Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition: Global Interrogations, Local Interventions

10. IMPORT/EXPORT WORK?: Using Cross-Cultural Theories to Rethink Englishes, Identities, and Genres in Writing Centers by Joan Mullin, Carol Peterson Haviland, and Amy Zenger

150 10. IMPORT/EXPORT WORK? Using Cross-Cultural Theories to Rethink Englishes, Identities, and Genres in Writing Centers Joan Mullin, Carol Peterson Haviland, and Amy Zenger Designing for learning cannot be based on a division of labor between learners and non-learners, between those who organize learning and those who realize it, or between those who create meaning and those who execute it. —Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity FOR SOME TIME now, U.S. writing center communities have been probing ideas of collaboration, of working on the margins or being in the center, of alternative languages and rhetorics, and of their role as change agents. The results of these inquiries have anchored much writing center research and practice: these are located in what has been called “nondirective” interaction that aims to build on writers’ knowledge; in “peer tutoring” that can mitigate authoritative, rote learning; and in collaboration that fosters writers’ “voices” instead of providing “normalizing” conventions. These ideals, while initially imagined to be uncomplicated when applied to native speakers, have proven to be both more complicated and less well received when applied to speakers of English from outside the United States or to those from inside who grew up with multilingual backgrounds. Indeed, multilingual and nonnative U.S. English speakers seem to resist collaboration, nondirectiveness, and peer tutoring, often leading centers to adopt more top-down conventional practices (Shamoon and Burns). While some writing center researchers have used ESL research (for example, Jacoby; Severino; Harris and Silva) to develop supportive practices that couple Import/Export Work? 151 language/genre proficiency with respect for home languages/cultures, these are no longer enough. With the day-to-day press of local calls for accountability ; with colleagues’ demands that students should write like native English speakers; and with international students’ desires to pass classes, sound “American,” and get good jobs by writing “well-enough,” writing centers need to more overtly assert their roles as change agents in the university. Very simply, World Englishes and multilanguages/literacies force reconsideration of the pedagogy and theories of writing that shaped the development of U.S. writing centers and that are still their bedrock. Academic English, Writing, and Genres: Our Theories, Our Practices Internationally, writing centers often start on the margins of institutions. However, informed but not encumbered by both the theories and histories out of which subsequent practices grew, many of these writing centers outside of the United States have been able to position themselves as the center of writing in their institutions (see Ganobscik-Williams; Björk et al.). We look here at the ways both mono- and multilingual English speakers use and want to use writing and at one of the central tenets of writing center work—collaboration —to critique some underlying assumptions that anchor many U.S. writing centers’ practices and may prevent them from being change agents like their counterparts elsewhere. U.S. writing centers have long imagined themselves as covert operations, undermining traditional notions of writing, even as they are encouraging students or institutions to think tutorials are supporting these same notions. Calling for writing centers to be “places where students learn to negotiate and understand the contact and conflicts of differences,” Nancy Maloney Grimm was one of the first to question typical “nondirective” tutoring, which she saw as implicitly supporting standard U.S. English and traditional writing practices (13–14). While many writing centers rose to Grimm’s challenge, valuing students’ rights to their own language and promoting this institutionally , such practices also continued to divide “academic” and “student ” language, creating a tension rather than a resolution. That is, students couldn’t understand why they weren’t being taught to “succeed” in their classroom writing, and faculty were perplexed as to why writing centers wouldn’t support “correct” use of language. We claim here that underlying such practices in writing centers and in composition is the assumption that 152 Joan Mullin, Carol Peterson Haviland, and Amy Zenger tutors and teachers still export something to students, without importing anything from them in return. With the advantage of more than ten years of research that now crosses continents, we expand Grimm’s inquiry, asking how a reciprocal import/ export model might shift assumptions about language/writing/culture and, therefore, change tutoring. If “responsible rhetorical agency is a matter of acknowledging and honoring the responsive nature of agency” (Cooper 422), then altering the interactions between learners and...