Rewriting Community Stories: Care and Relational Practice in Racialized Multilingual Students’ Revision

Research on students’ revision has mostly centered around how they (fail to) revise their writing “effectively” toward what is perceived as an “ideal” form of writing. Often overlooked in this discussion is an ideological perspective to understand students’ revision as a process and practice of critical language labor toward justice. Based on the analysis of revision practices and semi-structured interviews of three racialized bi/multilingual students enrolled in my first-year writing courses, this article discusses how their revision reflects their anticolonial relational thinking and care for their communities. More specifically, I show how they revise to honor and humanize their families’ language practices away from the dominant colonial, Eurocentric, English-only monolingual ideology. Their community-oriented revision, I argue, is a form of relational and care practice and complicates the dominant conceptualization of what counts as “substantive,” “effective,” or “major” revision. I call for reconceptualizing and teaching revision as a relational space to interrogate and refuse deficit-oriented ideologies toward racialized and multilingual communities for more humanizing writing pedagogy and practice. I conclude by discussing what such practice might entail for language and writing teachers and teacher educators.