My post today will be a little different as I touch upon a unique piece that I had the pleasure of reading this week, a blog post made by a writing center tutor in training at Stanford. It raises some important topics that must be considered within composition studies as a whole, and on a smaller scale, within the walls of the university writing center.

The blog post, http://crossculturalrhetoric.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/a-diverse-discussion/, raises the issue of race and diversity in written rhetorical situations. The author talks briefly about student fears in publishing writing involving race and racial experience. Part of me feels that there is an expectation, almost, for international students to incorporate their unique cultural experiences into their writing. This expectation in itself is not a bad thing, as personal, cross-cultural experience is rich ground for developing meaningful discourse. However, when a student is afraid to publish or submit a piece for race related content, we, as tutors, must step in to enable the student to feel confident in their work. As the author of the post points out, there is safety in anonymity. And so we must make sure that we can encourage our students without being overbearing and making them even more uncomfortable.

As part of expanding our abilities as tutors, we have to have a unique approach to the writing of students from a variety of national and socio-cultural backgrounds. In my paper on making writing center pedagogy more inclusive, I mention a tabula rasa, or blank slate approach.  This does not mean colorblindness or an indifference to a student’s racial or cultural background, rather it means that we approach the student and the piece without the biases that have been ingrained into our approaches. We often have a tendency to scrutinize some pieces for different reasons, depending upon the cultural background of the student. For example, we might approach an international student’s paper with a stricter eye for grammatical errors and not extend the same level of stringency to a domestic student’s writing. This is undoubtedly an unfair approach and it is often inadvertent, potentially developed through past experience.

We have to remember that multilingualism does not disadvantage students, in other words, the relationship between the languages is not necessarily a one way street where knowledge of one informs the practical application of the other. Rather, as Canagarajah puts it, there is an equal exchange, where multilingual authors accomplish rhetorical tasks according to their needs and the needs of their audience(s). When we validate our students for bringing their unique perspectives and skills to their pieces we encourage them to continue developing their creativity and simultaneously remove the confidence related hindrances preventing them from submitting their work to a public, intellectual forum. Everyone needs occasional validation and encouragement in order to thrive, and so, balancing this encouragement with an open, unbiased approach will more than likely improve student confidence and promote their growth as writers and academics.