A Writing Center Practitioner's Inquiry into Collaboration

Pedagogy, Practice, And Research

Georganne Nordstrom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367510336
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000348378
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book presents a model of Practitioner Inquiry (PI) as a systematic form of empirical research and provides a rationale for its suitability within a writing center context. Exploring the potential of writing centers as pedagogical sites that support research, the book offers an accessible model that guides both research and practice for writing center practitioners, while offering flexibility to account for their distinct contexts of practice.

Responding to the increasing call in the field to produce empirical "RAD" (replicable, aggregable, data-driven) research, the author explores Practitioner Inquiry through explication of methodology and methods, a revisitation of collaboration to guide both practice and research, and examples of application of the model. Nordstrom grounds this research and scholarship in Hawai?i's context and explores Indigenous concepts and approaches to inform an ethical collaborative practice.

Offering significant contributions to empirical research in the fields of writing center studies, composition, and education, this book will be of great relevance to writing center practitioners, anyone conducting empirical research, and researchers working in tutor professionalization, collaboration, translingual literacy practices, and researchmethodologies.

1 What Indigenous Practices Can Teach Us about Collaboration

Since my first forays into empirical research as a master’s student, I have been consumed with the ethics and implications of all aspects of my work. I know this is a result of where I grew up and the impact research and educational policies have had in Hawaiʻi, the islands I call home. Like many other locations in the Pacific and across the United States, there is a history of using the educational system to disenfranchise the Native people and other marginalized groups, particularly through the banning of the Indigenous language as a medium of education and academic/government-sanctioned research programs that exploit non-white peoples and their lands. As the title suggests, in this chapter, I will draw from Indigenous concepts and approaches to articulate a theory of collaboration for practitioners¹ in their research, teaching, and service. I therefore want to begin with an Indigenous voice to capture how this legacy is experienced by those being “researched,” “taught,” and “helped.” The poem, “Natives Wanted,” by Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian²) poet and scholar Brandy Nālani McDougall (2010) satirizes the self-serving, abusive exploitation and violence too many Euro-Western settlers/researchers have visited on Indigenous peoples as they moved through the Pacific and other colonized locations. It represents tragic and enduring scenarios all too familiar in McDougall’s home islands, and is illustrative of the irresponsible and unethical practices that have worked to serve settler colonialism—practices my own practitioner stance responds to:

Natives Wanted

Do you still hunt and/or gather?

Continue to use plants for healing?

Do you have a dying language

or live in a remote corner

of an island or rainforest?

Have you contracted foreign diseases

And are now facing cultural extinction?

Do you consistently reject the teachings

of missionaries and settlers?

Do you still chant, sing, and/or dance

as your ancestors did? Do you continue

to revere and/or worship your ancestors?

Do you still wear traditional attire

(i.e., loincloths, feathers, animal skins

or fur, bark cloth, leaves, etc.)

and/or pierce and/or tattoo and/or scar

any part of your body? Have you

maintained your oral traditions

and thus, received sacred knowledge

passed down for at least 5 generations?

Do you now or have you ever

practiced human sacrifice and/or eaten

your enemies (or your friends/family)?

Do you have a long history of burying

priceless treasures with your dead

and still know where they are buried?

If you can answer “yes” to 3 or more of the above

question, then you are an ideal subject of study

for anthropologists, archaeologists, pharmaceutical

companies, natural historians, museum curators,

colonial writers, missionaries and tourists.

Disclaimer: Compensation for all sacred artifacts and knowledge may be promised though generally not guaranteed. Side effects of study may include (but are not limited to): dispossession, displacement, more disease, chronic colonization, exploitation, diabetes, alcoholism/drug abuse, severe depression, paranoia, spiritual crisis, and xenophobia.

(p. 51)

The thing about satire is there is always a truth to it. While someone not familiar with the context McDougall is writing within might foreground the satire so evident in the poem, I would caution against misreading it only as hyperbole. Too much of what is detailed in the poem has been the reality of Indigenous peoples since representatives of the West stumbled onto the lands of their flourishing nations. Complex social and governmental systems were often dismissed as primitive, and the unfamiliar cultures deemed inferior, but nevertheless prime for research. This research, while designed to acquire “knowledge” for the researcher, too frequently worked to reinforce colonial claims to Indigenous land, property (intellectual and cultural), and bodies, without consideration of the impact of that research on individuals or their communities.

The concept of research in Western contexts is almost always a grand narrative in and of itself. Without a voice from the Other(s’) side to convey what it is like to be a victim of it, research is most often understood in the West as corresponding to intellectual engagement, innovation, and progress. Although McDougall’s poem obviously focuses on research, the exploitation, oppression, and disenfranchisement she refers to have been analogous across social contexts, including governmental, judicial, and educational institutions. The history and outcomes of Western contact are real and present as I write this chapter, and they inform who I am as a member of this community and my work as a practitioner. I suspect that some may counter by arguing that such extreme conditions no longer occur, or that what happens in our classrooms and centers does not align with such violence. I, however, work with many Indigenous students as well as students from other marginalized groups who can recount experiences when their language practices, ethnicity, or other cultural identifiers have resulted in their being marked as inferior, denied access, or otherwise disenfranchised in the academy. Their experiences are manifestations of the “Disclaimer” detailed in McDougall’s poem that points not only to the consequences for those directly impacted by these scientific undertakings but also to the ongoing intergenerational trauma it causes. A March 3, 2020, Star Advertiser (Hawaiʻi’s main newspaper) article, “After over a Century in England, 20 Native Hawaiian Skulls Return Home to Hawaii” [sic], is but one more example of how the trauma of being objectified for science to satisfy colonial curiosity continues to be leveraged. The article begins by explaining an all too familiar scenario: “Human remains taken from Hawaii in the name of science have been returned to the islands after more than a century in a museum in England” (Hurley, 2020). It is this sociohistorical context that this chapter responds to, as I believe enacting a critical collaborative practice can engender awareness of and provide strategies to counter hegemonic and oppressive constructs both in and out of the academy.

In general, the premise that collaboration counters institutionalized hegemonies is not new. Indeed, early efforts to theorize collaboration increasingly foregrounded subverting hierarchical structures in the academy. Responding to the “social turn” in writing studies that began in the 1980s, scholars such as Kenneth Bruffee (1984), John Trimbur (1989), and Andrea Lunsford & Lisa Ede (1992) shaped robust conversations focused on understanding the intellectual and ethical potential of collaboration. It is much more challenging, however, to find comparable works authored over the last two decades. Not only does it seem that treatments of collaboration have lost the rigor of these earlier discussions, this absence of theoretical grounding or interrogation of techniques for practice has left us ill-equipped to deal with the changing dynamics of our classrooms and in our research. For writing center practitioners specifically, while we have become more and more informed about the inherent hierarchical contingencies in our spheres of practice, our efforts to identify best practices to meet the demands of this work have not included rethinking how we understand and perform collaboration, its potential, and limitations. Thus, while collaboration has remained a prominent theme in our work, interrogation of what exactly makes an act collaborative, or the degree to which collaboration is attained, has waned. We use the word all the time, and I suspect in most cases we are enacting it in some form, but just what that form is, how it attends to the goals of a collaborative practice, and how those goals change across contexts remain largely under-discussed.

Since first contemplating writing this chapter, I have often thought of a passage by Mary Louise Pratt (2008) on reciprocity: “Reciprocity has always been capitalism’s ideology of itself….[reciprocity] is one of the stories it tells itself about itself. The difference between equal and unequal exchange is suppressed” (p. 84). The element of Pratt’s argument that resonates with my purposes here is the propensity by any group to claim a positive attribute such as reciprocity without interrogating the extent to which actions designed to enact reciprocity are truly reciprocal for those on the other side of the interaction. I have become increasingly concerned that the same argument can be applied to collaboration. To say that “collaboration” is common in our work is an understatement; it is often featured in book and article titles, and in conference themes and presentations. In writing center studies, collaboration is the concept at the very foundation of our practice. While I do not think that these widespread applications are problematic per se, the lack of explanation about what is meant by the word when it is invoked could be. The importance of collaboration to so much of our work demands that we constantly revisit how we engage with such a significant concept so we can better understand how and the extent to which collaboration is achieved in any particular interaction. Simply put, there seems to be a propensity in the scholarship to simply make claims of collaboration rather than theoretically ground or explicate our instances of collaboration and the limitations of a collaborative act.

The basic goals of this chapter are to (1) articulate a theory of collaboration guided by ethical approaches and strategies that can be applied across our sites of practice, whether teaching, service, or research; and (2) promote an understanding that collaboration occurs on a continuum, and, as responsible scholars and practitioners, we should be cognizant of where our discrete acts of collaboration lie on that continuum. I will begin by mapping several dominant treatments of collaboration from writing studies scholars, noting how they represent evolving efforts to acknowledge, then question, and finally contest the hierarchical structures in our institutions. I then argue that to meet the demands of our increasingly diverse sites of practice, and to attend to the value we place on access, equity, and inclusivity, we can learn from Indigenous, specifically Kanaka Maoli, approaches and practices. I look to these approaches and practices as they embody lifeways that support holistic manifestations of collaboration that extend beyond discreet interactions or a focus only on individuals. They can work to remind practitioners of the importance of understanding our interactions as taking place in a larger web of concerns and interests that include the places we occupy. This expansive understanding of the reach of our actions can guide our practices to better attend to power dynamics as well as varying concerns and experiences, and also highlights the need for us to acknowledge the impact of our work outside of academia. As histories of privileging and marginalization are increasingly laid bare in public discourse, to more fully attain our values of supporting diversity and inclusion, we need theories that complicate the normed assumptions about who our colleagues and students are and their lived realities, and push us to address the varied material conditions we all negotiate.

In many ways, the very concept of collaboration—co-laboring to attain an agreed-upon goal—does not naturally fit in the paradigm of traditional Western institutions and society. As many Euro-Western societies are built on the privileging of individualism, collaboration is arguably something better learned from communal societies. For most Indigenous peoples, collaborative practices are integral in everyday interactions—their nations and communities are built on relationships defined by collaboration, with practices and ways of interacting less learned than intrinsic to one’s state of being. Simply put, we can learn a lot from what Indigenous people have achieved over years of living in collaborative societies that work in conjunction with the environment as well as with each other. Their understandings of how such work should be performed and the expected results precede Western constructs designed to achieve similar outcomes. Moreover, as Indigenous scholars have had to respond to the abuses of Western research that serves ongoing settler colonialism, a significant body of Indigenous studies scholarship has articulated decolonial strategies that address institutionalized power structures and facilitate agency among research participants, and notably many of these practices foreground collaboration and reciprocity. I am not suggesting that all of our contacts in our academic contexts mirror the violence to which these treatments respond; however, such practices can provide a framework for dealing with inequities our students negotiate and mediate hierarchical structures reproduced within the academy.

The great irony of this chapter is that I am writing it alone. I have spent many hours contemplating how to construct an ethos worthy of the discussion I intend to put forth about collaboration that balances the contradiction of my solitary authorship. Many scholars before me have challenged the notion of whether authors ever really write alone. After all, I am reading and responding to the scholarship on collaboration across interdisciplinary conversations as I write. I have also had many discussions about this chapter with colleagues and practitioners working in other disciplines and at d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Figure
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Practitioner Inquiry and Empirical Research in the Writing Center
• 1 What Indigenous Practices Can Teach Us about Collaboration
• 2 Practitioner Inquiry: A Model for Research and Practice in the Writing Center
• 3 A Practitioner’s Inquiry into Tutor Professionalization vis-à-vis Collaboration
• 4 Translingual Practices vs. Academic Discourse: Writing Center Consultants Weigh in on Supporting Writers’ Multiliteracy Repertoires
• Epilogue: A Practitioner’s Final Thoughts
• Index