Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 23, No. 2 (2026)

“I was surprised at how well I was able to handle it”: Performing Emotional Labor with Emotional Intelligence in the Writing Center

Grace Williams
Lansing Community College
willig30@lcc.edu

Amy Latawiec
Wayne State University
amy.latawiec@wayne.edu

Abstract

This article, first, describes the inspiration for tutor training on emotional labor at our urban research university where we served as director and assistant director of the writing center. We then detail the results of an IRB-approved study in which we conducted a focus group with three writing center tutors who participated in this training during the 2024–2025 Academic Year. Our central research question for this study was, “Does specific training on emotional labor impact tutors’ relationship to their work?” We found through focus group data that the training did have a positive impact on tutors’ relationship to their work. Specifically, tutors who participated in the focus group reported that as a result of their training, they felt satisfied with their work and were comfortable supporting students intellectually and emotionally while setting boundaries when needed. These results affirm calls from within writing center studies about the value of addressing emotional labor of tutors in tutor training.

Keywords: writing center, tutor training, emotional labor, emotional intelligence, boundary-setting

Introduction

Emotion is a key component of writerly development because different emotions impact the relationship writers have towards their tasks. Emotional experiences relating to writing can impact both short- and long-term progress in student writers. Work from Dana Lynn Driscoll and Roger Powell suggests that when a student experiences an emotion during the writing process, that emotion can be categorized in one of three ways: generative (it assists the writing process), disruptive (it impedes the writing process), and circumstantial (it initially seems like a hindrance but is able to be worked through). Oftentimes, the emotions that would be categorized as circumstantial in Driscoll and

Powell’s study (frustration, anxiety, confusion) are the ones that tutors encounter in the writing center, something highlighted in the first chapter of Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli’s handbook The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors (the guide we—Amy and Grace—used in our writing center). It is the task of the writing center tutor to help the student manage their circumstantial emotions so the tutor can have a positive impact on the student’s writing development. In other words, writing center tutoring is a job that requires emotional labor because it, in part, involves the management of other peoples’ emotions.

In Arlie Hochschild’s seminal text, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, she defines jobs that require emotional labor as those that 1) feature contact with the public, 2) “require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person,” and 3) “allow the employer, through training and supervision, to exercise a degree of control over the emotional activities of employees” (147). All three of these criteria are met in the writing center as tutors work with students, build student confidence in writing (among other things), and follow the emotional display rules of their workplace (such as maintaining a curious demeanor towards student writing). Hochschild argues that while emotional management is a regular part of daily life and interacting with other people, this personal management becomes emotional labor when it is enacted as part of a public facing job. Additionally, when the employer is able to have a say in how the employee expresses emotion, “the worker must give up control over how the work is to be done” (Hochschild 119; emphasis original). The underlying source of stress for workers required to perform emotional labor is the dissonance between “self and feeling” and “self and display” when a worker’s feelings do not align with the emotional performance they are required to give for the benefit of a client (Hochschild 131). This dissonance can be exacerbated by poor boundary-setting and lead to burnout. Therefore, in order to avoid the negative consequences of emotional labor in writing centers for tutors, writing center directors must address it at the root: in job training. We attempted to do this in our writing center by focusing our tutor training on helping our tutors understand emotional labor required of them and developing the emotional intelligence necessary to perform this labor. We believe emotional intelligence is an important corollary to any conversation about emotional labor because emotional intelligence involves the ability to recognize and use emotions to complete tasks, the central duty of the emotional laborer.

This article, first, describes the inspiration for our tutor training on emotional labor at our urban research university where we served as director (Amy) and assistant director of the writing center (Grace). We then detail the results of an IRB-approved study in which we conducted a focus group with three writing center tutors who participated in this training during the 2024–2025 Academic Year. Our central research question for this study was, “Does specific training on emotional labor impact tutors’ relationship to their work?” We found through focus group data that the training did have a positive impact on tutors’ relationship to their work. Specifically, tutors who participated in the focus group reported that as a result of their training, they felt satisfied with their work and were comfortable supporting students intellectually and emotionally while setting boundaries when needed. These results affirm calls from within writing center studies about the value of addressing emotional labor of tutors in tutor training.

Emotional Labor in the Writing Center: The Past Becoming Present

Emotional labor within writing studies has received increased attention in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (Driscoll and Wells), but writing centers have long been invested in the emotions of the students they see. For instance, even before 1989’s “Freud in the Writing Center,” in a 1946 issue of College English, Levette Davidson and Frederick Sorenson described the way in which their writing clinic at the University of Denver acted as a supplement to English I courses and as part of a unit with a reading clinic, speech clinic, and counseling clinic. These four clinics were intended to provide individualized support to students outside of the classroom. Not only did Davidson and Sorenson invoke the idea of a medical facility in the name of their writing clinic and its association with entities that do attend to student health, they also advocated for a style of tutoring based on the work of psychologist Carl Rogers: Rogerian nondirective counseling. Rogerian counseling contends that the client is the expert and that the answers they need to their problems can be obtained through questioning and nonjudgement on behalf of the therapist. In the Denver writing clinic, clinicians—that is, English graduate students—used questioning to gather biographic information from a student in order to “identify his needs and his hopes and his fears” (Davidson and Sorenson 85). Davidson and Sorenson asserted that this approach would decrease writer’s block by increasing confidence in the student.

Nondirective tutoring is still one of the most recognizable features of writing center work and from the very start it was associated with supporting positive emotional development in students. Davidson and Sorenson’s use of therapeutic techniques was not received without pushback, however. Writing center historian Peter Carino notes that the Denver clinic was criticized for “engaging in amateur psychology” (108). Writing in 1949, Sorenson, too, called the writing clinic a failure. In particular, Sorenson notes that the writing clinic received little support from the counseling center, commenting that this was ultimately a good thing as “informed people” like actual psychologists “could not possibly permit uninformed ‘clinicians’ [writing center tutors] to tamper with student lives, and, as it turned out, there was no program for training clinicians in the methods of teaching grammar and rhetoric, let alone how to analyze students” (325). Still, Sorenson asserted his belief in the trial and error of the clinic and the larger student-centered model of English I at Denver. Also, as we will go on to discuss, it seems that as we have developed the ability to train our clinician-tutors in transmitting writing knowledge, writing center studies is reconsidering how to give students emotionally-sensitive feedback.

Elizabeth Boquet echoes Sorenson’s assessment of the value of his and Davidson’s work in her history of writing centers. Bouquet commends the educators for their “counter-institutional impulses” (469) that ultimately allowed writing centers to develop their own identity distinct from the writing classroom. Boquet writes that,

[T]he Rogerian nondirective method succeeds in securing the space of the writing lab as sacrosanct, … a space where students should feel secure in thoughts and ideas, as they should in a therapist's office. It is through this therapeutic closed-door policy that writing centers begin to engage in some version of counter-hegemonic work, supported by a doctor-patient privilege which ushers in both a model for professionalism and an invitation for tutors to assume a neutral posture (at least as an ideal). (470)

Writing center professionals have known since the inception of writing centers that what makes writing centers special is their ability to support students’ intellectual and emotional wellbeing, or as it has been put in recent years, the students’ “whole person” (McBride et al.; Driscoll and Wells).

With this history in mind, we are inclined to affirm Dana Lynn Driscoll and Jennifer Wells’ assessment that it is “possible, and perhaps likely, that students have been seeking writing center support all along because it is a place where both [social and emotional] needs can be met” (16). Though the gap between Davidson and Sorenson’s work in the 1940s and the recent uptake of emotional labor in the writing center has been long, it is promising that the writing center studies as a field is returning to the affirmation that this type of labor is essential to the work tutors do (Driscoll and Wells; Giaimo, Unwell Writing Centers; Im et al.; Mannon; Nelson et al., “Making Visible”). It is because of this return to the emotional side of tutoring that our training came to be, and it is our hope that the description of this training and results of this study can be used to further the growing body of strategies for supporting the emotional labor of tutors.

Our Training: Background and Design

While scholarship supports the existence of emotional labor, many of the materials we as writing center directors still rely on for training does not. In Bethany Mannon’s analysis of popular writing center tutoring handbooks, she found that they “rarely distinguish from the presence of emotion the work of managing emotion” (145; emphasis original), thereby making emotional labor invisible by lumping it into general information about emotions tutors may encounter from students. Mannon concludes that while tutoring guides may acknowledge emotion, they do not present emotional labor as a skill that can be improved (156). Moreover, training manuals, such as The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors by Lauren Fitzgerald and Melissa Ianetta, seem to assume that tutors will come into their positions at the writing center with a high level of emotional intelligence in place, with comments like, “You probably already know how to interact with others, to help put people at ease if they seem to be feeling unsure…” (qtd. in Mannon 145). When we as administrators assume tutors are adept at managing emotions (both those of others and their own), we make them responsible for figuring out what to do when emotionally charged consultations occur. The assumption Mannon describes training manuals as making—that because a person has a desire to become a tutor, they automatically have the willingness and ability to undertake emotional labor in that role—was a key consideration in deciding to focus our training on how to perform emotional labor.

Another impetus for our training is how tutoring guides advise tutors to deal with their emotions by projecting professionalism. In the handbook we use in our center, Ryan and Zimmerelli, in part, define professionalism as “conduct that demonstrates a good work ethic and respect for the people and situations you encounter” (ix). As part of maintaining professionalism, Ryan and Zimmerelli advise that tutors, “Greet each writer cheerfully and indicate that you are ready to begin work, even if you are tired or under stress from school or job responsibilities” (2). Here, employing professionalism is presented as a sort of coping mechanism for emotional stress tutors bring to consultations because it is what a tutor can defer to even when feeling overwhelmed themselves. However, this may instead compound that stress by forcing tutors to perform more emotional labor than their job initially requires in order to maintain a “pleasant” (Ryan and Zimmerelli 1) atmosphere in the writing center. Im et al. suggest that the emphasis on professionalism that tutoring guides present, “may impose emotion-display rules that further exacerbate the emotional labor demanded by tutors” (Im et al. 218). Tutoring sessions can become emotionally laborious when tutors feel pressured to uphold professionalism in scenarios where they, for example, experience conflict with a student or when they have to hide their true feelings in a consultation (Im et al.). In the narrow context in which Ryan and Zimmerelli define it (and that other manuals Im et al. explore), professionalism does not help tutors problem-solve or set boundaries because it asks them to subsume their emotions in favor of maintaining a positive work environment and service for student-clients. 

Im et al.’s work on professionalism once more calls to mind Hochschild’s focus on emotional labor as that which is prescribed and monitored by employers. When we say that we as administrators require emotional labor of our tutors this is what we mean: we make policies and assign handbooks that attempt to exert control on their emotional expression. It is essential for writing center administrators to acknowledge the emotional components of tutors’ work and to prepare them to engage in it because we are the ones that require them to do so as their supervisors. Some of the policies and procedures in our writing center that our tutors must follow that have allowed us (Amy and Grace) as administrators to control our tutors’ emotional expression include: “I will not comment negatively to students about any teacher’s grading policies, teaching methods, or personalities;” “I will refrain from commenting on the content of a student’s work and/or giving my opinion about the subject matter of a student’s writing;” “If a student is late to their appointment, I will kindly remind them that we must still adhere to the original appointment end time;” and “I will conduct myself professionally and refrain from becoming personally or romantically involved with a student while I am their tutor.” These policies exist to ensure tutors manage emotions they experience as a result of tutoring consultations in order to maintain a smooth operation which in turn contributes to building a positive campus presence for the writing center. We believe these are beneficial policies, though we do recognize they require tutors to perform emotional labor and tutors should receive support in learning how to implement them.

The focus of the tutor training that Grace developed for the Fall 2024 semester was on introducing tutors to the concept of emotional labor while providing opportunities to develop their emotional intelligence through personal reflection and group discussion. In several pieces about emotional labor in the writing center, scholars make the recommendation that tutors be given opportunities to develop their emotional intelligence in order to perform emotional labor (Driscoll and Wells; Iantorno; Lape; Peterson). John D. Mayer, Peter Salovey, and David R. Caruso state that a person is emotionally intelligent when they have the ability to “(a) perceive emotions in oneself and others accurately, (b) use emotions to facilitate thinking, (c) understand emotions, emotional language, and the signals conveyed by emotions, and (d) manage emotions so as to attain specific goals” (506). In other words, emotional intelligence requires being able to recognize emotions in oneself and in others and to take favorable actions based on those emotions. Emotionally intelligent tutors are tutors who can attend to the needs of students and to their own needs. Emotional intelligence has been identified as a trait that contributes to workplace satisfaction and better mental health (Guy and Lee; Newman et al.; Schutte and Loi) and as such, is an added benefit of our training, given that writing center tutors can and do take valuable lessons from their writing center training that helps them in careers beyond the writing center, and even within their personal relationships (Hughes et al.).

At the time of our training and focus group, all tutors in our writing center were students (both graduate and undergraduate, but primarily undergraduate) at our university and they were trained on the job as they were hired. In the Fall of 2024, we began the semester with two returning tutors and hired six new tutors. Training for this semester involved five modules on our institution’s Learning Management System (Canvas) and monthly hour-long meetings held via Zoom. The Canvas modules included training overviews, materials for review, and activities for practice. Overall, the modules and meetings from this semester focused on acclimating the mostly new tutors to the tutoring process, common writing situations at our center, and university resources, in addition to opportunities for developing emotional intelligence. At the start of the semester, tutors were asked to submit a reflection on Canvas about their incoming abilities to meet students’ writing and emotional needs. Then, the first training module provided an overview of emotional labor and emotional intelligence, paired with an activity where tutors identified potential student and tutor emotions and subsequent actions for a variety of tutoring situations. This was to foreground the first and fourth components of emotional intelligence: the ability to identify the emotions of oneself and others and to then act on them to accomplish tasks. The pre-semester reflective prompt as well as the emotions labor and intelligence overview and activity can be seen in Appendix A. 

Once tutors had a preliminary understanding of emotional labor and intelligence, they completed one Canvas module per month on a variety of topics to prepare for the intellectual labor of their positions, including working in unfamiliar genres, understanding citation styles, and conducting research. Each of these modules also included prompting for tutors to think about what emotions may come up in scenarios relating to these topics and how they may act in response, thereby continuing to work on recognizing emotions and considering how to use emotion to accomplish consultation goals. For example, in these modules, tutors reflected on what they might do if a student became frustrated learning a new citation style. The final activity for our tutors in the Fall 2024 semester was to take a section of our training manual (The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors) and to rewrite it with actionable options for practicing emotional intelligence (the prompt for which is also presented in Appendix A). This activity was intended for tutors to critically engage with training materials and apply their emotional intelligence by developing their own strategies.

Our monthly meetings kept the same idea as our Canvas modules, but focused on tutors sharing tutoring tips with one another to, 1) help develop a community of practice and 2) allow tutors see the different options for responding to emotions. With the knowledge that tutors may feel uncomfortable expressing negative emotions towards their work in front of their bosses, we also utilized breakout rooms for tutors to freely discuss their challenges with one another before bringing them for moderated discussion with input from us as administrators. Similarly, although not a part of our official training, we maintained a disposition of openness for tutors so they could employ the necessary boundaries for managing the emotional labor of their work by. These boundaries range from taking 5-10 minute breaks between back-to-back consultations, to the restriction of a student’s ability to schedule appointments with a specific tutor (a rare but important measure taken to ensure tutor comfort and safety). Overall, our goal for our Fall 2024 training was to encourage tutors to be consistently conscious of the emotions involved in tutoring, both from the students with whom they work and themselves. This is something that continued into our Winter 2025 training as a regular part of our meetings, though the larger focus was on professionalization projects (including producing training materials for other tutors, creating hand-outs for students, and presenting at a conference). One tutor (Tutor 1 in this study) spent the Winter 2025 semester planning for and filming a video for other tutors about boundary-setting for asynchronous appointments inspired by the Fall 2024 training.

Methods

Qualitative Methodology, Methods, and Data Analysis

This study used a qualitative description approach to assess student tutors’ insights about emotional intelligence, the training they received in our writing center, and other thoughts about their experience as tutors during the Fall 2024 and Winter 2025 semesters on our writing center team. The aim of the study was to collect data in an effort to learn the opinions and perspectives of tutors in our writing center who received specific training about the relationship between emotional intelligence and the work of a writing tutor. A qualitative description approach methodology provided rich discussion points for tutors to share their experiences and hear from each other throughout the discussion. This made it possible to highlight the voices of the tutors, ensuring that the findings were grounded in their actual experiences.

The qualitative data was collected during one focus group session lasting approximately 35 minutes. The focus group included four pre-written open-ended questions. During the focus group, we anticipated the potential need to skip questions for time or to substitute some questions with relevant follow-up questions (all questions can be seen in Appendix B). Each focus group question was tailored to identify the perspectives of our writing center’s tutoring staff about their experience with their work as it relates to emotional intelligence. We recruited five (5) student tutors who started in our writing center during Fall of 2024 (when we implemented training on emotional intelligence) and who were still employed during the Summer of 2025. Of those 5, three (3) tutors were available to attend the focus group session. All tutors were provided with a research sheet that stated the purpose of the research and were informed that participation is not mandatory, but appreciated. 

Upon completion of the focus group session, the written transcript was uploaded to a password protected shared document for both Amy and Grace to review. Once the data were shared, we read through the responses and applied codes according to our own reading and analysis of the data set. We applied thematic codes to the data set using the comment function in Google Docs. The entire transcript was coded twice. When the independent coding was complete, both team members met, using peer debriefing and support, to discuss the existing codes and their themes. Upon completion of both rounds of coding, Grace created a table detailing the themes of the transcript data as well as relevant quotes for each theme. Subsequently, Amy and Grace reviewed the codes, condensing repetitive codes and deciding on specific language for each code. Then, each code was categorized into its respective theme. From there, the themes were reviewed again for consensus.


Results

Qualitative Findings

The main themes identified in our data analysis are: 1) Tutor Emotional Satisfaction with Their Work, 2) Tutor Comfort and Rapport in Consultations, 3) Tutor Emotional Processing, and 4) Tutor Need for Breaks and Boundaries. All themes were present throughout the entire discussion.

Tutor Emotional Satisfaction with Their Work

The first identified theme is tutors’ emotional satisfaction with their work. This theme of emotional satisfaction was demonstrated in several ways. Tutor 1 expressed emotional satisfaction with her work by describing external validation she received as a result of her tutoring,

I got an email from that head of the department [of a student I worked with regularly] saying, like, ‘Hey, so and so, you know, was just speaking really highly of you, and I've noticed that her writing has, you know, changed a lot since you have started, like, helping her. So I just wanted to say thank you.’ So that made me, like, feel really good. I've never really had that sort of experience before, and it just makes me happy.

Another tutor, Tutor 3, summarized her general emotional experience upon finishing a consultation as positive: “I feel inspired by most of my appointments that I have had.” These tutors specifically use terms like “inspired” and “happy,” both of which are illustrative of a pattern emerging wherein, when given the opportunity to talk about their work broadly, tutors defaulted to discussing emotionally satisfying work. All three tutors also agreed to feeling “disappointed” when encountering no-shows. Tutor 1 reflected, “...part of me is like, oh, like, they didn’t show up. Kind of bummed, or, you know, a little disappointed that I didn't get to, you know, make that connection with someone.” This disappointment may be linked to tutors’ professed enjoyment of their work.

Tutor Comfort and Rapport in Consultations

All tutors gave detailed accounts of the experiences they had when building rapport with students. The tutors situated these interactions in the context of the feelings that would arise when dealing with the unknown of a new consultation and working with a new student. The following excerpts demonstrate the ways in which our tutors utilized emotional intelligence to recognize the changes in student emotions as consultations developed:

Tutor 1: At the beginning of these weekly sessions, our communication was kind of limited to just the text box, a bit like the chat. And that thing was, I think that was just a combination of, like, tech issues as well as a comfortability, you know. ...But over time, like, I felt that they were getting more comfortable. And by the end, we had the video on.

Tutor 2: But I could tell, because he was nervous about writing some stuff. Sometimes he would go a little bit off topic, and I would kind of have to, you know, but it wasn't a big deal. But one of those times he looked at the stickers on my laptop, because I have a bunch of them, and he was like, oh, you know, I really like those stickers that you have from this one comic that I like. And he was like, that's a really good comic. And I was like, Oh, thanks, you know. And then I, you know, ended up shifting it back so we didn't talk about it. But then we had like an hour long session once, and we made a lot of progress, and it was good. And there were like five minutes left of the session. And he looks up at me, and he goes, “Okay, we have five minutes left. Can I just talk to you about Dunmeshi right now?”

Both Tutor 1 and Tutor 2 describe situations in which students’ actions changed, signaling to the tutor that the student had become more comfortable with them. Tutors also mentioned how building rapport served to comfort them as tutors:

Tutor 1: So, right beforehand, it's always like, “Oh, what’s, what's gonna be.” It could be a wild card. But usually that changes, especially, you know, once they come on and we just start talking, especially the first few minutes, we're just building rapport and I'm explaining, you know what this is. And usually, on both ends, it feels like some ease has, has kind of entered so and over time.

Tutor 3: I feel like with just writing center students, it’s kind of nerve wracking, like [Tutor 1] said, like just to the initial like waiting period of them, like, coming in, or, like, waiting in the waiting room, like on the writing center platform. It’s always, like, a little bit of a nervous feeling that I get, like, what it…what are they going to bring, like, if they don’t submit their paper beforehand, like, what? What are we going to work on? I always kind of feel, like, reassured after the first, like, “Hello.” Like, “How are you doing?” Like, “What are we working on today?”

While these tutors generally felt nervous before a tutoring session with an unfamiliar student, it appears that this feeling is normalized enough among our staff to openly discuss it. Further, just as the tutors recognized emotional changes in students, they were also able to recognize the changes in their own emotional states during the rapport-building portion of consultations.

Tutor Emotional Processing

One of the most dominant themes in the conversation with the tutors was their discussion of emotional processing. This theme emerged across responses to multiple questions. All tutors discussed their feelings in relation to different scenarios during a typical semester as a writing tutor. As described above, we noticed a pattern of tutors choosing to speak about positive feelings as it related to their work. We also noticed that all tutors were able to discuss the ways in which the specific training on emotional intelligence assisted them in identifying and understanding their own emotions. For instance, Tutor 1 detailed feeling validated in feeling overwhelmed by her work when talking about it with other tutors during training sessions: “Being in, like, this group setting and hearing other tutors experiences made me realize, wow, like, you know, I'm not the only [tutor] who's feeling drained. … It also made me realize, especially during, like, busier seasons, like midterms and finals, to pause and, you know, check in with myself.” Similarly, Tutor 2, described the benefit of talking about her emotions with her peers, while also considering how students may feel in consultations as well:

I think having a lot of those training sessions where you gave us the opportunity to talk about emotional intelligence, and, you know, a lot of the labor that we're doing, um, gave me a good way of like, okay, here's how you can talk about this and process it, but in a way that still acknowledges right, the humanity of everyone involved, as opposed to, oh, complaining about your job, or, you know, whatever.

Tutor 3 reported that the training on emotional intelligence further encouraged her to be both confident and honest about her skills as an undergraduate student tutor: “I can still provide valuable information to [graduate students], just like with the [training] prompts, just answering those honestly, I should answer [students] honestly as well, and not like, kind of sugar coat it or make it sound like I'm older than I am.” All three tutors ultimately note how their emotional labor and emotional intelligence training caused them to change how they processed their emotions towards their work and actions they took during and between their shifts.

Tutor Need for Breaks and Boundaries

A final theme that emerged throughout the focus group conversation is tutors’ need for breaks and boundaries. For example, when discussing a student not showing up to an appointment, Tutor 2 saw it as an opportunity for a break: “Alright, I can, I can breathe a little bit.” Tutor 1 also described their break-taking as a “breather:” “I could take a break, like a breath, you know, have a little break.” While the tutors find satisfaction in their work, they also recognize it as work, as laboriously intensive. Tutor 1 then went on to specifically mention that the training on emotional awareness contributed to her own ability to see the space available to take care of herself: “I mean, I still always put … the writer first, but sometimes at the cost of, like, all right, I’m, you know, I need a break and that these trainings help me, you know, take care of myself more and check in with myself more.” In addition to taking breaks between consultations, Tutor 2 brought up establishing boundaries when being transparent with students about whether they feel capable of handling a particular writing situation: “You know, when you think you can’t handle something, I think it is important to put up that boundary, like, ‘I don’t think I’m equipped to discuss this.’” This statement was given in response to a question about what advice our tutors would give other tutors about performing emotional labor, indicating the need to set boundaries was one of Tutor 2’s primary takeaways from her training.

Discussion

Some themes that emerged from the focus group data were welcome and expected. Notably, the tutors’ willingness to openly discuss their own emotions as it relates to their work (emotional processing) as well as the choice to highlight positive emotions (satisfaction with their work) when asked about impactful moments they recall from their recent work. Though not expecting to see it as a theme, we nevertheless found it promising that tutors brought up the concept of boundaries when talking about various aspects of their work. As Noreen Lape states, an “emotionally intelligent tutor follows her intuition, draws a boundary, and reports such interactions to her director” (5). Boundary-setting is a popular and well-known concept in current culture and to see tutors’ implicit and explicit connections between their emotional intelligence and feeling comfortable enough to set boundaries in the workplace is an encouraging result of our small study because it is an important way to prevent the burnout caused by emotional labor.

The implications of training tutors, specifically on emotional intelligence, are many. First, while there are many negative depictions of and discussions around emotional labor (like those on burnout), emotional labor is not—and does not have to be—inherently negative. We hope that our small study illuminates the fact that emotional labor may only become a negative part of our lives when we do not have control over or awareness of our emotions. Both Mannon and Nelson et al. (“Making Visbile”) contend that emotional labor is not only necessary in the writing center, but that it is the type of labor that makes tutoring fulfilling. Ultimately, any attempt to dictate a tutor’s emotions in their workplace (e.g. through the use of politeness policies) without also providing them a space to explore and apply knowledge of those emotions can lead to suppression, avoidable outbursts, and, ultimately, burnout in their position. Hochschild explains that when workers are not prepared to engage in emotional labor, they develop one of three detrimental stances toward their work: 1) they identify too much with the emotions they perform and get burnout, 2) they distinguish between their own emotions and their display of emotions at work but feel guilty for needing to perform (see Nicklay for a discussion of how guilt impacts writing center tutors), 3) or they distinguish themselves from the performance and do not blame themselves but feel cynical about being required to perform. Hochschild recommends that “the harm in all three can be reduced … if workers could feel a greater sense of control over the conditions of their work lives” (187). In our writing center, what this has looked like for us is equipping tutors with the knowledge they need to understand when the emotional labor they are exercising is disproportionate to their role and the support to implement relevant boundaries that protect their emotional wellbeing. 

One of the tutors (Tutor 3) in our focus group said checking in with herself emotionally allowed her to be “emotionally available to students.” Although this tutor did not expand on what being emotionally available to her meant, in general, being emotionally available means being ready to engage with another person on an emotional level. One way tutors demonstrate emotional availability in the writing center is through performances of empathy, which proponents of emotional intelligence training hold as one of its key benefits. Lape argues that training tutors to develop their emotional intelligence can lead to tutors performing genuine empathy for students which can then encourage students to engage in the problem-solving necessary to complete their writing tasks. Once an emotion is identified, a tutor can verbalize observations about said emotions, question where they come from, and help students make a plan to work through/with them. Rachel Peterson, like Lape, also believes that emotional intelligence training can encourage empathy in tutors and highlights that empathy building is especially important as tutors work with diverse student populations. Peterson proclaims that the goal of emotional intelligence training for tutors should be to “help tutors interpret the words and actions of the students they work with as well as how to communicate in sensitive ways that facilitate learning” (n.p.). When tutors are empathetic, students feel safe and learning can occur (Lape). 

Training tutors in emotional intelligence can be beneficial for students receiving tutoring services, and it can also help improve tutor wellbeing, something discussed by the tutors in our focus group and within a growing body of literature on tutor emotions. Responding to the proliferation of work on the stress of students, Nelson et al. (“Does Peer-to-Peer”) sought to understand the stress of tutors and found that tutors with elevated stress levels going into writing center consultations maintained that stress at the end of consultations, but tutoring did not cause elevated stress where it did not already exist. This is significant because as Nelson et al. conclude, when stressed tutors go into consultations, they “are worse at perceiving the stress of the students with whom they are working” (“Does Peer-to-Peer” 35). If tutors do not have the emotional intelligence to recognize and manage their own emotions, they are going to be less effective in their job because they are less able to respond to student concerns (see Stanford for work on coregulation in the writing center). Nelson et al. recommend that “writing center directors should think more about how we can prepare peer tutors to notice and attend to their own stress, rather than focusing on managing student writers’ stress” (“Does Peer-to-Peer” 35). This recommendation is in line with those from scholars advocating for greater attention to tutor wellbeing in writing center studies (see Degner et al., Perry) and is something we worked to foster in our training as we had tutors to discuss the emotions relating to their work in private reflections and breakout rooms. It was encouraging to hear from the tutors in our study that being able to discuss emotions openly did not equate with “complaining about [their] job,” (Tutor 2) but rather served as a valuable outlet for processing job-related stress. 

Future work in the area of tutor wellbeing can include more methods to validate tutors’ experiences with learning about both emotional labor and emotional intelligence and how they see these concepts impacting their work. Specifically, the implementation of a survey instrument at multiple stages of a training during several semesters, both quantitative and qualitative, can support the more rich qualitative data in methods like focus groups and interviews. Additionally, studies that seek to understand the impact of tutors’ awareness of emotional intelligence on the students with whom they work can provide more context to the ways in which these trainings can impact student success more broadly.

Limitations

We acknowledge that our small study has several limitations. First, our writing center staff was small (with eight total who began training in Fall 2024 and five who remained employed through its entirety plus the implementation of this study’s methods) and thus studying the perspectives of our staff would naturally yield a limited amount of data. From the five tutors who could speak to the training on emotional intelligence and their perspectives on its usefulness in writing center work, due to scheduling conflicts, only three tutors were able to attend the focus group session. Another limitation we encountered was limited time to complete the study within the regular work of operating the writing center. There were original plans to study the emotional experiences of both tutors and students who utilized the writing center’s services during the study period, however, we encountered methodological challenges with the survey system we had integrated into our scheduling service. Further, we acknowledge that the discussions and conclusions drawn from the data would be strengthened through the ability to triangulate this focus group data with other quantitative and qualitative methods like student surveys and reflective writing. Finally, longer focus group sessions or multiple sessions would have also contributed to a stronger data set. Unfortunately, coordinating schedules was an issue during the summer semester in which we collected data. Despite these challenges, we believe that this study’s questions, rationale, and methods can serve as a strong foundation to future research on the subject of writing center tutors’ perspectives on the emotional labor of their work.

Conclusion

What we hope to contribute here is a voice in the ongoing conversation around emotional labor, emotional intelligence, and the work of writing center tutors. The training created, implemented, and the subsequent discussion from our tutors about their experiences are meant to provide a small example of what is possible in writing centers beyond the intellectual side of a tutoring session, but without attempting to overextend the bounds of our service and put tutors in the role of counselor. Existing scholarship tells us that consistency, focused training, and professional development for tutors play a key role in their ability to positively impact student success as well as their own confidence as it relates to their work (MacFarlane, Walker). Further, training that focuses on the awareness of and welcoming of emotions in the writing center is important. Given this, what we hope to demonstrate to readers here is that offering specific training on emotional intelligence, asking tutors to regularly respond to reflective prompts, and providing a space for them to openly discuss the emotions they witness and experience can lead to the overall emotional wellness that others in our field have called for both attending to and studying (Giaimo, “A Matter of Method”). 

While emotions are becoming a normalized part of consultations in the writing center, those emotions are usually assigned to the student and not the tutor. Typically, we see emotional labor as the work that the tutor may have to do to address the emotions of the student with whom they are working. Here, we argue that it is not just important to normalize emotions for students but for the tutors’ themselves because in its original conception, emotional labor involves the emotional management of others and of ourselves. Ultimately, we hope readers, especially those involved in tutor training, see that the awareness of the emotions of all peoples in a writing center consultation (emotional intelligence) is important because we do tutors a disservice when we focus solely on the emotions of the students with whom they work.

Appendix A: Training Activities


Pre-Semester Reflection on Writing Knowledge and Emotional Readiness

Prior to beginning the training for Fall 2024, please answer the following two prompts:

  • Writing tutors need not be subject-matter experts, but they do need knowledge of writing forms, strategies, and processes. What writing knowledge do you bring to the writing center? What areas of writing do you want to know more about?

  • As many of us understand, sharing one’s writing with another person can be an emotionally vulnerable situation. How prepared do you feel in coping with the emotional requirements of this job? What communication skills can you sharpen/rely on in the writing center?

Introduction to Emotional Labor and Emotional Intelligence

Background

A simple Google search for the term emotional labor will bring up several definitions, including this one: “the management of one’s emotions in order to present oneself and interact with other people in a certain way while doing a job.” An important part of the labor you perform as a writing center tutor is emotional in nature. As a tutor, you must project a caring professionalism, which includes providing cognitive and emotional support to students as they work on their writing. Writing for The Writing Center Journal, Bethany Mannon summarizes that, “During appointments, tutors draw from reserves of kindness and enthusiasm to help writers build confidence, even excitement. At times this means defusing writers’ frustrations over challenging assignments or writers’ disappointment in low grades, but even when no negative emotions arise during a conference, tutors try to spark writers’ investment in their projects and empathize with the challenges of navigating higher education” (144). Additionally, you work in the writing center to support students while managing your own emotions that come up as a college student and human being.

The first step towards performing the emotional labor of writing center work effectively is recognizing it as such. If emotional labor is what you do then emotional intelligence is what you use to perform such labor. Writing for American Psychologist, Mayer et al. summarize that emotional intelligence involves the following abilities to,  “(a) perceive emotions in oneself and others accurately, (b) use emotions to facilitate thinking, (c) understand emotions, emotional language, and the signals conveyed by emotions, and (d) manage emotions so as to attain specific goals” (506). Put another way, emotional intelligence is the awareness of one’s own emotions and the emotions of others combined with the ability to manage emotions and interact with others empathetically. 

Taking emotional labor and emotional intelligence together, this week’s Canvas training will ask you to, first, read through the second chapter from The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors on conducting writing center consultations. As you read through this chapter and are exposed to the tutoring strategies used within the writing center, think of where this chapter is implicitly or explicitly describing emotional labor or asking tutors to utilize emotional intelligence. Then, use your burgeoning knowledge of consultations to complete the discussion board activity on identifying emotion in the writing center.

Activity

From the list of five situations adapted from our tutoring handbook, The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors (Ryan and Zimmerelli), choose three. For each one, review the Feelings Wheel to help you identify what emotions the students in these situations may be feeling and what emotions you as the tutor would feel. After identifying the various emotions present in these sessions, explain why you think the student and yourself may feel those emotions. From there, use the knowledge of tutoring strategies you learned from reading the tutoring guides/prior experience with tutoring to describe how you would conduct these consultations. 

In sum, answer the following questions for each situation you choose,

  • What might the student be feeling?

  • What might you feel as the tutor?

  • Why would the student and yourself be feeling this way?

  • How can you proceed with the session?

The situations are as follows:

  • Situation 1: You are working with a student who was at the writing center door before the director opened the center. They are working on a ten-page literature review and describe their process so far: They got the research done for the literature review and finally sat down at 9:00 PM last night to write. At 5:00 AM, they realized they had good information, but they just weren't putting it together effectively. After a couple of hours of sleep, they arrived at the writing center at 9:43 AM to wait for it to open at 10:00 AM. Once you begin looking at the literature review, you see that the student has been describing their research article by article, so you tell the student that they should try to synthesize multiple authors’ ideas, instead of dedicating one paragraph to each source. The student looks at you, tears forming in their eyes, and tells you the assignment is due by the beginning of their class in 2 hours.

  • Situation 2: You are working with a regular student today. This student is the type of person who always has a thousand ideas bouncing around in their head at once. If someone asks them about subject A, they find some obscure relation to subject B and discuss that. For example, last time you saw them, they were working on a paper about Serena Williams and they began to tell you about their love of sports, especially soccer. They told you they were on their high school soccer team and then about their participation in a club sponsored by their favorite English teacher which led them into a discussion of their favorite book senior year. As they come in today, they smile at you and say, “I feel like I learn something new every time I work with you!” Their paper today is for a psychology class and is on Carl Jung’s theories. They are likely to end up talking about anything but Jung this session.

  • Situation 3: You have an asynchronous consultation where the student is writing an argumentative paper on immigration policy. According to their appointment note, the three areas they want you to focus on are: 1) if they have smooth transitions from idea to idea, 2) if they adequately describe their position after using quotations, and 3) if they implement the counterargument effectively. As you read the paper and prepare to leave your feedback, you find that their perspective on immigration is contrary to yours. You know from the writing center policies that you are not supposed to judge students or share your own opinion on their topic, and you still want to help this student with their writing. You take a break from this paper as you think about how to proceed.

  • Situation 4: You are working with a student in an online consultation who is writing a personal narrative about a difficult situation they have encountered. They chose to describe their experience with a learning disability, but are experiencing writer’s block. During the consultation, they keep their camera turned off and you hear rustling as you are working. As you discuss what they have written thus far, they respond to your feedback with sarcastic questions like, “Why do I have to explain everything? Shouldn't people just understand?” and paired with confused questions like “How personal should a ‘personal’ narrative be? How do I know what to include and what to leave out?” Finally they say, “I’m sorry, I just can’t focus on this paper right now. My sister was in a car accident last week and has been in the hospital ever since. I’m just so overwhelmed right now.”

  • Situation 5: You are working with an ESL student who has studied English grammar and is familiar with the rules who came to the writing center because their business instructor failed their paper for grammatical problems. The instructor told the student that their ideas and organization are “quite good” and is allowing them to revise the paper. The student is taking this opportunity to revise the paper, but wonders aloud if the professor may be discriminating against them because they are ESL. Still, they want a good grade on this paper because business is their major. Before beginning to read their paper, the student says to you, almost automatically, without making eye contact, “Please don’t judge my grammar. I’m horrible when it comes to writing in English.”

Final Training: Analysis and Revision of Writing Center Advice

We began the semester with an activity centered around developing emotional intelligence in response to the emotional labor of writing center work. To conclude the semester, we will return to these concepts.

In her analysis of writing center tutoring manuals published in The Writing Center Journal, Bethany Mannon found that many manuals only alluded to emotional labor in the writing center or took for granted the emotionally laborious components of tutoring. This leaves our training manuals incomplete, with their authors missing an opportunity for explicitly helping tutors not only manage but also recognize, accept, and harness emotion in tutorial sessions. This is an issue especially when manuals only address negative emotion (thereby making tutors nervous about the kinds of students they may encounter).

Now that you have more experience tutoring, you are well positioned to analyze and evaluate writing center advice as well as provide your own, which is what you will do as you participate in the following parts of this training:

  • Part 1: Read. Read chapters 4 and 7 in The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors. As you do so, think about the scenarios Ryan and Zimmerelli give advice for and how they approach emotion in their advice.

  • Part 2: Analyze. Choose one passage you think does a good job of explaining the emotional labor or emotional intelligence required for writing center work. Using quotes from the section, provide a one paragraph analysis of why you think this is so. Then, choose a passage you think is missing attention to emotional labor or an explanation of how tutors can use their emotional intelligence to respond to students. As with the effective passage, provide a one paragraph analysis using quotations to explain why you think this second passage is less effective.

  • Part 3: Rewrite. Rewrite the ineffective passage to be more explicitly attentive to emotional labor or emotional intelligence. Reproduce the passage in full and highlight your changes.

  • Part 4: Explain. Explain in one paragraph your revisions and the impact reading your revised version would have on another tutor.


Appendix B: Focus Group Questions

  • What is a memorable tutoring experience that you had last semester at the center?

  • How do you typically feel before your tutoring sessions, and does this feeling change during or after the sessions are over?

  • Follow up question: How does a “no show” make you feel about your work?

  • How did learning about emotional labor and emotional intelligence impact your work as a tutor if at all? 

  • Follow-up question: How, if at all, do you feel like any of the training that we did helped or hindered or had any effect on feelings you have about working with graduate students? 

  • Follow-up question: What, if any, training that we did made you feel like it was okay to express those feelings that you had about working with the graduate students?

  • What recommendations or advice do you have for tutors or students who want to become peer tutors as it relates to the emotional labor involved in a tutoring session?

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