Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 2 (2022)
Developing an Antiracist, Culturally Responsive Graduate Mentoring Process through Critical Reflection
Erica Cirillo-McCarthy
Middle Tennessee State University
Erica.Cirillo-McCarthy@mtsu.edu
Abstract
Antiracist writing centers work towards inclusivity, and thus resist and transgress narratives that limit who can tutor and who can serve in leadership roles in the writing center (Barron and Grimm; Condon; Aikens). However, the responsibilities of writing center administrators (WCAs) do not end with simply hiring a more representative and inclusive staff. In order to increase equity and inclusion in the field of writing center studies, WCAs need to disrupt the traditional mentoring that happens in writing centers and move towards a deeper consideration of racialized experiences in graduate students who staff writing centers. This article weaves together theories of mentoring that are grounded in culturally specific ways of knowing (Alaoui and Calafell; Ribero and Arellano) with narratives from BIPOC graduate students in the writing center (Burrows; Epps-Robertson; Faison and Treviño; Martinez). The author develops a process of critical reflection driven by Asao Inoue’s elements of white habitus to help identify and excavate the ways her current mentoring practices serve to reproduce the status quo, and then the author moves themselves through this reflective process for readers. Ultimately, the author develops a set of antiracist, culturally responsive mentoring elements informed by BIPOC graduate students’ experience to replace the elements of white habitus in her practice. By building a culturally responsive mentoring program that centers BIOPC graduate students’ embodied experiences, all graduate mentees benefit (Faison and Treviño). WCAs who are committed to access and equity in writing center studies and who mentor historically oppressed graduate tutors will find this article useful in building a culturally responsive mentoring process.
Writing center studies has recently begun to examine the importance of graduate tutor mentoring in the writing center, particularly as it relates to historically oppressed students in predominantly white institutions (PWIs) (Bell; Epps-Robertson; Singh-Corcoran). As a White writing center administrator (WCA) committed to antiracist writing center practices, I have been critical of my own practices and have worked to uncover ways I reproduce oppressive and exclusionary academic practices. For example, I have shifted the curriculum of my tutoring pedagogy course to center antiracist writing center scholars; I have collaborated with antiracist reflection groups within my department and at the institutional level to identify institutional and program-level policies that are inherently racist, whether implicitly or explicitly, and to generate replacement policies. But until now, I have not examined my mentoring practices of students who work in the writing center. According to the 2018-2019 Writing Center Research survey, 68% of writing centers employ graduate students. Like many writing centers, the one I direct employs graduate student tutors and provides leadership opportunities that come with a range of responsibilities and time commitments. I also teach graduate courses and serve on thesis and dissertation committees. Despite these high-stakes and important interactions with graduate students, my approach to building and sustaining a mindful mentoring practice has lacked theoretical grounding. Further, I have not approached mentoring in a reflective way; nor have I developed a way to measure the efficacy of my mentorship. I just keep doing the same ad hoc mentoring semester after semester. This mindless approach to mentoring could further marginalize graduate tutors, especially those who identify as BIPOC, because it avoids the culturally informed ways in which they engage with the world and instead reproduces the status quo (Figueroa and Rodriguez 28).
In 2006, Victor Villanueva invited the field of writing center studies to name the racism embedded in writing center practices; since then, writing center studies scholars have begun to excavate the ways racist gatekeeping and the status quo is reproduced through writing center practices, e.g., hiring and tutoring practices, tutor training, and outreach (Condon; Geller et al.; Greenfield and Rowan; Aiken; Dees et al). Each of these areas needs to be examined both separately and as part of a set of discursive practices so that the work of decentering whiteness can begin. Wonderful Faison and Anna Treviño posit that writing centers can support students best after centering marginalized embodied experiences in all their practices; however, before writing centers can do that, WCAs need to recognize their own “complicity within the colonial functioning of the academy, to reflect on these colonial tendencies, and to build resistance and space with underserved students through coalitional practices” (Martinez, “Alejandra”). Writing centers enact what Asao Inoue identifies as white habitus precisely because “they exist in and because of white educational institutions, exist because of predominantly white academic disciplinary histories and theories.” Inoue compels writing centers to investigate the ways in which they enact white habitus, and to uncover, name, and transgress their oppressive practices.
Writing centers have traditionally been predominantly white spaces. Sarah Banschbach Valles, Rebecca Day Babcock, and Karen Keaton Jackson’s 2014 writing center survey research found that WCAs overwhelmingly identify as White (91%), straight (93%) and monolingual (97%). They argue that WCAs can increase access and inclusion in the field by explicitly and mindfully inviting BIPOC students to work in the writing center and consider it for a career, and access to graduate student assistantships makes that easy. However, graduate faculty and WCAs who mentor graduate students in the writing center often mentor the same way they were mentored. All types of mentoring are raced because of our inherent system of reproduction in the academy. We want to mentor folks like us, and that often includes choosing mentees who are the same gender and same race as ourselves, thereby reproducing whiteness in the academy (Blackwell; Figueroa and Rodriguez). Mary Jo Hinsdale writes, “Traditional concepts of mentoring do not recognize the deep and abiding tensions that marginalized students might feel in the university” (xiv). Unexamined mentoring can lead to “reproducing the logic of white supremacy in mentoring models” (Madden 7). I seek to disrupt that reproduction by first critiquing and reflecting on the racialized way I mentor. I examine how my mentoring as a White woman administrator reproduces narratives that continue to center whiteness and reproduce limiting institutional hierarchies. More importantly, I want to identify strategies to resist and transgress these limitations in ways that support graduate students’ navigation of leadership and academia writ large.
I have identified this critical reflective mentoring challenge as a way to answer Rasha Diab, Beth Godbee, Thomas Ferrell, and Neil Simpkins’ call to make commitments to racial justice actionable. Antiracist writing centers work towards inclusivity, and thus resist and transgress narratives that limit who can tutor and who can serve in leadership roles in the writing center (Barron and Grimm; Condon; Aikens). However, the responsibilities of WCAs do not end with simply hiring a more representative and inclusive staff; in particular, WCAs who invite BIPOC graduate tutors to serve in writing center leadership roles must also create a robust mentoring program to complement and inform leadership experience. In order to increase equity and inclusion in the field of writing center studies, WCAs need to disrupt the traditional mentoring that happens in writing centers and a move towards a deeper consideration of racialized experiences in graduate students who find themselves staffing writing centers either because they were actively recruited, or they are working off part of their graduate program and assistantship responsibilities.
Before this project, I tended to conflate advising and mentoring when I engaged with graduate students. James E. Blackwell defines mentoring as a process wherein a mentor “counsels, instructs, and guides” growth and development in a mentee (9). Allan Schnaiberg argues that “[m]entors can help bridge the gap between the formal requirements and expectations of graduate programs,” showing graduate students how “to accumulate more emotional and social capital to enable them to shape their own careers'' (40). One way to distinguish between advising and mentoring is to categorize mentoring into two behaviors: academic and psychosocial (Kram). Sharon Fries Britt and Jeanette Snider argue that academic support often focuses on the professional aspect of graduate life, whereas psychosocial support is more holistic, centering mentees’ “personal well-being and confidence in their academic abilities and in personal identity” (4). A robust mentoring practice blurs the academic and the psychosocial aspects of our lives because these are not discrete categories, but ones with porous edges. This stance is important because while many value the ability to compartmentalize professional and social aspects of our lives, BIPOC graduate students may find that compartmentalizing nearly impossible, especially if their research interests use a racialized lens (Anzaldúa; Burrows; Martinez “A Plea”).
In this article, I weave together theories of mentoring that are grounded in culturally specific ways of knowing (Alaoui and Calafell; Ribero and Arellano) with narratives and counterstories from BIPOC graduate students in the writing center (Burrows; Epps-Robertson; Martinez) to do the “transformative listening” Romeo García prompts writing center studies scholars to do. I then develop a process of critical reflection driven by Inoue’s elements of white habitus to help me identify and excavate the ways my current practices reinforce whiteness, and then I move myself through this reflective process for readers. Ultimately, I develop a set of antiracist, culturally-responsive mentoring elements that are informed by BIPOC graduate students’ experience, specifically those who have worked in writing centers. By building a culturally responsive mentoring program that values embodied experiences, all graduate mentees benefit. WCAs who mentor graduate tutors will find this article useful in building culturally responsive mentorship programming that centers racially-inclusive graduate tutor experiences.
Authenticity and Belonging: Listening to BIPOC Graduate Student Voices
So much of a graduate program is about reproducing the status quo but focusing solely on the act of reproduction elides the racist element in this act: that we are in fact reproducing a White way of being in the academy. Graduate students of color are underrepresented because of deeply rooted systemic racism in the academy. According to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Survey of Earned Doctorates, in 2019, 5.5% of doctorates are earned by Black or African American students and 5.1% by Latino students. BIPOC graduate students and writing center tutors have begun to share their lived experience in graduate school, and almost every recounting of experience ends with a call for white WCAs and program administrators to listen to their stories (Burrows; Faison and Treviño; Green). One pattern that emerges in these lived graduate student experiences is the concept of belonging, namely the relationship belonging has to their ability to be their authentic selves in graduate school. Aja Martinez explains how this happens: “As a practice, unquestioned Euro-Western-centric curricula, pedagogy, and program administration actively chip and strip away writerly identity from Chicanx students” (“Alejandra”). If we pay close attention to other graduate students’ narratives, we can see patterns on centering authenticity (Inoue; Green; Lockett; Burrows). This goes beyond the concept of imposter syndrome, a feeling of inadequacy experienced by many graduate students regardless of positionality. The writing center can serve as a place where students learn how to navigate belonging while maintaining authenticity, or it could be the place that reinforces the stripping away of identity.
Treviño describes her experience in a PhD program as a time of loss due to internal tensions: “I felt loss, an emptiness caused by the disconnect between my identity and my surroundings, as well as facing the reality of how much of myself, of my ties to family and heritage I gave up to be here; I betrayed myself, and it disgusted me” (Faison and Treviño). Candace Epps-Robertson writes of her experience with belonging and authenticity in graduate school:
I remember sitting on the floor, looking out the window at the snow piled up past the tires of my car and asking myself: How am I going to find my way? How will I find a path and a place in academia? I’d entered a world that felt so different to me, a Black woman from the South, a wife, and mother. At that moment, I didn’t see how I’d ever feel comfortable as a scholar in the ivory tower because my ways of knowing, of problem solving, and of doing, seemed incompatible with academia. (“Writing with your Family”)
Epps-Robertson experiences the institution as unwelcoming and even hostile to her authentic self. None of her intersectional identities—Black woman, Southerner, Wife, Mother—has an established space in the academy. Treviño notes the sacrifice of navigating through academia as a BIPOC graduate student. Their embodied experiences come up against what Sara Ahmed calls “institutional walls'' that serve to exclude and reproduce the status quo. Pushing back against these institutional walls is emotionally and mentally exhausting for BIPOC in the academy and, as many have written, a never-ending process (Ahmed, On Being Included, 174). People in power positions are invested in not seeing the walls BIPOC graduate students encounter because not seeing them maintains the status quo (Denny; Ahmed, “Feminism and Fragility”). In their own words, BIPOC graduate students have detailed their experiences in graduate programs and writing centers that make these institutional walls visible for those of us who cannot see them; more importantly, their narratives can inform a culturally responsive mentoring practice that can lead to a more authentic graduate experience.
Issues of belonging and authenticity tend to manifest in graduate student writing expectations and thus in writing center work and graduate writing assessment. Cedric Burrows argues that there is never an “acceptable form of blackness” that will grant belonging and acceptance in academia. Burrows names the writing center as a place and a practice that reinforces this concept. He describes his encounter with a White writing center tutor and the racialized linguistic assumptions the tutor brought with them into the tutoring session, an experience that sent Burrows looking for writing support outside of the writing center. As it relates to oppressive linguistic practices, Laura Greenfield claims that the persistent myth that argues a mastery of Standard Academic English (SAE) conveys a certain sense of belonging, acceptance, and success on BIPOC and multilingual students needs to be dismissed. Graduate students are repeatedly told that they do not write well or that they are not writing academic discourse, as if they are avoiding it on purpose and can flip a switch. However, as Burrows details, the tax he and Black students pay is due to inferences based on skin color, not on any mastery or perceived lack thereof of SAE. These linguistic institutional walls can seem insurmountable for some graduate students, mainly because the problem does not lie within them or their writing, but instead in those who reproduce the myth of SAE through implicitly racist evaluation processes and policies.
Effective mentoring can have a lasting effect on a BIPOC graduate student’s career path, but effective mentorship can also reverberate throughout the field. Ana Ribiero and Sonia Arellano argue that developing more culturally responsive mentoring is foundational to decolonizing rhetoric and composition (335). They guide readers through their own experiences in both vertical and horizontal mentoring, identifying key elements of successful mentoring WCAs can engage with, starting with a broader definition of mentoring that includes or even centers kinship, what they call “comadrismo” (Ribiero and Arellano). They also center empathy in their supportive practice and specify actionable empathy: “the empathy of a comadre should not be understood as passive inaction. Empathy comes with the urgency to persevere, not through assimilation but through strategies that sustain the soul” (Ribiero and Arellano 348). They ask readers to consider how care and support can be networked, including but not limited to digital/live and in formal/informal spaces, academic and non-academic, and of course those in-between spaces. Thinking expansively about networks and creatively about connecting mentees to these networks leads to horizontal mentoring among graduate students (Van Haitsma and Ceraso), which can affect belonging and encourage authenticity. Finally, mentoring is necessary, Schnaiberg argues, because the process helps prepare students for the “diffused demands of the professional (or activist) marketplace” (40). Well-prepared and well-supported graduate students stay in the field, so in some ways mentoring is a part of sustaining the field.
Critical Reflection
I am grateful for the scholars of color who have written about their experiences as graduate students and as writing tutors and for those who share their experience at conferences (Green; Epps-Robertson; Burrows; Martinez). I draw upon their stories to help me cultivate a space where they feel a sense of belonging rather than a space, like so many others on campus, that serves to exclude them and their lived experiences. But to start this process, I have to critically reflect on my own practices in order to identify those that reproduce and remake the writing center as an exclusionary space. Critical reflection also starts the process of my own learning, especially in my role as a White WCA who mentors graduate students in the writing center. Alexandria Lockett encourages WCAs to endeavor “to understand the potential of [the writing center] as a route to success or detour to failure, depending on who runs it and the extent to which that director recognizes and leverages the power of the space.” Lockett’s call for WCAs to grapple with the “power of the space” begins with a process rooted in recursive and iterative reflective practice. In order to “understand and recognize,” WCAs need to cultivate a reflective practice. Frankie Condon details the reflective process necessary for antiracist work:
At the same time, whites who come to through desire or out of necessity to anti-racism must decenter, must recognize and account in some public way for the partiality of our perceptions, our experiences, our knowledge--those stories we tell about ourselves and others. Anti-racism work necessitates both inward or private reflection aimed at personal transformation and an outward, public turn that is at once both humbled and determined and is aimed at productive engagement in collective and institutional transformation. (22)
This article is in some ways a detailed account of my own critical reflective practice as a White WCA who seeks to disrupt limiting practices in order to build new inclusive practices. It also serves as my own “public turn” that invites others in the field to do similar work in their own institutional and personal contexts.
Critical reflection is an ongoing and iterative process that is always framed through the lens of social justice and equity, and the role we play in our institutions (Larrivee, “Transforming”). Further, “[a]cknowledging that classroom and school practices cannot be separated from the larger social and political realities, critically reflective teachers strive to become fully conscious of the range of consequences of their actions” (Larrivee, “Development” 343). Critical reflection should help practitioners in “remaining open to viewpoints different from their own, letting go of the need to be right, and acknowledging their own limiting assumptions'' (Larrivee, “Development” 346). Larrivee distinguishes the different levels of reflection, starting with pre-reflection, then surface reflection, moving to pedagogical reflection, and finally critical reflection, where we move past just thinking about how something works in the classroom, but also how it functions outside the classroom. Critical reflection asks us to expand our situational awareness to include other contexts and to probe our assumptions and underlying ideologies. Finally, it asks us to consider what is just in our actions and identify where we can be more actionably committed to social justice.
Critical reflection is a starting point for developing a theory of mentoring that is socially just, culturally responsive, iterative, and embodied, and as such can be useful to White WCAs who want to do the work but don’t know how to begin. You might ask: But won’t this just be an internal echo chamber? How do I hold myself accountable so that I engage in critical reflection? While Larrivee offers an effective heuristic practitioners can use to assess their level of reflection, I pivot to Inoue’s four elements of a white racial habitus to help prompt critical reflection on my mentoring of graduate students in the writing center. Inoue’s four elements include: Hyperindividualism; Individualized, Rational, Controlled Self; Rule-Governed, Contractual Relationships; and Clarity, Order, and Control. Inoue argues that these elements are not inherently negative or problematic on their own, but they are not race neutral. When woven into a mentoring process, they reinforce a White standard, a White way of mentoring and inculcation into the field and academia. However, if we come to understand the elements of white habitus in our mentoring processes, critique them, excavate them and replace them, we can “help students navigate the social and racialized structures of judgement that determine them,” especially at the graduate level (Inoue). For the rest of this section, I model the way I use Inoue’s elements of white habitus to prompt critical reflection on how I’ve approached mentoring; afterward, I develop a new set of antiracist and culturally responsive mentoring elements and show how they can manifest in mentoring practices.
Inoue lists hyperindividualism as the first element of a white habitus. As a WCA who works closely with graduate students tutoring in the writing center, I think about this element when working with dissertating students. I am so careful to not take control of the text that I stay far away, too far, farther than I would prefer. But I do so because this deeply embedded value informs so much of my interactions. It might also be a legacy of minimalist tutoring that is so often emphasized in tutor training. I reflect and think that I ask students to do so much on their own, but to what end? And I think about how hard that is for any graduate student with whom I work who is multilingual, multidialectical, or first generation.
Being explicit about the graduate school gatekeeping that is intentionally obscured and coded is how we help students develop ways to negotiate academia and authenticity. I had to reflect on what I was holding behind my back when working with dissertating writers, and how that was informed by white habitus and hyperindividualism specifically. I had to be honest that I was doing that, and that maybe I tried to justify it in some ways, e.g., this is the only way they can become independent writers. Instead, I should approach dissertation and thesis writing from a more collaborative stance, making transparent the moves they are expected to make in their writing to progress through evaluations and checkpoints, such as qualifying exams, preliminary exams, grant and proposal writing, and thesis/dissertation writing. At the same time, I need to explicitly discuss the linguistic racism that undergirds these evaluations and checkpoints with graduate mentees. Just as importantly, I need to talk about the ways in which an emphasis on hyperindividualism obscures the collaborative and social nature of writing and research.
Hyperindividualism also obscures the ways in which oppressive linguistic practices, such as blind adherence to SAE in graduate student writing, contribute to the linguistic invisible walls graduate students face (Inoue). For too long, the concept of SAE has been defined as something an individual must master in order to be perceived as legitimate, as respectable, as part of the group. But as Greenfield gracefully points out, this is a myth—or lie that we tell ourselves and our students—perpetrated to maintain the status quo. Using hyperindividualism to prompt my critical reflection, I realize that I’m not explicit with my mentees about oppressive linguistic practices. Nor do I offer ways to navigate these languaging practices and maintain a sense of authenticity, to understand, acknowledge, and master SAE while finding ways to disrupt oppressive language practices, many of which are reproduced by writing centers (Young; Greene; Burrows). As Shannon Madden argues, “[w]e must recognize how certain ways of knowing are privileged in the academy over others and consider what impact that privileging has on writers from marginalized identity groups, as well as the future of knowledge across fields” (33). Part of the SAE lie is that mastery of SAE directly results in more opportunities, i.e., students will sound more professional, be more respected, and thus have more opportunities. Acknowledging this part of the SAE lie is important because it brings into view the institutional wall that these oppressive linguistic practices uphold, but further, it helps me see how much I’ve participated in maintaining the wall. In the past, I did not talk about oppressive linguistic practices, and I ignored invitations to discuss the violence these practices can have on multidialectical and multilingual graduate students. I did not push back hard enough on departmental dissertation rubrics that focused on SAE, and I could have more quickly and strategically developed coalitions in my department that could have overcome my concerns of being labeled the antiracist (untenured) contrarian who just wants to disrupt. But this is exactly where hyperindividualism thrives and is reproduced. Hyperindividualism justifies the centering of the self rather than fostering a complex understanding of power, privilege, and coalition.
The next step is to figure out how to chip away at the SAE wall, and, more importantly, how to show graduate students how to strategize a way to chip, bit by bit, calling attention to the wall and bringing on more people to help chip away. I can continue to introduce them to antiracist authors and invite them to workshops and sessions on oppressive linguistic practices. I can hold discussions on the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” and subsequent “Statement on White Language Supremacy,” detailing the ways the field publicly grapples with its history of linguistic oppression and how it defines its future. At the same time, however, I need to hold space for graduate students to talk about the realities of exclusion and inequity and listen to them. I can chip at the wall by leveraging my position as a White woman to challenge departmental assumptions about SAE and its problematic association with “good” writing. I recently pushed back against an initiative that was grounded in oppressive linguistic practices, and one of my colleagues asked me if I was calling them racist because of the way they evaluate grammar. I didn’t have a good answer and stumbled a bit in my response. While I realize the imperative to develop effective ways to speak back against policies that support the status quo (and overcome fear of retribution), I was grateful that I had a coalition of antiracist faculty alongside me helping with this discussion, underscoring the fact that coalitioning is one antidote to hyperindividualism.
Inoue’s second element of white habitus is Individualized, Rational, Controlled Self, which, for the purposes of this article, I collapse this with his final element, Clarity, Order, and Control. These elements of white habitus devalue support systems and therefore dissuade graduate students from developing networks of support. When we combine the isolation typically experienced by graduate students with the message that graduate students should repress their emotions and focus on the rational and logical, the institutional wall strengthens. In her critical reflection on her time as a graduate student working in the writing center, Treviño argues that performing whiteness means performing a lack of emotion so that “people would not have to see my color” (Faison and Treviño). I think about my actions that have been informed by this element of white habitus. I wonder if my mentoring practices help to create a space where graduate students can express their emotion, but just as importantly, if I am helping them theorize that emotion and thereby acknowledging it as a valid form of meaning-making in the academy (Jaggar). I work to disabuse students of the notion that research can be free of bias and instead impress upon them that narrative, emotion, and experience are all valid forms of communication and evidence. This means supporting graduate students, specifically those who conduct research that centers embodied experiences, navigate processes such as IRB applications and grant proposals. But I can do more. I need to have explicit discussions on how I value emotions—as a researcher, an administrator, a human—and how I understand that taking on a graduate degree is an embodied experience, more so if family comes along. Specifically, I could show them how administrators can use emotions to identify new rhetorical strategies that push back on racist policies in the institution. Reflecting on this element of white habitus and how it manifests in my mentoring, I am learning how to show, through words and actions, that I value developing a network of support and more than that, I will help graduate students in the writing center cultivate that network of support that is contextualized to their individual needs.
Inoue’s third element of white habitus is “Rule-governed, contractual relationships that value rules and fairness while ignoring interconnectivity and collaborative support and problem solving.” After reading Inoue’s description of this element, I have identified it as the driving element that prevents me from rhetorically listening, from learning about my graduate students’ lives, or from sharing mine with them because really listening and sharing demands a certain closeness for which I was not ready. When I conducted a directed reading last year on zoom, there was not one zoom meeting where I shared my space. I always used a background filter so that no one could see my home. Even in my graduate seminar, students saw me floating in space or teaching from a virtual beach once a week for 16 weeks. Reflecting on this, I realize I do it because I am performing a type of professionalism that I thought was necessary in my role. It is that performance of professionalism that prevents me from being vulnerable, to show my home, my workspace right next to my messy bed. For some reason, I felt that showing my home would automatically revise our “contractual relationship” between professor and student. I wonder now what message this sends to graduate students. Am I fostering an interconnection in this way, or am I precluding any type of relationship other than a formal, contractual one? I wonder if I engage in conversations that talk about socially-oriented values enough and invite graduate students into these discussions, showing them that their voice has value and their experience can contribute to collaborative knowledge-making. Overall, can I be more intentionally invitational?
I’ve recently joined an antiracist reflection group in my English department and in that context, I have conversations with graduate students about these socially-orientated values, like antiracist writing assessment and fair and just graduate program policies. Many graduate program policies are not just precisely because they were created and exist for a graduate student body from the past. Enacting change must happen on two levels: at the policy level where faculty change policies that are exclusive in nature and uphold practices that exist to exclude; and in our mentoring of historically marginalized and oppressed graduate students in ways that support their authentic successful selves. Doing so may help them graduate and become faculty members who find meaning in their work but also ones who know how to cultivate new networks to sustain them throughout their career.
Now that I’ve used Inoue’s elements of white habitus to generate critical reflection and consider how I reproduce whiteness in my mentoring practices, I can begin to replace these elements with new ones that are informed by BIPOC graduate students’ narratives about their experiences.
Elements of Antiracist, Culturally Responsive Mentoring
Element One: Transparency about “Institutional Walls”
Acknowledging that writing centers can and often do reproduce oppressive language practices and, for the purpose of this text, restrictive and limiting graduate student experiences, is the first part of antiracist work and developing a mentoring process that is culturally responsive. Mentors who seek to do disruptive antiracist work must acknowledge the inequities graduate programs reproduce in conversations with their mentees, but also “teach the structures, academic norms, and power dynamics they wish to disrupt. How are mentors to promote egalitarian relationships with students, given the fact that a protégé may enter the relationship with guardedness, already associating the mentor with the exclusionary systems and history of higher education?” (Hinsdale 109). Being transparent with BIPOC graduate students about the role writing centers have traditionally played in exclusionary linguistic practices is not easy, but it is necessary. Many of them already know it and talking through this could establish trust between White WCAs and BIPOC graduate students. However, it is just as important for WCAs to let graduate students take the lead in these conversations in order to avoid reproducing hierarchies of power.
White WCAs also need to provide a generative space for brainstorming strategies for navigating and ultimately changing this reality. It’s not enough to just acknowledge oppressive linguistic practices; we can respond to Neisha-Anne Green’s call for accomplices and identify ways to dismantle the linguistic institutional walls' with BIPOC graduate students, all the while being mindful to protect mentees from retaliation or retribution. WCAs can start keeping a list of strategies that work to not only disrupt and interrupt the status quo, but also strategies that sustain BIPOC graduate students. We have to move beyond what works for White WCAs, because as all of these scholars have pointed out, that does not always work for BIPOC graduate students. But developing a keen eye and recording ways in which students develop strategies will help when encountering new students looking for ideas. Doing so moves us beyond just acknowledgement towards a deeper engagement with the actionable empathy Ribero and Arellano suggest.
Element Two: Support for Emotion and Embodied Experiences
The second element centers emotional support. It values embodied knowledge and is explicit about it. Emotions are part of our embodied experience because we physically feel emotions, but we have been taught that they have no place in academia. This barring of emotions in the academy becomes part of the institutional walls some BIPOC graduate students face, devaluing not only their experience as historically oppressed bodies in PWIs, but also any research that seeks to examine embodied experiences, such as anything critical of race, gender, or class. Epps-Robertson remarked that her mentors practiced active listening and respected what she calls her “local knowledge.” All of this supported her negotiation through the dissertation writing process. Recognizing, and in some cases helping graduate students recognize their own “local knowledge,” can be powerful for BIPOC graduate students, especially if their research centers race. I need to mindfully invite graduate students to express their emotions, and to see themselves as embodied researchers who respond to research from their own experiences. I can encourage them to see teaching and writing center work as embodied emotional work by sharing my own values, such as collaboration, transparency, and flexibility. It is important for me to model ways to sustain networks of care by talking about my own network—how I developed it and how I sustain it—while encouraging them to create horizontal networks to complement vertical ones. In this way, my mentoring process addresses the important and sensitive intersections of academic and psychosocial aspects of graduate student life.
Emotional support and deeper engagement with embodied experiences means discussing and reframing the concept of work-life balance. I remember in my graduate program hearing stories of a faculty member who slept in her office the entire six months before she went up for tenure. We would repeat this peculiar myth to each other, shocked and impressed and unsure of our own commitment to a career that would demand that much. Now that I am on the tenure-track myself, I see how ridiculous this all was and how the discussions around this faculty member avoided talking about the challenge women and marginalized scholars face in developing and sustaining a work-life balance. But talking about the challenges and myths fosters kinship, a practice and value I saw reverberating throughout BIPOC graduate students’ narratives (Burrows; Ribero and Arellano). Kinship can disrupt the limiting binaries we encounter in our relationships in higher education, including limitations on the mentor/mentee relationship which tend to reinforce racist and inclusive practices, boxing out BIPOC graduate students who will then choose a different path. And this is a loss for the field of writing center studies. I’m not saying that by shifting writing center studies to a more culturally responsive place for BIPOC graduate students will result in more of them choosing to study and work in writing centers. But even if a shift in our mentoring leads to more BIPOC graduate students feeling a sense of belonging in the academy, then this work is worth it.
Element Three: Mutual and Reciprocal Sharing of Lives
The third and final theme centers the interpersonal. I am not a very open person. In my role as a WCA, I have multiple stakeholders with whom I interact. I suspect that informs my more private nature because it’s easier to share oneself at the same level across the board. But not all stakeholders have the same experience, and some may benefit from a deeper, more intentional relationship, especially as it pertains to cultivating kinship and empathy. But it also implies a mindful consideration of the spaces in which mentoring happens. This particular point is salient in developing an antiracist, culturally responsive theory of mentoring, because if we can identify where mentoring happens, we can identify both the affordances and limitations of these spaces. How does a relationship between mentor and mentee change when meetings happen outside of the office space? What does it look like when we open up our spaces and invite the practice of mentoring in, and how does that change mentoring? Further, looking at the spaces we inhabit when we mentor helps us to better identify and then examine the power dynamics between mentor and mentee. This also helps us identify other networks, formal and informal, within the academy and without, into which we can invite mentees.
I draw upon Christina Cedillo and Phil Bratta’s concept of “positionality stories” to help tease out this important element. The authors argue that it is not enough just to share my academic experience with graduate mentees; by doing so uncritically, I would miss a chance for my story to “provide students with opportunities to move away from self-impressions of deficit that arise from assumptions that instructors are “naturally assimilated into educational cultures” (Cedillo and Bratta 216). Instead, the authors argue that positionality stories are open invitations for students to understand how they can “confront and contest often unquestioned norms” about academia and their place in it (Cedillo and Bratta 216). So when I share my experience as a first-generation student and daughter of a working-class immigrant, I also want to share with mentees what institutional walls I encountered, even though they may be very different from the institutional walls they encounter, and more importantly, the strategies in which I engaged to scratch and chip away at the wall. I also want to be honest and talk about how I too felt I had to sacrifice my family values in order to succeed in graduate school when I was surrounded by colleagues who were second- or third-generation academics or who had already earned degrees at much better schools than I attended. I do this while acknowledging my particular positionality that also allowed me to move through graduate school without coming up against racialized walls because I am White. By doing so, I attempt to use my positionality story to “make space to contest whiteness, straightness, maleness, eliteness, and other dominant positions as default norms that students oftentimes must strive to emulate, revealing these instead as intersecting locations of interpretation among many” (Cedillo and Bratta 220). Disrupting what constitutes the norm in graduate school allows for a broader conception of who belongs and who succeeds in graduate school and writing centers.
Conclusion
Antiracist, culturally informed mentoring is emotional and embodied. It takes time, something that not every WCA has. It bestows a responsibility on WCAs to be vulnerable and open to uncomfortable discussions and situations. It places even more stress on WCAs in vulnerable, precarious, and overworked/underpaid roles. Nevertheless, mentoring BIPOC graduate students still needs to be done, and given the statistics, will likely be done by White WCAs. Because of this reality, White WCAs have a responsibility to examine their mentoring practice through critical reflection and to pay close attention to the way it is racialized. But critical reflection can be used to uncover white habitus that informs other writing center practices, including hiring, tutor training, and campus outreach; therefore, my next step is to engage in the process and examine my other administrative and pedagogical practices, such as the ways I mentor undergraduate tutors, with the hope that I will develop new processes and practices that are guided by inclusive, antiracist values. My goal is to identify a wide variety of context-specific strategies that speak back to individual objections to antiracist work and chip away at institutional walls. Ultimately, culturally responsive mentoring is ongoing and actionable. It is not something that you can clock out on and leave the mentees on their own. It is a commitment to something larger, like antiracism, like institutional change; but it is also about the interpersonal relationships for which writing centers, by the nature of their practices, exist.
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