Ansam Abdeljaber
When I first agreed to my position as a writing consultant at Moraine Valley Community College, I often pictured working with clients like myself, a first-generation, bilingual client. However, within my first few weeks of training and experience, I realized the center was best designed for one type of student, the monolingual client. This became very apparent to me when I read the Stephen North essay, The Idea of a Writing Center, in which he explains that the writing center should not just be for the illiterate (435). While this is true, centers have since struggled to break this stereotype and, by doing so, have unintentionally undervalued the skills that come with their multilingual consultants. So, how can centers begin to reconcile the unique values of their writing consultants while ensuring that they don’t fit into the stereotype of only being able to help what North calls “the others?”
Similar to the way that consultants highlight a client’s strengths and weaknesses, coordinators of the center need to highlight a consultant’s strengths and weaknesses rather than have them fit into a box of what consultants can and cannot do. This means having individualized training that allows these consultants to use the skills they already have in order to be able to help a wide variety of clients. We must first figure out what it is that our minoritized clients need from us and begin our training with that in mind.
North also explains that “For whatever reasons writing centers have gotten mostly this kind of press, have been represented-or misrepresented-more often as fix-it shops than in any other way, and in some fairly influential places” (North 435). In other words, he is trying to explain that the writing center is not simply a fix-it shop, and one should not come there for just grammar. However, the North essay has been written 36 years ago, and since then, colleges have been more inclusive by allowing students who may not speak English to be admitted. Furthermore, with clients who are just learning to speak the language, grammar is an important foundation that will help them grow to create their own style of writing. So, in this case, grammar is the most important skill that the consultants need to work on to help their clients grow as writers. Multilingual consultants are able to understand how important grammar is when you’re just starting to write. However, when I sit with clients, I am so focused on what I can and cannot do as a consultant, which in turn makes me push aside what I know my multilingual clients need, grammar.
Not only that, but as a bilingual consultant, I always struggled to translate to my clients how to write their paper. I mean, what does a thesis statement translate to in Arabic or Spanish? Rather, I would go on a tangent of what a thesis statement would need to include, which in turn would overwhelm my client, further feeding into their belief that they are not smart or good enough to write. Now many of my fellow writing consultants have argued that those types of clients should be going to other resources offered by the school, such as a learning enrichment center, to help with their language barrier. While I do understand the value those resources provide, I feel that they validate writing centers not using the full potential of their consultants.
To conclude, we need to have individualized training for our consultants that allows them to highlight their strengths and work on their weaknesses rather than having them simply fit into a box. This would include frequent one on one conversations with the coordinator of the center in which the consultants begin to address their weaknesses and ways that they would be able to overcome them whether that be through online tutorials, classroom setting, or finding one on one tutoring. Our clients should have a different experience walking into the center based on the consultant they worked with. While I understand that this may blur the lines between what centers can and cannot do, this new approach will help the centers fulfill their main goal and philosophy of creating better writers, not better writing.
Reference
North, Stephen M. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English, vol. 46, no. 5, 1984, pp. 433–446. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/377047
About the Author
Ansam Abdeljaber is a first-generation college student who is pursuing her undergraduate in English. She has been writing since the age of ten and has aspired to be a published author. For almost two years she has been working as a writing consultant. She hopes one day to show others the gift that writing has to offer.