In light of disciplinary conversations and increased attention to anti-racism in writing centers, we see a disciplinary mandate for writing centers to better articulate a pedagogy for racial justice that informs our everyday work, including but not limited to tutoring practice. This mandate, we believe, involves asking: How do we make actionable our commitment to racial justice when working with writers one-with-one? What interactional stances and pedagogical moves enact a pedagogy of anti-racism in writing centers? How do we prepare ourselves to enact this pedagogy? Our answers to these questions center around (1) articulating and frequently re-articulating our commitments to racial and social justice and (2) making these commitments actionable through both reflective self-work and action-oriented work-with-others, as we have written in the related article “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable.” This work leads us to argue that a pedagogy of anti-racism must be more than a statement that we abhor racial injustice. Rather, this pedagogy must be multi-dimensional and include a positive and actionable articulation of the “ought to be” that we are aiming toward.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/beth_godbee/8/
Published version. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2012): 1-8. © 2012 University of Texas at Austin Undergraduate Writing Center. Permalink. Used with permission.