The hegemony of English, or at least a particular form of English, has been robustly critiqued, yet is far from having been abandoned in teaching.[1] In addition, dominant discourse deems Native American languages “extinct” or otherwise incapable of speaking to academic topics. However, Indigenous peoples develop language for various subject areas, and languages are used in ways that represent the cultural perspectives of their users.[2] Such perspectives are part of the heart of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty, and the right to use Indigenous languages supports, quite simply, Indigenous peoples’ right to speak and think.[3] Declining to accept assignments in an Indigenous or any heritage language (or requiring translations) conveys the message that English is needed in academic contexts, and is therefore communicatively superior. I argue that writing courses should support student refusals of translation, creating a situation where an instructor may not know what the content of a student submission even is, and that this inability “to know” serves the aims of decolonization.   [1] Alim & Smitherman 2012 [2] See: Kimura & Counceller 2009, McCarty & Nicholas 2014, Wilson & Kamanā 2011, Reyhner 2010, McIvor & McCarty 2017 [3] These rights are a main tenet of how Leonard (2008, 2011, 2021) theorizes language reclamation

Deborah Brandt’s concept of literacy sponsorship remains foundational in writing studies but, as Brandt herself noted in 2015, its sharper insights into power, ideology, and asymmetry have often been softened in application. Building on this framework, Kara Poe Alexander has shown how reciprocal forms of sponsorship emerge in service-learning contexts where students act as both recipients and providers of literacy support. Inspired by this expanded model, this symposium essay returns to the original concept of sponsorship not to dispute its fundamentals but to continue extending it toward a more networked, mutual vision that better reflects the conditions of AI-mediated, experiential learning. Drawing on my own institutional example, this essay traces how literacy sponsorship moves bidirectionally across instructional, technological, and community spaces. It invites further dialogue about the future of literacy sponsorship in an age of distributed expertise and asks how our field might adapt its theories to better account for the tangled, mutual economies of literacy unfolding around us.

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.

This article extends the engagement with decolonial theories within Latinx writing studies, particularly by engaging the ways literacy has been taken up within Basic Writing scholarship. In what follows, I argue that coloniality and decoloniality are crucial resources for Basic Writing and literacy scholarship under the larger umbrella of literacy/composition/rhetoric studies, and that in a symmetrical fashion a consideration of Basic Writing and the “politics of remediation” cannot be neglected or ignored within LCR studies’ decolonial turn if the decolonial imperative is to be achieved. To this effect, I advance three core claims. First, that the decolonial turn in LCR studies offers a potent set of resources for resolving core contradictions in Basic Writing scholarship. Second, that the decolonial turn offers Basic Writing scholars an opportunity to connect advocacy for students and student centered resources to larger public conversations about pedagogy and literacy. Finally, I argue that a decolonial turn in LCR studies offers Basic Writing scholarship a way to reconceive of its own historiography so as to overcome its current deadlocks.

Too often, those new to community literacy work naïvely overlook issues of paternalism (Mathieu), the violent aspects of literacy (Baker-Bell, Pritchard, Stuckey), and the deep legacies of racism that shape engagement (Kannan). Or, as graduate students and novice community-engaged teachers learn about ethical challenges, they can become disillusioned and paralyzed (Feigenbaum). Mentoring others in community literacy therefore requires nurturing critical hope, which I define and theorize as a disposition that blends a commitment to act with an unflinching awareness of harmful dynamics enmeshed in community literacy.  Drawing on data from sixteen students in a graduate community literacy practicum, I introduce a provisional matrix for mapping orientations to critical hope and explore factors that influenced students’ movements across the matrix. The most impactful factors were not pedagogical choices in the class, but ecological factors shaping students’ lives and community experiences. Given this finding, I suggest that instructors, mentors, and professional development facilitators who work with those new to community literacy provide spaces for personal reflection on individual critical hope ecologies, and I raise questions to consider as our field learns to better support those who are entering the unwieldy and energizing work of community literacy.   

This article examines the presence of intensive mothering within incarcerated motherhood and how mothers in jail manage the constraints this ideology imposes on their mothering practices. Analyzing questionnaire data collected from mothers in a Texas county jail through a feminist maternal framework reveals that these mothers have been influenced by the ideology of intensive mothering to serve as their children’s educator. Considering the standard to educate one’s children reinforces the idea that mothers must apply an autonomous model of literacy to childrearing, this article examines the ways in which mothers feel compelled to seek further instruction in order to mother and communicate with their children effectively. This article also examines incarcerated mothers’ simultaneous use of literacy to (re)appropriate intensive mothering and (re)claim agency as mothers. 

Because algorithms form the audiences that reach us online, students need algorithmic literacy as well as rhetorical awareness when learning to write online. This article examines student writing to explore how students can use theorycrafting to systematically test an algorithm to gain more critical awareness of how the algorithm functions and forms publics online. Finally, this article explores how students can use the algorithmic knowledge they learned from theorycrafting to reflect on the ethics their algorithm constructs for users and how it constructs ad hoc publics. The article then explores how students can create multimodal intersectional counternarratives in response that they can also more effectively circulate online to more deliberately construct inclusive online publics.

This essay reconsiders the role of the “self-sponsored” writer in the attention economy by suggesting that contemporary do-it-yourself publishers have not only attempted to negotiate a public sphere which has linked "self-sponsored" to "entrepreneurial," but contend with a digital environment that makes it difficult to parse authorial desire from neoliberal rationality. Ultimately, this essay suggests that materialist models of circulation should be accounted for in studies of extracurricular literacies, specifically by drawing from the literacy narratives of public writers such as zine authors. It thus provides a method of analysis for understanding how these writers, who must necessarily exist within a broader political economy, have developed publishing strategies to negotiate an alternative position — a stance which can benefit not only our disciplinary research on literacy and public writing, but our publicly-oriented composition classrooms as well.

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.

Although literacy narratives have been a popular assignment in college composition classrooms, the role of context and interaction in students’ writing and understanding of literacy is one of the least explored areas. This article reports the findings of a qualitative case study conducted in a regular first year composition class (English 101) of a public research university in the Southwest. The data is comprised of fifteen literacy narratives accompanied by reflective letters written by a group of English monolingual and bi- and multilingual students; transcripts of nine personal interviews; and twelve one-on-one conferences that were coded and analyzed using a combination of inductive, deductive, and literal or verbatim coding methods mostly informed by grounded theory. The findings show that a literacy narrative assignment in college writing can foster a complex understanding of literacies among student writers. When we adopt a translingual orientation to literacy, encourage cross-cultural conversations through various collaborative activities and diverse readings, and emphasize the role of little narratives to resist the master narrative of literacy, both English monolingual and bi- and multilingual students mutually enrich their understanding of literacies. In this process, the writing classroom becomes borderland and the instructor and students become border crossers.

This paper seeks to offer a constructive critique of the idea that in order to align US writing instruction with the learning needs of a globalized, linguistically diverse population, writing studies should challenge the notion that the English language needs to play a central role in college composition courses. I point out rhetorical and pedagogical fallacies in a language rights discourse that warns against “ceding rhetorical ground to monolingual ideologies” (Flowers 33) by affirming writing studies’ commitment to ensuring access to English while promoting linguistic diversity within writing instruction. I then discuss a translingual writing program I started at a Hispanic Serving Institution that links ESL and Spanish writing courses within a learning community. I discuss how the implementation of this program relied on finding a common ground with “English only” ideology and show how this program disrupted “unilateral monolingualism” (Horner and Trimbur 595), in spite of the fact that it foregrounded the need to facilitate English academic literacy acquisition.

Failure is a significant issue for researchers conducting community-engaged work. This article responds to calls to share research failures more transparently and to create reflective spaces for students to examine moments of failure. We offer our experience adapting three problem-solving strategies from a community literacy course (adaptive problem-solving, rivaling, and critical incident interviewing) to help each other revisit our own “failed” attempts at community-engaged work. By applying these problem-solving strategies to reflect on our experiences—advocating for graduate student parents, working with a summer literacy program, and collaborating with parents of disabled children—we show how these strategies can transform an initial sense of stigmatized failure into a longer process of inquiry and growth. Our approach, we believe, represents an important literate practice for community-based scholars, not only for those seeking to create more collaborative reflective space within university-community partnership, but also for novice scholars navigating the challenges of community-engaged work for the first time.

This article explicates trade as a fierce literacy by critically engaging with literacy narratives of Black queer people who meet with heterosexual men for sexual encounters. I focus on the “trade” knowledges and ways of knowing of Black gay men and transwomen at Harlem Pride 2017. Informed by the literacy work of Eric Darnell Pritchard, I argue that the participants deliberately engaged in corrective literacy practices that speak back to dominant sexual pathologies about straight Black men (and men in general). It is this ability to read and share against dominant scripts that I see as a fierce literacy. Their responses and narratives complicate heteronormative understandings of sexuality based on orientation. Trade is a term used in the larger gay culture that has existed since the late 1800s (predating down low, which I touch on below) but has particular traction in the Black queer community. Building on the works of other scholars (Johnson “Snap!”; McCune; Bailey), I found that my participants’ responses were in line with a larger discussion in the Black queer community about straight Black men who engage in queer sexual acts. Specifically, the participants told stories or literacy narratives to offer a queer-counter narrative, or an on-the-spot oppositional read of heterosexual men and heterosexuality more largely. I critically engage three ideas: (1) trade as a literacy, (2) “the truth about straight men,” and (3) “sex is more than tops and bottoms.”

Although much scholarship on community-engaged pedagogies attends to student negotiations of difference, little attention has been paid to how instructors navigate difference, particularly racial difference, across classroom and community spaces. In this article, we use the concept of brokering to examine how seven different instructors of a community-engaged writing course titled “The Literacy Narratives of Black Columbus” imagined the racialized spaces of the course and facilitated engagement between students and community members in those spaces. Drawing primarily on instructor interviews, we present three approaches instructors took to imagine and facilitate student and community engagement across racialized and spatialized boundaries. We found that instructor positionality influenced how they imagined and negotiated the roles of brokers who could facilitate connections between students and community members as well as provide students with cultural knowledge necessary for navigating the course’s racialized spaces. Ultimately, we argue that instructors, particularly in predominantly white institutions, must carefully consider race, space, place, and their own positionalities when planning and implementing community-engaged pedagogies.

In Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines and Academic Literacies, researchers have produced compelling evidence of the disjunction between faculty members’ assertions that good writing is universal—i.e., the autonomous model of literacy—and faculty’s own tacit practice of discipline-specific conventions. In studies of race and language in education, scholars have identified disconnections between what teachers profess to value—e.g., students’ right to their own language—and how they actually grade. Contradictions are a natural part of any ideology, and these are commonly understood to demonstrate the resilience of the autonomous model. In this article, however, I introduce a set of theoretical tools from the sociology of scientific knowledge—namely, the concept of interpretative repertoires and of variability in participants’ interpretations as an analytic resource—that can reveal cracks in the autonomous model. Although these tools are over thirty years old, they have not circulated widely in literacy and composition studies. I apply the tools to text-based interviews with two faculty writers who had espoused universal “rules” for writing. After identifying apparent disconnections between the rules and their own practices or those of other writers with whom they worked, I present this evidence to them and analyze their explanations: They maintain that the rules still apply, but their accounts are complex, shifting, and self-contradictory. These case studies reveal, rather than its strength, the inherent instability of the autonomous model. Ultimately, I hope that these research tools can, in conjunction with systemic efforts, aid in dismantling the construct of “good writing” and its inherent privileging of white language practices.

This paper examines three students’ multimodal composition experiences in Basic Writing where conceptions of literacy interacted with moments related to transfer across media. Extending Brian V. Street’s work on literacy and Rebecca S. Nowacek’s transfer theory to multimodal composition through video, we use analysis of ethnographic data to conclude that for some students, video facilitated both a robust conception of literacy as ideological and transfer across media. For others, external forces inhibited opportunities for transfer and reinforced a conception of literacy as autonomous. We close reflecting on how we might more usefully scaffold student learning for transfer and more complex conceptions of literacy.

Translingual scholarship emphasizes the temporal dimensions of language use, and frame language practices as emergent phenomena shaped by repertories of discursive activities sedimented through prior experience. This essay adapts Gee’s concept of lifeworld Discourse in order to theorize (1) how Discourse competencies are cultivated through the sedimentation of discourse practices over time, and (2) how actors occupy thresholds or dwell on borders while they draw on repertoires sedimented through prior experience in response to emergent rhetorical situations. I activate the lifeworld Discourse conceptual framework in an analytical approach that I call a Discourse genealogy in order to trace out the palimpsestic emergence and blending of Discursive competencies throughout labor and community organizer César Chávez’s life. The argument focuses on the archival record of Chávez’s literacy practices in order to understand his emergent lifeworld Discourses from birth in 1927 through the late 1950s, up to the point at which he began to organize the migrant farmworkers under the auspices of the Community Service Organization in Oxnard, California (1957-8). Using textual analysis of Chávez’s writings and oral history records, the following essay shows how one thread of Chávez’s lifeworld Discourse – responding to social injustice – binds together a number of Chávez’s varied Discursive repertoires. My central argument is that when we occupy thresholds that connect Discourses, our repertoires of practice may be blended with new practices to form emergent potentials for responding to rhetorical situations. The thread of repertoires sedimented throughout a lifetime bind together the various social Discourses we encounter and engage with in our public lives.

Despite significant work on literacy as a situated practice (Brandt; Street; Gee), in the African American community (Banks; Richardson; Young) and in the LGBT community (Alexander; Alexander and Rhodes), only recently have scholars looked at literacy at the intersection of Black and LGBT people. A notable example is Eric Pritchard’s discussion of “literacy normativity” and the multilayered ways in which Black queer literacies function(Darnell). In this multimedia article, the social space I focus on is Washington, DC, Black Gay Pride 2013, where I discussed shade and shade narratives with seven men and one transgender woman. A main finding of this research was that participants typically relied on narrative to illustrate how shade was thrown; in fact, narrative is a necessary component of catching shade. These narratives provide situated examples of throwing shade while foregrounding the subjectivities or backstories that give throwing shade traction. In this way, throwing shade as a part of a larger “fierce literacy” talks back to literacy normativity and speaks to Black queer people’s relationships with one another, with language, and with the larger culture.

This article reviews the history of conflicting meanings for translinguality in composition studies, locating that history in the context of other competing terms for language difference with which translinguality is sometimes affiliated and competes, and conflicting definitions of these, and in the context of perceived changes to global communication technologies and migration patterns. It argues for approaching translinguality and the confusion surrounding it as evidence of an epistemological break and explains confusions as a response to the challenges such a break poses. It demonstrates the residual operation of monolingualist notions of language in arguments for “code-meshing,” “plurilinguality,” and “translanguaging” and outlines a labor perspective on translinguality that highlights the role played by the concrete labor of language use, as work, in sustaining and revising language as well as the social relations language contributes to (re)producing.

Approximately 1.8 million students in the United States are homeschooled, according to 2012 data from the National Center for Education Statistics (Redford et al.). However, researchers have only begun to examine how these homeschooled students reflect on their own literacy development, especially once they have entered college. Using the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), I gather and analyze eighteen literacy narratives of currently and formerly homeschooled students, exploring how these students reflect on their own developing literacies, especially as they contrast their experiences with those of their traditionally-schooled classmates. The results of this study reveal, first, that these homeschoolers participate in a wide variety of literacy practices that both respond to and redefine those of the “traditional” classroom. Second, many of the narratives tend to embrace the “child prodigy” literacy structure, as identified and defined by Kara Alexander (2011) and Stephanie Paterson (2001). Third, four narratives reveal problems that can occur in homeschooling: namely, a parent-educator’s perceived lack of authority, and, in two cases, a tendency to trap students in unhealthy family environments. Despite these exceptions, most narratives reveal their family network as a place of vibrant literary sponsorship; and a few students narrate the “pedagogic violence” that may occur when they transition from this warm family environment into traditional secondary schools (Worsham 121). Overall, I argue that as participants in a non-dominant mode of education, these homeschoolers feel the need either to justify or to repudiate their literacy acquisition process against the dominant group. More quantitative research is needed to understand whether these experiences represent trends across the homeschooling movement.

Scholarship in literacy and composition studies has demonstrated the many connections between literacy education and citizenship production (e.g. Guerra, Wan). Despite often being neglected in conversations about literacy education and citizenship training, prison education programs and incarcerated students have a unique relationship to citizenship and can make an important contribution to that scholarship. By putting literacy studies in conversation with queer studies and critical prison studies, I argue that we as literacy educators and teachers can train ourselves to notice and push back against the harmful ideologies underlying the discourse around prison literacy education programs and citizenship education. This attention to language is essential because it has a material effect on the incarcerated students we teach, as well as the futures we imagine for our classes, programs, and the wider landscape of prison education.

The field of writing studies has highlighted the limitations of a monolingual orientation towards language, particularly in the context of English-only language policies, but there have been fewer accounts of how people actively navigate and advocate for alternatives. Drawing on a recent ethnographic, discourse analytic study of how writers reshaped a local language policy, I argue that there are advantages to cultivating and combining multilingual, raciolinguistic, and translingual approaches to language advocacy, yet at the same time, arguments for multilingualism risk eclipsing, and ultimately undermining, these other approaches.

This essay looks into the interactions between an older African American couple as they negotiate literacy together. By considering the entwined writing trajectories of longtime life partners, the author highlights ways that “Chief” and “Shirley” demonstrate their ongoing desire for literacy in this moment of their lives; how the reading and writing practices of the more literate partner impact the less literate partner, and vice versa; and, what that engagement can tell composition researchers about writing development across the lifespan, particularly for an older couple in which one partner has become more literate later in life. Writing, like many life practices that Chief and Shirley share, indicates personal and practical commitment. Their example can help literacy researchers in Age Studies and Lifespan Development of Writing Studies understand the unconventional paths that writing development can take, not just for an individual but for a couple, and to see the value in viewing writing development as always emergent.

Agency is a central concern of gerontology, age studies, and life course research, but the role of literate action in supporting and perpetuating agency in older adult writers is not well understood. A conceptual framework for the relationship between agency and literate action would provide important insight into contemporary writing research on older writers. In this study, I trace the literate practices of one writer, Frank, in order to understand how he used literate action to both negotiate his lifeworlds and support his own agency in his life after his retirement from an engineering career. Drawing on posthumanist understandings of agency, I use a combination of sociohistoric (Erickson and Roozen) and sociological (Brandt) methodologies to trace Frank’s literacy history, the chronotopes for writing that he enacts, and the agency that he develops and supports through that chronotopic work. I focus in particular on the acts of textual coordination that Frank enacts, using those data points to understand how Frank creates objects in his daily writing that bolster his agency in future social situations—a concept I refer to as expansive agency.

Abstract: Caregiving is a critical and yet understudied area related to aging, health, and wellness. Despite the importance of caregiving in the lives of older adults, assumptions about aging “actively” or “successfully” suggest that aging is independent, not interdependent. The healthcare industry reiterates these gerontological assumptions about aging when invoking notions of skills-based health literacy. This essay is an analysis of and response to the rhetorics of literacy as used in health care. Using John Duffy’s theoretical framework for literacy development as well as scholarship in age studies and community-literacy studies, I argue that literacy has become a rhetorical construct that promotes a view of older adults as particularly draining on the healthcare system. A more productive approach would be to frame the collaborative, distributed, and mediated work of giving and receiving care in the context of Paul Prior’s concept of literate activity. Finally, with a community-literacy approach that incorporates engagement and dialogue rather than individualistic skill development, I respond to this rhetorical construct of health literacy by considering how aging, interdependence, and networked caregiving expand the notion of what contributes to healthy living and well-being as we age. Using examples from a community care coordination project, this essay shows how compositionists might work together with patients, caregivers, and professionals to reframe health literacy rhetorics and act for change.

This article explores the critical literacy practices of a conservative, Christian woman as she engages in a church-sponsored reading program. Her story provides an opportunity to interrogate dominant cultural narratives that situate faith in conflict with critical consciousness and to expand our understanding of attitude change in older adults. I examine the cultural and religious contexts of her literacy, as well as the rhetorical practices that allow her to enter into dialogue with challenging texts. Ultimately, I argue for a more expansive view of critical literacy that takes into account the nonacademic settings where it occurs and the importance of transformative process.

In keeping with the recent global turn in literacy and composition studies, this article explores rhetorical agency in an English-medium Indonesian PhD program. Drawing from the critical reflective lens teacher ethnography allows, the author highlights how graduate students at this Indonesian, yet international site negotiated both textually and extra-textually with the critical pedagogy she developed, while she also questions some of her initial assumptions concerning genre, audience, and rhetorical agency. Overall, the data presented here indicates that rather than focusing solely on textual form as a site of critical agency, teachers and scholars should also take into consideration the ways writers appropriate and circulate knowledge to the diverse audiences in their lives, across multiple genres and languages—and as time unfolds. Broadening the lens to account for such translingual agency might also benefit U.S.-based graduate writing pedagogies, the author ultimately suggests.

The publication of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy has led scholars and teachers of writing and information literacy to identify ways of connecting threshold concepts of both disciplines to help students more easily and effectively acquire the transformed perspectives on research and writing. We argue that the practice of addressing writer exigence connects the concepts of IL and WS under a single literate practice. As the motivating matter of discourse, the perception of a particular exigence leads writers to identify a useful audience to address that exigence. Noting that audiences have their own exigencies for reading as well, we explain that writers must construct their texts in ways that signal a text’s exigency for readers, an effort that includes selecting the performances of evidence and writer legitimacy through information literacy. By teaching writing and researching as the literate practice of resolving the writer’s exigence by constructing exigency for particular readers, instructors can effectively link the six Frames of the ACRL Framework and Writing Studies threshold concepts and explain why concepts of both are essential and inextricable.

This article draws on a qualitative study of Chinese undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the top US enrollers of international students from China. Throughout, I study these students’ efforts to secure returns on what they described as an expensive and uncertain educational investment, often by asserting their power as consumers of US higher education. In particular, I argue that their struggles against segregation make visible broader changes in how student agency is made available in our corporate universities, prompting composition scholars to adapt the field’s tradition of student advocacy to our moment of fiscal turmoil and shifting institutional priorities.

Drawing on two accounts of information literacy, one from American students and another from teenaged Macedonian fake news makers, I argue that developing an information literacy reflective of the monetized and hierarchical nature of networks is paramount to writing and research. Focusing on the relationship between technological discourse—what is said about technology—and literacy—what people do with technology, I argue that recognizing the influence of corporations and differences between print and digital media are paramount for the development of information literacy.

In rhetoric and composition, much of the research on Black college students of the 1960’s and 1970’s has uncomplicatedly tied these students to basic writing historiography and left under-challenged the representational politics that positioned them as the products of open admissions and marked them as politically militant but underprepared and/or remedial in their literacy practices. Extending our purview beyond open admissions and basic writing, this article applies pressure to these disciplinary trends by turning to the extracurriculum and recovering the political literacies of the student-activists of the Black Liberation Front International (BLFI), a Black student organization at Michigan State University from 1968 to 1975. For Black students such as the BLFI activists, there were nonacademic political spaces that provided them with opportunities to learn and practice literacy for political aims. This article focuses on one of these sites of literacy education—a place the BLFI activists called The People’s House. Drawing upon archival research and oral history, the author recounts how the BLFI activists’ relationship with the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James created the contexts for them to organize reading groups at The People’s House, where they developed a form of critical reading praxis that enhanced their abilities to engage reading as a political, rhetorical, and epistemic act. The collaborative writing the BLFI activists composed at The People’s House is also constructed as a site for translingual production, where they practiced how to use the linguistic and discursive resources they had available to them to attend to the rhetorical and material aspects of writing.

Abstract This article explores how the children of immigrants queried and enacted the immigrant bargain narrative in their orientations to literacy and schooling at an afterschool program in New York City. The Mexican American elementary school students in this study expressed a common “immigrant bargain” narrative, a working-class immigrant family story of parents’ past and present sacrifices redeemed and validated through their children’s future academic merits (Louie 23; Smith 123). Language differences, transnational movements, and family histories affect how the children of immigrants imagine their parents’ migrations and their own transnational identities and literacies. Their identities as students, for example, compelled them to perceive their academic work ethic as repayment for their parents’ sacrifices, doubled with sometimes unreasonably high academic expectations for literacy achievement measured by merit. Literacy mentors and educators unfamiliar with the immigrant bargain should be attuned to its power for autobiographical writing, expressing both what motivates and constrains family migrations and second-generation students in their own academic goals. Afterschool program organizers, youth mentors, and school counselors especially should consider how the narrative builds confianza, or trust, and offers space for encouraging a transnational orientation to literacy in dialogue with immigrant families’ academic motives, goals, and preferences.

For over a decade, a particular transnational educational migration trend in Korea, known as jogi yuhak or “Early Study Abroad,” has been sending thousands of pre-college students to various parts of the globe (e.g. U.S., Canada, Australia, Singapore) with hopes that young Koreans will acquire “native-like” English and become “global elites.” Many of these students then enter U.S. universities that are built upon liberal ideals of diversity and individualism in theory, but offer in practice an indifferent climate towards racial and linguistic difference. Drawing on a two-year ethnographic study of Korean undergraduate students at the University of Illinois, the U.S. public higher education institution with the largest number of international students, the author examines interviews, observations and artifacts collected from the Korean Student Association (KSA), a registered student organization with over 100 staff members mostly with jogi yuhak experience. As the global university offers a rather unfavorable academic climate for racially and linguistically diverse students as well as heightens the failures of literacy as a way to “global elite.” It is in this context that KSA members work to build, reestablish, and preserve their identities and create conditions of respect through practices of localization: The students foster their “Koreanness” not only through Korean language use but also through institutionally rebuilding Korean social practices and networks strained by their many years abroad. Students are able to negotiate their liberal, or rather neoliberal college dreams in seemingly Korean ways of language and literacy that ultimately help them ground their identity as U.S. college students.

While a great many educational institutions now take part in the complex network of English language learning, this article asks what an institution expressly created to respond to and spur the transnational movement of English language learners, Intensive English Programs (IEPs), can reveal about how literacy is taught and learned transnationally. Specifically, I examine how the transnational political economy of English literacy is negotiated discursively at one US-based IEP (Northwest IEP) through teacher and student talk. From this discourse analysis, I suggest that, in addition to the difficult and time-consuming tasks of language learning, students in my study were involved in and recipients of another, much less visible type of literacy management: the ongoing valuing and defining of each other’s prior literacy-related knowledge vis-à-vis their and other students’ access to global Englishes. Thus, Northwest IEP did more than situate students in relation to privileged English literacy. That institution also served as a broker for the shifting status and subsequent privileging of global Englishes. This dynamic gives insight into how multilingual spaces come to mediate the broader transnational political economy of English literacy. Ultimately, this research shows the value of looking into institutes at the periphery of US higher education, which broadens the field’s linguistic terrain to situate US-based composition as one of many actors across the transnational landscape of higher education.

Using the methodology of third-wave feminist linguistic analysis, this article studies how one undergraduate writer, “Polly,” brings about her gendered identity as a leader of a social sorority through writing emails to motivate members to attend events. I offer a six-item taxonomy of the rhetorical strategies Polly uses to articulate the shared values of the sorority; excite members about events; and craft a unique, interesting, and relatable peer persona for herself. I connect each of Polly’s rhetorical strategies to research on gendered communication to understand how she uses the strategies to navigate her audience’s expectations of her gender and her leadership. A quantitative, temporal analysis of Polly’s use of all six strategies over the course of a year suggests that sororities (and other student organizations that offer leadership roles to students) present time and space for participants to try out a range of intellectual tools for different leadership personas, which can transfer to future rhetorical situations. This opportunity for rhetorical experimentation allows students to play and experiment with their public selves and group affinities.

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.

In my contribution to this symposium, I take up the call of this journal in its mission statement for “new interactions between Literacy and Composition Studies.” From the framework of competing ideologies of literacy, I explore points of intersection as well as divergence between strands of what’s known as “composition studies” and what has come to be identified as the “academic literacies” approach to academic literacy. My focus on “academic literacies” rather than the broader area of literacy studies signals at least three of my biases: first, I wish to counter the tendency to allow the cultural norm for academic literacy to go unchallenged, a tendency that a focus on those literacy practices deemed nonacademic risks maintaining; second, and relatedly, insofar as work in composition studies remains tied by its location in the academy to programs charged with the study and teaching of academic writing, those of us identified with composition cannot allow cultural norms for academic literacy to go unchallenged; and third, some of the most promising work challenging such norms can be found in work taking an academic literacies approach.

In this short essay, I want to consider, first, how literacy studies as a field has been sponsored—What work has been foundational, transformative, and innovative?—and second, to reflect on how my own study of literacy has been sponsored. In particular, I want to think about how Brandt’s concept of “sponsorship” has not only been transformative in conceptualizing the dynamics of literacy, but how it is also useful in addressing questions of equity and diversity within literacy studies. As defined by Brandt, “sponsors of literacy” are “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, and model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold, literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way” (19). It is the first part of this definition that is key to my discussion: How have sponsors who “enable, support, teach, and model” informed what we do as a field broadly, and what I have done in my own work specifically? In theorizing a deep understanding of how literacy is enacted, Brandt has helped us to see that literacy does not simply empower or provide access to resources for individuals, but perhaps most importantly creates a complex web of relationships that may sustain literate action. We might think of sponsorship itself as a literacy practice and as literate action, marshalling resources in order to create opportunities for literacy development.