Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 23, No. 2 (2026)
Exhausted: The Toll of Hyper-revision on a Writing Center Administrator
Andrea Efthymiou
Queens College, City University of New York
andrea.efthymiou@qc.cuny.edu
Foreword
I spent the better part of seven years working on the article that follows this foreword, previously titled “Writing Center as Public: Public Pedagogy and the Work of Undergraduate Writing Tutors.” Years ago, I viewed this article as the culminating piece from the dissertation I defended in 2015. Within a year of that defense, I was in a tenure-track job and felt very committed to getting this final piece of doctoral research into the world. I was proud of my main claim: that writing center work offers undergraduate tutors the unique experience of practicing and honing rhetorical skills with an authentic public and in supported ways. I saw tutors transferring their rhetorical skills among and between writing center and civic spaces in ways that felt kairotic to name. Prior to the publication of this special issue of Praxis devoted to the struggles of academic publishing, this article hasn’t seen the light of day. This foreword tells my story of hyper-revision of this piece.
I titled the first iteration of this piece “Public/Counterpublic: Writing Center Tutors as Rhetorical Actors” and submitted it to Community Literacy Journal in 2018. This early version began with an excerpt of field notes from my dissertation research in 2013–2014, where I described attending a Modern Orthodox Jewish prayer group facilitated by two undergraduate tutors who, at the time, worked at the writing center where I was the associate director. This early draft attempted to make the case that tutors transferred rhetorical skills from institutional spaces, like the writing center, to civic spaces, like communal prayer gatherings. I saw a connection between the pedagogical work tutors were doing in the writing center and the civic work they were doing in their lives beyond the institution. I was excited by the data collected through ten interviews I had done for my dissertation, but in that early attempt to publish the results, my argument was scattered and my evidence needed refining to strengthen my claims. This first submission resulted in a “desk reject,” never making it to anonymous reviewers because, according to CLJ editors, my piece was not a good fit for their journal.
I decided to revise, seeking feedback from one dissertation mentor and my peers in writing centers and writing studies. Rather than foreground field notes, the next draft of the article started traditionally, in academic terms, with a literature review focused on situating my key terms. I eliminated much of the narrative evidence that was in the earlier draft, focusing on two tutors’ interviews as case studies, and decided to submit the work to Praxis: A Writing Center Journal in 2019. My work improved enough by academic standards to merit being sent out to two reviewers, but alas, both decided to decline publication. Reviewer one commented, “It was very difficult for me to grasp the clear facets of your argument, so much would need to be done in order to create those connections so the readers would be able to understand.” And reviewer two advised me to focus on “peer-ness,” foregoing my claim about tutors’ rhetorical development. While discouraging, this more substantive feedback from an audience of anonymous peers taught me that what I intended to communicate with this research was still not clear outside of my own head.
Recommitting myself to revision, I continued to hone my presentation and analysis of evidence with the goal of submitting to Writing Center Journal in 2020. Focusing deeply on one case study, I refined my discussion of research methods in an effort to explain the richness I saw in one tutor’s interactions with students and fellow tutors in the writing center and in civic spaces beyond the institution. This close focus, I thought, allowed me to punctuate tutors’ learning transfer more intentionally and take the time to expand on how writing center work could be conceived as public pedagogy. Reviewers directed me to revise and resubmit, and I communicated with editors about ways to parse some divergent reviewer feedback. I felt good about the effort I was putting into these revisions vis-a-vis how my writing was being received. I made changes based on reviewers’ and editors’ feedback and received an ambiguous response in the second round of anonymous review. One reviewer deemed the piece ready for publication with minor revisions, but reviewer two—notorious reviewer two—was even harsher this second time around, taking issue with what they saw as flaws in my methodology. Following the long pattern already so familiar with this article, WCJ decided the piece was not ready for publication.
While this stream of rejections was exhausting, the piece that I had revised by 2021 represented important thinking about writing center work, specifically how tutors’ rhetorical skills may be much more sophisticated than writing center scholars had named in our research up to that point. I decided to aim high, in my view, and submit the piece to College Composition and Communication (CCC). I remember feeling intimidated by the journal, whose quality of work I had admired, and hoped that maybe I’d get a round of refreshing feedback from a new audience. My experience with CCC lived up to that expectation; reviewers saw what I was trying to say and directed me to moments in my writing that both highlighted and muddled my claims. I finally felt seen, that my argument was worth making, and that I could publish this work. One round of revisions turned into a second directive to revise and resubmit. Two of the reviewers were positive. The first stated, “You improved this article significantly - due to a sharper focus on public pedagogies and especially the implications for writing center spaces to be sites for more authentic public engagement that is not tied to school-based notions of writing or tutoring.” Another reviewer noted that, as a writing center director, they viewed my research as “another reminder of how overlooked the work conducted by tutors in the center can be.” But again, yet another reviewer took issue with my methods, as well as with how I was defining “public”: “The distinction is that public rhetoric is out in the community. It is not campus based. You frame public rhetoric as work beyond the classroom, but I think that isn't accurate—it is work beyond the campus.” This is good feedback to have, but so many years into this project, I was tired.
By the time the editors of CCC requested this second round of revision in 2022, I had survived a global pandemic, earned tenure, was starting a new role in my college’s dean’s office, straddling the administrative life of a writing center director and director of academic planning and first-year programs. I was preparing to make a mid-career move to a new job at a different institution and decided to pull my piece from the publication pipeline. In short, the toll of hyper-revision had worn me out. I no longer felt connected to the work and was ready to move on.
In looking back at this article from where I am now in my career, I feel both satisfaction and disillusionment. On the one hand, I ultimately developed a research agenda drawing predominantly on my administrative work, writing mostly about how identity circulates in writing centers and how to mentor undergraduate research in our spaces. I am proud of this work, which has informed my service to my students, department, and the field. On the other hand, this article was an attempt to articulate core theoretical principles at work in writing centers that I believe are important but that, as a pre-tenure faculty member, I was not able to share publicly with my peers. Taking an even longer view, this journey demonstrates how the praxis-oriented work of producing texts about administrative organization is valued over the inductive, inquiry-driven work that I tried, for years, to get into the world. That I was able to publish texts about how to administrate bodies in writing centers says something about the labor-based economy that writing centers are necessarily a part of. We are, whether we like or not, implicated in neo-liberal higher education, organizing bodies in the interest of capital, retention, and persistence to degree. I leveraged our field’s desire for how-to publications in a way that earned me tenure at the expense of other ideas that also really mattered to me but would take years to develop. Reflecting on this publication process has me thinking of increasing course loads, growing portfolios of administrative responsibilities, and tightening budgets for conference attendance. The demands of the modern American university increasingly are at odds with offering emergent scholars the time to think, write, and revise. Further, editors in our field—and I speak as one—likewise feel strained as our own labor structures, administrative loads, and tenuous course releases do not support the time necessary to truly serve writing studies as a field. So while the work of producing and supporting scholarship is some of the most meaningful of my career, the time needed to do the work well is simply not built into higher education today. As I rejoice in finally placing this long-fought article in the world, I wonder what the next decade of publishing in higher education will look like and worry that deeply inquiry-driven scholarship will become devalued in our increasingly high-paced, outcomes-oriented, techo-driven world.
The Writing Center as Public:
Public Pedagogy and the Work of Undergraduate Writing Tutors
Writing center administrators and researchers devote ample attention to identifying the myriad ways undergraduate tutors support their peers in writing for college courses. However, less common in conversations about the value of writing center work is the idea that peer tutoring also supports undergraduate tutors’ own rhetorical development. Using a case study of one tutor’s reflection on her own enactment of writing center pedagogy, combined with a reading of writing she shared that reflects her values in writing center work, I argue here that writing center pedagogy necessarily involves public pedagogy. In conceiving of writing center work in this way, I reposition the work of undergraduate tutors to directly connect tutoring pedagogy to the development of transferable knowledge as public rhetors. Specifically, undergraduate tutors practice skills as public rhetors within their writing center sessions and transfer these rhetorical skills to their own writing and activism beyond the writing center.
Where Does Public Pedagogy Live? A Revised Definition of Publics and Public Pedagogy
Before its application in composition studies, public pedagogy as a theory emerged from work in the broader field of education. Sandlin, O’Malley, and Burdick review 420 scholarly sources published between 1894-2010 that identify “public pedagogy” as a key term, mapping its use in defining citizenship, popular culture, informal institutions and public space, dominant cultural discourses, and activism. Their work, along with that of Henry Giroux’s, amplifies the tension that arises between formal classroom education and non-institutionalized work by public intellectuals committed to resistance. Building on this tradition of understanding the place of public pedagogy as existing somewhere between classrooms and the world beyond schools, I consider public pedagogy’s role in writing centers as creating a liminal space that serves as a site of resistance between the school and non-school spheres.
This liminality calls into question the kinds of rhetorical activity that constitute publics. Specifically, writing studies has worked to define the limits of how the field views publics and public pedagogy as existing predominantly within first-year writing courses or squarely in classroom-based spaces like service-learning courses. In their introduction to The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement, John Ackerman and David Coogan describe how publics have been figured within the discipline of English, the big tent that contains rhetoric and composition, claiming that “the public” is “a landing pad for students, a literate place where they can test what we have taught them with imaginary audiences. What this suggests to us is that our disciplinary achievements have not been earned through everyday contact with publics, but through a hard-earned insularity from them” (2). Ackerman and Coogan’s critique of composition studies’ view of publics here puts the public at a distance from the institution, something aspirational, and indeed only imagined by students and faculty in English, composition, or rhetoric classrooms. Furthering this critique of the isolation of the writing classroom, David Fleming argues for the relevance of publics in response to historical critiques of formal schooling. Fleming identifies rhetorical scholarship that positions writing for school as “discourse in which any authentic purpose is an illusion” (213). In other words, as a field, we have a tendency to lay claim to a public with whom we never actually engage.
There have been attempts to upset this binary of writing in the classroom versus writing in the world in theorizing public pedagogy. Brian Gogan defines public pedagogy as a way “to avoid this situational binary” through his revisioning of the letter-to-the-editor assignment; however, such definition only reifies the classroom as one option for a space where public work can happen. In taking up the letter-to-the-editor genre, Gogan argues that it is possible for a writing teacher to authentically constitute a public through this genre because the teacher legitimizes an actual, not imagined, audience. This concept of authenticity-as-legitimation suggests that an assignment authorizes participation from an audience, thereby constituting a public for student writers, even within the confines of a classroom. While Gogan reframes the value of the letter-to-the-editor assignment, his notion of publics still remains securely situated inside an English composition classroom, not so much avoiding a binary as re-inscribing one.
In my vision of public pedagogy and the constituting of authentic publics, school and non-school spaces need not necessarily function as binaries to create sites of resistance that serve an educational role. Nancy Grimm, consistent with Fleming and Gogan, notes that many of the opportunities for collaboration and community-practice for undergraduate students are highly orchestrated and inauthentic. Grimm identifies that the writing center resituates this reality of undergraduate education: “One place where undergraduates are able to participate in an authentic practice of community is in a writing center where they contribute to the teaching mission of the institution” (97). Grimm’s notion that writing centers are communities of practice differs from Geller, et. al.’s landmark text Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice in that Grimm envisions the work of tutoring as potentially and intentionally in communication with institutional mission. In Grimm’s view, the writing center is more than a space where tutors support writers, although that is always implicit in any understanding of writing center work; instead, the writing center is a rhetorical location, one of action in the “authentic practice of community” where undergraduate tutors, in particular, enact public discourse through assessing the exigency of the rhetorical situation each tutoring session presents. Further, if we understand, as Grimm does, that tutoring is a way for those undergraduate students who do such work to participate in “the teaching mission of the institution,” tutors’ work necessarily enacts public pedagogy, one not taught exclusively through classroom learning, nor wholly service oriented; the work of tutoring—for undergraduate tutors themselves—is a public activity that both involves them in institutional missions directed towards teaching and towards cultivating civic awareness and responsibility during their undergraduate lives.
Writing center scholarship comes close to considering the civic implications of writing center work, inasmuch as our scholarship addresses community writing centers (CWCs), but there is still work to be done in naming and theorizing how peer tutoring can be defined as public pedagogy. CWCs actively promote cross-cultural and inter-cultural relations beyond college campuses as part of their missions to serve a broad community, particularly communities lacking resources for job placement and public services (Rousculp 26). As Rousculp reflects, scholarship on CWCs focuses on the civic impact these centers have on people in the community outside of the institution and structural or programming concerns in sustaining a CWC. While Rousculp briefly considers how the work of “student writing assistants’”—like undergraduate tutors—enhances these students’ abilities for collaboration, little attention is paid to the complex pedagogical and rhetorical work undergraduate tutors enact in CWCs or traditional, student-serving writing centers. I argue here that, regardless of a center’s location or specific mission, peer tutors create spaces for underrepresented viewpoints in their writing center sessions and such acts of resistance prepare tutors to do similar advocacy work in their public lives outside of the writing center.
In defining the writing center as a space to nurture public pedagogy, analogous to first-year writing and service-learning courses, I acknowledge that writing centers offer tutors sustained practice as public rhetors; peer tutoring then cultivates, for undergraduate writing tutors, agency within the center that they can transfer into their academic writing, extracurricular activities, and civic lives. While writing classrooms aim for highly designed and controlled interactions, writing centers enact a pedagogy that is more authentically public, where rhetor and audience—or tutor and writer—interactions move “away from the classroom and towards community” (Fleming 214). Using theories of public pedagogy alongside writing center scholarship then helps us name moments when writing center tutors communicate in ways that move talk away from the college writing assignment into the sphere of tutors’ and students’ public, communal lives.
Going Public: An Undergraduate Tutor Enacts Interpretive Pedagogy
In response to our field’s limited vision of publics, I turn to my case study of Charlotte to show how the writing center offers a space for authentic public engagement.[1] I interviewed “Charlotte,” who chose her own pseudonym, along with nine additional participants who had been undergraduate writing center tutors at a private, women’s college with a religious-driven mission informed by Jewish Orthodoxy. This interview data was collected as part of an ethnographic study of one college writing center, examining how the religious-driven mission influenced writing center work. The mission was built into the college’s curriculum in that all undergraduate students were required to enroll in a specified number of credits towards Jewish Studies courses. In addition to two faculty tutors and three administrators who worked in this writing center, all peer tutors in this center were exclusively undergraduate women, reflecting the general undergraduate student body at this women’s college. As “peer tutors are, and by definition must be, students” (Efthymiou and Fitzgerald, 2016, p. 182), the unique perspectives of undergraduate tutors are crucial to understanding literacy and rhetorical practices of the larger student population.
In the case of the writing center where this study took place, as in many university and secondary school writing centers, the center was not operating as or with a community partner; therefore, there was no community-driven imperative. As a result, the writing center did not have a civic or public engagement curriculum in place for tutor education. I note these details to make clear that there was no explicit directive from writing center administrators motivating tutors to “go public.” In contrast to courses or programs with “service learning” or “civic engagement” designations, writing centers, although not classroom spaces, are not easily defined as spaces beyond their institutions where students can form new, extra-institutional relationships, as a student would when working with a community partner like a immigrant resource center or shelter beyond campus. Regardless of this absence of an official civic engagement designation, my research reveals that tutors consistently employ practices of public pedagogy in their writing center work. So whether or not an undergraduate writing center is explicitly civic-driven—or religious-driven—I argue that writing centers are complex spaces that offer opportunities to explore how public pedagogies are enacted by tutors.
In marking the space between classrooms and communities, Elenore Long theorizes interpretive pedagogies to “stress that students take public action when they venture somewhere new to build working relationships with others” (158). Although not a location “off” campus, a writing center provides a non-classroom space for both students and tutors to form relationships outside of their affinity groups. Long’s conception of interpretive pedagogy, then, is useful in defining how undergraduate students who work as writing center tutors constitute publics and enact public pedagogies. Tutors affect their local publics by working with stakeholders, in particular student peers, to confront and revise familiar stereotypes within their communities, creating a liminal space of resistance central to my definition of public pedagogy.
Charlotte described a rhetorical exchange within the writing center that demonstrates how peer tutoring in writing employs interpretive pedagogy to constitute publics through actions that revise familiar stereotypes that circulate within the institution and the community. In the writing center session Charlotte described, a student came to the center because she struggled with an art history assignment that asked the student to describe a nude statue. According to Charlotte, the art history assignment involved visiting a local art museum and choosing a statue from a list of options designated by the professor to describe in writing. During the writing center session, Charlotte soon realized that this particular assignment presented challenges because the student felt that describing a nude statue was in direct conflict with her level of religious observance. Charlotte indicated that the student felt the assignment was not tsnias, a Hebrew term the student used that Charlotte defined as referring to the Orthodox Jewish concept of “sexual modesty.” As a woman who also identifies as Modern Jewish Orthodox, Charlotte’s literacy of the student’s discourse community allowed her to understand—although not necessarily agree with—the student’s interpretation of the assignment. Because of their shared knowledge of the word tsnias, Charlotte understood the implication that this student, too, felt immodest writing about a nude statue. Charlotte used her own knowledge of the student’s discourse community to create a space for listening to the student, offering options that helped the student see alternative ways of situating the course assignment within a particular framework of religious observance.
Charlotte’s knowledge of the art history student’s discourse community positions her to both empathize with the student’s discomfort as well as offer alternative ways of understanding the assignment so the student could negotiate her own rhetorical positioning in relationship to the context of the assignment, the professor’s expectations, and the student’s own religious beliefs. Charlotte’s continued reflection on this session demonstrates that she is not attempting to necessarily align or deviate from the student’s level of religious observance; instead, Charlotte used her shared identity with the student to move talk away from the writing assignment to talk about the student’s life, thereby constructing a “community that supports dialogue across difference” (Flower 21). Charlotte said:
The session ended up turning into a conversation about how [the student] had asked her rabbi if she was allowed to take the course to begin with. [The rabbi] said, ‘yes, you should take certain steps to ensure that you’re not overstepping the bounds of modesty.’ [But the student] was very uncomfortable with the subject matter and was considering switching into music. I was trying very much to just convey her options to her and just support whatever she wanted to do.
It is tempting to understand this reflection as a description of friendly banter, something a tutor does to establish trust with a writer. And indeed, this trust is one part of tutoring. But what is easy to gloss as casual talk is also a rhetorical move that is distinctly communal in nature. For Charlotte’s session to move forward, she employed interpretive pedagogy to recognize and validate a student’s literacy practices and subsequent agency in light of those practices. While Charlotte’s session, on the surface, appears to be specific to the religious-driven mission of the institution where the session took place, the work of recognizing a student’s literacy practices and discourse community is crucial to writing center tutoring broadly, and also consistent with theories of public pedagogy. Interpretive pedagogies “support authentic, rigorous rhetorical engagement with others across difference” (Long 106), and tutors, like Charlotte, often draw upon their shared knowledge of students’ discourses to do this work well. Linguist James Paul Gee reminds us that “discourses are ways of being world” (6), a constellation of interactions extending beyond simply talk to reveal the implicit understandings of communities based on literacy practices, shared knowledge, and common belief systems. Undergraduate writing tutors’ discursive practices represent findings that have been explored across disciplinary contexts, yet have not been closely considered in writing center studies, such as the importance of shared cultural experiences and written and spoken discourse in rhetorical performance (Fine; Moss).
Charlotte’s writing center tutoring shows how she gains authentic experiences negotiating dominant discourse and resistance to norms within the writing center, which more closely represent public engagement between school and non-school than would occur within a college classroom. Although Charlotte called the student’s art history assignment “an innocuous thing” in our interview, her shared understanding of the student’s relationship with a religious principal—again, tsnias, or sexual modesty—allowed Charlotte to authorize a kind of public engagement, albeit one between the student herself, an assignment, and a professor—that the student previously viewed as off-limits. Charlotte casually describes how she offered the student choices for revision: “I told her ‘Use the word bicep. Use the word chest.’” Seemingly mundane, these suggestions for specific language to describe the form of the statue for the art history class, combined with Charlotte’s positioning of options for the student to revise her own understanding of religious observance within the broader context of an academic discipline, offered the student possibilities which could help the student see outside of a singular context. Because Charlotte moved talk with this student-writer “away from the classroom and toward community” (Fleming 214), Charlotte enacted public pedagogy, authorizing public communication that was previously unfamiliar to her undergraduate peer.
Charlotte enacts interpretive public pedagogy by circulating new insights through interactions between a writer, a reader, and the situated context in which the student’s text was constructed, highlighting the tutor’s rhetorical savvy, illuminating the roles of rhetor and audience that both the tutor and the student occupy at different times. Charlotte’s method of creating space for questioning and listening allows her to engage with the student both as a sophisticated rhetor and as an attentive audience. Charlotte also serves as a literacy sponsor (Brandt) for the student to begin developing these same rhetorical skills as she engages with Charlotte in the micro-public of the writing center, learning about her options for institutional life.
While writing studies continues to identify the limitations of a writing classroom as insulated from actual publics, the writing center is a material space where public pedagogy is actively at work. Rosa Eberly highlights the fluid line between private and public, identifying that we understand private conversations as drafts for public discourse. Eberly uses the term protopublic to name work in writing classrooms “because writing classrooms are in many senses prefab–the group has come together for institutional more than overtly political purposes–and because the instructor has a different position than the students vis a vis institutional power” (172). These protopublics are spaces for invention, process, drafting of publics because students think, write, and create drafts of public discourse but not for an authentic public. Charlotte’s work tutoring a student writer extends the classroom protopublic into a more developed and authentic public constituted through the writing center session. Although the art history assignment will never truly “get out into the world,” Charlotte’s conversation with the student writer does. Charlotte’s talk in this writing center session extends beyond the art history assignment to potentially affect the student’s curricular choices, for this student’s decision to remain (or not) in her art history class was certainly influenced by her writing center session with Charlotte. Likewise, Charlotte’s pedagogy responds to the exigence of the situation to draw on her shared knowledge of the student’s religious life and present options for the student-writer.
Charlotte’s description of her session demonstrates that she is a tutor-rhetor who modeled possibilities for revised public engagement. Charlotte’s rhetorical moves, her choices as a tutor situated in a specific context, convey options that challenge her student’s conception of religious modesty and perform a pedagogy that Brian Gogan would describe as constitutive of a public:
When publicity is understood as an activity, pedagogy assumes the power to authorize publicness. Understood as an activity, publicity signifies the process by which a rhetor seeks, engages and widens the attention of publics. […] Thus, this pedagogy teaches that rhetoric is constitutive of publics and emphasizes the processes through which student rhetors might make publics and public knowledge. (539)
Following Gogan’s imperative to understand publicity as rhetorical activity, Charlotte’s expansion of options for her student is an act of creating knowledge together. From the simple suggestions for language—bicep and chest—that normalized talk around an object of study to the deeply situated discussion of a student’s religious belief and rabbinical advice, Charlotte engages in a complex interaction that authentically invoked the student and tutor as audience and rhetor at different times. This exchange of rhetorical roles constitutes public activity, while identifying peer tutoring in these terms names a tutor’s work with her students as a public rhetorical process.
Writing center tutoring, as evidenced by Charlotte’s description of her session with the art history student, offered Charlotte experience using her shared identity to form alternative public interactions, ones not presented by a faculty instructor nor by, in this case, a religious leader in the student’s discourse community. Charlotte’s interactions in this writing center session, as in many tutors’ sessions, reveal how undergraduate tutors enact public pedagogy in the extracurricular space of the writing center, enabling authentic public engagement that contrasts with the experience of a traditional college writing assignment or classroom.
Extending Public Pedagogy to Consider the Possibility of Transfer
The subtlety of Charlotte’s resistance to discursive norms within her writing center cannot be overlooked, and in fact, may have also informed this tutor’s rhetorical and pedagogical engagement beyond the writing center and the institution. Charlotte connected her writing center work to her larger civic life, saying she was interested in “egalitarian forms of Judaism.” When I asked Charlotte to share a sample of her writing that reflects this egalitarianism that is connected to her writing center work, she shared an article she published in her college newspaper, written earlier in that same year of our interview.[2] Charlotte’s article reflected her viewpoint on gender and sexuality as related to Jewish Modern Orthodox principles of modesty that she claimed ran counter to dominant discourse within in her religious community. Her writing, which echoes some of the kinds of resistance she asserted in her tutoring session described earlier, was disseminated in print and on the web at the college newspaper’s site, as well as being shared widely on social media.
Charlotte’s facility with confronting familiar cultural stereotypes with students within the writing center was a skill she extended beyond the center through her writing. Charlotte’s article critiqued a popular book taught in Jewish Orthodox high schools that encouraged students to observe the imperative of shomer negiah, or the prohibition of “physical contact with members of the opposite sex” before marriage (Birnbaum). In her article, Charlotte disrupts the status quo by claiming that such prohibition promotes a culture of fear around human sexuality and unfair judgement about a person’s level of religious observance. Further, Charlotte’s article argues that the culture surrounding teaching religious tenets on physical contact dehumanizes both men and women, reinforcing negative stereotypes of each. Charlotte’s article claims that the book she critiques frames women as “used goods” and men as “pigs.” Charlotte’s article creates a counter discourse to dominant views in Modern Jewish Orthodoxy by advocating against the use of the book in question in Jewish schools. By highlighting that such texts reinforce fear and negative gender stereotypes, Charlotte mobilizes towards mutual respect between and among the sexes.
Like her work in the tutoring session with the art history student, Charlotte’s writing creates a liminal space of resistance between school and non-school spheres. Charlotte contextualizes her public writing within a culturally specific socio-historical context, offering her audience a first-hand account of her own experience as a young student who felt shame and fear around certain interpretations of modesty within her discourse community. The normative discourse to which Charlotte responds is evident both in the book she critiques, as well as in a public response she received from the book’s author. The book’s author, whose response was also published in the college newspaper, framed physical touch as an “error” that is “committed” and worthy of redemption, a redemption the author compares to a hypothetical American slave trader who would later become a voice of anti-slavery. Such charged discourse—which essentially equates a young woman who has decided not to have physical contact with her boyfriend as a converted slave-owner—is evidence of just how progressive Charlotte’s views could be understood within her community.
This exchange between Charlotte and the author she critiques—all published in her college’s newspaper as articles in dialogue with each other—performs the kind of resistance that defines public pedagogy. Charlotte’s argument functions as an intervention into religious education that has a history within Jewish Modern Orthodoxy and is relevant to her audience. Charlotte further contextualizes her argument within the cultural politics of her local community in that she calls out specific Jewish Orthodox youth organizations and prominent religious leaders who advocate for prohibiting touch through the use of fear tactics and negative stereotypes. Long calls attention to the combination of rhetorical activity and context specific history in identifying how students go public in courses: “these two features—a countervalent rhetorical force and a highly charged historical narrative—infuse both the distinct ways students go public in such courses and the ways teachers support students’ efforts to do so” (171, my emphasis). Unlike Long’s configuration, however, Charlotte’s self-sponsored writing (Roozen; Rosinski) for her college paper, like the rhetorical action she takes in her writing center sessions, exists beyond the curriculum. Charlotte’s acts of going public are not orchestrated by specific teachers or assignments; they are part and parcel of writing center work.
Charlotte’s interview and writing sample taken together lead me to wonder about the degree to which writing center work and civic engagement interanimate each other. I am tempted to read Charlotte’s public writing as an extension of the public pedagogy she enacted in her sessions, suggesting that this writing may be informed by the rhetorical skills she practiced and developed in the writing center. But because this study only asked participants to submit writing after the interviews, it is difficult to know to what extent tutoring helps undergraduate peer tutors transfer learning and rhetorical skills from the center to their self-sponsored public writing. Future research that extends the work I have begun with Charlotte might take up Engel et al.’s model of expansive framing, which deliberately moves across contexts and authorship roles to study and promote the transfer of learning.
These snapshots of Charlotte’s tutoring alongside her civic engagement evinces that “writing transfer success and challenges cannot be understood without exploring how individual learners are processing prior and new knowledge or without attention to learners' social-cultural spaces, including the standards and curricula that shape them” (Moore 7). Dana Driscoll’s research on transfer in writing centers argues for intentionally constructing peer-tutoring curricula that involves metacognitive reflection, an intervention that could have productively added to the findings from Charlotte’s interview and writing sample. The field’s history of considering learning transfer and writing center work often focuses exclusively on tutoring sessions. The Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project (Hughes, et. al.) has pointed in the direction of tutor transfer beyond the writing center, and Bonnie Devet’s work begins to consider the benefit of peer tutor labor on tutors themselves.
Writing Center Pedagogy as Public Pedagogy
Charlotte is an exemplar: a writing center tutor who employs public pedagogy by creating sites of resistance and a student-writer who writes for a public audience. How can we—writing teachers and writing center administrators—help set an educational scene so more students do what Charlotte has done? Over past fifteen years, college campuses in the United States have engaged in civic engagement around black lives, equity for trans people, awareness of sexual assault, and activism around decolonization; yet past work on rhetorical education and civic engagement demonstrates that students rarely, if ever, attribute their rhetorical education to learning in composition classrooms (Alexander and Jarrett). In my view of writing centers as fertile ground for public pedagogy, creating and negotiating sites of resistance, I suggest building centers with an eye towards researching and understanding how tutoring writing provides potential for peer tutor transfer beyond the university.
Charlotte’s reflection on tutoring, paired with her writing for the college newspaper, offer a fruitful beginning to consider what dispositions, or habits of mind (Devet), promote transfer for tutors between writing centers and wider publics. Charlotte’s case compliments what research has recently shown about the value of encouraging undergraduates to learn through cultivating a personal connection to their writing: “students find writing projects meaningful when they have opportunities to connect their writing to peers, family, and community members important to them” (Eodice, Geller, and Lerner 331). These personal connections should not be exclusive from writing center work. Writing center pedagogies may support the development of public rhetorics through building on peer tutors’ personal connections, be that gender equity and religious egalitarianism, as in Charlotte’s case, or otherwise. Taking the time and creating the space for tutors to articulate their personal connection to tutoring and considering how those values and interests exist in tutors’ civic lives could contribute to students’ rhetorical education in impactful ways.
Notes
The data presented here was collected as part of IRB-approved study #398211-1.
In an effort to preserve Charlotte’s anonymity, I do not offer the title of her article here or any other identifying information. I use direct quotations minimally and paraphrase whenever possible.
Works Cited
Ackerman, John and David Coogan, editors. The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement. U of South Carolina P, 2010.
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