The CEW is committed to ongoing action within each of our three pillars of linguistic justice: antiracism, translingualism, and gender inclusivity. In the spirit of accountability and transparency, we will report on our activities and next steps each academic year.
Antiracism
In the Fall of 2021 the CEW, in collaboration with Undergraduate Education and The Office of Inclusive Excellence inaugurated the Inclusive Pedagogy series with Dr. Baker-Bell’s presentation on Anti-Black Linguistic Racism, which was a powerful presentation widely attended by not only CEW staff, but faculty, administrators and students across UB campus and beyond.
Dr. Baker-Bell’s presentation was followed up in the Spring 2022 through two sets of reflective circles hosted by CEW Associate Director, Odette Reid – one attended by all CEW writing consultant staff, and another for faculty and administration participants in the original workshop.
In the Fall of 2021 the CEW also began a collaboration with the Academic and Professional Writing program to investigate antiracist writing assessment by engaging in a reading group of Asao Inoue’s Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. This led to interest in labor-based grading contracts as a key tenet of antiracist writing assessment. In the Spring of 2022, two post-doctoral fellows in the Academic and Professional Writing program piloted labor based grading contracts in English 105 courses, and reported on their experiences in the APW programs Fall postdoctoral fellows conference.
For the upcoming academic year, the CEW will host workshops for parties interested in trying out labor-based grading contracts and can also provide one-to-one consulting for transforming a syllabus for this mode of grading. Email writing@buffalo.edu to express interest in these events.
This summer the CEW administration will join with the Rocky Mountain Writing Center Association for a reading group of Counter-Stories from the Writing Center edited by Wonderful Faison and Frankie Condon. "Accessible and usable for both graduate and undergraduate students of writing centre theory and practice, this work troubles the field’s commonplaces and offers a rich envisioning of what writing centres materially committed to inclusion and equity might be" (USU Press).
Translingualism
In the 2021/22 academic year, all CEW writing consultants participated in reading and discussion of “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach” (2011, Horner & Lu) In keeping with antiracist writing pedagogy, this approach further encourages consultants to see language difference as an asset to be engaged rather than a deficiency to be eradicated, and orients us to effectively empowering multilingual and international student writers and resisting their marginalization.
For the 22/23 the CEW, in collaboration with the English Language institute and with the financial support of Undergraduate Education will hire a Graduate Assistant devoted to enhancing and expanding support of multilingual and international students at UB. For the upcoming year, we would like to introduce Yueqiu “QQ” Zhang who brings specialized knowledge of TESOL as well as enhanced disciplinary understanding of the journey of international/multilingual/NNES students in the US Academy through her doctoral studies in the Graduate School of Education. QQ Zhang will provide the following enhancements of CEW operations relative to the support of NNES students:
Create programs for support of multilingual writers across the curriculum.
Create workshops for faculty related to supporting multilingual writers.
Gender Inclusivity
Thanks to the diversity of the CEW writing consultant community, the CEW has done intensive and gratifying work this semester to make our Center a safer and more affirming space for transgender and gender non-conforming community members. This began with a practice circle in Fall 2021 from the gender expansive community both inside and outside of the CEW community in which problems were identified, experiences were shared, and better practices were identified. This led, in Spring 2022, to workshops for all CEW staff, led and developed by English PhD student in English Dana Fang, and greatly enhanced by the voices of CEW’s entire gender expansive community. This workshop led to better understanding and specific policy and practice changes in the CEW space. The practice circle convened again in late Spring 2022 to assess progress and recommend further actions to be taken to further our journey toward shaping the CEW as a space of inclusion and belonging.
We are particularly happy to be bringing a workshop and panel discussion to a faculty audience in the 22/23 academic year to bring insight about gender inclusive practices to the classroom environment. This workshop/panel on gender inclusivity will be part of the Inclusive Pedagogy series, a collaboration between the CEW, Undergraduate Education, Curriculum and Teaching Transformation and the Office of Inclusive Excellence.
And finally, bridging all three pillars of our linguistic justice initiative we are happy to announce that in 22/23 academic year, the CEW will again collaborate with the Academic and Professional Writing program to launch the latest iteration of Dr. Dalia Muller's Impossible Project with a focus upon linguistic justice. (See a description of CSE's Impossible Project on antiracist computing.) Expect to hear much more about this during the Fall of 2022!
