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Instructional Context and Assignment Descriptions
Assignment Goals and Learning Outcomes
Reflections on Implementing Our Assignments
Imagining Expansive Pedagogical Futures Towards Linguistic Justice
Introduction
In 1974, the National Council of Teachers of English endorsed linguistic diversity in writing classrooms by adopting the Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) resolution, which affirmed students’ right to use “the dialect that expresses their family and community identity, [and] the idiolect that expresses their unique personal identity.” While this resolution prompted a shift toward greater recognition and support of students’ diverse linguistic practices, many individual instructors still struggle to ensure students’ right to their own ways of languaging in practice (Perryman-Clark et al., 2014; Thompson & Hatch Pokhrel, 2025; Young, 2021). As current or recently former graduate students ourselves, we know that the task of ensuring students’ right to engage in their own authentic linguistic practices can prove particularly difficult for graduate student instructors, as we are often not provided with the resources and support needed to transfer our newfound theoretical knowledge about linguistic justice into pedagogical praxis.
In this symposium piece, we share assignments we designed to offer students avenues for engaging their full linguistic repertoires in our courses, as well as to enact linguistic justice as writing instructors, which we define as implementing a form of antiracist and socially just pedagogy in which we recognize the value of students’ diverse languaging practices and work against histories of linguistic discrimination. We will reference these assignments, found in the Appendix, throughout the piece.
This article includes pedagogical reflections from our years of prioritizing linguistic justice as graduate instructors, as well as our discussions about enacting linguistic justice in our local contexts and co-constructing an interpretation of the affordances those pedagogical practices offer, a project that began during a series of online meetings organized by Keli Tucker in 2024. In sharing our pedagogical insights here, we hope to not only ease the labor of other graduate student instructors who need additional support in teaching toward linguistic justice by sharing resources and ideas they might adapt to their local contexts but also inspire them to more meaningfully engage with equitable and inclusive pedagogies within their writing classrooms.