Writing Across Communities Literacy and Diversity at UNM

1. Writing Across CommunitiesLiteracy and Diversity at UNM • Civic/Community Literacies: Knowing Our Students (Spring 2005) • Academic Literacies: Inviting Our Students (Fall 2005) • Professional Literacies: Serving Our Students (Spring 2006)

2. Renewing Our Commitment to Addressing the Needs of Local Communities • CASA Latina (1994-1996) • Teachers for a New Era Washington Center for Teaching and Learning (Co-Director, 2004-Present) • Successful Schools in Action (2004-Present) • Campaña Quetzal (2004-Present)

3. Compaña Quetzal Latino Education Summit Resolutions • On Community Empowerment and Participation • On Parent Leadership and Involvement • On Early Childhood Education • On the Cultural, Linguistic, and Academic Needs of the Latino Community

4. Latino Education Summit Resolutions, continued • On Disproportionality in Discipline • On College Support • On Recruitment of Latino Instructional Staff • On Proyecto Saber • On State and Federal Obligations

5. Creating Pathways to Academic Literacy and Beyond Situating the Personal, Professional, and Political Juan C. Guerra Department of English University of Washington at Seattle

6. Expanded WAC/WID programs at most universities typically consist of four components: • First-year writing (introduction to academic discourse, topic seminars) • Student support (writing center, course-based tutoring) • Upper-level courses (writing in the disciplines) • Faculty development (seminars, consultations, course approval) (adapted from Parks & Goldblatt, 2000)

7. Most universities could create a writing across communities program by adding the following components: • Service and experiential learning • K-16 connections • Community literacy projects • Literacy research • Technology leadership • Business and professional outreach (adapted from Parks & Goldblatt, 2000)

8. Philosophical Principles Informing the Work of Transforming Cultures of Writing Across Communities First Principle: We must work to dismantle the barriers that separate the university from local communities. “From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his [or her] inability to utilize the experiences he [or she] gets outside of the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he [or she] is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school.” John Dewey Dewey in Education, 1899/1998

9. Second Principle: Because it occupies a position of power in the larger community and possesses the necessary resources, the university must work to address the literacy needs of the multiple communities that it serves. “What I’m describing might be called the ‘New American College,’ an institution that celebrates teaching and selectively supports research, while also taking special pride in its capacity to connect thought to action, theory to practice. This New American College would organize cross-disciplinary institutes around pressing social issues. Undergraduates at the college would participate in field projects, relating ideas to real life. Classrooms and laboratories would be extended to include health clinics, youth centers, schools and government offices. Faculty members would build partnerships with practitioners who would, in turn, come to campus as lecturers and student advisors. “The new American College, as a connected institution, would be committed to improving, in a very intentional way, the human condition.” Ernest Boyer “Creating the New American College” Chronicle of Higher Education, 1994

10. Third Principle: Everyone involved in the process of developing a writing across communities program must engage in a shared and mutually productive critique of public education. “A network of people concerned with literacy in a region could develop a supportive and constructive critique of public education that would make solutions possible across traditional educational and community boundaries.” Steve Parks & Eli Goldblatt “Writing Beyond the Curriculum: Fostering New Collaboration in Literacy” College English, 2000

11. The Rhetorical Practice of Transcultural Repositioning “Transcultural repositioning is a rhetorical ability that members of disenfranchised communities often enact intuitively but must learn to regulate self-consciously, if they hope to move productively across different languages, registers, and dialects; different social and economic classes; different cultural and artistic forms; and different ways of seeing, being in, and thinking about the increasingly fluid and hybridized world emerging all around us.” Juan Guerra “Putting Literacy in its Place: Nomadic Consciousness and the Practice Of Transcultural Repositioning” Rebellious Reading: The Dynamics of Chicana/o Cultural Literacy, 2004

12. The Roots of Transculturation • When he first coined the concept of transculturation in 1947 as an alternative to the concepts of assimilation and acculturation, Fernando Ortiz posited that “the result of every union of cultures is similar to that of the reproductive process between individuals: the offspring always has something of both parents but is always different from each of them.” • In 1991, Mary Louise Pratt described transcultuation as the processes “whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture. [While subordinate peoples] do not usually control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what gets absorbed into their own and what it gets used for.” • Vivian Zamel argued in 1997 that transculturation “reflects precisely how languages and cultures develop and change--infused, invigorated, and challenged by variation and innovation.”

13. The Roots of Repositioning • According to Min-Zhan Lu (1990), “each student writer has access to a range of discourses--the discourses used in college and in other cultural sites, such as home, workplace, high school, neighborhood, among religious, recreational, peer, or gender groups.” • Moreover, “conventions and meanings intersect and conflict both within and between these discourses.” • In negotiating their way through these conflicting terrains, Lu contends that students have three options: they may 1) choose to assimilate the academy’s ways of thinking and writing; 2) choose the path of biculturalism; or 3) see writing “as a process in which the writer positions, or rather, repositions herself in relation not to a single, monolithic discourse but to a range of competing discourses.”

14. A better understanding of cultural diversity can enhance our students’ ability: • To write appropriately . . . with an awareness of discourse conventions • To write productively . . . by achieving their social and material aims • To write ethically . . . by becoming attuned to the cultural ecology around them • To write critically . . . by engaging in inquiry and discovery • To write responsively . . . by responsibly negotiating the tensions of exercising authority

15. The Personal Before we arrive at the university, each of us learns how to communicate with others in the context of a situated community whose members share an identity and a set of linguistic and cultural values. These are then reflected in: • Our participation in local languages and dialects • Our enactment of local literacy practices • Our interactions with members of other discourse communities

16. The Professional The university is one of the many sets of discourse communities that we engage in the course of our social and personal development. There, we: • Learn the language of the academy • Are initiated into a discipline and prepare for a professional career • Acknowledge the likelihood of multiple career changes

17. The Political Besides preparing us for a career, a university education also prepares us to engage in the civic discourses of our local, state, and national communities. We initiate and carry out this process by: • Reconnecting with a local community • Identifying its particular needs • Addressing the community’s needs through a shared theory of action