narrative project

The obvious “problem” with this piece was that it did nothing to either explicitly or implicitly address Liz’s “epiphany,” and so that obviously became the focus of the tutoring session. I explained to Liz how I was concerned that she had not conveyed an epiphany, and she seemed to agree. \n\n“What was the epiphany you had about Michael?” I asked.\n\n“I’m not 100% sure,” Liz mused. “Based on what I wrote, what did you think it was?”\n\n[[But there were complications.]]\n

"White guilt" is a term coined by Judith Katz in 1978 to describe the feelings that white people experience when they reflect upon historic and current racism. While guilt is the feeling most commonly associated with the concept, feelings of sadness, anger, or even dangerous self-congratulatory feelings can occur. "White guilt" is also used in a derogatory manner sometimes, a way of accusing some whites of disempowering themselves only to empower blacks (thus becoming "race traitors") or of deriding attempts to discuss racism as futile and self-centered. \n\nWhile I find the concept problematic, and I have certainly seen "white guilt" become too self-congratulatory or paralyzing, I nonetheless find the term useful, and I have used the term here because I sincerely believe that this was the emotion I experienced following this tutoring session. By using this term, I am trying to convey that, due to this experience, I for the first time most fully realized my role in oppression, and truly grasped my privilege. That this only happened when I was 22-years-old is humiliating, but true. \n\n[[Return?|After the session...]]

In //The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing//, a good prompt is defined as one that is not too general, failing to offer the writer "enough purpose or give enough direction" (97). Likewise, a good writing assignment does not risk prompting students to submit an answer that is too personal, as it risks alienating students who do not want to reveal personal details, or worse, will elicit emotionally charged responses that are difficult to grade. How do you grade a student's essay about their father's death or a suicide attempt without risking hurting that student? Further, a student may end up discussing topics that he or she later realizes he or she is not ready to discuss. \n\n\nFollowing these definitions, the prompt the student brought in was bad. It was a non-specific prompt that was aiming to encourage a discussion of personal experiences. The breakdown in communication that follows in the session is, at the very least, exasperated by the prompt the student was asked to write on. Bad prompts foster "bad writing, replete with evasions [and] cliches" (97), and while a bad essay does not necessarily indicate that a session will go poorly, a frustrating prompt does nothing to help ensure a succesful tutoring session.\n\nIt should be kept in mind, however, that the bad prompt was one of many factors.\n\n\n[[Return?|Start]]\n

Whenever we walk into a situation, we have different preconceptions about what is going to happen. [[We tell different stories in our heads.]] \n\nThis is how this story starts: A student comes into the writing center with a paper for a required upper-division composition course. The student says she is not confident about her skill as a writer and would like the tutor to help her. The student’s paper is in answer to the prompt, [[“Write about an epiphany you had.”]] The paper tells a story about the student and a boy she had a crush on in school. The tutor reads the paper and then a tutoring session takes place. The student and the tutor part after 45 minutes. \n\nHow does this story continue?\n\n[[The Writing Center's Story]]\n[[The Student's Story]]\n[[The Tutor's Story]]\n\n[[The "True" Story]]\n\n

There is no moral to this story. There is not even a singular story. [[There is just a mess of stories, intersecting and interfering.]] And in the middle, there is Liz and I, sitting together at a table, looking at a paper, trying to craft two very different stories.\n\n\n[[Begin again? Another story?|Start]]

“Two cardinal rules for writing centers are that there be easily accessible stacks of scratch paper lying around and that the pen remain in the hand of the writer” writes Muriel Harris in “SLATE Statement: The Concept of a Writing Center.” This document was written as a professional guide to writing centers and includes advice about starting a writing center. These two cardinal rules, then, should not be taken lightly.\n\nI have always found the "pen remain in the hand of the writer," and other strictures pertaining to writing centers frustrating and counter to both the ethos and the purpose of writing centers, especially when proclaimed as being unconditional truisms. Writing centers work is at its best when tutorials are allowed to be flexible, acommodating a tutor's own style and the tutees preferred ways of learning. Nonetheless, the pen anecdote, like the [["fix-it shop,"|fixes the paper]] plays a large part in the narrative writing centers have chosen for themselves.\n\n\n[[Continue?|The Writing Center's Story]]

In my senior year of my undergraduate studies, a student came into the writing center I worked at, who, for the purpose of this story, I will call Liz. She had a paper for the university’s [[Advanced Writing class]], a mandatory class for any humanities degree at the university. Advanced Writing basically was like first year composition on steroids; it was supposed to check that the student had successfully grasped the basics of academic writing now that they were about to step into a writing intensive degree program. It also served a secondary purpose of introducing students to concepts like literature reviews and to the citation style used in their field of study. The similarities between Advanced Writing and FYE explain the diagnostic assignment that Liz had: she had to write a personal essay that discussed a time when she had an epiphany.\n\n[[Continue]]\n\n\n\n\n\n

In my Junior year of college, I was required to take "Basic Texts of Western Civilization." Marx and Engels' //Communist Manifesto// was required reading for the course, and like many young students, I began thinking of myself as an ardent communist after reading it. \n\n"The history of all hiterto existing society is the history of class struggles" (219) Marx and Engels wrote. And though the contexts were different, I saw in the bourgeoisie the 1%, the Wall Street investors who tanked the economy and played fast and loose with the money of whole goverments. I saw in the proletariat not just the industrial laborer, but the white collar office drone, the barrista with a BA in a service profession, "who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live" (219). \n\nClass awareness enabled class struggles. Professor Chadwick had made everyone in Basic Texts aware. How many people could I make aware?\n\n[[Continue?|But there were complications.]]

Still though…something about that session [[left a mark on me]]. It made me want to write about it. I remain uncertain about how I would do the session differently today. I still feel lingering guilt about the fact that I never saw Liz in the writing center again. I know for a fact that the professor she had was an incredibly hard grader and many students dropped and failed the class. Did Liz pass the class? Did she succeed in her goals? \n\n[[The moral to the story is...]]

I was fresh out of a sociology course that had exposed me to [[Bourdieu]] and [[Foucault]] for the first time. I had been stewing in ideas of social justice recently. I had taken a history of feminism course. With [[Marx in my heart]] and [[Freire]] in my mind, I was prepared for some consciousness raising action. \n\n“Well,” I said, “I think it’s about realizing that you don’t need to try to belong with a group just because you idealize them.”\n\nLiz scrunched up her face. “What do you mean?”\n\nWarning bells should have been going off in my head, but I was oblivious. “[[I mean, Michael is white and middle-class| Liz and a boy I’ll call Michael.]] and I think you kind of fell in love with that a bit too, and—“\n\n“What does Michael being white have to do with any of this?”\n\n“Well, you say you stopped speaking Spanish because you hung around him.”\n\n“Yeah, well, okay, that’s true, but…it doesn’t matter.”\n\n“That’s not what the piece was about?”\n\n“No. It was just a---Michael was just a stupid boy. It’s just about falling in love with a stupid boy and you shouldn’t do it. Stop pushing things when they’re not going to work.”\n\n“But you say if you could be like Michael and his friends then you could be with him.”\n\n“Yeah, but I didn’t mean like that. I meant, like, like not that. Not with [[the white thing]] or whatever.”\n\n“So what was your epiphany, then?” I asked.\n\n“I don’t know,” Liz said. “I shouldn’t have written about this. It’s just about not falling in love with people who don’t love you back.”\n\n“Oh,” I said. This was immensely awkward. “Okay, then.”\n\n[[The session ground to a halt.]]

In some ways, my interpretation of Foucault vis a vis this incident is coupled with [[Bourdieu]]'s ideas. Knowledge is power, knowledge is discourse, and thus, knowledge can be habitus. Knowledge is used to perpetuate hierarchical relationships. \n\nI actually read very little Foucault in the sociology class I mentioned earlier, and have read much more since then in grad school, but it was clearly just enough to hang myself.\n\n[[Continue?|But there were complications.]]

Robert Nash says that narratives are marginalized writing. One of his main goals in writing his book //Liberating Scholarly Writing: The Power of Personal Narrative// is to pose scholarly personal narratives as a counter-narrative to the hegemony of academic writing and research. \n\nAs Robert Nash's project was in some ways a narrative (or, in this case, counter-narrative) about another narrative, one of the reasons I chose to tell this particular narrative was because it involved conflicting narratives. In other words, this narrative allows me to explore the nature of narratives themself.\n\nBut why did I choose the format of Twine to share and refine my narrative? \n\nZoe Quinn, a game developer, says in "Punk Games" that "Twine can help a single beginner make a simple game in an afternoon, without needing a computer science degree," a fact that I can certainly attest to, as learning this program required about 30 minutes, while writing this piece has taken more than 12 hours.\n\nQuinn adds:\n\n<<<\nWhat people don't realize is that when you start making things outside of the convention of what is normal or good or "best practices", you're also shedding some of the baggage that comes with the concept of what a game "should" be. You won't be at the mercy of design conventions that haven't been challenged in 20 years just because they "seem game-y".\n<<<\n\nQuinn calls this a punk aesthetic, but it also echoes Nash's idea of constructing a counter-narrative to buck hegemony. Thus, Twine and scholarly personal narrative are natural allies; they are two counter-narratives uniting to help me tell my story about conflicting narratives.\n\nTwine also offers another benefit in that it is self-guided. Like a choose-your-own-adventure novel of old, the reader (player?) of a Twine game can choose their path, and they can see as many or as few possibilities as they want to. While the purpose of this piece is, first and foremost, as an assignment, and while because of this I'm sure my professor will be reading and selecting every option, I still want to offer my audience a choice of stories, just as we have a choice of stories when we remember our lived experiences. This is reflective of post-modernism; to quote Nash, "reality, while certainly existing 'out there,' is always and everywhere socially and personally constructed" (7). Similarly, I want the reader (player?) to construct their own reality in experiencing this piece, even to the point where I don't want to classify their role as either reader or player, but rather as both, or perhaps, neither. \n\nWhen discussing the way that narrative will change in our digital world, Janet Murray states in //Hamlet on the Holodeck// that narrative creations that play around with these concepts use "the fragmentation of the story structure [to represent] historical fragmentation, and the patterns of readings echo [an author's] efforts to reconstruct the past in order to restore a lost coherence" (37). Twine allows me to play with all these interconnected concepts of narrative. \n\n[[Return?|Start]]

The student is not sure why she wrote about this topic; [[she finds the whole story stupid]]. She feels that the assignment is silly and confusing. The fact that the upper-division course is mandatory is frustrating because the course feels unnecessary. She sees her professor as overly demanding, and worries about how exacting the professor’s grading standards are. The student comes to the tutor with these facts in her mind, and only hopes that this session will assure her success with this particular paper. She is happy to hear that the tutor also thinks the assignment and the teacher are ridiculous\n\nThe tutor greets the student, reads the paper, and [[fixes the paper]]. The tutor corrects all the grammar and mechanics errors and polishes the paper to a fine shine. She returns the paper to the student, and the student finalizes any corrections via the digital copy before turning it in.The student can stop worrying about this silly assignment and focus on her job and her other classes. The paper gets an A grade. \n\nAnother story? \n\n[[The Writing Center's Story]]\n[[The Tutor's Story]]\n\n[[The "True" Story]]\n\n[[Or begin again?|Start]]\n\n

I wish that I could talk to Liz and ask her about this incident. I wonder if she even remembers it.\n\nAt the same time, I'm fairly confident that if I had the opportunity to ask Liz, I wouldn't be able to. I think I'd be too scared to face up to my mistake in such a blunt way. I'm also afraid that the discussion would devolve quickly into a morass of socio-cultural issues that Liz would not want to discuss, and I promised my friend I wouldn't make the same mistake again! \n\nI can only speculate at Liz's expectations and realities of this experience. In a way, I'm co-opting her experience again. This is a perverse thought, but it recognizes some of the complications inherent in narrative inquiry. Whose story is it to tell? Even though none of the names are real, the actors in the piece would be instantly recognizable to themselves and their friends. How do we insure privacy? Post-modern reality ensures means there is no clear answer, and perhaps I should do more to make piece with that.\n\n[[Continue?|The moral to the story is...]]

The Final Narrative: A Narrative Final

In the wonderful world of writing center theory, two paradigms have frequently found themselves pitted against one another--directive and non-directive. Jeff Brooks' "Minimalist TutoringL Making the Student do all the Work" is the representative piece for the non-directive argument. In defining the writing center narrative for this piece, I chose non-directiveness to represent the writing center's narrative, even though an increasingly broad collection of tutor theories exist, because it falls nicely in line with abolishing the [["fix-it shop"|fixes the paper]] model, encourages student involvement and thus [[collaboration]], and is Socratic in nature. Academics always love a good bit of the Socratic method. \n\n[[Continue?|The Writing Center's Story]]

A student comes into the writing center with a paper for a required upper-division composition course. The student says she is not confident about her skill as a writer and would like the tutor to help her. The student’s paper is in answer to the prompt, “Write about an epiphany you had.” The paper tells a story about the student and a boy she had a crush on in school.\n \nThe session begins with the tutor [[greeting the student warmly]], leading the student over to a round table that best facilitates [[collaboration]]. There is small talk before segueing into talking about the assignment. The student is well-prepared for the tutoring session and presents an assignment sheet for the tutor to read over. After the assignment sheet is read, the student reads her paper out loud to the tutor, with the tutor listening attentively. Once the whole assignment has been read, the tutor and student talk about the piece. The tutor identifies patterns of error and then engages the student in socratic-dialogue trying to help the student recognize her own mistakes and correct them as necessary, with higher order concerns being focused on first. The session is the epitome of [[non-directiveness]]. The student is eager and engaged and follows the lead of the tutor. The student makes positive changes to her paper. The tutor never so much as raises a hand to the paper, [[never holds a pencil]] during the whole session. The paper is the student’s own. Over the course of the session the paper is polished to a shine, many “A-ha!” moments occur, the student learns the love and the joy of writing, and true collaboration happens. The student leaves the session, finally confident in her skill as a writer. She decides to make another appointment with the tutor, and a relationship builds. Repeat tutoring sessions foster even greater growth for the student. \n\nAnother story?\n\n[[The Student's Story]]\n[[The Tutor's Story]]\n\n[[The "True" Story]]\n\n[[Or begin again?|Start]]\n

The session basically ground to a halt from that point. I thought that Liz had this beautiful narrative about race and class issues and self-actualization. And maybe, in a sense, she did. But Liz did not want to think about the issues she had brought up, did not want to talk about anything along those lines. \n\nWe flailed about trying to find a way to make the epiphany in Liz’s paper clear, with two different opinions on what that epiphany should be. The gulf between Liz’s interpretation and mine was so vast as to make our differences irreconcilable. I must admit I was kind of in love with this romantic ideal of a narrative about a working class girl realizing that her life was valued above and beyond that middle-class status quo. I did not want to give that narrative up, and to that end, I pushed that perspective. I should have known better then to try and push this issue, but part of me was also thinking that maybe I could heal the emotional wound Liz’s relationship with Michael had left, or even beyond that, raise Liz’s awareness of class and race issues.\n\nThe session ended, and nothing was solved. \n\n[[After the session...]]\n

In his seminal piece "The Idea of a Writing Center," Stephen North bemoans the fact that many see writing centers as "fix-it shops," places where a student can get their paper corrected and perfected, an editing service more than a center for collaboration and learning. There is a tendency on the part of writing centers to see this as an outdated assumption, a relic of the bad old days, and while good advertisement and faculty relations may mean that student bodies at specific schools know the intended purpose of a writing center, recent research I have conducted on peer tutors indicate that absent any other context, students initially assume that a writing center's purpose is to fix and edit papers, supplying a one true //correct// answer.\n\n[[Return?|The Tutor's Story]]

Collaboration is important to writing center theory. Ideally, collaboration is a way to engage a student in the process of writing a paper, prevening and counteracting the dreaded "fix-it shop" narrative discussed by [[Stephen North|fixes the paper]]. \n\nCollaboration is a great thing in the writing center, but as Andrea Lunsford warned in "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center," tutors should be "cautious in rushing to embrace collaboration because collaboration can also be used to reproduce the status quo" (50). I don't think that is what happened in this case, because I don't think I fully enough embraced collaboration to actually say that what I did was collaborative, even in the most hegemonic sense. However, the idea of collaboration and its perversion is important to this story.\n\n[[Continue?|The Writing Center's Story]]\n

Liz was in our school’s social work program and came into the writing center with a lot of uncertainties about her writing ability. For reasons of class size and because it was geared less towards the practical side of the field and more towards research Sociology, Liz had not taken the special Sociology section of Advanced Writing. As the session started, she told me that she did not consider herself an academic writer but was instead much more comfortable writing in her field. She wanted to complete Advanced Writing so she could fulfill the requirement for her degree. \n\nWith this information imparted, the session began in earnest as Liz read her paper our loud.\n\n[[The Paper.]]

Bourdieu's ideas of habitus, taste, and cultural capital influenced my fool-hardiness in this endeavor. In my mind Liz was trying to adopt one habitus or establish a new kind of cultural capital. If I could get Liz to realize this, I could get her to understand that the relative valuation of cultural capital is a sham, and that her habitus was equally as valid as Michael's. \n\n[[Continue?|But there were complications.]]

Albert Bandura's self-efficacy theory asserts that students learn better when they have high self-efficacy (or self-belief) about their ability to complete a task. This self-efficacy is learnt through mastery experiences, or experiences where a task was successfully completed. Writing centers are uniquely positioned to foster such self-efficacy experiences, as they can provide support systems and encouragement for students to complete writing tasks. \n\nThe student who came into the writing center had low self-efficacy. This might have contributed to the problems with the session in a couple of ways:\n\n1) It might have made the student less susceptible to learning, as the student might have been an emotional state that was not conducive to learning.\n2) I might have focused too hard on bolstering self-efficacy at the expense of actually //listening// to what the student needed or said she needed.\n\n[[Return?|The Student's Story]]

The paper told the story of[[ Liz and a boy I’ll call Michael.]] She had met Michael at a church she was visiting when she was in middle school, and fostered a mean crush on him. So infatuated was she with Michael that she decided to change churches and join the choir to spend more time with him.\n\nThe paper was basically a chronological series of vignettes about Liz and Michael’s “relationship,”, with Liz trying to woo Michael only to be rebuffed time and again. Scenes included the following: Liz would confess to Michael that she had a crush on him, and he would laugh and tell her he thought that was sweet, completely ignoring Liz’s advance. Liz would feel awkward when she shows up to go bowl with Michael only to see he has also invited his new girlfriend. Liz and Michael would kiss in Michael’s truck after Michael has broken up with his girlfriend, only for the relationship to never move beyond that. Eventually, the piece finally ended with the fact that Michael had married the original girlfriend, and Liz had fallen out of touch with him, not having talked to him in a year or two.\n\n[[The "Problem" with the piece.]]

For someone whose work is so dear to the heart of many academics, Freire is frequently bastardized in much the same way I am guilty of bastardizing him in this experience. \n\nFreire states that "[t]o surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognize its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity" (47). In other words, consciousness raising. However, Freire also emphasizes that "[f]reedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly" (47). I was trying to //give// Liz freedom. Actually, giving might be too kind of a word; I was forcing freedom, or rather my idea of freedom, onto Liz. \n\nI find that amongst academics there is a strong tendency to force freedom on students. There is a rise in composition classes where the point is to inform students of social justice issues and bring them to the "right" side of these issues. As someone who has always had problems with authority, I balk instinctively at this idea. However, recognizing something as theoretically problematic and not doing that same thing are two different things. I fell into this trap with Liz.\n\nWas Liz oppressed? Most likely. However, Freire would say that in this situation I should have posed questions and done my best to empower Liz until she acquired Freire's//conscientizacao//. Instead, I, in my position as an oppressor, co-opted Liz's life experiences. I dehumanized her and took away her autonomy. I did exactly the opposite of Freire's pedagogy.\n\n[[Continue|But there were complications.]]

And here’s where things got really complicated. Liz was Hispanic and working class, and in her essay there had been little details that spoke to issues of class and race. She talked about how she stopped speaking Spanish, even around her parents, because Michael and his friends were white. She talked of how she was always receiving rides from Michael because she could not afford her own vehicle, and her mother was always at work and frequently unable to pick her up. One of the reasons that Liz and Michael had fallen out of touch was because Liz was busy working different full- and part-time jobs and Michael went away to a nicer university, while Liz had just recently transferred to this school from community college. Whenever these things were mentioned, Liz would bring them up in yearning terms. Michael was white and had money, and perhaps if she was like Michael, then she could be with Michael.\n\n[[Continue?|The Paper.]]

As soon as the session ended, I sat down to write my session report and was flooded with a feeling I can only describe as [[white guilt]]. I had known of the concept, but I had never experienced it personally. Now, there was nothing unmistakable about my feelings. I felt ashamed for the way I had tried to co-opt Liz’s experiences and tried to rescue her from the class- and race-based oppressions I perceived.\n\nHow dare I? How dare I make that session about me? How dare I try to deal with these issues that were not mine to deal with, try to tell Liz about her own lived experiences? I had spent that whole session trying to play white savior, trying to interject myself into a topic I knew nothing about. I had the privilege of looking at issues like this from the outside, as nothing more than a thought experiment. Liz lived these issues every day, and it was not my place to tell her how to handle any of this. \n\nBeyond that, in my zeal to play the liberator I had pushed aside some of the most basic principles of writing center pedagogy. Although I had initially asked Liz questions, I quickly began pushing my answers onto her. Instead of focusing on the paper as a whole, my scope grew narrower and narrower as I tried to push my agenda. I had taken away Liz’s agency in the most basic way; I had attempted to take over her paper.\n\n[[I later received some advice from my friend.]]

Much of America's view on race can be explained by a Stephen Colbert quote: "I don't see race, but people tell me I'm white, and I believe them because I look both ways before talking about race." America has an obsession with color blindness. To discuss race is almost to be racist de facto; it is playing the race card. We are taught in school that to be color-blind is the ideal, but all this serves to do is create a world where the issues of people of color are made invisible, their voices silenced. \n\nVictor Villanueva says in //Bootstraps// that "racelessness...is the decision to go it alone" (40). It is cultural alienation. The person of color who embraces racelessness is further alienated; since they are not white, they have no connection to the culturally accepted standard. To look at it from a [[Marxist|Marx in my heart]] point-of-view, pushing the idea of racelessness prevents class consciousness, prevents anyone from challenging the status quo. \n\nLiz had deeply internalized the concept of racelessness. I can only speculate what she must have thought when I brought up the idea. Was she afraid that if she talked about it, she would see as being a complainer? Pulling the race card? Or was she just //not// aware of the inherent socio-cultural issues in her piece? Was it a mixture of both? I don't know, and it's not my place to say.\n\n[[Continue?|But there were complications.]]

Ask any tutor, or really anyone in a helping profession, and they will admit that there is a certain high that is experienced from successfully helping someone. The high is likely very real, a rush of endorphins, so I hope you will forgive me for my extensive use of a drug metaphor in discussing this concept. \n\nThis high is one of my favorite parts of the job, but I would not go so far as to classify myself as a Writing Center "junkie." I rarely go into a session looking for one of the rare moments that produce an endorphin rush for me. However, on occasion, I do get a little caught up in seeking out that rush, and this probably played a factor into what went wrong in this session. \n\nIn terms of the "type" of high, I think there are emotional "hits" that are more attractive to me than others. My absolute favorite is probably when a student realizes they can be or are good at writing. A major breakthrough, like a sudden understanding of a concept is another one of my favorites.\n\nThis session tantalizingly offered me a new kind of high, of more which, later, but that can be summarized as the high of awakening someone to their own oppression, showing them the cause of social justice, and encouraging them to be free from the system.\n\n[[Return?|The Tutor's Story]]

A side story: Around 10 instructors taught Advanced Writing at my university at this time, with two or three instructors teaching the bulk of the sections, and then adjuncts or part-timers handling the rest. There were also special sections of Advanced Writing for Psychology and Sociology students, designed to focus on problems within their field. As a result, we tutored many advanced writing students in our writing center, primarily from the two or three instructors who had most of the sections. Advanced writing assignments were familiar to all tutors at the center, and the requirements of advanced writing as a whole were well-known. \n\nPurely by coincidence, Liz’s Advanced Writing professor was the same as mine, even though the professor was an adjunct and one for whom I had written this paper 1 ½ years earlier. This complicated my interactions with Liz; obviously the prompt of the paper is terribly vague, and the prompt can be interpreted so broadly that it leaves room for a student to get too confessional in his or her personal essay. However, having taken this professor and written on this prompt and after getting a strong grade on the essay for what I wrote, I had preconceived notions about what the professor wanted from the assignment. I had written an essay that dealt with an ethical dilemma I had faced where I had to decide between turning in an underage student with alcohol at a school-sponsored leadership convention or just looking the other way. I think this made me interpret the assignment as calling for a hard-hitting essay.\n\n[[Continue?|The "True" Story]]\n

Cresta Bayley\n

As soon as the session ended, I sat down to write my session report and was flooded with a feeling I can only describe as white guilt. I had known of the concept, but I had never experienced it personally. Now, there was nothing unmistakable about my feelings. I felt ashamed for the way I had tried to co-opt Liz’s experiences and tried to rescue her from the class- and race-based oppressions I perceived.\n\nHow dare I? How dare I make that session about me? How dare I try to deal with these issues that were not mine to deal with, try to tell Liz about her own lived experiences? I had spent that whole session trying to play white savior, trying to interject myself into a topic I knew nothing about. I had the privilege of looking at issues like this from the outside, as nothing more than a thought experiment. Liz lived these issues every day, and it was not my place to tell her how to handle any of this. \n\nBeyond that, in my zeal to play the liberator I had pushed aside some of the most basic principles of writing center pedagogy. Although I had initially asked Liz questions, I quickly began pushing my answers onto her. Instead of focusing on the paper as a whole, my scope grew narrower and narrower as I tried to push my agenda. I had taken away Liz’s agency in the most basic way; I had attempted to take over her paper.\n\n[[Still though...]]

In addition to being common courtesy, greeting a student enthusiastically and initiating them in small talk seems to be a consistent "rule" in writing center theory. The top writing center tutoring manuals according to Amazon's best selling lists--Muriel Harris' //Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference//; Margot Iris Soven's //What the Writing Tutor Needs to Know//; Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli's //The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors//; Ben Raforth's //A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One//; Toni-Lee Capossela's //The Harcourt Brace Guide to Peer Tutoring//; and Paula Gillespie and Neal Lerner's //The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring//--all emphasize repeatedly that the student should be greeted and made comfortable, that small-talk should be exchanged, and the tutor should try to find a way to "break the ice." That a center be comforting and open is heavily emphasized by these texts. \n\nIn //Peripheral Visions For Writing Centers//, Jackie Grutsch McKinney reifies this emphasis on comfort, stating, "I think the idea that a writing center is--and should be--a cozy, homey, comfortable, family-like place is perhaps most firmly entrenched" within the writing center master narrative (20). McKinney then goes on to question this narrative; whose idea of "homey" does this represent? "Homes are culturally marked," McKinney says, elaborating that the idea of being "comfortable" is a narrative associated with the American middle class. As became clear as I interacted with the student, she was more working class than middle class: a further complication to the narrative.\n\n[[Continue?|The Writing Center's Story]]

When I first sat down to write this piece, there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to write about this particular incident. What you choose to write about when presented with an open-ended prompt says a lot about your thought processes. Why //did// this experience leave such a mark on me?\n\nI'm ashamed of this story. I make the distinction of shame rather than guilt (for the purposes of //this// particular discussion, though for further musings, see [[white guilt]]) because shame is social, whereas guilt tends to be more purely internal. I feel as though Liz would have viewed what I did as shameful, and I certainly felt the same way. But, perhaps interestingly enough, I wonder if some of my shame was influenced by socialized ideas of not talking about race, of ideas about the status quo? I also, perversely, feel shame in the way that I undoubtedly betrayed and misinterpreted the theorists who influenced me (Marx, Foucault, Freire, Bourdieau) even though they're long dead. The psyche is a strange and complicated thing...\n\n[[Still though...]]