The 4Cs or CCCC conference – Conference on College Composition and Communication – is always a big event in the spring for members of the St. John’s English department. This year’s conference in Baltimore featured, among many other panels, an all-SJU session on
Getting from “B” to “Z”: The Possibility of B-Side Literacies in the Classroom and Beyond
This session featured presentations from our own Dr. LaToya Sawyer and SJU PhD students Andrew Schlosser and Jenn Patel.
Here’s the description of the panel –
Andrew Schlosser: Playing the System: Critical Literacy Through Gaming in the Composition Classroom
Critical literacy, the tools that one has for critically interrogating the world around them, is crucial for students in our changing world of reactionary and neoliberal systems of oppression (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994; Shore, 1999). As critical educators in Composition Studies, we must give students the tools of critical literacy to foster critical consciousness. It is equally important to engage students in ways they most effectively engage.
In this presentation, I will explore how I use video games and gaming to engage students in ways that excite them to learn and open discussions about literacy. Centering gaming literacy, a diverse kind of literacy practice that students either have or do not have, creates pathways for my students and I to discuss literacy practices more generally and expand the conversation to critical literacy. Video games have the added benefit of engaging students in comfortable and fun ways, encouraging an environment where students can learn deeply through play (Garcia, 2019; Gee, 2003). I argue that utilizing games and gaming in the composition classroom is vital to fostering a culture and practice of critical literacy, and this consciousness is not only necessary but vital. In this session, I will model this approach as we play a game together, highlighting the literacies some of us have and others don’t. We will discuss how literacies inform our practices and how they can help students understand critical literacy and consciousness.
Jenn Patel: Abolitionist Theories in Critical Literacy Praxis
Issues of mental health and academic performance are rampant in higher education, where only 40 percent of college students graduate within four years, and “rates of anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation on college campuses have never been higher” (National Education Association). Since students’ success and well-being are impacted by interlocking systems of oppression (hooks, 1994), abolition provides pathways out of these interrelated crises. While abolition is a budding area of research at the university level, most school abolition scholarship focuses on K-12, so more exploration is needed (Boggs, et al, 2019).
Responding to that invitation in the literature, this project identifies potential sites of abolitionist praxis in universities and illustrates how abolitionist harm reduction applies to teaching. Using Transformative Justice principles and Shira Hassan’s documented histories of harm reduction, these theoretical foundations provide tracks upon which educators can develop abolitionist literacy praxes: custom mixes that synthesize individual needs with collective struggles, adapting to various contexts that make up our daily soundtracks. I argue that we can, should, and sometimes already do use abolitionist harm reduction in our critical pedagogy.
LaToya Sawyer: The B-Side of #SayHerName: Expanding Black Womanhood through Trans-Counterpublics
The #SayHerName campaign and hashtag was created in 2014 by Kimberlé Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum in 2014 to address Black women’s intersectional erasure (Crenshaw 2015) within the Black Lives Matter movement. The hashtag and movement represent the largest digital born campaign for and by Black women. In its first full year of use, the #SayHerName hashtag created a digital counterpublic (Jackson and Welles 2015), a space and method that pushed back against the notion that Black women were not victims of state violence and promoted understandings of how state violence is both racialized and gendered.
In this presentation, the speaker will use rhetorical analysis informed by Black feminist theory (Crenshaw 2015) and hashtag activism (Clark 2016; Conley 2014, 2017; Dadas 2017; Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles 2018; Williams 2015) to show how Black trans women and advocates on Twitter used digital literacies to create a Black transwomen’s counterpublic within the #SayHerName counterpublic in 2015. Based on an analysis of over 3,000 trans-related tweets using the #SayHerName hashtag between January and December 2015, the speaker argues that the use of co-occurring trans-related hashtags helped to expand the prototype of Black womanhood through consciousness-raising and advanced the cause of safety and liberations for all Black women.
And here are the official bios of our speakers –
Andrew Schlosser is a PhD candidate and adjunct professor of First Year Writing at St. John’s University. He also teaches writing and works in the writing center at Long Island University – Post Campus. His academic work focuses on the intersection between critical literacy, first year writing and composition studies, and game studies. His dissertation as well as this presentation will focus on the ways in which using video games in the First Year Writing classroom can help teach and make clear literacy practices and critical literacy.
Jenn Lebowitz Patel is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at St. John’s University. She is also the inaugural Learning Specialist at Weill Cornell medical school, where she’s currently building a comprehensive academic success program for MD and MD-PhD students, which includes the peer tutoring program. Her research focuses on critical literacy, social epistemic rhetoric, and transformative justice to address student suffering and violence enacted by universities. She believes a better world is possible and that we can’t get there without each other.
LaToya Sawyer is an assistant professor in the English Department at St. John’s University in Queens, NY. She has a Ph.D. in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric from Syracuse University with a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Women and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on Black women’s rhetorical agency and identity performances through digital media. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in digital rhetoric, feminist theory, African American women’s rhetoric, and African American literacies. Awards and distinctions include being a 2023-2024 Wellesley College Suzy Newhouse Humanities Fellow, a 2020-2021 American Postdoctoral Fellow through the American Association of University Women, a 2014-2016 fellow in NCTE’s Cultivating New Voices program, and a 2012 4Cs Scholar for the Dream. She is currently finishing my first monograph titled Composing Digital Black Womanhood, which examines Black women’s identity-performances and agency on social media.
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