This article examines how a refugee-background student of Somali Bantu heritage employs linguistic resources to make sense of his experience with forced migration, resettlement, and formal education. Much of the educational research on refugee-background students (and other groups of English learners) propagates a deficit orientation in which educational gaps and challenges, rather than educational resources and potential, are the central focus. In contrast, this student's written and oral narratives construct a different identity, reframing his experience in terms of asset rather than deficit. Our discussion of asset discourse focuses on three central themes: agency, critical awareness, and contribution. This analysis suggests broader implications for research in educational linguistics and related fields.

Literacy "sponsorship" in refugee communities is not without its risks and limitations. For potential sponsors, risks include the commodification of refugee voices, while limits include inaccurate generalizations of those being sponsored. This essay draws from a case study of refugee student discourse to discuss how a more explicit decolonial approach to sponsorship can help sponsors rethink a giver-receiver paradigm. This approach would first deconstruct imperialist discourses of power and then replace them with new, alternatives to meaning-making. While contingent on local contexts, this study aims to set an agenda for continued debate within refugee community literacy support projects.

No abstract

The intention of this assignment is to use stories of refugee experience to cultivate a global perspective in the classroom. The final project of an intermediate college writing course (sophomore and junior level), this assignment asked students to research a topic related to refugee resettlement, apply ideas from course readings to that topic, and reflect on their own perspectives as readers and writers. This writing took the form of a textual analysis essay that combined primary and secondary sources grounded in library research. An emphasis on close-reading and rhetorical analysis provided students with strategies for moving between different modes of literacy (i.e. storytelling, theory, and reflection). The assignment was scaffolded throughout the semester by diverse readings that included memoir, journalist accounts, and scholarship in refugee studies. Although cultivating a global perspective with students was a central learning outcome of this assignment, the term proved difficult to define. This essay discusses how working with student writing provided some clarity on what a global perspective can mean.

Territories, frontiers, "the pedagogical West"-In metaphors to describe the new work of Open Admissions, our field generated a professional impulse for re-conceptualizing Basic Writing nearly simultaneous to the moment of its conceptualizing. Mina Shaughnessy's way of characterizing the "place" quality of Basic Writing-where we as professionals saw ourselves as going, and whom we were meeting there-aimed at, and for a time well accomplished, motivating self and others toward understanding teaching as both a searching and an encounter. But as we soon saw, those "spaces" were sorely troubled in that we brought along the imprimaturs of the academy and expected that we would always lead in these encounters. In the same way Basic Writing represented a clear departure from business as usual for writing instruction at CUNY and other open admissions sites, Shaughnessy's bequest of "place" and "travel" for Basic Writing pointed to a there that was clearly elsewhere, and acknowledged, if not affirmed, the trepidation that many felt about venturing there.Refiguring the "place" quality of Basic Writing, as we might characterize the work of this journal for many years, has largely meant shifting there to right here and the goal-oriented sometime soon to right now. Our first article, by Don J. Kraemer, "Fact and Theory and Value Judgment: What They Say/ We Say of Basic Writing's Unhedged Good," recalls the encounter among voices and communities as foundational in the work of Basic Writing. Kraemer maps a continuum of critical versions of such encountering, first through Graff and Birkenstein's They Say/ I Say; second through Zak Lancaster's critical reading of They Say/ I Say; and third through Kraemer's own argument for expanding that space in which students meet academics and their expectations for writing, whether in terms of academic moves (Graff and Birkenstein) or more indirectly, through the language of hedging and concession (Lancaster). Drawing on ideas of "spatial dynamism," Kraemer advocates for teaching beyond "the rules of the game" toward a type of "contact with . . . interlocutors" expressing choices "relative to those expectations" for "cultivating common ground, not prostrating oneself on ground owned by others." Following Suresh Canagarah's translingual classroom as contact zone, the refigured space of Kraemer's BW classroom "does not ignore 'dominant norms and ideologies of correctness'; rather norms are negotiated" to start from the "interests and values" of those whom he names "student-writer citizens." These students, as we find them, "should [be] imagine [d] . . . [to] regard others, as they regard themselves, as free and EDITORS' COLUMN