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Writing Tutoring recruits, trains, and hires its employees each fall through enrollment in an upper-division English course: ENG 41194 Tutoring of Writing. 

ENG 41194: TUTORING OF WRITING

This course is ideal for:

• Stark students interested in becoming stronger writing tutors or consultants
• all English and Integrated Language Arts majors
• other Education majors
• returning teachers
• other interested parties

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Current Writing Tutoring practice rests upon a substantial and sophisticated body of educational theory related to writing. This course will introduce students to the contemporary idea of a writing center and to a tutoring pedagogy which embraces non-directive and collaborative methods as a means of developing stronger writers, and not merely of strengthening or helping to "fix" individual writing assignments.

Though the course is designed with Â鶹ÊÓƵ Stark Writing Tutoring in mind -- as a means of providing a trained, motivated staff -- it would also be of real benefit to students considering careers in education.

The course will expose students to a wide range of pivotal readings in the field, encompassing the following topics:

• collaborative learning
• tutoring models
• the writing process
• brainstorming strategies
• drafting and revision models
• student "ownership" of texts
• tutorial ethics
• academic discourse
• issues of audience
• multicultural and ESL concerns
• negotiating tutor/student differences in the tutorial
• institutional politics and student writing
• error analysis
• the teaching of proofreading
• online tutoring strategies

For the course, students will be asked to:

• keep a personal tutoring journal on their reading and tutoring experiences
• take part in weekly e-mail discussions with their peers
• observe and conduct writing tutorials with undergraduate Stark students
• develop a theory-into-practice project utilizing both secondary research and field observations/testing
• prepare a poster or Powerpoint presentation of their projects to share with their peers and interested faculty

PREREQUISITES

• Students must have completed both College Writing I with a grade of "B" or better.
• Preferably, students will also have completed College Writing II or be taking it concurrently with this course.

TUTOR'S MANUAL

View a full description of the mission, operations and employment procedures of the Writing Center.

•  pdf

TUTORS AS SCHOLARS

As part of the Tutoring Writing course, writing tutors are involved in either individual or collaborative research projects on some aspect of writing center theory and practice. Other research projects continue throughout the year. Tutors have traveled to make scholarly presentations of their work at the Northeast Ohio Writing Centers Association Conference and the East Central Writing Centers Association Conference.