ABSTRACT
Community and Educational Engagement In Chapter 16, “Community Activism: Turning Things Around,” Arapera Ngaha describes connections between community activism and sociolinguistics, particularly with respect to linguistic rights and language planning. Describing the Māori people’s struggle to save te reo Māori (the Māori language), Ngaha explores ethics in language research in relation to community activism and provides recommendations that center on limiting the power differential between researcher and researched. With a focus on transparency and reciprocity, she calls upon scholars to collaborate with community members to determine the purpose and methods of linguistic work, allow community activists to make most decisions unless linguists are called upon, and actively search for ways to repay the debts of time and insights that community participants provide. In Chapter 17, “Sociolinguistic Engagement in Schools: Collecting and Sharing Data,” Anne H. Charity Hudley surveys various approaches that sociolinguists have taken to integrate linguistic research with educational outreach and social activism. Turning toward application, she explores models of sociolinguistic engagement for those who seek to collect data from and share data with those in schools. In order to collect reliable, valid, and relevant data in and for schools, Charity Hudley compels linguists to read widely in the field of education and related disciplines and to work collaboratively with scholars in these fields to share insights and methods. As early scholars of language and education have pointed out, including Hymes (1980, p. 139), “part of what we need to know in order to change is not known to anyone; teachers are closer to part of it than most linguists.” Charity Hudley makes the case for linguists to collect data from schools and students in ways that address issues of mutual concern, to work with research participants not merely as subjects but as partners, and to paint a comprehensive sociolinguistic picture that places language use within broader social contexts. Case studies and practical strategies highlight how sociolinguists can design research to be maximally useful to scholars as well as schools and communities, so that people who contribute data for research purposes can directly benefit from having shared it. Vignettes 17a and 17b, by Green and Serpell respectively, provide examples of some of the types of data that can be collected in schools, from students. Both authors call for collecting data from students in ways that accurately report on their patterns and norms of language use. Without data that take into account speakers’ range of variation, as Green notes, our measures can lead to false assumptions, both about them and about our research models. Instead, comprehensive and holistic assessments of students’ linguistic and communicative competence can ensure more accurate student assessment, which is particularly important for students from historically underserved groups. As illustrated in Serpell’s vignette, the accurate collection and interpretation of a range of sociolinguistic data are also crucial to the design of an effective literacy curriculum
and therefore to establishing educational policy that supports and serves a multilingual society. In Vignette 17c, Starks emphasizes some of the unexpected difficulties of collecting data in schools, recalling the Pasifika Languages of Manukau Project, in which she worked with a school as an entry point into a multilingual Pacific and Māori community in South Auckland, New Zealand. At the beginning of the project, the principal, who supported bilingualism, provided access for the research and promoted acceptance for it in the community. But the following year, when a new principal took over and the school lost most of its funding for bilingual programs, some of the materials that Starks and her colleagues produced were used in ways that supported a very different political agenda. Even if sociolinguists are unable to plan for the unexpected, Starks’s vignette makes clear the importance of anticipating the fact that micro-level research endeavors can have serious macro-level implications.
