Who We Are
The Writing Center at MSU operates with a broad vision of collaboration in the MSU community; peer-to-peer consultations with students, faculty, and the community allow us to expand ideas of literacy and composing beyond traditional models and geographic boundaries.
As Staff and Community Partners…
Writing centers have historically and contemporily been positioned as remedial spaces where writers “fix” their writing, most often grammar and language use, reinforcing white mainstream English as the only legitimate form of writing and speaking, thus stigmatizing multilingual writers. Furthermore, Michigan State University, like other land-grant institutions, was built on Indigenous lands and has participated in educational practices that have systematically devalued the linguistic resources and cultural knowledge that Indigenous students bring from their communities. While we may perceive writing and the writing center space as being apolitical or neutral, these spaces in fact reflect the dominant societal group’s education and literacy practices, i.e. white, middle-class ways of knowing and communicating. These practices then become standardized as the “correct” way of communicating, but scholar-activists have challenged standardized language ideology, which is any ideology that values one way of speaking, writing, and engaging with literacies while systemically devaluing all others. Scholars, like April Baker-Bell (2020) have defined these standardized language ideologies as “Linguistic Racism”, and Baker-Bell specifically points to language ideologies that devalue Black language by deeming it “slang” or inappropriate for public settings as “anti-Black Linguistic Racism.” As such, our consulting practices are informed by this position and influence the feedback writers receive and the conversations they’ll join when coming to the center for writing support.
Our Linguistic Justice initiatives must first be aimed at dismantling these systems in our own writing center. When linguistic justice is not made habitual, it becomes easy to be disregarded or even discarded. Language is not merely a tool for communication; it holds deep value and meaning (cite Kynard); it influences lived experiences and contains the histories, cultures, and interpretations that shape who we are. Consequently, we refuse to acknowledge “white mainstream English” as the standard. We recognize that our writing center community is composed of writers with diverse experiences, backgrounds, dialects, and language knowledge. By allowing space for writers’ lived experiences and cultures, we create opportunities for mutual learning and growth.
What We Do
As Staff
- We ask questions that seek to understand potential consultants’ understandings and alignment with our social justice values, ideologies, and initiatives such as unlearning, intersectionality, and the purpose of writing centers.
We revised our job descriptions to move away from recruiting “good writers” to instead center a call for “responsive listeners” and those “committed to learning about social justice”. We are continuing to research best practices for hiring and update our recruiting materials yearly.
All staff members participate in ongoing professional development through biweekly meetings that center values-based consulting praxis, guided by an overall theme for the academic year informed by these values.
We have conversations about our values such as linguistic justice with the writers who come to the center. This may mean unpacking what “grammar” means to an individual writer and sharing why we don’t “correct” grammars*.
- Our initiatives and programming are facilitated through committee work with our consultants.
We recently established an ad-hoc anti-racism committee with a long-term goal of reviewing our internal and external programs and materials to ensure they enact our values and center anti-racism, alongside specific projects the committee pursues such as this revision to our language statement.
- Our 2030 strategic plan ensures continuous review and revision of policies and procedures, hiring and training, and programmatic and community partner engagement for alignment
As Community Partners
- We facilitate workshops in classrooms on campus, several of our offerings (Intro to the WC, Plagiarism & Citations, & Framing Feedback) directly address linguistic justice across contexts. We’re working to revise our other workshop offerings to center this
- We have conversations with campus partners about anti-racism and social, linguistic, and racial justice, and how our collective efforts work towards more just spaces for our community
- Through journal publications and conference engagement, we contribute to the scholarly conversation on writing center work as related to linguistic and social justice. See more on our Publications Page
- The writing center’s partnerships with regional and state organizations as well as international partnerships fosters conversation of linguistic justice across contexts including joint conference presentations, programming and reflection.
- In centering conversation and practice of writing center pedagogy beyond the immediate academic context of MSU, the writing center engages with programming such as GEARUp (link) in connecting with writers across disciplines and experiences. While this programming is not fully formed, discussion of our LJ statement as outlined above will be integral to programming with these partners.
Globally
Toggle Content
Intentions and Desired Impact
This statement is written as both scholarship and an invitation to participate in connected and collaborative work toward racial justice within the academy and beyond. We believe engaging in conversations about race and language, albeit difficult or uncomfortable at times, is crucial to contribute to meaningful change toward a better, more just world. In that, we aim for this statement to educate about the linguistic and racial harm those with marginalized identities experience and the ways in which we are resisting systemic linguistic racism in our writing center.
We’ve revised our initial language statement, published in spring of 2019 and linked here, to reflect current research and conversations about language justice in writing centers, make our linguistic justice practices more transparent, and our commitments more actionable. In doing so, we open ourselves up to feedback and being held accountable as we work towards collective change. We acknowledge this work is never finished and, despite our intentions, we work in a context that is embedded in systems of inequality and therefore are complicit in inadvertently reproducing the very systems we hope to dismantle. As such this statement and our practices will be the subject of continuous reflection and ongoing development. It is our collective responsibility to battle systemic racism and white language supremacy in the contexts in which we live. Please read our full statement below in joining us in this work.