A Free-Standing Building: Defining Scaffolding for Equity and Justice Practice in Writing Center Work within Campus and Carceral Settings

I can still hear my ballet teachers, whether Vaganova devotees or Balanchine disciples, verbally harkening back to an earlier combination, movement, or place in the studio and saying “Remember…what you did then prepared you, taught you, what to do now.”

As a writing center tutor, I had an ORT in which a student had written a draft of a fascinating expository essay on comparative religion. Once we read through a significant section of the paper, I had more than an inkling that verbose sentences, indicating “cognitive or thinking congestion”, “bottle-necking”, or my favorite “sardining” would be the global concern. The text asked for concision to elucidate meaning and strengthen the claim. I didn’t say that.

 I led the student, let’s call him Dario, through one sentence and asked five questions: what he initially gathered from said sentence, what the challenge to comprehension and loveliness is/is not, what are the subjects and claims present in the sentence, where is causality present, where is punctuation asked for, and finally the “concision question”: what can go and what should stay?

What I experienced in served benefit as a ballet student is the same that I provided as a writing center tutor: learning through scaffolding. Scaffolding really gets at our collective conception and vision of teaching. When scaffolding is successful it strikes a nerve with all parties. The question is how can it be defined for it to be studied, taught, and repeated? How can it be understood to endure and grow through time, cultural changes, political movements, and through the day-to-day needs of a writer?

I begin with scaffolding’s literal meaning: constructing a skeletal structure for the purpose of building which will gradually go up the face(s) of the building-edifice as it needs to rise and down as the building concludes, resulting in a free-standing building. I’m deeply inspired by this image of the free-standing building, specifically the presence of freedom and its long wingspan.

Here is a definition of scaffolding within education from Leo Vygotsky as cited by John Nordolf in a research article about scaffolding within a WC:

“[Scaffolding] consists essentially of the adult ‘controlling’ those elements of the task that are initially beyond the learner’s capacity, thus permitting [the learner] to concentrate upon and complete only those elements that are within [the learner’s] range of competence” (Nordolf, 56)

How did we get from freedom to terms like capacity, competence, and most strangely control? To control is to restrain and reduce through the use of power. To control is not to be free. It is the opposite. Where does scaffolding lie? Does it inherently control? Or is it free? This conflict is resolved by intentionally revising the definition of scaffolding to subvert its historic assertion as a method of control to gain greater insight into how to do the work equitably, justly, enjoyably, and productively. We need another definition of scaffolding that relays what it is, what it is not, how it must center equity and justice, and how it leads to task completion and other defined and identifiable markers of success.

This need for definition is voiced within scaffolding research (Pol et al, 635). While the article cited singularly takes strides in our understanding of scaffolding’s pivotal role in student appreciation of support, task effort, and support contingency which helps define scaffolding success, it emphasizes the weight of remaining questions concerning how. The increasing questions are further shadowed by the increasing need amongst writers not only to encounter a tutor or teacher and gain skill in writing but also to have empowerment, equity, and justice in their day.

Questions of power, control, equity, and justice become paramount in carceral settings where incarcerated individuals are subject to the many acts of violence born of the prison industrial complex and are subject to its constant control that echoes legislative, financial, and cultural bodies that intentionally move to control their life outcomes. The contingent, relational, adaptive, and integrative intention that must be imbued in scaffolding in order for success struggles to have any sense of survival within carceral settings. Still, it is a great hope for prison educators and advocates to provide access to liberation even within a carceral context. In succeeding these teachers, peer educators, and students teach us that when confronted with the prosaic realities of power and control coupled with an urgent need for equity and justice we find resource and conviction within practices of transformation-liberation (McMay et al., 242 & Hartnett et al., 7).

I engaged with these sources and others to identify three core values and practices within carceral education: Reciprocal Liberation & Transformation, Self Reflection & Self Determination, and Community Building & Safe Space Making. With these in mind, I wrote an alternative definition of scaffolding:

“Scaffolding describes the collaborative process during which an educator-peer collaborates with a learner-peer to complete a task for the purpose of transformative learning. This process begins with a review of the personal, social or collective, cultural, political, and financial factors hindering such transformation. It continues through the gradual introduction of concepts relative to the task and is contingent upon the writer’s voiced challenges, strengths, and other factors provided by lived experience. This process is noted as successful through partial or whole task completion, further inquiry-scholarship, and expressions of gratitude & pride.”

I invite you to write your own definitions and for us to revise them together in the continuing work of being and constructing a free-standing building.

Love,

OG

References

HARTNETT, STEPHEN JOHN, et al. “Introduction: Working for Justice in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Working for Justice: A Handbook of Prison Education and Activism, edited by Stephen John Hartnett et al., University of Illinois Press, 2013, pp. 1–10. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt2ttdwk.4. Accessed 13 Nov. 2024.

McMay, Dani V., and Rebekah D. Kimble. Higher Education Accessibility behind and beyond Prison Walls. IGI Global, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-3056-6.

Nordlof, John (2014) “Vygotsky, Scaffolding, and the Role of Theory in Writing Center Work,” Writing Center Journal: Vol. 34 : Iss. 1, Article 4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1785

Van de Pol, Janneke, et al. “The effects of scaffolding in the classroom: support contingency and student independent working time in relation to student achievement, task effort and appreciation of support.” Instructional Science 43 (2015): 615-641.