Our Mission
The Center for Arts & Language (A&L) is a collaborative community where staff and peer tutors offer support for all forms of communication—written, spoken, visual, academic, creative, professional—at any stage of the composition process. We love the many intersections of arts and language, and we believe that effective expression through words as well as work is enriching and empowering. Working with students and faculty across the college to foster skill-building, confidence, connection, and reflection, we hope to amplify and fortify artists’ and designers’ voices at RISD and in the world. We understand and honor communication as a representation of diverse identities, languages, cultures, experiences, and beliefs, and we approach our roles as sounding boards and allies with care and respect.
Our Values
We are student-centered. As advocates for agency and efficacy, we are asset-oriented, drawing on students’ existing strengths and helping to cultivate new ones. As advocates for students’ right to their own voices, we strive to honor individuality and multiplicity in communication styles—each uniquely formed by the languages, cultures, communities, educational backgrounds, learning styles, abilities, and experiences that shape who we are and how we relate to others. Our methods are flexible, individualized, verbal, visual, and kinesthetic.
We are human-centered. We value authentic voices, deeply. The arrival of Generative AI has magnified this value for us. When we weigh the pros of engaging GenAI in a communication process or product (save time and effort) against the cons (deny oneself the chance to discover, think, learn, express, and connect; overuse diminishing natural resources; borrow from and add to information that is biased and inaccurate; misrepresent your ideas and selfhood), we are compelled to advise leaving AI tools aside, especially as a college student in formative educational and developmental years. Put another way, we would much rather hear and read an authentic voice and thoughts, no matter how muddled or unfinished, than machine-generated output, no matter how polished. At the same time, we welcome conversations about AI use and literacy and approach them with curiosity and without judgement.
We are committed to self-expression, listening, and dialogue. Being able to verbalize ideas supports understanding oneself, feeling understood, and engaging in many contexts, from scholarship to activism. We strive to help students develop the awareness, skills, and confidence they need to express themselves authentically and effectively. We understand communication as social and change-making; we listen with open ears and minds, value different perspectives, and approach difficult topics with awareness of our own and others’ internal biases.
We draw on progressive theories and methods in literacy education. Students sometimes seek our services to gain membership to discourse communities of Western academic writing and standard English language proficiency. We foster self-awareness of and access to academic expectations and conventions. We also understand the ways in which academia and writing centers have perpetuated Western scholarly rhetoric and monolingualism. Through approaches like code-meshing and inter-cultural communication, we encourage making space for varied voices and rhetoric.
We welcome communicative play. Given the long tradition of experimentation in artists’ and designers’ writings, we understand rhetorical play—subjectivity, fragmentation, poetics, for example—as an asset in some contexts. Where precision and persuasion are typical attributes of academic writing and speaking, ambiguity and complexity are typical attributes of art and design, and can be engaged in meaningful ways when we communicate about and around art and design.
We strive to be an inclusive and accessible space for the whole RISD community. Our work and values guide us in making our center a place for people of any race, ethnicity, nationality, physical and/or cognitive ability, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, religion, and age to feel welcome. We believe that students of color, multilingual learners, first-gen students, students with learning differences, whom we serve in large numbers, deserve especially active inclusion and support.
We are always working to make our center, website, services, and resources non-discriminatory and non-disabling. We invite community feedback at any time via the following channels:
Reach out to A&L Director Jen Liese (jliese@risd.edu).
Report concerns about social equity and inclusion to: sei@risd.edu
Report concerns about accessibility to: disabilitysupportservices@risd.edu
Report an incident of bias, discrimination, and/or harassment to Equity & Compliance.