Vol 10, No 1(2012): Diversity in the Writing Center

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10.1 (2012): DIVERSITY IN THE WRITING CENTER

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10 , No 1 (2012)

FROM THE EDITORS—DIVERSE PEOPLE, DIVERSE APPROACHES Elizabeth Goins and Frederick Coye Heard Managing Editors, Praxis praxisuwc@gmail.com We are proud to announce Praxis’ second volume as a peer-reviewed journal. Our call for articles addressing diversity in the writing center fielded a record number of submissions. We thank all of the authors who submitted careful, insightful, creative and challenging work. We also want to thank our external review board and our editorial team as well as the administrative staff at the Undergraduate Writing Center. Andrea Saathoff, who led Praxis into peerreview status last year and continues to work behind the scenes, deserves a special “Thank you.” This journal, like the writing-center scholarship and pedagogy it supports, exists because of the committed, collaborative work of a broad community of writers and educators. To our authors, reviewers, editors, readers and supporters—Thank you.

This issue of Praxis, “Diversity in the Writing Center,” reflects the broad range of individual and institutional experiences that shape writing-center practice across the country. The articles are rooted in the institutional realities of large and small universities, in racial, cultural and linguistic multiplicity, in the needs and opportunities of established and emergent centers, in the perspectives of student writers, tutors and administrators. While the authors included in this issue address topics as varied as racial justice, fat studies, multilingual centers and assessment strategies, several common interests run as threads through their arguments. The centrality of embodied experience to the work of writers and writing centers appears in two remarkably different lenses in “A Multi-Dimensional Pedagogy for Racial Justice in Writing Centers” and in “Making Room for Fat Studies in Writing Center Theory & Practice,” but Rasha Diab, Thomas Ferrel, Beth Godbee and Neil Simpkins agree with Eric Steven Smith in arguing that writing centers bear the burden of and opportunity for direct action on the behalf of writers with marginalized bodies. Nancy Effinger Wilson’s “Stocking the Bodega: Towards a New Writing Center Paradigm” and Noreen Lape’s “The Worth of a Writing Center: Numbers, Value, Culture and the Rhetoric of Budget Proposals” each address the possibilities entailed in taking writing center practice beyond English-centered language instruction. Lape uses her experience with the founding of Dickinson College’s Multilingual Writing

Center to illustrate a taxonomy of rhetorical approaches to institutional opportunities, a topic that Kristen Welch and Susan Revels-Parker also take up in “Writing Center Assessment: An Argument for Change.” Tallin Phillips’ “Graduate Writing Groups: Shaping Writing and Writers from Student to Scholar” uses a “communities of practice” framework to indicate how graduate-student writers negotiate growth in their professional and scholarly identities.

Sam Van Horne also addresses the role of writing centers in facilitating various writers’ movement towards maturity in “Characterizing Successful ‘Intervention’ in the Writing Center Conference.” Our two columns, Brooke Fiesthumel’s “Black Fingernails and the White Page: The High School Writing Center” and J. Michael Rifenburg’s “Fleshing Out the Uniqueness of Student-Athlete Writing Centers: A Response to Alana Bitzel,” also draw our attention to the needs of writing populations that differ from the image of the “standard” undergraduate.

We hope you find this issue of Praxis challenging, enlightening and enjoyable. As Rifenburg’s column indicates, we are always interested in continuing the conversations that take place in and around our pages, and we are happy to consider responses to any of the excellent articles published in this issue. You can also follow the conversations taking place on our blog, WritePraxis.wordpress.com, and through our Twitter account, @WritePraxis. We owe one final round of thanks to Jacob Pietsch, our blog coordinator, and to the writers who have made our weekly postings on that site possible.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10, No 1 (2012)

FLESHING OUT THE UNIQUENESS OF STUDENT-ATHLETE WRITING CENTERS: A RESPONSE TO ALANNA BITZEL J. Michael Rifenburg University of Oklahoma rifenburg@ou.edu I eagerly read Alanna Bitzel’s recent column in Praxis titled “Supporting Student-Athletes.” For many reasons I am still puzzling through, writing center studies, even academia writ large, often avoid discussing the multi-million dollar stadiums and operating budgets of the high-profile athletic programs sharing our campuses. And when academia does turn its eye toward athletic programs (be it in The Chronicle of Higher Education or in university press books), it decries their bigbusiness approach and loudly bangs the drum of academic reform.

Reading through Bitzel’s column, I felt myself nodding along. Like her, I work in a studentathlete writing center at the University of Oklahoma (OU). And like the University of Texas, where Bitzel works, OU is largely known for football and not, for example, the classics department. My staff and I, too, cater only to student-athletes and work from non-directive, non-evaluative writing center pedagogies while adhering to strict NCAA academic compliance mandates, which, for example, disallow a tutor writing on a student-athlete’s paper or collaboratively brainstorming and requires all writing-tutoring sessions to occur in a predesignated space with clear staff oversight.

Failure to adhere to these rigid mandates would cripple our institution. I also appreciate the attention she gave to exploring what she considers key strategies for working with football studentathletes who pose “unique challenges” (3).

However, I found the strategies she provided to be strikingly similar to strategies the typical campus writing center would espouse. In other words, Bitzel writes of “unique challenges” and the importance of adhering to NCAA guidelines (both great points), but I don’t see how these challenges and guidelines are practically manifested in her strategies. And I am left wondering: If the strategies for working with student-athletes and under NCAA guidelines are the same as if one were working with traditional students in a traditional campus writing center,

then why do student-athletes at, for example, the University of Georgia, Tennessee, and Arizona, have their own writing center? True, many athletic departments operate within an insular culture, largely cut off from the rest of a campus. If this culture is desired, then it makes sense to keep all tutoring—writing included—“in-house.” But, like Bitzel, I believe I work only with student-athletes because of their practical, pedagogical, and theoretical differences. In what follows, I more fully flesh out Bitzel’s argument. Despite her struggles to pronounce actual differences between tutoring student-athletes and traditional students, real differences exist.

For one, accounting for this level of difference and remembering NCAA academiccompliance guidelines force a constrictive hierarchical relationship between tutor and tutee, eliminate space for collaboration, and specify where tutoring may take place. Our tutoring methods cannot mimic what occurs in a traditional campus writing center, as Bitzel indirectly suggests. Sure, we are non-directive and non-evaluative like most other writing centers, but we cannot embrace novel advancements such as the current and important strand of writing center work which embraces chaos and creativity. In “Creativity in the Writing Center,” Elizabeth Boquet and Michele Eodice extend seven principles of jazz to writing center work. One in particular jumps out to me: “embracing errors as a source of learning” (8). Here, Boquet and Eodice aren’t simply imagining writer error (a misplaced comma or a dangling participle). They are also suggesting that errors committed by a tutor during a session are to be embraced, used as a conduit of learning as “judgment [is] suspended in order to explore the consequences of their decisions” (11).

In practice, the idea is nice. But student-athlete writing centers cannot tolerate tutor error. It results in NCAA sanctions, the firing of a head coach, and the vacancy of wins. ESPN scrolls tutor errors across the bottom of our television screens. My language may be slightly hyperbolic,

Tutoring Student Athletes • 2 but the idea isn’t: student-athlete writing centers cannot embrace error as a source of learning; error simply cannot exist for staff members.

Embracing error is the chaos I referenced earlier, and this is the chaos which Boquet, in Noise from the Writing Center, believes we should accept: “We [writing center consultants and administrators] must imagine a liminal zone where chaos and order coexist. And we would certainly do a service to ourselves…if we spent as much time championing this chaos…as we do championing the order” (84). While I wholeheartedly agree and would love to champion chaos in my center, I can imagine the horror covering the face of our compliance department if I were to say we are moving away from order and toward chaos—if, for example, we began collaboratively brainstorming ideas with a studentathlete, working with a student-athlete on a park bench, or even (gasp!) allowing a student-athlete who had not signed in to begin a session with us.

We are a writing center of strict protocol, of signed forms and constant observations. More work needs to be done that explores how studentathlete writing centers can get creative and dance with chaos while still adhering to NCAA guidelines. This is a question Bitzel sidesteps, one I don’t fully have an answer for, and one that is currently handcuffing student-athlete writing centers to staid and outdated models of training and practice.

Additionally, while I have never been a big believer in different learning styles (e.g., kinesthetic versus visual), I have been shocked by the unique learning processes many studentathletes bring to my writing center: learning processes refined through constant engagement with plays. Basketball and football, in particular, operate within playbooks. In constructing these plays, coaches have various modes at their disposal: geometrical figures; squiggly, straight, dashed, and looped lines; single alphabetic text; and full words and phrases. Thus coaches and, more importantly, student-athletes operate within a complex discursive community. I have worked with student-athletes who have memorized upwards of 400 of these plays—and can instantaneously and perfectly enact them during practice or game day—but struggle to write a coherent sentence. These student-athletes aren’t poor writers; instead, they are struggling to

transfer the successful learning processes they have acquired in sport into the classroom. As Mikhail Bakhtin argues, “[m]any people who have an excellent command of a language often feel… helpless in certain spheres of communication precisely because they do not have a practical command of the generic form used in the given sphere” (80). Extending Bakhtin to student-athlete literacy shows us that it’s a transfer issue, not one of intellect. While scholars such as Elizabeth Wardle, Gavriel Salomon, and David Perkins have argued that all students can struggle mightily with issues of transfer, this issue is even more acute with student-athletes who often excel at their sport—which typically requires just as much mental acumen as physical—but struggle with the mental tasks required for higher education. And our tutoring should account for and facilitate this important work of transfer by studying how one learns the literate activity of, say, football. A clearer understanding of the cognitive processes needed for football would give athletic writing centers a clearer picture of the student-athlete as a learner immersed in a thick and unique stream of literate activity: an initial step toward adapting our writing pedagogy to student-athletes.

Ultimately, we need a greater awareness of how student-athletes are a unique subset of our student population. A thin slice of scholarship focuses on the nexus of athletics and rhetoric and literacy, but I have yet to come across a source devoted to writing centers and student-athletes.1 As I wrote up my proposal for the 2012 International Writing Center Association Conference in San Diego, I received an email from a colleague at the University of Arizona. Like Bitzel and me, my colleague works at the student-athlete writing center. She, too, was thinking about a proposal and wanted to present on student-athlete writing centers and Cartesian theories of the mind/body split. But she couldn’t locate any sources. This dearth of scholarship, and the fact that studentathletes are struggling with issues of transfer and exposed to outdated models of tutoring, should propel qualitative research into examining how best to tutor our student-athlete under the auspices of NCAA guidelines. We find additional exigency for this research as we consider novel understanding of diversity in the writing center. In the wake of Harry Denny’s Facing the Center, as well as Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan’s edited

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10, No 1 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu

Tutoring Student Athletes • 3 Writing Centers and the New Racism, writing center studies are committing to exploring diversity and considering how best to account for diversity in our work. It is only natural that we consider student-athletes when we enlarge our understanding of diversity Notes 1. Here, I am thinking of Debra Hawhee’s interest in the Sophistic intertwining of rhetoric and athletics, and Julie Cheville’s work on studentathlete literacy and ontology.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Speech Genres & Other Late Essays. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. Print.

Bitzel, Alanna. “Supporting Student-Athletes.”

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. 9.1 (2012): Web. 1 Sept. 2012.

Boquet, Elizabeth H. Noise from the Writing Center.

Logan: Utah State UP, 2002. Print.

Boquet, Elizabeth H. and Michele Eodice.

“Creativity in the Writing Center: A Terrifying Conundrum.” Creative Approaches to Writing Center Work. Ed. Kevin Dvorak and Shanti Bruce. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2008. 3-20.

Print.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10, No 1 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal ! Vol 10, No 1 (2012)

BLACK FINGERNAILS AND THE WHITE PAGE: THE HIGH SCHOOL WRITING CENTER Brooke Fiesthumel Virginia Tech befiest@vt.edu In walks a blonde-haired, hooded student to the Blacksburg High School Writing Center. She has brought a personal narrative to share and work on with me, an intern from Virginia Tech. She sits next to me, flips her hair and pleads, “I just can’t figure out the ending.” Reassuringly, I state that we will start from the beginning, work through the paper and hopefully figure out an answer to her writing concerns.

As she begins to read, I hit a roadblock. Her narrative is gripping, heart-wrenching, and extremely personal.

I am caught off guard by the raw, emotive power coming from the tiny frame next to me. As she speaks about her parent’s divorce, her lost faith in God, her lost faith in humanity, and her newfound philosophy on life, I question what to do or say.

Although I had vaguely understood that I might encounter different situations at the Blacksburg High School writing center than I was used to at Virginia Tech, this experience took me by surprise. My writing center training didn’t include much discussion of this type of soul-bearing, non-academic work. During my first sessions with this girl, I was slightly disoriented, but as she became a regular client, we began to fall into our own routine of toiling over her personal, nonacademic pieces. My co-tutor, however, was under the impression that this type of work had no place in the writing center. When we were alone, she would sometimes accuse my client of being dramatic and hint that perhaps, by indulging this student, I was in danger of making her drama worse. Moreover, according to my co-tutor, I was taking up valuable time helping this client when some other students might show up with “real” writing—academic work. I had to wonder myself, what type of work is appropriate for the writing center? As her tutor, could I be responsible for making this girl more frantic, given the subject matter and intensity of our sessions?

Although this was my first contact with nonacademic, emotional pieces while tutoring, perhaps my

client’s anguish is neither uncommon nor unfounded.

Adolescence is marked by mood swings and general instability; in terms of the writing center, tutors should be aware of some characteristics of this age of rapid change and raging hormones. It is striking that suicide is the leading cause of death for adolescents and depression is the leading risk factor for suicidal thoughts and attempts. With 20% of all adolescents suffering from depression (10%-15% of adolescents in the U.S. are estimated to be depressed at a given time), the high school writing center tutor must be wary of what is often prevalent in the minds of their clients and be sensitive to their emotions (Garcia 166).

Complex factors contribute to adolescents experiencing depression, including developmental stressors, peer relationships, school accomplishments, physical and emotional changes, environmental, and contextual stressors (Garcia 170). It seems that for some high school students, problems are unavoidable, and my client was not alone in her struggle; many kids have quite the plateful.

While much writing center scholarship addresses issues surrounding what services the writing center can or should offer to clients, fewer scholars have addressed what forms of writing may be less appropriate than others. According to Nancy Welsh’s landmark essay in The Writing Center Journal, “From Silence to Noise: the Writing Center as Critical Exile,” an essential, if not the essential, role of the writing center is being a place where emotional issues can be tackled and ideas formulated on sensitive issues.

Because the “writing center is freed from the constraints of a predetermined curriculum and the normative force of grades,” this physical space, Welsh asserts, is the place for these issues to surface (Welsh 5). Considering that those who come into the center “carry with them conversations and arguments . . . already internalized, already being silently played in imagination,” the tutor must be willing to give the

Black Fingernails ! 2 client space for whatever needs to be worked through, instead of adding to the cacophony (Welsh 4). For writing centers to function as safe-havens from these other voices, it is necessary for tutors to accept emotional pieces as plausible, while not judging the positions of the writer or their chosen subject matter.

My client desperately wanted what any writer visiting the center is looking for: a person to help her work through her pieces, sentence by sentence, word by word.

Still, after our intense sessions I had to wonder: the writing was getting better, but what about her?

Was our focus on her issues—her loneliness, her parents’ betrayal, her painful disconnection with friends and school—helping or harming her situation?

This interest led me to a Journal of Behavior Therapy & Experimental Psychiatry study that questions whether certain writing is helpful or harmful for individuals getting over traumatic events. Participants who have experienced traumatic events were split up into groups; some wrote about neutral events, some described the upsetting event in great detail, and some focused on what upsets them now about the event.

The results: all participants found solace in their writing, no matter which type they were assigned. This notion—that I could simply be there, as a writing center tutor, to work with any type of writing and trust that even delving into pieces about traumas maybe beneficial—was comforting.

During my time at Blacksburg High School, I began to see the importance of the high school writing center’s unique position as a place where emotional, non-academic work can be seen as not only appropriate, but also powerful texts to work through during sessions. In the article, “The Writing Center as a Key Actor in Secondary School Preparation,” Thomas Tobin describes the high school writing center as a safe haven for the growth and development of students as writers. Rather than shrinking away from subject matter that can be emotional, unresolved, or dramatic, tutors making the adjustment from college to high school writing centers need to prepare for and welcome this type of writing. Tobin argues that the center’s safe-haven role creates a space in which secondary students will ultimately hone and

improve their writing skills, making the writing center the “hub of writing activity in secondary school,” no matter the topic (Tobin 234).

In the sessions at Blacksburg High School, my client’s private journals were treated just like other pieces of writing are treated during writing center sessions—we looked at focus, organization, style and development. To begin, we discussed global issues; expand on this point, maybe change this organization, and a add more poignant phrase here. Halfway through this tedious work, I realized that it may not just be the paper’s issues we were addressing: by bettering this piece we were clarifying her thoughts; by investigating the tone of the paper we were examining her feelings towards the event; by going through this experience we were ultimately putting the episode in perspective, working through her writing and emotional baggage simultaneously.

She chokes up. She tears up. We sit in reverence of the work we have accomplished, satisfied.

“Thank you so much, it really means a lot.”

After this experience and toiling over such research, I saw the value of our sessions in a different light. Although initially in the tutoring chair I was disoriented and caught off guard, I now began to understand the importance of such emotional writing.

When a coach is able to help with a piece so close, so personal, they are allowed into the lives and world of the writer; if the writer is ready and willing to bring a piece of this nature into the writing center, the coach must be willing to listen. The high school writing center has the capacity to be a safe haven for those, like this girl, who need to address a trauma and be treated as the serious writers they often are. Ultimately, what it comes down to is this: the girl came into the BHS Writing Center that day with a piece of work close to her heart and left with her ideas in order, her piece bettered, and perhaps a little something more.

Works Cited Garcia, Carolyn. “Conceptualization and Measurement of Coping During Adolescence: A Review of the Literature.“ Journal of Nursing Scholarship 42.2.

(2010): 166-185. Web. 17 October 2010.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal ! Vol 10, No 1 (2012) www.writepraxis.utexas.edu

Black Fingernails ! 3 Guastella, Adam J.; Dadds, Mark R. “Cognitive behavioural emotion writing tasks: A controlled trial of multiple processes.” Journal of Behavior Therapy & Experimental Psychiatry, 39.4 (2008): 558566, 9p. Web. 17 October 2010.

Tobin, Thomas. "The Writing Center as a Key Actor in Secondary School Preparation." Clearing House 83.6 (2010): 230-234. Web. 17 Oct. 2010.

Welsh, Nancy. “From Silence to Noise: The Writing Center as Critical Exile.” The Writing Center Journal.

14.1 (1993): 1-15. Web. 17 October 2010.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal ! Vol 10, No 1 (2012) www.writepraxis.utexas.edu

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10, No 1 (2012)

A MULTI-DIMENSIONAL PEDAGOGY FOR RACIAL JUSTICE IN WRITING CENTERS Rasha Diab The University of Texas at Austin rashadiab@austin.utexas.edu

Thomas Ferrel University of Missouri-Kansas City ferrelt@umck.edu

Beth Godbee Marquette University bethgodbee@gmail.com

Neil Simpkins University of Wisconsin-Madison nsimpkins@wisc.edu

This article has its origins in relationship: in a group of writing teachers/tutors all similarly committed to racial justice talking with each other about how those commitments become manifest and are made actionable in our everyday lives. Our conversations have informed, grown out of, and occurred alongside the ongoing work of the IWCA (International Writing Centers Association) and MWCA (Midwest Writing Centers Association) Special Interest Groups on Antiracism Activism. Victor Villanueva’s 2005 keynote address and subsequent publication in The Writing Center Journal have catalyzed the work of the SIGs as well as revived in writing centers calls for students’ linguistic and cultural rights—calls stretching back to the 1950’s debates that led to the CCCC’s crucial resolution “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” in 1974 and no fewer than thirty resolutions on diversity passed by the NCTE since 1970.1 Since Villanueva’s 2005 address, we have seen frequent discussions on writing center listservs; a number of conference presentations, articles, and chapters on anti-racism in writing centers (e.g., Condon; Dees, Godbee, and Ozias; Geller, et al.); and recent book-length manuscripts, including Harry C. Denny’s Facing the Center (2010), Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan’s edited collection Writing Centers and the New Racism (2011), and Frankie Condon’s I Hope I Join the Band (2012). We reference this history and the growing literature in writing centers to illustrate that this article and our own attempts at pedagogical intervention occur within a much longer and larger disciplinary conversation in the field of composition and rhetoric. Together, the aforementioned resolutions and scholarship on students’ linguistic and cultural rights not only counter overt racism and related language discrimination, but also begin the hard work of addressing implicit, institutionalized, and (inter)nationalized racism, which are often more difficult to identify and intervene into.

In light of these disciplinary conversations and increased attention to anti-racism in writing centers, we see a disciplinary mandate for writing centers to better articulate a pedagogy for racial justice that informs our everyday work, including, but not limited to, tutoring practice. This mandate, we believe, responds to questions, such as: How do we make actionable our commitment to racial justice when working with writers one-with-one? What interactional stances and pedagogical moves enact a pedagogy of anti-racism in writing centers? How do we prepare ourselves to enact this pedagogy? Our answers to these questions center around (1) articulating and frequently re-articulating our commitments to racial and social justice and (2) making these commitments actionable through both reflective self-work and action-oriented work-withothers, as we have written in the forthcoming article “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable.”

In preparing this piece and toward answering these questions, we have talked through conference calls and written long dialogic letters—narrating our commitments and racialized positions in the world, discussing our approaches to tutoring and writing center/program administration, and reading a range of scholarly literature we have recommended to each other. This work leads us to argue that a pedagogy of anti-racism must be more than a statement that we abhor racial injustice. Rather, this pedagogy must be multi-dimensional and include a positive and actionable articulation of the “ought to be” that we are aiming toward.

Among the many dimensions that make up a pedagogy for racial justice, we discuss here three crucial ones. First, this pedagogy is not a one-time deal, but is ongoing, and, as such, processual and reiterative.

Just as we in writing centers are likely to say (without much disagreement) that learning and writing are lifelong processes, so do we see that processes for equity and justice occur through ongoing commitment,

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Racial Justice • 2 consistent learning, and institutional change both in the here-and-now and sustained over time. Second, rather than a one-size-fits-all set of strategies to be applied in any situation, this pedagogy is reflective and attentive—meaning that, as tutors and administrators, we are observant throughout our interactions with others and adaptable to the ways in which power and privilege manifest in given moments. Third, because the work is sustained over time in deeply reflective and attentive ways, a pedagogy for racial justice recognizes the full personhood of all those involved: teacher and student, tutor and writer. As such, this pedagogy is embodied and engaged—affective, tangible, and holistic.

Together, these proposed dimensions respond to a question we are often asked: “So, what do we do in a session of thirty minutes or so?” In contrast to defining writing center work as a time-bound conference, we find that generative writing center work happens before, during, and beyond any timed unit of analysis and production (thirty minutes or otherwise). Specifically, we value the work before conferences as we study and construct our pedagogy and beyond as we reflect on our praxis; revise our pedagogy; and extend relationships begun in a session, classroom, or break room. Yet, this question is consequential, for it makes us strive to develop a handy toolkit, a short-list of “guaranteed good” strategies that maximize learning/teaching/tutoring in a bounded unit of time. This assumption, as Anne Ellen Geller has written, burdens us, making the clock central to writing center work. Geller reminds us to “embrace the notion that conferences are defined by much more than the time it takes to hold them” (22).

This “much more,” we believe, involves self-work, work-with-other, and work-within-institutions.

Thinking on all three layers highlights the need for more than creating better texts that take into consideration imagined readers, but that also exist apart from the writer’s and the tutor’s identity, ideology, and institutional influence (i.e., one’s role in maintaining, perpetuating, and disrupting socially constructed systems of oppression and marginalization).

Concomitantly, the aforementioned three dimensions model ways to intervene and shift attention away from a toolkit teaching model to a contextually rich, rhetorically savvy, relationally connective, and commitment-driven model that cannot be reduced to a list of strategies or techniques. As such, we advocate a pedagogy for racial justice with at least three dimensions: (1) processual and reiterative, (2) reflective and attentive, and (3) embodied and engaged. Identifying these

as dimensions helps us articulate the values and assumptions underlying our interactions in writing centers. We believe these articulations are especially important, for, as Nancy Grimm explains, “If we want to avoid complicity with racism and other forms of exclusion, then those tacit theories about language, literacy, and learning need to be made explicit and open to revision” (78). We invite you to consider these dimensions along with us and to work toward articulating other dimensions of a more racially just pedagogy.

Processual and Reiterative Pedagogy As a first dimension of a pedagogy for racial justice, the qualities of processual and reiterative signal a long-term investment in and ongoing commitment to racial justice. We highlight the processual nature of this work because we believe that when teaching writing aims toward racial justice, it is not and cannot be reduced to something that happens in just one moment. A pedagogy for racial justice can neither be a fiat, professed at a discrete moment, nor can it be assumed to exist by a well-intentioned force that we inherit because of the work of some. Rather, doing the work of anti-racism should be seen as everyday and ongoing, for we seek to do no less than contend with the history and seamless contradictions of the legacies of race/ism that (1) profess equity, while falling short of acting on it; (2) call for transformation, while asking us to keep our ways and stand still; (3) ask for expansion of access and resources, while hiding the mechanisms by which membership is extended and by which networks insulate some of us from others; and (4) claim protection against racism, while failing to engage its systemic and institutional dimensions. A pedagogy for racial justice not only provides us with a critique against and framework for responding to these conditions; it also provides us with a critique for and the means for imagining the ends toward which we are aiming. As such, uptake of anti-racism needs to be actionable and renewable—in other words, processual and reiterative.

To illustrate, we have read narrative accounts both in writing center literature and in our local writing centers that essentially reduce the work of anti-racism to encounters in which a student’s writing makes a racist argument and the tutor is positioned to respond.

Too often these accounts reduce racism to individual bias, and too often these reduce our pedagogy to the means of correction (hence, leading to concerns that anti-racism advocates just political correctness).

Although not always successful, we try to use such

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Racial Justice • 3 moments for reflecting on beliefs and actions within a much larger exploration of the morphing nature of racism and its interconnectedness with other manifestations of oppression. Our recognition of a larger context needs to leave us with nuanced understandings of both the historical legacies and current systems of power and privilege. Consider the following moment, a re-constructed scenario,2 which invites ongoing consideration and conversation with colleagues: A faculty member with a joint appointment in history and ethnic studies emails the writing center to request a class visit. In the email, she explains, “This course will have a mix of history majors and ethnic studies people, so that is why I think some extra attention to writing is important. Also, I hope the class visit will help the ethnic studies students (many of whom are non-traditional students) get acquainted with the writing center right away.” The tutor responds by scheduling the class visit, but doesn’t address the range of implicit assumptions about who most benefits from and is served by the writing center and who are likely to be “struggling” writers in the class.

Difficult discussions, of course, take time and are easily sidestepped. Yet, if we value the processual and reiterative nature of a pedagogy for racial justice, then we step into instead of away from difficulty. The scenario prompts us, for example, to understand outreach differently. It prompts us to talk with the faculty member about our understanding of the writing center’s value to all writers and perhaps even to address directly assumptions of “ethnic studies people” as opposed to “history majors”—categories that are racially marked and associated here with perceived writing ability and linguistic knowledge. As we consider multiple interventions, we consider the ways power operates for the multiple players, and we become co-learners who occupy multi-dimensional roles in the process.

Using the scenario above, we make the choice to re-read, re-imagine, and re-enact narratives. We learn to see discrete moments within larger patterns and to take courageous actions—perhaps here reaching out to the faculty member, if not rethinking our class visits or building solidarity with the ethnic studies program or reshaping our WAC curriculum to value linguistic diversity. We learn to see these actions (and occasions that call for action) not as isolated events, but as multiple iterations in an ongoing and always-striving process against racism and toward racial justice. With this example, if our goal were to resist easy narratives

about writers as a “liability” with “deficits” to be “fixed” by the writing center, then the assumptions that inform the professor’s urgent request would neither meet our goal nor serve the students’ needs for increasing awareness of how to negotiate linguistic and communicative practices. Further, re-reading and rewriting this scenario invites the self-work of building disciplinary knowledge—knowledge that provides us with counter-narrative to address such an outreach request.

Specifically, we need to know disciplinary positions on linguistic, cultural, and human rights. The pedagogical work we do in writing centers is at its best, we believe, when informed by research in language and linguistics. Geneva Smitherman, Suresh Canagarajah, Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Matsuda, among others, have shed light on how language policies and perceptions of the racialized Other disguise and hide racial attitudes and prejudice.

For example, many representations of multilingual writers limit our perceptions of the students and the instructional models available to us. Just as students of color in the United States are frequently perceived of as in need of changing (i.e., “whitewashing language”), so too are international and multilingual writers commonly perceived as needing revision and remediation. Rather, as Canagarajah explains, we should resist assumptions of deficiency and embrace a critical, reflective use of hybrid linguistic resources.

This post-structuralist linguistic approach, says Canagarajah, “adopts a critical orientation to language that assumes nothing instrumental or value-free about norms.” Aware that norms “favor some groups over others,” we need instead to adopt the generative “hybridity of language.” This hybridity not only makes us attentive to new communicative possibilities, but also detaches us from thinking of linguistic transfer as, essentially, a liability. We are then re-positioned to value and make use of writers’ varied linguistic resources. This repositioning reframes both the context and terms of communication. And, as Vershawn Ashanti Young contends in “Should Writers Use They Own English?”, such openness to and encouragement of linguistic diversity works toward abating prejudice and dismantling systemic racism.

Because writing centers are literacy and language sites (a fact highlighted in the move toward multiliteracy centers, which the past special issue of this journal addressed), a pedagogy for racial justice in writing centers operates through all aspects of our work, especially in the ways we respond to and work with writers in using linguistic and communicative

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Racial Justice • 4 resources. To call for transformation is to call for a transformed understanding of language, composition, and communication—the heart of what we do. As such, this pedagogical work is processual and reiterative: it remains ongoing, as we keep learning and keep striving both in a critique against racism—and resultant linguistic and cultural injustice—and critique for equity and racial justice.

Reflective and Attentive Pedagogy Every conversation we have among staff or in writing conferences, no matter the topic, has implications for the way that racism works in our lives.

And across these conversations, there is a need to lean in, listen carefully, observe, and respond in reflective and attentive ways. Ongoing reflection and attentiveness defy the logic of a one-size-fits-all approach that is often embodied in the notion, for example, of developing portable tutoring strategies that remain static across interactions. Rather, a reflective and attentive pedagogy leads us to a flexible and adaptable approach. Such an approach recognizes the multiple identities of tutors, writers, and outside others (e.g., faculty members, prospective employers, and other audience members) as well as the complex social dynamics at play in any conversation around writing, which is part of the third dimension we discuss in the next section.

Reflection and attentiveness are especially important when working in cross-racial collaborations in which racism can manifest in seemingly contradictory ways at one and the same time—being both implicit and explicit, institutional and individual, Other-oriented and internalized, local and (inter)national. As an example: We remember a session in which the writer had written a paper about the film The Piano and described the Maoris as primitive and uneducated.

The writer was a South Asian, American, first-year, female student, and the tutor an older white American undergraduate man. The tutor talked with her about why describing the Maori as primitive was problematic, and the writer immediately became visibly nervous and less engaged in the session, ultimately deleting the description of “primitive” without changing the substance of the argument.

How did the tutor’s white, male, American, and more academically senior identity complicate receptiveness?

How did asymmetrical power play a role not only in the interactional dynamics (e.g., who has the floor to speak), but also in the sense of who is “right” within

the session (e.g., who has the most accurate reading of the text)? And how does our ongoing education help to prepare tutors to intervene into similar situations with different enactments of racism, including situations in which internalized and (inter)nationalized racism are central? We need to attend closely to the examples we3 use because they can, on the one hand, flatten our understandings of racism and, on the other, help us see how responses differ based on who is positioned as the tutor, who as the writer, and who as audience members influencing a writing conference.

When discussing our experiences with tutoring, we kept coming back to this scenario because it helps us reflect on just how complicated anti-racism is. It is not only about the content (what is written) or the people involved (who is present) or the roles we play (how we perform tutoring), but it is also very much about understanding asymmetrical power and racial justice. If political correctness is our goal, then encouraging any writer to eliminate the word “primitive” meets that goal. But if our goal is something more—about embracing our full humanity, for instance—then explaining the uses of language would involve talk about how language recycles dehumanization and the essentialization of peoples and always has a national investment. In the scenario, we might reflect on the ways in which the writer understands her own identity and the rhetorical situation, as a woman of color writing to primarily white faculty members at her predominantly white U.S. university. It is not hard to imagine this situation happening with the same text being negotiated by a tutor of color and a white student or by writers, tutors, and faculty members with many different identities. In all cases, the situation would invite reflection on and attention to ways in which racism manifests as externalized, internalized, and/or (inter)national.

The more reflective and attentive we can be when tutoring writing, the more we can slow down the action, remember our commitments, and see challenging moments as moments both for teaching and for learning. In-the-moment conversations, then, may disrupt more typical agendas or agenda-setting, may require us to make efforts to follow up on a visit on different terms than we’re conditioned to, may ask us to engage in conversations with instructors and colleagues, and certainly may invite us to go beyond the 30- or 60-minute session as the only or typical structure of writing center work. Rather than just claiming protection against racism, we can see such moments as generative for learning (with and alongside

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Racial Justice • 5 others) how to intervene into the many ways that racism manifests in our writing and interactions.

Embodied and Engaged Pedagogy Like the first two, this third dimension of a pedagogy for racial justice makes our commitments actionable in the here-and-now, in the everyday.

Embodied and engaged pedagogy recognizes we are complex and capable beings in the way that Paulo Freire discusses being “fully human” in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and bell hooks advocates “full engagement” in Teaching to Transgress. What Freire and hooks affirm is our humanity, our existence as fully human. This humanity implies rights that are neither alienable, divisible, deferable, or debatable even if we are mired in discourses that make them seem so. These are rights to, in the sense of a right to life, to education, to security, and to linguistic and cultural resources. Yet, the dehumanization and marginalization of the Other is typically recycled in the form of “benign” arguments that violate rights. In the following scenario, a writer makes an argument about bilingual education, rehashing arguments of assimilation that hurt all involved. Under different guises, the arguments deny the perceived Other of one’s own language, while also denying Oneself of the right of access to different communicative and cultural resources: A white first-year student comes into the Multicultural Resource Center with a paper arguing that bilingual education should be outlawed in schools. He argues that bilingual education encourages Mexican immigrants not to learn English, and then they drop out of school and end up committing crimes. As he reads his paper aloud to a white tutor (who is the only writing center tutor at this location), other students walk in and out of the space, many of whom are bilingual Latino/a students. The tutor struggles with how to call the writer’s assumptions into question without getting so angry that the student feels attacked; she feels her heart rate rise at arguments she considers racist. After the session, she wants to debrief with someone, but she isn’t sure whom she can talk with.

Numerous identities are in play here, but in writing centers, we seldom talk about all the actual people involved or how racisms violate our rights, and perhaps this is because models of addressing racism in writing centers rarely talk about (human) rights. At the forefront of this scenario is the white student-writer, who is likely insulated from and prevented from developing relationships with people of color, as has

happened through the racialization of space and spacialization of race in the United States.4 Through this insulation connected to systemic power and privilege, the writer is denied the right to learn about other linguistic and rhetorical traditions and recycles assimilationist educational policies. In doing so, the writer becomes complicit in denying others their rights, while assuming that he is “saving” them and the world.

Alongside the writer are the tutor and her anger, an emotion that turns to a feeling of isolation as the session ends. Yet, there are also the bilingual Latino/a student-writers—the unintended witnesses of this interaction—moving in and out of the same space as well. Their presence is significant if we are to consider the implications of any conversation about writing and its tangible impact on the many people involved as direct participants, as possible recipients (i.e., audience members), and as observers, or people listening in.

When our tutoring methodologies/pedagogies are not attached to the reality of identities and systems, we author(ize) a pedagogy that de-prioritizes issues of human rights—including linguistic, cultural, and religious rights—rights that guarantee full realization of the humanity of each of us. Rather, by considering the people involved and the ways we are fully embodied and fully engaged in writing conferences, we can understand anti-racism as more than an intellectual activity. We can imagine, therefore, a tutor inviting the student to reflect on (1) the warrants that inform the argument; (2) the implications of the causal chain he constructs among immigration, English, school dropout rates, and criminal activity; (3) the subsequent image of the Mexican immigrant his argument constructs; and (4) the impact--intended and unintended—on Latino/as in his class, in the writing center, and in other locations as well. Further, we might imagine ways the tutor could invite the writer into an ongoing discussion of language and education, signaling investment both in the writer and in the individuals he is charged to write about through the lens of policy. This engaged reflection on racial justice becomes affective and holistic, instead of being just a conceptual, intellectual regurgitation of what is racially appropriate. Being embodied and engaged brings attention to the physicality of our spaces and to the structure of conversational activity; it helps us understand teaching/tutoring within the discourse of human rights in relationship to people present and imagined. At the same time, it helps us understand that talk about writing is talk about all facets of our lives: it is not just about a paper’s structure or for the outcome of an improved course grade. Rather, to

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Racial Justice • 6 clarify: within the framework of human rights, education is a right; racial justice is a right.

Concomitantly, teaching for racial justice can neither remain solely a topic for discussion, nor be an ignored right. To develop a tutoring pedagogy focused on rights, we see all individuals within systems as embodied, and we see the moments that make up our work as calling for deep and sustained engagement.

Freire’s principles of dialogue can help us move from a conceptual discussion of Othering practices, which are typically detached from our lives and lived experiences, to a dialogic learning space of action.

When we think about attitudes we want to develop and exhibit in the writing center (and in life in general, really), Freire’s dialogic model captures many of the values we identify as essential to being embodied and engaged: “Founding itself upon love, humility, and faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers is the logical consequence” (91). The horizontal relationship, or flat hierarchy, that Freire proposes meshes well with writing center studies’ aspiration for a one-withone, peer-with-peer relationship between writer and tutor. This relationship is characterized by the affective qualities of love, humility, and faith (and finding and strengthening those within one’s self) rather than a more altruistic or helping-others stance that Nancy Grimm has critiqued. As Freire writes, “love is a commitment to others” (89), and humility makes co-learning and power-sharing possible (90).

However, the two—love and humility—work together from faith: “Dialogue further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human (which is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all)” (90). Love, humility, and faith endure as important emotions, attitudes, and actions (for they are not static states) for co-learning about racism and collaboratively acting for anti-racism.

And dialogue, what underlies writing center work, is a central site for embodied, engaged pedagogy.

These attitudes/actions align with hooks’ argument that to attend well to others and ourselves— that is, to be fully present and in the presence of others—we need to avoid “the dualistic separation of public and private” (16). Avoiding this split means, in part, that we bring our full selves into the work and also see the people with whom we work as fully human. We see writers as more than a single text, writing conference, or individual, as we understand how our identities are shaped by larger group memberships that are historically, materially, and

socially constructed. Full embodiment forces us to resist universalized understandings of who the student is (imagining some “typical” first-year student, “nontraditional” student, etc.) and the idealized and (mis)represented history of the person rather than to the person herself. To move beyond universalized understandings, we need to see writers as complex: both uniquely human and humanly constructed, both on their own terms and on the terms of larger legacies and local conditions. To be present and in partnership, we need also to see others as we see ourselves (and ourselves as we see others): both capable of learning and teaching, both already positioned with rich linguistic resources and in ongoing development of new resources. These both/and stances bring attention as much or more to the tutor’s role in learning and engaging in sessions. Or, as hooks says when speaking to classroom teachers: “When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess.

Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process” (21). This third dimension of an anti-racism pedagogy draws our attention to holistic learning, as there is much to learn from a principled position and on the long haul for racial justice.5

Bringing It All Together: Toward A MultiDimensional Pedagogy for Racial Justice When we think about a pedagogy for racial justice, we think about a multi-dimensional approach for tutoring writing. This multi-dimensional approach involves teachers/tutors, students/writers, disciplines/institutions, as well as campus leaders/administrators. All are partners in addressing the many manifestations of oppression that impact our lives in educational settings. Together, we engage antiracism on many levels, including what we know (knowledge), how we know (our lived experience and methods), how we position ourselves in relation to others (stances), and how we think and act in the world everyday (actions). Because racism is both structural and everyday, anti-racism too must be structural and everyday. As such, anti-racism pedagogy touches on all aspects of writing center work, necessitating reflection on our deepest values and informal interactions. This work requires both individual and institutional investment in equity and justice, an investment that shapes the writing center at its core and requires frequent re-investment. We value

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Racial Justice • 7 this re-investment and strive, with humility, to write about making commitments actionable, even as our attempts recycle the same assumptions that leave us feeling stuck in the workings of ideology and whiteness. And yet we trust that with a long-term commitment to racial justice, we can more easily try out, “test,” refine, and re-articulate our own multidimensional approaches like the one discussed here.

With a long-term commitment to racial justice, we can more easily identify other important and unforeseen dimensions of anti-racism pedagogy, thereby answering our disciplinary mandate. And, with a longterm commitment to racial justice, we can see the work of anti-racism in all our interactions, not only ones explicitly about race/ism as highlighted in the scenarios we share here.

As we write concluding sentences to this piece, we remember Malea Powell’s 2012 Chair’s Address at the Annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). In this address, Powell and her invited co-authors recounted histories of exclusions and marginalizations in the discipline. Collectively, however, their stories exceeded a series of recounted histories. Rather, Powell and her co-authors intervened, changing the scene of exclusions and marginalizations, using their lived experiences and the narratives held within them to direct our attention toward the need for intervention.

They re-wrote history every time one of the coauthors said powerfully, provocatively, and persistently: “This is my story. Do with it what you will.” Their accounts thus became testimonies. In testifying, they were mobilizing a charge to the discipline at large. “Do with it what you will” is a call for action, for transformation that moves us together and forward toward racial justice with its attendant linguistic, cultural, and epistemic rights. Likewise, as we recount our perspectives and ongoing efforts toward a racially just pedagogy (one founded in praxis), we renew our commitment to social justice, on the one hand, while we seek with you to rewrite our disciplinary space, on the other. We echo the coauthors’ voices, giving homage to their call and charge for a similar actionable commitment: “This is our story.

Do with it what you will.”

Notes 1. For an historical account of 1950’s language rights’ debates that paved the road to the “Students Right to Their Own Language” Resolution, please read

Geneva Smitherman’s “CCCC Role in the Struggle for Language Rights.” The number of position statements addressing anti-racism or social justice increases once we add those passed by CCCC (the Conference on College Composition and Communication), MLA (Modern Language Association), CEE (Conference on English Education), and NCA (National Communication Association). The 30 reported here are ones listed under the category Diversity, one of numerous position statements categories. For a full list of all position statements, please see the NCTE's website: http://www.ncte.org/positions/diversity.

You might also find other statements listed under different categories pertinent to discussion of racial and social justice (e.g. Resolution on Social Justice in Literacy Education available at http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/socialjusti ce).

2. Part of our ongoing work toward developing a pedagogy for racial justice has involved compiling and reconstructing scenarios with colleagues across the United States. As we write in a separate project, we believe that scenarios like the ones shared here are valuable to document instances of oppression; to invite a range of reflection; and, perhaps most importantly, to develop intervention skills.

3. The we here signifies multiple positions, such as student, tutor, and director. Facilitators and participants both play important roles in helping each other conduct deep analysis; therefore, the way examples are discussed is as important as the examples themselves. Activities, protocols, and our own individual behavior can impact these conversations significantly, making a reflective and attentive pedagogy all the more important.

4. For a discussion of race and space, see especially work by George Lipsitz who shows how “the national spatial imaginary is racially marked, and segregation serves as crucible for creating the emphasis on exclusion” (10). Thanks to Moira Ozias for introducing us to this work. And see Kevin Fox Gotham’s book for a local discussion about race and urban development in Kansas City, Missouri.

5. The Long Haul by Myles Horton and the Highlander Research and Education Center (formerly the Highlander Folk School) not only shows the expansive time component of anti-racism and social justice work, but also provides insight into holistic and collaborative ways of working and living. Also see Condon's I Hope to Join the Band, Denny's Facing the Center, and Geller et al.’s The Everyday Writing Center for representations of embodied and engaged pedagogy in

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Racial Justice • 8 action within tutoring sessions, professional development, and program development. In addition to Horton’s The Long Haul, these three recent texts demonstrate how anti-racism work stretches across long periods of time within multiple settings.

Works Cited Canagarajah, Suresh. “An Updated SRTOL?” http://ccccblog.blogspot.com/search?q=canagarajah.

Conference on College Composition and Communication, 4 Nov. 2010. Web. 1 May 2011.

Condon, Frankie. “Beyond the Known: Writing Centers and the Work of Anti-racism.” The Writing Center Journal 27.2 (2007): 19-38. Print.

Condon, Frankie. I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric. Utah: Utah University Press, 2012. Print.

Conference on College Composition and Communication. “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.” College Composition and Communication 25.3 (1974): 1-32. Print.

Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Spec. issue of College English 68.6 (2006). Print.

Dees, Sarah, Beth Godbee, and Moira Ozias.

“Navigating Conversational Turns: Grounding Difficult Discussions on Racism.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 5.1 (Fall 2007). Web. Denny, Harry. Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2010. Print.

Diab, Rasha, Thomas Ferrel, Beth Godbee, and Neil Simpkins. “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable.” Forthcoming in Across the Disciplines. Special Issue on “Anti-Racist Activism: Teaching Rhetoric and Writing.” Eds. Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young.

Anticipated publication date: Fall 2012.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1970. New York: Continuum, 2006. Print.

Geller, Anne Ellen, Michele Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Caroll, and Elizabeth H. Boquet. “Everyday Racism: Anti-Racism Work and Writing Center Practice.” The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2007. 87-109.

Print.

Geller, Anne Ellen. “Tick-Tock, Next: Finding Epochal Time in the Writing Center.” The Writing Center Journal 25.1 (2005): 5-24. Print.

Gotham, Kevin Fox. Race, Real Estate, and Uneven

Development: The Kansas City Experience. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 2002. Print.

Greenfield, Laura, and Karen Rowan, eds. Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2011.

Grimm, Nancy. “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform a System of Advantage Based on Race.” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change. Eds. Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2011. 75-100. Print. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Matsuda, eds.

Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2010. Print.

Horton, Myles, with Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl. The Long Haul: An Autobiography. New York: Teachers College Press, 1997. Print.

Liptsitz, George. “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape.” Landscape Journal 26.1 (2007): 10-23. Print.

Powell, Malea. “Stories Take Place.” Conference on College Composition and Communication.

St. Louis, MO. 22 March 2012. Chair’s Address.

Smitherman, Geneva. “CCCC’s Role in the Struggle for Language Rights.” College Composition and Communication 50.3 (1999): 349-376. Print.

- - -. “‘Students' Right to Their Own Language’: A Retrospective.” The English Journal 84.1 (1995): 2127. Print.

Villanueva, Victor. “Blind: Talking About the New Racism.” The Writing Center Journal 26.1 (2006): 319. Print.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change. Eds. Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2011. 61-72. Print.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10 , No 1 (2012)

MAKING ROOM FOR FAT STUDIES IN WRITING CENTER THEORY & PRACTICE Eric Steven Smith Ursinus College esmith@usrinus.edu Fat Studies is “an interdisciplinary field of scholarship marked by an aggressive, consistent, rigorous critique of the negative assumptions, stereotypes, and stigma placed on fat and the fat body” (Solovay and Rothblum 2). This field is growing rapidly and seems as important from an activist’s perspective as it is from a scholar’s. Organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) combine scholarship and activism to support fat people in all aspects of their lives, from living healthily to dealing with an anti-fat society. Scholarly texts like the Fat Studies journal and The Fat Studies Reader are working to promote awareness and solidify the place of fat studies in academia. Thus, fat people—people considered “overweight” or “obese” by societal standards1—have acquired some status as an affinity group: activists bound by ideology, shared social experiences and concern for civil rights. What’s more, the term “fat”— considered a mere descriptor and not an insult (Wann xii)—may be the latest label under the “diversity” umbrella. Fat Studies, then, should join the various identity fields rightly consulted for more informed writing center theory and practice.

Many readers may be surprised that consideration of fat students, teachers, and tutors should be an imperative, but fat discrimination has substantial effects on both its victims and perpetrators. Books like Paul Campos’ The Obesity Epidemic, Peter Stearns’ Fat History, and Amy Farrell’s Fat Shame are just a few of the texts that discuss the nature and rhetoric of fat stigmatization and the connection to other modes of discrimination. Scholars like Eleana Andrea Escalera, Ashley Hetrick, and Derek Attig discuss fat discrimination in education specifically. These works suggest that body size may deserve as much attention as race, gender, disability, and sexuality in writing centers. How administrators and tutors choose to incorporate Fat Studies must be a situational endeavor, but some consideration is necessary.

Like other minorities, fat bodies are in opposition to the traditional academic persona, which Patricia Bizzell has described as agonistic, skeptical, precise, European, and male (10-11). According to Hetrick and Attig, “thin” can be added to that list. Hetrick and Attig insist that thinness is a marker of middleclass whiteness, which “not only privileges the mind

over the body, but also expects the former to rigidly restrain the latter as an ultimate, visible, and recurring testament of the invisible mind’s power” (200-201).

To be fat, then, is to fail at the rigid discipline expected of the genuine academic persona. Fat students and educators are a quasi-minority, at the very least.

Because weight induces societal prejudices about character and ability, the fat experience should be considered in writing centers. One must take into consideration the distinct experiences a fat person may bring. Just as tutors may be trained to consider and understand the experiences of racial, gender, sexual, and disabled demographics, they could be trained to understand that inhabiting a fat body brings with it marginal points of view that could inform one’s acquisition of academia and academic discourse.

Additionally, tutor trainers may do well to discuss how fat tutors themselves can be stigmatized: how do fat tutors deal with student perceptions of what it means to be fat? Fat Studies in the writing center, like anywhere else, must deal with society’s anti-fat bias and the decidedly pro-thin culture of academia.

As a writing center administrator, I hope to create awareness of Fat Studies and introduce the fat experience as a valuable subject position with its own ethos and critical standpoint. Like any other consideration of diversity in writing centers, fat students or tutors should not be essentialized.

However, recognizing the value of the fat experience may be as valuable as recognizing that of other groups.

Fat Studies is an issue of diversity, and diversity must be a priority in writing center theory and practice.

Fat as an Identity Group Fat Studies, like other academic fields, was born through activism. The Fat Acceptance Movement began in 1969 as a form of activism directed toward social equality for fat people (Rothblum 3), especially women, who continue to dominate both academic and activist factions of the movement.2 The field has since grown into concern for the legal and medical rights of people deemed “fat,” as well as the fair treatment of fat people by employers, proprietors, and society at large. Fat Studies deals with all these issues and is taken up by an eclectic set of scholars across the social

Fat Studies • 2 sciences and humanities. Nevertheless, Fat Studies flies under the radar of academic recognition.

This almost negligible recognition of Fat Studies stems from a general opinion that fat people are not oppressed. In fact, fat people may suffer from “mystified oppression” (Fishman). Unlike race, gender, and sexuality, fat people are, in a sense, supposed to be stigmatized and marginalized, at least until they lose weight. Based on societal assumptions, fat people themselves are culpable for their fatness. An apparent lack of discipline, self-respect, and morality—perceived as causes of fat—justify stigmatization (Farrell, location 2821). That is, fat people are commonly believed to deserve their oppression. In addition, the health detriments associated with fatness give many the go-ahead to criticize and shame fat people in the name of “tough love”; if fat people feel shame for their bodies, they will lose weight and gain health (Fishman).

Despite society’s sense of entitlement when stigmatizing fat people, its reasons for doing so are not entirely valid. When we prejudge a person based on that person’s body, we are merely making assumptions. A person can exercise, eat well, and have a generally active life while maintaining a fat body (Bacon, location 367). Even correlations of fat to type2 diabetes are questionable (Campos 22-23).3 Many even fail to realize that aesthetics are social constructions and that many people deem fat bodies attractive (Stearns 89-93).

We can gain more insight into the nature of weight discrimination by exploring the parallels between the stigmatization suffered by fat people and that suffered by the disabled. I must stress that I do not consider fat necessarily a “disability,” but I do acknowledge that others may behave toward fat bodies as they would bodies deemed “disabled” by the Americans with Disabilities Act, which considers a disability to include the following: (A) “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of such individual”; (B) “a record of such an impairment”; or (C) “being regarded as having such an impairment” (U.S. Department of Justice). Based on this definition, newly constructed in 2008, extremely tall people could be considered disabled in certain contexts. A 7’ ceiling would definitely impair a 7’1” person’s level of comfort. Yet, this person does not fit the common conceptions of “disabled.” Not only is fat—like tall— a floating signifier of sorts, but our constructed assumptions about fat bodies often do not match the reality of fat bodies.

Like the term “disabled,” “fat” is seen as a condition that impedes physical activities when it actually does not. For one, many fat people are “ablebodied” in that they can often out-perform their thinner counterparts: they are award winning dancers (e.g., Ragen Chastain), Olympic Athletes (e.g., Cheryl Haworth and Holly Mangold), and professional athletes (consider NFL linemen). So, one can see how Disability Studies could inform Fat Studies: one cannot judge the level of a body’s ability by sight alone.

Again, I am not suggesting that Fat Studies and Disability Studies are exactly the same. In fact, their differences may show that Fat Studies is more akin to studies in bigotry. A major difference between society’s view of disabled bodies and fat bodies is the conception that fat people are “to blame” for fat, which suggests that there is something inherently deviant about fat and the fat person’s character. Pattie Thomas, in Taking Up Space: How Eating Well and Exercising Regularly Changed My Life, writes that being fat is a potentially silencing effect, because, to many, a fat body is considered proof of incompetence, laziness, etc. This eradicates ethos, in general. Thomas speaks of fat adulthood: “It was no longer the occasional bully or routinely insensitive kid, it was colleagues and superiors showing a lack of respect for my work or utter shock when they discovered I could think and speak reasonably well” (location 500). The invisibility experienced by Thomas may be keener in the classroom, where classroom desks “make fat students visible in order to, eventually, make them invisible in a crowd of identically conforming bodies” (Hetrick and Attig 198).

More important for our purposes, however, are the effects of prejudice and stigma on fat students and tutors. Shame can be quite debilitating and can lead to stifling depression, which is inimical to creativity.

Writing centers, if they are true to a democratic and equitable mission, will do well to make sure such debilitation can be adequately dealt with in tutorials and workshops for both tutors and students. Thus, the potentially debilitating shame can be transformed into something beneficial.4 Writing centers can help students and tutors effectively use their fat experiences to realize a critical and, perhaps, innovative standpoint when both writing and tutoring.

Fat, Writing, and Tutoring All these considerations involve looking at writing centers through the lens of Fat Studies, but do we have a clear understanding of what it means to be a fat

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Fat Studies • 3 writer or tutor? Weight is just one of the dynamics that structure identity, but it garners little attention in writing center theory and practice.

Harry Denny, in “Queering the Writing Center,” lists several binaries that “overflow” in writing centers.

Out of the 18 proposed binaries, none is fat/thin. (His concluding “et cetera,” however, suggests its possibility.) However, Denny’s use of queering and his ideas that students of all creeds may discursively “pass” and “come out” may be helpful. Of course, since “fat” is a relatively new identity group, a fat discourse is not as readily available.5 However, I argue that fat students are expected to “pass” as the traditional academic, who, as mentioned above, is likely thin. Thus, fat students have to ignore a significant aspect of their material existence, like queer students who are often expected to ignore an aspect of their sexual realities. How would a fat writer and tutor “come out” in a tutorial?

Expectedly, the answer may be found in collaboration and social construction. Both tutor and student writer, whether one or both is fat, can negotiate an ethos appropriate to a particular assignment. That is, having a fat body can be constructed into a particular standpoint that accentuates the power of critical thinking. In fact, feminist standpoint epistemology may lend some guidance. Besides Fat Studies’ predominantly female participation, feminist standpoint epistemology may provide an excellent bridge between Fat Studies and writing center theory and practice.

Feminist standpoint epistemology, according to Abigail Brooks, is a theory of knowledge construction that seeks to understand viewpoints of women and apply knowledge gleaned from that understanding to social change. This theory “requires the fusion of knowledge and practice. It is both a theory of knowledge building and a method of doing research— an approach to knowledge construction and a call to political action” (55). Appropriating this theory for our purposes is valuable because there is much innovative and critical potential in the idea of placing fat people “at the center of the research process,” having their “concrete experiences provide the starting point from which to build knowledge” (Brooks 56). By “concrete experiences,” Brooks suggests traditionally female lived experiences, from homemaking to working in a male-dominated industry. The “fat experience” may have its own concrete experiences, like relating to the physical environment, relating to mainstream values, and dealing with perceived negative characteristics.

Feminist standpoint epistemology’s relevance in the context of a writing center is to apply what is

learned from concrete experiences to particular writing situations. Since students may not want to draw attention to their bodies, student writers and tutors can work together to focus on the marginal subject positions concomitant with fat experience. Brooks, referencing Kathryn Anderson and Dana Jack, calls this “the interactive approach,” an attempt “to talk about their daily activities with an interested party and [struggle] with how to put their thoughts and feelings about their daily activities into words” (57). So, a tutor can assist a student in focusing on a critical standpoint that can be lifted from the student’s own concrete experiences. Of course, this method is not new to writing center theory and practice, where collaboration and social construction are mainstays. What is different, however, is the nature of fat stigma in society. Unlike racism and sexism, fat stigmatization is not itself stigmatized. That is, where racist or sexist statements are frowned upon, if not completely ostracized, “fattist” statements are given significantly more leeway, and many fat people feel shame and guilt about their bodies instead of pride and defiance against an oppressive status quo. Social construction of a fat subject position, then, may have to be carefully co-constructed.

This co-construction can happen by asking students to focus on ways they are marginalized and use the inherently critical outlooks gleaned from that marginalization to address particular writing assignments. Brooks writes, Some feminist standpoint scholars argue that women’s subordinate status in society, and their capacity for double consciousness that evolves from it, places them in a privileged position from which to generate knowledge about the world.

This feminist standpoint concept, sometimes called ‘strong objectivity,’ teaches us that women are more capable of producing an accurate, comprehensive, and objective interpretation of social reality than men are. (66) Fat students may have similar outlooks based on their subordinate statuses. A constructed fat discourse may consider these experiences and place them into writing in obvious or surreptitious ways. According to standpoint epistemology, there is power in marginalization. From concrete experiences and a DuBoisian “double consciousness” (seeing oneself through one’s own eyes as well as those of hegemony), fat people may have developed skills unknown to hegemonic subjects. Thus, a writer can “fatten” discourse by applying experiences and insights— overtly or covertly—derived from open

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Fat Studies • 4 discrimination, a move that may be inherently critical . . . and, thus, academic.

This is how a student may “come out” as a fat person in academic writing, but what of the fat tutor?

Going back to Denny, a fat tutor can encourage standpoint epistemology through self-disclosure—not necessarily of fat experience, but of marginal experiences. Denny writes about how tutors may handle the risks felt by students who are either reluctant to talk about specific experiences or clueless about how to articulate them: Such risk can be mitigated if tutors themselves engage in a sort of coming out, thereby fostering a transactional dialogue in which knowledge is shared and consumption and transmission of it is not one-sided. By narrativizing their own concurrent experiences with joining academic discourse communities, tutors help students demystify the process as well as make their own struggles less individual and isolating. (280) Denny goes on to point out the risk the tutor takes in such disclosure. But, as mentioned before, such disclosure can be coded in a general discourse of marginalization, a standpoint epistemology that reflects experiences of blatant discrimination /stigmatization and the various ways such experiences can shape an approach to an assignment or text.

So, the fat experience, like other experiences, can be a source of power in academia: fat experiences can help shape and buttress a powerful academic subject position, even if (especially if) the traditional subject positions are criticized. Harold D. Lasswell, in Power and Personality, provides a simple but effective outline for creating personal power in specific contexts: Man Pursues Values Through Institutions On Resources. (17) The capitalized and italicized words are really variables in which we can plug in more specific terms. Lasswell describes scholarly values as promoting “Enlightenment,” which he defines as “the finding and spreading of knowledge” (17).6 So, for our purposes, we can specify Lasswell’s outline thusly: A Student Writer Pursues Enlightenment Through Academia On Fat Standpoint Epistemology.

There is power in the fat experience.

Fat in the Writing Center

Since diversity is a common goal in most writing centers, challenges of inclusion are nothing new.

Several texts exist on aspects of diversity, from race to sexuality. Studies have shown that those who harbor “strong anti-fat bias have also been found to express more racism (in an overarching tendency toward intolerance for deviation from the norm)” (Escalera 206). We can expect to see overlap in issues of racial discrimination and fat stigmatization, so educators concerned about fat acceptance may gather tips from work focused on other marginalized groups.

For clarity’s sake, I would like to first discuss the issue of fat students followed by that of fat tutors.

Although I will speak of them separately, I want to point out what each has in common: they do not match the typical image of the successful college student or educator. This may affect the ways, or the comfort with which, students and tutors communicate their thoughts. As Jacquelyn Jones Royster writes, interpretations of traditional academic standpoints “embody ways of seeing, knowing, being, and acting” that “tend to have considerable consequence in the lives of the targeted group, people in this case whose own voices and perspectives remain still largely under considered and uncredited” (613-614). Fat is a marginalizing feature in our society, and with marginalization comes relative silencing. Writing centers must be spaces that guard against this.

One silencing tactic can be seen in the “physicality” of academia. Most desks are not comfortable for bigger bodies; some cannot accommodate fat students at all (Hetrick and Attig 198). Little is done about this in the classroom.

Fortunately, writing centers often have space more conducive to fat bodies. Desks are replaced by tables, chairs, and even couches. Nevertheless, being denigrated as stupid, lazy, or undisciplined is unfortunate in any situation, but especially when walking into writing centers, a context already considered “remedial” (read: “deviant”) space by many. What’s more, writing centers, both materially and pedagogically, may be seen as weaker alternatives to classrooms, where rigor and disciplined conformity are valued (Hetrick and Attig 198). Writing Centers, already deemed “feminine” or “queer” spaces by scholars like Mary Trachsel7 and Harry Denny, respectively, may also be construed as “fat” spaces through the lens of Fat Studies.

Beyond having a body that could limit one’s “major life activities,” if fat people are even “being regarded” in ways that pathologize their bodies, perhaps tutors should be invited to explore the reasons and sources of such negative views. Writing

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Fat Studies • 5 Center tutors must be aware of these stereotypes to better avoid them. Most tutors know they are expected to harbor no preconceived notions based on race, sex, or gender (even if they actually do), but few realize the need to treat fat people similarly. During training, tutors can be made aware of the misconceptions about fat people by studying information like that found on the “Association for Size Diversity and Health” (ASDAH) or “Health at Every Size” (HAES) websites.

After discussing health/fat correlations, tutors can be invited to explore the term “overcome” in some aspect of their formal training. In Disability Studies, this term has become a bit of a four-letter word. As Margaret Price, in “Writing from Normal: Critical Thinking and Disability in the Writing Classroom,” writes, Disability studies rejects the notion of ‘overcoming’ in relation to disability, arguing that this locates disabilities in individuals who are then charged with ‘overcoming’ their disabilities in order to avoid being treated as tragic less-thanhumans. (69) Tutors who refuse to stigmatize fat people may think that pity and sympathy are steps in the right direction, but this assumes that fat is something to be overcome.

Tutor trainers can invite tutors to normalize fat bodies and see weight as something not to be overcome, but as another aspect of diversity and a source of innovative thought.

Lastly, an exploration of embodiment may be helpful. Amy Lee, in Composing Critical Pedagogies: Teaching Writing as Revision, suggests, like Escalera, that students (in our case, tutors in training) be given chances to write about the actual physicality of learning environments: their bodies and the positions of their bodies in academic contexts. Whereas Escalara suggests “anonymous five-minute reaction papers” about body perceptions (207), Lee recommends that “we need more discussions that represent and take into account the range of subjects and subjectivities that populate any actual site of writing instruction” (55). Lee reminds her students of this by reconfiguring desks in her classroom throughout the semester and asking students to discuss reactions to each configuration. For instance, what does sitting in a circle “allow for or encourage? How does it affect [the student’s] position in the classroom in relation to [the instructor], to one another and to the subject/object of study” (55)? This is to say that the fat body is only fat in relation to thin bodies and vice versa; we would do well to interrogate the experiences of each. No one need “come out” as a fat or skinny person in this experiment; I believe affect is key. That is, students

should explore their initial feelings in response to these questions and inductively apply these to broader aspects of their lives. This exercise may assist tutors in considering the effects of body type in any context, including writing centers.

Fat tutors must also have some training on ways to deal with stigmatization from students. Research shows that students admire and positively evaluate thinner educators. (I include tutors under the general category of “educator.”) In “Stigma Threat and the Fat Professor: Reducing Student Prejudice in the Classroom,” Escalera writes that an educator’s fatness can derail learning because “stigma threat” can “cause people who perceive a stigmatized person to feel anxious and threatened” (206). What’s more, “attractiveness makes a person more persuasive . . . so if fat is seen as an unattractive trait, this could work against the fat professor as communicator” (207).

Where do we go from here?

Again, awareness is important; education about fat and fat people would be beneficial. As Judith Kilborn suggests in “Cultural Diversity in the Writing Center: Defining Ourselves and our Challenges,” having the Writing Center sponsor or even perform diversitycentered events will show the campus community that the writing center is a space open and (hopefully) conducive to particular groups. Workshops featuring the kind of information provided by NAAFA, HAES, and ASDAH, followed by discussion, may be ideal.

Conclusion As writing center directors and tutors, we must help student writers find their own voices and transcribe them adequately and appropriately for academia. We are told time and again that stereotypical views of student writers and tutors are anathema, and we are also told that ignoring the influence societal status may have on writing is antithetical to good tutoring. Good tutoring, in theory, can be found at the nexus of these two imperatives. However, one does not think of fat people when considering these best practices, even though two-thirds of the United States population can be considered “overweight” or “obese” (Farrell, location 267). As the field of Fat Studies gets larger, writing center directors would do well to inform tutors—as potential perpetrators and victims—about the field’s purpose and relevance to writing center theory and practice.

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Notes

Fat Studies • 6 1. Who is fat? I define a fat person as someone who is deemed “overweight” by societal standards, regardless of whether he or she self-identifies as fat.

Of course, one’s status as overweight is contextual.

Activist Marilyn Wann writes, “Fat functions as a floating signifier, attaching to individuals based on a power relationship, not a physical measurement.

People all along the weight spectrum may experience fat oppression” (xv). However, the aforementioned societal standard is based on notions of obesity based on popular norms. Disregarding measurement systems like the Body Mass Index, which has various problems with accuracy, I leave the definition of fat to one’s own discretion: my point is not to define fat but to discuss the implications of being deemed fat in our society, in general, and in writing centers, specifically.

2. From its inception, the Fat Acceptance Movement has been a predominately female crusade.

It has roots in second-wave feminism, but, like other sub-groups within feminism, has become an aspect of a non-mainstream or third-wave feminism, a movement that advocates working with the particular differences that constitute women’s positions at the local level, inviting the expression of hybrid identities, while developing strategies for working productively across differences based on a coalitional politics of affinity rather than equivalence. (Budgeon 5) Fat, like sexuality, race, and socio-economic status, provides a marginalized perspective unacknowledged, if not unaccepted, in second wave feminism. Thus, Fat Studies is marginal on different levels: originally marginalized fields like feminism have marginalized it.

Its recognition as a field, and fat people’s recognition as an affinity group, is minimal.

3. Several sources explain how the correlations between fat and disease are questionable and based more on assumption than science. The texts by Bacon and Campos deal with this succinctly, but texts on size acceptance and activism most certainly address this.

4. Elspeth Probyn, in Blush: Faces of Shame, insists that shame can be a benefit. Taking her cue from psychologist Sylvan Tomkins, Probyn writes that “shame alerts us to things, people and ideas we didn’t even realize we wanted” (14). Often, a tutor’s job is to help students realize their interests in specific topics.

Marginalized statuses, and the possible moments of shame produced by hegemonic acts of oppression, could be a fecund source of such realizations. Probyn continues, “[Shame] highlights unknown or unappreciated investments. Viewing shame in this way must disabuse us of shame’s reputation as a

miserabilist condition…[Shame] is always productive” (14-15).

5. In this essay, I do not wish to hybridize a fat discourse with academic discourse in the ways Bizzell hybridizes alternative cultural discourses with traditional modes of academic writing, although such an endeavor is worth exploring.

6. This term is not to be confused with the period of Enlightenment and its paradigms of rationalism and objective thought. Although not completely divorced from the principles of “The Age of Reason,” Lasswell’s use of the “Enlightenment” is closer to its original meaning: realization and self-actualization.

7. Trachsel explores the place of women in academia and concludes that writing centers may be feminized spaces.

Works Cited Association for Size Diversity and Health. ASDAH, 2012.

Web. 1 Jun. 2012.

Bacon, Linda. Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight. Dallas: Benbella Books, 2010. eBook.

Bizzell, Patricia. "Hybrid Academic Discourse: What.

Why. How." Composition Studies 27.2 (1999): 7-21.

Print.

Brooks, Abigail. "Feminist Standpoint Epistemology: Building Knowledge and Empowerment Through Women’s Lived Experience." Feminist Research Practice: A Primer. Eds. Sharlene Nagy-Hesse-Biber and Patricia Lina Leavy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishing, 2007. 53-82. Print.

Budgeon, Shelley. Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Gender in Late Modernity. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave McMillan Press, 2011. Print.

Campos, Paul. The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health. New York: Gotham Books, 2004. Print.

Chastain, Ragen. Dances with Fat. Wordpress, 19 Nov. 2008. Web. 1 Jun. 2012.

Denny, Harry. "Queering the Writing Center." The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. Eds. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. 4th ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 263-283. Print.

Escalera, Elena Andrea. "Stigma Threat and the Fat Professor: Reducing Student Prejudice in the Classroom." The Fat Studies Reader. Eds. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 205-121. Print.

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Fat Studies • 7 Farrell, Amy. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2011. eBook.

Fishman, Sara. "Life in the Fat Underground."

Radiance: The Magazine for Large Women. Radiance Magazine, Winter 1998. Web. 12 Jun. 2012.

Health at Every Size. HAES, 2012. 1 Jun. 2012.

Hetrick, Ashley and Derek Attig. "Sitting Pretty: Fat Bodies, Classroom Desks, and Academic Excess."

The Fat Studies Reader. Eds. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. New York: NYU Press, 2009.

197-204. Print.

Laswell, Harold D. Power and Personality. New York: The Viking Press, 1948. Print.

Lee, Amy. Composing Critical Pedagogies: Teaching Writing as Revision. 1st ed. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2000. Print.

More of Me to Love. More of Me to Love, 2012. Web. 1 Jun. 2012.

National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. NAAFA, 2011. Web. 1 Jun. 2012.

Price, Margaret. "Writing from Normal: Critical Thinking and Disability in the Composition Classroom." Disability and the Teaching of Writing: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Jo. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2008. 56-73. Print.

Probyn, Elspeth. Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Print.

Rothblum, Esther D. "Why a Journal on Fat Studies?."

Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society 1.1 (2012): 3-5. Print.

Solovay, Sondra, and Esther Rothblum.

"Introduction." The Fat Studies Reader. Eds. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. New York: NYU Press, 2009. 1-7. Print.

U.S. Department of Justice. "A Guide to Disability Rights Laws." America Disabilities Act. U.S. Department of Justice, Jul. 2009. Web. 12 Jun. 2012.

Stearns, Peter N. Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West. New York: NYU Press, 1997. Print.

Swan, Jim. "Diabilities, Bodies, Voices." Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Eds. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. 1st ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. 283-295.

Print.

Thomas, Pattie. Taking Up Space: How Eating Well and Exercising Regularly Changed My Life. Nashville, TN: Pearlsong Press, 2005. eBook.

Trachsel, Mary. "Writing Center Journal." Writing Center Journal 16.1 (1995): 24-46. Print.

Wann, Marilyn. “Foreward.” The Fat Studies Reader.

Eds. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. 1st ed. New York: NYU Press, 2009. ix-xxv. Print.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10, No 1 (2012)

STOCKING THE BODEGA: TOWARDS A NEW WRITING CENTER PARADIGM Nancy Effinger Wilson Texas State University Nw05@txstate.edu You can probably imagine a large, chain supermarket right now—the cereal aisle, the pork chops and steaks packed in cellophane, the piped-in music, the large shopping cart. Less obvious are the maneuvers supermarkets employ to control how you shop. For example, products with higher profit margins are placed at the shopper’s eye level, and staples are stocked at the back of the store in order to encourage impulse shopping along the way. Even the piped-in music is chosen to create an ambiance conducive to mindless shopping, like the absence of clocks in a casino. In other words, whereas most of us assume that we use grocery stores, in many ways they use us, even define us, not only as individual shoppers but also as a community. Unfortunately, as Andrew Seth and Geoffrey Randall point out, supermarket groups such as Tesco and Wal-Mart “have undoubtedly driven thousands of small shops out of business, possibly increasing overall efficiency, but reducing choice. They do not always serve the poor and the old well” (179). And yet the consumer is only supposed to think about the freshness of the produce and the low price of a gallon of milk.

I worry that writing centers in the U.S., in their zeal to secure positive feedback from faculty and university administrators, also “do not always serve the poor and the old well,” nor any student who falls outside of the mainstream. Instead, to the background muzak of “just fix their papers” and “what is the writing center for if not to teach students how to use commas?” we too often succumb to a one-size-fits-all philosophy of writing and writing instruction—shrinkwrapped essays and aisles of grammar handbooks— that ignores university demographics that complicate such homogeneity. Standard Edited American English, standard essay conventions, and standard tutoring methods have been marketed to such a degree that we often do not even question their superiority, do not consider other options, other brands.

Of course writing centers support monocultural, monolingual writing models with the best of intentions (i.e. improving the university’s bottom line via higher retention and graduation rates). However, we must also consider how globalization has impacted real world writing (we speak now of Englishes,

alternative rhetorics, and of “overlapping interests and heterogeneous or hybrid publics” (Vertovec and Cohen 1); diverse perspectives and voices are more prominent on our campuses. In other words, while knowing the master discourse of the academic community remains valuable, that community and the world at large now have multiple master discourses, depending on the rhetorical situation. Therefore, just as many big box stores have begun stocking “ethnic foods” and hiring staff who speak multiple languages in order to accommodate their customers’ demands, writing centers must also adapt to the diverse needs of our students. As Elaine Richardson notes, “Our students have a wealth of knowledge about the world in which they live. Our pedagogies must advance accordingly” (xviii).

To conceptualize this writing center paradigm shift, I propose the writing center use as its model a local market (a.k.a. bodega, colmado, tiendita)—able to adjust quickly and deftly to local needs, or certainly more so than a big-box store. Bodegas, in particular, typify panethnicity and heteroglossia. In The Empathic Civilization, for example, Jeremy Rifkin, describing a bodega-like store in Washington, D.C., notes that “it’s not unusual to hear three or four languages being spoken at the checkout counter at a neighborhood supermarket. While first-generation newcomers tend to remain tightly wedged in their own ethnic enclaves, their children and grandchildren socialize much more freely with young people from other ethnic backgrounds” (433). Rifkin links this type of local store to “a kind of bottom-up neighborhood cosmopolitanism” (433), which he defines as being open to ‘the other” and “comfortable amid diverse cultures” (431).

We know that in the past, university faculty also tended to remain tightly wedged in “ethnic enclaves” that favored one “standard” of writing, one type of English. In the 1870’s and 1880’s, U.S. private colleges, according to W. Bruce Leslie in Gentlemen and Scholars: College and Community in the “Age of the University,” 1865-1917, were comprised almost exclusively of Protestants of northeastern European ancestry; “other groups remained outside the pale” (241). In fact, in “Mechanical Correctness as a Focus

Stocking the Bodega • 2 in Composition Instruction,” Robert J. Connors argues that the emphasis in English classes on proper usage and grammatical correctness arose from the Eastern U.S. reaction against the “roughness” of frontier America (63). In other words, then, as now, response to linguistic diversity led to a shoring up of “academic” language.

However, it is precisely because tutors and tutees from various backgrounds socialize that a writing center can be an ideal ecology for “bottom-up cosmopolitanism.” For example, in the south Texas university writing center I direct I routinely hear tutorials conducted in Spanish and English or Spanish exclusively; we also have a tutor who is deaf and uses American Sign Language and a Korean tutor who tutors in her home language.

In sum, we need not see the addition of alternative discourses into the academy as a zero sum game—any privileges afforded minorities cost the majority.

Tutees can learn “standard” and global Englishes and other languages, traditional and alternative rhetorics, and a variety of literacies. They should learn them all because the world today resembles the environment of a panethnic and heteroglossic bodega far more than a monolingual and monocultural big-box store.

The Changing Linguistic Landscape According to the U.S. Department of Education, the percentage of White students enrolled in U.S. degree-granting institutions dropped from 81.4% in 1980 to 62.3% in 2009. Put another way, university students in 2009 were twice as likely to be non-whites as they were in 1980. (See Table 1.)

While universities are clearly more ethnically diverse, these statistics do not in and of themselves prove linguistic diversity since not all White people use Standard English (or the Language of Wider Communication, to use Geneva Smitherman’s term), nor do all non-White people use an English variety or non-English language. As Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth observes, “you get Blacks who are whiter than the Whites” (144). However, according to the U.S. Department of Education, the number of school-age children who speak a language other than English at home “rose from 4.7 to 11.2 million between 1980 and 2009, or from 10 to 21 percent of the population in this age range” (“Children”).

Furthermore, as Paul Kei Matsuda notes, at the graduate level, especially in natural and applied sciences, it is not unusual to find graduate programs at U.S.based institutions where the majority of students

are speakers of different varieties of English, if not other languages.

The presence of these multilingual and multicultural writers is changing the nature of rhetorical situations in academia; what used to be alternative is now becoming part of the academy. (194) To complicate writing issues further, with an increasingly diverse, global audience, we are finding that writing conventions, rhetorical choices, and even the English language are changing. In his article in the journal English World-Wide, David Deterding argues that as an ever-expanding number of speakers of English in China become proficient in the language, it is likely that distinctive styles of Chinese English will continue to emerge, and one day a new variety may become established with its own independent identity. . . When this happens, Chinese English may have more speakers than Britain and America combined, and then it may start to have a major impact on the way the language evolves. (195) Consequently, although the “standard” variety of English remains important to know, it is not the only variety worth knowing. As Patricia Bizzell, co-editor of Alt Dis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy, asserts, slowly but surely, previously nonacademic discourses are blending with traditional academic discourses to form the new “mixed” forms (2). And clearly educators, including writing center tutors, who assume that a student thinks and writes as they do may be quite mistaken.

The necessity of valuing and accommodating student diversity is obvious given the 2011 Arizona House Bill 2281, also known as the Arizona antiethnic studies law. Tom Horne, at that time Superintendent of Public Instruction in Arizona, explains his support of the bill in an “Open Letter to the Citizens of Tucson”: I believe people are individuals, not exemplars of racial groups. What is important about people is what they know, what they can do, their ability to appreciate beauty, their character, and not what race into which they are born. They are entitled to be treated that way. It is fundamentally wrong to divide students up according to their racial group, and teach them separately.

Horne’s desire for a homogeneous center leads him to manufacture one—a center in his own image—that he can then funnel everyone into by deracinating them.

It’s a big-box philosophy.

The language of the bill itself is also telling as it calls for the prohibition of any class “designed

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Stocking the Bodega • 3 primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” ignoring the fact that instruction in most U.S. schools is designed for pupils of a particular ethnic group. As Milton M. Gordon explains in Assimilation in American Life, “indeed, the white Protestant American is rarely conscious of the fact that he inhabits a group at all.

He inhabits America. The others live in groups. One is reminded of the wryly perceptive comment that the fish never discovers water” (5). Even if proponents of the “melting pot” believe that they are treating everyone equally, they must recognize that people in the U.S. are supposed to melt into a Eurocultural model (not an African model nor an Asian model, for example), which means only some people have to give up their culture.

In response to HB2281, as well as Arizona SB 1070 (a bill designed to “discourage and deter the unlawful entry and presence of aliens and economic activity by persons unlawfully present in the United States”) and Oklahoma’s passage of a law declaring English the official language in the state of Oklahoma, the 2010 International Writing Center Association (IWCA) “Position Statement on Racism, AntiImmigration, and Linguistic Intolerance” declares these legislative initiatives “an attempt to de-legitimize the voices, bodies, and epistemologies of people of color.” As a counter measure, the IWCA’s Special Interest Group on Anti-Racist Activism calls for the movement of “the discourse surrounding race and immigration status into a more honest and humane space, in our own writing centers and in our communities at large.”

To develop these “honest and humane spaces,” writing centers must challenge the outdated one-sizefits-all, or worse yet one-size-must-fit-all, model of writing and writing/tutoring instruction, even in the face of pressure to retain existing privileges. As a panethnic, heteroglossic, local and global ecology, a bodega is a useful model for writing centers that are committed to the goals set forth by the IWCA, namely the “democratization of education on university campuses” and promotion of “social justice.” As I will discuss, writing centers have already launched programs that exemplify this Bodega Writing Center paradigm.

Stocking the Bodega Writing Center Consider the iconic bodega with its canary-yellow sign and large, apple-red, often handwritten, letters.

Such flamboyance, absent from the big-box store’s “corporate blue,” is an exemplifier of rasquachismo, the artistry of Chicanas and Chicanos who have found a

means by which to create beauty (and power) despite their poverty and oppression. Although “rasquache” literally means “poor,” “in bad taste,” and “vulgar,” Amalia Mesa-Bains in “‘Domesticana’: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache” explains that “in rasquachismo, the irreverent and spontaneous are employed to make the most from the least. In rasquachismo, one has a stance that is both defiant and inventive” (156). Writing centers have also traditionally made the most with the least. In fact, I have often thought that my growing up poor is one of the best preparations for directing a writing center.

But equally important is the mindset that rasquachismo (bricolage) represents, specifically the ability to deconstruct binaries in order to reassign privilege or to refuse to engage in binary thinking altogether. One bodega may stock primarily Latin American foods, and another may stock primarily Asian food, but often there is a mix of several cultures’ foods, oftentimes displayed together in seemingly chaotic ways—soy sauce, tamales, and SpaghettiOs on the same shelf.

The front windows reflect a cacophony of voices— posters advertising store specials, handbills seeking help in locating a lost pet, flyers publicizing upcoming community events, banners providing information on how to make international phone calls, and so on. For example, speaking of the bodegas they visited in Corona, Queens, authors Milagros Ricourt and Ruby Danta report that at one Dominican bodega at eleven on a weekday morning, four Mexican and Ecuadoran men were talking together in front. At another at noon, several Dominicans were watching a television soap opera while three South Americans entered to buy food items. On another day at this bodega, four Dominican and Central American men played dominoes at a small table placed on the sidewalk out front, surrounded by a group of Dominicans and Central and South Americans.

(48-9) The dynamism captured here reminds me of the beehive environment of every writing center I have ever visited. Indeed, if a writing center population is inherently diverse, it is likewise serendipitously accepting of that diversity because, as Daniel Hiebert notes, as a rule, individuals who live in multicultural communities, “especially those who consume multicultural products and services and who interact across cultures, are actively cosmopolitan” (213).

However, even for those who support multilingual/multidialectal/multicontextual instruction, developing praxis can be challenging. In her survey of composition faculty attitudes, for

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Stocking the Bodega • 4 example, Christine M. Tardy found that “many (if not most) teachers have a limited set of strategies for supporting multilingual students, whether through practices that explicitly incorporate their multiple languages or through English-medium practices that support second language development” (646).

Fortunately, others have developed writing center pedagogy and practice that reflect, respect, and encourage the complexity of writers and writing in the contemporary world and that typify Bodega Writing Center best practices: acknowledging and applauding the heteroglossia of our students and the world at large, as well as encouraging cosmopolitanism among faculty and administrators, via rasquachismo if necessary.

Heteroglossia In “Sitting on Top of the World: A Multilingual Writing Center?” Manuel Herrero-Puertas notes that “the University of Wisconsin-Madison alone counts almost 4,000 international students from more than 110 countries, the 12th largest international population in a U.S. campus” and that “UW-Madison offers instruction in roundly 80 different languages, some of which extend to graduate programs in which professional scholars write reviews, articles and dissertations in their target tongues.” Herrero-Puertas suggests that writing centers consider “the possibility of a bi-, tri-, or even a multilingual center.”

At the Texas State University Writing Center that I direct, we showcase the variety of languages spoken by our students, faculty, and staff via an intercambio (language exchange). This past term, twenty students from our university’s intensive English program came to the writing center to share their home languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, German, Japanese, Hindi, and French) with tutors and guests. Rather than the writing center functioning exclusively as a vehicle for assimilating non-native English speakers, these individuals became the tutors, the experts.

Furthermore, providing exposure to different languages, even on a limited scale, aligns with the Modern Language Association’s call for developing translingual and transcultural competence (“Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World”). The participants in intercambios are given the opportunity to “reflect on the world and themselves through the lens of another language and culture,” and the American students, in particular, learn “to comprehend speakers of the target language as members of foreign societies and to grasp themselves as Americans—that is, as members of a society that is foreign to others. They also learn to

relate to fellow members of their own society who speak languages other than English.” Each semester during Intercambio, the writing center resounds with a variety of languages . . . like a bodega.

Cosmopolitanism Exposure to linguistic variety and reflection on the experience is essential to shifting the existing bias against linguistic diversity. As John Trimbur notes in “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning,” “we cannot realistically expect that collaborative learning will lead students spontaneously to transcend the limits of American culture, its homogenizing force, its engrained suspicion of social and cultural differences, its tendency to reify the other and blame the victim” (603). To counter this “homogenizing force” and “suspicion of difference,” Herrero-Puertas discusses writing center blind spots in order to provide a model for tutors as they evaluate their own attitudes and as they seek ways to contextualize faculty expectations and assessments for their tutees. Herrero-Puertas explains that he used to tell his English Language Learners that native speakers can produce prose as murky and inaccessible as any foreigner’s. I now realize that this approach perpetuates the notion of a proper versus an improper English, a standard code well polished and universally accessible (by “universally” meaning, of course, readable for university instructors) against an illegitimate, hybrid variation that bespeaks awkwardness and lack of revision. In one word: otherness.

To similarly avoid the binary of “legitimate” and “illegitimate” language, the Valuing Written Accents project created by the George Mason University Writing Center and the George Mason University Diversity Research Group familiarizes faculty with not only the value of “written accents,” but also the hazards of denigrating them. On a website and in a downloadable monograph (now in its second edition), the project features twenty-six students from “varied cultural and linguistic backgrounds” describing their “experiences and stories as a way to build a bridge between faculty and students by promoting dialogue in the university community.” Because the writing center is providing a platform for students to speak to faculty directly and honestly about the cultural bias of “Standard” Edited American English and Eurocultural writing standards, this project exemplifies the Bodega Writing Center paradigm I have proposed. In effect, this project replicates the private conversations that occur between tutors and tutees in writing centers all

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Stocking the Bodega • 5 the time. That is, without concern about grades, the students are probably more forthright about their struggles with U.S. academic discourse, and I would hope that faculty would appreciate learning about not only these students’ difficulties but also their diverse perspectives, perhaps picking up tips for revising their writing assignments to accommodate their students’ diversity.

With a similar goal in mind, we sponsor a literacy journal and a literacy speakers series featuring writers who have had complicated relationships with “standard” discourses.

Speakers have included Yvonne Taylor: “Talking White: An African American Perspective on the Social Cost of Speaking the King’s English”; Tomás Morin: “No Fun with Dick and Jane: Comics, Soap Operas, and Literacy in a SpanishSpeaking Home”; and Dr. Sandy Rao: “Masala Chat: Of Hinglish, Kanglish, and British English.” These three speakers (one staff member and two faculty members) revealed the benefits of multiple linguistic identities but also the hazards when the larger community is hostile toward “betrayals” of linguistic “purity.” In the discussions that followed each lecture, students and faculty came together in a dialogue about writing that challenged not only Edited American English but also discrete linguistic boundaries and the problematic nature of attaching value to a language over another.

In concert with the speaker series, the literacy journal has as its goal the showcasing of alternative voices and Englishes. Carter Maddox, managing editor and writing center tutor, explains the philosophy of Words Work: A Literacy Journal: Literacy knows no boundaries; it differs from person to person, lifestyle to lifestyle, language to language. In this issue [of Words Work] alone, we hear an African American, a shotboy who works at a gay bar, Iraq war veterans, a disabled woman in and out of her wheelchair, a Tucker Max-ish everyguy and more. Each has his/her own perspective; each has her/his own thumbprinted language.

In the past, the journal has featured texts with accompanying drafts that have been annotated by the author to capture the process behind the final product; a short story written in Spanish; and a text with embedded hyperlinks to create a cross-media experience.

In these endeavors, our goal has been to foster cosmopolitanism on our campus—a mindset, according to Ulrich Beck in “The Cosmopolitan Perspective,” typified by “transnational ways of life,” including “cross-border private and public networks

and decision-making structures” and “new emerging ‘hybrid’ cultures, literatures, languages” (80). Such an effort may seem straightforward, but the big-box store has considerable power and considerable interest in keeping that power. To subvert that power, writing centers will have to be strategic. This is where rasquachismo comes in handy.

Rasquachismo In my own experience, when I have attempted to subvert the dominant, monocultural/monolingual university paradigm, more often than not I am accused of abandoning all standards, including, interestingly, rules of punctuation, and my perspective is disregarded out of hand. Geneva Smitherman seems to have experienced a similar frustration, leading her to assert, “Let me say this here, if you don't never read it or hear it no mo, nowhere else in life: I know of no one, not even the most radical-minded linguist or educator (not even The Kid herself!) who has ever argued that American youth, regardless of race/ethnicity, do not need to know the Language of Wider Communication (aka 'Standard English')” (142).

Instead, Smitherman advocates multilingualism/ multidialectalism for all U.S. citizens (141), as do I. For better or worse, I have had my greatest success in reaching faculty and administrators by employing the rasquachismo (defiance and inventiveness) associated with a bodega. For example, I was recently a participant in a university-run multicultural workshop for faculty. Although I was not a presenter, I seized every opportunity—during presentations, during lunches, in my multicultural transformation of a writing class—and every means at my disposal to enlarge my fellow participants’ narrow parameters for “good” writing. In this endeavor I was following the lead of Linda Adler-Kassner in The Activist WPA: Changing Stories About Writing and Writers and J. Elspeth Stuckey who tells educators in The Violence of Literacy, We must stop being almost hysterically convinced that students who cannot read or write the standard language cannot ‘make it.’ Students of nonstandard languages in the United States do not fail because of a language failure; they fail because they live in a society that lies about language. (122) After the institute ended, a social work professor emailed me that as a result of our discussions she had added the following statement to her graduate social work syllabus: “The journals will be graded based on adherence to the guidelines and evidence of the student’s depth of thought. Edited Standard Written

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Stocking the Bodega • 6 English (ESWE) is not required and students may express themselves in a style that allows for maximum self-expression.” According to this professor, her students were “visibly relieved,” and the class launched into a discussion that, in Louis Althusser’s terms, made Standard English “problematic.”

This one instance encourages me that writing centers can extend their influence beyond aligning students to the faculty’s standards; writing center directors may be able to influence faculty to consider the ways in which one’s own culture shapes one’s grading standards and why it is time to adjust to a shifting demographic.

Andy Besa in his essay “The Nepantla beyond the Writing Center Door” provides the valuable perspective of a tutor who revels in being rasquache.

Besa writes, I imagine my Cantinflas1 self, with a large, razorsharp, folding knife, slicing juicy wedges of onion and feeding them as my metaphorical morsels to folk in my department who vex me. Nepantla2 at once questions and assaults me while simultaneously allowing me the freedom of speech that I enjoy. The nepantla identity I held as a writing center tutor, freed me to comment as I pleased in every academic situation I found myself in.

Although I am sure that many outside, and quite a few inside, the writing center community might bristle at Besa’s “insubordination” here, many writing center theorists have also challenged the “big-box” academic hegemony. In Noise from the Writing Center, for example, Elizabeth Boquet applauds the fact that writing centers are loud, disruptive spaces, writing that “noise works against the idea of normalcy—the writing center as a place to bring aberrant students into line; the scripted session that takes a disorderly student/text and orders it into a pretty (dull) paper; the faculty member who claps her hands to her ears and pleads with us to make it stop” (62). And in Everyday Writing Center, Geller, Eodice, Condon, Carroll, and Boquet criticize the scripting of tutorial sessions (à la the big-box) and advocate instead “shifting familiar patterns and re-articulating order” to “make an attractive site for Trickster to enact ‘cultural hybridity’ and to more easily ‘cross linguistic borders’” (28).

In that spirit, I hope our writing center will be able to build on the Valuing Written Accents project by hosting a university-wide institute for the teaching of writing. I envision including university students among the speakers and participants, alongside writing experts and university faculty. Such an institute would

stand in contrast to faculty workshops in which the faculty members are isolated from the students (except when writing center staff speak about student issues) and the student workshops in which the student members are isolated from the faculty (except when writing center staff speak about faculty perceptions).

The goal would be the creation of an open, but informed, exchange of ideas among all the key partners involved in university writing. After all, the students are the intended audience for faculty assignments, and faculty members are the targeted audience for students’ written work. We would be shifting academic focus from the production of one hegemonic (big-box) discourse to the acquisition of (meta)knowledge of “standard” and global Englishes and alternative discourses. The writing center as bodega.

Conclusion In proposing the Bodega Writing Center paradigm, I do not imagine that everyone will agree that 1) a problem exists; 2) that the theory I reference is sound; 3) that the changes I indicate are worthwhile.

Many more people shop at Wal-Mart than at the neighborhood bodega.

Of course, U.S. universities can defy these demographic changes and demand of our students assimilation or failure. For example, when I was an undergraduate, I was told that I did not belong in college—implicitly by my family and neighbors whose poverty and lack of education had convinced them that such “high falutin’” aspirations were “not for the likes of us,” but also explicitly by my professors who found my inability to produce “Standard” English and formal academic writing an indicator of my general ignorance. I did not consider that academic discourse might be too narrowly defined. I also did not grasp that I could remain proud of my home discourse (and myself) while acquiring additional discourses. I just accepted that my “inferior” language needed replacing.

In fact, in my mind that's what education was—I had to silence my “ignorant” voice.

Had I visited a writing center back then, perhaps someone would have contextualized this new discourse for me—stressing that my home discourse had value and legitimacy, even if rhetorically ineffective given my professors’ requirements. Such a writing center would align with my vision of a Bodega Writing Center. On the other hand, the tutor might have just “banked” “correct” grammar in me and left it at that as though language were “one size fits all.”

Maybe the tutor would have even enjoyed feeling

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Stocking the Bodega • 7 superior to me. After all, an underlying assumption of U.S. universities, especially back in the 1980s, was that, as meritocracies, they must uphold the standard (“Standard” American English) of writing or sacrifice academic rigor. No complicating notions of how that so-called standard is neither as watertight as many would believe nor necessarily preferable given various rhetorical situations. Language at the university was a shibboleth: those who used the “standard” were declared the insiders with obvious stakes in keeping it that way. As Baugh and Cable humorously note, “good English is the usage—sometimes the divided usage—of cultivated people in that part of the English-speaking world in which one happens to be” (347).

Nancy Grimm explains in Good Intentions, “as long as writing center workers view themselves as having the expertise the student needs in order to manage academically, their ability to see beyond a needy individual to a less-than-perfect social structure is blocked” (xvi-xvii). Additionally, as long as writing center tutors and administrators perceive themselves exclusively as customer service professionals, the writing center is still peddling what the big-box academy is selling, even when we question its quality.

However, surely someone could have valued my home discourse, even as that person was teaching me the rules of the dominant discourse. Had this occurred, I might not have struggled so long with feelings of shame and anxiety, ironically the very emotions that Stephen Krashen has found to be “affective filters” that inhibit learning of a new language (and “Standard” Edited American English is a second language for everyone).

Will the Bodega Writing Center paradigm make a difference? I hope that others will help me find out.

For me, language attitudes will be a litmus test. When professors across the university campus believe that no language is wrong or invalid in and of itself, I will know that those diversity statements that appear on nearly every U.S. university website are more than mere words.

Notes 1. The actor Catinflas developed the rasquache character of el pelado (“the clown”), “a homeless type who in dialogue could state the unthinkable and mock everything and everybody” (Castro 184).

2. In Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldúa references “nepantilism,” “an Aztec word meaning torn between ways” (100).

Works Cited Adler-Kassner, Linda. The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2008.

Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.

Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review P, 1971. Print.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. Print.

Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 5th ed. New Jersey: Upper Saddle River, 2002. Print.

Beck, Ulrich. “The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology in the Second Age of Modernity.”

Vertovec and Cohen 61-85. Print.

Besa, Andy. “The Nepantla Beyond the Writing Center Door.” Research paper. Texas State U, 2009.

Print.

Bizzell, Patricia. “The Intellectual Work of ‘Mixed’ Forms of Academic Discourses.” Schroeder 1-10.

Print.

Boquet, Elizabeth. Noise from the Writing Center. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2002. Print.

Connors, Robert. “Handbooks: History of a Genre.”

Rhetoric Society Quarterly 13.2 (1983): 87-98. Print.

Deterding, David. “The Pronunciation of English by Speakers of China.” English World-Wide (2006): 175-98. EBSCO.Web. 23 June 2011.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 2004. Print.

Geller, Anne Ellen, Michele Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Carroll, and Elizabeth Boquet. Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2007. Print.

George Mason University. Valuing Written Accents: International Voices in the U.S. Academy. 2010. Web. 13 June 2011.

Gordon, Milton M. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins. New York: Oxford UP, 1964. Print.

Grimm, Nancy. Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times. Portsmouth: Boynton/CookHeinemann, 1999. Print.

HB 2281, 49th Arizona Legislature, 2nd Sess. 2010.

Web. 20 May 2012.

Herrero-Puertas, Manuel. “Sitting on Top of the World: A Multilingual Writing Center?”Another Word from the UW-Madison Writing Center. 28 April 2011. Web. 17 June 2011.

Hiebert, Daniel. “Cosmopolitanism at the Local Level:

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10, No 1 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu

Stocking the Bodega • 8 The Development of Transnational Neighbourhoods.” Ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice. New York: Oxford UP, 2002.

209-23. Print.

Horne, Tom. “An Open Letter to the Citizens of Tucson.” Tom Horne for Attorney General. 11 June 2007. Web. 10 July 2011.

International Writing Center Association. “Position Statement on Racism, Anti-Immigration, and Linguistic Intolerance.” IWCA Position Statements. 9 Nov. 2010. Web. 20 May 2012.

Krashen, Stephen D. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. New York: Pergamon, 1982.

Web. July 2009.

Leslie, W. Bruce. Gentlemen and Scholars: College and Community in the “Age of the University,” 1865-1917.

University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1992 Maddox, Carter. “Letter from the Editor 4.1.” Words Work Literacy Journal. 2011. Web. 20 January 2012.

Matsuda, Paul Kei. “Alternative Discourses: A Synthesis.” Schroeder 191-96. Print.

Mesa-Bains, Amalia. “Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache.” Distant Relations: A Dialogue Among Chicano, Irish, and Mexican Artists. New York: Smart Art P, 1995. 156-63. Print.

Modern Language Association. Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World.

2011. Web. 23 May 2012.

Richardson, Elaine. Hiphop Literacies. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Ricourt, Milagros and Ruby Danta. Hispanas de Queens: Latino Panethnicity in a New York City Neighborhood.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2003. Print.

Rifkin, Jeremy. The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World of Crisis. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.

SB 1070, 49th Arizona Legislature, 2nd Sess. 2010. Web. 20 May 2012.

Schroeder, Christopher, Helen Fox, and Patricia Bizzell, Eds. Alt Dis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy.

Portsmouth, NH: Boynton, 2002. Print.

Seth, Andrew and Geoffrey Randall. The Rise and Rise of the Supermarket Chains. 2nd ed. Dover, NH: Kogan, 2001. Print.

Smitherman, Geneva . Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Print.

Stuckey, J. Elspeth. The Violence of Literacy. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1991. Print.

Tardy, Christine M. “Enacting and Transforming

Local Language Policies.” College Composition and Communication 62.4 (2011): 634-61. Print.

Trimbur, John. “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning.” College English 51.6 (October 1989): 602-16. Print.

U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences. The Condition of Education. “Children Who Spoke a Language Other Than English at Home.”

June 2011. Web. 22 May 2012.

- - -. The Condition of Education. “Table A-8-3.”

September 2010. Web. 22 May 2011.

Vertovec, Steven and Robin Cohen. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.

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Stocking the Bodega • 9 Table 1: Percentage distribution of students enrolled in degree-granting institutions Asian/Pacific American Non-resident White Black Hispanic Islander Indian/Alaska Alien Native

1980

82.2

9.7

4.1

2.4

.7

2.0

1990

77.5

9.6

6.1

4.2

.8

1.8

2009

62.1

14.7

13.4

6.5

1.1

2.2

(Source: U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, “Table A-8-3”)

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10, No 1 (2012)

THE WORTH OF THE WRITING CENTER: NUMBERS, VALUE, CULTURE AND THE RHETORIC OF BUDGET PROPOSALS Noreen Lape lapen@dickinson.edu Dickinson College When it comes to securing funding from upper administration, all writing center directors share a similar rhetorical goal: to justify the “worth” of their writing centers. What kinds of appeals win over administrators, especially in times of economic recession? This question plagues Daniel Reardon, an Assistant Director at Missouri University of Science and Technology, in his Spring 2010 essay in Praxis.

Reardon explains how he chose to play the “numbers game” when his administration requested “estimates for a 3%, 5%, 7%, or 9% budget reduction.” He approached budget talks “lightly armed with . . . problematic attendance numbers and the support of a few instructors.” He admits to being “more comfortable talking qualitatively about what an undeniable benefit the writing center is for the student community,” but he “wonder[s] just how much weight those qualitative arguments have” with numbercrunchers. Reardon raises an important question: are numbers more persuasive than qualitative appeals when it comes to funding? In “Counting Beans and Making Beans Count,” Neil Lerner describes an all too familiar scenario: a “late-night phone call from [his] department chair, telling [him] of impending budget cuts.” His response, like Reardon’s, is to produce quantitative data since “college administrators often want numbers, digits, results” (2). Because a writing center’s “worth” is a construct that depends on institutional context, both quantitative and qualitative appeals are useful tools in any director’s toolbox. For some budget authorities, usage numbers (or some other quantitative data, like number of first-year students served) indicate the “worth” of the writing center; for others, “worth” resides in the value the writing center adds to students’ learning experiences.

In this essay, I will examine several different types of quantitative and qualitative funding appeals. While strong proposals generally combine various appeals, several factors, like the age of the writing center, the campus writing culture, and the institution’s sense of mission, influence the choice to emphasize one appeal over another.

When directors are asked to justify the worth of their writing centers, they often resort to the quantitative appeal—a type of necessary, albeit rudimentary, descriptive statistics that involves, for example, employing usage numbers to support

requests for a larger personnel budget, a better space, or new computers. This type of appeal is more likely to be successful if the audience already acknowledges the worth of the writing center. With a dubious audience, a more complex variation is the value-added quantitative appeal, in which a quantitative study is used to measure ways in which the writing center adds value to students’ learning experiences. Pointing out the writing center community’s proclivity for qualitative methods, scholars like Lerner, and Peter Carino and Doug Enders have led the charge to “use quantitative research to gain some answers to a question [that] could not have [been] addressed as efficiently using only qualitative methods” (Carino and Enders 83).

Carino and Enders, for example, created a statistical correlation study that measured student satisfaction with the writing center. Such projects, they say, are useful as “‘data driven assessment’ . . . [for] when the Dean comes knocking” (102). Still, assessment data is not the same as budget appeal data. When Carino and Enders found a correlation between “number of visits and student satisfaction,” they considered it “ammunition in arguing that the writing center has a positive effect on student writers’ perception of improvement” (99). While this data might very well convince a Dean who is already favorably disposed to the writing center to continue funding, would it be enough to convince the same Dean to increase funding?

Lerner wisely advises directors to marshal their data to address “the ‘So What?’ question” (3). With data showing that his writing center improved the writing of first-year students, Lerner crafted a successful value-added appeal: by contributing to firstyear students’ academic success, the writing center aids the retention effort (1,3).1 In addition, such data is not just personally beneficial, it serves the international writing center community by providing “large-scale evidence that writing centers can and do make a difference” (Lerner 3). Quantitative data, as Lerner suggests, can be used for multiple purposes: evidence of assessment for outside accrediting agencies, meaningful and potentially replicable findings for the community of writing center scholars, and proof of the writing center’s importance and value-added capability for campus administrators. In each case, however, the “So What?” would shift, for assessment

Rhetoric of Budget Proposals • 2 data and research results do not automatically translate into project funding. Instead, directors must interpret the data and explain the implications to the campus writing culture.

While the positive appeal emphasizes growth, the negative appeal focuses on deficit. There is a writing center oral culture of “war stories,” as a quick search for “basement” and “closet” in the Writing Lab Newsletter archives reveals. One director describes a writing lab housed in a “dimly lighted, ill-equipped broom closet that masqueraded as an office” (Davis 16); a second depicts one “in the basement, two or three floors away from the Arts and Sciences offices” (Farkas 3); and a third inhabits “one small room, too large to be a closet, too small to be anything else” (Kossman 1).2 I, too, have published my experience of setting up my previous writing center: “Immediately, we hired a staff of two tutors; cleared out the buckets, brooms, and cleaning solutions; and moved into a rather large-sized maintenance closet.” Within the writing center community, these stories are fun to share at conferences and in celebratory, rags-to-riches narratives illustrating how far we have come as a community. Yet, as several directors have pointed out, hanging on to the “war stories” can undermine funding requests—requests that could lead to the growth, change, or even the reinvention of writing centers. The less hopeful versions revel in lack and thus participate in recreating the writing center’s marginalization. As Linda Poziwilko observes, “We complain and fret to each other about being given quarters in the darkest corner of the basement of the humanities building . . . but we are not always eager to explore the avenues that will help us secure a more prominent place in our institutions” (4). Paraphrasing Jeanne Simpson, she suggests we focus on writing at the expense of engaging in the kind of “institutional politics” that will enable us to secure more space and resources (4). To that end, positive quantitative appeals indicating, for example, growing usage numbers and/or the writing center’s contribution to retention support bids for better lighting, access, and/or space to serve the students who threaten to overflow its boundaries. Positive quantitative appeals can also help new directors establish their credibility and garner the support of faculty. Joe Essid dares us to get “out of our battered chairs in our legendary leaky basements and stifling attics” and “mi[x] it up on the faculty e-list whenever curriculum discussions touch upon the role of writing” (3). These directors suggest a strategy for gaining credibility within the institution that involves moving into the campus writing culture and interacting with its natives.

Once a director moves into the campus writing culture, she or he can begin to construct the value-added cultural appeal. This appeal uses qualitative evidence grounded in an understanding of the writing culture and the mission of the institution to (re)imagine the worth of the writing center. To explain how this type of appeal works, I will draw on my recent experience transforming a robust, three-decades old writing center into an even more active Multilingual Writing Center (MWC) with writing tutors in eleven languages.

In developing the MWC, I emphasized the valueadded cultural appeal for several context-specific reasons. First, I was seeking to expand the staff and services of an English writing center that was wellestablished (30+ years old) and functional (3000+ visits for the last five years in a school of approximately 2400 students). Quantitative appeals would have served only to confirm the good reputation that the writing center already enjoyed on campus, not to extend its mission. Second, the change I proposed was a response to the 2006 external evaluators who charged the director with the task of “better integrating the Writing Center” into support programs, a challenge best tackled qualitatively.

My primary qualitative method was a type of ethnographic investigation. In The Impact of Culture on Organizational Decision Making, William G. Tierney suggests an ethnographic approach to administrative work. Tierney advises directors of all kinds to gain “an understanding of [the] organization’s culture” in order to approach “the organization as an . . . interpretive undertaking.” Such “cultural understanding” is “essential” for directors who want to “foment change in the organization” (3). These directors forego the presumption “that all organizations should function similarly” and develop “a schema to diagnose their own organizations” (Tierney 39). They act as “researchers” who, like participant-observers, “do not enter the field with preconceived notions about the problem to be studied but, instead, attempt to understand the problem ‘from the native’s point of view’” (14). Participant-observers do not rush to make changes, implement imported models, and/or solve problems. Instead, they gather data in a “variety of settings”: “the researcher tries to uncover informational data such as language habits, forms and patterns of written communication, and the agendas and interactions at various kinds of meetings. Clues of particular interest concern how members of an institution interpret the school’s history and environment both to themselves and others” (15). In diagnosing and interpreting an organization, the researcher-director uses the qualitative tools of an

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Rhetoric of Budget Proposals • 3 ethnographer, like observations and interviews that are structured and open-ended (Tierney 15).

With no predetermined plans to appeal for more funding but seeking only to interpret the organization from the “native point of view,” I adopted Tierney’s approach and undertook an “ethnographic tour” of the college’s writing culture in Fall 2009 when I was a brand new hire. The purpose of the ethnographic tour was to understand how faculty teach and students learn writing across the disciplines as well as the pedagogical role of the writing center in that process.

At the end of the year, I interviewed over thirty different departments to whom I posed the same five questions: 1. How do you implement the “three-tiered” writing program in your department—that is, first-year seminar, writing intensive, and senior capstone writing courses?

2. Where is writing taught in your curriculum?

3. How do you teach majors the writing specific to your discipline?

4. How do you teach the writing process?

5. What kind of support can the Writing Program provide for you?

In addition, I kept field notes and collected writing artifacts (e.g. syllabi, writing guides, email follow-ups).

What I learned from the ethnographic tour defied all expectations: foreign language faculty, as a cohort, wanted more writing center support for their students.

The foreign language faculty understood the value of writing center pedagogy—particularly peer review.

Some had abandoned peer review after observing nonfluent second language learners leading one another astray. Yet the same faculty were open to the idea of trained undergraduate peer writing tutors. In fact, for years they had been recommending talented bilingual students for the tutor training course. When those students became tutors, they would tutor writers in English and the second language as needed. Finding these limited interventions helpful, faculty across the languages supported the idea of a centralized writing center staffed by trained and fluent undergraduate peer writing tutors, some of whom were foreign exchange students. The ethnographic tour resulted in a proposal to create a Multilingual Writing Center where U.S. students, matriculated international students, and foreign exchange students would work with writers in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Once the idea of the MWC was formed, valueadded cultural appeals to upper administration helped bring the idea to fruition. First, I used the data from the ethnographic tour to show how and why a writing

center would benefit the second language learners in foreign language classes. The MWC would benefit the whole campus since all students are required to study a foreign language through the intermediate level.

Second, I appealed to the institution’s desire for programs that are distinctive. The MWC would be a new type of writing center needing a new theory and pedagogy, for there is no model of an internationalized writing center built through the collaboration of writing and foreign language specialists.3 Third, I appealed to a central mission of the college: to create global citizens. The college offers courses in thirteen foreign languages, houses a nationally-recognized global education program, and ranks near the top of U.S. baccalaureate institutions in the number of students who choose year-long study abroad. The MWC proposal supported the work of the foreign language departments and the Center for Global Study and Engagement.

This last point about connecting project funding appeals to the mission of the institution should not be taken lightly. Throughout the ethnographic tour, I noted that the campus community had a clear sense of shared mission; people routinely echoed parts of the mission statement in meetings; successful initiatives had strong connections to the mission. Tierney explains the importance of a clear mission when he asserts that an institution “is in charge of its destiny if it understands itself” (18). My interpretive foray into the college’s writing culture via an ethnographic tour enabled me to craft value-added cultural appeals to the college’s sense of identity and destiny. Quantitative appeals would have been less successful. The fact that in 2010 thirty-seven students worked with bilingual English tutors on Spanish writing does not make as strong a case for funding an MWC as does a collaborative proposal rooted in the mission of the college and endorsed by several foreign language departments and the Center for Global Studies and Engagement. As a result, despite tough economic times, the MWC was funded.4 Before making a funding request (or defense), directors should fully analyze the rhetorical situation— audience, purpose, and context. Does the proposal aim to support growth and change, or simply to maintain current conditions? Is the writing center new or established? Does the writing center overtly complement the mission of the college by linking its mission statement to the college’s mission? Does it have the buy-in of many or few faculty? Are upper administrators swayed more by numbers or by institutional values? For a new and developing center, qualitative arguments may be less compelling than

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Rhetoric of Budget Proposals • 4 quantitative evidence of growth. A marginalized or fossilized center could revive itself via an ethnographic tour that results in a revised strategic plan and concomitant value-added cultural appeals for fiscal support. Conversely, a named or well-established center would not need to argue about quantities in the way that a new center would. In the case of writing centers seeking a mission change, qualitative arguments place proposed changes in the broader contexts of the writing culture and the institution. By closely analyzing the rhetorical situation, writing center directors can enter budget talks strategically and persuasively.

Notes 1. In “Choosing Beans Wisely,” published in the Writing Lab Newsletter in 2001, Lerner points out that his 1997 study was “flawed, both statistically and logically” (1).

2. For other narratives of humble origins, see Abels, Broussard, Miller, and Puma.

3. Shortly after I wrote the essay, DePaul University in Chicago developed a Collaborative for Multilingual Writing and Research with foreign language writing tutors in eighteen languages. A search for other colleges and universities that have a Multilingual Writing Center yields few results. The University of San Francisco has a writing center that assists writers of French, Japanese, and Spanish. There are Spanish writing centers at the University of Minnesota, Amherst College, Grand Valley State University, the University of Iowa, Ohio State University, State University of New York, and St. Lawrence University. There are even fewer French and German writing centers. There are several English language writing centers that provide foreign language tutors.

4. The proposal won the approval of the writing center’s stewards. In my annual stewardship letter to our benefactors, I talked about extending the mission of the writing center and including writing tutors in multiple languages. The benefactors responded with a generous gift in support of the new initiatives. In the inaugural year, AY 2011, there were 298 visitors who made 819 visits. The following year the numbers rose 57% as 574 visitors made 1283 visits. This all occurred at a college with an enrollment of approximately 2400.

Works Cited

Abels, Kimberly Town. “The Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: A Site and Story Under Construction.” The Writing Center Director’s Resource Book. Eds. Christina Murphy and Byron L. Stay. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006. 393-402. Print.

Broussard, William. “Collaborative Work, Competitive Students, Counternarrative: A Tale from Out of (the Academy’s) Bounds.” Writing Lab Newsletter 28.1 (2003): 1-5. Writing Lab Newsletter Archive. Web. 18 March 2011.

Carino, Peter and Doug Enders. “Does Frequency of Visits to the Writing Center Increase Student Satisfaction? A Statistical Correlation Study – or Story.” Writing Center Journal 22.1 (2001):1-5.

Writing Lab Newsletter Archive. Web. 22 June 2011.

Essid, Joe. “Working for the Clampdown? Being Crafty at Managed Universities.” Writing Lab Newsletter 30.2 (2005): 1-5. Writing Lab Newsletter Archive. Web. 12 March 2011.

Farkas, Carol-Ann. “’Idle Assumptions are the Devil’s Plaything’: The Writing Center, the First-Year Faculty, and the Reality Check.” Writing Lab Newsletter 30.7 (2006): 1-5. Writing Lab Newsletter Archive. Web. 18 March 2011.

Kossman, Barbara. “Computers and the Perception of the Writing Center.” Writing Lab Newsletter 25.5 (2001): 1-3. Writing Lab Newsletter Archive. Web. 18 March 2011.

Lape, Noreen. “Trickster at Our Table: The Columbus State University Writing Center,” Southern Discourse 11.2 (2008). Print.

Lerner, Neal. “Counting Beans and Making Beans Count.” Writing Lab Newsletter 22.1 (1997): 1-4.

Writing Lab Newsletter Archive. Web. 22 June 2011.

Miller, William V. “Now and Later at Ball State.”

Writing Lab Newsletter 6.6 (1982): 1-2. Writing Lab Newsletter Archive. Web. 18 March 2011.

Poziwilko, Linda. “Writing Centers, Retention, and the Institution: A Fortuitous Nexus.” Writing Lab Newsletter 22.2 (1997): 1-4. Writing Lab Newsletter Archive. Web. 18 March 2011.

Puma, Vincent D. “The Write Staff: Identifying and Training Tutor-Candidates.” Writing Lab Newsletter 14.2 (1989): 1-4. Writing Lab Newsletter Archive.

Web. 18 March 2011.

Reardon, Daniel. “Writing Center Administration: Learning the Numbers Game.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 7.2 (Spring 2010): n. pag. Web. 15 March 2011.

Tierney, William G. The Impact of Culture on Organizational Decision Making. Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing, 2008. Print.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10, No 1 (2012)

WRITING CENTER ASSESSMENT: AN ARGUMENT FOR CHANGE Kristen Welch Longwood University kristen.d.welch@gmail.com

Susan Revels-Parker Longwood University leslie.revelsparker@live.longwood.edu

Assessment embodies the potential for change if used to its fullest advantage. For any writing center, assessment can build arguments for additional or continued funding, staffing, or space on campus. It can also provide an explanation of (and defense of) the value of its services to the campus community. Yet an assessment must have accurate outcomes and collect accurate data to build these arguments. Inspired by the desire to create a new, part time or full-time position in the writing center for the director, the pilot assessment at Longwood University (a small liberal arts college nestled in central Virginia) was designed to show the center’s effectiveness at helping to improve student writing, at helping to increase a student’s confidence about writing, at offering excellent professional development to the tutors and to the graduate assistant, at satisfying the needs of both students who use the center and the faculty who send them there, and at showing increasing amounts of usage to indicate positive growth. Thus, the pilot assessment was designed to show proof of the effectiveness of the center in order to ensure its longevity, along with the need for a permanent director so it would be able to reach more students through consistent leadership. As assessment takes center stage on the “to do” list of writing center directors, it is important to consider several aspects of building a coherent pilot such as context, audience, data collection, and possibilities for collaboration with faculty and the Office of Assessment and Institutional Research. In this paper, we will explore seven key questions for designing an effective pilot that address each of these areas.

6. How can you partner with your own Office of Assessment and Institutional Research to establish a plan, collect needed data, and analyze results?

7. How can you publish the results to help others and to be rewarded for your work?

How can you use the assessment process to mentor graduate students or junior faculty on campus?

1. Who should be in charge of assessment at your institution?

Most people would assume the director of the writing center would always be in charge, but this is not always the case. In “Assessing the Writing Center: A Qualitative Tale of a Quantitative Study,” Doug Enders describes his experience with allowing someone from the Institutional Research office to conduct the assessment. For one, the interpretation of purely quantitative data allows the attitude of the assessor to affect the portrayal of results since there is no clear way to quantify the effect the writing center has on students’ writing ability, student retention, or even student grades. Most of the published narratives of writing center assessments agree that the relationship between the writing center and its positive effect on students is a weak cause/effect argument without proper contextualization (Bell 2000; Lerner 2003; North 1994). In Ender’s article he writes that in all of the quantitative studies the IR person ran, the correlation between the center’s work and a student’s writing ability, choice to finish a degree at that institution, and/or grades was too weak to have any real meaning (9). If the administration had not already been favorable toward the center, it was a real possibility that the budget could have been negatively impacted (8).

At Longwood University, it is the choice of our OAIR office to always put faculty in charge of assessments in order to use the experience and expertise of faculty with the subject area in question to create a logical, usable assessment. So when the administration asks who should be in charge of the assessment, they might consider three things: 1. who has the most at stake, 2. who has the greatest amount of knowledge and experience with the subject at hand, and 3., who will be responsible for making changes in response to the assessment? It is difficult to convince

The Process for Creating Heuristics for Getting Started

a

Pilot:

The seven questions are: 1. Who should be in charge of the assessment at your institution?

2. What kinds of challenges does your writing center face?

3. What are your goals for the assessment?

4. What’s the mission of the writing center?

5. What kinds of data do you already collect and how it is useful for measuring the outcomes you define?

Writing Center Assessment • 2

someone that change is needed when the assessment was poorly designed or when it overlooked major concerns particular to that area. While it may seem like less work to send an OAIR expert to conduct the assessment, it ends up creating problems that make the implementation of change less efficient in the end.

2. What kinds of challenges does your writing center face?

At a workshop we offered at the Virginia Assessment Group’s conference in Williamsburg in November of 2011, we gathered answers to this question from the participants. Many faculty members misunderstand the mission of the center. One participant, who was chair of an English Department, believed the writing center was a “fix-it shop” and wondered how to get better proofreading out of the tutors. North famously defined the writing center as a place that helped with the writing-process, based on “the writers it serves,” with a goal to “make better writers, not better writing” (438). He disagreed with the idea that the writing center was just a first-aid station that did editing and proofreading. He also described the tutor as a “participant-observer” (439), or in other words, as a collaborative teacher. This conception of writing center work was very different from what we heard voiced during the workshop in Williamsburg last fall. Another participant had concerns about online tutoring since a significant number of his university’s programs were fully online and he worried about serving students who might never visit the campus, and another participant had concerns about communication with faculty in terms of pedagogical differences and areas of convergence.

The challenges at Longwood University include a need for additional ESL training for the tutors, and a need for more graduate students as tutors. Although we do not have the space in this paper to offer solutions, the point is that acknowledging challenges is an important part of the assessment process since goals can be set in response to them.

3. In light of these challenges, what are your goals for the assessment? In other words, who is your real audience for the assessment report?

We know that we are being asked to provide evidence of the quality of instruction at all levels of the university in order to maintain accreditation, but for most of us, the real audience consists of those administrators who can provide the monetary resources needed to support the center and its work.

In “Sustaining Argument: Centralizing the Program in Writing Center Assessment,” M. S. Jewell writes: Importantly…in addition to directly participating in assessment procedures, we have since spearheaded the communication of results to writing program and other campus administrators, and publicized the extent to which outcomes are met to faculty and students through outreach activities such as writing-center sponsored workshops. These activities have led me to reflect on the ways in which not only our own, but other writing centers might take advantage of the institutional discourses generated by program assessment.

She follows this with a beautifully stated question: “How might the transformative, dialogic spaces opened up by program assessment be useful not only in terms of their pedagogical benefits, but for their rhetorical value in terms of increasing writing center visibility and bolstering institutional legitimacy?”

Indeed, James Bell lists the two goals of an assessment as using the data to improve tutor training and to “influence the amount of funding from those who control the budget” (7, 8). We would add that an assessment might need to address the support for faculty teaching writing intensive courses in order to demonstrate the positive campus-wide impact the center has and also to show that the center can be a place to centralize writing-across-the-curriculum initiatives. By working closely with the center designed to support teaching on campus (called CAFÉ at Longwood University—a center where pedagogical advice and support is offered to faculty), writing across campus can be improved with instruction for faculty in designing clear assignment sheets, appropriate examples for writing in a particular discipline, and in assessing writing by doing more than marking spelling and grammar errors. Whereas Stephen North’s 1994 article about what a writing center should be and do called for embedding a need for writing instruction at all levels in English programs, today the proliferation of centers for faculty support mean that partnerships can be formed in new ways.

4. What is the mission of the writing center?

To conduct an assessment, the mission of the center determines the desired outcomes for an assessment. If the writing center at your institution does not already have a mission statement or has an outdated mission statement, here are some questions to help draft or revise one:

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Writing Center Assessment • 3

1. How does (or how can) the mission of the writing center mirror the institution’s mission?

2. How does the mission support the goals in place for assessment on campus?

3. How does the mission encompass a desire to aid in student support and retention?

4. Does the mission include a concern for the surrounding community (i. e. non-students)?

5. If you already have a draft to work from, does the mission ignore any particular group (i. e. faculty, athletes, graduate students)? If so, is this done intentionally or should the mission be revised to include one or more groups previously left out?

Neal Lerner suggests we use student and faculty perceptions, institutional expectations, and research on student needs to assess the effectiveness of the writing center (65). So, he wants us to ask: Does the mission of the writing center at your institution “fit” the need?

Also, Lerner asks: How does the center’s mission and stated outcomes line up with the national standards that exist? (72). Reviewing the International Writing Center Association (IWCA) and the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ (WPA) official statements on what a center should be and what “good” writing is can be useful for showing how your center aims for excellence in the teaching and support of good writing (72).

Adapted from Wright State University’s assessment plan, Longwood University’s writing center mission statement currently reads as follows: The mission of the Writing Center is to serve students, tutors, and faculty as a resource for improving writing across Longwood University's campus. We seek to improve student learning by working on written documents with students at any stage of the writing process. The mission is not to create a perfect paper, but to work on targeted areas of concern with students. We also seek to offer professional development opportunities that help them to embrace their role as citizen leaders in the Writing Center. We stress a caring, generous demeanor, and we emphasize listening over dominating the session. Finally, we seek to offer faculty on Longwood University's campus support through writing workshops for their students, specialized tutoring, or in other ways.

The mission statement has established a focus for the center, highlighting the fact that we serve tutors and

faculty, not just the students who come in. The statement also clarifies what we perceive is our “job” in the center for faculty who mistakenly believe every student who visits the center should emerge with an A+ paper. Finally, the mission statement outlines some of the work we do in offering workshops and specialized tutoring that is not immediately apparent to some faculty and administration on campus.

5. What kinds of data do you already collect, and how is it useful for measuring the outcomes you define?

A common theme in published articles on writing center assessment is that the best an assessment can do is show a “possible causal relationship” between higher GPAs, graduation rates, better scores on papers written later in the semester versus those written earlier, so it is wise to be cautiously optimistic about whatever data the assessment reveals (Wingate 9). At Longwood University, we have collected data on how many students visit the center for years. We now collect data on the number of visitors, repeat visitors, what classes they are there for and for what professor; the length of the session and the types of areas they address in a tutoring session (done through a discussion board folder on Blackboard that tutors submit after each session); student evaluations of the center; feedback on workshops conducted for faculty; and feedback from faculty on areas of improvement they noticed in student writing after a visit to the center. In addition, we ask tutors to offer feedback on their professional development through an interview.

Since professional development is a key part of the mission statement, it is vital to gather information so it can be used to improve tutor training.

6. How can you partner with your own Office of Assessment and Institutional Research to establish a plan, collect needed data, and analyze results?

Once these initial questions are answered, it is useful to have a paradigm for organizing the information you gathered. We chose to model ours on the assessment cycle used at Longwood. The assessment cycle typically consists of: 1. Establishing a mission statement (a vision for the efficacy of the work, not just a description of the center).

2. Setting Goals (broad statements based on the mission statement).

3. Establishing Outcomes and Objectives (concrete goals that can be measured).

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Writing Center Assessment • 4

4. Establishing Measures (both direct and indirect).

5. Setting Targets for Achievement.

6. Reporting Findings.

7. Establishing Action Plans based upon those Findings.

Each of these seven pieces is to be found in WEAVE (the online database designed by another university in Virginia and adopted for use at Longwood University) and can be used to show a SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) reviewer a coherent picture of how the writing center has established a cycle of assessment in order to bring about continued improvement. To simplify our work and to make it connect with other assessments done on the campus, we also decided to use a modified version of the rubric already approved for use in the SCHEV WCC (Written Communication Competency) assessment conducted over the last two years.

Thus, after the mission statement, we saw that the assessment plan needed to include four major sections: Goals, Outcomes, Measurements, and Targets. These sections define what is being collected and how the data will demonstrate the center’s effectiveness.

Working with Dr. Linda Townsend, the Assistant Director of OAIR, we defined five areas for each of the three sections to organize our articulation of goals and measurements: • Improved Student Writing.

• Increased Confidence.

• Increased Student Utilization of Services.

• Enhanced Professional Development.

• Satisfaction with Service.

Keeping these areas consistent for each of the four major sections helped to clarify the goals of the plan.

The section on “Improved Student Writing” was made consistent with the WCC because it focused on the same four areas of writing. Namely, these areas were analysis, organization, audience, and mechanics. One other note, a Likert scale was added to the original drafts of the surveys we designed as direct and indirect measures because Dr. Townsend argued that it would be difficult to quantify answers to open-ended questions and the administration responded best to quantitative data instead of qualitative. If we hoped to argue for a full time director or for additional resources for the center, we would need to convince the administration that it was absolutely necessary and that it made sense in light of our objective, numerical data. We also included a short consent form on each

because Mrs. Revels-Parker and Dr. Welch wanted to present this information and to make the results public through this publication, thus the surveys had to meet IRB requirements. Without IRB clearance, all of our data would have had to remain unpublished, minimizing the value of our work for ourselves and for other institutions wanting to review the strengths and weaknesses of the pilot assessment.

Finally, a full draft of the assessment plan is at the end of this article, but it is important to highlight the value of the surveys. In “The Faculty Survey: Identifying Bridges Between the Classroom and the Writing Center,” Masiello and Hayward emphasized the importance of routine faculty surveys to ensure that the faculty understands what the function of the center is. The inaugural survey they sent out revealed a broad range of ideas about the center’s role in improving writing across the campus and helped the center adjust program services and tutor training.

7. How can you publish the results to help others and to be rewarded for your work? How can you use the assessment process to mentor graduate students or junior faculty on campus?

We found that the most important aspect of the pilot assessment was that its organizational structure provided an excellent paradigm for other directors to build upon. In addition, our mistakes were just as interesting and valuable as our successes. Thus, as we drafted this article, we wrote about our disappointments. For example, even though making the assessment plan consistent with the structure of the assessment cycle was helpful, several significant problems emerged after running the pilot this year.

First, our attempt at rating papers written in the first part of the semester with a modified version of the rubric used for the Written Communication Competency assessment failed. We set up our plans with five different professors, collecting papers from them. However, we were reluctant to ask them to require students to come to the center in order to guarantee the success of our pilot. Thus, by November only six students from five different courses had chosen to visit the writing center despite the encouragement of faculty. One faculty member had even required her students to visit the center three times, but they still did not come. When it was clear that the assessment would not be useful for the pilot, we contacted to the OAIR office to cancel the assessment in order to sidestep any unnecessary expense.

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Writing Center Assessment • 5

Second, we provided a form in the center to collect data on how students perceived the help they received. The student evaluation of a tutoring session form has been very effective except that students skip any question that they do not feel is relevant to their particular session. They also sometimes would add a “6” in order to make the point that they were very, very pleased with the help they received. However, our initial results for the student evaluations show that 82% of our student clients rate us a “4” or higher on a 5 point scale.

While these are hardly insurmountable problems, a third problem consisted of a short survey we sent to faculty members to get feedback on student improvement. Instead of providing useful comments, they sent back the forms with some version of “I don’t know; I teach forty students in this class and don’t read drafts” or “I’m not sure how helpful my feedback will be since one student who visited the center is a strong writer and didn’t improve much and the other was weak and improved some.” Even though our rating with the four faculty members who sent back the survey shows that 75% of them rate us a “4” or higher, these ratings seem meaningless in light of the comments supplied.

Conclusion It is important to us to know that we have expended a great deal of time, energy, and money for the benefit of an institution with high academic integrity and standards that are recognized by other institutions, alumni, and perspective students.

Assessment allows us to see how one institution stacks up against another and to reach ever higher toward achieving even more. Pride in our institution is one reason we feel it is important to support and to raise writing performance across campus in measurable and meaningful ways. Working in the writing center provides us with a unique opportunity to share successful writing techniques and to offer access to the proper writing resources with our student clients. The writing center assessment is a valuable part of the institutional assessment for accreditation and should receive all of the resources it needs to continue serving students. In the future, the lessons learned from this

pilot assessment will be used to craft an even more effective assessment plan, to chart new goals, and to use new measures to show that the writing center is and continues to be one of the most important student support centers on our campus. Hopefully, our experiences will be of help to others as they begin this process for themselves.

Works Cited “Assessment Plan.” Wright State University. www.wright.edu/assessment/plans/ uwc_plan04.doc. Web. Bell, James. H. “When Hard Questions Are Asked: Evaluating Writing Centers.” The Writing Center Journal. 21.1 (Fall/Winter 2000): 7-28. Print.

“Center for Academic Success.” Christopher Newport University. Accessed Nov. 2011. Web. Jewell, M. S. “Sustaining Argument: Centralizing the Role of the Writing Center in Program Assessment.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. 8.2 (Spring 2011). Web. Lerner, Neal. “Counting Beans and Making Beans Count.” Writing Lab Newsletter 22.1 (1997): 1-3.

Print.

- - - . “Writing Center Assessment: Searching for the ‘Proof’ of Our Effectiveness.” The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship.

Ed. Michael A. Pemberton and Joyce Kinkead.

Logan, UT: Utah State Univ. Press, 2003. 58-73.

Print.

Masiello, Lea and Malcolm Hayward. “The Faculty Survey: Identifying Bridges between the Classroom and the Writing Center.” The Writing Center Journal. 11.2 (1991): 73-81. Print.

North, Stephen M. “The Idea of a Writing Center.”

College English. 46.5 (1984): 433-446. Print.

- - -. “Revisiting ‘The Idea of a Writing Center.’" The Writing Center Journal. 15.1 (1994): 7-20. Print.

Wingate, Molly. “Writing Centers as Sites of Academic Culture.” The Writing Center Journal. 21.2 (Spring/Summer 2001): 7-20. Print.

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Writing Center Assessment • 6

Longwood University Writing Center Assessment Plan 1. Mission The mission of the Writing Center is to serve students, tutors, and faculty as a resource for improving writing across Longwood University's campus. We seek to improve student learning by working on written documents with students at any stage of the writing process. The mission is not to create a perfect paper, but to work on targeted areas of concern with students. We also seek to offer professional development opportunities that help them to embrace their role as citizen leaders in the Writing Center. We stress a caring, generous demeanor, and we emphasize listening over dominating the session. Finally, we seek to offer faculty on Longwood University's campus support through writing workshops for their students, specialized tutoring, or in other ways.

2. Goals The University Writing Center will: • provide an accessible, comfortable, collaborative environment for writers of all abilities; • foster the growth and confidence of writers by clarifying and promoting techniques of effective writing; • serve as a writing resource for the university community and beyond through the Writing Center web page, presentations, and workshops; • enhance the academic experiences of writing consultants employed in the Writing Center by encouraging professional development and frequent self-reflection on their roles as tutors and writers.

3. Outcomes The Writing Center will assess the following outcomes for students who visit the center or who are taught through workshops: Improved Student Writing • Students will demonstrate improvement in their written communication competency skills in one or more of these four areas: analysis, organization, audience, and mechanics. o Analysis ! Identifies, summarizes, and analyzes the topic/problem in the reading with significant clarity and addresses all relevant questions and issues. o Organization ! Organizes paragraphs coherently to support the connections of the reading to the field and to articulate new concepts with consistent and skillful use of appropriate, clear transitions and well-developed explanations. o Audience ! Demonstrates precision and control over language, examples, and concepts that are appropriate to the topic and/or rhetorical situation. o Mechanics ! Uses perfectly correct grammar, spelling, and proper documentation.

Increased Confidence • Students should exhibit more confidence as writers. Also, faculty should see students exhibiting more confidence in their abilities as writers.

Professional Development The Writing Center will assess the following outcomes for the tutors and graduate assistant employed by the center: • Enhanced academic and professional experiences of writing consultants and a graduate assistant through training and professional development activities; Satisfaction with Service The Writing Center will assess the following outcomes for the faculty and students who use the center: • Satisfaction of students and faculty.

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The Writing Center will advertise and will work with faculty to increase student utilization of services.

4. Measures for each outcome Improved Student Writing • In conjunction with several faculty members, we will collect an early writing assignment and a writing assignment written after students have had the opportunity to visit the Writing Center. Using the rubric in Appendix 1, we will assess differences in the quality of writing.

• Student evaluations will be used to gauge students’ perceptions of improvement in their writing and to document which learning outcomes described in the “outcomes” section of this document were achieved (See Appendix 2).

Increased Confidence • Student evaluations will be used to gauge students’ perceptions of increased confidence in their writing abilities (See Appendix 2).

• Faculty evaluations from across the disciplines will be used to gauge faculty perceptions of improvement in student writing and confidence (See Appendix 3).

Professional Development • Exit surveys as well as interviews with graduating tutors and with the graduate assistant will be used as a means of assessing the writing center’s impact on its student employees (See Appendix 4).

Satisfaction with Service • Faculty and student evaluations will be used to gauge the level of satisfaction with the services (See Appendices 2 & 3).

• Faculty evaluations will be used to gauge the level of satisfaction with workshops and/or specialized tutoring sessions (See Appendix 5).

Increased Utilization of Services • Data on the number of visitors to the center, the number of repeat visitors to the center, and the number of students served through workshops will be collected and compared to data collected in the previous two years in order to demonstrate increased utilization of services (See Appendix 6).

5. Targets Improved Student Writing • The pilot will establish a baseline for the effects of the Writing Center intervention on student writing.

Increased Confidence • The pilot will establish a baseline for measuring improvement in student confidence about writing.

Increased Student Utilization of Services • The pilot will compare data from Fall 2011 to data collected in the Fall of 2010 and 2009 to show an increase in use of services.

Enhanced Professional Development • The pilot will establish a baseline for measuring the impact of professional development on Writing Center staff.

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Satisfaction with Service • The pilot will establish a baseline for measuring satisfaction with service.

Timetable for Assessment Surveys and data will be collected during the Fall 2011 semester. A pre-assessment will occur on Saturday, November 19th. A random sample of 50 papers collected from five faculty will be assessed by four different faculty members with the rubric in Appendix 1. These papers will be collected before students have been encouraged to visit the Writing Center.

A post-assessment will occur on Saturday, February 11th. A random sample of 50 papers collected from five faculty will be assessed by four different faculty members with the rubric in Appendix 1. These papers will be collected after students have had an opportunity to visit the Writing Center.

A report will be submitted by May of 2012.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10 , No 1 (2012)

GRADUATE WRITING GROUPS: SHAPING WRITING AND WRITERS FROM STUDENT TO SCHOLAR Tallin Phillips Ohio University tiller@ohio.edu Leaders in higher education increasingly recognize that writing in graduate school doesn’t come easily for many. Like undergraduates, many graduate students find they need structured writing support in order to succeed. In consequence, graduate writing is a growing topic in pedagogy and research as institutions make moves to provide some kind of support for their graduate students. Scholars such as Micciche, Rose, and also McClafferty have reported on attempts to address graduate writers’ challenges through dedicated classes on writing. Tardy and Casanave, among others, have made graduate writers’ development the subject of major research studies.

Although writing centers would seem positioned to respond to these newly recognized institutional needs, traditional tutoring can’t always provide the long-term, extensive support that graduate writers need as they spend years working on theses and dissertations. Some writing centers have thus begun offering graduate writing groups as a productive means of providing that long-term support. These groups are able to serve multiple writers throughout their graduate careers with the investment of one or two hours of time each week on the part of the facilitator. They can be led by a writing center director, a faculty member, or advanced graduate students or tutors who have been part of a group themselves.

Established groups may even be able to continue without the help of a facilitator. Groups may include members from the same, related, or different disciplines, although my experience has been that groups are most successful when the writers are either from closely related fields or else already know the other members of the group.

We still know little about how writing groups work, however, particularly at the graduate level.

Gradin, Stewart, and Pauley-Gose’s “Disciplinary Differences, Rhetorical Resonances” focuses specifically on graduate writing groups, discussing their formation, development, and benefits. They identify an alleviation of members’ isolation and an increase in their rhetorical awareness and competence as two important benefits of participation. Moreover, they suggest that graduate writing groups actually “help students discover and fulfill the most important

and most difficult purpose of their current academic project: becoming a colleague in one’s field and entering into the discourse community of the discipline with authority” (par. 12). Graduate writing groups serve to shape their members from students operating on the periphery into established scholars.

Exactly how one “enter[s] into the discourse community” and becomes an established scholar is at the heart of Lave and Wenger’s situated learning theory. They subscribe to a social theory of learning, arguing that learning occurs as novices engage in what they term legitimate peripheral participation—novices become experts not simply by observing or even, necessarily, through explicit teaching, but by engaging in activity around the edges and gradually circling closer, developing the requisite abilities and knowledge to become full participants. They argue that legitimate peripheral participation occurs in many different situations, but that communities of practice (hereafter, CoP) offer an especially effective environment. CoP are “people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems” or, I would suggest, graduate students learning to write in their fields (Wenger par.

1). Graduate writing groups are able to shape participants from student to scholar because of the CoPs that they form and because of the opportunities they offer writers to engage in legitimate peripheral participation.

Furthermore, legitimate peripheral participation is imbricated with the language of the discourse community and with what Gere terms the language of negotiation. In her seminal work, Writing Groups: History, Theory, Implications, Gere surveys the history of writing groups of all kinds, not just graduate groups. She identifies the language of negotiation as a common feature of most groups. Gere’s use of the term refers specifically to the ways that writers phrase their suggestions and responses to another member’s text.

She writes that “the language [that groups use] is often tentative, with phrases such as ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t think’ occurring frequently. Participants frame

Graduate Writing Groups • 2 comments in terms of their own experience with the writing rather than some ‘ideal’ text” (73).

I fully agree with Gere about the nature of talk in writing groups, but I also believe this concept, the language of negotiation, has many more layers of meaning that can help us understand how graduate writing groups function. In this essay I draw on my experience as a group facilitator and employ the work of both Gere and Lave and Wenger in order to offer deeper insight into what makes graduate writing groups work—into how they enable members to “enter into the discourse community with authority” (Gradin, Stewart, and Pauley-Gose par. 12). I argue that it is the language of negotiation operating within a CoP that makes graduate writing groups so powerful.

Essentially, situated learning theory and CoP frame the big picture around graduate writing group successes; the language of negotiation offers snapshots into exactly how that success is achieved.

Shaping Writing Groups Through the Language of Negotiation The language of negotiation offers much more than an explanation of how writers phrase critiques. It serves as a lens that helps us see the different ways that the work of an effective graduate writing group is accomplished as well as what marks a group as successful. The language of negotiation might best be described as the tentative, hedging language that writers use in discussing another writer’s text. In addition to the examples Gere mentions, we might also include phrases and questions like “I’m not sure I understand,” “Could you explain this to me?,” “I wonder if maybe…,” and “What if you…” as the language of negotiation. It is laced with conversational hedges and other face-saving language and is unlikely to employ to commands, directives, or other markers that might indicate assertiveness or aggressiveness.

Though this succession of hedges and politeness markers might initially be considered weak, they are actually crucial for creating functioning groups and for fostering revision. First, the language of negotiation allows writers and responders to save face, which is essential for encouraging group cohesion. A group can only function if all the members are engaged in the work of the group and have a reasonable level of trust in the one another. If a member is afraid of being strongly criticized, shamed, or ridiculed by another member, then the group is unlikely to be successful.

This is particularly true of voluntary writing groups where a member who is hurt or embarrassed may stop submitting writing or leave the group entirely. The

tentative, questioning, unassuming language of negotiation allows writers to save face, even when they have submitted weak texts to the group. It also allows other group members to save face when they are unsure of whether their critiques are valid. Enabling other members to save face builds trust and cohesion within the group and encourages the members to continue working on their writing.

The language of negotiation does more than allow writers to save face, though. It also works to encourage multiple levels of revision, which I discuss in more detail below. The language initiates multiple acts of negotiation by opening conversations with writers and encouraging them to rethink aspects of their texts. Finally, as I will conclude, engaging in these multiple acts of negotiation—explaining, rethinking, justifying, revising—also shapes the writers themselves by encouraging them to articulate a place for themselves as scholars. The language of negotiation, in all of its forms, is the tool that effective groups use to shape their members from students into scholars.

The members of both groups discussed here are multilingual writers—one cross-disciplinary group of doctoral students and one group of master’s students in linguistics. The groups were sponsored by the university’s writing center and facilitated by the writing center’s director. Both of these groups functioned as a CoP by allowing members to share knowledge and by creating space for writers to engage in legitimate peripheral participation. Within the CoP of the group, these writers moved beyond the genre of the graduate seminar paper and began to tackle the prospectus, dissertation, article, etc.—the genres that mark them as scholars, not students. As they received feedback on their writing, they became more adept at employing the discourses of their fields to build arguments, appropriately challenge or respond to the arguments of others, and to create space for themselves as scholars. In short, as members learned more about the discourse of their fields, they became more active and respected participants within them.

For multilingual writers, this legitimate peripheral participation might be especially vital as the ongoing language learning process that multilingual writers are engaged in can make them even more peripheral— marginalized, even—socially, linguistically, and disciplinarily. However, none of the writers I discuss here reported such feelings during the group. This, of course, isn’t to say that these writers never felt marginalized in some way, only that they didn’t express it to me in the group. Moreover, with the exception of some additional vocabulary work, I didn’t find either of these groups to be qualitatively different

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Graduate Writing Groups • 3 from other graduate writing groups comprised of native English speakers. All of these writers were quite proficient in English, though, and appeared to be acculturated to their lives as graduate students in the U.S. Participation in a graduate writing group might be far more important and more fraught for writers’ with lower levels of proficiency or who are less welladjusted.

The doctoral group was composed of three students from Cultural Studies and two from Communication Studies, one of whom had done master’s work in Cultural Studies. This group had been meeting weekly for several months when I joined them as an observer and began recording their hourlong sessions. They were an extremely highfunctioning group, and by that I mean that all members were committed to their projects, to the group, and to producing writing on a regular basis. In addition, their discussions were lively, and they were very supportive of one another. More than just producing writing, though, they had learned how to identify global concerns in a text and how to talk about them effectively. They had learned many rhetorical conventions of their own disciplines and that those conventions were not universal. Finally, they were advanced and fairly confident writers. They had little need for sentence-level help but instead focused on development, clarity, and methodological concerns.

The members of the group were at very different phases of high-pressure doctoral programs that they had only three years to complete. Aaliyah, who was Sudanese, had just entered the Communications program but was already busy publishing and presenting findings from her master’s thesis. Thema, a Ghanian, was drafting the final chapters of her dissertation in Cultural Studies. She functioned as the most established, knowledgeable participant in this CoP and was committed to bringing other members into fuller participation. She had learned the ropes of the program—how to survive the comps, what each professor’s pet peeves were, who the preferred committee members were—and was invested in passing her information on to the “younger” members. Both Christopher and Geoff were in the middle of the Cultural Studies program. Christopher, a Kenyan, was in the midst of writing 40 pages of comprehensive exam answers, and Geoff, also a Ghanian, was writing the first three chapters of his dissertation in order to defend his prospectus. Finally Rahim, an Afghani in the Communications Studies program, was the newest member of the group and was still completing coursework. The first four

members had been working together since the beginning of the academic year. Rahim joined in spring quarter, but he had been a member of a group with Aaliyah the year before and so he quickly acclimated to the group’s dynamics.

The master’s group of three linguistics students was a less mature group in terms of their writing and researching abilities, although they were also an effective group. They shared the common discourse of applied linguistics and language teaching and had already established relationships with one another during their graduate program. These factors, combined with the fact that they were all at the same stage of the same project—a master’s “proseminar” research essay—seemed to enable them to quickly grasp the importance of global concerns and offer one another substantive feedback.

They began meeting with about 12 weeks left in the school year, having already conceptualized and designed their projects. Amisi, an Egyptian, was writing her thesis, and Reiko, from Japan, and Lina, from Indonesia, were both writing shorter master’s essays which were due by the end of spring term.

Unlike Thema in the Cultural Studies group, this CoP had no “senior” or “established” participants. All three writers had come through the linguistics program together as friends and were now learning the process of linguistics research together. Their projects were fully developed and data had been collected by the time we began meeting, but they had no experience with writing up research or with writing texts longer than 10-12 pages. They were all reasonably strong writers compared with other second-year master’s students, yet novices compared to the doctoral group.

Although they spoke English fluently, they were still learning academic English lexis and had significant levels of writing difficulties.

Shaping Writing Through the Language of Negotiation Gere’s original use of the language of negotiation was to describe the speech acts that group members engaged in to provide one another with feedback.

Earlier I noted that one of the benefits of the language of negotiation was that its face-saving qualities build trust among group members and encourage group cohesion. Now, I'd like to extend her concept further to show how the language of negotiation opens up conversations with writers and thereby fosters revision at multiple levels of a text. Responding to a text—or the act of negotiating to encourage the writer to make particular changes—may entail anything from

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Graduate Writing Groups • 4 improving a single word, to a sentence, to a paragraph/section, all the way up to reshaping an entire paper. I want to begin by looking at how negotiation works at the micro level of a text as this kind of work can be especially common in groups that include multilingual writers and in groups like the linguistics one where the writers have not yet achieved a high level of English proficiency.

Language specialists often use the phrase “negotiation of meaning” to describe the talk that happens between two speakers who are working to clarify understanding. Particularly when writers have not yet achieved a high level of proficiency, such negotiations often revolve around relatively minor features of a text like word choice. An example might look something like this: [writer’s text] There are people who fit themselves into a box and believe in everything that could be explained by their belief. [reader] What do you mean by ‘fit themselves into a box’? [writer] That some people only believe things their religion tells them is true. [reader] Oh, now I think I understand. Well, in American English we might say that “religious people are narrow-minded” or “religious people do not think critically” or even “religious people are brainwashed and believe only what they are told.” Is that what you meant? [writer] Yes! That’s it. [reader] Do you know the word “brainwashed?” [writer] Yes, I think I understand. What if I changed it to “Religious people are brainwashed to believe what their religions tells them?” [reader] That is much clearer, although that sentence will sound very harsh and maybe too mean, to some readers. “Brainwashed” has a very strong meaning. You could make the sentence a little less strong by adding “many” before “religious people” and say “almost seem to be brainwashed” instead of just “brainwashed.” You could also say that “some people’s religious beliefs force them into a box.”

In this example, the reader and writer are working together to help the writer make her meaning more clear.

Negotiation of meaning at the micro level often requires engaging in vocabulary development as one member teaches another an idiom (e.g. “into a box”), collocation (e.g. “strong coffee” or “regular exercise”), lexicalized phrase (“chunks” of vocabulary, like “How are you? / I’m fine. How are you?”), or the connotations of a particular word (e.g. that

“brainwashed” is highly negative or that “kids” is informal). In the linguistics group, where the writers were at a lower proficiency level, the language of negotiation regularly involved this kind of sentencelevel negotiation of meaning in order to shape a text and develop the writer’s vocabulary. This kind of negotiation is important for writers who are new to academia, as “unnegotiated” passages of writing quickly mark a writer as a peripheral member of the field. As members engage in the legitimate peripheral participation of the group, the negotiation that helps writers to master vocabulary also enables them to participate in the field more fully.

The language of negotiation also encompasses the reader’s rhetorical stance within groups or the subjects and nature of a group’s talk. Gere, discussing texts on a more macro level, observes that “negotiation, rather than application of absolute standards, guides participants as they aid one another toward better drafts” and that the language group members use is often tentative (73-74). The acts of negotiation Gere describes, though they seem tentative, are actually indicators both that the group is effective and that its members are engaging in legitimate peripheral participation. These acts reveal that the group members support one another and are committed to one another’s success. They also reveal that group members understand that their texts are disciplinarily situated and in many cases, crafted for a very specific audience (i.e. one professor, one dissertation committee), even if they are somewhat unsure of what that discipline and audience require.

The language of negotiation was highly visible in the Cultural Studies group I observed. For example, when Thema, a Ghanian, would respond to Aaaliyah, a Sudanese, about Aaliyah’s project, Thema would be careful to contextualize her reaction within the two national frameworks. And Julia, the group’s facilitator from English Literature, because she was disciplinarily, racially, and nationally removed from the rest of the members, was always careful to contextualize her response as coming from an English Literature perspective and/or from a white American perspective. Group members would never say to one another “This is wrong,” but instead something like, “In my country/field/hometown it would have been different,” leaving the writer with the implied questions “Are you sure about this? Could you provide more evidence to convince me?” to stimulate a reevaluation of the passage in question. In the example below, Julia has a suggestion for Geoff’s presentation but couches her suggestion carefully, aware that it might be disciplinarily inappropriate.

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Graduate Writing Groups • 5 [Julia] How would it be received if you presented the lyrics to some of these songs on the screen?

[Geoff, after a bit of contemplation] It would be okay; I’m planning to have a lot of visuals.

[Julia] I think people will want to hear some of the music.

The language of negotiation makes suggestions, not demands. In this group, the negotiation stemmed in part from members’ diversity of nationalities and experiences, although other groups I have facilitated or have been part of have behaved similarly. The choices of Julia and of Aaliyah to negotiate rather than demand or ridicule reveal group members’ understanding that disciplines have distinct rhetorical conventions and so what is appropriate for one field may be very inappropriate in another.

Spigelman's analysis of writing group discourse using classical rhetorical terms offers further insight into how the language of negotiation happens. She notes that “writing group discourse is inherently persuasive” and argues that much of this persuasion is either deliberative, or “forward looking” and “oriented toward finding the best solution or most reasonable course of action” or else epideictic, “set in the present” whose “central purpose is praise or blame.”

For Spigelman, writing groups use "deliberative rhetoric when members interrogate the logic of an argument, suggest textual changes, or provide additional examples.” Epideictic rhetoric, on the other hand, occurs “when they express an emotional response to a peer’s essay or story and when they explain what they found meaningful or dissatisfying, attractive or ugly” (133).

Spigelman argues that “ideally, both rhetorical models should guide writing group practice” (133) and that was, indeed, the case for the Cultural Studies group of doctoral students. Deliberative rhetoric was most common in the group, but epideictic rhetoric was also present, although it tended to be restricted to word choice or a particular phrase that was awkward or that undercut the writer’s authority. Given the genres that members were writing in, members more often employed deliberative rhetoric as they negotiated with the writer to make a methodological change, provide more evidence, context, or to make implications more explicit. Below is an example of deliberative rhetoric at work, as Aaliyah tries to convince Christopher, whose research investigates schooling for girl children in Ghana, to clarify or change his research methodology.

[Aaliyah] What do you mean by evaluating the program’s effectiveness?

[Christopher] I am trying to see whether I can just remove the evaluation from the whole study because whenever you are talking about effectiveness it becomes more that you have to have something to show.

[Aaliyah] Not really, if you are doing qualitative. It depends on how you define effectiveness.

[Christopher] I was looking at enrollment, completion rate, and the last one is the quality of the school.

[Aaliyah] What do you mean by quality?

[Christopher] I’ll look at access to textbooks and infrastructure—the teacher-student ratio, facilities like chairs because studies have shown that all of these things impact schooling—[even things like] the distance between the school and the home.

[Aaliyah] I was thinking of more like empowerment. Infrastructure isn’t necessarily enough for impact.

[Christopher] One of my research questions is impact. The reason I was looking at parents etc. is because of the theoretical framework I chose, that all of these groups have impact on the girl child.

The school can have all the facilities it needs, but the family can stop her from going to school.

[Aaliyah] Maybe the impact has to come more stronger in your research. Maybe because of the place of the research question, but I didn’t see…?

[Christopher] I don’t think “impact” stands out so much in the first chapter.

Aaliyah uses deliberative rhetoric here to negotiate with Christopher and make his argument more clear.

Yet, Aaliyah’s use of deliberative rhetoric is not an attempt at persuading Christopher for Aaliyah’s sake—so that she can win the argument—but for Christopher’s sake, so that he has an opportunity to reshape and strengthen his paper. Aaliyah’s language of negotiation certainly aims to persuade, but it does so from the perspective of reader instead of evaluator, thereby drawing clear distinctions between the “owner” of the project—the writer—and those who are responding. And as Aaliyah questions and Christopher defends, they both understand the norms of their fields more fully and how to interact more effectively with other members of those fields. Their participation in the CoP of the group has moved both toward fuller participation in their fields.

Shaping Writers Through the Language of Negotiation Participating in the CoP of a writing group and using the language of negotiation doesn’t just shape

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Graduate Writing Groups • 6 texts. Even while the group is ostensibly “shaping writing,” the writer is being shaped in overt and covert ways as well. The language of negotiation works to build confidence and thus a writer’s scholarly ethos, and this is perhaps the most valuable work of a graduate writing group. Writers build confidence as they engage in the sentence-level negotiation described above and also as their critical thinking skills improve.

Gere suggests that the critical thinking skills that group members often develop are directly connected to the language of negotiation: “As a result of this negotiation within writing groups, participants develop metalanguage about writing. This metalanguage…aids the growth of critical skills so frequently attributed to writing groups” and that are so critical to moving graduate writers towards full participation in the field (94-95). Aaliyah, a member of the Cultural Studies group, identified growth in her critical abilities as a primary benefit of her group participation: The writing group first of all gives me feedback on my work…. And then I think it develop me as a critical reader. Because if I have to read a different topic every week it’s not just my paper, and then I think I just develop this critical reading skill. And then also, say like, seeing people—like sometimes I’ll skip something but if someone [else] say it, I’ll realize “Yeah, [that’s right]. Sometimes I’ll feel like there is something wrong with this paragraph, but I don’t know what and then the variations of viewpoints help me to see things.

In addition to the benefits to her writing, Aaliyah recognized that the group was shaping her into a more skilled reader. As this recognition grew, she became more confident and authoritative in her writing.

Writing groups also build confidence explicitly through the epideictic work of encouraging and blaming. Even if a text is very rough, groups that are only moderately effective will still highlight the positive alongside their critiques because that action keeps a group cohering together. Julia, the facilitator of the Cultural Studies group, identified confidence building and the resulting ethos development as a key benefit of writing groups. She observed, “Ethos is huge and [so is] confidence-building. And that’s from my own experience [as a member myself] and from leading. In the education group [I facilitate], one [member] is 67 years old and constantly we’re increasing her confidence because she feels like she’s not as capable.”

Spigelman argues that epideictic rhetoric occurs when group members respond emotionally to a text in some way. Those emotional responses—those acts of praising and blaming—are not just directed at texts,

but may even be directed at the writer herself for projecting (or failing to project) the ethos of scholar; thus, increasing confidence is about more than making the writer feel like she’s written a successful text. The epideictic rhetoric in the Cultural Studies group often focused on word choice or phrasing; however, in many cases, the “blame” was a response to phrasing that seemed to damage the writer’s ethos. The opposite was also true: At one point in a meeting Geoff nodded, responding to a particular rhetorical move that Christopher made, and said “Ah … you’re becoming a professor!” Geoff recognized that Christopher had chosen the more authoritative language of scholar and made the epideictic move to congratulate Christopher for his choice. In doing so, he didn’t just applaud Christopher’s phrasing, but also Christopher’s positioning of himself as a scholar. As Christopher’s confidence grew, the group empowered him to take ownership of his work as a full-fledged scholar and to develop his scholarly ethos.

Conclusion The language of negotiation writ broadly thus offers a variety of lenses into how effective graduate writing groups work. Though it may seem tentative and uncertain, the language of negotiation has powerful effects on group members and their writing.

It first operates as a face-saving tool that encourages group cohesion and participation. When group members feel safe to share their writing and respond to the writing of others—even as disciplinary outsiders—the language of negotiation begins shaping the writing itself through negotiation of meaning and other suggestions for revision at all levels of the text.

Fundamentally, almost all of the talk in a group is negotiation because members are either trying to persuade a writer to transform a text or to be sure to leave a text unchanged. Since no member actually has any power over any other member, negotiation is the only way to influence the writer’s text. Yet, even as it is shaping the writing, the language of negotiation is simultaneously shaping the writer as other group members challenge her to defend her ideas, to respond authoritatively to questions about her work, and to position herself as a scholar. The questions and comments may come in a tentative, uncertain format, but they nonetheless ask the writer to rethink her choices, rearticulate her ideas, and engage with her audience. By responding to her graduate writing group CoP, a writer is practicing for later engagement with the rest of her discipline.

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Graduate Writing Groups • 7 The graduate writing group then serves as a lowstakes CoP that helps writers move more fully into their disciplines’ higher-stakes communities of practice. Writing groups can function as a safe space, offering writers the opportunity to try out those more authoritative positions, perhaps even trying on several different rhetorical stances until they find something that is both comfortable and credible. The writing group thus operates as a kind of rehearsal for its members. As writers move more fully in to the CoP of the writing group, they are simultaneously developing the skills and ethos that allow them to edge a bit closer to full participation in their disciplines’ communities of practice.

Wenger,

Etienne. “Communities of Practice.”

Ewenger.com. N.p. June 2006. Web. 21 May 2012.

Note 1. All names are replaced with pseudonyms.

Works Cited Casanave, Christine Pearson. Writing Games: Multicultural Case Studies of Academic Literacy Practices in Higher Education. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2002. Print.

Gere, Anne Ruggles. Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Print.

Gradin, Sherrie, Jennifer Pauley-Gose, and Candace Stewart. “Disciplinary Differences, Rhetorical Resonances: Graduate Writing Groups Beyond the Humanities.” Praxis 3.2 (2006): n. pag. Web. 21 May 2012.

Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.

Micciche, Laura, with Allison D. Carr. “Toward Graduate-Level Writing Instruction.” College Composition and Communication 62.3 (2011): pp. 477501. Print.

Rose, Mike, and Karen A. McClafferty. “A Call for the Teaching of Writing in Graduate Education.”

Educational Researcher 30.2 (2001): pp. 27-33. Print.

Spigelman, Candace. “’Species’ of Rhetoric: Deliberative and Epideictic Models in Writing Group Settings.” Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom. Ed. Beverly J. Moss, Nels P. Highberg, and Melissa Nicolas. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2004. 133-149. Print.

Tardy, Christine M. Building Genre Knowledge. West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2009. Print.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10 , No 1 (2012)

CHARACTERIZING SUCCESSFUL “INTERVENTION” IN THE WRITING CENTER CONFERENCE Sam Van Horne The University of Iowa sam.vanhorne@gmail.com In the January/February 2012 issue of the Writing Lab Newsletter, Bird writes about specific ways to examine the concept of deep learning and how these concepts are suited to the work of writing centers. In arguing that writing centers can contribute to students’ cognitive development, Bird states, “By rethinking our view of learning to include not only concepts and skills but also thinking processes, we expand the learning potential in writing center work” (1). Attention to learning has, for decades, been of paramount interest to writing center scholars who envision the writing conference as a site for student learning. Scholars have frequently addressed how peer tutoring could promote successful student learning. For example, many (if not all) writing center practitioners can recite North’s adage about how writing centers should “produce better writers, and not better writing” (“Idea” 438), but perhaps fewer are familiar with his other writings in which he is more specific about the role of tutors.

In “Training Tutors to Talk About Writing,” North writes, “tutoring writing is … intervention in the composing process” (434). And in “Writing Center Diagnosis: The Composing Profile,” on the benefits of research in the writing center, North states, “[W]e are able to address our students’ writing processes directly and systematically, to move from informing students about writing to meddling with how they write” (42).

It is a sign of a healthy academic discourse that many writing center professionals have been endeavoring to explore and characterize the nature of successful “interventions.” And yet, reading these works gave me pause: how could I reconcile writing center pedagogy, with its emphasis on empowering students to make decisions in the writing process, with terms like “intervention” and “meddling”? The polar opposite of this approach might be the strategies advocated by those who have championed

nondirective tutoring methods, such as Brooks, who argues that tutors should mimic a student’s disinterest in a writing tutorial with a similar show of disinterest.

But there is a way for writing tutors to provide an effective structure for writing center tutorials that lies between extreme nondirective tutoring and prescriptive, directive writing tutorials. This strategy is grounded in the framework of Vygotskian theory that has already been cited by writing center professionals.

Bruffee cites the work of Vygotsky when describing the nature of collaborative learning: “In learning, there is always another person—or several other people— directly or indirectly involved” (137).

Although some writing center researchers have used Vygotskian theory to provide explanations of effective peer tutoring, relatively few have drawn upon the concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and its more recent developments (such as situation definition) that have contributed to the understanding of how learning happens in the ZPD. In this article I intend to describe how the ZPD and the neo-Vygotskian conception of situation definition provide a sound theoretical framework for promoting student learning in writing center conferences, describe strategies grounded in this framework, and briefly discuss examples of how situation definition plays a role in writing center conferences.

Review of Literature About Vygotskian Theory in Writing Centers With its emphasis on promoting the development of learners, the ZPD provides an effective framework for a writing center conference. Vygotsky defined the ZPD as the “distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving

Characterizing Successful “Intervention” • 2 under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (86). According to this perspective on learning, the proper object of instruction is those “functions that will mature tomorrow but are currently in an embryonic state” (Vygotsky 86). It is vital, then, for a tutor or instructor to keep the students working at the limit of what they can do alone. According to Vygotsky, “the notion of the zone of proximal development enables us to propound a new formula, namely that the only ‘good learning’ is that which is in advance of development” (89).

The original definition of the ZPD complements writing center pedagogy in that it refers not to tasks, but to levels of development (Chaiklin). Indeed, Gillespie and Lerner emphasize that while editors “focus on the text,” tutors “focus on the writer’s development and establish rapport” (45). Thus, the real power of this framework is that it provides a structure for considering how to facilitate an interaction that helps a writer develop a better writing process or a better conception of rhetorical strategies that implicitly guide the writing process. If the ZPD were merely a theory about helping people finish tasks, without considering their conceptions of the writing process, the activity in a writing conference would just be feedback or editorial help.

Vygotskian social constructivism and the more recent advancements in this theory of learning and development provide special tools to peer tutors in writing centers (Vygotsky; Wertsch Vygotsky; Wertsch “The Zone”). Writing center theorists have drawn upon Vygotskian social constructivism in their descriptions of effective peer tutoring. For decades, writing center researchers have emphasized the social nature of learning in writing center interactions (e.g., Bruffee; Lunsford; Murphy). Bruffee, for example, cites the work of Vygotsky in arguing that tutorial conversation can result in a student developing a better way of thinking about a topic or the writing process.

In that sense, advocates of nondirective tutoring can find the framework of the ZPD to be useful because of its emphasis on the development of the learner through social interaction. This emphasis is

central to the Vygotskian model in that students, as the primary agents of the writing center tutorial, determine goals for their development, and the role of the writing tutor is to provide scaffolding that is only necessary to the extent that the writer needs explicit assistance. Tutors then fade, using discourse strategies (such as abbreviated speech and open questions) that promote student ownership of the activity in the tutorial.

Some writing center scholars have drawn connections between so-called directive tutoring and elements of Vygotskian theory. Shamoon and Burns argue that directive tutoring can be a powerful strategy that involves inviting students to learn from a tutor through a process of observation and emulation.

Indeed, Shamoon and Burns argue, “Directive tutoring displays rhetorical processes in action” (146).

Such activities bring hidden writing processes out in the open, which a student can practice with a tutor as he or she engages in learning in the ZPD. These activities can result in effective student learning: “This cognitive shift seems to depend upon observation and extensive practice—often in emulation of the activities of the tutor-expert—leading to the accumulation of expert repertoires and tacit information” (Shamoon and Burns 143). In a discussion about why some students found directive tutoring to be so helpful, Clark and Healy argue that “directive tutoring is consistent with Vygotsky’s concept of ‘the zone of proximal development’” (38). They go on to argue that directive tutoring is helpful when the process engages the development of students and helps them to complete a task (e.g., plan a successful revision) that they could not do alone. Although some advocates of nondirective tutoring may claim that directive tutoring could prevent students from succeeding in their writing activities, Thompson et al. found that students in the writing center preferred interactions in which tutors structured a tutorial about an aspect of writing that the students were able to select.

Applying the ZPD and Situation Definition in Writing Center Tutorials

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10 , No 1 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu

Characterizing Successful “Intervention” • 3 Scholars have expanded upon the work of Vygotsky and have helped develop conceptions, which are grounded in social constructivism, that are useful to those involved in writing center work. For example, these scholars—having recognized that Vygotsky did not expand upon how a learner traverses the ZPD— explored the ways in which tutors can facilitate student-centered interactions that promote student development. These new insights provide the framework for facilitating interactions that take into account a student’s level of development as well as specific discourse strategies that a tutor may implement during a writing conference. These strategies can help ensure that the activity in the ZPD is productive and results in new strategies that the student may use after the writing conference.

One of these concepts is situation definition.

According to Wertsch (“The Zone”), “A situation definition is the way in which a setting or context is represented—that is, defined—by those who are operating in that setting” (8). In this perspective on activity in the ZPD, a tutor and learner may have two different conceptions of what is happening in an activity. Wertsch (“The Zone”) provides an example of two separate activities in which two children are building a shape out of blocks that is a copy of a model. One child consults the model in the activity, but the other child does not. Although both children are engaged in the same activity, they have different notions of what the purpose of the activity is, which in turn affects how they carry out the action. The goal in this situation is to structure an activity that helps the one child who is not using the model to begin consulting the model and build a copy. Thus, according to Wertsch (“The Zone”), learning in the ZPD is a process of “situation redefinition,” in which a learner develops a qualitatively different situation definition than the one he or she had at the beginning of the encounter (11). This complements the overall goal of many writing centers: that their students develop new attitudes toward writing and new psychological tools to use in the writing process.

There are different ways in which a tutor can promote situation redefinition, but one important

concept that must be considered at the outset of a tutorial is establishing intersubjectivity. A peer tutor and student achieve intersubjectivity when they have the same situation definition of the interaction and, importantly, know that they share the same situation definition (Wertsch “The Zone”). In the beginning of a writing conference, a peer tutor can elicit a student’s definition of rhetorical concepts that are important to the writing task at hand. For example, a student who says that a conclusion “wraps up the paper” may be able to benefit from a more nuanced definition that he or she can use in academic writing.

A student’s answer (as in the example in the previous paragraph) corresponds to his or her actual level of development—the current conception that implicitly guides a student’s writing process. A peer tutor can then use this information to plan a studentcentered writing conference that can help the student develop a more mature definition of a rhetorical concept or writing strategy for the task at hand. In an attempt to establish intersubjectivity and promote effective communication in the writing conference, a peer tutor may temporarily adopt the student’s situation definition in an activity that has the goal of helping the student progress and consider rhetorical concepts more critically. For example, the peer tutor may first ask questions about this situation definition such as “Can a conclusion do anything else besides ‘wrap up’ the ending?” This adoption of a temporary situation definition, which is closer to the student’s current level of development, enables the peer tutor to begin helping the student develop a more nuanced definition.

To promote situation redefinition, peer tutors may help students to make more context-informative expressions in which they use writing terminology in the specific context of their own work (Wertsch, Vygotsky). The conversation moves beyond abstract definitions of rhetorical concepts toward descriptions of how a certain rhetorical concept functions within a student’s writing. Context-informative expressions can be reflective of how students use the psychological tool. And these context-informative expressions could be supplemented with an activity in which, perhaps, a

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10 , No 1 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu

Characterizing Successful “Intervention” • 4 student practices writing a different conclusion and explaining its role more specifically in the text.

When peer tutors and students collaborate in an activity that promotes situation redefinition, this new definition must be within the student’s potential level of development, which may or may not be similar to the peer tutor’s actual level of development. This takes into account the need to set a concrete, realistic goal for a writing conference.

How does a peer tutor know exactly how far a student can progress in a writing conference?

Interaction in the writing conference establishes this knowledge. As a student progresses in the writing center conference, using more context-informative expressions to describe exactly how a rhetorical concept functions in his or her writing, the peer tutor may begin to use more abbreviated speech, which is characteristic of interactions in which interlocutors have achieved intersubjectivity. In using more contextinformative expressions, a student can, for example, move beyond describing “conclusion” or “argument” in abstract terms and describe how they function within the specific piece of writing. These contextinformative expressions can be a signal that the student is progressing through the ZPD and internalizing an idea that he or she could not explain in specific terms.

Students and peer tutors may also have different situation definitions of the conference interaction. For example, a peer tutor who is meeting with a student who only wants editing help may discuss the situation definition of the conference interaction. For this reason, a period in a writing conference is often devoted to discussing the purpose of the writing center and what the peer tutor’s role will be in helping the student to develop skills that he or she can apply not only to the paper or project in question, but to future academic writing projects.

In the following research study that I conducted at a college in the Midwest, I examined how writing center consultants (what peer tutors were called at the institution) promoted situation redefinition in writing center conferences. The Institutional Review Board at my university approved all research procedures, and I

assigned the participants pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. I observed, recorded, and transcribed each writing conference. After the conference, I collected copies of the student’s conference draft and written notes. I then interviewed the writing consultant to learn about his or her decision-making process during the writing conference. Upon completing the writing project, each student sent me a copy of the final draft and participated in a debriefing interview about the revision process.

To analyze students’ revisions, I labeled and coded each revision according to the taxonomy developed by Faigley and Witte. The taxonomy includes two main categories of revisions: surface and textual. Surface revisions include edits to grammar and spelling as well as meaning-preserving revisions that are, for the most part, synonymous to the text that was replaced.

Textual revisions comprise microstructure revisions, which alter the meaning of a local section in a piece of writing, and macrostructure revisions, which change the overall meaning of a text. To analyze the field notes, interview transcripts, and reflections, I sorted the data based on salient themes and coded the data in Atlas.ti to conduct cross-code analysis to determine the relationships between writing conferences and students’ revision processes. To ensure reliability, a coresearcher participated in the initial data analysis, the development of definitions for the codes, and the early stages of the coding process.

As part of this study, I examined a writing conference between two writing consultants and another between a student and a writing consultant. A full examination of the interactions in these writing conferences is outside of the scope of this article, so I include these examples to illustrate the concept of situation definition in writing center conferences. I used vertical transcription to capture the paralinguistic features of writing conference conversation (Gilewicz and Thonus). Table 1 includes the notation for vertical transcription.

In the following excerpt, Alicia was in the role of peer tutor and Brynna was the writer. Brynna had written a short nonfiction essay based on the death of an uncle, but had difficulty adhering to the 300-word

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10 , No 1 (2012) www.praxis.uwc.utexas.edu

Characterizing Successful “Intervention” • 5 limit. She had written this assignment for her class on writing center pedagogy (a staff-development course taught by the writing center director), and she was supposed to have a writing conference with a senior writing consultant.

Table 1: Notation for Vertical Transcription (Gilewicz and Thonus) Notation

Description

[ (.)

(3s) {?} ((laughs))

Indicates overlapping speech A pause of two seconds or less A pause of more than two seconds An unintelligible word or phrase

Dropped line

Italicized text

A gesture or some other action is included in double parentheses This indicates that one party has interrupted the main speaker, or responded with back-channel feedback Italicized text indicates that it was read from a draft

Being part of the same community of peer tutors, Alicia and Brynna had similar viewpoints on the purpose of a writing conference and had likely learned similar techniques for prompting students to revise their writing. In this case, Alicia asked Brynna whether she had done a specific activity to reduce the length of her writing. They communicated efficiently because of their similar situation definition of a writing conference and their shared knowledge of writing processes that are useful for different situations. Their conversation suggests that they both know of a wordcutting activity. In addition, in the interviews that I conducted separately with both participants both indicated they liked to spend extensive time revising.

Alicia (even though she claimed to be an environmentalist that hesitated to waste paper) said that she enjoyed interacting heavily with her own writing by marking up paper drafts, and Brynna also spent time marking up drafts after a writing

conference to help her decide how to proceed with revising her work.

Alicia: Did you have like a {?} like a space limit?

Like a word limit?

Brynna: Umm, not really, but, um, our professor Dr. Grant was saying something like it really shouldn’t be over 300 words or 400 words. (.) So it’s, ((grunts)), I had, I felt constrained by the amount of space I had because I’m a (.) I ramble. (.) And so this is not (.) the easiest thing for me to do.

Alicia: Well you know what you could have done? Or maybe you could still do is, you know, just go over the word limit and then do that little activity of cutting out words, did you try that?

Brynna: I did. I cut out like an entire paragraph after that.

Alicia and Brynna continued to discuss the main ideas in the writing conference. In the interviews I conducted with them after the writing conference, I learned that they had very similar attitudes toward writing centers and writing center conferences. About the main reasons she liked to have conferences, Brynna said, “I really like the idea of the re-vision, like you’re re-seeing your paper through somebody else’s eyes and they may not know the subject either, which is, like, even better for you because they’ll have more questions.” And Alicia said that her goal for the writing conference was “to just like help her like nudge her way into what her final version was gonna be which is, you know, something that was far more complex than what she’d put out, put down in the paper right away.” It was this intersubjectivity that may have enabled them to have a productive conversation in which Brynna welcomed questions about her writing and participated equally, without “yes” or “no” responses that can be indicative of a lack of interest in the writing conference.

But what kind of learning happens when a peer tutor and writer already share a similar situation definition of rhetorical concepts or of the writing conference? How, according to the Vygotskian framework of learning, can one peer tutor facilitate an

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Characterizing Successful “Intervention” • 6 activity in which another peer tutor expands his or her current level of development? This question, admittedly, poses a problem to a method of tutoring that is grounded in the concept of situation definition and the ZPD. In this case, a peer tutor like Alicia may help a fellow peer tutor to apply writing strategies in different rhetorical situations or use them in a more nuanced manner.

And what happens when, as is often the case, the writing consultant and student have different situation definitions of the purpose of the writing center conference? In the following example, a peer tutor (Nancy) has read entirely a paper written by the student (Janelle), who believes that she will receive editing help at the outset of a writing conference.

Nancy believed that she should first discuss the main ideas and then proceed to discuss errors in mechanics.

In this excerpt, she imposes her situation definition of a writing conference at the outset and makes explicit her reasons for avoiding talking about sentence-level problems in Janelle’s writing.

Janelle: Um, were there any grammar or punctuation?

Nancy: Yeah. I think, um, what I usually like to do is just kind of like go through what you’re saying first.

‘Cause usually if Janelle: okay Nancy: I’m looking for grammar then I get distracted by what you’re saying.

Janelle: oh, okay Nancy: And so then I go back [and do that, and Janelle: [okay Nancy: then, since I’m not allowed to, like, write on the paper [then I just point Janelle: [right Nancy: things out.

So is that okay?

Janelle: okay.

Yeah, no, no, that’s fine.

A method of tutoring that is grounded in these principles of learning theory does not suggest there is only one “definition” of a rhetorical concept (or some other idea) that students can learn and thereby master the writing process. This method complements nondirective tutoring strategies in that there is no

assumption of only one correct situation definition that the student must develop. Rather, these definitions are contextualized and particular to the discourse community in which the student is participating. Thus, methods of tutoring that are grounded in the concept of situation definition should include strategies for helping students recognize how different rhetorical concepts may be applied in a variety of contexts.

Assessment and Tutoring Based in the Framework of the ZPD This framework can also point toward effective assessment practices for writing conferences and peer tutoring. If the proper focus of assessment should be the development of the writer, an assessment process can also be grounded in learning theory that is student centered and oriented toward the development of students’ writing processes. For example, during the agenda-setting phase of writing conferences, peer tutors can ask students to define the concepts that are at the heart of the writing conference. Then, at the end of the writing conference, the peer tutor can ask the student to re-define the concept. A difference in definitions may reveal just how far the student was able to progress in terms of developing a better concept to use in the writing process.

In addition to assessment that is centered on how students can define rhetorical concepts or other concepts related to their writing processes, this framework provides a basis for assessment that happens in the dyadic pair of the peer tutor and student. Writing center conferences can uncover and examine the “maturing functions” that activity in the ZPD can elicit (Chaiklin 52). These maturing functions may be the abilities that are essential to succeeding in academic writing, but cannot be observed (yet) in solitary activity. Chaiklin argues, “Successful (assisted) performance can be used as an indicator of the state of a maturing psychological function” (53).

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Characterizing Successful “Intervention” • 7

Conclusion In looking toward new methods for writing centers to promote student learning, I propose that writing center administrators and tutors alike consider examining the theories of Vygotsky and of the neoVygotskian researchers who have expanded upon Vygotsky’s ideas. Writing center tutors can ground their writing-conference strategies in sound learning theory by seeking to helping students to achieve situation redefinition of rhetorical concepts. Thus, a writing tutor can carry out North’s effective “interventions” (“Training”) but avoid appropriating the student’s writing or focusing solely on correcting the text at hand. These new situation definitions can then establish students’ capacities to develop and apply new writing processes for successful revision.

Works Cited Bird, Barbara. "Rethinking Our View of Learning." The Writing Lab Newsletter 36.5-6 (2012): 1–6.

Brooks, Jeff. "Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work." The Writing Lab Newsletter 15.6 (1991): 1–4.

Bruffee, Kenneth. "Peer Tutoring and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’" Writing Centers: Theory and Administration. Ed. Gary Olson.

Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1984. 3–15.

Chaiklin, Seth. "The Zone of Proximal Development in Vygotsky's Analysis of Learning and Instruction." Vygotsky's Educational Theory in Context. Ed. Alex Kozulin, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 39–65.

Clark, Irene, and Dave Healy. "Are Writing Centers Ethical?" WPA: Writing Program Administration 20.1/2 (1996): 32–8.

Faigley, Lester, and Stephen Witte. "Analyzing Revision." College Composition and Communication 32.4 (1981): 400–14.

Gilewicz, Magdalena, and Terese Thonus. "Close Vertical Transcription in Writing Center Research." The Writing Center Journal 24.1 (2003): 25–50.

Gillespie, Paula, and Neal Lerner. The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 2008.

Lunsford, Andrea. "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center." The Writing Center Journal 12.1 (1991): 3–10.

Murphy, Christina. "The Writing Center and Social Constructionist Theory." Intersections: TheoryPractice in the Writing Center. Ed. Joan Mullin and Ray Wallace. Urbana: NCTE, 1994. 161–171.

North, Stephen. "Training Tutors to Talk about Writing." College Composition and Communication 33.4 (1982): 434–41.

---. "Writing Center Diagnosis: The Composing Profile." Tutoring Writing: A Sourcebook for Writing Labs. Ed. Muriel Harris. Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman and Co., 1982. 42-52.

---. "The Idea of a Writing Center." College English 46.5 (1984): 433-46.

Shamoon, Linda, and Deborah Burns. "A Critique of Pure Tutoring." The Writing Center Journal 15.2 (1995): 134-51.

Thompson, Isabelle, et al. "Examining our Lore: A Survey of Students' and Tutors' Satisfaction with Writing Center Conferences." The Writing Center Journal 29.1 (2009): 78-105.

Vygotsky, Lev S. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Wertsch, James V. Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.

---. "The Zone of Proximal Development: Some Conceptual Issues." New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development 1984.23 (1984): 7-18.

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CALL FOR PAPERS: SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE FUTURE OF WRITING CENTERS In honor of the 20-year anniversary of the Undergraduate Writing Center at The University of Texas at Austin and in conjunction with the UWC’s celebration and symposium on the future of writing centers, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal invites you to submit papers that reflect creatively on the challenges writing centers face, the questions writing center professionals should be asking, and the directions we might pursue as a field.

Some topics you might productively explore include: What aspects of our current practice should we pass on to the next generation of writing center practitioners? What would you like to reexamine, re-define, or re-imagine? How will the digital revolution continue to shape writing center pedagogy and practice? What challenges will arise as education becomes an increasingly digitized activity? How does growing up in a digitized world affect the way students experience the act of writing? What will best enable us to continue to meet their needs and expectations?

For the past forty years, writing centers have been engaged in legitimizing themselves as professional services. What arguments for legitimacy best serve us in the current landscape of university education? What issues deserve our attention now?

For information about submitting an essay, the journal's blind review process, or to contact the managing editors, please visit praxis.uwc.utexas.edu.

Please submit your essay by June 15, 2013 to be considered for this special Fall issue.

EDITORIAL BOARD !

! Abrahams, PhD, Eileen Janet Gebhart Auten, PhD Alice Batt, PhD Alanna Bitzel, MPAff, JD Jacob Blumner, PhD Brian Bremen, PhD Patricia Burns, PhD Kathleen Shine Cain, PhD Russell Carpenter, PhD Collette Chapman, ABD Davida Charney, PhD Diane Davis, PhD

Kevin Davis, PhD Rasha Diab, PhD Anthony Fassi, PhD Linda Ferreira-Buckley, PhD Brian Gatten, ABD Genie Giaimo, ABD Elizabeth Goins, ABD Frederick Coye Heard, PhD Mary Hedengren, ABD Justin Hodgson, PhD Brad Hughes, PhD

Brooke Hunter, PhD Jamie Jesson, PhD Andy Jones, ABD Roberta Kjesrud, PhD Chris LeCluyse PhD Sohui Lee, PhD Neal Lerner, PhD Thomas Lindsay, ABD Jackie Grutsch McKinney, PhD Sue Mendelson, PhD A. Paige Normand, MA

Michael Pemberton, PhD Patricia Roberts-Miller, PhD John Ruszkiewicz, PhD Andrea Saathoff, ABD Miguel Santos-Neves, PhD Simone Sesselo, PhD Steve Sherwood, PhD Margaret A Syverson, PhD Tim Taylor, PhD Gerald Tilma, ABD Jeffrey Walker, PhD

!

Call for Papers: Writing Center Theory and Practice The Winter 2013 (Vol. 17, Iss. 4) Issue of Academic Exchange Quarterly, an independent double-blind-peer-reviewed print journal, is now accepting submissions for its special section on Writing Center Theory and Practice. Articles may explore issues of theory, practice, and experience in writing center work, including qualitative and empirical studies and discussions of pedagogy.

Articles may also consider the following: How writing center professionals cope with change and the eventuality of needing to expand their efforts in response to new economic and demographic challenges. Furthermore, as we move towards increasingly virtual and technologically dependent learning communities, how can these efforts help meet the evolving demands of our students?

In addition to Writing Center Directors and other Administrators, submissions are welcome from professional staff, faculty tutors, and graduate students who work in the writing center. Manuscript length should be between 2,000 and 3,000 words. Please identify your submission with the keyword “Center-2.”

Submissions will be accepted now until the end of August; however, early submissions are encouraged as they offer the following incentives: - longer time for revision - opportunity to be considered for Editor’s Choice - eligibility to have article’s abstract and/or full text posted on journal’s main webpage - opportunity to be considered for inclusion in Sound Instruction Series For more information, please visit http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/center2.htm, or email Feature Editor and Sound Instruction Book Editor Kellie Charron at kajr10@comcast.net