Student Writing on Student Writing

Treviene Harris, Nozomi (Nakaganeku) Saito, Amanda Awanjo, Sam Lane, Nelesi Rodriguez, Tanya Shirazi, Khirsten L. Scott, Cory Holding

For(e)thought (Scott)

Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer. Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the world that imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gate, pollutes its vision. Writing and reading mean being aware of the writer’s notions of risk and safety, the serene achievement of, or sweaty fight for, meaning or response-ability.

 

Toni Morrison, 

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (xi)

 

This chapter is the result of mentoring relationships built through the University of Pittsburgh’s graduate student pedagogy training.^[1] As a collective, we have worked to expand the tenets of what is fondly called the “Pitt Way”^[2] to intend toward risk, beauty, and response-ability, and to challenge modes of (e)valuating student writing. This expansion necessitates looking to voices that aren’t already at the center of the field for pedagogical guidance. We use the University of Pittsburgh as a case study with hopes that audiences will be able to find their resonances. The principle project of the piece is the centering of and advocating for graduate student voices in the conversation of inventing the university. We invite you to take our methods as a model for continuing and shifting conversations in your respective locales in collaboration with and in response to the expertise of student practitioners.

Response-ability acts as a model of pedagogical practice that calls for careful regard toward our students’ embodied experiences of risk and safety across writing, reading, and other literacies. Far too often, instruction and responses to student writing conceptualize safety as a desire to preserve authority and control, while students simultaneously respond with a desire to evade harmful self- and work-(e)valuations. Consequently, “[both instructor and student] risk loss, hurt, and pain. [They] risk being acted upon by forces outside of [their] control” (hooks 152-53).  Safety and risk, then, must be actively co-constructed and continually re-negotiated in order to achieve pedagogical utility.^[3] These restorative endeavors demand shared tactical in(ter)ventions that disrupt inter-institutional power relationships and widely held disciplinary values entrenched in white didactic norms. As a result, pedagogical in(ter)ventions open space for relational learning opportunities and (re)imaginations of disciplinary and institutional futures. 

In what follows, graduate student writers and instructors model this reflexivity to demonstrate student viability as response-able contributors to pedagogical in(ter)ventions. The subsequent sweaty fight can bridge gaps between instructor and student, between perception and precarity, thus, collaboratively creating writing and reading (of self, of world) that might be better “alert and ready for unaccountable beauty.” This valuing of writing, both from/for undergraduate and graduate students, then, propels a relinquishing of predetermined (e)valuative standards and an embrace of critical vulnerability—an opening of self to the possibilities of the unknown, particularly as these unknowns exist interpersonally.

 

Callout: Toward Valuing the Labor of Students Teaching Student Writing (Harris)

A return to the question of inventing the university is necessarily a turn toward examining the ongoing transformation of the academic labor system. Insofar as contingent labor now assumes a significant portion of teaching responsibilities within English departments that house Writing Programs (Hoeller; Kroeger et al.), to contemplate broadly the state of composition as a discipline, it is urgent to not only consider the university as a discursive space that influences or shapes student writing, but also to consider how it operates as an evolving corporate enterprise. Academia’s increasing focus on non-educational amenities as part of competitive recruitment strategies leaves vulnerable any attention that might be given to evaluating the effectiveness of writing programs and consequently student writing outcomes. A greater focus on the ways in which pedagogical practices are standardized reveal a particular didacticism that dispenses the possibility of reciprocal learning. This standardization is often authorized from within a power structure that tends to prioritize benchmark achievements and curricular efficiency rather than a reflexive interaction between instructors and students. This top-down approach to developing curricula does not leverage the potentially transformative labor of writing instructors nor consider their contributions to shaping the discipline. Within the corporate model of today’s institutions, it is simply not profitable to do so. Thus, there is a need to assess the extent to which actual student writing is decreasingly attended to in disciplinary discussions about student writing. It is important to think through the relationship between the perceived devaluing of student writing relative to the devaluing of teaching labor as a function of the academic marketplace.

The scope of teaching done by contingent labor, in general, and graduate student labor, in particular, rarely finds a place in the work of composition research scholars who are invested in developing curricula that centers student writing. And here, what is named “labor” is constituted not only by the actual work of teaching, but also by the various contexts and experiences that are brought to teaching and that distinguish particular approaches and foci. To put it plainly, those who would write about student writing in terms of how it shapes the discipline (akin to Bartholomae) tend to deal with (basic) student writing less and less. Graduate student instructors and other contingent instructors who would bring diverse embodied knowledges and experiences to bear on ways to contemplate the future of the discipline are often excluded from such discussions. In the academy’s new labor schema, graduate student instructors’ work with student writing has limited opportunity to shape the discipline, as such, in any meaningful way. Due to the university’s attraction to profit vis-à-vis reducing the costs of labor (Samuels), student writing taught by graduate student teachers is overlooked as a meaningful site of research by being left unattended. If “what is attended to can be thought of what is valued,” then concerns about the state of the discipline should prompt us to think of how the university shapes the student through not only through curricula, but through their labor practices as well (Ahmed 30). Within the constraints of the existing labor framework, the possibilities for writing to be rigorously taught as a mode of learning, as Bartholomae advocates, are then restricted. It is crucial then to ask, how can we speak of inventing the discipline when teaching has been entrusted to people who have different stakes in teaching and different relationships to the university? Or to put it another way, can the discipline be invented by teachers who have less stake in research and who respond to student writing with different senses of urgency? And consequently, how can we re-frame research about the value of student writing by deliberating on these questions?

It is difficult to disentangle how the realities of contingent labor shape the way graduate student teachers interact with students and their writing. In addition to being asked to teach without extensive training, maintain funding, learn to navigate the academy, and produce work toward a terminal degree, what space is there for graduate student instructors to explore institutional tenets of teaching effectiveness and efficiency in ways that do not jeopardize their standing while also encouraging their students toward risk? It is imperative, then, to use the university’s lens to examine the discipline as a discursive space, paying careful attention to precisely where discursive power resides. In other words, material power not only determines the economic conditions of labor that graduate student instructors inhabit, but it also necessarily figures into how ideas of discursive belonging get constructed. In this construction, the insistence on composition studies as an objective field becomes ever more complicated. Moreover, in today’s fraught social and political climate where topical issues of race, citizenship, gender, sexuality, and linguistic differences inflect public discourse sometimes with a general lack of care, as precarious members of the academy, graduate student instructors must consider how these factors encroach on their ability to allow writing to be a means of discovery and learning for their students in these times. 

Teaching as a graduate student makes for unique encounters and observations with student writers and student writing. The ways their positionalities inflect teacher/student encounters escape the critical inquiries of tenured faculty who, although invested in student writing, never quite experience the classroom in similar ways. Thus, for the university to value and mobilize diverse possibilities that enrich the undergraduate experience through teaching, valuing those who provide contingent labor is central to a return of valuing student writing in ways that move the discipline and the university forward. 

 

Response One: Straddling the Red Line: Evaluating Student Work as a Writing Teacher and Student (Lane)

Here, on my own writing, I display my own editing technique that I employ on student work. My goal: to reconcile my role as writing student and writing teacher. As a busy grad student and teacher, I often depend on traditional editing methods when evaluating student writing, despite my appreciation of the experimental. Beyond line edits, I find myself questioning the very devices that I think make the essay below interesting, because in the context of my students I am often unwilling or too tired to understand their writing choices as deliberate or intentional.

 

 

Response Two: On Embodied Pedagogy and Writing Assessment (Saito)

It was the first week of Seminar in Composition (SC) and also my first semester of teaching. My class was in the Scottish Room, one of Pitt’s Nationality Rooms. The gleaming oak furnishings, the small wooden desks, the looming podium over which I could barely see, the grand portrait of a Scottish author—everything in the space made me uncomfortably aware of how the institutional setting was not designed for a person of my embodiment. As a Japanese immigrant raised in the US, I knew that my name and appearance marked me as foreign and other, especially in that classroom. I leaned on my Americanized accent, hoping it signified to my students my belonging and credibility. In recalling that first day, I am reminded of Zora Neale Hurston’s words: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” (216). Standing in front of a classroom of 19 alert first-year students, who were reading my body as a text against that sharp white background, I felt the precarity of being a graduate instructor of color claiming to embody the authority of the institution. 

During that first week, I assigned an in-class diagnostic essay. In the week-long graduate instructor training, this particular essay had been presented as a low-stakes model for assessing student writing. Using this assessment tool, instructors could “diagnose” student writing and identify those students who might benefit from the Composition Tutorial, an optional one-credit course at the Writing Center that supplements Seminar in Composition. Although the descriptor “basic writer” is no longer in use at Pitt, the presentation of Composition Tutorial indicated it was developed for students who might fall into this category, and more particularly, English language learners.

I dutifully assigned the diagnostic essay for reasons that ultimately had less to do with any belief in its pedagogical value and more so with my own anxieties about being a graduate instructor of color and teaching composition, a field with which I have only adjacent experience. I grasped for the institution’s pedagogical tools, hoping that objective assessment measures like the diagnostic essay would convince my students, as well as myself, of my credibility.

When I read through the diagnostic essays, I came upon one written by my student, Noor.^[4] In my initial assessment, I determined that she would need help with subject-verb agreement and verb tense consistency. Having never been in a position where my assessment could determine not only a student’s grade but her academic standing, collegiate career, and even potentially her professional trajectory, I reached out to a fellow graduate instructor for input about whether I should recommend Composition Tutorial. I explained that while Noor’s essay showed a clear understanding of the prompt, it demonstrated difficulties at the sentence-level. My mentor was supportive and suggested that if I thought it would be helpful for Noor’s grade and ability to participate in the course, I should recommend the tutorial.

I recommended Noor to enroll in the tutorial, but I eventually realized that this suggestion was erroneous. The issues I had identified were mere grammatical concerns that she could overcome with time. More significantly, I saw that behind the surface of Noor’s writing was a sharp, analytical mind capable of drawing on figurative language to express sophisticated analyses. Take, for example, this sentence from her second essay in response to Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone”:

Pratt idea of theories is like playing volleyball; the theory originates through the movement of discourse between two cultures just like the ball movement between two teams that meet at the net, which represents the contact zone where “cultures collide and clash.”

Noor often explains complex theoretical concepts through metaphors and similes. Perhaps it is not a “commonplace” move in rendering close readings and explications of theoretical texts, but for her argumentative style and voice, it works. In another essay, she describes movement through cultures as an embodied process, in which each culture leaves various “colors and stains” on the body. She writes with a clear, strong voice grounded in personal experience. I count myself fortunate to have Noor in another of my classes this semester because her writing has opened my eyes to the importance of taking seriously embodied pedagogy in assessing student writing.

In that first semester of SC, I came to admire the distinctive eloquence of Noor’s writing, but I also felt a profound sense of regret. I had directed her to the Composition Tutorial, and she had respectfully complied. But what damage had I done? Had I violated her trust in me, as the instructor, that I would cultivate a classroom culture that encourages risk? bell hooks reminds educators that “our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence” (Teaching to Transgress 8). In starting from a place of objectivity, rather than a position of openness to my students and their presences, I may have foreclosed the opportunity to generate excitement in learning about and through composition. Noor was by no means a “basic writer.” If anything, she was an advanced writer whose personal and educational background had required her to navigate several linguistic, cultural, and discursive communities. Noor entered my classroom faced with the monumental task of not only “inventing the university” but also the American university with its particular models of argumentation and composition.   

As composition instructors, we are taught objective instructional methods to standardize our assessment of student writing. But as Valerie Balester writes, “standardization . . . can be a means of marking otherness” (64). Nothing about teaching or writing is ever fully objective, or rather we shouldn’t pretend it is if we wish to fully model response-ability for our students. I had entered the classroom, carrying the anxieties of being a Japanese immigrant, a first-time teacher, and graduate instructor in an institutional setting that was not designed for a person of my embodiment. Noor had entered the classroom, embodying the complexities of also being an immigrant, a first-year student wishing to do what her instructor had requested of her, and someone who had learned to skillfully navigate not only multiple discursive spaces but cultural and linguistic ones as well. To claim objectivity in any of the work that we do in composition pedagogy is to close our eyes, ears, and minds to the complex ways that embodiment informs all aspects of writing and instruction.

I regard embodied pedagogy in student writing assessment as a step toward response-ability. As a pedagogical practice, embodied pedagogy calls out the assumptions of objectivity in assessment tools, which are imbricated within institutional structures of power that historically have been engineered to mark otherness and to reinforce the marginalization of students and people like Noor and myself. Being attuned to students as embodied writers and ourselves as embodied writing teachers is about recognizing that composition instructors in the US are read through a lens situated in specific modes of discourse. Centering embodiment in pedagogical practice is also being honest with ourselves and our students that universities have been and often continue to be spaces of exclusion that preclude the flourishing of diverse student voices and presences. Embodied practice in the teaching and assessment of student writing, then, recognizes that who students are and how they write is informed as much by the ways they’ve been taught to read a discourse as by their embodied ways of being and situating themselves within the university.

 

Response Three: On Process and the Response-Ability (Shirazi)

 

Assignment One:

• Do you know who you are?
• Do you know how your previous experiences have shaped who you have become?
• How have your personal experiences shifted your perspective? The way you see the world?

Keep your audience in mind.

 

 

Welcome to your first day as a graduate instructor. 

Welcome to your first-year composition course. 

 

You walk into a classroom, and you are the only person that looks like you in the room. But, own that title of instructor. Feel it. Embody it. Bestow your knowledge of writing. The weapon. That academic writing. You haven’t even attended your first day of class, you don’t even know where your office is, you’re here to write fiction, you’re here teaching seminar in composition. It’s been more than ten years since you’ve taken a composition course yourself. Forget your name, where you come from, how your previous experiences have shaped who you’ve become. How it’s colored the way you see the world. You’re the instructor. Keep your audience in mind. Remember you have a responsibility.

 

You walk into a classroom and your instructor provides you the aforementioned questions on an assignment sheet. You are expected to respond to these prompts as honestly and as open as possible. Now, imagine that you will share this piece of writing with the rest of the class and your instructor. These are difficult questions. The instructor offers race, gender, and socio-economic status as examples of positions of where she writes from. You can’t write from those positions offered. No way. It makes you uncomfortable. You tell her you’re just an “average, normal guy.” But you try your best to answer the questions that have never been asked of you before, to the best of your ability.

 

The paper returns with a red check mark across. Satisfactory.

It reads: 

Nice start.

Consider word choice. What do we mean by “normal”? “average”? As opposed to . . . ?

Revisit the prompt to ensure you’re properly answering the questions as based on the rubric.

Try again.

But wherein lies the space for instructors to strike a balance between humanistic teachers and evaluators of knowledge/writing/growth? Who have students been historically primed to read as authority figures to learn from? How can you teach without your body being read as a text? 

When first-year students walk into a classroom, they read me, as the instructor, as the authority in the room. I am a graduate student with very little agency for what happens beyond my classroom. This is the only power dynamic that students see. I’m a Latinx woman first-generation graduate student that stands at the menacing height of 5’2” in a predominantly white institution. What they read on my body as an instructor bleeds into how they receive my feedback, and their willingness to challenge themselves as writers. 

What have I asked from my students through the assignment design? How much agency do I have to formally respond? To really respond?  Have I (Can I? Should I?) model the same level of vulnerability I am asking for from my student? Have I gained their trust? Should I even be asking myself this question? As the instructor?

 

You use yourself as the text. On the first day, you sit amongst the students to show your vulnerability, to challenge their ideas of who is the “authority” in the classroom in an attempt to rewrite this narrative. And you pray they learn something about reading bodies, about assumptions. 

 

• Do you know who you are?
• Do you know how your previous experiences have shaped who you have become?
• How have your personal experiences shifted your perspective?

Keep your audience in mind.

 

 

Response Four: On Reinventing Graduate Presence in the University (Awanjo)

Within the complicated and ever-evolving space of the university, graduate student instructors live and work in dangerous precarity. This precarity is characterized by the university’s complicated relationship to the voices and experiences of graduate student instructors and the undergrads they teach. As a graduate student working with undergraduate writing, one’s positionality is always at the fore. The contingency of our labor is presented as both a part of and apart from the universities we represent. Fundamentally infantile within the university schema, graduate student instructors live as an unformed foil to the fullness, antiquity, and institutional power of the university. The university imbues a childlike futurity in graduate students that centers our potential contributions to scholarship and future reification of the university. In this way, the university infantilizes graduate student instructors as we are valued less for our current status in the university—a move that dogs our steps and changes our reality within the classroom.

Currently, I teach an undergraduate course that engages questions of composition and childhood studies. Fundamental questions of childhood studies include: who and what is the child?; How can the child speak through the many layers of attenuated meanings attached to them?; How can we empower the child to “mean” differently? These are questions that also sit at the core of composition by way of the writing classroom: Who is the student?; Who is the graduate instructor?; How can we empower both undergraduate students and the graduate students who teach them to rupture the attenuated meanings attached to their labor and comportment within the university? These interrogations are crucial in any attempt to invent or even reinvent the university.

As graduate instructors, we are often instructed to imbue ourselves with the artifacts, tools, and comportment of university authority. A blazer. A certain affective tone. Like the scripts that dictate the construction of childhood, children adjust their performances of self to respond to the needs, expectations and desires of the adults that form the space. In this way, graduate students, like children, align themselves with the powerful systems and historical scripts [of the university] as they acquiesce to the university’s expectation that students ignore the ways in which their labor is simultaneously subjugated and erased. So, when considering the questions: Who is the student? Who is the graduate student? a necessary skepticism should be directed towards identity categories and posturing within the university schema.

What becomes all important within the classroom is a dual acknowledgement of how both we and our students exist as essentially unformed to the university. And then together, we must form a full rejection to this infantilization. This refusal requires a new academic order that understands the present realities of graduate and undergraduate students. Our positionality critiques the patronizing relationship that students have with the university, and is, therefore, a step toward dismantling objectivity and the university’s silence-(re)inforcing rhetoric. 

Classroom dynamics are often experienced through knowledge facilitator/knowledge receiver, parent/child hierarchies. The adult first, the child second. The institution first, student and graduate instructor second. This reality frames how graduate student instructors interact with student writing. Sensitive to our space within the university, there exists a tenuous relationship between a graduate student and their undergraduate student’s writing. Consequently, we harbor an increased anxiety to not recreate the toxic relationship of our own infantilizing relationship to the academy within our own syllabi and classroom assessments. Troubling what authority looks like within this space, highlighting the ways in which our assigned roles within the university can harm us even as they name us is the first step within this process.

 

Response Five: Collaboration as Necessity (Rodriguez) 

A common way for me to open a reading discussion with my students is by recording on the board their initial reactions to/observations about a specific text. One day as I am doing this, a student volunteers, “Excessive use of description” and the moment the chalk touches the green stone, I freeze: I am blanking on the spelling of that first word. I breathe and think to myself: Exe-, exce-, exces- ¿¡cómo es que se escribe!? I have to make a decision, quick. I could take my guess. If I am lucky, my hesitation will go unnoticed. Or, I could Crowdsource the answer from my students, with the certainty that such an act would expose the cracks in what they assume bulletproof: my knowledge of the English language. Hoping for the best, I go with the latter.

“E-x-c-e-s-s-i-v-e,” one student spells for me. We all agree and the lesson moves on.

There is a body of work within composition studies that focuses on students learning "standard English" in writing classroom (e.g., Shaughnessy, Horner and Lu). Relatedly, composition scholars have advocated for translingualism in the teaching of writing (e.g., Canagarajah; Horner, Lu, and Matsuda; Horner et al.). But the teaching experiences of writing instructors who are ESL remain largely unexplored.

When we graduate students begin teaching, regardless of our native language, most of us find ourselves in a situation akin to that of “basic writers,” as per Dave Bartholomae’s definition. Our attempts at channeling the voice of the writing instructor are often awkward for several reasons: This is a voice we probably have not heard in years; most graduate seminars are structured so that faculty only provide extensive feedback on their students’ writing at the end of the semester. We are expected to rewrite and revise, but these processes are rarely built into our graduate curricula. Even if we remember those who taught us writing when we were undergraduate students, our values and priorities might differ from theirs. For this very reason, we might lack models and methods that help us enact our teaching agenda. Furthermore, we might find it especially hard to affirm ourselves as experts while our experiences in master and doctoral programs are often infantilizing, especially within institutions that do not recognize us as employees. For graduate composition instructors who are ESL, our different relation to the English language intensifies that already existing uneasiness. Perceiving ourselves as outsiders within our own classrooms might pressure us to over-perform knowledge and authority, particularly if we teach at institutions with a predominantly white student body. 

In my experience, giving students feedback on their writing remains one of the most anxiety-inducing aspects of my job. When I started teaching Seminar in Composition, I was too concerned about phrasing my comments “the way an English writing teacher would.” At first, this meant trying to translate my observations into jargon for the most part – “put ‘dangling modifier’ here,” “write ‘topic sentence missing’ there.” To my own relief, with time I have realized that this jargon is often meaningless to students when they find them in the margins of their papers. Now I worry less about calling things by their (academic) names and focus more on communicating to my students how they work.

As a composition instructor whose first language is not English, I benefit immensely from embracing a writing pedagogy that encourages multimodality, horizontality, and collaboration. Peer reviews, workshops, and collaborative assignments abound in my classes. I encourage my students to try things out and learn from their mistakes. In my classroom, I am often a living example of that. I am learning to be gentler with myself when, for example, I struggle to locate a word in English in the middle of a lesson. I trust that my students will learn not in spite but in part because of the stammering and the slippages. This, however, is easier written than done. Sharing authority with our students can feel particularly high stakes to minoritized graduate instructors who are already vulnerable in predominantly white institutions. But it might also be what we need to do in order to invent the university and the discipline.

 

Afterthought (Holding and Scott)

An often-asked question to which Bartholomae, Petrosky and Waite respond in Resources for Ways of Reading, 10^th ed. asks, “How do you know your class is going well? What are the signs that a class is working?” To which the authors respond that this “almost always means the students feel comfortable” writing and reading in community (187). But as Harris, Saito, Awanjo, Shirazi, Lane, Rodriguez and we contend, response-ability in the writing classroom is also something different than comfort. Comfort does not equate with safety; the university’s comfort within its current relationship with/to graduate students is disallowing graduate students the experience of safety within their own educational experience. We—as collective of graduate students and faculty—are, therefore, pushing administration and faculty to the edge of their comfort zone as we challenge them to (re)(e)valuate the comfort afforded to them by the privileges and demands of the university’s current hierarchical structure. We challenge readers, too, not only to make and enact response-able pedagogical moves in composition teaching and teacher training, but also to continue to make space in disciplinary conversations for graduate student scholarship on pedagogy. We believe that “responsiveness and reciprocity means that we share and risk as much as we ask our students to risk.” Are you ready to risk comfort and share the response-ability?

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Notes

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Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke UP, 2012. 

Balester, Valerie. “How Writing Rubrics Fail: Toward a Multicultural Model.” Race and Writing Assessment, edited by Asao B. Inoue and Mya Poe, Peter Lang, 2012, pp. 63-77.

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” Writing on the Margins : Essays on Composition and Teaching, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 60-85.

Canagarajah, A. Suresh. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations, Routledge, 2013.

Hoeller, Keith. “The Wal-Mart-ization of Higher Education: How Young Professors Are Getting Screwed.” Salon, 16 Feb. 2014.

hooks, bell. All about love: New Visions. HarperCollins, 2000. 

---. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994, pp. 8. 

Horner, Bruce, and Min-Zhan Lu. Representing the “Other” : Basic Writers and the Teaching of Basic Writing. NCTE, 1999.  

Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda. Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Southern Illinois UP, 2010.

Horner, Bruce, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur. “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach.” College English, vol. 73, no. 3, January 2011, pp. 303–321.   

Hurston, Zora Neale. “How it Feels to be Colored Me.” World Tomorrow, 11 May 1928, pp. 215-216. 

Kroeger, Teresa, Celine McNicholas, Marni von Wilpert, and Julia Wolfe. “The State of Graduate Student Employee Unions.” Economic Policy Institute, 11 Jan. 2018. 

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage, 1993. 

Samuels, Robert. The Politics of Writing Studies: Reinventing Our Universities from Below. Utah State UP, 2017.