Cultivating a Rhetorical Sensibility in the Translingual Writing Classroom
Let me begin with two questions I would like to address in my contribution to this symposium:1. When we as teachers take a translingual approach to difference, are we expecting students to produce a particular kind of writing that mimics what we call code meshing, or do we want students to develop a rhetorical sensibility that reflects a critical awareness of language as a contingent and emergent, rather than a standardized and static, practice?2. To what extent, if any, should we engage our students in explicit conversations about translingualism in the context of other approaches to language difference, and what consequences are likely to emerge from such conversations?The answer to the first question, I think, reflects a concept of translingualism as something more than an empty performance meant to fulfill a particular set of teacherly expectations about how we use language. It is a concept that reflects the belief that every student needs to develop a critical awareness about what language does, rather than what it is, in the context of very specific circumstances informed as the second question suggests by a critical awareness of the choices made in the context of the various competing ideological approaches to language difference currently available to us. Let me use a recent experience in the classroom to frame the concerns I raise here.Four years ago in an advanced undergraduate class I taught titled "Language Variation and Language Policy in North America" at the University of Washington, I had the thirty four students in the class read Bruce Horner et al.'s opinion piece "Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach" the week before class began so that we could use it as a lens through which we would read and discuss a series of journal articles and book chapters on language variation and language policy. On the basis of the Horner et al. essay, along with ideas from other scholars like Alex Kostogriz who have written about transcultural literacy, I had students in class consider three competing ideological approaches to language and cultural difference that together form what Pierre Bourdieu calls a battlefield, that is, "an arena of struggle through which agents and institutions seek to preserve or overturn the existing distribution of capital" (Wacquant 268).To make these approaches more readily accessible, I framed them as a continuum with a monolingual/monocultural approach at one end, a multilingual/multicultural approach in the middle, and a translingual/transcultural approach at the other end. Because I do not have the space or time here to describe these perspectives in detail, I hope it suffices to say that each of them represents a set of ideological beliefs, values, and practices that attempts to influence how we/students construct our/their notions of language and culture and deploy them in academic writing and beyond. I will add that I decided to present these approaches to my students explicitly to make sure I familiarized them with the ideological terrain that impinges on the choices speakers and writers need to make as they navigate and negotiate the competing ideologies that continuously hail them. In an effort to address the challenges our students encounter as readers, writers, and rhetoricians when they face these circumstances, I am going to look at the writing and reported perceptions of one of the students from my class in the course of addressing the two questions I asked at the outset. I should note that writing for the class consisted of two short self reflective essays about students' own language use, a midterm essay where I asked them to critique the position Horner et al. take in their opinion piece, and a final research essay on a topic of their choice. Here I will only discuss the writing this student did in the self reflective and midterm essays.In her first self reflective essay, Mina Nokeo (a pseudonym) wrote the following:It's Sunday morning and my family is getting ready for church.