Multisemiotics, Race, and Academic Literacies

Trajectories of Non-white Academic Writing Faculty in Canadian Postsecondary Education

Auteurs-es

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.18806/tesl.v40i1/1384

Mots-clés :

racialized faculty, raciolinguistics, academic writing, academic literacies, duoethnography

Résumé

This study examines the trajectories of two multilingual, racialized academic writing faculty, presenting how we brought our Southern onto-epistemologies (e.g., Santos, 2016) to curriculum, teaching, and assessment. Although plurilingualism has become a significant dimension of Canadian higher education (Marshall, 2020), monolingual norms that emphasize native-like competence continue to be a mainstream discourse in many academic writing courses. Building on the recent raciolinguistic critique (Rosa & Flores, 2017) of the lack of discussion of racism in academic literacies discourse, we acknowledge that academic literacies continues to force plurilingual, international students into a white subject position. Acknowledging the tension between the monolingual ideal and multilingual realities, we explore how two plurilingual, non-white faculty challenge an academic writing tradition that is constructed by the white listening subject.  By co-creating duoethnographic narratives that provide insight into our complex biographical journeys as cycles of becoming (Thibault, 2020), our story shows how teaching academic writing is not simply teaching a skillset but involves constant negotiation between students’ and teachers’ lived experiences. Through this process, we conceive of teaching academic literacies as both an ideological construct and a multisemiotic process that involves multiple histories and meaning-making resources across diverse time and place scales.

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Publié-e

2023-12-31

Comment citer

dos Santos, P., & Sohn, B.- gi. (2023). Multisemiotics, Race, and Academic Literacies: Trajectories of Non-white Academic Writing Faculty in Canadian Postsecondary Education. TESL Canada Journal, 40(1), 41–60. https://doi.org/10.18806/tesl.v40i1/1384