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irritant and frustration that resists resolution” ( Denny 2010 , 119). In contrast to the ongoing actualization of such attitudes in tutoring practice, a social justice orientation toward the teaching of writing one-with-one requires bringing issues of language “difference” and language privileging to the forefront. All of us, the tutors acknowledged, feel pressure to avoid naming difference. We have been taught that to notice difference of any kind aloud is to be, at least, uncivil. The proscription against naming difference, however, is predicated on the notion that difference signifies deficiency and, therefore, that to name difference—to talk about difference openly—is to name also broadly and deeply held convictions about who is normal, right, and superior and who is not. These proscriptions, we concluded, must be actively resisted both by tutors and by writing center administrators if we are to transform our writing centers and participate in the democratization of our institutions.
    In search of a bridge between their emerging sense of philosophical commitment and their sense of the ways and degrees to which their practices seemed to fail that philosophy, the tutors turned to Carol Severino’s (2006) essay “The Sociopolitical Implications of Response to Second-Language and Second-Dialect Writing.” Severino delineates three positions on a spectrum of teacher/scholar orientations toward World Englishes. The tutors considered Severino’s analysis of these positions as well as her alignment of them along a continuum when composing their book. Proponents of assimilation, Severino suggests, might teach multilingual students “to smoothly blend or melt into the desired discourse communities and avoid social stigma by controlling any features that in the eyes of audiences with power and influence might mark a writer as inadequately educated or lower class” (338). Within an assimilationist frame, Severino notes, “linguistic differences would be regarded as‘errors’ or instances of L1 ‘interference’—cultural or linguistic—to be eliminated” (338). Proponents of what Severino terms a “separatist stance,” on the other hand, “believe that the society and the class of employers or educators that disparage or discriminate against ESL and SESD [Standard English as a second dialect] speakers should be challenged and changed, not the ESL and SESD speakers themselves or their discourses. Separatists want to preserve and celebrate linguistic diversity, not eradicate it” (339). While Severino notes that “separatists read ESL texts generously,” at their worst, she suggests, “separatist responses, forgiving or applauding deviations from Standard English rhetorical and grammatical patterns, inevitably set students up for a shock when the next teacher, tutor, or employer they encounter tends toward an assimilationist stance” (339). Finally, Severino explores an accommodationist stance or “‘compromise’ position (Farr 1990)” ( Severino 2006 , 340). Proponents of accommodation, Severino suggests, advocate that rather than “giving up their home oral and written discourse patterns in order to assimilate,” multilingual students “instead acquir[e] new discourse patterns, thus enlarging their rhetorical repertoires for different occasions” (340); “In the best of all possible accommodationist worlds,” Severino suggests, “patterns are only gained, not lost” (340). She writes further that “at their best, accommodationist responses are comprehensive and rhetorical, emphasizing that certain discourse features are appropriate or inappropriate for certain occasions. At their worst, they are longwinded, laden with conditions, and hard to process” (340). Adding a further distinction, Severino writes that “sensitive accommodationists are, according to their name, accommodating of both linguistic differences and societal conventions. Insensitive accommodationists are overexplainers,