16.2 (2019) Race and the Writing Center

PR AXIS

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a writing center journal

16.2: Race & The Writing Center

VOL. 16, NO. 2 (2019): Race & the Writing Center TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS COLUMNS From the Editors: Race & the Writing Center Sarah Riddick & Tristin Hooker

FOCUS ARTICLES Potential for and Barriers to Actionable Antiracism in the Writing Center: Views from the IWCA Special Interest Group on Antiracism Activism Wonderful Faison, Elijah Simmons, Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison, Jasmine Kar Tang, Katie Levin, Keli Tucker Talking Justice: The Role of Anti-Racism in the Writing Center Hillary Coenen, Fehintola Folarin, Natasha Tinsley, Lisa Wright Why I Call It the Academic Ghetto: A Critical Examination of Race, Place, and Writing Centers Alexandria Lockett Exploring White Privilege in Tutor Education Dan Melzer Emotional Performance and Antiracism in the Writing Center Douglas S. Kern

SPECIAL SECTION: Minority Serving Institutions Edited by Karen Keaton Jackson & Mick Howard COLUMNS MSIs Matter: Recognizing Writing Center Work at Minority Serving Institutions Karen Keaton Jackson & Mick Howard Writing as a Practice of Freedom: HBCU Writing Centers as Sites of Liberatory Practice Wonderful Faison

FOCUS ARTICLES Rhetorical Authority in Student Language: A Study of Student Reflective Responses in the Writing Center at an HBCU Kathi R. Griffin, Tatiana Glushko, and Daoying Liu Dismantling Neutrality: Cultivating Antiracist Writing Center Ecologies Eric C. Camarillo Liminally Speaking: Pathos-Driven Approaches in an HBCU Writing Center As A Way Forward Kendra Mitchell

BOOK REVIEW Review of Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication by Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young JWells

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Eric C. Camarillo, M.A. currently serves the University of Houston-Victoria as manager of academic support, where he runs the writing center and sometimes teaches composition courses. He’s interested in issues of social justice, equity, race, and assessment. Eric is also a Ph.D. student at Texas Tech University.

Hillary Coenen, Ph.D. Hillary Coenen has a Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University in rhetoric and professional writing, specializing in feminist and social justice rhetorics. She has worked as an administrator and a consultant in writing centers for ten years in Texas and Oklahoma, where she plans to pursue a career in writing center administration. Growing up white in a rural Texas town, she first encountered activist teaching while pursuing her B.A. in English at a PWI in Texas. As a master’s student at the IWCA Collaborative at CCCCs in 2012, she began to understand the potential relationship between literacy work and activism, and since then she has sought ways to combine her passions for critical pedagogy, literacy education, and social and racial justice. Follow her @HMCoenen.

Wonderful Faison, Ph.D. (she/her) is an assistant professor of English at Langston University. She began her research on writing centers during her time in graduate school. She focuses on writing centers as racialized spaces, the use of Black language in the writing center, as well as a womanist approach to teaching composition. Her activism is rooted in the advancement of POC, the working class, and the LGBTQIA+ community.

Fehintola Folerin, M.A. has a master’s from Oklahoma State University in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESL). She earned her bachelor’s degrees in English at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. She taught International English Composition and doubled as a writing center consultant at Oklahoma State University. Her research interests focus on intercultural communicative competence and social justice research. Since arriving at Oklahoma State she has noticed that some people experience Blackness differently in America and she wants to work toward diminishing the inequities. Follow her @FPFolarin.

Kathi R. Griffin, Ph.D., M.A.T., University of Iowa, is Director of the Richard Wright Center for Writing, Rhetoric, and Research, and a composition instructor at Jackson State University in Jackson, MS. In 2001, she helped found the Mississippi Writing Center Association and has served on the boards of the Southeastern Writing Center Association and Midwest Writing Center Association.

Tatiana Glushko, Ph.D. coordinates the work of the Richard Wright Center for Writing, Rhetoric, and Research at Jackson State University, where she also tutors undergraduate and graduate students and trains peer tutors. Prior to this, she taught English to international students and was an English language instructor in Russia. Besides her interest in student rhetorical awareness, she also examines listening practices in the writing center and studies writing centers in Russia.

Mick Howard, Ph.D. is Director of the Writing Center and Assistant Professor at Langston University, the furthest west HBCU in the country. During his time there, he has transformed it from a writing lab to a writing center model utilizing undergraduate peer tutors. He has also led the effort to eliminate basic writing courses and replace them with corequisite models uniquely crafted to service the needs of Langston University students, which has led to a record number of students succeeding in their composition courses.

Karen Keaton Jackson, Ph.D. graduated summa cum laude from Hampton University and went on to earn her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Composition from Wayne State University. She currently is an Associate Professor and Director of the Writing Studio at North Carolina Central University where she continues her research on the role of HBCUs in conversations about race and writing.

JWells, M.A. is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas-Austin where she studies rhetoric and writing.

After teaching in correctional facilities, she decided to pursue an area of interest in the rhetorics of prisons.

She is currently researching how incarcerated mothers use their writing as a tool to mother while behind bars.

Douglas S. Kern, Ph.D. has served as an assistant director of The Writing Center at the University of Maryland College Park, where has taught Scriptwriting, Introduction to Academic Writing, Writing for the Arts, Introduction to Drama, and African-American Literature and Culture. His main research and teaching interests lie in communication, composition, English and American drama (across theatre, film, and television), African-American literature, language plurality, and creative writing. In listening to and working with his students, Doug implement’s a pedagogy in which linguistic diversity is valued as highly as academic achievement.

Daoying Liu, Ed.D. is an instructor in second language writing for undergraduates and a co-founder of English Writing Center at School of Foreign Studies, Nantong University, China. He also teaches academic writing and business writing for graduates and international students.

Alexandria Lockett, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English at Spelman College. She publishes about the technological politics of race, surveillance, and access. Her work has appeared in Composition Studies and Enculturation, as well as Black Perspectives on Writing Program Administration: From the Margins to the Center (SWR Press), Out in the Center (Utah State University Press), and Bad Ideas about Writing (West Virginia University Digital Publishing Institute). An extended biography is available via her portfolio at: www.alexandrialockett.com Katie Levin, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) is at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities as Co-Director of the Center for Writing and Affiliate Graduate Faculty member in Literacy and Rhetorical Studies. She began her work in writing centers at Skidmore College and continued to Indiana University–Bloomington, where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English and wrote a qualitative dissertation study of a large WAC writing center. She has been involved in the MWCA and IWCA Antiracism Activism SIGs since 2006. Katie is particularly interested in collective work for racial and social justice in and through writing centers.

Dan Melzer, Ph.D. is Associate Director of First-Year Composition. His research interests include writing across the curriculum, writing program administration, and multiple literacies. His articles have appeared in College Composition and Communication, Writing Program Administration, Kairos, The WAC Journal, and other publications. He has written two textbooks, Everything's a Text (with Deborah Coxwell Teague) and Exploring College Writing, and the scholarly books Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing and Sustainable WAC: A Whole Systems Approach to Launching and Developing WAC Prorgams, coauthored with Michelle Cox and Jeff Galin.

Kendra Mitchell, Ph.D. is a Fulbright alumna and earned her doctorate in English with a concentration in rhetoric and composition studies and a specialty in writing center studies. She has led writing initiatives, taught writing courses, and trained tutors at Florida A&M University.

Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) is an assistant teaching professor and Associate Director of the University Writing Center at the University of Notre Dame. She began working in writing centers as an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma. Talisha completed her Ph.D. with an emphasis in writing center studies from Purdue University. Her research investigated experiences of and insights into racism and antiracism of Black writing tutors at predominantly white institutions. Talisha is currently a coleader of the IWCA Antiracism Activism SIG. Elijah Simmons, M.A. (he/him/his) is a Ph.D. student in the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures Department at Michigan State University. He began his work in writing centers at Binghamton University and continued to Miami University and Michigan State University. He approaches writing center theory and

practice through the lens of critical race theory and fictive-kinship, with particular attention to Black students’ usage of the center.

Jasmine Kar Tang, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) is at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities as Co-Director of the Center for Writing, Affiliate Graduate Faculty member in Literacy and Rhetorical Studies, and Assistant Director of the Minnesota Writing Project. Her research interests involve critical race and ethnic studies, migration studies, and writing studies. She is currently working on a project on Orientalism in the writing center.

Natasha Tinsley, M.A. is a professor at Southwestern Oklahoma State University. She has a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Oklahoma State University (OSU), as well as a Master of Arts in Education from Cameron University. When she was an assistant director of the writing center at OSU, her contributions to the writing center included serving as a presenter, co-presenter, and contributor on presentations for several writing center conferences, and publishing a book review in the 2017 issue of the The Writing Center Journal. Her research focuses on identity, gender roles, and motherhood as they relate to Black people. As she grows as an educator and human being, she learns more about herself and her role in denouncing the discrimination that has impeded cultural growth and awareness in society for so long. Follow her @NatashaATinsley.

Keli Tucker, M.A. (she/her/hers) first joined the writing center field as a graduate assistant in the writing center at DePaul University, where she earned a master’s degree in English. At present, she supervises a team of peer writing tutors as an English Specialist in the Success Center of Southwestern Illinois College, and she is a co-leader of the IWCA Antiracism Activism SIG. Lisa Wright, M.A. is a Ph.D. student in English with a focus in nonfiction creative writing. She teaches composition and creative writing and is a writing center consultant at Oklahoma State University. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, The Muslim Journal and the 2017 Oklahoma Writing Project Anthology. Her research interests include critical race theory, antiracism, decolonization, women’s studies and liberation studies. She is currently working on an essay collection about her experience with home births. Follow her @MrsLisaEWright.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 2 (2019)

FROM THE EDITORS: RACE & THE WRITING CENTER Sarah Riddick University of Texas at Austin sarah.a.riddick@utexas.edu

To open this special issue, “Race & the Writing Center,” I (Sarah) would like to share its impetus. At the South Central Writing Center Association’s (SCWCA) annual conference in February 2018, I participated in Natasha Tinsley et al.’s workshop “Beyond Inclusion: Developing a Mindful Approach to Racial Justice in Tutor Training” (Tinsley et al.). Hillary Coenen et al. describe this workshop in detail in their contribution to this issue, “Talking Justice: The Role of Anti-Racism in the Writing Center,” which we hope will serve you as a resource for developing and delivering your own workshops. Here, though, I’d like to briefly reflect on this workshop from my perspective as a participant.

In the first part of Tinsley et al.’s workshop, we assessed our respective centers’ current approaches to antiracist work, which helped us improve our understanding of the intentional, different ways in which we at writing centers approach this work, as well as the ways this work could improve. The second part—which culminated in reflecting on each other’s anonymous six-word memoirs about our first encounters with race—created a space for acknowledging the range of racial experiences that shape our individual lives and interactions with another. In the third part, we brainstormed responses to actual encounters with racism in the writing center; through this process, we worked as a group toward the racial justice we seek, and, more importantly, we discovered our limitations and the ways we still need to learn and grow.

What emerged from that workshop for me and my fellow participants was a better understanding of our collective desire to do more and better work. So, with my colleagues, I got to work. Alice Batt, SCWCA President and Assistant Director of the University Writing Center at UT Austin, and I now deliver a modified version of Tinsley et al.’s workshop each year to our center’s interns. Here at Praxis, I immediately began working with Tristin, Trish, and our special section editors Karen Keaton Jackson and Mick Howard on this special issue. Underlying every issue and every piece we publish—in Praxis and in Axis—is an effort to create places that support and showcase the many voices of writing center work and

Tristin Hooker University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com

scholarship. Unfortunately, many voices and the invaluable experiences and insights they could offer are often neglected, ignored, or silenced. In this issue, we seek to do the opposite. Titled “Race & the Writing Center,” this special double issue offers a dedicated space to acknowledge and work through the racial injustices that our work may encounter and inadvertently perpetuate, as well as the ways we can productively respond.

Wonderful Faison et al. open our issue with “Potential for and Barriers to Actionable Antiracism in the Writing Center: Views from the IWCA Special Interest Group on Antiracism Activism,” which shares their contributions as panelists during the IWCA Collaborative at the 2018 Conference on College Composition & Communication. As Faison et al. explain, the “conference moved online because the physical location of Kansas City, Missouri, was deemed too racist by the voting members of IWCA for us to actually go there (Dietz)—seemed an appropriate time to reflect on action, specifically antiracist action” (4).

Structured as a dialogue, Faison et al.’s piece illustrates how writing center practitioners may engage in such reflective work, as well as conveys the urgency for doing so.

In “Talking Justice: The Role of Antiracism in the Writing Center,” Hillary Coenen et al. discuss the ongoing development and implementation of their antiracist workshop for writing centers called the Talking Justice Project (TJP), which “strives to answer the call to address racism in institutions that were designed to maintain white supremacy and systemically disadvantage People of Color” (12). This workshop asks participants to reflect critically on their own perspectives of race and to work through scenarios inspired by actual consultations. The structure of this workshop, which Coenen et al. describe in detail, offers an accessible yet challenging manner in which writing center practitioners at all levels can better prepare themselves for specific instances of (inter)personal and institutional racism that may arise during writing center consultations.

With “Why I Call It the Academic Ghetto: A Critical Examination of Race, Place, and Writing Centers,” Alexandria Lockett offers a closer look at the

From the Editors: Race & the Writing Center • 2 kind of experiences that drive this work. As Lockett underrepresented in scholarship. Thus, to Jackson and notes, “the perspectives of racially marginalized tutors Howard pose “the most fundamental question” they are overwhelmingly absent from WC scholarship” (21). and others have, and those interested in racial justice Thus, Lockett shares her perspective; reflecting on work should share: “Why are the voices who teach and personal and professional experiences as a graduate tutor hundreds, even thousands, of students of color student and “as a black queer writing center tutor,” each year not engaged in and, quite frankly, leading Lockett argues that “[Graduate Writing Centers] these conversations?” (51). In this issue-length section, function as ‘the academic ghetto’” institutionally and Jackson and Howard present several of these voices. culturally and calls upon us to share more of “y/our In “Writing as a Practice of Freedom: HBCU own lived experience” so we may “more Writing Centers as Sites of Liberatory Practice,” comprehensively interpret what might be happening Wonderful Faison reflects on the differences she has with race and WCs” (20, 29). observed in while working in a writing center at a In “Exploring White Privilege in Tutor Predominantly White Institution (PWI) and later at an Education,” Dan Melzer shares the results of his action HBCU writing center. Compared with the PWI, the research on four semesters worth of discussions of students in the HBCU center more frequently “asked white privilege in his tutoring internship courses at a how writing could free them, when writing and racially diverse institution. His article reflects on the learning to write had done nothing but oppress them” ways many white tutors “resisted” conversations about (53). Faison shares how and why tutors in this center privilege in those discussions, often assumed take a person-oriented approach to their consultations, assimilation to be an easy process, or even felt helpless one that acknowledges the serious struggles the writers to change embedded institutions. Ultimately, Melzer in their center may be facing and that shows those determined the need to foreground discussions of race writers how writing can help them beyond their and privilege in tutor preparation, and to prompt tutors coursework. to “directly confront white privilege” (40), to Kathi R. Griffin, Tatiana Glushko, and Daoying encounter implicit bias, and to work for institutional Liu answer the call for replicable, aggregable, and datachange by “allowing space for expressing feelings and driven research in the writing center with their study, lived experiences and not just abstract concepts or “Rhetorical Awareness of Student Writers at an positions” (40).

HBCU: A Study of Reflective Responses in the Writing Douglas S. Kern also addresses questions of Center.” The authors look at a collection of responses emotional engagement, white privilege, and antiracist on student reflection forms at an HBCU, in an attempt work in the writing center in “Emotional Performance to observe and measure rhetorical awareness. and Antiracism in the Writing Center.” Drawing on Measuring students across multiple discourse Laura Micciche’s work on emotion and performance, categories, the authors ultimately find that students’ Kern reflects on his own tutor training curriculum, reflections reveal more about curriculum, pedagogy, frontloading readings on students’ right to their own and social context than about individual students. language, and inviting the emotional responses that Noting that students did not demonstrate a high degree follow. Working through a series of “reenactments” of of rhetorical awareness or development of this these performances, Kern asks, “Can the tutors’ awareness over multiple visits to the writing center, the emotional performances, both in action and voice, authors suggest that student reflections are, themselves, eventually help to bring attention to, or subvert, the important indicators of a writing program’s rhetorical backlash and attacks antiracism rhetoric tends to success. The authors also argue that these results have invite?” (44). Reflecting on his own past performances important implications for writing program curricular as an ally, Kern states his intention to “move beyond reform and professional development that challenges narrative and into action” (48). current-traditional pedagogy, especially at minorityAlthough we have purposely kept the theme of serving institutions. this issue broad, we recognize that there are specific In “Dismantling Neutrality,” Eric C. Camarillo conversations that need to be had, as do our special focuses on the particular complexities of running a section editors Karen Keaton Jackson and Mick writing center at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), Howard. This section focuses on Historically Black and offers an ecological model of thinking of the Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority writing center. This model considers the writing center Serving Institutions (MSIs), which, as Jackson and as part of the larger system of writing assessment Howard explain in their opening column “MSIs students are exposed to, and can reveal the way Matter: Recognizing Writing Center Work at Minority practices in those institutionalized systems have Serving Institutions,” are significantly potential to harm students. Ultimately, by designing a Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 2 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com"

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From the Editors: Race & the Writing Center • 3 “revised writing center canon” (73) for his tutor training focused on antiracist writing assessment ecologies, Camarillo was able to create a space where writing center work engages meaningfully to dismantle the systems of power that marginalize students’ language.

Kendra Mitchell continues this theme in “Liminally Speaking: Pathos-Driven Approaches in an HBCU Writing Center as a Way Forward.” Mitchell looks at the reflections in her case study on interactions between African American consultants and consultees through the lens of Vorris Nunley’s idea of “hush harbors,” where African American Language develops and is used freely. Examining not only at the language but the spaces in which self-identified African Americans use AAL and negotiate AAL and Edited American English, Mitchell argues for “pathos-driven listening in a space historically misheard: historically black university writing centers” (74), revealing “the substantial contributions of AAL writers and tutors who wrestle for their language rights on their own terms (79).

We close this issue with JWells’s review of Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young’s (2017) Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication, an edited collection that offers theoretical and pedagogical tools for antiracist practices from which instructors and consultants alike would benefit.

Works Cited Tinsley, Natasha, et al. “Beyond Inclusion: Developing a Mindful Approach to Racial Justice in Tutor Training.” Mindfulness at the Center, South Central Writing Centers Association Conference, 23 Feb. 2018, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, Arkansas. Workshop.

Postscript: On a personal note here at Praxis, we are saddened to say goodbye to Sarah but proud to send her off with an issue she was so instrumental in bringing about.

Sarah has been our dedicated, conscientious editor for the last two years, a mentor and teacher to our copyediting staff and the rest of the editorial team. She has pushed to broaden our readership and our submission pool, both for our journal and for Axis, our blog, and throughout she has shown a dedication to preserving and maintaining our authors’ voices. She has encouraged Praxis to continue creating space and amplifying new, vital, often overlooked voices, and for that we are so grateful. Thank you, Sarah, for all of your time with us!

We’d also like to extend a warm welcome to our new managing editor Fiza Mairaj, a Ph.D. student in the Educational Policy and Planning program at the University of Texas at Austin. Fiza’s research interests and her experience as a graduate writing consultant make her a great fit for Praxis, and we look forward to working with her, beginning Fall 2019.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 2 (2019) www.praxisuwc.com"

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16, No 2 (2019) !

POTENTIAL FOR AND BARRIERS TO ACTIONABLE ANTIRACISM IN THE WRITING CENTER: VIEWS FROM THE IWCA SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP ON ANTIRACISM ACTIVISM Wonderful Faison Langston University dr._wonderful.faison@langston.edu

Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison University of Notre Dame thaltiwa@nd.edu

Katie Levin University of Minnesota–Twin Cities kslevin@umn.edu

Elijah Simmons Michigan State University simmone3@miamioh.edu

Jasmine Kar Tang University of Minnesota–Twin Cities jkt@umn.edu

Keli Tucker Southwestern Illinois College keli.tucker@swic.edu

Abstract The IWCA Special Interest Group (SIG) on Antiracism Activism “is a group committed to undoing racism at multiple levels: in the immediate context of the writing conference and local writing center, and more widely through systematic cross-curricular and cross-institutional initiatives” (“WCActivism”). This piece features the SIG’s participation in the 2018 online IWCA Collaborative at CCCC: the SIG leaders assembled a diverse panel of scholars and practitioners from different races, ages, institutions, and varying levels and types of writing center experience, but with useful and firm beliefs in action. Using Rasha Diab et al.’s 2013 article “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable” as a starting point, the panelists drew on their various perspectives to examine the potential for and barriers to actionable antiracism activism within both the writing center and the IWCA. The authors reflect on antiracism action in, through, and by writing centers and those who work in them, situated within writing centers’ local, academic, and institutional contexts.

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Introduction Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison and Keli Tucker: The IWCA Special Interest Group on Antiracism Activism “is a group committed to undoing racism at multiple levels: in the immediate context of the writing conference and local writing center, and more widely through systematic cross-curricular and cross-institutional initiatives” (“WCActivism”). The Antiracism Activism SIG became a standing SIG in 2017, and it is currently under our co-leadership. Since taking over leadership for the SIG, our primary goal has been to develop resources and support to help its members move toward the action invoked in the SIG’s name. The 2018 online IWCA

Collaborative at CCCC—a conference moved online because the physical location of Kansas City, Missouri, was deemed too racist by the voting members of IWCA for us to actually go there (Dietz)—seemed an appropriate time to reflect on action, specifically antiracist action. We assembled a diverse panel of scholars and practitioners from different races, ages, institutions and varying levels and types of writing center experience, but with useful and firm beliefs in action. Using Rasha Diab et al.’s 2013 article “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable” as a starting point, the panelists drew on their various perspectives to help us examine both the potential for and barriers to actionable antiracism activism within both the writing center and the IWCA. In their piece, Diab et al. ask their readers to go beyond simply articulating our commitments to racial justice and to move towards concrete, actionable commitments. In their reflections below, presented in the turntaking structure born out of the Collaborative session, the panelists elaborate on and further explore their responses to the panel’s original questions on antiracism action in, through, and by writing centers and those who work in them, situated within writing centers’ local, academic, and institutional contexts.

Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison and Keli Tucker: One of the justifications Diab et al. give for moving past confessional narratives is that

Potential for and Barriers to Actionable Antiracism in the Writing Center • 5 !

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our personal experiences of and interventions in racism are bound up in systems and institutions, including academic institutions. So, how can those in writing centers work towards building an institutional narrative of racism and/or antiracism, in addition to personal narratives?

What is the value of a broader view of racism as it relates to writing centers?

Wonderful Faison: Institutional Racism: A True American Horror Story. I always find it odd when people ask me to reflect on something I said previously about racism, since that reflection is always a laborious task. The labor of personal narrative and the labor of resisting those who are dismissive of it as a personal problem and not a systemic and institutional one leaves me dismayed, discombobulated, and downright pissed off. This is truth. This is my truth. White folk get to live in their perfect white imagined world and leave uncritiqued the damage, the bodies, the genocide—all so they can have their segregated neighborhoods. Yet, in the same breath, they suggest that black people who create spaces for themselves (BLM) are committing terrorism against the White State. Facts.

So yes, I attempt to render visible the brutality and racial violence that continues to this day in the academy—the academy I loved. The academy that betrayed me with its white lies of inclusion, tolerance, and social justice. This is truth. This is my truth. Facts.

Elijah Simmons: Do You Wear Your Identity Or Does It Wear You? I ask this question with the purpose of thought; I want you as a reader to ponder on your identity.

Invitation I used to think ‘bout how my identity changed from building to building . . . room to room.

I used to think if my name was Daquan . . . how would I be viewed on paper?

I used to think if I wore my earrings, hat backwards, tattoos, sneakers and necklace mixed with ma constant “playin of da dozens”

would/should/could offend you.

I think ‘bout how my identity is bigger than me, cuz this . . . is ‘bout the people who look like me.

I think how Dope, Beautiful, and Meaningful Black names are & should be celebrated I think ‘bout how love is key in erasure of racism.

Jasmine Kar Tang: When I was preparing for this session, I was at home with my kids: my three-year-old and my one-year-old were crawling all over me, the little one drooling, the older kiddo dancing around, both of them tripping over each other. That’s when I started thinking, This is the work. One of the most radical acts that I could do as a woman of color in academia is to center my kids. And everything else tells me I shouldn’t think or do this. I have a feeling, for example, that I’m not supposed to talk about my family or my parenting decisions in this session. I’m not supposed to talk about using my breast pump in my office, doing the most intimate of acts— breastfeeding—in this clinical, disembodied space.

But if you ask me about antiracism, I will talk about parenting, and I will talk about my kids because every day I think about what their educational environment is going to be one day, as kids of color at PWIs. This transforms into action on my part as a writing center director. I didn’t expect any of this, but what I realize is that every decision I make—especially ones that involve students and staff—I think, “That’s someone else’s child. That could be my kid.” That’s my broader view of racism: it seeps into our daily lives, it’s insidious, and if we don’t address it in our daily practice, it will continue sedimenting in our laws, our ways of knowing, and in our bodies.

Katie Levin: I want to specifically speak to the question, “How can you work toward building an institutional narrative of racism and/or antiracism?” In Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, organizer and black feminist writer adrienne maree brown identifies “interdependence and decentralization” as a key feature of powerful, ethical, justice-oriented group work (50). Citing several examples of root systems

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Potential for and Barriers to Actionable Antiracism in the Writing Center • 6 ! in nature (84–86), brown goes on to describe how a combination of reciprocal responsibility and distributed power strengthens and sustains activist groups to enact systemic and cooperative change.

For me, brown’s “root” metaphor calls to mind rhizomes—an underground connected system of roots and nodes that works to nourish and support a whole set of organisms both below and above ground. I’ve been thinking about the ways in which a writing center can be a rhizomic node in collaborative and reciprocal relationships with people in other campus units, through invitation, outreach, and being explicit about sustaining our cross-campus connections, whether they are events to do with antiracism or ways of amplifying the voices of people from marginalized groups.

For instance, we at the University of Minnesota connected with the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies graduate writing group on campus (“Critical Race & Ethnic Studies”); we’ve cosponsored one of their invited speakers for the past two years. We have also literally made space in the center for groups to meet and use the space.

For example, we opened the space for the Twin Cities Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) to conduct a two-day collaborative retreat; during the retreat, at the participants’ invitation, we supported their development of a community writing workshop on countering Islamophobia, to be held with the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. In other words, I’m thinking about connections with other units as a way of underscoring shared institutional work for racial justice.

Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison and Keli Tucker: How do you see working for racial justice as intersecting with working for other types of social justice?

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People can’t even undo the complex internalized “isms” they have within themselves, but societal and institutional injustice can all be undone if we just learn to tolerate or do a workshop on racial and social justice. (Starbucks and the academy have a lot in common, no?) Are we too dense to understand that if workshops and tolerance ended racism everyone in this article would all be talking about something else? Instead, I sit here feeling like the academy is constantly on rewind and repeat, like we some type of broken Blu-ray, I swear.

Undoing systemic justice takes work—and various types of work. You just gotta ask yourself if you wanna do the work, and if not, go away.

Don’t go away angry or nuthin, just GO AWAY. Facts.

Jasmine Kar Tang: My institution, the University of Minnesota, has developed some policies concerning mandated reporting of sexual violence.

In response, the Race, Indigeneity, Gender and Sexuality Initiative here is leading an effort to name the intersectional nature of sexual violence, challenging the university administration to enact a more trauma-informed, victim-centered lens. My writing center is fortunate that Dr. Rose Miron, a co-author of the document articulating this vision (Palacios et al.), is a former writing consultant; she led one of our staff meetings to unpack the question, “What would a trauma-informed, victim-centered consulting practice look like?”

This is complicated because at our university, students who work at the writing center are considered staff and are therefore mandated reporters. So where does race come into this?

Well, what happens, for example, if the mandated reporting situation involves a survivor who is an undocumented student of color?

Wonderful Faison: Always the victimizer, never the victimized—I trouble with the idea of victim and I still do. I trouble with this idea because as a black lesbian disabled working-class woman, I constantly feel victimized. However, because I am a black lesbian woman, I am, without question, perceived as the threat, and to a maddening degree, I am perceived as a male threat. I cannot be woman because I am black. I cannot be a victim because I am black. Every story of my racial harassment by white women (who, at times,

Wonderful Faison: If I Gotta Say Intersectionality One Mo Time—The real issue with undoing any systemic injustice is that everyone is looking for a silver bullet. The ONE thing that will end racism or homophobia or sexism, or, or, or. Not only is this thinking and approach reductive, it is downright delusional. In whose world (I recognize there may be some other worlds out there we ain’t found yet, soooo) is a complex system of injustice undone by the simplest of solutions?

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Potential for and Barriers to Actionable Antiracism in the Writing Center • 7 ! are A1 terrorists) gets turned into an interrogation of what I could have said or done to cause racism to happen to me—like being black and existing in a predominately white space was not the genesis of their racism. I swear.

So when the institution that beholdens me to report atrocities (and I do) to them, but refuses to see or give validity to the racist, sexist, and homophobic atrocities enacted on my body, I am given more than enough reason for pause and cause for concern.

Facts.

Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison and Keli Tucker: Writing centers are located in very rural areas, very urban areas, and many places in between. However, every writing center is located within a community in which racism is codified in both its laws and its culture. How do you see the role of place in antiracism activism?1 Katie Levin: I’m thinking about the histories of our writing centers. Down the street from my office is Appleby Hall, the former home of the General College, which included one of the earliest-established writing centers in the nation (Lerner). The General College (GC) was designed in 1932 to give access to higher education to firstgeneration students, including immigrants and people of color. Unfortunately, in the supposed interest of speeding graduation rates, the University decided to close the General College in 2006 (Worku 13). The GC, including its writing center, was known to attract and value more students of color—as both writing center clients and staff—than other units on campus. When the GC closed, things changed. The history of specific centers on campus is couched in a larger colonial history. I feel a bit weird bringing this up without sustained discussion, since merely naming the problem of land theft is not enough, but my whole university, a “Land Grant Institution,” is on stolen Native land. The Little Earth of United Tribes housing community is very close to campus. Native people have been displaced to make this university, and continue to be displaced on campus.

Elijah Simmons: Comfortable Counterstory Narrative (Martinez)

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First, we gotta start usin’ poppin’ methods for conveying students of color on seeing the purpose of writing centers in a way that works for them, as opposed to having a metanarrative of what a writing center is supposed to do. Again, this is ‘bout them. Reflecting on research I’ve completed with recruiting Black students to writing centers, a lot of universities have multicultural centers, and those centers don’t usually have a way of looking.

They can be in the auditorium, or it can be in the student center, they can be in the dorm hall. I say this to say place “Don’t Matta”; rather it’s about the community and interpersonal connections.

Secondly, we gotta connect on a personal level with students.

Pause: As you read this: ask someone where the students of color hangout at. Trust me, there is a place at your university.

Resume: Easy? Hard? Surprised? (Fill in your answer___________) Third, by now you may be wondering what’s a “poppin method”? That all depends on the center you’re at and the students. By finding where the students hangout, you may be able to glean their study habits, interests, desires, and goals.

Fourth: I challenge you to find a method that resembles the community they have in their “hangout” spot. I say this because that hangout spot is the place of comfort for the students. I won’t cite anyone for my last sentence; rather I ask you to observe how this hangout spot is a resource center, cafeteria, library, hairdresser, gossip hall, and everything else one could do on a campus.

Lastly, I push the idea of place not mattering for the fact these students have created places of familiarity through love for one another, in a location where they can find comfort in their own identity. It’s our job to ensure students of color feel secure in their identity in our centers, which can happen by loving on the given identity they possess.

Jasmine Kar Tang: I’m the dramaturg of a group called Aniccha Arts, which stages performances in nontraditional places, and we’ve long said that our work “interrupts public space.” Not too long ago, the artistic director Pramila Vasudevan and I were ideating about a project, and she reflected, “What does it mean when we say we ‘interrupt public space’ and we’re on Dakota land?” The space and

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Potential for and Barriers to Actionable Antiracism in the Writing Center • 8 ! place were “interrupted” long ago. In short, our referent frame was problematic, colonial. (Ironic, since we both have roots in colonized places full of brown and yellow bodies.) We continue thinking about and struggling with how to acknowledge the land.

Also, as someone who grew up in east Tennessee, I find that racism often gets pinned on the U.S. South. In the meantime, here in Minnesota, locals talk about something called “Minnesota nice,” which I realize is somewhat like “southern hospitality” (except with a dose of passive-aggressiveness): our understanding of what is “nice” or “hospitable” changes when we consider how white folks have historically interacted with communities of color and indigenous communities (Fuentes et al., Shin, Szczesiul). We have to be thoughtful when we talk about regional particularity, ethos, and history, for the racism that we see here versus the racism I grew up with in Tennessee is part of the same monster. My point is, when we as writing center folks hear another administrator reflect on racism at their workplace, we need to think twice about the “my school isn’t like that” response some of us go to.

Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison and Keli Tucker: Diab et al. claim, “Writing program administrators and writing center directors occupy positions of power making them responsible for structural components of an educational space” (Diab et al. 32). However, the “power” held by writing center practitioners can be complex and limited, and, in practice, often does not feel like power at all. What suggestions or ideas do you have for overcoming the barrier of having a lack of power within one’s institution, or even one’s center, to conduct actionable antiracism work?

Wonderful Faison: Doin what I wanna so maybe you can be free too—Let’s not talk about how black folk are limited. Let’s talk about how black folk, specifically, how black women turn limitations into possibilities, creating pathways to freedom.

Let’s talk about what freedom looks like in an always already racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, mysogynoirist academy. Let’s talk about what freedom looks like when you are bound by chains both seen and unseen.

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To see possibilities when bound by chains one must ask: how much give is in this chain? How old and rusty are these chains? Where is the weak link in the chain that bounds and confounds me?

How can my mind (the only thing slightly unbound) find freedom in the limitations of these chains?

Generational and systemic racism is hundreds years old (I’m being generous, we know it’s like thousands years old, but let’s keep it to the U.S. for the sake of simplicity), which is old enough to see the rust begin to form on decaying minds that have weakened enough to allow a slim few, intent on undoing the whole chain, to become a part of such a fragile system of bondage. It is here (at this point) right now, there is access. That interloper intent on undoing these chains you must find, you must engage, you must align, you must coerce, you must persuade. Everyone is an access point to somewhere.

But what if you, oppressed body, find you can be or are an access point? What if you, colored body, who has faked it until you made it, have the keys someone has been looking for? What if you, black body, had the power to be resilient in the face of erasure and confirm your existence, your right to be here in this space and just exist?

We are access points. We find ways. We make ways. That is the essence of BlackGurlMagic: We make a way outta no way. Facts.

Elijah Simmons: For this question I looked at Lamar Johnson’s piece called “The Racial Hauntings of One Black Male Professor and the Disturbance of the Self(ves).” Johnson writes, “Our racial hauntings can serve as an ontoepistemic and humanistic violent tool to dismantle white supremacist patriarchy. In other words, if we do not confront our racial ghosts, then it is an act of repressed and symbolic violence against y(our)self that ultimately continues the narcissism of whiteness and white supremacy” (480). I believe to understand one’s racial hauntings, either white or Black, is a poppin’ method for creating interpersonally with students, to understand and connect with the students on a humanistic level. I believe the questions from Johnson’s piece are needed in writing center training; “How does your racial background affect how you exist, and how others that are racially ostracized feel?”, “How does your racial background make you operate in

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Potential for and Barriers to Actionable Antiracism in the Writing Center • 9 ! the world?” and “How does your educational experience value your race?” (10). If we’re trying to become more antiracist, we as in people of color and/or white people—everyone has to try to understand how they can make this more liberating, such as uncovering your racial haunting then through loving on all the identities in the center.

Jasmine Kar Tang: When I danced in her company, Dr. Ananya Chatterjea taught me about “wiggling” as a way to navigate a closed system: the institution may present many barriers, but people of color and indigenous peoples must find ways to wiggle through or under it. As she recently shared, this means we need to “find our way in with our fullness”—that fullness being “all of our intersectional politics, values, all of our desires” (Chatterjea). Indeed, years of doing this work tell me that we have to insist on maintaining integrity and fullness through the process. And as Diab et al. suggest, “If we're in the shadow of power, that means we are really, really close to power, and with some creativity, we may be able to make something of the situation” (35-36). Where are other pockets of support for racial justice work?

Where are the communities, the other folks at the university, for example, whom we (as writing center directors) might collaborate with and get really creative with?

Katie Levin: I agree with Jasmine about the importance of creative collaboration for justice, and I’m also thinking about Diab et al.’s reminder to critically reflect on our own power/positioning: where do each of us have power over, power with, power for? As a way for me, a white person, to attend to power with and power for, community activism has been really important. Showing up in justice-oriented spaces as appropriate; reading work by brown, Robin DiAngelo, Ijeoma Oluo, Rinku Sen, the writers at Wear Your Voice, and many others; iteratively reflecting on my own positionality; and learning in other spaces from community leaders and community activists, have helped me re-see ways of making or supporting change in the institution. Similarly, when I do activism on campus, I have different risks than students, but I also have different kinds of access to power. I’ve done a lot of learning from and with activist groups and collectives here on

! campus that are student-led but are specifically open to everybody. Developing trusting and reciprocal relationships with members of these groups, and supporting them in their work— including from a position of institutional power— then engaging in faculty or staff activism that is supportive of student activism, is something that I and other writing center professionals can do, even if it’s not officially from within our centers.

(In fact, our collaboration with the JACL originated when Jasmine and I were participating in an on-campus rally and march in support of Teamster staff; at the rally, we ran into Jasmine’s friend Yuich Onishi, a faculty member and member of the JACL.) Also really important for me is ongoing learning and self-work. I strive to continue seeing sites of power, and ways of taking or supporting action—not only beyond what I could have done five years ago, or last year, or before this panel discussion, but also beyond what I am capable of today.

Elijah Simmons: I’d like to add one last point on trying to create a network of liberating forces. I think interpersonal connections are so essential combined with being more humanistic, making students feel like humans and not just a quota, actually making a bond with them. Lastly, loving on these students, cuz this is ‘bout them.

In Conclusion Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison and Keli Tucker: In the IWCA Collaborative session on which this piece is based, our hope was to acknowledge the barriers to antiracism, but also to look for and act on (or continue to act on) the potential for meaningful antiracism. We framed this discussion around action and actionable commitment because we believe, like Diab et al., that narratives and conversation are helpful, but more so when combined with intention and action. As Faison noted above, if sitting around and talking to one another were enough, the panel from which this article originated would not have existed. There have been other challenges and calls to action: Harry C. Denny’s Facing the Center, Nancy Maloney Grimm’s Good Intentions, and Frankie Condon’s I Hope I Join the Band are just a few. It is our hope that the conversation here can continue and build upon the work already done in the field, and that

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Potential for and Barriers to Actionable Antiracism in the Writing Center • 10 ! hearing the struggles and successes of the diverse contributors—three of whom are people of color, and all of whom draw on various aspects of their intersectional identities—will be useful.

Additionally, while the reflections above have been a means of highlighting the importance of listening to the lived experiences of people of color in our field, we hope that they also demonstrate that the responsibility for antiracism activism lies in each of us. Though some of us may not feel powerful as individuals working within distinct centers, as Levin noted when citing Diab et al., we do have power, and we need also to conceive of it as being “power with” and “power for”—to ask one another, “What can I help you do?” and “What can we do together?” As Simmons explains in his response above, creating an inclusive community transcends any barriers of place. And as Faison and Tang discuss, we must also ask ourselves whether we have really done all we can do, or whether the anticipation of the barriers we might face in conducting antiracism activism has itself become the barrier.

Since becoming co-leaders of the Antiracism Activism SIG, our goal has been to take our positionality and orientation from Neisha-Anne Green, who, in her 2018 article, “Moving beyond Alright,” called upon those in our field to be not just allies, but also accomplices (29). Moving forward, we intend to take steps to make the SIG and its work more visible within and more vital to the IWCA organization. While not all members of IWCA are members of the SIG, we hope this article will help all members work towards meaningful action and possible solutions for racism in their centers, institutions, and communities. We hope our colleagues’ responses will serve as a catalyst for this action, and will not only help us do what Diab et al. called the “selfwork” necessary to the process of antiracism activism, but also prompt each of us to consider all of the potential avenues through which we can make antiracism an essential part of our writing center practices.

Acknowledgments The conveners would like to acknowledge Jennifer Kavetsky, who sent in a question about place in antiracism activism during the IWCA @ CCCC Collaborative.

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Works Cited brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK P, 2017.

Chatterjea, Ananya. “Re: the wiggle.” Received by Jasmine Kar Tang, 31 Dec. 2018.

Condon, Frankie. I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric. Utah State UP, 2012.

“Critical Race & Ethnic Studies Graduate Group.”

Race, Indigeneity, Gender & Sexuality Studies, U of Minnesota, 2019, retrieved from https://cla.umn.edu/rigs/research/criticalrace-ethnic-studies-graduate-writing-group Denny, Harry C. Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring. Utah State UP, 2010.

Diab, Rasha, et al. “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable.” Anti-Racist Activism: Teaching Rhetoric and Writing, special issue of Across the Disciplines, vol. 10, no. 3, 2013, pp.

19-40.

DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Beacon, 2018.

Dietz, Lauri. “An Invitation for the 2018 IWCA Collaborative @ 4Cs.” Received by Talisha Haltiwanger, Keli Tucker, Joseph Cheatle, and IWCACollaborative2018. 10 Jan. 2018.

Fuentes, Venessa, et al. “Race and Reality in the Cool Blue North.” Big Ideas Series: True North, 24 January 2018, The Loft Literary Center, Minneapolis, MN. Lecture.

Green, Neisha-Anne. “Moving beyond Alright: And the Emotional Toll of This, My Life Matters Too, in the Writing Center Work.”

Writing Center Journal, vol. 37, no. 1, 2018, pp.

15–33.

Grimm, Nancy Maloney. Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times.

Boynton/Cook-Heinemann, 1999.

Johnson, Lamar L. “The Racial Hauntings of One Black Male Professor and the Disturbance of the Self(ves): Self-Actualization and Racial Storytelling as Pedagogical Practices.” Journal of Literacy Research, vol. 49, no. 4, 2017, pp.

476–502.

Lerner, Neal. The Idea of a Writing Laboratory.

Southern Illinois UP, 2009.

Martinez, Aja Y. “A Plea for Critical Race Theory Counterstory: Stock Story versus

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Counterstory Dialogues Concerning Alejandra’s ‘Fit’ in the Academy.” Composition Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2014, pp. 33-55.

Oluo, Ijeoma. So You Want to Talk About Race.

Seal, 2018.

Palacios, Lena, et al. RIGS Response to MR Policy @ UMN. Retrieved from docs.google.com/document/d/1PbKRDDG SzqQLHfV1mYUAqCUJ1kiNHRy93CRgM0j 0wV8/edit.

Sen, Rinku. Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy. Jossey-Bass, 2003.

Shin, Sun Yung, ed. A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. Minnesota Historical Society P, 2016.

Szczesiul, Anthony. The Southern Hospitality Myth: Ethics, Politics, Race, and American Memory. U of Georgia P, 2017.

“WCActivism.” WCActivism Google Group, 2006.

Retrieved from groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/wcactivi sm.

Wear Your Voice. Wear Your Voice, 2017, wearyourvoicemag.com. Accessed 13 Mar. 2019.

Worku, Hana. A Zine: Exploring Racial and Economic Exclusions at UMTC, Whose University, 2011. Whose Diversity: Resources, Whose Diversity, whosediversity.weebly.com/resources.html.

Accessed 9 Aug. 2018

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TALKING JUSTICE: THE ROLE OF ANTIRACISM IN THE WRITING CENTER Hillary Coenen Oklahoma State University coenen@ostatemail.okstate.edu

Natasha Tinsley Oklahoma State University tnatash@ostatemail.okstate.edu

Fehintola Folarin Oklahoma State University ffolari@ostatemail.okstate.edu

Lisa E. Wright Oklahoma State University liwrigh@ostatemail.okstate.edu

Abstract The article describes the process that four writing center consultants took to design and implement an antiracist workshop at the Oklahoma State University Writing Center (OSUWC). Using antiracist pedagogy, feminist invitational rhetoric, and inclusive writing center pedagogy, this essay documents the creation of an antiracist workshop designed for writing center staff and consultants, our presentation of the workshop at the South Central Writing Centers Association conference, the revision process, and training of writing center staff at the OSUWC. Rather than outline a one-size-fits-all workshop, this article provides a framework for addressing racism with reflexive, context-based resources.

disadvantage People of Color. Continuing the trajectory of social justice work in our writing center, TJP members designed and implemented workshops focused on antiracist pedagogy for OSUWC consultants and the broader writing center community.

This essay documents the steps taken to create an antiracist workshop, which includes the designing of the workshop in early November of 2017, the presentation of the workshop at South Central Writing Centers Association (SCWCA), the revision process, and the training of writing center staff at OSUWC. In this article, we discuss the literature upon which our workshop was built, the creation, implementation, and responses to our initial workshops, the process of revising for context, and what we learned as a result of this praxis. We provide an overview of how we negotiated and addressed the unforeseen complexities that arise when doing social justice work in writing centers. Finally, we discuss our vision for how this work can be implemented in our center and other writing centers in the future. Rather than proposing a one-size-fits-all workshop, this article provides a framework for addressing racism with reflexive, context-based resources to address the diverse iterations of writing centers.

Writing center scholarship has established that social and racial justice should be integral to the writing center’s mission. In a 2016 special issue of Praxis, Asao B. Inoue asserts that writing centers, “facilitate structural changes in society, disciplines, and the institution itself,” suggesting that writing centers can be “centers for revolutions, for social justice work” (Inoue).

Consultants and staff at the Oklahoma State University Writing Center1 (OSUWC) work hard to epitomize Inoue’s interpretation of writing centers by maintaining a place of collaboration and support through continuous self-reflection, routine procedural evaluation, and an unrelenting quest for effective approaches to writing center praxis. In recent years, OSUWC leaders have supported student-driven inquiry projects and events that work to make our writing center more inclusive, including but not limited to Conversation Groups for English learners, Safe Zone (LGBTQ +) training & research, training from multilingual specialists, letter-writing campaigns, and community discussion forums and writing events focused on issues of race and racism.

Since OSUWC is part of a college campus where quotidian racial aggressions occur, we agreed the space could serve as a launch pad to start addressing racism on our campus. The Talking Justice Project (TJP) is led by the authors of this article who are four OSUWC graduate consultants. TJP strives to answer the call to address racism in institutions that were designed to maintain white supremacy and systemically

Review of Literature and Resources In September of 2017, Tola, Natasha, and Lisa attended a session of The Conversation Workshops Pilot (CWP) for writing center consultants and English Department instructors at OSU that was facilitated by Hillary and the co-creators of the CWP.2 The CWP workshop, which teaches strategies for interpersonal antiracist activism by using Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin’s invitational rhetoric, is divided into three parts: Intentionality, Dialogues, and Community. The Intentionality section asks participants to consider the ways they are impacted by systems of racism. Dialogue offers a guide for talking about systems of racism with loved ones using “intentional dialogue,” which is based on invitational rhetoric, otherwise understood as “an invitation to understanding” that relies on “the

Talking Justice • 13 offering of perspectives and the creation of the external conditions of safety, value, and freedom” (Foss and Griffin 2). Community urges them to build networks for accountability that support their interpersonal activism.3 The CWP session for Writing Center consultants sparked meaningful conversation about how these strategies for personal relationships could be adapted to the university setting. In November of 2017, Natasha and Hillary wrote and submitted a proposal to our regional writing center conference, SCWCA. The initial proposal established a guiding vision, and in the spring Lisa and Tola helped create the conference workshop activities, which generated a concrete agenda for developing tutor training at OSUWC. In addition to the CWP, TJP drew inspiration from writing center scholarship, which has recently called attention to the racial inequities prevalent in academia. Scholars acknowledge the unique position that writing center staff and consultants have in denouncing (or enforcing) practices that maintain the status quo of oppression against historically marginalized groups. Our research led us to the following foundational pieces which support the development of the workshop goals and strategies.

“Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable,” Rasha Diab et al.’s chapter in Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication, outlines “what is wrong with the traditional reliance on such tools as the ‘confessional narrative’ and explains how these ideas leave people trapped in this belief that racism is something that is solely the defect of an individual and not as the result of the oppressive environment we all live in” (Tinsley 297). Beth Godbee et al.’s article “Body + Power + Justice: Movement-Based Workshops for Critical Tutor Education” offers ways to incorporate the body into tutor training as a means to cultivate critical awareness.

They argue that their approach provides a possible solution to writing center consultant’s inability to meaningfully engage with antiracist strategies and to restructure racial power. Nancy M. Grimm’s “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform a System of Advantage Based on Race” challenges writing centers to reflect on their own practices to find the deficiencies embedded in their policies that uphold the racially inequitable ideologies of the educational institution. Similarly, Michelle T. Johnson’s “Racial Literacy and the Writing Center” discusses tutors’ unwillingness to engage with racially influenced works, finding that their racial literacy increases when consultants are prompted to effectively interact with the racial content.

Victor Villanueva’s “Blind: Talking about the New Racism,” encourages writing center practitioners to talk about racism when racism is the (in)visible subject, naming writing centers as a part of the system which perpetuates and sustains racism, while also calling writing centers to action to “be bold,” to “think of the silence, [and] expose it” (Villanueva 18). Aligned with Villanueva, Inoue’s essay “Afterword: Narratives that Determine Writers and Social Justice Writing Center Work” explores his return to writing center work and his understanding of the significance that race and racism play in writing center scholarship and institutional structures. Greenfield and Rowan’s introduction to Writing Centers and the New Racism reminds us that staying silent about racism in writing centers is a “function of racism” ( “Introduction” 5), and their chapter “Beyond the ‘Week Twelve Approach:’ Toward a Critical Pedagogy for Antiracist Tutor Education” argues that because writing centers are raced, writing center directors should be involved in the work of preparing writing center tutors to “recognize and resist injustices in the writing center and the world” (“Beyond” 131).

Cheryl E. Matias’ Feeling White: Whiteness, Emotionality, and Education outlines her research related to her work as a teacher-trainer for predominantly white students, arguing that educators can best serve students and themselves by reflecting on their whiteness and how they impact social justice and antiracist work in their classrooms. She documents moments of resistance from the students and her interpretations of those moments. Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young’s book Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication collects the stories of several educators as they navigate racism, complicity, reflection, and resistance in their personal and professional lives.

These current conversations around race and systemic racism justify the need for our work and informed TJP’s workshop by providing a foundational sense of the scope of the problem, guidelines and warnings for this pursuit, and lenses for reflection and revision.

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Our Process TJP began out of a desire to enact practices informed by the strategies for antiracist writing center pedagogy that we had read about in the work of scholars like Villanueva, Greenfield and Rowan, and Godbee et al. Rather than approaching this as a research project, we sought to reflect upon our process of developing a training module that responds to the particular contexts of our writing center and that could be adapted for others.

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Talking Justice • 14 This section describes our praxis as we developed workshops for regional conference participants and our writing center consultants between fall 2017 and summer 2018 at a PWI situated in the South Central region of the U.S. Because this began as an informal training exercise, we did not seek approval from our Institutional Review Board for research or assessment purposes. We have taken a narrative and reflective approach, focusing on our learning experience rather than the review and analysis of systematically collected data. Here we describe our process in order to be transparent about what happened, the contributors and workshop participants, and our process of reviewing materials and revising in hopes of developing a framework for creating reflexive, context-based resources for addressing racism in writing centers.

Contexts of the Workshop Following the first CWP workshop in September 2017, Hillary and Natasha met to begin developing a workshop that could be used in tutor training, which we would test at the SCWCA conference. Drawing upon the invitational principles of equality, selfdetermination, and immanent value (Foss and Griffin 4), we agreed to begin shaping a workshop around the following three strategies for responding to problematic or racist incidents or ideas: promote mutual understanding, learning, respect; highlight common ground while acknowledging problematic points or harmful ideas; and clarify issues or redefine terms. Ultimately, we saw our role as two-fold; we hoped to provide training for the consultants at OSUWC, and we hoped to share our process with the larger community of writing center practitioners in order to contribute to and learn from scholarship on antiracist work in writing centers.

Developing the Workshop During our initial meetings we composed and revised the three primary goals, establishing that TJP strives to A) Cultivate a “willingness to be disturbed,” to disrupt our own individual ways of thinking and being that have continued systemic racism, which demands “a tireless investment in reflection, openness, and hope for a better, more fulfilling future for us all” (Diab et al.

20).

B) Create (brave) spaces where people are able to discuss issues and concerns surrounding race and racism with a willingness to be wrong, to

call out with compassion, and to seek mutual understanding.

C) Enact mindful inclusion practices that support diverse writers and resist the writing center’s historical role in gatekeeping and assimilating for academic institutions.

We spent several weeks creating the workshop for SCWCA, where Hillary and Natasha presented. The first workshop focused on three original activities: An anonymous reflection activity, a six-word memoir, and a role-playing scenario.

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Implementing the Workshop We planned for the workshop to occur in small groups of OSUWC consultants (ideally five to eight people, about the size of our staff development mentor groups4), and we documented and reflected on the planning process to share it at SCWCA, where we hoped to receive feedback. We also requested that both sets of workshop participants complete anonymous surveys in Google Forms to provide us with feedback on the activities, but because we ran out of time during the workshop, we received no responses to our survey on the SCWCA workshop.

Without written feedback, we relied upon Hillary and Natasha’s descriptions of the workshop and participants’ comments for the revision process. This reflective process guided our modifications of the workshop activities, for which we observed a need to develop more context-based scenarios for our workshop’s role-playing activity. To address this, we collected surveys about the forms of racism that participants had witnessed or experienced on campus and in the writing center. We used the survey responses to refine and craft existing and new scenarios for our consultant training. We then fictionalized some stories from the surveys and incorporated them into small-scale workshops for OSUWC administrators, leaders, and mentor consultants. We received immediate verbal feedback and suggestions from the first group of OSUWC participants, which we implemented prior to presenting with subsequent OSUWC groups, who responded to our paper surveys (Figure 1. TJP Survey, adapted from an Oklahoma Writing Project survey).

Our reflection and verbal and written feedback from SCWCA and OSUWC participants has directly influenced our revision process, and it continues to as we develop our resources for antiracist writing center praxis.

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Talking Justice • 15

Workshop Participants Workshop participants consisted of three different groups connected to the writing center. At the 2018 SCWCA Conference at the University of Central Arkansas, our workshop participants included writing center administrators, consultants, and student leaders of writing centers in the South Central U.S. The second group of contributors was the survey participants, consultants at our institution who responded to an emailed survey regarding their experiences and observations of racism at OSUWC. Their experiences served as the basis for determining whether our scenarios were true to our institutional context and revising the scenarios for relevance.

Afterwards, we conducted two small workshop sessions with the third group, which consisted of mentor group leaders and administrative staff of the OSUWC. These sessions were led by at least two of us, and as with our first workshop participants, we asked them to practice and reflect on the scenarios we developed from our initial survey. The administrators and mentor group leaders provided immediate feedback that helped in (re)shaping the scenarios even as we proceeded in the praxis. The mentor group leaders then led the rest of the OSUWC consultants in smaller versions of the workshops in their mentor groups, about which some group leaders provided feedback via email. In total, our various contributors, including writing center novices, student leaders, staff, and administrators, provided meaningful insights that supported the development and revision of this workshop.

Workshop Responses Throughout the workshop process, we adapted the workshop in response to multiple types of feedback, including the workshop events, the stories provided by the survey of OSUWC consultants, and workshop participants’ immediate feedback.

Participants also provided us with written responses to an anonymous Padlet activity, which asked what types of antiracist work was being done in their writing centers and the ways in which their writing centers enabled or perpetuated institutional/systemic racism.

Several participants also allowed us to keep their sixword memoirs, which were handwritten reflections on the first time they remembered being aware of their race. We also took notes over the participants’ discussion of the role-playing scenarios and the ways that they considered implementing the three strategies.

The OSUWC survey was emailed to consultants as a Google Form that requested their observations and experiences of racism. In order to anticipate what

problems and concerns OSUWC consultants might bring from their own experiences, the anonymous survey asked questions such as these: • Describe a time that you have been made to feel uncomfortable due to your ethnicity or race at the writing center.

• Give an example of a time that you may have made someone else feel excluded or marginalized, even if unintentionally.

• Describe a writing center session when you observed that race became an issue. How did you feel?

In the two small workshop sessions with mentor group leaders and administrative staff, each shared new strategies and offered feedback on those we presented. We took notes on the verbal feedback that they offered immediately following the session. Some mentor group leaders shared with us how consultants perceived these strategies and the additional strategies that emerged from their conversations, which we reflected on and incorporated into our later revisions.

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SCWCA Workshop During our presentation at SCWCA, workshop participants first responded anonymously to a discussion question on Padlet in which they shared what types of antiracist work was being done in their writing centers and how their centers enabled systems of oppression. After briefly discussing their responses, we introduced the goals and significance of our workshop, explaining, “This workshop operates from the perspective that writing center and composition scholarship has an obligation to acknowledge and resist the ways that our programs and research have historically served to support the primacy of Standard White English and other systems that reinforce hegemonic whiteness.” We explained that we hoped the workshops would allow us to share and reciprocate strategies for non-coercive, one-with-one conversations built on patience, active listening, and critical thinking—consistent with the goals of an inclusive writing center pedagogy.

During the next activity, participants created and shared six-word memoirs about the first time they remembered being aware of their race. Participants taped their memoirs to the walls of the room then engaged in a silent gallery walk, in which they left comments on others’ memoirs using sticky notes. As a group, we concluded that our worldviews are shaped by our perspectives on race and our racialized experiences. We hoped to emphasize the importance of cultivating practices that foster mindfulness of one’s own racialized experience and perspectives,

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Talking Justice • 16 especially for those who have not previously felt the need to consider how race shapes their experience.

For the final activity, we applied a staple of writing center training: the guided scenarios, and we offered three pedagogical strategies that could be used in contentious moments. We designed these strategies to reach beyond the work of the writing center session, and because of their connection to invitational rhetoric, they would be relevant to many different types of scenarios. Our presentation provided an overview of invitational rhetoric before introducing these three strategies to use in response to a selection of scenarios (see Figure 2). Each strategy is accompanied by a corresponding scripted template for responding, as follows: 1. Strategy: “Promote mutual understanding, learning, respect” Template: “I appreciate your experience with X, and I’m sure I can learn a lot from you about Y. I hope that we can both be open to listening and learning from each other.”

2. Strategy: “Highlight common ground while acknowledging problematic points or harmful ideas” Template: “Based on your comments about X, it seems like we agree about what it means to Y, but we may need to think about some other ways of understanding Z.” 3. Strategy: “Clarify issues or redefine terms” Template: “I think that you’re saying that X means ABC, but can I tell you why I think X means ADE?” Because, as Greenfield and Rowan suggest, all members of the writing center encounter manifestations of racism and operate within systems of oppression, our workshop activities were designed to include participants in all positions in the writing center (“Introduction”). We accomplished this by providing scenarios that account for the diverse occupants of the writing center and the professional relationships in which they engage: Consultant/Consultant; Consultant/Writer; Administrator/Writer; Administrator/Consultants.

Participants paired up and received a scenario representing one of the above dynamics, then they responded to their scenario by playing out the scene using one of the strategies we presented and another of their own making. Each of the pairs connected the scenarios to their particular contexts and problems related to their spaces, infrastructures, and staffing.

While checking in with the pairs, Hillary spoke to two experienced directors who had been assigned the

following scenario shown in Figure 3, which prompts participants to put themselves in the position of a writing center director trying to engage in conversation with staff members about making hiring practices more inclusive, in a situation where a staff member resists. The two participants had similar responses to the scenario, expressing that they would not encounter this particular situation because they would never discuss hiring practices with staff. Hillary asked follow-up questions, prompting them to consider what could be done in this situation to promote learning.

This moment of participants’ resistance would inform the revision process in significant ways.

Before concluding, we briefly discussed what other pairs encountered. The responses included consideration of power dynamics and the nature of the “peer” relationships in their centers, and participants explained that appropriate or comfortable approaches would vary depending upon the identity of the interlocutor and how they might be perceived. The workshop ended rather abruptly because we were immersed in the follow-up discussion, but this workshop experience provided great insight for how we might anticipate participants’ attitudes and responses in the future.

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Revising the Workshop During our initial meeting after the SCWCA conference, we discussed what worked, and we revised our workshop to train writing center leaders to present to the OSUWC tutors. Due to the concerns that arose at SCWCA, we questioned if we should revise the language in some scenarios or simply acknowledge that we would encounter some participants who would be resistant to change. We sought guidance from our writing center administrators, and we decided that we only needed to refine the language of some scenarios and to develop more scenarios to encourage discourse surrounding race issues for administrators. With the help of our writing center leadership, we had the opportunity not only to contribute but also to cultivate a willingness to be disturbed and to discuss racism.

The joint effort of the four presenters with the collaboration of the writing center leaders played a critical role in starting a genuine conversation. To further our initiative, writing center administrators and leaders offered additional literature, resources, suggestions, and ways to address the issue from multiple vantage points.

We had the opportunity to work alongside consultants at OSUWC whose diverse background, cultural views, experiences, and differing expertise contributed immensely to the success of this project.

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Talking Justice • 17 ! for white participants to either “(a) cry, which is symbolic of the normative story of how people of Color are the ones who cause White’s pain, which stifles conversation and elevates white emotionality above the pain that people of Color face daily; or (b) act aggressively, symbolic of the repressed pain of lying about a colorblind stance” (18). Our goal was to avoid these possible responses while still leading people to a “willingness to be disturbed” (Diab et al.

19). Our strategies were intended to invite our audience to see the systems in place around them and to demonstrate how each of us could be contributing to the systems of racism that continue to thrive in society and between university walls.

In our workshops, we noticed that consultants and administrators were more inclined to respond to problematic and racist incidents in ways that required minimal effort, disruption, and disturbance. As convenient as this may have seemed for them, it limits the ability to acknowledge the extent of the impacts of racism, as well as reliance on strategies that fail to disturb our understanding of racism allows for systems of oppression to remain unchallenged. To help promote this willingness to be disturbed, we created antiracist activities that included everyone in the writing center, simply because antiracist work has to be done at every level of the writing center. According to Greenfield and Rowan, “[W]hen we leave race out of the discussion, we allow tutors the opportunity to remain unmindful of how their writing advice may be racially biased. When we fail to help tutors recognize and interrogate standardized conventions, we inadvertently cast tutors in the role of assimilationist guides” (“Beyond” 130). To this end, we asserted the importance of mindfulness “of the culture of the writing center, its identity across campus and in the community,” that demands attention to the writing center’s presumed role of assimilating students into academic and institutional conventions (“Beyond” 130).

Collecting future workshop participants’ stories as the basis for practice scenarios helped us address multiple aspects of the problems we encountered.

Implications Incorporating this strategy into our praxis allowed us Our workshop addresses writing center to learn from narratives that did not center whiteness, consultants, staff, and directors, and we must account as Matias warns against, in a way that was grounded in for the fact that our audiences, like the demographic at the participants’ own contexts. Conveying to OSUWC PWIs, would be predominately white. Like anyone participants that the scenarios upon which the activity who does social justice work, we hoped for an was based emerged from the stories of their colleagues audience that would be prepared for and open to imbued these sessions with a sense of urgency and engaging with the ideologies and concepts we purpose. Additionally, we hoped that involving presented. While there is no script to how anyone will participants in the creation of workshop materials handle any situation, Matias explains that, when faced would promote their sense of belonging in the with matters of race and racism, there is the potential antiracist conversation and would facilitate their sense 17!

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We felt that it would be important to gather their stories pertaining to racism in the institution, which we did by collecting survey responses in a Google Form.

We then revised the scenarios to incorporate some of their responses and to provide more concrete descriptions in order to avoid some problems that emerged from a lack of clarity in the descriptions.

In order to prepare mentor group leaders to facilitate smaller workshops, we began by discussing the workshop’s goals and relevance to our writing center. Much like our opening to the SCWCA workshop, we also discussed the writing center’s role in addressing racism, how inherent oppression is in institutions, and what responsibilities consultants have to themselves and the writing center. We then paired the mentors and asked them to discuss two scenarios and develop a new strategy for each. Each pair shared their new strategies and offered feedback on those we presented. Interestingly, one of the new strategies was to address ambiguity. We interpreted the new strategy to read something like, “I heard you say this, and I was wondering if you could elaborate.” By saying this, the consultant addresses the writer with respect for their work while at the same time invites the writer to explain themselves further. We also learned that one of our strategies—“clarify issues or redefine terms”— may cause some confusion, so we revised our presentation to include an example of how to use this strategy.

After the first workshop session with mentors, we decided to provide more concrete resources that they could use in their workshops. We provided materials that outlined the strategies and goals of the project, including a handout (see Figure 4) and a Google Slides presentation that they could use in the small workshops, as well as an outline that guided our own presentation of the material. Feedback from mentors suggests that several consultants were encouraged by these strategies and agreed that we needed more of these initiatives to make the writing center more just and accommodating to all students.

Talking Justice • 18 of responsibility for contributing to an antiracist space.

Most importantly, focusing the discussion on these emergent stories helped participants to generate strategies that would fit within their own contexts at OSUWC.

Conclusion This praxis provided us with insight that informs our path as we move forward. In particular, we applied these revisions in fall 2018 orientation workshop sessions for incoming writing center consultants as well as new and returning instructors teaching firstyear composition courses. Additionally, we hope to apply these insights as we seek to make TJP a campuswide initiative by working with groups of staff and faculty whose work with students pertains to race, discrimination, and other social justice issues.

To develop and assess the workshop, TJP intends to consider the impact of the workshop on writing center occupants’ willingness to engage in conversation about issues of race and oppression, to question normative or long-held beliefs and practices, and to disturb spaces upheld by white supremacy with antiracist critique. We have continued to create resources and further training to provide sustained support for antiracist pedagogy, and we hope our contribution to the OSUWC through TJP will not only carve a long-term print on the minds of the OSU community but also have a substantial effect in many writing centers.

Our approach to the workshop treats the writing center as a locus from which to foster the cathartic repudiation of white supremacy in institutions. We believe not acknowledging racism (and our role in it) is a disservice to writing centers and the communities they serve. Inoue states, “For writing centers to be revolutionary change-agents in the institutions and communities in which they are situated. It means they facilitate structural changes in society, disciplines, and the institution itself” (Inoue). TJP, therefore, strives to offer a way to develop and disseminate an antiracist pedagogy that is inclusive and responsive to context.

undergraduates of various majors (~X); graduate teaching assistants from other departments (~5-10).

2. During the fall of 2017, Hillary led The CWP, a test version of a 3.5-hour workshop from which she collected data for her dissertation.

3. While TJP is distinct from CWP, the origins workshop are influenced by CWP, which are one-day, four-hour events that Hillary and the three collaborators conducted between September 2017 and February 2018. CWP applies principles from invitational rhetoric: equality, self-determination, and immanent value (Foss and Griffin 4).

4. Mentor groups are small groups of experienced and novice consultants that meet every other week for staff development, troubleshooting, and resource sharing.

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Acknowledgments We must acknowledge and thank Dr. Anna Sicari, whose endless support and generous feedback made this project possible and helped moved it forward. Dr. Sicari, Laura Tunningley, and the OSUWC enabled our work by providing us with dedicated time to collaborate. Laura and the OSUWC community also engaged us in insightful conversation and provided feedback that continues to guide our work. Finally, we’d like to thank Sarah Riddick, who not only wrote an Axis blog inspired by our workshop (Riddick), but also invited us to submit an article for this special issue. Sarah and our reviewers also provided valuable guidance for our revision.

Works Cited

Condon, Frankie, and Vershawn Ashanti Young, Eds. Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication. WAC Clearinghouse/UP of Colorado, 2017.

Diab, Rasha, et al. “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable.” Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication, edited by Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young, Notes WAC Clearinghouse/UP of Colorado, 2017, pp.

19-40.

1. The OSU Writing Center serves undergraduates, Foss, Sonja K., and Cindy L. Griffin. “Beyond graduate students, faculty, staff, and the community Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational surrounding the predominantly white institution Rhetoric.” Communication Monographs, vol. 62, 1995, (PWI). The OSUWC staff consists of a faculty pp. 1-18. director, a full-time coordinator, and a full-time Godbee, Beth, et al. “Body + Power + Justice: administrative assistant, and three groups of students Movement-Based Workshops for Critical Tutor which comprise the consultants: graduate teaching Education.”

The Writing Center Journal, vol. 34, no. assistants from the English Department (~30-40); 2, 2015, pp. 61-112.

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Talking Justice • 19 Greenfield, Laura and Karen Rowan. “Introduction: A Call to Action.” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, Utah State UP, 2011, pp. 1-14.

---. “Beyond the ‘Week Twelve Approach’: Toward a Critical Pedagogy for Antiracist Tutor Education.”

Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, Utah State UP, 2011, pp. 124-49.

Grimm, Nancy M. “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform a System of Advantage Based on Race.” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, Utah State UP, 2011, pp. 75-100.

Inoue, Asao B. “Afterword: Narratives that Determine Writers and Social Justice Writing Center Work.”

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 2016, http://www.praxisuwc.com/inoue-141.

Johnson, Michelle T. “Racial Literacy and the Writing Center.” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change. edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, Utah State UP, 2011, pp. 211-27.

Matias, Cheryl E. Feeling White: Whiteness, Emotionality, and Education. Sense Publishers, 2016.

Riddick, Sarah. “Workshopping Antiracism in the Writing Center.” Axis: The Blog, 4 Sep. 2018, www.praxisuwc.com/praxisblog/2018/9/4/workshopping-antiracism-in-thewriting-center.

The Conversation Workshop. The James and Elnora Boykin Arts and Culture Foundation, 2018, https://www.conversationworkshopsok.com/.

Tinsley, Natasha. “Review: Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication, edited by Frankie Condon & Vershawn Ashanti Young.”

The Writing Center Journal, vol. 23, no. 2, 2017, pp.

295-300.

Villanueva, Victor. “Blind: Talking about the New Racism.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 26, no. 1, 2006, pp. 3–19.

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WHY I CALL IT THE ACADEMIC GHETTO: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF RACE, PLACE, AND WRITING CENTERS Alexandria Lockett Spelman College AlexandriaLockett@gmail.com Abstract This article investigates my lived experience as a black queer writing center tutor for the purposes of theorizing the transformative power of learning centers. Drawing on several perspectives and methods offered in Praxis’s special issue on Access and Equity in Graduate Writing Support, this article argues that the antiracist potential of writing centers depends on more comprehensive analyses of how writing centers function as racialized places. Using the metaphor of the “academic ghetto,” I signify on the misconception of writing centers as places for correcting deficiency. I apply my analysis to both an Undergraduate Writing Center (WCs) and a Graduate Writing Center (GWC) space to systematically discover how racial biases mediate and construct these learning spaces. In particular, I structure my discussion through a blend of personal narrative and critical analysis that illustrates the epistemic conflict and character of the “academic ghetto.” The article concludes with a call to invent antiracist practices for writing centers that model more inclusive methods of living in these spaces.

As a graduate student, I needed serious help improving my ability to navigate the required inter/disciplinary writing and communication conventions. However, I was ashamed to seek assistance from any of the learning support services available to me. This avoidance was triggered by the daily pressure of interacting with peers/colleagues who explicitly doubted the legitimacy of my admissions. I routinely performed an intelligence they recognized by consciously code-switching my way through casual conversations, which inevitably focused on how the working-class black girl “got in” their beloved institutions. Doing this intense rhetorical work involves resisting two systemic misconceptions that are consistently used to make me lose faith in my abilities: were you admitted because of affirmative action or because of the sympathy of some “liberal” faculty?

Affirmative action has long been invoked as an expression that challenges the excellence of black and brown people. Its critics claim that racism is over and that the colorblind system works for everyone equally so long as no one receives “special treatment,” regardless of their ancestral and contemporary relationship to systemic oppression. Justifying my position in the graduate program against such specious arguments was exhausting and unnecessary. Similar to the poor single mother who avoids any and all public assistance to protect herself against public scrutiny, I

drew on an ethos of “doing it all by myself” through my refusal to pursue any learning support resources. If I could graduate having never set foot in a Graduate Writing Center (GWC), I could potentially defend myself against anyone who might question the value or validity of my degree on the grounds that I wasn’t solely, entirely responsible for my success.

Of course, rugged individualism was impossible and, more importantly, didn’t work. My writing became unnecessarily timid and obscure throughout graduate school. I shunned the writing center, but I certainly looked to other learning spaces for help. Three hour seminars, closed-door advisor meetings, and reading groups seemed to be places where it would be appropriate to obtain explicit instruction for how to write in ways that would help me succeed throughout graduate studies and beyond. Unfortunately, these intimate spaces seemed to operate as if grad students were already “insiders” to the professional world of academia. With the assistance of a mentor who met with me weekly to assist me with my writing, I successfully completed my dissertation. That experience showed me how important it is for writing to be social. The challenge of bearing with the intricate, often solitary, process of writing theses/dissertations inspired me to have more communication with other graduate writers, regardless of their discipline or cultural background. Consequently, I secured employment at the graduate writing center, serving as a Graduate Writing Center (GWC) consultant the year after I completed my PhD. This article critically examines this position, exploring how its multiple roles and locations taught me about the racial significance of my lived experience performing graduate writing conventions, both as an MA student at a mid-size public state university and as a PhD student at a large state university. Drawing on my background as both a struggling graduate student writer and a graduate writing center tutor, I argue that GWCs function as the “academic ghetto.” On the one hand, it literally organizes underserved demographics into a space for “development and improvement” that is physically (and conceptually) isolated from mainstream or privileged learning communities in the university. On the other hand, these are typically

Why I Call it the Academic Ghetto • 21 underfunded places where the design and operation of the learning space itself can be critiqued. GWCs may be cramped spaces that are “at capacity” without the resources to serve an overwhelming demand. They could be places where multilingual students take cultural pride in their ability to exercise polyvocality or experiment with structuring their studies around the problem of linguistic imperialism.

By contrast, the GWC could be used to keep students in an “(academic) ghetto mentality” by elevating belief in the correctness, purity, and intellectual superiority of those who speak standardized white English (SWE).

Whether historically marginalized students are able to tap into the resources of this “academic ghetto” for the purposes of cultivating enough self-esteem to “leave the hood,” or they “stay in the hood” because it offers an alternative strategy for knowledge-making that is unavailable to them in “white space.” This metaphor of the “academic ghetto” playfully (or shamefully?) invites readers to understand the potential of this place as a route to success or detour to failure, depending on who runs it and the extent to which that director recognizes and leverages the power of the space.

As part of the “academic ghetto,” GWCs serve as invaluable places to investigate how race mediates peer-to-peer interdisciplinary graduate student interactions. GWCs also enable researchers to observe racialized expectations of graduate student writing.

More specifically, GWCs offer a vital place to observe and theorize about three major interrelated issues related to race, place, and writing centers: 1. How race affects who seeks assistance from GWCs 2. How race affects power dynamics between tutors and clients 3. How race intensifies the overall labor of GWC tutors This article presents narratives organized around these specific points, and invites readers to consider the extent to which an antiracist perspective of GWCs opens up the potential to provide transformative mentorship for graduate student writers and collect invaluable data that could improve the viable enterprise of graduate studies, in general (Bloom; Grav and Cayley; Madden and Stinnett; Snively and Prentice; Summers; Tauber). Overall, the article calls for more research about the work and positionality of tutors working at Writing Centers (WCs), and especially GWCs. GWCs, in particular, are locations that are severely understudied. Furthermore, the perspectives of racially marginalized tutors are overwhelmingly absent from WC scholarship, in general. We need more information about our/their experiences.

Indeed, location, as I will argue throughout this piece, must be considered as one of the major factors that obscures the relationship between race and how students are socialized to understand graduate writing conventions. Learning how to write, as a graduate student, depends on moving through clandestine places like faculty offices, selective reading groups, and brief cubicle chats among peers, as well as publicly sanctioned intimate spaces like coffee shops where graduate students may be meeting with their mentors and colleagues about any number of projects. Indeed, learning support services for graduate students offer researchers, administrators, and faculty a rare glimpse of diverse experiences of graduate students writing across disciplines.

Writing Centers as Racialized Locale As an alternative to teaching in predominantly white male student classrooms, I requested to work in the undergraduate Writing Center in 2011. I jokingly dubbed it the “academic ghetto” for two reasons. First, it was the only place that I encountered such a large volume of historically underrepresented students at the university in the same space. Next, few if any doctoral students worked there. The WC had an unspoken reputation as a difficult, “less than” space where people assisted “basic” or “developmental” writers, given that the “best” grad students were measured by their ability to be selected to teach a survey course or even an elective for upperclass students. In sum, status among graduate students seemed to depend on the locale of one’s employment.

With exception of those who were researching the WC, English graduate students understood that it was typical to teach any class, but teaching classes that weren’t first-year Writing, or serving as an RA for a prestigious professor were more competitive opportunities. Working in the Writing Center was often met with surprise, and—unless the graduate student was only in their first or second year—it was rarely considered as a viable place to work.

In calling the WC an “academic ghetto,” I recognize that some may be offended. However, I am signifying as is common black cultural practice (Smitherman; Mitchell-Kernan). The word ghetto can be a sign of veneration. From my working-class Southern black perspective, ghetto does not necessarily conjure up those negative connotations of social class complete with images of impoverished black and brown bodies.

The term for me means a place that is both outta sight and out of sight, as in a space in which outrageously fascinating events are unfolding, but little is actually said about its merits. Outsiders fail to recognize its

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Why I Call it the Academic Ghetto • 22 nuanced rules of power exchange, or see it at all. It's just “them folk over there.”

But those who “represent” have experienced both joy and disappointment there. Many people leave WCs unsatisfied and never come back. Some people do.

In the “academic ghetto,” linguistic and racial violence is happening everywhere. There are costs to claiming marginalized languages and ethnic identities, or “hoods.” It is not a “safe space,” as if any place marking failure could be (Boquet 469-470). It’s not a place for the weak, or the meek. It's a place where you better speak up to get what you need. It’s a place of occasional success—sometimes people get out the hood. But a lot of people do not. Some people coming through won't graduate, or pass some of their classes that semester regardless of how hard they try. All expression in the WC occurs beneath the panoptic microscope of teachers and administrators who make it clear that the function of the place is to improve a dilapidated physical and mental condition—funding depends on that problem’s existence and the hope of fixing it. Its stigma directs deficient learners to go to some “project” outside of their departments or commons places like libraries. Rarely does a WC stand alone in its own building or is the place featured in one of the most populated locations on campus.

Sometimes we’ll find the WC in a library, but often it is in a basement or on some less trafficked upper-floor. It could be in a musty old building on campus. It may be a tiny room inside a much larger, more glamorous, learning space such as the all-purpose student success center that is inhabited by more “important” tutoring work in subjects like math or computer science.

In attempting to make WCs a “respectable” place, which is code for a certain ideology of whiteness that is concealed through the word “professionalism,” researchers risk neglecting that very place--much like well-meaning social workers do when they go to “check on” clients from the hood. It is very much a place that is under all kinds of surveillance. The “residents” are objects of study, as well as currency traded through transactions to be verified through routine paperwork circulated among peer tutors, other writing consultants, their teachers, and other administrators. Through “training” courses meant to “handle” the clientele, often conducted and administered by people who do not look like them or share their life experiences and academic struggles.

Despite this structural reality, the ghetto generates pride in oneself, as well as ingenuity: compelling artwork, critical conversations about human suffering, and hacking limited resources for their maximum value.

This section’s extrapolation of the concept of the “academic ghetto” offers a novel contribution to contemporary research. However, the use of this is not new, nor has it been used with the kind of adoration that I have expressed here. Since at least the 1960s, scholars across divisions and fields of study, including anthropology, English studies, philosophy, political science, public relations, sociology, women’s studies, and writing studies have described the need to “break out of” or resist being put in the “academic ghetto” to describe their fear of disciplinary marginalization (Caplan; Cotkin; Waymer and Dyson; Weiss; Wolf; Zirin). It is also used, perhaps more appropriately, to talk about the way institutions and other disciplines handle interdisciplinary fields that focus on identity, such as women’s studies, and especially black studies (Rabaka). Several queer studies theorists also employ the concept. For example, Lisa Duggan uses the term in her article, “Making it Perfectly Queer,” when she describes how gay and lesbian histories were ghettoized before Michel Foucault legitimized these narratives through History of Sexuality. For Duggan, “Theory is now working—finally—to get us out of the academic ghetto” (23). Duggan’s claim accounts for the veneration of Critical Theory in English Studies and its influence on knowledge creation in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies (RCWS). The “postmodern turn” certainly didn’t get our field out of isolation, but the spread of “high theory” was appropriated across the humanities and social sciences like fashion and music that originates in the hood and ends up on a Macy’s or Nordstrom Rack.

Other elitist references to this term appear during the roughly the same time period (1992), when Bernadine Healy critiques the marginalization of women faculty in medical schools. She argues that, With some 14,171 women now teaching in medical schools, women represent 21.5% of all medical school faculty. However, they occupy what might be called an academic ghetto: 49.8% are clustered at the assistant professor level, only 9.8% are full professors, and there are no women deans. (1333) Healy’s use of the term “academic ghetto” may not be the most appropriate way to talk about gender discrimination in the workplace. Although men dominate STEM fields, as well as the health professions (except Nursing), comparing the labor of women medical school professors to an “academic ghetto” feels offensive when considering the extreme labor issues facing humanities disciplines like RCWS and English Studies. Her discussion of tenure and promotion within the context of tenure-track positions is hardly applicable to the countless adjunct professors

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Why I Call it the Academic Ghetto • 23 and graduate students whose pedagogical labor earns at or below minimum wage.

Given these labor conditions and the novelty of its disciplinary emergence, I was hardly surprised to finally discover RCWS and English Studies scholars comparing the field to the academic ghetto. This metaphor is used within the historical context of general education and basic writing scholarship which have long focused on how to get “deficient” students (e.g. racial minorities) up to speed on learning how to master academic writing conventions. Fear of being part of disciplines relegated to the “academic ghetto” is so deep that it is at core of the disciplinary origins of RCWS. In her call for Rhet/Comp to disciplinize, Janice Lauer opens her essay with reference to the academic ghetto. She claims that, “freshman English will never reach the status of a respectable intellectual discipline unless both its theorizers and its practitioners break out of the ghetto” (396).

RCWS scholarship also contains one of the few references that compare WCs to academic ghettos. In Mark Waldo’s, “The Last Best Place for Writing Across the Curriculum: The writing center,” Valerie Balester compares WCs to the academic ghetto because she is “mindful of its connotations of poverty, isolation, and low prestige” (166). Feminist compositionists Rhonda Grego and Nancy Thomson invoke the notion of ghettos while also comparing writing instructors to housewives. They argue, It is not hard to see the work of compositionists in this depiction of how the housewife must organize her very consciousness as well as her day-to- day activities in response to other's needs, others' lives: composition's ghetto, its carnival, has been and is full of workers (often women, often untenured, unbenefitted, etc.) for years washing the masses, turning aside those who don't clean up well. (67) As this (white) feminist use of “academic ghetto” shows, scholarly adoptions of the concept of the ghetto are utilized to strengthen a message of gendered labor injustice and disciplinary discrimination. The next two examples take on even more overtly racial tones.

Apparently, American Studies, too, faces so-called oppression when too much race, class, and gender occupies theoretical, literary, and cultural space. According to one scholar, George Cotkin, “identity politics” has ghettoized American Studies. In his review of Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, Cotkin argues, In an age when so many books are confined to an academic ghetto, Menand’s book stands out

as a work that will remain popular outside of academe and be a continued presence in undergraduate survey courses in the history of American thought.

To suggest that the robust American canon of nineteenth through twenty-first century white male authors are suddenly placed into a ghetto because of contemporary multicultural interventions is absurd and, quite frankly, racist. It is a “There goes the neighborhood” type of argument. The emergence of fields like black, queer, and women studies is only a threat to the hegemony of Western patriarchal intellectual traditions when those who seek to rigidly protect that hegemony continue preserving a canon that clearly marginalizes work produced by non-white authors.

Of course, one of the few excusable instances of scholars employing the “academic ghetto” metaphor is in the context of Black Studies. These scholars have not simply complained about being relegated to the academic ghetto as mere hyperbole. They have fleshed out their rationale for this metaphor, carefully relating it to the desegregation of colleges and universities, its history of resistance and violence, as well as the history of Black Studies in relation to the exhaustive fight for civil rights. For example, Darlene Hine explains, Unfortunately, the early development and subsequent evolution of Black Studies was further tainted by the media’s sensationalized coverage of armed black students at Cornell University and the 1969 shoot-out at UCLA, which left two students dead. In the minds of many, Black Studies would forever remain nothing more than a new kind of academic ghetto. (9) Nellie McKay uses the term in a similar way in her article, “A Troubled Place: Black Women in the Halls of the White Academy.” Like Hine, McKay identifies the racial characteristics of this notion of the “academic ghetto.” She states, [B]ut in the 1960s and 1970s, for many black scholars there was no choice. Black studies were the only spaces available to them in colleges and universities. Nor in the academic ghetto of black studies, did the militant political rhetoric that so dramatically challenged racism build bridges between the new field and its disciplinary departments. (13) She further describes how white faculty attempted to delegitimize black studies by calling it “unsound academically” and “intellectually inferior” to other disciplines.

Overall, the notion of an “academic ghetto” serves as a rhetorical appeal for those—mostly in the

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Why I Call it the Academic Ghetto • 24 humanities and social sciences—to claim their right to higher pay, visibility, and rank. However, such a term deserves to be analyzed and evaluated in the various academic contexts that it appears. Situating a term like ghetto within such predominantly white, prestigious locations is more offensive than provocative. Such flippant comparison reminds me of that middle-upper class white friend who is ignorant of her race and class privilege. She picks you up in her five-year-old car and as soon as you compliment her expensive possession, she retorts with, “It’s so ghetto!” because it isn’t brand new.

Race and GWC Clientele In the last section, I described why I refer to WCs as the academic ghetto by juxtaposing my interpretation with the limited ways in which (primarily white) scholars operating from a position of privilege have sloppily applied this concept to describe their working conditions or “oppressed” disciplinary situatedness in the academy. With exception of references to Black Studies, few scholars push the “academic ghetto” metaphor in ways that deal with how race actually affects place in colleges and universities. In this section, I want to draw readers’ attention back to the Graduate Writing Center space.

Researchers should further investigate the demographics of GWC tutors and writers because race matters when it comes to whether a student might actually use GWC services. In my lived experience as a graduate student, I did not enter the Writing Center space as a client. I avoided this space for at least three interrelated reasons. Similar to most graduate students, I wondered whether I was “good enough” to pursue doctoral studies. However, this feeling was intensified by my hypervisibility at my university. As a queer black woman student at a predominantly white R1 institution, I was especially sensitive to being perceived as someone who needed “extra” help, as I mentioned in the introduction. Moreover, I did not want that help to come from my peers. The culture of both my M.A. and Ph.D. programs were collegial, but very competitive. Independently doing my work was absolutely necessary for me to prove my authorship, as I never wanted to be accused of not creating my own ideas. In sum, assistance seemed like something that could be used against me.

This certainly happened to Cedric Burrows after he decided to visit a writing center to address his tendency to erase dissertation writing under the pressure of feeling as if nothing he wrote could be good enough. As he describes in “Writing While Black: The Black Tax on African American Graduate Writers,”

Burrows went to the campus writing center where he, “met with the tutor, an undergraduate English education major who would begin student-teaching the next semester.” He describes the disastrous appointment, which was mostly a failure because the scope of the tutor’s critique fails to acknowledge the value of Burrows’ position as a Ph.D. student nearing degree completion, as well as his experience as a teacher of writing. He reflects on this dilemma in the following passage: After thanking him for his time, I left the center feeling frustrated. Did he not understand what I was writing? Or, did he not even try to understand? I couldn’t tell my committee for fear that they would think I wasn’t strong enough to deal with criticism, and I didn’t want to go back to the writing center after that experience. So, I resolved to try writing some more and hope it would work. But the double consciousness of being black and a dissertation writer kept me from writing more.

Burrows was not interested in whether his writing would offend white readers, as the tutor critiqued, but sought to discover strategies for composing without feeling the compulsion of self-erasure through his literal deletion of each day’s writing. However, Burrows remarks on the meaning of race during that WC appointment, Instead of learning to know who I am, the tutor took it upon himself to create an image that fit his expectation of what an African American writer should be. He didn’t show any sign of revising this expectation and expected all revision to be on my part. His reaction shows how the mere presence of the African American subject serves as an intrusion within predominantly white institutions.

Since the tutor/client knowledge gap is too vast, Burrowes’ must “pay” for making “prospective white readers” of his work uncomfortable by his claims about race and racism. After reading about Burrows’ experience being marginalized in a writing center by an undergraduate writing tutor, I felt compelled to wonder if what Burrows calls the “black tax” should be more broadly interpreted to include all sorts of ways people pay for their historical disenfranchisement by being visible and present in the dominant learning scene. Would access to a GWC, where his peers may have shared more common ground with him as fellow graduate writers, have enabled him to address his writing issues with less hostility? We must ponder this question as we consider the relationship between racial

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Why I Call it the Academic Ghetto • 25 diversity of scene and “student success” within the scene of graduate/professional studies.

Nevertheless, Burrows opted out of the WC space. Race and rank played a role in his decision to cultivate his own vision of what writing support for a black male graduate student. He attended a dissertation support group with colleagues going through the same writing experience. Furthermore, he connected with other black students who felt they were paying a “black tax” for being in white-dominant learning spaces, even when they sought additional learning support resources.

Therefore, Burrows co-organized independent writing groups with those students. In that learning space, he feels comfortable sharing and discussing the clarity of his work with other underserved students, which in turn increases his productivity and enables him to successfully produce both his dissertation and job search documents that led to his ability to attain a tenure-track position at an R1 institution. This experience also helped him gain additional understanding about what was insufficient about visiting the writing center, which demonstrates the need for WC scholarship and practice to adopt an antiracist methodology of inclusion (Condon; Villaneuva).

Race, Place, Dynamic

and

the

Tutor/Writer

Spatial investigations of Writing Centers occupy a central part of its literature since method constructs place. The kind of place a writing center is perceived to be—by its tutors, clients, director, and administrative assistants—affects what will happen there. Such metaphoric exploration is expressed by Elizabeth Boquet, who asks, Is the writing center, in other words, primarily a space, a “laundry” where work is dropped off and picked up, where students are bruised off and cleaned up? Or is it primarily a temporality, an interaction between people over time, in which the nature of the interaction is determined not by site but by method?. (464) It would seem, based on the academic ghetto metaphor, that WCs are both. Literally, a place where events occur that won't tend to happen elsewhere, as well as a space in which certain attitudes and habits construct the nature of that place.

Since I became a Graduate Writing Center tutor around the same time as I had successfully defended my dissertation (2013), I held a joint appointment (2013-14) with the English Department and my university’s online branch campus. The growth of this distance graduate education effort, as well as retention

concerns, led to some investment in online tutoring.

Thus, I worked with students online and offline. I also continued to work at the undergraduate writing center where I had been employed since 2011. This appointment was also rare, as a lack of interest in the WC opened up the possibility for me to combine these positions.

Our offline GWC space was not inviting. Liana M. Silvia-Ford’s description of her “office” vividly illustrates the place that I occupied for slightly over a year. She remarks, “[. . .] it was a hidden office, an office that could easily be mistaken for something else.

It had no windows, and [. . .] had been used for storage” (“Help Wanted”). The GWC’s rather unappealing spatial location in a former storage space in my PhD institution’s graduate school building contributed to its nebulous definition. It currently sits across from a noisy, heavily trafficked café and is adjacent to a large auditorium. It is several doors away from the main entrance, which features the Graduate School’s main office. This building also hosts some classroom and administrative meeting spaces, the Office of the Provost, as well as the “minority support services” such as the Office of Graduate Equity Educational Programs (OGEEP) and the McNair program.

Two people could comfortably occupy the space, and three would make it stuffy and uncomfortable. We tutors respectfully attempted to avoid booking appointments on top of each other when we needed the “office.” The spatial limitations greatly affected session activity. We had to bootstrap resources and adapt to the flow. If we were in the office, it was a rather private one-on-one consultation. If it was at the cafe, our noise synced up with the quick pace of the place and tended to maintain our focus on the “task at hand.” Online sessions were a combination of both, as the distance produced a sense of urgency, but also a one-on-one experience.

In that office formerly known as a janitor’s closet, I became accustomed to the feeling of being used like the mops and brooms and worn chairs and broken file cabinets that once collected dust in the little room.

One day, an Asian student came into the center, slammed his paper in front of me, sat down and looked at me with expectation in his eyes. Not a word escaped his lips to establish respect or trust, and his folded arms protected him from my flippant reaction. I slid the paper slowly back to him, bit my lip, and said, “I don’t do that.” He shot a dirty look my way, shook his head, and said, “Aren’t you the writing center? I need you to fix this.” His frank rejection of my refusal felt like a sexual violation. I felt a flash of shame and temporarily wondered if he was right. Was it my job to

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Why I Call it the Academic Ghetto • 26 “go over the paper” as he wanted--with him passively accepting or rejecting my editorial suggestions?

Before you think I’m just another black girl with a bad attitude, I want you to rewind this story for a second—omitting our racial markers of difference and simply examining the implications of the labor request happening here. I’m sitting; he is standing. I’m opening my mouth to greet him; he is making a request. He pushes something towards me; I push it away. He insists; I refuse. Clearly these images conjure associations to assault and rape. This wave of guilt quickly washed over me because I reminded myself that I do not owe the client any and every request.

Tutors should not feel that it is their job to edit a paper unless they are teaching the client how to edit a paper.1 This lack of clarity about tutorials has been written about by several scholars (Brady and Singh-Corcoran; Cohn; Mannon; Silva-Ford; Simpson; Snively et. al; Summers; Tauber). It results from the fact that WC practitioners hardly agree about when we should say no to certain expectations of service. The following questions might offer some guidance: • What, then, is intellectual service?

• How can it be performed without issues of ownership and its Western cultural ideologies of correctness and colonization compromising the integrity of the session?

• How do these questions come to relief when the racial difference of tutors and clients affects the work that happens in the WC? • How does this narrative allow us to (re)negotiate the terms of the argument about tutoring and grammar work, especially in the context of graduate writers?

Erica Cirillo-McCarthy et al. argue that, “By telling a student that we don’t “do” grammar, we are also telling them that their work is too deficient for the writing center.” They also claim that paying attention to stories about writing centers present researchers and practitioners with, “the opportunity to unpack and question stories often told about writing centers with regard to our work with GMLWs [graduate multilingual writers].”

There seems to be a discrepancy between WC scholarship’s discourses of inclusion and customer service. Arguably, this gap stems from the lack of nonwhite tutor perspectives in the research. Despite the fact that Cirillo-McCarthy et al. look to, “interrogate, disrupt, and complicate narratives, search[ing] for

untold stories or misrepresented voices buried in grand narratives of writing center missions and praxis,” their construct of the GMLW does not address race. The notion of “multilingual writers,” especially at the graduate-level, does not necessarily include firstgeneration graduate students, Black and Latinx graduate students, LGBTQ students. These populations, depending on the language and identity issue in question, may be considered “native English” speakers, but not necessarily multilingual writers. A significant portion of interdisciplinary research about graduate writers focuses on the “multilingual” writer, which is often code for “international students” (Canagarajah; Philips). The concept of multilingualism repudiates the habit of referring to international students as ESL and L2 since these historical terms position them as deficient English speakers rather than gifted individuals whose geographic movement has led them to acquire a complex linguistic identity that may include proficiency in several languages and/or Englishes.

In fact, some researchers have critiqued studies about multilingual and translingual writers because for lacking sufficient attention on race (Curtis & Romney; Kubota & Lin; Liu and Tannacito; Motha; Ruecker).

To illustrate, Pei-Hsun Emma Liu and Dan J. Tannacito remind us that some multilingual writers believe that Americanism and whiteness are superior forms of expression, which may motivate them to seek out white tutors at WCs. One Taiwanese student they interviewed [Monica] claimed that she thought, “white people have the better race” (365). Since race affects one’s motivation to learn “proper grammar,” or “sound white,” Cirillo-McCarthy et al.’s discussion of deficiency should include considerations of how clients may treat non-white and/or non-American tutors as unable to help them attain the white American English proficiency they seek to attain. This certainly may have been the case when I was treated with gendered contempt by the Chinese student before I signified my refusal to be treated disrespectfully by denying his request for me to correct his grammar.

Indeed, a session about grammar may need to also include serious dialogue about a client’s racial attitudes when arguments unintentionally exhibits or reinforces white supremacist attitudes. As Pei-Hsun Emma Liu and Dan J. Tannacito argue, Because race is implicated in L2 discourse and behavior, it is important for L2 writing professionals to be aware of students’ construction of whiteness in literacy practices.

This may be as basic as discussing and discerning tendencies from stereotypes (e.g.

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Why I Call it the Academic Ghetto • 27 ‘Chinese are often passive in writing class’).

(371) When considering the relationship between race and linguistic identity, we may encounter narratives of difference that illustrate a diversity of needs that may not result in cohesive notions of access. This will especially be the case if I am not as interested in helping clients obtain some variation of Standard American English that reinforces their view of black and brown people as inferior races.

In sum, what clients want can sometimes interfere with their own learning, especially in cases where they may decide to decline services from non-white or nonAmerican tutors because they automatically dismiss the very idea that they could speak or write “better English” than their white colleagues. These issues translate to contexts of learning graduate writing because students’ expectations of who ought to be mentoring them and teaching them affects language learning since the very definition of “professional writing” and “scholarly writing” signifies expression that will likely incorporate many assumptions about how to perform and elevate whiteness.

While I agree with Cirillo-McCarthy et al. in regards to their argument about being cognizant about what we see as “deficient,” I think that writing consultants should be willing to assert boundaries and resist being utilized as an unlimited service object when they are too exhausted to labor under conditions that prevent us from comprehensively assisting clients. For example, I should actually define editing for writers, as I understand it, at the very beginning of a tutoring appointment. This establishes the kind of role(s) they can expect me to occupy during a one-hour session. I communicate that I am not an editor in that context because “tutoring” means that I want the client to actually learn how to identify and strategically revise what could be considered “surface-level” issues on their own. For new clients, I explicitly discuss the difference between editing—which often means that the client sits there and silently watches you “correct” the paper—versus tutoring, which involves engaging the client in a problem-solving process that will increase their ability to revise. Occasionally, I have to remind returning clients about these boundaries, especially when they are pushing a thesis/dissertation deadline and trying to get me to work faster than I can realistically read that scope of writing.

Race and the Economic Conditions of Tutoring Writers Unknowingly, Cirillo-McCarthy et al. advance an argument that oversimplifies the racial aspects of the

economic contexts affecting learning support labor.

When considering the labor burdens on writing tutors versus instructors, race, gender, and sexuality intensify labor demands on tutors who are “women of color.”

The GWC demands its consultants to develop writing and writing pedagogy across the disciplines and cultural backgrounds throughout different stages of a program that might last for several years, exceeding the duration of an undergraduate degree. As universities pay more and more attention to the success of graduate students, especially those doing distance education programs, GWCs ought to receive more financial resources in exchange for the invaluable services they provide an institution. The freelance cost of consulting graduate writers far exceeds the university pay grade for teaching assistant and adjunct laborer positions.

Affluent (mostly international) students might pay upwards of $50-$70 per hour for private tutoring sessions, which some students’ families have already budgeted into the cost of graduate studies. Directors seeking to create an antiracist space might be more vocal with administrations about increasing GWC budgets, which could be more strategically connected to entities like equity programs to attract more racially diverse clients and tutors.

Their efforts might be ably assisted by the fact that few studies document the experiences of black women composition teachers, writing center tutors and writing program administrators (WPAs). Composition Studies and Writing Center scholarship tends to almost always exclusively position marginalized students as students not instructors, clients rather than tutors or directors (Denny; Lederman; Lamos; Malenczyk; Wallace and Bell). Typical narratives about access and equity often describe “people of color,” “queers,” and “firstgeneration” populations as patrons-only. When such demographics are elaborated on at all, the research may argue that WCs need to be “safe spaces.” The ‘safe spaces’ arguments reveal that the work of tutoring English writing, in such contexts, is clearly understood to advance standardized English and particular conventions of academic communication.

We need to realize how WCs function as academic ghettos, especially to those who must live and labor in that space as those who institutions have historically isolated. The work of getting someone to talk and write like “educated (white) folks” is an act of violence because it functions on the basis that patriarchal white supremacist manners of expression superior to those of unassimilated non-white people. “Good English,” then, is provided paramount linguistic value solely on the basis of the transferability of its socio-economic viability. This impression of WCs as racist and colonial

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Why I Call it the Academic Ghetto • 28 spaces, in fact, increased my desire to participate in leadership roles in the field.

Moreover, we need to talk more about race as it relates to those who labor in WCs. This article integrated personal narrative and rhetorical criticism for the purposes of challenging readers to think critically about race, place, and WCs. I was “a black graduate writing center tutor,” and that does matter.

We are extremely rare. Little research exists about the experiences of black women composition teachers, writing center tutors and writing program administrators (WPAs). For example, Composition Studies and Writing Center scholarship tends to almost always exclusively position marginalized students as students rather than instructors, clients rather than tutors or directors, as previously discussed. This typical narrative, in which “only minorities need help with their writing,” as I discussed earlier in this article, increased my desire to participate in leadership roles in the field.

I definitely recognized myself in the first scene in Harry Denny’s chapter on race in his book Facing the Center, and was grateful to see a discussion about an underrepresented student in the role of the tutor (32). However, published autobiographical accounts of our lived experience as graduate students writing, let alone as tutors of graduate students writing, are nearly non-existent with rare exceptions like Burrows’s account and frequent blog posts published on Conditionally Accepted—an InsideHigherEd blog/column.

In terms of scholarship, Dwedor Morais Ford’s recent work, “HBCU Writing Centers Claiming an Identity in the Academy” describes specific challenges facing black graduate student writers. Black Women WPAs such as Karen Keaton Jackson and Carmen Kynard, respectively, have also published significant work that confronts the negative effects of standardizing American English at the expense of the intellectual value of multilingual, multicultural, and diasporic language and discourse. Kynard’s continuously models exemplary geographic and technocultural critiques of institutional racism by identifying how scholars in the field benefit from doing research on race and racism while also inhibiting racially marginalized students and colleagues from fully participating in the academy (Teaching While Black 14; Stayin Woke 523). Jackson urges us to pay attention to the intensity of labor required from underfunded WPAs at HBCUs, as well as black college instructors teaching about race in predominantly white classrooms. Their combined works are exceptional because of the careful and unique attention paid to the relevance of HBCUs and black language learners.

Furthermore, Romeo García’s “Unmaking GringoCenters” presents a nuanced Mexican-American perspective on WC tutoring that seeks to broaden racial perspectives beyond the poles of black and white (32; 38-9). His investigation of thirty years of WC scholarship revealed a “low frequency” of articles regarding racial identities (34). However, García’s attempt to make racial discourses in WC scholarship more plural should recognize the complexity of gender and sexuality that exists within the dominant black/white racial narrative. We must theorize race from both the decolonial point of view that García advocates, as well as an intersectional perspective that considers gendered and economic mediations of race.

Consequently, this article contributes to black perspectives on graduate writing with a call for an increase in scholarship that explicitly addresses race and racism, as it relates to “formal” learning places.

This work is messy and meaningful, traditional and transgressive, hopeless and servile, empowering and violent depending on the day, the client, our attitude, our outlook, our training, our staff morale, our literal teaching and tutoring space (which can vary widely-online and offline), among so many other factors.

Conclusion: Towards More Inclusive Tutoring Models

Racially

What are the demographics of your WC? Of the directors, assistants, tutors, and clients? When considering the place of a WC, do you consider what kind of languages you expect to be spoken around you?

What is your relationship to Standard White English?

To Black English? To languages other than English?

What kind of order do you assert in your WC? Do you discourage people from getting up to move? Do your tutoring practices include whiteboard mapping, desktop note-taking, or recording the audio of sessions? Do you sit down for the entire hour? Are breaks encouraged? Do you tend to follow the same script of approaches? Do you call those approaches “best practices?”

In sum, antiracism in WCs pays attention to the spaces, in which we labor, as often we people are untenured and/or temporary laborers working the space. In the quest to serve for low pay and little recognition, we are most certainly disenfranchising those who have been historically underserved. To document how tutors resist labor exploitation in their practices would be a major step in beginning to articulate antiracist WC praxis. As I conclude this piece, I invite you to recognize how the previous paragraph guides you through a process that might enable you to more clearly recognize and articulate the

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Why I Call it the Academic Ghetto • 29 inclusion politics of your WCs. The disclosure of y/our own lived experience is an integral part of the work we should all be doing to more comprehensively interpret what might be happening with race and WCs.

Notes 1. While editing papers can involve a transactional and rewarding relationship between clients and editors, this relationship is much different when a person is paying $40-50/hr., and willing to provide continuous feedback. This kind of relationship cannot happen in a one hour session, nor should it ever be attempted.

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EXPLORING WHITE PRIVILEGE IN TUTOR EDUCATION Dan Melzer University of California, Davis dlmelzer@ucdavis.edu Abstract In this article I report the results of action research focused on white writing center tutors’ attitudes toward white privilege. I studied four semesters of my tutoring internship course at a linguistically and ethnically diverse university, analyzing white tutors’ written responses and classroom discussions connected to a survey and assigned article focused on white privilege and tutoring.

The themes that emerged in tutors’ “white talk” (McIntyre) regarding initiating/assimilating students to academic discourse caused me to rethink my curriculum and make white privilege a more central part of discussions about tutoring throughout the course.

In this essay I discuss the themes that emerged in four semesters of discussions of white privilege in my tutoring internship courses, and I discuss changes I made to my pedagogy based on my research—changes that I hope will be relevant for other writing center directors interested in exploring white privilege in their tutor education courses.

Introduction

Writing Center directors who are interested in learning more about theory and research connected to white privilege might begin, as I did, with the writing studies scholarship on linguistic and racial justice, cultural bias, and anti-racism work. Scholars such as Victor Villanueva, Keith Gilyard, Suresh Canagarjah, Geneva Smitherman, and Elaine Richardson have focused on cultural and linguistic bias in the teaching of writing and the gatekeeping role of academic literacy in the U.S. These scholars have argued for students’ right to their own languages, to use the title of the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s position statement demanding respect for linguistic pluralism and challenging the myth of a single, standard dialect. Writing Studies scholars focused on anti-racism work, such as Vershawn Ashanti Young, Frankie Condon, and Rasha Diab, encourage writing teachers to critique and expose institutionalized, systemic racism. These scholars argue that anti-racism work requires political activism and the courage not to avoid (as I was avoiding) uncomfortable discussions about the racial politics that shape instruction in academic literacies.

Critiques of white privilege are an important aspect of anti-racism scholarship and pedagogy, and seminal works by scholars in education such as Henry Giroux, Alice McIntyre, and Maureen Reddy and Bonnie TuSmith and sociologists such as Theodore W. Allen, George Lipsitz, Peggy McIntosh, and Tim Wise are important reading for writing center directors who desire to study more widely in white privilege theory and research. Although white privilege has long been an area of interest for education and writing studies scholars, it is only in the last decade that white privilege has emerged as a focus in writing center scholarship (Barron and Grimm; Condon; Denny;

As a new writing center coordinator at a linguistically and ethnically diverse state college in Northern California, I was troubled by the perspectives white students in my semester-long tutoring internship courses expressed about initiating tutees to academic discourse. During the one day I had squeezed into the busy course schedule for the topic of language diversity, white tutors often argued that academic discourse was more sophisticated and intellectual than students’ home discourses, and many were reluctant to accept that initiation to academic writing is not neutral but ideological. Semester after semester, it became apparent to me that the view of tutoring as a neutral, apolitical act of initiating students to academic writing conventions was a deeply held belief that many white tutors were reluctant to critically examine.

The missing element of critical literacy in the tutoring internship course was my fault—I devoted just a single class session to language diversity, and I had no readings focused explicitly on the concept of white privilege. I lacked awareness of the complexities of issues surrounding white privilege, and I was nervous about tensions that might flare if I challenged white tutors’ biases. I decided I needed to study the literature on white privilege, try to overcome my discomfort, and make the subject of white privilege a more integral part of the tutoring internship course. I decided I also needed to more closely examine white tutors’ attitudes about the concept of white privilege with an action research project. As a white educator at one of the most diverse state universities in the country, my history of avoiding the topic of white privilege was especially problematic.

Scholarship on White Privilege Teaching and Tutoring Writing

and

Exploring White Privilege in Tutor Education • 35 Geller et al.; Greenfield and Rowan; Villanueva). The literature in education, writing studies, and writing centers related to the white privilege themes I found in my study are the focus of the rest of this brief literature review. These themes include tutors’ white talk, color blindness, white tutor resistance, and tutors’ perception of academic discourse as unraced.

A seminal study in education by Alice McIntyre focuses on the language white teachers use to either avoid or resist instruction in anti-racism pedagogy; a language she refers to as “white talk.” White talk involves whites “talking uncritically with/to other whites, all the while resisting critique and massaging each other’s racist attitudes, beliefs, and actions” (McIntyre 45-46). Gaining a better understanding of the nuances of white talk was a primary goal of my research. McIntyre found that one predominant aspect of white talk is the belief in the importance of being color-blind—a belief that race needn’t be taken into account since we’re capable of getting beyond issues of race. This belief disregards systemic racism and unconscious biases and allows white people to “ignore the benefits of whiteness and dismiss the experiences of people of color” (McIntyre 126). Anne Ellen Geller at al. connect this disregard of the benefits of whiteness to the kinds of lived experience of white tutors I encountered in my tutoring education courses, arguing that “…the benefits and advantages that accrue to white people as a result of racism are an everyday experience for white students, tutors, and directors” (91). Condon and Villanueva discuss the ways color-blindness in the writing center can lead to tutors viewing white academic discourse traditions as ideologically neutral. In her seminal article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peggy McIntosh also comments on this idea of whiteness as neutral, saying that “whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average.”

It’s a challenge for writing center directors to get white tutors to critically examine white privilege and white talk in tutor education and in the writing center.

Henry Giroux comments on the pervasiveness of white student resistance to value systems that question white privilege, and both McIntyre and Nancy Barron and Nancy Grimm describe this resistance in their experience introducing anti-racism pedagogy in their courses. Many of the white tutors in my courses believe academic discourse conventions and the “rules” of Standardized English are a neutral or even superior form of literacy. As Ellen Geller at al. contend in The Everyday Writing Center, “structural inequalities are perceived as so normal, so natural, that they are invisible to most white people” (91). Echoing Ellen Geller et al., Timothy Barnett reminds us that

“whiteness only seems invisible, objective, and neutral,” and it maintains this appearance by presenting itself as unraced as opposed to politically interested (10). If academic discourse conventions are seen as neutral and not ideological, then initiating/assimilating students of color is perceived as less problematic for white tutors. But as McIntyre argues, “Whites talk assimilation, when what we really mean is dominance and control” (62). Students’ desire to gain access to academic discourse complicates issues of assimilation and control, but at a minimum I wanted to make white tutors more aware of how white privilege operated in the writing center, however that would wind up affecting their tutoring approach.

Research Methods The goal of action research is to solve a specific classroom problem through research, reflection, and action (Ray). My goal in conducting this research project was to become a more reflective teacher regarding educating tutors in issues of racial and linguistic diversity, and for my tutors—and especially white tutors—to become more critically self-aware of white privilege in the context of tutoring a linguistically diverse student population. In order to triangulate data regarding the ways tutors thought about white privilege, I assigned Barron and Grimm’s essay “Addressing Racial Diversity in a Writing Center” and received IRB approval from my institution to record and analyze “white talk” in conversations about the article, in tutors’ electronic discussion board posts in response to the article, and in articles about academic discourse and language diversity that tutors wrote for our course’s studentauthored tutoring book. My choice of Barron and Grimm’s essay was partially a pragmatic one—it was included in the main text for the class, The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. But I made Barron and Grimm’s essay the focus of my intervention for more than just pragmatic reasons. Because the essay explicitly discusses white privilege and tutoring, I felt assigning it would force both me and the tutors to have frank discussions about white privilege—it was an essay I’d avoided assigning prior to undertaking this research project for this very reason. I collected data on white talk from four course semesters: Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, and Fall 2014.

In addition to gathering this data, I drew on questions from an inventory of white privilege in Ellen Geller et al.’s The Everyday Writing Center that is based on McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” to create a brief class survey focused on tutors’ literacy histories in school. Geller at

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Exploring White Privilege in Tutor Education • 36 al. emphasize that their inventory is not meant as a tool for discussing tutoring practices, but rather as a way for tutors to confront white privilege. I had tutors fill out the survey before we read Barron and Grimm’s essay and reflect on the ways the survey complicated their thinking about their literacy histories and the concept of white privilege. I modified Ellen Geller et al.’s inventory to make it into a briefer survey, since my internship classes were fifty minutes once a week and I wanted to have plenty of time to discuss Barron and Grimm’s essay. Following is the survey I distributed and the quantitative results from four semesters of the course (N=58): 1. The way I typically communicate in writing for school is considered the standard and correct way of communicating in writing in the United States. a) true b) false All students answered “true.”

2. I have never chosen to be absent or not to participate in class discussion on a day the class was reading a text from an author of my race because of concerns I will be asked to represent my race in the class discussion. a) true b) false 72% of white students answered “true” and 43% of students of color answered “true.”

3. Most of the texts in my courses are written by people of the same race as me. a) true b) false 79% of white students answered “true” and none of the students of color answered “true.”

4. When I was in K-12 most teachers assumed I could be a successful writer. a)true b) false 73% of white students answered “true” and 56% of students of color answered “true.”

5. If I perform outstandingly in a writing course there is no chance I will be thought of by the teacher as a credit to my race. a) true b) false 85% of white students answered “true” and 65% of students of color answered “true.”

6. I can remain oblivious to rhetorical traditions not associated with my race without suffering any penalty for such obliviousness. a) true b) false 54% of white students answered “true” and 49% of students of color answered “true.”

7. I have been/can expect to be awarded in school rather than penalized for speaking/if I can speak more than one language. a) true b) false

92% of white students answered “true” and 75% of students of color answered “true.”

8. In most of my writing classes the teacher was a person of my race. a) true b) false 95% of white students answered “true” and none of the students of color answered “true.”

9. If a writing teacher is especially critical of my work, I do not need to ask myself if race is an issue. a) true b) false 91% of white students answered “true” and 70% of the students of color answered “true.”

10. I identify primarily as Caucasian. a) true b) false 67% of students identified as primarily Caucasian.

The focus of my research is on the attitudes of white tutors toward the concept of white privilege, and the quotes presented in this essay are from tutors who self-identified as Caucasian on the survey (over twothirds of the tutors identified as primarily Caucasian, but the semester I completed the research 35% of the students at this institution were Caucasian). I share quotes that are representative of the white talk I heard from tutors each semester, but it’s important to note that each semester there were some white tutors who acknowledged white privilege and defended Barron and Grimm’s positions. I didn’t include quotes from these students since the focus of my action research is exploring the problem of the white talk that predominated and often drowned out alternative perspectives.

Peggy McIntosh asserts, “it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage which rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex and ethnic identity than on other factors.” It was beyond the scope of my research to parse out other variables such as class and gender, or the differences across ethnic groups that identify as Caucasian, and I acknowledge that these variables are an important component of discussions of white privilege—but perhaps not nearly as critical a factor as being identified as Caucasian, as Tim Wise argues in White Like Me. White tutors rarely had to consider the issues of race mentioned in each survey question, and the unraced literacy experiences of white students is reflected in the themes that emerged in my research.

White Privilege and Tutoring Themes My analysis reveals four themes regarding white tutors’ attitudes toward academic discourse and language diversity. In the following section of this essay I discuss each theme and present evidence from

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Exploring White Privilege in Tutor Education • 37 tutors’ classroom conversations and written work.

Theme #1: Students should be able to move easily between discourse communities and should be able to learn academic discourse without feeling that they are giving up their cultural traditions.

Many white tutors resisted the ways Barron and Grimm complicate the initiation/assimilation model of tutoring. These tutors felt that students should be able to make a smooth transition from one discourse community to another without a sense of loss or alienation, as these quotes from a classroom conversation and a tutoring book article illustrate: It’s not so much taking a voice away . . . .

It’s not with a sense that you’re taking away a voice or taking away that person’s identity or the type of language they use but that they convey their ideas clearly.

By showing students that they can inhabit two discourse communities, diversity is actually promoted. This allows people to move between discourses more easily and comfortably.

I do disagree with Grimm’s statements that students who learn to write within the confines of academic discourse are relinquishing their cultural distinctiveness, so the writing center needs to be the place where these changes are prevented. I believe the job of the writing center is to help students move efficiently from one discourse to another.

White tutors who may not have experienced cultural loss in their own initiation to academic discourse conventions had difficulty imagining that students would experience conflict as they “faced pressure to accommodate to naturalized white codes of rhetorical expression” (Denny 38).

Some tutors felt that before students could consider the relationship between academic discourse and their home discourses, they first needed to learn “the rules” of academic writing. In an article for the tutoring book one tutor wrote: The rules are always there to use as tools with which a writer can better express themselves in a more commonly accepted way. As writers, we have to fit our writing to a specific discourse so that it is recognizable to a reader.

The “rules” of academic writing are perceived as a neutral set of tools or a “commonly accepted way” for

students to “better express themselves.” It is assumed that the generic academic reader is someone expecting white discourse—other discourse may not be “recognizable” (and probably will not be recognized).

Learning academic discourse while retaining home discourses was often perceived by white tutors as simple, apolitical, and unquestioningly beneficial.

Unfortunately the neutral way I had been presenting academic discourse to students—whether it was by providing them example disciplinary genres or guides to citation style conventions or strategies for helping multilingual students become better editors of their own writing—was reinforcing this belief in academic discourse as neutral and unquestionably beneficial.

Theme #2: Academic discourse is more sophisticated, articulate, and intellectual than other kinds of discourses.

One reason white tutors felt that moving among discourse communities should be relatively easy for students of color is the belief that academic discourse is superior to students’ home discourses, and thus something students would surely strive to assimilate into. Sometimes this justification was overtly based on a traditional canon of Western, white male thought, as in this quote from a tutor during a classroom conversation: We have this way of conveying ideas, and there’s an entire way to express ideas accurately. We have Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, John Locke, these individuals are trying to . . . convey ideas clearly and articulately.

Few tutors were so explicit about citing a white male tradition, but this notion that academic discourse is more clear and articulate than students’ home discourses was a claim made by other tutors in articles for the class tutoring book. Consider, for example, these excerpts from tutoring book articles about the advantage of learning academic discourse: Academic discourse is the ‘language of the university.’

It is typically straightforward, clear, concise and ‘elevated.’ By elevated, we are referring to using more complex ideas and higher levels of articulation.

Another reason why students should use academic discourse is because it advocates the thoughtful use of language.

This discourse is highlighted by intellectual speech and the ability to use it.

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Exploring White Privilege in Tutor Education • 38 Modernism also tends to uphold the current academic system, favoring a clean, concise essay that has a focused argument and relevant supporting citations. Since we are all members of an academic community that favors such standards, a tutoring session that helps the student acquire these skills is very useful.

Tutors associated academic discourse with elevation, clarity, complexity, thoughtfulness, and intellect. Many white tutors were unwilling to consider Frankie Condon’s argument that “definitions of excellence in writing within the American academy are circumscribed by the particularities of white Western values” (24). By failing to push tutors to identify these values as white and Western in class discussions, I had been complicit in this perspective of academic discourse as more sophisticated and intellectual.

Theme #3: Academic discourse is an unchanging tradition and tutors can’t or shouldn’t try to affect change.

In his examination of white privilege in literary studies, Barnett emphasizes that Whiteness relies on institutional structures. Tutors often took it for granted that these are permanent structures, not subject to interrogation and change. As one tutor put it in her tutoring book article: I do not believe that the academic standards should be changed or altered based on the various cultures that are currently present on our campus. If we reduce the tutoring center to a place where cultural differences are the focus, rather than the goal to improve the writing of our students, then we are doing our students a disservice.

Questioning academic discourse is associated with lowering standards, and focusing on language pluralism is placed in contrast to improving student writing—echoing Condon’s observation that in white talk “excellence and academic rigor are juxtaposed against diversity” (25).

Some white tutors acknowledged that the initiation/assimilation model of tutoring was problematic, but they often felt that they were powerless to effect change due to the structure of the institution, and therefore had no choice but to help students assimilate, as two different tutors expressed in classroom conversations: Change has to be at the teacher level . . . . I would feel I didn’t service my tutees well if I said oh yeah write it this way, they turn it in, and their audience says, no, this is not academic discourse, you know, you don’t get a good grade.

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I write the way academia—which is white, of course, but—I write the way my audience, which is usually my teacher, wants me to write. So when I’m teaching somebody to write, it never comes up that they might want to write a different way.

It’s understandable that tutors would feel helpless to effect change in a system where teachers and grades hold sway, but this fatalism about white privilege could prevent even the most reflective tutors from “confronting structural racism by creating spaces and occasions to self-reflect and question assumptions about race and its consequences for interaction,” as Denny argues for in Facing the Center (24). The fact that as the Writing Center coordinator I was not fully engaged in confronting structural racism meant that I was serving as a poor role model for this type of critical self-reflection.

Theme #4: In tutoring sessions race isn’t taken into account or shouldn’t be taken into account.

White tutors expressed a variety of perspectives on the concept of color-blindness. After reading Barron and Grimm, many tutors admitted they had never considered a student’s race when tutoring. As one tutor wrote in a discussion board post, “I have to admit that so far, I have been pretty color blind when it comes to my tutees. I have never even really taken race into account.” This tutor went on to critically reflect on her approach to tutoring, but some tutors never develop a critical stance and simply see colorblindness as unquestionably positive. A tutor who associated color-blindness with openness said in a classroom conversation, “Colorblindness created some openness that wasn’t there before. It’s difficult for me to think of a person as being of a specific race or a specific viewpoint.” In a classroom discussion another tutor associated color-blindness with universalizing experiences, saying, “You need to be able to treat a person as an individual as if you can universalize their action.”

Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg argue in “Addressing the Crisis of Whiteness,” “Whites alone have the privilege of opting out of their racial identity, of proclaiming themselves as non-raced” (22). Many of the white tutors in my courses simply opted out of considerations of racial identity in tutoring academic writing, as I opted out of building these kinds of discussion into my syllabus. In a classroom conversation about whether or not academic discourse is politically and racially neutral, one tutor said, “They come with a specific assignment which they’re trying to fulfill, and of course the assignment doesn’t say

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Exploring White Privilege in Tutor Education • 39 write white.” The white tutor can simply ignore the possibility that assignments might be implicitly asking students to “write white,” and the white tutor can also ignore the possibility that there is an imbalance of linguistic power in academic assignments.

The themes that emerged in my study connect to prior research on white teachers and white privilege, but I can’t generalize from my study of four courses to my future courses or to tutors at other institutions.

However, my research led me to make a number of changes in my pedagogy that other writing center directors may find informative.

Taking Action The most significant result of my action research was that I realized I needed to go beyond simply devoting one day and one article to white privilege as I had done in my intervention—what Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan refer to as the “week twelve approach,” discussing race “at an isolated moment, often late in the semester, rather than foregrounding such issues or accounting for their relevance in our everyday theories and practices consistently throughout the course” (132). After examining the persistence of white talk in my courses and the lack of willingness of many white tutors to critically selfreflect on their white privilege, I made a concerted effort to integrate discussions of race and tutoring throughout the tutoring internship course, from the first day to the final reading. There were a number of ways I reformed my pedagogy to address issues of white privilege throughout the course.

Connecting issues of language, power, and race to each aspect of the course and not isolating these issues in a single day devoted to language diversity.

I made a conscious effort to foreground race and white privilege in all of the topics of the course, from avoiding presenting the teaching of citation styles and American academic writing conventions as neutral and unraced to complicating the white tutor’s role in acting as a “cultural informant” for international students. In the role-playing scripts and videos I used for example tutoring sessions early in the course I added scenarios that brought issues of white privilege to the forefront.

And I made room for a substantial additional reading, Nancy Grimm’s Good Intentions, which highlights race, tutoring, and white privilege.

Integrating issues of language, power, and race throughout the class put less pressure on me to try to push white tutors to dramatically change their perspectives in a single class period. It also put less pressure on tutors of color, who were often feeling the

burden of making white tutors try to understand and acknowledge their experiences in just a forty-five minute discussion of a single reading. I found that I was able to be more artful and less blunt about issues of white privilege knowing that I could revisit in a later class a perspective or argument that had bogged down or become too heated for productive conversation.

Scaffolding discussions of white privilege from the first day of class.

Tutors who sign up for a tutoring education course are typically expecting to learn the “nuts and bolts” of tutoring, and are not expecting class topics that challenge their belief systems and may lead to emotional, often heated arguments. I revised my syllabus to ensure that I scaffolded the often-difficult discussions of white privilege and tutoring from the first day of class. I created a statement on my syllabus regarding expectations and ground rules for productive and respectful classroom discussion, and we discussed this statement on the first day. As one part of our conversation about tutoring international students, I added the video Writing Across Borders to my curriculum to get tutors to reflect on the biases we have toward American academic discourse conventions. This video—which is available on YouTube—includes interviews with international students about their struggles with American academic English and the contrasts between American writing conventions and the conventions of their first languages. I also integrated questions about language, race, power, and privilege into weekly journal reading responses. Finally, I chose tutor-authored readings from the course tutoring book that would introduce us to issues of white privilege from the perspective of tutors.

After I began scaffolding these discussions, I found that tutors were far more prepared to focus explicitly on white privilege in discussions of Barron and Grimm’s article and in the final reading for class, Grimm’s Good Intentions. Discussions were less superficial, and tutors of color felt more empowered to talk and less likely to skip class on any one day because of a concern about having to represent their race.

Integrating more diverse perspectives in class readings.

After completing this action research project I became conscious of the fact that all of my class readings—including readings on language and cultural diversity—were from white authors. I added the perspectives of authors of color by integrating readings from Villanueva, Canagarajah, and Smitherman and including the perspectives of students

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Exploring White Privilege in Tutor Education • 40 of color through the video Writing Across Borders. I also made a more conscious effort to assign readings from tutors of color from the course tutoring book.

Adding these readings helped to work against the white noise that had been drowning out alternative voices in classroom conversations, since the readings demanded that white tutors engage with the arguments and the lived experiences of authors of color. Prior to diversifying the voices of class readings I had put myself in the absurd position of trying to represent the perspectives of people of color as a white person— albeit a white person who was trying to be an ally. The tutors were especially persuaded by the perspectives of the students in Writing Across Borders. These were tutors who genuinely wanted to help their student writers, but were failing to fully investigate those students’ literacy histories or listen closely enough to their linguistic concerns and challenges. For many tutors, hearing the student voices in the video was like finally hearing about their own student writers’ struggles.

Forcing tutors to confront white privilege in direct ways.

As I learned more about anti-racism work and reflected on the results of my research, I became less afraid of frank and open discussions of white privilege in tutoring. I found that rather than trying to avoid difficult discussions, I became interested in forcing tutors to directly confront white privilege. I changed from being afraid of difficult conversations to being disappointed if conversations were so safe and superficial that the difficult work of exposing and confronting white privilege never materialized. One way I forced white tutors to confront white privilege was to change my course readings, as I mentioned earlier. Readings explicitly focused on white privilege forced tutors to begin to examine white privilege, as did the survey about prior educational experiences.

The survey is meant to force white tutors to reflect on the many invisible privileges they have taken advantage of in their academic careers, and even white tutors who are defensive about the concept of white privilege often acknowledge that they had not thought of these invisible privileges before.

I also asked tutors to complete and discuss the online test of implicit racial bias at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/. This test is focused on exposing deep-seated, systemic racism that has become so naturalized that even tutors who feel they are enlightened about racism and white privilege find that the activities they are asked to complete on the site reveal their unconscious biases. It upset me deeply that even after I had been conducting this research and trying to be especially cognizant of structural racism, when I took the test my scores

revealed racial bias. It typically bothers white tutors that they do poorly on tests of racial bias despite their best intentions, and discussions of this test of bias are often tense. But they are also productive in part because the test exposes implicit bias in ways that are measurable and are hard for white tutors to deny.

Making space for both intellectual and emotional discussions of white privilege.

The survey of educational experiences and the test of implicit bias are primarily intellectual experiences, but the intellectual discussions that the data informs can quickly become emotional, both for tutors of color whose experiences and perspectives are often denied or dismissed by white tutors, and for white tutors who feel they are being attacked. Barron and Grimm and Seibel Trainor emphasize that discussions about white privilege are not just intellectual but also emotional, and even with my revised curriculum sometimes classroom conversations about white privilege were heated and became personal. But as Diab et al. point out, “anti-racism work is messy and ongoing” (“Making Committments” par. 7). Denying the emotional components of discussions of white privilege leads to discussions that are less messy but also less productive. Ground rules and framing questions are important, but so is allowing space for expressing feelings and lived experiences and not just abstract concepts and positions.

As a result of the revisions to the tutoring education course curriculum, I found that tutors became more reflective about their biases and more critically aware of issues diverse student writers encounter in their initiation to academic discourse.

This increased awareness came out in ongoing classroom discussions, in tutors’ responses to readings, and in their tutoring book articles. To move beyond this anecdotal evidence of the positive effect of my revised curriculum, it would be useful in future research to compare the response of students to the old curriculum with the response to the new curriculum as it pertains to their awareness of issues of white privilege, to interview or survey students about the ways the course has affected their perspectives on white privilege, or to do a pre- and post-course assessment of their beliefs about white privilege.

Although I am no longer at the institution that served as the research site, I hope to undertake this type of research at my current institution.

Helping tutors become more critically self-aware of their biases is an important project, but it is just as critical to change institutional structures that support white privilege. Catherine Prendergast encourages composition teachers to focus their advocacy and

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Exploring White Privilege in Tutor Education • 41 scholarship beyond racism in the classroom to “racism as institutionalized, normal and pervasive” (36).

McIntyre and Seibel Trainer also call for a focus on larger contexts beyond the classroom, and Ellen Geller at al. encourage writing center directors to “broker considerations of race and racism across institutional boundaries” and to think of themselves not only as writing center leaders but as anti-racism leaders in their institutions (103). Perhaps the next phase in research on writing centers and white privilege is moving beyond the tutoring session, the writing center, and the tutor education course and considering ways that writing centers can facilitate institutional interventions that work against white privilege. At my former institution, this could have meant taking a number of steps: working through the Writing Across the Curriculum program to offer faculty development events explicitly focused on race and writing; speaking out to make sure that language pluralism is considered in our university writing rubrics and writing intensive course guidelines; forming long-term relationships with potential allies such as the Student Multicultural Center and the EOP program; using these alliances to recruit for a more diverse tutoring staff; inviting guest speakers whose scholarship focuses on issues of race and writing; and working to challenge institutional timed writing assessments that disproportionally place students of color into non-credit bearing “remedial” courses. Further research into what types of interventions are most effective for combating white privilege at the institutional level is needed.

Since conducting this research and composing this article, I have changed institutions, and I no longer direct a writing center. I now direct a first-year composition program, and teach first-year writing and graduate courses in composition theory and practice for new graduate teachers who will teach in the composition program at my new institution under my supervision. I have taken the lessons I have learned from my research project and my reading of the literature on white privilege to my new institution. For example, the FYC course readings bank that we collaboratively developed has literacy narratives from Sherman Alexie, Jay-Z, Amy Tan, and Gloria Anzaldúa, among other diverse voices. The academic articles about language and literacy that are also included in the course readings bank include Geneva Smitherman, Victor Villanueva, Suresh Cangarajah, and Jacqueline Jones Royster. The FYC learning outcomes we developed focus not just on asking students to practice academic writing conventions but to “explore the connections and conflicts between their home discourse communities and academic discourse communities.” Composing projects included

in the teacher’s guide encourage instructors to treat students’ literacy backgrounds and traditions as coequal to academic literacies through assignments like literacy narratives and autoethnographies, literacy inventories and self-studies, rhetorical analyses of multiple genres, and comparisons and analyses of school, home, and public discourse communities.

My deeper awareness of the responsibility WPAs have to do anti-racism work beyond just their own programs has also carried over to my approach at my new institution. For example, when I was asked to facilitate a speakers series at my new institution, a colleague of color let me know that she was concerned about the lack of diverse voices among the speakers that had been invited in the past. I worked with her to invite to campus Frank Waln, a Lakota Sioux hip hop artist and music producer, and I reached out to our Native American Student Academic Center and our Cross Cultural Center to collaborate on the event. I’ve also collaborated with WPAs in our University Writing Program to work against a structure of timed testing and remedial course work that disproportionately places students of color into non-credit bearing course work. I have also tried to be more conscious in my day-to-day administrative work with teachers and students: for example, by trying to be more supportive of teachers of color who face attitudes and biases from white students and peers that white teachers do not face.

It is understandable that the instinct of many WPAs is to avoid the uncomfortable, often emotional work required to confront white privilege. My earlier, superficial efforts to “cover” diversity in my tutoring education course only led me to further dread discussions of race and writing. However, my research has persuaded me that it is critical for writing center directors and WPAs in any type of program to confront white talk in a thoughtful, substantial, and theoretically informed way. White writing center directors who are failing to directly confront white privilege in their tutor education and their centers are unintentionally reinforcing structural racism, as I was before I undertook this project and changed my pedagogy. As McIntyre argues, white educators need to address “our own complicity around issues of educational racism” (148). It’s the responsibility WPAs to confront white privilege in their courses, their programs, and their institutions, rather than “turning a blind eye, safe in the silence” (Villanueva 18).

Works Cited Allen, Theodore W. The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control. Verso, 1994.

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Exploring White Privilege in Tutor Education • 42 Ashanti Young, Vershawn. Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity. Wayne State U.P., 2007.

Barnett, Timothy. “Reading ‘Whiteness’ in English Studies.” College English, vol. 63, no. 1, 2000, pp.

9-37.

Barron, Nancy and Nancy Maloney Grimm.

“Addressing Racial Diversity in a Writing Center: Stories and Lessons from Two Beginners.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 22, no. 2, 2002, pp. 5583.

Canagarajah, Suresh. Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. Oxford UP, 1999.

Condon, Frankie. “Beyond the Known: Writing Centers and the Work of Anti-Racism.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, 2007, pp. 1938.

Condon, Frankie and Vershawn Ashanti Young, editors. Performing Antiracist Pedagogy. University Press of Colorado, 2017.

Conference on College Composition and Communication. Students’ Right to their Own Language, 1974, http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Groups /CCCC/NewSRTOL.pdf. Accessed 2 May 2017.

Davila, Bethany. "Rewriting Race in the Writing Center." The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 31, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1-5.

Denny, Harry. Facing the Center. Utah State UP, 2010.

Diab, Rasha, et al. “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable.” Anti-Racist Activism: Teaching Rhetoric and Writing, special issue of Across the Disciplines, vol. 10, 2013, https://wac.colostate.edu/atd/race/diabetal.cfm.

Accessed 2 August 2015.

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

Gilyard, Keith. Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence. Wayne State UP, 1991.

Giroux, Henry. “Rewriting the Discourse of Racial Identity: Towards a Pedagogy and Politics of Whiteness.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 67, 1997, pp. 285-320.

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

Grimm, Nancy Maloney. Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times. Heinemman, 1999.

Kincheloe, Joe and Shirley R. Steinberg. “Addressing the Crisis of Whiteness.” White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America, edited by Joe Kincheloe et al., St. Martin’s, 1998, pp. 9-44.

Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Temple

UP, 2006.

McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” 1989, https://nationalseedproject.org/white-privilegeunpacking-the-invisible-knapsack. Accessed 2 August 2015.

McIntyre, Alice. Making Meaning of Whiteness: Exploring Racial Identity with White Teachers. New York: SUNY Press, 1997.

Ray, Ruth. “Composition from the Teacher-Research Point of View.” Methods and Methodology in Composition Research, edited by Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Sullivan, Southern Illinois UP, 1992, pp.

172-189.

Reddy, Maureen and Bonnie TuSmith, eds. Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics. Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Richardson, Elaine. African American Literacies.

Routledge, 2003.

Siebel Trainor, Jennifer. “‘My Ancestors Didn’t Own Slaves’: Understanding White Talk About Race.”

Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 40, no. 2, 2005, pp. 140-167.

Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin That Talk: Language, Culture, and Education in African America. Routledge, 2000.

Villanueva, Victor. “Blind: Talking about the New Racism.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 26, no. 1, 2006, pp. 3-19.

Wise, Tim. White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. Counterpoint Press, 2008.

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EMOTIONAL PERFORMANCE AND ANTIRACISM IN THE WRITING CENTER Douglas S. Kern University of Maryland, College Park dkern1980@gmail.com Abstract Why do conversations regarding students’ right to their own language and antiracism in the writing center still invite insults and agitation? After all, these struggles for students’ rights to selfdetermination and their own language in composition are far from new. The narratives present within this writing move beyond mere analysis of how and why established institutions attempt to control, and, rather, put Laura Micciche’s theories of emotion and performance to the test. When teaching tutor training, readings regarding students' right to their own language and race potentially cause conflict and can, at least at first, elicit strong emotional responses. This article explores the value of such early emotional reactions to these readings. Can the tutors’ emotional performances, both in action and voice, eventually help to bring attention to, or subvert the backlash and attacks antiracism rhetoric tends to invite? Within its pages, Micciche’s Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching suggests that we perform emotional appeals rather than simply make them. Through performance, she claims, we present emotion, not as something that resides in people to be shared or withheld, but as encounters between people. This article’s narrative “reenactments,” then, are set to reveal the fears and desires behind the resistance I’ve both witnessed and encountered all while promoting what I deem to be a necessity for emotional performance in antiracism and writing center work.

In the 1960s, political activist, poet, essayist, novelist, performer, and playwright Amiri Baraka fielded a question from a white woman at one of his performances regarding race relations and Black selfdetermination held at New York’s Village Gate in Greenwich: she asked, in earnest, “[C]ouldn’t any whites help?” Baraka replied, “You can help by dying.

You are a cancer. You can help the world’s people with your death” (Baraka, The Autobiography 285).

Baraka’s emotional reaction openly confronts the white system of power, oppression, and repression he attacks. To consider Baraka’s words or performances as potential challenges to institutional racism today seems appropriately responsive, as this system of power is far from dead. Not so long ago, I, a white male, administered a writing center in a major state institution responsible for teaching an undergraduate population in which over fifty percent of the students are white—an institution like many in America, whereby no matter how heavy the denial, racism is most certainly present and pervasive. Now, I’m not sure there is a “right” way to write this, or how to proceed exactly. But you wanna know what I think? I think everyone I have encountered in academia knows—on some level—that the academy privileges a white, male hegemony. I discovered, though, that as

students and colleagues read and respond to the words and performances of activists like Baraka, they find it increasingly difficult to avoid confronting these notions of white privilege and supremacy, especially as they relate to standards of English communication.

Sure, to confront race and racism in our classrooms and institutions remains dangerous. And, as white instructors, I think it’s important to understand that to do so means we’re going to misstep. To do so in the name of antiracism, though, is always a better option than doing nothing at all. As Asao Inoue writes in his Foreword to Frankie Condon and Vershawn Young’s Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication, “When it comes to race, racism, and antiracist work, it is important that everyone feels safe, but equally important that many also feel uncomfortable. It’s only through discomfort, perhaps pain and suffering, that we grow, develop, and change for the better” (xviii). Similarly, in their edited collection, Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan argue for a renewed, committed engagement toward antiracist work in writing centers.

Victor Villanueva, as another example, has long maintained that where some see racism, others see none (“Blind: Talking About the New Racism” 3-19).

Building upon these words and works, this essay promotes what I deem to be a necessity for emotional performance in antiracism and writing center work.

Of course, since its publication in 1971 and revisions in 1993 and 2010, The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control has been used to analyze how and why established institutions respond to—and attempt to control—social protest: “Agitation is persistent, longterm advocacy for social change, where resistance to the change is also persistent and long term” (Bowers, et al. 3). My exploration, however, moves beyond mere analysis to present a narrative of tutor training that puts Laura Micciche’s theories of emotion and performance to the test. When training tutors—as many of the essays in Greenfield’s and Rowan’s Writing Centers and the New Racism recommend—I have moved readings regarding students’ right to their own language and race to the top of my schedule in order to promote civil discourse throughout the semester.

While I stand by my decision, this shift could cause its own conflicts and can, at least at first, elicit strong

Emotional Performance and Antiracism in the Writing Center • 44 emotional responses and create a divide among the tutors. What I’m interested in exploring here is the value of such early emotional reactions to these readings and discussions. Can the tutors’ emotional performances, both in action and voice, eventually help to bring attention to, or subvert, the backlash and attacks antiracism rhetoric tends to invite?

The words that follow, then, are my thoughts/feelings: the beginnings of an antiracist narrative. And, while some might accuse me of not thinking carefully while I write, I know I must tell these stories to explore, enact, and learn. In I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric, Frankie Condon charges: [T]hose of us who are white may need to admit that we have not yet begun, really, to craft epistemological and rhetorical practices or a performative antiracist narrative tradition that might enable us to join meaningfully and productively with multiracial, antiracist coalitions in doing the work of antiracism. If this is so, and if knowing how to begin is not self-evident (and it isn’t), then those of us in academia need to begin admitting that we don’t know and lean into the possibility of learning. But antiracist epistemology and rhetoric are neither learned nor created under conditions of passivity or inaction. In order to learn—as this kind of learning requires experimentation—we will need to risk speaking aloud about what we are learning even before we know very much of anything with certainty. (33) So, I think back to the not so distant past, to scratch through the hard-crusted scabs of my own privileged, white memory. This article’s narrative “reenactments,” then, echo the scholarship mentioned above and set out to reveal the fears and desires behind the resistance I’ve both witnessed and encountered when promoting antiracism within writing centers. ***!

I might be impressed by the special effects if I weren’t horrified by the reality. I’m watching a split screen, as if Gordon Willis (the cinematic “Prince of Darkness”) has stepped in as our cinematographer to recycle a film technique used while shooting his famous dual therapy scenes from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977)—scenes which, on the surface, appear to employ a traditional split screen method, but which actually consist of a two-room set divided by a single wall. One room. Divided. One Wall. In her book, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Sarah Ahmed writes, “The official desire to

institutionalize diversity does not mean the institution is opened up; indeed, the wall might become all the more apparent, all the more a sign of immobility, the more the institution presents itself as being opened up” (26). So, the scene is set.

The mise en scène: as a writing center administrator following the scholarship of Condon, Young, and Ahmed, I consider it imperative that, in listening to and working with students, tutors and teachers implement a pedagogy in which linguistic diversity is valued as highly as academic achievement. In order to further my commitment to this cause, I apply for and receive grants to invite an antiracism activist and esteemed scholar to our campus. After leading a series of discussions and talks regarding antiracism and language plurality as a goal in writing center practice, my invited guest faces a barrage of insulting microagressions from the audience. The wall of division is conspicuous. I watch in terror as senior faculty and staff degrade diverse forms of communication. One commenter proceeds to compare varied linguistic practices to a racially coded article of clothing: “Yes, but, encouraging writers to blend their non-standards and grammars with Standardized Edited American English (SEAE) is like telling a student to wear a hoodie to an interview.”

Fact: language is nothing like clothing. Note: there’s palpable danger in describing language through fallacious metaphor. Opinion: your analogies don’t work. As my rage rises, I want to interrupt and expose this misguided comment’s deceptive, faulty comparison. However, as the shallow displays of knowledge surrounding linguistic, racial, and cultural acceptance continue, the wall closes in around me. I don’t act. As the events come to a close, though I have not said a word, and perhaps as a result of my silence, several audience members approach me to offer thanks and appreciation. I receive handshakes and smiles, pats on the back, and praise for “my accomplishment,” while the vast majority of my adoring fans outright ignore our speaker and guest. I know why: our distinguished visitor isn’t white.

Ahmed recounts, “People of color are welcomed on condition they return that hospitality by integrating into a common organizational culture. . . . When our appointments and promotions are taken up as signs of organizational commitment to equality and diversity, we are in trouble. Any success is read as a sign of an overcoming of institutional whiteness” (43). Yet this should be the goal of all of our centers: to overcome our institutions’ racialized standards and expectations.

In her essay, “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform a System of Advantage Based on Race,” Nancy M. Grimm encourages readers “to define

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Emotional Performance and Antiracism in the Writing Center • 45 literacy much more broadly, to incorporate a multiliteracies approach, one that incorporates all the ways that literacy (writing, reading, speaking, listening) is used to learn and to make meaning and one that recognizes multiple varieties of English and multiple literacies rather than a singular standard of English” (92). These struggles for students’ rights to selfdetermination and their own Englishes in composition are far from new (see, for example, the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” 1974); still, conversations regarding students’ rights and antiracism in writing centers continue to invite insults and agitation. In fact, no matter where I go to promote antiracism within writing centers and our institutions, I often witness aggressions and emotional backlash. ***!

On day one of tutor training, the tutors and I meet to discuss code-meshing (Young). Any undergraduates who want to become tutors in our institution’s writing center must apply to and complete this weekly class while also tutoring six hours each week. In this particular semester-long mandatory training course consisting of approximately twenty incoming tutor-interns, I’ve assigned “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” and Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English” before we meet. My goal is to challenge many of our incoming tutors preconceived notions regarding communication by facilitating a discussion of each reading. We debate and discuss the value of Young’s sociolinguistic term code-meshing, referring to the blending of so-called undervalued Englishes with socalled “Standard” English in both written and oral communication (Young 63). I post an example I know the tutors will recognize:

Fig. 1. Google Chrome’s “Aw Snap” image (Brinkmann).

The tutors begin to read how Google—an American multinational corporation—chooses to “tell” its users that a webpage has crashed. One tutor in training notices that, assuming users reading and writing in English scan a typical page left to right and top to bottom, the first code Google displays is strictly visual: a dot matrix style image of a folder with a sad face indicating something’s not quite right. Moving down the page, another tutor explains that Google employs a written message as its second code—“Aw, Snap!”— that would certainly be categorized as “non-standard” writing by most in the academy. As a third code, Google’s used what many tutors identify as more formal writing: “Something went wrong while displaying this webpage.” I ask the new tutors why they think Google chose to blend or mix codes as a way of communicating their message. Some begin to discuss what Young promotes: we all code-mesh, and blend our own unique forms of communication, even in formal writing. Nevertheless, on this particular day, and with this particular cohort, with the vast majority of the class self-identifying as “white,” the conversation begins to spark emotional response. A student raises her hand and vehemently declares that she doesn’t like the thought of using “howeva” in writing. This is fine, of course, and, to my mind, proves Young’s point—it’s important that this student recognize her own standards, and continue to negotiate her own style, voice, and systematic grammatical nuances. I ask if this was something she’d ever use in speech. “No,” she replies, so I proceed to ask others if they use “howeva” in speech. Of course, some said yes, so I explain that just because some writers wouldn’t use certain linguistic variations within their writing, this doesn’t mean others can’t. Some of the tutors begin to promote a systemic “yes, but” argument. I ask, “Didn’t Young successfully employ ‘howeva’ in his published article?” Some tutors clamor, “Yes, but ‘you’d’ never write that in a formal paper.”

These “yes, but” arguments must be debunked within our centers and institutions. I repeat myself: “No, no; you might not write ‘howeva’ in a formal paper. That doesn’t mean someone else wouldn’t. Indeed, Dr. Young did.” For the majority that oppose, nothing’s working. I try a new tactic, and end up sharing an emotional personal anecdote of my own: my whole family was born in New England, and many of my immediate family still possess the ability to employ their New England accents. I suggest, with much affect, that because of this fact, if ever I were to write the word “chowda,” I’d spell it C-H-O-W-D-A. Still, nothing’s working. I feel the wall of division.

I’m certain a tutor of color feels it too, for as she reveals her own propensity to code-mesh, several

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Emotional Performance and Antiracism in the Writing Center • 46 white tutors continue to question the concept’s legitimacy within academia. Once again, I refer to Young’s article, and ask the tutors to consider whether they should question code-meshing’s acceptability within the academy; more poignantly, should the question be, “who is able to mesh without rebuke?”

The lone tutor then asks her classmates why they’ve seemed to turn so strongly against code-meshing. She wants to know how her peers would respond to her own code-meshed writing. Suddenly, a white tutor responds, “Well, you know the rules; they don’t.” They.

Don’t. The words just hang in the classroom: two simple words that might as well be tacked to the wall on some educational word chart—the kind you might find in an elementary school classroom. Despite my efforts, these two words have now claimed their place, like so many other words prevalent within first-year writing and university handbooks. In this moment, the figurative chart from which they swing might be misleadingly titled—as so many pedagogical practices regarding language often are—“Words Rule/Word Rules.” The nuanced rhetorical reversal of this unseen—but nevertheless implied—title serves as a gentle guiding reminder of what shall remain right and wrong for the privileged among us: there’s power in language as long as we adhere to the language of power. At the same time, these two words enact their violence by propagating and proliferating the discriminatory language used to subjugate Black lives. It’s all too clear whose “words” and “rules” are ruling here. They—apparently—aren’t welcome, and don’t have a say. I want to be fair, but this use of they isn’t a misstep, or simple thoughtlessness. This is the academy—an institution in which people of color “are treated as guests, temporary residents in someone else’s home” (Ahmed 43). I wait for a response.

Calmly, but with affect, the tutor of color places both of her hands on the table, slowly propels herself out of her seat, and proceeds to march out of the classroom.

Given the chance, we could hear a pin drop. The whole class was affected. Such an act of performative emotion is defined at length in Micciche’s book, Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching. Within its pages, Micciche suggests that we perform emotional appeals rather than simply make them. Through performance, she claims, we present emotion, not as something that resides in people to be shared or withheld, but as “encounters between people, so that emotion takes form between bodies rather than residing in them” (13).

The tutor’s described linguistic choices were marginalized and disregarded, and her performative act of walking out mirrored a similar sense of disregard for her classmate’s (unintentional?) racism.

The remaining tutors had no choice but to respond and work through what had happened.

So, that’s exactly what they did. Tutors began to ponder the emotional performances they had just witnessed and think through the rhetorical power of emotional affect. The tutors debated the causes of what had happened and came to the collective conclusion that in each case the emotional response was caused by something specific. In the case of the tutor’s misguided choice of words, it was a selfproclaimed lack of empathy, awareness, and understanding. And, seeing as how, shortly after leaving, the tutor of color returned to class, we were able to listen as to how those misguided words stirred a powerful emotional response. What started off as a seemingly dangerous and uncomfortable situation shifted to an engaged discussion. As a group, we continued to think through and weigh in on each other’s unique forms of communication. Slowly but surely, the tutors began to see that their peers, often holding different or unique perspectives surrounding academia’s marginalization of “non-standard” dialects of American English, are just as emotionally charged.

This, in turn, made it easier for the tutors to understand how emotionally involved and attached we all are with our own unique and diverse forms of communication. As the weeks passed, many now felt more inclined to experiment with narrative modes, languages, and styles to find their voices. And, after the incident described above, I was able to meet with the tutor of color, exchange questions, and discuss the situation outside of the classroom. Above all else, though, I simply listened and learned. The tutor’s ability to reflect upon this emotional response revealed a maturity and complexity of thought I rarely witness within the academy. She knew her own emotional performance would spark conversation and ultimately help to educate the class. I also met with other tutors from the training course and listened. The tutor’s solo performative act of walking out spurred an exigency, and honestly helped our training cohort form a deeper discourse community as the tutors reflected upon their own ideas and emotions. The tutors then brought those contemplations back into the course and began to analyze how they might help enhance their tutoring sessions. By allowing these young tutors and writers to explore their own emotions regarding such topics early and often within my tutor training classrooms, I was able to encourage their curiosity. If, I’ve found, in addition to discussing “Standard American English,” tutors are equipped with readings and theories of marginalization as well, we work as a class towards fostering a sense of language acceptance in a university

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Emotional Performance and Antiracism in the Writing Center • 47 setting—possibly, for some writers, for the first time.

One may well ask, though: aren’t these emotional responses a liability in the classroom? Indeed, Micciche asks, “If emotion is ... produced during collisions of contact, then how do we make collisions the site of instruction?” (50). In his book Theatre & Race, Harvey Young notes, “To talk about race feels dangerous. There is the possibility of slippage, a verbal gaffe, or, perhaps worse, a sincere and honest opinion that does not jibe with contemporary groupthink” (3).

Both tutors tapped into such danger throughout their emotional exchange, though I'd like to argue that this exchange was unavoidable and necessary for learning to occur. This isn’t a new idea: Susan Jarratt has criticized the notion that classrooms are best when kept conflict-free. In “Feminism and Composition: The Case for Conflict,” she claims that students think more critically when confronted with opposition. And, Micciche contends, “Even as we tend to think of emotion as emanating from a ‘first place,’ a kind of first response, there is a history, a social context, and a set of experiences that come to constitute that ‘first place’” (67). All of our tutors come to our centers and unique forms of training with transferable ideas and experiences. Despite institutional demographics, all tutors bring cultural and communal histories, which, if explored, have the potential to unlock and leverage the unique discourses and knowledge all writers bring to our centers. It’s a concept tutors, in turn, bring to (and begin to leverage within) their sessions, as they learn to value the linguistic variations and unique writing strategies diverse student writers use and possess. The liability, then, lies in not allowing our students the time to perform such emotions in order to explore their assumptions. As Ahmed accounts, “Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (29). By bringing such discussions to the fore, our tutors gain the space and time to learn how to "use strong feelings as a resource for doing analysis" (Micciche 67). By beginning tutor training classes or sessions with readings and discussions regarding students’ right to language, and continuing the conversation throughout such training, tutors learn to recognize an affective dimension to their writing center work. Tutoring sessions and writing consultations are often emotional encounters. Just as emotions can lead to anxiety and vulnerability, they also have the power to yield healing and acceptance—something all tutors should strive to understand as they set out to work with a diverse population of writers in sessions capable of eliciting strong emotional reactions.

*** So, can tutors’ emotional performances, both in action and voice, eventually help to bring attention to, or subvert the backlash and attacks antiracism rhetoric tends to invite? I now know they can. Weeks after our first meeting, the tutors in training were assigned to read Kristi McDuffie's “Helping Students Negotiate Dialects in the Writing Center.” McDuffie asserts that her proposed approach of discussing standards and grammars with writers of “non-standard” dialects establishes a link between students’ writing and their speech. She proposes that tutors tell such writers, “There are certain grammatical forms evident in your papers that you may use when you talk to your family and friends; can I show you what forms are required for an audience of your teacher and classmates?” (15).

Despite her “enthusiasm and good intentions,” ALL of the tutors in my training class reached back to Young’s article, and that very first (emotional) discussion, to help expose McDuffie’s proposal as a racially charged contradiction, no different from “separate but equal.” Each and every tutor had considered the power and potential of emotion when reacting to and dealing with others. During our inclass discussion, the tutors in training decided that emphasizing fluency as a full and complete understanding of a language in constant flux can create confusion and frustration for writers. By failing to recognize marginalized forms of composition as legitimate rhetorical choice within their sessions, my tutors in training felt they’d limit the opportunity to provoke new questions regarding the field of writing.

The point here isn’t to simply challenge institutional learning outcomes regarding “Standard Written English.” My tutors learned that within their home institution, in both the Academic and Professional Writing Programs, “Standard Written English” is highlighted as a major learning outcome for all students. Within my institution, one learning outcome for Academic Writing states that students will “Use Standard Written English and edit and revise [their] own writing for appropriateness.” A major learning outcome for Professional Writing states that students will “Demonstrate competence in Standard Written English, including grammar, sentence and paragraph structure, coherence, and document design” (“General Education and Student Writing”). My tutors also learned that, within the academy, this remains the norm, of course. The problem lies in how our centers, and the varied instructors and students within our institutions, define “Standard Written English.” In his article review, “Authority and American Usage,” the late David Foster Wallace gives us an idea of how some instructors of English (still) define the so-called

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Emotional Performance and Antiracism in the Writing Center • 48 “Standard” to and for their students. Here’s Foster Wallace addressing a Black student in his classroom: [W]hen you’re in a college English class you’re basically studying a foreign dialect. This dialect is called Standard Written English . . . it’s not that you’re a bad writer, it’s that you haven’t learned the special rules of the dialect they want you to write in. Maybe that’s not such good news . . . That they won’t let you write in [Standard Black English] . . . I’m not going to let you write in SBE either . . . In my English class, you will have to master and write in Standard Written English, which we might just as well call ‘Standard White English’ because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people . . . I’m respecting you enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth. (108-109) If this counts as respect, it’s no wonder Baraka called for the death of this “white” thing. Despite acknowledging the power of language diversity and plurality early in his review, Foster Wallace here egregiously misrepresents the teaching of college composition as a necessary promotion of and adherence to a mythical “white standard.” In fact, his assumptions which equate any standard with whiteness are far from true, and students and teachers should know better. In “If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” James Baldwin writes, “I do not know what white Americans would sound like if there had never been any black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they sound” (650). Indeed, within our centers, don’t we tutor or consult with assignments written in more than one standard? In a digital age, in fact, students are often engaging with writings that rhetorically rely on socalled “non-standards” to make their point (once again, consider the Google image above). Throughout different disciplines and curriculums, student writers are certainly taught more than one structure. Given the nature of our varied courses and student populations, then, shouldn’t we train our tutors in multiliteracies, empowering them to tutor/consult with/discuss/learn from different grammars/spelling variations, and unique and helpful linguistic syntaxes and forms of punctuation?

It’s a question I continue to explore as I strive to come to terms with my own work regarding antiracism in writing centers and the institution. In terms of my earlier story regarding my invited guest, I’m afraid I got it wrong; my miscalculation and reluctance to act were dead wrong. I feel an emotional response from an active bystander would have worked to help

combat the insulting microagressions and bias. Too often, so-called “allies” of antiracism work remain inactive, and thereby unproductive. In their introduction to Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication, Condon and Young admit: Expressions of surprise and shock each time some new example of racism in the academy come to light grow wearisome … Given not only the frequency, but the long history of American racism, we wonder why folks continue to be surprised by the exposure of racism at work among us. We wonder why each new exposure of the ubiquity of everyday forms of racism is attended by claims of innocence and ignorance (“I had no idea!”).

The fact of these ongoing expressions of shock, we think, is less evidence of genuine ignorance than of the extent to which many academics labor to preserve their insulation from those quite regular conditions that compose the everyday lives of students, faculty, administrators and support staff of color on and off campus. (5) It is this sense of preservation that all writing centers must set out to dismantle. Rather than tutors who potentially have “no idea,” tutors ready to “fix” writers, or tutors who feel it is their duty to “give permission” for writers to use their own standards and grammars, we need tutors who understand emotions as well as they do rhetorical choice. As for me, as Rasha Diab, Thomas Ferrel, Beth Godbee, and Neil Simpkins explain in their chapter, “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable,” it’s time I move beyond narrative and into action. The next time I encounter bias, maybe I’ll follow in the footsteps of a courageous tutor, and perform my silence, arms crossed to illicit discomfort, with a simple, but questioning, cold white stare.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “Happy Objects.” The Affect Theory Reader. Duke UP, 2010, pp. 29-51.

---. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke UP, 2012.

Allen, Woody, et al. Annie Hall. Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 1998.

Baldwin, James. “If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985. St. Martin’s P, 1985, pp. 649-652.

Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. 1984.

Lawrence Hill Edition. Lawrence Hill Books, 1997.

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Emotional Performance and Antiracism in the Writing Center • 49 Bowers, John Waite, et al. The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control. 3rd ed., Waveland P, 2010.

Brinkmann, Martin. “How to Fix Google Chrome’s Aw, Snap! Error Message When Loading Websites.” Ghacks.net, 24 July 2014, www.ghacks.net/2013/05/23/how-to-fix-googlechromes-aw-snap-errormessage-whenloadingwebsites/. Accessed 19 Oct. 2016.

Condon, Frankie. I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric. Utah State UP, 2012.

Condon, Frankie and Vershawn Ashanti Young, editors. Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication. UP of Colorado, 2016.

Conference on College Composition and Communication. “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 25, no. 3, 1974, pp. 1-18.

Diab, Rasha, et al. “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable.” Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication, edited by Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young.

UP of Colorado, 2016, pp. 19-39.

“General Education and Student Writing: What Students Learn in Academic Writing and Professional Writing.” GeneralEducation@UMD. University of Maryland, www.gened.umd.edu/forfaculty/faculty-gened-writing.html. Accessed 26 March 2019.

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

Grimm, Nancy M. “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform a System of Advantage Based on Race.” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, Utah State UP, 2011, pp. 75-100.

Inoue, Asao B. “Forward: On Antiracist Agendas.”

Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric,Writing, and Communication, edited by Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young, UP of Colorado, 2016, pp. xi-xx.

Jarratt, Susan C. “Feminism and Composition: The Case for Conflict.” Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age, edited

by Patricia Harkin and John Schlib, MLA, 1991, pp. 105-123.

McDuffie, Kristi. “Helping Students Negotiate Dialects in the Writing Center.” The Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 34, no. 9/10, 2010, pp. 14-15.

Micciche, Laura R. Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching. Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2007.

Villanueva, Victor. “Blind: Talking About the New Racism.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 26, no. 1, 2006, pp. 3-19.

Young, Harvey. Theatre & Race. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, Utah State UP, 2011, pp. 61-74.

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PR AXIS

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a writing center journal

16.2 SPECIAL SECTION: MINORITY SERVING INSTITUTIONS Edited by Karen Keaton Jackson and Mick Howard

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16 No 2 (2019)

FROM THE EDITORS MSIS MATTER: RECOGNIZING WRITING CENTER WORK AT MINORITY SERVING INSTITUTIONS Karen Keaton Jackson North Carolina Central University kkjackson@nccu.edu When we were offered the opportunity to serve as editors of a special section of Praxis, we were elated.

We think (though we’d have to verify) that this would be the first time post-civil rights era (or perhaps ever) that two HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) faculty served as editors of a mainstream journal in our field, even more specifically one with a focus on HBCUs and other MSIs (Minority Serving Institutions). For years, we have read articles and attended conferences where colleagues from various institutions explored best pedagogies and practices for working with students of color in our composition classrooms and our writing centers. However, the common denominator with many of those colleagues is that they taught at institutions with limited student populations of color. Thus, their ideas either were solely theoretical in nature or, if some practical application occurred, it often was for a short and finite time period or limited in scope.

Many of us at MSIs realized that more voices needed to be included in the discourse, particularly from those of us who work on a daily basis with predominant populations of racially/ethnically diverse students. We think the most fundamental question so many of us have is this: Why are the voices who teach and tutor hundreds, even thousands, of students of color each year not engaged in and, quite frankly, leading these conversations?

The answer to that seemingly simple question actually is quite complicated. If we look back to Keith Gilyard’s 1999 College Composition and Communication article “African American Contributions to Composition Studies,” we see that African American colleagues at HBCUs laid the groundwork for STROL (“Students’ Right to Their Own Language”) and other initiatives for students of color prior to the Civil War (Gilyard; see also Conference); however, once campuses became more integrated and new job opportunities arose, many of those scholars moved on to predominantly white institutions (PWIs). Another very tangible barrier is the atmosphere of many campuses. For example, HBCUs and Tribal Colleges (TCUs) are primarily teaching institutions, so teaching

Mick Howard Langston University mhoward@langston.edu loads are heavy (4/4 or 5/5 teaching loads, with many faculty members teaching multiple overloads), committee work is overwhelming, funding for conferences can be difficult to attain, and graduate assistants who help with research efforts are merely an urban legend; many of us were teaching and research assistants in our own graduate programs, yet we rarely see them in real life on our own campuses.

Thus, the works being published here represent true commitment. But, we feel it is important for us to tell our own stories because those at MSIs can accurately reflect the contexts of our institutions.

When others attempt to tell our stories, it’s almost as if the essence, or the soul, of the piece can be missing.

Characteristics of MSIs that can be seen as odd or peculiar to those outside of our settings are very much the norm for us. At many HBCU writing centers, for example, some of our fundamental daily practices are in direct contrast to what mainstream scholarship suggests. And we take pride in that, for to us, context is everything.

It also is important to note that the works published here merely scratch the surface of life at MSIs, for we are not homogeneous institutions. For example, of all of the various types of MSIs, only HBCUs and TCUs were founded specifically for the education of a particular racial/ethnic group—HBCUs for African Americans and TCUs for Native Americans/American Indians. HCBUs were founded after the Civil War when slaves were free, yet still unable to attend PWIs (“Historically Black Colleges & Universities”). The first Tribal College was founded in 1968 on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona (“Tribal Colleges”). Thus, the curriculum, co-curricular and extra-curricular activities all cater to the culture of their student populations. They exhibit what Gloria LadsonBillings would call a “culturally relevant curriculum,” for the students’ identities are not at the periphery of the curriculum, but rather fully and consistently integrated. Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) and other MSIs, in contrast, have their governmental designation based on student enrollment from year to year. The required enrollment of that particular cultural

Special Section Introduction: MSIs Matter • 52 group varies a bit depending upon institution type.

HSIs, for example, only need to have a student population that is 25% Hispanic, while HBCUs and TCUs have the majority of their populations composed of a particular ethnic group. Most HBCUs and TCUs have percentages of 70% or higher of their ethnic group (“Minority Serving Institutions Program”). And if we go even further, there are many distinctions even among HBCUs—public vs. private, religious vs. nonreligious, land grant vs. non-land grant, small- vs. midsized, etcetera.

In short, MSIs cannot be and should not be lumped together as synonymous institutions, for we are hardly that. But, this publication is one step forward in recognizing that our institutions do bring some unique and often silenced perspectives about teaching and tutoring students of color that could benefit our colleagues in any writing center. If anything, it is our hope that this special issue will encourage even more MSI colleagues to share their stories and more PWI colleagues to listen to and value them.

“Historically Black Colleges & Universities and Higher Education Desegregation.” U.S. Department of Education. Mar. 1991. www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/hq9511.html.

Accessed 10 Apr. 2019.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria. The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children. Jossey-Bass, 1994.

“Minority Service Institutions Program.” U.S. Department of the Interior: Office of Civil Rights. www.doi.gov/pmb/eeo/doi-minority-servinginstitutions-program. Accessed 11 Apr. 2019.

“Tribal Colleges: Educating, Engaging, Innovating, Sustaining and Honoring.” American Indian Higher Education Consortium. www.aihec.org/who-weare/index.htm. Accessed 10 Apr. 2019.

Acknowledgments We must take a moment to thank our reviewers who spent time reading and offering feedback to our authors: Dr. Michele Eodice Oklahoma University Dr. Genie Nicole Giaimo The Ohio State University Dr. Sarah Gray Missouri Valley College Dr. Hope Jackson North Carolina A&T State University Dr. Robert Randolph North Carolina A&T State University Works Cited Conference on College Composition & Communication.

Students’ Right to Their Own Language, special issue of College Composition and Communication, vol. 25, 1974, pp.

1-32.

Gilyard, Keith. “African American Contributions to Composition Studies.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 50, no. 4, 1999, pp. 626-644.

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WRITING AS A PRACTICE OF FREEDOM: HBCU WRITING CENTERS AS SITES OF LIBERATORY PRACTICE Wonderful Faison Langston University dr._wonderful.faison@langston.edu Most of my time as a graduate student I spent critiquing the welcoming space of the predominately white writing center and asking: whom is this space supposed to welcome and whom is it intended to leave unwelcome? I wondered how a space that was supposed to be visually welcoming could continue to reconstitute certain raced and classed hierarchies with its performance of domestic life and its presupposed upper middle-class domestic comforts (Singh-Corcoran & Emika). Once I graduated, and because of the racial trauma I faced during my graduate studies at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI), I looked for a place and space that felt more familiar: a Historically Black College or University (HBCU), and I found the HBCU in which I wanted to work and the students whom I desired to teach.

As I transitioned into my new position as Assistant Professor of English, I began to notice the differences both subtle and not so subtle of how our Writing Center functions and serves students. Gone were the sofas, laptops, coffee pots, and plants, “writing center spaces” that tended “to be marked with particular objects to achieve a certain mood, serve specific purposes, or send a particular message to those who use the space” (Grutsch-McKinney 7). However, in this writing center, the well-lit rooms filled with students, faculty, and tutors who bustled around the writing center—regardless if they needed to be there working on a paper, running the front desk, or tutoring students—were simply not there. Gone were the painted walls, the photographs, the stuffed animals welcoming each person at the door. Gone were the resources that made those images even possible.

Instead, what I saw and encountered was a time machine carrying me back to days when writing centers were writing labs located in poorly lit basements that were lined with desktops in rows of two. This center was often a place where most students sought assistance only because of teacher encouragement or by mandated course requirement. However, lack of pretty trappings aside, our writing center also gave way to a more emotional, pathos-driven writing center where students who came to the writing center—at times feeling as if they were being punished for their “bad grammar,” which was, by and large, their vast

linguistic diversity—where students were able to work with more tutors with black and brown faces. These were faces often resembling their own. As Anna J. Egalite and Brian Kasida explain, “Minority students might benefit from seeing adults with a similar racial/ethnic background in a position of authority.

Such representation could increase the cultural value students place on academic success and perhaps reduce the stigma of ‘acting white’” (Egalite and Kasisa).

This writing center was a space where their writing became secondary to what was occurring in their everyday lives that might cause writer’s block. This writing center allowed tutors to discuss with students how their lives may positively or negatively affect their writing. Accordingly, recent studies show that many university students have significant worries about paying off school loans (Grabmeier) and dealing with their various mental health issues. Amu Novotney notes that “about one-third of U.S. college students had difficulty functioning in the last 12 months due to depression, and almost half said they felt overwhelming anxiety in the last year” (Novotney).

However, the students we encountered spoke about not only these problems, but also their involvement in gangs, early mother- or fatherhood, STDs (e.g., HIV), as well as their extreme poverty. While these concerns are not unique to people of color, they are more prevalent in economically and racially disenfranchised students—students who may not have the resources to hide their societal woes and the concerns they have (perceived or not) about their impoverished writing and/or oratory skills.

To be frank: many of the students we worked with were dealing with and spoke openly of these struggles and asked how they might be able to correlate the ways writing could help them—if it could—find a way out of their individual and social ghettoization. In other words, they asked how writing could free them, when writing and learning to write had done nothing but oppress them. Thus, our tutors had to find connections with former gang members’ literacy “issues” by walking them through assignment sheets, helping them dissect and then understand what assignments were asking them to accomplish, with how that assignment (or broadly a general education writing

Writing as a Practice of Freedom • 54 course) could give them an opportunity—a way out of the circumstances they knew so well—circumstances and situations that, while suspect, had somehow provided for them and landed them here in our institution and in our writing center space. Tutors here had to find ways to assist students in finding relatability and relevance in each assignment put before them. It was imperative and at times crucial to their very lives, lest they go back to what was before.

Essentially, and keeping in line with writing center best practices, our writing center does not focus on the product (the essay to be written). It focuses on those who must write the essay; those who do not, have never, and will never consider themselves writers; those who know that whether they like, love, or hate writing is irrelevant to the very real fact that they will have to write. And as I often tell my own students, if you have to write, regardless if it’s your jam, then you might as well do it well.

The tutors in this writing center deal with more than students struggling with an assignment. They deal with young students struggling to take care of their children as single moms and dads at eighteen years old.

They assist students who do not understand writing about writing because they need to navigate a court system that has writing that they 1) can barely understand [as is intended] and 2) can barely get a sense of how that writing impacts their very ability to exist as a free person [as is intended]. They aid students who want to be lawyers because they “can talk” and understand that any successful lawyer must read, analyze, and write before they dare speak sideways out they mouths to a judge and jury. They guide students who want to work in social services because not that long ago, they were taken from their mothers and fathers.

The tutors at this writing center hear these stories, understand these stories, and in some ways have lived these stories. They do not see them as writers, but as people who must use writing to effectively navigate that court system so they can get child support, apply for a loan, formally ask for rent extensions, understand and fill out Work-Study forms, so they can financially support their children. These tutors assist these students in showing them not only how writing assists them in navigating a course, but in navigating life. In our writing center we attempt to foster it as a place of love, of care, of genuine concern for the well-being of these students both intellectually (with regard to their academics) and socially (with regard to their daily lives).

This writing center need not be “pretty.” It need not have the trivial trappings to which so many in the PWI have grown accustomed. This writing center has and houses more: the ability to show people who use

writing in their daily lives why writing is about more than grades, why writing is about more than words on a page, how writing has been used to free them as much as chain them, and how--through writing—they can find a way to make a better life for themselves and their family. The tutoring that happens here shows them how writing can loosen the chains of their lives if only they commit, do the work, and work at seeing the ways writing impacts them and they impact the writing around them. These tutors help them loosen their chains, not because students are writing an assignment, but because students who use writing need it to be more than for a grade: these students need their writing to be a practice that assists them in their everyday lives as they navigate their jobs, social services, the legal system, etcetera. Essentially, they need writing to be a practice of freedom. And here our tutors are showing them the way.

Works Cited Egalite, Anna J., and Brian Kisida. “The Many Ways Teacher Diversity Might Benefit Students.”

Brookings, 19 August 2016, www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-centerchalkboard/2016/08/19/the-many-ways-teacherdiversity-may-benefit-students/.

Grabmeier, Jeff. “70 Percent of College Students Stressed out about Finances.”Ohio State University, 30 June 2015, news.osu.edu/70-percent-of-collegestudents-stressed-about-finances/.

Grutsch-McKinney, Jackie. “Leaving Home Sweet Home: Towards Critical Readings of Writing Center Spaces.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 25, no. 2, 2005, pp. 6-20, www.jstor.org/stable/43442220.

Novotney, Amy. “Students under pressure.” Monitor on Psychology, vol. 45, no. 8, September 2014, www.apa.org/monitor/2014/09/coverpressure.aspx.

Singh-Corcoran, Natalie, and Amin Emika. “Inhabiting the Writing Center: A Treatment of Physical Space: A Review in Five Texts.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, vol. 16, no. 3, 2012, kairos.technorhetoric.net/16.3/reviews/singhcorcoran_emika/physical-space.html.

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RHETORICAL AWARENESS OF STUDENT WRITERS AT AN HBCU: A STUDY OF REFLECTIVE RESPONSES IN THE WRITING CENTER Kathi R. Griffin Jackson State University kathi.r.griffin@jsums.edu

Tatiana A. Glushko Jackson State University tatiana.glushko@jsums.edu

Abstract The recent call for replicable, aggregable, and data-driven (RAD) research of writing center effectiveness motivated this study. In writing centers, the primary objective is to improve writers through one-to-one conversations. Improvement in writers, defined here in terms of rhetorical awareness, has proven difficult to measure. In this article, the authors describe how they developed a scale to measure rhetorical awareness, specifically purpose, genre, and audience awareness. Using both discourse and content analyses, they applied the scale to student responses on reflection forms collected over two semesters at an HBCU to see if rhetorical awareness might be observable and measurable.

Although the responses of students who visited the center more than once within six months did not show changes in their rhetorical awareness, as the authors had hoped, the results seem to reveal more about the social context than individual students, suggesting that current-traditional pedagogy persists. Aggregating data with this methodology may open new lines of inquiry for researchers of writing and allow them to track trends in discourse on writing.

Conversations with students who come to the writing center often begin with the question: “What brings you here today?” The response we hear all too often: “I need someone to proofread my paper before I turn it in.” As the conversation continues, we discover that students may still be working on trying to understand the assignment, trying to put their ideas together, articulate their thesis statement, find supporting evidence, or cite sources—in other words, anything but actual proofreading. The discrepancy between what students are working on at the moment and the words they use to describe it is striking. What is even more striking is students’ response when we begin to ask them why they are interested in their topic, who else might be interested in it, or what their purpose is. Some students seem baffled by the questions as though they did not expect someone to be genuinely interested in their writing. Some refuse to engage in conversation: “I just want you to read the paper to see if everything is correct,” they say. Our intentional appeal to students’ rhetorical awareness is often met with unintentional resistance.

Developing student rhetorical awareness has been a goal and a persistent challenge for writing center practitioners and instructors in the composition classroom since the “social turn” in the 1980s (see Gee, “New Literacy”). In the 1999 and 2014

Daoying Liu Nantong University, China daoying.liu@ntu.edu.cn

Statement of Outcomes for First-Year Composition, the WPA Council asserts that developing rhetorical awareness in students is central to the work of composition. Understanding how students develop rhetorical awareness and authority has become increasingly important among growing digital communities with diverse audiences, genres, and modes of interaction. Meaningful conversations—with people whom we may never meet in person and who may come from backgrounds vastly different from our own—require particular habits of mind: the willingness and ability to listen, to reflect, and to empathize as well as a willingness to embrace uncertainty. For composition instructors and tutors of writing, this new learning environment requires a shift in pedagogy (Beetham and Sharpe “Introduction”; Sullivan) from teaching students to write correctly toward increasing their rhetorical awareness.

At our urban public HBCU in the Deep South, students who come to our writing center have a diverse range of writing experiences and abilities.1 In our study, however, we discovered that, even at the graduate level, basic writing practices are prevalent.

Here we define basic writing not by identity markers of writers but based on “disciplinary and pedagogical practices of basic writing” (Matsuda 84). Writing requirements on our campus focus on form and correctness, which echo current-traditional pedagogy.

For example, the university catalog states that undergraduate and graduate students are required to take English proficiency exams “designed to show the strengths and weaknesses of each student in the areas of grammar and usage, logic, organization and content.” The undergraduate exam includes a fiveparagraph essay, and the graduate exam consists of an objective grammar test and an essay. Although our university has a research rank, it does not have an established writing program, a vital component in the development of pedagogies and practices necessary to the work of composition instruction.

The focus on correctness is indicative of current traditional rhetoric (CTR) in writing instruction, and its pervasiveness at our HBCU is both troubling and surprising. In 1999 Sharon Crowley explains that “[b]y the end of the nineteenth century most popular

Rhetorical Awareness of Student Writers at an HBCU • 56 composition textbooks written in the vein now described as ‘current-traditional’ treat invention as a means of systematically delimiting an area of thought” (146), thereby preventing students from developing rhetorical authority as writers. In the wake of the social turn, Crowley called for a discourse that moves away from the “neat process formulas recommended by current-traditional textbooks for roping off a topic, stating a thesis, listing and developing (usually three) supporting ideas and repeating the thesis” (159). Also in 1999, in “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies,” Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams describe how, since the nineteenth century, narratives in composition studies have excluded “suppressed groups, whether they intended it or not” (565) and called for the development of a critical interpretive “framework for resistance” (570-572, 582) to address the current-traditional pedagogy that perpetuates basic writing practices, which, unfortunately, remain in our present.

As we repeatedly respond to requests to help students proofread their papers, we strive to create a social context that emphasizes “intellectual engagement outside the classroom” (Our Mission). In the writing center, we train undergraduate and graduate tutors to engage students in conversations about their writing process in ways that position the students as writers, asking them about their audience, their purpose, genre conventions, and rhetorical choices they are in the process of making. In these conversations and by asking these kinds of questions, we want student-writers to experience social habits of mind associated with critical thinking, to practice new ways of thinking about their writing without anxiety or stigma associated with seeking feedback, and to increase their confidence in their ability to write and to learn. Outside the writing center, we also talk to students at orientations and in classes we visit, and we seek opportunities to speak with faculty in meetings and individually. On our campus, administrators and faculty acknowledge our efforts in the writing center, yet the center remains marginalized and described as a site of remediation, a sort of fix-it-shop—the result of a master narrative, Elizabeth Boquet suggests, that is “endemic to the institutional position of writing centers” (465).

At an HBCU, the narratives described by Royster and Williams and Boquet are troublesome as they serve to [re]produce and sustain “hegemonic institutional discourses” (Boquet 466). Boquet explains how, in the early 1980s, writing centers took a social turn by including peer tutors, not to change what students learned but to change the “social

context in which they [learned] it” (Bruffee qtd. in Boquet 474). In this turn, scholars described writing center practices and their inherent contradictions (477), within which issues of power came to the fore along with the potential for liberatory practices (476).

In the ensuing decades, however, the South remained insular, as Royster and Williams note (566; also see Armstrong), and thus did not experience the social changes of the 1960s and ‘70s. For example, unlike the writing centers Boquet describes, our writing center, established in 2003 as a site of remediation, served to sustain current-traditional pedagogy and its mechanistic practices. Practices related to CTR, even inadvertently, sustain a deficit model that, without programmatic changes, can continue to cause harmful social, political, and cultural consequences (Royster and Williams 563, 566; also see Brannon, et al., and Hull, et al). Royster and Williams also argue for research methodologies designed “for seeing the gaps in our knowledge and generating the research that can help us to fill those gaps” (583), and we argue that our methodology has revealed consequences related to CTR at our HBCU, where ninety percent of faculty and students are African American. In that the data collected with our methodology suggests all students who used our center would be described as basic writers, we would argue that such data reveals more about the social and educational contexts of students than their individual abilities.

In our study, we wanted to explore the possibility that students’ rhetorical awareness and authority may develop because of conversations with writing center tutors. After each tutorial session, students reflect in writing on their conversation with a tutor. Therefore, we turned to reflection forms to see what students’ responses on the forms could reveal. Specifically we wanted to know 1) whether there is evidence that students think about their writing in terms of product or process, 2) what indications of purpose, genre, and audience we could observe, and 3) whether we could observe any changes in rhetorical awareness after repeat visits. We also wondered how we might describe our findings and represent them in measurable terms. Compelled by the call for datasupported evidence in our field (Babcock and Thonus; Driscoll and Perdue; Liggett, Jordan, and Price 56), we sought to answer these questions using a replicable, aggregable, and data-driven (RAD) approach to research.

Conversation in the Writing Center and Rhetorical Authority

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Rhetorical Awareness of Student Writers at an HBCU • 57 Conversations with peer tutors are designed to help student writers negotiate their new academic audiences and develop rhetorical authority defined by Patricia Bizzell as “language use directed at a particular audience, for a particular purpose” (78) and as the ability to “recognize and incorporate into [one’s] persuasive arguments the values and circumstances of [one’s audience]” (292). In other words, one-to-one conversations with peer tutors can increase students’ rhetorical awareness and understanding of the writing process and thereby change writers in positive ways.

In “Designing for Learning in an Uncertain Future,” Helen Beetham argues that for meaningful conversations to occur, students will not only have to use “existing social habits” but also learn that “academic/professional ways of making and maintaining contacts are different” (272). For basic writers and first-generation college students, whose existing social habits, habits of mind, and rhetorical practices may clash with those valued in academia, developing rhetorical awareness and authority may be particularly challenging. In Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness, Bizzell explains that in college, students encounter rhetorical problems that include a “clash of dialects” (165) between faculty and students, a “clash of discourse forms” (165) and conventions, and a “clash in the ways of thinking,” a cognitive problem that results from “differences in thinking” (167). Each of these problems may lower students’ confidence in their ability to learn (167) and increase resistance to writing and learning. When we hear selfdeprecating comments by students—such as “I can’t talk right” or “I am a bad writer; I write the way I speak” or, when students bring papers with feedback from their instructors and say, “I don’t know what the teacher wants”—we hear evidence of lowered student confidence.

With an intentional focus on pedagogy that addresses rhetorical awareness, students might be empowered, begin to become “agents of their own learning” (Yancey 5). The changes we look for in student writers result from acts of communication in collaborative contexts, like writing centers.2 In the writing center, peer conversations position tutors as real readers and provide a context in which writers might engage in conversations about their writing process and about the purpose and audience for their writing (see Redd and Slater). In Classroom Discourse, Courtney Cazden describes a similar process when she talks about students transforming “social interactions into internal speech” (131). Peer-to-peer conversations in the writing center provide a sort of “ritualized activity,” like “sharing time,” which, Cazden explains, has four potential cognitive benefits: (a) “discourse as

catalyst” for internal change, which may not (yet) be observable (127–128); (b) “discourse as the enactment of complementary roles,” during which “peers could perform tasks together before they could perform them alone” (129–130); (c) “discourse as relationship with an audience” (130–133); and (d) “discourse as exploratory talk” (133–134), which seems to be potentially the most observable. Through peer interaction, less experienced writers may develop the necessary social habits to which more experienced writers attend automatically (Beetham; Shaughnessy; Flower; Severino).

As basic writers experience feedback and reflection in contrast to instruction or correction, they become aware of their writing process, begin to think of themselves as writers, to develop rhetorical awareness. Increasing rhetorical awareness and authority may be revealed in the way students talk about their new academic community and “think about their own thoughts” when they question, compare experiences, and deliberate (Bizzell 170-173; also see Yancey), and engage a new dialect (Smitherman). Although Cazden reminds us that positive changes in students might not be immediately observable, we wanted to know what could be observed. Can we see evidence of exploratory talk, as Cazden suggests, and what can we learn from it?

Methodology As Dana Driscoll and Sherry Wynn Perdue note, the challenge of RAD research in a writing center is rooted in the “uniqueness” of data collected in a particular center (121–123) and the “confusion about what replicability entails” (123). Of course each institutional context is unique, but problems students experience with writing for new audiences and how they develop rhetorical awareness are not necessarily unique to a particular site. The context of an HBCU isolates race—a significant social, political, and cultural factor—within an institution of higher education and thereby allows us to focus on how students talk about their writing, how writing is understood and practiced, and thereby how it is taught on our campus. Thus the replicability of our study does not rely on replicating the context or the results but on replicating the method we used to collect and analyze data (Smagorinsky; Driscoll and Perdue).

Instrument As a regular practice in our center, we invite students to complete a reflection form at the end of each tutorial. For this study, the form served as a sort of survey, which Neal Lerner explains is one of “the

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Rhetorical Awareness of Student Writers at an HBCU • 58 most common examples of methodological tools used to gather data that could be transformed into numbers but might still be part of a qualitative research project” (109). With the purpose of collecting data in a natural environment, we did not want to offer students incentives to fill out the form or explain the purpose of the form beyond our routine invitation to fill it out.

Thus the form allowed us to collect responses focused on student writing while it also served the purpose of aggregating data.

The form contains four prompts that invite students to reflect on (a) why they came to the center, (b) what they talked about with the tutor, (c) what they will do next with their writing or speaking project, and (d) what stood out most to them during the tutorial session (see Appendix A). By encouraging students to reflect on their writing, their conversation with a tutor, and their writing process, and to imagine possibilities for completing the task before them, we were also engaging them in writerly behaviors that would allow them to exercise more rhetorical authority (Bizzell 168).

Data Collection and Analysis From February to July 2014, we collected 354 forms from 268 students, undergraduate and graduate, and entered all responses into a table, which became our data set. The initial set of 354 forms was used to analyze whether students focused on product or process. Later, as we began the analysis of students’ rhetorical awareness, we found that the forms missing one or more responses did not provide necessary corroboration for interpretation of data. Thus we analyzed 293 forms for rhetorical awareness.

To analyze the data, we turned to discourse analysis to observe writers’ “language in use” (Gee 1) and to content analysis to “produce counts of key categories” (Neuendorf 14) and to “identify units of content” that may signal focus on product or process and may indicate rhetorical awareness (Bowen and Bowen 691). In How to Do Discourse Analysis, James Gee explains that discourse analysis is “a collaborative, social endeavor” (5), like writing center work itself.

Discourse analysis helped us look closely at “the details of language structure,” e.g., nouns and verbs, and more broadly at “social, cultural, and political” contexts (Gee 1), providing a “path to understanding” (2) how students make meaning out of, or internalize, their experience (also see Cazden). We inquired, for example, how students expressed in writing what was important to them as writers and what they took away from a conversation with a tutor. We examined the vocabulary students used and how each word suggested, for example, different ways students “build

and sustain or change relationships” (Gee 202) with an audience, and we considered what their focus might tell us about the social context and its “Discourse” (181–186, 204).

To explore whether students described their writing as product or process, we noted whether students used nouns or verbs to reflect on their writing and the tutorial. Nouns name objects and concepts, while verbs describe actions and processes, so if students used nouns when reflecting on their writing (e.g., “I came to work on grammar”), they might be focusing on the product of writing. In contrast, when they used verbs (e.g., “I came to work on citing sources”), they were more likely to be focusing on the process. Then we counted and categorized nouns and verbs related to the product and process of writing, noting how responses changed from Prompt 1 to Prompt 4. We also counted the number of times each noun and verb was used and the different nouns and verbs used in response to each of the four prompts.

In an attempt to measure writer’s rhetorical awareness, we looked for markers of writers’ “sense of authority” (Kirsch 81), considering what we might hear from “experienced” and “novice” writers (Flower et al.) when they reflect on their writing. For example, experienced writers might assert their communicative purpose, connect their purpose to the needs of an audience, and indicate how a particular genre helps them to achieve their purpose. They also may demonstrate rhetorical authority by explaining their choices, which also points toward abilities related to metacognition and reflection. In contrast, novice writers, as responses in our data set demonstrated, may refer to a writing process (e.g., organize my essay), mention an interdisciplinary genre (e.g., research paper, article critique), or mention a general “reader” or “audience,” but do not connect them or explain how they inform rhetorical choices. With this variation of responses in mind, we developed magnitude codes (Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña 80), which ranged from no indication of awareness (1) to strong/clear indication of awareness (5). (See the codes and their description in Appendix B.) Following the advice of William Bowen and Chieh-Chen Bowen to increase the “possibility of replication” (695), we trained each other as coders and coded independently. Then we invited three outside coders to code 20% of data selected randomly and trained them in the process. These strategies also served the purpose of triangulation. In instances of disagreement, we compared the codes looking for possible explanations for disagreements and adjusted our code descriptions and coding process. As Peter

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Rhetorical Awareness of Student Writers at an HBCU • 59 Smagorinsky advises, we reached agreement through a “thoughtful exchange about what to call each and every data segment” (402), and in the process, we gained a richer understanding of what we were observing. Our goal was to reach 0.70 reliability, which is acceptable for exploratory research like ours (Neuerndorf). Reliability was measured using Cohen’s Kappa (k) coefficient. After twelve cycles of revising the coding scheme, we achieved 0.785 reliability for purpose; 0.885 for genre; and 0.964 for audience. We then reviewed the coded responses from the 44 students who visited the center twice or more to see how they indicated their rhetorical awareness and authority from one session to another.

Findings What Writers Focus On When we began counting the number of nouns and verbs, we noticed that Prompts 1 and 3 seemed to draw attention to product, and Prompts 2 and 4 seemed to draw attention to process. Thus the prompts themselves seemed to shift students’ focus from product to process, with more nouns used in response to Prompts 1 and 3, and more verbs used in response to Prompts 2 and 4.

The analysis of the initial set of 354 reflection forms revealed that in 134 responses (38%), students focused on grammar and correctness. Responses to Prompt 1 included 327 nouns, more than 99% of responses, and 21 verbs, less than 1%. In Prompt 4, however, verbs comprised 94% of responses. From Prompt 1 to 3, nouns decreased by 30%, and from Prompt 2 to 4, verbs increased by 35%. The number of blanks also increased from Prompt 1 to Prompt 4, so percentages rather than numbers more accurately represent any differences (see Fig. 1 in Appendix C).

The vocabulary students used to describe their writing became more specific from Prompt 1 to Prompt 4, which may be evidence of exploratory talk.

Nouns used in Prompt 1 were vague “paper” or “essay,” and nouns in response to Prompt 3 were more specific, e.g., “my introduction” or “the body of my research paper.” Similarly, the variety of verbs used increased. For example, of the 194 verbs used in response to Prompt 2, 43 different verbs were used.

However, of the 228 verbs in response to Prompt 4, 87 different verbs were used. Overall, the increase in variety of nouns and verbs may also be evidence of students making sense of their experience, a metacognitive activity that reflection invites.

Rhetorical Awareness: Purpose, Genre, and Audience

Table C1 (See Appendix C) summarizes how many students indicated rhetorical awareness of purpose, genre, and audience from none (1) to strong (5).

Purpose None of the responses suggested a focus on exploring an issue, an intention to convince an audience, or an explanation of a rhetorical choice that would indicate a strong sense or awareness of purpose in writing. In only 1% of responses writers expressed an intention to “grab” or “keep” the reader’s attention, thus implying the purpose to affect an audience. In 7% of responses, writers only mentioned grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and changes or corrections at the sentence level. In 15% of responses, writers mentioned academic conventions, such as format, citations, reference pages, and referred to changes or corrections in those areas. In 77% of responses, writers referred to a writing process (often vaguely), parts of a paper, or learning and writing strategies, sometimes mentioning ideas (see examples in Table B1 in Appendix B).

Genre None of the responses referred to a communicative purpose of a genre or indicated how a genre might relate to an audience. Only in 6% of responses, writers mentioned a genre specific to an academic field (e.g., philosophy of education), qualified a genre by a field or a discipline, or referred to qualities or components of an academic genre (for additional examples, see Table B2). In 23% of responses, writers noted a cross-disciplinary academic genre (e.g., research paper). In 31% of responses, writers either did not name the product of writing or named it in a generalized way. Some defined a product by topic. In 40% of responses, students mentioned a product of writing (e.g., paper) qualified by discipline, course, mode of organization, or by instructor, or mentioned a non-academic genre (e.g., résumé). In these responses students also referred to features of an academic genre, such as citations.

Audience In contrast to genre awareness, there was little variation in how students demonstrated audience awareness. An overwhelming 95% of responses did not mention an audience and included first person pronouns, e.g., “I” and “my” (see Table B3). In 3% of responses, writers mentioned an instructor as an intended audience. A general “audience” or “reader” was mentioned in 1% of responses, and a specific audience was mentioned only in one response. None

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Rhetorical Awareness of Student Writers at an HBCU • 60 of the responses mentioned needs of an audience or connected those to the purpose of writing.

Changes in Writers Who Visited More than Once Of the 44 students who came to the center more than once, 33 completed two reflection forms, 7 completed three forms, 2 completed four forms, and 2 completed six and seven forms each, totaling 108 responses analyzed. Despite our expectation that we would see consistent positive changes in their rhetorical awareness, 50% of responses showed no change; the other 50% showed an inconsistent change, such as a decrease in one category but increase in another. The number of times students visited the center did not make a meaningful difference in how they described their writing.

Corollary finding While we observed no consistent changes in rhetorical awareness in writers who visited our center, one finding suggests that conversation with tutors motivated writers to rethink current habits and practices. In 13% of responses to Prompt 4, students made resolutions that extended beyond completing the task at hand and referred to social practices and habits of mind valued in academic communities, for example: • reading—e.g., “reading the whole story,” “referring back to writing styles that the social work department gave out”; • engagement with the learning and writing processes—e.g., “participate more in class,” “write a few pages more than required”; and • “writerly” habits—e.g., “writing every day,” “make necessary revisions on my own,” “come back to the writing center.”

A few students expressed the need for “rereading” the assignment, and one graduate student noted that she would be “reevaluating” her previous knowledge and what she wanted to learn. In other words, the act of reflection prompted some students to rethink their habits, and their responses may indicate decreasing resistance to reading, writing, and possibly to learning while also suggesting a growing confidence in their abilities to learn. If these were “reluctant writers” (Harris 23–33), then in conversation with tutors they might have enacted “complementary roles” (Cazden 129–130) that enabled them to experience, in positive ways, practices they had resisted. As many students said, the tutor really helped them understand whatever they needed at that moment.

Discussion In our study, we attempted to observe the rhetorical awareness of students as they reflected on their writing and conversation with a tutor. Overall, our findings suggest that students focused on the writing process more than we had expected and on rhetorical problems less than we had hoped. The vocabulary students used was general and vague, and most often they focused on completing the task correctly, which may reflect their previous experiences with writing. Genre awareness had the widest range of responses, which suggests an emphasis on product. In response to Prompt 1, we found that from the vocabulary we could identify where students were in their academic careers, from early undergraduate to graduate level. As students responded to each prompt, their focus seemed to shift from the product to the process of writing, and their language became more exploratory (Cazden 133–134). Most novice writers learning to write for new audiences in new genres tend to focus on the product. They do not yet have the vocabulary to externalize their thoughts about writing or their purpose for writing in the way more experienced writers do (see Carroll; Wong). While reading student responses, we noticed that each writer came to the center at a different stage of the writing process and for a different reason, so it was difficult to determine what “purpose” we were seeing, but it seemed more connected to completing a task than exploring or communicating ideas.

The focus on correctness that we observed is not necessarily surprising or unique to our institution, particularly for basic or novice writers, who may have experienced CTR in prior education settings. In “The Language of Exclusion,” Mike Rose describes how nineteenth-century prescriptive methods of teaching grammar shaped twentieth-century writing pedagogy with the focus on error as indicator of a writer’s ability or inability—methods, he argues earlier in Lives on the Boundary, that are “reductive” and “keep students from becoming fully, richly literate” (his emphasis, 210– 211). At an HBCU, the focus of faculty on correctness suggests that vestiges of current-traditional pedagogy remain in our present, and arguments made by faculty that students “need” to speak and write correctly to get jobs may reveal experiences of stigmatization and marginalization related to African American Vernacular English (AAVE/AAE) in public, professional, and educational spheres (see Alim and Smitherman 189-191). By stressing one standard of correctness, however, faculty sustain, albeit unintentionally, pedagogies that marginalize students.3

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Rhetorical Awareness of Student Writers at an HBCU • 61 In academic contexts, students experience differences beyond grammar that point toward rhetorical problems, as well as toward social issues related to class and race—issues that need to be addressed both inside and outside the writing center (e.g., Crowley; Royster and Williams; Shaughnessy; Maimon; Kirsch; Flower; Severino; Smitherman). The clashes between rhetorical strategies in and outside educational contexts were explored in the 1980s and ‘90s by Shirley Brice Heath and many others (see Hull and Rose; Ladson-Billings; Ogbu, “Literacy”; Redd and Slater; Villanueva), providing evidence of the social turn in composition studies. Critical interpretive frames ground research historically, Royster and Williams, Ogbu (“Adaptation”) and others argue, and focus on the social context to see gaps in knowledge and generate research to fill gaps that reveal the need for critical pedagogies.

In our study, we found that most students remained focused on “what the teacher wants” (Bizzell 167), which is common among basic writers.

The expectation for these writers to conform their writing and thinking to academic discourse often considered white and elitist outside academia may result in lowered confidence (Bizzell 167) and increased resistance (see Young et al. 67–69), not only to coming to the writing center but to writing (see Rose, cited in Bizzell 193–94), if not also to learning (167). Bizzell explains that students entering an academic discourse community new to them are, in a sense, becoming “bicultural” (169),4 which may cause “resistance” (168). African American students in particular, Vershawn Young explains in Your Average Nigga, may resist behaviors indicative of intellectual pursuits and essential to success in college because this behavior is perceived as “acting white,”5 and for males as less than masculine. As our findings suggest, conversations in the writing center may help students re-evaluate these habits and lessen resistance to academic literacy in ways that may empower them (also see Morrell).

Over the course of our six-month study, we did not find evidence that repeat visits made a difference in students’ rhetorical awareness. Although talking to a tutor about writing and then reflecting on it might have provided a platform for change, we realize that the learning process takes longer than the six months of this study. Studies that span several semesters might be necessary to track changes in individual students that may have been taking place internally, as Cazden and Gee suggest. Two longitudinal studies offer convincing evidence of the value of longer studies: Marilyn Sternglass’s Time to Know Them and Lee Ann Carroll’s Rehearsing New Roles. Both studies, however,

are small scale (9 and 20 students, respectively) and thus offer limited possibilities for aggregation or quantification necessary for tracking trends. Since we completed our initial study in 2014, we have continued to collect data that now spans four academic years and may provide more information on students’ rhetorical awareness and on how students see themselves as writers. With no changes in the way writing has been taught on campus since we began the collection of data, changes in how students describe their writing might then be attributed to their experiences in the writing center.

Limitations During our study, three limitations emerged. As mentioned earlier, we paid attention to how students used nouns and verbs on the reflection form to describe their writing, quickly realizing that the number of nouns and verbs elicited could have resulted from how we had worded the four prompts.

This limitation may be minimized by rewording the prompts or framing them as questions. For example, instead of using the prompt “I came to work on . . . ” we could ask an open-ended question: “What brought you to the writing center?”

The second limitation also relates to the instrument for collecting data but at the point of collection. For example, some students explained, as they handed the form to us at the end of the session, that they were in a hurry, on their way to class or work, and had no time to complete the form. This may indicate that the tutor and writer had not set an agenda for the session that included the form, or that the writer did not yet recognize the value of reflection, as the increasing number of blanks and stock phrases used on response forms also suggests. In addition, repeat visits occurred within a short period, from one day to one month between visits, which may also account for the increasing number of blanks and stock phrases. Students who came to the center in quick succession were often working on the same project and therefore might have felt overburdened by having to complete the form again.

The third limitation relates to time and methodology. While the data collection form aligns with writing center values and allows for aggregation of data, the six months of our study did not allow time to collect enough data for conclusive evidence. For shorter studies, it may serve to collect data to answer a different set of research questions or for purposes of triangulation alongside qualitative instruments, such as interviews with students.

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Rhetorical Awareness of Student Writers at an HBCU • 62

Implications While we found little evidence of rhetorical awareness in student responses and no evidence that it had increased with repeat visits to the writing center, we did observe that most writers at our HBCU struggled to describe their writing. Thus students need opportunities to reflect and to develop metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities through meaningful conversations about their ideas and their writing process, not just on format and correctness, and not just in writing centers. In these conversations, students also need to reflect on similarities and differences between their home language or dialect and that of each new discourse community they join, thereby developing new habits of mind and the flexibility necessary for meaningful interaction across discourse communities (see Matsuda; Beetham “Designing Learning”; Blankenship and Jory; Stanford). Graduate and undergraduate tutors, as students, also benefit from opportunities for reflection when they take the tutor training course and in their everyday writing and tutoring practices. On the back of the student reflection form, for example, tutors are also invited to reflect on the session, a source of aggregable data for another study.

Our study suggests that the way students describe their writing may have implications for the teaching of writing and for rethinking what we might ask as researchers. For example, with evidence of currenttraditional pedagogy that dominated the early part of the twentieth century, on our campus we might argue more compellingly for a strong writing program and professional development to redress entrenched values and attitudes about writing (see Thomas). With the aggregation of data, as researchers we can reimagine what we might learn: Could we observe changes in the teaching of writing on campus, across the state, and in the field more broadly? Could changes in students’ descriptions of writing serve as indirect indicators of changes in the curricula, pedagogy, or teaching materials? What results might we see if the study were replicated in HBCUs, in comparable research institutions, predominantly white institutions, tribal colleges, women’s colleges, community colleges, colleges with and without strong writing programs?

Replication of this study might also allow us to identify and track trends in how students transition from novice to experienced writers, acquire rhetorical awareness and authority, and engage in reflective practices across contexts. With aggregation of data, we may also be able to develop new theories and new

teaching and tutoring practices to intervene positively in student learning.

Notes 1. Annually, our writing center staff meet with 4% of student population; 70% of visitors are freshmen and 12%, graduate students.

2. See Bruffee. Also, on the value of talking about writing, see Mortensen.

3. See Ogbu; Bartholomae; Hull and Rose; LadsonBillings; Durst; Redd; Young, Your Average, “Keep Code-meshing,” “Should Writers”; Alim and Smitherman.

4. When applied to African American students, the concept of “bicultural” may be comparable to the concept of “dual citizenship” described by Signithia Fordham.

5. On the “burden of ‘acting white,’” see Fordham.

Also, in July 2014, President Obama addressed the issue of acting white: This is true not just for Native Americans, but it’s also true for African Americans.

Sometimes African Americans, in communities where I’ve worked, there’s been the notion of ‘acting white’–which sometimes is overstated, but there’s an element of truth to it, where, okay, if boys are reading too much, then, well, why are you doing that?

Or why are you speaking so properly?

And the notion that there’s some authentic way of being black, that if you’re going to be black you have to act a certain way and wear a certain kind of clothes, that has to go. (Applause.) Because there are a whole bunch of different ways for African American men to be authentic.

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Rhetorical Awareness of Student Writers at an HBCU • 65 !

Appendix A Student Reflection Form Student Name: _________________________________________________________________ Date: _____________________________________ Tutor Who Assisted You: ________________________________________________________ 1. I came to work on ____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ 2. The tutor helped me ___________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ 3. I will leave being able to work on ________________________________________________ 4. I will begin by _______________________________________________________________ and may also___________________________________________________________________ !

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Appendix B Coding Scheme Table B1 Purpose

Table B2 Genre

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Table B3 Audience

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Appendix C Fig. 1 Percentage of Nouns and Verbs Used by Students on Reflection Forms

Table C1 Percentage of Students Indicating Rhetorical Awareness !

Scale!

Category!

1!

2!

3!

Purpose!

7!

15!

77!

Genre!

31!

40!

23!

Audience!

95!

3!

1!

4!

1!

6!

1!

5!

0!

0!

0!

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DISMANTLING NEUTRALITY: CULTIVATING ANTIRACIST WRITING CENTER ECOLOGIES Eric C. Camarillo University of Houston-Victoria camarilloec@uhv.edu There is a temptation when working in writing centers, composition classrooms, and other languagefocused sites for us to say that we want students to be stronger communicators, stronger writers, stronger speakers. Yet, in the writing center at least, this notion of “stronger” is often understood as adherence to the rules of “Standard American English” (SAE). There are other names for this so-called standard: the Language of Wider Communication (LWC), the dominant discourse, academic discourse, and so on.

We who work in writing centers often convince ourselves that because we are focused on language, then we are free from bias, and that language and literacy are neutral skills. We want to help students, after all. We tell them that, yes, you’ve been writing for years now, but we can teach you to write better. Or, and somehow this seems worse to me, you have a home language, but that language is inadequate for your new setting. In this article, I explore the potential complications of running writing centers at minority serving institutions (MSI), with special attention to Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) and how thinking of writing centers as ecologies can provide keener insight into the real work of writing centers.

Context The University of Houston-Victoria (UHV) is located in Victoria, Texas, a small city that sits roughly two hours from Houston. UHV was established in 1974, but primarily served upper-division, graduate, and nontraditional students. In 2010, UHV achieved downward expansion, which dramatically changed the type of student being served: traditional freshmen from urban backgrounds and with diverse racial and ethnic identities. In 2009, we were a predominantly white institution. In 2010, we became an HSI. More to the point, our Hispanic enrollment increases every year—over 50% of entering freshmen in the fall of 2017 identified as Hispanic, which means UHV will soon find itself in a new category: the predominantly Hispanic institution. At the moment, though, UHV is not unlike other HSIs in the country. Many of our programs are underfunded, the majority of our students are from low-income backgrounds (regardless

of race or ethnicity), and our graduation rates are relatively low (García, “Complicating” 118).

However, the HSI designation only accounts for enrollment numbers and doesn’t necessarily track how Hispanic students are actually served at the institution.

In an attempt to more intentionally serve Hispanic (and all) students at UHV, I began critically questioning the work I did in the writing center, a liminal space between the academy proper and the student body, a space where the most vulnerable students often found themselves. While I like to think I approached this project objectively, I must also recognize my own positionality as a Mexican American who grew up in the area. In some sense, I want to help students who are like me.

What seems to be key for transforming a writing center is the shift away from the ways in which writing centers treat individuals and an emphasis on the ways in which a writing center exists within the larger ecosystem of the university. Nancy M. Grimm asserts, “[A]n ideology of individualism not only shapes writing center discourse but also races writing center practice, making it inhospitable to students who are not white” (“Retheorizing” 76). She proposes a social learning theory that challenges the unquestioned mottos of writing center work in order to make the writing center more welcoming to all students and to avoid the pitfalls of the cozy home. However, the writing center as home is not the only problematic metaphor draped over writing center praxis.

The Writing Center as Metaphor Other scholars have dissected the ways in which writing centers suppress and oppress minoritized students. Grimm posits that writing center administrators should be “more fully aware of the ways that literacy practices reproduce the social order and regulate access and subjectivity” (“Regulatory” 5).

Like border processing centers, writing centers decide who can and who cannot enter the university; that is, who does and does not belong. Anis Bawarshi and Stephanie Pelkowski extend Grimm’s idea, comparing the writing center to a colonizing site, one where “basic writers are expected to speak an academic language foreign to them” (51). In particular, Bawarshi and Pelkowski problematize the apparent neutrality of

process-oriented models, questioning whether focusing on process is any less deleterious than focusing on products (45-46). However, as they analogize the writing center as a colonizing force, it becomes clear that acculturation, and not more effective writing, is the true (though implicit) goal of the writing center. That is, it regulates and “corrects” students.

As Stephen M. North observes, the writing center is seen “to illiteracy what a cross between a Lourdes and a hospice would be to serious illness: one goes there hoping for miracles, but ready to face the inevitable” (435). If writing centers are hospitals, then the people who go there must be sick. It then becomes the job of those writing centers to “cure” those who visit, in the hopes the patients never have to come again. There are bountiful metaphors that can be overlaid on writing centers, which reflects the richness of their work. Not all of these metaphors have negative connotations. However, there’s a specific metaphor that highlights the racial and ethnic erasure in which the writing center, in its protection of the academic discourse, becomes complicit: writing center as migratory site.

If we extend the metaphor further, we can see the Academy, the University, as a different country with its own language, traditions, and culture. The writing center then becomes, essentially, a border processing center. In 2018, I fully intend to invoke all of the political ramifications and disturbing imagery that accompanies discussions of the border, especially here in Texas. The news is filled with horror stories of (brown) children ripped from their parents’ arms, (brown) children in cages, (brown) children abused, (brown) children killed. In what ways do these types of stories impact the way universities, writing centers, and classrooms interact with (brown) students? The old way of thinking of writing centers, as neutral sites full of non-evaluative, non-directive questions and prodding, is no longer appropriate for the modern writing center. In order to answer the question of how writing centers serve minoritized students, particularly at minority serving institutions, writing center administrators must begin thinking of changes that can occur at the system level, at the level of the ecology.

Writing Centers and Writing Assessment Ecologies Asao B. Inoue writes about ecologies in the composition classroom in Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future.

He raises issues with the way in which student writing

Dismantling Neutrality • 70! ! is judged and connects individual judgment to larger, systemic problems. He asserts, We can find racist effects in just about every writing program in the country. We live in a racist society, one that recreates well-known, well-understood, racial hierarchies in populations based on things like judgments of student writing that use a local Standardized Edited American English (SEAE) with populations of people who do not use that discourse on a daily basis— judging apples by the standards of oranges. (6) He argues that students, particularly students of color, are forced to approximate a white racial habitus and are judged by this approximation. This assessment is seen as a neutral practice, and it is this apparent neutrality that has enabled the practice to go unquestioned. Yet, if we conceive of the writing center as having an ecology, as a larger system, we can begin to see the ways in which our practices can harm students. Inoue claims antiracist writing assessment ecologies “provide for the complexity and holistic nature of assessment systems, the interconnectedness of all people and things, which includes environments, without denying or eliding linguistic, cultural, or racial diversity, and the politics inherent in all uneven social formations” (77). This notion of interconnectedness is especially key when thinking of writing center ecologies at minority serving institutions.

In “The Idea of a Writing Center,” North advocates for a process-oriented model, deliberately moving away from the act of editing, the “fix-it shop” model. In the process-oriented model, the consultant is focused on changing the student’s writing processes rather than the paper—that is, “the object is to make sure that writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what get changed by instruction” (North 438). Yet, Inoue asserts that ecologies have a quality of “more than,” of inter-existing that students must contend with (9), a notion that North doesn’t address in “Idea.” Indeed, reading through this foundational text of writing center studies, it becomes apparent that North had an idea of a student in his mind as well. In particular, he argues, “[W]riters come looking for us because, more often than not, they are genuinely, deeply engaged with their material, anxious to wrestle it into the best form they can: they are motivated to write” (443). This presumption is somewhat optimistic. While I have certainly worked with motivated students in the writing center, they are more of the exception than the rule. It is far likelier for the uncertain student to visit us, for the insecure student to cross our borders in search of a way to belong in their classrooms. Because of the remedial nature of the

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writing center space, motivated students at UHV do not often feel compelled to visit us.

While Inoue discusses antiracist writing assessment ecologies in the classroom, his view of interconnected elements supports Bawarshi and Pelkowski’s view of writing centers as colonial sites. In their view, “[t]he shift from a product- to a processbased pedagogy becomes an invitation to interfere with not just the body of the text but also the body of the writer” (45). In ecologies, writers are the writing.

People are the products and processes that they create or use. To change the process, then, means to change the person, which has been questioned by other writing center practitioners (e.g., Greenfield, Grimm and Barron, García, Villanueva). Romeo García in “Unmaking Gringo Centers,” asserts, “[W]hat was at a stake, among other things, was being an accomplice to my own degradation” (31), which mirrors Bawarshi’s and Pelkowski’s claim that “the ‘exchange’ is hegemonically constructed when dominance is called a service; in accepting the service (in this case, instruction in ‘good writing’), the oppressed consent to their own domination” (51). Yet, we often call this participatory degradation—this domination—neutral and good for the student.

The help we offer has a certain end goal. As Grimm notes in “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform a System of Advantage Based on Race,” when writing centers want to help students, this usually means we want to make them “more like us, thus (ahem) ‘better’ and ‘equal’” (75). That is, even when a writing center is staffed by “respectful, helpful, and friendly white people,” the goal of the writing center is to reduce the markers of race in a student, to essentially un-race them (75). In “The ‘Standard English’ Fairytale,” Laura Greenfield argues that the bulk of writing center and composition work is posed around getting minoritized students to “rid . . . themselves of all linguistic features that may identify them with communities of color” (46). In this view, we see that teaching students how to adhere to SAE has less to do with giving them a wider variety of writing tools than it does with removing the tools we don’t like.

However, this presumption of un-racing, or erasing, students is usually based upon an assumed institutional context. That is, a writing center at a PWI might very well have to contend with the potential harm of “improving” student writing when all this means is getting the student to write more like the writing consultant who, at a PWI, is also assumed to come from a certain background (white, middle-class, etc.). Writing centers at PWIs must contend with not just the apparent neutrality of language practices but

Dismantling Neutrality • 71! ! of the belief in, as Rosina Lippi-Green says, “an ideology of standardization” (218). Laura Greenfield, Nancy Grimm, and Romeo García lay out strategies and techniques for how to mitigate this ideology at PWIs, but MSIs may have to take different approaches. How does having a majority-white staff at an HSI impact students’ perceptions of the writing center? Does this reinforce Bawarshi’s and Pelkowski’s views of writing centers as colonizing sites?

Alternatively, if a writing center has a majority of nonwhite consultants at the writing center, does this enhance the perception of the writing center? Or does this, as García (“Unmaking”) puts it, allow students to more easily engage in their own degradation? Do the diverse racial and ethnic positionalities of consultants change the work of the writing center and make it less colonial? Or, since we’re still trying to get students to un-race themselves, does having a large minoritized staff further mask that purpose?

My point is that simply placing a writing center in a more diverse space does not remove the regulatory impulses that come from English departments, university administrators, and even within the writing center itself. Having an all person of color (POC) staff does not absolve a writing center from critically engaging with race and race relations. However, this does serve as an opportunity to discuss race and racism in ways that might be more difficult at the majority-white writing center. This isn’t to say that African Americans or Latinos experience race and racism in exactly the same ways, but it seems less likely for writing centers with majority-minoritized staff members to suffer the same kind of reactions as Grimm and Barron experience when trying to give race a more central place in writing center training (63). Indeed, discussing race and writing centers with consultants of color, when the manager or director is also a person of color, can generate powerful and meaningful conversations as shown in the conclusion.

This isn’t to say that one must be a person of color in order to have these conversations. Certainly scholars like Grimm and Greenfield show us that conversations on race and racism are important regardless of the racial makeup of a writing center. However, they also demonstrate that writing center managers and directors should thoughtfully consider their audiences when planning these conversations.

Toward Antiracist Ecologies

Writing

Center

This section explores the various layers of an ecology. Inoue identifies seven in total. For the purposes of this article, only three of the elements will

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be touched on: places, power, and people. It is difficult to examine ecological elements individually because of their inter-existing nature, but the three discussed here can be helpful in re-conceptualizing the writing center as an ecology. Before diving into the elements, though, it may be helpful to analyze the writing center as a site of assessment.

Writing centers tend to practice a kind of nondirective questioning, Socratic in nature, that is designed to help students think through their ideas.The ideal consultation may look like a conversation, a back-and-forth exchange between two people. For North, “the essence of the writing center method, then, is this talking” (443). Yet, at some point, the writing consultant must read a document, whether silently or out loud. This might be seen as an innocuous, if necessary, step. Reading is reading. Yet, for Inoue, reading equates to assessment, judgment, evaluation: “Assessment as an act is at its core an act of reading” (15). As we read or listen to a paper being read, we look and listen for errors. From the beginning of a consultation, then, the writing center searches for ways to label and organize people: this one is strong, this other is remedial. Yet, even as we judge, we claim to be non-evaluative. Literacy skills are often conceived of as neutral practices, what Grimm calls the autonomous model of literacy. Grimm asserts, “[W]hile [the autonomous model] insists on the valuefree nature of literate forms, it uses these forms to rank and sort students based on features of their texts” (“Regulatory” 19). Conceptualizing the writing center as an ecology can help writing center practitioners move beyond this assessment function.

Of all the elements that make up ecologies, Inoue identifies place as the most significant. He says, “If there is one ecological element that may be the best synecdoche for the entire ecology, it is place.

Antiracist writing assessment ecologies, at their core, (re)create places for sustainable learning and living.

This is their primary function, to create places, and I think we would do well to cultivate such assessment ecologies that self-consciously do this” (14). Inoue’s focus is on the composition classroom, but antiracist ecologies have a place within writing center praxis, too. While they don’t put it in this way, Bawarshi and Pelkowski want students to critically engage with the ecology of the writing center, of the university, to “look critically at the changes we are asking basic writers to accept” (50). For Bawarshi and Pelkowski, this critical eye was a way to move beyond the natural hegemonic forces that weave themselves into the fabric of the writing center. Inoue, with his ecological perspective, seeks to dismantle those hegemonic forces completely.

Dismantling Neutrality • 72! !

If a place makes up the entire ecology, then the physical space of the writing center ought to be taken into account. This doesn’t mean coordinators and directors need to look at alternate spaces to move into or begin new construction. What it does mean is taking note of the physical space the writing center currently occupies. What objects are in it? What’s on the walls? What kind of chairs and tables are there?

Round tables seem to be preferable, but I’ve found that any table shape will work as long as the consultant is careful to sit next to, rather than across from, the student. This positioning helps control the flow of power both within the consultation and even within the writing center.

For Inoue, power “operates through the disciplining of bodies and creating spaces that reproduce docile behavior as consent” (121). In this way, Inoue’s discussion of power ties into Bawarshi and Pelkowski’s idea of the colonial writing center.

“Power is the environment,” Inoue says (122), because it flows throughout a space and between people, controlling behavior. In a consultation, who has power and who doesn’t? Who can write on the document and who can’t? Who is talking? If we’re attempting nondirection, then the writing consultant’s goal is to ensure that power flows primarily from the student. In a process-oriented model, we might say that we’re giving the student increased agency, encouraging her to take control of her writing, that she wants control of the writing. Yet, some students do not want control of their writing. They want the consultant to be the sage on a stage and to give them useful, easy-tounderstand directions.

Who, then, has power in the consultation? Who should have power? These types of questions are not necessarily appropriate for an individual consultation, but they are certainly topics that can be discussed among writing center staff.

Inoue says, “[I]nterrogating power in an assessment ecology is important because it sets up the rest of the students’ problematizing practices” (123). Writing consultants, then, should be encouraged to think about how power is distributed between themselves and students, between themselves and writing center administration.

At UHV, every comment is framed as a suggestion or recommendation, and it’s up to the student to decide what advice to take and what to discard. However, it is equally important to help the student understand why they may take some pieces of advice and not others.

Many of the student writers at UHV, especially younger and less confident ones, want nothing more than to do what the writing consultant tells them.

They’re not lazy, just scared. So they come to the writing center for help.

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While a place may contain the entire ecology, a place is defined to an extent by the people who occupy it. That is, while we may conceive of the writing center as a physical site, it’s equally composed of the people who visit. Who visits the center? Is it mostly freshmen and sophomores? More women than men? More students of color than white students? Unlike other aspects of an ecology, the people within an ecology are ever-changing. The racial makeup and variety of background experiences changes year-to-year based on changes in the student body.

When UHV downward expanded in 2010, we saw a very rapid demographic shift from mostly nontraditional white students to younger, browner students. A change in people, then, necessitates a change in approaches and strategies. Inoue posits, “The local diversities that make up the students and teachers of a writing assessment ecology have their own purposes for the environment and may even design the assessment ecology itself” (138). In turn, the way an ecology defines people may also define the spaces which they are allowed to occupy. In this way, we see that the writing center is not just a site of remediation—it has this designation because the people who are referred to the space are themselves seen as remedial. Inoue asks, “Is it true that African Americans and Hmong are remedial because they are not prepared to write in college, or is it true that the designation of remedial, among other elements in the system, such as the bias toward a white racial habitus in the [standardized test], constructed such racial formations as remedial?” (139). Like Greenfield, Inoue asserts that the perception of remediation, of needing help, is formed more by an assessment of student bodies than actual student writing.

Conclusion When I began to develop a training program centered around antiracist writing assessment ecologies, I had some concerns about introducing the topic to my staff. In the south, it’s somewhat gauche to discuss sexuality, gender, race, and all the other things we can see but pretend that we can’t. When I finally presented on antiracism, I made it more a discussion of ecologies and power, avoiding mentions of race. I thought, perhaps, that it would be a distraction or that I would be seen as self-serving.

What’s significant is that I felt this way even at an HSI, where I share a cultural and ethnic background with the majority of students (though, not the majority of the writing consultants). I am empowered by my supervisors and have free reign over the writing center. Yet, my doubt and insecurities remained. The

Dismantling Neutrality • 73! ! more research I did, though, the more I realized that cultivating antiracist writing assessment ecologies in a border space such as the writing center would be essential to maximize student success, regardless of race or ethnicity. Everyone can benefit from it.

Since then, I’ve created a revised writing center canon that begins with North then moves to Bawarshi’s and Pelkowski’s “Postcolonialism and the Idea of a Writing Center,” Grimm’s “The Regulatory Role of the Writing Center,” Greenfield’s “The ‘Standard English’ Fairytale,” and Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English?”

The list is expanding, Works Cited Barron, Nancy, and Nancy Grimm. “Addressing Racial Diversity in a Writing Center: Stories and Lessons from Two Beginners.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 22, no. 2, 2002, pp. 58-83.

Bawarshi, Anis, and Stephanie Pelkowski.

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

García, Gina A. “Complicating a Latina/o-serving Identity at a Hispanic Serving Institution.” The Review of Higher Education, vol. 40, no. 1, 2016, pp.

117-143.

García, Romeo. “Unmaking Gringo Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, 2017, pp. 2960.

Greenfield, Laura. “The ‘Standard English’ Fairy Tale: A Rhetorical Analysis of Racist Pedagogies and Commonplace Assumptions about Language Diversity.” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Change and Dialogue, edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, Utah State UP, 2011, pp. 33-60.

Grimm, Nancy. “The Regulatory Role of the Writing Center: Coming to Terms with a Loss of Innocence.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 17, no.

1, 1999, pp. 5-25.

Grimm, Nancy. “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform A System of Advantage Based on Race.” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Change and Dialogue, edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, Utah State UP, 2011, pp. 75-99.

Inoue, Asao B. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future.

Parlor P, 2015.

Lippi-Green, Rosina. “The Standard Language Myth.”

Language Diversity and Academic

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Writing, edited by Samantha Looker-Koenigs, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2018, pp. 212-219.

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

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

College English, vol. 46, no. 5, 1984, pp. 433-446.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, vol.

12, no. 1, 2010, pp. 110-118.

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LIMINALLY SPEAKING: PATHOS-DRIVEN APPROACHES IN AN HBCU WRITING CENTER AS A WAY FORWARD Kendra Mitchell Florida A&M University kendra.mitchell@famu.edu African American rhetorics and knowledges can be understood through a rhetorical method that is concerned with what circulates as Black, but is not limited to Black bodies, while avoiding becoming mired in the quicksand of authenticity. (27) Vorris Nunley, Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric

Tutor Reflection Matthius: From a professional point of view, I wanna show the students who come in here that you don’t have to look a certain way, you don’t have to speak a certain way to be professional or to be intelligent. So I think that’s something very important because as a child, I felt like that was something that I was constantly bombarded with—with these images, with these models of how to look, how you act, how you talk. And my thing is it shouldn’t matter how you look, how you act, how you talk as long as whatchusayin’ is worthwhile, as long as whatchusayin’ is beneficial to somebody, and you know whatchutalkin’ ‘bout. I take a lot of pride in know what I’m talking about in regards to writing, and I don’t care how I express that as long as that message gets there. . . That’s [African American language as a tool of instruction] something that I do consciously to show clients that you can still be . . . very learned and very versed in writing, in grammar, and things that are not necessarily considered . . . “popular.”

I juxtapose Vorris Nunley’s theoretical articulation alongside the reflections of participants in my 2015 case study on language interactions between selfidentified African American tutees and tutors in the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) Writing Resource Center (WRC) to provide a snapshot of the circulation of language as “black” and the varying impact of its status in this historically black university’s writing center. Following my line of thought leads you to accept that: 1) African Americans have a shared, complex language and cultural system resulting from their systematic oppression that require nuanced approaches to understand; 2) locating self in

this system does not necessarily pin one to a monolithic conflation of that black language and culture; 3) the distance travelled between the residuals (and recurrences) of slavery and the agentic ways black people use those residuals (and recurrences) began with what Geneva Smitherman termed as linguistic pushpull, the DuBoisian-influenced term referring to black people who simultaneous appreciate and ridicule their language; and 4) the process of ebbing and flowing creates another space, a linguistic liminal space, that holds cultural knowledges in-between the masked cultural language trauma. A key point is that these collective traumas are repurposed in these modern-day hush harbors toward agentic ends, posing as potentially guideposts for supporting diasporic writers.

Nunley argues that there is a codified language system existing in "hush harbors," or spaces where African Americans engage in their own discourse free of the monitoring of dominant culture (23-24). It is these spaces that a hush harbor rhetoric develops, and those African American Language (AAL) and Edited American English (EAE) writers who are typically considered “unsanctioned” become authorities of their own discourse using their own methodologies (28), Matthius serving as an example. Nunley argues, then, that we need to adopt pathos-driven listening, “the attempt to hear and interpret from the cultural, epistemic, and normative assumptions of the performer, rhetor, or group producing the performance” (153). His text urges writing programs to consider the collective benefits of a concept of the “spatial rhetoric of blackness” (McFarlane 1), drawing from the polyvocality of marginalized participants in the academy through the close reading of not only the words self-identified African Americans use, but also the spaces in which they choose to use them. I see the intentional application of pathos-driven writing center practices as potentially shifting writing center practices closer towards more equitable spaces for marked identities. Specifically, I explore the ways I applied pathos-driven listening in a space historically misheard: historically black university writing centers. I focus on Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University Writing Resource Center (FAMU WRC) because of its prominence in producing black graduate students for

Liminally Speaking • 76 predominantly white institutions and my position as an alumnus. Most historically black institutions must prepare their students to traverse racially polemic academic and social landscapes. To the contrary, persons in those hegemonic spaces are not required to be remotely curious about the habits of mind of students who attend Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). This truth is reflected in our theories and practices: the grand narratives we choose to tell about our collective identities are centered on predominantly white institutions.

Understanding the need for a tailored approach for writers who vacillate between any two dialects, particularly AAL and EAE, requires an understanding of the interlocution of the language varieties and the broader implications on the writer’s composition.

When I refer to African American Language, or AAL, I am referring to the language system of African Americans rooted in African languages (Smitherman).

Akin to AAL is African American literacies, which for my purposes here, leans heavily on Elaine Richardson’s notion that African Americans traditionally have reading and writing skills that are drawn from the same African languages as AAL and literacy curriculum, as it stands, tends to oppose these literacies through normalizing academic literacies (“Background” 8). Understanding African American literacies, then, provides more understanding of AAL. The use of AAL in this article is pinned between white scholars’ perceiving AAL as a marker for black people’s deficiencies while AAL enacted (not always perceived) . . . is more than just words, grammar, and pronunciation; it is also rhetorics . . . [and is] what we get in classrooms [and many historically black university writing centers], what we see in students’ writing, what we hear from African American orators, and what we read in African American literary works.

(Kynard 358) Edited American English is the preferred language variety for academic writing (Bartholomae; Blackledge) and is used in this article to describe the English language adapted for academic discourse. More commonly recognized as Standard English or more pedestrianly speaking “proper” or “good” English, EAE is the term I use because “edited” infers an inherent ideology, one that is at once forgotten when “standard” is used and the colloquial “proper” or “good” adjectives illustrate the pejorative implications of the use of “standard.” As with any ideology, EAE “always carries with it strong social endorsements, so that what we take to exist, to have value, and to be possible seems necessary, normal and inevitable—in

the nature of things” (Berlin 479). This normative view of standardized language affects which literacies circulate as what Lisa Delpit notes as cultural power. It is EAE that shapes writing assessments and compositionists have already begun to reimagine how EAE could marginalize non-sanctioned literacy practices, ranging from the need for multicultural rubrics (Inoue and Poe) to the language interactions of African American tutors and tutees in a public HBU writing center (Mitchell).

It’s Personal My initial instinct was to avoid writing this article for fear of stating the obvious. Where I lived, it was a rite of passage to be able to play the dozens and roll our eyes without detection well before primary school in the forbidden alleys and in backyards. We learned to spell words too adult for mainstream conversations (I still tell stories. I don’t know when I will truly be grown enough to say anything else). I live(d) hush harbor rhetorics. And based on the day-to-day operations, I am certain I am not alone.

The “Center” serves as a place where we do the “hard labor” of writing instruction: the staff’s business is that of improving communicative practices in its broadest senses. Faculty hold office hours, grade papers, revise articles. Students have sessions, use computers, or study at one of the desks. In the same breath, the WRC is a social space for staff and faculty, separately and collectively. Some students and faculty convene in the WRC to socialize with the staff between classes. As I write, I am steeped in thought before I realize just how quiet it is in the Center. It is almost time for our annual black history month convocation, so every facility is closed— therefore the temporarily displaced science tutors sprinkled around the tables are too engrossed to hear just how loud their silence is. Awaiting the remodeling of their center, the science tutors armed with white boards and dry erase boards in true call-response mode dominated our one-tutor-to-a-table rhythm in an open room. It was not the ideal shared space, but what can I say? We are family. FAMUly. The FAMU WRC’s open-door policy embodies the southern charm of its location and exhibits the familial fictive kinships characteristic within an African American worldview. It is not just what we do in this space, but it is also how and why we do it that hums silently at undetectable frequencies to the untrained ear.

Why HBCUs? More broadly, HBCUs are unique sites of education and led by administrators who are equally

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Liminally Speaking • 77 unique. Constantly trying to equip their students with an education, freed and enslaved black people perceived education as liberation and were at the forefront of universal education in the antebellum South (Anderson; Mitchell). The level of collaboration and foresight required to traverse the many challenges surrounding these institutions recognition and admiration, yet it is often met with closed hands, zipped pockets, and excessive criticism. Some prevailing attitudes among HBCUs suggest that these institutions are not far removed from the foundational, polemic nineteenth century debate between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois concerning the appropriate direction for the black race. Maisha T. Fisher explains these spaces “constitute a collective consciousness of values and ideologies sometimes carried in the minds and hearts of its participants in the absence of formal buildings or recognition from the dominant culture of power” (14).

Fisher extends her definition her definition of institution to include churches, schools, and bookstores as sites for grooming African American children for future roles in society (15). I extend this same understanding to the WRC’s role in preparing students to negotiate language in-betweenness.

The university’s early focus on liberal arts education positions it to embrace a pathos-driven approach more broadly, if taken into consideration.

President Thomas DeSaille Tucker, the first president of FAMU, wrote letters and speeches addressing many of these same concerns as it related to the Tallahassee, Florida—centered university: providing the Black attendees with a liberal arts education, one that directly opposed Washington’s Hampton-Tuskegee Model, and thus provided a blueprint for an alternative model for Blacks in the university. The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute became the programmatic model for systematically instructing Southern black students in such a way that assuaged most white people’s fear of empowering formerly enslaved Africans with what they—the enslaved Africans— wanted most, literacy. Tucker’s emphasis on literacy situated the university and its students between the pervasive racist ideology about black people’s intelligence and their own perception and literate aspirations.

A brief contextualization of the origins of historically black institutions is necessary to hedge the conversation because these intentional educational communities were forged together by legal segregation and oppression: HBCUs, by their mere existence, are counterculture (Kynard and Eddy W25; Mitchell, “Reconstructing,” 5-6). African Americans were legally prohibited from participating in and significantly

influencing the political processes which brought adequate appropriations from state legislatures, their survival was dependent mainly upon the ability of the presidents of these institutions to persuade the legislatures to give support to their causes” (Neyland V). In essence, HBCUs’ origins and survival qualify them as liminal spaces.

Liminality and Writing Centers Liminality embodies the everyday, unspoken identities of many black tutees and tutors in writing centers. Bonnie S. Sunstein, in her article, “Moveable Feasts, Liminal Spaces: Writing Centers and the State of In-Betweenness,” describes writing center spaces as antithetical to higher education because of its liminality, noting each writing interaction in writing centers as “an in-betweenness of literacy” (13). This “tangled tension between our students, their texts, and our readings of their texts” (Sunstein 14) as writing center practitioners resemble the tangled tensions of linguistic push pull for black student writers in writing centers. Wonderful Faison toils with similar concepts of liminality at the interstices of space and racial identity in a predominantly white writing center as she argues “. . . through [sic] critiquing of the physical space as home, comfortable, and anti-institutional that I began to listen intently not only to the discourse of the tutors of color, but the discourse of the tutors of color about this supposed comfortable space” (Faison and Treviño). Reading Faison’s displacement and inbetweenness alongside writing centers’ narrative of inbetweenness, reveals a paralleled experience of marginalization and an equal opportunity for possibility. It echoes Tina Campt’s description of “the unsayability of words” (85), the “modality of quiet—a sublimely expressive unsayability that exceeds both words, as well as what we associate with sound and utterance—that moves [us] toward a deeper understanding of the sonic frequencies of the quotidian practices of black communities” (95). For Sunstein and Faison, the instability presses one between the agentic and the dangerous contact zones but to different ends. Although the FAMU WRC and most HBCUs do not struggle with race in overt ways, there remain “invisible webs of behaviors, shared beliefs, and languages [as well as] . . . the absence of a culture [that] presages many programs just finding their ways into our institutions today” (Sunstein 13).

Identifying these epistemologies is an act of defiance in a society conditioned to underhear, as Nunley calls it, black utterances in hush harbors like the WRC unmasks nuances in the ways black languages and ways of knowing circulate.

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Liminally Speaking • 78 A significant part of my contributions to tutor education in the WRC intentionally points tutors towards our pathos-driven approaches, which two tutors describe in recent publications. Maiya Grace, an undergraduate WRC tutor, describes a consultation with a student whose cultural identity could benefit her essay. The tutee could not see it at first, but “simply discussing the topic of her essay forced [her] to identify certain differences between our cultural backgrounds . . . [and] made me more adaptable in how I used this.” Treasure Glover’s article, “Setting the Stage for Students to Shine,” punctuates the motivation of pathos-driven approaches: she wants students “to understand [that] translating thoughts to words is a common yet magical practice, and their words matter no matter where they may fall in the language spectrum that ranges from EAE to AAL.” Pathos-driven listening as an approach for writing studies in general and writing center practices supports multivocal African American speakers and writers.

Nicole McFarlane, in her review of Keepin It Hushed, describes this form of listening as “the valuing of black cultural expressions and epistemes as means of practical wisdom” (4), a shared desire for most writing centers. The act of centering my gaze on the linguistic gifts (Williams-Farrier) African American speakers and writers bring to the writing center is an enactment of pathos-driven hearing.

The Margins Have Something to Say The tutor and tutee reflections in this article reveal the inherent demand for something more than an addendum to writing center practices, perhaps culturally relevant pedagogies with a twist. Reflecting on the select cued recall responses of the selfidentified African American tutors and tutees in my 2015 language interaction case study attuned to the frequency of the “quiet and quotidian” (Campt) further substantiates what Tina Campt describes as “this exquisite articulate modality of quiet—a sublimely expressive unsayability that exceeds both words, as well as what we associate with sound and utterance—that moves [us] toward a deeper understanding of the sonic frequencies of the quotidian practices of black communities” (4). Said differently, those cued recalls reveal how tutors and tutees create their own hush harbors and the relevant tutoring approaches when they are left in the margins of academia to fend for themselves. The dominant patterns emerging at the intersection of AAL and EAE in the five hour-long writing consultations ranged from African American Verbal Traditions such as signifying and EAE as linearity. Listening to the

everyday language patterns of African American students revealed the various ways tutors and tutees mediated their language interactions at these intersections for two rhetorical ends: bonding or working. It demonstrates how LPP is institutionalized and repurposed for agentic ends. This example permits us to see the portability of trauma into meaning-making strategies (as the adage goes: eat the meat, throw away the bones) for all and requires a heightened focus on ways to effect systematic and systemic changes for linguistically vulnerable students in the margins beyond our hush harbors.

Applying a pathos-driven approach also holds space for reimaging apathetic tutees. Reading Natalie DeCheck’s use of amotivation—the apathetic tutee— through the lens of pathos-driven approaches, the quiet refusals of students in writing sessions no longer exist in isolation awaiting severe typecasting as lazy or unmotivated. Instead amotivation can be heard and read as LPP in three registers, (a)motivation as reticence, (a)motivation as resistance, and (a)motivation as diversion (parentheses mine). Using this concept counters the dominant narrative that sees AAL was a deterrent from the overall learning goals of the WRC, and HBCU writing centers at large.

Tutee Reflection #1 Meredith: I’m used to talking a certain way and I really didn’t project that in my paper, so I had to listen to her [Maya] and . . . “talk how you exactly talk,” so I didn’t wanna sound how people say “too proper” in my paper, but I don’t always speak as proper [as I should] so she said talk how you exactly talk so that it’s coming from you and not something else.

In this example, Meredith demonstrated reticence as (a)motivation, an explanation confirmed in her cuedrecall interview, which points to the significance of culturally significant silences. Her essay revealed instances where her intersection of AAL and EAE derailed her learning goals, so it was essential that Maya negotiate language choices with Meredith to ensure Meredith understood how to translate her AAL usage into the EAE her professor required.

Tutee Reflection #2 Celest: As a teacher [and tutor], it’s your responsibility to help your students differentiate from social communication and academic language. So . . . I guess in trying to reach out to your students . . . you just want them to be engaged initially. And then you can help them grow once you’ve got them engaged . . . You don’t want to hinder the

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Liminally Speaking • 79 language learning process by pointing out flaws.

Celest, on the other hand, demonstrated a strong command of EAE in conversation and written communication, and therefore, exhibited more African American rhetorical strategies through amotivation as resistance. She brought a graded essay (B) to her session, she experienced moments in her session when LPP produced tutee amotivation through African American verbal traditions. Matthius challenged her perception of writing oftentimes missing her initial, nonverbal resistance. Denise Troutman attributes this blind spot to the oversaturation of emphasis of the linguistic patterns of European and African American men. She pointedly concludes that while there is a similarity between “European American women’s language” and what she calls African American Women’s Language (AAWL), Troutman concludes that the differences are worth further investigation (212), to which I concur. More accurately, I argue that Troutman’s AAWL provides a fine-grained definition of signifying and indirection, terms usually defined in terms of men. This distinction is important to note because they characterize Matthius’s misreading of Celest's shifting temperaments. Celest used latching, another part of the taxonomy of assertiveness. As Troutman clarifies, latching is “a turn-taking mechanism which occurs at the end of a conversational partner’s speaking turn, avoiding an interruption or overlapping of a conversational partner’s speech” (219), in order to settle a matter or “set [sic] the record straight” (219). Celest “set the record straight” once as she quietly waited for Matthiu to complete his thought before reiterating multiple times over the course of the tutorial that her “errors” were the result of unforeseen circumstances.

Considered together, these verbal features of AAWL, AAL by extension, represent resistance as amotivation, but this resistance does not completely erode the session because the tutor eventually reads the AAL and responds with the same language, diffusing the situation AAL. Tutee Reflection #3 John: I think I got influenced when I came to America because I did go to a private school.

We spoke British English, cuz we got colonized by Great Britain. So we speak British English, so I don’t use “tryna” and stuff like that.

Diversion as amotivation manifests in John’s negotiating more global definitions of AAL and EAE. A better explanation of this point is that John’s use of diversion represented traditional African principles

that value nonlinear approaches, whereas Matthius practiced the linear structure as is preferred protocol of the WRC. Despite John’s playful nature in this session, I resisted the urge to dismiss it as an empty, solely disruptive interaction. Instead, inspired by pathos-driven listening, I viewed it in terms of LPP, concluding that these instances of amotivation were not permanent but transient, and I propose that transience is due to the shared experiences with LPP. Sharing the linguistic push-pull between tutor and tutee enabled the participants to push beyond amotivation, demonstrating a pathos-driven approach.

This valuation manifested for some participants in a deep sense of social responsibility, an example of their collective valuation of black culture. In answering this question, I also attended to three challenges: AAL instruction as a threat to “ideal blackness” in HBCUs, finding strategies for reversing the negative impact of the deficit model associated with AAL, and identifying tutors to formally teach AAL in rhetorically nuanced ways. I submit that this study reveals ways that tutors in the FAMU WRC complicate this ideal in productive ways, modeling ways they become a good example of negotiating polyvocality in these hush harbors and imports to other writing spaces.

Pathos-driven approaches demands that we listen for the quiet and the quotidian revealed in nonverbal also. Considering the implications of a frequency of nonverbal response patterns of AAL tutors and tutees functions as a counternarrative to the misreading and mishearing of black bodies in the diaspora. Writing center spaces foster a sense of community and family, allowing students and staff to collaborate on the student’s specified writing goals. This collaborative environment arguably encourages low-stakes communicative practices (Balester), which includes nonverbal communication. Tutors are often trained to be attentive to the mental and physical state of the student, including remaining aware of the student’s body language, so that the student and tutor can benefit from the exchange (Bruffee). However, tutors must learn to be culturally sensitive to the ways verbal and nonverbal communication is culturally situated, which requires extending and applying Nunley’s pathos-driven hearing to our writing contexts.

As I listened for the ways the tutors and tutees negotiate EAE and AAL in the terms of their cultural identity, I gained a greater appreciation for students’ and tutors’ rights to their own language and means of achieving their learning goals despite their traversing a historically prejudiced educational system in a site that has emerged to battle racial injustice and foster racial uplift. It was in this study that the tutors became more than proponents of a Storehouse Writing Center, fully

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Liminally Speaking • 80 engaging in lessons of skills and drills while interweaving AAL as an investment in improving the process of student writing. Through field notes, interviews, and observations, I was able to piece together the narratives of the tutees and tutors, such as Matthius, who is acutely aware of and confident in his uses of AAL and EAE as a means of getting work done while connecting to the shared human experiences. Pathos-driven listening allows us to move beyond pigeon-holing his use of these languages as a mistake meant to be edited by the strictures of monolinguistic views and hear how his approach to tutoring is for bonding and working functions as an extension of his philosophy of life, which speaks to the value this study adds to composition and writing center studies.

It is fair to say, then, that neglecting LPP would mean to overlook the substantial contributions of AAL writers and tutors who wrestle for their language rights on their own terms. This article demonstrates not only that AAL is dynamic, but it also informs us of its importance as a medium of instruction and reminds us that AAL, as with all languages, enmeshes the productive tensions in the margins of AAL and EAE or any liminal space. As Bonnie Williams-Farrier informs us, “Ebonics [AAL] is not just an ‘American thing.’ Ebonics is diaspora in language” (219). The educational system has yet to capitalize on all that can be learned from the ways we do language and learning strategies in our neck of the woods. Liminally speaking.

Works Cited Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. U of North Carolina P, 1988.

Balester, Valerie. “How Writing Rubrics Fail: Toward a Multicultural Model.” Race and Writing Assessment, edited by Asao B. Inoue and Mya Poe, Peter Lang, 2012.

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.”

Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 5, no. 1, 1986.

Brufee, Kenneth. “Peer Tutoring and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’” The Longman Guide to Writing Center Theory and Practice, edited by Robert W. Barnett and Jacob S Blumner, Pearson, 2008, pp. 206-218, Berlin, James.Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges 1900-1985. Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Campt, Tina M. Listening to Images. Duke UP, 2017.

Ebook. Amazon Kindle. 2 Feb 2019.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Barnes & Noble Classics Series, 2003.

DeCheck, Natalie. “The Power for Common Interest for Motivating Writers: A Case Study.” The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research, edited

by Lauren Fitzgerald and Melissa Ianetta, pp. 33642.

Delpit, Lisa.“The Silenced Pedagogy: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children.”

Harvard Review vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 280-98, 1988.

Faison, Wonderful and Anna Treviño. “Race, Retention, Language, and Literacy: The Hidden Curriculum of the Writing Center.” The Peer Review, vol. 1, no. 2, 2017. thepeerreviewiwca.org/issues/braver-spaces/race-retentionlanguage-and-literacy-the-hidden-curriculum-ofthe-writing-center/.

Fitzgerald, Lauren and Melissa Ianetta, eds. The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research. Oxford UP, 2016.

Glover, Treasure. “Setting the Stage for Students to Shine.” Dangling Modifier, vol. 24, no. 2, 2018. sites.psu.edu/thedanglingmodifier/?p=3853.

Grace, Maiya. “Addressing Writing Insecurity among Minority Students & Cultural Differences in the Writing Center.” Dangling Modifier, vol. 24, no. 2, 2018. sites.psu.edu/thedanglingmodifier/?p=3855.

Inoue and Poe, eds. Race and Writing Assessment. Peter Lang, 2012.

Kynard, Carmen. Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies. State U of New York P, 2013.

Kynard, Carmen, and Robert Eddy. “Toward a New Critical Framework: Color-Conscious Political Morality and Pedagogy at Historically Black and Historically White Colleges and Universities.”

College Composition and Communication, vol. 61, no. 1, 2009, pp. W24-W42.

McFarland, Nicole. “Review of Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric

by Vorris L. Nunley for JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, & Politics. Forthcoming. uncfsu.academia.edu/NicoleAMcFarlane.

Mitchell, Kendra L. Language in the Center: A Case Study of Multilingualism in an Historically Black University Writing Center. 2015. Florida State U, PhD dissertation. purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_2016SP_Mitchell_fsu_ 0071E_13018.

Mitchell, Kendra. “Reconstructing Reconstruction: A Sociohistorical Perspective on A Digital Curriculum Initiative on an Historically Black College or University (HBCU).” Postcolonial Composition Pedagogy: Using the Culture of Students to

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Liminally Speaking • 81 Teach Writing, edited by Monique Akassi, Robbie Dean Press, 2011, pp. 140-59.

Neyland, Leedell W. Historically Black Land-Grant Institutions and the Development of Agriculture and Home Economics, 1890-1990. Florida A&M University Foundation, 1990.

Nunley, Vorris. Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric. Wayne State UP, 2011.

Richardson, Elaine. African American Literacies.

Routledge, 2003.

Sunstein, Bonnie S. “Moveable Feasts, Liminal Spaces: Writing Centers and the State of In-Betweenness.”

Writing Center Journal, vol. 18, no. 2, 1998, www.jstor.org/stable/43442045.

Troutman, Denise. “African American Women: Talking That Talk.” Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins, 2001, pp. 211-37.

Williams-Farrier, Bonnie. “Signifying, Narrativizing, and Repetition: Radical Approaches to Theorizing African American Language.” Meridians, vol. 15, no. 1, 2016, pp. 218-42.

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 16 No 2 (2019)

REVIEW OF PERFORMING ANTIRACIST PEDAGOGY IN RHETORIC, WRITING, AND COMMUNICATION, BY FRANKIE CONDON AND VERSHAWN ASHANTI YOUNG JWells University of Texas at Austin Jzwells3@utexas.edu Condon, Frankie, and Vershawn Ashanti Young.

Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, W riting, and Communication.

The WAC Clearinghouse, 2017. $30.95.

Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication presents reflections, conversations, and assignments from multiple educators that serve as examples of how we are reconstructing and/or allowing racism in our classrooms, as well as how we can improve our problematic behavior. Divided into three sections—including three to four articles each— that are preceded by a foreword and introduction, Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in its entirety reinforces the idea that antiracist work begins with acknowledging your racial presence in the academy and evaluating how this presence coincides or collides with your students’ identities.

Taking us back to one of the first places we experienced racism, Asao B. Inoue’s foreword “On Antiracist Agendas” critically reflects on the use of whiteliness by his teacher, Ms. Whitmore, to respond to the intersections of race and language in their second-grade classroom. Inoue explains that while teachers like Ms. Whitmore tend to have good intentions, their methods for treating students fair and equal are often flawed because they do so based on their rules of what is offensive or appropriate— deciding for black and brown students what the language they were immersed in means to them, rather than asking them. Inoue advises readers to resist these “whitely ways”—yes, all teachers can perpetuate whitely ways—and instead adopt an antiracist agenda, which “offers an understanding or explanation of race, racism, and the particular racial formations that develop in and around the classroom or program in question” (xvii).

Inoue’s foreword sets the tone for the intended audience, which is reinforced by Condon and Young’s introduction. Condon and Young address their book to educators who “are thinking carefully and critically about race, racism, and pedagogy . . . [,] [who] understand racism is real and already have some grasp

of its impacts on the lives of people of color . . . and [who] have some investment in action from where you are to teach for racial justice” (7). Condon and Young also provide these educators with context, working definitions, and key concepts, as well as manifestations that justify antiracist work as necessary, and they engage in conversations regarding this work in the academy. Reminding us that—contrary to post-racial rhetoric—we are not in living a post-racial society, Condon and Young assert that understanding the racism within our academy as well as the racism outside of it is foundational in “teaching writing across the disciplines as a vehicle for engaging students in resistance to racism in their own lives . . . ” (11). While Condon and Young’s introduction frames the injustices that students experience as a result of our society’s racial climate, the ten articles that follow make us aware of how we as individuals unconsciously and consciously preserve this racism within and alongside our institutions.

The works that make up Section One, “Actionable Commitments,” shift educators from recognizing racial injustices in the academy to enacting action by “embracing a willingness to be disturbed” (Diab et al.

19), acknowledging and unlearning bad habits (Logue), listening to counterstories (Martinez), and making space for linguistic diversity in our classrooms (Poe).

Acknowledging “a great deal of self-work is required on the journey of growth from articulating a commitment to racial justice to making that commitment actional and sustainable,” Rasha Diab et al.’s “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable” serves as a guide for “[a] moving from confessional narratives [b] with a ‘willingness to be disturbed’ (Wheatley, 2002, p. 34) [c] to articulations of commitment that are [c] paired with reflective action” (20). Diab et al. prioritize self-work but also encourage “work-with-others” to move racism from an individual problem that can be quickly solved to a shared recognition that racism is a global and political issue that has largely local and personal effects. With pictures to assist in contextualizing his personal journey, Calvin M. Logue’s “Teaching African

Merging Tutoring and Editing in a Chinese Graduate Writing Center • 83 American Discourse” models this willingness to be disturbed. To explain his motivation for proposing and teaching the first “Black Rhetoric” course at the University of Georgia in the 1970s, Logue recounts select interactions he had with African Americans as a white male who had been “socialized in rigid racial segregation” in Alabama during the 50s and 60s (44).

Logue credits his commitment to helping university students “examine the continuing efforts of African Americans to achieve equal rights, opportunities, and protections for the self . . . ” (49) to the times in which African Americans have provided him with safety, despite his family privately disapproving segregation conditions, but publicly adhering to them.

Mya Poe’s “Reframing Race in Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum” reinforces this need to situate race locally. Poe suggests instructors do so by figuring out our student’s needs, evaluating what expectations we bring to the table and by understanding the link between race and multilingualism. Referring to a workshop she conducted with first-year-seminar instructors, Poe confirms instructors often times assume African American, Native American, and Latino/a students will need more help with their writing. Poe suggests we check our biases by simply counting the comments we provide to different students or by marking student papers without the names on them (98). Aja Y. Martinez’s “A Plea for Critical Race Theory Counterstory” places a counterstory alongside a stockstory to propose the use of critical race theory in rhetoric and composition scholarship. She first displays the faculty’s critique of Mexican Ph.D. student Alejandra’s inability to write about anything other than race, keep up with conversations in class, and come to office hours.

Martinez juxtaposes this critique with Alejandra and her mami’s recollection of her attempting to use coursework as a way to explore her area of interest in race and being repeatedly shutdown or dismissed when asking for help from professors who kept mistakenly identifying her as Chicana. Martinez’s method forces educators to recognize how their refusal to accommodate students from marginalized populations and to acknowledge their racial presence causes graduate students to fail. In effect, Martinez’s proposal also provides a method for calling our departments out for pacifying and allowing racism to pervade our classrooms.

The articles in Section Two, “Identity Matters,” exemplify how the insecurities and privileges associated with our identities cause us to feel othered in our academic spaces, which at times influences us to perform in whitely ways. Octavio Pimentel et al.’s “The Myth of the Colorblind Writing Classroom” situates

narratives from two white instructors who, by grappling with their antiracist approaches to their writing classes, show the deconstruction of whiteness is continual and needs more than one approach. While one instructor, Victoria, decided to include multicultural texts in her syllabus but not talk about race directly, the other, Michael, immediately admitted his white male privilege to his class. Nonetheless, both approaches alone left students of color still feeling muted, Pimental et al. report. Also contemplating the presence of whiteness in their classrooms, Dae-Joong Kim and Bobbi Olson’s “Deconstructing Whiteness in the Globalized Classroom” shares their conversations about the ways in which they both enact whiteliness when teaching. Olson reflects on her experiences as a white instructor teaching a class full of non-white students, realizing her otherness as a white woman in this situation granted her the same authority it did working with all-white students. On the contrary, Kim’s otherness as a non-white international teacher in predominantly all-white classrooms put him in “an unstable position” where he felt it necessary to enact whiteliness in order to establish authority (151). Similar to Kim, Deatra Sullivan-Morgan’s personal narrative “Why Am I So Damaged” admits feelings of imposter syndrome. Sullivan-Morgan says as a black woman it’s been ingrained in her from birth to work twice as hard, and in doing so she’s become a “Ph. Diva” 160). But even with that success, she feels she is still struggling to swim through the “shark infested waters surrounding the ivory tower,” still questioning “will the fear ever leave me?” (160). Sullivan-Morgan’s narrative, like the other authors’ feelings of apprehensiveness regarding our identities’ place in the academy, is the result of the academy not following an antiracist agenda.

All featuring sample assignments completed by undergraduate and graduate students, the articles in Section Three, “In the Classroom,” demonstrate how students engaged with the topic of race and with race and language in writing courses, as well as how their instructors attempted to respond to this engagement.

Using a few essays written by a Puerto Rican male student and African American male student in her class, Sophia Bell’s “‘Whiteboys’” provides support for adapting Mary Lousie Pratt’s (1991) vision of classrooms as contact zones and for viewing the texts written by marginalized students in these contact zones as autoethnographic. Bell discusses how these two students used their assigned narrative project to interrogate their whiteness and the whiteness surrounding them; one student’s work shows signs of playing into the whiteness assigned to him, and the other’s work tries to disassociate from it. Their complicated relationship with whiteness is what made

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Merging Tutoring and Editing in a Chinese Graduate Writing Center • 84 it difficult for Bell to respond, as she had an impulse to encourage them to reject whiteness (191). Jessica Parker also requires students to engage critically with their race and class. In “Writing and Unwriting Race,” Parker discusses an activity that uses hip hop and a “Propaganda Exercise” to connect hip-hop texts with canonical works. Parker offers hip-hop as a framework for discussing race and class because it “provides a familiar foundation from which to explore these issues,” whereas canonical texts, when assigned alone, can leave students feeling uncomfortable with or distant from the context (198). In this chapter, Parker also gives us “A Note on Language” policy statement from the syllabus, which is used to recognize the power of language and the value of other discourses.

Both Parker and Bell agree there needs to be a foundation for discussing race specifically before writing about it. Using theatrics as a vehicle, Timothy Lensmire et al.’s “Dangerous Play,” too, supplies a creative approach to investigating race. Lensmire and his student co-authors use this chapter to reflect on their experience with Lensmire’s “Show Off Your Bakhtin Contest”’ assignment, which instructs students to put on a brief play where they “dazzle their friends and best enemies by making believe that you understand Bakhtin and you can apply his ideas to that which you apply them” (213). Lensmire suggested groups apply their Bakhtinian skills to terms that came up in the short essays they wrote discussing their interactions with language. One group used an essay written by Rebecca, the only black student in the class, who wrote about her son’s use of the phrase “niggah please” (212). While students were initially uncomfortable with the presentation, they ultimately seemed to appreciate being forced to realize more about their unprocessed feelings regarding language.

Posting the names of twenty out of hundreds of black individuals murdered by police officers, as well as listing colleges where students protested, occupied administrative buildings, and made demands for racial justice—the epilogue brings us back to Condon and Young’s advice to be aware of the racial injustices our students are facing, as well as their calls for educators to join students in their antiracist activism.

Because the texts in this collection do so well at capturing the whitely ways of all instructors—which is usually a strategy to overcompensate for insecurities— this text is especially useful for graduate students and novice instructors. I also believe this text serves as a resource to help graduate students of color initiate a conversation with our advisors, professors, and departments about the discomfort we feel within our programs. In addition, Diab at al., Poe, and Kim directly and indirectly provide content useful to writing

centers; however, I would have liked to have seen at least a couple of articles fully dedicated to explaining how writing consultants can respond to constructions of racism in student papers.

Performing Antiracist Pedagogy provides educators with a sense of responsibility and reality, which is why some of these articles are a bit difficult to read. Rather than just offering a checklist of best practices, exercises and workshops, or tips for handling heated discussions, Performing Antiracist Pedagogy provides educators with methods to address the insecurities, stereotypes, and whiteliness they bring into the classroom. If you read this text and don’t feel as if you, too, have accidentally enacted whiteliness in the same ways these other educators have, then you’re not doing the work.

Works Cited Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.”

Profession, 1991, pp. 33-40.

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