Bringing World Englishes into the Comp Classroom

In “The Place of World Englishes in Composition,” Canagarajah asks, “What is the place of [World Englishes] in college writing?” (594), listing the many ways that World Englishes are seen as non-standard, informal, and otherwise unacceptable forms of English. He argues that should encourage students to use multiple Englishes both in process writing and in their final written products. Can, and should, we teach World Englishes in the composition classroom? What do these final products look like?

"World Standard Englishes" from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language via talkingpeople.net

Multimodality could be an interesting framework for including World Englishes in composition settings. Because multimodal frameworks encourage multiplicity in genres, modes, and media, they could also accommodate multiplicity in languages and dialects. Situating composition in a framework that supports multiliteracies and multimodal composing could move away from simply tolerating students’ different linguistic backgrounds and move toward a classroom that supports and engages with those differences.

Say, for example, that a student does a multimodal research project about a local community center. The student could do archival research about how long the center has existed and what services they have offered over the years. She could photograph different events that the center sponsors. She could interview people who frequent the center and include those voices in the project. If the center hosts technology workshops, open mic nights, or conversational language groups, any of those perspectives could be easily represented within a multimodal project. Such a project blends genres, written and oral narratives, and literacies into a cohesive rhetorical artifact that encourages multiple voices. Is this a way that multiple Englishes can be integrated into the classroom?

 

Canagarajah, A. Suresh. “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued.” College Composition and Communication 57.4 (June 2006): 586-619.

 

The Accessible University: Applying UD and UDL to Writing Environments

For my dis/ability class, we were asked to create personal philosophy statements that incorporate concepts from the class readings with our ideas about inclusive education. Because I’m not a K-12 instructor like most of the people in the class, I decided to frame my response in terms of accessibility and thought I would share the highlights of that response here:

• When we talk about education, we must account for both classroom spaces and flexible pedagogical practices, denormalizing our ideas not only about students but also about teaching, learning, and composing practices.

• First-year composition curricula and writing centers would benefit from adopting principles of Universal Design and Universal Design for Learning to create the most accessible learning environments possible.

• Universal Design (UD) is a spatial theory that emphasizes the importance for all spaces to be as accessible for the widest range of people possible, regardless of bodily differences.

• Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a way to apply equitable and flexible curricular principles to writing pedagogies. UDL’s principles—multiple means of representation, of actions and expression, of engagement—necessitate writing practices that provide students with more opportunities for learning.
  

  "Universal Design": http://ecobrooklyn.com/green-contracting-universal-design/

• Writing centers are historically spaces with flexible practices—e.g. a tutor and student can interact with texts by reading them aloud and discussing them, by drafting outlines or revision strategies by hand or on the computer, or by looking up resources in books and online. These multimodal practices are great for giving students multiple means to learn and compose, but they privilege highly individualized instruction.

• Applying UDL to writing center pedagogies asks tutors “not to think of how they might adapt their tutoring for students with disabilities” because “all students come to sessions with a variety of differences” (Kiedaisch & Dinitz 50).

• Because first-year composition courses and writing centers must potentially serve all students in the university, these spaces must as accessible to the widest range of students as possible.

• For instruction, this means providing information in multiple modes—through spoken word, handout, group work, and electronic presentations. We must also create flexible assignments that allow students to compose projects that are most useful for them; for example, I can create assignment goals—e.g. exploring a central thesis statement and integrating research—while being flexible about how students apply these concepts. A final project, for example, could be a research paper, website, extended blog or social media project, visual collage, or photographic essay. The key is to create a flexible curricular base that allows students to choose the medium that works best for them.

 

The Activist WPA and a Skype Interview with Linda Adler-Kassner

I recently got the chance to read Linda Adler-Kassner’s The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers. I have very little (read: no) background in WPA work, so it was nice to have the opportunity to read about a position that most writing instructors will hold at some point. What I enjoyed most about the book was the idea that we can change the narratives surrounding writing, that if there is a story of writing and writing instruction that is circulating that we don’t like, we can use organizing as a way to reframe that narrative. Framing, here, is “the idea that stories are always set within and reinforce particular boundaries” (4).

Adler-Kassner poses three questions that frame The Activist WPA:

• “How should students’ literacies be defined when they come into composition classes?”
• “What literacies should composition classes develop, how, and for what purpose?”
• “How should the development of students’ literacies be assessed at the end of these classes?” (14)

These questions explore what shared values and goals undergird a writing program, which emphasizes the importance of individual principles that Adler-Kassner argues are necessary in order to enact change: “[Change is] about understanding one’s self, and then connecting with others around one’s own interests; ultimately, these connections lead to change-making movements” (23). However, Adler-Kassner also acknowledges that WPA work must navigate more than just these individual principles, operating in a larger social structure of academic work, “one that separates emotion and experience” (27). The issue, then, is determining the most effective frame for change, and Adler-Kassner offers three models of community organizing that may help with this endeavor:

In an interest-based model, an organizer facilitates the development of individual and group interests, helping individuals articulate the change-making process that best serves their interests (97).

In values-based organizing, which obviously emphasizes the values that a particular group shares, the focus is more long-term than that of interest-based (108). It is a model devoted to strategies, or sustainable practices, rather than tactics, the short-term attempts to disrupt a larger system or narrative.

An issue-based model is more like a blending of both interest- and values-based organizing. Here, a leader identifies an issue and forms a plan of action (taking into consideration interests and values of the group) that members of the group enact (117).

We had the opportunity to Skype with Linda Adler-Kassner about The Activist WPA and her experiences working as a WPA, and these are a couple highlights:

“Organizers develop strategies to become activists. I’m very much about organizing, and organizing for change. And I think when you organize for change that makes you more than an organizer.”

At the end of her book, Adler-Kassner describes WPAs as community organizers, writing, “I am deliberately using the word organizer, not activist, because organizing includes an explicit reference to deliberate, strategic planning and action that is sometimes not included in the notion of ‘activism’” (183). So when we talked to her and asked her why the book wasn’t called The Organizing WPA, the answer she gave focused on the role of change as a key goal of activism.

Any person going into post-secondary education needs to think about how to advocate for the programs and students and instructors. That’s why I do so much work with assessment, because I think assessment is a really powerful [form of] advocacy for that kind of work.

In the book, assessment is described as a strategy that is often overlooked. I found this interesting because I’ve never really thought of assessment as anything more than a Foucaldian mechanism of surveillance, a way of keeping checks and balances and knowing what both instructors and students are doing in the classroom. If we think about assessment in terms of showing what writing programs do, though, assessment can be a tool for changing the narratives about writing and writing instruction.

 

Adler-Kassner, Linda. The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2008.

 

Digital Composition: DH and Computers & Writing

For me, digital composition involves the use of various technologies to approach composition within the classroom. This includes the way instructors teach, how students research, and how we all interact with texts—through creation, manipulation, production, dissemination, and even assessment. I think of digital composition as an umbrella term for many concepts, e.g. multimedia, multimodal composition, remix culture, multiliteracies, and the many forms and formats that digital writing encompasses.

Of course, there’s a lot of scholarship on multimodality, remix, and multiliteracy, but I’m not well read on digital writing as a broader category. I chose readings for this week’s Digital Humanities class, and I found some good information about digital writing—what it is, how it’s implemented, and why it’s important for the humanities.

First is “Why Teach Digital Writing?”, a webtext created by the WIDE Research Center Collective. The WIDE collective defines digital writing as “the art and practice of preparing documents primarily by computer and often for online delivery.” This is a nice, brief definition, but digital writing is slightly more complex both in terms of praxis and theory: “Digital writing often requires attention to the theories and practices of designing, planning, constructing, and maintaining dynamic and interactive texts—texts that may wind up fragmented and published within and across databases.”

This more thorough understanding of digital writing focuses on two interrelated aspects of digital writing: dynamism and interactivity. The push for digital writing is necessary for a new writing environment, which requires students to have the rhetorical skills to “produce documents appropriate to the global and dispersed reach of the web.” In a dynamic and dispersed digital medium, students and instructors must recognize that writing is more than written text on a page. Digital writing extends to different modes and media that “allow us to weave and orchestrate multiple sign technologies (e.g. images, voice and other sounds, music, video, print, graphics), layered together across space and time to produce artifacts that can be interactive, hyperlinked, and quite powerful.” In order to be part of a digital culture, students must learn the rhetorical skills to create powerful and effective texts.

The second article is “What is Humanistic about Computers and Writing? Historical Patterns and Contemporary Possibilities” by Michael Knievel. Knievel seeks to answer “what, precisely, is humanistic about computers and writing” (92). Tracing the three major phases of humanistic arguments in computers and writing’s history—fear and loathing (1975–1992), moving the social turn online (1990–2000), and digital literacy and action (2000–present)—Knievel makes a similar argument about the rhetorical importance of digital writing.

By helping to shift humanistic conversation and responsibility toward an active, technologized literacy, computers and writing participates in re-imagining the humanities and its “outcome” at this cultural moment: now, a fully equipped rhetor must be equally capable of analysis and production for multimediated participation in the academy, the workplace, and both personal and public spheres. 103

Here, Knievel stresses the importance of an active and productive humanities that acknowledges its students (and its scholars) as effective “citizen-rhetors” (104).

Lastly, I looked at Alex Reid’s blog post, “Composition, Humanities, and the ‘Digital Age.’” This post explores the idea that the “future of all humanities is digital.” This idea echoes the idea from the WIDE article that most of the writing that we do takes place in digital environments. Reid makes two important arguments here: 1) Though scholars don’t need to focus on technology as a research inquiry, it is necessary to develop pedagogies that account for technology; and 2) writing pedagogies have remained fairly static, even though writing spaces and technologies have changed significantly.

These articles articulate a few themes that are crucial for a digital writing pedagogy:

1. Pedagogies must be relevant. As our culture becomes more technologically advanced, so should our writing and rhetorical skills.
2. Writing can benefit from interactivity, which necessitates an understanding of the importance us using different modes and media to compose texts.
3. Digital composition is more than just writing: it involves consideration of theory, appropriate mediums for composition and production, an understanding of how technology can be used to make texts even more effective, and a new framework for assessment.

 

Skype Interview with Jonathan Alexander

This is a quick follow-up to the post about Alexander’s book and some highlights from our class Skype session with him.

“Our own subject position within the classroom has to be taken into consideration. … What does my own positioning allow me to see and allow me to reflect on that other people might find useful?”

We asked Alexander what considerations must be taken into account when different bodies try to implement a pedagogy of sex/ual literacy. For example, if he identifies as a queer male, how does that change the perceptions that his students have about this pedagogy? If a heterosexual female adopts this pedagogy, do perceptions change? Alexander suggested that marking our bodies, and accounting for how those bodies might be perceived, can lead to useful class discussions about sex/uality and identity.

“Being gay is not this monolithic thing where we all understand what that means.   Sexuality is often not that simplistic.”

In Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy, Alexander acknowledges that there is an assumption that he is interested in sexuality because he is a gay man. As he posits, though, issues of sex/uality are not static, easily understood issues. Everyone has different understandings of sex, sexuality, and sexual identification that they must come to critically.

“Issues of queerness are often wrapped up in normative bodies, what normative bodies do,and how they are represented as sexual bodies.”

This quotation is wrapped up in a few larger issues. First, Syracuse’s Writing 105 and 205 classes are based on particular inquiries (e.g. poverty, reimagining the normal, food politics). When we asked him what a sex/uality inquiry would look like, Alexander responded that he would not add it to the list; rather, he would recommend taking a preexisting inquiry and examining how sex/uality can augment it. Second, Alexander took disability as a site of inquiry and briefly applied sex/uality to that, which is where this quotation comes from. A major issue in disability studies is normative bodies; likewise, a major issue in queer and transgender theories is the normative body and how particular bodies are normalized. Lastly, Alexander emphasized the importance of blending various inquiries and issues, arguing that this blending creates richer ways to think about complex situations. He stated explicitly, “I’m wanting more intersectionality from our field.”

I find this last point particularly interesting because it seems like some people argue that while it is important to make connections, we can only focus on so much at once (re: Banks), whereas Alexander argued that intersectionality is key for getting a full understanding of a situation. So, which is better for the field? Does it depend on particular contexts or on which “issues” we’re blending (e.g. intersections between race and gender)? Or is this all just a matter of perspective?

 

Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies

This week, we read Literacy, Sexuality, and Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies. I’ll be honest: I have a soft spot for Jonathan Alexander’s work, and I was really excited to read this book. It’s not a topic that I’m very familiar with—I’ve only heard sexuality discussed in terms of how the classroom is a space of sexual repression, so I was really into Alexander’s argument that we should focus on promoting sexual literacy.

Sexual literacy: “the knowledge complex that recognizes the significance of sexuality to self- and communal definition and that critically engages the stories we tell about sex and sexuality to probe them for controlling values and for ways to resist, when necessary, constraining norms” (5).

For me, the overarching question for this text is this: Why should we focus on sex and sexuality in the composition classroom? What does it add to writing?

Right off the bat, Alexander argues that “sex and sexuality are key components of how we conceive of ourselves personally, organize ourselves collectively, and figure ourselves politically” (1). He makes a case for the importance of discussions of sex/uality, but how does that affect literacy? Alexander writes, “How we talk about, define, and discuss the private versus the personal; how images and representations of sex and sexuality are constructed, written, and disseminated; how the state, the collective ‘we,’ defines sex and sexuality and controls information about it—all of these are literacy events that deserve attention and analysis” (4). These cultural and social issues are also matters of discourse—both written and spoken—that collectives take up and start defining and controlling. Alexander argues that our students need to take up these discussions in order to be better informed citizens-participants. 

Alexander makes it very clear that sexual literacy is something more than just being informed about sex/uality. He writes that “it should also be an intimate understanding of the ways in which sexuality is constructed in language and the ways in which our language and meaning-making systems are always already sexualized” (25). In order to facilitate that understanding, we must ask the following:

1. “How do students write sexuality?” (25)
2. “How do sexuality and literacy interconnect in complex ways?” (26)
3. “How can we create pedagogical environments to invite students—safely, productively, and insightfully—to compose about sex and sexuality?” (26)

In order to answer some of these questions, Alexander advocates for a critical pedagogy “that takes sexuality as a key and focal interest for the development of literate citizens. We need a strong, critical, disciplinary sense of sexual literacy as a central literacy need of our students” (64). Part of this critical pedagogy involves the inclusion of queer theory, which is “designed to provoke consideration of the construction of all sexualities in our culture as sites of identity, knowledge, and power” (14). Recognizing this construction of sexuality is key to Alexander’s argument. He wants students to recognize the social constructions of sex/uality and identity in order to gain a great understanding of how these constructions are normalized as good/bad ways of being. Because these constructions affect us all—whether we are part of these normative practices or reside in the margins—Alexander argues that students can benefit from disrupting and deconstructing these assumptions.

It is this idea of disrupting heternormative practices that also makes transgender theories important for critically understanding 1. gender as a social construct and 2. how we can expand and extend the narratives we have about gender (129). Alexander makes a connection between trans activists and feminists: “they seek an expansive notion of gender, a questioning of restrictive norms and categories, and an understanding of how gender is used a politically and personally normalizing category” (131).

To someone wary of bringing these different theories—critical, feminist, queer, and transgender—into the composition classroom, Alexander takes a stance against indoctrination. He writes, “While I believe that our classrooms should be free of indoctrination, I also firmly believe that a significant difference exists between indoctrination and critical examination” (184). Historically, the minute these more liberal theories are introduced into the classroom, we hear cries of indoctrination. The fact that Alexander keeps sex/uality a broad inquiry in the classroom (e.g. not limiting students to just sexual orientation or identification) maintains an open dialogue where students don’t have to necessarily think one way or the other.

“I believe all of us can—and should—consider the development of sexual literacy as a significant component of becoming literate in our society, and the only way to work with students on such sensitive material is to do so calmly, respectfully, openly, and honestly. Our students deserve nothing less” (209).

Alexander’s book is a strong argument for talking with students about sex/uality within the composition classroom. The purpose is not to indoctrinate or force students to be more tolerant; rather, it is to hook them with a topic that is always-already relevant to them (as all people are sexual beings) and to examine critically the ways that cultural discussions of sex/uality are constructed, normalized, and disseminated. What sex/ual literacy adds to the writing classroom, then, is attention to critical thinking, cultural and rhetorical awareness, and in-depth research on very relevant topics.

Alexander, Jonathan. Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2008. Print.

 

Skype Interview with Adam Banks

Adam Banks is a really smooth speaker, and we had a great discussion about community work, critically discussing race in the classroom, integrating useful technological practices, and how to make class spaces accessible.

Here are some quick highlights:

I see my main responsibility as helping my students to claim roles for themselves as intellectuals. To see themselves as doing intellectual work right here right now, not waiting until someone busts them with a piece of parchment, or a degree, that they can only access those conversations once they’ve graduated, but to take the responsibility that intellectual work requires now.

This says a lot about both Banks’ role as an instructor and as a community leader. As someone who does community work and values the intersections between academic and activist work, Banks’ emphasis on his students as intellectuals is very telling for how he sees them as agents of change.

We get the sense that access means we embrace everything. NO. We have to consciously ask the question, “What makes sense and why?”

In response to how he tries to use technology to create the “transformative access” promoted in Race, Rhetoric, and Technologies, Banks told us that the main point to remember with bringing technology into the classroom is that we have to think critically about those choices. That is, we can’t just bring in technology because something’s shiny and new; it has to be relevant and useful for students.

These different language varieties are strengths rather than something that somehow has to be accounted for, dealt with, something that’s just a challenge.

One of the texts we have discussed throughout this course is Students’ Rights to Their Own Language. Banks spoke against taking a viewpoint that encourages students to embrace their own voices throughout the writing process yet penalizes them on the final drafts. He argued that we are not in charge of employing a “linguistic poll tax”; rather, we are in charge of teaching students how to be rhetorically agile and flexible.

If there is any area of the academy that is severely tokenized and placed into its own space, disability studies would be it.

I want to on this note because it’s part of the response to the question that I posed before: What intersections are there between African American rhetoric and the rhetorics of other students who are often cast in liminal spaces within the classroom? Banks spoke about looking at the intersections of different rhetorics as they relate to our particular interests–in his case, African American rhetorics. Banks explained his work as an attempt to move black rhetorical traditions away from the tokenized inclusion where they usually fall, which is where he saw the connection with dis/ability.

We covered a lot of ground with this discussion, and speaking with Banks was a great experience. Next week? Jonathan Alexander!