The Bread Load School of English Santa Fe NM

My Master's Level Course in Multimodal Writing in the Digital Age
This summer I will be teaching as a part of the Santa Fe faculty for the The Bread Loaf School of English. The Bread Loaf program is a graduate level six-week intensive summer program for practicing English teachers seeking to earn a Master's degree or further develop pedagogical practices. I look forward to working with wonderful students and learning from the experience of innovative colleagues.

Exemplary Teaching Network
I will join a prominent group of scholar-professors at the Santa Fe campus, including, but not limiting to rhetoric and composition scholar Damian Baca and Chicana writer Ana Castillo, author of So Far from God: A Novel. My course is informed by my research on the digital writing genres of Twitter and digital storytelling, as well as my teaching with iPads and blogs.

Course description

This class asks how has new media literacy affected what makes ‘good’ writing in digital and online composing environments? And, once we understand new media literacy, how can we begin to take practical steps to implement multimodal practices in writing pedagogy? In Writing Studies, composing written communication no longer singularly refers to alphabetic texts and the ‘technology’ of the essay. Reflecting metacognitively on the writing process will bring to light what happens in the translation of alphabetic texts into the genres available in online writing environments such as blogs, instructional YouTube videos, and podcasts.

For more: http://www.middlebury.edu/blse/campuses/nm/nmcourses

CCCC 2016 Re-Cap

Presentations, Awards and Good Friends

Arrived in Houston, TX on a red eye flight at 4:30am (never again) on April 7 in time for the New Comer's coffee, where I met a grad student from University of Louisville who knew my colleague Amy Lueck (featured below). I then headed over to the Opening Session where Joyce Carter encouraged us all to be more entrepreneurial in our research.

Following the Opening Session, I met with Santa Clara University colleagues Simone Billings, Amy Lueck, and Julia Voss for our customary conference photo--'cause it didn't happen if there isn't a photo in this Instagram generation.

Here I am presenting along side Romeo Garcia (PhD Candidate Syracuse) and Karrieann Soto (PhD Candidate Syracuse University). We were fortunate enough to have Damian Baca (University of Arizona) chair the panel with respondents Aja Martinez (Syracuse University) and Jaime Armin Mejia (Texas State, San Marcos). My presentation was based on my chapter in a forthcoming collection on Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition.

With the next generation of Scholars for the Dream Award winners, along with the rest of the members of the committee that I had the privilege to serve on (as a Scholar for the Dream Award recipient in 2010).

At the exhibitor's hall, I bought a copy of Christopher Gonzalez's book on the writing of Junot Diaz.

A photo from the LatinX caucus meeting where I had the opportunity to see old friends and meet many young scholars from UT El Paso.

Another fun action shot of me presenting, because apparently I'm a gestural speaker.

Get your own copy of Christopher Gonzalez's book:

Digital Mestizo Mania: Norma Elia Cantu & Danielle DeVoss

Translingual Chicana Literature and the Digital Writing Matters
My digital mestizo senses were tingling as multimodal writing and Chicanidad in the Southwest were brought front and center for a wave of excellence in theory, teaching and aesthetics. We were extremely fortunate in February to have so many great speakers at SCU.  Dànielle DeVoss gave a talk for faculty and students on digital writing in the 21st Century, in addition to a workshop for faculty, and Norma Elia Cantú met with students and gave a reading from Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera.

Digital Writing Matters

Dànielle DeVoss was extremely generous with her time, meeting with members of the writing program faculty to discuss digital and multimodal writing curricula, assignments, and assessment. I was fortunate enough to speak with her about some ideas for my summer course (more on that in a future post) on teaching with technology. DeVoss helped define Digital Writing for the different incantations of Digital Humanities projects across campus.

 DeVoss outlined Digital Writing Matters as: (requiring) critical thinking, networked, collaborative, multimodal, remixed, policed--and policy(ed). Students and faculty took part in an engaging talk that provoked questions about critical media literacy and the ethics of online composing.

Students responded well to DeVoss's uses Lolcats to explain the collaborative aspect of writing in online environments. Examples of professional online media and student projects provided inspiration for what is possible for writing instruction in the 21st Century.

Sexism, Semiotics and Unruly Writing

During Norma Elia Cantú's talk, she described some of the sexist standards expected of women, where she grew up in Texas, evidenced by the book one of the women in her family wrote about the proper manners for women. Cantú spoke lovingly of her brother who died when he was young, and she described her writing process as extremely unregimented, writing best in the middle of the night. I particularly enjoyed the visual aspect of Cantú's reading that she explained came from her academic training in semiotics, an often ignored visual mode of literacy that many print-based writers do not employ in readings. My students who attended drew comparisons to Anzaldua's Borderlands, which they read in their fall first year writing. They identified with the connections among identity, culture and language.

One of the exciting projects that Cantú has also been working on is the translation of Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera into Spanish. 

From Dànielle DeVoss:

*Special thanks to Trish Serviss, Julia Voss and Juan Velasco for coordinating these amazing events*

Machete Viene!

Forthcoming Collection on Latin@ Popular Culture

Edited by none other than the prolific Frederick Luis Aldama, this collection The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Popular Culture includes examinations of expressions of Latin@ culture across various mediums of pop productions. They say don't judge a book by its cover, but they lacked semiotic depictions at the level of this beautiful design.

My chapter is on the pop expressions of Dia de los Muertos (or Pop de los Muertos), focusing on such recent films as the Book of Life, while paying homage to Romero's Dead Series.

2016 CCCC in Houston, TX

Flyer for My Presentation
In addition to my presentation and those by Syracuse PhD candidates Romeo Garcia and Karrieann Soto on Local/Regional strategies for decolonialism, we're having prestigious chairs and respondents, including Aja Y Martinez (Binghamton), Damian Baca (U of Arizona) and Jaime Armin Mejia (Texas State-San Marcos).

I anticipate a lively discussion despite the late Saturday morning session time of 11am. With so many rhetorical chingon@s and compositionist@s in attendance, you know I plan to get to Houston with practice, practice, practice.

See you there!

The 'First Hispanics on TV?' Says Don Francisco

Mini-Doc on Sabado Gigante

I was just talking to the students in my Bilingual first-year writing class about Sabado Gigante, and there was a mix of those who knew what it was and those who didn't. In this mini-doc, we find that there was some pushback against the objectification of women, the changing dynamics of advertising and how Sabado Gigante was the first place on TV for 'Hispanics' (their use not mine), although not exactly poch@ pop because it was primarily in Spanish (although the doc is in English).



For more on los poch@s, my book:

My Edited Collection on Race and Technology

Update on Ebook Project I'm Co-editing

The project began as a featured panel with Octavio Pimentel, and Natasha Jones at the Conference for College Composition and Communication in Indianapolis, Indiana (2104), and it has successfully made it through the proposal stage to the press. With feedback, chapters from contributors have been collected, circulated for review, and a great web designer who has experience with the press has been hired to mediate the chapters into HTML for the e-book platform. Would love to have more to note at this time, but we have submitted the e-manuscript to the press for review, so please keep los dedos cruzado in the meantime.

Below is a screenshot from the collection's homepage.

The 2014 featured panel was for the edited collection called Communicating Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Technical Communication on technical communication and race that Octavio Pimentel co-edited with Miriam Williams. On another positive note, this collection also won the 2016 CCCC award for edited collection on Technical Communication.

Review of Poch@ Pop in Reflections Journal

Reflections Review Raises Important Issues about Decolonialism
In the current issue of Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetorics, Civic Writing and Service Learning, Victor Del Hierro raises interesting questions about decolonialism, geo-politics, strategic essentialism and examining literacies beyond what is written. These questions remind me of the current issue of College English on translingualism in which Ellen Cushman emphasizes the decolonial potential of de-valuing English as the center of college writing while Suresh Canagarajah outlines a course for preparing graduate students to teach translingual students, and Keith Gilyard offers warnings about the potential for flattening linguistic difference, especially stripping the discrimination away from populations speaking particularly de-valued varieties of English. Because language is one of the main characteristics of what constructs the poch@ identity, I'm similarly interested in seeing how much the performance of linguistic difference will become a strategy employed by poch@s.

Del Hierro concludes his review:

The emphasis on Poch@ Pop artists’ abilities to operate within pop culture makes them important rhetoricians and communicators for Mexican Americans. Because of the myriad of experiences and political leanings within the community, the role of the Poch@ becomes vital towards creating a familiar ground for inter-generational belonging within and for Mexicans within the United States. (107)

Find the current issue of Reflections online, your subscribing university library, or through Interlibrary Loan (ILL): http://reflectionsjournal.net/purchase-articles/vol-15-2015/

HAPA cup of sugar: A play about race, family and identity

Written by SCU Student Marissa Martinez

This quarter I've been teaching a course titled "Writing about Literature and Culture" (English 79A), in which we look at how some communities are misrepresented from mainstream representations, asking students to look at some of the communities to which they belong to address some of these issues.

So I was excited to hear that one of my students, Marissa Martinez, who has been researching issues related to being bi-racial and bicultural, wrote a play about the very topic. Tonight, here at Santa Clara University Fess Parker Studio Theatre, Martinez's Hapa Cup of Sugar will play for its second night.

Poch@ Pop Across Digital Space

Skype Guest Lecture

On Monday, I had a great time skyping in with Octavio Pimentel's grad students in the  MA program in Rhetoric and Composition at Texas State University. Dr. Pimentel's graduate course is on cultural and linguistic diversity within the classroom, and his students brought up interesting concerns regarding choices of language in writing and how students are framed by deficiency rhetoric. 

I spoke with them about my book Reclaiming Poch@ Pop, and we discussed how public discourse and memory about highly politicized topics can be addressed in the analysis of engaging pop culture such as political satire that engage the relevant issue. Of course, Donald Trump came up as the exigency of this moment of kairos, and I included some images by Lalo Alcaraz that respond to the slanderous depiction of Latin@s, specifically Mexicans, in his public speeches.

(Lalo Alcaraz)

Al Madrigal's Pocho Quest

Since My Book Reclaiming Poch@ Pop

As it generally happens, once you complete your research and publish your findings, something new comes out that speaks directly to your subject matter. I mention Al Madrigal in Chapter 4 of my book Reclaiming Poch@ Pop because of his work on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, specifically his reporting on the anti-Ethnic Studies law HB 2281 in Tucson, Arizona.




In this video for Fusion, Madrigal touches on issues of language insecurity with regard to his inability to speak Spanish, stereotypes from outside of the Latin@ community as well as stereotypes from within Latin@ communities. When he starts interviewing Speedy Gonzalez three-quarters into the video, it kind of loses steam--but the scenes with bilingual kids, Jorge Ramos, and the first three minutes touch on more salient aspect of intracultural rhetoric.

Poch@ Pop Review in Rhetoric Society Quarterly

My book reviewed by Romeo García

In issue 4 of Volume 45 of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Romeo García of Syracuse University provides a thoughtful, well-referenced mediation on my book Reclaiming Poch@ Pop: Examining the Rhetoric of Cultural Deficiency. García articulates questions and exigencies about decolonial work that inform his discussion of chapters in the monograph.

If you have access to Rhetoric Society Quarterly, you can see it here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02773945.2015.1061862