PeerCentered

At the 2010 National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing/International Writing Centers association joint conference in Baltimore, Maryland, Jenny talked with me about benefits of peer tutoring during the Scholar to Scholar session Brandon Alva and I presented.

Stefan Spezio from Dutches County Community College asked me to post this survey for peer writing tutors . Have at it!

At his plenary wrap-up of the Joint NCPTW/IWCA Conference, writing center and peer tutoring legend Harvey Kail asked a simple question in response to the various ideas that came his way during the conference: "Are we asking too much of peer tutors?" Harvey was referring to specifically, I think, Nancy Grim's keynote challenge that writing centers take on new social realities and extend their project to important issues in social justice such as anti-racism work (among others.) (By the way, I only had the opportunity to record the tail end of Nancy's speach, and I will no doubt be podcasting it soon.) After he finished his talk, Harvey had us write on 3 questions--all relating to the challenges that the conference threw at us as writing center folk. The table I went to sit at were very interested in Harvey's statement about peer tutors. One person thought it was a false dichotomy, as if there was one pure thing that we are asking of peer tutors and that was s...

I've been pretty busy the last couple of days coordinating tech support and hosting my own personal Mike Douglas show with writing center megastars by the Alexis pool. I haven't been able to blog as I wanted, nor to record any sessions at all. I've run into various PeerCenterites, and we had our flash mob yesterday at noon. Despite Tiffany Turcotte's belief that our flash mob was at midnight, instead of noon, we had a great time. In between running around solving people's tech issues along with Allison Scheel, David Rockwell, Suzy Gehring, Zach Koppelman, Dusty Bailey, Jeannette Jeanault, and Chris Bently, I've seen many interesting sessions today. I have to run to the banquet now. More later.