Michael: This is
Sherita: Write.
Chris: Think.
Genevieve: Teach.
Michael: A podcast brought to you by the Writing Across the Curriculum, a program in the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing at The Ohio State University.
Prof. Vieira: I have this idea that writing is easy for someone else. There’s somebody else who can just pound it out more quickly and more eloquently and more beautifully and more perfectly than me. And I don’t know who that person is, but I think we all have that idea. So when I teach college writing, I really try to tell students that that person doesn’t exist. What you’re doing is tough, so let’s own your process and own the reasons why writing for you poses these particular challenges and let’s figure out what you can do to meet them.
Michael: Hello and welcome to another episode of Write. Think. Teach. I’m Michael Blancato.
Sherita: And I’m Sherita Roundtree. You just heard Kate Vieira, an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Composition, and Rhetoric and a faculty affiliate in the Second Language Acquisition Program at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Michael: Prof. Vieira describes herself as an “ethnographer of literacy” who works with immigrants, transnational families, and community organizations in the United States, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. We were fortunate to have a chance to talk with Prof. Vieira about her recent work when she visited Ohio State in the spring of 2017 to give a talk for the Lecture in Literacy Series.
Prof. Vieira: So my book that just came out in March is called American by Paper: How Documents Matter in Immigrant Literacy. And that book is really about the role of papers and how immigrants can access literacy and how they think about literacy and it works a lot with undocumented immigrants and thinks really about the role of paper in governments and how literacy sometimes is not such a great thing when it can restrict and regulate people’s movement and their rights. So after that book was published…that was really based on what was happening in the U.S., but then I started thinking more transnationally about what happened in the places where immigrants are from. So the second book manuscript that I have just completed is about immigrants’ homelands. I was interested in what happens to literacy when people leave because a lot of people talk about “brain drain” when immigrants leave. Like all of these big brains are kind of gone from communities. So I set up a couple field sites, one in Brazil and one in Latvia, and I looked at what happened to communities that were left behind and I found that actually their literacy learning kind of increased because…what happened was immigrants were sending back literacy technologies in order to keep in touch. So people were writing really for love and for money and so that’s the title of this next book. It’s called Writing for Love and Money: How Migration Drives Literacy Learning in Transnational Families.
Sherita: In the description you just heard, Prof. Vieira explains how her research interests inspired her to think transnationally about the social dynamics and literacy practices of families separated across borders. Her research on transnational families has given her valuable insights into some of the pressures faced by immigrant and international students. She shared some of these often overlooked pressures with us.
Prof. Vieira: My research both with undocumented immigrants and with left behind community members has really turned me on to the fact that it’s not just culture and language, that immigrant or international students may have certain pressures or other kinds of transnational goals that really go beyond culture and language and that it’s hard from a U.S.-centered standpoint to conceive of. I can give you just maybe a couple of examples. One college student that I’m working with for Writing for Love and Money, he is a college student in the U.S. and he emigrated to the U.S. at the age of three. His whole family emigrated here. All were undocumented. To make a long story short, because of economic conditions exacerbated by the fact that they were undocumented and couldn’t make a lot of money, he is the first in his family to be able to go to college. His older sisters who migrated with him were not able to go. There just wasn’t enough money. And I’ve worked with this whole family. Wasn’t enough money for them. Wasn’t enough money for them. And here he is. He’s like the golden child, right? He is the one that they sacrificed so much to come and give an education to. And he’s not…I teach at a predominately white institution. He’s not super privileged in relation to the other students there. But in relation to his family, he is very privileged. So, ok, I have this student in my class. Really, culture and language, he can handle the culture and language piece. The piece that my research shows me is the pressure on him to succeed and to make good as the first in his family who’s there. And he’s feeling pressure to send remittances back to Mexico to family that maybe he has never met before. But also just the pressure that everybody in his family is just kind of waiting to see what he’s going to do with this. And you know, he’s a fabulous student, brilliant guy. He’s going to do fine. He’s going to go to law school and he’s going to be great. But I think that perspective of the economic and the transnational piece – the real material challenges – are really important.
Sherita: Prof. Vieira’ research has also encouraged her to recognize how teachers’ expectations and motivations for learning might differ from students’ expectations and motivations for learning.
Prof. Vieira: Another thing that has come up in my research…and this is for more international students than immigrant students, is the importance of certificates and the importance of diplomas and how it may be the case that folks don’t really need the writing skills that we’re teaching them as much as they need the piece of paper that says that they completed a writing course in the United States. Because we don’t know what they are going to use that piece of paper for or what they are going to use that writing for. I think a lot of us in the academy tend to think that students are going to go on to write academic essays in their lives. But maybe they need a piece of paper to bring back to the country that they are from to show that they are certified in English language writing and then they’ll go on to do something else with it. And I think instead of demonizing that as instrumentalist or anti-humanist, I think it’s important to really understand the global economic pressures that make that person need the certificate and kind of work with that. I think we need to understand students’ goals, motivations, and their backgrounds.
Michael: Prof. Vieira also talked about how her background as a literacy researcher informs her approach to instruction in college writing classrooms.
Prof. Vieira: My background in literacy studies tells me that writing is just really, really complex. It’s a complex undertaking for a lot of reasons. So when I teach writing on my campus, which I love to do, and when I teach undergrads, I teach it with the topic “Why is Writing Hard?” because I feel like that question sums up so much in literacy studies and brings it into the college classroom. Why is writing hard? And then that gives us the chance to look at a number of theories of why writing might be hard. It’s hard for cognitive reasons. It’s hard for social reasons. It’s hard for material reasons. It’s hard for rhetorical reasons. Writing is hard for all of these reasons. So when we sit down…or when we ask students to sit down and try to write something, write an academic paper, there is a lot going on. And I think literacy studies really clues me into that and helps me kind of normalize that for students. I don’t know if you all feel this way, but I often feel this way that…I have this idea that writing is easy for someone else. There’s somebody else who can just pound it out more quickly and more eloquently and more beautifully and more perfectly than me. And I don’t know who that person is, but I think we all have that idea. So when I teach college writing, I really try to tell students that that person doesn’t exist. What you’re doing is tough, so let’s own your process and own the reasons why writing for you poses these particular challenges and let’s figure out what you can do to meet them.
Sherita: In addition to offering this encouraging advice about acknowledging the inherent complexity of writing, Prof. Vieira also provided useful suggestions about how to foster inclusive learning environments for students. She uses the metaphor of mirrors and windows to illustrate one way instructors can think about cultivating inclusivity through the readings they assign.
Prof. Vieira: I don’t think that I’m maybe an exemplar of great teaching and great socially-just teaching in this regard. But what I try to do is follow the advice that was given to me by my advisor Deborah Brandt when I started teaching composition at the University of Wisconsin years ago. She said this, she said “We often think of not wanting to bend over backwards for students of color, right?” There’s an argument that says we don’t want to bend over backwards, we don’t want to give special treatment. She said, “But what if instead of thinking about it as bending over backwards, what if we thought about working in predominantly white institutions as leaning in? What if we leaned in to the experiences of students of color and what if we leaned in to the experiences of white students to help them also understand their whiteness and the way that they are positioned?” One of the ways she suggested doing this, and I try to follow this in my courses, is giving people in the readings that we do…what did she call it? Both mirrors and windows, so people can see themselves and their experiences reflected, but also so people can see through windows to others’ experience. It’s really good to have guidelines because I think…as somebody who experiences white privilege, it’s really easy for it to become invisible. And so to have some kind of markers or guidelines that makes it visible…and of course, you know, in the current climate, I also am very conscious to say explicitly, explicitly in class that everyone’s welcome.
Michael: We want to thank Prof. Vieira for taking time to speak with us and for sharing her research and teaching expertise. If you are interested in developing additional strategies for building inclusive learning environments, check out our previous podcast with Jacinta Yanders and Ebony Bailey on identifying and addressing microaggressions in the classroom. But before we sign off, we have one final thought from Prof. Vieira.
Prof. Vieira: Writing is powerful and I kind of think it’s magic.
Michael: That concludes this episode of Write.Think.Teach. Thank you for listening.