STUDENTS' RIGHT TO THEIR OWN LANGUAGE
"We affirm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language -- the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language." (SRTOL Resolution, 1974)
PURPOSE
The intention for this project is to look at the historical roots of the Students' Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) movement in the United States which "officially" began with the Conference on College Composition and Communication's (CCCC) 1974 Executive Statement.
By investigating the historical, socio-political, and cultural circumstances that led to the SRTOL movement and its subsequent adoption by the CCCC, I hope to to contribute to extant literature on the subject by drawing parallels between the language, literacies, and historical circumstances at the time of the SRTOL statement and present day. In many ways, the SRTOL resolution's underpinnings in the Black Student Protest Movements of the 1920s and in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s are uncanny analogues to present day polemics surrounding Critical Race Theory in K-12, the proliferation of antiracist pedagogies in college writing classrooms, and the the political upsurge surrounding the Black Lives Matter Movement nationwide. The goal of this project is to begin to address the guiding questions below. |
"...given decades of research on the Black speech community and BL once being the most studied and written about language in the world ...one would assume that Black students’ language practices would have been embraced as a resource for educational innovation in classrooms” (Baker-Bell, 2020, p. 10). Though the 1974 SRTOL resolution encompasses all dialects deviating from SWE, for this project I have chosen to spotlight African American Vernacular (AAV) and Black Linguistic Consciousness (BLC). According to Baker-Bell (2020) “given decades of research on the Black speech community and BL once being the most studied and written about language in the world...one would assume that Black students’ language practices would have been embraced as a resource for educational innovation in classrooms” (p. 10). This isn’t the case. Current research shows that anti-black linguistic prejudices in the writing classroom persist even five decades after the publication of CCCC’s statement, while scholars and practitioners continue to advocate for outcomes that embrace linguist difference and anti-racism.
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