Languaging about Language in an Interdisciplinary Writing-Intensive Course.

This article gives an account of creating and delivering a (trans)disciplinary writing-intensive course focused on translation and translingual writing. The course, offered in a comparative literature program at a Canadian university, was co-created by an applied linguist, a literature professor, and a curriculum theorist, and was inspired in part by the translingual approach to teaching and understanding writing and language in general. In this article, we first discuss the development of the course and its assignments. We then examine written work produced by multilingual students, reflecting on the development of their metalinguistic, disciplinary, and writing-related knowledge. We aim to show that a course like this, which uses translingual “content” as the basis for a writing-intensive course, can be beneficial for students’ knowledge of language, literacy, and literature, and can encourage metalinguistic reflection that may allow student writers to recognize their linguistic repertoires as resources for academic writing in English. Language difference can be an object of study but is not itself a discipline. The group of scholars and writers whose work deals in some significant way with differences within and across languages is large and multifarious. While those of us who work with writing in various academic domains are now beginning to see difference in language as the norm (e.g., Horner, Lu, Royster, & Trimbur, 2011), behind this approach is years of work in disciplines like sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, critical theory, and translation studies, to name a scant few. If the recognition of multilingualism as an area of inquiry in writing and language studies is relatively new—if, for example, there can be said to have been a recent “multi/pluri turn” (Kubota, 2014) in applied linguistics and language education—the existence of such phenomena is not; human history is rife with examples of language contact, mixing, and multilingualism, and likewise, scholars in a number of fields have been studying them for years. Nevertheless, university instructors of writing and/or language and related disciplines have needed to find a way to address these issues that befits the particular disciplinary, historical, and academic context(s) they/we find ourselves working in. Composition teachers and scholars, and the institutions in which they work, are continuing to recognize the linguistic diversity of the students they work with. While there have been arguments to implement a translingual perspective on composition (Horner, Lu, Royster & Trimbur, 2011) and to integrate it into the first year writing classroom (e.g., Bizzell, 2017, Canagarajah, 2014, Guerra, 2016; Kiernan, Meier & Wang, 2016; Lalicker, 2017), there has been little work on integrating translingual or language difference perspectives into a disciplinary course. Interand transdisciplinarity have of late been of interest to scholars in language-related fields (e.g., composition and applied linguistics) who find themselves participating in initiatives that involve collaboration with “content” faculty. Various models and frameworks for collaboration have been theorized (e.g., Paretti, 2011; Fenton-Smith & Humphreys, 2015), but few published articles offer insight into the process of collaboration and the design and delivery of particular courses. This article aims to give Heng Hartse, Lockett, and Ortabasi 90 ATD, 15(3) such an account, describing the process of developing a (trans)disciplinary writing-intensive course, and examining the way the activities encouraged students to bring their linguistic repertoires into academic writing. The course, offered in a comparative literature program at a Canadian university, co-created by an applied linguist, a literature professor, and a curriculum theorist and taught by the former two, was focused on translingual writing and translation. Below, we first discuss the impetus for the creation and process of development of the course, and describe the assignments (including a portfolio, a poetry translation project, and a community-engaged language project) and the delivery of the course. In the subsequent section, we examine written work produced by multilingual students, reflecting the development of their metalinguistic, disciplinary, and writing knowledge during the course. We hope to show that a course like this, which uses translingual “content” as the basis of a disciplinary writing-intensive course, can be useful for prompting students’ knowledge of language, literacy, and literature, and can encourage metalinguistic reflection that may allow student writers to recognize their linguistic repertoires as resources (rather than deficits) for academic writing in English. The Course: Background, Approach, and Design Translation, writing, and literature were the areas one of us, Melek, initially wanted to address with the development of this lower-division writing-intensive course. As a professor of comparative literature, she had taught each of these topics, usually separately: the introduction to the theory and practice of literary translation for upper-division students; the principles of expository and research-paper writing for lowerand upper-division students; and literature courses, with a syllabus structured around a linguistically diverse list of literary texts in translation, organized according to a variety of themes, geographies, and chronologies. But since translation is central to the world literature program’s curriculum, Melek had a particular desire to introduce it in an approachable, hands-on way at the first-year level. Literary translation is a form of academic writing usually reserved for more experienced students, but she had long thought there must be a way to introduce the topic to beginners. (It was decided early on that this would be a writing-intensive or “WI” course.) The way to do this, Melek eventually decided, was to build on the lived experience of multilingualism and how that could be put into play in the world literature classroom. As a scholar of world/comparative literature, and based on her own upbringing, Melek identifies as multilingual (see Table 2 for the languages included in her linguistic repertoire). After coming across Matsuda’s (2014) article on the “lure” of translingual writing, Melek had a series of questions that would eventually develop into a course: might students’ lived experience of multilingualism not be a good way to engage students new to the idea of literature in translation? Might it not offer a different route to teaching and learning writing in the discipline? Rather than letting course content dictate the way in which the course theme took shape, as is usually the case, she wanted the linguistic diversity of the students themselves to become a primary focus of the course.1 In the summer of 2015, Melek and Michael began by sketching possible course structures and, as the designs unfolded, they realized that, although rare at the lower division level, a variation on a writing workshop might be a suitable model. At this stage, Joel joined the team to plan the course. As a group, we were aware of a deficit discourse at our institution, common to many North American universities—a perception of the “inadequate English skills” of second (and indeed first) language student writers.2 We hoped to situate multilingual students’ language backgrounds and repertoires not as deficits to be overcome but as resources for developing linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary knowledge. We also hoped the course would be a place where students of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds would interact, learning to understand and appreciate their own and each other’s linguistic repertoires. Drawing on pedagogies advocated by Canagarajah (2014), we decided the course would allow students to draw on Languaging about Language in an Interdisciplinary Writing Intensive Course 91 ATD, 15(3) various language repertoires including home/heritage languages, global varieties and dialects of English, and standard academic English, in order to scaffold language awareness and writing skills. Similarly, in the spirit of writing-about-writing pedagogy (Downs & Wardle, 2007), we wanted to focus the writing component of the course not simply on how to write, but learning “about writing.” (See, for example, the appendix for some of the theoretical readings from scholars of translingual writing that the students read.) And per Guerra (2016), we aimed not only to draw attention to practices of codemeshing, but to help students “develop a rhetorical sensibility” that recognizes “language as contingent and emergent” (p. 228). As we continued to develop a rationale and purpose for the course, we were guided by Melek’s original idea of the students’ lived experience of multilingualism being central to the course, without being tied solely to translation or literature as a single disciplinary focus. We began drafting and evaluating designs which included pedagogical approaches and disciplinary content from applied linguistics, second language writing, writing (both creative and academic) pedagogy, and translation studies. Michael set up consultations with two experts whose advice proved invaluable in shaping the course: Dr. Aron Aji, the Director of the MFA program in Literary Translation (one of only a few programs of its kind) at the University of Iowa (UI), and Erín Mouré, a major Canadian poet and translator. Both provided input on curriculum design and possible classroom activities. By this time, we had formalized a syllabus, drafted a course proposal, and submitted materials to Senate for review. The course was approved, with the following assignments (italicized portions taken from the syllabus; course readings are listed in the Appendix): Portfolio [30%], Including: Language and Literacy Autobiography A 3-page language and literacy autobiography about the development of your