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SSWCA Inclusivity Resources

One of the most important responsibilities we have as educators is to ensure we are supporting all students, regardless of who they are. SSWCA would like to take that a step further, and acknowledge the special space that is “the writing center”, and how we can not only support, but also embrace the identities of the students in our school community. Alongside our SSWCA Inclusivity Statement, SSWCA wanted to provide a running list of resources that could be used to make your writing center, or school community in general, a more inclusive space. We understand that this might look different; with current political pressures to avoid/include certain terminology in regards to equity and inclusivity, as well as each school’s context and director’s awareness, we know there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to this work. As a result, we have created “leveled” resources that could be used in your community.

As always with this work, this is a living document that will constantly be updated. We encourage you to email admin@sswca.org to pass along resources you may use in your school and give feedback for how implementation went in your school community.

General Websites and Books

• https://equityinthecenter.org/aww/
• https://www.nationalequityproject.org/resources
• https://www.learningforjustice.org/professional-development/webinars/speak-up-at-school-0
• https://www.learningforjustice.org/professional-development/webinars/confronting-implicit-bias
• https://www.learningforjustice.org/professional-development/webinars/what-is-white-privilege-really
• https://abolitionistteachingnetwork.org/

→ Cultivating Genius by Gholdy Muhammad

→ We Want to Do More than Survive by Bettina Love

Identity and Inclusivity

Videos:“The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie→ This popular TedTalk is a great introduction to the idea of monoliths and stereotypes. Adichie provides examples and anecdotes of how single stories, or single ideas of how someone or a group of people might be, are dangerous in perpetuating stereotypes. This might be a great way to discuss the different “types” of students who may come to your writing center, but also the dangers of categorizing/labeling those students as such. Articles/Journals: Activities and Writing Exercises: Unpacking Identity Lesson Plan→ In this lesson from Learning for Justice, formerly Teaching Tolerance, students will be able to define identity and learn more about assumptions we might make about people and their identities. Students will look at images of three individuals and make assumptions on their identity; later, they will learn more about that individual and what makes them who they are. There is a space for students to then reflect on assumptions made about them, and a space to create a list of identifiers about themselves. This is a great activity for writing center mentors when they are getting to know one another, but it is also a great activity to dispel some myths about students who may come to the space to receive support. This lesson can be deepened further depending on your school/center’s comfortability. Unpacking Diversity Lesson Plan→ In this lesson from Learning for Justice, formerly Teaching Tolerance, students will be able to define diversity, see examples of diversity in action, and support diversity in our schools and world. Students will start by comparing common euphemisms/sayings that are common in the United States to those common in other countries. This lesson in particular pushes teachers and leaders to consider how they handle particular situations that may arise in classroom interactions. Teachers could easily adapt these teacher-facing scenarios to scenarios that may occur in the writing center amongst tutors. Unpacking Action Lesson Plan→ In this lesson from Learning for Justice, formerly Teaching Tolerance, students will be able to define action and identify possible actions that can be taken in their community/world. Students will analyze a variety of actions and how those actions might try to achieve a goal. This lesson could be easily adapted to consider how the writing center and the act of tutoring or service can be an action. This lesson is a strong activity that can be modified for a school’s individual context, as well as student interests. Books and Other Resources: Everyday Advocacy→ This text is a collection of essays from English Language Arts teachers from around the country who have made strides in terms of advocating for their students, school, and community as it relates to Literacy. The essays are frontloaded with a step-by-step how-to chapter on being an advocate in your school. This text focuses less on students and more on how policies are created and changed; this text encourages teachers to be advocates for their students, create programs and policies, and engage with a network of other educators to affect change. There is a poignant chapter from Jeff Austin, SSWCA member and director of Skyline Writing Center on how to advocate for a writing center space that is equitable for all. This resource may be helpful for teachers or directors who are looking to create or advocate for a writing center, be a leader in their school community, or be inspired by the ideas of other educators in the field.

Advocacy + Culturally Responsive Teaching

Videos: Responding to Hate and Bias in Schools→ This webinar, organized in conjunction with the NEA and Learning for Justice, explores the presence of hate and bias in schools. Targeted for teachers and administrators, the slides in the webinar explore the recent wave of hate in the United States and how schools handle those situations as they arise. There is a great “School Climate Questionnaire”, a resource that could be easily adapted for writing centers. As a note, this resource includes slides about past presidential administrations: it may be best to review the slides before showing to ensure it is a good fit for your context.  How to Be an Ally in the Classroom→ Being an ally is the first step towards advocacy. This webinar could easily be used in your writing center when training your tutors on what it means to be an ally. As part of the webinar, this toolkit provides slides, handouts and resources on how to be an ally. These materials could be helpful in discussing your writing center context, marginalized groups, and how writing center mentors can advocate/be an ally for those who are traditionally underrepresented or oppressed. The Importance of Inclusive Language→ Farhad Saeed discusses the idea of intersectionality and how those identity factors impact ourselves and our relationships with others. Saeed is a gay, Muslim, immigrant who shares his story about how these identity factors have impacted his life. Saeed has interactive components, such as encouraging viewers to choose three identifiers about themselves, which could be useful in developing community and understanding others in the writing center. Articles/Journals: Activities and Writing Exercises: Understanding Justice Lesson Plan→ In this lesson from Learning for Justice, formerly Teaching Tolerance, students will be able to define justice, privilege, and discrimination, looking beyond an individual to a system. First, students will look at a variety of identifiers and list initial thoughts/reactions. Then, there is a video about stereotypes that could be easily paired with “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie (above). This lesson involves a lot of history, specifically focusing on Civil Rights Movement era actions for justice. The lesson contains a version of the “privilege walk”, which may require trust, community building, and norms to be successful. This lesson could easily be adapted when thinking about possible injustices that may occur in schools.  Books and Other Resources:

Anti-Racism in Action

Videos: Articles/Journals: Interview with Felicia Rose Chavez→ If you are trying to decide if you want to purchase The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, this may be a good first place to start. Her interview, in both video as well as transcript, provides an overview of her book, as well as her thoughts on inclusivity and anti-racist work. Activities and Writing Exercises: Implicit Bias Test→ This test from Harvard University is widely used in professional developments to reflect on individual biases across a wide range of groups, such as race, age, gender expression, etc. The test focuses on reaction time to binary constructs and analyzes errors to determine preconceived biases. This may be a bit difficult to discuss/conduct in a whole-group setting, but it may be a good resource for self reflection or journaling. This resource is recommended with additional context around biases.  Books and Other Resources: Antiracist Continuum→ This continuum is used to showcase an organization’s positionality in the antiracist space. Created by the Association for Educational Service Agents, this continuum can help you as a writing center director or a member of a school community evaluate your progress toward actively living as an antiracist organization. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez→ This book is primarily geared toward the writer’s workshop that exists in college classrooms; however, it does a great job of providing a person-of-color’s perspective of engaging in the writing process in a traditionally white space. This book is a mixture of personal accounts, strategies for restructuring classroom/writing instruction, and critiques of systems that have been supported by white supremacist ideals. Chavez includes an activity that she uses in her college courses where she asks students to write a poem about the barriers we have as writers, using the refrain, “I will write anyways” to show persistence in spite of these obstacles. This activity could be a great entry point for writing center staff. At the end of the text, Chavez provides resources, most notably a list of BIPOC authors for which you could draw from for mentor texts in your own classroom. This Book is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell→

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Inclusivity, Equity, and Accessibility Statement

This preamble and statement were published in The Journal of Peer Tutoring in Secondary Schools, volume 1, issue 1 in the spring of 2021.

In the summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement gained significant traction, state legislatures introduced laws that restricted the rights of trans youth, and the world grappled with questions of equity in and access to education amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It became clear to us, the members of the Secondary School Writing Centers Association (SSWCA) Board, that our organization needed to clearly articulate our position on the characteristics of inclusive peer-led tutoring centers and the importance of creating them. As the Immediate Past President of SSWCA, I felt particularly compelled to ensure that, as the secondary school writing and peer tutoring center movement grows, we pause and reflect on what we value most in our centers and what the larger purpose of our centers and our organization is.

My own interest in writing center work grew out of my belief that being an educator is inherently intertwined with social justice work. For much of the last decade that I have directed my school’s center, I believed that our very existence was an act of advocacy for student voices and student-centered learning opportunities. Our center did so much early on to position itself as a welcoming space: we recruited tutors who spoke Spanish so that our English Language Learners would feel comfortable in our center; we partnered with English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers to work with their students on specific writing assignments; we hosted school-wide writing events that encouraged students to find joy in writing; we created a Courage Wall, which invited students to share their hopes on a giant chalkboard outside of our center. 

However, as I found myself feeling deeply inspired by the ways in which young people were taking charge and leading our national conversations about much-needed change, I also began to reflect on whether or not our center was really the inclusive space I thought it was. When I looked at our tutoring data more carefully, I realized that our tutees overwhelmingly came from our Honors and AP courses, that our tutors also came from predominantly Honors and AP courses, and that, despite our school being one of the most racially and economically diverse in our district, our tutoring staff did not reflect our school’s diversity. 

Beginning in late summer 2020, with support from the SSWCA Board, the SSWCA president Renee Brown and I began crafting this inclusivity statement. Our goal was to ensure that SSWCA’s first position statement explicitly recognized all underrepresented and underserved groups. Over the past year, this statement has been revised and polished by several members of the SSWCA Board, who contributed insight and invaluable perspective as we prepared this statement for publication. 

Our intent with this statement is to establish SSWCA’s position on writing and peer tutoring centers as inclusive spaces. The statement begins with our explicit position and then offers directors and tutors a series of questions for reflection about their center’s current positions and practices and how they might evolve. In the future, SSWCA plans to offer resources for further reading from within the writing center community and beyond. Moving forward, we also intend to treat this statement as a living document that we will revise as we continue to grow and learn. 

I am very grateful to the members of the 2020–2021 SSWCA Board, who provided suggestions for revision and offered resources to crafting this statement over the course of the past year. 

In solidarity,

Kate Hutton, SSWCA Past President
Herndon High School, VA

SSWCA’s Inclusivity, Equity, and Accessibility Statement for Secondary School Writing and Peer Tutoring Centers

Providing equal access to student-centered opportunities in all schools is the foundation of secondary school writing centers and peer tutoring centers. As an organization, the Secondary School Writing Centers Association (SSWCA) values antibias and anti-racist practices in our organization and in our affiliated centers. We believe that all centers should be welcoming, inclusive, and accessible spaces for all students and staff, including, but not limited to, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC); LGBTQ+ people; people with disabilities; people of all religious beliefs; and historically underserved and underrepresented people.

By issuing this position statement, SSWCA seeks to encourage secondary school writing and peer tutoring centers to reflect upon their existing practices and amend them as necessary. The work done by secondary school writing and peer tutoring centers is social justice work. We invite all stakeholders to consider the ways in which our centers can do the important work of building inclusive communities of learners and to enact positive changes in our scholastic, local, regional, and national communities.

This is a living statement that will be updated and revised as our understanding grows. As we identify resources to help centers learn about inclusivity, equity, and accessibility, we will make them available. We invite feedback here for improving this statement.

Secondary school writing and peer tutoring centers should strive to uphold the following core practices:

• Directors and tutors should empower and uphold the agency of the students that the center serves. Directors and tutors should be cognizant of and respectful of each student’s unique background, including their race, gender expression, culture, religion, and language practices.
• Directors should consider their center’s operating hours, their physical or virtual locations and set up, and the ways in which students are able to access time with tutors. 
• Tutoring staff should represent the student body they serve.
• Directors should develop and enact tutor recruitment processes that identify and invite tutors from a range of backgrounds and experiences—including those from underrepresented populations. Directors must challenge inherent biases that may emerge in the tutor recommendation and selection process.
• Tutors and directors should be familiar with and, when possible, trained in anti-racist and antibias pedagogy and practices.
• As an equal-opportunity organization, SSWCA exercises the right to honor personal-pronoun preference in our compositions and publications to avoid gender-biased and exclusive language. This includes a student’s right to their personal pronoun preferences (e.g., she/her, he/his, ze/zir, they/their). 

Secondary school writing and peer tutoring centers should ask themselves the following questions for reflection:

• Whom does our center serve? Does our center serve our entire student body, or do we primarily serve certain groups of students?
• How do students access help from our center? Do our hours of availability make the center accessible to all students? How might we diversify our tutoring methods to include alternatives to in-person tutoring, including asynchronous digital feedback and/or virtual face-to-face conferencing, so that all students have the opportunity to work with a tutor?
• If centers offer specialized workshops, which student groups do those workshops support? Are workshops advertised and conducted using language that is inclusive? Does the content of the workshops imply a “correct” approach to writing that marginalizes certain student populations?
• Does our tutoring staff reflect our student body? What assumptions are made about certain populations within our school, and how do those assumptions impact the presence of certain populations on our tutoring staff?
• How are our tutors recruited? If we require applications, is the application process accessible, equitable, and fair to all students in our school? How might inherent biases impact the application process?
• What role do teachers play in the recruitment process? How do teachers’ ideas of what makes a student a “good tutor” align with or conflict with students’ and tutors’ ideas of what makes a student a “good tutor”?
• How are tutors trained? Is there an implied “correct” approach to writing that marginalizes certain student populations? Are tutors being explicitly taught anti-racist and antibias pedagogy?
• Does our center’s internally recognized mission align with our school’s administrative mission for our center? Did the school intend to create a center for remediation or a center for enrichment in establishing our center? Does our center foster equity in the whole school? When advocating and supporting our center, do school leaders and other stakeholders acknowledge the need for equitably supporting all learners? 
• What role does our center play in our community? How can our center be an advocate for equitably implementing writing and peer tutoring centers at other secondary schools?
• How does our center establish itself as a welcoming and safe space for all members of our school community? Do tutors and clients have rights to their pronoun preferences on items such as sign-up forms, name tags, etc.? Is our center’s space physically accessible to all students, including students with disabilities?

Approved by the Secondary School Writing Centers Association Board on April 17, 2021