Call for proposals

Background

Historically, the discipline of Writing Center Studies has emphasized collaboration in every context, including collaborative leadership (e.g., The Everyday Writing Center, Around the Texts of Writing Center Work, etc.). But what does this emphasis mean for supervisory practices, which are inevitably hierarchical? Writing centers have a vexed relationship with hierarchy and power—on the one hand, we prize peerness, collaboration, an ethos of nonevaluative feedback and support; on the other, writing centers are sites that historically reinscribe linguistic and racial power (García, 2017; Faison & Treviño, 2017; Haltiwanger Morrison & Nanton, 2019). These violent reinscriptions of power are not restricted to what happens at the consulting table. Complicating matters is that many of us who lead writing centers are drawn to the work because of the value of peerness and collaboration—and many of us came up as writing consultants ourselves—making it tempting to deny the fact that we hold institutional power over supervisees.

Our conversations about supervision tend not to be about power but rather about immediate problem-solving. In virtual spaces such as the wcenter listserv and the Writing Center Directors Facebook page, we talk about the day-to-day work of running a writing center, but these discussions are often highly localized or reactive to pressing concerns. International, regional, and local writing center conferences have provided space and time for us to reflect together about supervisory issues, but they are ephemeral moments that often evaporate when we all return to our campuses. We are missing sustained scholarly attention to the supervisory intricacies of writing center leadership. Nicole Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and Rebecca Jackson’s The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors (2016) is a notable exception to this relative silence in the literature around supervision, but the goal of that particular work is to map out the whole terrain of a director’s responsibilities comprehensively, not necessarily to take a deep dive into any one aspect of them.

In one way, it is surprising that writing center scholarship doesn’t talk more about supervision. While many disciplines are concerned with supervision (from human resources in business to student affairs in higher education), writing centers as workplaces have a number of quirks. The prevalence of student employees (or a combination of student and professional employees), the baked-in tendency toward high turnover as student consultants graduate, and the widely varying statuses of directors (who may be staff or tenure-line or contingent faculty employed on either the student affairs or academic sides of the institution) all produce unique workplace dynamics (Gladstein & Fralix, 2015).

In another way, however, perhaps this avoidance/reluctance is not surprising. After all, our field has struggled to be recognized as an academic discipline, and any acknowledgement of our supervisory labor might undercut these efforts. As a result, we’ve tended to gravitate toward “leadership” or “administration” rather than “supervision” to frame the work. In The Reluctant Supervisor, we call attention to supervisory practice because naming “supervision” forces us to attend to how power—institutional, racial, and otherwise—operates in our work relationships. We want to create a space for the hard conversations around supervision—ones that make us squirm, that question how much we really are “helping.” We need more opportunities to sit in discomfort with our supervisory choices, interrogate them, and really wrestle with this role (one that is often underappreciated and under-scrutinized, too).

What this book is

The goal of this collection is to take a hard look at supervisory practices in writing center work. We propose a collection that wrestles with and takes on the power dynamics, tensions, contradictions, and challenges of writing center supervisory work in an effort to name, own, and recognize supervision as a fundamental part of our work. We hope contributors will question, critique, and engage the messiness of writing center supervisory practice. We welcome submissions that unapologetically engage with racial power and its intersections and that continue to disrupt the notion of writing centers as neutral sites of teaching and learning (e.g., Camarillo, 2019; Denny, Mundy, Naydan, Sévère, & Sicari, 2018), while bringing these questions into the explicit context of supervision. We also welcome analyses that acknowledge the minutiae of everyday writing center supervision; for example, what are the implications of specific supervisory decisions we make around creating schedules, handling chronic lateness, etc.? What do those decisions reveal about our commitments?

Join us!

We welcome 500-word proposals that draw from multiple methodologies and institutional contexts. Chapters in the published collection will be of varying lengths, from the very brief to the more expansive.

We seek contributions from people in a wide variety of institutional roles and from different types of institutions. Further, while we welcome submissions from writing center directors and from seasoned practitioners, we strongly encourage submissions from graduate students, assistant directors, adjunct faculty, and from those who are early in their supervisory careers (or who have had supervisory roles in the past) as well.

We especially encourage submissions from members of historically marginalized or minoritized communities.

Proposals may address questions like the following:

• What does the term “student employee” mean for us as supervisors in writing centers? How do we supervise and support them when they are employees and students at the same time? When some students may still be new to a working environment that requires some independence and initiative?

• For those of us who supervise professional tutors, what are the overlapping and diverging supervisory challenges that come with this workplace relationship?

• How do we supervise ethically and equitably, especially when we are trying to negotiate the needs and expectations of the many writing center stakeholders (writers, consultants, faculty, administrators) at our institutions?

• What is the role of the body in supervisory practice?

• What is the role of intersectional racial power in supervisory practice? That is, what are the implications of racial power in supervisor/supervisee relationships (e.g., a director of color with white supervisees, or a white director with supervisees of color)?

• What does it mean to enact anti-ableist supervision (for ourselves and for employees) at the writing center?

• How do we assess our supervisory practices? How do we know if we are effective supervisors?

• What does supervisory failure look like—and how can supervisors and supervisees process and learn from it?

• What do we do with hard conversations with supervisees? How do we initiate them, or when do we avoid them? How can we have a hard conversation as a supervisor when multiple vectors of power/inequity are in play?

While we resist purely lore-based approaches (Kjesrud, 2015), we welcome multiple methods and methodologies. Here are some possibilities:

• Theory-based inquiry (e.g., analysis of texts, artifacts, or personal experience guided by frameworks in critical studies of difference, such as critical Indigeneity studies, critical disability studies, Women of Color feminisms, abolitionism)

• Narrative inquiry

• Counterstories

• Ethnography and autoethnography

• Focus groups

• Interviews

• Historical/archival analyses of how writing center scholars and practitioners have engaged with supervision (e.g. listserv postings, conference abstracts, IWCA Summer Institute curricula)

We welcome methods and methodologies that are not listed above.

As editors, we resist narratives of triumph, stories that reinscribe white saviorism, or approaches that are colorblind or liberal multiculturalist. We push back, too, on the idea of “best supervisory practices” because practices are positionality/identity dependent—and because supervisory work is always in progress and unfinished.

We do recognize, however, the need to read about concrete examples of practices that felt meaningful (or harmful) at a certain place and time, which might provide valuable scenarios for discussion or even fodder for the development of supervisory theory within writing center work. We therefore invite contributing authors to explain and explore the specificities of their own institutional contexts, group memberships, and embodied histories while also keeping in mind how readers working in very different contexts might learn from those examples.

Logistics

We invite 500-word proposals for chapters in a range of genres and lengths addressing one or more questions directly related to supervision, including but not limited to the ones we name above.

The submission form will ask for information about contributors’ institutions and their roles within these institutions. Within the proposal itself, we invite you to discuss the authors’ positionalities in relation to their experiences as supervisors.

Proposals should name

• the method/ology that will be employed,

• the major questions the chapter will explore, and

• the approximate length you anticipate for the manuscript.

Proposals should be submitted by May 15, 2022. Questions can be sent to ReluctantSupervisorBook@gmail.com.

Timeline

• Proposals due May 15, 2022.

• Prospective contributors will be informed about the status of their submission by July 1, 2022.

• Full drafts of chapters will be due by October 15, 2022.

References

Camarillo, E. C. (2019). Dismantling neutrality: Cultivating antiracist writing center ecologies. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 16(2), 69–74.

Caswell, N. I., McKinney, J. G., & Jackson, R. (2016). The working lives of new writing center directors. Utah State University Press.

Denny, H., Mundy, R., Naydan, L.M., Sévère, R., & Sicari A. (2018). Out in the center: Public controversies and private struggles. Utah State University Press.

Haltiwanger Morrison, T. M., & Nanton, T. O. (2019). Dear writing centers: Black women speaking silence into language and action. The Peer Review, 3(1). http://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/redefining-welcome/dear-writing-centers-black-women-speaking-silence-into-language-and-action/

Faison, W., & Treviño, A. (2017). Race, retention, language, and literacy: The hidden curriculum of the writing center. The Peer Review, 1(2). http://thepeerreview-iwca.org/issues/braver-spaces/race-retention-language-and-literacy-the-hidden-curriculum-of-the-writing-center/

García, R. (2017). Unmaking gringo-centers. Writing Center Journal, 36(1), 29–60. www.jstor.org/stable/44252637

Gladstein, J. & Fralix, B. (2015). National census of writing. https://writingcensus.swarthmore.edu/survey/4

Kjesrud, R. D. (2015). Lessons from data: Avoiding lore bias in research paradigms. Writing Center Journal, 34(2), 33–58.