Developing antiracist pedagogy & linguistic justice in cross-cultural composition through the “Toward Antiracist First-Year Composition Goals” statement

Abstract

While the publication of the “Toward Antiracist First-Year Composition Goals” Statement (Beavers et al., 2021) received much attention in the field of writing program administration, instructors need practical examples to demonstrate how to apply its conceptual framework to the composition classroom. This teaching report models how to use the Statement to design an antiracist cross-cultural first-year composition course. In order to promote antiracist pedagogy and linguistic justice, the course curriculum and assessment followed the Statement’s four dimensions: rhetorical knowledges, critical languaging, laboring as embodied processes, and conventions as languaging practices. Then, we conducted a small-scale classroom study to investigate multilingual students’ and instructors’ perspectives on the course curriculum. Participant perspectives show that cross-cultural composition courses can achieve antiracist aims and promote linguistic justice using the Statement as a guiding framework. The course design and student perspectives shed light on how the Statement can be used by program administrators and teachers to develop antiracist cross-cultural composition courses to address local context and constraints.