Well, it has been a little while since I have immersed myself in writing center research and scholarship. This is an area very dear to my heart, so it pains me to admit that I haven’t had a lot of time to read a lot of the new pieces that have come out. In working on a new manuscript with a colleague based on a study we did and presented at NCPTW in 2011, I was reinvigorated, though. I am heartened to see Praxis’s new issues lately. The scholarship on Praxis moves the community closer to a field of researchers and less a field of “lore-ists.” It’s heartening to see. After all, there are only so many times we can read about best practices based on one center’s work or one center’s experiences or workshop series.
I have recently read a few articles in Praxis that jumped out at me. Some of you may know of my work on writing centers and the age-related contact zone (click here for my Praxis article), and this is work with which I am currently re-engaging. There is a really interesting article about Generation 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 by Bailey (2012) tutor training manuals that we all need to pay more attention to. Bailey argues that Generation 1.0 and, more particularly, 2.0 tutor training manuals position tutors instinctually as native English speakers with a Euro-American background. This is especially problematic, not least because it is not true but also because it homogenizes a very diverse group of people–making them all seem to fit one particular mode when we all know that our school settings alone make each tutor a very different kind of person, not to mention their home language experiences and their life experiences. I think of my research as a different branch of what Bailey is talking about: I’m thinking about how we position peer tutors as undergraduates and tend to think of them that way. We also tend to think of our student-writers as undergraduates, but the problem is that many Euro-American, native English speaking writing center scholars think not just about our tutors as Euro-American native English speakers but as traditionally aged 18-23 year olds! This is simply not the case at many, many campuses across the country. It’s high time we start incorporating difference into our tutor training–not just difference of language and skin color but of sexual orientation, age, and life experiences, as well. We do tutors a disservice by not helping them see, understand, and negotiate the full spectrum of contact zones that surface in the confines of the writing center.
References
Bailey, S. K. (2012). Tutoring handbooks: Heuristic texts for negotiating difference in a globalized world. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 9(2). Web.
Rhetor(ic) in the Land of Nod 