Tutoring Peers

It was very fitting to read Muriel Harris’ Collaboration is Not Collaboration is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials Versus Peer-Response Groups, this week being that my tutoring in the ESL Center started on Monday.  As I was reading the article, my recent tutoring sessions in the center ran through my mind throughout. What stood out to me the most were the differences described in roles between tutorials and peer-response group. Now this may seem a little simple or obvious being that this is what most of the article entails, but being that I am in a situation where I feel I am both a tutor and a peer to my tutees, I feel torn between my roles.

The ESL Center is a very informal and comfortable place. Students come in when they please and can ask for help on a variety of things. This is one of the things that I love most about the ESL center. It is an amazing space where I feel great collaborative learning happens. This informality and comfort level, however, creates an atmosphere where it’s easy to feel more like a peer, which technically I am, than a tutor, to the tutees. Although my number of sessions is low and it is only the first week, I’ve found that the line between tutor and peer can be blurred when in a session, especially after reading Harris’ article.  One session in particular stands out to me. A girl came into the ESL center and told me she needed help with a short paper she was writing for a psychology class. I sat down with her and began asking her questions about the assignment so I could familiarize myself with the requirements. In doing so, I found out that this assignment was due in a few hours. This immediately changed the course of the tutoring session. As a tutor, as Harris points out, my job is to facilitate learning and to help improve students writing in the long run. I am not supposed to simply run through the essay and correct every incorrect thing I see, much like peer-response may do. When a student tells me that the essay is due in a few hours, however, I feel an obligation to focus mainly on the correctness of the essay at hand and to leave long term writing improvement instruction aside. I found myself walking the student through the essay and helping her fix the corrections I found.  I was a tutor doing the work of a peer-response.

After thinking more about the previously described session in regards to Harris’ article, I think that it was a more successful session than I had previously imagined. Initially, I felt like no true learning really occurred. I was simply walking through the essay with the student and pointing out things that I felt needed to be changed. Then, however, I remembered a conversation I had with the student about article usage. I had noticed that she had a problem with properly using articles throughout her paper so I stopped and discussed it with her for some time. I used a handout about articles that the ESL Center has a resource and talked her through the rules. This, I feel, was a moment where true tutoring occurred. Even though I spent a good amount of the session acting as what I feel Harris would define as a “peer-response”, it was still beneficial.

As student tutors, I feel that we will all have to learn how to balance roles as peers and tutors. Although this can be difficult, I feel that it is necessary. We must take on our roles as tutors and strive to encourage long term learning, but we also must remember to not be afraid to come down to the peer level. As Harris states: “Given the advantages and disadvantages of tutoring and group work, then, there is indeed a solid argument to be made for helping our students experience and reap the benefits of both forms of collaboration” (381).