Developing Racial Literacy in a Community College First-Year Composition Course

• In Event: Vice-Presidential Session. The Pursuit of Truth "Turnt Up": Considerations for Advancing Racial Literacy Beyond This Space and Time

Abstract

In order for college English Language Arts (ELA) educators to disrupt racial inequity and racism at the personal and structural levels, the work must begin in first-year composition (FYC) courses. This work entails introducing and centering race-based multimodal texts and race-centric conversations that support developing students’ racial literacy. In this article, I explore what happened to students’ racial literacy over the course of the semester with the aim of producing student data to answer my research question: Does FYC student racial literacy develop, stagnate, or regress over the course of a semester? Drawing from existing scholarship and my own racial literacy pedagogical practice, I offer four students’ experiences with an OER racial literacy over the course of the fall 2021 semester.
The research entailed a multiple-case embedded design (Yin, 2009) using four instrumental case studies: two extreme groups each composed of two individuals. A two-tail design (Yin, 2009) was used because it aligns with extreme sampling, and it is appropriate for exploring the experiences of students in the cases. I analyzed the structural, interactional, and interdiscursive features of the students’ papers, and I observed that some texts provided more valuable data for my analysis than others.
FYC courses are more than mere “service courses” that emphasize skills and drills (Harkin, 1994, p.279). FYC students are afforded space and opportunity for discovering and honing their own positionality on sociopolitical topics and forming their own ideas, opinions, and understandings in direct relation to those topics. This is valuable insofar as people in the U.S. can’t escape race, in large part, because “we are socialized into racial structures in our home, community, and school settings” (Sealey-Ruiz, 2013, p. 395). Even though we have been socialized into racial structures and ideologies, most people still have difficulty discussing race, particularly in racially diverse contexts. Discussing race and developing racial literacy in FYC helps address the U.S.’s history and hopefully changes the future with race and particular groups in our society.
Considering that almost every single college student here in the U.S. will take at least one FYC course during their academic career, and the racial demographics of the nation are rapidly changing from mostly white to mostly Brown (Quick Facts, 2022), discussing race in FYC, as well as other college courses, becomes more salient to our day to day lived experiences. Discussing race and developing racial literacy in FYC courses aids students in talking about and making meaning of their current social realities. Developing racial literacy helps students probe and understand their dispositions about race while reading, writing, and interacting with fellow classmates. In my class, reading and writing about race created space for the students to gain skill and comfort in discussing race in racially diverse public settings. This is due to the fact that they were allowed time to work through their personal and collective histories that affect how they think about and act upon race, racism, and racial inequity.

Author

• Jordan Bell, Graduate Center - CUNY
  Presenting Author