Editor’s Note: The Associate Editor, Esther R. Namubiru, reflects about the effect that this blog’s community has had on her conceptualization of the borders that writing center people cross everyday in their professional and personal lives. Her article is part of a longer series in which we, the editors of the blog, introduce ourselves and what we do, to you, our faithful readers. We have learned a lot about what editing, writing, and writing centers entails, but we are still growing. This series allows us to take stock and share with you our ongoing reflections. Thank you for reading and for supporting our team!
WLN Blog: What do you think about when you see the words ‘Connecting Writing Centers Across Borders?’
Esther: When I think of our blog’s name, my eyes linger on the word ‘borders.’ I imagine it is because of my own travels and interactions with the geographical, linguistic, and cultural borders I’ve encountered as a doctoral student, international scholar, and immigrant. But I’m also curious about the tension on a border – the rules that must be negotiated, the shifting landscapes within which partnerships are forged and ended. Shifting landscapes do not appeal to me, yet the writing centers represented on this blog function and sometimes even thrive in those spaces. I also think about our community which is made up of so many centers border-crossing every day in various tenuous environments. Anna Habib, Weijia Li, the WLN team, and I offer this blog as a space to connect that community like a bridge. But I also think about how I might need to (re)examine and (re)question my own assumption about the terms ‘borders’ and my border-crossing efforts not just in our writing center work but my personal work and life.
In fact, working on this team has caused me to ask two questions: what does it take to cross these borders and connect with unlikely partners? And how do you suspend all the assumptions surrounding the idea of a border to function and even thrive in everchanging environments? I keep returning to these two questions because they focus on the who behind the center’s work. That who informs how we work and what we choose to pursue and value not only in our centers but in our lives.
WLN Blog: What borders are we crossing and helping others cross anyway?
Contributors to our blog have many things in common: most work in multilingual multicultural and multidisciplinary communities serving students, faculty, and staff with different literacy backgrounds. While many focus on students’ academic writing, others invite faculty too. They serve professors and lecturers by inviting them to write in the center and explore their writer identities. I’ve even interviewed writing centers that cross disciplinary borders by blending the writing center discipline with with Applied Linguistics and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC). For instance, in the Peer Tutoring Scheme at the Chinese University in Hong Kong which integrates WAC, Applied Linguistics, and Writing Center studies, Lai and Ho emphasize that, after visiting with Terry Zawacki and other WAC experts at George Mason University in the U.S., they needed to find a way to teach about English writing in a manner that was true to their multicultural multilingual context while critically adapting WAC principles. After recognizing that their context’s writers taught and understood English writing from an Applied Linguistics perspective, they decided to remain true to that site’s orientation while adapting WAC as needed. Their center has Applied Linguists working alongside faculty in the disciplines to draw on writing approaches from within faculty’s disciplines to teach English writing.
WLN Blog: Earlier you said this blog’s title and and its community makes you wonder what it takes to cross a border. Any preliminary conclusions?
Yes. Crossing borders takes being comfortable with tension that is not for the faint of heart because the tension never goes away. I’m also starting to conclude that it takes holding the term ‘tension’ very loosely. Here in the U.S., our fields of writing studies, rhetoric, and writing centers are discussing the perceived linguistic tensions that exist when we serve writers within institutions that favor standardized (often Eurocentric) writing modes, theories, and pedagogies. We have internal struggles to on the one hand adhere to those institutions and policies that keep our centers’ lights on and on the other advocate for our student-first values. I’ve seen some of those discussions on this blog too, but I have also read about centers where what we might call ‘linguistic tensions’ are life itself. While we in the West might bristle with English-only tutoring policies, the writers and writing center staff in some multicultural and multilinguistic environments around the world might perceive those policies as potential tools to navigate a different kind of tension – that which exists when tutors and students do not speak the same language. As a U.S.-trained writing program administrator, tutor, and instructor, I start by asking if this ‘tool’ is colonial but having dialogued with many centers in this community, I now find myself asking: from whose perspective is it the case that tutoring in English creates linguistic tension? From whose perspective is it a foregone conclusion that tutoring in any other language but the student’s is colonial? As you can imagine, those questions make me uncomfortable. But this blog’s community embodies those questions every day which makes me think that crossing the border takes “unlearning” (Mignolo) many taken-for-granted conclusions about the tensions at those borders.
WLN Blog: What else are you finding yourself unlearning as a professional and personally because of the blog community?
Our work does not define us or our value. Who we are defines our work. For instance, writing centers like to call themselves resilient because of their ability to overcome their obstacles. Well, if our work defines us, then it’s true that we are resilient. However, I had to unlearn that while reading the resilience reflections that many in our blog community sent when they were writing about their COVID-19 reflections. In my 2022 article about resilience in the writing center, I questioned how ‘resilience’ is defined in the writing center field and proposed that basing resilience on works would exclude centers whose local contexts had insurmountable obstacles. If they were labeled resilient by virtue of overcoming obstacles, which is part of their work, then were they resilient if they did not overcome those obstacles? Now that I think about it: if I believe that my work does not define my worth, then my own assumption that others would start with that mindset as they label a resilient writing center gives me away. But my point remains: this blog community is made up of complex people serving in complex spaces and I must work hard to resist placing them into boxes based on their work. They are so much more than what they do and who they are informs their work.
WLN Blog: Trying to unlearn those taken-for-granted assumptions is obviously uncomfortable.
Of course! Do you remember that this Slow Agency podcast conversation with these two writing center directors where the topic turned to how writing centers have to contend with neoliberal institutions’ policies and prove their relevance? What about the conversation with these directors of writing centers located in the Middle East and North Africa? In both conversations, the topic of funding came up and I remember bemoaning how host institutions do not share writing centers’ values, they underestimate writing center directors’ and tutors’ emotional labor, and they falsely label the centers as ‘fix-it-shops’ demanding quantitative data to prove relevance in student writing because of the center’s work. Our guests largely agreed, but they gently challenged me to ask if the sustainability-focused exigencies that drive host institutions’ agenda could benefit writing centers’ existence too. In other words, could it be that centers do not have to be in an us-vs-them dichotomy when they think about their host institutions? To me, that was uncomfortable because I felt like I was having to sympathize with the institutions. But that is what doing this work on the blog offers – the opportunity to grow out of the taken-for-granted rhetoric, especially that which I have internalized thanks to my own training and consider that in other professionals’ contexts these questions matter more.
WLN Blog: How has the editorial work you influenced your other work/goals and how you perceive writing?
I’ve gleaned this one thing from the blog work: the relationship-building matters more than the product. I think that applies to writing too. As I think about the advents in A.I. and other things changing our work as writers and teachers/tutors/directors of writing centers, I think that one thing remains constant: relationships will always matter. When I’m editing, I must pose and ask myself: who is the person behind this article? What might concern them? What am I adding to them? That helps me proceed with care because the relationship I build with the writer will affect them, the readers, and me in the long run. Our students are also building relationships when they write and we are helping them with that work when we tutor or teach them. Value the person for who they are as opposed to what they do. That is what influences me and how I perceive my work and goals.
References
Lai, J. (Nov 12, 2021). Intangible and interactive writing center: Peer tutoring scheme at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Connecting Writing Centers Across Borders: A Blog of WLN A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. Retrieved from https://www.wlnjournal.org/blog/2021/11/intangible-and-interactive-writing-center-peer-tutoring-scheme-the-chinese-university-of-hong-kong/
Namubiru, E. R. (2022). Nuancing resilience in the post-pandemic writing center community. Working Papers in Language and Linguistics, 10, 1-21. https://orgs.gmu.edu/wpill/texts/issue_10/Namubiru_2022.pdf
Namubiru, E. R., Habib, A., & Li, W. (2023, March 17). A conversation on emotion and affect in the writing center (25). [Audio podcast episode]. In Slow Agency. https://wlnconnect.org/2023/03/17/e24-morris-concannon/
Namubiru, E. R., Habib, A., & Li, W. (2023, March 17). Teaching and researching writing in the Middle East (23). [Audio podcast episode]. In Slow Agency. https://wlnconnect.org/2023/02/17/e23-rhetorical-translanguaging-mena/
Reid, L. (2021) “Toward an empathy-first approach to student mental health: A guide for faculty development”.In C. Molloy & L. Meloncon (Eds). Strategic interventions in mental health rhetoric (pp.169-184). Routledge
About the author: Esther Namubiru’s current research concerns writing pedagogy and the experiences of writing instructors in East African university settings. Her other research areas include writing centers, writing program administration, and language and literacy. At the time of this article’s writing, Esther volunteered for this blog as an associate editor.
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