ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how the author's center has worked with a limited budget to assist students whose futures depend on a competence with academic English and, thus, the author's efficacious intervention. Cynthia, a bilingual writer who spoke no English when she emigrated from China as a teenager, explains: The author's first English tutor asked the author what he wanted to learn from their tutorial sessions at their first meeting. Elizabeth’s search for a more fruitful pedagogy led her to Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux, whose work she believed would strengthen the center’s tutoring not only with ESL students but also with all of the university’s writers. Giroux’s warning and subsequent advice began to help people look for ways to understand otherness without marginalizing students; to redefine authority as decentralized, collaborative consensus and dissensus rather than tutor-directed conformity; to separate the authority of knowledge from the power of position.
