Part One: Peer Tutoring as Leadership Development

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I direct a small writing center on my campus, and I’m currently participating in a year-long, state-wide leadership development cohort with peers from diverse industries including healthcare, finance, construction, and social services. During one of our early retreats, we were asked to draw a picture of leadership. Not yet knowing my peers well, I expected drawings of stick figures summiting mountains or standing at the front of a boat instructing a team of rowers—hand-drawn versions of images you might find on the success-themed motivational posters that were so popular in the 1990s. 

Instead, my some of my peers shared drawings of kitchens and gardens—spaces that are generative and collaborative. Others drew abstract images representing tensions and ambiguity. No one drew themselves standing at the top of a mountain. 

We don’t talk a lot about leadership in writing center scholarship, at least not explicitly. For example, when scholars present results of the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project (PWTARP) they often talk about how the communication and interpersonal skills that tutors develop help them succeed in their careers, but those skills are never framed as leadership skills. We often associate leaders—even student leaders—with specific roles like president or chair, and tutor doesn’t fit on that list. On my campus, for example, faculty can nominate students for a “Student Leader of the Quarter” award. It never occurred to me until very recently to nominate a peer tutors.

It’s easy to understand why we reject the leadership label when it comes to the work of peer tutors. Traditional notions of leadership related to authority, power, and control seem antithetical to the collaborative work of the writing center. A leader achieving an outcome doesn’t seem quite the right model for the recursive, process-based work of writing. We hear leadership and imagine the stick figure on top of the mountain.

I’ve learned, however, by listening to experts in leadership development and the peers in my leadership cohort that they reject that authoritative model of leadership, too. Current leadership theory and praxis is focused on communication, feedback, and empathy—skills central to writing center tutoring. Peer tutors are developing, as college students, precisely the skills that the seasoned leaders I’m learning with are trying to cultivate in themselves and in their teams.

For example, in a recent leadership workshop, we broke into small groups and brainstormed a list of the competencies good leaders have. Then, each group narrowed the list to five competencies and shared it with the rest of the cohort. There were a variety of answers—authenticity, ethical decision making, curiosity—that were unique to each group, but one answer showed up in every list: good communication. As groups explained their answers, they talked about the importance of clear messages, empathetic listening, and understanding the needs of an audience before speaking. In other words, they talked about the things that peer tutors practice consistently. 

This idea of the importance of communication to leadership often comes up in terms of the challenges of giving and receiving feedback. Even the most experienced leaders in my group struggle to deliver critiques of their team members, and nearly everyone has a story of needing clear feedback on their performance and not receiving it. Peer tutors are in a unique position to develop these feedback skills. Reading students’ work, tutors learn to see patterns and prioritize opportunities for change and growth. They listen to the needs and goals of their peers, and they help them identify ways to meet those goals. Perhaps most importantly, all of this happens in the context of communication and rhetorical awareness. Over time, tutors learn how to adjust their feedback to different students and different contexts. These are excellent communication and interpersonal skills, but they’re also highly valued leadership skills, and I think it’s important for peer tutors to see their skills in that context.

We shouldn’t reject the idea of leadership because we don’t like the connotations of authority and control. We need to separate our image of a leader from formalized positions of power and shift the definition of leadership to include the skills we teach and value. In other words, we should help develop the types of leaders we want to see. By calling tutors’ attention to their role as leaders—as communicators, as problem solvers, as collaborators—we encourage tutors to see themselves as leaders and perhaps to seek out those roles on campus, in their communities, and eventually in their workplaces.

Author Bio:

Sarah Summers is Associate Professor of English at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and is the founder and director of the Rose-Hulman CommLab, a writing center focused on technical communication. Her research interests include the overlap between STEM pedagogies and writing pedagogies, multimodal course development, and writing centers. Her work has been published in The Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Computers and Composition, and several edited collections.