FIRST-YEAR WRITING ~ ADVANCED WRITING
This is another course that has worked very well for both FYW and Advanced Writing courses. Since my experiences as a community researcher and volunteer have focused on the literacy aspirations of immigrant and refugee women, this is a topic that is an especially meaningful one to share with students. And of course, so many of my students bring their own experiences and complex knowledge that enrich our conversations for the class. Although I have not recently had the opportunity to teach this course, in the future we would need to find ways of understanding and grappling with the current brutal treatment of immigrants and people of color being targeted by the federal government. The many writers, poets, filmmakers and expressive artists whose work we have studied previously in this course help to provide historical context and critical language for the violence against their communities that continues. We also hear vital testimonies about how these communities have protected one another and their families through serial experiences of trauma even before arriving in the US. The most distinctive feature of our current moment may be how broadly residents of cities like Chicago and Minneapolis have been galvanized to support and protect their immigrant and refugee neighbors .
The paragraphs below are drawn from a previous Course Description
Thematic Framework: In this section of First-Year Writing, we will read about the detailed personal experiences of immigrants and refugees as they have struggled to emigrate to the U.S. Other narratives will offer a window into their efforts to adjust to living in this country and how their expectations about coming to the U.S. are transformed once they arrive. We will also read selections from a socio-historical study of how recent immigrants have shaped the cultural and political landscape of the city of Boston during the past 50 years. Other materials will detail the often prolonged process of naturalization that many of them have been through in seeking to attain US citizenship. All of these readings will help us to understand the ways in which immigration has both been held up as a threat to supposed American exceptionalism, and placed at the heart of our distinctive national identity.
The topic of immigration also offers the occasion for evaluating many varieties of narrative and critical discourse. This semester we will read and research memoirs, fiction, poetry, scholarly research, and historical archives––each with their own strategies of storytelling and persuasion which you will learn to recognize and decode. Visual rhetoric offers another window into this topic; narrative videos and documentary films will allow us to consider the role of visual and digital media in our public conversations about immigrants and refugees. Studying all of these genres will help you to expand your own repertoire of rhetorical strategies for the writing, research, and presentation assignments you will complete for this course and future courses.