Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 3 (2022)
Disrupting the Narrative: Cross-National Consultants in a U.S. Graduate Writers’ Studio
Yvonne R. Lee
Lehigh University
yrl219@lehigh.edu
Sinenhlanhla Zungu
Lehigh University
siz517@lehigh.edu
Varun Joseph Andrews
Lehigh University
vaa219@alum.lehigh.edu
Abstract
Much scholarship on working with multilingual writers at the undergraduate and graduate levels has been published in Writing Center scholarship. However, there is a dearth in literature regarding how the whiteness that haunts writing center spaces through the idealization of standard U.S. English may affect the experiences of members of minoritized communities (e.g., people of color, international students, non-native English speakers) working in the context of the writing center. This article attempts to fill space in that gap. We approached this project with the belief that writing center spaces can choose to either perpetuate whiteness as the global standard, or they can challenge such a colonial perspective. We believe that writing centers are the ideal spaces for such interrogations to begin. Thus, in this article, we present a conversation between one white, U.S.-born, monolingual writing center director and two writing consultants who are people of color, polylingual, and international, in an effort to inspire others to engage in similar reflexive practices. We believe our stories are most valuable when presented from our personal perspectives. Therefore, we utilize an autoethnographic approach, combining our autobiographical perspectives with research, as we begin to develop a theory of practice for our own space. Our goal is that what follows resonates with those for whom whiteness remains a haunt, whether they have lived in the U.S. their entire lives or have only recently arrived.
In the introduction to their edited collection, Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, Greenfield and Rowan ask the question, “How do we [the Writing Center field] persevere through the difficulty and messiness of negotiating race and racism in our writing centers?” When this question is answered, it is often through the frame of the writer who comes to our center for assistance or from the safety and distance of a theoretical perspective. In our piece, we try to turn the lens on ourselves to respond to this question, to be vulnerable and honest in our depictions of our own struggles and experiences with language being used by others and by ourselves as an identity eraser.
The impetus for this reflexive piece is to help ourselves and hopefully others grapple with understanding that the idealization of U.S. academic English language and native U.S. speakers of it can foster neo-colonialism – the colonization of a people through indirect means. The entrenched connection between English as the language of educational instruction and colonialism is already highly studied as language was one of the tools weaponized by imperialist Europeans in their subjugation of the nations they colonized (Bhattacharya 1; Viswanathan 1; Nieto 233). The process of colonization framed the acquisition of the language of the colonizers and their cultural standards as a key method for the colonized to be viewed as civilized (Fanon 17; Nieto 235). Post colonization, English continues to be used by Western countries as a neocolonial tool. English continues to enjoy dominance through the contemporary framing of English as the language of globalization and as an essential skill for members of former colonies to be able to engage in economic mobility and with the global political community (Probyn 153; Majhanovich; Tupas 55). A consequence of this neo-colonial behavior is that those who are not native speakers of U.S. academic English experience an erasure, an override of their identities - a sense of what Fanon (19) describes as “absolute mutation” - in an effort to force themselves into social practices that emphasize the supremacy of a language inextricably connected with whiteness.
The use of English as a neo-colonial tool has also bulldozed its way into the academic writing space. In the neo-colonial context, academic standards emerge to meet the needs of the colonizing population, often becoming what is considered to be the “norm.” This standardization, which has now been set in place within the institution, can make it difficult to detect the barriers of policies and practices that systematically disadvantage certain groups of people, leaving these groups to be considered anomalies that require special accommodations (Nguyen et al 110). As a result, the variations in English apparent in other and non-native (NNES) English-speaking communities are blatantly invalidated, thereby causing an anonymization of their identities (Geib et al.).
In our endeavor to actively combat this neo-colonial conservatism from pervading our writing center space, we tried to tackle the question of whether our writing center should be a comfort zone or a contact zone. In order to think through this question, we used Mary Louise Pratt’s definition of contact zones as being “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 34). This allowed us space and opportunity to reflect on the ways in which our own identities make contact, clash with, and resist the hegemony of academic English. Ultimately, we want our space to be a contact zone, especially for us in our praxis as writing consultants. In order to challenge the underlying ideas and thinking behind the lionization of U.S. academic English within the writing space in a manner representative of the contact zone, we questioned how best to approach our own understandings about language considering that for even our small group, U.S. English was not our first language. We questioned how U.S. academic whiteness, and its corresponding English informed our choices and approaches to working with writers in our Graduate Writers’ Studio.
To help us navigate the complexity of these questions, we also adopted Mary Louise Pratt’s conception of the autoethnographic text, “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them” (35). In our case, this autoethnographic text is a collaboration between cross-national writing center consultants who are learning to thrive in a culture we feel does not always value the cultural tools we bring with us.
Before we proceed, it is worthwhile to spend some time defining what we mean when we use the labels “white” or “whiteness” because it appears frequently in our narratives. In this piece, when we talk about “whiteness,” we are referring to the construct scholars such as Sara Ahmed have described as “an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space” (150). As such, whiteness works as a system that continues racial discrimination by maintaining white privilege. U.S. constructs of whiteness thrive in the unchallenged normativity of cultural and social U.S. academic institutions, particularly when foreign domestics and people of color continue to be marginalized by the colonial academic encounter (Shome 366; Ahmed 149). In this way, whiteness has its power in the violent normativity of life as practiced through the privileged lens held by people who have never had their identity questioned by systems and individuals who press the importance of acclimatizing to white ideals (Shome 366; Ahmed 149). What makes this construct dangerous is that it is enforced and maintained through the quotidian and mundane tasks of life. Tasks as unremarkable as how we use language; how, even at writing centers, we promote U.S. academic English as the legitimate way of communicating.
Methodology
In order to poke at our questions, we chose to craft an autoethnography. Thus, we engaged in “research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (Ellis et al. 274). We chose this approach because we felt it allowed all of our voices to be represented truthfully, and it allowed us to open up our own writing center to highlight the effects of the behaviors and attitudes that we believe currently pervade U.S. academic spaces.
To gather and integrate our narratives, we met virtually and assigned ourselves questions to answer regarding our own thoughts and experiences in our newly formed center. After our first meeting, we continued to meet and to discuss the similarities and differences in our stories, and we once again assigned ourselves reflective writing tasks to try to drill down even farther into our experiences. By our third virtual meeting, we had started drawing connections between our experiences and the literature, and we jumped into creating the article even while we continued to reflect. Each time we met, it was more than just a writing or revising discussion. Each discussion became a contact point where we could express our frustrations and learn from one another, a kind of co-mentoring (Burrows; Tang & Andriamanalina).
Because the three of us represent a diverse community of cross-national writers, albeit a small one, and because we wanted to call attention to and provide witness to our experiences, we believed that highlighting our voices and our stories was the best way forward. Our approach was informed by ideas similar to those of Ellis and colleagues who state, “Writing personal stories thus makes ‘witnessing’ possible - the ability for participants and readers to observe and, consequently, better testify on behalf of an event, problem, or experience . . . As witnesses, autoethnographers not only work with others to validate the meaning of their pain, but also allow participants and readers to feel validated and/or better able to cope with or want to change their circumstances'' (Ellis et al. 280).
INtroductions & Deciding to work in writing centers
Yvonne: I guess I will start. Not for any other reason than this particular story does start with me since I began the writing center in which we all work.
When I was 30 years old, I was a single mother of three, and I was fleeing from an abusive boyfriend. I fled back into the welcoming arms of my working-class, White, Appalachian-area family – a people whose English included words like “warsh” and “red up” and whose sentences included non-standard phrases like, “I seen that woman.” My flight simultaneously took me back to university to earn that bachelor’s degree I had always wanted but never completed. There, my sense of self and the communication skills I developed over 10 years of waiting tables for a living and that I had gleaned from my family’s grammar didn’t quite make the grade. Pun intended. But I adapted, loving all of the reading, writing, and learning I was doing to earn my degree. I very quickly found a home working as a peer tutor in the writing center at a satellite campus populated predominantly by other white, non-traditional, domestic students. What I appreciated most about that space was how welcome I felt. Part of the reason I felt so comfortable was that I saw myself reflected in the others who worked there and in the writers who came to us for assistance.
My work there birthed my own personal mission — I wanted to create more spaces that felt welcoming to even more people.
Had that center primarily consisted of non-white, traditional, or international students, my comfort and my story would likely be quite different. Thus, I knew that if I wanted spaces that felt inviting to a more diverse student body, I needed to purposefully work to make sure those students could see reflections of themselves in the people who work there. 16 years and 3 degrees later, in the midst of a global pandemic I graduated with my PhD in Literacy, Rhetoric, and Social Practice from Kent State University, moved to a new state, and started a position as the inaugural director of a writing center devoted to serving graduate students. As expected, I needed to interview, hire, and train writing consultants. I was lucky enough to have two amazing graduate students apply. Together, we worked to build a Graduate Writers’ Studio that is multifaceted and accessible to as many students as possible.
Varun: Since I was not yet privy to the vision that Yvonne had created for the Graduate Writers’ Studio, I was apprehensive about how welcoming such a space would be for me. In most ways, I do not resemble what is considered to be the archetype of the white, middle-class American who is presumed to have a command over the English language in the way that is required for a consultant at a writing center. I have observed that people in the U.S. are generally disconcerted to find that I am fluent in English, even though it is one of my first languages and my medium of education throughout my matriculation. I would ascribe this to preconceived notions of what it means to be “Indian” based on exaggerated or false portrayals by the media. This faulty physiognomic perception of me, and its consequences, dissuaded me at first from applying as a writing consultant at a predominantly White institution (PWI).
I questioned how writers would perceive an international person of color (POC) writing consultant. My concern was whether they would be comfortable with having me as their consultant. Would they feel that I may not be able to assist them substantially with their writing needs, and hence hesitate to approach me? Would their notions of me hinder them from being receptive to the feedback that I provide? Would my linguistic styles and expressions translate well in terms of feedback? These insecurities stemmed from a place of otherness and a place of skepticism about the acceptance of my unconventionality. I also wondered if the white, U.S. professors and Writers’ Studio staff would consider me capable of providing the services that their student writers would require. I was, after all, a stranger to U.S. academic discourse. Perhaps it would be easier for a white, U.S. writer who embodied the institutionalized standards to be assimilated into the system. Perhaps my credentials, if they were deemed worthy at all, would only allow me to cater to certain needs of multilingual learners and non-native English speakers. My diffidence regarding my worth as a consultant haunted me tremendously as I contemplated applying for the position.
Thus, I can also identify with Yvonne’s need to acclimate her language to an environment that has established benchmarks that one must measure up to in order to be considered worthy of merit. Growing up in post-postcolonial India meant that I had to adapt my language to the institutionalized standards that western colonialism had left in its wake. English took precedence over my native languages and being proficient in the ideal style of English as defined by Western standards was deemed necessary to help me stand in good academic and professional stead in a still developing country. In addition, unconventional expressions in English that are influenced by the regional language forms, albeit commonplace in everyday conversation for non-native English speakers, were considered by the Western eye to be peculiar and erroneous and were used as societal markers to dismiss an individual's linguistic dexterity. Therefore, I found myself making conscious efforts to ensure that my language was unadulterated by such influences, in order to live up to the caliber that was expected of me. I saw myself in a constant struggle to try and live up to these standards and found that it was easier to conform my linguistic styles to what is considered the norm by the West. This was exacerbated by the fact that I faced a continuous conflict in identity that stemmed from the plethora of influences on my language. There was discord between the British way of English that influenced my upbringing, the U.S. style of English that was slowly, but definitely, becoming commonplace in the professional setting, and the aforementioned flavors of the language influenced by my native tongues and diverse native cultures. I resorted to settling on an ambiguous and fluid identity that best catered to the situation and the environment.
When I moved to the U.S. to pursue my graduate education, my positionality as an international POC student at a PWI made it obvious to me that my most common interactions would be with white professors and scholars. As a writer, I found myself veering toward the institutionalized, neo-colonial academic standards due to my disinclination to counter the norms, thereby allowing my language to be appropriated by my peers or allowing the “norm” to appropriate my rhetoric. Having moved to a foreign land, I considered it my duty to adapt my language to the existing climate, since that would provide me with more opportunities in both the academic and professional settings. During my academic discourse, I have had my linguistic expressions questioned and invalidated by my peers and professors on various occasions. How could I expect anything less from audiences who did not know me? Therefore, I acquiesced to using a whitewashed persona to express my rhetoric and avoid being an anomaly. Consequently, I ended up cultivating a language that was appropriated within me through neo-colonial means, that was considered by U.S academic standards as a paragon free of blemishes. However, this came at a cost - the risk of losing the authenticity in my voice and an anonymization of my already vague identity.
Whiteness has always been a constant in my life, lurking around on the edges of my subconscious and plaguing me with the need to work harder at every step of the way in order to prove my critical faculties to my peers. It is a reminder that I am an oddity and that I must strive every day to meet the standards that it has imposed upon me just so that I can affirm my worth. Language, for me, is an integral part of self-expression, a tool to assert my individual truth in situations where my existence struggles to find a voice; however, my particular form of expression is riddled with hurdles that I must constantly overcome in order to be heard and accepted by a domineering community. Perhaps if fortune had aligned itself differently, I may have conceded to the conviction that the haunt of whiteness was my cross to bear, and hence would have never persuaded myself to follow my vocation as a writing consultant.
Sinenhlanhla: Applying for the position of graduate writing consultant was an action that required great courage and the impetus of necessity for me to undertake. I do not believe that I would have applied for the position had I not needed the financial resources it would provide. Like Varun, I experienced insecurities based on stereotype threat - the fear of not being adequate and, instead, confirming the stereotypes that others might have about my abilities (Steele and Aronson 797). This stereotype threat was aroused by the full understanding that I do not hold the typical white U.S.-English-speaking identity common in most writing centers. Thus, my decision to apply revealed the victory of necessity and knowledge of my own abilities over the white supremacy-inspired fear that caused me to doubt what I am capable of.
In many ways, I can relate to Varun’s felt pressure to negotiate identity with the expectations of the environment in order to adapt to a new cultural context. It is common for minoritized people moving into a dominant culture to feel the need to assimilate and forgo the customs (linguistic and otherwise) of their culture of origin in order to gain acceptance in their new home (Rudmin). However, coming from South Africa, a country with 11 official languages, with diversity on almost every marker of social difference, what I sought was integration instead of assimilation. In many ways, in the South African context, language is intimately connected with cultural identity; Zulu people speak isiZulu, Venda people speak Tshivenda. Language is the tool through which the culture teaches and maintains its customs and worldview. To learn a language of a tribe is to learn its way of seeing and speaking about the world. This is why I’ve sought the opportunity to develop a multicultural identity within myself; learning the different languages of the cultures around me without feeling as if I have to forsake the affirming worldview taught to me through the language of my culture of origin.
Even though I feel like I have been able to integrate within myself a useful learning of a variety of languages and worldviews, whiteness as expressed through U.S. academic English has always felt like a specter rather than a space of comfort and acceptance. In my life, whiteness has presented itself as unexamined assumptions about whose culture is acceptable and whose culture should be changed rather than permitted to coexist in a respectful way. Language has been the arena on which this false casting of cultural hierarchy has taken place in my life. I’ve found myself witnessing and - at times - abetting the promotion of the language of whiteness at the expense of my own identity. For example, in academic spaces, I’ve been asked to shorten my name in order to make it easier for native speakers of English to pronounce. In a culture where being able to correctly pronounce “Dostoevsky” is a sign of being cultured, being able to pronounce “Sinenhlanhla” seems to be an awkward inconvenience. I have consented to this even while knowing the value and meaning of names in my culture. Knowing that a name is not merely a way of referencing the person in question, but that names are descriptions of blessings that remind us of our identity, purpose and capabilities.
This has been my experience with whiteness; living under the hover of a strange spirit that is reluctant to accept me neither as I am, nor as I would like to be. Instead, whiteness has often presented itself as the specter of not measuring up enough to gain acceptance and access to the resources I need in order to thrive. Whiteness has haunted me as a spirit of unworthiness. A ghost that whispers its existence at the most unexpected of times, like lunch meetings where my white U.S. colleagues have corrected me by telling me “It’s called a napkin, not a serviette” as if there is only one way to refer to something. Small innocuous moments that remind me that my success in academic, and even social, spaces is dependent on me being able to adapt and adopt a language that is not my own and refuses to be in so many ways.
I experience the language of whiteness as a reminder that I have to negotiate my identity with my environment in order to be able to be my most empowered self. I navigate academia as a working-class black woman who is foreign to the United States of America. In a predominantly white university, I am different. Even amongst black people in the U.S., my accent betrays my belonging. As any work inspired by Crenshaw would put it, the oppressed categories I inhabit in terms of income level, immigrant status, race, and gender intersect to create a confluence of marginalization. In order to thrive despite the forces of oppression intended to act as barriers to my success, I have had to learn the work of whiteness and the tools its practitioners weaponize. I have had to learn how to differentiate between my own human imperfections, and the failures I experience due to the efficacy of white imperialism, even as it is expressed through language.
The weaponization of English in the neo-colonial encounter seems obvious to me when I consider how I came to learn the language. I was taught to speak English between the ages of 5-6 by teachers in a former British colony. It was taught to me in a postcolonial context where being able to speak English with the accent of English South Africans was still seen as a sign of intelligence and worth, particularly in the academic setting. I noticed that my teachers would tell me that I “spoke so well” when I would imitate their speech patterns. I noticed that other black students who did not follow this imitation did not receive the same praise or grades. As a student navigating school in bilingual academic spaces where my home language was never either of the official ones, I became fluent in English as a system of rules for acceptance and praise more than a language I could use to understand others and feel fully understood.
Reflections on our own practices
From our conversations that began to center around the idea of language as a neo-colonial tool, we discussed how our stories and theories have impacted, or even been invisible, in the work we have done in our writing center.
Sinenhlanhla: The one benefit of negotiating with whiteness from my youth is that I understand on a personal level how to mitigate its harm. In the context of my work as a writing consultant, I use the self-doubt that white supremacist ways of thinking bring about to drive myself to work harder than expected. For instance, I go over the recommendations I make to the writers who consult with me multiple times. Perhaps, my double-checking is another example of an experience lived by many people of color; the felt understanding that I have to work twice as hard for my work to be considered acceptable. However, the concept of working hard is not exclusive to whiteness. Excellence and hard work are values that were socialized into me by my culture of origin. In fact, my ability to work hard affirms my worth, despite the pressures of white spaces.
Varun: I share similar sentiments as Sinenhlanhla on how whiteness influences my practice as a consultant. My positionality in the writing center space has subconsciously coerced me into being aware of the sly ways in which whiteness asserts itself in the academic writing space by masquerading as institutionalized standards of writing. I stay cognizant of the many ways that the intersection of my varying identities as a POC international student hailing from a non-native English-speaking community disadvantages me, as well as other writers in similar positions, whose work is subjected to scrutiny through the lens of the U.S academic standards. These musings have coalesced in me developing certain reservations in my practice as a consultant within the writing center, especially while consulting with typical U.S writers who effortlessly embody the institutionalized standards of language through no reason other than the circumstances of life.
As a result, in my praxis in the writing center, I have found myself to be cautious, even hesitant at times, while consulting with white or white-adjacent writers. The idealized linguistic norm of the native English speaker makes me question my adequacy, not only as a writer, but also as a consultant, from the perspective of the writer that I am consulting with. I constantly fear that my feedback would pander to the writer in a way that placates what I presume to be their prejudices against me. For instance, my insecurity that I may be perceived by writers as a non-native English speaker could cause me to steer clear from any feedback that would make them, as native English speakers, defensive about their writing. In doing so, my feedback would fail to align with my virtues as a consultant, which is to enable the writers to master their own individual writing voices.
Yvonne: In my own work as both a peer and a professional writing tutor, this concept of giving writers space, time, and guidance on “mastering their own writing voice,” as Varun so eloquently puts it, is something that I have found myself struggling with as a White, U.S.-born, native English speaker who, as such, finds herself with a certain amount of privilege in our academic spaces. I am not saying that my experience has been one completely without strife or conflict, but when compared to the experiences of others with whom I have worked and whom I have tutored, I have learned that I may have been given certain leniencies that they may not have been given, and it has been a constant struggle to find the perfect balance between helping writers navigate an unjust system and helping them navigate their own stories with their own voices within that system. For example, as part of my master’s program, I taught a first-year English course for a group of students who had been considered “basic writers.” I discovered what was “basic” about their writing abilities was that they had not yet fully adopted the academic English championed by the university. As their instructor, I wanted to be their champion, to allow them to tell their own stories and to use their own words. The next semester, I was serving as a writing tutor in the campus writing center when one of the women who had taken that course with me came to me for writing tutoring for her second-semester English course. She complained that her new instructor was not as accepting as I was, and as a result, she was failing the course. I felt like the failure. I knew that in some way I had failed that student and the others in my class because I had encouraged the use of their own English over the use of the academy’s English, and I was not the one to pay the price, the students were.
This experience haunts me to this day, and I wish I knew what had become of that student. Even now, as I work with graduate writers from across the university and train other graduate students to serve as writing consultants, I wonder if what we are doing is enough, is right.
Varun: Reflecting on my experiences working with writers in the Graduate Writers’ Studio has helped me understand that the insecurities that I encounter as a result of my intersecting oppressed identities also plague the multilingual learners and non-native English speakers who approach the writing center with hopes of having their writing “fixed.” Since they feel the need to cater to the whims of the U.S. audiences and professors for the most part, they expect to have their writing whitewashed, and are thereby allowing their rhetoric to be appropriated by the institutionalized hierarchy. My foremost intention during such a situation is to actively challenge the hegemonic standards that have been entrenched within the institution over the course of centuries and consequently doing a disservice to writers who dare to reject such canons. I contemplate on the best ways to approach such a piece of writing in which I see flairs and deviations from the norm by questioning the validity of said normalized standards. I formulate my feedback in a way that is appreciative and encouraging of such creative uses of language. I have observed that linguistic variations, like the commonalities evident in the romance languages for example, are quite apparent in the rhetoric of non-native English speakers. Does this mean that their rhetoric is erroneous, and hence needs fixing? I do not think that is necessarily true.
Sinenhlanhla: Similarly to Varun, I do not consider it problematic when non-native English speakers use English in ways that indicate a creative flair that might be influenced by their home language. Therefore, I commend writers when they use language in innovative and unique ways. I acknowledge their effort when they use feedback in a way that is constructive to them, and always make sure to phrase my feedback only as suggestions and explain how I think they might help improve the communication of their thoughts. I consider this particularly important because through the act of writing about the ways they see the world, they challenge the monopolizing effect of white-idealizing spaces. Rhetoric is how reality is created, how worlds are shaped, and how lived experiences are acknowledged and shared. Therefore, through the rhetoric created by people of multicultural and international identities, the monopolized dominance of U.S English and whiteness can also be challenged, and spaces can be shaped to make room for a plurality of identity experience. In this way, I attempt to resist the pitfalls of thinking of English as a system of acceptance by thinking of my work as play, where grammar informs the rules, but the true joy is in empowering writers to say what they deeply wish to communicate in order to be understood for how they authentically see the world.
My support for how non-native English speakers use English is not without the knowledge of the fact that whiteness pushes back. Those with power do not hand it over joyfully, and systems of domination will resist those who hope to achieve their freedom. Yvonne’s detailing of the first-year student whose writing she championed ended up failing in a different English class is evidence of this fact. However, the rejection of hegemony requires that those who are subjugated refuse to consent to their subjugation. The fact that those who benefit from oppressive systems will resist when they are challenged is precisely why these systems should be challenged. Without writers and writing consultants to challenge the idealization of English as practiced by those in power, the status quo will continue. That being said, as a consultant, my main goal is to support writers as a resource they can use to tell their stories in the ways that are best for them. I do my best to support them as they navigate the paths that privilege whiteness through academic English without forsaking the authenticity of their identity.
Varun: My foremost intention while consulting is to maintain and uphold the integrity of the writers. I ensure that my feedback does not suggest that they conform to any standard, but rather, equips them with means to amplify their own voices. The aim is to find the right balance in catering to the requirements posed by the writing assignments while also preserving the identity of the writer through their expression and rhetoric. A failure to do so results in writers losing defining aspects of their identity that can potentially enrich their writing. The internal conflicts that I face as a consultant are especially significant since I tend to face with my own writing the same predicaments as the writers I work with. I am still on the journey of trying to figure out how to apply this praxis in my writing, and thereby translate that to writers with different identities and experiences.
Yvonne: As the identified leader of our space, consultants often come to me looking for answers on how best to strike that balance to which Varun refers. As can be seen in the narratives we present here, for those of us who work in writing centers, those answers do not come easily. They are not readily at hand in the pages of a tutoring manual or in the paragraphs of a journal article. We do not know how to answer the question, “What is truly best for the student?” From my own personal experience, I can also say that being a director provides no more concrete answers. I do my best to encourage the consultants to continuously examine and question their own positionalities within our space, our universities, and the consultations in which they find themselves. I also ask them to do the same kind of questioning in regard to the positioning of the writers with whom they work and to make decisions about what is “best” within that given moment, that consultation. For me, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Each consultant, each writer, each situation is fraught with its own convergences and as such must be handled accordingly. Maybe in some ways I did fail the student to which I referred earlier, but maybe in others, in ways I will likely never know, I didn’t. Maybe my acceptance and encouragement lead to insights for her that she carried into other courses or other spaces. Maybe not. What I do know that I did in that situation was open a door, even if only a crack, to the conversation about language and race and identity, and that is no small thing.
Sinenhlanhla: In our practice at the Graduate Writers’ Studio, the challenge of exorcizing the language of whiteness leaves us with many questions. What are best practices for working in writing centers in ways that do not center whiteness? How can our Graduate Writers’ Studio serve the community in ways that promote the identities of all our members and increase their feelings of belonging? How can we work together with professors and administrators to realize our ideals for decentering the white, U.S. experience, particularly considering the difficulties of engaging in conversations about racial injustice? These are some of the questions to which we hope to find answers through the work we do in our center.
Moving forward in our own space
Royster & Williams wrote, “[We] need to be critically disposed to see the negative effects of primacy, the simultaneous existence of multiple viewpoints, and the need to articulate those viewpoints and to merge them in the interest of the larger project of knowledge-making in the discipline” (568). In our writing center, we believe in these words. Therefore, to answer our previous question on whether the writing space should be a comfort zone or a contact zone, we see our space as a multicultural contact zone, where we consciously question and challenge the primacy of U.S. academic English, and we welcome and celebrate the variety of identities writers bring from cultures around the U.S. and from countries around the world. We believe that as writing center practitioners, we must be aware of and embrace the fact that such a significant portion of the populations we serve are not white, are not U.S.-born, and often do not blindly accept as “normal” the cultural and language indoctrinations the U.S. system of higher education embraces (Edwards). We believe we must constantly work to integrate those identities into the soul of the institution in which we work.
More than anything, we seek to be a space wherein all people, consultants and writers alike, feel seen, respected, and appreciated, irrespective of whether they are U.S. born or not, or whether their English is empowered by flairs and deviations from the academic standards that are influenced by their cultural and linguistic milieux. It is our opinion that the only way such a non-prejudicial ideal can be achieved is by challenging the normativity of U.S. academic English that often haunts such spaces. One of the reasons we decided to use an auto-ethnographic approach for this piece was our desire to engage with how our lived experiences with privileged language has influenced the kind of writing center staff we have become. In the space of this paper, we wanted to examine our own humanity in a manner informed by theory and praxis as we come to an understanding of how the ways in which we work are influenced by how we define ourselves, and how we have been defined by others in spaces that take comfort in and prioritize white, U.S. experiences. Perhaps this self-inspection and reflexivity might be useful tools for others who may be on a similar journey. Yet still, we recognize that the path that we are aspiring to advance towards is still a utopian one that is filled with hurdles and lessons at every turn. Thus, we remain open to learning and hope to share in creating non-prejudicial spaces.
Since the original drafting of this piece, Sinenhlanhla and Varun have left the Graduate Writers’ Studio. Varun graduated and is working full-time in a large U.S. metropolis, and Sinenhlanhla received a fellowship that has given her teaching opportunities. Our space, however, continues to work to destabilize privileged standards of U.S.- whiteness in language, knowledge, and being. Because we continue to encourage, even rely on, participation of students from around the globe, we work to acknowledge and subvert the imperial hauntings of our space. As Royster and Williams argued, “When we render stories of composition [read writing center work] from points of view other than dominant academic perspectives, we have the opportunity . . . to set the terms of historical engagement with a more critical view, to shift locations, and to raise questions, previously unasked, that might more fully animate knowledge and understanding” (568). The goal for our writing center is to add to the work of others who have begun to advance the writing center conversation beyond the realm of “standardized” and to continue to raise questions that promote a critical view of the work we do and the kind of work we can do. We also hope those who take the time to read this piece find something of themselves and their own spaces reflected in these pages and feel welcome and invited to continue the conversation in their own and in our shared spaces.
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