{"title":"Multisemiotics, Race, and Academic Literacies","authors":"Pedro dos Santos, Bong-gi Sohn","doi":"10.18806/tesl.v40i1/1384","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This study examines the trajectories of two multilingual, racialized academic writing faculty, presenting how we brought our Southern onto-epistemologies (e.g., Santos, 2016) to curriculum, teaching, and assessment. Although plurilingualism has become a significant dimension of Canadian higher education (Marshall, 2020), monolingual norms that emphasize native-like competence continue to be a mainstream discourse in many academic writing courses. Building on the recent raciolinguistic critique (Rosa & Flores, 2017) of the lack of discussion of racism in academic literacies discourse, we acknowledge that academic literacies continues to force plurilingual, international students into a white subject position. Acknowledging the tension between the monolingual ideal and multilingual realities, we explore how two plurilingual, non-white faculty challenge an academic writing tradition that is constructed by the white listening subject. By co-creating duoethnographic narratives that provide insight into our complex biographical journeys as cycles of becoming (Thibault, 2020), our story shows how teaching academic writing is not simply teaching a skillset but involves constant negotiation between students’ and teachers’ lived experiences. Through this process, we conceive of teaching academic literacies as both an ideological construct and a multisemiotic process that involves multiple histories and meaning-making resources across diverse time and place scales.","PeriodicalId":45904,"journal":{"name":"TESL Canada Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"TESL Canada Journal","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.18806/tesl.v40i1/1384","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This study examines the trajectories of two multilingual, racialized academic writing faculty, presenting how we brought our Southern onto-epistemologies (e.g., Santos, 2016) to curriculum, teaching, and assessment. Although plurilingualism has become a significant dimension of Canadian higher education (Marshall, 2020), monolingual norms that emphasize native-like competence continue to be a mainstream discourse in many academic writing courses. Building on the recent raciolinguistic critique (Rosa & Flores, 2017) of the lack of discussion of racism in academic literacies discourse, we acknowledge that academic literacies continues to force plurilingual, international students into a white subject position. Acknowledging the tension between the monolingual ideal and multilingual realities, we explore how two plurilingual, non-white faculty challenge an academic writing tradition that is constructed by the white listening subject. By co-creating duoethnographic narratives that provide insight into our complex biographical journeys as cycles of becoming (Thibault, 2020), our story shows how teaching academic writing is not simply teaching a skillset but involves constant negotiation between students’ and teachers’ lived experiences. Through this process, we conceive of teaching academic literacies as both an ideological construct and a multisemiotic process that involves multiple histories and meaning-making resources across diverse time and place scales.