Remapping Writing Instruction at the Borders of Modern Languages, Bilingual Education, and Translation Studies: A Canadian Proposal for a Transnational Conversation

This collection investigates the challenges and opportunities for the teaching of academic writing brought on by the increasing, and the increasing recognition of, the mobility across linguistic, national, disciplinary, and institutional borders of teachers, students, scholars, and institutional programs.As chapters in this collection demonstrate, the teaching, practice, and study of academic writing now take such mobility as their foundation; it is no longer adequate, if it ever was, to imagine academic writing as a subject for teaching or research, or as a practice, that is bound by linguistic, national, or disciplinary borders.This is not to ignore longstanding borders among all these, nor, importantly, the hierarchical relations among them: there remains a geopolitics at work in the production of academic knowledge that is manifested in "border disputes," as it were, among languages, disciplines, institutions, and nation states.But those disputes themselves demonstrate, and enact, the historical character of those borders as ever emergent, in construction, variable, fluid, and, above all, crossed, hence the shifting, intermingling, and interdependent character of what the borders are meant to maintain, however futilely, as discrete, stable, internally uniform, and independent.Like efforts to "contain" the Covid-19 coronavirus, those disputes bring out the many ways in which, contrary to prevalent notions of discrete and stable entities-sedentary and immobile-mobility across borders is in fact the operating condition of our work.Of course, many institutions of higher education (hereafter "IHEs") officially claim to be "global" in reach and foundation.But in practice, many of these same institutions maintain curricular structures, placement practices, and support services that were founded on more sedentarist conceptions of academic writing and its teaching-those that mobility scholars would characterize as based on assumptions of these as unchanging and immobile.As the chapters in this collection demonstrate, however, these IHEs are increasingly confronting the actual mobility and fluid character of academic writing and writers: their movement across borders of nation state, discipline, and language, and, in the process of that movement, the continual transformation of these.Against what Christiane Donahue (2009) has critiqued as the "export/import" model of writing programs and writing program expertise, teachers, scholars, and students are increasingly coming to recognize the need to address the inevitable and necessary transformation of themselves as academic writers and their writing as they move across borders, and in the process, their transformation of what those borders are intended to maintain.Terms like translinguality, transnationality, and transdisciplinarity have emerged to name this alternative model by which to engage in, teach, and study academic writing and its teaching.Rejecting tenets of the language ideology of monolingualism and outmoded models of immigration and assimilation to address and control student and faculty mobility, they pose new questions: How do we address the issue of the language medium to be used for writing and teaching in such partnerships?How do we formulate a transnational and translingual WAC approach?How do transnational perspectives call into question assumptions about disciplinary identities and boundaries?What opportunities do transnational, translingual, and transdisciplinary perspectives afford WAC programs?It is, of course, possible to take up these terms as simply new monikers for more familiar, and therefore understandable, models for addressing differences: translingual as multilingual, transnational as "global" or "international," transdisciplinary as "interdisciplinary" and/or "multidisciplinary."Such uptakes acknowledge the legitimacy of different practices but, crucially, maintain the borders among these as settled matters.At least some versions of WID, for example, while acknowledging differences among disciplinary writing practices, treat these practices as sets of discrete, stable, internally uniform kinds of writing specific to individual disciplines.And those advocating multilingualism, while acknowledging the legitimacy of the use of different languages, simultaneously insist, in keeping with the language ideology of monolingualism, that each language is discrete from others, internally uniform, stable, and with specific rules governing the locations for its appropriate use.Arguments for adopting "trans" perspectives on language, nation, and discipline are meant to challenge such uptakes as advancing not substantive difference but, instead, surface differences: glossodiversity, for example, papering over uniformity in meaning (see Cameron, 2002), and teaching translation of knowledge across disciplines or between academic and lay genres as a simple matter of recoding rather than rewriting (cf.Donahue, 2021, pp.26-28).At the same time, such arguments can themselves risk understating the continuing dominance of ideologies that permeate ordinary thinking and practice: named languages, nation-states, disciplines.While it's easy enough to demonstrate the invalidity of the claims of those ideologies for the discrete, internally uniform, and stable character of what they name (see Bazerman, 1992, p. 63), such demonstrations in themselves do not weaken the power of those ideologies (see Lewis, 2018).As Yasemin Yildiz (2012) has argued, for example, we live not in a translingual but a postmonolingual condition, one in

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