Background

Some years ago, I (Vidya) was preparing to teach a first-year Writing class–a class full of multilingual, international students–in a Canadian post-secondary institution. The essay on the syllabus for that week was a charming, wryly funny, whimsical meditation on the vagaries of fashion trends. Having arrived in Turtle Island/Canada not too long before this moment, I had just spent some of my class-prep hours looking up the array of words in the essay that were, to me, signs without signifiers, chains of letters without visual referents. What did a playsuit look like? Who were Ol’ Dixie and Ol’ Dobbin, and what was the comic import of that reference? What was a Bobby Brooks sweater? The enigmatic allusions kept coming. Go-go boots. Goodwill. Bride of Frankenstein. And then: a casual wisecrack referencing the poverty of African nations. A lighthearted description of the West as a place “where the buffalo roam” (did they, these days?).^[1]

If, despite my fluency in English, I had trouble deciphering these allusions, surely the cultural opacity of this essay placed a heavy and unnecessary burden on students who came from outside North America–students identified by the institution as “English learners”? The cognitive dissonance caused by the content of the Writing textbook that contained this essay was amplified when I considered the assignment prompts. The students in the course were expected to write academic essays, not journalistic ones that jauntily abjured citation and other markers of scholarly style. Moreover, most of them needed to write academic essays for the social science courses in which they were enrolled. Redesigning the course the next year, I searched for a textbook or collection of readings that would model academic genres and that included content with cultural and political relevance to multilingual students. Dissatisfied with the results of my search–not least because of the cost of some of the more likely choices–I ended up creating an early iteration of this textbook for multilingual first-year writers in 2018, authoring short essays myself. Emily contributed a chapter, and became interested in collaborating on a longer-term project to put together a collection of readings with multiple authors, to be made available as an Open Educational Resource (OER).

Goals

Multilingual and international students are constantly asked to demonstrate “critical thinking” as framed in the North American educational context, but are rarely invited to critique the economic, institutional, linguistic, and racial power structures, ideologies, and pedagogies that place them in the shadow of deficit, deprive them of agency, and invalidate the linguistic and cultural resources they already have. Thus, the question at the heart of our editorial venture was this: what if there was a textbook for multilingual students in North America that empowered them to be writers who could critically reflect on and resist the sociopolitical, linguistic, and ideological context within which they were invited to join the academic conversations taking place in English? We felt that, in addition to being a stimulus to critical thinking, such a textbook would reflect pedagogic care, giving students who experience exclusion based on categories like race, language, gender identity, or ability access to materials that not only develop academic literacies but also value and reflect their identities, languages, and cultures.

While we are committed to liberatory practices and the critique of educational hierarchy, we also wanted the readings in the textbook to support the practical goal of students’ academic success in their North American post-secondary institutions. This goal is somewhat conflict-producing to many instructors and multilingual students, as Ryuku Kubota (2022) notes, since we have concerns about the assimilation of diverse rhetorical resources and learning styles into Eurocentric and English-centric linguistic and cultural norms. Despite our reservations, however, most of us acknowledge that the pragmatic pursuit of academic success can be empowering to L2 students and may be crucial to their academic survival/thriving, especially if the goal itself is being critically examined.

We summarized our criteria in a book chapter on antiracist frameworks for textbook creation (Natarajan & Pez, 2024, p. 245) as follows:

Table 1

Criteria for a Year 1 Writing Textbook for Multilingual International Students

Modelling academic genres is one way of supporting student success. Our multilingual students had a recurring question: “Do you have an example or a model for the kind of paper that you are asking us to write?” The use of journalistic readings in academic writing textbooks reflects a persistent reluctance to offer students viable models of the kind of writing considered desirable in academia–readings that offer theses or arguments, that can be summarized in an abstract, that integrate research and exemplify widely used citation practices. This reluctance no doubt has some historical basis in the (broadly expressivist) idea that “original” writing must emanate from individual selves, but it needlessly mystifies genre conventions. To ask Year 1 students to extract genre features from actual 3000-6000-word academic articles is to erect a cognitive barrier to their academic success. Celebrating our students as also our guides and teachers, we incorporate models of academic genres into this collection of readings, but in condensed form, so that key features of a research essay, for instance, or of a case analysis, are compressed into three or four pages. To make genre choices easier for users of this collection, we have provided a table of contents based on the genres we have included–personal reflections, essays that present research findings, essays based on narrative and counterstory, case analyses, poetry, and public scholarship (see Table 3: Genres in this Anthology below).

We have been astounded by the ways in which students in our classes have brilliantly applied such models to communicate aspects of their identities and their research, whether through a reflective paper that makes connections between personal experiences and course content or through a case analysis that combines students’ own critical insights with theories from their research. Recognizing their own abilities to teach their peers, students have also offered their own papers as future writing models. Indeed, two such papers (by Junbo Huang and Nora (Zhixin) Wu) have been included in this collection.

We found that many of our contributors, guided by predecessors who had influenced our own work, and thinking through questions of linguistic and racial justice in their own contexts, agreed on the value, for multilingual learners, of both writing about writing and resistant approaches to language. Thus, the pieces in this collection seek to both empower students to take critical stances on linguistic and academic hierarchies and to acquire and practice academic literacies such as identification of genre conventions. The pieces, as noted in Table 2: Themes in this Anthology, touch on writing about writing, critical pedagogy, culturally responsive pedagogy, Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL), stereotyping as provocation to critical thought, and so on, while modelling citation practices (APA and MLA), and while reflecting the diverse identities and positionalities of their authors.

Influences

The seeds of our (Emily’s and Vidya’s) pedagogic practice were discovered, over many years of teaching experience and inquiry, in the work of transformative educators. We were deeply affected by Paulo Freire’s ideas about education as a liberating practice and bell hooks’ description of teaching as an invitation to transgress (Freire, 2000; hooks, 1994). We had come to believe that harnessing reflection on one’s own situation to the development of a critical consciousness offers the most powerful motivation for reading and writing. Both of us were drawn in by the work of Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995, 2014) and of Django Paris and H. Samy Alim (2017) on culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies that validate students’ identities and cultural/linguistic resources.

In addition to these formative influences, a host of scholar-activists and pedagogic innovators offered exciting and productive challenges to deficit modelling of students, monolingual thinking, and academic racism. Geneva Smitherman (1977), April Baker-Bell (2020), Vershawn Ashanti Young (2011), Asao Inoue (2015), Suresh Canagarajah (2002), and Ryuku Kubota (2022) were among the scholars we drew ideas and courage from. Inspired, too, by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs’ celebrated Writing About Writing (2020), we experimented in our first version of the writing textbook with the idea of making writing itself the subject of student inquiry. We found that the multilingual writers in our classes were stimulated by this approach to produce work that was both rigorous and heartfelt. Thus, the themes that structure the readings in this collection reflect the merging of a writing-about-writing approach with critiques of Standard Language Ideologies and practices (please see Table 2: Themes in this Anthology below).

Both of us live and work on the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak and Chonnonton Peoples, on the banks of the Deshkan Ziibi (the Antler River, which settlers have named “the Thames”). As settlers in what is now called Canada, we have come to understand that our moral compass must be calibrated to honour the teachings and world-views of the Original Peoples of this land. Our listening sessions with Anishinaabe/Oneida Knowledge Holder Nistangekwe Liz Akiwenzie led us to a life-changing awareness of how the ongoing colonial history of Turtle Island inflects our educational practices, and of how we (settlers and guests) must learn and live in relationship with each other, with sovereign Indigenous Peoples, with the land and all its denizens. Learning, too, from the published work of Marie Battiste (2013), Gregory Younging (2018), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017), among many others, we seek to bring our responsibility for reconciliation and decolonization to bear on our educational practices. By this last phrase we mean both practices that capture the ongoing process of our own education, through which we seek to disentangle our thinking from deeply ingrained colonial patterns, and teaching practices that reflect our commitments to recognize our students’ gifts, to support the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of education, to empower both compassion and confidence, and to enable resistance to oppressive social structures. It is no accident that this collection of readings begins with a piece by Nistangekwe Liz Akiwenzie; it is our hope that this opening chapter will be the gateway through which teachers and students who use this book will begin their learning journey.

Table 2

Themes in this Anthology

Table 3

Genres in this Anthology

We thank you for your interest in this collection of readings, and welcome feedback.