From "Struggling Writers" to "Writers in Residence": Reimagining Writing Instruction for Linguistically Diverse Students

• In Event: 64.085 - Centering Marginalized Voices: Emergent and Experienced Bilinguals as Writers "in the Struggle"

Abstract

Faith was repeating her senior year of high school. Despite having enough credits to graduate, she lacked one requirement: she had not passed her state’s required standardized exam in English Language Arts (ELA). As a result, Faith attended only one class per day: 11th grade ELA, which was meant to prepare her to retake the exam. As a researcher doing an ethnographic case study of this ELA classroom, I had the opportunity to talk with Faith at length during the school year. In that time, my impression of her was at odds with the labels placed on her by the school. Far from “struggling” to interpret complex, grade-level texts in her “second language,” Faith was an insightful and critical reader. And far from “failing” to represent her thoughts and ideas in writing, Faith was a self-described poet who published her work in online forums, writing, in her words, “her truth.” This paper draws on Faith’s own words - from our conversations and from her comments in the context of classroom discussions - to highlight the rich literacies and criticality about language and writing that she and other “struggling writers” like her bring to the ELA classroom.

This paper emerges from a year-long study of four sections of 11th grade ELA classrooms. This study involved working with a teacher to create a curriculum that drew on multilingual, multidialectical, and multimodal texts to engage students in discussions and writing on the topic of language and its connections to our identities and to power. As a participant-observer, I co-designed the curriculum, observed the teacher as she implemented that curriculum, and observed the students as they participated in, shaped, and re-designed the curriculum. Data consisted of audio recordings and transcripts of classroom sessions, field notes and analytic memos, and documents such as student work and teacher lesson plans. Analysis was done through a combination of deductive and inductive coding and the use of discourse analysis tools (Gee, 2011).

By focusing on one Latinx, experienced bilingual writer, this paper presents ideas for re-thinking the writing process in ELA classrooms for those students who are marginalized by oppressive raciolinguistic (Flores & Rosa, 2015) and standard language ideologies (Lippi-Green, 2011). By drawing on Faith’s words, I tease out ideas for how ELA teachers can center students’ own perceptions of themselves as writers by taking up a critical translingual approach (Author A, 2017) that values linguistic creativity and criticality (Li Wei, 2012). This includes using students’ out-of-school writing as classroom texts, designing writing prompts and activities that encourage students’ translanguaging (García, 2009; García & Li Wei, 2014), and positioning students like Faith as “writers in residence” who can shed light on issues such as audience and author’s purpose, ironically two central ideas of the ELA exam that Faith was unable to pass. The paper also contributes to recent scholarship that reframes language minoritized students’ perceived language and literacy deficiencies as deficiencies in the tools, approaches, and lenses that schools and research have employed to understand them.

Author

• Kate Seltzer, Rowan University