PROPOSAL #1 Code-Meshing the Curriculum: A Student- and Faculty-Centered Framework for Social Justice In a culture that assumes dominant language practices are standards--rather than conventions that change over time as all language does--we struggle in our own writing classrooms to respond to student writers in ways that both value their linguistic background and help them make empowering linguistic choices. This tension may be felt to an even greater extent in writing centers. As writing center practitioners, we hear first-hand accounts from students whose instructors have told them to “sound less Chinese” and “more American,” denying students’ identities and increasing writing anxiety. One undergraduate tutor, motivated by similar anecdotes in her tutoring sessions, conducted a focus group with NOAH students in the 2016-17 academic year. NOAH students reported coming to the writing center looking for support but being made to “feel stupid” by tutors who “talked down” to them about their understanding of English, asking questions like, “do you know what a verb is?” These narratives reflect that racist pedagogies are active within our institution and that their effects are felt by students of color. As we develop our understanding of racist pedagogies within our own writing classrooms and writing center, we feel a particular urgency to address this problem with the wider institution and find ways to promote equity in the teaching of writing across the curriculum. We recognize the institutional demand--and indeed our own conditioning for success in college--to teach students not only to use Standard Academic English (SAE) when culturally appropriate, but to value it above other forms of communication. This move devalues the rich linguistic backgrounds of many of our students and privileges linguistics “whiteness.” Following LeCourt, we believe that “a close examination of how writing across the curriculum has been theorized points to some disturbing possibilities which include the acculturation of students into an already normalized discourses, the reproduction of dominant ideologies that these discourses support, and the silencing of difference." The awareness that SAE impacts the teaching of writing leads us to imagine how we can effectively incorporate language diversity into the curriculum as a response to marginalization. To understand language diversity and how language is racialized further illuminates our understanding of institutional racism and implicit bias in our own practices. Our roles as writing teachers, both in the classroom and in the writing center, increase our awareness of Hofstra students’ language and dialect diversity. These roles also increase our awareness of the hegemonic structures influencing language use within the institution. Higher education--and indeed the world we live in--positions us to unquestionably assume that “Standard English” exists and “is the most proper, sophisticated, and clear way to speak English” (Greenfield 35). But Greenfield points out that these assumptions, and even our attempts to work against them, produce inherently racist pedagogies. The institution positions us, as educators, to simultaneously serve as both advocates for and oppressors of our students, particularly students of color and multilingual students. Discursive practices that only value SAE reinforce ideologies, methodologies, and discourse conventions to empower students to succeed within disciplinary discourse communities, but often do not include the perspectives or address the needs of people of color. We propose a translingual approach as one response to SAE in higher education. Students often get penalized for integrating words from their "home" language, and omit the "counterstory" presented by marginalized groups. While many educators teach students an awareness of code switching to reinforce responsible rhetorical choices as students move between academic and non-academic audiences, scholars of code-meshing would argue that expecting students to code-switch devalues students’ identities while privileging linguistic patterns associated with whiteness. By
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