Tutoring Employment Opportunities
The Writing Center recruits, trains, and hires its employees each fall through enrollment in an upper-division English course: ENG 39895 Tutoring Writing.
ENG 39895: Tutoring Writing
This course is ideal for:
- Stark students interested in becoming stronger writing tutors or consultants
- all English and Integrated Language Arts majors
- other Education majors
- returning teachers
- other interested parties
Course Description:
Current Writing Center practice rests upon a substantial and sophisticated body of educational theory related to writing. This course will introduce students to the contemporary idea of a Writing Center and to a tutoring pedagogy which embraces non-directive and collaborative methods as a means of developing stronger writers, and not merely of strengthening or helping to "fix" individual writing assignments.
Though the course is designed with the Kent State Stark Writing Center in mind -- as a means of providing a trained, motivated staff -- it would also be of real benefit to students considering careers in education.
The course will expose students to a wide range of pivotal readings in the field, encompassing the following topics:
- collaborative learning
- tutoring models
- the writing process
- brainstorming strategies
- drafting and revision models
- student "ownership" of texts
- tutorial ethics
- academic discourse
- issues of audience
- multicultural and ESL concerns
- negotiating tutor/student differences in the tutorial
- institutional politics and student writing
- error analysis
- the teaching of proofreading
- online tutoring strategies
For the course, students will be asked to:
- keep a personal tutoring journal on their reading and tutoring experiences
- take part in weekly e-mail discussions with their peers
- observe and conduct writing tutorials with undergraduate Stark students
- develop a theory-into-practice project utilizing both secondary research and field observations/testing
- prepare a poster or Powerpoint presentation of their projects to share with their peers and interested faculty
Prerequisites:
- Students must have completed both College Writing I with a grade of "B" or better.
- Preferably, students will also have completed College Writing II or be taking it concurrently with this course.
Tutor's Manual
View a full description of the mission, operations and employment procedures of the Writing Center.
Tutors as Scholars
As part of the Tutoring Writing course, Writing Center tutors are involved in either individual or collaborative research projects on some aspect of writing center theory and practice. Other research projects continue throughout the year. Tutors travel to make scholarly presentations of their work at the Northeast Ohio Writing Centers Association Conference each fall and at the East Central Writing Centers Association Conference each spring. Learn more about Tutors as Scholars.