Hidden in Plain Sight: Professional Tutors in the Writing Center

Out in the Center, 2019

2012

We are proud to announce Praxis' second volume as a peer-reviewed journal. Our call for articles addressing diversity in the writing center fielded a record number of submissions. We thank all of the authors who submitted careful, insightful, creative and challenging work. We also want to thank our external review board and our editorial team as well as the administrative staff at the Undergraduate Writing Center. Andrea Saathoff, who led Praxis into peerreview status last year and continues to work behind the scenes, deserves a special "Thank you." This journal, like the writing-center scholarship and pedagogy it supports, exists because of the committed, collaborative work of a broad community of writers and educators. To our authors, reviewers, editors, readers and supporters-Thank you. This issue of Praxis, "Diversity in the Writing Center," reflects the broad range of individual and institutional experiences that shape writing-center practice across the country. The articles are rooted in the institutional realities of large and small universities, in racial, cultural and linguistic multiplicity, in the needs and opportunities of established and emergent centers, in the perspectives of student writers, tutors and administrators. While the authors included in this issue address topics as varied as racial justice, fat studies, multilingual centers and assessment strategies, several common interests run as threads through their arguments. The centrality of embodied experience to the work of writers and writing centers appears in two remarkably different lenses in "A Multi-Dimensional Pedagogy for Racial Justice in Writing Centers" and in "Making Room for Fat Studies in Writing Center Theory & Practice," but Rasha Diab, Thomas Ferrel, Beth Godbee and Neil Simpkins agree with Eric Steven Smith in arguing that writing centers bear the burden of and opportunity for direct action on the behalf of writers with marginalized bodies. Nancy Effinger Wilson's "Stocking the Bodega: Towards a New Writing Center Paradigm" and Noreen Lape's "The Worth of a Writing Center: Numbers, Value, Culture and the Rhetoric of Budget Proposals" each address the possibilities entailed in taking writing center practice beyond English-centered language instruction. Lape uses her experience with the founding of Dickinson College's Multilingual Writing Center to illustrate a taxonomy of rhetorical approaches to institutional opportunities, a topic that Kristen Welch and Susan Revels-Parker also take up in "Writing Center Assessment: An Argument for Change." Tallin Phillips' "Graduate Writing Groups: Shaping Writing and Writers from Student to Scholar" uses a "communities of practice" framework to indicate how graduate-student writers negotiate growth in their professional and scholarly identities. Sam Van Horne also addresses the role of writing centers in facilitating various writers' movement towards maturity in "Characterizing Successful 'Intervention' in the Writing Center Conference." Our two columns, Brooke Fiesthumel's "Black Fingernails and the White Page: The High School Writing Center" and J. Michael Rifenburg's "Fleshing Out the Uniqueness of Student-Athlete Writing Centers: A Response to Alana Bitzel," also draw our attention to the needs of writing populations that differ from the image of the "standard" undergraduate. We hope you find this issue of Praxis challenging, enlightening and enjoyable. As Rifenburg's column indicates, we are always interested in continuing the conversations that take place in and around our pages, and we are happy to consider responses to any of the excellent articles published in this issue. You can also follow the conversations taking place on our blog, WritePraxis.wordpress.com, and through our Twitter account, @WritePraxis. We owe one final round of thanks to Jacob Pietsch, our blog coordinator, and to the writers who have made our weekly postings on that site possible.

I am new to the world of writing centers, though not so new to working with undergraduate populations. As a graduate student in sociology, I have interacted with students as a teaching assistant and a subject tutor before becoming a writing tutor at The University of Texas at Austin. Due to my interests in feminist, critical race, and queer theories, I have found my time as a writing tutor to be an opportunity for reflection on privilege and reflexive contemplation about positionality. My intersecting identities of writing tutor, instructor, and first-generation college student of color have allowed me to reflect on the relationship(s) between students of color, the academy, and constructions of knowledge. Specifically, my personal experiences and observations as a writing tutor have led me to focus on two central questions: how can students of color feel comfortable in the writing center, and how can the writing center encourage these students to embrace their own epistemological standpoints? Therefore, I will be drawing upon Patricia Hill Collins's concept of black feminist thought in order to guide my analysis of how experiential knowledge is operating in the writing center. While I believe there are several ways in which tutors and others involved in the writing center can effect change, in this essay, I will focus on diversity in the center; writing from a marginalized standpoint; and the utility of mentorship.

American Quarterly, 2023

This essay examines writer's block (and flow) in the American academy. It critically maps the production of blocks in higher education policy, the organization of knowledge, and academics' lived experiences with inquiry. University studies scholars, such as Marc Bousquet and Christopher Newfield, have powerfully critiqued academia's corporatization. This work, however, at times glosses over the diversely felt impacts of institutionalized oppression on writing and learning. In contrast to university studies, faculty development literature has provided granular accounts of writing in a publish-or-perish climate, as in Robert Boice's classic Advice for New Faculty Members or Paul Silvia's How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. The latter work, however, tends to offer individualized advice that risks exacerbating the very problems of the knowledge economy. The present essay underscores that written inquiry is both personal and political, bringing intersectional American studies together with university studies and affect studies to extend work on academe and social justice—such as Roderick Ferguson's The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference and Eli Meyerhoff's Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World. "Un/Blocked" argues that writer's block is less a psychological syndrome than a symptom of nationalist investments in academic writing as a way to manage knowledge, labor, and subject-formation. The slash in the title, then, marks writers' ongoing efforts to grapple with knowledge's terms and conditions—hard work that is part of academic inquiry itself.

Sensemaking in Writing Programs and Writing Centers, Rita Malnczyk Ed., 2023

Utah State University Press eBooks, 2023

2019

The article describes the process that four writing center consultants took to design and implement an antiracist workshop at the Oklahoma State University Writing Center (OSUWC). Using antiracist pedagogy, feminist invitational rhetoric, and inclusive writing center pedagogy, this essay documents the creation of an antiracist workshop designed for writing center staff and consultants, our presentation of the workshop at the South Central Writing Centers Association conference, the revision process, and training of writing center staff at the OSUWC. Rather than outline a one-size-fits-all workshop, this article provides a framework for addressing racism with reflexive, context-based resources.

Utah State University Press eBooks, 2023

2013

This latest issue of Praxis comes on the heels of the University of Texas at Austin Undergraduate Writing Center's 20th Anniversary and Symposium. This weekend-long event featured nearly thirty individual and panel presentations from writing center practitioners discussing the changing future of writing centers-technologically, theoretically, pedagogically, administratively, and globally. And although we did not issue a formal call for themed submission this issue, the focus articles and columns here all reflect that changes for writing centers are certainly on the horizon; figuring the ways to merge traditions of the past with practices for the future place writing centers in the U.S. and abroad at a crossroads.

Writing Center Journal, 2012

This article has its origins in relationship: in a group of writing teachers/tutors all similarly committed to racial justice talking with each other about how those commitments become manifest and are made actionable in our everyday lives. Our conversations have informed, grown out of, and occurred alongside the ongoing work of the IWCA (International Writing Centers Association) and MWCA (Midwest Writing Centers Association) Special Interest Groups on Antiracism Activism. Victor Villanueva’s 2005 keynote address and subsequent publication in The Writing Center Journal have catalyzed the work of the SIGs as well as revived in writing centers calls for students’ linguistic and cultural rights—calls stretching back to the 1950’s debates that led to the CCCC’s crucial resolution “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” in 1974 and no fewer than thirty resolutions on diversity passed by the NCTE since 1970.1 Since Villanueva’s 2005 address, we have seen frequent discussions on writing c...

Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 2022

Amplified voices, intersecting identities: Volume 2. First-Gen PhDs navigating institutional power in early academic careers , 2021

In this dialogue, we explore the topics of identity, spaces, and writing from our own perspectives as members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community, and as first-generation, immigrants, and working-class scholars of colors in academia. In this piece, we propose writing as an art of rebellion against a system designed to silence the voices of marginalized educators (Park, 2013; Van Galen, 2017). Within this space, we return to our true self and tell our stories in creative ways: sitting at the kitchen table and engaging in walking meditation. Furthermore, we write with the vision of working toward building a trusting space for minority communities of scholars in academia.

All three of us utilize different lenses to perceive the world. We enter spaces as gendered, sexualized, racialized, and nationalized people, yet too often those identities are not foregrounded in the everyday work we do in writing centers. As a result, our everyday becomes easily hegemonic, unchallenged. For us, questioning the pedagogy and process of how we operate in sessions should be just as ubiquitous as the stories we share and the practices we employ in writing centers. Three recent books in writing center studies—Jackie Grutsch McKinney's Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, Sohui Lee and Russell Car-penter's The Routledge Reader on Writing Centers and New Media, and Ellen Schendel and William J. Macauley Jr.'s Building Writing Center Assessments that Matter—offer theoretical frameworks, technological innovation and program inquiry to re-imagine and critically explore how we think and practice in the ordinary (sometimes exceptional) spaces where one-to-one mentoring happens. We approach this review attuned to the distinct standpoints from which we look. Too often scholarship for/on writing centers flattens its audience , rarely addressing the intellectual demands necessary for participating in disciplinary conversations or the process for a diverse range of interlocutors to join these communities of practice. Harry approaches these texts as a faculty administrator and researcher of writing centers; Cara as a recent graduate student and current professional writing center consultant; and Michael as a second-year doctoral candidate in writing center and composition studies. Our orientations to these texts reflect different degrees of experience—as purveyors of stories of writing centers (the good, the bad, and others), as tutors struggling with (and through) new media to collaborate with writers, and as scholars engaged in everyday and formalized assessment of our mentoring practices.

2020

Kinship of many kinds has brought me to this moment. My academic kin are numerous, but I will be brief. Ms. Jones and Mr. Arnerich: thank you for helping me love literature, not just books, and believing in my ability as a writer. Dr. Continothank you for making that very first paper bleed red. You helped me learn that our writing, too, must descend to ascend. Thank you, also, for teaching me how much the text matters. That advice has never steered me wrong. Dr. Julianne Smithyour many hours of attention to my words and the doors you opened for me into the Victorian past and the scholarly present have been invaluable. Thank you. The PepStep faculty: Damien, Stella, Carrie B., and Carrie W.thank you for ensuring we learned theory and praxis. It stood me well. To Waves near and far, but especially Catherine, Cassandra and Daniyour support at all hours of the day has been deeply meaningfulfriends for all seasons. To my many undergraduate researchers, you have been pearls without price. The OG crew who collected the website data: Kat, Kynedi, Michelle, and Abbymy gratitude knows no bounds. The citations crew: I see you. Paige and Ixchelyour amazing work at the final hour will not be forgotten. My GGSE valiant last-minute editors-Emily and Tanishathank you for your keen eyes. Without the material help of Khirsten Scott and Lou Maraj in the form of DBLAC, there are whole quarters worth of work that might not have gotten done. Jacqueline Jones Royster and Asao Inoue have, through their presence in the field and the fire that is their scholarship, profoundly shaped this dissertation and me. Thank you, Anne Charity Hudley, for the hours of mentorship. Vilna Bashi-Treitler, you inspire me every day, showing me what it looks like to claim your beauty and be a mom while also producing excellent scholarship. Dorothy Chunyour words about my writing have been a defense against imposter syndrome. Trish Fancher, Ellen O'Connell-Whittet, and Kara Mae Brown, you have all been a wonderful sisterhood of Writing Studies scholars and I am beyond grateful. Karen Lunsfordwhen I walked, pregnant, into your office all those years ago, you saw a woman ready to compose herself into a scholar. Thank you for helping me do just that. After a global pandemic altered many of my plans for completing this dissertation, most especially the structures I relied on for childcare, I found out quickly who my kin are. My neighborhood friends risked exposure to "the virwus," as Finn calls it, because of our bonds of affection and their desire to see me meet this goal. Thank you, Natalee, Else, Kristine, and Katie. Thank you Kim, Lena the birthday twin, and Marianne. Thank you Cheryl, for the peaceful retreat of your little farm in the middle of the suburbs. My in-laws watched my son for long afternoons and even longer Sundays so I could write. Their belief in me has been unwavering. Thank you Grammie and Grandpa (Joan and Rick). Alex, without your support during my Pepperdine years, I wouldn't have made it this far. My family in New Mexico stepped up, too, opening up their homes to me so I could have a room of my own. Thank you, Cash, for giving up your room. Thank you, Seth, for all your patience with Finn and for sharing your horses with us. Thank you, Anthony, for watching Finn like I watched you when I was seventeen. Thank you, Joe and Yvonne. There aren't enough words. Thank you, Mom. Your indispensable help in the final weeks of writing helped me quilt together this dissertation. Thank you, Dad. Any story I tell is because you taught me how. Thank you, David, for going where I go and staying where I stay, for all the little ways you supported me over the years of pursuing this degree and writing this dissertation. Of course, thank you to the One through whom all is made possible. v VITA OF MICHELLE NICOLE PETTY GRUE