As Director of the Writing Center, I want to let you know about a great opportunity for high caliber writers in Honors. The course is CAS 390: Peer Tutoring in Writing in the Disciplines, an experiential course with five weeks of training and, after that, three hours a week of tutoring on our own. Once you’ve completed one semester of this one-credit course, you’ll also be eligible for some other interesting assignments as writing fellows for faculty in specific courses.
Why am I so interested in Honors students? Because you’re talented and bright and because we’ve had some terrific Honors students in the past couple of years. Tara Kennon, for example, who went from Honors to major in English, was a peer tutor for two semesters. In her second semester, she worked as a writing fellow in Prof. Victoria Rader’s intro Sociology course. She presented two workshops, worked on drafts with students, and helped them with their homelessness project, one of Tara’s special interests. She’s now teaching in Japan, partly because of contacts she made through our ESL specialist who had lived in Japan. She writes, “Sharing the writing experience with so many diverse students writing wildly varying papers has helped me better understand the very, very different ways people give voice to our human experiences.’
Another peer tutor, Maya Johnson, is now in her third semester with us. Maya continues to be active in the Honors program and is now a Government and Politics major. This semester, she’s been a writing fellow in Provost Peter Stearns’ World History 125 course. She’s met many times with Provost Stearns to develop criteria for his writing assignments, to pinpoint students she then works with individually, and to prepare writing materials for the course website. Maya notes, “The writing center helps both tutees and tutors grow into better writers, thanks to the constant metacognition that takes place in sessions. It’s nearly impossible to not practice the techniques that we suggest to clients in order to make the writing process an all-encompassing, thoughtful activity.
Ed Holsinger, a third peer tutor from Honors, is currently working on a new media and multimedia design for the English Honors program, a multimedia project on folklore for English Matters (a web-based journal), and is a mentor for freshmen psychology majors through the “E-mail Mentoring in Psychology” program. All of these activities, he notes, came about through contacts he developed partially through the Writing Center. Last year he was paid a stipend by the Writing Center to work with another psychology student and a psychology professor on an On-line Writing Guide for Psychology, a wonderful resources for psychology majors. Ed writes, “Thanks so much for all the support, assistance, and opportunities I’ve gained. I’ve become a better writer and a better student, plus I had many doors open up for me as a result of my writing center work.”