Students' Right to Their Own Language A Critical Sourcebook

With perspectives from some of the fields most authoritative scholars, Students Right to Their Own Language establishes a foundation for comprehending the historical and theoretical context informing the affirmation of all students right to exist in their own languages.

Staci Perryman-Clark is an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the Department of English at Western Michigan University, where she also directs the First-Year Writing Program. Her work focuses on creating culturally-relevant pedagogies and curricular designs to support all students' expository writing practices. Her published work currently focuses on designing alternative curricular models for undergraduate and graduate courses. Her recent publications include journals published in Composition Studies and Composition Forum, WPA: Writing Program Administration, with forthcoming publications in Pedagogy and Teaching English in a Two-Year College (TETYC). She has received national honors from both the Ford Foundation and Conference on College Composition and Communication.

David E. Kirkland is an assistant professor of English Education at New York University. His scholarship explores the intersections among youth culture and identity, language, literacy, and power, and urban education. He has utilized critical approaches to qualitative educational research (including critical ethnography and critical discourse analysis) to understand literacy in the lives of a group of urban adolescent Black males. He examined closely the literate lives of young Black men, their language practices and participation structures within wider social and cultural fields that exist beyond school contexts. His work has been featured in several academic publications, including Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, English Education, and English Journal. His current research examines the literate construction of digital iDentities among urban youth participating in online social communities, its impact on youth culture and subjectivity, and its reconfiguring of race and gender.

Austin Jackson is an assistant professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. His research and teaching interests include writing and rhetoric, African American Language and literacy, and qualitative research in English education. He serves as Director of the My Brother’s Keeper’s Program, a mentoring program for middle school students attending the Paul Robeson - Malcolm X Academy (K – 8th grade) in Detroit, MI. He has co-authored several publications exploring links between critical approaches to writing pedagogy and student participation in contemporary struggles for critical democracy.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Understanding the Complexities Associated with What it Means to Have the Right to Your Own Language

 

Part One: Foundations

1 Students’ Right to Their Own Language

CONFERENCE ON COLLEGE COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION COMMITTEE

2 CCCC’s Role in the Struggle for Students’ Language Rights

GENEVA SMITHERMAN

3 The Students’ Right to Their Own Language, 1972-1974

STEPHEN PARKS

4 The Students’ Right to Their Own Language: Its Legal Basis

LAWRENCE D. FREEMAN

5 In Response to the Students’ Right to Their Own Language

ANN E. BERTHOFF AND WILLIAM G. CLARK

Part Two: The Politics of Memory: Linguistic Attitudes and Assumptions Post-SRTOL

6 Linguistic Memory and the Politics of U.S. English

JOHN TRIMBUR

7 Students’ Right to Their Own Language: A Retrospective

GENEVA SMITHERMAN

8 Students’ Right to Their own Language: A Counter-Argument

JEFF ZORN

9 No One Has a Right to His Own Language

ALLEN N. SMITH

10 Race, Literacy, and the Value of Rights Rhetoric in Composition Studies

PATRICK BRUCH AND RICHARD MARBACK

 

Part Three: The Special Case of African American Language

11 African American Student Writers in the NAEP, 1969-88/89 and "The Blacker the Berry, the Sweeter the juice"

GENEVA SMITHERMAN

12 Students' Right to Possibility: Basic Writing and African American Rhetoric

KEITH GILYARD AND ELAINE B. RICHARDSON

13 "I Want to Be African": In Search of a Black Radical Tradition/African-American- Vernacularized Paradigm for "Students' Right to Their Own Language," Critical Literacy, and "Class Politics"

CARMEN KYNARD

14 Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures (WRA) 125—Writing: The Ethnic and Racial Experience

STACI PERRYMAN-CLARK

 

Part Four: Pluralism, Hybridity, and Space

15 The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued

A. SURESH CANAGARAJAH

16 "They’re in My Culture, They Speak the Same Way": African American Language in Multiethnic High Schools

DJANGO PARIS

17 From ‘Bad Attitudes’ to (ward) Linguistic Pluralism: Developing Reflective Language Policy among Preservice Teachers

GAIL OKAWA

 

Part Five: Critical Language Perspectives and Reimagining SRTOL in Writing Classrooms

18 Myth Education: Rationale and Strategies for Teaching against Linguistic Prejudice

LEAH ZUIDEMA

19 Pedagogies of the ‘Students’ Right’ Era: The Language Curriculum Research Group’s Project for Linguistic Diversity

SCOTT WIBLE

20 From Language Experience to Classroom Practice: Affirming Linguistic Diversity in Writing Pedagogy

KIM LOVEJOY, STEVE FOX, AND KATHERINE V. WILLS

21 The Reflection of "Students’ Right to Their Own Language" in First-Year Composition Course Objectives and Descriptions

STUART BARBIER

22 Critical Language Awareness in the United States: Revisiting Issues and Revising Pedagogies in Resegregated Society

H. SAMY ALIM

23 Revisiting the Promise of ‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language’: Pedagogical Strategies

VALERIE KINLOCH

Part Six: Lingering Questions

24 What Should College Teach? Part 3

STANLEY FISH

25 What if We Occupied Language?

H. SAMY ALIM

26 Where Do We Go From Here?

ARNETHA F. BALL AND TED LARDNER