As I draft this introduction on a mid-pandemic August afternoon, from a small corner of the small room that, in just a few days, will become the backdrop of my virtual university classroom, Louisiana residents recover from a Category 4 hurricane; Californians inhale smoky air from wildfires; and Jacob Blake, a Black man in Wisconsin, lies handcuffed in a hospital bed, despite being paralyzed from the seven shots fired into his back by a White police officer. We like to remark on this as an “unprecedented” time, but to call it so is to willfully ignore the many, many precedents that bring us precisely to this moment. This issue of Undercurrents captures undergraduate students’ efforts to use writing and inquiry to do otherwise, as these authors pay close attention the conditions of their social and, especially, academic worlds. A small but visible spark of hope, the work of the eight students in this 2020 issue of Undercurrents provides striking examples of how writing and inquiry, with true openness and curiosity, may yet lead the way toward better futures.
Several contributors to this issue see the possibilities for a more just and equitable future through a robust education in language and rhetoric that is sensitive to culture and identity. Callia Chow’s experiences in a multilingual household, in which she learned to appreciate that “every single language has its own beautiful story,” led her to a conclusion that captures essence of this 2020 issue of Undercurrents: “Language can influence and shape the way we look at things, how we connect with others, and make our experiences in life more fulfilling.” Hoping to use language to make a world that is not only fulfilling, but truly accessible, Aneika Robinson traces a scholarly debate about code switching in the English classroom, and urges literacy and language educators not to teach students to “switch” varieties of English between home and school. Doing so, she argues, effectively tells African American students, “your dialect does not belong here.” Instead, students should learn “how language functions within and from various cultural perspectives.”
Similarly championing the study of rhetoric for educational equity, Whitney Posada reflects on how her lack of rhetorical awareness may have disadvantaged her college application essays. As a first-generation college student, she notes that she lacked rhetorical awareness of the “academic game” of college applications, putting her at a distinct disadvantage—a limitation she hopes early rhetorical education can change for future applicants. Making up for his own lack of rhetorical knowledge about a common genre in his discipline of chemistry, Cooper Wilkinson narrates his efforts to understand—and ultimately question—the conventional use of third-person passive voice in chemistry lab reports. While initially coming to realize that the passive voice can, in some circumstances, make abstract knowledge more legible, he also notices that this convention presents a disadvantage to global English speakers and writers, for whom grammatical and stylistic variation can be interpreted as lack of scientific merit.
Other students see a need for change in something even closer to home: the mind. Sarah Dickinson notes that, in the age of standardized testing, early childhood education has severely reduced opportunities for play in its core curriculum. She argues that the consequences of this loss are serious, as children miss out on crucial opportunities to reach cognitive and social milestones. Similarly concerned about the limitations that environments have placed on developing minds, two authors consider the impact of digital media on their lives as writers and thinkers. Adil Shahid uses survey data to explore the challenges students face when they are “consumed” by the digital mediascape, which—he hypothesizes—leaves no room for the pleasures of sustained reading and writing activity. Similarly concerned about the interference of digital life, research by another student author (who prefers to remain Anonymous) comes to the bleak conclusion that, as a storehouse of information, the Internet makes memory “obsolete”—echoing a similar complaint by Socrates, who lamented that writing would “introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it.”
How, then, during a time in which these students perceive the systemic exclusion of their languages and identities alongside the erosion of their agency and access, do we resist social “forgetfulness”? How do we move from a sense of loss and exclusion to positive change? Michael O’Shaughnessy offers a radical proposal: “it is our civic and societal duty to be offensive.” Taking offensive to mean challenging the status quo rather than seeking to harm others, he makes the impassioned plea that we speak up and, perhaps more importantly, that we listen. The Undercurrents staff is, perhaps now more than ever, grateful for these students’ efforts to “be offensive” and to share with us these lessons about how they see the world, both as it is today, and as it might yet be.
-Lauren M. Bowen, Editor-in-Chief of Undercurrents and Director of the Composition Program