Laura Gonzales emphasizes translation as an inherently rhetorical experience – with “constantly shifting and multi-layered cultural–rhetorical processes that encompass multimodal elements such as embodied movements, sounds, and digital composing” (Gonzales and Turner 2020) – that belongs even in monolingual writing classrooms (Gonzales 2018). Her work transformed how I teach First-Year Composition at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), a Hispanic Serving Institution in my bilingual, bicultural hometown of El Paso, Texas, which is separated from its sister city of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, by nothing more than a heinous steel border wall. The students I teach are primarily bilingual,…
Author: Julia Hettiger
Julia Hettiger
Julia Hettiger is a writer, educator, and Ph.D. student in the English Rhetoric & Composition program at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research interests include genre theory and censorship in academic writing, translanguaging in FYC, and visual rhetoric.