currently drives theorizing in a multitude of disciplinese.g., composition, literature, history, sociology, anthropologyit is not surprising that piece of music union scholars also use this framework to question the kind of friendship that tutors ca-ca in tutorial sessions (see Grimm 1999, Murphy 1995, Carino 1995, Hobson 1994). Are tutors simply replicating the hierarchical paradigms of knowledge construction in which academia seems to be fully invested? Or atomic number 18 they capable of thinking outside the box because they are peers kinda than teachers? My quest in how tutors theorize their practice in the writing nitty-gritty and how the writing rivet literature theorizes itself has been central to my work as a writing center director for the past 10 years. Th e small liberal liberal arts college where I teach and direct the writing center has a rung of all-female undergraduate tutors, and I am constantly surprised by their seraphic take on writing center possibleness and practice. They are nacreous and they question everything. Since this is exactly what a womens college should be teaching novel women to do, I encourage that stance in our writing center, and especially in the course tutors are required to take with me before they begin tutoring. In this paper, I will examine tutors journal responses written during a tutor training class held in the Fall of 2003. In these responses, tutors respond nowadays to articles which are very much considered central to understanding the concepts of collaboration, control, socially constructed knowledge, and the writing center as a site of resistance--concepts upon which writing center possibility is often built. An important aspect of these journals is that they are dialogic. That is, they a re entered on a chalkboard discussion forum that allows each tutor to read the other tutors journals and respond to them. The tutors responses seem to reveal a gap between what tutors understand close their own tutorial practices and what theorists believe to be true. In examining the tutors responses, I start out that theorists sometimes recast practice to fit their theoretical constructs as a result, tutors do not always see the same connections between theory and practice that theorists do. By listening to tutors voices as they critique writing center theory, I believe we can better understand how to use theory as a jumping off place for tutor training, rather than as an ending point.