Culturally Responsive Composition
Andy Gurevich
Writing Through Our Subjectivities
There are a number of issues that arise when students from diverse cultural, social, economic, religious, and educational backgrounds enter a college composition course and are expected to engage the materials in efficient, collaborative, and meaningful ways. From limited access to technology, to English as a second (or third) language, to a variety of learning disabilities, divergent learning styles, and diverse cultural ways of understanding, we must realize at the very outset we do not all come to the college writing process with the same backgrounds, the same skills, and the same access and opportunities. But with some awareness and careful planning, we can turn this situation largely into an opportunity for expansion and variety of expression, instead of a path filled with unnecessary roadblocks and unfair obstacles to student success. It may seem odd, at first, to discuss race, gender, class, and national/linguistic identity markers in the same space as those of the hard of hearing or seeing communities, or the various learning ability communities, but I believe that by treating each of these communities as a proper “culture,” we will better be able to design, implement, and evaluate the college writing experiences for these communities with more intentional balance, situational equity, and sufficient support.
Instructors are experts in the content, but will likely have less understanding of the students’ personal lives and the pertinent socioeconomic information required to make the content as meaningful, relevant, and accessible as possible for those very students. Students, on the other hand, know their own lives, but are not yet, usually, experts in the course content. But for this process to be successful, both the “objective” elements of the writing process and the “subjective” elements of students’ actual lives and experiences need to come together into a unity of focus and intent.
Students and instructors should work together to “level the playing field” as much as possible, giving each student the best chance to thrive and succeed in the writing classroom. Institutions are increasingly leaning into data-driven models of educational reform, and the data pretty clearly suggests that academic, research-based essay writing is a resource intensive process. And it is the process that matters, often more than the product. So if students do not have adequate access to the resources necessary to fully engage the materials, they will be missing out on the most important parts of what college writing classes are supposed to teach: critical and creative thinking and research-based writing skills. Students who are not adequately resourced are, out of necessity, more likely to become product-focused instead of process-focused because they will not have adequate or regular access to the resources necessary to fully engage the process. And this largely creates a opp