Writing Centers Go to Class: Peer Review (Of Our) Workshops

Peer review workshops have become a staple at many writing centers, including ours. At the writing centers we direct at the University of Connecticut, Avery Point and at St. Mary's College of Maryland, faculty members invite peer tutors to their undergraduate classes to lead workshops on a variety of writing-related topics--but most of all, they ask us to help with peer review. Faculty seek this help because peer review is, as Brammer and Rees found in surveys of faculty and students, notoriously hard to teach and to learn. After all, undergraduate tutors embody the fundamental principle underlying peer review: peers--not teachers alone--can offer meaningful feedback. And, at both our writing centers, we find peer review to be the best element of our in-class writing workshops. However, we have few ready, universally applicable answers to the questions peer review raises: Where is the borderline between peer review and joint authorship? How can authors share their knowledge of craft while fostering each other's individual styles and voices? How can we give genuine feedback that is true to our own writing preferences while acknowledging another writer's personal style and context? Overall, how can peer reviewers learn, or be taught, to become effective reviewers of each other's writing? These are questions that we, the co-authors, continually explore and answer for ourselves in our own research, since we formally collaborate on some writing projects and informally ask each other for feedback on others. Recently, we have peer reviewed each other in the administration of the in-class peer review workshops we organize at our respective colleges, and we have come to this conclusion: despite stylistic and institutional differences, writing workshops address both the practical and philosophical challenges of peer review when they draw students, tutors, faculty, and writing center directors into an authentic conversation about what peer review is and how it works.