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Here is the link to the blog post: https://www.scu.edu/cas/initiatives/center-for-the-arts-and-humanities/cah-blog/cruz-medina/blog-posts/writing-without-regret-for-the-road-not-taken.html
Several years ago I wrote a manuscript based on student writing📝
✍🏽 Students expressed the feeling of having to accommodate linguistically in spite of their multilingual abilities.
⏳When I tried to get this article published, I experienced similar feelings of accommodating to the methodologies privileged by “top-tier” journals📖
📚My chapter in this new collection describes the painful process of revision, during which I doubted my writing and the whole manuscript, for what became an article that was included in the 2020 Best of Rhetoric and Composition journals🏅📓
🙏🏽👏🏽🙌🏽 To the editors Laura Micciche Christina M. LaVecchia, PhD Hannah J. Rule, Allison D. Carr, and Jayne EO Stone
Link to article:
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1266&context=engl
It's been a minute since I made a Learning Glass video (ahem, a few years actually), so I was glad to get a new video recorded on the topic of Scholarly vs. Popular sources. I'm teaching research at the moment to my first year students in the first-generation college student program here, and this topic seems like a perennial concern that I'm always explaining, which is always a good reason to make a video on the topic.
What I of course found was how rusty I was at not just keeping my mini-lecture concise, but also how much more editing I found necessary because of some changes to the recording equipment since the last time I made some of these.
For more, visit my YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/user/Cruz858/featured
Or my Learning Glass site: https://sites.google.com/view/cruzphd/learning-glass-videos?authuser=1
Grateful teaching moment: this past Sunday, I had the amazing experience of attending a Shakespeare workshop at San Quentin with SCU LEAD Scholars students, faculty, and staff.
LEAD Scholars is a program for first-generation students and this workshop has been described by students as transformational because of how it helps to make the issue of mass incarceration personal and the social justice of the university meaningful.
The Shakespeare in prison program is organized by the San Marin Shakespeare company 🎭 and puts on a production of a play each year. The men we spent time with were dedicated and committed to overcoming the obstacles they’ve faced and wrong turns they’ve made. Thanks to Maura Tarnoff for organizing and my students who attended.
On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to meet with SCU LEAD Scholars, staff and faculty to discuss this year’s SCU Reads selection “Solito” by Javier Zamora.
“Solito” is a memoir about Zamora’s journey to the US from El Salvador as a nine year old traveling without his family (or “solito”) to the US as an unaccompanied, undocumented minor.
The historical context of the book resonates with my forthcoming book’s research in that “civil wars” in Central America were the reason that many like Zamora have migrated.
We discussed issues like the American Dream and the desire of migrants for “a better life” and how these definitions can vary depending on the situations and circumstances facing each person in their home countries.
Community Literacy Counterstory and Expectations of White Supremacy
Got to speak at a roundtable, serve as a respondent to a packed room, and present with other folks from the Latinx Caucus. Made a reel that I'm embedding below.
Was excited to present my research from my article and book chapter on Ozomatli at the COLEGAS conference, where I had the opportunity after the Welcome and Keynote speakers to preview the presentation I gave the following day. The organization is an amazing group of Latinx leaders in higher education and I felt honored to speak about Ozomatli, who performed at the event. Thanks to Dr. Cynthia Olivo, Michelle Y. Batista, and the rest of the executive committee for hosting an empowering event.
Information on COLEGAS: https://cccolegas.org/
Resources about Ozomatli related to my talk: https://cruzmedina.com/research/presentations/collegas-ozomatli-resources/
Composition Studies journal link: https://compstudiesjournal.com/current-issue-spring-2022-50-1/
I was honored to be a contributor to a position statement for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) on Media Education in English Language Arts. The statement provides support on behalf of the national organization and its members for educators whose institutions do not recognize how technology, media, and multimodal composing parallel traditional English Language Arts curricula while offering culturally and technologically relevant skills and literacies to students who read and write in these digital spaces.
The statement can be read on NCTE's website: https://ncte.org/statement/media_education/
A Washington Post columnist took umbrage with a lack of practical suggestions in the statement, but the intended audience for the statement is English educators who know how to suitably incorporate media texts into their class, though may lack the institutional support to do so.
This statement affirms the innovative practices of educators who seek to address the literacy rates that the authors points to in the introduction as the problem that he feels is not being addressed in this statement that tells administrators and school board officials that they should trust their educators to engage their students in new ways that will positively impact their literacy scores.
Feeling really grateful to the editors of this special collection, Christina Cedillo, Ersula Ore, and Kim Wieser, for including my work with so many great contributions. What's even more humbling is how something I said in conversation ended up in a Sonia Arellano, José Cortez, and Romeo Garcia's piece on shadow work with academia, and a reference to my digital testmonio chapter was included in Christine Garcia, Genevieve de Mueller Garcia, Christina Cedillo and Les Hutchinson Campos' piece on mentorship.
Christine Garcia et al.: https://compositionstudiesjournal.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/garcia-campos-de-mueller-cedillo.pdf
Talking #brownTV asks us to retrain our eyes to see brown as beyond black and white, thereby teasing out the nuance and complexity that’ is often ignored in polarised responses to Latinx representation.
