Textbook: Reading Culture

Reading Culture, edited by Diana George and John Trimbur, was the first textbook I used and is used throughout Emerson College’s First-Year Writing Program. Based on George and Trimbur’s backgrounds in rhetoric and composition, the reader comes from a social-epistemic orientation toward writing instruction. The reader includes many of the readings from this website—June Jordan, Min-Zhan Lu, Gloria Anzaldua—along with a host of others.

At Emerson College, we taught “in the contact zone,” meaning that we created moments of potential conflict and discomfort, but attempted to help students move through these and develop new and/or deeper understandings of issues such as racism, sexism, and discrimination.

Potential readings for a translingual classroom, other than those listed on this website:

• Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “Casa”
• Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone”
• Khaled Mattawa’s “History of My Face”
• Bakari Kitwana’s “Rap and the Cotton Club”
• Eva Sperling Cockroft and Holly Barnet Sánchez’s “Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals”
• Martín Espada’s “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100”

Reading Culture: Contexts for Critical Reading and Writing. Ed. Diana George and John Trimbur. Pearson, 8th edition, 2011.