“Just Do It!” - Celebrating Plurilingual Writing in an Undergraduate Writing Contest
Abstract
The Simon Fraser University Student Learning Commons holds an annual interdisciplinary, under-graduate writing contest. The writing contest provides an exciting opportunity to chal-lenge deficit frameworks within writing and academic success centres. Through the contest, the writing centre is empowered to actively seek out and showcase excellence in under-graduate writing. Throughout the five years of the contest, the organizers have tweaked the contest’s submission categories to reflect the needs and interests shared by students and faculty member, to ensure that thecontest supports the centre’s larger goals. This paper des-cribes the creation of the contest’s Plurilingual Prize category, emphasizing the ways that this prize advances the writing centre’s commitment to both linguistic diversity and linguistic justice. The paper also provides context for the decision to use the term plurilingual to describe this contest category, as opposed to other terms used in writing centre discussions, such as English Language Learner (ELL), English as an Additional Language (EAL), English as a Second Language (ESL), and multilingual learners.
References
Chavez, F. R. (2021). The anti-racist writing workshop: How to decolonize the creative classroom. Haymarket Books.
Committee on CCCC Language Statement. (1975). Students' Right to Their Own Language. College English, 709-726.
Condon, F., & Faison, W. (2022). CounterStories from the writing center. Utah State University Press.
Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy. Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781315147383
García, R. (2017). Unmaking gringo-centers. Writing Center Journal, 36(1), 29-60. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44252637
Greenfield, L., & Rowan, K. (Eds.) (2011). Writing centers and the new racism: A call for sustainable dialogue and change. Utah State UP. DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt4cgk6s
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
Inoue, A. B. (2015). Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: Teaching and assessing writing for a socially just future. WAC Clearinghouse; Parlor Press. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/inoue/
Inoue, A. B. (2021). Above the well: An antiracist literacy argument from a boy of color. WAC Clearinghouse. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/above/
Kim, J. Y. Y. (2022). AI translators and the international K-Pop fandom on Twitter. SLC Writing Contest Journal, (5). https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/slc-uwc/article/view/3823/3499
Linguistic Justice Statement (n.d.). UConn Writing Center - University of Connecticut. https://writingcenter.uconn.edu/linguistic-justice-statement/
Lockett, A. (2019). Why I call it the academic ghetto: A critical examination of race, place, and writing centers. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 16(2), 20-33.
Ma, E. (2022). Eating bitterness (吃苦): Critical to Chinese immigrant identity or perpetuating the model minority myth? SLC Writing Contest Journal, (5). https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/slc-uwc/article/view/3793/3493
Manifesto. (n.d.). About Us - Writing Centre at ECUAD. https://writingcentre.ecuad.ca/about-us/#manifesto
Marshall, S. (2020). Understanding plurilingualism and developing pedagogy: Teaching in linguistically diverse classes across the disciplines at a Canadian university. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 33(2), 142-156.
Martinez, A.Y. (2020). Counterstory: The rhetoric and writing of critical race theory. National Council of Teachers of English.
Nguyen, L. T. (2019, March 21). Fruits of the future. The Margins: Transpacific Literary Project. https://aaww.org/fruits-of-thefuture/
Piccardo, E., Germain-Rutherford, A., & Lawrence, G. (Eds.). (2021). The Routledge handbook of plurilingual language education. Routledge.
SFU Student Learning Commons Writing Contest, (n.d.). Judges and criteria. https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/slc-uwc/judges
SFU Student Learning Commons Writing Contest, (n.d.). Plurilingual prize. https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/slc-uwc/plurilingual
Who We Are. (n.d.). Writing Center at MSU – Michigan State University. https://writing.msu.edu/about/language-statement/
Young, V. A. (2010). Should writers use they own English? Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 12(1), 110–117. https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1095
Young, V. A., Barrett, R., Young-Rivera, Y., & Lovejoy, K. B. (2013). Other people’s English: Code-meshing, code-switching, and African American literacy. Teachers College Press.
Younging, G. (2018). Elements of Indigenous style: A guide for writing by and about Indigenous peoples. Brush Education.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Julia Lane, Hermine Chan
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
