Writing Center Reporting Strategies That Subvert Institutional Absurdities

But what is “normal” in the field of writing center administration? Consider how writing center administrators are often expected to report on their center’s activities or budgets. Typically, the successful receipt of our institutional documents, from annual review narratives to budget and space requests, is strongly connected to our ability to frame the writing center in transactional terms, meaning our ability to convey, in quantitative ways, what the institution receives in return for funding. Yet these high stakes institutional documents often reproduce systemic inequities by silencing or erasing non-quantifiable lived experiences, changing the ways in which we tell our stories. We are encouraged to engage with administrative speak in order to justify our writing center’s value in relation to “utilization” and “student credit hours,” or in relation to student success measures such as “resiliency,” “retention rates,” or “impact,” thus attempting to use such language to clarify the texture of writing center experiences. However, this reporting strategy often results in positioning writing center work in relation to capital. Nicole Caswell et al. (2016) note that the new directors in their research study “showed sophistication in navigating tricky administrative waters. They understood when issues carried political significance and seemed always viscerally aware of where they stood in terms of power within the institution” (p. 178). This awareness is keen because, as Alexandria Lockett (2019) notes, writing centers are “under all kinds of surveillance” (p. 22). Therefore, we take on institutional language in order to continue our funding lines or to be considered for that plum new spot in the library. But we’ve started to notice that engaging in institutional language, which ultimately values transactional framing, has rhetorical consequences, and we aren’t talking about increased funding. Further, using the language of the institution in our documents limits the ways in which we can tell the story of our respective writing centers. Laura Greenfield (2019), in challenging writing centers toward a radical praxis, reminds us that “language itself is engaged in a terrain of struggle” (p. 100). As Caswell, et al. (2016) write, much of our work is “labor intensive, ongoing, often unplannable, and […] highly relational” (p. 173), and much of it doesn’t “count” in annual reviews, at least, depending on how you tell the story. 

We started to notice that the language of the institution emphasizes institutional expectations we can only describe as “absurd.” We define absurdity as a persistence in the unreal that does not respond to the real urgency of the situation. Absurdity persists in the status quo, and this results in narratives about our value for the institution which tends to be measured by numbers, usage, retention, and budget concerns. Examples of absurdity include requests from upper administration to provide usage rates or to cut tutors from the payroll during the initial COVID-19 shutdown. These requests conflict with the writing center’s values to support students and our student workers. As we emerge from COVID-19, it seems absurd to continue working within the same frameworks and the increasingly absurd elements involved in presenting our worth and effectiveness to our institutions. We now notice, really notice, certain unsustainable working conditions. Writing our institutional documents brought these conditions further into focus as we began to notice the contrast between what we were expected to perform in these documents and our writing center values. We urge writing center administrators to lay claim to their values and share lived experiences of writing centers where they can.

As a group of writing center directors who frequently commiserate with and support one another, we recognize the liberatory nature of sharing stories. Our collaborative writing group, which we’ve named Radical Sandwiches, meets weekly during our lunch break to reflect on and analyze our respective administrative experiences. Similar to the authors of Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice, “we share a passion for and commitment to certain ways of knowing and practicing what we are always coming to know” (Geller et al., 2007, p. 114). We do this by sharing our stories with each other through text chats and zoom meetings. We also recognize the need to fold these stories into a pedagogy of resistance and equitable transformation. As writing center directors with doctorates in rhetoric and composition, our rhetorical training has taught us to be savvy and strategic when we file our administrative reports and budget requests. We were all hired specifically to direct writing centers in tenure-track positions. While each of us is housed in different institutional contexts, we tend toward administrative approaches that speak to our rhetorical training. We all work in public institutions: Amanda and Beth work in regional comprehensive universities, and Celeste and Erica work in Research II universities. Our administrative and teaching duties vary based on our contracts and home departments: Celeste and Erica teach one course per semester due to writing center administrative and/or research release time, Amanda teaches two courses per semester with writing center administrative release time, and Beth is library faculty with full administrative, research, and service duties. These roles are distinctive in terms of how we strategize administratively. Further, we approach administration with feminist values that attend to gender and affect in our labor and daily lives. At the same time, each of us has committed to antiracist writing center practices while working to maintain cognizance and critique about our positioning as cisgendered white women. We are conscious of the demographics in our field: in a review of writing center administrators and diversity, Sarah Banschbach Valles, Rebecca Day Babcock, and Karen Keaton Jackson (2017) found that “writing center leadership is not as diverse as we had hoped or expected to find” and that the lore of writing center directors being mainly white women is not far from the data (Conclusion section, para. 12).

Given our status, our identifications both assist in our ability to disrupt administrative discourses and limit what we can perceive and change. For instance, up until now, we believed it was strategically sound to frame our writing centers using the language of the institution. After overseeing pandemic-era student services that have been vital to student success during a time when students have struggled with more than they can manage, we now return to our institutional documents with an awareness of absurd institutional expectations. If, as many of us have discovered, our institutions have failed us in terms of supporting students and faculty’s needs during times of crisis, then perhaps now is the time to be more explicit about our writing center values. In posing and implementing these strategies at our institutions, we understand that our particular roles in the academic hierarchy strengthen our capacity to question convention and upper administration. We also understand that this questioning is risky for most WCAs, given the precarity of contractual positions and the ubiquity of budgetary and employment cuts. The strategies we suggest happen in contextualized, kairotic moments; therefore, we are not suggesting a redesign of reporting systems. Instead, we identify strategies for reframing reporting that could be adapted to different writing center contexts. Working in unsustainable conditions has heightened the need for a radical reframing of how we approach institutional evaluations and has reinforced the importance of engaging in feminist administrative practices that center the lived experience of tutors, students, and administrators.

While we agree that quantitative assessment of our practices is important and serves a purpose, we would like to expand what we assess and measure and ensure that what we measure tells the nuanced story of our writing center practices and reflects our writing center values. We propose a radical shift toward centering writing center values and the lived experiences of writing center personnel in evaluations and institutional reporting. We see this shift as an opportunity to push back against unsustainable practices and institutional absurdities we encounter. In this article, we take up the idea of intentional reporting strategies with a human element: in other words, how we tell the stories of our writing centers. Going beyond the initial work we have done to respond to the pandemic and call up real-time rhetorical strategies, we have become more deliberate and strategic about our institutional reporting. We examine how we shape high stakes documents with measurements of what we value. Yanar Hashlamon (2021) invites administrators to move toward “community-based systems of support” that emphasize lived experiences and experiential knowledge—two things that resist quantification (Introduction section, para. 4). In translating certain values that refuse bean-counting and quantitative reporting, we push against the hypocrisies evident in institutional visions versus material conditions, on the ground, at these institutions. We reflect on how our stories and values have helped us generate language and strategies for shaping high stakes documents that can subvert institutional absurdity. In doing so, we hope these narratives resonate and invite creative solutions for more equitable and just measures of assessment and institutional reporting.

The Limitations of a Transactional Framework

In our field, it has become almost commonplace for us to frame what we do in a series of transactions. WCAs often report their work to upper administration through numbers, e.g., student visits; utilization percentages; labor costs. Neal Lerner (1997) prompted writing center administrators to consider the ways in which they can express their value to the institution through assessment of writing center practices. Fifteen years later, William Macauley (2012), in discussing writing center assessment, asked administrators to consider, “[c]an it be measured or counted?” (p. 52). Data generated from these measurements and counting are utilized for yearly assessment reports typically called annual reports—outward-facing documents that illustrate the usefulness of a writing center and report on its annual programming and everyday practices. Furthermore, writing center studies scholarship frequently positions annual reports as the exigency for assessing writing center practices; these annual reports detailing writing center assessment are then often used to justify funding (Gofine, 2012; Lerner 2012). Because of their connection to possible funding, how we approach annual reports can have a material effect on writing center practices. Andrea Zachary (2005) encourages WCAs to engage with technical writing strategies to better convey writing center practices to a busy audience and to situate these practices within institutional goals and missions. Often, similar advice is directed toward new WCAs and explicitly encourages the use of institutional language in funding requests (Kinkead & Simpson, 2000). We acknowledge that annual reports are high stakes documents that are often tied to visibility and sustainability, and for these reasons and more, it is important that we pay attention to how we represent our work in them to our audiences and stakeholders. For example, Geller et al. (2007) rightly point out that “[f]rom water cooler talk to formal annual reports, we are complicit in filling the gap with words that attempt to be recognized, accepted, and funded” (p. 118). We agree that we should be able to speak to student credit hours and understand how our institution prioritizes retention and recruitment (Kinkead & Simpson, 2000). This messaging is important to help frame writing center practices that align with goals related to offices of student success, such as retention and sustainability.

However, we believe that using a transactional framework reduces writing center work to numbers on a spreadsheet, one of many absurdities that asks WCAs to ignore or crowd out the robust relational work that happens in writing centers. And it can be challenging to articulate our own writing center values when they may be at cross-purposes with institutional values that assume different frameworks. After the pandemic, we noticed that the stories we wanted to tell about tutors and students in the writing center did not fit into a narrative framework focused on numbers, so our annual reports felt incomplete. We also started noticing that faithful adherence to a transactional framework no longer benefited our funding. So why continue writing up our practices within these limiting frameworks? And to what end? We seek to enact change in institutional norms, not change what we value. Most significantly, telling the stories of our practices through transactional terms not only reifies institutional language that positions higher education within a capitalist framework, but it also results in the obfuscation of work that we value, the work that is highly individualized and relational. Furthermore, taking on institutional language to convey our message elides how rhetoric functions to create new knowledge and affect action. In other words, if we uncritically take on institutional language to tell the story of what our writing centers do, not only do we feel internal conflict resulting from the clash of values, but also we prevent the possibility of enacting change at the institutional level. While we agree that quantitative assessment of our practices is important and serves a purpose, we seek to tell a more nuanced story of our writing center practices and our values.

Nancy Grimm (1999) warned us that writing centers were at risk for reproducing the same limiting frameworks institutions rely on to justify their own existence and practices, such as a fixation on grades and outcomes rather than a focus on growth as writers, something much more complex to measure. Resisting institutional values such as oppressive language ideology, and speaking back to the banking concept of education in favor of a more collaborative, co-constructed view of knowledge are often what draws us to writing center work. We see our work no longer on the margins, but subverting from the center. And this subversion is directly connected to absurdity: “[b]ecause it is in that [subversive] moment that normalizing practices and the assumptions that underlie them are exposed not only in their absurdity, but also in their destructive power” (Geller et al., 2007, p. 114). Before the pandemic, we had not noticed the absurdity (and destruction) in taking on institutional language in our annual reports. Since then, we have sought new ways of communicating what we value and conveying its complexity and labor-intensive nature. Our work is also gendered, in particular the affective dimension of our labor, and this informs our scholarship. Even though labor and gender are important components of our writing center stories, a transactional framework can easily obscure or muddle these aspects of our work. According to Anna Sicari (2022), ignoring the gendered nature of writing center work leads to burnout; further, this burnout affects the retention of women and those with intersectional, historically oppressed identities. The soft language of inclusion at many institutions doesn’t adequately describe the exigency of writing center burnout. Kelin Hull and Marilee Brooks-Gilles (2022), however, propose using relational framing to articulate how our practices are situated within a particular set of values that prioritize the relationships within the center, rather than just visits and numbers, and thus can inform how we approach annual reports.

For the remainder of this article, we discuss strategies for weaving in writing center values as we draft annual reports. We describe the aspects of reporting that lend themselves to resisting solely quantitative language. We start with ways to center writing center pedagogy and expertise. Then, we discuss ways to make writing center labor visible, acknowledging unsustainable or inequitable labor practices, and centering lived experiences and writing center values over numbers. Throughout, we offer examples from our annual reports, and identify ways our annual report language conveys our values, such as through practices of collaboration or culturally responsive mentorship. We conclude with a discussion on the importance of a through-line in relation to naming and repeating our values and goals. We leave readers with a few generative questions for writing and reflection as they prepare their own high-stakes documents.

Resisting Templates: Centering Writing Center Values

As we demonstrate in our literature review, we must go beyond transactional terms in sharing our centers’ stories. Rather than merely reporting on yearly statistics that perpetuate a focus on numbers, WCAs can leverage their annual reports to emphasize writing center values and the lived experiences of our students and staff. Because annual reports are an institutional artifact, they are not usually a genre that WCAs gain experience with until they are expected to produce one. Further, the format and contents of writing center annual reports necessarily differ across institutional contexts. However, as Anis Bawarshi (2003) explains, “there is room for resistance and transformation within genres, some genres more than others” (p. 93). We argue that this genre, because it has some ambiguity, can be generative for WCAs looking to resist institutional absurdity. An intentional approach to these reports may allow us to underscore writing center values and resist unsustainable or downright absurd institutional practices or expectations.

Each of us has written annual reports, and the contents and format of these reports differ depending on audience, purpose, and local contexts. For example, as a member of the library faculty, Beth’s report is included in the library’s Research and Public Service department’s annual report to the Library Dean. However, because Beth lobbied for, and received, additional funds for her center from another campus area, she is also required to submit a separate annual report on the success of her funding to the Vice Chancellor of Student Services, and she approaches this report differently, as we will describe below. Celeste’s annual report is submitted in a combined report along with Writing Arts, the department that houses the writing center. The annual report is then submitted to the Dean’s office which then draws from it to angle for support for the writing center through the Provost’s office. Amanda’s experience with annual reports began at her first institution, where, in building a writing center from the ground up, she had leeway in determining the content and form of the annual report to her department, Dean, and Provost. Now, in a similar situation at her current institution, Amanda’s budget has been pulled into its own line within the English department.  As a result, her reporting work is often a response to upper administrators’ queries about budget justifications. However, there is no deadline or expectation for an annual report at her current institution: not yet. Erica sends her annual report to multiple stakeholders, collaborators, and funding units; this wide audience informs how she structures her annual report narrative, paying close attention to the information she wants to feature in her annual report. She does this in addition to a standard form with a strict template that she fills out annually as an administrator for her Dean.

The below strategies represent intentional efforts, informed by embodied experiences, to push back against institutional absurdities. Although we note the productive possibilities of the ambiguity of the annual report genre, we acknowledge that many WCAs work within context-specific constraints for producing these reports. For example, reports collected via a standard university form may contend with character limits and specific fields. In other cases, we may feel constrained by previous iterations of our centers’ annual reports. Still, we believe it’s possible to use the genre of the report to highlight absurdities and place them in contrast with writing center values. To that end, we offer the following invention strategies for annual reports and other high-stakes documents. While there is overlap among these strategies, they may help readers draft reports that explicitly articulate their writing center values. Ultimately, it is our hope that engaging in these strategies will inspire a shift from institutional values that prioritize transactions towards values that prioritize relationships.

Strategy 1: Emphasizing writing center pedagogy and expertise

Because many writing center positions are precarious and there is often a gendered assumption that teaching and tutoring writing is menial labor, WCAs should be explicit about the necessary expertise for administering a successful and meaningful writing center. When Deans and Provosts are happy to throw money to corporate tutoring programs because of the promise of 24/7 tutoring availability, WCAs must feel called to emphasize how our work is situated in expertise that cannot be matched through outsourcing. Framing a writing center’s success only in terms of growth and quantity of consultations sets centers up to be compared to for-profit tutoring companies. Where possible, WCAs should look for opportunities to highlight the researched best practices of our pedagogies and daily praxis. For instance, WCAs can focus a hearty percentage of institutional documents on sharing the daily activities and labor of tutors, including their extensive, ongoing training and professional development. Additionally, WCAs can articulate the pedagogical theories that undergird our practices, including how we work to enact them.

In one example of Strategy 1, Beth’s most recent report highlighted the depth of cognitive and motivational scaffolding that she and her tutors were intentionally building into her center’s newer asynchronous feedback option. She chose this focus because, in a year marked by a significant shift in tutoring modalities and labor, she wanted to redefine success through the lens of writing center values. In her annual funding report, she chose to emphasize the quality of her writing center’s online services rather than focus on a statistical comparison of center visits, which were down due to a variety of pandemic-related factors. She focused instead on a qualitative assessment project she and her staff completed wherein they analyzed data from their asynchronous written feedback service. Beth and her staff sampled written feedback comments from the year and coded them according to the methods of instruction. In her report, she focused on key takeaways from the assessment that she thought would demonstrate how the service is situated in expertise. For example, when discussing the amount of comments that are typically included in each written feedback consultation, she wrote “while these comments vary in scope depending on the project, 94% of the consultations we observed incorporated cognitive scaffolding strategies, where tutors co-construct meaning with students to help them move their thinking toward a new understanding.” As a result, Beth was able to demonstrate the depth and scope of this new service, while also laying the foundation to discuss the considerable shift in labor that this new service represented.

Similarly, in her 2020-2021 annual report, Erica brought attention to the shift in tutor education which resulted from going remote. Like many centers, her tutors had to shift to 100% online tutoring and introduced asynchronous tutoring for the first time. The shift in tutoring modes demanded new tutor education on asynchronous tutoring along with a deeper engagement with synchronous online tutoring best practices. Erica highlighted her center’s additional tutor education in the first few paragraphs of the annual report, using it to frame the rest of the text:

The University Writing Center (UWC) tutor training, which had to immediately shift online last year, has morphed into something stronger. In coming up with new ways to train tutors for online work, UWC administrators used all of the technologies available, including creating a D2L Tutor Education shell with both synchronous and asynchronous content and new orientations to be delivered remotely each semester. In addition, UWC administrators work hard to ensure tutors understand the differences between the modes of delivery (face to face/ online synchronous/ asynchronous) as well as best practices in tutoring in each mode. For example, we have to work hard to ensure that the [asynchronous tutoring] does not turn into an editing service, and much of that has to do with setting students’ expectations. But it also means developing tutor education that centers on student learning in asynchronous spaces. This is an ongoing and iterative part of their training, and doing spot checks on [asynchronous tutoring sessions] and conducting official tutor observations each semester helps administrators identify topics for further tutor education.

She placed this narrative above the numbers so that readers encountered tutors’ lived experiences before reading about how many students were served. In this way, Erica emphasized the writing center practices she values: a robust tutor education program grounded in writing center research that provides an engaged learning experience for tutors. Well-trained and supported tutors are a necessary component to effective tutoring and writing center growth, a fact that is difficult to convey in quantitative terms and therefore often escapes upper administration.

Further, professionally developing tutors and orienting them to the field of writing center studies features in all of our reports. For example, we each ensure that our annual reports contain a section on scholarship, editorial work, academic conference attendance, and networking. We see this as more than just tooting our own horn. By providing this information, we position the writing center as a place where students professionally develop and come to know the field and the discourse, where mentoring occurs in mindful ways. Concurrently, our stories resist quantification and transactional framing.

Strategy 2: Making labor visible