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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
Theoretical Framework
To provide background for the goals and learning outcomes of the assignments we discuss in this piece, we want to first offer both a brief overview of the theoretical grounding of our assignments, as well as resources readers can consult to apply these concepts in their own teaching contexts.
To support our students’ linguistic practices, our assignments are rooted in Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP), a theoretical framework originating from Ladson-Billings’ (1995) theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. As an antiracist framework, CSP draws explicit attention to the problem of hegemonic gazes—particularly the white gaze—in instruction, and asks what “liberating ourselves from this gaze and the educational expectations it forwards [would] mean for our abilities to envision new forms of teaching and learning” (Paris & Alim, 2014, p. 86). Rather than requiring students with minoritized racial and linguistic identities to perform white, middle-class norms, CSP guides instructors to sustain the heritage and contemporary languaging practices of racially and linguistically minoritized students. In this way, our assignments allow us to move beyond simply accepting and including non-standard ways of languaging in the classroom and toward centering students’ linguistic resources as strengths (Paris, 2021; Paris & Alim, 2014).
We also grounded our assignments in other theoretical frameworks that support and work toward equity and inclusion in the teaching of writing. Sophia’s assignment takes up the idea of translanguaging, an approach to writing and composition pedagogy originating in the linguistic practice of code-meshing, or the deployment of the full range of one’s linguistic repertoire (Lewis et al., 2012). Multilingual students frequently practice translanguaging in their communities, but these language practices are less often valued in the classroom. Assignments that utilize translanguaging emphasize that students’ wide range of linguistic variety is not a “barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but...a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening” (Horner et al., 2011, p. 303). Such assignments also help students practice composing across a range of rhetorical contexts.
Kelsey’s, Keli’s, and Sophia’s assignments are designed to help students build their Critical Language Awareness (CLA) by supporting them in uncovering the invisible ways that language can “be used to maintain, reinforce, and perpetuate existing power relations... [or] to resist, redefine, and possibly reverse those relations” (Alim, 2005, p. 28). Writing studies conceptualizes CLA as a pedagogical framework with practical applications for teaching toward linguistic social justice, one that moves beyond simply affirming the value of linguistic diversity by also actively working to increase students’ critical consciousness and rhetorical agency (Shapiro, 2022). Through CLA pedagogy, students develop the metalinguistic and rhetorical awareness to make effective choices in their writing. They also develop the agency to perform their right to their own language in academic settings, equipped with knowledge of the historical, political, and sociocultural factors influencing the choices they make and the consequences of those choices (Shapiro et al., 2016).
Through our assignments, such as Keli’s Language and Literacy Narrative, we also hope to increase students’ awareness of standard language ideologies. In particular, we guide them toward understanding how standard language ideologies impact our perceptions of whose languaging practices hold power by constructing certain linguistic performances as more professional, appropriate, or correct. Moreover, we want students to understand that a person’s languaging practices and the ways that person is racialized are connected as a result of raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) that have positioned standardized forms of English derived from white-centric expectations as normative in formal writing contexts.
Finally, Sasha’s, Kelsey’s, and Keli’s assignments ask students to narrate, research, and/or analyze the writing and languaging practices circulating in their local contexts, or those that students themselves use in their communities. These assignments support students in understanding the value inherent in community literacy practices, which emphasize the variety of social, cultural, and political contexts in which literacy is used and shared. They also recognize that different communities have unique ways of engaging with language and literacy based on their histories, values, and needs (Brandt, 2001; Flower, 2008). Our assignments further push back on traditional frameworks of cultural capital—which have historically been used to rationalize the lower social and academic outcomes of racialized people by claiming that only access to the linguistic and epistemic capital of the white middle and upper classes will result in success—by utilizing community cultural capital frameworks (Yosso, 2005) to prompt students to draw on unacknowledged or undervalued cultural capital forms.