| The writing center community has for many years been attentive to the need for more research of writing center practice. There are repeated calls in journals, at conferences, and on professional listservs for studies of what happens in writing center conferences and in writing center staff education. But little research has described or considered the experiences of graduate-student writing center tutors. This qualitative study was designed to allow six graduate-student tutors to describe the experiences of their first and second semesters of tutoring in a university-wide writing center. Each of the writing center consultants participated in this study by taping their conferences and taping reflections on those conferences. At the same time, these tutors were also teaching in the university-wide composition program.; This study reveals the graduate-student writing tutors often found themselves occupying multiple, and sometimes conflicting, roles. They were, at once, students, teachers and tutors. As tutors, they were often unsure whether they should work out of their experience as students or teachers, or whether they should work out of what they understood to be the writing center's "collaborative" philosophy. As new tutors, they seldom felt comfortable drawing on their own knowledge and expertise in their conferences. This frustrated tutors, and perhaps explains why the tutors saw their writing center work as disconnected from the rest of their teaching and learning. However, this frustration and uncertainty also pushed the tutors to articulate and test their pedagogical beliefs. Once the new tutors had accumulated some tutoring experience, the writing center provided opportunities for the graduate students to learn about themselves as teachers and tutors.; My findings suggest that the writing center community needs to do more to acknowledge the multiple roles graduate-student tutors inhabit, and needs to do more to value their experience as teachers and students. This might help graduate students reflect on their writing center work, and help that work become an important part of more graduate students' professional development. |
