University Writing Center

As a number of our writing center tutors prepared to enter first-year composition courses as classroom-based tutors, the question they most commonly asked was, "Will my one-on-one conferences with students be similar to those I conducted in the Writing Workshop?" My over-simplified answer, based upon my own recent experiences in on-location tutoring, was "yes and no." At times, as a classroom-based tutor, I found that my individual sessions with students played out much like scenes from a writing center, whereas at other times, these tutoring scenes bore little resemblance to their writing center progenitors. In the introduction to their anthology, On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring, Candace Spigelman and Laurie Grobman speculate about the reasons behind such similarities and differences, arguing that classroom-based writing tutoring should be treated as a distinct genre. Here, Spigelman and Grobman stretch the concept of "genre" beyond its traditional application to the literary text, drawing on Charles Bazerman's definition of genres as "environments for learning" (2) and Anis Bawarshi's notions of genres as "constitut[ing] the social conditions in which the activities of all social participants are enacted"(2). Indeed, when the learning environment of the writing center meets the social conditions of the first-year composition classroom, a hybrid genre emerges. The potential of hybrid genres, Patricia Bizzell theorizes, lies in their ability to "accomplish intellectual work which could not be done in either of the parent discourses alone" (Bizzell, 13)