ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
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Amy Garrett Brown
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The ProblemIn this analysis of an assignment that I created and have assigned to multiple English 102 (first year research writing) courses at the University of Arizona, I will explore how it furthers the work that has been done toward justice in the writing classroom for not only under-represented students who, according to Paris Django and H. Samy Alim, understand that “the purpose of state-sanctioned schooling has been to forward the largely assimilationist and often violent White imperial project, with students and families being asked to lose or deny their languages, literacies, cultures, and histories in order to achieve in schools,” but for all students to understand that their voices matter (1). Students who aren’t seen as marginalized, but believe that they can’t write because they don’t have anything to say, students who believe that they can’t write because their papers were covered in red ink, like blood, students who believe that they can’t write because they are different, ashamed, scared, weird, quiet, trans, disabled, scarred, depressed. Students who believe they can’t write because their English isn’t very good, students that grew up working in the fields, or were adopted, students that have dyslexia or anxiety or are hungry. Students who are marginalized in “the United States and other nation-states living out the legacies of genocide, land theft, enslavement, and various forms of colonialism,” are taught to read and write and think in Standard Edited American English (SEAE), but most students are taught to use an academic voice that isn’t their own, and they are expected to coldly embody this language to create projects that are meaningful to them (Paris and Alim).
This project is the culmination of observations of students and their responses and reflections about their disconnection with the writing assignments that they have encountered over their career as students. In 2024 at the main campus of The University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, the enrollment was 34,678 undergraduate students (University of Arizona). This is a city of students where freshmen can easily get lost and feel invisible. The U of A is a Hispanic Serving Institution with 30.2% of students identifying as Hispanic or Latinx. 53.3% of students identify as BIPOC and 27.8% of all freshmen in 2024 identified as first generation (University of Arizona). While these demographics show that the University of Arizona is diverse, it is also a campus where students come from every state, 3.3% are international students and represent 120 different countries (University of Arizona). Students are making huge life choices and moving far away from their support systems and communities. Michele Eodice et al. in The Meaningful Writing Project (2016) explains that “meaningful writing projects offer students opportunities for agency; for engagement with instructors, peers, and materials; and for learning that connects to previous experiences and passions and to future aspirations and identities” (4). As students wander into what is often one of their first college classes, they are looking for connections, meaning, and to discover who they are. I want to give each student, regardless of demographic, an opportunity to explore their identities and intersections, to make deep discoveries and build community. When Eodice et al. asked students which projects they had a personal connection with and what the results of having created that meaningful project were, students discussed how they felt connected, powerful, immersed in the process and thrilled with the experience of writing and researching deeply. They talked about feeling like the work they were doing mattered, and that it will relate to their real lives. They discussed transfer (4). Eodice et al. continue to explain that these sort of meaningful, connected projects, that are “developmentally effective,” help students to both utilize their own meaning, their own knowledge and assets, but also push them to see with openness. As students find connection, they also discover more than just their writer-self, they work toward self-actualization. According to the studies presented in The Meaningful Writing Project, they make leaps in “self-efficacy” or “self-authorship” (6). “If the goal of higher education is, in fact, to foster a self-actualization (Maslow 1967), certain personally significant experiences must occur” (Eodice et al. 6). As the study discovered, these experiences fell into several categories: a high level of interaction and engagement with both their instructors as well as their peers, a deep interest and excitement about the topics they were exploring, and finally, a belief that they had integrated knowledge and that it would certainly transfer (7). Methods for creating assignments that will lead to these “personally significant experiences” have been posed in depth for students who are linguistically and culturally disenfranchised. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) is one such pedagogy, defined by Alim and Paris, that “seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism” as an approach to pedagogy and praxis to create transformative educational and social outcomes. CSP is a heuristic which views intersectional awareness and flexible and reflexive self-identity as necessary and good, believes that we should be building upon our historical and powerful heritages, seen as assets rather than deficits, and rather than believing student foundations as weak or broken, we restore and sustain our knowledges. CSP asks “what would our pedagogies look like if this gaze (and the kindred patriarchal, cisheteronormative, English-monolingual, ableist, classist, xenophobic, Judeo-Christian gazes) weren’t the dominant one?” (2-3). What would stepping away from this line of sight and adjusting our lenses allow? What sorts of criteria would we use to measure success? How could we “envision new and recover community-rooted forms of teaching and learning?” (2-3). Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) “has centered implicitly or explicitly around the White-gaze-centered question: How can “we” get “these” working-class kids of color to speak/write/be more like middle-class White ones (rather than critiquing the White gaze itself that sees, hears, and frames students of color in everywhichway as marginal and deficient)?” (3). Paris and Alim ask us to move on. In order to focus on building on students’ knowledges and ways of knowing with these assignments, I thought about several of the tenets of CSP. Django Paris, H. Samy Alim, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Luis Moll, Asoa Inoue, Damien Baca, April Baker-Bell, Mya Poe, Aja Y. Martinez and many others, continue to push back with pedagogy that asks us to not just be relevant, but to be sustaining. In their introduction “Toward Writing as Social Justice: An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” in a special issue of College English, “which takes up a singular question: what would it mean to incorporate social justice into our writing assessments?” Mya Poe and Asao B. Inoue remind us that social justice considers the relationship between people and institutions or systems. They present Iris Marion Young’s four axes to map socially just writing assessment, “power, privilege, interest, and potential for action” (121). Thinking about these axes, and others important to CRT, social justice in the writing classroom looks a lot like possibilities, choice, agency, inquiry and voice. Gloria Ladson-Billings explains that culturally relevant/sustaining/revitalizing/reality pedagogies is designed to cultivate students’ voices, entrepreneurial inclinations, and inventive spirits. These pedagogies are not meant to fit students into neat boxes and categories like, ‘basic,’ ‘general,’ ‘regular,’ ‘honors,’ and ‘honors plus.’ Instead of relentlessly sorting, separating, and ranking students these pedagogies seek to open up worlds of possibilities for each student to bring his or her whole self into the classroom and into the world. (Ladson-Billings 344) This goal presupposes that there is a lot of sorting going on, and that students aren’t being served by this sorting. CSP is a movement that offers ways of lifting students up and giving them tools to explore these “possibilities” with their “whole self,” and it is our job to protect these possibilities.
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Amy Garrett Brown is a PhD student in Rhetoric, Composition and the Teaching of English at The University of Arizona. She has been teaching in higher education and secondary education for the past 19 years. Over the past 10 years she’s been teaching mostly at high schools on the U.S./Mexico border. Amy also has a M.A. in Literature from Boise State University, an M.F.A. in Poetry from George Mason University, and a M.Ed. from the Borderlands Consortium at the University of Arizona South. She lives in Tucson and spends her weekends at her property in the Mule Mountains where she and her husband are working to restore the land with native plants.
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