Writing Across Cultures

Writing Across Cultures invites both new and experienced teachers to examine the ways in which their training has--or has not--prepared them for dealing with issues of race, power, and authority in their writing classrooms. The text is packed with more than twenty activities that enable students to examine issues such as white privilege, common dialects, and the normalization of racism in a society where democracy is increasingly under attack. This book provides an innovative framework that helps teachers create safe spaces for students to write and critically engage in hard discussions.

Robert Eddy and Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar offer a new framework for teaching that acknowledges the changing demographics of US college classrooms as the field of writing studies moves toward real equity and expanding diversity. Writing Across Cultures utilizes a streamlined cross-racial and interculturally tested method of introducing students to academic writing via sequenced assignments that are not confined by traditional and static approaches. They focus on helping students become engaged members of a new culture--namely, the rapidly changing collegiate discourse community. The book is based on a multi-racial rhetoric that assumes that writing is inherently a social activity. Students benefit most from seeing composing as an act of engaged communication, and this text uses student samples, not professionally authored ones, to demonstrate this framework in action.

Writing Across Cultures will be a significant contribution to the field, aiding teachers, students, and administrators in navigating the real challenges and wonderful opportunities of multi-racial learning spaces.

Robert Eddy is an associate professor of English at Washington State University, and he was the department’s director of composition from 2002 through 2010. He has directed writing programs in China and Egypt and won the University of North Carolina Board of Governors’ Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2001. He is coeditor of A Language and Power Reader: Representations of Race in a ＂Post-Racist＂ Era (2014).

Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar is a two-year college English instructor and a professional scorer for Pearson Scoring Services. She has held a range of academic positions, including writing center director, composition coordinator, and assistant professor of English, and has published a variety of essays, articles, reviews, short stories, and poems. In 1996 she received the Scholars for the Dream Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.