Tutoring Outside Your Discipline

There are many fears of a new writing tutor when they come onto the floor and soon discover there are numerous variables in writing that can create a situation that he or she may not be familiar with or even know. As discussed in my previous blog some common fears of a new tutor are; helping a non-native English speaker, trying not to become a dry cleaning service, and reading in between the lines when a student asks to look as their grammar. Some fears though never go away regardless of tutoring experience. Helping a student with a paper on a discipline other than your own can be one of the most stressful situations we are put into. There are disadvantages to tutoring both in and outside your area of expertise.

Tutoring inside your expertise has some advantages obviously. For starters the student does not have to go into the process of explaining the subject or content beforehand thus the session can be focused solely on the paper and not the subject in its entirety. On the other hand  it has been found that when a specialist tutor is aiding a student writer the tutor can often come off as knowing what is right and wrong content wise and the student will tend to let the paper be written based on the tutor’s ideas (159).  According to the author of the book too much expertise in the area can be harmful to the learning process of the student writer, but some is still needed (159).

A student not proficient in a certain area is referred to as an ignorant tutor in this segment of the book. When an ignorant tutor takes on the task of sitting down with student who has let’s say a paper on astrophysics and the tutor is an English major, it is natural for the tutor to feel apprehensive.  Just as in the book I myself feel that our staff has been given the tools to handle most if not any situation we find may find ourselves in.  The advantages an ignorant tutor possess is that they must rely on the student’s reasoning and logic shining light on any idea’s that are not fully explained or could be expanded upon.

With so many majors and emphasis available it is highly unlikely that we will have an expert in the every subject and area of the education spectrum. Each tutor here at Gavilan is either an ignorant or specialized tutor. It is ok to admit that you aren’t completely familiar with how a neuron conducts a signal or the history of the French Revolution. We have been trained as “facilitators” and we as a team are able to handle anything. There is a balance to being a specialized and ignorant tutor, but what we lack individually we make up for in the types of students we have as tutors.