Negotiating a Transcultural Ethos from the Ground Up in a Basic Writing Program

This essay describes the process of reassessing our BW program at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in order to cultivate a more deliberate, transparent negotiation among stakeholders toward a “transcultural ethos.” Informed by Bruce Horner’s argument that leading-edge work on language and language difference can take place in BW, we formed a working group that conducted a two-year study designed to serve three purposes: to account for the local contexts of increasing language diversity in our BW classrooms; to revise the BW curriculum in ways that accounted for our evolving local contexts; and to begin fostering a transcultural ethos for our writing program. We found that the most progress toward these goals was made when language use was treated as a subject of critical inquiry, reflection, and analysis in the classroom. We also found that code-meshing approaches could foster student agency while making acts of negotiation more deliberate. The imperative to continue building toward a transcultural ethos has prompted us to pay more attention to the risks of commodifying student writing and to place greater emphasis on teacher self-reflection.