Going Beyond the Native-Nonnative English Speaker Divide in College Courses: The Role of Nonnative English-Speaking Educators in Promoting Critical Multiculturalism

Authors

  • Lisya Seloni Illinois State University Author

Abstract

As the number of international faculty members teaching in U.S. colleges steadily increases, greater attention needs to be given to how 21st-century college classrooms can be shaped by these multilingual teachers' linguistic and sociocultural "funds of knowledge" (Moll, 1990) and how their backgrounds can help native-speaking students to become active participants of global communities. This article reports a case study of a non-native English-speaking (NNES) teacher-scholar's attempts to integrate world literature into a mainstream reading-intensive college classroom through the use of internationally acclaimed multilingual authors. The results illustrate that students establish various intertextual links while making the unfamiliar familiar as they read non-Western texts written by multilingual authors and take up creative roles in their reading of non-Western literature. Aiming to look critically at the discourses surrounding literacy education at the college level, the author argues that building pluriliteracy pedagogical practices through NNES professionals' "funds of knowledge" (Moll, 1990) can not only advance students' notions of multiculturalism in college writing classrooms, but also build a positive NNES teacher identity.

Published

2024-03-23