Starting with the writing center at the University of Iowa ...]]>

Writing center workers are agents of change whose practices might reverse the resegregation and new racism occurring in our country. As leaders in the academy who advance a pedagogy of hope, writing center workers model a practice for bringing about a lasting and abundant multicultural community.

Starting with the writing center at the University of Iowa in the first half of the last century, there has been a tension between those who seek to pigeonhole writing centers as fix-it shops that remediate the scarce skills they perceive in our novice writers and those who believe that the idea of a writing center can bring about an abundance of positive outcomes, not only in highlighting the strengths of our novice writers, but also in constructing a helpful dialogue about race.

This century’s writing center workers model a practice for bringing about a multicultural community. Nancy Grimm, director of the Michigan Technological University Writing Center, calls this practice a pedagogy of hope—and it may well lead to a lasting multicultural community. The foundation for such a community is the tutoring that occurs in the writing center. That’s because writing center tutors practice collaborative learning, or laboratory learning as writing center historian Neal Lerner terms it, which will inevitably compel them (and us) to examine the rhetoric of the writers with whom they work. Through this examination, tutors help writers to note, as critical theorist Victor Villanueva phrased it, the material reality of racism in their developing texts.

In a very blatant example, within a draft of a paper about living away from home for the first time, a new college student describes a recent incident: “When I saw my iPod was missing, I asked the guy sitting at a table if he saw any darkies hanging around.” The writing center tutor reading this draft pointed out the racism in at least two ways: by explaining why the word “darkies” is offensive and by helping the writer to see the prejudice in the assumption that persons of color are responsible for the missing iPod. Even though such egregious racism should have been rooted out long before showing up in the writing center, the tutor exposes for the writer the inherent racism in the draft.

When scarcity becomes hegemony

In “‘Loaves and Fishes’: Acts of Scarcity and Abundance,” educator Parker Palmer writes, “The culture of scarcity thrives on dissatisfaction, and breeds it as well.” What Palmer means is that such a culture is highly critical of educational practice, presuming deficits and citing poor outcomes on standardized tests as evidence for this stance. Indeed, education in America is constantly under attack by those who are dissatisfied with student achievement. Take the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation of 2001, which brought about fear from both teachers and administrators. This fear, which stifled difference, resulted from the fact that most NCLB people equate good teaching and effective learning with high test scores. In literacy classrooms, therefore, “Many [teachers] turned to low-level drill and practice sessions, leaving little time for students to read and write in authentic contexts,” argue education professors Joseph M. Shosh and Charlotte Rappe Zales of Moravian College.

This is one reason why, in “Addressing Racial Diversity in a Writing Center: Stories and Lessons from Two Beginners,” Nancy Barron, a professor of rhetoric and the teaching of writing at Northern Arizona University, and Nancy Grimm take a critical look at the writing center community’s celebration of diversity, on the one hard, and its championing acculturation, on the other. They note that, while difference in writing should be celebrated in a writing center, the writing center becomes, unfortunately, a place where students are encouraged to write as if there were no difference, in Standard Edited English.

Standard Edited English has hegemonic implications, particularly for persons of color. As MacArthur Award-winning author Lisa Delpit has pointed out:

I have come to understand that power plays a critical role in our society and in our educational system. The worldviews of those with privileged positions are taken as the only reality, while the worldviews of those less powerful are dismissed as inconsequential. Indeed, in the educational institutions of this country, the possibilities for poor people and for people of color to define themselves, to determine the self each should be, involve a power that lies outside of the self. It is others who determine how they should act, how they are to be judged. When one “we” gets to determine standards for all “we’s,” then some “we’s” are in trouble!

The Brown v. Board of Education decision clearly helped desegregation efforts in the 1950s and led to social and education successes. Yet in the past 20 years, Supreme Court rulings and the inability of the federal government to fund desegregation programs at adequate rates have encouraged the resegregation of public schools. Instead of integration and its material, social, and intellectual abundance, we have been left with:

• Unequal opportunities and unequal educational outcomes;
• Unlikely access to our nation’s prosperity for persons of color;
• Higher high school dropout rates for persons of color;
• Lower graduation rates for persons of color;
• Less qualified teachers and support personnel as a result of lower wages;
• Fewer teachers of color as role models in public schools;
• Assigning students of color to lower-level programs as a result of tracking;
• Assigning whites to higher-level programs as a result of tracking;
• Honors or college-preparatory classes not normally offered to students of color; and
• Placing students of color in special education and also identifying them as behaviorally difficult.

Eric J. Cooper, president of the National Urban Alliance (NUA), points out that, currently, in America, we practice a pedagogy of despair, particularly for persons of color. Such a stance is marked by:

• Lower-quality curricula, larger class sizes, and fewer technologies and science/language laboratories;
• Overcrowded classrooms and rundown buildings for schools populated by persons of color;
• A lack of basic supplies as well as antiquated school books and materials;
• Inequities in staffing, student assignment, and transfer options;
• Concerns about school safety and violence;
• Testing that relegates persons of color to lower-achieving classes;
• Learning measured by standards erected by whites;
• Questioning discouraged;
• Testing mastery praised.

The writing center model: pedagogy of hope

Writing center workers are agents of change whose practices will expose the new racism occurring in our country.

One of the writing center’s early change agents, Kenneth Bruffee announced that “a necessary intermediate step on the way to effective independence is effective interdependence. . . .” Bruffee’s program demonstrated that conversation among knowledgeable peers would bring about community and concomitant material, intellectual, and social abundance. For almost 30 years now, practitioners in the field have argued how far and with whom we should take that program of peer collaboration and conversation and its modifications. Some have opted to stay on the margins, cautious about being co-opted, secure in the rarefied air of their idea of writing center work, and then offering complaints about that marginalization. Others have accepted the challenge of becoming institutionalized—albeit in fits and spurts. I would argue that, 50-plus years after Brown, the only way writing center workers can deal with the systemic problems of race and class is systemically. That means the field needs to advance its writing center pedagogy of hope.

Grimm’s pedagogy of hope can promote literacy and empowerment. It is a decidedly writing center pedagogy, a problem-posing pedagogy in which learners become teachers and teachers become learners—face to face in centers, classrooms, or in parlors in the clouds to which everyone contributes and in which everyone participates. By practicing such a pedagogy, as Brazilian educator Paulo Freire maintained, people “develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.”

Can we really replace scarcity with abundance?

For writing center workers to be the change agents, they will have to make their risky move to become our country’s intellectual and pedagogical engineers, helping us in this century to bring about the equality in education Brown was supposed to legalize in the last century.

Consider what Cooper has placed as an epigraph on his website: “When we are able to break the glass ceiling for inner-city children and see achievement gains go way beyond system expectations, that is when I am the proudest. To seize the opportunity to create hope out of despair—to see children and teachers’ eyes light up, with expectation and awareness that they can teach and learn complex concepts . . . wow!”

Or Palmer’s concern about waiting for the kairotic moment: “When we approach community as a project that can succeed if only we have the right technique, the right setting, the right goals, the right people, we are on the wrong track.”

Those of us who work in the writing center assume abundance, “a mixing of our ideas and energies,” as Palmer put it. Therefore, writing center leadership is absolutely necessary, and we may have to undertake the risky action of talking about race until every community tells a different—an abundant—story about race, one that invites into our community colleagues from K-12, from NUA, from HBCUs, and the like.

Not alone

We are not alone—either in the writing center or outside of it—though it might seem that way sometimes as we all think about how to enter into the terribly important conversation about race, its repercussions, and the challenge race presents for constructing a multicultural community. This is important to keep in mind, because “we must have models for how to dive into, rather than turn away from, the fear, conflict and uneasiness that often accompanies . . . discussions . . . about race, racism, literacy, and education,” say Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan, authors of Writing Centers and the New Racism. The risk that today’s writing center workers take to give the gift of community within the writing center, throughout the institution, and outside the institution will provide a model and a process for developing abundant conversations about these issues within a community of creative and critical thinkers. In so doing, all of us may well realize Thurgood Marshall’s definition of “equal,” offered during the time of the Brown decision: “‘Equal’ means [everyone is] getting the same thing, at the same time and in the same place.”

Albert DeCiccio is provost of Southern Vermont College, a past president of the Writing Centers Association and former co-editor of The Writing Center Journal.

The Vermont Community Foundation’s 2009 report on postsecondary education asserts that college graduates live longer, healthier, more lucrative lives than their peers who did not graduate college. But the report is harsh in its assessment of the readiness of Vermont high school students for college, revealing that: one in three juniors is not proficient in ...]]>

The Vermont Community Foundation’s 2009 report on postsecondary education asserts that college graduates live longer, healthier, more lucrative lives than their peers who did not graduate college. But the report is harsh in its assessment of the readiness of Vermont high school students for college, revealing that: one in three juniors is not proficient in reading; seven in 10 are not proficient in math; and six in 10 are not proficient in writing. Vermont’s expenditures for high school students are among the highest in the nation, yet these students lag in college preparation. These are troubling data about the possibilities for Vermont youth to achieve the goals of college graduates.

These data become even more disturbing in view of a 2001 report by the National Center on Educational Statistics on academic preparation and postsecondary success. That report focuses on the challenges confronting first-generation students, noting the sizable success gap between college students whose parents graduated from a four-year college and those who did not. The report points out that a person’s graduation from college is correlated to his or her parents’ completion of bachelor’s degrees. Interestingly, first-generation students who undertook a rigorous high school curriculum, one that was aligned with the core expectations of college, were able to reduce that identified gap significantly. In short, a rigorous high school curriculum aligned to the college curriculum is an antidote for failure.

Given the need for a bachelor’s degree for many future jobs, improvement in collegiate graduation rates could not be more important. Nevertheless, if there are weaknesses in college preparedness among Vermont high school students, which the VCF report suggests, and if these weaknesses are exacerbated by misaligned and non-rigorous curricula, then Vermont’s first-generation students will struggle mightily if and when they progress to college.

At Southern Vermont College, more than 60% of our students are the first in their families to progress to a bachelor’s degree. We are acutely aware of the challenges facing our students, and we have been deliberate in our efforts to provide them with needed support across the institution. That support takes many forms: a first-year course emphasizing civic engagement, an academic advisor/counselor, a retention committee, improved residential life, peer tutors and peer mentoring, professional tutors, and specialized tutoring for those with learning differences. We are adjusting our entire curriculum to facilitate hands-on, laboratory learning across the curriculum. We will continue to explore ways we can increase student success.

The aforementioned data suggest, however, that our internal collegiate efforts are not enough; something has to happen at the K-12 levels. In consideration of these studies, Southern Vermont College is turning more attention to its links with its K-12 neighbors. The college has had a history of partnering, and we already have several programs in place with K-12 students. These include reading programs in elementary schools, a poetry contest for elementary school students, a math program tying collegiate athlete statistics to elementary school problem-solving, and an Upward Bound program that has been operating for 30 years to prepare high school students for college. These initiatives, however, have focused on K-12 and SVC students; they have not been part of comprehensive efforts to promote collegiate success through year-round K-12 faculty development and K-16 programmatic alignment.

As we move forward, we are relying on a proven practice in our nation’s teacher-preparation colleges and universities, that is, the idea of a K-16 “professional development school” arrangement between higher education institutions and neighboring schools. Within that model, we are trying existing approaches, but also developing some new initiatives that we are testing on a pilot basis. Our programming involves, among other strategies, aligning high school and collegiate curricula, assisting with state-identified teacher-development needs, and introducing a different type of involvement with high school students—namely their participation in a credit-bearing “mini-mester,” a variant of bridge programming and Upward Bound’s residential programs that focus on academic readiness.

Here are some concrete examples of our new initiatives.

We have begun to connect faculty at SVC with teachers at Bennington’s Mount Anthony Union High School (MAUHS). Our immediate hope is to establish an SVC/MAUHS partnership so there may be ongoing teacher-inquiry groups comprised of MAUHS teachers and SVC faculty. In these groups, best practices and current theories will be shared for better preparing Vermont students to achieve success in college. To that end, we have already conducted a workshop at SVC on preparing writing assignments to which MAUHS English faculty have been invited. A related hope is to help students from MAUHS achieve those core competencies that are expected at a college like SVC, including reading, writing, critical and creative thinking, speaking, ethics, information technology and respect for the globe. Our ultimate hope is to create a strong partnership between the two schools, not just so more students from MAUHS will elect to attend SVC, but so that MAUHS students are as prepared as possible for ongoing academic success in college.

We have also engaged in similar partnering discussions with MAUHS’s neighboring technical high school: the Southwestern Vermont Career Development Center (SVCDC). To inspire SVCDC students to consider college, we have created a college atmosphere by enabling SVC students to take college-level laboratory courses on site at the SVCDC, as they are doing this term in a forensic criminal justice class. In addition, as with the MAUHS teachers, we are making it possible for teachers at the SVCDC to work with faculty at SVC to align curricula so the transition for college-eligible students becomes more negotiable. We are considering offering some co-branded courses at the SVCDC site and having some SVC faculty teach SVCDC students.

Our new efforts expand how we include elementary and middle schools. The twist here is to prepare students early to meet challenges for state-identified deficits, for example, in reading. To that end, we have a number of courses now in which SVC professors and their students work with area elementary- and middle-school teachers and their students. Examples include SVC’s reading program with Mount Anthony Middle School, titled “Questing for Literacy: Guiding Middle Schoolers in the Search for Wisdom Within and Without.”

In addition to these initiatives, the mini-mester program offers high school students a brief, intensive, on-campus academic and residential life experience that has a career focus and opportunities for students to try out their navigational skills in a safe, caring and controlled environment. This program will be especially beneficial for those who are the first in their families to consider a four-year residential collegiate opportunity.

Based on the stories told in Ron Suskind’s book, Hope in the Unseen, this program will enable students to gain familiarity with the complex aspects of the collegiate experience that often make college transition difficult and uncomfortable. Some attention, depending on the age group, will be paid to the college admissions process itself. If successful, this program will mean more Vermont students will attend college and, more importantly, progress effectively toward graduation.

To extend the idea of partnering using the mini-mester idea, Southern Vermont College and Wheelock College are collaborating to pilot a one-credit mini-mester this summer geared towards high school juniors from both urban and rural settings. It will provide these students a unique opportunity to learn about and engage in hands-on experiences related to health care, with problem-based learning that demonstrates the difference between urban and rural health care delivery systems. Spanning two weeks and one weekend, students will examine a timely healthcare question and discover approaches to its answer by examining urban clinical healthcare sites, rural clinical healthcare sites, experiences in SVC’s Simulation Laboratory and experimentation in several science laboratory sites.

Partnering is one way, in addition to SVC’s current on-campus efforts, to help more Vermonters succeed in higher education. The stakes are high, but the rewards for students and the larger community are clear: longer-living, healthier, wiser, more engaged citizens. The very future of the state depends upon the success of such partnering initiatives.

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Karen Gross is president of Southern Vermont College. Albert DeCiccio is provost of the college.