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

Everyone involved in writing centers must recognize that the educational community of the 1990s 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. The authors' hopes for these redefined social relationships in the writing center carry with them hopes for a redefined sense of academic literacy as well. This article joins the voices of two tutoring program coordinators and four peer tutors from two institutions: The University of Washington's Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) Writing Center and California State University, Chico's Writing Center. The variety of voices in this article illustrates, in a way that the single voice of a writing center director could not, the importance of critical reflection in a tutor-training program.