Writing Center Research

I do believe that research is necessary for any writing center (or academic program) to best serve its many populations and to thrive. I’ve been thinking a lot about how our writing center incorporates collaboration into its tutoring, not just between the WC tutors and their individual tutees, but also between tutees themselves. This is especially apparent in those enrollment situations in which two students have been paired together for their sessions.

Since these students are often in different sections of Rhetoric and may be struggling with different aspects of their courses and writing more generally, it would be interesting to research how they actually teach one another during the semester. I’d be particularly curious to see what types of pedagogical tools they use with one another (consciously or unconsciously). I also wonder if it might be worthwhile to more transparently show these paired students how they can use pedagogical tools to help one another and to thus assist themselves. It could be worth creating research groups around these pairings. Some of the pairings could function normally while other pairings could also receive some directed guidance for how to tutor one another alongside the tutor (maybe with a focus on specific writing issues?). It could be interesting to see if there’s any significant difference between the pairings.