Conference presentation given at the
Canadian Writing Centres Association (Calgary, 2016).
The presentation focuses on how the Learning Centre at Douglas College combines tutor training for both content-area tutors and writing tutors. This is a timely topic, in a period where many writing centres across the country are being combined with or collapsed into learning centres or learning commons areas. We attempt to show that when such a move takes place, there is not necessarily a degradation in the quality of tutor training for writing tutors. We propose that much of tutor training is concerned with skills that help students participate in their classes more effectively, including helping students learn the culture of academia and of the courses they are taking. We claim that as tutors train together, they share discipline-specific knowledge, learning skills, and writing skills from their various content areas in ways that enrich the whole of the tutor community. Tutors learn to articulate the disciplinary conventions of their own fields, and share this knowledge with tutors in other subject areas. This training provides tutors with an interdisciplinary perspective that enriches their work with students.
