19.1 Have We Arrived Yet?

PR AXIS a writing center journal

19.1: Have We Arrived Yet? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work

VOL. 19, NO. 1 (2022): HAVE WE ARRIVED YET? REVISITING AND RETHINKING RESPONSIBILITY IN WRITING CENTER WORK: THE NEED FOR TRANSFORMATIVE LISTENING AND MINDFULNESS OF DIFFERENCE TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS FROM THE GUEST EDITORS Have We Arrived? A Special Issue Romeo García and Anna Sicari

FOCUS ARTICLES Asians Are at the Writing Center Jasmine Kar Tang Arriving, Becoming, Unmaking: Stories of Arrival at an HSI Writing Center Sonya Barrera Eddy, Katherine Bridgman, Sarah Burchett, Juan Escobedo, Marissa Galvin, Randee Schmidt, and Lizbett Tinoco Todos Estos Cuentos Catalina Benavides Our Theories of Race Will Not Save Us: Towards Localized Storyings of Race, Colonialisms, and Relationships Isaac Wang (Re)envisioning the Writing Center: Pragmatic Steps for Dismantling White Language Supremacy Hidy Basta and Alexandra Smith Listening Across: A Cultural Rhetorics Approach to Understanding Power Dynamics within a University Writing Center Marilee Brooks-Gillies, Varshini Balaji, KC Chan-Brose, and Kelin Hull Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification: Transforming Writing Center Response to Faculty Outreach Hadi Banat Listening to the Friction: An Exploration of a Tutor’s Listening to the Community and Academy Kathryn Valentine

Tutoring, Minus Bigotry! LGBT Writers, SafeZone Tutors, and Brave Spaces within the Rural Writing Center Galen Bunting Seeing the Air: Neurodiversity and Writing Center Administration Karen Moroski-Rigney A Parliament of OWLS: Incorporating User Experience to Cultivate Online Writing Labs Eric Camarillo

COLUMNS Transformative Listening: Making Lived Experiences Visible Rachel Stark and Kennedy Essmiller Coach Prime and Me: Deion Sanders’ Impact on My Academic Self Karen Keaton Jackson CORNERSTONE Neisha Anne Green and Frankie Condon Making and Taking Up Space as a Black Woman at a Predominantly White Institution Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison JUST LOOK AT THESE SCARED FUCKING DWEEBS Randall Monty Myth Busting the Writing Center: A Critical Inquiry of Ideologies and Practices Bethany Meadows and Trixie Smith Beyond Binaries of Disability in Writing Center Studies M. Melissa Elston, Nicole Green, and Ada/Adam Hubrig Counterstory in the Center: Replacing Privileged Pedagogy with Brave Teaching of Writing Beatrice Mendez Newman Where We’ve Been and Where We Are Wonderful Faison and Anna Treviño

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Varshini Balaji, B.A. is an anthropology graduate student at The New School for Social Research and an Impact Entrepreneurship Fellow at the Parsons School of Design. She graduated with a B.A. in anthropology from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, where she worked at the University Writing Center for nearly three years. Much of her research focuses on themes of postcolonialism, migration, transnationalism, and the decolonial project. Growing up in six different countries, she has always been deeply curious about the human experience and the cultural forces that shape it. Her anthropological training coupled with her commitment to decolonization inform her thinking and approach. Beyond her professional life, Varshini enjoys running, writing, and spending time with her friends and family.

Hadi Banat, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of English and the ESL Program Director at University of Massachusetts Boston. His published works appear in World Englishes, TESOL Journal, Communication Design Quarterly and in edited collections published by MLA, Utah State University Press, and Routledge. His scholarship focuses on L2 writing assessment and pedagogy, tutor identity in writing centers, the internationalization of writing and ESL programs, and grant writing and constructive distributed work in collaborative research teams.

Hidy Basta, Ph.D. is the Director of the Writing Center and an instructor of English at Seattle University. She holds a PhD in Language and Rhetoric and a MAT ESOL from the University of Washington. Her research and teaching interests include language ideology and policy, multilingual identity narratives, genre theory, and writing in the disciplines. Her current research and teaching focus on linguistic justice and writing consultants’ education toward an antiracist pedagogy.

Catalina Benavides, M.A. is a first-generation Costa Rican American writer and educator who grew up in Brentwood, NY. She has worked at the Long Island University Writing Center since 2018. She also has an M.A. in English Literature from Long Island University and is currently pursuing her M.A.T. in Secondary Education of English from Stony Brook University. Catalina is very passionate about education that incorporates diverse literature to broaden her students’ world view and increases awareness of social justice issues. If she isn’t reading a good book with her favorite iced coffee accompanying her, she is capturing moments of beauty with her camera.

Katherine Bridgman, Ph.D. is an associate professor of English at Texas A&M UniversitySan Antonio where she directs the Writing Center. Her research focuses on embodiment across digital interfaces. Her scholarship has appeared in venues including Kairos, South Atlantic Review, College English, Computers and Composition, and various edited collections.

Marilee Brooks-Gillies, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of the University Writing Center at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. She currently serves as President of the East Central Writing Centers Association and on the International Writing Centers Association Social Justice & Inclusion Task Force. Her scholarship is situated within cultural rhetorics and writing center studies with an emphasis on place-making in communities of practice. Her work has been published in the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, The Peer Review, and enculturation. She is an editor of the collection Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines as well as special issues of Across the Disciplines and Harlot.

Galen Bunting, M.A. is a doctoral candidate in English at Northeastern University. In his research, he analyzes war writing and Modernist literature, tracing textual representations of trauma and gender in the aftermath of the First World War. He has contributed to the Women Writers Project, worked as an editorial assistant for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and currently teaches at Northeastern University in both the Department of English and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. He holds a master’s degree in English from Oklahoma State University.

Sarah Burchett, M.A. is a native of Eastern Kentucky but has resided in South San Antonio for the majority of her life. After graduating with her Master of Arts in English degree, Sarah has continued to pursue her passion for writing through her career as a Communications Coordinator at her alma mater. She enjoys bringing creativity into all of her writing and hopes to continue working in higher education.

Eric Camarillo, M.A. is the Director of the Learning Commons at Harrisburg Area Community College where he oversees testing, the library, user support, and tutoring services for over 17,000 students at five campuses. His research agenda is currently focused on writing centers and best practices within these spaces, antiracism as it applies to writing center practices, and how these practices change in asynchronous and synchronous online modalities.

He has published in The Peer Review, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and The Journal of Academic Support Programs. He has presented his research at numerous conferences including the International Writing Center Association, the Mid-Atlantic Writing Center Association, and the Conference on College Composition and Communication. He's currently the President of

the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing and the Book Review Editor for The Writing Center Journal. He is also a doctoral student at Texas Tech University KC Chan-Brose, M.A. is the Assistant Director of the Marian University Writing Center and the Flanner Community Writing Center. She is the co-developer of Marian University’s “Write Here, Write Now! Social Action Writing Camp” and served for two years as the East Central Writing Centers Association’s graduate representative. Her passions include cooking, eating, and gardening with her three daughters.

Frankie Condon, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Her books include I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric; Performing Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing and Communication, co-edited with Vershawn Ashanti Young; The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice(co-authored with Geller et al); and her recent co-edited collection, CounterStories from the Writing Center (with Wonderful Faison). Her current projects include a new monograph: The Road To Hell: Radical Precedents of Post-Racial Rhetoric in the 21st Century, a genealogical history of the metaphor of colourblindness for racial justice.

Dr. Condon received the Faculty of Arts Excellence in Teaching Award from the University of Waterloo in 2021. In 2017, Dr. Condon was the recipient of the Federation of Students Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award (Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance).

Sonya Barrera Eddy, Ph.D. is an Assistant Instructional Professor at Texas A&M University-San Antonio and the Integrated Reading and Writing Program Director. Born in San Antonio and raised in Arizona, Sonya is a fifth-generation Tejana and a first-generation college graduate. Her work centers around the intersection of art, rhetoric, and writing, focusing on how marginalized communities employ art and community education in deliberative contexts. Her scholarship has appeared in Composition Forum, Open Words, and the WPA Journal Symposium on Black Lives Matter and Anti-Racist Projects in Writing Program Administration Juan Escobedo is an Artist, Art Educator, and Writing tutor who is invested in dissecting and dismantling archaic colonist practices in academia.

Kennedy Essmiller, B.A. has worked as a Writing Consultant at Oklahoma State University (OSU) while working on her MFA in Creative Writing. She assisted in the development of a Multimodal Composition Contest through the OSU Writing Center. Her research includes exploration of multimodality as writing that does not privilege alphabetical text.

M. Melissa Elston, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at Palo Alto College, where she teaches composition and English courses. Previously, she served as a writing center director at Northwest Missouri State University, and a graduate assistant director at Texas A&M University. Her essays have appeared in venues including Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, and Atenea.

Wonderful Faison, Ph.D. (Dr. Wonderful), is the chair of the English department at Langston University. Her research focuses on race and antiracist praxis in the writing center.

Her book, Counterstories from the Writing Center presents antiracist theory and practices for writing center administrators, staff, and tutors.

Romeo García, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing & Rhetoric at the University of Utah.

Marissa Galvin, M.A. is a retired United States Airforce Veteran and a graduate of Texas A&M University-San Antonio where she also earned bother her BA and MA. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in African American Literature and Studies. Marissa’s scholarship focuses on Black, Women, and Queer studies. Marissa is the author of a performance review entitled “The African Company Presents Richard III” which was recently published in Shakespeare Bulletin, The Journal of Early Modern Drama in Performance (vol.39, 2, 2021).

Neisha-Anne Green, M.A. is Director of the Academic Student Support Services & The Writing Center at American University in D.C. She has given keynotes at the International Writing Center Association, the International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference and the Canadian Writing Centers Association, etc. Her first conference presentation was as a tutor at the National Conference of Peer Tutoring in Writing; she has since presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Modern Language Association, etc. Neisha-Anne is a multidialectical orator, author and an accomplice who welcomes invitations to collaborate on workshops and publications on linguistic justice and anti-racist pedagogy.

Nicole E. Green, Ph.D. is the Assistant Director of the Writing Fellows Program and a Lecturer at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she has been a part of the Writing Center for the past decade. Along with further investigating the intersections among disability and writing center theory, practice, and administration, Nicole is also interested in exploring the ways writing centers can support and partner with faculty teaching writing in the disciplines and the outcomes of these partnerships for students, faculty, and writing center staff.

Additionally, she is interested in conversations around community and high school writing centers. Nicole's work has appeared in College English and English Journal.

Kelin Hull, M.A. is a Visiting Lecturer of English and Assistant Director of the University Writing Center at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Her scholarship is positioned within cultural rhetorics and writing center studies with an emphasis on the rhetoric of community. Her work is featured in the forthcoming collection Emotions and Affect in Writing Centers and in The Peer Review. Her current projects focus on emotion, digital rhetoric, community, and social justice. Outside of her professional life, Kelin is an avid cook, hiker, gardener, cat lover, and traveler who loves adventuring with her husband and two children.

Ada/Adam Hubrig, Ph.D. (they/them) is a multiply disabled caretaker of cats. They live in Huntsville, Texas, where they work as an assistant professor of English at Sam Houston State University. Their research centers on disability justice, queer rhetoric, and writing studies.

Their work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, The Community Literacy Journal, and The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric. Ada is currently guest editing a special issue of Teaching English in the Two-Year College on disability.

Karen Keaton Jackson, Ph.D. earned a B.S. in English Secondary Education with Summa Cum Laude distinction from Hampton University. She then earned her Master’s and Ph.D. in English/ Composition Studies from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. In May 2015, she received a University of North Carolina Board of Governors Award for Teaching Excellence. Her current research interests include the importance of the HBCU context when considering issues surrounding literacy, race, and identity for African-American students. She has served on the executive boards of the Southeastern Writing Center Association and the Council of Writing Program Administrators. Presently, she serves a as a trustee on the NCTE Foundation Board, as an executive member of the Southern Regional Honors Council and is a Professor of English and Director of the University Honors Program at North Carolina Central University.

Randall W. Monty, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, & Literacy Studies in the Department of Writing & Language Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Research interests include critical discourse studies, writing centers, technical and scientific writing, and border studies. He is currently collaborating on community projects with La Posada Providencia and the Edinburg Scenic Wetlands & World Birding Center.

Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison, Ph.D. (she/her) is Director of the OU Writing Center and Expository Writing Program at the University of Oklahoma, where she is also an Assistant

Professor of Writing. Haltiwanger Morrison’s work incorporates antiracism and Black feminist approaches as writing center administration and often elevates the voices of student-tutors.

Her work has appeared in publication such as The Peer Review, Writing Center Journal, and the edited collection, Out in the Center.

Karen Moroski-Rigney, Ph.D. is an Associate Director of the Writing Center at Michigan State University, where she also serves as affiliate graduate faculty in Rhetoric and Writing and is a Center for Gender in Global Context Fellow. Karen serves as the Managing Editor of The Peer Review Journal and was an Associate Editor for WAC Clearinghouse's Practices and Possibilities Series from 2017-2021. Her work has been featured in WPA Journal, Pre/Text, The Peer Review, WLN Blog, and several edited collections—but in her life, she is proudest of her abilities to solve a Rubik's cube, to parent two poorly behaved cats, and to be a loving wife to Stacia. To learn more about Karen, visit her website at https://karenmoroski.com.

Beatrice Mendez Newman, Ph.D., Professor in Writing and Language Studies, has served as Writing Center Director where she explored intersectionalities between WC and classroom pedagogies. Back in the classroom, she has retooled her advocacy of student writers through evolving means of writing support in online learning venues. Seeing classrooms as sites where writing ecologies can be shaped and supported, she has expanded her study of spaces as online learning has thrived in recent years. At the 2022 Global Society of Online Literacy Educators Conference, her presentation “Leaving Room for Learning: Exploring Student-Created Makerspace Ecologies in OWI” illustrated how students create prolific learning spaces to meet the exigencies of online learning. “When the Classroom Becomes a Screen: Finding Talent Zones for Teaching,” published in 2020 in The English Journal, shows how pedagogies inspired

by WC theory and pedagogy can help student writers compose confidently and proudly, even in online settings. Dr. Newman’s scholarly and pedagogical work focuses on recognizing how student writers embody the spaces in which they write, integrating distinct social, rhetorical, linguistic, and writer identities in seizing agency as writ Randee Schmidt, B.A. was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. While attending Texas A&M University-San Antonio as an undergraduate student, she began working in the writing center on campus in 2018. After graduating with her Bachelor of Science in Psychology, she continues her work in the center, remaining involved in tutoring, workshops, and the social committee. She is currently preparing for graduate school, working as a research assistant on projects focused on moral injury and PTSD, with the goal of becoming a clinical psychologist.

Anna Sicari is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Oklahoma State University, where she also directs the university writing center.

Alexandra Smith, Ph.D. is the Assistant Director of the writing center and an instructor of English at Seattle University. She holds a PhD in English literature and culture, with an emphasis on twentieth-century multi-ethnic literatures of the United States. Her research focuses on antiracist writing pedagogy and assessment, and representations of the street and urban space in literature.

Rachel Stark, B.A. is a second year MA Literature student at Oklahoma State University. She is an Assistant Director for the OSU Writing Center, officer for the local Rhetoric Society of America, and teaches composition courses. Her interests include environmental composition, ecology, and community engagement.

Jasmine Kar Tang, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) works at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities as Co-Director of the Center for Writing, Assistant Director of the Minnesota Writing Project, and Affiliate Graduate Faculty member in Literacy and Rhetorical Studies.

Lizbett Tinoco, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. Her research interests include writing program administration, two-year college writing studies, and writing assessment. Her most recent publications appear in the Community College Journal of Research and Practice, Journal of Writing Assessment, and The Peer Review, among other journals and edited collections.

Anna K. Treviño, Ph.D. is currently an assistant professor of Gateway to Belonging at OU and of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies at the University of Oklahoma (OU). She has previously taught First-Year Seminar courses, First-Year Composition, and Expository Writing. She also worked at the OU Writing Center as a graduate consultant and graduate assistant director.

Kathryn Valentine, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies and Writing Center Director at San Diego State University. Her research and scholarship often focus on aspects of social interactions in the context of the tutoring and teaching of writing.

Isaac K. Wang is a writing center practitioner and researcher from Kona, Hawai‘i. His scholarship has primarily attended to how composition practitioners can incorporate placebased and Indigenous methodologies into practice to support students from minority and Indigenous backgrounds. His current research aims to map writing centers at Indigenousserving institutions to develop recommendations for culturally relevant writing center

pedagogy. Outside of his academic pursuits, Isaac enjoys roasting coffee, playing Hawaiian music on the guitar or ‘ukulele, and seeing God show up unexpectedly.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 1 (2022)

GUEST EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: HAVE WE ARRIVED YET? Romeo García University of Utah Romeo.Garcia@utah.edu We wrote the CFP of this special issue on hauntings, writing centers, and arrival during the height of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, when a regional writing center conference, the South Central Writing Center Association Conference, was canceled due to COVID-19 like so many conferences were in spring 2020. While all conferences are opportunities for community building, for open dialogue and exchanging of ideas, and learning from different perspectives, this conference felt particularly meaningful. After a series of racist incidents that occurred at a large, research university in Oklahoma, met with initial silence from administrators, students began demanding for racial justice across college campuses in the state. The conference at Oklahoma State, intentionally would have focused on the ongoing racism in writing centers, and the need to reckon both with the haunted histories of writing centers as entangled and complicit in and with policing practices and the desire to signal an arrival of a new present and new actor-agents. It would have provided a space of and for difficult conversations, in which people of privilege were to be faced with listening to histories of violence that higher education, and writing centers, have partaken in and created. Members of different communities were to discuss ways to move forward, in solidarity, and to acknowledge the difficulties of coalition building. In this region, and in the state of Oklahoma in particular, this was important and needed for the writing center community, with governmental leadership impacting higher education and silencing faculty, professionals, and students calling for racial justice, inclusivity for all marginalized communities, and equity work that has transformative impacts. This dialogue did not happen.

Will it ever have arrived?

This special issue on hauntings, writing centers, and arrival comes at a time of continued uncertainty, exhaustion, and fear; as racial, social, and political unrest and the pandemic continues to upend our daily lives, with individuals and communities suffering physically, financially, emotionally, and spiritually.

Many of us have grown tired of academic discourse; it remains intangible and disembodied while many are just trying to stay alive and keep others safe where they can. Not surprisingly, women faculty members, especially racialized and minoritized women and those

Anna Sicari Oklahoma State University anna.sicari@okstate.edu from marginalized communities, have been most impacted by the pandemic, with an even stronger increase in “institutional care work” (“Gender, COVID, and Faculty Service”). Racialized and minoritized faculty and admins have been supporting vulnerable students (“Keeping COVID from Sidelining Equity”), as studies have shown that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students have steep and disproportionate declines in student retention compared to their White peers (Excelencia in Education); online harassment and violence towards Asian American and Pacific Islanders has threatened the safety of students from this community at all-time rates during the height of this pandemic (Pew Research Center Survey); LGBTQ college students were nearly twice as likely to lose financial aid and 31% of transgender students reported they do not have reliable internet access or secure spaces to study and attend classes. COVID has exacerbated and shed light on racialized, minoritized, and marginalized communities in higher education, and how higher education is failing those in these communities and those working with them. For many, academic discourse is but a reminder of that which will never have arrived beyond the words etched into antiracist, DEI, decolonial, and land acknowledgement statements.

In the CFP, the editors write, “How might we reenvision the writing center as a haunt/ed/ing and wound/ed/ing place, and re-envision the writing center narratives under the lens of responsibility? What new stories might we gain through transformative listening and a more thorough understanding of what the work might entail for those invested in social justice and anti-racist work?” The authors of this special issue take on these questions in their essays, questions that feel all the more necessary to address as we stare at the numbers of people struggling, of people trying to survive, and we—the writing center community—are aware in ways in which the writing center can be a space of intervention, despite its haunted beginnings and entanglements. The articles in this essay address tangible ways forward, and through their narratives, through working with theories and methodologies, and posing new ways of thinking about the work that we do, this special issue reminds us of the importance of academic discourse, and what it can

Have We Arrived? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work • 2 be and do for a community, especially a community feeling isolated and exhausted.

Generosity, Community, and Coalition Building Of course, writing centers are not the only spaces feeling the loss of community and reckoning with haunted histories. All of higher education and the education system more broadly is suffering. In a relatively recent book, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University, author Kathleen Fitzpatrick uses bell hooks work on community to frame her concept of generous thinking, and quotes hooks’ work from Teaching Community, “One of the dangers we face in the educational system is the loss of a feeling of community, not just the closeness among those with whom we work and with our students, but also the loss of feeling of connection and closeness with the world beyond the academy” (hooks, Teaching Community). For many of us, there is disconnect between our academic worlds and the world outside; and when again, we look at the current statistics of students falling behind, of faculty and admin of color struggling, and how the pandemic has amplified racist tensions, class divides, bigotry, and misinformation, it is clear there needs to be a radical shift in how we talk with one another, and how we learn from one another.

And while higher education, particularly higher education in the United States, is created from haunted histories, it is also possible that higher education, and spaces like the writing center, can be spaces that can rebuild communities. Will “community” ever have arrived? Fitzpatrick uses the term “generous thinking” to help us rethink and reconcile with higher education and what it can provide for communities within and beyond the academy. “Generous thinking is a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, collaboration over competition, and lingering with the ideas that are in front of us rather than continually pressing forward to where we want to go” (4). Generous thinking does not allow us to ellide difference, but rather begin from difference, if we are to address the concerns of different communities; communities that do not necessarily always agree with one another on topics and concepts, that use different methodologies to arrive to similar conclusions, that have their own agendas and responsibilities; however, it is—now more evident than ever—that we need one another to make oddkin (Haraway) if we are to combat systemic inequities created under settler colonialism, which, for the purposes of this essay, we connect with capitalism

and capitalist forces, particularly within the context of the U.S. Universities and college campuses have always been sites of violence. They are inherently located on and are themselves wounded/ing places (see Till; Brasher et al.). Recent research has exposed the haunted histories of land-grant universities specifically, with a closer examination of The Morrill Act of 1862, which “granted expropriated Indigenous land to states in order to fund universities. Indigenous territory acquired through lopsided treaties and outright seizures was funneled through the act to make advanced agricultural and mechanical education more widely accessible” (“How They Did It: Exposing How U.S. Universities Profited from Indigenous Land”). As many of us are aware, the very places and spaces in which we work and teach reside on stolen land--and those of us invested in accessible education have to wrestle with the violent past of the universities we do so work in. It has also been well-documented that U.S. universities supported the African slave trade through research and curriculum design (“The Long, Ugly History of Racism at American Universities”) and it was not until 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education that state schools were mandated to integrate Black students—and even then, it was not until the 1970s that segregation was completely abolished. Let us not then forget the poignant critique offered by Leigh Patel, building on the historian Craig Steven Wilder’s observation, that the university is a central pillar alongside church and state that has allowed the settler colonial project to persevere (No Study Without Struggle). Higher education has always been immersed in and supported violence. That is its haunting past.

And we are still haunted by western ideologies and ontologies. Many of us are forced to ground our work in such thinking (as several of the authors in this collection discuss). Of Western ideology, specifically Western scientific thought, but a concept that dominates many of our disciplines (and we can see this most recently in the writing center field’s push for empirical RAD research), much of our research and ways of being in academia remain rational, in objectivity (see Chilisa; Smith). Gloria Anzaldua writes, “In trying to become objective, Western culture made objects of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing touch with them.” To do university work implicates all of us; we are all entangled, and thus it behooves us all to acknowledge that the institutions in which we work are haunted. The work that many of us aspire to do—education as liberation (Freire; hooks)—is hope as action. And

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Have We Arrived? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work • 3 while we recognize the creations of our universities as haunted, we are also aware that higher education continued further in the economic divide, and growingly evident with the Reagan administration. As Reagan's political career began in racist rhetoric and class divides, he was quick to admonish the Kent State protests, using higher education and “intellectual curiosity” as public enemies to a right-wing conservative agenda.

Through Reagan’s administration, higher education was seen as a private good rather than a public service, and education was “for profit.” (Berrett). The “neoliberal” university with its focus on workforce skills, yet at the same time, exploits labor from contingent faculty, such as those working in writing centers/programs (Bousquet; Nayden, Gardner, Herb; Monty) and graduate student labor (Madden et al), has also shaped the way we conduct ourselves in our academic communities, through teaching, and through our work. The field of writing studies is indicative of such thinking as we advocate for disciplinarity (Boquet, Lerner, Malenczyk): what we have to offer society is through our individual expertise rather than through a shared commitment of learning, of helping others feel they belong, of listening to others to be better, since we remain right in our own convictions and expertises.

Fitzpatrick writes, The best of what the university has to offer lies less in its specific power to advance knowledge or solve problems in any of its many fields than its more general, more crucial ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world. It’s for this reason that those of us who work in those institutions must take a good hard look at ourselves and the ways that we engage with one another and with the world, in order to ensure that we’re doing everything we possibly can to create ways of thinking we’d like to see manifested around us. (56) As the university recognizes and reconciles with our pasts and presents, there are spaces on campus, the writing center as one, that can model ways forward to create community—if we are to accept the great responsibility that work entails, and what it would mean in terms of our own commonly accepted pedagogies, policies, and practices. Community can often be read, often because it is, as a reductive term or a “nice” phrase; community can often deflate difference. However, borrowing from Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism, Fitzpatrick argues that community is one of the more important useful organizing tools for those of us wanting to do social

justice work more broadly to use as a way to embrace differences, embrace dischord with one another, as we work towards solidarity and coalition-building. And while strategic essentialism is surely not enough--Joy Ritchie reminds us it should only ever be a temporary point of departure-- it is key and important for those of us in writing centers to dwell on, as this CFP asks the community to rethink the “well-meaning rhetoric” that allows for many of our [white] bodies to applaud ourselves for saying the right thing. Community work is difficult work. As bell hooks teaches us, All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like…I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don’t challenge ourselves to practice…To build community requires constant vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.

We ask readers to turn to the essays in this collection through this lens of community and coalition-building; to recognize that these readings might challenge us; that we might not agree with the ideas posited from the authors; but that we come to this collection ready to work through generous thinking and a commitment to community as we rethink our responsibilities in writing center work.

Fitzpatrick writes, “Generosity is as much connected to the mutual recognition and honoring of differences, perhaps especially when they cannot be resolved, as it is to our continuing determination to be in community together” (33). As we reckon with our pasts and presents, and recognize the ways in which we are implicated in perpetuating oppression and domination, we also must recognize our differences, how some of us have “inherited hard histories” (Haraway) more than others, and work together even if we might not always be in reconciliation, to move forward for inclusion and equity work that so clearly needs to be done, even in such spaces. As Audre Lorde teaches us, “Without community there is no liberation. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”

As we are in a time now that asks us to rethink our communities, as many feel isolated through quarantining and the mass loss of life we have experienced (some communities more than others), as many do not have access to the virtual communities built, we are in a new space to rethink responsibilities.

Jim Corder wrote that “we are always standing somewhere in our narratives when we speak to others

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Have We Arrived? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work • 4 or ourselves” (17). The implied where is significant here as it stands at the nexus of all our past/present and future selves. Where will we choose to stand? Perhaps, it depends on a specific question. “What do we want from each other after we have told our stories,” Audre Lorde asks in, “There are no Honest Poems about Dead Women.” Perhaps, then, before we can imagine the arrival of “community” we must practice friendship otherwise. Corder was concerned not with community, for it is an instant example of putting the cart before horse, but rather friendship: how are we to be present with, see, embrace, know, and hold another in mind (23)? How are we to live in-common with each other, to welcome each other in our everyday lives of chance encounters, and to love each other [where]ver we may be (see Garcia and Cortez)?

Similarly, Frantz Fanon placed emphasis on friendship: “I…want only this…That it be possible for me to discover to love [another], wherever [they] may be” (231). Perhaps, what we are talking about, and what we must commit ourselves to rethink, is our obligation to an ethics of responsibility. The implied where is significant here as well. So often left unquestioned is the very place in and from which responsibility is being proposed. The where is the place where one’s “I am,” always already wedded to one’s “where I do and think,” is constituted. Towards such ends, we must rethink responsibility.

Rethinking responsibility Center Work

of

Writing

The authors in this collection all ask us to rethink responsibility and move beyond mere “benevolent rhetoric,” if we are to reconcile with the haunted pasts of the institutions we work in and our own implications with systemic inequities and racism in the work that we do. Much of this work will ask readers to embrace humility and to accept, too, that sometimes we are the problem. It is this acceptance of admitting to being wrong; of acknowledging our perpetuations that can lead to real activism in our spaces and in our work in the writing center communities.

As Sara Ahmed writes, “Activism might need us to involve losing confidence in ourselves, letting ourselves recognize how we too can be the problem. And that is hard if we have a lifetime of being the problem” (9).

Losing confidence in oneself might be difficult for many of us, especially as we are ingrained to be “experts,” when we enter our academic spaces--and yet it, accepting an orientation of acknowledging “you are the problem,” that can lead to forming what hooks calls, “beloved community,” created not on the eradication of difference, “but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies

that shape who we are and how we live in the world.”

Such community might ask for many of us, especially those white, cisgender people, to admit their legacies are built on haunted histories; and these histories and ideologies have shaped and informed our ways of thinking, and our ways of talking and thinking about writing.

As editors, this issue has challenged us in thinking about our own editing practices, and we thank the authors and all of those we worked with in embracing difficult conversations in order to form stronger coalitions within the writing center community. We’ve too had to think about ways to revisit our own responsibilities in writing center work, and what activism might look like in an issue like this, and how that might mean we, as editors, needed to recognize when we were wrong. Authors pushed us in their stories and experiences and through their research methodologies; ideas and theories posited by the authors in this collection are not always in agreement.

However, all authors in this collection speak to activist work and the need for equity and inclusion as action in our spaces, not simply as words; in this sense, we see a community of thinkers and doers, aiding in dismantling White Supremacy and capitalism in the spaces that are part of such systems. As editors, we agree with scholareditors Kelly Blewett, Christina M. LaVecchia, Laura R. Micciche, and Janine Morris on their commitment to editing as inclusion activism: “Our thinking about inclusion is connected to a recognition that we learn with and through others. In that sense, inclusion signals a responsibility one feels toward community, a sense that we are better when “we expands, gets challenged, and modified over time” (281). We too “ask the field to reconsider what factors determine the quality of research and writing in our field and how they might be in danger of being shaped by White Supremacy” (289) and we look forward to the dialogue that will come from this particular issue, its own community of scholars and writing center practitioners, who are part of expanding and challenging the work done in writing centers. To that end, we encourage all readers and scholars in the field to read and utilize the “Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors,” a necessary document articulated by Lauren E. Cagel et. al.

Much of this CFP asks us to rethink arrival, and to ask WC practitioners and scholars to move from more than just mission statements that call for inclusion to ways of doing and being activist. Part of such doing and being of activist work is to learn from those who do not belong, because the institution was never created for them in the first place. Sara Ahmed writes,

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Have We Arrived? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work • 5 “But think of this: those of us who arrive in an academy that was not shaped by or for us bring knowledges, as well as worlds, that otherwise would not be here. Think of this: how we learn about worlds when they do not accommodate us. Think of the kinds of experiences you have when you are not expected to be here. These experiences are a resource to generate knowledge” (Living A Feminist Life). Many of the authors in this issue come from the standpoint of “arriving” in an institution that was not shaped from them; through their knowledge, we learn about ways to expand and make more inclusive exclusionary structures in the worlds we reside in.

While this special issue comes out in a time of exhaustion and unrest, in which systemic inequities are heightened and made more visible, we are aware too this issue comes out in a time in which there is great divide, and in which it seems as if rhetoric is failing us, and perhaps, too, our academic discourse. The authors in this issue show us what our scholarship can do and be: as spaces to build solidarity through sharing different ideas, of recognizing and reconciling with haunted histories that have paved ways for problematic presents, and asking readers to rethink their responsibilities, some perhaps more than others, as we work to build solidarity and coalitions, albeit in institutions and structures that were created out of exclusion; we ask readers to attend each piece with generosity and humility, which asks us to acknowledge our differences (and not put them aside) and put away any initial reaction to be right, but to orient oneself to learn from being wrong.

An Overview of the Articles We were excited by the submissions we received to our initial call, and to see the diversity of voices and work we received from those in the writing center community. The authors in this issue range from junior scholars to more senior scholars, all discussing the need for inclusion work in our writing centers from different perspectives and orientations at a wide range of institutions. asking readers to dwell with difference.

We were particularly excited to see the collaborative works, learning from the dialogue that is occurring between directors and administrators and peer tutors.

We see these authors responding to where the writing center field is currently, through our focus on haunted and violent histories, a questioning of arrival, and asking the field to move beyond rhetoric to the doing and being of justice work. We were also excited by the intersectional work showcased in this special issue, with articles discussing racial justice, linguistic justice, disability justice, and queer and gender justice.

Jasmine Kar Tang’s article, “Asians are at the Writing Center,” discusses the epistemic erasure of Asians and Asian Americans at the U.S. writing center, drawing on Women of Color feminisms and theorize in the flesh (Morgan and Anzaldua). Through a selfreflexive close-reading of a personal story, Kar Tang unpacks a tutoring session that brings up issues of power, race, embodiment, consent, and agency; with an extended discussion of Asian American history and cultural politics, she provides a powerful lens of how white supremacy works on Asian Bodies at the writing center. We see this piece speaking to recent calls made by writing center practitioners/scholars Neisha Anne Green, Wonderful Faison and Anna Treviño, and Kendra Mitchell and Robert Randoph. Tang’s article shows “how recognizing and acknowledging that white supremacy and imperialism are intertwined, we will then be in a better position to identify and name the extent of violence (epistemic and otherwise) happening at our centers” (Tang 15).

Authors Sonya Barrera Eddy, Katherine Bridgman, Sarah Burchett, Juan Escobedo, Marrisa Galvin, Randee Schmidt, and Lizbett Tinoco, in their article, “Arriving, Becoming, Unmaking: Stories of Arrival at an HSI Writing Center,” also acknowledge histories of colonial violence, as they interrogate the physical space their writing center resides, and the regulatory role of the writing center as an educational space part of a settler-colonist project, “to discipline and subjugate” (Eddy et. al). Through intentional story-telling and the collective sharing of stories from BIPOC tutors and staff, the authors showcase the importance of relationships and relation-making in resisting the settler-colonist project of the university, and how “the relationships are themselves disruptive of our complicity…and it is through these relationships that we chip away at the standard language ideology enforced outside of the center (Eddy et. al 28).

Through co-constructed knowledge of both directors and tutors, the authors in this piece and their dialogue embody the importance of “unmaking” and acknowledging privileges and powers as tutors and writing center practitioners, as they examine SLI practices and move towards linguistic and racial justice (Baker-Bell).

In the article, “Todos Estos Cuentos,” Catalina Benavides powerfully uses the stories of her experiences as a Latina woman, narratives drawn from memories, to invite BIPOC writers and tutors to “feel empowered all the spaces they are in, but especially in the spaces where there aren’t many people who look like them” (Villanueva)” (Benavides 36). Benavides discusses her experiences with Critical Race Theory

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Have We Arrived? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work • 6 and Latina feminism, and how these theories have led her to recognize the importance of storytelling, of sharing memories from her lived experiences, “stories of experience,” to combat racism in education, as she has been and is a victim of racism in education.

Critically examining one particular white space, the academic conference, Benavides powerfully discusses, through memory-telling, hearing Spanish from the keynote speaker: “No te dejes. Literally it translates to “Don’t allow yourself” but what it really means is “Don’t allow them to do what they want against your wishes. Stand up for yourself” (Benavides 38).

Isaac Wang’s article too draws on and discusses Critical Race Theory, albeit differently than our previous author, in his article “Our Theories of Race Will Not Save Us: Towards Localized Storyings of Race, Colonialisms, and Relationships.” In this article, Wang writes, “As writing center practitioners of color, we must ask whether the map which has been set before us, the master’s tools that have been placed in our hands (Lorde), is conducive to moving towards relations that are truly decolonized. While our theories of race are useful, they often center whiteness and a white response to issues of race. We can no longer tacitly bow before the primacy of western epistemologies and ontologies” (Wang 48). Wang suggests that writing center practitioners of color move towards a grounded understandings of race and coloniality that are situated in community, local context, and storying practices and he uses his own storying of living and growing up in Hawaii and his great-grandfather’s history, and the colonization what we now call the state of Hawaii, to provide models for the writing center community.

Hidy Basta and Alexandra Smith, however, show us how Anti-Racist theories, drawing from scholars such as Vershawn Young, April Baker-Bell Neisha Anne Green, Frankie Condon, and Asao Inoue, have been important to their work in the writing center, as they discuss ways in which they have put theory into practice as they dismantle White Language Supremacy within the institutional framework. In their article, “(Re)envisioning the Writing Center: Pragmatic Steps for Dismantling White Language Supremacy,” the authors share the work they have done in their center for other centers to draw on; this piece shows the work that is committed to doing Anti-Racist work in these spaces, as well as the constant negotiation and conflict one might face institutionally in doing such work. This piece is particularly helpful for writing centers wanting to form staff education and faculty outreach centered on Anti-Racist pedagogy.

“Listening Across: A Cultural Rhetorics Approach to Understanding Power Dynamics within a University Writing Center” foregrounds storytelling and lived experience of writing center staff as they examine and investigate the internal power structures of the writing center. Authors Marilee Brooks-Gilles, Varshini Balaji, KC Chan-Brose & Kelin Hull share positionality stories (Cedillo & Bratta) from their different institutional and social identities to “practice thereness” (Riley-Mukavetz) to create what the authors call a “listening across framework.” As the authors write, “Through listening again and again, we began to understand the ways our experiences in the same community differed; we began to understand each other’s motivations and choices…These practices allow us to understand our experiences in interlinked ways rather than isolated ways.” Through their positionality stories and their “listening across framework,” the authors in this essay provide methodologies and frameworks to address issues of community in our spaces and to the multiplicity of identities, stories, voices, and experiences and how we are always in flux.

Hadi Banat discusses the complications with identity and listening in his piece, “Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification: Transforming Writing Center Response to Faculty Outreach.” Banat’s essay uses ethnographic fieldwork observations that he collected during his term as Purdue Writing Lab Workshops and WAC Coordinator; he writes on the complicated position he was in as a WAC Coordinator, as he discusses entering the faculty offices to listen to their concerns with his own visible identity markers. Banat writes that “the erasure of my Palestinian identity, incessant forms of marginalization, and experiences of domination I have witnessed throughout my life” set him up for transformative and intentional listening to change the culture of WAC outreach work. Drawing on Krista Ratcliffe’s work on rhetorical listening, and his own experiences with identification and non-identification, and the emotional labor and toll this takes, Banat discusses the complications of transformative work as a person “on the margins,” and asks the WC community difficult questions about the labor we require from those of marginalized positions and identities.

Kathryn Valentine, too, discusses the difficult and complicated work of and on listening in her article, “Listening to the Friction: An Exploration of a Tutor’s Listening to the Community and Academy.” Valentine writes, “For my purposes, listening to the friction focuses on how tutors’ listen to what haunts writing in

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Have We Arrived? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work • 7 the academy and therefore what haunts writing center work. Situating “listening to the friction” within community listening (Garcia; Lipari), this article explores the listening of one writing tutor in a qualitative study Valentine conducted to understand and learn more on listening from the perspective of tutors. Valentine writes on the responsibility that comes with listening to the friction, interrogating the white privileged positions many of us take in the writing center, as well as paying attention to the community languages and literacies of those othered by the academy racially and linguistically, as well as those from marginalized communities. This small, localized study at an HSI offers the writing center community much to think and dwell on as we teach listening in our spaces, and expand our understandings of communities.

Galen Bunting’s essay also asks the writing center community to rethink our staff education to make our spaces more inclusive through LGBTQ initiatives and SafeZone programming. In this article, “Tutoring, Minus Bigotry! LGBT Writers, SafeZone Tutors, and Brave Spaces within the Rural Writing Center,” Bunting addresses the political climate of Oklahoma and the exclusionary laws and policies against the LGBTQ community that continue to make the state and education systems unsafe, and in fact, violent spaces for this community. Recently, the Oklahoma governor, Kevin Stitt, signed House Bill 1775, a bill that prohibits mandatory diversity training for students in Oklahoma’s public universities regarding gender identity, sexual orientation, and sex stereotyping for students (Human Rights Campaign). The first of what many claim will be many anti-LGBTQ bills passed by the state legislature. Bunting addresses the haunted and local history of anti-LGBTQ policies in Oklahoma as he focuses on the importance of investigating the potential of the rural writing center as a brave space, affirming the rights and dignities of LGBTQ students and tutors coming from educational spaces that have historically denied their existences and rights.

In Karen Moroski-Rigney’s essay, “Seeing the Air: Neurodiversity & Writing Center Administration,” Moroski-Rigney challenges, however, performative inclusion work in the writing center, as she discusses how neurodivergent members of the writing center community are regularly denied arrival in such spaces.

In this article, Moroski-Rigney discusses how everyday programming, mentorship, strategies and pedagogies, and expectations and policies for hiring and employment are ableist and neglectful of disabled members of the academy and discusses the need for access-intimacy in our field and in our work. Drawing

on her own narrative and weaving scholarship throughout her narratives, she writes, “We can move towards access intimacy by listening to and believing one another--and by creating space for others like me to come forward in their truths, and ask for what they need. This means openly talking about disability (whether visible or invisible) and meaning it when we say we want to accommodate” (Moroski-Rigney 125).

This essay asks the writing center community to once again revisit their inclusionary rhetoric and to do the work of inclusion work in a reconstruction of policies and practices that are ableist and that have historically excluded disabled bodies, brains, and BodyMinds.

While many of the articles discussed physical spaces and experiences in the writing center, Eric Camarillo’s essay, “A Parliament of OWLS: Incorporating User Experience to Cultivate Online Writing Labs” examines the online spaces, specifically writing center websites (and he acknowledges the difficulties of defining what an OWL is) through an Anti-Racist lens. Camarillo writes, “Webpage designs, algorithms, coding--they all come from real, live people who made choices about what to do and how to do it…So, as we discuss race and technology and racism on our (web)sites, I invite you to pay attention to the real consequences of apparently objective choices.”

(Camarillo 132). This essay asks the writing center community to interrogate and explore their own use of OWLS and their work in digital spaces to see how we bring in past/haunted histories of whiteness into our online sites; with a focus on user perspective through an Anti-Racist lens, we can begin restructuring our online sites to make them more accessible and inclusive for those who use them--important work now as we continually move more and more to online work.

Columns: Where the Writing Center Field is and Where It Needs to Go

Once we received the article submissions, the editors of this issue wanted to create a space where we could invite scholars in and beyond WCs to contribute to the special issue, in the hopes that this issue will start a cross-dialogue and conversation in related fields. We asked scholars with different backgrounds and at different institutions to explore the question, “Where is the writing center field currently? And where does the field need to go?” These shorter think pieces address a wide-range of topics such as writing centers at HBCUs, Black Women WCDs working at PWIs, to disability and writing center work; all essays showcase, again, the need for coalition-building and an acknowledgement of the differences in our communities, while we all work towards combating

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Have We Arrived? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work • 8 white supremacism in our spaces and the need for our field to do more, in our scholarship, in our collaborations, and in our everyday work. Rachel Stark and Kennedy Essmiler discuss the impact the 2020 SCWCA conference had on them in their column, “Transformative Listening: Making Lived Experiences Visible,” as they were beginning their educational journeys in the writing center, and recognizing where both the field, and their writing center needs to go as they learned from this conference that was canceled.

Karen Keaton Jackson’s “Coach Prime and Me: Deion Sanders’ Impact on My Academic Self” discusses perhaps a surprising topic: NFL football, and ways in which Coach Deion Sanders embodies “leveling the playing field.” Keaton Jackson calls for institutions with an abundance of resources and healthy budgets to actively collaborate and engage in quality professional activities and research with those who do not. Following this thought-provoking piece, Neisha Anne Green and Frankie Condon, in their piece, “CORNERSTONE,” discuss the need for white writing center folks to get out of the way to build AntiRacist centers designed by and for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and committing to the hard work of being Anti-Racist accomplices. In “Making and Taking Up Space as a Black Woman at a Predominantly White Institution,” Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison discusses her experiences as a Black Woman at a PWI and the emotionally and physically exhausting work of being a Black Woman WCD doing racial justice work in her center, and explores why she continues to do such work even when her body says “enough,” to make more spaces for Black Women.

Randall Monty discusses right-wing efforts to control education in conservative states and highlights policies that include banning Critical Race Theory; Monty posits that the field of writing centers are in a contentious spot, but is hopeful that our field can provide a template for not only future WC scholars, but for those in other disciplines as we work towards equity and inclusion work that legislature is trying to deny. Bethany Meadows and Trixie Smith, in their essay, “Myth Busting the Writing Center: A Critical Inquiry of Ideologies and Practices,” discuss the common mythical themes we, as a field, continue to hear at conferences and gatherings, about the writing center and provide discussion of the rejections of such themes and tropes, as well as posing questions and places for further inquiry. We appreciate their acknowledgement that even when the field was being created, and narratives were forming, there was always push at “best practices” and what the writing center is and is not. M. Melissa Elston, Nicole Green and Adam

Hubrig provide a more specific essay on “grand narratives” (McKinney) that have excluded certain bodies in their essay, “Beyond Binaries of Disability in Writing Center Studies,” through binaries that permeate WC scholarship currently, flattening discourse surrounding disabilities and erasing the experiences of multiply marginalized disabled members of the writing center community. Beatrice Mendez Newman writes on the writing center as a site of instruction, and not just one of support, as she emphasizes that writing instruction and mentorship of writers does not always happen in the writing classroom in her column, “Counterstory in the Center: Replacing Privileged Pedagogy with Brave Teaching of Writing.” Wonderful Faison and Anna Trevon’s piece, “Where We’ve Been & Where We Are,” is a powerfully reflective piece on conversations the two authors have on meeting students where they are and building just writing support for those students, particularly those at minority serving institutions, such as HBCUs and HSIs; this piece reflects on the transitions they have both made as they discuss where the field is at.

These column pieces invite the community to dialogue, to respond, and to talk back to this issue and the issues the authors address. We would be remiss to not acknowledge some gaps in topics covered by these column pieces, such as responses from those working in Tribal Colleges, scholars addressing LGBTQ and gender issues, concerns raised by multilingual writers, and international students facing increased risk at our institutions. These gaps are reminders of the work that is required in inclusion work, and the difficulties that arise with coalition-building, some of the gaps are due to the difficulties with inclusion activism in editing work and the need for us to change the way our academic work looks like, and how we discourse with one another; these gaps are important for us, as editors, to own and recognize, as we continue with a commitment to the work in inclusion work, and address inequities within our own communities. We are hopeful that the column pieces allow for such dialogue to happen. **** We thank the authors of both the articles and the column pieces for their labor, for their work, and for their honest assessment of what the field needs to do, particularly as we are, to quote one author, in a contentious space right now, during a pandemic that has shed light on the severe inequities that continue to impact the work. While we acknowledge the exhaustion most of us feel during this moment, we

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Have We Arrived? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work • 9 encourage the community to engage with this scholarship in generous ways, and to enter with us in a bigger dialogue about reconciling with violent histories and rethinking our responsibilities in rebuilding the work that we do.

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Boquet, Beth, Neal Lerner and Rita Malencyzk. “Learning from Bruffee: Collaboration, Students, and the Making of Knowledge in Writing Administration.” In Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity: Traces of the Past, Issues of the Moment, and Prospects for the Future, eds. Rita Malenczyk, Susan Miller-Cochran, Elizabeth Wardle, and Kathleen Blake Yancey. Utah State University Press, 2018, pp. 70-84.

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ASIANS ARE AT THE WRITING CENTER Jasmine Kar Tang University of Minnesota – Twin Cities jkt@umn.edu Abstract

What happens when an Asian body enters the PWI writing center?

What forces are at work when an Asian woman enters the whitewoman–dominated space of a writing center? Continuing the call to refuse colorblind approaches to writing center consultancy and administration, I push for a recognition of how racial power operates on and through the bodies of Asians and Asian Americans at writing centers in the U.S. nation-state. Attending to the presence and embodied histories of Asians and Asian Americans at the writing center can show how our centers reinforce U.S. imperialism alongside white supremacy, which thrive in our policies, supervisory and consulting practices, and, most subtly, in the ephemeral nature of our interactions, movements, gestures, and other non-verbals with one another. I take my cue from Women of Color feminisms and theorize in the flesh (Moraga and Anzaldúa), hoping to activate spaces and practices of liberation. This selfreflexive piece offers an analytical lens that enables us to reflect on the persistence of the “model-minority racial project” (Fujiwara and Roshanravan) and, correspondingly, the epistemic erasure of Asians and Asian Americans at the U.S. writing center.

For months—years, actually—I have been blocked when trying to write this piece, and I think it’s because this topic exists in subtleties and shades. I’m talking about the presence of Asian bodies in writing center spaces. “How could a racialized body be a subtlety?” I imagine someone asking. I want to explicitly acknowledge the presence of Asians and Asian Americans 1 at the writing center. In tutor education curricula and staff development practices, sometimes it feels like the only possible mention of Asian people is through discussions of supporting multilingual (and often international) students. Even in such moments, it feels as though language and “culture” (not race) are named.2 I want to recognize the racial difference of the Asian body, not just the sounds coming from it (although we know that language is racialized, too (e.g., Delpit and Dowdy; Rosa and Flores)). If we only think of Asian writers and consultants through perceived language difference, we contribute to their racial erasure. Further, viewing Asians only through the lens of language difference also ignores entire communities of both monolingual and multigenerational Asian Americans. Crudely put, once Asians are perceived to speak English well, their Asianness seems to disappear from writing-center discourse. Thus, I want to think about how racial power operates on and through the bodies of Asians and Asian Americans. As an Asian American, I ask, where are Asians at the writing center? In the spaces of predominantly white institutions (PWIs), what is the status of our ways of

knowing? Can we let them loose at the writing center?

Thus, while representation and numbers are important, I wonder, can we bring our full selves to the writing center? Invoking this special issue’s call, what are the conditions and circumstances of our “arrival”? I lovingly invite readers to join me in a larger conversation about what equitable, liberatory administrative practice can look like. To fellow Asians and Asian Americans at the writing center—transracial and transnational adoptees and those who are mixed race, I see you3—I hope that this piece continues a conversation we can have together about the multiplicity of our experiences at writing centers.

In what follows, I focus on the erasure of Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S. nation-state4—and how this may take shape at U.S. writing centers. With its white-savior helping narratives, with white women making up the majority of directors, with the field’s overall ethos of “good intentions” (Grimm), and with the white liberalism that characterizes much of academia, the work of writing center administration creates a perfect storm for this erasure. That is, a multiplier effect results from the white ethos of writing center administration combined with the “modelminority racial project,” to embrace Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan’s semantic intervention (for it is not merely a myth or stereotype) (9).5 I ask fellow practitioners of Writing Center Studies to take a hard look at how this erasure is reproduced in writing-center structures, from policies to supervisory practice.

Pointedly, I resist suggesting “best practices” for “how to” work with Asians. My feel is that such an approach can unintentionally become a dehistoricized and/or essentialist exercise in surrendering nuances that are crucial to our comprehension of the workings of white supremacy. Rather, I hope to offer an analytical lens that may help us identify the subtleties of what we might call epistemic erasure at our writing centers, contributing to a conversation about valuing and believing the lived experiences and ways of knowing of Asians and Asian Americans in writing centers. Taking as a given the tenets of critical race theory—namely, that racism is “ordinary, not aberrational” in U.S. society and that race is a social construction (Delgado and Stefancic 8, 9), I focus on the sociohistorical particularities of Asians and Asian Americans at the writing center in the context of

Asians Are at the Writing Center • 12 larger concerns about retaining and supporting Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Southwest Asian/North African (SWANA), and Asian staff. I lean heavily on scholarship in Asian American Studies—especially Asian American feminisms—to consider how the embodied histories of Asians and Asian Americans emerge at the everyday writing center (Geller, Eodice, Condon, Carroll, and Boquet).6 In this way, because racial formations are shaped by the historical specificities of a nation-state, my thoughts are limited to and rooted in my observations working, researching, and studying at PWIs not only in the U.S. nation-state but on the U.S. mainland. As always, positionality matters. Living on stolen Dakota land, I currently work at a Research 1 land-grant (“land-grab”) university in the Upper Midwest (Lee and Ahtone). I experienced all of my formal schooling in Tennessee and my post-secondary learning in multiple regions. I am an able-bodied, class-privileged, U.S.-born cisgender daughter of naturalized U.S. citizens who are from Hong Kong and Thailand. Speaking Cantonese and English at home, I am also a second-generation PhD. All of these histories are wrapped up in my research and writing.

In this piece, I self-reflexively conduct a close reading of a personal story (and correspondingly, my embodied histories): I unpack a consultation I had as a student tutor, a story that brings up questions about embodiment, agency, consent, and racial power.

Invoking methodologies from Women of Color feminisms, I value the rich site of personal experience and, with this, the body’s capacity to know and to produce knowledge. This piece functions as a “theoretical rumination” on a subtlety,7 an exercise in “theorizing in the flesh.” In the iconic collection This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa introduce “theory in the flesh” as “the ways in which Third World women derive a feminist political theory specifically from our racial/cultural background and experience” (xxiv).8 Theory in the flesh has since been employed in a number of studies by women of color, especially Chicanx and Latinx feminists. As Bernadette Marie Calafell finds, “Anzaldúa continued to refine the theory of the flesh or theorizing through lived experience, noting the rigor associated with it” (31). According to Anzaldúa, “Instead of coming through the head with the intellectual concept, you come in through the backdoor with the feeling, the emotion, the experience. But if you start reflecting on that experience you can come back to the theory” (qtd. in Calafell 31). For Jesica Siham Fernández, Theory in the flesh describes the contradictions, along with the quotidian ways

women of Color reflect upon and engage their embodied subjectivities to problematize, resist, and heal from systems of oppression (Cervantes-Soon, 2014; Cruz, 2013; Hurtado, 2003). For women of Color scholars this process of bridging, reflecting and healing is necessary to our thriving and surviving in academe. (224) Theory in the flesh methodologically helps me as a woman of color center intersectionality, the body, and lived experience within a systemic critique.

Relatedly, I am interested in drawing from the nonverbals and the movement/knowledge of our bodies, as well as the histories in our bodies. I remember an embodiment workshop from years ago, when artist Pramila Vasudevan challenged attendees to push back on the mind/body split by participating as “movingthinking selves”: our movements, gestures, and nonverbals produce knowledge (Tang and Vasudevan). This isn’t just about the big movements we might imagine in a great performance hall. I think about the meanings made by the sweep of a hand, a tilt of the head, a sideeye, a quick intake of breath, a long exhale. Writing as a moving-thinking self, I like to think that the explicit recognition of movement also pulls us away from static, essentialist renderings of bodies and communities.

Thus, while this essay draws from personal experience and reflection to raise questions, it must not be read as definitive or representative.

I hope this reflective essay gestures toward the potential of self-reflexive praxis for racial justice, and perhaps one way to move closer to this goal is by centering embodied history—that is, our body’s reactions to what we experience and remember, as well as the interpellation that our bodies inherit. Our experiences do not exist in isolation, and what we experience is felt and stored in our bodies (Menakem).

At our writing centers, every body is infused with history. And this history informs how we interact with one another and how our body is situated in relation to the bodies around us (i.e., positionality) and in relation to the institutions and systems we are in (Godbee, Ozias, and Tang 62). If it is the body that bears racial difference, then thinking about our racialized embodied histories becomes paramount to the project of equitable, liberatory administrative practice and to our ongoing goal of treating one another—especially those we supervise—with humanity and love.

In the midst of the history, multigenerational remembering, and knowledge production of the body, most writing center practitioners would agree that the writing center consultation, like all learning spaces, is never neutral (e.g., Camarillo). If the singular body is

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Asians Are at the Writing Center • 13 infused with history, then so, too, is the writing center.

Racial power persists, and the PWI writing center inherits and perpetuates histories of harm.9 “Yet writing centers can and do also function as sites of slippage and subversion where agents can challenge institutionality and where institutions fail to deliver on their objectives,” as Harry Denny, Robert Mundy, Liliana A. Naydan, Richard Sévère, and Anna Sicari remind us (5). Though not immediately visible, possibilities to “wiggle” under, around, and through the system are everywhere if we move/think creatively enough (Chatterjea as qtd. in Faison, Haltiwanger Morrison, Levin, Simmons, and Tang). One way to subvert and wiggle is to name—and therefore insist on the existence of—the violences and injustices we may witness or experience at our centers. I argue that attending to the presence and embodied histories of Asians and Asian Americans at the writing center can show how our centers reinforce U.S. imperialism alongside white supremacy. (By white supremacy, I refer to the systemic embeddedness of “the hierarchical categorization of ‘white’ as racially superior” (Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre 67).10) That is, empire and white supremacy thrive in our policies, supervisory and consulting practices, and, most subtly, in the ephemeral nature of our interactions, movements, gestures, and other non-verbals with one another.

To mount this argument, I take my cue from Moraga and Anzaldúa and turn to a personal story, but first, I unpack the relationship Asians and Asian Americans have with racial power in the U.S. nationstate. Placing Writing Center Studies in conversation with Asian American Studies is therefore the focus of the next section, for Asian American Studies, from its inception in the 1960s in the movement for Ethnic Studies programs in California,11 involved “conjoined political mobilizations for civil rights in the United States and against American imperialism in Asia, most pointedly through the Vietnam War” (Kang 5). My hope is that cumulatively, through an extended discussion of Asian American history and cultural politics, this piece develops and employs a lens that enables us to read the subtleties and particularities of how empire and white supremacy work on Asian bodies at the writing center.

Asian American Studies at the Writing Center

With the Writing Center Studies community in mind, this section highlights frameworks in Asian American Studies toward what I hope is a fuller “critique for” racial justice (Diab, Ferrel, Godbee, and Simpkins 19). In the tradition of writings especially from women of color (particularly Black and Chicana scholars) who

push for a reckoning with racism and white supremacy in writing centers (e.g., Faison and Treviño; Green), I contend that exploring questions about the lived experiences and embodied histories of Asians and Asian Americans can further activate spaces and practices of liberation for our writing centers. I also build on existing conversations about disrupting the racial binary in writing centers (e.g., García). Further, I’m not particularly committed to making the case for “another Other” in Writing Center Studies12 or fulfilling a ‘four food group’ liberal project of racial inclusion, nor am I looking to compete with scholarship that has understandably and necessarily engaged with such politics. Building on this work, I argue that recognizing the U.S. nation-state’s historical/imperialist relationships with nation-states in Asia—and how Asian diasporic communities have fared upon arrival—can give us a fuller picture of the sociopolitical forces at play at our writing centers, providing another reason to refuse liberal multiculturalist pedagogies in our consulting practice.

But first, what do I mean by empire or imperialism—and how does Asian America figure into such discussions? While I limit my discussion of imperialism to U.S. empire in Asia and how this affects Asians in the U. S. nation-state, the history of imperialism is tied up in the history of the formation of the United States: in short, U.S. imperialism, built through land theft, Manifest Destiny, and enslavement, is closer than an ocean away. We are living in/on it. The “nation-empire” has always been at the U.S. writing center (See xv). From the Philippine-American War at the turn of the twentieth century, to the Secret War in Laos in the 1960s and 70s (involving the CIA recruitment of Hmong children and adults as soldiers), U.S. imperialist projects in Asia also haunt the everyday exchanges in our writing centers—and this haunting involves the bodies of Asians and Asian Americans.

This is complicated by the fact that “a paradigm of denial” is one of the defining characteristics of U.S. empire (Kaplan 13): that is, “the American empire constitutively forgets that it is an empire” (See xvii). In response, Asian American cultural production has produced counternarratives to visibilize and speak back to the U.S. empire (e.g., Bascara; J. Kim; See). In this respect, Asian American cultural politics (of which the discipline of Asian American Studies is their institutionalization) have the capacity to facilitate deeper, more nuanced conversations about equity in writing centers: they can push us to confront U.S. empire-building in Asia and how these imperialist projects affect everyday interactions and relationships at our centers. To explore this further and to contextualize

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Asians Are at the Writing Center • 14 the embodied histories of Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S. nation-state (and therefore in higher education and in writing centers), I now back up a bit for some conceptual and historical grounding.

The construction of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners within the U.S. cultural imaginary has long been a central concern in Asian American Studies.13 For example, introductory Asian American Studies courses often include history lessons about the Asian migrants who arrived centuries ago. The “Asian American as forever foreigner” construction is perhaps best articulated in the racial microaggression that many Asian Americans are familiar with: “Where are you from?” (and its corresponding, “No, where are you really from?”) (Sue, Capodilupo, Torino, Bucceri, Holder, Nadal, and Esquilin 276). Historically, Asian Americans have been constructed as racialized aliens in the U.S. cultural imaginary in ways that correspond with legislative acts (R. Lee). For example, political cartoons featuring derogatory portrayals of Chinese migrants were common during the era of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act (Choy, Dong, and Hom; Moon).14 Numerous immigration restrictions based on race, ethnicity, and/or national origin have been imposed on Asians (among other groups) over the years (e.g., 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 1917 “Barred Zone” Act, 1934 Tydings-McDuffy Act, and more). And still, we cannot totalize the histories and lived experiences of Asian Americans. As I heard Ronald Takaki say in a lecture a couple decades ago, “In Asia, there are no Asians.”15 The model-minority racial project is one example of the way that Asian Americans are viewed as a monolith, denying the “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity” of Asian American communities (Lowe).16 Mainstream media sources dating back to the 1960s attribute Asian American academic success to cultural practices and beliefs, in effect totalizing Asian ethnicities and simultaneously rendering other communities of color as culturally inferior (A. Chung 4–5). Asian Americans have been read as emblematic of an Alger-like American Dream, accomplishing their goals through traditional conceptions of meritocracy.

A classic exercise in the divide-and-conquer logics of white supremacy, the model-minority racial paradigm survives on Asian foreignness, anti-Blackness, and cultural essentialism; it also leads to material consequences, obstructing the U.S. public’s view of the realities that Asian American communities face. For example, once we disaggregate the data among these communities, existing disparities (e.g., in poverty rates and educational attainment) become even more visible (“Critical Issues Facing Asian Americans and Pacific

Islanders”). As Anne Anlin Cheng remarks, “the praise of the Model Minority ensures compliance, erases inequalities (making invisible the fact that Asian Americans have replaced African Americans as the racial group with the highest income disparity in the country today), and isolates them from other racial minorities” (“Anxious Pedigree”). To complicate matters, we as Asian Americans often buy into this socalled praise, participating in anti-Blackness and our own erasure, too.17 Simultaneously, the model-minority narrative stealthily and hegemonically fuels tension and competition among communities of color, making opportunities for solidarity more difficult to realize.

While the cultures of non-Asian communities of color are pathologized as deficient, Asian cultures are totalized and pathologized in mutually constitutive ways: Asians thrive at rote learning and do not defy authority. Asians need to save face. These static, distilled scripts emerge over and over again for many Asians in the U.S. nationstate.

The model-minority paradigm dehistoricizes Asian America, flattening the histories of U.S. empire-building and of U.S. immigration laws, which, taken together, largely shape the composition of Asian American communities.18 Deftly directing our gaze away from the U.S. nation-state’s actions domestically and abroad, the paradigm drives mainstream perceptions of Asian Americans as having “made it,” masking the history of anti-Asian racism and state violence (e.g., Japanese American incarceration during World War II). The reach of U.S. empire in Cambodia, Japan, Korea, Laos, the Philippines, Vietnam (there are more) is forgotten.19 And, if Americans have forgotten about U.S. imperialism, then other empires (e.g., the British in China, in India) may not enter our consciousness, either.

To be sure, the model-minority narrative extends beyond memory and history: it renders contemporary anti-Asian hate crimes, state violence, and racist rhetoric nonexistent, incomprehensible, or, at best, as anomalous acts committed by rogue individuals.20 Writing center practitioners may wonder, what does this discussion of Asian American racialization and history have to do with our writing centers, with our day-to-day work? When we don’t know about these histories and systems of violence, we lose perspective and context: we can slip into pathologizing culture—and the writers and consultants at our centers. Our writing centers are historical sites, and the model-minority racial project circulates within them on a daily basis. It may especially thrive in the teaching and learning spaces of writing centers. For example, I think of how praising Asians for their “work ethic” can come easily alongside our profession’s arguable overdependence on praise in

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Asians Are at the Writing Center • 15 staff development (Levin and Tang). I suspect that such tropes exist at the everyday writing center in insidious ways that lead to the devaluing, dismissal, or erasure of Asians and Asian Americans.

Given my concerns about how writing centers may unwittingly participate in racial erasure, the activism that birthed Asian American Studies over fifty years ago can help us see how imperialism figures into white supremacy, and employing such a lens can both resist the model-minority paradigm and contribute to “unmaking Gringo-centers” (García). According to Yuichiro Onishi, “Coining a movement-building nomenclature, ‘Asian American,’ in and of itself was politics”; for example, “Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, two iconic figures of Asian American movement history… learned to articulate a distinctly Asian American conception of politics derived from the currents of resistance that were anti-imperialist and antiwar.” I want to take this call for attention to U.S. imperialism and civil rights as a challenge for Writing Center Studies and practice: what can happen if we look at our administrative and consulting practice through this lens? That is, at the U.S. writing center and beyond, once we acknowledge that white supremacy and imperialism are intertwined, we will be in a better position to identify and name the extent of violence (epistemic and otherwise) happening at our centers.

The teachings of Asian American Studies (particularly from Asian American feminisms) and Critical Ethnic Studies (especially Women of Color feminisms), as well as the embodied wisdom of my loved ones and co-mentors of color, provide context and validation to the emotions that arise in my body in different situations. To give some shape to this discussion of how Asian American Studies meets Writing Center Studies, I turn now to a story that I have been telling for years to anyone who listens.

“So, What Do You Think? Do You Want to Work with Me?” I am working my shift as a graduate student consultant at the center. I read the writer as a white cisgender man who is older than the average college student on our campus.21 (This latter point is especially noticeable, for our student population feels very young.)

The writer begins by sharing with me an idea for a longterm project and how he wants me to be part of this journey. He is in the military and says he recently came back from serving in the Middle East. I squirm with discomfort, thinking about what this kind of stuff— what the so-called War on Terror—means for SWANA communities here, too. At the end of this spiel about the

project, the writer asks, “So, what do you think? Do you want to work with me?” I don’t know what to say. My unspoken response: I don’t have a choice. You signed up to work with me. I really have no choice. I vividly remember the non-verbals of the consultation: Me: on the job, engaged.

Sitting upright, leaning forward, welcoming, inviting.

Eye contact.

Strong engagement, good affect.

I was a seasoned consultant: friendly and confident.

Writer: crew cut, glasses, big guy.

Very intense energy and eye contact.

Leaning, sitting back in the chair, legs crossed over knee, hands behind head. Taking up a lot of space.

Very confident, very relaxed, very direct.

Me: shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, as the consultation progressed.

Writer: crotch adjustment. (Repeat.)

Me: Ewww. Shrinking, retreating. Maybe freezing. Posture caving. Stomach tense. Facial expressions going a little flat but still fakeengaging. (Just get through it.)

Maybe here is where the shades and subtleties of my story exist: there is no plot twist. The writer doesn’t make an undeniably racist comment to me, but something felt really off about this exchange—and I don’t think it was just about gender. ~~ I have an earnest question for writing center directors: What would you feel, say, or do if I were a consultant who told you about this experience? What if I came to your office and said, “This icky thing happened, and I think that it has to do with my being an Asian woman”? I would imagine that most directors would nod and say, “Oh, ew [insert disgusted facial expression].” For many of us directors, affirming the experiences of staff and of writers is part of our daily work; we’re usually pretty good at it, too. And the reality for many of us is that conversations with women consultants about creepy or inappropriate writers (to say the least) are not unusual. Thus, I also imagine that many

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Asians Are at the Writing Center • 16 directors would agree that the story I describe above is gendered, but would people (specifically white people) be able to recognize that it could be highly racialized, too?

I want to read the situation in an intersectional “both-and” way: it was simultaneously an icky story that happened to me as a woman, and its ickiness was deepened and informed by racial identity (mine as Asian and the writer’s as white). As a reminder, as developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw when analyzing discrimination against Black women in the 1980s (“Demarginalizing the Intersection”), intersectionality is “a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other” (“She Coined the Term,” my emphasis). In this sense, I am concerned that well-intentioned cisgender white women directors may dismiss how intersectionality is at work in a consultation like the one I had. Specifically, in the effort to affirm the messed-up, gendered, crotch-adjusting dynamics of the consultation, a white woman administrator may deny the possibility that racial power is wrapped up in the exchange.22 And in doing so, she can universalize and flatten the embodied experience of an Asian woman at the writing center.

The literature on racial microinvalidations can help us unpack the idea that race and gender were at play. As many of us know, “Racial microaggressions are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color” (Sue, Capodilupo, Torino, Bucceri, Holder, Nadal, and Esquilin 271). I sense that white progressives will nod their heads when coming upon this term—but I worry that they may interpret racial microaggressions only as ephemeral, living and dying in the moment.

Unfortunately, such an understanding reflects a liberal multiculturalist move because it centers a dehistorized, individualistic reading of an insult or behavior that actually adheres to patterns in place over time. With a systemic critique in mind, I want to focus on the subcategory of “racial microinvalidations,” which involve “communications that exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of a person of color” (274, my emphasis). As Janice McCabe points out, “The subtle nature of microaggressions makes it easy to doubt their existence or to dismiss them as innocuous, which contributes to their power” (qtd. in Diab, Godbee, Burrows, and Ferrel 463). As a subset of racial microaggressions, the idea of microinvalidation names the difficulty I have had when processing the shades and subtleties of my experiences, including the

one I describe here. In conversation with Miranda Fricker’s study, Rasha Diab, Beth Godbee, Cedric Burrows, and Thomas Ferrel discuss how a racial microinvalidation can operate as an articulation of epistemic injustice: it “hurts ‘someone specifically in their capacity as a knower’ ([Fricker] 1)” (464). They continue, “When microinvalidations undermine people as knowers, they also undermine full personhood, which includes having one’s experiences acknowledged by others, being able to construct new knowledge, and being able to contribute as a knowledgeable agent within one’s community” (464). I am concerned that in a liberal, progressive white woman director’s efforts to affirm the experiences of someone like me (i.e., a cis Asian American woman), she may inadvertently participate in a racial microinvalidation—one of epistemic injustice—because she relates to the situation primarily through a shared gender identity. In short, the white woman director can undermine the Asian American consultant’s “capacity as a knower.” Thus, this is potentially a moment of epistemic erasure of Asians in the U.S. nation-state, shaped by the specificities of writing center work.

The act of ignoring—and even not attending to— the presence of racial power in the consultation (or in a post-consultation reflection) subscribes to the liberal multiculturalist ideology of colorblindness. This latter point may not be obvious. I think most white progressives would agree that colorblindness is something to be resisted, but the struggle may lie in operationalizing such resistance. As Robin DiAngelo notes, “White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived” (5). It is in these dynamics that epistemic erasure occurs—enabled and deepened, too, by the model-minority racial project.

And still, I know there are those (even in my own racial/ethnic communities) who, buying into the modelminority paradigm, question whether Asian American women can be recipients of racial microaggressions in the first place. In a moment when Asian Americans are described as being in close “proximity” to whiteness— and in a moment when we are barely named even in best-selling antiracism literature (e.g., DiAngelo; Menakem), Anne Anlin Cheng asks, “Is the yellow woman injured—or is she injured enough?”

(Ornamentalism xi).23 Cheng looks at the construction of the “yellow woman”—and how there are persistent traces and material consequences to this construction.

While the othering of Asian women has traditionally been described as an “objectification” (e.g., ‘Asian women are treated as objects’), Cheng analyzes how the

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Asians Are at the Writing Center • 17 figure of the Asian woman began as an object in the cultural imaginary—that is, “how things have been turned into people” (x). Cheng’s work theorizes and affirms my emotions: I feel the effects and traces of the construction of the yellow woman on lived experience and on the body. Further, the subtlety of the racial microinvalidation on the body of the Asian woman is part of a larger phenomenon of the erasure of Asian American communities. If the model-minority racial project has the power to erase the history of state violence against Asian American communities, then it also renders my emotions during my writing consultation illegible.

In short, if Asian women have historically been constructed as objects first in the U.S. cultural imaginary, then what is the status of our personhood and our ways of knowing in the “cultural and interdisciplinary contact zone” of the writing center (Monty)? Does anyone know we’re here? If Asians and Asian Americans have arrived at the writing center (as this issue’s editors ask), then our arrival is conditional, stuck in a Derridean hospitality anchored in white liberalism and “American imperial disavowal” (See xvii).

To be clear, I’m less concerned about whether the crotch-adjusting writer committed a racial microaggression on me (he may have—to this day, I am not sure). I’m focusing on the actions that white writing center directors take when a consultant of color reflects on a session with them. I have been struggling with the intersectional subtleties of epistemic erasure, and this struggle is compounded and facilitated by an historical landscape in which Asian Americans are situated as inbetween—be it racially triangulated (C. Kim) or racially interstitial (Bow), if we are even acknowledged as people of color in the first place (e.g., Raymundo). The conditions of Asian women’s “arrival” at the writing center also rest on sexualized foreignness (Shimizu). So when this hypersexualized, exoticized body of the yellow woman enters the white-woman–dominated space of the writing center, what happens? The conditions are ripe for white woman administrators to over-identify with a story like mine. Racial difference gets dismissed, and gender takes center stage.

Intersectionality is denied. Again, the perfect storm for racial erasure.

The Weight of Imperialism on Our Bodies So, what actually happened after my consultation with the writer? I went to my boss, one of the writing center directors, and somehow just started crying. In the moment, I don’t know why I cried. You could say I am a crier (I am). But there was something I could not name

that my cis white woman boss was able to as we reflected on the session: “And you are even going to that Miss Saigon protest tonight, too!” she said unexpectedly, remembering what I’d mentioned to her earlier that day and recognizing the problematic politics of this Broadway show. Whoa. That was it. Miss Saigon, “the hit musical that tells the story of the Vietnam-era doomed romance between American GI Chris and Vietnamese prostitute Kim,” based on the short story made famous by the Puccini opera Madama Butterfly of the early 1900s (Hu Pegues 193). Both Miss Saigon and Madama Butterfly perpetuate stereotypical narratives about Asian women, something I remember learning about in my earliest Asian American Studies courses as an undergraduate student.24 Somehow, there was this coincidence of having a shitty consultation on the same day I was going to protest Miss Saigon. The genre of the Broadway musical facilitates Miss Saigon’s ridiculous portrayal of Vietnamese women, featuring an opening number about how “The heat is on in Saigon. The girls are hotter ‘n’ hell… One of these slits [sic] here will be Miss Saigon.”

Somehow my consultation reflected a strange convergence involving what Susan Koshy describes as a historic “white man–Asian woman dyad” (qtd. in T. Chung 62). As Tsu-I Chung explains, “[T]his colonial narrative…functioned symbolically to resolve colonial conflicts through the willing subjugation of the Asian female body associated with the conquest of the land (Koshy 20)” (62). And at the protest that evening, as hundreds of mostly white theater-goers filed into the beautiful performance hall of the Ordway Theater, our small group of protesters passed out “Don’t Buy Miss Saigon” flyers about what was wrong with the theater’s decision to host this musical—for the third time in twenty years, as David Mura points out in his commentary on Minnesota’s racial climate (50). Three runs, three protests. A big F.U. to Vietnamese and Asian Americans in a region known for having one of the largest Southeast Asian American communities in the country (“States with Largest Southeast Asian American Populations”).25 I suspect that this connection between my consultation and the Miss Saigon protest may be hard for many white people to understand. The root of this is that Asian American women inherit a set of historical conditions involving their/our bodies in the U.S. nation-state. I can hear a reader’s “yes, but [you aren’t Vietnamese]” response to my claim. A shared though fraught interpellation of Asian American women results from the conflation of Asian ethnicities in the U.S. cultural imaginary, in spite of the histories of war and colonialism between our ancestors’ lands in Asia.26 The

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Asians Are at the Writing Center • 18 case of Miss Saigon illustrates this complexity, for its predecessor, Madama Butterfly, features a Japanese woman character. These dynamics involving Asian women’s bodies haunted my consultation with the writer, whom I read as a white man. Was I triggered simply because the writer was in the military—and because I have an aversion to U.S. military operations abroad that may function to enforce the U.S. empire?

Perhaps. And this is augmented by the fact that in these contemporary times, deployment in the SWANA region involves bodies that I as an Asian American feel some sense of kinship with. Or maybe, was I triggered because my mother, a Hong Kong immigrant, is a former subject of the British empire? More questions come up: what if it’s just me? What if I am just too sensitive? Is this about a sensitive Asian woman who is making a big deal out of nothing? Could this have been a case of eros in the writing center—of a consultant getting confused by (and therefore denying the presence of) sexual tension with a writer (hooks)? No, I respond confidently and quietly.

Over time, I keep experiencing and witnessing this racialized, gendered dynamic around, through, and in me. I can already hear dismissals of my claim—that this is all about me bringing my own baggage to the writing center. Yes, my baggage, I want to say—and that of many of my Asian American friends, too. This must be what Cathy Park Hong describes as “minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions… built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed” (55). I also turn to my Asian American Studies roots again and the unpacking of Madama Butterfly and with it, Miss Saigon, in which the Asian protagonist kills herself in the end. As Karen Shimakawa observes, “...the self-sacrifice of an Asian woman for the love of a white (Western) man has become an archetypal template, against which Asian women’s sexuality is always measured in terms of self-denial/self-destruction (and often internalized racism)” (qtd. in Hu Pegues 193).

This archetype in U.S. popular culture is linked to historical forces of U.S. empire-building in Asia (and, correspondingly, anti-Asian legislation within the borders of the nation-state). This is a crucial point that can help us recognize U.S. imperialism as it is enacted through the body and as it persists at the writing center.

Naming the ongoing presence of U.S. imperialism and white supremacy at our writing centers productively lends nuance to the racial microinvalidations maintained by the model-minority racial project. In short, without this explicit acknowledgement, these acts of erasure will continue to exist in subtleties and silences, maintaining a liberal multiculturalist (and yes, imperialist) writing

center that perpetuates epistemic injustice on Asians and Asian Americans.

The policies of my writing center intensified the racialized, gendered model-minority dynamics of my experience: specifically, the moment of interaction in which the writer asked, “Do you want to work with me?”, was a confusing one. At our center at that time, a writer could choose a consultant based on the photographs and biographies on the website. So this “Do you want to work with me?” question was a fallacy, exposing the contradiction of someone giving agency to another. It is also an arguably loaded question for the model-minority subject, for, as erin Khuê Ninh asks, “What is consent for a subject whose algorithm for all things is to identify and meet the standards set by others?” (76). That is, for Ninh, the algorithm of the model minority is involved in the “subject formation” of Asian American women (76): in short, the model minority plays a role in our socialization and, to some extent, how we as Asian American women come to understand ourselves.27 At my writing center, these dynamics were situated in an appointment-making system that prioritized writers’ choices (a system that is worth revisiting). Thus, at a structural level, the writing center anchored and participated in the racialized and gendered haunting—in the historical relationships between the body of the writer and my own.

Is it melodramatic to say that I cried in my boss’s office that day because of the weight of U.S. imperialism? Bascara writes about how Asian American cultural politics make U.S. imperialism visible and undeniable, given “the chronic resistance of American culture to casting the United States as imperial” (xvi). In this way, my boss, in bringing up Miss Saigon, was taking a crucial step toward acknowledging the presence of white supremacy and U.S. empire. The years of writer’s block I’ve experienced when trying to understand my tears that day also speak to the power of the modelminority paradigm, which clouded my ability to process and unpack the exchange. It is no surprise then that I felt relief when protesting Miss Saigon that night, joining others at the theater to resist our casted roles as model minorities. ~~ Weeks later, during a walk at a nature preserve, I am still bothered by the consultation and tell a friend about it. It’s my Korean American activist friend who has thought a lot about Seoul’s camptowns, which historically have been sites of state-sanctioned sex work in service of American GIs (Yuh). He remarks, “It sounds like you’re a prostitute at your writing center.”

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Asians Are at the Writing Center • 19 “NO,” I say just as bluntly. (He tells me later that I was clearly angry, but in the moment, I’m too stunned by the comment to know my feelings.) As I think about it more, I hear my Writing Center Studies colleagues’ voices in my head, for this possibility has been raised before (Russell). So, what if my friend was on to something? What happens if I think of the situation through such a lens, where my body is in service to another? (And, how do I even talk about this without pathologizing sex work or stigmatizing sex workers?)

While questions of consultant agency and voice are not new, what does framing a writing center consultation as an interaction that reproduces that “ancient arrangement of provider and client” (Russell 71) mean for consultants who are Indigenous, Black, Latinx, SWANA, or Asian, whose labor and bodies have historically been in service to white people and in service to the nation-state? Where our bodies have historically been excluded by these very institutions that we teach, learn, and consult in (and most often on land stolen from Native communities)? What does this mean for Asian American women consultants? What differential risk is there for minoritized subjects?

“A Gap That Was Existing Inside Me for a Long Time”

It is years later. I have more institutional power now. I am a co-director with my former boss. I am also the first and only full-time person of color on staff at my writing center, the very place that trained me. The question extends and morphs: What are the costs of bringing Asians on board as consultants—and as administrators? How much epistemic erasure can the body sustain? And how in the world can we metabolize the subtleties emerging in our everyday writing center work? Once again invoking Hong, what do we do with our “minor feelings”—these emotions that “occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance” (56)? Since becoming director, I have witnessed and been part of conversations with other writing center staff of color who also grapple with white liberalism’s subtleties and silences (in addition to more obvious articulations of racism). While we all have to “choose our battles,” what happens when we start noticing a pattern of comments and interactions that chip away your personhood, your histories, and your communities—as well as those of other marginalized communities? As Diab, Godbee, Burrows, and Ferrel suggest, “[M]oments cumulate and take larger, systemic turns” (460): the moment of erasure may be ephemeral, but the impact is not. The logics of

white supremacy and U.S. empire exist in loud and quiet ways.

After I presented some of these ideas at an International Writing Centers Association conference, I received an email from someone who had attended my session: I really enjoyed your presentation. It filled a gap that was existing inside me for a long time. I... have often thought of my involvement with writing centers in north America. What can I, an Asian female from [an Asian country], bring to writing centers? How would my background as a [non-U.S.] national and my knowledge of writing centers be accepted by writing centers?

Am I even worth working in a writing center?

My eyes linger on this last comment each time I read it, with the writer linking her self-worth to her potential contributions to a writing center. I wish to draw attention to the gendered and racialized labor an Asian or Asian American staff member may feel at the writing center. Thus, as an Asian American friend and former writing center colleague recently suggested to me, maybe we need to flip this question about “worth”: is the PWI writing center worth our labor?

Notes I am deeply grateful to Rebecca Disrud, Darren Lee, Katie Levin, Tammy C. Owens, and Thomas Xavier Sarmiento for their feedback on earlier drafts. I also thank Rachel Azima and Harry Denny for our writing group. Thank you to the editors and anonymous reviewers. This essay is dedicated to Asians and Asian Americans at the writing center.

1. At the risk of wordiness, I use the terms “Asian” and “Asian American” together to acknowledge solidarities and differences among and within Asian communities in the U.S. nation-state. At times I use “Asian” by itself to refer to those from Asia and those in the diaspora. I use “Asian American” to describe those who self-identify as such, regardless of citizenship status. I also occupy a privileged status in which the term “Asian American” has traditionally centered Chinese Americans. Further, at the risk of exclusion, I do not incorporate “Pacific” or “Pacific Islander” in my terminology or analysis (as in “Asian Pacific American,” Asian American Pacific Islander,” or “Asian Pacific Islander American”), given the history of Asian settler colonialism especially in Hawai’i. See Fujikane and Okamura; Hall; Trask.

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Asians Are at the Writing Center • 20 2. One piece in Writing Center Studies that powerfully speaks to the intersection of race and language for Asian Americans is Tammy S. Conard-Salvo’s essay in which she reflects on how her multilingualism and mixed-race Korean American identity emerge in her writing consultancy and administrative practice.

3.

I borrow this language from the BIPOC Healing Art Series at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

4. I use the term “nation-state” “to point to how the United States is not a natural formation, but one that exists through the maintenance of laws, systems, and regulations that rest on a history of colonization, genocide, and imperialism” (Godbee, Ozias, and Tang 69n6).

5. Hereafter, I also employ the term “model-minority racial project,” though I use it interchangeably with “paradigm” and “narrative.” All of these terms speak to the insidiousness of the historical construction and figure of the model minority.

6.

In this piece, I break MLA convention when it comes to citing source with multiple authors. Instead of using “et al,” I include all names so that all authors are explicitly credited.

7. This term is also used in essays by Ed Cohen and D. Soyini Madison, respectively.

8.

This description is from the anthology’s introduction. In the “Entering the Lives of Others: Theory in the Flesh” section itself, Moraga also writes, “A theory in the flesh means one where the physical reality of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse together to create a politic born out of necessity” (23).

9.

Though higher education as a whole warrants critique (see, for example, Squire, Williams, and Tuitt), I especially look to hold PWIs accountable in this piece.

10. As Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre explain, “Our focus on white supremacy—instead of only race and racialization—is to name whiteness and its centrality to the construction of this racialized unequal world that we all inhabit” (67). See also Junaid Rana’s discussion of white supremacy as both ideological and systemic.

11. To be sure, the discipline has crucial divergences and tensions, and I’m concerned about the sexism, heterosexism, and patriarchy that especially defined the cultural nationalism of the Asian American movement, as well as the centering of Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans in early Asian American Studies scholarship (Choy 12). Furthermore, even as I make a case for the usefulness of how the discipline engages with U.S. empire, it is not a given for imperialism to be recognized in Asian American Studies curricula.

12.

I’m appropriating Catherine J. Kudlick’s term “another Other” when she makes the case for Disability Studies to American Studies scholars.

13.

While the “transnational turn” (Fisher Fishkin) disrupted and complicated this critique (C. Lee), Asian American Studies is not to be confused with Asian Studies (Hune).

14. U.S. popular culture depictions of Asians are not only connected to legislation of the state but also to U.S. foreign policy and shifting international relations over time. For example, see Naoko Shibusawa’s study of changes in U.S.-Japan relations after the Asia-Pacific War. 15. In other words, the interpellation of a given Asian ethnic group as “Asian” grows stronger outside of Asia.

In Asia, the distinctions between, say, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese people are historically and violently defined, but once our communities arrive in the U.S. nation-state, we are often lumped together.

16.

I also want to keep in mind regional and local particularity: how we understand the model-minority racial project can be informed by historical context and immigration waves and patterns in different places. And still, conceptions of regionalism on the U.S. mainland (and perhaps even institutional particularity) can become a way to deny Asian American erasure. I can imagine a reader saying, “Asians may feel erased where you are at, but my institution is different because…”

17. I find relief when reading Bao Phi’s essay, “Brutal,” which eloquently articulates these nuances and problematics.

18. For example, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act involved a preference system that favored individuals with training or occupations desired by the state, facilitating a socalled brain drain (see Reimers). The model-minority narrative ignores this historical context and renders post-1965 Asian immigrants as successful because they come from cultures that value hard work and education, implicitly suggesting that other communities of color do not have such values.

19.

I recognize that this is fraught and that U.S. imperialism can look different across contexts. In the midst of being on the receiving end of U.S. empire, some of these nation-states have turbulent imperialist histories with one another, too.

20. In recent times, for example, 45’s use of phrases such as “China virus” and “kung flu” to describe COVID-19 serves only to mark him, an individual, as racist; the phrase becomes stripped of the xenophobic rhetoric that is in its lineage. In short, how can such phrases be harmful to a community that is perceived to be so successful?

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Asians Are at the Writing Center • 21 21. Looking back, I now wonder about the role of cisnormativity in my reading of the writer.

22. Critical race feminists help us unpack this situation, too, given their attention to antiessentialism, which involves “a critique of the feminist notion that there is an essential female voice, that is, that all women feel one way on a subject” (Wing 7).

23. I thank Michelle Lee for drawing my attention to this work. Lee has also written a helpful review of Cheng’s Ornamentalism.

24.

A number of compelling studies speak to the nuances and layers of this musical. For example, Celine Parreñas Shimizu urges us to "move beyond a one dimensional understanding of sexual representation as always already injurious, dangerous, and damaging.

Asian women's performance and consumption of racialized hypersexuality provides the terms for resistant authorial and spectatorial relations in the theater" (31).

25. For a multitude of reasons (including casting and yellowface), Miss Saigon has elicited many protests from Asians and Asian American communities since its debut in the 1990s (Burns 107–38; Kondo 228–34).

26. Lynn Fujiwara offers a compelling argument about how “multiplicity as a conceptual framework” is productive when analyzing differences within Asian America and across communities of color (245). In the context of imperialism, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns also examines how productions of Miss Saigon invoke “the triangulated imperial histories of the United States, the Philippines, and Vietnam” (109).

27. Because Ninh is talking about sexual assault, I tread on difficult terrain and risk dismissing sexual violence in making this connection.

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ARRIVING, BECOMING, UNMAKING: STORIES OF ARRIVAL AT AN HSI WRITING CENTER Sonya Barrera Eddy Texas A&M University – San Antonio Writing.Center@tamusa.edu

Katherine Bridgman Texas A&M University – San Antonio Writing.Center@tamusa.edu

Sarah Burchett Texas A&M University – San Antonio Writing.Center@tamusa.edu

Juan Escobedo Texas A&M University – San Antonio Writing.Center@tamusa.edu

Marissa Galvin Texas A&M University – San Antonio Writing.Center@tamusa.edu

Randee Schmitt Texas A&M University – San Antonio Writing.Center@tamusa.edu

Lizbett Tinoco Texas A&M University – San Antonio Writing.Center@tamusa.edu Abstract This article works to center the conversation between administrators and tutors to make visible the labor of collaboration and understanding as we engage with the topic of our individual arrivals at our Writing Center at Texas A&M-University San Antonio, a Hispanic Serving Institution. The conversation is the framework for touching on the concepts of arriving at our identities and becoming who we are as individuals and scholars.

This conversation highlights the complexity of the recursive process of unmaking who we thought we were so that we can arrive at who we would like to become, in our individual lives, situational identities, and how we navigate our unique institutional system.

Arrival to our Writing Center by tutors and administrators is an act that invites both becomings and unmakings. Our experiences of arrival connect us to the many arrivals, becomings, and unmakings that have occurred on the celebrated and contested land on which our writing center is situated. Our university resides on the Yanawana, the homelands of the Payaya, Coahuilteca, Tonkawa, and Lipan Apache (Santos, et al).

Once part of the Mission San Francisco de Espada, A&M- SA is situated on a site of colonial violence that emerges from the Spanish missions. It is land that has at various times been part of Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and most recently the United States.

Geopolitical borders have moved back and forth across this land for six centuries.1 It is land that holds histories

of conquest, colonization, subjugation, and segregation and is deeply entwined with coloniality.

Our Writing Center is implicated in these histories through the role it plays in current manifestations of the settler-colonist project, a project that used education to discipline and subjugate. We encourage our tutors to arrive with their whole selves, to engage with our efforts to divest our center of unexamined biases and notions of what it means to be a “good writer,” and to engage with us in a process of becoming and unmaking that works to disrupt the broader settler project we are called upon by the university to continue. As educators and administrators, we have tried to unmake the White Mainstream English (Baker-Bell) narrative and policing of languages that it requires and make our writing center a place that resists the neocolonial becomings around us through our unmaking that disrupt the institutional becomings which surround us and in many ways bring our Writing Center into being.

Institutional Becomings Our University is becoming one of the fastest growing universities in south central Texas. Texas A&M University-San Antonio (A&M-SA) is a space of becoming with an institutional vision to develop “a national reputation for fostering equitable learning

Arriving, Becoming, Unmaking: Stories of Arrival at an HSI Writing Center • 26 experiences and outcomes, and increasing influence as a catalyst for social, cultural and economic impact” (University Vision Statement). Established as a landgrant university in 2009, A&M-SA is located in a historically underserved section of south San Antonio once described as a “degree desert” by our local newspaper (Foster-Frau 2016). The “degree desert” of the south side reflects larger dynamics of racial and economic segregation that have resulted in “portions of our population [that] have been denied investment for generations” (qtd. In McNeel). A&M-SA seeks to disrupt these dynamics of racial and economic segregation through its mission of educational access and transformation with a mission statement that opens with the promise to “transform[...] lives, our local community, and those to which our graduates return.”

The university serves a student population that is approximately 72% Latinx or Hispanic-identifying and about 77% first in their family to attend college (A&MSA “About”). Our student population is also closely tied to all branches of the US Military with one in six students being affiliated with the armed forces. San Antonio is also known as Military City USA, and is home to four military installations (Randolph AFB, Lackland AFB, Fort Sam Houston, and Camp Bullis) representing each branch of the military. These demographics frequently generate excitement about the investment, transformational potential, and expanded access to higher education that A&M-SA brings to the south side and San Antonio more broadly.

Maps such as the one above often become emblematic of the broader project of becoming the university has embarked on. The large new buildings, the maze of walkways, the expansive windows looking out onto the surrounding landscape all celebrate the growth of a university poised to transform the students and communities it serves. At the same time, Melquiades (Kiado) Cruz reminds us of the violence masked by such glossy images, writing “a map serves to define a certain spatial reality, one that does not necessarily correspond to the reality of those who experience it. It creates an abstract idea of a space that is not part of a lived landscape, and fails to acknowledge flows, movement, and ways of being” (421). Maps such as the one above put a glossy sheen on the colonial legacy of our university that is not only reflected in our Mission

Revival architecture, but also continued in our encroachment onto the Yanawana (Santos, et al). Maps such as this capture what Romeo García reminds us when he writes that “[w]riting centers function within a tapestry of social structures, reproducing, and generating systems of privilege” (32). Each of us within the Writing Center is an active agent of this tapestry. As such, we seek to disrupt our complicity through our unmaking of entrenched notions of what writing centers do and unexamined behaviors that discipline student writing.

Everyday Unmakings: Disrupting Complicity To engage with the unmaking of preconceived notions about writing and writing centers that are rooted in coloniality, we must recognize what they are and from whence they arise, which can be entangled with our location within “the larger ecosystem of the university” (Camarillo). As we do this work, we must learn to be “suspicious of [our] own imbrication, [our] own complicity, within the Academy, an institution predicated on Western European ideas and values” (Powell 2). Our work in the writing center bears witness to the “cultural bomb” that continues to echo across our university as minoritized students “are asked to distance themselves from their names, language, and heritage in order to assimilate to the dominant group—White European Americans (WEAs) (Santa Ana; Shaheen)” (Pimentel and Wilson 126). Through this process of assimilation, many of the students we work with are instructed to come to the writing center for help as part of a broader colonizing pedagogy of the university that asks them “to view their pasts as one wasteland of achievement from which they should distance themselves” (Pimentel and Wilson 126). Writing centers often willingly participate in this distancing through our “failure to explicitly name and grapple with [the field’s] politics, which has contributed to our often precarious positioning in the academy and has made us unintentionally passive facilitators of a host of unethical practices'' (Greenfield 44). In particular, writing centers are often expected to be – and have often gladly filled the role of – acculturating influences within the university as we enact “an ideology of individualism not

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Arriving, Becoming, Unmaking: Stories of Arrival at an HSI Writing Center • 27 only shapes writing center discourse but also races writing center practice, making it inhospitable to students who are not white” (Grimm, “Retheorizing,” 76). This acculturation frequently becomes a justification for our own existence as acculturation “becomes a means not only of precluding the Other, but also of validating the academic culture to itself” (Bawarshi and Pelkowski 43).

A key facet of our everyday unmakings is our disruption of standard language ideology, “the belief that there is one set of dominant language rules that stem from a single dominant discourse (like standard English) that all writers and speakers of English must conform to in order to communicate effectively” (Young 111). Tasked with controlling “this heterogeneity” (Grimm, “Rearticulating” 524), we silence both the language practices of our students and the knowledges that come along with those language practices when our pedagogies project a frontier of academic achievement beyond the “wasteland of achievement” (Pimentel and Wilson 126) students bring into the writing center. This work of the writing center does not simply happen in the abstract. It is work we embody as “[t]he ‘rules’ of scholarly discourse — the legitimizing discourse of the discipline of rhetoric and composition — require us to write ourselves into this frontier story” (Powell 3). It is here that our unmaking begins in moments of arrival when our enforcement of standard language ideology is what is expected.

In the spirit of comadrismo, a concept introduced

by Ana Milena Ribero and Sonia C. Arellano as a tactic both for mentoring Latinas in Rhetoric and Composition and for disrupting institutional cultures that exclude Women of Color. As we engage in this work, we heed warnings from José Cortez and Romeo García about the limitations of decolonial work in our context. As a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) located within hours of the U.S.-Mexico border, our decolonial work can easily fall into the trap of reproducing epistemologies grounded in the violent colonial legacies we discuss above. To help us reframe our thinking as administrators, we work to focus on and use rhetorics of women of color. Sonya, Katherine, and Lizbett all talk together, form friendships, grow in relationship, and know that we can count on, lean on, and ask for advice or help when needed. We model comadrismo for our

tutors through dialogue that we have in their presence, which models for them how to navigate highly emotional and important topics. We acknowledge that we have tutors with multiple and varied positionalities, which is why we say “in the spirit of comadrismo” because the types of relationship and interaction that comadrismo addresses and are the types of relationships we intentionally seek to foster within the center for our tutors, administrators, and staff for our tutors.

In the spirit of cultural rhetorics performance as story (Powell et al.; Cedillo, et al.), we have used narrative to try and capture these conversations and the knowledge we made together about our arrivals, our becomings, and our unmakings. What follows is a narrative of a dialogue among Katherine Bridgman, the Writing Center Director; Sonya Barrerra Eddy, the Assistant Director of the Writing Center at the time this article was first drafted; and Sarah Burchett, Juan Escobedo, Marissa Galvin, and Randee Schmitt, who were writing tutors at the Jaguar Writing Center at the time of this writing. In order to facilitate the sharing of these stories, Katherine and Sonya first discussed the topics and the potential for submission for this article in a weekly meeting with the tutors. We had been looking for ways to write about our writing center that did not center the experience of white administrators, but rather centered the voices of BIPOC faculty and tutors and was not administrators writing about tutors, but was actually tutors constructing the knowledge for themselves with their voices at the center.

After our first meeting, many of the tutors expressed interest in deepening the conversation and participating in the writing of an article. Sonya then constructed a few writing prompts, and at the next meeting we took time to journal about the writing prompts and discuss our answers. This conversation was wide ranging and most of the tutors not only wrote extensively but shared many stories. After this initial sharing, we asked the tutors to refine their contributions and to place them in a shared document. Katherine, Sonya, and Lizbett then constructed the introduction and the theoretical sections of the piece and gave the tutors each a word count, so that they could revise their section to place in the piece. We wanted the piece to mimic our conversation as closely as possible, but we didn’t want the administrators choosing what the tutors

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Arriving, Becoming, Unmaking: Stories of Arrival at an HSI Writing Center • 28 were including in the conversation. We then began the process of collecting the narratives and weaving them together into the dialogue you see below. We decided to keep the dialogue format to foreground rhetorics of women of color. Sharing these stories about how we navigate our arrival to writing center studies and the Jaguar Writing Center helped us in understanding connections among our experiences, while also developing ideas for what we envision for the becomings and unmakings that happen through our current and future work together. The goal of sharing our stories is to listen, reflect, and build community in ways that are locally and contextually situated.

While we may not yet have arrived at a way forward, the discussion below about our arrivals to the center seeks to disrupt the essentializing topos of Latinx identity that we may so often see manifest within the discourse of HSI’s and to resist discourse that relies on “metaphors for impurity, mixture and border become new concepts of the very purity they were employed to disavow” (Cortez and García 569). Engaging with each other and working with our students, we are confronted with the challenge of avoiding a “conception of a resistant subjectivity as an exception to coloniality when coloniality is the condition of possibility” (576). While there is a growing body of scholarship that theorizes the complexity of this, we are seeking to avoid a rhetoric of propriety and instead examine the work we do as we trek across campus and embody the spaces of the writing center. Our dialogue below reveals how the relationships we build with each other and with the students who come into the writing center are at the heart of the unmakings we seek to enact. These relationships are themselves disruptive of our complicity in the settler-colonist project of the university, and it is through these relationships that we chip away at the standard language ideology enforced outside of the center.

Let us begin. How did we arrive here?

Sonya: Arriving at the writing center at this university, on this parcel of land was arriving at a place I had long romanticized as my ancestral homeland. My cousins all wanted to leave the South Side of San Antonio. I always wanted to be a part of a community I felt excluded from,

so when I arrived at Texas A&M-San Antonio, I arrived at a place that no longer existed only in my mind. I am a sixth generation Tejana who was raised in Arizona, because my parents relocated there for jobs. I visited my grandfather’s store on Roosevelt, a few minutes from our current campus, a few times per year. My understanding of all of Texas was limited to what I knew of the south side and southwest side of San Antonio. My father’s family is from the Valley, and I grew up hearing stories of him playing with friends in dugout houses that used to belong to indigenous people. I heard of him and his friends finding arrowheads and tying them to sticks to play war. I also heard stories that frightened me of Texas Rangers and some of the atrocities my family witnessed. This land we stand on has a history, a history that is passed down in bits and pieces from my family who has been here since before it was the Republic of Texas or the United States. The stories are faded, and complex, and often bloody, and contain hierarchies of color, language, and cultures. This complex history of violence and colonialism in the settlement of Texas, the one that doesn’t often appear in the history books, is not only my legacy, but the legacy of many of the students we serve and it also the legacy of the land on which we stand.

Katie: Because our university is built on the homelands of the Payaya, Coahuilteca, Tonkawa, and Lipan Apache, we grapple both collectively and individually with the history of settler-colonialism that has enacted violence on both the land and the communities in which our university is situated. This violence, though, is not only in the past tense. This violence is never separate from the writing center that we work in together and is in many ways continued through my presence here. My presence as a white tenured writing center director who moved to San Antonio for this position extends the violence of settler-colonialism. I had finished graduate school with just a couple of years of experience in writing centers and applied to many of the jobs that were posted that year. The position I currently hold was one of those jobs, and so I moved to San Antonio having only visited the city for my interview and for a conference that was held here shortly after I accepted the position. My arrival continued a neocolonial violence that takes shape in a number of ways across our

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Arriving, Becoming, Unmaking: Stories of Arrival at an HSI Writing Center • 29 university including the linguistic violence that is often enacted through a writing center and that I was in many ways hired to enact as a white settler-colonist. My arrival is marked by the becomings of a center that has the potential to grow alongside the university and the unmakings that must also challenge the colonial legacies that enable our very presence and growth.

Sonya: I feel like we arrived in opposite ways. This is my first job out of graduate school and I had been on the job market during my last year of graduate school and I worked full-time and completed my dissertation. I applied to something like thirty-seven jobs that year, and I was fully prepared to go anywhere there was a job. But, I also wanted to stay in San Antonio to be near my family, because I returned to San Antonio with my parents when they retired for a reason. I wanted to raise my children in this contested space, with all its complexity, as Tejanas, so they could know their family and our deep ties to the land. I didn’t dare voice my hope to remain here to anyone, and I was overwhelmed with excitement at the opportunity to work at A&M - SA and return to the historic spaces my family occupies. Mixed in with the excitement was the apprehension of entering a space to work with a white Director and a transplant to San Antonio. I am not sure if I was worried about the history of settler-colonialism, or about our university and writing center participating in a history that threatened to continue to displace my family.

that we work together as a Director and Assistant Director, as friends and colleagues, with the tutors and front desk staff to create a vision of a different type of space in our center. I often wish I had known about spaces like our center sooner, because it was in a writing center that I learned to be a scholar and an academic, a researcher, and an administrator. I learned to research things I find important, to write with vulnerability and bravery, and towards a future I want to see in the world.

However, I also learned that not everyone sees the center the same way. I found many colleagues in the university who see the center as a place of correction, as a place of assimilation, and a place to fill in the deficits of those students who look like and sound like me. So, we are often at odds with our vision for the center and the expectations of the broader institution.

Randee: This is how I saw writing centers before I started. I assumed writing centers were places where students went to get help with their writing, or where tutors would take a piece and respond to any grammatical errors or other concerns. I really didn’t have any idea what a center would even look like. Desks?

Would it be dimly lit? Quiet?

Katie: I think many of our tutors and students may share your experience of arriving, of coming to a place that claims to embrace them, yet threatens to break their ties to land and community. For example, in our enforcement of Standard Language Ideology, the university writ large often enforces a narrow becoming of the very students it claims to embrace, a becoming that enacts violence on the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of these students. In the work of our writing center, we seek to invite an unmaking of the institution rather than an unmaking of the language practices of our staff and the students who come to the center.

Sarah: Me, too. Before working in the Writing Center, as a student, I always imagined the writing center as a place for students who did not excel in their writing courses. I strived to be the best writer I could be and, being an English major, I felt an added pressure from myself to be successful in every piece of writing that I created. When professors would suggest that the class go to the writing center I always worked harder to prove to them that I didn’t need that assistance. My first time visiting the center was after my interview when I was taken into the center by a fellow tutor to show me around the space. It looked much more casual than I had expected, with large tables and open spaces for students and tutors to gather. I had always imagined small desks, paperwork spread around, and tutors in business casual attire. Those first footsteps that I took inside the center changed my entire perspective of what the writing center really was.

Sonya: Yes, and I think that part of that unmaking of the institution begins with the space of our arrival. I think

Katie: Many of our tutors are like you and arrive in the center because they are confident in their writing skills.

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Arriving, Becoming, Unmaking: Stories of Arrival at an HSI Writing Center • 30 Many are also negotiating the nuances of unmaking and becoming that accompany this arrival. After having invested years of work in unmaking their own language practices and the cultural values that are circulated through those practices, we work with tutors to see these practices as powerful facets of becoming for both themselves and the students they work with. It is not the writer that we are working to unmake and remake in the writing center, it is the institution that surrounds us.

Juan: I agree. I arrived at the writing center by accident.

I’m not a writer in the sense that I studied it or have an English degree. I mostly used writing as a tool to describe to a general audience my artwork, but writing has always come somewhat natural to me because I associate it very much to storytelling. I see any paper, including any type of formal research paper, as a story being told. I have always been good at describing events in an organized way. At a young age my mother would have me write formal complaint letters to her bosses which often got her some kind of attention. Although I didn’t have a formal education in writing or English, I had the confidence to apply to the position at A&M because, at the very minimum, I felt I had the ability to identify structural issues within writing.

Marissa: Same here. I have always felt that my writing was strong, so I didn’t necessarily see the Writing Center as a place where I would go to get corrections on my writing. It wasn’t until I went to the Writing Center when a faculty member required the visit that I came to see how helpful tutors were, even for strong writers.

When I entered, the center was welcoming and there were tables and the space felt open and inviting. There were two other people in the room when I arrived. The session was good, I received some feedback on some concerns I had with my draft and it was a collaborative experience. I didn’t have any apprehensions about visiting the center, and after visiting, my initial feeling was confirmed by how good the visit went. When I applied for the Writing Center tutor position, I came into it with the belief that I could help people and support them with their writing. I wanted to replicate the experience that I had when I visited.

Katie: Yes. And as so many of us arrive to the writing center having been successful within classrooms shaped

by Standard Language Ideology, we must retool our understanding of language to begin unmaking the colonial and racist language practices that get glossed over in the broader becoming of the university.

Sonya: Yes. Until I was a graduate student I didn’t know the writing center existed. As a highschool dropout I missed much of the foundational education in English.

As an avid reader and writer I often was able to pass any test that was put in front of me. When I decided I wanted to go to college I found out there was a test required for entrance, something I had never heard of before, the SAT. I took the test and was admitted with a reasonable score even though I could only do rudimentary math. I had a good ear for words and I understood the underlying rhythm and nuance of language and words. Although never successful in school, I was a C and D student and at different times I was given ESL (I am a native English speaker) and reading interventions, however I was quickly exited from both programs. As an undergraduate, when I changed schools (it took me 7 years and three universities to earn my BA) I scored in the top ten percent when I was required to take the written essay exam. I earned a degree in creative writing and considered myself a good writer. Over a decade later when I entered graduate school after working as a copy writer then a Public Relations Director, I was faced for the first time with academic writing. I found myself floundering. The academic genre was so new to me and required so much precision, I began to doubt my ability.

I read the suggested grammar books and did the suggested exercises, but my writing skill never seemed to improve no matter how many worksheets I did. In despair, I asked a mentor who suggested I go to the writing center. This was near the end of my graduate career. It was there in the last year of my MA degree that I learned how to write academic papers, and I also learned the art of revision. Prior to this my revision process was to throw the story away and begin again, until I could finally tell the story right. I had no vision of writing centers. Until that moment I had zero exposure to writing centers. At the moment, when I was directed to the writing center, I felt a bit embarrassed because I knew that whatever it was I didn’t know meant I was really no good at writing. I continued to use the writing center as a place to understand the academic genre

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Arriving, Becoming, Unmaking: Stories of Arrival at an HSI Writing Center • 31 through my first few years of my PhD program. I found the model at my university restricting my work, so I switched to working with an “Academic Coach” in a different department instead.

Katie: Our embodied experiences stand in such contrast, and unmaking the privileges that come with successfully aligning our language practices with Standard Language Ideology looks so different for each of us. A question you and I are constantly grappling with is how do we introduce new tutors into the center and prepare them to challenge the privileges they’ve enjoyed as a result of their successes with Standard Language Ideology and to participate in the broader unmaking of the university that unfolds through our daily arrivals to the Writing Center.

Sarah: This is especially complex because, as tutors and writing center staff, we all have lived experiences that we bring with us into the workplace. Whether we visited the writing center before working there or not, we are all unique and bring with us a different perspective on how we should develop our best practices. No two tutors approach their positions in the same way, which works to the benefit of the students because they are always receiving assistance from a tutor who is doing their best, rather than a tutor who is trying to fit a mold created by a detached entity. This also allows students to work with different tutors and determine who they work with the best. If a writing center is designed to be uniform, with no room for individuality or change, then it will become stagnant and create an environment that is not conducive to growth or necessary adaptability. Just as tutors and writing center staff are different, each student that visits the center is their own unique individual, as well. Therefore, the writing center must acknowledge who their students are and what ways will best serve them.

Marissa: I agree. I view my role as a tutor as someone who supports students throughout their writing experience. I appreciated the collaborative approach in my own session as a tutor, so I wanted to do the same for the students that I work with as well. I try to offer anecdotes about my own struggles as a writer so that the students know that they are not alone in their

insecurities about writing. I think it’s important to be transparent about those experiences.

Juan: I think that the approaches and theories we discuss at the writing center are more transparent for the student than what they are receiving elsewhere. The student does not leave the writing center feeling that writing is a grand mystery that only an elite few can understand. I also think it begins to hold the institution and everyone that upholds academic writing as THE standard accountable– that academic english is only another code and that any other language code can be used to decipher academic english.

Marissa: I’ve always believed and tried to live by the notion that change begins with the individual. Structural and Institutional change begins with me. I realize that I have to “buy in” to the work that we do as a center in order to effect change. We have read and continue to read and study antiracist work and practices that help us to not only understand the impact of the work that we do but allows us to examine and see the students that we help in all of the ways that they “arrive” at the center.

Juan: I do feel that the writing center is currently in subversive mode– meaning we are informing students one at a time, and sometimes they exit the writing center aware of these new approaches but having to grapple with instructors and fellow students that are unaware they are reinforcing racist practices. Worst yet, the boundary guarding instructors/ students that are aware of anti-racist practices but reinforce because these new approaches tap at their white fragility.

Marissa: I feel that we as a center are doing this work to create structural and institutional change. If structural and institutional entities see the benefits of this work, then that will hopefully lead to more changes that benefit students. That work begins with us and I feel that as we consistently and fervently enact these practices that the tides will shift. It won’t happen overnight, but I am hopeful that it will happen. How can we bridge the gap between doing what’s right and operating within an institution with troubling and archaic notions of what it means to be educated, to be a good writer? I still believe that we as a center can be the

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Arriving, Becoming, Unmaking: Stories of Arrival at an HSI Writing Center • 32 catalyst for change. I’m not naïve about the challenges that we face, particularly against administrations and “the old ways of academia,” but because we interact so closely with students, we have the unique opportunity to directly impact their experience. Because of this, we can see how theory works in practice and this information should be valued for how it can encourage change at the higher levels of institution and instruction, so that students’ writing and experiences are honored at every level.

Conclusion Marissa highlights the ways in which the collective work we engage as we arrive in the center involves both collaborative and individual work to interrogate and challenge our positionalities in the center and in the university. As she builds relationships through her work in the writing center, she brings to the fore that it is through these relationships that we enact institutional change. As we move forward from these discussions and the arrivals they story, our writing center finds itself in an effort to embrace “a knowledge that actively unworks itself,” unmakes itself (Cortez and García 585).

At our writing center, the unmaking of preconceived notions and unchallenged and internalized ideas happens over time through the relationships we build with each other and with our students. It is when we are in relationship with others that we disrupt the settlercolonist project of the university and move away from the too-often disciplining role of the writing center. It can be through the building of these relationships that we stop trying to conquer the world through education, and we begin engaging in and owning our growth. As time passes and our relationships grow, we learn to understand each other and depend on one another. This leads to an unmaking that displaces the sedimented knowledge about language and writing centers that we arrive with and that constrain our work. Nancy Grimm describes this constraint of our work in the center writing, “Because the work of the writing center is strongly regulated by how we read and write the cultural beliefs about literacy embedded in normalized practices such as institutional placement, syllabus construction, assignment making, conferencing, grading, and writing center policies, a reexamination of the role of the writing center must include a critical engagement with these

cultural beliefs” (“Regulatory” 8). These beliefs “teach us to locate the problem of literacy in individuals (e.g. a lack of preparedness, carelessness, "poor" family background, first language "interference") and the solution in institutional practices (e.g. tougher assignments, more muscular models of assessment, increased emphasis on standards, back-to-the-basics instruction - even in more vigorous and visible writing centers),” tenets that are often reflected through the becoming of our university as it strives to expand access to higher education without stopping to question what that education might look like (“Regulatory” 8). As we arrive with these beliefs, we work collectively to navigate arrivals that at once contribute to the becoming that surrounds us and participate in an unmaking that seeks to disrupt the colonial violence embedded in the university’s becoming. This involves work that is both collective and personal in nature, as Marissa describes.

The knowledge informing this praxis is “a knowledge that is not knowledge but a clearing, an opening: a possibility to think through the base conditions of knowledge production and whether or not the work we do in the academy can amount to anything other than the expropriation of difference” (Cortez and García 585). We enter this opening together in a number of ways, including reading groups that hopefully destabilize sedimented knowledge that often underpins writing center work. For example, we have done reading groups unmaking our knowledge about the collaborative relationships at the core of a writing center session, unmaking our knowledge about bodies that write and the abilities they must possess, and unmaking knowledge that masks Standard Language Ideology and the ostensible neutrality of “academic English.” We do this work and sit with the discomfort of destabilized knowledge in a context that strives to facilitate a mutual trust. When we first arrive, we share our stories, we get to know one another, and we engage each other as whole people. This engagement comes in many forms, through reading a variety of texts together (not just scholarship), sharing food and stories at potlucks, watching movies together, and engaging in social and interpersonal activities that are designed to facilitate a community that celebrates its own heterogeneity. By sharing our spaces, stories, and lives, in the spirit of comadrismo1 we build trust and support systems that

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Arriving, Becoming, Unmaking: Stories of Arrival at an HSI Writing Center • 33 help us sit with discomfort and do our broader work of unmaking.

When we think about how our relationships grow, then we understand that our arrival at the center is not an end goal. Instead, our arrival to the center initiates a process of unmaking that challenges us to do the becoming we want while avoiding the types of replication of standards that we are simultaneously complicit in as part of a writing center. Our arrival then also highlights the absence of those who will never arrive and those who do not wish to do the type of work that we engage in. Our arrival helps us think about those who have been erased, those who have been barred from entry, as well as those who refuse to participate. As our stories demonstrate, arrival begins the unmaking of our sedimented beliefs and unacknowledged biases about writing and the writing center. As we unmake, we grow to become mindful listeners who are open to engaging in the collaborative work of helping writers find their vision. We also grapple with the very real notion that we should not deprive students of the skills they will need inside and outside of academia to succeed in places where they will be expected to be able to participate in standard language practices when they need to. We recognize that if we deprive students of these skills due to our own sedimented knowledge, we are replicating colonial practices that have very real social and economic implications, especially for already marginalized students. We arrive at this unmaking and becoming after first grappling with our arrival to this space and the land on which it is situated. We listen to the stories of those who came before us and we share and tell our stories so that we can know not only that we have arrived, but where we arrived from. This arrival prepares us to unmake both the sedimented knowledges of our field and the university that continues the colonization of this land and the communities that reside here. This arrival opens spaces of unmaking and new becomings for us and our university, allowing us to move forward with intentionality and not be swept up in the tides of blindly repetitive history.

Notes

1. The Six Flags of Texas, have become part of the visual identity of the state, and serves as a reminder that that Texas was once a colony of Spain (1519-1685 and 16901821), France (1685-1690), Part of Mexico (1831-1836), An Independent Nation, Republic of Texas (19361845), a member of the United States (1845-Present), and also a member of the Confederate South as part of the Confederate States of America (1861-1865).

Works Cited Baker-Bell, April. Linguistic Justice. New York, Routledge, 2020.

Bawarshi, Anis and Stephanie Pelkowski. “Postcolonialism and the Idea of a Writing Center.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 19, no. 2, 1999, pp. 41-58.

Camarillo, Eric. “Dismantling Neutrality: Cultivating Antiracist Writing Center Ecologies.” Praxis, vol. 16, no. 2, 2019.

Cedillo, Christina V., et al. “Listening to Stories: Practicing Cultural Rhetorics Pedagogy.” Constellations, 2018.

Cortez, José and Romeo García. “The Absolute Limit of Latinx Writing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 71, no. 4, 2020, pp. 566-590.

Cruz, Melquiades. “A living space: The relationship between land and property in the community.” Political Geography, vol. 29, 2010, pp. 420-421.

De Hoyos Comstock, Nora. Introduction. Count on Me: Tales of Sisterhoods and Fierce Friendships, edited by Adriana V. Lopez, Simon & Schuster, 2012, pp. ix-xiii.

García, Romeo. “Unmaking Gringo Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, 2017, pp. 29-60.

Grimm, Nancy. “Rearticulating the Work of the Writing Center.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 47, no. 4, 1996, pp. 523-548.

---. “The Regulatory Role of the Writing Center: Coming to Terms with a Loss of Innocence.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 17, no. 1, 1996, pp. 5-29.

---. “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform a System of Advantage Based on Race.” Writing Centers and the New Racism, edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rown, Utah State University Press, 2011, pp.

75-100.

Greenfield, Laura. Radical Writing Center Praxis. Logan, Utah State UP, 2019.

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Arriving, Becoming, Unmaking: Stories of Arrival at an HSI Writing Center • 34 Pimentel, Octavio and Nancy Wilson. “Éxito (Success).”

Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies, edited by Iris Ruiz and Raul Sánchez, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp.

125-136.

Powell, Malea. “Blood and Scholarship: One MixedBlood’s Story.” Race, Rhetoric and Composition, edited by Keith Gilyard, Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1999, pp. 116.

Powell, Melea, et al. “Our Story Begins Here: Constellating Cultural Rhetorics.” Enculturation, 2014.

Ribero, Ana Milena and Sonia C. Arellano. “Advocating Comadrismo: A Feminist Mentoring Approach for Latinas in Rhetoric and Composition.” Peitho Journal, vol. 21, no. 2, 2019, pp. 334-356.

Santos, Adrianna, et al. “Texas A&M University-San Antonio Land Acknowledgment.” 2020.

Texas A&M University-San Antonio. 2017 Masterplan.

Image retrieved from: Texas A&M University-San Antonio Master Plan 2017. https://issuu.com/tamusanantonio/docs/a_msa_masterplan_final Young, Vershawn. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2010, pp. 110 - 118.

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Arriving, Becoming, Unmaking: Stories of Arrival at an HSI Writing Center • 35 Appendix A Figure 1: Map of Texas A&M University-San Antonio’s 2017 Master Plan

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TODOS ESTOS CUENTOS Catalina Benavides Long Island University catalina.benavides@my.liu.edu Abstract

With so many stories out in the world, not all stories have been encouraged to be told and shared. The stories of BIPOC are still missing and not being heard as they should be especially in educational spaces. Our life experiences as we navigate a divided society and in education through a system that is not designed for us need to be heard, but how can we do this if we have been excluded out of the conversation most of the time? I encourage the creation of stories of experiences, mine inspired by memories, CRT, and Latina feminism, to reveal and validate our struggles in education and other societal institutions that are racist and discriminatory. Every story of experience holds value and should be given the space to exist and be shared. Greater change in homes, communities, and spaces of learning includes the need to validate BIPOC voices and not ignore them. We are here and we are ready to make change, bright and proud like papel picado.

En la Lucha En la Lucha. Latina feminists have been en la lucha since the mid 20th century, if not earlier. It has been a long and hard fight for Latina and Chicana feminists to be heard. They have struggled to be acknowledged and taken seriously with their stories about the realities of being a woman in Latine culture and American culture usually ignored, silenced, and, in some cases, forgotten.

Yet women like Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Norma Alarcón have been able, with the help and support of one another, to create a space for themselves so that their thoughts, ideas, conversations, voices, and stories are heard. Their efforts, along with the efforts of other Latine writers, have allowed Latinas to be able to join the conversation and contribute to the fight for equality and respect in our culture and American culture through our writings years after their initial fight began.

I am present in this conversation as a storyteller who is inspired by these Latina feminists. The writings of Anzaldúa inspired me to weave stories of the women in my life and myself with the stories these Latina feminists have told because our voices and writing matters. As she once asked herself why she wrote in “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers,” I too ask myself this and come to a similar answer: Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. . . Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it . . . I write to record what others erase when I

speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you. To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve selfautonomy . . . Finally, I write because I’m scared of writing but I’m more scared of not writing. (168169) The writings and words of Cisneros inspired me to channel inspiration from not only the stories I want to tell but the stories that need to be told no matter how painful or raw they are. In an interview with the New York Times, Cisneros said, "I am a woman and I am a Latina,. . . "Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power” (Tabor). I embrace the painful stories that spring from memories along with embracing my identity as a Latina woman.

Just like these Latina and Chicana writers and women, I too have faced challenges and obstacles when writing about these stories and topics, from struggling to organize my ideas to struggling with the right words to analyze these stories and connecting them to the larger issues that oppress not only women but other BIPOC. I have taken on the challenge of writing about these issues that are still issues for Latines and BIPOC all over the country and greater world.

Since our memories have never been welcomed, included, or properly written about in white academia (Villanueva), I pose the use of stories of experiences, narratives formed from memories of my life. These memories come back to me as if I am reliving them the day they happened. They translate into my stories of experience which are strong and unapologetic recounts.

I am writing because I want readers of color to feel and connect to what I am writing since the narratives writers of color create invite BIPOC to see themselves and/or to remember their own experiences in a new way. I want them to feel empowered in all the spaces they are in, but especially in the spaces where there aren’t many people who look like them (Villanueva). I want readers to be awaken and empowered to make change in white academia. We can no longer allow our memories to haunt and hurt, but instead we need them to inspire and grow from. Memories are not something we should repress. Memories should be embraced and channeled as inspiration and drive-- an inspiration and drive we must use in our professions, especially in our academic

Todos Estos Cuentos • 37 spaces (Villanueva). We, as BIPOC in white academia, need to use the memories which inspire our stories of experience to hope and to work on making changes that matter. Changes that tear down walls and rebuild them with space for all who want to write, think, teach, and fight.

I create stories out of my memories to process them into something positive. Memories/ stories of experience push me forward because they have pulled me back at one point in my life. My stories of experience are my responsibility to write about and present to white academia (Dillard). First, I share in hopes of a change in education. Second, I encourage others to share their own stories. My research is my storytelling. I need to remind myself of where I am and support those who need to get to their destinations. I must use my stories of experience/memories to make change. I am responsible to do so.

To end the silencing, we can lead and continue to have important conversations about the things that matter to us through sharing our experiences/stories.

Storytelling and using our voices to create awareness about the issues we face in our culture face is up to us.

We can no longer fail one another anymore as Gloria Anzaldúa puts it in This Bridge Called My Back: “How many times do we fail to help one another up from the bottom of the stairs? How many times have we let someone else carry our crosses? How still do we stand to be crucified?” (231). We can no longer allow BIPOC of the past, present and future to be “crucified” by the oppression we face constantly. The sharing of stories of experience would help us have important conversations with one another and potentially support those who need more support. Support not saving—we don’t need saving. So now I want you to join me in these stories of experience. I am not asking for help. I am saying that I am already present and am here to be heard by you.

CRT

I now invite you all to join in on the conversation about the importance of Critical Race Theory along with Latina feminism. Initially, I felt out of place and a bit confused by this giant, Critical Race Theory (CRT). I felt as if I had to read every article and book about this theory in order to contribute to the conversation.

However, unknowingly, I had written a lot about what CRT is addressing throughout my graduate career and I am/had been an example/victim of the racism in education.

In “Critical Race and LatCrit Theory and Method: Counter-storytelling” Daniel Solorzano and Tara Yosso

define the primary goal of CRT as/is “to develop a theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical strategy that accounts for the role of race and racism in U.S. graduate education and works toward the elimination of racism as part of a larger goal of eliminating other forms of subordination, such as gender, class, and sexual orientation” (472). I began to understand that CRT isn’t just one big giant (Solorzano and Yosso). It is a theory in education which includes “transdisciplinary knowledge base of ethnic studies, women’s studies, sociology, history, law, and other fields to better understand racism, sexism, and classism in education” (Solorzano and Yosso 473). I now understood how different knowledges connect and grow stronger in our addressing of racism in education when they are brought together instead of separating them into boxes. I look at that the same way I think of diversity. It’s easier for them to separate us into boxes and labels instead of us coming together in growing numbers as we embrace our identities created from diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Yet I will not be placed in a box or packed away. I will continue to climb up and over the colossal obstacles I have faced and will face. I will not forget to, as Solorzano and Yosso advise, hold on to the escalera with one hand, pero con la otra mano (“Critical Race and LatCrit” 485), I will reach down and pull as many people as I can up with me as I echo pa’ lante. I do not need to change or become complacent with a system I do not feel seen or heard in. I have endurance labor; a labor that “originates from the disempowered and moves toward equality through the creation of inner and collective strength that challenges the status quo’s power relations” (Solorzano and Yosso, “Critical Race and LatCrit” 486). Every story I have to tell of failure and suffering as a clueless individual has been converted into the drive, I have to fight them (Solorzano and Yosso, “Critical Race and LatCrit”).

And to fight them I pose the use of stories of experience. Why do we have to use counterstories? Why do I have to counter what someone else is saying? I (the self and the stories) are equally valuable. I can claim a regular narrative and the space to be seen too. While I understand the point of counterstories, I don’t want to write from a place where I am arguing with someone else or trying to prove a point that is already a valid point to me. I am already up against enough. I agree with the idea of counterstories as Aja Martinez defines them in “The Responsibility of Privilege: A Critical Race Counterstory Conversation” as a way “to empower the marginalized through the formation of stories with

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Todos Estos Cuentos • 38 which to intervene in the erasures accomplished in “majoritarian” stories or “master narratives” (214), but I will be using the term stories of experiences to validate my stories. In this article, I am going to share with you/show you my papel picado, a collection made up of my own stories of experiences in the form of snapshots of significant moments ranging from vulnerable moments in my life as a student, academic, and WOC. The stories of experience I share now might be the the same as those told by others of the past, present, and future, but I storytell with the hopes that change in education and even in some aspects of society, big or small, may come from it.

Let the storytelling begin . . .

1. This too shall past. I have this phrase written on the back of my door just like this— the way I hear it when I say it to myself. It’s the first thing I see in the morning when I open my door to walk to my makeshift home workspace for yet another day as a result of this pandemic. I sit down in front of my laptop screen, a sight that causes me an anxiety and a frustration I have never known before: my master’s thesis has become a colossal task for me to complete— a project I was so excited about a near year ago has tested me as a student, writer, and academic of some sort. If I can even call myself an academic. This thesis, instead of being a culmination of my ideas and appreciation for literature, has become a giant concrete wall that I am expected to climb over with no rope or help. If I don't climb over by some miraculous means, then I am forced to believe it's my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s a gatekeeping function to keep us out (Martinez, “A Plea”).

I sometimes don’t even know what to call myself anymore when I find myself in any academic space that I have to prove myself in and climb over the everyday concrete walls. This thesis is just one big challenge forcing me to prove myself to gringodemia (Garcia). I don’t understand the logic of why struggles have become a normal part of "making it" in this country.

Why must I struggle and barely make it to prove myself while others are already seen and proven with minimal, if any struggle, at all? Will this ever past? Will I ever feel like I have proven myself enough?

2. People are talking about a new virus spreading around the world but all I can think about is the annual MAWCA conference I am attending and presenting at with my writing center. It's the first day and the keynote speaker is going to address the crowd soon. I'm a bit tired but eager to learn about new ways to make the WC

an anti-racist space, yet I am skeptical on how an auditorium of white people will do that. Not to dismiss their effort but given what I have seen and experienced it’s just hard for me to be open to these kinds of things.

I hear . . . Spanish? Is that right? Para que sepas y aprendes. No te dejes. Así son las cosas. All phrases I have heard my mother say time and time again as she raises me in a country too different and unfamiliar to her own. These sayings and ways of looking at the world have also affected my being, seeing, and doing (Garcia) in a society that does not embrace a mind and heart that think in two languages.

Of all the phrases I hear No te dejes leaves me con un nudo en la garganta and tears in my eyes. No te dejes.

I feel like that is the phrase that has kept me going for so long. Hearing the keynote speaker say it in perfect Spanish in front of this audience does something to me.

No me voy a dejar. And I am going to make sure that in all I do academically I will help others learn a no dejarse.

For too long we have had to dejarse but now it is time we use our stories of experience in academia to center ourselves. We are not going to dejar them to continue to perpetuate the racist and classist realities that attempt to erase us (Martinez, “A Plea”).

But how do I translate this saying into words that everyone could understand? No te dejes. Literally it translates to “Don't allow yourself” but what it really means is “Don't allow them to do what they want against your wishes. Stand up for yourself.”

3. “I still suffer from an acute case of imposter syndrome, not an uncommon affliction to those of us whose bodies are in spaces not traditionally constructed for us” (Martinez, “The Responsibility” 220).

I am starting all over again. Basically. This feels like a failure on my part for not knowing what to do or for not knowing how to prevent this from happening in the first place. It's mid-July at this point. I should've been done in May. That train has long left the station. I can’t seem to process my ideas about the novel Women Hollering Creek well enough to translate them clearly onto the pages. I rewrite the same name, Clemencia, over and over again. Page after page. Why don't I know how to do this? Should I even be here? Wherever here is anyways.

Is that what this is or always has been? I have always felt like I never know enough or that I don't know what I should know. This has always been the case ever since high school started (See Fig. 2 from my own social media). Yet here I am finishing a graduate program feeling defeated and deflated.

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Todos Estos Cuentos • 39 4. Representation matters. I walked into a space and saw people that looked like me for once. Coming from a predominately white undergraduate institution I had accepted my fate of being the only POC in a classroom.

However, walking into such a welcoming space that was diverse was refreshing and allowed me to put my guard down. I was excited to be a part of this writing center and to now welcome all students into this space as well.

Papel picado— the colorful and vibrant Mexican decoration used to brighten a variety of celebrations for Latine families across all borders (see Fig. 3). My mind immediately goes to making this kind of decoration when I’m asked to decorate the writing center for Hispanic Heritage Month. I’m overly excited to do this because I realize that I’ve never really celebrated this— not in high school or college. The spaces and buildings are not designed like us or named after us. This practice of plastering pasty whiteness all over campus, as Aja Martinez argues, is “demonstrated through the naming of campus buildings as an act of instituting whiteness, . . . further demonstrating the institution’s history did not include you (POC) or folks who look like you” (Martinez, “The Responsibility” 225). The whiteness blinds us so much so that we are disoriented and unable to see what we want to see, and instead we see what we are forced to see. The papel picado breaks through the whiteness for me. However, this is bittersweet because of the fact that no other space has allowed me to embrace and celebrate this occasion— an occasion to celebrate los logros of my culture.

Isabelle Allende. Sandra Cisneros. Gabriel García Márquez. Guillermo del Toro. Roque Dalton. Sonia Sotomayor. These are some of the names of the faces I see as I cut them out to create a collage of them on a wall under the colorful papel picado I have hung up with my fellow Latina tutor. Here I am beautifully grouping the faces together for all the right reasons— admiration and respect— opposing the overwhelmingly negative generalizations of my culture that they ignorantly make of us. I am defying them and their overwhelming white space one piece of paper at a time. As Martinez reminds us, white academia and its pasty buildings, the ones that consume my campus, are “not ours, it is not our space, and we are welcome, tolerated, maybe even served, but it is never ours” (“The Responsibility” 226). However, I believe that the papel picado will make it ours— maybe just temporarily right now but one day permanently.

5. I'm from a border town too (Garcia). A different kind of border town. One that is not defined by its literal

geographic positioning or proximity to México, but a border town that is surrounded by certain people that reject us— the brown people. Collectively rejected by some of the most racist and segregated towns in America for a myriad of reasons but rejected, nonetheless (Lambert; News12 Long Island; Winslow).

As we grow up, we are naive to the rude reality that awaits us outside of our town borders/classroom walls.

Our schools are filled with kids who all speak, think, and dream in both Spanish and English.

But one day, I met this rude reality head on and felt an embarrassment like no other for being a brown girl from this border town. I now knew what it felt like to be “othered.” Yes. I knew racism exists but, as my mother says, es una cosa verla venir y otra cosa es hablar con ella, so experiencing it is a completely different thing.

I loved playing softball. It made me feel American because it wasn’t soccer and my dad loved baseball, so it was basically the same thing. Each game was met with excitement and nerves because no one wants to lose, you know? But today was the day we played one of the best teams in the area and not only were they good, they were rich and prepared. They had been playing softball since they could walk and hold up a bat. Not us.

We were playing on their turf. As the bus pulled in, I felt uneasy; I could see from the bus their nice softball field. It was nothing like our field that would always flood at the slightest bit of rain. As we stepped off the bus, we lugged all of our old looking equipment in a dusty bag towards the dugout. From a distance, we could catch side glances from the parents and full on stares from the opposing team. Man, they had some nice equipment. Everything matched and looked new. We were almost embarrassed to go onto the field with our faded jerseys and gloves that were probably older than each one of us. I remember our pants were boy pants and they wouldn’t fit us right. When I would run around bases I’d have to tie them with a shoelace around my waist to keep them up—I still felt so proud of wearing the uniform though (See Fig. 4).

We always knew that these towns weren’t always excited to play us. It was a waste of time to them. We were bad because were poor and brown and they were good because they were rich and white (Solorzano and Yosso, “Critical Race Methodology”). To this day, I vividly remember losing. Badly. I remember wanting to cry mid game, holding back the tears until my face grew hot, as I ran after a ball that was hit into the parking lot.

I could feel the weight of the gazes. Their gazes. This is so embarrassing. I’m being humiliated for sport while

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Todos Estos Cuentos • 40 playing a sport. I feel like in life I keep running the bases round and round and I score each time, but I never score enough to win. I can’t even enjoy softball or baseball or anything they consider American-like in this moment. I still hear their parents cheer and scream as I run and run. They wanted us to know, as if we didn’t already know, that they were better than us. I didn't even want to throw the ball back towards the second basemen because I felt like my arm had lost all of its give—I had lost all my give. Defeated and deflated again.

6. From a young age we are programmed here to understand that we are poor and not that bright. If you’re bright, it’s rare. Because not everyone is bright here. But who decides who shines the brightest? They do.

They don’t get it. Whoever they is. They just don’t get it. I remember sitting in my high school English class my senior year and feeling set up. This is a set up. All of this. My AP English exam was a week away and I was nowhere near prepared. When we all refused to take the exam that year, I remember being told by my teacher “How dare you all think you can do this to me. I can’t have my entire class opt out from taking it. How would that make me look?” But what about us, the students?

We wouldn't have paid $90 to take the AP exam had we known we wouldn’t be prepared to pass it. Did these teachers have any idea how hard it was for us to get $90 from our parents? Or how hard our parents worked to make $90? No. They didn’t.

Apparently, it wasn't the teacher’s fault, as they reminded us every chance they got. It was our fault. We were the empty shells of students that they were supposed to have information dumped into (Freire).

These teachers told us—constantly—they were Ivy League graduates. I would say they ended up here by accident. Maybe some Ivy League people aren’t that smart after all, they might just act smarter than everyone else. Regardless though, we were the poor kids from this brown bordertown who needed saving since we were so helpless and clueless. We were the ones who rejected their gracious teaching and remained empty shells of nothing. We were already poor, but they increased our deficit— they continued to take away more of our confidence and leave us in the red.

7. Listening. I find myself listening now more than ever in this job as a writing center tutor. I have been able to listen to what is really the issue behind the writing for the students who come to us. I hesitate at using the word “issue” because sometimes it’s not an issue but just another unfair professor expectation/demand. It’s

challenging for me to explain to students that there isn’t anything wrong with them. Their accent or educational experience is different than those of their classmates, but professors usually ignore that reality. Instead, they pounce on students for not knowing or for even asking a question. Students come to the WC frustrated and confused— a feeling all too familiar to me. This last year of graduate school has tested me, but it has allowed me to use my own frustrations to be sympathetic with the frustrations of students with their own writing.

Most of the students I have the pleasure to work with are non-native English speakers including a beautiful array of languages from Creole to Swedish to Spanish. When they tell me what it is they are trying to say in their writing. I am at awe at the complexities of their ideas that are too often dismissed for not being written in “correct standard American English”— whatever that is. All Englishes are still English at the end of the day (Young et al.); it is up to the reader to value and appreciate the ideas that come served in the various Englishes. These students have come to a new country and are determined to learn a new language while they also learn how to be the professionals they have always dreamed of being.

I have learned that as a tutor here I am more than a person who edits or “perfects” papers. I have developed relationships with these students since this WC is a meaningful space that provides students with encouragement and guidance. A WC has the power to be the source of comfort for those in need, but also of resistance towards gringodemia (Garcia). We answer all their questions. The questions that they ignore. We encourage them to keep going when professors are making them feel less of themselves or that they do not deserve to be here. No one else should feel defeated and deflated if we can help it.

8. This is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong too. Go back and check. Check the MLA. Do you not know how to do this? You are a graduate student. If I ever did this, I would be thrown out of my program.

Okay. I get that it may be wrong but how do I fix it I thought to myself? I kept hearing that what I had done was not right— apparently it was never right. I had resorted to silencing myself once again as the best strategy to survive this rejection (Martinez, “A Plea”). I had become a part of their power games. I was now complacent to this treatment. This is what I get for being a BIPOC in white academia, I thought. Why am I even here and do I deserve this degree if everything I do is

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Todos Estos Cuentos • 41 wrong? (Garcia; Solorzano and Yosso, “Critical Race and Lat Crit”).

But you see, that’s the thing. It’s so easy to call out what’s wrong—or wrong to some that is. They label some of us as incapable of. . . too lazy to . . . not responsible enough . . . not mature enough. . . . In reality they are the ones not capable of seeing behind/beyond their gold colored lens. Gold— not rose as the saying goes— Gold because they set the golden standard, their own standard, a made up standard. A standard that the rest of us can't afford. So easy for them to make us feel less than for not knowing how to reach that supremacy or how to mask ourselves to survive the white language supremacy (Inoue).

White. Language. Supremacy. We must call is what it is—white supremacy—even if you feel uncomfortable reading that word, saying that word, or feel a part of that word. We must label it what is (Inoue) because we have gone too long allowing that thing/word/concept to tear us down, to make us feel less and less capable, to keep us out of spaces of learning. Pero ya no más.

9. I look to the door to a familiar face. A warm smile and shy student standing at the doorway waiting for me to acknowledge them. I smile a big smile and I get one just as big in return. I've worked with this student ever since I started at the WC. She calls me "Miss Cat" which warms my heart but also makes me feel old in a way.

She's an adult student in the health sciences school and English is her second language. She comes to me today to express her anxiety at being placed in an independent study course where she must write a long research paper.

I too feel some anxiety at the task because I know how hard it is for her to write in general. She talks about how she doesn't feel cared for on campus and how they think she is dumb for asking any question and because of her accent. Unfortunately, she knows, as well as I do, that she really is alone in this, or that she would be alone. But she comes here to the WC because she knows that we will help her. I've tried my best to help her because in her I see my mom and others I know who are dismissed because they speak English con accento. I see in her the struggles of BIPOC navigating college. She wants to succeed so badly and to know that her writing is what is in the way of her success is unfair. No one else should feel defeated and deflated.

Don't worry we will meet every Tuesday for the rest of the semester. Each session you will bring the draft you have, and we will talk about the sources and then the ideas you want to write about. The way I try to help this student is the same way we should help all students

in education. We shouldn't decide who can and can't get helped based on race or socio- economic background.

They can't do that to us. They cannot continue to deny that racism does not haunt the spaces we try to navigate in academia (Garcia). We know it exist. We see it. We live it. But we are here to share our stories of experience in response. We might be “outsiders”, but they cannot deny our existence and our will to rebuild the way we do things in our communities, especially in our spaces for learning (Solorzano and Yosso, “Critical Race and Lat Crit”). No es justo. Ya no es justo.

Conclusion One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to hold me here forever.

One day I will go away. Friends and neighbors will say, “What happened to that Esperanza?

Where did she go with all those books and paper? Why did she march so far away?” They will not know I have gone away to come back.

For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot [get] out. (Cisneros 110) So why am I writing all of this? Who is going to read this? Who is going to care? What will my writing and sharing my stories of experiences lead to? I ask myself this as I tie it all together for you. Honestly, all I care about really is who is going to feel after reading this? Not what are they going to feel. I don’t know what I want them to feel. I just want them to feel something. I hope that my/yours/theirs/our stories of experience may be the vehicles to help in whichever way we want to—to change whatever we can in homes, communities, and spaces of learning.

And like Esperanza I too will use my “bags of books and paper” to do all that I can to make us seen and heard. And actually, that wasn’t my original plan.

Initially, I thought the more I distanced myself from what caused me so many challenges—what made me so different—would lead me to be happier. To feel like I made it. I’d be a rich doctor or lawyer in the city like everyone wanted me to be. I would never come back home, home wasn’t for me so I thought.

Yet it took me leaving home. Leaving helped me to understand where I was really meant to be was where I was fleeing from. Home is where most of my memories come back to life to empower me. My original plan wasn’t to come back. But now it is. I’m coming back and staying back. I’m climbing up the escalera and trayendo me los que puedo, todos.

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Todos Estos Cuentos • 42 Let’s not forget that I am still collecting stories of experiences. I am still creating el papel picado, mi papel picado. I am the collection of colorful papers creating a longer and longer garland as I learn and live more. I am being cut out and formed in various patterns and shapes but all still beautiful. They might all look different but that’s okay. I will be the bright papel picado in all rooms and spaces that I walk into; nosotros crearemos nuestro propio papel picado una historia a la vez.

Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983. 2nd edition, pp. 165-174 Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. Vintage Books, 1984.

Dillard, Cynthia B. “The Substance of Things Hoped for, The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Examining an Endarkened Feminist Epistemology in Educational Research and Leadership.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 13, no. 6, 2000, pp.

661-681. DOI: 10.1080/09518390050211565 Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 4th ed., Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Inoue, Asao B. Above the Well: An Antiracist Argument from a Boy of Color. Utah State University Press, 2021.

Lambert, Bruce. “Study Calls L.I. Most Segregated Suburb.” New York Times, 5 Jun. 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/05/nyregion/stu dy-calls-li-most-segregated-suburb.html Martinez, Aja Y. “A Plea for Critical Race Theory Counterstory: Stock Story versus Counterstory Dialogues Concerning Alejandra's "Fit" in the Academy.” Composition Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2014, pp.

33-55. DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/ATDB.2016.0933.2.03 ---. “The Responsibility of Privilege: A Critical Race Counterstory Conversation.” Peitho Journal, vol. 21, no.

1, 2018, pp. 212-233. https://cfshrc.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/10/13_Martinez_TheResponsibility-of-Privilege_21.1_Final.pdf News12 Long Island. “Study: LI one of the most segregated places in the U.S.” 24 Feb. 2011, https://longisland.news12.com/study-li-one-of-themost-segregated-places-in-the-us-34755044 Solorzano, Daniel G. and Tara J. Yosso. “Critical Race and LatCrit Theory and Method: Counter-storytelling.”

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol.

14, no. 4, 2001, pp. 471-495. DOI: 10.1080/09518390110063365 Solorzano, Daniel G. and Tara J. Yosso. “Critical Race Methodology: Counter-storytelling as an Analytical Framework for Education Research.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 1, 2002, pp. 23-44. DOI: 10.1177/107780040200800103 Tabor, Mary B. W. “At the Library With: Sandra Cisneros; A Solo Traveler In Two Worlds.” The New York Times, 7 January 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/07/garden/atthe-library-with-sandra-cisneros-a-solo-traveler-in-twoworlds.html This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. 2nd ed., Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983.

Villanueva, Victor. “Memoria” Is a Friend of Ours: On the Discourse of Color.” College English, vol. 67, no. 1, 2004, pp. 9-19. https://doi.org/10.2307/4140722 Winslow, Olivia. “Long Island Divided Part 10: Dividing Lines, Visible and Invisible.” Newsday, 17 Nov. 2019, https://projects.newsday.com/longisland/segregation-real-estate-history/ Young, Vershawn Ashanti et al. Other People’s English: CodeMeshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy.

Teachers College Press, 2014.

Oppression in the Writing Center. Writing Center Journal, vol.

31, no. 2, 2011, pp. 13-49.

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Todos Estos Cuentos • 43 Appendix A Figure 1. Me storytelling at age 3.

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Todos Estos Cuentos • 44 Appendix B Figure 2. Tenth grade in highschool.

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Todos Estos Cuentos • 45

Appendix C Figure 3. Papel picado at our LIU Post WC.

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Todos Estos Cuentos • 46

Appendix D Figure 4. Batter up.

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OUR THEORIES OF RACE WILL NOT SAVE US: TOWARDS LOCALIZED STORYINGS OF RACE, COLONIALISMS, AND RELATIONSHIPS Isaac K. Wang Purdue University wang3679@purdue.edu Abstract

In this essay, I argue that theorizations of race in writing center scholarship tend to draw on western ontologies, leading to the erasures of complex relationships between peoples of color. In response, I suggest that writing center practitioners of color move towards grounded understandings of race and coloniality that are situated in community, local context, and storying practices.

Kiawe Kiawe trees grow abundantly along the arid shorelines of Kona. Prosopis pallida, or kiawe by its Hawaiian name, is a species of mesquite that was introduced to Hawaiʻi shortly after the arrival of the missionaries in 1820 as a replacement for the lowland forest that was quickly being devastated by the sandalwood trade and the introduction of European livestock. A fast-growing and hearty tree, kiawe rapidly spread throughout the islands. Unlike many invasive species, kiawe has a bounty of uses: its dense, hard trunks can be used for charcoal or firewood; the yellow bean pods are edible and offer feed for animals; and kiawe forests prevent soil erosion in areas that have lost their indigenous flora.

When I was a boy, I remember helping my dad cut kiawe in preparation for making imu1. We would find trees that were dead and dry, saw them up, and carefully load them into the back of his faded blue Mazda pickup.

The kiawe logs would be arranged pyramid-style in the imu pit, and over the logs we stacked smooth volcanic river stones. We would light the imu fire at 3:00 a.m., and wait for dawn as the rocks began to glow red-hot.

In some ways, these kiawe fires were a callback to the first generation of my family in Hawai‘i, to my greatgrandfather who came shortly after the American annexation of Hawaiʻi and sold kiawe charcoal to sustain his family.

But the thorns are a pain. Long, sharp, and slightly toxic, kiawe branches are covered in them, and they hide among the dried foliage at your feet, waiting to be stepped on. As gingerly and carefully as you might try to walk, at some point you’ll misstep and get stabbed.

When that happens, it’s usually easy enough to pull the thorn out of your slipper. However, what often occurs is that you step on a thorn without realizing it and the tip of the thorn sits just below the surface of your insole.

Every now and then, you’ll put your foot down just right

and—AUĒ! And because the base of the thorn gets broken off, it’s not easy to find and pull out either. I’ve walked for weeks with an unfound thorn stuck in the bottom of a slipper, not causing me enough pain to throw the pair away, but uncomfortably jabbing into my foot every few days.

When I came to the continental US to learn how to direct a writing center, the academic discussion of race pricked me like a kiawe thorn hidden in my slipper. It pricked me in my first month in my PhD program when a well-meaning (white) graduate student warned me about the struggle of dealing with racists in Indiana as a person of color, and offered to help me find resources.

It pricked me as I sat in the middle of a convention hall in the Chicago Sheraton and listened to a room full of white writing center administrators applaud NeishaAnne Green’s address as she urged them to “give up some of the privilege you hold so dearly so that I can have some” (29).

It pricked me a year and a half later in Asao Inoue’s address at the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication. A confession: though I had met Asao years earlier, when he interviewed for a position at my alma mater, I didn't actually attend his talk. The first few days of the conference, I was stuck feverishly working to reconfigure my panel after two members cancelled at the last minute. It wasn’t till a month later, as I carefully read over the transcript of Inoue’s talk, that I felt sharp discomfort. In the opening of his speech, Asao addresses scholars of color in the room, applauding them for their struggle against white supremacy. I’ll return to that introduction in a minute, but what burned me with anger, what hobbled me with its poisonous thorn, was the direction Asao went next.

Turning to the white scholars in the room, he asked “When I addressed only my colleagues of color just a minute ago, how did you feel? How did it make you feel in your skin to be excluded? How did it feel to be talked about and not talked to, to be the object of the discussion and not the subject? How does it feel to be the problem?” (Inoue 356). Inoue went on for the next thirty-two minutes of his forty-six minute talk to call out the white folks in the room for being complicit in white supremacy and white language supremacy. Thirty-two minutes for white folks. We got just twelve.

Our Theories of Race Will Not Save Us: Towards Localized Storyings of Race, Colonialisms, and Relationships • 48 Do you see the irony? Do you see the thorn beginning to show its pointed tip? Inoue addresses the scholars of color in the room to make a point to the white folks. We were merely a rhetorical weapon, wielded without consent, against the monstrous superstructure of whiteness, and against a roomful of white scholars.

There is an underlying assumption, both in the opening of Inoue’s speech and in its two-part structure addressing two audiences. In the short section where he talks to folks of color, Inoue states: You live it, but sometimes we have to remind ourselves of the magnitude of shit—that we are not oppressed alone. We need to commiserate together here in this place because often we may be alone at our home institutions. We need to lament together. Of course, I commiserate with you today in the presence of White people, so there are other reasons I remind us of the steel cage of racism. We should lament together. It builds coalitions among the variously oppressed, such as our LGBTQIA colleagues, many of whom are White. (Inoue 354).

Underlying Inoue’s presentation of struggle is an assumption of power as the currency that determines our relationship to one another, with oppression and resistance being the two sides of that coin. Hetero cis white people are on one side as the representatives of systemic racism, unintentionally or not. On the other side are people of color and LGBTQIA+ folks, joined together by the crushing weight of oppression. This assumption of power struggle as primary leads to an overdetermined and outdated binary, one that cannot be solved by using intersectional understandings of positionality and identity to deconstruct the simplistic division of people into categories of “the problem” or “the variously oppressed.” By placing power at the center of how we understand our work towards justice and decolonization, we force our lives into a western ontological framework that is ultimately, and ironically, colonial.

I am not suggesting that critiques focusing on power are wrong, nor am I saying that using critical theory to uncover the white underbelly of oppression should be discarded. However, I am suggesting that to ground our ontology in a struggle for power is to situate ourselves within knowledge systems that can occlude other ways of knowing and being together. In her book Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology, Kanaka Maoli (Hawaiian) scholar and philosopher Karin Amimoto Ingersoll states:

[The] West is not the axis of negotiation that moves my articulations and reactions, because in a multisited world, our intelligibility is an interconnected matrix. Instead, my aim is to pull indigenous peoples away from the binary oppositions between the “colonizer” and the “colonized,” to minimize the “otherness” from both sides, and to decenter the conversation towards independent and alternative ways of knowing and producing knowledge that allows for empowerment and self-determination within a modern and multisited world.

(Ingersole 3) As writing center practitioners of color, we must ask whether the map which has been set before us, the master’s tools that have been placed in our hands, is conducive to moving towards relations that are truly decolonized. While our theories of race are useful, they often center whiteness and a white response to issues of race. We can no longer tacitly bow before the primacy of western epistemologies and ontologies.

The argument that I’m making in this paper is simple: the focus of critical theory on the complex ways that power is used to oppress certain groups of people, the setting of oppositions and resistances as the foundational framework through which we see our work, is not descriptive of the actual ways that people live in community. Our theories of race attempted situate people of color as natural allies—or more accurately, allies of necessity—due to how white supremacy bears down on us all. I believe that it is important to interrogate not only how are we positioned against systemic racism, but also how we are in relationship with one another. As writing center practitioners of color, we must consider our relationships and responsibilities to other people of color within the specific geographic and cultural places we find ourselves. To put it another way, we must ask what are the connections, threads, and ties that bind us?

To move towards this kind of knowing, I draw on settler colonial theory’s critique of the erasure of Indigenous presence in conjunction with storying to offer a deeper understanding of the relationships of people to one another on colonized land. Through a multidimensional mapping of story centered around my history in Hawai‘i, I offer an example of how writing center practitioners of color can begin to chart our relationships to other people of color within the histories, struggles, and relationships that grow from a place.

Moving Race to the Center

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Our Theories of Race Will Not Save Us: Towards Localized Storyings of Race, Colonialisms, and Relationships • 49 There has never been a livelier discussion of race in the writing center, at least in terms of volume and diversity of publications. Over the last ten years since Greenfield’s and Rowan’s landmark collection, a slew of publications addressing race in the writing center has begun to shift the conversations around diversity.

Although race has been woven into the fabric of writing centers since the influx of open-admissions students brought about their 1970s reincarnation, issues of race were often primarily linked to language in earlier scholarship (Greenfield and Rowan 6). Recent moves in the field, however, have centered the need for writing centers to take an explicitly anti-racist orientation. In surveying the increasingly vibrant body of scholarship on race in the writing center, several trends emerge: an increasing awareness of the diversity of experience of people of color, a confrontation of academic narratives of neutrality, an articulation of the writing center as an explicitly anti-racist space, and the sharing of pedagogical strategies to dismantle racism in the center.

This shift is perhaps not surprising for two reasons: Although writing center administration remains predominantly white and female (Valles et al.), a growing cohort of scholars of color (such as Neisha-Anne Green, Talisha Haltiwanger-Morrison, Wonderful Faison, Jasmine Tang, Kendra L Mitchell, Rasha Diab, and Romeo García, to name a few) have shouldered their way into the conversation on race. When folks of color write about race, we’re not talking about an abstracted concept that is siloed in our 9 to 5 in a writing center; we’re writing about our lives. Or, Talia Nanton, says “when you’re a person of color, you’re a person of color all the time” (Haltiwanger-Morrison and Nanton).

Thus, folks of color writing about race in the center has led to a more urgent tone in the scholarship. The other obvious reason is our cultural context. The last five years have seen a parade of unavoidable images: resurging white supremacy, police murders of unarmed Black men and women, and the detention of immigrant children.

Within this context, the catalytic energy of activism has created a kairotic awareness that the ugliness of racism is embedded in the fabric of American life.

Two kinds of work in particular have begun to shift the image of the center from a grainy black and white picture of interchangeable students of color towards a fuller, technicolored representation of racial experiences of writing and working in the center. First, personal literacy narratives, such as Aja Martinez’ “Alejandra Writes a Book,” Cedric Burrows’ “Writing While Black,” or Neisha-Anne Green’s “The Re-Education of Neisha-Anne S Green” offer intimate visions of the challenges that writers of color face within the academy.

These narratives are significant because the

overwhelmingly white history of the academy has meant that narratives of people of color writing and working in the field have been written largely from white perspectives. For example, one of the most cited early works on race in the field is Annie DiPardo’s 1992 essay “‘Whispers of Comings and Goings’: Lessons from Fannie,” a case study of the relationship between two women in the writing center: a Black, middle-class tutor and a first-generation Diné student. Although this piece portrays the interactions between two women of color, a white perspective is the centered, authoritative voice.

Throughout the essay DiPardo hovers in the background as the “objective” narrator, commenting on the problems and imbalances of the tutorial interaction.

It is painfully obvious in pieces like this one that people of color are the subject of examination, and are neither writer nor audience. Thus, when Niesha-Anne Green addressed a room full of IWCA participants and stated, “I have never had a job where I wasn’t made aware of my Blackness. I have never had a higher ed job where I wasn’t made aware of my lack of my whiteness. I have never had a job in writing center administration where I wasn’t the first Black woman” (“Moving Beyond Alright,” 20-21), it is significant because Green represents a historic “other” speaking her truth to power. Writing or speaking from the margins always carries within it an implicit attempt to dethrone the center. When members of the writing center community write about writing and draw on their own experiences, histories, and languages, we begin to move away from composition’s historic single narrative of race.

The other parallel shift has been towards showing visions of writing centers in institutions that serve significant numbers of students of color, a counter portrait to the image of mainstream writing centers located in predominately white institutions. Karen Keaton Jackson and Mick Howard neatly summarize the problem of institutional whitewashing in their editor’s introduction to the 2019 special issue of Praxis: “Why are the voices who teach and tutor hundreds, even thousands, of students of color each year not engaged in and, quite frankly, leading these conversations?” (51).

Some of the failures of writing center theory to adequately address the complexities of racism beyond a Black/white binary are a byproduct of institutional privilege in the centers represented in scholarship and the wicked architecture that twists resistance to uphold status quo. Despite our assumed marginalization, many writing centers exist near the center of the hierarchy of higher education. As a result, those centers operate in spaces that have historically been pervaded by whiteness. Additionally, resistance to whiteness in these institutions often is made toothless and reincorporated

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Our Theories of Race Will Not Save Us: Towards Localized Storyings of Race, Colonialisms, and Relationships • 50 into university structures to mask the pernicious undercurrent of racism. For both of these reasons, the vision from many mainstream centers is shaded in ways that obscure non-white perspectives. Thus, the contributions of scholars such as Kendra Mitchell, Eric C. Camarillo, and Wonderful Faison has been to provide a counter-perspective from MSIs, from centers that primarily serve students of color and are staffed by students of color. I highlight both the personal and institutional portrayals of writing center work by practitioners of color because they are doing essential work in moving the field away from totalizing portrayals of people of color. By telling narratives from diverse positionalities, they make visible the ways our pedagogy can be colonizing and offer new possibilities for revolutionary praxis. Through story, writing center practitioners of color have been resisting whiteness and moving writing centers towards social justice.

These narratives that many scholars of color in the writing center have been telling draw heavily from critical race theory’s concept of “counterstory.” Critical race theory (CRT) was birthed in the 1980s out of the work of a handful of legal scholars who wanted a theory that addressed the central role of race in creating an unjust legal system and society. Angela Harris, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, and Derrick Bell were among the early founders of the movement, and saw the aims of CRT being to “develop a jurisprudence that accounts for the role of racism in American law and that work toward the elimination of racism as part of a larger goal of eliminating all forms of subordination” (Matsuda 1331). In the years since its inception, CRT has been adapted by a number of scholars outside the field of law, including political theorists and scholars of education. Although fractionalized into subfields across the disciplines, scholars of CRT tend to hold in common a few principal assumptions: the social construction of race, the normality rather than aberration of structural racism, the benefit of structural racism to the dominant group, and the unique positionality that enables people of color to disrupt hegemonic narratives (Delgado and Stefancic 811). It is from this last item that the counterstory emerges. Counterstories are a CRT tactic, blurring method and methodology, that maps knowledge from the margins in order to understand the ways the functioning of racism in society. Counterstory can be defined as a method of telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told (i.e., those on the margins of society)” (Solórzano and Yosso 32). While the end of counternarratives is often to make visible oppression, it also creates opportunities for

transformational resistance: resistance moves towards social justice (Martinez Counterstory 28).

Asao Inoue, in his reflective piece “Narratives that Determine Writers and Social Justice Writing Center Work” provides a clear articulation of the central issue that social justice work, including CRT, in the center is attempting to address: “It’s an accounting of the white supremacist system that causes all these problems, whether they are located in gendered, disability, racialized, national, or linguistic differences. Why? Because white supremacy determines the entire system—is the system—and structures the limits and pressures of all writing center work, whether it is with or by graduates or undergraduates, faculty or staff” (96).

For Inoue, it is the system of white supremacy, acting through what he calls “white racial habitus” that determines the network of assessment that writing centers find themselves part of. Bourdieu defines habitus as “systems of durable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu 64). Habitus, then, is as a set of embodied dispositions and tastes that are shaped by and through lived experience rooted in culture, and operate below the level of consciousness. Inoue argues that within the system of higher education, it is a white habitus that becomes embodied in our ecologies of assessment, in the ways that language is or is not valued, and in the ways we subtly push our students to write white. As Inoue sees it, the work of social justice in the writing center is to make visible that habitus.

Although I believe work must be done to unmake and unmask white racial habitus, when that work is our primary telos, it means that despite a mosaic fracturing of perspective through counterstories, the picture being constructed has a preset design that individual pieces fit into. That design is a description of the system of white supremacy. As a result, when I try to bring these conversations into the center with me, they sit around the shoulders like a suit that is too tight, fixing the head forward, like an unneeded neck brace. While my understanding of storying draws from CRT’s counterstorying, I do not fully align myself with critical race theory. Because counterstory emerged with the goal of activism and reshaping the legal system, it is oriented towards working within structure. The orientation towards a structure, specifically a western legal structure, means that the often-responsive telos of counterstories’ knowledge production results in a mirroring of western epistemologies. To set myself constantly against white supremacy is to set white supremacy constantly before me. It is to live with the monstrous horror of racism as the primary lens through which I understand my relations to the people around me. It is to let a western

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Our Theories of Race Will Not Save Us: Towards Localized Storyings of Race, Colonialisms, and Relationships • 51 ontology delimit the boundaries of my vision of liberation. To put it simply, a single-minded focus on that which we wish to dethrone results in us becoming further entangled in it. What I believe is necessary is a “situatedness” in our stories: for our stories to engage with the unique histories of place that spring from relationships with other people of color.

Reimaging Relationships Through Story Being from Hawai‘i in Indiana seems to have a kind of magic power. Almost everyone I’ve met on the continental US has the idea that Hawai‘i is a tropical paradise with gorgeous vistas, sultry weather, and endless Mai Tais on the beach. When I respond to the question of “Where are you from?” with “Hawai‘i,” I become enmeshed within a fantasy of the Islands, the fabricated vision of a place that everyone “wants to visit someday. . .” The visual signifiers of my body as a person of color are joined with “being from Hawai‘i,” and my identity is collapsed into a mythic-colonial construct. I’ve had to explain too many times to count I’m not Hawaiian just because I’m from Hawai‘i, that we use US dollars, and that just because it’s beautiful doesn’t mean it’s paradise. While these exchanges are often light and humorous (“Oh, you didn’t know that we paddle between the islands on canoes?”), it’s hard to avoid the messy strands of my history disappearing into crayon simplicity as the person in front of me mentally situates me somewhere on a beach in paradise.

There is a similar process of condensing and smoothing that occurs when I get hailed as a person of color. Until I moved to the Midwest, I didn’t consider myself a person of color. I knew the term academically, but back in Hawai‘i, it didn’t seem to signify me or my family. I wasn’t a person of color; I was Chinese, Okinawan, German, English, and Scot-Irish. It was my relationships with people, where my family lived, and who I knew that formed the framework for identification. When I moved into academia on the continent, I found that suddenly I was a “POC” (this was before BIPOC gained popularity). The assumptions that people made about me—the folks who welcomed me into my program, not those who were ostensibly racists—were either tied to me being a person of color or to their notions of Hawai‘i. Neither of those categories fit.

I found I being woven into a fabric with an unfamiliar design, one where parts of my identity were being read as threads within histories and patterns I had no knowledge of or connections to. It was kind of jamais vu I felt perceiving myself reflected back through the eyes of others; and nowhere did I feel this sensation

more than in the academy. The tendency of us academics to accumulate knowledge that is disembodied from the communities that knowledge originated from meant that most of the people I encountered in my daily life in my department “knew” the history of Hawai‘i and its colonial occupation. At the same time, how they engaged with me normal interactions made me feel as if they were drawing more from a tacit knowledge that understood the strands that bound me to culture, race, and coloniality in simplistic and inaccurate ways.

To pull at one thread, consider how I speak: I speak something close to “unaccented” English, close enough that most folks on the continental U.S. can’t pin me down by my tongue. Although the English I speak at home includes Hawaiian, Japanese, and Filipino words, I didn’t grow up speaking with an inflection too different than someone from northern California. And on the continent, my non-white words disappear leaving only a trace of difference. This lack of discernible accent, along with being from Hawai‘i, almost always get me a positive response. Even the cheerful tow truck operator who asked me “What kind of Asian are you?” and went on to tell me about how his family didn’t want him “raising half-breed children,” responded to me being from Hawai‘i with, “Well, that’s all right then. . . It’s the Chinese and Vietnamese women who are crazy. . .” My language lets me pass without a second thought. But my language has a history, one that is tied to two colonialism and the relationships between settlers of color to Indigenous language.

When I was a child, I loved climbing hau trees. Hau, with their yellow hibiscus-like flowers and dark green leaves, grow up and spread out, creating interconnected canopies. When I climbed them, I would have a tree where I started, but would be able to climb through the whole network without touching the ground. Stories are like that. They are intangible, thickly growing networks where any point, any one story, is connected by myriad branches to multiple trunks. To draw out the connections in story allows us to grow our knowing from the ground and see that who we are and where we stand is determined as part of an ever-expanding grove.

I offer you two stories—one about language and power, the other about relationship. They may not technically be writing center stories, but they are the stories that have carried me into the writing center. *** My first ancestor to come to Hawai‘i was my great grandfather Tokushin Nakamoto, who left Ryukyu (Okinawa) in 1908 at the age of 26. Tokushin was the son of a farmer, though his grandfather and other

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Our Theories of Race Will Not Save Us: Towards Localized Storyings of Race, Colonialisms, and Relationships • 52 ancestors had been teachers of Chinese. What I had heard growing up was a typical American bootstrap story of my great grandfather’s immigration to Hawai‘i; that he left poverty in his home country to make a fresh start in a land of opportunity. The truth is more complicated. In 1872, Japan annexed the Ryukyu Kingdom, and in 1879 the prefecture of Okinawa was created. Uchinanchu (Okinawans) are genetically and culturally different from Japanese; thus, as part of its imperialist nation-building, the Meiji administration attempted to suppress Ryukyuan culture and language, viewing the Uchinanchu as backwards, needing to be assimilated into mainstream Japanese culture. When Japan began colonization, it outlawed education in Uchināguchi (Okinawan language) and forced traditional practices to stop. Thus, at the time my great grandfather immigrated from Okinawa, the islands were facing famine due to mismanagement and neglect by the colonial Japanese government. Tokushin could not have known that he were fleeing one colonialism to participate in another.

The colonization of Hawai‘i and loss of sovereignty is a long and complicated story, but I’ll offer an abridged summary: Protestant Missionaries arrived in 1820 at a time of turmoil in Hawaiian society, leaving an opportunity for Christianity to spread rapidly through the islands. With the growth of Christianity, foreigners began to quickly gain power alongside a precipitous decline in the Hawaiian population due to the introduction of European diseases. The increasingly wealthy white oligarchy used their newly acquired land for plantations, which required the importation of labor from China, Japan, Portugal, the Philippines, and Okinawa. On January 17, 1893, a coalition of white American businessmen and politicians, backed by a company of U.S. marines, orchestrated the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and formed the Provisional Government. One of the goals of the Provisional Government was to make Hawai‘i more appealing as a US possession through the suppression of the Hawaiian culture. A few years after the overthrow, a mandate by the new Republic of Hawaii formally instituted English as the sole language of instruction and banned the use of ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian language) in schools (Wilson and Kamanā 154). The erasure of Hawaiian language facilitated through systems of education furthered the colonial aims of the United States by severing the Hawaiian people from their connection to language, and through language to cultural history. This state orchestrated linguicide worked to disguise the Indigenous history of Hawai‘i, legitimizing the equalclaim rhetoric put forth by the white oligarchy which asserted that Hawaiians are merely another ethic group

in Hawai‘i with no special claim to self-governance or sovereignty (Trask 47).

In response to the loss of their language, Hawaiians turned to Hawaiian Creole English, more commonly known as “Pidgin,” to maintain discursive autonomy.

Pidgin, which borrows English, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Hawaiian words, had developed in the late 1800s as a language of necessity among the immigrant plantation workers who needed a way to communicate with one another. In her essay “Pidgin as Rhetorical Sovereignty: Articulating Indigenous and Minority Rhetorical Practices with the Language Politics of Place,” Georganne Nordstrom argues that in the years following the ban of Hawaiian as a language of instruction in the public schools, Hawaiians chose to speak Pidgin, which retained some Hawaiian words and grammar, as a way of maintaining an Indigenous identity in the context of colonization (335). This assertion of rhetorical sovereignty was not left unchallenged, and the use of Pidgin denigrated by colonial institutions, beginning in the territorial era of Hawai‘i.

My grandmother grew up in these territorial years.

She was born in Kohala on Hawai‘i island, but moved with her family to Oahu during the war years. The stories that she told me as a child are now fragments that piece together a partial image: my grandmother working in the sweet potato patch with her siblings, walking after dark among the sugar cane, and sewing clothes out of the cloth rice-sacks because fabric was too expensive.

Woven into the background of these stories are the relations between members of different immigrant communities and the Hawaiian people. Although the Uchinanchu community was considered “Japanese” by the wartime American military and forbidden from living near the coast, costing my great-grandfather his business, relationships between Japanese and Uchinanchu peoples were sometimes tense. In an interview conducted in the early 1980s, my greatgrandfather alludes the pressures on Uchinanchu people to assimilate to Japanese norms in Hawai‘i: After I ate, I usually relaxed one or two hours at home playing the shamisen. There was no one that could teach, so we learned by just listening as somebody else played. They played mostly mainland Japanese songs from bars and those kinds of places. They didn't play Okinawan songs. Okinawan people only sang Okinawan songs at home, hiding from others. (394) Even on a sugar plantation on the northmost part of Hawai‘i island, the politics of Japanese colonialism, which positioned Uchinanchu culture and language as inferior, mapped the ways that Uchinanchu people,

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Our Theories of Race Will Not Save Us: Towards Localized Storyings of Race, Colonialisms, and Relationships • 53 including my great-grandfather, interacted with members of the Japanese community.

An undercurrent in some of my grandma’s stories about the growing up in rural Hawai‘i is a sense of embarrassment at “being country” or not speaking “proper” Japanese and English. My grandmother and her family spoke Uchināguchi, which meant that they were marked as obviously not from mainland Japan if they interacted with Japanese immigrants. Uchināguchi and Japanese are not mutually intelligible, and even though my grandmother and her family had learned to understand Japanese, their accents gave them away as being from Okinawa, which carried the stigma of being unrefined or uneducated. My grandma worked exceptionally hard in school to learn “proper English” and to avoid “broken English.” In high school, this work paid off and she was allowed to enter McKinley High School, an English Standard School. In the 1920s, English Standard Schools were created as a way of separating (largely) white children from Local and Hawaiian children who spoke Pidgin (Hughes 71).

These schools required prospective students to prove proficiency in Edited American English, with the intent of filtering out non-white, Pidgin speaking students who might prove a “bad” influence. My grandma’s education in the English standard schools, along with an overall excellent performance, meant that she was given greater opportunities to advance her education. Through hard work in this school system, she gradually was able to acquire language that passed for something closer to “Standard” English. This acquisition of the language of power, however, meant that my father and his siblings did not grow up speaking hearing or speaking much Pidgin. Interlocking colonialisms in Okinawa and Hawai‘i, alongside the language politics in both spaces, shaped how my family’s language developed and gave me a tongue that sounds whiter than I look. *** My tongue first betrayed me around the time I was ten. I’m pretty sure it was at a first-year baby party for one of my parent’s friends. A salty breeze drifted up from the nearby harbor, cooling the humid night. Under the open pavilions, people drifted from table to table with plates stacked high with food. I stuck close to my mom, unsure of whether to join the other kids who were running around with Matchbox cars between the legs of the wooden picnic benches.

I was just old enough to recognize that this party was a space where I didn’t quite fit. The kids were all speaking Pidgin, and my own tongue didn’t form words or sentences in the same way. Big Island Pidgin has a

different cadence, flow, and vocabulary than Oahu Pidgin, which I had heard from my friends. And I didn’t really even speak that much Pidgin. Instead of showing myself as an interloper, I picked up a paper plate and began loading it up with the most local foods still left in the aluminum trays: I took both ‘ahi and marlin poke, scooped up yellow ‘opihi (even though I didn’t like ‘opihi), grabbed a small cup of poi, and shoveled a large helping of the black ‘a‘ama crab legs onto my plate.

I had seen ‘a‘ama before, alive, running nimbly along jagged lava plates near the ocean, and had used their dried red carapaces to tease my sisters. But I had never eaten ‘a‘ama. However, surveying the food before me, ‘a‘ama seemed the most alien and thus the most likely signifier of belonging in this new community. To my ten-year old anxieties, partaking in the same food as everyone else seemed like the best bet to invisibly slip into place. I sat down and started eating; but a moment after I squeezed the tiny white portion of meat from the first crab leg and swallowed, I knew something was wrong. My tongue went numb and tingly and my throat started to contract. My parents had wondered off, but Uncle Billy came over to ask how we were doing and if the food was good. I enthusiastically nodded, despite my face feeling like it was being pricked all over. I kept eating and didn’t leave my table because I didn’t trust my tongue.

Uncle Billy2 was my dad’s reception’s husband, a big Hawaiian man from Kohala, deeply tanned from years of working out under the sun. I remember him taking off his watch, and the spot under his watch being the only part of him that was not a deep brown. “Dat’s my haole3 part” he joked. Uncle Billy’s day job was building rock walls, and he had a company with several of his sons. The rock walls that he made were intricately constructed, and I remember him pointing out to me a corner of a wall that he had built and talking about how much time he spent finding rocks that fit perfectly into one another. Although some builders would shape the rocks or chip away the edge of a plate, Uncle Billy preferred to find natural stones and interlock them using their original shapes. This was how the ancient Hawaiians did it, he told me, building heiau (temples) like Puʻukoholā, with the whole structure being held together only through gravity and interlocked stones.

Sometimes when we were hunting together on the jagged slopes of Mauna Kea, walking up and down miles of ridges until my legs ached, he would point out a beautiful unbroken lava plate, weighing perhaps several hundred pounds, and ask me, “Boy! You like grab that one for me?” Of course he was joking, and we would trek on, shotguns in hand. Uncle Billy always ended up

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Our Theories of Race Will Not Save Us: Towards Localized Storyings of Race, Colonialisms, and Relationships • 54 bagging plenty chukkars and quail, game birds introduced by white settlers who wanted hunting on the islands. I always ended up shooting rocks, which had less meat. In the lulls between action, when we were just hiking, Uncle Billy told me about growing up on Big Island back in the day, and needing to hunt to provide for his family. “What they no understand is that if da government outlaw huntin’, some people not goin’ eat.”

With Uncle Billy, I was still self-conscious about sounding too haole. But my tongue was loosening.

Ironically, when I found my voice, it was through my hands and not my mouth. When I was sixteen, I picked up kī hōʻalu, a Hawaiian style of guitar, under the instruction of Keoki Kahumoku, a teacher, farmer, pig hunter, and musician from a long line of Hawaiian musicians. He encouraged me and my siblings to come to Pāhala, a town several hours drive on the other side of the island, for a workshop that he was running for a week with a number of other local musicians. A few months later, we pulled up in front of a green two-story plantation house where the workshop was being held.

The participants were a mixed bunch: haole retirees who were paying significant amounts of money to come, and kids from the community who were there on scholarship. In recent years, I’ve talked to some of the other workshop students around my age, and there is a shared sense that the weeks we spent in the old Pāhala plantation house held a kind of communal magic that linked us together. For one week each year, we all lived and breathed music; together we learned ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, danced hula, made imu, learned ‘oli (chants), and played music until dawn began to lighten the sky.

Alongside musical instruction, one of the main lessons that my kumu taught me was my kuleana as a haumana (student) learning Hawaiian music. The concept of kuleana can be defined as a right, privilege, or responsibility and carries the implication of reciprocal system of relationships. Kanaka Maoli scholar Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua refers to kuleana as “intertwining authority and responsibility,” pointing to how one’s authority is tied to responsibility and positionality (47).

Learning slack key guitar was a privilege I was invited into by my my kumu. Historically, kī hōʻalu was consider secret knowledge and taught only within families; however, this secrecy led to the art form almost becoming extinct in the 1970s. When I was taught kī hōʻalu, I was one of the few young people on the island learning slack key. My teachers emphasized to me that I now had a kuleana to teach and pass on the knowledge to the next generation of Hawaiian musicians. Learning kī hōʻalu gave me a voice, one that fit into the joyful

mess of ‘ukulele, steel guitars, and people singing “E Hawai'i e ku'u one hanau e, ku'u home kulaiwi nei. . .” *** These are two kinds of stories, with different foci.

Both the first story’s wider mapping of power and language in my family and the second story’s understanding of self-in-community are valuable. When I worked with Kanaka Maoli students dealing with the trauma of generational linguistic colonialism, the mapping of my family’s history provided me with important background and understanding of my own positionality. In her essay “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in Hawai‘i,” HaunaniKay Trask critiques the rhetoric of “Local,” which positions Asian settlers as equal possessors of Hawai‘i alongside the Hawaiian people, erasing the genealogical connections between Kānaka ‘Ōiwi and land. Trask argues that Asian settlers benefited from the dispossession of the Hawaiian people by American colonialism, and need to recognize their complicity in the continued effects of colonialism. Indeed, my own family is complicit in this history. The event that firmly cemented Hawai’i as American territory was the bombing of Pu‘uloa, or Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor and WWII did two things in Hawai‘i: it established the islands firmly as part of the United States, and positioned Japanese (and Okinawans) who fought as good Americans. My great uncles all served in the U.S. military, and most of them reaped the economic rewards of the general upward trend of Okinawans in the U.S. With the recognition of my family’s complicity in the continued dispossession of Kanaka Maoli from their land and language, I recognize my kuleana as a tutor to work towards the decolonization of language and of land.

Some of the Kanaka Maoli students that I worked with, including graduate students, had a strong sense of shame over the fact that their language didn’t match the expectations for SAE in the academy. I remember working with one student in particular who told me that he didn’t want other people knowing that he came to the writing center because he was afraid they’d think “How did that stupid guy get into grad school?” The baggage that students brought into the center with them had within it the weight of over a century of colonial education that devalued Kanaka Maoli languages, whether Hawaiian or Pidgin, and taught that standard, unaccented English was the only correct way to communicate. I can’t count the times that I heard students refer to their English as “broken” because they couldn’t code-switch completely out of Pidgin. By

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Our Theories of Race Will Not Save Us: Towards Localized Storyings of Race, Colonialisms, and Relationships • 55 understanding my family’s story and its historical context, I was able to see my positionality within the center and the responsibility to other writers of color in the context of colonialism.

Although understanding my family’s role in colonialism in Hawai‘i was useful, it was ultimately what I learned in relationship that I carried with me into sessions. When I draw on my knowledge of place to make connections for a writer or used words in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, I pull on the things that I learned in community.

The embodied ways of being with people in a Hawaiian cultural context were not learned in a classroom or from studying. They were learned through being with people who welcomed me in and generously shared knowledge with me. They were learned in hours walking through lava fields waiting for birds to flush. They were learned in the community I became a part of through playing music. To return to Bourdieu, my habitus, my “feel for the game,” the unconscious ways I had learned to navigate space and engage with folks, were the result of years of being with people and becoming part of a community.

Paths Forward: Situating and Unsettling our Knowledge Although there can be the impulse to ignore the ways that our institutions are tied to place and history, a writing center does not exist as an impermeable entity, grappling with issues of race, language, and power in absence of an immediate geographic, cultural, and historic context. The outside is always seeping into the center, and what seeps in is specific to place and the genealogies of relationships between people within that place. When I am in a center in Hawai‘i, the history of that place and my family’s past, patched into the larger story of Hawai‘i, both determines my responsibilities in how I engage with writers as well as maps potentialities for relationships that work towards unsettling the settler colonial state. Although I draw on settler colonial theory to examine my family’s history and understand my kuleana, I do not see settler colonial theory as an end point, as it is entangled within western ontologies. What is needed is an orientation towards community beyond the confines of academia that allows for knowledge and pedagogy to form within the writing center as an extension of local networks of relationships. To move beyond the Black/white binary that García critiques in “Unmaking Gringo-Centers,” what is necessary is not a shift away from theories of race and colonialism, but rather a grounding of theory in the local, tangled, and earthy relations between people of color in a specific community.

Theory from the top down is a mapping that both charts and determines the thing being mapped. Too often, the conversation around race and the discourse of allyship centers the efforts of the white subject in participating in the liberation of the non-white other.

Even though “allies” may acknowledge the need to give up their own power and privilege, the focus is on “being an ally,” as Green points out. Alternatively, scholars of color deploying critical race theory leads to setting ourselves in opposition to whiteness as a system of oppression. While this does not seem problematic, the lens of critical race theory applied to our everyday practices means that we often see and validate our lives within a framework of power struggle.

The vision of the socially just, activist writing center within contemporary scholarship is still largely built within the framework of a western capitalist culture. To try to move the writing center towards a vision of justice that works smoothly in a majority of academic context means that the vision of justice and egalitarian community that we can conceive of for our center still exists within the confines of a western ideology. The imposition of a worldview which maps all relationships to a grid of power struggle between oppressor and oppressed, white and other, or colonizer and colonized is itself a colonizing descendent of European thought.

To develop centers that are truly just, we must also work to decenter western epistemologies and create definitions of justice which are rooted in local and Indigenous epistemologies. I believe that we can move towards these local definitions through storying our own positionality, receiving stories from others, and being deeply imbedded in communities outside the academic context of writing center work.

I know this direction forward is hard. Academics tend to be nomadic, and settle far from our homes of origin, if we had them to begin with. Because the academy forces us towards isolation from our communities of origin, it becomes easier to map a capital “T” Theory of race onto what we see in the small sphere of a writing center. That mapping can lead increased activism, change, and diversity; however, it may not consider local context or knowledges. As writing center practitioners, it’s often easier to apply Theory to a local context because we often have not been in the local context long enough or deep enough to understand the nuance of place, the relations of people to one another and to the land, and our kuleana in the middle of all of it. In addition, these theoretical mappings are unlikely to result in anything truly decolonial because they are still building a vision of social justice is rooted in a western ontology that does not acknowledge other ways of knowing and being in the world. Although a full

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Our Theories of Race Will Not Save Us: Towards Localized Storyings of Race, Colonialisms, and Relationships • 56 decoupling from ideology may not be possible, we can sink ourselves deeply “under the discourses of others” through being in community.

Although I have thought of folks of color in writing centers as my audience for most this piece, I have a simple charge to all writing center practitioners: Unsettle yourself. The conversations I’ve been hearing for years in writing center circles about trying to implement theory, whether critical race theory or decolonial theory, is too often in absence of being in community with people of color. Land acknowledgements, claims to decolonize pedagogy, and calls for social justice work do nothing if we are talking about helping people but are not willing to live with them. So, consider moving out of your middle-class neighborhood, if you live in one, and into a community that is uncomfortably unwhite.

Make friendships with your neighbors. Don’t try to save them. Listen to them. Serve them in ways that don’t benefit you academically or otherwise. Be with people, not just for them. If you do, your view of the center will not remain the same.

Notes 1. Imu is a traditional Hawaiian method of cooking that involves steaming food in underground oven.

2. “Uncle” and “Auntie” are honorifics in Hawai‘i used with older people, and do not necessarily denote blood relationship.

3. Haole, a Hawaiian word meaning “foreigner,” but in contemporary usage referring to white people.

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Our Theories of Race Will Not Save Us: Towards Localized Storyings of Race, Colonialisms, and Relationships • 57 Nordstrom, Georganne. “Pidgin as Rhetorical Sovereignty: Articulating Indigenous and Minority Rhetorical Practices with the Language Politics of Place.” College English, vol. 77, no. 4, 2015, pp. 317-337.

Silva, Noenoe K. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Duke UP, 2004.

Solórzano, Daniel G., and Tara J. Yosso. “Critical Race Methodology: Counter-Storytelling as an Analytical Framework for Education Research.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 1, 2002, pp. 23–44.

Trask, Haunani-Kay. “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: ‘Locals’ in Hawai‘i.” Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i. Edited by Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, U of Hawai‘i P, 2008, pp. 45-66.

Wilson, William H. and Kauanoe Kamanā. “‘For the Interest of the Hawaiians Themselves’: Reclaiming the Benefits of Hawaiian-Medium Education.” Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being, no. 3, vol. 1, 2006, pp. 153-182.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 1 (2022)

(RE)ENVISIONING THE WRITING CENTER: PRAGMATIC STEPS FOR DISMANTLING WHITE LANGUAGE SUPREMACY Hidy Basta Seattle University bastah@seattleu.edu

Alexandra Smith Seattle University smithalexan1@seattle.edu

Abstract

the institution, assimilate) the languages and ways of knowing and communicating the students bring to the classroom.

It was in this context that our interviewee sat at the end of the table, nervous but polished in his interview attire. He answered the questions with specifics; it was clear he had prepared along the lines of what he expected a writing center to privilege, demand, and support: “correct” grammar and language use. As he discussed his love for grammar rules, and the joy he felt for helping students learn and master the rules and expectations of good writing, we watched as our current staff members made eye contact with each other unsure how to respond to this interviewee who was clearly passionate about writing, but was advocating an approach to writing that our writing center had been diligently working to rethink.

Once the interview was over, we looked around the room and waited for the debrief to begin.

“I just don’t know if he will be a good fit because he seems really intent on reinforcing grammar rules,” said Student A. “I’d be worried he would have a hard time letting that go and embracing what you teach, Hidy, in 30901,” said Student B. “I wonder, though,” said Student C, “if this is an opportunity for intervention. He mentioned he wanted to be a teacher. If we hired him, and he took 3090, which could open up an entire new way of looking at writing and fluency; he could take that with him into his future classroom, which is, ultimately, the goal, right?”

Our students nodded and affirmed Student C’s point. We made eye contact across the conference room table and couldn’t help but smile. To hear the students not only echo the pedagogical theory we have been emphasizing, but also apply it to a decision making situation profoundly illustrates a small victory in our tenacious commitment to (re)envisioning the role of the writing center. This conversation gave us hope we were changing the system from the inside. Slow, to be sure, but real change nonetheless.

The speed at which change takes place, especially at an institutional level can be infuriatingly and painfully slow. And it seems the change that supports and makes space for linguistic and racial justice is even slower and

Writing center work has long been haunted by the mandate to either fix the writing or fix the writer--both approaches share an assumption of a deficit model. As critical writing center scholarship has made clear, this is an assimilationist practice that re-enacts colonialist views of English. This paper expands the writing center work to reflect on effective strategies for interrupting this assimilationist methodology in order to create the kind of change that prioritizes making it make sense (Demand). We suggest making sense--true sense of writing center practices--means dispelling the myth of the superiority of standardized English and occupying braver spaces to hold honest conversations about languages and effective writing. These honest conversations are grounded in a critical examination of what we know of effective writing and what has long been taken for granted about the role of writing support and assessment. In this paper, we recount a brief history of the writing center as an institution--and our specific positionality within this history--to provide context for how our practices create and sustain change. We share the pragmatic steps of 1) revising tutor education curriculum to focus on antiracist approaches to writing, 2) facilitating conversations with faculty about antiracist writing assessment strategies, and 3) continuing professional development of writing center student staff. The writing center’s role in this broader communal work is essential, we argue, and necessary for dismantling white language supremacy in the ways we teach, mentor, and assess writing.

We were in the middle of one of our final rounds of interviews for hiring writing consultants. Members of the current staff were participating in the interview process: kindly asking questions, smiling with encouragement, and practicing the body language of those who are wrestling with being both welcoming and supportive, but aware of the sudden power and authority they hold as interviewers. It was January 2020, and we had worked diligently over the past two years to reframe ideologically and practically how our primarily white institution’s writing center operated. As a space that sits at the intersection of writing, assessment, access, and equity, the writing center is an essential space for influencing and reproducing a culture of writing on campus. And until recently, our institution’s writing center, like many in the United States, maintained dominant writing pedagogies grounded in ideologies that ensured the standardization of academic English--a process that attempts to eradicate (or, in the language of

(Re)envisioning the Writing Center: Pragmatic Steps for Dismantling White Language Supremacy • 59 faces greater resistance. Given this reality, we have found it essential--for sustaining morale and commitment to this work-- to celebrate the small victories and to share pragmatic approaches with others.

Thus, there is celebration at the heart of this essay, even as we continue to wrestle with the challenges that make it clear that the writing center remains haunted by standards and ways of knowing that are predicated on whiteness and the rhetoric of modernity. For us, a crucial component of avoiding burnout is celebrating the victories, no matter how small, and building a network of support. Our celebration pays homage not only to the victories but also to the networks of support and community that have guided and inspired this work.

These networks include student staff and faculty groups, and the essential work of scholars and practitioners in writing center and language and composition studies.

Without these networks it would be extremely difficult to not only make the radical change we need, but also maintain the level of commitment required to dismantle white language supremacy from within the institution.

We want to acknowledge that we have benefited from the work and generosity of writing center scholars who have shared their stories and their experiences. The work of scholars such as Frankie Condon, Neisha-Anne Green, Laura Greenfield, Nancy Grimm, Asao Inoue, Victor Villanueva, Vershawn Ashanti Young, and others who have written extensively on revolutionizing how we teach, mentor, and assess writing to combat educational systems and approaches grounded in anti-blackness and white supremacist culture and language, have been essential for guiding, inspiring, and challenging any action we take. Edited book collections, such as The Writing Center and the New Racism (2011), special issues such as the Praxis (2019) issue on Race and the Writing Center, the work of IWCA Special Interest Group on Antiracism Activism, The University of Connecticut conference on Racism in the Margins, and other writing center regional and national conferences have been instrumental. Additionally, we pay tribute to the antiracist mission statement the University of Washington, Tacoma’s Writing Center revealed in 2017. While writing centers across the country are now also crafting and adapting mission statements to reflect anti-racist pedagogies, the mission statement at UWT directly inspired and energized our staff to revise our own mission statement (see Appendix A). The ways in which UWT held their ground and engaged with the negative press they received reminds us of the importance and bravery of fostering public engagement, even if it means encountering misunderstandings and resistance (Santos). Our article contributes to this ongoing

conversation by writing about our experiences implementing these transformative theories. To do so not only bears witness to the ways in which the writing center continues to be haunted by these histories, but also to illustrate how our particular center seeks to adapt and put into practice these theories. Thus, we ground this essay in specific examples of steps we have taken-namely, repositioning the role of the writing center from focusing solely on the students we support (the clients) and expanding to include the consultants (tutors) and the faculty who, after all, are the ones assessing the writing of our clients--with the hopes of inspiring and contributing to a collaborative community of writing scholars and activists who can take these ideas and adapt and customize to their particular institutions. This broader focus for our writing center is essential for reckoning with pedagogical and ideological approaches that are predicated on a belief--subconscious or otherwise--in maintaining white supremacy. As BakerBell et.al. emphasize, it is “in a commitment to widespread systemic change in curricula, pedagogical practices, disciplinary discourses, research, language policies, professional organizations, programs, and institutions within and beyond academia” that we can claim a commitment to social justice. Thus, in order to reckon with and, ultimately, dismantle what Asao Inoue has described as the white racial habitus--the “sets of durable, flexible, and often invisible (or naturalized) dispositions to language that are informed by a haunting Whiteness” (34) -- that characterizes the writing standards that govern our pedagogies, we suggest we must broaden and (re)envision the role of the writing center.

We believe (re)envisioning the writing center’s role in supporting and instigating the widespread systemic change Baker-Bell et.al. demand requires the cultivation of what Laura Greenfield describes as a radical writing center. A radical writing center engages in a “critical relationship” with its practice for working with student writing and ensures the methods “are always engaged in a process of transformative interrogation or ethical reinvention” (117). That said, while we are in support of fostering a dynamic and critical relationship to our practice, we struggle with the word “radical.” On the one hand, we view our work as the unarguable, selfevident representation of our fields of study, and, by that logic, not radical. The above call for Black linguistic justice is, similarly, not a radical statement. It simply seeks to correct oppressive and uninformed pedagogies.

On the other hand, we are both constantly reminded of the ideological dominance of Standard English that haunts education, and writing in particular. The

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(Re)envisioning the Writing Center: Pragmatic Steps for Dismantling White Language Supremacy • 60 conservative uproar that emerged in the spring of 2021 regarding the teaching of critical race theory in schools further underscores the magnitude of this point. It is clear that our new practices challenge deficit frameworks, individualist assumptions about writing center work, and traditional evaluation of counter homogenic writing practices. And, in that sense, perhaps it can be viewed as radical work.

Whether or not the work can be described as radical, we embrace the essential methodology of frequently questioning the “absolutism, presumed neutrality, [and] centrality” of dominant methods that govern ways and standards of writing (Greenfield 122).

We offer our experiences as illustrative of the ongoing work--both through interrogation, transformative listening, and reinvention--that we constantly employ in our negotiation within our institutional framework.

While this negotiation manifests via a range of services and resources we offer--including but not limited to class visits, student run and public facing blog and podcast, workshops, and faculty support--we focus this article on emerging curriculum and professional development grounded in antiracist and decolonializing approaches to writing, and partnerships with faculty. We begin with a brief discussion of the writing center to provide context for how our practices interrogate and change several of the policies upon which our institution’s writing center was built. We then share the pragmatic steps we have taken--namely, revising tutor education curriculum and facilitating conversations with faculty about antiracist writing assessment strategies--to reckon with the responsibility of beginning the process of dismantling white language supremacy in our writing center and, hopefully, our broader institution. We recognize, though, that in sharing these steps we by no means seek to imply or contend that we “have arrived” in our writing center work. In fact, we are suggesting the opposite; the journey toward dismantling white language supremacy is long. We believe this work must always be dynamic: open to constant revision and reflection.

The Writing Center as an Institution In reckoning with the writing center as an institution, it is helpful to reflect on and confront the historical roots and the ways in which they inform current practices. The history of writing centers is not simple nor monolithic progression2. In general, the writing center has flourished as a response to increased enrollment and open admission. The focus of the work has been to fix students’ papers, produce grammar worksheets, and to prepare those who the institution deemed “underprepared.” As the understanding of the

writing process gained momentum, writing center recommendations adopted minimalist tutoring approaches3 where students are made to do all the work.

A good tutorial was based on how the consultants (tutors) resisted interfering with the student’s writing.

Mottos such as “our job is to produce better writers, not better writing” and “we prioritize higher order concerns” emerged and persisted in our current moment. When Hidy began to revise the tutor education course in 2017, she realized how much the writing consultants felt confused and uncertain about how to best support writers. While some expressed their willingness to help students with grammar and editing, others felt that the non-directive minimalist tutoring was the most ethically responsible approach.

While both the “fix-it” and minimalist tutoring approaches led to extreme and divergent writing center practices, they are built on the same white language supremacy assumptions. Nancy Grimm convincingly argues if the need for the writing center’s existence is to either fix the writing or fix the writer, then both approaches share the same assumption of a deficit model--one that locates the wrongness (i.e. deviation from the acceptable limits of standardized academic discourse) in either the student or their writing. Thus, framing the work of the writing center as a site to help students better perform within the expected standardized English is haunted by assimilationist practices. Whether intentional or not, it re-enacts colonialist views of English4. Even when the metaphor of assimilation gets framed as inclusive and comprised of empowering strategies to share the language of power, it rarely questions the racist and colonialist structures that make Standard English the language of power as the only acceptable variety in academic discourse.

Grimm argues that the unexamined centering of whiteness in the writing center curriculum itself is part of the problem as it promotes a system of advantage based on race5. The long-held mottos of minimalist tutoring: improving the writer and aiming for the writers’ independence are models based on individualism. Textbooks directed at tutors certainly reinforce this centering of whiteness. For example, the “us and them” approach assumes that all consultants are white and students who seek their support are Others.6 Steven Bailey notes that even when tutor training textbooks introduce consultants from linguistically marginalized backgrounds, they discuss them as tutoring problems and prepare them to face challenges in which clients may not trust them as good informants of the academic culture. Thus, as we looked to reimagine the

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(Re)envisioning the Writing Center: Pragmatic Steps for Dismantling White Language Supremacy • 61 writing center, we had to echo Grimm’s question: if our work is always couched in making things “better,” why are we not also expected or invited to make our institution a better institution? Our efforts to organize and reframe our work, then, required a different interrogative approach: • •

•

Why are the linguistic resources of our Black and Brown students a liability?

How do we reconcile a linguistic framework where all languages and dialects are equal in linguistic terms and rhetorical frameworks that celebrate multiliteracies as rich resources for effective discourse with a limiting practice that upholds “Standard” English as the norm and the only language variety accepted in “good” academic discourse?

How do we challenge the minoritized and marginalized narratives of BIPOC students when our writing center literature and narrative continues to refer to them as other contexts for tutoring addressed at the end of tutor training curricula?

Structuring a curriculum based on a critical examination of these issues requires flexibility and ongoing collaboration with writing consultants and colleagues. Before we discuss the specifics of the revised curriculum, it is important to emphasize that we are able to ask these questions and to take steps to address these issues because we are afforded the resources and institutional access to these conversations. This is due to several intersecting factors including the fact that our institution operates within a social justice mission and is in support of antiracist curriculum. Our writing center exists spatially in the library’s Learning Commons--a space shared with Learning Assistance Programs, the Media Production Center, and Math Lab. The English department, where we are both non-tenure track faculty, is our intellectual and pedagogical home. We recognize that our role as faculty in the English department has made navigating the process of implementing change within the institution more accessible. This positionality and the resources we have been given--including, crucially, the support of the Chair of the English Department and the Director of the Writing Studies minor to design and develop the tutor education curriculum, and the continued financial backing and support of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences-affords us space as faculty members to be an active part of conversations and reaching an audience beyond the center’s immediate student employees.

That said, while we acknowledge the relative privilege and security this positionality affords us, implementing these changes have not been without challenges. It’s also important to acknowledge that the cost of doing antiracist work differs for those who are doing it based on their identities, institutional positions, and even location. Our own identities play a significant role in the ways we arrive to and are perceived in our antiracist work. We are two women who, while offering a combined 29 years of teaching experience, are considered young and in early and mid-career: Hidy is an immigrant, US citizen, has lived and worked in the US for over two decades, multilingual, and speaks English with an accent; Alex is white, born in the U.S., and monolingual. Hidy is consistently aware that her darker skin and accent can render her advocacy to little more than self-serving. Her approach is to be transparent and sensitive to the discomfort that her minoritized position and power status as an administrator may cause the students she supervises.

Her labor could easily be dismissed as personal and thus suspect and “biased.” Hidy struggles with her awareness of the complicated role a white racial habitus plays in her own experience of education as it has simultaneously empowered her to gain trust and disempowered her by knowing that this trust is gained through performing to rules of monolingual standard ideology. For Alex, not having any lived experiences in these matters requires consistent listening to and reading from those who do.

It also requires a recognition of and constant work to decenter and redirect the ways in which her whiteness, and her white racial habitus manifests and haunts all conversations and interactions. Part of this haunt, of course, emerges as a result of the immediate power and authority whiteness connotes in most circles on a predominantly white campus. Furthermore, the fear of losing our jobs if we stray too far from what is deemed useful or appropriate work as we (re)envision the potential of this space is a constant specter we have to weigh and assess. Of course, the fact there are two of us running the center is beneficial in empowering us to navigate and take on various risks. For many writing center directors, the imposed isolation can be incredibly taxing. Sharing this leadership role has created space for safe and insightful dialogues, reflection, and supportive camaraderie--an essential part of doing this work and resisting burnout. We cannot begin to count the times where our conversations have allowed us to process whatever was the challenge of the day to explore ways to move through it.

While these layers of precarity can be paralyzing we want to emphasize, again, that we offer this narrative as

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(Re)envisioning the Writing Center: Pragmatic Steps for Dismantling White Language Supremacy • 62 a pragmatic approach and share the small successes we have had so far in our journey and effort to mobilize our writing center as a unit for, as the “Demand for Black Linguistic Justice” insists, “mak[ing] it make sense.”

Making sense--true sense--means dispelling the myth of the superiority of Standardized English and occupying braver spaces to critically examine the relationships between languages, what we know of effective writing, and what has long been taken for granted about the role of writing support. In doing so, we acknowledge and confront the haunting of the deficiency model and the complacency of writing center work and the university as an institution that continues to enact colonialist and assimilationist policies.

When Common Sense Becomes Undone: Tutor Education Revision Perhaps one of the most challenging tasks in teaching writing is to separate the scholarship of writing and composition from the ideological public perceptions (common sense) of good writing. Hidy found it helpful to introduce standard language ideology as a threshold concept7 to unpack what we think of as “good writing” and what it means to commit to nonoppressive tutoring practices (Basta 244).

The consultants studied and reflected on texts such as Greenfield’s, “The ‘Standard English’ Fairy Tale,” Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English?”, and Anzuldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, which introduced them to threshold concepts essential to lead transformative practices. A commitment to naming what we know as the basics of linguistics and writing studies separated the field’s actual knowledge from the systemically racist ideologies that shape its practices and “common sense” judgements.

Concepts as simple as realizing that the United States of America is a multilingual nation, understanding that Black language follows its own grammatical rules, realizing how language and identity are intertwined, and understanding that standardization and language planning can often lead to inequalities were essential to questioning the status of Standard English as the only variety that is acceptable in academic discourse.

Understanding that the claimed superiority of Standard English is not based on unique merits, but rather on ideology sustained by institutional practices was a first step for students in learning “the truth” about language varieties, and learning to make it make sense in a consultation. Working with Mandy Suhr-Sytsma and Shan-Estelle Brown’s model of addressing the everyday language of oppression in the writing center enhanced our understanding that language is not a neutral medium

of communication, and that an explicit discussion about race, language and grammar is needed to destabilize linguistic privilege. For example, instead of following traditional writing center practice that treats grammar as a lower order concern beyond the interest of the writing center, writing consultants were encouraged to discuss the conventions, the genres, and the requirements, and to support students in understanding the linguistic options available to them. This rhetorical and critical approach moves away from the universalist correct/incorrect methodology to an approach in which students can negotiate multiple discourses and practice their agency.

Questioning the deficit assumptions introduced a framework where critical questions were possible. This led to revisions in our practices and our mission statement that moved from “The Seattle University Writing Center is dedicated to fully engaging students in becoming the most effective writers they can be” to a mission and core values that make space for students’ racial, linguistic, social identities and resist the deficit stance that limits the center’s work and others its clients (see Appendix A). This stance enabled us to revise our hiring practices. Instead of seeking faculty nominations of students who achieve excellent grades in writing courses, we asked students to self-nominate, held info sessions, and made it clear that our center is stronger when it truly reflects multiple disciplines and the rich linguistic identities of our campus community. After naming what we knew, we could no longer make sense of our old practices, so we had to let them go. In a recent reflection on the Black Linguistic Justice, an undergraduate writing consultant captures this feeling well: It wasn't until I took the 3090 class that I began to challenge the linguistic paradigm that haunts academia and my own academic work. I will admit that when I first started questioning the rules, styles, and conventions that I cultivated in my school work, I was very uncomfortable.

Having been taught a "standard" for the past 12ish years of education made it hard for me to accept the fact that what I have been practicing and mastering in my writing has been harmful and abusive to many people who identify as non-white. It then made it hard for me to believe that in many ways, I've been silencing my own identity as a person of color.

The consultant’s reflection here equally traces both the discomfort of letting go of internalized assumptions and the freedom the anti-oppressive pedagogy affords to their identity as a student of color and their practice with

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(Re)envisioning the Writing Center: Pragmatic Steps for Dismantling White Language Supremacy • 63 other students. This is the beginning of transformative practices.

The Writing Center’s Transformative Role

As we hope we’ve made clear, our new vision for the writing center works to transform the ways in which students work within and against dominant writing standards. Our primary method for achieving this cultural shift derives from mentoring the writing consultants in antiracist approaches. But it is also in our ability to conceptualize the writing center as a resource that extends beyond the parameters of student support that empowers us to further operationalize our antiracist mission statement. While our website is replete with research and resources for faculty (and student staff), we’ve found wrestling with ideas and brainstorming what this antiracist commitment looks like in an individual classroom or in a consultation inspires revision to current practice in ways that solitary reading and research may not always afford. Importantly, dialoguing in real time is an essential component of this.

It is not uncommon for Hidy to receive emails offering feedback about the direction of the writing center, but with little opening for conversation: emails with sentiments such as “I used to trust the writing center and send my student there”, or “I don’t want the Center working against me ☺” reveal both faculty discomfort, and their attempt to engage with the changes we have made. These emails are challenging to receive because as critical and feminist scholars, we can’t help identifying the distrustful tone, the passive aggressive use of a smiley emoticon, and the rhetorical positioning of the writing center in relation to student writing. However, our commitment remains to respond to them as “requests for information,” and optimistically, as evidence for a promising fact that the work of the writing center is destabilizing problematic assumptions.

While these emails attempt to reinscribe the role of the writing center to cater to faculty requests to lighten their load for individual feedback, they also indicate that a large gap exists between the writing center’s practice of inclusive pedagogy and how some faculty conceptualize their role especially when these concepts are based on their previous experience of the writing center in their own undergraduate education. Working to close, or at least narrow, this gap is to confront how whiteness haunts our conversations within and outside of the writing center. It requires a commitment to continually engage in multiple conversations--in real time, and ideally not via email--of naming and explaining what we are doing and why we are doing it. While the effort can be demanding, our obligation remains to

voice concerns, share scholarship, and explain our practice to build collaborative relationships. When given the space to engage in this kind of dialogue, we have yet to have an occasion when a faculty member didn’t express appreciation for the perspective and the practice of the writing center. In fostering these conversations with colleagues and our student staff, we hope we’ve begun to lay the groundwork for a greater cultural shift in how we conceptualize, discuss, and, perhaps most significantly, assess writing within an educational framework that is systemically predicated on adherence to white language supremacy. While an adherence as entrenched as this may never be fully exorcised in our professional lifetime, we remain committed to this work because the alternative would be to allow oppressive assumptions to continue to frame what it means to offer writing support.

Supporting Faculty with Contract Grading While we have been negotiating these kinds of conversations for the past couple of years, the confluence of events that characterized our 2020 Spring quarter inspired even greater urgency and transparency.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests in response to the public murder of George Floyd, our campus encouraged compassion, flexibility, and sensitivity to students’ backgrounds, needs, and circumstances with a different kind of intensity. In the midst of this explicitly flexible and accommodating environment, Alex advocated for more direct conversations regarding contract grading on campus. This approach to writing assessment is starting to gain popularity in writing assessment conversations, and, despite its transformative potential, is not without its own flaws.

Yet, the methodology encourages regular pedagogical reflection; its parameters are discussed in dynamic, flexible, and adaptable terms, which, as we indicated earlier, are crucial components of the kind of radical work necessary to engage the writing center as a haunted space. The critical work offered by Asao Inoue, in particular, illustrates why it is a necessary practice, especially as institutions and programs around the country profess their support for and commitment to antiracist work and, more broadly, the Black Lives Matter movement. There is a clear disconnect, Inoue writes, between “our pedagogies and writing assessments” that are often “warm, soft, social, and inviting” and our methods of assessment which “are cold, hard, individualistic (even selfish), and discouraging” (85). Until our grading practices match the kind of compassion, flexibility, and sensitivity being

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(Re)envisioning the Writing Center: Pragmatic Steps for Dismantling White Language Supremacy • 64 advocated by our pedagogies, systemic change-characterized in this instance by incorporating and drawing from students’ own languages and knowledges-will be impossible to achieve. We need to rethink our assessment strategies to match our pedagogies. We need to make it make sense.

While the intent is not to reproduce the entire history of grading contracts, we briefly describe the aspects that were of particular interest to an impromptu faculty support group and our students. Inoue’s work on labor-based grading contracts builds on the work of those such as Jane Danielewicz and Peter Elbow by embedding an explicit discussion of race and equity. His incorporation of the work of language and compositions scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Victor Villanueva directly inform his critique that current scholarship on contract grading ignores a key aspect: assessing writing based on quality is a practice predicated on a racist system and white supremacist culture. Since academic writing standards, he argues, are governed by a “white racial habitus” assessing quality reinforces “white language supremacy” and prevents teachers and students from “seeing a wider, more colorful, deeper felt world of language and logics” (35). While we believe one would be hard pressed to find a writing teacher who is against embracing a “deeper felt world of language”, putting this assessment strategy into action in the classroom and advocating for it in conversation with colleagues and administrators requires an adaptability and flexibility that the education system, a structure built on measurable standards and adherence to tradition, largely discourages. Of course, this assessment strategy does not eradicate power differentials, but it does create space for students to critically question assessment methods they have previously accepted as objective and rational. Encouraging them to critically engage with the standards and regard them as socially, racially, historically, and politically constructed--a construction that often functions as a means of forced assimilation and gatekeeping--is important for naming the haunting pervasiveness of white language supremacy. Because of this shift in relationality to mandated standards that structure our courses, we have found that building a supportive community from which one can troubleshoot, brainstorm, and revise this new approach to assessment important. As our students know all too well, the process of learning (and unlearning) is often frustrating and uncomfortable. And, just as we ask our students to be brave in moments of difficult learning (and unlearning), we too “can choose to be brave in moments of discomfort” (Inoue 248). In our experience, even having just one other colleague can

foster commitment in the face of backlash, fear, and/or frustration.

An emphasis, therefore, on collaboration, conversation, and the development of a community of practitioners is a significant aspect of doing this work.

Inoue has modeled this by making both of his books open access and putting together a dynamic google drive8 account with resources, templates, and the opportunity to connect. Significantly, this pooling of resources Inoue encourages is, in many ways, contrary to the business model of education that permeates many disciplines, but especially the humanities, where scholars often work in isolation from and in competition with one another. Thus, to not only pool resources, but encourage collaboration and experimentation in real time works to change a culture of education predicated on the success and resilience of the individual. Inspired by the emphasis on collaboration, Tara Roth, Hannah Tracy, and Alex established a support group for those implementing labor-based grading contracts in Fall quarter 2020. We met periodically over the summer to discuss the research, workshop drafts of materials, share and create resources together, and process anxieties and concerns about the risks of incorporating a shift in assessment that--despite making sense--upends traditional methods of assessment and can, once again, be interpreted by some as dangerously radical.

These anxieties are not miniscule as the demographics of our support group are telling: we consist predominantly of non-tenure track full time and part time faculty. Given this precarity, collaborating with colleagues can offer not only emotional support, but also, to some extent, greater protection in the face of resistance or pushback. This positionality, however precarious, is also strategic and has the potential to generate large scale cultural and institutional change given the demographics we teach: non-tenure track faculty at our institution predominantly teach general education writing courses, and tend to reach the most students. For example, in AY 19-20, 3,071 (out of a Fall quarter 2019 enrollment of 4,700 undergraduates) students took these lower level, writing intensive, general education classes.

The response to the labor-based grading contracts in our classrooms has been overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic. Fully engaging with students’ written work instead of being burdened with trying to objectively assess an inherently subjective product is liberating for both student and instructor. Students have expressed relief and enthusiasm for this mode of assessment and engagement and participation in Alex’s class was high.

On the anonymous course evaluation form, one student

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(Re)envisioning the Writing Center: Pragmatic Steps for Dismantling White Language Supremacy • 65 wrote “The labor based grading contract at first made me think I would try less but that wasn't the case.

Because there was no grade I got to really enjoy my writing and that extra weight off my shoulders gave me space to do better. It also made me want to do better and see if I could improve.” The notion that this student was able to not only want to learn more about the writing process, but was also able to claim ownership of their writing (“my writing”) illustrates an enthusiasm for learning that traditional grading practices often inhibit. It remains to be seen what the institutional response will be or to what extent departments, including our own, will follow our lead9. For now, though, it is a small victory that at least six general education writing courses have implemented their own version of a labor-based grading contract and, in so doing, have prioritized, supported, and made space for students’ right to incorporate and draw on their own languages and ways of knowing in the classroom.

Student Staff Reading Groups While conversations with faculty are essential, generating conversation amongst the student population is also key for widespread cultural and institutional change. Because of this we briefly acknowledge and attest to the importance of continued professional development and immersion in writing theory and scholarship that centers antiracist and antioppressive pedagogies for our writing center student staff. While we have informally shared various research articles with our student staff in the past, it wasn't until our students-- in response to the widespread social unrest that began in the late spring of 2020--explicitly asked for structured opportunities and support to continue the conversations begun in 3090 that we built in time in the schedule to facilitate this conversation. As with the faculty, providing the resources has not been enough. It is by reading and wrestling with the ideas together in real time--an act that in hindsight seems obvious, but is, admittedly, challenging to prioritize-that the most profound difference occurs. Thus, in collaboration with our students, we set aside time every other week for our staff to voluntary attend paid reading groups where we read and discussed antiracist writing and language scholarship10. In addition to general knowledge building, we situated the conversation in the context of their work, and discussed how these ideas informed the practice they engage in every day when working with fellow students on their writing.

The first article we offered focused on problematizing assessment standards that privileged a single standard for academic English. We felt this was

essential context for our student staff given that a significant aspect of their role as writing consultants focuses on interpreting, applying, and contextualizing instructor feedback for clients. The fact that the consultants often have to negotiate interpreting written comments on student work that is at odds with how they were trained to approach language forced us to face the reality that the institutional discourse was not quite in sync with anti-oppressive practices. Because of this, it left writing consultants a bit vulnerable to defend their practice and left us questioning how we could best support them. The reading group became a possible solution that not only enables students to stay informed regarding current scholarship in the field, but also helps them process this haunting sense of vulnerability and find a community of like-minded scholars and research.

At our first reading group meeting we discussed “Classroom Writing Assessment as an Antiracist Practice: Confronting White Supremacy in the Judgments of Language” By Asao Inoue. Our students were both intrigued and, perhaps, slightly overwhelmed.

They wrestled with how to incorporate this approach to assessment in their consultations when they are not the ones assessing writing. One student offered that this article reminded her of the importance of sharing with the writer to what extent the writing was effective for their intended purpose and goals: “That way, the writer knows at least one reader liked their ideas and writing style.” If the writer comes back with a poor grade, she continued, that opens up a conversation about standards and the subjective nature of grading writing. Of course, finding a way to initiate this conversation with a client without undermining the faculty member is a key objective both for us and, genuinely, our consultants.

Understanding standards as systems integrated in academic discourse and consciousness, rather than an issue of individual faculty supports our framing of these discussions. The consultants do an incredible job at broaching this conversation with interested clients in a way that gives the client a systems-based framework for understanding that can then generate further conversation with their professor. That is the goal, after all: to spark conversation, not judgement or shame.

Towards the end of the conversation, one student, who had remained quiet through much of the conversation, stared somewhat dumbfounded at the group. “This kind of assessment just makes sense!” she exclaimed. “Why isn’t everyone doing this? It just makes so much sense.”

It was, in some ways, a hard question to answer.

In sharing these critical resources with our student staff, the writing center becomes an empowering resource for the rest of the student population as they

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(Re)envisioning the Writing Center: Pragmatic Steps for Dismantling White Language Supremacy • 66 engage with and encounter professors whose evaluation of writing, grading practices and approaches are, at times, antithetical to and outdated with the kind of contemporary scholarship that seeks to transform a racist education system. This kind of transformational work that takes place--via conversation between student and student; student and faculty; faculty and faculty--is fundamental to how we manifest substantial change within our education systems. Though this work may, at times, move painfully and devastatingly slowly, as our opening anecdote illustrates, real change is possible and can start to take shape with commitment, resources, and a dogged determination to celebrate small moments of progress. We hope these pragmatic examples illustrate that while this subtle work may seem infuriatingly small in its scope, given time, it can ripple out to create the kind of systemic change we need.

Conclusion In framing the importance of storytelling in writing center research, Frankie Condon notes that we are storytellers: “[E]ach of us creates the narrative that he or she is. We tell our lives and live our tales, enjoying what we can, tolerating what we must, turning away to retell or sinking into madness and disorder if we cannot make (or remake) our tale into a narrative we can live in” (qtd.in Condon, Green and Faison 36). In our attempts to make our services and practices make sense in an antiracist framework, we experienced great discomfort with the widely circulating common sense stories of the writing center’s work, writing pedagogy, and assessment. The revised curriculum, policies, and practices we share here resist common sense based on racist and colonialist assumptions, while adopting and building on antiracist frameworks to tell our counterstory—one that we can live in.

More importantly, one that all our students can live peacefully in. We are committed to frameworks in which our counterstories remain open to the experiences of our campus community. We can’t undermine the role of “accomplices”--a term used by Neshia Anne Green to describe the invested partnerships in this work for social justice. As we work with writing consultants and colleagues, we are grateful for the genuine inquiries and ongoing conversations and to those who dared to grapple with common sense and upended their practices

to create new ones—ones that are beginning to make sense.

Notes We would like to thank the writing center staff at Seattle University. Their thoughtful insights, their courage to question oppressive frameworks, and their dedication to engage in critical reflective practices shows us that change is possible. We would also like to thank faculty members Loren Cressler, Tara Roth, Benjamin Stork, and Hannah Tracy whose participation in labor-based grading contract conversations have been instrumental in the development of this work and essential for moving the conversation forward at our institution.

Special thanks to Hannah Tracy and Tara Roth for their courageous and bold ability to ask tough questions, draw attention to issues of inequity and stand firm in the face of resistance, pushback, and dismissive language. We couldn’t do this work without you.

1. 3090 is English 3090, Tutor Education: Theory and Practice. The course is required for all undergraduate students who get hired as writing consultants.

2. See Peter Carino, 1995 and Elizabeth Boquet, 1999.

3. See Jeff Brooks, 1991.

4. See Bawarshi and Pelkowski, Postcolonialism 1999 5. See Grimm’s Retheorizing 2011.

6. See Steven Bailey, 2012 and Romeo García, 2017.

7. See Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, 2015.

8. http://tinyurl.com/GradingContractResources 9. We are hopeful about this. In Spring 2021, our group received a grant from our institution that was cosponsored by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. The grants fund faculty to revise and create curricula that incorporate anti-racist pedagogy and frameworks. Our group plans to create workshops for faculty and staff across the institution about grading contracts and support them in adapting this particular framework into their classrooms and assessment strategies.

10. We discussed the structure of the reading group with the students who proposed it. All agreed that participation should be voluntary but also paid to acknowledge and center the fact that continued learning is an essential part of our roles as writing center practitioners.

Works Cited

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(Re)envisioning the Writing Center: Pragmatic Steps for Dismantling White Language Supremacy • 67 Adler-Kassner, Linda and Elizabeth Wardle. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies. Logan: Utah State University Press, Logan, 2015.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” In K. Ronald and Ritchie, J (eds). Available Means: An Anthology of Women's Rhetoric(s) (pp 357-365). University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.

Bailey, Steven K. "Tutor Handbooks: Heuristic Texts for Negotiating Difference in a Globalized World." Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 9, no. 2, 2012, pp. 1-8.

Baker-Bell et. al. “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!”. Conference on College Composition and Communication. Retrieved from https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/demand-for-blacklinguistic-justice, 2020.

Basta, Hidy. “The Multilingual Turn in a Tutor Education Course: Using Threshold Concepts and Reflective Portfolios.” Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, vol 30, 2020, pp. 237-257.

Bawarshi, Anis and Pelkowski, Stephanie.

“Postcolonialism and the Idea of a Writing Center.”

Writing Center Journal, vol.19, no.2, 1999, pp 41-58.

Boquet, Elizabeth H. ""Our Little Secret": A History of Writing Centers, Pre- to Post-Open Admissions."

College Composition and Communication, vol. 50, no. 3, 1999, pp. 463-482, doi:10.2307/358861.

Brooks, Jeff. “Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Students Do All the Work. Writing Lab Newsletter, 15(5), 1991, pp. 1-4.

Carino, Peter. “Early Writing Centers: Toward a History.”

The Writing Center Journal, vol. 15, no. 2, 1995, pp. 103– 115.

Condon, Frankie., Green, Neisha-Anne, and Wonderful Faison. Writing Center Research and Critical Race Theory (pp. 30-39). In Mackiewicz, Jo, and Rebecca Babcock, (eds.). Theories and Methods of Writing Center Studies: A Practical Guide. Routledge, 2019.

García, Romeo. "Unmaking Gringo-Centers." The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, 2017, pp. 29-60.

Greenfield, Laura. “The “Standard English” Fairy Tale: A Rhetorical Analysis of Racist Pedagogies and Commonplace Assumptions about Language

Diversity.” In Laura Greenfield & Rowan, Karen.

(Eds). Writing centers and the new racism: A call for sustainable dialogue and change (pp 34-60). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2011.

---. Radical writing center praxis: A paradigm for ethical political engagement. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2019.

Grimm, Nancy. M. “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform as System of Advantage Based on Race. In Laura Greenfield & Rowan, Karen. (eds). Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change (pp. 75-100). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2011.

Inoue, Asao B. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially just Future. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse; Anderson, South Carolina: Parlor Press, 2015.

---. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Writing Classroom. Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse; Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado Boulder, 2019 ---. "Classroom Writing Assessment as an Antiracist Practice: Confronting White Supremacy in the Judgments of Language." Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, vol. 19, no. 3, 2019, pp.

373-404, doi:10.1215/15314200-7615366.

Santos, Melissa. “UW Tacoma Fighting Back on an ‘Inaccurate Reports’ That Has Declared Proper Writing Racist.” The News Tribune, Feb 26, 2017. Accessed https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/politicsgovernment/article134902324.html Suhr-Sytsma, Mandy and Shan-Estelle Brown. “Theory In/To Practice: Addressing the Everyday Language of Oppression in the Writing Center.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, 2011, pp. 13–49.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” In Laura. Greenfield & Rowan, Karen. (eds).

Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change (pp. 61-72). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2011.

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(Re)envisioning the Writing Center: Pragmatic Steps for Dismantling White Language Supremacy • 68 Appendix A Mission: Seattle University Writing Center supports the SU community from all levels of writing expertise, voices, experiences, and writing practices to achieve their writing goals. The Writing Center seeks to provide an accessible, supportive, and collaborative space for learning and growth through one-on-one peer consultations.

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Core Values: ●

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We understand writing as a process and as such welcome students at all stages of this writing process: brainstorming ideas, organizing paragraphs, integrating sources, developing argument, editing, etc.

We understand that effective writing responds well to the genre’s expectations and as such we support students in unpacking assignment requirements, and discipline expectations.

We acknowledge a person's right to their own language and continue to engage in multiliteracies in our community while problematizing the ways in which Academic “Standard” English is often employed to further exclude and marginalize Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC).

We understand the false dichotomies between form and meaning, content and language, and as such, we welcome questions about clarity, grammar conventions, and assignment expectations. There is no question that is too trivial to bring to peer consultants at the Writing Center.

We understand that writing is a practice and a skill that can be developed and transferred to other contexts. We encourage writers to keep track of their own journey through their questions, challenges, and victories.

We understand the boundaries of our expertise. The writing consultants are welleducated in writing center literature and wellversed in the best practices to support writers.

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While we are not subject experts and may not have the answers to all questions, we will partner with clients on researching these answers and/or making appropriate referrals.

We understand that language and identity are intertwined and strive to maintain an environment in which students of different races, ethnicities, abilities, gender identities, sexual orientations, and religions and spiritualities are respected, and supported in maintaining their rights to their own boundaries, privacy, agency, personal dignity, and value systems.

We understand that students have agencies and that their effective communication means a negotiation between multiple literacies and a critical understanding of the rhetorical choices available to them. As we follow post colonialist, anti-oppressive tutoring practices we uphold students’ linguistic abilities as rhetorically rich resources and support students who like to explore opportunities for code-meshing.

We are committed to ethical practices where we share what we know about the rhetorical choices available to writers and the possible consequences of these decisions, leaving the final decision to the writer.

We are committed to always draw on sound Writing Center pedagogies and to reflect on our practices, be held accountable for our work, and to engage in reflection, learning, and research. We are committed to a critical understanding of our identities and positionalities to identify and challenge the ways in which white supremacy influences writing standards and literacy.

We are committed to conducting on-going assessments of our day-to-day work, policies, and initiatives to identify and address patterns of inequalities and oppression in the Writing Center.

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LISTENING ACROSS: A CULTURAL RHETORICS APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING POWER DYNAMICS WITHIN A UNIVERSITY WRITING CENTER Marilee Brooks-Gillies Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis mbrooksg@iupui.edu

KC Chan-Brose Marian University kchanbrose@marian.edu

Varshini Balaji The New School balav909@newschool.edu

Kelin Hull Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis kmcclana@indiana.edu

Abstract

In this multivocal piece, we take a cultural rhetorics approach foregrounding story and lived experience as we investigate the internal power structures of our writing center. We share positionality stories from our different institutional and social identities to practice there-ness and constellate our stories to create what we call a listening across framework. Through listening across our stories, we sometimes find common ground and sometimes find ruptures that we cannot mend. We see listening across as a decolonial practice that interrogates and disrupts practices that reinforce colonial structures and ways of knowing.

“Stories go in circles. They don’t go in straight lines. It helps if you listen in circles because there are stories inside and between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. Part of finding is getting lost, and when you are lost you start to open up and listen.”

—Terry Tafoya (qtd. In Wilson 2) “Settler colonialism and its decolonization implicates and unsettles everyone.”

—Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (7)

Introduction Writing Center administration is complex. The role of writing center administrators has received significant scholarly attention (Geller and Denny; McKinney; McKinney, Caswell, and Jackson; Perdue and Driscoll).

The internal dynamics of writing centers are similarly complex (Dixon; Baldwin et al.) and the relationships among the larger units and institutions in which a writing center is located offer unique challenges (LaFrance and Nicolas; Miley). Our project draws from this body of scholarship and looks to lived experiences of consultants, the assistant director, and director of our own University Writing Center (UWC) to interrogate our internal power structures and their impact on the everyday practices within the UWC.

Our project complements recent scholarship on institutional ethnography that has focused on how writing center work is understood within a larger institutional structure. Michelle Miley explains that institutional ethnography “begins from the standpoint of those doing the work and zooms upward and outward” (104). Michelle LaFrance and Melissa Nicolas see institutional ethnography’s potential to show us how “our discourses actually mobilize the work of our programs” (146). Miley argues “that as a method of inquiry institutional ethnography can help those of us in writing center work align our visions of our work with the understanding of writing centers in the institution writ large” (108). However, unlike the work of institutional ethnography, which looks upward and outward and focuses primarily on texts, our cultural rhetorics approach to understanding writing center structures listens across the UWC community and focuses primarily on stories of lived experience. Our cultural rhetorics orientation means we attend to story more than text because the core of cultural rhetorics practices is an orientation and embodied storying of the maker in relation to what is being made. The makers . . . engage in that storying in different ways, through different means, hearing the voices of different ancestors and elders, honoring different kinds of stories. Their stories build and are theories, forming a web of relations. (Bratta and Powell) The consultants, coordinators, assistant director, and director are makers of and within the community of the UWC. Listening to stories from within our community has made more visible how colonial understandings of power, as demonstrated through hierarchy, paternalism, and agency, inform our UWC. Through listening, and listening carefully, we have gained a better understanding of our different lived, embodied experiences and the ways our various identity positions (including but not limited to race,

Listening Across • 70 gender, institutional status, and disciplinary backgrounds) and prior experiences inform how we engage in the work of the writing center and the ways we negotiate relationships with and among one another within and beyond the UWC. We recognize that we come to the UWC with different orientations to the work, different embodied realities and positionalities, and different lived experiences, which influence how we conceptualize and engage in the work of the UWC. We see our project supporting a re-imagining and re-making of structures and practices within the UWC. Like Anne Geller, Michele Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Carroll, and Elizabeth H. Boquet, we wish to see “everyday challenges as moments of possibility in and through which we might more creatively manifest principles, create collaborative relationships, teach tutors, faculty and our institutions with a richer accounting for the complexity of learning and producing knowledge in an intellectual community” (114). Most importantly, we wish to emphasize relationality and see the project creating a space to remind ourselves of how our practices within the UWC build our relationships and our community; as Shawn Wilson puts it, “Relationships do not merely shape reality, they are reality" (7).

Our project is one of many projects that examines and disrupts the writing center grand narrative, which according to Jackie Grutsch McKinney “goes something like this: writing centers are comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” (3, emphasis in the original). As a field, we tell stories that indicate the rosier side of our centers much more often than the stories that show dissonance and ruptures. Like Elise Dixon, we recognize that offering only “uncomplicated depiction[s] of the center without an equal representation of the unsettling, messy, or queer moments does writing centers an injustice. Such onesided representations paint unrealistic pictures of the moments that make up an individual writing center’s identity.”

In addition to painting a more accurate picture of in-center dynamics and relationships, and a deeper understanding of power structures within writing center communities, our project intentionally includes the experiences and viewpoints of writing center consultants as well as administrators. We agree with Rita Malenczyk, Neal Lerner, and Elizabeth H. Boquet who write “disciplinarity in Writing Studies is indebted to and dependent on student knowledge-making in, through, and about writing. The Writing Studies tent should be a large one, and students as researchers (not

only as subjects or objects) need to be in it” (80).

Although much writing center scholarship focuses on student writing center consultants primarily as research participants, we see necessity in including student consultants as researchers not only as research subjects.

It would be impossible to understand the internal dynamics of the UWC without consultant voices, without listening across multiple institutional and sociocultural positionalities within our community.

In this article, we share stories about our experiences in the UWC from times when the administrative structure was in flux, experiences impacted by our different embodied, material identities, and institutional statuses within our university and the UWC itself. We share our experiences of the difficulty of holding onto and sharing our stories with each other through what we are calling a listening across framework. Our work takes up Romeo García and Anna Sicari’s call to engage in transformative listening, “a listening that requires those of privileged positionalities to recognize the necessity to learn with and from difference; to understand institutional and historical power dynamics; to reconcile with a history of whiteness and domination; and to value lived experience of others.”

In this article, we share the listening across framework we’ve developed as a decolonial practice that interrogates and disrupts practices that reinforce colonial structures and ways of knowing. Listening across is a cultural rhetorics methodology informed by constellating experiences (Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab), sharing positionality stories (Cedillo and Bratta), and practicing there-ness (Riley-Mukavetz). Through listening across our stories, we sometimes find common ground and sometimes find ruptures that we cannot mend.

Decolonial Orientations to the University Writing Center We are Marilee, director; Varshini, former undergraduate writing consultant; KC, former graduate student administrator; and Kelin, former graduate student administrator and current assistant director.

We were led to this project due to a confluence of events, structures, and positionalities. Our Center has two physical locations and offers synchronous online appointments. The UWC typically employs 25-30 consultants each semester and conducts between 3,000 and 4,500 sessions per year; offers classroom workshops, write-on-site programming, in-Center workshop series and events; hosts a staff blog and social media presence; and provides consultants with ample opportunities for research. The UWC has an

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Listening Across • 71 antiracist and decolonial mission (see Brooks-Gillies) that recognizes the UWC operates within a “system of advantage based on race” (Grimm). At the UWC, our mission statement and course-based and ongoing writing center education emphasizes that the purpose of our work is to support writers in the larger context of individual texts and their experiences as an individual writer to consider how the genres they are asked to write and the language they are asked to use is influenced by institutional and social structures. For instance, at the UWC, we often work with students who write in forms of English that do not conform to White Mainstream English. Our role in the UWC is not to suggest changes so that writers can sound more like mainstream writers but to contextualize their options and encourage their agency, recognizing diverse Englishes as valid. To this end, Marilee spent her first few years as director working with the UWC staff toward building a student-staffed writing center that emphasizes peer learning and provides significant professional development opportunities for student consultants to support programming that is assetdriven, antiracist, and decolonial. Through this approach, the entire staff supports the ongoing making of the UWC, always learning from and with one another through ongoing dialogue and inquiry.

In our continued making of the UWC, we want to emphasize our orientation to our work as decolonial.

We recognize that the related concepts of decolonization and decoloniality are expansive with multiple orientations and conceptualizations that interact in complex ways. Some scholars conceptualize decolonization as the project of recognizing the ongoing material legacies of colonization and working toward land redress1, while other scholars conceptualize decolonization as a project of expanding our thinking and understandings beyond hegemonic narratives thus decolonizing knowledge and the mind.2 Decoloniality focuses on knowledge production and necessitates an epistemic shift away from colonial structures and ways of knowing. Such a shift requires delinking3 from Western paradigms, which "means to change the terms and not just the content of the conversation" (Mignolo, “Delinking” 459). In other words, to disrupt coloniality and enact decoloniality, we must change our everyday practices to delink from reinforcing and replicating colonial structures. Despite these shared commitments, the specific ways various scholars conceptualize the decolonial project do not necessarily align with each other.

Our understanding of decolonization and decoloniality are primarily informed by Cultural Rhetorics, especially the Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab

who anchor their work to Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Qwo-Li Driskill.

Tuhiwai Smith writes, “Decolonization, once viewed as the formal process of handing over the instruments of government, is now recognized as a long-term process involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial power” (98). Driskill writes, “By using the term decolonization, I am speaking of ongoing, radical resistance against colonialism that includes struggles for land redress, self-determination, healing historical trauma, cultural continuance, and reconciliation” (69). These definitions help us consider ways to continue (re)shaping our pedagogies, administrative structures, and relationships with and among one another in the UWC and in Writing Centers as a discipline.

With these understandings of decolonization and a cultural rhetorics orientation, we recognize that our everyday practices contribute to reinforcing colonial structures or remaking them into something that contributes to the decolonial project. We are intentionally working toward decoloniality. That said, our Center is not necessarily advanced in its approach to decoloniality, which is ongoing and messy work. We wish to acknowledge how our practices are contributing to the larger decolonial project while recognizing that there is a lot of room for us to do more and do better. Our emphasis is on listening to each other and considering the ways we make and remake the UWC. As Andrea Riley Mukavetz writes, “By understanding the spaces we share, we more fully understand the knowledge we create” (120).

The difficulty of ongoing decolonial work at the UWC became clear to us when adjusting to shifts in the administrative structure. To address a clear need for administrative labor following the departure of two longtime assistant directors, a new assistant director was recruited from the English department and three graduate assistants were hired as Graduate Student Administrators (GSAs) in the fall of 2017. The GSAs, assistant director, and director were all referred to as the leadership team (LT). The primary role of the GSAs was to serve as on-the-ground managers— debriefing with a consultant after a difficult session, directing consultants to useful resources to support their consulting and other projects, addressing issues with technology or facilities, and reporting to the director and assistant director about odd situations that arose within the UWC. In addition, each GSA had responsibility for some administrative tasks. This time of flux overlapped with the director’s pregnancy and maternity leave.

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Listening Across • 72 The staff, especially undergraduate consultants, responded to shifts in the leadership structure and the director’s semester-long absence in primarily negative ways. Several consultants developed negative attitudes about the UWC because of their perceptions of power and authority within the UWC including difficulty in recognizing particular forms of (invisible, emotional, administrative) labor performed by consultants in leadership roles, especially the GSAs, and difficulty in recognizing and addressing ongoing microaggressions toward consultants of color despite the UWC’s mission to support antiracist and decolonial approaches. The changes to the UWC’s administrative structure created confusion for consultants. The transition was messy, emotionally charged, and contentious.

Although the UWC is structured to value the experiences and insights of all community members, the difficult transition into the new leadership structure showed us how we carried colonial mindsets and reinforced particular notions of power as enacted through hierarchy, paternalism, and agency. We see this project of reviewing our stories and how we learned to tell and listen to our stories as an opportunity to engage more deeply in the decolonial project, recognize the ways we reinforced values we did not consciously hold, and rethink and reimagine our practices in ways that more consistently value and promote decoloniality.

Sharing Positionality Stories Our methods center on our lived experiences as UWC consultants and administrators. The project began with a conversation about the disruption caused by the new leadership structure. We began to consider the ways our different orientations and positionalities impacted our experiences. Like John Gagnon, we see our work as “driven by stories, the stories told by others and [our] own stories, too. The stories that live inside [us] give form to [our] identit[ies] and constantly negotiate [our] place[s] in this world. These stories connect with, pass through, and bounce up against other bodies, and in other spaces, places, and times” (Smith et al. 53). Instead of falling into the binaries of professor-student, supervisor-employee, undergraduate student-graduate student, we see each other as people with multiple identity positions that are influenced by the structure of the Center and its institutional and disciplinary constraints. We wanted to make sense of what had happened and figure out a way to address fissures in our relationships and improve the working conditions of the UWC, a place we had all felt strong, positive feelings for at one point. At first, then, the project consisted of coming together and trying to extend goodwill to one another, enough goodwill that

we could share our stories with one another. We met several times, every couple of months for over a year, and discussed our experiences. We weren’t exactly listening yet, though.

We were beginning to recognize the power of story in understanding our own lived experiences and how our lived experiences connect in ways that can be generative and/or disruptive. At first, sharing our stories was a frustrating experience. We had very different stories, and it became difficult to hear each other because even though we recognized each of these stories were true stories, we didn’t like all these stories and sometimes quibbled over decisions other community members made. For instance, KC contended that there wasn’t a GSA job description.

Marilee countered that one was sent with the application and discussed at several early LT meetings; it was open for revision but not non-existent. A consultant who has since left the project indicated that no one had communicated about the new structure.

Marilee countered that there had been emails and required staff meetings devoted to the topic. The frustrated consultant said, “No one reads their emails or pays attention during meetings!” Kelin and Varshini were less talkative during these early meetings, not sure what they could or should share. We’d gotten used to not listening to one another and were anchored in our own stories. Each of our stories mattered, and we needed to find a way to make space for each other and recognize that our frustrations were linked to our different positionalities, forms of power, and embodied realities embedded in colonial structures we perpetuated through our practices.

We decided that we needed to reflect on the moments when the leadership structure was in flux that made us feel the most discomfort and consider why we felt that discomfort, and then we needed to share those stories. The stories we’ve shared with each other, while constructed in good faith to be accurate, are incomplete. Like Christina Cedillo and Phil Bratta, we recognize that “Story as a guiding practice—in selfpositioning and in constellating ourselves within networks of meanings—reminds us that epistemology is not ontology; our situated perspectives cannot tell a whole story except through exchange with others” (235). With these guiding thoughts, we continued to tell our stories to ourselves and each other. To show the core tensions in our lived experiences, we share a few of the stories that we’ve carried for so long in the next section. We see them enacting positionality stories, which we then constellate to listen across.

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Listening Across • 73

On-The-Ground-Leadership: An Undergraduate Consultant’s Experience Varshini Balaji In January 2018, several undergraduate consultants felt that their work was being monitored by LT members, and that the LT were not leading or intervening in moments of disruption such as problematic sessions with writers and microaggressive behaviors by other consultants. Additionally, consultants had indicated microaggressive comments fetishizing race were made by a LT member. As a South Asian, settler, woman of color, and immigrant, I was attuned to these kinds of experiences in the UWC and was already developing an article proposal aimed at addressing the UWC’s (in)ability to engage with diversity.

The new LT structure shifted communication patterns, so that consultants were supposed to communicate on-the-ground issues first to the LT member acting as on-the-ground manager instead of immediately telling Marilee and the assistant director.

This system exacerbated the divide between consultants and the LT. A few consultants indicated that they were planning to bring up their concerns at the upcoming biweekly staff meeting: they wanted action. My limited time at the Center allowed me to only receive much of this as distilled, second-hand information through Olivia,4 another undergraduate consultant. Olivia and I, good friends with a shared commitment to addressing questions of inequity and power, took consultants’ feedback to one of the GSAs, Kelin, whose job description involved community engagement and consultant support.

During our meeting in early February, Kelin listened carefully and suggested we develop a survey where consultants could anonymously share their perceptions of and experiences with the LT. Throughout the semester, Olivia and I kept pushing to make consultant concerns visible to the LT by having meetings with Kelin and the assistant director and drafting and revising the survey multiple times. We often had meetings postponed and felt like we were being intentionally stalled. We were concerned that the longer we waited to share the survey, more consultants’ already negative feelings about the LT would be exacerbated.

In early March, Olivia and I met with Marilee to discuss article proposals and saw clear connections between our proposals and the events unfolding at the Center. We knew these concerns would be easier to discuss in person but were hesitant to disrupt Marilee’s maternity leave. Going into the meeting, I was nervous

about Marilee’s reaction because I deeply valued her opinion. I felt assured that our good working relationship—informed by her support on a research project and an independent study focused on themes of social justice, power, and decolonization—would allow her to readily understand consultant concerns as urgent and visceral. However, in the meeting, we felt that Marilee dismissed the survey and the urgency to administer it. We felt helpless and disappointed. We were frustrated and were trying our best to listen and support our fellow consultants while respecting and working within the established leadership structure. As consultants on-the-ground, Olivia and I experienced a greater sense of urgency. Additionally, for people of color, like myself, there is a radical urgency for change.

Leading from Between: A GSA’s Experience Kelin Hull During my meeting with Varshini and Olivia, I felt uneasy. Their request for confidentiality meant that I would have access to knowledge I could not share with my fellow GSAs, exacerbating the confusion about our roles. They reported that other consultants shared concerns that the LT was “unapproachable,” ineffectual, and an “oppressive presence” in a “capitalist structure.” In one example, they noted that when a male consultant made an inappropriate sexist remark to a female consultant other consultants stepped in to mediate the situation and educate the male consultant, but the LT member remained silent.

When they indicated that some consultants were in favor of commandeering a staff meeting to direct a dialogue about the consultants’ accusations regarding the LT, I balked knowing that Marilee would not be present to mediate and offer guidance. I offered the idea of a survey that, in my mind, would be informal and focused on the negative emotions in circulation; it would scaffold us towards a dialogue with established ground rules and, most importantly, a heads-up to my fellow LT members. I was comfortable keeping the secret at first because soon everyone would know, and it would be directly addressed in a way that I thought would succeed.

Varshini and Olivia began drafting the survey, and in the meantime, I met with the assistant director to provide her a detailed overview of my meeting. I followed her instructions to continue overseeing the survey draft but felt even more caught in the middle.

How could I, a member of the LT, provide constructive feedback on a survey about the LT? It soon became apparent that Varshini and Olivia were

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Listening Across • 74 not in the position to author a constructive survey, either. I felt stuck. I knew the survey would not be distributed; I was uncomfortable and feeling “in between” my roles in the Center and my own identities as it became apparent that I would have to continue keeping this secret.

Meanwhile, I continued to receive information regarding things the LT was “doing wrong.” I wanted to be a friend to the other GSAs and protect them from further critique without breaking my promise of confidentiality, so I tried to tell KC about consultants’ concerns but could not be too specific. Without access to all the contexts in play, she dismissed my warnings.

Because my attempts were relegated to vague allusions, they exacerbated the friction between the GSAs and further destabilized the community in the Center, helping feed the narrative circulating that privileged certain performances of leadership—who was “doing it right,” according to the consultants. The consultants seemed to want the LT to act authoritatively according to their definition and understanding of authority but also not to be authoritative. It wasn’t fair.

I didn’t want the power this insider knowledge was providing, and in not wanting it, I didn’t use it in the best way. I could have simply asked key individuals to a meeting and let everyone talk. But I didn’t because I was highly invested in not elevating myself in any way.

I did not want to be seen as taking/having more power. Instead, I tried to disappear, minimize, and redirect, focusing what little energy I had left on stabilizing the relationship with my fellow GSAs. But it was too late.

In the end, I felt isolated and alone. I shared my feelings with the assistant director. She felt protective of me—of the entire LT, so she suggested a post-it note activity where consultants would have an opportunity for “celebrations, questions, and concerns” before our late-February staff meeting, believing it might be a release valve for the consultants.

As the LT gathered after the meeting, I could see that the statements on the notes, things like “LT are tellers not leaders,” were not new to me, but they were to the other GSAs. I was relieved to have the secret out; I wanted them to experience this with me, like someone who had sat and stewed on this information for months. “I tried to tell you,” I thought. “I tried to warn you. You scoffed at it all.” My impatience was the opposite of listening. In my need to protect, placate, and soothe the emotional experiences of everyone in the Center, I was unable to actually listen.

(Mis)Leading: A Big Fish/Small Fish Experience

K.C. Chan-Brose Spring 2018 seemed to be going smoothly, but there were still traces of resentment for the GSAs trickling through. Almost all these grumbles were filtered through Kelin, from her weekly check-in meetings with committee coordinators. I didn’t give much weight to these complaints because, honestly, they seemed silly: the LT being too clique-y; sharing dinner together; offending consultants by greeting them with different amounts of enthusiasm throughout the long workday. There were never specifics about who was complaining, about whom they were complaining about, or about whether the complaints were more than just that—grumbles which cropped up during a weekly check-in with a chronic emotional laborer. Many of these grumbles were character assassinations and clearly rooted in sexism: “she’s unapproachable”; “she doesn’t smile”; “she’s gossiping about the staff.” Though, at first, we’d tried to react to each vague complaint, we only had so much energy to expend and were already emotionally exhausted. We needed to start being more selective about which issues took up our ever-shrinking energy and time.

We were working with adults who were empowered enough to openly complain about their supervisors and ballsy enough to express that they deserved our positions in the Center more than we did yet cited their reason for not addressing their frustrations directly with us as that person being “too unapproachable.” As the GSA in charge of professional development, I felt it was irresponsible to encourage consultants to believe that this is how things might be handled in their jobs beyond college. It also seemed childish, unprofessional, and decidedly antifeminist to keep entertaining the notion that these frustrations deserved this much merit, especially when giving them such merit just fueled the fire. We could not keep wasting energy worrying about whether we were likeable, especially when the perception of us was so skewed and subjective. We had jobs to do. So, I stopped listening. I had to. The noise was so loud and so constant that I couldn’t think. I stopped listening so that I could survive. And then the post-it note meeting happened.

After all this time drudging through the miasma of negativity that had become our jobs, all of the foggy, murky, misunderstanding of what we were doing that was so horrible, Kelin admitted that she had been having her “secret meetings'' and, thus, had the answers. She had for a while now and had been expected to do something with that knowledge, but instead she’d kept it to herself. I felt ambushed, Kelin’s

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Listening Across • 75 hinting washing back over me like a smack in the face.

I felt Kelin had betrayed the GSAs by keeping this information quiet; that Kelin and the assistant director’s choice had infantilized myself and the other GSA. I also felt frustrated that there was nothing I could do to “make it better” because I didn’t know what “it” was and Kelin’s withholding of “it” disrupted the equity of power between the three of us.

Mostly, though, I was hurt because I thought Kelin was my friend. She was also a student and a mother, like me, and the person I’d shared my dreams and insecurities with. She got me in a way that my peers never had. On the truly hard days, I had this powerful visualization of the three of us walking across the graduation stage together, of us working together as teachers and writers and makers. But suddenly it felt like she’d had a different motivation. Those common goals that had once united us now read differently to me; we were not partners, but competitors in a shrinking job market. Regardless of her good intentions, I felt she’d taken advantage of her position in order to redirect all of the negative energy from the staff away from herself and towards us. I felt she’d taken away my choice and my agency. So, I put myself back into the driver’s seat, took back my agency, and chose to walk away from the Center with a broken heart and a thicker skin.

Leading from a Distance: A Director’s Experience Marilee Brooks-Gillies In early March 2018, I met with Varshini and Olivia to discuss article proposals they were developing. I had continued to make myself available for supporting consultant scholarship during my maternity leave, while our assistant director handled day-to-day administration with support from the GSAs. A few minutes into our meeting, I realized that they didn’t want to talk about the proposals. They were deeply frustrated with members of the new LT. They shared a desire for more transparency about how LT members spent their time, concerns about microaggressions, and general confusion about our administrative structure. This led them to be extra critical of all actions by LT members. They were adamant about deploying a survey for consultants to anonymously share frustrations with the LT. Since we were holding focus groups about UWC administration as part of our regular assessments in early April, I was distressed by the idea of creating an additional instrument. A draft the assistant director shared with me the day after our meeting was filled with survey

crimes—leading questions, loaded questions, and double-barreled questions. One question read, "Is there too much unnecessary drama in the writing center?"

They wanted swift action, but my sense was that to respond to their concerns we needed to consider the long-term vision and mission and material consequences of our actions. I needed to learn more about the conversations they’d already had with the assistant director and Kelin to understand the situation.

While they noted that undergraduate consultants were feeling surveilled by LT members, I knew from communications from the assistant director that LT members felt like they were trapped in a situation where they could do nothing right and that they could not be seen as people in new leadership roles who sometimes make mistakes. A new assessment tool deployed just before the regular focus groups would have little impact on anyone’s actions in the short term.

The focus groups would provide important information alongside the frustrations and whisperings I’d heard throughout my leave. These could be reviewed in the summer to restructure the LT and improve communication practices. I was worried that Varshini and Olivia were being reactive instead of responsive, but I was having a hard time showing my overlapping concerns while questioning their approach.

Because I was on leave, most of our interactions were over email, which was a significant departure of our mostly in-person conversations previously. I could feel my relationship with Varshini slipping. We’d been close, as I had been her faculty mentor for a research project the previous summer, and she’d worked with me on an independent study on decolonial methodologies in the fall. Email correspondence limited our ability to see each other and recognize the ways we cared about each other and our community.

Ultimately, my position of authority and my physical absence from campus, which both removed me from many of the day-to-day interactions in the UWC, made it hard for me to understand the embodied and lived experiences of consultants and LT members.

Enacting a Listening Across Framework We thought about these stories—letting them circle around in our minds, writing them down, talking about them with each other in planned and unplanned interactions. At one point, we got caught up in the accuracy of the timeline for our stories; we found ourselves fact checking dates and searching through emails and events on our calendars to piece together a sequence of events. This made us feel awful, reliving times that made us uncomfortable, and didn’t lead to any major insights since the timeline of events wasn’t

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Listening Across • 76 that important. What was important was how we felt about our experiences. From there we decided to focus on the events that we remembered viscerally.

We continued to repeat our stories, but we’d found new language to share our ideas, and we began to really listen to each other, to—in effect—learn how to listen to one another and began to understand the stories together. We kept coming together, in person and sometimes on Zoom, and sharing our stories. Through the accumulated telling of our stories over the course of over a year, we heard them differently and heard each other. After practicing sharing our stories and— more importantly—listening to each other's stories, we have learned not just about one another's experiences but have found a way to listen that honor one another’s embodied realities in ways our early storysharing, focused on being right and being understood as individuals, did not.

In telling and sharing our stories, we eventually stopped trying to “fix” the Center by recognizing what went “wrong” and began to focus on how to listen to each other. In fact, we began to see that our attempts at “fixing” the UWC were perpetuating colonial structures instead of interrogating the power structures and colonial ways of thinking we were trapped in. We had focused on who had the truest experience instead of acknowledging in a meaningful way that each story was true. Instead, we needed to concentrate on listening to understand and connect beyond how we perceived our own stories, experiences, and selves to let in the lived experiences of one another. In this way, our work is similar to what Andrea Riley-Mukavetz has theorized as there-ness. She writes, “There-ness, as a practice, is about being attentive to how relationships and space impact the opportunity for and construction of knowledge making. As intercultural researchers, we must be mindful of the practices we use to make ourselves present and absent—visible and invisible—to the cultural communities we work with and belong to” (120). We needed to actually listen to each other, show up for one another, and find ways to be and stay in community. Through the process of reflecting on our positionality stories, including the portions shared here, and telling and re-telling our stories among one another, we’ve learned not just from the stories themselves but the relationships among them and ourselves through the process of sharing. This is what we are calling the listening across framework. Within the process we have found ways to listen and hear one another and more fully consider the relationships we have fostered, ignored, enhanced, disrupted across our interactions. We have also begun to see more clearly the ways our interactions and positionalities are

impacted by the colonial structures that inform the UWC. We realized that our real project wasn’t about safeguarding the UWC against future negative events, reconciling all the bad feelings we had about our own negative experiences, or even completely healing our own relationships with each other. Instead, we’ve embarked on a much broader challenge—to work toward intellectual decolonization, delinking from colonial notions of power and relationships. Making the colonial structures informing the UWC visible through listening across can support delinking from them and enacting a more decolonial approach to writing center work.

In this section, we constellate tensions within our positionality stories to listen across. According to the Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab, the idea of constellation allows for all of the meaning-making practices and their relationships to matter. It allows for multiplysituated subjects to connect to multiple discourses at the same time, as well as for those relationships (among subjects, among discourses, among kinds of connections) to shift and change without holding a subject captive (1.2).

In this way, we recognize that listening across is an active engagement, a practice, not a one-and-done activity but a way of engaging in community to listen to and strive to understand the lived, embodied experiences of one another. In telling our stories and attempting to listen, again and again, we’ve come to recognize how colonial understandings of hierarchy structure how we communicate, which led to paternalistic and infantilizing behaviors of protection, and influenced our notions of agency and accountability.

Hierarchy as Demonstrated through Communication Practices

Writing centers often laud their own structures as “flattened hierarchies,” indicating the importance of writer and consultant voices and experiences to the community, but a flattened hierarchy is still a hierarchy.

In addition, our experiences with other hierarchies mapped onto the UWC, even as we worked to flatten it. In our previous leadership model, consultants reported directly to an assistant director and director in addition to receiving guidance on projects from a committee coordinator. The GSAs were intended to take some of the burden off the assistant director, acting as on-the-ground managers, but consultants and GSAs alike began to see a chain of command in which consultants reported to coordinators, GSAs reported

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Listening Across • 77 to the assistant director, and the assistant director reported to the director. Varshini and Olivia went to Kelin with concerns from consultants because they misinterpreted her “community support” role as meaning that issues between staff members should be reported to her. Kelin brought this information to the assistant director since she wasn’t sure how to address it with KC, who was her administrative equal, but the assistant director—perhaps not understanding the depth of the issues raised by Varshini and Olivia— delegated the primary work of addressing the concerns to Kelin. Marilee was on leave, so these issues were not brought to her until later, when it was clear the community was troubled. This could have been an opportunity to have open conversation among the entire staff and work to flatten the hierarchy, but the power structure was confusing to everyone, and trust was rapidly disintegrating. Instead, circles of communication became smaller, and most consultants felt unable to talk about it with anyone who had power to change it.

We understand more than ever that listening across recognizes reciprocity and respect. Dixon writes that “writing centers are supposedly safe, conversational, nonhierarchical places,” but this is patently untrue as our stories demonstrate. We put our faith in a flattened hierarchy but then worked to enact a traditional hierarchy, expecting the leader at the helm to make decisions and take responsibility for the bad feelings of the community. In the UWC, we have different but equally important roles. We need to recognize how instead of flattening a hierarchy we were reinscribing it; we instead need to recognize our actions and delink from practices that make it harder for us to communicate with each other.

Paternalism Framed as Professionalism and Protection We continued to reinforce a traditional hierarchy and create communication obstacles when working to “protect” various members of the community in the name of “professionalism.” Varshini and Olivia sought to protect unnamed consultants by anonymously sharing their concerns with Kelin; Kelin protected Varshini and Olivia by keeping their concerns confidential; the assistant director downplayed the intensity of the complaints in her communication with KC to protect her; the assistant director introduced the anonymous post-it note activity to protect the identities of consultants while allowing them to communicate their concerns; the anonymous survey Kelin suggested and Varshini and Olivia designed was also a form of protection. The notion of creating a somehow “unbiased” survey instrument to gather data

is entrenched in Enlightenment thinking that has been instrumental in extending the colonial project. In some ways, the instinct toward protection was a way of honoring a request and encouraging dialogue, but in other ways it exacerbated the problem because so many members of the community were nervous about openly expressing their concerns.

The newly implemented leadership structure put into question how power operated in the UWC, and many consultants who had negative experiences with the new GSAs were concerned that the GSAs could enact power over them. The GSAs, however, only had authority to relay consultants' concerns to the assistant director and director. Conflating our understandings of power and authority disrupted trust in the community and raised questions about accountability. Who are we accountable to? How might accountability held and practiced in human relationships expand our ability to listen to each other’s embodied experiences?

Instead of bringing concerns out into the open in a way that the community could work together to address, all concerns were shared in secret meetings and anonymous forms of feedback. It was as if the entire community demanded transparency from everyone but was unable to enact it themselves. The desire to keep themselves safe or protect others got in the way of communicating with the community. While notions of protection are often perceived as good and necessary, protectionism frequently manifests as paternalism and limits people’s ability and agency to act for themselves as KC’s story illustrates. For us to address concerns openly as a community, leaders of the community needed to create an opening for discussion about the new power structure. As Cedillo and Bratta write, “In order for positionality stories to function effectively, they ever so briefly center the teacher in the moment and rely on students seeing their teacher as a figure with, rather than of, authority gained through both personal experience and academic learning. As a result, teachers can potentially begin to build trust with their students” (221). In this case, the assistant director and director needed to be vulnerable and share their positionality stories about their experiences with the UWC’s shifting structure to build trust and encourage consultants to share their own stories which could allow us to be accountable to our community, to each other.

Agency with(out) Responsibility and Accountability

As a community, our desire to respect confidentiality and protect each other limited our own and others’ agency. This led to everyone enacting their own notions of change in siloes, disconnected and

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Listening Across • 78 alienated from the larger structure and the complex web of relationships that underlay the UWC’s daily operations. Everyone wanted the agency to enact their own notions of change; however, no one wanted to bear the responsibility of their actions. This was complicated by the sense of urgency that people experienced by virtue of their institutional positionalities and sociocultural identities.

Even when members of the community wanted to hold each other accountable and saw shared responsibility for the community, interactions were strained. For instance, Varshini and Marilee shared similar orientations to the UWC as a promising site to enact decolonial pedagogies, but their different positionalities and experiences made it difficult for them to understand and trust one another. Varshini’s positionalities as an on-the-ground consultant and woman of color exacerbated her felt urgency for change, which demanded immediate, concrete action.

This sense of urgency was at odds with Marilee’s longterm vision as the director who saw that institutional change was slow, difficult, and uneven. Varshini’s desire for immediate, concrete action made the creation and implementation of an anonymous survey seem like a necessary act, while Marilee’s long-term vision for the UWC showed her that rushed implementation of the survey would heighten the staff’s expectations for change while yielding limited useful data, especially since the existing focus group assessment worked to gather similar information. Both sensed each other’s distress, and both recognized the need to act, but to Varshini, Marilee’s choice to stop the implementation of the survey seemed only like inaction while to Marilee the importance Varshini placed on the survey was misguided. They both wanted to hold each other accountable and felt accountable to each other, yet as they tried to share their concerns, they both felt their actions and ideas were misunderstood by the other.

Although they had a common anchoring, a similar orientation to the mission and vision of the UWC, they had different notions for how to effect change within the UWC, how to address the instability introduced by the new LT structure. Paul Farmer warns us that without a broad, historical, and interlinked understanding “we risk seeing only the residue of meaning. We see the puddles, perhaps, but not the rainstorms and certainly not the gathering thunderclouds” (309). Marilee’s longer experience in the UWC and enculturation into the discipline of Writing Studies gave her a broader picture of the Center and working timetable for change. Varshini’s embodied experiences as a woman of color and

consultant on-the-ground informed her felt urgency for change. We could only see the gathering thunderclouds if we could trust one another enough to listen across, to be responsible to one another and our community. Frantz Fanon reminds us that “Decolonization, therefore, implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation" (2). How can our actions address this urgent need in environments where change is slow?

Listening Across Our Stories: A Reflection and a Call Writing Centers are sites of constant flux characterized by perpetual novices, and relationships are at the core of our work making this a deeply complex site to navigate and decolonize. Romeo García notes that, “As a site of place, meaning, and knowledge-making, the writing center is about interactions and encounters, co-existing histories and trajectories, and is always in the process of being made” (48). Although writing centers are always in flux, there are practices and orientations to the work that may seem “fixed” or seen as “best practices,” and any change and/or disruption to everyday practices is generally met with unsettled feelings and resistance as we continue upholding colonial structures, even as we speak out against them. We had rooted problems to particular people; assigning blame for the troubles of our community to specific people based on their place in the hierarchy and the way they enacted their power and authority. By “listening across,” we divested from notions of power being anchored to the top of a hierarchy and recognized the ways we all contribute to the community and enact different kinds of power and influence.

Through listening again and again, we began to understand the ways our experiences in the same community differed; we began to understand each other’s motivations and choices; we began to more deeply understand how the community of the UWC operates. While we are still haunted by and entrenched in colonial ways of knowing, we recognize that listening across provides a broad, interlinked understanding of people’s experiences that can be used to guide and inform delinking through our choices, practices, and pedagogies. Much writing center scholarship focuses on how writing center administrators are trying to make their everyday working conditions more visible to administrators and faculty, and addresses dynamics between writers and consultants, but writing center communities also need to make more visible the interplay of positionalities across the various roles within our Centers to include

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Listening Across • 79 consultant-consultant dynamics, consultantadministrator dynamics, junior administrator-executive administrator dynamics, and the ways that various institutional and sociocultural identity positions impact the relationships among our writing center communities.

Listening across through sharing and constellating positionality stories to practice there-ness allows us to make and remake the UWC. These practices allow us to understand our experiences in interlinked ways rather than isolated ways and help us anticipate the implications and consequences of change as it creates space to intentionally listen to the embodied experiences across our writing center community, including concerns and critiques. Importantly, we have learned that our emphasis when facing difficult situations in the UWC should not focus on "fixing" or avoiding them but on creating conditions that encourage deep attention and listening to the embodied experiences of one another. Lessons we’ve learned are not going to be directly applicable to every situation, but listening deeply and recognizing unique, embodied lived experiences are decolonial practices that support delinking from colonial structures that inform institutional structures and our shared experiences.

Ultimately, this is a story not only of the past but of the future. We must remind ourselves that "colonialism and imperialism have not settled their debt to us once they have withdrawn their flag and their police force from our territories" (Fanon 57). In addition, while we see disciplinary potential through decolonial methods we must emphasize that “decoloniality is an epistemic, political, and ethical project. It provides both the analytic for a position of critique and a vision of a world that does not deny the possibility for people, elsewhere and otherwise, to participate in the production, distribution, and/or organization of knowledge. It can and should be more than disciplinary reform” (García and Baca 24).

The work of delinking from colonial practices and structures is complicated and filled with tension and dissonance. Delinking allows us to contribute to decoloniality, to work toward multiplicity instead of universal notions of Western superiority. A decolonial future values multiple identities, multiple notions of change, multiple voices, and multiple stories. Listening across as a decolonial practice demands consistent, sincere, and critically empathetic engagement. We must keep coming back together, gathering, dialoguing, listening across, and working with each other toward a decolonial future. As our constellated positionality stories indicate, during the time of administrative flux,

we weren’t consistently practicing there-ness; listening across has helped us recognize the ongoing work we need to do within our Center and ourselves to delink from colonial ways of understanding relationality and to “become allies, not competing individuals, working toward the survival of our shared community” (Powell 42).

Acknowledgements The development of this article was supported in part through an International Writing Centers Association Research Grant.

Notes 1. This orientation is exemplified by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang who write “Though the details are not fixed or agreed upon, in our view, decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically. This is precisely why decolonization is necessarily unsettling, especially across lines of solidarity” (7).

2. Walter Mignolo describes how in the early nineteenth century “decolonization” was understood to be synonymous with “independence” and “revolution,” as a way for people of a colonized site to gain control of their land and government, before becoming associated with decolonizing knowledge in the post-Cold War era (Darker 53).

3. Our understanding of delinking comes from Walter Mignolo who combines sociologist Samir Amin’s “la desconnection” and Anibal Quijano’s “desprendimiento” (“Delinking” 502).

4. This is a pseudonym.

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CROSSING THROUGH BORDERLINES OF IDENTIFICATION AND NONIDENTIFICATION: TRANSFORMING WRITING CENTER RESPONSE TO FACULTY OUTREACH WORKSHOPS Hadi Banat University of Massachusetts Boston hadi.banat@umb.edu Abstract

Transformative change in writing center work can take place through a critical evaluation of histories and habits of practice. Writing Centers at universities that do not institutionalize an organized and funded Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative can get overwhelmed by outreach from faculty in the disciplines.

Prepackaged writing center heuristics for the interpretation of and response to faculty outreach workshop requests may create conflicts and destroy bridges of potential collaboration. By adopting participatory ethnographic research while employing Kris Ratcliffe rhetorical listening framework, I investigated causes of conflict between former writing center practices and faculty expectations of outreach workshops. This conceptual narrative documents fieldwork observations and lays out the roots of conflict involving various stakeholders: writing center administration, writing tutors, and faculty in the disciplines. Ultimately, this narrative demonstrates the outcomes of rhetorical listening and intercultural dialogue and describes two initiatives that transformed the culture of WAC outreach: (1) a new model engaging faculty partners in peer review workshops, remote lab tours, and mentoring consultations on workshop design and delivery, and (2) a conflict resolution training tutorial for professional development of tutors.

Voices from the Periphery into the Center In the academic year of 2015-2016, I started my doctorate degree in English with a dual concentration in Rhetoric/Composition and Teaching English as a Second Language. I moved to the United States from the Middle East. I am Muslim. I am Palestinian Lebanese, born in Lebanon with a Palestinian refugee status. I am a US permanent resident through family chain immigration. I am bilingual – Arabic is my first language while English is my second. I speak and write English with an accent. My darker physical features help people classify me as either Middle Eastern or Latinx. I have other identity markers that do not align with mainstream culture. I have completed my PhD residency amid the exclusionary rhetoric resulting from President Trump’s administrative stance in favor of the Muslim ban, the US media’s persistent propaganda of religious extremism, and narratives about Islamophobic incidents and terrorist bombings of religious sites. I would attend Friday prayers on campus. I fast during Ramadan, and I do not eat pork. My minority status is thus easily defined and labelled in mainstream America.

I bring a diverse palette of differences into spaces I enter, thus triggering the interplay of identification and

disidentification with mainstream culture and further complicating power dynamics with my interlocutors.

At the beginning of my time at Purdue, I witnessed the shift in writing center leadership which brought a wave of increased accountability towards difference, thus creating a new Writing Center (WC) mission centered on social justice and inclusion. Harry Denny calls for taking up “diversity, not just as a slogan, but as a central axis for critical thinking, student engagement, and teaching and learning” (165). Denny reminds us that our writing centers do not operate in a vacuum; they routinely get disrupted by environmental exigencies and forces. He cautions against the naivety of imagining “that the outside can’t or will not intrude into our spaces”, and he invites us to “engage difference and [face] the commonplace of identity politics” (Denny 166). Progressive scholarship on identity in writing center work (Denny; García; Denny et al.,; Webster) strategically inspired a transformation in the bodies that inhabited the staffing platform of the center. Tutors with linguistic, cultural, identity, racial, and religious differences started occupying the material infrastructures of the space to transform its social and cultural infrastructures away from its history of whiteness and domination. Such an intentional decolonizing act gradually built trust between diverse tutors and the writing lab administrators. That change also initiated the social mobility of marginalized tutors like me towards inhabiting managerial positions in writing center administration.

I was the only multilingual graduate student tutor who joined Purdue’s writing lab in 2016-2017. I started tutoring while simultaneously taking a practicum in writing theory and practice with Harry Denny. Due to schedule conflicts with the writing across the curriculum seminar, Denny generously accommodated my schedule and offered me the practicum on a one-to-one basis.

The practicum combined theory on writing center practice, L2 writing, and translingual writing with experiential assignments that maximized my immersion in tutorials with the writing lab’s tutors as well as problem solving exercises with staff and administrators.

During my training, Denny emphasized the power of

Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification • 83 intentional listening, awareness of embodiment and identity politics, and the art of tactful communication to negotiate differences and resolve conflicts. I developed new knowledge about how to navigate “flash politics that infiltrate the everyday routine of sessions and staff development within writing centers” (Denny et al. 7).

During the practicum, we have witnessed together an array of environmental turbulences, the most relevant of which was a strong wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric. Denny was aware that school shootings, gun open-carry laws, Black Lives Matter, the use of antigay slurs in athletics, sexual violence, and lack of response to racial bias on university campuses remain “hegemonic events in our collective conscience” (Denny et al. 8) imposing fear on complete outsiders to the US context like me. I gradually realized how focusing on writing and writers in tutorials get politicized by the sociocultural, socioreligious, socioeconomic and sociopolitical exigencies in our environment and on our campuses. Interactions with interlocutors in writing center tutorials, workshops, and staff meetings are highly contextual, so we can “never provide blanket solutions to every problem” we encounter (Denny et al. 4). Within the complexity of environmental turmoil, I have come to understand how “listening [could emerge] in the crux of incoherencies and disjunctions” and “how [we could] practice survivance, resiliency, and agency through listening” (García 30). Listening cultivates better communication across differences (Ratcliffe), so engaging in intentional, purposeful, and rhetorical listening can transform former practices and ways of doing. To set ourselves up for rhetorical listening, community listening comes first to develop knowledge about various environmental exigencies and build awareness of multiple perspectives.

In response to Sicari and García’s research question, “What might transformative listening look like in writing center work? How can we work towards mindfully incorporating transformative listening in our pedagogies and practices?”, I propose a narrative that conceptualizes how crossing through borderlines of identification/non-identification (Ratcliffe 63) has played a major role in transforming my minority status into a power force imposing transcultural practices and changes in the spaces I inhabit and enter. I emphasize my minority status as “the precondition of an individual predisposition to listen rhetorically” and how it facilitates crossing the borders of identification and nonidentification (Oleksiak 15). My conceptual narrative articulates the notion of equilibrium I have created thus balancing the asymmetrical powers of domination and submission that haunted prior writing center and faculty relationships.

In my narrative, I share ethnographic fieldwork observations I have collected during my term as Purdue’s Writing Lab Workshops and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) coordinator (2017-2018).

Through participatory ethnographic research, I investigated causes of conflict between former writing center practices and faculty expectations of outreach workshops. By reversing former protocols of “entering spaces”, I presented new opportunities for transformative listening. I paid fieldwork visits to faculty in their own dwellings–their own colleges, departments, and buildings–to challenge the writing center’s prior culture of subordination to electronic underprepared faculty workshop requests. With my visible minority identity markers, I gently entered faculty offices and classrooms to observe, listen, and ask questions. My ancestry narratives of the 1948 Palestinian exodus and our prior relocations across borders haunted me with every faculty office visit on campus. The erasure of my Palestinian identity, incessant forms of marginalization, and experiences of domination I have witnessed throughout my life set me up to “cultivate listening as a form of resolve between being heard and seen” (García 31), which creates exigency for transformative action and response. In the narrative, I describe the outcomes of intentional listening and intercultural dialogue which transformed the culture of WAC outreach work. I particularly emphasize two initiatives I led: (1) a new model engaging our faculty partners in peer review workshops, remote lab tours, and mentoring consultations on workshop design and delivery, and (2) a conflict resolution tutorial for continuous professional development of tutors.

Writing Centers—De-Facto WAC Outreach Partners Transformative change in writing center work takes place through a critical evaluation of histories and habits of practice. Hauntings of past ideologies about who owns knowledge and expertise about writing should inspire an ethical responsibility towards transforming the rhetoric of managing, controlling, and policing the other. This is possible when enacting decoloniality which engages in exploring “border thinking as the site of knowledges and epistemic alternatives that can move us beyond Western categories of epistemology, thought, and feeling” towards pluriversality (García and Baca 2).

At institutions that do not have an organized writing across the curriculum initiative, the writing center becomes the de facto space for such work (Harris 101; Kuriloff 109). The becoming of the writing center as a WAC outreach partner promotes its status in the

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Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification • 84 institution when new practices adopt an antiracist and decolonial approach to building knowledge about writing, i.e., recognizing and acknowledging diverse stakeholders. Who is arriving and who is transforming– the Writing Center or Faculty in the Disciplines?— remains a troubling question that shakes the “domination subordination” (Pratt 7) dynamics of who owns knowledge and expertise on writing instruction.

Prepackaged and traditional writing center heuristics for the interpretation of and response to faculty outreach requests can create conflicts and destroy bridges of potential collaboration. When faculty in the disciplines reach out to enter the writing center space, they are approaching this act with agency and trust in the other.

This positive initiative sometimes gets underestimated by memories of institutional marginalization of the writing center, reckoning it as a space for support and service rather than knowledge making. Transformative listening plays an agential role in the erasure of past dwellings and rebirth of new ways of doing in writing center work (García 33) when it invests in community listening that seeks to understand both the opportunities and challenges embedded in cross disciplinary collaboration. Only then, transformative listening creates a culture of “mindfulness towards difference” (García 33) that can resolve asymmetrical relations of power between the writing center and faculty in the disciplines.

Purdue’s writing lab serves undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and faculty from across various disciplines. The center employs both undergraduate and graduate tutors and presents leadership opportunities for graduate students interested in seeking professionalization in writing center/program administration. These administrative professionalization opportunities include assistant director for undergraduate education, assistant director for workshops and writing across the curriculum, assistant director for multilingual writing, and assistant director for content development of the Online Writing Lab (OWL). Keen on reflecting the diversity of the student population on campus, Purdue’s writing lab is intentional about recruiting students from diverse disciplinary and identity backgrounds. This diversity is more prevalent within the undergraduate than the graduate tutor population due to the limited hours graduate students on a half time assistantship (0.5 Fulltime Equivalent) can work. In the past and during my term as WAC coordinator, only domestic graduate students could be on a three-quarter assistantship, i.e., they could teach a writing course (0.5 FTE) and work for ten hours in the writing lab (0.25 FTE). However, this pattern could not endure within the context of an

institution that values research production more than teaching; thus, recently there has been more pressure on graduate students to work a limited number of hours in order to direct their undivided attention towards research and publications.

Responding to the institutional context, the writing lab has to balance the mission of mentoring students on writing development with new goals aiming to transform the writing lab into a space for knowledge making. For that purpose, the writing lab has become more purposeful with recruiting graduate students who aim to professionalize in writing center administration and are thus devoted to fulfilling their research agendas and employment responsibilities towards achieving that goal. Graduate tutors who work in the writing lab are required to enroll in a three-credit graduate practicum seminar on writing center theory and practice during their first semester of employment. Undergraduate tutors, on the other hand, have to successfully complete a three-credit undergraduate course on theories and methods of tutoring writing prior to their employment.

The writing lab also hires business writing consultants, students majoring in Professional Writing who successfully complete a discipline-specific practicum for tutoring on business, technical, and professional writing genres before they start tutoring. Throughout their employment at the writing lab, all populations of tutors participate in compensated professional development workshops and meetings in addition to online training tutorials for mentoring multilingual writers. Seventy percent of the Writing Lab visits during the academic year of 2017-2018 were made by multilingual writers (2017-2018 Annual Report 29).

On a campus that does not have an institutionalized WAC program, the writing lab gradually and naturally becomes a WAC outreach center. However, without institutional sanction and sufficient financial resources dedicated for a WAC initiative, a writing center “can achieve certain goals but is limited in its ability to bring about the self-sustaining changes a WAC program seeks” (Harris 90). The lack of funding dedicated for WAC outreach work through Purdue’s Writing Lab has changed since Muriel Harris’s administrative term but not in substantial ways. Thus, Harris’s caution against bottom-up attempts by the writing center “to launch a WAC program of its own” (90) still hold ground during Denny’s writing center administration. Currently, Purdue’s Writing Lab offers faculty resources, faculty guides, one-on-one and group consultation faculty meetings, and outreach workshops in addition to some OWL resources designed for writing development in the disciplines. To further promote STEM engagement, Purdue’s Writing Lab operates a satellite location in the

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Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification • 85 Mechanical Engineering building one night a week to provide tutoring for engineering undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and faculty. Due to the STEM orientation of the school, the writing lab has been intentional in fostering relationships with faculty from the colleges of pharmacy and engineering.

Traditionally, all graduate tutors are hired from and funded by the English Department. During the 20172018 academic year, the Graduate School funded three new 0.5 FTE positions for graduate tutors from other departments in the College of Liberal Arts to support graduate student writers in the disciplines (2017-2018 Annual Report 15). The limited funding for such positions and the research-based nature of STEM graduate assistantships stand as obstacles for hiring consultants from disciplines representing the diversity of colleges and departments at Purdue. This challenges the enactment of Peshe Kuriloff’s vision of fostering a “multidisciplinary environment [where] no individual possesses all the pieces of the puzzle [and] consultants have much to learn from each other” (111). With the allocated funding, Purdue’s writing lab cannot recruit sufficient and relevant human resources to nurture a transcultural learning environment where writing consultants listen to each other intentionally and rhetorically to collaborate on developing “a basic knowledge of common discourse conventions in disciplines other than their own” (Kuriloff 111). In an attempt to navigate such limitations, Purdue’s Writing Lab created and funded a new graduate student administrative position – Workshop and Writing Across the Curriculum Coordinator. I was responsible for collaborating with faculty in the disciplines to address their needs on integrating and assessing writing in coursework as well as to address student needs through designing workshops, planning consultation sessions, and providing remote lab tours.

Enacting Identification, Disidentification, and Non-Identification In my approach to WAC work, I have employed Krista Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening framework (identification, disidentification, and non-identification) to facilitate building relationships with faculty across campus as well as with my partners in the Writing Lab. Ratcliffe argues rhetorical listening facilitates crosscultural communication when it “assumes the possibility of conscious identification” (48). Community listening builds up the knowledge and schema which facilitate mapping identifications. In this conceptual narrative, I use cross-cultural communication as communication between various cultures of writing in the institution. By

cultures of writing, I mean disciplinary dispositions towards writing communicated through various discourse communities on campus who utilize common terminology and genres to produce new epistemologies in their own fields of study. To enable intentional identifications with various disciplinary realities about writing, one ought to remain open to multiple identifications. This premise enabled me to frame myself as “a compilation of many identifications” in my role as the Writing Lab WAC coordinator (Ratcliffe 51).

As I traveled between the writing lab and faculty offices, I was entering new discourse communities and participating in community listening for identifying commonalities and differences. Through the “gaps and conflicts between the embodied discourses” (Ratcliffe 53), I found opportunities to claim my agency and recommend the most suitable interventions for WAC work in the context of an institution like Purdue where no official sanction and dedicated funding for a campuswide initiative has been put in place. In the process of making conscious identifications, Ratcliffe sees a necessity in both acceding to power and learning submission (60). In theorizing spaces for queerness, Timothy Oleksiak has also utilized Ratcliffe’s framework to demonstrate the interplay between domination and submission. My approach to WAC work resonates with Oleksiak’s demonstration because he invites us to “allow ourselves and others to enter into a disorienting effect that resists the closure of identification and disidentification” (15). The sense of disorientation Oleksiak frames gets messy while negotiating with faculty in the disciplines, but this disorienting effect enables “transformation [which can only happen] in light of a collaborative exchange” (20) through community listening. My motive as the workshops and WAC coordinator was to decolonize knowledge ownership by building healthier relationships between the writing lab and faculty in the disciplines based on two premises: (1) openness to difference, and (2) a reciprocal exercise of domination and submission that all stakeholders involved learn to participate in.

In mapping conscious identifications, witnessing disidentifications is inevitable and continuously evolving. Ratcliffe relies on Diana Fuss’s definition of disidentification – “an identification that has already been made and denied in the unconscious” (7); thus, disidentifications between the writing lab and faculty in the disciplines are the result of troubled histories based on faulty or stereotypical identifications (Ratcliffe 62).

Inspired by Ratcliffe’s invitation to observe how identifications and disidentifications function, I was cognizant of the policing, regulating, and controlling culture of traditional writing center work. I was also

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Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification • 86 cognizant of the faulty assumptions faculty in the disciplines have about the role of writing centers in initiating WAC work and supporting faculty with integrating writing instruction in their content courses.

Through negotiating identifications, disidentifications, and hauntings of prior outreach workshops, I invited faculty to enter a conversation and fostered a dialectical dialogue that continued until we collaboratively identified the most suitable intervention. The process is messy and raises questions about “power plays that are ideologically unfair” (Ratcliffe 66) to prior identifications of the writing center as a place of service and prior identifications of faculty in the disciplines as ignorant of writing knowledge. Most of our conversations centered on mapping the commonalities and differences between how we teach and tutor writing in rhetoric and composition and how faculty in the disciplines perceive writing instruction and define good writing. Through mapping commonalities and differences, we engaged in cross-cultural communication to find suitable interventions that bridge writing center pedagogy and faculty expectations about the outcomes of outreach workshops and writing center tutorials. The paradigm shift I adopted in responding to faculty outreach workshop requests was a conscious and intentional move towards making reconciliations with past practices and inventing alternative practices.

To erase past hauntings of policing places and bodies whether it was exercised by the writing lab or faculty in the disciplines, I adopted Ratcliffe’s concept of non-identification and positioned myself in the margin. It is a place I am used to inhabiting as a Palestinian refugee, but the margin provides “a place of pause, a place of reflection, a place that invites people to admit that gaps exist” (Ratcliffe 73). By inhabiting the margin, I could not meet faculty in the writing lab space.

I entered their offices as a visitor that does not claim ownership of space, materiality, and resources. I claimed my graduate student persona in my role as the workshops and WAC coordinator to ease faculty into entering a dialogue with me. This powerplay of submission allowed them to trust me gradually especially when explaining how my position was created “to revisit former identifications and disidentifications” (Ratcliffe 73) about good writing in the disciplines. Ratcliffe argues this position of non-identification “is important in rhetoric and composition studies because it maps a place, a possibility, for consciously asserting our agency to engage cross-cultural rhetorical exchanges across both commonalities and differences” (73). By placing myself in the margin, I was performing rhetorical listening and giving myself a chance to hear faculty

complaints and relay prior frustrations of the writing lab.

In this context, living in the margin allows you recess time to carve new directions and approaches towards conflict resolution. Through community listening, a collaborative navigation of troubled identifications and disidentifications made such conversations successful because we could reach consensus to reciprocally engage in the interplay between domination and submission regarding who owns knowledge about writing. This dialectical exchange “provides a ground for action motivated by accountability” (Ratcliffe 73) because all parties involved “reconsider previous identifications and disidentifications” and allow themselves to “act in a variety of ways … and decide whether to say yes, and/or no and/or maybe” (Ratcliffe 75). This dialectical exchange also helped me and faculty partners remain open and exercise agency only when relevant – not for the virtue of the power we believe we acquire from our own disciplines. When we successfully became part of that dialogue, we set ourselves up “to choose to act ethically, either by listening and/or acting upon that listening” (Ratcliffe 76). In this case, rhetorical listening facilitated via community listening becomes transformative “as a form of actional and decolonial work” (García 33) in erasing past histories of policing, controlling, and regulating.

Amid the conflicting realities of emotional belonging and detachment as a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, I mastered the playful act of identification and disidentification. I identified with the Lebanese culture when it served the purpose. I did so through code switching and performing a social demeanor aligned with Lebanese cultural structures and practices because “you persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (Burke qtd. in Ratcliffe 55). On the other hand, I did not identify with the Lebanese culture in situations where I was denied the agency of belonging. The shift between identifications and disidentifications was emotionally haunting and psychologically exhausting, which sometimes necessitates resting in the margin not as a form of submission but as an opportunity to pause, reflect, and regain your powers. Ratcliffe emphasizes the hyphen in non-identification which symbolizes the margin between identifications and disidentifications, “a place wherein people may consciously choose to position themselves to listen rhetorically” (72). In nonidentification, Ratcliffe argues for an opportunity to “assert personal agency … to act in a variety of ways … to exercise capacity and willingness to listen to [oneself] and others” (75). These exercises “marked the impetus for my search for self, my search for my identity, for a

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Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification • 87 home, for a culture, and for a community to which I could belong”, i.e., my search for my identity as a Palestinian refugee “who [has] experienced the exigency of living dual realities” (Banat 160). The emotional labor of being haunted by my Palestinian heritage, i.e., inhabiting multiple grounds, living in the margin, waiting on borders, and being policed, prepared me to shift tactfully between identification and disidentification with former writing center practices in my role as the lab’s WAC coordinator. Intentional listening remains a craft to master, but one’s disposition to engage active listening is a natural tendency acquired through past accumulative experiences.

WAC Administration Initiatives To invent new initiatives, I had to interrogate former practices. I quickly realized that the writing lab’s traditional response protocols to hastily prepared electronic faculty workshop requests cannot endure the emergent complexity of writing needs in various disciplines on campus. The first task I engaged myself with was reviewing the list of departments and faculty who requested workshops in the past, the types of workshops they requested, and how often they have reached out for such requests. I then went through the inventory of workshop materials the writing lab kept and assessed the visibility of the infrastructure where these materials live. I questioned former practices of responding to faculty workshop requests after I have witnessed a pattern of recurrency, i.e., the same faculty members reaching out for workshops on the same topics. I interviewed the associate director of the writing lab for possessing memory of former protocols; the past tradition was to accommodate as many faculty outreach workshops as possible in hopes to spread awareness about the writing lab across various disciplines and attract more student traffic into tutorials. Despite the sound logic in former reasoning and outreach goals, I identified three major problems: (1) a lack of outreach to new faculty partners, (2) tutor disinterest in designing and delivering outreach workshops, and (3) sustainability was at stake. I, thus, have prioritized three milestones during my term as the workshops and WAC coordinator: (1) changing the culture of response to faculty workshop requests, (2) creating a mentor model for designing outreach workshops, and (3) increasing the visibility of the workshop material inventory.

In the following subsections, I will lay out interventions for supporting writing lab tutors with workshop design and delivery as well as training them to resolve conflicts they encounter with students and faculty across disciplines.

A More Sustainable Model for Faculty Outreach Workshops Recognizing the power of rhetorical listening “as a trope for interpretative invention and as a code for cross-cultural conduct” (Ratcliffe 1), I had to listen to become more open to how communicating about writing across disciplines remains a process of negotiation and conflict resolution. I did not witness any enactment of intentional listening through reading and responding to faculty workshop requests in silos. The intentional act of listening involves interlocutors engaging in active conversation after paying attention to the exchange of ideas and language. Thus, I initiated response to workshop requests via thank you emails to faculty with appointment requests for face-to-face meetings. I looked up faculty profiles to compose personalized positive notes embedded in each meeting request – a speech act of complimenting I borrowed from my Palestinian Lebanese heritage. Recognizing and giving credit to other knowledge and expertise is an act of paying respect. One use of rhetorical listening “is predicated upon respect for self and others; it also assumes that listeners possess the agency for acknowledging, cultivating, and negotiating conventions of different discourse communities” (Ratcliffe 34). My disciplinary affiliation naturally prompts me to internalize rhetoric and composition as the professional field of studying, researching, and teaching writing. By default, rhetoric and composition scholars own knowledge about writing theory, practice, conventions, and genres. However, a postpositivist perspective implies embracing multiple realities; thus, moving away from a purely objective stance about knowledge becomes imperative. Adopting a postpositivist worldview kept me open to other knowledges about writing at the institution. This stance of openness helped me endorse Ratcliffe’s notion of respect for self and others, i.e., participating in and inviting others to a collective acknowledgement of multiple realities about writing that live in our disciplines and institutions.

My email requests for meetings with faculty in the disciplines were never turned away. I paid visits to faculty in their own dwellings to initiate conversations about their workshop needs. My understanding that many faculty are good writers but do not possess explicit knowledge about writing pedagogy in alignment with their own discipline-specific ways of thinking (Kuriloff 108) encouraged me to repurpose my faculty visits into discourse-based interviews to unpack faculty tacit knowledge about good writing in their disciplines. I entered faculty offices gently, sat in their office chairs cautiously, tilted my posture forward attentively, smiled shyly, and listened attentively. The act of trepidation I

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Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification • 88 would perform is inherited. With every visit to faculty offices, my Palestinian ancestry 1948 exodus narratives and relocation across borders and into new lands haunted me. As Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, we are denied citizenship, employment, health care access, ownership, and inheritance rights. Despite my attachment to Lebanon, it has always been a country that belongs to other people; “we had to accept the fact that the things we were using would never belong to us, and that this country, this other land, would never belong to us, either” (Pamuk). I was not possessive of writing knowledge because I rarely experienced ownership rights. When I was entering spaces outside the Writing Lab, I recognized that writing knowledge does not only belong to me. It also belongs to faculty who practice it in their own disciplines.

Through my collaboration with faculty from various disciplines, outreach workshops became less lecturebased and instead adopted a peer-review model; I worked with the writing lab tutors on designing workshops that mentored students and faculty to provide discipline specific feedback. Writing lab tutors would visit a classroom only after students finished the first draft of an assignment and only after they have received feedback from their professor. The writing lab tutors work with faculty and students to develop knowledge about strategies and tactics for revision and also involve students in peer review to make them more autonomous reviewers of their own writing. Keen on promoting sustainability and reaching out to new faculty partners across campus, I also prioritized another type of workshop, the mentor-model workshop, which instructs faculty and empowers them to design peer review classroom activities. A third type of workshop was the Remote Tours which promoted the writing lab interventions and highlighted how consistent visits to the center can make students better writers in their disciplines. Bringing such information into courses across campus increases student traffic to the writing lab. When we see more students from the disciplines in tutorials, we invite faculty and students to participate organically in the teaching and learning process by “creating a feedback loop and conveying vital information gleaned from students to their professors” (Kuriloff 114).

During the academic year of 2017-2018, the Writing Lab offered 17 in-house workshops for general writing concerns. In-house workshops include various topics like generating research proposals, using source texts, building citation knowledge and skills, developing job search and graduate school application materials, and learning email etiquette. For outreach, I collaborated with my partners in the writing lab to offer six in-class

peer review workshops requested by faculty in the disciplines, five workshops on graduate student writing, and five remote tours to promote the writing lab interventions. Workshops are typically an hour-long and either adapt the peer-review model or consist of faculty mentoring. One of my goals was to provide outreach to new faculty on campus from outside the traditional realm of engineering and pharmacy. Purdue is mostly known for being an engineering school, but that should not necessarily reduce it into one identification. Other colleges on campus play an essential role in feeding and balancing the STEM orientation of the school. Ratcliffe admits that identifications craft an identity but cautions us against reducing identity to a single identification (51).

The two tables (Appendix A) present all the faculty and staff discipline-specific workshops conducted in Fall and Spring of 2017-2018. Adopting a visual landscape for the types of workshops offered is purposeful and rhetorical to represent two important notions essential to WAC work: (1) tracking outreach to new faculty, staff, and student partners across colleges, and (2) record keeping and data collection.

Workshop Design and Delivery I did not encounter much resistance when I was shifting faculty prior dispositions and preferences from a lecture-based to a peer review workshop. Peer review workshops have become popular with faculty in the disciplines. Intentional and curious listening included faculty in the conversation, i.e., they felt their knowledge about writing and expertise in their own disciplines were recognized by the Writing Lab. The philosophy of knowledge co-ownership helped us approach problem solving as equitable partners and stakeholders. I emphasized the importance of feedback faculty provide students because they possess content knowledge in their own disciplines, and I highlighted the writing lab’s role in unpacking the writing process and providing interventions that make students more capable writers in their own disciplines. The process of negotiation does not always flow smoothly but gradually allows us to “hear things we cannot see [whether we] hear differences as harmony or even as discordant notes” (Ratcliffe 25). The disciplinary differences about what defines good writing did not scare me away; they prompted me instead to convince faculty how peer review workshops allow them, their students, and the Writing Lab to engage in the process of writing and revision and create opportunities for collaborative thinking and invention. Peer review workshops involved us all in the intentional act of listening because “it proceeds via different body organs, different disciplinary and cultural assumptions, different figures

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Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification • 89 of speech, and most importantly different stances” (Ratcliffe 24). In addition to peer review workshops, faculty who needed direct instruction on assignment design or integrating writing instruction in their coursework benefited more from explicit mentoring.

For that purpose, I participated with the Writing Lab Director in offering one-on-one mentoring consultations.

Due to my limited hours of employment as a graduate assistant, I could not fulfill all faculty outreach needs. I had to find partners in the writing lab to collaborate with. Even when designing and delivering workshops were highly compensated by the Writing Lab, graduate tutors were hesitant to take lead and participate in them. At the beginning, I misinterpreted their resistance and discussed with the writing lab director potential ways to make such opportunities more attractive. Increased financial incentives did not solve the problem. I called for a meeting with the graduate lab tutors, and I participated in intentional community listening to hear about their prior experiences with designing workshops and the reasons for their lack of interest. By alternating between my graduate student and WAC coordinator personas, I balanced between identification and disidentification with the writing lab’s prior culture of designing faculty outreach workshops.

This tactful shift made them feel more at ease and fostered a culture of openness. Two major issues were recognized: (1) lack of resources and mentoring on outreach workshop design, and (2) prior negative experiences with faculty in the disciplines during workshops.

To solve these issues, I increased the visibility of prior workshop materials. All the files were stored on a hard disk drive in a drawer in the Writing Lab. The lack of visibility of infrastructure prompted me to collaborate with the assistant director for content development of Purdue OWL. We worked together to sort out, rebrand, and create an inventory of prior workshop materials available online and thus easily accessible to all graduate tutors. I also relayed the writing lab director’s openness to mentor graduate tutors on workshop design and delivery. Thus, we dedicated some of the professional development opportunities to achieve that goal. Whenever possible, I intentionally brought together various tutor identities (undergraduate, junior graduate, and senior graduate tutors) to work collaboratively on the design and delivery of faculty outreach workshops. Being cognizant that the Writing Lab is a discourse community with members entering and leaving periodically, I had to consider long-term sustainability of knowledge making and sharing. We offered financial incentives to all tutors

who participated in workshops, and I documented their experiences with workshop design and delivery. With the OWL content development assistant director, I followed up on archiving newly designed materials and making them available online. The visibility of these materials also saves time and financial resources in the long run. As we reach out to new faculty partners on campus and as we identify common requests, tutors can use, recycle, and easily repurpose workshop materials to fit the new context and need.

Conflict Resolution Tutorial WAC work is not only limited to designing faculty outreach workshops; working with students across various disciplines is the daily reality many tutors experience at Purdue’s writing lab. Through my meetings with graduate tutors, I have listened to the conflicts that could arise in tutorials or while delivering in-house and faculty outreach workshops. Rhetorical listening involves “a stance of openness [whose] purpose is to cultivate conscious identifications in ways that promote productive communication” (Ratcliffe 25).

In my role as the WAC coordinator, I made an identification with administration and their stance in favor of outreach workshops, thus communicating to graduate tutors short- and long-term goals that achieve the writing lab mission. Through my graduate student persona, I made an identification with my peers’ emotional distress, frustration, and their resistant stance towards outreach workshops. Listening to their prior negative experiences allowed me to understand my position in relation to my peers and the writing lab administration and helped me understand my peers better in relation to administration and faculty in the disciplines. This openness motivates a sense of accountability according to Ratcliffe who differentiates accountability from responsibility, clarifying that accountability combines both responsibility and response (191). Through mapping commonalities and differences between my own and peers’ dispositions, I carved multiple identifications thus furthering my analysis of various claims and their cultural relationships to roles and dispositions.

These four moves outlined above enact Ratcliffe’s trope for interpretive invention (26). My empathetic stance towards my peers accomplished through making multiple identifications enabled me to assess a gap in problem solving skills. Thus, my contribution to invention was a proposal to design a conflict resolution module for my mid-semester project in the writing center administration seminar. The content of the module was utilized in professional development workshops that I co-delivered with Harry Denny. The

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Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification • 90 module integrates both a theoretical and practical component. The theoretical component focuses on defining a conflict, types of conflict, and circumstances when conflicts arise in a tutorial. The practical component includes activities utilizing transcripts of writing center tutorial sessions and video scenarios. The training starts with a warm-up activity which focuses on some of the challenges tutors encounter in writing center tutorials. Depending on responses, mentors can cluster these difficulties under different categories, which can guide discussions about defining conflicts and conflict resolution. This facilitates scaffolding and enables tutors to transfer their prior knowledge about conflicts they had encountered in tutorials or during faculty workshops. Tutors then work through exercises that enable them to identify a conflict, frame it, articulate the reasons for its occurrence, then find possible solutions or successful interventions and strategies to solve it. The targeted audience for this training module include writing center administrators, writing center mentors, in addition to novice and experienced writing center tutors. Mentors working on this module can utilize the content and materials autonomously depending on the group of tutors in training, their level of expertise, and their learning styles and preferences.

Neil Katz, Katherine Sosa, and Suzzette Harriot described conflicts as “emotionally tense, volatile situations”, and working productively towards a resolution calls for managing emotions and addressing all parties’ needs (315). To help tutors assess each situation of conflict and adopt a suitable intervention strategy, the module exercises were designed to promote effective observation and rhetorical listening. Enacting Ratcliffe’s four moves for practicing rhetorical listening helped us collaboratively describe various types of conflicts we witnessed in tutorial transcripts and videos.

Framing conflicts collaboratively in a group setting gives new tutors prerequisite knowledge and a framework to build upon when similar conflicts emerge in practice.

Through the training module, the writing lab community identified the following types of conflicts: A- Epistemological conflicts arise when tutors and tutees do not share the same level of information and knowledge in relation to issues that come up in a tutorial. For example, a tutor might define the graduate school application genre as a persuasive statement which highlights the applicants’ experience and skills, while a tutee might consider the same document as a narrative that engages the reader and makes the statement stand out in a competitive environment.

The disidentifications made with respect to the

document’s genre in addition to the tutor and tutee’s incapability of perceiving an application statement to be both–an engaging narrative and a persuasive argument–can create conflict.

B- Pedagogical conflicts happen when the method the tutor follows to facilitate learning in a tutorial is not the preferred method of the tutee. This disidentification with respect to preference can create emotional distress early on during the session. For example, a tutor believes that reading aloud is a strategy which can effectively engage the tutee in the proofreading process of the paper, but a tutee is neither comfortable nor confident about listening to someone else reading their writing aloud. The tutee prefers if the tutor does silent reading and gives suggestions for proofreading.

Such a scenario can elevate tension from the onset of the session due to a paradox in preferences.

C- Identity conflicts are sensitive and critical because embodied and hidden identities can pose different types and levels of challenges.

Various markers of identity can influence student writing and thus emerge in writing center tutorials. For example, a tutee might not be comfortable working with a non-native speaker of English in the writing lab because they believe native speakers are better communicators and cultural informants about writing expectations in English. As a result, false assumptions can lead to passive aggression which stirs emotions.

D- Intercultural conflicts arise when both the tutor and tutee do not have sufficient knowledge about each other’s cultures, or they generalize based on broad cultural stereotypes.

For example, a tutor works with a tutee from China. The tutor believes that all Chinese students are quiet and timid and do not feel comfortable speaking up. The tutor dominates the session and does not invite the tutee to share their perspective. The tutee gets dissatisfied for being marginalized and deprived from the opportunity to exercise agency and make decisions about their own writing.

E- Ideological conflicts take place when both the tutor and tutee are not on the same page with respect to how tutorials or workshops are handled.

Instead of communicating expectations, both the tutor and students make assumptions that can offend each other. For

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Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification • 91 example, conflicts can arise when some faculty and students expect writing lab tutors to deliver a toolkit of suggestions and tips on effective writing while tutors design hands-on workshops which require faculty and student collaboration. The mismatch in expectations can lead to a climax of frustration during a workshop.

David Healy presented another framework for conflict classification that divides conflicts into three types: intra-sender, inter-sender, and person-role conflicts.

Intra-sender conflicts happen when expectations projected from one member are incompatible, for example a tutee asks a tutor to examine the paper with an editing role but then disagrees with the tutor’s suggestions and wants to keep the original wording.

Inter-sender conflicts are characterized when “pressures from one role sender [oppose] pressures from one or more senders” (Healy 45). For example, a professor referred a student to the writing lab to improve language use, but a tutor had been mentored to address high-order concerns first. This can easily lead to a conflict especially if the tutee is under the pressure of deadline constraints and time crunches. Person-role conflicts occur when “role requirements violate particular values or needs of an individual, or the individual’s needs and aspirations result in actions that antagonize other members of the role set” (Healy 45).

For example, a female tutor whose history of abuse from a male guardian makes it difficult for her to work with an older male tutor, and the writing center policy does not always facilitate voluntary selection of tutors.

In such cases, the tutee might not feel comfortable expressing the reason for resistance because it is sensitive and personal, and the writing center staff find it difficult to read between the lines. Healy’s classification of conflicts stem from disidentifications that interlocutors were not able to reconcile due to unequal power dynamics. According to Ratcliffe, these limitations are dehumanizing and can result in misunderstandings and violations (72).

Translating tutor concerns into professional development interventions made them feel recognized and listened to. Consequently, they have become more ready to collaborate and more open to communicating concerns. They recognized the conflicts they deal with on the ground are real and shared by other peers. This boosted the collaborative spirit and fostered rapport, comfort, and trust among various stakeholders in the Writing Lab.

Collaboration, Fluidity, and Relationality Through Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening framework of making identifications, disidentifications, and nonidentifications, we witness active collaboration and a stance of openness that encourages fluidity in shifting frames of reference. This progressive disposition of achieving relationality does not evolve naturally; it requires intentionality. Even with oppressive histories and imposed systems of control, I as a Palestinian refugee learned to endure the hardship of waiting on borders and the anguish of living in the margins.

Adopting a pragmatist perspective towards my compulsory submission to systemic oppression required taking intentional initiatives to disrupt larger systems of domination. Through my reality, I had to consider borders and margins as transient stages for exploring new ideas of arrival. With new arrivals, transitions magnify disorienting effects only to restore equilibrium afterwards. Experiencing transitions to new lands has initiated my consubstantiality, i.e., the acculturation of material bodies to new environments; thus, developing rhetorical confidence and personal agency to find common grounds despite differences and to mystify unfair ideological power plays (Burke qtd. in Ratcliffe 58).

This is the approach I have implemented in building relationships between the writing lab and faculty in the disciplines. Jonathan Rylander and Travis Webster provide a queer framework for WAC work by adopting a “lens for incisively understanding collaboration and relationality through the lens of transdisciplinarity” (210). The motive to instill change gradually even if change is initiated in “one faculty’s teaching and for one student maybe enough of a seed planted in an institutional culture of writing” (Rylander and Webster210). Faculty outreach implemented by the workshop models outlined in this article (peer-review, mentor-model, and lab remote tours) is one sustainable way to “avoid Band-Aid WAC help” when resources are limited (Harris 93). Such initiatives take time, but time allows us the opportunity for actional and decolonial work, i.e., “participating in a different logic that invests in a pluriversal understanding of differences” (García 48). García revolutionizes the concept of time and space and their relationship to decolonizing writing center work by inviting us to give opportunities to new voices in the writing center – new bodies whose differences can reconcile “center/periphery binaries and uphold [alternative] forms of management” (49). And yet, this work is only possible when “directors play a critical role in this type of transformative learning and praxis” (García 50). It is more attainable when writing center directors “hire with an eye for diversity and [evaluate

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Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification • 92 reflexively] how staffs have the potential to represent a diverse critical mass that can foster a truly innovative learning environment” (Denny et al. 244). The transformation of the bodies in the center brought in minority voices who are more inclined to listen and coshare knowledge, thus crossing boundaries and innovating praxis. Yet this work remains emotionally, psychologically, and physically daunting because experiencing disorientation in the margins brings back memories of suppression from past experiences and contexts. The central axis remains: How do we balance our time in the center and the periphery, our roles between domination and submission, and the equilibrium among emotion, reason, and transformative action in WAC work?

Acknowledgements I thank Harry Denny whose transformative mentorship set me up to innovate with WAC design thinking and relationship building across disciplines. I am grateful to Anna Sicari and Romeo García for giving me a voice to represent the complexity of my professional and personal experiences. Their revision recommendations were valuable and impactful. I am also fortunate to have spent four days in July 2021 at a writing retreat in central Massachusetts with Matt Davis, Timothy Oleksiak, and Lauren Marshall Bowen.

Their generous support, careful review, and constructive feedback on an earlier version of the piece have carved its debut. Thanks to my friend Hicham Naimy, the associate director of scientific publications at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, for providing me the opportunity and digital space to listen to myself going through the revision cycles of the manuscript.

Works Cited Banat, Hadi. “Floating on Quicksand: Negotiating Academe While Tutoring as a Muslim.” Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles edited by Harry Denny, Robert Mundy, Liliana M. Naydan, Richard Severe, and Anna Sicari, Utah State University Press, 2018, pp.

156-172.

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

Denny, Harry. Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2010.

Denny, Harry, Robert, Mundy, Liliana M. Naydan, Richard Severe, and Anna Sicari (Eds.). Out in the Center: Public

Controversies and Private Struggles. Logan: Utah State University Press.

Denny, Harry, Conrad-Salvo, Tammy, Kennell, Vicki, and Geib, Elizabeth. “2017-2018 Annual Report.” https://owl.purdue.edu/writinglab/about/writing_lab _annual_reports.html. Accessed 28 July 2021.

García, Romeo. “Unmaking Gringo Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, 2017, pp. 29-60.

García, Romeo, and Damian Baca. “Hopes and visions: The possibility of decolonial options.” Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions, edited by Romeo Garcia and Damian Baca, Conference on College Composition and Communication of the National Council of Teachers of English, 2019, pp. 148.

Harris, Muriel. "A Writing Center without a WAC Program: The De Facto WAC Center/Writing Center.” Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum Programs: Building Interdisciplinary Partnerships, edited by Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S. Blumner, Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 1999, pp. 89-104.

Healy, David. “Tutorial Role Conflict in the Writing Center.” The Writing Center Tutorial, vol. 11, no. 2, 1991, pp. 41-50.

Rylander, Jonathan J. and Webster, Travis. “Embracing the Always-Already: Toward Queer Assemblages for Writing Across the Curriculum Administration.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 72, no. 2, 2020, pp.

198-223.

Kuriloff, Peshe C. "Writing Centers as WAC Centers: An Evolving Model.” Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum Programs: Building Interdisciplinary Partnerships, edited by Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S. Blumner, Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 1999, pp. 105-118.

Neil, H. Katz, Katherine J. Sosa, and Suzzette A. Harriott.

“Overt and Covert Group Dynamics: An Innovative Approach for Conflict Resolution Preparation.” Conflict Resolution Quarterly, vol. 33, no.

3, 2016, pp. 313-348.

Oleksiak, Timothy. “Composing in a Sling: BDSM, Power, and Non-Identification.” Queer Rhetorics, special issue of PRE/TEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, vol.

24, no. 1- 4, 2018, pp. 9-24.

Pamuk, Orhan. “My First Passport.” The New Yorker. April 9, 2007. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/ 16/my-first-passport. Accessed 28 July 2021.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession, vol. 91, 1991, pp. 33-40.

Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Southern Illinois UP, 2005.

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Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification • 93 Appendix A

Table 1: Fall 2017-2018 Faculty Outreach Workshops Workshop Type

Topic

Audience

Department

Date

Remote Lab Tour

Writing Center Interventions

Grad Students

Art and Design

September 2017

Peer Review

Cover Letter

Undergrad Students

Materials Engineering

October 2017

Peer Review

Grad School Statements

Minority Undergrad Students

Black Grad Student Association

November 2017

Remote Lab Tour

Writing Center Interventions

Undergrad Students

School of Aeronautics and Astronautics

November 2017

Remote Lab Tour

Writing Center Interventions

Grad Students

Agriculture

November 2017

Peer Review

Argument Construction

Honors Class Undergrad Students

History

November 2017

Remote Lab Tour

Writing Center Interventions

Post Docs

Chemistry

December 2017

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Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification • 94

Table 2: Spring 2017-2018 Faculty Outreach Workshops Workshop Type

Topic

Audience

Department

Date

Mentoring on Workshop Design & Delivery

Proposal Review Journal Proposal Reviewers

Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research (JPUR)

February 2018

Focus Group Interactive Discussion

Email Etiquette| Communication

Mentoring on Workshop Design & Delivery

Brand Identity & Dining Hall Marketing Student Workers

Dining Services

Remote Lab Tour

Writing Center Services

Earth, April 2018 Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS)

Accomplished Human Clerical Resources Excellence Class

Incoming Freshmen Class

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March 2018

April 2018

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LISTENING TO THE FRICTION: AN EXPLORATION OF A TUTOR’S LISTENING TO COMMUNITY AND ACADEMY Kathryn Valentine San Diego State University kvalentine@sdsu.edu

Abstract

This article explores what it might mean to listen to the “friction,” here understood as ideological contestations of writing, as a part of writing center work. For my purposes, listening to the friction focuses on how tutors’ listen to what haunts writing in the academy and therefore what haunts writing center work. In particular, I focus on how one tutor, who was a research participant in a qualitative study I conducted, shows the possibility of listening to the haunting of remediation by drawing on a blend of community and academic listening.

“Might it be more productive to approach listening via the definition of friction as that which gets in the way of ‘smooth’ hegemonic flows (Tsing 6)?”— Romeo García Near the start of the pandemic in March 2020, the writing center I direct quickly transitioned our tutoring to remote-only services. We converted all tutoring appointments to online-only sessions and also started to offer “e-tutoring,” for those students who might not be able to consistently access synchronous, online sessions. We found ways to stay in touch as tutors and directors, through zoom meetings, text chats, and a tutor homeroom on our university’s course management system. Suddenly, as with many centers during the pandemic, we were fully online, and things seemed okay. But as the months continued and we continued online, I noticed that I could no longer listen in the same way to the tutoring at my center. I could no longer hear a tutor greet a student for the first time. I could no longer encourage a new tutor to listen in on a session while not formally observing. I could no longer either grin or grimace as I heard a tutor give advice I either embraced or not. I also could no longer hear students talk about their writing: their concerns, their excitements, their confusions, their questions, and their complaints. For the most part, the sounds of the center were dispersed—into zoom meetings, text chat, or individual sessions using text, audio, and video that, yes, I could join but would disrupt in doing so. And while the pandemic has brought much greater losses, this too was a loss.

Having worked in writing centers as a tutor and director for over twenty years, listening to students, to

writers, to other tutors has been a central activity of my work, even if it is sometimes a passive or background activity. It has also been a focus of some of my scholarship as I became interested in the ways we offer listening in the writing center that promote transformation as well as in ways that uphold the status quo (Valentine). Through this work and my awareness of my own listening during the pandemic, I’ve come to be interested in listening less as a practice to deploy, although it can be, and more as a way to enact or fail to enact responsibility.

In this essay, my purpose is to think about what it might mean to listen to the friction from the perspective of one writing tutor. And my purpose is to rough up the idea that listening, especially in writing centers, is always smooth. Drawing from García’s question, what I learn about listening from Irma, the tutor and research participant I write about here, is “a reminder of a foundation of listening where it is not yet,” and I see my approach as beginning to explore how community listening might inform the work of writing centers. For my purposes, listening to the friction focuses on how tutors’ listen to what haunts writing in the academy and therefore what haunts writing center work. In particular, I focus on how this tutor, Irma (referred to by this pseudonym throughout), shows the possibility of listening to the haunting of remediation through drawing on a blend of community and academic listening as I discuss below.

Ways of Listening as Ways of Being

This approach to listening draws on Lisbeth Lipari’s idea of listening being, which offers a holistic understanding of listening in contrast to dominant U.S. cultural understandings of listening. She suggests that such listening . . . would begin with the understanding that listening requires an awareness of our habitual categories and a willingness to go beyond them. So how does one listen beyond the schemas, categories, and dualistic thinking of the conceptual mind? One suggestion is to listen from a space of emptiness and unknowing, to be strong enough to

Listening to the Friction • 96 relinquish our perceived mastery, control, and foreknowledge while remaining attentive and aware. (99) Lipari’s notion of listening offers a way for those of us situated in the academy to attend to both when listening leads to understanding and also when listening leads to the recognition that we might not understand another person and therefore have a responsibility to make space for their experiences and perspectives.

Lipari’s concept of listening might be said to be in contrast with traditional notions of what I call academic listening, in which listening is often focused on placing a speaker’s ideas into a disciplinary context, one in which the listener has knowledge and understanding, assuming they are a member of that discipline. This academic listening makes sense of what is listened to largely in terms of the knowledge and experience already accepted in the academy.

In addition to drawing on Lipari, my approach to listening draws on and is productively informed by Romeo García’s concept of community listening, particularly as a lens through which to view listening in the context of writing center work. García describes community listening as “listening for humanity in stories and memories in between cultures, times, and spaces” (“Creating” 7) and shares how his grandmother, among others in his life, taught him the connection between such listening and responsibility: “Responsibility, then and now, meant listening to know and to learn” (“Creating” 10). Importantly, García argues that situating community listening within academic spaces or in tension with academic listening, “departs from individualism and mere presence as the genesis for listening. Rather, it re-situates the individual within constellations of stories, genealogies, ghosts, and hauntings” (“Creating” 14). García’s conception of community listening offers an understanding of how listening might entail not only attending to a present individual but also to what is absent, whether that be a perspective the individual might feel too vulnerable to share in an academic space or the community experiences that the individual brings to but does not see represented, let alone valued, in the academy.

García also extends my understanding of academic listening as a type of listening which “is characteristically reflective of a colonial unconsciousness” (“Creating” 13) and which positions listening as a means to discipline or to dismiss and replace community perspectives and experiences with “academic” ones. I draw most directly from Lipari and García because they focus their concepts of listening on interactions as opposed to work on listening such as Krista Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening, which typically is

focused more on listening as a matter of textual interpretation.

While writing centers are academic spaces, recent work on listening within tutoring has focused on the idea of hosting through listening as a way to make the space of the center more hospitable to all students and not only those already comfortable within the academy.

Lipari also offers the notion of listening as hospitality or hosting: “[L]istening can be understood as a kind of dwelling place from where we offer our hospitality to others and the world. It is an invitation—a hosting. I don’t have to translate your words into familiar categories or ideas. I don’t have to ‘feel’ what you feel, or ‘know’ what it feels like to be you” (102). She calls our attention to listening not strictly as a means of understanding others but as a way of inviting others to connect with us at the same time as we hold space open for what they know or feel without insisting on our own understanding of that knowledge or feeling.

While listening in tutoring has often been discussed as allowing tutors to better understand the writers they work with or even to empower those writers (see for example Hughes, Gillespie and Kail’s 2010 discussion of alumni tutors’ listening), more recent work has envisioned listening along the lines of Lipari’s hosting as noted above. For example, Anglesey and McBride forward the idea of listening as welcoming in their study of tutor education as a means to create a culture of listening in their center. In that work, they argue that listening is a taken-for-granted tutoring practice which, if approached more intentionally, can be used more fully to support students and address their concerns, particularly for students with disabilities. They write, “Becoming more analytical and intentional in our understanding of what listening encompasses . . . and how it can effectively be used to understand students’ concerns and provide them with guidance and support, may improve our ability to train consultants to respond to a broader range of students and create a stronger sense of welcome.” In addition, Tracy Santa explores the idea of listening as shelter or safekeeping with a focus on how tutors make this type of invested, empathetic listening visible through backchannels and gaze because, “listening makes the collaboration inherent to a successful tutorial possible” (2).

Work on listening in both writing center studies and rhetoric, helps me to also conceptualize listening, including silence, as a rhetorical force. As Laura Feibush contends, “Listening as a rhetorical force is simply that although we commonly think about listeners being affected by speakers, and not the other way around, there are, in fact, things listeners do that influence what gets said. Listeners, in other words, can

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Listening to the Friction • 97 actually impact communicative situations” (35). Based on interviews and observations of video tutorials, Feibush suggests silence is a “complex signifier” (40) and also argues that expressive listening, especially through gestures, supports effective online tutorials.

While Feibush is focused on gestures within online tutorials as a form of listening, her work connects to earlier work by Cheryl Glenn on understanding silence as rhetorical action: “silence as a rhetorical art of empowered action, action that can stimulate the formulation of a new way of being rhetorical” (284). Glenn’s notion of silence as rhetorical action is a useful lens through which to view listening in writing center tutorials, particularly given her attention to not only silence as rhetorical action but also silence as a shared experience between participants in a rhetorical situation.

Drawing on these concepts of listening, this article explores the listening of one writing tutor who participated in an exploratory study I conducted to begin to understand listening from the perspective of tutors. This tutor, Irma, helped me to understand that listening can be a means of understanding a writer, their writing, and community and also that listening can be a way to attend to lack of understanding and to listen to transform what we know or become aware of what we don’t yet, or may never, know. Irma’s listening helps illustrate listening as being in which we hold space for what we might not understand while offering compassion to ourselves and those we listen to.

A Tutor’s Ways of Listening The study was conducted after IRB review and exemption and took place at a large, public university characterized as a Hispanic-Serving Institution and located in the West. Irma was working as a writing fellow and tutoring students enrolled in a basic or remedial writing course which the students attended the summer prior to their first academic year as undergraduates. My only relationship with Irma was through the study when I initially invited any writing fellows working that summer to participate and during her participation in the study. I observed three of Irma’s tutoring sessions and interviewed her after those observations. The study was a basic qualitative study (Merriam and Tisdale) with a focus on beginning to explore listening from the perspective of tutors and to, potentially, consider how issues of identity intersected with listening. In this essay, I focus on Irma’s experience with listening as a tutor in order to explore or illustrate the concepts of listening being and community listening in the context of writing center work. While my focus on Irma has the benefit of

allowing me to look closely at her listening over a short period of time and to share what I learned from that experience, it is limited to one tutor’s experience and to my own interest in reading her listening through the lens of Lipari and García along with the other scholars I draw on.

Irma described herself as a woman born to firstgeneration U.S. immigrants from two different cultures and countries. She considers the university a place that helps connect her to family members who also graduated from the same university. She speaks three languages and also sees herself as an avid traveler who hopes to bring “open-mindedness” and “awareness of others” to her studies and her teaching. A master’s student, Irma had taught first-year composition and tutored first-year writing students at the time of the study. During the study, she was in her second semester working as a tutor, although she had informally tutored friends and family members since she was in high school. I believe that Irma’s approach to listening helps us to think more fully about how we can listen in the writing center not only as a means to confirm what we already know or as a means to smoothly understand students and their writing but also as a way of being listening in order to attend to what we don’t know or understand, to attend to what is creating friction, and, perhaps most importantly, to attend to what haunts not only the writing center but also the academy.

Irma’s discussion of her listening in my interview with her suggests that tutors may already be engaged in the kinds of listening envisioned by Lipari and García. For example, Irma discusses her listening as a kind of hosting when she described how she listens and responds to students’ interpretations of readings as both a tutor and a teacher. Of note here, is her focus on listening as a means of incorporating differences of interpretation, a hallmark of community listening as opposed to academic listening: Just trying to understand, like if there is a reading that we had to read for example and they understood in a different way. Not just saying, ‘No. It’s wrong; it’s this.’ But trying to understand how it was they even came to that idea or that theory that the reading should even be interpreted in this way or that way. At times, they come up with their own original ideas, sometimes that weren’t discussed in class, that could be added to the discussion so I feel like that’s very important to listen to other ideas that maybe can be included in class discussion. Because, you know, as teachers we don’t always have everything included in our lesson plan or understand the reading completely.

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Listening to the Friction • 98 Here Irma shows her awareness of listening as a means to move beyond habitual or assumed categories such as the teacher/tutor as most knowledgeable about or most prepared to interpret a reading and the student as least knowledgeable or prepared as she seeks to listen to and incorporate students’ perspectives and interpretations. In this sense, Irma might be said to draw on listening from the community and not only the academy (or writing center) as described by García: “Community listening, rather, encourages a type of responsibility and justice that does not function from the ‘right to speak’ for (Alcoff) or to eavesdrop upon the subject, but rather from an understanding that students, while already shaped by language, are also shapers of language, discourse, and modalities of agency” (“Creating” 13). In her community listening, Irma understands students as shapers of language, discourse, and modalities of agency while in her academic listening Irma attends to how students might work on their writing in ways that position them within the academy. Listening to students with the assumption that they do have something to contribute to the classroom discussion, even as that contribution may not be framed as the teacher or tutor would frame it, is a way listening that can create space for contributions from students as shapers of discourse and as members of communities that have not always been welcomed in the academy.

In discussing her listening, Irma’s approaches also helped me to understand how tutor listening might function as a means of bearing witness to hauntings, or “the epistemic work of managing, controlling, and policing places and bodies” (García and Sicari), particularly such work that happens through basic or remedial writing and tutoring programs. During our interview, Irma considered how both she and the students she tutors might be haunted by being considered “remedial” writers. At the same time, Irma considered how she inhabits her current position as a writing teacher and tutor. She also considered how her background connected her to some of the students in the course because of shared community and academic experiences. In this regard, she draws on the idea of listening to the community and to the academy as both a witness to herself and to students, looking both to the past and the present.

A lot of [the students] do come from [name of area] and I have cousins that live down there.

That's basically my second home. I do come from a Hispanic background. We do have a lot of Hispanic people in the class. There was a time when I had to take a remedial writing course. So I know what it's like. And that's affected me, I feel

like, even to this day. Where I'm thinking like, wow, how did I get this far if I had to take that class in high school or whatever. So I know. And it was in the summer. So I understand being singled out like that is— It doesn't feel that great.

Here Irma highlights what might be haunting both her listening as well as the students’ speaking and listening as she describes the feeling of being singled out for seemingly not writing well enough and to feel that judgement is connected to a community one belongs to. She attests to the haunting of remediation in her phrase that taking a remedial class has affected her “even to this day” and her comments about getting “this far” as she acknowledges both her past and her present. And she connects her understanding of this positionality to her listening to the students she tutors.

In this sense, I see her listening not only to when things are smooth but also to when things are creating friction, for her as a tutor or for the students as writers.

Irma’s listening suggests that the haunting of remediation is a part of the historical connection and conflict between social spaces such as the writing center and (some) bodies as socially contested within those spaces. As García writes of his own listening, “From listening, I understood that I was situated within a historical space and connected to historical bodies” (“Unmaking” 30). Irma, too, seems to share this awareness as she listens to the affective dimension of students’ experiences and shares her own and her family member’s experiences with remediation, which she told me she mentioned to some of the students: “I did mention, hey, you know I had to take a remedial summer class. Or telling them that my own [family member] had to take this exact class. And he's a successful engineer. Just all of them understanding, he graduated last year. And all of them being like, okay, we can do this, too. And this is not the end of our career.” Here, Irma’s community listening, through her response, invokes the future as she states “this is not the end.” In this comment, she connects students’ experiences to her own and her family’s past experiences in a way that recognizes the haunting of remediation while invoking a future beyond such haunting.

In addition to illustrating how a tutor can listen to the hauntings of remediations through community listening that attends to the past, present, and future, Irma’s discussion of her community connections and background as a writer suggests that she also blends her listening to the community with her listening to the academy as both a witness to her own haunting and to that of her students. This blends community and academy listening in that Irma is speaking of her own

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Listening to the Friction • 99 and her family’s success within the same (haunted) academic space. I suggest this is blended listening in that in order for Irma to listen to her own and her students’ experience as a haunting, she must listen at the intersection of community and academy because it is at the intersections that the hauntings or friction occur. In this aspect of her listening, Irma helps me to understand how her work with listening connects her to a community as well as to her own writing past while she also uses listening to reflect on how she has changed as a writer, and, to help students envision how they might change as writers in the present and future as a way to envision their success in the academy. Irma listens with a sense of belonging to one of the same communities as the students she works with while also having attained some sense of belonging to the academy even as her experience and her family’s experiences with remediation sometimes haunt that belonging.

An additional facet of Irma’s listening to the haunting of remediation is evident in her discussion of listening to the student’s frustration with the course.

Here Irma seems to blend community listening with listening being as she draws on her understanding of students’ identities based on her own community experiences while at the same time not assuming she understands or knows precisely why students are frustrated or how they are positioned. Speaking of this frustration, Irma noted, “A lot of them, and it might be because it's summer and this is a remedial course, have been extremely frustrated. And sometimes when I ask them questions about why they did something, it's a little bit defensive, and I noticed that they have kind of this guard up a bit more than I do with . . . non-native speakers, who just, hey we make mistakes, we don't really care.” Here, again, I see Irma considering and comparing how she listens and how students position themselves depending on how they might identify. I see how her community listening may inform her tutoring as she considers why students may be responding in certain ways without assuming she knows for certain. Discussing students’ frustration further, Irma stated, “I mean some of them are quieter than others but that part's over [by this time in the term]. This is something like I feel like there's more vulnerability. Maybe they are. [One student] said, I've always been a bad writer or writing isn't my thing or my strength. And so, yeah, I see that kind of collectively as a class.” Here Irma seems to witness, through her listening, how students reckon with the haunting of remediation which also entails understanding that some students as writers may be more vulnerable than others as they navigate language

and literacy in this context and as they reckon with past racial injury around writing. She also engages with being listening in that she attends to the categories that the students she listens to may inhabit but in a provisional way as she considers if they are frustrated, vulnerable, think of themselves as bad writers or a blend of the three.

At the same time as Irma listens to the students’ frustration, vulnerability, and identities as writers, she also seeks to continue to advise them on their writing and to encourage them to use the feedback from the teacher to revise their writing. In this regard, Irma blends community and academic listening as she works with students who are writing for the academic context within which they now learn. Connected to her speaking to students about how they can be successful as writers who have been remediated, Irma attends to academic listening and seeks ways to listen to students as academic writers. Irma explained how her listening shapes the students as well as how their listening or silence shapes her. “When I listen to them, it's a bit. It's almost like a lot of sighing and telling me what they have to do and well, this is the reason why I did this, and this, and this, and that. And I let those students know, hey, you're not really listening to me here.” Here Irma’s comment echoes Feibush’s understanding of the rhetorical force of listening: “This “rhetoric of listening” turns the tables on a more traditional rhetorical paradigm, and understands listening not just as a mode of reception but as a formative, even expressive, component of communicative situations” (35). Attending to listening as rhetoric, Irma considers how this refusal to listen may be signaling that a student is not allowing for feedback on their writing, as she explains: “I did tell one student yesterday you're not allowing for our feedback to resonate with you. I thanked him for pointing out exactly why he did what he did but I told him, you know, in order for you to get to the next level you have to allow for feedback.

Because it was just really like, I did this because of that.

And all of the mark ups were shooed away for a reason here and there.” Here Irma’s listening might be said to be academic listening as she listens to a student’s disavowal of feedback on his writing and asks him to consider it in order to move to the “next level,” as she states.

However, Irma then discusses how she also listens to understand the motivations a student might have for not listening to or allowing feedback, which returns her to engaging in what Lipari calls listening being. It also suggests that she understands the student’s listening as a rhetorical force, one that she can attend to as a tutor.

Regarding this she said, “It’s very interesting, a

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Listening to the Friction • 100 defensiveness or not even willing to try sometimes just saying, I don't know. I'm not sure. Something like that.

And I notice that even not just in tutoring but in class, too, when a question is asked it's silent . . . And so I don't know if that has anything to do with identity and kind of this competitiveness and not wanting to be wrong and stand out in that way.” As opposed to a singular focus on listening as understanding, Irma’s listening to silence, to the rhetorical force of the students’ own listening, suggests that her listening begins to challenge “the illusion of control and sees how the distortions that arise from our insistence on innocence, certainty, and understanding damage our capacity for compassion” (Lipari 184). In such a conception of listening, in contrast to Irma’s, a tutor would assume that the questions they ask and their listening can be certain to lead to understanding and a tutor would assume that the questions they ask are innocent or neutral. As such, it is likely a tutor using this form of listening will miss or misconstrue who that student may be as a person and as a writer. Instead, Irma’s discussion of her listening suggests a sense of compassion as she reflects on what she seems to know about a student, what she would like to know, and what she might not ever know. It also suggests an awareness of listening as being, in which a tutor holds open space to listen without asserting understanding or assumptions, and with the possibility of listening changing what one knows, what one takes responsibility for, or who one is as a tutor and writer.

As a way of concluding my discussion of Irma’s tutoring and listening, I share an excerpt of one of Irma’s tutoring sessions that I observed during the study. The session took place in a small classroom and was about sixteen minutes in length; I observed, video recorded, and transcribed the session. The student Irma worked with, Mateo (referred to by this pseudonym throughout), was a traditionally-aged, firstyear student enrolled in the basic writing class discussed above. The student described himself as, “a happy, outgoing, Hispanic that loves to laugh.” He described English as his primary or home language, noted he also speaks Spanish, and described the state that the university was located in as his home geographical region. Mateo and Irma were discussing an assignment that Mateo was working to revise and edit based on the teacher’s feedback, which Irma was partly responsible for explaining to him. The assignment was an analysis of a speech by Frederick Douglass and the students were asked to look for claims the author was making and to consider how different audiences might respond to those claims.

In the session, I noticed Irma’s listening practice entailed initiating conversation about the draft and the teacher’s feedback, using wait time or silence which allowed her to attend to how much she was speaking, and then listening to the student as he generated ideas for how he might revise his work based on teacher feedback. While Irma’s approach can be described or seen as common tutoring practices, such as scaffolding, her blend of community and academic listening helps me to see how she offers hospitality to the student as he seeks to invent his response to the teacher’s feedback and Irma listens to him as a writer. In a way, Irma might be said to host the student as an academic writer as she attends to but does not wholly embrace the teacher’s feedback and in which she prompts Mateo’s invention or revising work but doesn’t directly tell him what to write or how to respond. The excerpt below comes a little less than ten minutes into their session; they are sitting side by side, both looking at Mateo’s paper and the teacher’s feedback.

Irma: Ok. There would be (reads paper). So she mentioned that this last section here the grandmother paragraph that you have [was a bit Mateo: [Uh-huh.

Irma: vague. So do you want to look at this with me and see maybe why she would think that?

Mateo: Yeah.

Irma: I'll let you write that down but you get to keep this. [You're taking this and then you Mateo: [Ok. Irma: have to make corrections with your colored pen.

Mateo: Um. [Reading and pointing to his paper. 3 seconds.] Is it more like this part where she's?

Irma: Yeah. This is the section here.

Mateo: [Continues reading. 5 seconds.] Ok. I think I know why she was a bit confused. I went from [5 seconds] It's that I went from the audience's reaction directly to why um why Douglass was getting the claims. Because I say that he kind of like he treated his grandmother being on a pedestal, [like she was such a great person, Irma: [Uhhuh Mateo: she cared for everybody. Um. Irma: So you see here how you used the word, "they" as to why they were wealthy? Be a little bit more specific there. Yeah.

Mateo: That. Okay. That's very helpful.

Irma: Yeah. Because it's just why they were wealthy. Well who? And what? So he's making this big claim there, right, the subclaim that his

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Listening to the Friction • 101 grandmother- Well, how would you define “they”?

How would you change that word?

Mateo: I would change it to be the reason as to why [2-3 seconds.] Douglass' master was wealthy.

Irma: Ok. And then why would that make someone- why would that make the audience upset?

Mateo: Because he had been giving credit all to his grandmother for the master's work.

Irma: Yeah, exactly. So that could really cause anger. So it's just, you see that, it's just being specific. Who are you talking about when you say "they?" And um giving a little bit more details.

[Irma continues speaking.]

Irma opens this section of the session by noting a comment from the teacher and asking Mateo if he would like to explore why the teacher made the comment that his writing was vague in this part of his paper. As Irma listens, Mateo silently reads his paper to see what the teacher might have been indicating. With this opening, Irma positions herself to work with the student to respond to the teacher’s feedback. In this regard, she makes space for both of them to listen and speak as they engage in this work. Irma then listens to Mateo’s discussion of why his writing might be vague and then speaks to direct him to a specific word, they, that seems central in clarifying his meaning. As Irma and Mateo discuss this, he remarks that the comment is helpful, and Irma explains why but shifts from that explanation to again inviting him to speak by asking him how he would define they. She listens as he responds and affirms his explanation, thereby affirming that he can address the revision comments as a writer.

Here, I would say that Irma is hosting Mateo’s work as an academic writer as she listens to him invent and revise in response to the teacher’s request for more explicitness in his writing. Although the work is in accommodating to the academic norms of writing in this course, Mateo seems to engage that work productively and with a sense of being listened to as a writer.

Both Irma and Mateo seem to use silence “to think through a problem” and to “reflect on what the rhetor or audience is saying and thereby invite understanding” (Glenn 284). Irma is silent as Mateo reads the section they are working on and starts to think through the teacher’s comment. She also listens to Mateo’s silence, his long pauses, during his talking about this section of writing. This series of two to five seconds of silence on the part of both Mateo and Irma creates space for writing and for sharing perceptions about what the teacher might be saying about Mateo’s draft. As Glenn

also suggests silence can be a form of sharing, “sharing perceptions, understandings and power” whereby participants sharing silence “embody new ways to challenge and resist domination—and, when necessary, discipline.” (Glenn 284). While I offer this interpretation tentatively, I see Irma’s listening and Irma and Mateo’s shared silence here as having a rhetorical impact in the way they engaged with the teacher’s feedback as subject to interpretation and response as opposed to, for example, mistakes that Mateo needed to correct. In this way, they seem to take a small step away from the haunting of remediation, in this case writing as being disciplined, and step toward writing as sense making with attention to both the writer’s and the audience’s interpretations. In this way, I also see it as a small moment of shared responsibility of navigating writing in the academy.

While this excerpt and the study itself is only a glimpse at Irma’s experience of listening as a tutor and Mateo’s experience writing at a university, this glimpse helps me to see how a blend of community and academy listening that tutors such as Irma deploy can begin to support students who are haunted by remediation to claim a writerly identity. Such listening also suggests possibilities for writing centers to be “best positioned to truly serve the underserved when their conception of liberation is expanded to realize students possess an understanding of who they are as writers and how this relationship has been shaped (for better or worse) by the academy” (Martinez 60) as well as how writing center tutors and directors can serve such students when they “listen to, learn from, make space for, and perhaps even assist students in the rebuilding of a writerly identity” (Martinez 56).

Attending to the kinds of listening described in this study calls us to listen to our own listening as a means to understand who we are as tutors, teachers, and directors and also to who we might become. It also calls on us to reckon with what our listening offers or denies others, especially those seeking belonging in the academy.

In that regard, this study is largely about listening to tutor listening, but it also suggests implications for attending to our own listening whether we work as a tutor, director, or staff person in a writing center or fellow program. It is about taking responsibility for our listening not with the assumption that listening will always be smooth or that listening will always lead to understanding, to our adding to our knowledge.

Instead, we engage the responsibility of learning to recognize when our listening also tells us what we don’t know or haven’t experienced and how we can resist the colonizing tendency to see listening as a way

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Listening to the Friction • 102 to capture that knowledge, that experience. And, from there, we seek ways that we can either act on that listening or support others in acting on their speaking and listening, as they write and rewrite their way to a new or renewed identity.

Finally, this kind of attention to listening is one response or addition to the existing calls and practices for writing centers to take responsibility for reckoning with the ways the experiences of students who are othered by race and community belonging are haunted as writers. For tutors, engaging this responsibility through or with listening can mean that they listen as Irma does, with attention to both the academy and to the community—their own communities and those of the students they work with. For some tutors, this will mean reckoning with the haunting of their writing, their uses of language and literacy; while for other tutors, such as those who identify as white, this will mean interrogating the privileged positions from which they write, including considering how their community listening may uphold dominant practices and how they might listen otherwise to challenge such practices. Such a blend of listening can be incorporated into the kind of reflection and work with portfolios that García’s calls for and, in particular, being listening, as Lipari conceptualizes it, can help tutors to attend to what they know and hear but also what they don’t know or experience and therefore have difficulty hearing. For directors, engaging this responsibility of being listening means we can do much of the same work as tutors while we also listen to those tutors and to the sounds of our centers. Depending on how directors are positioned, such listening may help them hear how tutors and students from communities similar to their own are navigating their way through and into the academy and where they may be able to offer support, recognition, or guidance. For other directors, this may mean hearing how we cannot arrive at a socially just writing center solely by acknowledging our whiteness without ongoing listening to the legacy of whiteness in the academy and the haunting of literacy in the writing center. In this regard we commit to listening when it’s smooth and also listening when there’s friction as we listen and listen again to tutors and students such as Irma and Mateo.

Acknowledgements Thank you to Romeo García and Anna Sicari, for your work as editors of this special issue. Thank you also to Jenn Fishman, Jeff Ringer, and Kuhio Walters for your feedback and for your willingness to listen to me as a

writer and writing researcher. I am grateful to the tutors who participated in the study described here and to those tutors and students I have worked with over the years who have taught me a great deal about listening.

Works Cited Anglesey, Leslie and Maureen McBride. “Caring for Students with Disabilities: (Re)defining Welcome as a Culture of Listening.” The Peer Review, vol. 3, no. 1, 2019. http://thepeerreviewiwca.org/issues/redefining-welcome/caring-forstudents-with-disabilities-redefining-welcome-as-aculture-of-listening/ Glenn, Cheryl. “Silence: A Rhetorical Art for Resisting Discipline(s).” JAC, vol. 22, no. 2, 2002, pp. 261–291, www.jstor.org/stable/20866487 García, Romeo. “Creating Presence from Absence and Sound from Silence.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, 2018, pp. 7-15. https://www.communityliteracy.org/index.php/clj/art icle/view/389 ----. “Unmaking Gringo-Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no.1, 2017, pp. 29-60. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44252637 Garcia, Romeo and Anna Sicari. “Have We Arrived?

Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work: The Need for Transformative Listening and Mindfulness of Difference.” Axis: The Blog, October 7, 2020. http://www.praxisuwc.com/praxisblog/2020/10/6/have-we-arrived-revisiting-andrethinking-responsibility-in-writing-center-work-theneed-for-transformative-listening-and-mindfulness-ofdifference-special-summer-2021-issue-praxis Feibush, Laura. “Gestural Listening and the Writing Center’s Virtual Boundaries.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 15, no. 2, 2018, pp. 34-43. http://www.praxisuwc.com/feibush-152 Hughes, Brad, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail. “What They Take with Them: Findings from the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project.” The Writing Center Journal, vol 30, no. 2, 2010, pp. 12-46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43442343 Lipari, Lisbeth. Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2014.

Martinez, Aja Y. “Alejandra Writes a Book: A Critical Race Counterstory about Writing, Identity, and Being Chicanx in the Academy.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 14, no. 1, 2016, pp. 56-61. http://www.praxisuwc.com/martinez-141

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Listening to the Friction • 103 Merriam, Sharan B, and Elizabeth J. Tisdell. Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2016.

Santa, Tracey. “Listening in/to the Writing Center: Backchannel and Gaze. WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 40, no. 9-10, 2016, pp. 2–9. https://wlnjournal.org/archives/v40/40.9-10.pdf Valentine, Kathryn. “The Undercurrents of Listening: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Listening in Writing Center Tutor Guidebooks.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 2, 2017, pp. 89–115. www.jstor.org/stable/44594852.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 1 (2022)

“TUTORING, MINUS BIGOTRY!”: LGBT WRITERS, SAFEZONE TUTORS, AND BRAVE SPACES WITHIN THE RURAL WRITING CENTER Galen David Bunting Northeastern University bunting.g@northeastern.edu Abstract

This study has been approved by the Institutional Review Board, protocol AS-16-99. At Oklahoma State University, SafeZone tutors are trained to serve as liaisons between the LGBT community and the writing center. Few writing center studies have considered the role of SafeZone tutors within rural writing centers, especially when the rural writing center takes up the role of a safe/brave space within a rural campus. A safe/brave space provides a space for marginalized voices, does not allow bigotry, and encourages difficult and challenging conversations. Within a rural location and conservative climate, how do SafeZone tutors interpret their own work? How do students interpret conversations and collaborations with the SafeZone tutor within the broader context of the writing center? Do SafeZone tutors within a rural university’s writing center consider themselves part of a safe/brave space? Through interviews with SafeZone tutors and through surveying student reactions, this study argues that the rural writing center has the potential to become a safe/brave space.

Introduction

When I started my first year of graduate school at a large southwestern university, I was intimidated and confused, but most of all, lost. My documentation held the wrong name, and due to a new computer system, this name had been distributed across all university platforms, from my email to my online assignments.

The only place where I was able to substitute my name was within the Writing Center, where I held an assistantship. This situation goes further than an institutional mistake: it is a common experience for people in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community whose names and pronouns may not be reflected across official documents. The options offered by the Writing Center signaled its potential as a place of change and openness. On an institutional level, writing centers are affected by systemic oppression: many writing centers were intended to rectify “larger numbers of ‘underprepared’ students” during the Open Admissions movement of the 1970s (Boquet and Lerner 172), and to regulate the language of students “who didn’t measure up” (Grimm 6). As haunted and wounded places, students are sent to writing centers when their use of language does not fit with the academic standards of the academy, thus students may already fear that their right to selfexpression is at stake when they enter our walls. In the conservative legislative climate of red states, where no anti-discrimination policies exist to protect them,

LGBT students may fear outright attack for stepping outside the closet. Rural writing centers have a unique ability to ally with LGBT writers to express their own subjectivities, especially when they may have been denied this agency in the past. A writing center’s needs are shaped by the clients and tutors who write within its walls, there is potential, not only to foster writing and creative expression of identity, but to re-examine the structures of authority which make up a writing center. Upon discovering that the Oklahoma State University writing center integrated a program known as “SafeZone” tutors, I was intrigued. SafeZone tutors are tutors who have undergone training to serve as liaisons between the LGBT community and the writing center, regardless of whether they identify within the LGBT community or serve as allies. As a result of these experiences with the Writing Center, I embarked upon this study. I saw the SafeZone training program as a place of potentiality, where tutors collaborated with the LGBT community to create a welcoming environment within the writing center, where the voices of LGBT students are uplifted and valued.

The early stages of this study took place in an inquiry group, made up of diverse tutors who were currently employed at the writing center.1 As a part of an ongoing conversation, this inquiry group provided an excellent place to discuss the goals of my research and thus forward the voices of those who perform this intensely interpersonal form of labor every day. In these meetings, we focused on a sampling of articles which addressed both the issues of writing centers as spaces within rural communities and equality within writing centers. At one such meeting, the inquiry group discussed Jay Sloane’s “Closet Consulting,” a feature from the 1997 edition of The Writing Lab Newsletter. We talked through uncomfortable situations that might unsettle or confuse tutors, thereby preventing them from addressing the writing at hand. Our group rehearsed strategies through which a tutor might assertively oppose homophobia in writing center sessions. One tutor mentioned that it may be difficult to discuss LGBT subjects at all within writing center spaces: in one session, her student heard the word “lesbian” read aloud in a different session and became distracted. Another tutor shared, “In one session, a

“Tutoring, Minus Bigotry!” • 105 student said, ‘all families of other makeup beyond my own are wrong.’ I could see how that phrasing might be inflammatory.”

These moments, in which tutors explained their own confusion, their own lack of knowledge, and their willingness to challenge themselves as educators, are the moments that inspired this essay. By building on the organic conversations that transpired, the inquiry group became a brave space. We sought to reach through and across boundaries of authority and hierarchy to question our approaches toward inclusivity in our writing center. From these conversations, I drew the questions that would become the guiding focus of this study.

SafeZone Tutors: Creating a Place of Potentiality

Few writing center studies address the concerns of LGBT students within the rural university writing center, much less the figure of the SafeZone tutor. In this study, I suggest that by publicizing SafeZone tutors as a resource in the writing center and on its website, the Oklahoma State University Writing Center announces its intent to support LGBT students and their voices. By publishing a decisive and intentional statement on its website, the Writing Center creates a place of potentiality: a brave space. This statement is no small assertion of support; Oklahoma State University’s student body is comprised of people from various areas, many of them rural. When we confront homophobia and transphobia within writing, we avoid imposing heteronormativity (the assumption that all people conform to straightness) upon LGBT students.

The purpose of this study is to explore the ways in which SafeZone tutors understand their missions within the writing center, and how these tutors are invested in creating a brave space. This study is drawn from three interviews with three tutors at a large rural university writing center. I conducted one interview per tutor, in an office located inside the writing center. In addition, I surveyed responses of 14 LGBT students regarding the presence of SafeZone tutors.

The research questions guiding this study are as follows: 1) Within the rural location and conservative climate of Oklahoma State University, how do SafeZone tutors interpret their own work?

2) How do students interpret conversations and collaborations with the SafeZone tutor within the broader context of the writing center?

3) Do SafeZone tutors within a rural university’s writing center consider themselves part of a safe/brave space? And if they do, why?

Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces, and the SafeZone Tutor SafeZone programs are university-based training programs that have emerged, over the past twenty years, from colleges and universities within the United States. Also known as Safe Spaces, Safe Harbors, Safe Space Ally, and SAFE on Campus, SafeZone programs seek to improve campus climate for LGBT students (Alvarez and Schneider 71-74; Draughn et al. 9-20; Evans, Henquinet, Phibbs, and Skoglund 24-26; Poynter and Tubbs 121-132; Young and McKibban 361-384). SafeZone programs usually take the form of educational workshops that teach attendees skills to confront homophobia and transphobia in the classroom. Created and led by staff and/or faculty, these programs are tailored to each region and institution as a result of social activism. The Safe Zone Project’s website defines someone who has received SafeZone training as “a person [who] is open to talking about and being supportive of LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer/Questioning +) individuals and identities” (“What Is Safe Zone?”). The Oklahoma State University SafeZone program identifies a SafeZone ally as “someone who chooses to become educated about LGBTQ issues and believes all sexual orientations and gender identities/expressions should be acknowledged and supported” (“SafeZone Training”). I draw on these definitions in this paper: a Safe Zone is a place where a student can exist on the same footing as any other student, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. It should not be a place where students are buffered from learning or widening their horizons: rather, they should be encouraged to expand their knowledge. When I use the terms “SafeZone” or “safe space,” I mean a space that does not shield students from reality. I mean a place where students can encounter other viewpoints without having to first defend their right to exist as a sexual or gender minority. SafeZone tutors exist in Oklahoma State University’s writing center as visible allies of the LGBT community. Such alignment is necessarily political in the context of this university’s rural location, which augments its approach as an institution. Through tutor education, writing centers can become generative places that establish safe/brave spaces via tutor-student interactions, tutor-tutor interactions, and through community outreach.

The ramifications of the “SafeZone” title are many, especially in the context of rural universities, where spaces for LGBT inclusion may be limited or absent. A safe zone indicates an area where someone is protected, not from challenging ideas or personal growth, but from prejudices that may prevent or

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“Tutoring, Minus Bigotry!” • 106 hamper their journey of encountering challenging ideas and undergoing personal growth. Others have critiqued the concept of safe spaces, as Judith Shulevitz did in her much-shared 2015 op-ed, “In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas,” where she presents this definition: Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the liveaction version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material.

Shulevitz seems to have misapprehended what the “safe space” metaphor means. She understands it as educational complacency, in which college students are oddly contradictory figures, both too fragile to engage with challenging ideas and at the same time powerful enough to topple university policies. Shulevitz and her contemporaries are willfully ignorant of the metaphor’s history within educational settings. In practice, the term “safe space” as an educational policy is an indication that a physical space or a person does not tolerate harassment or violence but does favor fostering a secure learning environment. Lynn Holley and Sue Steiner define a safe space as an “environment where students are willing and able to participate and honestly struggle with challenging issues” (49). A safe space, then, is a site that does not tolerate harassment, but does encourage difficult conversations.

Whether the “safe space” metaphor does justice to the often-fraught spaces in which we teach is a subject of debate. Debates surrounding safe spaces may appear contemporary at first glance, but pedagogical conversations regarding safe spaces began in the 1990s. Robert Boostrom critiques the metaphor of the safe space: for Boostrom, a “safe space” is a metaphor that stands for the physical and mental support that a classroom can offer. Boostrom finds the term ineffective, as “learning necessarily involves not merely risk, but the pain of giving up a former condition in favour of a new way of seeing things” (399). Educators invested in critical pedagogy understand the learning environment as a site of liberatory praxis, building upon Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Jeannie Ludlow’s contested space and Megan Boler’s pedagogy of discomfort contest the metaphor of the safe space by naming the conflict and risk present in building these critical pedagogies of dispute, collaboration, and transformation. As Romeo García points out, the term “safe space” itself asserts control (48). Toward embracing the struggle and pain

of difficult learning, Brian Arao and Kristin Clemens argue for the term “brave space” in lieu of the “safe space” metaphor, affirming difference and struggle as a fundamental part of learning (139). Writing centers offer unique opportunities to craft safe/brave spaces through tutor-student interactions and tutor-tutor interactions. These writing centers can also hold community spaces for tutors to challenge their own writing center pedagogies. Rebecca Hallman Martini and Travis Webster view the writing center through the lens of a brave/r space: “a concept that urges particular ways of acting in spaces, beyond the mere acknowledgement of politics, identity, and difference” (“Writing Centers as Brave/r Spaces”). Brave spaces enable encounters with educational risks, difficulties, and controversies by allowing students to participate without continually justifying their own existence. In these spaces of risk, historically marginalized scholars may find that it is difficult to enter the conversation, especially when visibility itself can be a danger. Harry Denny and Beth Towle point out that institutions must consider the material effects of systemic oppression for clients and tutors in the center: “To make a space ‘brave’ its participants must be willing to speak openly about their identities, biases, and experiences…more hidden identities, such as class or sexuality, must be verbally disclosed in order to move into ‘brave space’ territory” (“Braving the Waters of Class”). Brave spaces can provide agency to clients and tutors in negotiating the power structures which order our relationship, but these spaces are not divorced from systemic oppression. When I speak of brave spaces in the writing center, I speak of intentionally political spaces that provide a collective approach to address bigotry, while also providing a space for marginalized voices, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

The Rural Writing Center as Brave Space

When LGBT students graduate from their rural high schools to attend larger state universities, many have not experienced the opportunity to have their voices heard, much less their writing. Within the context of a rural university, LGBT students face stressors unique to their geographic location, including possible danger of physical attack. In 2018, a transgender elementary-school student in Achille, Oklahoma received death threats, threats of physical assault, and other forms of intimidation from parents in a Facebook group. To protect her safety, the rural school system shut down for two days (Caron).

Though the state of Oklahoma issues marriage licenses to same-sex couples, there are no laws against housing

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“Tutoring, Minus Bigotry!” • 107 discrimination, bullying, or hate crimes that target a victim for their gender, sexuality, or expression. Even before they approach the rural writing center, LGBT students may have been encouraged to engage in selfsurveillance and censorship. Oklahoma is one of four states which still legislate “no promo homo” laws in public schools, which limit educators in their ability to teach regarding LGBT identities (Steinberg).

Oklahoma law requires educators to teach that the only way to avoid contracting the AIDS virus is to refrain from same-sex sexual activity, thus LGBT students may be told that their very identities are responsible for death (Oklahoma Statute 70 § 11-103.3). Within the space of a writing center, which holds a history as a space for correcting expression, students may not feel they are able to come out, even as they express themselves through writing. Though the city of Stillwater, Oklahoma where Oklahoma State University is located, does not have any nondiscrimination policies in place to protect LGBT rights, Oklahoma State University has a nondiscrimination policy specifying that the university provide “equal employment and/or educational opportunity on the basis of merit and without discrimination because of age, race, ethnicity, color, sex, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, veterans’ status, or qualified disability” and that the university protects transgender people via prohibition of “unlawful gender discrimination” (“Affirmative Action Plan: Minorities And Women,” 51, 27). This issue is not only localized to Oklahoma, as a 2006 study by Michele Dillon and Sarah Savage found: negative attitudes toward samesex marriage pervade the southern rural United States (where many students of Oklahoma State University live). This antagonism toward LGBT equality is paramount to comprehending the context of Oklahoma State University’s student body, as well as the significance of the writing center as a brave space.

When there is no place to exist as LGBT within the rural, there is no space for rural LGBT voices.

Sherrie Gradin writes of the unimaginable, invisible rural queer voice within rural schools: in rural writing centers, LGBT writers may also face the same erasure.

In their 2013 article “‘Rainbows in The Past Were Gay’: LGBTQIA In The WC,” Andrew Rihn and Jay D. Sloan discuss how writing center studies have neglected LGBT narratives: “Heteronormativity has dominated writing center scholarship, unintentionally but effectively winnowing out sexual identity as a subject for sustained reflection and interrogation” (1).

Addressing homophobic rhetoric, dismantling heteronormative assumptions of sexuality and gender, and advocating for inclusivity are three concerns that

Rihn and Sloan broach throughout their study. When tutors listen to students, they too can learn within a place where students can express their own identities and opinions, as Nancy Grimm discusses in her article, “Redesigning Academic Identity Kits.” Within writing centers, the disparate identities of writers and students alike are often at the foreground of creativity. Harry Denny’s Facing the Center argues for moments of “discursive complication” in the contact zone of the writing center to disrupt and interrogate identities, a means of destabilizing the hierarchy of the writing center (110). As Denny writes in “Queering the Writing Center,” writing centers are areas of contradictory binaries that are forever in flux as writers and tutors come together to “shore up, build anew, and deconstruct identities and the ways of knowing that are sutured to them” (103). In the “safe space” of writing center sessions, tutors can work with students to test the limits of traditionally understood academic identities, giving them both the ability to “pass” within the space of the writing center and to “come out” in order to express their needs (Denny 121). The space of the writing center affords many opportunities to LGBT students and tutors alike. As a site of crucial pedagogy, the writing center can aid LGBT students’ writing. The SafeZone tutor, as a visible ally of the LGBT community, offers support to LGBT students in crafting their writerly voices. As a site where LGBT students can thrive, the rural writing center in red states can be an especially unique place to craft brave spaces, to amplify the voices of marginalized students who occupy these spaces.

One means of understanding the context of Oklahoma State University is to look at Oklahoma State University’s institutional approach to LGBT students. When I created an account on the Oklahoma State University writing center website, I was surprised: the system offers you the option to use your preferred name. This installation may seem small, but it does send a message: you are welcome to go by the name you are most comfortable with. Throughout the writing center, one might also spot small triangles of varying rainbow colors, with the words “SafeZone” beneath the triangles. This sends a clear message: LGBT students are welcome here. In contrast, when students apply to Oklahoma State University, while they can suggest a preferred name, there is no way to remove their legal names from the directory entry, which appears online via most learning management systems. Many writing centers switched to online sessions during the COVID-19 pandemic. When writing centers permit students to make accounts using their preferred names for online tutoring, they

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“Tutoring, Minus Bigotry!” • 108 communicate openness to students who may be unable to change their preferred name across university learning management systems. A visual marker, such as the SafeZone insignia, presents another way to signal openness to LGBT students, not only in the physical space of the writing center, but also in online sessions.

Rural writing centers within red states can borrow approaches from both safe spaces and brave spaces to provide learning environments that address the needs of their students and tutors alike. When discussing the relevance of brave spaces and safe spaces for rural writing centers, Jacob Herrmann sets brave spaces and safe spaces apart in terms of the opportunities that both spaces can provide for learning: safe spaces are sites where “physical and emotional safety of the marginalized individual is the primary concern,” which he contrasts with “brave spaces, in which social justice education is the primary concern” (“Brave/R Spaces Vs. Safe Spaces For LGBTQ+ In the Writing Center”).

When I speak of brave spaces in the writing center, I speak of intentionally political spaces that provide a collective approach to address bigotry, while also providing a space for marginalized voices.

Such spaces are complicated by race, class, gender, sexuality, and other intersecting oppressions. The impetus to disclose identity can place students and tutors in treacherous waters, especially in rural writing centers, where students are sometimes closeted for their own safety. As Denny et. al argue, writing center pedagogy that centers the needs of the marginalized is a result of active, constant labor, regardless of geographic context: We must do the active work of creating the spaces to hear and deeply listen to one another and to perform the work of challenging the inertia of the status quo and moving toward a commonplace interrogation of the hegemonic practices of domination in our everyday lives, teaching, and learning. (Denny, Out in the Center 123) Critical pedagogy works to unravel the entrenched, often unseen presence of homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, classism, and ableism. Through collective spaces such as safe/brave spaces, writing centers can provide resources to contribute toward a shared awareness of the constant choices we make through language and rhetoric. As I spoke to SafeZone tutors throughout the process of writing this article, the willingness of these tutors to encounter difficult conversations became a driving factor for the urgency of this study. In our current polarizing political sphere, where binary rhetoric holds sway and there is little opportunity for nuance, it is easy to disregard the rural writing center and its tutors. In these spaces, SafeZone

tutors can challenge the writing center to be a place of learning and a place of bravery, as they navigate multiple identities as students, tutors, and allyeducators.

Interviews with SafeZone Tutors This IRB-approved study (protocol AS-16-99) was administered at Oklahoma State University Writing Center, which is centrally located on the university’s sizable campus. This writing center employs 21 undergraduate tutors and 44 graduate tutors. After they had attended the optional SafeZone tutor training, three SafeZone tutors were interviewed for the purposes of this study. These three tutors opted to participate after a discussion regarding the goals of the study. These questions allowed tutors to define what SafeZone meant to them. Tutors were offered the opportunity to decline questions at their discretion. All interviews were transcribed and anonymized after recording. These interviews took place in a private office located near the writing center and were carried out between September 2017 and November 2017.

Question 1: What first drew you to become a SafeZone tutor?

Tutor 1: I wanted to be aware, to be socially conscious of the clients that we could encounter…When I translated it to teaching, to have that insignia on my desk, I realized that this may make my students more comfortable…I want to help out everyone regardless of sexual orientation.

Tutor 2: I knew in both my community college and [previous] university that people were SafeZone trained... I wanted to become one of those people. I haven’t taught yet but when I am teaching I want to have the emblem on my door, so that students know.

Tutor 3: I saw it as an opportunity to learn more about the LGBTQ+ community. The topic was something I had little exposure to in the past. I guess ultimately I had a desire to fix my own ignorance of the topic.

These SafeZone tutors emphasized their desire to signal acceptance to members of the LGBT community, to learn further and challenge themselves.

SafeZone tutors shared goals of openness toward the LGBT community, and were interested in communicating their allyship to students, especially students who may be struggling with their identities.

Tutor 1 referenced language of allyship, suggesting that his presence as a SafeZone tutor “may make my students more comfortable.”

Tutor 2 understood her role as a SafeZone tutor through her own experiences as a student—seeing SafeZone stickers on the doors of faculty members—

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“Tutoring, Minus Bigotry!” • 109 and as a sign of welcome: “I wanted to become one of those people.” Tutor 2 saw the SafeZone as a space without judgement, where students will “feel safe.” In her reflection on the possibility to “become one of those people,” Tutor 2 understands SafeZone tutoring as an aspiration which shapes her future goals as an educator, turning towards greater justice and equality in the writing center. She concludes by making a compelling argument for SafeZone certification in crafting a pedagogy of openness and equality, as well as its utility beyond writing centers. Both Tutor 1 and Tutor 2 signaled that they understood SafeZone tutors as establishing tutoring sessions that work within the parameters of safe spaces. Tutor 3 wanted to address his “own ignorance of the topic” of LGBT issues through the process of SafeZone training. He also expressed a desire to encounter experiences that differed from his own. While Tutor 3 presents himself as ignorant, his understanding of SafeZone tutors as simultaneously educators and educated is insightful for viewing rural writing centers as brave spaces. In the rural writing center, tutors create brave spaces when they continually challenge themselves, even as they collaborate with writers.

Question 2: How has your alignment with the LGBT community affected your interaction with students?

Tutor 1: If anything, it’s strengthened that [alignment] because there is that acceptability implied if a student identifies as queer.

Tutor 2: I think that there’s an alignment in that the [SafeZone] training lets people know how they should be approaching these situations, especially when people aren’t used to dealing with people as LGBTQ, I like the idea of using the SafeZone emblem of marking a place where students can step outside that relationship and open up, especially for first years who may be discovering things for the first time.

The strength of the SafeZone emblem lies in its ability to convey allyship and solidarity with LGBT students.

For SafeZone tutors, the use of a recognizable emblem is an immediate way to convey their acceptance of LGBT students. Tutor 1 drew on the rhetoric of safe spaces, pointing to the SafeZone logo as reinforcing the “acceptability” of LGBT students within a space, to put students at ease within the writing center session. For Tutor 2, a safe zone is “a place where students can… open up”—a site where students can express their identities freely, without judgement. In addition, Tutor 2 references the SafeZone insignia to mark herself as an educator, not just for LGBT students, but for students who are generally curious about the LGBT community. Tutor 2’s work as an

educator is tied to her work as an ally within a brave space. Both Tutor 1 and Tutor 2 identify the SafeZone emblem as a conspicuous sign of allyship, to put LGBT students at ease. In cases where rural writing enters may be limited in their ability to openly display visible signs of allyship, tutors may rely on openly asserting that homophobia and transphobia are unacceptable. In doing so, these tutors craft a brave space within the center.

Question 3: Have you ever encountered transphobia or homophobia within student writing, and if so, how did you handle it?

Tutor 1: I spoke with a student [who] interviewed a friend from high school, and was…narrating his rise to fame in sports, but it seemed he was a bit too raw in the way he described things in high school, using words such as “homo,” and “fag,” ...but she didn’t use quotation marks to designate that it was an interview…[the session] became a discussion of ethics which I don’t think she was prepared to talk about, because for her that’s not how it was in her small town.

Tutor 2: Balancing professional and personal beliefs can be difficult, because I don’t want to be seen as unprofessional and yet I disagree with what [some students] are saying. A guy came in with his paper that said, “you can tell a man’s been raised right because of how he shakes someone’s hand.” ...He made it very clear that no, men shake hands this way, and he did mean just men, not women... In that situation, I felt uncomfortable because I was in a professional setting and couldn’t be angry...I wasn’t allowed to be angry because I wanted the student to come back to the writing center.

Tutor 3: I have experienced it [encounters with transphobia or homophobia] tremendously in the community. I try to be vocal while maintaining a level of respect...I think what I can do now is call attention to the issue.

Throughout this study, individual tutors struggled to establish a brave space while retaining professional conduct as writing center tutors and educators. Tutor 1 explained his decision to address the slurs “homo” and “fag” in student writing through the basis of ethics. In Tutor 1’s case, the geographic background of the student caused a dilemma for the tutor within the session. The student saw nothing amiss in the words she had used in the essay because of their banality within her high school and within her small-town environment. First, the tutor addressed the slurs on the basis of the assignment, to discuss how the student framed the slurs in the interview. Second, Tutor 1 used the situation to discuss the ramifications of those slurs.

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“Tutoring, Minus Bigotry!” • 110 By addressing the slurs through the guidelines of the assignment, and then on the basis of ethics, Tutor 1 defended his identity as a professional while still addressing the homophobia within the session.

Tutor 2 expressed conflict at the varying roles that she holds as a tutor, and the ways in which she strives to navigate these varying roles. While she had not encountered homophobic or transphobic rhetoric in any papers, she had encountered sexist ideas. When asked about her encounters with transphobia or homophobia, Tutor 2, who identified herself as female, felt that she was unable to correct students and still maintain a congenial environment within the writing center, even when encountering sexist writing in the process of her session. The burden of maintaining a congenial, homelike environment in the writing center and in the composition classroom most often falls upon women (Nicolas 11-13, Holbrook 201-229). In “Leaving Home Sweet Home: Towards Critical Readings of Writing Center Spaces,” Jackie Grutsch McKinney critiques the notion of the writing center as “home,” and argues that feminist work within the writing center may be most effective when it is “confrontational and unsettling” (17). Even in brave spaces, women tutors may be penalized for their perceived lack of hospitality, but should be supported by other tutors and writing center directors if they choose to push back. Writing center leadership must acknowledge that women tutors may be required to perform double duties; while all tutors are expected to teach, women tutors are often expected to perform hospitality as well. This expectation of hospitality may place women tutors in situations where they cannot avoid sexism or potential harassment without undue questioning. Centers must institute policies which allow tutors to opt out of working with students for any reason. In addition, the use of surveys to ensure client satisfaction may reflect unduly upon the conduct of tutors when they may engage in confrontational feminist work within the center: such surveys should not be a qualifying factor for tutor evaluations. Indeed, writing center directors should codify powerful statements of feminist solidarity in their policies which are upheld in their practices of tutor training, tutor support, and evaluation.

Tutor 3 spoke about his experiences with a community environment notably influenced by homophobia. Tutor 3 felt that the SafeZone training had allowed him to “be vocal while maintaining a level of respect” and “call attention to the issue” of homophobia. This study suggests that writing center professionals should be offered tools to confront sexism, homophobia, and transphobia in student

writing. These tools may take the form of participatory workshops within the writing center, which include opportunities to role-play or otherwise respond to these situations in a safe space (the space of the workshop) so that the tutors can then build upon their learning in a brave space (the writing center).

Question 4: How would you define the mission of a SafeZone Tutor?

Tutor 1: I define myself with respect to that as a heterosexual ally...you can be an ally and can fight for LGBT rights just the same, it’s fostering that togetherness, that nobody should be afraid to learn more. Acceptability and togetherness is the point, really.

Tutor 2: I guess what I would say [is] I think of SafeZone as a place where people can go …where they can talk without being judged or condemned for their identity, that they feel safe, so that they know that people will not have strong prejudices where people will not react, even in consultations the tutor has some authority. So, a SafeZone is a place where they won’t be affected by someone in authority.

Throughout this study, tutors expressed a consistent message of allyship and interest in creating a place of mutual respect for all voices within the cultural context of this southwest university. SafeZone tutors consistently indicated their negotiations with authority and power as part of a brave space. Tutor 1 defined this work in terms of his own identity as a heterosexual ally, “fostering that togetherness, that nobody should be afraid to learn more.” Tutor 1 defined his work as a SafeZone tutor as establishing a space of togetherness and open learning. Tutor 2 describes safe/brave spaces as a negotiation of power and authority: “even in consultations the tutor has some authority. So, a SafeZone is a place where they [the students] won’t be affected by someone in authority.” In considering the mission of a SafeZone tutor, the question of authority must be (re)considered: again, as Tutor 2 points out, “even in consultations the tutor has some authority.”

To uphold the writing center as a brave space, these negotiations of power and authority should be addressed in SafeZone tutor training. Andrea Lunsford addresses such hierarchies directly: “A collaborative... environment rejects traditional hierarchies” (95). Thus, a SafeZone tutor rejects traditional hierarchies to create a collaborative environment. However, in creating such a collaboration, the negotiations of power that challenge SafeZone tutors should not be discounted.

The SafeZone tutor works within Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the contact zone, as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often

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“Tutoring, Minus Bigotry!” • 111 in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (607). SafeZone tutors invoke the risks of the contact zone when announcing their intent to craft a safe space for collaboration with LGBT students. These three tutors who identify themselves as SafeZone tutors see themselves as opening the space as a zone of acceptance, a zone where ideas do not stagnate, but instead are promoted.

Student Responses to the SafeZone Tutor

In addition to the interviews conducted, I also created an online survey of current Oklahoma State University students who utilize the writing center. To recruit subjects for the student response survey, I worked with the Coordinator of Women’s and LGBTQ Affairs to draft an email that we sent to the campus LGBT alliance group’s listserv.2 The survey requested students (n=14) to navigate to the SafeZone tutor page on the Writing Center website, and then asked students to record whether they had been to the writing center and how they felt about the installation of the SafeZone tutor in the writing center. Students were asked to rate how they felt about the presence of SafeZone tutors on a sliding scale from wholly negative to wholly positive, with 1 being wholly negative and 5 being wholly positive. Students were asked what emotions they felt when encountering the SafeZone tutor description on the website, with the options of “Content,” “Upset,” “Disinterested,” “Interested,” “Reassured,” and “Confused.” Finally, students were asked if they were more or less likely to request a SafeZone tutor the next time they visited the writing center, with 1 being least likely and 5 most likely.

Results ●

Of the 14 students surveyed, 10 had been to the writing center, and 4 had not. ● 7 students had heard of SafeZone tutors before, and 7 had not. ● When asked to select emotions they felt when viewing the SafeZone page, students selected “Content,” “Interested,” and “Reassured.”

The emotion “confused” was also selected, indicating that more signage and explanation may be needed. ● When asked if they would be more or less likely to request a SafeZone tutor, all students marked that they would be more likely to request a SafeZone tutor.

In considering student reactions to SafeZone tutors in the writing center, half (7) of the surveyed students had heard of SafeZone tutors, and half (7) of the surveyed students had not heard of SafeZone

tutors, though 10 of the 14 surveyed students had visited the writing center. Therefore, some responses regarding student conceptions of SafeZone tutors were likely based upon the writing center’s website, along with the SafeZone label itself. Students redefine SafeZone tutors in the following terms: “safe place”; “a tutoring enviroment [sic] free of discrimination”; “a zone… without the fear of judgement”; “a safe place to review... work while still giving helpful criticism”; and “tutoring that makes the student feel that they are in a safe environment.” Students repeatedly defined the writing center as a space, an environment, and as a zone, which reinforces the physical properties of the writing center as a refuge within the university. These responses regarding place recall Nathalie SinghCorcoran and Amin Emika’s concept of the writing center as a “nonplace,” or places that are “not fixed.”

The exigency of the SafeZone tutor as providing safety and lack of judgement to an otherwise charged collaboration defined students’ spatial understandings of the center as a brave/safe space.

Student responses in defining the mission of the SafeZone tutor provide additional applications for the rural writing center as a brave space. Many responses engaged with the survey question, “Given the description on the Writing Center website, what do you think a SafeZone tutor’s job is? Please use your own words.” Some students explained the role of SafeZone tutors as academic instructors. These formulations emphasized the word “job” or a reiteration of the title “tutor.” Such statements include, “Their job is to help in all ways that a tutor is supposed to do”; “their job is to help the student with their writing assignments”; and “teach and help people understand academic concepts.” The classification of SafeZone tutors as performing a pedagogical function can be used to craft “kairotic moments,” or moments of timely action, which Christine Hamel-Brown, Celeste Del Russo, and Amanda Fields use to structure physical and conceptual space within their own writing center. Such moments of timely action can be crucial in collaborating with students to address their individual means of expression.

More often, students perceived the SafeZone tutor as collaborating with LGBT writers. Such statements include either specific mentions of the LGBT community or LBGT-related topics: “To help with writings of LGBT areas of interest”; “to help lgbt students without judgement”; “to help students who need discretion as far as LGBT+ topics are concerned”; and “provide assistance with lgbt related work.” Other students based their definition upon the emblem on the site, writing, “I think a SafeZone

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“Tutoring, Minus Bigotry!” • 112 tutor’s job is to help students who need discretion as far as LGBT+ topics are concerned (based on the rainbow button on the site).” Most students seemed to view the name “SafeZone,” when paired with the emblem, as asserting support for and affirmation of the voices of students who are LGBT or have LGBT interests.

Other students gestured to broader concepts of inclusivity and anti-discrimination in understanding the SafeZone tutor. One student referenced the close interactions that the writing center provides: “I can see how some students would feel more comfortable working with a lgbt supportive person as the writing center involves close interactions.” This student reflects on the interpersonal tasks that students and tutors participate in as they confront their writing center sessions. This student emphasized the positioning of the SafeZone tutor as an agent who resists or avoids discriminating against LGBT students, a place where students can bring their writing without fear of judgement.

Another student shared a personal experience to provide context for understanding the SafeZone tutor: “Tutoring, minus bigotry! Sounds great. I pass now, but I didn’t always, and got misgendered a lot. That really colored my prior college experience.” The student contrasts a history of negative college experiences with the “great” idea of tutoring without bigotry, in order to emphasize the power that the SafeZone tutor may hold over a potentially vulnerable trans student. As SafeZone tutors work within nonnormative frameworks of literacy and meaning-making, they might take up Jonathan Alexander’s challenge of “becoming literate” regarding expressions of class, race, sex, and gender, both in troubling their own readings of student writing and in collaborating with students (15). In destabilizing these hierarchical frameworks, SafeZone tutors work within the vicissitudes of providing “tutoring, minus bigotry!”

After taking the survey, all surveyed students indicated they may request a SafeZone tutor in the future. Denny’s Facing the Center indicates the importance of giving students tools to either “pass” or “come out.” Presenting SafeZone tutors and their availability on the writing center website affords students the agency to choose whether they prefer to “come out” in the writing center. This agency facilitates further collaboration between the SafeZone tutor and the student, allowing for this brave space to persist, even when the writing center session is virtual.

Applications for the Rural Writing Center

Through these encounters with risky conversations, I worked with my inquiry group to assemble a workshop within our weekly educational meetings. After presenting the consultants with two difficult scenarios, one regarding homophobia within a session, the other regarding misogyny within a session, we invited further discussion and response. The first question was based upon a situation with a student I had encountered in one of my table sessions: “A student brings in a paper, in which he argues that children will be traumatized if they are raised in a family composition of anything besides one man and one woman. How do you think you would respond if you were confronted with this situation?” Some tutors argued for the necessity of immediate pushback, while other tutors argued that it would be more effective for the tutor to bring focus back to the original prompt.

One tutor confided, “I’d be worried about asserting a political opinion. The session could get ugly, really fast.” The second question also received a variety of responses: “A second student asks you to read through his essay, in which he argues that women are unsuited for the working world. What would your first impulse be if you were confronted with this situation? How do you think you would respond?” One tutor pointed to herself and said, “Well, I’d just use myself as an example. I’m here, teaching him!”

As a group, we rehearsed these two scenarios and discussed strategies for crafting teachable moments.

Despite the uncomfortable questions, the writing center became a staging ground to rehearse and encounter difficult conversations: in short, a brave space. These lateral conversations allowed tutors to consider generative answers that extended the work of SafeZone tutors beyond the tutoring session, and toward the contact zone of messy ideas.

Further Implications

The writing center community can learn much from the rural writing center as a site of active pedagogy: a learner-centric model where strategies of learning are a collaborative process between tutors and clients alike, in which “learners gradually know what they did not yet know, and the educators reknow what they knew before,” where tutors act as facilitators and guides, and individuals are allowed to construct their own knowledge (Freire 90). In this mode of active pedagogy, writing center clients are active participants in the process of writing. Preconceived notions may color rural writing centers as antithetical to spaces where LGBT writers can grow. On the contrary- rural writing centers are uniquely positioned to support LGBT writers who may lack the chance to express

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“Tutoring, Minus Bigotry!” • 113 themselves by establishing a brave space, where LGBT writers can participate without encountering judgement or shame. When students enter these spaces, they may come to us with a history of being told that their expression, not only in writing, but of identity is incorrect, a problem to be fixed. “No promo homo” laws still remain instituted in Oklahoma public schools, which many educators interpret as a blanket ban against the formation of student-led gay-straight alliances, or similar organizations (Steinberg). As of July 2021, Norman became the first city to outlaw conversion therapy, which is still legal statewide (Griffin). For LGBT students in the rural writing center, their ability to exist is subject to debate. When LGBT students are given an active role in constructing their means of learning, especially in the context of the rural writing center, they are given more than a right to assert their own voices: they learn that their presence within the writing center is valued.

Writing centers should look toward SafeZone tutors as experts within the rural writing center and listen to LGBT students to discover what they may need. SafeZone tutors offer a range of strategies in their work with clients, destabilizing the hierarchal relationship of the classroom to support LGBT clients who visit the rural writing center. These tutors navigate multiple roles as educators, allies, and students, which influence this interpersonal form of labor. SafeZone tutors can lead training sessions, where other tutors can encounter address difficult questions in table sessions. They can provide outreach to LGBT writers and show where writing centers may overlook instances of entrenched oppression, so that students can write “without being judged or condemned for their identity.” In rural writing centers where a SafeZone emblem may not be permitted, tutors can ally with LGBT writers to support their writerly voices, to confront homophobia and transphobia, and to make the rural writing center a brave space for LGBT writers, providing “tutoring, minus bigotry.” When writing centers look to SafeZone tutors as experts, they can provide a challenging glance back at our assumptions of who can teach, who can learn, and how we conceive of LGBT writers within our walls.

As both educators and educated, SafeZone tutors enter the contact zone of the rural writing center with the express mission of creating a welcoming space for LGBT students who may have been made to feel as though their voices do not matter, that they are not welcome in academia. By listening to who they are and what they value, we grant SafeZone tutors an agential role in crafting a safe/brave space within the rural writing center, and as a site of collaboration and

creativity. SafeZone tutors can challenge the writing center to be more than a place of learning. Through the expertise of SafeZone tutors, the writing center can become a place of bravery.

Notes 1. I appreciate the efforts of Elliot Wren Phillips, Field Watts, and Levi Ross, whose participation and assistance in coordinating this inquiry group were invaluable.

2. My heartfelt thanks to Irissa Baxter-Luper, Coordinator of Women's and LGBTQ Affairs at Oklahoma State University, who assisted in distributing this survey.

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“Tutoring, Minus Bigotry!” • 115 Poynter, Kerry John, and Nancy Jean Tubbs. “Safe Zones: Creating LGBT Safe Space Ally Programs.” Journal of LGBT Youth, vol. 5, no. 1 (2008): pp. 121-132, https://doi.org/10.1300/J524v05n01_10.

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SEEING THE AIR: NEURODIVERSITY AND WRITING CENTER ADMINISTRATION Karen Moroski-Rigney Michigan State University moroskik@msu.edu

On Recognition In Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, she writes lines oft-echoed in Writing Center Scholarship ever since: “Thinking of our writing centers as cozy homes, insisting on them as such in our discourse and scholarship, can certainly make us feel good . . . [but one] problem [with that] is the fact that homes are culturally marked. If a writing center is a home, whose home is it? Mine? Yours? For whom is it comfortable?” (McKinney). McKinney’s pointed questions engage writing center scholarship’s engagement with intersectional identities: writing center scholars work to root out sexism (Grustch McKinney, Miley), racism (Grimm; Young; Condon; Garcia; Martinez; Williams; Cedillo), and homophobia (Denny; Dixon) from our programs and journals. We are a discipline of pedagogy (Bruffee) and practice (Ianetta; Fitzgerald). We are open-hearted and committed to power diffusion, to rhetorical listening (Ratcliffe; Elbow), to seeing the potential and power in underestimated or yet unrecognized places.

Recognition is an act of storying: it requires context, belief, arrangement. Whose stories do writing centers recognize—that is, dignify with arrival and welcome? What narratives do writing centers recognize as story, rather than as only antagonism or alignment?

Neurodiverse people may not story their experience of themselves or of writing center work in linear or recognizable ways: what a neurotypical or abled mind minded folks might see as disengagement/refusal may instead be a yet-unrecognized practice of storying the self, and storying the center.

In this article, I will weave together stories and scholarship of neurodivergence—a topic largely undiscussed by writing center scholarship—wwith concepts of welcome and performative inclusion/belonging in writing center work. Narratives of disability in writing center work haunt the writing center texts –rarely discussed, and when discussed only in terms that can be encapsulated or solved. We can only arrive if we’ve already gone, so to speak—our stories aren’t engaged or listened to unless they can be solved.

Solving is not recognizing.

As “writing centers may try to create welcoming spaces, but this sense of welcome is somewhat undone by the activities that occur in that space,” (Camarillo) neurodivergent members of the writing center

community are regularly denied arrival. Programming, curriculum development, mentorship and consultation strategies, and actual employment expectations (for directors and consultants alike) neglect and/or do not research the realities faced by disabled members of the academy (Anderson; Olkin), and only through intentional reconstruction and welcome can we foster recognition of disability in writing centers, and recognition of the place writing centers and their work occupy in the ableist structure of the academy.

This article is both narrative and scholarship, moving forward and backward and in and out of time, jumping from memory to analysis, attempting to “crip”1 the practice of writing an article while simultaneously engaging my reader in a form they (you) find comfortable. It won’t be a traditional traipse through the ivory tower. The narrative model of this essay was chosen in the spirit of transparency, and borne of my hope that if someone else sees themselves in the lines of this text that they will seek support. And, perhaps even more importantly, that they will receive it.

Now, I want to tell you a story. *** Tiny, prismatic flecks. I sit on the cement steps of my back porch with my head feeling like a shrinking balloon. Glitter in the air. All colors. Every color. So tiny I can’t hold them still with my eyes. I try. They move, like they’re shimmering, or maybe dancing.

Always moving. I can both see the flecks and see through them. I don’t understand how that can be. I’m seven years old. I’m wearing red sweatpants that irritate my ankles and have some orange mark on the knee.

What was that from? I don’t remember. I poke the orange mark, and beneath it, my leg hurts. A bruise. I don’t remember. My dad is painting our cellar door. I can hear the radio inside the house and the birds in the trees and the wind and the sound of the paint brush, and I can smell the paint and the grass and the scent of sunshine’s heat itself beating burning shining spinning—and still, these tiny flecks everywhere.

Everything is swirling together, like it always does, and I’m vaguely unmoored, like I always am. It’s hard to pick out any one thing to feel at a time. So I feel it all.

Seeing the Air: Neurodiversity and Writing Center Administration • 117 The colors smell like sounds and the noise tastes like a color and it’s hard to focus.

“Can you see the air?” I ask Dad, abruptly. He looks up from his painting, tips his head. His dark brown hair falls across his eyes and he uses an inverted wrist to push it back.

“Like smoke? Or fog?” he asks, then suddenly with mild alarm, “Wait. Why? Do you see smoke?

Where?” I sigh.

“No. Just the air. Can you see the air?”

He can’t, he says.

Nobody can, he says.

I think to myself that I’ve got to be describing this badly, since there the air is, plain as day, ten million colors dancing in the light and it’s everywhere I go (unlike smoke) and it’s in all weather (unlike fog). I try to explain what I can see, but words are failing. My brother, aged ten, walks by dressed in his tiny camouflage outfit and brandishing his toy shotgun.

Playing soldier. I notice the way his mouth and nose twitch as he considers me. My eyes take him in: hairbrowngreenmouthcornernosetwitcheyeswooden.

My brother turns, looks at me, and says “You’re weird.”

I decide to ask around. Mom can’t see the air either (Heartbreak! She is usually who understands me); my neighbor Veronica can’t see it either; my friends at school are similarly bewildered by my insistent question: Can’t you see the air? Eventually, I decide that one of two things is happening: I am either the worst possible descriptor of my own human life and am not getting my meaning across, or I do not see the air after all and nobody can, like Dad says.

Airing on the safe side, I decide that maybe both things are happening: that I’m not particularly adept at explaining the things I experience, and that I must be wrong about what I see. It feels better to be wrong than to be disbelieved—or worse, differentiated and alone. The constant visual static—the laughing, dancing, vibrating, haunting air—never goes away, even more than twenty years later, but I stop believing that I am seeing it. Never underestimate your own power to talk yourself out of believing your own experiences. *** I will be thirty-one when I am finally diagnosed with both Adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD, Level 1 / Mild). Did you know that many of us autistics experience visual snow—an unexplained visual

phenomena where a person can see constant, moving pixelation in the air?

You might call it a neurodiverse method of recognition. ***

On Recognizing Neurodiversity in Writing Centers Writing centers hope to, as Romeo García suggests, “cultivate a mindfulness of difference and be mindful of spatio- and temporal attributes.”2 However, at present, being a writing center director with both ADHD and ASD often feels like operating in a world where everyone is—a la Barthes (and in truly good faith)—studying and describing the air, describing air as “the Grand Unseen,” and coming up with new breathing strategies to encourage more people to inhale deeply more often. We have journals dedicated to air and the study of its ineffability.

But I do see the air, I try to say.

That’s not the point. That’s not how air works. And anyway, we’ve made sure the lights are on so you can see clearly, our field says back to me while not quite glancing in my direction, and surely our commitment to electricity means you can see clearly as anyone else. I stand still, close my eyes, practice deep breathing. I practice the lifelong meditative skill of accepting my own unbelonging, my not-yet-arrival, carving out a tiny space within myself where I can be believed at least by me. Even here, in the darkness behind my eyelids, I can still see the prismatic, immutable air.

The difference between what I can see and what you can see, and the physiological traits that foster that difference, are known as neurodivergence.

Coined by Dr. Judy Singer in the 1990s, the word “neurodiversity” intends to “shake up the existing orthodoxies of not only the medical and psychiatric establishments, but also of the disability rights movement.” Neurodiversity moves away from rhetorics of disorder and toward rhetorics of multiplicity, or the idea that there are many neurotypes and that not all-but-one are disordered.

Neurodiversity’s framework leaves room not only for differences in our brains but also for all that is yet unknown about them—it doesn’t attempt to diagnose or cram unique experiences into one medicalized identity model; it allows for varied traits and subjective experiences; it is, in essence, a “queering” of mental disorder or neurological traits. We can, as Jerara Nerenberg puts it, “tell different stories” about neurodivergence (198). And so let me be clear: I am just one person whose experiences do not represent the whole of the neurodiversity buffet. Many people

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Seeing the Air: Neurodiversity and Writing Center Administration • 118 with autism and/or ADHD have traits wildly dissimilar to mine, or have some things in common with me and others not at all. There is no one way to recognize neurodiverse people, nor any one way for us to recognize you.

The flexibility and possibility of neurodiversity is akin not only to the flexibility and possibility of queerness (McRuer), but also to those same core practices within writing center studies. As a field, we have done such important work on the crucial intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and socioeconomic status and writing centers / higher education; I hope we will soon approach disability and neurodivergence with that same rigor and transparency.

In Composition Forum vol. 39, Christina Cedillo cautions: “Foregrounding the material and embodied needs of audiences requires that we be upfront about why we do the things we do, that we eschew universal ideals in favor of plainly centering race and disability, whether our own or that of our students when we write and teach others to write.”

Writing center scholarship has infrequently done this type of foregrounding with regard to disability: inconvenient, perhaps, and in many ways difficult to study, the conversation about writing centers and disability usually seems to go about this far: 1. Are your doorways wide enough for a wheelchair? a. Make them wide enough for a wheelchair. Very good.

2. Is something else wrong? More than the wheelchair thing? Refer them to the campus disability office. They can get help there. Oh. They’ve already gone? Do they have paperwork to prove it? We can’t be responsible for this.

3. We aren’t specialists. We can’t be responsible for this.

4. We can’t just change the rules for everyone all the time. We can’t be responsible for this.

We have one book in our field about disability (Babcock and Daniels’ 2017 text, Writing Centers and Disability) and the International Writing Center Association’s Position Statement on accessibility is a solid decade old. I truly don’t believe anyone in our field intends malice against disabled students or colleagues. But—here, quick, while no one is looking but you—check your syllabus, your handbook, your website, your institutional documents for your center: How many disabled folks have you hired? How many do you know/work with? What else do you know about disability? What else have you done to foster access? What else have you read about it? Anything? Sit

with that. Everyone like me has to sit with that; just for this altruistic minute, you can too.

And to be clear, I’ve only asked about what concrete materials you’ve developed concerning students. I’ve not yet begun to touch the ever-present, haunting of the unwritten rules that follow faculty, directors, and administrators around—something Margaret Price writes about so powerfully in Mad At School: “The fact is, not all job candidates are equal in . . . kairotic space such as interviews, [wherein interviewers] single out and punish with particular force traits associated with mental disability” (105). We academics, we administrators—we mustn't disclose our infirmities, our weaknesses, our need for accommodations. Particularly in a field like writing center work where so much of a center’s success relies on the networking, planning, and improvisational abilities of its leadership—what psychologists would call “executive function”—the traits associated with invisible disabilities present particular challenges. Price writes: Isn’t it the case that a person with Asperger’s, or anxiety . . . may unintentionally come across as dismissive, or even insulting? Isn’t it possible that short term memory impairments might impede a candidate’s ability to extend thanks, display knowledge of [the] unfamiliar . . ., and pay attention in approved ways? Are we comfortable treating these difficulties as dealbreakers in candidates? What sort of academic culture are we creating if the job candidates we accept are only those who can avoid outbursts, memory lapses, or outlandish coifs (120).

The spectre of disability and unbelonging prevents arrival: there is unmooring. There are phantoms in the air, and while I can see both around and through them they color the light. We aren’t seeing the same consultations, the same rooms, the same meetings, the same conferences, the same experiences. We are side by side at times, you and I, and still worlds apart. We can’t visit each other’s worlds, either. The best we can do is believe each other.

There is such a loneliness to that. And such possibility, too.

There is possibility in me, a disabled writing center director, and in light, and in air, and in what Price and others have called kairotic spaces (including the ones you may not see but others can). In her book The Body, Theorist Lisa Blackman writes, “We . . . need to move beyond thinking of bodies as substances, as special kinds of thing or entities, to explore bodies as sites of pentiality, process, and practice (5). Disability is both socially constructed (“. . . a political and cultural

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Seeing the Air: Neurodiversity and Writing Center Administration • 119 identity, not simply a medical condition” (Dolmage 5) and within/of the body—and each is a kairotic space.

The experiences of disabled people within writing centers and what writing centers want to recognize or believe about themselves intersect in ways that can’t be teased apart. Blackman notes that “the sentient lived body is a good starting point for examining the complex intersection of nature with culture” (Blackman 87), arguing against Cartesian dualism. The body, the mind, the brain, the world they inhabit—they bind together. And too often, in the case of disabled folks, the story then disappears.

I want to appear out of thin air. To materialize. I want to stop being a ghost, both haunting and haunted, something only on your periphery. Disability scholar Eli Clare movingly declares that we unchoose disability in hundreds of ways (29). I’m trying now to choose my beautiful, disabled self. I had to wait thirty-one years to believe my own experience of my own life. I hope it will take me less time than that to convince you. ***

Spring 2020: An Interlude A global pandemic strikes. My institution sends us all to work from home, and I discover nearly immediately that my quality of life benefits immensely when I have more control over my environment— control I’d never had before. No surprise knocks on my office door. No excess noise or lights. No abrupt changes. No interruption. No exhaustive socializing and small talk around every literal and metaphorical corner. I joke with others that while I am an “introverted extrovert,” I was clearly born to withstand quarantine. I move happily from day to day with only my wife and my cats; I see my parents and brothers (who live eight hours away) as often as I safely can.

And in this blessed quiet, I finally have time to see myself more clearly through the dazzling, stillelectrified air.

I notice the change, the quiet, the peace. I start to chart what stresses me, when various moods occur, what’s really going on when I feel fatigued or annoyed.

I talk with my wife, and we agree that I experience many symptoms of ADHD—particularly as it appears in AFAB folks: I struggle with executive function and task switching, despite strong organizational coping skills; surprise interactions are hard for me, and I get both irritated and tongue-tied easily when caught off guard; I am incredibly, almost painfully sensitive to sound and light both as sensations and as distractions; my brain is always shouting at me; my attention span is all or nothing. I’m exhausted—truly exhausted—pretty

much all the time, and I find the basics of everyday life very hard (though I never miss a meal, a shower, or a deadline). I’m tired of finding life very hard. I decide to pursue formal testing for neurodivergence. *** Before the testing, I’m afraid of what I’ll find out; I’m afraid I’ll be told I’ll need medication for the rest of my life; I’m afraid I’ll find out that I am… limited, I think. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed writes that fear “in its very relationship to an object, in the very intensity of its directedness toward that object, is intensified by the loss of that object” (65). And I am certainly afraid of the loss of my own possibility, of my mind. For an academic—a career mind—this is a frightening pill to swallow and so for months I turn away from it before finally convincing myself to begin the referral process.

But as a typical academic, I can’t leave well enough alone. I start researching everything I can about my symptoms. And the more I research, the more I learn, and the less sure I am that ADHD is all that’s going on. A typical ADHD diagnosis doesn’t account for all my most vexing struggles. I’m either the opposite of a medical miracle or something else is going on. I need to read more, I think to myself.

One night, we are driving back to Michigan from Pennsylvania and our car feels like a sacred, separate little rocket ship shuttling along in the dark. I love night drives—there’s less distraction and my eyes and mind are more at peace. Colors feel more vivid against the inky blue. I look over at my wife, who is driving.

“Do you have a monologue in your head?” I ask, remembering a social media discussion where some folks have total narration inside their minds—a running script, it would seem—and others don’t. My wife confirms that she does have a narrator in her mind, and that even if it happens very quickly, she can always internally recognize her words or thoughts before saying them. I sit in the silence. Not the answer I wanted. We are not alike. I am again unarrived.

“I don’t have any words inside,” I say, bracing myself for disbelief.

“What do you have?” she asks, instead of telling me I’m wrong.

I describe the inside of my mind: There aren’t words, just pictures, colors, light, sound, smell, and what I can only describe as “senses'' that seem like hazy, reconstellating forms of context. Everything is always moving. Sometimes, my “senses” feel like watercolor leaves drifting softly in a puddle of rainwater. Other times, there is lightning and neon and

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Seeing the Air: Neurodiversity and Writing Center Administration • 120 the force of a hurricane and nothing stays still. While I can think of words or hold one or two in my mind at a time, I don’t think in sentences. I think in images, in colors, in “senses.” It’s frenetic and difficult, but it’s also generative. Also, I’m quite used to myself, so it’s not as bad as it sounds on paper to live inside this brain of mine. I work best alone, though, because it’s awfully hard to convey what’s up here—gestures vaguely—to anyone else, let alone collaborate.

“I don’t ever really know what I’m going to say until I say it,” I tell her, “and it always feels like I’m meeting my words for the first time. Whether I’m writing or speaking. That’s why social stuff makes me so anxious.” I never know what I’m going to say or do until I’m saying or doing it, and I never know if it’ll be right since I can’t plan the words ahead of time. Even if I’m trying to plan how I want to come across. It’s exhausting.

My wife doesn’t tell me I’m wrong. She just listens.

I pause, think, and then try again.

“What do you think in your head when you see things?”

She doesn’t know what I’m asking. I figure I will explain by example.

“Like here in the car, when my eyes rove around, my brain says, but like, without words: blue blue dark truck light radio 97.1 cars railing silver moon dark seat floor voice warm. Constant barrages of recognition.” My wife nods slowly.

“Is it like that all the time?” she asks.

“Yeah. Like a hurricane when I’m anxious. My brain just keeps hurling everything at me like it’s new and important and now, now, now.”

My wife’s brain does not think like this, she tells me, but she’s listening. I’m willing to talk.

I tell her that as a child, I was always told I talked a lot—sometimes, my mom and dad called me “Mouth.”

I was, I think, always trying to make my insides visible.

To process the noise, color, and light into something I could share. I only ever wanted to connect. But I probably also talked without stopping for most of my childhood, and I’m self-conscious now about oversharing information about my interests, feelings, or ideas. I’m permanently suspicious that I am annoying others. This makes it hard to make small talk, to lead meetings, to be sure of myself in times where it counts: Am I getting it wrong? What will I even say next?

Who can tell! What a terrible thrill!

But even as I hear myself explain these things aloud to my wife, I realize that I know. I know, because I am a good little academic who has been reading, and reading, and reading. I have canvassed the literature.

And I know with increasing dread that while I surely

have symptoms of ADHD, I also seem to have very many symptoms of AFAB-presenting autism. This is a gut punch. How can someone like me be autistic? This disbelief is a painful and inaccurate bias I will work to unlearn over time.

I think out loud to my wife, listing out things that may confirm the possibility: my social unease, the sense that I am forever a performing monkey when around most people, my particularity about my appearance, my schedule, and my possessions, my unwillingness to voice or believe my own discomfort (and a propensity to get bruises or injuries I can’t remember getting), my intense interests and ability to both focus and produce in extreme quantities at some times and not at all at others, my passionate distaste for meetings of any/all kinds, the lack of a mind-based conveyor belt for thoughts and words to receive inspection upon before leaving my mouth, my strident opinions, my love of rationality. And then there’s visual processing issues: I can, after all, see the air.

I talk myself out. I wear myself out.

“I’m tired,” I say, putting on a true crime podcast and counting mile markers.

My wife reaches over and holds my hand in the dark.

I wonder if medication will give me words inside my brain.

I wonder what that must be like.

On Writing Centers and Excellence I’m not yet three the first time I touch the piano.

My brother is thirteen, and he plays the piano beautifully; I adore him—want to do everything he does—want to be just like him. He is loving and good, it seems to me, and I want to be good too. I watch him and learn him, liking the sounds of the music he listens to and the way he smiles at me and his willingness to have tea parties with me on the back porch even in January snow. I want to take piano lessons so I can be more like him. “If she can sit still, I’ll take her on,” his teacher tells my mom. I promise to sit so still. Very still. The stillest. Please, just teach me this thing.

In the years that follow, it turns out I’m as good as my brother. Maybe even better. Piano is solace: I can make meaning, emotion, and story with my fingers and not have to move my face at all. I now know that this departure from performing affect is a specific form of relief for me; in childhood it feels like a vacation from my body. I seem to always be trying to escape my body, but I don’t know why.

I will later recognize that affect—the way in which your body or face performs your emotional state to

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Seeing the Air: Neurodiversity and Writing Center Administration • 121 communicate that state to others—is hard for me (and for most autistics). It takes work, especially when I’m tired. But I don’t know that yet, not at age four or seven or even twenty-seven. I just know that my whole self can rest yet still be understood when I play the piano.

At my parent’s encouragement, I practice for an hour or more every day. Decades later, I learn that this ritualistic expulsion of tactile energy is likely a form of stimming3 or even fidgeting. I learn much sooner than that piano keeps me intensely calm and safe inside myself. So I play more, and more, and more. Achieving feels concrete, feels good. At age thirteen, I will win a youth competition and play in a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

The piano is my first lesson in excellence. What I learn is this: If you are excellent, if you are perfect, if you don’t make mistakes or let on that you’re only feeling your way through, you will create things that other people will understand—and in understanding your creations, they will perhaps understand you.

Though maybe this isn’t a lesson piano teaches me; maybe it’s a compulsion brought forward by neurodivergence that playing the piano only justifies. It doesn’t really matter either way. The belief sets. *** Writing center practitioners must, too, be excellent. In a field known for its labor precarity4, we lack the option of assuming our colleagues know or value the work we do and we usually lack opportunities to delegate work we find personally challenging. Casual examples of this work include: developing tutor training courses and teaching them, mentoring students at both the undergraduate and graduate level, carrying out writing consultations ourselves if tutors aren’t available, responding to drop-in meetings and sudden incidents within the center—all things that require much executive function, and all things that are particularly fatiguing for a neurodiverse writing center director. We are never, it seems, not singing for our supper. But does the academy see it that way? Seems not: Robert Anderson notes that “When institutions treat disability as something inside a person’s body, they fail to see it in the campus environment” (188).

And so: the consistent pressure to maintain funding, staffing, scheduling, training, and research for our centers becomes just “part of the job.” The academy locates my difficulties within me, not within an underpaid, undersupported, underresearched, overtaxed, jack-of-all-trades scholarly and administrative role whose constant (and necessary-for-

survival) “people-ing” has very little to do with my credentials, PhD, scholarship, or curriculum development talents.

However, disengaging from or questioning this intensive work—or to enlist support in doing it, or to seek ways to do using methods that are healthier for disabled minds or bodies—remains taboo. Numerous studies (Baldridge and Swift; Santuzzi et al.) indicate that disabled academics rarely request accommodations in an effort to keep their disability status hidden—and with good reason: academia puts a high premium on equating normalcy with the quality of a person’s mind and work (Iantaffi). This is why diagnostic “functioning” labels for autistics are unhelpful: autism and excellence are not mutually exclusive, though ableism preaches otherwise. Diagnosis isn’t about how highly you function—it’s not about what you do well or how you cope: it’s about what’s hard. Using a stepladder all my life does not make me less short; successfully using coping strategies to manage my work/career does not make me less neurodivergent (or make my work less good). Still, misguided perceptions persist.

If being willing to pursue a disability diagnosis as an adult requires both introspection and humility for anyone, requires a smidge more for an academic. I am constantly using my brain to write, to mentor, to teach, to create. My brain is, in so many ways, excellent and it has always been how I have earned both belonging and love (from myself and from others). The diagnostic process—the pursuit of the possibility that my brain isn’t working “as it should”—breaks both my mind and heart. Inside my ribs, a seven-year-old Karen wonders: How can I need help and still be excellent?

On The Devil in the Diagnoses The process of diagnosis is just as punishing as the impetus, and shows me just how dangerous an emphasis on formalized medical diagnosis is for anyone unable to slog through (or afford) a months’ long war with insurance, with scheduling, with finances, coupled with the deep anxiety of waiting. If I were a student attempting this process, much of the academic year would pass before I could secure a diagnosis, paperwork, and accommodations—a process Dolmage describes as not so much as asking “. . .for a special advantage within a world in which your needs are centered -- rather, it is to identify your needs within a framework in which everyone . . . seem to know what [you] need, and who [you] are, better than [you] do [yourself]; a world in which any small, real adjustment can be quickly inflated into . . . fictionalization; a realm in which asking for help is

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Seeing the Air: Neurodiversity and Writing Center Administration • 122 immediately stigmatized” (69). It is difficult enough to seek help and more difficult still to wait while help slowly, unenthusiastically arrives. If it arrives.

Stephanie Goodwin and Susanne Morgan succinctly describe another layer to the stress: even though universities are beginning to invest more in developing programs that support disabled students, “few models exist for parallel accommodations to promote the success of faculty members with [disabilities].” (Evans, et al. 198). All this could be for nothing, I think to myself, as I pick up the phone to schedule my referral.

Still, I am on my own side. I recall reading Jenara Nerenberg’s book Divergent Mind. Nerenberg suggests that the most helpful part of adult diagnosis for women is the diagnosis itself—the knowing, the connecting, the understanding—and that in seeing one’s self more clearly, the world too comes into better focus (203). I am banking on this. ***

On Parody as Coping Method

To be hummed to the tune of the Barenaked Ladies’ song “One Week…”

talk.

It takes two months just to call the doc.

She acts real shocked when you tell her why you wanna Two weeks, testing center calls.

They say the next appointment’s at the end of fall.

Six weeks ‘til the testing starts.

Six hours of answering questions with a racing heart.

One month til your follow-up, which is a thirty minute call where the doc says she’s sorry.

She says you’re ADHD and ASD, and that it’s plain to see -but she’s got no resources to give you.

You feel panicked so then frantic you try to call your GP but it’s Titanic, ‘cause you’re sinking ‘cause they never got your paperwork.

You tell the doc that you’d like meds for ADHD. She says “Prescribed by me? It’s just, I’m not a psychiatrist..”

Eventually, you get off the call RX in hand: you finally have a plan!

But your insurance won’t approve it.

Two months of changing doses, mild psychosis, and some creeping vague neurosis.

Finally you find a dose of it that doesn’t try to kill you.

Still see the air -- for real, it’s there!

But you tell no one, ‘cause you know they won’t believe you.

This was a much more succinct and perhaps even amusing way to describe what was, ultimately, (from when I first believed I had symptoms through when I finished titration) a seven-month stint in hell.

(University accommodations took thirteen months to secure.) Each step takes tremendous vulnerability, takes weeks or months. Each step was “hurry up and wait,’ and changed not only how I felt about myself but how others felt about me: whether the “others” were my doctors, my wife, my friends, or my colleagues. I remembered reading Carol Ellis’s depiction of being disabled while working in writing centers—she recalled “becoming a case study in disability . . .” (Ellis 35).

This terrified me, because I could feel the gap between my disability and my work disappearing. And not in the way I’d hope: Common themes among . . . personal narratives of student affairs professionals with disabilities included significant differences in the experiences of practitioners with apparent disabilities and those with hidden disabilities . . . Being able to (personally and organizationally) to set limits, engage in self-care, and advocate for oneself are struggles faced by those whose impairments limit their energy or are exacerbated by stress or lack of rest; often this problem was made more difficult by writers’ desire to prove they had no limitations and could accomplish as much work as, and in the same manner as, their nondisabled colleagues (Evans, et al. 211).

Sounds familiar.

I spent months anxious, tired, reading too much about my symptoms. And I was so angry, too, that as an exhausting, pandemic-laden semester dragged on I was helpless to expedite my own process of getting help. I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone what was happening, manifesting what Moira A. Carrol-Miranda describes as “the continuous act of positioning [my]self from within and from the outside” (279). I know what it feels like to have someone tell you that you can’t see the air; I wasn’t going to risk being wrong again without proof. And even with proof: What if others thought less of me? What if it ruined my career? These were and still are valid questions. In Shahd Alshammari’s “A Hybrid Academic Identity,” she writes that disability “holds negative connotations and is associated with lack, failure, and loss” (27). I think of Ahmed, of fear intensified by impending loss.

I feel fear. I feel loss.

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Seeing the Air: Neurodiversity and Writing Center Administration • 123 Even the best autistic masking5 fails during seven months of extreme duress: in meetings, I was tired.

Mentoring students felt very hard indeed. Planning programs and syllabi. Following up on emails.

Delegating. Supervising. All of it felt impossible. Each day: a new sense of dread, winding together with an increasing awareness that most of my struggles were directly linked to symptoms I was now reading book after book about, and then trying to understand those books, and trying to anticipate what the psychiatrist would finally tell me at my follow-up appointment, and then to anticipate what titrating medication while trying to hold down a director-level position at work would feel like. For the first time in my life, I felt like a failure.

Reader, I did not feel excellent.

But like any good autistic (I jest), I have learned to mask that sense of failure.

I have to.

Behind the (Autistic) Mask I can’t allow feeling not-excellent to stop me, not when I can avoid it. Though my disabilities tack on significant cost to the tightrope-walk of highperforming academy work, I recognize the incredible privilege I have in that I can—at least, to the outside eye—push through most things, and that many disabled people’s limitations prevent them from cobbling together the facsimile of “fine” that I rely so heavily upon in my career and personal life. In the 2020-2021 Academic Year Of the Global Pandemic, I gave numerous invited talks, published articles, continued field service and university-level service work, taught multiple classes. I didn’t have any choice; I’m thirty-two years old and my academic career is at the pivotal late-early-stage where I need to continue to carve out my professional identity. The reality is that “the way time is organized and valued and productivity is evaluated -- both organizational issues -- can create barriers to disabled employees” (Evans, et al. 206). No matter how much I want to be gentle on myself, I just won’t get publications or visibility or a promotion or recognition if I don’t find some way to keep surviving the work. I want this to not be true, at least not all the time, but here we are. Price and others have argued for the idea of cripping time in the academy—finding alternative ways to meet expectations or even deadlines. But we’re just not there yet. Not in practice.

To be sure, this grinding pace we’re accustomed to in the academy is hard on everyone. Everyone. It’s just hard in specific and complicated ways for a person whose ability to regulate stimulation, rest, and stress is seriously compromised. It’s hard for me.

As an autistic woman, I am deeply trained by our culture and my own survival mechanisms to stay hyper-aware of what the people around me want or need me to be, and then… to be that. Autistic women often fly under the radar this way, with many of us often being told “I would have had no idea you’re autistic!” Well, sure, you wouldn’t, because the entirety of my public personality is constructed to make sure you don’t. I’ve been practicing all my life—that’s what masking is: trying to keep up with and fit into the body and bodymind the world expects you to occupy.

I have a complicated relationship with masking—I both resent it, in that it precludes me from entirely knowing who I am, and yet I desperately need it to get by: It doesn’t matter if a surprise meeting gets added to my calendar and my very soul leaves my corporeal form because I can no longer sit still or perform my affect (“fixing my face”) for another solitary minute without suffering: I need to say “Sure thing, I’ll be there.”

It doesn’t matter if trying to represent the writing center at New Student Orientation fills me with such anxiety that I do not sleep for two nights beforehand nor for two nights after, and am selectively mute when I finally get home: I have to pack the swag bags and head to the student union, and Do The Thing. To see me out there tabling, you’d think I enjoy it.

That’s what I need you to think. That’s how I manage. However: I am no stranger to seeming better than I feel. That skill has taken a lifetime to build. **** In high school, I am a Speech and Debate star. I am a national qualifier several times in the speechwriting category, and what takes so much practice for others seems to come naturally to me.

Writing and memorizing a speech is one thing—but curating and then memorizing the affect you’ll marry to your delivery is second nature to an autistic AFAB person.6 I decide how I want to look, sound, and “feel,” and then I deliver. The same skills prove useful later for teaching. And for running a writing center.

And, well, life. But there is a cost, then and now: After winning nearly every tournament every weekend, I come home completely depleted. The victory feels like a tangible achievement, yes, but I just want to hide. I tell my parents how badly I want to quit. They don’t understand why—I’m so good at it. I guess I am so good at it, I tell myself, and maybe this exhaustion is just part of giving something my best. The belief sets. In fact, it calcifies into a core personality trait I am working hard to

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Seeing the Air: Neurodiversity and Writing Center Administration • 124 unlearn (and, even more importantly, to help others unlearn).

There is an unspoken fourth thing, too, that I’ve mentioned before: Writing Center people are, implicitly, people people. “We” love collaboration, face to face interactions, engaging strangers and learning their stories, sitting in close proximity to one another and exploring academic intimacy, the energy-boost that comes from presenting a workshop or guiding a consultation. To be a Real Writing Center Person, I must excel at/love these things—or else how can I mentor the students who I hope will do the same?

Margaret Price puts words to my anxieties: How does one speak (either aloud or on the page) if one’s mind spins with anxiety, grapples with depression, freezes with panic, or is occluded by brain fog? What shall we do with notions of collaboration, activism, and community that presuppose all participants will arrive at the table ready and able to engage in ‘lively’ (and implicitly) logical conversations? (“Her Pronouns Wax and Wane,” 13).

I’ll let you in on a secret: I dread most of these social, collaborative things. I may be more a Writing Center Ghost, then, than a Real Writing Center Person.

I haunt and am haunted by our spaces, our practices, our community, and the gaps in our scholarship.

However, I’m hopeful: I don’t think someone needs to love high-octane personal interactions to be a successful writing center professional (whether at the student or administrator level). Instead, I think our field needs to think more critically about the ableism inherent in our most esteemed practices and traits (from reading out loud to nondirective consultation strategies to the neverending networking of administrators) and find other ways to honor the value of our work and of one another.

Disabled writing center practitioners deserve honor and recognition, too.

rest of my life. I have to think ahead, consider future steps, wonder what the other person is doing, calculate what risks to take, and try hard to see see see see see what the right next move will be. Often, in life as in chess, I find that it’s hard to make the pieces stay still in my mind and I can stare at the board for a long time without knowing what to do. Despite knowing. ASD often comes with deficits in visual processing, and I experience them while playing chess. Some folks take to chess naturally; others, like me, must pore over books and practice ad nauseum to improve. Yes, this is a parable as much as it’s a story.

Immediately after my diagnoses, I am terrified of taking medication: What if it changes me? Does it mean I’m dependent? Does it mean I can’t manage my own life without a pill? I decide I’ll only take it on workdays. Maybe not even every workday . . .

The morning I do begin taking medication for ADHD, I am unsettled by the way my body feels. A little tight. Anxious. Fluttery. Things that will go away in time as I adjust. But before they go away, I’m looking for a way to settle myself and I wander to my iPad and pull up my chess app. I start to play.

For the first time, the pieces stay still. I see all the answers immediately. I make the right moves. It feels fun and easy. I feel like I’ve got control of what I’m doing and planning. I slaughter a dozen internet opponents in a row and improve my score by hundreds of points. I am not miserable when my wife asks how practice went. Instead, I’m okay. I’m okay.

The parable completes.

I decide that I will take medication all my life if it means that the right moves won’t always be so hard to find, if it means I can recognize my own mind. I resolve to never disbelieve myself again.

On Honoring My Beautiful, Prismatic, Disabled Self

My work life during quarantine has been relative bliss. I’m home, with my wife and our cats, in my own space. I can burn candles and diffuse essential oils in my work space. I can work in natural light. I set my own schedule for work, for meditation, for exercise. I can see changes coming ahead of time. I’m comfortable in myself and I’m rarely asked (aside from Zoom fatigue) to put myself in situations where I’ll find it hard to cope.

I’ve gotten used to being surrounded only by people (and cats) who love me and want me to be comfortable. My access needs aren’t hard to meet here at home, and my wife graciously embraces them/me.

Chess is one of my life’s great loves. I practice about an hour a day, every day. I read books about chess. I play against strangers online. I’m annoyed when everyone else falls in love with The Queen’s Gabmit on Netflix. After receiving an honorarium for a talk I’ve given, I buy a particularly expensive blue and boxwood Staunton chess set. It glistens. To play on such a fine board feels like being made of lightning.

Chess is order. Calm. Intelligent. Dramatic!

Contained. Fascinating! Chess is pattern and forecast, and I play chess in a way similar to how I navigate the

***

On Recognizing Possibility and Access Intimacy

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Seeing the Air: Neurodiversity and Writing Center Administration • 125 She understands my access needs and so I no longer feel the need to constantly explain myself. Like the most practiced zen master, it seems her entire relation to me comes from a place of loving. Simply, she loves me. What I need, she wants me to have. Who I am, she respects and appreciates. What I say, she listens to and believes. And while this is perhaps true of many married couples, I posit that my wife has a harder job because I am not always easy to care for, understand, or know. I’m like a Jackson Pollock painting, but in person form. Stacia accepts and appreciates me as I am, seeing beauty where others see chaos.

Here, with her, I have what Julie Minich coins in her blog Leaving Evidence as “access intimacy: “that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs.” Minich describes “a kind of access intimacy that is ground-level, with no need for explanations. Instantly, we can hold the weight, emotion, logistics, isolation, trauma, fear, anxiety and pain of access. I don’t have to justify and we are able to start from a place of steel vulnerability. It doesn’t mean that our access looks the same . . .” . I feel safe in my relationship because I can plainly ask for what I need and I believe my request will be embraced not as special treatment, but rather as an act of care.

I think we can, as a field, do more of this type of care with and for one another. We can, as bell hooks reminds us, choose love: “Choosing love we also choose to live in community, and that means that we do not have to change by ourselves” (hooks, “Love as The Practice of Freedom”).

We can move toward access intimacy by listening to and believing one another—and by creating space for others like me to come forward in their truths, and ask for what they need. This means talking openly about disability (whether visible or invisible) and meaning it when we say we want to accommodate. It means openly developing possible accommodations like flexible scheduling, or allowing for rest and recovery, or even offering opt-outs of uncomfortable practices.

This type of movement requires us to admit that we have not yet arrived—literally or metaphorically—at a world where disabled writers, staff members, consultants, or administrators are received in their fullness. There can only be intimacy or recognition if there is trust, and there is neither without interdependence. I am reminded again of hooks: “Until we are all able to accept the interlocking, interdependent nature of systems of domination and recognize specific ways each system is maintained, we will continue to act in ways that undermine our individual quest for freedom and collective liberation

struggle.” She’s right. I’m writing this article because I’m trying to trust you, to depend on you. I want you to recognize me. I want to give other people like me the chance to be heard and believed. If even one person reading this becomes less scared to know themselves, I will feel joy.

Joy can be work. Joy can be hard. Joy, in any form, requires recognition. And part of that recognition requires transparency and intentionality in acknowledging where there’s still more work to do.

We can consider multimodal formats for our publications, including providing audio options of articles and books for readers who need them; we can develop Accessibility Committees within our service organizations and within our own centers, and those committees can continually audit our services, our conferences, our websites, our programs, our training—all of it—to ensure maximum access. We can encourage our mentees to research and write about disability as a powerful component of restorative justice. We can empower and believe the neurodiverse among us, encouraging those who live with disabilities to share openly about their experiences and to tell us what they see, experience, endure, and hope for.

We can ask ourselves hard questions about our own centers and practices. What of your centers’ physical spaces or programming: do you provide accessible space for consultations? And when your think about accessibility, are you thinking only about, say, space for a wheelchair but not quiet rooms for those with attentional difficulties or asynchronous or virtual sessions available for folks with social challenges? What about your hiring practices? Your training practices? What’s it like to work for your center—do you have remote, asynchronous, or flexible shift options? Do you provide accommodations for consultants who struggle with the uncertainty of dropin consultations? What staff training do you facilitate on disability justice or access? Does your center have an accessibility statement? Do you know whether or not your website is accessible?

When we imagine a future for our field, do we collectively and intentionally imagine disabled and/or neurodiverse writers using our spaces? Do we imagine hiring and accommodating disabled and/or neurodiverse consultants? And maybe most vulnerable for me, at present: do we imagine hiring disabled and/or neurodiverse administrators? Will we publish their work? Will we take them seriously? Will we accommodate their access needs? Will we find ways to shape our workdays, conferences, publications, and field to better center their experiences? Will we

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Seeing the Air: Neurodiversity and Writing Center Administration • 126 empower those administrators to take up space, to seek accommodation, to demand validity?

I’m asking a lot of questions here, I know, and I’m asking them because as a field we need to answer them.

So much depends on it. I’m trusting you.

Disabled writing center professionals deserve to move from the margins to the center. They deserve for their access needs to be met and respected whether or not their disability is visible to or understood by others.

They deserve to feel safe at work. They deserve to feel wanted, celebrated, welcomed. To feel beautifully and wholly unsolved—yet recognized.

“I’m telling you stories. Believe me.”

-- Jeanette Winterson Notes 1. From Hutcheon & Wolbring: “Work by Judith Butler and Michael Warner on the word ‘queer’ may illuminate these new uses as they relate to ‘cripple’ Warner notes that ‘queer’ is used not only to describe a particular identity or trait of a person but as a verb to describe a resisting of ‘the regimes of the normal’ (Warner xvii). ‘Queering’ is an always-changing and an often re-deployed “site of collective contestation and the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings” (Butler 228). In other words, ‘queer’ depicts a critical orientation to the world, a positionality, and a process by which power structures and oppressive assumptions are revealed and disrupted.

‘Cripping’ has taken on a similar flavour in disability studies. For example, Sandahl defines queering as ‘[spinning] mainstream representations to reveal latent queer subtexts [or] deconstructing a representation’s heterosexism’ (37) and cripping similarly as ‘spin[ning] mainstream representations or practices to reveal ablebodied assumptions and exclusionary effects’ (37).

Wolbring, Gregor; Hutcheon, Emily (2013-08-20). "'Cripping' Resilience: Contributions from Disability Studies to Resilience Theory". M/C Journal. 16 (5). doi:10.5204/mcj.697.

2. García, Romeo. “Unmaking Gringo-Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no.1, 2917, 29-60.

3. In Divergent Mind, Jenara Nerenberg describes stimming as “Movements -- such as flapping the hands or tapping the fingers -- that help relieve anxiety that comes with overstimulation. It can also take the form of mental stimming, such as repeating numbers, words, or letters (also referred to as echolalia” (73).

4. Fels, Dawn. et al. “Toward an Investigation into the Working Conditions of Non-Tenure Line,

Contingent Writing Center Workers.” College Composition and Communication, vol 68, 2016.

5. “Women with autism are able to apply the systemic nature of their autistic brain . . . to the study and replication of people skills in order to imitate and participate socially. However, the mechanical (rather than intuitive) basis of these strategies means that at times of stress, it may be impossible for them to be maintained . . .” (Hendrickx and Gould 30) 6. “We are better at masking our challenges and blending in, perhaps because we are under more social pressure to do so . . . Many professionals will only give you a diagnosis if they judge that your ability to “function” is being severely impaired, which seems unfair since it effectively penalizes you for putting in the work to manage your challenges. Importantly, the diagnostic criteria [for autism] are skewed toward the male representation of autism.” (Cook, et al. 23) Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Anderson, R.C. “Faculty Members with Disabilities in Higher Education.” In M.L. Vance (ed.) Disabled Faculty and Staff in a Disabling Society: Multiple Identities in Higher Education. Association on Higher Education and Disability. 2007 Alshammari, Shahid. “A Hybrid Academic Identity: Negotiating a Disability Within Academia’s Discourse of Ableism.” Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education, edited by Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, Laura T. Eisenman, and James M. Jones.. University of Michigan Press, 2017, pp. 25-38 Baldridge, D.C, & Swift, M.L. “Withholding requests for disability accommodation: The role of individual differences and disability attributes.” Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 25.4. 2013.

Blackman, Lisa. The Body: Key Concepts. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008.

Camarillo, Eric. “Burn the House Down: Deconstructing the Writing Center as a Cozy Home.” The Peer Review, Issue 3.1. 2019: http://thepeerreviewiwca.org/issues/redefining-welcome/burn-the-housedown-deconstructing-the-writing-center-as-cozyhome/. Accessed 21 July, 2021.

Carroll-Miranda, Moira A. “Access to Higher Education Mediated by Acts of Self-Disclosure: ‘It’s a Hassle.’”

Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education, edited by Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, Laura T. Eisenman, and James M. Jones.. University of Michigan Press, 2017, pp. 275-290.

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Seeing the Air: Neurodiversity and Writing Center Administration • 127 Cedillo, Christina V. "What Does It Mean to Move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy."

Composition Forum. Vol. 39. Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition, 2018.

Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Duke University Press, 2017.

Cook, Barb, et al. Spectrum Women: Walking to the Beat of Autism. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2018.

Dolmage, Jay. Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. University of Michigan Press, 2017.

Ellis, Carol. “Her Brain Works.” Writing Centers and Disability, edited by Rebecca Day Babcock and Sharifa Daniels, Fountainhead Press, 2017, pp. 31-46.

Evans, N. J., Broido, E. M., Brown, K. R., & Wilke, A. K. (2017). Disability in higher education: A social justice approach. Nashville, TN: John Wiley & Sons.

Fels, Dawn. et al. “Toward an Investigation into the Working Conditions of Non-Tenure Line, Contingent Writing Center Workers.” College Composition and Communication, 68, 2016.

García, Romeo. “Unmaking Gringo-Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no.1, 2917, 29-60.

Goodwin, Stephanie A. and Morgan, Susanne, "Chronic Illness and the academic career: The hidden epidemic in higher education" (2012). Faculty Articles Indexed in Scopus. 1132.

Hendrickx, Sarah, and Judith Gould. Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Understanding Life Experiences from Early Childhood to Old Age. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2015. hooks, bell. “Love as the Practice of Freedom.” Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge, 1994. 289-98.

Iantaffi, Alex. “Women and Disability in Higher Education: A literature search.” In L. Morley & V. Walsh (Eds.) Breaking Boundaries: Women in higher education. Taylor and Francis, 1996.

McKinney, Jackie Grutsch. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers. University Press of Colorado, 2013. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt4cgk97. Accessed 21 July 2021.

Minich, Julie.”Access Intimacy: The Missing Link.” Leaving Evidence, 12 April 2017. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/ access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disabilityjustice/. Accessed 14 January 2021.

Nerenberg, Jejnara. Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World that Wasn’t Designed for You. HarperOne, 2020.

Price, Margaret. Mad at School: Rehtorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2011.

Price, Margaret. ‘Her Pronouns Wax and Wane’: Psychosocial Disability, Autobiography, and Counter-

Diagnosis. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, Jan. 2009, pp. 11-34, http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jlc.0.0010.

Santuzzi, A.M., Waltz, P.L., Finkelstein, L.M. and Rupp, D.E. “Invisible Disabilities: Unique challenges for employees and organizations.” Industrial and Organizational Psychology. 7.2. 2013.

Singer, Judy. NeuroDiversity: The Birth of an Idea. Kindle, 2016.

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A PARLIAMENT OF OWLS: INCORPORATING USER EXPERIENCE TO CULTIVATE ANTIRACIST ONLINE WRITING LABS Eric Camarillo Harrisburg Area Community College ecamaril@hacc.edu Abstract

This essay explores the creation, role, and functions of online writing labs (OWLs), particularly focusing on user experience design as a tool to produce antiracist outcomes. It asks the reader to question the apparent neutrality of technology and consider larger questions about the effects of website design on the student experience. It also offers general strategies for designing OWLs. Finally, the article attempts to redefine how the field of writing centers conceive of its spaces and how students interact with those different spaces and makes an argument for rethinking the value of online, especially asynchronous, work.

A Framing and a Naming My history with racism begins before I was born.

My family is from a small city: Victoria, Texas, in the Golden Crescent region of that state. My grandmother was forced into bilingualism through Spanish-speaking parents and school policies that mandated English only.

Whenever she slipped back into her home language, accidentally using the language of her family, she was violently reminded through the use of rulers rapped on knuckles that this aspect of herself was totally and completely unwanted1. In Texas, even today, English is the language of power, while Spanish may be perceived as the language of submission, of invisibility, of outsiders.

Spanish is foreign even in the spaces where it is widely spoken. My grandmother’s experience could be seen as a form of coloniality, which forced her into making certain choices for her survival. As Walter D. Mignolo writes, “coloniality names the underlying logic of all Western European colonialism…Coloniality names something you do not see that works in what you do see.

You do not see coloniality, but there is no way you cannot sense it” (372, emphasis in original). My history with racism, then, does not necessarily begin—or end— with my personal experiences but with the systems created by racist power structures which, in turn, shape my family’s experiences.

In my grandmother’s experience, we can see the systemic nature of racism, and the way in which it reinforces particular epistemologies and policies. Ibram Kendi defines racism as “a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities” (17). In the above anecdote, racial inequities emerge in, and are explicitly tied to, linguistic practice.

The use of Spanish was not just stigmatized; it was

actively punished in accordance with explicit written policies in order to, I’d argue, reinforce Standard American English as the norm. For Kendi and other anti-racist scholars, racism is necessarily systemic. The punishment of individuals matters less (though, this is the inevitable outcome) than the explicit privileging of a certain racialized discourse over another. Education is a system by which a culture reproduces its own values; when certain linguistic practices, like the use of Spanish, are actively punished through the application of official policies, the system itself is weaponized.

In this small city where my grandmother was violently reminded of her status as Other (even though she is second generation American), my mother would eventually become pregnant with me. She played with names, carefully considering, holding them against her ear, seeing how they rolled off the tongue. She tossed several aside, like Ernest for her father, or Jésus, my grandmother’s suggestion. Eventually, she whittled her choices to two: Cruz and Eric. One was a family name, the name of her favorite grandparent, and would tie her son to a legacy. The other name sounded more “normal.” She finally went with Eric. As she puts it, “I thought this would make things easier for you.” Even as a teen mom, my mother was able to intuit what Ruja Benjamin puts so well: “A ‘normal’ name is just one of the many tools that reinforce racial invisibility” (4). An invisible name was my mother’s way of trying to protect me from discrimination, to help me blend in. Whether or not she was aware, Victoria was a place that used things like Anglo names and minimal “Hispanic” accents as metrics for hiring in certain jobs.2 It’s a choice that I’m not sure white mothers in Victoria would have had to make. Perhaps it was less of a choice, as Romeo García and José Cortez contend in “Trace of a Mark that Scatters: The Anthropoi and the Rhetoric of Decoloniality.” They write that situations like the one my mother found herself in may give rise to a “forced choice, which is not a choice at all but a demand” (106).

Yet, for the all the invisibility my first name may have offered, there’s nothing I can do about my last name. We moved to Houston when I was in middle school, and I found myself in eighth grade at a new middle school. Included in my class schedule were the regular class offerings: Reading, English, Social Studies,

A Parliament of OWLS • 129 school, and I found myself in eighth grade at a new middle school. Included in my class schedule were the regular class offerings: Reading, English, Social Studies, and so on. Yet, my schedule also included a new category of classes: ESL Reading and ESL English. I should note, I am not bilingual (would a white scholar need to provide such a note?). My grandmother’s experiences with the tyranny of English meant she strove to limit the amount of Spanish she taught her daughter, which would limit what came down to me. I like to say that I’m hopelessly monolingual, which ironically led to me not questioning my placement in these classes.

I had no idea what ESL stood for, and neither did my mom. I sat in these classes for two weeks before my social studies teacher finally noticed these classes on my schedule and told me to talk to my school counselor, who promptly placed me into pre-AP reading and English. In my memory, I don’t remember talking to someone about my initial schedule, and I certainly don’t remember any kind of assessment mechanism that would have determined my placement. My school only had my name and my ethnicity to go on, and they made that decision without any input from me or my family.

In this case, there were decisions made by agents in the system that ultimately determined my experience. That is, the racist decision-making process that led to steering me toward ESL courses were normalized by the system.

While individual action may have resulted in preventing my placement in these courses, that action only could have occurred if I or my family had possessed knowledge of the system in the first place.

Names, then, the things at the core of our identities and the foundation for our existences, are anything but neutral as my experience has shown. As Benjamin so astutely notes, “Like a welcome sign inviting people in or a scary mask repelling and pushing them away, this thing that is most ours is also out of our hands” (3). Our names are out of our hands not just in terms of who gives them to us (how we inherit them), but also in terms of how people react to them. And our names change and morph to suit different audiences—sometimes this changing and morphing comes with our consent and sometimes it doesn’t. Yuri becomes Judy. Yesenia becomes Jessie. Enrique becomes Henry or Ricky. This type of transformation occurs to make it “easier” for non-Spanish speakers to pronounce names. Rather than suffer through a several-minute tutorial with an instructor, a student may simply have a prepared nickname ready to go. This translating to suit English is not limited to Hispanic or Latinx people, certainly, but this translation of a name is also a translation of the self under conditions not of one’s own making. Sometimes

we choose to translate ourselves, and sometimes this translation is chosen for us. And sometimes, a choice is not a choice at all, but a demand.

This essay is not really about names, although names are a good starting point. Names are not just names. They are always already a corollary for the people they represent and their histories. Names are palimpsests, constructed and layered with all the history and stories of the people who came before us. This essay is not really about names but about the false invisibility, the false neutrality, they pretend to offer. In the vein of Romeo García, names are hauntings: “hauntings gesture to that which I could not see, but that stained and coinhabited my memory and body and staged my inheritance” (232). My name existed before I did, and I’ve been trying to fit into it ever since.

I’ve ignored my ghosts for a long time, especially those that haunt the ones who came before me. You’ll have noticed a lack of men in my stories, and their absences bend the arc of my story. Their absence is a presence. My attunement to the effects of absence also makes me sensitive to things that claim to be neutral or invisible. Yet, as I consider the hauntings that dwell in myself, I also feel compelled to examine the hauntings of other spaces.

In his “Haunt(ed/ing) Genealogies and Literacies,” García argues, “Predictably, scholars in the academy do not take the position to speak of or on hauntings. Their privilege is not having to address oneself to hauntings” (238). As I continue to engage in writing center work, I seek to address myself to hauntings—both my own hauntings and those which haunt the writing center.

Through unacknowledged hauntings, the writing center is also a wounded place. In her conception of wounded places, Karen Till writes, “Rather than harmed by a singular ‘outside event,’ these forms of violence often work over a period of many years...and continue to structure current social and spatial relations, and as such also structure expectations of what is considered ‘normal’” (6). Framing the writing center as a wounded/ing place is necessary to see how historical discursive and linguistic power structures have shaped how writing centers regulate students and how the work of writing centers themselves is delimited.

However, my current focus is not on phantoms of the past, but those of the present (as if these types of hauntings can ever truly be separated). In particular, I’m drawn to the increasingly invisible nature of online writing labs, or OWLs, and the way this invisible work shapes student experience. I wonder how students interact with these digital spaces, especially when one OWL can be so different from another. One school’s OWL may allow students to submit documents directly

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A Parliament of OWLS • 130 through a submission form, another may act mostly as a repository for documents, and another may allow the student to schedule an appointment. The process by which a writing center decides its OWL’s functionality is largely unseen by the student and, yet, this unseen work has an outsized impact on what a student can actually accomplish through an OWL. That is, the decisions a writing center makes about the functionality of its OWL may largely be based on what the writing center staff believe students should do rather than what students themselves may actually want or need to do.

These decisions may be apparently neutral, but they are likely informed by a set of values related to how writing centers ultimately see themselves. If we could name these values, make visible that which is invisible, perhaps writing centers could enhance the student experience.

Writing Centers as (Web)Sites Writing centers are often preoccupied with their spaces. That is, the space of the writing center itself serves to define the center. Consider the grand narrative of writing centers that Jackie Grutsch McKinney distills in Peripheral Visions of Writing Centers: “writing centers are comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-toone tutoring on their writing” (3, emphasis in original). Her distillation leads into a discussion of the writing center as cozy home, a defining attribute of these spaces.

Grutsch McKinney asserts, “To be legible, indeed, to be read as a writing center, a space needs to have a particular array of objects...we could even say that spaces tell us a story about what they are and how we may use them” (21). For instance, couches and plants are common features of writing centers, in part because these objects further remove the writing center from their prior lab or clinical connotations. Grutsch McKinney notes that writing centers “wanted students to feel welcome and like one big family…The way to send this message to students was to add and arrange objects in ways that evoke home” (24).

One of the main goals of the cozy home is to invite people in, to convince people to visit. Consider Nancy Grimm’s conundrum in her “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform a System of Advantage Based on Race,” where she asks: “What could we do to make our space more welcoming so that we could extend our helpful services to a broader clientele? What did we need to know about them in order to communicate the value of our services?” (75). While she admits the misguided nature of these questions3, these are questions that many writing center administrators struggle with, especially as they relate to making students feel at home. Yet, what is homey to one person may not

be homey to another. As Grutsch McKinney deconstructs the cozy home metaphor, she points out, “These patterns might not be shared by all students, particularly in writing centers when our clientele might include a greater proportion of students who are not white or privileged or American” (25).

Yet, student’s first interactions with the writing center may not involve the physical space at all. In “Exploring the Representation of Scheduling Options and Online Tutoring on Writing Center Websites,” Amanda Bemer posits, it is likely that a writing center website is the first image of a writing center that many students encounter. Because of this, a writing center’s website can be an important persuasive tool in helping students become excited about visiting the center and using its services. More importantly, it is the first step in a user’s experience with a writing center. (23) In the context of online writing labs, the writing center becomes dislocated, and the site itself becomes a synecdoche for the entire writing center. Websites, then, may already perform the suasive function of getting students to access the services available to them or to visit the physical centers.

The importance of writing center websites cannot be overstated in a post-pandemic world, where writing centers that may have offered no online options for tutoring before 2020 suddenly found themselves forced into it. That is, the field of writing centers has suddenly become a parliament of OWLs that perform unknown, invisible work with students we may never physically see. As the field of writing centers moves forward, we need to better understand the work that these sites do as well as the potential harm. How can we avoid merely recreating cozy homes digitally that only work to reinscribe our own values? How do these sites perpetuate the racist, regulatory functions that we know can rise in our field if we are inattentive? Like the hauntings of names we carry with us, what histories from our field, from our society, exist a priori that in turn shape the work of our parliament? And what can we do to mitigate these effects?

What are OWLs?

In his work surveying and communicating with writing center administrators, Mark Shadle notes, “Because defining an OWL is tricky, the respondents wrote more about what they had, rather than about what an OWL should be,” (4) which included items like homepages on “the World Wide Web,” tutoring e-mails, and online resources. Some rarer features include “a grammar hotline archive, an interactive net forum,

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A Parliament of OWLS • 131 general links, links to other schools...critiques of student Web pages, an online survey about writing attitudes, information on summer institutes, and classroom presentations on technology and synchronous courses” (4). Shadle’s chapter is featured in James Inman and Donna Sewell’s edited collection Taking Flight with OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work, which explores many aspects of online writing labs. It was also published at the turn of the millennium, in the year 2000, when the internet was still a place one could go rather than something one carried around all the time.

While some of the language is somewhat outdated, such as the use of “netstream,” and some of the technologies no longer exist (such as the Gopher internet protocol), Shadle’s work provides an interesting snapshot of OWLs at the millennial fin-de-siècle. Or, as he puts it, “These surveys are offered as a still life of OWLs, allowing administrators to tell their stories” (Shadle 4). What becomes clear in his discussion of OWLs is not just the features that make them up but the challenge of creating OWLs in the first place. As a millennial who grew up in an analog world that became increasingly networked, much of the struggles the writing center administrators went through in the past are foreign to me. In 2000, many “OWL builders,” as Shadle refers to them, struggled with budgeting and funding an OWL (10). This aspect of OWL building I struggled to understand at first. I wasn’t quite sure what the funding problems might be related to—perhaps a better modem or staff? As it turns out, the major funding problem was equipment. I was blind to this as a problem because I’ve never worked in a writing center that did not already have computers. Another struggle was writing center staff or students being unfamiliar with technology and administrators not having the time to properly train their staff. One interesting side note from Shadle’s survey is how “one sixth of respondents felt OWLs dramatically affected writing center practice by providing their audience with exciting e-mail encounters” (6, emphasis added). In a world now mediated by e-mail “encounters,” it’s hard to imagine them as exciting.

While some of the struggles that previous generations of writing center administrators went through no longer apply, others are still applicable. For instance, Shadle notes, “OWLs affect tutor training in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. With computer technology constantly changing, pedagogy moves to take advantage of new opportunities for teaching and tutoring” (7). Tutor training is an ongoing issue no matter the decade. Or consider the work of Lady Falls Brown from the same collection as she details the work of establishing an OWL:

the writing center staff reflected on what we were doing and debated the ethics of responding to papers online, concerned about what kinds of comments to make, where to place comments, how many comments to make, and whether online responses violated the principle of face-to-face interaction. (21) My staff and I have similar conversations on an ongoing basis, especially about asynchronous tutoring and how best to enact antiracism or resist the everyday use of oppressive language. In some ways, it’s comforting to know that others struggled with similar questions and problems. In other ways, it’s disconcerting to know we’ve not yet arrived at solid answers. Kathryn Denton points out as much in her 2017, “Beyond the Lore: A Case for Asynchronous Online Tutoring Research.” In her article, Denton writes, “Until research-based studies can yield insights into online tutoring, discussions surrounding this format will remain divided” (178). While she’s mostly arguing for expanding beyond the lore-based tradition of writing centers, her argument also encompasses the need to better understand a practice that has existed “for about three decades” (Denton 177). Part of this lack of research stems from uncertainty surrounding the practice of asynchronous sessions. For many, asynchronous work resembles too closely a “drop-off” service, a model anathema to the field. Yet, Denton argues, it’s the writing center field’s reliance on lore, and nothing about the practice itself, that reinforces the lack of research. She asserts, “Initial scholarship on this format urged caution and reinforced fears of asynchronous online tutoring grounded in lore and stemming from mistrust that the practices surrounding this format look too different from other tutoring practices” (Denton 179). There is much more to learn about technology and asynchronous work in writing centers.

Regardless, Shadle and Brown demonstrate that writing centers have both adopted (and adapted to) technology while also struggling with layers of challenges that using this technology creates. What I hope to do in this article is move further away from a siloed view of technology and consider the various ramifications of its use. While each OWL may implement technology differently, foundational issues such as training and dealing with ethical issues remain.

Unlike with the brick-and-mortar writing center, though, different technologies mediate the student experience when it comes to OWLs.

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A Parliament of OWLS • 132

Race and Technology For this discussion, it’s important to recognize the general impotence of being colorblind or neutral.

Certainly, there may be people who wonder about my supposition here that websites can carry the prejudices of people from the “real” world or that technology can actually discriminate against people. Aren’t we only talking about html or CSS or 0s and 1s? Yes, in one sense. However, this coding does not come from the ether to encode itself. Webpage designs, algorithms, coding—they all come from real, live people who made choices about what to do and how to do it. It’s true that the outcomes of technology may not have been intended, but one does not need intention to be racist.

One only needs to be disinterested and inattentive. So, as we discuss race and technology and racism on our (web) sites, I invite you to be interested and attentive, to pay attention to the real consequences of apparently objective choices.

As Ibram Kendi reminds us in How to be an Antiracist, “The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism...the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it” (9).

Writing centers should strive to cast this antiracist eye not just onto their practices but also to tools that support and mediate their work, including OWLs. While maintaining racist structures or practices requires only a lack of attention, since racist structures constitute themselves and are present in our society a priori, enacting antiracism requires intention and critical engagement with practices, behaviors, and beliefs. One cannot accidentally be antiracist, even if our unconscious actions don’t necessarily produce racist outcomes. Producing antiracist outcomes requires vigilance.

This need for vigilance gives rise to my concern about writing center websites. If writing centers generally aim to create “cozy” spaces, as Grutsch McKinney asserts, but cozy is a coded term that is both raced and classed, and if writing center websites are extensions of the writing center space, how may we be unconsciously coding (metaphorically and literally) these (web)sites to suit particular kinds of students to the disadvantage of others? Even something as apparently objective as a search engine can produce unintentional racist outcomes, as Benjamin notes: “These tech advances are sold as morally superior because they purport to rise above human bias, even though they could not exist without data produced through histories of exclusion and discrimination” (10). These histories also extend, I argue, to how we organize information on our OWLs, how we present options, and what functionalities we tie into our OWLs. In her discussion

on cultivating identification with students, Bemer contends, “writing center directors, professors, and tutors can attempt to figure out the most basic writing needs of all our students in order to reach as many of them as possible” (24). While I don’t argue that effective usability can manifest equity, we must also strive to be transparent in our attempts to figure out writing needs.

Benjamin notes, “even just deciding what problem needs solving requires a host of judgments; and yet we are expected to pay no attention to the man behind the screen” (11). How do we make judgments about our sites and what students can do on them? And is there a way to make these judgments better? That is, we must be attentive to how we make judgments and gain a better understanding of how real students actually use our OWLs.

Producing Antiracist OWLs through User Experience

Kendi’s work on racism and antiracism can be a useful frame for identifying racist or antiracist practices and outcomes. Kendi posits that antiracism “is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas” (20). Underlying Kendi’s conception of racism is the act of intention. For Kendi, “there is no such thing as a notracist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ones” (20).

One cannot be neutrally non-racist. This neutrality only reinforces racist ideas and practices, ideas that position and defend a racial hierarchy. Truly countering racism requires intentional antiracism and the creation of ideas and practices that work to dismantle racial hierarchies.

This effort of intentionally dealing with racism addresses García’s call to reckon with what haunts us. Part of this reckoning also includes “delinking,” as Romeo García and Damían Baca layout in their introduction to Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Colonial Visions. In their introduction, they write, “we must move to delink, to ‘contest,’ what today is as normative or juridical as it has also always been prejudicial and oppressive” (5). They tie this delinking to the creation of a pluriversality of stories and experiences that expand writing and rhetorical studies elsewhere and otherwise—stretching it in new directions and new possibilities, incorporating the voices of many.

Important to note here is that we come to antiracism from this decolonial perspective, rather than the other way around. That is, when we treat decoloniality as a real exigency, rather than just a potential epistemic option, the work of antiracism and social justice can begin.

To incorporate the voices of many, I posit that user experience (UX) theory may be fruitful in producing

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A Parliament of OWLS • 133 antiracist writing center websites (to say nothing of writing center practices more broadly). Jesse Garret, in The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, asserts that “the user experience design process is all about ensuring that no aspect of the user’s experience with your product happens without your conscious, explicit consent” (18). This means we must have a strong understanding of how the user (the student) will navigate or behave on the site. In order to understand what the user will do, we must also understand key aspects of the user. Brian Still and Kate Crane provide a helpful guide to what aspects of the user we must understand in their Fundamentals of User-Centered Design: A Practical Approach: • What users want and need • What they experience in their use environments • What motivates them to use certain products • What makes it possible to use these effectively • What obstacles stand in the way of successful use or problem solving (68) Gathering this information will likely require direct interaction with the users. Still and Crane recommend three types of methods for researching users: “one that captures what users actually do, one that captures what users say, and one where the designer ‘sees’ how users interface with design” (68). These three methods work in tandem to paint a picture of the user and help the designer anticipate how their products are used. In writing centers, there might be some reluctance to think of our sites (or any aspect of our work) as solely a “product” to be used. Yet, in the case of OWLs, this mindset might be helpful in producing successful sites and positive student experiences with the writing center.

Let’s consider the points Still and Crane offer to understanding users in turn. What do your students want and need? This point calls us to be aware of our locally diverse student populations. Who are our students? Are they mostly commuters? Do they live on campus? What is their average age? Are they predominantly white? Black? Hispanic? Asian? What is the gender ratio? It’s also important to consider these questions specifically regarding the writing center. Most third-party appointment platforms will track basic demographic information. If your writing center uses an intake form, either on the site or in person, it might be helpful to have a section where students can check off or fill in why they’re visiting. Otherwise, a survey sent to students directly to gather what they think they need or interviewing a select group of students might be effective methods of addressing this first point.

When considering use environments, we might recast this point as thinking about where students are

when they access our OWLs. In a pandemic, the list of places might be somewhat unlimited. As we think through this point, we might consider whether a student is at home, in a residence hall room, at work, or elsewhere and how they are accessing the site. We can also add another dimension to this point: on what devices are students accessing our sites? Are they using their mobile phone and a cellular connection? Are they on a tablet? A laptop? A desktop? Arguably, the devices themselves impact the user experience. If a site doesn’t appear correctly on its mobile version, this affects what and how a student is able to access. We might ask students, then, where they are when they access OWLs and what devices they use to do so.

While writing center people might struggle with motivating a student to use the center, we can also think through how a website could persuade a student to use the center’s services. I'm not necessarily arguing here that people from different ethnic or racial backgrounds use sites differently; however, we might consider how students from different backgrounds have different motivations and expectations of how a site should work.

Consider Kristen Arola’s work on indigenous interfaces, where she explores how Native Americans would reimagine social media. Ultimately, the visual design aspects of a site faded in importance when compared to the functional aspects of a site. Arola writes, “the respondents imagine an interface that doesn’t necessarily look a certain way but that allows and encourages certain actions important to a group of people” (215). What, then, is important to the students on your campus? Do they want information about the center? What kind of information? Do they want to submit documents through the site? Do they want to schedule appointments? How are these features enabled (or not)? Here, we might seek to better understand why a student is visiting the website in the first place.

Finally, consider the obstacles that stand in students’ way of using the site successfully. Bemer reveals a startling finding in her study: Forty-three percent of writing centers in this study offered online tutoring, nearly half. Of these 43 centers, 16 centers (37.5%) did not have online scheduling for their online tutoring appointments...When scheduling online is mandatory, not providing an online tutoring option creates a disconnect that is possibly shocking— requiring students to use the computer for one act and then totally prohibiting computer use disrupts the act of identification and the connection the student is working to make with the center. When students are trying to understand the writing center

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A Parliament of OWLS • 134 and its value to them, this disconnect in values is confusing. (26) While the raw numbers here have likely changed over time (Bemer wrote her article in 2015), the problematic nature of her finding remains. The student’s work in navigating the site is disrupted, which adds an additional barrier to actually using the site effectively and connecting with the resources the writing center offers. Not all obstacles are necessarily this obvious, though. As Benjamin points out, “While more institutions and people are outspoken against blatant racism, discriminatory practices are becoming more deeply embedded within the sociotechnical infrastructure of everyday life” (34). That is, writing centers must also confront cultural hauntings around technology, especially the myth of its objectivity, and work to mitigate unintentional student experiences.

Writing centers must work to delink technology from its apparent neutrality in order to avoid moving the inherent oppressiveness of writing center work from their physical locations to digital ones. We must then be vigilant in our watch against these deeply embedded practices and bringing students into our processes is one way to ensure these practices can be rooted out.

My own institution’s work with antiracism and my department’s website is ongoing. I oversee a Learning Commons, which includes the library, testing, tutoring (which houses the writing center), and user (tech) support. It’s a relatively new website, completed in fall of 2020 as my institution completed a collegewide reorganization. One advantage we have is that we were able to build the website “in house” as long as we adhered to general marketing and branding guidelines.

As we built the website, we thought primarily of accessibility and made sure each page could be re-sized, that it worked well on different types of devices, and could still be used with a screen reader. As the website approaches its first full year of use, we’re preparing a usability test like the one described here. This test will help us better identify the parts of the site that are working and the parts that could be improved, especially the pages that see a high-level of visitors, such as our tutoring and user support pages. What’s been encouraging is the willingness of Learning Commons staff (who are mostly white) to engage in these conversations and their enthusiasm for wanting to produce equitable outcomes.

centers are coding their websites, which are arguably extensions of their physical spaces, in similar ways, privileging certain perspectives and uses over others?

What if writing centers have brought the ghosts, their hauntings, from their physical spaces into their digital ones? How can we know if we’re doing this? And what can we do about it?

In part, this article that began about names and invisible histories attempts to answer these very questions. An antiracist lens may be helpful in re-seeing what would normally be invisible to us, both in terms of what kind of information is on an OWL and in terms of what the OWL allows students to do. Yet, antiracism only allows us to see the problem. From there, we must then take steps to mitigate the problem. Ultimately, I’m arguing that focusing on user experience, and bringing in the perspectives of those using our OWLs, is one potential way to bring what haunts us from the shadowy corners of our vision into full view and to cast them out.

Increasingly, especially in whatever a post-pandemic world looks like, we are a parliament of OWLs. As much as we might learn from our students in recreating or reimagining our websites, I hope that we can also learn from each other. Some OWLs are robust while others may still be in the early stages of development. Even so, who can say what challenges the years ahead might bring as our students expect more, or differently, from our digital spaces?

While this article focused on OWLs, there are certainly other aspects of online writing center work worth exploring. Online asynchronous tutoring, for instance, has not yet developed a fleshed out set of best practices, and it’s worrying to think that this valuable service could be discounted or mistrusted when viewed through the traditional best practices of the writing center. The field would be enriched by a better understanding of how asynchronous tutoring actually works, to say nothing of synchronous online tutoring.

Finally, as technology advances and writing centers adapt and adopt new technologies, it’s important to consider our approach to incorporating these technologies into our work rather than just the specific software or hardware. Continuously viewing our processes through an antiracist lens is a long-term way of ensuring we remain vigilant about the work we do and the outcomes of that work.

Conclusion Grutsch McKinney posits that the intentional coding of writing center spaces as cozy homes necessarily invokes and privileges white and middle/upper class perceptions (25). What if writing

Notes 1. Compare to Gloria Anzaldúa’s experience in “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” from Borderlands/La Frontera.

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A Parliament of OWLS • 135 2. As Anthony Quiroz writes in Claiming Citizenship: Mexican Americans in Victoria, Texas.

3. Grimm notes, “Our willingness to ask those questions (misguided as they were), our efforts to find answers…led us toward some hard lessons” (75).

Works Cited

Flight with OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work, eds. James Inman and Donna Sewell, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000, pp. 3-16.

Still, Brian and Kate Crane. Fundamentals of User-Centered Design: A Practical Approach. CRC, 2016.

Till, Karen. “Wounded Cities: Memory-Work and a PlaceBased Ethic of Care.” Political Geography, vol. 31, 2012, pp. 3-14.

Arola, Kristin. “Indigenous Interfaces.” Social Writing/Social Media: Pedagogy, Presentation, and Publics. Eds. Douglas Walls and Stephanie Vie. WAC Clearinghouse Perspectives on Writing Series, U Colorado P, 2017.

Bemer, Amanda. “Exploring the Presentation of Scheduling Options and Online Tutoring on Writing Center Websites.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol.

12, no. 2, 2015.

Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019.

Denton, Kathryn. “Beyond the Lore: A Case for Asynchronous Online Tutoring Research.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 2, 2017, pp. 175-203.

Falls Brown, Lady. “OWLs in Theory and Practice: A Director’s Perspective.” Taking Flight with OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work, eds. James Inman and Donna Sewell, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000, pp. 17-28.

García, Romeo. “Haunt(ed/ing) Genealogies and Literacies.” Reflections, vol. 19, no. 1, 2019.

García, Romeo and Damían Baca. Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions. NCTE, 2019.

García, Romeo and José M. Cortez. “The Trace of a Mark that Scatters: The Anthropoi and the Rhetoric of Decoloniality.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 2, 2020, pp. 93-108.

Grutsch McKinney, Jackie. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers. Utah State UP, 2013.

Garrett, Jesse. The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond. New Riders, 2011.

Grimm, Nancy. “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform A System of Advantage Based on Race.” In Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Change and Dialogue, edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, pp. 75-99. Utah State UP, 2011.

Kendi, Ibram. How to Be an Antiracist. One World, 2019.

Mignolo, Walter D. “Decoloniality and Phenomenology: The Geopolitics of Knowing and Epistemic/Ontological Colonial Differences.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 32, no. 3, 2018, pp.

360-387.

Shadle, Mark. “The Spotted OWL: Online Writing Labs as Sites of Diversity, Controversy, and Identity.” Taking Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 1 (2022) www.praxisuwc.com

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TRANSFORMATIVE LISTENING: MAKING LIVED EXPERIENCES VISIBLE Rachel Stark Oklahoma State University rachel.m.stark@okstate.edu The purpose of this column is to explicate how the call for proposals for the 2020 South Central Writing Center Association (SCWCA) Conference impacted our enactment of transformative listening as graduate students in the Oklahoma State University (OSU) English department. We were specifically intrigued by the call for proposals for the 2020 SCWCA Conference because of our university’s history as one institution of many settled on land belonging to indigenous communities. Despite the fact that this conference was one of many affected by the COVID19 Pandemic and therefore did not take place as intended, we were still challenged by this call, as well as the call for papers for this special issue of Praxis challenging scholars to acknowledge how our history continues to influence our present. Due to this history, it can be particularly challenging to build community while also avoiding the friction that can come from this in a predominantly white space such as the OSU Writing Center.

Transformative listening—as detailed by Romeo Garcia in the call for proposals to establish a "mindfulness of difference”—is a necessary action the OSU Writing Center as well as others with similar histories must take.

In the following pages, we describe what transformative listening is and can look like within the writing center space as well as specific examples of how students and scholars alike can utilize it to make their practice more effective.

Writing centers are places where people come together to co-create. This requires a space that encourages and nurtures writers from all sorts of different backgrounds. It is a place where consultants can and should strive to advocate for student voices, as Romeo Garcia says (Garcia 32). As advocates for student voices across a wide variety of backgrounds, writing centers and their consultants can work together to aid in “providing pathways so that students can negotiate the academy successfully” (32-33). Garcia points out that listening can work as a “form of actional and decolonial work” (33). This transformative listening is described by Garcia as listening “to the world, well and deeply” (52). It is necessary to understand how this listening can be used to recognize our history and how it impacts our present.

One community of historically marginalized voices we often see in the writing center are multilingual

Kennedy Essmiller Oklahoma State University kennewe@ostatemail.okstate.edu writers. There is a “potential for writing centers to be transformative for teaching and learning when curious, open-minded, empathetic peer tutors invite multilingual writers to negotiate and co-construct meaning” (Blazer and Fallon). Sarah Blazer and Brian Fallon’s work on multilingual justice and writing centers also point out how collaboration and co-creation through this type of open-minded and empathetic listening and learning allows people to help each other succeed in their interactions (Blazer and Fallon). While Blazer and Fallon are specifically speaking into the experience of multilingual writers, the importance of maintaining and encouraging cultural identities as well as utilizing openminded and empathetic listening and learning extends to a variety of lived experiences ranging from sexuality to gender to race, among others. Essentially, writing centers exist in spaces wherein transformative listening can be used to combat the historical silencing of marginalized voices.

Romeo Garcia discusses the importance of embracing and encouraging the role of the writing center in making the lived experience of race visible in his piece “Unmaking Gringo-Centers.” Garcia, who is an Assistant Professor in Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University Utah emphasizes the importance of listening, again calling attention to the need to listen “to the world, well and deeply” (Garcia 52). Therefore, we have provided some examples in our writing center practices where we transferred and applied this understanding. All of this, the OSU Writing Center does through the framework of employing an ethics of care, as guided by our writing center director Anna Sicari.

What can transformative listening look like, and how can we listen in such a way that lends itself to transformation and change? There are two primary forms of listening that we focus on as seen within our writing center--empathetic listening and authentic listening. These types of listening can and should be used by our consultants to engage in transformative listening and thereby co-creating a mindfulness of difference within our writing center spaces.

One type of listening we find in the writing center is a more empathetic listening. Empathy, as the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, is a beneficial form of listening that can ultimately lend itself to transformative listening. This listening tends to have

Transformative Listening: Making Lived Experiences Visible • 137 the ability to open people up as they realize that they are being listened to. This allows for a space of acceptance and encourages people to feel comfortable making their identity visible and speak without the fear of judgment.

Writers are thus enabled to share their own concerns and experiences, inviting the listener to respond. In the writing center, this type of listening encourages the consultant (the listener) to open a dialogue with the writer (the speaker) about their lived experiences. This can lead to building relationships between the consultant and the writer, laying the groundwork for the co-creation of a space mindful of difference, bringing in the variety of backgrounds--from different races to different disciplines--to form an environment that is able to effect change. However, understanding and sharing the feelings of others--especially marginalized members of our communities--cannot enact change by itself alone. It is simply one step in the right direction.

Authentic listening is another form we find in our interactions with writers. While empathetic listening serves to open a dialogue, authentic listening serves to confirm the writer and their experiences. This listening tends to involve confirmation of what the writer has to say, which might present itself as verbal cues such as words of reassurance as well as nonverbal cues such as head nodding. For example, if a multilingual writer comes into the writing center with comments from their professor telling them that their English is not up to their standards, authentic listening can provide these writers with a space to feel reassured and have the importance of their voice confirmed. This type of listening leaves the writer and consultant with feelings of understanding. This confirmation allows writers to feel comfortable representing their identities in the writing center space. Thus, in the case of the multilingual writer, they would feel empowered to include their own voice and represent their own experiences in the writing center. Here again, we find Garcia's specific call for "mindfulness of difference" to be particularly important.

Because we are not always able to fully understand the experiences of the different writers with whom we work, we must understand the importance of learning with difference. Ultimately, as with empathetic listening, authentic listening can be a step in the right direction towards transformative change in the writing center spaces, allowing for the voices and lived experiences of marginalized members to be heard and made visible.

True transformative listening requires action— action on both the scale of the individual writing center consultants as well as on the larger scale of the institution as a whole. That action might look different depending on the type of listening employed as well as the lived experiences being made visible, both by the

writer and the consultant. For example, because empathetic listening serves to open a dialogue, actions that can follow that might include something as seemingly small as a critical conversation about how the consultant might better serve the writer in light of their experiences, or it can even open the door to a larger conversation within the writing center, leading to a semester focused on how the writing center can serve a particular marginalized community. Transformative listening can lead to the implementation of various practices such as antiracist pedagogy as well as services that serve the LGBTQIA+ community like our own Oklahoma State University Safe Zone training. These are often the result of these dialogues opening up because of empathetic listening. On the scale of individual consultants, we are often inspired by empathetic listening to engage in these trainings as well as encourage others to do so.

Authentic listening can lead to actions such as the building of a community within the writing center. For example, in our Oklahoma State University Writing Center, the act of authentic listening can result in the creation of an inquiry group consisting of writing center consultants who come together to discuss their own lived experiences such as a group dedicated to graduate students specifically or LGBTQIA+ people and allies.

These different forms of listening can provide the “opportunity to learn from the encounters and interactions that take place in our writing centers” (Garcia 40). As consultants and as writing centers as a whole, we have the obligation to learn from our lived experiences and the lived experiences of those with whom we engage. Not only will these lessons improve us as consultants and instructors, but they will also better us as members of our communities.

Transformative listening requires making lived experiences visible both on the writer’s side as well as the consultant’s. Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison discusses in the chapter “Being Seen and Not Seen: A Black Female Body in the Writing Center” her own experiences as a black woman in a predominantly white space, both at her university and within the writing center where she worked. Haltiwanger Morrison comments on how she either felt ignored or singled out because of her lived experiences as a black woman. She says that because of the insistence of those around her declaring they did not see race, she felt they did not see her (Haltiwanger Morrison 21). On the other hand, she also describes feeling called out by her instructor in the classroom specifically because of her race (23). After responding when she was called out, her peers determined that she had not “spoken ‘authentically’ as a Black person nor shared an appropriate Black response”

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Transformative Listening: Making Lived Experiences Visible • 138 (23). Not only did these experiences affect her in the classroom, they reached into her experiences as a consultant in her writing center as well.

As a consultant, Haltiwanger Morrison had a session in which a client was “looking to make money from exploiting Black women’s struggles to care for [their] hair—to make money” (25). She describes feeling a physical reaction to the way he could “sit beside [her] and discuss it so objectively, analytically” (25). In this instance, Haltiwanger Morrison found that this student was not reciprocating the types of listening we outline above in which consultants and writers both make their lived experiences visible in efforts to facilitate dialogue and effect change. Haltiwanger Morrison questions “But what of the tutors? Where was the line between [her] obligation to the student and [her] own personal safety?” (26). Therefore, it is necessary that writing centers do not sacrifice their consultants for the sake of the writers. In fact, we argue that the safety of our consultants as well as our writers are required for true transformative listening and making lived experiences visible. Again, actions are required for true transformative listening. Specifically, there is an issue within the writing center spaces of people listening passively instead of authentically. True transformative listening requires actions such as the revision of policies to protect consultants and writers alike who experience things like racism and sexism.

In terms of making our own lived experiences visible, we have outlined here a few of the different ways it has impacted our work. Working as women in our writing center, we have found that female-identifying writers feel more comfortable booking sessions with female-identifying consultants. We find that as writers ourselves we feel more comfortable engaging in sessions with female-identifying consultants. As consultants, we have experienced male-identifying writers who have either chosen a male-identifying consultant over us or who have not respected our authority on the subject of writing. We have each had experiences with maleidentifying writers who have either ignored our suggestions or pushed back against what we had to say in a session. A male-identifying writer might come in and, when presented with the option of either a maleidentifying consultant or a female-identifying consultant, prefer the male-identifying consultant because of his assumed authority. By making our lived experiences as women visible, we can make other female-identifying writers comfortable contributing to the writing center space. Through these experiences, we can identify ways in which our writing center space can be improved.

However, identifying ways in which our writing center space can be improved is only the first step in a series of steps needed to effectively recognize and incorporate the lived experiences of others. It is necessary to listen “well and deeply” as Garcia said to create a writing center space in which all lived experiences can be made visible (Garcia 52). We agree that as consultants in university writing centers, it is our responsibility to partner with our writers and their instructors to best equip students with the tools they need to succeed within the academy. Because universities, and by extension writing centers, are rooted in historical racist/sexist/Western practices, there is a “tendency to reduce or retrofit students of color” as well as students belonging to other marginalized communities (32-33). This past continues to make its mark on our present. Therefore, it is our responsibility to initiate this change through transformative listening and making lived experiences visible, thus taking the first step to emphasize the voices who have been systematically silenced.

Works Cited Blazer, Sarah, and Brian Fallon. “Changing Conditions for Multilingual Writers: Writing Centers Destabilizing Standard Language Ideology.” Composition Forum, 2020, https://doi.org/https://compositionforum.com/issue /44/changing-conditions.php.

Esters, Jason B. “On the Edges: Black Maleness, Degrees of Racism, and Community on the Boundaries of the Writing Center.” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, Edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, Utah State University Press, 2011, pp. 290-299.

Garcia, Romeo. “Unmaking Gringo Centers.” The Writing Center Journal 36.1, 2017, pp. 29-60.

Haltiwanger Morrison, Talisha. “Being Seen and Not Seen: A Black Female Body in the Writing Center.” Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles, by Harry C. Denny et al., Utah State University Press, 2018, pp. 21–27.

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COACH PRIME AND ME: DEION SANDERS’ IMPACT ON MY ACADEMIC SELF Karen Keaton Jackson North Carolina Central University kkjackson@nccu.edu Recently, I have been finding my academic inspiration from a most unlikely place: a college football coach. It’s Deion Sanders --- former National Football League (NFL) and Major League Baseball (MLB) player, Deion Sanders. While he dominated professional football far more than professional baseball in the 1990s and early 2000s, he remains the only athlete who has competed in both an MLB World Series and an NFL Super Bowl. Often called by the name “Prime Time,” NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders was known during his sports career for his bodacious ego, flashy attire, and his ability to back up his swag on the football field.

Sanders has built his career and his entire reputation on being a winner and dominating his crafts. While it may feel like somewhat of a stretch, I see that we can learn much from Coach Prime in the field of Composition and Writing Center Studies. There are several scholars and thought-leaders in our field who have built their careers and developed successful writing programs and writing centers at large R-1 universities and other institutions with stable financial support, high visibility, and tangible resources. What they can learn from Coach Sanders is it is time to use their status and resources to create new experiences and opportunities for reciprocal success at other institution types.

Deion Sanders has brought an expectation of authority and success to the HBCU sports realm.

Currently, Sanders is championing the idea of exposure for HBCU football teams on mainstream television channels (such as ESPN) and ultimately access to the NFL Combine and into the League. His strategy includes hiring film crews to document his team and the teams they battle each week. He believes that with more scouts having access to see these athletes, they are more likely to have a chance at being recruited. Overall, his goal is to give voice, recognition, and tangible opportunities to those who often are excluded from mainstream athletic conversations. Connected to that, his broader goal is to give respect to the spaces, HBCUs, that create these athletes.

In 2019, Deion Sanders accepted a position as the head football coach at Jackson State University (JSU), a public HBCU in Jackson, Mississippi. Many questioned his decision, noting that he had been a commentator on CBS and the NFL Network and certainly had many

options to go to larger programs for his coaching career.

And yet, he chose a historically black university in a small town in Mississippi. In several interviews, he has noted that for him, this is not just a job, but a calling.

He sees it as a mission beyond helping the student athletes just at JSU, but as a way to provide exposure for all HBCU athletes who often are overlooked because they do not get as much airtime on television and because NFL teams rarely send scouts to these institutions.

In May 2021, Sanders was questioned on the YouTube show I Am Athlete by other outstanding African American former NFL stars, many who went to large or “Power 5” colleges known for their football programs. Specifically, they questioned the quality of the talent on his HBCU team, the conditions of the facilities and resources available at the institution, and the value of the reputation of the institution. Sanders confidently responds that those Power 5 institutions only got those reputations when the top black players left HBCUs to go play for those institutions. In the I Am Athlete episode, he touts the historical legacy of top football players who specifically came from Jackson State University; that institution had four (4) players be awarded Hall of Fame status, more than any other university in Mississippi (Go JSU Tigers), and more than most top large football programs. (most occurring before top players began to more frequently join large PWI programs) In addition, he argues that if you were to take the top player from any HBCU team and place him on the field from a top player from a larger program – no resources, no facilities, no supporting team or established play system – just one man against another, he believes you will see very little difference between them in terms of raw talent and potential.

What I find most inspiring by Sanders’s attitude is that he is requiring action on both sides. He has identified the gap and is calling on both HBCUs and the NFL to step up their game so that ultimately, the students, their institutions, and the NFL all benefit. In my 2016 Writing Center Journal Community Series blog series and even more recently in the 2019 CCC article I co-authored with Hope Jackson and Dawn HicksTafari, “We Belong in the Discussion: Including HBCUs in Conversations About Race and Writing,” the

Coach Prime and Me: Deion Sanders’ Impact on My Academic Self • 140 primary message in both pieces is a call to action. I am clear in challenging mainstream professional organizations and R1 institutions with the resources to be inclusive of the colleges that actually teach the demographics many of their academians study.

Similarly, here, I am challenging more HBCUs to speak up and demand respect and action. I must caution everyone here to note that demanding respect does not equate begging for inclusion. In other words, I am not looking for projects where the inclusion of HBCUs helps others check a diversity box, where they benefit from access to our students, yet our institutions or learners get nothing in return. These should be projects taking place that provide benefits to both sides.

In past conversations and discourse with colleagues, a dominant perspective seemed to be a genuine sense of disbelief that the HBCU context brought a type of knowledge that other spaces could not. Thus, our intent with the 2019 CCC article was to lay the theoretical framework that justified why HBCUs bring unique knowledge to the table and why our spaces are worthy of study and respect. Yet, in my anecdotal conversations with colleagues from all institution types, I have yet to hear of many collaborative projects between HBCUs and PWIs. Granted, I realize that I am not the gatekeeper for all-things-HBCU. I also recognize that COVID has altered many of our institution’s plans over the last couple of years, so very few of us are operating in optimal ways.

But, the time for talk is over. Action is long overdue. Too many scholars have written works and given keynote speeches about being inclusive of HBCUs and other minorities serving institutions, or MSIs. Yet, when they are directly approached with project ideas or have the opportunity to connect, several do not follow through. Or better yet, when directly approached, multiple responses to me have been something to the effect of, “When you figure out what you need, you know where to find me.”

The implication in that response is that they are not interested in any meaningful collaborations, or intentional discourse about how we can both take part in this exchange. It’s dismissive, to say the least. Real work takes extensive time, energy, and commitment.

That response essentially demonstrates a “blame-thevictim” mentality, highlighting that they are unwilling to assist in bringing about change. The reality is, I do not have all of the answers figured out. Do I have some ideas? Yes. But, I will never purport myself as someone who is all-knowing in this space. In addition, I recognize that my ideas can and should be strengthened, nurtured, and likely transformed into something even greater once they are paired with the ideas of someone from a

different context and with a distinct set of experiences and resources.

Coach Deion Sanders’ team and other HBCU teams will benefit from his own personal brand and the attention that naturally brings. NFL greats such as Troy Aikman have been seen at his Jackson State football games, mentoring his players. Rather than hoarding the resources for his own individual gain, Sanders sees it as his responsibility to use those talents to uplift others.

Not only does Sanders mentor his players, he mentors his staff. Recently, one of his own Jackson State assistant coaches was hired as an assistant coach in the NFL. Moreover, since Sanders announced his arrival at Jackson State University, former NFL players Eddie George and Tyrone Wheatley have accepted head coaching positions at Tennessee State University and Morgan State University respectively, both HBCUs. In a separate sport, golf, NBA star Stephen Curry recently agreed to fund personally the collegiate golf team at Howard University for the next six years in order to restore its status as a Division I sport.

Recently, I learned of two amazing colleagues who demonstrate what true and intentional collaborations can look like. Both are HBCU graduates. One, Dr. Hope Jackson, is the coordinator of the English Graduate Program at her HBCU alma mater, North Carolina A&T State University. The other, Dr. Khristen Scott, is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. I first met Dr. Scott when was still a graduate student at the University of Louisville. She always maintained that she would not forget the value of her experiences at her alma mater, Tugaloo College, and that once she completed her doctoral studies she would intentionally connect with HBCUs. She followed through on that promise and recently reached out to Dr. Hope Jackson with a research and professional development opportunity that benefitted both A&T students and those at the University of Pittsburgh. I will not go into detail here about the project’s parameters, for I think the two of them should tell that story in their own way and in their own time. However, they are proof positive that when colleagues come together and plan proactively, they can bring out the best in each other in a way that they, their students, and their institutions benefit.

To bring it full circle to the purpose of our conversation today, those in the field of Composition Studies with healthy budgets and a plethora of resources at larger – those who genuinely and sincerely care about leveling the playing field (to keep with our sports theme) have an obligation to use their talents to engage in quality research and professional activities with those

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Coach Prime and Me: Deion Sanders’ Impact on My Academic Self • 141 institutions that do not. It’s time to put up or shut up.

Are you in?

Works Cited “Deion Sanders.” https://www.biography.com/athlete/deion-sanders “Deion Sanders: Head Coach.” https://gojsutigers.com/sports/football/roster/coach es/deion-sanders/152 Deprisco, Mike. “Curry Details Story Behind Funding Howard Golf Team.” 8 April 2021. https://www.nbcsports.com/washington/wizards/ste ph-curry-details-story-behind-funding-howarduniversity-golf-team Jackson, Karen Keaton and Hope Jackson and Dawn Hicks-Tafari. “We Belong in the Discussion: Including HBCUs in Conversations About Race and Writing.” CCC Dec. 2019.

“A Prime Time Season Finale.” I Am Athlete. 31 May 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUmmLo9omE 8

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 1 (2022)

CORNERSTONE Neisha Anne Green American University ngreen@american.edu The call for papers offered by Romeo Garcia and Anna Sicari for this special issue of Praxis invited scholars in the field of writing center studies to acknowledge the ways our field’s history accretes in the present despite our collective inclinations to move on.

We are haunted, the editors argue, by the persistent presence in the writing center of those peoples we have historically surveilled, policed, and controlled: Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color who may well enter the writing center but are never permitted to arrive. As a field, we are called by Garcia and Sicari to reckon with our history.

To do the work Garcia and Sicari demand of writing center studies will be hard for, as James Baldwin once wrote, “[P]eople who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world” (175). If we read Baldwin’s words carefully, allow our good opinions of ourselves to be pierced by them, we may notice that they, too, include a call - for those who have been so well served by the histories we have written to listen, learn, and yield to the vision and leadership of those who would change the course of history and have the means and will to change the world.

Writing center folks do good work. Writing centers are good places. To say a history of injustice of systemic and institutional racism accretes in them is not an act of disloyalty nor a dismissal of their importance in the writing lives of the students with whom we work. It is, however, to speak with courage and forthrightness the truth that writing centers have served as shibboleths of white supremacy and will continue to do so for as long as our principles and practices are built upon white and whitely needs and interests and serve as sites for the reproduction of white privilege. To speak and write well about the ways and degrees to which writing centers are haunted by our histories (and by well we mean to speak in ways that enable meaningful anti-racist change), will require us to take a big dose of racial realism.

Recently, Frankie was a guest on the podcast, Let’s Be Clear, hosted by New York State Senator James Sanders Jr. with fellow guest Rashad Shabazz. The question they were discussing is why critical race theory is currently under attack. At one point, Frankie was talking about calling a nation to live up to the principles

Frankie Condon University of Waterloo fcondon@waterloo.ca it espouses. Dr. Shabazz responded by reminding listeners of the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol Building. Referencing Afro-Pessimism and the work of critical race theorist, Frank Wilderson, Dr. Shabazz argued that the Capital attack raises the question of whether white Americans would rather burn the nation to the ground than live in a racially just and equitable republic.

This question haunts us. As we talk together, we think of states that are systematically defunding public higher education even as the student populations of their colleges and universities become increasingly diverse. We think of the chronic underfunding of writing centers that so often serve students who are marginalized within predominantly white institutions including first generation college attenders, poor and working-class students, multilingual students, and Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color. But we note that direct assaults are not the only means by which equity, access, and opportunity may be obstructed or prevented, whether in the nation’s capital or in our colleges and universities.

We are reminded of WEB Dubois’ prescient observation that ““we have the somewhat inchoate idea that we are not destined to be harassed with great social questions, and that even if we are, and fail to answer them, the fault is with the question and not with us.

Consequently, we often congratulate ourselves more on getting rid of a problem than on solving it” (157). In a similar vein, James Baldwin writes, “reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see” is “utterly futile, of course, since they do see what they see. And what they see is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history, known all over the world. What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present, condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility.

But since, in the main, they appear to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it” (173). We are also reminded of Cornel West’s incisive distinction between optimism and hope.

Dr. West argues that optimism is the mindless assertion that “things will get better” despite all evidence to the contrary, while hope lies in determined and deliberate engagement with that evidence (Prisoner of Hope). With Garcia and Sicari, we worry that when writing center scholars, directors, and tutors focus too early and too

Cornerstone • 143 hard on making the case that we have arrived someplace worth being, we fail to think carefully and critically about the anti-racist journey we should and, indeed, could be on.

The term, anti-racism, turns on a particular understanding of racism and white supremacy as ubiquitous: baked into western political philosophy, capitalism, and social and cultural life. Quite deliberately, we think, the term “anti-racism” suggests that if you ain’t with us you against us or that if you aren’t doing anti-racism then you are - by dint, at least, of the accretion of history in the present and by the degree to which we are all steeped in the ideological commitments of a white supremacist racial order - doing racism. The term is purposefully provocative, designed to agitate, to discombobulate, to disconcert. This provocation is necessary, we think, because of the degree to which the existing racial order is normalized as “commonsense” and so natural as to be, for many of us, nearly or utterly invisible. Discomfort, we believe, is an enabling condition for learning when and if we can choose what Garcia terms “transformative listening” over and against refusal.

Thanks to Craig Steven Wilder’s exceptional book, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, we now have a better understanding of the intertwined history of slavery and the emergence of the American university and college system. There is no secret now in the fact that no college could or would have survived the colonial world without attaching itself to the Atlantic slave trade in some way.

The foundations of higher education as we know it in the United States were established at the pinnacle of the slave trade. Churches that sought to expand into the new colonies invested in colleges by capitalizing on the new wealth being produced by their slave owning members. The boards of these schools were largely comprised of slave traders and owners who often went south to fundraise from wealthy Christians, who, in turn, sought education for their sons in these institutions. The young men of the slaveholding South would arrive at university with their slaves and pay extra for the “luxury” of possessing a slave at school.

Universities also owned slaves who were charged with maintaining the grounds, farming to produce the food the men and tutors ate, and yes, maintaining the cafeteria as well. Not much has changed has it? It is important to note that without the financial backing of those happy to profit from the slave trade the schools we now associate with the Ivy League wouldn’t have survived.

Slavery buttressed the University system. Built with profits garnered from the most extreme forms of racist oppression and exploitation, with racist ideas and

ideologies in the very mortar and stones of American colleges, it is little wonder that, despite some folks’ best efforts, we are still writing and talking about racism in our writing centers even as the political right within and beyond the academy attempts to dismiss and discredit critical race theory by distorting, diminishing, and misrepresenting what it is and does.

With Lerone Bennett Jr. we believe that “the problem of race in America...is a white problem. And to solve that problem we must seek its source, not in the Negro but in the white American (in the process by which he was educated, in the needs and complexes he expresses through racism) and in the structure of the white community (in the power arrangements and the illicit uses of racism in the scramble for scarce values: power, prestige, income) (Ebony 1). We note that, by and large, Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color are doing the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) grunt work in our field and beyond while white folks manage the speed and degree of change - with the rather obvious result the work of BIPOC doing DEI hard labour is doomed to failure as white folks prohibit, obstruct, minimize and delay meaningful change. We got the wrong people doing the wrong kinds of work. BIPOC should be the visionaries and architects of anti-racist change while, at their direction, white folks do the hard labour for a while. And some of that hard labour has got to be demolishing what we have created, what has been created in our name, and what we have enjoyed without acknowledging the harm we do.

In a speech decrying the absence of women of color at a feminist conference, Audre Lorde writes that “those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (1984, p.2). With particular regard to writing centers, too often, we believe our work has been organized around teaching writers of color to play a game designed to ensure that the odds are not in their favor. Regardless of our field’s historical embrace of the axiom that we make better writers, not better writing, when we work with writers of color, we have ignored the ways and degrees to which language is bound up with identity: with culture, community, and with self-hood. And we have also ignored the reality that linguistic supremacism is neither an effect of Othered Englishes nor the presence of Othered bodies in historically white spaces, but of white supremacy and racism (Young, 2011). To begin

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Cornerstone • 144 from where we are, then - from the institutional site of the writing center will require that we study what racism and white supremacy are, their history, how they work and operate; learn to recognize, acknowledge, and honor the leadership of Peoples of Color in the work of dismantling them, drawing on that newfound knowledge and following that leadership to build a new house.

Among the convictions - and commitments - widely shared by anti-racist scholars, teachers and tutors, and activists whose work is deeply informed by critical race theory is this: we believe that for there to be change, walls buttressed by racism must crumble and the foundations set upon white supremacy must be torn down: renovation or retrofitting for racial justice will always be insufficient to the cause of racial justice.

Further, we believe that the work of building anew is not merely the work of People of Colour, but the particular responsibility of the beneficiaries of the historical legacies conferred by white supremacy and racism.

Dismantling the master’s house is the work of the master’s descendants. Because race is a white construct and racism and white supremacy the tools with which a white supremacist and racist social order was constructed, white folks need now to create the tools by which this old house may be demolished.

And yet, this will not be sufficient. For once the house is down, white folks need to get the hell out of the way. An anti-racist writing center - to the extent we can imagine such a space - will be one in which the stone we refused in the building of earlier writing centers becomes the cornerstone. That is, such a space will have to be designed by and, in the first instance, for Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Colour. To be a part of this change, white and whitely writing center folks will need to take up Neisha Anne Green’s insistent call that we reject allyship, refuse to merely stand beside BIPOC folk as they do the hard work and instead learn to be antiracist accomplices (2018).

We ask readers of this special issue, as we ask ourselves, to embrace being uncomfortable, for we believe that only from that condition can we forge the tools needed to disrupt, intervene, and begin to dismantle the legacy of white supremacy that haunts our field and our writing centers; only from the condition of discomfort can we hope to serve the cause of more fully realized racial justice and equality. We seek to learn and invite readers to join us in learning to share the responsibility for building a new house for our work. We see the collective labour of anti-racist activism within and beyond the academy as requiring raced-white peoples to yield, both to the architectural design and to the leadership of Peoples of Colour, and to take it in

turns, with People of Colour, to be the tool or to act as builders. Racial justice, we believe is a shared responsibility. (the beat drops and the now nostalgic double-skank of reggae builds a vibe) The stone that the builder refuse Will always be the head cornerstone—sing it brother!

The stone that the builder refuse Will always be the head cornerstone You’re a builder, baby Here I am, a stone Don’t you pick and refuse me ‘Cause the things people refuse Are the things people should choose Do you hear me?

Hear what I say? (Bob Marley) Works Cited Baldwin, James. “Unnamable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes.” The White Problem in America. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1966.

Bennett, Lerone. “The White Problem in America.” The White Problem in America. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1966.

Green, Neisha Anne. “Moving Beyond Alright.” The Writing Center Journal, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp15-3.

Bob Marley and the Wailers. “Corner Stone.” Rainbow Country, 1998. https://www.allmusic.com/album/rainbow-countryorange-street-mw0000050630?1631624813788 (accessed 14 September, 2021).

Shabazz, Rashad. Interview. Let’s Be Clear. Senator James Sanders, Jr. 10 September, 2021, https://youtu.be/RJ9819RIowo West, Cornel. “Prisoner of Hope.” https://www.alternet.org/2005/01/prisoners_of_hope / (accessed 14 September, 2021).

Wilder, Craig Steven. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Trouble History of America’s University. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 1 (2022)

MAKING AND TAKING UP SPACE AS A BLACK WOMAN AT A PREDOMINANTLY WHITE INSTITUTION Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison University of Oklahoma tmhmorrison@ou.edu My friend Sherri and I (Craig and Haltiwanger Morrison 2021) have been thinking and writing a lot lately about the challenges of being Black women in higher education and how Black women in academia make space and create ways to support one another, helping others navigate the strange and difficult and often oppressive environments of higher education and academia, specifically the environments of predominantly or historically white institutions (PHWI).

I’ve spent pretty much my entire educational career in predominantly white spaces. So, often, being in these spaces does not bother me because I’m used to it. I’ve built up a tolerance or barrier to many of the subtle reminders that I am somewhere I was not meant to be.

But then, I reach a point where tolerating leaves me exhausted. I feel drained and weary and have knots of tension in my back and shoulders.

Turns out there’s a downside to increased racial awareness. Reading, writing, and thinking about race so frequently makes it impossible to dismiss subtle microaggressions as harmless or irrelevant to my identity. Incidents such as someone interrupting me, failing to see or acknowledge me, or being afraid of me I might have, in the past, wondered about, trying to determine why it had happened. Now, I attribute these moments to others’ reactions to my embodied identity as a Black woman. For example, once on my way to a meeting with writing center colleagues, I passed a white woman attempting to get into her office. Her arms were full, so she put down her computer and other items to unlock the door. As I approached, she gathered up her things and clutched them to her chest, still trying to unlock the door and sending furtive glances over her shoulder at me as I passed by. In another instance, I stopped by the library cafe to grab lunch. As I exited through the double doors, a white woman entered. She turned to face me, eyes wide, sliding by with her back against the door like a heroine in a horror movie trying to escape from the killer.

These moments, neither of them particularly subtle, demonstrate the things that happen to Black women and other BIPOC folx all the time on PHWI campuses.

These moments leave us feeling angry or frustrated or exhausted. They remind us that the spaces we inhabit were not meant for us and that our presence is often

viewed as a threat to the comfort of others. These moments often take place “between” the work (really, it’s all work)—on the way to the meeting, while gathering materials for the workshop—and then we are meant to go on as though nothing happened: discuss long-term goals for our centers, deliver the workshop to a mostly white audience with varying degrees of interest in what you’re saying. And Black women at PHWIs do this largely without built-in community support.

I said nothing to the women in either of the above examples. Nothing to inspire their fear, and nothing to confront them and their racism. Some might say that I should have, but the time and energy to engage with people who are not ready to engage are not things I have to waste. Ironically, in the second example described here, I was in the library to pick up books for a workshop I’d been asked to do on racial battle fatigue1 in higher education.

I’ve spent the entirety of my time in my current position (Director of the OU Writing Center and Assistant Professor of Writing) in the COVID-19 pandemic. The Writing Center is an independent department, reporting directly to the Provost. While this setup has its advantages, it also means I have been more isolated than I would probably be if I were in, for example, the English department. I have met no other pre-tenure faculty (of any race) and almost all of my interactions with other Black employees have been with Black people in professional staff positions. Much of this is due to the pandemic, as I assume that, under different circumstances, many Black faculty might have reached out to me to welcome me to campus if they weren’t busy trying to keep themselves and their students sane.

What’s interesting, however, is that this isolation and lack of interaction with Black faculty also occurred at my former institution. I was in my previous position for two years. During that time, I did not meet any other Black women faculty. Or, I should say that I did not have any substantial meeting with another Black woman faculty member. I had a passing conversation with a tenured Black woman professor who immediately dismissed me upon learning that I was in a non-tenure track position (we do not always look out for one another). I did meet one Black male professor, and I had

Making and Taking up Space as a Black Woman at a Predominantly White Institution • 146 the opportunity to connect and work with some amazing Black women in professional staff positions. I reached out to several women to collaborate and found support that was gravely lacking elsewhere on campus. I showed up to the meetings with these Black women ready to talk business, and their first question was always, “Are you okay?” They were checking in on me, as a Black woman and as a person. Although I was in a faculty position, my writing center work felt familiar to them as administrative work. Black staff, like Black faculty, are often overlooked and overworked in institutions of higher education (Arday, 2021; Payne & Suddler, 2014), and they could relate to feelings of stress, anxiety, and isolation as Black women on a predominantly white campus. That question that was posed to me, “Are you okay?” is an important one. And I will say that the answer was and is not always, “yes.” I was asked this question out of concern, but also out of knowing how difficult it can be for a Black woman at a PHWI. I am now at a different institution, and I am fortunate to have inherited a writing center that has a reputation for being one of the more inclusive spaces on campus, where conversations about race and social justice are frequent, and that other offices and departments that serve underrepresented populations want to work with. As Director, I can talk openly about racial justice. I can ground my consultant education curriculum in racial justice and, despite the overwhelmingly conservative culture of the state, not go out of my way to conceal this. I can take up space in a way that works for me. But I am not without worry. As a Black, female, non-tenured faculty member, I cannot be. But, I’m grateful for the Black women and others who are here and helping to create space for me and my work. I hope that I can do the same for others.

While I can say that I am genuinely happy in my new position (I know, odd for an academic) and that I enjoy the work I do each day, I am also exhausted.

At times, I’ve been so tired that I’m almost in tears.

Sometimes my immune system is just like “nope,” and I have no choice but to stop. It is the daily strain of inhabiting this space, and, of producing work that I know is intended for a mostly white audience of that cannot fully understand my story.

I want to end this column by returning to the workshop I mentioned before on racial battle fatigue. I ended that workshop by referencing the recently published (Dooley & Douge, 2019) policy statement entitled “The impact of racism on children and adolescent health,” published by the American Academy of Pediatrics. I brought in this perspective because one, I thought it was interesting, and two,

because I felt it useful to acknowledge that pain and trauma from racially tense or hostile environments do not start in higher education. Black and brown faculty, staff, and students have preexisting exposure to and consequences from their previous educational and societal experiences. I have not always been okay.

Sometimes I have been exhausted or overwhelmed or frustrated or angry. As readers of this piece will know, teaching writing and directing a writing center can both be emotionally draining. My friend Sherri and I (Craig and Haltiwanger Morrison, 2021) have developed some guiding principles for supporting Black women colleagues, including writing center administrators.

These principles include accepting and taking opportunities to build community as they arise, particularly in informal ways. We also encourage exercising privilege in a way that acknowledges and advocates for Black women. Finally, we encourage permitting failure. There are so many ways to fail in this work. But we cannot be so afraid of failure, of saying or doing the wrong thing, that we leave Black women in isolation, without support or community.

Notes 1. Term coined by critical race scholar William Smith to describe the psychophysiological symptoms Black men (and later other people of color) experience as a result of living and working in historically white spaces.

Works Cited Arday, J. (2021). No one can see me cry: understanding mental health issues for Black and minority ethnic staff in higher education. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00636-w.

Craig, S. & Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison (2021, September 21). Weaving inclusive communities through Black feminist waymaking [Online Webinar]. CFSHRC “Advancing the Agenda” Series. Virtual. https://tinyurl.com/waymaking2021.

Payne Y. A. & Carl Suddler (2014) Cope, conform, or resist? Functions of a Black American identity at a predominantly white university. Equity & Excellence in Education, 47:3, 385-403, DOI: 10.1080/10665684.2014.933756.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 1 (2022)

JUST LOOK AT THESE SCARED FUCKING DWEEBS Randall Monty University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley randall.monty@utrgv.edu “Where we are” in writing center research and as a disciplinary community is directly related to where we are as advocates for a just society and inclusive institutions more broadly: facing shit odds. This is because the work of writing centers can’t be separated from their political, economic, and cultural contexts, which Rachel Azima, Writing Center Director at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, crystalizes as a disciplinary obligation: “for those of us who work in U.S. writing centers, given our current political climate, it is imperative to put any commitments we have to social justice into action.” (74).

In an update for Carter’s writing center paradox, contemporary writing center scholarship operates within contentious space, promoting bravery and justice within a system that values neither, facilitating empirical research while still having our expertise overlooked by other programs and upper administration. Externally, our work is under attack by anti-democratic efforts propagated by a bunch of scared fucking dweebs, a group consisting of right-wing politicians, media outlets, quasi-academic departments, and private “think tanks”—as well as centrist and ostensibly left-leaning enablers—all connected through insidious donor networks. Evidence how ideas circulate through these networks can be found in proposed legislations in Republican-controlled states like Texas and in commissioned reports like “Social justice ideology in Idaho higher education” (Yenor and Miller), the latter of which directly attacks writing centers at public institutions of higher education. So, while writing centered folks have promoted praxis and scholarship that are more inclusive and equitable, the broader conditions we’re working in have gotten worse.

This is because, in the United States, writing centers and institutions of higher education function within what Bromley et al identified as “the ideology of white supremacy,” that, “demands that we interrogate writing centers’ participation in systems of racism” (13). That ideology is entangled with a brand of neoliberal capitalism bent on preserving hegemonic institutional

power in service of identities that are largely conservative, white, male, heterosexual, Evangelical, and non-disabled, and that intentionally targets for eradication the theories, practices, and most importantly, the people, whose mere existences are deemed a threat to that hegemony (Butler; McNamee and Miley).

But these conditions can also provide opportunities for writing centers to enact positive, sustainable change (Giaimo). I am emboldened by the work of disciplinary colleagues on matters of social and restorative justice (Mitchell and Randolph, Robinson et al), antiracist and equitable tutoring praxes (Faison et al), and research methodologies centered on “communities of practice, activity theory, discourse analysis, reflective practice, and inquiry-based learning” (Hall, 4). The current state of writing centers is equipped to challenge bad faith attacks on our work. But in order to do that, we should make plain the systemic, intentional power structures that we’re dealing with.

In the late spring of 2021, likely to distract from the state’s mishandling of the COVID pandemic and the state-wide power grid failures during the previous winter’s storms, the popular education news story for the far-right in Texas was the recent efforts of the state legislature to ban what they called “woke philosophies” (Coenen, et al). Reminiscent of the Southern strategy, these bans weaponized and euphemized the language of social justice to clandestinely interject white supremacist ideology into everyday discourse (Butler). Notoriously, the term “Critical Race Theory”, was disingenuously appropriated as a catch-all term for anything that promoted equity among racial, gendered, or religious differences, or that was otherwise critical of white supremacy, systemic privilege, or any other idea or perspective that didn’t cater to a contemporary conservative worldview (Goldberg).

The Texas bills (Senate bill 2202, House bill 3979, both proposed by Republicans) included restrictions on public schools teaching that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,” or that “an

Just Look at These Scared Fucking Dweebs • 148 individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” The wording of these bills is intentionally opaque in order to deflect critique.

Writing centered folks intuitively see how these bills should be viewed as part of a larger, synchronized effort to eradicate from public discourse anything that criticizes hegemonic power or that challenges its preferred worldview (Zhang et al). The same legislative session forwarded bills that sought to completely reshape what it means to participate in society and exist in public space by: ● ● ● ●

● ●

restricting voting among Black and Hispanic communities while enabling partisan “poll watchers” to harass voters criminalizing public protest while making it legal to run over people who are protesting in public spaces disincentivizing green energy initiatives while further entrenching the state’s reliance on nonrenewable energy effectively criminalizing abortion while empowering vigilantes to harass anyone supporting a woman’s individual health decisions prohibiting transgender kids from playing school sports while forcing public displays of patriotism at those same sporting events banning public homeless encampments while damn-near mandating that everyone walk around with a gun (less you be the only one without a gun in a place where these ghouls think you should need a gun, like a grocery store or elementary school).

Nothing was done to address the state’s flailsome electrical grid and crumbling transportation infrastructure, prevent felony fraud by elected officials, or compress inequities in the state’s racist sentencing guidelines.

The Texas anti-CRT bill is now law, and it is part of larger, coordinated efforts to control who is allowed to participate in society and what is germane to civic debate. Instances documented by Brian Lopez of the Texas Tribune include: Dr. James Whitfield, the first

black principal at Colleyville Heritage High School in the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District, was forced to resign after he was accused by members of the public of “encouraging the disruption and destruction of our district” after he wrote a public letter expressing his personal feelings over the publicized murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery (“North Texas principal...”). The Carroll Independent School District in Southlake reinforced the white supremacist roots of the laws, recommended that teachers offer opposing perspectives on the Holocaust and reprimanded a fourth-grade teacher who had an anti-racist book in their classroom (“The law...”).

Republican law makers across the state are threatening public-school teachers and librarians who assign or even have books address issues of racial, gender, and economic difference and injustice (or that just have Black or queer authors) (“Texas House committee...).

Meanwhile, there are coordinated, state-wide efforts to replace non-partisan school boards with far-right wing ideologues promoting a propagandized version of American history (Cruz). These efforts are often cagey to not outright proclaim their nefarious intentions, but careful and critical reading of their public statements and publications counters their attempts to obfuscate.

Texas is not alone. Similar laws have been proposed and passed in conservative state legislatures across the United States. In Wisconsin, the Republican-controlled assembly proposed banning curriculum about antiracism, critical pedagogy, equity, institutional bias, intersectionality, restorative/social justice, systemic racism, and white privilege (Holmes). The fact that none of these terms are accurately or substantially defined by their critics is beside the point, as the purpose of these laws is to limit what is considered acceptable discourse to a predictable set of self-serving ideas. These laws are also fundamentally anti-democracy, which is why far right-wing media has spent so much energy over recent years pushing into the mainstream propagandistic, thought-terminating clichés like, “the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy.”

Although contested and incomplete, the assumption that writing centers should aim to uphold democratic ideals of collaboration and equitable access is about as close to a disciplinary consensus as we can

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Just Look at These Scared Fucking Dweebs • 149 currently claim (Grimm; Mack & Hupp). Contemporary writing center scholarship knowingly responds to a historical narrative that positions writing centers as supporting diverse people and groups that have been intentionally underserved and underrepresented within institutions of higher education. However, there is constant debate as to how writing centers should go about should be doing this work as well as who should be leading it (Bell et al).

I advocate following Arterburn and Leibman, who argue that we need to “engage with difference” and “become comfortable with discomfort.” This requires a disciplinary community that encourages dissent, welcomes challenges to received knowledge, and promotes equitable access to resources, scholarship, and membership. This puts our field in a contentious and precarious position relative to the current political climate of the U. S.. It puts us at odds with the individual culpability expected to participate in a neoliberal society.

It actively rejects political polarization and grouping.

And it positions those working for progressive change against a small but loud portion of the electorate that rejects the idea of a free, liberal education and the prospects of living in a multicultural and multiracial democracy.

In Texas, the current effort is to control what is taught in public secondary and elementary schools, but the situation in Idaho shows how this kind of ideological influence will play out for higher education. There, the Republican legislature cut funding for “social justice” programs and threatened to withhold further funding for public postsecondary schools that “indoctrinate” students or teach “critical race theory” (Dutton). Again, none of those terms were accurately defined in the proposed legislation because there is little political incentive to accurately represent what they’re complaining about. What they do care about is preserving structural power. Misrepresenting ideas through tidy ideographs is an efficient way to do that.

The proposed legislation in Idaho was aided by the reports “Social justice ideology in Idaho higher education,” which was commissioned by far-right-wing, so-called “think tanks,” the Idaho Freedom Foundation and the Claremont Institute. The document itself employs recognizable genre expectations to boost its

own credibility, “a well-designed and consistent visual identity, striking and attractive layout and typography, and skilled and dramatic use of color and original and stock photography,” a rhetorical move that is common in conservative media (Edwards, 74).

The stated goal of this report is to “implement innovative ideas to deplete the power of special interests and free people from government dependency,” which ironically (or unironically, because it’s so blatantly insipid), is exactly what the report aimed to do (32). A problem with offering serious critiques of these efforts is that accurately describing how these political donor networks impact policy can make you sound like a conspiracy theorist (Rice).

With that warning in mind, here goes: Right-wing efforts to control education are generously funded by private, monied interest groups headed by beneficiaries of generational affluence, largely from the Midwestern U.S., who have maintained grudges against the expansions of a universal, publicly-funded education system and a multiracial democracy since at least the passage of the New Deal in the 1930s (especially the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set restrictions on child labor, hours in a work week, and minimum hourly wage). These benefactors are many of the same who have also provided financial support for racist reactions to Civil Rights movements in the 1960s (such as the erection of cheaply made statues depicting Confederate slavers), neoliberal economic and neoconservative social policies in the mid-1970s, on-campus conservative groups in the 1980s, astroturfed populist movements in the 2000s, and wide-scale antivaxx and anti-CRT protests today (Bartels; Schneider and Berkshire; Towns).

Each step of the way, these private interest groups have used the dismantling of a free, liberal education system as a means for achieving their goals. Ever since formally segregating public schools according to race and religion was no longer a politically viable policy position, a direct line can be traced from the money these groups spend to marketized concepts such as school/consumer choice, return on investment, human capital, outcomes-based design, research priority areas, and student-support-as-customer-service all creeping

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Just Look at These Scared Fucking Dweebs • 150 their way to the forefront of the discourse of education (Holmwood and Servós).

The Idaho report is a manifestation of a research report genre whose primary function is to provide cover for ideologically biased (and often unjust) laws. Even cursory discursive analyses of these kinds of reports and the proposed legislations show textual traces of basal source material. For example, Idaho House Bill 377 (Appendix B) uses recognizably similar wording to Texas Senate Bill 2202 (Appendix A).

Revealing the authors’ and think tanks’ stunted conception of who counts as a citizen and who should be allowed to participate in society, the Idaho report began by whining that, “Social justice education poses a threat to education in America and to the American way of life” (1). Later, it divided the courses in Boise State University’s general education degree plan into three categories: “Indoctrination Majors,” “Social Justice in Training,” and “Professional Development.” From there, the report dedicated an entire section to the Writing Center, noting, “Even the Writing Center is infused with social justice education” (22). (I suppose the report meant that as a scare tactic; I think it just makes the folks at the BSU Writing Center sound rad.)

As evidence of their claims, the “Idaho” report alluded to a presentation that BSU Writing Center tutors gave at a previous National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing. The NCPTW is an organization that promotes the scholarly contributions of tutors and other emergent scholars and making conference resources available online is part of the organization’s accessibility efforts. I chaired the 2018 NCPTW in Texas, with the conference theme “Migration,” and a program that included numerous critical presentations with descriptions that included easily searchable keywords like: multi/translingual tutoring, queer and Black identity in writing centers, antiracism in tutor training and assessment, power and privilege, social justice, and “toxic capitalism.” I should probably prepare for a similar attack from conservatives in my own state.

Reports like Idaho’s get so much wrong about what they seek to criticize that they almost inoculate themselves from any kind of critical or honest response.

They exist in a space in between grey literature and

“pseudo-profound bullshit” (Pennycook et al), designed to provide a superficial glean of intellectualism while the legislators pass the law they already wanted to pass (Bader). This trajectory has a cognate in higher education, as administrators and coordinating boards leveraged the precarious financial conditions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic to again invoke a sort of force majeure to “turbocharge the corporate model,” and enact changes to programmatic funding and structures that they had already wanted to make (AAUP). These changes included: ●

● ●

● ●

enacting austerity measures (furlough and firings of faculty and staff, ceasing matching contributions to retirement plans, cutting travel support, and eliminating unprofitable programs) subverting collectively bargained policies and reducing shared governance suspending elected faculty senates and replacing them with appointed advisory committees of indeterminate authority, reducing academic freedom delaying tenure and promotion, and ignoring faculty handbook policies and previously established plans for emergency response.

In this way, as García de Müeller et al have noted, institutions of higher education responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with a strategy of disaster capitalism that reflected the U.S.’s response writ large, compounding material conditions that disproportionately adversely affected Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities, and that, “underline the urgency of social justice issues which is especially relevant for BIPOC and other marginalized communities.” Although not immune to these effects (or absolved of their consequences), writing centers have proactively used publications, conferences, and networks to share resources for working during the pandemic (Brooks-Gillies et al), including research on sustaining online writing centers (Worm) and supporting tutor wellbeing (Clements et al).

Taken together, these coordinated proposed legislations and supporting reports do not come from places of

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Just Look at These Scared Fucking Dweebs • 151 intellectual depth, moral strength, or for that matter, legal consistency. “The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover,” Sawchuk criticized, “It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.”

That is not the same thing as saying they aren’t consequential.

This is because they do come from a place of power, and because they do come with the historical threat of state violence in the defense of white supremacy, which is, not coincidentally, the exact sort of thing these bills seek to prevent students from learning about.

Based on their coordinated, astroturfed, comingwith-the-threat-of-state-violence responses, it’s clear that these right-wing funders, think tanks, and legislators share this interpretation. This is why those groups try so hard to undermine and prohibit the work of academics who are doing the work of anti-racism and social justice.

So, what are these fucking dweebs scared of?

After all, they continue to benefit from decades of misinformation campaigns, conspiracy spreading, voter suppression, and fear mongering from influential media outlets like talk radio, FOX News, and Facebook.

As best as I can surmise—because good luck getting an honest answer out of these grifters—what they’re afraid of is the temporal relevance of their own worldviews.

It’s related to why these same groups are adamant about revising history education to downplay the United States’ legacy of slavery, secession, segregation, the Southern strategy, and Shelby County vs. Holder and rehabilitating the legacies of villains of democracy like Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and Phyllis Schlafly.

Superficially, they want to preserve—and this is a point they don’t refute—a version of U.S. history where white supremacist hegemonic power is unquestioned.

Subconsciously, perhaps, they hope that by revising history their own duplicitous attempts to entrench their own privilege won’t get paved over by future generations who know better.

I’m willing to concede that my tone in this essay may not be the most productive if our goal is to change the minds of those who disagree with us politically. But everything I’ve critiqued in this essay is already happening.

As disability scholars and activists have noted, appeals

for civility in the face of inhumanity is both ablest (Cherney) and a threat to academic freedom (Cloud). I doubt that if I’m nicer to white supremacist fascists they will, in Asao Inoue’s words, “stop killing” the people they hate.

So, for the moment, I’m invested in responding to and giving voice to the frustration, fear, and anger that I’m hearing from my colleagues, tutors, and students.

Writing center professionals welcome critique when it is presented with a sincere spirit of support. But what we’re seeing developing in far-right wing state legislatures across the country is not that. Compounding the harm is that these bad faith efforts are aided by reports posing as scholarship, from paid writers and organizations posing as academics and academic programs, sometimes from within our own institutions, that directly target writing centers, tutors, and faculty.

Where are we in Writing Center Research, in the context of anti-racism, decoloniality, and/or social justice? In a contentious spot. But we’re moving in important directions with regards to comprehensive research that has the potential to disrupt the status quo and challenge institutional power, and as important, to force our educational institutions and country to live up to the promises they’ve made. Wisniewski et al (2020) recently provided an exceptional model for how writing center scholarship can meet at the intersection of empirical research methods, equity and studentcentered objectives, and emergent technology.

Collectively, our field is providing a template for our own future scholars, but also for other fields and disciplines.

More important, we’re showing our students and tutors that we are committed to them, their safety, and their wellbeing.

Works Cited Denny, Harry C. Facing the Center. UP of Colorado, 2010.

---. “Queering the Writing Center.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 25, no. 2, 2005, pp. 39-62.

Denny, Harry C., Robert Mundy, Liliana Naydan, Richard Sévère, and Anna Sicari. Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles. UP of Colorado, 2018.

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Just Look at These Scared Fucking Dweebs • 152 Fowler, Floyd. J. Jr. Survey Research Methods (5th ed.). Sage Publications, Inc., 2014.

International Writing Center Association. “Position statement on the use of the singular ‘they.’” 2018 http://writingcenters.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/0 6/IWCA_Singular_They.pdf. Accessed 14 May 2019.

Manion, Jan. “The performance of transgender inclusion.”

2018 http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/11/theperformance-of-transgender-inclusion/. Accessed 27 Nov. 2018.

MyPronouns.org. “Sharing your Pronouns.” 2017, https://www.mypronouns.org/sharing. Accessed 14 May 2019.

Rihn, Anrew and Jay Sloan. “‘Rainbows in the Past Were Gay’: LGBTQIA in the WC.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 2013.

Rubin, Herbert. J., and Irene S. Rubin. Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data (3rd ed.). Sage Publications, Inc, 2012.

Schendel, Ellen, and William J. Macauley, W. J. Building Writing Center Assessments That Matter. UP of Colorado, 2012.

Sharp, Travis, and Karen Rosenberg. “The Grammar of Social Justice: Gender Non-binary Pronouns and the Writing Centre.” Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Redactologie, vol. 28, 2018, pp. 212-226.

Spade, Dean. “Some Very Basic Tips for Making Higher Education More Accessible to Trans Students and Rethinking How We Talk About Gendered Bodies.

Radical Teacher, vol. 92, 2011, pp. 57-62.

---. “We Still Need Pronoun Go-rounds.” http://www.deanspade.net/2018/12/01/we-still-needpronoun-go-rounds/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2018 Suhr-Sytsma, Mandy, and Estelle Brown. Theory In/To practice: Addressing the Everyday Language of Oppression in the Writing Center. Writing Center Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, 2011, pp. 13-49.

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Just Look at These Scared Fucking Dweebs • 153 Appendix A Section of Texas Senate Bill 2202

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Just Look at These Scared Fucking Dweebs • 154 Appendix B Section of Idaho House Bill 377

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MYTH BUSTING THE WRITING CENTER: A CRITICAL INQUIRY OF IDEOLOGIES AND PRACTICES Bethany Meadows Michigan State University meadow53@msu.edu We were asked to talk about the state of the field at this moment in time, this mid-pandemic moment that has urged all of us to rethink much of the work we do in our writing centers, or at least how we do the work.

This moment is also full of racial violence and proud proclamations of racism from police brutality to targeted shootings to riots at the U.S. Capitol. This moment of continued sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism and more. All of these moments affect us as human beings working in the center with and alongside other human beings, consulting sessions with both consultants and writers who have a range of embodied experiences, traumas, and understandings that they bring to their writing and to their sessions.

In our writing center at Michigan State University, engaging with these moments and all that they indicate about the state of the world around us has necessitated being very deliberate about our philosophies and positions; it has also meant making sure that our practices, policies, and procedures all align with our stated beliefs. The big picture, if you will. It should come as no surprise then, that this engagement with both theory and practice, has resulted in many questions, tensions, and downright resistance with many of the accepted stances in the field, the canon of writing centers as others have called it. This questioning, however, has also revealed that despite the canon, perhaps even through it at times, that resistance and calls for more inclusive and just writing centers have always existed. Even as folks were defining the field in the 1980s, others were pushing against it, asking writing center professionals and practitioners to do more, to question more, to call out the academy when it wasn’t/isn’t serving students humanely and fairly.

Considering the state of the field, led Bethany to think about a video game she plays. In Democracy 3 (Positech Games), you play as an elected official and try to get policies passed to be re-elected. In the game, events and policies exist in different thematic realms (e.g., criminal justice, social welfare, taxes, healthcare, education, etc.). If you hover your computer cursor over a single policy or event, you see how it is being affected (both negatively and/or positively) by other policies and events as well as its effect on others. From this, you

Trixie G. Smith Michigan State University smit1254@msu.edu cannot separate them into mutually exclusive bubbles, but instead they all overlap and affect one another. This relates to the state of writing centers—every happening, every promising practice, every practice based in myths or misguided beliefs all relate and affect each other. We cannot focus on one area at a time. We must look at how they are conversing with and impacting others.

For instance, at an East Central Writing Center Association (ECWCA) book chat, we discussed Wooten et al.’s edited collection, The Things We Carry. During Bethany’s second book chat session, she was placed in a Zoom breakout room with two writing center directors.

They were each asked to describe their writing center spaces and relate them to the book. In this discussion, one director described their center as a “very cozy place where people feel at home,” and the other director responded in agreement before discussing their center as a “safe space.” But, as other scholars have discussed, many times this is not the case in our centers. For Bethany, it has most definitely been the case in several centers where she has experienced biphobia, sexism, ableism as well as heard other oppressive ideologies uttered by both clients and writing center professionals.

After Bethany relayed this story to Trixie, Trixie discussed those misguided ideologies as part of the reason she preferred to think of the MSU Writing Center as a brave space, as well as a space that is always evolving.

From the genesis of this conversation, Trixie and Bethany began to brainstorm a list of myths that we still hear perpetuated in our everyday discourse of writing centers, at conferences, on listservs, in training guides, and even in our journals. Many of these myths have already been called out or disrupted within writing center scholarship (Grimm; Grutsch McKinney; Greenfield), but as evident by the informal book chat, these universalizing tropes, as well as many other myths still pervade our everyday work and interactions with writers and each other as writing center professionals.

In this short essay, we will describe some of the myths still being perpetuated in informal and formal discourse and practices and then conclude with a call to action. In the following chart, we offer a common mythical theme in writing center work, a rejection of that myth, questions raised by this tension, and a

Myth Busting the Writing Center: A Critical Inquiry of Ideologies and Practices • 156 sampling of where you can go for further information and inquiry.

While there are no “best practices” in our work, there can be practices that are less harmful than others.

To conclude, we urge writing center professionals to continually interrogate their beliefs and practices in order to evolve. In fact, we challenge you to expand this list by examining the practices and guiding beliefs in your own centers. Do your stated beliefs, philosophies, visions, missions actually coincide with your practices, policies, and procedures? Can you explain to others the theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings of both? Do you have a plan for conveying this foundation to your staff and stakeholders?

The work we as writing center professionals have already done is important and was good for the time, but we cannot stagnant in that progress. Ongoing research, new critiques, repeated inquiries, mean new opportunities to question how and what we do, make critical pedagogical choices, and move away from a mythical, neoliberal canon. The only norm we should have is a constant, critical engagement and questioning of our praxis and theory.

Works Cited Appleton Pine, Andrew, and Karen Moroski-Rigney. “‘What About Access?’ Writing an Accessibility Statement for Your Writing Center.” The Peer Review, vol. 4, no. 2, Oct. 2020, thepeerreviewiwca.org/issues/issue-4-2/what-about-access-writingan-accessibility-statement-for-your-writing-center/.

Boquet, Elizabeth. Noise from the Writing Center. Utah State University Press, 2002.

Carino, Peter. “Power and Authority in Peer Tutoring.”

Center Will Hold, edited by Michael A. Pemberton and Joyce Kinkead, University Press of Colorado, 2003, pp.

96–113, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt46nxnq.9.

Cedillo, Christina. “What Does It Mean to Move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy.”

Composition Forum, vol. 39, Summer 2018, compositionforum.com/issue/39/to-move.php.

Degner, Hillary, et al. “Opening Closed Doors: A Rationale for Creating a Safe Space for Tutors Struggling with Mental Health Concerns or Illnesses.” Praxis, vol. 13, no. 1, 2015, www.praxisuwc.com/degner-et-al-131.

Denny, Harry C., et al. Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles. Utah State University Press, 2018.

Denton, Kathryn. “Beyond the Lore: A Case for Asynchronous Online Tutoring Research.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 2, Writing Center Journal,

2017, pp. 175–203.

Dixon, Elise. “Strategy-Centered or Student-Centered?: A Meditationon Conflation.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 42, no. 3–4, Dec. 2017, pp. 7–14.

Dixon, Elise, and Rachel Robinson, editors. “Special Issue: (Re)Defining Welcome.” The Peer Review, vol. 3, no. 1, Summer 2019, thepeerreviewiwca.org/issues/redefining-welcome/?

East Central Writing Center Association. ECWCA Discussion of Section 2: Preserving Communities.

Geller, Anne Ellen, et al., editors. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Utah State University Press, 2007.

Green, Neisha-Anne. “Moving beyond Alright: And the Emotional Toll of This, My Life Matters Too, in the Writing Center Work.” The Writing Center Journal, vol.

37, no. 1, Writing Center Journal, 2018, pp. 15–34.

Greenfield, Laura. Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement. Utah State University Press, 2019.

Greenfield, Laura, and Karen Rowan, editors. Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change. Utah State University Press, 2011.

Grimm, Nancy Maloney. Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times. Boynton/Cook-Heinemann, 1999.

Grutsch McKinney, Jackie. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers. University Press of Colorado, 2013. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt4cgk97.

Hallman Martini, Rebecca, et al., editors. “Writing Centers as Brave/r Spaces.” The Peer Review, vol. 1, no. 2, Fall 2017, thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/braver-spaces/.

Harris, Emma, and Emily Kayden. “Pandemic Consultations Create Space for Accessible Practices through Technological Affordances and Reflection.”

Dangling Modifier, Spring 2021, sites.psu.edu/thedanglingmodifier/?p=4353&preview_ id=4353.

Mingus, Mia. “Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice.” Leaving Evidence, 12 Apr. 2017, leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/accessintimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/.

Positech Games. Democracy 3. 2013.

Rafoth, Ben. “Faces, Factories, and Warhols: A r(Evoluntionary) Future for Writing Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 35, no. 2, Writing Center Journal, 2016, pp. 17–30.

Riddick, Sarah, and Tristin Hooker, editors. “Race & the Writing Center.” The Peer Review, vol. 16, no. 2, Summer 2019, www.praxisuwc.com/162-links-page.

Webster, Travis. Queerly Centered: LGBTQA Writing Center Directors Navigate the Workplace. Utah State University Press, 2021.

Wooten, Courtney Adams, et al., editors. The Things We

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Myth Busting the Writing Center: A Critical Inquiry of Ideologies and Practices • 157 Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration. Utah State

University Press, 2020.

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Myth Busting the Writing Center: A Critical Inquiry of Ideologies and Practices • 158 Appendix A Table 1: Common Writing Center Myths Mythical Theme

Myths within this Trope

Rejection of the Mythical Trope

Questions Raised

Further Inquiry

Welcoming

● The writing center is a safe space. ● Writing centers are cozy homes. ● Writing center professionals are a second family.

As many other scholars have discussed, writing centers are not safe, welcoming, or cozy spaces. Similarly, thinking of the writing center as a home and family reinforce traumatic and heteropatriarchal views of shared workplaces.

● When we forefront training and design of our writing centers to be welcoming, who are we excluding in the process? ● Who has access to our spaces?

Who is excluded by our space? ● How does the Paradox of Tolerance complicate our work? How can we foster braver spaces for clients, tutors, and administrators that move away from a neoliberal model?

● Boquet ● Degner et al. ● Grimm ● Grutsch McKinney ● Hallman Martini et al. ● Dixon and Robinson

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Myth Busting the Writing Center: A Critical Inquiry of Ideologies and Practices • 159

Table 1: Common Writing Center Myths (Continued) Modalities and Techniques

● Face-to-face as well as non-directive (minimalist) tutoring are the norm and better than other techniques. ● We don’t tutor grammar, and proofreaders don’t belong in the writing center. ● All tutors can and should be generalists.

Many times, we have defaulted to face-to-face and/or minimalist tutoring as the epitome of “good” tutoring. But, these modalities and techniques exclude and privilege certain types of writers. Similarly, by not allowing writers to access tutors who will uplift their writing and tutor grammar when asked, we confine knowledge to the elitist ivory tower. Finally, sometimes tutors may work best in their own strengths and knowledges without having to purport being an expert on everything, which is a white supremacist concept. Instead, we value various modalities and techniques, with each having different affordances and constraints.

● How can we (re)imagine our training and consulting to decenter these myths? ● How can we help writers with academic survival, such as grammar, while not centering White Mainstream English? ● How can tutors focus on their strengths with a dynamic/growth mindset (e.g., through disciplinary knowledge or with languages) to best uplift writers?

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Myth Busting the Writing Center: A Critical Inquiry of Ideologies and Practices • 160

Table 1: Common Writing Center Myths (Continued) Power and Oppression

● Tutors are just a peer. ● Tutors should play devil’s advocate for oppressive papers. ● Writing centers can act separately from the university. ● Giving class credit or internships to training tutors equates to payment and is fair.

Within this theme, many myths ask tutors to exist in a vacuum where they are not required to acknowledge their power within the university and global systems of oppression.

Writing centers may be considered to be progessive places away from the university, but most of us are still a part of the university system. Within this, when we consider tutor training, many times we are asking tutors to pay tuition to take a class and do unpaid training through an internship or similar model. Any of these models are predatory, benefit already privileged tutors, and are not equitable.

● How do we ask tutors to consider their power and move beyond fragility? ● How can we ask tutors to foster braver spaces while acknowledging potential trauma and honoring their agency to step away? ● How do we move away from the neoliberal model toward a radical model (Greenfield)? ● How can we compensate for labor equitably while also balancing institutional budget constraints?

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● Appleton Pine and MoroskiRigney ● Carino ● Denny et al. ● Geller et al. ● Green ● Greenfield ● Greenfield and Rowan ● Riddick and Hooker ● Webster

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BEYOND BINARIES OF DISABILITY IN WRITING CENTER STUDIES M. Melissa Elston Palo Alto College melston@alamo.edu

Nicole Green University of Nebraska-Lincoln ngreen4@unl.edu

In her introduction to the anthology Writing Centers and Disability, Allison Hitt argues for the importance of honoring the nuances and complexities of disabled student writers in writing center work (viii). In our provocation, we center these nuances and complexities of disability, not only for disabled people/people with disabilities1, but also as these complexities might shape writing center praxis. Too often disabled experiences are not relayed in their complexity but are flattened by binary understanding of disability. We worry about the ways in which an understanding of disability in writing center studies is haunted by the stories nondisabled people tell about disability, about how Disability discourse in writing center research both opens and forecloses possibilities for disabled student writers and writing center instructors.

In this article, we highlight how binary stories about disability flatten disabled experiences and uphold ableism in writing center spaces. We echo Jay T. Dolmage, who carefully lays out how the narratives we tell about disabled students are frequently deployed in support of ableist practices and attitudes. Dolmage argues that it’s important to understand how these narratives of disability “are created in service of particular cultural narratives [. . .] especially as they impact the roles that we make available to any student” (114). We apply Dolmage’s argument about disability narratives to writing center research, asserting that the narratives writing center research tells about disability shape the roles we make available to disabled student writers and writing center instructors and can create and reinforce false binaries.

In what follows, we interrogate binaries that permeate disability narratives and haunt writing center scholarship, binaries that we believe flatten discussions about disability in writing center contexts, and especially erases the experiences of multiply marginalized disabled students and writing center professionals. In this article, we write as disabled scholars, each exploring a binary around how disability is discussed: Nicole writes beyond the binary of “Us” vs. “Them”; Ada writes beyond the binary of “Accessibility” vs. “Inaccessibility”; and Melissa writes beyond the binary of “normalcy” vs. “subnormalcy.”

We argue that certain binaries in how we discuss

Ada/Adam Hubrig Sam Houston University adamhubrig88@gmail.com

disability in writing center contexts flatten conversations about disability and erase the nuance and complexity of disabled experiences, and reorient ourselves to disability as a site of pedagogical invention.

I. Beyond “Us vs. Them” --Nicole I was in my first semester serving as our Center’s graduate student Writing Center Assistant Director when I attended my first state-wide annual writing centers consortium. Attended by directors and administrators, along with a handful of undergraduate and graduate consultants from nearly all of the state’s colleges and universities, the annual meeting began with the requisite introductions in which we were each asked to stand and share, along with our names, one challenge and one success we had experienced that year in our center. As the train of introductions snaked around one round table and to the next, one woman, whose name and institutional affiliation I do not remember, boldly explained her challenge was working with difficult students, like the “ones with disabilities.”

“What?!” I mouthed dramatically at my director who sat beside me, as we both exchanged looks of dismay. When my turn came, while I considered introducing myself as “Nicole, ‘one of those difficult students with a disability,’” I swallowed my sarcasm and opted for what felt like a more professionally “safe” introduction. I nevertheless fiercely hoped that the woman would later notice me navigating the remainder of the consortium with the help of my German Shepherd guide dog and (though not likely) cringe in shame and regret as she recalled her words.

Now, more confident in my professional identity (and my identity as a professional with a disability), I would like to think if given the chance again, I would resist the urge to “play nice” and would have the courage and wherewithal to publicly point out the multiple problematic aspects of her statement.

Most obviously problematic is her construction of students with disabilities as “difficult,” which writing center scholars attending to disability have identified as problematic (Babcock, “Disabilities in the Wirting

Have We Arrived? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work • 162 Center”; Hewett; Hitt, “Access for All”). However, an even more troubling aspect of the consortium comment was the speaker’s implicit assumption that none of us—the other writing center administrators and tutors in that room with her—could ourselves possibly be one of them—those “difficult” people with disabilities. While such a blatant framing of my disabled existence as a “difficulty” others must overcome was a somewhat new experience for me (at least within a professional context), I was far too familiar with her binary approach to disability within the academy—one that understands us (writing center professionals and academics more broadly) as a mutually exclusive group separate from them (those with disabilities whom we “serve”). Both Molly McHarg and M. Melissa Elston point to the prevalence of this us versus them binary. While McHarg broadly highlights that “very little has been written about writing center tutors with disabilities” (p. 14), Elston goes even further to argue, “As with most writing about disability and the academy as a whole, the focus in many articles is on how the (presumably ablebodied/-minded) tutor can serve disabled students, ... rather than exploring the possibility that tutors—as well as other writing center professionals, such as administrators and reception staff—can themselves be writers with disabilities” (16).

While this us vs. them binary has long troubled me, as I write this, I have come to realize that I, myself, have been unwittingly reinforcing it within the culture of my own Center. Looking back across my own professional development as a consultant, I am retrospectively aware that no one—no fellow consultant, administrator, or mentor—ever discussed, either as part of staff development or with me individually, the role disability might play in our lives as consultants. Instead, I spent the first several years of my consulting career feeling that I needed to pass in order to create the least inconvenience to the writer.

Then, as I grew in my confidence as a writing center professional and, with the help of the incredible community of disability studies scholars and several gracious and insightful writers with whom I worked, I developed my own strategies for disclosing my disability and communicating to writers what I would need in order to best help them. Now as a writing center administrator myself, I realize that while I regularly include discussion of disability in our staff development activities and share my own experience with my staff, I have only done so in service of conversations about how disability and Universial Design for Learning (UDL) should help in shaping our pedagogical practices and approaches. In spite of my

own experience—feelings of professional exclusion and desire for mentorship—I have never once considered including in my own design of staff development any activities or conversations that explicitly address our staff’s own experiences with disability, how it might affect their work in the center, and ways we can work together as a staff to create a more accessible and supportive environment for both writers and ourselves. Thus, along with echoing Hitt, McHang, and Elston’s arguments for significantly increasing our awareness of disability and revising our approaches to it in order to deconstruct the us vs. them binary within writing center scholarship and our professional conversations, I would also suggest that another significant move toward deconstructing this false binary involves explicitly acknowledging in our staff development the potential role disability may be playing in the lives of our staff. By acknowledging this possibility we stand to learn from the experiences of our colleagues, potentially develop richer pedagogies, and become a more inclusive us.

II. Beyond Inaccessibility”

“Accessibility

vs.

--Ada

At the 2019 College Composition and Communication Conference, a large signpost in a central walkway read, in large letters, “CCCCs is Accessible!”

I grimaced, annoyed. Well that’s that, then. Mission accomplished, I guess.

I was grateful for the opportunity to join several disabled conference goers and nondisabled allies in responding by pointing out the many ways they experienced inaccessibility at the conference. Affixing sticky notes to the sign, we noted a range of access issues including childcare, inaccessible technology, presenters not using microphones, missing access copies, and other issues (see Simpkins). While institutions might declare their spaces as accessible or inaccessible, this binary framework too-frequently ignores the material realities of actual disabled people (Hubrig 234-235). Put another way, institutions should not unilaterally decide when disabled people’s—or anyone’s—needs are met: “accessibility” is not a finished, achievable state but a constant series of negotiations.

We hope writing center professionals might learn from the “CCCCs is Accessible!” sign—and crip critique—both the importance of seeking out disabled perspectives in working toward accessibility, but also in understanding that no arrangement is ever totally

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Have We Arrived? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work • 163 accessible: the binary between “accessibility” and “inaccessibility” is too reductive, and ignores real, lived embodied experiences (Cedillo; Rice-Evans and Stella).

Rather, writing center theory and practice must be open to negotiation and consent around issues of access.

It’s necessary to recognize that nothing is universally accessible. Here I echo disability scholars including Aimi Hamraie and Dolmage, who point to the importance of Universal Design (UD) while productively critiquing it. Hamraie points to how UD design does not consider actual disabled experiences while centering whiteness and other markers of privilege, arguing that “Intersectionality must consider how the normate template for the built environment is a system of exclusion that segregates spaces and people along the axes of disability, race, class, and gender (among others)” (np). Dolmage similarly points to these issues with UD, and argues that UD shouldn’t be abandoned outright, but argues “student learning differences should drive design” (134). As Hamraie’s and Dolmage’s work highlights, UD frameworks too often treat disability as a monolith rather than consulting disabled people. That doesn’t mean writing center professionals shouldn’t attempt to create more inclusive writing centers through our policy, sessions, and instructor training (Elston 18), but it’s necessary to understand the limitations of UD and seek feedback from multiply marginalized disabled people, rather than proclaiming writing center spaces accessible because it adhered to a premade UD checklist.

And these limitations of UD are exactly why the Accessibility/Inaccessibility binary fails us, bringing us back to why careful attention to negotiation and consent is necessary. In “Articulating Betweenity: Literacy, Language, Identity and Technology in the Deaf/Hard-of Hearing Collection,” Brenda Brueggemann inverts the notion of “overcoming” disability and instead suggests that teachers take a “coming over” stance. Hitt (Rhetorics of Overcoming), who more fully elaborates on the pedagogical issues of “overcoming” vs “coming over,” juxtaposes the overcoming narrative with a coming over narrative, “that embraces disability, difference, and nonnormative practices—a narrative that informs the crafting of pedagogical practices that welcome a wide range of embodied experiences to come over and join the conversation on accessibility” (20). In moving beyond the accessibility/inaccessibility binary, I hope to move toward configurations like “betweenity” and “coming over” that engage disabled embodied experiences.

While I draw attention to the limitations of accessible/inaccessible binaries, I underscore that whiteness and white supremacy in writing centers and

writing center scholarship make accessibility impossible. As Asao Inoue has argued, much of writing center studies has failed to provide “an explicit account of how whiteness and whitely ways of being determine much of what happens in writing centers” (95). In centering whiteness, writing centers become inaccessible for people of color (see García). We echo disability justice advocates who have argued that ableism is inseparable from cis-heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, colonialist, and capitalist oppression (Sins Invalid 18), and ableism can only be addressed in conjunction with other forms of oppression.

With these threads in mind, I return to the “CCCCs is Accessible!” sign: rather than working with an “accessible” vs. “inaccessible” binary and proclaiming our spaces accessible, I’d like to push us toward conversations about accessibility in writing centers (Babcock 42), taking our cues about access needs from those seeking access. I echo Tara Wood et al who have advocated for “accessible course design and emphasize a dynamic, recursive, and continual approach to inclusion rather than mere troubleshooting” (148).

Rather than a limiting binary of accessibility/inaccessibility writing centers should seek dialogue with disabled people—not imagining disability as something to be diagnosed and accommodated, but as a site of pedagogical invention in the writing center, understanding that closer attention to diverse embodied experiences may make writing centers more accessible for disabled and nondisabled people alike.

III. Beyond “Normalcy” vs. “Abnormalcy” --Melissa

2021 is a hell of a year to write about disability.

I still remember a conversation I had with a colleague in 2020, just before Spring Break, as initial reports were filtering in from overseas. We were standing near a refrigerator in a common break area, retrieving food.

Neither one of us knew that this was the last inperson conversation we would have for 18 months.

“You shouldn’t really worry about the virus,” my colleague confidently remarked. “They say it’s only killing old people and people with serious pre-existing conditions.”

I stared back, flatly. “I’m in that last group.”

There were blinks. An awkward, fumbled “Oh!” Then: “Really? You are?” A pause. “Oh.” Despite our normally good working relationship, I didn’t attempt to smooth over the gaffe. After a few more words, we both exited the room. On the drive home that afternoon, I was troubled. In addition to

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Have We Arrived? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work • 164 seeming dismissive of marginalized lives, my colleague’s offhand comment echoed the oft-repeated wish that Dolmage describes: “There are no people with disabilities here” (43). This is, of course, a fantasy, built on a number of faulty underlying endoxa about higher education, normative public spaces, and the people one encounters within them.

When Covid-19 arrived in the weeks that followed, this fantasy became unstable. After all, if disability can be understood as a product of the physical and social environments that we build, then the abruptly inaccessible, virus-laden public spaces of 2020 disabled an awful lot of us — at least according to the social model of disability (Hamraie; Wendell 46).2 Indeed, the pandemic has served as a grim demonstration that circumstantial shifts can, in turn, alter the organismenvironment relationship and render anyone less able to function in a given space.

In 2020, a number of journals addressed our new situation directly. Muriel Harris acknowledged the “difficult academic year” we had entered, as well as the “challenges of a pandemic” (1). As the semester dragged on, we all watched colleges and universities rapidly pivot, in response to the virus’s threat.

Accommodations that a number of Disabled people had long lobbied for — but had been told weren’t feasible — were suddenly the de rigeur standard, across the board for many campuses: working/teaching from home, videoconferencing with students and tutees, offering more generous extensions (Krishnaiah and Hermann.).

Writing centers are not exempt from this critique.

As J.M. Dembsey has argued, adoption of online writing-center support has been slow and uneven, across the field, despite evidence that such support makes writing centers more accessible to a spectrum of Disabled and other frequently marginalized writers.

“Only after an international pandemic threatened the health, safety, and education of non-[D]isabled, white, and/or monolingual writers did the writing center community take quick interest in promoting and implementing online writing center work,” Dembsey charges (3, capitalization mine).

Writing center professionals are frequently uncomfortable with the presence of Disabled writers, a phenomenon that Dembsey tracks through the extant professional literature (4). Some of us are even more unsettled by the experience of situational disability we have just lived through, as well as the possibility that we ourselves may be considered disabled. Indeed, now that many of our campuses are physically reopening for 2021-22, a “return to normal” discourse has emerged — from headlines to hallway conversations — one

which adopts the ableist lexis of our broader public conversations about Covid-19. The word “normal” is frequently, eagerly invoked as the standard that an ideal post-Covid educational experience should meet, implying that anything outside of “normal” is abnormal (subnormal, really) and therefore less desirable or a failure.

It is worth reflecting on how much of this public response is rooted in our own collective anxieties about, and rejections of, disability. Additionally, this preoccupation with achieving a “normal” state echoes the “normalcy/abnormalcy” binary articulated by Lennard Davis. The scholar in me is exhausted by the fact that we haven’t collectively moved past this dichotomy, decades after Davis and other scholars first identified it. The Disabled person in me — the person who has spent the better part of the last year and a half dealing with an additional pandemic-era layer of ableist nonsense — is even more exhausted.

In the rush to reattain “normal,” many schools (and political bodies) are once more jettisoning accommodation measures — from masking to videoconferencing — framing them as unnecessary or even an intrusive threat to individual freedoms. Our writing centers would do well to resist this pendulum swing and re-examine the binary that drives it.

Otherwise, we’ve squandered an opportunity to practice the pedagogical invention that Nicole and Ada both endorse.

Beyond Disability Binaries: Disability as Site of Invention, not a Monolith While writing center scholarship is often haunted by binaries that present disability as a challenge to be accommodated, through our own embodied experiences we suggest that disability can instead be a rich site of invention in writing center studies, inviting deeper engagement with disability scholarship and disabled embodied experiences in writing center studies.

We also consider the material conditions in which this article was drafted, noting the tensions between academic schedules and our own range of disabled embodied experiences—some of this article was written in the bathroom, on bedrest, in the hospital, or transferred between documents as workarounds for screen-reader issues with different word processing programs. Considering our embodied experiences of disability, we also hope to move beyond disability binaries in creating new spaces for disabled writing center scholars and professionals, and ways to honor the often invisibilized work of supporting disabled scholars (Hubrig). We urge writing center scholars to

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Have We Arrived? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work • 165 take up disabled embodied experiences, reimagining and reinventing academic practices and academic publishing through disability.

In pushing beyond the binaries of “us” vs. “them,” “accessibility” vs. “inaccessibility,” and “normalcy” vs “abnormalcy,” we hope to wade deeper into a fuller range of embodied experiences. We echo disability activist and author Alice Wong, who writes “To me, disability is not a monolith, nor is it a clear-cut binary of disabled and nondisabled. Disability is mutable and ever-evolving” (28). In our desire to move away from the ways institutional use of disability narratives still haunt disabled experiences and flatten disabled experiences, we push toward a less monolithic and more expansive notion of disability in writing center practice and scholarship that breaks down binaries as a site of pedagogical invention.

Notes 1. In the process of writing this piece, collaborators were committed to different terms, with some preferring “person with disabilities” and others preferring “Disabled person.” Rather than choosing one or the other, this became a productive site of conversation for us as collaborators, prompting us to reflect more fully on how different models and our differing embodied disabled experiences shape these preferences and our understanding of disability. We feel strongly that this, too, is an example of moving beyond disability binaries.

2. A quick note on language: Disability has been theorized a number of different ways in contemporary scholarship. According to the social model, it is a product of the accessibility of a given environment.

However, there is another important way in which the word “Disabled” is frequently used: as a marker of identity or natural mode of human difference (Price 2011). In cases where this sense of the word is intended, I will denote its use with capitalization.

Works Cited Babcock, Rebecca. “Disabilities in the Writing Center.”

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 13, no.1, 2015, 39– 50.

Babcock, R.ebecca D. and Sharifa Daniels., editors. (2017).

“Forward.” In Writing Centers and Disability. Press, 2017, pp. vii-x.

Brueggemann, Brenda. “Articulating Betweenity: Literacy, Language, Identity, and Technology in the Deaf/Hard-

of-Hearing Collection.” In H. L. Ulman (Ed). Stories that speak to us: Exhibits from the digital archive of literacy narratives. Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2013.

Cedillo, Christina. “What does it mean to move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy.”

Composition Forum, 38, 2018.

Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York: Verso, 1995.

Davis, Lennard. “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century.” In O. Obasogie & M. Darnovsky (Ed.), Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics, pp. 63-72. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520961944010 Dembsey, J. M. “Naming Ableism in the Writing Center.”

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1–11.

Dolmage, J. T. Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. University of Michigan Press, 2017.

Elston, M. M. “Psychological Disability and the Director’s Chair: Interrogating the Relationship Between Positionality and Pedagogy.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 13, no 1, 2015, pp. 15–20.

García, Romeo. “Unmaking Gringo Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 29-60.

Hamraie, Aimi. “Designing Collective Access: A Feminist Disability Theory of Universal Design.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 33, no.4, 2012.

Harris, Muriel. Editor’s note. WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 45, no. 1-2, 2020, p. 1.

Hitt, Allison. H. “Access for All: The Role of Dis/ability in MultiliteracyCcenter.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 9, no. 2, 2012, pp. 1–7.

---. “Foreword.” In R.D. Babcock & S. Daniels (Eds.), Writing Centers and Disability. Southland, TX: Fountainhead Press, 2017, pp. vii-x.

---. Rhetorics of overcoming: Rewriting narratives of disability and accessibility in writing studies. National Council of Teachers of English, 2021.

Hewett, Beth. (2000). “Helping Students with Learning Disabilities: Collaboration Between Writing Centers and Special Services.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol.

25, no. 3, 2000, pp. 1-5.

Hubrig, Ada/Adam. (2020). “Narrativizing Dis/ability: Deconstructing Institutional Uses of Disability Narratives.” In A. R. Carr and L. R. Micciche (Eds.), Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What it means to Fail, Peter Lang, 2020, pp. 223-237.

---. On ‘Crip Doulas,’ Invisible Labor, and Surviving Academia while Disabled. The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 33-36, 2021.

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Have We Arrived? Revisiting and Rethinking Responsibility in Writing Center Work • 166 Inoue, Asao. B. “Afterword: Narratives that Determine Writers and Social Justice Writing Center Work.”

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95–99.

Krishnaiah, Raghu and Kelly Hermann. 2021).

“Accessibility Gains Must Become Lasting Learning Practices.” Inside Higher Ed., 2021.

McHarg, Molly. The Dual Citizenship of Disability. The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 36, no. 7/8, 2012, pp. 14–15.

Price, Margaret. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (Illustrated edition). University of Michigan Press, 2011.

Rice-Evans, Jesse. and Andréa Stella. “#Triggered: The Invisible Labor of Traumatized Doctoral Students.”

The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, vol. 5, no. 1, 2021, pp.

20-32.

Simpkins, Neil. “The Sticky Note Snap.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 72, no. 1, 2020, pp. 87-117.

Sins Invalid. Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People. Berkeley, CA, 2016.

Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Wood, Tara et al. “Moving Beyond Disability 2.0 in Composition Studies.” Composition Studies, 42(2), 2014, pp. 147-150.

Wong, Alice. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories of Disability from the Twenty-First Century. Vintage Books,

2020.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 1 (2022)

COUNTERSTORY IN THE CENTER: REPLACING PRIVILEGED PEDAGOGY WITH BRAVE TEACHING OF WRITING Beatrice Mendez Newman The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley beatrice.newman@utrgv.edu When students walk into a writing center—online or onsite—they reverse the dynamics and politics of traditional pedagogy. Drafts in hand, whether confident or confused about their writing tasks, the second they set foot in writing center space, students seize agency for their success as writers. That matters tremendously because it disrupts the story of how writing instruction should happen. As writing center workers, we know a big unspoken truth that forms a conundrum of institutional life: that the instructors who are nominally responsible for teaching writing, whether in English classes or other disciplines, often ignore, renege on, or simply reject the responsibility of teaching writing. In other words, the story of teaching writing in institutional settings often turns into a counterstory where the writing center becomes the site of instruction not just a site of support.

Recently, Olga, a student in my Composition Theory and Pedagogy class, wrote about negotiating a writing task assigned in another class. The task was to write a reflective essay on a class reading, but, in the absence of instructional guidance, she had to figure out how to tackle the task on her own. Here’s how she explained her initial thinking about the task: “How am I going to write this essay?” I have experience writing analytical essays and research papers, but I have no experience in writing reflection essays. . . . A part of me thought of reaching out to my professor, explaining that I didn’t have experience in writing a reflective essay, and asking her to show me an example of one. But I stopped myself because I didn’t want her to think I was trying to cheat on the final exam.

I was stunned when I read this, equally because Olga assumed that asking a question meant cheating, but also because the professor had failed to explain what was required.

In an edifying instructional framework, Olga should have been able to count on her instructor for guidance. Instead, Olga went to the writing center— which was a really good thing! As Olga’s “after story” shows, the tutors stepped up and filled the instructional role: The tutor told me to provide background information . . . in my introduction, . . . to discuss three main topics for my body paragraphs

discussing the chapters from the textbook. In another tutoring session, I was told to move information from one body paragraph to another and to briefly list what I learned in the class. In those first two tutoring sessions, I was given a lot of suggestions in how to improve my paper. And in my final tutoring session, the tutor and I went over grammatical errors in my paper. During those tutoring sessions, I started to feel more and more confident as I was given suggestions on how to revise my paper. When I turned in my final, I was proud of my work.

Olga’s expression of pride exemplifies Stephen North’s oft-quoted mantra: “in a writing center the object is to make sure that writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by instruction. . . . [O]ur job is to produce better writers, not better writing” (438). That her session at the writing center strengthened her as a writer is demonstrated in Olga’s reflective comments about her essay: “Despite getting an A on my reflective essay, I felt unsatisfied with the way my paper turned out.” She explained that she could have had a more assertive voice, a more fluid approach, more trust in her abilities as a writer. Olga was a changed writer, a writer with critical awareness of having written a paper she felt was flawed but that the instructor, who never explained what a reflective essay is, “rewarded” with an A. The tutor’s work led to a positive affective outcome: the tutor bolstered Olga’s confidence as a writer by showing her how to complete the writing task.

Writing centers, whether we want to see it this way or not, fill gaps created when instructors fail to mentor students in processes that lead to writing success. The traditional narrative about the function of writing centers is that they support what happens in the classroom. Olga’s confidence was forged not as an outcome in a student-instructor interaction but as the result of competent, directive tutoring in the writing center. The counterstory1 in writing centers is that a good bit of writing instruction happens in the center, not because it is the job of the center to teach but because those who should be teaching writing are not.

Privileged Pedagogy

Traditionally writing center pedagogies, grounded on the work of greats like North, Irene Clark, Muriel

Counterstory in the Center • 168 Harris, Beth Bouquet, Nancy Grimm, and so many others, established the center as safe spaces where students could grow as writers. In recent years, writing center pedagogy has integrated much-needed work in social justice, translanguaging, disciplinary literacy, antiracist pedagogies, LGBTQ inclusivity, accessibility, and disability, transforming writing centers to sites of cutting-edge pedagogies for all learners. This integration reflects the understanding that difference— whether physical, cognitive, ethnic, sexual, genderbased, neurological, social, racial—profoundly shapes the psyche of the writer. Traditional approaches to teaching writing, like so much of what happens in classrooms from pre-school through graduate school, have been aimed at mainstream, white/middle class students, who fit a narrative of privilege, a story of undifferentiated teaching. Writing centers, on the other hand, recognize difference and operationalize real adjustments in pedagogies of accessibility.

I want to take a brave step back to encourage writing centers to seize an even more assertive claim to their role as de facto teachers of writing in institutional settings. Let’s start by acknowledging fundamental problems that bring students to the center, problems I refer to as “privileged pedagogy,” the unreflective teaching that happens in classrooms and that leaves writers needing more instruction.

1. Writing is often assigned but not taught. This pedagogical failure results in writing insecurity and a concomitant negative view of writing (Gallagher, 9, 52-53).

2. A culture of continuous improvement through formative feedback is not embraced throughout campus communities. Instead, assignments are made, students often bumble through the processes of writing, summative grades are given, and students learn on their own how to respond to failure in writing, which often leads to holistic failure in a class or perhaps even in the institution.

3. Instructors and professors see the work of teaching writing as the job of the English department. Disciplinary literacy (Shanahan and Shanahan), the mindset that recognizes distinctions in learning, researching, writing, expression, and conversation for individual disciplines, is rarely integrated into teaching in college classes.

4. Instructors and professors in college classrooms, by and large, have had no training in general classroom pedagogy or in disciplinespecific pedagogy. If we think about this, this is an egregious situation. In colleges and

universities, professional development in pedagogy is optional or even unnecessary.

Recently, in pragmatic but unfortunate acknowledgement of writing instructors’ lack of professional readiness to teach writing, colleges and universities have resorted to predesigned writing courses that package instructional materials and activities that can be used by anyone teaching the course (Tspetsura; Mitchum and Winet).

There are many more problems, but these are sufficient for scaffolding some brave truths as a counterstory of real teaching in the writing center.

Brave Teaching: Owning the Privilege of Teaching Writing Let’s attend to North’s words again: in writing centers we work to change the writer not the writing. I interpret this as knowing how to show student writers what to do when they are faced with a writing task that they may not quite understand, how to take risks that help them create writing that stands out, how to do the hard work of just writing and then revising. I offer some principles and powerful teaching practices drawn from a diverse assortment of resources for teaching writing in secondary schools. Yes . . . much of the best practices are presented and demonstrated in books for writers younger than college students, but those practices transfer prolifically and reliably for college writers who are writing apprentices, still learning the art and craft of writing.

1. “[A] good writer recognizes that a lot of lousy first-draft writing must be done before better writing can occur” (Gallagher, 50). My students love this comment; they embrace it joyfully, finding validation in their efforts to just write and then worry about revision later.

They love even more Anne Lamott’s much more straightforward comment that “all good writers write [shitty first drafts]. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts” (Ch. 3). The truth that students need to learn is that first drafts often are completely off target, but if they’ve taken the initiative to come to the writing center, then there’s time and space for productive revision.

2. Revision is extremely challenging, tedious work. Gallagher’s STAR approach to revision (Substitute, Take things out, Add, Rearrange) (59-62) gives writers a playbook for confident revision. Imagine a tutoring session with a student writer who has a good draft but could

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Counterstory in the Center • 169 use some syntactic tinkering. The STAR approach is perfect. Harry Noden’s image grammar strategies are similarly transformational. Tutors should take a look at least at the first chapter of Noden’s Image Grammar: Teaching Grammar as Part of the Writing Process to learn how participles, absolutes, adjectives out of order, appositives, and vivid verbs can turn lifeless writing, in any genre in any discipline, into writing that pulls readers into the writing, and, as Noden puts it, eliminates “image blanks”) (4-13, 29).

3. The thinking backward strategy explained in Writing on Demand: Best Practices and Strategies for Success by Anne Ruggles Gere, Leila Christenbury, and Kelly Sassi shows students how to extrapolate effective writing practices from writing models (11-27). Let’s go back to Olga’s example. Using the thinking backward strategy, a tutor could have shown Olga a sample reflective essay, a mentor essay from which she could have deductively identified what works and how she could adapt those strategies for her own writing. Models are invaluable teaching tools in writing because, as Lynne R. Dorfman and Rose Cappelli explain, mentor texts inspire writers to take risks, “to learn how to do what they may not yet be able to do on their own” (3).

4. Feedback, even the worst feedback, should be interpreted as a route to improvement. This is a tough lesson for writing center tutors to teach because feedback, especially in summative assessment, is often not offered as a catalyst for improvement. Additionally, feedback can set back a writer if it is misinterpreted by the student or ineptly constructed by the instructor. In an insightful essay on how students process feedback, Kelly Blewett focuses on students’ affective and then operational response to feedback. Blewett inventively shows how students can use emojis to process their reaction to feedback (66-70).

Writing center tutors can be valuable “translators” of feedback, helping students find direction and guidance in even the most ineptly constructed feedback.

I know these strategies work because I used them daily in the years that I served as writing center director— and I use them in my classrooms. Students like Olga, however, show that in a lot of classrooms throughout our institutions, good teaching of writing is not happening. In the absence of firm, reliable writing

instruction in the classroom, tutors must teach bravely, boldly, and directly.

Counterstory in the Center

If the writing center could be kept functionally in support service status, there would be no need for a counterstory. The tough truth is that writing centers perform much of the real writing instruction in institutions, especially at institutions with large populations of marginalized students. Privileged pedagogy elides difference, eschews hard teaching in favor of completion, coverage, and syllabus-driven instruction, and outsources to the writing center the challenging work of teaching writing. Brave teaching in the center seizes advantage of counterstory to create agency, empowerment, and writing success for students who, like Olga, had to find edifying, productive instruction when classroom teaching failed.

Notes 1. I want to recognize the inspiration I drew from Aya Y. Martinez’s Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory (2020). Though not focused on CRT, I strive to reflect her spirit of questioning, challenging, and reconstructing things as they are to shape new ways of being and acting in our worlds.

Works Cited Blewett, Kelly. “FYC Students’ Emotional Labor in the Feedback Cycle.” JAEPL: The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives in Learning, vol. 20, 2020, pp. 6078.

Cantu, Olga. “The reflective essay.” Essay written in English 4343, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Summer 2021.

Dorfman, Lynne R., and Rose Cappelli.. Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature, K-6, 2nd ed.

Stenhouse, 2017.

Gallagher, Kelly. Teaching Adolescent Writers. Stenhouse, 2006.

Gere, Anne Ruggles, Leila Christenbury, and Kelly Sassi.

Writing on Demand: Best Practices and Strategies for Success.

Heinemann, 2005.

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing and Life.

Anchor Books, 1994. Kindle e-book.

Martinez, Aya Y. Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. National Council of Teachers of English, 2020.

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Counterstory in the Center • 170 Mitchum, Catrina, and Kristen Winet. “The Potential of Pre-Designed Online Writing Courses as Instructor Training in Multimodality.” Global Society of Online Literacy Educators Annual Conference. 28 Jan. 2022. online.

Noden, Harry. Image grammar: Teaching Grammar as Part of the Writing Process. 2nd ed., Heinemann, 2011.

North, Stephen M. “The idea of a writing center.” College English, vol. 46, no. 5, 1984, pp. 433-446.

Shanahan, Timothy, and Cynthia Shanahan, C. “What Is Disciplinary Literacy and Why Does It Matter? Topics in Language Disorders, vol. 32, no. 1, 2012, pp. 7-18.

Tseptsura, Mariya. “Flexibility and Autonomy in Predesigned Composition Courses: In Search of a Solution for Post-COVID Online Instruction.” Global Society of Online Literacy Educators Annual Conference. 28 Jan. 2022. online.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 1 (2022)

WHERE WE’VE BEEN AND WHERE WE ARE Wonderful Faison Langston University dr._wonderful.faison@langston.edu During my time in writing centers located at Predominately White Institutions (PWIs), one of the problems writing center directors and staff attempted to solve was its lack of racially diverse tutors. Desiring not to reflect the image of white writing tutors helping students of color--deemed deficient--with their writing, writing center administrators at PWIs became concerned with ways to attract and keep racially diverse tutors, staff, etc. Thus, an onslaught of diversity, selfcare, and social justice initiatives intended to reflect our wokeness began being implemented at various predominately white writing centers, mine included. I was, happily so, eager to contribute to the waves of wokeness.

Consequently, when Anna and I wrote “Race, Rhetoric, and Literacy: The Hidden Curriculum of the Writing Center,” we wrote it at a time when the field of the writing center was beginning to reflect on its philosophies and pedagogical practices. We did not expect this piece to have any impact on the writing center community or be the article for which both Anna and I are known. We wrote the piece because we were frustrated with the racial politics of the writing center. These politics consisted of creating a familial feel in the Writing Center (WC), complete with the domestic trappings, but devoid of the raced, classed, and heterosexist understandings of family and domesticity upon which the WC was trying to build.

These ideas of family grated on us; we did not feel a part of this “family”. As a black woman, I constantly felt outnumbered. When encountering racism, it seemed as if it became an area for me to study and research during my graduate studies more so than an issue I could report and expect any meaningful change.

I did not know what to do and not knowing led me to write that article.

I (Anna) certainly did not expect to be thinking of that article in the following years to come. It is not like I believed my writing center or the broader writing center community would forever change between then and now, but for some reason, I did not expect for our words to keep resonating so deeply within the Writing Center community. Since then, locations within writing centers have changed. In light of the BLM and MeToo movement, social justice and antiracist scholarship has helped reshape writing center scholarship, ideology, and design. Now, both Anna and I reside in the same

Anna Treviño University of Oklahoma aktrevi@ou.edu state working at two distinctly different institutions serving two distinct populations with differing needs.

After Grad School and onto HBCUs My current location/position is as the English department chair at Langston University, a small regional Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Oklahoma. I am no longer in the writing center. And yet, I am over it. The writing center director implements the directives I give. Our concerns do not match those of the writing center field. They are different. We are different.

My experiences with racism in the writing center, which was so fundamentally shaped by and tied to my time in Predominantly White Writing Centers (PWWCs) at PWIs, was not my experience with the writing center at an HBCU. In my transition into this HBCU, some of the problems that remain prevalent in PWWCs, i.e., hiring and keeping tutors and staff of color, were nonexistent. My experience at this HBCU affords me the ability to see the ways in which HBCU writing center directors can reach across the aisle and work with PWWCs to create more diverse and inclusive hiring practices and retention programs.

With writing centers current interests in diversity and inclusion, we can now answer Karen KeatonJackson’s call to bring HBCUs to the writing center table. A letter from several writing center directors at different universities written to IWCA in 2020 showed that not only is the field ready to address longstanding social justice issues in the writing center, but also the tutors, staff, and directors are ready to address these longstanding issues.

During Grad School: The Move to a PWI

While Wonderful has moved from a PWI to an HBCU, as I (Anna) wrote in our previous article, “Race, Rhetoric, and Literacy: The Hidden Curriculum of the Writing Center,” I moved from a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI)/Minority Serving Institution (MSI) to a PWI. Wonderful’s move happened after earning her PhD and mine was to begin a PhD program. I did not work as a tutor at my HSI. The experiences that bonded us had to do with both being women of color attending PWIs for our PhDs and working at writing centers while in our respective programs. Wonderful no longer works as a tutor, but

Where We’ve Been and Where We Are • 172 her job keeps her in the discussions of writing centers generally and specifically at her institution. I hardly work as a tutor these days. I now primarily have an administrative role being the graduate assistant director.

In the work I do now, I am heavily involved in tutor education. The time that I have spent in this position has led me to think about anti-racist work in the writing center and having tutors learn and reflect on racism in the writing center. From 2019-2020, focused more on a vision of a writing center committed to social justice—a place that doesn’t focus on assimilating writers and works to have conversations about writing rather than marking papers. I tried to communicate to the tutors that the writing center is not a fix-it shop. However, as most of us know, pedagogically moving beyond the idea of the writing center as a fix-it shop is difficult. There’s a lot of pressure for writing centers to continue to be remedial spaces for papers to be polished according to the so-called conventions of Standard American English. Even more, there’s a tension that exists now as a result of writing centers distancing themselves from the idea of remediation, a move from solely working to support writing done in classes to a space with its own vision and mission. Specifically, I think about Frankie Condon’s following words: In the world of writing centers, despite a recent surge of interest in and an emerging commitment to stamp out oppression and racism, there continues to be a kind of ongoing hand-wringing with regard to how to put that commitment into effect. We perceive, not without reason, that our institutional position is perpetually in peril, always contingent upon the perception of administrators, teachers, and students that what we do supplements and reinforces both the kinds of writing taught in the classroom and the ways that writing is taught. Too often we have kept the same deal with the devil that has undermined the realization of a fully formed, multiracial democracy since the framing of the U.S. Constitution. That is, we ostensibly subscribe to the principle that all people (all Englishes) are equal but in practice sacrifice that ideal at the altar of political and pedagogical expediency. (4) I don’t think there could be a much better description of what I think haunts the writing center and even me. There’s a stickiness to writing center work. So much can be said, but only so much is accepted and done. Sacrifices must be made not only because of a writing center’s institutional position, but also because of what faculty and students expect of

them. That makes me feel like conversations are going around-and-around, but not forward. In part, I understand that is the result of the fact that first-year writing curricula differs across universities, so do the writing expectations they have of their students.

There is much of a difference in the writing I saw when I taught at a HSI and the writing I see here at a PWI. I suspect, those differences are not uncommon, and I believe writing centers are haunted by those differences as well. Those differences also allow firstyear composition/writing curriculum to sparkle, to be beyond requiring students to visit the writing center as a part of their grade here. Here at the PWI, the standardized first-year composition curriculum centered the use of research (including personal writing/reflection, reading, interviewing, observation, and analysis of primary documents) to investigate their own and others’ literacy experiences/to investigate a particular failure of communication. At the HSI, during the first semester writing class, students reflected who they have chosen to become, what has influenced that decision, issues that affect their culture, community, or generation. In the second semester writing class, students explored their college and career goals.

Noteworthy is that at the HSI the class started by introducing the five-paragraph essay and the longest essay had to be 4-5 pages long. At the PWI, the shortest essay had to be 4-5 pages long. The readings also differed. Everything is an Argument and Rules for Writers were the required texts for the class at the HSI. There were no required texts at the PWI. Readings were open-access articles about writing such as GrantDavie’s “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents” and Kevin Roozen’s “Journalism, Poetry, Stand-up Comedy, and Academic Literacy.” At the HSI, the class was designed the way it was because, as I was told, “most of our students are not English majors,” unlike at the PWI where higher administration wanted the first-year writing curriculum to standout against other well-known universities. What I mean to say here is that first-year writing assignments can be haunting because they can reinforce ideas of the writing center: is the writing center a fix-it shop? Where can it be more than one?

I hear similarities in the recent conversations I have had with Wonderful. But our conversations are not about figuring out how to make a sparkly curriculum. Our conversations are about figuring out how we can meet students where they are at and building just and integrated curricula at minority institutions for students. Our conversations are about the conversations that perpetuate unjust writing programs and support. Of course, that is considered

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Where We’ve Been and Where We Are • 173 just is also something that can be haunting. What if students need a fix-it shop approach?

Until our recent conversations, I will admit that I never paused to think about how I only remember working with one white tutor when I went to mandatory visits as a first-year student (2007-2008).

What does it mean when the students who faculty generalize when they say things like, “the students here just can’t write” and tutors are those students? If my mother were not my mother but instead a first-year student visiting the writing center, how would I interact with her? And what would the differences be if the visit were at a PWI or HSI/MSI? Should there be a difference? I’ve gotten a similar question during job interviews, a question along the lines of, “how would you adjust the way you teach for a job at a HSI/MSI?” That question feels like a trap. It feels deficit-oriented.

Should there be a difference?

What might the future hold?: Where We Think We’re Going

developmental writers and pedagogy? If not, now what?”

Like Condon’s words and Wonderful’s question highlight, writing centers are haunted by the question of what writing centers are and should be, what would make writing centers a site of justice, and the sacrifices that keep us from arriving.

Works Cited Faison, Wonderful and Anna Treviño. “Race, Retention, Language, and Literacy: The Hidden Curriculum of the Writing Center.” The Peer Review, vol. 1, no. 2, Fall 2017.

Grant-Davie, Keith. “Rhetorical Situtations and Their Constituents.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 15, no. 2, Spring 1997.

Roozen, Kevin. “Journalism, Poetry, Stand-up Comedy, and Academic Literacy.” Journalism of Basic Writing (CUNY), vol. 27, no. 1, 2008, pp. 5-34.

What is concerning about writing center scholarship is their dismissal or avoidance of Basic/Developmental writers. There seems to be a correlation between Basic/Developmental writers and skill-and-drill grammar activities. However, with more and more institutions moving to remove Basic/Developmental Writing from university curriculums, this move could have a significant impact on writing center scholarship and pedagogy.

Unfortunately, this move does not bode well for the advancement of writing center pedagogy as it may cause the very function of the writing center to change.

And since removing Basic Writing from the curriculum does not remove students deemed Basic Writers from the institution, this move is likely to shift the responsibility of getting students to meet college writing standards from the professor and on to the tutor. And if the demand is for Basic Writers to work on and improve their grammar as it is at my institution, the writing center may be forced into a pedagogical regression.

Again, we think of Condon’s words, “We perceive, not without reason, that our institutional position is perpetually in peril, always contingent upon the perception of administrators, teachers, and students that what we do supplements and reinforces both the kinds of writing taught in the classroom and the ways that writing is taught” (4).

Wonderful asks “what is the role of the writing center in English corequisite models and remediating Basic/Developmental writers? Does writing center scholarship and best practices align with research on Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 19, No 1 (2022) www.praxisuwc.com