ABOUT THE AUTHORS COLUMNS
From the Editors: Interrogating Intricate Entanglements in the Writing Center
Tristan Hanson and Emma Conatser
The Things Left Unsaid: Student Death and Writing Centers
Genie Giaimo
FOCUS ARTICLES
Defining and Learning About Multilingual Linguistic and Professional Labor in the Writing Center Context: An Autoethnographic Tutor Perspective
Saurabh Anand
Writing Centers’ Entanglements with Neoliberal Success
Crystal Bazaldua, Tekla Hawkins, & Randall W. Monty,
Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM and Health Sciences Populations
Candis Bond and James Garner
What makes a Writing Center Experience Useful? Perceptions of Native, Non-native, and Generation 1.5 Writers
Grant Eckstein and Kate Matthews
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Genie Giaimo is Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Middlebury College, where they serve as the writing center director. Their research has appeared in Praxis, Writing Center Journal, TPR, Journal of Writing Research, Kairos, Journal of Writing Analytics, Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, and several other peer reviewed journals in rhetoric and composition. They are the author of Unwell Writing Centers: Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond (2023) and the editor of Wellness and Care in Writing Center Work (2021)
Saurabh Anand holds an MA in TESOL and is an assistant director of the University of Georgia Writing Center, where he is pursuing a Ph D in Rhetoric and Composition Studies in the Department of English His research interests include autoethnography, writing centers in multilingual contexts, and decolonial writing center pedagogies
Crystal Bazaldua, M A , graduated with a master’s degree in English Studies from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and now teaches first-year writing as a lecturer in the UTRGV Writing Program. She is currently a PhD student of Technical Communication & Rhetoric at Texas Tech University
Tekla Hawkins is an Assistant Professor at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley; their research focuses on accessibility and pedagogy.
Randall W. Monty is an associate professor of rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies, and the former associate director of the Writing Center at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley His work is at the intersection of political discourse, spatial literacy, and science writing.
Candis Bond is director of the Center for Writing Excellence at Augusta University, where she is also an associate professor of English Her research interests include dimensions of writing center labor, writing in STEM, WAC/WID, and higher education leadership. She has published scholarship in journals such as Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Praxis, Southern Discourse in the Center, and The Peer Review
James Donathan Garner is associate director of the Center for Writing Excellence at Augusta University. His research interests include professional development for writing center practitioners, interconnections between writing center and WAC/WID pedagogy, technology in writing instruction, and the history of rhetoric. His work has appeared in Rhetorica and The Journal for the History of Rhetoric..
Grant Eckstein is a professor of linguistics at Brigham Young University where he teaches graduate academic writing and teacher training courses His research interests include second language reading and writing development and pedagogy, including issues related to first-year composition and writing center praxis He is the associate editor of Journal of Response to Writing and has published in The Writing Center Journal, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and The Peer Review.
Kate Matthews holds a master’s degree in TESOL from Brigham Young University. She teaches English classes in Utah Her research interests include second language acquisition and writing with an emphasis on feedback.
EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: INTERROGATING INTRICATE ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE WRITING CENTER
Tristan Hanson
University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com
As writing center practitioners, we often find ourselves tangled in situations that have no easy solutions and searching for help Whether confronting crises, mediating the desires of institutions and individuals, communicating with tutees, or developing and assessing our practices, we rely on our personal and communal experiences, as well as work of our colleagues, to guide us through The articles in this issue probe some of our thornier entanglements by first revealing them and then offering useful guides for how we might deal with them both personally and communally. In doing so, they offer us concrete first steps for addressing the kinds of problems that keep us up at night
Genie Giaimo’s column essay begins the issue by addressing “the things left unsaid” in her book Unwell Writing Centers and in writing centers generally, namely, student death. Giaimo frames her personal experiences of student death as an administrator with evidence of the increasing need for writing center practitioners to develop practices “to plan for, respond to, and address student death ” Crucially, these practices should draw on experiential knowledge, crisis response work, and postvention planning to move beyond sterilized institutional responses to potentially traumatic crises
In this issue’s first focus article, Saurabh Anand provides an autoethnographic look at linguistic labor in the writing center Anand uses the “betweener” framework to position multilingual tutors as those who are best equipped to meet the unique needs of multilingual tutees. The article features three episodes of this framework in action from Anand’s lived experiences as a tutor, highlighting the way linguistic labor is navigated in each case
Crystal Bazaldua, Tekla Hawkins, and Randall W Monty follow with an interrogation of the assumptions behind the use of the ideograph “ success ” in writing center discourse. Using a Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis, the authors examine the webspaces of writing centers in a large state university system for how they deploy “ success ” Through their analysis, they conclude that writing centers may be propping up institutionalized neoliberal and white-supremacist discourses and structures even as they espouse and enact more equitable practices in their day-to-day operations
Emma Conatser
University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com
From there, Candis Bond and James Garner propose a new way of thinking about professional tutors and STEM consultations in “Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM and Health Sciences Populations.” The article discusses the way one health science university writing center prepares graduate and professional tutors to address the increasing need for advanced writing guidance in STEM areas specifically Bond and Garner propose a training program for equipping these tutors to work with STEM writers with confidence in multiple genres and contexts
In the issue’s final piece, Grant Eckstein and Kate Matthews reveal students’ perceptions of the “usefulness” of our centers Specifically, they compare survey data on usefulness across three student groups: native English speakers, non-native English speakers, and those “who straddle the nuanced divide between native and non-native language proficiency,” Generation 1 5 In comparing these groups, the authors find that, while writing centers seem to be useful for nearly all students there are measurable differences between how different groups assess their experiences. They close by calling for further research that considers “the unique challenges faced by non-traditional students ”
We’d like to conclude this introduction by thanking our authors, reviewers, and readers for their hard work and engagement with the journal As the outgoing editors, we are so grateful to have been a part of this scholarly community and are proud of all the work that we ’ ve overseen at Praxis We’d especially like to thank our editorial assistants, Sydney Patterson and Ava Hammon, for their hard work promoting and copy editing the journal while also working as consultants and staffing the front desk. They were an immense help this semester and deserve a lot of credit for supporting the publication of this issue We offer our farewell knowing that the important conversations represented here will continue beyond our editorship and hope to see you all in writing centers, at conferences, and in the pages of Praxis soon.
Genie
Giaimo Middlebury Collegeggiaimo@middlebury.edu
Content Warning:
This article contains discussion of student death, suicide, murder, school shooting, sexual violence, domestic violence, cancer
Introduction: Haunted by Death
There is a ghost that haunts my book. It is called by many names trauma, crisis, emergency but, really, the ghost is death. My book is haunted by but never really confronts death
I wrote Unwell Writing Centers because I had a lot to say about the worrisome movement of the wellness industry into higher education I also felt like our field could benefit from non-optimization framings of wellness work. I wrote about my desperate desire to keep my tutors (and myself) safe Crises strike our colleges and universities with alarming regularity. After COVID-19, I rarely find a practitioner or educator who tells me that I am overreacting about the mental health crisis we are facing or the wellness-related challenges of working within the managed university Emergency plans and crisis response work have been normalized and are highly visible to those of us who work in higher education We live and breathe emergencies.
At the same time, I am witnessing practitioners’ desire for more I am realizing that no matter the plan, no matter the preparation, there will always be some new crisis thrown at us, so long as we continue to work in academia (and even if we leave) The ultimate crisis, I believe, is student death. I can’t continue to write about how we keep ourselves and our students safe from harm a major goal of emergency planning without acknowledging that student death is the ultimate thing I am trying to prevent I am saying the thing left unsaid in Unwell Writing Centers: we need to prepare writing centers, and ourselves, for the possible crisis of a student death
As new writing center directors, we are often not trained or prepared for much of the work we do While some graduate programs provide courses on writing program administration that include writing
center work, the day-to-day lived experiences of administrators might play second string to other seemingly more important official duties We might learn best practices in running a writing program or how to balance institutional mission with programmatic vision If we are lucky, we might learn how to manage a budget, how to mentor and manage student workers, or how to create professional development programs We might also learn how to assess our programs for efficacy.
I write tentatively here, using “might” because many of us do not get this kind of training, and no amount of training will prepare us for complex and unanticipated experiences we have on the job, such as active aggressor situations, pandemics, or other traumatic events. We are especially unprepared to handle student death
Now, death is not the conclusion of every emergency Some emergencies, like a bad snowstorm or a cyberattack both of which are statistically more likely to occur than a pandemic or active aggressor situation might seem terribly mundane and not all that dangerous, though weather can be. But what keeps me up at night are not the mundane and non-injurious emergency scenarios; it is the crises that lead to death with which I am concerned.
As academic workers, we are likely to experience an emergency or crisis at some point in our career In my book, I argue that we should be prepared for pre-and post-crisis work I also write about how to prepare for crises, as writing centers are often left out of official institutional emergency plans. On the emergency plan for our building, for example, the writing center didn’t exist; it was a big gaping hole in the plan. No one knew we were there. No one told us what to do in case of an emergency in our space Coincidentally, our space was what one might consider to be the least optimal for sheltering in place: a long continuous room with one main door and three side doors and giant floor-to-ceiling windows. So, in my book, I provide resources for building in-program
emergency plans specific to the space and structure of writing centers.
But this is where my book ends. I write about the lead-up I write about the aftermath I don’t wade into the specifics. I don’t speak directly about what to do when a student, or even multiple students, dies. It is here in this uncomfortable and tragic possibility that I locate this piece. It is an omission I only recognized after the publication of my book, which I worked on for over five years This omission speaks to my development as a writing administrator and the ways in which new tragic experiences continue to shape my work. However, this omission also reverberates throughout our field its silence is deafening. There are so few articles, as my overview below shows, about student death, yet writing centers are likely to feel death acutely when it occurs, even outside the center
So, to remedy my omission to expel this ghost haunting my book I write here about student death. I hope that this conversation continues It is only the beginning
Preparing for Crisis: Emails in a Folder
This journey started when I first became a writing center director. I was in the first semester of my work and an email hit the WCenter Listserv asking how one might address the death of a tutor I have maintained that folder (labeled “in case of tutor death”) for ten years And I have added to it Most of these emails, however, are just that: folk information shared in moments of acute crisis.
This is not to say that relying on one ’ s community for support and guidance in a moment of acute crisis like the death of a tutor is wrong. The challenge is that these conversations occur intermittently and, often, only in the moment of crisis. They do not anticipate student death. They do not assess response post-death They do not engage in proactive rather than reactive work around death and loss They do not, in other words, form a complete whole on how to cope with a tragic and emotionally charged event, nor do they really tell us what works or what is preventative
The field of writing center studies has published little on death. Keyword searches for the term often result in reference to metaphors about our work, such as “working ourselves to death” (Ede 5), being “meeting-ed to death” (Simpson et al. 80), and “death knells” in the profession (Giaimo; Kinkead; Spitzer-Hanks). There are also several references to
metaphorical death in writing center praxis (Petit 113; Carino 40). There are a few instances where the trauma of death seeps in, such as a student who writes about workplace sexual harassment and being “scared to death” (Welch 77); Thomas Spitzer-Hanks’s blog on gun violence’s impact on the physical and “spiritual” work of writing centers; and Marilee Brooks-Gillies’s article “Constellations across cultural rhetorics and writing centers,” which details the impact of familial death on academic work. In tutoring work, death is often the topic of research papers rather than personal and reflective writing (Blau et al ; Mackiewicz and Thompson; Williams).
There are, however, several articles and books that discuss the very real instances of death among minoritized people, such as those from the BIPOC community and from the LGBTQIA+ community, and how these deaths shape the work of BIPOC and queer writing center workers. In Queerly Centered, Travis Webster discusses the increased rates of murder among BIPOC transgender people as well as how the deaths of queer people impact queer writing center administrators For these administrators, there are traumatic queer historical touchstones like the AIDS crisis, or the outing and subsequent suicide of a queer college student, that are profoundly impactful Andrew J. Rihn and Jay D. Sloan centering their argument in gay suicide and matters of life and death for the queer community offer a very limited annotated bibliography of writing center scholarship centered on LQBTQIA issues
Zandra L. Jordan’s “Womanist Curate, Cultural Rhetorics Curation, and Antiracist, Racially Just Writing Center Administration” details the deaths of George Floyd, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland and Renisha McBride and the impact they had on her and her tutors, demonstrating that we do not do our work in a vacuum. Jordan argues for “life giving” practices in and around the writing center that include, but are not limited to, anti-racist practices. Neisha-Anne Green discusses the Black Lives Matter movement and “who among us actually matters, both in life and in death” (18). Green also describes the challenges Black activists face, such as burnout and suicidal ideation when she tells the story of Jedidiah Brown (20). She rightly asks how BIPOC writing center workers who might lack the community that Jedidiah Brown had can continue to do their work in the face of micro-and-macro-aggressions In a follow-up piece, Green discloses her own challenges with well-being
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and notes her reluctance to self-disclose (19) Her articles rightly address the very real physical and emotional challenges that BIPOC workers face in writing studies, including how BIPOC people are at higher risk of death.
While BIPOC writing center workers and queer writing center workers make far more frequent reference to death, there are moments when death punctures the tutorial or even characterizes the main processing work of a tutorial Citing Nancy Welch, Elizabeth Boquet discusses “death work” and “life work” in her book Noise from the Center (39) Framed in Lacanian terms, the writer works through their experiences of war within the confines of the writing center Here, writing about death and life enables deeper understanding and trauma processing. Many researchers over the years have discussed how writing enables us to work through grief, loss, and other traumas related to death (Pennebaker and Beall; Range et al ; Travagin et al ) Writing about grief and death can specifically facilitate grief recovery, though several studies found that anxiety and depression are not mitigated by writing (Range et al ; Travagin et al ; Breen et al.).
While Hillary Degner et al. argue for more research on the rising challenges tutors face with mental health concerns a call that has been met with several publications on mindfulness, wellness, and emotional labor research (see my “A Matter of Method: Wellness and Care Research in Writing Center Studies” for a review of recent literature)–there are almost no articles or stories that I could find that specifically work through the death of a tutor or a student closely related to the writing center Like many of the challenges we face in our work, we tend to write around the issue We write about how it arises in tutorials as part of assigned writing, or how it punctures the lived experiences of marginalized writing center workers, or the ways in which death might drive or impact our administrative work. At the same time, little space has been given in our research publications about facing death and processing grief and trauma in the writing center, or what we can do as administrators and tutors when there is a death in our community
There is, however, a lot of lived experience on the topic that circulates in informal online communities and among our personal and professional networks After sharing stories about my experience of student death, I aggregate what informal knowledge I found on death in the writing center from within the field Then, I turn to some of the best practices and
resources I have drawn from outside the field, namely in crisis response work and postvention planning. Aggregating these materials is a continuation of my book’s project; it is critical for us to examine our experiences, to collect our community’s knowledge, and to explore what other related fields have learned about student death Putting these practices together starts a necessary if also uncomfortable conversation. As I have learned through personal experience and through secondary research, death does happen. We need to begin these conversations proactively before a crisis is upon us
The Normalization of Student Death on College Campuses
At my previous institution, student death occurred often. It happened on campus and off campus. It happened among currently enrolled students and among alumni. It happened so frequently that, at one point, my tutors told me that they couldn’t keep track of everyone who died Messages were sent out after the more high-profile student deaths, and task forces were established However, I don’t recall additional mental health support services, canceled classes, memorials, anniversaries, or anything other than emails sent by University communications The day after sheltering in place for hours due to what was initially reported as an active shooting situation, classes resumed A week later, armed gun rights activists marched through our campus supporting a House bill that enabled institutions to permit concealed carry on their campuses
During the active aggressor situation, a student died and many (at least 11) were hospitalized with injuries. Complexly, however, the student who died was the attacker; there was little mourning of this student because of the grief and devastation they caused to so many in our community. The active aggressor situation raised other issues related to gun rights: the alienation of Muslim students of color (the aggressor was a Muslim student of color who expressed feelings of alienation in our campus newspaper), the growing nation-wide mental health crisis, and, of course, student death and injury. Issues related to the 2016 Presidential election (Trump was elected a few weeks before the attack), like the rising hate crimes on and around campus, also contributed to this situation but were never addressed by the institution. Death can be bound-up with politics, institutional crisis management, institutional self-protection, and several other local and national
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networks of power Death and trauma can also be made into a spectacle for opportunistic and bad faith actors from outside the university community.
This was a high-profile death and injury crisis on campus, but it was not the only one by a longshot. In the 2016–2017 year, there were six suicides (Hendrix). In the year and a half that followed, four more students would attempt suicide. Over a four-day period in spring 2018, two students jumped from the same university building One died, one survived (614 Now). A writing tutor witnessed one of these attempts They held the person’s hand while waiting for the ambulance. When the tutor told me about this experience, my stomach churned, my body tensed, and I was unable to speak
There were still more student deaths. Regan Tokes was raped and murdered on her way back home from work Heather Campbell was murdered by her boyfriend who then died by suicide in a domestic dispute, also off campus (Wells) After each death, I sent emails, I offered resources, I developed training, I added questions to my longitudinal assessment on tutor well-being
Yet even as I try here to catalog the number of student deaths, I struggle with chronology. I struggle to convey meaning There were times when student deaths would come so quickly that it became nearly impossible to respond without flooding my already flooded staff I did, however, make changes in the spaces I nominally controlled. I arranged REACH Suicide Prevention training for tutors I shared materials on domestic violence and stalking I brought the topic of death into our weekly mentorship meetings I assessed how tutors experienced student death. Most of the data from assessing the efficacy of these interventions didn’t make it into my book but one finding that did was how a tutor reported back that the training allowed them to broach the topic of suicide with their romantic partner They were able to use their training to get their partner support at a moment of utmost crisis. Another finding was that tutors respond to death in mixed ways: some are deeply impacted, some are not. The more a tutor feels unaligned with the institution by identity markers like race, gender, sexuality, and political stances, the more they report being impacted by student death and other crises From these findings we can surmise that tutors use their training in non-work situations and that our tutors’ identities impact their sense of belongingness in our institutions Writing centers, then, can play a pivotal role in preparing tutors for the challenges of
addressing and processing student death but, also, tutors are differentially affected by such crises based on their own positionality within the community. We need to learn more about how tutors process crises in and around our centers because these issues invariably impact our workplace and our community
Despite how widely higher education institutions vary, they respond to student death in strikingly similar ways Some of these responses are intentional and include policies that have been developed in reaction to crises. My book, for example, discusses how nation-wide interventions such as the Clery Act which requires colleges and universities to disclose campus crimes and security policies were enacted because of tragedy and death In 1986, Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in her campus dorm. After her death, there was a call to report crime statistics, to alert campus to imminent dangers, and to produce annual security reports. The Clery Act aims to protect students through systematically reporting on previously unreported crimes; it is an attempt to reduce potential harm through institutional transparency requirements Another communication failure at Virginia Tech during an active shooter situation contributed to the development of large scale and system-level communications in emergency communication through campus-wide alert systems. During the Virginia Tech school shooting, a series of communication failures (including a delayed set of active shooter announcements) led to students coming onto campus during the shooting Once again, a university’s communication failures contributed to student death This incident gave rise to campus-wide alert systems among other emergency planning interventions, many of which were provided by for-profit vendors (Foster)
Communication, of course, matters during moments of dire distress and crisis. In my book, I argue that proactive rather than reactive approaches to crisis are necessary for the safeguarding and well-being of our communities. Emergency planning, as an example, is critical to writing center directors who might otherwise not be included in official university plans, which I experienced But the subtext here is how to carry on once students and other community members have died What happens in the aftermath? Much of the emergency planning that we do is to ensure that this doesn’t happen or, if it does, to mitigate further loss Ultimately, of course, we hope that planning prevents loss, but it seems more a matter
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of when rather than if death will occur, as I have found both from personal experience and from data on college-aged student death rates.
A Matter of When Rather than If: Preparing for Student Death Through Examining Death Rates Among College-Aged Youth
The CDC lists the following as the leading causes of deaths in 15-19-year-olds: accidents (unintentional injuries), homicide, suicide. Among those 15-24, the World Health Organization offers a profile of risk that includes “accidents and injuries, self-harm and interpersonal violence” (“Key Facts”) Males in this age group are at higher risk for these kinds of deaths than females (“Key Facts”). In the past year, 41% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered attempting suicide (“Facts About Suicide Among LGBTQ+ Young People”). Black transgender and nonbinary young people reported disproportionately higher rates of suicide risk: in the past year, 58% seriously considered suicide and 25% attempted suicide (“Facts About Suicide Among LGBTQ+ Young People”) While youth deaths are declining around the world, in the United States they are stagnant or rising (Yorke)
It is, however, difficult to find aggregated university data on cause of death among students in higher education including accidental deaths (Kim; Turner et al.). A recent study supports these findings, noting “there is little published data about mortality and causes of death in the college population” (Marconi et al. 206). They found that:
contrary to published data and national statistics for the relevant age groups, intentional by self-harm deaths lead causes of death in enrolled students from 2004 to 2018 Intentional by self-harm is the main cause of death in male students, younger students, and white students “Other” [unintentional] causes of death is the main cause in female students, older students, and students of color (205)
These findings underscore both the causal and probabilistic possibilities of death among the main population that many of us work with, which is traditionally college-aged students (18–25) However, death is hard to track from an institutional or even definitional standpoint, as researchers note This suggests that we might not always be aware of the statistical risks of death among specific student populations, or the common behaviors or experiences
that contribute to these risks Articles about students who died by suicide often emphasize their academic achievements, as if academic success is somehow an insulator from suicidal ideation At the same time, we know that self-harm deaths (suicide) are one of the most common types of student deaths and they have risen an alarming 40% (with some citing even larger increases) since 2000 (“Generation Z and Deaths of Despair”) We also know that substances like alcohol are involved in 2 out of 10 student deaths and “mortality related to substance use among college students is increasing” (Marconi et al 212) The realization that death does happen at our small residential liberal arts college we often hear the refrain “that just doesn’t happen here” can be shocking, disheartening, and downright scary for workers and students alike And student death often elides both cause and effect; in other words, cause is frequently left vague or indeterminate and the impact of student death on the campus community is under-studied
Yet the general statistics and the politics of death (describing how a person dies, for example, is deeply tied to cultural, religious, and other values) do not really capture the individual impact that each student death has upon our communities For example, to say that, by some measurements, suicide has risen more than 60% from 2000–2021 among young people ages 20-24 from “11 9 deaths per 100,000 to 19 4” (Curtin and Garnett) simply does not capture the impact that these kinds of deaths have on college campuses.
What Happens or Doesn’t Happen When Death Occurs?
At my current institution, we are contending with three student deaths this past semester. One death was ruled an accidental overdose, one was initially ruled an accident but is now described as a suicide, and the third was a murder. Two deaths occurred on campus and one, just over the holiday break, off campus These are not the first student deaths since I arrived In the past several years, we have lost others: to suicide, to cancer, to accidents Death, as my student said recently, is becoming part of our college’s experience, so much so that the school newspaper has published several articles against normalizing it The editorial board published “Student death is now part of the routine at Middlebury” collectively urging our institution to act And the deaths themselves are complicated by their circumstances as well as the institution’s response and the response of family,
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which has erased conversations about harmful and at-risk behavior, as well as suicide on campus.
Student death raises all kinds of issues for those of us who have made our life’s work in academia In many ways, despite many arguments to the contrary about the role work should play in our lives, when a student or worker dies, our community mourns as if we lost a member of our family. In Judaism, when a loved one dies, we practice Kriah, or the rending of a garment which represents the pain of loss and grief A student death tears the fabric of our community; there is an absence, a loss, a frightening puncture of the quotidian. At small schools, this loss is even more acute as students are more likely to know one another and to feel the loss, especially if the student death happens on or close to campus.
Yet, once a student dies, a bureaucratic response kicks into high gear Their information is removed from the advising portal. An email is sent out first announcing a death and, later, identifying the person who died On our campus, emails are also sent out with as students ruefully note the same five resources (spiritual center, wellness center, therapy, etc.) alongside a more detailed set of facts about the student. Otherwise, it often seems like business as usual
Usually, classes are not canceled. Faculty are told to return to the classroom to keep the routine and to put “ eyes on ” students Acknowledgment of the fear of death “contagion” drives these decisions, yet they are implemented unevenly Some faculty cancel class Some engage students in off-topic discussions about their well-being. Others, as one student told me, hold tests and quizzes as if nothing happened Often, informal memorials are immediately planned by students and occur within days or even hours of the news circulating through campus Official college memorials occur a little later, sometimes a week or two after a student’s death and sometimes a month or longer There might be no official memorials but many unofficial ones outside the spaces where the student died Flowers, photos, stuffed animals, and other offerings outside of dorms, parking garages, and other on-campus spaces. Despite being considered a best practice, most institutions where I have worked do not celebrate death anniversaries or create official memorials Furthermore, at every institution where I have worked, students have struggled to access mental health support in timely ways. At my previous institution, the wait could be several months long Here, students have been advocating for on-campus
psychiatric care and specialized mental health services for decades (Ji; Pagni; Walters).
Findings from a survey of university and college counseling services point to the challenges of supporting students’ mental health and well-being. In the survey, directors of mental health centers report challenges with attracting and retaining staff because of low pay and poor working conditions (Gorman et al 31) High turnover in counseling services is also a perennial issue Additionally, staff are often unprepared for supporting grieving students, especially those with complicated grief and those who refuse to seek support (Wrenn). There are challenges, then, in how colleges and universities collect and report data on student death, in how they respond to student death, and in their material support for mental healthcare Students, in turn, struggle to access services and often reject official support services, perhaps because of institutional distrust.
Postvention Plans and the Illogic of Student Death
After several experiences of student death, and passively collecting information for years, I intensively researched how institutions respond to student death and the efficacy of emergency response protocols. Last fall, I attended workshops and meetings held by my institution’s crisis response team I talked with colleagues at my institution and at other institutions. I examined research on postvention plans, including the commonly referenced Comprehensive Crisis Plan Checklist (CCPC-2) and interrater agreement on plan development (McCleary and Aspiranti) I hoped the research on crisis management and student death plans would give me answers, but it only added more questions I found that we still know little about the efficacy of specific postvention actions and how death impacts students on campus (Devore)
While most schools have crisis or postvention plans, the majority “are significantly below best practice criteria for each of the three subcategories of prevention, intervention, and postvention” (West 57). West found that in line with other findings such plans “lack comprehensiveness” (58) In addition to the challenges of maintaining crises response plans, it is difficult to assess whether these plans are effective because there are no validated rubrics on crisis response. So, on the one hand, these plans are critical in responding to and mitigating crisis, and on the Praxis: A Writing Center Journal •
other, they are unevenly enacted from institution to institution. We know little about their efficacy.
Yet postvention plans following student death have long been argued to be a critical element of community intervention. O’Neill et al. note that postvention plans are a key component of suicide prevention programs and in addressing suicide contagion events. In the K–12 education system, multiple states in the US require suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention plans (62) The “core goals for suicide postvention include: (a) returning the focus of school to education; (b) facilitating natural coping responses of those affected; (c) providing resources for those affected; (d) preventing suicide contagion or imitative behaviors; and (e) identifying ongoing needs of the school community” (62).
Despite the wealth of information available on how to develop postvention plans, empirical research on the efficacy of postvention plans is lacking (62). There are only a few systematic reviews of postvention plan efficacy, likely due to the high amount of variation in plans alongside a “void of rigorous experimental designs and methodology” (62) There are downstream effects in how postvention plans are developed, implemented, and assessed due to the dearth of rigorous studies As O’Neill et al notes:
Without evidence-based postvention programs for schools, school districts and their crisis responders are advised to utilize clinical judgment and refer to published toolkits, general guidelines for community responses and safe reporting, and expert recommendations for conducting postvention within schools to support students and mitigate contagion effects. (62)
Without large scale assessment, we are left to rely on in-house support and guidelines, which themselves might be limited, out of date, or incomplete. Alarmingly, we know that how we respond to student death matters and can exacerbate or reduce further student crises, yet we know little about the degree to which specific interventions work
For example, a study on the effectiveness of interventions for people bereaved through suicide found that the quality of studies was weak which led the researchers to conclude that “while there was some evidence of the effectiveness of interventions for uncomplicated grief, evidence of the effectiveness of complicated grief interventions was lacking”
(Andriessen 1) While research has found that individuals bereaved by suicide are at higher risk for several mental health issues, as well as at a higher risk for completing suicides themselves, there is little empirical research on what interventions work best. Most research on the subject “focused on the experiences of those who have been bereaved and the characteristics of suicide bereavement, whereas the effectiveness of postvention in terms of its impact on the grief process and mental health of bereaved individuals remains unclear” (2). So, while we know that proactive and reactive responses are necessary, and there are several important elements of postvention response to student death including clear communication, student support, community member triage, and memorials/anniversaries we also know that a major limitation to effectively carrying out crisis response plans is that “there are no empirically validated rubrics to evaluate school crisis plans” (West 7) So, it is hard to assess if our plans are actually working, not to say anything of the material challenges with establishing and maintaining crisis response teams and ongoing work outside of an immediate crisis
To be sure, there are many different people who are part of the crisis response teams for institutions of higher education Often, these response teams are led by the Office of Student Affairs alongside campus mental health offices, campus safety, and other on-campus organizations tasked with managing day-to-day residential life and well-being for students. At the same time, we teachers and administrators are not outside of the campus community. When a student dies or other crises occur, we too are impacted More often, we are also asked to do crisis response work in our classrooms, offices, and centers. One way to become involved in this work is to meet with your on-campus crisis response team and to become part of the team and/or to receive crisis response training. Another approach is to learn from others in our field about their responses to student death.
Wisdom from WCenter for Ways to Take Action After Student Death
The WCenter Listserv provides practical folk guidance on responding to crises; it is filled with compassionate people who are willing to share advice on any number of crises, not just about student death or the death of a tutor I have, over the years, found myself returning again and again to the collective wisdom and, namely, experience of thousands of colleagues. And, when I have seen things come across
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my desk that I have yet to experience in my center, such as the death of a peer writing tutor, I put this information into a folder for safekeeping and future reference
In reviewing the keywords tutor loss, student death, tutor death, and tutor memorialization, I came across several shared responses of how colleagues have responded to student death in or around the writing center Below, I paraphrase and summarize much of what they share, but I want to note that this is only an partial list as the Listserv archive only reaches back a few years
Guidance for Administrators Upon a Tutor Death:
● Work with grief counselors to determine needs for writing center workers
● Bring grief counselors to all-staff meeting
● Have someone from the counseling center lead a discussion on student death and processing loss and grief
● Check-in with tutors and see if they're able to continue their writing center work, and, if they're not, allow them to step away or flex their time.
● Send the message that everyone grieves in their own way and that they shouldn't hold themselves or others to a particular standard of how grief “should” happen
Ways for Tutors and Administrators to Memorialize Tutor(s):
● Create a collection of things that belonged to the deceased student You can create an altar, a memorial wall, a picture box, or a plaque in the main area of the center. Tutors can participate in selecting objects
● Give tutors and others the chance to fill out a book of memories and messages to the deceased tutor Place the book in a communal space where people can easily access it.
● Create a memorial fund or prize in honor of the deceased tutor to support tutors annually
● Hold a celebration of life or other grief/support event
● Archive materials that the deceased tutor created and showcase in the center.
● Create a book of memories about the deceased tutor to share with their family
● Petition the school, the city or town to set aside a bench or space in a green space to memorialize the deceased student.
● Record tutors’ memories of the deceased tutor as a way to remember who they were in life and to memorialize them.
Ways for Tutors and Administrators to Collectively Grieve:
● Write Engage in letter writing to the deceased to process grief (Larsen).
● Reflect Engage in therapeutic journaling (Neimeyer et al )
● Create a memory box about the deceased tutor
● Celebrate Celebrate what the tutor brought to the community.
● Gratitude Set-up a card bank where tutors write thank you cards to medical or emergency personnel who helped in the situation, if applicable
● Connect. Find out what your institution has planned for memorializing the deceased, for reaching out to their family, and for providing support for students, staff, and faculty.
● Connect with the broader college community to celebrate the student
Ways for Tutors and Administrators to Personally Respond to Loss:
● Withhold judgment before entering conversations about the death of the tutor
● Witness: Be open and available to whatever unfolds, not to solve it or fix it but to really see, hear and experience what it is with the others there
● Respond with loving action.
● Take time to grieve
● Take time to process
● And, as one person on the WCenter Listserv noted:
Be prepared for the very individual responses your tutors will have, and the very different ways they will have of coping with this loss Some will want to talk about it, but others won't have much to say. And they will process this loss at different rates For some, it will hit them right away, and it might hit others later, or in waves. For us, this meant finding as many different, small ways (some non-verbal) to honor and remember the tutor as possible, over the course of the entire year And yes, find out what they
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want, but be prepared for them to be too struck and too numb to be able to come up with anything particularly coherent or actionable My staff didn't want to cancel meetings or trainings; they wanted to be together But that was about as clear a plan as they could come up with at times
On Processing Grief as an Administrator
Many of the administrators who responded to the WCenter queries noted that they processed their own grief over tutor death in unique and highly varied ways Because administrators hold the continuity of the program they will likely remember individual tutors long after they have moved on from the writing center they also hold the responsibility for memorializing and remembering losses At the same time, they also might process tutor death differently because of their unique relationship with their tutors as managers, mentors, teachers, and friends Writing administrators carry the loss of a tutor in longstanding ways; over time, they might find themselves in the unenviable place of being the only person in the writing center who remembers the tutor who died. As one writing center administrator shared: “As I write this, I realize with some real sadness that soon enough there won't be students around who knew [the tutor], and it will be less palpable a personal and communal loss. But it remains a personal loss for me, and, of course, for his family and friends ”
The “wrap-around” role that administrators serve for their tutors might make the grief complicated and long-term Administrators might feel responsible for the tutor’s death because of the often close-knit and long-term relationships that tutors share with their directors As one administrator wrote:
I was also not entirely prepared for my own sense of loss and grief And regrets I could think of so many ways I could have been a better mentor, teacher, and friend. And sometimes I wasn't very good at helping my staff process this loss because I was having a hard time processing it myself. So go easy on yourself
As writing administrators, we carry the history of our programs alongside their legacies on campus. Student involvement is critical for our work Tutor death punctuates a community that is often otherwise close knit and connected, sometimes for years So, while we
administrators may carry grief well beyond academic semesters or years, try not to do so alone.
Conclusion: Postvention Planning After Student Death
So much of what my colleagues intuitively or professionally landed on are indeed standards of best practice for responding to student death in other spaces on campus. The impulse to gather in community, to process, to seek counsel, to memorialize, and to grieve align well with postvention plans in higher education spaces Writing, of course, can also be a powerful tool in processing death and grief.
At the same time, many of the postvention plans at the college or university level might be too generalized or too focused on single loss events. Instead of understanding student death each student death as an ongoing iterative process of making sense of loss and responding to grief as it emerges, changes, compounds, and is shaped over time, many of the practices in postvention plans seem like a “one and done” model The lack of assessment of these plans further begs the question of whether these protocols are helping our community members to process and heal And, finally, these plans often include a lot of practices around communication that adhere to legal frameworks (such as not immediately disclosing cause of death or identifying information) and controlling the death narrative rather than engaging in healing practices At times, the well-being of the institution and the community align, but, frequently, these protocols and plans appear more about reputation and liability than compassion or care work.
Of course, there are legal and ethical obligations that institutions have to students around disclosure that make sudden displays of memorializing or grief challenging or even downright illegal. Though I advocate for center-specific responses to crisis, I also believe it is critical to be aware of one ’ s institutional policies and structures around crisis This knowledge is critical for shaping programmatic response to student death.
As a field, however, we need to do more to address student death as it might occur in and around the writing center. We need to prepare new administrators in crisis response and management work, and we need to conduct more research on how deaths in and around the writing center impact us. The
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data above suggests student death is becoming more frequent, especially among LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and intersectional youth populations. This is not a numeric issue alone, however; the anti-racist mission of many writing centers indicates that the students most likely to staff and attend our centers are becoming increasingly at risk My hope is that we develop data-informed response plans and eventually aggregate information about student death and its impacts on writing centers and its community members. We need to learn more about student death, and we need to share what we learn in professional spaces like conferences, journals, and workshops. This is a matter of preparation, of course, but it is also one of inclusion and anti-racist praxis and prevention We need to support our community, particularly the most vulnerable among us
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) a research-intensive STEM university exemplifies how an institution can respond to student death through intentional, neutral, and data-driven approaches. After several students died by suicide in fall 2021, they created a task force (made up of administrators, students, staff, and faculty) to collect data on what was wrong in the community Another task force was created to implement the first task force’s findings An independent review of the school’s mental health practices was also conducted by Riverside Trauma Center. Instead of leaping into action, the task force intentionally built a multi-tiered assessment and implementation system that included data collection, assessment, external consultation, community listening sessions, and a campus wide survey They presented initial findings in January 2022 That same year, WPI opened a Center for Well-Being. Currently, nearly all the task force recommendations and most of the independent reviewer recommendations have been implemented.
Using methods familiar to many of us, the institution’s taskforce created and implemented a multi-stage plan for learning about and then addressing the challenges with mental health that the community faced. They recognized the limitations of prior best practices in student mental health support none of the students who died by suicide were identified as at risk under the prevailing criteria and, the failures of conventional wisdom around responding to student death, such as foregoing memorialization. The institution provided resources to address the issue and brought in community members
at each stage of the process, from design and fact finding to implementation.
Several of the task force’s findings mirror other mental health surveys and research in higher education. For example, faculty who are BIPOC, female, trans, and nonbinary do more care work than their white male colleagues Junior and mid career faculty support students more than senior colleagues. Faculty struggle to keep up with student demands for support and feel underprepared to do this front-line work. Similarly, students struggle with the fallout from the pandemic, “specifically citing the feeling that their ability to perform academically was demanded at the expense of their feelings, health and humanity” (Kisner, par 13)
Writing centers are not colleges or universities. In many ways, we are well situated to support student well-being over academic performance; empowerment and process over product. This starts with tutor training and developing a clear mission and benchmarks for center outcomes At the same time, as I have learned, research can be a critical element of understanding the new landscape that we are in post-pandemic. We can learn a lot from WPI’s unflinching and comprehensive approach to exploring mental health and student death on campus Of course, I hope what I write here remains theoretical for readers But in case of emergency this piece begins the conversation of how we plan for, respond to, and address student death.
Acknowledgement: Thank you to Dan Lawson for feedback on early drafts of this project.
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Saurabh Anand
University of Georgia saurabh.anand@uga.edu
Abstract
Utilizing three tutoring episodes as qualitative data, this article attempts to define and articulate multilingual labor in the context of the US writing center Incorporating Betweener Autoethnography as a methodological lens and descriptive/self-affirmative framework, the author, a South Asian Rhetoric and Composition doctoral student from India and a multilingual speaker/writer, urges WC directors and peer tutors in the US how to consider fostering multilingual tutees’ writing development by intentionally creating moments, where the language of writers are relieved as assets but often go unnoticed.
I am a South Asian Rhetoric and Composition doctoral student from India. Until my adolescence, I grew up in Delhi, India's national capital and one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities In postcolonial India, multilingualism was inseparable from my literacy; I attended an English medium school and college and grew up speaking Hindi, English, and Punjabi at home and in non-academic spaces. Hence, switching between languages has been second nature to me While earning my undergraduate degree in management, I learned two European languages: German and Hungarian My language learning experiences as an adult were so intellectually stimulating that I later decided to pursue language teaching as a career My literacies in India opened opportunities for me in language tutoring young adults and adolescents for academic and professional purposes After tutoring in India for nearly half a decade, I moved to the US in 2018 on a non-immigrant student visa (F-1) In 2020, I graduated with an MA in English, specializing in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL/Applied Linguistics), from a Midwestern University.
While earning my master's degree, I was a graduate teaching assistant (of English Composition), and exposure to TESOL/Applied Linguistics helped me connect, reflect, and analyze my language learning and teaching experiences in India and the US from various theoretical and pedagogical points of view and how they translate into practice Most of my students were either fellow international students (often multilingual) or second/third-generation immigrant
writers in the US While teaching, I also took an on-the-job composition teaching practicum. During the training sessions, I was formally introduced to the Writing Center (WC). (I say formally because I knew about WCs in informal and limited ways since there have been a handful of WCs in India or Asia ) In training sessions, I was introduced to WCs as one of the academic campus resources in US colleges and universities with whom I could partner to help my students write better than they were already. While partnering with the WC, I also found it to be helpful for my own writing development. In many ways, it was the formal beginning of my interest in writing center studies As a Rhetoric and Composition Studies doctoral student, I explore multilingualism, rhetoric studies, and writing center studies research tendencies through qualitative research lenses such as interviews, ethnography, narrative inquiry, and autoethnography. This piece is an autoethnography exploration of my identities in the US writing center spaces. These include my experiences as a graduate student of writing center studies with a background in TESOL/Applied Linguistics, tutoring, learning diverse languages in India, and an urge to explore multilingual tutoring practices My multilingual WC research interventions also percolated because between my master's and doctoral programs, I switched my US immigration status to permanent residency. I choose to mention such instances because my personal and professional trajectories influenced my tutoring in my writing center pedagogy.
I also intentionally choose to elaborate on my intellectual trajectories and development as an individual, student, language learner, language tutor, researcher, and scholar because many tutees I worked with often share those experiences with me. However, at the time of writing this article, most of my colleagues were white and monolingual at my WC, with essentially no personal experience of learning and practicing a language other than English in daily discourse or a scholarly background in language studies They worked with multilingual tutees using their “traditional” and
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mainstream education experiences Being curious and trained to personally and professionally negotiate with the tutoring environment nudged me to reflect on the communities-specific labor I have spent working with multilingual writers. I call this kind of specific labor my multilingual (linguistic and professional) labor throughout this piece I have chosen this language because often, while operating in my WC space (tutoring and otherwise), I reflected on ways of learning, unlearning, relearning, or meshing my new or past literacies and how such experience helped me re-engineer my multilingual WC tutor identity, which continues to grow.
Inspired by racio-lingusitic WC tutor enactments and scholarly commentaries towards linguistic justice, I am often motivated to think about specific emotional relationships and opportunities I provided to my tutees. Such thoughts include using my language experiences and supporting and practicing multilingualism Via this autoethnographic piece, I explain and discuss what multilingual labor looks like in the WC where I work To do so, I will use my three WC tutoring episodes of working with multilingual tutees as qualitative data and demonstrate to readers my "scholarly personal narratives" (Nash 23), informed by the Descriptive/Self-affirmative framework (Chang). To thread my reflections on multilingual or multilingualism-oriented professional and personal identity markers, I use the “betweener” autoethnography as my interpretive and research methodology (Diversi and Moreira) to decolonize tutor knowledge production and conundrums of multilingual tutors in the US WC spaces With those research intentions, I aim to focus on the research question: What does multilingual tutor labor look like in a US WC context from a multilingual tutor perspective with a background in TESOL?
Being mindful of autoethnography as a method and/or methodology is nascent in the WC field (Jackson and Grutsch-McKinney). I divided this piece into the following subsections to present a structure of pursuing transformative and ethical personal narrative-based research (Ellis). The subsections of this piece include: 1) the rationale behind choosing the Descriptive/self-affirmative framework; 2) why I decided to utilize autoethnography, specifically the betweener autoethnography for this piece; 3) three specific incidents showing “Multilingual Labor” as data; and 4) discussion and conclusion
Conceptual Framework:
Descriptive/Self-affirmative Framework
I adopted the Descriptive/Self-affirmative framework throughout this piece by centering on tutoring episodes Chang described this framework approach as similar to writing a memoir. This approach is apt for my piece because of its literary memoir genre affordances. The affordances allow me to elaborate on my interactions with multilingual writers in detail. I also aim to argue to extend the scope of autoethnographic methodology beyond Anglicized conventions by including multilingual interactions within the US WC spaces As a TESOL professional and multilingual tutor, I use my conversations and emotional responses in tutoring sessions For example, I could comment on the current WC material and professional reality, which scholars pointed out often lacks perspectives from diverse identities, such as multilinguality (Cui) With the help of the tutoring stories that took place in my WC, I attempt to add to other tutor voices, like mine, arguing on behalf of our writers and us that multilingual writers require distinctive and dedicated tutor attitudes, which are different than working with “traditional” tutees (Tang) depending on the purposes and needs of learning a target language (for the purpose of this article, the target language would be English language, where English seems to be the medium of instruction unfortunately) These nonfictional narratives that I shared with my tutees nudge and build the case of tutors being sensitive if not speaking, reading, and operating across the language and needs of our multilingual writers. I hope the collective history I share with my tutees provides glimpses of my specific linguistic and TESOL-informed labor that intended to foster multilingual tutees’ writing development by intentionally creating educating moments for WC directors and peer tutors that often go unnoticed
Another important reason I chose the Descriptive/Self-affirmative framework is to further deepen conversations about labor in the WC context (Giaimo and Hashlamon). Through the narrative discussions as evidence, I intend to broaden the scope of labor within WC spaces by adding representations of multilingual tutors with an applied linguistics background Such tutors utilize professional and lived experiences while interacting with multilingual writers. Though WC practitioners and scholars (Shiell) have begun employing multilingual tutors in WCs by duly valuing multilingual tutors' linguistic and cultural repertoires, my piece provides something unique
In this piece, I provide my transnational tutor perspectives, including engagements, negotiations, and discussions utilizing my multilingual tutors with TESOL backgrounds and labor while engaging in work
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at my WC Readers will find that such performance led to my WC becoming a safe and culturally and linguistically enriched space. I did so by critically looking at and utilizing experiences of growing up multilingual and researching the affordances of multilingualism in WC spaces From the qualitative research point of view, my descriptions of the self-narratives will provide readers with a peek at a cultural location (my WC) and how things, operations, and emotions prevail in a space ethnographically (Denzin).
Scholars (Reed-Danahay) also advocate for the Descriptive/Self-affirmative approach, an agent of a new source of scholarly knowledge or phenomenon that dissents the positivist views in a field Hence, through this epistemology I engage in the process of noticing and framing other yet-to-be-recognized multilingual epistemologies in my WC. While doing so, I interact with the multiple identities I mentioned at the beginning of this piece to recognize and reflect on exploring various tutoring affordances and areas of improvement within WC practice For example, in the WC field, a focus hasn’t been applied/targeted much on inviting multilingual tutors as a valid population with the vision of improving tutees’ writing development. In cases where this was the focus, WC TESOL-related scholarship has historically focused on tutee perspectives for the same purposes (Bruce and Rafoth; Harris and Silva; Myers). The Descriptive/Self-affirmative framework provided me a possible structure for incorporating my tutor's tact, work, and initiatives. To do this, I use my scholarly background (TESOL and Writing Center Studies), combined with my language experiences in the service of WC tutees who look like me, are multilingual, and/or people of color in the US, and vice-versa I hope my WC experiences anoint and provide space for the voices of other multilingual tutors
The Betweener Autoethnography
I relied on autoethnography as a broader research method in this piece I used my "epiphanies" (Ellis et al. 275) to explore my WC micro circle as " a site of cultural inquiry within a cultural context" (Hughes et al. 210) and to provide readers with a sense of my everyday multilingual tutor engagements in my WC space Within autoethnography, my decision to include the betweener autoethnography (Diversi and Moreira) for this WC-based study was intentional for two reasons First, the autoethnography (methodological) type, like the recent trends and conversations within
writing center studies, aims to express “resistance that historically marginalized and displaced scholars should use as a critical tool to destabilize Euro-American norms and transgress the national order of things” (Alhayek and Zeno 549). As a multilingual person, tutor, and immigrant, by adopting this qualitative methodology, I was able to "bring personal troubles to living history with the intent of disrupting essentializing representations and interpretations of lived experience" (Diversi and Moreira 582), because multilingual people (such as tutor, teachers, and others) have been intentionally painted to be part of a “dwindling minority” (Kirkpatrick 346), especially in the US educational context As one who also comes from India, a postcolonial nation, I could not find a better method than the betweener autoethnography to center my dissent and build counter discussions on the themes/experiences from the conversations I had with multilingual tutees in my WC. With the help of the betweener autoethnography, I invite various WC stakeholders to reflect on my lived reflections, values, literacies, and ethics that further complicate and reshape how to tutor multilingual tutees and be sensitized towards racial-linguistic initiatives and practices in the WC
Second, I selected this methodology because I wanted to break the colonial impetus and structures by decolonizing ethnographic practices (Diversi, Gannon) within WC research. Engaging with scholarship using the betweener autoethnography was my intentional step toward supporting the works and research of professionally, culturally, and linguistically inclusive writing pedagogues (Lee, Naydan) who argue that ignoring pro-multilingual epistemologies could be a result of “ignorance and isolation” (Rafoth 16). A common rhetoric between their works has urged more multilingual voices to share the explicit need for tasks, initiatives, and policy amendments in WC studies to make it a more critical place and improve its daily course of actions and mission (Hall). This piece is my attempt to nudge such social justice-oriented conversations based on memories and personal experiences of working as a tutor in my micro circle via the betweener autoethnography (Moreira and Diversi) With that background, I elaborate on my WC positionality and share tutoring episodes in the next section
Introducing Myself, My Positionality, Site, and Tutoring Episodes
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When thinking and writing this piece, I was often the only WC tutor of color, or one among a few, in my tutoring context. Yet, I saw many incoming tutees who were like me
For example, until I began writing this piece, I had at least 90 appointments in four semesters (with varied schedules) These appointments included multilingual tutees who spoke Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, or Vietnamese as their first/home language Such interactions in my WC scenario nudged me to research how WCs could prepare their tutors to guide multilingual writers. The WC Studies field has realized this need with the ongoing increase of multilingual writers on American campuses and how to cater to them (Alvarez) However, I also learned that tutor and admin positions in the WC spaces have historically been either majorly white or white in their ideologies (Baker-Bell) Here, I repropose WCs as a space where multilingual tutors and administrators are valid and needful tutoring partners Multilingual tutors and administrators have to be reaffirmed, acknowledged, and celebrated. Hence, I aim to connect with the broader WC community to reconfigure their understanding of tutor labor This tutor community also includes multilingual tutors with TESOL backgrounds who are often trained and capable of working across languages and represent unique tutor labor aspects as a valid set of knowledge.
Fortunately, my WC micro circle is a bit unique from its broader (American South) and specific (Georgia) locational rhetoric with a checkered history present in regard to racial and ethnic violence and oppression (Beckert; Hill and Beaver; Olson; Taylor), which often mask down multilingualism in the region My WC director, who grew up in Upland US South and studied in different subregions of the Southern United States, has proven her commitment to contending anti-racist practices by "barricad[ing] whites from the United States' racial identity" (Bonilla-Silva 265) For example, during the initial days of my tutoring career at my current university, I also took her WC theory and pedagogy graduate course, where she trained us to find value in the stories we consumed and encouraged us to reflect, contextualize, and constructively critique the writing center studies research and practice. This training was crucial for me to center my previous personal and professional backgrounds to serve broader tutee populations, especially multilingual tutors. This piece is tangible evidence of how, through her mentorship in the course, I learned to present the WC as an inclusive, critical, and multilingual-welcoming place for multilingual writers in my micro circle
As a result, both during and post-tutoring, I attempted to interpret my tutoring experiences from the labor standpoints I adopted and connect those instances with current WC scholarship, which could be argued as being at the heart of autoethnography-based research in WC studies (Jackson and McKinney) I define "multilingual labor" as the distinctive labor multilingual WC tutors employ during writing consultations or broadly related to WC endeavors/initiatives that are different from monolingual tutor labor in the service of multilingual writers using combinations of either identity/-ies one wears or the language(s) one speaks. To show specific incidences of multilingual labor in my WC context, as data, I used anecdotes and reflections of being a TESOL professional and multilingual tutor employed in my WC catering to multilingual tutees (directly) and broader WC stakeholders (indirectly) as my descriptive narratives. I adapted my understanding of labor in the WC context from Geller and Denny (2013) as “work of directing a writing center day-to-day and the ways that work seemed to fill their time” (Geller and Denny 12-13) of the WC employees, for example tutoring in my case. One of the implicit observations of my multilingual labor is that I switch between my identities as a foreign language writer in the English language, a former international student, a person of color/immigrant writer working in WC, and others I want to reiterate that my tutoring instincts were often the results of the other spaces and intellectual experiences I grew up with and the spaces in which I have been operating. These include my history of growing up writing in more than three languages and speaking five languages, with scholarly interests in TESOL/Applied Linguistics, having grown up in a postcolonial country, and the experience of working as a language tutor, among others. Such identity foci immensely impacted and shaped my tutoring in layering ways that are mentioned in the episodes below
Episode 1: When Multilingual Tutors and Tutees are Aware of Linguistic and Rhetorical Needs and Seek Support
As a habit, I began reading the tutee's profile five minutes before my noon appointment I noticed the tutee, a multilingual international ESOL graduate student, was my former student: I taught them in an ESOL section of the preservice international teaching assistant preparatory course. Having one of my former students as a tutee made me smile I enjoyed working with them and their entire cohort of freshly admitted
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international students As an international, and later a student of color, graduate assistant, I have worn multiple hats (such as a researcher, course instructor, and tutor) to fund my studies, so when the audiences of each role overlap, it allows (and sometimes requires) me to swap roles It prepares me to develop a certain kind of flexibility professionally For example, this time, the dynamics between the tutee and me were different. In Muriel Harris's words, as a tutor, I now had to be "someone to help them [tutee] surmount the hurdles others [often teachers and other educational stakeholders] have set up for them " (28)
At precisely 12 PM, my tutee entered the WC. After exchanging pleasantries and our excitement to work together, my tutee mentioned that it was their first WC appointment and they needed help with their conference paper Upon swapping basic information and looking at their conference paper, I sensed some inhibitions my tutee had. To clarify my doubt, knowing this tutee wouldn’t judge due to my previous instructional experience, I asked them: “What really could you use this meeting for?" I noticed the tutee had that uncomfortable smile on their face It was the one I was familiar with as a multilingual writer, too. Later, they confided in me that they intentionally booked their writing appointment with me because of my TESOL background, as they knew I wouldn’t judge them due to our previous professional interactions I became more alert.
Upon further questioning, my tutee mentioned they had already given multiple reads to their paper and had it run by their friend from their home country. Still, they weren’t confident about their paper, as English wasn’t their first language. Though thrilled to have their abstract accepted to the conference, they were anxious about the writing quality of their whole paper because of its extensive length; they didn’t want to embarrass themselves in front of a professional audience I wasn’t shocked by the situation I was caught in, but sad. This is a reality for many multilingual WC tutees Often, in such scenarios, multilingual tutees might need a little push, communicated in a motivational tone.
Our WC session became more intense when they mentioned they saw me as their role model. Explaining it further, they mentioned that since I (as a multilingual English/foreign speaker from India) had taught them before, had presented at conferences, and taught English composition, they assumed I had a better grasp of writing in English. I felt ambivalent. On the one hand, I was happy my tutee chose me over my domestic WC counterparts because they are often not equipped enough professionally to cater to the needs
of ESOL writers/tutees (Rafoth), and I could use my TESOL background to guide them. However, I also felt anxious about my tutee's "perceived capability for performing actions at designated level" (Schunk and DiBenedetoo 515) for me. Their assumption of me being a writing expert wasn’t true, but then I realized that this assumption has a greater meaning than may appear .
This interaction with my tutee prompted me to think about the WC field from multiple directions. I was happy that my student self-identified their writing mentorship needs as an ESOL writer However, this situation became that 'occasion' for me, which Denny (2018) described as "critical yet rarely have language or occasion to speak into and interrogate them" (Denny 120) because in my WC, tutors were not there to represent multilingual identity (Phillips) In my liminal space, I felt the nudge to express my tiredness of taking the major onus of working with tutees who look like me, speak like me, and/or are ESOL speakers (Severino and Illana-Mahiques). I recalled the underlying and normative assumption that monolingual tutors are the believed norm for the WC spaces They are assumed to be the ideal tutor population who could serve all tutor clientele, including ESOL writers, despite the tutee’s specific language needs. This ignorance within the field makes multilingual tutors the victims of a larger writing center cultural discourse where multilingual labor goes unacknowledged despite writers’ need for it
Episode 2: “I did not know I mustn’t speak English only.”
It was one of those days when I didn’t have any scheduled appointments As our WC director requested for all unscheduled tutors to do in the past, I was at the welcome desk using this time to respond to WC email queries, another part of my assistantship At the tenth minute of the hour, a tutee requested a drop-in appointment. Since other tutors weren’t available, we began working as I put emails on hold The tutee apologized to me while they watched me wrapping up the email I was then drafting, but they were also grateful I told them, "It's okay! How may I help you?" with a smile. They mentioned they were applying for an undergraduate research assistant (RA) position and added that this RA would be essential for them, since it allowed working remotely. Since my tutee lived forty minutes away from the university town with their elderly immigrant grandparents from India, this
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position would allow them to minimize travel frequency.
As an immigrant student living away from my parents for over five years, I understood the opportunities this RA position could offer to my tutee. With the best intentions, I began assisting my tutee in discussing the RA application When I asked them to tell me about it and what makes them a competitive applicant, they started elaborating on what they'd do if they got this assistantship and the skills they had to do the required tasks effectively and efficiently. Taking their responses as a great starting point, I asked them a few follow-up questions: Why should you get this RA over others? What unique experiences could you bring if you get this RA? As they meant to respond to my follow-up questions, my tutee again began centering their answers on the skills the call for RAs suggested Finding my tutee struggling, I rephrased my questions. They responded affirmatively when I offered them a few moments to collect their thoughts and perhaps make a list. As they began working by themselves, I noticed them murmuring in (one of) my mother tongues, Hindi
I asked myself: “Why did I not trust my gut feeling that my tutor could be an Indian American who was a speaker of Hindi?” Later, I thanked myself for not trusting my initial gut feeling because not all Indian Americans are multilingual or necessarily Hindi speakers Gujarati, Tamil, Punjabi, Kannada, and their dialects are other majorly spoken languages in the US, too In my English composition classrooms, I often found that many Indian American undergraduate students informed me of mother tongues/first languages other than Hindi I did not want to assume my tutee was a Hindi speaker and internalize language biases as a Hindi speaker. Such negotiations are unique to people belonging to multilingual societies, histories, and language traditions.
But that is a half-picture I also recalled an incident discussed in the WC theory and pedagogy graduate course related to a course peer from India. My peer worked with a tutee analyzing an interview transcribed in Hindi. My peer’s tutee assumed that their tutor (my peer) could read/write in Hindi because they had a Hindi-language-sounding name That wasn’t true in my peer’s case. They were a Bengali speaker who wasn’t much exposed to Hindi This incident with my peer taught me always to ensure I don’t adopt linguistic biases and stereotypes just by assuming my tutees' looks and cultural background Therefore, when I heard my tutee speaking in Hindi, I was sure I could help them with their RA application with more nuance. Following is a closer version of the interaction between my tutee and me in Hindi:
Tutor: अगर तम चाहो तो हम हद म भी बात कर सकत ह I
If you want, we can talk in Hindi too
Tutee: अ छा! हम हद म भी बात कर सकत ह?
य अ छा होगा | मझ लगा यहा बस इि लश म
बात करनी होती ह | हद म सह स बता पाउगा। दो-तीन मनट दो I [In shock with a smile]: Really! Can we talk in Hindi as well? That would be good. I thought I just had to talk in English in here I will be able to explain better in Hindi Give me 2-3 minutes
We continued the rest of our conversation in Hindi, English, and, in fact, Hinglish (Hindi + English, see Bhatia). I realized that my tutor comfortably and more clearly explained their ideas and their unique positionality for the RA, and even asked follow-up questions with confidence later in the session But their question: अ छा! हम
?/ Can we talk in Hindi as well? stayed with me, as it seemed to be a comment for our WC field This led me to think about the many subsequent questions which are unique to someone who speaks multiple languages and/or someone with a TESOL within the writing center context. Thinking about one of those questions includes the following conundrum/questions:
Yes, writing centers are recognized campuses/support systems for ESOL students (Bruce and Rafoth) and teachers who teach them (Ferris et al.), but how often have WCs thought about employing multilingual tutors or someone who writes in multiple languages like their second language tutees, who are a considerable population that WCs serve every day?
Have we, as the WC field, thought enough about employing multilingual writing tutors who would be better positioned to switch or mesh multiple languages intuitively to help the intellectual or writing goals of our multilingual writers to create "the ideal learning environment for students [WC tutees] whose first or strongest language is not English: one-on-one, context, rich, highly focused," (Leki 1) as Leki suggested for writing scenarios from which tutee would immensely benefit?
I know some writing scholars have been recently researching writing consultations across languages and geographical locations (Ayash). However, we need more critical WC scholars who utilize their liminal positionalities as tutors or other WC stakeholders as
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