Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 1 (2022)
(Re)envisioning the Writing Center: Pragmatic Steps for Dismantling White Language Supremacy
Hidy Basta
Seattle University
bastah@seattleu.edu
Alexandra Smith
Seattle University
smithalexan1@seattle.edu
Abstract
Writing center work has long been haunted by the mandate to either fix the writing or fix the writer--both approaches share an assumption of a deficit model. As critical writing center scholarship has made clear, this is an assimilationist practice that re-enacts colonialist views of English. This paper expands the writing center work to reflect on effective strategies for interrupting this assimilationist methodology in order to create the kind of change that prioritizes making it make sense (Demand). We suggest making sense--true sense of writing center practices--means dispelling the myth of the superiority of standardized English and occupying braver spaces to hold honest conversations about languages and effective writing. These honest conversations are grounded in a critical examination of what we know of effective writing and what has long been taken for granted about the role of writing support and assessment. In this paper, we recount a brief history of the writing center as an institution--and our specific positionality within this history--to provide context for how our practices create and sustain change. We share the pragmatic steps of 1) revising tutor education curriculum to focus on antiracist approaches to writing, 2) facilitating conversations with faculty about antiracist writing assessment strategies, and 3) continuing professional development of writing center student staff. The writing center’s role in this broader communal work is essential, we argue, and necessary for dismantling white language supremacy in the ways we teach, mentor, and assess writing.
We were in the middle of one of our final rounds of interviews for hiring writing consultants. Members of the current staff were participating in the interview process: kindly asking questions, smiling with encouragement, and practicing the body language of those who are wrestling with being both welcoming and supportive, but aware of the sudden power and authority they hold as interviewers. It was January 2020, and we had worked diligently over the past two years to reframe ideologically and practically how our primarily white institution’s writing center operated. As a space that sits at the intersection of writing, assessment, access, and equity, the writing center is an essential space for influencing and reproducing a culture of writing on campus. And until recently, our institution’s writing center, like many in the United States, maintained dominant writing pedagogies grounded in ideologies that ensured the standardization of academic English--a process that attempts to eradicate (or, in the language of the institution, assimilate) the languages and ways of knowing and communicating the students bring to the classroom.
It was in this context that our interviewee sat at the end of the table, nervous but polished in his interview attire. He answered the questions with specifics; it was clear he had prepared along the lines of what he expected a writing center to privilege, demand, and support: “correct” grammar and language use. As he discussed his love for grammar rules, and the joy he felt for helping students learn and master the rules and expectations of good writing, we watched as our current staff members made eye contact with each other unsure how to respond to this interviewee who was clearly passionate about writing, but was advocating an approach to writing that our writing center had been diligently working to rethink.
Once the interview was over, we looked around the room and waited for the debrief to begin.
“I just don’t know if he will be a good fit because he seems really intent on reinforcing grammar rules,” said Student A.
“I’d be worried he would have a hard time letting that go and embracing what you teach, Hidy, in 3090¹,” said Student B.
“I wonder, though,” said Student C, “if this is an opportunity for intervention. He mentioned he wanted to be a teacher. If we hired him, and he took 3090, which could open up an entire new way of looking at writing and fluency; he could take that with him into his future classroom, which is, ultimately, the goal, right?”
Our students nodded and affirmed Student C’s point. We made eye contact across the conference room table and couldn’t help but smile. To hear the students not only echo the pedagogical theory we have been emphasizing, but also apply it to a decision making situation profoundly illustrates a small victory in our tenacious commitment to (re)envisioning the role of the writing center. This conversation gave us hope we were changing the system from the inside. Slow, to be sure, but real change nonetheless.
The speed at which change takes place, especially at an institutional level can be infuriatingly and painfully slow. And it seems the change that supports and makes space for linguistic and racial justice is even slower and faces greater resistance. Given this reality, we have found it essential--for sustaining morale and commitment to this work-- to celebrate the small victories and to share pragmatic approaches with others. Thus, there is celebration at the heart of this essay, even as we continue to wrestle with the challenges that make it clear that the writing center remains haunted by standards and ways of knowing that are predicated on whiteness and the rhetoric of modernity. For us, a crucial component of avoiding burnout is celebrating the victories, no matter how small, and building a network of support. Our celebration pays homage not only to the victories but also to the networks of support and community that have guided and inspired this work. These networks include student staff and faculty groups, and the essential work of scholars and practitioners in writing center and language and composition studies. Without these networks it would be extremely difficult to not only make the radical change we need, but also maintain the level of commitment required to dismantle white language supremacy from within the institution.
We want to acknowledge that we have benefited from the work and generosity of writing center scholars who have shared their stories and their experiences. The work of scholars such as Frankie Condon, Neisha-Anne Green, Laura Greenfield, Nancy Grimm, Asao Inoue, Victor Villanueva, Vershawn Ashanti Young, and others who have written extensively on revolutionizing how we teach, mentor, and assess writing to combat educational systems and approaches grounded in anti-blackness and white supremacist culture and language, have been essential for guiding, inspiring, and challenging any action we take. Edited book collections, such as The Writing Center and the New Racism (2011), special issues such as the Praxis (2019) issue on Race and the Writing Center, the work of IWCA Special Interest Group on Antiracism Activism, The University of Connecticut conference on Racism in the Margins, and other writing center regional and national conferences have been instrumental. Additionally, we pay tribute to the anti-racist mission statement the University of Washington, Tacoma’s Writing Center revealed in 2017. While writing centers across the country are now also crafting and adapting mission statements to reflect anti-racist pedagogies, the mission statement at UWT directly inspired and energized our staff to revise our own mission statement (see Appendix A). The ways in which UWT held their ground and engaged with the negative press they received reminds us of the importance and bravery of fostering public engagement, even if it means encountering misunderstandings and resistance (Santos). Our article contributes to this ongoing conversation by writing about our experiences implementing these transformative theories. To do so not only bears witness to the ways in which the writing center continues to be haunted by these histories, but also to illustrate how our particular center seeks to adapt and put into practice these theories. Thus, we ground this essay in specific examples of steps we have taken--namely, repositioning the role of the writing center from focusing solely on the students we support (the clients) and expanding to include the consultants (tutors) and the faculty who, after all, are the ones assessing the writing of our clients--with the hopes of inspiring and contributing to a collaborative community of writing scholars and activists who can take these ideas and adapt and customize to their particular institutions. This broader focus for our writing center is essential for reckoning with pedagogical and ideological approaches that are predicated on a belief--subconscious or otherwise--in maintaining white supremacy. As Baker-Bell et.al. emphasize, it is “in a commitment to widespread systemic change in curricula, pedagogical practices, disciplinary discourses, research, language policies, professional organizations, programs, and institutions within and beyond academia” that we can claim a commitment to social justice. Thus, in order to reckon with and, ultimately, dismantle what Asao Inoue has described as the white racial habitus--the “sets of durable, flexible, and often invisible (or naturalized) dispositions to language that are informed by a haunting Whiteness” (34) -- that characterizes the writing standards that govern our pedagogies, we suggest we must broaden and (re)envision the role of the writing center.
We believe (re)envisioning the writing center’s role in supporting and instigating the widespread systemic change Baker-Bell et.al. demand requires the cultivation of what Laura Greenfield describes as a radical writing center. A radical writing center engages in a “critical relationship” with its practice for working with student writing and ensures the methods “are always engaged in a process of transformative interrogation or ethical reinvention” (117). That said, while we are in support of fostering a dynamic and critical relationship to our practice, we struggle with the word “radical.” On the one hand, we view our work as the unarguable, self-evident representation of our fields of study, and, by that logic, not radical. The above call for Black linguistic justice is, similarly, not a radical statement. It simply seeks to correct oppressive and uninformed pedagogies. On the other hand, we are both constantly reminded of the ideological dominance of Standard English that haunts education, and writing in particular. The conservative uproar that emerged in the spring of 2021 regarding the teaching of critical race theory in schools further underscores the magnitude of this point. It is clear that our new practices challenge deficit frameworks, individualist assumptions about writing center work, and traditional evaluation of counter homogenic writing practices. And, in that sense, perhaps it can be viewed as radical work.
Whether or not the work can be described as radical, we embrace the essential methodology of frequently questioning the “absolutism, presumed neutrality, [and] centrality” of dominant methods that govern ways and standards of writing (Greenfield 122). We offer our experiences as illustrative of the ongoing work--both through interrogation, transformative listening, and reinvention--that we constantly employ in our negotiation within our institutional framework. While this negotiation manifests via a range of services and resources we offer--including but not limited to class visits, student run and public facing blog and podcast, workshops, and faculty support--we focus this article on emerging curriculum and professional development grounded in antiracist and decolonializing approaches to writing, and partnerships with faculty. We begin with a brief discussion of the writing center to provide context for how our practices interrogate and change several of the policies upon which our institution’s writing center was built. We then share the pragmatic steps we have taken--namely, revising tutor education curriculum and facilitating conversations with faculty about antiracist writing assessment strategies--to reckon with the responsibility of beginning the process of dismantling white language supremacy in our writing center and, hopefully, our broader institution. We recognize, though, that in sharing these steps we by no means seek to imply or contend that we “have arrived” in our writing center work. In fact, we are suggesting the opposite; the journey toward dismantling white language supremacy is long. We believe this work must always be dynamic: open to constant revision and reflection.
The Writing Center as an Institution
In reckoning with the writing center as an institution, it is helpful to reflect on and confront the historical roots and the ways in which they inform current practices. The history of writing centers is not simple nor monolithic progression². In general, the writing center has flourished as a response to increased enrollment and open admission. The focus of the work has been to fix students’ papers, produce grammar worksheets, and to prepare those who the institution deemed “underprepared.” As the understanding of the writing process gained momentum, writing center recommendations adopted minimalist tutoring approaches³ where students are made to do all the work. A good tutorial was based on how the consultants (tutors) resisted interfering with the student’s writing. Mottos such as “our job is to produce better writers, not better writing” and “we prioritize higher order concerns” emerged and persisted in our current moment. When Hidy began to revise the tutor education course in 2017, she realized how much the writing consultants felt confused and uncertain about how to best support writers. While some expressed their willingness to help students with grammar and editing, others felt that the non-directive minimalist tutoring was the most ethically responsible approach.
While both the “fix-it” and minimalist tutoring approaches led to extreme and divergent writing center practices, they are built on the same white language supremacy assumptions. Nancy Grimm convincingly argues if the need for the writing center’s existence is to either fix the writing or fix the writer, then both approaches share the same assumption of a deficit model--one that locates the wrongness (i.e. deviation from the acceptable limits of standardized academic discourse) in either the student or their writing. Thus, framing the work of the writing center as a site to help students better perform within the expected standardized English is haunted by assimilationist practices. Whether intentional or not, it re-enacts colonialist views of English⁴. Even when the metaphor of assimilation gets framed as inclusive and comprised of empowering strategies to share the language of power, it rarely questions the racist and colonialist structures that make Standard English the language of power as the only acceptable variety in academic discourse.
Grimm argues that the unexamined centering of whiteness in the writing center curriculum itself is part of the problem as it promotes a system of advantage based on race⁵. The long-held mottos of minimalist tutoring: improving the writer and aiming for the writers’ independence are models based on individualism. Textbooks directed at tutors certainly reinforce this centering of whiteness. For example, the “us and them” approach assumes that all consultants are white and students who seek their support are Others.⁶ Steven Bailey notes that even when tutor training textbooks introduce consultants from linguistically marginalized backgrounds, they discuss them as tutoring problems and prepare them to face challenges in which clients may not trust them as good informants of the academic culture. Thus, as we looked to reimagine the writing center, we had to echo Grimm’s question: if our work is always couched in making things “better,” why are we not also expected or invited to make our institution a better institution? Our efforts to organize and reframe our work, then, required a different interrogative approach:
Why are the linguistic resources of our Black and Brown students a liability?
How do we reconcile a linguistic framework where all languages and dialects are equal in linguistic terms and rhetorical frameworks that celebrate multiliteracies as rich resources for effective discourse with a limiting practice that upholds “Standard” English as the norm and the only language variety accepted in “good” academic discourse?
How do we challenge the minoritized and marginalized narratives of BIPOC students when our writing center literature and narrative continues to refer to them as other contexts for tutoring addressed at the end of tutor training curricula?
Structuring a curriculum based on a critical examination of these issues requires flexibility and ongoing collaboration with writing consultants and colleagues. Before we discuss the specifics of the revised curriculum, it is important to emphasize that we are able to ask these questions and to take steps to address these issues because we are afforded the resources and institutional access to these conversations. This is due to several intersecting factors including the fact that our institution operates within a social justice mission and is in support of antiracist curriculum. Our writing center exists spatially in the library’s Learning Commons--a space shared with Learning Assistance Programs, the Media Production Center, and Math Lab. The English department, where we are both non-tenure track faculty, is our intellectual and pedagogical home. We recognize that our role as faculty in the English department has made navigating the process of implementing change within the institution more accessible. This positionality and the resources we have been given--including, crucially, the support of the Chair of the English Department and the Director of the Writing Studies minor to design and develop the tutor education curriculum, and the continued financial backing and support of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences--affords us space as faculty members to be an active part of conversations and reaching an audience beyond the center’s immediate student employees.
That said, while we acknowledge the relative privilege and security this positionality affords us, implementing these changes have not been without challenges. It’s also important to acknowledge that the cost of doing antiracist work differs for those who are doing it based on their identities, institutional positions, and even location. Our own identities play a significant role in the ways we arrive to and are perceived in our antiracist work. We are two women who, while offering a combined 29 years of teaching experience, are considered young and in early and mid-career: Hidy is an immigrant, US citizen, has lived and worked in the US for over two decades, multilingual, and speaks English with an accent; Alex is white, born in the U.S., and monolingual. Hidy is consistently aware that her darker skin and accent can render her advocacy to little more than self-serving. Her approach is to be transparent and sensitive to the discomfort that her minoritized position and power status as an administrator may cause the students she supervises. Her labor could easily be dismissed as personal and thus suspect and “biased.” Hidy struggles with her awareness of the complicated role a white racial habitus plays in her own experience of education as it has simultaneously empowered her to gain trust and disempowered her by knowing that this trust is gained through performing to rules of monolingual standard ideology. For Alex, not having any lived experiences in these matters requires consistent listening to and reading from those who do. It also requires a recognition of and constant work to decenter and redirect the ways in which her whiteness, and her white racial habitus manifests and haunts all conversations and interactions. Part of this haunt, of course, emerges as a result of the immediate power and authority whiteness connotes in most circles on a predominantly white campus. Furthermore, the fear of losing our jobs if we stray too far from what is deemed useful or appropriate work as we (re)envision the potential of this space is a constant specter we have to weigh and assess. Of course, the fact there are two of us running the center is beneficial in empowering us to navigate and take on various risks. For many writing center directors, the imposed isolation can be incredibly taxing. Sharing this leadership role has created space for safe and insightful dialogues, reflection, and supportive camaraderie--an essential part of doing this work and resisting burnout. We cannot begin to count the times where our conversations have allowed us to process whatever was the challenge of the day to explore ways to move through it.
While these layers of precarity can be paralyzing we want to emphasize, again, that we offer this narrative as a pragmatic approach and share the small successes we have had so far in our journey and effort to mobilize our writing center as a unit for, as the “Demand for Black Linguistic Justice” insists, “mak[ing] it make sense.” Making sense--true sense--means dispelling the myth of the superiority of Standardized English and occupying braver spaces to critically examine the relationships between languages, what we know of effective writing, and what has long been taken for granted about the role of writing support. In doing so, we acknowledge and confront the haunting of the deficiency model and the complacency of writing center work and the university as an institution that continues to enact colonialist and assimilationist policies.
When Common Sense Becomes Undone: Tutor Education Revision
Perhaps one of the most challenging tasks in teaching writing is to separate the scholarship of writing and composition from the ideological public perceptions (common sense) of good writing. Hidy found it helpful to introduce standard language ideology as a threshold concept⁷ to unpack what we think of as “good writing” and what it means to commit to non-oppressive tutoring practices (Basta 244). The consultants studied and reflected on texts such as Greenfield’s, “The ‘Standard English’ Fairy Tale,” Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own English?”, and Anzuldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, which introduced them to threshold concepts essential to lead transformative practices. A commitment to naming what we know as the basics of linguistics and writing studies separated the field’s actual knowledge from the systemically racist ideologies that shape its practices and “common sense” judgements.
Concepts as simple as realizing that the United States of America is a multilingual nation, understanding that Black language follows its own grammatical rules, realizing how language and identity are intertwined, and understanding that standardization and language planning can often lead to inequalities were essential to questioning the status of Standard English as the only variety that is acceptable in academic discourse. Understanding that the claimed superiority of Standard English is not based on unique merits, but rather on ideology sustained by institutional practices was a first step for students in learning “the truth” about language varieties, and learning to make it make sense in a consultation. Working with Mandy Suhr-Sytsma and Shan-Estelle Brown’s model of addressing the everyday language of oppression in the writing center enhanced our understanding that language is not a neutral medium of communication, and that an explicit discussion about race, language and grammar is needed to destabilize linguistic privilege. For example, instead of following traditional writing center practice that treats grammar as a lower order concern beyond the interest of the writing center, writing consultants were encouraged to discuss the conventions, the genres, and the requirements, and to support students in understanding the linguistic options available to them. This rhetorical and critical approach moves away from the universalist correct/incorrect methodology to an approach in which students can negotiate multiple discourses and practice their agency.
Questioning the deficit assumptions introduced a framework where critical questions were possible. This led to revisions in our practices and our mission statement that moved from “The Seattle University Writing Center is dedicated to fully engaging students in becoming the most effective writers they can be” to a mission and core values that make space for students’ racial, linguistic, social identities and resist the deficit stance that limits the center’s work and others its clients (see Appendix A). This stance enabled us to revise our hiring practices. Instead of seeking faculty nominations of students who achieve excellent grades in writing courses, we asked students to self-nominate, held info sessions, and made it clear that our center is stronger when it truly reflects multiple disciplines and the rich linguistic identities of our campus community. After naming what we knew, we could no longer make sense of our old practices, so we had to let them go. In a recent reflection on the Black Linguistic Justice, an undergraduate writing consultant captures this feeling well:
It wasn't until I took the 3090 class that I began to challenge the linguistic paradigm that haunts academia and my own academic work. I will admit that when I first started questioning the rules, styles, and conventions that I cultivated in my school work, I was very uncomfortable. Having been taught a "standard" for the past 12ish years of education made it hard for me to accept the fact that what I have been practicing and mastering in my writing has been harmful and abusive to many people who identify as non-white. It then made it hard for me to believe that in many ways, I've been silencing my own identity as a person of color.
The consultant’s reflection here equally traces both the discomfort of letting go of internalized assumptions and the freedom the anti-oppressive pedagogy affords to their identity as a student of color and their practice with other students. This is the beginning of transformative practices.
The Writing Center’s Transformative Role
As we hope we’ve made clear, our new vision for the writing center works to transform the ways in which students work within and against dominant writing standards. Our primary method for achieving this cultural shift derives from mentoring the writing consultants in antiracist approaches. But it is also in our ability to conceptualize the writing center as a resource that extends beyond the parameters of student support that empowers us to further operationalize our antiracist mission statement. While our website is replete with research and resources for faculty (and student staff), we’ve found wrestling with ideas and brainstorming what this antiracist commitment looks like in an individual classroom or in a consultation inspires revision to current practice in ways that solitary reading and research may not always afford. Importantly, dialoguing in real time is an essential component of this. It is not uncommon for Hidy to receive emails offering feedback about the direction of the writing center, but with little opening for conversation: emails with sentiments such as “I used to trust the writing center and send my student there”, or “I don’t want the Center working against me ☺” reveal both faculty discomfort, and their attempt to engage with the changes we have made. These emails are challenging to receive because as critical and feminist scholars, we can’t help identifying the distrustful tone, the passive aggressive use of a smiley emoticon, and the rhetorical positioning of the writing center in relation to student writing. However, our commitment remains to respond to them as “requests for information,” and optimistically, as evidence for a promising fact that the work of the writing center is destabilizing problematic assumptions.
While these emails attempt to reinscribe the role of the writing center to cater to faculty requests to lighten their load for individual feedback, they also indicate that a large gap exists between the writing center’s practice of inclusive pedagogy and how some faculty conceptualize their role especially when these concepts are based on their previous experience of the writing center in their own undergraduate education. Working to close, or at least narrow, this gap is to confront how whiteness haunts our conversations within and outside of the writing center. It requires a commitment to continually engage in multiple conversations--in real time, and ideally not via email--of naming and explaining what we are doing and why we are doing it. While the effort can be demanding, our obligation remains to voice concerns, share scholarship, and explain our practice to build collaborative relationships. When given the space to engage in this kind of dialogue, we have yet to have an occasion when a faculty member didn’t express appreciation for the perspective and the practice of the writing center. In fostering these conversations with colleagues and our student staff, we hope we’ve begun to lay the groundwork for a greater cultural shift in how we conceptualize, discuss, and, perhaps most significantly, assess writing within an educational framework that is systemically predicated on adherence to white language supremacy. While an adherence as entrenched as this may never be fully exorcised in our professional lifetime, we remain committed to this work because the alternative would be to allow oppressive assumptions to continue to frame what it means to offer writing support.
Supporting Faculty with Contract Grading
While we have been negotiating these kinds of conversations for the past couple of years, the confluence of events that characterized our 2020 Spring quarter inspired even greater urgency and transparency. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests in response to the public murder of George Floyd, our campus encouraged compassion, flexibility, and sensitivity to students’ backgrounds, needs, and circumstances with a different kind of intensity. In the midst of this explicitly flexible and accommodating environment, Alex advocated for more direct conversations regarding contract grading on campus. This approach to writing assessment is starting to gain popularity in writing assessment conversations, and, despite its transformative potential, is not without its own flaws. Yet, the methodology encourages regular pedagogical reflection; its parameters are discussed in dynamic, flexible, and adaptable terms, which, as we indicated earlier, are crucial components of the kind of radical work necessary to engage the writing center as a haunted space. The critical work offered by Asao Inoue, in particular, illustrates why it is a necessary practice, especially as institutions and programs around the country profess their support for and commitment to antiracist work and, more broadly, the Black Lives Matter movement. There is a clear disconnect, Inoue writes, between “our pedagogies and writing assessments” that are often “warm, soft, social, and inviting” and our methods of assessment which “are cold, hard, individualistic (even selfish), and discouraging” (85). Until our grading practices match the kind of compassion, flexibility, and sensitivity being advocated by our pedagogies, systemic change--characterized in this instance by incorporating and drawing from students’ own languages and knowledges--will be impossible to achieve. We need to rethink our assessment strategies to match our pedagogies. We need to make it make sense.
While the intent is not to reproduce the entire history of grading contracts, we briefly describe the aspects that were of particular interest to an impromptu faculty support group and our students. Inoue’s work on labor-based grading contracts builds on the work of those such as Jane Danielewicz and Peter Elbow by embedding an explicit discussion of race and equity. His incorporation of the work of language and compositions scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Victor Villanueva directly inform his critique that current scholarship on contract grading ignores a key aspect: assessing writing based on quality is a practice predicated on a racist system and white supremacist culture. Since academic writing standards, he argues, are governed by a “white racial habitus” assessing quality reinforces “white language supremacy” and prevents teachers and students from “seeing a wider, more colorful, deeper felt world of language and logics” (35). While we believe one would be hard pressed to find a writing teacher who is against embracing a “deeper felt world of language”, putting this assessment strategy into action in the classroom and advocating for it in conversation with colleagues and administrators requires an adaptability and flexibility that the education system, a structure built on measurable standards and adherence to tradition, largely discourages. Of course, this assessment strategy does not eradicate power differentials, but it does create space for students to critically question assessment methods they have previously accepted as objective and rational. Encouraging them to critically engage with the standards and regard them as socially, racially, historically, and politically constructed--a construction that often functions as a means of forced assimilation and gatekeeping--is important for naming the haunting pervasiveness of white language supremacy. Because of this shift in relationality to mandated standards that structure our courses, we have found that building a supportive community from which one can troubleshoot, brainstorm, and revise this new approach to assessment important. As our students know all too well, the process of learning (and unlearning) is often frustrating and uncomfortable. And, just as we ask our students to be brave in moments of difficult learning (and unlearning), we too “can choose to be brave in moments of discomfort” (Inoue 248). In our experience, even having just one other colleague can foster commitment in the face of backlash, fear, and/or frustration.
An emphasis, therefore, on collaboration, conversation, and the development of a community of practitioners is a significant aspect of doing this work. Inoue has modeled this by making both of his books open access and putting together a dynamic google drive⁸ account with resources, templates, and the opportunity to connect. Significantly, this pooling of resources Inoue encourages is, in many ways, contrary to the business model of education that permeates many disciplines, but especially the humanities, where scholars often work in isolation from and in competition with one another. Thus, to not only pool resources, but encourage collaboration and experimentation in real time works to change a culture of education predicated on the success and resilience of the individual. Inspired by the emphasis on collaboration, Tara Roth, Hannah Tracy, and Alex established a support group for those implementing labor-based grading contracts in Fall quarter 2020. We met periodically over the summer to discuss the research, workshop drafts of materials, share and create resources together, and process anxieties and concerns about the risks of incorporating a shift in assessment that--despite making sense--upends traditional methods of assessment and can, once again, be interpreted by some as dangerously radical.
These anxieties are not miniscule as the demographics of our support group are telling: we consist predominantly of non-tenure track full time and part time faculty. Given this precarity, collaborating with colleagues can offer not only emotional support, but also, to some extent, greater protection in the face of resistance or pushback. This positionality, however precarious, is also strategic and has the potential to generate large scale cultural and institutional change given the demographics we teach: non-tenure track faculty at our institution predominantly teach general education writing courses, and tend to reach the most students. For example, in AY 19-20, 3,071 (out of a Fall quarter 2019 enrollment of 4,700 undergraduates) students took these lower level, writing intensive, general education classes.
The response to the labor-based grading contracts in our classrooms has been overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic. Fully engaging with students’ written work instead of being burdened with trying to objectively assess an inherently subjective product is liberating for both student and instructor. Students have expressed relief and enthusiasm for this mode of assessment and engagement and participation in Alex’s class was high. On the anonymous course evaluation form, one student wrote “The labor based grading contract at first made me think I would try less but that wasn't the case. Because there was no grade I got to really enjoy my writing and that extra weight off my shoulders gave me space to do better. It also made me want to do better and see if I could improve.” The notion that this student was able to not only want to learn more about the writing process, but was also able to claim ownership of their writing (“my writing”) illustrates an enthusiasm for learning that traditional grading practices often inhibit. It remains to be seen what the institutional response will be or to what extent departments, including our own, will follow our lead⁹. For now, though, it is a small victory that at least six general education writing courses have implemented their own version of a labor-based grading contract and, in so doing, have prioritized, supported, and made space for students’ right to incorporate and draw on their own languages and ways of knowing in the classroom.
Student Staff Reading Groups
While conversations with faculty are essential, generating conversation amongst the student population is also key for widespread cultural and institutional change. Because of this we briefly acknowledge and attest to the importance of continued professional development and immersion in writing theory and scholarship that centers antiracist and anti-oppressive pedagogies for our writing center student staff. While we have informally shared various research articles with our student staff in the past, it wasn't until our students-- in response to the widespread social unrest that began in the late spring of 2020--explicitly asked for structured opportunities and support to continue the conversations begun in 3090 that we built in time in the schedule to facilitate this conversation. As with the faculty, providing the resources has not been enough. It is by reading and wrestling with the ideas together in real time--an act that in hindsight seems obvious, but is, admittedly, challenging to prioritize--that the most profound difference occurs. Thus, in collaboration with our students, we set aside time every other week for our staff to voluntary attend paid reading groups where we read and discussed antiracist writing and language scholarship¹⁰. In addition to general knowledge building, we situated the conversation in the context of their work, and discussed how these ideas informed the practice they engage in every day when working with fellow students on their writing.
The first article we offered focused on problematizing assessment standards that privileged a single standard for academic English. We felt this was essential context for our student staff given that a significant aspect of their role as writing consultants focuses on interpreting, applying, and contextualizing instructor feedback for clients. The fact that the consultants often have to negotiate interpreting written comments on student work that is at odds with how they were trained to approach language forced us to face the reality that the institutional discourse was not quite in sync with anti-oppressive practices. Because of this, it left writing consultants a bit vulnerable to defend their practice and left us questioning how we could best support them. The reading group became a possible solution that not only enables students to stay informed regarding current scholarship in the field, but also helps them process this haunting sense of vulnerability and find a community of like-minded scholars and research.
At our first reading group meeting we discussed “Classroom Writing Assessment as an Antiracist Practice: Confronting White Supremacy in the Judgments of Language” By Asao Inoue. Our students were both intrigued and, perhaps, slightly overwhelmed. They wrestled with how to incorporate this approach to assessment in their consultations when they are not the ones assessing writing. One student offered that this article reminded her of the importance of sharing with the writer to what extent the writing was effective for their intended purpose and goals: “That way, the writer knows at least one reader liked their ideas and writing style.” If the writer comes back with a poor grade, she continued, that opens up a conversation about standards and the subjective nature of grading writing. Of course, finding a way to initiate this conversation with a client without undermining the faculty member is a key objective both for us and, genuinely, our consultants. Understanding standards as systems integrated in academic discourse and consciousness, rather than an issue of individual faculty supports our framing of these discussions. The consultants do an incredible job at broaching this conversation with interested clients in a way that gives the client a systems-based framework for understanding that can then generate further conversation with their professor. That is the goal, after all: to spark conversation, not judgement or shame. Towards the end of the conversation, one student, who had remained quiet through much of the conversation, stared somewhat dumbfounded at the group. “This kind of assessment just makes sense!” she exclaimed. “Why isn’t everyone doing this? It just makes so much sense.” It was, in some ways, a hard question to answer.
In sharing these critical resources with our student staff, the writing center becomes an empowering resource for the rest of the student population as they engage with and encounter professors whose evaluation of writing, grading practices and approaches are, at times, antithetical to and outdated with the kind of contemporary scholarship that seeks to transform a racist education system. This kind of transformational work that takes place--via conversation between student and student; student and faculty; faculty and faculty--is fundamental to how we manifest substantial change within our education systems. Though this work may, at times, move painfully and devastatingly slowly, as our opening anecdote illustrates, real change is possible and can start to take shape with commitment, resources, and a dogged determination to celebrate small moments of progress. We hope these pragmatic examples illustrate that while this subtle work may seem infuriatingly small in its scope, given time, it can ripple out to create the kind of systemic change we need.
Conclusion
In framing the importance of storytelling in writing center research, Frankie Condon notes that we are storytellers: “[E]ach of us creates the narrative that he or she is. We tell our lives and live our tales, enjoying what we can, tolerating what we must, turning away to retell or sinking into madness and disorder if we cannot make (or remake) our tale into a narrative we can live in” (qtd.in Condon, Green and Faison 36). In our attempts to make our services and practices make sense in an antiracist framework, we experienced great discomfort with the widely circulating common sense stories of the writing center’s work, writing pedagogy, and assessment. The revised curriculum, policies, and practices we share here resist common sense based on racist and colonialist assumptions, while adopting and building on antiracist frameworks to tell our counterstory—one that we can live in. More importantly, one that all our students can live peacefully in. We are committed to frameworks in which our counterstories remain open to the experiences of our campus community. We can’t undermine the role of “accomplices”--a term used by Neshia Anne Green to describe the invested partnerships in this work for social justice. As we work with writing consultants and colleagues, we are grateful for the genuine inquiries and ongoing conversations and to those who dared to grapple with common sense and upended their practices to create new ones—ones that are beginning to make sense.
Notes
We would like to thank the writing center staff at Seattle University. Their thoughtful insights, their courage to question oppressive frameworks, and their dedication to engage in critical reflective practices shows us that change is possible. We would also like to thank faculty members Loren Cressler, Tara Roth, Benjamin Stork, and Hannah Tracy whose participation in labor-based grading contract conversations have been instrumental in the development of this work and essential for moving the conversation forward at our institution. Special thanks to Hannah Tracy and Tara Roth for their courageous and bold ability to ask tough questions, draw attention to issues of inequity and stand firm in the face of resistance, pushback, and dismissive language. We couldn’t do this work without you.
1. 3090 is English 3090, Tutor Education: Theory and Practice. The course is required for all undergraduate students who get hired as writing consultants.
2. See Peter Carino, 1995 and Elizabeth Boquet, 1999.
3. See Jeff Brooks, 1991.
4. See Bawarshi and Pelkowski, Postcolonialism 1999
5. See Grimm’s Retheorizing 2011.
6. See Steven Bailey, 2012 and Romeo García, 2017.
7. See Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, 2015.
8. http://tinyurl.com/GradingContractResources
9. We are hopeful about this. In Spring 2021, our group received a grant from our institution that was co-sponsored by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. The grants fund faculty to revise and create curricula that incorporate anti-racist pedagogy and frameworks. Our group plans to create workshops for faculty and staff across the institution about grading contracts and support them in adapting this particular framework into their classrooms and assessment strategies.
10. We discussed the structure of the reading group with the students who proposed it. All agreed that participation should be voluntary but also paid to acknowledge and center the fact that continued learning is an essential part of our roles as writing center practitioners.
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