NCPTW at Mount Holyoke College

Go to host Website for details: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/wcl/21984.shtml

The National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing

Hosted by the Speaking, Arguing, and Writing Program of the Weissman Center for Leadership Mount Holyoke College

November 6-8, 2009

Leadership and Peer Tutoring:
Hope, Vision, Collaboration, Action

What exactly is leadership and what does it have to do with peer tutoring? Some view leadership as a responsibility bestowed upon those who hold formal positions of power; in this way, the work of peer tutoring might be understood as an act of leadership or the writing center as a training ground for future leaders to hone their use of rhetoric. Some view leadership as collaborative social action; in this way, the writing center community might be viewed as a leader in our recent efforts to explore the social justice possibilities of our work. Others see leadership as a set of qualities and attitudes that guide the lived experiences of all people regardless of formal position; in this way, peer tutoring may be understood as an opportunity for students, tutors, and directors to develop personal responsibility, to resist complacency, to recognize one’s own agency, and to define one’s own goals.

Mount Holyoke College, this year’s NCPTW host, was the first women’s college in the United States, founded in 1837 as the female equivalent to the then predominantly-male Ivy Leagues. With a continued commitment to women’s education and leadership, the college will be celebrating in 2009 the 10th anniversary of its Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts—the center in which our Speaking, Arguing, and Writing Program is housed. Our program and writing center’s mission is to empower students as leaders who think critically and creatively and who speak and write persuasively.

Our conference this year seeks to consider the various ways in which peer tutoring and leadership inform one another. We invite proposals for interactive sessions that explore any topic, though we are particularly interested in questions such as

- How does peer tutoring and writing center work allow us to develop and complicate various definitions of leadership?

- In what ways does tutoring work foster leadership skills in tutors and tutees?

- What leaders have inspired our work as tutors and directors, and how do we translate those lessons into our own leadership?

- In what ways do our writing centers provide leadership on our campuses?

- How does writing center work take the lead beyond the walls of our campuses?

- In what ways does the lens of leadership challenge, complicate, and/or provide new opportunities for the ways in which we conceptualize our work, define our missions, and communicate with our campus communities?

Contact for more information:

Laura Greenfield, RE: NCPTW 2009
SAW Program, 117 Porter Hall
Mount Holyoke College
50 College Street
South Hadley, MA 01075