Rhetoric and Composition master's student Alberto Herrera wins National Conference for Peer Tutoring in Writing Trustees Award

By Lilliana Solovay

In just three days, Florida State University graduate student Alberto Herrera composed an award-winning proposal to the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing. His quick work secured Herrera a Trustees Award from organization.

Throughout the summer of 2022, Herrera had been working as a consultant at the university’s Reading-Writing Center, which provides a resource for students of all majors and backgrounds to receive help with their writing processes. After finishing what he refers to as an “incredible session” with a student he regularly assisted, Herrera was inspired to form a proposal for the grant.

“The person expressed to me that this session just felt very different, it felt so much lighter,” says Herrera, a master’s student in FSU’s Rhetoric and Composition Program. “I was really happy because we could laugh and talk through their writing, and ultimately, I wanted to highlight that collaboration in my proposal.”

The NCPTW Trustees Award recognizes tutors who excel and, according to the organization’s website, “supports tutors who are contributing in significant ways to writing center pedagogy and theory and are from institutions that are typically underrepresented.”

Kamila Albert is the Reading-Writing Center’s director, and she says the applicant pool for the award is highly competitive. She adds that she is thrilled that Herrera earned this recognition, which included receiving the award at the 2022 NCPTW conference.

“Alberto is an incredibly dedicated student and strong writer,” Albert says. “He is also a terrific communicator with an ability to convey complex ideas in understandable, engaging ways.”

Herrera describes the encounter with the student he had in the summer of 2022 as an opportunity to connect and share with each other common experiences.

“We were able to kind of laugh about our own culture and feel a sense of acceptance about that culture,” Herrera says.

He earned his Associate of Arts degree in 2014 from City College of San Francisco. After taking “an extensive break,” he says, he decided to continue his educational journey away from home to gain independence. He moved from California to Florida and waited out the residency status requirements before he eventually obtained his Bachelor of Arts in Writing Studies from the University of South Florida.

Herrera then applied to and was accepted at FSU, where he is currently in his second year as a graduate student.

“It’s been a long journey,” he says.

The proposal Herrera submitted for the Trustees Award is a result of his work in the RWC. Additionally, his graduate student profile states that his research “focuses on intersecting systems theory with composition pedagogy to cultivate spaces of compassionate intervention for students and instructor.”

“I felt like I could open myself up a little bit more in that session and I tried to be a little bit more myself and more humorous and more responsive to things outside of their writing,” Herrera says.

The experience led him to speak about his takeaways to Albert, the RWC’s director, who encouraged him to formulate a proposal. The “crazy part,” Herrera says, is that the proposal was due in three days.

“I don't know what part of me kicked the gears with writing that, but literally that night I wrote the entire proposal, with abstract and everything else,” Herrera recalls. “I sent it to my director for feedback, got all the notes for feedback, did the edits, submitted it that Friday night.

“And I got in,” Herrera adds, recalling the process with amazement. “It was down to the wire.”

His proposal addressed the idea that “when we use humor in settings where it's more compassionate and when we aren't so focused on something that is so cold and professional,” there is more opportunity to improve and feel heard and appreciated within this space, Herrera says.

“When someone is given that opportunity to laugh and have a very human moment in something like the sessions that we run in the RWC, I think it improves so much,” he says.

Herrera believes that by offering these human connections for support, “it really makes a huge difference for a lot of those folks.” Herrera credits much of his own successes to getting to know his department and being able to network with people within his field.

He appreciates the bonds and trust that he has with the staff and the faculty here at FSU.

“[They] are just as passionate as I am about composition and rhetoric,” Herrera says. “Also just having those people who I can trust and confide in when those ideas happen, as it happened with my director—I really owe it to my department.

“Had I not had that opportunity, I would not have been able to identify that moment as being one that I could write about and submit to the NCPTW.”

Albert points out that students appreciate Herrera’s tutoring style because he is knowledgeable and patient. In addition, RWC staff members enjoy working with him because he is collaborative and kind.

“When Alberto started working in the Reading-Writing Center, he told me that he had a background in statistics and had never worked in a writing center before,” Albert says. “Well, I was impressed with his work from the beginning. He is a valuable member of the RWC-DS team.”

Outside of working in the RWC or working on his research, Herrera enjoys creating connections with people by cooking meals for them. He is also a Pokémon Go enthusiast.

For Herrera, winning this award was recognition that marginalized people of color and marginalized groups in general have the opportunity to be represented at a national conference on this level, and “that our voices and our experiences really do matter,” he says.

“Once you're able to just speak, sometimes it's the most powerful thing, and people will listen,” Herrera says.

Lilliana Solovay is a senior double majoring in English-Editing, Writing, and Media and Political Science.

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