Stranger Than Fiction: The Training Program Couldn’t Prepare Me for This!

M2265

In this session, participants will begin by sharing stories and reflections of tutoring appointments that were strange, challenging, or just plain uncomfortable. This is meant to be highly interactive, with the presenters opening the discussion to everyone and asking not only for unique writing center stories, but also opinions and options for how tutors could better navigate situations that are considered out of the ordinary. For the rest of the session, we will switch to a research-based presentation of data collected from a previous conference on the same subject. We will share our findings—including, but not limited to, categorization of these sessions, the level of “strange” or odd most people experience, and the range of tutor experience. We will then compare our findings to research in the field, establishing the position of these kinds of sessions by the materials that either are or are not available to tutors when strange sessions occur. We are hypothesizing that, although there is scholarship regarding many of the uncomfortable situations that happen in writing centers, there is a “gray area” that the scholarship doesn’t cover. Our session will be discussing how writing tutors can bridge the gap between the scholarship and what actually happens in the writing center. By drawing examples from interdisciplinary studies, training material, and other resources we will be outlining some of the ways that we can more effectively train tutors to deal with strange and uncomfortable situations. We will seek possible solutions to the questions discussed in the panel.