A Basic Writing Adjunct Program and the Challenge of Student Diversity. Their struggles and successes suggest that the tensions aroused by campus diversity and educational-opportunity programs should be discussed openly by faculty and students, that basic writers need help finding personal meaning in the academic work in a cultural environment that is often unfamiliar or hostile, and that peer tutors need to extablish their role as facilitators without being undermined by student resistance or riding roughshod over it. Tutoring should not be seen as an extension of other forms of instruction. The tutor is a middleperson mediating between the teacher and the student, a role teachers cannot truly take. The tutorial relationship is, moreover, flexible and conversational and therefore more personal than classroom interaction.
Students feel helped rather than instructed by the tutor.
Talking to a teacher, students feel pressured to perform rather than to think freely, as they can with a tutor. In the tutoring experience, students actually write, reread, and revise, gaining practical knowledge in collaboration with the tutor. Students can also express anxiety with a tutor, rarely if at all with a teacher. In their intermediate position, tutors are able to interpret academic language and ease the transition to a new discourse community. In short, writing instruction without a writing center would lack activities essential for students to mature as writers.