Praxis 16.3: Breaking Down & Building Up in the Writing Center

PR AXIS

a writing center journal

16.3: BREAKING DOWN & BUILDING UP IN THE WRITING CENTER

VOL. 16, NO. 3 (2019): BREAKING DOWN & BUILDING UP IN THE WRITING CENTER TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS COLUMNS From the Editor: Breaking Down & Building Up in the Writing Center Tristin Hooker Writing Center Tutors Take on Plagiarism Elyse Pelzer

FOCUS ARTICLES Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Centers and Programs Andrea Rosso Efthymiou, Liliana Naydan, Anna Sicari Cultivating Graduate Writing Groups as Communities of Practice: A Call to Action for the Writing Center Tiffany Kinney, Julie Snyder-Yulu, Sumiko Martinez Claiming an Education: Using Archival Research to Build a Community of Practice Molly Tetreaualt, Patty Wilde, Sarah Franco Undergirding Writing Centers’ Responses to the Neoliberal Academy Randall Monty

BOOK REVIEW Review of Writing Programs and Writing Center Collaborations, Edited by Alice Johnson Myatt and Lynee Lewis Gaillet Wenqi Cui

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Wenqi Cui, M.A. is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is also a composition instructor and a writing center tutor. Her work has appeared in The Journal of English as an International Language, The Journal of Literature in Language Teaching, and The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics. Her research interests include writing center research, writing transfer, digital rhetoric, multimodality, and multilingual writers.

Andrea Rosso Efthymiou, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Writing Studies & Rhetoric and Director of the Writing Center at Hofstra University. She chaired the 2017 National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing (NCPTW) and regularly mentors tutors’ research. Andrea’s research interests include writing center administration, tutor education, and tutors’ civic engagement.

Sarah Franco, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English at New England Institute of Technology.

Tiffany Kinney, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English at Colorado Mesa University, where she teaches courses on composition pedagogy, rhetorical theory, and technical writing. Kinney has worked in a variety of writing centers and even established a writing center at her current university.

She earned her B.A. in English at Westminster College, her M.A. from the University of Oregon, and her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Utah. Her research is typically located at the intersection of writing studies, feminism, and historiography.

Sumiko Martinez, Ph.D. earned her B.A. in English at Westminster College, where she served as a writing consultant in the Writing Center. Her Master's and Doctorate degrees in Communication are from the University of Utah. She is currently Associate Director of Scholarships and Student Funding at the University of Utah College of Nursing, where she brings her humanities training and social justice perspective to issues of financing higher education. Her current research interests center on rhetorics of subjectivity, particularly concerning students' agency and accountability within the context(s) of K-12 and higher education.

Randall Monty, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, & Literacy in the Department of Writing and Language Studies and the Associate Director of the Writing Center at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His is the author of The Writing Center as Cultural and Interdisciplinary Contact Zone (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), and in addition to his current research of the neoliberal academy, he is currently studying writing centers' intersections with institutional success, articulation, and DeafSpace.

Liliana M. Naydan, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of English and Writing Program Coordinator at Penn State Abington. She researches social identity in relation to writing center work and her publications on the subject have appeared in journals including Forum: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. She is also the author of Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction (Bucknell UP, 2016) and the co-editor of Terror in Global Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Out in the Center (Utah State UP, 2018).

Elyse Pelzer is the Writing, Reading, Speech Assistance Specialist at the College of DuPage Learning Commons, located in Glen Ellyn, IL. She began working as a writing tutor while attending the College of DuPage and has worked in various departmental roles ever since. Elyse holds a B.A. of General Studies with a concentration in Arts and Humanities and is currently pursuing a M.S.Ed. in Adult Education from Indiana University.

Anna Sicari, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at Oklahoma State University. Her scholarship focuses on writing center theory, writing program administration, and feminist theory and scholarship. Anna is a co-editor of a forthcoming collection,

Out in the Center: Public Controversies, Private Struggles (Utah State UP 2018) and served as an associate editor of The Writing Center Journal.

Molly Tetreault, M.A., M.Ed. is the former writing center director at the University of New Hampshire, serving in this position from 2015-2018.

Patty Wilde, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English and Writing Program Administrator at Washington State University, Tri-Cities.

Julie Snyder-Yuly, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Marshall University where she teaches social media, public speaking, and leadership courses. She earned her B.S. in Psychology from the University of Iowa, M.S. in Interdisciplinary Studies at Iowa State University, and her Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Utah. Her research interests include critical race theory, microaggressions, new media, and women's studies.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16 No 3 (2019)

BREAKING DOWN & BUILDING UP IN THE WRITING CENTER Tristin Hooker University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com This summer, Praxis brings you a collection of pieces that all, in some way, address the building, maintaining, and re-building of communities, the tensions that strain them, and the barriers and walls that writing center practitioners—and writers—must break down in order to do the work of building. For us here in the Praxis offices, located in the beautiful Writing Center space in the Perry-Casteñada Library on the University of Texas-Austin campus, this has also been a summer of literal building and breaking down, as the library moves through important summer renovations. I wrote about this for our Axis blog this summer, considering the way we are engaged in a constructive/deconstructive experience with writing during our consultations, and the way the noise of those constructions and deconstructions are part of the experience. We are pleased to bring together deeper considerations of the (de/re)construction process in individual writing center communities, and the larger writing center community as a whole.

We begin with “Writing Center Tutors Take On Plagiarism,” Elyse Pelzer’s consideration of the complexities that writing center professionals face in dealing with plagiarism, collaboration, editing, and the idea of students receiving “help.” Pelzer points to the experience of one writing center, and strategies that helped to empower tutors to work through these questions.

We then move to “Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Centers and Programs,” Andrea Rosso Efthymiou, Liliana Naydan, and Anna Sicari’s reflections on the thorny and often-unexplored questions of faith—its expression and its potential to impact community—in the writing center. Exploring the author’s own positionality, as well as the institutional and linguistic structures that often reinforce or create “silence,” the authors argue for complexity that will do want Liliana Naydan calls “counterfundamentalist work” that “facilitate[s] meaningful dialogue” in the center for the benefit of the community and its writers (7).

In “Cultivating Graduate Writing Groups as Communities of Practice: A Call to Action for the Writing Center,” Tiffany Kinney, Julie Snyder-Yuly, and Sumiko Martinez continue to explore building stronger community in the writing center, this time

through the creation and maintenance of graduate writing groups. The authors consider their own successful writing group, and highlight both why and how they found it to be an invaluable support system and community of practice during their graduate education. They close their exploration with insights into the ways writing centers can facilitate and support this kind of community, acknowledging that “graduate students require different support than the one-off tutoring that often happens in writing center and in faculty-student interactions,” that graduate writing groups “not only develop better writers but also socialize us into broader communities of practice within the academy” (23), and that these groups can help writing centers to achieve their mission at the graduate level.

Molly Tetrault, Patty Wilde, and Sarah B. Franco also examine the foundations of a solid community of practice in “Claiming an Education: Using Archival Research to Build a Community of Practice.” In the wake of moving to a permanent space, the authors focus on the way research in the archives of their own writing center history can help build a shared sense of community and continuity among their consultants and staff. Ultimately, they find that “archival research facilitates a culture of constant, continual, and recursive thinking, one that is central to the work the writing center staff engage in daily” (25). They conclude with recommendations for ways other writing center professionals can incorporate archival research into their own centers and practices.

Randall Monty then invites us to consider the way the communities and structures we build in writing centers exist as both “a part of and a response to” political and social structures that govern higher education in “Undergirding Writing Centers’ Responses to the Neoliberal Academy.” Informed by Critical Discourse Analysis and aiming toward promoting social and restorative justice, Monty’s article argues that writing centers “have long been recognized as equipped to respond and push back against neoliberal impositions” (37), and that many emergent themes in Writing Center Studies “are particularly suited as responses to neoliberalism” (38). This article, then, asks us to consider what we are capable of breaking down even as we build, and vice-versa.

Breaking Down and Building Up in Writing Center • We close with Wenqi Cui’s review of Writing Program and Writing Center Collaboration, edited by Alice Johnson Myatt and Lynee Lewis Gaillet. This collection spotlights eleven interdisciplinary collaborative programs, and delves into the development, assessment, and maintenance of successful collaboration between writing centers, writing programs, and other departments on the programmatic level. Cui recommends this collection to writing program administrators and writing center directors interested in applying theory to praxis as they are “building, planning, or sustaining their collaborative projects” (50).

We here at Praxis are grateful for the dedicated work of our reviewers, authors, and copy-editors who have been part of building this issue. We look forward to continuing the process—construction noise, tensions, and all—and to continuing the conversations that our authors invite us to, in this issue.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16 No 3 (2019)

WRITING CENTER TUTORS TAKE ON PLAGIARISM Elyse Pelzer College of DuPage neriel@cod.edu John had been working with a student on a research paper and had serious doubts about whether this student was writing the words she was presenting as her own. Each time they met, the student would bring in a professional-looking draft. John often referenced the previous draft as they discussed the way the student had built meaning within her body paragraphs. It became increasingly evident that this student had not read the material, as she was not cognizant of her own concepts on the page. John tried to get the student to notice her organizational pattern and continue the logical progression of her work. To do so, he referenced the previous paragraphs and led her along the cognitive cobblestones by saying, “If this is so, and this is so, then this must also be so. You've built a good deduction.” Wide-eyed, the student surprisingly responded, “But, I don't think that [first statement] is true,” referring to her own paper. John replied, “Well, you do say that here, and here. Also, here,” as he scrolled to where she had “written” the very positions she was denying. “I didn't mean that,” she said, appalled. Gently, John explained that if the student disagreed with the positions that she had spent the last page-and-a-half confirming, that would be a very innovative way to support her argument. It was clear that this student had not written the draft she was representing as her own. Moreover, she had not even read the work she had put her name on and planned to submit.

Ida was working with a student when she quickly realized that the student had copied and pasted an entire article into the paper. Spending a good portion of the appointment, Ida explained the concept of plagiarism and the severe consequences that it might incur. The student, taken aback, responded that this was how she and other students wrote papers in Iran.

Taking note of the cultural difference at hand, Ida advised the student on the importance of paraphrasing, quoting, and properly citing sources.

Deena asked a student to read his paper aloud during an appointment. Deena soon noticed that the student was mispronouncing a number of words. For instance, when reading the word “discreet,” the student said “different.” The words that he chose did not flow smoothly or sound natural; this led Deena to suspect that the student had not written the paper. Deena

asked if the student had let a friend “edit” or “peer review” his paper, to which the student admitted that a friend from another university had peer edited his paper to make it “sound more professional.” Deena informed the student that the peer editing may have gone too far and submitting someone else’s work as his own, even if only borrowing words/phrases from another student, could be considered a form of moderate plagiarism. She explained that it is acceptable for writers to bounce around ideas, but it is important to incorporate those ideas into the paper using their own voice, which is only done when they fully understand the meaning of any words used. Further, he could get in trouble if his teacher were to compare this piece of writing to others that he had previously submitted.

John, Ida, and Deena are not the only tutors to experience these kinds of scenarios in the College’s writing center. In fact, these examples and misconceptions of plagiarism are a few of the many that writing tutors witness while working with students.

Considering that plagiarism is the use of someone else’s words or ideas without giving credit through proper citation, writing tutors see a large population of students who, perhaps unintentionally, plagiarize but are able to slip through the cracks of adhering to plagiarism rules.

The question of what to do about plagiarism— intentional or not—has long plagued educators, tutors, and writing center directors alike. Betty Hoskins, founder of the Writing Lab at James Madison University, reflects upon the delicate relationship between tutor and faculty in her 2007 article, “Ethics and Empathy in the Writing Center.” Hoskins admits to being “suspicious of a paper that uses words that seem out of place or of a paper that ‘sounds too good’” (20). Although, instead of alerting faculty of such suspicions, Hoskins stresses to the student the importance of providing credit where it is due and leaves it to the student to correct the matter. Director of the University Writing Center at California State University, Lise Buranen, takes into account both the student’s and tutor’s perspectives on plagiarism in her 2009 article, “A Safe Place: The Role of Librarians and Writing Centers in Addressing Citation Practices and Plagiarism.” Through discussion with her tutors,

4! ! student who came to the writing center because he was confused by his instructor's version of self-plagiarizing.

The student was warned that repeating quotes he had used in an earlier paper—quotes that included an interview with his father—would be considered selfplagiarism and reason to fail the class. The student was so afraid of breaking confusing plagiarism rules that he put the majority of his essay in quotes because he was terrified of the instructor's threat that anyone caught plagiarizing would fail the class. In fairness to the student, Deanna recognized that he had come in the writing center doing something that he did not understand, but she could not talk him out of overquoting material. Personally, part of her could not blame the student. Often times, tutors share the students’ vexation with assignments that require challenging citations.

Moreover, specific assignments may require perplexing citations, which can result in a circular pattern of confusion. One such assignment might ask students to choose a specific topic—for example, a particular disease—for an informative research paper in a science-based class, leaving little to no room for the writer’s voice. This type of assignment has always confused one of our tutors, so she attended a citation workshop offered through the library. Our tutor thought this was the perfect opportunity to ask the presenter how to avoid over-citing research papers for science-based classes, like nursing. The presenter paused for a moment and said that would be a question for the writing center. The tutor then informed her that she was from the writing center. Faculty members’ altered interpretations of citation rules can also present a challenge for tutors because they are encouraged to follow the most recent editions of MLA and APA formatting, as well as the college library’s website and OWL Purdue’s website.

In the struggle to combat student plagiarism, writing tutors face a variety of roadblocks while trying to enforce academic honesty. The first roadblock encountered is the discomfort of addressing plagiarism suspicions. After inquiring where the information came from and then explaining the definition of plagiarism and importance of citing, tutors are often unsure how far they can go when questioning a student’s authenticity.

The second roadblock consists of cultural differences, as demonstrated in the vignette of Ida and the Iranian student. Because some cultures view using another’s work as a sign of respect and do not hold the same idea that other people’s work/ideas need(s) to be cited, unintentional acts of plagiarism may occur.

Regardless of intent, these students may be penalized just the same.

Writing Center Tutors Take on Plagiarism •

Buranen concludes that some cases of plagiarism arise from students’ “naiveté” of proper citation conventions (27). Furthermore, Buranen finds tutors to be more forgiving “of the subtleties and complications of plagiarism and issues of intertextuality” than faculty members, as she believes tutors are better able to relate to the students (32). In her 2018 article, “Reframing Anti-Plagiarism Efforts in the Academic Library,” Dalton State College Librarian Amy Burger refers to the point of view of Rebecca Moore Howard, director of the Writing Center at Syracuse University. Howard asserts that some methods of plagiarism are “a necessary and productive step in students’ development of proper citation skills” (Burger). Rather than penalize students that have plagiarized, Howard views circumstances of plagiarism as learning opportunities. Hoskins, Buranen, and Howard hold different beliefs and maintain different approaches in regards to addressing plagiarism in their writing centers, but all could agree that plagiarism is a persistent problem. The problems that exist for tutors include faculty being allowed to decide how to handle plagiarism violations, confusion following instructors' interpretations of standard citation rules, and the roadblocks presented by cultural differences and various comprehension levels.

Ultimately, faculty have a responsibility to decide how to handle students’ academic dishonesty as they see fit. Depending on the faculty member, consequences can be anything from a warning to expulsion from the class or university. After meeting with a student suspected of plagiarizing, if it is determined that the violation was unintended, the faculty member may offer a chance to advance the student's learning and not impose a sanction. This means that one student could potentially get a hand slap, under the guise of a learning experience multiple times throughout their academic career, while another receives a permanent black mark on their academic record. It makes one wonder: How many students claim to be unaware of plagiarism rules even after repeated learning experiences, and what, if anything, can be done to keep this from happening? Should the rules regarding plagiarism infractions be more concrete, so each student faces the same consequences, rather than allowing each faculty member to subjectively decide?

The fact that faculty have a right to alter citation requirements to fit assignments can further lead to student confusion and result in acts of plagiarism.

Students may carry those altered versions of citation rules onto their next class and beyond, even if they no longer apply in a different setting. One writing tutor, Deanna, had an extreme case of this involving a

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Writing Center Tutors Take on Plagiarism • The third roadblock occurs with some assignments and requirements that may be beyond a student’s comprehension level or ability. The problem arises when these students receive extra “help” from parents or peers. I once worked with a student who, I saw, faced extreme difficulty constructing one complete sentence. One day, after weeks of working together, going over each sentence, the student came in with perfectly constructed paragraphs, full of vocabulary that he had never used before. Moreover, very little of the work that was done together was present in the draft. I asked the student if he had gotten help with his paper, and he said that his mother had “helped” him.

When asked how, the student volunteered, “She wrote it,” with no comprehension that this was not allowed. I informed the student that this could be considered plagiarism, and his instructor might also detect this change in work if he were to compare the student’s essay to in-class work. Before the student left, I printed the College’s plagiarism policies and encouraged him to schedule a follow-up appointment. Unfortunately, the student never came back.

On a mission to improve how tutors help students that are struggling with plagiarism issues, our writing center staff met to figure out if there was anything else that we could do. A new plagiarism policy based on a three-strike model has been created in order to better serve the students in terms of how plagiarism is handled in the writing center. The policy had to best serve the tutors so that their role was not to judge a student’s authenticity, but rather to educate and provide every resource available to help students improve in this area. After piloting the new plagiarism policy for the duration of one semester, our tutors were more diligent in informing students of plagiarism guidelines and more expressive with plagiarism concerns, resulting in a number of students placed on a plagiarism-monitoring list. We have, through our new policy, created a program that gives tutors a clear path on how to handle, record, and report plagiarism suspicions, while providing lessons and monitoring where needed. Policies that encourage learning opportunities may not only help students in their understanding of plagiarism and its consequences, but also guide writing tutors in addressing this ongoing issue.

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Burger, Amy. “Reframing Anti-Plagiarism Efforts in the Academic Library.” Georgia Library Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 1, 2018. digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/glq/vol55/iss1/11.

Accessed 4 April 2019.

Hoskins, Betty. “Ethics and Empathy in the Writing Center.” College English Association Forum, vol. 36, no. 1, 2007, files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1097334.pdf.

Accessed 4 April 2019.

Sherman, Jane. “Your Own Thoughts in Your Own Words.” English Language Teaching Journal, vol. 46, no. 2, 1992, pp. 190-198.

Works Cited Buranen, Lise. “A Safe Place: The Role of Librarians and Writing Centers in Addressing Citation Practices and Plagiarism.” Knowledge Quest, vol. 37, no. 3, 2009, pp.

24-33.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16 No 3 (2019)

POSSIBILITIES FOR INTERFAITH DIALOGUE IN WRITING CENTERS AND PROGRAMS Andrea Rosso Efthymiou Hofstra University

Liliana M. Naydan Penn State Abington

Anna Sicari Oklahoma State University

andrea.r.efthymiou@hofstra.edu

lmn122@psu.edu

anna.sicari@okstate.edu

Abstract This article speaks into the pervasive silence on the subject of faith in writing center and writing program work. Through revisiting Sharon Crowley’s Toward a Civil Discourse and investigating silence, we encourage “counterfudamentalist work”: work that counters fundamentalist methodology by inviting fundamentalists and believers and nonbelievers of different kinds into nonliteralist and open-minded ways of reading writing-centered experiences involving religious faith and secularism. The three authors of this article offer personal narratives about their own experience with faith in their centers/programs and use different theoretical perspectives to start a necessary dialogue on faith and religious experiences. By interweaving theoretical perspectives, research, and personal narratives involving our WPA work, this article argues that writing center/program administrators must do the same, and we hope to model the types of conversations we must bring into our centers.

As scholars and practitioners in writing programs, we work increasingly to create safer or brave spaces to discuss race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality.

Yet discomfort involving the subject of religious faith and identity persists, perhaps because religion exists as a hotly binarizing subject in current American political conversations. Most recently, Donald Trump has invoked religion in his speeches, as have many of his conservative and liberal antecedents,, among them the liberal evangelical Christian Jimmy Carter and the conservative evangelical Christian George W. Bush.

We see such religious invocations in Trump’s zeal to wish the nation a “Merry Christmas” and insist that there has been a war on Christmas for decades. We also see them in his speeches to pro-life protestors, whose work has helped “tens of thousands of Americans” reach “their full, God-given potential” (“‘You Love Every Child’: President Trump Addresses March for Life”). And, as some of his predecessors have, Trump references religion to encourage division as opposed to community or interfaith dialogue in a highly polarized context.1 In doing so, he attempts to position faith as part of a rhetoric of the right and to associate secularism and atheism with a rhetoric of the left. Yet this positioning belies the fact that religious believers exist across the political spectrum and ignores the many religious believers on the political left, among them Reverend William Barber or the former U.S. president Barack Obama, who would arguably

appreciate more of an association between left-wing rhetoric and religious rhetoric. Perhaps in part because of the current political climate, a resonant silence on the subject of faith persists in writing center studies, a field that engages in progressive rhetoric and perhaps fears that a conversation about religion might imply conservatism. An unsettling silence about faith among believers and non-believers of different kinds pervades the field even though the broader field of rhetoric and composition has addressed faith in more robust ways2 and even though scholars such as Frankie Condon, Harry C. Denny, Donna LeCourt, and Vershawn Ashanti Young encourage us to move past the guise of academic neutrality. Despite this work, silence on faith and identity persists even though writing centers exist as sites for imagining dialogic potential in writing program administration because the writing center director occupies a “both/and” role as a WPA (Ianetta et al.).

As writing center researchers and current or former practitioners in writing centers, we attempt to speak into this pervasive silence on the subject of faith to understand and complicate it and to transform unproductive silence into productive work for WPAs. Building on Denny’s discussion of identity politics in writing centers in Facing the Center and on Elizabeth Vander Lei and Lauren Fitzgerald’s consideration of religious faith in relation to writing programs, we focus on belief as a key feature of social identity in writing center work at both secular and religious institutions.

Like Vander Lei and Fitzgerald, we believe that to “administer writing programs without acknowledging the rhetorical force of religious belief is to ignore the personal commitments that compel some students and instructors to engage in scholarly inquiry” (189). Yet we see that belief transcends personal motivation because it shapes our identities as community members who may be reluctant to communicate about differences. In the argument we offer, we attempt to resist binary thinking, revisiting and revising our understanding of Sharon Crowley’s Toward a Civil Discourse and the dialogic impasse she describes as existing between believers and nonbelievers.3 We do so to invite possibilities for nuanced interactions between

7! ! extremely critical of the Catholic Church for its oppressive rhetorics and actions. In this section, I describe silence, which Cheryl Glenn theorizes in Unspoken, in relation to conversations about or dialogic impasses involving religion—impasses of the sort that Crowley describes. I do so with the goal of exploring why dialogue about religion fails in our writing centers and programs. I also do so with the goal of beginning the process of imagining heretofore unrealized roles for writing center directors and WPAs at similar institutions who find themselves involved in silences that they wish were moments of productive interfaith dialogue. In other words, I do so with the goal of exploring possibilities for dialogue about faith and faithlessness.

The first story I tell is of an experience I had talking privately with a colleague when I worked as the writing center director at a major public institution. At this institution, sentiments on campus were largely secular, as secularism and atheism are so often aligned with intellectualism.4 I was new at my institution and this colleague, who identifies as gay, was trying to show me the ropes. They are a fierce intellectual who ascribes to progressive political views that I wholly share, they are well liked, and they have a dominant personality. When they invited me to their office, it was so they could tell me privately about different colleagues, and they mentioned a certain colleague of ours who was really quite wonderful “even though she’s a Christian.” She’s not that kind of an evangelical, the colleague with whom I was speaking explained. I must’ve smiled a polite smile because I was new and didn’t want to make waves. I said nothing about the peculiar feeling that their proclamation left me with because I’m a Christian of a sort, too—even though I apparently pass as secular because of my politics.

The second story I tell is about a similar sort of silence that resulted in my first year working in a different job at a public college. An alumnus of color from our institution was interested in starting an online writing center, and he came to my office with the director of the Learning Center at the time, an older white woman, to talk about his ideas. As our meeting wound down, the former student wanted to make a bit of small talk, so he asked me about my research. I told him about my book project on religion in American fiction since 9/11 and he asked me if I was religious. I told him the peculiar reality of my faith and he looked interested in my answer. And then he asked me if I was writing about Muslims. I said of course, and then he noted that he identifies as a “cultural Muslim.” This religious identification interested me because it spoke to my own liminal religious identity—and because I want to have conversations with believers about faith.

Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Centers and Programs • believers of different faiths and levels of observance and to invite possibilities for more diverse representations of faithlessness.

We structure our article with an eye toward silence on the subject of faith as a starting point past which the field of writing center studies and WPAs must move. In section one, we locate ourselves in writing center work and theorize the rhetorical silences that result between fundamentalists, liberal non-believers, and believers of different kinds, complicating these silences by recognizing their intersection with racial and sexual identity. In section two, we acknowledge the tendency that we as WPAs might feel toward academic neutrality, blurring the distinction between alliance and complicity. In section three, we define tutor and administrator talk as enacting revisionary rhetorics and imagine rhetorical possibilities within silence and dialogue. Ultimately, each of our sections encourages “counterfundamentalist work” (Naydan 15), meaning, in this context, not work that excludes the voices of fundamentalists as members of academic and writingcentered communities, but work that avoids the closed-mindedness of literalist reading in which fundamentalists engage.

As we see it, counterfundamentalist work avoids a fundamentalist methodology because it involves open-minded and inclusive ways of reading and talking about writingcentered experiences involving religious faith and secularism in their different forms and lived experiences. By interweaving theoretical perspectives, research, and personal narratives involving our WPA work, we argue that writing center administrators must do the same. They must create conditions for writing center inhabitants to recognize that “most of the major disagreements that currently circulate in American political discourse arise from conflicts between liberal and apocalyptist approaches to argument” (Crowley 23). In turn, writing center administrators must teach consultants to facilitate meaningful interfaith dialogue through thoughtful mentoring and professional development to transcend dialogic impasses about religion of the sort that Crowley describes.

Faith and Silence at Work In my former position as a writing center director at a major public university and in my current position as a writing program administrator at a small public college, I (Liliana, or Lila for short) have often found myself involved in unsettling moments of silence that supplant potential moments of dialogue about faith or lack thereof, an important subject for me personally because I study faith and because I am a person of faith: a Ukrainian Catholic by upbringing who is

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8! ! under scrutiny. In the first exchange I mention, I worry that my silence indicated a tacit agreement that religious believers in the academy are a problem and that secularism or atheism are somehow preferable to belief. And I worry that my silence suggested that I see faith and homosexuality as incompatible when they’re potentially compatible without problems that organized religion creates. In the second exchange I mention, I worry that my silence allowed the older white woman’s interpretation of the alumnus of color’s sense of his beliefs to cover over his own articulation of his own faith. I worry that I should have helped to make space for that alumnus to speak when someone else talked over his identity. And then, of course, when I think about what I might have said but didn’t say, I think that maybe it wasn’t my place to speak after all.

But then I find myself back in the midst of the memory of the silence that unsettled me in the first place. I find myself pondering the power dynamics in these situations and considering Glenn’s observation that “[j]ust like speech, silence can deploy power; it can defer power. It all depends” (15).

Years later, I still have no clear sense of what should have happened, what if anything I should have done differently. I have no clear sense of how to talk about faith at work when the conversation gets personal, and it’s arguably always personal. But what feels clear to me is that many academics—even those like me who study faith—feel cautious in moments such as these when the subject arises. Academic believers of different kinds perhaps, too, view faith as unprofessional even though there never exists a way to check identity or some aspect of identity at the door of the academy. This sense of faith as unprofessional— the sense that to be professional or polite, one ought not talk about religion—is perhaps most prevalent at public institutions even though most Americans are believers of some kind. Indeed, eighty-seven percent of respondents to the Gallup International Millennium Survey identified themselves as “followers of some religion” and nearly two-thirds viewed God as “very important” in their personal lives (Carballo).

What feels clear to me, too, is that conversations about faith—especially those that happen among believers of different kinds—are important to have, even though I, like others, clearly have yet to master the art of having them across rhetorical situations. I have now, however, at least started the thorny process of having them in my role as a WPA. I now talk with one colleague who continually contemplates leaving the profession for a life of service that more directly involves her Catholic faith. She tells me there are few academics with whom she can talk about her situation, and so our conversations remain in the metaphorical

Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Centers and Programs • Even though I study faith, these conversations are hard to come by. I was about to speak—to ask him what being a cultural Muslim means to him—but the director piped up first. She said that she wasn’t sure what a cultural Muslim is. And then she asked this alumnus whether he had meant to say that he was a “secular Muslim.” She had heard of secular Jews and assumed that Muslims of the sort that this student was claiming himself to be must be akin to them. The student said yes. He said that one might describe his beliefs in that way. And then he quickly changed the topic away from religion. I felt uncomfortable about the exchange and no one in the room spoke about it again, so I unfortunately don’t know if others felt uncomfortable about it, too. I especially worry that the cultural Muslim in the room felt uncomfortable about it.

In reflecting now on these exchanges, I see, first, that they speak to the notion that there exists a dialogic impasse not only between fundamentalist believers and liberal non-believers, as Crowley suggests, but between believers of non-fundamentalist varieties and between non-believers and believers of different kinds. Second, both of these exchanges show that faith and faithlessness exist in intersection with other features of social identity such as sexuality and race, and so these intersections inform in profound ways the dialogic impasses that manifest in conversation. Third, both of these exchanges reveal that faith exists often as invisible and necessitates articulation. And, finally, both of these exchanges involve noteworthy silences that I helped to create—silences that unsettle me now and that prompt me to explore why they occurred. As Glenn suggests, “[l]ike the zero in mathematics, silence is an absence with a function, and a rhetorical one at that” (4), especially because of expectations that Westerners have of conversation. As Glenn explains, “Ideally, there should be no gaps and no overlaps, no competition for speaking, no worries about silences” (6). And in the instances I describe, there were noteworthy gaps—unexpected by me because I see myself as someone who is capable of talking about faith effectively, but perhaps not quite so well when I’m at work as a WPA at a secular institution. Too much may well be on the line in the back of my mind to have an open dialogue about faith.

According to Glenn, “unexpected silences unsettle us, often making us anxious about the specific meaning”—even when these unexpected silences are our own (11). And the unexpected silences I crafted unsettle me because I think they supplanted important albeit non-existent utterances and because they manifested to maintain or regain some degree of comfort for me instead of social justice for the believer

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9! ! feminist, I find my inability to talk about why I choose to remain a Catholic, despite my deep misgivings with the Catholic Church, to be problematic. Similar to my own hesitation with terms like “brave space,” I cannot seem to simply say “I’m a Catholic” and “I’m a feminist.”

Both labels sound wrong and uncomplicated, both lead to a reductive way of thinking. In my work as a writing center director and as a feminist scholar (and again, I’m finding it difficult to separate the two labels), I find myself returning to Crowley’s Toward a Civil Discourse and Donna Harraway’s concept of “bag-lady storytelling.” To me, these works written by women interested in real dialogue refuse to fall into the binary trap and rather ask us to complicate our understandings of the world in which we live. Crowley, in her once again very timely work on religious fundamentalism, asks us to return to rhetoric in our conversations about religion: “Well-prepared rhetors can find openings that can help participants to conceive of themselves and their relations to events in new ways. To my mind this is at the very least an improvement over the current ideological impasse, to which Americans typically respond with anger or silence” (23). These works help me in thinking about faith and religion and ways they intersect with the writing center, with my work, with my personal life. In keeping with Harraway, I proceed to tell two stories on religion and faith in the writing center and explore ways these experiences can turn to productive dialogue through the work of these scholars.

I earned my doctorate at a Catholic institution and spent most of my time in the writing center.

Consultants often came to me when they had difficult experiences in the center. One particular consultant came to me frequently, and we grew close. In many ways, we were similar: both of us grew up Catholic, white and middle class, always questioning certain values and traditions that were forced on us, and later on, found solace in feminist readings and scholarship as we sought to navigate ourselves in this world.

Interestingly enough, as I reflect on this memory and my friendship with this consultant, we never discussed how the two different aspects of our identities intersected (if they ever did) or our own reconciliations with the two, often conflicting, ideologies. However, this consultant approached me one afternoon to discuss a difficult conversation she had not with a writer but with a colleague, a peer. In this conversation, she told me, she felt attacked for her Catholicism by her fellow tutor, and worse, she felt “dumb,” as she couldn’t adequately justify her own positioning, and agreed with the tutor’s critique of the Catholic Church.

They were discussing the March for Life event that our

Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Centers and Programs • closet that email through our personal email accounts provides to protect her privacy. Likewise, I have talked with a former colleague about how he lost his job for criticism over a mention he made in his academic book about his belief in God. Most notably, however, I appreciate a conversation I had with two colleagues of different faiths—one a Protestant and the other a Muslim—about how faith motivates us in our work.

And finding a place for faith at work in the academic, writing-centered workplace is at the heart of what I’m writing about here. Certainly, there exists the faith among Catholics that personal goodness comes from work as opposed to faith alone. And Protestants, too, have a work ethic that distinguishes them despite the fact that they historically distinguished themselves through the doctrine of sole fides. This Protestant work ethic gives shape to the American Dream that immigrants to the U.S. in particular idealize. Finally, Muslims see faith as a motivation for good work as well, especially if they focus on work as it leads to adherence to the third pillar of faith, zakat, which involves sharing the fruits of one’s labor with those in need.

Certainly, there exist anxieties involving belief and there exist stories involving lost jobs that show that faith is always already political and not solely personal.

Faith is polarizing as it intersects with other features of our identities and because of our tacit or overt sense of that reality, we perhaps prefer silence to talking about faith. But by finding ways to move beyond the kinds of silences that I have described here, by finding ways to engage in dialogue about belief or interfaith dialogue, we might find other commonalities among believers and nonbelievers of different kinds. And surely we’ll find rifts as well—the sorts of impasses that Crowley discusses. But we’ll not know what we might find if we continue to say nothing.

Bag-lady Storytelling of Faith and Religion in the Writing Center Recently, staff in my writing center have been interrogating the terms “safe space” and “brave space” when discussing our work, particularly in identity politics and intersectional work. While my staff and I (Anna) have had productive conversations on gender and sexuality, and we’re slowly starting to have critical conversations on race, I have found that discussions on religion and faith have led to unproductive outbursts and silences of the sort Lila explores. In sessions with writers, I, too, have witnessed a lack of dialogue in discussing religion: this is what my faith dictates, this is how I respond. In my own personal and complicated relationship with faith, as a Catholic and a

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Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Centers and Programs • 10! ! school was promoting, both having problems with this pedagogy, for feminism in the writing center. In a march and the way the institution was framing a “proconservative public institution, in which a more life” movement, yet this conversation then grew larger, conservative Christian and often Evangelical rhetoric more unwieldy, as conversations do, and the two began dominates, the writing center can be seen as a “brave arguing over Catholicism in general. The tutor with space.” Trump was elected president my first year and whom she was fighting defined himself as a “cultural we mourned. During a staff meeting shortly after, we Jew” and had some very difficult experiences being a discussed microagressions in the writing center. An student in a Vincentian Catholic institution. The young undergraduate consultant, our one very conservative woman did not know how she could both affirm the and Christian tutor, proclaimed at a staff meeting that experiences that her tutor (and friend) experienced as a he had recently been reading more scholarship on Jewish member of a relatively conservative Catholic writing center work and that he finds the scholarship institution while “defending” (her word) her faith. to be anti-Christian, anti-white male. A graduate What I should have done—what I wished I had student, in response to this claim, immediately shouted, done—was use this moment to build on a difficult but “Fuck Donald Trump!” In attempts to create a brave necessary conversation with the staff on faith in the space, I facilitated a dialogue on why the writing center. This was an opportunity to explore with undergraduate’s statement was problematic and racist; the tutors what it means to work in a conservative on how simplistic his reading of the scholarship was Catholic institution and the daily negotiations and even and the ways in which we live in a white, heterosexist, sufferings we all experienced because of religion and capitalist and patriarchal culture. These are all things faith. that I absolutely believe in and the staff chimed in What I did instead: I resorted to the still dominant beautifully in response to this one, lone consultant. He trope of “academic neutrality” and focused more on was silenced in the conversation. the importance of building a community in the center, In reflection, I am not happy with my response to despite differences, and the importance of professional the student. In my attempt to make the writing center a discourse during these moments. What would happen site of activism and socially just thinking, I refused to if nearby writers, waiting for their tutors, heard this allow for openings and disagreements from consultants religious debate? Did this debate appropriately reflect with differing viewpoints and instead created a space in our work as tutors, did religion have a space in our which intimidation and incivility dominated (Crowley). academic setting? In my concern with making the In what ways did I fall into a binary logic of writing center a “safe space” for all, I cut off this guilt/blame as I so desperately (and earnestly) tried to dialogue in fear of offending. And I did it all too easily, create a “brave space”? In what ways did I refuse to as I advocated for having difficult conversations in the understand how this young man, a Christian who grew center on gender and race, and I think this was because up in rural Oklahoma, surrounded by people who have the topic was religion and faith. felt neglected by the government for many years, might Flash forward to my current position: I am now a respond to the work that we’re trying to do? In what director of a large writing center at a public university ways did I solely judge his intent—which I still find to in rural Oklahoma. Although I work at a public be wrong—and not the historically situated discourse institution, I have found faith and religion to be that undoubtedly swirls around his head. And in what perhaps even more dominant in this space than they ways did my action only create more accusation and ever were at my Catholic institution. Faculty defensiveness—creating a status quo of “us versus orientation emphasized how important faith is in our them.” Again, what if I were, instead, to draw on the students’ lives, and that we should be wary of certain work of Crowley and use them in an attempt to create conversations and behaviors that can easily offend a productive dialogue, one of true understanding. In students. Similar to my Catholic upbringing, the this particular context, religion would be an emphasis on the female’s body is all too present in appropriate starting place to discuss identity and conversations about classroom management. Students intersectionality in our work, and yet was neglectful of, here might be more quick to be upset about the way a as I refused to see anything productive coming from professor dresses—to think about what it means to the conservative evangelical rhetoric that was look professional in the classroom. During our oppressing to me, in so many ways. orientation, the facilitator made a joke about cleavage.

These two experiences, and revisiting and In the writing center, I find solace in the reflecting on work done by Crowley, bring me to conversations we have: we celebrate pushing back on where I am now and my interest in religion and faith in narratives of professionalism and academic neutrality. writing center professional / WPA work. As I continue We advocate for linguistic diversity, for antiracist to try and resist the real temptation of binary thinking Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 3 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com!

Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Centers and Programs • 11! ! and easy labels to latch on to, I realize I put forth no with the world and discourses that dominate our clear, linear argument in this retelling of my stories on world. Faith and religion can help us inform our work faith and its intersections with writing center work. in more meaningful ways if we allow ourselves to be in Rather, I ask that we—as writing center professionals, spaces that might not have names or narratives; in fact, WPAs, and scholars—start reflecting more and allow a critical examination of faith and religion could just let for stories and experiences to create an ongoing us get to that place. dialogue that is not happening in our field, not happening in our society. If we are to allow ourselves Revisionary Rhetorics and Writing Center to talk openly, perhaps we will begin seeing why and Administration how we continue to separate religion and faith from Anna’s turn to Harraway’s call for stories that our work in the academy. Too often, I find, do religion contain “continuations, interruptions, and and faith become dominated by white men, both in reformulations” is an apt response to the silences that society and in the field of writing studies,5 creating Lila reflects on in her writing center experiences. In narratives out of religion and faith for others. If we’re Julie Jung’s terms from her work Revisionary Rhetoric, to accept that religions have commonalities, we can Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts, Anna and Lila certainly see that good will and love are the dominating enact the kinds of listening and reflection that “attend ideas, and perhaps it is not religion or faith that is to the silences” of their spaces (34). In her discussion problematic but the way that they have been read and of revisionary rhetorics, Jung identifies two rhetorical narrated for us. This turns me again to a woman strategies—metadiscursive commentary and scholar (and queer feminist thinker), Donna Harraway, intertextuality—“that enable rhetors to give form to and her work on bag-lady storytelling. According to paradox as their writing both makes itself heard as it Harraway, bag-lady storytelling puts “unexpected listens” (30). Extending these rhetorical moves beyond partners and irreducible details into a frayed, porous written texts, revisionary rhetors employ carrier bag” (160). And as Harraway continues, “The metadiscursive commentary and intertextuality to stories do not have beginnings or ends; they have communicate their purpose, while creating spaces to continuations, interruptions, and reformulations—just listen and invite their audience’s response. Jung’s the kind of survivable stories we need these days” foundation for her theorizing of revisionary rhetorics is (160). If we are to attempt to create a more socially just that knowledge is partial within any rhetorical situation: future, and incorporate this work in our writing spaces, “By marking their texts as partial versions of some we need to begin reformulating the powerful narratives unknowable and revisable whole, revisionary rhetors that are so dominant in our everyday discourses. create gaps that invite readers to speak back” (30).

Religion is one extremely powerful discourse and it Jung’s theory of revisionary rhetorics is useful when we has, for far too long, been removed from work focused consider tutor-talk, specifically in terms of tutors’ on identity and intersectionality. As Crowley writes, communication with writing center administrators. In “arguments from complexity or nuance suggest only Jung’s terms, revisionary rhetors “sustain revision by that those who make them are confused” (147). And as situating meaning within layered and multiple she continues, “In ethical terms a refusal of ambiguity contexts” (33). Writing center administrators, and complexity allows no space for negotiation, no way particularly in terms of negotiating religious identity, to generate alternatives or gradations” (147). Rather engage in such revisionary practices in many rhetorical than reduce our work to labels and names that create situations involving tutors and colleagues. Indeed, Lila, simplistic thinking, let us turn to Harraway’s call for Anna, and I (Andrea) in all of our writing center stories without beginning or ends. To complicate this experiences, reflect such repositioning of our own call for stories, Crowley discusses the problems with sense of our audiences and ourselves in our centers, single-mindedness, particularly in religious rhetoric and offices, and larger institutions. how it privileges hegemonic structures: “the singleI use Jung’s notion of revisionary rhetorics to read mindedness that accrues to isolation and privilege” interactions I had with one tutor over the period of a (194). As she continues, “those of us who want change semester. These conversations reflect metadiscursive should challenge privilege and isolation in whatever commentary and intertextuality to reveal some of the ways we can find or invent” (194). To challenge the work I, one writing center administrator, did with one privileging of religious rhetoric, let’s put works we tutor, whom I identify as R., enacting revisionary normally wouldn’t put together in conversation with rhetorics together. While revisionary rhetorics serve as one another. Instead of creating straightforward a useful lens in any writing center, religious identity is arguments from rational thinking, let’s complicate our particularly relevant within the following interactions arguments as we interrogate our everyday interactions Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 3 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com!

Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Centers and Programs • 12! ! because of the Modern Jewish Orthodox institutional teach in a [Jewish] day school, I know I’m going to be context where these interactions took place. I asked to teach things that I find controversial.” She documented my conversations with R. during the told me that certain opinions she had would be semester when I was finishing my own graduate frowned upon in the Orthodox community, especially coursework and moving toward writing my dissertation coming from a teacher in an Orthodox Jewish day proposal. At that time, I was the associate director of a school. I asked what she considered controversial, and writing center at the all-women’s undergraduate after a long pause, said, “ummm, it’s hard to think of a campus of a Jewish university in New York City. The specific example.” university’s two single-sex, undergraduate campuses are Capturing this brief moment of conversation on its distinctly influenced by the institution’s Modern Jewish own may represent the kinds of talk that many Orthodox mission statement. As an Eastern Orthodox administrators have with tutors nearing graduation and Christian woman working in a Jewish Orthodox thinking about their careers beyond the writing center, women’s space, I spent eight years of my daily work but this moment lingered with me for what I felt R. life working alongside undergraduate women whose and I left unsaid. Once our conversation ended, I had beliefs differed from my own and who also taught me the sense that there was much more here that R. could how intimately religion, gender, and education are have shared but didn’t. This clearly subjective feeling related within their institutional and religious traditions. led me to consider my own silence, quieting the voice These early years in my own WPA career offered me a in me that said R. is progressive, that she was identifying framework for studying institutional mission— a kind of conservative strand in Jewish Orthodox particularly in a religiously-driven institution—and its thinking. I recognized that I defaulted to these role in rhetorical education, which I ultimately binaries—progressive and conservative—that always documented using qualitative research methods for my failed in forwarding my thinking as a writing center dissertation. The interactions I document here are administrator, and failed even more glaringly at a taken from my personal notes leading up to my single-sex, religious campus. This voice in my head— dissertation research on writing center tutors’ civic the negotiation between what I thought I knew about engagement; these are samples of only a few identity categories and the awareness that those conversations I ended up coming back to with R., who categories are partial, misinformed, even flawed—is an was one participant in later research. I return to these example of the kind of metadiscursive commentary interactions here to read through the lens of that Jung encourages in her writing classrooms. A revisionary rhetorical theory. revisionary rhetor’s authority is predicated on accepting Tutors and WPAs employ metadiscursive that knowledge is partial. Revisionary rhetors’ texts— commentary often in their interactions with each other. and here I take “text” to mean any tutor-talk—invites Understanding my interactions with R. through the audience perspective, deliberately making space for the lens of metadiscursive commentary demonstrates an listener to hear the rhetor, but also to bring the example of a silence that invited me into R.’s story of listener’s own experience into the rhetorical situation. negotiating her religious identity. One afternoon, R. In Jung’s terms, metadiscursive commentary is came into my office toward the end of her writing closely related to intertextuality as a tenet of revisionary center shift and asked me how she was supposed to rhetorics. While literature scholars are no strangers to teach a Jewish text that she fundamentally does not intertextuality, this idea may seem out of place in agree with or cannot take an acceptable position on. theorizing writing center interactions. Yet my time While I am not a Jewish Studies scholar, I am working as a WPA at a writing center on a religious influenced by Lauren Fitzgerald’s work connecting campus demonstrates that intertextuality offers a Jewish religious education to the kinds of collaborative productive way to understand tutor-talk. In her practices familiar in writing centers; yet much of what I downtime between tutoring sessions later that know about Orthodox Judaism I learned as a sort of semester, R. and I started talking about the reading lists apprentice to the observant Jewish tutors within this I had begun compiling for my dissertation proposal. I discourse community, and with whom I worked during had been thinking about how gender and religion my years as a WPA at the Beren Writing Center.6 As a intersect in the space of the writing center, and I asked non-Jewish person working in a predominantly Jewish R. to teach me about the tradition of married women space, I asked R. for an example of what an in Jewish Orthodoxy covering their hair. She told me a “acceptable” position might be, but she didn’t quite story from a religious text about a married woman who answer that question. Instead, she responded by had been accused of adultery—“only accused, not found projecting ahead, after graduation, envisioning herself guilty of, adultery,” R. emphasized—and who was walking in her anticipated career as a Jewish educator: “When I through the marketplace with her hair uncovered.

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Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Centers and Programs • 13! !

According to R., and to my potentially flawed memory, not scholars and theorists pay any attention to it and it is from this story that some rabbinical commentators whether or not practitioners know that they are, derive the Jewish law for women covering their hair indeed, engaging in rhetoric” (28). To be sure, writing once they are married; for in an effort not to fall into center tutors and administrators are constantly the category of adulteress, women began covering their engaging in rhetoric, developing our own agentic tools hair. R. also noted that there is a notion in Orthodoxy and refining ways of responding to each other across that a married woman’s natural hair is considered difference and shared identity, whether or not we “naked,” therefore only permissible to be seen by that realize it on a daily basis. As a rhetorical space, one that woman’s husband. While R. doesn’t revise religious text is constantly alive with diverse rhetors, exigencies, to explain the Jewish Orthodox practice of a woman constraints, and identities, writing centers are well covering her hair, she (or perhaps we) invited religious positioned to counterfundamentalist work, even as we texts into the space of the writing center. This may may be invited into seemingly fundamentalist seem like a superficial way to think about frameworks. Jung’s rhetorical strategies offered me a intertextuality; however, the real intertextual moment lens to identify the way my own thinking had been here is in how this interaction between R. and me influenced by a particular fundamentalism, one that invites “juxtaposing [one text] with other kinds of made me default towards binary categories, but also contingent texts” (Jung 31). R.’s own experience helped me think beyond such categories, developing covering her hair as a married Jewish woman both dialogue with one tutor, and with myself, that I deviates from and intersects with my experience, as a continue to aspire toward. married Christian woman, learning about a cultural tradition that is not my own. Our individual narratives Beyond Conclusions: Implications for were both divergent and parallel. To consider talk in Future Conversations about Faith the center in terms of generating narrative oral texts— We as the authors of this essay produce close such as the those R. and I shared—we can understand readings of unsettling situations in our writing center tutors and WPAs as revisionary rhetors. work to reflect on what silence and talk about religion Perhaps the most relevant contribution revisionary might mean. We reflect on binary ways of thinking that rhetorics can have for writing center administrators inform conversations about religion in America, for and writing centers in general is to highlight the ways instance the conservative/progressive binary as it in which our work involves disruption. After R. offered manifests in conversations about the opposition of me a textual explanation of why women in Jewish Catholicism with feminism or traditional Judaism with Orthodoxy cover their hair, I told her that I couldn’t feminism. And we try to create through our help but think that these traditions uphold a system scholarship the sort of brave space that Anna mentions where men dictate the constraints by which women in her narrative—a space that necessitates nonlive. She smiled, laughed a little, and said, “Andrea, it’s binarizing, open-minded, and nonliteralist ways of a patriarchal religion, we’ve got to get over that.” She reading writing-centered experiences: then reinforced an idea that she had mentioned to me counterfundamentalist methodologies that open many times before and would come back in later dialogue among fundamentalists and believers and interviews as a participant in my dissertation research: nonbelievers of all kinds and that thereby respond to that upholding her commitment to community is at the Vander Lei and Fitzgerald’s call for engaging “the core of her religious practice. R. explained that she conflicts that come with addressing religious belief in constantly made choices in her daily life to maintain writing programs” (192). We must embrace that there some traditions and push back against others. As a is no one easy or right way to read an experience, revisionary rhetor, R. disrupted my reading of her dialogue, or silence involving faith in writing center religious tradition, one that motivated me to insist on a work. Instead, the nuances of these experiences and gendered way of reading when she herself was reading the changing feelings that these experiences produce communally, and constantly negotiating and blurring point to the value of having changing perspectives. gender categories that I was viewing as static. These There is value in understanding writing centers as disruptions create or strengthen relationships, and spaces that call for trust (and allowances for silence, disrupting hierarchical binaries—tutor / admin, teacher storytelling, and revisions) in the face of uncertainty / student, private / public—is one of the hallmarks of and there is value in having unanswered questions that writing center work and of revisionary rhetorical can lead to productive dialogue and understanding strategies. about religious and secular Others to ourselves.

In Toward a Civil Discourse, Crowley reminds us that “the practice of rhetoric continues apace whether or Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 3 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com!

Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Centers and Programs • 14! !

The unanswered questions with which we started faith. Those would mirror the sort of narrow thinking this project—about the role that religion plays in tutor that fundamentalism produces to unproductive ends. education, writing spaces, and conversations about Instead, we hope our readers see the different stories writing—led us to share our stories and experiences we put forth and the theories we come into involving faith. Although we knew when we began conversation with as a useful method and as just a talking and writing that religion informed our work beginning to a much-needed dialogue. In turn, of despite our different institutions, we learned a great course, we hope our readers join into multivocal deal from conversation and from writing. We learned interfaith dialogue about faith in the writing center to about our own identities and we began wondering see how these conversations can develop in our writing about how being white, Christian-affiliated women centers and programs. affected our own understandings of religion in the center and perhaps even played a role in silencing us.

In the stories we share in this work, we explore our Notes own positionalities and embrace disruptions. And we hope that readers will take away from this article the 1. A 2014 Pew Research Center Survey finds that US need to have more open dialogue with staff on “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along religious identity because religious rhetoric always finds ideological lines . . . than at any point in the last two a way into our centers, no matter how secular the space decades” (“Political Polarization in the American or its inhabitants may seem. Indeed, as Crowley Public”). suggests, religious rhetoric is at the center of our 2. There is extensive scholarship on religion and conversations on civic-mindedness and democracy. writing studies by scholars such as Jeffrey Ringer, Paul And we are currently living in uncertain times in which Lynch, Michael de Palma. Also, Cheryl Glenn and some staunchly fundamentalist rhetorical Krista Ratcliffe have written on women and religious approaches—approaches that inhibit dialogue across rhetoric. difference because they seek to erase difference—may 3. We are aware of the criticisms Toward A Civil stifle democracy and civic-mindedness.

Discourse received and find Beth Daniell’s “Whetstones Moreover, democracy and civic-mindedness exist Provided by the World: Trying to Deal with Difference as possibly unattainable ends that we strive toward in a Pluralistic Society” and David Timmerman’s through thorny processes, and we suggest here that review of her work to be particularly compelling in these thorny processes are perhaps more valuable than pointing out Crowley’s problematic use of terms and polished end results might ever be. They involve how it promotes a binary way of thinking and talking strategic engagement with rhetorical approaches and about religion. rhetorical thinking. They involve, as we frame them, 4. See Harvey Graff’s The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities attention to the rhetoric of silence, the rhetoric of bagand Contradictions in Western Culture and Society for a lady storytelling, and revisionary rhetoric—rhetorics discussion of the secularization of literacy practices that invite metadiscursive dialogues that prime that are part and parcel of higher education. audiences to listen to layers of meaning in dialogue.

5. I agree with Helen Sterk who in “Faith, Feminism, According to Jung, revisionary rhetorics rely on and Scholarship: The Journal of Communication and teaching and revising through the use of multigenre Religion, 1999-2009,” claims more work needs to be texts—texts that speak to the kind of work that our done on faith, feminism, and intersectional work. This voices together produced here and that voices in is specifically important and somewhat lacking in conversation with one another in general have the writing program/center scholarship. capacity to produce. Whereas our individual sections 6. Much of our field’s work understands religion are not written in different genres per se, taken exclusively within Christian traditions even though together, they create a multivocal picture of religious some scholarship has expanded writing studies’ faith in the writing center. They add layers of context consideration of religious identity to include Jewish and meaning about religious identity in writing centers rhetorical traditions, e.g. Andrea Greenbaum and and writing program administration. And they perform Deborah Holdstein’s Judaic Perspectives in Rhetoric and the kind of metadiscursitvity that revisionary rhetorics Composition and the Special Issue of College English, vol. enact by attending not only to the silences in our local 72, no. 6 (2010), dedicated to Jewish rhetorics. contexts but to the silences and disruptions between each other's work. Ultimately, in offering a picture of this multivocal reality, we deliberately opt against offering singular prescriptions for staff education on Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 3 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com!

Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue in Writing Centers and Programs • 15! !

Works Cited Lecourt, Donna. Identity Matters: Schooling the Student Body in Academic Discourse. SUNY P, 2006.

Balester, Valerie, and James C. McDonald. “A View of Lynch, Paul, and Matthew Miller. “Twenty-Five Years Status and Working Conditions: Relations Between of Faith in Writing: Religion and Composition, Writing Program and Writing Center Directors.”

1992-2017.” Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 24, no. 3, Society. vol. 6, no. 2, 2017, pp. 1-195.

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McCammon, Sarah and Amita Kelly. “‘You Love Carballo, Marita. “Religion in the World at the End of Every Child’: President Trump Addresses March the Millennium.” Gallup International Association, 1 for Life.” NPR. WBUR. 19 Jan. 2018.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16 No 3 (2019)

CULTIVATING GRADUATE WRITING GROUPS AS COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE: A CALL TO ACTION FOR THE WRITING CENTER Tiffany Kinney Colorado Mesa University tkinney@coloradomesa.edu

Julie Snyder-Yuly Marshall University snyderyuly@marshall.edu

Abstract According to the Council of Graduate Schools, the attrition rate for graduate students is high and becomes higher when looking at underrepresented populations inside the academy. One particular need that has been identified is that of writing support for doctoral students (Kamler and Thomson xi; Mullen 117; Paltridge and Starfield 53). This article builds on this call by giving attention to writing support for graduate students in the form of doctoral writing groups, specifically facilitated by writing centers. These graduate student-writing groups are comprised of graduate students, who share their writing and give feedback on writing inperson during regular group meetings. As such, these graduate writing groups function as a community of practice through which we trace the struggles, benefits, and implications of writing groups for ameliorating access and equity issues in graduate writing support. This article focuses on experiences of the authors’ own writing group, in which they have participated throughout their doctoral education. We employ an inductive, multi-narrative approach to examine the underlying needs of graduate student writers and we suggest facilitating a writing group as a way to meet those needs. As such, this project sheds new light on the successes and struggles of a graduate student writing group and how writing centers can provide support for these groups. As a type of “third space,” operating apart from faculty purview, the writing center is an ideal place to formalize, organize, and invigorate graduate writing communities by initiating and hosting graduate writing groups.

Much discussion has taken place on the role of writing centers and writing groups in higher education for faculty (Page-Adams, et al. 403; Aitchison “Learning Together to Publish” 83, “Writing Groups for Doctoral Education” 914; and Geller 9); however, there remains little literature from the lived experience of doctoral students involved in any such writing groups (D. Maher et al. 263). Scholars call for more attention to graduate education, particularly writing support for doctoral students (Kamler and Thomson 8; Mullen 118; Paltridge and Starfield 53). As such, writing studies scholars have ignited an interest in graduate writing groups (Geller 16; Garcia, Eum, and Watt 265; Fraser and Little 75). The authors of this article contribute to this line of research as they were part of a student-created and student-run doctoral writing group developed to supplement the existing forms of writing support provided to graduate students. This research departs from previous interdisciplinary research, in that it explores a

Sumiko Martinez University of Utah sumiko.martinez@utah.edu

disciplinary writing group where graduate students from related disciplines come together to read and respond to writing as disciplinary professionals/experts. This article also departs from the work above in that it strictly considers forming graduate writing groups as a response to the isolation experienced in graduate school and it suggests that writing centers can serve an integral role in helping graduate students build these communities of practice.

As some of the founding members of this group, we are sharing our experiences to benefit other graduate students and to provide insight into how writing centers could better assist students in the writing process. In response to Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, we argue that the practice of de-centering the writing center ought to include discipline-specific, graduate student writing groups and we provide some specific suggestions as to how writing centers can better work with graduate students (8).

This call to writing centers is expressly important because research has shown that insufficient attention is given to doctoral writing, yet graduate students, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, are expected to engage in substantial writing throughout their programs (Rose and McClafferty 27; “Learning Together to Publish” 95; Mullen 118; Kamler and Thomson xi). As Damien Maher et al. note, universities help students develop their research skills, yet fail when it comes to initiating them into written disciplinary literacies (264). This omission, coupled with many universities’ failure to provide academic writing guidance at the graduate level, leaves students ill-prepared to engage with their intellectual communities, especially since establishing a publishing record is needed to get or keep an academic position (Mullen 120). The lack of attention given to the process of writing not only continues to obfuscate the writing process, but presents challenges to those seeking writing support (Ferguson 286).

Help acquiring the conventions of graduate writing can normally be found by seeking out faculty assistance, taking writing courses, or utilizing campus writing centers. However, each of these options is not

without problems. Although faculty are often helpful, their time is limited, some of them struggle with their own writing, and their expectations for writing in the classroom differs from publication. Additionally, we have found throughout most of our coursework, faculty rarely provide opportunities for graduate students to share written work in their courses. When we have shared, it has been via end-of-semester presentations, leaving relatively limited time to engage our peers regarding each other’s work. While writing for publication courses have been extremely beneficial for some students, in our own programs they were rare.

Apart from the graduate classroom, we recognize the importance of writing centers in helping graduate students improve their writing. In our own experience, serving as tutors or clients in writing centers, we recognize the value of graduate-serving writing centers.

Our own writing center provides free consultations for graduate and undergraduate students. Through this service, assistance was provided for graduate students to assist with grants, publications, research proposals, reports, and application materials. However, there were restrictions on what could be reasonably achieved in the writing center. Often the appointment times are short, the staff may change by semester or year, and writing consultants outside the client’s field may not be an ideal match. While the authors strongly advocate for writing centers, we also suggest there are other ways writing centers can further assist graduate students, by specifically forming self-directed writing groups.

This essay examines how self-directed graduate writing groups can serve as communities of practice that offer benefits to members well beyond improving writing. In the sections that follow, we provide our own experiences to illustrate how our writing group constitutes a community of practice by helping us become part of an intellectual community, serve as disciplinary and emotional support, develop trust and respect in members, and re-contextualize the writing process from an individual act to a socially embedded scholarly practice (Wenger 2). In the end, these practices can inform writing center administrators aiming to facilitate advanced graduate writing.

Maud May Babcock Doctoral Writing Society In the spring of 2013, an invitation went out from one of our peers inquiring about interest in creating a writing group. Ultimately, nine female students responded to the inquiry and formed the Maud May Babcock Doctoral Writing Society, identifying ourselves with our university’s first female professor in

Cultivating Writing Groups as Communities of Practice • 17! ! order to bring attention to women’s contributions to our institution. No men accepted the invitation or inquired about the writing group. The group was made up of members ranging from more traditionally-aged students in their twenties to returning students in their forties, full-and part-time students, and first-generation students from the Communication Department and Rhetoric and Writing Studies Department.

In an attempt to break through this isolation and to learn more about writing, we forged a community of practice; our identity was based on a common domain of interest, we engaged in joint activities such as peer reviewing and practicing presentations that allowed us to build relationships and learn from each other, and we shared our writing practice and experiences of being graduate students (Geller et al. 7; Wenger 5).

This also provided scholarly benefits in the form of job talks, job document reviews, and preparing to become good colleagues. In establishing this community, one of the most important things we did early on was to agree upon ground rules. First, we decided to limit the membership to eight-to-ten students. This was a manageable number to allow everyone to participate and ensure there would always be enough members present during meetings to provide feedback. We met twice monthly for two hours that included peer review, discussion, and other academic endeavors. Meeting times were negotiated around members’ schedules, ensuring that each member received peer reviews at least once per semester. While there was no specific attendance policy, it became a common expectation that if a member was unable to attend, she notified the group and still provided written reviews to the author.

We also wanted to keep membership closely aligned to our discipline while accommodating a variety of research topics.

As the initial group was all women, we decided to remain an all-female society in order to freely discuss gender issues inside scholarship, our disciplines, and academic institutions. As noted above, our writing group was not intentionally designed as a women-only group, yet only women responded to the initial email query asking for interested participants. Writing groups, in general, are frequently all female, which is further supported by writing studies research. As Virginia Fajt, et al. found, women take advantage of “faculty professional development activities [like writing groups] far more frequently and in greater numbers than do their male colleagues” (172). Brian Baldi, et al. echo Fajt et al. by explaining that in the seven structured writing retreats she studied, “a majority or all of the participants were women” (40).

As members of an all-female writing group, we found the gender composition of our writing group important

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because it was a defining characteristic that we all shared. Furthermore, our experience in writing groups gave us space to counter our gender socialization and develop academic identities imbued with authority.

More specifically, we found that the informal training built into writing groups helps female graduate students counter their gender socialization, as they try on academic personas as experts of their writing and as peer mentors to graduate students earlier in their programs. The closeness experienced in these writing groups also allows women to break through the isolation that often characterizes most students’ experience in graduate school.

While gender socialization maybe the reason women seek out writing groups, it may also be the reason men are underrepresented in writing groups. By joining a writing group, one is conceding that they may need help with their writing and that they will have to humbly share ideas in a collaborative atmosphere. In effect, males joining a writing group, or seeking out any faculty development opportunities, are confronting masculine gender socialization by admitting that they are not the “ideal” of a reclusive, independent writer capable of success without help. As a writing group comprising only women, an unexpected benefit was a feeling of breaking through the isolation often experienced when facing down the daunting conventions of an academic institution on one’s own.

Problems in Graduate Education: Isolation Attrition rates for graduate students are inordinately high with only 56.6% completing degrees within ten years (Council of Graduate Schools). These numbers range greatly from completion rates of less than 50% in the Humanities (the home college of our writing members) to 63.6% in Engineering. The same study found that women doctoral graduates outnumber men in seven out of eleven identified graduate fields and those often with the heaviest writing requirements.

Three primary reasons are given for students dropping out: predisposing characteristics, critical events in students’ lives, and institutional factors (Stoessel, Ihme, Barbarino, Fisseler and Stürmer 229). As previously mentioned, additional reasons for this attrition include feeling isolated and not receiving explicit instruction on advanced academic literacies (Aronson and Swanson 165; Casanave and Vandrick; Gere 3; Aitchison “Learning Together to Publish” 86; Rose and McClaffery 28). Underrepresented populations often face compounding challenges to completing graduate degrees, such as impostor syndrome and infantilization

Cultivating Writing Groups as Communities of Practice • 18! !

(Aronson and Swanson 157; Maher, Fallucca and Halasz 193).

Isolation in graduate school is often attributed to the competitive nature of departments or the design of degree programs expecting students to seclude themselves in order to complete lengthy writing and research projects. Early in their graduate careers, students note that intradepartmental competition leads them to self-isolation to protect their ideas or withhold peer support (Aronson and Swanson 165). Moreover, Therese Ferguson found that this isolation sparks a range of negative emotions that hinder writing, including self-doubt, fear, anxiety, insecurity and lack of motivation (287). Our experiences fall in line with this characterization: it is isolating as one progresses in the program, making it difficult to manage emotions that could lead to attrition. We soon realized we craved social and emotional support in addition to writing support. Not only were we all experiencing isolation and doubt but we were also struggling to understand how to be good scholars and academic peers.

Ironically, we were not alone in feeling isolated.

Scholars of genre and literacy studies find that “institutions, like universities, constrain and enable the writing practices of the individuals who are affiliated with them” (Salem and Follett 54). One of the ways institutions constrain writing practices is through isolation and separation, as many graduate students and faculty working in universities report feeling secluded from others (Fraser and Little 75). Early on in our graduate careers, we felt isolated because the only spaces in which we interacted were in competitive, occasionally hostile seminar rooms, under the faculty’s guidance and frequently judgmental purview. Although we were considered “students” in these spaces, the graduate seminar room is often not the space to act as a student, as one questions and reveals their ignorance at the price of public shaming. And as advanced graduate students, we were isolated by space—as we no longer had the classroom community to fall back on—and time, due to the intense studying required for qualifying exams or drafting dissertations.

Lack of Explicit Instruction Another way that institutions often exacerbate graduate students’ feelings of isolation is by encouraging writing instruction primarily through the use of writing centers. A one-hour meeting with a tutor, who may or may not be familiar with the norms of one’s discipline, does not provide ample opportunities for the type of social support that graduate students may crave. Additionally, a student can visit the writing center on multiple occasions and perhaps see a different tutor every time, preventing the

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kind of close interpersonal relationships that might happen within a writing group. While these forms of writing instruction are necessary in many cases, they are not the only kind of support that graduate students need in order to be successful.

Furthermore, we felt isolated from the learning process and often struggled with becoming socialized into the tacit expectations and academic literacies of our disciplines (“Writing Groups for Doctoral Education” 907). Arguably, one of the primary functions of graduate education is to socialize students into active members of a specific discipline vis-à-vis nuanced and complex research, writing, teaching, and service expectations. As Susan K. Gardner and Pilar Mendoza articulate in Becoming a Scholar: Socialization and Development in Doctoral Education, Socialization, generally defined, is the process through which an individual learns to adopt the values, skills, attitudes, norms, and knowledge needed for membership in a given society, group, or organization. (19) In particular, disciplinary socialization as a doctoral student is the process of learning the unspoken conventions and practices to become an academic in a specific discipline, such as the minutiae of acceptable writing techniques and the preferred methods of making and defending credible knowledge claims.

However, faculty often assumed we already had certain types of disciplinary knowledge and advanced writing skills, which is not always the case with graduate students from diverse socioeconomic and educational backgrounds (Fraser and Littler 75-85). In practice, this assumption about our writing skills meant that we were rarely asked to submit drafts and were not given lessons focused on the disciplinary quirks, expectations, and implicit rules of academic writing— sometimes we were not even given feedback on final drafts apart from a course letter grade or a simple “no.”

As is evident from our experience, explicit instruction seldom occurs from professors to graduate students. Graduate students are frequently tasked with building their own academic and professional identity, which does not always lead to success. Writing studies scholars recognize the need for explicit teaching of academic writing in the graduate curriculum, arguing that even though doctoral students are considered highly literate and not in need of writing instruction, such is not necessarily the case, since they must now prove themselves in a new kind of scholarly literacy (Rose and McClafferty 28; Aitchison “Learning Together to Publish” 87). The struggle to become disciplinary socialized is a stressful one, but writing groups can be a forum in which to safely discuss one’s

Cultivating Writing Groups as Communities of Practice • 19! ! difficulties and exchange knowledge with peers about strategies for enacting such socialization.

As such, writing groups, for both faculty and graduate students, are heralded by writing studies scholars as “an explicit antidote to the isolationism in academic life surrounding writing” (Herald 2005; Grant 2006; cited in Fraser and Little 85). A writing group is explicitly an antidote to isolation as it functions as a coming together of minds to facilitate the “exchange of ideas and opportunities” as well as provides “support and encouragement” for various intellectual projects (Geller 9; Gray and et al. 98). For those nascent to the discipline, writing groups take on an even higher level of importance as they are a space for graduate students to cultivate an academic identity, wherein they try on the identity of disciplinary expert and peer mentor. In fact, peer mentoring “is often cited as one of the primary benefits of graduate writing groups” (Garcia et al. 2604). It seems that by surrounding themselves with others who are actively learning to assert themselves as disciplinary experts, members of the writing group start to identify as disciplinary experts, researchers and writers, too (Banks and Flinchbaugh 237). Moreover, for female graduate students, experiencing oneself as a disciplinary expert is expressly important because we are often haunted by the impostor syndrome: “impostors who cannot actually do the work being asked for and who do not belong” (Garcia et al. 265).

As an antidote, writing groups allow graduate students the opportunity to break through this isolationism, cultivate academic identities, and silence nagging and unfounded doubts about intellectual ability.

Characteristics Groups

of

Productive

Writing

Writing center research notes characteristics that mark writing groups as productive communities of practice: a pervading sense of trust, respect for other members, admiration and generosity when interacting with others and their scholarship, a non-competitive atmosphere of support, and members with the same disciplinary expertise. Although these characteristics are all important in cultivating a productive writing group, trust emerged as the most significant, overarching characteristic in the scholarship (Gere 3; Aitchison “Learning Together to Publish 95;” Maher, Fallucca and Halasz 195). In our group, this trust required members to respect the vulnerability of those who share writings in-progress. Even if the work is in its final form, this trust assumes that members will not critique or share their intellectual work with others outside of the group. As such, this trust created a safe space where students can reveal their insecurities about

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writing and honestly seek help (Aitchison “Learning Together to Publish” 69). As one of our group members observed, “I’ve shared the crappiest drafts with my writing group when I was stuck on an idea, and received incredibly generous and open feedback. I have complete confidence because we all trust each other with our work.”

This trust cultivated in our writing group extended into other, more personal spaces as members sought advice on all matters inside and outside academia.

Michelle Maher et al. share our experience with graduate writing groups as spaces to solve problems both personal and intellectual, finding the “opportunity to speak frankly about [their] concerns and hear them echoed by respected peers has been transformative” (259). Another writing group member said, “When I was preparing for comprehensive exams, I turned to the group’s more advanced students. It was so good to hear about surviving exams from my peers rather than my advisor and committee, and made me feel like I could tackle them, too.” Here, trust allowed for frankness to pierce through isolation and any insecurity graduate students have about their writing or their experience in the program.

Furthermore, the meeting space where the writing group gathered is outside the confines of the traditional classroom and the purview of faculty. As such, it became a place where power dynamics are more equalized and trust prevails. We met in a former interaction/observation lab that is tucked into a secluded corner of a building on campus, equipped with tables, chairs, couches and a chalkboard.

Although our meeting space was in this former observation lab, we argue that writing centers could facilitate this space to host meetings for graduate writing groups, as the writing center is also outside of the traditional classroom and apart from the purview of the faculty. Meeting in a type of third space allows for diffuse power relationships between members in order to promote a non-competitive environment where members may compete for the same fellowships, funding, awards and honors, yet continue to support each other and not sabotage one another’s efforts. Equalizing these dynamics coupled with trust means that there is more attention to learning as a process and to writing as a craft. According to Linda S. Bergman, trust allows for graduate students to craft a “protected space” where “trickster moments’ (moments when ...unexpected learning) [can] occur” (534). Beyond posturing and competitiveness, these “moments” allow for a kind of trickster learning that supports innovative research in generative, extracurricular spaces (Geller et al. 16). Without a sense of trust, Anne Ruggles Gere notes that writing groups

Cultivating Writing Groups as Communities of Practice • 20! ! risk diminished performance and commitment from all their members (104).

In addition, trust facilitates the development of another characteristic that makes writing groups successful—respect for members. In our writing group, this respect was ingrained inside the practice of giving constructive feedback on written work. Claire Aitchison notes that developing respect through feedback is a characteristic of most writing groups: these groups operate on the principle of ‘mutuality’ and ‘community’ [so] group members invest considerable energy in reviewing others’ writing, knowing their efforts will be returned when they submit their writing for peer review.” (“Writing Groups for Doctoral Education” 913) The respect circulating in this space authorizes students to cultivate their own “research voice” in an intellectual setting—both for the student offering feedback and for the student who accepts the feedback and/or chooses to defend their written position. This experience of embodying academic authority is one that members take with them into other spaces where power dynamics are more hierarchical.

Related to trust are admiration for fellow members and willingness to share one’s time and resources generously. As the group developed and members moved into advanced stages of candidacy, we found that members cultivate a sense of admiration for one another and the work they have achieved together. Our group celebrated as our peers achieved important milestones and accolades, including job offers, fellowships, entrance into honors seminars, and publications. Michelle Maher et al. further bolster our characterization of writing groups by describing them as intellectual communities with a shared purpose that is “diverse, multigenerational, flexible, respectful and generous” (194; our italics). Our writing group mirrored this characterization, especially the emphasis on generosity, as we sacrificed time, offered extensive feedback and shared meals together. In a real way, our writing group developed beyond a community of practice to a community of friends and scholars.

Benefits of Community in Writing Groups This section draws heavily on our experiences as members of a doctoral writing group to suggest several benefits reaped by members, specifically: motivation, intellectual and emotional support, continuity of experience, the chance to learn from writers with diverse strengths, and peer mentoring. As Sarah Moore rightly observes, People writing as part of a community of writers are more likely to learn faster about the

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conventions and challenges of writing, to support each other at times of blockage, and to demystify the process of writing by sharing each others’ successes and failures. (Moore 334; cited in Schendel, et al. 145) These scholarly benefits of building community in writing groups are powerful academic tools.

Staying motivated despite the stresses of graduate school is a major struggle for many students. Research suggests that writing groups can increase students’ motivation; Deborah Page-Adams et al. note that writing group members reported increased quality and quantity of scholarly writing and higher motivation (406). This rings true with our experience; knowing that it is your turn to receive feedback from respected peers is powerful motivation to write and/or revise a piece of work in time for the group to read it. As one member explains, When we chose which week we’d like to receive feedback, I purposely asked for times that forced me to write well before the deadline I’m working toward, whether it’s the end of the semester or for something else. The group has almost cured me of my writing procrastination!

Beyond the accountability that a writing group provides, being a part of a social writing community makes writing seem invigorating and enjoyable rather than isolating and dreadful.

Hand-in-hand with the motivation to produce quality writing, we find a tremendous fount of intellectual and emotional support in our writing group. Group members reap scholarly benefits of the writing community when we challenged one another on theoretical concepts, made straightforward comments about organization or foundational principles, and suggested improvements that ultimately pushed us all forward as writers and reviewers. Because we had group members at various stages in their education, we were also able to benefit from one another’s experience by suggesting references or addressing unclear arguments.

As we are all socialized into our disciplines, the writing group offers chances to immediately put our boots on the ground. Sherrie Gradin, et al. find graduate writing groups helpful in “becoming a colleague in one’s field and entering into the discourse communities of the discipline with authority.” Writing groups give students a place to learn “how to scholar,” to become experts in their disciplinary field, in the most pragmatic, hands-on way. This includes the opportunity to give regular, thorough feedback and receive criticism on our own writing, organize panels, coauthor articles, and set up workshops with visiting scholars. Another significant benefit to participating in

Cultivating Writing Groups as Communities of Practice • 21! ! a writing group is the opportunity for peer mentorship.

Our writing group served as an informal, intergenerational network between students at a more advanced stage of doctoral candidacy and newer students to help initiate them into the department, the discipline, and the academy.

We also benefited from the chance to learn from each others’ strengths. Within our group, members were variously skilled in theory, graceful prose, asking probing questions, organizational strategies, and finetuning essays. Receiving feedback from writers with so many different points of expertise is invaluable. In addition to strengthening our papers, it allowed us to practice writing for audiences with different expectations, thereby furthering our socialization into our discipline. This disciplinary socialization was facilitated by inviting members who were all from related disciplines and who were learning to become experts within their fields (Anson; Clark-Oates and Cahill). Finally, not only did our writing group prepare us to get jobs within or outside academia, it prepared us to be good colleagues. Several of the members have continued to review for each other, write together, help make networking connections, and prepare job documents. While there were many successes within our group, to pretend it was without challenges would be an oversight.

Limitations of Our Writing Group This section discusses some of the challenges we encountered as we developed our writing group. One of the most difficult challenges was recruiting and maintaining active new members. As members of the initial group graduated, it was difficult to recruit new members and to develop the level of trust and comfort with the vulnerability of sharing works in progress that we had established with prior members. A few promising new recruits did not integrate into the writing group as hoped, and their participation was short-lived for a semester or less. Some members were less dedicated and participated only when their work was being evaluated. There were unsuccessful meetings that drifted off-topic and resulted in a member’s work not getting evaluated or having limited review. After the founders of the group began to graduate, the remaining members struggled to thrive with reduced membership and participation, although there were dedicated members trying to find success with the group.

As previously discussed, while there were definite advantages of an all female group, the opportunity to have male members may have been beneficial as well.

It could have provided the chance to engage in the

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gendered differences in dialogue and critique, facilitate conversations about gender differences in the discipline, and potentially allow women the chance to address the gender disparity within the research.

Likewise, while drawing membership from a common discipline was advantageous in terms of accelerating disciplinary socialization and sharing foundational theoretical knowledge, the group may have benefitted from the fresh perspectives that disciplinary outsiders could have shared. Finally, while our group was fortunate to have easy access to an ideal meeting space within one of our departments, the logistics of arranging schedules was a negotiation each semester, and on occasion it was impossible to accommodate everyone’s coursework, teaching, outside work, or familial obligations. This would usually result in one member taking a brief hiatus for a semester so that the rest of the group could carry on with meetings as usual, and then rejoining once schedules realigned.

While some of these challenges may be endemic to the realities of doctoral education, others may be resolvable with careful guidance from a writing center administrator more familiar with navigating these territories. It is through these challenges, where students and the writing centers can come together to offer space and opportunity for meaningful change.

How Writing Centers Can Support Graduate Student Writing Groups This essay emphasizes the importance of developing graduate writing skills and the benefits of writing groups in facilitating this goal. But the question remains, how can writing centers utilize our experiences to improve writing support for graduate students? What follows are ways of answering McKinney’s call to de-center the writing center and facilitate other forms of writing support, including graduate student writing groups (90). In our own experiences working at and utilizing writing centers, we have found that they are an important asset to students. As mentioned previously, the types of services that writing centers provide graduate students are often limited by issues of time, frequency and familiarity with the various fields from which clients come. As such, we propose that writing centers partner with graduate students (and potentially departments) to help facilitate and support disciplinary-specific writing groups.

We propose that writing centers can do this by encouraging frequent clients to develop and use writing groups, working with academic units to support writing groups, and serving as facilitators and mentors for emerging writing groups. Writing centers can support

Cultivating Writing Groups as Communities of Practice • 22! ! graduate writing by creating connections throughout campus to broaden the recognition that writing is a social practice. Although writing as a social practice is something that writing centers stress, because help provided in the writing center is one-on-one and does not frequently involve a group, this social element of writing is not often conveyed to students. As such, writing centers could begin by helping “graduate” frequent visitors into writing groups by connecting students to others with similar research or interests in the same field.

Although writing centers serve students from across the university, it is important that the “graduated” students making up the writing groups come from similar programs. For example, our group may have diverged based on stage of candidature and chosen methodology, yet we made a deliberate attempt to keep our membership within disciplines that are closely related. We argue that crafting writing groups with members from similar disciplines is essential to receiving feedback that will push graduate student writing and integrate students into the conventions of their discipline. As Chris Anson notes, no practices to improve a piece of writing will be more effective than having other disciplinary professionals read and respond to it.

One solution to this problem is to create writing groups within departments or generalized disciplinary areas that produce closely allied kinds of scholarship. (28) This is not to discount writing feedback from members outside of one’s academic specialty—this feedback remains helpful. Yet, we agree with Anson; particularly at the doctoral level, this feedback is not as helpful in cultivating one’s “disciplinary discourses or their heteroglossic histories” (Bazerman 243, quoted in Anson 28). According to Angela Clark-Oates and Lisa Cahill, feedback from disciplinary professionals teaches one to become an “insider” into an academic community by trading in the “codes used by the community and the customs and conventions in play” (112), advancing students’ disciplinary socialization.

Our disciplinary-centric writing group is in-line with Anson and Clark-Oates and Cahill’s recommendation that writing feedback is most helpful from disciplinary experts (a recommendation strictly in tension with the multidisciplinary graduate writing groups promoted by Elena Marie-Atkins Garcia et al. and Gertrude Fraser and Deandra Little). As such, our disciplinary similarity allows us to deepen our knowledge of our field’s conventions and understand how arguments are framed from different perspectives inside the same discipline.

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Since the disciplinary elements of writing groups are so crucial, writing centers can promote writing as a social practice by working more closely with academic units to develop writing groups. Writing groups rectify many issues with graduate education, expressly as an antidote to isolation and socializing students into their disciplines. Key personnel in writing centers can meet with administrators and faculty to promote more student writing groups by educating these campus leaders about the importance of graduate writing support to enhance students’ progress towards doctoral completion. For example, advisors could encourage students to join writing groups based on their needs for all the reasons we discussed above. By providing faculty, and especially graduate student advisors with best practices, writing centers can help illuminate the challenges graduate students face as new scholars and highlight writing group success stories.

Of course, the direct role of writing center staff in helping graduate students develop their writing is critical. Writing center staff can partner with academic departments to ensure graduate students are getting explicit instruction in the writing conventions of their respective fields. Additionally, writing center staff and administrators can serve as mentors to facilitate new writing groups, which can include providing interested students with tips on organizing and direction on how to be good peer reviewers. But we advise this should be a limited role in getting groups started; writing center staff should not function as ongoing facilitators.

Graduate students need to feel a sense of ownership and trust in order to sustain a successful writing group.

Our own group emerged as many of us realized our needs relating to writing and becoming scholars. We recognize this is somewhat unusual, as the literature suggests many writing groups are formed with help from faculty or writing center staff. As such, we strongly encourage writing centers to continue leading the development of university support for writing groups.

In the end, graduate students require different support than the one-off tutoring that often happens in the writing center and in faculty-student interactions.

Furthermore, implementing these practices extends the impact of writing centers by tailoring their support to the needs of graduate students by developing writing groups where innovative research and psychological support thrive. Academic units and graduate advisers must recognize students’ need for writing support beginning with the suggestions provided above.

Graduate writing groups not only develop better writers but also socialize us into broader communities of practice within the academy.

Cultivating Writing Groups as Communities of Practice • 23! !

Works Cited Aitchison, Claire. “Learning Together to Publish: Writing Groups Pedagogies for Doctoral Publishing.” Publishing Pedagogies for the Doctorate and Beyond, edited by Claire Aitchison, Barbara Kamler and Alison Lee, Routledge, 2010, pp. 83-100.

---. “Writing Groups for Doctoral Education.” Studies in Higher Education, vol. 34, no. 8, 2009, pp. 905916. Scopus, doi.org/10.1080/03075070902785580.

Anson, Chris. “Beyond the Curriculum: Supporting Faculty Writing Groups in WAC Programs.”

Working with Faculty Writers, edited by Anne Ellen Geller and Michele Eodice, Utah State UP, 2013, pp. 21-37.

Aronson, Anne L., and Diana L. Swanson. “Graduate Women on the Brink: Writing as Outsiders Within.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 3, 1991, pp. 156-173. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40003311.

Baldi, Brian, et al. “The Scholarly Writing Continuum: A New Program Model for Teaching and Faculty Development Centers.” Working with Faculty Writers, edited by Anne Ellen Geller and Michele Eodice, Utah State UP, 2013, pp. 38-49.

Banks, William and Kerri Flinchbaugh. “Experiencing Ourselves as Writers: An Exploration of How Faculty Writers Move from Dispositions to Identities.” Working with Faculty Writers, edited by Anne Ellen Geller and Michele Eodice, Utah State UP, 2013, pp. 228-245.

Bergman, Linda S. “Writing Centers and CrossCurricular Literacy Programs as Models for Faculty Development.” Pedagogy, vol. 8, no.3, 2008, pp.

523-536. Project MUSE, muse-jhuedu.proxy.lib.iastate.edu/article/247977.

“Best Practices: Degree Completion.” CGSNET. Council of Graduate Schools, cgsnet.org/attritionand-completion. Accessed 30 June 2017.

Clark-Oates, Angela and Lisa Cahill. “Faculty Writing Groups: Writing Centers and the Third Space Collaborations.” Working with Faculty Writers, edited

by Anne Ellen Geller and Michele Eodice, Utah State UP, 2013, pp. 111-126.

Council of Graduate Schools. “Ph.D. Completion Project -Council of Graduate Schools.” 2008. www.phdcompletion.org/. Accessed 11 January 2018.

Fajt, Virginia, et al.“Feedback and Fellowship: Stories from a Successful Writing Group.” Working with Faculty Writers, edited by Anne Ellen Geller and Michele Eodice, Utah State UP, 2013, pp. 163-174.

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Fraser, Gertrude and Deandra Little. “Talking about Writing: Critical Dialogues on Supporting Faculty Writers.” Working with Faculty Writers, edited by Anne Ellen Geller and Michele Eodice, Utah State UP, 2013, pp. 73-94.

Ferguson, Therese. "The ‘Write’ Skills and More: A Thesis Writing Group for Doctoral Students."

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2, 2009, pp. 285-297. EBSCOhost, doi: 10.1080/03098260902734968.

Garcia, Elena Marie-Atkins, et al. Working with Faculty Writers, edited by Anne Ellen Geller and Michele Eodice, Utah State UP, 2013, pp. 260-278.

Gardner, Susan K., and Pilar Mendoza, editors. On Becoming a Scholar: Socialization and Development in Doctoral Education. Stylus Publishing, 2010.

Geller, Anne Ellen, et al. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice, Utah State UP, 2007.

Geller, Anne Ellen. “Introduction.” Working with Faculty Writers, edited by Anne Ellen Geller and Michele Eodice, Utah State UP, 2013, pp. 1-20.

Gere, Anne Ruggles. Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Carbondale: Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1987.

Gradin, Sherrie, et al. “Disciplinary Differences,Rhetorical Resonances: Graduate Writing Groups Beyond the Humanities.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol 3, no. 2, 2006, pp. 1-5. www.praxisuwc.com/new-page-83.

Gray, Tara, A., et al. “How Teaching Centers Can Support Faculty as Writers.” Working with Faculty Writers, edited by Anne Ellen Geller and Michele Eodice, Utah State UP, 2013, pp. 95-110.

Kamler, Barbara and Pat Thomson. Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision, Routledge, 2006.

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2, 2008, pp. 263-275. EBSCOhost, doi: 10.1080/01580370802439870.

Maher, Michelle, et al. “Write On! Through to the Ph.D.: Using Writing Groups to Facilitate Doctoral Degree Progress.” Studies in Continuing Education, vol. 35, no. 2, 2013, pp. 193–208.

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Mckinney, Jackie Grutsch. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, U of Colorado P, 2013.

Mullen, Carol A. “The Need for a Curricular Writing Model for Graduate Students.” Journal of Further and Higher Education, vol. 25, no. 1, 2001. pp. 117126. Taylor & Francis Online, doi.org/10.1080/03098770020030551.

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Page-Adams, Deborah, et al. "Establishing a Group to Encourage Writing for Publication Among Doctoral Students." Journal of Social Work Education, vo. 31, no.3, 1995, pp. 402-407. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/23042882.

Paltridge, Brian, and Sue Starfield. Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language: A Handbook for Supervisors, Routledge, 2007.

Phillips, Talinn. “Graduate Writing Groups: Shaping Writing and Writers from Student to Scholar.”

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Educational Researcher, vol.3, no. 2, 2001, pp. 27–33.

Salem, Lori and Jennifer Follett. “The Idea of a Faculty Writing Center: Moving from Troubling Deficiencies to Collaborative Engagement.”

Working with Faculty Writers, edited by Ann Ellen Geller and Michele Eodice, Utah State UP, 2013, pp. 50-72.

Schendel, Ellen, Susan Callaway, Violet Dutcher, and Claudine Grigg. "Assessing the Effects of Faculty and Staff Writing Retreats: Four Institutional Perspectives." Working with Faculty Writers, edited

by Anne Ellen Geller and Michele Eodice, Utah State UP, 2013, pp. 142-162.

Stoessel, Katharina, et al. “Sociodemographic Diversity and Distance Education:Who Drops Out from Academic Program and Why? Research in Higher Education, vol. 56, no.3, 2014, pp. 228-246. doi 10.1007/s11162-014-9343-x.

Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge UP, 1998.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16 No 3 (2019)

CLAIMING AN EDUCATION: USING ARCHIVAL RESEARCH TO BUILD A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE Molly Tetreaualt m.f.tetreault@gmail.com

Patty Wilde Washington State University Tri-Cities patty.wilde@wsu.edu

Abstract This article explores how archival research can be used in staff education courses to work toward what Ann Ellen Geller et al. call a “community of practice”: a writing center culture that emphasizes constant, continual, and recursive thinking and learning among directors and consultants. Offering voices of tutors and directors captured in a three-year study of an archival project, the authors maintain that this kind of research offers several gifts, as it cultivates flexible conferencing practices, dismantles hierarchies, and establishes a cross-generational community. To help writing center directors and assistants incorporate such research into their own center, this article concludes with assignment instructions, tips for archival research, and suggestions for building a writing center archive

“[Y]ou cannot afford to think of being here to receive an education; you will do much better to think of yourselves as being here to claim one. One of the dictionary definitions of the verb ‘to claim’ is: to take as the rightful owner; to assert in the face of possible contradiction.

‘To receive’ is to come into possession of: to act as receptacle or container for; to accept as authoritative or true.”

--Adrienne Rich, Claiming an Education After twenty years of occupying space in various nooks and crannies around campus, our writing center recently found a permanent home in the library, a place the center’s founder and first director, Robert Connors, had envisioned as an ideal location. Although moving to the library symbolized the writing center’s success and growth, we, the directors, were concerned about what might be lost in this transition. Aside from a portrait of Connors and a large oak table he built to symbolize the collaborative work done in the center— fondly referred to by the tutors as the “big table”—few other historical relics from our writing center’s past made it to the new space. Ten new tutors started work in the center that fall, and after one of them asked, “who’s the guy in the portrait?” we decided to implement an archival project into our tutor education course. This project asked new writing assistants to conduct research in the writing center’s archive, collaboratively reconstruct a history of our center’s early years, and contribute their own documents to the archive at the end of the semester as a way of “talking back” to layers of writing center legacies (Wilde, Tetreault, and Franco). What started as a pedagogical

Sarah B. Franco New England Institute of Technology sfranco@neit.edu

experiment has since become of hallmark assignment of our writing center curriculum. After conducting this project for several years now, we have come to see how it builds what Anne Ellen Geller et al. call a “community of practice,” in which “what [tutors] learn is not a static subject matter but the very process of being engaged in, and participating in developing, an ongoing practice” (13). Although there are numerous ways to cultivate such an environment, our three-year study of this project indicates that archival research facilitates a culture of constant, continual, and recursive thinking, one that is central to the work the writing center staff engage in daily. After providing a brief overview of relevant scholarship and the course project, we discuss three main “gifts” of the archive, to use the language of Susan Wells and Wendy Hayden.

First, we share how the project cultivated relevant habits of mind. Next, we illustrate how archival work dismantles hierarchies. Finally, we review how this project helps sustain community in an environment where there is constant turnover.

An Archival Education As Jessica Enoch and Pamela VanHaitsma observe, there has been a move for “scholar-teachers [to] tur[n] their attention from the archive’s role in research to its role in pedagogy” (216). Drawing from the scholarship of Jane Greer, Megan Norcia, and Wendy Hayden, Enoch and VanHaitsma identify several benefits of incorporating archival research into composition-rhetoric curricula, including experience with primary sources, constructing and contextualizing historical narratives, and consideration of audience (216-17). While the advantages of incorporating archival research into the undergraduate classroom have now been widely documented, how they enhance writing center work has been less frequently explored.

Writing center archives are often seen as valuable sites for writing center professionals, especially in times of transition when directorships change hands. As Stacy Nall explains, The institutional knowledge contained in the archive may be especially relevant to [writing center directors] who, new to an institution, hope

to learn more about their centers’ previous initiatives in order to successfully plan new ones.

(105) While we agree with Nall, archives can also serve as a fruitful resource for tutors, prompting reflection about a writing center’s past, present, and future. As a particularly worthwhile endeavor for consultants to undertake—especially those just joining the community—archival research enables them to learn about their own writing center’s past while reading and discussing broader narratives of writing center history.

As Neal Lerner notes, “The rich history of writing instruction in higher education . . . can tell us a great deal about the challenges and opportunities we continue to face, whether we are teachers, researchers, or students” (1). Conducting research in writing center archives has the potential to make such struggles and successes even more visible, enabling writing center staff to understand their current context in revelatory ways.

Far from functioning as a neutral repository of documents, however, archives are curated to tell specific stories. As Nall points out, writing center archives are often comprised of administrative documents rather than artifacts that offer “multiple perspectives” (109). We echo Nall’s concern, advocating for more inclusive archival practices that incorporate consultant voices and knowledge. As the members of our community who do the vast majority of our conferencing, archives should reflect their contributions and contain documents generated by and for tutors. Doing so is one step toward rectifying Elizabeth Boquet’s observation that with “few notable exceptions . . . conclusions are drawn about peer tutors, information is produced for peer tutors, but rarely are these things created by peer tutors” (18).

Archives can act as a platform through which tutors can make their mark on their community. Further, assistants repeatedly confirmed Sue Dinitz and Jean Kiedaisch’s view that As the folks at the boundary of theory and practice, tutors are well positioned to explore the connections between them, to tease out the subtleties, the complications, the assumptions, the omissions in our theory and our practice, and to see how one might shed light on the other. (75) We hope to showcase this intellectual work in action through our tutors’ own words while also advocating for including such artifacts in institutional archives.

It is important to acknowledge that we recognize not all institutions have an established writing center archive, let alone one that allows for student contributions. For this reason, we’ve included tips for building archives at the end of this article (see

Claiming an Education • 26! !

Appendix A). But we also want to make clear that, as much as we believe archives are essential for writing center and writing program research and continuity, the project we describe in this article is not simply about archival exploration and contribution. More broadly, we want to underscore the importance of staff education within writing centers. Similar to Geller et al., we see this change of nomenclature as indicative of “a shift to a more ongoing and holistic orientation to writing center work” that moves toward cultivating a community of practice (136). In our experience, traditional training models primarily offer new consultants a rigid set of “best practices” for conferencing, often delivered in a top-down fashion: examine the assignment sheet; read the essay out loud; ask questions; have the student take notes; don’t be directive, etc. In such a training model, there are so many scenarios and variables to cover that an archival project would likely be considered extraneous and superfluous. But in developing a curriculum for our staff, we open up more possibilities for creative practices that invite both assistants and directors to engage in new learning opportunities. In this way, we “practic[e] our praxis” (301), as Muriel Harris phrases it, using writing center pedagogy to educate all members of our team. By modeling what we value in helping people learn, we teach new assistants how to be members of the community, inviting them to see the effectiveness of writing center practices, while continuing to learn ourselves. The archival project we discuss in this article is one way that we work toward this goal.

Project Overview At our institution’s writing center, assistants participate in the archival research project (see Appendix B) as part of the two-credit, new staff education course during their first semester working in the writing center. The exploration begins a month into the course, after consultants have become familiar with some of the foundational perspectives on writing centers and have begun facilitating conferences.

During the first week of the project, we introduce the assistants to archival project. This introduction includes the following: • pointing back to historical sketches of writing centers that they’ve read as part of previous weeks’ coursework, including Stephen North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center” and Andrea Lunsford’s “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center” • highlighting the important moments included on our center’s timeline in our staff handbook

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providing the finding aid for the collection discussing “Archival Research Tips” (see Appendix C).

After this overview, we ask assistants to brainstorm topics of interest for their archival exploration. As they share what they hope to explore, we group assistants with similar questions to work together in the archive.

Over the next few weeks, tutors and at least one director visit the archive for a two-hour period.

Founded in memory of Connors in 2000 after his untimely death, this archive contains memorials of Connors and his work in the field of compositionrhetoric as well as material that speaks to the everyday operations of the center, such as staff meeting agendas, conference observations, annual reports, training materials, memos, email correspondence, and student papers. Together, consultants and directors examine artifacts, taking notes and photographs of interesting or important documents to share with the whole class.

After searching through the archival materials, consultants then print their documents and prepare a brief presentation for the class, explaining their interests, sharing artifacts, and reflecting on their time in the archive. Following the presentations, the class engages in a discussion of the research process, piecing together a history of the early writing center. We then ask tutors to write an “archival narrative,” which functions as a reflection on the archival exploration and class discussion. Finally, at the end of the semester, we ask them to choose a document—if any—from the work they produced to contribute to the archive and to write a brief explanation of their choice.

During the three years that we conducted this IRBapproved project, assistants allowed us to record and transcribe class sessions related to their archival research. They also granted us permission to use documents they generated as part of the exploration.

The student excerpts that we use in this article come from these recordings and writings. Making their voices heard both through their archival contributions and this article is an important part of our project. As such, we do not use pseudonyms in this piece: all names referenced below belong to three generations of writing center employees.

• •

Gift One: Cultivating Habits of Mind In working toward a community of practice in writing centers, Geller et al. advocate adopting a “pedagogy of becoming,” an approach that emphasizes the infinite, recursive process of learning (59). Such an orientation toward staff education is important because, much like writing is more than a set of codified skills, so too is writing center work. Tutors are

Claiming an Education • 27! ! constantly called upon to respond dynamically to the circumstances of the conference. A writing center education, we maintain, should reflect this reality. After conducting this project for several years, we came to realize that archival research functions as a way of relating the importance of adapting to the ever-shifting context of writing center work. This mindset can be achieved in many ways, of course, but we found archival research and its ability to engender creative and reflexive habits of mind to be a particularly effective approach.

Archival research often starts with questions born out of curiosity: Why is something the way that it is?

How did it get to be that way? How has it changed over time? And how can knowledge of the past inform the present? But because the majority of our writing assistants had never been to the archives, we, the directors, had to help ignite that curiosity. Question posing was an essential first step of this process. We, the directors, introduced them to the finding aids that outlined the contents of the Robert J. Connors Writing Center Files, 1994-2010, and after reviewing the list of holdings, students formulated preliminary research questions that allowed them entry into the project.

Some of the initial questions that assistants chose to explore include the following: • •

• • • •

When and how did the writing center get started?

What strategies did early tutors utilize in conferences and how do they compare to our current approaches?

Who were the students who used the center and what did they study?

Who were the multilingual students and what were their major writing-related concerns?

Who was Connors and how did he approach writing center work?

How was the early writing center different from our current iteration?

After giving assistants a crash course in archival research methods, directors and tutors went to the archives to seek out answers to their questions.

Although the directors had some familiarity with the collection, the consultants had not previously viewed these artifacts. Together, we all rolled up our sleeves and dug into the materials to get a fuller sense of our origin stories.

We let the assistants take the lead, and as is the case with archival work, their questions multiplied and morphed as their understanding of the documents developed and deepened. Like a choose-your-own-

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adventure story, our assistants did not know where their research would lead them. When consultants Sholanna and Colton went to the archives, their initial questions focused on the data that was collected on the early writing center. As they reviewed the annual reports compiled by Connors and they learned more about the precarious origins of the center, their questions evolved, focusing more on how the director handled the various obstacles that he encountered while trying to stabilize the center. Some assistants, though, found that their research questions shifted entirely once they began examining artifacts. Our consultant Martha went to the archive with questions about the early writing center’s approach to conferencing and how the “philosophy” affected the local community, but as she explained, when she began sifting through tutor training syllabi and assignments, observation reports, and internship documents, she felt compelled to take her research in a different direction.

Rather than exploring her initial questions, Martha examined the hiring practices of the early writing center—an approach that drastically differed from our current model. The experiences of Sholanna, Colton, and Martha illustrate the necessity of adaptability when conducting archival research, a habit of mind that is also essential for conferencing.

Alexis Ramsey et al. explain that Archival research . . . is never a rigid process, nor should it be. Similar to the composing process itself, archival research is often recursive—subject to start and stops, revisions and reworking, throughout the lifetime of a project. (5) As our staff sifted through archival documents, they learned to adapt their questions and burgeoning narratives, as with each artifact and perspective, a new possibility of the past emerged. In his archival journey that originally focused on the director, Brandon discovered an exercise that the director designed for a staff meeting after an unknown but unfortunate incident occurred with a student named Monica. The handout asked assistants to read a piece by Helen Fox on cultural issues in academia and reflect on experiences in which they may have felt “othered or stigmatized.” It also asked them to consider how they thought Monica “might think the staff felt about her or thought about her after reading the [email].” Adapting his interests in response to his discoveries, Brandon, working with Patty, one of the directors, spent his time in the archive attempting to unravel this mystery, reviewing appointment books, student work, meeting notes, and staff evaluations. Together, Brandon and Patty weighed different possibilities while attempting to compose a cohesive narrative of this event.

Although they made some headway, they still had

Claiming an Education • 28! ! unanswered questions about what happened. In an interesting turn of events, assistants from the staff education course the next year took up the challenge of exploring Monica and the email. Their collective efforts allowed them to find new documents and consider new possibilities. This experience illustrates, as Connors observes, that “All of historical work . . . is provisional, partial—fragments we shore against our ruin. We are trying to make sense of things. It is always a construction. It is always tottering” (21).

The precarious nature of archival work, Wendy Hayden explains, can elicit frustration from students “when [they are] unable to identify a precise source that would answer their research inquiry” (412). There were moments when we observed similar tendencies in our assistants. Many of the questions that they brought to the archive were only partially answered, while some tutors did not find any artifacts related to their initial questions. As noted, these experiences required flexibility from our assistants, by either altering their line of inquiry or changing course entirely. But these situations also asked tutors to exercise patience and lean into their discomfort of not knowing. Brandon and Patty, for example, never determined precisely what transpired with Monica and the staff. Although the assistants the following year added to the narrative that Brandon and Patty had begun to craft, the staff had to face the limitations of the archive: it did not contain documents that fully explained what happened with Monica and the email. Our assistant Yussra approached the limitations of the archive from a different, although equally important, perspective. She found herself wondering, as she says, whether the documents left behind were really the documents that should have been left behind. If I traveled back in time, would I really find that most students loved the writing center? I hope so, and I don’t really doubt it, but still the past unsettles me.

Her observation highlights the rhetorical nature of the archive, reminding us that archival collections are constructions that advance particular narratives—ones that are innately limited and biased. As these two positions illustrate, archival work requires assistants to accept inevitable uncertainty, and as Hayden explains, “make peace with how the archives can refuse any ‘answers’” (412). But learning to sit with the uneasiness of not knowing, we believe, encourages assistants to focus on “becoming knowledgeable rather than being knowledgeable,” which is essential for writing center work (Geller et al. 68).

After our tutors had explored the archives in small groups, the staff reconvened around the “big table” to share documents and begin piecing together a working narrative of the past. As assistants passed around

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photocopies of artifacts, they contemplated the connections between the documents, taking into consideration their previous knowledge of writing centers, both locally and broadly. In so doing, they created a fluid narrative of our writing center’s history, one that was open and adaptable to the new information they learned from their peers. Watching them, for example, attempt to make sense of an email in which the director reprimanded two assistants for missing a class presentation was particularly worthy of note. “Was [Connors] a ‘strict’ director?” our assistant Josh asked the class. Offering the information she gleaned from reviewing his annual reports, Sholanna relayed Connors’s concerns with stagnant numbers and shrinking budgets. This information led the class to reason that the he was upset with the consultants who missed the appointment because they could have potentially cost the center much needed clients and institutional support. As this anecdote illustrates, deciding on the history of our writing center was not— and could not be—the endgame for the archival project. Rather, in accordance with a pedagogy of becoming, we emphasized the journey of collaboratively speculating, questioning, and contemplating possibilities.

The intellectual nimbleness that is necessary for archival research, we found, is analogous to the work that we ask consultants to do in writing center conferences. When assistants begin a session, they often don’t know much about the student with whom they will work. Tutors don’t know where the student has been, what successes and challenges they have experienced, or even where they want to go with their writing. Just as consultants must adapt their narratives to the documents and perspectives they encounter, so too must they modify their approach to conferences according to the circumstances of the session.

Grounding discussions of writing center practice in the context of the archive gave the staff a new way to think about their techniques, contributing to the pedagogy of becoming that we aim to foster in our writing center.

Gift Two: Working Together to Dismantle Hierarchies In addition to cultivating intellectual flexibility, the design of our archival project offered new ways to discuss the collaborative nature of conferences. But this collaboration, we also found, allowed us to subvert common hierarchies that exist within writing center spaces, as it helped cultivate a community of practice that put all members on a level playing field. Such efforts are necessary, for although collaboration is a main tenet in writing center work, new tutors may have

Claiming an Education • 29! ! few examples of productive, democratic collaborations.

While collaborative assignments may intend to show students the social nature of learning and knowledge production, they often end up reaffirming a hierarchical, individualistic view of educational success.

It is paramount, then, that directors provide writing assistants with opportunities to experience collaboration in ways that directly counteract the effects of a hierarchical learning model. The archival project, in our experience, was one particularly effective way to challenge that structure.

In the context of writing center spaces, directors are often perceived as experts, and consultants, particularly new ones, are seen as novices. Yet in order to live out a true community of practice, we must work to dismantle this hierarchy so that all members of the writing center are viewed as equals. In such a model, both directors and tutors explore writing center-related issues to improve upon the work that we all do. While we strive to prioritize collaboration in all of our staff education events, we have found the archival exploration project to be an especially fruitful way to foster a cooperative community within our writing center. As outlined in the previous section, archival work depends on utilizing several habits of mind and engaging in a process of exploration. Although we, the directors, have more archival experience, the process of constructing of history is iterative and ongoing. The artifacts are made new to us through the interpretations of the assistants, as evidenced by Patty and Brandon’s search for Monica. Despite our experience, we often find ourselves engaging in the archival exploration as new learners, drawing on the same skill sets we intend our tutors to acquire, and feeding off of each other’s and the tutors’ questions and curiosities. The effects of this genuine collaboration are perhaps, though, most evident during the post-archive discussion around the “big table.” In this space, the writing assistants take the lead, sharing their discoveries and working together with the directors to construct a narrative of our past. In the archives, we address very narrow questions of the past, but when assistants and directors come together to share our findings, the pieces begin to create a bigger picture that has shifted over the three years of conducting this project--from focusing on the struggles of the early writing center to tutor training practices to interpersonal communication to equity and access issues. These broader themes illustrate how our discussions are constantly in flux, shaped by our assistants and current concerns in the writing center. In this way, directors and consultants alike utilize habits of mind that are essential to a productive community of practice.

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But the design of our archival project also asked assistants to collaborate with directors and archivists to continue developing the writing center’s history and future. Because we invite tutors to contribute their own artifacts to the archive, they actively participate in shaping future narratives of the past. Recognizing this, our consultants see their role as a great responsibility.

Our tutor Liz articulated her sense of responsibility in her reflection of the project, explaining, We in the writing center today are controlling the direction that the writing center’s history will take.

The archival contribution is a tangible reminder of this, but how we conduct ourselves in every conference, staff meeting, and chat around the table is a small chunk of the center’s continued history, too.

But assistants’ contributions are also a meaningful source of pride. After writing about the “additional respect” she gained for writing center pedagogy after her visit to the archive, Emma shared, I feel that my work has an impact on the future of the writing center, and where the future of the writing center goes from here. I love the idea that someday, in twenty more years, writing assistants will look back on the work we are doing today and use it to help their own understanding of the writing center.

Typifying common consultant responses, the reflections of Liz and Emma illustrate the value of reinforcing tutors’ authorship and participation in the archive. There is a sense, then, that archival exploration project makes writing assistants aware of the necessity of collaboration not just now, but also with the assistants who come after them.

Through the kinds of collaborative practices described, established hierarchies are disrupted, triggering what Lauren Fitzgerald calls the “authorizing” effect (27). In her International Writing Center Association keynote address, Fitzgerald asks: What would happen . . . if undergraduate writing tutors stopped citing the giants of writing center studies—the Bruffees, Norths, and others I've mentioned here? And what if, instead, the giants on whose shoulders peer writing tutor-researchers stood were those of other peer writing tutorauthors? What kind of authorizing would happen then? How would the boundaries of the field and our collective understanding of what we do be redrawn? (30) The reprioritization of expertise that Fitzgerald describes becomes possible through exposure to other “peer writing tutor-authors.” In reading documents of previous assistants as well as sharing their work with future ones, this authentic collaboration allowed tutors

Claiming an Education • 30! ! to experience authority in novel ways. They feel authorized to engage more critically with past practices, oftentimes pointing out problems they had with previous approaches. Sameer, for example, was “glad” that the writing center has ended its practice of collecting SAT verbal scores from visiting writers.

After digging up the documents related to this issue, he was impressed by how past undergraduates expressed their opposition. This finding sparked a fantastic conversation about the interrelationship between theory and practice, particularly in regard to assessment in writing center work, illustrating the necessity of exchange between administrators and assistants. We need to know each other's experiences and ideas in order to develop effective practices. Collaboration is an essential aspect of the work we do to support student writers.

This kind of open exchange, we found, led to a number of tutors posing questions about what else the writing center should be doing and what areas they can continue to grow. Natalie wondered, “what else does the center need to improve on? What more are we striving for?” She offered some preliminary answers to these questions, and the document she contributed to the archive seeks to pushback on some writing center commonplaces. Similarly, Yussra chose to contribute a piece in which she openly questions and explores the efficacy of some of the advice we directors had offered about avoiding praise in conferences. As she explained in a written reflection, her initial research on the issue led to an in-class discussion on the topic, helping the group arrive at a more nuanced understanding that “praise can take different forms, some less helpful than others.” Her example illustrates how the questions assistants pose and their explorations of practice help drive our collective knowledge forward.

Gift Three: Addressing Turnover in PeerStaffed Writing Centers In working toward a community of practice, our staff gains valuable knowledge, which we continue to develop throughout the semesters and years, but time is a double-edged sword in writing centers. The typical patterns of the academic year have taught us that May will signal changes in the staff, when we sometimes lose up to three-quarters of our personnel when they graduate. While we are excited to see where our assistants go next, we can’t help but also mourn the loss of their experience and insight. Our tutors reveal that they, too, are concerned about staff turnover and sustainability. In his reflection, Connor notes, “Because of the three-year tenure concept for a lot of writing centers, these places always find themselves in

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motion.” But asking assistants to submit their own work to the archive, as we discuss in this section, helps to address this gap. In this way, their contributions provide what Nall describes as “a valuable institutional memory,” which allows future consultants “to better understand the position” they are assuming (104).

Their artifacts will be shared with future generations of staff, people who visit the archive, and—via this article—the writing center community at large.

One of the challenges to what Jackie Grutsch McKinney calls the “ever-beginner culture in writing center studies” (84) is the perpetuation of the writing center grand narrative, which she describes as the dominant belief that “writing centers are comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” (3). Grutsch McKinney asks, “[I]f the majority of those engaging in writing center discourse stay for only a few years, do they—do we—ever move beyond this [grand narrative]?” (85). Looking at our assistants’ archival contributions, we see traces of that narrative, but they also push back, reconsider, extend, complicate, and step outside of it. In the piece that she contributed to the archive, Marie, for example, reminds us of the vulnerability that students may feel when sharing their writing. Because conferencing becomes a common occurrence to consultants, “We tend to forget that not everyone is comfortable,” she explains.

“I know I was terrified when I had to start conferencing with my English teacher.” Relatedly, Natalie’s archival selection encourages new staff to always question the status quo. As she writes, “writing assistants, and any professionals in the center, should be questioning the way that the center is run. In order for the writing center to improve and continue to blossom, it is essential to examine the way things are done at the center and strategize how things can be improved.” The thoughts and reflections of Marie and Natalie, among others, help answer Grutsch McKinney’s call for writing that draws attention to our points of difference (89) and “instantiations of counterstories to the grand narrative” (86). Our tutors’ contributions remind us that this important intellectual work can be done by those new to the community; in fact, sometimes their fresh perspective can help dislodge the comfort that is the writing center grand narrative, revealing assumptions and encouraging new ways of approaching our work.

When assistants submit their artifacts to the archive, they are keenly aware that they are circulating their acquired knowledge to those who come after them. As Brandon explains, We know that history is studied because having as much knowledge about the past as possible allows us to see what we have yet to learn. So I see my

Claiming an Education • 31! ! contribution as a window to my knowledge, so that the next assistants can simply pick up what I learned and spend more time learning, well, new stuff.

And while he realizes that learning to be a writing tutor is not as easy as reading documents and acquiring all the secrets of writing center pedagogy, he recognizes that his contributions will make a significant impact on future tutors. Not only do these archival materials help to pass on various gifts, but as Brandon remarks, they also “giv[e] us a sense of being in the ‘tribe.’” build community.

Indeed, many of our assistants write explicit invitations for new staff to become part of the community. Kate explains of her archival contribution that it “provides some insight to what our writing center community is like.” Her contribution, a letter to future writing assistants, emphasizes the role of reflection—for the writer and tutor within a conference, for the writing assistant after the conference, for the staff—and encourages consultants to always reflect “with the other assistants at the [‘big table’] in order to improve your role as an assistant.

You will feel better talking about the conference you just had and will always receive some great advice!”

Such letters, as previously mentioned, had a meaningful effect on our tutors, a point that Madison underscores in the narrative of her archival experience: When I went into the archives for our project, I found the letters to writing assistants the most interesting and helpful documents to look at. It shows the history of our welcoming atmosphere and gave me a better appreciation for what we strive for. It would be nice to have documents from writing assistants to further show how our friendly environment can be inclusive of not only new staff, but new writers.

Madison, in fact, was so moved by the letters that she asked Molly, one of the directors, why the documents aren’t shared at the beginning of the staff education course or during orientation. Molly was surprised by the oversight. Of course those letters should be shared, especially because of the invitations to join the community and to question the work we do. And so, the next fall, they were. The numerous examples of writing assistants emphasizing the role of collaboration speak to the importance of a community of practice as a touchstone and point of sustainability when turnover is relatively quick and high. What the writing center lacks in consistent staffing is tempered by a shared way of viewing learning in the center. By helping smooth the transition into the center and consciously inviting new tutors to join the community through their archival contributions, our previous consultants can

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kickstart the process of the new staff sharing their own perspective, ideas, and knowledge.

Claiming a Writing Center Education Although we recognize that archival research deviates from traditional writing center tutor “training” courses, we were inspired by Geller et al.’s reminder “to be curious . . . to read widely and to find points and patterns of intersection across disciplines not to feel bound by what has been written precisely about writing centers or about composition and rhetoric” (11).

Impelled forward, we began the process of designing the archival research project that we have described in this article. At the time of its inception, we could not have anticipated the kind of impact that this project would have on assistants, administrators, and director—how, in addition to learning about our past, archival research would cultivate mindfulness, decenter authority, and help ease tutor turnover. Because archival artifacts are interpreted through an individual’s own terministic screens, writing center staff can continue to learn from one another as we uncover and contemplate our findings and negotiate their meanings.

And the possibilities for understanding the past will only continue to grow as we incorporate documents produced by our own assistants into the archival collection, thereby extending the legacy of our community. Guided by our consultants’ voices, we hope to continue to listen, learn, adapt, and grow, as we actively work toward claiming a writing center education.

Works Cited Boquet, Elizabeth. “Intellectual Tug-of-War.” Stories from the Center: Connecting Narrative and Theory in the Writing Center, edited by Lynn Craigue and Meg Woolbright, National Council of Teachers of English, 2000, pp. 17-30.

Connors, Robert. “Dreams and Play: Historical Method and Methodology.” Methods and Methodology in Composition Research. Edited by Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Sullivan. Southern Illinois UP, 1992, pp.

15-36.

Dinitz, Sue, and Jean Kiedaisch. “Creating Theory: Moving Tutors to the Center.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 23, no. 2, 2003, pp. 63-76.

Gannett, Cinthia, Elizabeth Slomba, Kate Tirabassi, Amy Zenger, and John Brereton. “‘It Might Come in Handy’ Composing a Writing Archive at the University of New Hampshire: A Collaboration between the Dimond Library and the Writing

Claiming an Education • 32! !

Across the Curriculum/Connors Writing Program 2001-2003.” Centers for Learning: Writing Centers and Libraries in Collaboration. Edited by James Elmborg and Sheril Hook. Association of College and Research Libraries, 2005, pp. 115-137.

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

Enoch, Jessica, and Pamela VanHaistma. “Archival Literacy: Reading the Rhetoric of Digital Archives in the Undergraduate Classroom.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 67, no. 2, 2015, pp. 216-242.

Fitzgerald, Lauren. “Undergraduate Writing Tutors as Researchers: Redrawing Boundaries.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 33, no. 2, 2014, pp. 17-35.

Greer, Jane. “Undergraduates in the Archives: Researching Girls’ Literacies as Feminist Activism.” Peitho, vol. 11, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–8.

Grutsch McKinney, Jackie. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers. Utah State UP, 2013.

Harris, Muriel. “Using Tutorial Principles to Train Tutors: Practicing our Praxis.” The Writing Center Director’s Resource Book edited by Christina Murphy and Byron Stay, Routledge, 2006, pp. 301-310.

Hayden, Wendy. “‘Gifts’ of the Archives: A Pedagogy for Undergraduate Research.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 66, no. 3, 2015, pp. 402426.

Lerner, Neal. The Idea of Writing Laboratory. Southern Illinois UP, 2009.

Lunsford, Andrea. “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, 1991, pp. 3-10.

Nall, Stacey. “Remembering Writing Center Partnerships: Recommendations for Archival Strategies.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 33, no. 2, 2013, pp. 101-121.

Norcia, Megan. “Out of the Ivory Tower Endlessly Rocking: Collaborating across Disciplines and Professions to Promote Student Learning in the Digital Archive.” Pedagogy, vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp.

91-114.

North, Stephen. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English. vol. 46, no. 5, 1984, pp. 433-446.

Ramsey, Alexis, Wendy Sharer, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa Mastrangelo. (2009). “Introduction.”

Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods.

Edited by Alexis Ramsey, Wendy Sharer, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa Mastrangelo. Southern Illinois UP, 2009, pp. 1-10.

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Thompson, Isabelle, and Jo Mackiewicz. “Questioning in Writing Center Conferences.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 33, no. 2, 2014, pp. 37-70.

Wilde, Patty, Molly Tetreault, and Sarah Franco.

“Talking Back: Writing Center Assistants Renegotiate the Public Memory of Writing Centers.” Pedagogies of Public Memory: Teaching Writing and Rhetoric at Museums, Archives, and Memorials.

Edited by Jane Greer and Laurie Grobman.

Routledge, 2015, pp. 105-116.

Wells, Susan. “Claiming the Archive for Rhetoric and Composition.” Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work, edited by Gary Olson, Southern Illinois UP, 2002, pp. 55-64.

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Claiming an Education • 33! !

Appendix A Creating an Archive The kinds of educational practices for which we advocate in this article do not require an archive that is formally situated. Although partnerships between writing centers and college libraries can be beneficial, we recognize that these arrangements are not always possible. For this reason, we offer some suggestions about how writing centers can construct their own archives.

Gathering Potential Documents Selecting the documents to include is one of the first points of consideration when building an archive of writing center materials. In our experience, annual reports, conference observations, training materials, staff meeting agendas and minutes, email correspondence, and hiring documents have proven to be particularly valuable additions to a writing center archive. These kinds of artifacts can offer directors and assistants a more thorough understanding of the writing center’s past, including the successes and challenges that the center may have previously encountered.

Documents created by writing center tutors, including conference notes, research projects, photographs, selfevaluations of conference practices, letters, and other general ephemera, are also valuable contributions to archival holdings. Such documents offer viewers an opportunity to see everyday life in the center, but as we discuss in this article, asking students to select more detailed projects has proven to be a powerful pedagogical experience. This gave them the opportunity to make their voices heard, but it also offered a more seamless approach to tutor education, as it gave new assistants a chance to learn from their predecessors.

Additionally, if proper permission is obtained, documents composed by those who visit the center can also be a beneficial contribution to writing center archives.

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Student papers, intake forms, evaluations, etc., can offer tutors a sense of trends of student usage, assignments, writing styles, etc. We see great potential in folding these materials into future archival projects.

Organizing and Storing Artifacts After assistants and directors gather potential documents to include in the archive, they will need to categorize the documents. Although there are many meaningful organizational schemes that can be employed, artifacts arranged chronologically and according to event or genre (student letters, education course, meeting minutes, etc.) provide the reader with some context for understanding the materials.

The finding aid should name and briefly describe the artifacts using key words that represent the material.

Further, the finding aid should clearly explain where the artifacts are located, so that those wanting to utilize the collection can easily find what they are seeking. Because finding aids can potentially obscure archival holdings, we recommend that it is tested before it is widely used to ensure that it accurately depicts the artifacts and their location.

There are many options for storing archival documents. We recommend first contacting campus libraries to inquire about housing documents in their special collections. This makes the materials accessible to a wide audience. If such a partnership is not possible, artifacts can be held in folders and boxes in the writing center. If space is a concern, several electronic storage options exist. Blogs/websites (e.g., Wordpress, Tumblr, WIX, etc.) or electronic storage systems (Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc.) can store digitized materials. In addition, Omeka and Collective Access are both free, opensource cataloging tools that can be used to create online archives.

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Appendix B Archival Exploration Project Assignment This project will introduce you to the Writing Center Files in the University Archive. Through exploring the archives and engaging with the documents you find there, you will learn a bit about the history of the center and its institutional context. In class, small groups will sign up for specific times to visit the archives. Small groups will be created primarily around a similar interest in specific aspects of the archives. Your group will brainstorm a set of questions to guide your exploration Part I: Archival Exploration Photos The archival exploration itself will take place outside of class time, based on the archives’ hours and your group’s availability to make the trip.

1. As a group, write out responses to your group’s questions (hand written is fine).

2. As your group explores the archives, photograph documents that you use to answer your questions or that you find particularly interesting. You can borrow Molly’s camera if you’d like, or you can use your camera on your phone. Then, email your photographs to Molly to print out before class.

You’ll use the photos to help provide an overview to the whole class of your group’s findings in the archive.

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Part II: Archival Exploration Narrative In a 500-word narrative, describe your archival experience. In what ways, if any, was this experience meaningful to you as a writing assistant or to your understanding of writing center theory and practice? You might reference specific materials from the archives (staff observations, student evaluations, writing assistant letters, ESL training, staff meeting agendas, etc.). You might incorporate thoughts or reflections from our whole group conversation about the archival exploration. Consider, too, how this assignment has affected the way you see the work you do in the center as contributing to our writing center narrative.

Part III: Archival Contribution Explanation Choose an artifact from the work that you have completed this semester that you would like to contribute to the archives. Write a 1-2 paragraph explanation as to why you’ve chosen this particular artifact to contribute.

Consider the following questions in your explanation: Why did you choose these documents? How might they be of interest and value to future writing assistants? How does contributing to the legacy impact your writing center work?

Note: While this assignment is mandatory, you will choose whether or not your archival contribution is placed in the archives. At the top of your explanation, write “Place in the archives” or “Don’t place in the archives.” **Submissions will be held in the writing center for five years before they are placed in the archives.

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Appendix C Archival Research Tips for Visiting the Writing Center Files Before the Archive 1. Brainstorm topics about the center that are interesting to you. What questions do you have about past assistants, practices, problems, and successes? Record these questions.

2. Review the finding aid to give you an idea about what kinds of artifacts are housed in the writing center files. Do you identify files that align with your initial research questions?

What new questions can you develop after reviewing the finding aid? Do you have any questions about the finding aid or the archival materials?

3. Bring pencils and/or your computer to take notes of your observations and thoughts while you are sifting through the archival materials; also record the box number, file number, and artifact dates for documentation purposes.

• Many archives, including the ones at this institution, do not allow use of pens.

4. Bring a digital camera to the archive to photograph artifacts of interest.

• Photographing documents allows you take the artifacts “home” with you and share them with your classmates.

• If necessary, you can also manipulate digital images in ways that may help you read the documents more clearly.

In the Archives 1. When reviewing the archival documents, look for possible answers to your questions. It is important to remember, though, that these “answers” will likely not be explicitly stated; further, they probably won’t be found in one document. As you review archival artifacts, aim to craft a working narrative that attempts to answer your question. This narrative will continue to shift and evolve as you examine more documents and share your ideas with your peers and directors.

2. Talk with your peers and with the directors as you review your documents in the archive. We are working together to construct narratives of the past, so let everyone know what interesting, unusual, strange, troubling discoveries you make as you review

documents. Sharing your discoveries are key to the collaborative aspect of this project.

3. Ask questions—ask Molly, Sarah, Patty, or the archivists. We can help point you in the direction of helpful artifacts or fill in gaps of the narratives. And if we don’t know, we will help you find out!

4. Remember that the writing center doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Keep in mind some of the scholarship that Molly had you read for class.

How does your hypothesis confirm, complicate, and/or contradict these larger narratives?

5. More than anything, have fun in the archives—let yourself “play” as you conduct your search. You never know what you are going to find when conducting archival work, which is part of the fun of this kind of research!

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UNDERGIRDING WRITING CENTERS’ RESPONSES TO THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY Randall Monty University of Texas Rio Grande Valley randall.monty@utrgv.edu Abstract Writing centers are at once a part of and a response to the neoliberal academy, a phenomenon that Ryan King-White describes as a place where, “students have come to be regarded as customers, academic researchers are thought of as entrepreneurs competing for external grant funding, and the university itself more closely resembles a business model than an institute of higher learning” (223). Using that as a starting point, this essay functions part historiography, part diagnosis, and part synthesis, with three main goals: (1) redefine “neoliberalism” as a framework of critique for contemporary higher education within the United States, (2) diagnose writing centers situatedness within the neoliberal academy, and finally, (3) identify how emergent social justice scholarship—here defined as those theories accounting for access and ability, anti-racism, braver space, mindfulness, and labor—within Writing Center Studies are particularly suited as responses to neoliberalism. By expanding disciplinary praxes to examine how writing centers function within the neoliberal academy to incorporate a broader range of identities, theories, and people, writing centers can be better equipped to identify the reifying practices of our centers and develop ways to resist the harmful effects of neoliberalism that evoke these responses.

Exigence Shortly after starting my current job, the human resources department at my institution informed employees that if they experienced back pain while working, they could request a special padding to make their office chair more comfortable. As someone who deals with frequent knee pain, my initial thought was, “What a considerate gesture on the part of my new employer!” Over the next few weeks, as I got acclimated to the campus and the job, I wondered that a more effective email would say, “If your back hurts from sitting down too much, you should take a short break.” It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that my employer had considered this option, but for some reason chose to recommend a solution that would keep me in my office, at my desk, working.

This anecdote is representative of what Bjarke Risagur and Mikkel Thorup identify as the conditions of the “neoliberal academy,” where institutions of higher education assume, “a narrow, economistic and market-oriented understanding of ‘utility’ and ‘relevance’ . . . by, what [they] call, a de-academization of knowledge” (8), and what Henry Steck observed as “characterized by the entry of the university into marketplace relationships and by the use of market

strategies in university decision making” (74). The telos of the institution is shifted from assumed goals of the investigation and production of knowledge based on student and disciplinary interest, to objectives that are more implicitly or explicitly for the benefit of preferred, external industries, ideologies, and groups.

As a natural extension of these ideas, Ryan KingWhite describes the neoliberal academy as a place where students have come to be regarded as customers, academic researchers are thought of as entrepreneurs competing for external grant funding, and the university itself more closely resembles a business model than an institute of higher learning. (223) With these perspectives in mind, administrators, researchers, tutors, and students are faced with differing ideas where writing centers fit within the framework of the neoliberal academy, including how various stakeholders can situate their praxes and identities to respond to these conditions.

As part of the neoliberal academy, writing centers are frequently required to function according to neoliberal logics, making choices based on return on investment rather than humanitarian or educational benefits (Burns). At the same time, writing centers have long been recognized as equipped to respond and push back against neoliberal impositions. Harry Denny argues for “writing centers as sites for activism and social change (515),” while Lisa Zimmerelli points to writing centers’, “rich tradition of fostering social justice work, whether in implicit, counter-hegemonic ways, or via explicit advocacy” (58-59). This complex tradition, as Bridget Draxler archives, has moved writing center researchers and other stakeholders to consider the ways that race, gender, ability, and other identifications impact and are impacted by the work of writing centers and their institutions. These emerging focuses have a substantial impact on disciplinary and local praxes, and can be kairotically positioned as ways to manage, or perhaps mitigate, the constraints and demands of neoliberalism in contemporary working environments.

This essay is part historiography, part diagnosis, and part synthesis, with three main goals: (1) redefine

Undergirding Writing Centers’ Response to the Neoliberal Academy • 38! ! “neoliberalism” as a framework of critique for Within this context, Lisa Duggan’s framing is contemporary higher education within the United particularly relevant: “neoliberalism is not a unitary States, (2) diagnose writing centers situatedness within ‘system,’ but a complex, contradictory cultural and the neoliberal academy, and finally, (3) identify how political project created within specific institutions, emergent social justice scholarship within Writing with an agenda for reshaping the everyday life of Center Studies (WCS) are particularly suited as contemporary global capitalism” (70). Neoliberalism responses to neoliberalism. What this essay is not is an functions as an ideology, a set of practices, and most attempt to position neoliberalism, or economic significant to my analysis, as intentional processes of concerns more broadly, as the singular or essential enactment and becoming. Although neoliberalism isn’t issues impacting writing centers. Rather, my goal is to a system, per se, it is systemic and systematic. Therefore, a augment the strong foundation of institutional critiques critical examination of neoliberalism would be less that promote social and restorative justice in writing concerned with identifying what is and what is not centers and of higher education. “neoliberalism,” and instead would seek to understand Methodologically, this essay is informed by Critical how neoliberalism impacts upon groups and Discourse Analysis, which Sandy E. Green, Jr. and individuals in discrete and intersecting ways.

Yuan Li justify as suitable for rhetorical critique of neoliberal institutions, because it “can shed light on Facilitation: how actors purposefully use specific discursive Contra the romanticized version of capitalism, strategies to manipulate institutional logics, thus neoliberalism isn’t interested in the abolishment of differentiating between disembodied discourse that shared, public resources, but in the repurposing of constrains and embodied discourse that enables those resources for the benefit of private industry agency” (1,682). Focusing in on what “logics” mean in under the premise that private industry is better suited this usage, CDA attunes researchers to the ways than public governments to meet the needs and solve institutions strategically employ language, actions, and the problems of a global public (Zirin). In the US, this policies in order to reframe themselves and their manifests as federal and state governments actively missions to more closely align with neoliberal facilitating private economic production by way of ideologies. reduced tax obligations, limited regulations, and direct subsidies for infrastructure, defense, agriculture, energy, healthcare, education, and other industries Redefining Neoliberalism for the Writing (Predergast). Therefore, neoliberalism can be Center understood as further redefining the role of Neoliberalism is a useful artifact in critiquing government as facilitating private industry and personal higher education in the United States because it’s economic growth with limited oversight (Plant). Hiding already installed as the dominant epistemological and that dependence is part of the epistemological process, interpretative framework within that context. At the a factor that a framework of critique attuned to same time, paradoxically, because an ideology of neoliberalism allows us to identify (Stenberg). neoliberalism permeates so many aspects of lived Working within neoliberal logics, the tenure of experience, it is effectively rendered invisible to then-US President Ronald Reagan ushered in an era of critique. Therefore, understanding the obfuscating reduction of what have become labeled “progressive” origins and manifestations of neoliberalism is necessary policies, such as social services and welfare programs, for informed response. corporate taxes, and government oversight and Neoliberalism, as currently understood, was regulations of private industry. These concepts were initiated as a legitimized way for management to hedge either expelled from the US society, or the the power of labor as a direct response to a, “global responsibility for maintaining them was shifted from phase of stagflation that lasted through much of the public to private control. These reduction efforts were 1970s” (Harvey 12). However, as David Harvey details, successful largely because their proponents knowingly the creation of neoliberalism was as much a response employed language of personal responsibility, equal to the expansion of union membership and the opportunity, free market rationalism, and callbacks to benefits of collective negotiation in the US during the nationalist/religious historical imagery. As Genevieve preceding half-century. Like theories of capitalism or Garcia de Mueller demonstrates, this approach was classic economic liberalism, neoliberalism correlated necessarily reliant on racial animus, bigotry, and personal liberty with property rights, but it was scapegoating of an imagined other (immigrants, drugs, deliberately designed to privilege the economic and welfare “queens”). It is also therefore no coincidence personal liberty of certain classes over others. that the emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 3 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com!

Undergirding Writing Centers’ Response to the Neoliberal Academy • 39! ! political economic ideology in the United States framework of biopolitics draws attention to the coincided with resurgences of nationalism. impacts that the neoliberal political economy has on humans and human bodies, which in turn manifests in Conflation: Neoliberalism and the Body contemporary issues such as access to healthcare, birth Further complicating the relationship between the rates, transmission of infectious disease, and the public and the private, neoliberalism conflates binary allocation of public space. With the justification of the concepts like the individual and the corporation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, for civic and the industrial, the citizen and the customer, example, neoliberalism was reinforced as a systemic and the body and the machine, so that people and enactment of an ostensibly progressive concept businesses are positioned as hypothetical equals (publicly provided health care) through traditionally engaged in contractual agreements and transactions. conservative means (maintained private control of Maddux interprets this as “making economic industry). production a right of citizenship . . . foundational to As a result of this dominant neoliberal framing, U.S. ideals” (121), so that not only are corporations Stenberg contends that individual identifications and currently placed as having rights equal to and the autonomous rights of the biopolity are flattened or occasionally surpassing those of individuals, in order to altogether erased in favor of a uniform, hegemonic fully actualize as citizens, people are required to identity defined through participation in preferred participate within a given economic system as economic systems. These competing definitions reveal corporations. a fundamental limitation of neoliberalism: it seeks to This leads to a complicated network of flatten difference while simultaneously revealing and identifications which positions individuals and reinforcing the existence of difference. corporations as having cohabitable rights, even as the playing field is continuously slanted in favor of the Towards a Critique of Neoliberal Writing Centers latter. This focus on the individual, whether in praising A central contradiction of neoliberalism, as well as success and hard work, or blaming the individual for the exigence for a social justice-based critique in failing to be successful, arranges neoliberalism as writing centers, is that the neoliberal academy preaches uniquely incontrovertible, and positions critiques of individual success but remains reliant on overt actions neoliberalism as against a perceived common sense or of public support. This perspective will credit expected “political and cultural truths,” (St. Onge 295individual attributes such as “hard work,” “genius,” 296). As a result, Vicente Navarro points out, and “grit,” while overlooking or ignoring factors of individuals that are unable to successfully participate as privilege and oppression. Furthermore, as all results neoliberal agents receive reduced access to the entire and impacts that take place within neoliberalism are neoliberal system, limiting economic advancement. In a framed as deserved or fair, in instances where an parallel to the tautology that students need to know individual is not successful, the blame is placed on the how to “do school” in order to be successful in college individual for not adequately managing their own (Houp), in order to be successful within a neoliberal progression or applying enough effort. This myth of system, individuals must be good at the sorts of things neutrality perpetuates itself, and it is a function valued by neoliberalism. designed to absolve neoliberalism - and its enforcers Shari Stenberg points out that neoliberalism is of culpability. Following the advocacy of Rebecca capable of accounting for identity and difference, but it Hallman Martini and Travis Webster, when writing inevitably does so on its own, limited terms, with centers assume a stance of neutrality, they reify individual identity recognized insofar as it can be structures of oppression. With that in mind, Denny’s commercialized and, “diversity . . . embraced so long as framing of identity as, “by-products of these postit is marketable, entertaining, and unproblematic” (98). industrial economic and social shifts” illuminates how Wingard says this context results in “branding” the conditions of neoliberalism made necessary the humans and their physical bodies: it reinforces emergence of identity politics (535). preferred hegemonic identifications of identity and Genuine critiques of neoliberalism are often othering along lines of class, ability, nationality, race relegated—or outright dismissed—along with concepts and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality. of social justice, cultural relativism, intersectionality, Collectively, these perspectives invoke Michel identity politics, safe space, accessibility, and political Foucault’s characterization of neoliberalism as a matter correctness as postmodern performance foisted on the of biopolitics, that can “rationalize the problems posed rest of society by the humanities and liberal arts. to governmental practice by phenomena characteristics Although I’m less interested in validating bad faith of a set of living beings forming a population” (317). A arguments, we can be weary of Timothy Barouch and Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 3 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com!

Undergirding Writing Centers’ Response to the Neoliberal Academy • 40! !

Brett Ommen’s warning that when humanities and “bureaucratic-institutional model” of central, liberal arts programs claim that their efforts are hierarchical, and removed control (463). somehow outside the influence of a larger neoliberal Within this model, the neoliberal academy cannot structure, the result is a “willful ignorance of material be separated from issues of globalism and the impacts and cultural conditions of liberal public culture that that institutions have on physical bodies. Athletic shape the expectations of students” (168). It is programs doubly exemplify this dynamic because they necessary to recognize how writing centers are culpable are concerned with the physical, but also because they in perpetuating myths of upward mobility, access draw stakeholders from around the world to through standardized language/academic performance, institutions in the US, including to land grant, and of an idealized “middle-class identity” that is often community, and regional institutions (Steck). Although uncritically coded as white, standard English speaking, perhaps not as explicitly, writing centers also attune to and heteronormative (Denny and Towle). Unless physical experiences, an awareness that is a natural critically examined, writing centers risk designating extension of traditional face-to-face tutoring sessions, those identifications as invisible or immaterial to their which place students and tutors in proximity. This objectives and practices. extends to other issues of space and the bodies that occupy them, including interior design, locations on campus, and online access. Increasingly, writing centers Diagnosing Writing Centers as Part of the are forced to consider new ways of thinking about Neoliberal Academy space, such as automation, streamlining, and the When I talk about diagnosing writing centers as outsourcing of labor to tutoring and editing services part of the neoliberal academy, I’m borrowing from (Stenberg).

Stenberg’s concept of “repurposing,” which, “involves Granted, depending upon the type of institution, (1) attending to and challenging the habitual or status the extent to which this status aligns with or quo, (2) drawing on and departing from these existing contradicts the university mission can vary—land grant conditions, and (3) moving to articulate and enact new institutions might be explicitly geared towards purposes” (17). This is a useful framework because it preparing students for vocation and employment in was developed to specifically designed to reveal how industries and benefit the state, whereas for-profit the purposes of writing move away from “civic institutions might be explicitly beholden to shareholder engagement, personal inquiry, exploration of unfamiliar returns.

Proponents of this increasingly perspectives” and are replaced with “ancillary to more commercialized approach to higher education tend to “profitable” ends” within the neoliberalism (8). frame neoliberalism and its effects in a sort of appeal The shift towards the neoliberal academy is to nature—this is the way things are, or this is the way evident in how writing centers are named and things are going, so education better get on board and perceived by the public (Hawzen, Anderson, and fast—and in doing so, ignore that institutions, and the Newman), have modified their mission towards more conditions they create, are themselves rhetorical explicitly-stated objectives of job preparation and constructions. Furthermore, such arguments view the economic feasibility (Bolling, Ternes and Giardina), ethical implications of technological access, such as increased their emphases on record keeping, budget institutions requiring students to use preferred management, big data, and assessment protocols materials, private companies profiting from the labor (Macauley), and adopted the use of language and of students, and student work becoming the property practices that reflects this reframing of identity and of those companies as logical conclusions. neoliberal ethos (Rifenberg). Even seemingly smaller These conditions cannot be read outside the changes, such as moving centers out of academic anthropological context of writing centers, which have departments and reclassifying them as service historically served people from non-traditional and programs, transitioning administrator roles from under-represented groups within higher education, faculty to staff positions, renaming tutors as namely women, people of color, linguistic minorities, “consultants,” and redirecting resources away from international students, and people of different physical original research and towards grant procurement, are abilities—demographic groups that Jennifer Wingard likewise attempts to imbue writing center work with an has noted have been particularly susceptible to having air of authority that only registers as coherent within a their bodies taken advantage of by neoliberal context that already assumes neoliberalism as its institutions. This places an ethical and pedagogical essential logic. Chris Gallagher collectively refers to obligation on centers to situate their practices, these sorts of shifts as, “accountability discourses” identities, and physical spaces so as to account for the which reframe higher education according to a physical, emotional, and intellectual labor that takes Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 3 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com!

Undergirding Writing Centers’ Response to the Neoliberal Academy • 41! ! place in writing centers, and to provide accessibility Naydan, who argues that these emphases will and accommodation for students and tutors (Hitt; “inevitably devalue the professional backgrounds of Smith; Macauley and Maurillo). writing center workers and the work that writing center Each interaction between a writing center and a workers do.” Scaffolding on these perspectives, writing stakeholder leads to unique potentials regarding the center scholars run the risk of overlooking the intersections of language, gender identification, race institutional factors and contexts in which those very and ethnicity, and physical and cognitive ability. conditions arise, including the larger societal, political, Thought of another way, in framing writing centers cultural, or economic structures that contribute to (and, by extension, WCS) in terms of how they can these contexts. function as responses to the neoliberal academy, I’m Reiterating this status of construction is important drawing attention to the various ways in which centers because it keeps the door open for others to offer position themselves in accordance to conditions of responses based on their own worldviews and modernity vis-á-vis consideration of postmodernity. In experiences. This includes incorporating scholarly lines other words, writing centers are particularly suited to of inquiry that focus on, such as mindfulness, antirespond to the conditions of the neoliberal academy, racism, braver spaces, and accessibility into writing precisely because they force the institution to confront center research. The underlying concepts supporting its status as neoliberal. Invoking Denny again, writing these focuses—labor, race and ethnicity, language, centers illuminate how neoliberalism reveals exigence gender identification, class and privilege—are also for identity politics and social justice. concepts that are inextricably linked to neoliberalism.

Historically, writing centers have pointed to Furthermore, since writing centers are a part of perceived lacks (time, material resources, money) in neoliberal institutions and enact those policies, and order to shape disciplinary identifications, lauding given writing centers’ disciplinary history and underdog status at local campuses and within the identifications of promoting equitable treatment and academy at large. McKinney presciently critiques this accessibility, writing center stakeholders should “grand narrative” response as a multifaceted rhetorical incorporate praxes of social justice. strategy, one used by writing center scholars to define themselves as outsiders working within and against a Responses to Neoliberalism commercialized institution, while at the same time Duggan articulates the necessity for incorporating providing cover for a lack of what our colleagues in identity-situated critiques because, “Neoliberalism was other disciplines might consider rigorous scholarship. constructed in and through cultural and identity politics and Following McKinney’s critique and others like it, cannot be undone by a movement without constituencies and writing center disciplinary discourses have partially analyses that respond directly to that fact” (3, emphasis in shifted to an “output fundamentalism” of higher original). Yet even self-proclaimed progressive critiques education that prioritizes market mechanisms that of institutions of higher education can inadvertently emphasize productivity and performance measures (or, in some cases, intentionally), overlook the fact that (Giroux, Seals Giroux, and King-White, 733). This neoliberalism interacts with and impacts upon people, framing is evident in writing centers and writing center their identities, and their embodiments. At the same scholarship in the privileging of quantitative and RAD time, because of these conditions that it sets for itself, research, as well as in an increased emphasis on neoliberalism invites critique, resistance, and response institutional assessment, marketability of services, and (Risager). Therefore, in addition to accounting for positioning of centers as solutions to perceived labor and class, writing center critique must also problems, and to “streamline and standardize incorporate frameworks of social and restorative education” (Stenberg, 4). justice—here inclusive of concerns of race and These responses are typically positioned as intraethnicity, language difference, gender identification, disciplinary responses to each other, or as responses to accessibility and privilege, and the intersectionality of the conditions we’re working in as such. In other words, these concepts. In this section, I will discuss how five they respond to the status quo on its terms, and thus thematic strands of writing center social justice can be used to reinforce that status. However, as scholarship—which I momentarily categorize as Hallman Martini and Webster assert, “the field’s accessibility, anti-racism, mindfulness, braver spaces, emphasis on empirical and replicable aggregable dataand labor—can be read in terms of responses to the supported (RAD) research that attempts ‘objectivity’ neoliberal academy. may inhibit identity-based research that recognizes how race, sexuality, gender, ability, privilege, and emotion impact our work.” This sentiment is echoed by Liliana Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 3 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com!

Undergirding Writing Centers’ Response to the Neoliberal Academy • 42! !

Accessibility Anti-Racism Writing is both a cognitive and an embodied act Writing centers are places where diverse cultures that necessarily invokes issues of accessibility (Heard and Goins), languages (Rafoth), and literacies (Lewiecki-Wilson and Brueggemann, Dolmage, (Saathoff) intersect and interact. However, institutions Babcock and Daniels). For writing centers, which are at and disciplines, including writing centers and WCS, will once disciplinary places and physical spaces, centering utilize a range of strategies to avoid confronting issues of physical bodies is exponentially relevant. critique, particularly accusations of racism. Whether Responses of “accessibility” build off of used intentionally or not, Laura Greenfield and Karen interdisciplinary scholarship from areas such as medical Rowen note, responses that rely on metaphor, humanities, disability rhetoric, and occupational synecdoche, metonymy, and irony to deflect critique therapy in order to develop frameworks and language will give the appearance of addressing racism, but can for discussing and critiquing how writing centers in effect work to reproduce structures of inequality. In address issues related to physical and emotional health. order to counter these attempts at deflection, Representative of the range of this significance, incorporating methodologies and pedagogies informed individual researchers have drawn attention to how by critical race theory (Martinez) and anti-racism writing centers can, as examples, address issues of fat (Garcia) can center issues of race and ethnicity in ways studies (Smith), tutoring deaf students (Babcock), and that institutional approaches and master narratives assisting students with visual impairments (Sisk), while cannot. an entire special issue of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal For example, by incorporating a method of themed “Dis/ability in the Writing Center,” includes multimodal “counter-story” “storytelling,” Nancy research on topics such as social anxiety disorder, Alvarez, et al. articulate the unique concerns of “multilearning disabilities, and mental illness (Spitzer-Hanks marginalized, first-generation college students” in order and Garner). to argue that writing centers (and higher education, Advocating for a larger disciplinary shift in more broadly) must support “decolonizing dialogue thinking, Allison Hitt advises that writing centers that sanctions the production of diverse knowledge incorporate pedagogies, physical designs, technologies, and epistemology.” By bringing together issues that and research that are intentionally composed to institutions have on raced and gendered bodies, these “support students’ different physical abilities, modes of authors demonstrate a multifaceted response the learning, types of knowledge, and literacies.” Along neoliberal academy that speaks directly to the similar lines, others have argued that centers pay close problematic core of the economic system. attention to the metaphors of inclusion (Rollins) and Reiterating a point referenced above, writing dual identities of ability (McHarg) at play, as the centers have historically served people from groups language of centers can inadvertently reproduce that the neoliberal academy has traditionally systemic and hegemonic expectations of ability. overlooked, underrepresented, and taken physical Reading scholarship of accessibility in terms of advantage of. Therefore, by centering anti-racist neoliberal response heightens how these lines of approaches, stakeholders can be better prepared to inquiry can are complicated and constrained. For preemptively address issues related to race and example, training tutors to work with students with hopefully push back against the reproduction of differing abilities takes time and resources that upper institutional racism across writing center contexts: administration might prefer be allocated to other research and scholarship, pedagogy and training, and in programs or services. With regards to the physicality, the creation of discourses. an emphasis on accessibility causes stakeholders to consider the designs, layouts, arrangements, and Braver Spaces entryways of writing center spaces. Often, as a residual The embrace of the narrative of writing centers as effect of being placed in leftover locations on campus, safe spaces for diverse learners and workers has centers are forced to retrofit accommodations. Such substantial evidence in disciplinary practice and approaches are not ideal or always effective, but they scholarship (Papay, Esters). Incorporating a theory of do align with the kind of responses expected by braver space as part of a critique of the neoliberal neoliberalism. Instead, designs and professional academy can give us the tools to challenge writing development that are proactive and intentional, and center and institutional narratives. For instance, we can that include stakeholders representing the groups that be moved to ask: Who made this place safe? Whose centers intend to serve, should be preferred courses of home is it supposed to feel like? Unlike most popular action. criticism of educational institutions’ use of safe space terminology, which tend to be rooted in white male Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 3 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com!

Undergirding Writing Centers’ Response to the Neoliberal Academy • 43! ! fragility rather than serious attempts at scholarly placements within their surrounding environments and inquiry, intra-disciplinary critique of safe space are how those placements impact their work. This talk and largely based on challenging received truths. These conference contributed to a developing body of critiques complicate how perceptions of safety are in knowledge within writing center scholarship that fact functions of privilege based on race and ethnicity, includes inquiry into how mindfulness can help tutors linguistic background, economic class, and gender to diffuse assumed institutional hierarchies during identification. In calling for writing centers to view consultations (Dueck), and how mindfulness pedagogy their complex contexts as opportunities to “innovate can augment sustained tutor training to improve tutor and experiment” their practices and pedagogies in light empathy, listening skills, and enjoyment (Mack and of the “the influence of corporate-style management Hupp). discourses,” Denny draws a thread that shows how Mindfulness approaches are not only useful for these issues of social justice are necessarily connected promoting mental and emotional wellness, they also to issues of neoliberalism (151, 144). respond to the physical demands of writing center Furthermore, for reasons both embraced and labor, which necessarily includes the interactions and thrust upon them, responses themed as braver space negotiations of bodies within shared spaces. This can are necessarily political in nature. Hallman Martini and be read as a direct response to Wingard’s main concern Webster, in their introduction to the special issue of with neoliberalism, that it, “in very direct, material ways The Peer Review themed “Writing Centers as Brave/r it harms the bodies of some of the United States’s Spaces,” assert: most vulnerable occupants” (77). Together, these As gun violence, explicit homophobia and perspectives reveal a connective thread for how writing transphobia, systemic racism and classism, and all centers can open the door for mindfulness: as oppressive intersections thereof, were made neoliberalism, by definition, ignores intellectual possible and given precedence by the elected individuality and mistreats human bodies, writing executive administration, our educational sites centers can respond by positioning themselves to serve aimed at creating inclusivity became increasingly the student’s minds and the student body. more threatened.

Given that forces of hegemonic and bigoted Labor oppression are persistently seeking to enact upon By investigating issues of work such as institutions of higher education, regarding a writing management, professional status, compensation and center as “safe” may be insufficiently passive and funding, and balancing job requirements, writing center constrained. In response, it is vital for stakeholders to scholarship addresses the impacts of neoliberalism in a expand upon goals of social justice, and construct common language or economy. In their extensive writing center pedagogy, assessment, and spaces that study of the material working conditions new writing are proactive and restorative, while also accounting for center administrators, Nicole Caswell, et al. learn that individual and local contexts (Pittendrigh and many in these positions are familiar with the Camarillo). characterization of writing centers as under-resourced businesses. Although workload expectations can vary Mindfulness greatly across institutional contexts, new writing center Writing centers are at once a part of and a response to directors feel pressure to meet their requirements as the neoliberal academy. As such, writing centers can be managers first, leaving little time for scholarship, conflicted when it comes to how they support the teaching, or other service opportunities. student body (a metaphor that, in this usage, is stacked Along similar grounds, Elisabeth Buck finds that with meaning). Incorporating practices of mindfulness the business pressures of the job permeate to preinto writing center theory and practice, particularly service writing center professionals and graduate those approaches that allow the individual to be students who hope to someday land a coveted tenurementally, emotionally, and physically removed from track position (or at least a job with consistent pay and their role as labor, is uniquely suited to re-redefine the benefits). Modeling her argument for greater writing center space with the neoliberal academy in accessibility to WCS scholarship, Buck tells the story of ways that are productive and sustainable. how she used part of the start-up funds at her new job In his keynote address at the 2018 South Central to open-access publish one of her book’s chapters.

Writing Centers Association Conference at Central Studies such as these adroitly diagnose the issues Arkansas University, Jared Featherstone explains how impacting WCS, while also revealing the need for mindfulness practices can be used by tutors, students, dealing with issues as they currently exist. and other stakeholders to develop better senses of their Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 3 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com!

Undergirding Writing Centers’ Response to the Neoliberal Academy • 44! !

In order to avoid the reifying effects of academic they are exercises in performing or doing justice rather hegemony Naydan argues that prominent disciplinary than sustaining it. organizations and their conferences should Some responses to the neoliberal academy are incorporate, “a rhetoric of labor activism” to “revitalize more adept than others at complicating the context of shared governance and academic freedom, which are the neoliberal academy, such as responses that involve currently threatened by corporatizing forces.” physical bodies doing decidedly un-neoliberal things in Although there can be material benefits to positioning privatized public spaces. A productive illustrative writing center work in the language and terms of the instance are THE General Body sit-in protests that neoliberal academy (for instance, ensuring equitable took place at Syracuse University during the 2014-2015 and competitive tutor pay is a net positive), by focusing school year in response to the administration’s plans to on monetary compensation, we reproduce the systemic cut funding for support and counseling services biases we’re hoping to critique. At the same time, (THEgeneralbodySU). Proposals like these are holding these contradictory goals in mind is necessary increasingly common and follow an economic logic of for writing center workers to reconstitute their the neoliberal institution: Institutions should cut identities as promoting labor practices that are humanities and liberal arts programs because they cost embedded in social justice, while also positioning other money and don’t lead to (the right kind of) jobs issues of social justice as inextricable from issues of (Bolling, Gupta et al, Ternes and Giardina), labor and compensation.

Furthermore, they should reduce funding for support services because those services are only used by some students, students who would otherwise not be able to Concluding Thoughts cut it in the university (Caplan).

Institutions continue to promote an idealized So, just as neoliberal governmental policy frames version of wellness and healthy living that favors dissent as undeserving of citizenship, the neoliberal certain identifications and rewards continued academy frames dissent as undeserving of participation productivity: a recent email I received included the in higher education. But responses like those made by click-baity subject: “How to Eat a Cheeseburger & Still the THE General Body are effective precisely because Lose Weight,” while a colleague at another school they break from the expected neoliberal logic. They received a subsidized Fitbit activity tracker for force institutions to confront and reconcile the enrolling in a wellness program. Although I can potential hypocrisies of their neoliberalism by drawing acknowledge that there are some potential benefits to attention to the identities and bodies of those draw from these sorts of initiatives, such as impacted, and in doing so, unironically reframe the membership in community with shared goals, conversation on what many institutional mission participation should not preclude critical scrutiny. Who statements claim to advocate for: the best interests of has access to the tracked wellness data and for what the student. purposes? How long, as Karen Holbrook and Eric C. The tendencies and ramifications of the neoliberal Dahl predict, before those data factor into hiring and academy are not always negative, even if the root promotion decisions? concept is wholly indifferent to justice. As a rule, I In most cases, neoliberalism is aware that it invites disagree with any implication that because institutions response, and neoliberal institutions inoculate of higher education have become marketized, writing themselves from certain types of responses. This is centers and programs should unilaterally embrace evidenced by institutions requiring permits to protest, market-based discursive identifications and logics. And designating certain physical spaces as “free speech yet, I can find Daveena Tauber’s advocacy for zones,” and relying on the tautology that labeling preparing tutors to be independent writing consultants something a “private event” can justify allowing for the to be a convincing argument for writing centers to seek dissemination of hate speech on a public campus. As out different ways to establish professional long as the actions can be framed within a neoliberal identifications. logic, they can be accounted for. Often, neoliberalism Although not exclusive within institutions of will co-opt the language of social justice in order to higher education as places where different disciplines, sustain itself, such as when institutions support one-off cultures, and abilities intersect, writing centers can be mindfulness workshops or retreats. Although these identified as particularly situated to respond to kinds of events can stem from sincere places of neoliberalism as a systemic, globalized, and physical concern, and are often led by qualified and invested phenomenon. Writing center praxes that account for faculty and staff, the transitory nature suggests that accessibility, anti-racism, mindfulness, braver spaces, and labor, can be read as kinds of responses to Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 3 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com!

Undergirding Writing Centers’ Response to the Neoliberal Academy • 45! ! neoliberalism. As a way of downplaying the collective Babcock, Rebecca and Sharifa Daniels. Writing Centers significance of these ideas, institutions will and Disability, edited by Allison D. Smith and Trixie compartmentalize responses of social justice as only G. Smith, Fountainhead, 2017. addressing specific needs, such as anti-racism being Barouch, Timothy and Brett Ommen. “The invoked only when an issue of explicit racist violence Constrained Liberty of the Liberal Arts and occurs. This is a category error, and it is doing the Rhetorical Education.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. work of reinforcing the hegemonic hierarchies that 47, no. 2, 2017, pp. 158-179. neoliberalism seeks to sustain. Acknowledging the Bolling, Chase. ““Is College Worth It?” Arguing for existence of intersectionality as a baseline assumption Composition’s Value with the Citizen-Worker.” is necessary for sincere critique of the neoliberal College Composition and Communication, vol. 67, no. 2, academy. At the same time, the social justice themes 2015, pp. 151-172. discussed here must be addressed on their own terms.

Buck, Elisabeth. Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing The goal should be to embrace both the intersections as Center Studies. Pivot, Palgrave MacMillan, 2017. well as the unique contexts provided by each Burns, William. “Critiquing the Center: The Role of perspective.

Tutor Evaluations in an Open Admissions Writing This comprehensive approach contradicts Center.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 11, neoliberal logics, and that is the point. According to no. 2, 2014.

Duggan, “as the ideas of Liberalism become common Caplan, Bryan. The Case Against Education: Why the sense, they also work to create or remake institutions and Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. practices according to their precepts” (5, emphasis in Princeton UP, 2018. original). In doing so, neoliberalism impacts writing Caswell, Nicole, et al. The Working Lives of New Writing centers by redefining what our very work, spaces, and Center Directors. Utah State UP, 2016. selves mean and are capable of. By expanding our Denny, Harry. Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics praxes to incorporate a broader range of identities, of One-to-One Mentoring. Utah State UP, 2010. theories, and people, we can be better equipped to Denny, Harry and Beth Towle. “Braving the Waters of identify the reifying practices of our centers and to Class: Performance, Intersectionality, and Policing develop ways to resist the deleterious effects of of Working Class Identity in Everyday Writing neoliberalism.

Centers.” Writing Centers as Brave/r Spaces, special issue of The Peer Review, vol. 1, no. 2, 2017, Acknowledgements thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/braverI would like to extend my gratitude to everyone that spaces/braving-the-waters-of-class-performancehelped me think through and revise the ideas for this intersectionality-and-the-policing-of-working-classessay, including the tutors at the UTRGV Writing identity-in-everyday-writing-centers/. Accessed 14 Center, the editors and reviewers at Praxis, and March 2018. countless audiences and respondents from across Dolmage, Jay Timothy. Disability Rhetoric (Critical various writing center conferences. Special thanks to Perspectives on Disability). Syracuse UP, 2014.

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REVIEW OF WRITING PROGRAM AND WRITING CENTER COLLABORATIONS , EDITED BY ALICE JOHNSTON MYATT AND LYNÉE LEWIS GAILLET Wenqi Cui Indiana University of Pennsylvania w.cui@iup.edu Myatt, Alice Johnston, and Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Editors. W riting Program and W riting Center Collaborations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. $109.

Alice Johnston Myatt and Lynée Lewis Gaillet’s edited collection Writing Program and Writing Center Collaborations brings together eleven academic collaborative programs characterized by writing centers, English departments, the Writing in the Discipline (WID), Writing Across Curriculum (WAC), and disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Notably, this collection offers insights into how theory can be used as a heuristic to design, develop, enact, assess, and sustain successful collaborations, especially complex collaborations which often require collaborators to “cross disciplinary, organizational, national, and/or cultural boundaries” (15). Building on previous descriptive work on collaboration in the field of composition studies, this collection aims to understand “the why and how of successful programmatic collaboration” (viii)). To do so, the contributors of this collection “explore both theory and praxis” of their collaborative programs (ix).

Encouraged by Joseph Staling’s advice of being “less timid about theory” (qtd. in Myatt and Gaillet ix), a specific focus in this collection is on how to use theory and research to support productive academic collaborations in the field of composition studies. This book starts with Myatt’s review of the theoretical frameworks regarding complex collaboration from the fields of organization studies, business management, public administration, and economics, based on which she synthesizes six useful principles. Then, by examining the challenges that collaborative partners may encounter, she explicates how to use those principles to enact effective complex collaborations. In the subsequent chapters, eleven projects are delineated to illustrate the practical application of the theories in those collaborative praxes among individuals, programs, departments, disciplines, and civic communities. Lastly, each chapter concludes with a “Postscript from the Editors” where the editors highlight the connection between theory and practice,

reflecting on how the principles of collaboration are applied in each collaborative project.

Another appealing feature of this book is its intention to invite and inspire readers to find opportunities and develop partnerships that suit their own contexts and professional goals. The collection also invites readers to expand, improve, or promote existing partnerships and relationships in local contexts, rather than claiming the specific patterns or methods for crafting collaborative programs in the book’s featured programs are universally applicable.

With this intention in mind, the contributors of this collection not only analyze, assess, and reflect on the successes and challenges of their collaborative projects, but also elucidate the theories and research these projects are built on, giving readers insights into the features of successful collaborations and elements that sustain their development. These collaborative programs range from basic partnerships involving individuals to complex initiatives that require collaborators to engage in diverse cultural and linguistic practices and transcend multiple boundaries. Though each collaboration is unique and contextualized, the successful endeavors featured in this collection share similar hallmarks: they are built on complex collaboration theories, and they employ pragmatic tactics. These tactics can be adapted, reshaped, or remade by readers for their own collaborative ventures.

Among this wide range of collaborative programs, some are institution-based and initiated by the programs’ administrators. Chapter 2 illustrates how to find a common ground on which a partnership can be built between two institutions, each of which works independently and has its own “force field” (27). The director from one institution’s writing center and the administrator of that institution’s writing program (WPA) agree—after many communications—that their collaboration has to be built on “collaboricity”: the combination of “collaboration” and “reciprocity” (40).

This successful project suggests that shared values and goals, reciprocal caring and respect, and dynamic interactions between the two parties are key to successful collaborations.

As challenging as enacting collaborations between two organizations is, it is similarly difficult to form

collaborations amongst different disciplinary departments, such as STEM and English departments, because they often hold different perceptions of writing. Readers who are interested in crossdisciplinary collaborations can be enlightened after reading Chapters 5 and 6. In Chapter 5, the collaboration is a ten-year long project between the instructors from the Animal Sciences Department and the graduate student coordinators from the English Department. Instead of celebrating successes, the authors of Chapter 5 focus on the limitations of their Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) model. The obstacle in this cross-departmental writing program is mainly derived from the tension between the “writing to learn” approach desired by the English department’s WAC coordinators and the “learning to write” approach wanted by the faculty members from the Animal Sciences Department. What readers can learn from this unsuccessful cross-disciplinary collaboration is that negotiations and compromises should be made between administrators and instructors if they intend to initiate and sustain a cross-disciplinary program on campus.

Contrary to the project in Chapter 5, the collaboration between a STEM program and the English Department portrayed in Chapter 6 is very successful. The triumphal collaboration results from two aspects. First, the curriculum is collaboratively designed on “shared tenets and methodologies” (119) of English and STEM-based learning. Second, a miniwriting center was established specifically to meet the “curricular, thematic, and rhetorical demands” (123) of the STEM-based program. Nevertheless, the lessons from Chapter 5 and successful experiences from Chapter 6 both showcase the importance of shared perceptions and methodologies of teaching writing in cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Collaborations do not always happen between organizations. More often, they can be between individual faculty members like the collaboration in Chapter 3 between two individual lecturers of two courses—Composition Theory/Pedagogy and Writing Center Pedagogy—for pre-service tutors and teachers.

However, some collaborative projects start on an individually-based level but then are expanded to institution-based programs. A case in point is Chapter 4, which describes a successful institution-based collaborative project that was expanded from a “grassroots” collaboration between a lecturer in the first-year-composition (FYC) program and the writing center administrator (WCA). What the administrators face in this writing-center and FYC program is different from the collaboration imposed on individuals from upper administration in Chapter 2.

Review of Writing Program and Writing Center Collaborations • 49! !

When individual-based collaboration seeks to develop into an institution-based program, the “democratic” and egalitarian nature of grassroots collaborations is disrupted by the traditional “vertical hierarchies” (77) of institution-orientated programs.

In this circumstance, the key to a successful grassroots collaboration lies in a compromise and balance between the needs of students and tutors, the “academic freedom” of instructors, and the goals of programs and institutions (90). To ensure that local exigencies and needs are will be considered seriously by administrators in negotiations, assessment of the program should be conducted and reflections from instructors, tutors, and students should be collected regularly.

Regardless of whether a collaborative program is composed at an individual or institutional level, a collaboration can be developed to serve specific individuals, such as faculty members, undergraduates, graduates, international students, and high school students, as illustrated in Chapters 7, 8, 10 and 11. The project in Chapter 7 involves the collaboration between tutors, students, and disciplinary teachers, where tutors’ narratives concerning their own experiences as student writers were utilized to improve faculty’s pedagogy regarding how writing is taught in the curriculum, institutional policies related to writing, and attitudes towards multilingual writers. Chapter 8 describes and evaluates a collaborative mentoring program among the composition program, the writing center, faculty, and veteran graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) for new GTAs in a composition program.

Chapter 12, the last chapter, engages the collaboration between first-year composition students and high school students from the local community. The collaborative workshop program in Chapter 10 is for serving new coming English as a Second Language (ESL) students and for training their writing center tutors. From the above projects, readers can be prompted to creatively design or customize their own collaborative initiatives to serve their specific purposes.

The most complex collaboration is presented in Chapter 11, “Collaborating to Support InternationalStudent Writers.” The program is launched to facilitate a group of international undergraduates to make successful cultural, academic, and social transitions at an American university. What makes this collaboration the most complex is that this project involves eight ventures: a student-affairs unit, six different undergraduate college writing programs, and a writing center. Coordination and cooperation among these units is particularly challenging because these programs and institutions are significantly different in pedagogy, philosophy, and structure. Again, as collaboration

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theory and praxis verify, it is the common goals, a shared vision, and mutual trust among these units, established through listening, understanding, negotiating, and discussing, that contribute to their successful partnership.

Finally, it is worth noting that in addition to their focus on both theory and praxis, each project is accompanied with well-developed teaching materials, empirical-based assessment, and reflections on the project’s successes and limitations, which can be conveniently adopted by readers for their collaborative attempts. For instance, in Chapter 3, the two authors include their narratives, reflections, research questions and methods, collected data, and their findings, from which readers can clearly see how the authors use research to collaboratively develop a curriculum to address a group of pre-service teachers’ academic needs. Another example can be found in Chapter 4 where the authors used interviews and forums to assess the communications between FYC director, WCA, and teachers. These interviews and forums offer teachers opportunities to articulate their “dissent” and to “voice their concerns about the structure of the collaboration,” as well as to recommend strategies to promote communication practices, such as holding regular face-to-face and online forums to develop collaborative initiatives (83). Meanwhile, the assessment allows the administrators to realize the communicative obstacles caused by the traditional hierarchy between administrators and teachers. There are many pragmatic and handy scenarios in this book from which readers can learn about these programs’ accomplishments, ponder over the limitations and weaknesses reflected on by the authors, duplicate their practice, and apply the detailed teaching materials and course design in their own programs.

Writing Program and Writing Center Collaborations brings up some current discussions about academic collaborations involving diverse writing programs and writing centers among various ventures in variegated contexts. Yet, despite the diversity of issues and topics contributors provide in this collection, there are still many questions to be asked regarding collaborations.

In Chapter 9, the proposed collaboration possibility between writing centers and writing programs to support students’ multimodal composing projects still needs to be tested, though that suggestion is established on the findings of an empirical research.

On the whole, this book encourages readers to address those unanswered questions through transcending the collaborative boundaries of disciplines, organizations, and communities as well as continuously committing to their collaborative efforts.

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Overall, this collection, highlighting both theories on complex collaboration and their praxis, can serve as a valuable resource for writing program administrators, writing center directors, and faculty in many disciplines who are building, planning, or sustaining their collaborative projects.

Works Cited Myatt, Alice Johnston, and Lynée Lewis Gaillet, editors. Writing Program and Writing Center Collaborations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Staling, Joseph. “Centering: What Writing Centers Need to Do?” Writing Center Perspectives, edited by Byron L Stay, Christina Murphy, and Eric Hobson, NWCA Press, 1995, pp. 146-154.

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