The Reluctant Supervisor
Recognizing and Rethinking Power in Writing Center Supervisory Practices
Recognizing and Rethinking Power in Writing Center Supervisory Practices
The Reluctant Supervisor: Recognizing and Rethinking Power in Writing Center Supervisory Practices is an edited collection whose goal is to take a hard look at supervisory practices in writing center work. We propose a collection that wrestles with and takes on the 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.
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? The intricacies of the supervisory aspects of writing center leadership have not tended to receive scholarly attention. We don’t talk about supervision perhaps because, as a field, we’ve 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.