Event Details

• Date: August 31, 2020, 4-5:30pm EST
• Presenter: Zandra Jordan
• Title: “Racial Justice in Virtual Tutoring: Considerations for Antiracist Online Writing Center Praxis”
• Hosting Organization: Global Society for Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE)
• Cost: Free for GSOLE members; $15 for non-GSOLE members
• Registration: Register Online>>

Event Description

The webinar will explore the ways our commitments to antiracism and racial justice can translate into online writing center tutoring practice. The leader, Zandra, will share the ways her identity informs her ethics, and will invite participants to explore their own values and the values that shape the identities of their writing centers. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to promoting racial justice through writing center practice, the webinar will stress that by examining our shared commitments and values, we can think through our individual contexts and determine strategies for action.

The first step is to develop a clear ethic: we need to recognize and account for race in our writing center practice, and then question what a justice-oriented practice should look like. This is particularly important in our current moment, when so many writing centers have shifted to online delivery. This webinar will thus recommend strategies for ensuring that our practices and our engagement with writers through the online medium are promoting racial justice.

Webinar participants will:

• Inquire about their ethics and values around racial justice and antiracism
• Reflect on how attitudes around race and difference are encoded into the language we use when we give verbal and written feedback
• Recognize that neither asynchronous nor synchronous online writing center interactions are neutral
• Acknowledge the unique challenges with and opportunities for antiracist praxis in an online writing center
• Tailor an ethic of racial justice to their particular contexts