21.2 Interrogating Intricate Entanglements in the Writing Center (UPDATE)

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Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 21, No. 2 (2024)

VOL. 21, NO. 2 (2024): INTERROGATING INTRICATE ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE WRITING CENTER TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHORS COLUMNS From the Editors: Interrogating Intricate Entanglements in the Writing Center Tristan Hanson and Emma Conatser The Things Left Unsaid: Student Death and Writing Centers Genie Giaimo

FOCUS ARTICLES Defining and Learning About Multilingual Linguistic and Professional Labor in the Writing Center Context: An Autoethnographic Tutor Perspective Saurabh Anand Writing Centers’ Entanglements with Neoliberal Success Crystal Bazaldua, Tekla Hawkins, & Randall W. Monty, Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM and Health Sciences Populations Candis Bond and James Garner What makes a Writing Center Experience Useful? Perceptions of Native, Non-native, and Generation 1.5 Writers Grant Eckstein and Kate Matthews

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 21, No. 2 (2024)

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Genie Giaimo is Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Middlebury College, where they serve as the writing center director. Their research has appeared in Praxis, Writing Center Journal, TPR, Journal of Writing Research, Kairos, Journal of Writing Analytics, Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, and several other peer reviewed journals in rhetoric and composition. They are the author of Unwell Writing Centers: Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond (2023) and the editor of Wellness and Care in Writing Center Work (2021).

Saurabh Anand holds an MA in TESOL and is an assistant director of the University of Georgia Writing Center, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition Studies in the Department of English. His research interests include autoethnography, writing centers in multilingual contexts, and decolonial writing center pedagogies.

Crystal Bazaldua, M.A., graduated with a master’s degree in English Studies from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and now teaches first-year writing as a lecturer in the UTRGV Writing Program. She is currently a PhD student of Technical Communication & Rhetoric at Texas Tech University.

Tekla Hawkins is an Assistant Professor at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley; their research focuses on accessibility and pedagogy.

Randall W. Monty is an associate professor of rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies, and the former associate director of the Writing Center at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His work is at the intersection of political discourse, spatial literacy, and science writing.

Candis Bond is director of the Center for Writing Excellence at Augusta University, where she is also an associate professor of English. Her research interests include dimensions of writing center labor, writing in STEM, WAC/WID, and higher education leadership. She has published scholarship in journals such as Writing Center Journal, WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, Praxis, Southern Discourse in the Center, and The Peer Review.

James Donathan Garner is associate director of the Center for Writing Excellence at Augusta University.

His research interests include professional development for writing center practitioners, interconnections between writing center and WAC/WID pedagogy, technology in writing instruction, and the history of rhetoric. His work has appeared in Rhetorica and The Journal for the History of Rhetoric..

Grant Eckstein is a professor of linguistics at Brigham Young University where he teaches graduate academic writing and teacher training courses. His research interests include second language reading and writing development and pedagogy, including issues related to first-year composition and writing center praxis. He is the associate editor of Journal of Response to Writing and has published in The Writing Center Journal, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and The Peer Review.

Kate Matthews holds a master’s degree in TESOL from Brigham Young University. She teaches English classes in Utah. Her research interests include second language acquisition and writing with an emphasis on feedback.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 21, No. 2 (2024)

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: INTERROGATING INTRICATE ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE WRITING CENTER Tristan Hanson University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com

Emma Conatser University of Texas at Austin praxisuwc@gmail.com

As writing center practitioners, we often find ourselves tangled in situations that have no easy solutions and searching for help. Whether confronting crises, mediating the desires of institutions and individuals, communicating with tutees, or developing and assessing our practices, we rely on our personal and communal experiences, as well as work of our colleagues, to guide us through. The articles in this issue probe some of our thornier entanglements by first revealing them and then offering useful guides for how we might deal with them both personally and communally. In doing so, they offer us concrete first steps for addressing the kinds of problems that keep us up at night.

From there, Candis Bond and James Garner propose a new way of thinking about professional tutors and STEM consultations in “Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM and Health Sciences Populations.” The article discusses the way one health science university writing center prepares graduate and professional tutors to address the increasing need for advanced writing guidance in STEM areas specifically. Bond and Garner propose a training program for equipping these tutors to work with STEM writers with confidence in multiple genres and contexts.

Genie Giaimo’s column essay begins the issue by addressing “the things left unsaid” in her book Unwell Writing Centers and in writing centers generally, namely, student death. Giaimo frames her personal experiences of student death as an administrator with evidence of the increasing need for writing center practitioners to develop practices “to plan for, respond to, and address student death.”

Crucially, these practices should draw on experiential knowledge, crisis response work, and postvention planning to move beyond sterilized institutional responses to potentially traumatic crises.

In this issue’s first focus article, Saurabh Anand provides an autoethnographic look at linguistic labor in the writing center. Anand uses the “betweener” framework to position multilingual tutors as those who are best equipped to meet the unique needs of multilingual tutees. The article features three episodes of this framework in action from Anand’s lived experiences as a tutor, highlighting the way linguistic labor is navigated in each case.

Crystal Bazaldua, Tekla Hawkins, and Randall W. Monty follow with an interrogation of the assumptions behind the use of the ideograph “success” in writing center discourse. Using a Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis, the authors examine the webspaces of writing centers in a large state university system for how they deploy “success.” Through their analysis, they conclude that writing centers may be propping up institutionalized neoliberal and white-supremacist discourses and structures even as they espouse and enact more equitable practices in their day-to-day operations.

In the issue’s final piece, Grant Eckstein and Kate Matthews reveal students’ perceptions of the “usefulness” of our centers. Specifically, they compare survey data on usefulness across three student groups: native English speakers, non-native English speakers, and those “who straddle the nuanced divide between native and non-native language proficiency,” Generation 1.5. In comparing these groups, the authors find that, while writing centers seem to be useful for nearly all students there are measurable differences between how different groups assess their experiences. They close by calling for further research that considers “the unique challenges faced by non-traditional students.”

We’d like to conclude this introduction by thanking our authors, reviewers, and readers for their hard work and engagement with the journal. As the outgoing editors, we are so grateful to have been a part of this scholarly community and are proud of all the work that we’ve overseen at Praxis. We’d especially like to thank our editorial assistants, Sydney Patterson and Ava Hammon, for their hard work promoting and copy editing the journal while also working as consultants and staffing the front desk.

They were an immense help this semester and deserve a lot of credit for supporting the publication of this issue. We offer our farewell knowing that the important conversations represented here will continue beyond our editorship and hope to see you all in writing centers, at conferences, and in the pages of Praxis soon.

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 21, No. 2 (2024)

THE THINGS LEFT UNSAID: STUDENT DEATH AND WRITING CENTERS Genie Giaimo Middlebury College

ggiaimo@middlebury.edu Content Warning: This article contains discussion of student death, suicide, murder, school shooting, sexual violence, domestic violence, cancer.

Introduction: Haunted by Death There is a ghost that haunts my book. It is called by many names—trauma, crisis, emergency—but, really, the ghost is death. My book is haunted by but never really confronts death.

I wrote Unwell Writing Centers because I had a lot to say about the worrisome movement of the wellness industry into higher education. I also felt like our field could benefit from non-optimization framings of wellness work. I wrote about my desperate desire to keep my tutors (and myself) safe. Crises strike our colleges and universities with alarming regularity. After COVID-19, I rarely find a practitioner or educator who tells me that I am overreacting about the mental health crisis we are facing or the wellness-related challenges of working within the managed university.

Emergency plans and crisis response work have been normalized and are highly visible to those of us who work in higher education. We live and breathe emergencies.

At the same time, I am witnessing practitioners’ desire for more. I am realizing that no matter the plan, no matter the preparation, there will always be some new crisis thrown at us, so long as we continue to work in academia (and even if we leave). The ultimate crisis, I believe, is student death. I can’t continue to write about how we keep ourselves and our students safe from harm—a major goal of emergency planning—without acknowledging that student death is the ultimate thing I am trying to prevent. I am saying the thing left unsaid in Unwell Writing Centers: we need to prepare writing centers, and ourselves, for the possible crisis of a student death.

As new writing center directors, we are often not trained or prepared for much of the work we do.

While some graduate programs provide courses on writing program administration that include writing

center work, the day-to-day lived experiences of administrators might play second string to other seemingly more important official duties. We might learn best practices in running a writing program or how to balance institutional mission with programmatic vision. If we are lucky, we might learn how to manage a budget, how to mentor and manage student workers, or how to create professional development programs. We might also learn how to assess our programs for efficacy.

I write tentatively here, using “might” because many of us do not get this kind of training, and no amount of training will prepare us for complex and unanticipated experiences we have on the job, such as active aggressor situations, pandemics, or other traumatic events. We are especially unprepared to handle student death.

Now, death is not the conclusion of every emergency. Some emergencies, like a bad snowstorm or a cyberattack—both of which are statistically more likely to occur than a pandemic or active aggressor situation—might seem terribly mundane and not all that dangerous, though weather can be. But what keeps me up at night are not the mundane and non-injurious emergency scenarios; it is the crises that lead to death with which I am concerned.

As academic workers, we are likely to experience an emergency or crisis at some point in our career. In my book, I argue that we should be prepared for pre-and post-crisis work. I also write about how to prepare for crises, as writing centers are often left out of official institutional emergency plans. On the emergency plan for our building, for example, the writing center didn’t exist; it was a big gaping hole in the plan. No one knew we were there. No one told us what to do in case of an emergency in our space.

Coincidentally, our space was what one might consider to be the least optimal for sheltering in place: a long continuous room with one main door and three side doors and giant floor-to-ceiling windows. So, in my book, I provide resources for building in-program

The Things Left Unsaid • 3 emergency plans specific to the space and structure of writing centers.

But this is where my book ends. I write about the lead-up. I write about the aftermath. I don’t wade into the specifics. I don’t speak directly about what to do when a student, or even multiple students, dies. It is here in this uncomfortable and tragic possibility that I locate this piece. It is an omission I only recognized after the publication of my book, which I worked on for over five years. This omission speaks to my development as a writing administrator and the ways in which new tragic experiences continue to shape my work. However, this omission also reverberates throughout our field—its silence is deafening. There are so few articles, as my overview below shows, about student death, yet writing centers are likely to feel death acutely when it occurs, even outside the center.

So, to remedy my omission—to expel this ghost haunting my book—I write here about student death.

I hope that this conversation continues. It is only the beginning.

Preparing for Crisis: Emails in a Folder This journey started when I first became a writing center director. I was in the first semester of my work and an email hit the WCenter Listserv asking how one might address the death of a tutor. I have maintained that folder (labeled “in case of tutor death”) for ten years. And I have added to it. Most of these emails, however, are just that: folk information shared in moments of acute crisis.

This is not to say that relying on one’s community for support and guidance in a moment of acute crisis—like the death of a tutor—is wrong. The challenge is that these conversations occur intermittently and, often, only in the moment of crisis.

They do not anticipate student death. They do not assess response post-death. They do not engage in proactive rather than reactive work around death and loss. They do not, in other words, form a complete whole on how to cope with a tragic and emotionally charged event, nor do they really tell us what works or what is preventative.

The field of writing center studies has published little on death. Keyword searches for the term often result in reference to metaphors about our work, such as “working ourselves to death” (Ede 5), being “meeting-ed to death” (Simpson et al. 80), and “death knells” in the profession (Giaimo; Kinkead; Spitzer-Hanks). There are also several references to

metaphorical death in writing center praxis (Petit 113; Carino 40). There are a few instances where the trauma of death seeps in, such as a student who writes about workplace sexual harassment and being “scared to death” (Welch 77); Thomas Spitzer-Hanks’s blog on gun violence’s impact on the physical and “spiritual” work of writing centers; and Marilee Brooks-Gillies’s article “Constellations across cultural rhetorics and writing centers,” which details the impact of familial death on academic work. In tutoring work, death is often the topic of research papers rather than personal and reflective writing (Blau et al.; Mackiewicz and Thompson; Williams).

There are, however, several articles and books that discuss the very real instances of death among minoritized people, such as those from the BIPOC community and from the LGBTQIA+ community, and how these deaths shape the work of BIPOC and queer writing center workers. In Queerly Centered, Travis Webster discusses the increased rates of murder among BIPOC transgender people as well as how the deaths of queer people impact queer writing center administrators. For these administrators, there are traumatic queer historical touchstones like the AIDS crisis, or the outing and subsequent suicide of a queer college student, that are profoundly impactful. Andrew J. Rihn and Jay D. Sloan—centering their argument in gay suicide and matters of life and death for the queer community—offer a very limited annotated bibliography of writing center scholarship centered on LQBTQIA issues.

Zandra L. Jordan’s “Womanist Curate, Cultural Rhetorics Curation, and Antiracist, Racially Just Writing Center Administration” details the deaths of George Floyd, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland and Renisha McBride and the impact they had on her and her tutors, demonstrating that we do not do our work in a vacuum. Jordan argues for “life giving” practices in and around the writing center that include, but are not limited to, anti-racist practices. Neisha-Anne Green discusses the Black Lives Matter movement and “who among us actually matters, both in life and in death” (18). Green also describes the challenges Black activists face, such as burnout and suicidal ideation when she tells the story of Jedidiah Brown (20). She rightly asks how BIPOC writing center workers—who might lack the community that Jedidiah Brown had—can continue to do their work in the face of micro-and-macro-aggressions. In a follow-up piece, Green discloses her own challenges with well-being

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The Things Left Unsaid • 4 and notes her reluctance to self-disclose (19). Her articles rightly address the very real physical and emotional challenges that BIPOC workers face in writing studies, including how BIPOC people are at higher risk of death.

While BIPOC writing center workers and queer writing center workers make far more frequent reference to death, there are moments when death punctures the tutorial or even characterizes the main processing work of a tutorial. Citing Nancy Welch, Elizabeth Boquet discusses “death work” and “life work” in her book Noise from the Center (39). Framed in Lacanian terms, the writer works through their experiences of war within the confines of the writing center. Here, writing about death and life enables deeper understanding and trauma processing. Many researchers over the years have discussed how writing enables us to work through grief, loss, and other traumas related to death (Pennebaker and Beall; Range et al.; Travagin et al.). Writing about grief and death can specifically facilitate grief recovery, though several studies found that anxiety and depression are not mitigated by writing (Range et al.; Travagin et al.; Breen et al.).

While Hillary Degner et al. argue for more research on the rising challenges tutors face with mental health concerns—a call that has been met with several publications on mindfulness, wellness, and emotional labor research (see my “A Matter of Method: Wellness and Care Research in Writing Center Studies” for a review of recent literature)–there are almost no articles or stories that I could find that specifically work through the death of a tutor or a student closely related to the writing center. Like many of the challenges we face in our work, we tend to write around the issue. We write about how it arises in tutorials as part of assigned writing, or how it punctures the lived experiences of marginalized writing center workers, or the ways in which death might drive or impact our administrative work. At the same time, little space has been given in our research publications about facing death and processing grief and trauma in the writing center, or what we can do as administrators and tutors when there is a death in our community.

There is, however, a lot of lived experience on the topic that circulates in informal online communities and among our personal and professional networks.

After sharing stories about my experience of student death, I aggregate what informal knowledge I found on death in the writing center from within the field.

Then, I turn to some of the best practices and

resources I have drawn from outside the field, namely in crisis response work and postvention planning.

Aggregating these materials is a continuation of my book’s project; it is critical for us to examine our experiences, to collect our community’s knowledge, and to explore what other related fields have learned about student death. Putting these practices together starts a necessary if also uncomfortable conversation.

As I have learned through personal experience and through secondary research, death does happen. We need to begin these conversations proactively before a crisis is upon us.

The Normalization of Student Death on College Campuses At my previous institution, student death occurred often. It happened on campus and off campus. It happened among currently enrolled students and among alumni. It happened so frequently that, at one point, my tutors told me that they couldn’t keep track of everyone who died. Messages were sent out after the more high-profile student deaths, and task forces were established. However, I don’t recall additional mental health support services, canceled classes, memorials, anniversaries, or anything other than emails sent by University communications. The day after sheltering in place for hours due to what was initially reported as an active shooting situation, classes resumed. A week later, armed gun rights activists marched through our campus supporting a House bill that enabled institutions to permit concealed carry on their campuses.

During the active aggressor situation, a student died and many (at least 11) were hospitalized with injuries. Complexly, however, the student who died was the attacker; there was little mourning of this student because of the grief and devastation they caused to so many in our community. The active aggressor situation raised other issues related to gun rights: the alienation of Muslim students of color (the aggressor was a Muslim student of color who expressed feelings of alienation in our campus newspaper), the growing nation-wide mental health crisis, and, of course, student death and injury. Issues related to the 2016 Presidential election (Trump was elected a few weeks before the attack), like the rising hate crimes on and around campus, also contributed to this situation but were never addressed by the institution. Death can be bound-up with politics, institutional crisis management, institutional self-protection, and several other local and national

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The Things Left Unsaid • 5 networks of power. Death and trauma can also be made into a spectacle for opportunistic and bad faith actors from outside the university community.

This was a high-profile death and injury crisis on campus, but it was not the only one by a longshot. In the 2016–2017 year, there were six suicides (Hendrix).

In the year and a half that followed, four more students would attempt suicide. Over a four-day period in spring 2018, two students jumped from the same university building. One died, one survived (614 Now). A writing tutor witnessed one of these attempts. They held the person’s hand while waiting for the ambulance. When the tutor told me about this experience, my stomach churned, my body tensed, and I was unable to speak.

There were still more student deaths. Regan Tokes was raped and murdered on her way back home from work. Heather Campbell was murdered by her boyfriend—who then died by suicide—in a domestic dispute, also off campus (Wells). After each death, I sent emails, I offered resources, I developed training, I added questions to my longitudinal assessment on tutor well-being.

Yet even as I try here to catalog the number of student deaths, I struggle with chronology. I struggle to convey meaning. There were times when student deaths would come so quickly that it became nearly impossible to respond without flooding my already flooded staff. I did, however, make changes in the spaces I nominally controlled. I arranged REACH Suicide Prevention training for tutors. I shared materials on domestic violence and stalking. I brought the topic of death into our weekly mentorship meetings. I assessed how tutors experienced student death. Most of the data from assessing the efficacy of these interventions didn’t make it into my book but one finding that did was how a tutor reported back that the training allowed them to broach the topic of suicide with their romantic partner. They were able to use their training to get their partner support at a moment of utmost crisis. Another finding was that tutors respond to death in mixed ways: some are deeply impacted, some are not. The more a tutor feels unaligned with the institution by identity markers like race, gender, sexuality, and political stances, the more they report being impacted by student death and other crises. From these findings we can surmise that tutors use their training in non-work situations and that our tutors’ identities impact their sense of belongingness in our institutions. Writing centers, then, can play a pivotal role in preparing tutors for the challenges of

addressing and processing student death but, also, tutors are differentially affected by such crises based on their own positionality within the community. We need to learn more about how tutors process crises in and around our centers because these issues invariably impact our workplace and our community.

Despite how widely higher education institutions vary, they respond to student death in strikingly similar ways. Some of these responses are intentional and include policies that have been developed in reaction to crises. My book, for example, discusses how nation-wide interventions—such as the Clery Act which requires colleges and universities to disclose campus crimes and security policies—were enacted because of tragedy and death. In 1986, Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in her campus dorm. After her death, there was a call to report crime statistics, to alert campus to imminent dangers, and to produce annual security reports. The Clery Act aims to protect students through systematically reporting on previously unreported crimes; it is an attempt to reduce potential harm through institutional transparency requirements. Another communication failure—at Virginia Tech during an active shooter situation—contributed to the development of large scale and system-level communications in emergency communication through campus-wide alert systems.

During the Virginia Tech school shooting, a series of communication failures (including a delayed set of active shooter announcements) led to students coming onto campus during the shooting. Once again, a university’s communication failures contributed to student death. This incident gave rise to campus-wide alert systems among other emergency planning interventions, many of which were provided by for-profit vendors (Foster).

Communication, of course, matters during moments of dire distress and crisis. In my book, I argue that proactive—rather than reactive—approaches to crisis are necessary for the safeguarding and well-being of our communities.

Emergency planning, as an example, is critical to writing center directors who might otherwise not be included in official university plans, which I experienced. But the subtext here is how to carry on once students—and other community members—have died. What happens in the aftermath?

Much of the emergency planning that we do is to ensure that this doesn’t happen or, if it does, to mitigate further loss. Ultimately, of course, we hope that planning prevents loss, but it seems more a matter

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The Things Left Unsaid • 6 of when—rather than if—death will occur, as I have found both from personal experience and from data on college-aged student death rates.

A Matter of When Rather than If: Preparing for Student Death Through Examining Death Rates Among College-Aged Youth The CDC lists the following as the leading causes of deaths in 15-19-year-olds: accidents (unintentional injuries), homicide, suicide. Among those 15-24, the World Health Organization offers a profile of risk that includes “accidents and injuries, self-harm and interpersonal violence” (“Key Facts”). Males in this age group are at higher risk for these kinds of deaths than females (“Key Facts”). In the past year, 41% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered attempting suicide (“Facts About Suicide Among LGBTQ+ Young People”). Black transgender and nonbinary young people reported disproportionately higher rates of suicide risk: in the past year, 58% seriously considered suicide and 25% attempted suicide (“Facts About Suicide Among LGBTQ+ Young People”).

While youth deaths are declining around the world, in the United States they are stagnant or rising (Yorke).

It is, however, difficult to find aggregated university data on cause of death among students in higher education including accidental deaths (Kim; Turner et al.). A recent study supports these findings, noting “there is little published data about mortality and causes of death in the college population” (Marconi et al. 206). They found that: contrary to published data and national statistics for the relevant age groups, intentional by self-harm deaths lead causes of death in enrolled students from 2004 to 2018.

Intentional by self-harm is the main cause of death in male students, younger students, and white students. “Other” [unintentional] causes of death is the main cause in female students, older students, and students of color (205).

These findings underscore both the causal and probabilistic possibilities of death among the main population that many of us work with, which is traditionally college-aged students (18–25). However, death is hard to track from an institutional or even definitional standpoint, as researchers note. This suggests that we might not always be aware of the statistical risks of death among specific student populations, or the common behaviors or experiences

that contribute to these risks. Articles about students who died by suicide often emphasize their academic achievements, as if academic success is somehow an insulator from suicidal ideation. At the same time, we know that self-harm deaths (suicide) are one of the most common types of student deaths and they have risen an alarming 40% (with some citing even larger increases) since 2000 (“Generation Z and Deaths of Despair”). We also know that substances like alcohol are involved in 2 out of 10 student deaths and “mortality related to substance use among college students is increasing” (Marconi et al. 212). The realization that death does happen—at our small residential liberal arts college we often hear the refrain “that just doesn’t happen here”—can be shocking, disheartening, and downright scary for workers and students alike. And student death often elides both cause and effect; in other words, cause is frequently left vague or indeterminate and the impact of student death on the campus community is under-studied.

Yet the general statistics and the politics of death (describing how a person dies, for example, is deeply tied to cultural, religious, and other values) do not really capture the individual impact that each student death has upon our communities. For example, to say that, by some measurements, suicide has risen more than 60% from 2000–2021 among young people ages 20-24 from “11.9 deaths per 100,000 to 19.4” (Curtin and Garnett) simply does not capture the impact that these kinds of deaths have on college campuses.

What Happens or Doesn’t Happen When Death Occurs?

At my current institution, we are contending with three student deaths this past semester. One death was ruled an accidental overdose, one was initially ruled an accident but is now described as a suicide, and the third was a murder. Two deaths occurred on campus and one, just over the holiday break, off campus.

These are not the first student deaths since I arrived.

In the past several years, we have lost others: to suicide, to cancer, to accidents. Death, as my student said recently, is becoming part of our college’s experience, so much so that the school newspaper has published several articles against normalizing it. The editorial board published “Student death is now part of the routine at Middlebury” collectively urging our institution to act. And the deaths themselves are complicated by their circumstances as well as the institution’s response and the response of family,

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The Things Left Unsaid • 7 which has erased conversations about harmful and at-risk behavior, as well as suicide on campus.

psychiatric care and specialized mental health services for decades (Ji; Pagni; Walters).

Student death raises all kinds of issues for those of us who have made our life’s work in academia. In many ways, despite many arguments to the contrary about the role work should play in our lives, when a student or worker dies, our community mourns as if we lost a member of our family. In Judaism, when a loved one dies, we practice Kriah, or the rending of a garment which represents the pain of loss and grief. A student death tears the fabric of our community; there is an absence, a loss, a frightening puncture of the quotidian. At small schools, this loss is even more acute as students are more likely to know one another and to feel the loss, especially if the student death happens on or close to campus.

Findings from a survey of university and college counseling services point to the challenges of supporting students’ mental health and well-being. In the survey, directors of mental health centers report challenges with attracting and retaining staff because of low pay and poor working conditions (Gorman et al. 31). High turnover in counseling services is also a perennial issue. Additionally, staff are often unprepared for supporting grieving students, especially those with complicated grief and those who refuse to seek support (Wrenn). There are challenges, then, in how colleges and universities collect and report data on student death, in how they respond to student death, and in their material support for mental healthcare. Students, in turn, struggle to access services and often reject official support services, perhaps because of institutional distrust.

Yet, once a student dies, a bureaucratic response kicks into high gear. Their information is removed from the advising portal. An email is sent out first announcing a death and, later, identifying the person who died. On our campus, emails are also sent out with—as students ruefully note—the same five resources (spiritual center, wellness center, therapy, etc.) alongside a more detailed set of facts about the student. Otherwise, it often seems like business as usual.

Usually, classes are not canceled. Faculty are told to return to the classroom to keep the routine and to put “eyes on” students. Acknowledgment of the fear of death “contagion” drives these decisions, yet they are implemented unevenly. Some faculty cancel class.

Some engage students in off-topic discussions about their well-being. Others, as one student told me, hold tests and quizzes as if nothing happened. Often, informal memorials are immediately planned by students and occur within days or even hours of the news circulating through campus. Official college memorials occur a little later, sometimes a week or two after a student’s death and sometimes a month or longer. There might be no official memorials but many unofficial ones outside the spaces where the student died. Flowers, photos, stuffed animals, and other offerings outside of dorms, parking garages, and other on-campus spaces. Despite being considered a best practice, most institutions where I have worked do not celebrate death anniversaries or create official memorials. Furthermore, at every institution where I have worked, students have struggled to access mental health support in timely ways. At my previous institution, the wait could be several months long.

Here, students have been advocating for on-campus

Postvention Plans and the Illogic of Student Death After several experiences of student death, and passively collecting information for years, I intensively researched how institutions respond to student death and the efficacy of emergency response protocols. Last fall, I attended workshops and meetings held by my institution’s crisis response team. I talked with colleagues at my institution and at other institutions. I examined research on postvention plans, including the commonly referenced Comprehensive Crisis Plan Checklist (CCPC-2) and interrater agreement on plan development (McCleary and Aspiranti). I hoped the research on crisis management and student death plans would give me answers, but it only added more questions. I found that we still know little about the efficacy of specific postvention actions and how death impacts students on campus (Devore).

While most schools have crisis or postvention plans, the majority “are significantly below best practice criteria for each of the three subcategories of prevention, intervention, and postvention” (West 57).

West found that—in line with other findings—such plans “lack comprehensiveness” (58). In addition to the challenges of maintaining crises response plans, it is difficult to assess whether these plans are effective because there are no validated rubrics on crisis response. So, on the one hand, these plans are critical in responding to and mitigating crisis, and on the

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The Things Left Unsaid • 8 other, they are unevenly enacted from institution to institution. We know little about their efficacy.

Yet postvention plans following student death have long been argued to be a critical element of community intervention. O’Neill et al. note that postvention plans are a key component of suicide prevention programs and in addressing suicide contagion events. In the K–12 education system, multiple states in the U.S. require suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention plans (62). The “core goals for suicide postvention include: (a) returning the focus of school to education; (b) facilitating natural coping responses of those affected; (c) providing resources for those affected; (d) preventing suicide contagion or imitative behaviors; and (e) identifying ongoing needs of the school community” (62).

Despite the wealth of information available on how to develop postvention plans, empirical research on the efficacy of postvention plans is lacking (62).

There are only a few systematic reviews of postvention plan efficacy, likely due to the high amount of variation in plans alongside a “void of rigorous experimental designs and methodology” (62). There are downstream effects in how postvention plans are developed, implemented, and assessed due to the dearth of rigorous studies. As O’Neill et al. notes: Without evidence-based postvention programs for schools, school districts and their crisis responders are advised to utilize clinical judgment and refer to published toolkits, general guidelines for community responses and safe reporting, and expert recommendations for conducting postvention within schools to support students and mitigate contagion effects. (62) Without large scale assessment, we are left to rely on in-house support and guidelines, which themselves might be limited, out of date, or incomplete.

Alarmingly, we know that how we respond to student death matters and can exacerbate or reduce further student crises, yet we know little about the degree to which specific interventions work.

For example, a study on the effectiveness of interventions for people bereaved through suicide found that the quality of studies was weak which led the researchers to conclude that “while there was some evidence of the effectiveness of interventions for uncomplicated grief, evidence of the effectiveness of complicated grief interventions was lacking”

(Andriessen 1). While research has found that individuals bereaved by suicide are at higher risk for several mental health issues, as well as at a higher risk for completing suicides themselves, there is little empirical research on what interventions work best.

Most research on the subject “focused on the experiences of those who have been bereaved and the characteristics of suicide bereavement, whereas the effectiveness of postvention in terms of its impact on the grief process and mental health of bereaved individuals remains unclear” (2). So, while we know that proactive and reactive responses are necessary, and there are several important elements of postvention response to student death—including clear communication, student support, community member triage, and memorials/anniversaries—we also know that a major limitation to effectively carrying out crisis response plans is that “there are no empirically validated rubrics to evaluate school crisis plans” (West 7). So, it is hard to assess if our plans are actually working, not to say anything of the material challenges with establishing and maintaining crisis response teams and ongoing work outside of an immediate crisis.

To be sure, there are many different people who are part of the crisis response teams for institutions of higher education. Often, these response teams are led by the Office of Student Affairs alongside campus mental health offices, campus safety, and other on-campus organizations tasked with managing day-to-day residential life and well-being for students.

At the same time, we teachers and administrators are not outside of the campus community. When a student dies or other crises occur, we too are impacted. More often, we are also asked to do crisis response work in our classrooms, offices, and centers. One way to become involved in this work is to meet with your on-campus crisis response team and to become part of the team and/or to receive crisis response training.

Another approach is to learn from others in our field about their responses to student death.

Wisdom from WCenter for Ways to Take Action After Student Death The WCenter Listserv provides practical folk guidance on responding to crises; it is filled with compassionate people who are willing to share advice on any number of crises, not just about student death or the death of a tutor. I have, over the years, found myself returning again and again to the collective wisdom and, namely, experience of thousands of colleagues. And, when I have seen things come across

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The Things Left Unsaid • 9 my desk that I have yet to experience in my center, such as the death of a peer writing tutor, I put this information into a folder for safekeeping and future reference.

In reviewing the keywords tutor loss, student death, tutor death, and tutor memorialization, I came across several shared responses of how colleagues have responded to student death in or around the writing center. Below, I paraphrase and summarize much of what they share, but I want to note that this is only an partial list as the Listserv archive only reaches back a few years.

Guidance for Administrators Upon a Tutor Death: ● ● ● ●

●

Work with grief counselors to determine needs for writing center workers.

Bring grief counselors to all-staff meeting.

Have someone from the counseling center lead a discussion on student death and processing loss and grief.

Check-in with tutors and see if they're able to continue their writing center work, and, if they're not, allow them to step away or flex their time.

Send the message that everyone grieves in their own way and that they shouldn't hold themselves or others to a particular standard of how grief “should” happen.

Ways for Tutors and Administrators to Memorialize Tutor(s): ●

●

● ● ● ● ●

Create a collection of things that belonged to the deceased student. You can create an altar, a memorial wall, a picture box, or a plaque in the main area of the center. Tutors can participate in selecting objects.

Give tutors and others the chance to fill out a book of memories and messages to the deceased tutor. Place the book in a communal space where people can easily access it.

Create a memorial fund or prize in honor of the deceased tutor to support tutors annually.

Hold a celebration of life or other grief/support event.

Archive materials that the deceased tutor created and showcase in the center.

Create a book of memories about the deceased tutor to share with their family.

Petition the school, the city or town to set aside a bench or space in a green space to memorialize the deceased student.

●

Record tutors’ memories of the deceased tutor as a way to remember who they were in life and to memorialize them.

Ways for Tutors and Administrators to Collectively Grieve: ● ● ● ● ●

●

●

Write. Engage in letter writing to the deceased to process grief (Larsen).

Reflect. Engage in therapeutic journaling (Neimeyer et al.).

Create a memory box about the deceased tutor.

Celebrate. Celebrate what the tutor brought to the community.

Gratitude. Set-up a card bank where tutors write thank you cards to medical or emergency personnel who helped in the situation, if applicable.

Connect. Find out what your institution has planned for memorializing the deceased, for reaching out to their family, and for providing support for students, staff, and faculty.

Connect with the broader college community to celebrate the student.

Ways for Tutors and Administrators to Personally Respond to Loss: ● ●

● ● ● ●

Withhold judgment before entering conversations about the death of the tutor.

Witness: Be open and available to whatever unfolds, not to solve it or fix it but to really see, hear and experience what it is with the others there.

Respond with loving action.

Take time to grieve.

Take time to process.

And, as one person on the WCenter Listserv noted: Be prepared for the very individual responses your tutors will have, and the very different ways they will have of coping with this loss. Some will want to talk about it, but others won't have much to say. And they will process this loss at different rates. For some, it will hit them right away, and it might hit others later, or in waves. For us, this meant finding as many different, small ways (some non-verbal) to honor and remember the tutor as possible, over the course of the entire year. And yes, find out what they

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The Things Left Unsaid • 10 want, but be prepared for them to be too struck and too numb to be able to come up with anything particularly coherent or actionable. My staff didn't want to cancel meetings or trainings; they wanted to be together. But that was about as clear a plan as they could come up with at times.

On Processing Grief as an Administrator Many of the administrators who responded to the WCenter queries noted that they processed their own grief over tutor death in unique and highly varied ways.

Because administrators hold the continuity of the program—they will likely remember individual tutors long after they have moved on from the writing center—they also hold the responsibility for memorializing and remembering losses. At the same time, they also might process tutor death differently because of their unique relationship with their tutors as managers, mentors, teachers, and friends. Writing administrators carry the loss of a tutor in longstanding ways; over time, they might find themselves in the unenviable place of being the only person in the writing center who remembers the tutor who died. As one writing center administrator shared: “As I write this, I realize with some real sadness that soon enough there won't be students around who knew [the tutor], and it will be less palpable a personal and communal loss. But it remains a personal loss for me, and, of course, for his family and friends.”

The “wrap-around” role that administrators serve for their tutors might make the grief complicated and long-term. Administrators might feel responsible for the tutor’s death because of the often close-knit and long-term relationships that tutors share with their directors. As one administrator wrote: I was also not entirely prepared for my own sense of loss and grief. And regrets. I could think of so many ways I could have been a better mentor, teacher, and friend. And sometimes I wasn't very good at helping my staff process this loss because I was having a hard time processing it myself. So go easy on yourself.

As writing administrators, we carry the history of our programs alongside their legacies on campus. Student involvement is critical for our work. Tutor death punctuates a community that is often otherwise close knit and connected, sometimes for years. So, while we

administrators may carry grief well beyond academic semesters or years, try not to do so alone.

Conclusion: Postvention Planning After Student Death So much of what my colleagues intuitively or professionally landed on are indeed standards of best practice for responding to student death in other spaces on campus. The impulse to gather in community, to process, to seek counsel, to memorialize, and to grieve align well with postvention plans in higher education spaces. Writing, of course, can also be a powerful tool in processing death and grief.

At the same time, many of the postvention plans at the college or university level might be too generalized or too focused on single loss events.

Instead of understanding student death—each student death—as an ongoing iterative process of making sense of loss and responding to grief as it emerges, changes, compounds, and is shaped over time, many of the practices in postvention plans seem like a “one and done” model. The lack of assessment of these plans further begs the question of whether these protocols are helping our community members to process and heal. And, finally, these plans often include a lot of practices around communication that adhere to legal frameworks (such as not immediately disclosing cause of death or identifying information) and controlling the death narrative rather than engaging in healing practices. At times, the well-being of the institution and the community align, but, frequently, these protocols and plans appear more about reputation and liability than compassion or care work.

Of course, there are legal and ethical obligations that institutions have to students around disclosure that make sudden displays of memorializing or grief challenging or even downright illegal. Though I advocate for center-specific responses to crisis, I also believe it is critical to be aware of one’s institutional policies and structures around crisis. This knowledge is critical for shaping programmatic response to student death.

As a field, however, we need to do more to address student death as it might occur in and around the writing center. We need to prepare new administrators in crisis response and management work, and we need to conduct more research on how deaths in and around the writing center impact us. The

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The Things Left Unsaid • 11 data above suggests student death is becoming more frequent, especially among LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and intersectional youth populations. This is not a numeric issue alone, however; the anti-racist mission of many writing centers indicates that the students most likely to staff and attend our centers are becoming increasingly at risk. My hope is that we develop data-informed response plans and eventually aggregate information about student death and its impacts on writing centers and its community members. We need to learn more about student death, and we need to share what we learn in professional spaces like conferences, journals, and workshops. This is a matter of preparation, of course, but it is also one of inclusion and anti-racist praxis and prevention. We need to support our community, particularly the most vulnerable among us.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)—a research-intensive STEM university—exemplifies how an institution can respond to student death through intentional, neutral, and data-driven approaches. After several students died by suicide in fall 2021, they created a task force (made up of administrators, students, staff, and faculty) to collect data on what was wrong in the community. Another task force was created to implement the first task force’s findings. An independent review of the school’s mental health practices was also conducted by Riverside Trauma Center. Instead of leaping into action, the task force intentionally built a multi-tiered assessment and implementation system that included data collection, assessment, external consultation, community listening sessions, and a campus wide survey. They presented initial findings in January 2022. That same year, WPI opened a Center for Well-Being. Currently, nearly all the task force recommendations and most of the independent reviewer recommendations have been implemented.

Using methods familiar to many of us, the institution’s taskforce created and implemented a multi-stage plan for learning about and then addressing the challenges with mental health that the community faced. They recognized the limitations of prior best practices in student mental health support—none of the students who died by suicide were identified as at risk under the prevailing criteria—and, the failures of conventional wisdom around responding to student death, such as foregoing memorialization. The institution provided resources to address the issue and brought in community members

at each stage of the process, from design and fact finding to implementation.

Several of the task force’s findings mirror other mental health surveys and research in higher education. For example, faculty who are BIPOC, female, trans, and nonbinary do more care work than their white male colleagues. Junior and mid career faculty support students more than senior colleagues.

Faculty struggle to keep up with student demands for support and feel underprepared to do this front-line work. Similarly, students struggle with the fallout from the pandemic, “specifically citing the feeling that their ability to perform academically was demanded at the expense of their feelings, health and humanity” (Kisner, par. 13).

Writing centers are not colleges or universities. In many ways, we are well situated to support student well-being over academic performance; empowerment and process over product. This starts with tutor training and developing a clear mission and benchmarks for center outcomes. At the same time, as I have learned, research can be a critical element of understanding the new landscape that we are in post-pandemic. We can learn a lot from WPI’s unflinching and comprehensive approach to exploring mental health and student death on campus. Of course, I hope what I write here remains theoretical for readers. But in case of emergency this piece begins the conversation of how we plan for, respond to, and address student death.

Acknowledgement: Thank you to Dan Lawson for feedback on early drafts of this project.

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DEFINING AND LEARNING ABOUT MULTILINGUAL LINGUISTIC AND PROFESSIONAL LABOR IN THE WRITING CENTER CONTEXT: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC TUTOR PERSPECTIVE Saurabh Anand University of Georgia saurabh.anand@uga.edu Abstract Utilizing three tutoring episodes as qualitative data, this article attempts to define and articulate multilingual labor in the context of the Southern US writing center while working with multilingual writers. Incorporating Betweener​ Autoethnography as a methodological lens and Descriptive/Self-affirmative framework, the author, a South Asian Rhetoric and Composition doctoral student from India and a multilingual speaker/writer, urges WC directors and peer tutors in the US how to consider fostering multilingual tutees’ writing development by intentionally critical creating moments where the languages of writers are received as assets, which often go unnoticed.

I am a South Asian Rhetoric and Composition doctoral student from India. Until my adolescence, I grew up in Delhi, India's national capital and one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities. In postcolonial India, multilingualism was inseparable from my literacy; I attended an English medium school and college and grew up speaking Hindi, English, and Punjabi at home and in non-academic spaces. Hence, switching between languages has been second nature to me. While earning my undergraduate degree in management, I learned two European languages: German and Hungarian. My language learning experiences as an adult were so intellectually stimulating that I later decided to pursue language teaching as a career. My literacies in India opened opportunities for me in language tutoring young adults and adolescents for academic and professional purposes. After tutoring in India for nearly half a decade, I moved to the US in 2018 on a non-immigrant student visa (F-1). In 2020, I graduated with an MA in English, specializing in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL/Applied Linguistics), from a Midwestern University.

While earning my master's degree, I was a graduate teaching assistant (of English Composition), and exposure to TESOL/Applied Linguistics helped me connect, reflect, and analyze my language learning and teaching experiences in India and the US from various theoretical and pedagogical points of view and how they translate into practice. Most of my students were either fellow international students (often

multilingual) or second/third-generation immigrant writers in the US. While teaching, I also took an on-the-job composition teaching practicum. During the training sessions, I was formally introduced to the Writing Center (WC). (I say formally because I knew about WCs in informal and limited ways since there have been a handful of WCs in India or Asia.) In training sessions, I was introduced to WCs as one of the academic campus resources in US colleges and universities with whom I could partner to help my students write better than they were already. While partnering with the WC, I also found it to be helpful for my own writing development. In many ways, it was the formal beginning of my interest in writing center studies. As a Rhetoric and Composition Studies doctoral student, I explore multilingualism, rhetoric studies, and writing center studies research tendencies through qualitative research lenses such as interviews, ethnography, narrative inquiry, and autoethnography.

This piece is an autoethnography exploration of my identities in the US writing center spaces. These include my experiences as a graduate student of writing center studies with a background in TESOL/Applied Linguistics, tutoring, learning diverse languages in India, and an urge to explore multilingual tutoring practices. My multilingual WC research interventions also percolated because between my master's and doctoral programs, I switched my US immigration status to permanent residency. I choose to mention such instances because my personal and professional trajectories influenced my tutoring in my writing center pedagogy.

I also intentionally choose to elaborate on my intellectual trajectories and development as an individual, student, language learner, language tutor, researcher, and scholar because many tutees I worked with often share those experiences with me. However, at the time of writing this article, most of my colleagues were white and monolingual at my WC, with essentially no personal experience of learning and practicing a language other than English in daily discourse or a scholarly background in language studies. They worked

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Multilingual Linguistic and Professional Labor • 16 with multilingual tutees using their “traditional” and mainstream education experiences. Being curious and trained to personally and professionally negotiate with the tutoring environment nudged me to reflect on the communities-specific labor I have spent working with multilingual writers. I call this kind of specific labor my multilingual (linguistic and professional) labor throughout this piece. I have chosen this language because often, while operating in my WC space (tutoring and otherwise), I reflected on ways of learning, unlearning, relearning, or meshing my new or past literacies and how such experience helped me re-engineer my multilingual WC tutor identity, which continues to grow.

Inspired by racio-lingusitic WC tutor enactments and scholarly commentaries towards linguistic justice, I am often motivated to think about specific emotional relationships and opportunities I provided to my tutees. Such thoughts include using my language experiences and supporting and practicing multilingualism. Via this autoethnographic piece, I explain and discuss what multilingual labor looks like in the WC where I work. To do so, I will use my three WC tutoring episodes of working with multilingual tutees as qualitative data and demonstrate to readers my "scholarly personal narratives" (Nash 23), informed by the Descriptive/Self-affirmative framework (Chang). To thread my reflections on multilingual or multilingualism-oriented professional and personal identity markers, I use the “betweener” autoethnography as my interpretive and research methodology (Diversi and Moreira) to decolonize tutor knowledge production and conundrums of multilingual tutors in the US WC spaces. With those research intentions, I aim to focus on the research question: What does multilingual tutor labor look like in a US WC context from a multilingual tutor perspective with a background in TESOL? Being mindful of autoethnography as a method and/or methodology is nascent in the WC field (Jackson and Grutsch-McKinney). I divided this piece into the following subsections to present a structure of pursuing transformative and ethical personal narrative-based research (Ellis). The subsections of this piece include: 1) the rationale behind choosing the Descriptive/self-affirmative framework; 2) why I decided to utilize autoethnography, specifically the betweener autoethnography for this piece; 3) three specific incidents showing “Multilingual Labor” as data; and 4) discussion and conclusion.

Conceptual Framework: Descriptive/Self-affirmative Framework I adopted the Descriptive/Self-affirmative framework throughout this piece by centering on tutoring episodes. Chang described this framework approach as similar to writing a memoir. This approach is apt for my piece because of its literary memoir genre affordances. The affordances allow me to elaborate on my interactions with multilingual writers in detail. I also aim to argue to extend the scope of autoethnographic methodology beyond Anglicized conventions by including multilingual interactions within the US WC spaces. As a TESOL professional and multilingual tutor, I use my conversations and emotional responses in tutoring sessions. For example, I could comment on the current WC material and professional reality, which scholars pointed out often lacks perspectives from diverse identities, such as multilinguality (Cui). With the help of the tutoring stories that took place in my WC, I attempt to add to other tutor voices, like mine, arguing on behalf of our writers and us that multilingual writers require distinctive and dedicated tutor attitudes, which are different than working with “traditional” tutees (Tang) depending on the purposes and needs of learning a target language (for the purpose of this article, the target language would be English language, where English seems to be the medium of instruction unfortunately). These nonfictional narratives that I shared with my tutees nudge and build the case of tutors being sensitive if not speaking, reading, and operating across the language and needs of our multilingual writers. I hope the collective history I share with my tutees provides glimpses of my specific linguistic and TESOL-informed labor that intended to foster multilingual tutees’ writing development by intentionally creating educating moments for WC directors and peer tutors that often go unnoticed.

Another important reason I chose the Descriptive/Self-affirmative framework is to further deepen conversations about labor in the WC context (Giaimo and Hashlamon). Through the narrative discussions as evidence, I intend to broaden the scope of labor within WC spaces by adding representations of multilingual tutors with an applied linguistics background. Such tutors utilize professional and lived experiences while interacting with multilingual writers.

Though WC practitioners and scholars (Shiell) have begun employing multilingual tutors in WCs by duly valuing multilingual tutors' linguistic and cultural repertoires, my piece provides something unique.

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Multilingual Linguistic and Professional Labor • 17 In this piece, I provide my transnational tutor perspectives, including engagements, negotiations, and discussions utilizing my multilingual tutors with TESOL backgrounds and labor while engaging in work at my WC. Readers will find that such performance led to my WC becoming a safe and culturally and linguistically enriched space. I did so by critically looking at and utilizing experiences of growing up multilingual and researching the affordances of multilingualism in WC spaces. From the qualitative research point of view, my descriptions of the self-narratives will provide readers with a peek at a cultural location (my WC) and how things, operations, and emotions prevail in a space ethnographically (Denzin).

Scholars (Reed-Danahay) also advocate for the Descriptive/Self-affirmative approach, an agent of a new source of scholarly knowledge or phenomenon that dissents the positivist views in a field. Hence, through this epistemology I engage in the process of noticing and framing other yet-to-be-recognized multilingual epistemologies in my WC. While doing so, I interact with the multiple identities I mentioned at the beginning of this piece to recognize and reflect on exploring various tutoring affordances and areas of improvement within WC practice. For example, in the WC field, a focus hasn’t been applied/targeted much on inviting multilingual tutors as a valid population with the vision of improving tutees’ writing development. In cases where this was the focus, WC TESOL-related scholarship has historically focused on tutee perspectives for the same purposes (Bruce and Rafoth; Harris and Silva; Myers).

The Descriptive/Self-affirmative framework provided me a possible structure for incorporating my tutor's tact, work, and initiatives. To do this, I use my scholarly background (TESOL and Writing Center Studies), combined with my language experiences in the service of WC tutees who look like me, are multilingual, and/or people of color in the US, and vice-versa. I hope my WC experiences anoint and provide space for the voices of other multilingual tutors.

The Betweener Autoethnography I relied on autoethnography as a broader research method in this piece. I used my "epiphanies" (Ellis et al. 275) to explore my WC micro circle as "a site of cultural inquiry within a cultural context" (Hughes et al.

210) and to provide readers with a sense of my everyday multilingual tutor engagements in my WC space. Within autoethnography, my decision to include

the betweener autoethnography (Diversi and Moreira) for this WC-based study was intentional for two reasons. First, the autoethnography (methodological) type, like the recent trends and conversations within writing center studies, aims to express “resistance that historically marginalized and displaced scholars should use as a critical tool to destabilize Euro-American norms and transgress the national order of things” (Alhayek and Zeno 549). As a multilingual person, tutor, and immigrant, by adopting this qualitative methodology, I was able to "bring personal troubles to living history with the intent of disrupting essentializing representations and interpretations of lived experience" (Diversi and Moreira 582), because multilingual people (such as tutor, teachers, and others) have been intentionally painted to be part of a “dwindling minority” (Kirkpatrick 346), especially in the US educational context. As one who also comes from India, a postcolonial nation, I could not find a better method than the betweener autoethnography to center my dissent and build counter discussions on the themes/experiences from the conversations I had with multilingual tutees in my WC. With the help of the betweener autoethnography, I invite various WC stakeholders to reflect on my lived reflections, values, literacies, and ethics that further complicate and reshape how to tutor multilingual tutees and be sensitized towards racial-linguistic initiatives and practices in the WC. Second, I selected this methodology because I wanted to break the colonial impetus and structures by decolonizing ethnographic practices (Diversi, Gannon) within WC research. Engaging with scholarship using the betweener autoethnography was my intentional step toward supporting the works and research of professionally, culturally, and linguistically inclusive writing pedagogues (Lee, Naydan) who argue that ignoring pro-multilingual epistemologies could be a result of “ignorance and isolation” (Rafoth 16). A common rhetoric between their works has urged more multilingual voices to share the explicit need for tasks, initiatives, and policy amendments in WC studies to make it a more critical place and improve its daily course of actions and mission (Hall). This piece is my attempt to nudge such social justice-oriented conversations based on memories and personal experiences of working as a tutor in my micro circle via the betweener autoethnography (Moreira and Diversi).

With that background, I elaborate on my WC positionality and share tutoring episodes in the next section.

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Multilingual Linguistic and Professional Labor • 18

Introducing Myself, My Positionality, Site, and Tutoring Episodes When thinking and writing this piece, I was often the only WC tutor of color, or one among a few, in my tutoring context. Yet, I saw many incoming tutees who were like me. For example, until I began writing this piece, I had at least 90 appointments in four semesters (with varied schedules). These appointments included multilingual tutees who spoke Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, or Vietnamese as their first/home language. Such interactions in my WC scenario nudged me to research how WCs could prepare their tutors to guide multilingual writers. The WC Studies field has realized this need with the ongoing increase of multilingual writers on American campuses and how to cater to them (Alvarez).

However, I also learned that tutor and admin positions in the WC spaces have historically been either majorly white or white in their ideologies (Baker-Bell). Here, I repropose WCs as a space where multilingual tutors and administrators are valid and needful tutoring partners. Multilingual tutors and administrators have to be reaffirmed, acknowledged, and celebrated. Hence, I aim to connect with the broader WC community to reconfigure their understanding of tutor labor. This tutor community also includes multilingual tutors with TESOL backgrounds who are often trained and capable of working across languages and represent unique tutor labor aspects as a valid set of knowledge.

Fortunately, my WC micro circle is a bit unique from its broader (American South) and specific (Georgia) locational rhetoric with a checkered history present in regard to racial and ethnic violence and oppression (Beckert; Hill and Beaver; Olson; Taylor), which often mask down multilingualism in the region.

My WC director, who grew up in Upland US South and studied in different subregions of the Southern United States, has proven her commitment to contending anti-racist practices by "barricad[ing] whites from the United States' racial identity" (Bonilla-Silva 265). For example, during the initial days of my tutoring career at my current university, I also took her WC theory and pedagogy graduate course, where she trained us to find value in the stories we consumed and encouraged us to reflect, contextualize, and constructively critique the writing center studies research and practice. This training was crucial for me to center my previous personal and professional backgrounds to serve broader tutee populations, especially multilingual tutors. This piece is tangible evidence of how, through her mentorship in the course,

I learned to present the WC as an inclusive, critical, and multilingual-welcoming place for multilingual writers in my micro circle.

As a result, both during and post-tutoring, I attempted to interpret my tutoring experiences from the labor standpoints I adopted and connect those instances with current WC scholarship, which could be argued as being at the heart of autoethnography-based research in WC studies (Jackson and McKinney). I define "multilingual labor" as the distinctive labor multilingual WC tutors employ during writing consultations or broadly related to WC endeavors/initiatives that are different from monolingual tutor labor in the service of multilingual writers using combinations of either identity/-ies one wears or the language(s) one speaks. To show specific incidences of multilingual labor in my WC context, as data, I used anecdotes and reflections of being a TESOL professional and multilingual tutor employed in my WC catering to multilingual tutees (directly) and broader WC stakeholders (indirectly) as my descriptive narratives. I adapted my understanding of labor in the WC context from Geller and Denny (2013) as “work of directing a writing center day-to-day and the ways that work seemed to fill their time” (Geller and Denny 12-13) of the WC employees, for example—tutoring in my case. One of the implicit observations of my multilingual labor is that I switch between my identities as a foreign language writer in the English language, a former international student, a person of color/immigrant writer working in WC, and others. I want to reiterate that my tutoring instincts were often the results of the other spaces and intellectual experiences I grew up with and the spaces in which I have been operating. These include my history of growing up writing in more than three languages and speaking five languages, with scholarly interests in TESOL/Applied Linguistics, having grown up in a postcolonial country, and the experience of working as a language tutor, among others. Such identity foci immensely impacted and shaped my tutoring in layering ways that are mentioned in the episodes below.

Episode 1: When Multilingual Tutors and Tutees are Aware of Linguistic and Rhetorical Needs and Seek Support As a habit, I began reading the tutee's profile five minutes before my noon appointment. I noticed the tutee, a multilingual international ESOL graduate student, was my former student: I taught them in an ESOL section of the preservice international teaching

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Multilingual Linguistic and Professional Labor • 19 assistant preparatory course. Having one of my former students as a tutee made me smile. I enjoyed working with them and their entire cohort of freshly admitted international students. As an international, and later a student of color, graduate assistant, I have worn multiple hats (such as a researcher, course instructor, and tutor) to fund my studies, so when the audiences of each role overlap, it allows (and sometimes requires) me to swap roles. It prepares me to develop a certain kind of flexibility professionally. For example, this time, the dynamics between the tutee and me were different.

In Muriel Harris's words, as a tutor, I now had to be "someone to help them [tutee] surmount the hurdles others [often teachers and other educational stakeholders] have set up for them..." (28).

At precisely 12 PM, my tutee entered the WC. After exchanging pleasantries and our excitement to work together, my tutee mentioned that it was their first WC appointment and they needed help with their conference paper. Upon swapping basic information and looking at their conference paper, I sensed some inhibitions my tutee had. To clarify my doubt, knowing this tutee wouldn’t judge due to my previous instructional experience, I asked them: “What really could you use this meeting for?" I noticed the tutee had that uncomfortable smile on their face. It was the one I was familiar with as a multilingual writer, too.

Later, they confided in me that they intentionally booked their writing appointment with me because of my TESOL background, as they knew I wouldn’t judge them due to our previous professional interactions. I became more alert.

Upon further questioning, my tutee mentioned they had already given multiple reads to their paper and had it run by their friend from their home country.

Still, they weren’t confident about their paper, as English wasn’t their first language. Though thrilled to have their abstract accepted to the conference, they were anxious about the writing quality of their whole paper because of its extensive length; they didn’t want to embarrass themselves in front of a professional audience. I wasn’t shocked by the situation I was caught in, but sad. This is a reality for many multilingual WC tutees. Often, in such scenarios, multilingual tutees might need a little push, communicated in a motivational tone.

Our WC session became more intense when they mentioned they saw me as their role model. Explaining it further, they mentioned that since I (as a multilingual English/foreign speaker from India) had taught them before, had presented at conferences, and taught English composition, they assumed I had a better grasp of writing in English. I felt ambivalent. On the one

hand, I was happy my tutee chose me over my domestic WC counterparts because they are often not equipped enough professionally to cater to the needs of ESOL writers/tutees (Rafoth), and I could use my TESOL background to guide them. However, I also felt anxious about my tutee's "perceived capability for...performing actions at designated level" (Schunk and DiBenedetoo 515) for me. Their assumption of me being a writing expert wasn’t true, but then I realized that this assumption has a greater meaning than may appear .

This interaction with my tutee prompted me to think about the WC field from multiple directions. I was happy that my student self-identified their writing mentorship needs as an ESOL writer. However, this situation became that 'occasion' for me, which Denny (2018) described as "critical yet...rarely have language or occasion to speak into and interrogate them" (Denny 120) because in my WC, tutors were not there to represent multilingual identity (Phillips). In my liminal space, I felt the nudge to express my tiredness of taking the major onus of working with tutees who look like me, speak like me, and/or are ESOL speakers (Severino and Illana-Mahiques). I recalled the underlying and normative assumption that monolingual tutors are the believed norm for the WC spaces. They are assumed to be the ideal tutor population who could serve all tutor clientele, including ESOL writers, despite the tutee’s specific language needs. This ignorance within the field makes multilingual tutors the victims of a larger writing center cultural discourse where multilingual labor goes unacknowledged despite writers’ need for it.

Episode 2: “I did not know I mustn’t speak English only.”

It was one of those days when I didn’t have any scheduled appointments. As our WC director requested for all unscheduled tutors to do in the past, I was at the welcome desk using this time to respond to WC email queries, another part of my assistantship. At the tenth minute of the hour, a tutee requested a drop-in appointment. Since other tutors weren’t available, we began working as I put emails on hold. The tutee apologized to me while they watched me wrapping up the email I was then drafting, but they were also grateful. I told them, "It's okay! How may I help you?" with a smile. They mentioned they were applying for an undergraduate research assistant (RA) position and added that this RA would be essential for them, since it allowed working remotely. Since my tutee lived forty

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Multilingual Linguistic and Professional Labor • 20 minutes away from the university town with their elderly immigrant grandparents from India, this position would allow them to minimize travel frequency.

As an immigrant student living away from my parents for over five years, I understood the opportunities this RA position could offer to my tutee.

With the best intentions, I began assisting my tutee in discussing the RA application. When I asked them to tell me about it and what makes them a competitive applicant, they started elaborating on what they'd do if they got this assistantship and the skills they had to do the required tasks effectively and efficiently. Taking their responses as a great starting point, I asked them a few follow-up questions: Why should you get this RA over others? What unique experiences could you bring if you get this RA? As they meant to respond to my follow-up questions, my tutee again began centering their answers on the skills the call for RAs suggested. Finding my tutee struggling, I rephrased my questions. They responded affirmatively when I offered them a few moments to collect their thoughts and perhaps make a list. As they began working by themselves, I noticed them murmuring in (one of) my mother tongues, Hindi.

I asked myself: “Why did I not trust my gut feeling that my tutor could be an Indian American who was a speaker of Hindi?” Later, I thanked myself for not trusting my initial gut feeling because not all Indian Americans are multilingual or necessarily Hindi speakers. Gujarati, Tamil, Punjabi, Kannada, and their dialects are other majorly spoken languages in the US, too. In my English composition classrooms, I often found that many Indian American undergraduate students informed me of mother tongues/first languages other than Hindi. I did not want to assume my tutee was a Hindi speaker and internalize language biases as a Hindi speaker. Such negotiations are unique to people belonging to multilingual societies, histories, and language traditions.

But that is a half-picture. I also recalled an incident discussed in the WC theory and pedagogy graduate course related to a course peer from India. My peer worked with a tutee analyzing an interview transcribed in Hindi. My peer’s tutee assumed that their tutor (my peer) could read/write in Hindi because they had a Hindi-language-sounding name. That wasn’t true in my peer’s case. They were a Bengali speaker who wasn’t much exposed to Hindi. This incident with my peer taught me always to ensure I don’t adopt linguistic biases and stereotypes just by assuming my tutees' looks and cultural background. Therefore, when I heard my tutee speaking in Hindi, I was sure I could help them with their RA application with more nuance.

Following is a closer version of the interaction between my tutee and me in Hindi: Tutor: अगर तम ु चाहो तो हम हिंदी में भी बात कर सकते है I If you want, we can talk in Hindi too.

Tutee: अच्छा! हम हिंदी में भी बात कर सकते है ? ये अच्छा होगा | मझ ु े लगा यहाँ बस इंग्लिश में बात करनी होती है | हिंदी में सही से बता पाउँ गा। दो-तीन मिनट दो I [In shock with a smile]: Really! Can we talk in Hindi as well? That would be good. I thought I just had to talk in English in here. I will be able to explain better in Hindi. Give me 2-3 minutes.

We continued the rest of our conversation in Hindi, English, and, in fact, Hinglish (Hindi + English, see Bhatia). I realized that my tutor comfortably and more clearly explained their ideas and their unique positionality for the RA, and even asked follow-up questions with confidence later in the session. But their question: अच्छा! हम हिंदी में भी बात कर सकते है ?/ Can we talk in Hindi as well? stayed with me, as it seemed to be a comment for our WC field. This led me to think about the many subsequent questions which are unique to someone who speaks multiple languages and/or someone with a TESOL within the writing center context. Thinking about one of those questions includes the following conundrum/questions: Yes, writing centers are recognized campuses/support systems for ESOL students (Bruce and Rafoth) and teachers who teach them (Ferris et al.), but how often have WCs thought about employing multilingual tutors or someone who writes in multiple languages like their second language tutees, who are a considerable population that WCs serve every day?

Have we, as the WC field, thought enough about employing multilingual writing tutors who would be better positioned to switch or mesh multiple languages intuitively to help the intellectual or writing goals of our multilingual writers to create "the ideal learning environment for students [WC tutees] whose first or strongest language is not English: one-on-one, context, rich, highly focused," (Leki 1) as Leki suggested for writing scenarios from which tutee would immensely benefit?

I know some writing scholars have been recently researching writing consultations across languages and geographical locations (Ayash). However, we need more

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Multilingual Linguistic and Professional Labor • 21 critical WC scholars who utilize their liminal positionalities as tutors or other WC stakeholders as assets. As writing center scholars, have we considered making intentional spaces for writing consultations in languages other than English to mark down the colonial educational legacies by which our writing center pedagogy is informed?

Would centering WC pedagogy on the diverse linguistic and cultural communities our multilingual tutees come from be a step to support their writing?

Episode 3: Scaffolding Writing Mentorship Trajectories Using Tutees' Languages This time, upon reading the tutee form before my tutee arrived, I could tell they were anxious and stressed about the writing project, which was a statement of interest (SOI) to apply for a specialization in their business degree. They mentioned securing admission in the desired specialization was more than an academic goal because they wanted to learn to open a product line to support their immigrant family business. I felt a little comforted, since I graduated from a business school with my undergraduate degree.

When the tutee showed up for the WC consultation, though multilingual, I realized we did not share any language other than English. In the later part of the consultation, they also mentioned that since they managed their time earning a business degree and worked for their family’s (seasonal) business, they couldn’t give their SOI as much attention as they would like to. They were nervous, but when they saw my tutor profile mention my business background, they hoped to specifically work with me so that they didn’t have to explain content; they didn’t have much confidence in their English language skills, either. But when I told them I earned my degree from India and upon chatting further, we both realized that our educational experiences were quite different.

Therefore, I requested them to give me background information about their program until then and how such experiences are aligned with contributing to their family business. Inadvertently, they became more nervous. Honestly, I was too. I had helped tutees from the fields I knew something or nothing about.

However, this tutoring scenario was different, since our educational experiences with earning a business degree differed because of the location of the study and programmatic conventions (I got direct admission to my desired specialization). Additionally, the tutee wasn’t confident in English, our connecting language.

I had two challenges before me: 1) minimizing my tutee’s communicative anxiety in English and 2) encouraging them to explain the disciplinary content; both intended to help my tutee put together a competitive SOI. At this moment, I could only resort to my English composition teaching experience, where I taught multilingual writers. I often had students who did not share my first language or other languages, just English. In such scenarios, I often used my students' current literacy skills to build further literacy skills to have them practice the target language to meet their goals. Adapting the same idea, I asked my tutee if they would like to use their home/first language (or languages) to jot down things they thought would be crucial for the SOI application. This could also include their brainstorming ideas; later, they could translate them into English for us to further discuss. The student’s reaction, in return, was precious. I saw my tutee instantly feeling hopeful; I saw a smile on their face. They then asked for five minutes to do what I requested. I gladly allowed them, and we were able to put together a draft of the application. I must mention the technique I employed was an instant tutor instinct, but also inspired by Durba Chattaraj’s 2019 essay, in which she shares her tutoring experience with multilingual tutees in India, a multilingual, yet largely English language, educational society, especially at the higher education level. However, through my connections, I also know pedagogues operating in other US WCs have been disincentivized to similar tutoring strategies, as such practices are usually thought of outside the American higher education scenarios.

These language ideologies delegitimize the need to incorporate languages or/and other literacies of multilingual writers in the service of their writing goals in the target language.

So far, the multilingual-WC research has, unfortunately, overly focused on legitimizing the need to create support for ESOL tutees (Zhao). However, this felt need has a problematic premise because it centers on and celebrates the assumption that US academia is only an English-centric academic society.

Hence, training monolingual/domestic US English-speaking tutors in different languages to work with speakers of those hadn’t happened until recently (Lape). Scenarios 2 & 3 are positive yet unfortunate examples of how we, WC scholars in the US, have minimized our own potential to be more inclusive and linguistically democratic toward the tutees of other languages to the extent that our tutees drop in at their centers assuming they are not allowed to use any other language but English as they work toward their writing goals.

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Multilingual Linguistic and Professional Labor • 22 In the above three episodes, readers will find explicit instances where when I, as a multilingual tutor, provided my multilingual tutee agency to incorporate all the ways they could communicate, students became agents of new ideas informed by tapping into their multicultural legacies and backgrounds. I hope these scenarios provide strong examples of my tutor labor advocating for second language literacy and language empowerment among writers and that these instances mirror what Garcia calls a tutor to be: "decolonial agents" (Garcia) in their specific tutor scenario.

Discussion and Conclusion This piece, informed by the Descriptive/Self-affirmative framework and the betweener autoethnography methodology, centers on accounts of contributing my distinctive labor sourced from my TESOL knowledge, being multilingual, and other identities manifested in my WC performance. In Scenario 1, I showcase language production trauma within the realism of racio-lingusitics and the WC, especially among ESOL writers. Multilingual writers and/or tutees often feel inferior for their multilingual abilities. However, having adequate multilingual tutors in WC spaces could help multilingual writers embrace writing across languages with adequate guidance.

In Scenario 2, I exhibit how multilingual tutors can engage multilingual writers in distinctive endeavors by making them feel legitimate in their histories and literacies. One way to do so is by motivating multilingual writers to communicate ideas in languages comfortable to both. Such initiatives can be especially useful when both share home/first language(s) other than English.

In Scenario 3, I demonstrate how inclusive and culturally relevant WC research and practices can come together. For example, multilingualism-informed tutor aptitude provides dedicated occasions for multilingual writers to showcase their multilingual, multicultural, and multidisciplinary identities during consultations. In my case, I did so during idea generation by motivating them to use their linguistic repertoires, despite us being ESOLs and having no common language other than English.

One common multilingual tutor ideology in all the above scenarios is to imagine and present the WC as an inclusive space: a place, through its tutor force, that believes in strength-based tutoring techniques while working with multilingual tutees. My multilingual labor was informed by my willingness to engage in and deploy multiple literacies, languages, cultures, and

contexts while I tutored in my WC. I hope, through my stories, that my monolingual WC colleagues feel encouraged to continue finding value in creating inclusive tutoring scaffolds and support by thinking of personalized and context-specific ways to help multilingual writers. Doing so will help multilingual writers set their academic trajectories for themselves.

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Multilingual Linguistic and Professional Labor • 23 Denzin, N. K. (2006). Analytic autoethnography, or déjà vu all over again. Journal of contemporary ethnography, 35(4), 419-428.

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44–57).

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Appendix English version of my interaction with my tutee in Episode 2 Tutor: If you want, we can talk in Hindi too.

Tutee: [in shock with a smile]: Really! Can we talk in Hindi as well? That would be good. I thought I just had to talk in English in here. I will be able to explain better in Hindi. Give me 2-3 minutes.

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Writing Centers’ Entanglements with Neoliberal Success Crystal Bazaldua University of Texas Rio Grande Valley crystal.bazaldua01@utrgv.edu

Tekla Hawkins University of Texas Rio Grande Valley tekla.hawkins@utrgv.edu

Abstract Throughout the 2010s, “success” became a common descriptor in writing centers, academic units, and student services. While the term carries connotations of professional achievement and economic improvement, it is rarely explicitly defined. This ambiguity is an example of how the interests of public institutions of postsecondary education are entangled with neoliberalism. Using a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis approach, this essay examines uses of the ideograph “success” within an original mini-corpus comprising the webspaces of eight writing centers from one large state university system in the United States. The analysis considers how writing centers contribute to neoliberal discourses of “success” that are defined by specific political and business ideologies, reinforce white supremacist ideology, and require students, tutors, and others associated with writing centers to adopt those same perspectives.

Exigence In their keynote address at the 2018 International Writing Centers Association Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, Kendra L. Mitchell and Robert E. Randolph show how “student success” reinforces hegemonic and racist expectations of student language and writing.

They argue that because the discourse of postsecondary institutions of public education is rooted in “social capital” that “either confines or regulates people to the margins of our society,” the legacies of racism and white supremacy are continuously reaffirmed (28, 30). This calling out of “success” struck a nerve for us and likely rang familiar for other writing center folks who have recognized how neoliberalism and white supremacy permeate our everyday lives.

In the Fall 2015 semester, the Writing Center at our institution — a large, public, emerging research, and Hispanic-Serving Institution located in a US/Mexico border region — was reassigned to the newly-minted “Student Academic Success” administrative unit. This shift was matched by a physical move from its place in the university’s library

Randall W. Monty University of Texas Rio Grande Valley randall.monty@utrgv.edu

to a corner office on the third floor of a new building at the edge of campus. The new space was presented as an improvement in many ways: it was bigger, with state-of-the-art technology, modern furniture, and a lovely vantage of the surrounding suburban city. Yet, the move relocated the Center from a position that benefited from frequent student cross traffic to the literal periphery of the institution, both in terms of disciplinarity and physicality; a place students would go to only if they already intended to go there.

The repositioning of the Writing Center was illustrative of institutional, state, and national shifts in policy, such as the updated strategic plan from the state’s higher education coordinating board, which sought “to increase student success through the combined expertise and resources of many stakeholders” (“Texas Higher Education Strategic Plan”), as well as the 2015 “Every Student Succeeds Act”, which replaced the by-then-much-maligned 2001 “No Child Left Behind Act” (emphases ours). Concurrently, “success” quickly became a ubiquitous descriptor across our campus and statewide university system, and indeed across the discourse of public institutions of postsecondary education (PIPE), showing up in program mission statements, student learning outcomes, names of administrative units, and strategic plans (Rihn; Höög).

And yet a consistent, coherent definition of “success” is rarely articulated. As a result, the many people who have an interest in writing centers—students, tutors and consultants, writing center directors and staff, faculty, and publics—are left to assume what success means within the context of their work in the writing center (Buck).

This project contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions that explore how discourse creates a shifting reality for institutions of higher education, for students and educators, and for the public. The goal of this research project is not to commit to a single definition of “success.” Instead, we interpret this key

Writing Centers’ Entanglements with Neoliberal Success • 27 term as an ideograph, slogan-like argot employed to shape language, behavior, and reality for members of groups (McGee). We chose to use “ideograph” as our framing device over related concepts like “god term” because ideograph draws specific attention to how ideology is facilitated through writing and discourse.

Further, ideographs are not inherently good or bad; framing a word or phrase as an ideograph is a methodological move to draw attention to how language functions for different audiences. Terms like “neoliberalism” and “white supremacy,” when not used critically or sincerely, can also function as ideographs.

Our efforts to document and reflect on the emergence of “success” in PIPE are not aimed at revealing a subversive or hidden agenda. Rather, the increased and prominent use of “success” indicates an intentional rhetorical move on the part of institutions that facilitates a broader discourse of neoliberalism, and thus, white supremacy.

In order to learn more about how writing centers use “success,” we collected and analyzed an original mini-corpus of eight writing center webspaces from a single public university system. Based on our analysis of writing center webspaces and our observations in the local context of our institution, it becomes clear that the myriad ways that “success” is used do not always align with Writing Center Studies’s (WCS) disciplinary identity of prioritizing ideals such as collaboration, equity, and student agency, but instead results in, “visions of student success that deny student agency and epistemological justice,” particularly for minoritized students, tutors, and writing center directors and staff (Faison et. al. 82). This is even true for those writing centers that clearly articulate missions of social and restorative justice, antiracism, decoloniality, and accessibility (Brooks-Gillies et. al.; García and Kern). Despite good intentions, dominating ideologies can’t be resisted if we continue to use oppressive language. The uses of “success” by the writing centers we will discuss in this article assume that everybody begins at the same starting line, has the same opportunities, and is working towards the same goal. These assumptions are not only wrong but lead to further marginalization of already oppressed groups.

When student success is identified as economic advancement, then people who already have economic advantages are defined by the institution as better and are by default more successful. Moreover, students without economic advantage, either because they represent historically marginalized groups or because their academic major isn’t considered economically beneficial for the institution or state, are default coded as less successful.

Context Institutional discourses reflect and prescribe the values, norms, and expectations of immediate stakeholders and surrounding communities. Michelle LeFrance and Melissa Nicolas link institutional goals with ideological discourses, which together set norms for behavioral expectations and establish permission structures that “offer a sense of continuity across individuals, practices, times, and sites” (7). In line with the state’s higher education coordinating board’s strategic plans, our state university system identified three aspirational pillars for achieving success: financial stability, academic and employment advising, and a sense of belonging with the institution (“Student Success”). Maria Fotiadou shows how official institutional discourse such as this, “reproduces and promotes neoliberal ideology,” which privileges the agency of institutions and corporations with whom people are required to form meaningful relationships (1). Following Manuel Piña, we find Karen Barad’s concepts of agential realism, intra-action, and the material-discursive, to be intriguing metaphors for considering writing centers’ place within neoliberal institutions because they illuminate the ways we do work, how we measure it, and how our work leads to certain outcomes and excludes others (19). Webspaces epitomize how writing center identities are co-constituted through what Barad describes as entangled “causality, materiality, agency, dynamics, and topological reconfigurings” (160). Even though writing centers strive to be accessible to all students and are one of the few places on a university campus where there is no additional student cost at the point of use, they nevertheless are part of neoliberal, white supremacist institutions, necessarily entangled with those ideologies.

Writing Center Studies and the Problematic Literacy of Success Critical Discourse Analysis begins by identifying a social problem that you want to learn more about and ideally improve. Despite our historical efforts to support social justice, writing centers can be “perpetrators or subverters of the hegemonic, White supremacist, middle-to-upper-class discourse privileged in higher education” (Morrison 120). These contrasting identities provide a new interpretation of what Shannon Carter refers to as the “writing center paradox,” wherein “the writing center functions as a democratic institution representing both our students

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Writing Centers’ Entanglements with Neoliberal Success • 28 and the literacy demands of the academy, especially as we resist the autonomous model of literacy dominating most rhetorical spaces over which we are not in control” (138). Discourses of “success” highlight this paradox.

Historically, “success” has been defined by writing centers in various ways. According to Kaidan McNamee and Michelle Miley's analysis of writing centers, “success [is] measured in monetary terms, with quantitative data being the only evidence of research,” and in this way positions student achievement as a placeholder for economic advancement. Marguerite P. Murphy identifies writing centers’ “need to define success” and gestures towards objectives like students seeing “themselves as intelligent human beings” who are capable of “improved performance in writing” (2).

Beth Rapp Young and Barbara A. Fritzsche align success with avoiding procrastination and attaining “higher grades, greater satisfaction, and lower evaluation anxiety” (47). In a foundational shift, Terese Thonus positions success as being the result of “mutual satisfaction,” between the tutor and student (125). More recent scholarship has built from Thonus by defining writing center success according to alignment between anticipated and demonstrated student learning outcomes (Fledderjohann) and the professional advancement of writing center administrators (Brooks-Gillies & Smith).

And yet, Rogers notes that, “most writing center claims of success are not evidenced-based” (56 qtd. in Salazar 33). For many working-class students, Harry Denny et.al argue, “the more ‘success’ they achieve, the greater the symbolic and material separation between them and their families and home communities” (71).

Similarly, Brett Griffiths et. al. argue that a centralized definition of “success” is necessarily decontextualized from students’ goals and contexts and thus prioritizes institutional interests.

“Success” in critical discourse studies and higher education Critical discourse analysts align “success” with neoliberal objectives of economic advancement (Mooney), individual accomplishment (Shoshana), and employment with preferred industries (Fotiadou).

Within educational contexts, Mary Ryan notes that “success” means “doing the ‘right’ thing for minority and/or marginalized groups, and of budding potential for transformative social action” (220). Yet, as Ryan also notes, these well-intentioned goals can be contradicted by individual biases against members of racial, ethnic, and religious groups, particularly during

periods of economic stress. These warnings align with earlier research by Rudolf P. Gaudio and Steve Bialostok who link a “neoliberal cultural model of success” (57) with “the everyday racism that pervades White middle-class discourses about cultural difference and social inequality in the United States” (52).

Ultimately, when students attempt to assimilate to the expectations of neoliberal institutions under the promise of personal economic benefit, they also inevitably reify the structural power imbalances and hierarchies inherent within that system.

Our recognition of “success” as a dominant ideograph within higher education in the contemporary neoliberal era parallels Bill Readings’s characterization of “excellence,” which similarly ensures subjects’ participation in an academic system without affording them either agency in or protection from the bureaucracy of that system. Rebecca Hallman Martini connects excellence to another neoliberal concept: innovation, which “does not necessarily carry any specific content, but is rather used as an adjective to describe the next best thing in pedagogy worth selling” (11). Since none of these terms have a fixed definition, a positive interpretation of their ambiguity is that they permit individuals to feel their contributions, assumptions, and even dissent are valued. But as others have noted, neoliberal institutions allow strategically created spaces for diversity and inclusion only as long as those efforts are within the profit-seeking terms prescribed by the institution (Azima et. al.).

By situating writing centers within programs and departments identified by “success,” and demarcating writing centers’ objectives as promoting “success,” PIPE, the systems they belong to, and by extension, the state, implicitly assert that the purpose of writing centers—and perhaps of writing education as a whole—is to sustain neoliberal, and therefore white supremacist, interests.

Neoliberalism in the University Neoliberalism is contentiously and inconsistently defined, even by those who endorse it. Generally, neoliberalism in the university endorses rationality, privileges market-based thinking and problem solving, and can be recognized by policy positions such as austerity measures, individualized culpability, debt funding, rent seeking, outcomes based planning, and what Hallman Martini calls a “political climate driven by college administrators who are strongly influenced by a business-model mentality, corporate interests, and post-Fordist values, including privatization, efficiency, cost-cutting, and mass production” (7). Since the 1970s

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Writing Centers’ Entanglements with Neoliberal Success • 29 in the United States, neoliberalism has become a synecdoche for a reactionary response to domestic civil rights movements. Lisa Duggan cites the project of neoliberalism as intentionally implemented at various moments in the 20th Century to “separat[e] class politics—the critique of economic inequality—from identity politics” (7). Jeff Bale and Sarah Knopp note that this separation impacts educational institutions by “privatizing new sectors of the economy once thought to be the domain of the public sector, slashing government spending on social services, and promoting anti-union, ‘flexible’ labor policies” (111).

In addition to acknowledging how these ideas are discursively related, it’s important to document how the movements supporting these ideas are materially connected. In many instances, the same groups that organized to install neoliberal policies in response to civil rights advances in the 1960s and 1970s, are, in the 2020s, installing anti-abortion policies, legislation attacking transgender people, school and library book bans, anti-vaccine initiatives, union busting tactics, and school voucher programs. All but the first of these are typically framed as matters of “choice,” even though the consequences are communal, and are indicative of a mentality that permeates higher education: students are expected to act as atomized individuals making choices about their own education under market conditions, whether that’s a choice about selecting a marketable major, taking out loans, or, relevant to writing centers, seeking additional academic help.

A common but still useful catch-all is that neoliberalism re-defines students, faculty, and staff as entrepreneurial individuals entering contracts with the institution and each other, and as such are expected to assume all financial culpability and continually update their skills to meet changing workplace needs (Mautner, “The Entrepreneurial University”). This individual responsibility is often packaged around ideas of “choice,” wherein the neoliberal agent has the freedom to make market-based choices regarding anything from what brand of toilet paper to buy to what college major to pursue. What is left out of these claims of student choice is that those choices are directed—by program requirements, by laws, by advisors, by registration software—in ways that are not always clear to the students. For example, if a particular course is required for students, many students will attempt to enroll in the course, sometimes resulting in a waitlist, and upper administration will determine that students are “choosing” that course. Respecting student choice, however, rarely extends to instances where the data run contrary to the expectations or preferences of those in institutional power. If a writing center has a backlog of

online asynchronous consultations, but there are free spots available for in-person consultations, the institution won’t necessarily fund more online asynchronous support if the institution is trying to increase on-campus activity.

As Mery F. Diaz et. al. point out, “[i]nstitutions that embrace neoliberal ideals value independence, self-reliance, efficiency, and non-relational helping relationships” (192). Objectives framed around these kinds of terms illustrate how neoliberal ideologies are not spread through discourses that directly harm or oppress others, but rather, they reproduce discreetly through discourses that claim to offer support (Kauppinen). For instance, M. Remi Yergeau et. al. argue that student accessibility services which are meant to support student needs can deny accommodations if rigor is affected because it would create an unfair disadvantage for able-bodied students.

Returning to the point introduced by Mitchell and Randolph, writing centers perpetuate the inherent racism of both academia as a whole and the English discipline, where white supremacy is built in as the default state. In fact, as Wonderful Faison and Anna Treviño argue, “many ableist, racist, classist, xenophobic, and/or sexist assumptions and institutional practices are embedded in student success initiatives, under the guise of generosity or altruism.”

At issue here is not just that any ambiguous space allows for participants to create their own meanings, which can be confusing for individual students as well as for writing centers. It’s also that because success as a term is so closely aligned with neoliberal capitalism, specifically with financial gain at the expense of others’ suffering, people will fill in that objective as “natural” absent any other definition.

In the case of writing centers, they stand as a platform that offers services to any student in need of writing support. For students to receive these services, they have to position themselves as customers who have self-diagnosed themselves as having a need. Here, we don’t mean to critique self-advocacy, rather we point out how treating students like customers is indicative of neoliberalism and that can lead to outcomes that may run contrary to a writing center’s mission.

The conditions of neoliberal institutions in the United States cannot be separated from the contexts in which they arise, what hooks identifies as an “interrelated system of domination” designed to promote “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (xi).

Neoliberal success, therefore, is intertwined with, “the dominant epistemology (of white privilege),” which, according to Faison et. al. “provide[s] white people

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Writing Centers’ Entanglements with Neoliberal Success • 30 with the privilege to insist that race is not/no longer an issue in the U.S., as well as the privilege to insist that the dominant epistemology is not only the norm, but also the only epistemology” (81). This context is accentuated by writing centers’ institutional precarity, especially for contingent staff who are often excluded from their own centers’ decision-making processes (Fels et. al.). It also includes writing centers at schools that have received less attention in terms of historical research and archiving in WC scholarship such as HCBUs, HSIs, women's colleges, and tribal colleges (Denny and Boquet), but are nevertheless forced to play a part in maintaining the racist expectations of the institution (Barrera Eddy et. al.) Critical observations such as these reveal the limits of critiques or theories that focus mainly on economic concerns, because neoliberalism and white supremacy are engaged in overlapping projects. Central to both is rendering their hegemonies at once invisible and self-evident. An idea of “success” rooted in neoliberal ideology necessarily perpetuates racism, patriarchy, classism, ableism, and restricts efforts to promote justice, equity, and inclusion.

Methodology Artifact The university system at the center of our analysis identifies “student success” as being “core to the mission” (“Student Success”). The system includes eight academic institutions with writing centers, and although each institution is an autonomous entity, enacting its own missions, strategic plans, and developing its own degree and support programs, they are all governed by a single Board of Regents, a shared set of system policies, and common state laws.

Emerging as a guiding principle as well as a series of academic programs, “Student Success” demarcates system-wide and locally enacted administrative units facilitated by “coordination and collaboration across…institutions, and with partners beyond the System” that value certain kinds of accessibility, degree attainment, and career preparation (“Student Success”).

Writing centers produce all kinds of artifacts that tell researchers a lot about what writing centers do and why they do it (Faison and Condon). Webspaces are important contributors to writing center discourse, and include, for instance, official institutional websites, social media pages and accounts, management systems like WCOnline, and videoconferencing services. As Eric Camarillo argues, the decisions writing centers

make with their webspaces on design and functionality aren’t neutral; they reflect the values of the institution (“A Parliament of OWLS”). Our mini-corpus consists of the webspaces for each writing center in the university system including the home/landing page and all other levels of “child” pages. PDF attachments were not included, nor were pages located elsewhere on an institution’s website that mentioned the writing center.

This helped ensure that we were able to obtain comparable information from each writing center webspace.

These webspaces prominently display hours of service, location, contact information, and descriptions of services. In addition, webspaces variably include photos of the center itself, short bios of center staff, resources for writers and instructors, and supplementary content like blogs, journal articles, and instructional videos. All of these features are common across WCS, making this mini-corpus sufficiently representative of the broader disciplinary community.

Our data were collected during the Fall 2021 semester. Since then, some of the writing centers represented in the mini-corpus have changed personnel and updated webspace designs and content. Likewise, the university system and state higher education coordinating board have both revised and updated their missions and objectives. Our mini-corpus artifact serves as a snapshot of writing centers at the time it was created, a strategic approach to documenting historically relevant moments in the field during an era of accelerating technological and political change (Azima et. al.).

Critical Discourse and Corpus Analyses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) refers to a range of approaches designed for understanding and critiquing how power is created, reproduced, and circulated through language and practice across societies and institutions. Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) is the commonly used name for the associated academic discipline. Gerlinde Mautner grounds CDA’s metadisciplinary application by defining critical as the work of “unveiling and challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about language and the social” (“Checks and Balances” 123-124). Discourse is defined as authentic texts that perform social functions. Analysis accounts not just for an institution’s stated intentions but considers how discourse was created, its material impact, its effects, the interactions and networks that result from and create it, and the physical and digital spaces that are modified or created for such interaction. It is the systematized linking of text and

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Writing Centers’ Entanglements with Neoliberal Success • 31 context. Finally, recalling Shawn Wilson, who writes, “researchers, no matter how objective they claim their methods and themselves to be, do bring with them their own set of bias,” CDA considers the observer as part of the apparatus, and so the researcher is entangled in that meaning making (16).

CDA can be augmented by methods like Corpus Analysis (CA) to analyze patterns in language across large quantities of textual data, known as a corpus, using computer-mediated concordance software (Höög). Following Charlotte Taylor, rather than starting “from the corpus,” our project uses “a discourse-analytical frame,” resulting in the modified approach of Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CACDA) (22). To complete our analysis, we primarily used concordance software to help us identify the extent, instances, and contexts in which the broader phenomenon of “success” is enacted. This approach places our project in line with CDS’s objectives of analyzing discursive power in discrete as well as broader societal contexts by giving us a bird’s eye view of writing center webspaces while also zooming in on the target ideograph.

It is useful to recall Karen Barad's framing of discourse, which she says is the "field of possibilities" that "constrains and enables what can be said" and through which we "define what counts as meaningful statements" (147). This perspective accounts for expanded definitions of discourse that are grounded in political practice (Gee), includes “semiotic systems such as images, layout and typography” (Bednarek and Caple 136), and attends to the overlap of the “textual details” of composing practices and the “social structures” of institutional policies (Huckin et. al. 112).

LaFrance and Nicolas found that, “the apparatus of the writing center … is constructed to minimize the ambiguity of the relationship between any two people working together in an academic setting,” (104-105).

Accounting for all of these factors, it becomes necessary to consider not just an institution’s stated intention; we must also consider how the discourse was created, its material impact, the effects of that discourse, the interactions and networks that result from and create the discourse, and the physical and digital spaces that are modified or created for such interaction. Our comprehensive approach affords us the opportunities to directly concern ourselves with the stated objectives of writing centers and their broader institutions, and identify how those objectives are manifest in subtle and incremental ways (Parnell).

Methods

In this subsection we overview our step-by-step process for collecting data and analyzing our artifact.

First, we created a mini-corpus populated with text data from every page of every writing center webspace within the selected university system. This required converting individual web pages into text files that could be processed by the concordance software. This was done by inputting the URL of each page of the corresponding writing centers’ webspace into the iPodulator online conversion application which would return a plain text file version of each page’s content (Krupa). The resulting text data from each individual page were compiled into larger text files, one file for each writing center webspace in its entirety, resulting in eight files total.

Second, we sorted the data using Laurence Anthony’s AntConc concordance freeware, starting with the word “succe*.” Stylizing the search term with the asterisk (*) tells the concordance software to include all suffixes and word endings, which accounts for a word’s various forms and usages (success, successes, succeed, etc.). Since our analysis is concerned with the different ways in which the key term was used and not on word frequency, we did not consider duplicate content as separate plots for our coding. This approach is referred to as focusing on unique instances of use.

Third, Crystal and Monty individually read through each “succe*” plot and coded each instance according to themes we felt best represented the way “success” was being used in context (Tekla was responsible for checking the coded data for any inconsistencies). To avoid influencing each other’s coding processes, we waited until we had each concluded our coding to share and discuss our results. After discussing how we coded each plot, and coming to consensus on any convergences and discrepancies in our coding, we organized the data into a finalized list of seven collocate themes. These themes were cross-referenced with contemporary WCS scholarship, searching for direct matches of terms as well as for relevant cognate terms (eg, “writer” and “author” were both counted in instances where they referred to the student as the one doing the writing). We discuss those themes in the “Results” section of this essay.

This process was time and labor intensive, making real Barad’s materiality, particularly the role of the apparatus as co-constitutive of epistemology and ontology. That is, our methodological approach mattered in what data we were able to collect, how we were able to analyze those data, and what meaning could be derived from our research. For instance, our data collection and analysis process were partially shaped by the affordances and constraints of the

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Writing Centers’ Entanglements with Neoliberal Success • 32 AntConc freeware. Converting the webspaces into text files made using the concordance software possible, but it was not conducive to analyzing key features of web-based discourses, such as visual design (e.g., color, arrangement, logos), audio/video content (tutorials, podcasts, sound effects), accessibility (typeface, transcripts, captions on a/v content), and end-user experience (pathways, number of clicks to find content, individual technologies or software), which Catharina Nystrӧm Höög identifies as a shortcoming of corpus analysis.

Data

The mini-corpus that forms the basis for our analysis includes a total 313,815 individual word tokens, representing 12,431 different words. The key term “succe*” plotted a total of 382 times across the mini-corpus, with 63 unique instances. Figure 1 indicates how the key term token “succe*” is plotted in the mini-corpus, along with the most common forms: “success,” “succeed,” and “successful.” This figure also shows how these terms rank on the reference corpora, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Academic Journals genre corpus (ACAD). By comparing how frequently the key term occurs within the mini-corpus to its frequency in the two reference corpora, two preliminary conclusions can be drawn: “succe*” is more frequently used in the mini-corpus than the other corpora and, based on the frequency in both the mini-corpus and the ACAD, the key term is more prominent in academic discourse than in more general discourse.

Results This section includes seven thematic subsections, one for each collocate theme that we identified: academic objectives, independence and service, writing, professionalization, branding, and abstract. Each subsection indicates the number of relevant plots, and is then defined, analyzed, and supported by relevant scholarship. Two instances of “successive” were coded as not relevant. Following standard practice with CACDA, individual institutions are cited anonymously,

while benefit terms and cognates are indicated in aggregate.

Academic objectives (8) The theme of “success” as an academic objective refers to those instances where a student indicated having met the stated or assumed objectives of a course, assignment, or instructor. For example, among a list of services that includes disciplinary-aligned objectives like developing critical thinking skills and supporting other programs on campus, one center frames student success as “defined by completion, improved grades, or publications.” Another center identifies successful students as effective writers who “use controlling ideas: thesis statements, hypotheses, questions of inquiry, etc. to signal intent, provide direction, and summarize main points for their readers.” Along similar lines, other centers reference “success” in classes, on dissertation defenses, and in general “academic endeavors.” Students, too, associate “success” with classroom performance, noting that, “I do believe the tutoring will help me be more successful in my class.”

Each of these reflects the idea of “success” as defined by meeting predetermined standards that lie outside of an individual student’s learning or objectives.

Meeting course objectives is a kind of “success,” one that Readings identifies as having, “no content to call its own,” which is to say, anything the institution chooses can be considered a potential indicator of “success” (24). There are instances where meeting course or instructor objectives could be viewed as in-line with WCS’s social justice goals, such as if the student learning outcomes of a course or program specifically articulate these goals. However, given how language and goals of social justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion are being made illegal for academic programs and support services, particularly in Republican-led states, assessing whether course outcomes lead to positive social outcomes will be increasingly difficult.

For writing centers, an emphasis on doing what an instructor “wants” the student to do reproduces the “banking model” critiqued by Paulo Freire (Hull).

Accordingly, there is less evidence in the mini-corpus of common WCS scholarship themes, such as collaborative practice, and there is only one reference to “meaning making practices.” This could be due to centers preferring not to foreground disciplinary concepts out of concerns that it would confuse or turn off potential students. Another interpretation is that these writing centers—and by extension, their

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Writing Centers’ Entanglements with Neoliberal Success • 33 institutions and system—are wary of critiques of collaborative work as somehow lesser than individual work. A prejudice against collaboration shows up in policies that frame collaborative practices as cheating, and in annual review guidelines that favor single-author publications over collaborative writing. Further, the idea of collaboration runs contrary to the neoliberal concept of the atomized individual.

Independence and service (5) Writing center independence, which Hallman Martini, in a gesture towards post-human interaction, refers to as “agency,” can be understood in terms of institutional place, including the allocation of space and resources (63). Most writing centers “belong to,” or are dependent on, academic departments or larger administrative units that may not hold the same views of writing support and the role of writing centers.

Absent its own independent academic identity, Lori Salem observes, a writing center is typically relegated to the role of “service unit” (“Opportunity and Transformation” 27). Under a service model, interactions between students and tutors take the shape of consumers purchasing a product, with tutors and other center staff acting as customer service agents.

Independence can also refer to the student writer gaining confidence in their ability to complete their own writing. However, as student writers become more self-sufficient and confident in their writing, they may become less reliant on the support provided by the writing center (Carillo). Writing centers are “supportive” spaces that meet institutional objectives according to quantitative measurements, such as improved student grade point averages, matriculation, retention, graduation, and job placement (Nordstrom).

Since quantitative measurements like usage rates are “the market-based logic of evaluating writing centers,” lower usage—ostensibly the result of effective tutoring operations—can be viewed as indicative of poor performance (Salem, “Decisions” 151). Taken in the inverse, writing centers are dependent on students feeling like they lack “independence.”

Throughout the mini-corpus, the writing center is positioned as successful because it helps students.

Considering writing centers’ histories of providing support for non-traditional and marginalized students—while also acknowledging that history has not always led to equitable representation in hiring practices or publication—defining writing center success according to the help it provides students would seem to be in-line with WCS’s social justice and antiracist objectives. Put another way, writing centers’

positive desired outcomes do not compensate for the broader desired outcomes of the institution. In other words, writing centers can promote independence, but often it can only achieve a certain kind of neoliberal-approved independence.

A lack of evidence within the mini-corpus to frame writing center success in terms of institutional or disciplinary autonomy, contributions to the advancement of scholarship, or tutors developing as researchers or learners in their own rights (outside of job training to meet service objectives), is noticeable.

Not surprisingly, “success” across the mini-corpus was less frequently attributed to the center or tutors and instead revolved around the student. The instances coded as “center and tutor services” reaffirm this framing, by emphasizing the centers’ roles in meeting external expectations.

Writing (14) Expectedly, helping students to become better writers is considered a successful outcome for writing centers. Better can mean a lot of things, such as: effective at reaching and persuading intended audiences, able to situate writing within different contexts, aware of their disciplines' expectations.

Centers in the mini-corpus accomplish this through individualized, contextual feedback, with one center noting that “there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to successful writing” (D). Topics such as coherent organization and transitions, developing ideas, supporting arguments with credible evidence, and transfer of writing and languaging skills are frequently mentioned. Further, successful writing demonstrates “metacommentary” on and “synthesis” of ideas, arguments, and sources. It incorporates arguments and claims supported by various forms of secondary and primary evidence, the value of each determined by differing audiences and disciplinary contexts.

Writing centers in this mini-corpus are less likely to advocate their services for writing conventions—grammar, spelling, punctuation—even as those features might be areas of evaluation in disciplinary writing assignments. This stance is in-line with WCS lore, although more recent scholarship signals a shift in disciplinary thinking. Salem, for instance, notes that “affecting a genteel disregard for grammar makes no sense if we are working with English language learners, with students who spoke a less-privileged version of English at home, or with any student who feels anxious about grammar” (“Decisions” 163). Only one center in the mini-corpus indicates that they offer language support in languages

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Writing Centers’ Entanglements with Neoliberal Success • 34 other than English—or, at least, that their tutors also speak Spanish.1 When writing centers privilege English language writing, they reinforce what Caswell critiques as “the narrative that academic mobility is tied to [Standard Academic English]” (113). At the same time, helping students to become successful writers often means guiding them to be more aware of and skilled at deploying English language conventions and SAE. Writers and consultants alike are aware of this pressure.

For Instance, Faith Thompson describes consultants as “‘playing the game,’” wherein they “communicated to students that code-switching was the only way for academic success.” These conditions highlight the disharmony that writing centers face within neoliberal institutions. Centers are compelled to reinforce white language dominance while our scholarship recognizes that doing so reconstitutes racist linguistic hierarchies.

Professionalization (10) Plots coded as “professionalism” included those that describe writing as a prerequisite or component of job or career attainment. Writing centers endorse neoliberal ideology by aligning writing with markers of professional success such as job procurement, appeal to potential employers, and field-specific outcomes like journal article publication and “book contracts.”

Sometimes, these connections are less explicit. For instance, the mission statement of one writing center links critical thinking to external pressures “including assessment and shifting demands from a variety of writing cultures in higher education.” Although the referent for the “shifting demands” language is unstated, its proximity to “including assessment” implies familiar external pressures associated with the neoliberal academy.

Professionalization is listed as something to strive for regardless of degree type. For example, one center notes that, for undergraduate students, “the ability to communicate in writing is one of the most important keys to professional success,” while for graduate students, success is marked by an ability “to communicate the value of your research to people inside and outside of your discipline.” These examples position successful writing at both the undergraduate ("professional") and graduate ("value") levels in terms of economic signifiers. In doing so, writing centers suggest that students gain independence by accomplishing tasks and goals that could help them procure gainful employment.

However, professionalization as a marker of success aligns with writing centers’ administrative

outcomes more so than with learning objectives. Since institutions value economic outcomes like job placement for their graduates, writing centers are successful when they contribute to that outcome by helping students improve their professional prospects.

This principle applies to consultants who gain professional experience and develop hirable skills through their work in the writing center. However, these kinds of measures are different from learning outcomes in that they are indirect evidence of achievement but not direct evidence of student learning or student writing.

Returning to our initial exigence, emphases on professionalization are connected to institutional racism, as noted above by Mitchell and Randolph.

Because it is taken as a given that it is a desirable outcome, professionalization in the writing center has the effect of rendering institutional racism less visible because it is laundered through language of academic success.

Branding (18) Given our methodological and thematic focuses, it was not surprising that the “branding” theme was the most frequent hit in our analysis. This is because services, workshops, academic departments, and writing centers themselves frequently include the word “success” in their titles (Monty). One “Success Center” has the slogan “Success is not an accident. It’s a result.” prominently displayed on its homepage. It reinforces the idea of accountability, demonstrates how neoliberal discourse functions tautologically (as it’s not immediately indicated what success is the result of), and equates personal identity with brand identity. For individuals, this means defining an education as the accumulation of marketable and employable skills.

Writing centers’ branding of success reflects the influence, values, and control of their institutions.

Although more autonomous centers may have control over their webspaces, most writing centers enact the same designs, color schemes, and user experiences as their institutions. Yiqiong Zhang and Kay L. O'Halloran find that this has the effect of conflating “ideas, values, and identities” (438). In other words, when writing center webspaces look like every other website, students associate the center with the values of the institution, not the other way around. Similarly, Höög notes, “visual elements like background colors or photographs, giv[e] university webspaces a more sophisticated – and perhaps more commercial – appearance than public sector texts in general” (213 214). This effect also occurs when writing center

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Writing Centers’ Entanglements with Neoliberal Success • 35 webspaces link to programs like career services, which Fotiadou notes are where students receive writing services at institutions outside the U.S., and where objectives of academic success and employability are more explicitly connected.

Within the mini-corpus, workshops promise “success” in writing lab reports and literature reviews, while student feedback of writing center services is presented as “Success Stories.” Centers offer “Success Camps” and are housed in programs with names like “Undergraduate Success” and “Student Academic Success.” Linked-to services such as “Military and Veterans Success Center” and “Career Success” reveal networks of specialized support services framed in terms that subtly normalize higher education’s role in the U.S.’s military-industrial complex.

When writing centers incorporate the ideograph “success” into their own branding, they commodify themselves as tools students utilize to improve their own brands, and as marketable and employable commodities. Thus, the term “success” is used to sell what can be gained through success: independence.

With slogans like “The sign of a good tutoring session means you find yourself relying on a tutor less and less.

In other words, our Success Center focuses on empowering students,” it is easy to see students buying into the idea of free thinking and growth as promised by the writing center. Within neoliberal institutions, branding is seen as a logical and necessary move, as the only move. A disharmony presents itself when understanding branding as another aspect of neoliberalism and all the contradictions that it carries with it.

Abstract ideas (6) The final group of coded hits were characterized by their lack of continuity, yet, in a way, the items coded as “abstract” are the best representatives of “success” as a neoliberal ideograph. Across higher education, “success” is always used metaphorically, signifying an assumed achievement or positive outcome. Its usage signifies to the audience, “you know what we mean,” without ever actually stating what they mean. But in some instances, that metaphor is a tautology related to another circular logic of the neoliberal academy: the market cost justification that argues that a program or service is worth sustaining if it generates capital. Writing centers are typically free to students at the point of use, drawing their operational budgets from student fees or allocated funds, and so they are perceived as programs that cost money rather than make money. For Denny, writing centers having to

constantly justify their budgets and actions isn’t just about the centers, but rather it “speaks into the influence of corporate-style management discourses and philosophy on college education as well as a historical distrust of and ambivalence toward education.” In these abstractions, success doesn’t mean anything specifically, and that’s perhaps where its usage is most insidious, reiterating ideologies of neoliberalism and white supremacy.

For instance, one writing center webspace directs students to find external resources to support their writing: “There are many useful and comprehensive resources for becoming a more effective and successful writer that can be found online.” Outsourcing writing support to copy editing services like Grammarly and tutoring feedback mills like Smarthinking, or requiring them to use surveillance tech like Turnitin’s plagiarism checker or Respondus’s browser lockdown, are common in business schools and disciplinary writing courses. Drawing on Angela Davis, among others, we see these practices as making a kind of sense within the context of the neoliberal academy, reiterating a throughline in U.S. history that connects prison-military-industrial complexes, chattel slavery, and policies of writing education.

Conclusion Analyzing “success” as an ideograph reveals that this term reinforces neoliberal ideology that defines “the outer parameters of a society” while “signifying a collective commitment” to success’s contextual meaning and use (McGee 8, 15). Understanding how writing center discourses function, and revealing potential motivations for these functions, particularly when they contradict disciplinary objectives, is fundamentally important work because discourse(s) at once produce material conditions and reproduce ideological power. If writing centers are not aware of and able to reconcile the neoliberal contexts in which they operate, they will inadvertently continue to serve the material and intellectual interests of a capitalist, white supremacist hegemony (Azima et. al.). Our analysis draws attention to the institutional conditions that prevent critical interpretation in favor of accepting self-evident meanings and subsequent policies. Even though writing centers promote a form of student and tutor collaboration that is unique within institutions of higher education, our analysis shows how these objectives are contingent upon a range of neoliberal contextual factors that inform each other: social practices, physical and online spaces, human interactions, and access to capital (Singh-Corcoran and

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Writing Centers’ Entanglements with Neoliberal Success • 36 Emika). Indeed, these imperatives are accelerating. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s most recent strategic plan explicitly ties student success to economic advancement, and boasts to “be the first state in the country to tie our completion goals directly to the wage premiums associated with postsecondary credentials” (“Building a Talent Strong Texas,” emphasis in original). At the same time, the state has outlawed diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives on college campuses, a directive that some institutions have been willing to over-comply with, by eliminating DEI initiatives, renaming and repurposing diversity offices, and enacting policies to avoid non-compliance even before the law went into effect in January 2024 (Xia & Dey).

The language of neoliberalism and white supremacy “in the writing center occurs not because of linguistic/dialectic clashes of a genuine misunderstanding of linguistic meaning, but because of racism/racial supremacy” (Condon et. al. 37). There is no anti-neoliberalism without antiracism, and vice versa. Yet, we’re hopeful about efforts that decenter academic discourse and white supremacist audiences (Treviño and Ozias), emphasize transfer of and respect for students’ multiple literacies (Stock and Liechty), critique writing centers’ hegemonic, iterative roles within institutions, offer pathways for remediation and response, recognize systemic and institutional change as enactments and processes of becoming (Zhang et. al.), empower students to reflect on their writing processes and define successful writing for themselves (Blackmon), and promote interdisciplinary collaboration to create new visions for writing centers based on shared goals and values (Hallman Martini).

We are critiquing neoliberalism at the discursive level in a moment when Neo-Confederate fascism is attacking higher education out in the open. Why are you paying attention to that, when there's all this? The counterargument to our project from the contemporary neoliberal movement would likely hinge on the premise that positive outcomes of egalitarian, pluralistic, and democratic institutions and societies can only be achieved through economic opportunity and advancement. However, those attacking higher education have used the logics and systems of neoliberalism—unfettered economic privilege, so-called free speech absolutism—to achieve their recent gains. To continue to facilitate the positive outcomes that writing centers have been working towards for decades, it is necessary for writing centers to disentangle from neoliberal discourses of success and redefine their work according to collaboration and community.

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the editors, reviewers, and readers of Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines, as well as the conference audiences at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing and the South Central Writing Centers Association, who provided feedback on earlier versions of this project. We are especially grateful to our colleagues who provided discussion and feedback on our drafts: Wonderful Faison, Marlene Galván, Rebekah Hamilton, Andrew Hollinger, Allison Hutchison, and Sarah Swaim.

Notes 1. At the time of writing, one other center represented here now indicates on their website that they offer Spanish language writing support.

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PREPARING PROFESSIONAL WRITING CENTER STAFF TO WORK WITH STEM POPULATIONS: A MODEL Candis Bond Augusta University cbond@augusta.edu

James Garner Augusta University james.garner@augusta.edu

Abstract

with writing center practices and prepared for the work they will do (“Introduction” 4-7). While professional consultants often do bring expertise in classroom teaching, writing pedagogy, and other skills relevant to writing center labor, scholars are beginning to recognize that these staff members also need training and mentoring to help them define and excel in their writing center roles (Allison; Fahle Peck et al.; Sharkey Smith; Jewell and Cheatle, “Introduction” and “Toward a Professional Consultant’s Handbook”; Shiell; Siemann).

Recently, at Augusta University, we hired our first full-time professional consultants. Home to the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University is known as Georgia’s “Health Sciences University.”

Thus, the majority of students enroll in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), health sciences, and health professions fields, and, by extension, many faculty work within these disciplines.1 This shift in staffing resulted from increasing demand for writing support from advanced undergraduate researchers, graduate and professional students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty, most of whom are within STEM disciplines.

Unsurprisingly, approximately 50% of our writing center’s consultations are held with STEM graduate students and faculty each academic year. While half of the writers who visit the CWE are STEM students and faculty, most of our staff—including undergraduate, graduate, and professional consultants—do not have extensive knowledge of or direct experience with these fields at the time of hire.

Part of our motivation for moving to more professional staffing was so that we could devote needed time to researching STEM disciplines and genres to provide more targeted and tailored support.

Our undergraduate and graduate staff are only paid for consulting hours, so we are limited in our ability to pay them to conduct research. By contrast, professional staff consult approximately 20 hours per week, totaling 50% of their contracted labor. The remaining 50% of their contracted time is allocated to researching genres

In this article, we describe a two-day, intensive STEM training that we piloted in summer of 2022 to prepare newly hired professional staff to support STEM writers. The training was created by the director and associate director and was offered to two professional consultants and two graduate assistant consultants in-person over a two-day period before the start of the fall semester. Staff training should always be responsive to local contexts, and we are aware our model may not transfer to other university settings. However, we do hope that our pilot offers a model that other universities can adapt to meet local needs and implement when training professional and graduate staff. Although we focus on professional staff, our model may also be useful for supplementing a generalist approach to training graduate and undergraduate peer tutors who work closely with STEM writers or as a primary form of training for embedded consultants working within STEM courses. As we discuss our model, we turn to writing in the disciplines scholarship to explain our choices and ground our pedagogy. We also turn to research on tutor training and writing center staff professional development. As we describe our training activities, we also identify areas for improvement based on our own perspective and that of our professional and graduate staff attendees.

As the subject of numerous journal articles and books in the field, tutor training remains an evergreen topic in formal and informal writing center conversations alike. Much of this scholarship, however, focuses on training undergraduate peer tutors using a generalist training model (Fitzgerald and Ianetta; Gillespie and Lerner; Ryan and Zimmerelli). As Megan Swihart Jewell and Joseph Cheatle point out in their anthology, Redefining Roles: The Professional, Faculty, and Graduate Consultant’s Guide to Writing Centers, this emphasis does not reflect the reality of writing center staffing in the United States (3). According to the Purdue Writing Lab’s 2020-2021 Writing Centers Research Project survey, nearly 30% of participating writing centers (n=270) staffed professional consultants. Jewell and Cheatle define professional consultants as “writing consultants who are not primarily teaching and who are not enrolled as graduate or undergraduate students...hired to work exclusively (or nearly exclusively) in the writing center” (3). They suggest the lack of scholarship on professional consultant training and roles stems from false assumptions that these consultants arrive at their positions already familiar

Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM Populations • 42 and disciplines to prepare for consultations, developing and presenting workshops, and pursuing scholarly publication. Another part of our motivation to pursue this training was that we wanted to advertise more robust support for faculty and advanced graduate and postdoctoral writers. Prior to hiring our professional consultants, we worked quietly with these writers, who could make appointments either with the director or, depending on the writing task, a graduate student, but we did not have the workforce to advertise these resources more broadly. With the addition of professional staff, however, we are now fully committed to supporting these populations in their roles as both researchers and teachers. As we onboarded incoming professional consultants, we realized quickly that we needed to provide some baseline training for working with STEM writers, especially STEM graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty, who face high stakes for publication and obtaining funding and often distrust writing support provided by those outside of their disciplines.

In her chapter “Faculty and Professional Consultants, the Writing Center, and STEM,” Catherine Siemann notes universities’ increasing emphasis on STEM education. She argues writing centers must adapt to this shift in university populations and curriculum and that a “professional or mixed peer-professional tutoring model becomes increasingly valuable” in these contexts because professional staff members “can bring a confidence to working with writing outside their own academic field that comes from the breadth and depth of their experience with student writing” (111-112). Siemann claims “the wealth of experience faculty and professional tutoring staff bring to the writing center makes these individuals exceptionally valuable for working with the sometimes-complicated tutoring situations that are typical of STEM programs and STEM students” (111). She aptly notes, however, that professional consultants’ impact depends on the quality of their training. If time is invested in training professional consultants on STEM-specific rhetorical and genre knowledge, assignments, writing processes, and challenges and if, using Rebecca Nowacek and Bradley Hughes’s framework, these staff members are trained to work as confident “expert outsiders,” then they can have great impact (Siemann 113-120). We agree that professional consultants who work with STEM writers benefit from discipline-specific training, so we turned to the wealth of insights in the field of writing in the disciplines (WID). Thus, as we

onboarded our incoming professional staff, we developed a training program based on the needs of our local contexts and writers.

In this article, we describe a two-day, intensive STEM training we piloted in the summer of 2022 to prepare professional staff to support STEM writers.

The training was created by the director and associate director and was offered to two professional consultants and two graduate assistant consultants.

Although we were focused on preparing full-time professional staff, we thought it was important to also include our graduate assistants, who do still work with advanced graduate writers and faculty from time to time. This seemed like a great way to foster an inclusive staff community while professionalizing our graduate employees. The training took place in-person over a two-day period just before the start of the fall semester.

Staff training should always be responsive to local contexts, and we are aware our model may not transfer to other university settings. However, we do hope that our pilot offers a model that other universities can adapt to meet local needs and implement when training professional and graduate staff. Our model may also be useful for supplementing a generalist approach to training undergraduate peer tutors who work closely with STEM writers or as a primary form of training for embedded consultants working within STEM courses.

As we discuss our model, we turn to writing in the disciplines scholarship to explain our choices and ground our pedagogy. We also turn to research on tutor training and writing center staff professional development. As we discuss our training activities, we also identify areas for improvement based on our own perspective and that of our professional and graduate staff attendees.

Our Model: An Intensive STEM Training for Professional and Graduate Writing Center Staff Although writing is central to STEM disciplines, it is often subordinated to content and is not integrated into graduate curriculum or stressed in faculty professional development (Beaufort; Davies et al.; Emerson; Lane; Madson; Mallette; Moon et al.; Poe et al.; Winsor). Consequently, STEM writers may not identify as “writers” (Emerson “‘I’m not a writer’” and Forgotten Tribe), and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty in these fields may face challenges when attempting to write, publish, and obtain intramural and extramural funding. Faculty in these

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Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM Populations • 43 disciplines may also feel ill-equipped to offer explicit writing instruction to students, especially graduate students and postdoctoral fellows (Emerson Forgotten Tribe; Moon et al.). Writing centers can partner with STEM programs to provide more support for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty writers. Offering consultations to faculty, especially, not only helps them meet publishing and funding goals; it can also model to faculty how they can mentor their research team members and students through the writing process. For both of these reasons, we work with both students and faculty at the Augusta University Center for Writing Excellence. We believe everyone can benefit from talking about their writing, even if they are already prolific writers with numerous publications and grants to their name. Our professional staff, therefore, need to be prepared to assist STEM writers who vary in ability and level of experience as they engage disciplinary genres for distinct purposes and audiences.

Our intensive STEM training aimed to provide a foundation for doing this work effectively and with confidence.

Before detailing the training itself, we should briefly explain why this training was designed with professional staff in mind but also offered to graduate student consultants. There were two reasons for this decision. First, our reasoning for designing this with a focus on our professional consultants’ needs: at the time we designed this training, professional writing consultants were a new resource, and we wanted to ensure that our professional consultants could present themselves such that STEM faculty would see them as peers and colleagues, recognizing their knowledgeability on both general writing concerns as well as STEM-specific writing needs. As mentioned, our professional consultants did not earn degrees from STEM fields, so they needed to get up to speed quickly on key concepts in STEM writing to cultivate trust and consult confidently with faculty. Second, we allowed graduate consultants to join, to prepare them if they should find themselves working with faculty. Our center tries to operate on a peer model, with professional staff working with faculty, graduate staff working with graduate students, and undergraduate staff working with undergraduates. However, we realized our faculty members occasionally meet with graduate students due to scheduling limitations, so we wanted to make sure graduate students had the opportunity to benefit from this training. The training thus focused more on STEM-related content and discipline-specific needs rather than concerns that

might be more germane to graduate consultants (for instance, negotiating power dynamics with faculty).

The training totaled approximately 12 hours over a two-day period (see Appendix for schedule agenda), with activities running from 8am- 3pm both days.

Participants received an hour-long break for lunch as well as several short breaks throughout both days, which were important for keeping everyone engaged and comfortable. Several writing center scholars have noted the importance of rhetorical and genre knowledge for STEM writers (Shome; Siemann; Walker). Most recently, in a mixed-methods study comparing the efficacy of writing consultations conducted by generalist tutors and tutors trained in writing literature reviews, Lucy Bryan Malenke et al. found that writers who worked with genre-trained tutors revised more effectively and offered more robust post-survey feedback than writers assisted by generalist consultants (92-94). Consequently, the first day of the camp familiarized staff with common genre and stylistic conventions of STEM disciplines.

Day one included sessions on principles of scientific style, the Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion (IMRD) and Create a Research Space (CARS) models, common STEM genres local to our context, and using rhetorical genre analysis (RGA) as a consulting and teaching tool.

In the afternoon, attendees read independently on the genre of clinical notes in preparation for a guest-led session on day two. The second day of the camp moved away from conventions to focus more on application. The day featured sessions on building trust with STEM writers, including a session on defining and using key terms in quantitative research and applying genre analysis through intensive genre exploration. Day two concluded with a guest speaker from our university’s medical school who had served as a writing consultant in the past. She provided a primer on clinical notes and ways our center could collaborate with the medical school. Both days included time for written reflection and group discussion. Below, we discuss content from both days of the training. Instead of moving through sessions in order, we have organized our discussion around major training themes, including staff reflection and discussion, linguistic and stylistic knowledge, and rhetorical and genre knowledge.

Staff Reflection and Discussion Sessions We felt it was important to begin and end both days of the training with periods of staff reflection and

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Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM Populations • 44 discussion. We found beginning each day with discussion was helpful for setting the stage for the remainder of the training. The group discussions ranged widely, offering our cohort a chance to share about their successes and opportunities for growth in working with STEM writers. The inaugural reflections also allowed the presenters to adapt content to staff concerns as the trainings progressed.

At the start of the first day, all staff, including the director and associate director, reflected on the affective dimensions of working with STEM writers.

Our professional staff were brand new—one had been at the university only one week at the time of the training and the other, only two months. The fields in which our professional staff completed their dissertations were rhetoric and composition and linguistics, and our graduate staff members were both completing master’s degrees in counseling. Though these writers had some familiarity with the stylistic and generic conventions of scientific writing, the STEM-focused projects they would be working with were not their primary fields of expertise. The training was also our first time gathering for professional development as a cohort. We wanted to acknowledge any emotions or concerns that staff may have at the onset so these discussions could shape our presentation of material throughout the training.

Consequently, day one began with a written reflection period that opened into a group discussion.

We encouraged vulnerability and curiosity. Our discussion questions for the period were “What concerns do you have about working with writers in STEM, health sciences, and health professions?” and “In what ways do you already feel confident working with STEM writers?” These questions were intended to inspire our professional staff members and graduate students to begin reflecting on their existing strengths and areas for development when working with STEM writers. The strengths that they mentioned included an understanding of academic conventions, general knowledge of publication practices, and experience with writing as a process. Our new staff ’s anxieties were predictable ones: the cohort noted their limited experience with STEM genres; the occasional complexity of STEM—particularly computer science—writing, especially formulas and research methods; and conveying appropriate confidence when working with STEM writers.

A few concerns emerged that were novel to our context. For example, asynchronous written feedback has been our center’s most popular consultation mode for graduate students and faculty, so consultants

expressed some anxiety about the possibilities of miscommunication in written feedback. They also mentioned the difficulties that written feedback would create in fostering trust with STEM writers, given this modality’s affective limitations and the inability to communicate quickly back and forth. Our cohort’s observations about trust and asynchronous written feedback echo Mathew Sharkey-Smith's arguments about the professional consultant’s hybridity in asynchronous online consultations: “[I]n our work as professional writing consultants, we occupy a role between that of peer and faculty” (103). “Like faculty,” he continues, “we help students satisfy institutional curricular expectations in their writing, but like peer tutors our central purpose is to help students grow as writers. We never intended to be seen as quasi-faculty, but since our students perceive us as having authority...we have tried to use it to their benefit” (104).

At Sharkey-Smith's institution, professional staff work primarily with students, albeit they are professionally experienced, returning adult students. At our institution, professional staff will spend a great deal of time working with faculty in addition to students. The hybridity of their role and the process of earning trust is thus quite complex: professional staff are peers of faculty in the sense that they also have advanced, terminal degrees in their discipline; they are authorities in the sense that they have expertise in writing pedagogy and rhetorical knowledge that the faculty writer may not possess; but they are also non-experts in the sense that they do not possess disciplinary content knowledge that the writer has. They also occupy staff rather than faculty positions within the university. The power dynamics at play in professional staff consultations with faculty and some post-doctoral fellows require nuanced awareness of positionality, expertise, and authority. It can be difficult to work through these power dynamics, establish trust, and gain the respect of the writer through asynchronous written feedback.

To kick off day two, the associate director led staff through another reflective writing and discussion session, offering five minutes to free write on what makes them trust or distrust someone with their writing, and describing and reflecting on both a positive and negative experience when they trusted someone with their writing. After the more theoretically focused first day, the second day of the training turned to application and greater reflection on ways our consultants might work with STEM writers.

To this end, the broad theme of the second day was how our consultants can build trust with STEM

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Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM Populations • 45 writers, and how the strategies from the previous day might allow them to foster that trust. Participants discussed times, especially, when teachers, reviewers, and dissertation directors broke trust either with outright insulting comments or—the worse offense, our consultants agreed—simply not engaging with their writing on its own terms. But we also discussed ways that trust was built: when dissertation directors’ feedback demonstrated that they had read the writing carefully and thoughtfully and taken it seriously; when they balanced constructive criticism with praise; and when they read and responded to writing reasonably quickly. Even though our staff had limited experience working with STEM writers, especially faculty writing, they found this discussion affirming. It showed they had insight into and knowledge about building trust and helping writers grow of which they weren’t always consciously aware. All participants discussed ways they could use these themes about losing and earning trust to establish healthy, engaged relationships with STEM writers.

This reflection/discussion period preceded a short session with additional concrete strategies for earning STEM writers’ trust. The session walked consultants through some of the key problems they might run into working with STEM writers, who can be skeptical of the help they might receive from scholars trained in the humanities. We discussed technical strategies, such as becoming conversant in scientific terminology and the expectations of scientific style, as well as interpersonal ones, such as questions to ask and ways to leverage their own credentials and expertise. Then, the session talked through strategies to help consultants be more confident, curious, process-oriented, precise, and empathetic. This segment culminated with more discussion from our consultants about ways to translate these strategies into asynchronous written feedback, the preferred mode for consulting of the graduate STEM writers who utilize our services.

Linguistic and Stylistic Knowledge To work effectively with STEM writers, professional staff need insight into how scientific writing works at the sentence level, as well as how numeric and symbolic text operates alongside written text to convey information and convey arguments. Our training included several content-oriented sessions on scientific style and quantitative research terminology to provide this training.

Our first content session focused on scientific style, aiming to teach our consultants genre and discipline-specific features of STEM writing to focus their more general knowledge of writing center pedagogy. In keeping with Stephen J. Corbett’s acknowledgment of “the rhetorical complexity that any given tutorial … can entail,” our center trains all our tutors to conduct consultations by navigating the directive/nondirective instructional continuum according to each individual writer’s needs (39). Thus, much of consultants’ training in our broader approach to writing center work and instructional editing occurred prior to this session. We began the session with scientific style, because a deep understanding of scientific style and the ways it is distinct from writing in other fields is foundational for working with STEM writers.

While professional and graduate consultants are not expected to be content experts, knowledge of scientific style is warranted if they are to provide effective feedback and earn STEM writers’ trust. The director has worked at three health science universities over 15 years, and she has observed that one of the fastest ways to lose the trust of writers in the sciences is to lack knowledge of scientific style at the sentence level. She has also observed that many writing center staff members undersell their expertise in this area due to self-doubt about their abilities—they may feel they don’t have the authority or knowledge to comment on elements of scientific style if this is not how they write for their own disciplines. Or they may falsely assume the STEM writer is already an expert in scientific style and would be offended by the consultant’s input at the sentence level. This first session set the stage for boosting consultants’ confidence and helping them gain practical knowledge of common formal and linguistic features of scientific style.

The session began by introducing the rhetorical situation for STEM writing, which includes scientists conveying original findings to other scientists within the context of ongoing conversations about the research topic. (Our training did not focus on science writing for lay audiences, although that is terrain we may explore in the future.) Since the purpose of scientific writing is usually to convey original findings to other scientists who may use the findings to replicate the study or make changes to research, policy, teaching, or practice, the style prioritizes clarity and readability. Our session thus emphasized strategies for being concise, precise, objective, and

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Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM Populations • 46 cohesive—principles discussed at length in most scientific writing textbooks and style guides.

Pulling largely from Steven M. Griffies et al.’s book Publishing Connect: Elements of Style for Writing Scientific Journal Articles; Russell Hirst’s article “Scientific Jargon, Good and Bad”; and George D. Gopen and Judith A. Swan’s classic article “The Science of Scientific Writing,” we reviewed reader-centric strategies for achieving clarity and readability. Consultants receive copies of Hirst’s and Gopen and Swan’s articles to read between workshop days. During the session, the director synthesized key observations about scientific style from these sources in a PowerPoint presentation, and consultants were given opportunities throughout to practice editing strategies and ask clarifying questions. We discussed jargon as a means of achieving precision, rather than as a means of elevating prose. We also dispelled the myth that passive voice is always preferred in scientific disciplines and showed how active voice can make writing more concise and precise. We spent considerable time on sentence structure, especially Gopen and Swan’s points about keeping subjects and verbs close together and intentional use of the topic and stress position, to equip our staff with concrete tools for teaching writers about concision and cohesion at the sentence and paragraph levels.

The session also pushed consultants to think critically about objectivity and to use a rhetorical perspective when deciding which principles—concision, precision, or objectivity—to prioritize in each situation. Most writing center staff understand scientific writing does not contain a lot of personal opinions or emotive adjectives. If you provide them with a sentence such as, “The caring teaching provided a thrilling lecture,” they will be able to identify the problematic adjectives and explain how it creates a subjective tone and ambiguous concepts (don’t we all define “caring” and “thrilling” differently, after all?). However, consultants may be less well-versed in more neutral adjectives and how they can negatively impact replicability or clarity of research.

For example, Griffies et al. provide the following sample sentence as unclear due to subjective language: “"We use a simple model of the ocean's thermocline to describe the dynamical response" (7). In this case, the adjective “simple” is unclear because scientists define it differently depending upon discipline and it does not provide enough description of the model to be useful.

Griffies et al. recommend the following revision: “We use an idealized model of the ocean's thermocline based on approximating the continuous stratification

with two immiscible fluid layers to describe the dynamical response” (7). In this revised sentence, concision is sacrificed to achieve objectivity and precision.

Throughout our session on scientific style, we included both content and hands-on practice activities.

After most of the major sections of the presentation, such as on ineffective use of jargon or sentence structure, consultants were given sample sentences to edit before discussing their solutions and sharing with them possible sample solutions. Additionally, we discussed strategies for conveying edits and revisions to writers while navigating the directive/nondirective continuum. However, for time, hands-on activities were more limited than we would have liked.

Providing examples like this is vital for consultants because it shows that scientific style is not a magic formula nor is it black and white; communicating effectively in the sciences requires rhetorical decision-making and careful consideration of audience and purpose. Similarly, choices about when to use active versus passive voice are usually dependent upon the author’s intended focus: if the action is the focus, as is often the case in a methods section, then passive voice may be preferred; however, in most other circumstances, active voice will be clearer and more concise, and thus will be preferred. Teaching consultants to consider principles of scientific style rhetorically prepares them to have similar conversations with writers. These conversations can help scientific writers increase agency over their text and become more attuned to the distinct rhetorical situations shaping their texts.

Quantitative Research Terminology On the morning of day two, the director led a second session related to linguistic and stylistic elements of scientific writing, this time on quantitative methods and terminology. This session focused on quantitative research terminology and the role of equations, statistical symbols, and visual displays of data in scientific genres. Over the years, the director has observed that quantitative jargon and the presence of equations and visual displays of quantitative data can cause writing consultants anxiety, especially if they have never conducted quantitative research themselves.

Significantly, she has also observed that a lack of confidence discussing quantitative methods and terms can lead STEM writers to lose confidence in writing consultants. She explained to attendees that knowing

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Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM Populations • 47 even just a little bit of quantitative “lingo” can go a long way toward earning STEM writers’ trust.

To provide staff with a baseline of this knowledge, this session provided attendees with a list of common statistical symbols and their definitions as well as information about programs, such as SPSS, R, Stata, MATLAB, and SAS, commonly used for quantitative data analysis in STEM fields. More time was spent on terms and methods that we see frequently in consultations, including the meaning of a p value and statistical significance and the meaning and uses of chi-square and ANOVA tests. We found tech journalist Stephanie Glen’s website Statistics How To: Statistics for the Rest of US! to be a comprehensive yet comprehendible resource for defining descriptive statistics and quantitative terms. We used several videos from this site in our session, including videos on p-values and ANOVA tests. We also found Colorado State University Writing Center’s consultant-created page, “Qualitative and Quantitative Research: Glossary of Key Terms,” to be helpful. In addition to discussing quantitative methods and jargon, we spent time discussing data visualization as rhetorical practice.

Ethical and effective displays of data are persuasive and do not present data out of context; we explored examples of inaccurate data visualization to learn more about the subjective elements and rhetorical decision-making that goes into effective displays of data.

Rhetorical and Genre Knowledge As demonstrated continually in scholarship on discourse analysis and WID, rhetorical and genre knowledge are key to consulting with scientific writers.

As outlined below, we led several sessions on these concepts, first familiarizing staff with the generally useful IMRD format and John Swales’ “Create a Research Space” (CARS) model. Following our session on these more generalizable concepts, we narrowed our focus to several common genres they would encounter and the important skill of rhetorical genre analysis.

IMRD (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion) and CARS (Create a Research Space) To provide staff with tools for more effectively reading and giving feedback on scientific texts, the associate director presented on two concepts central to our center’s approach to STEM writing: the IMRD format standard in scientific writing and John Swales’s

CARS (Create a Research Space) model for academic introductions. We had two purposes in beginning with this section: first, to help our staff quickly acquire transferable knowledge that could be broadly useful for working with scientific and health disciplines; and second, to lay a foundation for our more specific exploration of common genres and rhetorical genre analysis. We concur with Joanna Wolfe, Barrie Olson, and Laura Wilder, who suggest that even though the features of disciplinary writing have become increasingly individualized and unique, commonalities across disciplines nevertheless deserve recognition (44).

IMRD and the CARS model are common features that Wolfe, Olson, and Wilder would describe as macrostructures. During the portion on IMRD, the cohort was introduced in detail to the individual parts of the IMRD model, what their purposes were in scientific and medical communication, and how those pieces fit together to create a cohesive whole that reflects the scientific method (Hofmann 117). While our staff—particularly our PhD-holding professional consultants—were familiar with IMRD in broad strokes, this refresher session also explored ways that staff could employ more precise knowledge of IMRD when consulting with students and faculty in STEM disciplines. For instance, as the associate director has noted in his ten years working in writing centers with significant usage by STEM writers, even advanced doctoral students sometimes struggle with distinguishing the types of claims they should make in the results section from commentary that is appropriate for the discussion section. Thus, in addition to enhancing our consultants’ ethos with STEM writers, the purpose of this session was to equip them with more precise conceptual understanding to assist writers who use this common format for assembling articles.

Once we had familiarized our consultants with IMRD, we devoted attention to introductions. First introduced in 1981 as a four-category model before being streamlined into its current iteration, Swales’s CARS model is a generally useful tool for scientific writing and a mainstay of WAC/WID scholarship.

Swales was a linguist who conducted a multidisciplinary study of scholarly introductions and identified three moves common to academic introductions: 1.

Establishing a territory; 2. Establishing a niche; and 3.

Occupying the niche (Swales 41).

During our presentation, we looked at examples of these moves and then discussed as a group how specific writers achieved them. Since nursing faculty and students typically make up 25-30% of consultations each

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Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM Populations • 48 academic year in our center, the most in-depth example used an introduction from an article published in the Journal of Nursing Informatics. A nursing PhD student had recently published in this journal, and our center finds it helpful to make trainings align with real-life scenarios as much as possible. Looking at a nursing journal that our graduate student writers publish in gave consultants practical experience for future consultations. We recommend writing center administrators tailor STEM training to their own institutional contexts by using journals, genres, and disciplines that their staff are most likely to encounter.

Common Genres and RGA (Rhetorical Genre Analysis) While examining macrostructures such as IMRD and CARS can be good starting points for working with STEM writers, they are not universal. The way STEM disciplines structure texts and make rhetorical moves is nuanced and varies by field and area of specialization. Consequently, we held a session on day one of the training where we introduced staff to common genres at our institution. This session immediately followed the IMRD/CARS session, allowing staff to see how scientific style, quantitative terms, IMRD, and CARS look in practice across disciplines. Common genres will vary by institution, so this type of session is an opportunity for writing centers to review past appointments to identify patterns. At our institution, common genres include research proposals; literature reviews; DNP (Doctor of Nursing Practice) and PhD Nursing capstones/QI (quality improvement) projects/dissertations; master’s theses in fields such as occupational therapy, nursing, and biostatistics; graduate coursework, including reading reflections, article critiques, and discussion posts; personal statements for medical/dental school and residency programs; professional cover letters and CVs; conference proposals/abstracts; and conference presentation materials (proposals, PPTs, and posters).

We also see a fair number of grant proposals and manuscripts for publication from advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty, including NIH (National Institutes of Health) and NSF (National Science Foundation) proposals.

It was not feasible to go examine all these genres in detail, but we selected some of the most common and reviewed prompts, rubrics, and model texts for each. Using information from the IMRD/CARS session, we spent time looking at research proposals to identify common rhetorical moves. We homed in on the literature review sections of these proposals since

we see this genre frequently in our center. We also looked at samples from nursing and education to consider how health science disciplines differ from disciplines consultants may be more familiar with.

Attendees quickly noted differences in use of quotations and paraphrases; use of signal phrases; style, formatting, and placement of citations; and depth of analysis of source material. Attendees were able to connect these differences to principles of scientific style discussed earlier in the day.

The section on RGA drew especially from Amy J. Devitt’s now-classic Writing Genres, Amanda Greenwell’s 2017 article on rhetorical reading guides and Ellen C. Carillo’s work on reading strategies.

Devitt’s efforts to redefine genre as neither a classification system nor as a formula but as “rhetorical and dynamic, integrating form and content, product and process, individual and society” provided important grounding for our approach to genre analysis (6). We wanted to provide our consultants with ways of understanding genre that attended to the interrelationships between writer, audience, text, and content. Participants learned strategies for reading with purpose by attending to generic features of the author’s writing task (Carillo), using the says/does approach while offering feedback during consultations (Carillo), and highlighting their own experience of and expectations from the text as readers (Greenwell).

Carillo’s version of “says/does” annotation asks writers to first summarize what a paragraph says, followed by its rhetorical purpose in the holistic text. Greenwell’s emphasis on “readerly experience” in her discussion of rhetorical reader guides (RRGs) adds a third element to our approach to genre analysis: describing how the paragraphs or sections “orchestrate a reader’s experience” of the text, primarily by setting up readers’ expectations (9). When combined with our discussion of IMRD and CARS, this segment provided consultants with concrete strategies for helping writers address the dynamic and shifting complexities of genres and ways to unfamiliar genres in STEM fields.

We found approaching RGA in this way useful for consultants in two ways: 1) it can help them read scientific writers’ dense, often jargon-filled texts more quickly and with greater ease, and 2) it can be used as a teaching tool in consultations to help scientific writers develop awareness of rhetorical moves and better align their writing with audience expectations and genre conventions.

RGA in Practice: Intense Genre Exploration

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Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM Populations • 49 In addition to introducing common genres and providing instruction on RGA, the training provided staff with opportunities to apply RGA in practice through three sessions of intense genre exploration.

For two of the sessions, we allowed staff to choose common genres they would like to focus on. They chose to explore personal statements for medical residency and an article published in the journal Biostatistics. For the third session, we focused on the genre of clinical notes. Although our writing center has not seen many writers working on clinical notes, we are seeking ways to work more closely with the medical school. The clinical note is a genre all medical students engage with throughout their training, so it seemed like fruitful ground for building new relationships with medical faculty and students.

For the session employing RGA with personal statements for medical residency, staff looked at two anonymized personal statements that had been submitted for asynchronous feedback over the summer. The group decided one was much stronger than the other based on genre conventions and audience expectations. We deconstructed both statements and then, as a group, brainstormed how we might provide feedback to the writer who had submitted the weaker draft. This exercise was helpful for giving consultants concrete strategies for working with writers in this popular genre. The staff chose to review a biostatistics article to become more familiar with the quantitative research terminology and use of equations and symbols discussed in our quantitative research terminology session. The group worked through RGA of the text and spoke at length about the rhetorical function of numbers and symbols, as well as ways we might advise writers working on similar texts with confidence. This session helped staff understand why equations and numbers are important in technical fields, as well as ways they might still provide writers with helpful commentary even when they don’t quite grasp the mathematics at play in the text.

Our training concluded with an invited guest speaker, a second-year medical student who had previously worked as a writing consultant in our center.

Because the speaker was uniquely positioned to understand both our mission as a center and possessed discipline-specific knowledge pertinent to the medical field, we asked her for an overview of some of the types of writing she has had to do in her medical program. Perhaps the most common genre of writing that medical students on our campus complete is the reports that they make when encountering patients, called clinical notes.

The clinical notes that medical students must complete orient them to the documentation practices that they must become proficient in as professionals. Under the guidance of a preceptor, students learn to write detailed reports containing several interconnected parts, including the patient’s name, chief complaint, past medical and surgical history, hospitalizations, assessment plan, and more. As our speaker explained, what medical students tend to struggle with most is writing the portion called the history of present illness (HPI), a concise narrative that details the patient’s current concerns. There is no standard format for the HPI—it can be written in paragraph form or in bullet points. Medical professionals tend to rely on the mnemonic OLDCARTS (Onset, Location, Duration, Character, Aggravating/alleviating factors, Radiation, Temporal, Severity) for gathering the information to be presented in the HPI. During the session, our speaker taught staff how medical students practice these clinical notes, what preceptors tend to want in terms of specificity and clarity, and what makes an effective clinical note in a professional setting.

Discipline-Specific Training and Faculty Support Before we conclude, we want to address the value of providing discipline-specific training for consultants who work with faculty. The periods of intense genre exploration boosted staff confidence and helped them embrace their role as writing experts capable of working with advanced STEM writers, including faculty. In an undergraduate peer setting, students may be tempted to defer to the peer consultant as an authority, and the most prescient challenge may be tipping the balance of power back to the student. In consultations with advanced graduate students and faculty, however, the opposite dynamic is more likely: faculty may enter the relationship skeptical of the consultant’s expertise and ability to help, with the balance tipping unhelpfully to the writer’s side of the scale. The consultant needs to have a higher baseline of disciplinary writing expertise and be equipped with tools for making strategic moves to earn writers’ trust and establish the consultant’s authority as an expert to create a collaborative, mutually respectful dynamic.

While STEM writers, many of whom are seeking prestigious grant awards or publication in highly-indexed journals, bring their own expertise and authority to sessions, they are simultaneously seeking expert advice on how to better communicate with audiences so they can achieve their purpose and

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Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM Populations • 50 articulate the significance of their work—and the stakes are high. For professional consultants, this means developing deep, nuanced rhetorical awareness of disciplinary audiences and generic conventions, as well as disciplinary ways of knowing and doing.

Meghan Velez argues that knowledge of STEM disciplines—not so much knowledge of the content of a field but rather a sophisticated understanding of how disciplinary texts function in “real world” applications—can make consultations with STEM writers more effective. It can also earn STEM writers’ trust and facilitate buy-in. Although her study focused on undergraduate writers and peer consultants, her findings have relevance for professional writing center staff who work with STEM writers: In my observations, STEM writing tutors do leverage rhetorical knowledge in tutoring sessions, but they appear to do so as a means of connecting with students on a disciplinary level as much as to construct their own identities as writing instructors or experts. In other words, STEM writing tutors’ rhetorical knowledge does not exist as a separate domain from tutees’ disciplinary knowledge; instead, the two are intertwined. In writing consultations, STEM tutors engage in disciplinary socialization, drawing on and constructing co-relational identities with STEM writers that are based on their mutual experiences and participation in disciplinary communities. (56) We do not expect our consultants to become STEM content experts, but we think that discipline-specific training can prepare professional staff to “leverage rhetorical knowledge” in ways that forge connections and “intertwine” disciplinary and rhetorical knowledge.

On the other end of the spectrum, while consultants must become adept at presenting themselves as writing experts while deferring to STEM writers’ content expertise, they may also need to be ready to recognize the writing expertise of these writers.

As Lisa Emerson points out in her book The Forgotten Tribe: Scientists as Writers, faculty in STEM can be “among the most sophisticated and flexible writers in the academy...and since their writing is most often collaborative and multidisciplinary, their practices may be more socially complex” (8). Despite this sophistication and expertise, Emerson argues that humanities disciplines have not recognized STEM faculty as writing experts. Keeping this in mind, we hope our training helps consultants become more

aware of the different types of writing expertise both parties bring to sessions: the consultant brings writing expertise, and the writer brings disciplinary content knowledge. Sometimes, the professional consultant may be the primary expert in writing and rhetorical knowledge, but not always. STEM writers may also bring quite a bit of writing expertise to sessions.

Balancing expertise with a sense of mutual appreciation is essential for productive sessions. Professional consultants who do not have background in STEM fields should, of course, not aim to become masters of these disciplines in the way their writers are; despite this, they can devote time to RGA and research on disciplinary practices to connect with writers and assist them as they navigate disciplinary communities.

Conclusion At the end of our workshop, we concluded with a freewriting activity and discussion answering two questions: 1) What was most useful from the sessions? and 2) What do you still want to learn more about? To the first question, our professional staff and graduate consultants reported that this intensive, two-day session prepared them with some helpful resources for meeting the needs of the diverse writers they work with in STEM fields. Staff reported in the final, informal discussion of the day that the segments on the features of science writing, the CARS model, and the strategies for reading papers were the most useful parts of the training session. Attendees shared that seeing examples of common genres and learning how to use RGA to prepare for and conduct sessions made them feel better prepared for consultations with STEM writers; it also made them feel more confident going into these appointments. Overall, exposure to common genres and specific information about scientific style seem critical for helping consultants develop expertise that they need to consult confidently with STEM writers, whether graduate students or faculty.

There is, of course, always room for improvement, and we aim to revise this session in the future so that we can offer it for incoming staff and graduate students. A general criticism that we received from attendees was that they wanted more interactive sessions throughout the two-day period, which occasionally skewed more lecture-heavy than the directors initially planned. For instance, when we asked our attendees for feedback on the principles of scientific style session, they noted it was the most helpful session overall but would have been improved if they had had a full session’s worth of time after the

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Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM Populations • 51 content-heavy portion to practice on sample papers and through role play. Similarly, during the sections on rhetorical reading and genre analysis, attendees wished there had been more time in the training to review and analyze model texts. We plan to include more time for RGA as well as increase the number of interactive application sessions in future iterations of our training.

Given the amount of material covered, we also may consider expanding to a third day. To measure professional consultants’ learning more accurately, we would also add a more formal feedback mechanism to the final day.

The feedback our attendees shared is helpful to the directors as we redesign this training later. We have also been able to use attendees’ feedback to build some of this activity into our ongoing professional development meetings throughout the year. We hope that these insights offer writing centers at STEM-focused institutions—particularly where non-faculty staff work with faculty writers—ideas for navigating their sometimes-difficult roles as expert outsiders. Certainly, our local context affected the genres that we emphasized, but as disciplines become increasingly atomized and disciplinary conventions become more specific, writing consultants need strategies for quickly acquiring knowledge of discipline-specific writing expectations.

However, given the often-reported skepticism toward professional staff ’s competencies and suitability to assist with writing in STEM genres, any STEM writing training also needs to acknowledge the power dynamics at play. More research is needed about how to help professional writing consultants negotiate the difficulties that can arise from trying to create a climate of mutual respect with faculty, particularly faculty outside of their disciplines, but the authors hope that this article might serve as a starting point for that conversation.

Notes

2. For brevity, we use the acronym “STEM”

throughout the rest of the article to encompass all three of these areas.

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Appendix Augusta University Center for Writing Excellence STEM Training Schedule August 8th, 8:00 am - 3:00 pm 8-8:30 am Discussion: Concerns about Helping STEM Writers 8:30-9:00 am Principles of Scientific Writing 9:00-9:30 am IMRD and CARS 9:30-9:45 am Break 9:45-10:45 am Common Genres 10:45-11:00 am Break 11:00 am-11:30 Genre Analysis pm Reflective writing (10 minutes -- What did you learn? What do you still want to know?

11:30 am-12:00 What resources would you like to have?) pm Discussion (20 minutes) 12:00-1:00 pm Lunch Reading time: "SOAP Notes" by Vivek Podder, Valerie Lew, and Sassan Ghassemzadeh: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482263/ MCG OLDCARTS Handout 1:00 pm-3:00 pm "Write-Ups: Practical Guide to Clinical Medicine" by University of San Diego School of Medicine: https://meded.ucsd.edu/clinicalmed/write.html "Quality of Outpatient Clinical Notes: A Stakeholder Definition Derived through Qualitative Research" by Janice L. Hanson et al.: https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6963-12-407 August 9th, 8:00 am - 2:00 pm Reflective writing: Write for 10 minutes about a time when you trusted someone to look 8-8:30 am at your writing and a time when someone broke your trust while reading your writing.

Discussion 8:30-9:00 am Building Trust with STEM Writers 9:00-10:00 am Key Terms in Quantitative Research 10:00-10:15 am Break 10:15-111 am Genre Analysis: Personal Statements for Medical Residency 11:00 am-12:00 Intense Genre Exploration: Biostatistics Sample Article pm 12:00-1:00pm Lunch Break 1:00-1:30pm Guest speaker: Melinda McKew on clinical/OLDCARTS notes 1:30-2:00pm Group discussion: Clinical Notes 2-3pm Final reflections and discussion

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What Makes a Writing Center Useful? • 54

WHAT MAKES A WRITING CENTER EXPERIENCE USEFUL? PERCEPTIONS OF NATIVE, NON-NATIVE, AND GENERATION 1.5 WRITERS Grant Eckstein Brigham Young University

Kate Matthews Brigham Young University

Abstract

with a tutor to get feedback on her language. That same day, a tutor might meet Jacques, an outgoing student with a Haitian accent. Little does the tutor know that Jacques was orphaned at the age of fifteen, that he was placed with an English-speaking foster family in the U.S., that his college application was initially denied because of his interrupted education in Haiti, or that, with the help of an English teacher, he appealed the admission decision and was ultimately admitted to the university. He navigates an intricate identity, academically competent yet often perceived as an L2 learner because of his accent. The tutor’s next session might be with Samantha, a second-year student from Colorado with high expectations for success. She interned with her town’s health department to increase public awareness about the dangers of cannabis use among minors as part of a concurrent enrollment program at her high school. Ultimately, she wants to become a pharmacist since both her parents work in the medical field. Despite her linguistic and educational advantages, Samantha struggles to organize her thoughts coherently in writing and signed up to get feedback on the first draft of an essay on a topic that she finds uninteresting.

These vignettes illustrate the diverse needs and self-perceptions converging within the writing center.

Because writing centers in U.S. higher education were initially established as peer-run tutoring facilities (something of a “by-students, for-students” model) in the 1930s and 40s, they served the kinds of students enrolled on campuses at the time: middle-class white students who spoke English natively. Students like Samantha as described above. But, according to Neal Lerner, immigrant student populations at U.S. institutions increased sharply following World War II with another inflection point in the 1960s (188).

International student enrollment in higher education really hasn’t abated. Most recently, the Open Doors Report estimated that just over one million undergraduate and graduate international students

grant_eckstein@byu.edu

Within universities, writing centers are often seen as service providers that allow students to receive support and feedback on their writing. The usefulness of writing centers has been evaluated by things such as total number of visits and return visits, students’ trust and comfort in asking tutors questions, and tutors’ overall knowledge of writing concepts. But few researchers have shone light on students’ own perceptions of the usefulness of a writing center, especially perceptions between native English (NES), non-native English (NNES), and Generation 1.5 students. We did just that by sending a usefulness survey to 800 universities across the U.S. We analyzed the data from 463 student responses to these surveys using non-parametric statistics and found that NNES and Generation 1.5 students reported more difficulty making an appointment than NES writers. They also reported being slightly less likely to ask their tutor questions, trust their tutors, and return to the writing center, which is perhaps the most important outcome of usefulness. This information can help writing center administrators better anticipate multilingual writers’ needs and take steps to improve informational materials and the writing center experience for these writers which may increase their overall attendance.

University writing centers are often lively spots on campus humming with private tutoring episodes with diverse learners. Even when the university’s student body is highly homogeneous, tutors in one shift could be meeting with native English speakers (NES), non-native English speakers (NNES), and those identified as Generation 1.5—individuals who straddle the nuanced divide between native and non-native language proficiency. Writers within these three broad groups may approach the writing center with distinct needs, expectations, and apprehensions.

To illustrate such diversity, a tutor might hold a tutoring session with Maricel, a Spanish speaking Colombian who moved to the U.S. because of her husband’s engineering job. Since she had nursing experience in Colombia, she wanted to complete a nursing degree in the U.S. despite fears that her English was too weak. A university advisor told her that the writing center could check the grammar in her English essays. She spent three days laboring over her first writing assignment before scheduling an appointment

hadfield.kate@gmail.com

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What Makes a Writing Center Useful? • 55 attended U.S. universities in the 2022-2023 school year, a 29% increase from ten years before. Many of these students are non-native English speakers (NNESs) who find their way to writing centers.

As student bodies diversify, a pertinent question arises of whether NNESs experience the writing center the same way as native English speakers (NESs) or even Generation 1.5 writers (Gen 1.5). We were interested in learning the extent to which writers with different English language backgrounds felt that the writing center was useful to them. Maricel may find the writing center very welcoming but perhaps unsupportive of her language needs. Jacques, so used to being academically excluded, may not know how to navigate the writing center system. Meanwhile, Samantha may feel that the writing center is perfectly honed to support her writing challenges. We wanted to get a sense of writers’ own perceptions in ways that were directly comparable between groups. In the study that follows, we analyze the data from 463 surveys that asked students across the nation about their experiences in the writing center. From this data, we observe that Gen 1.5 and NNES writers differ from NESs in how useful they find the writing center to be.

By understanding these perceptions, writing center tutors and administrators can craft a more useful writing center experience, particularly for multilingual writers.

Background of University Writing Centers Within a university setting, writing centers are often thought of as service providers that offer writing support and feedback to students. Different tutoring methods may be used across university writing centers, but the general expectation among students is that they can use the university’s writing center to better a particular paper and/or their own writing skills. And because writing center tutorials are often private, peer-like interactions, they contribute to a feeling that “students [can] drop in for help anonymously without fear of being graded or judged” (Dugger 30).

Christina Savarese speculates that students see the writing center as a useful resource for improving grades since she found in her dissertation work that community college students with low first-year writing scores, or those who had taken remedial writing classes, were significantly more likely to use the writing center than others (65). Similarly, Jacelyn Wells reports that the usefulness of a writing center for students in her study was based on how much their grades improved.

Several writers revealed that they saw an increase in

their grades after visiting the writing center, which increased their motivation to return (8). The writers also explained that because they had found a tutor that matched what they were looking for, they were more likely to return (18). The implication appears to be that from a student’s perspective, usefulness and success in writing centers come from tutor matches and result in good grades.

Beyond grades and tutor fit, the success and usefulness of a writing center from a writing center administrator perspective may also be determined by things like how often writers use the center, how well the tutors within the center are trained on writing and teaching methods, how much writers understand and improve their writing skills, how much writers trust the tutor’s feedback, and how comfortable writers are in asking questions during their tutor session. To this last point, Jacobs and Karliner conducted an early investigation of speech roles in individual writing conferences. They suggested that the relative amount of negotiation in a conference impacts the quality of a student’s writing (503). Although this finding derived from teacher-student conferences, it aligns with the common writing center theories of collaborative learning and Zone of Proximal Development, which Rebecca Babcock explicates in her review of writing center theory and research. Recent writing center reports have similarly shown the value of fostering negotiation and encouraging writer control in writing center interactions (e.g., Carter; DeMott; Eleftheriou; Yu). Thus, the success of a writing center may be based on writers viewing themselves as co-contributors to the conversation and not on traditional teacher-student asymmetric power relations.

Repeat visits have also been shown to correlate with perceptions of student satisfaction and usefulness of a writing center over the years. According to early survey research on the topic of successes conducted by Cynthia Linville, “only students who find…tutoring helpful continue to attend sessions” (31). In her analysis of tutorial success, Terese Thonus insinuates that, for good or bad, students who return to the writing center do so to get more of what they first experienced (“Success”). Presumably, a student who finds the writing center satisfying is more likely to return and by extension develop or improve as a writer.

Underscoring this critical issue, Isabelle Thompson et al. later observes that writers “expect to feel comfortable during conferences” (96).

Overall, existing writing center literature associates writing center usefulness to factors like writers’ grade improvement, return visits, levels of interaction or

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What Makes a Writing Center Useful? • 56 negotiation, and satisfaction with or level of comfort in the center (Ginting and Barella; Thonus, “Success;” Linville; Moser and Raphan; Salem). However, these observations have largely been drawn from interactions with native English speakers or in contexts where writer language backgrounds are not well reported.

This can be problematic because, as Lori Salem states, “the choice to use the writing center is raced, classed, gendered and shaped by linguistic hierarchies” (8), indicating a reality that certain groups, including NNESs and Gen 1.5 students, are disproportionately more likely to seek writing center help. For this reason, it is important to understand the unique perceptions of NNES writers of the writing center in contrast to their NES peers. In doing so, writing center directors can better anticipate NNESs’ needs and expectations and ensure that the writing center becomes or remains a space available for writers regardless of their English language backgrounds.

Of course, previous work has been done to examine the perceptions of NNESs in writing centers generally, and unfortunately, the news is grim. In one of the earliest NNES perception studies published, Jean Kiedaisch and Sue Dinitz report greater levels of dissatisfaction among NNES writers than NES writers.

Cynthia Linville as well as Janet Moser and Deborah Raphan found higher attrition rates of NNES writers from the center. Some NNES writers stop attending tutorials because of pressures or cultural expectations which make the experience unsatisfying. For instance, Shanti Bruce in “Listening to and Learning from ESL Writers” describes a Korean student who stopped attending writing tutorials because she expected her tutor to be older than her and to have extensive writing experience and was frustrated when this was not the case (221). Bruce also wrote of a Saudi Arabian student who stopped attending the writing center because he worried that his peers would view him as weak or unskilled for attending (218).

To further illuminate NNES perceptions and potential mismatches, several writing center researchers have suggested that multilingual writers expect their writing center tutors to be authoritative or teacher-like figures (Eleftheriou; Moussu; Thonus, “How to Communicate”; “Differences”; Schiera). Others have indicated that because of cultural norms, NNES writers sometimes feel uncomfortable asking questions or answering questions given by their tutors, including questions that would help clarify a suggestion or a directive (Leki; Patrick). Some NNES writers feel uncomfortable asking questions due to their unfamiliarity with the social structure of such

interactions, their limited linguistic ability to quickly formulate questions, or their general cultural reticence to challenge or interrupt a tutor (Thonus, “Differences”). NNES writers may struggle to get what they want from a tutorial when tutors privilege their own agenda or policies espoused by the writing center over that of the writer, such as dismissing a writer’s request for lower order vocabulary or grammar support in favor of unsolicited help on higher order concerns, as was the case with a NNES student that Grant Eckstein details (“Specialist”). Other cultural mismatches can be found in things like different understandings of teacher-student talk, direct and indirect communication styles, culturally different experiences with praise and criticism, and divergent understandings of plagiarism. Culture conflicts like these may translate to negative impressions of the center and a reluctance to return (Patrick; Winder, et al.).

Levels of dissatisfaction and attrition from the center may be further explained by the fact that despite the increasing presence of NNESs in writing centers, tutors repeatedly expressed uncertainty and sometimes outright anxiety about working with them, especially in the 1990s and early 2000s. Judith Powers uses images of failure and betrayal to describe the feelings tutors can have when working directly with NNES writers (42), and Susan Blau, et al. reflected “feeling frustration and guilt” about tutoring NNESs (23). Even Muriel Harris and Tony Silva—pioneers of NNES tutoring—acknowledge that working with these students can reveal “bewilderingly different rhetorical patterns” and can reduce tutors to “stunned silence” (525). More recently, this tone has evolved as entire guidebooks, such as Reynolds’ One on One with Second Language Writers, and increasing numbers of articles (Moussu and David) have investigated and/or recommended ways to work effectively with NNESs to avoid feelings of insecurity.

To counter the narrative of dissatisfied NNES writers, Susan Blalock found that when a trained ESL tutor was placed in a writing center, the number of NNES writers who visited that writing center increased dramatically (4). In a satisfaction study, Pamela Bromley et al. (“Student perceptions” 3-4) found that 83-95% of students strongly agreed that their consultation was intellectually engaging, and of those who agreed with that statement, 99% agreed that the consultation was productive, though the researchers did not compare NNES to NES writers. When Harry Denny et al. conducted open ended interviews to explore NNESs’ feelings towards their schools’ writing

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What Makes a Writing Center Useful? • 57 centers, they found that while the tutoring writers received in the center did not match their preferences for directness, engagement, and authoritativeness, they reported mostly positive experiences in the grammar feedback they received (86). Furthermore, Zhang et al. found mostly positive perceptions of writing centers showing that writers felt the centers were “increasing their writing skills, helping them get better grades, giving them more confidence in writing, and helping them understand grammar rules better” (39). The point here is that NNESs are not summarily fleeing the writing center because of unmet expectations or a perception of writing centers not being useful. Many, and perhaps most, are very satisfied with their experiences.

It should be stressed that not every study mentioned above compared NES and NNES students’ perceptions, so it is hard to get a sense of which group finds the center more useful. But Pam Bromley and her colleagues did investigate this in their article, “L2 Student Satisfaction in the Writing Center.” They used a survey approach to identify NES and NNES student satisfaction of writing centers and received 2,262 responses (22). The results showed that NES and NNES students were equally likely to recommend the writing center to a friend, with NNES students reporting a higher likelihood of returning to the writing center than NES students and 80% of the NNES students reporting feeling intellectually engaged in their session. This is great news and suggests that the writing center is useful for NNESs in spite of any potential frustrations that might exist among writers or their tutors. But again, there may be more to the story since none of these studies asked specific questions about writers’ comfortability in asking questions to their tutor or their perception on how helpful their tutor was.

In a more finely grained study, Salem conducted research over a four-year span at Temple University in Philadelphia where she garnered responses from 4,024 entering students in 2009. She found that female students were more likely to attend writing centers than male students, as well as students whose fathers did not attend college. She also points out that groups who are less socially privileged (NNES, women, non-white students) had higher writing center attendance. She also found that students make their decisions about whether they will use a writing center before they even enter college. All this led her to pose the following questions: “If students with less privilege are more likely to come to the writing center, is this a good thing or a bad thing for the students? Does the writing

center serve them well? Would something else serve them better?” (8). She leaves these questions unanswered, but we speculate that by understanding what contributes to the usefulness of a writing center for writers with different English language backgrounds, we may be able to draw some insights.

Researchers have a sense of what usefulness in a writing center means, but not very many studies have asked students for their own perceptions of the writing center. Moreover, the studies which have examined writing centers rarely compare NES and NNES writers and regularly overlook a third, in-between group often referred to as Generation 1.5 writers (some notable exceptions include Eckstein, “Directiveness;” Nakamaru; Thonus, “How to communicate politely;” Thonus, “Triangulation;” Thonus, “Serving generation 1.5;” Thonus, “Differences”). Gen 1.5 are different from NNES writers as they do not typically hold student visas and arrive in an English-speaking country before completing high school or its equivalent in a foreign country (Ferris). Gen 1.5 students may sound proficient in English but might have a difficult time transferring this knowledge to a written paper (Ferris).

They may exhibit variability in their language skills, and they may not feel comfortable in contributing to discussions, including negotiated exchanges in writing tutorials (Ferris and Hedgcock). Thus, questions remain about the extent to which Gen 1.5 and NNESs view writing centers as useful, and how these views compare with those of NES writers.

Furthermore, many perception studies have used interview methodologies that provide deep insights but limit the perception of writers to a small number of individuals or a limited population pool. Michael Rymer traced the use of discourse analysis in writing center studies from researchers like Terese Thonus who had used interactional sociolinguistic methodologies to discover what conversations take place during tutoring sessions between NES and NNES writers. These methodologies allow the researcher to record and analyze real conversations through context. In this type of methodology, the researcher records a conversation between tutor and writer, transcribes it, and then identifies features of interest either though an a priori approach or through an a posteriori approach. In an a priori approach, the researcher counts certain pre-identified features of the conversation including things like pauses, false starts, backchannels, and so on. An a posteriori approach categorizes salient features of the conversation after examining the data. These analyses have helped to make observations about the differences between

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What Makes a Writing Center Useful? • 58 native-English and multilingual tutorials in terms of turn length, mitigation, negotiation of revisions, charge-taking, holding the floor, social closeness, reflection of authority, and involvement in conversations (Thonus “How to communicate politely”; Thonus, “Triangulation”; Thonus, “Serving generation 1.5”; Thonus, “Differences”; Williams), but they do not offer NNES and Gen 1.5 perceptions of the tutoring received.

In this study, we compare the perceptions of NNESs and Gen 1.5 writers with their NES peers through a survey methodology in order to positively contrast these groups and suggest ways writing center directors and tutors can support writers with different English language backgrounds.

To guide our research, we asked the following questions: 1. To what extent do NES, NNES, and Gen 1.5 writers’ perceptions differ in their reports of feeling comfortable and asking their tutor questions in a writing center?

2. To what extent do NES, NNES, and Gen 1.5 writers’ perceptions differ in their reports of tutor’s knowledge and ability to provide helpful feedback in a writing center?

3. To what extent do NES, NNES, and Gen 1.5 writers’ perceptions differ in their reports of usefulness of a writing center and feelings of returning to the writing center after their first appointment?

The Study on Students’ Perceptions of University Writing Centers In order to help writing center administrators and staff effectively communicate and engage with multilingual writers, we designed a survey for writing center attendees and sent it to more than 800 writing centers across the U.S. with the request that they forward the online survey link to recent center attendees. While we could not determine which schools we sampled from due to IRB limitations, we nonetheless received positive confirmation from 56 writing center directors in 26 U.S. states that they would distribute the survey to writers who visited their centers. From our full dispersal program, we collected 462 responses drawing from universities of different sizes, including small (15%), medium-sized (27%), large (20%), and very large (23%) with 14% of respondents unsure of their university size. As a crucial step in this study, we divided respondents into three English language groups based on their demographic

information: 280 (60.6%) were NESs, 105 (22.7%) were Gen 1.5 writers, and 77 (16.6%) were NNESs. The survey asked all participants to rate a series of statements about the usefulness of the writing center during their most recent writing center experience on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree), which included the following statements: 1. It was easy to make an appointment at the writing center 2. You felt comfortable asking your tutor questions 3. You would feel comfortable returning for at least one more session at the writing center if needed 4. Your tutor sincerely tried to help you 5. You trusted your tutor's knowledge and expertise We anticipated that in all questions, most respondents would rate the writing center positively (meaning very useful) since, as mentioned earlier, Bromley et al.’s research showed high rates of positivity among writing center survey respondents (“Student perceptions”). However, we expected small differences to show NES writers to have a slightly more positive experience with the writing center than Gen 1.5 or NNES writers based on findings from Thonus (“Differences”) and cultural sensitivities that might make it harder for some NNES writers to trust their tutor or the writing center or to return as described by Bruce. Furthermore, we speculated that NES writers are likely better equipped with the linguistic resources to make appointments and are more likely socialized to a university environment that recommends students seek out institutional resources. Thus, we anticipated that, in general, Gen 1.5 and NNES writers would find the writing center slightly less useful.

To measure the results, we used a Kruskal-Wallis test to analyze participant responses to the survey questions. The Kruskal-Wallis test is a non-parametric, one-way ANOVA which calculates the average responses of participants and compares these across language groups (NES, Gen 1.5, NNES) to identify statistical differences in participant responses.

Non-significant findings can also reveal basic trends, but in these cases, student responses may be too close to really tell if one language group is especially different from another.

The Results: Usefulness of the Center

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What Makes a Writing Center Useful? • 59 Since the issue of usefulness of a writing center has been under-researched in the available literature, we chose to investigate the issue using a number of different items. Several writing center researchers have suggested that NNES writers expect their writing center tutors to be authoritative or teacher-like figures (Healy and Bosher; Moussu; Thonus “How to Communicate”; “Differences”).

Furthermore, researchers have indicated that because of cultural norms, NNES writers sometimes feel uncomfortable asking questions of their tutors, including questions that would help clarify a suggestion or a directive (Leki). Similarly, unmet cultural expectations, such as a belief that a tutor should be older and more authoritative than the writer, may also translate to a perception of that service being less useful. And when tutors privilege their own agenda over that of their writers’, this can also lead to negative impressions of the center and a reluctance to return.

The survey results of five statements about usefulness are listed in Table 1 below. Responses are broken down by English language background and further displayed with means on a range from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 4 (Strongly Agree). The penultimate column lists the p-value, a measure of statistical significance if below .05 whereby we can interpret that there are important differences among the language groups. The final column lists the epsilon-square value, which is a measure of effect size; that is, it reports the percentage of variance accounted for by the main effect (i.e., English language background) when multiplied by 100. Typically, .01 is interpreted as a small effect size, .06 as medium, and .14 or higher as large.

Ease of Use The first item, which asked participants to respond to the statement “It was easy to make an appointment for a tutorial” resulted in the kind of response pattern we had anticipated, namely that NES writers would find it easier to make an appointment than both multilingual writing groups. The result is statistically significant, meaning that the language groups had measurably distinct answers. This gap of accessibility based on language background indicates that multilingual writers indeed reported a disadvantage when encountering writing center websites, announcements, or advertisements. This disadvantage may stem from the language used in these mediums, or perhaps the medium themselves. NNES may be unfamiliar with making online appointments or misunderstand the information on the advertisements.

The way in which appointments are made in a NNES student’s culture could also be a contributing factor.

It should be noted that despite the statistical significance of the result, the mean difference between the groups is rather small. NNES writers reported an average score amounting to a quarter of a point lower than NES writers. Reinforcing this is the fact that the effect size was also rather small at .026, suggesting that language background is only a small reason for variance in writers’ perception of how easy it was to make an appointment for a tutorial. A final graph can further illuminate the dispersion of writers’ scores on this item as illustrated in Table 2. Less than 3% of NES writers disagreed or strongly disagreed that it was easy to make an appointment compared to almost 11% of

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What Makes a Writing Center Useful? • 60 NNES writers. By the same token, 76% of NES writers strongly agreed with that statement compared to just a little over half of NNES. In other words, it is statistically more likely for NNES writers to find scheduling a tutorial to be easy compared to NNES writers.

not attended a tutorial to get a sense of how certain communication will land. This is because students who have not attended the writing center may have much more to say about their reasons for not attending, some of which may reveal more obvious patterns in the accessibility of the center.

Comfort in Asking Questions

Given the small differences in the data, can the results really be meaningful? On the one hand, they illustrate how similar writers are across language groups. The vast majority agreed or strongly agreed that it was easy to get an appointment, and for this, writing center administrators should rejoice. But of the few who struggle, it is statistically more likely for them to be NNES writers, and this is a nontrivial finding.

One reviewer of an earlier version of this manuscript pointed out that as universities become even more service-oriented and require students to already know how to navigate online spaces, this discrepancy could become more noticeable. This may already be the case in different institutional types such as Hispanic-serving institutions compared to primarily white institutions or schools which, for various reasons, have limited engagement with students from diverse English language backgrounds or students with potentially overlapping features of race, class, age, or experience in higher education settings.

Students who struggle to make an appointment initially may set themselves up for low expectations and bad experiences when they do get to the writing center.

Inasmuch as writing centers often brand themselves to be inclusive, inviting, helpful spaces where students can get individualized writing support, it is critical to consider even the small details such as language in advertisements and websites which can color the expectations and experiences of NNES writers. Writing centers which engage multilingual writers as a clientele group need to examine the channels by which students make appointments and discover the methods which can best support multilingual writers. If centers haven’t already, they might also benefit from testing their communication streams and appointment procedures with students from diverse backgrounds or hold focus groups with diverse writers including those who have

The next item asked participants to respond to the statement “You felt comfortable asking your tutor questions.” We included this item because when writers ask questions in a tutorial, it is a mark of engagement, negotiation, and collaboration, which in turn is associated with an increased likelihood of student revisions and effective conferences and tutorials (Goldstein and Conrad; Thonus, “Success”). And while NES writers may feel very comfortable asking questions in a tutorial because of their familiarity with the social structure of such interactions and their linguistic ability to quickly formulate questions, the same is not necessarily true for multilingual writers. For instance, Thonus argues that multilingual writers may not have the linguistic resources to adequately ask questions of their tutor in the moment of a short writing tutorial, or they may not have the social or cultural confidence to interrupt a tutor, challenge their suggestions, or otherwise interact with the tutor through questions (“Differences”). We assumed that when writers felt comfortable asking questions of their tutors, this suggested that they felt that the tutorial was useful and that they could actively interact in the tutorial rather than just passively receive knowledge (Sperling). Furthermore, we expected that NES and Gen 1.5 writers would feel more comfortable asking questions than NNES writers. This expectation was based on our assumption that NES writers are more prepared linguistically and culturally for the kind of conversation-based practices of mainstream writing tutorials and that Gen 1.5 writers tend to value oral conversation as a means of learning while NNES writers are more likely to prefer direct instruction (Eckstein, “Directiveness”). As seen in Table 1 above, our expectations were fairly accurate, though not statistically significant. Group means showed that NES writers were the most likely to agree that they felt comfortable asking their tutor questions, with Gen 1.5 writers reporting a slightly lower mean, and NNES writers reporting the lowest mean at 3.52 out of 4.0. In other words, multilingual writers were less likely to feel comfortable asking questions than NES writers based on mean responses, but not to a significant degree.

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What Makes a Writing Center Useful? • 61 As with the previous finding, the data on comfort of asking questions should be seen as tentative for now.

This is because there are likely more reasons than those we explained above for why NNES writers might feel uncomfortable asking questions. For instance, it may be that NNES writers felt no need to ask questions in the first place, or that their tutors were so directive that there was no opportunity to ask. Thus, additional inquiry through interviews and observation should investigate the reasons why some writers might feel uncomfortable asking their tutors questions and what this might mean in terms of the usefulness of the writing center or the tutor. Exploring factors such as tutor approach, perceived need for questions, and potential barriers could offer a nuanced understanding of the issue, and writing centers that wish to improve the NNES writer experience need to take the linguistic abilities and cultural preferences of their writers into consideration when providing NNES-specific tutorials and in tutor training.

Comfort in Returning to the Writing Center The following item asked participants to report on their willingness to return to the writing center for at least one more session and was motivated by our desire to determine if the issue was at all related to language background. We expected that NNESs would be more inclined to respond favorably since this is the result Bromley and her colleagues reported in their comparison of NES and NNES writers (“Student satisfaction” 23). On the whole, respondents in our survey largely agreed that they would likely return (see Table 3 for a breakdown of scores). However, our specific findings contradicted those of Bromley et al. (“Student satisfaction”) by showing that NES writers reported a significantly higher likelihood of returning than multilingual writers. Additionally, the mean scores show that of the multilingual writers, Gen 1.5 writers reported a slightly lower likelihood of returning than NNES writers, though the effect size was rather small.

We wondered what it could mean that two similar studies, both comparing NES and NNES writers

across multiple writing centers using survey data, could report opposite findings. The answer may lie in the sampling procedures. Bromley and colleagues (“Student satisfaction”) showed that the likelihood of returning for a second visit was actually non-significant between NES and NNES writers at two of the three institutions sampled, namely a small liberal arts college and a large public university. It was only at a medium, private, research university where NNESs were significantly more likely to return. But in sampling only three universities, the results may reflect opinions of well-prepared, well-resourced, socially privileged students who are familiar with college support mechanisms rather than students who are new to or unfamiliar with such resources. Different outcomes might be expected when polling students in two-year institutions, community colleges, or graduate programs where students may need more individualized support and direction on how to use that support. Our present study did not control for this factor directly but did sample from universities across the U.S. in all size categories. The divergence in findings underscores the importance of considering the nuances of institutional differences. The identified pattern of higher return probabilities among NNES writers in a medium, private, research university but lower likelihood of return when sampling from a greater range of universities should prompt more discussions about how institutional characteristics and student demographics may influence the writing center experience. If factors such as university size, resources, and academic preparedness of students play a role in shaping student perceptions and behaviors, then future writing center research that explores these variables could inform targeted interventions and support mechanisms. More specifically, writing center directors could examine their institutional identity and student body for clues about what multilingual writers need or want in order to feel encouraged to return to the writing center.

In turning to the bigger questions of why our data showed that multilingual writers and Gen 1.5 in particular were significantly less likely to return to the center, we reasoned that the writing center experience may have contradicted the expectations and self-perceived needs of some multilingual writers; some may have shown up seeking grammar help and received something else altogether, which is a common enough experience that it is often discussed in writing center literature. Or it may be that multilingual writers were more likely to use the writing center because a teacher suggested it or assigned it, and so, after an

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What Makes a Writing Center Useful? • 62 initial visit, they had no intention of returning.

Conversely, multilingual writers may have been more advanced in their studies (e.g., graduate students) and thus may have had access to other resources such as academic advisors, writing fellow programs, or private tutors who could assist them in their tutoring. Perhaps, some writing centers operate without a retention strategy for multilingual writers. Without consulting directly with the writers who felt uncomfortable returning, it is unclear their precise reasons, and the present methodology precluded such inquiry, so more probing by individual centers can help unravel the interplay of factors that might cause the seven or eight percent of multilingual writers to feel uncomfortable returning to the writing center.

Sincere Attempts to Help Another item related to the usefulness of the writing center is whether a tutor sincerely tried to help.

This is an interesting consideration since the basic service rendered in writing centers is to help writers develop as writers. It seems at odds with that purpose that a writing tutor would withhold sincere help. Yet it may be the case that some tutors are unable to provide the kind of help NNES writers want without extensive content or linguistic knowledge, or because of institutional policies prohibiting some types of linguistic help (Blau et al; Moussu). For instance, if the tutor privileges higher order concerns, or if time prohibits a full review of a paper, this might lead to a writer mistakenly believing that a tutor was not sincerely trying to help. Moreover, even though NNES writers are more likely to request help with grammar (Eckstein, “What students want” 20), Gillespie and Lerner argue that many students use this as a catch-all term to refer to any number of issues they aren’t sure how to explain, even if they have nothing to do with grammar (51). Thus, if a NNES writer requests grammar help, a tutor might demur, thanks to a policy or force of habit even if by “grammar” the writer really wanted help with organization, idea development, or word choice for targeting a specific audience.

With this scenario in mind, we reasoned that NNES writers would most likely see a tutor as unhelpful. Our expectations appeared to hold true at least when looking at means. As seen in Table 1, NES writers had a mean of 3.72 out of 4.0, showing that they strongly agreed that their tutors tried to help. This is in comparison to Gen 1.5 and NNES writers who both had a mean of about 3.60. While the difference in means was not large enough to claim statistical

significance, there nevertheless appears to be a trend toward significance given that the p-value was .053. In instances like this, statisticians suggest a larger or more balanced pool of respondents in order to clarify the pattern; indeed, we received more than triple the number of NES responses than NNES responses, so our results underrepresent multilingual writers. But what can writing center directors and tutors do with the information presented here in spite of the unbalanced results? Perhaps the best advice is to talk with all writers—multilingual writers especially—long before they sit down with a tutor about what they find helpful in a tutorial, possibly in focus groups or individual conversations. Getting to know what writers view as helpful early on can give tutors more time and opportunity to address those preferences as they undoubtedly want to, thus aligning perceptions and realities of usefulness.

Tutors’ Knowledge and Expertise The final item in our survey asked participants to respond to the statement “You trusted your tutor’s knowledge and expertise.” We found that the general trend of lower ratings among multilingual writers held true in terms of the mean scores, but again, the item did not reach statistical significance, so caution should be exercised in drawing definitive conclusions.

Nevertheless, the slightly lower means seem to align with previous research. For instance, the multilingual writers' diminished trust in their tutor's expertise compared to their NES peers might stem from their perception of tutors as authority figures, aligning with Thonus's observation that multilingual writers often value advice from teachers or teacher surrogates ("Triangulation") over undergraduate or peer tutors. It may also be that tutors are able to establish more rapport with NES writers through backchanneling and laughter than with multilingual writers, a finding supported by Thonus (“Differences”).

Conclusion of Writing Center Perceptions At the beginning of this article, we described three students who might visit the writing center on any given day: Maricel, the NNES, Jacques, the Gen 1.5 writer, and Samantha, the native English speaker. All were hypothetical amalgams of real students we have worked with over the years in writing classes and in writing centers. While they might all attend the same university and want writing support, their experiences of writing center usefulness might be very different and

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What Makes a Writing Center Useful? • 63 may differ based on their English language backgrounds.

Indeed, as explained in the study above, the results of our survey illustrate a couple of real differences in whether writers find the writing center to be useful.

The most obvious findings were that multilingual writers—both NNESs and Gen 1.5 writers—found it harder to make an appointment for a tutorial and were less comfortable returning for another writing center visit compared to NESs. In other areas, multilingual writers felt less comfort in asking questions, were slightly more dubious that tutors were sincerely trying to help, and had slightly lower trust in their tutor’s knowledge and experience.

But where do we go from here? Perhaps the first thing to clarify is that writing centers are overwhelmingly positive places for almost all writers.

While it is true that there are differences between groups of English language users, those differences exist on the right side of the Likert scale, between the labels agree and strongly agree. The data shows that multilingual writers agreed that it was easy to make an appointment at the writing center; it’s just that NESs agreed more strongly. The same is true for the other items measured.

The variation observed between English language groups in this study is probably related more to individual variation within those groups. That is to say, NNESs differed more from one another while NESs were a more homogenous group. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to those familiar with the language acquisition process—there is often wide heterogeneity among NNESs in terms of the skills, expectations, and cultural understanding they bring to a U.S. learning environment. The same is true for Gen 1.5 writers.

And in international writing centers outside of the U.S., we might see an analogous survey to our own with reversed results: U.S. NESs might struggle slightly more to use a writing center that is situated within the cultural and linguistic expectations of a dominant NNES population. What this all says about U.S. writing centers that cater to multilingual writers is that understanding their diverse needs and expectations is imperative to ensuring that writing centers are easy-to-use resources. In particular, writing center directors might examine the language used in their documentation to ensure it reaches a diverse audience.

Is it clear for both NESs and NNESs how to make an appointment? Or what services are offered?

Additionally, if they don’t already do so, writing centers may consider explaining the role of the writing center and what students can expect during an appointment.

This would be particularly vital in helping NNESs know the expectations before attending.

A particularly salient observation which was highlighted by this investigation is that many variables can co-occur with English language background including race, class, age, and experience in higher education settings. These variables should be considered in research that investigates the useability of writing centers. It may not be multilingual learners per se who struggle more to make an appointment, but rather those unfamiliar with university support services in general, non-traditional students who may feel otherized, or individuals working multiple jobs whose schedules make it difficult to get a writing center appointment.

There are multiple realities of the writing center and its perceived usefulness, influenced by a myriad of factors. While our focus has been on English language background, we recognize the interconnected nature of other social variables. It's crucial to broaden the scope of research, considering the unique challenges faced by non-traditional students or those juggling multiple responsibilities. Exploring these dimensions, alongside amplifying individual student voices, will contribute to a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the dynamics at play in writing center useability.

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