"To Whom Do We Have Students Write?": Exploring Rhetorical Agency and Translanguaging in an Indonesian Graduate Writing Program

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On a critical activity framed monolingually

Although the majority of the two-semester course I developed focused on genres commonly expected of PhD students in Religious Studies,⁶ students began by writing a critical literacy narrative. I wanted, in Kubota’s words, to have them “write about how they perceive[d] the ways in which they [wrote]…in their first languages and critically bring their perceptions to bear on the work of composing texts” in my course (21). To help them draft their texts, and to avoid promoting essentialist understandings of language and culture, I developed activities that helped students critically reflect on the multiple and co-existent “cultures” and identities they might move between as they composed their English texts. However, because these activities weren’t accompanied by overt discussions of audience and rhetorical choice, students maintained a monolingualist orientation—an orientation I wouldn’t have questioned had the faculty member discussed above not asked me, “But to whom do we have students write?,” and had I not taken the time to reflect in my teaching journal on the connections between this discussion and my curriculum.

To begin, I asked students to read Shen’s “The Classroom and the Wider Culture,” in which he contrasts the ideologies influencing Western genres with those of Chinese genres to reflect upon his difficulties acculturating to American composition practices. He explains that the personal experience and voice valued in Western writing— the “I” that “promotes individuality (and private property)”— was, in Communist China, “always subordinated to ‘We’—be it the working class, the Party, the country, or some other collective body” (460). This Chinese ideology, he argues, was reflected in Chinese genres which encouraged him to suppress the “I,” making his transition to US-based “individualist” writing practices difficult. Ultimately, he argues that writing in English meant “creating and defining a new identity and balancing it with the old identity” (466). As dated as Shen’s 1989 text is, it opened up conversations about “culture” and “identity” in class discussion, where many of my students linked practices in their Indonesian genre repertoires to the “we-centered” Chinese practices Shen outlines (5 September 2009).

However, because Shen compares only China’s and the United States’ national cultures, he creates a monolithic and essentialist model for students; as Ivanic and others argue, students bring multiple identities and “cultures” to their writing practices. To challenge this one-culture-equals-one-identity binary, we then discussed Swales’ definition of “discourse community,” a concept students grasped easily as the majority of students were fluent in at least three languages,⁷ as well as in the languages of their professions and academic disciplines.

Once they were comfortable with the concept, I asked students to brainstorm multiple discourse communities in which they participated and, for each, to answer the following questions:

• How do the language practices in these discourse communities interact with each other?
• And how might they interact with your writing identities in English?

This reflective writing activity spurred a lively discussion on the ways students’ already-existent discourses might affect their discoursal selves as they wrote in English.

As recorded in my teaching journal, when we reconvened, one student explained that he had connected his Javanese discourse community⁸ and his professional discourse community as a licensed therapist; he linked the hierarchical respect of authority in Javanese culture to what he described as a “culture of listening” in his therapist community to argue that both encouraged a more indirect notion of critique than might be expected in an “I”-centered culture. Another student put in conversation his identities as a feminist activist and Muslim imam to discuss how moving between these discourse communities might help him navigate a new, more “I-centered” English identity. Yet another contrasted her experiences studying abroad in Hawaii and her experiences with English at ICRS and the ways West-based assumptions about language mediated the texts she produced in these different countries (7 September 2009).⁹

Given these vibrant discussions, I initially deemed this assignment sequence a successful one in my teacher’s journal; it highlighted for students the notion that language is culture while simultaneously making Western genre norms explicit, and it also encouraged students to think about discourses as co-existent—a step towards helping students build bridges between their existing discourse practices and the ones I planned to introduce in the class.

It wasn’t until the next day, after the meeting where my Indonesian colleague asked me “But to whom do we have students write?” that I realized this sequence might be construed as very West-oriented and monolingualist in nature because we didn’t explicitly discuss which English-using audience students might reach with their knowledge, and with that, the possibility that they might negotiate with textual form depending on the rhetorical situations they imagined. Shen’s focus is very “East writing to West” and unidirectional, probably because he writes as a US immigrant; though he urges teachers to make the connections between composition practices and ideology explicit, his overall argument is that this might better help students create an English identity that can assimilate to Western practices. Similarly, because we didn’t explicitly discuss audience in the discourse community activity, I realized it might have been interpreted as an activity meant to locate and “fix” students’ non-Western textual moves when they bled into their English texts—to make it easier to adopt the Western identity Shen embraces.

This activity sequence, upon reflection, took a monolingualist approach to genre and audience. As evidenced by my colleague’s question, such a unidirectional, East converting to West approach to English writing is challenged by ICRS’s positionality as an Indonesian yet international site. It is problematic to link one language to one discourse—in this case, English to the West— without considering audience and the fact that English is capable of appropriation and re-articulation by non-Western writers. My research approach helped me to reflect on these particular West-based assumptions, which, as the next section will explore, led me to more explicitly incorporate discussions of audience and textual negotiation into the course.

 

On Western academic genre conventions and rhetorical agency
For the remainder of the course, I developed activities that allowed for the possibility that students’ Indonesian audiences might dictate the way they negotiated Western genre conventions in English. Given expectations that I would teach students genres necessary to English-using Religious Studies scholars, many of these activities involved pairing short critical reflective writing activities with explicit genre instruction and discussions about textual negotiation. These activities both elicited vibrant class discussions and highlighted the limitations of locating rhetorical agency solely in the genre moves students chose to make.

An activity sequence I developed for a research article unit illustrates this claim. Given my initial West-centered framing, openly discussing the question of audience with the graduate students in my class seemed imperative. Therefore, to begin this unit, I asked students to do a reflective writing activity in response to these questions:

• Who do you imagine as your English-using audience for this paper?
• And what country or countries does this audience come from?

Students’ answers to these questions point to the important role Indonesian audiences played in their composing processes: four of the five students.¹⁰ taking part in the activity reported that they imagined Indonesian audiences, with only one imagining a Western audience because, he explained, “English is a Western language.”

One student, for example, imagined a local ICRS audience for his paper, and explained his reasoning as follows:

The academic audience whom I imagine as I write my paper are my teacher and my classmates here at ICRS… I don’t have any imagination to talk to American people or Australian people over there…I feel difficult to write when I imagine Western people because I don’t know their context. That’s why it’s better for me to imagine my people, my friends, imagine my intimate audience here…

His desire for an intimate audience was echoed by two other peers, who both imagined Indonesian graduate students as their audiences. In the words of one, “In my paper, I would like to address it to university students at any level...Since I am from Indonesia, my audience is from Indonesia, too.”

Besides the student who imagined a Western audience, only one student imagined an audience that was significantly wider than ICRS, though this audience was still Indonesian. He wrote:

This paper is intended to the audience who comes from all parts of Indonesia whose English is very good... They belong to intellectual groups of people who come from… outstanding universities in Indonesia and they are the audiences who are accustomed to do religious dialogues.

He imagines a broader Indonesian academic audience as he composes, but notably one with “good English” rather than the more Western audience suggested by English’s origins.

That the majority of students chose to imagine an embodied audience of real Indonesian people they knew—as opposed to imagining advanced academic literacy as an interaction with significant texts in the field—could be symptomatic of students’ identities as novice academics seeking to enter a conversation where they felt less than authoritative (see Irene Clark). To return to Ivanic’s terms, because they were uncomfortable with the “discoursal selves” expected of them when writing in English—whether because of cross-cultural differences or being new to the field—it could have felt more comfortable imagining an intimate, embodied audience as they sought to construct “self as author,” at least for the time being. However, that they were writing as Indonesians in an Indonesian context also could have influenced these target audiences. As I’ll discuss in more detail below, many of these students were engaging in advanced academic literacy not just to engage textually in larger academic conversations, but to use their knowledge, regardless of genre or language, to foster concrete social change for real people in their Indonesian communities.

Given that the majority of students imagined Indonesians as their target audiences in this class activity further reinforced the importance of considering audience and textual negotiation when framing this research article assignment. Therefore, the next activity sequence I introduced paired explicit genre instruction with a discussion of critical negotiation.

I first introduced students to John Swales’ CARS (Create a Research Space) Model, which outlines common moves in Western academic introductions (Swales and Feak, “Academic”). We then went over a list of common Western academic genre features compiled by Swales and Feak in their Academic Writing for Graduate Students, which aligned—albeit with more specificity—with Shen’s article in the prior unit.

In addition, to avoid the monolingualist approach the literacy narrative unit took, we also discussed the following excerpt from Canagarajah’s Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students: “It is possible in critical writing for multilingual students to tap the resources of English and use it judiciously to represent the interests of their communities. An uncritical use of the language, on the other hand, poses the threat of making the individual and community prone to linguistic domination” (17). This excerpt fostered a discussion that drew from the identity work students had done in their literacy narrative unit and highlighted their complicated beliefs about assimilating to Western norms as Indonesian writers.

An excerpt from my teaching journal reads as follows:            

One woman talked about power and the English language and how it eradicated other ways of thinking. They must learn English and its ways of being, she explained, because they wanted to do well in school. I asked if assimilation was the only option and students had mixed reactions—one student argued they should just be aware of audience, and that he could keep two identities, like Shen, and switch in between them. Other students said it was complicated because sometimes the languages mixed with each other—English bled into Indonesian writing practices and vice versa, showing they had mixed identities. Another student then brought up linguistic standardization and that Standard English rules were often enforced by instructors unaware of the “cultural aspect” of language. Yet another student thought that they should be able to write in an Indonesian way to Indonesian people (16 November 2009).

This excerpt highlights that when given designated space within the classroom to do so, students were ready to discuss ways they might negotiate audience and textual identity when engaging with English genres. That students were so ready to engage in this discussion indicates their already existent translingual orientations towards knowledge and the importance of making space for such extra-textual conversations in the classroom.

Given the vibrancy of this discussion, it seemed important to move toward ways students might take agency in the actual texts they wrote. Since students were getting their degrees in Religious Studies, I assigned for homework Mahboob’s “English as an Islamic Language: A Case Study of Pakistani English,” where he shows how English language textbooks written in Pakistan incorporate Islamic sayings—in their original Arabic—despite being written primarily in English, what translingual scholars would term “code-meshing.”

To help frame discussion of the rhetorical moves Mahboob highlights, in class we discussed another excerpt from Canagarajah’s Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students in which he outlines ways multilingual writers might negotiate dominant English language forms:

• Accommodation:  following the rules and assimilating to dominant language forms, even if at the expense of one’s own beliefs or linguistic traditions.
• Opposition:  ignoring the rules by refusing to adopt any dominant practices because they are against one’s own beliefs or linguistic traditions.
• Appropriation:  bending the rules and negotiating between one’s own linguistic traditions and dominant language forms; in Canagarajah’s words, “Although [writers using this technique] establish a discourse counter to that of the dominant conventions, they still establish a point of connection with the established genre conventions” (Critical 116).

Taken together, these texts spurred a lively discussion about the risks and rewards linked to accommodation, opposition, or, in the case of code-meshed texts like the ones Mahboob explores, appropriation of dominant norms.

Here is an excerpt from that day’s teaching journal:                                      

One student asked [in relation to Canagarajah’s heuristic], “Which do you think is the easiest to do?” I threw the question back at the class and another student replied that accommodation is the easiest because you “don’t have to think.” Another student said that emotionally, though, accommodation was more difficult, even if writing in this way was easier, because of cultural differences. Another student countered and said that opposition might be easiest because you can do whatever you want without taking into consideration genre requirements. The student who asked which was the easiest ended the discussion with, “sometimes it is very hard to do when you are new to writing” (18 November  2009).

From this extra-textual interaction, it is clear that students were working through the relationship between genre and textual identity negotiation—and that they had different views concerning the feasibility of code-meshing and genre-bending.

Furthermore, as the final student suggests, critical appropriation—at least at the textual level—might take time for people “new to writing” in English, an argument for considering agency from a spatial-temporal framework. That seemed to be the case as we moved to our next activity, which was meant to bridge this discussion with choices they might make in their own texts to reach specific audiences.

        To link back up to the first reflective assignment in the unit—and to catch up those students who had missed the opening activity— we once again brainstormed as a class multiple English-using audiences that might benefit from their research projects. Students came up with the following list: Amber as instructor; Indonesian instructors at ICRS; Indonesian English-users; Western Academic Audience; and Southeast Asian Academic Audience.¹¹

Though their monolithic conceptions of audience might be considered problematic given the complexity of our global academic conversations, I did want students to take agency and define their own rhetorical situations for this assignment. Therefore, I asked students to choose one of these audiences and to reflect on the following questions in relation to that audience:

• Why might you share your research with this audience?
• What info can you assume they know? What info do they need to know?
• What kind of textual identity will you convey?
• How might you begin your text? What writing moves might you use?

Similar to their work in the first activity, most students (nine out of ten this time) chose to write about and address their texts to Indonesian audiences.

Notably—at least in hindsight— the discussion this activity spurred indicated that students were more interested in the first two content-based questions than the final two genre-based questions. Students were particularly interested in the way that they might transmit Indonesian Religious Studies content from local to global audiences and vice-versa. One student, for example, shared how her research on Islamic boarding schools (pesantran) might be important to share with Western audiences, but it would be “old news” to Indonesian audiences. Another student also drew from our previous discussion of the CARS model to postulate that putting Indonesian voices into conversation with Western ones might be a way to add new information to global conversations (22 November 2009). Knowledge itself, rather than form, took primacy in this discussion.

Though I viewed this discussion as productive, I still wanted to help students link their genre choices to the audiences they were imagining before they began crafting their texts. Therefore, I asked them to do one more reflective writing activity, where I asked:

• Do you think it’s OK to deviate from the CARS model? Why or why not?
• And for what reasons might you do so?

This reflective activity highlighted that although most students believed it was appropriate to deviate from the CARS model, they thought that assimilation to Western norms was their best choice—for the time being.

One student, for example, wrote:

I think it is fine to deviate from the CARS model as long as we have supportive knowledge to do it. However, I will not deviate at this time since I think this model is easy to understand as a new English writer and also fluid if I want to later on. We can follow the model but we can still be creative in doing it. The reasons for wanting to deviate, I think, are the different nature of academic culture, audience and purposes (my emphasis).

This student signals her belief that it is acceptable to deviate when considering different cultures and audiences, but because she is so new to academic writing in English, she won’t deviate yet. Another student pointed to the model’s newness as his reason for assimilating: “I think CARS model is really new for me and it can enrich me how to create a research space.” These students see the CARS model as a “fluid” heuristic, and as a way to “enrich” their existent rhetorical repertoires. In keeping with a translingual orientation, rather than viewing this Western model in an either/or relationship with their existing linguistic traditions, these students view it as another part of their toolkit that they might draw from again—or challenge— in the future. For now, though, these students chose to assimilate, regardless of the audience they imagined.

Other students, however, pointed to power and to English’s ties to the West as their reason for assimilating. One student wrote, “It is hard to deviate from CARS because it is such a ‘universal guide’ in Western research writing. I do not want to deviate. I just want to follow this model. Maybe in a perfectly new territory, it can be deviated.” Though signaling the possibility for new rhetorical situations to expand textual possibilities, he has no desire to deviate because of the CARS model’s “universalized” acceptance in English conversations long linked to the West. Another student echoed this belief that deviation from dominant norms can be difficult: “The risks for deviating from the CARS is our research is likely to be considered as non-academic.” Power matters, particularly to these novice academics.

Thus, although aware of English’s ties to Western ideology, and that they might negotiate with Western norms to reach their imagined Indonesian audiences, students were willing—for now—to assimilate: a testament, it could be argued, to the West’s power to define “good English;” to their own identities as new graduate students wanting to try out a new genre prior to challenging it; and to a translingual orientation towards language use that positions new genres as additive, rather than subtractive. That we began the course with a unit that assumed a de-facto Western audience and that they were being evaluated by a “native speaker” might also have spurred their decisions, despite my efforts to revise the course in a way that encouraged critical negotiation with audience and genre conventions.

Were these critical genre activities, then, a waste of time? No. These conversations about textual form and audience weren’t meant to forward a particular, “correct” way to negotiate English genres; rather, they were meant to encourage students to make conscious rhetorical choices as they wrote their “discoursal selves” into English. And my students chose to assimilate in their research articles, regardless of their intended Indonesian audiences, at least for the time being. As Bawarshi suggests, in a translingual world, agency is located not in the final product, but in the writer’s choices as she negotiates “memory, emotion, [her] sense of self, available discursive and linguistic resources, embodied dispositions, [and] histories of engagement” (Bawarshi 247) in her particular historical moment. Assimilation can be a critical choice. In addition, as some students indicated, “assimilating for now” does not preclude writers from making different choices in the future as the translingual “river” (Pennycook, Language 35) shifts around them.

Furthermore, in hindsight I realize that students’ preference for discussing the ways their Indonesian knowledge might contribute to global conversations points to the limitations of a pedagogy that links agency solely to negotiations with textual form. From a translingual perspective, populating a conventional English-medium literature review with Indonesian knowledge—or vice versa— could also be considered a form of code-meshing. Though I didn’t cue into it at the time, students’ vibrant discussion about the role that Indonesian knowledge might play in expanding global conversations about religion points to the importance of moving past a focus on academic product and towards an understanding of the ways that knowledge itself circulates across languages, audiences, and genres.

 

On academic product versus translingual circulation
Indeed, students were concerned with more than what their academic texts looked like in the translingual spaces at ICRS; they were just as concerned with how the knowledge they accessed through English might reach the Indonesian public, whether in English or Indonesian. As Ringer and DePalma argue in their “Theory of Adaptive Transfer,” when considering multilingual writing practices it is important to look past textual production to the ways students “reuse and reshape prior writing knowledge to fit new contexts” (135). To understand knowledge production in a translingual world, we must look past textual form to the “circulation” of ideas across languages and rhetorical situations (Canagarajah, Translingual 16).

Prior to enrolling at ICRS, most of my students were activists in their local communities, working with various Indonesian NGOs to forward such issues as religious tolerance, women’s rights, and community literacy. As my pedagogy developed, I began to reflect in my teacher’s journal on the way students’ work on the ground fed into their academic scholarship, making me question my initial assumption that the only genres they would need to write would be academic in nature, scope, and audience. This assumption forwarded a one-way, extractive relationship, where students’ community activism fed into their scholarly work, but not vice-versa. This realization, and mid-year evaluations requesting more “public” texts, spurred me to incorporate non-academic genres into my pedagogy. One of the most popular of these assignments (according to final evaluations) was the opinion piece, in which I asked students to revise the research article they produced in the unit described above to reach a public audience of their choice.

Given that the course was English-medium and that most students preferred to write to Indonesian audiences, it’s not surprising that all nine students taking part in my study chose to write opinion pieces for the English-medium Jakarta Post. To help students critically reflect on their rhetorical choices as they moved between academic and public audiences, I asked them submit a cover letter with their final texts that addressed the following questions:

• What public audience do you wish to reach with your research? Point to a specific publishing forum.
• Why do you think it’s important that this audience read your work?
• What decisions did you make to target this audience?
• Overall, these cover letters indicated that when writing in English for a public Indonesian audience, students were more likely to code-mesh.

For example, one student chose to write about the lack of pre-natal care in Indonesia. She pointed in her cover letter to her choice to include the Islamic phrase “Innalillahi wa Innalillahi rojiun” in its original Arabic: “I include this phrase in my JP opinion piece because usually if we Indonesians have sad tragedies, we always say it. It means that everything is from God and everything goes back to God. I don’t include it in my research article because of some in my academic audience not being aware of Muslim sayings.” This choice to code-mesh in her piece shows a translingual rhetorical awareness and her willingness to code-mesh Arabic into her English pieces, particularly when writing in English to the Indonesian public. She could also have been taking a cue from our previous discussion of code-meshing in Pakistani textbooks (Mahboob).

Moreover, several students also chose to translate their opinion pieces, which were essentially already “translations” of the work they’d done in their research articles, from English to Indonesian—on their own time. Students’ choice to revise their knowledge across genre and language multiple times—for class activities and to serve extra-curricular purposes— indicates that rather than focusing solely on academic form as a site of identity negotiation and critical agency, we should also take into consideration the ways writers negotiate knowledge procured through English to serve non-English audiences, and vice-versa.

The student whose code-meshing I just highlighted was one of these writers. She explained her choice to revise and re-signify her knowledge in this way:

My opinion piece is not only academic information, but also personal experience. I also want to share this academic information to reach many Indonesian women who can read my article, and the personal makes it more interesting. That’s why I rewrote it in Bahasa Indonesia and put on Facebook.¹²

As this student indicates, for many of my students, it wasn’t just what their academic texts looked like, but what their knowledge did in the community that mattered most. Rhetorical agency happens not just within students’ academic texts, but as they appropriate and circulate knowledge to the multiple and diverse audiences in their lives, across multiple genres and languages—and as time unfolds. Broadening the lens to account for such negotiation, as scholars espousing a translingual approach to agency argue, is quite important when considering the ways that knowledge garnered through English is actually being used on a global scale.

And the pedagogical choices instructors make should account for such negotiation. Though the pedagogy outlined above initially began in a “monolingualist” way, my revisions in the research article unit and students’ real-time interactions with these revisions indicate that the course did encourage students to think critically about genre, audience, and the possibility they might take agency to challenge Western genre conventions. That said, as I step back and reflect on the course as a whole, I do think that the research article unit I developed positioned rhetorical agency as overly-tied to the textual moves students might make to challenge Western genre norms; in hindsight, I should have paid just as much attention to students’ interest in negotiating Western and Indonesian knowledge as they constructed their literature reviews. We might have discussed at more length, for example, whose voices are most often seen in English-medium literature reviews and why—and ways they might put knowledge written in Indonesian in conversation with overly-represented Western voices to reach and teach different audiences with their English texts. Rather than focusing solely on academic form as a site of identity negotiation, scholars should consider the ways writers negotiate knowledge procured through English to serve non-English audiences, and vice-versa.

That said, given my experiences teaching in Indonesia, I do still think we should invite conversations about code-meshing and genre bending into our classrooms. The fact that the student above (and others) chose to code-mesh in her opinion piece could be linked to the discussions we had in prior units, or to an already existent translingual orientation—or to both. Regardless, given classroom politics, we as instructors should help students feel invited to make conscious choices to assimilate—or not—to the genre conventions we introduce them to. In addition, though, we must broaden the lens to address other ways students might take agency in our translingual world: critical agency might manifest itself in oral communication but not in students’ final texts as the discussion excerpts from my teaching journal indicate, and it might manifest itself in the ways students choose to populate what seem to be “normative” texts with knowledge they draw from their local language communities.

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Though the data highlighted above is specific to one Indonesian literacy site, I hope this small glimpse into my students’ linguistic negotiations might encourage teacher scholars working in the US to develop graduate pedagogies that more openly address the translingual world our students navigate. Though further research needs to be done on the efficacy of such pedagogies in U.S. contexts, to me, challenging West-centered, monolingualist assumptions regarding knowledge production in graduate classrooms seems vitally important in US universities where graduate populations are increasingly comprised of domestic and international, monolingual and multilingual writers. To that end, I’ll conclude with some ways my Indonesian research might inform US-based pedagogies.

Taking a translingual approach in US graduate writing pedagogies (where they exist)¹³ might involve first asking students to whom they wish to write, and in what languages they wish to reach these audiences, rather than just assuming a monolithic Western academic audience as default, as I initially did at ICRS. Even if students do end up choosing to write to a Western academic audience in English, starting with these questions might expand students’ understanding of the rhetorical situations they might engage with in the future—whether academic or public— while also de-centering English as the only language of academic knowledge circulation (see Horner, NeCamp, and Donahue).

Furthermore, engaging graduate students in activities where they explore the multiple linguistic communities and genres they already navigate, whether in English or not, and then asking them to critically reflect on ways these language communities intersect with advanced academic literacy might create a future cadre of global scholars who, rather than assuming a de-facto Western academic audience when writing in English, instead make conscious choices to tailor their texts to fit audience, context, and the identity they wish to portray. Such activities would position these burgeoning academics as agentive co-constructors of knowledge, rather than mere emulators of it.

Encouraging students to view their non-academic language communities as intersecting with, rather than separate from, their academic contexts might also help them connect their academic lives to advancing the “public good.” As Richard Ohmann has argued, teaching graduate students to write effectively should involve more than inculcating them into narrow, discipline-specific communities; enculturating graduate students should involve cultivating the “concern about social problems” (248) that spurred many to apply to graduate school in the first place. One way to do that could be to help students re-imagine knowledge production as a translingual process, where they might strategically move knowledge drawn from their local communities into their academic texts, and vice-versa. Students should feel invited to move between different genres, audiences, and languages as they negotiate and produce knowledge—whether this knowledge is drawn from community work that engages in different “Englishes” or whether it’s drawn from entirely different language communities, as in the case of my Indonesian students. And we must learn to recognize this translanguaging as agentive, regardless of the final form students’ texts take.

To conclude, though the bridge I’ve constructed between my Indonesian research site and  U.S. graduate writing classrooms is purely hypothetical at this point, I do believe creating space for conversations about language, culture, and power in our linguistically diverse US graduate classrooms might help students negotiate the tensions involved with (re)writing their identities as burgeoning “academics.” And just as importantly, such a pedagogy might help them take agency to re-write the global academic conversation in a way that assumes global connection across difference as the norm, rather than the exception.