Covel tutorials to return to UCLA next year
By Sophie Rane
March 30, 2010 6:33 a.m.
The university recently reallocated funds to allow the Covel tutoring programs to return next year.
Since the suspension of the Covel Composition and English as a Second Language Tutoring Lab last year, tutoring slots for the Writing Success Program consistently fill up just a few hours after their posting.
Because of this high demand for one-on-one writing assistance, several campus groups have pushed for the reinstatement of the suspended peer tutoring programs.
Funding for the Covel tutorials, a resource open to all undergraduate students, was originally cut last year because of budget concerns. University funding for the Covel tutoring programs, about $40,000 per year, is now guaranteed to continue for at least the next three years, said Layhannara Tep, Undergraduate Students Association Council Academic Affairs commissioner, whose office has been working to bring back the program since the beginning of the year.
In addition to funds allocated by the university, Covel’s services will be reinstated using $20,000 in USAC surplus funds, which the council approved in a vote at the end of winter quarter.
Although the Covel tutorial programs are a service for undergraduate students, members of the graduate student community have also shown considerable support for the re-establishment of the tutorials.
Netta Avineri, vice president of Academic Affairs for the Graduate Students Association, said she worked with Tep’s office to garner support for the re-establishment of the Covel programs.
Avineri said she contacted a number of graduate student teaching assistants and asked them to document their teaching experiences since the closing of Covel.
Almost all of the respondents said the increased section sizes, combined with the absence of academic counseling services like the Covel labs, have made it difficult for teaching assistants to meet student demand for writing assistance, Avineri said.
Avineri said she was particularly invested in the continuance of the program because she spent several years as a Covel tutor as an undergraduate student and eventually became the program’s ESL training supervisor.
Because the counseling facilitators in the Covel Writing Lab are students, the program provides a comfortable place to get one-on-one assistance that might not be available from TAs or professors, she said.
However, Tep and Avineri said their goal was to ensure that the Covel tutorial programs are not only reinstated, but also adapted to allow for several important changes.
Though details are still being worked out, Avineri said organizers are considering new methods of tutoring, like shorter sessions, online tutoring, group tutoring and increased drop-in hours to allow the Covel programs to reach the greatest number of students.
Information collected by the Writing Success Program, one of the only undergraduate writing resources left on campus, was an important factor in illustrating the need for the Covel programs, Tep said.
The Writing Success Program is part of the Student Retention Center, which seeks to provide support to underrepresented student groups. Though the Writing Success Program is open to all students, it is designed to run on a much smaller scale than the Covel tutorials, said Anjali Rodrigues, a fourth-year English student and assistant director of the program.
The Writing Success Program typically serves about 800 students per year, compared to around 1,900 served by Covel’s programs.
Rodrigues said many students have not been able to schedule the tutoring sessions they need because the suspension of the Covel tutorials caused an increase in demand.
“We are experiencing firsthand the repercussions of cutting Covel,” Rodrigues said.
Both Tep and Avineri also said the Covel programs are an essential resource for ESL students, and tutors at Covel receive free ESL training.
In contrast, Rodrigues said counselors in the Writing Success Program are not ESL-certified.
“There is an entire population not being served,” Tep said.
She added that, once reinstated, the new Covel writing labs will place an even greater focus on providing assistance to ESL students by expanding ESL training for peer counselors.
“We want Covel to return in a way that is even more helpful to students,” Tep said.
