Kate Kostelnik

I designed ENWR 3620 Writing and Tutoring Across Cultures, a Writing Center practicum with an engaged-learning component, to meet the needs of multilingual writers at UVA and in the community.[1] In this course, students learn intercultural communication, contrastive rhetorics, rhetorical listening, and ethical collaboration with multilingual writers. Every semester, the course attracts many multilingual and international students who seek empowering, culturally sensitive pedagogies that run counter to their past training in ESL programs and English composition courses. Students reflect on their own mis-educations as they learn strengths-based strategies for tutoring writers. While the course trains students to work in the UVA Writing Center, students also tutor weekly in adult ESOL classes, at Charlottesville City Schools ESL (afterschool) programs, with Latinx and Migrant Aid (LAMA), and at Computers 4 Kids (C4K).[2] Students learn by doing; dialogic engagement with multilingual learners allows students to apply theories and best-practices from scholarship by Krista Ratcliffe, Ilona Leki, and Frankie Condon (among others). I’m currently editing a collection of student essays from the class; the book, Speaking Back: Student Voices from Writing and Tutoring Across Cultures, will be published by the New City Community Press next year.

Although I have been committed to anti-racist pedagogy in the context of Writing Center work since graduate school, my time at UVA has inspired me to learn more about institutional and community history. I teach students to bring their cultural backgrounds into conversation as they learn academic discourse and engage in writing projects that allow them to enter public conversations and communities. In ENWR 1506, Collaborative Inquiry into Race and Identity,[3] students reflect on their relation to UVA and situate themselves within historical and cultural narratives even as they might critique those narratives and begin to write new ones.

As a result of my work with diverse undergraduate students and colleagues in a range of rigorous and thoughtful professional development programs here at UVA,[4] I crafted a new engaged-learning course that allows students to interact with our history using place-based learning and writing projects that speak back to issues of racial reckoning at UVA. A grant, through the Community Engaged Teaching scholars (https://cte.virginia.edu/home/meet-our-scholars), allowed me to secure community speakers and plan field trips for my new class, “Writing the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at UVA.” The course also provides innovative opportunities for students to work with librarians, archivists, and curators at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. Community speakers include Dr. Frank Dukes from UVA’s Institute for Engagement and Negotiation (IEN) and Dr. Andrea Douglas from the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.