If you have ever trained or supervised peer writing tutors or been a peer tutor yourself, you have probably noticed that tutoring is as beneficial for the tutor as it is for the writer, maybe even more beneficial. Collaborative learning really does seem to work in two directions, although not in entirely transparent ways. What interests us, and we hope what will interest you, is how significant the experience of collaborative learning is for peer tutors even after they graduate from college, leave the Writing Center or Writing Fellows Program behind, and plunge into their post-graduate lives. We recognized that something of real interest was going on in this regard because so many former peer tutors kept in touch with us over the years through letters, emails, triumphant announcements about jobs, notices of publications or business openings, or a wedding or a birth. In a sense, all these messages said the same thing to us: for many of our former students, being a peer writing tutor was vitally important not only in their college education but in their life experience.
What, we wondered, do students take with them from their training and experience as peer writing tutors that would account for this continued engagement? We want to answer that question with as much specificity and depth as we can because we believe that something really special in American higher education is going on in writing centers, where an innovative pedagogy of collaborative learning and teaching has been harnessed to provide access to the powerful resources of the English language.
To start our research, we consulted our local statisticians and sent out a pilot survey to a very small sample. Then, to discover areas we might have missed in our own attempts to ask significant questions, we videotaped focus groups at Marquette University and the University of Maine to explore the personal and educational themes that former tutors associated with their time as tutors. Encouraged by what we saw and learned, we began to develop a survey to send to former tutors. Pilot studies were conducted at Marquette, Maine, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison to help us develop the survey instrument. By comparing and analyzing our responses, we worked together to revise the survey and sent it out again and then again. We were very excited by the results, not the least of which was an astonishing return rate above eighty percent!
Now we want to invite you to join us in this research. The purpose of this website is to share with you the survey we have been developing, as well as some suggestions, samples, and formats for building your own research study with your own former peer tutors. The survey has been designed so that you can add questions to it that particularly suit your own program or that reflect issues that you are interested in but that don't get directly addressed in the survey instrument that we have developed. This research is a work in progress, and we hope that you will contribute to its development and to our understanding of what students carry with them into their lives as a result of their work with us, with student writers, and with each other.
Harvey Kail , University of Maine