Writing Across Communities Literacy and Diversity at UNM

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Writing Across Communities Literacy 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)

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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)

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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

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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

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Creating Pathways to Academic Literacy and Beyond

• Situating the Personal, Professional, and
  Political
• Juan C. Guerra
• Department of English
• University of Washington at Seattle

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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)

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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)

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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
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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 Im 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
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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
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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
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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.

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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 academys 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.

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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

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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

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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

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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 communitys needs through a shared
  theory of action