Keywords
responding to writing, writing center tutors, teaching assistants, antiracist assessment
Abstract
The relationship between tutoring and teaching has been a recurrent topic of interest among writing center directors and writing program administrators. While scholarship agrees tutoring experience aids composition teachers with implementing process pedagogy and fostering a collaborative classroom, the relationship between tutoring and assessment of student writing is less clear. This qualitative study uses interviews with eight graduate teaching assistants with tutoring experience to examine how they transfer and juxtapose knowledge, practices, and values for response between the writing center and classroom. Like previous scholarship, this research finds writing center tutoring contributes to teachers’ enactment of constructivist, student-centered pedagogy and enhances their understanding of students’ relationship to writing and feedback, standard language ideology, and systemic inequities in education. However, evaluation led these instructors to experience tension between their values and preferred respondent roles, with many reporting anxious grading processes and some experimenting with alternatives to traditional grading. The article concludes with suggestions to build bridges between tutoring and teaching contexts, particularly through explicit attention to antiracist pedagogy and alternative assessment practices.
Recommended Citation
Wisniewski, Carolyn
(2024)
"Generous Audience, Activist, Evaluator: Tutor-Teachers’ Knowledge, Practices, and Values for Response to Writing,"
Journal of Response to Writing: Vol. 10:
Iss.
1, Article 1.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/journalrw/vol10/iss1/1