Unmaking Gringo-Centers

About a Lucky Man Who Made the Grade

“…As Vinitha Joyappa and Donna Martin (1996) write, "Feminist scholarship draws upon the wisdom of different disciplines, while simultaneously offering a critique of knowledge and methods on patriarchal understandings" (7). The various theories incorporated by our authors highlight their different bodily experiences and truly embrace the idea of "learning WITH (emphasis added) difference" (Garcia 2017) while also creating a necessary fleshy epistemology that is, at yet, underdeveloped in the field.…”

Systems Shift: Creating and Navigating Change in Rhetoric and Composition Administration

“…Many scholars and administrators attempt to answer North's other call to describe our work, most often a kind of talk, that goes on in the writing center space (p. 444). Anis Bawarshi and Stephanie Pelkowski (1999) discussed how traditional writing centers reinforce histories of colonialism; Grimm (1996) highlighted the regulating function of writing centers; Laura Greenfield (2011/2019) presented the function of racism and linguistic discrimination in writing center practice; Romeo García (2017) argued writing centers should develop decolonial frameworks in order to best serve their locally diverse student populations; and there are others. The writing center is a highly discursive space where "talk is everything" (North, 1984, p. 444), so focusing on the activities that occur within the writing center space, and how they reinforce or breakdown the borders of institutional networks, offers valuable insights into how writing centers currently work and how they can be transformed.…”

8 Embracing Diffi cult Conversations: Making Antiracist and Decolonial Writing Center Programming Visible

“…More importantly, the course allowed me to learn about and embrace my sociocultural identities and transformed the way I value and look at human relationships'. A course objective is 'cultivating a mindfulness of difference' (Garcia, 2017: 33, emphasis original), and consultants work to develop strategies for discussing options that writers can choose from instead of imposing a false standard upon them. Throughout the semester, we discuss observations, co-consultations and the readings with the central idea of recognizing that our main function is to support other people, and we cannot support writers without first recognizing and valuing their humanity.…”

“…As we change from the inside, we can move that change outward into our campus communities. Garcia (2017) writes, 'As a site of practice, meaning, and knowledge-making, the writing center is about interactions and encounters, co-existing histories and trajectories, and is always in the process of being made. Imagine, then, if we included other groups into conversations on race and power ' (p. 48).…”

“…Writing center scholars have long noted that 'the discourse framing writing center theory and practice' is 'a discourse so at odds with itself' (Boquet, 1999: 464). Writing center scholars frequently highlight the post-colonial (Bawarshi & Pelkowski, 1999), counterhegemonic (Boquet, 1999) and decolonial (Garcia, 2017) potential of writing centers, but we also acknowledge 'a reading of writing centers as producing and sustaining hegemonic institutional discourses' (Boquet, 1999: 466). These contradictions are common across decades of writing center scholarship owing to two very different orientations to the purpose and mission of writing centers, which can be seen as focused on supporting institutional change around the ways multiple forms of English and ways of communicating are valued but are often hampered by a focused on 'helping' individual student writers 'improve', thus reinforcing mainstream, hegemonic understandings of literacy.…”