Leaders—at least when they’re peer tutors—are also writers, and writing assignments are important ways to encourage reflection. Asking students to reflect on the relationship between peer tutoring scholarship and leadership will allow tutors to consider how leadership skills complement their work as peer tutors and, just as importantly, identify the times leadership doesn’t seem to fit with or describe their work.

It’s easy to understand why we reject the leadership label when it comes to the work of peer tutors. Traditional notions of leadership related to authority, power, and control seem antithetical to the collaborative work of the writing center. A leader achieving an outcome doesn’t seem quite the right model for the recursive, process-based work of writing. We hear leadership and imagine the stick figure on top of the mountain.