What happens in the Writing Center when FYC moves to a WaW curriculum? In short, a bit of anxiety, a need for some tutor education, and a deeper, more thoughtful approach to tutoring writing.

The Composition program at the University of Central Florida transitioned to a Writing about Writing curriculum for first-year composition (FYC) starting in 2009, moving to a completely WaW focus in 2012. This transition impacted more than just students and faculty in first-year composition. As more and more first-year writers began to seek help with assignments from FYC courses, our writing center tutors became concerned about their abilities to help these writers. These concerns led our director, Dr. Mark Hall, to develop a more formal introduction to the threshold concepts central to our field because, according to Hall, “tutors who come through the WaW curriculum understand something more about writing because they have a better understanding of threshold concepts” in writing.

At the writing center, we’ve found that our tutors fall into three groups: tutors who were formally trained in WaW during this professional development, tutors who transferred FYC credits and who have no experience with WaW, and cradle WaW’ers who learned the concepts as FYC students.

The first group are those who were asked to study the WaW curriculum during our weekly Writing Seminar in Fall 2013. Those tutors had guided professional development with a faculty member to help them think and learn about threshold concepts such as rhetorical situations, discourse communities, and writing processes. Andres, a tutor who went through this training explains that the seminar discussions with other tutors and with faculty in the writing center deepened his own understanding of writing, helping him communicate that knowledge during tutoring sessions.

The second group of tutors were not familiar with WaW and began tutoring with us after the professional development seminar. For these tutors, seminar experience focused on other areas of concern in our center (multi-lingual writers and commonplace genres, for example). They have no formal training in WaW and are “learning on the job” as they tutor, just the way they would tackle any other unfamiliar disciplinary writing. Casey, a tutor who just started this past year, describes the learning she did on her own and with her writers as she learned the concepts with them during tutoring sessions. Exposure to WaW during her tutoring sessions has helped her think about writing differently.

The third group consists of those who “grew up” with our first-year composition program and came to tutoring specifically because they were intrigues by WaW’s rich approach to thinking about writing. These tutors are more knowledgeable about writing and how it works—they have some awareness of threshold concepts in writing and are more attuned to the ways of thinking in our field. Allie, one of our newest tutors, came to the writing center because she wanted to continue the learning she began in first-year composition. According to Allie, this knowledge about threshold writing concepts, such as the ways in which discourse communities use language, makes her more confident as a tutor because she understands how language works and she has language to explain this to others.

While we can’t ensure that all our writing tutors know and appreciate the threshold concepts forwarded in a WaW curriculum, we can use our weekly seminar to help them understand writing and how it works in ways that help them approach tutoring more thoughtfully. We’ve seen this transformation in all our tutors—an unintended side-effect of WaW in FYC.