If I’m being honest, I don’t know what makes my students struggle when they write—not really. The only things I hear about is when they aren’t clear on instructions, but a lot of that feels like something they’re just not paying as much attention to the prompts. They want a clear-cut “answered” way of doing things, and I keep telling them that I don’t think that exists.

What I’ve seen a lot in freshmen (not necessarily this quarter, but a little bit) is that they want a more formulaic version of writing, and that’s not necessarily something that is readily available for them. Most of my students have liked project 4 more than other projects, but I don’t think any of them have really had their ideas/writing truly valued in any meaningful way, so they don’t really have a real motivation to care outside of what they’ve been conditioned to care about.

There’s seems to be more of a consensus of grades being valued over learning, which is exactly the opposite of what I feel/believe, so I just want to try to get them to think about writing a little differently (especially because I think their ideas about writing in English in the past has been so connected to reading for something that is “right” or “wrong” that it can make reading overwhelming.

I think this kinda feeds into my reading of Friere a little bit in the sense that they’ve been conditioned to feel like the only way they can learn is this banking model of education where there voices and thoughts aren’t valued that they don’t want to take ownership over the voice and value they do have. But this might just be me projecting my own experiences onto them.

Less direct to the question note: This brings me to thinking about my friend’s research in Writing Centers on marginality and mattering. She pulled from Nancy Schlossberg’s “Marginality and Mattering: Key Issues in Building Community”and what my friend’s conference research came down to (in my own interpretation of what I took out of it) was that if you’re intentional in the ways you’re welcoming someone into a space/place/community/etc. then you’ll be starting to show them their value in that space/place/community as more than just someone who is passing through. So how do I start to apply that kind of ideology in my classroom while I’m practicing participatory hospitality, and do students even notice or care? Do they need to? I think about how these issues of mattering and of interaction tie themselves to the identities within a space, within a classroom, within a writing center, and through this I’m forced to think about Harry Denny’s Facing the Center which focuses on “the transparency of identity, where bodies and affects seem to exist and perform beyond or post identity, where they seem the ‘same’ or ‘other.’ [And how Denny’s idea of] Facing the center requires an awareness that the identities at the center signify just as richly as those at the margins” (3). So even just thinking of this role of student being something that exists on the margins of a typically institution/instructor center approach to teaching (something that the banking model enforces), how do I as an instructor and an educator create a classroom where students know they matter, know they are important, and know that they are heard? And I think it applies even more to those identities that have not been welcomed into academia in very obvious ways. Marginality and mattering theory came out of 1st generation students, non-native English speaking students, and students of color being marginalized in a university in Texas. This translates into my friend’s tutoring practice as trying to make sure every student she works with feels like they matter because there is no real way to tell the moments when a student is uncomfortable of feeling marginal in their university identity. Or why it is happening.