The St Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors

Tutoring is interpersonal. Tutors must draw upon extensive interpersonal skills to work effectively with students who bring a range of educational and cultural backgrounds and a variety of learning styles to their tutoring sessions. Tutors need effective interpersonal skills because the purpose of tutoring is to meet the needs of individual writers. -p.1

Expressivist tutors often employ "the Socratic dialogue," asking heuristic, or exploratory questions as a way of getting the student to discover and think about ideas and how they can best be communicated. -3

The writing center practice advocated by social constructionists involves extensive use of peer group critiquing to reflect the workings of discourse communities and to downplay the role of the tutor as an authority figure or the single source of knowledge. -4

In this view [cultural studes pedagogies], the goal of writing tutorials should not be the simple improvement of student writing. Instead, the goal is to give student writers a heightened awareness of the social injustice perpetrated by the dominant culture's racist and classist agenda and to empower these writers to resist this agenda. In short, the goal of such tutoring is to make better citizens of both tutors and student writers. -4

In a similar vein, proponents of postmodern, postcolonial, and post-process theories of composition call for approaches to tutoring that emphasize plural perspectives, identities, and processes. -5