In Krista Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening Theory: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, she discusses something called a “dysfunctional silence” which centers around the idea that a silence (of voices in different contexts) is no longer “merely the absence of speaking voice(s); it is also the absence of hearing ears” (85). “Silence” or the absence of voices is something that’s been brought up a lot in 501 this quarter, but it’s also something I think about in my classroom. It is especially important for me to think about when looking at the role that “difference” plays in my teaching. The reason this is relevant is because if we don’t see both the commonalities and differences in identity (usually through the means of looking at language, but can be more versatile), then we are creating a “dysfunctional silence” and shutting down room for further exploration and conversation, as well as shutting down the room for a diversity of identities with different intersections.

My classroom is a room of individuals and the biggest commonality that we have is our context—students of English, in BH 221, at WWU. Our life-vendiagram converges here. This space is liminal, like many spaces, and that’s part of what gives it value. And what makes a classroom special is the difference, and I think it’s silly to ignore it. I think that’s why I value participatory hospitality so much. It seems to celebrate the incorporation of commonalities and differences. These aspects of identity are constantly appearing in my classroom, and I want to embrace them and support my students in expressing them. Each time I sit down it seems like they’re interested in something that ties back to the idea of identity and how it impacts people as they act as audiences.

Difference is valuable to think about and recognize, but it’s damaging if you make it an isolating experience. So it’s all about navigating that fine line between the two worlds and think critically about how it is and is not present in our classrooms… or at least for me in my classroom.

Of course I’m aware of the difference in my classroom and the difference between me and my students. I am supposed to know a lot about this one topic, and they hopefully don’t know that yet. I’ve been in school longer than them and am older than almost all of them. My in-class persona and performance isn’t based off of these little facts—because if that’s what I based everything off of, I would be feeling a hell of a lot of imposter syndrome. Instead, I think the biggest difference between my students and myself is the feeling I carry into the classroom (which sounds obscure).

Because I had been a key player in my former Writing Center, I was asked (very politely) if I could help out with a couple of things after I graduated. Sweet, I thought to myself. I don’t have enough time left in Bozeman to get a job and I need money to make it to the beginning of the school year. The duties I was asked to help with were simple enough—help incorporate new tutors into how to tutor an asynchronous online studio because I was now the last remaining person who had facilitated one, help facilitate one until I left town on my graduation road trip, and lastly facilitating a writing studio for my mentor’s “Intro to Writing Studies” summer class.

Michelle (my mentor) had texted me about 30 minutes before she wanted my help one day. I was sitting in my very messy, half-packed apartment rewatching Gilmore Girls and refusing to be productive when she asked me what I was doing. I told her I was packing and she told me that if I couldn’t come it would be fine, but that she’d love it if I could come facilitate a studio for her class. Writing center work was something I was too passionate about to pass up, so I trudged to campus in the rain and sat at the front of her classroom until she finished her introduction.

Before that day, I’d always just been a peer tutor. We emphasized the importance of our peer tutoring system, as it was a legacy we’d been gifted from years of hard work getting it to become a peer tutoring program rather than a professional tutoring program. I took my students down the hall to the WC, plopped down on our comfy orange couches and did the thing that was expected of me. And though I had done it hundreds of times before, this time was different. It was as if this invisible switch was flipped in some cubicle of my identity as I went from undergraduate to not. From peer… to not. And even though I’d taken that class from their instructor, and I knew how to navigate the English department they were just entering, I no longer belonged to them, and I no longer could claim that as part of my tutor identification—an identification that I’d mourned over a few weeks prior when coming to terms with never being a writing tutor in that capacity again.

It brought my back to helping with new tutor development when we had two new graduate tutors joining us. Our peer tutoring program focused a lot on readings that dealt with peer tutor authority, but as a writing center funded for undergraduates, it was strange for me to think that they didn’t identify as peers of their writers, but I get that now.

The big difference between my students and myself, is all in my mind. I’m not afraid of the authority I have because it’s something I’m allowed to have right now. Sometimes I’ll bring it back to our similarities in class, but I like to keep them distant from most of my identifications. I share things about myself every so often, but there is a lot they don’t need to know about me. I’m sometimes pointedly ambiguous with my language when talking about myself in class because I don’t need them to know a lot of things about me. I talk about my passions in school and learning. I talk about my experiences as a writer. I talk about the experiences and identifications that I think could help a conversation we’re having.

I try to sprinkle in the ways I’m similar to them like I’m using salt on a dish. And I’m willing to be more liberal with what I share the longer we know each other, but I’m always going to pull it back out to the bigger differences we have so that I can more easily retain my control in the classroom.