Education Commons^™

Beyond Accommodations: Imagination, Decolonization, And The Cripping Of Writing Center Work, Karen Moroski-Rigney

Writing Center Journal

This article examines connections among disability, colonization, university policies, and writing center work in North America. By positing that university policies have long mimicked medical and scientific processes for creating—and then discriminating against—perceived categories of disability, this article makes interventions into traditional writing center practices and pedagogies without dismissing the spirit with which these aspects of our field came to be. The article has several central claims:

• Disability has been constructed by nondisabled entities (including doctors, scientists, and institutions).
  
  
• Disability’s “drift” and myriad forms act as both specter and insidious insurance against progress or inclusive design.
  
  
• Writing center scholarship has …

Centerless? Making Sense Of Disruptions In The Graduate Writing Center, Shannon Mcclellan Brooks

Writing Center Journal

This critical self-reflection is not a success story; rather, it is an effort of decolonial thinking that reckons with the idea, experience, and practice of centerlessness during pandemic-induced online transitions and operations in a graduate writing center (GWC). By tracing the contours of a series of interlocking disruptions the author and her graduate writing center community experienced during COVID-19, this article brings into sharp focus present colonial legacies inhibiting effective developments, moves, and adaptations to the GWC physical center space and praxis. Through retrospectively following pandemic-induced disruptions to her center, the author critically engages how epistemologies of coloniality and modernity …

Re/Searching (For) Hope: Archives And (Decolonizing) Archival Impressions, Romeo Garcia

Writing Center Journal

On archives and archival impressions, this essay extends archival research to the elsewhere and otherwise. The essay asks, how do we reposition the contents of archives so that we can position ourselves in relation to it otherwise? It puts forward a theory of (decolonizing) archival impressions.

The Idea Of A Writing Center In Brazil: A Different Beat, Ron Martinez

Writing Center Journal

This article explores the emergence and development of writing centers in Brazil, using the author’s experience founding the Centro de Assessoria de Publicação Acadêmica (CAPA) at the Universidade Federal do Paraná as a case study. The author provides some historical context about Brazilian education and its traditional “banking model” of education (Paulo Freire) that did not value individual expression—including through writing. This model persisted even as composition studies evolved elsewhere. Academic literacy development in Brazil is thus a relatively recent phenomenon, and the effects of that paucity are felt among scholars in higher education settings. This motivated the author’s research …

Accidental Outreach And Happenstance Staffing: A Cross-Institutional Study Of Writing Center Support Of First-Generation College Students, Beth A. Towle

Writing Center Journal

First-generation students (FGS) make up a significant percentage of college populations. However, they experience hardships that are less common for their continuing-generation peers. They struggle to understand the “rules” of college and lack the cultural capital that can help students succeed through generations of knowledge about how to navigate college. Writing centers attempt to lessen these burdens by providing outreach to marginalized student populations, including FGS. However, there has been a lack of cross-institutional research that examines exactly how writing centers support FGS. This article presents a mixed-methods study that begins to close that knowledge gap and demonstrate common patterns …

Writing Centers And Neocolonialism: How Writing Centers Are Being Commodified And Exported As U.S. Neocolonial Tools, Brian Hotson, Stevie Bell

Writing Center Journal

In this paper, we explore the complicity of writing centers in the Global North in global neocolonialism despite its resounding rejection within Western writing center scholarship, in which Romeo García contends that writing tutors can be “decolonial agents.” We show that higher education is used by governments in the Global North as a neocolonial tool and situate international U.S. writing center initiatives within this context. Writing centers have remained complicit in global neocolonialism involving the commodification and exportation of American English as well as Western-style institutions, curricula, and pedagogies. This is most explicit in recent writing center initiatives undertaken by …

Effectively Affective: Examining The Ethos Of One Hbcu Writing Center, Karen Keaton Jackson, Amara Hand

Writing Center Journal

Over the past several decades, writing center scholarship has evolved to include multiple theories and pedagogies that led to widely used best practices. As is the case in many disciplines, often writing centers at large, research PWIs are most often cited and highlighted within the scholarship. While many of those readings do offer helpful strategies for working with students at all levels, often they do not account for the unique contexts and diverse student populations that make up many HBCUs. As a result, more research from a variety of writing centers is needed so practitioners see there are multiple ways …