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Home Âť Archives Âť Spring 2010 (Volume 7 Issue 2) Professionalization and the Writing Center, Part II
From Writing Center to Classroom and Back Again: Pursuing the Unknowns of Tutoring and Teaching Spring 2010 / Training
by Sarah Dees, Indiana University
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The role of the writing center in literacy and higher education
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Submissions Submit an article to Praxis Sarah Dees Writing center work has been an integral part of my higher education experience. I tutored in the writing center during my undergraduate years and as a master’s student[1]. Now a doctoral student in religious studies and Native American studies at Indiana University, I am still a writing tutor, and have recently started working as a teaching assistant. There are countless ways in which skills I have developed as a tutor have prepared me for teaching. However, I would like to look beyond connections others have made regarding transferable skills students develop in the writing center[2], and reflect instead on the ways in which the writing center pedagogy can influence the intellectual development of employees, with potentially significant effects on their academic and professional careers. The practice of tutoring and the intellectual environment of the writing center have impacted, first, my understanding of individual student learning; second, an awareness of disparities within the structures of higher education that affect student learning; and ultimately, my own educational trajectory. At the outset of my higher education experience, I had the notion that my college education would be a path of individual enlightenment, supported by a steady growth in personal knowledge. While this may be true in a sense, working in writing centers has helped to complicate this understanding of higher education, alerting me to the many unknowns that confront us in learning, tutoring and teaching. In what follows, I briefly explore some of these unknowns, ultimately hoping to highlight the role of the writing center in literacy education, broadly conceived, not only for students that visit the writing center, but those involved in writing center work.
The first important take-home lesson I learned in my writing center work, then, regarded the collaborative nature of writing.