"Tutorizing" certification programs.

Not all unintended consequences are negative. I discovered this when the writing center I direct adopted a program giving our undergraduate writing assistants the opportunity to certify with a national organization. Based on this experience, I am convinced that even certification programs designed to "professionalize" tutors can provide them a systematic way to "tutorize" our profession. More specifically, I have found that tutors completing certification requirements tend to re-define academic writing in ways that sometimes challenge our disciplinary conceptions. When those re-definitions take the shape of public events planned by tutors to fulfill certification requirements (and, not incidentally, to earn substantial pay raises), interesting ideas about the place of student writing in academe emerge. Moreover, when tutors enact their ideas in public forums such as workshops, readings, contests, and conferences, they provide an effective antidote to the "fix-it shop" image still plaguing our discipline despite the more than two decades that have passed since Stephen North's famous rejection of that metaphor (22-23).

Although one of my purposes here is to explain the nuts and bolts of the way our particular certification program extends North's "idea of a writing center" as student- and process-focused, my second major goal is as much theoretical as practical. That goal owes much to Joyce Kinkead and Jeanette Harris's important observation that "writing centers ... change from context to context" and "that, in fact, it is their environment, academic and otherwise, that most directly shapes them, giving them form and substance and the impetus to define themselves in certain ways" ("Introduction" xv). Because our center defines its work within a distinct institutional context, I will avoid the temptation of providing a template for other programs, each with distinctive needs, to follow. Instead, I suggest a set of questions that administrators and tutors considering entering, adapting, or altering a certification program might answer together to create a process that answers their particular needs: How will a certification program further our center's practical and theoretical goals? What should certification offer tutors beyond a line in their credentials file? How might it benefit our individual program and our discipline?

Perhaps the first question is the most important, the most difficult, and the most tightly connected to institutional context. In answering it, a center also makes certain responses to the other two questions possible or impossible, as I hope to show in a discussion that, out of necessity, keeps circling back to the issue of definition. Perhaps a brief description of our own center will serve to make it clear that individual contexts should shape the kind of certification tasks tutors should be asked to complete. Our Southern Utah University's (SUU) Center, for example, enjoys certain advantages even though it also must cope with challenges unique to our institutional context. The center I direct is housed in an English Department classroom remade into a computer lab, and that has served to help us hang onto our place on a campus where space is at a premium. We operate on a budget supported by composition course fees, a situation that gives me the luxury of a relatively stable budget over which I exercise a great deal of control.

Although we offer consultations--a total of about a thousand sessions a semester--to anyone who walks through the door, our departmental affiliation means that we give priority to meeting the needs of composition students. Our departmental affiliation also means that, in addition to offering consultant services to novice writers, we want to support our English majors and minors in pursuing their professional goals. In our unique context, such support means helping our majors stay in school in a state where the minimum wage doesn't offer workers a penny more than the federal standard.

Faculty and university administrators alike understand how essential the availability of "meaningful work" is to our institution's ability to attract and retain students. At the same time, because so many students on our campus need work in a climate of scarce resources, I must regularly defend my decision to offer an hourly wage much above minimum wage. Therefore, for me, the question of how best to define our certification program has to be answered in a way that would allow tutors to earn pay raises above a $7.50 base pay rate, which is already high enough to raise administrative eyebrows.

Certainly, such a definition also strongly implies an answer to my second question--what should certification offer tutors? However, as I tried four years ago to create a certification program reflective of our center's needs, the obvious response--the training to perform meaningful work and the credentials to convince upper-level administrators that tutors deserved considerably more than the minimum wage--struck me as insufficient. As tutors began putting our program into play, they taught me to recognize both the practical and the theoretical difficulties of limiting our program to the requirements, as thoughtful and rigorous as they were, of a national certification process.

The practical shortcoming was rooted in time--more specifically, my time. Although it is true that I enjoy privileges not available to every center director (chiefly, the stable source of funding mentioned earlier), my situation as a part-time director who is also a full-time faculty member is problematic. Like most of the readers of the Writing Lab Newsletter, I don't have nearly enough time to get everything done. And yet, again like the readers of this publication, I have high aspirations. Rather than simply adopting national standards and devoting a chunk of my limited time to supervising their fulfillment, I wanted to invite tutors to carve out individual paths to certification. At first, I thought that a homegrown certification program would be the answer. I simply gave the tutors the opportunity to engage in what I called "professional development activities" by paying them for the hours they needed to keep reflective journals, to observe each other's sessions, and to work on writing center projects. The extra pay, though, lost its motivating power about mid-term as the tutors tried to balance work with the need to prepare for tests and write major papers.

The next year, I decided to add the incentive of formal certification through the College Reading and Learning Association's national program. The move from informal tutor-centered professional development to a training regime that listed specific and sequenced goals was such an easy one for me logistically that I failed to notice the problematic theoretical shift I was making. Since there was an SUU staff member authorized by the College Reading and Learning Association (CRLA) to approve tutor training programs and to offer certification at two levels, gaining access to the national program was relatively easy. Liking much about the CRLA, I created a list of certification requirements adhering to the organization's guidelines. (More information about CRLA is available on the organization's Web site: <http://www:crla.net>.)

However, I did not realize at the time how much the insertion of national certification standards into our center's culture would push our center's training philosophy towards what James Trimbur has identified as the "apprentice" model--a model that, by stressing professional development, presents "peer tutoring as an arm of the writing program, a way to deliver state-of-the-art instruction in writing to tutees" (26). The trouble with this model, Trimbur explains, is that it worsens the writing assistants' tendency to think and act like administrators and faculty, thus encouraging them to abandon their true authority as writers who are also students (25).

Keeping Trimbur in mind, I decided that I needed to customize the CRLA model to create a certification process that would encourage tutors to resist a "Mini-Me" identity. As Trimbur explains, "Tutors need ... to develop confidence in their autonomous activity as co-learners, without the sanction of faculty leaning over their shoulder and telling them and their tutees when something is learned and when not" (27).

To give certification a "co-learner" flavor, I asked tutors to help me create an approach to certification that would allow them to move from the margins of academic life to the center of our center. Toward this end, tutors and I decided to augment the CRLA list of requirements with a set of tasks that would invite those working on certification to take the initiative in creating and conducting activities designed to support campus literacy in any way they wished to define that literacy. As a result, I ended up with a definition that characterized certification as a process through which tutors would insert themselves into the system not as a mere cog, but as something akin to a wrench. (1)

Has my attempt worked? As I prepared an earlier version of this paper for the Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference, I asked our tutors why they were pursuing certification. Their answers, perhaps predictably, focused on the practical matters of being able to earn a higher hourly wage--50 cents per hour for the first level and $1 an hour for the second. All of them also mentioned the importance of being able to claim the honor of certification on their resumes. However, they also specifically mentioned the pleasure they felt in learning by doing, getting involved, having an influence. Their pleasure in those activities has been manifested not so much by what they say, but what they have done to shape the certification process to their own ends.

I say this quite mindful that many certification projects benefit me more than they do the tutors who initiate them, thus answering my third question--how might a certification program benefit our center and our discipline?--in an embarrassingly director-centered way. For instance, when tutors generate tipsheets and workshops--those tried-and-true staples of writing center pedagogy--they save me time and labor that I would otherwise have to invest in keeping our offerings fresh. However, when tutors create a handout or a workshop, they not only make my professional life easier, they exercise agency by identifying a double-sided problem--not only a writing problem that many of our clients are trying to solve, but a consulting problem that needs clearer articulation by and for our center community. In other words, they recognize that some of the struggles in their consultations result not so much from a client lack, but from a dearth of tutor certainty about how best to support the writer seeking help.

I should note here that many of those problems are not ones that I myself would have recognized as needing the formal recognition of a tipsheet or some other outreach effort. For example, tutors have created handouts on ways to figure out what faculty members want as readers and how students can overcome writer's block. Other topics explore how imagery works in literature and what dialogue can add to fiction. Even more standard topics, such as applications of MLA style, take on a student-inflected view of the world when tutors present them in workshops that offer participants not only the usual guidelines, but insider information on which professors insist on italics and which ask for underlining and who is "picky" and who is not. Often delivered in a locution that uses the expressions "you guys" and "like I said" (despite my railing against such deviations from Edited American English), the tutors offer up perfectly useful academic material that hails from Planet Student.

In doing so, tutors seeking certification seem to demonstrate an alternative to Trimbur's suggestion that the center take a developmental approach to training tutors by preserving the insights they hold as students as long as possible. He argues that administrators can refrain from professionalizing our tutors too soon by first training them to recognize the power of collaborative approaches to learning and writing and their own ability to tutor not as an "expert," but as a partner in inquiry (26). I endorse these ideas as sound in a theoretical sense. However, on my planet, there is not a lot of time to enact the two-part approach to training that Trimbur advocates--at least not if that approach is construed as a linear one. Perhaps, though, the kind of certification program I advocate makes it possible for students to comfortably and productively deal with the problems, sometimes subtle, that leave both writing assistants and their clients frustrated. By giving tutors the incentive to act and then getting out of their way, directors can acknowledge their abilities and their rights to shape the institutional spaces all of us share.

In our center, tutors have exercised this right and this ability in events that I like to think of in terms of what Donna Haraway might call "modest interventions" meant to readjust cultural systems from the inside out. A few brief examples of the way our writing assistants have "tutorized" their certification requirements may serve to illustrate my point. When I suggested that our center sponsor a reading by a regional nature writer, tutors agreed with excitement and then promptly planned a panel discussion that featured not only the writer, but a professor and a student, all engaged in producing various forms of nonfiction. A similar process unfolded when a different set of tutors agreed to take over our contest for composition students. Yes, of course, they followed the template of the shopworn, faculty-directed version of the contest to some degree. However, once they were in control, tutors made several changes meant to highlight student writing in more concrete terms than before. Deciding that a once-a-year contest was insufficient, tutors set up a system of early deadlines so that awards could be given to students currently enrolled in our composition classes. Furthermore, they rejected our old print journal as too expensive and decided on publication in the form of our snazzy but inexpensive on-line journal. They invested the savings in larger cash prizes and in a reading and reception for the winners, complete with an elegant dessert table. The reading no longer featured an invited professional author, but the winners themselves, who were introduced with the sort of brief biographies usually reserved for those with formal credentials.

A similar re-emphasis on student experience and knowledge asserts itself in almost every project the tutors plan. Weary of professorial pronouncements on graduate school, tutors planned a workshop featuring a recent writing assistant graduate who had entered the University of Utah's graduate school. Organizing our center's participation in the annual NCTE African American Read-in, tutors made a productive connection with the campus Multicultural Center. Asked to facilitate small group workshops in our new basic writing program, tutors created a survey that asked students detailed questions about their experience. They also created a panel discussion for the Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference on the ways in which their experiences had influenced their writing center work. Furthermore, the leader of the panel wrote an article on the topic that was published in an on-line peer tutoring journal. Last fall, a tutor organized a reading of excerpts of challenged books when she realized the local library had not planned any events in connection with Banned Book Week. As a follow-up, she researched the library to create a long list of challenged books that had been "lost" by patrons, a list that another tutor plans to use as the basis for a project designed to get those volumes back on the library shelves.

Now I come to my last point: invited to certify by taking innovative actions of their own choice, writing assistants have found ways to insert themselves into the academy and to remind me that training should not be a matter of setting tasks and then pronouncing judgments on them. Instead training--and thus certification processes--should offer opportunities for tutors to make their own way though the academy and, in doing so, to leave paths for other students to follow. By the not-so-simple acts of creating such personally-inflected events, they have answered that third question--"How might certification benefit our individual program and our discipline?"--in ways more complicated and more interesting than I first thought. Rather than getting work done that I don't have time to do, writing assistants who are certifying often get work done that I wouldn't think of doing myself. Moreover, in doing so, they demonstrate to the university at large that writing is not just a professor-driven activity, but one that students find valuable, exciting, and amenable to the furthering of student (not faculty) purposes. A fix-it shop surely would have no interest in checking library shelves for the presence or absence of banned books. Nor would it bother to survey basic writers about what they were getting out of a required class. However, a writing center staffed by tutors certifying in a way that asks them not only to complete tasks, but to create them, is interested in a variety of projects and programs designed to make institutional life better. As the late, great Donald Murray, whose death was announced the week I began this essay, was eager to remind us, writing is about surprise and discovery. If this statement is true, certainly any writing center endeavor, including certification, should offer avenues into the unexpected joy of unintended consequences.

Works Cited

Haraway, Donna J. Modest Witness@Second Millennium. Female Man Meets Onco Mouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Kinkead, Joyce A. and Jeanette G. Harris, eds. Writing Centers in Context: Twelve Case Studies. Urbana: NCTE, 1993.

North, Stephen M. "The Idea of a Writing Center." St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. Ed. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. New York: St. Martin's, 1995. 22-37.

Trimbur, John. "Peer Tutoring: A Contradiction in Terms?" Writing Center Journal 7.2 (1987): 2128.

Julie Simon

Southern Utah University

Cedar City, UT

Note

(1) To view our certification checklist: <http://www.suu.edu/hss/english/writingcenter/pdf/certification.pdf>.