The Writing Tutors Program integrates undergraduate peer tutors into CAS classes across the disciplines and in the First-Year Seminar Program, offering students in these classes an intensified drafting, conferencing, and revising process. The tutors learn about course content and writing expectations by meeting with course faculty, attending selected classes, and working with EWP faculty mentors. Through careful feedback and constructive dialogue, course tutors seek to cultivate inclusive peer-to-peer communities centered on learning a repertoire of techniques for university-level writing, thinking, and learning. Tutors and students do their work together in a space that is distinctly different from the classroom, cultivating a sense of belonging while collaborating to expand students’ understanding of what it means to write for an academic audience.
What can I expect from my course-based Writing Tutor?
Writing Tutors are an important part of your course. As they are getting integrated into your course, the writing tutors will meet with your professor, attend selected classes, and work with EWP faculty mentors so that they can provide customized feedback and advice to you. Typically, you will meet with your tutor two or three times per semester in one-on-one draft conferences. You’ll submit your draft in advance, and during the conference, your tutor will collaborate actively with you to learn about your ideas and suggest how to revise and develop your writing. They will also provide you with written feedback in the form of advanced notes sent back to you before your conference or a post-meeting recap of the targets for revision that you identified together. The tutors help to assure that improving your writing is a major goal for the course, and you can expect your tutor to be curious about your ideas, knowledgeable about your professor’s expectations, and interested in instilling a sense of peer community, confidence, and hope into their collaboration with you.
For CAS Faculty: How do I request tutors for my course?
The Writing Tutors Program assigns peer tutors to CAS courses—mostly first-year seminars and gateway or sophomore-level courses in the disciplines—to provide one-on-one writing conferences for students and written feedback on drafts as they develop their writing throughout the semester.
Here’s how the program works. Before the semester begins, an EWP faculty member will meet with you, learn about your course and expectations for student writing, and plan with you for 2-3 occasions during the semester when the tutors will conference with your students and provide written feedback on their drafts. While the tutors work with your students, they are mentored closely by an EWP faculty member to hone their tutoring practices to your expectations for student writing and to your students’ capacities and needs. The EWP faculty member who supervises the tutors also takes care of the logistics for the tutoring process. We have collaborated successfully with many CAS faculty and their students in courses as small as 10 students or as large as 80 students during the past decade, and we would look forward to partnering with you in the future, too.
If you would like to discuss the possibility of adding peer tutors to your course in an upcoming semester, please write to William Morgan, Director of the Writing Center.