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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Educators and scholars in racially and linguistically diverse settings are re-envisioning the practice and teaching of writing (Baker-Bell, 2017; Flores, 2018; Horner et al., 2011), which necessarily entails a rethinking of who “counts as” writers and “contributes to” the practice of writing. Advancing this re-envisioning, this symposium centers the voices of emergent and experienced bilingual writers at the high school and college levels in order to defy monolingual ideologies that construct these students as “struggling writers,” “basic writers,” and “English Language Learners.” The symposium features perspectives from a range of fields within language and literacy education and qualitative research, and offers four interdisciplinary and multimodal paper presentations. The papers highlight the writing practices and multimodal counter-stories of these marginalized bilinguals.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chair

• Sara P. Alvarez, Queens College, CUNY

Papers

• From "Struggling Writers" to "Writers in Residence": Reimagining Writing Instruction for Linguistically Diverse Students - Kate Seltzer, Rowan University

• Escuchando the Borderlands: Exploring Youths' Translingual Podcasts in a Secondary Ethnic Studies Class - Cati V. de los Rios, University of California - Davis

• Pushing Out and Pulling In Writers: A Student's Journey Through Higher Education - Maneka Deanna Brooks, Texas State University; Arlene M. Alvarado

• Undocumented Emergent Bilinguals as Professional and Activist Writers - Sara P. Alvarez, Queens College, CUNY

Discussant

• Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, University of Massachusetts - Amherst