By Lin Li (PhD Candidate), Gideon KwawuKumey (2nd Year PhD Student), and Dr. Shakil Rabbi (Assistant Professor, Department of English)
The Writing Education Across Borders is a conference on multilingual and international writing education. The fourth iteration of this convention was hosted by the University of Utah in September in Salt Lake City, Utah, and various scholars from across the country and the world participated. The pleasant weather and the insightful presentations provided fodder for our minds and bodies, energizing us in our vocations of teaching writing, which is our daily job. Furthermore, unlike a large national conference, the WEAB conference is relatively small (with about 75 attendees); this small setting made it easier to have a chat and connect more deeply.
Academic conferences – at their best – help us interact closely with fellow disciplinary travelers, connecting across our places at different institutions and different stages of careers. These connections are how we can grow and learn to become better teachers and researchers of writing; it is also how the field grows and matures. Presenting our activities in the classroom helps us ground our research in everyday work as writing teachers and explore the things we might talk about in our research around academic practices in our classrooms. Talking with interested audiences – especially those that speak the same disciplinary language – lets us test out our ideas and research through conversations and learn more about what we are trying to understand through our scholarship.
Three of us from the English department took part in the opportunity that WEAB at the University of Utah afforded. The panel was titled “Connecting Locations of Writing”and included Dr. Shakil Rabbi, an Assistant Professor, Ms. Lin Li, a PhD Candidate, and Mr. Gideon Kwawukumey, a second year PhD student. We discussed the overlap between rhetoric and multilingualism in the context of writing education across borders through our research and how it informed our classroom activities. Two of the presentations drew directly from the activities in our first year writing classes, showcasing the intersection of research and pedagogy in our University Writing Program. The occasion provided us a space to interact with audiences and discuss ideas about our topics in a way that helped us draw connections between our work and the work of other scholars at the conference.
Picture of the Panelists (from left to right): Ms. Lin Li (PhD-Candidate), Mr. Gideon KwawuKumey (2nd Year PhD Student), and Dr. Shakil Rabbi, Assistant Professor, Department of English.
Lin Li’s talk discussed how writing assignments in a first year writing class fostered the development of translingual practice and audience awareness among three Chinese international students. Li employed a comparative rhetorical analysis of writing samples produced for her and American instructors, involving a detailed textual analysis of students’ work on patterns in language use, rhetorical strategies, and cultural references. The research highlighted the complex interplay between cultural background and academic writing expectations in a multilingual context and how rhetorical performances and choices signaled audience awareness based on the identity of the instructor. The findings could help educators understand how international students navigate cross-cultural writing situations and how we might provide tailored support to them.
Gideon Kwawukumey, the second speaker, critically examined the relationship between Ghana’s National Literacy Acceleration Program (NALAP) and classroom practices, utilizing linguistic discourse analysis and autoethnographic insights. Utilizing translingual theory and language policy implementation framework, he discussed how these frameworks informed a critical understanding of the realities of rhetoric and multilingual education in Ghana. Just as NALAP policy prioritizes a fluid pluriversal use of language at the early-exit level, Kwawukumey’s work presents a way to decolonize first-year writing by embracing student writers’ multiple linguistic repertoires in their writing practices. Additionally, his research into Ghanaian classrooms demonstrated tensions between writing classroom realities and NALAP policy, calling for paying attention to students’ linguistic choices. He wants to build these discussions further by incorporating translanguaging pedagogies into the first year writing classes he teaches at Virginia Tech. He believes that this will help students enact students’ linguistic voices and identities while also facilitating the goals of the curriculum’s learning outcomes.
Dr. Shakil Rabbi’s talk discussed a linked section of ENGL 1106 (co-taught with Dr. Megan Weaver) and how activities that were a part of research and writing assignments were modified to foster the development of intercultural communicative competence. Specifically, Rabbi explained how a Cultural Inquiry Report (a profile of a fellow student from another cultural or national background) fostered engagement across difference through an interview activity that could be the basis of an analytical narrative. This research process fostered awareness of the “dangers of a single story,” as one of the students wrote in their reflections on the assignment. The assignment also made use of AI transcription tools to facilitate the research process and foreground the issues of such a tool – and what it automates and what it still needs human oversight for.
The experiences and knowledge gained from this conference will certainly enrich our pedagogy and contribute to the ongoing development of effective, inclusive writing practices at Virginia Tech and beyond. As we continue to pursue these questions in the near future we hope to become better teachers and researchers of writing and rhetoric, especially as it relates to better serving the needs of the diverse student populations that make up our classrooms. Connecting with participants in conferences and our classrooms will always be invaluable, especially when they help us share our insights, challenge our perspectives and ideas, and collaboratively explore new writing pedagogy in the context of the classes at Virginia Tech.