Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 23, No. 1 (2025)
Crossing Thresholds: Identifying and Disrupting the Autonomous Models of Literacy Shaping Writing Center Work
Katherine Bridgman
Texas A&M University-San Antonio
ktbridgm@tamusa.edu
Abstract
This essay traces a long-standing tension in writing center studies that has for many become a matter of fact: the tension between our celebration of the space of our work within the writing center and our desire to resist and disrupt the violent power structures around the center. Underlying this tension—and often contributing to our willingness to maintain it—are autonomous models of literacy which, despite the tutoring praxes we enact resisting these understandings of literacy, are maintained by the focus of writing center work on one-on-one sessions within the center. I close with a description of how one writing center has worked to disrupt this tension between our spaces and our praxis through its transformation into a multiliteracy center. Engaging these considerations moves the work of the center increasingly across center thresholds and out across the university, where we can actively work alongside students as they draw from the breadth of their literacy practices to navigate university spaces.
Keywords: literacy, multimodality, praxis, program administration
Introduction
In this essay, I invite readers to turn their attention to a tension that has largely become accepted in our field: a tension between the sacrosanct spaces that physically center our work in the university and the iconoclasm that informs and motivates this work. This tension emerges in the crux of an ambivalence that has hampered so much of our field’s work over the last decades. It has left us hamstrung between the physical and intellectual spaces we occupy. On one hand, we have largely treasured and protected the physical spaces that house our tutors and our work with students. On the other hand, our field often works tirelessly to resist the very contexts that give rise to these spaces. We catch a glimpse of this tension in what Jackie Grutsch McKinney describes as “the writing center grand narrative” wherein “writing centers are comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-on-one tutoring on their writing” (3). Here, writing centers are at once spaces of iconoclastic resistance and comfortable, singled out places where students go for support. In what follows, I suggest that these two facets of a writing center’s identity are often at odds in a way that we must attend to further.
This essay will move through three segments before concluding. I open with a discussion of why this tension warrants our attention. Next, I look at how this tension between the physical and intellectual spaces we occupy shapes our day-to-day work as a limiting factor in the reach of our field’s investment in doing the work of creating more equitable spaces on college campuses, work that is frequently described across our scholarship in terms of its anti-racist and decolonial commitments. Finally, I turn to examine one writing center’s response to this tension and the remaking of the writing center into a multiliteracy center that has resulted.
What’s the Issue Here?
In part II of Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine discusses a YouTube content creator named Hennessy Youngman. Youngman’s video series, Art Thoughtz, seeks to mentor young Black artists. Rankine discusses a particular video where Youngman discusses how to metabolize Black rage for a YouTube audience. She writes:
Youngman’s suggestions are meant to expose expectations for blackness as well as to underscore the difficulty inherent in any attempt by black artists to metabolize real rage. The commodified anger his video advocates rests lightly on the surface for spectacle’s sake. It can be engaged or played like the race card and is tied solely to the performance of blackness and not to the emotional state of particular individuals in particular situations. (23)
I reflect on this passage as a white cis-gendered settler-colonist living on the Yanaguana, named for the life-giving waters of the San Antonio River and land resided on by the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation and the Esto’k Gna/Carrizo-Comecrudo Nation that was violently colonized through a settler-colonial agenda that I continue to embody through both my presence in this space and my career as a writing center director at a Hispanic-Serving Institution. I think about the “actual anger” Rankine describes Youngman having, an anger “built up through experience and the quotidian struggles against dehumanization every brown and black person lives simply because of skin color,” an anger that Rankine observes he does not address in his YouTube video that is about anger (24). Rankine seems to be observing that his actual anger is not “sellable anger,” and so this “actual anger” is not addressed in his video, a video meant to mentor young artists in a commodified anger that will help them build their careers.
As I reflect on Rankine’s and Youngman’s work, I think about our writing centers. I think about our anti-racist and decolonial commitments. I wonder if our centers are operating in a space similar to the corner of YouTube where Youngman operates, supporting students in an anger that many may feel, but that we ask ourselves and our students to abridge at the door. As universities commodify this anger, a student can be angry in a writing center, but not too angry, not so angry that they leave the university all together. This kind of anger is the kind of anger that may spur students to come to college, to take courses supporting them in bringing the kind of civic action that finds itself mentioned in university mission statements and celebrated by student leadership programs. All while students are processing this celebrated anger, they are encouraged to come to the writing center to work on the papers that share their ideas, the cover letters that articulate their passions for leadership programs and employers, and speeches that pitch their graded solutions to issues they face in the world.
As students do this work in the center, their work in a sense becomes decontextualized as they are physically at a remove from the spaces they are wishing to engage and they are so often guided to the language practices of the university, language practices that Eric Garner engaged, saying “I cannot breathe.” April Baker-Bell asked us at NCTE in 2017, “Wouldn’t you consider ‘I cannot breathe’ standard English syntax?” (5). While Baker-Bell is calling out the lie of White Language Supremacy, she is also making clear how the spaces writing centers occupy within universities not only mute the anger of students through the language practices they are complicit with, but writing centers are themselves also muted as products of these language practices following the rules of university spaces. Kendra Mitchell and Robert Randolph confront us on this facet of our complicity in their 2018 IWCA keynote address when they describe the context of their centers: “You see, black skin places a demand of social justice on Black people at a high price. For us, it becomes more than a curriculum: it is a matter of life and death” (22). They remind writing center practitioners that the work we do engages in a context that extends far beyond the sacrosanct walls of our centers supporting student research papers and cover letters as they head back out to the halls of higher education. They challenge us to look in the mirror and ask if our centers are creating spaces for “actual anger” or merely “sellable anger.”
As we, as I, work to turn this reflection into action through the work I do facilitating a writing center as its director, Romeo García urges us to enact “epistemological disobedience,” to “till the grounds on which power takes root. It is the most we can long for if indeed the WC cannot be saved” (5). What does it mean to till these grounds of our writing centers? I may ask myself, am I not already doing this through the antiracist and decolonial praxis our center is developing within our sessions? And then I think about what Audre Lorde says in “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” when she asks us: “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” (41). Where, I wonder, are these questions coming from in our writing centers? How are our centers supporting students who are seeking answers to these questions?
Some readers of this essay may respond that these questions are coming from the centers they work in and the sessions they facilitate with students. And they are! We have ample evidence across our conferences and publications. At the same time, I ask where is this work happening? Where are these conversations unfolding? Is the answer, in the center? Where are the contexts students are living, working, surviving? Is the answer, outside of the center? By doing so much of our work in the center, do we share in Stanley Fish’s guilt when Vershawn Young writes: “Dominant language ideology also say peeps can speak whatever the heck way they want to — BUT AT HOME!” (111). Are we not also saying, “We have your back, we support you, let’s get angry together, but just in here and just in some ways”? In how we do our work, are we communicating to students something similar where the “here” is in the writing center, a space that is at once a part of the university yet isolated away from classrooms and the rest of our campuses in its work with students through one-on-one sessions? The remainder of this essay will seek to till the ground where power has taken root so firmly in our understanding of writing centers that we rarely, if ever, question that our work remains predominantly in the writing center, despite working diligently from within our sessions to disrupt the spaces around us.
Before I go further, I want to acknowledge the rich scholarship in our field about the healing, safe(r), brave(r) spaces that our centers are for many tutors and students, and I want to clarify that this is not an argument to do away with the one-on-one session and the other forms of individual work that happen within the center. Rather, I am inviting us collectively to examine the unquestioned and accepted centrality of our spaces (physical and online) as the primary, and sometimes exclusive, location for our work as writing centers. I’m also inviting us to ask why it might be that we continue to center our work within the spaces of our writing centers. In particular, I ask us to examine the tension between this centering of our work and the iconoclasm we espouse that resists the very spaces we embrace being embedded within.
Are We Okay with this Tension?
It is not uncommon that the idea of challenging this tension comes up in our work. However, if we revisit these calls for disruption, we find that authors frequently retreat back into the spaces of their writing centers, returning to follow the rules of place in the university, which stipulate that our work happens in the center. For example, as we headed into the twenty-first century, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford invited us to embrace our positions as initiators of institutional “refiguration.” The potential areas for this refiguration they identified were “the refiguration of institutional space, of concepts of knowledge production and intellectual property, of research paradigms and rewards, and of budget allocations” (33). In their discussion of the space they prompted readers to refigure, they reflected:
Writing centers offer a clear and compelling alternative use of space, one that in many instances combines the best of face-to-face and virtual education. In our centers as in many others, for example, the physical space allows for one-on-one consultations, for small group work, for individual work in quiet reading or writing corners, as well as for online access either within the physical center or from a distance. This new mix of space and use seem to us a very important but often taken-for-granted contribution writing centers make to refiguring higher education. (34)
Nearly twenty-five years into the new millennium they were addressing, it is likely that few would disagree with any of this. What does stand out in their work, however, is that the work of refiguring seems to stop at the walls of the center, or digital interface extending from the center, in this invitation to reimagine our future in a new century. The refiguration they seem to invite is a refiguration of the spaces already within the writing center.
Later, Nancy Grimm brushes up against this tension in her essay included in Writing Centers and the New Racism (2011). Grimm opens this essay reflecting on some assumptions privileging “white mainstream students” that her own writing center once held:
that students of color needed our help; that they would find our services useful; that the university and thus the writing center were race-neutral and benign spaces; and that the literacy education offered by the university and the writing center contributed to leveling the playing field, allowing them to become like us, thus (ahem) “better” and “equal” (75–76).
Grimm turns here to examine what happens within the writing center session and at the end of her essay concludes: “a tutor still works with one student at a time, but there are no attempts to control or manage the powerful learning potential inherent in tutorial interaction with rules about who can or who can’t hold the pencil or how many appointments a student is allowed to have” (98). Reading this now, it stands out that perhaps one of the field’s more iconoclastic scholars wraps up an essay claiming to “retheorize” writing center work with the reassurance that no challenge has been made to the central role of the one-on-one session in our work. Her statement about the one-on-one session, like those making similar returns to our work within the writing center, perhaps suggests that our spaces and our pedagogies are able to exist outside of the violent spaces existing just across writing center thresholds. However, as Baker-Bell, Randolph, and Mitchell remind us, this now and never has been the case.
This comfort with our work remaining predominantly within the spaces of our centers is not by accident. Thirty years ago, Anne Ruggles Gere reminded us that there was more than one story to tell about Composition, and she went on to critique the history of Composition that was widely taught through the 1990s. She reminds us that the story we told each other about Composition for so long was a story of convenience, one that I would argue confirmed our allegiance to the violent colonial work of the university and, ultimately, tethered writing centers to the violence that largely defined the spaces around us. The story of Composition she tells is one that in its early moments maintained a somewhat dynamic relationship with the world of writing outside the academy, that bolstered and shaped the early iterations of Composition as a field. In her discussion of this, she points to work done by Frederick Randolph, Arthur Applebee, and Gerald Graff, and she expands on the gaps in their work to highlight that nonacademic traditions, literary clubs, and other student organizations were vibrant parts of the extracurriculum in the nineteenth century and shaped English curricula and the future composition programs that would emerge within these departments. These early reference points for writing centers, however, were curtailed and ultimately elided in the historical narrative created around English Studies and Composition Studies as Composition sought a closer marriage with rhetoric that would reward both with a more legitimated place within English Studies.
The historical trajectory Composition took as a result was one of convenience that garnered clout for Composition, a field that was seen to have a “historical and theoretical vacuum” and be an illegitimate member of English studies (Robert Conners, Lisa Ede, and Andrea Lunsford qtd in Gere 79). For Gere, as Composition sought to build legitimacy, it put its eggs in the basket of professionalization. The tradition of the extracurriculum that informed writing center studies as it took shape within an emergent field of Composition came to be seen as a threat to the professionalization of Composition and thus writing centers as well. Commenting on this key moment in the history of Composition in “Our Little Secret,” Elizabeth Bouquet writes: “As much as I might like to think that the extracurriculum exerted the primary influence over the development of writing labs, ultimately I am inclined to trace the development through the more typical institutional channels” (466). As we continue to work in the lanes outlined for us by these “more typical institutional channels,” the legitimacy of writing centers is often tethered to the physical (and digital) spaces we have been granted in universities across the country.
This marriage between writing centers and their institutional spaces, however, has not been without its tensions. Elizabeth Bouquet traces the roots of this tension to “[a] slow drift [that] occurred between the 1920s, when the writing lab was most recognizably a method of instruction, and the 1940s, when it became most recognizably a site” (469). Bouquet argues that during this time “writing labs begin to show evidence of the tension emerging between the institutional space of the writing center and the individual pedagogies enacted in that space” (469). This tension is still with us today as the work of writing centers is often seen as indistinguishable from the space it occupies on campus, a space that is also, more often than not, antagonistic of our iconoclasm. It is as we negotiate this tension that I ask if we are perhaps no less guilty than Stanley Fish when we challenge institutional values and beliefs and invite our students to do the same—but continue to do this work only from within the walls of the writing center.
While the work of Bouquet, Gere, and others provides us with insight into the disciplinary history that has located our work as writing center practitioners so firmly within the walls of our spaces, there is a much deeper violence that we enact by leaving this tension between our spaces and our practices unresolved. As we grapple with this violence, García urges us to build an awareness that “[a]t the organizational level, Gringo-Centers like Gringodemia and gringoland empty land and people of substance to clear a pathway for modern/colonial and settlerizing designs to take root – the technological power of the idea (of the Americas)” (4). If we examine the identification of writing center spaces as the location where writing center work occurs within the settlerizing design of universities, we begin to see in perhaps new ways how tutors and writing center administrators become “entangled in informing-giving form to coloniality of knowledge-being and complicit in managing and controlling bodies of knowledge and the bodies of human beings” (4) through the repeated retreat of our work into the writing center space. By accepting the settlerizing design of the writing center, which keeps our work (regardless of decolonial aims) within the center, we mute our iconoclasm, always keeping writing centers distanced from the structures they are working to disrupt.
Keeping our work and our bodies focused on one-on-one sessions within our spaces is a way of “managing and controlling bodies of knowledge and the bodies of human beings” of both our writing center staff members and the students we work with in tutoring sessions as we require students to step outside of contexts rife with colonial violence and into our centers only to have to return to these contexts that remain unchanged after a session (García 4). As students go back and forth across our thresholds, we see that we, even if unintentionally, have shifted the responsibility for addressing the violent spaces of the university from actors in the university to the students navigating the violence of these spaces (McKinney). Even as we may work with students in sessions supporting them with powerful linguistic tools to use in their courses and other composing contexts, we remain removed from those contexts with students as we work with them in the center and away from the contexts they are actively negotiating beyond our walls. This removal of our work effectively puts the responsibility on students to do the work we may imagine from the safety of our spaces and that we may be inclined to imagine as separate from the work of the writing center (even though we can never completely distance ourselves nor unentangle ourselves from the colonial violence of the university). This is implicitly acknowledged when McKinney articulates her frustration negotiating the tension between our physical commitments to our space and our intellectual challenges to it in Peripheral Visions. She writes that it’s “like we keep bandaging up the war-wounded, fixing [students] up for their next battle without ever seeing if something can be done about the war” (69). This is largely the case because our work remains within our spaces instead of out in the university amid the violences that students are negotiating every day. In this arrangement, students, as McKinney says, are the ones going out into battle. Not us.
Tilling the Subsoil
A key, but often underacknowledged way that writing centers participate in the maintenance of the settlerizing design of the university is through their maintenance of autonomous models of literacy. In particular, remaining within the center for so much of our work is one of the more subtle, yet more dangerous ways, writing centers sustain these autonomous models of literacy. Ede has written that autonomous models of literacy are “one of the most important, because most hidden and commonsensical, assumptions of our culture: that writing and thinking are inherently individual, solitary activities” (9). Stemming from this idea is that writing and thinking exist independently from the embodied spaces students share with their intended audiences and can be improved in any space.
This understanding of literacy and its material instantiation across the university has been one of the bludgeons of colonial violence. These understandings of literacy were introduced to North America alongside European literacies that Steven Alvarez writes “dominated the hemisphere, physically and symbolically destroying Indigenous writing practices deemed as nonliterate at best and demonic at worst” (17). “Centuries later,” he writes, “these European literacies still dominate” and, I would add, fundamentally shape the way writing center work is conceived as primarily one-on-one support within our centers. These models of literacy perpetuate a white racial habitus that prizes “individualism and self-determination, Descartes’ cogito, individuals as the primary subject position, abstract principles, rationality and logic, clarity and consistency, and on seeing failure as individual weakness, not a product of larger structural issues” (Inoue 49). All of this embodies what Gloria Ladson-Billings describes as “the dominant Euro-American epistemology” (qtd in Delgado Bernal 107) that shapes our classrooms and gives rise to a “Eurocentric epistemological perspective” (Delgado Bernal 111). These epistemologies lead us to see our work and that of students “individualistically, as the preserve of rational, adult (male) actors unfettered by affectionate ties with concrete others” (Keller 154). Jean Keller goes on to write that the individualist Western model of autonomy “has been thought of as the pinnacle of human achievement, the source of human dignity, and the mark of moral maturity” (154). In contexts such as the university, which prize autonomy and individualism in student learning, it is taken for granted that an individual student can step into the one-on-one session within writing center spaces to work on their writing and, in some ways, this endows our spaces with the prestige of rationality and moral maturity—which further mutes the iconoclasm of our praxis as we leave the settlerizing designs of autonomous models of literacy untouched beyond writing center walls.
As writing centers embody these understandings of literacy in their support of students’ literacy practices within the university, they become what Grimm describes as regulatory centers within the university. Always hamstrung by our compliant residing in the physical spaces of our centers, we are “reproduc[ing] the social order and regulat[ing] access and subjectivity” (5) as we facilitate centers that leave the spaces students are living and working in untouched. Through this work, writing centers become more than simply regulatory centers, they become what Eric Camarillo describes as “whitening centers” as we allow the tension between our iconoclasm and our compliant attachment to our spaces go unresolved.
This tension has resulted in much handwringing by some of the more visible members of our field. For example, Shannon Carter describes this push and pull as one between meeting the needs of the institution and working to meet the needs of our students as the “writing center paradox.” Carter describes this paradox as a tension wherein the writing center responds to “both our students and the literacy demands of the academy” (138). She goes on to say that it is “crucial that we ask ourselves how one can possibly effect change in a system that is so profoundly shaped by and dependent on maintaining the status quo,” a system that is invested in “the autonomous model of literacy dominating most rhetorical spaces over which we are not in control.” Like others, Carter observes the tension, but ultimately comes to accept this tension in a way that I am calling into question. I wonder if accepting the tension in our work between the values of our field and the values encoded in the brick and mortar spaces we occupy allows us to leave unaddressed (a) that these rhetorical spaces are embodied and materialized through the settlerizing designs that writing centers are part of and (b) that these “rhetorical spaces” are primarily beyond our control because we choose not to enter these spaces. All too frequently, we couch our choice to accept these underlying tensions of our field using what Eric Camarillo describes as “the neutral rhetoric writing centers use [that] often cloaks their true purpose, which is to get students’ writing to align with an academic standard” (n.p.).
Being Different
As we challenge these long-held beliefs about the production and circulation of knowledge, Ede and Lunsford have challenged us to step into our roles as “bricoleur[s], trickster[s], and inventor[s]” (36) within the Writing Center. Claude Lévi-Strauss describes the work of the bricoleur as “a kind of radically flexible handiwork, an eclectic method by which the practitioner of bricolage, the bricoleur, employs all the available tools and materials ‘at hand’ to accomplish some purpose, typically in innovative, unpredictable, and cunning ways” (Farmer 32). Bricolage does this through “find[ing] ways of using the constraining order” to establish a “degree of plurality and creativity” (de Certeau 30). In other words, bricolage is “a practice that is simultaneously resistant and constructive” of the contexts in which it is practiced (Farmer 34). While Ede and Lunsford primarily drew from bricolage to think about how we could transform the spaces within our centers, I urge us to think about how our centers can themselves do the work of bricolage to challenge the settlerizing design of the universities that surround us. Doing so not only frees our iconoclastic work from the gates of our thresholds, it also takes the responsibility for change off the shoulders of our students and acknowledges that writing centers can be actors for change themselves.
The bricoleur’s resistance to the “law[s] of place” (de Certeau 29) nudges writing centers to disrupt their own allegiance to their places within the university, the spaces from which they hold one-on-one sessions with students away from classrooms and other composing environments across the university for students. As autonomous models of literacy are part of the university’s laws of place—laws of place that isolate literacy support for student writers within the walls of writing centers across the country—disrupting these laws of place enables embodied disruptions of the autonomous models of literacy that have hamstrung writing centers for so long. While much work has been done to disrupt these models of literacy and their influence on earlier writing center pedagogy, less has been done within writing center studies to disrupt the material ways these autonomous models of literacy shape the spaces we continue to occupy with students. In the remainder of this section, I invite writing center practitioners to think about what we can take from the strategies of the bricoleur to extend our work inside the center to the spaces that exist beyond our walls as we take a step toward resolving the tension between our celebration of writing center spaces and our commitment to being iconoclastic forces in the university.
In Luz en Lo Oscuro, Gloria Anzaldúa highlights the ways identity is always reflective of and contributing to the environment that surrounds us. In particular, she underscores how important it is to consider our interactions with the environments that surround us, which is of particular relevance to those working in and through writing centers. She writes:
Identity is relational. Who and what we are depends on those surrounding us, a mix of our interaction with our alrededores/environments, with new and old narratives. Identity is multilayered, stretching in all directions, from past to present, vertically and horizontally, chronologically and spatially. (69)
As our field continues to do work within our sessions, without extending this work outside of our walls to engage our environment, we are leaving the underpinning values of these spaces untouched. In particular, we are leaving the violent ideologies of autonomous models of literacy intact outside of our walls. In what follows, I tell the story of a sometimes clumsy and frequently unexpected journey our writing center has taken to address the tension between our iconoclasm and our place-based practice within the center. Despite the stops, starts, and detours that may characterize this journey, the general trajectory is one of moving our work outside of the center, of destabilizing autonomous models of literacy, and of working with students in the composing environments many are negotiating in college. Doing so has not relinquished us from our complicity in the violence of the academy. Rather, it has helped us to be more accountable in our work and disruptive of the autonomous models of literacy that have maintained our place-based practice in the center and muted the iconoclasm of our field.
We started with the materiality of our composing practices. Gunter Kress highlights for us critical connections between the materiality of our composing practices and the habitus we embody around these practices as writers. He writes that in addition to shaping meaning, the medium of our composing shapes our “habitus and the way we approach and conceive of our lifeworld” (185). With this in mind, early on, we leaned into the power of medium to initiate new relationships with the spaces and communities that contextualize our work in the university, to embody the disruption occurring within our sessions outside of the center.
We initially did this by inviting our university community to collaborate in the creation of an Earth Day text, a very large tree made of butcher paper that went floor to ceiling in one of our university’s common spaces across from our library. We used white butcher paper to create the large tree that would serve as the background for student texts. One of our tutors volunteered to design and paint the tree with some paints she had left over from another school project. About halfway up the trunk of the tree, another tutor added a sad looking face with a thermometer sticking out of its mouth suggesting that the tree—like the environment—was ill. The crown of the tree was large and painted green, providing a backdrop where participants placed paper bandages on which they wrote what they were going to do to help the earth. The bandages were cut from light and dark brown construction paper. The tree, along with a piece of poster board with the writing prompt “What can you do to help the earth?”, was hung on a large wall directly in front of the entrance to our library.
This public and collaborative text was an early step in enacting the praxis we so often talk about enacting in the quiet of our centers out in the open, across the halls of our university where students are always already negotiating meaning as agentive users of literacy, with or without a tutor. I wish to draw your attention less to the content of our message and more toward the ways in which moving our work outside of the center allowed us to engage students and our university community in small yet profoundly different ways that actively challenged the autonomous models of literacy that dominate so many of our university spaces. This tree demonstrates what Kress reminds us of when he writes that medium can be a “means of expressing power or deference to power” (74). As the broader text of our tree came together through a range of actions among ourselves and with students that would not have happened in this way within the writing center, we were able to facilitate the creation of a collaborative text that invited both the creators and interpreters of this text to embody and make writing visible as a social practice. This happened as our tutors and students met outside of the center, embodying how “[t]here is outward social (inter-)action in which meaning is constantly created, in a transformative process of interactions with and response to the prompts of social others and of the culturally shaped environment” (Kress 93-94). As this kind of multimodal work spills beyond the margins of the page and the walls of our writing centers, we are able to make visible the “socially constituted systems” that shape literacy practices across the university and students’ lives and redraw those systems by building new relationships with students and literacy.
Slowly, over the course of years, we began to expand the scope of these events where we would leave the center and consciously reshape spaces through invitations for student writing. While our work has extended well beyond these butcher paper creations, the value of this work is still a key piece of our movement outside of our center. For example, the first time our tutors meet many of our first time in college students is during a summer block party we throw during a mandatory four-day program for all of our incoming students. This event is titled “Make Your Mark.” We have snacks, t-shirts for students reading “There’s More Than One Write Way” across the back, a DJ, bubbles, and chalk inviting students to quite literally make their mark on our campus’s central courtyard where convocation is held a few days later. This event illustrates the ways in which our center is taking our work outside of our walls, writing with students across the spaces of the university and using this writing to—even if for only a short time—transform the spaces we share with them. As students meet tutors at this event, they meet them outside our space in a context that is oriented toward our campus community and the vibrant work our literacy practices do to re/shape this community while students are invited to get to work as they transform our central courtyard with their art and motivational quotes. Over the course of the event, a tapestry of text emerges that contributes to the transformation of the space right alongside the work we are doing to transform what a writing center is and the role that writing tutors play on our campus.
As we have done this multimodal work, we have built new and more sustained collaborations across campus that have enabled a broader removal of our work from the walls of the center. For example, “Make Your Mark” is done in collaboration with our Office of First-Year Experience, which organizes the larger program that students are participating in. As this collaboration has grown, we have sustained relationships with individual faculty who invite our tutors into their first-year seminar courses for workshops and to introduce their students to the center. Additionally, we collaborate with this office on an event that we refer to as our “HIIT sessions.” These sessions occur in different spaces ranging from campus common spaces to gathering rooms in dorms throughout the semester and provide students with snacks and a supportive space to study. There with them while they study are writing and math tutors. Some students come to these events, work with their friends, and leave. Others come and work extensively with tutors. As these HIIT sessions are held in spaces such as student dorms, we are able to disrupt the narrative that students must leave their spaces and come into our spaces for support.
In addition to these events, our tutors spend a significant amount of time outside of our center doing classroom introductions that are either brief five-to-seven-minute overviews of the center or they are longer sessions that walk students through how writing tutors support their work throughout the writing process. These latter sessions often serve the goal of teaching students about the center and introducing them to the idea of a writing process in the context of their course. Many faculty who request these introductory sessions also follow up later in the semester with requests for circulating tutors who visit their courses and offer students support as they are workshopping or working independently.
This work with students outside of the center is helping to establish our visibility on campus as an active participant in the dialogues that are going on about writing and the negotiations students engage in as they compose across the varied spaces of the university. We disrupt autonomous models of literacy as we no longer solely engage students as individuals outside of the vibrant contexts they compose across. Instead, we are working to be in conversation with stakeholders across the university and becoming part of a much larger network on campus.
As our work outside of the center increased alongside many of the sustained collaborations that allow for this work, we saw that the traditional model of writing center administration was not working as well as we would have liked. As a result, we have added to our team an assistant director and a position we refer to as a first-year liaison. This staff member works 40 hours a week sustaining our work outside of our center and connecting with first-year students across the university. This shift was critical for our success with this new direction. Prior to her arrival, the limitations of a director’s position with a 50% course reassignment for a 3/3 load ensured that work outside of the center could not be sustained or part of deeper reciprocal collaborations with other offices on campus. As our first-year liaison has come in, we have been able to build collaborations with students and other stakeholders that are reciprocal and sustainable as they have become institutionalized within our center. For example, we have a first-year advisory board made up entirely of first-year students, and we are in the process of implementing a faculty/staff advisory board that will work with the director. It has for many become accepted to see our tutors out and about on campus doing a range of activities that extend beyond one-on-one tutoring in the center.
In addition to moving our work outside of the center, we have also refigured what it means to be “in” the center. The brick and mortar space of our center has extended to include three spaces. One of these spaces is a community space used for book launches, workshops, and club meetings for two student organizations that are sponsored through our writing center: the Writing Club and the Spanish Club. This community space has a couple of high-top tables, two funky triangle tables, and about 15 comfy chairs with swivel desks. When the space is not being used, we frequently leave it open and students will come in to study, scroll their phones, or occasionally watch a movie together. Through these organizations and the space that is distinctly not a classroom or tutoring space, we are able to work with students across the university in contextualized ways that disrupt autonomous models of literacy. Our two other spaces are a podcasting studio, which I discuss more below, as well as a large space where we do our more traditional tutoring and which includes an area for full class visits and workshops in addition to tables for one-on-one tutoring.
Finally, and perhaps most disruptive of the autonomous models of literacy that have hamstrung our work between our loyalty to our space and our iconoclastism has been that we are no longer a writing center. This shift in our relationship with the university, our students, and our administrative structure, has allowed us to transition into a Writing, Language, and Digital Composing Center that includes a podcasting studio that we equipped with funds not spent during COVID when our operations were virtual. This podcasting studio is open to students who are working on school projects as well as students who are looking to produce their own podcasts. In addition to this, our digital tutors support students creating digital texts, using our learning management system, and other platforms across which they work. We also now employ Spanish tutors and speech tutors.
Conclusion
In their introduction to The Writing Center Director’s Resource Book, Christina Murphy and Byron Stay comment that “[t]he writing center professional must map out management styles that will meet institutional needs/demands and that will enable success” (xiv). When I started directing our writing center in 2014, I took this at face value: writing centers strove to meet institutional needs and enable student success. It was years before I began to question what “success” meant for students and who was defining success for students in college. Once we start to ask some of these difficult questions, the façade of student-centered language that often hides the autonomous models of literacy sustained by the long history of universities begins to crack. We begin to see how understandings of student success that bolster autonomous models of literacy fortify “institutional needs,” naturalizing them within a context that regards literacy as a neutral, autonomous skill that is transmittable through White Mainstream English (Baker-Bell). When we see literacy as always contextualized and imbued with power, we have to look beyond the individual writing center session and the pedagogies that guide that session and ask how it is that our spaces and the administrative structures that maintain them are engaging a system that keeps the racist and colonialist underpinnings of our universities in place.
As we so often come to this work with “an idea about what directing a writing center would look like,” even those who come to writing center work equipped with anti-racist or decolonial frameworks often find themselves in the uncomfortable space of reimagining things like administrative structures that maintain autonomous models of literacy, which often isolates writing centers from the broader contexts they are working in—again suggesting that writing is a neutral and autonomous skill (Caswell, McKinney, and Jackson 177). While we are part of the broader dynamic landscape of the universities that surround us, writing centers are also part of a broader, perhaps existential at times, landscape across which students live and work as writers. Our work to destabilize autonomous models of literacy connects us to that landscape and shapes our agency across it alongside students.
García reminds us that “we cannot decolonize being without decolonizing knowledge” (2). One step in this work, I suggest, is to challenge the tension that, although frustrating, has often been naturalized within our work between the disruptive work we imagine ourselves doing and the often-cloistered spaces where this work is happening. This decolonizing requires us to move ourselves and our work outside of our writing center spaces, spaces that are relics of the colonizing designs of universities through which writing centers were established as regulatory spaces perpetuating what we have come to no longer see as a standard academic English, but as a White Mainstream English that enacts “white ways of speaking [that] become the invisible – or better, inaudible – norm” (Baker-Bell 3). In order to disrupt this, we must divest ourselves from the privileges of our space, and move our work out into the spaces of the university. Such a transition makes our iconoclasm no longer simply disruptive, but allows us to actively participate in the (re)creation of the spaces we share and build with students across the university.
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I would like to thank Elizabeth Chilbert Powers and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and generative feedback to this piece as it was being revised.