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Zachariah Pippin

Dr. Howard

MTW Portfolio

April 5, 2021

Pragmatism and Idealism in Language

It seems trite to want to reflect back as far as my application essay during my portfolio’s

cover letter, a natural, if overly literary desire to see my time at AUM bookended by the same

words, neatly tying everything off. It seems too easy, the kind of idea that absolutely everybody

has at first but then abandons for the preference of something more academic and artful, but the

fact remains that the content of this portfolio presents a kind of reflection of the content present

in my application essay, a matured, more nuanced, if not slightly darker understanding of the

ideas presented in that essay.

My application essay was composed at a strange time in my life, a rootless, shiftless, and

directionless 2018 the first and only year of my adult life that I ever had not to contend with

school. I had a lot of free time, a large and expanding friend group, and a job I was in no danger

of losing, and I was perfectly unhappy. Engagement with the English language, writing and

speaking was the only thing that ever seemed to give my life any meaning. Without structured

writing, my whole life had stalled, a series of endless pre-written phone greetings and tense

conversations with district managers. It seemed like every day was spent on conversations with

strangers about how we’d rather be anywhere but here. The MTW program seemed like the

breakthrough that I had been looking for. I wanted to give people the same drive, the same

structure and purpose that my writing teachers had given me in high school and in my

undergraduate studies. In that mindset, hopeful and ecstatic, I composed the application essay.
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I still remember writing about how important language was, not just to me but to the

world and to the way we interact with one another, how without language progress was

ultimately impossible, and how I felt there could be no more noble thing than to share my love of

language with students. At the time, I was speaking about “language” in the simplest and most

poetic of terms, because that was the way that I connected with it. As I said, I was a struggling

retail worker, and language was the only thing that had given me the ability to connect with

people beyond myself. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I wasn’t presenting a view of language

as a field of academic study. At my absolute most grounded, I was viewing it as some grand,

formic object of philosophy, a noumenal, capital-L “Language” which could be spoken about in

broad strokes without the need for things like nuance and specificity, but more often than not, I

was speaking of it as something deeply personal to myself, something that couldn’t be talked

about at all because it could not be divorced from my own experiences with it. My perspective

was limited, and more than a little bit naïve in retrospect.

These explanations and self-criticism are ultimately what bring me to the substance of my

portfolio. The thematic line that runs through all of the papers in my portfolio demonstrate the

tail end of a move away from the sweeping, almost ideological view of language expressed in

my application essay in favor of a view of language that focuses on dealing with phenomena,

with observable practices and material objects that exist physically in classroom settings rather

than as objects of philosophy. There are simply too many real-world challenges that are affecting

real world people to spend so much time enamored with concepts and ideals, and my portfolio

demonstrates steps taken in the direction of pragmatism, confronting real issues that affect

students in classrooms that I’ve seen, heard, and spoken with.

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The issue that I’ve chosen to reckon with in this portfolio is the teaching of a multilingual

(and by extension often multicultural) classroom and the divide that exists between monolingual

and multilingual students in the composition classroom, and there are two primary reasons for

this: firstly, because essays on these topics comprise some of the very best I have to offer with

regard to what I’ve composed during my time in the MTW program, and secondly because these

themes typify the distinction between the ideological and the pragmatic. In my application essay,

I tended to think of the classroom in terms of a frictionless plane. The idea of teaching

multilingual students was never a thing that occurred to me in any real sense until I started to

study.

Surely, I had multilingual classmates before, in high school and during my bachelor’s

degree, but there were not very many. They mostly kept to themselves, and did not often make a

show of participation in classroom activities until they were explicitly called upon to do so by the

instructors. Speaking of my instructors, they seemed, on the surface, to pay these multilingual

students little special attention, treating them with the same care as they treated myself and the

rest of their monolingual classmates. I now realize, of course, that they had theory informing

them and concrete pedagogical objectives for all of the students they taught and had likely

studied multilingual pedagogy specifically at some level, but at the time, such considerations

were not something I paid much mind.

Even as I progressed through the program, I thought of multilingual students offhandedly,

no different than any other students in my classroom. Myopically, I considered cultural diversity

broadly without taking time to address the specifics of linguistic diversity in the classroom.

Language, I thought, was just another aspect of culture, after all, and it needn’t be considered

separately. I didn’t pay any mind to the extant hierarchies that exist between native and
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nonnative speakers of the very language that I was teaching. Even though, I was beginning to

think in more pragmatic terms, I could not see the trees for the forest.

Two things happened which caused me to reevaluate the way that I thought of

multilingual students in the composition classroom and to consider more carefully the way that I

would teach them: firstly, I took a class, Multilingual Composition under Dr. Lilian Mina

focused on the theory and practice of teaching multilingual students first-year composition, and

secondly, in my first semester teaching composition, I had my first multilingual student. Both of

these events occurred in tandem with one another during my final semester of classes in the

spring semester of 2020.

Before taking Multilingual Composition, I knew very little about the particular theory

and scholarship surrounding the instruction of multilingual students. I had only ever considered it

a single arm of composition studies, rather than viewing it as its own distinct field of study, as

distinct from the mainline of composition studies as composition studies is from the mainline of

English education. Teaching in a multilingual setting presents its own unique challenges that are

not present in a monolingual classroom, and as such, it requires a different set of skills, different

pedagogy informed by different theory in order to successfully reach every individual student.

Discovering this distinction is why I applied myself so vigorously to the papers I wrote for that

course, which now comprise the content of this portfolio.

That having been said, this newfound vigor for the subject was only buoyed by my first

experience actually teaching multilingual students. In my composition classroom, there was only

one multilingual student, a young Chinese man whose writing stood out immensely from his

classmates. While his work may not have conformed to traditional academic grammar structures,

and he had some difficulty with spelling, the content and style of his work spoke to a surprising
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frankness, something that was remarkably uncommon to me. I found myself lingering on his

papers, reading and rereading them. Especially, his personal narrative assignment stood out to

me for the level of honesty, comfort, and almost cavalier approach to criticizing western liberal

academia that he displayed. This young man went on to not only pass but to succeed with

aplomb in my class. As he wrote, his understanding of the English language improved, and

thankfully without losing the fascinating voice he displayed in that narrative early on in the

semester. I wanted to learn more about how to do well by him and other multilingual students.

The perspective he provided was valuable and engaging, and to help a student learn to express in

a voice so singular is a rewarding thing for teacher and pupil alike.

It is within the spirit of these two factors that I began work on the portfolio in earnest.

Each of the papers present in the portfolio constitute coursework from the Multilingual

Composition course given revisions. The first paper I worked on for the assignment was the one

that would ultimately end up being the culmination of my work, the largely far-flung and

theoretical “Landing in the Vacuum.” It might seem at odds with a portfolio whose theme I’ve

isolated as a pragmatical take on the notion of language to have a theory-driven essay serve as its

centerpiece, but the entire purpose of “Landing in the Vacuum” is essentially a warning against

the excessive pursuit of what may seem a theoretical good without being engaged with the praxis

that theory implies.

As I state in “Landing in the Vacuum,” the reader will be unsurprised to learn that the

broader strokes of translingualism have always been appealing to me, but it would be appealing

to me, would it not? My background is in philosophy, and I am interested in theory. There are

aspects of translingual theory that, if not properly checked, will act as runaway ideas that

threaten to obfuscate, if not completely swallow the initial intentions of the scholars who
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proposed the theory in the first place. This is why I am so careful in the paper to never refer to it

as a “critique of translingual theory,” (even harsher) a “refutation of translingual theory,” or

anything else so blunt as that, but to use softer phrasing like “a warning against the aggressive

pursuit of translingual theory.” “Landing in the Vacuum” is not, per se, meant to be a critique of

the ideas of Horner et al. On the contrary, I think that “Language Difference in Writing: Toward

a Translingual Approach” is an excellent paper that presents an idealistic vision for a

multilingual classroom that anyone possessed of a love of diverse writing would like very much

to see come to fruition.

The issue lies within how certain scholars take the approach proffered in “Language

Difference in Writing” and run away with it assuming a perfect vision of the translingual

classroom to be not only desirable but plausible, allowing the theory not to guide their praxis, but

to subsume it. The translingual classroom becomes, not a concrete goal which is to be achieved,

but an object of philosophy. It is an ideal, and it presumes the exact same notion of language as

the “frictionless plane” that I referenced on page 3. For anyone familiar with physics, the

frictionless plane is a familiar working device for making theoretical work easier, simpler. It is

something that can enable calculations which might be impossibly minute without it, but

engineers cannot work with frictionless planes, because they do not exist in reality. Perfect

translingual writing is an exemplar, not an expectation, and the expression offered in “Landing in

the Vacuum” is that letting perfect be the enemy of good can often do more damage than not

performing any intervention in the classroom whatsoever. We cannot over-theorize the

multilingual student experience to the point of divorcing it from the material realities of existing

as a multilingual student in an American classroom for the sake of projecting an aspirational

exemplar.
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With this having been said, it is also important to note that even as I attempt to make my

views on the matter known in “Landing in the Vacuum,” I certainly don’t view the work of

Horner et al. as wasted or being without merit. On the contrary, without the theory they provide,

there is no space for practice to manifest itself. In some ways, my work mirrors that of Paul Kei

Matsuda, who I reference in “Landing in the Vacuum” and whose commentaries on the

translingual approach were the first critiques I read that caused me to pump the breaks on my

enthusiasm for the theory. Matsuda’s work critiques, not the theory, but the practice. It’s taking

the process of trial and error when putting the theory into practice and explaining where the

errors are from a multilingual perspective. Even Jeroen Gevers’s “Translingualism Revisited”

which I would consider a relatively harsh critique of Horner et al. when compared to either

Matsuda’s work or “Landing in the Vacuum,” is not so harsh as to throw the theory away

wholesale. It only expresses discontent with the way the theory is put into practice.

The remaining two papers in the portfolio are focused around practical affairs (an

observation of two sessions in a multilingual classroom and an interview with a Mexican woman

who grew up speaking Spanish and studied English in the United States), and this focus on the

practical is by design. The order of the papers in the portfolio itself is also deliberate. As

mentioned above, all three papers were originally coursework for Multilingual Composition, and

they are presented in the order they were completed for the class, not in the order they were

completed for the portfolio. This order is important because of the way that the ideas presented

in the papers build on one another; the practical implications of the first two, “The Synthesis of

Natalia” and “Beyond Bridging the Gap” are what initially inspired the final paper, in their own

way. That said, I felt the need to discuss the content of “Landing in the Vacuum” first because
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the thesis of “Landing in the Vacuum” is, after a fashion, the thesis of the portfolio itself: theory

being a springboard to practice rather than an end in itself.

“The Synthesis of Natalia” takes the story of one particular multilingual learner and puts

her at the forefront. I feel like my one-on-one interviews with Natalia were what gave this essay

its gas, so to speak. I have a habit of taking overdetailed notes when I am working with a person

or observing a classroom, and despite my interviews with Natalia and her writing samples all

being relatively brief, I spent a lot of time working to set the scene so that my reader can see the

minutiae of Natalia’s experience. I wanted the reader to understand not only her experiences, but

her ways of speaking, her ways of expression. After a fashion, the entire paper is an exploration

of the character of Natalia as much as it is an essay on teaching theory. “The Synthesis of

Natalia” uses only a little academic voice and spends as much time as I am able simply having a

conversation with Natalia’s work.

Natalia’s work is important. While it is good that instructors connect with our students on

a personal, it is absolutely essential that we connect with their writing. Natalia’s writing has a lot

to engage with when we begin to analyze what goes on beneath the surface, and by engaging

with a multilingual voice, the essay hopes to demonstrate the need for pragmatism in our look at

the process of teaching multilingual students. Natalia talks, after all, not of any particular

assignment or of any book that her English teachers were reading, merely that they took the time

to engage with her personally and give her the attention she needed. Most highly, she speaks of

the peers who helped her along the way.

By beginning with Natalia’s story, we start on the smallest unit of a classroom, the single

learner, and in “Beyond Bridging the Gap” we look at the classroom. Specifically, I wanted to

analyze the movements and behaviors of the multilingual students in the classroom. This desire
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is ultimately why the finished product turns out much more like “The Synthesis of Natalia” than

it does like “Landing in the Vacuum.” The more essential part of the paper is the content of the

observation itself, as opposed to the theoretical inferences I draw from it or the scholarship I use

to engage with the observation. The focus of the paper ultimately ends up being very narrow and

involving very little theory. Any scholarly sources that I do employ are based heavily around

providing hard data that can be used to better analyze exactly what is going on in the classroom

and how we might interpret different actions being taken by different students in a practical way,

but the data that we do draw from those sources are enormously important to the way that

“Beyond Bridging the Gap” develops. Without the influence of Wei Zhu’s study on the way that

communication develops in mixed-peer groups, the observations that I had in the classroom

would not have made any sense to me, and interpreting them into any kind of potential practical

application from those would have been as good as throwing darts to the wall in a dimly lit

cavern. It’s no exaggeration to say that any practical solutions present in the paper are born

directly of Zhu’s work. Without him, the paper would surely end after reporting the results of the

observation. “I saw students take these actions; make of it what you will.”

Seeing the way that multilingual students interact with one another, with their instructors,

and with their monolingual classmates is an essential factor in taking a more pragmatic approach

to the multilingual classroom, but it is by engaging with additional data that we can give context

to what we see and use those observations to guide our actions. It is only with these data in hand

that I feel that the focus on the observation content works as a second part to the portfolio.

Furthermore, it serves to lay a kind of foundation as the portfolio culminates in “Landing in the

Vacuum.” We begin with Natalia, a single individual, before gradually moving into a single

classroom and the interactions to be found within. Finally, “Landing in the Vacuum” adopts the
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largest possible universe by being a paper on theory. In this way, “Beyond Bridging the Gap”

works as a stepping stone. On a macro-level, the portfolio builds from practice into theory, rather

than, as is traditional, from theory into practice. This inversion of the traditional pathway serves

the portfolio’s focus on working in the pragmatical over the ideal. This structure indicates what I

want to impress: even when our hands are on theory, our minds should ever be on the ways in

which that theory is applied, because those applications are ultimately what our students see.

It has been two years since I completed that application essay, two years since I put in

mind to learn the craft of writing pedagogy, and two years since I held my romantic beliefs about

language. Looking back, I can’t help but call myself naïve before beginning the program, at least

with regard to language. It is all well and good to opine and wax poetical about the great

wonders (and terrors) that words can wreak in the hands of those who can use them properly. It

is another thing entirely, and a far more important thing to understand the students with whom

we work and to be able to impart the tools to understand and mold language through their voice.

Through this portfolio, I hope to have demonstrated both an emphasis on pragmatism and a bit of

theory that can work within the framework of the prevailing scholarship on translingualism to

demonstrate a need for a practical and reasoned approach to the application of translingual theory

to the composition classroom.