BRIDGING CULTURES IN THE CLASSROOM: EMBRACING VULNERABILITY AND IDENTITY IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES

This paper presents an autoethnographic narrative detailing the experience of becoming an international instructor in U.S. first-year writing classrooms, marked by a discernible accent, a distinct educational background, and ongoing pressure to conform to expectations of linguistic and pedagogical correctness.Drawing on classroom reflections, course artifacts, and informal student feedback, I analyze how vulnerability and cultural identity shape authority, trust, and involvement in the composition classroom.I argue that vulnerability, defined not as oversharing but as a conscious openness to ambiguity, dialogue, and mutual understanding, can serve as a pedagogical asset that enhances learning and humanizes academic rigor (Brown, 2015).I contextualize this assertion within Freire's advocacy for dialogic education and collaborative meaning-making (Freire, 2020), alongside writing studies literature that promotes translingual and code-meshing methodologies as valid tools for knowledge creation (Lee, 2021;Young, 2010).Throughout this paper, I demonstrate how simple instructional strategies, articulating my positionality, encouraging students to examine language as cultural evidence, and creating low-stakes interactions that prioritize curiosity over precision, lowered students' hesitance to engage and transformed my Samuel Idowu