Tunnel, teapot, mermaid, ghost: Creative-critical practice as critical language awareness

Abstract

What if a writing class is expressed as a shape? What if English is reimagined as an entity? Presenting case studies from two tertiary-level L2 English for Academic Purposes classes in the United States, this article explores intersections between creative-critical practice and critical language awareness (CLA). The multimodal and interdisciplinary approaches included here demonstrate how concepts from art education can be used to center students’ language practices and knowledges. Through prompts designed to elicit creative-critical responses, students explored their multilingual identities and their relationships to academic writing and academic writing classes. Examples of their work are analyzed according to three strategies of creative-critical practice: relationality, recursivity, and interpretation to demonstrate how arts-based practices align with CLA. Working inventively and imaginatively in response to these prompts, students’ work offers productive disruptions to dominant language ideologies and positively (re)frames their experiences as multilingual writers.