Re: the tutee's privacy

[Chad Engbers <engbers@cua.edu>]

I think some form of WC confidentiality makes sense for pedagogical reasons
as well as legal ones.

If a professor sends a student to the Writing Center here at Catholic
University, we return a dated acknowledgement form, signed by the tutor, to
verify that the student did in fact pay us a visit.  (Some professors make
WC sessions a requirement, so it's important that this information gets to
them.)  But we have an explicit policy against discussing the -details- of a
student's session with that student's instructor--this is printed in the
brochure we take to each and every freshman comp class.  We want to provide
a place where a student can work risk-free, beyond the gaze of the person
who will put a letter grade on his or her performance.   It's a way of
reducing "stage fright."  When a student comes to see us, we want that
student to think most about the writing itself, not the teacher's
expectations (although these of course never completely leave a student's
mind).   We are not an extension of the professor; grades are not our trade.
And our confidentiality policy is one way of making this distinction clear
to students.

Chad

On Thu, 3 Sep 1998, Noreen Lape wrote:

> I am currently involved in establishing a writing center at my
> university.  In one of our planning discussions, we thought about
> having tutors send brief reports about the tutoring sessions to the
> tutee's instructor.  We also talked about having a sign-in book that
> instructors could have access to if they wanted to see if a student
> had been receiving tutoring.
>
> Does anyone know if allowing the instructor to know about a student's
> tutoring session legally violates that student's privacy?  Is it
> common or not common practice to keep the tutee's
> instructor informed?
>
> Noreen Lape
> Department of Language and Literature
> Columbus State University
>
>