The relationship between tutoring and teaching has been a recurrent topic of interest among writing center directors and writing program administrators. While scholarship agrees tutoring experience aids composition teachers with implementing process pedagogy and fostering a collaborative classroom, the relationship between tutoring and assessment of student writing is less clear. This qualitative study uses interviews with eight graduate teaching assistants with tutoring experience to examine how they transfer and juxtapose knowledge, practices, and values for response between the writing center and classroom. Like previous scholarship, this research finds writing center tutoring contributes to teachers’ enactment of constructivist, student-centered pedagogy and enhances their understanding of students’ relationship to writing and feedback, standard language ideology, and systemic inequities in education. However, evaluation led these instructors to experience tension between their values and preferred respondent roles, with many reporting anxious grading processes and some experimenting with alternatives to traditional grading. The article concludes with suggestions to build bridges between tutoring and teaching contexts, particularly through explicit attention to antiracist pedagogy and alternative assessment practices.

The purpose of the present study is to examine the resources for responding to grammatical issues in student writing that are available to writing teachers. The study analyzes two sets of data: (a) the position statements issued by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and the National Council of Teachers of English, and (b) the best-selling writing-teacher preparation materials. The results are discussed through the theoretical lens of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) in order to portray how the field of composition studies—as a community of practice— models responding to linguistically diverse students, whether L1, L2, or international students. The results show that the expectations set by position statements are not met by writing-teacher preparation materials. Thus, teachers are lacking resources to know how to respond to students’ grammar rhetorically in the context of writing. Based on these findings, I discuss implications for responding practices and propose future avenues for research on preparing teachers to respond to student writing.