One of the challenges of being an educator in any academic setting is reconciling best practice with policy. As a Senior Instructor in the Department of English at the American University of Sharjah, oftentimes what I want to do in the classroom has to coalesce with what I can do based on pre-established parameters for general education courses such as writing. A knowledge gap exists at most higher education institutes (HEIs) between the needs of multilingual learners and the pedagogical practices used by educators who teach them. This is further complicated by common course syllabi, where an individual instructor has limited autonomy on how courses are taught. How can educators effectively teach multilingual learners within the confines of common course syllabi, such as those used by writing instructors? This presentation redesigns a first-year writing composition course to demonstrate how educators can use curriculum content and design to bring linguistic justice to multilingual learners. The purpose of this presentation is three-fold: (1) to explain the importance of pedagogy that promotes learning for multilingual writers, (2) to discuss multimodal instructional practices that are inclusive and reflective of multilingual learners, and (3) to demonstrate how linguistic freedom and justice for multilingual learners can be promoted through even traditional genre modes of writing. This paper contributes to the fields of adaptive teaching and transformative pedagogy within higher education for multilingual learners.

Authors:
Sana Sayed, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

About the Presenter(s)
Sana Sayed is a Senior Instructor in the Department of English at the American University of Sharjah, located in the United Arab Emirates. Her research interests include equitable pedagogy for multilingual learners in higher education institutes.

Additional website of interest
https://scholar.google.ae/citations?user=kOE-JEwAAAAJ&hl=en

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