The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento

The Writing Center as a Bridge: A Postcolonial Approach
149
Jill Buettner
Fall 2009
One of the most frequent questions we, as writing center tutors, get is, “What exactly do you do
here?” I think the fact that question gets asked is key to what we do here. Students know that we are not
teachers, but we can provide writing help and instructive advice. We’re students, but we’re not beginning
writers either, so what are we? We are not easily pegged, labeled, or identified within the hierarchy of the
academy. In some respects, we function both within and without the university. We exist in a space
somewhere in between—a “Third Space,” if you will. (I have further evidence of the writing center as a
third space because it is the only place on campus where delicious free snacks magically appear without
fail. That may or may not be related to what I’m going to talk about, but it’s definitely an added bonus.)
In “Post-Colonialism and the Idea of a Writing Center,” Anis Bawarshi and Stephanie Pelkowski
argue that because of the writing center’s
physically and politically peripheral place—marginalized from and yet part
of the university—. . . .the writing center is an ideal place in which to begin
teaching and practicing a critical and self reflective form of acculturation,
what Edward Said calls ‘critical consciousness’. . . [T]he writing
center can become what Mary Louise Pratt has termed a ‘contact zone,’ a
place in which different discourses grapple with one another and are
negotiated. (81)
There is a lot going on in this passage, so let’s unpack some of these ideas. Postcolonialism has to do with
structures of power, and so a Postcolonial approach to writing center pedagogy examines power relations
within the university. Because the writing center exists on the edge of the university power structure, it is
a useful space to teach students to critically examine the university and their place in it. We get students
from numerous cultural and linguistic backgrounds and of all different writing levels, so we truly are an
amalgamation of discourses.
Numerous scholars have given the type of space Bawarshi and Pelkowski are describing different names.
In The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha compares his notion of Third Space—a contact zone in
which the constructed nature of cultural systems is brought to light and fixed notions of identity are
challenged—to a bridge or a stairwell. As he describes it:
the stairwell as liminal space, in-between the designations of identity, becomes
the process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the
difference between upper and lower, black and white. The hither and thither of the
stairwell, the temporal movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at
either end of it from settling into primordial polarities. This interstitial passage
between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity… (4)
The stairwell is a workable, though temporary space between binary oppositions. For us, these binary
oppositions may manifest themselves as academic discourse versus Other discourses, teacher versus
student, beginning writer versus advanced writer, etc. And yet, we all come to the same place to write and
communicate, dissolving the boundaries that binary constructions rely upon. As tutors, who are neither
teachers nor students, exactly, we challenge the binary oppositions created by academic power structures.
Though Bhabha’s idea is highly theoretical, we can act as a sort of interpretive “bridge” between teachers
and students when we help students understand writing prompts, can’t we? We can also function as a
“stairwell” between academic and home discourses by creating a safe space where students and tutors can