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Graduate Students’ Development of Academic Identities
The Goals and Mission of EnglWrit111
Stacie’s Teaching Reflection
As I began teaching Writing, Identity, and Power, I was preparing to defend my comprehensive exams on action research and the role of language ideology in community literacy research. This transitioned into my dissertation study, a historically informed ethnographic case study of a community writing group I facilitate at my public library. Underlying my research project is a belief that writing can be used to create social change generally and specifically that we can use writing (and research about writing) to create community with others. In my research, this looks like asking about people’s lived experiences and their relationships to writing and seeing how that shapes their participation at the writing group, as well as asking them to co-construct the writing group’s activities. In doing this project, I have realized that I have developed a lot of my practice as a researcher and facilitator through my experiences as a teacher.
Broadly speaking, I take an asset-based and critical approach to writing in my teaching, with the hope that students’ relationships to writing change so that they recognize what literacy resources they have, can build on, and use to meet their own writing goals. This means understanding and valuing what writing and language knowledge, experiences, and resources students bring into the classroom and also understanding the hierarchies, contexts, and power relations that structure their writing experiences at our university. Many students are already quite aware of these dynamics, but the class highlights what this looks like on an everyday basis in accordance with the objectives to identify that “writing is socially and culturally situated” and to “[p]ractice respectful and ethical ways of engaging with others’ ideas,” as the course learning objectives state.
One example of this occurs early in the semester when we discuss Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “Should Writers Use They Own Language?” We discuss theories of translanguaging and linguistic repertoires, that literacy resources live together, collide with one another, and sometimes mesh in ways that can be creative, subversive, or penalized in academic spaces. Students will talk about this in a very granular way, like how they had to get used to the subject-verb-object structure of a sentence in English, which is different from their native language. From there, students reflect on their orientations towards writing and language – how they’ve come to feel, know, and value things about language and literacy – which is expanded in the second half of the semester with a family and community literacy project, where students are tasked with identifying the people who have acted as sponsors of their literacy and conducting an interview with them. After the interview is complete, students write a paper that reflects on what gets passed down (or not) to others within their family or community and why, as well as how these literacy practices matter to them. Students have told me how this assignment is often the first time they broach meaningful subjects with family members and elders in their community. Examples include how oral history in Khmer has helped three generations survive the trauma of war and immigration; how watching Marathi-language films preserve a cultural identity in both India and the U.S.; or how a parent reading to their child at bedtime helped them develop a love of reading even when navigating school-based challenges.
The history of critical pedagogy, at UMass Amherst and generally, informs my approach to this class. On a foundational level, I am cognizant that I am a white, monolingual teacher at a predominantly white institution. And yet, in the four semesters I have taught it, this class has been primarily composed of multilingual students of color, many of whom are international students. Facilitating a classroom environment where students not only learn about their own writing lives but learn from each other – and, in doing so, identify the vast writing and language resources they already have to draw on – is crucial to my pedagogy. This research unit treats students’ own lives, literacy sponsors, and literate repertoires as a site of knowledge just as worthy as any published text. I am constantly learning from my students, just as they learn from each other or from me. Looking back, I see that this kind of open reflection about their literacy experiences pushed me to want to understand better how this might work similarly within a community writing context. My research informs my teaching, which has informed my approach as a researcher.