Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 1 (2022)

Crossing through Borderlines of Identification and Non-Identification: Transforming Writing Center Response to Faculty Outreach

Hadi Banat
University of Massachusetts Boston
hadi.banat@umb.edu

Abstract

Transformative change in writing center work can take place through a critical evaluation of histories and habits of practice. Writing Centers at universities that do not institutionalize an organized and funded Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative can get overwhelmed by outreach from faculty in the disciplines. Prepackaged writing center heuristics for the interpretation of and response to faculty outreach workshop requests may create conflicts and destroy bridges of potential collaboration. By adopting participatory ethnographic research while employing Kris Ratcliffe rhetorical listening framework, I investigated causes of conflict between former writing center practices and faculty expectations of outreach workshops. This conceptual narrative documents fieldwork observations and lays out the roots of conflict involving various stakeholders: writing center administration, writing tutors, and faculty in the disciplines. Ultimately, this narrative demonstrates the outcomes of rhetorical listening and intercultural dialogue and describes two initiatives that transformed the culture of WAC outreach: (1) a new model engaging faculty partners in peer review workshops, remote lab tours, and mentoring consultations on workshop design and delivery, and (2) a conflict resolution training tutorial for professional development of tutors.

Voices from the periphery into the center

In the academic year of 2015-2016, I started my doctorate degree in English with a dual concentration in Rhetoric/Composition and Teaching English as a Second Language. I moved to the United States from the Middle East. I am Muslim. I am Palestinian Lebanese, born in Lebanon with a Palestinian refugee status. I am a US permanent resident through family chain immigration. I am bilingual – Arabic is my first language while English is my second. I speak and write English with an accent. My darker physical features help people classify me as either Middle Eastern or Latinx. I have other identity markers that do not align with mainstream culture. I have completed my PhD residency amid the exclusionary rhetoric resulting from President Trump’s administrative stance in favor of the Muslim ban, the US media’s persistent propaganda of religious extremism, and narratives about Islamophobic incidents and terrorist bombings of religious sites. I would attend Friday prayers on campus. I fast during Ramadan, and I do not eat pork. My minority status is thus easily defined and labelled in mainstream America. I bring a diverse palette of differences into spaces I enter, thus triggering the interplay of identification and disidentification with mainstream culture and further complicating power dynamics with my interlocutors.

At the beginning of my time at Purdue, I witnessed the shift in writing center leadership which brought a wave of increased accountability towards difference, thus creating a new Writing Center (WC) mission centered on social justice and inclusion. Harry Denny calls for taking up “diversity, not just as a slogan, but as a central axis for critical thinking, student engagement, and teaching and learning” (165). Denny reminds us that our writing centers do not operate in a vacuum; they routinely get disrupted by environmental exigencies and forces. He cautions against the naivety of imagining “that the outside can’t or will not intrude into our spaces”, and he invites us to “engage difference and [face] the commonplace of identity politics” (Denny 166). Progressive scholarship on identity in writing center work (Denny; García; Denny et al.,; Webster) strategically inspired a transformation in the bodies that inhabited the staffing platform of the center. Tutors with linguistic, cultural, identity, racial, and religious differences started occupying the material infrastructures of the space to transform its social and cultural infrastructures away from its history of whiteness and domination. Such an intentional decolonizing act gradually built trust between diverse tutors and the writing lab administrators. That change also initiated the social mobility of marginalized tutors like me towards inhabiting managerial positions in writing center administration. 

I was the only multilingual graduate student tutor who joined Purdue’s writing lab in 2016-2017. I started tutoring while simultaneously taking a practicum in writing theory and practice with Harry Denny. Due to schedule conflicts with the writing across the curriculum seminar, Denny generously accommodated my schedule and offered me the practicum on a one-to-one basis. The practicum combined theory on writing center practice, L2 writing, and translingual writing with experiential assignments that maximized my immersion in tutorials with the writing lab’s tutors as well as problem solving exercises with staff and administrators. During my training, Denny emphasized the power of intentional listening, awareness of embodiment and identity politics, and the art of tactful communication to negotiate differences and resolve conflicts. I developed new knowledge about how to navigate “flash politics that infiltrate the everyday routine of sessions and staff development within writing centers” (Denny et al. 7). During the practicum, we have witnessed together an array of environmental turbulences, the most relevant of which was a strong wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric. Denny was aware that school shootings, gun open-carry laws, Black Lives Matter, the use of antigay slurs in athletics, sexual violence, and lack of response to racial bias on university campuses remain “hegemonic events in our collective conscience” (Denny et al. 8) imposing fear on complete outsiders to the US context like me. I gradually realized how focusing on writing and writers in tutorials get politicized by the sociocultural, socioreligious, socioeconomic and sociopolitical exigencies in our environment and on our campuses. Interactions with interlocutors in writing center tutorials, workshops, and staff meetings are highly contextual, so we can “never provide blanket solutions to every problem” we encounter (Denny et al. 4). Within the complexity of environmental turmoil, I have come to understand how “listening [could emerge] in the crux of incoherencies and disjunctions” and “how [we could] practice survivance, resiliency, and agency through listening” (García 30). Listening cultivates better communication across differences (Ratcliffe), so engaging in intentional, purposeful, and rhetorical listening can transform former practices and ways of doing. To set ourselves up for rhetorical listening, community listening comes first to develop knowledge about various environmental exigencies and build awareness of multiple perspectives.  

In response to Sicari and García’s research question, “What might transformative listening look like in writing center work? How can we work towards mindfully incorporating transformative listening in our pedagogies and practices?”, I propose a narrative that conceptualizes how crossing through borderlines of identification/non-identification (Ratcliffe 63) has played a major role in transforming my minority status into a power force imposing transcultural practices and changes in the spaces I inhabit and enter. I emphasize my minority status as “the precondition of an individual predisposition to listen rhetorically” and how it facilitates crossing the borders of identification and non-identification (Oleksiak 15). My conceptual narrative articulates the notion of equilibrium I have created thus balancing the asymmetrical powers of domination and submission that haunted prior writing center and faculty relationships.

In my narrative, I share ethnographic fieldwork observations I have collected during my term as Purdue’s Writing Lab Workshops and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) coordinator (2017-2018). Through participatory ethnographic research, I investigated causes of conflict between former writing center practices and faculty expectations of outreach workshops. By reversing former protocols of “entering spaces”, I presented new opportunities for transformative listening. I paid fieldwork visits to faculty in their own dwellings–their own colleges, departments, and buildings–to challenge the writing center’s prior culture of subordination to electronic underprepared faculty workshop requests. With my visible minority identity markers, I gently entered faculty offices and classrooms to observe, listen, and ask questions. My ancestry narratives of the 1948 Palestinian exodus and our prior relocations across borders haunted me with every faculty office visit on campus. The erasure of my Palestinian identity, incessant forms of marginalization, and experiences of domination I have witnessed throughout my life set me up to “cultivate listening as a form of resolve between being heard and seen” (García 31), which creates exigency for transformative action and response.  In the narrative, I describe the outcomes of intentional listening and intercultural dialogue which transformed the culture of WAC outreach work. I particularly emphasize two initiatives I led: (1) a new model engaging our faculty partners in peer review workshops, remote lab tours, and mentoring consultations on workshop design and delivery, and (2) a conflict resolution tutorial for continuous professional development of tutors.

Writing centers-de-facto wac outreach partners

Transformative change in writing center work takes place through a critical evaluation of histories and habits of practice. Hauntings of past ideologies about who owns knowledge and expertise about writing should inspire an ethical responsibility towards transforming the rhetoric of managing, controlling, and policing the other. This is possible when enacting decoloniality which engages in exploring “border thinking as the site of knowledges and epistemic alternatives that can move us beyond Western categories of epistemology, thought, and feeling” towards pluriversality (García and Baca 2). At institutions that do not have an organized writing across the curriculum initiative, the writing center becomes the de facto space for such work (Harris 101; Kuriloff 109). The becoming of the writing center as a WAC outreach partner promotes its status in the institution when new practices adopt an antiracist and decolonial approach to building knowledge about writing, i.e., recognizing and acknowledging diverse stakeholders. Who is arriving and who is transforming– the Writing Center or Faculty in the Disciplines?—remains a troubling question that shakes the “domination subordination” (Pratt 7) dynamics of who owns knowledge and expertise on writing instruction. Prepackaged and traditional writing center heuristics for the interpretation of and response to faculty outreach requests can create conflicts and destroy bridges of potential collaboration. When faculty in the disciplines reach out to enter the writing center space, they are approaching this act with agency and trust in the other. This positive initiative sometimes gets underestimated by memories of institutional marginalization of the writing center, reckoning it as a space for support and service rather than knowledge making. Transformative listening plays an agential role in the erasure of past dwellings and rebirth of new ways of doing in writing center work (García 33) when it invests in community listening that seeks to understand both the opportunities and challenges embedded in cross disciplinary collaboration. Only then, transformative listening creates a culture of “mindfulness towards difference” (García 33) that can resolve asymmetrical relations of power between the writing center and faculty in the disciplines. 

Purdue’s writing lab serves undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and faculty from across various disciplines. The center employs both undergraduate and graduate tutors and presents leadership opportunities for graduate students interested in seeking professionalization in writing center/program administration. These administrative professionalization opportunities include assistant director for undergraduate education, assistant director for workshops and writing across the curriculum, assistant director for multilingual writing, and assistant director for content development of the Online Writing Lab (OWL). Keen on reflecting the diversity of the student population on campus, Purdue’s writing lab is intentional about recruiting students from diverse disciplinary and identity backgrounds. This diversity is more prevalent within the undergraduate than the graduate tutor population due to the limited hours graduate students on a half time assistantship (0.5 Full-time Equivalent) can work. In the past and during my term as WAC coordinator, only domestic graduate students could be on a three-quarter assistantship, i.e., they could teach a writing course (0.5 FTE) and work for ten hours in the writing lab (0.25 FTE). However, this pattern could not endure within the context of an institution that values research production more than teaching; thus, recently there has been more pressure on graduate students to work a limited number of hours in order to direct their undivided attention towards research and publications.

Responding to the institutional context, the writing lab has to balance the mission of mentoring students on writing development with new goals aiming to transform the writing lab into a space for knowledge making. For that purpose, the writing lab has become more purposeful with recruiting graduate students who aim to professionalize in writing center administration and are thus devoted to fulfilling their research agendas and employment responsibilities towards achieving that goal. Graduate tutors who work in the writing lab are required to enroll in a three-credit graduate practicum seminar on writing center theory and practice during their first semester of employment. Undergraduate tutors, on the other hand, have to successfully complete a three-credit undergraduate course on theories and methods of tutoring writing prior to their employment. The writing lab also hires business writing consultants, students majoring in Professional Writing who successfully complete a discipline-specific practicum for tutoring on business, technical, and professional writing genres before they start tutoring. Throughout their employment at the writing lab, all populations of tutors participate in compensated professional development workshops and meetings in addition to online training tutorials for mentoring multilingual writers. Seventy percent of the Writing Lab visits during the academic year of 2017-2018 were made by multilingual writers (2017-2018 Annual Report 29).

On a campus that does not have an institutionalized WAC program, the writing lab gradually and naturally becomes a WAC outreach center. However, without institutional sanction and sufficient financial resources dedicated for a WAC initiative, a writing center “can achieve certain goals but is limited in its ability to bring about the self-sustaining changes a WAC program seeks” (Harris 90). The lack of funding dedicated for WAC outreach work through Purdue’s Writing Lab has changed since Muriel Harris’s administrative term but not in substantial ways. Thus, Harris’s caution against bottom-up attempts by the writing center “to launch a WAC program of its own” (90) still hold ground during Denny’s writing center administration. Currently, Purdue’s Writing Lab offers faculty resources, faculty guides, one-on-one and group consultation faculty meetings, and outreach workshops in addition to some OWL resources designed for writing development in the disciplines. To further promote STEM engagement, Purdue’s Writing Lab operates a satellite location in the Mechanical Engineering building one night a week to provide tutoring for engineering undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and faculty. Due to the STEM orientation of the school, the writing lab has been intentional in fostering relationships with faculty from the colleges of pharmacy and engineering.

Traditionally, all graduate tutors are hired from and funded by the English Department. During the 2017-2018 academic year, the Graduate School funded three new 0.5 FTE positions for graduate tutors from other departments in the College of Liberal Arts to support graduate student writers in the disciplines (2017-2018 Annual Report 15). The limited funding for such positions and the research-based nature of STEM graduate assistantships stand as obstacles for hiring consultants from disciplines representing the diversity of colleges and departments at Purdue. This challenges the enactment of Peshe Kuriloff’s vision of fostering a “multidisciplinary environment [where] no individual possesses all the pieces of the puzzle [and] consultants have much to learn from each other” (111). With the allocated funding, Purdue’s writing lab cannot recruit sufficient and relevant human resources to nurture a transcultural learning environment where writing consultants listen to each other intentionally and rhetorically to collaborate on developing “a basic knowledge of common discourse conventions in disciplines other than their own” (Kuriloff 111). In an attempt to navigate such limitations, Purdue’s Writing Lab created and funded a new graduate student administrative position – Workshop and Writing Across the Curriculum Coordinator. I was responsible for collaborating with faculty in the disciplines to address their needs on integrating and assessing writing in coursework as well as to address student needs through designing workshops, planning consultation sessions, and providing remote lab tours.

enacting identification, disidentification, and non-identification

In my approach to WAC work, I have employed Krista Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening framework (identification, disidentification, and non-identification) to facilitate building relationships with faculty across campus as well as with my partners in the Writing Lab. Ratcliffe argues rhetorical listening facilitates cross-cultural communication when it “assumes the possibility of conscious identification” (48). Community listening builds up the knowledge and schema which facilitate mapping identifications. In this conceptual narrative, I use cross-cultural communication as communication between various cultures of writing in the institution. By cultures of writing, I mean disciplinary dispositions towards writing communicated through various discourse communities on campus who utilize common terminology and genres to produce new epistemologies in their own fields of study. To enable intentional identifications with various disciplinary realities about writing, one ought to remain open to multiple identifications. This premise enabled me to frame myself as “a compilation of many identifications” in my role as the Writing Lab WAC coordinator (Ratcliffe 51). As I traveled between the writing lab and faculty offices, I was entering new discourse communities and participating in community listening for identifying commonalities and differences. Through the “gaps and conflicts between the embodied discourses” (Ratcliffe 53), I found opportunities to claim my agency and recommend the most suitable interventions for WAC work in the context of an institution like Purdue where no official sanction and dedicated funding for a campus-wide initiative has been put in place.  In the process of making conscious identifications, Ratcliffe sees a necessity in both acceding to power and learning submission (60). In theorizing spaces for queerness, Timothy Oleksiak has also utilized Ratcliffe’s framework to demonstrate the interplay between domination and submission. My approach to WAC work resonates with Oleksiak’s demonstration because he invites us to “allow ourselves and others to enter into a disorienting effect that resists the closure of identification and disidentification” (15). The sense of disorientation Oleksiak frames gets messy while negotiating with faculty in the disciplines, but this disorienting effect enables “transformation [which can only happen] in light of a collaborative exchange” (20) through community listening. My motive as the workshops and WAC coordinator was to decolonize knowledge ownership by building healthier relationships between the writing lab and faculty in the disciplines based on two premises: (1) openness to difference, and (2) a reciprocal exercise of domination and submission that all stakeholders involved learn to participate in.

In mapping conscious identifications, witnessing disidentifications is inevitable and continuously evolving. Ratcliffe relies on Diana Fuss’s definition of disidentification – “an identification that has already been made and denied in the unconscious” (7); thus, disidentifications between the writing lab and faculty in the disciplines are the result of troubled histories based on faulty or stereotypical identifications (Ratcliffe 62). Inspired by Ratcliffe’s invitation to observe how identifications and disidentifications function, I was cognizant of the policing, regulating, and controlling culture of traditional writing center work. I was also cognizant of the faulty assumptions faculty in the disciplines have about the role of writing centers in initiating WAC work and supporting faculty with integrating writing instruction in their content courses. Through negotiating identifications, disidentifications, and hauntings of prior outreach workshops, I invited faculty to enter a conversation and fostered a dialectical dialogue that continued until we collaboratively identified the most suitable intervention. The process is messy and raises questions about “power plays that are ideologically unfair” (Ratcliffe 66) to prior identifications of the writing center as a place of service and prior identifications of faculty in the disciplines as ignorant of writing knowledge. Most of our conversations centered on mapping the commonalities and differences between how we teach and tutor writing in rhetoric and composition and how faculty in the disciplines perceive writing instruction and define good writing. Through mapping commonalities and differences, we engaged in cross-cultural communication to find suitable interventions that bridge writing center pedagogy and faculty expectations about the outcomes of outreach workshops and writing center tutorials. The paradigm shift I adopted in responding to faculty outreach workshop requests was a conscious and intentional move towards making reconciliations with past practices and inventing alternative practices.

To erase past hauntings of policing places and bodies whether it was exercised by the writing lab or faculty in the disciplines, I adopted Ratcliffe’s concept of non-identification and positioned myself in the margin. It is a place I am used to inhabiting as a Palestinian refugee, but the margin provides “a place of pause, a place of reflection, a place that invites people to admit that gaps exist” (Ratcliffe 73). By inhabiting the margin, I could not meet faculty in the writing lab space. I entered their offices as a visitor that does not claim ownership of space, materiality, and resources. I claimed my graduate student persona in my role as the workshops and WAC coordinator to ease faculty into entering a dialogue with me. This powerplay of submission allowed them to trust me gradually especially when explaining how my position was created “to revisit former identifications and disidentifications” (Ratcliffe 73) about good writing in the disciplines. Ratcliffe argues this position of non-identification “is important in rhetoric and composition studies because it maps a place, a possibility, for consciously asserting our agency to engage cross-cultural rhetorical exchanges across both commonalities and differences” (73). By placing myself in the margin, I was performing rhetorical listening and giving myself a chance to hear faculty complaints and relay prior frustrations of the writing lab. In this context, living in the margin allows you recess time to carve new directions and approaches towards conflict resolution. Through community listening, a collaborative navigation of troubled identifications and disidentifications made such conversations successful because we could reach consensus to reciprocally engage in the interplay between domination and submission regarding who owns knowledge about writing. This dialectical exchange “provides a ground for action motivated by accountability” (Ratcliffe 73) because all parties involved “reconsider previous identifications and disidentifications” and allow themselves to “act in a variety of ways … and decide whether to say yes, and/or no and/or maybe” (Ratcliffe 75). This dialectical exchange also helped me and faculty partners remain open and exercise agency only when relevant – not for the virtue of the power we believe we acquire from our own disciplines. When we successfully became part of that dialogue, we set ourselves up “to choose to act ethically, either by listening and/or acting upon that listening” (Ratcliffe 76). In this case, rhetorical listening facilitated via community listening becomes transformative “as a form of actional and decolonial work” (García 33) in erasing past histories of policing, controlling, and regulating.

Amid the conflicting realities of emotional belonging and detachment as a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, I mastered the playful act of identification and disidentification. I identified with the Lebanese culture when it served the purpose. I did so through code switching and performing a social demeanor aligned with Lebanese cultural structures and practices because “you persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (Burke qtd. in Ratcliffe 55). On the other hand, I did not identify with the Lebanese culture in situations where I was denied the agency of belonging. The shift between identifications and disidentifications was emotionally haunting and psychologically exhausting, which sometimes necessitates resting in the margin not as a form of submission but as an opportunity to pause, reflect, and regain your powers. Ratcliffe emphasizes the hyphen in non-identification which symbolizes the margin between identifications and disidentifications, “a place wherein people may consciously choose to position themselves to listen rhetorically” (72). In non-identification, Ratcliffe argues for an opportunity to “assert personal agency … to act in a variety of ways … to exercise capacity and willingness to listen to [oneself] and others” (75). These exercises “marked the impetus for my search for self, my search for my identity, for a home, for a culture, and for a community to which I could belong”, i.e., my search for my identity as a Palestinian refugee “who [has] experienced the exigency of living dual realities” (Banat 160). The emotional labor of being haunted by my Palestinian heritage, i.e., inhabiting multiple grounds, living in the margin, waiting on borders, and being policed, prepared me to shift tactfully between identification and disidentification with former writing center practices in my role as the lab’s WAC coordinator. Intentional listening remains a craft to master, but one’s disposition to engage active listening is a natural tendency acquired through past accumulative experiences.

wac administration initiatives

To invent new initiatives, I had to interrogate former practices. I quickly realized that the writing lab’s traditional response protocols to hastily prepared electronic faculty workshop requests cannot endure the emergent complexity of writing needs in various disciplines on campus. The first task I engaged myself with was reviewing the list of departments and faculty who requested workshops in the past, the types of workshops they requested, and how often they have reached out for such requests. I then went through the inventory of workshop materials the writing lab kept and assessed the visibility of the infrastructure where these materials live. I questioned former practices of responding to faculty workshop requests after I have witnessed a pattern of recurrency, i.e., the same faculty members reaching out for workshops on the same topics. I interviewed the associate director of the writing lab for possessing memory of former protocols; the past tradition was to accommodate as many faculty outreach workshops as possible in hopes to spread awareness about the writing lab across various disciplines and attract more student traffic into tutorials. Despite the sound logic in former reasoning and outreach goals, I identified three major problems: (1) a lack of outreach to new faculty partners, (2) tutor disinterest in designing and delivering outreach workshops, and (3) sustainability was at stake. I, thus, have prioritized three milestones during my term as the workshops and WAC coordinator: (1) changing the culture of response to faculty workshop requests, (2) creating a mentor model for designing outreach workshops, and (3) increasing the visibility of the workshop material inventory.

In the following subsections, I will lay out interventions for supporting writing lab tutors with workshop design and delivery as well as training them to resolve conflicts they encounter with students and faculty across disciplines.

A More Sustainable Model for Faculty Outreach Workshops

Recognizing the power of rhetorical listening “as a trope for interpretative invention and as a code for cross-cultural conduct” (Ratcliffe 1), I had to listen to become more open to how communicating about writing across disciplines remains a process of negotiation and conflict resolution. I did not witness any enactment of intentional listening through reading and responding to faculty workshop requests in silos. The intentional act of listening involves interlocutors engaging in active conversation after paying attention to the exchange of ideas and language. Thus, I initiated response to workshop requests via thank you emails to faculty with appointment requests for face-to-face meetings. I looked up faculty profiles to compose personalized positive notes embedded in each meeting request – a speech act of complimenting I borrowed from my Palestinian Lebanese heritage. Recognizing and giving credit to other knowledge and expertise is an act of paying respect. One use of rhetorical listening “is predicated upon respect for self and others; it also assumes that listeners possess the agency for acknowledging, cultivating, and negotiating conventions of different discourse communities” (Ratcliffe 34). My disciplinary affiliation naturally prompts me to internalize rhetoric and composition as the professional field of studying, researching, and teaching writing. By default, rhetoric and composition scholars own knowledge about writing theory, practice, conventions, and genres. However, a postpositivist perspective implies embracing multiple realities; thus, moving away from a purely objective stance about knowledge becomes imperative. Adopting a postpositivist worldview kept me open to other knowledges about writing at the institution. This stance of openness helped me endorse Ratcliffe’s notion of respect for self and others, i.e., participating in and inviting others to a collective acknowledgement of multiple realities about writing that live in our disciplines and institutions.

My email requests for meetings with faculty in the disciplines were never turned away. I paid visits to faculty in their own dwellings to initiate conversations about their workshop needs. My understanding that many faculty are good writers but do not possess explicit knowledge about writing pedagogy in alignment with their own discipline-specific ways of thinking (Kuriloff 108) encouraged me to repurpose my faculty visits into discourse-based interviews to unpack faculty tacit knowledge about good writing in their disciplines. I entered faculty offices gently, sat in their office chairs cautiously, tilted my posture forward attentively, smiled shyly, and listened attentively. The act of trepidation I would perform is inherited. With every visit to faculty offices, my Palestinian ancestry 1948 exodus narratives and relocation across borders and into new lands haunted me. As Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, we are denied citizenship, employment, health care access, ownership, and inheritance rights. Despite my attachment to Lebanon, it has always been a country that belongs to other people; “we had to accept the fact that the things we were using would never belong to us, and that this country, this other land, would never belong to us, either” (Pamuk). I was not possessive of writing knowledge because I rarely experienced ownership rights. When I was entering spaces outside the Writing Lab, I recognized that writing knowledge does not only belong to me. It also belongs to faculty who practice it in their own disciplines.

Through my collaboration with faculty from various disciplines, outreach workshops became less lecture-based and instead adopted a peer-review model; I worked with the writing lab tutors on designing workshops that mentored students and faculty to provide discipline specific feedback. Writing lab tutors would visit a classroom only after students finished the first draft of an assignment and only after they have received feedback from their professor. The writing lab tutors work with faculty and students to develop knowledge about strategies and tactics for revision and also involve students in peer review to make them more autonomous reviewers of their own writing. Keen on promoting sustainability and reaching out to new faculty partners across campus, I also prioritized another type of workshop, the mentor-model workshop, which instructs faculty and empowers them to design peer review classroom activities. A third type of workshop was the Remote Tours which promoted the writing lab interventions and highlighted how consistent visits to the center can make students better writers in their disciplines. Bringing such information into courses across campus increases student traffic to the writing lab. When we see more students from the disciplines in tutorials, we invite faculty and students to participate organically in the teaching and learning process by “creating a feedback loop and conveying vital information gleaned from students to their professors” (Kuriloff 114).

During the academic year of 2017-2018, the Writing Lab offered 17 in-house workshops for general writing concerns. In-house workshops include various topics like generating research proposals, using source texts, building citation knowledge and skills, developing job search and graduate school application materials, and learning email etiquette. For outreach, I collaborated with my partners in the writing lab to offer six in-class peer review workshops requested by faculty in the disciplines, five workshops on graduate student writing, and five remote tours to promote the writing lab interventions. Workshops are typically an hour-long and either adapt the peer-review model or consist of faculty mentoring. One of my goals was to provide outreach to new faculty on campus from outside the traditional realm of engineering and pharmacy. Purdue is mostly known for being an engineering school, but that should not necessarily reduce it into one identification. Other colleges on campus play an essential role in feeding and balancing the STEM orientation of the school. Ratcliffe admits that identifications craft an identity but cautions us against reducing identity to a single identification (51). The two tables (Appendix A) present all the faculty and staff discipline-specific workshops conducted in Fall and Spring of 2017-2018. Adopting a visual landscape for the types of workshops offered is purposeful and rhetorical to represent two important notions essential to WAC work: (1) tracking outreach to new faculty, staff, and student partners across colleges, and (2) record keeping and data collection.

Workshop Design and Delivery

I did not encounter much resistance when I was shifting faculty prior dispositions and preferences from a lecture-based to a peer review workshop. Peer review workshops have become popular with faculty in the disciplines. Intentional and curious listening included faculty in the conversation, i.e., they felt their knowledge about writing and expertise in their own disciplines were recognized by the Writing Lab. The philosophy of knowledge co-ownership helped us approach problem solving as equitable partners and stakeholders. I emphasized the importance of feedback faculty provide students because they possess content knowledge in their own disciplines, and I highlighted the writing lab’s role in unpacking the writing process and providing interventions that make students more capable writers in their own disciplines. The process of negotiation does not always flow smoothly but gradually allows us to “hear things we cannot see [whether we] hear differences as harmony or even as discordant notes” (Ratcliffe 25). The disciplinary differences about what defines good writing did not scare me away; they prompted me instead to convince faculty how peer review workshops allow them, their students, and the Writing Lab to engage in the process of writing and revision and create opportunities for collaborative thinking and invention. Peer review workshops involved us all in the intentional act of listening because “it proceeds via different body organs, different disciplinary and cultural assumptions, different figures of speech, and most importantly different stances” (Ratcliffe 24). In addition to peer review workshops, faculty who needed direct instruction on assignment design or integrating writing instruction in their coursework benefited more from explicit mentoring. For that purpose, I participated with the Writing Lab Director in offering one-on-one mentoring consultations.

Due to my limited hours of employment as a graduate assistant, I could not fulfill all faculty outreach needs. I had to find partners in the writing lab to collaborate with. Even when designing and delivering workshops were highly compensated by the Writing Lab, graduate tutors were hesitant to take lead and participate in them. At the beginning, I misinterpreted their resistance and discussed with the writing lab director potential ways to make such opportunities more attractive. Increased financial incentives did not solve the problem. I called for a meeting with the graduate lab tutors, and I participated in intentional community listening to hear about their prior experiences with designing workshops and the reasons for their lack of interest. By alternating between my graduate student and WAC coordinator personas, I balanced between identification and disidentification with the writing lab’s prior culture of designing faculty outreach workshops. This tactful shift made them feel more at ease and fostered a culture of openness. Two major issues were recognized: (1) lack of resources and mentoring on outreach workshop design, and (2) prior negative experiences with faculty in the disciplines during workshops.

To solve these issues, I increased the visibility of prior workshop materials. All the files were stored on a hard disk drive in a drawer in the Writing Lab. The lack of visibility of infrastructure prompted me to collaborate with the assistant director for content development of Purdue OWL. We worked together to sort out, rebrand, and create an inventory of prior workshop materials available online and thus easily accessible to all graduate tutors. I also relayed the writing lab director’s openness to mentor graduate tutors on workshop design and delivery. Thus, we dedicated some of the professional development opportunities to achieve that goal. Whenever possible, I intentionally brought together various tutor identities (undergraduate, junior graduate, and senior graduate tutors) to work collaboratively on the design and delivery of faculty outreach workshops. Being cognizant that the Writing Lab is a discourse community with members entering and leaving periodically, I had to consider long-term sustainability of knowledge making and sharing. We offered financial incentives to all tutors who participated in workshops, and I documented their experiences with workshop design and delivery. With the OWL content development assistant director, I followed up on archiving newly designed materials and making them available online. The visibility of these materials also saves time and financial resources in the long run. As we reach out to new faculty partners on campus and as we identify common requests, tutors can use, recycle, and easily repurpose workshop materials to fit the new context and need.

Conflict Resolution Tutorial

WAC work is not only limited to designing faculty outreach workshops; working with students across various disciplines is the daily reality many tutors experience at Purdue’s writing lab. Through my meetings with graduate tutors, I have listened to the conflicts that could arise in tutorials or while delivering in-house and faculty outreach workshops. Rhetorical listening involves “a stance of openness [whose] purpose is to cultivate conscious identifications in ways that promote productive communication” (Ratcliffe 25). In my role as the WAC coordinator, I made an identification with administration and their stance in favor of outreach workshops, thus communicating to graduate tutors short- and long-term goals that achieve the writing lab mission. Through my graduate student persona, I made an identification with my peers’ emotional distress, frustration, and their resistant stance towards outreach workshops. Listening to their prior negative experiences allowed me to understand my position in relation to my peers and the writing lab administration and helped me understand my peers better in relation to administration and faculty in the disciplines. This openness motivates a sense of accountability according to Ratcliffe who differentiates accountability from responsibility, clarifying that accountability combines both responsibility and response (191). Through mapping commonalities and differences between my own and peers’ dispositions, I carved multiple identifications thus furthering my analysis of various claims and their cultural relationships to roles and dispositions.

These four moves outlined above enact Ratcliffe’s trope for interpretive invention (26). My empathetic stance towards my peers accomplished through making multiple identifications enabled me to assess a gap in problem solving skills. Thus, my contribution to invention was a proposal to design a conflict resolution module for my mid-semester project in the writing center administration seminar. The content of the module was utilized in professional development workshops that I co-delivered with Harry Denny. The module integrates both a theoretical and practical component. The theoretical component focuses on defining a conflict, types of conflict, and circumstances when conflicts arise in a tutorial. The practical component includes activities utilizing transcripts of writing center tutorial sessions and video scenarios. The training starts with a warm-up activity which focuses on some of the challenges tutors encounter in writing center tutorials. Depending on responses, mentors can cluster these difficulties under different categories, which can guide discussions about defining conflicts and conflict resolution. This facilitates scaffolding and enables tutors to transfer their prior knowledge about conflicts they had encountered in tutorials or during faculty workshops. Tutors then work through exercises that enable them to identify a conflict, frame it, articulate the reasons for its occurrence, then find possible solutions or successful interventions and strategies to solve it. The targeted audience for this training module include writing center administrators, writing center mentors, in addition to novice and experienced writing center tutors. Mentors working on this module can utilize the content and materials autonomously depending on the group of tutors in training, their level of expertise, and their learning styles and preferences.

Neil Katz, Katherine Sosa, and Suzzette Harriot described conflicts as “emotionally tense, volatile situations”, and working productively towards a resolution calls for managing emotions and addressing all parties’ needs (315). To help tutors assess each situation of conflict and adopt a suitable intervention strategy, the module exercises were designed to promote effective observation and rhetorical listening. Enacting Ratcliffe’s four moves for practicing rhetorical listening helped us collaboratively describe various types of conflicts we witnessed in tutorial transcripts and videos. Framing conflicts collaboratively in a group setting gives new tutors prerequisite knowledge and a framework to build upon when similar conflicts emerge in practice. Through the training module, the writing lab community identified the following types of conflicts:

A-   Epistemological conflicts arise when tutors and tutees do not share the same level of information and knowledge in relation to issues that come up in a tutorial. For example, a tutor might define the graduate school application genre as a persuasive statement which highlights the applicants’ experience and skills, while a tutee might consider the same document as a narrative that engages the reader and makes the statement stand out in a competitive environment. The disidentifications made with respect to the document’s genre in addition to the tutor and tutee’s incapability of perceiving an application statement to be both–an engaging narrative and a persuasive argument–can create conflict.

B-    Pedagogical conflicts happen when the method the tutor follows to facilitate learning in a tutorial is not the preferred method of the tutee. This disidentification with respect to preference can create emotional distress early on during the session. For example, a tutor believes that reading aloud is a strategy which can effectively engage the tutee in the proofreading process of the paper, but a tutee is neither comfortable nor confident about listening to someone else reading their writing aloud. The tutee prefers if the tutor does silent reading and gives suggestions for proofreading. Such a scenario can elevate tension from the onset of the session due to a paradox in preferences.

C-    Identity conflicts are sensitive and critical because embodied and hidden identities can pose different types and levels of challenges. Various markers of identity can influence student writing and thus emerge in writing center tutorials. For example, a tutee might not be comfortable working with a non-native speaker of English in the writing lab because they believe native speakers are better communicators and cultural informants about writing expectations in English. As a result, false assumptions can lead to passive aggression which stirs emotions.

D-   Intercultural conflicts arise when both the tutor and tutee do not have sufficient knowledge about each other’s cultures, or they generalize based on broad cultural stereotypes. For example, a tutor works with a tutee from China. The tutor believes that all Chinese students are quiet and timid and do not feel comfortable speaking up. The tutor dominates the session and does not invite the tutee to share their perspective. The tutee gets dissatisfied for being marginalized and deprived from the opportunity to exercise agency and make decisions about their own writing.

E-    Ideological conflicts take place when both the tutor and tutee are not on the same page with respect to how tutorials or workshops are handled. Instead of communicating expectations, both the tutor and students make assumptions that can offend each other. For example, conflicts can arise when some faculty and students expect writing lab tutors to deliver a toolkit of suggestions and tips on effective writing while tutors design hands-on workshops which require faculty and student collaboration. The mismatch in expectations can lead to a climax of frustration during a workshop.

David Healy presented another framework for conflict classification that divides conflicts into three types: intra-sender, inter-sender, and person-role conflicts. Intra-sender conflicts happen when expectations projected from one member are incompatible, for example a tutee asks a tutor to examine the paper with an editing role but then disagrees with the tutor’s suggestions and wants to keep the original wording. Inter-sender conflicts are characterized when “pressures from one role sender [oppose] pressures from one or more senders” (Healy 45). For example, a professor referred a student to the writing lab to improve language use, but a tutor had been mentored to address high-order concerns first. This can easily lead to a conflict especially if the tutee is under the pressure of deadline constraints and time crunches. Person-role conflicts occur when “role requirements violate particular values or needs of an individual, or the individual’s needs and aspirations result in actions that antagonize other members of the role set” (Healy 45). For example, a female tutor whose history of abuse from a male guardian makes it difficult for her to work with an older male tutor, and the writing center policy does not always facilitate voluntary selection of tutors. In such cases, the tutee might not feel comfortable expressing the reason for resistance because it is sensitive and personal, and the writing center staff find it difficult to read between the lines. Healy’s classification of conflicts stem from disidentifications that interlocutors were not able to reconcile due to unequal power dynamics. According to Ratcliffe, these limitations are dehumanizing and can result in misunderstandings and violations (72).

Translating tutor concerns into professional development interventions made them feel recognized and listened to. Consequently, they have become more ready to collaborate and more open to communicating concerns. They recognized the conflicts they deal with on the ground are real and shared by other peers. This boosted the collaborative spirit and fostered rapport, comfort, and trust among various stakeholders in the Writing Lab.          

Collaboration, Fluidity, and Relationality

Through Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening framework of making identifications, disidentifications, and non-identifications, we witness active collaboration and a stance of openness that encourages fluidity in shifting frames of reference. This progressive disposition of achieving relationality does not evolve naturally; it requires intentionality. Even with oppressive histories and imposed systems of control, I as a Palestinian refugee learned to endure the hardship of waiting on borders and the anguish of living in the margins. Adopting a pragmatist perspective towards my compulsory submission to systemic oppression required taking intentional initiatives to disrupt larger systems of domination. Through my reality, I had to consider borders and margins as transient stages for exploring new ideas of arrival. With new arrivals, transitions magnify disorienting effects only to restore equilibrium afterwards. Experiencing transitions to new lands has initiated my consubstantiality, i.e., the acculturation of material bodies to new environments; thus, developing rhetorical confidence and personal agency to find common grounds despite differences and to mystify unfair ideological power plays (Burke qtd. in Ratcliffe 58).

This is the approach I have implemented in building relationships between the writing lab and faculty in the disciplines. Jonathan Rylander and Travis Webster provide a queer framework for WAC work by adopting a “lens for incisively understanding collaboration and relationality through the lens of transdisciplinarity” (210). The motive to instill change gradually even if change is initiated in “one faculty’s teaching and for one student maybe enough of a seed planted in an institutional culture of writing” (Rylander and Webster210). Faculty outreach implemented by the workshop models outlined in this article (peer-review, mentor-model, and lab remote tours) is one sustainable way to “avoid Band-Aid WAC help” when resources are limited (Harris 93). Such initiatives take time, but time allows us the opportunity for actional and decolonial work, i.e., “participating in a different logic that invests in a pluriversal understanding of differences” (García 48). García revolutionizes the concept of time and space and their relationship to decolonizing writing center work by inviting us to give opportunities to new voices in the writing center – new bodies whose differences can reconcile “center/periphery binaries and uphold [alternative] forms of management” (49). And yet, this work is only possible when “directors play a critical role in this type of transformative learning and praxis” (García 50). It is more attainable when writing center directors “hire with an eye for diversity and [evaluate reflexively] how staffs have the potential to represent a diverse critical mass that can foster a truly innovative learning environment” (Denny et al. 244). The transformation of the bodies in the center brought in minority voices who are more inclined to listen and co-share knowledge, thus crossing boundaries and innovating praxis. Yet this work remains emotionally, psychologically, and physically daunting because experiencing disorientation in the margins brings back memories of suppression from past experiences and contexts. The central axis remains: How do we balance our time in the center and the periphery, our roles between domination and submission, and the equilibrium among emotion, reason, and transformative action in WAC work?

Acknowledgements

I thank Harry Denny whose transformative mentorship set me up to innovate with WAC design thinking and relationship building across disciplines. I am grateful to Anna Sicari and Romeo García for giving me a voice to represent the complexity of my professional and personal experiences. Their revision recommendations were valuable and impactful. I am also fortunate to have spent four days in July 2021 at a writing retreat in central Massachusetts with Matt Davis, Timothy Oleksiak, and Lauren Marshall Bowen. Their generous support, careful review, and constructive feedback on an earlier version of the piece have carved its debut. Thanks to my friend Hicham Naimy, the associate director of scientific publications at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, for providing me the opportunity and digital space to listen to myself going through the revision cycles of the manuscript.

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