During my education, I have found nothing but support from my writing teachers when expressing myself in academic writing. From my first composition class to my creative writing courses, I was always encouraged to use writing to express my experiences and what is important to me. Even thinking on my paper for this class, I am thinking about doing it on educating senior citizens, comes from my experience. Some personal stories from my life still need to be worked out before I would ever introduce them to an audience. I have yet to reach that final act segment in some shows going on in my life and would need to see their value to others before I used them in an academic setting. 

During my reading of Stewart, I noticed how easily I flowed through the passages and understood their importance and relevance. Stories are most likely my favorite thing about being alive and having those stories be apart of academic literature gets nothing but thumbs up from me!

One writer talked about her experience working for a WC at a PWI.  Trevino (2020) writes that the WC provided a “space where I can openly discuss the continual renegotiation of the relationship among my mind-heart body, and space, and where I can also openly discuss resistance to and possible ways to subvert problematic discourses and practices of exclusion with not only the other tutors but with writers who also need my support beyond writing.”  She says that the WC she works in offers her a “place to be brave, purposefully creating a braver space (Faison, 2020).”  The WC she talks about exists beyond four walls.  I really liked that.

The second story talked about designing the WC to move beyond the idea that the design of the space reflects the middle-class, while simultaneously dismissing different racial and cultural comforts of people of color.  She describes colors used, and furniture, and how the provost referred to the pronoun “they” when saying “they deserved nice things.”  The main question asked was - who do they mean by “they”?  It was this language and design that caused people of color to feel oppressed and uncomfortable in a space that was supposed to be anti-institutional.  The idea behind all of this being that if the WC is supposed to be called “home” - what ideologies are behind that description?  And how do we change those ideologies to create an inclusive space?

Another key point the author made was that institutional diversity is a factor that affects writing support.  This was displayed predominantly in the article in Part 1 I read by Faison and Trevino.  They both sought out, and worked at, writing centers and found them to be somewhat oppressive and not inclusive.  It’s a problem.  How do people navigate spaces where they’re not being heard and are being obstructed?

Being a graduate student is lonely.  Being a graduate student without writing support is even more lonely, and again, I speak from my position as privileged.  So, my question after this, which aligns with Lockett, is how do we design, and make accessible, the resources we have available to more fully support student success?

 

described with presenting opportunities for “we”. Jackson et al. (2020) recounted a busy schedule which made it difficult to find time to cowrite this book section, but felt the opportunity for them, as well as professors of color trying to enter the space of academic writing, was too great to pass up. Tiger Woods’ family described a similar feeling Tiger felt when playing golf. 

Jackson et al. (2020) go on to lay out the differences in their experience and research with mentoring what they call “sister-scholar-friends” and the literature in academia as related to mentorship. The comparison between white formal mentors and black informal mentors is shown as two relationships, one devoid of emotional and spiritual support with the formal mentor, and another of “wisdom and sound doctrine” from their informal mentor of color. Though Jackson et al. (2020) go on to say this perception is not necessarily a rule, authors highlighted white instructors and mentors who are capable of close connection with their students of color, the other authors mostly agreed their most influential mentors were people of color. 

As a white teacher who has a majority people of color in their class, these words are invaluable to me as a try and create bridges and relationships with students of color. The section on successful white mentors gave me a firsthand account of how differences in race can affect student-mentor relationships. 

In a nutshell, this piece is about epistemic injustice. If I grasp it, that entails a situation of not  being taken seriously as a knower based on prejudices. If you suffer from epistemic injustice, someone might not be valuing your accomplishments because you’re--something else: a woman, a person of color, etc.; essentially anything not, what Godbee refers to as part of the “mythical norm” (4). This in turn causes trauma, and in particular (as it’s the point of the article) in graduate women. 

Apparently, this is a very common thing, to be “presumed incompetent” (3) because you’re not a middle-class, straight, White guy. The author gives many examples of this and it’s really quite compelling, if disconcerting. My experience in graduate school has not been so. This is my third (out of five) semester and with one notable exception, all my professors have been awesome. 

As the article progresses, eventually we get to the part I liked: what to do about it, and how to counter it. It gets down to mentoring. We need to find someone to be a partner, to hear our voices and our stories, and help us put them forward. I particularly liked her description of utilizing “power with” versus “power over” (8). That really works for me. 

This piece, to me, was not challenging (in the best of ways). Many of our articles hurt my brain. This was honestly business as usual for me. I tend to write the way Stewart describes. While most of our classmates have been boots on the ground classroom teachers for a decade or two, I made my bones as a human interest writer and homeschool mama. While I also like her conversational writing style and simple, clear suggestions, the validation was nice. I guess for me, it gets back to the oft quoted, “All writing is personal” (164). That’s how I roll. 

Russel-Pinson points out the underlying emotional factors which may lead to procrastination, staying away from the edict of students just being lazy. Stress related to past, present, or future anxiety are all symptoms of a procrastinating student (Russel-Pinson et al., 2020). 

We then get an interesting story about a doctoral student named Diana who is described as the model student, but they run into problems when beginning to write about their thesis. Russel-Pinson et al. (2020) point out Diana’s problem may stem from a term known as maladaptive perfectionism, defined as the need to write perfectly and the inability to do so, which creates anxiety which pushes students away from completing academic goals. Jakub suffers from procrastination as well due to a disagreement with their advisor (Russel-Pinson et al., 2020).

Some of the relief from Russel-Pinson and Haadi Jafarian (2020) includes setting up weekly meetings with doctoral students, as to make sure they have a motivation to continue with their work, but allowing the student to set the agenda, as to avoid situations like Jakubs. For Diana, Russel-Pinson (2020) advises reminding high performing students of past achievements as a reassuring measure, as well as sharing difficult times in the advisors past experience to reaffirm doctoral thesis writers emotions as normal. 
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