Doing More with Barely Enough: Understanding the Benefits & Costs of Undergraduate Tutor Labor* Santiago Zea, Researcher Assistant Dr. Andrea Efthymiou, Faculty Mentor LITERATURE REVIEW ●
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Writing tutoring as a crucial part of institutional retention efforts (Harris, 1995). Writing center tutoring is a contribution to the pre-professional lives of undergraduate students who work as tutors (Hughes, Gillespie, and Kail, 2010). Tutoring is an avenue for undergraduate students to contribute to the larger field of writing center studies (Ianetta and Fitzgerald, 2012). Efthymiou and Fallert (2022) encourage expanding our field’s notion of peer tutor labor to include undergraduate research, but this growth comes at a cost. Tutor labor is part-time (WCRP, 2020-21).
AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE My problem with writing center work is the never-ending opportunity cost issue: should I invest more hours tutoring or more hours studying, serving coffee, or resting? This is a material battle against time, and I only have a little left to accomplish everything my ambitious self wants. ● Do I have time to go to the Naylor Workshop & NCPTW? ● Will I have to give up tutoring to focus my attention on my research project with Prof. Efthymiou? ● What about my presentation for the the NCPTW Emerging Scholar award I earned?! ● Will I get more opportunities to share? Or was this my 15 minutes of fame?
CONCLUSION & WHAT’S NEXT Despite the discomfort in acknowledging the exploitative nature of writing center work, we must attend to the problematic opportunity cost of putting pressure on students to work on campus, perform undergraduate research, and complete general ed requirements. We know that packing in High Impact Practices (HIP), like undergrad research, makes a positive difference on students (Moore et al, 2020), yet the curriculum is not built to sustain this work for either students or faculty. How can we adjusting teaching load and gen ed requirements to sustain HIP that writing centers offer? *Our co-authored article will be submitted to a special issue of Writing Center Journal on contingent labor.