Abstract

Writing center training often teaches tutors to be aware of the “writer not the writing” (North) across from them—the whole person —but tutors are less-informed on how to bring their whole person to sessions. In this article, we question how tutors can practice restorative justice if they aren’t aware of the harm, hurt, or, even at times, healing that our whole person, as tutors, can bring to the table. To do this, we weave together stories of and theoretical influences on the planning and implementation of our undergraduate writing center theory and practice course. Further, we provide a course model for administrators interested in moving away from tutor training as a set of how-tos and inoculations, and toward a more embodied training that relies on centering the experiences of the whole student and the whole tutor in the writing center. Similar to our time together teaching the writing center theory and practice course, we include here an ongoing conversation alongside the main text in which we reflect on our experience and model the ongoing critical reflection necessary to embody a restorative justice ethos. Keywords : restorative justice, tutor training, wholeness, canon “Similarly, issues around gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality, and physical ability will inevitably arise in a writing center and the available responses to these issues vary greatly among cultures. A general, short text such as The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors cannot adequately cover all possible situations and issues, and so we invite you to explore more deeply with your tutors the concerns of subjects that affect the writers who visit your writing center.” (Ryan and Zimmerelli, 2016, p.VI) During the summer of 2019, we (Shelby, Floyd, and Rachel) met together in a conference room that was always too hot and crowded with obnoxiously loud chairs. We were meeting to discuss plans for the upcoming writing center theory and practice course for the Fall 2019 semester. Shelby, a master’s student; Floyd, a PhD student; and Rachel, a PhD candidate, met to talk about the course they would be working on together. Rachel, as the instructor of record, created an agenda for the meeting that included looking over previous versions of the course, the service learning component, and what Shelby and Floyd’s roles would be, as two graduate student teaching assistants. We talked about our respective experiences in tutor training courses and how that preparation looked unlike what we had all come to know as writing center work, particularly when we considered the movement the Writing Center @ MSU was undergoing as we rolled out our Language Statement . Our “rollout” included a Speaker Series of invited lecturers and focused workshops on languaging in the center. We felt more traditional writing center training courses often create a utopian ideal and then complicate it, retrofitting the course to accommodate a checklist of writer identities. However, it was the complications of writing center work that felt more urgent for us in light of our center’s current initiative. We asked ourselves, how do we get new tutors, in just 15 weeks, to do this complex people-work in a way that is responsible to marginalized folks who are disserved by the institution. It was our responsibility to construct a primer that is built on social truths like systemic oppression. Accordingly, we began to construct a course that worked against writing center commonplaces and toward a social justice framework that we hoped would foster a more equitable, embodied, and human tutoring practice. Our epigraph, pulled from Ryan and Zimmerelli’s (2016) The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors , one of the most ubiquitous tutor training guides, frames identity as “issues that might arise,” tertiary concerns to the foundations of writing center work. Conversely, we tried to create a new vision of what the “basics” of writing center work entails, shifting away from the traditional trope of introducing new tutors to writing centers via the pathway: North’s “Better Writer’s”>History>What is Tutoring>Styles>Types of Students. Shifting away from this comfortable pathway was welcoming for us as teachers but still unsettling for our new tutors. We leaned into this discomfort because for us, this act was one of restorative justice. In fact, when we deviate from that pathway, we might be more likely to see the harm that the WC, as an institution itself, is complicit in and work to neutralize it. We must stop onboarding people to orientations that do harm—we must begin to reduce the need for restorative justice as an after-thought and, instead, consider the history of writing center tutorial training and courses as unjust and reorient ourselves to centering marginalized voices and bodies as the explicit way of introducing newcomers to the field of writing centers. This reorientation to the work of tutor training, in our minds, is a restorative justice stance that lends itself to writing center faculty and staff who are the stewards of the profession—those of us who are charged with undoing the harm of writing center lore that was once held sacred. Given our experiences and understandings of this charge, in this article, we offer three stories from our unique perspectives working on this course that further illustrate how restorative justice work uses the whole person—writer, tutor, teacher, and administrator—to create a tutor training course centered on restorative justice. Further, we provide a course example for administrators interested in moving away from tutor training as a set of “how-tos” and inoculations, and toward a more embodied training that relies on centering the experiences of the whole student and the whole tutor in the writing center. As you read our article, we want to offer our intention behind the format. While textually we follow a fairly typical organization pattern, we’ve additionally interspersed the article with comments. We did this so that we could use our individual voices to talk back to our collective voice and reflect more personally on specific moments in our experiences. They also provide space for smaller ideas that don’t easily fit into the larger narrative of our article but that still have great importance. We think these comments are representative of collaborative writing in general, but more specifically, they represent what tutoring looks like: a back and forth conversation, sometimes, even, across time and space.