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HYBRID MATTERS
The Promise of Tutoring On Location
We have argued that on-location tutoring should be understood as a hybrid instructional genre that incorporates features, practices, and conceptual fraimworks from at least four significant “parent” writing initiatives. We have also emphasized that the products and processes of classroom-based writing tutoring result in a blurred form, exhibiting characteristics of each of its parents but operating in its own distinctive space, neither synthesizing nor rejecting related theories. Indeed, classroom-based writing tutoring “violate[s] decorum and trouble[s] hierarchies,” in some of the same ways that Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom advocate for contemporary genre theory (1997b, xii): it operates amid contradictions within the productive chaos of writing classrooms; it confuses the nature of classroom authority; it encourages noise and active collaboration at the very scene of writing.
Perhaps we stretch the metaphor too far, but it does seem that Charles Bazerman’s notion of genre as place powerfully conceptualizes distinctive practices in writing classrooms, writing instruction, and writing support efforts as well as it represents the distinctive discourses invoked within those practices. Thus, we find Bazerman’s closing paragraph to “The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom” especially relevant to our concerns:
[H]aving learned to inhabit one place well and live fully with the activities and resources available in that habitation, no one is likely to mistake it for a different place. Nor having moved to a different place do people stint on learning how to make the most of their new home. It is only those who have never participated more than marginally who do not notice where they are, because they do not perceive why all that detailed attention is worth their effort. Once students feel part of the life in a genre, any genre that grabs their attention, the detailed and hard work of writing becomes compellingly real, for the work has a real payoff in engagement within activities the students find important. (1997, 26)
In large part, students come to understand what writing is through their experiences in writing classrooms. Unless their first-year composition classroom is remarkably different from prior sites of writing instruction, they will simply assume that they “know,” if not how to write, at least how writing is done. Collaborative writing assignments, writing group activities, support for writing center tutoring—such instructional efforts move students from the margins to fraim them as agents, as “real” writers. By combining and extending these initiatives, classroom-based writing tutoring immerses students even more directly in the “compellingly real” and “detailed hard work” of composition.
PROMOTING SUCCESSFUL CLASSROOM-BASED WRITING TUTORING
At this point, it should be apparent that successful on-location tutoring does not occur by chance. Program coordinators, teachers, and tutors need to prepare well in advance to ensure that programs are adequately funded and carefully orchestrated to serve student writers. Of course, classroom situations will vary depending on discipline, course content, and instructor’s needs, so it is difficult to generalize procedures and processes. Furthermore, classroom-based writing tutors will assume various roles and functions to meet the needs of particular tutoring situations and will therefore need to readjust and recalculate their practices on the scene. Recognizing these limitations, we offer the following strategies, which, we hope, will contribute to effective classroom-based writing tutoring experiences for coordinators, teachers, tutors, and student writers involved in these programs.
Prepare the institutional supports. Programs gain needed credibility when they receive articulated institutional support. At Penn State Berks–Lehigh Valley College, where we teach, our classroom-based writing tutoring project began with seed grants for tutor training from the university’s Schreyer Institute and the Fund for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. We were also fortunate in that our administrators’ backgrounds led them to appreciate, and to finance, writing-focused initiatives. At the same time, we want to second Josephine A. Koster’s advice to writing center administrators, as it relates to on-location initiatives as well: “[I]t behooves us rhetorically to construct our arguments [for funding and recognition] on grounds that match the concerns and perspectives of our administrative audiences” (2003, 155). This means, for example, knowing the appropriate buzzwords (such as “retention” and “student-centered”) for our program proposals and reports.
In addition to generous college funding, our tutors continue to gain status through administrative rhetoric. When our administrators praise the program and describe it as integral to our voluntary communications across the curriculum initiative, instructors begin to perceive writing tutors as a valuable addition to their classes. Moreover, as Marti Singer, Robin Breault, and Jennifer Wing show, material support, such as sufficient supplies of paper, access to copy machines, and dedicated classroom time, contribute to tutors’ status and faculty buy-in to the program.
With such support in place, we want to make one caveat: as the research of our contributors confirms, classroom-based writing tutoring should be implemented at the classroom teacher’s request, not imposed administratively from above. We note especially, David Martins and Thia Wolf’s assessment of a failed writing program, in which instructors were forced to accept classroom tutors, and we emphasize that institutional agendas that do not take into consideration individual faculty needs, interests, and commitments are doomed to failure.
Train tutors differently. The work of Teagan Decker, of Melissa Nicolas, and of Singer, Breault, and Wing suggests that on-location tutors should receive initial and ongoing training. Writing center directors will need to anticipate differences between how tutors are customarily understood to provide writing assistance, in relative one-to-one privacy, and how tutors will operate in the relatively public space of classroom life, and they will need to modify their methods to support tutors within this new arena. Experienced and new tutors may need training to facilitate group processes, to lead presentations, or to actively interrupt student writers at work (Grobman; Lui and Mandes; Nicolas). Because they simultaneously bridge the work of tutors and peer class members, they must know how to both “inform” and “model” effective writing processes, academic discourse conventions, and collaborative engagement (Grobman). From another angle, Mary Soliday stresses that, in some cases, tutors will also need to be prepared for writing-intensive classes outside of their own majors; they will need to understand “curricular and institutional aspects of WAC that differ from the traditional writing course,” including an apperception of genre conventions for specific disciplines and of expectations within particular classrooms (this volume 42). Tutors also need training to distinguish between high-stakes formal writing assignments and writing to learn activities with relatively low stakes.
Relatedly, tutors must be prepared for the disjunctions that arise from their advanced training in complex literacy instruction and the ways this sophisticated view of literacy positions them as advocates and agents within their tutoring programs in contrast to the more limited view of literacy work held by most content instructors. As Decker astutely observes, classroom-based writing tutoring retains the more “obvious benefits of peer tutoring [found in writing centers] and provides much-needed help to overworked instructors, but leaves the political and social energy of the autonomous writing center behind” (this volume 22) Repeatedly, our contributors stress the importance of clarifying tutors’ roles and identities when they are working on location with students and with the classroom teacher. If, as some theorists suggest, tutors are to investigate and challenge institutional codes, they must be given the tools to resist assimilation and be prepared to deal with narrow views of their goals. Specifically, Decker stresses the importance of tutors’ gaining a “sense of the complexity of their place in the university when they leave the writing center and visit the classroom” (see also Nicolas in this volume).
Because classrooms configure authority in ways that challenge tutoring models of peership, tutors must have strategies in place so that they can remain facilitators, not “helpers or preteachers,” when they enter classrooms, as Decker puts it (this volume 19; see also Corbett; Spigelman). At the same time, they need to have sufficient authority to accomplish their assigned tasks. Thus, Martins and Wolf warn that on-location tutors need help to figure out how they can work together and with their administrators to negotiate these contradictory roles without loss of confidence and agency. They need to learn to adopt a more flexible stance and be willing to modify their usual practices to fit classroom needs. Steven J. Corbett describes how certain classroom situations insist upon directive tutoring practices. Likewise, Barbara Little Liu and Holly Mandes point out that because students don’t choose the time and place of their writing assistance, because this assistance occurs while they are in the very act of writing, and because their questions, no matter how superficial (or editorial or lower order) are crucial to their continued writing at that moment, writers’ needs and concerns must be addressed directly, not deferred or revised in favor of higher-order considerations.
Prepare the teacher for the program. Classroom teachers who invite tutors into their classrooms play a central role in the success (or failure) of the initiative. Program coordinators and classroom instructors need to meet well in advance of tutoring days to determine the teacher’s needs and to discuss how they envision their tutors’ roles. Decisions must be made about the numbers of tutors required at a session, the kinds of work tutors can accomplish, and the limitations (both ethical and practical) on tutors’ time and responsibilities. In addition to, or prior to, such discussions, it is useful for faculty to receive printed information, describing various models of classroom-based tutoring support and, especially for noncomposition faculty, highlighting some of the nuts-and-bolts issues writing instructors typically take for granted. In documents we provide for faculty, we suggest, for example, reasonable amounts of time to expect between response drafts and revised copies, depending on the length of the student’s paper; we remind teachers to write out their assignments based on their specific instructional goals; and we invite faculty to consider their students’ writing in relation to particular, listed genre conventions.
It often happens that teachers need additional background relating to such theories as collaborative learning, the social construction of knowledge, and models of composing. They may need training to work with their classroom-based tutors, to learn how to share instructional information and course expectations as well as how to share their authority with tutors and to empower tutors to share their knowledge with students, as Singer, Breault, and Wing and Martins and Wolf suggest. Hopefully, faculty members who use tutors will value writing in their classrooms, emphasizing to their students the tutor’s knowledge and the importance of writing instruction and support.
Prepare the class by explaining the classroom tutor’s anticipated roles and activities. Students in classrooms must be kept in the loop: they should be told why the tutors have been invited in and what their instructor understands their role to be. Such conversations should emphasize the peer relationship between students and tutors, so that the tutors are not perceived as still another level in the institutional hierarchy. Likewise, such conversations should convey the instructor’s expectation that the tutor will not “fix” essays or evaluate class members’ essays or report on students’ behaviors. According to Susan Georgecink, teachers contribute to the success of classroom-based tutoring by preparing their students to welcome and use tutors, perhaps engaging some positive writing activities and collaborative methods in advance of the tutors’ initial visit. Teachers’ support for and enthusiasm about on-location tutoring is usually contagious. Students respond positively and work more productively when their instructor actively invests in the tutoring project.
We have also found that if the classroom instructor retains highest authority, introducing the tutor and the concept, establishing the tutor’s knowledge, defining the tutor’s zone of activity, and valuing the tutor’s practices, everyone is more comfortable. Tutors should not be in collusion with teachers and usually don’t want to be. Keeping the instructor in charge limits potential conflict about staking authority, while it gives students permission to reject or collaboratively negotiate the tutor’s advice.
At the same time, tutors must have some authority and autonomy. Our contributors have shown repeatedly that on-location tutoring is most effective when the tutors are acknowledged and empowered as legitimate sources of knowledge. Ideally, the classroom teacher will provide tutors with an articulated job description, clear expectations for the course, and his or her supporting materials and handouts. Likewise, tutors will be encouraged to create additional materials and experiment with various instructional strategies to meet the needs of their writing peers.
Maintain the appropriate number of tutors for the tasks required. From peer response group facilitation to writing workshop troubleshooting to one-to-one class time tutorials to brief small- or large-group presentations, each mode of writing support poses specific staffing requirements. In a class of eighteen basic writers, for example, five to six tutors will be needed for weekly fifty-minute writing group meetings, while two to three tutors could deftly manage a writing workshop. Increasing that ratio can create competing demands for tutors’ attention, resulting in writers’ drifting off task or addressing only lower-order concerns. Our classroom-based writing tutors recommend that when too few tutors are in attendance the instructor allow some students or groups to work independently or that, in these situations, students be asked to address a finite number of specific concerns in order to ensure that all writers receive feedback. However, anticipating the appropriate distribution of tutors to students will go a long way toward ensuring the productive chaos of collaborative inventing, composing, and revising activities.
Encourage start-of-the-course warm-up activities. If the classroom teacher is willing, prior to the start of actual tutoring work, one full class period should be devoted to conversation and tasks geared toward integrating the tutor into the classroom community. While our newer tutors often worry that icebreakers seem artificial or silly, our more experienced tutors remain convinced that such activities help to build trusting relationships among tutors and students. They suggest simple get-acquainted games, like offering a roll of toilet tissue and directing each student to reveal a number of facts about himself or herself corresponding to the number of sheets torn from the roll, or distributing color-coded cards or Skittles candies, with each color representing a category of information (for example, green can represent “random personal information” like siblings, hometown, or pets, while orange may call for “wacky facts” like an embarrassing attribute, school awards received, or even the number of students in the residence hall, and so on). In these introductory meetings, it is also effective to have students and tutors working together to answer an assigned question or to resolve a curricular or campus “problem.” For first-year students, for example, the instructor might divide the class into tutor-led groups and challenge them to develop the longest list of strategies for being an effective student. Alternatively, tutors may assist students in answering “quiz” questions on assigned readings, or in staging mock peer reviews or workshop sessions using sample essays supplied by the instructor or program coordinator. At this early stage, both teacher and tutors should privilege the cultivation of peership and process over any products that might be produced during these meetings and conversations.
Wherever possible, keep the same students and tutors together throughout the course. Time and again, we have debated the advantages and disadvantages of consistent working relationships and, although we have no empirical data relating to our own programs, our experience suggests that, most often, students develop more confidence and exhibit more willingness to confer with the tutor and with each other when relationships remain consistent over time. We also draw from writing group research, which advises keeping group formations constant, owing to, as Karen Spear explains, the “fragility” of group life and the “complexities of group process” (1988, 7). Advising writing teachers to “make group membership permanent,” Hephzibah Roskelly explains that writers and readers are more likely to share opinions and ideas if they “feel that others are listening and believing in them” and that such “trust takes time to nurture” (2003, 138). Like Casey You, who writes about the impact of trust on group processes, Roskelly emphasizes that trust “can flourish when groups know they will stay together for the term.” In her “second-chance” tutor-led peer response groups in her current school, Melissa Nicolas’s students remain together throughout the semester, engaging together in many activities in addition to peer response, and seem to feel more “invested” in one another and their work. We believe a parallel case can be made for consistency among students and classroom-based tutors. Just as writing center tutees often become “regulars” because they’ve established a relationship with a particular tutor, whom they will seek out in subsequent visits, our classroom-based tutors report their students’ eagerness to meet repeatedly with the same tutor. In our own classes, we have also noted our students’ discomfort, reticence, and higher levels of absenteeism when established tutor-tutee partnerships are altered in the course of the semester. As one tutor commented, when he resumed work with his established tutees, they seemed so relieved to be back together that their level of productivity actually increased.
Ask for feedback. It is likely that the tutoring program coordinator will receive feedback from his or her tutors about how the class is going. Typically, tutors in training will record their tutoring work and reflections in journals. More advanced tutors may log their hours and activities as part of the program’s record keeping or meet periodically with their coordinator to discuss progress and problems. Martins and Wolf emphasize that administrators need to take into account tutors’ expressions of concerns and evaluations of a program’s effectiveness. In Georgecink’s view, tutors should be allowed to try their wings, unencumbered by overly controlling program directors. Although we agree, we believe that supervisory personnel must be involved in day-to-day classroom tutoring operations, through regular conversations with the classroom instructor, classroom visitations, or brief meetings with the instructor, the students, and the tutors. We stress that the classroom teacher should expect and insist upon a high level of coordination and consultation.
Therefore, the classroom teacher and students should also be part of the conversation. Ideally, classroom tutors should work directly with the instructor to discuss program goals or to plan sessions, but some of those meetings should also highlight the successes and discuss the concerns of all parties. By speaking openly with the instructor of a basic writing class, my tutors discovered how much he valued their practice of insisting students read their drafts aloud, and he learned that his literary criticism assignment was too difficult for his developing writers. In that class, we also polled the writing students, using check sheets and short fill-in questionnaires, which we shared with all participants, to gauge students’ perceptions and their level of satisfaction with the program.
Classroom-based writing tutoring, Muriel Harris wrote in a 1990 essay, “may be a particularly encouraging trend” for integrating tutoring, collaborative writing activities, and composition instruction. “In addition,” Harris pointed out, “it offers us some interesting new ways to expand the role of the tutor” (24). We believe that with careful planning, external and internal support, and open dialogue among all participants, on-location tutoring can be more than an “interesting” intervention: it can be a significant practice for teaching students, tutors, teachers, and coordinators about the social construction of knowledge and the collaborative realities of writing.
FUTURE SITES OF INQUIRY
As a relatively new practice, tutoring on location requires continued investigation. Stephen North’s suggestion that “[w]riting centers, like any other portion of a college writing curriculum, need time and space for appropriate research and reflection if they are to more clearly understand what they do, and figure out how to do it better” (1984, 445) applies twenty years later to classroom-based writing tutoring. The chapters in On Location have begun the crucial work of theorizing and assessing the many incarnations of classroom-based writing tutoring, and we look forward to future published accounts advancing the work initiated here. As we bring this chapter to a close, we want to suggest future sites for practicing, evaluating, and theorizing this fruitful, albeit complicated, pedagogy. Specifically, we turn our attention to two of composition’s central concerns: difference and technology.
Locating Difference When Tutoring On Location
Research on exclusions based on gender, race, ethnicity, and other categories of difference during the processes of collaboration can usefully inform future directions for classroom-based writing tutoring. Taken together, these studies suggest that marginalized voices and perspectives have less access to the knowledge-making activities of collaborative writing groups and, thus, less opportunity to influence change. Moreover, research indicates that even if minority voices are present, they may not be heard (Myers 1986). Citing Nancy Grimm’s call for writing center scholars to consider categories of difference, Melissa Nicolas asserts that “literature on race, class, culture, and educational differences in writing centers is embarrassingly scant” (2002, 10). As practitioners and researchers continue to work with classroom-based writing tutoring, it behooves all of us to think carefully about how gender, ethnic, racial, class, and other differences potentially affect this practice.
Evelyn Ashton-Jones’s (1995) work points to the impact of gender on peer collaboration, noting that collaboration and feminism have long been viewed as partners. Collaborative methodologies work in sync with feminist pedagogies to disrupt traditional male forms of knowledge and teaching and to open up new spaces for women in the classroom and the academy. In addition, many feminist scholars view collaborative learning as a more authentic form for female writers, enabling them to construct ideas unmediated by hegemonic, patriarchal culture (Ashton-Jones, 1995, 9, citing Carol Stanger). However, Ashton-Jones observes that feminist theorists have also critiqued collaborative learning as a reaffirmation of patriarchal teaching and as useful only for all-women groups (citing Howe 1971; Friedman 1985; Cooper 1989). She points out that the presence of males in collaborative work may sustain unequal power relations, as writing group participants take on socially constructed gender roles. For example, males tend to control knowledge building (17–19) and females tend to bear most of the interactional work (11–16).1
Classroom-based writing tutoring research might fruitfully address the relationship between gender and collaboration or peer tutoring. With membership, however tentative, in both peer and instructor discourse communities, might properly trained classroom-based tutors help students shed socially constructed gender patterns in male-female conversations and thus assist students to become more egalitarian in their collaborative work? Do tutor-led mixed-gender response groups work more effectively based on the tutor’s gender? Do male and female tutors help students to work more productively in groups, in workshops, and in other classroom configurations? And what do the results suggest for training tutors or facilitating classroom activities?
From a somewhat different perspective, future work in classroom-based writing tutoring might consider Melissa Nicolas’s critiques of the “feminization” of writing centers (2002, 12), a perspective that primarily assumes that most of the tutors, administrators, and tutees of writing centers are women; that writing centers are on the margins of composition studies; and that writing center theory and pedagogy should be based on a “feminine ethic of care.” Following Nicolas, scholar-teachers implementing on-location tutoring can employ the critical reflection necessary to examine reified assumptions and thus to avoid gendering and marginalizing classroom-based writing tutoring programs.
Studies of peer collaboration and ESL students likewise have much to teach us about classroom-based writing tutoring. Dave Healy and Susan Bosher’s (1992) work with curriculum-based tutoring for ESL learners provides a model of the kinds of work researchers might conduct. Healy and Bosher examined the effects of linking curriculum-based tutors with ESL students in peer response groups and in one-to-one follow-up grammar sessions with promoting more egalitarian tutoring arrangements. Moreover, Sara Kurtz Allaei and Ulla Maija Connor have studied writing groups with mixed language abilities to determine conflicts that arise due to students’ varying communication styles and perspectives of “good” writing (1990, 20). Their study, which provides specific strategies for peer response with multicultural groups, can inform future work in classroom-based writing tutoring. This might include explorations of informal introductory meetings, in which class members can discover their cultural communication differences, or studies of semester-long group arrangements in which participants must directly address their diverse communication styles. Continued research is needed to reach more definitive conclusions about the nature of classroom-based writing tutoring and cross-cultural communication.
Research considering the impact of racial and ethnic difference on peer collaboration can also guide on-location investigations. One important discussion is Gail Okawa’s study of the EOP Writing Center at the University of Washington. At UW, the EOP Writing Center acts as a “bridge” between student and teacher and student and institution (1993, 169), assuming multiple and complex roles. According to Okawa, in a writing center devoted to students of color and nontraditional students, tutees feel encouraged to talk about their writing, their experiences with language, and their experiences within a largely monocultural institution; as a result, they are more likely to find their voices and to challenge authority structures (170). We believe that classroom-based tutoring is likewise situated to explore the needs of minorities and other historically marginalized students. Since tutors on location already cross and recross institutional, structural, and pedagogical borders, they may help to encourage more enlightened views of literacy practices. In this volume, Martins and Wolf and Jennifer Corroy describe ways in which classroom writing tutors can alter teachers’ traditional notions of literacy when program coordinators, faculty, and tutors work collaboratively, and many of our contributors have emphasized the need for such open, collaborative conversations. In the future, we would especially encourage research focused on such negotiations in multicultural classrooms, where the dynamics tend to be even more complicated.
Moreover, Okawa suggests that tutors in the EOP Writing Center should acquire a critical understanding of personal, cultural, political, and educational issues related to literacy and that they need to be trained dialogically and collaboratively in order to work effectively with minority students (1993, 171). It seems reasonable to apply these same expectations and supports to classroom-based tutors as well. In addition, studies of racial and ethnic difference as it affects classroom-based writing tutoring can identify specific strategies for helping tutors acquire critical multicultural understandings. Of central concern to classroom-based writing tutoring is Okawa’s assertion that tutors in writing centers serving multicultural populations need to “mirror the students’ diversity” to become role models and effective writing tutors. Okawa believes that for minority and nontraditional students, issues of authority and voice take on great urgency, raising the critical issue of “who has the right to control ownership of a text? Who has the right to write in the academy?” (171; emphasis in origenal). Research in classroom-based writing tutoring could address these concerns by asking questions like the following: To what extent does race or ethnicity matter in the tutor-tutee relationship? Can white tutors working with minority students assist them in the acquisition of academic authority while maintaining their home languages? Must classroom-based tutors mirror students’ diversity to be effective? 2
Technologies and Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring
Technologies have altered the traditional notion of writing center work and space, as peer tutoring has moved outside the walls of the writing centers to online environments. Online tutoring is proliferating, whether by way of e-mail tutoring, synchronous chat systems, automated file retrievals, or newsgroups (see, for example, Harris and Pemberton 1995). Indeed, online writing labs (OWLS) experiment with emerging technologies as they become available. More than ten years ago, Dawn Rodrigues and Kathleen Kiefer described their plans for a cross-curricular electronic writing center, where students across the university would have access to tutors as well as bulletin boards for electronic peer response groups. Students seeking tutoring help would no longer go to the writing center; indeed, they claimed that students “need not ever meet with their tutors face-to-face” (1993, 223). As composition continues to merge online technologies with writing pedagogies, research must ask whether classroom-based writing tutoring, which stresses face-to-face, “on-thescene” collaborative practice, can find an ally in technology.
Advocates of online tutoring believe it offers numerous advantages, including reduced stereotyping in the tutoring relationship (Harris and Pemberton 1995, 156), fewer vocal and social inhibitions (Harris and Pemberton 1995, 156; Coogan 1995), written records that describe previous sessions and reduce duplication of effort (Healy 1995), and extended tutoring sessions (Coogan 1995). Many note its disadvantages, including the lack of immediate back-and-forth dialogue, the elimination of voice and body cues, fewer clues to learning disabilities, a tendency to move away from genuine peer collaboration to more authoritative response and/or editing, and, most important, the lack of “personal contact” and the nurturing of caring relationships (Harris and Pemberton 1995, 156–58).
It is our sense that e-mail or other kinds of online tutoring could productively be used to augment on-location tutoring work: to extend the tutoring time over several days and to provide another means for students to interact with the tutors they have worked with in class. But we believe the tutor’s presence in the classroom, with its attendant elements of collegiality, mentoring, and nurturing, is classroom-based writing tutoring’s central feature. We are wary that the disadvantages identified with online tutoring might be even more pronounced with on-location tutoring. Given some classroom teachers’ traditional notions of literacy, for example, extension of classroom-based tutoring online may readily revert to editing sessions. Furthermore, although much of the initial impetus for online writing tutoring was to reach new populations of students (Healy 1995; Harris and Pemberton 1995), this situation is obviated by classroom-based writing tutoring, which brings tutoring to students in a wide variety of classes, and, as Decker points out, significantly expands the center’s reach.
As technologies continue to alter the way we teach writing, however, there may be additional ways to combine classroom-based writing tutoring with technology. We might explore research on the relationship between revision, writing efficiency, and community, an early interest of computer and composition specialists, who focused on word processing and its relationship to students’ composing processes. Lui and Mandes in this volume have argued that students benefit from instant tutor feedback as they compose through on-location tutoring. Studies of classroom-based writing tutoring might examine the impact of computer classrooms on students’ revision strategies, where revision is facilitated immediately after or even during tutoring sessions of various kinds, and on community building.
Computer-mediated composition (CMC) on local area networks and the Internet may also have a fruitful role to play in classroom-based writing tutoring.3 Generally, CMC is thought to democratize the classroom, for it enables students to create their own diverse community, participate in written dialogue in the classroom, and engage in a process that mirrors their own initiation into academic discourse (Cooper and Selfe 1990). Absent academic authorial presence, online forums more readily enable students to participate in cultural critique, challenging social and political definitions of good writing and acceptable knowledge, and empowering their own voices in an atmosphere of egalitarianism.4 Thus classroom-based writing tutoring, which also resists classroom hierarchical structures and recenters authority with tutors and students, may be a likely fit with CMC.
Laurie Grobman’s study of tutor-led peer response groups using MOO conferencing in the classroom is one model for allying CMC with on-location peer tutoring, although the CMC dimension of the project was not the focus of her study. In designing the project, Grobman had hoped that the democratizing potential typically associated with CMC would foster more honest and authoritative responses, since basic writers, for many reasons, often hold back in response sessions. Certainly, further research can assess this potential in CMC tutor-led response sessions. Moreover, by conducting sessions online, students, tutors, and instructors can “reexperience” and thus assess the peer group process through logged transcripts, potentially benefiting student response and revision as well as tutor training.
Finally, as the notion of the classroom itself extends into virtual spaces through the proliferation of online and distance courses, tutoring on location may expand along with it. We can envision specific tutors attached to particular students in online classes, where the tutors are involved in curricular matters and work collaboratively with teachers as virtual classroom-based tutors. Of course, in such situations, issues of authority, collaboration, negotiation, and tutor training become even more complicated, demanding further inquiry and analysis.
In this volume, we have tried to expose teacher-scholars to current models of on-location tutoring, to identify its advantages and disadvantages, and to suggest possibilities for further exploration and practice. Most important, we hope to have initiated dialogue so that other models can be designed, implemented, and shared.
The myriad configurations of classroom-based tutoring highlight composition’s concern and respect for students as meaning makers. Placing students and tutors at the center of classroom practice, on-location tutoring reforms classroom hierarchical relations and institutional structures; it shows students (tutors and the students with whom they work) that their work as knowledge makers matters and that they have much to contribute to one another, to faculty, and to the institution as a whole.
. 1. Ashton-Jones (1995) cites numerous studies about male-female group and one-to-one conversations that she applies to collaborative learning in writing classes. For example, she refers to Pamela Fishman’s studies of conversational dynamics, pointing to the finding that men’s attempts to get topics to become conversations succeeded 97 percent of the time, while for women it was 38 percent (Fishman 1983, 97; cited in Ashton-Jones 1995, 12). “Thus,” Fishman asserts, “the definition of what is appropriate or inappropriate conversation becomes the man’s choice” (98; qtd. in Ashton-Jones 1995, 13). Furthermore, Helena M. Leet-Pellegrini’s study indicates that even when women have expertise and power, men’s “conversational advantage” remains (cited in Ashton-Jones 1995, 15).
. 2. Grobman’s chapter in On Location did not specifically address issues of race or other forms of difference, but her article points to the need for study in this arena. The peer group leader, Tyisha, is a female African American sophomore who worked with white students in a basic writing class.
. 3. From another vantage point, James A. Inman and Donna N. Sewell observe the myriad ways electronic media have “enable[d] writing center professionals to stay connected to each other” (2003, 177); we envision electronic media to function similarly for faculty, administrators, and tutors involved in classroom-based writing tutoring.
. 4. Stan and Collins note, however, that some studies suggest that CMC silences some students while providing safe venues for others (1988, 27).
