Tutor Education

All tutors must submit two professional journal responses per semester. The journals are in the Writing Center.  Please click on the link below for the journal response form:

• Professional Journal/Text Response Sheet

Tutors: Please follow the links below to access material.  While the first section, "RWU Tutor Documents" focuses more on the mechanics of tutoring in a writing center, the second section, "Articles," provides a crucial foundation for the philosophical bases of tutoring. 

RWU Tutor Documents

• Tutor Code of Conduct 2011-2012
• Peer Tutor Guide by Dave Gillespie
• Role Playing Strategies
• 10 "Tutor Do's"
• Introduction to Academic Writing Course Guide
• Expository Writing Course Guide

Articles (Once you click on the link and get to the article, in order to read or print more efficiently, click on the PDF symbol to the right of the title.)

New Tutors

• "Responding to Student Writing," by Nancy Sommers.  College Composition and Communication, Vol. 33, No. 2 (May, 1982), pp. 148-156. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/357622
• "On Students' Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response," by Lil Brannon and C.H. Knoblauch.  College Composition and Communication, Vol. 33, No. 2 (May, 1982), pp. 157-166.  Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/357623
• "Encouraging Critical Thinking: A Strategy for Commenting on College Papers," by Patrick Slattery.  College Composition and Communication, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Oct., 1990), pp. 332-335. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/357661
• "Training Tutors to Talk about Writing," by Stephen M. North.  College Composition and Communication, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Dec., 1982), pp. 434-441. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/357958
• "On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism," by Victor Villanueva.  College Composition and Communication, Vol. 50, No. 4, A Usable Past: CCC at 50: Part 2 (Jun., 1999), pp. 645-661.  Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/358485
• "Talking Across Difference: Intercultural Rhetoric and the Search for Situated Knowledge," by Linda Flower.  College Composition and Communication, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Sep., 2003), pp. 38-68.  Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3594199

New & Returning Tutors

• "Power and Authority in Peer Tutoring," from The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship, eds. Michael A. Pemberton and Joyce Kinkead.  Published by Utah State University Press; Logan, Utah; 2003.  Pages 96-113.  USED WITH PERMISSION OF AUTHOR.  Click here for article in pdf form.
• "Ch. 11: Rhetorical Genre Studies Approaches to Teaching Writing," from Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy by Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff.  Published by Parlor Press and the WAC Clearinghouse, 2010.  Available at: http://wac.colostate.edu/books/bawarshi_reiff/chapter11.pdf.
• "Addressing Genre in the Writing Center," by Irene Clark. The Writing Center Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Fall/Winter 1999), pp. 7-32. Available at: http://casebuilder.rhet.ualr.edu/wcrp/publications/wcj/wcj20.1/wcj20.1_clark.pdf
• "An Alternate Approach to Bridging Disciplinary Divides," by Catherine Savini.  The Writing Lab Newsletter, Vol. 35, No. 7-8 (March/April 2011), pp. 1-5.  Available at: http://www.writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v35/35.7-8.pdf
• "Not Remedial, But a Walk-Through," by Jacob Bender. The Writing Lab Newsletter, Vol. 35, No. 9-10 (May/June 2011), pp. 14-15.  http://www.writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v35/35.9-10.pdf
• A final word:
  In "The Idea of a Writing Center," North remarks on the "heritage" of the writing center: "it stretches back farther than the late 1960s or the early 1970s, or to Iowa in the 1930s--back, in fact, to Athens, where in a busy marketplace a tutor called Socrates set up the same kind of shop: open to all comers, no fees charged, offering, on whatever subject a visitor might propose, a continuous dialectic that is, finally, its own end" (446).