On Tuesday the institute took a more reflective and collaborative turn as we engaged with diversity and considered our own roles as leaders. Nathalie Singh-Corcoran and Karen Rowan invited us to consider what diversity looks like on our campuses and in our writing centers, to identify the various discourses that make up our "identity kits," and to determine how those identities interact. A series of cases really turned on our brains and mouths: an African American tutor who has decided not to return to the staff because her fellow tutors keep mistaking her for a client, a gay tutor confronted with a paper against legalizing same-sex marriage, a partially deaf tutor who uses ASL in the writing center.
Thinking about the discourses that make up my own identities, I realized the conflict between the things I am generally asked to say, do, value, and believe as a man and writing center practice. Since I've never been terribly into maleness, I wondered if that's what drew me to writing center work in the first place. We talk quite a bit about writing centers as "feminized spaces" (here's an interesting study from The University of Texas at Austin), but oftentimes that just means that more women come to or work in the writing center than men—not that the writing center embodies feminist principles. A more interesting question is to what extent writing center praxis intersects with our culture's discourse of womanhood.
Returning to diversity in general, our centers no doubt benefit from staffing tutors that reflect the diversity of the institution as a whole (an issue much on my mind as I anticipate a school year in which 11 of my 13 consultants are women and 11 of 13 are white). I wonder, though, if employing a truly diverse staff doesn't let us off the hook a bit. If we are to work as true allies, then we need to identify with and advocate for people from groups that we don't belong to. That work can't be "outsourced" to consultants who do belong to those groups.
Acknowledging such issues and taking action requires courage and leadership. Michele invited us to identify situations in which do and do not take a leadership role. Many of us agreed that we are not leaders when we see something that can be changed and fail to change it. A quote from John Tagg that Michele shared with us expresses how we can act for change: "Functional leaders extend their assigned role to move their mission and passion deliberately to new challenges; they look for expanded responsibilities and collaborative opportunities to partner outside of their defined status." Collaborative, moving beyond hierarchies—sounds like a writing center.
Love the thoughts and the quote-thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteI'm reading this on Friday, and it brings back some really powerful memories. One of those days where I really felt the community of practice.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your reflections here, Chris. They again remind me how valuable Summer Institute is to the work we do.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like at least some of the day's discussion was influenced by the book Michele E. helped write: _Everyday Racism_. I read it as I prepared to teach our UWC Practicum Course this summer and found it important and highly resonant, especially in terms of addressing race/racism within writing center work. From the beginning of my tenure as UWC director, I felt compelled to hire, encourage, and retain consultants from diverse backgrounds -- and I'm not just talking about diverse in discipline and interest. I specifically mean diverse in terms of ethnic, class, and racialized background because far too few writers of "a certain sort" (to use Gee's code) walk through our doors. In the last two years, we've made some good progress in this regard, but I have to say that juxtaposing all these people in the writing center space has meant confronting some uncomfortable moments. We are all at such varying stages of addressing our oppressions and privileges. In the main, I think our confrontations have been productive, have kept the difficult conversations going, but some have felt these attempts to be just plain painful.
I guess my point in this posting -- and I'm sure you've thought in this direction as well, Chris -- is that our actions as leaders must go beyond token gestures. We must be prepared, as Malea Powell says, to "sit" with the consequences accompanying those gestures. It's our imperative. So . . . are we prepared? Can we effectively mediate a young, white, male consultant's racist comments and a young, female, U.S. resident, of-color consultant's rage? When and how do we step in? Is it our right to tell someone else how to "behave"? How do we determine appropriate behavior when one person's offense is another's learning? How long do we work with people to encourage changes in perspective? At what point, when we hear a consultant's voice veer from confidently directive to irritation, do we interfere? How hard will we work to establish a 21st Century writing center?
Many questions.