Rebecca Rickly. “Reflection and Responsibility in (Cyber) Tutoring: Seeing Ourselves Clearly On and Off the Screen.”
Rickly describes how the training program for peer tutors at her writing center changed their OWL. The program emphasizes reflection and responsibility and uses electronic chats to facilitate discussion in training sessions and give future tutors the experience of communicating about writing electronically. Despite the electronic component, after the training sessions, tutors who were strong face-to-face tutors had difficulty tutoring in the OWL, which requires tutors to be diplomatic and accessible. Rickly makes several recommendations “that might encourage reflection and responsibility in tutor training,” including “collaborating with (and among) students” and “be flexible with (and within) the curriculum” for tutor training programs. Rickly believes that integrating face-to-face and electronic components in the training program was successful in preparing students to tutor, concluding that “with the inclusion of computer-mediated discourse in the tutor training program, students became uncomfortable but began to take risks, to push boundaries to try on new personas. . . they are able to reflect more often, more fully, and from different perspectives about who they are, what they do, why they do it, and what it means to others in the writing center” (61).
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