Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 1 (2022)
Listening Across: A Cultural Rhetorics Approach to Understanding Power Dynamics within a University Writing Center
Marilee Brooks-Gillies
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
mbrooksg@iupui.edu
Varshini Balaji
The New School
balav909@newschool.edu
KC Chan-Brose
Marian University
kchanbrose@marian.edu
Kelin Hull
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
kmcclana@indiana.edu
Abstract
In this multivocal piece, we take a cultural rhetorics approach foregrounding story and lived experience as we investigate the internal power structures of our writing center. We share positionality stories from our different institutional and social identities to practice there-ness and constellate our stories to create what we call a listening across framework. Through listening across our stories, we sometimes find common ground and sometimes find ruptures that we cannot mend. We see listening across as a decolonial practice that interrogates and disrupts practices that reinforce colonial structures and ways of knowing.
Introduction
Writing Center administration is complex. The role of writing center administrators has received significant scholarly attention (Geller and Denny; McKinney; McKinney, Caswell, and Jackson; Perdue and Driscoll). The internal dynamics of writing centers are similarly complex (Dixon; Baldwin et al.) and the relationships among the larger units and institutions in which a writing center is located offer unique challenges (LaFrance and Nicolas; Miley). Our project draws from this body of scholarship and looks to lived experiences of consultants, the assistant director, and director of our own University Writing Center (UWC) to interrogate our internal power structures and their impact on the everyday practices within the UWC.
Our project complements recent scholarship on institutional ethnography that has focused on how writing center work is understood within a larger institutional structure. Michelle Miley explains that institutional ethnography “begins from the standpoint of those doing the work and zooms upward and outward” (104). Michelle LaFrance and Melissa Nicolas see institutional ethnography’s potential to show us how “our discourses actually mobilize the work of our programs” (146). Miley argues “that as a method of inquiry institutional ethnography can help those of us in writing center work align our visions of our work with the understanding of writing centers in the institution writ large” (108). However, unlike the work of institutional ethnography, which looks upward and outward and focuses primarily on texts, our cultural rhetorics approach to understanding writing center structures listens across the UWC community and focuses primarily on stories of lived experience. Our cultural rhetorics orientation means we attend to story more than text because
the core of cultural rhetorics practices is an orientation and embodied storying of the maker in relation to what is being made. The makers . . . engage in that storying in different ways, through different means, hearing the voices of different ancestors and elders, honoring different kinds of stories. Their stories build and are theories, forming a web of relations. (Bratta and Powell)
The consultants, coordinators, assistant director, and director are makers of and within the community of the UWC. Listening to stories from within our community has made more visible how colonial understandings of power, as demonstrated through hierarchy, paternalism, and agency, inform our UWC. Through listening, and listening carefully, we have gained a better understanding of our different lived, embodied experiences and the ways our various identity positions (including but not limited to race, gender, institutional status, and disciplinary backgrounds) and prior experiences inform how we engage in the work of the writing center and the ways we negotiate relationships with and among one another within and beyond the UWC.
We recognize that we come to the UWC with different orientations to the work, different embodied realities and positionalities, and different lived experiences, which influence how we conceptualize and engage in the work of the UWC. We see our project supporting a re-imagining and re-making of structures and practices within the UWC. Like Anne Geller, Michele Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Carroll, and Elizabeth H. Boquet, we wish to see “everyday challenges as moments of possibility in and through which we might more creatively manifest principles, create collaborative relationships, teach tutors, faculty and our institutions with a richer accounting for the complexity of learning and producing knowledge in an intellectual community” (114). Most importantly, we wish to emphasize relationality and see the project creating a space to remind ourselves of how our practices within the UWC build our relationships and our community; as Shawn Wilson puts it, “Relationships do not merely shape reality, they are reality" (7).
Our project is one of many projects that examines and disrupts the writing center grand narrative, which according to Jackie Grutsch McKinney “goes something like this: writing centers are comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” (3, emphasis in the original). As a field, we tell stories that indicate the rosier side of our centers much more often than the stories that show dissonance and ruptures. Like Elise Dixon, we recognize that offering only “uncomplicated depiction[s] of the center without an equal representation of the unsettling, messy, or queer moments does writing centers an injustice. Such one-sided representations paint unrealistic pictures of the moments that make up an individual writing center’s identity.”
In addition to painting a more accurate picture of in-center dynamics and relationships, and a deeper understanding of power structures within writing center communities, our project intentionally includes the experiences and viewpoints of writing center consultants as well as administrators. We agree with Rita Malenczyk, Neal Lerner, and Elizabeth H. Boquet who write “disciplinarity in Writing Studies is indebted to and dependent on student knowledge-making in, through, and about writing. The Writing Studies tent should be a large one, and students as researchers (not only as subjects or objects) need to be in it” (80). Although much writing center scholarship focuses on student writing center consultants primarily as research participants, we see necessity in including student consultants as researchers not only as research subjects. It would be impossible to understand the internal dynamics of the UWC without consultant voices, without listening across multiple institutional and sociocultural positionalities within our community.
In this article, we share stories about our experiences in the UWC from times when the administrative structure was in flux, experiences impacted by our different embodied, material identities, and institutional statuses within our university and the UWC itself. We share our experiences of the difficulty of holding onto and sharing our stories with each other through what we are calling a listening across framework. Our work takes up Romeo García and Anna Sicari’s call to engage in transformative listening, “a listening that requires those of privileged positionalities to recognize the necessity to learn with and from difference; to understand institutional and historical power dynamics; to reconcile with a history of whiteness and domination; and to value lived experience of others.” In this article, we share the listening across framework we’ve developed as a decolonial practice that interrogates and disrupts practices that reinforce colonial structures and ways of knowing. Listening across is a cultural rhetorics methodology informed by constellating experiences (Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab), sharing positionality stories (Cedillo and Bratta), and practicing there-ness (Riley-Mukavetz). Through listening across our stories, we sometimes find common ground and sometimes find ruptures that we cannot mend.
Decolonial Orientations to the University Writing Center
We are Marilee, director; Varshini, former undergraduate writing consultant; KC, former graduate student administrator; and Kelin, former graduate student administrator and current assistant director. We were led to this project due to a confluence of events, structures, and positionalities. Our Center has two physical locations and offers synchronous online appointments. The UWC typically employs 25-30 consultants each semester and conducts between 3,000 and 4,500 sessions per year; offers classroom workshops, write-on-site programming, in-Center workshop series and events; hosts a staff blog and social media presence; and provides consultants with ample opportunities for research. The UWC has an antiracist and decolonial mission (see Brooks-Gillies) that recognizes the UWC operates within a “system of advantage based on race” (Grimm). At the UWC, our mission statement and course-based and ongoing writing center education emphasizes that the purpose of our work is to support writers in the larger context of individual texts and their experiences as an individual writer to consider how the genres they are asked to write and the language they are asked to use is influenced by institutional and social structures. For instance, at the UWC, we often work with students who write in forms of English that do not conform to White Mainstream English. Our role in the UWC is not to suggest changes so that writers can sound more like mainstream writers but to contextualize their options and encourage their agency, recognizing diverse Englishes as valid. To this end, Marilee spent her first few years as director working with the UWC staff toward building a student-staffed writing center that emphasizes peer learning and provides significant professional development opportunities for student consultants to support programming that is asset-driven, antiracist, and decolonial. Through this approach, the entire staff supports the ongoing making of the UWC, always learning from and with one another through ongoing dialogue and inquiry.
In our continued making of the UWC, we want to emphasize our orientation to our work as decolonial. We recognize that the related concepts of decolonization and decoloniality are expansive with multiple orientations and conceptualizations that interact in complex ways. Some scholars conceptualize decolonization as the project of recognizing the ongoing material legacies of colonization and working toward land redress¹, while other scholars conceptualize decolonization as a project of expanding our thinking and understandings beyond hegemonic narratives thus decolonizing knowledge and the mind.² Decoloniality focuses on knowledge production and necessitates an epistemic shift away from colonial structures and ways of knowing. Such a shift requires delinking³ from Western paradigms, which "means to change the terms and not just the content of the conversation" (Mignolo, “Delinking” 459). In other words, to disrupt coloniality and enact decoloniality, we must change our everyday practices to delink from reinforcing and replicating colonial structures. Despite these shared commitments, the specific ways various scholars conceptualize the decolonial project do not necessarily align with each other.
Our understanding of decolonization and decoloniality are primarily informed by Cultural Rhetorics, especially the Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab who anchor their work to Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Qwo-Li Driskill. Tuhiwai Smith writes, “Decolonization, once viewed as the formal process of handing over the instruments of government, is now recognized as a long-term process involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial power” (98). Driskill writes, “By using the term decolonization, I am speaking of ongoing, radical resistance against colonialism that includes struggles for land redress, self-determination, healing historical trauma, cultural continuance, and reconciliation” (69). These definitions help us consider ways to continue (re)shaping our pedagogies, administrative structures, and relationships with and among one another in the UWC and in Writing Centers as a discipline.
With these understandings of decolonization and a cultural rhetorics orientation, we recognize that our everyday practices contribute to reinforcing colonial structures or remaking them into something that contributes to the decolonial project. We are intentionally working toward decoloniality. That said, our Center is not necessarily advanced in its approach to decoloniality, which is ongoing and messy work. We wish to acknowledge how our practices are contributing to the larger decolonial project while recognizing that there is a lot of room for us to do more and do better. Our emphasis is on listening to each other and considering the ways we make and remake the UWC. As Andrea Riley Mukavetz writes, “By understanding the spaces we share, we more fully understand the knowledge we create” (120).
The difficulty of ongoing decolonial work at the UWC became clear to us when adjusting to shifts in the administrative structure. To address a clear need for administrative labor following the departure of two longtime assistant directors, a new assistant director was recruited from the English department and three graduate assistants were hired as Graduate Student Administrators (GSAs) in the fall of 2017. The GSAs, assistant director, and director were all referred to as the leadership team (LT). The primary role of the GSAs was to serve as on-the-ground managers—debriefing with a consultant after a difficult session, directing consultants to useful resources to support their consulting and other projects, addressing issues with technology or facilities, and reporting to the director and assistant director about odd situations that arose within the UWC. In addition, each GSA had responsibility for some administrative tasks. This time of flux overlapped with the director’s pregnancy and maternity leave.
The staff, especially undergraduate consultants, responded to shifts in the leadership structure and the director’s semester-long absence in primarily negative ways. Several consultants developed negative attitudes about the UWC because of their perceptions of power and authority within the UWC including difficulty in recognizing particular forms of (invisible, emotional, administrative) labor performed by consultants in leadership roles, especially the GSAs, and difficulty in recognizing and addressing ongoing microaggressions toward consultants of color despite the UWC’s mission to support antiracist and decolonial approaches. The changes to the UWC’s administrative structure created confusion for consultants. The transition was messy, emotionally charged, and contentious.
Although the UWC is structured to value the experiences and insights of all community members, the difficult transition into the new leadership structure showed us how we carried colonial mindsets and reinforced particular notions of power as enacted through hierarchy, paternalism, and agency. We see this project of reviewing our stories and how we learned to tell and listen to our stories as an opportunity to engage more deeply in the decolonial project, recognize the ways we reinforced values we did not consciously hold, and rethink and reimagine our practices in ways that more consistently value and promote decoloniality.
Sharing POsitionality Stories
Our methods center on our lived experiences as UWC consultants and administrators. The project began with a conversation about the disruption caused by the new leadership structure. We began to consider the ways our different orientations and positionalities impacted our experiences. Like John Gagnon, we see our work as “driven by stories, the stories told by others and [our] own stories, too. The stories that live inside [us] give form to [our] identit[ies] and constantly negotiate [our] place[s] in this world. These stories connect with, pass through, and bounce up against other bodies, and in other spaces, places, and times” (Smith et al. 53). Instead of falling into the binaries of professor-student, supervisor-employee, undergraduate student-graduate student, we see each other as people with multiple identity positions that are influenced by the structure of the Center and its institutional and disciplinary constraints. We wanted to make sense of what had happened and figure out a way to address fissures in our relationships and improve the working conditions of the UWC, a place we had all felt strong, positive feelings for at one point. At first, then, the project consisted of coming together and trying to extend goodwill to one another, enough goodwill that we could share our stories with one another. We met several times, every couple of months for over a year, and discussed our experiences. We weren’t exactly listening yet, though.
We were beginning to recognize the power of story in understanding our own lived experiences and how our lived experiences connect in ways that can be generative and/or disruptive. At first, sharing our stories was a frustrating experience. We had very different stories, and it became difficult to hear each other because even though we recognized each of these stories were true stories, we didn’t like all these stories and sometimes quibbled over decisions other community members made. For instance, KC contended that there wasn’t a GSA job description. Marilee countered that one was sent with the application and discussed at several early LT meetings; it was open for revision but not non-existent. A consultant who has since left the project indicated that no one had communicated about the new structure. Marilee countered that there had been emails and required staff meetings devoted to the topic. The frustrated consultant said, “No one reads their emails or pays attention during meetings!” Kelin and Varshini were less talkative during these early meetings, not sure what they could or should share. We’d gotten used to not listening to one another and were anchored in our own stories. Each of our stories mattered, and we needed to find a way to make space for each other and recognize that our frustrations were linked to our different positionalities, forms of power, and embodied realities embedded in colonial structures we perpetuated through our practices.
We decided that we needed to reflect on the moments when the leadership structure was in flux that made us feel the most discomfort and consider why we felt that discomfort, and then we needed to share those stories. The stories we’ve shared with each other, while constructed in good faith to be accurate, are incomplete. Like Christina Cedillo and Phil Bratta, we recognize that “Story as a guiding practice—in self-positioning and in constellating ourselves within networks of meanings—reminds us that epistemology is not ontology; our situated perspectives cannot tell a whole story except through exchange with others” (235). With these guiding thoughts, we continued to tell our stories to ourselves and each other. To show the core tensions in our lived experiences, we share a few of the stories that we’ve carried for so long in the next section. We see them enacting positionality stories, which we then constellate to listen across.
On-the-ground-leadership: An undergraduate consultant’s experience
Varshini Balaji
In January 2018, several undergraduate consultants felt that their work was being monitored by LT members, and that the LT were not leading or intervening in moments of disruption such as problematic sessions with writers and microaggressive behaviors by other consultants. Additionally, consultants had indicated microaggressive comments fetishizing race were made by a LT member. As a South Asian, settler, woman of color, and immigrant, I was attuned to these kinds of experiences in the UWC and was already developing an article proposal aimed at addressing the UWC’s (in)ability to engage with diversity.
The new LT structure shifted communication patterns, so that consultants were supposed to communicate on-the-ground issues first to the LT member acting as on-the-ground manager instead of immediately telling Marilee and the assistant director. This system exacerbated the divide between consultants and the LT. A few consultants indicated that they were planning to bring up their concerns at the upcoming biweekly staff meeting: they wanted action. My limited time at the Center allowed me to only receive much of this as distilled, second-hand information through Olivia,⁴ another undergraduate consultant. Olivia and I, good friends with a shared commitment to addressing questions of inequity and power, took consultants’ feedback to one of the GSAs, Kelin, whose job description involved community engagement and consultant support.
During our meeting in early February, Kelin listened carefully and suggested we develop a survey where consultants could anonymously share their perceptions of and experiences with the LT. Throughout the semester, Olivia and I kept pushing to make consultant concerns visible to the LT by having meetings with Kelin and the assistant director and drafting and revising the survey multiple times. We often had meetings postponed and felt like we were being intentionally stalled. We were concerned that the longer we waited to share the survey, more consultants’ already negative feelings about the LT would be exacerbated.
In early March, Olivia and I met with Marilee to discuss article proposals and saw clear connections between our proposals and the events unfolding at the Center. We knew these concerns would be easier to discuss in person but were hesitant to disrupt Marilee’s maternity leave. Going into the meeting, I was nervous about Marilee’s reaction because I deeply valued her opinion. I felt assured that our good working relationship—informed by her support on a research project and an independent study focused on themes of social justice, power, and decolonization—would allow her to readily understand consultant concerns as urgent and visceral. However, in the meeting, we felt that Marilee dismissed the survey and the urgency to administer it. We felt helpless and disappointed. We were frustrated and were trying our best to listen and support our fellow consultants while respecting and working within the established leadership structure. As consultants on-the-ground, Olivia and I experienced a greater sense of urgency. Additionally, for people of color, like myself, there is a radical urgency for change.
Leading from between: a gsa’s experience
Kelin Hull
During my meeting with Varshini and Olivia, I felt uneasy. Their request for confidentiality meant that I would have access to knowledge I could not share with my fellow GSAs, exacerbating the confusion about our roles. They reported that other consultants shared concerns that the LT was “unapproachable,” ineffectual, and an “oppressive presence” in a “capitalist structure.” In one example, they noted that when a male consultant made an inappropriate sexist remark to a female consultant other consultants stepped in to mediate the situation and educate the male consultant, but the LT member remained silent.
When they indicated that some consultants were in favor of commandeering a staff meeting to direct a dialogue about the consultants’ accusations regarding the LT, I balked knowing that Marilee would not be present to mediate and offer guidance. I offered the idea of a survey that, in my mind, would be informal and focused on the negative emotions in circulation; it would scaffold us towards a dialogue with established ground rules and, most importantly, a heads-up to my fellow LT members. I was comfortable keeping the secret at first because soon everyone would know, and it would be directly addressed in a way that I thought would succeed.
Varshini and Olivia began drafting the survey, and in the meantime, I met with the assistant director to provide her a detailed overview of my meeting. I followed her instructions to continue overseeing the survey draft but felt even more caught in the middle. How could I, a member of the LT, provide constructive feedback on a survey about the LT? It soon became apparent that Varshini and Olivia were not in the position to author a constructive survey, either. I felt stuck. I knew the survey would not be distributed; I was uncomfortable and feeling “in between” my roles in the Center and my own identities as it became apparent that I would have to continue keeping this secret.
Meanwhile, I continued to receive information regarding things the LT was “doing wrong.” I wanted to be a friend to the other GSAs and protect them from further critique without breaking my promise of confidentiality, so I tried to tell KC about consultants’ concerns but could not be too specific. Without access to all the contexts in play, she dismissed my warnings. Because my attempts were relegated to vague allusions, they exacerbated the friction between the GSAs and further destabilized the community in the Center, helping feed the narrative circulating that privileged certain performances of leadership—who was “doing it right,” according to the consultants. The consultants seemed to want the LT to act authoritatively according to their definition and understanding of authority but also not to be authoritative. It wasn’t fair.
I didn’t want the power this insider knowledge was providing, and in not wanting it, I didn’t use it in the best way. I could have simply asked key individuals to a meeting and let everyone talk. But I didn’t because I was highly invested in not elevating myself in any way. I did not want to be seen as taking/having more power. Instead, I tried to disappear, minimize, and redirect, focusing what little energy I had left on stabilizing the relationship with my fellow GSAs. But it was too late.
In the end, I felt isolated and alone. I shared my feelings with the assistant director. She felt protective of me—of the entire LT, so she suggested a post-it note activity where consultants would have an opportunity for “celebrations, questions, and concerns” before our late-February staff meeting, believing it might be a release valve for the consultants. As the LT gathered after the meeting, I could see that the statements on the notes, things like “LT are tellers not leaders,” were not new to me, but they were to the other GSAs. I was relieved to have the secret out; I wanted them to experience this with me, like someone who had sat and stewed on this information for months. “I tried to tell you,” I thought. “I tried to warn you. You scoffed at it all.” My impatience was the opposite of listening. In my need to protect, placate, and soothe the emotional experiences of everyone in the Center, I was unable to actually listen.
(Mis)leading: a big fish/small fish experience
K.C. Chan-Brose
Spring 2018 seemed to be going smoothly, but there were still traces of resentment for the GSAs trickling through. Almost all these grumbles were filtered through Kelin, from her weekly check-in meetings with committee coordinators. I didn’t give much weight to these complaints because, honestly, they seemed silly: the LT being too clique-y; sharing dinner together; offending consultants by greeting them with different amounts of enthusiasm throughout the long workday. There were never specifics about who was complaining, about whom they were complaining about, or about whether the complaints were more than just that—grumbles which cropped up during a weekly check-in with a chronic emotional laborer. Many of these grumbles were character assassinations and clearly rooted in sexism: “she’s unapproachable”; “she doesn’t smile”; “she’s gossiping about the staff.” Though, at first, we’d tried to react to each vague complaint, we only had so much energy to expend and were already emotionally exhausted. We needed to start being more selective about which issues took up our ever-shrinking energy and time.
We were working with adults who were empowered enough to openly complain about their supervisors and ballsy enough to express that they deserved our positions in the Center more than we did yet cited their reason for not addressing their frustrations directly with us as that person being “too unapproachable.” As the GSA in charge of professional development, I felt it was irresponsible to encourage consultants to believe that this is how things might be handled in their jobs beyond college. It also seemed childish, unprofessional, and decidedly anti-feminist to keep entertaining the notion that these frustrations deserved this much merit, especially when giving them such merit just fueled the fire. We could not keep wasting energy worrying about whether we were likeable, especially when the perception of us was so skewed and subjective. We had jobs to do. So, I stopped listening. I had to. The noise was so loud and so constant that I couldn’t think. I stopped listening so that I could survive. And then the post-it note meeting happened.
After all this time drudging through the miasma of negativity that had become our jobs, all of the foggy, murky, misunderstanding of what we were doing that was so horrible, Kelin admitted that she had been having her “secret meetings'' and, thus, had the answers. She had for a while now and had been expected to do something with that knowledge, but instead she’d kept it to herself. I felt ambushed, Kelin’s hinting washing back over me like a smack in the face. I felt Kelin had betrayed the GSAs by keeping this information quiet; that Kelin and the assistant director’s choice had infantilized myself and the other GSA. I also felt frustrated that there was nothing I could do to “make it better” because I didn’t know what “it” was and Kelin’s withholding of “it” disrupted the equity of power between the three of us.
Mostly, though, I was hurt because I thought Kelin was my friend. She was also a student and a mother, like me, and the person I’d shared my dreams and insecurities with. She got me in a way that my peers never had. On the truly hard days, I had this powerful visualization of the three of us walking across the graduation stage together, of us working together as teachers and writers and makers. But suddenly it felt like she’d had a different motivation. Those common goals that had once united us now read differently to me; we were not partners, but competitors in a shrinking job market. Regardless of her good intentions, I felt she’d taken advantage of her position in order to redirect all of the negative energy from the staff away from herself and towards us. I felt she’d taken away my choice and my agency. So, I put myself back into the driver’s seat, took back my agency, and chose to walk away from the Center with a broken heart and a thicker skin.
leading from a distance: a director’s experience
Marilee Brooks-Gillies
In early March 2018, I met with Varshini and Olivia to discuss article proposals they were developing. I had continued to make myself available for supporting consultant scholarship during my maternity leave, while our assistant director handled day-to-day administration with support from the GSAs. A few minutes into our meeting, I realized that they didn’t want to talk about the proposals. They were deeply frustrated with members of the new LT. They shared a desire for more transparency about how LT members spent their time, concerns about microaggressions, and general confusion about our administrative structure. This led them to be extra critical of all actions by LT members. They were adamant about deploying a survey for consultants to anonymously share frustrations with the LT. Since we were holding focus groups about UWC administration as part of our regular assessments in early April, I was distressed by the idea of creating an additional instrument. A draft the assistant director shared with me the day after our meeting was filled with survey crimes—leading questions, loaded questions, and double-barreled questions. One question read, "Is there too much unnecessary drama in the writing center?" They wanted swift action, but my sense was that to respond to their concerns we needed to consider the long-term vision and mission and material consequences of our actions. I needed to learn more about the conversations they’d already had with the assistant director and Kelin to understand the situation.
While they noted that undergraduate consultants were feeling surveilled by LT members, I knew from communications from the assistant director that LT members felt like they were trapped in a situation where they could do nothing right and that they could not be seen as people in new leadership roles who sometimes make mistakes. A new assessment tool deployed just before the regular focus groups would have little impact on anyone’s actions in the short term. The focus groups would provide important information alongside the frustrations and whisperings I’d heard throughout my leave. These could be reviewed in the summer to restructure the LT and improve communication practices. I was worried that Varshini and Olivia were being reactive instead of responsive, but I was having a hard time showing my overlapping concerns while questioning their approach.
Because I was on leave, most of our interactions were over email, which was a significant departure of our mostly in-person conversations previously. I could feel my relationship with Varshini slipping. We’d been close, as I had been her faculty mentor for a research project the previous summer, and she’d worked with me on an independent study on decolonial methodologies in the fall. Email correspondence limited our ability to see each other and recognize the ways we cared about each other and our community. Ultimately, my position of authority and my physical absence from campus, which both removed me from many of the day-to-day interactions in the UWC, made it hard for me to understand the embodied and lived experiences of consultants and LT members.
Enacting a listening across framework
We thought about these stories—letting them circle around in our minds, writing them down, talking about them with each other in planned and unplanned interactions. At one point, we got caught up in the accuracy of the timeline for our stories; we found ourselves fact checking dates and searching through emails and events on our calendars to piece together a sequence of events. This made us feel awful, reliving times that made us uncomfortable, and didn’t lead to any major insights since the timeline of events wasn’t that important. What was important was how we felt about our experiences. From there we decided to focus on the events that we remembered viscerally.
We continued to repeat our stories, but we’d found new language to share our ideas, and we began to really listen to each other, to—in effect—learn how to listen to one another and began to understand the stories together. We kept coming together, in person and sometimes on Zoom, and sharing our stories. Through the accumulated telling of our stories over the course of over a year, we heard them differently and heard each other. After practicing sharing our stories and—more importantly—listening to each other's stories, we have learned not just about one another's experiences but have found a way to listen that honor one another’s embodied realities in ways our early story-sharing, focused on being right and being understood as individuals, did not.
In telling and sharing our stories, we eventually stopped trying to “fix” the Center by recognizing what went “wrong” and began to focus on how to listen to each other. In fact, we began to see that our attempts at “fixing” the UWC were perpetuating colonial structures instead of interrogating the power structures and colonial ways of thinking we were trapped in. We had focused on who had the truest experience instead of acknowledging in a meaningful way that each story was true. Instead, we needed to concentrate on listening to understand and connect beyond how we perceived our own stories, experiences, and selves to let in the lived experiences of one another. In this way, our work is similar to what Andrea Riley-Mukavetz has theorized as there-ness. She writes, “There-ness, as a practice, is about being attentive to how relationships and space impact the opportunity for and construction of knowledge making. As intercultural researchers, we must be mindful of the practices we use to make ourselves present and absent—visible and invisible—to the cultural communities we work with and belong to” (120). We needed to actually listen to each other, show up for one another, and find ways to be and stay in community. Through the process of reflecting on our positionality stories, including the portions shared here, and telling and re-telling our stories among one another, we’ve learned not just from the stories themselves but the relationships among them and ourselves through the process of sharing. This is what we are calling the listening across framework. Within the process we have found ways to listen and hear one another and more fully consider the relationships we have fostered, ignored, enhanced, disrupted across our interactions. We have also begun to see more clearly the ways our interactions and positionalities are impacted by the colonial structures that inform the UWC.
We realized that our real project wasn’t about safeguarding the UWC against future negative events, reconciling all the bad feelings we had about our own negative experiences, or even completely healing our own relationships with each other. Instead, we’ve embarked on a much broader challenge—to work toward intellectual decolonization, delinking from colonial notions of power and relationships. Making the colonial structures informing the UWC visible through listening across can support delinking from them and enacting a more decolonial approach to writing center work.
In this section, we constellate tensions within our positionality stories to listen across. According to the Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab, the idea of constellation
allows for all of the meaning-making practices and their relationships to matter. It allows for multiply-situated subjects to connect to multiple discourses at the same time, as well as for those relationships (among subjects, among discourses, among kinds of connections) to shift and change without holding a subject captive (1.2).
In this way, we recognize that listening across is an active engagement, a practice, not a one-and-done activity but a way of engaging in community to listen to and strive to understand the lived, embodied experiences of one another. In telling our stories and attempting to listen, again and again, we’ve come to recognize how colonial understandings of hierarchy structure how we communicate, which led to paternalistic and infantilizing behaviors of protection, and influenced our notions of agency and accountability.
Hierarchy as Demonstrated through Communication Practices
Writing centers often laud their own structures as “flattened hierarchies,” indicating the importance of writer and consultant voices and experiences to the community, but a flattened hierarchy is still a hierarchy. In addition, our experiences with other hierarchies mapped onto the UWC, even as we worked to flatten it. In our previous leadership model, consultants reported directly to an assistant director and director in addition to receiving guidance on projects from a committee coordinator. The GSAs were intended to take some of the burden off the assistant director, acting as on-the-ground managers, but consultants and GSAs alike began to see a chain of command in which consultants reported to coordinators, GSAs reported to the assistant director, and the assistant director reported to the director. Varshini and Olivia went to Kelin with concerns from consultants because they misinterpreted her “community support” role as meaning that issues between staff members should be reported to her. Kelin brought this information to the assistant director since she wasn’t sure how to address it with KC, who was her administrative equal, but the assistant director—perhaps not understanding the depth of the issues raised by Varshini and Olivia—delegated the primary work of addressing the concerns to Kelin. Marilee was on leave, so these issues were not brought to her until later, when it was clear the community was troubled. This could have been an opportunity to have open conversation among the entire staff and work to flatten the hierarchy, but the power structure was confusing to everyone, and trust was rapidly disintegrating. Instead, circles of communication became smaller, and most consultants felt unable to talk about it with anyone who had power to change it.
We understand more than ever that listening across recognizes reciprocity and respect. Dixon writes that “writing centers are supposedly safe, conversational, nonhierarchical places,” but this is patently untrue as our stories demonstrate. We put our faith in a flattened hierarchy but then worked to enact a traditional hierarchy, expecting the leader at the helm to make decisions and take responsibility for the bad feelings of the community. In the UWC, we have different but equally important roles. We need to recognize how instead of flattening a hierarchy we were reinscribing it; we instead need to recognize our actions and delink from practices that make it harder for us to communicate with each other.
Paternalism Framed as Professionalism and Protection
We continued to reinforce a traditional hierarchy and create communication obstacles when working to “protect” various members of the community in the name of “professionalism.” Varshini and Olivia sought to protect unnamed consultants by anonymously sharing their concerns with Kelin; Kelin protected Varshini and Olivia by keeping their concerns confidential; the assistant director downplayed the intensity of the complaints in her communication with KC to protect her; the assistant director introduced the anonymous post-it note activity to protect the identities of consultants while allowing them to communicate their concerns; the anonymous survey Kelin suggested and Varshini and Olivia designed was also a form of protection. The notion of creating a somehow “unbiased” survey instrument to gather data is entrenched in Enlightenment thinking that has been instrumental in extending the colonial project. In some ways, the instinct toward protection was a way of honoring a request and encouraging dialogue, but in other ways it exacerbated the problem because so many members of the community were nervous about openly expressing their concerns.
The newly implemented leadership structure put into question how power operated in the UWC, and many consultants who had negative experiences with the new GSAs were concerned that the GSAs could enact power over them. The GSAs, however, only had authority to relay consultants' concerns to the assistant director and director. Conflating our understandings of power and authority disrupted trust in the community and raised questions about accountability. Who are we accountable to? How might accountability held and practiced in human relationships expand our ability to listen to each other’s embodied experiences?
Instead of bringing concerns out into the open in a way that the community could work together to address, all concerns were shared in secret meetings and anonymous forms of feedback. It was as if the entire community demanded transparency from everyone but was unable to enact it themselves. The desire to keep themselves safe or protect others got in the way of communicating with the community. While notions of protection are often perceived as good and necessary, protectionism frequently manifests as paternalism and limits people’s ability and agency to act for themselves as KC’s story illustrates. For us to address concerns openly as a community, leaders of the community needed to create an opening for discussion about the new power structure. As Cedillo and Bratta write, “In order for positionality stories to function effectively, they ever so briefly center the teacher in the moment and rely on students seeing their teacher as a figure with, rather than of, authority gained through both personal experience and academic learning. As a result, teachers can potentially begin to build trust with their students” (221). In this case, the assistant director and director needed to be vulnerable and share their positionality stories about their experiences with the UWC’s shifting structure to build trust and encourage consultants to share their own stories which could allow us to be accountable to our community, to each other.
Agency with(out) Responsibility and Accountability
As a community, our desire to respect confidentiality and protect each other limited our own and others’ agency. This led to everyone enacting their own notions of change in siloes, disconnected and alienated from the larger structure and the complex web of relationships that underlay the UWC’s daily operations. Everyone wanted the agency to enact their own notions of change; however, no one wanted to bear the responsibility of their actions. This was complicated by the sense of urgency that people experienced by virtue of their institutional positionalities and sociocultural identities.
Even when members of the community wanted to hold each other accountable and saw shared responsibility for the community, interactions were strained. For instance, Varshini and Marilee shared similar orientations to the UWC as a promising site to enact decolonial pedagogies, but their different positionalities and experiences made it difficult for them to understand and trust one another. Varshini’s positionalities as an on-the-ground consultant and woman of color exacerbated her felt urgency for change, which demanded immediate, concrete action. This sense of urgency was at odds with Marilee’s long-term vision as the director who saw that institutional change was slow, difficult, and uneven. Varshini’s desire for immediate, concrete action made the creation and implementation of an anonymous survey seem like a necessary act, while Marilee’s long-term vision for the UWC showed her that rushed implementation of the survey would heighten the staff’s expectations for change while yielding limited useful data, especially since the existing focus group assessment worked to gather similar information. Both sensed each other’s distress, and both recognized the need to act, but to Varshini, Marilee’s choice to stop the implementation of the survey seemed only like inaction while to Marilee the importance Varshini placed on the survey was misguided. They both wanted to hold each other accountable and felt accountable to each other, yet as they tried to share their concerns, they both felt their actions and ideas were misunderstood by the other.
Although they had a common anchoring, a similar orientation to the mission and vision of the UWC, they had different notions for how to effect change within the UWC, how to address the instability introduced by the new LT structure. Paul Farmer warns us that without a broad, historical, and interlinked understanding “we risk seeing only the residue of meaning. We see the puddles, perhaps, but not the rainstorms and certainly not the gathering thunderclouds” (309). Marilee’s longer experience in the UWC and enculturation into the discipline of Writing Studies gave her a broader picture of the Center and working timetable for change. Varshini’s embodied experiences as a woman of color and consultant on-the-ground informed her felt urgency for change. We could only see the gathering thunderclouds if we could trust one another enough to listen across, to be responsible to one another and our community. Frantz Fanon reminds us that “Decolonization, therefore, implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation" (2). How can our actions address this urgent need in environments where change is slow?
Listening across our stories: a reflection and a call
Writing Centers are sites of constant flux characterized by perpetual novices, and relationships are at the core of our work making this a deeply complex site to navigate and decolonize. Romeo García notes that, “As a site of place, meaning, and knowledge-making, the writing center is about interactions and encounters, co-existing histories and trajectories, and is always in the process of being made” (48). Although writing centers are always in flux, there are practices and orientations to the work that may seem “fixed” or seen as “best practices,” and any change and/or disruption to everyday practices is generally met with unsettled feelings and resistance as we continue upholding colonial structures, even as we speak out against them. We had rooted problems to particular people; assigning blame for the troubles of our community to specific people based on their place in the hierarchy and the way they enacted their power and authority. By “listening across,” we divested from notions of power being anchored to the top of a hierarchy and recognized the ways we all contribute to the community and enact different kinds of power and influence.
Through listening again and again, we began to understand the ways our experiences in the same community differed; we began to understand each other’s motivations and choices; we began to more deeply understand how the community of the UWC operates. While we are still haunted by and entrenched in colonial ways of knowing, we recognize that listening across provides a broad, interlinked understanding of people’s experiences that can be used to guide and inform delinking through our choices, practices, and pedagogies. Much writing center scholarship focuses on how writing center administrators are trying to make their everyday working conditions more visible to administrators and faculty, and addresses dynamics between writers and consultants, but writing center communities also need to make more visible the interplay of positionalities across the various roles within our Centers to include consultant-consultant dynamics, consultant-administrator dynamics, junior administrator-executive administrator dynamics, and the ways that various institutional and sociocultural identity positions impact the relationships among our writing center communities.
Listening across through sharing and constellating positionality stories to practice there-ness allows us to make and remake the UWC. These practices allow us to understand our experiences in interlinked ways rather than isolated ways and help us anticipate the implications and consequences of change as it creates space to intentionally listen to the embodied experiences across our writing center community, including concerns and critiques. Importantly, we have learned that our emphasis when facing difficult situations in the UWC should not focus on "fixing" or avoiding them but on creating conditions that encourage deep attention and listening to the embodied experiences of one another. Lessons we’ve learned are not going to be directly applicable to every situation, but listening deeply and recognizing unique, embodied lived experiences are decolonial practices that support delinking from colonial structures that inform institutional structures and our shared experiences.
Ultimately, this is a story not only of the past but of the future. We must remind ourselves that "colonialism and imperialism have not settled their debt to us once they have withdrawn their flag and their police force from our territories" (Fanon 57). In addition, while we see disciplinary potential through decolonial methods we must emphasize that “decoloniality is an epistemic, political, and ethical project. It provides both the analytic for a position of critique and a vision of a world that does not deny the possibility for people, elsewhere and otherwise, to participate in the production, distribution, and/or organization of knowledge. It can and should be more than disciplinary reform” (García and Baca 24).
The work of delinking from colonial practices and structures is complicated and filled with tension and dissonance. Delinking allows us to contribute to decoloniality, to work toward multiplicity instead of universal notions of Western superiority. A decolonial future values multiple identities, multiple notions of change, multiple voices, and multiple stories. Listening across as a decolonial practice demands consistent, sincere, and critically empathetic engagement. We must keep coming back together, gathering, dialoguing, listening across, and working with each other toward a decolonial future. As our constellated positionality stories indicate, during the time of administrative flux, we weren’t consistently practicing there-ness; listening across has helped us recognize the ongoing work we need to do within our Center and ourselves to delink from colonial ways of understanding relationality and to “become allies, not competing individuals, working toward the survival of our shared community” (Powell 42).
Acknowledgements
The development of this article was supported in part through an International Writing Centers Association Research Grant.
NOtes
This orientation is exemplified by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang who write “Though the details are not fixed or agreed upon, in our view, decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically. This is precisely why decolonization is necessarily unsettling, especially across lines of solidarity” (7).
Walter Mignolo describes how in the early nineteenth century “decolonization” was understood to be synonymous with “independence” and “revolution,” as a way for people of a colonized site to gain control of their land and government, before becoming associated with decolonizing knowledge in the post-Cold War era (Darker 53).
Our understanding of delinking comes from Walter Mignolo who combines sociologist Samir Amin’s “la desconnection” and Anibal Quijano’s “desprendimiento” (“Delinking” 502).
This is a pseudonym.
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