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Writing Center Journal

Abstract

A reflective, ethnographic study of a grassroots, antiracist educational workshop (The Conversation Workshops, TCW) reveals that writing center (WC) pedagogy and feminist invitational rhetoric’s (FIR) influence on TCW enables participants to recognize their own and their partners’ expertise, meaningful experiences, valuable perspectives, and their need to be listened to, accounted for, and understood. In an invitational model, particularly one based on a one-with- one, interpersonal dynamic, participants are more like collaborators than audiences, an approach that can be applied in diverse educational settings, and which reflects the WC’s model of one-with- one pedagogy. This dynamic also reveals one of TCW’s major limitations; the invitational model demands significant emotional and interpersonal labor, especially on the part of the initiator, which is only appropriate and productive in certain contexts. When combined with self-reflection, articulated positionality, and study of systems of oppression, writing centers can help facilitate antiracist community building by deploying their one-with- one pedagogical practices to call in accomplices beyond the writing center.

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