Axis Special Issue: Imagining the Decolonizing Writing Center
From the Editors
Imagining the Decolonizing Writing Center: From Standard Edited English to Returning the Land
Kiara Walker and Kaitlin Passafiume
University of Texas at Austin
This unique Axis: A Praxis Blog call attempts to find out what you, our fellow writing center practitioners, are theorizing about and carrying out on the ground. We wanted to know what you think about the notion of a decolonizing writing center, and what sort of work your centers are doing. We yearned to connect our research to lived experience, and to bring academic theory into practice. Primarily, we thank you for your earnest responses and we are elated to learn that so many practitioners are sharing our thoughts: How do we advocate for many Englishes while aiding multilingual writers in their own success, in an often rigid academic environment? Are our writers the ones who need guidance, or are they those who uphold colonial standards and assign writers’ grades (and is this our jurisdiction)? Can we decolonize writing center spaces that purvey Standard Edited English (SEE) in the U.S. and abroad, even as we strive to validate a multidialectal approach? Can we even use the word “decolonize” without returning the land on which our institutions operate, to their original owners? We chose the present progressive form of decolonizing to acknowledge our inability to restore our environs to their past states. Yet, we must work toward an imagined future that we hope to materialize in the words that follow. In its noun form, decolonization implies some destination, but to create an equitable future, we must accept decolonizing work as a key feature of our new reality.
We do not promise to answer these queries in this special issue, but we aim to shine a light on diverse approaches to them. Our current authors at once muse on theoretical issues and enact policies, showing the varied nature of writing center work. As centers who serve students from the humanities to STEM, from qualitative to quantitative, how can we not equally serve diverse student populations? At Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, we hope that the work chronicled here will aid you in your own musings, or give you the evidence you need to implement our writing centers’ future. Our practice is too important to go down in the annals of history as colonizing measures, so we must shape it into an avenue for all of our writers’ success, and for the success of the written word itself.
In this issue’s opening column, Lindsey Albracht asks us to consider Eric C. Camarillo’s claim that writing centers’ role may, in part, be 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.” In “Burning Down the House (and Returning the Land),” Albracht references personal experiences while calling on practitioners to realize that the land on which we stand rightfully belongs to many who are excluded from its very borders. Until this wrong is righted, who are we to implement decolonizing practices within fully colonial walls?: “As Itchuaqiyaq and Matheson remind us, decolonization will certainly involve examining our own motivations and their ‘colonial underpinnings,’ and engaging Indigenous stakeholders in the work that we do (25). It is unlikely that decolonizing Writing Center work will leave the Writing Center, or the university, in a recognizable shape.” This assertion gives us hope, since we know that we cannot continue to repeat past mistakes and expect transformative results.
In the words that follow from “Mindful Language-Use: Recognizing Indigenous Peoples when ‘Decolonizing Writing Centers’,” Matthew Louie encourages the writing center community to take an intentional and mindful stance when speaking about and engaging in decolonizing work. Informed by Tuck and Wang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” (2012), Louie extends their work to writing centers, calling upon our community to recognize stolen land as fundamental to decolonizing efforts. In line with this call for intentional articulation and recognition, Louie presents this approach as “not a decolonizing project in itself, rather, it is an additional consideration we need to make while we are ‘decolonizing’ to serve as a reminder that decolonization is a larger project beyond the writing center.”
Brie Winnega Reamer offers an alternate possibility, since “Writing Centers as Spaces of Care: Reflections and Possibilities” explains how feminist care ethics resonates with writing center pedagogy. This adaptation offers a way for practitioners to attend to the work necessitated by decolonizing. Reflecting on a workshop she developed and led, centered around writing center tutors engaging with care at theoretical and practical level, she shows the possibilities present in using theories and language of feminist care ethics to implement writing center work. In encouraging a different approach to decolonizing—what do we want our world to look like?—“Writing Centers as Spaces of Care” elucidates how care ethics engages with decolonizing work.
Next, Dani Putney and A. Poythress focus on the connection between LGBTQ+ liberation and decolonization in “Writing Center Decolonization is a Queer Endeavor.” Viewing LGBTQ+ liberation as a fight that intertwines with decoloniality, Putney and Poythress explain how their recent projects at Oklahoma State University Writing Center work toward liberation. Putney and Poythress demonstrate how, informed by Tuck and Wang, decolonization is not a metaphor, since writing center practitioners can engage in tangible steps in the larger mission of decolonizing.
When “Establishing and Maintaining a Sustainable AntiRacist Writing Center at a PWI Writing Center: Our Journey of Becoming” follows, Lisa E. Wright reflects on the next steps she and her writing center colleagues take toward developing an antiracist writing center. Wright focuses on one key to this sort of center, re-envisioning Oklahoma State University’s writing center mentor groups. Drawing on Romeo García’s “Unmaking Gringo-Centers,” Wright explains how their writing center reshaped mentor groups to offer consistent antiracist training. Wright’s experience demonstrates how writing centers can implement training practices that respond to the mission of antiracism, to the local context of one’s own center, and to students’ needs and interests.
In “Shifting Theory and Practice: Professional Development on Linguistic Antiracism,” Doug Kern and Ella Raynor offer their professional development course, “Linguistic Diversity & Antiracism,” as a model for working toward decolonization and linguistic justice. Calling attention to the significant relationship between writing centers and the wider college community for accomplishing such work, Kern and Raynor explain how bringing these two communities into contact can open conversations and offer an opportunity to learn (and unlearn) together. Kern and Raynor demonstrate how an approach to decolonizing can bring in the wider college community, informing and shaping theory and practice toward equity.
Alyssa Bernadette Cahoy asks us to consider racialized practices surrounding “who speaks and who listens,” in her column entitled “Unearthing Affective Artifacts: Embedded Solidarity with Multilingual Writers.” She summons Asao Inoue (159) as she surmises that a truly antiracist ecology pays “close attention to relationships that make up the ecology, relationships among people, discourses, judgments, artifacts created and circulated.” The author finds that forcing assimilation into Western academe promotes a single English language, while positioning our writers according to their proximity to whiteness. While pointing to this problem, Bernadette Cahoy concludes that we must “center multilingual communicators’ stories” if we want our writing centers to become places of “embedded transnational solidarity.”
“This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun” (Harjo), quotes Albert C. DeCiccio. In “Learning about Tutoring Multilingual Writers from Multilingual Tutors,” this author suggests that the very table on which we counsel diverse writers can be a place of affirmation, or a place of injustice. The table itself is useless unless we shield it from the rain, and prevent harmful effects of the sun. Using Salem State University Writing Center practices as emblems, DeCiccio decries efforts to create a “beautiful English” (Cox 151) while giving up the fight against “fossilized errors and mistakes” whose correction may discourage our writers. The author asserts that guiding tutors away from stereotypical judgments allows them to see more clearly the ways that those very judgments continue to prevent writers’ success.
Also referring to Eric C. Camarillo’s article “Burn the House Down: Deconstructing the Writing Center as Cozy Home,” Tyler Gardner and Katie Watkins note a certain tension present when we force writers’ work into institutional boxes. In their column “Longitudinal Support for Multilingual Writers,” the authors proclaim that the best way to make writers feel as if they are in a foreign land is to make them feel unwelcome. While this may seem obvious, Gardner and Watkins suggest that widespread writing center practice might not reflect this dynamic. The authors proclaim that while “we’re inviting students to join us in a larger battle,” they might just want to “survive the struggle with their everyday assignments.” Just because a student may register under our conception of diverse, does not mean they wish to carry some banner or check some box.
Each writer should encounter the same opportunities for success, without the expectation to cram social progress in their already loaded rucksack. This statement finds its exception with students who, of course, choose to carry such a banner. In writing center work, we might be able to support this choice.
Bonnie Devet seems to agree in “Decolonizing a Writing Lab: Training Consultants through Analogies.” We are purveyors of rhetoric, so using lexical tools to shape our centers seems more obvious than it is. Devet throws code-switching into the mix, since we cannot claim to serve multilingual writers without at least evaluating our response to linguistic complexity. The author cites Vershawn Ashanti Young when she correctly questions the true meaning of code-switching versus its popular definition. Devet offers her own analogy to educate practitioners as well as consultants: “…you dress one way to go bowling but another to attend your prom. For code-meshing, I use Young’s metaphor of black and white piano keys. No one makes music with just one or the other” (64-65).
Adam Daut and Tristan Rebe follow in their position on “Training Writing Tutors about Language and Identity.” They ask, “…how do writing centers reconcile the demands of rigid academia with the practice of linguistic justice?” In the practice of training our tutors, they posit, we can “more directly empower students to make choices about their writing.” These authors proffer their own workshop aimed at tutor training, interrogating tutor training to improve writing center praxis at its core.
Our special publication closes with one final thought from Janice Lark, in “Feeling Welcome, Respected, Safe, and Accepted.” Lark reflects on the process and reasoning behind the 2021 mission statement for Writing, Reading, and Speech Assistance at College of DuPage. The author details how the four touchstones for WRSA’s new mission statement inform its writing center's understanding of equity and how these touchstones are acknowledged in WRSA appointments. Lark explains how mission statements can serve as a sign of commitment and a guide to practice when working toward decolonizing writing centers.
We feel the weight of our responsibility to shape writing center praxis around decolonizing thought, and we heed to the notion that returning original peoples’ land is urgent. While this movement stalls in the cogs of institutional barriers over which writing centers commonly do not have control, at Praxis and by proxy at Axis, we still believe that we can begin doing this work and maybe, lay the foundation for which our lands are finally recognized as fundamentally not our own. Until then, we applaud your efforts to ground theory in practice, and we look forward to seeing what you come up with next.
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/.
Cox, Michelle. (2019). “‘Noticing’ Language in the Writing Center: Preparing Writing Center Tutors to Support Graduate Multilingual Writers.” Re/writing the Center: Pedagogies, Practices, Partnerships to Support Graduate Students in the Writing Center, edited by Terry Myers Zawacki and Susan Lawrence. University Press of Colorado, 2018, pp. 146-62.
García, Romeo. “Unmaking Gringo-Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, 2017, pp. 29–60, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44252637.
Harjo, Joy. “Perhaps the World Ends Here.” The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. W. W. Norton and Co., 1994, p. 68.
Inoue, Asao B. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. The WAC Clearinghouse; Parlor Press, 2015.
Itchuaqiyaq, Cana Uluak, and Breeanne Matheson. 2021. “Decolonizing Decoloniality: Considering the (Mis)Use of Decolonial Frameworks in TPC Scholarship.” Communication Design Quarterly 9 (1): 20–31.
Tuck, Eve, and K. W. Yang. “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40, https://clas.osu.edu/sites/clas.osu.edu/files/Tuck%20and%20Yang%202012%20Decolonization%20is%20not%20a%20metaphor.pdf.