Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 1 (2022)
A Parliament of OWLS: Incorporating User Experience to Cultivate Online Writing Labs
Eric Camarillo
Harrisburg Area Community College
ecamaril@hacc.edu
Abstract
This essay explores the creation, role, and functions of online writing labs (OWLs), particularly focusing on user experience design as a tool to produce antiracist outcomes. It asks the reader to question the apparent neutrality of technology and consider larger questions about the effects of website design on the student experience. It also offers general strategies for designing OWLs. Finally, the article attempts to redefine how the field of writing centers conceive of its spaces and how students interact with those different spaces and makes an argument for rethinking the value of online, especially asynchronous, work.
A Framing and a Naming
My history with racism begins before I was born. My family is from a small city: Victoria, Texas, in the Golden Crescent region of that state. My grandmother was forced into bilingualism through Spanish-speaking parents and school policies that mandated English only. Whenever she slipped back into her home language, accidentally using the language of her family, she was violently reminded through the use of rulers rapped on knuckles that this aspect of herself was totally and completely unwanted¹. In Texas, even today, English is the language of power, while Spanish may be perceived as the language of submission, of invisibility, of outsiders. Spanish is foreign even in the spaces where it is widely spoken. My grandmother’s experience could be seen as a form of coloniality, which forced her into making certain choices for her survival. As Walter D. Mignolo writes, “coloniality names the underlying logic of all Western European colonialism…Coloniality names something you do not see that works in what you do see. You do not see coloniality, but there is no way you cannot sense it” (372, emphasis in original). My history with racism, then, does not necessarily begin—or end—with my personal experiences but with the systems created by racist power structures which, in turn, shape my family’s experiences.
In my grandmother’s experience, we can see the systemic nature of racism, and the way in which it reinforces particular epistemologies and policies. Ibram Kendi defines racism as “a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities” (17). In the above anecdote, racial inequities emerge in, and are explicitly tied to, linguistic practice. The use of Spanish was not just stigmatized; it was actively punished in accordance with explicit written policies in order to, I’d argue, reinforce Standard American English as the norm. For Kendi and other anti-racist scholars, racism is necessarily systemic. The punishment of individuals matters less (though, this is the inevitable outcome) than the explicit privileging of a certain racialized discourse over another. Education is a system by which a culture reproduces its own values; when certain linguistic practices, like the use of Spanish, are actively punished through the application of official policies, the system itself is weaponized.
In this small city where my grandmother was violently reminded of her status as Other (even though she is second generation American), my mother would eventually become pregnant with me. She played with names, carefully considering, holding them against her ear, seeing how they rolled off the tongue. She tossed several aside, like Ernest for her father, or Jésus, my grandmother’s suggestion. Eventually, she whittled her choices to two: Cruz and Eric. One was a family name, the name of her favorite grandparent, and would tie her son to a legacy. The other name sounded more “normal.” She finally went with Eric. As she puts it, “I thought this would make things easier for you.” Even as a teen mom, my mother was able to intuit what Ruja Benjamin puts so well: “A ‘normal’ name is just one of the many tools that reinforce racial invisibility” (4). An invisible name was my mother’s way of trying to protect me from discrimination, to help me blend in. Whether or not she was aware, Victoria was a place that used things like Anglo names and minimal “Hispanic” accents as metrics for hiring in certain jobs.² It’s a choice that I’m not sure white mothers in Victoria would have had to make. Perhaps it was less of a choice, as Romeo García and José Cortez contend in “Trace of a Mark that Scatters: The Anthropoi and the Rhetoric of Decoloniality.” They write that situations like the one my mother found herself in may give rise to a “forced choice, which is not a choice at all but a demand” (106).
Yet, for the all the invisibility my first name may have offered, there’s nothing I can do about my last name. We moved to Houston when I was in middle school, and I found myself in eighth grade at a new middle school. Included in my class schedule were the regular class offerings: Reading, English, Social Studies, and so on. Yet, my schedule also included a new category of classes: ESL Reading and ESL English. I should note, I am not bilingual (would a white scholar need to provide such a note?). My grandmother’s experiences with the tyranny of English meant she strove to limit the amount of Spanish she taught her daughter, which would limit what came down to me. I like to say that I’m hopelessly monolingual, which ironically led to me not questioning my placement in these classes.
I had no idea what ESL stood for, and neither did my mom. I sat in these classes for two weeks before my social studies teacher finally noticed these classes on my schedule and told me to talk to my school counselor, who promptly placed me into pre-AP reading and English. In my memory, I don’t remember talking to someone about my initial schedule, and I certainly don’t remember any kind of assessment mechanism that would have determined my placement. My school only had my name and my ethnicity to go on, and they made that decision without any input from me or my family. In this case, there were decisions made by agents in the system that ultimately determined my experience. That is, the racist decision-making process that led to steering me toward ESL courses were normalized by the system. While individual action may have resulted in preventing my placement in these courses, that action only could have occurred if I or my family had possessed knowledge of the system in the first place.
Names, then, the things at the core of our identities and the foundation for our existences, are anything but neutral as my experience has shown. As Benjamin so astutely notes, “Like a welcome sign inviting people in or a scary mask repelling and pushing them away, this thing that is most ours is also out of our hands” (3). Our names are out of our hands not just in terms of who gives them to us (how we inherit them), but also in terms of how people react to them. And our names change and morph to suit different audiences—sometimes this changing and morphing comes with our consent and sometimes it doesn’t. Yuri becomes Judy. Yesenia becomes Jessie. Enrique becomes Henry or Ricky. This type of transformation occurs to make it “easier” for non-Spanish speakers to pronounce names. Rather than suffer through a several-minute tutorial with an instructor, a student may simply have a prepared nickname ready to go. This translating to suit English is not limited to Hispanic or Latinx people, certainly, but this translation of a name is also a translation of the self under conditions not of one’s own making. Sometimes we choose to translate ourselves, and sometimes this translation is chosen for us. And sometimes, a choice is not a choice at all, but a demand.
This essay is not really about names, although names are a good starting point. Names are not just names. They are always already a corollary for the people they represent and their histories. Names are palimpsests, constructed and layered with all the history and stories of the people who came before us. This essay is not really about names but about the false invisibility, the false neutrality, they pretend to offer. In the vein of Romeo García, names are hauntings: “hauntings gesture to that which I could not see, but that stained and coinhabited my memory and body and staged my inheritance” (232). My name existed before I did, and I’ve been trying to fit into it ever since.
I’ve ignored my ghosts for a long time, especially those that haunt the ones who came before me. You’ll have noticed a lack of men in my stories, and their absences bend the arc of my story. Their absence is a presence. My attunement to the effects of absence also makes me sensitive to things that claim to be neutral or invisible. Yet, as I consider the hauntings that dwell in myself, I also feel compelled to examine the hauntings of other spaces.
In his “Haunt(ed/ing) Genealogies and Literacies,” García argues, “Predictably, scholars in the academy do not take the position to speak of or on hauntings. Their privilege is not having to address oneself to hauntings” (238). As I continue to engage in writing center work, I seek to address myself to hauntings—both my own hauntings and those which haunt the writing center. Through unacknowledged hauntings, the writing center is also a wounded place. In her conception of wounded places, Karen Till writes, “Rather than harmed by a singular ‘outside event,’ these forms of violence often work over a period of many years...and continue to structure current social and spatial relations, and as such also structure expectations of what is considered ‘normal’” (6). Framing the writing center as a wounded/ing place is necessary to see how historical discursive and linguistic power structures have shaped how writing centers regulate students and how the work of writing centers themselves is delimited.
However, my current focus is not on phantoms of the past, but those of the present (as if these types of hauntings can ever truly be separated). In particular, I’m drawn to the increasingly invisible nature of online writing labs, or OWLs, and the way this invisible work shapes student experience. I wonder how students interact with these digital spaces, especially when one OWL can be so different from another. One school’s OWL may allow students to submit documents directly through a submission form, another may act mostly as a repository for documents, and another may allow the student to schedule an appointment. The process by which a writing center decides its OWL’s functionality is largely unseen by the student and, yet, this unseen work has an outsized impact on what a student can actually accomplish through an OWL. That is, the decisions a writing center makes about the functionality of its OWL may largely be based on what the writing center staff believe students should do rather than what students themselves may actually want or need to do. These decisions may be apparently neutral, but they are likely informed by a set of values related to how writing centers ultimately see themselves. If we could name these values, make visible that which is invisible, perhaps writing centers could enhance the student experience.
Writing Centers as (Web)Sites
Writing centers are often preoccupied with their spaces. That is, the space of the writing center itself serves to define the center. Consider the grand narrative of writing centers that Jackie Grutsch McKinney distills in Peripheral Visions of Writing Centers: “writing centers are comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” (3, emphasis in original). Her distillation leads into a discussion of the writing center as cozy home, a defining attribute of these spaces. Grutsch McKinney asserts, “To be legible, indeed, to be read as a writing center, a space needs to have a particular array of objects...we could even say that spaces tell us a story about what they are and how we may use them” (21). For instance, couches and plants are common features of writing centers, in part because these objects further remove the writing center from their prior lab or clinical connotations. Grutsch McKinney notes that writing centers “wanted students to feel welcome and like one big family…The way to send this message to students was to add and arrange objects in ways that evoke home” (24).
One of the main goals of the cozy home is to invite people in, to convince people to visit. Consider Nancy Grimm’s conundrum in her “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform a System of Advantage Based on Race,” where she asks: “What could we do to make our space more welcoming so that we could extend our helpful services to a broader clientele? What did we need to know about them in order to communicate the value of our services?” (75). While she admits the misguided nature of these questions³, these are questions that many writing center administrators struggle with, especially as they relate to making students feel at home. Yet, what is homey to one person may not be homey to another. As Grutsch McKinney deconstructs the cozy home metaphor, she points out, “These patterns might not be shared by all students, particularly in writing centers when our clientele might include a greater proportion of students who are not white or privileged or American” (25).
Yet, student’s first interactions with the writing center may not involve the physical space at all. In “Exploring the Representation of Scheduling Options and Online Tutoring on Writing Center Websites,” Amanda Bemer posits,
it is likely that a writing center website is the first image of a writing center that many students encounter. Because of this, a writing center’s website can be an important persuasive tool in helping students become excited about visiting the center and using its services. More importantly, it is the first step in a user’s experience with a writing center. (23)
In the context of online writing labs, the writing center becomes dislocated, and the site itself becomes a synecdoche for the entire writing center. Websites, then, may already perform the suasive function of getting students to access the services available to them or to visit the physical centers.
The importance of writing center websites cannot be overstated in a post-pandemic world, where writing centers that may have offered no online options for tutoring before 2020 suddenly found themselves forced into it. That is, the field of writing centers has suddenly become a parliament of OWLs that perform unknown, invisible work with students we may never physically see. As the field of writing centers moves forward, we need to better understand the work that these sites do as well as the potential harm. How can we avoid merely recreating cozy homes digitally that only work to reinscribe our own values? How do these sites perpetuate the racist, regulatory functions that we know can rise in our field if we are inattentive? Like the hauntings of names we carry with us, what histories from our field, from our society, exist a priori that in turn shape the work of our parliament? And what can we do to mitigate these effects?
What are OWLs?
In his work surveying and communicating with writing center administrators, Mark Shadle notes, “Because defining an OWL is tricky, the respondents wrote more about what they had, rather than about what an OWL should be,” (4) which included items like homepages on “the World Wide Web,” tutoring e-mails, and online resources. Some rarer features include “a grammar hotline archive, an interactive net forum, general links, links to other schools...critiques of student Web pages, an online survey about writing attitudes, information on summer institutes, and classroom presentations on technology and synchronous courses” (4). Shadle’s chapter is featured in James Inman and Donna Sewell’s edited collection Taking Flight with OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work, which explores many aspects of online writing labs. It was also published at the turn of the millennium, in the year 2000, when the internet was still a place one could go rather than something one carried around all the time.
While some of the language is somewhat outdated, such as the use of “netstream,” and some of the technologies no longer exist (such as the Gopher internet protocol), Shadle’s work provides an interesting snapshot of OWLs at the millennial fin-de-siècle. Or, as he puts it, “These surveys are offered as a still life of OWLs, allowing administrators to tell their stories” (Shadle 4). What becomes clear in his discussion of OWLs is not just the features that make them up but the challenge of creating OWLs in the first place. As a millennial who grew up in an analog world that became increasingly networked, much of the struggles the writing center administrators went through in the past are foreign to me. In 2000, many “OWL builders,” as Shadle refers to them, struggled with budgeting and funding an OWL (10). This aspect of OWL building I struggled to understand at first. I wasn’t quite sure what the funding problems might be related to—perhaps a better modem or staff? As it turns out, the major funding problem was equipment. I was blind to this as a problem because I’ve never worked in a writing center that did not already have computers. Another struggle was writing center staff or students being unfamiliar with technology and administrators not having the time to properly train their staff. One interesting side note from Shadle’s survey is how “one sixth of respondents felt OWLs dramatically affected writing center practice by providing their audience with exciting e-mail encounters” (6, emphasis added). In a world now mediated by e-mail “encounters,” it’s hard to imagine them as exciting.
While some of the struggles that previous generations of writing center administrators went through no longer apply, others are still applicable. For instance, Shadle notes, “OWLs affect tutor training in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. With computer technology constantly changing, pedagogy moves to take advantage of new opportunities for teaching and tutoring” (7). Tutor training is an ongoing issue no matter the decade. Or consider the work of Lady Falls Brown from the same collection as she details the work of establishing an OWL:
the writing center staff reflected on what we were doing and debated the ethics of responding to papers online, concerned about what kinds of comments to make, where to place comments, how many comments to make, and whether online responses violated the principle of face-to-face interaction. (21)
My staff and I have similar conversations on an ongoing basis, especially about asynchronous tutoring and how best to enact antiracism or resist the everyday use of oppressive language. In some ways, it’s comforting to know that others struggled with similar questions and problems. In other ways, it’s disconcerting to know we’ve not yet arrived at solid answers. Kathryn Denton points out as much in her 2017, “Beyond the Lore: A Case for Asynchronous Online Tutoring Research.” In her article, Denton writes, “Until research-based studies can yield insights into online tutoring, discussions surrounding this format will remain divided” (178). While she’s mostly arguing for expanding beyond the lore-based tradition of writing centers, her argument also encompasses the need to better understand a practice that has existed “for about three decades” (Denton 177). Part of this lack of research stems from uncertainty surrounding the practice of asynchronous sessions. For many, asynchronous work resembles too closely a “drop-off” service, a model anathema to the field. Yet, Denton argues, it’s the writing center field’s reliance on lore, and nothing about the practice itself, that reinforces the lack of research. She asserts, “Initial scholarship on this format urged caution and reinforced fears of asynchronous online tutoring grounded in lore and stemming from mistrust that the practices surrounding this format look too different from other tutoring practices” (Denton 179). There is much more to learn about technology and asynchronous work in writing centers.
Regardless, Shadle and Brown demonstrate that writing centers have both adopted (and adapted to) technology while also struggling with layers of challenges that using this technology creates. What I hope to do in this article is move further away from a siloed view of technology and consider the various ramifications of its use. While each OWL may implement technology differently, foundational issues such as training and dealing with ethical issues remain. Unlike with the brick-and-mortar writing center, though, different technologies mediate the student experience when it comes to OWLs.
Race and Technology
For this discussion, it’s important to recognize the general impotence of being colorblind or neutral. Certainly, there may be people who wonder about my supposition here that websites can carry the prejudices of people from the “real” world or that technology can actually discriminate against people. Aren’t we only talking about html or CSS or 0s and 1s? Yes, in one sense. However, this coding does not come from the ether to encode itself. Webpage designs, algorithms, coding—they all come from real, live people who made choices about what to do and how to do it. It’s true that the outcomes of technology may not have been intended, but one does not need intention to be racist. One only needs to be disinterested and inattentive. So, as we discuss race and technology and racism on our (web) sites, I invite you to be interested and attentive, to pay attention to the real consequences of apparently objective choices.
As Ibram Kendi reminds us in How to be an Antiracist, “The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism...the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it” (9). Writing centers should strive to cast this antiracist eye not just onto their practices but also to tools that support and mediate their work, including OWLs. While maintaining racist structures or practices requires only a lack of attention, since racist structures constitute themselves and are present in our society a priori, enacting antiracism requires intention and critical engagement with practices, behaviors, and beliefs. One cannot accidentally be antiracist, even if our unconscious actions don’t necessarily produce racist outcomes. Producing antiracist outcomes requires vigilance.
This need for vigilance gives rise to my concern about writing center websites. If writing centers generally aim to create “cozy” spaces, as Grutsch McKinney asserts, but cozy is a coded term that is both raced and classed, and if writing center websites are extensions of the writing center space, how may we be unconsciously coding (metaphorically and literally) these (web)sites to suit particular kinds of students to the disadvantage of others? Even something as apparently objective as a search engine can produce unintentional racist outcomes, as Benjamin notes: “These tech advances are sold as morally superior because they purport to rise above human bias, even though they could not exist without data produced through histories of exclusion and discrimination” (10). These histories also extend, I argue, to how we organize information on our OWLs, how we present options, and what functionalities we tie into our OWLs. In her discussion on cultivating identification with students, Bemer contends, “writing center directors, professors, and tutors can attempt to figure out the most basic writing needs of all our students in order to reach as many of them as possible” (24). While I don’t argue that effective usability can manifest equity, we must also strive to be transparent in our attempts to figure out writing needs. Benjamin notes, “even just deciding what problem needs solving requires a host of judgments; and yet we are expected to pay no attention to the man behind the screen” (11). How do we make judgments about our sites and what students can do on them? And is there a way to make these judgments better? That is, we must be attentive to how we make judgments and gain a better understanding of how real students actually use our OWLs.
Producing Antiracist OWLs through User Experience
Kendi’s work on racism and antiracism can be a useful frame for identifying racist or antiracist practices and outcomes. Kendi posits that antiracism “is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas” (20). Underlying Kendi’s conception of racism is the act of intention. For Kendi, “there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ones” (20). One cannot be neutrally non-racist. This neutrality only reinforces racist ideas and practices, ideas that position and defend a racial hierarchy. Truly countering racism requires intentional antiracism and the creation of ideas and practices that work to dismantle racial hierarchies. This effort of intentionally dealing with racism addresses García’s call to reckon with what haunts us. Part of this reckoning also includes “delinking,” as Romeo García and Damían Baca layout in their introduction to Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Colonial Visions. In their introduction, they write, “we must move to delink, to ‘contest,’ what today is as normative or juridical as it has also always been prejudicial and oppressive” (5). They tie this delinking to the creation of a pluriversality of stories and experiences that expand writing and rhetorical studies elsewhere and otherwise—stretching it in new directions and new possibilities, incorporating the voices of many. Important to note here is that we come to antiracism from this decolonial perspective, rather than the other way around. That is, when we treat decoloniality as a real exigency, rather than just a potential epistemic option, the work of antiracism and social justice can begin.
To incorporate the voices of many, I posit that user experience (UX) theory may be fruitful in producing antiracist writing center websites (to say nothing of writing center practices more broadly). Jesse Garret, in The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, asserts that “the user experience design process is all about ensuring that no aspect of the user’s experience with your product happens without your conscious, explicit consent” (18). This means we must have a strong understanding of how the user (the student) will navigate or behave on the site. In order to understand what the user will do, we must also understand key aspects of the user. Brian Still and Kate Crane provide a helpful guide to what aspects of the user we must understand in their Fundamentals of User-Centered Design: A Practical Approach:
What users want and need
What they experience in their use environments
What motivates them to use certain products
What makes it possible to use these effectively
What obstacles stand in the way of successful use or problem solving (68)
Gathering this information will likely require direct interaction with the users. Still and Crane recommend three types of methods for researching users: “one that captures what users actually do, one that captures what users say, and one where the designer ‘sees’ how users interface with design” (68). These three methods work in tandem to paint a picture of the user and help the designer anticipate how their products are used. In writing centers, there might be some reluctance to think of our sites (or any aspect of our work) as solely a “product” to be used. Yet, in the case of OWLs, this mindset might be helpful in producing successful sites and positive student experiences with the writing center.
Let’s consider the points Still and Crane offer to understanding users in turn. What do your students want and need? This point calls us to be aware of our locally diverse student populations. Who are our students? Are they mostly commuters? Do they live on campus? What is their average age? Are they predominantly white? Black? Hispanic? Asian? What is the gender ratio? It’s also important to consider these questions specifically regarding the writing center. Most third-party appointment platforms will track basic demographic information. If your writing center uses an intake form, either on the site or in person, it might be helpful to have a section where students can check off or fill in why they’re visiting. Otherwise, a survey sent to students directly to gather what they think they need or interviewing a select group of students might be effective methods of addressing this first point.
When considering use environments, we might re-cast this point as thinking about where students are when they access our OWLs. In a pandemic, the list of places might be somewhat unlimited. As we think through this point, we might consider whether a student is at home, in a residence hall room, at work, or elsewhere and how they are accessing the site. We can also add another dimension to this point: on what devices are students accessing our sites? Are they using their mobile phone and a cellular connection? Are they on a tablet? A laptop? A desktop? Arguably, the devices themselves impact the user experience. If a site doesn’t appear correctly on its mobile version, this affects what and how a student is able to access. We might ask students, then, where they are when they access OWLs and what devices they use to do so.
While writing center people might struggle with motivating a student to use the center, we can also think through how a website could persuade a student to use the center’s services. I'm not necessarily arguing here that people from different ethnic or racial backgrounds use sites differently; however, we might consider how students from different backgrounds have different motivations and expectations of how a site should work. Consider Kristen Arola’s work on indigenous interfaces, where she explores how Native Americans would reimagine social media. Ultimately, the visual design aspects of a site faded in importance when compared to the functional aspects of a site. Arola writes, “the respondents imagine an interface that doesn’t necessarily look a certain way but that allows and encourages certain actions important to a group of people” (215). What, then, is important to the students on your campus? Do they want information about the center? What kind of information? Do they want to submit documents through the site? Do they want to schedule appointments? How are these features enabled (or not)? Here, we might seek to better understand why a student is visiting the website in the first place.
Finally, consider the obstacles that stand in students’ way of using the site successfully. Bemer reveals a startling finding in her study:
Forty-three percent of writing centers in this study offered online tutoring, nearly half. Of these 43 centers, 16 centers (37.5%) did not have online scheduling for their online tutoring appointments...When scheduling online is mandatory, not providing an online tutoring option creates a disconnect that is possibly shocking—requiring students to use the computer for one act and then totally prohibiting computer use disrupts the act of identification and the connection the student is working to make with the center. When students are trying to understand the writing center and its value to them, this disconnect in values is confusing. (26)
While the raw numbers here have likely changed over time (Bemer wrote her article in 2015), the problematic nature of her finding remains. The student’s work in navigating the site is disrupted, which adds an additional barrier to actually using the site effectively and connecting with the resources the writing center offers. Not all obstacles are necessarily this obvious, though. As Benjamin points out, “While more institutions and people are outspoken against blatant racism, discriminatory practices are becoming more deeply embedded within the sociotechnical infrastructure of everyday life” (34). That is, writing centers must also confront cultural hauntings around technology, especially the myth of its objectivity, and work to mitigate unintentional student experiences. Writing centers must work to delink technology from its apparent neutrality in order to avoid moving the inherent oppressiveness of writing center work from their physical locations to digital ones. We must then be vigilant in our watch against these deeply embedded practices and bringing students into our processes is one way to ensure these practices can be rooted out.
My own institution’s work with antiracism and my department’s website is ongoing. I oversee a Learning Commons, which includes the library, testing, tutoring (which houses the writing center), and user (tech) support. It’s a relatively new website, completed in fall of 2020 as my institution completed a collegewide reorganization. One advantage we have is that we were able to build the website “in house” as long as we adhered to general marketing and branding guidelines. As we built the website, we thought primarily of accessibility and made sure each page could be re-sized, that it worked well on different types of devices, and could still be used with a screen reader. As the website approaches its first full year of use, we’re preparing a usability test like the one described here. This test will help us better identify the parts of the site that are working and the parts that could be improved, especially the pages that see a high-level of visitors, such as our tutoring and user support pages. What’s been encouraging is the willingness of Learning Commons staff (who are mostly white) to engage in these conversations and their enthusiasm for wanting to produce equitable outcomes.
Conclusion
Grutsch McKinney posits that the intentional coding of writing center spaces as cozy homes necessarily invokes and privileges white and middle/upper class perceptions (25). What if writing centers are coding their websites, which are arguably extensions of their physical spaces, in similar ways, privileging certain perspectives and uses over others? What if writing centers have brought the ghosts, their hauntings, from their physical spaces into their digital ones? How can we know if we’re doing this? And what can we do about it?
In part, this article that began about names and invisible histories attempts to answer these very questions. An antiracist lens may be helpful in re-seeing what would normally be invisible to us, both in terms of what kind of information is on an OWL and in terms of what the OWL allows students to do. Yet, antiracism only allows us to see the problem. From there, we must then take steps to mitigate the problem. Ultimately, I’m arguing that focusing on user experience, and bringing in the perspectives of those using our OWLs, is one potential way to bring what haunts us from the shadowy corners of our vision into full view and to cast them out.
Increasingly, especially in whatever a post-pandemic world looks like, we are a parliament of OWLs. As much as we might learn from our students in recreating or reimagining our websites, I hope that we can also learn from each other. Some OWLs are robust while others may still be in the early stages of development. Even so, who can say what challenges the years ahead might bring as our students expect more, or differently, from our digital spaces?
While this article focused on OWLs, there are certainly other aspects of online writing center work worth exploring. Online asynchronous tutoring, for instance, has not yet developed a fleshed out set of best practices, and it’s worrying to think that this valuable service could be discounted or mistrusted when viewed through the traditional best practices of the writing center. The field would be enriched by a better understanding of how asynchronous tutoring actually works, to say nothing of synchronous online tutoring. Finally, as technology advances and writing centers adapt and adopt new technologies, it’s important to consider our approach to incorporating these technologies into our work rather than just the specific software or hardware. Continuously viewing our processes through an antiracist lens is a long-term way of ensuring we remain vigilant about the work we do and the outcomes of that work.
Notes
Compare to Gloria Anzaldúa’s experience in “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” from Borderlands/La Frontera.
As Anthony Quiroz writes in Claiming Citizenship: Mexican Americans in Victoria, Texas.
Grimm notes, “Our willingness to ask those questions (misguided as they were), our efforts to find answers…led us toward some hard lessons” (75).
Works Cited
Arola, Kristin. “Indigenous Interfaces.” Social Writing/Social Media: Pedagogy, Presentation, and Publics. Eds. Douglas Walls and Stephanie Vie. WAC Clearinghouse Perspectives on Writing Series, U Colorado P, 2017.
Bemer, Amanda. “Exploring the Presentation of Scheduling Options and Online Tutoring on Writing Center Websites.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 12, no. 2, 2015.
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019.
Denton, Kathryn. “Beyond the Lore: A Case for Asynchronous Online Tutoring Research.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 2, 2017, pp. 175-203.
Falls Brown, Lady. “OWLs in Theory and Practice: A Director’s Perspective.” Taking Flight with OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work, eds. James Inman and Donna Sewell, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000, pp. 17-28.
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