Introduction

What We Are Doing in This Project

Welcome to our Open Education Resource (OER), Your Voice Matters: First-Year Writing & Social Justice. We are a group of faculty in the English Department at Santa Clara University who wrote this book with our students in mind.

This project grows out of our experiences in Ignatian pedagogy, which is an approach to education that is grounded in social justice. In Ignatian pedagogy, writing is a tool of inquiry that leads not only to knowledge but to social transformation: writing is a way to make a difference in the world. The Jesuit tradition also centers care for the whole person (cura personalis) and the common good, and this book is an affirmation of those values as well.

We developed these resources alongside ten other teams as part of the OER for Social Justice [Website] project. This OER is intended to improve access to high-quality materials and academic success for students from all backgrounds—particularly first-generation and low-income students, as well as students with disabilities. Moreover, we have developed this project to address gaps we’ve found in existing instructional materials—including attention to how systems of power shape whose language practices and knowledge are valued in a given context. Our work on this project is deeply rooted in a commitment to antiracist pedagogy, as well as the principles of linguistic justice and research justice.

This OER draws from and expands on the culturally sustaining practices and materials used in the first-year writing sequence that is taught annually to first-generation students in our institution’s LEAD Scholars Program [Website]. To ensure alignment with institutional and departmental values around DEIA, we’ve focused our OER on the following:

• linguistic justice that 1) centers the work of Black, Latinx, and Asian-American writers, 2) supports and honors the cultural and linguistic practices of multilingual and BIPOC students, and 3) challenges white norms of writing and academic success
• information literacy that 1) examines how bias, structural inequality, and oppression shape who defines and controls the production of knowledge and 2) encourages students to recognize the value of their and their communities’ experiences and expertise within various research contexts
• multimodal composition that decenters white academic language and encourages students to build on their own media literacies, diverse cultural traditions, and modes of expression

To achieve these goals, we followed a set of guiding principles and values:

• Recognize that ways of knowing through critical thinking are rooted in the multifaceted components of identity.
• Center linguistic justice, which affirms and values students’ experiences, languages, and modes of expression as rhetorical and epistemological assets in a variety of assignments and communication contexts.
• Reframe academic discourse as one evolving practice among many different communities and discourse practices.
• Emphasize multimedia and multimodality.
• Implement metacognitive reflection practices that allow students to understand the individual, social, cultural, and institutional practices that shape the way we think, learn, and communicate.

Message to Students

Students, we welcome you to this OER and want you to understand that it was made with you in mind. We hope you find that it affirms and celebrates the voice you bring to academic discourse because we, as instructors, know how valuable your contributions to research and writing are. No matter your experience or background, remember this:

You belong here; your voice matters.

How to Use This Resource

This OER contains nine modules designed to follow the curriculum of Santa Clara University’s first-year writing sequence. Although they are written to be sequential, feel free to rearrange them or use chapters and sections separately. We attempt to link conversations throughout the text, so you’ll be able to jump to relevant sections as needed. We include all of our citations for copyrighted work in our Works Cited [Chapter] section at the end of the OER. For Creative Commons licensed material we use, you’ll find the relevant attributions at the bottom of each page.

The nine modules are described briefly below:

1. Personal Ways of Knowing [Chapter 1]: Understand and apply the concepts of intersectionality and positionality to examine how aspects of your identity shape your perspective and approach to critical reading and writing.
2. Identity Shapes Language [Chapter 2]: Explore the relationship between language, identity, and power through the framework of linguistic justice and the practice of rhetorical analysis.
3. Writing Happens Socially—In, with, and for Communities [Chapter 3]: Understand that writing is a form of social engagement in, with, and for publics that students can use to positively impact their communities.
4. Delivery—Writing Genres, Modes, and Conventions [Chapter 4]: Identify a diverse range of genres and modes and practice composing effective arguments for real publics to refine students’ understanding of the rhetorical situation and its components.
5. Research Methods, Research Justice, and Research Questions [Chapter 5]: Provide inclusivity-centered frameworks to support the early stages of the research process and help students understand their identities as researchers.
6. Collecting and Assessing Sources [Chapter 6]: Identify genres of sources and curate a collection of quality sources from diverse perspectives.
7. Analyzing Sources [Chapter 7]: Categorize, analyze, and blend sources into projects to create a conversation and support students’ authoritative voice on their topic(s).
8. Speaking Back to Your Sources, Analyzing Data, and Including Your Voice [Chapter 8]: Infuse students’ authoritative voices into their projects by helping them identify gaps in their sources, analyze data collected to fill those gaps, and compose a research article.
9. Remixing/Remediating a Scholarly Conversation for Your Community [Chapter 9]: Explore options for multimodal transmission of students’ research to speak to a variety of audiences, including their communities.

Within the modules, we include common textual elements to signal exercises and other engagement opportunities for readers:

• “Consider Together” introduces a reading or video with guiding questions for students to critically think about a concept or practice.
• “Apply It” asks students how to implement a practice in their own writing and research.
• “Practice” features quick interactive activities to engage with ideas introduced in the text.
• “Putting It All Together” offers assignments for instructors to adapt into their curriculum.

At the end of this OER, you’ll find appendices related to annotation practices and using hypotheses [Chapter]; implementing peer review and creating communities of practice; developing classroom community guidelines [Chapter]; and incorporating AI [Chapter] that can support your classroom instruction across a wide variety of critical thinking and writing topics.

Who We Are

• Loring Pfeiffer is a middle-aged white woman who grew up in the American Midwest and West and attended public schools (with the exception of her bachelor’s-granting institution). She teaches writing studies courses and researches critical information literacy. The child of educators, Loring has been working on unlearning some of the meritocratic myths that shaped her upbringing. That unlearning has been furthered through the process of collaborating on this OER.
• Maura Tarnoff is a white cisgender woman of Jewish Ashkenazi heritage who grew up in a small town in Western Pennsylvania, a region known for its distinctive dialect shaped by the linguistic heritage of immigrants. She has been teaching at Jesuit institutions since 2007, including Saint Louis University–Madrid and Santa Clara University, where she currently teaches in SCU’s LEAD Scholars Program for first-generation college students. She draws inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories of writing as a metacognitive practice—part of the “inner work” that prepares us for “public acts” of social justice. Her approaches to teaching are deeply interwoven with a commitment to valuing the rich linguistic, cultural, and epistemological traditions that students bring to the classroom, as well as cultivating communities of care and belonging through writing.
• Jackie Hendricks is a white cisgender woman who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She researches medieval English literature, and the recent shakeups in the field—partly in response to the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017—have inspired her to foreground diverse representation and nontraditional voices in all of the subjects she teaches, including first-year writing. Moreover, experiencing a natural disaster that highlighted the importance of community has drawn her to collaborative projects like these that create opportunities to learn from the collective expertise of her co-authors and teach students to do the same within their own communities.
• Amy Lueck is a white cisgender woman from the Anishinaabe territory of Northern Minnesota. She was raised in a suburban area outside of Minneapolis, but has spent her adult life living in various cities around the United States. Moving from a racially homogeneous area in Minnesota to Chicago for college was when she first became alerted to the realities of racial inequity; she became a teacher and literacy scholar to combat those inequities through education.