Tutoring Second Language Writers (6 page)
Read Tutoring Second Language Writers Online
Authors: Shanti Bruce
Toward this end, for three weeks following the close of the 2012 spring term, we gathered eight consultants (four graduate and four undergraduate) and paid them through an internal grant to study our center’s work with multilingual writers and to compose a body of philosophy and theoretical understanding that might serve as a foundation for ongoing staff education. Together the consultants examined assessments gathered over the previous five years. Individually and in small working groups, consultants gathered articles and books that seemed to them to be relevant to our inquiry and important reading for all of us to discuss. Together we talked each day about these materials, the sense we were making of them, and the questions that seemed to us to arise from them. Together in their groups, tutors began to draft a book: not a manual of how-to’s, but a text that in successive chapters would lay out key questions and core principles with which future consultants might engage in order to sustain an ongoing, critical, and reflective dialogue about their praxis. By
praxis
we mean the dynamic relationship between theory and practice. Praxis is the process by which ideas are put into practice, practices are reflected upon, and ideas are transformed or revised in an ongoing feedback loop.
Over the course of the three weeks they spent together, the tutors composed a core principle: “The UNL Writing Center takes a strengths-based multi-competency approach to our work with multi-lingual and English Language Learning student writers.” They agreed that a writing center animated by a shared sense of convictions about the relationship between language learning and social justice must recognize and acknowledge through its pedagogical approaches the experiences, knowledge, ability, and skill individual writers already possess, building upon those strengths in service of learning. The tutors agreed also that such a writing center must be cognizant and respectful of
student-writers’ goals but also honest and realistic about the possibility of achieving those goals in the near term. They agreed that discursive and rhetorical hybridity were values they would hold both as they worked with student-writers and as they developed workshops and seminars for faculty and students beyond the bounds of the writing center. Finally, the tutors agreed that humility and compassion were richer grounds for building meaningful and learningful relationships with writers than any “mastery” of language or of writing practice that might be possessed by a tutor. They agreed that rather than privileging their own credentials and good intentions in their work with multilingual writers, in particular, our individual and collective philosophies and practices as tutors and administrators in the UNL writing center should orient around our uncertainties—the questions into which we continue to inquire and do not yet (may never) know the answers to—and our recognition that neither we nor the writers with whom we work can ever fully know ourselves, our abilities and our limitations, the discourses that shape us and the world in which we make our relations. Rather than asserting certainties we don’t possess, then, the tutors agreed that our individual and collective praxis might be better shaped by sharing our culture of inquiry with the writers with whom we work.
To prompt their own and other tutors’ understanding and consideration of their work in the writing center, the tutors composed a book in four chapters (or movements), the first of which centered around collaboration. They prioritized humaneness as a necessary condition for collaboration as well as for the ongoing collective practice of decentering authority within and beyond the tutorial. The tutors talked at great length about the qualities of a collaborative conversation between tutor and writer. While they recognized and honored processes of negotiating roles, goals, and directions, they also affirmed that the initial maps of these negotiations do not constitute the territory itself: that collaborative conversations are only sustained through ongoing dialogue and transparency as roles, goals, and directions shift in the changeable environs of a consultation. The second chapter took up linguistics, discourse, and rhetorical theory focusing on the complex relationships between form and meaning, on the politics of teaching SWAE in one-with-one settings, and on the array of dynamic complexities that might trouble tutors’ attempts to enact political principle in easy and thus authoritarian ways. In this sense, the second chapter cycled back to principles articulated in the first chapter in order to inquire into the possibilities for collaborative dialogue during consultations with multilingual writers.
Tutors organized the third chapter around the concept of agency. To them, working with writers to create and sustain conditions for writing in which writer agency was possible and realizable was a primary value. The tutors felt that agency as writers was critical for multilingual writers facing and laboring against forms of bias, discrimination, and marginalization on the basis of language, race, and nationality. Transparency made a return appearance in this chapter as tutors talked and wrote about the necessity for honesty and clarity about the array of discursive and rhetorical choices available to writers as well as the ways in which those choices might be limited by reader expectations (and the constellation of ideological as well as intellectual and rhetorical forces shaping those expectations). Finally, the tutors discussed and wrote about the relationship between agency and difficult dialogues about difference. They agreed that agency is occluded by silence on the matter of difference—that if writers are to act as agents in their own learning as well as in the production of their own writing, tutors can neither behave as if difference doesn’t exist or its effects are minimal, nor as if the institutional conditions around matters of difference are insignificant to conditions for learning and the production of new knowledge by multilingual writers.
In the final chapter of their book, tutors worked to redefine success, both in terms of individual consultations and in terms of their own praxis. They agreed that, as difficult as such a concept might be in practice, they needed to work with writers to understand the success of consultations in terms of ongoing learning rather than completion—in terms of what becomes possible for a writer to conceive and to practice after a consultation both in the revision of a current text and in the drafting of new work. They agreed also, however, that as well as being open and honest about their senses of success, they needed also to listen and attend to writers’ senses, their felt and expressed needs and interests, and to navigate differences with writers rather than in spite of them. Tutors felt that in order to reconceptualize success, they needed to understand time differently and to share that understanding with the writers with whom they work. Taking up the concept of a big here/long now, or what writing center scholar Anne Ellen
Geller (2005)
has termed “epochal time,” the tutors worked to theorize conditions within consultations in which tutors and writers might together press back against the constraints (and anxieties) associated with the right here/right now of due dates, clocks, and immediate needs. (
Condon 2012
, 125–26;
Geller 2005
, 8)
Finally, the tutors affirmed their collective valuation of learningful failure as integral to their own development as tutors. They talked
and wrote about the value of narrative—of storytelling—to their own growth as tutors (and writers) (see Medina Reyes, this volume) and to the ongoing quality of staff development as a whole in our writing center. Just as they had affirmed the necessity and value of difficult dialogues between tutors and writers, the tutors also affirmed the necessity and value of difficult dialogues to inquiry-based staff development. They needed, they felt (and wrote), time to share stories with their colleagues, to be supported but also questioned and challenged in service of learning from those stories. They felt convinced, as Elizabeth
Boquet (2002)
has written, that “freedom of inquiry is not a one-person job; it is a many-persons job” and that the shared labor of free inquiry needed to move dynamically between theory and practice via tutor stories collected and shared as an integral part of ongoing staff education (59).
The book begun by tutors over the course of that three-week collaborative effort has been nearly continuously drafted and revised during the time since our initial gathering. It served as a required text for the writing center theory and practice course offered the following autumn. Undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in that course grappled with its philosophical orientation and pedagogical claims, read the source material that shaped the work in both theoretical and practical terms, and prepared themselves as future tutors to contribute to its ongoing revision. The book has been used by tutors to design faculty development workshops as well as seminars and workshops for student-writers. It has served as the basis for weekly staff-development meetings during which tutors have inquired into questions or problems raised by the work or unaddressed, in some sense, within it. Although the book has some qualities of a manifesto, as a continuous work in progress, subject always to question, debate, and revision, it has not become nor was it intended to be a statement of doctrine or dogma. Even the ways its key principles, arguments, and source materials enable and constrain inquiry have been available for debate—for the very sort of difficult dialogues valued by the tutors who composed the originary text.
Although none of us on the staff of the UNL writing center were surprised by the vitriol of the tweets posted on the
UNLHaters
blog, we were deeply troubled by them. They confirmed realities with which we
had long been contending in the writing center. Many of the student-writers with whom we worked frequently and, indeed, some of us—international and US multilingual tutors and writers—were regularly subjected on our campus to surveillance; they/we were observed closely and with profound suspicion by some peers and faculty and judged by them in and outside of classrooms in ways that seemed animated by racist, white-supremacist, and nationalist perspectives on language, culture, and belonging/unbelonging. The hostility articulated explicitly in those tweets on the
UNLHaters
blog and implicitly through the everyday experiences of many international and multilingual writers and tutors as they moved through classrooms, cafeterias, residence halls, and across campus made for an institutional environment that was far from hospitable. However much we might have liked to separate our writing center from the hostility of those implicit and explicit messages, and as committed as we all were to creating a writing center community that would be welcoming and supportive of all students, we felt deeply the ways and degrees to which that inhospitable climate infected our best efforts at community building regardless of our intentions.
In working together on the book project, the tutors began to recognize a relationship between the privileging of particular languages and discourses within and beyond the classrooms they moved through and the animus directed at multilingual members of the university community in the tweets published on the blog. Their research suggested to them that the forms of linguistic imperialism and its underlying logics they detected in those tweets had long attended and sustained both global and local forms of cultural, social, political, and economic domination. They became convinced that so long as tutoring practices in the UNL writing center worked within rather than challenging the logics of linguistic supremacy, in particular, the effect of our work would be to reinforce the fabric of institutional intolerance at the intersections of SWAE with normative racial, ethnic, national, and linguistic identifications and exclusions. We needed, the tutors realized, to address the most powerful underlying logics of our practice—our understanding of language difference—if we were to address the faulty structure of our writing center rather than merely repairing the roof, as it were. In this regard, the tutors argued, their study of the ways language difference is addressed extended necessarily beyond the boundaries of our university and writing center to universities and writing centers across the United States and to widely shared assumptions within many institutions and writing centers about the relationships among language, intellectual ability, individual value, and national belonging.
The tutors were familiar with claims by writing center administrators and tutors at other predominantly white institutions that their schools are free of the kind of racism and white supremacy, ethnocentrism, and nationalism evinced in the above tweets. Many of them had heard such claims at regional and international writing center and tutoring conferences over a period of years. To be honest, however, neither we nor the tutors with whom we worked in the UNL writing center ever believed those claims. We agreed that there might be local differences in institutional conditions, but all of us remain convinced that at this historical moment, pressures around racial, ethnic, national, and cultural normative identifications in the United States are ubiquitous. Collectively, we believed that within predominantly white colleges and universities across the country, including UNL, the presence of difference—the presence of Othered bodies, Othered voices, Othered languages and cultures—is still represented and treated as a “problem” for those who occupy normative subject positions. This (il)logic is taken up in the classroom and in the writing center in and over student bodies, student voices, and student texts that classroom teachers and writing center tutors alike still seem too frequently compelled to “fix.”
The
Inside Higher Ed
article and wave of public discussion and debate about the haters blogs following the article’s publication confirmed for all of us that our institution was not unique, nor were our writing-centered perceptions of the impacts of institutional, linguistic, cultural, and social marginalization on multilingual writers wrong. UNL and colleges and universities across the country are seeking to increase international enrollments in order to both diversify and internationalize their student bodies and to increase tuition revenues. As the numbers of international, multilingual students—particularly those students who will be perceived as students of color in the United States regardless of their experience of racialization in their home countries—increases at our nation’s universities, so too do the racial, cultural, and linguistic anxieties of white, monolingual, American students.
There is, it seemed to the tutors, a plethora of evidence available that access and opportunity are in fact distributed unequally along lines of privilege and normative identity. Within a cultural, political, and economic milieu in which educational and economic opportunities are represented as being finite and distributed by virtue of individual merit alone, historically privileged students are taught that they have earned the historical benefits they possess and to feel fear or anxiety about the loss of those benefits. Within such a milieu, students of color and multilingual students, in particular, seemed to all of us to be experiencing
a different yet related anxiety. The students with whom we worked felt keenly the pressure to change their languages/change themselves in order to gain access and opportunity that might otherwise be denied to them. A third form of anxiety emerged among tutors working in the writing center, including those who participated in the initial project of collaboratively researching and composing the sourcebook. Even as we acquired more and more evidence of the ways in which normative identities and the privileges that attend possession of those identities overlap with and are reinforced by the underlying logics of linguistic supremacy, many of the tutors wrestled with their belief that their job was to assist multilingual students to earn their access and opportunity by normalizing their identities—by helping multilingual writers perceive, feel and think, read, write, and speak as if they were “white,” “American” (in the case of international student-writers) native speakers of American academic Englishes. Tutors who felt this way understood the impossibility of the task they set before themselves and the writers with whom they worked, and yet they believed this was the only ethical and pedagogically sound choice—a choice that was, in effect, not a choice at all (see Liu, this volume).
It wasn’t just individual tutors who struggled with how and to what degree our work in the writing center should focus on SWAE. To one degree or another, in our discussions of tutoring praxis and social justice,
all
of us struggled with learned beliefs in the superiority of SWAE and/or with our sense of the power of SWAE. Convinced that students would fail academically and, later, professionally as well if they didn’t compose in SWAE, within the writing center we grappled with our individual and collective propensity to represent SWAE as the “correct” English, the only English in which new knowledge might be produced and effective professional communications composed. We struggled, in other words, quite literally with the very (il)logics professed in the tweets posted on the haters blogs.
We wanted to believe our intentions were better than those of the folks who composed those tweets, but the frames of our stories about the English language and English-language learning—stories that shaped our practice—were similarly predicated on foreignness, on strangeness, and on wrongness. Oddly and discordantly, all of us clung to these (il)logics in our ideas about SWAE and the practice of tutoring, even as we understood and discussed Patricia
Bizzell’s (2002)
claim that “at any given time [SWAE’s] most standard or widely accepted features reflect the cultural preferences of the most powerful people in the community. Until relatively recently these people in the academic
community have usually been male, European American, and middle or upper class” (1). In theory, we understood SWAE to be a racialized (and gendered and classed) discourse. In practice, we continued to struggle with what to do with that knowledge in the moment of the consultation. We felt, observed, and heard the conflict between our theory and our practice, for example, in tutor narratives about working through teacher feedback on student writing produced by international multilingual writers (see Amevuvor, this volume). The tutors heard that conflict also as they narrated and struggled with their conviction that it was their responsibility to help multilingual writers eliminate any trace of “accent” in their texts, particularly when instructor feedback was inclined in that direction.
These conflicts and others like them magnified the anxieties we felt as we imagined our job was to manage linguistic, cultural, and racial difference in service of somehow producing sameness. We encountered similar anxieties around SWAE among the faculty who attended the regular workshops and seminars we offer across campus. We encountered this anxiety as well among aspiring tutors in the writing center theory and practice course we offer each fall semester. Tutors and classroom teachers articulated with great clarity and conviction the sense that their
job
requires them to teach SWAE, regardless of whether to do so is possible or desirable, fair, or just.
In this regard, the UNL tutors articulated an ongoing need to investigate often-unexamined ideas about language use—and how writing center tutors across institutions teach language in the writing center—for the degree to which those implicit notions of difference as deficit create not only a hierarchy of language use but also a hierarchy of language users. As Laura
Greenfield (2011)
notes, “Language prejudice is not a figment of the imagination” (50). Vershawn
Young (2010)
makes this point even more clearly: “Dont nobody’s language, dialect, or style,” he writes, “make them ‘vulnerable to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES. It be the way folks with some power perceive other people’s language” (110). Myths about the quality and authority of SWAE, and the attitudes and anxieties those myths agitate in tutors and teachers of writing, result in everyday forms of discrimination based only ostensibly on language but more accurately on the array of meanings and value—or lack of meanings and value—attributed to speakers and writers. Since “language is also race in America,” (
Villanueva 1993
, xii) writing center tutors and directors must pay careful attention to what their pedagogical choices signify for and about multilingual writers. All of this is to say the languages in which we speak and
write, including the multiple forms and discursive registers of English we employ as teachers and tutors of writing, are always already ideologically freighted as well as materially consequential. If “language and culture are inextricably interwoven,” as Jennifer
Grill (2010)
claims, writing centers must be particularly careful about what language (and subsequently racial, ethnic, culture, and national) identifications are privileged (361)
That old canard about writing centers making better writers not better writing took on new and troubling valences for all of us as the tutors researched and composed the book. To the extent that we were focusing on fixing students’ languages and, hence, their racial, ethnic, and cultural identifications in the writing center alongside classroom teachers and, indeed, the institution as a whole, we worried about whether or how we might be treating the canary in the coal mine rather than addressing in a sustained, theorized, and activist sense the range of conditions writ large and small, global and local that sustain predominantly white culture within the US academy.
To do the important work of recognizing the teaching of language as a form of activism toward social justice, the tutors began to argue, writing center tutors and administrators must be aware of the ways in which attitudes regarding language “difference” are rooted in attitudes about the bodies within and through which these language “differences” are made material. They referenced
Dees, Godbee, and Ozias (2007)
, who remind us of the danger of reifying “difference.” “Differences,” the coauthors write, “are more than just differences: they become unfair organizers of our lives, providing some of us with fewer opportunities, less insider knowledge, and limited access.” The tutors came to believe that what is frequently represented as best practice in the tutoring of writing has been shaped by popular beliefs about language diversity in the United States largely informed by two dominant language ideologies. The first of these is a monolingual ideology manifested as a monolingual English ideology in the United States (
Wiley and Lukes 1996
, 514), and it is easily identifiable in the rhetoric of the English Only movement. The second is the ideology of standard language, or, more specifically in the context of the United States, the ideology of Standard English. Both of these linguistic ideologies are tied to other ideological assumptions related to beliefs about the relationship between language and national unity and between language and social mobility (
Wiley and Lukes 1996
, 512). That is, notions of
linguistic Otherness and deficiency are essentialized and mapped onto social representations of those who are identified as deficient Others by virtue of their linguistic difference. Linguistic Otherness and deficiency, in other words, are racialized, handcuffed to what people “are” or are represented as being.
