Reflections/Admin Project

Although this reflection may not (1) list the issues from the readings that we should discuss in class, (2) dialogue about the readings or (3) relate the readings to actual pratice in the WC, I do believe that this reflection serves as a vital role in my experiental and epistemological frames of race and the writing center, and to reflect, clarify and draw relationships to my attempts to tackle this admin project along with my final paper (incomplete).

I have often told those close to me that race haunts me, within my constant collides with race and language in the writing center I am open to the fact that I and the writing center space are seperate beings, with distinct/different historial backgrounds. In my ESL admin project and my final paper I attempt to answer the following questions:

1. If as Matsuda/Cox argues the reader formulating a response is the most important part of the WC session, In what ways do the racialization of writing influence listening or erasures (Ratcliffe)?

Erasure-as Ratcliffe contends is when a person disregards the racialization or contents of a speaker when/if they are identified as "racial markers"

2. How do tutors and writers silence issues of race or culture in formal sessions?

3. How can whiteness studies be used to bring forth a WELL NEEDED CONVERSATION on race and the writing center?

4. How can rhetorical listening be used as a code-of cross-cultural conduct to which can be utilized within writing center professional development, theory and practices?

5. Does/Can cross-cultural conversation influence/contribute to better academic writing?

In seeing race as a trope and examining the ways in which this trope is employed in the writing center; like literacy, I believe (as Grimm contends) this trope liberates and dominates; demands submission and offers promises of agency. As in Patricia Bizzell's article "4th of July.."where she contends that others/outsiders etc. who learn the dominate discourse can then utilize a "shared" vocabulary and a "shared" view to which can allow them to persuade the dominate rhetorics in their own wrong doings.

In Nancy Grimm’s book Good Intentions she contends that “writing centers cannot resolve the national confusion about literacy, but I believe that over time they can contribute to a deeper understanding of literacy and to more democratic approaches to literacy education. To do this, writing centers need to be more fully engaged with the paradox of literacy” (xiii). I am concerned about the notion that the “national” confusion of literacy cannot be healed or “resolved” by writing centers. Does history bind writing centers in the same way that academic instiutionalization bind identities and language?

...to be continued