The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Accessibility

To download a free dyslexia-friendly font, please visit OpenDyslexia (not associated with JOMR).

To download a free ADD/ADHD-friendly font, please visit BeeLine Reader (not associated with JOMR).

Hannah Franz (Jack Kent Cooke Foundation), Anne Charity Hudley (Stanford University), Kia Turner (Stanford University), and Marie Tano (Stanford University)

---

In our work with Black students, we emphasize multilingualism and multivarietalism as a value, as the Black Diasporic superpower that it is! Black students are masterful commanders of the language varieties they are exposed to (Charity Hudley, Mallinson, & Bucholtz, 2022). In our Talking College text (Charity Hudley et al, 2022), Joy Davis describes the continued need for an educational emphasis on this Black Diasporic superpower and Black genius generally: 

In my nearly 40 years as a Black female scholar in a field dominated by white teachers, scholars, counselors, and educators at all levels, I have been constantly amazed by the lack of progress we have made toward acceptance of Black genius. This lack of acceptance creates anti-Black educational spaces from K–12 to higher education. Black students, no matter how they demonstrate their genius, are less likely to have access to publicly funded school programs and institutions of higher education. As secondary-level Black gifted students prepare to make choices for their future education, they face socioemotional criticisms that, for some, may be devastating beyond repair. (p. 111)

Davis goes on to share information from one of her former students, Damarius, and how he was able to navigate his college experience linguistically and emotionally. He had made a conscious choice to attend an HBCU in Virginia, less than two hours from his home. Davis sent him questions regarding his linguistic experience and about how being Black and gifted impacted him as a Black intellectual in high school and college. Damarius sent Davis the following responses: 

1. Q: What was your language experience like in high school as a Black gifted student? In other words, do you believe that you were judged by how you used language or did your peers mention how you talked often?

A: I feel I was judged by my peers based on my use of semantics. While I was at the specialized high school in the mornings, I was ostracized for using too much slang [i.e., too Black to be gifted]. When I was around my friends in the afternoon at my regular high school, I was accused of “sounding white” [i.e., not Black enough]. 

2. Q: Did you feel like you were forced to code-switch to engage in conversations with different peers and teachers?

A: I mastered code-switching upon realizing, during class, my verbal responses weren’t met with the same excitement/praise when given in dialect. My interactions with gifted school peers meant I was constantly feeling like I was having to “wear the mask.” 

3. Q: How did code-switching make you feel? Was the transition to college language/speaking easy or difficult? If difficult, why?

A: Having attended an HBCU, the college experience was refreshing. I was surrounded by people who felt like family so finally there was no need to code-switch in an educational setting. I could be respected regardless. It was effortless.

Damarius’s linguistic experience echoes Moss (2021): “Black rhetorical excellence has thrived at HBCUs. Pedagogical and scholarly creativity in the teaching of writing has excelled” (p. 146). Yet, linguistics as a discipline has primarily been accessible in elite and predominantly white institutions (PWI), and as such, most courses about African American linguistics are taught at institutions that disproportionately under-enroll Black students (Horsford, 2011). There are currently no Historically Black Colleges or Universities (HBCUs) that have a standalone linguistics department. Due to these overlapping realities, linguistic justice has yet to surface in teaching pedagogy of higher education. We seek to harness the power of Black rhetorical excellence at HBCUs to make such linguistic justice a reality through our work on the Students' Right to Their Own Writing (SRTOW) guides. This work is an attempt to address and protect Black college student identities and voices in higher education, falling in the footsteps of so many other social movements and advancements in the United States that began with the insights and actions of Black college students (see, e.g., Libresco, 2015). In this manuscript, we report the development of a website that aims to spread general linguistic information about written African American English with Black students, especially those who are not in linguistics classes.

Our research shows that faculty have also experienced similar challenges, and so we share our own positionalities as we grapple with similar questions ourselves, which compel us to do this work.

 

Windows, Doors, and Mirrors: Tying Our Stories to HBCU Legacies

Anne

I write as the daughter of Renard Charity, MD, a father who is a double HBCU graduate. Dr. Charity attended Virginia Union University, where he often caught rides to class and lived with relatives to make it work. His brilliance and hard work got him accepted to Meharry Medical College, where he graduated near the top of his class and became a resident, then the chief resident, and then an instructor of OBGYN at Columbia Physicians and Surgeons in NY. He returned home to serve his local community in Richmond, Virginia, and that commitment to community and the health, education, and welfare of Black women led me to my current work. I also write as the daughter of a mother whose parents were both double HBCU graduates. My maternal grandfather attended Howard University as an undergraduate and Shaw University as a graduate student. It was there he met my grandmother, who earned an undergraduate degree and two master’s degrees from Shaw– in education and in history. 

I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, so local HBCU graduates were there for community and culture. My and my mother’s educational paths were dedicated to the integration of often hostile white spaces, so it was the HBCU scholarship and care that sustained them. Reunions, Gold Bowls, and visits with HBCU educators and students reminded me of the rich world I was doubly lucky to be a part of, sometimes apart and sometimes intersecting with the white daily world that made up her life. I am also very conscious that the economic privilege and stability that I have enjoyed her entire life is due to these HBCU educations and the economic stability they afforded my community in Richmond, VA, from which her parents drew their patients. 

And then I realized I could be a connector. A Jesse Ball DuPont grant allowed me to form close partnerships with HBCU educators who were dedicated to high-impact practices, including writing instruction and undergraduate research. Those partnerships led to joint classes and events with students and colleagues at the College of William and Mary and Norfolk State and Virginia State Universities. When I was recruited to the University of California Santa Barbara, I applied to the UC-HBCU fund and established a UC-HBCU program for students interested in linguistics. I also helped my colleagues, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, advocate for changes to the UC-HBCU fund policies that helped them be more active and successful participants in the program. Through my experiences mentoring and advising HBCU students in the UC-HBCU program and in my position as associate dean of educational affairs at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, I have found HBCU students to be excellent writers and curious students who wanted to learn more about their language varieties and had so much to teach us– their approach is Black informed and often English, psychology and speech and hearing informed but not so many had the sociolinguistic information needed to make critical connections between their lived and educational experiences and their professional and educational career paths. 

My mother created a visual representation of our lived learning experiences. There are a set of doors in the house with three panels—one for each generation of our story. The first panel represents the HBCU experiences of my grandparents. The second panel represents the HBCU and other experiences of my parents and siblings. The third generation represents my nieces' experiences at Stanford, where I try to have them experience a small piece of the warmth and love that an HBCU community provides every day.

 

Kia

The gift of language, for me, has always been gilded with Black.  When I think about the birth of my passion for coding and decoding, for writing and the twisting together of words, I think about my grandfather and North Carolina.  I think about the pride with which he searched the curve of Sweetfern and Carolina Rose, his nostalgia thick as we drove from Snowhill to Raleigh, how the gravel crunched underneath us as he eased the car to the road in front of Etsey Hall at Shaw University.  

The old space—our mausoleum of Black learning—is the flower vase from which my grandfather’s story bloomed. My grandfather was the son of teachers blacklisted for their involvement with the NAACP, a graduate of Shaw University at 18, Howard Medical School at 22, Harvard School of Public Health, and eventually the first Black doctor to be promoted to general officer in the Army on active duty.  He was the devoted husband to my grandmother, whose educational roots at N.C. A&T. also come from the Carolina soil. So because of my grandfather, I knew that my ancestors called to me through language and education.  

Without HBCUs, the work I did with my Black students in Harlem to weave language and story with justice and liberation, would not have been possible.  And so, as I move to read and write my way into deeper relationships with the Black students, teachers, and communities that have grown me, I do so knowing that we can’t do the dreaming, the imagining, or the doing of Black futures without doing so in community and partnership with HBCUs.  

 

Marie

I was born and raised in a small suburb right outside of Atlanta, in Gwinnett County, Georgia. With my parents being immigrants, I didn’t feel the most connected to my ethnic roots, but I found great strength and pride in my schooling. Education was always central in my life and I knew from the moment I started high school that I had to go to college. And I was lucky enough to attend a pretty well-resourced, public high school, in the biggest school-system in the state. Moreover, Georgia is home to over 50 colleges and universities to choose from, 10 of them being HBCUs. Ironically, despite such a close proximity to HBCUs, my high school was not intentional at all about encouraging students to attend them. From my guidance counselors to my homeroom teachers—most faculty members at my high school were white. Moreover, with a large portion of us being low-income and on free/reduced lunch, most of the colleges and universities being marketed to first-gen, high-achieving students were those in partnership with full tuition/full-ride scholarships like Posse, Questbridge, etc. With most of the universities on such lists being PWIs, I was always greatly discouraged from applying to HBCUs. 

 My entire educational journey has transpired at predominately white spaces and institutions—including middle school. Because of this, I would often seek mentorship from Black Educators at my institutions. One of the most impactful educators that I had the chance to work with at my undergraduate institution was a HBCU-educated professor of cultural psychology. Through his mentorship, I learned a great deal about cultural psychology and Afrocentric theories of research that seek to center and humanize Black people as they navigate their respective societies. My coursework and research projects in his lab were foundational in my interest in studying the academic experiences of bidialectal students. As I progress in my scholarly journey, I only have interest in studying Black people, and centering my communities in my work. But, I feel like I have to work extra hard to undo and unlearn my approach to studying my people, which was largely informed by non-Black academics. I lean heavily on the work that has come out of HBCUs, as well as the work that has been inspired by HBCUs—ones that center us, with our progression in mind. 

 

Hannah

I taught middle school in Norfolk, Virginia. Although I grew up as a student in Virginia public schools and went to a Virginia college for my undergraduate education, I did my teacher training at a PWI in the Northeast. Meanwhile, many of my Norfolk Public School colleagues received their education degrees from colleges and universities in the Virginia Tidewater area, including many who went to programs at the HBCU Norfolk State University. From my childhood, I was familiar with the Virginia public school landscape – the valued role of Black culture and language in schools juxtaposed with the racist institutional practices of tracking and frequent standardized testing. Yet, coming to Norfolk Public Schools, I was certainly an outsider as a new white teacher moving back to Virginia from Pennsylvania and trained in practices, like reading and writing workshop (Atwell), that differed in many ways from both traditional and contemporary Southern pedagogy. Meanwhile, my colleagues from Norfolk State University had trained in the Norfolk community - with their future colleagues and students. 

In my teacher training, I had experienced a sense of disconnect: my program was explicitly social-justice focused, yet there were only a few Black students in my classes and some of my Black peers shared with me the ways in which the curriculum and instruction excluded their perspectives. This disconnect became starker when I took my training to Norfolk Public Schools. It was abundantly clear that I had been trained by white faculty and their teaching assistants in what they believed was best for students of color with little to no input from Black teachers, especially Southern Black teachers. While I was taught to see practices like standardized test preparation and traditional classroom management as antithetical to social justice, my HBCU colleagues learned to teach in a Black-centered environment with a focus on the Virginia Standards of Learning. African American English was an integral part of their classrooms – including Black Southern discourses of classroom management – and, in many ways, not mutually exclusive with test preparation. Standardized tests were normed on students like me, so who was I to say something like I was taught, “Let’s put aside the test prep and just read”? 

From an academic standpoint, it was my linguistics training more than my education training that won the trust of my colleagues, because it was from linguistics that I gained a comprehensive understanding of patterns of reading and writing. Meanwhile, HBCUs do not tend to offer linguistics. PWIs, meanwhile, have failings in their curricula, including a common lack of understanding in both education and linguistics that Black people rather than white people are the experts in Black language and culture. I largely gained this understanding elsewhere – from my childhood and K-12 education. And it is with this understanding, tied with my linguistics background and a deep appreciation of the work of HBCUs in preparing teachers of Black communities, that I have contributed to the SRTOW website.

-----

These windows, doors, and mirrors compel us to ask: what kinds of approaches should we take toward linguistic varieties in the English classroom across academic institutions and contexts? Historically, progressive educators and scholars have taken different approaches. On one end of the spectrum, you’ll find a primarily navigational approach, one that emphasizes the importance of imbuing Black students with the writing tools they need to successfully maneuver through dominant society; often, this looks like centering mainstream white English with the assumption that students will be expected to perfect mainstream white English in future jobs and in graduate programs (Bean et al., 2003). This approach has been seen as a necessity to repair inequality and to help students face unjust educational and work environments. Within this stance, students’ home languages can be relegated to tools that classroom teachers use to help acquire mainstream language skills. Other scholars argue for a more pluralistic approach to how language should be used in writing courses, encouraging teachers to decenter mainstream white English, but still keep it as a part of the curriculum (Metz, 2017). 

Recently, however, a different and arguably more radical approach has emerged from the scholarship. This approach argues that teachers of Black students should comprehensively and intentionally center Black language varieties and demands that teachers of Black students stop encouraging students to code switch, and stop using standard English as the “communicative norm” (Baker-Bell et al., 2020). Centering Black students and Black language varieties in the classroom as the goal, rather than the means to that goal, is a method that has societal transformation in mind. This approach makes our mission and our teaching truly transformational and Black centered. The goal here explicitly refrains from centering student navigation of dominant society through language and instead aims to create classrooms that are microcosms of an otherwise world in which Black language varieties are synonymous with academic language. In centering Black language varieties, we harken back to historical arguments on the purpose of Black education.  As Carter G Woodson saw it in 1933, Black education must move away from a fixation on “what others have shown that they can do” and move instead towards “developing [Black students’] latent powers that [they] may perform in society a part of which others are not capable” (1933). In regard to language, he specifically urged educators to dive into the study of Black “linguistic history” to encourage students to utilize the power of Black language to feed the communal uplift and enrichment of the Black community.  Woodson, himself a former dean at Howard and faculty at what is now West Virginia State University, had a deep commitment to the education of Black students in the HBCU context when writing about the blossoming of Black students’ latent powers.  It is time now to build upon his legacy in the field of language by acknowledging and growing the power of Black language in our students.

Ultimately, if we want to truly transform society, and work towards creating in our classrooms the seeds of a future where Black language is as valued as mainstream white English, we must work together with Black students and encourage them to be designers of their own educational (and societal) destinies.  We must be wary of what Savannah Shange calls “carceral progressivism” in our approach to language—as educators we must not “prefigure destinations” for our students by assuming that what they need is to acquire mainstream white English language skills for test scores, college acceptances, etc. (Shange, 2019), especially as we increasingly see that even degrees from the most prestigious institutions don’t protect Black people from the daily threats of racism (Getachew, 2019). In addition, the racism is also structural. Many of our HBCU student collaborators have noted how AAE is much more frequently taught in elite institutions as classes but is not so often offered as a class at HBCUS (Calhoun et al., 2021; Thornton, forthcoming).

While linguistic minoritization is clearly a structural issue that requires transformation from the top down—such as registrars and universities requiring courses on the use of Black language varieties for their own purposes, we also believe that transformation can also happen from the daily practices that educators choose to engage in their classrooms.  As educators, we know the power that can come from changing instructional choices for our students can blossom students' successes, pushing our institutions and systems to adapt and change. Therefore, we provide some specific suggestions that educators can use in their daily classroom practices to uplift Black language for its own sake. Ultimately, we believe that educators should explicitly explain the motivating debate behind instructional choices regarding Black language. Only then can our students make informed decisions about their own use of language. Student agency and self-determination are necessary conditions for us to move toward liberation in our classrooms. 

One way to encourage students to harness their own linguistic agency is to ask them to write a cover letter for their assignments, in which students position themselves as decision-makers in their writing.  Here we can push students to be thoughtful about why they choose to write in certain language varieties depending on their audiences and purposes in their writing.  And, to encourage students to move beyond the dynamic of writing in mainstream English because of its navigational potential, we encourage instructors to include writing exemplars and models across disciplines and professions where writers have explicitly chosen to use Black language varieties, even in the face of the seductive pull of mainstream language.  

Some examples might include the works of Black writers like Tressie McMillian Cottom whose book of essays Thick purposefully jumps back and forth between mainstream English and Black language, who views her writing as an intellectual project to “naturalize the sound of expert information in a Black American woman’s voice” (Toor, 2021). The online blog “Very Smart Brothas,” a column of the online newspaper The Root, can show students the power of Black language representation in the sphere of journalism, where the founders choose to highlight writers who break mainstream white language rules as a way of signaling to their intended Black audience that the writing is decidedly for the Black community. And then of course there is always a plethora of examples in literature like Zora Neale Hurston who decidedly chose to center Black colloquial language in Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937.  And these are only a few examples.  The above writers, among others, are covered in more detail on the website that is described further in the next section, that aims to showcase the power of Black writing across disciplines and professions. Ultimately, what these and many other examples show, is that Black voice is central to the work of many Black creators, and that choosing to explicitly center Black language is a way of growing our dexterity as writers and as change-agents.  

 

The Students’ Right to Their Own Writing Website

The Students’ Right to their Own Writing (SRTOW; srtow.org) website intentionally provides guidance for teachers of writing courses, considering the fact that writing courses can serve as an especially appropriate setting of empowerment for Black students, where they can be equipped with linguistic information about African American English (e.g., Perryman-Clark, 2013; Richardson 2003). These courses, including first-year writing courses, often have goals that center on developing students' rhetorical knowledge and linguistic independence. Understanding African American English, its linguistic nature as well as its cultural significance to Black students, is central to their development as writers (Richardson). Moreover, for decades, the field of composition has asserted that students have a right to their own language, through their position Students' Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL), which is largely based upon leading research on African American English (CCCC, 1974/2014). 

With a Research Initiative Grant from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) supporting the conception of our website, we addressed writing feedback from the perspective of what both Black college students deserve and what their instructors need to know about African American English. We based the guide’s content on what we know about African American English in educational spaces from our prior research (Charity Hudley & Mallinson, 2011, 2014; Franz, 2019), including the language patterns that students make use of in their writing and how instructors tend to respond to those patterns. As we drafted and revised the content, Angela Rowell, a graduate student in Speech, Language, Hearing Sciences with a BA in Media Studies, led our website design efforts. Angela focused on creating accessible web layout and engaging visuals to capture the content’s core points. See Franz et al. (2022) for further description of our design process and methods.

Our goal throughout the guides is to demonstrate and explain practical examples. This approach provides readers with immediate take-aways for their practice or college studies. In their respective sections of the guides, students and instructors can find examples of African American English in college student writing, variations in classroom grading and feedback, and African American English across genres. For students, we additionally emphasize questions to ask instructors during class, office hours, and individual conferences.

As we provide example feedback for instructors, we differentiate culturally sustaining comments from more traditional feedback methods, given how the former consider the sociolinguistic detail and the rhetorical value of language variation. Each set of example feedback opens with culturally sustaining comments, maintaining emphasis on what instructors can do rather than simply on what to avoid. Examples of culturally sustaining comments include questions about students’ choice (e.g., “Does your use of ‘you’ serve to draw in the reader here?”) and explicit descriptions that help students understand feedback (“This use of idiom matches your engaging writing style and helps us hear your voice”). These forms of feedback are more descriptive and explanatory and better suited to encourage a student’s linguistic autonomy. While keeping the emphasis on positive examples, we also include contrasting, traditional comments that are not culturally sustaining. Our aim is to show readers what culturally sustaining comments offer students that traditional comments do not. The traditional comments include corrections and labels such as “unclear pronoun choice” or “informal language.” These types of comments tend to be vague and encourage the student writer to assimilate towards prescriptive linguistic norms and standards.

To help readers see culturally sustaining comments in context, the website includes graded student papers in two versions: a how-to-respond version and a how-not-to-respond version. These sample graded papers put together our recommended feedback in response to  different facets of written African American English, including organization, word choice, grammar, and spelling. Below is an excerpt from one of the sample student papers with culturally sustaining comments:

Unlike the 2000 Election, the 2008 Presidential Election was a historic election due to the story behind the candidates participating in it. For the first time in United States History, an African-American was running for the most powerful office in the United States. Illinois Senator Barack Obama was a young, African-American lawyer who was poised to be the first African-American President. But he was not running unopposed. [Instructor comment: This stylistic variation between long and short sentences, including fragments like this one, can help maintain your reader’s interest] John McCain, the senior Senator from Arizona ran opposite of Obama. The story of these two candidates couldn’t be anymore different. Senator John McCain was an experienced politician serving his fourth term in Senate at the time. McCain was also a Navy Veteran who served in the Vietnam War. Obama on the other hand had just begun his first term as a United States Senator and had no prior military experience. Despite their differences, these two men ran in one of the most historic races in American history foreshadowing the most historic election outcome in history.

The candidates in the 2008 Presidential Election displayed two different and unique communication styles in order to appeal to America’s voting population. Barack Obama campaigned as a “Man for the People” [Instructor comment: The capitalization here gives a sense of naming a legitimate rhetorical style. Do Alim and Smitherman capitalize this phrase as well?] (Alim & Smitherman, 2012). By campaigning as man first and politician second, he connected on a personal level with all voters, specifically African-American voters. Obama style [Instructor comment: Here you have variation in possessive form. “Obama style” can also be “Obama’s style.” This variation can work well with your points about style-shifting! Think about such variation strategically. Who is your audience? How do they themselves style-shift?] of campaign communication was revolutionary and in my opinion [Instructor comment: How does your opinion relate to the evidence from your sources? Your perspective can build on and be in conversation with your sources, so explain these connections to your readers] this drastically affected the outcome of the election. Obama used a technique known as Style-shifting (Alim & Smitherman, 2012) to communicate with voters. Style shifting is a technique where the speaker will change his or her diction depending on the audience that the speaker is addressing. Obama used this technique effectively and was able to appeal to a wide variety of voters. The best case of Obama using this technique was when he was eating at a restaurant in Washington D.C. Obama had just ordered his food and was preceding to hand a twenty-dollar bill to the cashier. When the cashier attempted to give Obama his change back, Obama replied “Nah, we straight” (Alim & Smitherman, 2012). The use of the lexical variant of the word no, “nah”, made Obama’s appeal as a “Man for the People” (Alim & Smitherman, 2012). Obama combined his use of style shifting with a heavy social media campaign to appeal to voters. John McCain on the other hand [Instructor comment: Repeating phrases can be engaging to your audience. Could depend on the reader, though, so it would be good to get feedback from different readers] used George W. Bush’s communication style of grassroots campaigning. McCain encouraged Americans to “Live off of the Land” [Instructor comment: As above, the capitalization can achieve a particular effect. Does Claiborne capitalize this phrase as well?] (Claiborne, 2007). McCain’s entire campaign was centered on making America more “Financially viable” (Claiborne, 2007). His ideas of financial viability were shown throughout his campaign communication through taking advantage of free advertising events such as debates and public speeches. These two different campaign communication styles made each candidate appeal to specific audiences and this led to a record outcome at the polls.

Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential Election and became America’s first African-American President of November 4, 2008. Obama won single handedly in the Electoral Colleges with a victory margin of 365 – 173 and won 52.86% of the popular vote (Leip, 2012). When it came down to the actual election, Obama had 69,499,428 compared to 59,950,323 votes that McCain obtained (Leip, 2012). The 2008 Elections also had a rise in the amount of African Americans who participated in the election. About 65% of African American [Instructor comment: This variation is similar to the possessive variation I mentioned above. Here you have plural variation. “65% of African American” can also be “65% of African Americans.” Again, I think your linguistic choice works well here for writing about style-shifting] voted in the election, which equates to about 16 million of the 131 million votes casted [Instructor comment: More African American English variation here as well! The standardized past tense form of “cast” is “cast.” Consider both your audience—what forms do they use—and your purpose. The variation aligns with your style-shifting topic] (File, 2013). I believe that Obama’s ability to Style-shift gave him the opportunity to connect with a diverse group of voters specifically African-American and young voters.

This culturally sustaining feedback asks questions to encourage the student writer to make their own rhetorical choices. The comments also provide sociolinguistic detail so that the student has the tools they need to decide how to revise based on their goals and intended audience. Franz (2024) gives further guidance on how instructors can incorporate different types of culturally sustaining comments into their feedback on students’ writing. Franz (2024) also demonstrates models for using this recommended feedback in a range of classroom contexts, taking into account that many writing instructors don’t have time to write lengthy comments on each student’s paper.

The SRTOW website provides a second version of the above sample paper, this time graded with more traditional feedback. These comments correct and label the student’s writing without context and without support for the student’s linguistic agency. For example, “Obama style” and “65% of African Americans” are corrected without explanation of the linguistic variation. Other parts of the paper are labeled “redundant” or “informal word choice.” In response to “in my opinion,” the student writer is told, “remove yourself from the research” without information on why or how to make this revision.

Given how limited instructor education is in both language variation and writing feedback, we find that it is important to empower students with resources that allow for them to reimagine their goals for courses and assignments. For instance, sometimes a student may aspire to get the best feedback possible to develop as a writer, while still maintaining their own voice in their writing. In other circumstances, a student may primarily be interested in maintaining an A in a particular class so that they can move on with their studies. And at other times, a student may want to promote the value of African American English in writing, as well as the rights of Black students in their classes. Regardless of the goal, while it is important to note that attention to sociolinguistic variation and detail is often key, it is also important to note that student goals for writing will vary widely in an HBCU context, as HBCU students may have a broad range of prior writing experiences and intentions for developing their writing while in college. On the website, we suggest questions that students could ask themselves as well as their instructors in the name of self-advocacy and feedback solicitation. Questions that students might consider include:

• What do you want to get out of the class and the particular assignment? How can you use their feedback to improve certain writing areas that you would like to develop? 
• If you’re required to say what type of feedback you would like: My goals for college and for after college are______. Considering my goals, what do you think is the most important area of writing/oral communication for me to focus on? 
• Do the instructor’s criteria mention anything about language, standard English, grammar, mechanics, style, voice, or something similar? Does the instructor’s criteria for language and writing include space for your own language and voice? 

If students receive unhelpful feedback, they can in turn ask questions that invite their instructors to provide more descriptive feedback:

I see you made a lot of comments on ___(ex: grammar, punctuation, citation, etc.)__. This pattern/style is new to me. Can you explain how to use it or point me to some resources on this pattern/style?

I see that this part of my paper was __(ex: confusing, unclear, unreadable, unfocused)___. What I have written is how I would communicate this idea using my language patterns. What alternative language patterns would be better for communicating this idea to you or my audience?

 

What HBCU Faculty and Students Say about SRTOW

We gathered feedback on SRTOW through focus groups. We oversaw four faculty focus groups with a total of thirteen participants and two student focus groups with a total of eight participants. Participants in our faculty focus groups were scholars of Black language and literacy practices across disciplines such as linguistics, K-12 education, and college composition at both HBCUs and PWIs. Here, we highlight responses from HBCU faculty. We offered participants the choice to either associate a pseudonym or their real name to their testimonies and insights. 

A number of faculty members talked about SRTOW’s pragmatic and useful approach to synthesizing what decades of scholarship have told us about teaching. For example, Dr. David Green of Howard University shared:

I really do like the idea of examples. The more the merrier… [This approach is] not to try to legislate, but [offering] ways to respond or to get the student to think differently about their language. [The website] answers a lot of questions that teachers have, [especially for] people who are willing, but don’t have the time for the deep reading.

Dr. Green went on to list additional institutional contexts where the SRTOW approach is needed: Writing Center training, teacher training and retreats, curriculum committees, and classes and professional development around feedback. His book Visions and Cyphers (Green, 2016) shares his personal and professional vision for the work that is needed. 

Other participants, such as Dr. Kendra Mitchell of Florida A&M and Candice Thornton of Clark Atlanta University, similarly suggested the SRTOW material and approach for writing center training. Much of the learning is said to take place in writing centers, which serve as areas that must both assuage student anxieties regarding the use of home languages in formal writing examples, while also preparing students for the real world, where nonstandard language use is often stigmatized and exoticized (Mitchell & Randolph, 2019; Thornton, forthcoming). For example, participants addressed the role of writing centers in disseminating the power of African American English against a backdrop of entrenched language ideologies that students and faculty have internalized, including through years of educator feedback. In one of our focus groups, Candice Thornton described these ideologies:

Because a lot of the feedback given is still rooted in some problematic rhetoric, when we tell students that they’re incorrect or [their writing] could be done better, we’re still maintaining the linguistic hegemony.

In the same focus group, Dr. Mitchell further explained how these ideologies impact instructor feedback:

Even if by a miracle you can get your whole English department on board, you still need to interact with prescriptivism that is deeply rooted. We are up against affective and practical resistance. These are the things that bolster [comments] like ‘word choice’ and ‘awkward.’

Dr. Mitchell continued by illustrating how she works with students at her HBCU, based on their own writing needs and despite entrenched prescriptivism, and how the writing center can be a venue for negotiating with students, faculty, and language ideology:

“There’s something about the way that you’re writing that you value. You might not know what it is; let’s find it.” On my campus, students are kind of searching for something, but are not sure what they’re searching for… “Why isn’t anyone telling us [about the power of African American English in writing]?” They’re feeling behind the eight ball, but people publish on [African American English] and you can actually do something with this. I have a special eye on students who feel like they can’t do it. I have the privilege of teaching where I graduated from. I think this website and centering it on the writing center space gives students different angles. 

The SRTOW approach and the approaches that Dr. Mitchell uses address the needs that students expressed in our focus groups. In thinking about the value of language variation, some student participants remarked on the importance of being able to take feedback, and revise their work while still maintaining their voice (see also Hankerson, 2017; Mitchell, 2020). When asked about what they wish they learned about writing in college, one participant stated:  

What would [have been] helpful [would have been] getting training in how you maintain your voice across disciplines. That is how bias is manifested. It’s not about what I’m saying but how I’m saying it but with my Black woman voice. Keep your own voice in your writing so that I’m staying true. Get professors to understand that people will use African American English in a way that is rhetorically powerful but considered incorrect grammar.

Considering how subjective writing can be, and how expectations can range from course to course, themes from our student focus groups covered helpful and affirming feedback as well as unhelpful and discriminatory feedback. Regardless of the type of feedback, a common theme among the student participants was that non-explanatory feedback was hard to learn from: 

I would spend tons of time on an assignment and get a B. Why? Then do one last minute and get an A: “This is amazing.” What did I do differently? I didn’t understand or get feedback on what changed. I want to repeat what I did here, but I don’t know exactly what I did.

The SRTOW questions to ask instructors are designed for students to get answers to questions about what they did well or can improve on with a level of sociolinguistic detail.

Participants from the alum focus groups identified writing courses in programs at their respective universities as providing them the proper preparation to write a wide range of papers post-college, as well as for a wide range of audiences: 

I went on to graduate school to do many different types of writing for different types of audiences: creative writing, action research, all built into translational research for community-based research. I wrote grants for NIH and NSF, also policy [writing] for the Secretary of  Education office. [I needed to] be able to quickly tailor for the audience. 

The feedback we received in both the faculty and student focus groups stressed the need for SRTOW and related work. We have expanded on the website with the book A Linguistically Inclusive Approach to Grading Writing: A Practical Guide  (Franz, 2024). The book demonstrates the need for instructors to grade and comment for linguistic justice in writing classrooms; analyzes common grading and commenting approaches through the lenses of language variation, audience design (Bell, 1984), and multicultural education (Banks, 2020); and provides models of responses to student writing that attend to students' linguistic agency. Each chapter ends with questions for instructors to self-assess their grading and feedback practice and a list of recommended practices.

 

Conclusion

A quote from Lilla Watson drives our work, “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” Our work with SRTOW has shown us more than ever that we can’t figure out linguistic liberation with a focus on one kind of university experience. And our experiences with and as K-12 teachers have led us to the insights of HBCU-trained teachers that are invaluable to our pedagogical efforts. The linguistic complexities are most rich and comprehensively addressed when we work together across contexts and across the full diaspora. We know that Black students and teachers want and deserve to benefit from Black-centered linguistic knowledge. As we state in Charity Hudley et al. (2022), we want to know even more about what Black students want– what we know so far: 

You want not to be broke. You want to learn about the world. You want to see yourselves in the material you are learning. You want to create knowledge. You want a quality experience. If you don’t go to an HBCU or an MSI, you may want more people who look and sound like you at the college you attend. If you attend an HBCU or MSI, you may want your institution to get the resources and support it deserves. You want to know how to do well in college so you can help other Black students do well. You want to know how to get a good job. You want a sense of community while learning. I derive endless joy from working with students. I see you. I hear you. You are worth it.

That is what makes this work so important. Thanks again to everyone who has participated in this work and have made this scholarship and our lives more rich. 

 

This work is sponsored by a Research Initiative Grant from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Thanks to our website collaborators Dr. Michelle Petty Grue (University of California, Santa Barbara), Angela Rowell (San Francisco State University), and Sierra Johnson (College of William & Mary). Thank you to Christine Mallinson for your valuable suggestions and feedback. And thanks to Dr. Kendra Mitchell for inviting this work and giving us a home among our HBCU colleagues.

---

 

Hannah Franz is the Associate for Graduate Advisement at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Her book A Linguistically Inclusive Approach to Grading Writing: A Practical Guide (Teachers College Press) was published in spring 2024. She is also a co-auther of The Indispensable Guide to Research: Success in and Beyond College (Teachers College Press). Hannah has a Ph.D. in Educational Policy, Planning, and Leadership from the College of William & Mary, an M.S.Ed. in Reading/Writing/Literacy from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in Linguistics from North Carolina State University, and a B.A. in Linguistics from the College of William & Mary.