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WRITING LIAISONS, WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM 1

Writing Liaisons, Writing across the Curriculum, and World History Narratives:

A Study of High School Writing Center Tutors' Impact on Writing across the Curriculum Efforts

Jennifer Smyth

East Carolina University


Abstract

High school writing centers, in simplest terms, serve as spaces where high school students can

talk about writing with their peers. Though much rarer in high school settings than in post-secondary

institutions, a review of the body of literature specific to high school writing centers reveals that these

institutions produce scholarly work that values the voices of students as clients, tutors, and occasional

co-authors; that the mission and work of the high school writing center (like its postsecondary

counterparts) is often very closely aligned with schoolwide writing across the curriculum efforts; and

that the unique and complex work in which high school writing center tutors engage leads to the

formation of a new tutorial identity as students adopt and adapt to new roles within their learning

communities. Though initially designed using mixed-methods to explore the impact of high school

writing center experiences on faculty, students, and tutors, this study faced major revisions in the

process of implementation; ultimately, the study evolved into an examination of the effect of a pilot

writing liaison program, in which a writing center tutor was embedded in the classroom, on students

and tutors. Findings revealed that working with writing liaisons affected both the strategies students

employed as writers and the stances and perspectives these writers adopted; that tutors collaborate

with clients as co-learners, and that a sense of empathy may be a significant habit of mind in fostering

this relationship; that the already complex identities tutors develop can become even more complex

depending on the identity of the clients they work with and the roles they engage in; and that tutors,

especially in an early college high school setting, serve as guides into college-level academic discourse

communities. Additional conclusions include strategies for reinforcing the work of the writing center

through client recruitment, tutor training, and data collection for further evaluation.

Keywords: high school writing center


Background

Three years ago, students at the early college high school where I teach began taking

college-level composition classes for the first time. I found myself inundated with requests to

read papers, holding conferences during planning, at lunch, after school, and, in emergencies,

while my students were engaged in collaborative tasks or taking tests. I was stretching myself

too thin, and I was shortchanging my own students in an effort to meet the needs of students in

college classes. Why didn’t the community college have a writing center to help these students?

It turns out that it did, but that it was an online writing center, that service having been

contracted out to a third party. My students needed more.

At the end of the year, when the staff looked at performance data for college classes,

we realized we had a problem: too many of our students were failing to earn the Cs (or above)

they needed to earn college credit; if we failed to turn that around, we were in danger of failing

in our mission as a school: “preparing students for college, career, and life […]” (Hertford

County Early College High School, 2010). Our school needed more.

That summer, we developed a comprehensive intervention plan: below 80 was the new

failing, and we developed a system of academic warning and probation, with required study

time at lunch or afterschool, regular meetings with parents, and advisory groups. We made

optional academic supports available to all students in the Homework Hub afterschool, with

teachers agreeing to spend one (sometimes two) days a week to work with students

individually and in small groups. We opened a writing center, with the students who had passed

college composition classes serving as our first class of tutors. Soon they were the ones holding

conferences – before school, in between classes, at lunch, and after school – and they were so


much better at it than I was.

In the time since then, our writing center has continued to grow. We’ve developed a

mission statement and identified a set of core values. We’ve trained four new classes of tutors,

published reflections in a blog post for NC New Schools, and presented at two conferences.

We’ve helped spread the word regionally, training new writing center tutors at a high school in

another county.

Despite these early successes, however, we have an awareness that the writing center

at our school is not all that it could be. Despite an early tutor-led PLC session introducing faculty

to what the writing center is (and isn’t), which included examples of cross-curricular support

from the writing center (House, 1983; Morris, 2006), most of the students who come to the

writing center bring assignments from two categories of courses: high school English and

writing-intensive college courses (English and social sciences). Despite the expertise our

students are developing as tutors, we are not serving enough of our students as clients.

The impetus for this study, then, is an attempt to answer the questions raised by this

shortcoming: How do we get more students to come to the writing center? How do we get

more faculty involved in the writing center? How can the writing center encourage and support

writing across the curriculum in our school? Asking these questions, however, raises another,

much bigger question: How do we know that what we do as tutors works? And who does it

work for?

High School Writing Centers

High school writing centers, modeled after their university counterparts, have been

available in a small number of schools since at least the 1970s (Farrell, 1989; Reigstad,


Matsuhashi, & Luban, 1978), but have not yet become as widely established in high schools as

they have at the post-secondary level. Like their post-secondary inspiration, writing centers at

the high school level have traditionally focused on supporting and promoting writing across the

curriculum efforts (Beck, 1994; Bräer, 2006; Brooks, 1989; Gehrmann & Upton, 1990; Herkner,

Pydde, & Tschirpke, 2012; Kent, 2006a; Mullin & Childers, 1995; Jordan, 2006; Morris, 2006;

Nicolini, 2006; Spillane, 2006; Upton, 1990; Wells, 2011), in part by borrowing strategies from

university writing programs, such as establishing writing fellows or liaison programs, in which

student tutors are embedded in content-area classrooms (Grant, Murphy, Stafford, & Childers,

1997; Jensen, 2012; Tobin, 2006).

Though high school writing centers are not as seemingly omnipresent as their post-

secondary counterparts, high school writing center scholarship is a growing field, with two

books published in the last decade to serve as resources for interested teachers: Rich Kent’s A

Guide to Creating Student-Staffed Writing Centers, Grades 6-12 (2006a) serves as a practical

how-to guide for starting a high school writing center, while The Successful High School Writing

Center: Building the Best Program with Your Students (2011), edited by Dawn Fels and Jennifer

Wells, offers theoretical and practical advice alongside qualitative evidence of writing center

successes. The online republication of Pam Childers (then Farrell)’s The High School Writing

Center: Establishing and Maintaining One (1989) at Colorado State University’s WAC

Clearinghouse offers another (previously out of print) practical, theoretical, and evidentiary

resource.

Articles about high school writing centers have appeared in journals since the 1970s, but

these pieces focus on establishing high school writing centers (Ashley & Shafer, 2006; Behm,


1998; Barnett, 2006; Bräer, 2006; Brinkley, 1986; Feltenberger, 2008; Grace, 2011; Greer &

Trofimoff, 2013; Kolba & Crowell, 1996; Marcus, 1984; Reigstad, Matsuhashi, & Luban, 1978;

Silva, 2004), theorizing the work of high school writing centers (Bottoms, et al., 1987; Childers,

Fels, & Jordan, 2004; Farrell-Childers, 1993; Inman, 2006; Jordan, 2006; Mullin & Childers, 1995;

Turner, 2006; Upton, 1990), and describing writing center practices (Beck, 1994; Gehrmann &

Upton, 1990; Grant, Murphy, Stafford, & Childers, 1997; Kent, 2006b; Kolba, Crowell, and

Sullivan, 2006; Littleton, 2006; Mullin & Childers, 1995; Nicolini, 2006; Straka & Childers, 2004;

Spillane, 2006; Tinker, 2006; Tobin, 2010; Wells, 2008), rather than formally studying high

school writing centers’ effectiveness.

There are several good reasons for this perceived gap in scholarship: as Fels and Wells

acknowledge in the introduction to their book, “many high school writing center directors are

also full-time high school faculty with neither time nor incentive to publish their experiences or

to present at conferences” (2011, p.1). The focus on narrating high school writing center

experience also reflects the scholarly traditions of postsecondary writing centers: “Writing

center scholarship generally privileges qualitative methods, such as ethnographic narratives,

individual case studies, and even stories, to assess writing center work” (Carino and Enders,

2001, p.83). The preponderance of narratives of “starting up” a high school writing center and

stories of successful high school writing center practices, though not always presented as

formal studies, nevertheless represent a wealth of qualitative data, in the form of anecdotal

evidence and faculty and student voices. Once we have enough of these voices and stories,

patterns begin to emerge as possibilities for more formalized study: Kathleen Palacio and Kevin

Dvorak’s (2011) narrative of increased student writing self-efficacy as an effect of high school


writing center practice, for example, affirms what tutors in my school’s writing center have to

say about our impact on client confidence (The Writing Center @ECHS, 2012; Brownlee et al.,

2012), suggesting an avenue for future research.

In the narratives of high school writing centers, who is telling the story is as important as

the narrative itself. The use of student (both tutor and client) voices in high school writing

center scholarship (Adams, 2011; Brinkley, 1989; Childers, 1987; Dean, 2011; Elchinoff and

Kowalski, 2011; Elwood, Murphy, & Cardenas, 2006; Farrell, 1989; Farrell & Marcus, 1989;

Grace, 2011; Herkner, Pydde, & Tschirpke, 2012; Jensen, 2012; Levin, 1989; Mulqueen, 2011;

Nicolini, 2006) is of central import – not merely in establishing evidence of writing center

success, or telling the story of each writing center, but in affirming the theoretical foundations

for high school writing centers. If we believe, as Stephen North says, that “Our job is to produce

better writers, not better writing” (1984, p.438), then one of the most important measures of

our effectiveness, one of our most important pieces of evidence, is the voices of our clients.

These voices may not always be presented as a formal study, but they still represent the results

of teacher action research (Chiseri-Strater & Sundstein, 2006). These voices, as they appear in

high school writing center scholarship, are without exception, claiming positive effects.

The theoretical base for high school writing centers insists that writing centers do not

only have a positive effect on students as clients, but also have benefits for tutors (Childers,

Fels, & Jordan, 2004), and the use of tutor voices in high school writing center scholarship

provides evidence to support this claim: Jeannette Jordan (2006) cites a tutor voice to

demonstrate the ways in which tutoring leads to learning not just for the client, but for the

tutor: “My experience working in the writing center helped me become more familiar with the


revision process. I can ask myself a series of questions that I might ask when reading another

student’s paper in the writing center” (p.54 ). Elchinoff and Kowalski’s (2011) collection of tutor

voices reaffirms this theme, as do Pamela Farrell (Childers)’s interviews (1987) with writing

center tutors and clients. Kerri Mulqueen (2011) identifies the development of tutor leadership

as an effect of writing center practice, echoing Pam Childers’s tradition of co-authoring with

tutors (Baker et al, 2007; Grant, Murphy, Stafford, & Childers, 1997; Straka & Childers, 2004) as

a means of providing opportunities for empowerment (Childers, Fels, & Jordan, 2004).

Writing liaison programs, in which student tutors are embedded in classrooms to

provide support, offer another such opportunity for empowerment (Grant, Murphy, Stafford, &

Childers, 1997; Jensen, 2012; Tobin, 2011). This emerging high school writing center tradition

starts with Pam Childers’s work in the McCallie School, established in the literature first through

student voices, narrating their own experience, and now extends to case studies of liaison

programs in both the McCallie School (Tobin, 2011) and Thomas A. Edison High School (Jensen,

2012). Tobin’s study focuses on describing the implementation of the McCallie Writing Fellows

program and discussing its implications as a model for others; Jensen’s provides a detailed

implementation plan and initial results of the pilot program, finding positive effects of the

program for both tutors and teachers across the curriculum.

Cynthia Dean’s (2011) study of the development of tutor identities among the tutors in

her high school’s writing center poses a framework (also cited by Jensen, 2012) for considering

the effects of a high school writing centers and writing liaison programs on tutors. Dean’s

findings suggest prior tutor experience with writing, acceptance or rejection of authority in

tutoring relationships, and the effects of tutoring on teacher-student relationships as factors to


consider (p.53) when examining tutors’ high school writing center experiences.

In addition to impacts on students and tutors, high school writing centers also affect

teachers. Much of the literature on Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) and high school

writing centers attests to the power of the writing center to affect change in teacher practice

(Jensen, 2012; Jordan, 2006; Mullin and Childers, 1995; Spillane, 2006), but the literature also

speaks of teacher resistance to writing centers and WAC (Bagby, 2006; Herkner, Pydde, &

Tschirpke, 2012). Glaze and Thaiss suggest that “accepting the need to work with these

resistances rather than seeing them as problems we have failed to solve” (1994, p.13) may be a

way to promote change in teacher practice. They identify common factors contributing to

teacher resistance to WAC – teacher preparation, theory of practice, prior experience with

writing, attitudes towards assessment, discomfort with risk-taking, and student resistance – and

describe their own strategies for “working through” each area of resistance (Glaze & Thaiss,

1994, p.13-18). Framing resistance in more positive terms and considering the reasons for

teacher resistance may allow teachers to approach WAC (and writing centers) without the

oppression of mandates, which classroom teachers know all too well.

Writing across the Curriculum and Writing Centers

Joan Mullin’s (2001) exploration of the connections between WAC programs and

postsecondary writing centers proposes two paths to these connections: “writing centers beget

WAC programs or WAC programs beget writing centers” (p.183). Though Peter Carino argues

for dating the origin of the writing center back to at least 1904, in a St. Louis high school

classroom, tracing the iteration of this “laboratory method” through the writing labs of the

1930s, the Army-influenced “communication emphasis” of the 1940s, and College Composition


and Communication-published reports of workshops in the 1950s (Carino, 1995), he cites the

implementation of open admission policies (beginning in the late 1960s) as the impetus for an

explosion in the number of post-secondary writing centers (Carino, 1996).

Several scholars (Anson, 2010; Childers, Gere, and Young, 1994; Maimon, 2001; McLeod

and Miraglia, 2001; Mullin, 2001) date the beginning of the WAC movement in the American

academy to the 1970s. McLeod and Miraglia (2001) cite Barbara Walvoord’s 1970 WAC faculty

seminar in Iowa as the first; Maimon’s foreword in the same volume recalls her own early

experiences with WAC beginning in 1974. Both Anson (2010) and Childers, Gere, and Young

(1994) point to the influence of James Britton and colleagues, whose The Development of

Writing Abilities 11–18, published in 1975, seems to serve as a benchmark text in the

development of WAC. Another textual influence (Russell, 2002, as cited in Brewster and Klump,

2004; Thaiss, 2001) is the 1975 Newsweek article “Why Johnny Can’t Write,” which Christopher

Thaiss names as one source of the “1970s furor created by concern about correctness” (2001,

p.304).

In the introduction to their Programs and Practices, Childers, Gere and Young (1994) cite

the link between high school writing centers and secondary WAC efforts; chapters in that

volume describe WAC efforts that grow out of the writing center (Bruce & Mansfield, 1994) and

writing centers that begin with WAC programs (Beck, 1994; Farrell-Childers et al, 1994; Clifford

et al, 1994). Several other pieces of literature on high school writing centers (Hodgdon, 1990,

Jordan, 2006; Mullin & Childers, 1995) advocate establishing a high school writing center as the

foundation of a school’s WAC program or cite the importance of writing across the curriculum

as a core belief guiding center practice (Nicolini 2006). Lil Brannon cites her own involvement in


both models of program development in her entry to The High School Writing Center (1989): a

high school in Long Island that started a writing center first and another in New Jersey that

began with a WAC program. In high schools, then, one can find multiple models for both sides

of Mullin’s chicken-egg origin story for WAC and writing centers.

Five of Programs and Practices’ fifty-seven contributors (and one of its editors) are

affiliated with high school writing centers, as identified in the text or in the volume’s

“Description of Programs”; though the correlation between high school writing centers and

WAC programs may not be as strong as the one Mullin (2001) notes at the post-secondary level

(as she says, “many high school WAC programs have evolved on their own” (p.193)), the body

of literature on writing centers and WAC efforts (see also Bagby, 2006; Gehrmann & Upton,

1990; Herkner, Pydde, & Tschirpke, 2012; Jensen, 2012; Jordan, 2006; Mullin & Childers, 1995;

Spillane, 2006) suggests a relationship that, if not always symbiotic, remains significant.

Mullin (2001) lists “faculty development” as one of several areas of potential

partnership between postsecondary writing centers and WAC programs; she cites practices for

building community between the writing center or WAC program and faculty through (1)

workshops, (2) “monthly talks during which a faculty member discusses the writing done in

class,” (3) faculty writing groups, (4) informal conversations, and (5) tutor reports (p.187). Each

of these methods is echoed in the literature about high school writing centers and WAC

programs: (1) in workshops (sometimes led by outside consultants) (Brannon, 1989; Beck, 1994;

Childers, 1994; Clifford et al, 1994; Jordan, 2006; Mullin & Childers, 1995; Spillane, 2006); (2) in

Beck (2006), Childers (Farrell-Childers et al, 1994), Gehrmann and Upton (1990), and Jordan’s

(2006) publication of instructional practices for teaching writing, contributed by faculty; (3) in


the use of the writing center as a space for supporting faculty in their own work as writers

(Beck, 1994; Gehrmann and Upton 1990; Upton 1990); (4) in opportunities for informal

conversation with faculty (Bagby, 2006; Brooks, 1989; Gehrmann and Upton, 1990; Upton,

1989); and (5) in anecdotes about tutor reports and their potential to identify areas for change

(Beck, 1994; Mullin & Childers, 1995).

Jensen’s study of the WAC Liaison program at her high school, which grew out of the

writing center she directs, reflects another of Mullin’s (2001) recommendations for partnership

between WAC programs and writing centers: “tutor-linked” courses, which provide “not only an

opportunity for the director to talk about disciplinary writing, but also a non-threatening co-

instructor in the form of a tutor” (p.189). The work of these “linked” peer tutors (also referred

to as curriculum-based peer tutors or Writing Fellows) at the university level can include

tutoring (in the form of writing conferences) in class, responding to student drafts with written

comments, leading discussions, and giving presentations (Soven, 2001). These course-

embedded peer tutoring programs often begin in first-year composition courses, housed in

English departments (Kail and Trimbur, 1987, as cited in Soven, 2001).

Jensen asserts that “while programs like these exist in secondary schools..., relatively

little has been written so far about their development, implementation, results, and

possibilities, particularly in public high school settings” (2012). While we have few studies of

writing center tutors embedded in secondary classrooms in a liaison role, from the very

beginning of what has become the writing center, in that St. Louis high school classroom in

1904 (Carino, 1995), the literature on high school writing centers is rife with references to and

descriptions of the work of teacher-directors and tutors (be they adults or peers) in the


classroom. Carino cites the methods of this classroom, “one-to-one instruction and peer

critique,” as “techniques at the heart of writing center methodology today” (1995, p.105).

Writing centers at the secondary level, then, have their own chicken-egg argument: it would

seem that, according to Carino’s chronology, “tutor-linked courses” did not begin with the

writing center; the in-class tutorial came first.

It seems fitting, given this origin, that so much of the literature about high school writing

centers - be it narrative, theoretical, or practical - makes a point of mentioning the center’s

work in classrooms. This classroom-embedded work occurs both in faculty- (or volunteer-)

staffed (Adams, 2011; Bruce & Mansfield, 1994; Gehrmann and Upton, 1990; Jordan, 2006;

Kolba & Crowell, 1996; Michell, 2006; Morris, 2006; Palacio & Dvorak, 2011; Upton, 1989;

Wells, 2011) and student-staffed writing centers (Beck, 1994; Farrell-Childers et al, 1994;

Clifford et al, 1994; Grant, Murphy, Stafford, & Childers, 1997; Kent, 2006b; Kolba, Crowell, &

Sullivan, 2006; Spillane, 2006 ; Tobin, 2010; Wells, 2011); though Jensen (2012) focuses

exclusively on in-class peer tutoring programs, the work of secondary writing center-affiliated

faculty in high school classrooms remains significant, in that it reflects practices that also

sometimes occur at the postsecondary level (Mullin, 2001).

Mullin (2001) argues that her experiences in linking herself to courses allow for “insights

[…] passed along to writing center tutors [that] benefit the students they work with across the

curriculum” (p.191). Kolba, Crowell, & Sullivan (2006) assert that their work in classrooms also

serves students by addressing important curricular and public-relations purposes:

Bringing coaches into the classroom demonstrates to the students that writing and

revising are essential parts of the curriculum, with classroom time devoted to them [...]


Working in the classroom with all students also makes it clear to everyone that this is

neither a remedial program nor a program just for the gifted (p. 60).

At the high school level, then, classroom-embedded work allows us to address one of the

fundamental misunderstandings about what writing centers are and do -- what Kerry

Mulqueen (2011) calls the “hierarchy that comes with a ‘good student helping poor student’

approach, which often leaves the struggling learners diffident and defensive” (p.31) -- to

establish the writing center as a place “where any student could seek assistance” (Jeter, 2011,

p.40) -- a place for talk about writing, rather than remediation (see also North, 1984).

Evaluating Writing Centers’ Effectiveness

High school writing centers also function as a space for pushing back against data-

driven, high-stakes educational environments that have become the norm since the advent of

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (Fels, 2011; Jensen, 2012; Northern Virginia Writing Project, 2011).

Thus, high school writing centers are located not just within a broader writing center tradition

extended from postsecondary institutions, but are also connected to a tradition of teacher

research as an act of resistance: “Teacher inquiry is a form of resistance against both

authoritarian mandates and professional or public apathy. It allows us to rebuild our

educational independence in the pursuit of authentic, nonmandated change” (Chiseri-Strater &

Sunstein, 2006, p. xvi).

High school writing centers go beyond inquiry-based teacher resistance, however, by

making room for and empowering student resistance:

Programs that mobilize students to facilitate better writing instruction by collaborating

with both their peers and their teachers powerfully contradict the top-down


educational climate perpetuated by national standards and high-stakes tests. They

subvert a traditional hierarchy and promote student-centered agency and learning

(Jensen, 2012).

The high school writing center, then, creates a space in which students can push back against

authoritarian educational environments by focusing instead on collaboration. This collaboration

can, in turn, effect change by altering the way teachers see instruction: “Peer tutoring

interrupts the status quo of teacher authority and suggests that high school writing tutors can

be agents of change who introduce and advocate for a less conventional definition of what it

means to teach” (Dean, 2011, p.61).

In the context of NCLB’s mandated focus on numbers and scores, Dawn Fels argues

against quantitative measures of high school writing center effectiveness:

The tutoring session is about much more than the number of sessions held each day or

over the course of the year, the number of minutes tutors spend tutoring, the number

of students they can see during their shifts, or the lists of strategies they encourage

students to try. Similarly, students’ needs are much more complex than statistics can

convey (2011, p.119).

Fels’ language notably echoes Stephen North’s call for more writing center research,

from his seminal essay “The Idea of a Writing Center”:

If the writing center is ever to prove its worth in other than quantitative terms –

numbers of students seen, for example, or hours of tutorials provided – it will have to

do so by describing this talk: what characterizes it, what effects it has, how it can be

enhanced (1984, p.444).


North’s call was answered with a tradition of writing center scholarship focused on

qualitative methods (Carino & Enders, 2001), so much so that Casey Jones notes, in his

assessment of the literature on writing centers’ impact on writing, 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” (2001, p. 3).

Evaluating writing centers by examining their effect on student writing violates one of

the central tenets of writing center philosophy, North’s focus on “the writer, not the writing.” In

echoing North’s axiom, Jones notes that “many writing center scholars would be averse to the

idea that their performance in assisting students to improve their writing abilities can be

assessed by comparing composition products” (2001, p. 8). Neal Lerner points out that these

kinds of studies are also problematic in that they make several faulty assumptions, including

that grades are “an indication of a student’s writing ability” and that “teacher effects” do not

skew grades (2001, p.2-3). Lerner calls for research “that examines effects with far more impact

than course or paper grades” (2001, p.3).

Perhaps there is a fundamental flaw in quantitative measures of “the writing,” but

neither Lerner nor Jones’s admonishments deter Henson and Stephenson (2009) from a

quantitative study of writing gains. In doing so, the researchers incorporate the concerns of

both Lerner and Jones in their design by controlling for “teacher effects” by training scorers “to

ensure rating consistency” (Henson & Stephenson, 2009, p.4) and producing a design that

focuses on gain, mitigating ability as a confounding variable. They also heed Jones’s warning

that “such assessments of writing quality would involve subjective judgments and would be

vulnerable to the influence of confounding variables, e.g. composition instruction received by


subjects outside the writing center” (2001, p.8): to ensure consistency of instruction across

classes, they served as instructors for the two courses included in the study. Their causal-

comparative study of the effects of writing center visits on clients’ writing as measured “from

large-order to small-order concerns” (Henson & Stephenson, 2009, p.3) finds statistically

significant improvements from first to final drafts for writing center clients (Henson &

Stephenson, 2009, p.4), but lists several significant caveats, such as the self-selecting nature of

clients who choose to visit the writing center, the fact that “students’ quality of writing varies

from essay to essay,” and the inconsistency in number of visits to the writing center (Henson &

Stephenson, 2009, p.4-5).

Despite Lerner’s warnings about students whose performances do not match their

abilities and the influence of “teacher effects,” several more recent quantitative studies have

focused, at least in part, on grades as a measure of student performance (Enders, 2005;

Martinez, Kock, & Cass, 2011; Williams & Takaku, 2011; Yeats, Reddy, Wheeler, Senior, &

Murray, 2010; Young & Fritzche, 2002). Results would appear to depend on the date of the

study: earlier studies find no relationship between writing center visits and paper grades (Young

& Fritzche, 2002), course grades (Enders, 2005; Young & Fritzche, 2002), or GPA (Enders, 2005;

Young & Fritzche, 2002), but the more recent British study finds a “highly significant positive

relationship between writing center attendance and module grade” (Yeats et al., 2010, p.503),

and the recent American studies find “that those students who frequently obtained writing

center tutoring received higher grades in composition than those who did not” (Williams &

Takaku, 2011, p.13), and that students “who received tutoring assistance four times or more

earned grades 42-65% higher than students who received no tutoring assistance at the writing


center and 20-36% higher than students who received tutoring assistance one to three times”

(Martinez et al., 2011, p.358-9). Enders’ qualitative report of a failed qualitative study (2005)

serves to reinforce Lerner’s assertion that “reporting average grades across individual classes is

not a particularly sound research method” (2001, p.3), while Young and Fritzche acknowledge

that “course grades can be troublesome because they are influenced by many factors

unconnected to writing, such as attendance or homework assignments” (2002, p.55-6).

Williams and Takaku defend their use of grades, arguing against the inevitability of Lerner’s

“teacher effects” as what Jones calls a “confounding variable”: “What typically is overlooked,

however, is that these possible confounding variations become a confounding variable if and

only if a relationship between writing center tutoring and success in composition is found in

some composition classes but not for others” (2011a, p. 6). Though the use of student

performance as a variable appears in writing center scholarship at the postsecondary level, it is

entirely absent from the literature on high school writing centers.

Research Questions

This study originally aimed to examine the effect of a writing liaison program on high

school writing across the curriculum efforts by examining a pilot liaison experience in one

course. Research subjects were to include a World History teacher, writing center tutors, and

two classes of ninth-grade students. In the original plan, data was to be collected and analyzed

both qualitatively (in the form of interviews, reflections, surveys, audio and video recordings,

and student work) and quantitatively, by analyzing student performance on writing

assignments. Effects (or lack thereof) on teacher attitudes towards WAC and the writing

process, on student writing processes and performance, and on tutor identity and the tutoring


process were to be examined. One of the classes in the study would have had access to writing

center tutors only after school or during lunch, while the other would have worked with writing

center tutors embedded in the classroom as liaisons.

The original plan was sound, but perhaps excessively ambitious. When it became clear

that scheduling and other constraints (such as a paucity of returned consent forms) would

interfere with the quantitative portion of the study, the control group was dropped from the

study. Several issues also arose in the qualitative portion of the study: when it became clear, in

the first semester, that the World History teacher was uncomfortable with the proposed writing

assignment, the writing assignment moved into the English course, with students engaging in a

complementary video documentary project in World History as a multimedia companion text.

When pressure to follow the World History pacing guide at the beginning of the second

semester became too great, that video project, too, was dropped, which rendered the World

History teacher’s participation in the study moot. Scheduling also impacted the participation of

writing center tutors: the class period of the course to be studied (a year-long course) was

changed for second semester, and during the new class period, only one experienced tutor was

available to serve as a liaison.

The necessity of revising these “best-laid plans” refocused the study on the student

participants, in their roles as writers, writing center tutors, and liaisons in the classroom. The

final study, then, examines the effects (or lack thereof) of a much smaller liaison experience on

student writing processes, tutor identity, and tutoring processes. Given the student-centered

nature of writing center work, this refocusing seems appropriate.

Methods


Participants in this research study are students at Hertford County Early College High

School in Ahoskie, NC. This school, designed for first-generation college students (FCGS), serves

a population that is 80% FCGS; 51.27% of our students receive free and reduced lunch. The

majority of our students (69%) are female; 66% of our students are African-American; 32%

white; 7% Latino; and 6% self-identify as multi-racial.

In the initial plan for this study, two ninth-grade classes were to participate. The control

group would have been eleven African-American females, three African-American males, 2

white females, one white male, one Latino, one Latina, and two multi-racial females; this class

is 95% FGCS. Because of inconsistencies between first and second semester in terms of

scheduling, instruction, and participation rates, the control group was dropped from the study.

The treatment group was twelve African-American females, two African-American males, five

white males, one white female, two Latinas, one multi-racial female, and one multi-racial male;

this class is 83% FGCS.

Writing center tutors also participated in this study. Seventeen tutors are currently

active: four eleventh-graders (two white males, two white females), six twelfth-graders (three

African-American males, two African-American females, one multi-racial male, and one multi-

racial female), and six students in grade thirteen (three African-American females, two African-

American males, and one white female). This group of active tutors is 76% FGCS. Two of the

tutors (an African-American female and a white female) graduated in December, and were not

available to participate in the study intervention. The writing center, however, trains new tutors

each semester; six new tutors (five African-American females and one white female) joined the

writing center staff shortly before implementation of the study; two of those new tutors were


able to observe the writing liaison in the classroom, and one of those new tutors joined in

conducting writing conferences in the classroom at the end of the study. This group of new

tutors is 83% FGCS.

The history teacher who was to participate in this study is a white male; the principal

investigator and English teacher is a white female. The control group was enrolled in World

History first semester, and participated in the project for the study at the end of first semester;

the experimental group takes World History second semester, and participating in the project

at the beginning of second semester. Both groups are enrolled in English for the entire school

year. Because of scheduling, collaboration, and pacing concerns, however, the World History

teacher dropped out of the study second semester.

The project is a nontraditional research paper, a first-person narrative of a historical

moment, modeled after the project Cindy Heckenlaible (2008) describes. First semester,

students worked on the project in both World History and English classes – conducting research

in both classes, participating in mini-lessons in both classes, getting feedback from both

teachers throughout the process, and creating products in each class - the historical narrative in

English class, and a documentary video using found footage and photographs in World History

class. At the conclusion of the project, both teachers were to score student work using a

common rubric (Appendix A), aligned with Common Core State Standards. The changes to the

study in second semester, however, eliminated the World History class’s involvement in the

project; all work second semester took place in English class, and requirement for the video

product was dropped.

During second semester, writing center tutors would have been embedded in the World


History class to support the project. Tutors might have led mini-lessons (how to format

endnotes, for example), conduct conferences, lead peer response groups, and collaborate with

the history teacher to support students throughout the writing process. Initially, this class was

scheduled at a time when five tutors were available to work in the World History classroom;

last-minute schedule changes in the second semester, coupled with the lack of involvement

from the World History teacher, however, moved the liaison experience from the World History

classroom to the English classroom.

Due to this change, only one tutor was initially available to serve as a liaison, but he was

eventually joined by two inexperienced tutors who observed his work as part of their training.

This liaison came to the English classroom three days a week, conducting writing conferences

with students during workshop time and planning, creating materials for, and presenting a

mini-lesson on dialogue for the class. At the beginning of the project, four experienced tutors,

working on their own graduation projects, joined the class for a note-taking mini-lesson in

which they shared their own note-taking processes and worked with small groups on note-

taking strategies. Towards the end of the unit, the two inexperienced tutors were able to

observe the liaison, and one of those new tutors was able to join in conducting writing

conferences. Despite the difficulties posed by scheduling, a fairly large number of writing center

tutors were able to participate in at least a part of the liaison experience.

The initial plan for this study included two ninth-grade classes (serving as a control and

an experimental group), a World History teacher, an English teacher (the principal researcher),

and writing center tutors in a mixed-methods design. The quantitative portion of the study, of

nonequivalent groups design, was to involve collecting data about student performance on a


writing assignment for both control and experimental groups. Classes would not have been

randomized, but the demographics of each group would have allowed for some matching (34 of

45 subjects) by demographic; scores on a prior writing assignment may have provided a more

effective means of matching. Both assignments would have been anonymized and scored by

faculty following a training session, following Henson & Stephenson’s (2009) model. The

intervention to be studied was the implementation of a pilot program in which writing center

tutors were embedded in the second semester World History class as Writing Fellows. After

collecting data, pretest and post-test data would have been analyzed for both groups and

compared, using ANOVA to analyze the variance in data for the quantitative portion of the

study.

I found the quantitative portion of the study problematic. It violated my own philosophy

about writing center work (borrowed from Stephen North – we focus on “the writer, not the

writing”); in mimicking Henson & Stephenson’s (2009) design focus on gain, I tried to ensure, as

much as possible, that analysis of effects remained focused on the writer. However, the same

caveats that applied to that study would have applied here, most significantly in the variance in

“quality of writing” from assignment to assignment. The fact that both assignments were

narratives was an attempt to control for this variable; the recursive nature of the writing

process means that we get better with practice, and any possible gains might have been due

primarily to additional practice in writing narratives. One benefit of this design, then, is that it

may have allowed for clearer distinction between gains that are due to practice and gains that

are due to intervention.

The timing of the study also presented what may have proven to be a confounding


variable, in that the treatment group, in addition to working with writing liaisons, received one

month of additional English instruction (and this class already received an extra half-hour of

instructional time each day because of a scheduling issue); Lerner’s “teacher effects” posed

another problem – the control group completed a project that was brand-new to both

instructors, while the treatment group worked with an English teacher who had the benefit of

experience, but did not work on the project at all in World History. Even if no changes had been

made to the structure of the project from one semester to the next, I suspect that instruction

would have changed, even within the structure of lessons that remained in place. I change,

becoming more confident, giving directions more clearly, improvising new solutions to

problems and better answers to questions, in teaching the same lesson in one day, with almost

no time for reflection. I know, given more than a month to reflect on my experience, that

students second semester received much stronger instruction over the course of this unit; I

cannot help but consider the resulting “teacher effects” to be extremely problematic.

I did, however, want to see that data. I believe that teacher research is an act of

resistance; I believe that writing centers are a means of pushing back against data-driven, high-

stakes environments. I also, however, see the value of familiarizing myself with the rhetoric, the

argument of that environment, the method of storytelling that is now dominant in the

environment I work in. I believe in fighting fire with fire. Even if this variables affecting this data

would have been problematic, even if the sample size is too small to be generalizable (and it is),

even if I had found no discernible effects, no gains in student performance, even if I never

wanted to publish the quantitative portion of this study, I still wanted to learn how those who

value numerical data think. That can be a powerful weapon in my efforts to resist; it can help


me build arguments for considering other forms of data; it can give me space to make sure that

my students’ voices are heard too.

Despite my initial desire to look at quantitative data, I find myself relieved to have

abandoned that portion of the study. The initial design was probably too ambitious, but as the

study progressed, I also found I valued the quantitative data I was gathering, in the form of

rubric scores, much less than the qualitative data, in the form of written reflections and

conversations, I was collecting from students. I’ve always liked hearing student voices a lot

more than I like grading papers.

The qualitative portion of the study prioritized the voices of students and tutors. The

design was ethnographic ( Fraenkel, Wallen, & Hyun, 2011) in approach, a case study of the

intervention of writing center tutors in the classroom, and used linguistic methods, such as

discourse analysis (Gee, 2011), in identifying possible effects.

With each major writing assignment, students submit a Writer’s Memo, a description of

the assignment, their process in completing the assignment, and the type of response they

would like. The Writer’s Memo for this assignment (Appendix B) includes questions asking

students to reflect on their work with writing center tutors. Thus, students in the control group

could reflect on any possible after school visits to the writing center, and students in the

experimental group could reflect on their work with tutors in the classroom (in addition to

possible after school visits). After the control group was dropped from the study, only Writer’s

Memos for the experimental group were coded for emerging themes.

Students were also asked to respond to the on-line Writing Center Feedback Form

(Figure 1) after each writing conference, both in class and in the writing center. Student


responses to the open-ended questions in that form were also collected and coded. The Google

form requires a school Gmail login for access; these logins were used to identify the responses

of students in the study; the responses of students who had not returned consent forms were

deleted from the spreadsheet housing responses, and the column identifying responders was

deleted.

After each tutoring session, writing liaisons and writing center tutors were asked to

reflect on their experience in their Daybooks using the prompts below (Figure 2).

Figure 1. Writing Center Feedback Form Figure 2. Post-Conference Reflection


These responses were collected and coded for emerging themes, which, along with discussions

at writing center staff meetings, informed questions for a videotaped focus group with tutors

after the conclusion of the project.

The initial plan also asked tutors to audio record one in-class tutoring session for later

reflection, using the prompts listed above. By time-delaying reflections on one session, we

hoped to gather more studied tutor reflections than those composed without the benefit of

playback. These reflections would also be coded for emerging themes. These audio recordings,

however, were eliminated from the study; I had a lot of data, and too few tutors in the

classroom; asking them to complete this task would not have added enough value to this study

to justify the burden on tutors, but audio recording remains a tool the writing center may use

for its own reflective and self-evaluative work in the future.

Co-planning this assignment with the World History teacher presented an opportunity

for a pre-interview. Our schedules are busy; I planned on asking him to respond via email to the

following questions, inspired by some of the literature on WAC and writing centers (Glaze &

Thaiss, 1994; Bagby, 2006) before we began planning first semester:

● What is your writing process like?

● What experiences have shaped you as a writer?

● What experiences have you had with WAC (Writing across the Curriculum)?

● What risks do you feel in embarking on this project?

● What concerns do you have in designing writing assignments?

● What concerns do you have in assessing writing assignments?

● What scaffolding do you provide for writers in your classes?


● What barriers have you experienced in implementing writing-to-learn?

● In what ways have your students embraced or resisted writing-to-learn?

● How often have your students used the writing center?

● What do you think about the writing center?

● What reservations or questions do you have about the writing center?

● How does the writing center affect you? Your students?

I also thought a reflective journal over the course of each project implementation would reveal

his experience before and during the intervention, and planned on a post-interview to collect

his reflections on the experience as a whole, using the following questions as prompts:

● What went well first semester? What could have gone better?

● What went well second semester? What could have gone better?

● What was your experience working with tutors as writing liaisons?

● Did you experience any conflicts with liaisons? If so, how did you resolve them?

● What roles did liaisons take on in the classroom?

● What additional roles would you like to see them take on?

● Where did you think liaisons were most effective? Least?

Once it became clear that the World History teacher was uncomfortable with “teaching” a

writing assignment, however, I abandoned the pre-interview. When it became clear writing

liaisons would be embedded in English class, I abandoned the reflective journal and eliminated

the World History teacher from the study. His collaboration was essential to shaping the

project, and I enjoyed working closely with him first semester, but it became easier, and

perhaps more considerate, to drop his involvement in the study; as his former mentor, I did not


want to make this fourth-year teacher’s work more difficult for the sake of pursuing my own

research interests.

In collecting a great deal of data from a variety of sources, using a variety of approaches,

this study hoped to compose a narrative not only of the functions of the writing center, writing

liaison pilot, and writing across the curriculum efforts in one high school, but also the effects of

these efforts on students, tutors, and teachers. In narrowing the study, so that it focuses on

effects of the writing liaison pilot on students and tutors, some of these sources and

approaches to collecting data were lost. Nevertheless, the overarching purpose of the study

remains the same: it is the principal investigator’s hope that the interventions studied here may

lead to broader, more formalized interventions and a more central role for the school’s writing

center.

Data Analysis

Changes to study design due to difficulties in scheduling, collaboration, and rates of

participation in one class eliminated all but four sources of qualitative data: student reflections

in Writer’s Memos, student feedback via the Writing Center Feedback Form, tutor reflections in

Daybooks, and a focus group interview with tutors. This narrowing of the study’s scope thus

refocused the study on the voices of students and tutors, moving the study away from

examining one aspect of the writing center’s mission (writing across the curriculum efforts) and

towards an examination of our core purpose and focus - “the writer, not the writing” (North,

1984).

Each of these sources of data has a story to tell; each story is linked to the others. This

interconnectedness sometimes makes it difficult to organize these stories into a logical whole,


but perhaps we should begin where the writing center does: with the writer.

The Story of Our Writers

For each writing assignment my students complete, I also ask them to complete a

Writer’s Memo, or written reflection, looking back on the purpose, audience, and context of

their writing, their writing process, any obstacles and successes they experienced, and their

own learning. These Writer’s Memos serve two purposes: the metacognition they encourage

promotes transfer of learning (Wilhelm, Smith, & Fredricksen, 2012), and they introduce

students to the conventions of an important genre of workplace writing (). In this study, these

Writer’s Memos also served a third purpose: by asking students to reflect specifically on their

experience working with writing center tutors during the course of the assignment, I could

collect qualitative data about the effectiveness of the writing center in general and, more

specifically, the effectiveness of the writing liaison pilot program.

The prompt for this Writer’s Memo included several questions about students’

experiences working with tutors:

I also asked you to work with writing center tutors over the course of this project. What

was that like? What concerns did you bring to the conference? How did your tutor

address those concerns? What strategies did you learn? Was the experience useful?

How could the experience have been better? Will you continue to use the writing

center?

As the prompts for Writer’s Memos are intended only as questions to get students started in

their reflection, responses varied a great deal. Not all participants turned in Writer’s Memos for

this assignment; of the twenty-four participants, only sixteen turned in Writer’s Memos.


Additionally, not all students worked with a writing center tutor over the course of the project;

they were not required to do so. As the writing center remains a space for those who want to

use it, I felt uncomfortable requiring students to make use of the writing liaison or force

appointments in the writing center after school (see North, 1984). Of the Writer’s Memos that

were turned in, ten students indicated that they had either conferred only with the teacher or

that they had chosen not to confer with anyone about their writing over the course of the

project. Several of the students who indicated they had only worked with the teacher,

however, appeared to count the teacher as a writing center tutor:

Through the course of this project I didn’t really work with any tutors besides Mrs.

Smyth.

Working with the writing center tutors was good. Although, I only got to really talk to

Ms.Smyth.

This inclusion of teacher as tutor is interesting, as it speaks to one of the conflicts tutors often

face in navigating their new tutorial identities (Trimbur, 1987 ; Dean, 2011). Trimbur (1987)

insists that “peer tutor” is a contradiction in terms, arguing that because of their expertise as

writers and authority as tutors, tutors can not truly be peers; Dean’s (2011) study of high school

students serving as writing center tutors includes the voices of two tutors who “insist that

teaching and tutoring are different constructs” (p.55). If the teacher is included as a writing

center tutor, what does that say about how students construct the identities of the peer tutors

they work with?

Several of the students who indicated they had not worked with writing center tutors

cited “not needing” help as a reason for not conferring with a tutor:


I really had no tutor because i chose not to work with one because i felt i could handle

my work on my own.

I didn’t work with the writing center tutors because I didn’t feel like I needed help with

anything.

i dint work with any of the writing center tutors. i really just didnt have any big issues.

This pattern of response is also interesting, in that it suggests that students may see the writing

center, even when embedded in the classroom, as a space for remediation, a place where they

go only if they need help, a marker of some deficiency in their writing.

This deficit approach also appears in the responses of students who did work with

tutors, who tended to focus on how tutors helped them “fix” their writing:

After reading my paper she said that I had a few grammatical errors but she helped me

fix them.

The writing center tutors were very informal. They would know what you needed to fix

after reading your story and tell you.

I enjoyed working with the writing center tutors, because they helped me understand

the faults in my story. I’m glad I had them around to assist me in the project.

That did help me with my paper a lot. It was useful because it gave me the opportunity

to use dialogue in my narrative correctly.

After I was satisfied with my work I had a conference with Alex, fixed what he told me

too, then had another conference with him.


Students appear to be viewing the revisions prompted by conferences in terms of error

correction, rather than rhetorical choice, and two of the responses (“she said that I had a few

grammatical errors”; “I had a conference with Alex, fixed what he told me too”) suggest a

student perception of the writing conference as directive, rather than discussion. Students

seem to think that they are required to make changes discussed during conferences, a finding

that reflects a conflict I observed over the course of project implementation. After conferring

with writing liaison Alex, student Katherine called me over to answer a question: “Do I have to

make the changes the tutor and I talked about? What if I like this part of my story?”

Student responses also suggest, however, that this tension between the advice of tutors

and the writer’s vision for the piece of writing sometimes finds resolution in ways that are

surprising or lead to new insights for the writer:

It gave me an outlook on what I should do for my assignment and how to line it up. i

wasn’t sure as of how wass gonna write it out so im glad i found a way.

They gave me ideas and thoughts of things that didn’t cross my mind [...] They gave me

a new way of putting things in my point of view.

These new “outlooks” and “ways of putting things in my point of view” suggest that students

are taking on new stances, new ways of thinking and approaching intellectual problems, as a

result of writing conferences.

Responses also suggest that students are trying out new strategies as a result of writing

conferences, such as being more specific, organizing ideas (“I learned different tips on

placement of sentences, phrases, etc.”), and including dialogue. Alex’s mini-lesson on the

effective use of dialogue, in fact, was the most-cited strategy in Writer’s Memos, appearing in


the responses of three students, two of whom chose not to confer with a tutor. Even if students

chose not to work directly with the writing liaison in a writing conference, his work in the

classroom had an effect on the strategies they focused on in crafting their narratives.

Writer’s Memos also reveal that students find value in working with writing center

tutors: the words “useful,” “helped,” or “helpful” appear ten times in student responses,

including two responses from students who did not work with a tutor. One of these responses

indicated a sense of regret over not engaging with the writing liaison: “I really wished I would

have because maybe that would’ve helped me to create a better interesting story.” Responses

also indicated student willingness to make use of writing center resources in the future, with six

students indicating such plans.

One of the students who felt he didn’t need to talk with a tutor about his own work

expressed a desire to become a writing center tutor in the future. Whether his expressed lack

of need on this assignment and desire to become a tutor are related, however, remains to be

seen, as he also indicated a desire to use the writing center in the future.

In addition to the Writer’s Memos students completed at the end of the unit, students

also had the opportunity to complete the online Writing Center Feedback Form after working

with tutors in class. They were reminded to do so near the end of each class period in which

writing center tutors were present, but, given that writing center tutors were present for a total

of ten days, the response rate was low (only fifty responses from twenty-seven students over

three weeks), and the bulk of student responses appear to have been recorded on dates

corresponding to more formal presentations, such as the sharing of note-taking strategies by

senior writing center tutors and Alex’s mini-lesson on the effective use of dialogue.


The Feedback Form asked students to respond to three open-ended prompts:

● I felt that my tutor helped me by…

● I felt that my tutor could have helped me more by…

● I would visit the writing center more if…

Fourteen responses indicated that students had not worked with a tutor during the class

period; though these responses did not provide data in response to the first two questions,

they were not excluded, as their answers to the third question provided valuable information

about the reasons why students use (or do not use) writing center resources.

The themes identified in Writer’s Memo responses also appear throughout Feedback

Form responses, with seventeen responses indicating students would visit the writing center

more often if they felt a “need” or deficit in their own writing; three responses indicated a lack

of desire to visit the writing center or “talk to people about my writing.” Alex’s mini-lesson

about dialogue, cited in Writer’s Memos, received a lot of positive feedback on the day of the

mini-lesson, with six students using their responses to the second question (“My tutor could

have helped me more by…”) to say what a “good job” he had done; perhaps more significant

are the five responses to the second question indicating student desire to work more closely

with Alex in a writing conference or small group:

My tutor could have helped me more by...

● explaining and interacting with us and explaining the use of dialogue and giving tips

on it helping me find places for dialog

● Really talking with me about my work

● Explaining how to use dialogue with the person we are using as our narrator.


● Gone by table to table and helped us individually?

The impact of this mini-lesson is also reflected in five student responses from the days

that followed, in which students reported talking about strategies for using dialogue in writing

conferences with tutors. Another strategy mentioned in Writer’s Memos, organization (“Telling

me what order I should put my events”), appears once in Feedback Form responses, as does the

idea of a new perspective gained from working with a tutor (“giving me insight on how to

improve my draft”).

Student responses to the first two prompts seem to confirm the effectiveness of writing

center tutors, with thirty-three of fifty responses indicating specific strategies or problems with

which writing center tutors were able to help; only ten responses indicated students wanted

help tutors were not able to provide (one of these responses was “fixing google drive,” a

problem that at times seems beyond any of our influence). One response to the third question,

from the first day tutors visited the classroom, suggests students might visit the writing center

more often if “i knew more about it , i need to know more details on how it functions and what

special strategies we use to help us improve my writing and other things.” This type of

response, indicating a lack of awareness of the center’s work, appears only once, at the very

beginning of the project; this seems to suggest that if nothing else, the presence of writing

liaisons in the classroom raises student awareness of what the writing center does.

Student responses to the third prompt also offer new information about the ways in

which the writing center could be more effective in recruiting students as clients: in coding

these responses, several new themes emerged, representing both barriers to and opportunities

for increased student use of the writing center. In addition to the already identified perception


of the writing center as a “remedial” space that students visit when they feel a deficit or need,

ten student responses indicated time was a barrier for student entry into the writing center;

another three responses indicated students felt ill-prepared to visit the writing center, that

their writing was not where they wanted it to be before sharing it with an audience, either in

terms of planning (“[if] i had all my information more organized and ideas thought out”) or

drafting (“[if] i finished my draft and had my pieces together”; “[if] i was at the point of my story

when the massacre started”). Students have a perception, then, that the writing center is a

space for working through only the later stages of their writing process; they do not see it as a

place where they can begin to plan or draft their work.

Students also appear to perceive the writing center as a creative space, however, with

four responses indicating that students would visit the writing center more if they got to write

about topics of their own choosing (“[if] I could write about fun topics like minecraft or pizza”),

if they wanted to further develop an oeuvre (“[if] I become deeper into my works as a young

writer”), or if they wrote more narratives. These responses may be reflective of the type of

writing students were engaged with during the pilot, but it may also suggest student interest

and creativity as a “hook” for involvement in the writing center.

Several student responses to the Feedback Form suggest relationships with tutors as

another possible “hook” the writing center can take advantage of, with four students indicating

they would visit the writing center if they knew they could work with the same tutors they

worked with in class. This possibility points to the effectiveness of both the tutors, in the

relationships they form during conferences, and of the liaison pilot, in allowing the time and

space for these relationships to form within the classroom. The value of these relationships to


students is also evident in the time since the pilot ended: students have asked repeatedly when

Alex is coming back to class; I’ve seen them stop him in the hall to ask where he’s been, and

when he stopped by my room last week to ask me a question about citation styles, the room

erupted in a cheer at his perceived return. The relationships our tutors build with students may

be the most powerful recruitment tool the writing center has to offer.

The Story of our Tutors

Just as I ask students to write memos reflecting on their writing, I ask tutors to write

reflections about their tutoring experiences in their Daybooks (Brannon et al, 2008). Tutors

receive a Daybook during training, and record their thoughts and responses to prompts

throughout training, during retreats, and during staff meetings. I try to also format readings and

other resources so they can be pasted easily into the Daybook; the hope is that by writing and

collecting texts and resources in the Daybook, each tutor creates his or her own training

manual, which they can refer to for purposes of reflection, guidance, or, as experienced tutors

are responsible for training new staff members, planning.

Alex’s Daybook, and the way he used it in conferring with students in class, provides an

example of how this process works, and how tutors make use of their Daybooks as resources

during conferences. When I reviewed his Daybook at the end of the unit, I noticed that Alex had

been taking notes on one of the mini-lessons I delivered, about television writer Dan Harmon’s

(2009) story circles and how they might be used to plan out a narrative arc:


Figure 3. Alex’s Notes on Story Circles

I never asked or suggested that Alex take notes on what I was teaching, and I don’t recall any

conversations focused on how he might use his knowledge of what students were learning in

class in writing conferences, so I was interested to see that not only was he taking notes on


mini-lessons and strategies I was teaching, but he was incorporating these strategies into

writing conferences:

Figures 4 and 5. Collaborative Story Circles from Conferences

These images are artifacts of two conferences Alex had with members of the group researching

the fall of the Berlin Wall; each member of the group is writing about the same event, but from

a different narrator’s perspective.

In addition to revealing how Alex uses his Daybook as a resource for conferences, these

story circles also provide evidence of how he collaborates with students during a conference

and the role the Daybook plays in ensuring this collaboration is equitable. These images suggest

that Alex is not telling his clients what to do - if he were, these images would be in student

Daybooks only, and absent from his own. These images suggest the listening Alex engages in -

he lacks the expertise in the historical events students have been researching, so the ideas he

records belong to the student; Alex’s contribution is the strategy they work on together. By


recording these images in his Daybook, he is working with the client; if he or she wants a record

of this collaborative planning, the client must record the image in his or her own Daybook, so

that the tutor and client are working in parallel. The presence of these images in Alex’s Daybook

also sends a powerful message to students about the value he places on their work together

(see also Brannon, et al, 2008, p.113) - he records the client’s ideas and the collaborative

diagrams in his Daybook because he wants to hold on to them; these drawings have meaning

for him; they (the images and the students) are worthy of inclusion.

Tutor Daybooks also include written reflections; we reflect in writing a lot during

training and staff meetings, and I also ask tutors to write reflections about their writing

conferences in their Daybooks at the end of each session. For most of our history, the writing

center has not had a formal prompt for this kind of reflection; I wanted to maintain tutor

ownership of the conferencing process, and of the Daybook. I don’t stand over tutors’

shoulders as they talk with writers, and I don’t read their Daybooks. Conferencing experiences

belong to the tutors; not reading their Daybooks is, for me, a way of respecting tutor ownership

of the process. In the early days of the writing center, I also felt that a formal prompt for

reflection might create the impression that tutors were somehow accountable to me for what

they write in their Daybooks, and that this might keep them from reflecting as honestly as they

might otherwise.

As a researcher, however, I needed to be able to collect tutors’ thoughts about specific

tutoring experiences, and about specific aspects of those experiences. Before beginning this

project, I developed a reflection form (Figure 2), which we used both for in-class writing

conferences and our usual after-school operations. In collecting this data, and really looking at


Daybooks for the first time, I was struck by how little of this data there was - tutors were taking

notes during conferences, but they weren’t reflecting on the process itself. Once I provided the

reflection questions, tutors began answering them, but their answers seemed perfunctory.

Tutors also weren’t as faithful about writing reflections as I had hoped they would be, even

with the scaffold for reflection. None of the seniors, for instance, wrote reflections about their

experience during the note-taking mini-lesson. This lapse is understandable - they were in the

classroom only once, for forty-five minutes, after which they each had a college class to get to;

none of them had time to sit down and write that reflection in the moment, and remembering

to write the reflection may not have been a huge priority for students who are balancing high

school classes, college classes, graduation project, the writing center, sports, and jobs. Alex,

too, was not as faithful in reflecting on his liaison experience as I would have liked, but I also

have a hard time faulting him - he worked with students until the end of the period most days,

so when did he really have time to write?

I was able to analyze a total of four reflections - three from Alex (two reflections about

his observations of class, before he started working with students, and one near the end of his

liaison experience) and one from Kate and, who worked with a student from the class engaged

in this project in the writing center after school. Alex’s written reflections are interesting, in that

he clearly has me in mind as an audience (where the other tutors do not, or at least do not refer

to me as such), posing questions and referring to the class as “your second period.” This

identification of the teacher as audience in his responses (but not the others) raises some

interesting questions about how the liaison experience might be different from other tutoring

experiences. Does this shift to teacher as audience for reflection indicate some lessening of


tutorial authority? In other words, do tutors feel less confident or competent as tutors when

embedded in the classroom, a space that “belongs” to another authority? Was Alex looking to

me for approval of his work, or was he trying to start a conversation? Was he trying to use the

Daybook as a space where we might talk about his work, where I might tutor him in “teaching”?

Alex’s reflections are also striking in that each response mentions how much he enjoys

his work as tutor. He mentions his enjoyment four times in three responses; the idea of helping

others is another significant theme, appearing five times. This theme also reveals Alex’s growing

confidence as a tutor over the course of his liaison experience; in his initial reflection, he writes

about understanding “why everyone needs help with research,” and suggests character

development as a possible mini-lesson: “I could probably help a lot with that.” He seems

reticent about his role here, although he has clearly identified a purpose (to help students) for

his work in the classroom. By the end of the unit, however, he seems much more confident in

his ability to help: “The other day, I believe it was Wednesday, when I had like 5 conferences

back to back I felt so helpful.” Alex’s final reflection also identifies what he sees as his own

personal growth:

Honestly, since the Monday that I did that lesson on dialogue I’ve noticed improvement

in my own writing. I just see myself becoming both a better writer & a tutor & I think it’s

like the coolest thing ever.

Kate’s reflection suggests that tutors may be feeling some resistance to the reflection

prompt: she answers each question in order, and her answers seem perfunctory and a bit

rushed. For instance, she writes exactly one sentence in response to each question. All but two

of the sentences she wrote are simple sentences; the outliers are a comma splice and a one-


word fragment. Her longest sentence is eleven words long; on average, each sentence is about

five words long. Kate, a self-described “grammar Nazi,” loves to write; she thinks, speaks, and

writes ideas that are much more complex than what her reflection offers. Kate is not writing

this reflection for herself; she is doing it for me, for my research, which means that, just as with

Alex, I am her intended audience. If Kate is just going through the motions in her reflection, if

tutors are not being consistent in writing reflections, and if tutors are only reflecting because I

ask it of them, then perhaps the writing center needs to revisit the very idea of post-conference

reflections, or at least the methods we use to generate them.

Though tutor Daybooks were not quite the rich source of data I had anticipated, the

videotaped focus group interview provided a wealth of information about how tutors perceive

their own tutoring (and liaison) experiences, the tensions they face as tutors, and how they

perceive their own impact on the school’s community of writers. I generated the questions for

this focus group (Figure 6); the interview was led by Dr. Sherri Steadman and videotaped for

transcription purposes.

Dr. Steadman’s role as interviewer was vital; I worried that if interviewed tutors, their

responses might be shaped by an awareness of me as an audience, as in the case of Alex’s

Daybook reflections. Being interviewed by Dr. Steadman, speaking to her as an audience, I

hoped, would allow for less constructed, more honest responses. I also hoped that, because Dr.

Steadman was not familiar with our writing center, students might avoid some of the shorthand

that characterizes a lot of our writing center discussions, providing her with more detailed

explanations of the work that they do.

My hopes were well-founded, as this interview provides a much fuller story of the work


Figure 6. Focus Group Questions

our tutors do than the data I was able to collect from Daybooks, but it also reflects many of the

themes from analysis of tutor Daybook data, student Writer’s Memos, and student responses

to the Feedback Form. For instance, the story of Alex’s liaison experience, as it emerges during

the focus group, reflects the confidence from his last Daybook reflection and his previously

stated enjoyment of the process:

I’d say that the overall experience just went, like, really well. You know, me being in the

classroom - it encouraged the students to, you know, ask me questions instead of


relying on Ms. Smyth and just things like that. And I’d say something that could have

went better was like in some of the lessons that I taught they weren’t as cooperative

with me… they just weren’t open, if that makes sense... It just was the fact that, like, I

guess they felt intimidated, you know, by having a peer instead of a teacher, and they

didn’t really know how to react to the whole situation.

Alex seems to have resolved his early anxiety about his role in the classroom, evident in his

early Daybook responses. He’s no longer reticent about his own authority as liaison, but

recognizes that he serves as an important resource for students, helping them become more

independent learners. He’s also able to empathize with students who feel “intimidated” by his

presence, perhaps having experienced something similar and being unsure of “how to react to

the whole situation” in his early days as liaison. That he uses this empathy to navigate a

tension, a conflict in which he feels at least the potential for rejection, is nothing less than

impressive. I suspect this empathy is something that comes naturally to Alex, but this response

raises a significant question about the role of empathy as a habit of mind for effective tutors:

are empathetic tutors more effective, and if so, how might we more effectively build empathy

through tutor training?

Alex’s discussion of his routine as liaison also reflects some of the tensions about

authority present in his Daybook:

I guess I was there to just reinforce and help some of the things Ms. Smyth was doing,

because when I was being, or working as a Liaison in the classroom, they were working

on a writing assignment, and so I would have basically, just like back to back

conferences with the students, like I would go in the classroom and ask who needed


help. If someone needed like additional help, I would pull them out of the classroom and

sit down somewhere and have a conference with them, you know, that’s more face-to-

face, and just work with them. So, yeah, I guess that’s my major role.

Alex first states his primary role as to “reinforce and help some of the things Ms. Smyth was

doing,” to support the teacher’s work in the classroom, but the work he describes engaging in

involves supporting student work in the classroom. His position, his identity, as tutor, then, is

somewhere between the two - a position that reflects the tensions discussed by both Trimbur

(1987) and Dean (2011). Alex is not quite a peer - he has the authority, for instance, to remove

a student from the classroom for one-on-one work, but he also resists identifying tutoring with

teaching - what he does is to “support” teaching and learning. His focus on supporting teaching

is also interesting, in that it suggests an accountability not often present in regular writing

center tutoring sessions. Alex explains, later in the discussion, why the writing center rejects

accountability for the grades of the student writers we work with:

Well, I think one of the reasons why that doesn’t happen is that we have this thing you

know where like we can’t ensure them a good grade, but we can ensure them you know

like improvement of some sort, but we can’t, like, get them a good grade. It’s

understood, but if it’s not understood, then like, you have to tell them, you have to

make it clear.

This unwillingness to promise a “good grade” is rooted in our focus on “the writer, not the

writing” (North, 1984), and, in fact, North makes it clear that “we are not here to serve,

supplement, back up, complement, reinforce, or otherwise be defined by any external

curriculum. We are here to talk to writers” (p.440). What happens, then, when we move the


writing center into the classroom? To what extent is our work then determined by supporting

the teacher’s work, the “external curriculum”? And how do we reconcile the tension between

our theories about what writing centers (and by extension, writing center tutors) should be and

the actual practice of tutors as liaisons? Alex’s response suggests that keeping the work focused

on “talk[ing] to writers” may be one method of resolution.

What, then, of his work as a presenter in the classroom, a role common in other liaison

programs (Soven, 2001) and more closely aligned with traditional definitions of “teaching”?

It’s not that big of a difference; I mean, in the classroom setting, Ms. Smyth will like, like

she got me to teach a couple of lessons and stand up, and hold like a discussion, and

actually teach. I enjoyed it.. they, I guess they enjoyed it. They told Ms. Smyth they

enjoyed it. They didn’t tell me they enjoyed it, because like I said they were really just

kinda quiet at first, but they got used to me after a while.

Alex identifies this role as the biggest “difference” between tutoring in the writing center and

tutoring in the classroom, and identifies this presentation as “actually teach[ing]”, suggesting

that he views this aspect of his work as different from the writing conferences more closely

aligned with his role as tutor. He enjoys both roles, and though he remains reticent about

student engagement with his work in this new role, the data from Writer’s Memos and

Feedback Forms suggests he has reason to feel confident about his effectiveness in “actually

teach[ing].” Alex’s identification of this “difference” between work as a liaison and tutoring in

the writing center further suggests that the liaison role may afford tutors a new identity to

navigate, in addition to the intersections between “peer” and “tutor” they are already engaged

in exploring.


One of the ways in which tutors resolve these sometimes contradictory identities in

their work is by building relationships with the writers they work with. Just as Alex recognizes

that students in the classroom “got used to me after a while,” the other tutors interview

responses demonstrate an awareness of the importance of building effective tutor-client

relationships, though they take a variety of approaches to building those relationships. Diane, a

new tutor in training, speaks about the ways in which, even before becoming a writing center

tutor, she has claimed tutorial authority in working with other writers:

I haven’t tutored, like in the writing center, but i have helped friends with different

types of papers before...I try to treat them as if they’re not a friend. Not in like a mean

way, but like I’m trying to help you with your paper or something like that. It works most

of the time, it does. I just try to, you know, I just help them like I would, as I would if it

was someone that I didn’t know who was coming to me for something.

For Diane, then, authority as a tutor, some clear delineation between identities as “friend” and

“tutor,” is essential to building a good working relationship with other writers. For Kate, these

identities grow more complicated:

I do the complete opposite. In a sense that if I’m staying in a tutoring session after

school with someone that I didn’t know too much about, that would be one thing, but if

I’m like at home, and a friend’s over, and I’m helping them with a paper, I’m more, like,

direct with them because I feel like, since I’m in a different setting, and I know them in a

different way, there’s other ways that I can give them advice that’s more direct…

Kate, then, in addition to considering “peer” and “tutor” roles, subdivides her identity as a

writing tutor into “professional” and “friendly” roles. Her identity as a tutor depends largely on


the relationship she already has (or lacks) with the client. In her “professional” role, Kate also

recognizes the time that it takes to build a new working relationship:

Two, three sessions maybe. I mean, an hour and thirty minutes times three, that’s a long

time to spend with one person, especially if you’re just talking about writing the entire

time.

Other tutors spoke about how the writing conference process helps them “get to know”

writers and build relationships. Nicole, another new tutor with some experience working in the

writing center, suggests mirroring as a method of relationship-building:

You feel a little bit more comfortable, because like you get to see like how they are. Like

you get to tell what they’re saying to you, and then you can say the same thing back. It

just depends.

Nicole’s conception that the shape of the conversation “depends” on the client’s needs, and her

desire to “say the same thing back” suggest an empathy similar to that demonstrated by Alex,

and raises the question of how this empathy might help build a sense of being “comfortable”

for tutors as they navigate new roles. New tutor Alice analogizes this sense of comfort as “kind

of like having learned their writing style,” suggesting that tutorial relationships begin with

listening another writer’s voice, or style, but go beyond recognition - here, learning seems

something akin to the empathy suggested by other tutors’ responses.

This focus on relationship-building is essential to the collaborative nature of tutors’

work; according to tutors, part of navigating an identity as a tutor seems to involve building the

kind of relationship with clients that allows them to work with clients and not for them. Nicole,


who worked with students in the classroom near the end of the project, describes encountering

this conflict as a liaison:

Not really rejects, but they just like don’t say anything. I mean, like, in the classroom,

when I was in here, like I was helping I don’t know, some kid, and he wasn’t really saying

anything, he just kept saying yeah. He just kept saying yeah, and I was like… And I just

like, I ended up highlighting everything that I saw, and then, like, I made him pay

attention. Like I went through each piece, and I said like, I highlighted like things that

you could reword differently, and when he saw it he was like, Oh, wow, I didn’t even

think of that the first time...You just like, you can’t let them take advantage of you

either, like you can’t sit there and do the paper.

As a brand-new tutor, Nicole is relying on authority as the component of her tutorial identity

that allows her to resolve this conflict by “ma[king] him pay attention.” Perhaps as she grows

more experienced, she will rely on other tools, such as the empathy she has in mind, to practice

building relationships with other writers that go beyond identifying a client as “some kid,” as

did Victoria, one of the seniors who led the note-taking mini-lesson:

Well, I came in one time with Ms. Smyth’s class. It was a freshman class, and they were

working on research papers, I don’t know what - for what exactly - can’t really

remember, but they all had to take, they were just doing the note-taking part of their,

like, their whole paper, and since we had like, since we’re seniors we were doing that,

our note-taking part, on index cards for our senior paper, so we brought in our index

cards and we showed them, well, this is how we do ours, and then like one of, they all

raised their hands when we asked them who needs help, and stuff, but when we came


to them, they’re like, they really didn’t care anymore. They wanted us to do, like go up

there and copy and paste everything that we like, I was just like no, this is how I did

mine, so why can’t you just do the same thing?

Victoria’s response suggests that, as a more experienced tutor, she has learned to use

questions and modeling as tools for building relationships that maintain the writer’s

independence and ownership of the work.

Experienced tutor Kate identifies questioning as a key collaborative technique for

building relationships that value the student’s autonomy:

Probing questions. It’s the answer to everything in tutoring, is probing questions. A

probing question looks like a friendly token of advice. That’s how I would put it. I’m a

grammar Nazi, so it really bothers me when I’m reading something and it just like tears

my nerves apart, and I’m just like, probing question, probing question, breathe in,

breathe out, and then I’m like, ok, ok, I got this, because that’s like the most difficult

thing for me, is to develop probing questions about grammar. Like, if we’re talking about

ideas, or like, organization, that’s easy for me, because you can like ask questions that

lead to other answers, but like, when something’s right or wrong, how do you approach

that? …Or, what if, you know, what if you tried to reword it, and you know, instead of

saying this part first, you said this first, just like, imply to change it, so that maybe they

solve it on their own.

Kate, like the other tutors, recognizes both the importance of helping clients “solve it on their

own” and her own frustration, arising from the occasional difficulty of collaboration. Alex

speaks directly to this frustration, and importance of managing this frustration as a tutor:


What is frustrating, is you do feel sometimes like just saying, just do it, or just do it for

them, or just show them, do it this way, or do it that way, but I guess part of being a

tutor is just knowing, and just being able to I guess control that, frustration, and use it as

a vehicle to, I guess, better help them with that.

Tutors, then, are students who, rather than managing the writing or managing peers, manage

themselves: they recognize their own frustration, reflect on it, and use it as a motivation for

collaborating with clients. In this context, self-awareness and self-discipline become significant

aspects of tutor identity.

Alex speaks about the way he employed this self-discipline as a liaison:

I had the same experience when I was in the classroom. Like, I would go, and I would,

like, help somebody, and sometimes I would feel like they were just, like, waiting for me

to tell them what they did wrong, and to fix it. But like you know, being a tutor, like, you

have to ask probing questions, like Kate said, and like, you have to get them on the right

track of thinking, so that they do it themselves. And, like, what you were saying about,

like, how tempting is it, like I would say it’s not, it’s not very tempting, it’s not as

tempting as it seems, but there’s always something in the back of my mind, like, it

would be so easy if I could just be direct with these people, but then, like, I have to stop

myself from just telling them what to do.

It’s interesting to note that Alex, like the other tutors, does not frame his work with other

writers as collaboration. His Daybook shows evidence of collaboration, as does his (and other

tutors’) insistence as on probing questions as a tool for collaborative inquiry. So why doesn’t he


call it collaboration? Tutors seem insistent that the client’s role is to “do it themselves,” while

the tutor’s role is to “help” and “get them on the right track of thinking.”

Kate speaks directly to this perception of the tutor’s role:

...because that’s not your role, you know. If that’s not your responsibility, then you’re

obligated to do what you’re supposed to do as a tutor, and let them do the rest. You’re

supposed to guide them - you’re not supposed to just come in and sweep away the

assignment for them. A lot of people have the wrong perception of what a tutoring

session should look like and what the purpose of a tutor really is.

Again, Kate frames the tutor’s role and the client’s role as separate and distinct, but this may

not necessarily mean that tutors don’t see these roles as collaborative. In an educational

context where students work in class collaboratively on an almost daily basis, often with clearly

defined roles, as in Literature Circles (Daniels, 2002), tutors may be delineating tutor and client

roles in an effort to clearly define those roles; their experience as students may be telling them

that this definition, this delineation, this fulfilling of “your responsibility,” is necessary for the

collaboration to work.

Our tutors believe that their collaboration with clients does work, and not just for the

clients, but also for themselves:

I don’t know about y’all, but like, sometimes we learn by helping others. We’re out

there tutoring things, and we might see something we’ve never seen, and we work with

them to get it done, and it’s like, oh, well, we learned something new today.

Caroline’s assessment that “we learn by helping others” reflects Alex’s revelation about his own growth

as a writer and tutor during his liaison experience, though she is more specific about the way that


collaborating with clients affects this learning. In “work[ing] with them to get it done,” she also echoes

the equity evident in the drawings from Alex’s Daybook. Despite the questions of identity, authority, and

collaboration they often wrestle with, our tutors see themselves as colearners, working alongside their

clients to build expertise together.

Questions of collaboration, authority, and relationship-building also appear throughout

the discussion of a surprising theme that emerged during the focus group discussion: the role

tutors play in initiating the students they work with into college-level academic discourse

communities. Though I was aware of this theme in the literature on post-secondary writing

centers (see Bruffee, 1984), I was surprised to hear it delineated so clearly in the responses of

our high school tutors, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been: we are, after all, housed on the

campus of a community college, and our students begin taking college courses in their

freshman year. We started the writing center, in part, to help students work through anxiety

about college writing. I just was not expecting tutors to identify this anxiety as such an

important theme in our work.

In the focus group, tutors talked about themselves as guides, responsible for helping

other students navigate the differences between high school and college writing. That

navigation begins with the tutors recalling their own experiences in making that transition.

Victoria recalls the disconnection and confusion she felt upon return of her first college paper:

But at the same time, we all look at that same experience where we’re like, we’re used

to just the basics where we’re like just graded on having five paragraphs, five sentences

each paragraph, and they really, they really they check grammar, but it’s not like when


you get to over there, the college side, and you get that first paper, and you get, like

most of us, have gotten just a 60 on that paper, and we’re just like, how?

Victoria is identifying two key differences in college and high school expectations about writing:

conventions and organization, in the form of the five-paragraph essay. Travis echoes both of

these assessments:

They don’t like, a lot of them, grade on content instead of mechanics, and we’re used to

like, the five paragraphs, and a lot of them over there, they say throw the five

paragraphs out.

Tutors, then, are aware of two contexts, two identities, writers at our school must navigate: as

high school writers, they must write five-paragraph essays to fulfill audience expectations; as

college writers, they must focus on correctness, or face the consequences.

Tutors are also aware that their experience as students in college classes helps them

guide their clients as they navigate these two very different discourse communities. Travis

speaks to the way this prior experience allows tutors to empathize with the experiences of their

clients:

I think it’s a little easier for us, though, being that, like I know most of us are seniors and

juniors, we’ve had most of the teachers that they have, and so we kind of know what

they’re looking for and how they’re going to grade. It helps us a lot...We were actually

joking during one meeting, saying we were going to make a list of all the teachers and

how they grade.

Knowing teacher expectations, or how a teacher grades, then, is an important expertise for

tutors, despite the fact that we don’t believe in focusing on the grade. As in the


aforementioned conflict between peer, tutor, and “teaching” identities, this expertise in “how

they’re going to grade” means tutors must find a way to reconcile what they believe about

writing center practice and the lived experience that informs what they actually do. Senior

Chris, an experienced tutor, addresses this conflict by returning to the idea of not being able to

guarantee clients improved grades:

At the same time, sometimes, with a certain professor, you can’t, regardless of what you

do or what you say, you can’t, I guess, guarantee them that they’ll do good on that

paper, just because certain teachers grade certain ways, and even if you’ve taken that

class before, you never really, you never I guess get used to it because they… because I

guess they’ve grown accustomed to grading a certain way, even if it’s not necessarily

the right way, and there’s really no way to I guess, you can help them with that, but

there’s no way I guess to really help them as much as you feel like you should be able to.

Here Chris is returning to “the writer, not the writing” (North, 1984), but he acknowledges his

own desire to help students “do good on that paper.” He resolves the conflict by focusing on

growth instead of the grade because he recognizes writers, unlike papers, are not ever finished

products, and thus can’t be “fixed.” Chris also seems to recognize a conflict between the high

school’s approach to writing assessment and that of college professors - if college professors

are “grading a certain way...not necessarily the right way,” in his estimation, then what is “the

right way”? Is he referring to high school teachers’ assessment practices, or to his own

approach to writing instruction in the writing center?

Despite the conflicts tutors may feel about assessment and their own role in helping

students meet teacher expectations, they also recognize that, as guides with prior experience in


college courses, their expertise can be invaluable to clients:

But see, the experience with that specific class, or that specific professor, is what kind of

sets up two people, you know, like if I’ve had this professor before, but maybe another

student hasn’t, and maybe someone else had professor S, then, you know, I know what

X wants because I had X and you know, now I know more of an idea of where this paper

is headed because there’s like some people that like depending on the class and

depending on the teacher, their expectations are completely the opposite. And so if Ms.

Smyth knows, oh, well you had professor X, so maybe you can help this student that has

her this semester, and that’ll help you, you know, lead her in the right direction.

Perhaps my informal matching of clients and tutors is to blame for creating some of the conflict

about whether tutors focus on the writer or the writing for college courses; in matching

students with tutors who have expertise in a certain class, or with a certain professor, I may

inadvertently create an atmosphere that focuses on the grade, rather than writers’ growth; the

“right direction” in which tutors may be leading their clients may stand in violation of what we

say we believe about our work.

Conclusions

This study was the first formal evaluation of our school’s writing center; as such, it

covers a lot of ground, though perhaps less than I had originally intended. Though I was not

able to evaluate our impact on writing across the curriculum, on the instructional practices of

faculty, or on student performance in writing, the data I was able to collect tells a compelling

story about the impact of the pilot liaison program on student thinking and writing process and

sheds important light on tutor identity, tutors’ collaborative practice, and tutors’ unique


position as escorts into the academic discourse communities of our school.

First, our writing center tutors have a significant impact on the student writers they

work with. In the focus group, Travis spoke about his perception of this impact:

I kind of feel that, like, because of the writing center, students have a better, they have a

better idea and a better, I guess, feeling about writing. Because, you know, most

students don’t certainly enjoy writing, but I guess because of the writing center - it’s not

to say that they enjoy writing more, but they feel like they’re better...yeah, more

comfortable about writing.

Travis’s perception is borne out in student Writer’s Memo and Feedback Form responses citing

the impact of Alex’s work in the classroom, both in terms of strategy and new “perspectives” on

writing. Tutors are making students more comfortable with writing, and they are doing so by

changing student perspectives about writing. In this context, writing center tutors act as

significant agents of change within our school.

The stories our students tell about the liaison pilot also suggest that the relationships

tutors build with students are significant, and that the liaison program has the potential to

serve as a powerful recruitment tool for engaging students who are new to the writing center.

If our students are suggesting increased willingness to visit the writing center to work with

tutors they have a relationship with, however, the inverse may also be true - students may be

unwilling to work in the writing center with tutors with whom they have not developed

relationships. The tools tutors use to develop these relationships with clients, such as

collaborative inquiry and adoption or rejection of roles as authorities, bear further study, but

the findings here suggest that (1) this arsenal of tools available to tutors grows with experience


and that (2) empathy may be a key component in developing effective tutor-client

relationships.

Another finding that might bear further study is that of the complex nature of tutor

identities. Despite the peer-tutor and tutor-teacher dichotomies outlined by Trimbur (1987)

and Dean (2011) respectively, the work tutors do with their friends outside of the writing

center, tutors’ unique role in navigating academic discourse communities, and the unique

nature of our school setting suggest that tutor identities may not be dichotomous at all, but

rather intersectional. The writing liaison role, in particular, seems to exist in the space between

tutor and teacher, and I remain interested in learning more about how tutors navigate the

intersections between high school and college, peer, tutor, and teacher, that are unique to their

experience.

As an evaluation, this study also provides valuable information not only about where

our writing center (and the pilot liaison program) is now, but also where it needs to go in the

future if it is to serve more students, and serve them more effectively. First, in order to study

tutor-client relationships and complex tutor identities, we need to collect more qualitative data.

The informal Daybook reflections we used for most of our history could not provide this kind of

data; neither, though, could the Post-Conference Reflection prompt devised for this study. As

writing center director, I may need to be clearer in establishing expectations and accountability

for reflection, perhaps through the development of a form tutors fill out and hand in at the end

of a session. I would prefer, however, for the tutors to develop the expectations and system we

use for reflection.

This February, I attended a session at the Southeastern Writing Centers’ Association


Conference on the use of Daybooks in East Carolina University’s University Writing Center

(UWC) (Caswell, Flinchbaugh, & Herrmann, 2014, February). I also would like to talk more with

the UWC about the strategies they employ with tutor Daybook reflections, which they use as a

source of qualitative data. In doing so, I also hope to think more purposefully and effectively

about the way tutor Daybooks function not only as tools for reflection, but also as training

manuals and resource guides. If our writing center is to use Daybooks more effectively, in all of

their possible contexts, we need to open up our Daybooks to each other. Some of the

collaborative-response activities employed by UWC may be useful in this regard, but a tutor

training session focused on how tutors use their Daybooks as resources during conferences (led

by Alex, perhaps) may also be useful.

The data about student rationales for using (or not making use of) the writing center will

be especially useful in recruiting new clients; despite Kolba, Crowell, and Sullivan’s (2006)

encouraging vision of tutors in the classroom functioning to break down misconceptions of the

writing center as a “remedial space,” student responses on Writer’s Memos and Feedback

Forms suggest that, at our school, despite the intervention of the liaison pilot, a deficit-oriented

perception of the writing center remains. This may be due, in large part, to the scheduling-

induced shortage of available liaisons; not all students worked with Alex over the course of the

three weeks he was with us. An expanded pilot, in which more tutors were available to serve as

liaisons, liaisons were embedded for longer time periods, or liaisons served in more than one

class might provide different results; several tutors have expressed keen interest in serving as

liaisons, and we hope to expand the pilot in the coming school year.

Student responses to the Feedback Form, however, also suggest an appeal to students’


creative impulses as a means of eliminating the misconception of the writing center as a

“remedial” space. Special events around National Novel Writing Month in November and

National Poetry Month in April may help us to recontextualize the writing center as space for

enrichment. Maggie, an experienced tutor about to embark on her graduation project, has

indicated an interest in exploring possible interrelationships between creativity, design, and

writing, and the ways in which writing can foster more creative and generative thought

processes. Perhaps the writing center can serve as a site for her own study of creativity.

Finally, the findings related to tutors’ role as guides through the complex and varied

academic discourse communities they must engage with provides important information about

the writing experiences of students in our school and the extent to which high school teachers

are preparing students for college writing. Tutors need to share this data with faculty and lead

us in exploring possible solutions; in this arena, they have expertise the rest of us are sorely

lacking. Perhaps empowering tutors in this way will lead faculty to rely on the writing center,

and its tutor-experts, as a resource for writing across the curriculum efforts.

Despite my disappointment in the loss of writing across the curriculum efforts as a

subject for this study, I am incredibly pleased with the shape the final study took, as that shape

is determined almost entirely by the voices of students and tutors. I learn a lot from those

voices because the high school students with whom I work are, in many ways, so much better at

tutoring than I am. Experienced tutor Caroline explains this apparent contradiction:

The way I see it is, like, cause you can, before we even had the writing center, like, a lot

of us would go to our teachers for help, like a lot of us, all of us would go to Ms. Smyth,

and say, hey, can you help us with this? But now that we’ve got the writing center, we


can come to our peers and it’s easier cause we’ve got a better connection. So that’s how

I feel like it impacts because you know we can get more one-on-one with each other

than having to get with the teachers because it’s just like the teachers sometimes they

have so much to do but with us being students you know we kind of understand how it

is.

This “connection,” this understanding of “how it is” that peer tutors offer to their clients is

invaluable, not just for what students can help each other to learn, but for what it can teach the

rest of us about collaborative teaching and learning.


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che.pdf


Appendix A: Historical Narrative Rubric


Appendix B: Writer’s Memo Prompt

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