Writing Accomplices with Student Immigrant Rights Organizers

Glenn Hutchinson

Description

How might writing instructors dedicated to community-writing or service-learning courses take into account and even mobilize the lived experiences of all their students? 

Veteran community-writing instructor Glenn Hutchinson charts the history of his understanding that the conventional goal of such courses, to engage students in their communities and help them become more active citizens, doesn’t acknowledge the reality of the many college students who are prohibited from becoming US citizens, despite long years of residence in this country. 

Writing Accomplices with Student Immigrant Rights Organizers argues for a pedagogical shift toward centering the public-writing classroom on students’ work as organizers and rhetoricians. Instead of focusing only on community partnerships, the writing classroom can foreground the work of student organizers and how they can better inform the field’s teaching practices. Each chapter focuses on students’ rhetorical skills through petitions, op-eds, and campaigns to stop deportations.

Hutchinson emphasizes teachers’ responsibility to act in solidarity with immigrant students, pointing to a new role for the writing teacher in changing anti-immigrant and white supremacist laws and policies.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series
In this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

Sujets

• Writting
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Subjects
• Teaching
• EDUCATION
• Citizenship in the United States
• Higher
• Level
• General officer
• Subject
• Writing
• School
• Rhetoric
• General

Informations

• Publié par: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
• Date de parution: 02 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780814100189
• Langue: English

Extrait

CCCC STUDIES IN WRITING & RHETORIC

Edited by Steve Parks, University of Virginia

The aim of the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric ( SWR) Series is to influence how we think about language in action and especially how writing gets taught at the college level. The methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—incl uding rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse— ranging from individual writers and teachers, to work on classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching. SWR was one of the first scholarly book series to f ocus on the teaching of writing. It was established in 1980 by the Conference on College Co mposition and Communication (CCCC) in order to promote research in the emerging field of writing studies. As our field has grown, the research sponsored by SWR has continued to articulate the commitment of CCCC to supporting the work of writing teachers as reflective practitioners and intellectuals. We are eager to identify influential work in writing and rhetoric as it emerges. We thus ask authors to send us project proposals that clearly situate their work in the field and show how they aim to redirect our ongoing conversations about writing and its teaching. Proposals should include an overview of the project, a brief annotated table of contents, and a sample chapter. They should not exceed 10,000 words. To submit a proposal, please register as an author atwww.editorialmanager.com/nctebp. Once registered, follow the steps to submit a proposal (be sure to choose SWR Book Proposal from the drop-down list of article submission types).

SWR Editorial Advisory Board

Steve Parks, SWR Editor, University of Virginia Kevin Browne, University of the West Indies Ellen Cushman, Northeastern University Laura Gonzales, University of Texas-El Paso Haivan Hoang, University of Massachusetts-Amherst Carmen Kynard, John Jay College of Criminal Justice Paula Mathieu, Boston College Staci M. Perryman-Clark, Western Michigan University Eric Pritchard, University at Buffalo Jacqueline Rhodes, Michigan State University Tiffany Rousculp, Salt Lake Community College Khirsten Scott, University of Pittsburgh Jody Shipka, University of Maryland, Baltimore County Bo Wang, California State University

Staff Editor: Bonny Graham Series Editor: Steve Parks Manuscript Editor: Leigh Scarcliff Interior Design: Mary Rohrer Cover Design: Pat Mayer

Cover Image: Glenn Hutchinson NCTE Stock Number: 58500; eStock Number: 58524

ISBN 978-0-8141-5850-0; eISBN 978-0-8141-5852-4 Copyright © 2021 by the Conference on College Composition and Communication of the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright holder. Printed in the United States of America. It is the policy of NCTE in its journals and other publications to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified. NCTE provides equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all staff members and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, physical, mental or perceived handicap/disability, sexual orientation including gender identity or expression, ancestry, genetic information, marital status, military status, unfavorable discharge from military service, pregnancy, citizenship status, personal appearance, matriculation or political affiliation, or any other protected status under applicable federal, state, and local laws. Every effort has been made to provide current URLs and email addresses, but because of the rapidly changing nature of the web, some sites and addresses may no longer be accessible.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952438

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword Angelica Velazquillo

Prologue: Organizer-Writers’ Insights and Lessons

Community Partner Syllabus Fall 1997

1. The Limits of Partnership

2. Petitions to Stop Deportations

3. A Collective Lens for the Public-Writing Classroom and Op-Eds

4. Detention/Writing Center Campaigns for Freedom

5. A Shift toward Being an Accomplice

Community Accomplice Syllabus Spring 2020

Epilogue: Reflections from Student Organizer-Writers

Works Cited

Index

Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

STHANKS TO AP ECIAL NGELICA , J ULIO , M OHAMMAD , C LAUDIO , V IRIDIANA , N ICOLAS ,F RANCIS , Thomas, and all the organizers who inspired this book. Paula Gillespie and Sara P. Alvarez, thank you for your valuable feedback. Steve Parks, thank you for your patience, time, and guidance. And Maria, for your love, strength, and support.

FOREWORD

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Angelica Velazquillo December 2020

Prologue: Organizer-Writers’ Insights and Lessons

Yes, I went to high school but I never believed I would go to college. I knew I was undocumented…. I still remember when I crossed the border. So I went to high school, Miami Senior High…. Right after I graduated, I started working with my dad in construction. And we used to work every day, especially in the summer, even before I graduated…. So I started saving money, but never really looking to higher education because I just believed it wasn't for undocumented students… .

—Julio

So I remember I went to transfer…. I took my grades and everything. And so the counselor, you know, they looked at my application and everything. And they came out and they said, “You know, Mohammad, you're the perfect student that we're loo king for on this campus.” And they gave me my acceptance letter and I was sitting there reading m y acceptance letter, you know, my student ID number, when I could start and everything, and then, it was maybe ten seconds later, the guy came back and “Oh, shit, we made a mistake. We did not read your application where you mentioned you were born in Iran.” So they took my acceptance letter away from me.

—Mohammad

I know kids who are DACA-applicable and meet all the requirements, but schools are still denying them in-state tuition. So we had some problems trying to explain to the schools that this is state law and they have to abide by it. And teaching the colleges and schools how to go about it.

—Claudio

[W]hen DACA was under question … I remember F IU sent out an email that I have saved that F IU will always be a welcoming place for undocumented i mmigrants as long as F IU is in compliance with federal law. You might as well just not send anything. Just keep quiet. Because that's insulting at that point. You have like 800,000 students at ri sk of losing their status … and the university releases that level of noncommitment, a school that's 70 or 80 percent Latino—it's embarrassing.

—Tomas

I think working with the student and understanding that when you are someone who has multiple identities—you're not just a student, but you're also someone who doesn't have documentation, or you might be part of a mixed-status family—then you have additional worries. You're not just thinking about your grades and school, but you're sometimes worried about coming home and not seeing your parents or your siblings because they m ight be detained or you yourself could be detained… .

—Angelica

I think the first campaign that I actually did was we just sort of went and spammed, found like twelve thousand email addresses from professors and stuff around the United States who were teachers, thinking that you know this is the population that we can reach out to, that would be the most receptive to young people that have grown up here all their lives who can't move forward in the same way that they see students every single day are being able to move forward … No response. Very minimal. Like just one or two people responded…. We probably got more people saying take me off the list than we got the same amount, you know, saying, oh, I didn't know this was happening…. And so if we had, like even one teacher who reached out, like oh, this was amazing, this really affected me, I didn't know this was happening, that would have really, I think, been helpful to us in maybe our future work when trying harder to build alliances with teachers…. I think we might have lost some— not respect—but trust. It's just in the scope of several years of working and maybe not having as much of a receptive space in sort of what people consider the safe space, which is schools.

—Mohammad