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eBook details

• Title: Tutorizing Certification Programs
• Author : Writing Lab Newsletter
• Release Date : January 01, 2009
• Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 58 KB

Description

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?

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