Immigrant Scholars in Rhetoric, Composition, and Communication

Description

Editors Letizia Guglielmo and Sergio C. Figueiredo and their contributors share the experiences of first-generation immigrant scholars in rhetoric, composition, and communication and how those experiences shape individual academic identity and, in turn, the teaching of writing and rhetoric.

With stories of migrants, refugees, and immigrants constantly in the news, this collection of personal narratives from first-generation immigrant scholars in rhetoric, composition, and communication is a welcome antidote to the polemics about who deserves to live in the United States and why. As literacy scholar Kate Vieira states in the foreword, this book “tells better, more fully human, more intellectually rigorous stories.” Sharing their experiences and how those experiences shape both individual academic identity and the teaching of writing and rhetoric, Letizia Guglielmo and Sergio C. Figueiredo and their contributors use the personal as a starting point for advancing collective and institutional change through active theories of social justice. In addition to exploring how literacy is always complex, situational, and influenced by multiple and diverse identities, individual essays narrate the ways in which teacher-scholars negotiate multiple identities and liminal spaces while often navigating insider-outsider status as students, teachers, and professionals. As they extend current and ongoing conversations within the field, contributors consider how these experiences shape their individual literacies and understanding of literacy; how their literacy experiences lie at the intersections of gender, race, class, and public policy; and how these experiences often provide the motivation to pursue an academic career in rhetoric, composition, and communication.

Sujets

• Language Arts
• Social Science
• Subjects
• Teaching
• EDUCATION
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Citizenship in the United States
• Higher
• Level
• Emigration
• General officer
• Subject
• School
• Rhetoric
• General
• Immigration

Informations

• Publié par: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
• Date de parution: 08 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780814100325
• Langue: English

Extrait

Immigrant Scholars in Rhetoric, Composition, and Communication
NCTE E DITORIAL B OARD : Steven Bickmore, Catherine Compton-Lilly, Deborah Dean, Antero Garcia, Bruce McComiskey, Jennifer Ochoa, Staci M. Perryman-Clark, Anne Elrod Whitney, Vivian Yenika-Agbaw, Kurt Austin, Chair, ex officio, Emily Kirkpatrick, ex officio

Staff Editor: Bonny Graham
Interior Design: Jenny Jensen Greenleaf
Cover Design: Pat Mayer
Cover Image: iStock.com/Bluberries
NCTE Stock Number: 17392; eStock Number: 17408
ISBN 978-0-8141-1739-2; eISBN 978-0-8141-1740-8
©2019 by 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.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Guglielmo, Letizia, 1977- editor. | Figueiredo, Sergio C., editor.
Title: Immigrant scholars in rhetoric, composition, and communication : memoirs of a first generation / edited by Letizia Guglielmo, Kennesaw State University; Sergio C. Figueiredo, Kennesaw State University.
Description: Urbana, Illinois : National Council of Teachers of English, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Shares the experiences of first-generation immigrant scholars in rhetoric, composition, and communication and how those experiences shape individual academic identity and, in turn, the teaching of writing and rhetoric”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019025845 (print) | LCCN 2019025846 (ebook) | ISBN 9780814117392 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780814117408 (adobe pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: English language—Study and teaching—Foreign speakers. | English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching—Foreign speakers. | English language—Composition and exercises—Study and teaching—Foreign speakers. | Teachers, Foreign—United States. | English teachers —United States.
Classification: LCC PE1128.A2 I35 2019 (print) | LCC PE1128.A2 (ebook) | DDC 808/.0420869120973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025845
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025846
For Mom and Dad Letizia
Para minha mãe, Maria Aurora Correia Figueiredo Sergio
CONTENTS
F OREWORD
Kate Vieira
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I NTRODUCTION : F RAMING , T RACING, AND C OMPLICATING THE E XPERIENCES OF US I MMIGRANT T EACHER -S CHOLARS
Sergio C. Figueiredo and Letizia Guglielmo
1   Being First: Motivation or Albatross
Chloe de los Reyes
2  Tenemos que hacer la lucha: Reflections of Latinas in Rhetoric and Writing Studies
Lizbett Tinoco and Jennifer Falcón
3   Desi Girl Gets a PhD: Brokering the American Education System with Cultural Expectations
Ashanka Kumari
4   Writing to Name: Documents, Movement, and Disruptions of a New Filipino Immigrant Teacher-Scholar
Peter Mayshle
5   A Right to My Language: Personal and Professional Identity as a “First Generation Teacher-Scholar-Rhetorician
Letizia Guglielmo
6   Choosing English: Crafting a Professional Identity as a College Professor
Natalia Kovalyova
7   Literacy, Rhetoric, Language Barriers, and Academia: A Journey of Knowledge and Identity
Estefany Palacio
8   From Orality to Electracy: A Mystory
Sergio C. Figueiredo
Index
Editors
Contributors
F oreword
K ate V ieira
I n the nightmare of the late 2010s in the United States, migrant lives, in particular those of migrants of color, are newly threatened. The rapid and haphazard changes to immigration policies since 2017 seem aimed at fomenting large-scale chaos and fear, across DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipients, refugees, those with protective status, families seeking asylum, and countless others, including—and it is horrifying to type the words—infants and toddlers. I am in the final stages of revising a book about transnational families separated across borders. In this draft, I find myself insisting, again and again, on the fact that migrants are human beings. Apparently, it bears repeating. What is at stake, what has always been at stake, is our shared humanity.
In this context, Immigrant Scholars in Rhetoric, Composition, and Communication offers an intellectual, aesthetic, and political balm. The first- and second-generation transnational scholars who have contributed to this volume teach readers what it can mean to write and teach amidst the roiling social context of global mobility. In doing so, they remind us—and remind us just in time—that writing has the potential to be a humanizing practice.
Literacy, it's important to point out, is not always humanizing, especially where migration is concerned: literacy has been used to racially engineer the US population (Ngai); to homogenize an unruly immigrant workforce (Graff); to restrict and regulate immigrant rights (Vieira); to “co-naturalize” language and race, thereby reinforcing white supremacy (Rosa and Flores); and to otherwise perpetuate immigrants’ “legal, economic, and cultural exclusion” (Wan 35), including recent proposals to renew the racist legacy of literacy tests for legal entry (a policy that makes about as much sense as a border wall).
Immigrant Scholars in Rhetoric, Composition, and Communication both acknowledges such abuses and offers other, more empowering ways of doing literacy. It lets readers in, for example, to a moment in school when one is speaking the way one knows how to speak and, in a small heartbeat, one realizes one's speech—the speech that flows through one's body and blood, the speech of one's mom, dad, familiars—suddenly becomes a “problem” to be fixed (Guglielmo, this volume). In this way, this book joins scholarship that reimagines language and literacy education not from a monolingual, but from a translingual and community-based, perspective (e.g., Alvarez and Alvarez). It shows how, for example, in the skilled hands of Latina faculty, composition pedagogy can resist white supremacist interpretations of literacy (Tinoco and Falcón, this volume). That is, this book both lays bare injustice and offers possibilities for change: in one chapter, the author shows how official migration papers tried to define him, but how, hah!, he defined the papers instead (Mayshle, this volume).
These and the other chapters in Immigrant Scholars in Rhetoric, Composition, and Communication are unique in that they offer more than point-counterpoint in the ongoing ideological struggles over language and literacy in transnational lives. The volume's value also lies in its stories. The complexity and thoughtfulness of these accounts put to shame the simplistic and racist narratives currently circulated in US policy and practice. Consider the story that underlies the policy of separating children from caregivers at the US-Mexico border, which can be summed up in one brute, unimaginative, if-then clause: If you don't want your children taken, then don't come here. This story is so poorly composed, so underdeveloped in relation to context and plot and human complexity, so impoverished in its conception of who counts as “you” and who counts as “we” and what kind of world constitutes “here,” that if it weren't written in papers—in the visas, green cards, passports, and laws that can grant or deny the right to be treated as a human being in the United States—most of us would probably be happy to ignore it. But we can't. Because this story, whose meanings are now indelibly branded into the tender developing consciousnesses of children, is backed up by an army of one of the most powerful nations in the world.
Immigrant Scholars in Rhetoric, Composition, and Communication tells better, more fully human, more intellectually rigorous stories. It meets force with words. In these pages, readers are asked to imagine or to remember the following: being asked about one's English on official forms (Kovalyova); being slotted or not into ESL classes and unraveling the associated stereotypes (de los Reyes); moving among orality, literacy, and electracy (Palacio); embodying the legacy of one's parents’ rural homeland (Figueiredo); experiencing both gender oppression and gender empowerment across continents, generations, and social classes (Kumari). These writers couple the art of first-person storytelling with a theoretically grounded communal vision of a more just world, participating in composition and rhetoric's robust legacy of justice-oriented literacy narratives, from Villanueva to Young to Richardson to Gilyard and others.
In writing their stories as transnational scholars—risky subject positions—these authors invite readers into discursive worlds marked by both the volatility of borders and the instability of language i