Multi-cultural Voices: Peer Tutoring and Critical Reflection in the Writing Center

Abstract

All of us involved in writing ccnters (indeed, all of us in education) must recognize that the educational community of the 1 990s will continue to grow more diverse culturally, linguistically, scholastically.Given this diversity, students, teachers, and tutors will become more, not less, interdependent.The ready, predictable answers and assumptions that existed once in a monocultural classroom or university don't exist anymore."Success" will not be meted out by one authoritative figure, but will be measured by the mutual nature of the success, hinging on the degree to which all members of this threesome of tutor, student, and teacher can become what Paulo Freire calls the "subjects" of their own learning process.Our hopes for these redefined social relationships in the writing center carry with them hopes for a redefined sense of academic literacy as well.Multi-cultural student populations will not only change social relationships but challenge monolithic conceptions of academic literacy.We will need to seek out views of student literacy that will emphasize interdependence, such as the ones articulated in David Blcich's The Double Perspective , Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman's Writing as Social Action^ and Deborah Brandt's Literacy as Involvement.By situating literacy in social relationships and communal action, these studies have begun, as the title of a recent article by Bleich makes

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