What I hold at the core of my beliefs about my classroom and try to bring into my classroom is that it is a place that we create together—I’m kind of pulling from the ideas of a community of practice that I was so entrenched in at my old WC. Writing center scholar, Michele Eodice, talks about the concept of “participatory hospitality” at a time when hospitality is being brought into the classroom. Participatory hospitality centers around this idea that everyone has something to offer each other and that in order for that “gift giving” to be completed, the recipient of the gift needs to accept it. I think this is especially prominent in my understanding of the classroom because I believe that the heart and center of the classroom is, in fact, my students.
Even if my students are being harder to handle or doing something other than what I want from them, I am constantly reminding myself that this system and this classroom cannot be successful if it is not reciprocal and consenting. If they do not agree to take the information/knowledge I have for them, I can’t force them to take it, just like they can’t force me to understand them outside of what they’re willing to share and gift me. When a student isn’t listening or it doesn’t seem care about how much I want them to care about the penalty points, I remind myself that even if these things are gifts I’m trying to give them that I cannot force it onto them. I have to wait for them to want to take it. This was something I really had to work on in my tutoring practice, especially when we partnered with a scholarship group and did intensive tutoring with repeat incoming freshmen students for four weeks before the semester started.
I’ve talked to my students about how I believe they need to be accountable to each other, and that if they are missing classes it doesn’t hurt me but it does hurt the learning community we’re trying to build and they’re not going to be able to benefit from the ideas of their classmates and their classmates are going to be able to benefit from their ideas either. I want them to exchange “gifts” with each other because I know they have much more to offer each other in building this community of practice than I can give them, so I’m always hoping they’ll share and build off of each other.
A new addition to this prompt was the question: “who should feel safe or vulnerable, and how?” I have a lot of feelings about this, but I’m going to try to keep this one short.
The short answer—which I can thank Mikel for making me state both short and in person— for me is: everyone should feel both things at different times.
My answer from this comes from my understanding of the construction of brave and safe spaces as examined in the context of writing centers for the first conference presentation I ever did. My research partner and I were intrigued by the idea of brave spaces after reading this article which we bought into at first, but then felt like they unintentionally ignored the necessity of a safe space in a learning environment. We focused a lot more about on the necessary interplay of brave and safe spaces in WC sessions and writing groups/studios (“studio” being termed in the same vein as Greggo and Thompson’s “third-space theory,” not in the way that the Writing Studio at WWU uses that term). Our understanding of brave and safe spaces being more closely related to the article that was published around the same time by our director Michelle Miley and a fellow tutor at the time Kaidan McNamee (who is now a second year in this program!) critiquing brave spaces being held above safe spaces using autoethnographic writing (the McNamee & Miley article is part of a special issue on brave(r) spaces in an emerging WC journal if anyone is interested in reading more about other people’s experiences and thoughts on those spaces…. or there’s an article in the graduate-student-support issue of Praxis that touches on it—even if I don’t always agree with that).
Mostly, I think I’m having a difficult time articulating more of my thoughts and opinions about this because I’ve recently spent too much time writing about it. It’s more of a conversation I’m willing to have, but it’s also one I have a pretty strong opinion about.