Amy Wan | Queens College of the City University of New York (original) (raw)

Papers by Amy Wan

Research paper thumbnail of Producing Good Citizens

Research paper thumbnail of Strangers in a Strange Land: “The Foreign Student” at US Universities after World War II

Utah State University Press eBooks, Apr 1, 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Shifting the Paradigm of Translingual and Transnational Graduate Education

Utah State University Press eBooks, Apr 15, 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Composing the Future of English Studies

2020 MLA Annual Convention, Jan 11, 2020

Research paper thumbnail of Workin' Languages: Who We Are Matters in Our Writing

Research paper thumbnail of Beyond 'Bad' Cops

In this article, we define and examine surveillance culture within US college classrooms, a logic... more In this article, we define and examine surveillance culture within US college classrooms, a logical extension of pervasive carceral and capitalist logics that underlie the US educational system, in which individual success is tied to behavior monitoring, rule following, and sorting, particularly within marginalized student populations. Reflecting anxieties about the expansion of educational access, we argue for how crisis and change have historically contributed to the urgency and opportunity to expand surveillance culture and consider why this has continued to happen as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. We offer suggestions and alternatives to surveillance culture that have helped us foster student engagement in our own classrooms while also arguing for more substantial structural changes that could challenge surveillance culture beyond the individual unit of the classroom.

Research paper thumbnail of Rhetoric , Deliberation , and Democracy in an Era of Standards W

hen my master’s class on composition theory and literacy studies began talking about the semester... more hen my master’s class on composition theory and literacy studies began talking about the semester’s readings on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS, the Common Core), students expressed weary familiarity with the implementation of these new learning goals that would largely be defining their jobs at public middle and high schools in New York. Already subject to the state’s own Regents Exams, the teachers in my class vented their frustration, not always over the standards themselves, but over how an exam assessing these new standards would most likely limit their teaching to whatever skills this new test would happen to measure. The teachers imagined other possibilities—communication, equality, democracy, self-expression—that might also be gained through learning how to write. But they, all of whom started teaching in the last five years, were resigned to the influence of the CCSS, new tests, and ever-present accountability through assessment. Three recent books, though none of the...

Research paper thumbnail of Republicanism, Religiosity, and the Rhetoric of Women’s Labor Reform in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1830–1850

Research paper thumbnail of REVIEW: Rhetoric, Deliberation, and Democracy in an Era of Standards

Review: Rhetoric, Deliberation, and Democracy in an Era of Standards Deliberative Acts: Democracy... more Review: Rhetoric, Deliberation, and Democracy in an Era of Standards Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric and Rights. Arabella Lyon. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. 222 pp. Print. ISBN: 978-0-271-05974-7.Education and Democracy in the 21st Century. Nel Noddings. New York: Teachers College Press, 2013. 179 pp. Print. ISBN: 978-0-8077-5396-5.Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice. Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark, eds. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. 270 pp. Print. ISBN: 978-1-61117-318-5.When my master's class on composition theory and literacy studies began talking about the semester's readings on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS, the Common Core), students expressed weary familiarity with the implementation of these new learning goals that would largely be defining their jobs at public middle and high schools in New York. Already subject to the state's own Regents Exams, the teachers in my ...

Research paper thumbnail of Global Citizenship as Literacy: A Critical Reflection for Teaching Multilingual Writers

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2019

Research paper thumbnail of Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times by Amy J. Wan

Community Literacy Journal, 2015

Strong in theory, rich in history, and farreaching in its implications, Producing Good Citizens w... more Strong in theory, rich in history, and farreaching in its implications, Producing Good Citizens will soon become a staple for scholars, activists, and pedagogues alike who are interested in the complicated intersections of literacy and citizenship. In this historicized work, Amy Wan explores three main sites of citizenship training during the 1910s and 1920s-federally-sponsored immigrant Americanization programs, unionsupported worker education training, and college-mandated first-year writing courses. Wan's book starts with a brief introduction to citizenship theory, moves into archival research of each training site, and concludes with applications of her methodology to present anxieties over citizenship, particularly in relation to the Patriot and DREAM Acts. Through her book, Wan complicates citizenship as a discursive construct and demonstrates the limits of what literacy-and citizenship-can do for students as well as "the limitations put upon students by not only the idea of citizenship, but also its legal, political, and cultural boundaries" (178). Wan's powerful, timely argument and her final challenge to educators and scholars alike should not be ignored. Together, Wan invites us to consider what is meant by the invocation of citizenship in the classroom, to analyze the habits of citizenship that are encouraged by our practices, and to connect our citizen-making processes to other more politically and materially situated notions of citizenship. In her use of "citizenship, " Amy Wan builds on Danielle Allen's Talking to Strangers (2004), Barbara Cruikshank's The Will to Empower (1999), and Bryan Turner's introduction to Citizenship and Social Theory (1993). Wan, along with these scholars, expands the concept of citizenship from mere legal status to a "kind of credential with legal and cultural purchase" (6). In this manner, Wan justifies the exploration of citizenship construction in not only legal spaces, but also in classrooms, workplaces, and community spaces. She cites Harvey Graff 's The Literacy Myth (1979) and Deborah Brandt's Literacy in American Lives (2001), assessing that, while literacy might deem an individual worthy of certain resources (i.e. passing first-year composition in order

Research paper thumbnail of After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur . Frank Farmer

Rhetoric Review, 2013

As College English's recent special issue on the social turn can attest, english studies in gener... more As College English's recent special issue on the social turn can attest, english studies in general and composition studies in particular have often embraced the epochal language of "the turn" to gauge its self-efficacy, often hinging on the mission of its determined publics and/ or the liberal mission of the university. It is in this context that Frank Farmer's book, After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur, is welcome, as it attempts to put these turns into perspective by splicing the concept of counterpublics into our understanding of two publics often evoked in composition studies: one cultural and ad hoc, one disciplinary and institutional. In the introduction, Farmer begins by helpfully historicizing these various turns, winnowing in on the turn toward the public, which he explicates via Mathieu, Welch, Flower, Long, and others, while at the same time reminding us that this turn "encompasses a variety of concerns-pedagogical, institutional, disciplinary, and cultural" (24). Yet, for all of the public turn's complexity, Farmer argues that "definitional ambiguity" and traditional attachments to public sphere theory have led us to largely ignore counterpublics, a term he traces from negt and Kluge to nancy Fraser, the latter proposes that they exist in order to circulate counter-discourses that permit oppositional identities (16). Farmer also spends a significant portion of the introduction with Michael Warner's Publics and Counterpublics, which challenges Habermas and Fraser's ideas that counterpublics and its discourses must be deliberative. Importantly for composition studies, Warner proposes that counterpublic discourse can be affective, expressive and otherwise, non-rational. This should interest composition studies, says Farmer, because it opens up our students and ourselves to alternative, bottom-up versions of citizenship, democratic participation, and public engagement-understandings that include an array of discourses, forms and sites

Research paper thumbnail of In the Name of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom and the Promise of Citizenship

College English, 2011

EJ940539 - In the Name of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom and the Promise of Citizenship.

Research paper thumbnail of Producing good citizens: Literacy and citizenship training in anxious times

UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissert... more UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Producing good citizens: Literacy and citizenship training in anxious times. by Wan, Amy ...

Research paper thumbnail of Making Sense of Researcher Positionality in Foundational Literacy Studies Research

Literacy in Composition Studies

Research paper thumbnail of Producing Good Citizens

Research paper thumbnail of Strangers in a Strange Land: “The Foreign Student” at US Universities after World War II

Utah State University Press eBooks, Apr 1, 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Shifting the Paradigm of Translingual and Transnational Graduate Education

Utah State University Press eBooks, Apr 15, 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Composing the Future of English Studies

2020 MLA Annual Convention, Jan 11, 2020

Research paper thumbnail of Workin' Languages: Who We Are Matters in Our Writing

Research paper thumbnail of Beyond 'Bad' Cops

In this article, we define and examine surveillance culture within US college classrooms, a logic... more In this article, we define and examine surveillance culture within US college classrooms, a logical extension of pervasive carceral and capitalist logics that underlie the US educational system, in which individual success is tied to behavior monitoring, rule following, and sorting, particularly within marginalized student populations. Reflecting anxieties about the expansion of educational access, we argue for how crisis and change have historically contributed to the urgency and opportunity to expand surveillance culture and consider why this has continued to happen as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. We offer suggestions and alternatives to surveillance culture that have helped us foster student engagement in our own classrooms while also arguing for more substantial structural changes that could challenge surveillance culture beyond the individual unit of the classroom.

Research paper thumbnail of Rhetoric , Deliberation , and Democracy in an Era of Standards W

hen my master’s class on composition theory and literacy studies began talking about the semester... more hen my master’s class on composition theory and literacy studies began talking about the semester’s readings on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS, the Common Core), students expressed weary familiarity with the implementation of these new learning goals that would largely be defining their jobs at public middle and high schools in New York. Already subject to the state’s own Regents Exams, the teachers in my class vented their frustration, not always over the standards themselves, but over how an exam assessing these new standards would most likely limit their teaching to whatever skills this new test would happen to measure. The teachers imagined other possibilities—communication, equality, democracy, self-expression—that might also be gained through learning how to write. But they, all of whom started teaching in the last five years, were resigned to the influence of the CCSS, new tests, and ever-present accountability through assessment. Three recent books, though none of the...

Research paper thumbnail of Republicanism, Religiosity, and the Rhetoric of Women’s Labor Reform in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1830–1850

Research paper thumbnail of REVIEW: Rhetoric, Deliberation, and Democracy in an Era of Standards

Review: Rhetoric, Deliberation, and Democracy in an Era of Standards Deliberative Acts: Democracy... more Review: Rhetoric, Deliberation, and Democracy in an Era of Standards Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric and Rights. Arabella Lyon. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. 222 pp. Print. ISBN: 978-0-271-05974-7.Education and Democracy in the 21st Century. Nel Noddings. New York: Teachers College Press, 2013. 179 pp. Print. ISBN: 978-0-8077-5396-5.Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice. Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark, eds. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. 270 pp. Print. ISBN: 978-1-61117-318-5.When my master's class on composition theory and literacy studies began talking about the semester's readings on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS, the Common Core), students expressed weary familiarity with the implementation of these new learning goals that would largely be defining their jobs at public middle and high schools in New York. Already subject to the state's own Regents Exams, the teachers in my ...

Research paper thumbnail of Global Citizenship as Literacy: A Critical Reflection for Teaching Multilingual Writers

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2019

Research paper thumbnail of Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times by Amy J. Wan

Community Literacy Journal, 2015

Strong in theory, rich in history, and farreaching in its implications, Producing Good Citizens w... more Strong in theory, rich in history, and farreaching in its implications, Producing Good Citizens will soon become a staple for scholars, activists, and pedagogues alike who are interested in the complicated intersections of literacy and citizenship. In this historicized work, Amy Wan explores three main sites of citizenship training during the 1910s and 1920s-federally-sponsored immigrant Americanization programs, unionsupported worker education training, and college-mandated first-year writing courses. Wan's book starts with a brief introduction to citizenship theory, moves into archival research of each training site, and concludes with applications of her methodology to present anxieties over citizenship, particularly in relation to the Patriot and DREAM Acts. Through her book, Wan complicates citizenship as a discursive construct and demonstrates the limits of what literacy-and citizenship-can do for students as well as "the limitations put upon students by not only the idea of citizenship, but also its legal, political, and cultural boundaries" (178). Wan's powerful, timely argument and her final challenge to educators and scholars alike should not be ignored. Together, Wan invites us to consider what is meant by the invocation of citizenship in the classroom, to analyze the habits of citizenship that are encouraged by our practices, and to connect our citizen-making processes to other more politically and materially situated notions of citizenship. In her use of "citizenship, " Amy Wan builds on Danielle Allen's Talking to Strangers (2004), Barbara Cruikshank's The Will to Empower (1999), and Bryan Turner's introduction to Citizenship and Social Theory (1993). Wan, along with these scholars, expands the concept of citizenship from mere legal status to a "kind of credential with legal and cultural purchase" (6). In this manner, Wan justifies the exploration of citizenship construction in not only legal spaces, but also in classrooms, workplaces, and community spaces. She cites Harvey Graff 's The Literacy Myth (1979) and Deborah Brandt's Literacy in American Lives (2001), assessing that, while literacy might deem an individual worthy of certain resources (i.e. passing first-year composition in order

Research paper thumbnail of After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur . Frank Farmer

Rhetoric Review, 2013

As College English's recent special issue on the social turn can attest, english studies in gener... more As College English's recent special issue on the social turn can attest, english studies in general and composition studies in particular have often embraced the epochal language of "the turn" to gauge its self-efficacy, often hinging on the mission of its determined publics and/ or the liberal mission of the university. It is in this context that Frank Farmer's book, After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur, is welcome, as it attempts to put these turns into perspective by splicing the concept of counterpublics into our understanding of two publics often evoked in composition studies: one cultural and ad hoc, one disciplinary and institutional. In the introduction, Farmer begins by helpfully historicizing these various turns, winnowing in on the turn toward the public, which he explicates via Mathieu, Welch, Flower, Long, and others, while at the same time reminding us that this turn "encompasses a variety of concerns-pedagogical, institutional, disciplinary, and cultural" (24). Yet, for all of the public turn's complexity, Farmer argues that "definitional ambiguity" and traditional attachments to public sphere theory have led us to largely ignore counterpublics, a term he traces from negt and Kluge to nancy Fraser, the latter proposes that they exist in order to circulate counter-discourses that permit oppositional identities (16). Farmer also spends a significant portion of the introduction with Michael Warner's Publics and Counterpublics, which challenges Habermas and Fraser's ideas that counterpublics and its discourses must be deliberative. Importantly for composition studies, Warner proposes that counterpublic discourse can be affective, expressive and otherwise, non-rational. This should interest composition studies, says Farmer, because it opens up our students and ourselves to alternative, bottom-up versions of citizenship, democratic participation, and public engagement-understandings that include an array of discourses, forms and sites

Research paper thumbnail of In the Name of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom and the Promise of Citizenship

College English, 2011

EJ940539 - In the Name of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom and the Promise of Citizenship.

Research paper thumbnail of Producing good citizens: Literacy and citizenship training in anxious times

UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissert... more UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Producing good citizens: Literacy and citizenship training in anxious times. by Wan, Amy ...

Research paper thumbnail of Making Sense of Researcher Positionality in Foundational Literacy Studies Research

Literacy in Composition Studies