Negotiating Southernness: How Speaking a Socially Stigmatized Dialect Complicates Preservice Teachers' Identities and Linguistic Ideologies

• In Event: Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Overcoming Fear, Fostering Understanding: Preservice Teacher Identity

Abstract

Despite calls from scholars and English Language Arts organizations, teacher education programs often inadequately prepare pre-service teachers (PSTs) with the sociolinguistic knowledge necessary to teach diverse populations (CCCC/NCTE, 1974; Delpit, 1988; Author, 2006). To better equip PSTs with research-based, language-related pedagogies, we created a four-week, online “mini-course” on language variation which drew from Critical Language Pedagogy (Author, 2008), an approach requiring students to critically examine and challenge ideologies surrounding language, dialects, and power. This paper examines data from three public American universities, two Southern and one Midwestern, to assess how regional differences affect PSTs’ knowledge and development of sociolinguistic perspectives. Specifically, we examine how being Southern shapes language ideologies in PSTs’ online discussions of sociolinguistic content knowledge and pedagogy.

Authors

• Jeanne Dyches Bissonnette, University of North Carolina

• Jessica Hatcher, North Carolina State University

• Jeffrey Reaser, North Carolina State University

• Amanda J. Godley, University of Pittsburgh