Rocky Mountain Writing Centers Association TutorCon 2025
February 28, 2025 – Virtual/Online
Call for Proposals
Proposal Deadline: January 21, 2025
Theme
Tutors Too
Narrative Description
Tutors are constantly inhabiting complex, liminal spaces as they address their own needs and writers’ needs, negotiate instructor expectations, and follow the direction of administrators. As such, listening to the voices of tutors from a variety of academic, cultural, and personal backgrounds and identities matters. We want to explore how tutors navigate these shifting responsibilities and shape their writing centers by amplifying their stories and voices. For TutorCon 2025, we invite you to share tutor perspectives that may sometimes get lost in the many moving pieces of writing center work.
We hope the questions below will provide a starting point, but not limit, your thinking:
- What does tutoring or consulting mean to your center and what does it look like compared to other centers? How have you and other tutors successfully adapted approaches to your local context and the writers you work with?
- What do you see as the constraints or assumptions around the role of tutors – whether physical, pedagogical, intellectual, or cultural? How do they impact you and your writing center? How have you challenged them or how would you want to change them?
- What does tutor training or mentorship look like in your center? What role do tutors play or how do tutors shape these efforts?
- How can we support tutors’ mental health and wellbeing? How do you navigate the emotional labor of writing tutoring? What strategies do you use for taking care of yourself, especially when working with traumatic or sensitive writing topics? How do you approach setting boundaries and expectations while still having open space for dialogue?
- What leadership positions are open to tutors in your context? Where do tutors have an opportunity to shape your writing center’s initiatives and what have you seen as a result?
- What are your professional goals as a tutor and how are you working toward them? What professional skills are you gaining from tutoring that you see as transferable to other contexts? How can you effectively frame your tutoring experience on application materials?
- How has generative AI impacted your work as a tutor? How do you encounter AI in sessions with students? What have been the challenges or opportunities? How is your writing center adapting (or not adapting) to these tools? What are the institutional constraints around this?
- What conversations are occurring in your center about diversity, identity, race, gender, etc (or however we want to name/list those) and how are those supporting you as a tutor, employee, and/or student?
- How has government legislation and/or institutional policies impacted your center and its work, training, initiatives, etc.? How have you navigated these changes?
- How has your identity (e.g., BIPOC, LGBTQIA+2S, disabled, neurodivergent, first gen, wide-ranging academic expertises and goals, and/or multilingual) impacted your work? How can we amplify tutors’ voices and stories? How can we advocate for counterstories in writing center spaces and conversations?
- What is your tutoring story? What led you to tutoring? What has made you stay in tutoring? What has tutoring brought you – good or bad?
Types of Submissions
Creativity in conceptualizing, planning, and delivery is welcome. We encourage you to share your works-in-process or works in development, in a creative form or in terms of one or more of these categories.
Individual presentations (25-minute synchronous presentation and Q&A, or asynchronous recording)
Presenters can share an argument, inquiry, narrative, or research project for 15-20 minutes. (Work in progress is encouraged!) Synchronous presentations will be followed by 5-10 minutes for audience members to ask questions.
Conference workshops (50-minute or less synchronous presentation and Q&A)
One or more facilitators lead conference attendees in an interactive session that usually involves conversation, writing, breakout groups, and/or other activities.
Workshop-in-a-Box or Training-in-a-Box (50-minute or less synchronous presentation and Q&A, or asynchronous recording)
Facilitators lead participants through a student-facing workshop or tutor training their Writing Center offers on their own campus and then provide the resources for attendees to adapt the same workshop/training for their own contexts.
Roundtable discussions (50-minute or less synchronous discussions)
Facilitators share brief context (10 minutes) about a problem and a set of questions they hope to explore with participants during the roundtable. They then facilitate a discussion and offer a brief recap at the end.
Tutoring Approaches Exchange (10-minute synchronous presentations)
Presenters share a specific strategy, practice, process, tool, or idea that they use in their writing center consultations to introduce conference attendees to a successful approach to tutoring. Submissions will be combined with 2-3 other submissions into a panel with shared Q&A.
Proposal Deadlines and Timeline
The conference will be held online on February 28th, 2025. Participants can present synchronously or asynchronously.
Submit your proposal using this Google form. For more information, check out the proposal guidance page.
Proposals will be accepted through January 21st, 2025.
Proposal responses will be sent out by February 7th, 2025.
