No one says it’s easy to teach language equality in the context of academic writing.
Here are what some of the authors cited below have to say about working from a perspective
of linguistic justice in the writing center:
Writing center practitioners often feel an institutional pressure to participate in
the effort to mainstream “different” sounding/looking texts. Also, we often feel a
sense of immediacy from sitting next to writers who radiate a sense of distress…in
these moments, we want to allay that distress. Yet writing center practitioners’ worry
about helping multilingual writers succeed in the university as it currently exists
may have caused writing center studies to focus too much on the needs of the institution
at the expense of the needs of multilingual writers—the individuals and communities
with whom we actually work and to whom we are accountable. In providing tips and strategies
for helping multilingual writers meet instructors’ (monolingual) expectations, for
instance, we have failed to help multilingual writers thrive as individuals and writers
with agency. (Bobbi Olson, “Rethinking Our Work with Multilingual Writers”)
I talk to the student about audience and how some people might view their writing
and misjudge their capabilities and label them as dumb or having a “cognitive deficit.”
I use the language “as a reader this is what I see,” “some readers may interpret this
as…” “you as the author have choices.” Then and only then—after I’ve informed the
student—do I say “well what do you want to do?” I let them choose. Never once am I
forcing any agendas. Never once do I say that their codes are only useful in the brainstorming
portion of an essay and then must be erased for fear of judgment. Never once are their
codes and their use seen as a crutch or deficit. My approach is very ally centered.
(Neisha-Anne Green, in “The Re-Education of Neisha-Anne Green,” p. 78)
Because I am focusing on the ways writing center practices may be complicit with racism,
it may seem that I am suggesting that students of color are always newcomers to academic
discourse. That is not true. However, it is sometimes true, just as it is also true
that many white students are newcomers to academic discourse. My point is that when
writers are newcomers to a discourse or a culture, a writing center should be a place
where they can expect to find someone who knows how to make discourse and cultural
expectations explicit. Too often writing centers are staffed by members of what Jacqueline
Jones Royster (2003) calls the “well-insulated community that we call the ‘mainstream’”
(616), and that needs to change because the insulation makes it difficult for them
to identify the expectations and assumptions they have always taken for granted. (Nancy
Grimm, in Writing Centers and the New Racism, p. 77)
Keynote from the Mid-Atlantic Writing Center's Association July 24, 2020 Conference
on Anti-Racism
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English.” In Writing Centers and the New Racism : A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change,
edited by Laura Greenfield, and Karen Rowan. Utah State UP, 2011. 61-72.
This book is available through ProQuest Ebook Central with RamNetID.
Young, one of the foremost scholars in Composition studies, writes this essay entirely
in Black English. Rather than just argue that the language of his nurture is eloquent,
he also shows it. The essay is an argument in opposition to an opinion piece by Stanley
Fish in The New York Times. Young begins with an epigraph from Fish’s article: “First,
you must clear your mind of [the following...]: ‘We affirm the students’ right to
their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever
dialects in which they find their own identity and style.’” Young has a difference
of opinion.
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. "Black Lives Matter in Academic Spaces: Three Lessons for Critical Literacy. " Journal of College Reading and Learning, vol. 50, no. 1, 2020, pp. 5–18.
Read this article to understand Young's term "code meshing" as a way to reorient to
the actual linguistic definition of "code switching." Young points out that "leave
that language at home" is not "code switching," rather it is linguistic violence.
As Vershawn puts it, "We always say we want Black men to succeed; well--let them be
Black men in school."
Greenfield, Laura. “The ‘Standard English’ Fairytale: A Rhetorical Analysis of Racist
Pedagogies and Commonplace Assumptions about Language Diversity.” In Writing Centers
and the New Racism : A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, edited by Laura Greenfield,
and Karen Rowan. Utah State UP, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central with your RamNetID
Among other important contributions to the conversation on linguistic diversity in
the context of composition instruction, this article explores assumptions and contradictions
inherent in the idea of “Standard English,” a linguistic, rhetorical, and embodied
abstraction which, regardless of the liberatory intentions of teachers and tutors,
is always an unwieldy assemblage of power.
Delpit, Lisa D. "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children." In Thinking about Schools: A Foundations of Education Reader, edited by Eleanor
Blair Hilty. Westview Press, 2011. 157-175.
Lisa Delpit is quite a controversial figure and as an "assimilationist" is often targeted
for critique. Vershaun Ashanti Young even titled a book "Other People's English" in
his edited collection that centers on "code meshing." In Delpit's view, well-intentioned
white teachers end up doing more harm than good in their attempts to enact linguistic
justice in the classroom, certainly something to keep in mind.
Green, Neisha-Anne S. “The Re-Education of Neisha-Anne S Green: A Close Look at the
Damaging Effects of ‘A Standard Approach,’ the Benefits of Code-Meshing, and the Role
Allies Play in This Work.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 14, no. 1, July
2016, pp. 72–82.
Part memoir and part pedagogical treatise, this essay by celebrated writing center
scholar Neisha-Anne Green describes both her journey as a multi-dialectical speaker
and writer to integrate, not erase her linguistic identity. She also proposes concrete
techniques for working with writers to ensure they maintain control of their language
choices, while also getting the clear instruction they are asking for. One of the
topics she handles is balancing where to state a grammar correction, and where to
discuss a language choice.
Coenen, Hillary, et al. “Talking Justice: The Role of Antiracism in the Writing Center.”
Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, Mar. 2019, pp. 12–19.
The authors of this article are graduate students working in a writing center who
offer a narrative of their process to create a compassionate and mindful antiracist
training module for tutors and administrators. Key to their project and the article’s
implications is the exploration and evocation of vulnerability and openness for participants
of the training. Only through disruption of our comfortable, often “color-blind,”
assumptions about race and racism can we formulate strategies to counter its effects.
Olson, Bobbi. “
Rethinking Our Work with Multilingual Writers: The Ethics and Responsibility of Language
Teaching in the Writing Center.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 2013, pp. 1–6.
The author reminds us that writing centers are complicit in processes of language
“gatekeeping” and makes the case for an ethical shift in our understanding of multilingualism.
While many academic and professional contexts understand multilingual writers as deficient
in their use of “Standard English,” shifting our perspective to explore how multilingualism
promotes a complex, creative orientation to language allows for a rich understanding
of rhetorical, contextual, and hybrid features of discourse.
Charity Hudley, Anne, et al. "
Linguistics and race: An interdisciplinary approach towards an LSA statement on race." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, vol. 3, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1–14.
Accessed 15 July 2020. 8
This article calls for more attention to the historical significance and interdisciplinary
of the concept of “race” within the research area of linguistics. The authors provide
an extensive review of linguistics literature at the intersection of anthropology,
sociology, and education, among other fields of study. This call for a collective
“statement on race” can be understood as a desire to collectively acknowledge what
has been erased or omitted from previous research and why, to navigate the difficult
and sometimes painful process of contextualizing a concept which is always expanding
and evolving, and to conceive of pathways forward that allow for rich interdisciplinary
work with liberatory ends.
