The Tutor Exchange Project: A Multi-Institutional Tutor Education Project

Sipai Klein
Clayton State University
SipaiKlein@clayton.edu

Lauren DiPaula
Georgia Southwestern State University
LaurenDiPaula@gsw.edu

The Tutor Exchange Project¹ is a multi-institutional tutor education project that encourages reflective practice by connecting tutors with each other and with research in the field. In the Exchange, we ask tutors from different universities to meet online,² where they share their own expectations, experiences, and lessons learned; to search for and read articles on a self-selected topic about writing tutoring; and to compose a reflection on what they learned about their topic and the research process. The Exchange is an opportunity to encourage tutors to raise questions, explore the literature first-hand, write about their own practice and what they read, and, as importantly, do so while partnered with a peer tutor from another center, which may be very similar and also very different.

Our project builds on Lauren Fitzgerald’s 2012 keynote speech at IWCA, whereby she moved us to view tutors as tutor-researchers and to incorporate this perspective into writing tutoring education. As Fitzgerald and Melissa Ianetta expound in The Oxford Guide to Writing Tutors, writing center research needs to assume that “there are no conversations in writing center studies that peer tutors cannot fruitfully address” (11). We believe that the Exchange helps move a peer tutor closer to not only being “a practitioner of tutoring writing but also researcher and theorizer of it” (Fitzgerald and Ianetta 87). While participating in the process of interviewing, reading, and reflecting, tutors engage in key aspects of the research process.

The core of the Exchange project is the interview, whose main purpose is to help the tutor-researchers move forward in the research process, but there is another purpose as well: to teach how to ask different types of questions. This is worthwhile for the tutor- researchers because questioning is, as Isabelle Thompson and Jo Mackiewicz point out, “a major tutoring strategy used in writing center conferences” (62). Participants are therefore provided with resources on questioning at the start of the project. In the interview, participants find out about each other’s experiences at their respective centers and help each other develop ideas for their own individual research projects. In terms of the interviews the Exchange provides participants the opportunity to ask questions for both interviewing and tutoring purposes and to use those questions to help each other reflect.

We understood that the Exchange might not make participants perfect tutors or perfect researchers, or even that it might not spark instant connections, but we hoped that it would plant the seeds for reflective practice, which is essential to the research process. As in Mark Hall’s study that asked tutors to engage in reflective blog posts in order to develop a writing center community of practice, tutors in this study reflect through interviews and through shared writing that serve as “opportunities for participation and enculturation” (“Theory In/To Practice” 84). Reflective practice aims to help tutors identify practices, assumptions, and blind spots. By starting with expectations and lessons learned, participants enter the conversation on their own, bringing their own untold lore. From that observation point, they are prompted to reflect on the conversation of the field.

Subsequently, as participants extend their own tutoring experiences to their findings within the literature, they continue reflecting on the conversation in written form by composing a research narrative in what John Bean calls an “intellectual detective story” (92). In such writing activity, the thinking process of the tutors is prioritized as they integrate and evaluate their experiences, the conversations with another tutor, and the readings. This, in turn, helps tutors develop their ideas while their voices are emphasized. The final draft of the research narrative, as the culminating process of the Exchange, therefore, brings together the other elements and enables tutor-researchers to explore joining the exchange of ideas in the field writ large.

The Exchange

We piloted this project with six different tutors over two semesters. What follows are the steps taken during the piloted version of the project that led to our initial conclusions. Overall, there are two main components to the project: the interview and the narrative.

Step 1: Individually, each participating tutor reviews the instructions and materials on how to prepare for an interview and how to search for articles in writing center literature. Participants are also asked to develop a research question or identify a research topic.

Step 2: The tutors interview each other with questions aimed at establishing rapport, and at introducing the pair to each other’s tutoring experiences that relate to their research question or topic. That is, this interview guides the tutors to better understand their interview partners, with questions about the tutor’s background, the other writing center’s actors and environment, and basic assumptions about writing tutoring.

Step 3: The pair continues the project by each locating at least three articles in writing center literature on their respective research topic. The pair is provided with a list of publications from within the field so that they can more easily locate sources.

Step 4: The tutors each draft a research narrative. In that narrative, they compile their notes from the literature and, possibly, the interview, and they compose a first- person narrative detailing the thinking process and possible solutions to the research question or research topic. The prompt for the tutors encourages them to emphasize the research process and to narrate their thinking and the events surrounding their research.

Step 5: The tutors revise their respective drafts and submit them individually to the researchers.

What we found from the pilot³

The Tutors Reflected

We observed participants reflecting on their chosen topic and making connections between the literature and the interview as well as between their own tutoring experiences and the chosen topic. For example, in her research narrative, Lela describes how her interview partner, Heather, manages time. Lela explains how, for Heather, “time does play a huge factor in how to set up an appointment,” which is why Heather sets an agenda at the start of a session. Furthermore, as a way of reducing the concern of not addressing every reviewable element in the paper, Lela says that she will adopt Heather’s emphasis on inviting writers to visit the center again at the end of her sessions.

The Tutors Practiced Researching

In their research narratives, tutors discussed how they waded through the challenges of navigating writing center literature and the articles they read. We saw that Lela and Kylie made explicit connections between articles they read, and while Jay was able to summarize what he read, he also struggled to connect the readings to his own tutoring experience. In Lela's narrative, she explained how she determined certain articles to be relevant to her own research, which informed us that she paid attention to the relevance of the articles to her topic. Similarly, Kylie spent time thinking about whether the articles she was finding pertained to her research questions.

The Tutors Felt an Empathic Connection

We observed an empathic connection among the tutors. Jay may have expressed that connection best when he noted in his research narrative that “Asking a fellow experienced [tutor] helped me realize that I am not the only one who may handle these situations.” Lela similarly acknowledged that the conversation with her interview partner gave her the opportunity to compare her own experiences at the center when she said “Through her [Heather’s] answers to the interview questions, I was able to gain a better understanding of the similarities and differences between the two centers and I was able to gain some insight into how a different tutor deals with time management in consultations.” She realized that, with the similarities and differences, there was much to learn.

Conclusion

We view the themes in this short column as a prototype for future collaborations at other centers that furthers cross-institutional work, such as Mark Hall’s Around the Texts of Writing Center Work. Additionally, this project enables us to break the grand narrative of writing center work that Jackie Grutsch McKinney outlines in Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, the narrative we tell about our work in writing centers that simultaneously unites us and holds the possibility of dividing us (88). By telling stories about how we are different, she suggests, we can enlarge the idea of who we are as a field (Grutsch McKinney 86). This project might be an ideal place where tutors will find community and see how, as a community, we both come together and diverge. From these early iterations of the Exchange, we observed participants reflecting on their own tutoring practice, reading about their self-selected writing topics in the field’s literature, and, as importantly, making connections between what they learned and what they practice in terms of the centers to which they belong and other tutors in their respective community. These three recurring themes encapsulate major movements in the project. Nonetheless, we saw room to enrich the experience in future iterations, which is why for the next iteration, we made available a set of questions focused on rapport building for interview partners. We also added a second interview where participants could share their final thoughts and gain some feedback from a peer tutor. Even in the early versions, though, we saw that one benefit of the Exchange is to help tutors develop reflective practice and to encourage curiosity for research. Observing how tutors scaffold, motivate, and guide themselves through the research process and move closer to the tutor-researcher role that they can have within our community is an exciting starting point.

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to the generosity of our tutors at Clayton State University and Georgia Southwestern State University who participated in the online pilot. There are many individuals who helped create a supportive space for this project as it developed over the years from a face-to-face to an online format. These include the administrative teams and tutors at Agnes Scott College, Clark Atlanta, Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, Gordon State College, Mercer University, Spellman College, and University of West Georgia, who believed in the early iterations of this project.

Notes

1. This project was approved by Clayton State University’s IRB (Proposal # 20180323001).

2. In our particular partnership, we overcame the hurdle of geographical distance between our institutions by designing the Exchange as an online, video interaction. We worked on the assumption that tutors would have a rich enough interaction through video interviews for them to reflect on their own practice and questions about writing tutoring.

3. In order to analyze the research narratives, research notes, and transcripts, we coded our data individually and then came back together to reach consensus on the codes and themes. Though we did have some agreed upon codes at the beginning of the process from the language in our research questions themselves—such as reflection, research process, belonging, challenges, quality, and attitude—we allowed more codes to emerge as we read through the data. We discuss our results here using pseudonyms for the tutors.

Works Cited

Bean, John. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. Jossey-Bass, 2001.

Fitzgerald, Lauren and Melissa Ianetta. The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research. New York: Oxford University, 2016.

Fitzgerald, Lauren. “Undergraduate Writing Tutors as Researchers: Redrawing Boundaries.” Lines in the Sand: How Writing Centers Draw and Redraw Boundaries, International Writing Center Association Conference, 26 October 2012, San Diego, CA. Keynote Address, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43443370.

Grutsch McKinney, Jackie. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers. Kindle ed., UP of Colorado, 2013, Link.

Hall, Mark R. Around the Texts of Writing Center Work: An Inquiry-Based Approach to Tutor Education. Utah State University Press, 2017, Link.

--. “Theory In/To Practice: Using Dialogic Reflection to Develop a Writing Center Community of Practice.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, 2011, pp. 82-105, JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43442358.

Thompson, Isabelle, and Jo Mackiewicz. “Questioning in Writing Center Conferences.”The Writing Center Journal, vol. 33, no. 2, 2014, pp. 37–70, JSTOR, https://www .jstor.org/stable/43443371.