Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 1 (2022)
Listening to the Friction: An Exploration of a Tutor’s Listening to the Community and Academy
Kathryn Valentine
San Diego State University
kvalentine@sdsu.edu
Abstract
This article explores what it might mean to listen to the “friction,” here understood as ideological contestations of writing, as a part of writing center work. For my purposes, listening to the friction focuses on how tutors’ listen to what haunts writing in the academy and therefore what haunts writing center work. In particular, I focus on how one tutor, who was a research participant in a qualitative study I conducted, shows the possibility of listening to the haunting of remediation by drawing on a blend of community and academic listening.
“Might it be more productive to approach listening via the definition of friction as that which gets in the way of ‘smooth’ hegemonic flows (Tsing 6)?”— Romeo García
Near the start of the pandemic in March 2020, the writing center I direct quickly transitioned our tutoring to remote-only services. We converted all tutoring appointments to online-only sessions and also started to offer “e-tutoring,” for those students who might not be able to consistently access synchronous, online sessions. We found ways to stay in touch as tutors and directors, through zoom meetings, text chats, and a tutor homeroom on our university’s course management system. Suddenly, as with many centers during the pandemic, we were fully online, and things seemed okay. But as the months continued and we continued online, I noticed that I could no longer listen in the same way to the tutoring at my center. I could no longer hear a tutor greet a student for the first time. I could no longer encourage a new tutor to listen in on a session while not formally observing. I could no longer either grin or grimace as I heard a tutor give advice I either embraced or not. I also could no longer hear students talk about their writing: their concerns, their excitements, their confusions, their questions, and their complaints. For the most part, the sounds of the center were dispersed—into zoom meetings, text chat, or individual sessions using text, audio, and video that, yes, I could join but would disrupt in doing so. And while the pandemic has brought much greater losses, this too was a loss.
Having worked in writing centers as a tutor and director for over twenty years, listening to students, to writers, to other tutors has been a central activity of my work, even if it is sometimes a passive or background activity. It has also been a focus of some of my scholarship as I became interested in the ways we offer listening in the writing center that promote transformation as well as in ways that uphold the status quo (Valentine). Through this work and my awareness of my own listening during the pandemic, I’ve come to be interested in listening less as a practice to deploy, although it can be, and more as a way to enact or fail to enact responsibility.
In this essay, my purpose is to think about what it might mean to listen to the friction from the perspective of one writing tutor. And my purpose is to rough up the idea that listening, especially in writing centers, is always smooth. Drawing from García’s question, what I learn about listening from Irma, the tutor and research participant I write about here, is “a reminder of a foundation of listening where it is not yet,” and I see my approach as beginning to explore how community listening might inform the work of writing centers. For my purposes, listening to the friction focuses on how tutors’ listen to what haunts writing in the academy and therefore what haunts writing center work. In particular, I focus on how this tutor, Irma (referred to by this pseudonym throughout), shows the possibility of listening to the haunting of remediation through drawing on a blend of community and academic listening as I discuss below.
Ways of Listening as Ways of Being
This approach to listening draws on Lisbeth Lipari’s idea of listening being, which offers a holistic understanding of listening in contrast to dominant U.S. cultural understandings of listening. She suggests that such listening
. . . would begin with the understanding that listening requires an awareness of our habitual categories and a willingness to go beyond them. So how does one listen beyond the schemas, categories, and dualistic thinking of the conceptual mind? One suggestion is to listen from a space of emptiness and unknowing, to be strong enough to relinquish our perceived mastery, control, and foreknowledge while remaining attentive and aware. (99)
Lipari’s notion of listening offers a way for those of us situated in the academy to attend to both when listening leads to understanding and also when listening leads to the recognition that we might not understand another person and therefore have a responsibility to make space for their experiences and perspectives. Lipari’s concept of listening might be said to be in contrast with traditional notions of what I call academic listening, in which listening is often focused on placing a speaker’s ideas into a disciplinary context, one in which the listener has knowledge and understanding, assuming they are a member of that discipline. This academic listening makes sense of what is listened to largely in terms of the knowledge and experience already accepted in the academy.
In addition to drawing on Lipari, my approach to listening draws on and is productively informed by Romeo García’s concept of community listening, particularly as a lens through which to view listening in the context of writing center work. García describes community listening as “listening for humanity in stories and memories in between cultures, times, and spaces” (“Creating” 7) and shares how his grandmother, among others in his life, taught him the connection between such listening and responsibility: “Responsibility, then and now, meant listening to know and to learn” (“Creating” 10). Importantly, García argues that situating community listening within academic spaces or in tension with academic listening, “departs from individualism and mere presence as the genesis for listening. Rather, it re-situates the individual within constellations of stories, genealogies, ghosts, and hauntings” (“Creating” 14). García’s conception of community listening offers an understanding of how listening might entail not only attending to a present individual but also to what is absent, whether that be a perspective the individual might feel too vulnerable to share in an academic space or the community experiences that the individual brings to but does not see represented, let alone valued, in the academy. García also extends my understanding of academic listening as a type of listening which “is characteristically reflective of a colonial unconsciousness” (“Creating” 13) and which positions listening as a means to discipline or to dismiss and replace community perspectives and experiences with “academic” ones. I draw most directly from Lipari and García because they focus their concepts of listening on interactions as opposed to work on listening such as Krista Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening, which typically is focused more on listening as a matter of textual interpretation.
While writing centers are academic spaces, recent work on listening within tutoring has focused on the idea of hosting through listening as a way to make the space of the center more hospitable to all students and not only those already comfortable within the academy. Lipari also offers the notion of listening as hospitality or hosting: “[L]istening can be understood as a kind of dwelling place from where we offer our hospitality to others and the world. It is an invitation—a hosting. I don’t have to translate your words into familiar categories or ideas. I don’t have to ‘feel’ what you feel, or ‘know’ what it feels like to be you” (102). She calls our attention to listening not strictly as a means of understanding others but as a way of inviting others to connect with us at the same time as we hold space open for what they know or feel without insisting on our own understanding of that knowledge or feeling. While listening in tutoring has often been discussed as allowing tutors to better understand the writers they work with or even to empower those writers (see for example Hughes, Gillespie and Kail’s 2010 discussion of alumni tutors’ listening), more recent work has envisioned listening along the lines of Lipari’s hosting as noted above. For example, Anglesey and McBride forward the idea of listening as welcoming in their study of tutor education as a means to create a culture of listening in their center. In that work, they argue that listening is a taken-for-granted tutoring practice which, if approached more intentionally, can be used more fully to support students and address their concerns, particularly for students with disabilities. They write, “Becoming more analytical and intentional in our understanding of what listening encompasses . . . and how it can effectively be used to understand students’ concerns and provide them with guidance and support, may improve our ability to train consultants to respond to a broader range of students and create a stronger sense of welcome.” In addition, Tracy Santa explores the idea of listening as shelter or safekeeping with a focus on how tutors make this type of invested, empathetic listening visible through backchannels and gaze because, “listening makes the collaboration inherent to a successful tutorial possible” (2).
Work on listening in both writing center studies and rhetoric, helps me to also conceptualize listening, including silence, as a rhetorical force. As Laura Feibush contends, “Listening as a rhetorical force is simply that although we commonly think about listeners being affected by speakers, and not the other way around, there are, in fact, things listeners do that influence what gets said. Listeners, in other words, can actually impact communicative situations” (35). Based on interviews and observations of video tutorials, Feibush suggests silence is a “complex signifier” (40) and also argues that expressive listening, especially through gestures, supports effective online tutorials. While Feibush is focused on gestures within online tutorials as a form of listening, her work connects to earlier work by Cheryl Glenn on understanding silence as rhetorical action: “silence as a rhetorical art of empowered action, action that can stimulate the formulation of a new way of being rhetorical” (284). Glenn’s notion of silence as rhetorical action is a useful lens through which to view listening in writing center tutorials, particularly given her attention to not only silence as rhetorical action but also silence as a shared experience between participants in a rhetorical situation.
Drawing on these concepts of listening, this article explores the listening of one writing tutor who participated in an exploratory study I conducted to begin to understand listening from the perspective of tutors. This tutor, Irma, helped me to understand that listening can be a means of understanding a writer, their writing, and community and also that listening can be a way to attend to lack of understanding and to listen to transform what we know or become aware of what we don’t yet, or may never, know. Irma’s listening helps illustrate listening as being in which we hold space for what we might not understand while offering compassion to ourselves and those we listen to.
A Tutor’s Ways of Listening
The study was conducted after IRB review and exemption and took place at a large, public university characterized as a Hispanic-Serving Institution and located in the West. Irma was working as a writing fellow and tutoring students enrolled in a basic or remedial writing course which the students attended the summer prior to their first academic year as undergraduates. My only relationship with Irma was through the study when I initially invited any writing fellows working that summer to participate and during her participation in the study. I observed three of Irma’s tutoring sessions and interviewed her after those observations. The study was a basic qualitative study (Merriam and Tisdale) with a focus on beginning to explore listening from the perspective of tutors and to, potentially, consider how issues of identity intersected with listening. In this essay, I focus on Irma’s experience with listening as a tutor in order to explore or illustrate the concepts of listening being and community listening in the context of writing center work. While my focus on Irma has the benefit of allowing me to look closely at her listening over a short period of time and to share what I learned from that experience, it is limited to one tutor’s experience and to my own interest in reading her listening through the lens of Lipari and García along with the other scholars I draw on.
Irma described herself as a woman born to first-generation U.S. immigrants from two different cultures and countries. She considers the university a place that helps connect her to family members who also graduated from the same university. She speaks three languages and also sees herself as an avid traveler who hopes to bring “open-mindedness” and “awareness of others” to her studies and her teaching. A master’s student, Irma had taught first-year composition and tutored first-year writing students at the time of the study. During the study, she was in her second semester working as a tutor, although she had informally tutored friends and family members since she was in high school. I believe that Irma’s approach to listening helps us to think more fully about how we can listen in the writing center not only as a means to confirm what we already know or as a means to smoothly understand students and their writing but also as a way of being listening in order to attend to what we don’t know or understand, to attend to what is creating friction, and, perhaps most importantly, to attend to what haunts not only the writing center but also the academy.
Irma’s discussion of her listening in my interview with her suggests that tutors may already be engaged in the kinds of listening envisioned by Lipari and García. For example, Irma discusses her listening as a kind of hosting when she described how she listens and responds to students’ interpretations of readings as both a tutor and a teacher. Of note here, is her focus on listening as a means of incorporating differences of interpretation, a hallmark of community listening as opposed to academic listening:
Just trying to understand, like if there is a reading that we had to read for example and they understood in a different way. Not just saying, ‘No. It’s wrong; it’s this.’ But trying to understand how it was they even came to that idea or that theory that the reading should even be interpreted in this way or that way. At times, they come up with their own original ideas, sometimes that weren’t discussed in class, that could be added to the discussion so I feel like that’s very important to listen to other ideas that maybe can be included in class discussion. Because, you know, as teachers we don’t always have everything included in our lesson plan or understand the reading completely.
Here Irma shows her awareness of listening as a means to move beyond habitual or assumed categories such as the teacher/tutor as most knowledgeable about or most prepared to interpret a reading and the student as least knowledgeable or prepared as she seeks to listen to and incorporate students’ perspectives and interpretations. In this sense, Irma might be said to draw on listening from the community and not only the academy (or writing center) as described by García: “Community listening, rather, encourages a type of responsibility and justice that does not function from the ‘right to speak’ for (Alcoff) or to eavesdrop upon the subject, but rather from an understanding that students, while already shaped by language, are also shapers of language, discourse, and modalities of agency” (“Creating” 13). In her community listening, Irma understands students as shapers of language, discourse, and modalities of agency while in her academic listening Irma attends to how students might work on their writing in ways that position them within the academy. Listening to students with the assumption that they do have something to contribute to the classroom discussion, even as that contribution may not be framed as the teacher or tutor would frame it, is a way listening that can create space for contributions from students as shapers of discourse and as members of communities that have not always been welcomed in the academy.
In discussing her listening, Irma’s approaches also helped me to understand how tutor listening might function as a means of bearing witness to hauntings, or “the epistemic work of managing, controlling, and policing places and bodies” (García and Sicari), particularly such work that happens through basic or remedial writing and tutoring programs. During our interview, Irma considered how both she and the students she tutors might be haunted by being considered “remedial” writers. At the same time, Irma considered how she inhabits her current position as a writing teacher and tutor. She also considered how her background connected her to some of the students in the course because of shared community and academic experiences. In this regard, she draws on the idea of listening to the community and to the academy as both a witness to herself and to students, looking both to the past and the present.
A lot of [the students] do come from [name of area] and I have cousins that live down there. That's basically my second home. I do come from a Hispanic background. We do have a lot of Hispanic people in the class. There was a time when I had to take a remedial writing course. So I know what it's like. And that's affected me, I feel like, even to this day. Where I'm thinking like, wow, how did I get this far if I had to take that class in high school or whatever. So I know. And it was in the summer. So I understand being singled out like that is— It doesn't feel that great.
Here Irma highlights what might be haunting both her listening as well as the students’ speaking and listening as she describes the feeling of being singled out for seemingly not writing well enough and to feel that judgement is connected to a community one belongs to. She attests to the haunting of remediation in her phrase that taking a remedial class has affected her “even to this day” and her comments about getting “this far” as she acknowledges both her past and her present. And she connects her understanding of this positionality to her listening to the students she tutors. In this sense, I see her listening not only to when things are smooth but also to when things are creating friction, for her as a tutor or for the students as writers.
Irma’s listening suggests that the haunting of remediation is a part of the historical connection and conflict between social spaces such as the writing center and (some) bodies as socially contested within those spaces. As García writes of his own listening, “From listening, I understood that I was situated within a historical space and connected to historical bodies” (“Unmaking” 30). Irma, too, seems to share this awareness as she listens to the affective dimension of students’ experiences and shares her own and her family member’s experiences with remediation, which she told me she mentioned to some of the students: “I did mention, hey, you know I had to take a remedial summer class. Or telling them that my own [family member] had to take this exact class. And he's a successful engineer. Just all of them understanding, he graduated last year. And all of them being like, okay, we can do this, too. And this is not the end of our career.” Here, Irma’s community listening, through her response, invokes the future as she states “this is not the end.” In this comment, she connects students’ experiences to her own and her family’s past experiences in a way that recognizes the haunting of remediation while invoking a future beyond such haunting.
In addition to illustrating how a tutor can listen to the hauntings of remediations through community listening that attends to the past, present, and future, Irma’s discussion of her community connections and background as a writer suggests that she also blends her listening to the community with her listening to the academy as both a witness to her own haunting and to that of her students. This blends community and academy listening in that Irma is speaking of her own and her family’s success within the same (haunted) academic space. I suggest this is blended listening in that in order for Irma to listen to her own and her students’ experience as a haunting, she must listen at the intersection of community and academy because it is at the intersections that the hauntings or friction occur. In this aspect of her listening, Irma helps me to understand how her work with listening connects her to a community as well as to her own writing past while she also uses listening to reflect on how she has changed as a writer, and, to help students envision how they might change as writers in the present and future as a way to envision their success in the academy. Irma listens with a sense of belonging to one of the same communities as the students she works with while also having attained some sense of belonging to the academy even as her experience and her family’s experiences with remediation sometimes haunt that belonging.
An additional facet of Irma’s listening to the haunting of remediation is evident in her discussion of listening to the student’s frustration with the course. Here Irma seems to blend community listening with listening being as she draws on her understanding of students’ identities based on her own community experiences while at the same time not assuming she understands or knows precisely why students are frustrated or how they are positioned. Speaking of this frustration, Irma noted, “A lot of them, and it might be because it's summer and this is a remedial course, have been extremely frustrated. And sometimes when I ask them questions about why they did something, it's a little bit defensive, and I noticed that they have kind of this guard up a bit more than I do with . . . non-native speakers, who just, hey we make mistakes, we don't really care.” Here, again, I see Irma considering and comparing how she listens and how students position themselves depending on how they might identify. I see how her community listening may inform her tutoring as she considers why students may be responding in certain ways without assuming she knows for certain. Discussing students’ frustration further, Irma stated, “I mean some of them are quieter than others but that part's over [by this time in the term]. This is something like I feel like there's more vulnerability. Maybe they are. [One student] said, I've always been a bad writer or writing isn't my thing or my strength. And so, yeah, I see that kind of collectively as a class.” Here Irma seems to witness, through her listening, how students reckon with the haunting of remediation which also entails understanding that some students as writers may be more vulnerable than others as they navigate language and literacy in this context and as they reckon with past racial injury around writing. She also engages with being listening in that she attends to the categories that the students she listens to may inhabit but in a provisional way as she considers if they are frustrated, vulnerable, think of themselves as bad writers or a blend of the three.
At the same time as Irma listens to the students’ frustration, vulnerability, and identities as writers, she also seeks to continue to advise them on their writing and to encourage them to use the feedback from the teacher to revise their writing. In this regard, Irma blends community and academic listening as she works with students who are writing for the academic context within which they now learn. Connected to her speaking to students about how they can be successful as writers who have been remediated, Irma attends to academic listening and seeks ways to listen to students as academic writers. Irma explained how her listening shapes the students as well as how their listening or silence shapes her. “When I listen to them, it's a bit. It's almost like a lot of sighing and telling me what they have to do and well, this is the reason why I did this, and this, and this, and that. And I let those students know, hey, you're not really listening to me here.” Here Irma’s comment echoes Feibush’s understanding of the rhetorical force of listening: “This “rhetoric of listening” turns the tables on a more traditional rhetorical paradigm, and understands listening not just as a mode of reception but as a formative, even expressive, component of communicative situations” (35). Attending to listening as rhetoric, Irma considers how this refusal to listen may be signaling that a student is not allowing for feedback on their writing, as she explains: “I did tell one student yesterday you're not allowing for our feedback to resonate with you. I thanked him for pointing out exactly why he did what he did but I told him, you know, in order for you to get to the next level you have to allow for feedback. Because it was just really like, I did this because of that. And all of the mark ups were shooed away for a reason here and there.” Here Irma’s listening might be said to be academic listening as she listens to a student’s disavowal of feedback on his writing and asks him to consider it in order to move to the “next level,” as she states.
However, Irma then discusses how she also listens to understand the motivations a student might have for not listening to or allowing feedback, which returns her to engaging in what Lipari calls listening being. It also suggests that she understands the student’s listening as a rhetorical force, one that she can attend to as a tutor. Regarding this she said, “It’s very interesting, a defensiveness or not even willing to try sometimes just saying, I don't know. I'm not sure. Something like that. And I notice that even not just in tutoring but in class, too, when a question is asked it's silent . . . And so I don't know if that has anything to do with identity and kind of this competitiveness and not wanting to be wrong and stand out in that way.” As opposed to a singular focus on listening as understanding, Irma’s listening to silence, to the rhetorical force of the students’ own listening, suggests that her listening begins to challenge “the illusion of control and sees how the distortions that arise from our insistence on innocence, certainty, and understanding damage our capacity for compassion” (Lipari 184). In such a conception of listening, in contrast to Irma’s, a tutor would assume that the questions they ask and their listening can be certain to lead to understanding and a tutor would assume that the questions they ask are innocent or neutral. As such, it is likely a tutor using this form of listening will miss or misconstrue who that student may be as a person and as a writer. Instead, Irma’s discussion of her listening suggests a sense of compassion as she reflects on what she seems to know about a student, what she would like to know, and what she might not ever know. It also suggests an awareness of listening as being, in which a tutor holds open space to listen without asserting understanding or assumptions, and with the possibility of listening changing what one knows, what one takes responsibility for, or who one is as a tutor and writer.
As a way of concluding my discussion of Irma’s tutoring and listening, I share an excerpt of one of Irma’s tutoring sessions that I observed during the study. The session took place in a small classroom and was about sixteen minutes in length; I observed, video recorded, and transcribed the session. The student Irma worked with, Mateo (referred to by this pseudonym throughout), was a traditionally-aged, first-year student enrolled in the basic writing class discussed above. The student described himself as, “a happy, outgoing, Hispanic that loves to laugh.” He described English as his primary or home language, noted he also speaks Spanish, and described the state that the university was located in as his home geographical region. Mateo and Irma were discussing an assignment that Mateo was working to revise and edit based on the teacher’s feedback, which Irma was partly responsible for explaining to him. The assignment was an analysis of a speech by Frederick Douglass and the students were asked to look for claims the author was making and to consider how different audiences might respond to those claims.
In the session, I noticed Irma’s listening practice entailed initiating conversation about the draft and the teacher’s feedback, using wait time or silence which allowed her to attend to how much she was speaking, and then listening to the student as he generated ideas for how he might revise his work based on teacher feedback. While Irma’s approach can be described or seen as common tutoring practices, such as scaffolding, her blend of community and academic listening helps me to see how she offers hospitality to the student as he seeks to invent his response to the teacher’s feedback and Irma listens to him as a writer. In a way, Irma might be said to host the student as an academic writer as she attends to but does not wholly embrace the teacher’s feedback and in which she prompts Mateo’s invention or revising work but doesn’t directly tell him what to write or how to respond. The excerpt below comes a little less than ten minutes into their session; they are sitting side by side, both looking at Mateo’s paper and the teacher’s feedback.
Irma: Ok. There would be (reads paper). So she mentioned that this last section here the grandmother paragraph that you have [was a bit
Mateo: [Uh-huh.
Irma: vague. So do you want to look at this with me and see maybe why she would think that?
Mateo: Yeah.
Irma: I'll let you write that down but you get to keep this. [You're taking this and then you
Mateo: [Ok.
Irma: have to make corrections with your colored pen.
Mateo: Um. [Reading and pointing to his paper. 3 seconds.] Is it more like this part where she's?
Irma: Yeah. This is the section here.
Mateo: [Continues reading. 5 seconds.] Ok. I think I know why she was a bit confused. I went from [5 seconds] It's that I went from the audience's reaction directly to why um why Douglass was getting the claims. Because I say that he kind of like he treated his grandmother being on a pedestal, [like she was such a great person,
Irma: [Uhhuh
Mateo: she cared for everybody. Um.
Irma: So you see here how you used the word, "they" as to why they were wealthy? Be a little bit more specific there. Yeah.
Mateo: That. Okay. That's very helpful.
Irma: Yeah. Because it's just why they were wealthy. Well who? And what? So he's making this big claim there, right, the subclaim that his grandmother- Well, how would you define “they”? How would you change that word?
Mateo: I would change it to be the reason as to why [2-3 seconds.] Douglass' master was wealthy.
Irma: Ok. And then why would that make someone- why would that make the audience upset?
Mateo: Because he had been giving credit all to his grandmother for the master's work.
Irma: Yeah, exactly. So that could really cause anger. So it's just, you see that, it's just being specific. Who are you talking about when you say "they?" And um giving a little bit more details. [Irma continues speaking.]
Irma opens this section of the session by noting a comment from the teacher and asking Mateo if he would like to explore why the teacher made the comment that his writing was vague in this part of his paper. As Irma listens, Mateo silently reads his paper to see what the teacher might have been indicating. With this opening, Irma positions herself to work with the student to respond to the teacher’s feedback. In this regard, she makes space for both of them to listen and speak as they engage in this work. Irma then listens to Mateo’s discussion of why his writing might be vague and then speaks to direct him to a specific word, they, that seems central in clarifying his meaning. As Irma and Mateo discuss this, he remarks that the comment is helpful, and Irma explains why but shifts from that explanation to again inviting him to speak by asking him how he would define they. She listens as he responds and affirms his explanation, thereby affirming that he can address the revision comments as a writer. Here, I would say that Irma is hosting Mateo’s work as an academic writer as she listens to him invent and revise in response to the teacher’s request for more explicitness in his writing. Although the work is in accommodating to the academic norms of writing in this course, Mateo seems to engage that work productively and with a sense of being listened to as a writer.
Both Irma and Mateo seem to use silence “to think through a problem” and to “reflect on what the rhetor or audience is saying and thereby invite understanding” (Glenn 284). Irma is silent as Mateo reads the section they are working on and starts to think through the teacher’s comment. She also listens to Mateo’s silence, his long pauses, during his talking about this section of writing. This series of two to five seconds of silence on the part of both Mateo and Irma creates space for writing and for sharing perceptions about what the teacher might be saying about Mateo’s draft. As Glenn also suggests silence can be a form of sharing, “sharing perceptions, understandings and power” whereby participants sharing silence “embody new ways to challenge and resist domination—and, when necessary, discipline.” (Glenn 284). While I offer this interpretation tentatively, I see Irma’s listening and Irma and Mateo’s shared silence here as having a rhetorical impact in the way they engaged with the teacher’s feedback as subject to interpretation and response as opposed to, for example, mistakes that Mateo needed to correct. In this way, they seem to take a small step away from the haunting of remediation, in this case writing as being disciplined, and step toward writing as sense making with attention to both the writer’s and the audience’s interpretations. In this way, I also see it as a small moment of shared responsibility of navigating writing in the academy.
While this excerpt and the study itself is only a glimpse at Irma’s experience of listening as a tutor and Mateo’s experience writing at a university, this glimpse helps me to see how a blend of community and academy listening that tutors such as Irma deploy can begin to support students who are haunted by remediation to claim a writerly identity. Such listening also suggests possibilities for writing centers to be “best positioned to truly serve the underserved when their conception of liberation is expanded to realize students possess an understanding of who they are as writers and how this relationship has been shaped (for better or worse) by the academy” (Martinez 60) as well as how writing center tutors and directors can serve such students when they “listen to, learn from, make space for, and perhaps even assist students in the rebuilding of a writerly identity” (Martinez 56). Attending to the kinds of listening described in this study calls us to listen to our own listening as a means to understand who we are as tutors, teachers, and directors and also to who we might become. It also calls on us to reckon with what our listening offers or denies others, especially those seeking belonging in the academy.
In that regard, this study is largely about listening to tutor listening, but it also suggests implications for attending to our own listening whether we work as a tutor, director, or staff person in a writing center or fellow program. It is about taking responsibility for our listening not with the assumption that listening will always be smooth or that listening will always lead to understanding, to our adding to our knowledge. Instead, we engage the responsibility of learning to recognize when our listening also tells us what we don’t know or haven’t experienced and how we can resist the colonizing tendency to see listening as a way to capture that knowledge, that experience. And, from there, we seek ways that we can either act on that listening or support others in acting on their speaking and listening, as they write and rewrite their way to a new or renewed identity.
Finally, this kind of attention to listening is one response or addition to the existing calls and practices for writing centers to take responsibility for reckoning with the ways the experiences of students who are othered by race and community belonging are haunted as writers. For tutors, engaging this responsibility through or with listening can mean that they listen as Irma does, with attention to both the academy and to the community—their own communities and those of the students they work with. For some tutors, this will mean reckoning with the haunting of their writing, their uses of language and literacy; while for other tutors, such as those who identify as white, this will mean interrogating the privileged positions from which they write, including considering how their community listening may uphold dominant practices and how they might listen otherwise to challenge such practices. Such a blend of listening can be incorporated into the kind of reflection and work with portfolios that García’s calls for and, in particular, being listening, as Lipari conceptualizes it, can help tutors to attend to what they know and hear but also what they don’t know or experience and therefore have difficulty hearing. For directors, engaging this responsibility of being listening means we can do much of the same work as tutors while we also listen to those tutors and to the sounds of our centers. Depending on how directors are positioned, such listening may help them hear how tutors and students from communities similar to their own are navigating their way through and into the academy and where they may be able to offer support, recognition, or guidance. For other directors, this may mean hearing how we cannot arrive at a socially just writing center solely by acknowledging our whiteness without ongoing listening to the legacy of whiteness in the academy and the haunting of literacy in the writing center. In this regard we commit to listening when it’s smooth and also listening when there’s friction as we listen and listen again to tutors and students such as Irma and Mateo.
acknowledgements
Thank you to Romeo García and Anna Sicari, for your work as editors of this special issue. Thank you also to Jenn Fishman, Jeff Ringer, and Kuhio Walters for your feedback and for your willingness to listen to me as a writer and writing researcher. I am grateful to the tutors who participated in the study described here and to those tutors and students I have worked with over the years who have taught me a great deal about listening.
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