Written Communication Jan 2022

“A Lot of Students Are Already There”: Repositioning Language-Minoritized Students as “Writers in Residence” in English Classrooms

Kate Seltzer Rowan University

Abstract

This article centers on Faith, a Latinx bilingual student who, because of her failure to pass a standardized exam in English language arts, had to repeat 11th-grade English. Despite this stigma of being a “repeater,” during the year-long ethnographic study I conducted in her classroom, Faith proved to be an insightful and critical reader and self-described poet who shared her writing with her peers as well as with other poets in online forums. Drawing from that more expansive classroom study, this article features Faith’s metacommentary on language and her own writing process and explores how her insights (1) disrupt monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies by highlighting the disconnect between her sophisticated understandings of language and the writing process and her status as a “struggling” student; (2) draw attention her wayfinding, which chronicles her navigation of those ideologies that complicate her search for a writerly identity and obscure the translingual nature of all texts and all writers; and (3) can move teachers and researchers of writing to reimagine the writing classroom so that it (re)positions students like Faith as “writers in residence,” whose existing translingual writing practices and wayfinding can serve as mentors and guides for others.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
2022-01-01
DOI
10.1177/07410883211053787
Open Access
Closed
Topics
rhetorical theory race and writing translingualism multilingual writers

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (3)

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    Rhetoric and Affect: The Role of Faith in Student Writers’ Wayfinding
    Written Communication
  2. Jacobson (2024)
    Social Positioning and Learning Opportunities in One Student’s Textual Transiti…
    Written Communication
  3. Brodeur et al. (2023)
    Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English
    Research in the Teaching of English

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