This CFP is for a forthcoming book about enacting transnational pedagogical practice in freshman composition courses. Researchers and teachers are encouraged to email a 500 word abstract to William.Ordeman@unt.edu by December 17, 2019.

William Ordeman is currently a lecturer at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX. He has studied and taught in universities along the US and Mexico border. His research is transnational pedagogy and digital rhetorics. The book will feature several authors each contributing one chapter of about 6,000 words. Please direct questions to the above email address. 

Below is the prompt:

Translingual and transnational students are represented within universities not just along the geo-political borders of the US, but in classrooms across the nation. Many of these students are entering institutions and first-year-writing programs that still function under monolingual ideology. Suresh Canagarajah defines this monolingual space as a place where “the language [is] capable of naturally expressing only the values and thoughts belonging to [one specific] community” (Canagarajah)*. That is to say, many universities have yet to adopt a writing program that encourages the expression of values and thoughts of their transnational students but instead continue to see their classrooms as a “monolingual” space. Some writing programs have attempted to foster self-reflection pedagogy that addresses our students’ unique socio-linguistic context. Assignments in first-year-writing are meant to encourage the reflection of transnational space where the exchange of ideas and resources supersede barriers of language and structural borders. These are meant to demonstrate to the students the value of their complex translingual and transnational rhetorical ecology.

In this book, I would like to discuss the successes and shortcomings of these FYW assignments in meeting the needs of our students and offer insights to other writing programs who seek to incorporate pedagogy that addresses the values of such intersections of cultures, languages, and people. 

*Canagarajah, A. Suresh. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. Routledge, 2013.