Intended and Lived Objects of Learning: The (Mis)Aligned Purpose and Reported Effects of Writing Center Instruction

Matthew Fledderjohann
Le Moyne College
fleddema@lemoyne.edu

Abstract
What do tutors think they teach in a given writing center session? What do the writers they work with claim they learned? This IRB-approved study looks at responses from 74 pairs of surveys completed by tutors and writers about what they taught and learned in particular writing center tutorials. Drawing on the distinctions variation theory makes between intended and lived objects of learning, this study analyzes the general response trends evident across these surveys by coordinating tutors’ and writers’ separate perceptions. The results suggest that writers identify learning as having taken place much more frequently and across a wider range of writing-related topics than tutors claim to have taught. While short-answer responses reveal occasional overlap between writer’s perceived learning and tutor’s intended teaching, the marked discrepancy between the two suggests that a teaching/learning causality does not accurately represent much of the instructive effort and outcome occurring through writing center tutorials. Knowing that writers claim to be learning even when the tutors they meet with don’t think they are teaching informs how tutors can perceive their effectiveness and how writing centers can position themselves as alternative educational spaces.

A writer made an appointment to talk with a tutor about her supplemental application essays for a physician assistant graduate program. She and the tutor spent an hour working through these documents, discussing the guidelines, reading the drafts, and identifying revision plans. The writer left feeling like the appointment had been “very helpful.” The tutor also thought the session had been productive. However, the writer and the tutor had two very different perspectives on what had been learned and taught through that session. The writer said she’d learned the value of writing with confidence, the importance of reading her drafts aloud, and strategies for identifying what an essay prompt is asking. The tutor described teaching about tailoring application essays for specific audiences and using commas. One session. Two individuals. A scattered range of instructive intentions and reported learning.

This study explores the divergences and agreements—as represented in this example—between what tutors believe they’re teaching and what writers claim they’re learning in order to further understand the instructive work writing centers do. The alignment, or lack thereof, between what teachers teach and what learners learn is something that education scholars have long recognized as being central to understanding and assessing knowledge acquisition. As education historian Robert McClintock has claimed, “[S]ince mass education developed, the dominant problem for educational theorists has been to ensure that students will learn what teachers try to teach” (412). More recently, this sentiment has been echoed by Graeme Gooday’s assertion that “the most important point in evaluating the educational process is not what teachers try to teach, but what learners actually succeed in learning” (144). But measuring learning is difficult because learning can be widely defined¹, and it is differentiated across varied situations and the experiences of unique individuals. As education scholars Barbara McCombs and Donna Vakili have summarized, “Research underlying the learner-centered principles confirms that learning is nonlinear, recursive, continuous, [and] complex” (1586). Given writing’s intricately multifaceted nature, learning to write is no exception (Wardle and Roozen). It’s much easier to ask a tutor to identify their learning objectives than it is to confirm that those objectives were met, but the efficacy of a writing program is informed not by the teaching it intends to do but by the learning it achieves.

I began exploring tutors’ reported teaching and writers’ reported learning in connection to an institutional assessment project I developed at the writing center I direct at Le Moyne College—a small, Jesuit liberal arts institution in Syracuse, New York. I wanted to explore what our tutors say they teach, what the writers they work with say they learn, and what alignment might exist between the lessons and the learning. I structured this project as a way to assess our writing center’s engagement with one of our established learning goals—“Writers who visit the Writing Center will become more rhetorically savvy, technically skilled, appropriately confident writers who are able to attain greater success in their writing”—and one of our learning objectives—“Tutors will be able to explain writing processes, rhetorical expectations, stylistic norms, and grammatical conventions related to writing tasks that writers bring in.” I wanted to understand our tutors’ teaching in connection to our writers’ learning.

In what follows, I detail the scholarly context, research methodology, findings, and significance of a survey assessment project that analyzes 74 pairs of surveys accounting for both the tutors’ and the writers’ perspectives about particular writing center sessions. Tutors detailed what they had intended to teach in a given session, and then the writers described what they learned. The resulting data reveal minimal alignment between what tutors believe they taught and what writers claim they’ve learned. And even when tutors and writers agreed that teaching/learning happened in connection to broad categories (e.g., writing in general, the writing assignment, the writer’s strengths/weaknesses, grammar/formatting, or external resources), they frequently disagreed on the specific lessons taught and learned. However, across these surveys, writers claimed to learn more than tutors said they’d taught. This suggests that tutors may not be aware of either the specifically learned content or the broad extent of their educational efforts. This reminds us that learning happens outside moments of direct instruction, that tutors’ instructive influence can transcend their intentions, and that tutors can facilitate learning without knowingly teaching.

By asking tutors to detail what they teach, this project joins a long history of writing center scholarship focused on tutors’ teaching. Tutor handbooks are filled with advice on what and how a tutor can teach. Scholarly attention to this important topic has ranged from Stephen North’s early insights on the value of training tutors to talk effectively about writing to Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson’s in-depth looks at veteran tutors’ teaching strategies. Empirical investigations of tutors’ specific teaching practices have explored how tutors use scaffolding strategies (Thompson) and questions to teach (Limberg, Modey, and Dyer), how tutors teach multilingual writers (Alshreif; Nakamaru) and writers with disabilities (Cherney; Gentry), how composition instructors with tutoring experience implement tutoring strategies in their composition classrooms (Zelenak et al.), and how tutors teach when facing writers’ resistance (Park), among many others. This body of research considers what tutors do when they are tutoring writing and what is effective or ineffective about their teaching strategies.

But as previously referenced, education’s true effect is evidenced within a student’s learning. As such, what writers learn through their interactions with writing centers has been another primary concern for composition scholars and practitioners. In 2001, Casey Jones conducted a review of the existing literature on writing centers’ influence on students’ writing abilities. Jones begins with studies from the late 1970s and finds that by 1990 efforts to quantify tutees’ learning gains dissipated so that “only a handful of researchers have attempted to evaluate the performance of writing centers in enhancing student writing skills through the use of empirical study designs” (3). Jones notes that while “concrete evidence that writing centers do improve student writing is difficult to construct, indirect evidence is far easier to extrapolate” (17). More recently, scholars in search of that concrete evidence have designed a range of different kinds of studies, including ones that evaluate students’ post-writing center revisions as indicators of tutorials’ impact (Bleakney and Pittock; Pleasant, Niiler, and Jagannathan) and studies that use experimental and control groups to evaluate the influence of writing center tutorials (Farnworth et al.; Miller).

However, despite the attention that has been devoted to understanding tutors’ teaching and assessing writers’ learning, only a few studies have put these companion educational processes in direct conversation with each other. The current study’s simultaneous focus on both tutors’ and writers’ perspectives of particular writing tutorials parallels the methodologyTerese Thonus used in her research on how tutors and students understand success in writing center instruction (“Tutor and Student Assessments”) and her work on tutors’, tutees’, and instructors’ perceptions of tutors’ roles (“Triangulation in the Writing Center”). I have drawn additional inspiration from the triangulation methodology Isabelle Thompson et al. and Beth Kalikoff employ in their research on various stakeholders’ opinions about tutorial sessions. My study uses the practice of coordinating separate perspectives on the same phenomenon to explore particular teaching/learning events.

In attending to how learning and teaching function (in)dependently, I have been influenced by educational psychologists’ variation theory because of its capacity to identify unique elements occurring within an educational event (Morton and Booth; Marton and Morris). Specifically, variation theory makes a distinction between three different kinds of “objects of learning”: the intended object of learning, the enacted object of learning, and the lived object of learning (Häggström 53-4). The intended object of learning corresponds with a teacher’s plan and focus—the content transmission they are working toward (Marton, Runesson, and Tsui 4). The enacted object of learning is what an external observer can identify about how a teacher structures an experience to make the learner aware of the intended object of learning (5). And the lived object of learning is what the student takes away, the student’s experience of “the outcome or result of the learning” (5). For example, in the context of a writing center tutorial, an intended object of learning might be a tutor’s plan to teach a writer how to strengthen their thesis statement; an enacted object of learning could be what a tutor-in-training shadowing the session notices about how the tutor explains the writer’s need to understand thesis statements; and a lived object of learning would be whatever lesson the writer takes away from the session—whether that be strategies for writing a stronger thesis statement, a deeper understanding of their paper’s content, insight into their capabilities as a writer, greater appreciation for the writing center’s services, or something else.

Since my study draws from indirect reporting methods by relying on what tutors and writers say they taught and learned (as opposed to direct observation or external analysis of learning), I do not consider tutorials’ enacted objects of learning. My interest is in the intended and the lived objects of learning and the places where those objects align or disagree. As Thomas Bussey, MaryKay Orgill, and Kent Crippen have asserted, “Comparisons between the intended and lived objects of learning can be used to identify differences between what instructors hope students will learn and what students actually learn about a given concept” (13). To assess the relationship between tutors’ intended teaching and writers’ reported learning, this project directly compared tutors’ and writers’ reported teaching and learning experiences.

Methodology

I began this research project by organizing IRB-approved focus group discussions with students who had visited our Writing Center. I wanted to gain an understanding of the kind of learning writers attribute to our Center so that I could ground the subsequent work in writers’ actual experiences. During the Fall 2020 semester, I used our appointment records to locate a random sample of writers who had visited the Center at least three times in the past year. I wanted focus group participants to have had a range of different writing center experiences to draw upon and reflect on. Once I found 7 willing participants, we set up two 1-hour Zoom conversations. The questions that guided these discussions were, “What have you learned through your interactions with the Writing Center? How did you learn this? What implications does this knowledge have for your continued growth and development?” Participants shared their perceptions of writing in general, their experiences with the Writing Center, specific things they’ve learned through their tutorials, and how they have applied those lessons in other contexts. I used the conversation generated by the first focus group meeting to draft questions for this study’s survey. I asked focus group members for their feedback on these questions during our second meeting. Focus group participants received $50 each through funds secured from my college’s student learning assessment initiative.

The survey I developed for writers about what they’ve learned through their Writing Center experiences served as a model for the parallel survey I created for tutors. Both surveys asked for respondents to share about specific things they taught/learned in the following five categories: writing in general (information about writing processes and rhetoric), writing this particular assignment (explorations of the prompt or assignment’s genre), the writer themselves (their strengths/weaknesses or perceptions of their confidence), grammar or formatting (ranging from sentence structure and comma rules to information about citation styles), and online resources. There were also questions about the tutors’/writers’ general impressions of the tutorial session and perceptions of the tutorial’s usefulness.

After securing IRB approval for this part of the study, I began distributing these surveys through the Spring 2021 and Fall 2021 semesters. I invited all of the tutors who worked at our center across these semesters (n=13) to participate. The ten who participated agreed to fill out surveys for a randomized selection of the tutorials they facilitated according to a pre-determined schedule. For example, some tutors committed to filling out a survey for every other appointment; some responded to surveys for the first or last tutorial they conducted every week. Whatever the frequency and schedule, these set response rates randomized the sessions tutors were describing and kept them from deciding after the fact to complete or not complete surveys for certain tutorials. Through the Spring 2021 semester and most of the Fall 2021 semester, ten tutors responded to 193 surveys about what they had intended to teach in those tutorial sessions. Tutors received $3 for each survey they completed.

When a tutor submitted a new survey, I would use the day/time information the tutor provided and our appointment schedule to identify the writer for this appointment and email them an invitation to respond to the corresponding survey about what they had learned through this session. I invited each of the writers associated with those 193 sessions to respond to the survey detailing what they had learned. Writers received $5 for completing a survey.² I stopped collecting surveys after I’d gotten 75 responses from writers. I believed that 75 pairs of surveys would provide me with a data set that was both large enough to generate notable trends and manageable enough for me to work through on my own in a timely manner. One survey ended up being a duplicate (filled out twice by the same writer about the same session). I kept the first version of this survey and was left with 74 usable pairs of surveys describing what the tutor thought they had taught and what the writer claimed to have learned.

Results

As previously detailed, the surveys contained five sections that focused on a different area of writing teaching/learning: writing in general, writing this particular assignment, the writer themselves, grammar or formatting, and online resources. Each section began by simply asking the tutor/writer to respond “yes” or “no” depending on whether or not they had taught/learned about that particular topic. Figure 1 (see appendix for all figures) details the frequency of “yes” and “no” responses across all categories for both tutors’ reported teaching and writers’ reported learning. For the purposes of this analysis, I only included responses to yes/no questions that had been answered by both the writer and the tutor within a given session. For example, twelve of the 74 writers skipped the question about whether or not they had learned about external writing sources. Even when the tutors associated with these tutorials answered this question, their responses were not factored into the full analysis. As such, the 796 individual responses delineated above account for 348 pairs of responses from both the tutor’s and the writer’s perspective. The 107 times these tutors said they had taught about a particular category and the 194 times writers said they had learned about that category is further visualized in Figure 2 which shows how many tutors/writers answered “yes” for each of the five categories of teaching/learning.

Across these five categories, the writers who said they’d learned about these issues outnumbered the tutors who said they’d taught about them. The closest alignment between the tutors’ reported teaching and the writers’ reported learning was within the more easily definable categories: teaching/learning about grammar and formatting and teaching/learning about online resources. The most pronounced discrepancy between tutors’ reported teaching and writers’ claimed learning was evidenced in the “learning about the writer” category. Here writers were asked if they had learned anything about themselves as writers through the tutoring session; tutors were asked if they had tried to teach the writer anything about themselves as writers.Over half of the responding writers (59%; n=44) answered “yes” to this question, whereas across the tutor surveys, only 11% (n=8) indicated that they had taught the writer anything about themselves as a writer.

It is obvious through these data that many writers claimed they had learned about an issue that their tutor had not identified as something they had taught. But there were also occasions when tutors said they had taught something but the session’s writer said they hadn’t learned it. In fact, out of the 301 total “yes” answers provided by both tutors and writers, only 80 sets (n=160, 53%) were instances when both the tutor and the writer agreed that something had been taught/learned in connection to a particular writing category. Figure 3 clarifies further the extent to which tutors and writers consistently disagreed with each other across all five categories on whether or not teaching/learning had occurred.

And even in the 80 sets of answers when both the tutor and the writer agreed that teaching/learning had occurred in connection to a particular writing topic, participants’ responses to the subsequent short answer questions sometimes revealed additional divergences between what was perceived as taught and what was reported as learned. Respondents who selected “yes” for a given category were then invited to answer additional questions about what specifically they had taught/learned related to that category and how they had taught/learned it. An analysis of these short answer responses revealed that in 62.5% (n=50) of these 80 “yes” sets, the tutor and the writer both identified the same topic or issue of teaching/learning. Figure 4 shows how many tutors and writers indicated that they had taught/learned about a general category as well as how many times their short answer responses aligned by referring to the same instructive topic. Figure 5 provides two examples of paired answers to the follow up question about what the tutor/writer had taught/learned about writing in general (i.e., writing process and rhetorical issues). In the first example, the tutor and writer describe the same learning topic. In the second, the respondents describe very different learning topics. These 50 sets of closely aligned responses account for 14% of the 348 paired instances of teaching/learning the survey gathered data about. While this is a low percentage, these 50 instances of coordinated objects of learning were distributed across 53% (n=39) of the 74 surveyed tutorial sessions. This means that in the majority of the tutorial sessions this study considered, there was at least one instance of teaching/learning where what the tutor identified as their intended object of learning and what the writer identified as their lived object of learning were in close agreement as confirmed by congruent short-answer responses.

Discussion

Survey Design Limitations

Before discussing more fully the findings apparent across these surveys, it’s valuable to briefly account for what these data suggest about how the surveys’ designs elided the intersecting multiplicity of various writing functions. As compositionists well know, writing is complex. The teaching and learning associated with its processes aren’t always easily categorized. Across survey responses, learning encounters drift from one question to another and are identified as fitting within different kinds of learning by different individuals. For example, one tutor reported in the “writing in general” category that they had worked to teach a writer about avoiding repetition by identifying “a specific example of repetition in the student’s writing, [going] over how to fix it, and discuss[ing] how that same process can be applied to other areas of repetition in this paper as well as future papers.” This writer expressed an awareness of this multifaceted lesson, describing in the “learning about writing in general” section that they had “learned that I am too repetitive” and again in the “learning about yourself as a writer” section that they had “learned that ‘less is more’ sometimes. Not repeating myself makes my writing stronger.” What for the tutor was a lesson about writing in general was experienced by the writer as a lesson about both effective writing and about their own writing practices. Similarly, another writer detailed how they had learned about pre-writing strategies in the “writing in general” section of the survey, but the tutor for this appointment saw this as an assignment-specific lesson since they had been brainstorming topics for the writer’s paper. In comparing tutors’ and writers’ responses to these categories, we’re reminded that writing’s various activities don’t lend themselves to discrete, uniform, or easily agreed-upon categories. Some of the instances of teaching/learning that may have been aligned across the tutors’/writers’ experiences were perhaps artificially divided by the separate categories used to structure this survey.

I also recognized through my analysis that tutors’ fluency with the distinctions compositionists make between features of writing may have informed their survey responses in ways that contrasted with some of the writers’ responses. This became most apparent when comparing the responses to the “writing in general” category. This category had been designed to focus on issues of rhetoric and writing process—key elements of what are commonly identified in writing center practice and pedagogy as “higher-order concerns” (McAndrew and Reigstad). And most of the twenty-four instances when tutors answered “yes” to having provided instruction within this category described teaching about issues like developing thesis statements, drafting introductions and conclusions, responding to particular audiences, and revising. Tutors mentioned teaching about grammar within this category only twice. However, of the 54 occasions when writers indicated learning about writing in general through their tutorials, fifteen identified lessons about grammar, punctuation, and formatting issues. The fact that these writers identified what are commonly considered “lower-” or “later-order concerns” (Gillespie and Lerner) as being related to their learning about rhetorical issues or writing processes coincides with the move in writing center scholarship to eliminate the valuative distinctions between higher-order concerns (HOCs) and lower-order concerns (LOCs) (Grimm 14; Phillips 96). This also supports Sarah Summers’ claim that “what seem like LOCs in general writing center scholarship may, in fact, be HOCs in practice” (259). Tutors might have a more specific, shared understanding of what the survey meant by “writing in general” than did the writers, but the writers’ responses encourage us to continue reflecting on how rhetorical knowledge is evaluated and distinguished.

In connection to tutors’ and writers’ potentially different assumptions about the components of writing as presented by this survey, study participants may have also used different language to describe similar objects of learning. Given their training and experience, tutors may be more adept at writing about writing and compositional instruction than the students they work with. For example, while one writer described learning how to simply “plan ahead,” their tutor detailed teaching them the pre-writing strategy of outlining their body paragraphs. The actual similarities in how learning/teaching instances like this one were experienced and perceived may be obscured by the different ways they were described.

Of course, the limitations of using a survey as a methodological tool to account for intended and lived objects of learning transcend potential variations in response generated by imposed learning categories and the differentiated knowledge about writing held by tutors and writers. As Miriam Gofine has acknowledged, the validity of surveys as a research tool is limited (47). In this study, the surveys revealed not what was objectively taught by tutors in a given session or what was demonstratively learned by writers but what the tutors and writers reported having taught and learned. Even though a gap may exist between reported and actual teaching/learning, examining tutors’ and writers’ perceptions of their respective teaching and learning provides a point of entry into this issue—a way of starting the conversation about how tutors’ and writers’ understanding of the work achieved within discrete tutorial sessions might align or diverge.

Writers’ Learning > Tutors’ Teaching

Despite the various ways the survey itself may have influenced responses, a dominant trend that emerges through these results is the degree to which writers reported learning more than tutors reported teaching. As particularly evidenced through the gap between the No : Yes ratios identified in Figure 1, tutors were much more likely to answer “no” to these questions about whether or not they taught about an issue, and writers were more likely to answer “yes” about their learning. This discrepancy is most profoundly noticeable in the category about teaching/learning about the writer. In 11% (n=8) of surveys, tutors said they’d taught the writers about themselves; in contrast, 59% (n=44) of the writer surveys reported that the writer had learned something about their strengths, weaknesses, or confidence as a writer. In contrast, across 23% (n=17) of the tutor surveys and 24% (n=18) of the writer surveys, respondents indicated “yes” to the question regarding teaching/learning about online resources. Of course, how a writer learns about their compositional strengths might look very different from how they learn about, say, using an online citation generator.

For example, in response to the question about learning about themselves, one writer said that by “working with my tutor,” they had learned, “I can do it but it just takes time to become a good writer.” This was an uplifting and realistic lesson in confidence that was gained through experience and mentorship, not necessarily through direct instruction. In fact, this tutor didn’t report having taught this writer anything about themselves as a writer. In contrast, both this writer and this tutor answered “yes” to the question about teaching/learning about grammar and formatting. “I learned more about formatting,” the writer wrote, “[b]y giving each other examples.” The tutor said that they had “clarified [the writer’s] understanding of MLA in-text citations [by w]riting out an in-text citation and giving multiple examples of the different types of MLA in-text citations.” This learning was achieved through a discrete lesson, complete with explanations and practice examples. But as the writer’s reported learning about confidence suggests, not all learning is associated with direct instruction. Many other writers referenced learning about their writing style, strengths, or patterns of errors simply through reading (or having the tutor read) their paper aloud. These were instances of, perhaps, passive or unintentional instruction that nevertheless translated into lived objects of learning.

Learning Despite Discrepancies

While the imbalance between what the tutors identified as their intended objects of learning and what the writers described as their lived objects of learning weighed in favor of writers’ learning, the gap itself is worthy of closer consideration. Discrepancies between what the tutor thought they’d taught and what the writer said they’d learned make sense when considering amorphous concepts like gaining compositional confidence. How would a tutor necessarily know that they had influenced a writer’s perception of their writing ability? However, this gap was also notable across more concrete learning topics that could be paired with discrete teaching moments. For example, in the teaching/learning about grammar/formatting category, only 36% (n=27) of the 74 tutorials featured agreement between both the tutor and the writer that they’d taught/learned about grammar expectations or formatting practices.

The low levels of agreement between what these tutors identified as the intended objects of learning and what the writers reported as their lived objects of learning raise many questions. To what extent is this discrepancy related to tutors’ and writers’ differing views of writing—potentially diverging perspectives that could point back to their positions as expert or novice writers? When were tutors’ instructive attempts simply not effective, not communicated, or not received? Could this discrepancy be related to writers’ possible comparative eagerness to report lived objects of learning in contrast to tutors’ potential cautiousness toward identifying intended objects of learning?

Despite these questions, as this center’s director, I’m more satisfied with a reported teaching/learning imbalance that favors writers’ claimed learning than I would be with one that favors tutor teaching. In 62% (n=46) of the 74 appointments, writers indicated with a greater frequency that they learned across more categories of writing topics than their tutor indicated having taught; in 26% (n=19) of responses, the writers and tutors answered “yes” to the same number of learning/teaching categories, and in 12% (n=9), the tutors identified teaching across more categories than the writers identified learning. A reported teaching/learning imbalance that favored tutors’ teaching would make me wonder more about possibly ineffective teaching and tutors’ potentially inflated view of their instructive influence. Instead, these survey results convincingly indicate that these writers believe they learned about writing through particular interactions with writing center tutors. Only 4% (n=3) of the responding writers reported not having learned anything about writing during their sessions—yet even two of those respondents described in their short answer responses how the tutor had helped them improve their papers. In the vast majority of cases, writers identified a range of lessons they had learned about writing—from structuring an essay to gaining confidence in their writing to citing sources in accordance with APA’s guidelines.

While I was working on this project, I showed these aggregated survey results to our center’s tutors in a writing center staff meeting. Many of the tutors had participated in this study, and they were eager to learn how the writers they had been working with had experienced their instructive efforts. We spent the meeting sorting through some of the anonymized data and asking ourselves, “What do these results suggest about tutors’ teaching, writers’ learning, and the relationship between the two? What implications do these results have for how we tutor?” The tutors were also pleased that so many writers reported having learned so much across so many different categories of potential writing instruction. But through this discussion, the tutors also raised an important question, “Matthew,” they asked me, “what did you mean by ‘teaching’?”

The fact that so much of what the writers had identified as their lived objects of learning had no connection to the tutor’s intended objects of learning brought into focus certain discrepancies between learning and teaching. Because, as we well know, teaching and learning are not always direct corollaries. Teaching can be attempted even if learning isn’t achieved, and, as previously noted regarding the tutors unintentionally teaching writers about themselves as writers, learning frequently happens apart from direct instruction. And, as my tutors reminded me, direct instruction is more associated with the role of a teacher than it is with the functions and responsibilities of a tutor. Certainly, sometimes tutors included discrete lessons about particular issues. We saw this earlier in the example of the tutor and writer working through practice citations. Another writer explained that their tutor, “taught me the details behind Ethos, Pathos, and Logos and how to incorporate it in my essay.” The tutor in a third session described identifying “a few different grammar rules (subject-verb agreement, punctuation rules, etc.),” and the writer they worked with confirmed that they had “learned some comma rules.” But many of the interactions these writers and tutors shared transcended the kind of direct knowledge transfer typically expected within a teacher/student interaction. Instead, these tutors and writers “discussed” (a term that was used 106 times across these 74 pairs of surveys), “work[ed]” (70 times), “read” (47 times), and “talked” (26 times). Tutors may not have always associated these efforts with teaching, but many of the writers claimed that they were learning.

This reminds us of the unique role that tutors play within the context of higher education. Tutors aren’t teachers. They don’t interact with students like teachers do. They don’t always align their efforts with distinct learning objectives or see themselves as conducting lessons in the same way as a teacher might. And yet tutors are still doing important, educative work. Students clearly perceive tutors as influencing their learning—as playing a role in the new knowledge and expertise they are gaining. The extent to which students claim that learning is happening apart from tutors’ intentional teaching encourages us to refine our understanding of what is happening in writing center sessions and what makes them effective. Writers are learning even when tutors are not intentionally teaching. This pushes us to understand more fully how learning can emerge without direct instruction and how writing centers fit into that process.

Conclusion

The alignment and misalignment that this study identifies between what tutors cite as their intended objects of learning and what the writers they work with report as their lived objects of learning offer validation for the compositional support writing centers provide. This study reminds us of how many different learning opportunities and processes can occur within a tutorial session, and the fact that so many writers reported having learned about so many different issues suggests that tutorials can flexibly respond to writers’ learning concerns.

However, the extent to which what tutors and writers report as their intended and lived objects of learning diverges gives us pause for further consideration and opens additional questions about the nature of tutoring and learning. This study reveals that often tutors and writers have very different perspectives of what happens in a tutorial session. This discrepancy may be connected to any number of factors. It could be related to learning’s function as an individual and often internal process that can sometimes occur apart from direct instruction. It could be related to writers’ ongoing confusion or uncertainty about writing issues and indicate missed opportunities. It may connect to tutors’ and writers’ differing perspectives on writing and the elements, skills, and processes writing draws upon. This study has prompted me to encourage our tutors to more intentionally reference teaching and learning in their tutorial sessions. Instead of just asking, “What do you want to work on?” at the start of a session, we’ve been experimenting with asking, “What do you want to learn today?” We’re considering the value of fostering more metacommentary within our tutorial sessions as a way to explain what we see ourselves as teaching and what we’re trying to help writers learn.

As previously referenced, this study serves as an opening exploration into this nexus between tutors’ and writers’ experiences. More work needs to be done to explore how tutors and writers experience the same tutorial session in different or similar ways in an effort to understand the points of connection and divergence between what tutors teach and what writers learn. Certainly, approaching this issue through alternative research methodologies could productively further this conversation. For example, future researchers could observe tutorials in order to track what Ference Marton, Ulla Runesson, and Amy Tsui refer to as the “enacted object of learning” and compare it with the intended and lived objects of learning (5). Research could focus on how writers manifest and apply the learning they claim to have achieved through tutorial sessions by pairing surveys or interviews about writers’ writing center experiences with analysis of their writing. Doing so would move the focus away from writers’ self-identified knowledge and expertise and open an exploration into their changed behavior and practices. To continue understanding both what influence writing centers are having on writers and how our centers are having that influence, writing center administrators would benefit from continuing to bring tutors’ and writers’ experiences and efforts together.

For me and my tutors, however, one of the most compelling aspects from this preliminary foray into how tutors and writers teach and learn through writing center tutorials has been the way it has highlighted the nature of peer tutoring as a lower-stakes instructive encounter where learning can happen through conversation and not always through prescribed lessons. This is an important quality of tutoring that we don’t want to lose—the organic, instructive possibilities of talking through assignments, reading writing with an informed peer, and discussing a text’s future development. This study suggests that writers’ learning is frequently not associated with tutors’ intentional teaching, and that’s okay. However, this is something that tutors should be aware of: the effects of writing center instruction as exhibited by what writers ultimately learn may not be anything the tutor was overtly trying to teach. This reminds us of how expansive the learning opportunities are across a tutorial session and how important it is for tutors to realize that even when they might not be knowingly teaching, the writers they’re working with may be learning.

Notes

For the purposes of this study, I draw from Malcolm Knowles et al. to define learning as gained knowledge and expertise. The focus that others have put on learning in association with changed behavior (De Houwer et al.) raises important considerations but does not align with the self-reported nature of this study’s data.
Tutors received less money per survey than writers because tutors could respond more frequently. Tutors’ multiple opportunities to fill out a survey allowed them to become more familiar with its questions which, I believed, would influence how long it would take them to respond. Also, since tutors filled out more surveys than writers, this varied compensation rate allowed me to extend my budget further.

Works Cited

Alshreif, Nouf. “Multilingual Writers in the Writing Center: Invitational Rhetoric and Politeness Strategies to Accommodate the Needs of Multilingual Writers.” The Peer Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/issue-1/multilingual-writers-in-the-writing-center-invitational-rhetoric-and-politeness-strategies-to-accommodate-the-needs-of-multilingual-writers/. Accessed 21 Sept. 2023.

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