Axis Special Issue: Imagining the Decolonizing Writing Center

Establishing and Maintaining a Sustainable AntiRacist Writing Center at a PWI Writing Center: Our Journey of Becoming

Lisa E. Wright
Oklahoma State University

In her 2017 International Writing Centers Association keynote address, Neisha-Anne Green calls for writing centers to “go beyond the ‘safe space’ and design a ‘brave space’ where BLACK LIVES MATTER TOO.” As a Black writing center leader, I have collaborated with colleagues, Hillary Coenen, Fehintola Folarin, and Natasha Tinsley at Oklahoma State University (OSU) to create antiracist tools. Together we co-founded the Talking Justice Workshop. It’s an interactive workshop that teaches antiracist strategies for tutors. These workshops were offered at the beginning of the semester orientations in hopes of equipping our tutors to address racist behavior within the center amongst their peers, and within the writing they might encounter within their sessions. We were invited to present similar workshops for writing teachers at Oklahoma State University, and Texas Women’s Institute. We’ve presented at the South Central Writing Centers Association Conference, and were featured at the National Conference on Peer-tutoring of Writing for our scholarship. Our presentation encouraged the editors at Praxis: A Writing Center Journal to create the Special Issue: Race & The Writing Center. We published “Talking Justice: The Role of Antiracism in the Writing Center,” which describes our process of creating the workshop, and provides a framework for addressing racism within writing centers. Talking Justice Project’s strategies of invitational dialogue are effective, and have been useful to the writing center community, and/yet/still, I’ve been asking myself what’s next?

A once a semester antiracist tutor training doesn’t produce antiracist consultants. At the end of these training sessions, consultants may not be fully prepared to respond to racist topics in tutee papers or respond to/or prevent microaggressions against peer consultants. Furthermore, like many other writing centers, OSU’s writing center is working to diversify our staff. This semester we’ve asked ourselves, how do we prevent racial violence against the People of Color we hire once we have invited them into the white space of our writing center?

Calling on Asao Inoue’s ecological theory as a framework for “welcoming or un-welcoming students” into our writing centers, in his “Burn the House Down: Deconstructing the Writing Center as Cozy Home,” Eric C. Camarillo suggests our goals should be to “define, articulate, and potentially modify, the implicit functions of a writing center.” For years, our writing center has held space for what we call mentor groups. These mini staff meetings have been led by senior writing center consultants. In one-hour meetings, we ask consultants to share challenging and successful sessions they have had. Oftentimes, consultants gain tips and inspiration from their peers. In addition, our sessions have covered tips for working with STEM papers, APA, responding to online submissions, or how to respond to multilingual writers.

One of our larger goals this semester was to find ways to create an antiracist writing center. As we began considering the ways we could implicitly expand our writing center to become antiracist, we redesigned our mentor meetings to purposely promote dialogue about racism. In his “Unmaking Gringo-Centers,” Romeo García focuses on consultant training as a key component to creating antiracist centers. Garcia calls for consultants to engage in monthly antiracist professional development conversations. We reshaped our mentor meetings, so that consultants attended synchronous mentor groups with their mentor leaders once a month, and participated in asynchronous mentor groups with an antiracist reading once a month. We hoped that independent reading would be not only informative, but also encourage tutors to reflect on their own beliefs concerning race.

For the first asynchronous meeting, consultants were assigned Zandra L. Jordan’s “Flourishing as Anti-Racist Praxis: ‘An Uncompromised Commitment’ to Black Writing consultants.” It’s important to be clear that over the last few years, our writing center has been strategic in hiring more diverse people of color. Our leadership team wanted our tutors of color to truly feel welcomed, respected, and valued at our center. We feared that if we didn’t initiate conversations about diversity in our writing center we could be viewed as a center that was complicit in racism.

Despite our Inclusion, Equity, and Accessibility Statement and antiracist orientations, as one can imagine, we have had a few racist incidents. Jordan argues, “To hire more racially diverse consultants without also critiquing our practices is to deny the ubiquity of racism and its deleterious effects” (36). In her article, Jordan writes of a new Black tutor who was undermined and demoralized in a session by a white student, during her tutor training. White tutors did not have similar experiences, thus the Black tutor believed her race, gender, and training status all energized the white student to dismiss her as incompetent. In hopes of preparing our tutors should these types of incidents occur, we assigned Zandra L. Jordan’s article. Our goal was to continue our antiracist training and to generate discussion about racial issues in our writing spaces. Along with the article, we posted the following questions on our writing center Canvas page and asked consultants to respond within a given amount of time.

• In what ways does this statement, and the article help us in thinking about our own practices as consultants in the writing center?

• What is the problem experienced by the Black tutor in this article?

• Have you experienced or seen someone have a similar experience in our writing center?

• If you observe a Black/POC have an experience that might be considered racist, would you feel comfortable supporting them? Why or Why not? In what ways would you support them? What are the tools that you need to feel empowered to transform OSU’s writing center?

• Jordan cites Romeo García who “envisions writing center consultants as ‘decolonial agents’ as ‘theorists of race and racism’ with the ability to ‘transform’ the writing center” (39). With this quote in mind, what does it mean to be a ‘decolonial agent’ or ‘theorists of race and racism’ with the ability to ‘transform’ the writing center?

• OSU’s writing center has and is in the process of hiring more Blacks/POC. To ensure our center is anti-racist and a center that welcomes people of all backgrounds what training/ or support does the center need? Please list one idea.

We received a range of responses from our consultants. They agreed that hiring people of color and not looking at our practices is performative. Our consultants requested multiple mandatory antiracist consultant training. They want scenarios, readings, videos, and sessions to address racism. While some consultants admitted feeling empowered to step in if they witnessed a person of color experiencing a racist incident, others do not feel like they have the tools. Next semester, I plan to continue researching, exploring, and creating tools to support our centers’ journey in becoming antiracist. OSU’s writing center is its own melting pot of sorts, and our consultants represent various genders, disciplines, and races. These consultants will leave our centers, and they are our future leaders. So, while it is important to create safe and brave spaces, Neisha-Anne Green is correct, we must go further. Using our antiracist mentor groups to continue antiracist consultant training, makes use of our positions as writing centers housed within universities. Our position allows us the opportunity to amplify/embed antiracist practices within and across disciplines.

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/.

Coenen, Hillary, et al. “Talking Justice: The Role of Antiracism in the Writing Center.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 16, n. 2. Spring 2019, http://www.praxisuwc.com/162-coenen-et-al.

García, Romeo. “Unmaking Gringo-Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, Writing Center Journal, 2017, pp. 29–60, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44252637.

Green, Neisha-Anne. “Moving beyond Alright: And the Emotional Toll of This, My Life Matters Too, in the Writing Center Work.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 37, no. 1, Writing Center Journal, 2018, pp. 15–34, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26537361.

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

Jordan, Zandra L. “Flourishing as Anti-Racist Praxis: ‘An Uncompromised Commitment’ to Black Writing Tutors.” Writing Program Administration: Special Issue: Black Lives Matter and Anti-Racist Projects in Writing Program Administration, vol. 44, no. 3, 2021, pp. 36–40., https://wpacouncil.org/aws/CWPA/asset_manager/get_file/604408?ver=1