Axis Special Issue: Imagining the Decolonizing Writing Center
Shifting Theory and Practice: Professional Development on Linguistic Antiracism
Douglas S. Kern and Ella Raynor
Valencia College
As Nancy Grimm elucidated in Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, our “tacit theories” influence our actions and have “real consequences for people who are subject to our decisions, assumptions, and judgments.” Grimm calls for us to open those theories about writing and language to revision and to paradigm shifts that reshape our practice and work tangibly to decolonize our writing centers and larger educational communities. We believe that in order to achieve a paradigm shift, these very communities must learn and unlearn together. As a Professor of English (Doug) and Writing Center Supervisor (Ella) at Valencia College, we designed and currently deliver a professional development (PD) course for faculty and staff titled “Linguistic Diversity & Antiracism.” We embarked on this effort in order to initiate college-wide conversations on linguistic justice and antiracism, to engage our community in a reexamination of literacy, language diversity, and linguistic anti/racism.
We believe that engaging our community in these conversations helps decolonize the writing center in tandem with the larger college. In collaboration with writing center tutors and colleague Garret Gaudens, a former writing center supervisor at another campus, Ella designed a “Statement on Linguistic Justice in the Writing Center.” This statement explains the writing center’s goals to center student agency, voice, and experience; investigate tacit beliefs about the superiority of so-called “standard English”; and invite dialogue on linguistic justice through ongoing research and development. Our work on the PD course has facilitated the introduction of this statement to the other writing centers across Valencia’s seven campuses, who are now in the process of collaborating to establish the statement and its goals in our collective tutoring practices.
The call for this special issue of Axis specifically references Eric C. Camarillo’s “Burn the House Down: Deconstructing the Writing Center as Cozy Home” and his assertion that “[w]e must work to decolonize the writing center space, thereby moving away from the regulatory function the writing center has historically performed.” Axis then invites contributors of this blog to contend with how writing centers might achieve this decolonization and advance linguistic justice. The brief narrative that follows recounts our collaborative efforts to promote both.
We first presented a version of “Linguistic Diversity & Antiracism” in Fall 2020, revised and refined the course, and have since led several additional sections. This PD course is included in Valencia’s Faculty Development “Equity-Minded Practice” series; for their participation in and completion of the course, faculty and staff receive twelve hours of PD “credit,” which can be used to obtain certifications such as the “Associate Faculty Certification” that grants an increase in pay per contact hour taught. Our course explores key concepts in literacy and language diversity while engaging participants in activities, readings, and discussions in which participants scrutinize their own courses and roles at the college to identify the unique ways in which these concepts play out in their disciplines and syllabi. Throughout the course, we as facilitators provide individualized conversation, feedback, and suggestions to each participant in order to identify the best way to approach these issues in their spheres of influence. Throughout the four-week course, participants are encouraged to learn about the links between language and identity and to explore their own linguistic identities; examine the underlying values that inform their own and their disciplines’ expectations for communicative practice; and identify concrete ways to enact antiracist linguistic policy and practice in their work at the college.
Our course participants, 93 at the time of writing, have responded with a variety of reactions from enthusiasm, to ambivalence, to outright opposition. We consider the range of emotions we’ve encountered as useful because they all signify disruption of preconceived notions that may lead to change. What we discuss inevitably feels uncomfortable for some. But as Asao Inoue writes in his foreword to Frankie Condon and Vershawn Young’s Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication, “When it comes to race, racism, and antiracist work, it is important that everyone feels safe, but equally important that many also feel uncomfortable. It’s only through discomfort, perhaps pain and suffering, that we grow, develop, and change for the better.” And this change requires a shift in institutional policies as well as individual beliefs. In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi writes that an antiracist world “can become real if we focus on power instead of people, if we focus on changing policy instead of groups of people.” However, in The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together—a publication Kendi praises as the book he’s been waiting for—Heather McGhee argues that “laws are merely expressions of a society’s dominant beliefs. It’s the beliefs that must shift in order for outcomes to change. When policies change in advance of the underlying beliefs, we are often surprised to find the problem still with us.”
We share these perspectives with our participants during the course in order to highlight the need for actual change in both theory and practice. Our college has been asked to grapple with equity and inclusion, and Valencia’s recent definition of equity states that “we strive to dismantle systems that prevent the ability of every person to thrive.” For some, it is not yet clear which systems of oppression must be dismantled and how. Our intention with this professional development course is to provide faculty and staff, including other writing center practitioners at the college, with new systems that actively work against what Angela Davis calls "corporate strategy." She's said, "I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy. It’s a strategy designed to ensure that the institution functions in the same way that it functioned before, except [...] that you now have some black faces and brown faces. It’s a difference that doesn’t make a difference." Equity requires action; it's a never-ending call for communities to actively identify, accurately name, and strategically pursue alternatives to systems of oppression—like racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and heteronormativity—that account for the social and historical context of exclusionary practices. Equity means that our students, faculty, staff, and communities need to both discuss and combat how individuals' basic human rights are challenged, withheld, and/or denied within our institution and beyond. For example, as teachers of writing, we know that students’ linguistic variations are policed in higher education even when they are just as valid, correct, respectable, and useful as any other version or variation of language. Policies and beliefs regarding linguistic diversity must be evaluated and changed as a step toward equity. This is why we felt there was a need for a course that explicitly addresses the underlying racism in many language-teaching beliefs and practices (such as enforcing required code switching in students’ writing and speech) and offers concrete alternative strategies such as code meshing pedagogies (Young).
What’s more, we necessarily supplement the work we do in this PD course with additional student skillshops and faculty/staff workshops on linguistic justice held throughout the academic year. These collaborative efforts enable Valencia’s faculty, staff, and students to think together about diversity in student writing and communication. These conversations have inspired additional commitments regarding equity and antiracism at Valencia. For example, as a result of our PD course’s success, we’ve been invited to develop and present additional workshops that address linguistic diversity for specific disciplines, such as Valencia’s School of Allied Health. And, after a direct request for more conversation from our PD participants, Faculty Development has commissioned a team to develop and facilitate a course on antiracist pedagogy as a supplement to our Linguistic Diversity course.
We hope this blog post presents a model of how to start and replicate these conversations at other institutions so that policies and beliefs regarding linguistic diversity are evaluated and changed as a step toward equity in our writing centers, higher education, and our wider communities.
Works cited
Camarillo, Eric C. “Burn the House Down: Deconstructing the Writing Center as Cozy Home.” The Peer Review, no. 3.1, Summer 2019, https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/redefining-welcome/burn-the-house-down-deconstructing-the-writing-center-as-cozy-home/.
Eckert, Maddi. “Civil rights leader Angela Davis speaks at Bovard.” Daily Trojan, 23 Feb. 2015, https://dailytrojan.com/2015/02/23/civil-rights-leader-angela-davis-speaks-at-bovard/
Grimm, Nancy M. “Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform a System of Advantage Based on Race.” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, Utah State UP, 2011, pp. 75-100.
Inoue, Asao. “Forward.” Condon, Frankie, and Vershawn Ashanti Young, editors. Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication. The WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado, 2017, pp. xi-xx.
Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist. One World, 2019.
McGhee, Heather. The Sum of US: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. One World, 2021.
“Opportunity and Equity Update: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Definitions Explained.” The Grove: Growing Fresh Employee News Daily. 20 July, 2021. Valencia College, http://thegrove.valenciacollege.edu/opportunity-and-equity-update-key-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-definitions-explained/
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, Utah State UP, 2011, pp. 61-74.