ABSTRACT
We are professors at the same college but in different departments, who collaborate to teach about issues of diversity. Rebecca Sperling (RS), a social worker, designed and teaches a course called Valuing Difference, using categories such as ethnicity, culture, class, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, nationality, religion, and language to reflect on social mechanisms that both construct and replicate socio-economic and political power, and oppression. Susan Behrens (SB), a linguist, teaches Language and Culture, an examination of the intersections between societal constructs and language forms. We began our collaboration more than ten years ago, and, with our students, continue to examine the material presented in this chapter. In our classrooms, we encourage students to reflect on their use of language, attitudes about accents, dialects, the use of supposedly ungrammatical forms, and language usage in the world around us. We ask our students to challenge their years of exposure to the prescriptive approach to language study most commonly embraced in educational settings. And we collect words of our students, through freewritings and journal entries, tracking changes in attitudes. Here we try to give you a sense of our classroom work. As you read through the chapter, we ask you to refer to and work through the interactive, fieldwork-like exercises we include, and keep track of attitudes you notice (others’ and your own) about the issues we raise.
