The following stories are presented in groups. For example, our first collection of stories, from the first-year writing program at California State University, Los Angeles, presents stories written in response to prompts provided by five faculty members in the program.
The First-Year Writing Program at California State University, Los Angeles serves one of the most diverse student populations in the country. 85% of our Cal State LA students identify as persons of color, and many are bi- or multi-lingual. Another 77% identify as first-generation college, and a majority come from working-class and low-income backgrounds.1 The stay-at-home orders issued in response to the Coronavirus pandemic have impacted our students in complicated ways. As faculty, we have witnessed the challenges our students must negotiate as a result of closures to their university campus and their places of employment. While they worry for the health and safety of loved ones and the world at large, they also struggle with issues like increased work and family responsibilities, lack of access to technology and study spaces, food and housing insecurities, and general anxiety and confusion about the future. We work with a unique population of learners, and we wanted to provide a forum for the students in our classes to express their experiences with the pandemic alongside their culturally diverse identities and interactions with the urban metropolis they call home.
The narratives in this collection represent the voices of students who were enrolled in first-year writing courses at Cal State LA during the Spring 2020 semester. Additionally, we include work by students in one English major course—Literary Los Angeles—which offers insight into the experiences of students navigating critical transitions in the time of Coronavirus. As first-year writing faculty, we design courses that foreground major writing concepts and skillsets—process-oriented approaches to writing, awareness of genre conventions, critical thinking, argumentation and analysis, and information literacy—but our pedagogies also emphasize the value of the unique experiences, knowledges, and literacies our students bring into the writing classroom. We know our students have powerful stories to tell, and we understand the critical importance of providing opportunities for our students to tell those stories in their own words. This is an especially important endeavor for students living and persevering through crisis.
In the introductions that follow, we provide insight into the content of our individual courses, the kind of work we do with our students, and our different approaches to engaging a common conceptual prompt that we hoped would help us to better understand and document our students’ experiences, observations, and perspectives during the time of Coronavirus. We express our different views on the importance of a project like this and offer some discussion on the ways in which the work supported our and our students’ transition to remote instruction. We believe the stories collected here demonstrate the perceptiveness, resilience, and resourcefulness of our students. They represent trials and tribulations but also powerful acts of perseverance. We hope they will provide valuable perspective for those trying to understand the impact of this pandemic on historically underrepresented communities.
Upon submission, each proposed entry receives at least two anonymous peer reviews. Reviews are consolidated by the editor and provided to the author for revision purposes, if revision is recommended by reviewers. WiSER uses a double blind review process, so please de-identify submissions.
