Linguistic Anthropology of Education

Undergraduate / Graduate

Students in this course will learn to think critically about the entangled roles of language and education in processes of sociocultural (re)production, that is, in how forms of social organization and collective meaning-making are produced and/or reproduced. Students will learn to analyze language use as a social activity: not merely as a code for referencing events in the world, but as a way of managing social relations. In reading about language in educational contexts, students will come to see how collectively held beliefs about language and language users inform moral, political, and often (de)racializing evaluations of better and worse ways of speaking, writing, teaching and learning, leading to differential educational opportunities, access, and outcomes. Education will be treated broadly, though there will be a focus on formal educational contexts. Nonetheless, the class will always challenge students to think about "the classroom," including our own, as continuous and contiguous with "the real world."