Review of When Tutor Meets Student: Experiences in Collaborative Learning

Bradley T. Hughes
1991 Writing Center Journal  
In this anthology, Martha Maxwell, founder of the Berkeley Student Learning Center, has collected nineteen "vignettes" (as they are called in the book) written by undergraduate writing tutors at Berkeley between 1 987 and 1989. At first glance, When Tutor Meets Studentseems informal: published by Maxwell herself, it is spiral bound, more like a copy-shop course packet than a book. But as a whole it is an impressive collection of stories about writing center students and tutors, and among its
more » ... ries are some real gems -compelling and personal stories, stories narrated in the tutors' fresh and candid voices. The nineteen authors -unfortunately too many to mention here -were all first-time tutors participating in a tutoring course, so they offer the valuable perspective of the newly experienced; their vignettes, which range in genre from narratives to more analytical essays, summarize and reflect on the tutors' recent work with one or two students. Averaging three-to-five pages long, the pieces focus not on techniques for tutoring writing (which several recent books have already done so well) but instead on the attitudes tutors bring to their work, on the personal dimensions of tutoring, and on students' development over time. In what could serve as an epigraph for the anthology, Susanna Spiro declares that for her, "There was no ignoring the social and personal aspects of a tutoring session" (75). Some of the entries do include
doi:10.7771/2832-9414.1259 fatcat:lhedi5wubfho5iogxo7sqenkgi