Abstract

Writing Center scholarship has not paid enough attention to the commonplace administrative practices of recruiting, hiring, and training writing center consultants and how these practices are “reproducing and generating systems of privilege” (García, 2017, p. 32). This article begins to address the gap by sharing results from our ongoing examination of how to improve the diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) of our recruiting, hiring, and training practices at a small midwestern liberal arts university. This article showcases a heuristic we developed that will assist writing center administrators to navigate similar interrogation processes. Drawing from Romeo García (2017) we began with listening. We listened to the existing literature, we listened to our colleagues at our university; and we listened to our colleagues within the writing center community. Our heuristic represents the recursive process of this interrogation. For each step in the process, we provide explanations, examples, and recommendations. We conclude by presenting three of our key findings from this ongoing process: 1) the Writing Center community needs to more critically question the equity, and potential exploitativeness, of three-credit hour tutor education courses, particularly when these courses are a requirement of employment; 2) if we want to create an inclusive, equitable environment where students with non-majority identities can feel like they too belong, then we need to integrate DEIB into all aspects of our work; 3) our interrogation of the equity and inclusion of recruiting, hiring, and training practices needs to be an ongoing, recursive, learning process. In short, we hope this article will serve as a call to action for other writing center administrators to interrogate and improve the equity of their recruiting, hiring, and training practices, as well as act as a catalyst for much needed research in this area. Keywords : recruiting and hiring practices, recruiting, hiring, training, tutor training, tutor education, diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, DEIB, diverse and equitable hiring practices, SWOT analysis Periods of change and transition present challenges, but they also present opportunities to question our commonplace practices. Like many writing centers in this post-COVID world, our writing center is in a period of change and transition. In addition to the obvious transitions of figuring out what our “new normal” looks like, we are also facing two significant administrative changes, both of which began in the 2021-2022 academic year. First, we welcomed a new Writing Center Director (Megan Connor) in August 2021. Second, partway through the Fall 2021 semester, we learned that our university is putting the English Department Master’s program on hiatus and will no longer be accepting new students into the program. Currently, the English Department graduate assistants (GAs) provide 50% of the writing center’s consulting hours. Because our university is no longer admitting students into the English Master’s program, the writing center will lose these GA consulting hours at the beginning of the Spring 2023 semester. To address this imminent and extreme staffing shortage, we knew that we needed to critically examine and rethink our recruiting, hiring, and training practices. As we began this work, we quickly realized that our staff is disproportionately White and female. During the 2021-2022 academic year, our Writing Center staff consisted of 14 undergraduate consultants and eight GA consultants. Of our 22 staff members, 77.3% (17) identified as female and 90.9% (20) identified as White. For comparison (see Table 1), in the 2021-2022 academic year, only 47.7% of university students identified as female and 84.7% identified as White. Our center’s period of change and transition led to a kairotic moment to question the equity of our commonplace administrative practices of recruiting, hiring, and training writing center consultants. Our numbers told us that our staff lacked diverse representation. We knew, however, that simply approaching diversity as a numbers problem would not create an inclusive and equitable environment where students with non-majority identities could feel like they belonged (Del Russo et al., 2020; Haltiwanger Morrison & Nanton, 2019). As Romeo García (2017) explains, “Writing Centers function within a tapestry of social structures, reproducing and generating systems of privilege” (p. 32). In order to combat the equity issues within our recruiting, hiring, and training practices, we need to understand the tapestry of structures that is reproducing and generating systems of privilege. García (2017) argues that this process “begins with listening, both in the sense that Krista Ratcliffe (2005) discusses it—as a code for cross-cultural communication—and as I conceive of listening—as a form of actional and decolonial work” and calls on the writing center community to engage in transformative listening (p. 33). We echo Garcia’s call. Writing center scholarship has not paid enough attention to the commonplace administrative practices of recruiting, hiring, and training writing center consultants and how these practices are “reproducing and generating systems of privilege” (García, 2017, p. 32). In an effort to begin addressing this gap, we share our ongoing journey to critically examine and improve the equity of our recruiting, hiring, and training practices. As García (2017) suggests, we began with listening. We listened to the existing literature, we listened to our colleagues at our university; and we listened to our colleagues within the writing center community. As we listened, we reflected, made action plans, listened some more, adjusted, and improved the action plans. Like García (2017), we call on writing center community members, particularly writing center administrators, to engage in a similar examination and rethinking of their recruiting, hiring, and training practices. To that end, we have developed a heuristic that others can use to help navigate through this process. For each step of the heuristic, we provide explanations, examples, and recommendations. We conclude by sharing the lessons we’ve learned so far.