Pedagogies of Belonging: Listening to Students and Peers
Abstract
Aer they are admitted, many students find actually joining the university to be disorienting and even daunting, especially those whose socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and/or educational worlds differ markedly from the academic world they encounter in college. We know that writing centers play a key role in helping students make this transition, serving as crucial conduits of adjustment for otherwise marginalized students. But exactly how we help tutors to help these students is less familiar ground. Tutors are not usually considered when composition scholars characterize the ways in which writing professionals help students belong. Nevertheless, tutors as well as teachers are party to a process seen variously as assimilation, accommodation, separatism, acculturation, translation, or repositioning (Severino; Bruffee-, Lu, ''Writing as Repositioning"), and the students tutors work with must undergo a process that can be positively characterized as "going native" (Bizzell, "Cognition" 386), quizzically understood as invention (Bartholomae), or negatively viewed as conversion 0-Harris io3; Lu, "Conflict") or initiation (T. Fox). Clearly, there is no consensus among these many "camps"; rather, what we have is provocative, useful discussion on the pedagogical processes of belonging. But many a tutor who finds herself on the frontlines with a lost student will not have the benefit of knowing this discussion. As a writing center administrator who has worked in two urban institutions with ethnically and linguistically diverse student populations, I have struggled to formulate tutor training that urges tutors to consider the complexities of belonging. I believe the tutor needs to understand the paradoxical ways in which writing and academic literacy more generally are instruments of belonging that can constrain as well as liberate.
- Journal
- Writing Center Journal
- Published
- 2005
- DOI
- 10.7771/2832-9414.1573
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