A Multimodal Representation of Our Linguistic Identities
Having shared stories of our social identities and the relative power and privilege associated with them, I invite students to dive deeper into one expression of these identities: language. To put it another way, as the Explanation of Assignment 2 details:
In Assignment 1, we filled out an Excel chart listing our various identity groups. We located them on the Wheel of Power and Privilege to see which were closer to the center of power and which were further away. It’s possible to do the same thing for the languages we speak, because languages convey information about the groups we belong to. Certain languages (whether national languages, dialects, sociolects or registers) will be viewed as appropriate or “normal” in certain contexts, and certain ones are associated with greater power in American society as a whole.
In order to avoid getting tangled up in the same language(s) we’re trying to study, we create this representation with images, sounds, music … not only words. Seeking to get a feel for the possibilities, we begin by looking at a variety of posters, cartoons, self-portraits, sculptures, maps, timelines…– all expressing an aspect of the creator’s linguistic identity. In spring 2022, to fully understand my students’ process, I did the project with them, building a diorama illustrating my linguistic identities before, during and after my 25 years in Europe.
I try to convey the experience of living and teaching in a highly prescriptivist linguistic environment, where the Académie Française officially protects the purity of the language. (The standup cardboard figure wears a beret and a t-shirt reading “Grammar Police: To Serve and to Correct.”) I contrast this with returning to the US and encountering a climate of asset-based and translingual pedagogies here at MSU and in WRAC.
After brainstorming and sharing possible ideas for the A2 project, students will write a brief proposal describing the Mode, Audience, Purpose and Situation (MAPS) of their intended project.
Try it now. Reflect: what aspect of your linguistic identities would you share? How is this aspect connected to power and privilege? What might you make to communicate your insights?
Next I share a spreadsheet, similar to the Social Identities chart we completed for Assignment 1.
I invite students to carry the chart around for a day, noting each time they find themselves speaking a different language. Some notations have included national languages, regional dialects, sports jargons, ASL, dog-training commands and computer languages.
To focus on the relation between languages and power, I ask all students to watch the powerful documentary “Talking Black in America” and to read the Introduction to this “Viewers’ Discussion Guide” from North Carolina State University. The remaining Discussion Guide is divided into seven “Chapters” of readings, viewings and discussion questions, which students complete in teams, before presenting their findings to their classmates. Students have found this video and these activities to be eye-opening; in spring 2022, one Black female student exclaimed, “I knew that’s how my friends and family talked. I didn’t realize it was an actual language.”
As students prepare their multimedia projects to present to classmates, we have other readings, viewings and discussions of linguistic racism and linguistic bias more generally. We try to plot out our languages on a theoretical privilege wheel like the one we used in Assignment 2. In spring 2022, one student brought in the Taylor Mali poem, “Totally like whatever, you know?” which marginalizes the semantic, syntactic and phonological practices of many young women, providing an example of linguistic bias against a chronolect and a genderlect. For a closeup of a day in the classroom during this part of the semester, please see “Snapshots: a day in a First-Year Writing class with an anti-racist curriculum.”
Before the classroom presentations, I share the design tools of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity (CRAP), and we use these for audience response, noting the message or takeaway that we get from each student presentation, as well the the ways in which they have used CRAP to communicate it. In the Learning Reflection that follows the presentation, one question I ask is, “How do you use CRAP in an audio or visual presentation like A2, in comparison to the ways you use it in your writing (e.g. in A1)?” I think that this move reinforces the idea of each student’s multiple linguistic repertoire, and the different affordances of each language for different contexts and purposes.
What about you? What are your ideas on how you might re-imagine the Cultural Literacies assignment in an anti-racist, perhaps transmodal, framework?