Using Contact Zone Concepts to Teach Critical Autoethnography to Multilingual Writers in Foundational Composition

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Contents

Introduction

The Multilingual Writing Classroom: A Contact Zone

Negotiating Literate Identities in the Contact Zone

Contact Zone-Based Composition Pedagogy

The Critical Autoethnography Project

Conclusion

References

About the Author

Appendix

Introduction

I remember sitting in the orientation for graduate student teachers who would be working in the writing program. The majority of participants were first-time teachers slated for the “mainstream” sections which, at our university in the southeastern US, were largely composed of domestic, white, monolingual English-speaking students. The small handful of us in the MA program in applied linguistics and TESOL already had a year of experience co-teaching the EAL (English as an Additional Language) sections that were “intended and required for international students who are non-native speakers of English” (“Course Descriptions and Outcomes”).

At the meeting, everyone was given the same materials–textbooks, syllabi, training–regardless of which course we were going to teach. I remember receiving the syllabus that included the series of projects for the course, thinking about how clear it was, based on the entire orientation and the resources with which we were provided, that everything was geared towards the mainstream course. Those of us teaching the EAL sections had support from our own faculty, but the writing program did not explicitly provide any unique preparation for our work in this different context.

I tried to rationalize that this made some sense given the fact that this was the first year that the EAL teachers had ever been required to attend this orientation and that there were many, many more mainstream sections than EAL ones. Even so, as I read the materials, I thought about my own research and coursework and felt compelled to engage in praxis, “when theory and practice inform and transform each other” (Berlin 76), and acknowledge the unique socio-linguistic, -cultural, and -political nuances of the classroom I was about to enter. In the writing that follows, I attempt to unpack contact zone theory (Pratt 34) in regard to multilingual writing pedagogy and demonstrate how I updated a foundational writing assignment prompt to reflect contact zone principles.

Through this work, I aim to empower other graduate student teachers to practice autonomy in their curriculum design, advocate for critical curriculum design in EAL writing classes, and encourage the use of culturally-relevant, decolonial pedagogies in all kinds of writing courses.