Antiracism and Writing / Linguistic Justice

  • Baker-Bell, April. Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. Routledge. [publisher's site] [video - book preview]
  • Condon, Frankie & Young, Vershawn Ashanti. (Eds.). Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication. Across the Disciplines Books. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado, 2016. [open access e-book] In particular these sections:
    • Foreword: On Antiracist Agendas, Asao B. Inoue. Inoue lays out the imperative for antiracist agendas in education, agendas which question structures and systems in academia, from "standard English" to grading methods.
    • Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable, Rasha Diab, Beth Godbee, and Thomas Ferrell with Neil Simpkins. The authors "advocate for additional and ongoing considerations of the work of antiracism in educational settings, [and] we invite others to embrace, along with us, both the willingness to be disturbed and the attention to making commitments actionable."
    • Reframing Race in Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum, Mya Poe. Poe, a leader in writing-across-the-curriculum pedagogy, writes from the perspective of one who supports faculty who teach writing. She advocates for "re-framing race in writing across the curriculum [to be] attuned to the contexts in which writing is taught at our institutions and how race is meaningful for us and our students at the institutions at which we teach."
    • The Myth of the Colorblind Writing Classroom: White Instructors Confront White Privilege in Their Classrooms, Octavio Pimentel, Charise Pimentel, and John Dean. This chapter addresses the ways in which writing instructors "displace the colorblind approach to teaching writing in their classrooms by using an antiracist approach to multiculturalism."
  • Lyiscott, Jamila. Why English Class is Silencing Students of Color, TedX The Benjamin School, 2018. [video, 22 min]
  • Savini, Catherine. "10 Ways to Tackle Linguistic Bias in Our Classrooms." Inside Higher Ed, January 27, 2021.
  • This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice! Conference on College Composition and Communication, July 2020.
  • Young, Vershawn Ashanti. Interview on Kentucky PBS television about his book, Other People's English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy. [video, 28 min]
  • Young, Vershawn Ashanti. "Should Writers Use They Own English?" Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 12.1 (2010) [open access article]

Multilingualism, Accents, and World Englishes

  • Canagarajah, Suresh. "Codemeshing in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging." The Modern Language Journal 95. 3 (2011): 401-17. [article access - requires login].
    From the abstract: "Studies on translanguaging of multilingual students have turned their attention to teachable strategies in classrooms.... [This] study describes how the feedback of the instructor and peers can help students question their choices, think critically about diverse options, assess the effectiveness of their choices, and develop metacognitive awareness."
  • Global Diversity in the Classroom: Empower your Pedagogy/Resources for Faculty. This guide from the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program at the George Washington University introduces faculty to a range of questions, perspectives, and tips relevant to teaching multilingual and globally diverse students.
  • Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. [publisher's site]
  • Looker-Koenigs, Samantha. Language Diversity and Academic Writing. A Bedford Spotlight Reader, 2018. [publisher's site].
    Designed as a student textbook, readings in this collection include short works of fiction and critical pieces by rhetoric scholars including Peter Elbow, Nancy Sommers, and Vershawn Young.

Writing Assessment

  • Blum, Susan. Ungrading. West Virginia UP, 2020. [publisher's site]
  • Inoue, Asao B. "Classroom Writing Assessment as an Antiracist Practice: Confronting White Supremacy in the Judgments of Language." Pedagogy 19.3 (2019): 373–404. [article access - requires login]
  • Inoue, Asao B. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. Perspectives on Writing. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado, 2019. [open access e-book]
    "Inoue argues for the use of labor-based grading contracts ... as a way to do social justice work with students. ... The heart of the book details the theoretical and practical ways labor-based grading contracts can be used and assessed for effectiveness in classrooms and programs."
  • Inoue, Asao B. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Perspectives on Writing. The WAC Clearinghouse; Parlor Press, 2015. [open-access e-book]
    "Inoue theorizes classroom writing assessment as a complex system that is 'more than' its interconnected elements....Inoue helps teachers understand the unintended racism that often occurs when teachers do not have explicit antiracist agendas in their assessments."
  • Inoue, Asao B. and Mya Poe. Race and Writing Assessment. Peter Lang US, 2012. [publisher's site]