Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 1 (2022)
Tutoring, Minus Bigotry! LGBT Writers, SafeZone Tutors, and Brave Spaces within the Rural Writing Center
Galen Bunting
Northeastern University
bunting.g@northeastern.edu
Abstract
This study has been approved by the Institutional Review Board, protocol AS-16-99. At Oklahoma State University, SafeZone tutors are trained to serve as liaisons between the LGBT community and the writing center. Few writing center studies have considered the role of SafeZone tutors within rural writing centers, especially when the rural writing center takes up the role of a safe/brave space within a rural campus. A safe/brave space provides a space for marginalized voices, does not allow bigotry, and encourages difficult and challenging conversations. Within a rural location and conservative climate, how do SafeZone tutors interpret their own work? How do students interpret conversations and collaborations with the SafeZone tutor within the broader context of the writing center? Do SafeZone tutors within a rural university’s writing center consider themselves part of a safe/brave space? Through interviews with SafeZone tutors and through surveying student reactions, this study argues that the rural writing has the potential to become a safe/brave space.
Introduction
When I started my first year of graduate school at a large southwestern university, I was intimidated and confused, but most of all, lost. My documentation held the wrong name, and due to a new computer system, this name had been distributed across all university platforms, from my email to my online assignments. The only place where I was able to substitute my name was within the Writing Center, where I held an assistantship. This situation goes further than an institutional mistake: it is a common experience for people in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community whose names and pronouns may not be reflected across official documents. The options offered by the Writing Center signaled its potential as a place of change and openness. On an institutional level, writing centers are affected by systemic oppression: many writing centers were intended to rectify “larger numbers of ‘underprepared’ students” during the Open Admissions movement of the 1970s (Boquet and Lerner 172), and to regulate the language of students “who didn’t measure up” (Grimm 6). As haunted and wounded places, students are sent to writing centers when their use of language does not fit with the academic standards of the academy, thus students may already fear that their right to self-expression is at stake when they enter our walls. In the conservative legislative climate of red states, where no anti-discrimination policies exist to protect them, LGBT students may fear outright attack for stepping outside the closet. Rural writing centers have a unique ability to ally with LGBT writers to express their own subjectivities, especially when they may have been denied this agency in the past. A writing center’s needs are shaped by the clients and tutors who write within its walls, there is potential, not only to foster writing and creative expression of identity, but to re-examine the structures of authority which make up a writing center. Upon discovering that the Oklahoma State University writing center integrated a program known as “SafeZone” tutors, I was intrigued. SafeZone tutors are tutors who have undergone training to serve as liaisons between the LGBT community and the writing center, regardless of whether they identify within the LGBT community or serve as allies. As a result of these experiences with the Writing Center, I embarked upon this study. I saw the SafeZone training program as a place of potentiality, where tutors collaborated with the LGBT community to create a welcoming environment within the writing center, where the voices of LGBT students are uplifted and valued.
The early stages of this study took place in an inquiry group, made up of diverse tutors who were currently employed at the writing center.¹ As a part of an ongoing conversation, this inquiry group provided an excellent place to discuss the goals of my research and thus forward the voices of those who perform this intensely interpersonal form of labor every day. In these meetings, we focused on a sampling of articles which addressed both the issues of writing centers as spaces within rural communities and equality within writing centers. At one such meeting, the inquiry group discussed Jay Sloane’s “Closet Consulting,” a feature from the 1997 edition of The Writing Lab Newsletter. We talked through uncomfortable situations that might unsettle or confuse tutors, thereby preventing them from addressing the writing at hand. Our group rehearsed strategies through which a tutor might assertively oppose homophobia in writing center sessions. One tutor mentioned that it may be difficult to discuss LGBT subjects at all within writing center spaces: in one session, her student heard the word “lesbian” read aloud in a different session and became distracted. Another tutor shared, “In one session, a student said, ‘all families of other makeup beyond my own are wrong.’ I could see how that phrasing might be inflammatory.”
These moments, in which tutors explained their own confusion, their own lack of knowledge, and their willingness to challenge themselves as educators, are the moments that inspired this essay. By building on the organic conversations that transpired, the inquiry group became a brave space. We sought to reach through and across boundaries of authority and hierarchy to question our approaches toward inclusivity in our writing center. From these conversations, I drew the questions that would become the guiding focus of this study.
SafeZone Tutors: Creating a Place of Potentiality
Few writing center studies address the concerns of LGBT students within the rural university writing center, much less the figure of the SafeZone tutor. In this study, I suggest that by publicizing SafeZone tutors as a resource in the writing center and on its website, the Oklahoma State University Writing Center announces its intent to support LGBT students and their voices. By publishing a decisive and intentional statement on its website, the Writing Center creates a place of potentiality: a brave space. This statement is no small assertion of support; Oklahoma State University’s student body is comprised of people from various areas, many of them rural. When we confront homophobia and transphobia within writing, we avoid imposing heteronormativity (the assumption that all people conform to straightness) upon LGBT students. The purpose of this study is to explore the ways in which SafeZone tutors understand their missions within the writing center, and how these tutors are invested in creating a brave space. This study is drawn from three interviews with three tutors at a large rural university writing center. I conducted one interview per tutor, in an office located inside the writing center. In addition, I surveyed responses of 14 LGBT students regarding the presence of SafeZone tutors.
The research questions guiding this study are as follows:
Within the rural location and conservative climate of Oklahoma State University, how do SafeZone tutors interpret their own work?
How do students interpret conversations and collaborations with the SafeZone tutor within the broader context of the writing center?
Do SafeZone tutors within a rural university’s writing center consider themselves part of a safe/brave space? And if they do, why?
Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces, and the SafeZone Tutor
SafeZone programs are university-based training programs that have emerged, over the past twenty years, from colleges and universities within the United States. Also known as Safe Spaces, Safe Harbors, Safe Space Ally, and SAFE on Campus, SafeZone programs seek to improve campus climate for LGBT students (Alvarez and Schneider 71-74; Draughn et al. 9-20; Evans, Henquinet, Phibbs, and Skoglund 24-26; Poynter and Tubbs 121-132; Young and McKibban 361-384). SafeZone programs usually take the form of educational workshops that teach attendees skills to confront homophobia and transphobia in the classroom. Created and led by staff and/or faculty, these programs are tailored to each region and institution as a result of social activism. The Safe Zone Project’s website defines someone who has received SafeZone training as “a person [who] is open to talking about and being supportive of LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer/Questioning +) individuals and identities” (“What Is Safe Zone?”). The Oklahoma State University SafeZone program identifies a SafeZone ally as “someone who chooses to become educated about LGBTQ issues and believes all sexual orientations and gender identities/expressions should be acknowledged and supported” (“SafeZone Training”). I draw on these definitions in this paper: a Safe Zone is a place where a student can exist on the same footing as any other student, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. It should not be a place where students are buffered from learning or widening their horizons: rather, they should be encouraged to expand their knowledge. When I use the terms “SafeZone” or “safe space,” I mean a space that does not shield students from reality. I mean a place where students can encounter other viewpoints without having to first defend their right to exist as a sexual or gender minority. SafeZone tutors exist in Oklahoma State University’s writing center as visible allies of the LGBT community. Such alignment is necessarily political in the context of this university’s rural location, which augments its approach as an institution. Through tutor education, writing centers can become generative places that establish safe/brave spaces via tutor-student interactions, tutor-tutor interactions, and through community outreach.
The ramifications of the “SafeZone” title are many, especially in the context of rural universities, where spaces for LGBT inclusion may be limited or absent. A safe zone indicates an area where someone is protected, not from challenging ideas or personal growth, but from prejudices that may prevent or hamper their journey of encountering challenging ideas and undergoing personal growth. Others have critiqued the concept of safe spaces, as Judith Shulevitz did in her much-shared 2015 op-ed, “In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas,” where she presents this definition:
Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material.
Shulevitz seems to have misapprehended what the “safe space” metaphor means. She understands it as educational complacency, in which college students are oddly contradictory figures, both too fragile to engage with challenging ideas and at the same time powerful enough to topple university policies. Shulevitz and her contemporaries are willfully ignorant of the metaphor’s history within educational settings. In practice, the term “safe space” as an educational policy is an indication that a physical space or a person does not tolerate harassment or violence but does favor fostering a secure learning environment. Lynn Holley and Sue Steiner define a safe space as an “environment where students are willing and able to participate and honestly struggle with challenging issues” (49). A safe space, then, is a site that does not tolerate harassment, but does encourage difficult conversations.
Whether the “safe space” metaphor does justice to the often-fraught spaces in which we teach is a subject of debate. Debates surrounding safe spaces may appear contemporary at first glance, but pedagogical conversations regarding safe spaces began in the 1990s. Robert Boostrom critiques the metaphor of the safe space: for Boostrom, a “safe space” is a metaphor that stands for the physical and mental support that a classroom can offer. Boostrom finds the term ineffective, as “learning necessarily involves not merely risk, but the pain of giving up a former condition in favour of a new way of seeing things” (399). Educators invested in critical pedagogy understand the learning environment as a site of liberatory praxis, building upon Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Jeannie Ludlow’s contested space and Megan Boler’s pedagogy of discomfort contest the metaphor of the safe space by naming the conflict and risk present in building these critical pedagogies of dispute, collaboration, and transformation. As Romeo García points out, the term “safe space” itself asserts control (48). Toward embracing the struggle and pain of difficult learning, Brian Arao and Kristin Clemens argue for the term “brave space” in lieu of the “safe space” metaphor, affirming difference and struggle as a fundamental part of learning (139). Writing centers offer unique opportunities to craft safe/brave spaces through tutor-student interactions and tutor-tutor interactions. These writing centers can also hold community spaces for tutors to challenge their own writing center pedagogies. Rebecca Hallman Martini and Travis Webster view the writing center through the lens of a brave/r space: “a concept that urges particular ways of acting in spaces, beyond the mere acknowledgement of politics, identity, and difference” (“Writing Centers as Brave/r Spaces”). Brave spaces enable encounters with educational risks, difficulties, and controversies by allowing students to participate without continually justifying their own existence. In these spaces of risk, historically marginalized scholars may find that it is difficult to enter the conversation, especially when visibility itself can be a danger. Harry Denny and Beth Towle point out that institutions must consider the material effects of systemic oppression for clients and tutors in the center: “To make a space ‘brave’ its participants must be willing to speak openly about their identities, biases, and experiences…more hidden identities, such as class or sexuality, must be verbally disclosed in order to move into ‘brave space’ territory” (“Braving the Waters of Class”). Brave spaces can provide agency to clients and tutors in negotiating the power structures which order our relationship, but these spaces are not divorced from systemic oppression. When I speak of brave spaces in the writing center, I speak of intentionally political spaces that provide a collective approach to address bigotry, while also providing a space for marginalized voices, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.
The Rural Writing Center as Brave Space
When LGBT students graduate from their rural high schools to attend larger state universities, many have not experienced the opportunity to have their voices heard, much less their writing. Within the context of a rural university, LGBT students face stressors unique to their geographic location, including possible danger of physical attack. In 2018, a transgender elementary-school student in Achille, Oklahoma received death threats, threats of physical assault, and other forms of intimidation from parents in a Facebook group. To protect her safety, the rural school system shut down for two days (Caron). Though the state of Oklahoma issues marriage licenses to same-sex couples, there are no laws against housing discrimination, bullying, or hate crimes that target a victim for their gender, sexuality, or expression. Even before they approach the rural writing center, LGBT students may have been encouraged to engage in self-surveillance and censorship. Oklahoma is one of four states which still legislate “no promo homo” laws in public schools, which limit educators in their ability to teach regarding LGBT identities (Steinberg). Oklahoma law requires educators to teach that the only way to avoid contracting the AIDS virus is to refrain from same-sex sexual activity, thus LGBT students may be told that their very identities are responsible for death (Oklahoma Statute 70 § 11-103.3). Within the space of a writing center, which holds a history as a space for correcting expression, students may not feel they are able to come out, even as they express themselves through writing. Though the city of Stillwater, Oklahoma where Oklahoma State University is located, does not have any nondiscrimination policies in place to protect LGBT rights, Oklahoma State University has a nondiscrimination policy specifying that the university provide “equal employment and/or educational opportunity on the basis of merit and without discrimination because of age, race, ethnicity, color, sex, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, veterans’ status, or qualified disability” and that the university protects transgender people via prohibition of “unlawful gender discrimination” (“Affirmative Action Plan: Minorities And Women,” 51, 27). This issue is not only localized to Oklahoma, as a 2006 study by Michele Dillon and Sarah Savage found: negative attitudes toward same-sex marriage pervade the southern rural United States (where many students of Oklahoma State University live). This antagonism toward LGBT equality is paramount to comprehending the context of Oklahoma State University’s student body, as well as the significance of the writing center as a brave space.
When there is no place to exist as LGBT within the rural, there is no space for rural LGBT voices. Sherrie Gradin writes of the unimaginable, invisible rural queer voice within rural schools: in rural writing centers, LGBT writers may also face the same erasure. In their 2013 article “‘Rainbows in The Past Were Gay’: LGBTQIA In The WC,” Andrew Rihn and Jay D. Sloan discuss how writing center studies have neglected LGBT narratives: “Heteronormativity has dominated writing center scholarship, unintentionally but effectively winnowing out sexual identity as a subject for sustained reflection and interrogation” (1). Addressing homophobic rhetoric, dismantling heteronormative assumptions of sexuality and gender, and advocating for inclusivity are three concerns that Rihn and Sloan broach throughout their study. When tutors listen to students, they too can learn within a place where students can express their own identities and opinions, as Nancy Grimm discusses in her article, “Redesigning Academic Identity Kits.” Within writing centers, the disparate identities of writers and students alike are often at the foreground of creativity. Harry Denny’s Facing the Center argues for moments of “discursive complication” in the contact zone of the writing center to disrupt and interrogate identities, a means of destabilizing the hierarchy of the writing center (110). As Denny writes in “Queering the Writing Center,” writing centers are areas of contradictory binaries that are forever in flux as writers and tutors come together to “shore up, build anew, and deconstruct identities and the ways of knowing that are sutured to them” (103). In the “safe space” of writing center sessions, tutors can work with students to test the limits of traditionally understood academic identities, giving them both the ability to “pass” within the space of the writing center and to “come out” in order to express their needs (Denny 121). The space of the writing center affords many opportunities to LGBT students and tutors alike. As a site of crucial pedagogy, the writing center can aid LGBT students’ writing. The SafeZone tutor, as a visible ally of the LGBT community, offers support to LGBT students in crafting their writerly voices. As a site where LGBT students can thrive, the rural writing center in red states can be an especially unique place to craft brave spaces, to amplify the voices of marginalized students who occupy these spaces.
One means of understanding the context of Oklahoma State University is to look at Oklahoma State University’s institutional approach to LGBT students. When I created an account on the Oklahoma State University writing center website, I was surprised: the system offers you the option to use your preferred name. This installation may seem small, but it does send a message: you are welcome to go by the name you are most comfortable with. Throughout the writing center, one might also spot small triangles of varying rainbow colors, with the words “SafeZone” beneath the triangles. This sends a clear message: LGBT students are welcome here. In contrast, when students apply to Oklahoma State University, while they can suggest a preferred name, there is no way to remove their legal names from the directory entry, which appears online via most learning management systems. Many writing centers switched to online sessions during the COVID-19 pandemic. When writing centers permit students to make accounts using their preferred names for online tutoring, they communicate openness to students who may be unable to change their preferred name across university learning management systems. A visual marker, such as the SafeZone insignia, presents another way to signal openness to LGBT students, not only in the physical space of the writing center, but also in online sessions.
Rural writing centers within red states can borrow approaches from both safe spaces and brave spaces to provide learning environments that address the needs of their students and tutors alike. When discussing the relevance of brave spaces and safe spaces for rural writing centers, Jacob Herrmann sets brave spaces and safe spaces apart in terms of the opportunities that both spaces can provide for learning: safe spaces are sites where “physical and emotional safety of the marginalized individual is the primary concern,” which he contrasts with “brave spaces, in which social justice education is the primary concern” (“Brave/R Spaces Vs. Safe Spaces For LGBTQ+ In the Writing Center”). When I speak of brave spaces in the writing center, I speak of intentionally political spaces that provide a collective approach to address bigotry, while also providing a space for marginalized voices.
Such spaces are complicated by race, class, gender, sexuality, and other intersecting oppressions. The impetus to disclose identity can place students and tutors in treacherous waters, especially in rural writing centers, where students are sometimes closeted for their own safety. As Denny et. al argue, writing center pedagogy that centers the needs of the marginalized is a result of active, constant labor, regardless of geographic context:
We must do the active work of creating the spaces to hear and deeply listen to one another and to perform the work of challenging the inertia of the status quo and moving toward a commonplace interrogation of the hegemonic practices of domination in our everyday lives, teaching, and learning. (Denny, Out in the Center 123)
Critical pedagogy works to unravel the entrenched, often unseen presence of homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, classism, and ableism. Through collective spaces such as safe/brave spaces, writing centers can provide resources to contribute toward a shared awareness of the constant choices we make through language and rhetoric. As I spoke to SafeZone tutors throughout the process of writing this article, the willingness of these tutors to encounter difficult conversations became a driving factor for the urgency of this study. In our current polarizing political sphere, where binary rhetoric holds sway and there is little opportunity for nuance, it is easy to disregard the rural writing center and its tutors. In these spaces, SafeZone tutors can challenge the writing center to be a place of learning and a place of bravery, as they navigate multiple identities as students, tutors, and ally-educators.
Interviews with SafeZone Tutors
This IRB-approved study (protocol AS-16-99) was administered at Oklahoma State University Writing Center, which is centrally located on the university’s sizable campus. This writing center employs 21 undergraduate tutors and 44 graduate tutors. After they had attended the optional SafeZone tutor training, three SafeZone tutors were interviewed for the purposes of this study. These three tutors opted to participate after a discussion regarding the goals of the study. These questions allowed tutors to define what SafeZone meant to them. Tutors were offered the opportunity to decline questions at their discretion. All interviews were transcribed and anonymized after recording. These interviews took place in a private office located near the writing center and were carried out between September 2017 and November 2017.
Question 1: What first drew you to become a SafeZone tutor?
Tutor 1: I wanted to be aware, to be socially conscious of the clients that we could encounter…When I translated it to teaching, to have that insignia on my desk, I realized that this may make my students more comfortable…I want to help out everyone regardless of sexual orientation.
Tutor 2: I knew in both my community college and [previous] university that people were SafeZone trained... I wanted to become one of those people. I haven’t taught yet but when I am teaching I want to have the emblem on my door, so that students know.
Tutor 3: I saw it as an opportunity to learn more about the LGBTQ+ community. The topic was something I had little exposure to in the past. I guess ultimately I had a desire to fix my own ignorance of the topic.
These SafeZone tutors emphasized their desire to signal acceptance to members of the LGBT community, to learn further and challenge themselves. SafeZone tutors shared goals of openness toward the LGBT community, and were interested in communicating their allyship to students, especially students who may be struggling with their identities. Tutor 1 referenced language of allyship, suggesting that his presence as a SafeZone tutor “may make my students more comfortable.”
Tutor 2 understood her role as a SafeZone tutor through her own experiences as a student—seeing SafeZone stickers on the doors of faculty members—and as a sign of welcome: “I wanted to become one of those people.” Tutor 2 saw the SafeZone as a space without judgement, where students will “feel safe.” In her reflection on the possibility to “become one of those people,” Tutor 2 understands SafeZone tutoring as an aspiration which shapes her future goals as an educator, turning towards greater justice and equality in the writing center. She concludes by making a compelling argument for SafeZone certification in crafting a pedagogy of openness and equality, as well as its utility beyond writing centers. Both Tutor 1 and Tutor 2 signaled that they understood SafeZone tutors as establishing tutoring sessions that work within the parameters of safe spaces. Tutor 3 wanted to address his “own ignorance of the topic” of LGBT issues through the process of SafeZone training. He also expressed a desire to encounter experiences that differed from his own. While Tutor 3 presents himself as ignorant, his understanding of SafeZone tutors as simultaneously educators and educated is insightful for viewing rural writing centers as brave spaces. In the rural writing center, tutors create brave spaces when they continually challenge themselves, even as they collaborate with writers.
Question 2: How has your alignment with the LGBT community affected your interaction with students?
Tutor 1: If anything, it’s strengthened that [alignment] because there is that acceptability implied if a student identifies as queer.
Tutor 2: I think that there’s an alignment in that the [SafeZone] training lets people know how they should be approaching these situations, especially when people aren’t used to dealing with people as LGBTQ, I like the idea of using the SafeZone emblem of marking a place where students can step outside that relationship and open up, especially for first years who may be discovering things for the first time.
The strength of the SafeZone emblem lies in its ability to convey allyship and solidarity with LGBT students. For SafeZone tutors, the use of a recognizable emblem is an immediate way to convey their acceptance of LGBT students. Tutor 1 drew on the rhetoric of safe spaces, pointing to the SafeZone logo as reinforcing the “acceptability” of LGBT students within a space, to put students at ease within the writing center session. For Tutor 2, a safe zone is “a place where students can… open up”—a site where students can express their identities freely, without judgement. In addition, Tutor 2 references the SafeZone insignia to mark herself as an educator, not just for LGBT students, but for students who are generally curious about the LGBT community. Tutor 2’s work as an educator is tied to her work as an ally within a brave space. Both Tutor 1 and Tutor 2 identify the SafeZone emblem as a conspicuous sign of allyship, to put LGBT students at ease. In cases where rural writing enters may be limited in their ability to openly display visible signs of allyship, tutors may rely on openly asserting that homophobia and transphobia are unacceptable. In doing so, these tutors craft a brave space within the center.
Question 3: Have you ever encountered transphobia or homophobia within student writing, and if so, how did you handle it?
Tutor 1: I spoke with a student [who] interviewed a friend from high school, and was…narrating his rise to fame in sports, but it seemed he was a bit too raw in the way he described things in high school, using words such as “homo,” and “fag,” ...but she didn’t use quotation marks to designate that it was an interview…[the session] became a discussion of ethics which I don’t think she was prepared to talk about, because for her that’s not how it was in her small town.
Tutor 2: Balancing professional and personal beliefs can be difficult, because I don’t want to be seen as unprofessional and yet I disagree with what [some students] are saying. A guy came in with his paper that said, “you can tell a man’s been raised right because of how he shakes someone’s hand.” ...He made it very clear that no, men shake hands this way, and he did mean just men, not women... In that situation, I felt uncomfortable because I was in a professional setting and couldn’t be angry...I wasn’t allowed to be angry because I wanted the student to come back to the writing center.
Tutor 3: I have experienced it [encounters with transphobia or homophobia] tremendously in the community. I try to be vocal while maintaining a level of respect...I think what I can do now is call attention to the issue.
Throughout this study, individual tutors struggled to establish a brave space while retaining professional conduct as writing center tutors and educators. Tutor 1 explained his decision to address the slurs “homo” and “fag” in student writing through the basis of ethics. In Tutor 1’s case, the geographic background of the student caused a dilemma for the tutor within the session. The student saw nothing amiss in the words she had used in the essay because of their banality within her high school and within her small-town environment. First, the tutor addressed the slurs on the basis of the assignment, to discuss how the student framed the slurs in the interview. Second, Tutor 1 used the situation to discuss the ramifications of those slurs. By addressing the slurs through the guidelines of the assignment, and then on the basis of ethics, Tutor 1 defended his identity as a professional while still addressing the homophobia within the session.
Tutor 2 expressed conflict at the varying roles that she holds as a tutor, and the ways in which she strives to navigate these varying roles. While she had not encountered homophobic or transphobic rhetoric in any papers, she had encountered sexist ideas. When asked about her encounters with transphobia or homophobia, Tutor 2, who identified herself as female, felt that she was unable to correct students and still maintain a congenial environment within the writing center, even when encountering sexist writing in the process of her session. The burden of maintaining a congenial, homelike environment in the writing center and in the composition classroom most often falls upon women (Nicolas 11-13, Holbrook 201-229). In “Leaving Home Sweet Home: Towards Critical Readings of Writing Center Spaces,” Jackie Grutsch McKinney critiques the notion of the writing center as “home,” and argues that feminist work within the writing center may be most effective when it is “confrontational and unsettling” (17). Even in brave spaces, women tutors may be penalized for their perceived lack of hospitality, but should be supported by other tutors and writing center directors if they choose to push back. Writing center leadership must acknowledge that women tutors may be required to perform double duties; while all tutors are expected to teach, women tutors are often expected to perform hospitality as well. This expectation of hospitality may place women tutors in situations where they cannot avoid sexism or potential harassment without undue questioning. Centers must institute policies which allow tutors to opt out of working with students for any reason. In addition, the use of surveys to ensure client satisfaction may reflect unduly upon the conduct of tutors when they may engage in confrontational feminist work within the center: such surveys should not be a qualifying factor for tutor evaluations. Indeed, writing center directors should codify powerful statements of feminist solidarity in their policies which are upheld in their practices of tutor training, tutor support, and evaluation.
Tutor 3 spoke about his experiences with a community environment notably influenced by homophobia. Tutor 3 felt that the SafeZone training had allowed him to “be vocal while maintaining a level of respect” and “call attention to the issue” of homophobia. This study suggests that writing center professionals should be offered tools to confront sexism, homophobia, and transphobia in student writing. These tools may take the form of participatory workshops within the writing center, which include opportunities to role-play or otherwise respond to these situations in a safe space (the space of the workshop) so that the tutors can then build upon their learning in a brave space (the writing center).
Question 4: How would you define the mission of a SafeZone Tutor?
Tutor 1: I define myself with respect to that as a heterosexual ally...you can be an ally and can fight for LGBT rights just the same, it’s fostering that togetherness, that nobody should be afraid to learn more. Acceptability and togetherness is the point, really.
Tutor 2: I guess what I would say [is] I think of SafeZone as a place where people can go …where they can talk without being judged or condemned for their identity, that they feel safe, so that they know that people will not have strong prejudices where people will not react, even in consultations the tutor has some authority. So, a SafeZone is a place where they won’t be affected by someone in authority.
Throughout this study, tutors expressed a consistent message of allyship and interest in creating a place of mutual respect for all voices within the cultural context of this southwest university. SafeZone tutors consistently indicated their negotiations with authority and power as part of a brave space. Tutor 1 defined this work in terms of his own identity as a heterosexual ally, “fostering that togetherness, that nobody should be afraid to learn more.” Tutor 1 defined his work as a SafeZone tutor as establishing a space of togetherness and open learning. Tutor 2 describes safe/brave spaces as a negotiation of power and authority: “even in consultations the tutor has some authority. So, a SafeZone is a place where they [the students] won’t be affected by someone in authority.” In considering the mission of a SafeZone tutor, the question of authority must be (re)considered: again, as Tutor 2 points out, “even in consultations the tutor has some authority.”
To uphold the writing center as a brave space, these negotiations of power and authority should be addressed in SafeZone tutor training. Andrea Lunsford addresses such hierarchies directly: “A collaborative... environment rejects traditional hierarchies” (95). Thus, a SafeZone tutor rejects traditional hierarchies to create a collaborative environment. However, in creating such a collaboration, the negotiations of power that challenge SafeZone tutors should not be discounted. The SafeZone tutor works within Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the contact zone, as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (607). SafeZone tutors invoke the risks of the contact zone when announcing their intent to craft a safe space for collaboration with LGBT students. These three tutors who identify themselves as SafeZone tutors see themselves as opening the space as a zone of acceptance, a zone where ideas do not stagnate, but instead are promoted.
Student Responses to the SafeZone Tutor
In addition to the interviews conducted, I also created an online survey of current Oklahoma State University students who utilize the writing center. To recruit subjects for the student response survey, I worked with the Coordinator of Women’s and LGBTQ Affairs to draft an email that we sent to the campus LGBT alliance group’s listserv.² The survey requested students (n=14) to navigate to the SafeZone tutor page on the Writing Center website, and then asked students to record whether they had been to the writing center and how they felt about the installation of the SafeZone tutor in the writing center. Students were asked to rate how they felt about the presence of SafeZone tutors on a sliding scale from wholly negative to wholly positive, with 1 being wholly negative and 5 being wholly positive. Students were asked what emotions they felt when encountering the SafeZone tutor description on the website, with the options of “Content,” “Upset,” “Disinterested,” “Interested,” “Reassured,” and “Confused.” Finally, students were asked if they were more or less likely to request a SafeZone tutor the next time they visited the writing center, with 1 being least likely and 5 most likely.
Results
Of the 14 students surveyed, 10 had been to the writing center, and 4 had not.
7 students had heard of SafeZone tutors before, and 7 had not.
When asked to select emotions they felt when viewing the SafeZone page, students selected “Content,” “Interested,” and “Reassured.” The emotion “confused” was also selected, indicating that more signage and explanation may be needed.
When asked if they would be more or less likely to request a SafeZone tutor, all students marked that they would be more likely to request a SafeZone tutor.
In considering student reactions to SafeZone tutors in the writing center, half (7) of the surveyed students had heard of SafeZone tutors, and half (7) of the surveyed students had not heard of SafeZone tutors, though 10 of the 14 surveyed students had visited the writing center. Therefore, some responses regarding student conceptions of SafeZone tutors were likely based upon the writing center’s website, along with the SafeZone label itself. Students redefine SafeZone tutors in the following terms: “safe place”; “a tutoring enviroment [sic] free of discrimination”; “a zone… without the fear of judgement”; “a safe place to review... work while still giving helpful criticism”; and “tutoring that makes the student feel that they are in a safe environment.” Students repeatedly defined the writing center as a space, an environment, and as a zone, which reinforces the physical properties of the writing center as a refuge within the university. These responses regarding place recall Nathalie Singh-Corcoran and Amin Emika’s concept of the writing center as a “nonplace,” or places that are “not fixed.” The exigency of the SafeZone tutor as providing safety and lack of judgement to an otherwise charged collaboration defined students’ spatial understandings of the center as a brave/safe space.
Student responses in defining the mission of the SafeZone tutor provide additional applications for the rural writing center as a brave space. Many responses engaged with the survey question, “Given the description on the Writing Center website, what do you think a SafeZone tutor’s job is? Please use your own words.” Some students explained the role of SafeZone tutors as academic instructors. These formulations emphasized the word “job” or a reiteration of the title “tutor.” Such statements include, “Their job is to help in all ways that a tutor is supposed to do”; “their job is to help the student with their writing assignments”; and “teach and help people understand academic concepts.” The classification of SafeZone tutors as performing a pedagogical function can be used to craft “kairotic moments,” or moments of timely action, which Christine Hamel-Brown, Celeste Del Russo, and Amanda Fields use to structure physical and conceptual space within their own writing center. Such moments of timely action can be crucial in collaborating with students to address their individual means of expression.
More often, students perceived the SafeZone tutor as collaborating with LGBT writers. Such statements include either specific mentions of the LGBT community or LBGT-related topics: “To help with writings of LGBT areas of interest”; “to help lgbt students without judgement”; “to help students who need discretion as far as LGBT+ topics are concerned”; and “provide assistance with lgbt related work.” Other students based their definition upon the emblem on the site, writing, “I think a SafeZone tutor’s job is to help students who need discretion as far as LGBT+ topics are concerned (based on the rainbow button on the site).” Most students seemed to view the name “SafeZone,” when paired with the emblem, as asserting support for and affirmation of the voices of students who are LGBT or have LGBT interests.
Other students gestured to broader concepts of inclusivity and anti-discrimination in understanding the SafeZone tutor. One student referenced the close interactions that the writing center provides: “I can see how some students would feel more comfortable working with a lgbt supportive person as the writing center involves close interactions.” This student reflects on the interpersonal tasks that students and tutors participate in as they confront their writing center sessions. This student emphasized the positioning of the SafeZone tutor as an agent who resists or avoids discriminating against LGBT students, a place where students can bring their writing without fear of judgement.
Another student shared a personal experience to provide context for understanding the SafeZone tutor: “Tutoring, minus bigotry! Sounds great. I pass now, but I didn’t always, and got misgendered a lot. That really colored my prior college experience.” The student contrasts a history of negative college experiences with the “great” idea of tutoring without bigotry, in order to emphasize the power that the SafeZone tutor may hold over a potentially vulnerable trans student. As SafeZone tutors work within non-normative frameworks of literacy and meaning-making, they might take up Jonathan Alexander’s challenge of “becoming literate” regarding expressions of class, race, sex, and gender, both in troubling their own readings of student writing and in collaborating with students (15). In destabilizing these hierarchical frameworks, SafeZone tutors work within the vicissitudes of providing “tutoring, minus bigotry!”
After taking the survey, all surveyed students indicated they may request a SafeZone tutor in the future. Denny’s Facing the Center indicates the importance of giving students tools to either “pass” or “come out.” Presenting SafeZone tutors and their availability on the writing center website affords students the agency to choose whether they prefer to “come out” in the writing center. This agency facilitates further collaboration between the SafeZone tutor and the student, allowing for this brave space to persist, even when the writing center session is virtual.
Applications for the Rural Writing Center
Through these encounters with risky conversations, I worked with my inquiry group to assemble a workshop within our weekly educational meetings. After presenting the consultants with two difficult scenarios, one regarding homophobia within a session, the other regarding misogyny within a session, we invited further discussion and response. The first question was based upon a situation with a student I had encountered in one of my table sessions: “A student brings in a paper, in which he argues that children will be traumatized if they are raised in a family composition of anything besides one man and one woman. How do you think you would respond if you were confronted with this situation?” Some tutors argued for the necessity of immediate pushback, while other tutors argued that it would be more effective for the tutor to bring focus back to the original prompt. One tutor confided, “I’d be worried about asserting a political opinion. The session could get ugly, really fast.” The second question also received a variety of responses: “A second student asks you to read through his essay, in which he argues that women are unsuited for the working world. What would your first impulse be if you were confronted with this situation? How do you think you would respond?” One tutor pointed to herself and said, “Well, I’d just use myself as an example. I’m here, teaching him!”
As a group, we rehearsed these two scenarios and discussed strategies for crafting teachable moments. Despite the uncomfortable questions, the writing center became a staging ground to rehearse and encounter difficult conversations: in short, a brave space. These lateral conversations allowed tutors to consider generative answers that extended the work of SafeZone tutors beyond the tutoring session, and toward the contact zone of messy ideas.
Further Implications
The writing center community can learn much from the rural writing center as a site of active pedagogy: a learner-centric model where strategies of learning are a collaborative process between tutors and clients alike, in which “learners gradually know what they did not yet know, and the educators reknow what they knew before,” where tutors act as facilitators and guides, and individuals are allowed to construct their own knowledge (Freire 90). In this mode of active pedagogy, writing center clients are active participants in the process of writing. Preconceived notions may color rural writing centers as antithetical to spaces where LGBT writers can grow. On the contrary- rural writing centers are uniquely positioned to support LGBT writers who may lack the chance to express themselves by establishing a brave space, where LGBT writers can participate without encountering judgement or shame. When students enter these spaces, they may come to us with a history of being told that their expression, not only in writing, but of identity is incorrect, a problem to be fixed. “No promo homo” laws still remain instituted in Oklahoma public schools, which many educators interpret as a blanket ban against the formation of student-led gay-straight alliances, or similar organizations (Steinberg). As of July 2021, Norman became the first city to outlaw conversion therapy, which is still legal statewide (Griffin). For LGBT students in the rural writing center, their ability to exist is subject to debate. When LGBT students are given an active role in constructing their means of learning, especially in the context of the rural writing center, they are given more than a right to assert their own voices: they learn that their presence within the writing center is valued.
Writing centers should look toward SafeZone tutors as experts within the rural writing center and listen to LGBT students to discover what they may need. SafeZone tutors offer a range of strategies in their work with clients, destabilizing the hierarchal relationship of the classroom to support LGBT clients who visit the rural writing center. These tutors navigate multiple roles as educators, allies, and students, which influence this interpersonal form of labor. SafeZone tutors can lead training sessions, where other tutors can encounter address difficult questions in table sessions. They can provide outreach to LGBT writers and show where writing centers may overlook instances of entrenched oppression, so that students can write “without being judged or condemned for their identity.” In rural writing centers where a SafeZone emblem may not be permitted, tutors can ally with LGBT writers to support their writerly voices, to confront homophobia and transphobia, and to make the rural writing center a brave space for LGBT writers, providing “tutoring, minus bigotry.” When writing centers look to SafeZone tutors as experts, they can provide a challenging glance back at our assumptions of who can teach, who can learn, and how we conceive of LGBT writers within our walls.
As both educators and educated, SafeZone tutors enter the contact zone of the rural writing center with the express mission of creating a welcoming space for LGBT students who may have been made to feel as though their voices do not matter, that they are not welcome in academia. By listening to who they are and what they value, we grant SafeZone tutors an agential role in crafting a safe/brave space within the rural writing center, and as a site of collaboration and creativity. SafeZone tutors can challenge the writing center to be more than a place of learning. Through the expertise of SafeZone tutors, the writing center can become a place of bravery.
Notes
I appreciate the efforts of Elliot Wren Phillips, Field Watts, and Levi Ross, whose participation and assistance in coordinating this inquiry group were invaluable.
My heartfelt thanks to Irissa Baxter-Luper, Coordinator of Women's and LGBTQ Affairs at Oklahoma State University, who assisted in distributing this survey.
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