Closing Keynote: How Tutors’ Creativity will Save Tutoring and Advising

Session Outline

Tutors and advisors are very creative people. In practice, they show their ability to use models, theories, and concepts to analyze and interpret their interaction with their students quickly. They then weigh their options and creatively consider and implement an intentional way to assist their students. All through this process, they are continually reinterpreting and adjusting their interactions. Most of the ideas tutors and advisors use to filter their interactive experiences with students come from diverse fields of study. Observing talented tutors and advisors’ perform is watching a work of art.

However, too often, this creative act is not recognized sufficiently from within higher education or, sadly, amongst the tutoring and advising community itself. Too often, we reduce the action of tutoring or advising to a being only a series of behaviors related to a model, a theory, or a process. This neglect is unfortunate because these creative acts, these unique performances, are the foundations of how tutors and advisors must face the challenges of 21st-century practice that will increasingly rely on the use of technology. The COVID 19 crisis has become the tipping point for the use of technology in tutoring and advising. It is difficult to imagine how students or administrators will ever want to return to the limited asynchronous approaches we relied on before this tragic event. Therefore, tutors and advisors must reimagine their practice using technologies in new ways that were not considered less than a year ago.

This keynote will explore how expanding the individual tutor or advisor creative process by embracing technologies that support student success needs a supportive community of practice. Hence, this talk will not focus on technologies per se but on the types of technology cultures that can help and encourage tutors and advisors, use their creative energies to embrace technology to assist their students.