Telling Stories and Growing Up: An Autoethnography on Writing Center Storytelling

Melanie Doyle
Memorial University of Newfoundland
mad225@mun.ca

Abstract

Recognizing the power of storytelling as an influencing writing centre practice (McKinney), this paper examines my near-decade long relationship with writing centres and explores stories I have told about writing centre work. Using analytic autoethnography, I analyze three reflective narratives from my writing centre history across two countries, through multiple disciplines.  Despite the differing contextual factors of these narratives and the stories they feature, my analysis reveals institutional neoliberalism as the guiding influence on my storytelling. This finding is discussed alongside literature on emotional labour, contingent employment, and institutional interference. Ultimately, this paper highlights the untapped potential of autoethnography as an accessible methodology for precariously employed writing centre scholars and calls on the field to consider the influence of neoliberalism on our communication with students and tutees.

Since my first introduction to writing centres, I have been an undergraduate peer tutor, a graduate tutor, and a writing centre staff member in a disciplinary writing program. More recently, I work adjacent to my institution’s writing centre as a part-time writing instructor and contractual educational developer. These roles have brought me from Canada to the U.S. and back again, across English, education, and health sciences disciplines. Like Stevie Bell, I feel as if I have grown up, academically speaking, in writing centres. 

In their seminal guide, Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner advised writing centre professionals “to understand where our practices come from and to unravel the various influences on those practices” (154). This understanding not only allows for more effective tutoring, according to Harry Denny, but it is also necessary in order to critically interrogate “commonplace mindsets” about writing and “problem-pose institutional and social discursive practices” (39). However, given the precarity of many writing centre professionals (Giaimo 4), their related lack of power within the academy (Fels et al. 356), and their winding career trajectories (Geller and Denny 105), many writing centre professionals may not have the ability, opportunity, or authority to do the unraveling Gillespie and Lerner call for. Indeed, there have been few opportunities in my own writing centre history to critically engage in such understanding.

Certainly, a lot has changed since I was first introduced to writing centre work as an undergraduate tutor in 2013, and although some tenets of my writing centre philosophy have remained steadfast, my specific geographies, disciplines, and pedagogies have shaped the ways in which I have positioned writing centre work and communicated its value. While I have always considered myself a writing centre cheerleader, I recognize that I have told the “story of a writing centre” in multitudinous ways. How have I described writing centre work when speaking as a tutor or to my classmates? Alternatively, how do I advocate for writing centre work when communicating to my own students or from a place of power? 

Given that the stories we tell “shape others’ views about what is writing center work” (McKinney 5), I became increasingly curious about how my geographic, disciplinary, and pedagogical identities shaped my own storytelling practices, wondering “What has influenced the stories I tell and have told about writing centre work?” Using autoethnography, I trace my writing centre experience over a decade—through two countries and across multiple disciplines—to explore the stories I have told about writing centre work and uncover the neoliberal influences on my storytelling. This paper contributes to scholarship on writing centre labour and ultimately calls for increased attention to autoethnography as an underutilized and agentive methodology for writing centre professionals.

Autoethnography as a Methodology

I chose to explore these stories through autoethnography, a qualitative research methodology in which the researcher’s personal stories are the subject of the study, in conversation with the related literature and larger sociocultural contexts (Anderson 375). There are two common approaches to autoethnography: analytic and evocative. Researchers conducting analytic autoethnography focus on understanding and developing their stories through a theoretical lens, whereas evocative autoethnographers prioritize crafting intimate narratives with lasting aesthetic or emotional resonance (Ellingson and Ellis 445). Both are personal in nature, and both rely on authors’ reflexivity to reach levels of analysis and understanding not typically found in autobiographical writing. Yet personal and autobiographical writing are common in writing centre scholarship. Indeed, the personal stories of directors and tutors comprise the lore for which the field is known (North 23). While these stories can be autoethnographic in nature, autoethnography remains a sparse but growing research methodology across writing studies (Jackson and McKinney 16-17). I believe this methodology holds untapped potential for writing studies researchers due to its accessibility, a trait that may be of particular interest to writing centre scholars and practitioners.

Writing centre staff are often employed precariously, holding non-tenure track positions, working on short contracts, or operating in near-liminal institutional space (Giaimo 4). According to Beth Sabo et al., autoethnography is a uniquely accessible methodology for such contingent staff or temporary staff, as they often do not have the authority or resources to conduct research with human subjects (56). Additionally, Rebecca Jackson and Jackie Grutsch McKinney note that autoethnography has a history of being used by writers and scholars on the margins to write back to those in the centre (13). As a white, cisgendered settler, I am not socially marginalized. I am, however, working from outside the disciplinary writing centre. Deborah Mutnick argues autoethnography can create a “bridge between [a writer’s] communities and the academy” (84). My current academic communities include literature and education departments, as well as the field of educational development, and it is from these perspectives that I hope to reconnect with writing centre studies. Autoethnography is thus an agentive methodology with which to explore the influences on the stories I have told in and around the writing centre; it enables me to complete this study independently without relying on the status of more senior researchers at my institution, and it allows me to tap into personal stories that would be inaccessible through other methodologies. 

Methodological Decision Making

Data collection in autoethnography can draw on a number of methods to elicit and mine personal stories or experiences, including observational logs, journaling, artifacts such as artwork, photos, or poetry, and narrative retelling of memory and reflection (Leavy 158). For this study, I first listed and grouped my professional experiences with writing centres into three categories each tied to a specific year, and then wrote a narrative reflection for each category. As a whole, I see these narratives in the form of a triptych, in which the three pieces speak to a particular period and role but work together to tell a more complete story. 

While readers are able to generalize from stories told through autoethnography (Ellis, Ethnographic I 194-195), the methodology has been subject to criticism due to its rejection of abstraction or generalization as they are traditionally understood (Anderson 377). These calls are not unlike those aimed at writing centre studies researchers for the past two and a half decades (Driscoll et al. 11). Paula Gillespie criticized research coming out of writing centres for relying too heavily on observation, lived experience, and “lore,” arguing that the field requires more replicable, aggregable, and data-supported research in order to grow (39). Leon Anderson likewise calls on autoethnographers to adopt a more analytic approach in order to broadly comment on social phenomena (377). In response to these calls for more rigorous autoethnography, Steven Pace presents a methodological approach that relies on analytic strategies resembling those used within grounded theory. This approach, he writes, preserves the “essential characteristics” of autoethnography while allowing for “improve[d] theoretical understandings” (4). Recognizing the ongoing debates, I approached this study as analytic rather than evocative autoethnography, and I adopted Pace’s processes of analysis to stay true to the stories that, for me, define writing centre research and to enhance the rigor of my autoethnographic study, particularly through its analytic reflexivity. 

After writing the three-piece narrative, I completed a round of open coding, followed by iterative rounds of theoretical and selective coding (Pace 12). Some of these codes included multitasking jobs, roles, and identities; loss of control; and feeling pressure to conform or change. This process, particularly the initial round of open coding, was also informed by narrative analysis according to Riessman (2008), as many of the codes I used during this phase were born of the stories’ narrative elements, namely the characters featured (administration, boss, and friend)and where I chose to begin each piece (reporting, communicate, ad, and surveil). Throughout these rounds of coding, I wrote “memos” to help draw connections across codes, and as Pace outlines, from writing and collating memos, I was able to see core themes within each narrative and delimit codes to only those that related to those themes (10-11). For example, through reviewing my memos on multitasking, holding multiple positions, and feelings of pressure or uncertainty, I began to focus on the theme of contingency. This identification led me to revisit my narratives, seeking out other concepts related to this emerging theme. Once the core concepts began to “crystallize” (Pace 12), I returned to the literature in order to put my stories in conversation with the larger sociocultural context. I have chosen to present my narratives alongside the literature in order to combine my storytelling and analysis (Ellis, Ethnographic I 198). 

Ethical Considerations 

Although my autoethnography centers on my individual account of working in writing centres, it is essential to recognize the possible involvement of other individuals in my stories. According to Carolyn Ellis “when we write about ourselves, we also write about others” (“Telling Secrets” 14). Considering that I am writing about my professional roles, my coworkers (past and present) are inherently implicated in this autoethnography even though they are largely absent from the paper itself. As such, I have made reasonable attempts to preserve their privacy by not stating their names or locations, nor that of their institutions. I do recognize, however, should someone close to me read this paper, they may be able to identify to whom I am referring. I thus proceeded with this autoethnography using ethics of care when making many authorial decisions. 

Ethics of care are guided by principles of care, empathy, and the needs of others (Botes 1073). I greatly value my professional relationships, and I believe my coworkers deserve care and consideration. As such, I have made reasonable efforts to share this paper with the intimate others (Ellis, “Telling Secrets” 17-18) of my professional life in order to ensure their comfort with the stories I have featured. Further, I locate myself centrally in each vignette, owning that every circumstance described is based on only my own feelings and experience, and like Sarah Wall, I use the first person singular and do not attempt to speak for anyone else (51). Despite the number of ethical considerations at play in this research, I feel it is important to tell these stories as a means of coming to know, and coming to change, my relationship with writing centres, a relationship I hold in high regard (Holman Jones 230).

A Writing Centre Chronology 

2013

My shift was ending soon. I still had to complete a post-session write up for a new tutee—it had been her first appointment at the Writing Centre. 

We met in a British literature class last semester. She was an English major like me and I had a friendship-crush on her ever since I heard her describe the idiosyncrasies of her long-haired Maine Coon, Peggy. I bet she’d be a real pal. We could go for hikes, talk about books, order americanos and pretend to like them. I still hadn’t made many friends in my program. 

I finally struck up the nerve to chat with her after we got our grades back on our third essay assignment. She complained about receiving the same grade and feedback as the two assignments prior, and I jumped when I saw an opening. You should visit the Writing Centre, I suggested. I explained that I had worked there for a semester, that it was for writers of all levels, and that her tutor would be an undergraduate like her. Talking through your work can’t hurt, I told her. I never told her that she did better on the essay than I did. As I sat in the Centre with her, I wondered whether anyone noticed us. Do we look like we could be friends? Do I seem professional or convivial? Can my boss see? 

As I completed the write-up following her appointment, I made a mental note to tell the Director when I saw her next. A referral. I convinced someone to come, I practiced in my mind, my eyebrows raising with the excitement I planned to portray. Was it helpful? Did she like me? Does she know she’s a better writer than I am?

My experience as an undergraduate peer tutor was, in many ways, exactly as Bradley Hughes, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail describe: transformative, developmental, and one of the “most important experiences in [my] educational [career], a complex, multi-faceted experience whose influence persists not just years but decades after graduation” (13). Indeed, I have credited that part-time job with igniting my passion for writing and teaching on numerous occasions. When I reflect on that time, I am reminded of the pride I felt in securing the position; the respect and admiration I had for my director; and the sense of community I was building with the other tutors and the university as a whole. I also recall the utter confusion I sometimes felt identifying with the peer writing tutor role.

My feelings are reflected in the literature. For example, Hughes et al. found writing tutors to develop confidence in themselves through their work, and tutors in Jennifer Nicklay’s study reported a strong sense of community within their writing centre. Yet Nicklay also found guilt to be an overwhelming feeling amongst peer writing tutors, particularly as it relates to allyship and loyalty amongst tutors, between tutors and tutees, and between tutors and the institutions in which they work and go to school (25). In his seminal work, John Trimbur unpacks the contradiction between peer and tutor that is at the core of these experiences. He notes that by their very position of employment, peer writing tutors are singled out for their perceived skill or academic success, signaling a difference between them and the tutees with whom they will work. While I can admit to relishing in some “sense of cultural superiority” (Trimbur 24) bestowed upon me through my position, as reflected in my narrative by my eagerness to please and impress my employer, this portion of my narrative is also rich in doubt and insecurity. These feelings of disconnect are common among peer writing tutors (see Bouquet; Geller et al.; Trimbur), yet the emotional labour necessary to navigate such cognitive dissonance (Trimbur 23) was not something my tutor handbook covered. I identified this emotional labour as a primary theme of my first narrative.

2017

My boss and I worked collaboratively, responding to one another’s questions in the comments of our Google Doc. She’s probably on the subway now, I thought, coming from class, or from the community college. She taught sessionally, too. The heading “Funding Proposal” looms over our back-and-forth, and each of our pale orange highlights signifies a potential query, a choose-your-own-adventure with branching paths that could lead to more or fewer dollars. I wondered, “Should we start with the number of students who visited, or the number of appointments?” My boss quickly responded in the comments: “the appointments make a stronger case.” 

She wasn’t wrong—the centre was busy. I was the second hire of a brand-new writing centre, housed in a tiny office away from the rest of the nursing department. I tutored students in hallways, the lobby, and over the phone while they worked evening shifts. Students returning for repeat appointments… That shows real demand, real impact. My reply was marked “resolved” before I convinced even myself. Repeat appointments… Real demand, real impact. The Dean would get that, I wondered aloud. Right? 

My eyes turned toward my calendar on the wall. It was a gift from a student. It featured a cheerful toucan with an oversized, tangerine-coloured beak, on which a frothy pint of Guinness rested. It was February, and two dates were circled in the coming months: the day next year’s funding application was due, and the final day I would be permitted to work in this country unless my Visa was renewed.

It is not uncommon for writing centres to operate contingently, supported by precariously employed staff who tread cautiously from one contract to the next (Giaimo 4). Indeed, Anne Geller and Harry Denny refer to the “profound risk and uncertainty” of such contracts and staff’s limited job security (114). Relatedly, Emily Isaacs and Melinda Knight report that many writing centre professionals struggle to find recognition or institutional support for their work. Similar to Sherry Perdue and Dana Driscoll’s findings, my narrative reflects the burden placed on writing centre staff to continually “court” upper-level administration and story our work in such a way that heightens the writing centre’s visibility and “position[s] it for more resources” (202). For example, the participant in Perdue and Driscoll’s study was encouraged to reduce tutoring appointments by 10 minutes in order to increase the number of possible appointments in a day (202). This experience, as well as my own, suggest a conflation between the quantifiable use of the writing centre with its inherent value and worthiness of support. Reporting on his own role as a first-time writing centre director, Neal Lerner likewise reflects on having to justify his existence and that of the centre through “statistical arguments” (40). This administrative work is additionally riskier for contingent employees whose personal, professional, and financial security may depend on how these statistics are received, valued, and interpreted.

In their recent study on contingent writing centre staff, Dawn Fels et al. found that many professionals feel they have power in their positions but not within their institution at large. Participants were thus unable to “advocate for themselves or their centers without putting their own jobs at risk” (356). Perdue and Driscoll describe a similar phenomenon as lacking “academic currency” (202). Relatedly, Fels et al. uncovered personal risks to contingent staff, including financial insecurity and emotional instability. Indeed, I recall the uncertainty I felt sitting alone in our small writing centre, wondering where I would be living in a year’s time. Although the centre’s funding was renewed, I ultimately decided to return to my home country at the end of the academic year. I do not remember the final numbers I included in the report, but I do know that writing centre staff “become part of the intellectual and social fabric” of universities in ways that are “not easily measured by [writing centre] usage statistics” (Lerner 41). As such, the perils of contingency was the theme I identified from this second narrative. 

2022

The new job ad was for a manager, rather than a director, and conveyed no hint of the academic responsibility or privilege the position once held. The chain of reporting was unclear but the writing centre’s lack of autonomy was not. Is the centre under the English as a Second Language Department now? Or is it the Internationalization Office? Did the university move them somewhere else? 

My desk is littered with paper, including a sticky note with a running bullet list titled Ed Dev + WC collab ideas. I’ve been adding to the list since joining the educational development team, though I have let it stagnate since the latest leadership shuffle. Who would the manager be? Would she have the budget or freedom to take on a writing-enriched curriculum initiative with me? We could have done that before.

Come lunch hour, I open a new tab to begin updating my “Intro to Writing” syllabus for the fall semester. I scroll to the Writing Centre heading and pause. After a quick but careful read, I decide to leave the same encouraging statement I’ve used for years. It states the value of peer tutoring for all writers and invokes in me the spacious, warm yellow rooms where I spent so much of my own undergraduate degree. When I walked by last, many of the spider plants that once lined the windowsills were gone, removed during the reign of one of the recent interim non-directors. I think of the dried leaves at the bottom of a waste basket as my text cursor blinks. Has the ethos been tossed out in the shuffle, too?

The writing centre is vulnerable. It is not uncommon to hear of a centre experiencing “[organizational] interference” (Giltrow 18) or of one’s near nomadic existence, being institutionally relocated, reorganized, or reclassified every few years. Perdue and Driscoll highlight the impacts of writing centre location within an institution’s organization chart. They find that when centres are led by and housed within student affairs or larger learning centres, writing centre staff typically have to navigate administrative leadership who “neither understand how writing tutoring differs from other subject tutoring nor appreciate the specialized writing knowledge needed to effectively facilitate tutorials” (201). Further investigating the impacts of a writing centre’s institutional positioning, Michelle Miley takes up an institutional ethnography of her own writing centre to uncover “how [her] work shapes and is shaped by the institutional ecosystem” (104-105). Her findings are varied and rich in detail, but she begins her story by describing a job ad. The vision it depicted, she later learns, did not always align with that of the institution or her colleagues. Miley’s experience depicts the impact of this misalignment on her professionally; however, I believe students can also be implicated when institutional and personal narratives conflict.  

Lori Salem states that when students use the writing centre, it is understood as an endorsement of the centre’s pedagogy and location (151). Within institutional discourse, then, what might students—or staff and faculty—infer about said pedagogy when a writing centre is located within an English literature department, a learning technology centre, or an English as a Second Language office? For Miley, her understanding of the nature of her role, her institution, and her colleagues was shaped by institutional documentation that presented a particular narrative. When writing centre narratives are continually recreated, reorganized, and rehomed, there can be a lasting impact on others within the institutional ecosystem, including potential staff and faculty partners (see Perdue and Driscoll) and student tutees (see Salem). I identified institutional interference as the primary theme of this narrative. 

Discussion

In my decade-long relationship with writing centres, I have told their story to classmates, direct supervisors, upper-level administrators, and my own students. When I began this study, I assumed the stories I have told about writing centre work would be largely shaped by the country I was in or my disciplinary home. While these factors certainly influenced my work, they are not what stands out in the above triptych and accompanying analysis. As a tutor, I grappled with emotional labour; as staff, I faced contingency and insecurity; and now from beyond the writing centre, I stand witness to institutional interference that sidelines this vital work. Exploring these themes within the literature has helped illuminate that from my earliest socialization with writing centres, I was being shaped by the feminized nature of writing centre work within the neoliberal institution. 

Neoliberal ideologies are marked by their emphasis on capitalism and the entrepreneurial free market, and they have grown in academic settings over the past 40 years (Iantosca 155-156). As these views systematically creep throughout public institutions, the economic and material value of students’ education becomes privileged over the creation and sharing of knowledge (Monty 38). Randall Monty describes a number of ways neoliberalism is made visible in writing centres, including moving centres out of academic units, modifying their mission towards service programs, transitioning senior leadership roles to lower staff positions, and increasing their emphasis on record keeping and surveillance (40), each of which were present in my own narrative. With that interference comes a rise in contingent staffing, and, in some cases, outsourcing (Stenberg). This contingent labour has historically been tied to gender, as women are more represented in both the growing part-time and non-tenured status in academic positions and in writing centres (Sicari 566). Although contingent writing centre employment is not a new practice, voices of contingent staff are “dangerously invisible” in this field (Fels et al. 353). In response to this dearth, a recent special issue of the Writing Center Journal reveals the lived experiences of precariously employed writing centre staff, including tutors, part-time employees, administrators, junior lecturers, and other traditionally sidelined roles. These voices bring to light the detriments of contingent employment beyond individual experiences (Lee-Amuzie 50).

For tutors, Tony Iantosca identifies that tutoring roles increasingly occupy a similar position to that of a service sector worker within the university (152). As such, they often carry the burden of ethical and emotional labour as well as care work. Hutchinson et al. also identified emotional labour as a key tenet of the contingent tutor’s experience, noting the need for heightened and sustained vulnerability in order to perform the role (76). Personally, I recall the peer tutor role requiring constant attention to relationships. It was often arduous to work with the same tutee multiple times, carefully peeling back layers in an attempt to understand the writer, not just their writing; building trust was slow and meaningful. So, it felt like betrayal when, weeks later, I would have to complete a report to the student’s professor. Or alternatively, when I would see the student working with another tutor and would question my own value: Does she like that tutor more? Is he better at this than I am? Does the relationship we built not matter? In reality, reporting and scheduling are simply facets of the writing centre’s service model and had little to do with who I was as a person. The “feminized” traits of empathy and compassion that caused me to care so much are necessary for tutors to possess, but they are typically least valued in the neoliberal institution—except in their capacity to produce high usage statistics and conventional writing. As Trimbur notes, this position is hard to hold, as tutors feel pulled toward a loyalty to their peers, but also to the academic system that has rewarded them for their perceived writing skill, and whose values they may even unknowingly enact and internalize (23).

When I now think of the stories I have told about writing centre work, I more easily see how facets of neoliberalism influence these narratives. As a peer tutor, I told the story of a writing centre to my fellow classmates, attempting to recruit them as tutees, and retold it to my boss in order to earn a “good job” for my efforts. As a ____,/ Later, I told the story of a writing centre to upper administrators through monthly and annual reports, spinning a strategic narrative to hopefully renew the centre’s funding and my own employment. And now I tell stories to the undergraduates I teach. I tell them to visit the writing centre, praising its pedagogy and lore, but part of me wonders whether these stories should be shared when I see the narrative put forth by the wider institution. As Wonderful Faison and Anna Treviño maintain, some of the writing centre stories we are told are lies (para. 39), and thus I’m left wondering whose version is true. 

Ana Maria Guay offers an analysis of writing centre work through the lens of (dis)comfort (Ahmed) and interrogates many of the themes I discuss here, including contingency and emotional labour. She presents these concepts through metaphors of a magician’s smoke and mirrors or sleight of hand (8), and although she does not name the structures of neoliberalism in her essay, it is these structures that are wrapped in star-speckled capes, pretending to pull rabbits from hats. I find her metaphors of magic and trickery to be salient considering my own blindness to the realities of my employment. Indeed, prior to this study, I rarely—if ever—noticed the neoliberal forces at play in the stories I told. This invisibility, however, is not a mistake of our higher education system but an intentional feature (Guay 13). As Guay asserts, the realities of emotional labour, contingency, and interference are hidden in order to keep “[writing centre] positions underpaid, exploited, and impermanent” (10).

Since these traits are hidden, it has become easy to devalue and overlook service-oriented traditions of writing centres (McNamee and Miley). It is for this reason that writing centres and writing centre studies have long been conceptualized as a “feminized” space and field (see Grimm; Stenberg). As Nancy Grimm notes in her seminal article, the writing centre’s history as a remedial service through which students seek comfort, guidance, and support has shaped the view that writing centres are subordinate, “nurturing” students into producing writing deemed fit by the male-dominated academy (524). Grimm advocates for moving away from subordinate service positions and transforming the patriarchal institutions that perpetuate them (525), yet it is the care and emotional labour of these service spaces that have the power to enact necessary transformation. Indeed, Stenberg and McNamee and Miley argue that feminized spaces are necessary for resisting the neoliberal culture that devalues such space. Until I stepped outside and did this work, I could not have seen the influence these realities had and thus could not participate in the resistance. 

In some ways, engaging in autoethnography research is itself an act of resistance, as some would argue that the level of vulnerability and risk-taking required is a privilege afforded only to those who have already “made it” (Jackson and McKinney 14). While I posses the “cultural capital that is the historical birthright of white [straight, cisgendered] women” who dominate writing centres and writing centre studies (Condon and Faison 5), I have not quite “made it” professionally: I am contractually employed in a role that greatly differs from the initial career trajectory I aspired to upon completing my graduate degree, and I teach part-time on a sessional basis (often at night or online) when departmental funding permits. Yet I feel it necessary to share these stories and their influences, even if, like Sabo et al. note, it is risky to do so given the peripheral space I hold within my institution (56). By foregrounding my lived experiences within and around writing centres, despite the neoliberal ideology that inherently does not value my feminized storytelling, I am starting the work of reclaiming these stories from the lens of production or commodity. While the labour associated with storytelling and reclamation may be undervalued in economic terms, it—like tutoring—may be the most essential for personal and scholarly growth. 

Conclusion

I began this study in order to better understand the influences on the stories I have told about writing centre work because, as McKinney asserts, the stories we tell “shape others’ views about what is writing center work” (5). This paper presents my relationship with writing centres and the stories I have told about this work as a peer tutor, writing centre staff, and university instructor. Although I expected to explore how my geographic and disciplinary home shaped these stories, I instead discovered how the neoliberal institution and its feminized positioning of writing centres influenced—and continues to influence—my stories of the writing centre. 

This study has been an exercise in reclaiming my own story within writing centre studies. The greatest influencing factors are not the differences in geography or discipline, but the omnipresent reality of neoliberalism. And I have been able to investigate my own stories? only now that I have stepped outside the literal and figurative centre of this work. Now that I am not tutoring day-to-day and reporting on students, or writing reports for administration, I can see the neoliberal influences on my relationships with writing centres and their stories. Although the writing centre will always be the exigence of my scholarly identity, lifting the veil from these formative moments has been an act of reclamation. 

When I reflect now, it is with a critical gaze, one more able to see the cautionary tale lurking beneath the fable. By reclaiming these stories, I hope to no longer blindly sing the praises of the inviting writing centre to which I credit my career path. Rather, I call on myself to tell more counterstories (Martinez) instead, those of  “[students and staff] whose experiences are not often told” (62). This reclamation will also allow me to exert greater agency over the next steps of my professional trajectory. Should I return to the centre, may it not be in search of a familiar comfort, but as an act of resistance to the neoliberal pressures faced by those students and staff struggling to enter or barely hanging on. May I no longer simply accommodate these pressures, but use my power as storyteller to advocate and subvert. 

These revelations could not have occurred without autoethnography. This paper thus contributes to the value of autoethnography as a research methodology in writing studies. While it is gaining attention in the field (Jackson and McKinney 16-17), this methodology holds untapped potential for writing centre studies as well as other writing scholars whose authority and access to conduct research may be tenuous. Autoethnography is not only accessible to precariously employed staff who may lack status or research funds, but through empowering researchers to voice their experiences and speak back to broader sociocultural institutions, it grants agency. 

So what might it mean for writing centre studies to embrace autoethnography? Through this methodology, I believe we can unlock a potential avenue for future research as our field continues to define and redefine what it means to construct and share knowledge. In essence, autoethnography allows scholars to take steps toward more data-supported research while maintaining and affirming the stories that have shaped the field. According to Stacy Holman Jones, these autoethnographic processes are means of becoming. Autoethnography is concerned less with “creating stable, coherent, finished, and identifiable knowledges and more focused on engaging with the world as shifting, partial, unfinished, and animated” (229). For those working in writing centres, it may thus offer a new mode of becoming and show us ways of embodying change at disciplinary, institutional, and personal levels. 

Although I turned to autoethnography as a means of understanding the self, this paper holds meaningful contributions for individual readers as they consider their own experiences and the influences on their practices. Indeed, as Ellis asserts, it is the readers of autoethnography who determine if and how my stories “[speak] to them about their experience or about the lives of others they know” (Ethnographic I 195). As readers recognize their own experiences within my stories, might our collective storytelling empower others to recognize the neoliberal structure from which the writing centre has emerged, and to reflect on how this provenance influences tutees, tutors, and staff as they navigate the emotional labour of this work, precarious employment, and institutional vulnerability. 

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ginny Ryan for her insightful feedback throughout the revision process. This final draft—like so much else—is a credit to your friendship and unwavering support. A version of this paper was previously presented at the Canadian Writing Centre Association’s Annual Conference in 2023, so I would also like to thank Chantelle Caissie and Cecile Badenhorst whose comments were integral to the initial presentation and conceptualization of this study.

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