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A Review of Existing Scholarship
Distinguishing Between Tutor-to-Peer Review and Peer-to-Peer Review
“In colleges and universities today, peer tutors as a group, acting collaboratively, are potentially among the most powerful agents for educational change, because peer tutors learn the most important tool for effecting change, the art of translation—the art of conversation at the boundaries between communities” (Bruffee, “Lost in Translation” 1).
In his keynote address “Lost in Translation: Peer Tutors, Faculty Members, and the Art of Boundary Conversation” at Brown University’s first national peer tutoring conference in 1993, Kenneth Bruffee highlighted the seemingly precarious position between teachers and peers that peer tutors are asked to assume. The peer tutor’s role encompasses a variety of tasks: offering a reader’s response, leading the student toward their own answers, listening while the student articulates their goal, pinpointing possible underlying problems, suggesting strategies, and supporting the writer throughout the composing process. To do this, the tutor must be selected and trained, in the process becoming “a hybrid creation—neither a teacher nor a peer” (Harris 371).
While Writing Fellows and members of the Rose Writing Studio alike are asked to assume this role, their levels of training vary significantly. As a result, two distinct dynamics emerge: tutor-to-peer review, operationalized in this paper as a non-reciprocal writing tutorial between and an undergraduate familiar with writing center pedagogy and practice and an undergraduate, and peer-to-peer review, operationalized as a reciprocal writing tutorial between two relatively untrained undergraduates. The asymmetry between tutor and writer in tutor-to-peer as compared to peer-to-peer review elicits three significant differences between these types of writing reviews, including different theoretical foundations (Hansen and Lui) and distinct agenda-setting structures to define goals and methods (Harris).
In “Guiding Principles for Effective Peer Response,” Jette G. Hansen and Jun Liu establish the theoretical frameworks that support the various kinds of peer review. Ultimately, they argue that the theoretical approaches that support writing center pedagogy diverge slightly from that informing the peer-to-peer work, as tutor-to-peer review is more closely informed by Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development theory. Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development theory asserts that a student’s cognitive development results from social interaction in which students extend their existing learning through the guidance of a more experienced individual (Hansen and Liu 31). Scaffolding writing is a Vygotskian-based technique developed to support and investigate writing (Bodrova and Leong 3). The technique of scaffolded writing is encouraged by Melissa Ianetta and Lauren Fitzgerald’s writing tutor pedagogy, which stresses that “tutoring is scaffolding,” for “tutors…use their authority and the asymmetry of their relationships with writers to make sessions more productive than they would have been had the tutors been on equal footing with the writers” (65). Hence, Writing Fellows utilize their knowledge about writing center pedagogy and tutoring best practices and experience from previous sessions to encourage deeper reflection from the writer, fomenting the development of an asymmetrical relationship between tutor and student.
On the other hand, Hansen and Lui assert that peer-group work discourages such asymmetry by assuring that each student has the same level of received knowledge and, by extension, authority. As such, peer-to-peer review is more clearly informed by collaborative learning theory, which holds that learning is a socially constructed activity that takes place through communication with peers (Bruffee, “Collaborative Learning” 635). This theory stresses the importance of discussion with peers, rather than the imbalance reproduced by tutors through “scaffolding” practices. Of course, Writing Fellows’ tutorials integrate collaborative learning theory in their discussion-based conferencing formats, but the information gap between tutor and student and the one-sided nature of tutoring produces an asymmetrical association that more closely aligns with Vygotsky’s theory.
That said, these asymmetrical relationships are far from inherent. Indeed, writing center scholarship increasingly highlights the importance of training tutors in inclusive practices that counter colonized ways of knowing. In Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, editors Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan identify inclusivity in the writing center as existing at multiple levels, including, but not limited to, attentiveness to the tutor’s lived experiences and understandings of power, awareness of literacy education in a global context, and attention to the writing center as a material space. This last point, in particular, has received increasing attention as a focus on inclusive practice has led to the problematization of the material space the writing center occupies (Reynolds, McKinney). In that manner, writing center scholarship increasingly recognizes the importance of inclusivity—in terms of both practice and space—and heeds the necessity of deconstructing colonized knowledge. This means that tutors trained on recent writing center pedagogy will be increasingly effective at dismantling the asymmetrical tutor-to-peer relationship. Furthermore, it is important to note that asymmetry can also exist between peers who lack knowledge of inclusive practices; this is particularly true of peers with disparate literacy backgrounds due to social factors such as class. As a result, asymmetry in tutor-to-peer and peer-to-peer review is far from a monolith. Nonetheless, it remains true that the information gap between tutor and student and the one-sided nature of tutoring typically produces a power asymmetry in tutor-to-peer review.
The asymmetry between peer and tutor in the tutorial relationship is further distinguished by the practice of agenda-setting, which sets out to create specific goals for the reviewing session. Muriel Harris describes this difference in “Collaboration Is Not Collaboration Is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer-Response Groups,” which compares the goals tutors seek and methods they employ to offer the advantages of tutoring in the writing center over peer review in the classroom. Harris explains that writing center staff are taught to focus on the long-term development of the writer. However, this emphasis is sometimes at odds with the desires of the student, who may come to the tutorial with different, perhaps more short-term, goals for the tutorial (Raymond and Quinn). This is the central difficulty that Writing Fellows must face, as they are in the precarious position of “leading them [students] to become better writers” while also avoiding perpetuating a “model of dependence” (Raymond and Quinn 76). Nonetheless, Writing Fellows—and, historically, writing center tutors more generally—receive instruction to focus on one or two higher-order concerns in a draft (Harris 374). As such, tutors confront multiple goals, generally aimed at improving ideas, organization, development, and overall clarity over lower-order concerns, which must be reached through several layers of compromise with the student in the agenda-setting process.
By comparison, Harris points out that the agenda of students in peer-response groups involves reading and responding to each other’s writing, stressing the equal relationship between peers and the benefits accrued to both reader and writer through critical assessment. In the Rose Writing Studio, for example, the student whose paper is being discussed exercises more power over the agenda based on their intake form. Furthermore, comments aim to improve both readers and writers through the unique recognition that each can learn from the other. The fact that this relationship exists on a more level playing field is further established by the discussion of the Rose Writing Studio as a community: “The Rose [Writing Studio]…emphasizes the immeasurable value of a larger community of writers: a place where students share their work, think critically about their peers’ writing styles, and contribute to an ongoing conversation about forming, reshaping, and communicating one’s ideas through the written word” (Detry and Rentscher). Detry and Rentscher’s emphasis on the Rose Writing Studio as engaging an “ongoing conversation” corresponds to Harris’s recognition that “the underlying similarity in peer-group work is the assumption that [readers]…sharpen their own critical reading skills” (375). Hence, while the tutor-to-peer review and peer-to-peer review alike aim to improve student writers by moving the writer from the traditional stance of receiving knowledge from an authority figure to an active involvement that makes discussion integral to writing, Harris’s scholarship and the characterization of the Rose Writing Studio highlight that the process of commenting is perceived as benefiting both reader and writer more explicitly in peer-group discussions.
To aid in the initiation of discussion, Harris points out that tutor-training manuals frequently discourage tutors from using a directive approach. Such manuals emphasize the tutor’s role in helping the writer find their own answers and guiding the student through questioning rather than by telling or explaining. The importance of helping the writer do their own work is evidenced by the title of Jeff Brooks’s “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work,” which encapsulates the nondirective, question-driven pedagogy often stressed by writing center practitioners. Indeed, the importance of questions appears at the very outset of commenting, when Writing Fellows consider a student’s intake form discussing their concerns and hopes for feedback. Ianetta and Fitzgerald’s The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors highlights that the scaffolding approach “starts from the beginning of the session, when [the tutor] asks the writer about what [they’d] like to work on. Such questions are crucial in recruiting the writer’s interest in both continuing the writing process and in making best use of the session itself” (68). Hence, tutorials with Writing Fellows are intended to emphasize the student’s discovery. Even so, the relative merits and deficiencies of directive and nondirective tutoring remain one of the great writing center debates. Peter Carino compellingly argues in “Power and Authority in Peer Tutoring,” for example, that there are ways in which “directive tutoring is not plagiarism, but help” (113). Steven J. Corbett similarly asserts that, in the “real world” of the writing center, it is sometimes acceptable to offer a pointed suggestion, provide examples of alternate wordings, or explain how to properly cite a source. Thus, while it is important to note that recent scholars have problematized the perhaps false binary between directive and nondirective tutoring, writing center pedagogy, including that which informs UW-Madison’s Writing Fellows program, traditionally encourages a nondirective approach.
Contrastingly, Harris concludes that peer review likely assumes a more directive form, as students lack knowledge of writing center pedagogy concerning directivity. For example, readings in the Rose Writing Studio syllabus from Spring 2022 included scholarship mainly on writing processes and linguistic justice, and only in the last week before commenting on peers’ papers did students read one source that discusses the importance of prioritizing higher-order concerns, namely Dan Melzer and John C. Bean’s “Providing Effective and Efficient Feedback.” Furthermore, scholarship confirms that peer review tends to assume a more directive approach: Harris cites the study of peer response groups by Anne Ruggles Gere and Robert Abbott, who observe that the second most common comments on student drafts offer directives about writing (362). Thus, without instruction in nondirective practices, peer review tends to be directive, thereby shifting closer to joint authorship.
Concerns about Peer Review
My hypothesis that the comments made by Rose members will be less effective in terms of higher-order emphasis and specificity than those made by Writing Fellows is in line with prior research on the difficulties associated with peer review. Indeed, authors have expressed meaningful concerns about the effectiveness of comments made by untrained peer reviewers, such as those in the Rose Writing Studio. Carol Berkenkotter concludes her study of the response of three students to peers’ comments by asserting that “students who write for peer readers…might not necessarily reap the advantages [one would] like to imagine” (318). This is because untrained peer editors are likely inexperienced in critically reading text (Flynn 120). While such concerns are mitigated in the Writing Fellows Program by the training of new Fellows in English 403, the relatively little education that members of the Rose Writing Studio receive before beginning to comment on the work of others suggests that these concerns may appear in comments made by Rose members. This idea will be explored in the following evaluation of the effectiveness of comments made by Writing Fellows and members of the Rose Writing Studio.
The Gap in Existing Scholarship
My research is a continuation of Harris’s examination of the differences between tutorial and peer review. Harris’s comparison of the goals sought by tutors and the methods they employ utilizes existing scholarship to paint a compelling picture about all that tutoring in the writing center can offer compared to peer review in the classroom. However, in discussing the goals sought and methods utilized in tutor and peer review, Harris fails to concretely examine the effectiveness of each. Indeed, while other work has touched on the benefits (Schneider and Andre, Lundstrom and Baker, Yalch et al.) and drawbacks (Berkenkotter, Flynn) of peer review, none have systematically compared both. I do so in order to concretely grasp the differences in comments made by peers and tutors, thus suggesting the way in which the education that a reviewer receives informs their ability to productively comment on the drafts of other students.
My research also explores two programs that occupy a liminal position, existing “at the boundaries between communities” (Bruffee, “Lost in Translation” 1). By examining the comments made by Writing Fellows and members of the Rose Writing Studio, two groups of students with some knowledge of writing center pedagogy but without the more intensive training of writing center tutors, I contribute to the conversation about the value of CBPT and its by-products, such as the Rose Writing Studio.