Writing Across Communities: Cultural Rhetorical Ecologies and Transcultural Citizenship in a Climate‐Change COVID‐19 Global Political Economy
Authors: Kells Michelle Hall 
Published: March 2022

Writing Across Communities (WACommunities) represents a translingual/transcultural model of postsecondary US literacy education. After more than 15 years since the conceptualization and implementation of WACommunities, rapidly shifting socioeconomic, environmental, and geopolitical conditions, further complicated by the COVID‐19 public health pandemic in 2020, underscore the relevance and efficacy of WACommunities pedagogies and practices. Growing populations of transnational migrant communities and environmental refugees, navigating limited resources and inequitable access to public education systems, illustrate that linguistic racism remains one of the most insidious and unaddressed obstacles to education for ethnolinguistically diverse student populations. While it is a basic tenet of linguistics that all languages are equal, it is an enduring social reality that not all languages have equal social value. This fact directly impacts student retention, graduation rates, and school placement for ethnolinguistically diverse groups—and, in turn, reproduces social inequality and restricts economic opportunities and political participation. In a climate‐change pandemic global climate that most adversely impacts historically colonized socioeconomically vulnerable communities, Writing Across Communities advocates for transliteracy, cross‐disciplinary K‐16 language arts and writing‐across‐curriculum education that systemically enacts pedagogical practice engaging the intersections of public health, cultural health, and environmental issues.

WACommunities principles and practices advance ethnolinguistic diversity as an integral feature to maintaining healthy human communities and supporting the emergence of new cultural rhetorical ecologies. As an alternative approach to traditional Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines programs, WACommunities engages language diversity as a reflection of deep cultural connections locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. WACommunities represents the first sustained WAC/WID approach in the United States that foregrounds linguistic diversity in an institution‐wide literacy education initiative. WACommunities recognizes the heterogeneity within all linguistic codes and language varieties, including the multiple variations of world Englishes represented globally. WACommunities accepts the notion that the acquisition of academic literacy (and standardized American English) enhances students' communicative resources, yet asserts that academic literacy education should not seek to erase students' vernacular discourses. Finally, it advocates for culturally responsive approaches to literacy education across and beyond the curriculum.

WACommunities aligns the intellectual resources of the humanities (rhetoric, critical theory, cultural studies, and sociolinguistics) toward reconfiguring educational spaces and constituting more inclusive teaching practices that press the limits of institutional rhetorical imagination by advocating for linguistic diversity and students' right to their own languages and promoting methods that foreground students' cultural rhetorical ecologies to reshape social environments for greater inclusion and social justice. WACommunities resists the reproduction of hegemonic language practices in English literacy education through the application of principles of translingual/transcultural citizenship in the teaching of writing across the curriculum. This entry considers the underlying support, both theoretical and empirical, for the localized application and institutionalizatio‐‐n of WACommunities approaches to K–16 literacy education.