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While the history of anti-racist pedagogy spans decades and includes a wide range of voices and events, this overview focuses on a few key moments and movements that felt most foundational and informative to me as I began to understand the topic.
Historically, academic life was primarily accessible to privileged white men (Bonilla-Silva and Peoples 2-3). Scholars like Mary Bucholtz, Kira Hall, and James Gee highlight that identity and language are closely linked. In fact, the word identity comes from the Latin noun “identitas,” which refers to sameness (Identity - etymology, origin & meaning). Historically, people developed identity by interacting with people who communicated similarly to them and separated themselves from those they perceived to be different (Bucholtz and Hall 369-370). Academia is one of the key places where language plays a role in shaping identity (Norton and Morgan). Scholars and intellectuals created and shared ideas through specific language styles acquired during their schooling, eventually creating Standard Academic English (SAE), the norm for academic communication (Ashamarri 150). This communication style set them apart from those who didn’t have access to higher education and never learned SAE. With time, academia began prioritizing how a person said something over what they said, turning school into a “sorting mechanism” (McLaren 160), marginalizing students from linguistically diverse backgrounds (Monzo and Soohoo 150). Many now refer to SAE as the dialect of social and political power, also calling it Dominant American English (DAE) to reflect the sociopolitical implications (Paris).
Following the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) commissioned a statement called “Resolution on Student Right to Their Own Language” (SRTOL). This statement affirms that students’ home and community dialects are instrumental in identity creation, among other things. SRTOL was reaffirmed in 2003 and again in 2014, but the broader educational climate had shifted. With Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election, American politics and education took a conservative turn. As Geneva Smitherman observed in 1995, the era’s optimism gave way to “stagnation and dreams deferred” (24).
Despite the good intentions and many instructors fully supporting SRTOL, controversies and flaws still arose. For example, there was a moderately successful transition to a more process-centered pedagogy, moving away from rigid standards of correctness toward a broader acceptance of linguistic diversity as expression and viewing writing as an ongoing process rather than just a finished product. However, the foreseen improvements in student writing never came. Instructors outside the composition field claim writing became “entirely inadequate for both serious academic inquiry and the communication needs of an advanced society” (Ellwanger). Many critics associate this with the lack of pedagogical tools in SRTOL. To the rest of the academic and professional world, SRTOL was a moral and political sentiment rather than guidance on empowering students and fighting injustice, paired with adequate writing skills.
During the late 80s, composition studies began to move away from the “individualistic, cognitive models” that dominated the 70s and early 80s, and moved toward “more socially and politically conscious frameworks” that responded to the broader world. (Killingsworth, 1999). The move to process-centered pedagogy gained momentum, emphasizing writing as a recursive, student-centered activity rather than a product to be perfected.
In the 2000s, scholars like Canagarajah A. Matsuda and P.K. Matsuda, advocated for the inclusion of World Englishes in composition, arguing for a pluralized understanding of English (Canagarajah, The Place of World Englishes in Composition; A. Matsuda and P.K. Matsuda, World Englishes and the Teaching of Writing). Vershawn Ashanti Young popularized the concept of code-meshing, encouraging students to blend dialects and languages in their writing rather than switching between dialects based on context (“Nah, We Straight”; Other People’s English). During that same time, Horner et al. proposed a translingual approach to writing, emphasizing language difference as a resource rather than a barrier (“Defining Translinguality”). The field also began to embrace multimodal literacy, recognizing that students communicate through a variety of modes beyond just words on paper (Self; Lynch and Wysocki). All of these changes occurred at a time of rising racial tensions in the US and higher education, aiming to improve pedagogical practices and shed light on the importance of linguistic justice, providing tools and frameworks that make the writing classroom a more just place for students with diverse linguistic backgrounds.
The most recent progress in linguistic justice in composition studies was already in motion as the field was responding to the national rise in tensions surrounding race and minorities during the first Trump administration and the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the fight for Black justice was reignited on a national and global level following the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade, which sparked the boom of the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020 (This Ain't Another Statement! This is a Demand for Black Linguistic Justice!). Adding their voice to the movement, Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) published, “This Ain’t Another Statement, It’s a Demand for Black Linguistic Justice.” The authors of this demand argued that we cannot claim that Black lives matter if we aren’t willing to profess that Black language matters and demand linguistic justice in writing classrooms.
That brings us to where the field is today. With all this history to build on, it can be daunting for a graduate student instructor (GSI) to know where to begin researching and implementing principles in their own classrooms. While there are many who have explored different views on linguistic justice, below, I outline the mainstream theories of the field today: code-switching, code-meshing, and translingualism. In each section, you’ll find compilations from the forefront academics in the field, covering the praises and hesitations, and ending with practical steps forward to teaching linguistic diversity and ensuring linguistic justice in the composition classroom.