Correcting "Correctness": Writing Teacher Education Courses as Sites for Disrupting Oppressive Language Ideologies

• In Event: Critical Writing in Teacher Education

Abstract

Recognizing language policing as one way writing teachers often participate in dehumanizing pedagogies, we draw on data collected in New Zealand and the United States to explore how oppressive discourses about language manifest within university writing teacher education courses and how we might disrupt those discourses. As we explore discourses of “correctness” and “academic language,” this work offers opportunities to analyze ideologies in the teaching of writing and writing pedagogy in two geographically and culturally distinct contexts. Our overarching questions demand attention to the ways teachers and teacher educators have similar struggles of balance—to both prepare students to succeed within the world as it is now and to prepare them to push against the systems that maintain those inequities.

Authors

• Charlotte L. Land, Pennsylvania State University

• Jessica Cira Rubin, University of Waikato