Tutoring Second Language Writers (7 page)

Armed with insights from Terrence Wiley and Marguerite Lukes, the tutors argued that basing writing center consultations upon dominant-language “standards” had the effect of engaging them, knowingly or not, in the practice of cataloguing the bodies of those who speak and write “differently” and, given the authority of linguistic supremacy, in deciding whom those bodies and their utterances must be made or taught to be instead. As the tutors searched for alternative theory and more just practice to reconceive and refigure their work with Othered student writers, they became increasingly convinced of Denny’s argument that the general attitude evinced in professional conversations in the field of writing center studies seems to be that multilingual writers “are a problem that requires solving, an irritant and frustration that resists resolution” (
Denny 2010
, 119). In contrast to the ongoing actualization of such attitudes in tutoring practice, a social justice orientation toward the teaching of writing one-with-one requires bringing issues of language “difference” and language privileging to the forefront. All of us, the tutors acknowledged, feel pressure to avoid naming difference. We have been taught that to notice difference of any kind aloud is to be, at least, uncivil. The proscription against naming difference, however, is predicated on the notion that difference signifies deficiency and, therefore, that to name difference—to talk about difference openly—is to name also broadly and deeply held convictions about who is normal, right, and superior and who is not. These proscriptions, we concluded, must be actively resisted both by tutors and by writing center administrators if we are to transform our writing centers and participate in the democratization of our institutions.

In search of a bridge between their emerging sense of philosophical commitment and their sense of the ways and degrees to which their practices seemed to fail that philosophy, the tutors turned to Carol
Severino’s (2006)
essay “The Sociopolitical Implications of Response to Second-Language and Second-Dialect Writing.” Severino delineates three positions on a spectrum of teacher/scholar orientations toward World Englishes. The tutors considered Severino’s analysis of these positions as well as her alignment of them along a continuum when composing their book. Proponents of assimilation, Severino suggests, might teach multilingual students “to smoothly blend or melt into the desired discourse communities and avoid social stigma by controlling any features that in the eyes of audiences with power and influence might mark a writer as inadequately educated or lower class” (338). Within an assimilationist frame, Severino notes, “linguistic differences would be regarded as
‘errors’ or instances of L1 ‘interference’—cultural or linguistic—to be eliminated” (338). Proponents of what Severino terms a “separatist stance,” on the other hand, “believe that the society and the class of employers or educators that disparage or discriminate against ESL and SESD [Standard English as a second dialect] speakers should be challenged and changed, not the ESL and SESD speakers themselves or their discourses. Separatists want to preserve and celebrate linguistic diversity, not eradicate it” (339). While Severino notes that “separatists read ESL texts generously,” at their worst, she suggests, “separatist responses, forgiving or applauding deviations from Standard English rhetorical and grammatical patterns, inevitably set students up for a shock when the next teacher, tutor, or employer they encounter tends toward an assimilationist stance” (339). Finally, Severino explores an accommodationist stance or “‘compromise’ position (Farr 1990)” (
Severino 2006
, 340). Proponents of accommodation, Severino suggests, advocate that rather than “giving up their home oral and written discourse patterns in order to assimilate,” multilingual students “instead acquir[e] new discourse patterns, thus enlarging their rhetorical repertoires for different occasions” (340); “In the best of all possible accommodationist worlds,” Severino suggests, “patterns are only gained, not lost” (340). She writes further that “at their best, accommodationist responses are comprehensive and rhetorical, emphasizing that certain discourse features are appropriate or inappropriate for certain occasions. At their worst, they are longwinded, laden with conditions, and hard to process” (340). Adding a further distinction, Severino writes that “sensitive accommodationists are, according to their name, accommodating of both linguistic differences and societal conventions. Insensitive accommodationists are overexplainers, whose own agenda, shared by many separatists, to rid themselves of any association with academic or linguistic assimilation or colonization, can overwhelm their teaching of writing” (340).

In many ways, the spectrum described and stances/practices along that spectrum offered by Severino became helpful frameworks for us as we worked to understand the various approaches one might take in multilingual tutoring and what the implications might be for each approach. The case studies Severino offers in her essay as examples of both particular and blended approaches were especially useful to all of us. As we talked together, about both Severino’s article and the tutoring practices we had engaged or observed other tutors engaging in the UNL writing center, the tutors articulated concerns about the ways in which they and their fellow tutors seemed to be adopting one stance and using it unilaterally. Absent a theoretical framework that might enable tutors
to make discerning choices about which strategies to employ under what circumstances, the tutors observed that they tended always to land on or near assimilationism by default. They worried that the term
separatism
effectively warned them away from exploring with writers productive engagement with the blending of discourses within a single text, or code-meshing (
Young 2010
, 114). In order to make informed and pedagogically sound decisions about tutoring strategies, the tutors felt they needed to learn or to develop means of conceptualizing the relationship between systemic inequality, language difference, and their individual work with student writers.

To create inclusive theoretical and pedagogical spaces/relations within communities of writers, writing center practitioners—especially monolingual tutors and administrators—will be well served, we concluded, by using categories like those delineated by Severino carefully and critically as starting points for reexamining attitudes about language and identity. In the UNL writing center, we hope, however, that those conversations will take up the limitations or reductiveness of complete subscription to any single approach even as more recent scholarship is examined. We believe in the importance of continuing to study the degree to which common assumptions and practices are mythologized even within the categories outlined above, underwritten within them rather than challenged by them.

As we considered the mythologizing of various approaches to the teaching of writing, we were struck by Jennifer Grill’s insight that SWAE anxieties are rooted, in fact, in certain myths about the language itself. We note the degree to which such myths undergird what can seem like very ordinary, “commonsensical” sorts of conversations between tutors and writers. Jennifer Grill’s work from TESOL, for instance, lays out “Assumptions about Language” (
Grill 2010
, 359) that need to be reconsidered:

As they studied and talked together, the tutors began to recognize the ways and degrees to which these myths constituted our own writing
center version of the (il)logics of the tweets published on the UNL haters blog and how buying into these myths helped perpetuate the “guest” status of multilingual writers and tutors. Collectively, we sought to continue to study the ways and degrees to which these myths may inform, albeit perhaps implicitly, our practice of working with multilingual writers. We all noted, with Severino, that “because it is impossible to separate language issues from their political contexts, and because the international and national ‘macropolitics’ affect the ‘micropolitics’ of the relationships among teacher, student, and text, it is important for L1, L2/ESL composition, or any endeavor concerned with English language teaching to acknowledge and make explicit the sociopolitical implications of response to writing” (
Severino 2006
, 346–47). However difficult the dialogue may be, continuing dialogue among tutors about the ways in which the mythologies underwriting monolingual writing pedagogies tend to operate along national and racial lines seems critical to the project of ongoing and dynamic tutor education.

In short, the tutors not only noted but also developed a conceptual vocabulary with which to name the array of systemic inequalities that might trouble their work with writers. All of us began to grapple with the realization that there are critical linkages between the identification of linguistic difference as fundamental difference, the racialization of an Other, and the operations of linguistic supremacy over and against that Other. As a staff, we needed and continue to need to acknowledge the ways and degrees to which, however unintentionally, racism might continue to inflect our practice, for its logics are “deeply entrenched in our discourses about language” (
Greenfield 2011
, 34). A treatment of language “differences” as a deficit perpetuates and sustains processes of racialization that reproduce conditions of inequality in all of our writing centers, regardless of whether or not we claim a social justice mission. To address this array of systemic inequalities in our writing centers and to make such a mission actionable requires sustained critical inquiry that continuously and dynamically shapes the ways we conceive of collaborative tutor practice with all writers, especially with writers who have historically been Othered and marginalized within and beyond our colleges and universities (see Balester and Cox, both in this volume).

As we were beginning to realize that the house we had built in our writing center was not, in fact, a house for diversity but one designed to exclude or erase difference, and beginning also to conceptualize the
project of reenvisioning and revitalizing ongoing staff education in our writing center, we began traveling regularly together as a staff to conferences, listening and talking with administrators and tutors from other institutions across the country. At those conferences, we heard established writing center scholars and directors struggling to come to terms with the relationship between the framing of linguistic difference as deficit and the racialism inherent in linguistic supremacy. Absent this understanding, many “elders” in the field seemed to feel that addressing social justice issues in a writing center is too much for tutors, too difficult a labor for them (for us) to bear. As we pondered taking up and countering the kinds of hate articulated directly and indirectly across our campus, the tutors acknowledged the weight of that burden. But as we, collectively, began to understand that the very (il)logics undergirding hate speech were also manifest in our writing center work, the tutors discussed and wrote about their emerging perception that the social justice labor they felt called to do was less a burden than a pedagogical responsibility. If we accepted this responsibility and chose to act on it, we realized, we would have to think deliberately, reflectively, and collectively about how to enact our principles on the ground, as it were, as well as how to keep on keeping on, even and especially when the work gets particularly hard and when one or all of us get tired.

Below are five lessons we learned, offered provisionally because—let’s face it—we’re still learning.

Much of our work together involved turning toward one another and to others for help, for support, for learning. Together, as a staff, we read the work of scholars such as Vershawn Ashanti Young, Min Zhan-Lu, Suresh Canagarajah, Bruce Horner, John Trimbur, Donna Lecourt, Victor Villanueva, Paul Kei Matsuda, and Geneva Smitherman. And as we worked to cultivate a shared pedagogical praxis rather than individual tutoring scripts and “toolkits,” we realized we are not alone in our struggle to enact our commitments in performative ways, to share the labor of creating, in other words, a just and inclusive community of writers with those who, although characterized and treated as Others, also share stakes in the institution and the discourses in and through which we make ourselves and our world.

As we began to think of social justice work in our writing center as a pedagogical responsibility, we began to understand that taking up that
responsibility might bring us not to overwhelmment but to a sense of alliance, of interconnectedness, and to the best kind of interdependence and mutual support with other similarly committed and laboring individuals and institutional sites across our university. We can, we learned, choose to take on the conditions that produce hate speech from where we are situated institutionally, and this work is not incidental to social justice work on our campus but critical to that work.

When we began to think in terms of actual and potential alliances, we began to recognize administrators, faculty, and staff, as well as graduate and undergraduate students across our institution, who were already similarly committed and with whom we could work. We recognized the degree of support we could both give and receive from the Antiracism Special Interest Groups (SIGs) active within the Midwest Writing Centers Association, the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing, and the International Writing Centers Association. Sometimes these connections are as simply supportive as individual tutors sharing a lunch or coffee and conversation with a colleague from across campus and bringing back what they’ve learned to a staff-education gathering or inviting an ally to one of our staff meetings. Sometimes they involve groups of tutors working together to develop workshops rooted in our collectively conceived philosophy and practice for our allies across campus. Sometimes these alliances grow from introductions at SIG gatherings, Facebook friendships, or conference-panel proposals. However they are enacted, the alliances we build within our institution and beyond its bounds sustain our hope as well as help us to learn better how to craft our work as writing center tutors to better match our convictions and our intentions.

We believe that neither the epistemological and pedagogical processes we have engaged as a staff in writing a book for tutor education nor the ongoing revision by successive generations of tutors is sufficient to confer innocence upon the UNL writing center. Conditions of inequality, marginalization, and exclusion continue to operate beneath the surface of our institution (as they do in every predominantly white college and university at this historical moment), and we are still implicated in the reproduction of them. We do think, however, that the process of tutors engaging with tutors in critical and reflective analysis of the politics of language and language learning, and of the normalization and privileging of particular discourses and rhetorics, is an integral means by which our writing center makes actionable its commitment to
social justice. We see, in other words, that the range of theoretical and pedagogical inquiries we value as scholars, teachers, and tutors of writing are not separate and distinct from our commitments to social justice writ large or to antioppression activism and pedagogy within our institution; they are contiguous with those commitments and essential to them.

Paulo
Freire (1993)
defines praxis as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (36). Praxis is not only the practice of making theoretical understanding actionable but also of reflecting carefully and critically upon the relationship of theory to practice in order to extend understanding. In other words, the concept of praxis, as Freire defines it, is the labor of human agents—teachers and learners—who are both public intellectuals and public activists. For a tutor to make pedagogical choices responsibly and responsively, she must be critically engaged with the underlying logics of those choices, the reasons they might be desirable or productive, and for whom. Without this critical reflection, implicit dominant ideological forces will manifest in untroubled, uninterrogated ways in and through our tutoring practice. Tutoring multilingual writers well requires theoretical or philosophical understanding that shapes and is in turn shaped by practical know-how (see Rafoth, this volume).

This kind of praxis requires reading current scholarship broadly, including research from the fields of composition and rhetoric, writing center studies, and TESOL. Tutors should join the communities of scholars inhabiting those fields and contribute to what is known within them. The production of new knowledge within those fields should become part of the work tutors are expected to engage and rewarded for engaging. We learned through the collaborative work of reconceiving tutor education at UNL that there is a critical, recursive relationship between the UNL tutors’ knowledge production, their ability to tutor with flexibility and adaptability, and their willingness to bring the complexity of the tutoring moment back to the table as we collectively (re)consider whether or how our principles work in practice (see Hutchinson and Gillespie, this volume).

Tutors in the UNL writing center have discussed (and continue to work through) their fear that student-writers will suffer to the extent
that tutors explore with them greater ranges of discursive and rhetorical choice. We have agreed that we want to continue these conversations, for we think these fears are understandable and frequently legitimate. With the UNL tutors, we have come to believe, though, that tutors can support writers more effectively by helping them to understand the rhetorical concepts of audience, purpose, and context and to make writerly decisions for themselves. Ultimately, we have come to the conclusion that tutors should reach for high-risk/high-yield practice and be able to recognize the differences between catastrophic pedagogical failures (which, in our experience, are rather few and far between) and learningful pedagogical failures: between failures that produce little or no learning for either writer or tutor and failures that may produce discomfort or frustration but that both tutors and writers can learn from and out of which tutors might produce new tutoring scholarship to be shared within our center during weekly staff-development meetings, at regional and international writing center and composition conferences, and at workshops and seminars for faculty, staff, and students across our university (see Babcock, this volume).

We have learned that high-risk/high-yield tutoring isn’t necessarily dramatic, though we know from the stories we have shared in the UNL writing center that it can certainly
feel
quite dramatic at times. We have come to believe, though, that tutors talking openly with multilingual writers about SWAE, and the potential consequences of “fixing” texts rather than enacting rhetorical agency, is unlikely to produce catastrophic failure (see Praphan and Seong, this volume). We have learned that working with writers to find balance together between the contending imperatives for success measured by grades and success measured by learning can yield terrific learning. Silence about the forces that shape the learning experiences of Othered writers in conversations with those writers may feel safer for tutors, but isn’t, in actuality, safer for Othered writers or learningful for them.

None of us are interested in creating tutor education that cultivates writing center tutors who are doctrinaire in their approach to tutoring, nor are we interested in tutors as dogmatists. We recognize with
Dinitz and Kiedaisch (2003)
that each tutor will bring “to the writing center a unique vision of tutoring, shaped by past experiences as a writer and with other writers, by career goals, personality, values, socio-economic status, politics” (73–74). Without exposure to and critical engagement with scholarship that makes visible the (il)logics of the status quo and that critiques the hidden assumptions and imperatives of dominant perspectives on language, culture, and belonging—on racial, ethnic, and national identification—the tutors of UNL concluded, and we concur, that all of us will, wittingly or not, subject ourselves and the student-writers with whom we work to that status quo. In redesigning ongoing staff education, the UNL tutors never insist that all tutors endorse a particular array of practices or subscribe to (believe in) a particular philosophical orientation toward the work of tutoring one-with-one. The tutors working on the staff-education project did expect that their colleagues and successors would arrive at the philosophical and pedagogical stances they occupy through sustained engagement with past, current, and emerging scholarship—that they would equip themselves with understanding such that they would be able to offer a full and fair account of research that might counter their tutoring philosophies and practices before they discredit or dismiss that research (see Rafoth, this volume). And this, we still believe, is a reasonable expectation.

We are learning, however slowly and haltingly, that
finishing
the crafting of our writing center as a house for diversity is not, in fact, our aim. Instead, our aim is to
keep on crafting
. Our aim is collective humility in the face of what we do not yet know, may never know. Our aim is compassion for ourselves and others as we teach and learn together within conditions of inequality. Our aim is continuous resistance of those conditions using those means we have most readily at hand: our understanding of the power of inquiry and our evolving practice of questioning, analyzing, critiquing, experimenting, of sharing and studying our stories together, of articulating what we think we know, recognizing what we do not know or only partly know and opening ourselves up to challenge in service of learning, growth, and transformation.