Ivy Plus Meeting Notes

Introductory Bio

Mya Poe (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts) is Director of Technical Communication at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she has a joint appointment in the Program in Writing and the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program. Her research focuses on race, genre, and writing across the curriculum. At MIT, she teaches Rhetoric of Science and works with science and engineering faculty to integrate writing and speaking instruction in undergraduate and graduate courses. Her co-authored book Learning to Communicate in Science and Engineering: Case Studies From MIT (MIT Press, 2010) provides case studies of 17 MIT students as they learn to write and speak like professionals. She is currently working on an edited collection with Asao Inoue on race and racism in writing assessment. Her articles have appeared in College Composition and Communication, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and the Journal of Business and Technical Communication.

Blog Entry

The Ivy Plus Writing Consortium is an organization including program directors from Ivy League, small liberal arts colleges, and other selective schools who are dedicated to sharing issues relevant to teaching writing at Ivy Plus institutions. Topics relevant to Ivy Plus members include addressing the needs of students served at Ivy Plus institutions, managing the infrastructures often at place in such institutions (e.g., many programs are run by non-tenure track, full-time directors), and teaching writing in a way that is consistent with the goals of these institutions.

Every year since the early 1990s, the members of the Ivy Plus Consortium have met at an annual meeting, sponsored by one of the participating institutions. In October 2009, the members of the Ivy Plus Writing Consortium met at Brown University to discuss issues of diversity in the writing classroom: Programmatic and Assessment Responses to Issues of Diversity in the (Writing) Classroom. The meeting featured talks by two keynote speakers—Dennis Williams, Director of the Georgetown Center for Multicultural Equity and Access (http://cmea.georgetown.edu/), and Mya Poe, Director of Technical Communication at MIT. Williams spoke about the Georgetown Community Scholars Program, a bridge program for 60 incoming students who represent a range of ethnic and racial backgrounds and are often first generation college students. Poe shared insights from contributors to her forthcoming collection of essays on race and writing assessment (co-edited with Asao Inoue), Race and Racism in Writing Assessment. In discussing examples of research from the book, she described the varied approaches that contributors took to investigating race and student writing in different contexts. By making race a focus of research on writing assessment, for example, one contributor was able to uncover how certain institutional practices led to racial tracking of students into writing classes at his college.

Following the two presentations, the Ivy Plus members met in break-out groups for discussion and then re-convened to share their ideas and suggestions. The following questions were raised by Ivy Plus members in the group discussion. In sharing the questions raised by the Ivy Plus members, we hope that other CCCC members will find that we share many of the same concerns. Such questions reveal the scope and complexity of addressing diversity at all levels of our programs, and they invite us to engage with other institutions in continuing a dialog on diversity.

In addition to the questions raised by Ivy Plus members, we also share examples of diversity initiatives in which we participate at our institutions and helpful resources, such as Ronald Ferguson’s Toward Excellence with Equity: An emerging vision for closing the achievement gap.

Questions Raised

Writing Program Administration

• What practical steps can program directors take to address race?
• What should program directors do with the data they collect?
• How do we address issues of diversity after first year writing? How do we address bias in faculty assessments? How do we teach tutors and TAs about these issues?
• How do we raise questions of race within our institutional hierarchies?
• What kinds of issues in advising are raised by advance assessments that “pre-sort” students? What if there’s a tendency to pre-sort minority students but not legacy applicants with comparable records?
• What do we do about remediation when it comes to race? Are we providing remediation or a right to an educational future?
• How do we promote bridge programs and community scholars programs that encourage good writing practices? How do we get our institutions to recognize the outcomes of bridge programs and community scholars programs?
• Why is it that under-represented minority students are singled out for remediation when legacy applicants have equally poor SAT scores?

Teaching Writing

• How does an agenda for teaching writing intersect with the agenda for teaching race?
• How do we address student pushback to talking about race?
• How do we bring different perspectives into the classroom?
• Does reading diverse texts lead to tolerance or better understanding of diversity?
• What issues do we want to engage with when we bring in diverse reading material and writing topics into our classrooms?
• Does this generation of students bring a new attitude to diversity? What are students learning about diversity in high school? What are they prepared to do and what do they want to know?
• Because there are a range of “diversities” – by race, class, religion, gender, learning styles, etc.—should the cohering goal perhaps be to engender civility and empathy in the classroom?

Theoretical Concerns

• What do we talk about when we talk about diversity?
• How do we understand diversity in our students?
• How does a university view of writing promote a certain rhetorical position in regards to race?
• Why is embracing remediation so problematic, especially when some students, such as international students, seek that extra support?
• How do we make diversity a series of intellectual projects to share with undergraduates and graduate students?

Diversity Initiatives at Ivy Plus Institutions

Brown University: Excellence at Brown is a free, five-day program that orients incoming students to Brown's academic and campus culture. Offered from August 30 to September 4, the week before general Orientation, the program includes five seminars taught by distinguished Brown professors from a range of academic disciplines. Short reading assignments serve as the basis for seminar discussions, and students work one-on-one with graduate-student staff at Brown's Writing Center to learn the elements of successful academic writing across the curriculum.

Excellence at Brown provides an intense, fun, meaningful academic experience that puts students in a position to thrive at Brown. Throughout the week, students have the chance to make connections with other students in the program and to learn about Brown's campus. By the time Orientation begins, students are ready to immerse themselves in Brown's rich living and learning environment.

Dartmouth College: Dartmouth College most directly serves its population of diverse student writers in Writing 2-3, a two-term course sequence that we offer to 105 of our under-prepared writers. These writers, identified for placement largely by SAT and ACT scores, are required to undergo an online placement process that asks them to answer a few questions about their writing history and writing confidence, and to produce a writing sample based on a prompt that we give them. The instructors reading these essays recommend placement into either Writing 2-3 or Writing 5 (the writing course required of most of Dartmouth's incoming students). Placement is made without awareness of ethnicity --although students who declare themselves as ESL or bi-lingual are evaluated with these issues in mind. Once they receive our placement recommendation, students may accept or reject that placement, a policy that ensures that enrollment in Writing 2-3 is voluntary. Nevertheless, we have no shortage of volunteers--we yearly compile a waitlist of students who request the course but cannot be accommodated.

The population of Writing 2-3 is diverse -- 2.5x more diverse than the typical Dartmouth classroom. This diverse population includes international students, African-American students, Native American students, Hispanic students, and students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds working alongside European-American students. Course content often focuses, directly or indirectly, on issues of diversity. Writing, reading, critical thinking, and research instruction is rigorous, designed so that students will emerge from 2-3 on par with their peers.

To help students navigate the rigor of the course, we have an extraordinarily committed faculty, supported by a staff of graduate teaching assistants who meet with each Writing 2-3 student once a week to offer individualized writing instruction. The program, we believe, is working: not only do our students go on to succeed in their first-year seminars (the second part of Dartmouth's first-year writing requirement), but one has gone on to become a valedictorian, another has been named a salutatorian, and several others have gone on to be Presidential Scholars or to win honors for their senior theses.

Yale University: In practice, the writing program at Yale recognizes two kinds of diversity: that of international students, and that of non-European American students. Our resources for international students are better developed. We offer an interactive reading and writing session during their orientation, we have an Associate Director in the writing program who helps writing faculty work with their ESL students, and we provide specially trained tutors such that every international freshman in a writing course may request a private writing tutor. Yale also offers an orientation program for freshman who identify with African, Asian, Latino, or Native American culture. (Each group also has an Assistant Dean in Yale College who coordinates ongoing support and enrichment.) The Writing Center offers an interactive reading and writing session during this orientation, too, but we have no additional writing support directed primarily at these students. Note that we offer 4,500 tutoring sessions a year that are open to everyone. One thing we don't know is whether students in these two groups use tutoring more, less, or just as often as European-American students. We're trying to figure out a way to track this usage without introducing stereotype threat.

MIT: Following several recent research projects, the MIT WAC program has begun to investigate diversity issues across the curriculum. In one initiative, a collaborative program with universities in Mexico, we are working toward understanding how to bridge cultural and institutional differences as we shape an international WAC model.

In another year-long study of 17 students in 7 science and engineering departments, we found that nationality could play an important role in student learning, ranging from student interactions with mentors to how students interacted on teams. For example, one participant in our study was worried about openly critiquing international scientific funding since he was returning to Israel after graduation. Because funding is limited is Israel, he needed to maintain good connections with his U.S. collaborators. In another case, grant reviewers noted “errors” in the writing of a researcher who spoke English as his second language. Even though the scoring rubric included no criterion for language use, reviewers considered language fluency in their scoring practices. Such instances are worthy of further investigation in the MIT WAC program because they have important implications for the ways that we teach writing across the curriculum.

Ivy Plus Instutions for the Meeting in October 2009

Dartmouth College

Brown University

Smith College

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Princeton University

Wesleyan University

Yale University

Bryn Mawr College

Wheaton College

Haverford College

Cornell University

Bowdoin College

Georgetown University

Columbia University

Georgetown University

Hamilton College

Challenges from the Margin: Diverse Feminist Theories for Diverse Women

Introductory Bio

Dr. Hui Wu is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Central Arkansas. Her scholarship encompasses history of rhetoric, comparative studies of rhetoric, global feminist rhetorics, and archival research in rhetoric and composition. Currently, she continues to study post-Mao Chinese literary women’s feminist rhetoric and has begun writing about and translating China’s first book on persuasion, Guiguzi (Master of the Ghost Valley, 400-300 BCE). Her Chinese translation (Jiangxi Education Press, 2004) of C. Jan Swearingen’s Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies offers Chinese academics an alternative perspective of the history of Western literacy. Her critical anthology in translation, Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women, is forthcoming from Lexington Books.

Editor's note: find Hui Wu's Works Cited page at
http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEfiles/Groups/CCCC/huiwuworkscited.pdf

Blog Entry

Time is ripe for CCCC to address diversity in terms of what we do as scholars and teachers. Today, each of us is part of the diversity we live and work in. Personally and professionally, diversity is what I am, what I live, what I “do” in everything I do. Yet diversity remains an issue with the whole baggage of problems, problems that permeate our research, teaching, and service. Feminist theory and research methodology can serve as a prime example. For years, until recently, “Privileged feminists have largely been unable to speak to, with, and for diverse groups of women because they either do not understand fully the interrelatedness of sex, race, and class oppression or refuse to take this interrelatedness seriously. Feminist analyses of women’s lot tend to focus exclusively on gender and do not provide a solid foundation on which to construct feminist theory (bell hooks 15).

Since 2001, my publications on post-Mao Chinese women writers’ rhetoric have been addressing methodological problems caused by the dominant interpretive feminist framework that has evolved from white middle-class women’s perspectives (Wu 2001, 2002, 2005). Such perspectives, I have been arguing, disable us to explain the lot of women of other cultures, ethnicities, and classes. The dominant feminist theory focusing on individualism and women’s sexuality hardly provides a valid critical lens for the understanding of non-white, non-middle-class women’s lives. It does not respond to post-Mao Chinese women’s rhetoric nor explain their lived experiences. First, individualism is a concept inherited from the Western white male tradition for the independent pursuit of the self, so it is still patriarchal. Second, sexuality as a critical concept is developed from white women’s gender perspectives against white men and for the sexual emancipation from white men. To other women, for example, African-American women, the fight for women’s sexuality is a family quarrel between white women and white men (Morrison 21). Other women want “something real: women talking about human rights rather than sexual rights” (Morrison 30).

To the question, “how do you address diversity in your research, teaching, and service?” I am providing this answer--what I have been doing is addressing problems to shape and reshape feminist theory by making Chinese women’s feminist rhetorics visible and their voices heard, because of the challenges these women pose to the feminist mainstream theoretical framework.
Since the late 1980s, particularly the most recent years, Western feminists' interest in Chinese women’s life, history, and writing has exploded. Yet, for more than three decades, post-Mao literary women, who came of age in the late 1970s, have been baffling their Western sisters with their vehement repudiation of Western feminism. For so many years, this breach has been barely patched. And for so many years, the disassociation and repudiation have undergone intensive examinations in the West but with little satisfaction to either side.

My reading of their writings shows that post-Mao women writers’ experiences under Mao and their observations of women’s lives during economic reforms have largely shaped their feminist standpoint, a standpoint that distinguishes them from white middle-class women and Chinese women before and after their generation. This standpoint encourages women to develop themselves into strong world leaders who embody both the Confucian value of the exemplary human and the modern feminist values of the independent equal woman. The ostensibly conflicting values have possibly engendered their disassociation with many Western feminist critics, whose reading of their works is often dominated by individualism and sexuality.

Such an interpretive framework fails to appreciate post-Mao women writers’ collective activism for a women’s literature, which distinguishes itself not only from mainstream male literature, but also from two types of women’s writing for commercial purposes--one that encourages women to shape their bodies and minds for male approval and the other that focuses on sexual encounters with graphic details mostly read by Western critics as free expressions of women’s self and sexuality. The post-Mao female writers want to continue developing a literature of women, by women, and for women, a literature that centers on women’s past and present, including women with/without choices, working women, impoverished women, married/unmarried women, and young women. They hope this literature will educate men (not fight against men for sexual rights) and emancipate women to develop China into a society respectful of human rights and free of gender discrimination.

It’s no coincidence or surprise that I am frequently quoting African-American women in this blog. Actually, my research draws upon their womanism more than mainstream feminism, because of some interrelatedness between post-Mao Chinese women and black women in the U.S. These two groups of women in different socio-cultural contexts have both been deprived of human rights by the state political machine, a regime that has also oppressed their men. Theirs is not only gender oppression but also socio-political oppression.

This cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, cross-class feminist standpoint is what we should continue to advocate and develop in order to read diverse women’s writings, rhetorics, and histories on their own terms. This is because “it has become so commonplace for individuals doing feminist work to evoke gender, race, and class, it is often forgotten that initially most feminist thinkers, most of whom were white and from privileged class backgrounds, were hostile to adopting this perspective” (bell hooks xii). Until recently, few feminist critics of white middle-class backgrounds have transcended their own race, culture, or class to use theories of non-white, non-middle class women to reflect upon their practices or theories. It is quite often to see feminist critics of other cultures and ethnicities being trained with the dominant feminist theory, but it is rare to see their theories being part of the training unless the course title has some distinguishing “Other” words—“African-American” or “third world.” Isn’t it odd that other women should master the dominant feminist theory consequently to deprive their own voices and find no valid methodology to explain their own lives or interpret their own writing?

I feel it compelling to take this opportunity to promote diverse feminist approaches and show how cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, and cross-class approaches can bring us “together in difference” (Mao). A successful example is Krista Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening, where she braves the ideology of white supremacy openly. Her confession about her refusal to include Alice Walker in her previous book, Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions is like a fresh breeze into a room covered by layers of heavy dust from years of feminist talk that has never personally transcended the dominant discourse. Ratcliffe’s approach is encouraging and aspiring. It is encouraging, for it shows that it the margin is pushing the frontline of feminist research, taking its footing in the mainstream framework. It is aspiring for it testifies that marginalized feminist theory is indeed useful to the analysis of mainstream identity and discourse, making us better critics, theorists, and teachers with diverse perspectives. Evidently, the feminist theoretical landscape demands culture matters, “race matters” (Middleton), and class matters.

Learning about Racial “Diversity” & College Composition

Introductory Bio

Haivan V. Hoang is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her ethnographic work on Vietnamese-American rhetorical identities has been widely recognized for its insight into Asian American identity and literacy. Her presentations and publications have addressed important contemporary issues related to Asian American identity, including cultural memory in rhetorical performances and language politics. Her dissertation, "To Come Together and Create a Movement: Solidarity Rhetoric in the Vietnamese American Coalition (VAC)," won the James Berlin Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2005.

Her current book project, Rewriting Injury: Asian American Rhetoric and Campus Racial Politics, explores the ways Asian American students in post-1960s California have used extracurricular rhetorical spaces to intervene in school racial politics centered on a "rhetoric of injury." The study counterposes two historical moments in Asian American
education: the early 1970's identification of injury and claim to language, whether to a bilingual-bicultural education in Lau v. Nichols or alternative student newspapers among Asian American student activists, and the early 2000's adaptation of the rhetoric of injury in the context of what one compositionist has called "diversity fatigue." In addition to her scholarship, Hoang's undergraduate and graduate teaching focuses on rhetoric, race, and politics. She has been an active member of many departmental and university committees at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the Ohio State University. She is a former member of the CCCC Committee on Diversity and has been the co-chair of the Asian/Asian American Caucus since 2005.


Blog Entry

It was with a little apprehension that, over two years ago, I decided to teach a graduate course called Writing and Race. The course was an effort on my part to address the meaning of racial “diversity” in my research and teaching.

Why I Proposed to Teach Writing and Race
The impetus for the course was, in fact, my research. I hoped that teaching a course on Writing and Race would help me get past a snag in my writing. At the time, I was beginning the introduction to my book on Asian American college students and their activist rhetoric; the manuscript tentatively titled, Rewriting Injury: Asian American Rhetoric and Campus Racial Politics, is still in the works. The book, through historiography and ethnography, explores political texts produced by Asian American students: alternative news publications, student club’ constitutions, conversations in club meetings, and other activist rhetoric. In short, my purpose is to call attention to Asian American students’ activist rhetoric in extracurricular spaces and to mine these texts for broader lessons about rhetoric, campus racial politics, and higher education.

But then there was this snag: How could I introduce the project in a compelling way to composition faculty, especially those who neither self-identify as Asian/Asian American nor teach students who themselves are identified as such? I worried that readers would ask me a dreaded though fair question, What does this have to do with college composition? or Quite frankly, why do Asian American students’ activist rhetorics matter to my understanding of writing or writing pedagogy?

I soon realized that, in order to explain what compositionists can gain from my book on Asian American students’ activist rhetoric, I needed to step back and address an even bigger question. How have racial politics and college composition informed one another since the 1960s, and why should compositionists be asking this question?

Teaching a graduate seminar on Writing and Race was a way to explore this question in more depth, but I had a few concerns. To what extent could I account for the complex and contradictory history of race in America? How could I maintain intellectual vigor when trying to teach race scholarship from several disciplines? How would I facilitate class discussions if they were to get heated—or even worse, grow silent? How willing would I be to negotiate viewpoints that I hold dear? I decided to take the plunge because I wanted to further understand how racial politics and composition studies have been intertwined and believe that this is important for graduate students entering the field. Even with the good work that composition scholars have contributed on race as a concept or on racialized writers, we still need to do much more to clarify the ways race figures into our teaching, scholarship, and service.

I believe that’s partly why Joyce Middleton and her colleagues on the CCCC Committee on Diversity kindly invited us all to reflect on everyday strategies for responding to campus diversity. So, I share here a bit about the Writing and Race course in the hope that readers can draw on these ideas when addressing “diversity” in your respective teaching and research efforts.

Composing the Writing and Race Syllabus
I began preparing by defining my terms. Writing is a social art, the practice of crafting language in order to engage with one another; writing is informed by and informs how we understand reality. Race, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant explain in Racial Formation in the United States, “is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (55). Our understanding of race shifts as a result of “racial projects,” which are “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” (56). In the class, this would be our starting point.

Then, I generated a list of “racial projects” since the 1960s that also involved conceptualizations of writing, student writers, composition pedagogy, and disciplinary histories of college composition. The list was wide and varied, and so were the participants within these “projects.” Consider how the following “projects” evidence the complex ways our discipline intersects with racial politics:

• the selection of English as the language of early college composition requirements and university courses in general;
• school segregation for racial minority children;
• writing education at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs);
• extracurricular literacy practices in African American women’s literary clubs;
• the legitimation of Black English through 1960s and 70s sociolinguistic research;
• debates over Chinese American, linguistic minority students’ civil rights in the 1974 case Lau v. Nichols;
• prejudice against speakers and writers of Black English, particularly in the Ann Arbor Black English case and in the mid-1990s Ebonics controversy in Oakland;
• the introduction of “basic writing,” specifically following CUNY’s 1970 adoption of an open admissions policy, and a subsequent racializing of basic writers;
• CCCC statements, including Students’ Right to Their Own Language and the National Language Policy;
• the argument to validate codeswitching among speakers and writers of, for example, Black English, Hawai‘i Pidgin, Spanish, and more;
• critiques of multicultural pedagogy and related assumptions about authenticity;
• debates over the ways race has or has not been addressed in the context of process approaches to teaching writing;
• historical recovery of racial minority writers and writing teachers;
• recognition of the absence of linguistic diversity from composition studies and exploring the complicated relationship between ethnicity and race;
• arguments for and refutations against movements to make English the official national language;
• burgeoning research on World Englishes;
• inquiry into whiteness and the implications of whiteness studies on composition pedagogy; and
• the inclusion of racial minority writers and writing teachers in histories of college composition.

Surely, there must be more, but this was a start. I composed the syllabus, ordering the required readings (listed below--see hyperlink) under the following headings:

1. Introduction to Racial Formation & College Composition
2. From the Late-1960s and Early-1970s “Social Turn” to the Post-Civil Rights Movement
   “Retreat from Race”
3. Ethnicity, Language Difference, and Language Politics
4. Critical Race Theory, Whiteness Studies, and a Critique of Rights Rhetoric
5. Reflections & Looking Forward…

Students in the class would write weekly questions and comments on our discussion board; contribute to discussion; and propose, draft, and revise a final essay. In the end, I was appreciative of the students, who were smart, collaborative, and questioning. Their talk and their writing about the readings yielded important insights and fresh points of departure.

What I Learned about Racial “Diversity” and College Writing
Racial “diversity” is surely complex; it is the accumulation of past and present racial projects, including those I glimpsed above. So I present just a few of the thoughts-in-progress that emerged from our class in response to the question, How have racial politics and college composition informed one another since the 1960s, and why should compositionists be asking this question?

Racial minority students prior to the 1950s and 60s were scarcely visible in histories of college composition and, for that matter, mainstream American universities. Not until the Third World Liberation Front strikes for ethnic studies and “self-determination” and universities’ subsequent adoptions of “multiculturalism” and “diversity” did racial minority students become systematically visible in higher education (through admissions data, new courses, new student support services, and so on). In spite of the critiques against university commitments to diversity—even valid ones—I am encouraged that the institutionalization of “diversity” provides an opening to name and discuss issues concerning racial minorities on college campuses.

The climate of civil rights activism, as disciplinary narratives tell us, was a turning point for college composition. It is common knowledge among compositionists that, in 1974, CCCC issued the position statement Students’ Right to Their Own Language. The statement was a response to the ways criticism of dialect difference could mask racist approaches (even if inadvertent) to language education.

But this historical moment of the 1960s and 70s also hummed with related racial projects in language education that need to be understood in concert. We might read the Third World Liberation Front strikes for ethnic studies alongside the introduction of “basic writing” at CUNY. We might read Lau v. Nichols and its impact on Chinese American students alongside discourse about Black English. And then, shifting to the late 1970s onward, we might read interest in process approaches to pedagogy alongside historical recovery projects that attend to ethnic/cultural heritages that inform writing practices in the present. We might read calls to recognize world Englishes and linguistic diversity (like those by fellow blogger Paul Kei Matsuda) alongside critical race theorists’ play with genre.

Knitting these racial projects together, we are faced with abundant evidence that indeed race matters in the teaching of college writing. How does it matter? SRTOL begins to answer this question by revealing how disregard for dialect difference can mask uneasiness with racial difference. As a result, compositionists and other researchers of language have attempted to validate linguistic difference by documenting different dialect/language systems and historicizing (and thus valuing) the ethnic/cultural heritages that inform writing practices in the present. Indeed, we require further study into the relationship between ethnic heritage and racial politics, which becomes especially important in light of the changing nature of Englishes across nations.

And there is still more work to do. We need a deeper understanding of the ways racial “diversity” takes shape on college campuses and thus produces students rhetorical imperatives. For me, it is important to study Asian American students’ activist rhetoric because their performances and the conditions that call for their performances cue the dynamic relationship between racial politics and composing practices (even if extracurricular).

The inquiry into racial “diversity” should, I hope, continue for some time. With this reflection, I mean to suggest that I address diversity –whether in my scholarship or my teaching—by seeking deeper understanding of what racial difference means and how it impacts the teaching and learning of writing.

See the syllabus at http://www.ncte.org/library/files/CCCC/1-hoang-syllabus.pdf