Composition Forum 54, Summer 2024
http://compositionforum.com/issue/54/

Contemplation in the Writing Center: Pedagogies of Kindness, Respect, and Community for Mindful Activist Work

Anna Sicari and Laura Tunningley

Abstract: This essay explores contemplative pedagogies in the writing center, a space the authors believe allows for practices of mindfulness, awareness, and reflection in organic ways, as writing center pedagogy focuses on the importance of the relational, flattening hierarchies, and a focus on the conversation between writer and tutor (or between writers). With a focus on the whole person, the writing center advocates for the type of contemplative pedagogy Mathieu and others have called for: “To see any problem as an opportunity to make ourselves more aware of the way we perpetuate pain and suffering in the world” (Minnix). Grounding this essay in bell hooks’ framework of community, we will explore two important pedagogies to our center: intentional kindness (Boquet) and rhetoric of respect (Rousculp), and ways in which they have fostered contemplative pedagogy in the writing center during difficult and tenuous times in the current political climate.

Introduction

In 2016, the U.S. experienced a significant shift with the election of Donald Trump, revealing deep divisions within the nation. This event prompted reflection among many in academic leadership roles, such as writing center directors. Trump’s controversial rhetoric, characterized by racism and hostility towards certain groups, left writing centers grappling with how to address his presidency within their teams. Questions arose about supporting staff members who feared the implications of Trump’s leadership while also respecting others who supported him. Additionally, concerns emerged about potential backlash for publicly condemning his presidency. As newly appointed directors of a large writing center at a state university in Oklahoma, we found ourselves in a similar quandary. The complexity of this situation highlighted the dual nature of writing centers—as both institutional and communal spaces, and as places of learning and professional employment. Unlike classroom discussions, addressing the election within the writing center posed unique challenges due to its professional context.

The 2016 election in many ways taught us how difficult the work is in building community with mindfulness and contemplation as a lens. Community work is difficult work. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick writes in Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University: “Community is something that does not simply exist but instead must be built, recognizing that community is always complex, negotiated, multifarious, and recognizing the forces that are arrayed against the formation of community might help institutions of higher education, and all of us that work within and for them, think differently about what we do and how we do it” (13). Like many others nationwide, we observed significant disparities in the reactions of students, the community, and our staff at OSU to the presidential election. While numerous tutors in our midst were distressed, a few celebrated Trump’s election, placing us, as leaders, in a challenging position. How do we build community in such a space? How do we do this work mindfully and work with the local communities as we aim to foster innovation, peace, and restoration? These were questions we were immediately met with and have guided our work the past six years.

This essay explores contemplative pedagogies in the writing center, a place many view as a “thirdspace” (Grimm; Grutsch McKinney), which allows for practices of mindfulness, awareness, and reflection in organic ways, as writing center pedagogy focuses on the importance of the relational, flattening hierarchies, and a focus on the conversation between writer and tutor (or between writers). With a focus on the whole person, the writing center advocates for the type of contemplative pedagogy Mathieu and others have called for: “To see any problem as an opportunity to make ourselves more aware of the way we perpetuate pain and suffering in the world” (Minnix). Grounding this essay in bell hooks’ framework of community, we will explore two important pedagogies to our center: intentional kindness (Boquet) and rhetoric of respect (Rousculp), and ways in which they have fostered contemplative pedagogy in the writing center during difficult times, through the ongoing pandemic, the election of Trump, and the current political climate we are working in (in a deeply red state). These pedagogies are not easy to cultivate and require both intellectual and emotional labor, as we ask tutors, students, and writers to reconsider their orientations and positionalities. As hooks writes in Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, “to build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination” (36). Our place in the writing center, interacting with all different disciplines, levels of study, and backgrounds, as well as our already existing community partnerships, situates us in an ideal place to engage in this difficult work and strive towards change, including in ourselves.

Working with the Community

We work at a state institution in one of the reddest states that is actively proposing or passing bills that limit talk about and work to dismantle systemic racism, about discussing LGBTQ+ identities, and barring trans people from using the bathroom that matches their gender. As our institution works to limit social justice initiatives, we grapple with putting into practice the love hooks talks about that can change our communities and ourselves. As hooks wrote in Love as the Practice of Freedom, “Working within community, whether it be sharing a project with another person, or with a larger group, we are able to experience joy in the struggle. That joy needs to be documented. For if we only focus on the pain, the difficulties which are surely real in any process of transformation, we only show a partial picture” (243). So, as we reflect on our community, campus, and writing center outreach and activities, we want to focus not only on the struggles but also the good coming from this place.

Our Writing Center hosts a memoir writing workshop series for military veterans in the community. This began because one of our Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs), who is also a veteran, had expressed interest in collaborating and reaching out to veterans within our institution. While presenting their ideas during a new tutor orientation, a librarian attending the session mentioned the option of applying for a microgrant designed for libraries engaging with veterans. A few weeks later, after successfully securing the grant, our GTA and our Writing Center began promoting the opportunity for community members to participate in a memoir writing workshop.

While planning and brainstorming this workshop details, we were concerned about a veteran being triggered while writing or working with others’ writing at the workshop. We wanted to prioritize this very real aspect of a veteran’s experience that is just as important as the writing itself. As Mathieu states, “So for myself and for my new teachers, I increasingly have focused on awareness and mindfulness practices to help pay attention to those ‘indoor voices’ and perhaps revise them, working to develop compassion, and exploring empathy” (15). How could we work to develop veterans’ writing while also cultivating mindfulness and compassion? With the funding provided through the microgrant, we were able to pay a stipend to not only WC GTAs to facilitate, but also a Psychology GTA to begin each workshop with mindfulness and grounding techniques intended to provide strategies to veterans and their family members who may be triggered and experiencing PTSD symptoms while writing and giving feedback to other writers.

Giving priority to start each workshop session in this way, we hope that we are modeling and experiencing in ourselves that kindness and compassion to ourselves as whole beings, taking that moment to be aware of emotions and prioritize taking care of ourselves. That moment of care for ourselves helps develop empathy for others experiencing distress while writing or reading, and helps foster that caring connection.

That is not to say this process was cut and dry and heartwarming for all throughout. While we were visiting various veterans services in town to promote the workshop, we started at the local VFW on the day they had their weekly breakfast. We, two women in business casual dresses, walked into a group of all men wearing faded jeans and wrinkled flannels. After talking about why we were there and handing out flyers, we received comments like, “I don’t know that I’d want to write about anything while the statute of limitations might not be up,” followed by loud guffaws all around. Were we being tested? Were these legitimate concerns? Definitely feeling out of place, we struggled not to view the men as so different from ourselves that we couldn’t imagine them benefiting from the workshop and sharing with others. We had to reflect on our attitudes towards the veterans we met. One of the points we wanted to cultivate at the workshop was compassion towards themselves and others, and we were falling into seeing the men as “other” from us. hooks words strike us here:

Critically examining these blind spots, I conclude that many of us are motivated to move against domination solely when we feel our self-interest directly threatened. Often, then, the longing is not for a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change. Fundamentally, if we are only committed to an improvement of the politic of domination that we feel leads directly to our individual exploitation or oppression, we not only remain attached to the status quo but act in complicity with it, nurturing and maintaining those very systems of domination. Until we are all able to accept the interlocking, interdependent nature of systems of domination and recognize specific ways each system is maintained, we will continue to act in ways that undermine our individual quest for freedom and collective liberation struggle. (244)

We were guilty of not looking introspectively at ourselves and our need to understand and change. The workshops were meant to be for a specific group to which we do not belong, and we have not suffered in the same way that veterans have. Their own liberation is just as important as our own, and othering people is never the answer.

Every year in April, our writing center partners with university and community collaborators to put together a nature walk at the botanic garden in town. The idea is to have a day for all ages and walks of life in our community to spend a day outside together and have various writing and art activities to foster relationships between the university and town. hooks writes in all about love:

We can begin the process of making a community wherever we are. We can begin by sharing a smile, a warm greeting, a bit of conversation; by doing a kind deed or by acknowledging kindness offered to us. Doing this we engage in love practice […] we lay the foundation for the building of community with strangers. The love we make in community stays with us wherever we go. With this knowledge as our guide, we make any place we go, a place where we return to love (141).

The event is free, and we have stations set up from the writing center, the art museum, the public library, and others. The humane society has even brought adoptable dogs to some of our events, and at the last one, one of the dogs was adopted. We advertised through our community partners with flyers for them to share, by placing advertisements in both the OSU and Stillwater community newspapers, and through local businesses who had donated door prizes for the nature walk. We hope to include community members who aren’t connected to OSU and try to place advertisements in places that are more readily viewed by the public.

The focus of the event is on nature and connecting to nature through writing, art, yoga, and other mindfulness activities. We focus on the whole self. One new station this past year was something one of our GTA assistant directors came up with. She contacted a local store who donated flowers, soil, and small pots. There were key words for inspiration set out, and visitors could write a poem inspired by one of the key words, and then use the soil to plant a flower in the pot to take home. Holding this event at the botanic garden gives participants the opportunity to interact with all senses—touching soil, seeing the vibrant colors of the flowers, hearing the birds and various wind chimes, tasting the snacks and drinks, smelling the flowers and herbs. A chance to slow down and be mindful and aware of their surroundings, to write poetry to express their creative side. As I stood at the station to write my poem, something about the three different colors of flowers to choose from made me slow down, take in the beauty of each, and what emotions each elicited inside of me. Walking around the beautiful garden is already a mindfulness activity but choosing one flower just for me to take home, made each petal and pop of color more alive, and I felt more aware of the joy of spring and hopefulness that the flowers brought with them. I hope that the Stillwater community participants felt that same awe and joy.

The community of Stillwater has about 30% of residents who live below the poverty level, which is something many are not aware of, including myself until a couple of years ago when I was interviewing community partners for a research project. There is a sometimes tangible line between the OSU community and the Stillwater community—town and gown, if you will, as is the name of our community theater. Events like this give an opportunity for everyone to come together and plant the same flowers, and use the same watercolors. To develop empathy while practicing yoga together by the chickens, and laughing together at our bodies’ resistance to the movements.

While the nature walk does a lot of wonderful things for the community, it might not be as accessible an event for those in a lower socioeconomic status in Stillwater. There are transportation issues, as the botanic garden is a little out of the way and not very close to campus. It is also not located by neighborhoods and/or sidewalks that would make it easy to walk to. While conducting interviewing for an IRB approved research project, we noticed that community partners brought up again and again the high poverty level in Stillwater, and the need to make any kind of community writing accessible for Stillwater residents in that demographic.

We have had a long-term goal of opening a community writing center, and are seeking grants to fund that. In the meantime, we looked for places in the community where we may be able to hold a pop-up community writing center. After looking into several options, we ended up opting for the community food pantry. This is a location where many low-income residents have already made arrangements to travel to once a month to get their groceries, plus there are other resources at the food pantry, such as free haircuts, so it is a one-stop shop for many community members.

As with many partnerships in this small town, we had some hesitations about using this location. The nonprofit is run by conservative Christians, and while community participants do not have to subscribe to a certain religion in order to receive groceries there, there are religious markers at the food pantry. Many times when walking up to the front, there are chalk drawings with phrases like “Jesus loves you,” which might be more encouraging and comforting for some community members than others. But there are other community norms, such as the volunteer dress code, that could make some volunteers feel less welcomed. We hadn’t noticed the dress code initially when making initial contacts with the food pantry for the tentative pop up, and no one mentioned it when giving the authors a tour. But a few days before our first pop-up was scheduled, the food pantry was advertising a need for volunteers to help community members with shopping for groceries. I (Laura) clicked on the information, and one of the links was to the dress code. No sleeveless or mid-riffs allowed, which is obviously pointed towards female volunteers. Having grown up in a fundamentalist Christian church myself, familiar feelings of shame washed over me as I thought through which of my dresses I typically wear to the writing center would even work, as I prefer sleeveless. And most of all, feelings of protectiveness of our tutors washed over me.

We do not have a dress code in our center, which is something I am proud of. I am not going to police a female tutor’s dress and tell them if they volunteer at the community pop up that they have to make sure their shoulders and mid-riff aren’t showing. And how would we handle it if one of our tutors was shamed by a food pantry staff person? Modesty culture is certainly tied to rape culture, among other problematic ideals. But this is also the community in which we live, and there aren’t a lot of community partnership options in this small town. In addition to policing dress, we had to wonder how LGBTQ+ tutors would be treated. If “modesty” is being enforced at the food pantry, it is probably safe to assume that any LGBTQ+ identity is considered sinful. Two people who participated in the pop up identify as non-binary. We had concerns about how tutors would be treated, yet we moved forward.

Looking back on this community writing pop-up, we reflect on the various needs this community food pantry served. Food is a physiological need that none of us can survive without. Getting a haircut, might be related to esteem. Getting a haircut helps someone feel confident about themselves and how they look. Writing can fulfill myriad needs.

We certainly assist with practical needs such as resumes and cover letters, and we have had several community members come work with us on creative writing projects related to community or personal issues. Mathieu stated in an interview with Christopher Minnix, ”And that’s what I like about community-based writing and public writing as goals for Writing Studies because they are always about trying to imagine something that’s not yet, whether it’s a way to frame an issue, a campaign, or whatever. I think that focus on building something rather than tearing something down, at least for me, is really necessary. I find it very emotionally draining to be just tearing things down. It’s not how I want to spend my day.”

In our community writing center, we hope to work with community individuals on projects that speak to the whole person and their worth. Some community members seem to feel embarrassed at the food pantry and avoid eye contact. We want to treat people with dignity, empathize, connect with them on a creative level, and give them that resource to work on the creativity inside of them. One person who talked with our tutor has had tragic life circumstances and wants to write as a way to grieve. Writing connects with mindfulness, expression, and the inner self in a way that not many other outlets do. A way for a person to not only get physical needs met, but to express other inner parts of themselves.

Kindness, Respect, and Love as a Way of Being

Like the Stillwater communities we work with, our staff, too, consists of people with differing viewpoints and agendas—and sometimes this causes conflict. To work with a large and diverse writing center staff brings challenges, particularly when building and working with the complexities of community writing projects. In our own administrative work, we have aimed to bring in a rhetoric of respect not just in our community partnerships, but in our work with our staff and one another. This rhetoric “entails recognition of multiple views, approaches, abilities, and limitations,” and it allows for people to recognize the complexities and contradictions of working with individuals, especially in the attempt to bring about positive change for communities of writers. While we know that some discourse is not acceptable and some ideology is based solely on hate—therefore not a viewpoint worth discussing—we also are aware that not everyone will always agree on a view or perspective, and we can still work with them to accomplish a goal. Having our tutors recognize the web of relations (Cooper) we create with one another, with the writers we meet, helps in preparing tutors to engage in mindful writing. As Marilyn Cooper writes in The Ecology of Writing, “Writing is one of the activities by which we locate ourselves in the enmeshed systems that make up the social world. It is not simply a way of thinking but more fundamentally a way of acting” (373). Having our tutors recognize that writing is a way we act in the world changes the way they see their role and how they work with students; recognizing that we are all enmeshed in different systems of the social world allows us to work with difference in ways that are productive, and to engage in conflict in productive ways.

This way of thinking about writing—as a mindful way of being in and with the world—has allowed us to have difficult conversations with our staff when it comes to working in the local pop-up writing center with the dress code. The tutors who work there come and openly talk about what it means to do activist work within institutional spaces—whether that be in the food pantry or at OSU. Working in spaces with missions that conflict with who we are and what we do is part of the complicated experience of working with different communities—and very often, when we continue a community partnership, it comes down to agency we have in doing the work and being potentially a change-agent to the people who use the services. As of now, the pantry has not yet made comments to our staff about their dress, nor mentioned the dress-code. A tutor, who is non-binary, has told us that the work they have done with the community members has been rewarding to their own work as a writer, and believes that the work we are doing in that space is needed. As of now, they do not feel monitored, policed, or unsafe. We are now brainstorming ways in which we can make our mission more visible and prominent in this space—how we create a place in a space that might be hostile to some of our initiatives, including working with and empowering the LGBTQ+ communities. Ideas to promote events and community writing projects are currently on our agenda, in which we can create new public spaces that foster the inclusion work we so deeply believe in, in a space that starts from the pop-up but expands and evolves into something else entirely.

One way we think about teaching a rhetoric of respect for our staff (beyond just readings in our staff education curriculum) is to create events that build community in the writing center. Just this past semester, we had LGBTQ+ mixers, a writing retreat for tutors, a tea hour with undergraduate tutors, and our annual holiday party. Community events for our staff are commonplace; pizza nights to decompress after a long orientation, to welcome new tutors, and movie nights in the WC happened frequently. While we resist family metaphors in the writing center and echo McKinney who pushes back at the “grand narratives,” that writing centers are “cozy places,” we also know that creating opportunities for tutors to build community models the type of mindful actions we want to create for writers. Generosity and kindness are not “innate” qualities or characteristics, but we believe, are concepts and values that should be taught and can be learned. Beth Boquet writes about kindness in her keynote on intentional kindness in writing center pedagogy:

Too often we think of kindness as a quality someone either possesses or not. We admire a kind person as a rare object. We speak of kindness as a random act, something that surprises us entirely…Kindness, however, is really a habit, an orientation, something we practice, and indeed, can become better at. Kindness is something we practice in relation to community, and some kindnesses are not associated with any one individual but with a sense of collective purpose (25-26).

Kindness was foregrounded in our contemplative pedagogy not because we are “nice” people, but because it made our space better for all involved. It is something we work on and practice on a daily basis, because it can be so hard to do. For us, the type of intentional kindness Boquet speaks of is reminiscent to bell hooks and her work on Buddhism and love. hooks writes in Toward a Worldwide Culture of Love, “To work for peace and justice we begin with the individual practice of love, because it is there that we can experience firsthand love’s transformative power.” Love and kindness, key concepts in mindful WC pedagogy, are crucial in our teaching and tutoring at the OSU WC and these concepts are experiential. Being present and practicing such concepts were important to us as administrators, and while these community events we organized sometimes seemed effortless, it was not until the surge of the COVID-19 pandemic did we realize how difficult this work really was.

Staff education looked much different when lockdown orders came in 2020. The immediate concern was for providing excellent online writing instruction for students who would need help more than ever. The administrative team put all of its efforts into sharing best practices in online learning, as well as creating training materials and curriculum for asynchronous feedback. While many people praised the WC for the “seamless” transition we made online (our WC already offered online sessions and our tutors were prepared for this transition in ways perhaps composition instructors were not), we did not realize how much our tutors were struggling. Staff meetings that we had emphasized the importance of taking care of the writers we worked with and making sure to spend time talking through their issues or struggles with online learning, but there was hardly any emphasis on tutors taking care of themselves or what administrative leadership could do to help tutors holistically. The days were gone when an administrator could just be in the center overhearing conversations happening, or when a tutor could walk into our offices for a conversation. The crosstalk that could so seamlessly happen before a staff meeting, over pizza, about someone’s weekend that might lead to an issue the WC needs to address did not happen over Zoom. Our focus on making Zoom meetings as useful and quick as possible did away many of our community building efforts. In other ords, with a staff of 60+ tutors, both graduate and undergraduate students, we prioritized efficiency over the slow, difficult work of brainstorming and dwelling with one another during difficult times. The disembodied online spaces left us all feeling tired and perhaps even empty, when once our meetings had us energized and excited.

As we continued on with remote learning, it was clear the WC staff was getting exhausted and agitated in ways we never experienced before. Snarky comments would be made by tutors, tutors who we valued and enjoyed working with. It wasn’t until one of our assistant directors, a graduate student, mentioned a past party we had (pre-pandemic) and how she felt the WC was losing its sense of community that we recognized how difficult the community initiatives we would plan for the center were,d how long it took to build them up—and how quickly to could unravel. As Rousculp writes, “Respect implies a different type of relationship, one that is grounded in perception of work, in esteem for another— as well as for self” (24-5).

While we emphasized respecting the writers and students we worked with, I realized there was less of an emphasis on respecting one another—on holding each other in esteem and to some degree, celebrating one another, too. While still in lockdown, in Spring ’21, we decided we had to do some type of community event for the tutors. So many aspects of our daily life were still uncertain, and you can tell the tutors were experiencing varying degrees of burnout, many of us were neglecting our mental health, many of our tutors were experiencing tragedies related to the pandemic, and all of us were wondering if this was how our daily life would like: connecting through Zoom boxes. While we learned a good deal of how to provide excellent and accessible education through remote learning, we would be lying if we didn’t say something was lost: the embodied responses of learning and laughing and building community. While our community event had to be online, we knew we wanted to engage with our senses, to do something tactile, and to engage with one another through being present. We needed to create a space for “creative placemaking,” (Boquet), such spaces as a community of people to dwell deeply together, to engage in the material realities of our local environments. A painting night immediately came to our minds, and so, with our budget we purchased canvases, brushes, and acrylic paint. Paint and sip parties became all the rage during the pandemic, and so we found a good organization that you could purchase an online video tutorial, with a skilled painter breaking down a painting for participants. When looking for what we should paint, the answer was obvious as soon as we saw it: one of Claude Monet’s bridges over a water lily pond. A bridge: the symbol of building unions and establishing bonds across communities—an engineering construct that looks simple, but take years to construct, often with much difficulty and strife. It was the type of embodied symbolism we needed at this event to explain what we wanted to say to our staff, but not necessarily through text and explicit communication. We all knew what this event was about.

The paint night was one of the WC’s biggest turnouts—with not just our WC staff coming, but former tutors, and even composition instructors Zooming in. While everyone was getting their paintbrushes and water cups ready, we chatted in ways we never did before—with people talking and giggling via Zoom about their lack of painting skills, other folks using the chat box to type in dumb jokes. Once the tutorial started, we were all engaging in our own individual painting, but enjoying the process of how we were all working towards the same, envisioned goal: building the bridge. We laughed when the painter went at rapt speed making the lilies, some of us desperate to keep up; many requests for pauses or “do-overs” were had. Some tutors had their kids come to the party, and they, too, were engaged with their art. As we wrapped up our paint night, some tutors shared their works of art—and it was fun to see how different the same versions looked, and to admire the beauty in the subtle differences each artist took, intentionally or not. As we were saying our goodbyes, tutors thanked us and one another. “I really needed that,” one tutor said. “This was the best time I had in a while,” another said, almost embarrassed. I recognized I too needed to feel that sense of community with my staff again, for us to work together to build more bridges together. To return again to bell hooks and her work on community in all about love:

We can begin the process of making a community wherever we are. We can begin by sharing a smile, a warm greeting, a bit of conversation; by doing a kind deed or by acknowledging kindness offered to us. Doing this we engage in love practice […] we lay the foundation for the building of community with strangers. The love we make in community stays with us wherever we go. With this knowledge as our guide, we make any place we go, a place where we return to love. (141)

This paint night, simple in its concept and outcome, was an important night for the WC as we began again to recognize the importance of love as action, doing and giving and acknowledging kindness as practice, and creating community wherever we are. This helped us recognize and respect one another in doing the difficult work we were asked to do—and showed the staff how we respected, and needed them, too. Love as our guiding practice carries us through the difficult times and allows us to do the difficult work in working with local communities.

Celebrating Writing: Continuing on Mindfully

With the passing of Oklahoma HB 1775, which among other things, prohibits Critical Race Theory in public institutions, the general atmosphere and leadership at OSU are limiting anti-racism and other social justice initiatives on campus. We are once again in an uncertain spot as WC admin, with a diverse staff who are anxious and concerned about how these changes affect them, and also limits what we are allowed to say and do as a center. Upper admin at our institution have already made us remove our antiracism statement from the WC website and shut down an antiracism tutoring initiative. But our social justice work remains just as, if not more, important, and navigating doing the important work of campus and community change and meeting our staff’s needs, while complicated, is a top priority. We still want to focus on the good that we are doing and can do as a center. One of our Black GTAs recently commented on how much it meant to her just to see other tutors of color working in the WC at our PWI institution, and how important that is for making students of color on campus feel welcome in the WC. How can we, with intentional kindness, a rhetoric of respect, and a framework of hooks’ love continue to move towards change and developing intentional mindfulness while navigating this political climate on our campus.

We know we cannot do this work alone, and it must be through collective efforts. In collaboration with the Composition program, the library, and academic advising, we are currently planning a Celebrating Writing event at the end of the semester. The purpose of this event is to mindfully celebrate all writers and to recognize and value the different types of writing students and instructors do. This event is a collaborative one, in which students, tutors, and instructors work together to create a journal that showcases their work and research, with those interested in publishing in the journal working with a tutor throughout the semester to have their piece ready for publication. We’re creating different types of awards to celebrate writing, awards highlighting multimodality, social justice work, innovative research, and stylistic experimentation. These awards help those of us teaching writing to showcase to the university how codemeshing is essential pedagogy, celebrating linguistic difference and rhetorical agility. This event is highly relational, with each individual participating recognizing their work is in response to a situation, to other individuals, and they’re involved in an ongoing dialogue. Through listening to students, we’re focusing on the process of writing, and celebrating excellent collaborators, strong listeners, those invested in revising processes. Leading events like this on campus—in which we are promoting the work done by students and instructors and highlighting the importance of community and difference—are ways in which we continue developing intentional mindfulness during the difficult political climate we’re in, as we’re celebrating good writing and pedagogy.

The planning of this event has been at the urging of the WC staff, who never let us as directors of the center lose sight of the bigger picture. There have been times in which we have wanted to quit—particularly during these difficult political times. However, the tutors—particularly our tutors invested in social justice work and from marginalized communities—never let us off the hook. Their energies around work for inclusion and their passion for having all students mindfully recognize themselves as writers give us the fuel we need to continue the work. The relationships we have cultivated with our community partners and our staff help us carry on regardless. Without kindness, without respect, and without love—this work cannot be done.

Works Cited

Boquet, Beth. It’s All Coming Together, Right Before My Eyes: On Poetry, Peace, and Creative Placemaking in Writing Centers. The Writing Center Journal, vol 34, no. 2, 2015, pp. 17–31.

Cooper, Marilyn. The Ecology of Writing. College English vol 48, no.4, 1986, pp. 364–375.

Grimm, Nancy. Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times. Heinemann, 1999.

Grutsch McKinney, Jackie. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers. Utah State UP, 2013.

hooks, bell. all about love. Harper Collins, 2000.

———. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. Routledge, 2013.

———. Toward a Worldwide Culture of Love. Lion’s Roar, 8 Nov. 2022, https://www.lionsroar.com/toward-a-worldwide-culture-of-love/.

———. Love as the Practice of Freedom. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, Routledge, 2006, pp. 243–250.

Minnix, Christopher. ‘Imaging Something Not Yet’—The Project of Public Writing: A Conversation with Paula Mathieu. Composition Forum, vol. 36, Summer 2017. https://www.compositionforum.com/issue/36/paula-mathieu-interview.php.

Rousculp, Tiffany. Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center. NCTE, 2014.