Interview with Dr. Max Orsini and Loren Kleinman on Student Writing Tutors in their Own Words: Global Voices on Writing Centers and Beyond

The impetus for the collection of this book was threefold:

• As tutors, editors, educators, and writers, we find ourselves unwaveringly committed to our shared belief in the power of the written word and its integrality to the human story – to the acquisition and realization of human voices and the stories human voices powerfully transmit.
• During our shared time in the writing center at Drew University, we encountered students–undergraduate and graduate alike–who had innumerable stories to tell about the ways in which experiences with writing challenges them – both personally and academically. At the same time, we saw evidence of the innumerable ways in which writing tutors and writing mentors had served as guides for those who faced what we might call “moments of rhetorical turbulence.” And we thought to ourselves – “there must be many other agents of writing support, many other tutors and tutee-turned-tutors who have stories of access, discovery, tribulation and triumph to share from their educational experiences.” Indeed there were many. There are many.
• We both had encountered many rich and valuable texts written by experts on tutoring experiences and tutoring curricula in the past, but we were curious about what students themselves had experienced, and were experiencing, both before the pandemic and during the pandemic. There has been much emphasis on “student-centered learning” in recent years, but it struck us that to place students at the center of education–at the center of their own story–we would have to hear it from them.

Our text contains essay contributions by writers hailing from multiple continents. We feature essayists from Brazil, Lebanon, China, the US and beyond. The global perspectives throughout the pages of our text reflect the beauties and challenges of globalization and global writing center experience. From nascent writing centers in zones of war to centers navigating pandemic-related complexities and negotiating institutional complexities, our essayists chronicle personal and pedagogical uncertainty, creativity, difficulty and beauty throughout international centers of writing. They give voice to writing center stories within US borders, and beyond US borders.

The “global” perspectives that our essayists offer also signify a process of moving beyond the local zone of one’s own experiences into an empathetic and enriching space where readers of the text can learn about the power of inclusion and community building that happens in writing centers. Many of our writers offer accounts of challenges faced ranging from racial, sexual, spiritual, academic and intellectual marginalization. Thus, in our text, global not only implies “international” but also suggests hearing the stories of others who allow us to transcend ourselves and enlarge the radius of our own experience as writers, tutors, educators, citizens of the world.

Your title also suggests that these voices will inform have an influence “beyond” the confines of the writing centers and “beyond.” What’s the “beyond” you’re envisioning? Could you expand on what you mean by “beyond”?

We are very much envisioning the “beyond” to include the following audiences for this text:

• Writing instructors and their students
• Writing programs/departments
• Writing across the curriculum specialists
• Faculty interest groups
• First Year Experience (FYE) advisors
• University administrators
• Writing curriculum designers
• University groups devoted to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)
• Graduate students in the field of education
• Individuals studying the intersectional power of writing and community
• Readers interested in personal narratives on writing (metatextual writing)

By the way, thank you again for letting our blog feature four of the collection’s chapters. We love that they are written by students/tutors outside of the U.S. What are some of the most noteworthy and impactful insights that students have shared with us in writing center studies?

Did anything the writers say surprise you in this collection (could be content or process-related, or both, or something else)?

On one hand, it was surprising to encounter the myriad ways in which tutors and tutees had found to move from difficulty, discomfort, inscrutability and estrangement to understanding, productivity, joy, and enlightenment. And yet, on the other hand, the stories of accomplishment and insight our contributors have chronicled are also unsurprising, in a sense. This is because their stories of rhetorical and personal growth and evolution are proof of what we all know to be true  about one another as people – that deep down we are each capable of so much…as writers, readers, listeners, workers. Centers of writing are centers of resilience and recuperation, reflection and recompense. The medium, the writing center, is the message here. Those who inhabit centers of writing both surprisingly and unsurprisingly come to inhibit their own lives in new and meaningful ways.

With respect to composing the text, we were surprised by the organic unity or harmony that emerged among the essays on access, community and voice. Though the book is divided in distinct sections, there are threads which connect all the essays in this textual tapestry.

How do you envision folks in writing centers using this book for tutor training or other purposes?

We’ve included our inventory of questions at the back of our text to accompany each of our contributors’ essays. Our hope in including these questions was that writing center personnel would utilize them in staff training events.

We envision them, first and foremost, using the text in ways that seem best suited to their writing centers’ goals and imperatives.  However, one approach we suggest is creating three separate training sessions – one session devoted to each section of the book: access, community, and voice. Center directors and staff could select two essays from each section and place the two essays in conversation with one another. (For instance, there are two essays on the power of mentoring in serving to promote access to tutees and students. One could frame the first training session around mentoring (perhaps tied to an inciting discussion of what it is that has drawn tutors to tutoring and mentoring others in writing and academics). It is also possible to “jump around” the text, and choose essays that demonstrate resilience in the face of academic hardship and life challenges.For folks looking to accommodate and understand international student experiences more fully, an option would be to choose two international student essays from our text and talk with tutors and staff members about the kinds of challenges international students face on campus and how selected essays from our book help to understand how to meet their needs or realize strengths that international students possess and offer.

Many students arrive at writing centers in moments when they have expanded their own resources for resilience, which is very understandable. Tours might find it very useful to equip themselves with a kind of “rhetorical resilience inventory” that they might draw upon in future encounters with their tutees. Our book presents such an inventory for use.

Are there any next steps that you both would like to take in light of what the students have taught you/us about writing center praxis? How do you want to, or would you invite others to, extend the work you’ve done here?

Generally speaking, we’d like to imbue our teaching and work with additional student-centered practices, practices that fuse the narrative and academic writing modalities in meaningful ways beyond simple task completion or results-based writing. From our contributors, we have learned that access, community, and the acquisition of voice really are aspects of the writing experience  that people truly value. Hence, we are in the process of thinking about ways to enhance these aspects of our own course design and instruction. We are reflecting upon ways that values gained in writing center work can infuse themselves throughout classroom work so that classrooms can further evolve into centers of communal opportunity and personal possibility.

With respect to extending the work we’ve done as editors of this text, our sense is that there is more to be gleaned from students in terms of narrative accounts of things they’ve gained that might add to what we’ve gathered here on access, community, and voice. From tutor and student testimony we gain valuable insight on the kinds of rhetorical challenges they daily encounter in higher education. ChatGPT, for instance, has of late been the apparent subject of either scrutiny or revelry (or something in between). While questions about the utility, accuracy,and ethics of AI writing software are all very crucial to the immediate future of the writing field, it would be interesting to see how such software is enhancing things like access, community, and voice for academic and creative writers. Does a medium like ChatGPT promote access for students and tutees by helping them “get started” as it were, providing models for writing? Or does it conversely already place the writer or learner somewhere in the middle of the writing event, thereby diminishing access by removing the accessor from the act of autonomous composition? And what about community? If a student were to visit ChatGPT rather than a tutor, would they experience a sense of inclusion, or would their rhetorical isolation only increase? And this is to say nothing here of the impacts of ChatGPT on the “voice” of the original composer of a text. Certainly voice seems to be a very important feature of writing in a democratic writing context where all are encouraged to speak and write and sing.

It would likewise be very interesting for professors and writing center personnel to incorporate our text into their curricula and to see if a blog or article might be produced which chronicles the way  their own tutees or students have responded to our own contributors’ narratives. What do students think about what other students before them have experienced and encountered? What can student writers learn from and about each other? How are student narratives different, similar or both?

We speak quite copiously today in education about “meeting students where they are.” It is from the students themselves that we will discern where to meet them.

About our guests

Dr. Max Orsini is a professor, academic writer, poet, and singer-songwriter. He is the author of The Buddhist Beat Poetics of Diane di Prima and Lenore Kandel (Beatdom, 2018) and the co-editor of Student Writing Tutors in their Own Words: Global Voices on Writing Centers and Beyond (Routledge 2022). His poems have appeared in VIA, The Stillwater Review, and The Flatbush Review. His musical EP’s Let Love Go (2021), and North / South (2022), are available for streaming on Spotify, and for download, on Apple Music. Orsini currently serves as Professor of English, Writing and American Studies and as an international student advisor, at Drew University in Madison, NJ.  He hails from Brooklyn, NY.

Loren Kleinman‘s nonfiction has appeared in the Independent, New York Magazine (The Cut), The Rumpus, The New York Daily News, and more. She is the co-editor of Student Writing Tutors in their Own Words (Routledge, 2022), The Forgotten Survivors of Gun Violence (Routledge, June 2023), and If I Don’t Make It: I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings (Skyhorse, 2019). She is also the editor of the anthology Indie Authors Naked and the co-edited collection with Amye Archer My Body, My Words, which Bustle named one of the “11 New Feminist Books That Could Totally Change Your Year.” Her short film, Suffering Is the Easy Part, directed and produced by Jaime Ekkens, is distributed by Seed&Spark and Docademia.