Week 8, Post 2A: Students' Rights in a Nutshell

In your second blog synthesize the readings into a single set of issues:
What do we, as writing teachers, need to know from these articles as a group?
What do the readings, taken together, tell us about teaching and learning with students who are speakers of dialects? 
What teaching recommendations can you make based on the readings?
What ongoing questions do the articles raise?
What kinds of discussion questions should we tackle in class?
 Feel free to do this in the form of "10 take-away points."


1. Students' Rights is an extremely sensitive, volatile and political issue.  As such, it should be dealt with delicately, humanely and directly.

2. While some students who feel studying and using SE and its concomitant culture is contrary to their own dialect and culture, other students actually tend to ignore their own culture in order to fit in, thereby denying their own voices.  As teachers, we need to do what we can to ensure that this tragedy does not occur.

3. While many take for granted that SE is the form of English in its ideal form, many linguists and educators see it as just another dialect.  (Many feel SE doesn't even exist; it's just some ideal).  We should be careful not to assign it too much credence.

4. On the other hand, it's the language of prestige and success.  We want to give our students every opportunity to learn and use SE.

5. Many educators, linguists and anthropologists feel a student's identity is intrinsically connected to his home dialect.  It's vital, therefore, to respect students' home dialect; we should never denigrate it or speak of it as an obstacle to learning SE.  SE should be seen as one more dialect of many acceptable dialects.

6. Many linguists agree that the ideal means to learn SE is by using the home dialect as a springboard. 

7. Where possible, students should conduct ethnographic research to study some of the contributions their dialect brings to the general American culture.

8. Students can write narratives that speak about how they became aware of race, class, gender differences.

9. Students can create skits dramatizing the inappropriate use of dialect.

10. Bottom line: it's vital to present SE along with a creative and dignified look at other dialects and how they function.