1 The Writing Center is Not a Place

Pomona College 

Perhaps the most important thing we learned during the full year of keeping a remote writing center open is that “center” doesn’t mean, and has maybe never meant, exactly what we thought it did. Center, the year 2020 taught us, means something more like the cluster of values and commitments we orbit, or a nerve center, or a center of gravity. Or sometimes, a heart.

Losing our physical space from March 2020 to January 2022 was a little like catapulting a structure we’d built on solid ground into the air and hoping that it wouldn’t in liftoff suddenly disintegrate, fly apart. And it didn’t. In many ways, it became stronger—paradoxically, more solid. Once we no longer had the physical space of our writing center to rely on as proxy for community, we needed suddenly to focus, to redouble our efforts to secure the bonds we have with each other, to sharpen our sense of common purpose, commitment, and the full reach of our work with the students who had also lost their academic, social, and economic foundations.  And we needed to do it at a moment when the coordinates by which we understood centeredness, comfort, human interaction, connection, and community itself were shifting beyond recognition. We were not, to put a finer point on it, only losing the candy bowl and the tea pot.

I want to underscore this last point. Others have written eloquently about the sometimes-deceptive physical space of the writing center. Consider Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s account of how we use the physical space to communicate a sense of welcome that might only be superficial:

We use the physical space to communicate comfort, welcoming, and openness, but that can mean we come to lean on those visual, spatial, and haptic cues. We let the space of the writing center be the space of the writing center. And then when we lost the former, we needed urgently to rebuild the latter.  But to rebuild the latter meant returning to something other than our physical foundations. It meant asking, what does it mean to do this work right now?

We could name many things we did to keep the center open and functional: we expanded our hours so that students across different time zones could participate; we never closed, even during campus eviction, so that students could experience continuity across at least one campus service. In the fall of 2020 when it became clear the whole year would be remote, we held a series of trainings and orientations about Zoom presence, setting boundaries in virtual spaces, wellness and anxiety, working together in Google documents, “chat” etiquette and potential, and other concerns as they cropped up. None of these are spectacular. What we did that changed things for us, and changed our writing center permanently, is use the moment of fracture to redefine for ourselves, and for the college as a whole, what communication–and support for that communication–look like on a college campus.

We want to talk about this redefinition in three key ways and to emphasize that while we did this in the specific space of Pomona College, we see the moves we made as replicable, scalable, and available to all of our colleagues at other institutions. These relationships with other institutions have also become even more important as we moved into virtual space. Uprooted from the affordances and limitations of our physical, geographical, and even financial space, we were differently able to recognize the vital network of collaboration between communication nerve centers on campuses across the country, to hear the echoes of our voices talking about communication, community, and connection coming from places that no longer seemed so distant.  What’s more, and we think this is something we can make more visible in all writing centers across the country, we came to see where a communication center—writing, speaking, visual—is a site, or nerve cluster, in which faculty, staff, and students from one institution, or many, come together to engage in mutual care work. No longer peripheral or ancillary, we came to see our work as what we might call instead pituitary: helping the various systems into which we release our labor talk to each other. Put another way, because our work is to monitor, consider, and support the forms of communication in which the disciplines transact their work, and by which the students learn and engage, and with which we build, sustain, and practice community, the communication breakdowns of the pandemic set that work in stark relief for us. It clarified both our existing purpose and the rebuilding work we might help the college do going forward.

This is not a new idea, that writing is collaborative; it wasn’t new even when Kenneth Bruffee wrote his groundbreaking essay on “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’” in 1984. Bruffee’s point, that collaboration re-externalizes the “internalized conversation” we’ve learned from the basic acts of communication by which we develop our ability to write and speak, played out in real time during the pandemic (640). Students in near-total isolation came to their writing to say something to an audience they needed to imagine, and, in doing so, managed to, as Bruffee puts it, “create referential connections between symbolic structures and reality,” where perhaps those seemed even more tenuous, and “by doing so maintain[ed] community growth and coherence” (650).

This runs like a leitmotif through the literature on writing centers: when we write we “join a conversation,” says Gerald Graff (230). In Writing Communities, Steve Parks makes the more expansive point about the way writing can form the connective tissues of the worlds around us: our communities, our families, our multiple identities. Further examples are legion, but here we’re interested in a discovery that is something more like the one Maggie Nelson makes over the course of The Argonauts. Sometimes words are enough, she ventures, because hollowed out and insufficient though they may be, we have them. What would it mean, she asks, “to punish what can be said for what, by definition, it cannot be?” (3). What we do have is what can be said: “words are good enough” (3). She ends with an image of the “songs of care” we all have for each other, where perhaps that song—the “singing line” that connects all of us, as Teju Cole puts it—is sometimes all we have (324).

We saw something of that more visceral need to be heard, cared for, sung to in the virtual year of the pandemic, when students would make appointments with the writing center simply to have their words be heard by someone else. It isn’t an easy thing to trace, the singing line, but if you look at the logs of our WC ONLINE records you begin to see it: students making appointments “just to talk,” or because “they didn’t know how else to make friends,” or because they’d been “reading their drafts alone in their rooms.” The premise here is not, or is only very thinly, that they wanted to “work on their writing,” develop a professional community, or join a disciplinary conversation. Mostly, they wanted to make a connection, and words, for that purpose, were good enough.

Of course, this put pressure on our Writing and Speaking Partners, as they are called in our center, who were themselves alone in their rooms, or not alone—caring for a mother in chemotherapy, sharing a bedroom with younger siblings in Zoom elementary school, studying in the kitchen or on the fire escape, ill themselves—and being called on to listen and read in a situation with suddenly much higher stakes. People experienced the pandemic unevenly, we know. Less easy to express is the way people experienced (and continue to experience) what Jill Stauffer calls the “ethical loneliness” of “being abandoned by humanity or by those who have power over one’s life’s possibilities” in wildly different ways and degrees (9).

This recognition showed us in no uncertain ways why we need to think more about the wellness of our own student staff– physical and mental, intellectual and emotional–  because our student consultants are sometimes holding only a thin tissue of words as barrier against an ethical loneliness, the dimensions of which for any individual person they can barely fathom. And hasn’t it always been a little like this? Shouldn’t we address this? “As we consider if wellness and self-care interventions are ‘enough,’” write Genie Giaimo and Yanar Hashlamon, “we must consider the material conditions under which we labor, the ways in which we support marginalized workers, and the ways we ethically incorporate wellness and self-care into writing centers” (1).  Perhaps we stayed busy in 2020 because our students learned that even the thinnest tissue of words can help make suffering visible, audible, and thus open to response, connection. Perhaps even saying out loud to our students, “this is secondary trauma, this is compassion fatigue” helped, affirmed the things they were feeling, and de-pathologized the exhaustion. And yet, words are not good enough.

It happened that in August 2019 we’d hired nine students to pilot a new Speaking Partner program, students trained specifically to offer consultations in oral communication. The Speaking Partner program had been up and running for only seven months, the new Speaking Partners only freshly trained and trying out their new skills when campus was evacuated. But by the summer of 2020, it was clear that this new program would be fundamental to our remote consultations and that the Speaking Partners would be able to help us do work which would have been impossible before we started theorizing the need for oral communication support in our center.

Fig. 3. Pomona CSWIM tutors describe their work as speaking partners.

Beyond supporting public presentations and interview skills, the Speaking Partner program is designed to problematize, theorize, and support class discussion on a discussion-intensive small liberal arts campus (an epistemological problem not unique to SLACs, but also relevant in discussion sections and small seminars at R1 institutions), where “class participation” is a major part of explicit curricular expectations, and being good at talking in a certain way and for certain reasons is a major part of the “hidden curriculum.” This has been enormously important for our students. While support for speaking is the remit of many writing centers, we want to stress that the explicit move to helping students practice class discussion, raising their hands, speaking up in class, asking questions, writing in the Zoom chat, or figuring out how and when to enter the stream of conversation has been the most important feature of our new program and has seeded other discussions about our normative expectations for the classroom on campus.

In 2019, this seemed important in and of itself, and we designed a training program to help our new Speaking Partners work with students in preparing to ask questions in class, track discussion, shift the flow of a conversation, disagree, and find ways to speak out loud in classes with explicit participation grades, even when the class protocols tacitly assumed a degree of neurotypicality and monolingualism that left many participants excluded or disadvantaged. Rather than working toward some impossible and homogenous “neurotypical” classroom, our Speaking Partners work with students to help them get the most out of a class discussion on their own terms. While the details of this work extend beyond the scope of this brief essay, we can say here that they have as much to do with listening as with speaking, with recognizing and understanding nuanced and diverse modes of participation, effort, and commitment. When Covid-19 hit, and we needed to move rapidly to remote learning, the work of the Speaking Partners in the Writing Center became urgent in new and different ways (Zoom, for example, posed challenges for class discussion; distance posed challenges for interpersonal dialogue), and we responded accordingly. Multimodality became the center of our practice, not simply something we wanted to begin theorizing and considering. The program director began working with her colleagues to think about how a multimodal peer support center, one already built around the care work of listening, might best collaborate with faculty and students to ease the transition to remote learning and help students—especially first-year students—find ways to navigate these new rhetorical situations.

We developed a now-annual ad hoc seminar on oral communication for our cohort of Speaking Partners and any interested Writing Partners. Our goal in creating this annual Seminar on Oral Communication was to create a sustainable model in which Speaking Partners (and other interested Writing and Image Partners) learn about oral communication from different perspectives and angles, collaborate on ways to work with and support students in oral communication, and learn from faculty members across the disciplines. These Speaking Partners are then prepared to bring this knowledge and training back to their own consultations with students. In addition, we now have a senior Head Speaking Partner and a junior Head Speaking Partner; part of their training is to learn how to facilitate the Seminar on Oral Communication so that we build sustainability, institutional memory, and a sense of ownership into the program. Spring 2022 marked the first semester we had a student–one of the original nine students hired in August 2019–run one of these seminars.

The seminars worked (and continue to work) as follows: every Friday, a different faculty member from a different discipline gave a seminar session on oral communication in their own field as it might be related to challenges arising from remote learning, class discussion, and speaking and listening in the pandemic. Faculty members then participated in the discussion and worked with the students to think about the implications of these different disciplinary engagements with oral communication for our new center. Seminars ran from a Theater professor teaching us how to be present in body and in voice on Zoom, to a visual anthropologist considering how to encourage a diverse body of interlocutors to speak: she and her co-filmmaker had the Armenian people with whom they worked in Lebanon draw maps as they were answering questions, letting their pens annotate and fill in what they couldn’t express in response to questions. We hosted a seminar on education and the history of Black oratory in different cultures, a presentation about helping students ask difficult questions in class, and a seminar on inflection, register, and gender bias in speech. Students in the seminars have space to talk about challenges they’re experiencing in their consultations, to ask the questions they bring to us from what they’re learning and doing in their day-to-day appointments, and to suggest new topics for research, outreach and community connection, and discussion.

This intensive collaboration meant that our colleagues found themselves in the position of helping to build our program, which made them instant stakeholders and community members. In turn, they asked for those students to be embedded in their courses,  help facilitate Zoom discussions, meet with students one on one, build syllabi, and assess the inclusiveness of their virtual classrooms. This collaboration, in turn, revealed our shared concerns around speaking and listening—concerns that run deeper than anything immediate to a virtual classroom or Zoom room. While we have not yet done a comprehensive self-study on this new program, early data from 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 reveal a more than 50% increase in faculty requests for Speaking Partners to be attached with (or, more familiarly to some, embedded in their courses) and a 35% increase in Speaking Partner appointments. …more than 50% increase in faculty requests for Speaking Partners… and a 35% increase in Speaking Partner appointments

Central to our Speaking Partner program is a mission we see as common to all writing and communication centers in ways not always apparent (or legible to administrators): not speaking, but listening. During the year of remote learning, the trappings of class discussion, participation grades, and formal oral performance fell away and showed us that we need to teach, to learn, and to support both speaking and listening. We saw clearly how listening—now so much harder—perhaps needed far more support than speaking. How can I learn from and with you if I can’t easily talk to you, we heard our students and colleagues asking—and we asked ourselves.  Is typing the same as talking? What gets lost in the awkward pauses of Zoom class discussions? When we spent those 15 minutes in that breakout room “together” were we really together in a meaningful sense?  What was real about it was the talking and listening that happened. We saw each other; we heard each other. Our ideas shaped each other’s thinking; our questions took each of us in new directions. This mutuality is not dependent on physical proximity.

But the loneliness we feel when the Zoom call ends and we’re alone with our laptops in our childhood bedrooms is real. Listening suddenly became not only something we do as a matter of course in our learning, but something we needed to draw students’ attention to, something we needed to model—something we needed to promise still existed. What we learned above all else about our writing center is that it represented the promise that someone was there to listen.

And finally, the move to remote learning underscored the importance of visual modalities in our work. When we reopened in Spring 2022, we opened as the Center for Speaking, Writing, and the Image (CSWIM), supporting fully multimodal rhetoric, accounting for the image-saturated way we read, the “talk-like” way we write, and the things for which there are no words. Zoom was a weird proving-ground for this, but it was a proving-ground nonetheless. Suddenly the little-boxed classroom was a visual image the students needed to read differently than their 3D spaces. Our “Image Partner” program–always part of our restructuring plan, but incipient before the pandemic hit–took on new urgency and resonance when we moved to Zoom.

But why haven’t we always been reading images in our writing centers (some have—we have not)? The answer, as Birgit Brander Rasmussen puts it, is a long and violent history of settler colonialism that determined not only the fate of bodies and lands, but also languages and rhetorics:

What does this have to do with our writing center during the pandemic? Nothing, and everything: moving to a virtual environment, where students both enjoyed the chat and seemed to see the emoji-potential of that chat as “cheating” (as if the cute laugh-cry face is any less complex than the words it attempts to shorthand), or merely having a laugh, and where we were always looking and reading and speaking all at the same time, made this history of rhetorical subordination something we simply couldn’t ignore. The admission that using emojis felt like getting away with something, or cheating, opened up a rich and ongoing discussion about colonial histories of writing that cast some semasiographic (writing with symbols not based on spoken language) and pictographic writing systems as proto-writing^[1]. In so doing, these histories build a tendentious progress narrative into linguistic history, and aspects of that narrative live in academic writing instruction and assessment. While emojis are not and cannot be understood as equivalent to indigenous writing systems, the anxiety students feel about using non-alphabetic language to convey ideas in academic settings emerges at least in part from this aspect of the history of language subordination. There was never “just writing” in acts of communication; using the fully integrated “chat” function in Zoom feels a little like at once the frightening isolation and possible erosion of communicative richness of the future and the multiliterate, rhetorically saturated history of human connection.

Much time has passed since we first submitted our proposal to the editors of this collection to write about the imagined community of the writing center, the space we form by virtue of our bonds with each other, our shared commitments, and our technological affordances. One of the things the passage of time allows us to see is how what we’ve learned might be of help to others: while Pomona College, a small residential liberal arts college in Southern California, has its own character, what we’ve learned and done extends beyond the local. Above all else, I think what we’ve learned is that when you strip away the physical space of a writing center, you have the opportunity to see more clearly the network in which it exists and to strengthen the intellectual and emotional collaborations on which it was built.

Throughout his examination of language, expression, and colonial dispossession, Poetics of Relation, his restorative jeremiad for poetry, movement, and relation, Édouard Glissant enjoins us again and again to see that “expanse…leap and variance,” “the knowledge in motion of beings,” the “open circle” make possible a new poetics of relation, new forms of communication that are not hierarchical but conterminous, touching, but not colonizing, relational, but not binary. Our program, compelled to leap by Covid, opened its circle even wider, reconsidered its expanse, turned toward the poetics not of page, or of place, but of relation.

In leaving behind the physical space and strengthening our network by bringing into our ambit images and oral culture, listening and reading, by bringing in our colleagues from other disciplines, staff members with stories to tell, poetry and aimless conversation, slow reading and silence, we created a space where we could rethink the nature of communication in the absence of physical presence, including the history-laden colonial walls of our own institution. Practically speaking, this meant a few things, from the least to perhaps most complex:

* * *

All that we did, we continue to do, and all of what we learned remains true, but we can see other things as true now, also. There are things about the physical space we do need, things we couldn’t see so clearly before and value all the more for not having noticed the first time around (if we could call the world before Covid-19 such a thing). We can be alone together in our virtual spaces for many things, but as Roland Barthes writes so beautifully in How to Live Together, we might find that we need each other as night falls: being together, he writes, is “perhaps simply a way of confronting the sadness of the night together”; “the community,” he muses, “prepares to brave the night” (132).

The physical space represents a place where we can find each other when everything feels scattered and far flung, and that has real value. Our space is modest, but we now know we can’t underestimate the value of being able to point to a space down a path, or in a hallway, or on a map, where a student can go and encounter other humans ready and willing to help, to talk, to listen. Re-encountering, at the end of a semester in which students were on campus but our center stayed virtual for safety issues, Stephen North’s evocation of the writing center as a “the castoff, windowless classroom (or in some cases, literally closet), the battered desks, the old textbooks, a phone (maybe),” we find we read it differently (437). Yes, a marginalized, under-funded space in many cases (and perhaps an embattled space everywhere, if the existence of “space committees” on the campuses at which we have worked are any indication), but still a place we can point to and say there. Someone is there who will listen to you. 

The someone matters, we know. The listening matters the most. But now we want to add that the there matters a little, also. Something, in this uncertain time, is still there.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. How to Live Together. Translated by Kate Briggs, Columbia UP, 2012.

Bruffee, Kenneth. “Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind.” College English, vol. 46, no. 7, 1984, pp. 635-652, https://doi.org/10.2307/376924.

Cole, Teju. Blind Spot. Penguin Random House, 2017.

Giaimo, Genie, and Yousif Hashlamon. “Guest Editor’s Note.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 44, no. 5-6, p. 1, https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/wln/v44/44.5-6.pdf.

Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation.Translated by Betsy Wing, U of Michigan P, 1990.

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. Norton & Co, 2021.

Grutsch McKinney, Jackie. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers. Utah State UP, 2013.

Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf P, 2015.

North, Stephen. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English, vol. 46, no. 5, 1984, pp. 433-446, https://doi.org/10.2307/377047.

Parks, Steve. Writing Communities: A Text with Readings. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.

Rasmussen, B.B. Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature. Duke UP, 2012.

Stauffer, Jill. Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard. Columbia UP, 2015.