I WAYWARD STORIES: a RHETORIC of COMMUNITY in WRITING
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WAYWARD STORIES: A RHETORIC OF COMMUNITY IN WRITING CENTER ADMINISTRATION Kelin Hull Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the Department of English, Indiana University July 2019 i Accepted by the Graduate Faculty of Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Master's Thesis Committee ______________________________________ Marilee Brooks-Gillies, PhD, Chair ______________________________________ André Buchenot, PhD ______________________________________ Sarah Layden, MFA ii © 2019 Kelin Hull iii DEDICATION I’d like to dedicate this thesis to my writing center community. These stories highlight some moments in our community that may have felt uncomfortable or even terrible. It may seem strange, then, to dedicate this project to all of you. Yet, as this project hopefully will both show and tell, these stories are the work of community. They explicate a group of people fighting to stay together within the constraints of something they all care about. These stories would not be possible without you all. I am grateful that I get to be a leader in this community. May these stories help me understand my work so that I can lead in meaningful ways. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I’d like to thank my husband and children for continually being patient and loving and supportive in so many ways throughout this journey. I want to thank my husband, especially, for letting me make him a part of this journey. To my thesis director, Marilee, I can’t express in words what our relationship has come to mean to me. You are my friend and partner in this crazy writing center life, and I look forward to more years of learning and growing with you. v Kelin Hull WAYWARD STORIES: A RHETORIC OF COMMUNITY IN WRITING CENTER ADMINISTRATION Six weeks in to my position as assistant director of the writing center and suddenly I was confronted by a cluster bombing of issues and concerns – microaggressions, depression, confusion, suspicion – each one separate but related, and threatening to tear a new hole in the already fragile foundation of community in my writing center. How do we feel, what do we do, how does a community survive when the story we’re experiencing isn’t the story we want or expected - when it is, in a word, terrible? After McKinney’s Peripheral Visions, we know our labor and our centers do not look, act, and feel cozy, iconoclastic, or focused on one-on-one tutoring all of the time. And yet, if we are going to continue to move beyond the grand narrative, a deep and meaningful understanding of community is essential. When we put our story in relation to our communities, then our story becomes just one thread in a much more complex tapestry. We cannot separate one person’s story from the story of the writing center. Each person, each story, is a stitch in the rhetorical fabric of community. Using critically reflexive stories to change and shape practice, this thesis highlights the grand narrative of community and shows how that narrative serves to stymie community growth. These stories resist boundaries. They are wayward. They are counter to the narratives around which we construct our lives. When we share stories and write together, we begin to understand the threads we’re all weaving into the tapestry – our community, stitched together through shared practice; a process that will never end, as each person comes and goes. The community will never be resolved, and in the ambiguity of boundlessness, vi comes a new way of seeing the world - through constellations and the dwelling in inbetween. Marilee Brooks-Gillies, PhD, Chair vii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Pictures ................................................................................................................... ix List of Abbreviations ...........................................................................................................x Introduction On Coming to Cultural Rhetorics ...................................................................................1 On the Writing Center .....................................................................................................6 They Need to Deal with Their Own Damn Problems ...................................................12 On Story and Story-telling ..........................................................................................14 On Communities and Communities of Practice ..........................................................18 On Connection and Identity, Emotion, and Power ......................................................21 On the Things That Get in The Way ...........................................................................39 Chapter 1: The LT Revolution ...........................................................................................41 Chapter 2: The Sexism Staff Meeting ................................................................................55 Chapter 3: Weaving in Arizona .........................................................................................79 Conclusion: The Problem is not the Problem. The Problem is Your Attitude about the Problem ............................................................................................................100 Afterword: Limitations, Further Study, and the Pros and Cons of Transfer………...119 Appendices .......................................................................................................................125 Appendix A ................................................................................................................128 Appendix B ................................................................................................................137 Appendix C ................................................................................................................137 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................140 Curriculum Vitae viii LIST OF PICTURES Picture 1: Hurricane Text Message Exchange ...................................................................76 Picture 2: Weird Stuff Text Message to Me ......................................................................89 Picture 3: Weird Stuff Text Message Response ................................................................90 Picture 4: Weird Stuff Text Message to Marilee ...............................................................94 Picture 5: Weird Stuff Text Message Marilee Response ...................................................95 ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AP – advanced placement DROC – Digital Resources and Online Consulting (Committee) GSA – graduate student administrator IUPUI – Indiana-University Purdue-University Indianapolis LCD – Language and Cultural Diversity (Committee) LT – Leadership Team RA – research assistantship R&A – Research and Assessment (Committee) TA – teaching assistantship TT – tenure-track UWC – University Writing Center WAC – Writing Across the Curriculum (Committee) WACKO – pseudo-acronym for WCOnline WCA – writing center administrator WPA – writing program administrator x Introduction On Coming to Cultural Rhetorics Many years ago, so many that I can say it was just before the dawn of the new century, I was in a high school AP English class my senior year, tasked with the assignment to discover and perform a year-long inquiry into any topic I desired. The summer before, I had spent two weeks at the Pine Ridge Reservation for the Oglala and Lakota Sioux in South Dakota learning about their history and their present. In the years leading up to that visit (what was then titled a “mission trip” but I now find that term to be problematic and will refrain from using it), I had read and devoured countless American Indian authored or inspired texts. I could not understand why my white mainstream culture had not valued American Indian culture and I wanted to know as much as I could. So, for my AP English class, I embarked on a year-long inquiry about the Sioux and Pine Ridge Reservation. I examined their socioeconomic status and the public policies and political mechanisms that governed that status. I talked about voting rights, mining rights, rights to land ownership and hunting and fishing, and lack of access to basic items like grocery stores. Alongside that scholarship in the final portfolio, I included multimodal aspects, such as photos I had taken or captured from movies, and non-traditional scholarship, such as poems I had written or found, quotes from American Indian songs and personal narratives, and my own personal narratives. I viewed my final portfolio not just as a simple examination of the oppression and continued marginalization experienced by American Indians, but my relationship to that subject. I storied my journey from a land of privilege and white people to a land of poverty where no one looked like me but welcomed me nonetheless, as they educated me on their culture and their history, telling 1 me stories about the things I wouldn’t find in my textbooks. I didn’t realize it then, but in the doing and the making of this inquiry, I was practicing cultural rhetorics. Cultural rhetorics is defined by the Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab (CRTL) as “an orientation to a set of constellating theoretical and methodological frameworks” that “engages with the material, embodied, and relational aspects of research and scholarly production” (Riley Mukavetz 109).