“What’s in a Name?”: Consultancy, Culture, and the “Tutor Jar”
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Image by author, Jeff Howard.
Keywords: tutor, consultant, community, culture, decision-making
Deciding what to name or label things is one of the primary interests of our Western academic and scientific tradition. Sometimes things are named after those who discovered, invented, or made famous the thing being named (e.g. Fermat’s last theorem in mathematics or Planck’s constant in physics). Sometimes people work within the constraints or guidelines of an established taxonomy, which leads to snails being named ba humbugi and fish called Bidenichthys beeblebroxi. In writing centers, we are not exempt from this drive to classify and label the numerous things that fall within our disciplinary boundaries. For example, in my center (as in many others over the last few decades), we have labored over the question of how to refer to our staff members: Are we tutors or consultants? Upon choosing one (consultant) over the other (tutor), our center has also dealt with the challenge of making that change permanent, a difficult task considering how engrained tutor had been in the lexicon of our writing center culture. When making any drastic change in culture, policy, or behavior, writing center administrators need to provide support strategies that can help staff members make that change effectively rather than simply issuing a mandate and expecting staff members to comply. In this post, I would like to discuss one strategy—the “tutor jar”—that has helped our staff members make the vernacular shift from tutor to consultant and how that strategy itself evolved and enriched our writing center’s culture.
Decisions of such magnitude merit input from all center stakeholders. In deliberating about the title change, input from consultants helped shape the decision to begin using consultant rather than tutor in our conversations, training materials, and marketing. By having this discussion, we were engaging with an ongoing conversation that has included scholars such as John Trimbur (1987), Lex Runciman (1990), William McCall (1994), and others about the pragmatics of writing center discourse and how these specific terms (tutor and consultant) characterize or fail to characterize the work we do, how our staff members perceive their work and community roles, and how they want to be perceived by others within the university.
In the context of our campus, using consultant rather than tutor seemed a necessary move. Many of our STEM and business students understand the nature and purpose of consultancy. To many of them, they see a consultant as someone who can analyze a situation, identify issues, and make recommendations, which is certainly a large part of what we do, though we might use different words to say a similar thing. On the other hand, for many of these same people, the term tutor might carry the connotation of “‘little teachers’ passing down state-of-the-art knowledge about writing to those less informed” (McCall 165). Neither term is ideal for capturing the entire essence of writing center work, and while both seemed like reasonable approximations, we still needed to choose just one. As a result, we went with consultant because we felt it could help combat the false expectation that clients could come into the center thinking that we aim to pour knowledge into their brains like motor oil into a car engine. Regardless of how one might feel about either of these titles, what was also important in this change was that all of our staff members had a say in the discussion about what they were to be called. In a few years, who knows? Our staff members may lobby that the title be changed back to tutor—or changed to something else entirely—in response to whatever the campus culture may require at that time.
Cultural and habitual changes in any community can require a great deal of time and effort, even when consensus and unity are driving them. While the consensus had been reached about the title change in our center, moving the term tutor out of our collective lexicon in favor of consultant did not occur quickly. While there may be any number of solutions for a situation like ours, one of our key solutions for supporting the transition came through what we call the “tutor jar.” The tutor jar was just a regular Mason jar I brought from home with a paper label taped around it declaring, “‘Tutor’ Jar (We’re Consultants Now!!) 5¢.” In other words, it was supposed to look like a traditional “swear jar” that people put money in every time they curse. After dropping a few coins in it to complete the look, I set it on a table in plain sight in the middle of our center. The point was not to force people to pay money every time they said “tutor” instead of “consultant,” but rather to create a visual reminder of the change we were trying to make. However, if people felt like paying money, I certainly would not stop them. I, on more than one occasion, paid up for using the wrong word (So many nickels!), and so did others. Our executive director paid a very generous sum in advance because she knew she was going to say the wrong word a lot. As a bonus, at the end of the semester, we collected the money deposited in the tutor jar and put it toward prizes for a staff party, thus reiterating that the jar was not to punish but rather to support. As a result, we made some progress in helping our staff members use the new term. They were not perfect with it—and many of us still flub from time to time—but we are, little by little, becoming much better at catching ourselves.
Very rarely do people put money in the jar anymore. It still sits on my desk, a few coins piled at the bottom. However, that is not to say that it has become obsolete. Rather, its cultural and symbolic functions have evolved to the point that it continues to occupy a place in our center’s community discourse. Our staff members still refer to or joke about the jar from time to time, and when our director uses the word tutor instead of consultant, someone might laughingly respond with, “Oh, you have to put money in the jar!” Simply walking past or noticing the jar might provoke some people to exclaim something like, “OMG, I owe the jar so much money!” Part of the gag is that they never pay up, and that is fine. What matters is that what started as a visual reminder of the change we were trying to effect evolved into a small piece of our culture that has impacted the way we behave, the way we talk, and the way we relate to each other. In other words, the evolving function of the tutor jar as a material object, image, and source of fun has strengthened and enriched our writing center’s community.
Deciding what title works best for the staff members of any center depends heavily upon the immediate context and culture of that center, so this is not an attempt to tell anyone that they ought to choose one term over another. I am simply recommending that when writing center administrators attempt to implement a name change (and perhaps this discussion could be applied to any kind of change in writing center policy or procedure) that they do not approach the change as replacement of the old with the new. Unless a center needs an absolute culture shift (which can happen), it is useful to treat such a change as an opportunity to build on and within their center’s culture and the community, and the strategies and support administrators provide to help their staff members make difficult changes should also be viewed and treated as opportunities to build and enrich their center’s community.
Work Cited
McCall, William. “Writing Centers and the Idea of Consultancy.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, 1994, pp. 163–171. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43441953. Accessed 12 Aug. 2021.
Author bio:
Jeff Howard is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow teaching composition and technical communication in the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech. Jeff is also an assistant co-director of the Naugle Communication Center. His scholarship on writing instruction and writing centers has appeared in TETYC, WLN, and Beyond the Frontier: Innovations in First-Year Composition: Vol. II. In 2021, he was the recipient of the Southeastern Writing Center Association’s Professional Tutor of the Year Award.