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Language, Power, and the College Archives
This is a post about how I partnered with the college archives to help my students interrogate language and power as part of “culturally sustaining” pedagogy. I didn’t do an IRB or plan an official study of the class, so this is a somewhat vague, but hopefully interesting/helpful, description of what what I did, what…
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“Honest-to-Goodness American Speech”: MLA “Outtakes” Part 2
This post is the second in a series inspired by material I came across in my research for MLA 2021, but did not quite fit into the presentation project. My MLA project traced the way literary texts were used as data for insight into African American language in the important journal, American Speech, in the…
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“A Crude Duplication of the Sounds”: Some “out-takes” from my MLA 2021 talk
I’ll be honest; my presentation for MLA this year–a pilot study on how linguists talk about literary texts in the journal American Speech in the early 20th century–was probably the least polished talk I’ve ever done at MLA, or maybe anywhere. It was difficult to focus on that work knowing people were storming the capitol…
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Linguistic Diversity “Starter Kit”
This is a hastily written, flawed introduction to linguistic diversity and linguistic justice, but I put it together at the request of some colleagues and thought others might find it helpful. Some caveats: this is not a syllabus, this is not an academic lit review, this is in no way complete. This is just a…
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Tips for Teaching African American Language in American Literature
As we all launch into a new semester, I’d like to draw attention to a post from this spring I wrote for the Pedagogy and American Literary Studies blog. This was written mainly for white college professors and high school/middle school teachers, but might be helpful for any educator who does not identify as a…
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The Shift Online is Both Good and Bad for International/L2 Students
This could be great. Most of the advice out there for online teaching emphasizes scaffolding and transparency, which is absolutely key for international/second language students. As Raichle Farrelly, Shawna Shapiro, and Zuzana Tomas explain in Fostering International Student Success in Higher Education (2014), scaffolding can mitigate the fact that college learning is rife with unarticulated assumptions…
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What International Students Need vs. What the Campus Thinks They Need
If you ask a random staff or faculty member on a college campus, “What are the needs and concerns of international students?” they will likely point to 1) help developing their English skills and 2) help assimilating to American culture. If you ask a random international student, though, the answer may not include either of…
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The Contingent Faculty Crisis is also a DEI Crisis for Students
One important step higher education institutions can take to support international students and domestic multilingual students is to grow the tenure-track faculty. International students and multilingual students (along with all students of color, first gen, and low-income students) are disproportionately affected when the college resorts to visiting and contingent faculty. I outline a few things…
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The Word Gap is a Racist Myth (and it follows kids to college)
Former Vice President Joe Biden was asked, during the most recent Democratic debate, to speak on “inequality in schools and race,” which was framed (correctly) in terms of “the legacy of slavery in our country.” Biden topped off his bumbling response with a gesture towards this idea of a “word gap” that children of color…
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The problem with “But some day they’ll have job interviews!”
I absolutely loved Viji Sathy and Kelly A. Hogan’s inclusive teaching guide from the Chronicle this summer. It made me think a lot about how we support linguistic diversity in our classrooms. Sathy and Hogan address, unflinchingly, some common questions about inclusive teaching that many of us in this space have heard before. Among them,…
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Carly Overfelt, Ph.D. 