Continuing education for linguists: An approach to linguistics pedagogy
Those who have been present for the longue durée of academic linguistics may be pleasantly surprised to see its slow transition from something of an arcanum to a relatively prominent discursive landmark in public life, thanks to the tireless work of numerous scholar-popularizers (e.g., McWhorter, Pinker, McCulloch, Bender, Bickerton, Charity Hudley, Holliday, Jurafsky, Okrent, Liberman, Everett, inter multissima alia). Linguistics is also somewhat unique among the social sciences in that data from minoritized varieties have been objects of scholarly interest and catalysts of theory construction from the very birth of the field (cf. Bloomfield 1919 on Fox, Cree, and Menominee, Stokoe 1960 on American Sign Language, and Labov 1966 on African American English), even if the users of those varieties have not always been furnished with the support that they need to thrive inside and outside of linguistics, although there are hopeful signs that this is changing.
As the field continues to raise its profile in public life, and as minoritized linguists continue to raise their profiles within the field, the United States is facing a concerted attack on the diversity of linguistic practice, to say the very least (e.g., dismantling of DEI and affirmative-action programs, freezing and elimination of research grants, executive orders designating English as the official language and recognizing only two genders, decommissioning of multilingual webpages and forms, etc.). One way in which universities are complying to these demands while maintaining a diverse student body is by giving greater attention to first-generation status, a prima facie race-neutral criterion that nevertheless correlates with a number of demographic—and, as we argue, sociolinguistic—characteristics that do much to enrich our classrooms. First-generation students are disproportionately multicompetent, whether in English and a heritage language or in mainstream English and a stigmatized, non-mainstream ethnic or regional variety of English. Their experiences of moving between worlds, broadly conceived, cultivate in them a level of metalinguistic awareness that inexorably pushes them into courses in linguistics and its allied fields. Crucially, we observe that these students often do not share the language myths of the white listening subject (Nelson & Flores 2015). We share strategies about how to approach this population from an asset-based perspective (Moll et al. 1992, Paris & Alim 2017, Bucholtz et al. 2017, Rosa & Flores 2017) and how doing so enhances the classroom experience for all students. We couch our interventions in the frame of continuing education for linguists—ways in which we keep our pedagogical practice fresh and responsive to the needs of the current student population.