Tutoring Second Language Writers (5 page)

As a result, Gawande not only improved his own skills, he learned techniques about surgery, and about observing operations and giving feedback, that he now shares with other doctors. In terms of reflective thinking, Gawande’s decision to break out of his comfort zone meant he adopted an attitude toward learning that gave the highest priority to personal and intellectual growth. He reached out to others who could help him do something he was unable to do by himself—that is, view his performance from a fresh, critical perspective. And he connected what he discovered to a deeper understanding of himself and the work of surgery so he could then extend what he had learned to surgeons everywhere. This doctor’s movement from doubt to investigation and interaction, and from there to connection with his broad group of peers, is the essence of reflective thinking and a model for tutors.

When tutors think reflectively, as Dewey and his followers believe, they will find doing so creates its own reward, and in the company of a supportive team, can be downright transformative.

As we saw in chapter 1, philosopher John Dewey believed that reflective thinking gives rise to social progress when schools promote learning that engages with real-world problems and issues and continues to build new knowledge. In this book, reflective thinking begins with tutors who engage with students’ diverse cultures and languages, confront matters of justice and fairness, and remain open to learning and discovery. In the first chapter of part 1, we see how tutors became involved in their center’s proactive stance toward language difference, which culminated in the writing of a book for staff education. The book they created has now been used in their education course, for faculty development workshops, and at staff meetings. Chapter 3 presents an opportunity for thinking critically about linguistic and cultural differences that accrue to the ways we refer to our clients. Labels, it turns out, say something not only about the people we apply them to; they are also statements about us, the ones who apply them. However necessary, labels begin to fall away when we develop relationships with L2 writers because getting to know one another, on a personal level, is its own education. On that point, the author of chapter 4 shares personal and professional stories, based on interviews with writing center tutors at the University of Puerto Rico in Humacao. Her conversations with tutors there reveal the mixed feelings students at this university have about learning English and how they try to deal with these feelings in the writing center.

Writing Centers, English-Language Teaching and Learning, and Social Justice

FRANKIE CONDON AND BOBBI OLSON

In this chapter, we are concerned with the interconnections between institutional contexts for writing center tutoring and institutional needs for social justice activism. We are interested in the ways and degrees to which peer tutors, when given opportunity and support for theorizing their own work with student writers and the intersections of that work with social justice matters, can and do produce new knowledge, transforming what is known both within the writing center and potentially across their institutions.

We describe an institutional moment and context in which peer tutors in the writing center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) experienced a call to leadership as writing center theorists as well as practitioners. We also describe a sense of urgency about the relationship of that work to critical, troubling, and barely implicit conditions of linguistic and cultural intolerance, xenophobia, and racism within and beyond their university. We write both as supporters and as participant-observers in a process by which peer tutors pursued a sustained intellectual, pedagogical, and activist engagement with their own education as writing center practitioners and, in doing so, created a critical, dynamic, and fluid legacy of ongoing tutor education and knowledge production to be passed forward to their successors. We describe the research and writing engaged collectively and collaboratively by graduate and undergraduate tutors in the UNL writing center, the challenges they faced, and what we learned from them as they theorized their practice.

Frankie arrived at UNL in the fall of 2007 at an institutional moment in which the university was moving to actively recruit and retain a much
greater population of international students. Bobbi arrived in the fall of 2008 as a graduate student committed to writing center scholarship and practice with an interest and experience in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). With few institutional supports in place for cultural and academic transitions to a US university, increasing numbers of international students were seeking assistance from our university’s writing center. The university and, in particular, those administrators most involved in the array of initiatives to grow and sustain international student enrollment were very supportive of the role the writing center was playing in contributing to the success of new international students. Significant funding was provided to the writing center for the development of ongoing tutor education to meet the diverse needs of multilingual student-writers, to grow a writing center staff sufficient to meet those needs, and for ongoing assessment of the writing center’s efforts to support multilingual student-writers.

As the population of international students at the university grew, however, so too did the overt articulations of fear, resentment, and racism from the predominantly white community, both within and beyond the university. In 2012,
Inside Higher Ed
published an article publicizing blogs created anonymously at both Ohio State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to expose hostile conditions within those institutions for students of color, generally, and for international English-language learning students in particular. Among the items published on those blogs (
UNLHaters
and
OSUHaters
) were the following examples:

The UNL writing center tutors didn’t need the haters blogs to inform them of the racist and xenophobic undercurrents shaping their own living and learning experiences and those of the international and multilingual students with whom they were working. And the tutors didn’t need the blogs to understand that words like these hurt. That these words wound. The tutors didn’t need the blogs to know, in some cases intimately, that the injury such words cause is suffered disproportionately by those who are already marginalized within the institutions they share with folks who use social media to promote xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and racism—with those who compose and post tweets like these. The tutors also understood and frequently discussed the reality that the silences too often following hate speech have a doubling effect: those silences sustain conditions in which it seems acceptable to feel, give voice to, and act on hate, and those silences, regardless of intent, send the message to those who are targeted by hate speech that they are alone—that they are strangers and unwelcome guests in a house that was built for and belongs to those of us who occupy dominant, normalized subject positions (see Witherite, this volume).

In 1994, Carolyn Turner noted the “alien,” “stranger,” and “guest” status implicitly and explicitly accorded students who are racialized Other within predominantly white colleges and universities. “Like students of color,” she writes, “in the university climate, guests have no history in the house they occupy. There are no photographs on the wall that reflect their image. Their paraphernalia, painting, scents, and sounds do not appear in the house. There are many barriers for students who constantly occupy a guest status that keep them from doing their best work” (
Turner 1994
, 356). Within our writing center, we claimed to have created a climate of hospitality in service of a community of writers we worked to support and sustain. Yet, we noted the degree to which, regardless of our intentions, we, too, were receiving and treating/teaching many students, but particularly international multilingual students, as guests in a home we had built for ourselves.

Written by R. Roosevelt Jr. and Marjorie Woodruff, the book
Creating a House for Diversity
has been helpful to us in telling a learningful story about how our writing center seemed complicit in the forms of intolerance and injustice we saw around us and in which we felt implicated.
The book is organized around a parable of sorts that we tell here in our own words but that goes something like this:

A giraffe and an elephant were best friends who liked each other so much they agreed to live together. In service of this goal, the giraffe engaged in an extensive renovation of the home they planned to share and was eager to show off the beauty of the reconstructed home to his friend. Accordingly, on the morning the house was completed, the giraffe called out to his friend. “Elephant, our beautiful home is finished! It’s so lovely, and I’m so excited to share it with you.” The elephant, eager to see the fruits of the giraffe’s labors and delighted at the prospect of spending every day with his friend, began to climb the porch steps to the front door. The steps cracked under his weight. “Wait!” cried the giraffe. “You are breaking my beautiful steps! They weren’t made for someone like you. Come round the back where I’ve built an egress into the basement. You can come in that way.”

Accordingly, the elephant circled the home, observing the lovely landscaping of the grounds along the way, but leaving deep footprints in the freshly watered lawn. At the basement egress, the giraffe met his friend and waved him down the concrete steps into the basement. The elephant found himself in a lovely family room, graced with a home theater and a wet bar. The giraffe invited him to sit and view a movie, but when the elephant lowered himself into one of the chairs appointed for that purpose, the seat crumbled beneath him. “Wait!” cried the giraffe. “You have broken my beautiful chair! You can watch later from the back of the theater where there’s room for you to stand. Let me just show you the rest of our house first.” The elephant took in the craft room lined by shelves with materials for every sort of project he and his friend might embark upon together. But he couldn’t fit through the door. “Nevermind,” said the giraffe. “Come upstairs and see the kitchen where we’ll eat together and your new bedroom.” The elephant started up the staircase, but it was much too narrow, and his girth broke the bannister. By this time, the elephant was near tears. He yearned to fit into this beautiful home and felt mortified at what he was certain was his failure. “Don’t worry,” said the giraffe. “I know exactly what to do. You can stay outside for now. We’ll put you on a strict diet and exercise regimen. I’ll help you change that body for a lovely new thin one, and in no time at all, you’ll fit right in here with me.”

And so the elephant began the effort to transform himself so that he might fit into the house his friend, Giraffe, had promised to share with him. But in secret, he wondered whether they might not just start over and build a house from the ground up that would actually be built for both of them, with all their differences, to share.

In his book,
Racism without Racists
, Eduardo
Bonilla-Silva (2006)
describes the work stories do to communicate the racial identifications and commitments of their tellers but also to actualize a world that suits
those identifications and commitments. He writes, “The stories we tell are not random. They evince the social position of the narrators” (75). Bonilla-Silva goes on to explain that the ideological frameworks through which we make stories of our lives and our work are too often invisible to us. The giraffe, for example, may in fact have the best of intentions with regard to making a place for his friend, the elephant, in his house. The ways in which the giraffe has built a house that is, however, uninhabitable for his friend are invisible to him. The giraffe’s redesign and renovation of his home have been animated by own his desires and needs, as well as by a narrative about what will be good for the elephant based on an assumption that the elephant’s needs and wants will, of course, be the same as his own. The giraffe builds the house
for
his friend rather than
with
his friend.

As we pondered with UNL tutors the dichotomies between the public commitment of our writing center to antioppression pedagogies and the practices we actually engage in teaching writing one-with-one to multilingual writers, we worried collectively about whether or to what degree we, too, were building a house for ourselves as if the needs, desires, knowledge, and expectations with which we were familiar were universal for everyone in our writing center community. We noted the degree to which, in practice, we were engaging scripts or narratives of linguistic and rhetorical, racial, ethnic, and cultural belonging and unbelonging that seemed to reproduce the very conditions of normativity that, in principle, our pedagogical commitments should have countered.

As we talked together about what we perceived to be the disparities between our aspirations to enact a well-theorized, inclusive, one-with-one writing pedagogy in our work with all student writers and the social justice principles to which we publicly subscribed, we began to see that not only were we embedded within a giraffe-like institution, we were also enacting giraffe in the very writing center we had posited as both a counter- and a transformative agent within that institution. We may not have been “rush[ing] to monolingualist hegemony” as Harry
Denny (2010)
, author of
Facing the Center: Towards an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring
, writes, but we were enacting that hegemony in spite of our best intentions not to do so (126). When, despite our extended reading and discussions around addressing patterns of error, we worked line by line with student-writers, correcting each variation (often without regard for whether the variation was a prescriptive grammatical mistake or a stylistic preference), we were—we realized—demanding assimilation in ways that protected and preserved a house designed for
the comfort and ease of those who already fit rather seamlessly within normative identifications of race and ethnicity, language, and culture. We had been unreflective and uncritical of the assimilationist stance we had taken. And we had failed to consider the fact that when such a practice does not include an examination of implicit valuations of Standard Written American English (SWAE), the results marginalize and exclude those who speak and write in World Englishes.

The UNL tutors understood that to some degree they were implicated in the force of the messages posted on the haters blogs and by the institutional silence around those blog entries, if not by virtue of their subject positions (for not all of the tutors were white or native English speakers or middle class or American), then by their institutional situatedness as tutors. They felt a critical need, however, to discern means of resisting not merely their own implication but also the conditions that seemed to them to support and sustain an institutional culture too tolerant of racism and xenophobia. The tutors wanted, in other words, to make moves at rebuilding the house rather than simply making easy, but only minimal, modifications.

To these conversations about race, xenophobia, and the ways in which their work as tutors might challenge and resist those forces, the UNL peer tutors brought their own commitments and convictions as well as the collective imprimatur of a writing center already committed to a progressive political vision of literacy education and its relation to the work of antiracism, even though we were inadequately realizing that commitment. Informed by the work of Harry Denny as well as scholars such as Elizabeth
Boquet (2002)
, author of
Noise from the Writing Center
and coauthor of
The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice
, and Sarah
Nakamaru (2010)
, author of “Theory In/To Practice: A Tale of Two Multilingual Writers: A Case-Study Approach to Tutor Education,” the writing center staff became increasingly convinced that our collective and individual change agency would begin and be sustained by a culture of inquiry. The staff wanted to extend our writing center’s notion of tutor education from the writing center theory and practice classroom and the staff meeting to the everyday—from the day-to-day operations of the writing center to the consultation and subsequent critical reflection in and on practice. With Denny, we collectively agreed that “it’s not the prescriptions for making this or that session effective that matter; rather, it’s the processes we make possible, the conversations we reward and make time for, the faces that come to the center, margins that change the center. To them, we’re indebted. For them, the writing center exists” (
Denny 2010
, 167). As we talked about how
we might proceed in productively challenging social and institutional forms of and tolerance for racism and xenophobia, we agreed that we wanted to create and sustain conditions for learning in which tutors and writers could do their best work, together. We wanted to begin and continue to construct a different kind of house altogether. We agreed that taking on challenges and obstacles to social justice within our writing center, our institution, and beyond is critical to the creation of productive conditions for learning. And we understood that such conditions can never be constructed for others: that Bobbi and Frankie could not do this work for tutors any more than the tutors could do this work for writers. We would need to learn to cocreate, to coconstruct, to coauthor an inclusive center.