The Translingual Challenge: Boundary Work in Rhetoric and Composition, Second Language Writing, and WAC/WID

This article applies the perspective of “boundary work,” an approach originating in science studies, to relations between the disciplines of Second Language Writing (SLW) and rhetoric and composition (R&C), especially to controversies surrounding the concept of translingualism. Boundaries both separate and connect, a dual potential to exacerbate tensions or to create opportunities for cooperation. Translingualism has sometimes been regarded by R&C as a radical innovation and by SLW as a distracting novelty, but a closer exploration shows both common historical roots and shared contemporaneous parallels in disciplines such as applied linguistics and second language acquisition. For WAC/WID, the translingual challenge may lead to a deconstruction of the L1/L2 binary and to the further rhetorization of correctness, as we find ways to help faculty help students negotiate language choices within a context of acceptance of their full linguistic repertoire and empowerment of their writerly choices. Robert Frost’s (1969) poem “Mending Wall” famously suspends itself between two repeated and contradictory principles: “Good fences make good neighbors” and “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” In my first two sections, I want to talk about how two disciplinary neighbors, rhetoric and composition (R&C) and second language writing (SLW), define their relationship, how they patrol the borders between their territories. Specifically, I’ll focus on the question of why R&C, despite its tradition as an English-only monolingualist discipline, has in recent years embraced “the translingual approach” (Horner et al., 2011)—witness the many sessions at recent conferences in the field with variations on “translingual” in the title—while some in SLW have resisted translingualism as irrelevant or even antithetical to its own disciplinary interests—witness the “Open Letter” (Atkinson et al., 2015). This results in the paradoxical situation of a self-described “transdisciplinary field” (Matsuda, 2013) attempting to draw firm institutional, pedagogical, and disciplinary boundaries around itself, while a field that has been accused of being notoriously slow to change appears enthusiastic in accommodating its theories and research, if not yet its pedagogies, to the translingual challenge. Why, that is, does SLW apparently believe that good fences make good disciplinary neighbors, while R&C, if not quite ready to tear down the wall, at least has ceased to love it? After this initial discussion of disciplinary responses, ranging from informed or uninformed enthusiasm to ambivalent or resistant boundary work, my third section will examine how translingualism can be and has been placed in its historical context and in relation to parallel contemporaneous developments in fields such as critical applied linguistics. My concluding section will turn to the question of how an inherently transdisciplinary field like WAC/WID, in its pedagogy and its professional development and its research, can respond to the translingual challenge. The Translingual Challenge 29 ATD, 15(3) The Contradictory Impulses of Boundary Work Who is the WAC/WID persona in Frost’s “Mending Wall”? Are we the neighbor who believes that “Good fences make good neighbors,” having inherited a traditional ritual of bonding through separation? This position implies that boundaries are a crucial means of creating social identities, of defining relationships, of removing sources of stress that might stem from ambiguity, and that they are therefore well worth the joint work required to maintain them. WID traditionally defers to “faculty in the disciplines” and defines the WID role as helping those faculty to articulate their disciplinary values and to develop assignments that implement their disciplinary genres, conventions, and epistemology. Or is WAC/WID better located closer to the poem’s speaker, who is more skeptical and ironic, musing that “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”? From this perspective, boundaries are not natural; in fact they seem to go against the nature of things; they tend to collapse themselves. The speaker comes to regard them as “Oh, just another outside game,” though also expressing a wish—“If I could put a notion in his head...”—to lead the neighbor to a more nuanced understanding of boundaries. WAC has always been tasked with crossing departmental boundaries in search of a unified writing curriculum, and WAC professionals find their work routinely intersecting with faculty and courses in multiple disciplines. To move from Frost’s poetic metaphor to a more academic one, we find a similar ambivalence in the concept of “boundary work,” which in science studies originally (Gieryn, 1983) addressed ideological definitions of science vs. non-science, that is, a way that scientists patrol the borders of the scientific domain and exclude what they see as not scientific–e.g., creation science, various types of pseudo-science. Fuller (1991), pertinently for us, expanded the notion of boundary work to include negotiations between adjoining social science disciplines, noting that “disciplinary boundaries provide the structure needed for a variety of functions, ranging from the allocation of cognitive authority and material resources to the establishment of reliable access to some extra-social reality” (p. 302). Put that way, boundary work for Gieryn and Fuller is an act of group self-assertion, often in response to an underlying anxiety: you don’t need to say that something is unscientific unless you’re worried that someone will think that it is. This kind of boundary work seems defensive and exclusionary, a power move designed to create an in-group and an out-group. But that’s not the whole story. Noting that another strain in the boundary work literature focuses on boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989), boundary organizations (Guston, 1999), boundary concepts (Klein, 1996), and boundary discourses (Shackley & Wynne, 1996), Riesch (2010) identifies a persistent duality in the idea that echoes Frost’s poetic meditations on good fences and bad walls: A group or a group member can draw a rhetorical boundary that excludes other groups’ claims to competence in their area, thus exerting or trying to exert some sort of control over their epistemic authority. In the other tradition a boundary is seen as a given division between social groups that, while working together, view the world and the object of their collaboration in fundamentally different ways. In this view a boundary is not something created to establish epistemic authority, but rather something to be overcome to create scientific cooperation. (p. 456) Boundaries, that is, not only exclude but can also connect, and the most fruitful areas for cooperation may lie specifically in the most contested boundary zones. From this perspective, putting up boundaries and taking them down are not opposites but rather simultaneous and interrelated, as mirror twins, aspects of the same action. The apparent act of raising fences can actually be seen as an invitation to collaborate–and perhaps the reverse as well. We may see boundary work of various kinds, complex gestures of rejection and inclusion, ambivalent acceptance and conflicted resistance, often simultaneous, in the responses of several disciplines to the translingual challenge.