Vol. 6, No. 1 Fall 2024
Brian Hotson, CWCR/RCCR Editor
Stevie Bell, CWCR/RCCR Associate Editor
Note: This post does not reflect the position of the CWCA/ACCR.
Last week, the IWCA announced their 2024 grants and awards winners. Once again—and year over year—the International Writing Centers Association awards go to those in the Global North, specifically Americans, save two: the non-US awardees are Editors, Karin Wetschanow, Erika Unterpertinger, Eva Kuntschner, Birgit Huemer, of the collection, Neue Perspektiven auf Schreibberatung, awarded Outstanding Book; and Gillian Saunders, University of Victoria, awarded a Dissertation Grant. Of all the IWCA Outstanding Book award winners since 1999, with the exception of this year, all awards have gone to American authors, written in American English, and published in the US (Heinemann/Boynton-Cook is a US subsidiary of Heinemann UK). Of those listed as recipients of the Dissertation Grant, this is only the second year that the grant has gone to a non-US graduate student. Only once has the grant gone to a graduate student from the Global South.
There are many examples of non-US writing centre practitioners and scholars deserving recognition. The new Centro de Escritura y Argumentación, part of the Red Mexicana de Centros de Escritura, continues the building of the writing centre community in Mexico. Examples of publications include the edited collection, Centros y Programas de Escritura en América Latina: Opciones Teóricas y Pedagógicas para la Enseñanza de la Escritura Disciplinar (2023), edited by Estela Inés Moyano and Margarita Vidal Liza; Reimagining Writing Centres Practices: A South African Perspective (2023), edited by Avasha Rambiritch and Laura Drennan; Multilingual Contributions to Writing Research: Toward an Equal Academic Exchange (2023), edited by Natalia Ávila Reyes; Negotiating the Intersections of Writing and Writing Instruction (2023), edited by Magnus Gustafsson and Andreas Eriksson; and Inclusive Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning Practices in Higher Education in India (2024), edited by Kanika Singh of Ashoka University’s Centre for Writing and Communication. Recognizing work published or to be published is laudatory and important. Taking a global approach to this task should be the work of an international organization.
Future concerns
Looking further at this awards year’s list, what should be concerning for the global writing centre community is the IWCA’s Future Leader Award Recipients list: of the 32 recipients since 2016, only one, in 2019, was non-American. What kind of future does the IWCA as an organization envision if, over a span of eight years, only one future writing centre scholar, practitioner, and administrator is not from the US? The future would appear to continue to be a US-based, American English language vision, focusing on issues relating only to US tertiary institutions, and those institutions’ international work. The list of the other awards and their recipients are the same: American winners, from American institutions, with American writing centre issues, writing in American English.
These patterns in the awards and grants highlight the US-based membership of the IWCA. The outstanding article and book awards are chosen from among member nominations and Future Leaders applicants must be members in good standing and interested, at least in part, in attending a lunch or dinner with IWCA leaders during the annual IWCA conference held in the US.
Prior to 1999, the IWCA was an American organization, the National Writing Centers Association (NWCA) (Kinkead et al., 2015, p. 12). Kincade, in 1996, writing as an NWCA insider, describes the purpose of the NWCA’s annual awards: “Giving awards for outstanding research and service-followed by letters of commendation to the winners and their administrators, plus press releases-was one way to provide…validity” to writing centres and writing practitioners. “The NWCA thus saw itself in an advocacy role, offering the authority of a professional organization” (1996, p. 137). This would seem to make the exclusion of non-US writing centre by the IWCA more significant, especially for those who require legitimacy in their institution and from national education bodies, and who continue to be colonized by American English and American writing centres and the pedagogies of the Global North.
In 2015, on the 30th anniversary of the NWCA/IWCA, Kinkead et al. describe a meeting of the NWCA’s founders who wanted to “reflect on the organization’s beginnings, its strategies for institutionalization, and challenges that may still exist” (p. 1). This meeting, taking place 15 years after the NWCA claimed international status, has no mention of any international, non-US related planning or vision for the IWCA. In 2012, Jeanne Simpson, an NWCA past-president (1984-85), writes, “the National Writing Centers Association and the International Writing Centers Association are the same organization in terms of historical continuity” (Simpson, 2012). The IWCA’s present future continues from its US roots. In 2024, ten years on from the founders’ reminiscences and predictions, the IWCA continues its US focus.
Self-titled
The NWCA took on the international title after it connected to the European Writing Centers Association (see Hotson & Bell, 2024), which was founded in 1998 by Americans Anna Challenger (The American College of Thessaloniki, Greece) and Tracy Santa (The American University in Bulgaria). Their goal was “to integrate universities in Europe into a framework for exchanging ideas and establishing an infrastructure for Writing Center goals and objectives” (European Writing Centers Association, 2023). The experience of “integration,” however, does not seem to have been marked by a spirit of exchange in light of the IWCA’s US positioning and focus. As Lawrence Cleary, a founder of the EWCA, states on the Connecting Writing Centers Across Borders’ podcast, Slow Agency, “the European Writing Center Association, we definitely are taking critical approaches to U.S. exports of theories and practices.” He continues:
When I went to my first [IWCA] summer institute in 2007, there were a handful of us from Europe and much of the conversation was so U.S.-specific that you almost felt like somebody was speaking another language that you couldn’t understand in front of you and not involving you in the conversation. (CWCAB, 2023)
Kail, another EWCA member, writes of their experience at the 2001 IWCA conference:
some at the conference seemed tempted to conjure up an image of a pedagogical Trojan horse, built (in part) in the USA, that once allowed inside the ancient walls of European academies would disgorge a McProcess model of teaching writing, dragging in required first year writing courses and remedial writing labs. How European higher education makes use of American models of writing instruction will be one of the more interesting and crucial issues to be pursued in the next few years. (2001)
Criticism of the continued domination of the international writing centre space by US voices and vision is not new. In 2009, Donahue describes the North-South character of international writing program initiatives as a “colonial dynamic” (p. 215), and prompts the North American community to think critically about the “choice to proclaim internationalization” (p. 237) for national associations such as the IWCA. Also in 2009, the IWCA produced an updated IWCA Bibliography of Resources for Writing Center Professionals, which included only US authors, US-focused resources, published in American English.
Colonizing the international centre and the margins
In the 25 years since claiming the international space, the IWCA/NWCA has done little for non-US writing centres, scholars, and practitioners as compared to its work for US writing centres. It has made no statement regarding the continued knowledge colonization by the Global North, especially by the US government, in the Global South. Its board has been and continues to be dominated by US writing centre practitioners. While its constitutional commitment is to “[r]ecognizing and engaging with writing centers within an international context,” the same constitution requires all officers of the IWCA to “maintain…NCTE memberships during terms of office,” the National Council Teachers of English, a US national association that mentions no international vision or position.
Claiming and occupying international space is not without consequence. The “international” moniker benefits US scholars who are incentivised to demonstrate their presence and impact internationally without the need to physically or cognitively cross borders, potentially perpetuating assumptions about US experience as universal and normative. The domination of American pedagogies and scholarship in IWCA’s awards and grants helps to perpetuate this false universality. For individuals outside of the US context who also experience the pressure to engage in the international scene, the moniker often obliges them to make themselves and their work appealing to US leaders and membership in ways that situate the US context as normative. For many non-US members, this pressure to engage with the IWCA simply because of the moniker “international” is a strong force incentivising them to attend the IWCA’s annual conferences or fill seats around its board table. We can attest to the fact that board discussions rarely turn to matters of interest outside of the US context.
In this way, the moniker is unintentionally self-perpetuating for the organization and functions to maintain a privileged status for the US context, which is then projected outwards. Similarly to the international scholarly publishing industry where American voices writing in English dominate, the IWCA through its conferences and publications act as a gatekeeper of global writing centre scholarship, pedagogies, and administrative practices (e.g., Belcher, 2007). We are describing a colonial dynamic whereby the IWCA claims international space and controls it according to US interests, intentions notwithstanding.
The stakes are significant. Suresh Canagarajah, in A Geopolitics of Academic Writing (2002), writes that because the Global North “holds a central place in the process of constructing, disseminating, and legitimizing knowledge” (p. 6), scholars from the Global South are excluded, their languages and scholarship dismissed or appropriated by the Global North. In this way, academic writing contributes to the “ideological hegemony of the West” (p. 6).
All of this points to the failure of the NWCA’s twenty-five year international project. For the sake of the global community of writing centres, the IWCA should reckon with the reality of its own making, and decolonize the international space by returning to its roots as an American national organization. This decolonial action would make space for the emergence of a globally focused caucus of national organizations, the NWCA among them, who may co-construct the terms on which they exchange knowledge, support each other, and account for critical issues, including power and coloniality, within writing centre praxis.
References
Belcher, D. D. (2007). Seeking acceptance in an English-only research world. Journal of Second Language Writing, 16(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2006.12.001
CWCAB, Connecting Writing Centers Across Borders. (2023). E33 Adapting to local contexts: A conversation with the European Writing Center Association board members. https://wlncnnect.org/2023/11/13/adapting-to-local-contexts-a-conversation-with-the-european-writing-center-association-board-members-slow-agency-e33/
Canagarajah, A. S. (2002). A geopolitics of academic writing. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Donahue, C. (2009). “Internationalization” and composition studies: Reorienting the discourse. College Composition and Communication, 61(2), 212–243.
European Writing Centers Association. (2023). https://culture360.asef.org/resources/european-writing-centers-association/
Hotson, B., & Bell, S. (2023). Writing centers and neocolonialism: How writing centers are being commodified and exported as U.S. neocolonial tools. Writing Center Journal, 41(3). https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.2027
Kail, H. (2001). Teaching academic writing across Europe: Conference review. Kairos, 6(2). https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/6.2/binder.html?news/kailreview.htm
Kinkead, J. (1996). The National Writing Centers Association as mooring: A personal history of the first decade. The Writing Center Journal, 16(2), 131–143. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43442620
Kinkead, J., Harris, M., Simpson, J., Childers, P. F., Brown, L. F., & Harris, J. (2015). The International Writing Centers Association at 30: Community, advocacy, and professionalism. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1642&context=english_facpub
Simpson, J. (2012). IWCA history: Brief history of the N/IWCA. International Writing Centers Association. https://writingcenters.wordpress.com/about-2/iwca-history/