What Counts as Literacy in the Polytechnic Hispanic Serving Institution? Culturally Sustaining Frameworks for Writing Assignments, Assessment, and Language Use

Abstract

hat counts as literacy ? This question is a timely and pertinent one for instructors and administrators to ask at Cal Poly Hum-boldt. As a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and a newly designated and developing polytechnic campus, what students do as writers and readers across courses and in their major programs is imbricated in the Cal Poly Humboldt identification. But literacy is not only school-based, it is also shaped by and reflective of all of our identities, our past and present lived experiences of reading, speaking, writing and being. How educators understand and teach toward disciplinary literacy, then, requires them to not only understand students’ personal, social, cultural and disciplinary literacies as enmeshed, it also invites them to view students’ literacies as dynamic and flexible, as having the potential to enrich learning and each disciplinary community. In other words, we all have and display multiple literacies, and these appear