Hello UCWbLers, and happy start to the spring quarter! We know it’s a weird one, but hang in there! We’re all going to get through this.
While the Social Justice Team has been around since the start of this school year—check out this blog post by our lovely former team member, Amanda—we realized that because we’ve been hard at work, siloed in our own little team meetings, a lot of you may not know what we’ve been up to. That’s all going to change with this new series of blog posts, all about what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and how you can get involved!
To wrap up last quarter briefly, we welcomed Lizzie and Deyana to our team, established rotating sub-committees (named submarines, because we love nomenclature), continued presenting social justice keywords during our meetings, and led a round-robin titled “Rolling out the Red Carpet for Inclusivity” at the Peer Tutor and Mentor Summit!
Recently, the SJ team had our first meeting of the quarter over Zoom, which, we know, is not the same as meeting in person, but we definitely all felt a little better after seeing each other! We spent a good chunk of our meeting discussing how we can support other UCWbLers during this time—should we provide resources about mental health? Should we facilitate a professional development…something dealing with the crisis? We had a great discussion about finding out what you all need from us! More on that to come later.
Since the beginning of the year, we have also been working towards creating a professional development workshop for the UCWbL to be able to come together and engage with the social justice issues that we are discussing in our team meetings every week. Now that things are structured a little differently, we spent some time talking about how we can craft our professional development resources to suit our new professional development structure and offer meaningful opportunities for you/tutors to learn and reflect.
The SJ team has put together a two-part PD model for this quarter, starting Week 4 with part one and concluding Weeks 8 and 9 with part two. This PD opportunity will hopefully give you all a chance to reflect on your own internal biases and discuss with your PD groups about what these biases can mean not only for your work as tutors, but as you move forward with your lives and careers. The first part of the PD will involve taking assessments from Harvard’s Project Implicit, that help gauge your automatic responses to different stereotypes related to race, gender, physical appearance, ability and more. After reflecting on these assessments, the second part of the PD will be a resource packet that will hopefully help all of you address your implicit biases. We all have plenty of learning and unlearning to do, and the SJ team is excited to collaborate and grow with all of you this quarter!
Because the SJ team has many goals that we’re working towards, we have been hard at work in our submarines making sure that we’re progressing on all of them. Ryan and Sahi are currently working on our professional development resources, Lizzie and Deyana are creating a survey for all of you to let us know about your concerns and experiences, and Riley and Page are working on our final goal for this quarter: our social justice statement, which you may remember from the Chicagoland Peer Tutor Day or our Winter Retreat round robin!
A brief note about this survey: just in individual chats with various tutors, we’ve noticed that something a lot of us struggle with is dealing with and responding to writing that contains racist, sexist, or otherwise problematic arguments and ideas in all kinds of appointment modalities. As tutors, we don’t want to tell someone what to write, but as a part of a writing center committed to social justice, we also don’t want to implicitly condone these ideas. So, what we hope to do is send out a survey to you in the coming weeks to hear about your experiences, and hopefully, we can put our heads together and come up with some ways for tutors to process and respond to this type of writing while also treating the writers who collaborate with us with respect and compassion like you’re all already so good at doing! If you have any ideas or suggestions for this survey or want to collaborate with us on devising best practices for dealing with these kinds of appointments, please, let us know. We’d love to work with you!
Phew! This ended up being a pretty lengthy general update about the team, but we hope that you all find it useful in learning a little more about what our team is doing, how we seek to serve this community, and the different projects you can pitch in on! If you have any questions or ideas for us, feel free to Slack Deyana A., Lizzie L., Page G., Sahi P., Riley O., Ryan Z. or Erin, as we’d love to have a chat with you!
Also, feel free to Slack us if you’re just feeling lonely in quarantine. We are too, and we can totally commiserate. The SJ team is here for you, both in terms of our work at the writing center and just in terms of making sure we all get through this weird time in one piece. We wish you all the best this quarter, and we look forward to collaborating with you all more in the coming weeks!
This post was written collaboratively by the social justice team.