Writing Centers and DEI
If you’ve worked in higher education long enough, you’ll hear people throw around the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion—often abbreviated to DEI—a lot. Sometimes, people use these terms well, using them to drive the design and implementation of academic programs, but at other times, people throw them around as buzzwords.
At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Keith Hall, the Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Azusa Pacific University, gave a talk titled “5 Equity Minded Strategies to Amplify Learning and Engagement in the Online Environment.” His primary audience included faculty and staff, so he wanted to give them some principles for engaging with their students online. I found that his points framed many of the things that staff and student coaches already do to engage clients in the writing center.
Call me biased, but writing centers can be at the forefront of DEI efforts in institutes of higher learning. Usually, a college or university already has a writing center or similar academic support service. By intentionally designing writing center policies and services, or tweaking existing ones, seemingly small things can meet students where they are and make them feel like they belong at the university.
To encourage my fellow coaches, I summarized Dr. Hall’s points (in bold below) and then related them to some of the ways we work with clients in the writing center. These points especially helped our student coaches as they shifted from working with clients in person to working with them online, giving them needed reminders that what they did mattered to clients. I’ve since tailored it for our Canvas training course for both writing coaches and subject tutors. I wanted to include it here to demonstrate how tangible some of these abstract concepts can become in places like a writing center.
Keep in mind that my audience consists of my fellow coaches, so the “we” in the sections below is to include both myself and my work colleagues at APU.
Be proactive and intrusive: Many students (or clients as we refer to them in the Writing Center) wonder “am I even seen?” Just because we use non-directive coaching approaches doesn’t mean the coach just sits back for the ride. Clients always engage better with us if we first engage them. For example, we often,
Ask the client how they are in addition to collaboratively setting an agenda for the session
Encourage the client by telling them what we find compelling about their writing or what you thought they did well, and
Provide feedback and strategies that clients can use to keep engaging with their paper and developing as writers.
Other ways that we show clients that we see them include things like making a courtesy call after the 5-minute waiting period (because a client may be having trouble connecting to their online appointment and we can walk them through that; or they may have had a family emergency and thus be unable to make their appointment) and even sending the client report form (a summary of the appointment that many clients use as proof that they had an appointment) to the client as a follow-up.
Be authentic and relational: This is where small talk at the beginning of a session (or end, if there is time) is important. Taking two minutes to introduce yourself or welcome a returning client, ask the client about their name (e.g., how to pronounce it or whether they have a preferred nickname), and learn a bit about the client as a person in addition to the assignment they’ve brought helps that relational aspect. As relevant to the coaching session, sharing your own experiences as a writer can help you build rapport with the client, humanizing you as a fellow writer. Also, learning is not just cerebral; we engage our emotions and relationships in learning. So, taking the time to relate to the client can actually help them learn better!
Be mindful of diversity: Working online, you will work with a much more diverse array of clients than you would in the brick-and-mortar Writing Center. You’ll encounter graduate and professional students, students at APU’s regional campuses, and even the occasional staff member. Many of these students already have families and are returning to school for additional certifications or degrees to advance their existing careers. Being mindful of where a client is at in life helps you understand why they may have missed that APA is now in its seventh edition (it may have been in its fifth edition when they last used it!), or have never used Google docs (but can teach you how to use advanced features in Microsoft Word!).
Diversity is more than just where a student may be at in their educational trajectory. You’ll also pick up on how clients’ personalities affect how they approach their writing process. Some of you have worked with clients who are Deaf or hearing impaired or have a visual impairment. Consequently, you’ve had to find other ways to get a student engaged with their paper—reading a paper aloud will not help a Deaf student, and color-coding main points, topic sentences, or summary versus analysis may not help a visually impaired student! And of course, you’ll encounter numerous writing genres, learn about the values of different disciplines and how they manifest in writing, and which audiences clients are writing for, all of which may be very different from your own academic concentration.
All of these situations means that you to need meet the client where they are. As you work with different writers, use the tools you learned in this onboarding to focus your sessions on what the client needs rather than what you’re comfortable with.
Be culturally relevant: A campus’s diversity, especially its cultural diversity, comes to the Writing Center—we don’t have to go looking for it! You’ll work with clients whose cultural backgrounds and experiences are different than your own, and consequently whose relationship to (and experiences with) the English language is different from yours. Hence, working at the Writing Center is one way to increase your own cultural fluency. In a coaching session, the client is the authority on their experiences and audiences and you get to help them leverage that knowledge in their writing, but you can also approach these sessions with curiosity and use them as a springboard to delve deeper into cultural factors on your own that you were previously unaware of--especially as concerns writing and rhetoric.
Build community: Points one through four relate to membership (or a feeling of belonging) and relationships (connecting with others). However, because our end goal is to empower the writer, we want clients to walk away feeling ownership of their writing (knowing they can contribute) and that they are in partnership with others in their educational journey (like writing coaches). We can build community with our returning clients by having a steadier role in their time at APU, be it over the course of a semester or their entire program. Our Writer’s Studio option, where a student can sign up for six consecutive sessions with the same coach as they work on a longer project, is one way that we help build this community. Even if a student only comes to the Writing Center once, we can use our resources--such as handouts, blog posts, and YouTube channel--to continue to helping the student see themselves as part of a writing community.
And sometimes, clients may need something we can’t offer them, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help them. Do they need help finding a more appropriate source for their research paper? Show them how to connect with a research librarian. Do they have questions about their student visa forms? Direct them to international student services. Are they dealing with multiple stressors and having trouble managing them all, and it’s showing in their academic work? Connect them with the counseling center. As a “front porch” service with friendly, approachable people available and wanting to help, the Writing Center has the opportunity to connect clients to the campus resources that best answer their stated need.
