The first major writing assignment in English 2100 is a literacy narrative that over the last two years has served as the basis for the rhetorical analysis and research paper students will go on to perform. The literacy narrative gives expression to students’ lived experiences and worldview, allows them to realize the ways these experiences often are the subjects of scholarly agendas and ideology, and empowers them to enter this wider discourse.

As a migrant to the US, I code-switch, code-mesh, and use idiomatic gestures in and out of class, which I share with many of my students. In our discussions on Jeroen Gevers’s Translingualism, it became clear that writing studies had to reckon with translingualism (either for or against). Yet, their narratives lacked any trace of such multiple fluencies. Conferencing with students on their drafts, I became aware that many were censoring such details in their narratives: for example, they translated into AES exchanges that occurred in other or multiple languages or dialects or they omitted idiomatic gestures or forms of body language.

Such erasures were all the more significant because their literacy narratives revolved around stereotypes or microaggressions. In speaking with a number of my students, I saw that they felt a need to represent themselves to conform with certain preconceived expectations. Conferencing with students remains one of the best ways to engage with students that makes feedback a conversation and not a unilateral transfer of information from instructor to student. Of the many forms of feedback that we discussed when reviewing Stephanie Crook’s “A Social-Constructionist Review of Feedback,” conferencing remains an important feedback strategy.  

The literacy narrative assignment was inadvertently promoting monolingual biases and prioritizing verbal communication, so I asked them to consider how the events or experiences they were exploring actually engaged a range of communication modes including the verbal, spatial, gestural, and sartorial. Students increased their opportunities and avenues for writing. They demonstrated their cultural knowledge while practicing important skills such as translating or paraphrasing between different languages and dialects and providing context and other tools for intelligibility for idiomatic concepts and practices. Given Baruch’s diversity, this production of knowledge both enriched their writing experiences and strengthened our sense of classroom community while reflecting better the pluralities of our linguistic landscapes.

Below is the general prompt for the literacy narrative that contextualizes the revised prompt for the first stage, a narrative of a central experience of a stereotype or microaggression, that asks students to engage their multiple modes of communication.

Paper 1: Literacy Narrative

The Assignment Overview

Your first major writing project is a form of composition called a “Literacy Narrative.” It asks you to reflect upon and write about an experience of racial or ethnic stereotyping or a microaggression that led you to examine the various ways you identify and represent yourself in the world, how others see you, or how you think they see you, and how this experience influenced the way you see and represent yourself or others. 

The experience you explore could be one that you experienced, witnessed happening to another, or that you committed.

Your story will employ the rhetorical elements and strategies we’ve explored so far.  It must: have a claim (implicit or explicit); be relevant to our context; represent some knowledge, realization, or understanding gained; and contain the necessary elements of ethos, logos, and pathos as we’ve discussed in The Rhetorical Situation.  

Two texts we’ve read so far, “Just Walk On By” and “Microaggressions Matter,” are helpful models.

In analyzing and reflecting upon your experience of racial or ethnic stereotyping or misunderstanding, how does your language compare to the language used by others?

What does the language of others reveal about the stereotypes you think people may have about you and fellow members of your discourse community?  

What language did you draw upon to work and think through your experience of stereotyping or misunderstanding?

After reading and discussing readings on literacy and discourse communities, you’ll be even better positioned to do this: What discourse communities are you part of?  Are those discourse communities defined by or related to race or ethnicity?  What is the language broadly of your discourse community?  What is the language specifically of race and ethnicity in that community?  What is significant about such language?  If there isn’t such language, what does that mean? How have those discourse communities changed over time and place in your experience?  Why?  What words have been associated with members in your group(s)? What is significant about such words? What’s the history of that language or the words you consider important in your story and that have been used to describe you?

Stage 1: A Narrative of the central event. 

Write a 500-word narrative of the central event that will anchor your essay. Think of the instances of stereotypes that have been projected onto you, that you’ve seen projected onto others, or that you’ve projected onto others. Focus on the one that seems most significant, that changed you in some way, or that still bothers you. 

The following questions can help you arrive at and think through your central event.  Before writing your narrative, use it as a checklist to gather your details. You don’t have to address them all;  you may not recall many of them. Read through them to help you recall as many details as possible: 

• Which incidents stand out most significantly or have left an impression on you?  
• What was the context—time, place, your age? What were you doing at that time? 

What specific language and other forms of communication were used in the incident? For instance, try to recall and detail:

• Spoken words:  What language was used? English, another language, multiple? Why is that important? What was the tone and did this change? What does that mean?
• Sounds: What other non-verbal sounds were present? Were they usual or expected? 
• Gestures, facial expressions, and body language–for many of us, gestures, facial expressions, and body language can carry as much or more meaning than words: a middle finger, giving someone a cutting look, raising the eyebrows, sucking the teeth, frowning, standing akimbo (hands on hips), a sarcastic smile, flaring the nostrils. 
• Were any of these involved? What specifically did they mean to you? What did they communicate?  For example, over the Caribbean, women and girls bracing for a fight will stand contrapposto (one foot forward with knee slightly bent, one foot back carrying the weight), hands on hips tucking in the skirt, with the front foot tapping in time with the shaking of the hips.  
• Did all people involved share the same meanings of these gestures? For instance, nodding the head side to side generally means “no” in the West but “yes” in South Asia. 
• Do you have specific language for these gestures, facial expressions, or body language? For instance, in Trinidad, sucking the teeth is called a “stchups” and its meaning varies with context, the parties involved, and the duration of the sound. Thus, a short “stuchps” expresses mild irritation or surprise while a protracted one means, literally, “kiss my a–!” 
• Clothing–clothing can often carry specific messages about our identities, how we wish to relate to others, and how we want to fit into a specific space. What do you communicate when you wear a suit or a leather jacket? How do they relate to the rules of a place? How does a person’s clothing conform or not with their other forms of communication in your encounter? (Remember the ways Brent Staples describes the possible impressions created by his military jacket?)
• Spatial communication–how we occupy space in relation to one another can carry meaning. For instance: Why do you sit where you do in class? What message may that communicate about you? How closely are people situated in your encounter? 
• Place–where did the incident occur? Is it something you would expect to occur in that place? What are the rules–explicit or implicit, spoken or unspoken–of that place as relates to language and race? Who makes and enforces the rules of that place?

Requirements:

500 words, double-spaced, Times New Roman, font 12. No Pages docs or PDFs. 

Due: ___________________________