Executive Board Social Justice Statement

The Midwest Writing Centers Association is committed to serving our diverse membership. In the following statement, we articulate our commitment to social justice, name our values, and offer action items that hold us accountable to these commitments.

As a professional organization, encompassing diverse members and institutions in a vast region, we express and affirm our commitment to inclusivity and equity. As a writing center community, we acknowledge social injustice in all of its forms and recognize that our work is inseparable from the social and political injustices in our communities. For instance, we acknowledge that the majority of our centers and institutions reside in Indigenous territories and ancestral lands; we also recognize that acknowledgements alone are insufficient without some kind of restorative action. Our region has been no stranger to the historical and systemic racial injustice and violence that has led to a wave of social movements rippling throughout the U.S. and the world. The murder of George Floyd and hundreds of other Black people at the hands of the police are intimately tied to the systemic inequities associated with the current coronavirus pandemic, which also disproportionately affects BIPOC people in the U.S. These are only a few examples of systemic injustice that have an impact on historically excluded and marginalized populations in our region and the nation as a whole. In the face of this devastation and tragedy, we strive to articulate the meaning and impact of social justice in our writing centers in order to lay the groundwork for meaningful change.

Values

We recognize that language and power are intimately related and that writing centers have been and continue to be implicated in injustice and oppression. The writing we discuss on a daily basis in our centers cannot be separated from the social, political, and historical contexts that shape that writing; the interpersonal interactions between writers and consultants are also inevitably shaped by these contexts. There are myriad forms of injustice and oppression at work in our writing centers and in our institutions that our communities experience in intersectional ways, but we (the 2020-2022 MWCA Executive Board) feel called at this historical moment to respond in particular to demands for racial justice in writing centers.

Our values are aligned with the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) mission statement as it “advocates for broad and evolving definitions of literacy” and “for students, teachers, programs, and policies that support ethical and effective teaching and learning.” We recognize commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion are vital to ethical writing instruction in any context, including one-to-one writing center conferences. As MWCA’s own Policy on Professional Ethics states, “The Midwest Writing Centers Association is committed to advocating for writing centers as sites where bigotry has no place. We recognize the degree to which discrimination, coercion, and harassment based on sex, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, physical ability, national origin and age insult the dignity of our students and impede their freedom to learn and labor well.” While our organization has thus taken a clear position on what does not belong in writing center spaces, we are taking a more proactive stance and engaging in more specific actions in service of creating more just environments. We seek to play a part in examining how writing center practices unintentionally (or intentionally) label certain language practices as deficits and perpetuate the systemic racism embedded in our institutions, local communities, and country.

We are all individually and collectively at different places in our journeys of understanding and action to address injustice, and this includes MWCA as an organization. This statement is, therefore, a response grounded in a specific moment in time and as a first step on our organization’s journey. We join the efforts of the IWCA Inclusion and Social Justice Task Force as well as those of regional affiliates who are also engaging in this work, and we hope this statement will launch a larger conversation about where we go from here.

Action Items

The MWCA’s commitment to these values and beliefs must be actionable. To this end, we have created an evolving framework of action items to ensure our values and beliefs move past good intentions and into practicable steps that work toward social and especially racial justice in our writing centers. These action items keep foremost in mind the need to support all students and colleagues in their efforts to practice and research social justice in their centers, their institutions, and their neighborhoods and environments at large. Further, we have created two categories of, sometimes overlapping, action items: those to which the MWCA is committed, and those we encourage our member organizations to pursue. We recognize that social injustice is systemic in our institutions; therefore, this list is meant to evolve as we continue the complicated work of acknowledging, unpacking, and combating the racism, bigotry, ableism, and other forms of social injustice endemic in university and college systems throughout the Midwest and the country.

MWCA will work to:

• Increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in
• MWCA membership
• Board make-up
• Mentoring opportunities
• Research and support grants
• Conference planning and implementation
• Offer opportunities for open dialogue on social justice topics and event planning
• Reach out to Tribal Colleges and Universities in our region to explore creating meaningful partnerships
• We will support our membership in:
• Creating values statements that reflect a commitment to social justice
• Offering professional development activities related to social justice
• Continuing to offer opportunities for all individuals to develop personally authentic voices in their writing
• Exploring community service or outreach events particular to their environment
• Encouraging critical self-reflection on the inclusivity and equity of our recruitment and hiring practices and center policies