While writing support services have the potential to amplify and support student voices, they can also easily replicate and enforce assimilationist, eradicationist pedagogies that stifle student voices, frequently through a mandate of standard English grammar.  Laura Greenfield argues that "'Standard English' is a qualifier ascribed to many ways of speaking (and by extension, though differently, writing) by privileged white people, or perhaps, more accurately, any variety of English that has not been associated historically with resistance by communities of color. . . many Englishes secretly enjoy this designation.” (Greenfield 43). Carmen Kynard further notes the double standard of professors and researchers being rewarded for “non-standard” language use while students are punished. Camarillo also points this out, writing that “while imitation is rewarded, difference is punished. The fear of a bad grade, of punishment, coerces students [. . .] into sublimating their own agency.” (170).  Writing centers/peer tutoring in writing can “often function to reinforce the status quo, to ensure that the empire of literacy remains undisturbed.” and Camarillo further argues that "students are rarely in positions to challenge this function." (170). We are, perhaps, one of those rarities. 

Grammar is a far more controversial and nebulous concept than many believe, deeply intertwined with systems of power and histories of exclusion. You will often hear students insist that they need help with grammar. This is rarely the case, most especially for those who speak English as a first language, and as Hartwell argues in "Grammar, Grammars, and the teaching of Grammar," devoting valuable and limited session time to explicit grammatical instruction supplants more pressing conceptual or organizational concerns. 

Grammar is contextual, and reflects the communities that students speak and write in. Mandating “correct” grammar can erase any “non-standard” grammars that students use. Laura Micciche makes the case for rhetorical grammar, writing “the grammatical choices we make---including pronoun use, active or passive verb constructions, and sentence patterns--- represent relations between writers and the worlds they live in.” (719) Denying these relations can mean denying a student the full expression of their perspective. 

COMING SOON: Comparative Approaches for working with Multilingual Writers