Summer writing project (Week Fourteen): Notes on GHK and translingualism

Not surprisingly, I didn't get anything done this week on my writing project. In fact, on Monday I woke up thinking about George Kerr and that earlier project, and I started getting interested in picking that up again. 

So a question for all of my reader(s): should I put my "main" project aside for a bit and go back to my Kerr paper, with the hope that putting the other project out of my mind for a while will allow me to come to it anew when I do that? These are two very different projects, I need to mention, and for very different audiences. What do you do in this situation? 

I should add that I've been dragging on both projects. You can see from my blog that I've been doing stuff with Kerr for about 10 years or more, and I haven't really achieved much in terms of publications (well, there's that introduction to the Camphor Press edition of Formosa Betrayed, which I enjoyed completing). I think I mentioned that the other project, a more rhetoric-focused project, has also been percolating in my brain for about 15 or so years. I have trouble getting things done, in other words. One of my Syracuse professors once said to me, when I was telling her about my idea for a project, "Everybody has ideas! Some turn into books, and some turn into after-tea chat!" I sometimes think I'm more the after-tea chat kind of idea person... *sigh*

I was also interviewed this week for a project some of my colleagues are working on. One of the questions had to do with what I knew about translingualism, so of course, being who I am (see "academic imposter syndrome"), I prepared for the interview by reading whatever I could about translingualism so I wouldn't sound like I didn't know anything. I even ordered an ebook for the library (which came the next day!) entitled Reconciling Translingualism and Second Language Writing, edited by Tony Silva and Zhaozhe Wang. It's a collection of essays growing out of the tensions between the academic field of second language writing and what I'd probably call the "translingual movement" in composition studies. I read a few chapters of that, including those by 

• Paul Kei Matsuda ("Weathering the Translingual Storm"), 
• Jonathan Hall and Maria Jerskey ("Tear Down the Wall: Institutional Structures vs. Translingual Realities"), 
• Xiaoye You ("The Yin-Yang of Writing Education in Globalization"), 
• Todd Ruecker and Shawna Shapiro ("Critical Pragmatism as a Middle Ground in Discussions of Linguistic Diversity"), 
• Michelle Cox and Missy Watson ("A Translingual Scholar and Second Language Writing Scholar Talk It Out: Steps Toward Reconciliation"), and 
• Bruce Horner ("Language Difference, Translinguality, and L2 Writing: Conflations, Confusions, and the Work of Writing"). 

(I always overprepare for interviews, though it usually doesn't show it in the end!) The chapters gave me a lot to think about. One thing I thought about centers around whether I'd consider my own pedagogy "translingual." I'm hesitant to call it that, particularly after reading Horner's chapter, which disavows the idea that translingualism is exclusively concerned with second language writing (or teaching writing to multilingual students, which is my primary job). In his chapter, Horner claimed that translingualism isn’t primarily about L2 writing, but rather that it’s more closely tied to the Students’ Right to their own language movement and the idea of allowing people with different dialects of English to use their own styles. As he writes,

In other words, while the growing numbers of students and faculty speaking and writing languages other than English may have contributed to galvanizing the development of translingual language ideology, and while that ideology is certainly as applicable to those using multiple named languages as it is to those claiming to use and know only one, that demographic change is not, in fact, the most appropriate conceptual lineage by which to understand the emergence of translingual ideology. (58)

I have to admit that, after I copied that quote in my journal, I said that I found this idea a bit disingenuous, "as though [I wrote] he thinks he owns the term 'translingualism.' (Note that he identifies 'Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach' as sort of the urtext of translingualism in composition studies.) There are a heck of a lot of scholars (as he himself admits) who have used the writings of people using different 'named languages' as part of their research on translingualism." Some of them have collaborated with him on translingual projects, as well.

But, I continued, "if Horner wants to say that translingualism is not primarily related to L2 writing, I’m fine with that. But that leaves us to think about this question of my familiarity with translingualism in my role as a teacher of multilingual students." Along the way in his paper, Horner characterizes translingualism as a "language ideology" that is opposed to the other language ideology (are there only two?) of monolingualism, and that it really applies to both the teaching of "L2"/multilingual writers and everyone else. Whether you teach writing from a translingual perspective becomes, then a political question, or what seems to me to be a moral question. That is, you're either working from a translingual perspective or you're not, and if you're not, you're on the wrong side (of history, of pedagogy, etc.). 

As a lapsed evangelical, I find myself "allergic" to these moral arguments. I'm also resistant because how this ideology is supposed to work in practice is such a murky thing. I found myself more in tune with the "critical pragmatism" discussed by Todd Ruecker and Shawna Shapiro. Critical pragmatism draws on Critical English for Academic Purposes (EAP) "to 'rediscover' the middle ground between the two polarities of pragmatism (which is often framed as assimilationist) and idealism (which is often framed as resistant to linguistic norms)" (141). They show how a writing course (and a writing program) can balance these two motives and avoid the "false dichotomy between conformity and resistance" (147). They even quote Horner and Lu to point out that these translingualists also have a pragmatic perspective at times: Lu and Horner (2013), say Ruecker and Shapiro, "have (re)defined a translingual approach as 'a disposition of openness and inquiry toward language and language differences' (p. 586), including toward standardized English" (147). This sense of translingualism seems closer to critical pragmatism than some of the other stuff I've read about it.

After reading their chapter, I felt a bit more clear about what I'm doing in class--what I'm already doing that could be seen in this light (whether you call it "translingual" or "critical pragmatism") and what I could do to make my course more "open" to language and language differences. 

Well, that was a longer update than I expected to write. And it got way off whatever it was that I thought I was going to write. But that's OK. I recommend looking at Silva and Wang's book, though, if you have access to it and you're interested in the "debate" between SLW and translingualism.