The language movement in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was a social movement that seeded Bangladeshi consciousness and is often considered as prefiguring Bangladeshi independence in 1972. It underscored the centrality of linguistic identity in modern nationalism. Developments in the language movement also provide a generative example of how development and modernity can frame discussions around language reform and literacy in contexts characterized by a multilingual norm and postcoloniality. This article examines the rhetorics of language reform in the movement through a reading of a set of recommendations for developing a simplified register of Bangla, called Shahaj-Bangla, within a sense of the overall language movement and its discourse. I argue that the new register simultaneously presents a scientific and cultural view of language to suit the needs of the region. This study contributes to current scholarship in the field by showing how an example of language reform assumes a fluid nature of language while also arguing for a form of standardization aligned with modern nationalism. It also adds to our developing conversations around language and literacy transnationally through its focus on a language debate about a non-European language set in a non-Western context.

In my sometimes-murky role as a writing program administrator, I often think about Eli Goldblatt's chapter "Lunch" in Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum.Goldblatt posits the main job of a writing program administrator is to have lunch with as many people on campus as possible.His advice is simple.I tell myself it's a lesson I already know.Yet again and again, just as I begin to wonder if I should renew that WPA contract the next time, I run into someone new on campus, we discover all that we share in our hopes for our institution, we make a plan or two, and I remember I have Eli to thank.This kind of move characterizes Goldblatt, both as a person and as a writer and scholar.His personability leads, distracting us from the fact that he is also a profound thinker whose writing models what we value most in composition, rhetoric, and literacy studies: it gently sets aside our concerns with form-genre form, forms of difference, disciplinary forms-and helps us commune, instead, through practice.For that reason, we are lucky now to have Goldblatt's new book, Alone with Each Other: Literature and Literacy Intertwined, a compilation of his published writing from the beginning of his career in rhetoric and composition to the present, between 1995 and 2022.Divided into three sections by topic-Composition Theory and Pedagogy, Community Literacy, and Poetics and Practice-the collection reveals, at last, just how much is really going on in Goldblatt's work when we see it in its wholeness.In the excellent new introductory chapter, Goldblatt shows us how he's been thinking of his tripartite work all these years, straddling university writing programs and literature departments, community literacy settings, and the poetry community.Goldblatt loosens literacy and literature from their disciplinary forms and reframes them, so that "literacy" denotes reading and writing in the world, and "literature" means reading and writing for art's sake.Then he argues that this reframing allows us to make our way around and through their politicized institutional histories.While we in composition have often lamented our precarity and lesser status in relation to literary study, Goldblatt shows us how to respect our own grounding in our peculiar intersection of college writing, English literature, and English education.But what Goldblatt also achieves-without stating as his aim-is a tender embrace of the varying stances, and dare I say open conflicts, within composition itself.He extols Aja Martinez's work drawing on Critical Race Theory, for instance, seeing a kindred spirit in the conviction that "argumentation divorced from accounts of lived experience too easily leaves oppressive structures in place" (7).He brings this newer critical work into conversation with the earlier energies of the social turn, especially the "often . . .

Precarious Citizenship: Ambivalence, Literacy and Prisoner Reentry examines the role of literacy in the experiences of formerly incarcerated people as they navigate the process of reentry into mainstream citizenry. I argue that the unsustainability of mass incarceration has created uncertainty about the place of formerly incarcerated people in the democratic imaginary, opening for debate who deserves to participate in civic life. In response, higher education is increasingly being called upon to address the precarious citizenship of formerly incarcerated people and, I argue, serves to credential formerly incarcerated people not only for future employment but for inclusion in social life. The literacy narratives these individuals tell, however, are marked by an ambivalence toward the power of literacy as a mechanism for inclusion, as well as an ambivalence toward mainstream inclusion itself.

How can it be possible for disempowerment to be mistaken for empowerment?Isn't the dichotomy between the two abundantly clear?Erec Smith thinks not.Smith's ethos as a Black professor of rhetoric and composition places him in a unique position to critique anti-racist pedagogy.It is not his perspective that racism is not present in the academy: far from it.He has been the recipient of prejudice and discrimination from his graduate work all the way to his teaching.In his book, Smith includes personal experiences and anecdotes that help to illustrate his perspective.As a Black rhetoric and composition instructor in the majority White institution of York College of Pennsylvania, Smith has experienced these issues firsthand and has found that anti-racist pedagogy alone, which he argues can lead to a lack of academic rigor, is not necessarily the appropriate answer.Smith's main argument is that anti-racist pedagogy in rhetoric and composition often inadvertently disempowers students by ignoring important aspects of empowerment theory.This pedagogy instead encourages marginalized students to embrace their positionalities as the center of all arguments and to fall back into positions of victimhood.Smith explains that this "victim framing" creates "disempowered entities in need of enlightenment instead of empowered agents with selfefficacy and a desire to broaden the interactional and behavioral components of empowerment" (88).This victimhood allows students to escape from proper academic scrutiny which, in turn, reduces academic rigor.In his introduction, Smith begins his critique with a vignette in which W. E. B. Du Bois recounts an experience in a composition class at Harvard.In his first essay for that class, Du Bois had railed against racist issues present in society at the time and had let fly his own colloquial grammar and syntax.This first effort was met with a failing grade.From this experience, Du Bois noted, "[he] realized that while style is subordinate to content, and that no real literature can be composed simply of meticulous and fastidious phrases, nevertheless solid content with literary style carries a message further than poor grammar and muddled syntax" (Smith xix).Du Bois realized it was imperative to adapt to "standard English, " or what Smith prefers to call the "language of wider communication" (LWC) (5), rather than insist on communicating in the vernacular he grew up speaking.Using Du Bois as an example of code switching, Smith addresses the present climate of code meshing taught in many quarters of the rhetoric and composition field.According to scholars like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Asao Inoue, and others, rhetoric and composition instructors who require their students of color to adapt to the LWC engage in a form of racism because this adaptation automatically alienates students' home dialects.As such, they propose that students in rhetoric and composition should be encouraged to inject their writing with African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as well as other dialect forms.In writing and speaking this way, anti-racist scholars argue, students embrace

In U.S. secondary schools there is an overriding emphasis on formulaic approaches to argumentative writing instruction in English language arts that tends to trivialize disciplinary norms of argument and evidence because of institutional pressure to bolster students’ test performances.  This paper seeks to provide an ethnographically-informed framework for understanding for whom, how, when, and to what extent it is possible for students to participate, through writing, in the study of literature as the central disciplinary content of English language arts. The corpus of data used in this study of an 11th grade International Baccalaureate (IB) classroom (26 students) consisted of classroom instruction (video-recordings and field notes) that occurred across an initial instructional unit (September 8th to November 3rd). Of particular importance is a summative writing assignment, teacher interviews and collaborative data analysis (with video clips), student interviews about instruction and their writing, samples of student writing, and related documents. We also analyzed two essays written by the two case study students in response to a writing assignment that the teacher, described as an IB “literary commentary with an unspecified topic” that she reframed as a literary argument. Discourse analysis of a series of events within instructional conversations revealed that rather than prescribed forms, the teacher offered “possible” writerly moves for her students’ arguing to learn. Consequently, her students enacted their writerly moves in a variety of patterns suggestive of disciplinary ways of knowing in English language arts rather than in a pre-set formula that they had learned in previous grades. In order to trace how the students enacted modes of participation (procedural display and deep participation) in disciplinary activity (literary argumentation) as writing practices and shifting writer identities  we also conducted a multi-phased and multi-layered ana

This article examines a debate from the early 1980s about siting the Nixon Presidential Library at UC Irvine. I analyze the debate as it unfolds across the pages of the campus newspaper, exploring the interplay between literacy and geography to document how the newspaper provides a venue for inhabitants of the campus and the surrounding area to wrangle over the academic, civic, and regional responsibilities of UCI. The ideological fault lines that emerge are evidence that campus values are, much like the campus itself, an evolving construction to which college writing has much to contribute. I conclude by calling upon teacher-scholars to sustain and diversify the array of literacy practices associated with college campuses by using newspapers and other campus publications for research, pedagogy, and other curricular and cocurricular ends.

In this article, I examine the role of affect management in the transnational migration of Filipino care workers. Drawing on qualitative research in the Philippines, I claim that in government-mandated skills training, opportunities for Filipino migrants to critically engage in print and English literacies were often limited to standardized and rote practices to enhance transferability. In response, these migrant workers turned to affective literacies to engage in the kind of critical thinking and knowledge transformation necessary to challenge their labor conditions or simply survive the daily traumas of migrant life. While policies for skills-based labor migration categorize workers and their migration trajectories through a high-skills/low-skills divide, I suggest that affect management is the “high-skilled” work in such contexts where the mobility and flexibility of the global economy are experienced as precarity and insecurity. This reversal of high-low skill categories prompts a re-imagining of the transnational movement of labor—one where worker-citizens and their literacies move through a continuous series of affective attachments to and detachments from the nation-state.

This essay revisits two proposals for the abolition of compulsory freshman English: Thomas Lounsbury’s “Compulsory Composition in Colleges” in 1911 and Oscar James Campbell’s “The Failure of Freshman English” in 1939. It demonstrates how the New Literacy Studies provides a generative theoretical perspective from which to make more visible the assumptions, definitions, and attitudes about literacy that perpetuate the compulsory composition debate.

Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education to substantiate our claims that literacy has often, if not always, been framed as a white property.Nonetheless, I am still perplexed that there has been no real, vociferous debate around one of the book's most critical contributions, namely chapter three, on Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words.In fact, after that chapter, it seems like the very terms we use to talk about literacy when we imagine ourselves to be talking about multiple locations, academic literacy/discourse communities, schooling, and marginalized communities should be called into question.Ways with Words is a central canon in literacy studies, a product of a Post-Civil Rights/Post-Brown agenda at the same time that it reproduces that agenda.This is why Kathryn Flannery's text, "Babies and Bath Water, " offers us an important reminder that the ideological discourses we are often deploying are fundamentally connected to Ways even though we do not always recognize this text as doing that kind of heavy lifting in composition-rhetoric studies.It seems as if our elitist tendency to distance ourselves from literacy studies, an elitism that Brenda Glascott has meticulously shown in "Constricting Keywords: Rhetoric and Literacy in Our History Writing, " has left us with some blindspots.To riff off of Morris Young in his "Sponsoring Literacy Studies, " we, too, can consider Ways a literacy sponsor to the kinds of work we have done in framing literacy in the post-Brown era.To take this back to Prendergast's argument, the very thing that we imagine ourselves to be pursuing in composition studies, namely the framing of contexts, histories, and ideologies in relation to literacy, has been inhibited as much as it has been promoted when Ways with Words acts as a framing device.To quote Harvey Graff 's contribution here: "the roster of literacy studies' commissions and omissions is lengthy."In its documentation of the literacy practices of a working class black community and a working class white community in 1960s/1970s South Carolina, alongside both communities' conflicts with the middle-class townspeople (whose discourse norms match and are sustained by schooling), Heath offered an analytical schema that suggested that non-dominant groups' social clashes with school was a cultural clash.As should be fairly obvious, the focus in our research on speech communities, discourse communities, cultural models of literacies, etc. can, thus, be traced back to or, at least, connected with Ways.However, Prendergast reminds us that Ways emerges out of and because of the Post-Brown mandate to desegregate, a racial clash that Heath always distanced herself from.While Heath's focus on the local offered important models for new research, race was as local as it was national, but is still given no real frame of analysis.If we go back to Ways, or (re)read Prendergast's chapter, we will remember the white working class male who said he only went to college when the town's mill (where he worked)