Figure 21: Interviews with former graduate student directors and tutors
In one sense, it was training people in how to understand the space. This is what we have. This is how we log student visits. This is how you should greet people. So it was kind of at first, you know, this is the logistics of how a tutor should function within the space, and then it was trying to teach them the functional literacy because how we saw the studio to a lot of tutors was that we will teach you how to use these programs, right? That’s why we didn’t have as much enthusiasm about tutoring in the studio initially because people were a little reticent; I’m interested in this, but I don’t think I know how to do this really. I know I should, but who am I to be able to help these students to learn how to use Dream Weaver, or InDesign or Photoshop, right? 
I think because I was there in the very beginning, I was part of developing the training experience. I think at that point, when I came in we were trying to figure out what it meant to be a tutor. There were a lot of, I think I remember us doing a lot of forms, a lot of reflections, a lot of talking with the director about what are they coming in and what do they want to work on and what do you feel like you want to work on?  What are their expectations, and what are your expectations? What are their goals and outcomes? What are your goals and outcomes? How are they coming together? So that first semester was a lot actually, mostly reflecting, and letting whatever was organically happen in that space happen. We had like an overlapping mentoring program happening at that point because it was still real basic training. So they made sure that any new tutor was always with someone that had already been in the space so that they weren’t so overwhelmed. So that even it was still relatively new, even to the experienced tutor, they could at least make it happen together. 
I think the fact that tutors now take so much more initiative on their own to learn software is in part a symptom of the fact that tutors are often by themselves in the space. At least more so than we’ve had in the past. So before we had two studio locations, tutors would be paired up to work with one another. We always have two tutoring working in the studio. At least almost always. And usually how it worked was a more experienced tutor would get paired with a less experienced tutor. So in those cases, and this is not any indictment lesser experienced tutors, but it’s just natural that when someone, when a student came in and wanted help with a program usually the less experienced tutor would rely on the more experienced tutor, and they would just kind of fall by to their expertise. Instead of being forced to find out the answer on their own. So, you know I don’t think we could have known that that would be a symptom of that. That not pairing tutors together would lead to more initiative on the part of the tutor, but it has been, that has been a success that we’ve seen. 
In the studio, you definitely get a sense of people trying to figure things out together, which in the writing center is not the case. People usually tutor in the writing center and they know what they’re doing, and they know how to help the student, and they know you know what it’s supposed to look like, and they know what they tools are and how use them. Whereas in the studio I think the tutor is often figuring it out with the student, which on one hand is a limitation, but on the other hand that’s kind of cool. So you get see a lot of collaborative learning because we’re not all extremely well trained in all these programs. 
For me, I’m more of a hand on learner. So it wasn’t until I could really work with the students and refer to the other tutors about how to get things going in their projects and do the google searches and actually applying those to the student projects that I started to gain some knowledge about the things. So it wasn’t really, it was kind of an on-going training over the year and a half that I worked at the digital studio, where the skills built upon themselves.
It was a matter of sitting up workshops geared towards programs that we knew that there was a lot of interest in. You know, so we had been tracking data of what these students had been coming in here to work on. You know, you could isolate the, these were the three or four main programs that students had to use here, and that we could then develop workshops to tackle those. And they were often student led workshops. You know, we would identify a tutor, part of the staff who knew how to, you know was proficient in Photoshop or proficient InDesign, and they would develop the workshop. You know, I would always be there overseeing, and keep things kind of moderating, But it was very student based tutor led. There wasn’t the sort of direction that we had, no with Dr. Wells. She’s, she, her position is to the focus of this job. She got a class over the summer that helps to train the new graduate students, but also there’s a course that’s offer to undergraduates that join in the fall and the spring to help train them to become tutors over the student and the RBC. So there’s much more structure in place. It was more difficult to do tutor training because we were very much divided. You know, I was directing the digital studio, but I was also a graduate student who was teaching other classes and taking other classes, or doing my own work. So I had to divide my interest in a way that Dr. Wells maybe doesn’t have to as much now, which I think is a lot more helpful. 
I think that the training we got prepared us for the kind of work that we would be doing in the digital studio philosophically and helped us understand why the digital studio is here. In terms of technical expertise I feel that, I mean I’m not sure how to fix this, but I do wish there was more training. On the other hand, do tutors necessarily have the time to become experts before they start working here? Maybe not. Maybe it’s sort of a on the job thing.
I knew I think by the second week of boot camp I wanted to work in the digital studio. I just wish we might have spent more time in here, or we could’ve at least had the option of maybe instead of attending the writing center class because personally I was very familiar with the writing center. I had worked it before. I wasn’t learning as much as I would have had I maybe been getting an hour worth of Photoshop in every week or something like that. So I think that, you know in the future it would be a very good idea to get students more familiar with the digital studio. More familiar with the programs just to get their feet wet with it before actually coming into it with, you know whatever minimal knowledge they have by the time they’re in here. 
Receiving the training helped prepare me for the specific kinds of assignments we’re likely to encounter with students, and it helped that there were people engaged in the actual coursework students were bringing in. So it helped me to figure out what I needed to emphasis and my self-education in these programs, and the tools that we use. 
During our boot camp training, most of the, most of our class our experience was focused on the reading and writing center. On actually writing tutoring. I feel like any experience we had in the digital studio was minimal, especially during boot camp. We had, that I can remember just one tutorial on InDesign and it was very, it just kind of gave us the basics, but we didn’t even, there were what, fifteen, thirty of us in the digital studio at one time. There was no way that the computers could facilitate every one of us working with InDesign. So, I feel like there was definitely a lack of exposure to the programs we’d be using, and we were just kind of told well early in the semester we won’t have many appointments. So, that’ll be your time to kind of figure it out, and even then it was, without some sort of guidance, it was kind of a frontier sort of thing. Throughout semester, our training has continue with a few different workshops. One or two with Photoshop, one with InDesign, and those were also collaborative in that we were kind of showcasing different things we learned in our free time, but even then I feel like it was limited because we just kind of shown how to do it and expected to kind of retain that knowledge. More workshops would help as far as continuing professional development for digital studio tutors, but I feel like another, some sort of other mechanism would also be helpful to make sure that our tutors are becoming very familiar with these software. 
Josh Miller helped create tutor training manual for the digital studio, which was a huge help. And so, every year I feel like we’re going to get better, but it’s definitely a challenge. And it’s a challenge to train people when you don’t necessarily have a lot of influence over how much training their coming in with.