The Undersea World of Clint Gardner

Since I’m cycling off the Executive Board of the International Writing Centers Association this coming November, I’ve come to be a bit nostalgic about it. My involvement in the Executive Board first started back when Eric Hobson was President and he gave me the opportunity to engage in committee work. I then took on the role of the first Wed Editor of writingcenters.org, and then was elected to be Community College Representative. I threw my hat in the ring for Vice President (the leadership track in IWCA is V.P. to President to Past President–a six year stint!) and was stunned to actually be elected. My “platform” (it seems a bit pretentious to call it that) was to build on IWCA’s excellent history of outreach by allowing for more opportunities for people to be involved in the organization.

That’s the nice thing about the IWCA Executive Board and IWCA itself–we try to involve our membership as much as we can in official committees and other activities of the organization. I think it is a great way to grow the organization and give others leadership opportunities. It also makes IWCA truly a member-driven organization. I’ll probably write more about my experiences as November approaches and I grow more nostalgic.

In any case, I started out this post intending to write about a completist project I want to take on: getting all the minutes of N/IWCA in one place on writingcenters.org (in cooperation with the current IWCA Web Editor Chris Ervin) as well as getting all our official documents (like IWCA Update) there as well.

I know that official IWCA minutes were published in Writing Center Journal but I can’t check it due to a server move on the part of its archive. I don’t know, however, if all the minutes were published there. I am very interested in our history as an organization, and think our members need to be more aware of our past. It may be interesting to propose to the Board that we appoint an official historian. I don’t think that position need be elected by the membership and shouldn’t have term limits.

I’ve been prepping for our regular before-the-semester staff meeting/discussion and was thinking of using “You Fix it For me: A Lesson in Women’s Work and Cultural Misunderstandings” by Kim Zabel in the latest Writing Lab Newsletter. In the article, Zabel describes a tutorial session in which she was the subject of sexist behavior in the writing center, and how she was verbally attacked by a male client for “shaming him” by not doing the work that he was demanding from her. Zabel then goes on to explore the cultural ramifications, as the student was a recent refugee to the United States from a culture that demands women take on certain roles and always defer to men.

Given that I’ve witnessed sexist behavior in the writing center before, and how tutors who are women deal with it, I thought this would be a good article to spur a beneficial conversation. I think it is important to discuss this matter, as well, since the majority of the tutors who work in the Student Writing Center are women and I believe they face challenges with sexist behavior from male students that our male tutors don’t necessarily face. (I might point out that sexist behavior knows no cultural bounds.)

With that, I started to dig around on Google scholar to find other articles to build a bibliography for the tutors should they wish to pursue the topic. I was actually a bit surprised by the lack of attention to the area. I know there are pieces in the Writing Center Resource Manual and a few others that I can think of (but can’t remember the titles of) in Writing Center Journal. I’m pretty sure if I keep digging around I will find a wealth of articles on the subject (perhaps not specifically related to writing center work, but tangentially so through subjects like sexist behavior in the classroom with female teachers).

In any case, this spurred an idea that I don’t think has been approached before in writing centers: a survey of tutors who work in writing centers about sexist behavior they’ve been subject to. I’m no sociologist, so I’d like to collaborate someone in gender studies or sociology to construct a suitable survey.

I’ll keep you posted.