Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 1 (2022)
Where We’ve Been and Where We Are
Wonderful Faison
Langston University
dr._wonderful.faison@langston.edu
Anna Treviño
University of Oklahoma
aktrevi@ou.edu
Predominately White Institutions (PWIs), one of the problems writing center directors and staff attempted to solve was its lack of racially diverse tutors. Desiring not to reflect the image of white writing tutors helping students of color--deemed deficient--with their writing, writing center administrators at PWIs became concerned with ways to attract and keep racially diverse tutors, staff, etc. Thus, an onslaught of diversity, self-care, and social justice initiatives intended to reflect our wokeness began being implemented at various predominately white writing centers, mine included. I was, happily so, eager to contribute to the waves of wokeness.
Consequently, when Anna and I wrote “Race, Rhetoric, and Literacy: The Hidden Curriculum of the Writing Center,” we wrote it at a time when the field of the writing center was beginning to reflect on its philosophies and pedagogical practices. We did not expect this piece to have any impact on the writing center community or be the article for which both Anna and I are known. We wrote the piece because we were frustrated with the racial politics of the writing center. These politics consisted of creating a familial feel in the Writing Center (WC), complete with the domestic trappings, but devoid of the raced, classed, and heterosexist understandings of family and domesticity upon which the WC was trying to build.
These ideas of family grated on us; we did not feel a part of this “family”. As a black woman, I constantly felt outnumbered. When encountering racism, it seemed as if it became an area for me to study and research during my graduate studies more so than an issue I could report and expect any meaningful change. I did not know what to do and not knowing led me to write that article.
I (Anna) certainly did not expect to be thinking of that article in the following years to come. It is not like I believed my writing center or the broader writing center community would forever change between then and now, but for some reason, I did not expect for our words to keep resonating so deeply within the Writing Center community. Since then, locations within writing centers have changed. In light of the BLM and MeToo movement, social justice and antiracist scholarship has helped reshape writing center scholarship, ideology, and design. Now, both Anna and I reside in the same state working at two distinctly different institutions serving two distinct populations with differing needs.
After Grad School and onto HBCUs
My current location/position is as the English department chair at Langston University, a small regional Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Oklahoma. I am no longer in the writing center. And yet, I am over it. The writing center director implements the directives I give. Our concerns do not match those of the writing center field. They are different. We are different.
My experiences with racism in the writing center, which was so fundamentally shaped by and tied to my time in Predominantly White Writing Centers (PWWCs) at PWIs, was not my experience with the writing center at an HBCU. In my transition into this HBCU, some of the problems that remain prevalent in PWWCs, i.e., hiring and keeping tutors and staff of color, were nonexistent. My experience at this HBCU affords me the ability to see the ways in which HBCU writing center directors can reach across the aisle and work with PWWCs to create more diverse and inclusive hiring practices and retention programs.
With writing centers current interests in diversity and inclusion, we can now answer Karen Keaton-Jackson’s call to bring HBCUs to the writing center table. A letter from several writing center directors at different universities written to IWCA in 2020 showed that not only is the field ready to address longstanding social justice issues in the writing center, but also the tutors, staff, and directors are ready to address these longstanding issues.
During Grad School: The Move to a PWI
While Wonderful has moved from a PWI to an HBCU, as I (Anna) wrote in our previous article, “Race, Rhetoric, and Literacy: The Hidden Curriculum of the Writing Center,” I moved from a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI)/Minority Serving Institution (MSI) to a PWI. Wonderful’s move happened after earning her PhD and mine was to begin a PhD program. I did not work as a tutor at my HSI. The experiences that bonded us had to do with both being women of color attending PWIs for our PhDs and working at writing centers while in our respective programs. Wonderful no longer works as a tutor, but her job keeps her in the discussions of writing centers generally and specifically at her institution. I hardly work as a tutor these days. I now primarily have an administrative role being the graduate assistant director.
In the work I do now, I am heavily involved in tutor education. The time that I have spent in this position has led me to think about anti-racist work in the writing center and having tutors learn and reflect on racism in the writing center. From 2019-2020, focused more on a vision of a writing center committed to social justice—a place that doesn’t focus on assimilating writers and works to have conversations about writing rather than marking papers. I tried to communicate to the tutors that the writing center is not a fix-it shop. However, as most of us know, pedagogically moving beyond the idea of the writing center as a fix-it shop is difficult. There’s a lot of pressure for writing centers to continue to be remedial spaces for papers to be polished according to the so-called conventions of Standard American English. Even more, there’s a tension that exists now as a result of writing centers distancing themselves from the idea of remediation, a move from solely working to support writing done in classes to a space with its own vision and mission. Specifically, I think about Frankie Condon’s following words:
In the world of writing centers, despite a recent surge of interest in and an emerging commitment to stamp out oppression and racism, there continues to be a kind of ongoing hand-wringing with regard to how to put that commitment into effect. We perceive, not without reason, that our institutional position is perpetually in peril, always contingent upon the perception of administrators, teachers, and students that what we do supplements and reinforces both the kinds of writing taught in the classroom and the ways that writing is taught. Too often we have kept the same deal with the devil that has undermined the realization of a fully formed, multiracial democracy since the framing of the U.S. Constitution. That is, we ostensibly subscribe to the principle that all people (all Englishes) are equal but in practice sacrifice that ideal at the altar of political and pedagogical expediency. (4)
I don’t think there could be a much better description of what I think haunts the writing center and even me. There’s a stickiness to writing center work. So much can be said, but only so much is accepted and done. Sacrifices must be made not only because of a writing center’s institutional position, but also because of what faculty and students expect of them. That makes me feel like conversations are going around-and-around, but not forward. In part, I understand that is the result of the fact that first-year writing curricula differs across universities, so do the writing expectations they have of their students.
There is much of a difference in the writing I saw when I taught at a HSI and the writing I see here at a PWI. I suspect, those differences are not uncommon, and I believe writing centers are haunted by those differences as well. Those differences also allow first-year composition/writing curriculum to sparkle, to be beyond requiring students to visit the writing center as a part of their grade here. Here at the PWI, the standardized first-year composition curriculum centered the use of research (including personal writing/reflection, reading, interviewing, observation, and analysis of primary documents) to investigate their own and others’ literacy experiences/to investigate a particular failure of communication. At the HSI, during the first semester writing class, students reflected who they have chosen to become, what has influenced that decision, issues that affect their culture, community, or generation. In the second semester writing class, students explored their college and career goals.
Noteworthy is that at the HSI the class started by introducing the five-paragraph essay and the longest essay had to be 4-5 pages long. At the PWI, the shortest essay had to be 4-5 pages long. The readings also differed. Everything is an Argument and Rules for Writers were the required texts for the class at the HSI. There were no required texts at the PWI. Readings were open-access articles about writing such as Grant-Davie’s “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents” and Kevin Roozen’s “Journalism, Poetry, Stand-up Comedy, and Academic Literacy.” At the HSI, the class was designed the way it was because, as I was told, “most of our students are not English majors,” unlike at the PWI where higher administration wanted the first-year writing curriculum to standout against other well-known universities. What I mean to say here is that first-year writing assignments can be haunting because they can reinforce ideas of the writing center: is the writing center a fix-it shop? Where can it be more than one?
I hear similarities in the recent conversations I have had with Wonderful. But our conversations are not about figuring out how to make a sparkly curriculum. Our conversations are about figuring out how we can meet students where they are at and building just and integrated curricula at minority institutions for students. Our conversations are about the conversations that perpetuate unjust writing programs and support. Of course, that is considered just is also something that can be haunting. What if students need a fix-it shop approach?
Until our recent conversations, I will admit that I never paused to think about how I only remember working with one white tutor when I went to mandatory visits as a first-year student (2007-2008). What does it mean when the students who faculty generalize when they say things like, “the students here just can’t write” and tutors are those students? If my mother were not my mother but instead a first-year student visiting the writing center, how would I interact with her? And what would the differences be if the visit were at a PWI or HSI/MSI? Should there be a difference? I’ve gotten a similar question during job interviews, a question along the lines of, “how would you adjust the way you teach for a job at a HSI/MSI?” That question feels like a trap. It feels deficit-oriented. Should there be a difference?
What might the future hold?: Where We Think We’re Going
What is concerning about writing center scholarship is their dismissal or avoidance of Basic/Developmental writers. There seems to be a correlation between Basic/Developmental writers and skill-and-drill grammar activities. However, with more and more institutions moving to remove Basic/Developmental Writing from university curriculums, this move could have a significant impact on writing center scholarship and pedagogy. Unfortunately, this move does not bode well for the advancement of writing center pedagogy as it may cause the very function of the writing center to change.
And since removing Basic Writing from the curriculum does not remove students deemed Basic Writers from the institution, this move is likely to shift the responsibility of getting students to meet college writing standards from the professor and on to the tutor. And if the demand is for Basic Writers to work on and improve their grammar as it is at my institution, the writing center may be forced into a pedagogical regression.
Again, we think of Condon’s words, “We perceive, not without reason, that our institutional position is perpetually in peril, always contingent upon the perception of administrators, teachers, and students that what we do supplements and reinforces both the kinds of writing taught in the classroom and the ways that writing is taught” (4).
Wonderful asks “what is the role of the writing center in English corequisite models and remediating Basic/Developmental writers? Does writing center scholarship and best practices align with research on developmental writers and pedagogy? If not, now what?”
Like Condon’s words and Wonderful’s question highlight, writing centers are haunted by the question of what writing centers are and should be, what would make writing centers a site of justice, and the sacrifices that keep us from arriving.
Works Cited
Faison, Wonderful and Anna Treviño. “Race, Retention, Language, and Literacy: The Hidden Curriculum of the Writing Center.” The Peer Review, vol. 1, no. 2, Fall 2017.
Grant-Davie, Keith. “Rhetorical Situtations and Their Constituents.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 15, no. 2, Spring 1997.
Roozen, Kevin. “Journalism, Poetry, Stand-up Comedy, and Academic Literacy.” Journalism of Basic Writing (CUNY), vol. 27, no. 1, 2008, pp. 5-34.