Polyphony gathers texts and activities for the first-year writing classroom to facilitate critical conversations about multilingualism, the politics of language, and linguistic justice. When we began this book project, we knew we wanted to write something that went beyond a traditional textbook; we wanted to write something that reflects the creativity in our classrooms and teaching approaches while also offering concrete ways of putting principles into practice. As polyphony became a keystone to our work together, we decided to create a resource that embodies and enacts this idea. Rather than present a comprehensive reader or full study of these issues, this book is designed to offer different modes of engagement and offer various access points. We make suggestions for connections, combinations, and transitions in a way that retains a sense of multiplicity and variability that will resonate differently across readers, courses, and classroom communities. We envision the resources within can be used in a variety of combinations, read by both  teachers and students, and engaged in and beyond the classroom.

The book follows a basic two-part structure, Reader and Explorations, to address both course content and class practices.

In the Reader section, we have gathered texts (written, audio, and video) that reflect diverse perspectives on themes like silencing/voicing, language extinction and reclamation, (in)visibility, translation, agency, and validation, among others. When available, we have included the full text, and in other cases, we have included key excerpts with links to access the full text online outside of the OER. At times, the excerpts stand alone, and for others, the excerpts can be a useful starting point to enter a text since they reveal core topics and themes without giving away the force of the full piece. For instance, Elise has taken to starting a reading together with a class with these excerpts. Having a shared reading experience that gets students thinking about their questions and thoughts has helped increase reading engagement as they go on to explore and annotate the entire reading as homework. Rather than organize by topic or chronology or geography, etc. as they may be in a traditional textbook or anthology, the chapters are simply presented in alphabetical order with a range of suggested connections. In general, the following notations accompany each reader chapter to facilitate your exploration:

Hashtags – At the top of each reader chapter is a list of hashtags that go some distance to describe key topics, themes, frameworks, or approaches that are relevant for reading and discussion. These tags are by no means exhaustive, but we have put together a set that may also help to track clusters of texts (and activities) that one could engage in together. For this function, we recommend using the search box at the top of the Pressbooks page. You can also see the full set of tags under the List of Hashtags page. And of course, as an open resource, suggestions for other hashtags are always welcome!

Introductory Comment – Each reader chapter includes a brief note from the author who was primarily responsible for the write-up. These comments vary in style and approach but usually provide an overview of the text, a bit of background on our process, and some explanation of how we chose to present it in the book given its unique features, challenges, and affordances.

Wide, Close, and Mid Shots – In the spirit of presenting multiple ways of engaging with a text in ways that are generative, creative, and ideally a bit surprising compared to the usual textbook fare, we developed a way of talking about our discussion questions and extended activities that borrow from film terminology.

• • Wide shots refer to big-picture questions that are more conceptual or reflective, offering a zoomed-out overview of important ideas. These questions don’t require references to the text and may work well before, during, or after reading.
  • Close shots refer to discussion questions that zoom in on the text, focusing on certain passages, conceptual inflections, or formal features that deepen the meaning of the text. Many times our initial annotations became close shots, and often more involved close shots became mid shots.
  • Mid shots refer to more extended discussion and writing activities that take more time and encourage different kinds of thinking, sometimes with linked texts or contextual research. As in film, a mid shot includes a lot of details and movement in the same field of vision, sometimes referring back to wide and close shots for information that helps with interpretation.

As much as possible, we collaborated when devising the “shots” for a given text, aiming to suggest different camera angles that might reveal different aspects through a shift in perspective. Early in our ideation process, we noticed that while focal distance offered different views on the same reading, each of us as readers were drawn to different focal points and thus placed our cameras at diverse angles from one another. We also endeavored to present the wide and close shots in a way that was nonlinear and nonhierarchical. The questions might be approached in any number of ways, taken alone or moved through in various combinations before, during, or after reading.

Annotations – A handful of readings also include in-text annotations that express our own reading processes and how we think on the page. Insofar as first-year writing is also about reading skills, we agreed it would be important to show how we tackle complex texts through our own reading processes. In general, we offer comments that react, connect, and question, but they are mostly written in a free form that represents intuitions, inquiries, and first takes. In our conversations, it was extremely illuminating (and enjoyable) to discover how differently we responded to the same text, so we attempted to represent that range by including two commenters with each annotated text.

By contrast, some readings are intentionally free of annotations. Jennie has experimented with “cold readings” in class in which a new text is introduced simply by reading it out loud with the group. These cold readings invite a closer attention to language and detail that initiates a different kind of relationship to the text. (This has worked really well with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Asters and Goldenrod,” perhaps in part because she identifies as a poet and brings that care to her prose.) Other texts are audio or visual, and the close shots work as annotations insofar as they correspond to pause points in the clip. In a similar way to cold reading, Jennie has also incorporated these texts in group-listening activities in which the questions generate discussion as we listen together for the first time. Often, it is worth listening again on your own and these questions can again serve as annotations to key moments for consideration.

Possible Transitions – Each reader chapter ends with a couple of suggestions from the co-authors about connections with other texts and the themes, topics, or frameworks. These suggestions include direct links to the corresponding pages, encouraging open exploration of the book rather than a linear progression.

The Explorations section features at least one activity (sometimes two or three) designed around each text in the Reader. With the first-year writing classroom in mind, these activities foreground reading, writing, and, at times, research. They range from shorter in-class activities for a single period to longer plans that could span a week or two of class meetings, depending on how they are assigned. As with the Reader, we include a few notations with each chapter as a guide:

Hashtags – As with the reader chapters, the hashtags provide an overview of key features and topics of the activity. In this case, the tags also refer to estimated length of time on the activity and core skills that are engaged, which may be helpful for planning. These ideas are elaborated in a brief description below.

Introduction – This section is written with the instructor in mind, providing some background on the design, learning goals, and rationale. Very often, we have shared some of our experiences teaching these activities, connecting to responses from our students and/or our own reflections as teachers.

Guide – This section is written to be used by students and teachers alike. We have written out directions for various activities, including discussion progressions and steps for research and writing assignments. Very often in these mid shots, we have included links to connected texts that provide additional context, extend the conversation, or deepen engagement with the original text. As an OER with a Creative Commons license, we encourage you to use this assignment directly as written, or modify as you like!

An Invitation

As an OER project, we leaned into the possibilities of open pedagogy and collaboration to design something for the first-year writing classroom that is functional, creative, and radical. We move away from conventional textbooks and composition handbooks by actively engaging students (and instructors) in critical conversations about language, education, and the institutionalization of both.

While there are certainly many ways to go about this collaborative thinking around developing chapters, in our own practice, we each nominated potential readings that were open access or available through an external link. We then read independently and meet to discuss the reading and the kinds of questions we would be interested in exploring with students, loosely drafting wide and close shot questions. We also brainstormed extended activities that provided for good mid-shot questions. At the end of these meetings, we each adopted mid-shots or readers that we took the lead on writing up and then met in a couple weeks to discuss, expand upon, and edit.

That regular rhythm of reading and thinking together throughout the semester fed so much creative thinking and self-reflection on how we teach. Working together with colleagues on shared readings and discussing and then concretizing how we teach and use texts in our own classrooms became opportunities to expand our individual practice as educators and make course prep a socially engaged activity that builds community around teaching.

This is an ongoing project that we will continue to develop, and all readers are invited to contribute to this collection as well. To amplify the polyphony, we are eager to expand the Reader and Explorations sections with new chapters from new contributors and to see what other directions this book may go.

Active feedback is also very much welcome.  For example, Diego opens up about some of his experiences teaching Ada Limón’s, “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual” and asks other instructors to share their successes and failures with teaching this text. In early iterations of the “Parsing Themes” activity for Yiyun Li’s “To Speak is to Blunder,” Elise explored and then included other thematic observations students had beyond those she opened the class with. We want to keep the spirit of this reader as “live” as possible, and we look forward to hearing about any classroom experiences with these readings.

We hope that both teachers and students will approach this book as open and evolving and in that spirit use this Google Form to share feedback, experiences, and new chapters.

More Context, Further Reading

Below is a reading list we have found helpful in thinking through the politics of language in first-year writing and finding more creative, radical, polyphonic, and justice-oriented approaches to our teaching.

Armen Avanessian, Overwrite: Ethics of Knowledge – Poetics of Existence, Sternber Pr, 2017.

April Baker-Bell, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, Routledge, 2020.

Suresh Canagarajah, Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations, Routledge, 2013.

Suresh Canagarajah, “Translingual Writing and Teacher Development in Composition,” College English, vol. 78, no. 3, 2016, pp. 265–273.

Jhonni Carr and Román Luján, “Language Solidarity: How to Create a Force Field with Words,” Let’s Talk About Your Wall: Mexican Writers Respond to the Immigration Crisis, edited by Carmen Boullosa and Alberto Quintero, The New Press, 2020.

Conference on College Composition and Communication, “Statement on Second Language Writing and Multilingual Writers,” Revised 2020.

Ruth Crossman, “Problem Posing in the ESL Classroom,” Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom, edited by John Mink, PM Press, 2019.

Erin Dyke, Eli Meyerhoff, and Keno Evol, “Radical Imagination as Pedagogy: Cultivating Collective Study from Within, on the Edge, and Beyond Education,” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, vol. 28, no. 2, 2018, pp. 160-80.

Bruce Horner, et al., “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual  Approach,” College English, vol. 73, no. 3, 2011, pp. 303–321.

Bruce Horner and Elliot Tetreault, eds., Crossing Divides : Exploring Translingual Writing Pedagogies and Programs, Utah State University Press, 2017.

Asao B. Inoue, “How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, or What Do We Do about White Language Supremacy?,” College Composition and Communication, vol. 71, no. 2, 2019.

Natasha Lennard, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, Verso, 2021.

Kyna Leski, The Storm of Creativity, The MIT Press, 2020.

Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read, Vintage, 2014.

Urayoán Noel. Invisible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, University of Iowa Press, 2014.

Krista Ratcliffe, “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretative Invention and a “Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct,” College Composition and Communication, vol. 51, no. 2, 1999.

Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture, AK Press, 2019.

Miguel Sicart, Play Matters, The MIT Press, 2017.

Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), Verso, 2020.