Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 22, No. 2 (2025)
Navigating Writing Center Timescapes: Reflections on Tutor Self-Efficacy at University and Community Sites
Kendyl Harmeling
The University of Louisville
kendyl.harmeling@louisville.edu
Alexandria Degner
The University of Louisville
alexandria.degner@louisville.edu
Jennings Collins
The University of Louisville
jennings.collins@louisville.edu
Lauren T. Cox
The University of Louisville
lauren.tweedell@louisville.edu
Abstract
This reflection came together over the course of a semester while the co-authors were working in their University Writing Center and at community partner sites. Only a handful of writing center scholarship has investigated how time as an agent plays into pedagogical performance (Geller, “Tick-Tock”; Geller et al., The Everyday Writing Center; Terzano, “Short-Time Tutorials”). Yet, across writing centers we’re all negotiating these material and temporal realities as part of the daily structure of our work. And, as Powell and Hixson-Bowles point out, writing center studies often publishes about the writing self-efficacy of the students and clientele of center services but not tutor self-efficacy. We therefore use time as a lens with which to view and better understand our individualized tutoring efficacies. The co-authors’ stories demonstrate how time can be a valuable reflective lens for connecting theory to action within a session and for the development of one’s sense of self as a writing center professional (their tutor self-efficacy) across sessions and spaces. By so doing, exploring time as a pedagogical influence, tutors can carve out more confidence in themselves, authority in their self-efficacy, and find success in familiar and unfamiliar writing center terrains.
Introduction
As any tutor who has three back-to-back sessions may come to find, time and its influence on pedagogical performance – and later how we feel when we reflect on that performance – can be felt in the body. A dry mouth after three writers preferred you do the read aloud or sore eyes from computer screen after computer screen, time takes its toll as we perform “writing center-ness.” And we can feel it in our pedagogical soul when we’ve had a day of literacy narratives, and the last-hour-of-the-day writer comes in with yet another one; time can have much more a say in how we perform that writing center-ness than we want to admit. It’s therefore necessary to narrate how time is woven into writing center theory, practice, and experiences of tutor self-efficacy in doing the work.
In the recursive process of becoming and enacting “tutor,” experience can be a good teacher by itself, but tutors can further shine when “strategic instruction and counseling” are provided (Bannister-Willis 137). More than just instruction and practice alone, Geller et al. argue that discussion and reflection are critical steps in the process of becoming and enacting tutor identity. For aid in navigating the dynamic between instruction and experience, or theory and practice, Anne Geller et al. argue that writing center directors should theorize time with their tutors in discussions about practice. Doing so can afford tutors and administrators alike the opportunity to summon different performances of writing center-ness (Geller et al.). To do this summoning, and to feel confident in the varied performances there-of, tutors must reflect on their training and enact it as praxis in the moment of a session, after the session, and re-start again before the next one. Critically, however, time and tutor self-efficacy are under-discussed in the nebula of writing center studies. Therefore, this article aims to showcase time as a useful reflective lens for understanding and expanding tutor self-efficacy.
This article invites you to think about the language and discourse of time as an under-discussed but powerful agent in tutor self-efficacy. By so doing, exploring time as a pedagogical influence, tutors can carve out more confidence in themselves and find success in familiar and unfamiliar writing center sessions. As the co-authors’ reflections demonstrate, time is a valuable reflective lens for connecting theory to action within a session and for the development of one’s sense of self as a writing center professional across sessions and spaces.
In an efficacy-themed issue of Praxis, Roger Powell and Kelsey Hixson-Bowles petition writing center studies for greater inquiry into tutor self-efficacy. In “Too Confident or Not Confident Enough,” they argue that self-efficacy is a well explored and valued outcome of writing center use-value, yet it has been explored nearly exclusively for those outside the center coming in (e.g. the writers), not for the tutors. Fundamentally, Powell and Hixson-Bowles explain that the field makes assumptions about but has little empirical evidence of the correlative relationship between tutoring experience and tutor self-efficacy. And while the field of writing center scholarship debates if trust (Gillespie and Lerner), conversations about writing (North), or the event of the tutorial itself (Vandenberg) are the core of what it is writing centers do, the stacking of all these purposes inform the nebulous thing tutors tap into when wearing this hat or that one, or at this site or that one.
These moves, or hats, or roles – like establishing rapport, discussing a piece of writing’s constraining influences (assignment-specific, prompt, deadline, or generic requirements), reading aloud, non/directive guidance through the document, providing emotional support – are well wrought (e.g. Longman, Bedford, Allyn and Bacon, Oxford). These moves are also, largely, how it is the writing centers (and their people) describe what it is that we do. It’s these moves that populate the field guides and tutor training courses that orient new and experienced tutors in the moment of a session. And it’s in the experience of navigating these terrains that tutors’ senses of self-efficacy evolve. In other words, the structures of professional development as a tutor – being trained, discussing training, practicing, experiencing, and reflecting on the doing of the work – are all protocols of tutor self-efficacy which the field leaves up to the tutor to figure out and form on their own. In this article, we define tutor self-efficacy as a tutor’s felt sense of confidence and authority in understanding the possibilities and potentials in the work and then acting to bring possibility and potentiality into reality. And time is a crucial element of tutor self-efficacy given that most often, tutors’ performances of their self-efficacy are a timed product or occur within temporal boundaries.
Like Haynes-Burton writes in “Constructing Our Ethos,” administrators are often reporting usage numbers as means for funding, both taking and relenting the power to define writing center value in their institutional contexts. But it is not only the administrators who define the work, as tutors are frequently performing and negotiating the ethos of the center to the writers in the moment of a session. Both of these performances of writing center-ness are reductive in that, given the constraining contexts of individual performances, administrators and tutors alike bring one of many possible expressions of writing center ethos into reality for a given rhetorical situation. And, as individuals, we all feel the weight and worry of such performances of authority – the authority to bring one potential over another into reality. While the power dynamics, localities, and agents differ between decisions that an administrator or tutor might make in defining and constructing their center’s ethos, these negotiations for tutors and for writing centers as institutions can feel more confident when all agents are tapped into their efficacies (Bannister-Willis).
Conversations about time and pedagogy sparked a semester long-inquiry for the four co-authors into how it is the tutors at our UWC and community partner sites negotiate time’s influence on pedagogical practice, outcomes, and goals for writing center work. At its root, the inquiry began with trying to understand tutors’ anxiety and drops in senses of self-efficacy when they face new answers to old questions, questions like how long they will have with a writer, what if the paper is too long, what if the writer is late, and more. Our tutors had faced all of these questions about the unknown before as first-time tutors in the Fall 2023 semester at our UWC, and even still before if they tutored elsewhere in their undergraduate institutions. Tutors’ confident sense of “I can do what I know how to do,” started to shrink the closer we got to the launch of tutoring services at community sites in the Spring 2024 term, especially when more than place and space were changing, but time too.
In the following narratives sparked by questions of acting within time, Jennings, Lauren, and Allie build, reflect, and rebuild their senses of tutoring as process and as identity enaction. And as emotional labor and self-efficacy populate our conferences, journals, and centers themselves (Bartelt; Sherwood; Geller et al.; Powell and Hixson-Bowles; Mannon), tending to what time’s got to do with it feels like a natural next step. Especially since Anne Geller’s “Tick-Tock” reminds us, “clocks are everywhere” (8). By tuning into time as a pedagogical influence on senses of self-efficacy as tutors, the four of us started seeing time everywhere – in policies, marketing materials, training, community literacy relationships, spatial design, writing center goals and outcomes, and more. By reflecting, we began to feel time and our tutorly ethos within it everywhere – in how we approach a given writer and writing situation, in the space of the session, and in how we see ourselves as tutors and writing studies professionals more broadly.
Talks of Time and Self-Efficacy
On a rainy drive back to campus after an orientation with a community partner geared at bringing our new volunteering tutors up to speed, I ask Lauren and Allie how they’re feeling. Really excited, they reply, if not for some apprehension about the amount of time they’ll have with community writers in appointments: only 30 minutes, compared to the 50-minute sessions we have in our University Writing Center (UWC) location. While our sessions at the UWC don’t always last 50-minutes, there’s that guaranteed time just in case it’s needed. So, even though these consultants have already experienced 30-minute sessions, and some even shorter, the prospect of having only 30-minutes with community writers felt daunting. They asked: how can we do what we know how to do in only 30 minutes? How do we tutor without time? One week later, at a different community site where we volunteer, Jennings and I are on the site’s stoop in the frigid cold talking about how to make sure the partnership works well and that we work well for the site. It’s 3:30 pm and 29 degrees Fahrenheit, but it feels like 15 with the 12-mph winter wind. Jennings and I stepped into these conditions to start talking through ideas without disrupting the fluid silence of the community members inside. Unlike the UWC, this community site is walk-in only and without time-stamped sessions. Jennings describes some excitement and some anxiety in playing with the pedagogies they’ve learned from sessions at the UWC and in their graduate cohort’s tutor training course. The four of us all agree some thinking and rethinking about time is needed. So we hit the books.
What we learned is that plenty of scholarship in the form of field guides and manuals talk about time, but most often when the field talks time, it’s talking time that provides borders within which to analyze pedagogy, or in reference to determining what length session to offer (e.g. Fitzgerald & Ianetta, The Oxford Guide; Myers-Breslin, Administrative Problem Solving; Iris-Soven, What the Writing Tutor Needs To Know). Writing center studies discusses less often what time’s role is in shaping how the events of a session unfold. Only a handful of writing center scholarship has investigated how time as an agent plays into pedagogical performance (Geller, “Tick-Tock”; Geller et al., The Everyday Writing Center; Terzano, “Short-Time Tutorials”). Yet, across writing centers we’re all negotiating these material and temporal realities as part of the daily structure of our work. In a quick search of writing centers in the United States, for instance, sessions last anywhere from a quick 5-minute question, to 15-minutes, 30-minutes for some centers, and 45-60-minutes for others. The power that time has in codifying our behaviors, discourses, practices, and affective states that govern what it is writing centers do is an influential, disciplining power. All writing centers are making decisions, structuring training, and practicing pedagogies with different material and temporal contexts in mind. And tutors are developing their self-efficacy within the local dynamics of the field’s differing landscapes.
Through reflecting on time as a pedagogical influence, Geller’s “Tick-Tock” speaks to how tutors feel in the moment of developing, challenging, or expanding their tutoring self-efficacies against the clock. Geller analyzes how tutors navigate the felt-sense of sometimes rivalling affective and institutional discourses on time within the session, the same sorts of anxieties the co-authors introduce this literature review with. Thoughts of “can I do what I know how to do” and “will the writer think I’m helpful,” bob in the slowly but increasingly stirring waters of anxiety in so many tutors’ minds. Urgent deadlines, anxious writers, session length limits, paper lengths, writer expectations, teacher expectations, tutor expectations, and more coalesce in the tutor’s head while they sit at the table with their writer, hoping to satisfy.
Geller writes that her tutors so often, “put moments of awareness, or negotiation, or confusion, or frustration, or success, in relation to time” (8). The time a tutor has and gets with a given writer structures how tutors understand and enact their tutorly ethos. And while Geller argues that there is great value in the exchanges that occur in sessions when tutor and writer turn toward one another and away from the ticking clock, the authors of this article argue that turning away from the clock and turning toward the clock can be generative for tutors to reflect on their practices, philosophies, and for their senses of tutor self-efficacy. As in this article, by tuning into and turning toward how the clock is an agent of the session, tutors can be better equipped to confidently make new and creative pedagogical choices, feeling empowered to do so.
Self-efficacy’s common definitions circle one’s awareness of and belief in their achievement ability (Martinez et al., “Pain and Pleasure”; Ekholm et al., “College Student Self-Efficacy”). Studies of writing self-efficacy, or one’s awareness of and belief in their writing ability, correlate higher senses of writing self-efficacy with higher academic achievement (Schunk and Zimmerman, “Influencing Children’s Self-Efficacy”; Hawkins, “From Interest and Expertise”; Pajares, “Self-Efficacy Beliefs”; Mitchell et al., “Exploration of Writing Self-Efficacy”). As Powell and Hixson-Bowles point out, writing center studies is most often publishing about the writing self-efficacy of the students and clientele of center services but not tutor self-efficacies (e.g. Lundin et al. “Impact of Writing Center Consultations”). They write, “to our knowledge there exist no studies [to date] that try to determine what exactly tutors’ writing and tutoring self-efficacies are, or in other words, which levels of self-efficacy they might have” (Powell and Hixson-Bowles 33). However, in an even more recent review of self-efficacy in the field, Wetzl et al. argue that writing studies and writing centers’ concern for student/writer self-efficacy is well placed and reciprocally beneficial. Wetzl et al. state, “the unique role[s] that regional campus student tutors play in the education of tutees and the formation of their identity as tutors” are mutually constitutive (65). And while much of writing center scholarship isn’t explicitly tagged as “tutor self-efficacy,” or conducted via RAD or quantitative research there-in, the field has nonetheless theorized the components and essence of tutor self-efficacy that can make up a tutor’s sense of “professional self.”
Wetzl et al. enumerate some of the things falling under the realm of “tutor self-efficacy,” like interacting with tutees, fellow tutors, fellow students in coursework, faculty, staff, and administrators while part of “both the university’s and the global community of practice of writing tutors, wanting to understand their communities of practice more fully, as well as the knowledge they wish they had” (65). Explicit ties to tutor self-efficacy, or the sense of and belief in one’s tutoring abilities, are outnumbered in the writing center studies parlor room of implied, affective analyses of tutor expertise and authority. While not writing exclusively about tutor self-efficacy, writing center studies takes up the essence there-in when it writes on how tutors analyze and act within the power, institutional, and pedagogical dynamics at play in their writing center sessions and centers more generally. Therefore, the field is often, if not always, thinking about tutor self-efficacy when scholars write about how it is a tutor scopes and determines how to summit the mountain terrain that can be the writing center session.
Take, for example, Peter Carino’s “Power and Authority in Peer Tutoring,” as one of many field texts which implicate tutor self-efficacy as a central, but unnamed, pillar of practice. The chapter argues that the fluid localities within a writing center session cannot be removed from the power dynamics “imbricated in the institutional position of the writing center but carrying over into the pedagogy of peer tutoring” (100). Within the landscape of power and authority, a tutor must recognize the locality of the appointment while also tending to the larger ties to discursive, cultural, and institutional influences of that session, that writer, and that writing.
Their tutor self-efficacy functions as a pedagogical map to guide them through the moments of a session. However, given the under-discussion of tutor self-efficacy in the field, tutors are also the ones who have to make that map, and largely by themselves. Therefore, their self-efficacy in regard to their ability to render a self-guiding pedagogical resource also influences how confident they feel when making decisions about where to go or what to do in a session based on that map. Though Carino doesn’t tag the chapter with “tutor self-efficacy” as a keyword, his description of power and authority in the session aligns with Wetzl et al.’s earlier definition of the very same, where a tutor and how they enact pedagogy are implicated in the global and local contexts of the moment.
Powell and Hixson-Bowles determine that tutor self-efficacy is exampled in how tutors “help students who struggle with writing … push students who succeed with writing, and work with all those in between” while balancing confidence in their own writing abilities between the diverse situations of a writing center session (32). And tutors must do this while maintaining “an understanding of what it is like to struggle with writing” (32). One of the methods of tutoring that Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Thompson propose, “cognitive scaffolding,” examples how it is tutors can do the balancing act of their own sense of self as writer and as tutor, and for helping their writer to have of themselves. Mackiewicz and Thompson write that cognitive scaffolding is an active method wherein “the tutor acts as a scaffold, helping the student to do things he or she cannot perform alone” (54-55). And Steven Corbett details that tutors negotiate building a scaffold, and their own pedagogical authority, to “broaden their instructional repertoires” in order to explore “more flexible notion[s] of what it means to tutor in the writing center, in the classroom, and in between” (84). Corbett, and Mackiewicz and Thompson explicate the pedagogical performances of the tutor as essentially tied to the tutor’s ability to recognize their unique power and positions and act to perform their idea of writing center-ness. As the authors argue in this article, and as tutors know well in the performance of their tutor-ness, all of these strategic and tactical maneuvers that a tutor must identify and balance are done with a timer counting down.
In essence, the field has been writing about the situations and actions of tutor self-efficacy without naming it as such, and this is clear because it is all these conversations that tutors read and figure out how to make real in the lived experiences of their writing center sessions. It is therefore an act of praxis to reflect on tutoring self-efficacy, affording tutors new perspectives on the cyclical connections between their tutoring practice and who it is they are as tutors in the timed moment of a session or across the timed months of a term. If all the field’s talk on and in tutor training is meant to help tutors feel empowered to wield the tools of the trade and do the work of the trade, under-discussion of time as a tool and as a constraining influence has left the toolkit incomplete. Moreover, the non-naming of tutor self-efficacy may leave tutors feeling like it’s all up to them to figure out the unknown, alone, of how to connect theory and practice. Yet, the co-authors of this article learned that wading through the unknown can feel scary, but it is also rife with creative potential for self-discovery.
Reflection Writing, Co-Authoring, and Community Sites
This reflection came together over the course of a semester while co-authors were working in the University Writing Center and at community partner sites. In my capacity as an assistant director of our UWC, I guided Lauren, Jennings, and Allie (graduate writing tutors) at and about the sites weekly during the Spring 2024 term.
We are lucky to have multiple community partnerships as a center, but the two highlighted in these narratives are a live-in learning community and a historic branch of the city’s free public library. The live-in learning community site provides housing and academic, personal, and familial support to their participants. Participants live on site, are parents/guardians of young children, and have left some form of federal or state support system. The site’s mission is to help their participants overcome obstacles, end the cycle of poverty, and head out into the workforce as educated, confident individuals. The space that we use in our partnership is a computer lab. In our partnership with this site, we offer 30-minute writing appointments at their location, which generally functions like a satellite center. Lauren and Allie tutored here once a week, in two-hour shifts, each having up to four 30-minute sessions a week.
The free public library site is a founding Carnegie library located in a historically Black neighborhood in the city. While we are also there to tutor specifically for a youth poetry competition that the library hosts, our partnership with them is more fluid and long-form. It is less focused on structured appointments like the live-in learning site, and is more centered on maintaining our partnership’s presence in the space to cement it as part of local community expectation. We’re there for whatever the community might bring us, including but not limited to their poetry for the contest. Jennings and I were at the library once a week, for three and two hour shifts respectively. Though we saw little traffic, the library’s administrators’ main goal for our partnership is not so much that we run a satellite office in their space, but so that someday, down the line, community members view us as constant and consistent visitors they can rely on to be at that place, at that time. Bronwyn Williams and Amy McCleese Nichols’ (2019) “Centering partnerships: A case for writing centers as sites for community engagement” overviews the development, stakes, and aims of these partnerships in detail.
On top of the hours spent tutoring in the UWC and community sites, we met as a group and in one-to-one conferences frequently to talk through how things were going at each site, community literacy readings, questions or ideas we had that we wanted to float, etc. Through these discussions, each co-author developed their narratives as they are presented here.
A key result of Powell and Hixson-Bowels’ study is that tutors each occupy diverse identities coming from unique and local backgrounds to the shared space of the center (37); therefore, tutor self-efficacy develops individualized to each tutor and intersecting with their other senses of self and self-efficacies. Given the unique contexts that each of the co-authors brings to and occupies in these experiences, we determined that individual narratives were the best form for this reflection. Presenting three stories from writing center timescapes which snapshot how each author constructs and reflects on their tutoring self-efficacy, Lauren, Allie, and Jennings welcome you to some of their time at our community partner sites. The three of them revised multiple drafts in conjunction with peer feedback from the group and informed by the continuing development of their community site relationships. This process helped the co-authors of this article identify and tap into the undercurrents of their writing center praxis.
Lauren’s Reflection: The Intersection of Writing Center Policy and Time
In Allie, Jennings, and my tutor-training course during the Fall 2023 semester, we often discussed directive vs. nondirective tutoring, writing across disciplines, and motivating writers to complete their assigned coursework. All the while, I had been waiting to work with the UWC’s community partners, and I was eager to apply our conversations and dive in. After a tour of the facility, Kendyl, Allie, and I sat down with a few staff members. It was then that I learned all our sessions would last thirty minutes.
The new sense of urgency made me nervous one week later as I sat in the site’s computer lab waiting to take my first virtual appointment with a participant. I logged on early and found myself still alone on the call five, ten, and 15 minutes after my appointment was meant to start. This begged the question: how long is it appropriate to wait online before I call it and log off? The ambiguity regarding appointment policies outside of the University Writing Center was new to me, as I am accustomed to a very specific set of timestamped procedures. The last thing I wanted to do was leave just before a writer logged on. If not for an administrator being there that day to ask about the call status and who could contact the participant, I think I would’ve waited an hour before daring to press the end call button.
This experience brought to my awareness that so much of writing center policy governs time; when a writer can walk-in and still be accepted for an appointment, how long a tutor or consultant will wait for them, when tutoring needs to pause or cease, and when a writer is considered a ‘no-show,’ are all determined and enforced by measurements of time. As much as English scholars may joke that we don’t like numbers, we are rather reliant on them when it comes to the daily operations of the writing center. We neatly package messy, generative conversations about ideas and pedagogy into different pockets of time, and often judge the success of a session based on how long we can persuade writers to continue sitting and writing with us.
I didn’t know what to expect the following week, when my writer rescheduled our virtual appointment, and I waited on the video call again. There was no administrator on-site that day, and I sat for another 25 minutes, still unsure how long was an appropriate amount of time to wait. At the University Writing Center, video appointments are either converted to written feedback (if there is a document attached to the appointment form) or disregarded after 15 minutes have lapsed without a writer or writing present. But here, without communication that was specific to our setting, I couldn’t bring myself to end the call. Fortunately, my instincts were correct as my writer logged on at 3:25 and we reviewed her research proposal.
Any nerves I felt regarding time constraints or tutor pedagogy quickly diminished as the writer and I considered her previous experiences in English classrooms, her excitement that her instructor enjoyed her writing style, and her new puppy, who frequently chimed into our appointment. Our conversations centered on organization or the effective use of topic sentences were of equal importance to affirmation and rapport building throughout our session. During our appointment, totaling 25 minutes, I realized that establishing trust and rapport with writers should not be sacrificed in this community’s context, no matter the time constraints placed upon us. Yet, due to the brief nature of a two-page research proposal, we were able to address organization, topic sentences, and writing process concerns during our session.
Rather than slashing important pedagogical strategies to accommodate a shortened session, consultants and tutors might consider collaboratively setting the agenda with their writer instead, maintaining a tight focus on their individual concerns and needs. Our discipline’s dependence on timekeeping as a means of meeting institutional standards, clarifying writing center expectations for writers, training tutors, and maintaining professionalism may need to become more flexible, or at the very least be reconsidered, when operating in community settings outside the university. As consultants and writing center scholars, we must ensure that our understanding and use of time serves writers and writing center pedagogy, and not the other way around.
Allie’s Reflection: Navigating Time Constraints
Through previous weeks, Lauren and I have prepared to work with the community site participants and have been getting acclimated to the setting of the site. The first writer I met with was an intern who was getting hours for her graduate social work practicum, which she was doing at the same community site. I wondered how was I supposed to tutor someone who was in the environment but was not a participant? And, because she was not a “participant,” did she still apply to the 30-minute session rule? I felt I had little time to prepare for the session and brainstorm how I was supposed to navigate the scenario, so I didn’t know exactly what it was I should do when it came to working with her. But, I could already feel my mindset shifting to how I could better accommodate the participants from incredibly diverse backgrounds and experiences and with similarly diverse writing needs.
In my undergraduate years as a writing center consultant, we had evening open appointment hours where anyone could come in with any writing question and stay for as long as they wanted during those hours until the center closed. Coming to our current UWC from my undergraduate institution’s writing center, I was not prepared for the new physical structure and an ability to head to a “back room” when appointments were done, eliminating the possibility for students to linger around the center like they did for hours after an appointment at my undergrad institution that had no back room. During the session I had with the intern at our community site which takes place in an open computer lab, I felt like I was back in that same scenario; I knew that we had talked about only having 30-minute sessions, but I had no other appointments scheduled for the day and I had no back room to go to indicating that the session was done. Because of this, the appointment ended up lasting for 75 minutes.
Even though I was unsure about how to proceed in a session with her, and despite the fact that we did a lot of talking that wasn’t necessarily about writing, I did feel like I was able to build a connection with her through our long appointment. She even stopped in to say hello and give us updates on how her paper went when we were back for our third week of sessions. On the other hand, when I had my first session with an actual “participant,” I was beginning to feel the pressure of the time constraint. The writer came in right on time as Lauren and I got there, which worked out well because her being on time meant we could use every minute up if need be. I had the writer read her paper out loud as I would do in any normal writing center session at the UWC. We had the perfect amount of time to read over the paper as it was only two pages and then discuss it afterwards. I felt we were able to touch on all her points of interest within the paper, such as citations and transitions.
It wasn’t until after the session that I reflected on the use-value or applicability of the read-aloud method; would it be as effective in sessions that have such a time constraint like ours? Because of the time constraints, I realized that I needed to prepare for giving up the read-aloud method but still have a way to involve the participant in describing their feelings on the paper to me. The most effective way I could think of doing this was to have the participant narrate their writing process to me. Perhaps they were really struggling in a certain section, or maybe they felt particularly good about a section that their professor told them was not working. In describing the writing process and the emotions that come with it in the session, more time is saved for the discussion of the piece that could otherwise be taken up by the read-aloud. With this, it also leaves more opportunity for the writer and the consultant to connect with one another. With only 30 minutes to spend together, the more time that is spent discussing their work, the more possibility there is for this connection to become established between both parties.
Jennings’ Reflection: Adjusting to Absence
The first day we visited the community site ended up with a lot of questions about how we could best use the space as a writing center space. Kendyl and I had many long talks about how to make ourselves a reliable resource and negotiate our pedagogical practices in an entirely different setting than what that pedagogy is often intended for. But the thing that concerned me most about working in a public space with K-12 students after school was the lack of pre-existing knowledge of a writer and their needs that, at the UWC, usually provides as preparation for a session with a limited amount of time. If we don’t have the same kind of time for preparation regarding a tutoring session here at the community site, how could we best adapt our services for a new demographic in a new setting with a new time constraint?
I began to realize that the time we have at the site is limited, but its limits come in a different form than a writing center. We don't have three hours that we must divide into thirty-minute sessions with an individual student. We have three hours to be present with an unknown number of students with unknown needs at any given time. Early on, Kendyl and I would arrive at 3:00 on the dot, set up our various activities and signage at the center table to then see little-to-no traffic. Aside from one community member sitting with us to make Valentines cards one afternoon, it felt like we were only occupying a table. All of this is to say, by the end of our first month, I largely felt like I had failed in my community site when it came to traditional writing center pedagogical practice. To overcome the hump of disappointment I was feeling in myself, I started rethinking our utilization of time and my conception of it. If it’s not just the time spent with writers, but the time spent at the site overall, what can pedagogy and purpose become?
One day, as soon as I sat down at our usual table, I was approached by a community writer who had heard about us from the site staff. He had two big projects for us: a nonfiction book and a book of poetry that he’d written with a specific audience in mind. He was apprehensive about approaching us, as he’d been in and out of academic circles. But in talking with us, we were able to reassure him that we weren’t just here to work with academic writing, and wanted to meet the needs of anyone who came to us. We planned to meet again the following week, to give us time to read his work and discuss his wants for the writing.
Then, an uptick in tours of the site gave rise to more student interest in the space as an after-school study spot. The week after our session with our book writer, we again walked right into a potential community interaction. We found half a dozen students already in the space, and while the initial group wasn’t very interested in us, I was able to have a session with one of the site staff. She was co-writing and editing a memoir with her grandmother, but was having trouble navigating the collaborative process and designing the structure of the book. It seemed that she was having to transcribe and organize handwritten excerpts from her grandmother and was being encouraged by her grandmother to contribute her own writing to the book. I offered the structure of a novel I was familiar with as an example of how she could organize a book with a mismatched divide in the words of the two writers, and she was excited to try it as she continued to write.
After that, another group of students came from a later bus run. I introduced myself and told them about what we do, and one immediately asked me for time. This was the closest we’d gotten so far to what we’d been told to expect in our days of tutoring at the beginning of the year, working with a student on a research paper. She told me she would be picked up in only a few minutes, so I took some practices I’d learned from doing sessions at our UWC. As I read and left comments on her paper, I narrated things I was noticing, but wanted to have my feedback in writing so the student could reference it later. I had a major confidence boost after these sessions because I was able to find a way to deliver feedback more efficiently when we knew our time was limited but were uncertain of how much we actually had. I was proving to myself that I could expand pedagogy to an engaged community setting and it could work, regardless of how much time we had together.
Concluding Thoughts
This reflection came about through conversations about working at community partner sites. However, we’ve seen that regardless of where a writing center moment unfolds, community site or UWC, we think about time and our ability to identify the work and do the work (Geller; Powell and Hixson-Bowles). Whether at a UWC or a community site, it is important to foster tutors’ self-efficacy in writing center work. One way to do this is to examine the parameters that frame tutor decision-making. We have found time to be a valuable asset for examination, both at the institutional and interpersonal levels. Writing centers often function by structuring time. However, when moving into communities, we learned that a great way to build tutor self-efficacy is by providing opportunities to engage with writers in situations that have unstructured time. Because of the nature of our community relationships, a lot of time went ungoverned or under-structured compared to our well-established UWC, and therefore tutors felt they could really flex in their self-efficacy by their unique abilities to decide what to do about time. Across these narratives, tutors found that they were able to make powerful decisions about how to structure time based on the writer and the community they were encountering and how it helped them grow as tutors and helped us as a center think about time and efficacy differently.
Spending a semester in the unknown has helped Lauren discover how both tutor and writer creating a shared affective environment, together honing their tutorly and writerly self-efficacies, can help both feel like mutually empowered agents in the moment of the session. Lauren deciding to wait–to not hang up the call after the writer hadn’t appeared–though she was anxious in that moment, helped her root into her senses her tutor self-efficacy and what she as a tutor can decide. Outside the spatial boundaries of the UWC, Lauren was able to flex new muscles as a tutor and start to analyze her relationship to policies, pedagogies, their interaction, and her agency there-in. In essence, because of the new and unfamiliar, Lauren negotiated who she is as tutor and how she in that role can make the unfamiliar meaningfully familiar.
Allie also narrates how space and the time spent within it are highly influential elements of tutor senses of self, their role, and their relationship to writers – in other words, their tutoring self-efficacy. Maybe at the UWC, Allie wouldn’t have felt empowered to have a 75-minute session because of the structural and procedural differences of the main center compared to the community sites. Nonetheless, Allie felt empowered to work with a writer for as long as that writer found it valuable, and in doing so, made decisions about pedagogy based on her awareness of and agency within institutional norms. A sort of inverse to Lauren’s story, Allie explores the boundaries and form of writing center studies through her analysis of space and time’s relationship. Because of her work reflecting on her individual tutor self-efficacy as it’s evolved across centers and spaces, Allie felt like she could meet this writer’s needs, how the writer needed.
In yet another unique context outside the UWC, Jennings initiated their own paradigm shift on the value that writing center studies bring to community relationships, related to and outside the boundaries of “the session.” Where Lauren and Allie experienced what felt to them like sort of compacted and expanded writing center sessions and had to grapple with time and their sense of self in that dynamic, Jennings’ time at their community site was a sort of ad lib, on-call dynamic. The community writers at Jennings’ location may not have even known they had a question about writing in some form until they got to the space that day and saw our table set-up. In this dynamic, Jennings, unlike Lauren and Allie, was not really a determiner of session time or time spent talking with writers. At this community site, the site itself is the main draw for community members and we offered them yet another activity with which to spend their time while there. Unlike Jennings’ experience with walk-ins and scheduled appointments at the UWC, they had to define and negotiate how to “writing center” on the fly and be able to let it go along with the writer, no matter how much time spent there-in and with no clue when it may happen again.
Though there’s ample scholarship on space (Hadfield et al), emotional labor (Mannon), hospitality (Haswell and Haswell) and community relationships (Rousculp) which supports these take-aways, it is a different thing to be a tutor and to feel it, to learn it from experience rather than just by reading it. Or, to experience putting reading into action. Through action and enaction, we have learned that “what feels achievable” and “what success looks like” are choices that a tutor who is tapped into their self-efficacy feels empowered to decide. Although it came for these tutors at the end of their time in our UWC, this is an important take-away for these tutors and tutors in general.
It’s significant because, upon reflection, these are considerations all of us in writing center work are always making. It’s happening all the time; tutors are always evaluating their sense of self and ability as tutors to identify and meet the needs of their writers within the boundaries of local center or community dynamics (Bartelt). Whether first-time tutors in a UWC or a community site, and even as veteran tutors, we’ve found time to be useful in understanding tutor reflexes, both as a lens with which to analyze the development of tutor self-efficacy over time and as an agent of pedagogy for tutors to engage with in the moment of a session with a writer, in whatever form that session takes. For other writing centers, finding ways to adjust time—whether that means adding structure, or taking it away—has the potential to continue this work and possibly reveal different ways to tailor timescapes to writer and tutor need.
We therefore echo Powell and Hixson-Bowles’ call for greater attention paid to tutor self-efficacy, and Geller’s call for further research into time as an agent in the writing center. As we have begun to do here, future scholarship might engage the fabric of writing center studies to weave together a history and modernity of tutor self-efficacy. We ask what tenets of writing center studies and practice are imbued with the mark of tutor self-efficacy? And like Geller and her tutors’ use of reflection, discussion, and even drawing to tell the stories of their tutoring and time, we encourage the same for scholarship and practice. Let’s tell stories about time, about tutoring self-efficacy, about ourselves and the boundary-ing and disciplining dynamics of the work we do. If it is through stories, the ones we tell as tutors and to tutors, that the nature of writing center-ness can be revealed, what stories of tutor self-efficacy do you, your tutors, and your centers have to tell? What might we learn about ourselves and our field when we do?
Works Cited
Bannister-Wills, Linda. “Developing A Peer Tutoring Program.” Writing Centers: Theory and Administration, edited by Gary Olson, NCTE, 1984, pp. 132-43.
Bartelt, Margaret. “Am I a Good Tutor?” Writing Lab Newsletter, 19, 6, 1995, pp. 8.
Carino, Peter. “Power and Authority in Peer Tutoring.” The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives On Writing Center Scholarship, edited by Michael Pemberton and Joyce Kinkhead, UP Colorado, 2003, pp. 96-113.
Corbett, Steven J. “Negotiating Pedagogical Authority: The Rhetoric of Writing Center Tutoring Styles and Methods.” Rhetoric Review, 32, 1, pp. 81-98, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2013.739497
Ekholm, Eric et al., “The Relation Of College Student Self-Efficacy Toward Writing And Writing Self-Regulation Aptitude: Writing Feedback Perceptions As A Mediating Variable.” Teaching in Higher Education, 20, 2, pp. 197-207. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2014.974026
Fitzgerald, Lauren and Melissa Ianetta. The Oxford guide for writing tutors: Practice and research. Oxford UP, 2016.
Geller, Anne. “Tick-Tock, Next: Finding Epochal Time in The Writing Center.” The Writing Center Journal, 25, 1, 2007, pp. 5-24. https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1569
Geller, A., et al. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Utah State UP, 2005.
Gillespie, Paula and Neil Lerner. The Allyn and Bacon guide to peer tutoring. Allyn & Bacon, 2000.
Gillespie, Paula and Neil Lerner. The Longman guide to peer tutoring, 2nd ed., Pearson Education, 2008.
Hadfield, Leslie et al. An Ideal Writing Center: Re-Imagining Space And Design. In The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives On Writing Center Scholarship, edited by Michael Pemberton and Joyce Kinkhead, Utah State UP, 2003, pp. 166-176.
Haswell, Richard and Janis Haswell. Hospitality and authoring: An essay for the English profession. UP Colorado, 2015.
Hawkins, R. Evon. “From Interest and Expertise: Improving Student Writers’ Working Authorial Identities.” Writing Lab Newsletter, 32, 6, 2008, pp. 1-5.
Haynes-Burton, Cynthia. “Constructing Our Ethos: Making Writing Centers ‘Convenient.’” Composition Studies, 20, 2, 1992, pp. 51-59. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43501238
Iris-Soven, Margot. What The Writing Tutor Needs To Know. Thomson Wadsworth, 2006.
Lundin, Isabelle M. et al. “The Impact of Writing Center Consultations on Student Writing Self- Efficacy” The Writing Center Journal, 41, 2, 2023, pp. 7-25. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/27262713
Mackiewicz, Jo and Isabelle Thompson. “Motivational Scaffolding, Politeness, And Writing Center Tutoring.” The Writing Center Journal, 33, 1, 2013, pp. 38-73. https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1756
Mannon, Bethany. “Centering The Emotional Labor Of Writing Tutors.” The Writing Center Journal, 39, 1/2, 2021, 143-168. https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1962
Martinez, Christy T. et al. “Pain and Pleasure in Short Essay Writing: Factors Predicting University Students’ Writing Anxiety and Writing Self-Efficacy.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 54, 5, 2011, pp. 351-360. International Reading Association, doi: 10.1598/JAAL.54.5.5
Mitchell, Kim M. et al. “An Exploration Of Writing Self Efficacy And Writing Self- Regulatory Behaviors in Undergraduate Writing.” The Canadian Journal for The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 10, 2, 2019, pp. 1-23. https://doi.org/10.5206/cjsotl-rcacea.2019.2.8175
Myers-Breslin, Linda, editor. Administrative Problem-Solving For Writing Programs And Writing Centers: Scenario In Effective Program Management. NCTE, 1999.
North, Steven. “The Idea Of A Writing Center.” College English, 46, 1984, pp. 433-446. https://www.jstor.org/stable/377047
Pajares, Frank. “Self-Efficacy Beliefs, Motivation, And Achievement In Writing: A Review of The Literature.” Reading and Writing Quarterly, 19, 2, 2003, pp. 139-158. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10573560308222
Powell, Roger and Kelsey Hixson-Bowles. “Too Confident or Not Confident Enough?: A Quantitative Snapshot of Writing Tutors’ Writing and Tutoring Self-Efficacies.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 16, 1, 2018, pp. 36-56. https://www.praxisuwc.com/161-powell-and-hixson-bowles
Rousculp, Tiffany. Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change At a Community Writing Center. NCTE, 2014.
Ryan, Leigh and Lisa Zimmerelli. The Bedford Guide For Writing Tutors. 6th ed., Bedford/Saint Martin’s, 2016.
Schunk, Dale and Barry J. Zimmerman, “Influencing Children’s Self-Efficacy and Self-Regulation of Reading and Writing Through Modeling.” Reading and Writing Quarterly, 23, 1, 2007, pp. 7-25. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10573560600837578
Sherwood, Steve. “Tutoring And The Writer’s ‘Felt Sense’: Developing And Safeguarding The Mind’s Ear.” Writing Lab Newsletter, 19, 10, 1995, pp. 10-14.
Terzano, Kathryn. “Short-Time Tutorial Strategies.” Writing Lab Newsletter, 35, 1, 2010, pp. 14-15.
Vandenberg, Peter. “Lessons of Inscription: Tutor Training And The ‘Professional Conversation.’” The Writing Center Journal, 19, 2, 1999, pp. 59-83. https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1416
Wetzl, Ana et al. “What Our Tutors Know: The Advantages of Small Campus Tutoring Centers.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 20, 2, 2023, pp. 68-77. https://www.praxisuwc.com/202-wetzl-et-al
Williams, Bronwyn and Amy McCleese Nichols. “Centering Partnerships: A Case For Writing Centers As Sites For Community Engagement.” Community Literacy Journal, 13, 2, 2019, pp. 88-106. doi: 10.25148/CLJ.13.2.009071