Christine Garcia, assistant professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University, has won a 2018 Scholars for the Dream Travel Award given by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Garcia, who resides in Willimantic, CT, and hails from San Angelo, TX, is one of 20 award recipients, and will use it to present her research at the CCCC Annual Convention on March 15 in Kansas City, MO.

Her presentation, “Contesting the Myth of the Monolithic Linguistic Experience: Latina Student Writers, Translingualism, and Writing Across Communities,” “asks how a writing-across-communities/translingual approach to first-year college writing can cultivate agency and autonomy for the Latina student writer,” explained Garcia.

“This approach to teaching college writing practices respect for our writers’ knowledge and abilities instead of focusing on remediating the skills they lack,” she said. “I reject the notion that young college students cannot write, and instead honor them as complex language users who require contemporary and thoughtful college writing courses to continue cultivating their writing strengths and talents.”

Garcia concluded: “Much of my research is with Latina college writers, a student population whose rich linguistic repertoires and innovative ways of crafting and creating deserves recognition. My presentation at this conference, made possible by the Scholars for the Dream travel award, will be focused on highlighting and honoring Latina college writers.”

The CCCC is a constituent organization within the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The CCCC sponsors the Scholars for the Dream Awards to encourage scholarship by historically underrepresented groups, which include Black, Latinx, Asian, American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander scholars.

Garcia is originally from San Angelo, TX, where she received her undergraduate and master’s degrees in English Language and Literature from Angelo State University. She received her PhD in Rhetoric and Writing at the University of New Mexico.