Welcome to Praxis! Interview with Kaitlin Passafiume

Image by 👀 Mabel Amber, who will one day from Pixabay

Hi Kaitlin! Welcome to your first Axis post. You’ll be spending the next two years with us here at Praxis, but let’s start by looking backwards. Where are you from, and how did you end up here at the University of Texas at Austin?

Hi! I’m thrilled to be on the Praxis team for the next few years, and I feel certain that this work will inject newness into my now nearly five year PhD journey at UT Austin. I thrive on moments of change, and I largely attribute this tendency to my family’s habit of moving every few years. As a child, I grew up between Orlando, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; and Birmingham, Alabama. 

Following in my parents’ footsteps as pseudo-nomads, I have also lived in many new places which converged upon my current quest for a doctorate degree here at UT Austin. After completing an M.A. in Latin American Languages and Cultures at Auburn University (Auburn, Alabama) in 2011, I took the unlikely step of accepting a job in education in Taipei, Taiwan. With a dual Bachelor's degree in Spanish and French, I was excited at the prospect of adding Mandarin Chinese to my language repertoire. 

After teaching English and Spanish in the lovely city of Taipei for nearly four years, I decided to continue my academic journey in the USA once more. Back in Birmingham, Alabama with my family, I began teaching Spanish as an Adjunct Instructor at Samford University. Anyone who has done this level of university instruction will know why I then decided it was time to pursue my PhD at long last.

As a rare writing center employee who hails from a department outside of Rhetoric, UT Austin offered me the very best resources for Latin American Studies, like the LLILAS Benson Latin American Collection. As such, our university was my first choice and I happily accepted when offered a place. Besides working as a Praxis Co-Editor with the writing center, I instruct Advanced Spanish Grammar and have enjoyed consulting with undergraduate and peer-graduate writers alike.

And how about the University Writing Center? What is it that drew you to writing center theory and pedagogy? Have you spent a lot of time in Writing Centers before now?

In the name of transparency, it must be said that I was drawn to my work at the UWC as a way to supplement a meager graduate student income while also using my hard won skills. I attempted work outside of academia, but found it to be incongruous with my student lifestyle and when I overheard some colleagues in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese chatting about a new hiring cycle at the UWC, something felt so right about this opportunity.

I had been teaching writing skills for many years at this point, in both Spanish and English. Due to this breadth of experience in education, my application was successful and I quickly found my penchant for consulting work. As I expanded my writing center interests into multilingual consulting theory, I helped to develop and lead the new Spanish Consulting Branch at the UWC while heading up our collaboration with the first ever Ecuadorian writing center at the Universidad de San Francisco in Quito, Ecuador. This work convinced me of the importance of ethics and linguistic justice in writing centers, and I hoped to help our center move forward in decolonial ways.

In 2019-2020, I became the UWC’s first Diversity and Inclusion Coordinator while serving my home department as an unofficial editor for colleagues and advisors. I aim to use the theoretical knowledge I gained in that role as a Co-Editor of Praxis, advancing scholarship on best inclusive practices in writing centers everywhere.

Are there any especially memorable moments from your time working in Writing Centers that our readers might find interesting?

I am in love with the breadth of studies that one comes to know in an intimate way as a writing consultant. Truly, consultants can often become the students in this setting, and our writers are deserving of a great deal of respect for sharing with us their work, their lives, and the subjects that are closest to their hearts. For this reason and many more I am committed to advancing inclusive practices in writing centers and fighting for a multidialectal approach to language. 

The professional and mutual learning relationships created in writing centers are remarkable. In my first year as a peer-graduate consultant, I guided a multilingual writer through improving his editing skills on his dissertation focusing on superconductors (I’m in the humanities, for reference). More recently, I worked with a brilliant ethno-musicologist on several articles which uncovered singing practices in rug weaving workshops in Iran. She detailed these collective songs as a way for these women to write their own histories while weaving music into their textiles. 

Academia can be a singular, isolating environment. A writing center, and especially our UWC, serves to connect knowledges through the people that produce them. Although I wouldn’t claim mastery of the plethora of studies I have encountered in my four years at the UWC, I am honored to have learned from these writers as much as, I hope, they have learned from me. I am thankful to see the intricate details of our world that circulate in the writing center space, and no matter the discipline, the basic building blocks of these ideas are words.

You’ve only been on the job here at Praxis for a couple of weeks, but what are you looking forward to the most? What do you hope to get out of this editorship?

In fact, I worked remotely with Praxis throughout the summer of 2021, so thankfully I have had some time to learn the ropes at our journal. I’m looking forward to expanding my experience in the editing world, while becoming more prepared for a career in editing and publishing. Through my work in Diversity and Inclusion, I feel positioned to use these theoretical and practical skills as an editor of Praxis, suggesting that the future of writing centers is a path that incorporates greater representation.