Another thing that I hope that readers get out of this particular article is seeing the theory applied to practice. Because it can be really challenging to be exposed to this theory and think, but okay. What does that mean for tutoring? And so that’s why Becca and I made it a conscious decision to talk about that one of the ways we use this into our own writing center by changing our intake process.

In this episode, Weijia spoke with WLN authors Kerri Rinaldi and Rebecca Spiegel on their article titled Disrupting Habits: Modifying Writing Center Processes In Pursuit of Disability Justice. The article was published in June 2023 special issue on disability justice and anti-able-ism in writing center work. Kerri and Becca talked about the aim with the article, their research study, and their thoughts on collaboration. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Weijia Li: Hi there, this is Weijia. Have you ever felt anxious about working with writers? At writing centers, sometimes situations like that happen when we don’t share similar experiences as the writer. In this WLN author interview, I want to share an article that talks about this very issue. From a disability justice point of view, joining me today are two co-authors from the June 2023 special issue on disability justice and anti-ableism in writing center work.

[00:00:35] Kerri Rinaldi: Hi, I’m Kerri Rinaldi and I am the former director of the Immaculata University Writing Center located outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and I’m currently an English PhD student at Old Dominion University. And my research interests lie in disability justice, writing center studies, and epistemic injustice.

[00:00:58] Rebecca Spiegel: My name is Rebecca Spiegel. I’m the former assistant director of the Immaculata University Writing Center, currently contingent faculty at Drexel University in the first-year writing program. And my research interests are also in disability justice and writing center studies and creative practices in first year writing programs.

[00:01:26] Weijia Li: The title of their article is Disrupting Habits, Modifying Writing Centered Processes in Pursuit of Disability Justice. Kerri and Becca, thank you so much for joining me.

[00:01:40] Rebecca Spiegel: Thanks for having us.

[00:01:41] Kerri Rinaldi: It’s great to be here.

[00:01:46] Weijia Li: To begin with I want to hear more about, you know, how did this article come into being?

[00:01:52] Kerri Rinaldi: I think that the motivation for this article started way back in 2021, when I co-chaired the Mid Atlantic Writing Center Association Conference. with my colleague, Erica O’Mahony. And for that conference, Alison Hitt was our keynote speaker. And she gave this amazing talk entitled, Centering Disability in the Writing Center, Moving Up Beyond Access and Towards Accessibility.

[00:02:17] So at the time, I was the director and Becca was the assistant director of the Writing Center at Immaculata University. And so, of course, our entire staff was involved with conference planning, attendance, and the keynote. And Becca ended up running this amazing professional development training for our staff afterwards, where we really engaged with the questions that Dr.

[00:02:37] Hitt brought forward. And we kind of came to this collective realization that even though our center had been devoted to disability justice, because as a deaf scholar, that’s always been really important to me as an administrator, we had built a lot of processes and procedures into our writing center.

[00:02:56] That centered on making our lives easier, the tutors and the administrators, sometimes even at the expense of students. And so, we had a really productive, robust conversation among the staff about different ways that we could change that. Including changes to and then I said to Becca, would you like to do a research study with me on these changes?

[00:03:22] And to my delight, she said, okay. And then when we saw the call for the WLN special issue, we thought it felt like a great fit for our project. And it doesn’t actually report on the outcome, the findings of our research study, but it’s almost like a theoretical precursor to it.

[00:03:43] Rebecca Spiegel: Yeah, I thought the amazing thing about that, too, was that this research really was inspired by our undergraduate writing center tutors and our graduate assistant at the time and that made it feel really meaningful in a way, right because we were able to make a real change in all practices and study sort of what the effects were at the same time.

[00:04:27] Weijia Li: And you, and Kerri, you just mentioned the keynote, right? So, and I think that quote you placed, you both, you placed at the beginning and I quote, There’s a lot of disciplinary anxiety about disability. in that folks wanted to help disabled students but don’t know how. End of the quote. So, I was really struck by this quote.

[00:04:55] And it also reminded me of a conversation my colleagues and I had with Genie Giaimo on her new book Unwell Writing Centers. What Genie said came out of a different context for sure, but what she said was there is this pervasive desire to make things right at the writing center.

[00:05:15] Rebecca Spiegel: yeah, absolutely.

[00:05:16] Weijia Li: Yeah. And… It got me thinking, okay, I definitely can see how that can really provoke some certain anxiety when I can’t make things right.

[00:05:29] Kerri Rinaldi: Yeah, absolutely, because on the first hand, I think that all of the scholars and practitioners in the writing center study field, they’re coming from a place of good intentions, right?

[00:05:40] They want to improve access. They want to be inclusive. They want to do that and what that exactly means. Oh, and I think… And I’ve argued this, and other scholars have argued this as well, that that anxiety comes from this misplaced overemphasis on the medical model of disability, thinking about an individual deficit of medicalized problems. If we think of it that way, then that kind of makes sense, right? That we then would think we need to learn more about disabilities. We need to write in the student’s diagnosis. We need to learn how to work with that pathologizing writers, like that’s even what we’re going to be talking about.

[00:06:30] Rebecca Spiegel: Sorry, Kerri, I was going to add and right, that part of what that lends itself to is that a writing center staff or administration or whatever should have it all figured out before anyone even comes into a session or comes into the room.

[00:06:48] That there’s one, right way to do things and it’s on us to know that, to have that knowledge rather than thinking about it as a collaborative process which is also something that comes up in the article when we discuss the concept of access fatigue.

[00:07:11] Kerri Rinaldi: Exactly, and I think that’s one of the main intentions of this article, is to encourage the field to instead, think about disability from a critical disability studies frame that thinks of disability as a socio-cultural identity that exists within larger power structures.

[00:07:28] Weijia Li: Yeah, and I gotta say, like, personally, as an able-bodied person, I’ve learned from my own limited experience that disability is not always visible or obvious, and that working with disabled writers is really a case-by-case matter.

[00:07:47] There’s no, like, one formula to say, okay, when you work with students with… this type of disabilities, you do X, right?

[00:07:57] Rebecca Spiegel: Yes.

[00:07:59] Weijia Li: And I feel like reading your article really allowed me to further interrogate how I or, you know, we as a field think about disability and its consequences, on writing center work, right? working with writers. So, what do you hope readers will gain from reading your article?

[00:08:23] Kerri Rinaldi: I love the way that you put it because I feel like that’s one of the things that we really want readers to come away with is that interrogation of their own preconceived notion that they’re holding and that they feel.

[00:08:35] And I think we’re gonna really hope that they learn more about critical disability studies and how it’s applicable to our work, but also in that critical disability studies is expansive. It’s generative. It can help us not only to challenge how we think about working with disabled writers in the tutorial.

[00:08:53] But about ideas we hold, about normative ways of composing, about interacting with students. Another thing that I hope that readers get out of this particular article is seeing the theory applied to practice. Because it can be really challenging to be exposed to this theory and think, but okay. What does that mean for tutoring?

[00:09:16] And so that’s why Becca and I made it a conscious decision to talk about that one of the ways we use this into our own writing center by changing our intake process. Very specifically the form that students fill out on WC Online when they’re booking an appointment and how that small act really can change the way that we approach working with different students.

[00:09:42] Rebecca Spiegel: Yeah, I, I totally agree with everything that you just said, Kerri, and… I think that, right, the, our article is really theory heavy in the beginning. And the part of the thought behind that, right, is a, trusting that we have interested intelligent readers who, who want to sort of explore these ideas, but also then I think part of our part of the reason why we felt that that was important was because if we had just presented, here’s this really practical thing that we did without sharing all of the, the sort of, the theory behind it and the, and what informed our thought process, even in terms of like the question that we added to our appointment intake form and why it’s worded the way that it is if we had just, if we hadn’t shared the, the theory and the reasoning.

[00:10:54] It would be more difficult for others to then think about what changes they could make within their own writing centers but if we are able then to like share the way we were thinking about it people can then take that and think about how it applies to their own work or their own centers and practices.

[00:11:25] Kerri Rinaldi: Yes, absolutely. Because I feel like if we just, instruct readers to change the way that they run their particular intake process for making appointments that’s not really going to point towards or generate disability justice. Instead, what we’re hoping for as readers to, like you had said, reframe the way that they think about disability and disabled students.

[00:11:50] So instead of thinking about it like an individual problem where we need to adjust what we’re doing to get to that person. You certainly could have just gave the intervention; what we did, it could be interpreted that way. Instead, we want readers to become aware of what, this is a sociocultural identity that’s complex, and it has a lot of nuance to it, and it existed in the power structure of academia.

[00:12:16] And so, how does what we do impact that power structure, and impact those students’ identities?

[00:12:25] Weijia Li: Love what you just said you know, interrogating the power structure of academia. Because sometimes a lot of things like we don’t, we just don’t see what’s going on. I was, I was also thinking about tutors, right? What if we have tutors with disabilities? What does that look like when we train them as opposed to, you know, able bodied tutors? Go ahead, Becca.

[00:12:59] Rebecca Spiegel: I was, I was going to say this actually came up as part of our research when we conducted a focus group with a subset of our tutors at the end of the academic year, when we were doing research. One of our tutors self-identified as disabled and shared sort of her perspective on on like this process and what we were talking about.

[00:13:31] So in the context of our study it was certainly relevant to think about. The experiences of, you know, disabled, students who have disabilities, tutors who have disabilities, and administrators who have disabilities, right? There’s a, there’s an interaction happening among many parties, again, existing within a particular the particular, like, power structure of academia that often is running with what we would say is an outdated understanding of what disability is and means.

[00:14:25] Weijia Li: Kerri, do you have anything to add?

[00:14:35] Kerri Rinaldi: Yes, I am really excited for folks to eventually read the results of our research study exactly for this year’s ???? that added so much. Depth and complexity to what we originally set out to study because, as Becca shared, in our focus group, we had a big mix of tutors who all had different disability statuses and identities and previous exposure to working with disabled students and for folks who are familiar with the work that I’ve put out before, I’ve always been a very big proponent of not pushing disclosure and letting students self-advocate and really relying heavily on the self-advocacy of disabled writers and the focus group is so meaningful because this tutor, especially that Becca was referring to, challenged me to remind me, I’m 18.

[00:15:37] I’ve never had to advocate for myself before. I’m not sure I really had a connection to my disabled identity and thus the skill to advocate for myself, to be able to get myself to where I need to be in the, you know, in the structure of the classroom, in the writing center, and in the relationship that I’ve had.

[00:16:00] And so, it really allowed us to add a lot more depth to the argument that we made.

[00:16:10] Weijia Li: Kerri, you just said the research findings of the study are different from what you set out to study. So, can you say, or can you say more about the study? Like what, what’s the research question and you know, what was the I guess the expectation at the beginning.

[00:16:35] Kerri Rinaldi: I think that the original intention of the research study was simply to examine how inviting writers to articulate the needs and preferences through the appointment intake form could contribute to disabilities aspect.

[00:16:49] We ended up, extending the study for an additional semester because something that we found was that in an open invitation to share needs, preferences, we kept it very open ended intentionally because a lot of students were sharing negative emotional states. And it was a lot of, I’m anxious, I’m nervous, I feel like I’m going to die trying to write this paper.

[00:17:15] And we ended up introducing a professional development unit for our tutors on trauma informed pedagogy, some pedagogies of care. She really found out the way that also mental health contributes to disability justice.

[00:17:32] And I don’t think that our findings were necessarily completely different from what we were expecting, but just so much more layered and richer partially because our writing tutors are just amazing.

[00:17:46] Weijia Li: Yeah they are.

[00:17:51] Rebecca Spiegel: And I would say also, also partially, and again, this comes up in our article, but sort of because there’s an intersection with like mental health issues or chronic illnesses or whatever it may be with again, like, perhaps a more limited or traditional understanding of disability and what disability justice applies to.

[00:18:25] Weijia Li: Great. Then so most of our listeners are writers. What advice would you give them about how to collaborate with someone else in writing an article?

[00:18:38] Rebecca Spiegel: Oh man work with Kerri, cause like that’s, I think that’s step number one. I, I, you know, a lot of our writing process happens, and this may not surprise anyone, but happens off the page, right? Like, we’re, we’re having a lot of conversations. We found that we worked really well together through one person, and it was scary, putting down ideas and then being able to, much like a writing center session talk with each other in order to expand on or clarify things and Google Docs was our friend throughout this too. Being able to, to comment on each other’s sentences.

[00:19:50] And track potential changes. And yeah, Kerri, go ahead.

[00:20:00] Kerri Rinaldi: I think we both smiled because we both… really, really love collaborating with each other. And I think Becca’s advice is really great is to figure out the way that the two of you work best, because it’s going to treat every collaborative writing partnership. And figure out what you feel like you respond well to and where your idea generation is going to have the most productivity. I really loved collaborating with Becca.

[00:20:28] I had never collaborated with anybody on a journal article before. So, it was new to me. And I was just a little nervous, as any other, you know, human being might be, like, what’s it going to be like? Yeah. But it ended up being a fantastic experience.

[00:20:42] Another piece of advice that I would give, and this might be niche, but to be mindful of the power structures that exist in the relationship because at the time, I was Becca’s boss. And so, I was very honest and transparent at the forefront about it, that even though I’m in a supervision role over here, when I’m thinking about this article, I’m thinking about us as colleagues, and I really want the power distribution to be equal, but I know it never can be equal, because I’m involved.

[00:21:11] So, that’s always be communicating about that and talking about that. And if something feels like it’s getting like off balance because it sounds like I’m just, you know, delegating something to you, let’s talk about it. So, I think being honest about the power structures is also really great, especially if you work together in some kind of way.

[00:21:31] Weijia Li: Those are great advice. Thank you so much. Listeners, the conversation you just heard was with Kerry Rinaldi and Rebecca Spiegel, co-authors for the June 2023 special issue of WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. Their article is titled, Disrupting Habits, Modifying Writing Center Processes in Pursuit of Disability Justice.

[00:21:55] We hope you’ll check it out. Thank you so much Kerri and Becca.

[00:22:00] Rebecca Spiegel: Thank you so much.

[00:22:02] Kerri Rinaldi: Thank you so much for having us, it was a pleasure.