By Iris Cushing
Sometime in the spring semester of this year, I did something I had always wanted to do in a writing center session: at the end of a meeting with an international student, I asked her what country she was from, and then went a step further and asked if we could look up her exact home region on Google Maps. Looking at a map of her country (and city) of origin on the screen together sparked a delightful conversation: about the university she’d attended in her mid-sized Central Asian city, about the way the city is rapidly changing, about the things she misses about her home, about the reasons she loves New York. We looked at the map and talked in this way for less than five minutes, but the shift between us was quite palpable. Since this first experience looking up a student’s home on the map, I’ve done it regularly—at least once a week. I am interested in thinking through what it means to me as a consultant, and what it might mean for my students.
I’ve been interested in geography for as long as I can remember. When a girl who had emigrated from Vietnam joined my 5th grade class, I nervously and excitedly approached her and asked her to show me where she was from on the classroom map of Southeast Asia. Looking at the map together connected us instantaneously. I hope and believe that this interest in the visual artifact of the map stemmed not from an urge to exotify my new friend, but from a genuine curiosity about life in another place, a place this person knew well (just as I knew my own home well). This is the same curiosity that leads me to invite my students to show me their home on a map—a sincere desire to spend a moment imagining life in another place, in another culture, in another language.
But I think the effect of looking at a map together goes beyond the fulfillment of my own curiosity. For a long time, it was a scary leap to ask international students what country they were from, even though many of them disclose the fact that they are non-native English speakers up front, and a student’s native language is noted in their Writing Center profile. It can feel impolite at best to assume someone is not “American” by asking what country they come from. I was concerned that at worst, students would think that I was fixating on the ways in which they present as “international”— their accents, their names—as a means of singling them out as “foreign.” Examining this fear further, I realize that, in an attempt to be inclusive, I was subconsciously invested in maintaining a kind of invisibility around students’ diverse backgrounds. Without realizing it, I thought that part of my job was helping students feel they were assimilating successfully, most importantly when it came to their writing. By helping them become capable users of Standard Written English (or even Metropolitan English, or other World Englishes) without acknowledging where they were coming from, I was reaffirming an unspoken, unexamined goal: that their origins (including their native language and culture) could be elided from their personal idiom.
One effect of the great translanguaging work we’ve done at the Writing Center over the last few semesters is that I am able to follow the curiosity about places that I had cultivated early on in school. I now feel comfortable asking a student where she’s from—if there is time, and if I sense that she’d be interested in sharing—because our Writing Center is a culturally inclusive place where difference is celebrated. I know every student has her own relationship to disclosing where she is from, and I take care to only ask students who I think would welcome such a question. Having finished working on writing, it’s great to move with a student into a new, shared space in which her particular cultural context is acknowledged and valued. Taking the time to look up a student’s home region on the map, I think, allows the student to be seen as a person, beyond the confines of her writing or her academic life. Oftentimes there are clear entrées into looking up a student’s home on a map: a mention of an overseas job on a resume, a narrative about arriving in New York from another place. I’ve found the conversations that emerge when the map is visible to be delightfully open-ended. People begin talking about food, music, friends, cultural values, their families, architecture, history . . . there is something about the map that encourages writers, in many instances, to talk about things that interest them. I believe that this kind of free articulation can only be a good thing for someone in a new place, who may be just finding their home in a new language.
Published October 20, 2016
