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Associate Professor
CMU 034B
543-9019
Email: jguerra@u.washington.edu
B.A., University of Illinois at Chicago, 1972
M.A., University of Illinois at Chicago, 1983
Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago, 1992
Language and Literacy Studies, Rhetoric and Composition Studies
Juan Guerra is Associate Dean and Director of the Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Program in The Graduate School at the University of Washington. His scholarly interests are reflected in two current book projects:
Writing Across Communities: A Cultural Ecology of Language, Literacy, and Learning (with Michelle Hall Kells). This book project argues that traditional models of Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) too narrowly privilege academic discourse over other discourses and communities shaping the worlds in which our students live and work. WAC replicates and reaffirms dominant discourses by socializing new writers into established systems without cultivating critical awareness of the ways that literacy practices remain embedded in ever-shifting sets of economic, political, social, cultural, and linguistic factors. A Writing-Across-Communities approach to college writing instruction, on the other hand, invites students to consider how an understanding of cultural diversity enhances their ability to write appropriately (with an awareness of different discourse conventions), productively (to achieve their desired aims), ethically (to remain attuned to the communities they serve), critically (to learn to engage in inquiry and discovery); and responsively (to act responsibly as they negotiate the tensions caused by the exercise of authority).
Sin Vergüenza/Without Shame: The Politics of Language, Schooling, and Ethnic Identity. In this book project, Guerra undertakes an autoethnographic analysis of his experiences growing up in a highly segregated Chicano/Mexicano community in south Texas. He examines how a Spanish dominant interpretation of the world was forcefully replaced by an English Only effort by an educational system specifically designed to assimilate his siblings and him into a profoundly different understanding of the world in which they lived. In the process, he discusses how his ethnic identity was in turn shaped by an array of social, cultural, economic, and linguistic factors that shamed him into turning away from family and community. Because he wants to challenge a "bootstraps" ideology that suggests we as individuals can all be successful in this country if only we try hard enough, he plans to embed these lived experiences in the larger context of the trajectories that the lives of his eight siblings—five of whom dropped out of high school—followed as they too tried to negotiate their way through a gauntlet of linguistic, educational, and identity crises.
