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

In the 1930s-1960s, Phibun’s Thai Nationalism campaign promoted the use of the Thai language while segregating and discriminating against non-Thais, especially the Chinese community in Thailand. The government associated the Chinese language with communism, amplified by global Western xenophobic ideologies, leading to the closure of Chinese schools and widespread fear of Chinese literacy. This article explores two key questions: how xenophobic ideologies manifested in education and how the members of this suppressed generation navigated their language and literacy education in and out of school. Drawing on the narratives of five Thai Chinese individuals, aged 73 to 93, it illuminates the factors contributing to the creation of a repressive language ecology, its impact on their learning experiences, and how individuals within such a context made sense of their surroundings. This research enriches literacy studies by broadening its geographical and historical reach, revealing the intricate interplay between language ideology and ecology, and how these concepts help us understand factors in literacy and language learning. Additionally, it underscores narrative inquiry as a teaching and learning tool and offers strategies to prevent the emergence of suppressive ecology in the classroom.

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.   

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.

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

he first class I ever took as an undergrad with Dr. Mara Holt was titled "Women's Rhetorics. " I barely knew what rhetorics were (testing out of first-year composition via the AP exam was a mixed blessing for someone who became an English major), and I certainly didn't know what the word "pedagogy" meant. The first readings in Dr. Holt's course-Nancy Schniedewind's "Teaching Feminist Process" and Carolyn Shrewsbury's "What Is Feminist Pedagogy"-left me a little blindsided. Not only did both address concepts that felt above my understanding, but what I could make out focused on teachingsomething that seemed, from my inadequate understanding, as distinct from the focus of the class. (The teacher might be interested in articles like these, I thought, but why would the students be?) This reaction is the almost textbook response of a student who had, until then, been inculcated in the traditional power dynamics of a teacher-focused educational system. Only gradually would I come to understand how different, and important, it was that Dr. Holt was making clear her own pedagogical influences and opening these up for discussion.

Because bisexuality, even within queer spaces, is often made invisible and erased, here I argue that bisexual literacy practices are also often similarly invisible and erased. Additionally, I ask that we consider bisexual survival and literacy in terms of age and sexual fluidity. Creating space for people to identify as queer throughout their lives—and to recognize sexual fluidity as an embodied literacy practice that challenges normativity—is, I argue, also necessary for survival. Yet as I tried to read myself queer later in life, the literacy practices that had once sustained me were no longer life-affirming. When even queer texts fail to sustain us, what options do we have for survival? How do we teach, how do we live, when we know that literacy and composition practices are often simultaneously a means of both survival and risk? In this essay, I interrogate how bisexual and later-in-life literacies challenge normative reading practices and contribute to queer literacies and possibilities for survival. I argue that we need more possibilities for bisexual and later-in-life reading and writing practices, both to affirm who we are and to help navigate the binaries that insist we deny part of our identities.

Book review

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

Our patterns of connection shape how we think, write, read and relate. In response, scholars have begun to understand and teach literacy as a networked phenomenon. This essay contributes to that effort. I argue that in an age of media convergence, to think networked literacy is to think everyday digital media literacy habits, particularly as they relate to the design and maintenance of information ecosystems. Combining new materialist writing studies scholarship with design thinking and media theory, I propose and model a materialist approach to literacy analysis that respects both the human and non-human elements in such systems. I then discuss how this approach might inform writing pedagogy.

This article calls for the fields of literacy and composition studies to develop more progressive understandings of the aging process as not only biological, but as culturally and socially situated. Drawing from age studies, we investigate a contribution to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (www.thedaln.org) as an approach that complicates prevailing notions of aging and literacy. We argue that an age studies approach to literacy provides teacher-researchers and students a language to conceptualize aging together. The article concludes with specific recommendations for composition teacher-researchers to conduct oral history collection events with students and older adults.

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.

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.

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.

Symposium contribution.

Symposium contribution.

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.

There's a saying, sometimes attributed as a French Proverb: "If you don't do politics, politics does you. " This seems a straightforward enough idea. Yet as a field, we seem hesitant to acknowledge our necessary and unavoidable role within political structures. Perhaps out of a sense of professionalism, we place a veneer of neutrality around our classrooms and scholarship that constrains our potential as rhetoricians, public writers, and educators. At such moments, we are reminded of Paulo Freire's "Letter to a North American Teacher": "The idea of an identical and neutral role for all teachers could only be accepted by someone who was either naive or very clever. Such a person might affirm the neutrality of education, thinking of school as merely a kind of parenthesis whose essential structure was immune to the influences of social class, of gender, or race" (211). That is, claims of neutrality are either naive of political conditions or a clever way of preserving an unjust status quo. Breaking free of this thinking allows us to ask what our teaching supports and challenges, what our scholarship maintains and combats. With these questions in mind and a recognition of the need to decide and to act, we developed this special issue.

Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.

Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.

magine a department where there is only one black professor, a common occurrence across universities and colleges today.She is the first black professor in the history of the department there and certainly the first to be tenured.After many years, she finally sees a graduate student complete her dissertation, a young black woman who is also amongst the first black females to graduate with a doctorate from this program.And while there are plenty of ancestors and kinfolk across states, countries, and even continents celebrating this achievement, some of the white faculty are not as ecstatic.In fact, a few white junior professors, self-proclaimed feminists who teach first year writing, both stunningly under-achieving in their fields, begin to tell people that the professor wrote the dissertation for this black female graduate student, with the full support of staff/administration in spreading this Untruth.In the parlay of black youth culture, yes, we can call that: haters gon hate.While fully acknowledging all that hateration, let's also dig deeper.It would seem that any researcher or scholar in the academy would know that you cannot possibly present at conferences, give keynote addresses, publish your own articles, review other articles for peer-reviewed journals, work on your own book manuscripts, review other people's manuscripts and books in print, work on grant-funded projects, and then also write someone else's dissertation for them.It seems safe to say that it is a huge task to even make time to read drafts of advisees' dissertations.This event is just one of many that show how white faculty and staff can be deeply invested in the illogic of their racism.This story, along with the many other stories that I will tell here, will serve not as micro-instances of campus racism but as macro-pictures of political life in American universities.I intend for these stories to offer a context for the ways in which we must understand and rupture whiteness, racial violence, and the institutional racism of our disciplinary constructs in composition-rhetoric as central to the political work we must do.

y copy of the first issue of Literacy in Composition Studies is thoroughly marked up.It engages issues, questions, and even anxieties I have carried with me over my roughly twenty years as a teacher and literacy researcher.In an effort to continue the conversation I am going to take up two themes that thread through many of the initial articles and their responses.The first theme regards the conceptual tropes we use to describe our work.The second relates to transformative potential and, equally as important, limitations of scholarship that is directed to providing access and opportunity to historically disenfranchised students and communities.This interest in equity is something I believe many share across the areas of Literacy Education and Composition and Rhetoric.In his opening essay, Bruce Horner argues for a shift from spatial to temporal metaphors in the conceptualization of literacies.Spatial metaphors risk essentializing literacy practices-exoticizing or romanticizing them-and even reproducing the very autonomous ideologies the field has worked so hard to deconstruct.A methodological focus on temporality may help researchers work through some of these contradictions (Horner 4-5).In a similar vein, many of the subsequent authors invoke the terms "purpose, " "labor, " "intentionality, " "process, " "circulation, " "work, " and "movement, " a historicizing direction that I for the most part endorse, and which seems to be in line with the empirical realities of global migrations and transnationalism.My qualification is because phrases like "emergent dynamism" shade into the discourse of neoliberal incursions into education, which valorize innovation, as there will always be new literacies, and literate identities, to market.A renewed emphasis on temporality may also exist in tension with another acknowledgement made by several of the contributors: that there is often, following Pierre Bourdieu, significant social inertia and reproduction in the field of education, even as we work within and against the system to try to expand what constitutes academic knowledge and practice.This tension can induce some self-reflection and soul searching for scholars who try to balance an analytical disposition, the pressures to generate new terms and ideas for the academic market, and the desire to make a difference in students' lives.My own contribution engages these themes from the vantage point of having taught and conducted research with elementary school students and their families in predominantly under-

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.

A s I write this response, the end of the term is nearing, and with it, the end of my weekly meetings with a diverse group of graduate students (literature program, writing program, school of education, composition program) enrolled in my "Literacy and Pedagogy" seminar.The issues raised by this symposium's contributors resonate and echo back with the seminar's term-long collective investigation, so it is from within this context and through the concerns these graduate students have articulated throughout the term that I want to join the conversation.But first a few words about the seminar itself, the historical, theoretical, and ideological scrutiny of literacy and pedagogy it calls for, the reflexive inquiry it incites, and the contributions this kind of inquiry can make to a discussion of "the implications of Literacy Studies research, theory, and practice for Composition Studies" (LiCS Mission Statement).I started teaching this seminar in the late 1980s.What I had initially proposed was a seminar in histories, theories and practices of pedagogy (which eventually, led to my articulation of "pedagogy as reflexive praxis" (Salvatori 4).The intellectual atmosphere of my department at the time was beginning to be hospitable to the idea that advanced graduate students from our different programs, with their different teaching experiences and theoretical backgrounds, could benefit from such a course of study.But, it was suggested, it might be strategic for me to combine "pedagogy" with "literacy, " since as the subject of a graduate seminar, literacy would carry greater intellectual weight than pedagogy, and attract more students (and, I sensed, raise fewer faculty eyebrows).Needless to say, I was taken aback by the suggestion, but because I was equally invested in the study of theories of literacy, I complied and decided to foreground in my course proposal what would have been in any case two of my planned lines of critical inquiry: what kinds of literacy different theories of reading and writing, and their pedagogical enactments, assume and can presume to foster (Cultural Literacy was earning large numbers of academic and non-academic acolytes); and what can a critical and reflexive study of pedagogy contribute to and draw from the study of literacy.The "and" in the title became and has since remained the central focus of the seminar's theoretical investigations, a nexus that through the years, because of different texts and different students, has consistently disclosed new and exciting "matters of concern" (Latour) for graduate students who are about to make crucial decisions about their professional future.Since the very first time, the diversity of students' backgrounds and interests led to more expansive and inclusive articulations of the seminar's original keywords and concepts (Glascott), and consequently of the seminar's affordances (Vieira).Even before we read Street, the use of the singular for literacy and pedagogy in the original title soon felt inaccurate, constrictive, but for bureaucratic reasons, it could not be changed.Thus "the singular" remained.But it consistently occasioned early