Anti-Racist Pedagogy

Map-Making and Storytelling

Gitte Frandsen Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Transnational, multilingual students have extensive experiences negotiating language difference by translating, translanguaging, and drawing from their literacy and rhetorical resources (Canagarajah). Further, by traversing physical and digital borders, these students habitually engage in the transnational flow of ideas and information, which gives them access to a wealth […]

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Building Inclusive Classrooms: Equipping Educators with an Introductory Social Justice Lesson Plan

Bethany Meadows and Kimberly Groves Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Many scholars have called for the necessity of social justice frameworks within K-16 classrooms for decades (e.g., Friere; hooks; Walton et al.; Muhammad). Specifically, in the first-year writing classroom, we know that neither writing nor our writing classrooms are neutral, apolitical spaces, but instead

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Writing Counterstories: Ways to Challenge Dominant Narratives in FYC

Sana Sayed Volume 7 Chapter Description This chapter draws from Aja Martinez’s concept of counterstories as a rhetorical research methodology in rhetoric and writing studies and encourages you, a first year writing student, to draw upon your experiential knowledge to both challenge and reframe master narratives that are accepted by the majority. In first-year composition

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Getting in Conversation about Activism: Group Podcast Assignment

Jeanette Lehn Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In my class on public rhetorics, I strive to empower students to possess agency in speaking to an unbounded global public with the understanding that all rhetors are constrained and imbricated in complex systems. Cooper writes, “Rhetors—and audiences—are agents in their actions, and they are responsible for

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What Can I Add to the Disourse Community? How Writers Use Code Meshing and Translanguaging to Negotiate Discourse

Lisa Tremain Volume 5 Chapter Description This essay explores how discourse communities change over time and through participation, and it shows how we can negotiate the expectations for discourse through translanguaging and code-meshing. As discourse community members learn and practice the language rules of a community, they also act as agents to develop, change, or

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What Color Is My Voice? Academic Writing and the Myth of Standard English

Kristin DeMint Bailey, An Ha, & Anthony J. Outlar Volume 5 Chapter Description In this chapter, a community college writing professor and two of her first-year writing students collaboratively address the issue of Whiteness in academic writing. Specifically, we challenge the notion that academic language is neutral as well as the expectation that all academic

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Exploring Ideology in Written Language: A Translingual Approach

Alex Way Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description There are power dynamics at play in spoken and written language. Language is wielded by people and institutions to exert power over others or to maintain the power they already possess. But power dynamics in language are not always obvious. For instance, one manifestation of power dynamics

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Literacy Autobiography

Anita Chaudhuri & Subrata Bhowmik Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description Writing a personal narrative assignment is commonplace in first year composition classrooms and the proposed assignment presents it as a literacy autobiography (LA) which can, according to Canagarajah, focus on individual learning journeys and underline “in-between identities and discourses” (p. 13). The transnational identities

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Non-standardized Grammar Assignment

Cheyenne Franklin Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description “… dont nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them ‘vulnerable to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES” (Young 110). Vershawn Ashanti Young, along with Asao Inoue, Geneva Smitherman, and more recently April Baker-Bell, have long fought against oppressive language standards in education. It is not enough, they have jointly argued,

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Writing toward Racial Literacy

Mara Lee Grayson Volume 4 Chapter Description Curricula that engage students in reading and writing about race and racism are increasingly common in composition classrooms, but writing about race, even when guided by an instructor well-versed in critical race theory and critical pedagogy, isn’t easy. Racial literacy requires that students develop a discursive toolbox with

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