Identidad, voz y agencia: Claves para una enseñanza inclusiva de la escritura en la universidad

Amidst the process of enrollment growth in Higher Education in Latin America, several inclusion policies that benefit traditionally excluded students stand out. However, academic writing continues to be a challenge for their academic pathways. The objective of this article is to propose an evidence-based conceptual framework on inclusion and writing, aiming to overcome deficit narratives and to vindicate student perspectives. Using a qualitative design, we conducted interviews and surveys with the participants of a national inclusive admissions program in three Chilean universities, which were analyzed using thematic codes and qualitative reliability protocols. The results show a low student appreciation of their varied and frequent vernacular literacy practices and a pervading tension between their identity and linguistic performance in different spaces, within and outside the academia. In addition, self-managed literacy practices, commitment to the task of writing and the possibility of putting one's own perspective into writing appear to be factors of persistence. The article offers evidence-based suggestions on how to operationalize university inclusion in the writing curriculum, based upon the concepts of identity, voice, and agency of students.

“Let me tell you my life in a song” On Autobiography and Begging in Broadside Ballads of the Blind

What can street ballads tell us about the lives and realities of “common people”, of experiences “from below”? This article discusses the functional aesthetics and social context of one particular genre that has circulated in ephemeral song prints (skillingtryck) in Sweden: beggar verses of the blind. For centuries, such songs were sold in the streets and at market places as a means for the blind to earn a living, and a major part of them tell the life story, the sad fate, of their protagonists. Many prints declare the genre of autobiography on their very front page, quite literally selling the story of the protagonist’s life and addressing the audience’s compassion. How, then, do these narratives relate to real life? How is individuality and authenticity expressed within a genre that to a large extent relies upon conventions and formulas? As is argued, songs of this kind are a suggestive source material of vernacular literacy, as well as of social and personal history from below. Simultaneously, the discourse is marked by and shaped in a dialogue with the sighted world’s view of the blind.

The History of the English Language and the Medievalist

The History of the English Language (HEL) is a largely ideological enterprise keyed to fitting literary evidence into expected categories, and yet recent work has suggested that we can no longer simply assume that phenomena such as the Great Vowel Shift were “real,” historical, systematic changes. Contemporary debates on language change and use have historical precedent; social arguments about language are part of a very long tradition; languages in contact have generated linguistic change and adaptation, and language and national identity, as well as personal self-consciousness, have long gone together. This chapter will explore the ways in which the historical and institutional associations of HEL and the “medievalist” are contingently driven, and then to suggest some ways in which the redefinition of the “medievalist” in the twenty-first century can productively include a newer, critical sensibility about the place of HEL in the teachings of social vernacular literacy.