Please use the Project Summary Template introduced in Session 2: Project Scoping and post your updates here.
Working Summary as of 8/8/23:
This OER reader on the politics of language and multilingualism will serve as a sourcebook for students and teachers with texts, approaches, and activities that can be used across disciplines. We have a special focus on first-year writing courses, and with this book, we aim to move away from conventional textbooks or composition handbooks to engage students in conversations about the pressures on language learning within educational institutions and our societies more broadly. Taking up topics such as language politics, extinction and reclamation, global Englishes, code-switching, descriptive linguistics, linguistic violence, and translation, this reader will create an accessible collection of multimodal texts that can be engaged in different combinations for a range of course contexts. Alongside primary texts, we will include critical frameworks, discussion questions, and writing/revision activities that prioritize multilingualism as an academic resource. We hope that our book can help shift away from the academic culture of remediality and standardization. We are three English Studies faculty with different academic specializations and linguistic backgrounds who are writing as those who regularly seek multilingual texts to create critical conversations in our courses about language, education, and the institutionalization of both. We hope this OER reader is a resource for students and teachers at our sister institutions who are also prioritizing multilingualism in FYW, and it may have a wider reach among colleagues across disciplines such as communications, sociology, linguistics, or cultural studies.
Course and Audience (draft as of 8/8/23):
This OER is designed for adoption across our first-year writing sequence which includes ENGL 0100: Basic College Writing, ENGL 1100: Writing 1, and ENGL 1200: Writing 2. Our audience is both students in these courses and instructors. We are approaching this reader and sourcebook as a tool that can be particularly impactful at an institution like Fitchburg State University that serves many first generation and working class students, prioritizes educational access, and is adapting to better serve its student populations. For first-year writing this means moving away from deficit models and remedial structures and shifting toward more inclusive frameworks including multilingual and translingual composition. Part reader, part sourcebook, we anticipate this resource being potentially valuable to instructors and researchers across composition studies working in a range of institutional contexts.