Suhr-Sytsma, Mandy. “Theory In/To Practice: Addressing the Everyday Language of Oppression in the Writing Center.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, 2011, Web.

Summary

The focus of this article is to bring attention to the ways that language in the day-to-day work of writing centers can be oppressive and try to give those who work in writing centers tools for combating oppressive language. The article aims to provide other writing centers an “in” to talking about or having a dialogue surrounding language oppression and resistance. It tries to root itself not only in writing center theory but also in the first-hand experience of tutors and members of a writing center. The research was completed using focus groups created collaborative lists of what makes oppressive language and what challenges it. The article concludes by encouraging a tutor-centric approach to the continued discussion of and discussion surrounding oppressive language as it appears in the writing center.

Quotations

“How can tutors better identify and challenge the everyday, often subtle, language of oppression in their own discourse and in that of other tutors and writers in writing centers” (14)?

 

“By ‘oppression’ we refer to systemic inequalities and discrimination based on sites of difference such as race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, sexuality, and/or (dis)-ability. We define ‘everyday language’ not as informal language, but rather as common language, the sort of speech and text that we see every day on college and high school campuses. The ‘everyday language of oppression’ is subtle as well as ubiquitous. Therefore, it often goes unnoticed, not being recognized as oppressive at all and/or not receiving as much attention as more extreme forms of oppressive language such as threats or hate speech do” (15).

 

“We then prompted a brief conversation about aspects of the tutors’ identities, cultures, or experiences that influenced their perspectives” (21).

 

(22).

 

“The tutors explained that they and their fellow students want to be polite and politically correct, and they sometimes fear that simply bringing up differences of, say, race or gender would make them come across as racist or sexist (even if they approach the matter sensitively and recognize the socially constructed and in other ways problematic nature of these categories)” (24).

 

“Even as they identified patterns of oppressive language in writing and share methods for addressing such language, the focus groups also repeatedly referenced tutors’ limits in identifying oppressive language as well as their desire to improve their strategies. Everyone who participated in the focus groups co-created knowledge that immediately influenced their practices as writers and tutors, but they all left knowing that they had much more to learn” (40).

 

“Unlike the 2008 staff, which was very concerned with differentiating intentionally and unintentionally oppressive language, most tutors on the 2010 staff emphasized the effects of oppressive language regardless of writers’ intentions. Many of these tutors therefore challenged one another to avoid making language ‘sound nicer’ without addressing the underlying assumptions that make it oppressive (whether those assumptions are the writer’s own or not)” (42).

Reflections

When thinking about how this article relates to the work we do in the classroom, I was drawn to it because of its focus on language and the way that most “pyramids of violence” you see drawn out have language being the base of the pyramid that all other violent acts build off of. It is something I’ve felt very aware of as a survivor’s advocate (and peer educator in adjunct to this role), a tutor, and now again as a teacher who tries to be deliberate with the language I use in the classroom. For me, this centers around trying (and sometimes failing) to be conscious of the language that I’m using in the classroom that is less gender-neutral or is less inclusive. As “simple” as it is, this even connects to the ways that other students in the program used the “Current WWU English Grad Students” page to draw specific attention to trying to incorporate more gender-neutral language and more language that is inclusive or aware of neurodiversity.

 

Suhr-Sytsma’s article specifically speaks to how oppressive language happens racially—based of previous big-named writing center scholarship that centers race when discussing identity politics and the day-to-day life of writing center work including Harry Denny’s Facing the Center and Geller et al.’s The Everyday Writing Center. Though the article centralizes around race, the ideas it proposes are not exclusive to only that set of marginalized identifications within the university system. Further analysis or critical thinking could apply these ideas to the other identifications examined in Facing the Center.

 

An interesting consideration of using this article is how it shows its age because of its use of “he or she” grammar that was acceptable seven years ago but in the context of an article talking specifically about the oppressive nature of language would be frowned upon using anything except for singular “they” today—this note is not necessarily content-reflective, but it is something to pay attention to if moving forward with using this as evidence for what it is arguing.

 

What’s particularly interesting to me in this article is the use and focus on tutor identities. I think that identity is attached very strongly to everything I do and am—a student, a teacher, a former tutor, a former boxing instructor, a writer—and that it’s something I’d like to focus on and bring up more specifically while thinking about teaching. I’d like to see what happens to a class when they’ve been asked to explore their identities and think critically about how identity relates to audience and the idea of a “rhetor” or writer. This is specifically interesting to me in terms of whether or not a student identifies as a writer. I’ve experienced this on a large scale as a student, but I wonder how it could work on a small scale in a FYC class.

 

While reading through the things that seemed limiting to the tutors, I’m brought back to thinking about Krista Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening theory. This article aligns fairly nicely with the way that she discusses the moves that create a “dysfunctional silence.” For me this is especially important to how I think about oppression and the idea of “silence” in a community or in a writing center—something that (if I took the time to do) could probably also be transferred into my classroom. A lot of the work I see this article doing is getting at similar things to what Ratcliffe is speaking to in her book and trying to come up with ways (if not simply an awareness) to not erase identity in writing center appointments or—in my case now—in the classroom. And if we’re going to think about identity in the classroom or in writing center appointments, I think we also need to think about the construction of spaces as brave and safe.

 

What is essential for the connection to Ratcliffe’s theory and the construction of space as brave/safe is the long lists that were co-created in the focus groups in this research and are then elaborated on. These items provide concrete theory-related (if not theory-based) examples for others to use to begin extrapolating on the issue of oppressive language in writing centers or the classroom. The article also appears to push toward the intertwined nature of theory and practice being “one-in-the-same” opposed to a dichotomy—just as R. Mark Hall touches on in the introduction to his book Around the Texts of Writing Center Work: An Inquiry-Based Approach to Tutor Education (which, after taking a closer look at, references the exact CFP this article was published from).

 

The next step for these in my mind is connecting how we have a discussion about oppressive language and how we build our brave/safe space around that. I think that these are tools that can inform each other because brave/safe spaces can feel very abstract (until they aren’t) whereas the questions brought up in this article are much more concrete.