Stephanie Schlitz's Blog

Here’s what was on my mind and here’s the whole, happy DH smorgasbord!

loving the most recent blog posts written by undergrads working for the Martha Berry Digital Archive Project: Hot Toast and Augustus O. Bacon, two superb reads which illustrate the rich, fun, and important work of digital editors and the impressive philological and literary finesse of our students.

examination of stigmatized language varieties is complex stuff, especially in the context of dominant language ideologies, minority oppression, and the well justified – if sometimes too theoretical – debate about standard English. it’s not my practice to introduce highly controversial topics here, in a class, or in my research without representing more than one perspective. and i don’t find contrastive analysis and codeswitching, on the one hand, and interrogation of deeply entrenched dominant language ideologies, on the other hand, to be mutually exclusive topics. in my field, they’re intimately linked, and this means cross-examination of writings by rebecca wheeler with writings by sonja lanehart, for example, is not only necessary but essential to study of the past, present, and future of language ‘standards’, language variation, and institutionalized linguistic prejudice, perhaps most especially when these are examined in the context of educator responsibilities.

lanehart, after all, writing in 2002, summons Sledd (1969) to aid in her dismantling of the ideologies of opportunity, progress, and emancipation and to remind readers that even

“compassionate, liberal educators, knowing the ways of society, will change the color of a student’s vowels because they cannot change the color of their students’ skins” (p. 325).”

even now, a decade later (…over four decades later) — haunting words.

but perhaps cross-examination conveys the wrong intention, because i would argue that the two are allied. questioning what’s standard and why is commensurate with developing methods to address linguistic prejudice in the classroom. and the goal of each? a shared one: systemic change.

as i think ahead toward spending a month in post-colonial Cameroon or toward my History of English mid-term which will ask students to examine parallels between Jamaican Creole and AAVE in the context of debate about translation of the bible into the former, it’s impossible to escape how global and pressing these issues are.

this is the fastest and easiest (and briefest) speaker intro i’ve ever drafted. wheeler’s work and its importance make it easy, and brevity is essential (after all, the heavy lifting is in her talk).

It’s my honor and privilege to welcome Prof Rebecca Wheeler to Bloomsburg University and to introduce you to her this evening. Prof. Wheeler’s work as an educator, her numerous – canonical – books and articles, and her longstanding commitment to linguistically diverse learners underpin the teaching of standard English in many, many classrooms across the nation. But –  I would argue – there is considerably more work to do, and that’s why I’ve invited her to speak with us this evening —

Dr. Wheeler joins us tonight following a talk at Harvard, where she participated in the Annual Alumni of Color Conference dedicated this year to “Disrupting the Discourse” and to “Discussing the Undiscussable” – In every way, her talk this evening is designed precisely to ‘disrupt’ the discourse and to engage us in dialogue about the ‘undiscussable’. Why? So that educators at ALL levels:

• Recognize our responsibility to understand the facts about language variation
• Recognize our responsibilities to dialectally diverse learners

and so that we

• Recognize who and what we sacrifice when we fail to do these things

Please join me in welcoming Prof. Wheeler.

Monday, March 5 @ 7 pm – “Power, Prestige, Prejudice: Dialect as Elephant in the School Room”

have the pleasure today of working with nearly 40 future teachers (and some amazing experienced teachers and colleagues) as part of a workshop for English/Language Arts Education majors at Bloomsburg University. one-word summary of session one with freshmen and sophomore (and junior and senior) preservice teachers: inspiring.

listening to a small group of future educators describe their passion for teaching and learning, their commitment to shaping the lives of their future students through exposure to language and literature, and the amazing stories which explain how they chose the path to teaching – a very good morning!

possibly the most marked part of any classroom based discussion on language variation, perhaps especially ethnically-based dialectal variation, is the pronounced use of the pronoun forms they  and them (wish i could do a frequency count in class and measure the percentage of they/them). but that’s okay. i can see how it’s difficult not to focus on difference, difficult not to assume that “we’re not the ones who are speaking a different variety: they are.” refining our understanding of stigmatized dialects takes study, maybe even practice, and very often the first discussions are the most challenging, entailing radical re-evaluation of perspective. but even with difference as a point of departure, okay,  there are enough common threads eventually to weave a richly textured, more unified understanding. but when i hear future teachers disparaging vernacular/stigmatized varieties after a linguistics class themed around dialectal diversity: a difficult, disappointing day.

In addition to her communication work for the project, MBDA’s spring 2012 undergraduate intern (senior Comm Studies major from Bloomsburg Univ) has started a letter of the week (LOTW) series on Crowd-Ed, and her first two posts are promising. She and an undergraduate research assistant (first-year History major from Berry College) are also completing digital editing tasks on the dev site. Thanks to these students and our undergraduate scanning team (which has already imaged thousands of documents) working in the Berry College Archives, the project is steadily advancing.

Although I never had any doubts about applying for and using funding to hire and train undergrads to support MBDA, I did not entirely predict how essential to development their collective contributions would become. In fact, I’m counting weeks already… not because I’m eagerly anticipating semester’s end, but because – knowing that we’ll be losing several of these wonderful researchers in May – it’s coming much too soon.

check out this osmium-dense new infographic by Melissa Terras ….as I return to this data, I’m struck by how islanded it is and how useful it could be to review these figures in the context of data about the humanities in general or data about the humanities compared to the sciences with the DH data as a cross-section of the humanities data. the snapshot is a brilliant and important start, no question, but i think we’ll need a lot more data and a much larger context to parse it.

& this very smart XKCD money infographic: