ASSIGNMENTS

ELL-103/ENG-111--Connecting Cultures--Taught by Jennifer Valdez and Ashley Paul

In our themed class, Connecting Cultures, we find it essential to emphasize the importance of the students’ cultural wealth from day one. The goal of our class is to learn from each other about our varied cultural backgrounds through writing personal narratives, reading literature written from a variety of authors, and writing about cultural food. These major assignments serve to “create space for new stories about race and difference, rooted in the lived experience of people of color and aimed at promoting a pluralist vision of society” (Shapiro, 2014, p. 390). In addition to the major assignments, we offer a range of low stakes writing assignments such as journals and discussions that also revolve around the cultural wealth of our students.

The first major writing assignment of the semester is the personal narrative. As critical race theory purports, the “experiential knowledge of people of color is legitimate, appropriate, and critical to understanding, analyzing, and teaching about racial subordination” and we must “view this knowledge as a strength and draw explicitly on the lived experiences of people of color including such methods as storytelling, family histories, biographies, scenarios, parables, cuentos, testimonios, chronicles, and narratives” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 26). With this in mind, we have constructed the Personal Narrative Essay assignment with a focus of writing about one’s culture that values their cultural wealth. Their goal is to tell a story that will teach us something about a culture with which they identify. Our classes typically have students from all over the world. We have had students from Morocco, Brazil, Albania, China, Japan, Vietnam, Japan, as well as Kazakhstan and India. Each of these students has their own story to tell and no two stories are ever alike. The majority of these stories have not been written before, and we recognize that these stories are “tool[s] for exposing, analyzing and challenging majoritarian stories of racial privilege” (Solórzano Yosso, p. 32). As Martinez (2013) explains, majoritarian stories “privilege whites, men, the middle and/or upper class, heterosexuals, and the able-bodied” (and we could add perceived “native speakers”) “by naming these social locations as natural or normative points of reference” (p. 23).  We want to transgress the idea that there is a “single story” for our students (Shapiro, 2014, p. 394) because the “majoritarian story distorts and silences the experiences of people of color (Solórzano and Yosso, p. 29). For example, we may have two students from Morocco, but they have very different stories that reflect their varied cultural backgrounds. Here the CRT concept of intersectionality, originated by Crenshaw (1989),  is crucial, as “using personal narrative to elucidate the complex intersection of identity factors that inform diverse perspectives allows for more accurate descriptions of lived reality” (Liggett, 2013, p. 117-118).

Furthermore, we recognize their ability to speak multiple languages as a cultural asset, and we encourage them to use their own language in parts of the narrative, especially through dialogue. We discuss how this adds authenticity and value to the essay, and we show them examples of how other authors do this such as Amy Tan in “Mother Tongue” and Junot Diaz in “Watching Spider-Man in Santo Domingo.” Our goal is to get away from the idea that “students of color should assimilate to the dominant White middle-class culture to succeed in life and school” and that this “cultural assimilation may take place” by “learning English at the expense of losing Spanish” or whatever languages they speak (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 31). We place value on their multilingual abilities and try to show them that their knowledge is an asset to their writing. However, “According to cultural deficit storytelling, a successful student of color is an assimilated student of color” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 31), but that is certainly not the case. Students are successful through the telling of their own narratives and using their own languages as cultural assets.

Another major assignment that draws upon cultural wealth, and our last essay of the semester, is the Exploratory Research Essay. This assignment offers two options for inquiry, research, and writing: a personal comfort food or an interesting food from another culture. Students almost always choose the personal comfort food option. While it is not unusual to share about cultural foods in an ELL course, this assignment design highlights the community cultural wealth, particularly linguistic and familial, that connects students to their chosen food and to their academic work. Yosso (2005) explains that “community cultural wealth is an array of knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed and utilized by Communities of Color to survive and resist macro and micro forms of oppression” (p.77). Students draw upon their knowledge of multiple languages, translation and interpretation skills, and familial relationships to find and contribute to meaningful scholarship in English about their chosen comfort foods.

A common obstacle, or “micro form of oppression” that arises during the research phase is a dearth of information in English about a student’s chosen comfort food. For example, a student originally from Cape Verde chooses to research and write about cachupa, the Cape Verdean national dish. She follows all of the steps in the research process, which include consulting online encyclopedias and library databases, and finds nothing about cachupa. There is not even a section about Cape Verdean food in A-Z World Food, a popular database for this assignment. These research sources represent an “accumulation of specific forms of knowledge, skills and abilities that are valued by privileged groups in society” (Yosso, p. 76).  At this point, the student may start to doubt her research skills or choice of topic. It is pivotal to ask at this moment: How are these sources failing you? What are they missing, overlooking, or erasing? Why might they be doing this? Students are often taught to think critically about their sources, and this is no exception--students think critically about this lack of sources as a systemic issue and not as a deficiency in themselves.  Returning to our Cape Verdean researcher, we can relate her dilemma to CRT’s “importance placed on understanding the historic effects of European colonialism” (Liggett, 2013, p. 116), since it is not difficult to find information about Portuguese cuisine in the A-Z World Food database.

To address this research obstacle and generate new English scholarship on the student’s chosen food, we emphasize forms of research that draw upon linguistic and familial capital. Linguistic capital involves “intellectual and social skills attained through communication experiences in more than one language and/or style,” while familial capital “refers to those cultural knowledges among familia (kin) that carry a sense of community history, memory and cultural intuition” (Yosso, 2005, pp. 78-79). Languages other than English become crucial here as students pursue alternative research paths: Internet-based research in other languages and primary source interviews with family members. Students may use sources in other languages by clearly translating and citing the information in English. This multilingual research is often done in close partnership with a professor or tutor to help vet and communicate the quality of the original source. The family interviews may draw upon generations of cultural knowledge as students learn more deeply about their comfort foods from the very people who introduced them into their lives: parents, aunts and uncles, siblings or close friends. The finished essay offers a venue for telling family, regional, or cultural stories that may not often or ever be told in English. Many of these stories reflect broader histories of oppression and resistance, such as that of soup joumou, the Independence Day soup which is a popular research topic with Haitian students.

ASSIGNMENTS 

ELL-103/ENG-111--Coming of Age and Identity--taught by Naoko Akai-Dennis and Jennifer Burke Grehan

Our students come to us with cultural wealth and experience that open the door to wonderful discourse, writing, and presentations. We acknowledge and appreciate their individual experience and it serves as additional content for our courses. Our job, as educators, is to offer the students the language and strategies they need to academically and socially navigate a flawed system. In creating a community of learners and moving within college resources and events, we are empowering our students to step out of their marginalized corner and into the college community, prepared to move within the system that challenges others who are less familiar or informed.  

 The overarching theme in  our Spring 2019 ELL-103/ENG-111 cluster was Coming-of-Age, organized into 3 units.  Our aims in this cluster course are multiple but interconnected with each other.  One of them is for the students to develop higher order thinking skills through reading and watching the various kinds of texts and of course revising multiple drafts. Another aim is for them to find their voices by telling a story about their coming-of-age and to recognize the value in the voices.  They are also instructed to situate their stories in wider social historical contexts and use their higher order thinking skills to investigate the contexts that inevitably play some roles in their lives and stories as well.  The last two aims in particular are undergirded by one of the major tenets of CRT, “the centrality of experiential knowledge” (Solórzano &Yosso, 2002, p. 26), since experiential knowledge could “expose[s], tell[s] and retell[s], signal[s] resistance and caring, and reiterate[s] what kind of power is feared most” (Bell, 1995, p. 907, as cited in Martinez, 2020, p. 15).  The students use “I” as a source to construct knowledge and also examine wider social cultural historical contexts.   Utilizing this qualitative research methodology, we had the students delve into their narratives about themselves and discover their beliefs, cultural values and norms as well.   

This “centrality of experiential knowledge” frames all three units in this themed course.  Unit 1 is an autobiographical inquiry.  Informed by narrative inquiry in the qualitative research field, Unit 1 allows students to not only tell their stories about coming of age but also examine their beliefs, cultural values and norms that the story reveals by locating their stories in their wider social cultural contexts.  To accomplish this objective in Unit 1, we carefully selected the texts that had them think about what it means for them by coming of age.  In ELL courses, they read the book that was selected for the college’s 2018-2019 One Book selection, The Year of Zero by Seng Ty.  Along with that, the students read three short stories (“This is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” by Sherman Alexie, “The Flowers” by Alice Walker and “The Eleven” by Sandra Cisnerus), so that the students can get a better understanding that coming-of-age does not happen in silo, but rather in a larger social, cultural, and historical context.  Also, since these stories question the Euro-American version of coming-of-age, the students learn that the idea of coming-of-age varies depending on culture, history, belief system, etc.  These short stories and the movie version of the short story by Alexie, Smoke Signals, helped us to take a close look into the idea of “coming-of-age” in Native American culture, which helped them look at the idea of coming of age in their respective cultures and societies.   Reading the scholarly article “Race, Ethnicity, Adulthood” in ELL classes, which problematizes the Euro-American notion of coming-of-age, also furthered their understanding that the idea of coming-of-age varies among race and ethnicity/culture and needs to be examined within a wider social context.

Unit 2 is drawn from critical race theory’s conceptualization of storytelling.  Critical race theory contends that the value of storytelling is to give us ways to “strengthen traditions of social, political, and cultural survival and resistance” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 11).  We wanted the students to find those “traditions of social, political, cultural survival and resistance” against the dominant ideology that people had to overcome.   Further, Solórzano and Yosso’s (2002) argument that other people’s stories require “biographical analysis of the experiences of a person of color” (p. 33) pedagogically fortifies Unit 2, in which the students interviewed a living person whose experiences and experiential knowledge they are interested in and analyzed their experiences. 

Another theme that we have the students explore is identity, “what makes you who you are.”  As is in the other themed course, we wanted them to find the voices in recounting and reaffirming who they are, whether their identities that they narrativize are cultural, national, racial, gender-related, religious, to name a few, or a intersectionality of some of those aspects of identity.  We also wanted them to explore complexities of identity.  We especially aimed to have them dismantle essentialized identities, which CRT strongly denounces.   Taking this anti-essentialist position that CRT promulgates allowed the students to tell their “lived reality from (intersectional) rather than about (essentialist)” racialized non-native speakers (Martinez, 2020, p. 14).  

Aiming to have them de-essentialize their identities and see the complexity of identity, two of the three units enabled the students to explore and reflect on their multilayered discursive identities.  Since identity is a concept that can be slippery and elusive to grasp, we started with a more concrete topic, their names.  In an explanatory essay “to what extent does the name represent who you are,” and stand for, which they also wrote about in the ELL class, the students were asked to explain how certain incidents illustrate their responses to the question.  Building upon their “lived reality” about who they are in Unit 1, we did separate assignments in Unit 2.   Then, in the last Unit, drawing on their arguments about the different notions of identity in Unit 2, they go back to their identities, and examine their personal and social identities. 

Through engaging with the Unit 1 theme, Name and Identity, the students in the ENG-111 course started to see the complexity of their identities by reading and watching the texts and then recounting who they are.  First, they watched the YouTube video by Key and Peele’s “Substitute teacher,” in which a Black substitute teacher comes into a White classroom and calls the students names in Black English.   The students discussed the tension between the teacher and the students, the importance of pronouncing people’s names correctly, and the importance of recognizing the linguistic identity of the Black teacher as well.  They also shared their “lived reality” about how their identities are essentialized and so misconstrued.  Filling out the social identity and the personal identity wheels, which eventually lead to our Unit 3, also required them to see the complexity of their identities.  So, in the Unit 1 exploration, some students talked about their national and/or linguistic identities, while others portrayed their personal aspects of their identity.  By reviewing peers’ drafts, in which they focus on the content by relating to what they read and asking questions about it, they were able to see how identity is differently understood.

In conjunction with Essay 1 in the ENG-111 course, the students in the ELL course wrote about how their names present their identity and why.  In this unit, students learn both content and strategies as they watch “(un) Learning My Name” a spoken word film by Mohammed Hassan, read about names and identity from Facing History.org while answering connection and comprehension questions, explore the NY Times article “What’s In a Name? A Lot, as It Turns Out” by Erik Eckholm, and submit a writing sample response to Sandra Cisneros’ “My Name”. During these first couple of weeks, students explore reading and writing as processes in their ELL courses. They work on outlining for notetaking and outlining as a writing strategy for Essay 1. They focus on thesis work, paragraph work, understanding plagiarism, and using two-sided notes to record reactions to readings. Students also visit college resources like the library, Language Lab, Innovation Lab, and Writing Place.

As suggested in Solórzano and Yosso’s (2002) social justice and critical race research “Critical race researchers acknowledge that educational institutions operate in contradictory ways, with their potential to oppress and marginalize coexisting with their potential to emancipate and empower” (p. 26), we built our course around acknowledging the value of student experience, cultural wealth, and backgrounds of our English language learners. We selected readings, videos, and discussions that would challenge students to discuss issues like professors mispronouncing their names or assigning nicknames instead of taking the time to learn to pronounce names and to explore identity as seen by them and others. In acknowledging that the students already possess the content necessary to write about identity and culture, we are able to focus on the strategies, opportunities, and language that students need to discuss, explore, and become a part of the college community, hence empowering students who may otherwise be marginalized.

Solórzano and Yosso (2002) remind us that “down-playing the intercentricity of race and racism in the discourse helps tell majoritarian stories about the insignificance of race and the notion that racism is something in the past” (p. 32). In acknowledging that ignoring names or re-naming students is wrong, students learn that they have both the right and the power to question authority and make social change. We do not avoid difficult conversations, we encourage them. Students are acting as agents in a culture where historically the story is told to justify the actions of the dominant. In telling their stories, students are flipping this dynamic and in truly hearing these stories we are aiding in this process.  

After this exploration of their own identities and names in Unit 1, the ENG course and ELL course move on to two separate units.  In Unit 2 in ENG-111, they read two scholarly articles about identity: “The complexity of identity” by Beverly Daniel Tatum and “Introduction: Identity in Question” by Stuart Hall, a pioneer of cultural studies.  These two articles help them learn how to read closely and also more importantly grapple with highly conceptual articles.  However, since they had already done the “literary circle” in ELL courses (see page 14), it was not so challenging for them to read these two articles.  Along with this collaborative reading with peers through different approaches of visualizing, connecting, and creating questions from the texts, they also wrote journals about these articles.  These journals help them not to just summarize sources but to speculate on and sort out their thoughts on them.  Then, they drafted a persuasive essay about notions of identity, based on the reading of the two articles.  In Unit 2 of the ELL course they explore several coming-of-age short stories like Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds”, Robert Cormier’s “Guess What, I Almost Kissed My Father Goodnight”, and “Shaving Instructions” by Leslie Norris. These are enjoyable stories that are accompanied by comprehension questions, discussion groups, and workshops like choosing their favorite sentences to practice quotation integration.

ENG and ELL courses come back together in the cumulative last unit, in which  students explore the concept of personal and social identity.   We have discussed that the theme of the class is “Identity” and have already completed 2 units, Name and Identity and Coming of Age.   Identity is a muddled theme that incorporates perspectives and assumptions made by one’s self and others.  At the same time, we consider that identity as a theme is confidence and strength building when students are reminded of the power in “seeing” themselves in a broader social cultural context.  They create not only a final essay but also a collage that represents who they are, their personal and social identities, and encourages them to see themselves within and beyond the college.  Another goal is for the students to be independent readers and writers by having them revise their drafts by getting support from the supporting resources at the college. Thus, we aim to have them end the course with an empowered feeling about themselves, critical thinking skills, and study strategies. 

From the ELL perspective, we work hard to institute study strategies and skills that will support students as they bridge from the ELL program to College Writing I and from College Writing I to the next steps in their academic and professional journeys. Students start off creating a reading process in a whole group using literary circles. This lesson is pared down throughout the semester as the groups become smaller and eventually it becomes an independent process of applying the reading strategies on their own. Similarly, students acknowledge that writing is a process and, through a series of reflections, identify the version of the writing process that works for them. These processes often incorporate campus resources such as the Language Lab, Writing Place, and Smarthinking. We are working to empower our students through both content and skill.

You cannot teach writing without reading and vice versa. “Teaching reading in terms of its connections to writing can motivate students to read and increase the likelihood that they find success in both activities. It can lead students to value reading as an integral aspect of learning to write. It can help students develop their understanding of writerly strategies and techniques,” Michael Bunn (2013) exerts in his article “Motivation and Connection: Teaching Reading (and Writing) in the Composition Classroom” (p. 512). The class has worked with online literary circles in the previous two units and they will use them one last time in approaching “Identity: Personal and Social” by Virginia Vignoles, a chapter included in the Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology (2nd edition). Completing a difficult reading with specific tasks in mind and examining it repeatedly in group conversation has allowed texts to become more meaningful for the class and presenting what they learned to the rest of the class has made them experts on the material. Our goal is that in familiarizing themselves with the reading strategies necessary to take on a literary circle role, students will be able to apply these strategies to future independent readings. We discuss this in the follow-up activity.

Students create two sided notes for the next reading. Tajfel and Turner’s “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior” (2004) is also an academic reading. We pre-read this article in class. Then, students work on the note-taking strategy at home. At the top of a page the students type or write the article’s MLA citation. They then split the page into two columns. On the left-hand side, students record interesting quotes from the article with the page number. On the right-hand side of the page, students record their thoughts. In completing this exercise, students have an active, written conversation with the text. In class, we review the text one more time. We use the notes that the students take to work on an exercise integrating quotes into paragraphs in class. Online literary circles and two-sided notes are activities that we use in every unit of the class. These are reading, writing, and note-taking strategies that students will continue to use in writing across the curriculum in content courses, both independently and in groups when the opportunity presents itself.

We also work to relate to the assignment and apply the prompt to our lives in two activities that will serve as brainstorming for their essays. First, we will discuss social identity and personal identity by reviewing the idea of the “cultural iceberg”. Following our discussion, students will have the opportunity to fill out an identity wheel about themselves. We model this activity. Then, we will define key vocabulary and describe people in photographs posted around the room in one word. We will then discuss perspective, assumptions, personal identity, and social identity. Students will be given fifteen to twenty minutes to write a reflection on this activity before we discuss it as a whole group. As online work for that week, students will watch Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Ted Talk “The Danger of a Single Story” and reply to Adichie in another reflection.  Lastly, students will receive the essay prompt and project assignment. We will discuss the prompt and show the students examples of the collage. The rough draft will be due the following week.

Before turning in their final essays, students will fill out the cover sheet for their essay, staple it to the top of their hard copy, and turn it in. In her article “Encouraging Active Participation in Dialogic Feedback through Assessment as Learning,” Rodway (2017) examines the use of interactive coversheets as an assessment tool for teachers and students in a first-year undergraduate writing course. In addition to the traditional red inking that teachers perform on essays, Rodway asked students to fill out an interactive coversheet. The left side of the sheet lists the criteria students were expected to meet in three categories (with specific points in each category): task fulfillment, coherence and cohesion, and grammar and vocabulary. The right side of the form leaves space for students to add comments on where they’d like feedback. Rodway (2017) specifically asks that students do not request feedback in all areas. At the bottom of the page there is a space where students can assess the strengths of their paper. This assessment, created as a learning tool, allows students to transfer their internal processes of reflection and self-assessment to both a written and oral conversation about how students think critically and use teacher feedback. This process empowers students, moving them from inexperienced students to thoughtful, authoritative authors.

In ELL-103 we work with students to develop a plan for studying, filling a graphic blank agenda with all other commitments (work, family, etc.) and setting aside time to attend classes and complete homework weekly. Similarly, we start off by explaining that reading and writing are processes and that successful readers are successful writers. A large part of the course includes revising and editing writing and because this cannot be accomplished in one sitting, we suggest that they block off a few chunks of time during their week when they can focus solely on schoolwork. 

We believe all of the students in our classes benefit from very specific lessons on writing and study strategies. For this reason, we offer our students the opportunity to explore new information in small groups, as a whole class, and to reflect individually. For instance, students regularly participate in small group discussions and literary circles. As a whole class, we explore readings and participate in campus-led events. We also encourage them to make use of the support offered to them in the college’s Writing Place and Language Lab. This study strategy often aids students in finding the writing process that works for them as individuals. The focus of the course is strong theses, strong paragraphs, organization, and integrating quotations. We teach them through peer editing and support to self-assess, edit, and revise their own work.

In the ELL courses, we approach individual meetings on essays in a way that encourages students to work with professors’ feedback, acknowledge the suggestions, question new ideas, and discuss the decision-making in their composition. Students are given their appointments and asked to arrive twenty minutes early. We expect each meeting to take about 15 minutes. However, students need time to prepare. When students arrive, they are given a pile of post-it notes and their graded essay. Students sit and independently read through the essay and feedback. The students post the notes to areas of feedback that they’d like to discuss or need explanation. They write their specific questions or comments on the notes to discuss during our meeting. 

The benefits to this process are ample. For professors, we know that students are not looking at their grade and tucking their paper into their backpacks without acknowledging the feedback. For English language learners, this is an opportunity to discuss their work as an author, negotiate ideas, question, and explain. This adds an additional layer of academic discourse and also breaks down the barrier of approaching or questioning a person of power like an educator. Next, students will make an appointment with the Writing Place or Language Lab to review their draft with a tutor. They will approach editing with clear ideas of what the professor suggested, what they think, and what their next action step may be.

In Izabela Usscinski’s article “L2 Learners’ Engagement with Direct Written Corrective Feedback in First-Year Composition Courses” (2017), she exerts that students use more metacognitive thinking when they are encouraged by the instructor to engage with feedback. Uscinski explains that English language learners need to be taught to deal with feedback and use their errors as an opportunity to develop language and writing skills. The teacher needs to consider the feedback that they leave on ELL’s papers and teach them to engage with their audience (their teacher) and take accountability for their learning. One suggestion the author makes is asking students to include a note with new drafts, explaining how and why they made changes.The post-it notes allow us to discuss important points with students, assess how they handle feedback, and serve as more evidence for the tutor when they visit in the language lab or writing place.

Valuing experience as an important part of identity construction fosters a better understanding of the situated interconnections between identity factors (Liggett, 2010).  Liggett points out that “this aspect of CRT has been an important part of English language teaching for several years, used to build community in classrooms by allowing ELLs the opportunity to not only voice their perspectives but also to convey alternative understandings of their learning” (2010).  The last two classes of the semester are the occasions where they can “voice their perspectives but also to convey alternative understandings of their learning.”  The classes are dedicated to presentations of their final project and collage. Students present their collages on “What Makes Me Who I Am”. Students separate their collage into two parts, What You See or social identity and Who I Am or personal identity. Students showcase what they’ve learned throughout the semester in a celebratory cumulative presentation and gallery walk to share their work with their classmates. At some point in this course, the class also worked on a group submission to 2019 Fall “Tell” magazine, a campus digital literary magazine, about Taboo.   The theme “Taboo” interested them since some taboos are culture, religion, ethnic, and race specific and so was tied closely to our overarching theme.  This additional fun project knitted the class community across ELL and ENG since both professors also participate in this project and also brought up a sense of belonging to the college community.  Further, seeing their piece of writing published helped them boost their confidence in writing in English.