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The Multilingual Writing Classroom: A Contact Zone
Negotiating Literate Identities in the Contact Zone
Contact Zone-Based Composition Pedagogy
Conclusion
While writing an assignment prompt is critical in designing a project, it is equally important to consider the actual implementation of the unit in class, focusing on questions like “How will I teach this project? What activities do I want to include? What do I want to explain to my students or let them discover on their own? What kind of environment do I want to create?” When operating within a framework like contact zone ideology, particularly if it is a new method for the instructor, these questions are of the utmost importance to consider. This requires a great deal of work, especially in a diverse multilingual classroom, but the goal is to make the contact zone visible, tangible, collaborative, and customized to local contexts. The main goal of the writing classroom is that students learn how to write; the goal of a contact zone writing classroom is expanded to include participants learning how to engage meaningfully with their culture and others’ through writing in a way that does not promote xenophobia or prejudice.
Contact zone classrooms and pedagogy are continuously evolving (Miller 145), so teachers are encouraged to engage with various techniques and iterations of assignments and activities to discover what might be successful. Implementing contact zone-based ideologies in the multilingual writing classroom will require trial and error. This is important to remember within an individual section, but also in iterations of it with different student groups, where a new contact zone will have to be created each time. The extent to which students will engage with or grow from this pedagogy is “displayed to varying degrees by multilinguals from different walks of life in the extant literature” (Canagarajah 99), so teachers should not be disheartened by difficulties they may encounter.
The contact zone can be unpredictable. Firsthand accounts of teaching within it describe it as being “dynamic, heterogeneous, and volatile. Bewilderment and suffering as well as revelation and exhilaration are experienced by everyone, teacher and students, at different moments” (Lu 481). Deciding to create and engage a contact zone in one’s classroom is therefore not a decision made lightly. It requires a great deal of effort by all parties involved and can cause some uncomfortable situations. However, a contact zone also enables participants to learn more about themselves and others, and the composition contact zone allows participants to deal with and express those thoughts and emotions in writing. The contact zone does not and cannot promise that all involved will emerge culturally and linguistically enlightened. It cannot promise the impossible: that people will leave without any prejudices or with a full understanding of all cultures, including one’s own or others. The contact zone is promising, however, in its ability to at least initiate thought-provoking conversations that can enact productive change. The multilingual writing contact zone can be a safe place for people of diverse backgrounds to have their own space to develop their multiliterate, multicultural, and multilingual identities.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Dr. Amber Buck for her feedback on early drafts of this work as well as the anonymous reviewers of this article for their suggestions.