Axis Special Issue: Imagining the Decolonizing Writing Center

Longitudinal Support for Multilingual Writers

Tyler Gardner and Katie Watkins
Brigham Young University

Locating the need to decolonize the writing center, Eric C. Camarillo notes the tension between writing centers designed to “get students’ writing to align with an academic standard” and students feeling as though “there is something wrong with ‘the words that come naturally to our mouth or pen’.” “Deviation from a standard,” Camarillo explains, “does not denote a deficit, something we have to be careful to remind the students with whom we are working.” Of course, as the theme of this special issue implies, we have to be careful not only to remind, but also in how we remind students.

As Denny, Nordlof, and Salem demonstrate in their study of working-class students, one surefire way to make students feel unwelcome in the center is to evoke “the feelings of dislocation and discomfort that come from mismatched implicit assumptions: we are not what they expect us to be, and we do not do what they expect us to do” (71). While it may sometimes be true, as Camarillo notes, that students can be less inclined to visit the writing center if they see it as “just another place where someone else can tell them how to fix their writing,” many students, especially multilingual students, seem to come to the writing center looking for exactly that. Our experiences with students at our university’s writing center match closely with the findings of Denny, Nordlof, and Salem (2018) and Salem (2016), who found that many students from less privileged linguistic and academic backgrounds seek out the writing center in the hope that tutors can “tell [them] exactly what it was that [they] were doing that was so bad” (Denney, Norlof, & Salem 79), often because they can find nowhere else to turn for this type of information.

Responding to these expectations with encouragement to “challenge the standard discourse” can feel patronizing to students—as though we’re inviting students to join us in a larger battle, when they are trying to just survive the struggle with their everyday assignments. Such a response can signal to students that we aren’t listening to them, that we know what they need or should want better than they know themselves (Denny, Nordlof, & Salem 2018).

In other words, though the writing center, as a central hub of writing on campus, might seem like the ideal place to help students challenge standard discourse, such attempts may be disorienting for students who turn (or are sent) to the writing center for help navigating such perceived standards. This mismatch in student and writing center goals can create further marginalization and lead students to turn to other resources that will perform the regulatory function they seek (e.g., a premium Grammarly subscription, a private tutor, and other resources that entail personal spending).

Ultimately, as Camarillo suggests, when it comes to effectively reminding students that deviation is not deficiency, the writing center is short on both power and time, especially when compared to the classroom. A peer tutor in a writing consultation lacks the power of a professor to create and reshape expectations, the ethos to help students feel comfortable challenging their relationship to standard academic discourse, and the duration of a semester-long class to build trust and encourage and facilitate change.

In our desire “to help students understand their experiences as they are acculturated into academic discourse rather than mindlessly accepting the superiority of a single form of communication” (Camarillo), our writing center’s administrative staff sought a means of providing both additional time and a more robust, consistent, collaborative relationship between tutor and student. This is in line with Denny, Nordlof, and Salem's (2018) conclusion that “students would be better served by a pedagogy that prioritizes multiple back-and-forth interactions with tutors throughout the drafting process” (87). We believed that creating this space would empower the student to both achieve their personal goals of academic success and value their own unique knowledge, skills, and perspectives.

1. The Writing Tutorial for Multilingual Students

In Fall 2021, we developed and piloted a longitudinal program called the Writing Tutorial in which multilingual students meet one-on-one with the same writing tutor for an hour each week throughout the semester. As with a regular consultation, the student was responsible for bringing their own goals, ideas, questions, and assignments to the Tutorial; unlike a regular consultation, however, the student and tutor were able to delve more deeply into their work together and spread out the collaborative experience across multiple visits. We staffed this program with experienced writing center tutors who completed additional training. Students self-enrolled in this program based on their semester’s coursework (i.e., they had at least one writing-intensive course) and their own desires for this type of longitudinal support.

1.1 Recruiting

We advertised the Tutorial to students via flyers, social media outreach, class instructors, and advisors. Over the course of the semester, 23 multilingual students enrolled in the Tutorial. Our efforts to spread awareness about the Tutorial, and our subsequent experiences with the students enrolled in it, showed us that many multilingual students want and seek this type of support. Beyond just a desire to improve their writing, we found that students crave a friendly, supportive relationship with a peer tutor who knows and cares about them.

1.2 Training

We created a six-week training program for our Tutorial tutors, where we emphasized developing an additive rather than deficit perspective about diverse language and academic backgrounds. We trained tutors to avoid making assumptions about the students and their needs, leaving the power to direct the sessions in the hands of the students. Through this training, and the hands-on experience our tutors got through working with their paired students, our tutors learned to better navigate the complexities students face when trying to meet academic standards.

1.3 Outcomes

The outcomes of our Tutorial pilot program were positive on many levels. We were able to see the benefits of Denny, Nordlof, and Salem’s (2018) recommendation of a back-and-forth tutoring exchange throughout the drafting process. Students enrolled in the Tutorial visited the writing center at least every week of the 14-week semester (from the point at which they enrolled) and, as a result, collaborated with tutors at every stage of the writing process. This retention is significant; in previous semesters, only a small fraction of our multilingual patrons visited the writing center more than twice per semester (and only around 1% visited 10 times or more).

At or near the end of the semester, students enrolled in the Tutorial reported more confidence and deepened skills in their writing, satisfaction in how well they were able to fulfill their goals, and more academic success. Meanwhile, our tutors themselves reported more confidence in supporting multilingual students (inside and outside of the Tutorial), more ability to overcome their own assumptions and deficit perspectives, and a greater awareness of diverse linguistic perspectives in a writing context.

We have implemented the program again in this new semester and hope to continue expanding and improving it in the future.

Works cited

Camarillo, Eric C. “Burn the House Down: Deconstructing the Writing Center as Cozy Home.”

The Peer Review 3.1 (Summer 2019). https://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/redefining-welcome/burn-the-house-down-deconstructing-the-writing-center-as-cozy-home/.

Denny, Harry, John Nordlof, and Lori Salem. “‘Tell me exactly what it was that I was doing that

was so bad’: Understanding the Needs and Expectations of Working-Class Students in Writing Centers." The Writing Center Journal 37.1 (2018): 67-100.

Salem, Lori. "Decisions... Decisions: Who Chooses to Use the Writing Center?" The Writing

Center Journal 35.2 (2016): 147-171.