Proposal Title
Awkward! Creating Discomfort to Encourage Understanding
Proposal Type
Individual Presentation
Location
Olscamp 201: Language, Voice, and Collaboration
Start Date
21-10-2017 2:15 PM
End Date
21-10-2017 3:30 PM
Abstract
In mostly mainstream-English-speaking classrooms, it can be difficult to help students understand how language difference creates inequality. This presentation offers a suggestion for pushing mainstream English speakers to understand the damage of assuming their own “correctness” of language through uncomfortable collaborative reading.
Awkward! Creating Discomfort to Encourage Understanding
Olscamp 201: Language, Voice, and Collaboration
In mostly mainstream-English-speaking classrooms, it can be difficult to help students understand how language difference creates inequality. This presentation offers a suggestion for pushing mainstream English speakers to understand the damage of assuming their own “correctness” of language through uncomfortable collaborative reading.
Proposal
This interactive presentation focuses on a lesson plan for helping mainstream-English-speaking students to see the inequity of learning in a devalued English. Designed for a wealthy, mostly white, suburban high school English class, the lesson focuses squarely on language differences and argument construction.
First, I will frame the lesson: prior to starting argumentative writing and midway through reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, students blog about code switching as a reflection of Calpurnia's speech in Chapter 12. I will briefly review the elements of the lesson start: discussion of code switching, rule-governed dialect differences, and a demonstration/class collaborative reading of Stanley Fish’s “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3.” This explanation takes roughly five minutes.
Participants will then get into small groups and be given the same text students of the lesson were given (Vershawn Young’s response to Fish: “Should Writers Use They Own English?”) and be asked to complete the same activity: read it out loud to one another, stopping periodically to analyze and outline the argument. After five minutes of activity, we will discuss how participants felt and how my students reacted.
The presentation will finish with take-away ideas: having the students work in groups make the discomfort of reading in an unfamiliar dialect communal, so they could deal with their frustrations together; seeing what it takes to read an unfamiliar dialect is important for helping mainstream English speakers understand challenges faced by non-mainstream-English speakers; collaboration can be an effective tool for challenging student thinking.