Language Growth
Narratives of Otherness: Language Education and the Social Divide
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Gorka Bilbao Terreros
This paper delves into how language can act as a weapon of exclusion, evident in everyday language and historical narratives that perpetuate stereotypes and create division. However, language and culture classrooms can become laboratories for dismantling these structures. By analyzing and deconstructing narratives that perpetuate the silencing or exclusion of marginalized voices, they become critical spaces for fostering intercultural understanding and empathy, both on and off campus. Through an exploration of historical and contemporary examples of dehumanizing and divisive discourse, this paper highlights how language contributes to the processes of othering and exclusion. The use of loaded language and thought-terminating clichés are shown to be central mechanisms in these processes, which educators must actively challenge. The paper argues for a pedagogical approach that emphasizes critical thinking and interpretative analysis, treating language not merely as a communicative tool but as a powerful force that shapes reality and social structures. Furthermore, incorporating diverse voices through authentic materials and guest speakers fosters empathy and other-oriented perspective-taking. Students are encouraged to see the world through different lenses, challenging their own biases and fostering a more inclusive understanding. By equipping them with these critical thinking skills, language educators ensure that students are not merely passive recipients of information but are active participants in the ongoing dialogue surrounding the complex sociopolitical challenges shaping our world.
Teaching Writing to Freshmen: Foundational Skills and Language Diversity
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Kimberly Russell
This paper addresses the complexities of teaching writing to freshmen students, particularly those from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. As universities continue to serve a broadening array of students, writing instruction must adapt to meet the needs of individuals who bring different academic, linguistic, and cultural experiences to the classroom. Drawing from both research and personal teaching experience, this study highlights strategies for teaching foundational writing skills, while also focusing on how to address common challenges in grammar, composition, and developing a personal voice. The study emphasizes how the evolving landscape of student demographics necessitates an approach to writing instruction that is inclusive, culturally responsive, and flexible in its pedagogical techniques.
Phaedrus in the Shadow of the Chatbots: On Teaching Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the 2020s
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Jacob Bender
This paper argues that Robert M. Pirsig's 1974 counter-cultural classic "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" merits revived critical attention, for how it has anticipated many of the anxieties among writing instructors and students alike, since the debut of Large Language Model chatbots in the early-2020s. Specifically, this paper analyzes chapters 15-19 of the novel, wherein the narrator reminisces on his time as a composition instructor at Montana State University in the 1950s, when he became deeply critical of the manner by which college students are largely trained to write in a mechanistic, regurgitating, and repetitious manner--language remarkably similar to the modus operandi of 2020s chatbots. That is, students were being trained to write like chatbots decades before the chatbots were ever invented. As Pirsig's near-contemporary Paulo Freire also wrote in 1968's "Pedogogy of the Oppressed," this style of instruction tends “to turn women and men into automatons—the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human” (Friere 74); that is, Freire also saw back how all of these formulaic, impersonal approaches to instruction only trains students to behave like “automatons,” and thus ultimately become replaceable by automatons. Pirsig's novel, then, can provide insight into how to teach writing in a much more humanistic and student-centered manner--which per Freire, is how we should have been teaching them all along.
Teaching Humanities at a STEM University: Research Methods and Popular Culture Rhetorics
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Caroline Koons,
Melika Nouri
Humanities faculty may struggle to get STEM students to engage with humanities classes in their general education. In classes centered on teaching social justice through global social movements, presenter one formulates major assignments around group podcasts as an entry point for archival research methods. In groups, students locate a commonplace archival text from that social movement, then rhetorically connect the textual products from their shared social movement to craft a rhetoric of social justice. Groups produce two podcast episodes over the course of the semester: one focused on a historical social movement, and another focused on a contemporary social movement. Through these assignments, students gain firsthand experience with archival research methods and popular culture media production. Presenter two discusses incorporating pop culture artifacts to cultivate students’ rhetorical knowledge and critical thinking skills in engaging with current social/political issues. Students explore the rhetorical concepts and elements of persuasion in a pop culture artifact, situating it in an ongoing conversation on a given social/political issue (timeliness/ kairos). Students investigate how a pop culture product persuades by identifying argumentative strategies within contextual constraints and exigencies. These practices aim at inviting students to become a more critical consumer of pop culture, and to engage with pop culture artifacts as one representation of a particular issue. Students further research the same issue to expand their knowledge of the public spaces surrounding that issue. The course concludes with multimodal presentations advocating for social change, inspire the audience to take action, and offer ideas for involvement/social change.
