Designing a racial project for WAC: International teaching assistants and translational consciousness

This essay argues that international teaching assistants (ITAs) bring to their writing and teaching of writing a perspective shaped by translation. They occupy intercultural spaces that make them acutely sensitive to complexities of language, and by extension, to the struggle to write well. Their struggle to write across languages and cultures can and should be recognized and mobilized in the teaching of writing, not only as an effort to achieve writing competence but also as a deflection of dominant ideologies inherent in dominant languages. This essay suggests that WAC practitioners activate this between-language experience toward producing writing instruction that is culturally and racially aware by considering ITAs models of translational consciousnesses—mindsets habituated to the process of working between languages and cultures and increasingly valuable to universities where the ability to understand and discuss cultural and racial difference is central to the collegiality of the institution. As WAC practitioners, we must help our ITAs recognize the significance and value of their conditions of translation in order to begin to unpack the layers of complexity that cultural and racial difference brings to writing practices across campus. I have become—as I’m sure everyone does who has left his or her country—someone else. Someone who has translated myself into other cultural codes. [...] And since it is a generally acknowledged idea that something is lost in translation, it should come as no surprise that we unlearn—at least partially—what we used to be, to make room for what we have become. —Négar Djavadi, Disoriental, translated from the French by Tina Kover Writing professionals (Rodrigue 2012, Simpson, et al. 2015) often remark on the great value graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) add to writing across the curriculum programs on campus. However, international graduate teaching assistants (ITAs) are not often singled out as a resource for writing programs, either for writing across the curriculum or for writing in the disciplines. In fact, ITAs are often thought to be struggling with their own writing in ways that make them unreliable personnel for the assessment of good writing form and style, even as they are often extraordinary assets when it comes to content knowledge. Refuting this common perception, this essay argues, first, that ITAs bring to their writing and teaching of writing a perspective shaped by translation, including keen understandings regarding 1) translation processes, 2) the power of words to convey (and misconvey), shape (and distort) ideas, and 3) cultural biases of language structures and use. Second, ITAs occupy intercultural spaces that make them acutely sensitive to complexities of language, and by extension, to the struggle to write well. ITAs, as speakers of other languages at universities (like my Designing a Racial Project for WAC