Axis Special Issue: Imagining the Decolonizing Writing Center

Unearthing Affective Artifacts: Embedded Solidarity with Multilingual Writers

Alyssa Bernadette Cahoy
Rice University

Class specifications manifest in traditional writing center dynamics, in that the relations between tutor and student are often racialized—consider who is meant to speak and who listens, or how one with authority makes the red marks and the one in the designated position of learner makes the suggested edits. In his 2012 book Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future, Asao Inoue asserts that we as teachers must pay attention to what informs our judgment of language and how students are positioned in relation to hegemonic discourses. Inoue also provides us with a theoretical framework for assessment:

Antiracist writing assessment ecologies explicitly pay close attention to relationships that make up the ecology, relationships among people, discourses, judgments, artifacts created and circulated. They ask students to reflect upon them, negotiate them, and construct them. Antiracist writing assessment ecologies also self-consciously (re)produce power arrangements in order to examine and perhaps change them (159).

To unlearn the colonial worldview of knowing and assigning value, we must empower our multilingual students to teach us about their experiences, i.e., unearth affective artifacts. Unearthing affective artifacts entails mindfully asking multilingual students questions, listening to their stories, and departing from writing center pedagogy that has undermined their confidence. Allowing multilingual students to unpack their affective artifacts is a step towards establishing the writing center as an anti-colonial space. We must shift our conception of multilingual students being the only ones in a writing center session learning; communications center staff are included in the process of understanding and interpretation as well.  

As a communications consultant at a university with a substantial international population, I hear similar testimonies from my multilingual clients in which an instructor has told them their command of the English language is weak or average. Multilingual students’ interaction with Western academia has led them to believe there is an accurate correlation between their proficiency in the English language and their intellectual competence. Among the several hardships students whose first language is not English face, academic imperialism alienates multilingual communicators and undermines their confidence. Multilingual students arrive at communication centers with remarkable cultural knowledge, but they are relegated to a secondary status of scholarship. There is a deeply-rooted, underlying assumption that communication centers are to be utilized for them to learn only the basics of grammar and style. In other words, writing centers are framed as a place of remedial education for multilingual communicators. Accomplished writing center director Frankie Condon states:  

The writing center staff will need to recognize and account for the lived experience of people of color whose credibility and competence are questioned in and outside of the classroom by virtue of their race, whether or not they possess fluencies in academic English (24).

Colonial writing center pedagogy dictates multilingual communicators’ forced assimilation into the Western academe. In accordance with this imperialist ideal, writing center tutors would then promote conforming to an idealized standard of the English language and positioning themselves in proximity to whiteness. Excavating affective artifacts through thoughtful, open conversation is a way to combat the erasure of cultural references and practices. Rather than immediately critiquing certain rhetorical choices or pointing out a grammatical error, we can choose to first, acknowledge linguistic differences and second, validate their labor. In doing so, we affirm not only their abilities, but also their identities. This anti-colonial view of writing center pedagogy does not constrain various modes of knowledge production. Only when we center multilingual communicators’ stories can the writing center become a place of embedded transnational solidarity.

 works cited

Condon, Frankie. “Beyond the Known: Writing Centers and the Work of Anti-Racism.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, 2007, pp. 19–38.

Inoue, Asao B. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. The WAC Clearinghouse; Parlor Press, 2015.