Affecting Change in the Writing Center Tutorial

"I would argue that, perhaps inadvertently, many of us who work in writing centers practice a form of censorship as part of our everyday duties," writes Steve Sherwood in "Censoring Students, Censoring Ourselves: Constraining Conversations in the Writing Center." "For the most part, we censor or urge self-censorship in the interest of helping students adjust to and succeed in the academic world. We want to protect students from the practical and political effects of their words. We want to show them that their opinions have consequences, that using sexist or racist terms, espousing particular political causes, speaking carelessly on topics they don't fully understand, and offending their audiences can cost them good grades and the esteem of their teachers and fellow students" (131).

I disagree with Sherwood. Not about the fact that writing consultants "censor or urge self-censorship" when a client puts forth a racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise oppressive idea, but about the reasons why we challenge these ideas - or, at least, the reasons why we should, after the first shock of, Did this client really just say that? wears off.

Sherwood and I have a different take on how the First Amendment applies to the writing center. I'm sure my husband the attorney would cringe at this, but I don't actually care about the legal space of the center. Sure clients have "the right" to hold (and espouse) whatever opinion they want to - in our writing centers, our classrooms, and their papers. Writing consultants can't technically "censor" anyone, because it isn't our paper: The client decides what to write and what to turn in. Of course, that's side-stepping the much more nuanced point Sherwood makes that, as moral authorities - the spokesperson of the academy in our clients' eyes, someone to be listened to - we censor students simply by telling them an idea, word, or anecdote is unacceptable. In that sense, I do agree that we censor students. More importantly, I believe that we should.

The argument I'm making isn't about free speech. Free speech is a given, in my book: Clients can write, say, and think whatever they want. But as an educated person, someone committed to the ideals of human rights, I have a responsibility to uphold a moral and ethical code that refuses to accept the legitimacy of racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise oppressive beliefs.

Sherwood quite rightly points out that "by encouraging self-censorship in the early stages of composition, we may prevent student writers from fully developing and expressing valid and valuable ideas and opinions" (131). If, as writing consultants, we say, "That's ignorant/racist/appalling/etc." and don't push the client to interrogate her/his own beliefs, we don't affect change. And affecting change is what we should be after: We should look for ways to engage our clients in a dialogue about ideas that offend us, rather than assuming a stance of institutional or moral authority that simply declares, "You can't say that."

But our motives have to be about more than fixing a paper up for an A or protecting a student from a teacher's wrath. (In fact, in tutorials where clients have refused to budge on their racist or sexist opinions, I've often sat back, rightly or wrongly, with a private glee that this student would no doubt be eaten alive by a professor.) Leading a student through the steps of argumentation, insisting that she prove her claims, consider her ethos, create effective emotional appeals for her audience, is an excellent means of prompting a client to question her ideas, but in so doing, what we should be focused on is bigger than the client's paper. We are focusing on the core principles at the heart of a liberal arts education, which seeks to build a diverse society founded not on an "anything goes" approach to ethics and morality but on respect for diversity. Such respect precludes hate speech - and, more to the point, hate thought, which is what we really want to challenge in our students.

So the point is not self-censorship in the sense that we convince clients their true opinions have to be hidden, if they want to get a good grade or avoid being taken to task by a teacher. The point is acting as a member of the client's educational system, upholding the beliefs and morals a liberal arts education tries to instill in future citizens of a global society, and thereby hopefully affecting change in our clients' ways of thinking. I disagree with Sherwood again when he tries to make this an argument about "literacy." Refusing to agree with a client that the Holocaust didn't happen or that all Muslims are terrorists has nothing to do with valuing a client's home culture or "discourage[ing] diversity and independent thinking" (133). Nor does it have anything to do with playing into notions of "ideal texts" or "ideal students" who always-already fall in line with the academy's ideological stances. It does have a lot to do with helping students become critical thinkers. Even if they ultimately decide they disagree with our views as writing consultants, at least they've been challenged to think.

I am speaking from experience here, both good and bad, but Sherwood's article always makes me think of perhaps my greatest success story as a writing teacher. I was teaching first-year writing at a small, private community college in rural southern Illinois in my last year of MA coursework, and a young woman (I'll call her Sally) wanted to write her argumentative paper against legalizing gay marriage. Her first draft had the requisite number of sources - all from fundamentalist Christian groups. In conference, I explained to her that the academy is secular; if she wanted to use evidence her audience would find convincing in this instance, she had to find sources that weren't based in any religion, not just Christianity. To make a long story short, Sally took up my challenge. She wrestled with that paper for four weeks; she came close to switching topics more than once. But she stuck with it. And when she presented her final draft to the class, she explained that even though she still believed that homosexuality was a sin, she had changed her mind about legalizing gay marriage: The fact that she couldn't find any non-biased, non-religious sources arguing against gay marriage, and that she had been forced to truly read the arguments in support of legalizing gay marriage, had convinced her that private morality should not infringe upon gay couples' rights to enjoy the benefits of marriage.

Sally and I had a good working relationship in that class. She knew my religious and political views, and I knew hers. I never allowed myself to be angry over or offended by her opinions, and she in turn accepted my authority as a representative of the academy to insist that she argue in certain ways in an academic paper. Did I censor Sally or urge her to self-censorship? Absolutely. But the end result wasn't that Sally went away grumbling about having her right to free speech suppressed by some bleeding-heart liberal who could only tolerate ideas she considered to be "p.c." The result was that Sally came to a personal theory of the contested issue of gay marriage, one that didn't change what she believed personally but that did change how she looked at the world and the rights of others different from herself.

To me, that's the point.

Sherwood, Steve. "Censoring Students, Censoring Ourselves: Constraining Conversations in the Writing Center." The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors 3rd ed. Eds. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 129-137.