A Case Study of Multilingualism in an Historically Black University Writing Center Kendra L

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2015 Language in the Center: A Case Study of Multilingualism in an Historically Black University Writing Center Kendra L. Mitchell

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

LANGUAGE IN THE CENTER:

A CASE STUDY OF MULTILINGUALISM IN AN

HISTORICALLY BLACK UNIVERSITY WRITING CENTER

KENDRA L. MITCHELL

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2015

Kendra L. Mitchell defended this dissertation on December 4, 2015. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Kristie S. Fleckenstein Professor Directing Dissertation

Robert A. Schwartz University Representative

Maxine L. Montgomery Committee Member

Rhea Estelle Lathan Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

In memory of my grandparents: Bishop John F. Mitchell, Mother Essie B. Mitchell, and Samuel E. Sharper, Sr., and in honor of my grandmother, Juanita Sharper

I hope I have made you proud.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“It takes a village to raise a child”—African proverb A common interpretation of this axiom refers to the collective rearing of a child, often extended to mean that no one accomplishes a task alone: the assumption, in turn, is to expect interdependency. Therefore, I thought it befitting to use this saying as a metaphor for the dissertation process, acknowledging the generosity of those who have contributed to its completion. My village is vast, ranging from my committee members to the custodial staff in the Williams building who followed my journey closely, cheering all the way. To my family: thank you, especially my mother, Sherry Arlene Sharper, for accepting the journey and hanging in there even when I was too buried in my scholarship to reciprocate the visits and dote on you in real life as I have desired in my heart. Better days are ahead. To my FAMU WRC family: This project would not exist if you did not embody “Excellence with Caring.” Thank you for always believing in and supporting me. I am especially indebted to Dr. Veronica Adams Yon for more than I can truly acknowledge. To my ALARM covenant family: Thank you Bishop and Pastor Stewart and covenant family for being an added value to my life and a continued support. To the Kingsbury family and fellowship committee: thank you for investing in my scholarship. To my committee: you have been gracious beyond measure, and I am grateful. Dr. Kristie S. Fleckenstein, your tireless generosity has helped not only shape this project but also shape me as a scholar. Your mentorship has been invaluable. Dr. Rhea Estelle Lathan, thank you for believing in this day long before I could see it. Dr. Maxine L. Montgomery, I have learned to be that much more dexterous in my teaching and scholarship because of the opportunities you have extended me and for that I am grateful. Dr. Robert Schwartz, thank you for the insight for future applications of my study. Lastly, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge a few special persons: Dr. Faye Spencer-Maor, you introduced me to rhetoric and composition studies through books and intellectual debates in the FAMU WRC that led to this study. You saw something in me far greater than the simple life I sought, and I will always be appreciative of those days. Dr. Natalie King-Pedroso, you also saw this day before I had the first degree. Thank you for your light and showing me my own. Also, special thanks goes to Janiece Smith for being not only a friend but an answer when I needed it most. And to the many others near and far, baaie dankie (Afrikaans).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... vi 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 2. REVIEW OF LITERATURE ...... 24 3. METHODOLOGY ...... 65 4. ANALYSIS ...... 92 5. CONCLUSION ...... 133 APPENDICES ...... 143 A. IRB APPROVALS ...... 143 B. INITIAL INTERVIEW ...... 146 C. CUED-RECALL INTERVIEW ...... 148 D. SAMPLE CODING ...... 150 E. INFORMED CONSENT FORM ...... 152 NOTES ...... 154 REFERENCES ...... 160 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 172

ABSTRACT

This study included eight self-identify AAL participants, three tutors and five tutees, who negotiated AAL and EAE for two ends: to bond and to work. Given that the tutor-tutee interactions in this study share AAL and EAE, the results of this study revealed that patterns in (a)motivation: reticence, resistance, and diversion. For example, Matthius, an AAL-speaking tutor, used EAE syntactical as well as organizational structures when teaching his participants EAE grammar, but he used rhetorical features of AAL, such as signifying, narrativizing, and indirection, to establish or sustain fictive kinships with his tutees that positively influenced student and tutor outcomes. Meanwhile, Maya's use of these same strategies at time yielded adverse responses. Overall, the interpretation of these data depicts how LPP supports, and at times erodes, the expectation of learning in the FAMU Writing Resource Center.

Though challenges of teaching AAL include the homogenizing HBCUs and deciding who will teach it, the benefits of viewing AAL as multilingualism yielded individual and collective valuation of language and culture. Taken together, AAL tutors and tutees align with Natalie DeCheck’s claim that tutors who share common interests with tutees, such as language, motivate tutees to improve their writing. Specifically, they use AAL to redefine amotivation as an agentive process of learning and instruction. The results of this agency not only expands our understanding of culturally-situated motivation but they also complicates Smitherman’s definition of LPP, to love and hate one’s language simultaneously. Tension between the tutor and tutee, however, proved to be more complex and resulted from varying degrees of LPP. This study, then, also provides insight to intersection of African American language and culture and their impact on AAL student-tutor negotiations of academic literacies. By seeking deeper knowledge of the language and literate practices of African American learners, this dissertation provides a means of supporting and valuing these learners and the spaces they create to value themselves while traversing the often dismal academic terrains.

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Concerned with the 1974 Conference on College Composition and Communication initiative Students Rights to Their Own Language (SRTOL), a resolution calling for writing teachers to respect the rich diversity of languages students bring with them to the classroom, this dissertation investigates the language interactions between the writing tutors and their tutees in a historically black college or university (HBCU)1 writing center and examines the participants’ means of negotiating the challenges common among multilingual learners as expressed by SRTOL. One of the driving questions this resolution asks is, “What should the schools do about the language habits of students who come from a wide variety of social economic and cultural backgrounds?”, and many scholars have argued for African American2 multilingual learners' rights to their language, pointing to the implications of the absence of this right within predominately white universities. However, composition studies has yet to explore the implementation of SRTOL in a historically black university. This dissertation fills that gap. In addition, composition studies has yet to pose this question in terms of HBCU writing centers, sites that may provide insights about these learners and present practices that add value to the larger body of writing center knowledge. Therefore, to better understand the intersection of African American Language (AAL)3 and Edited American English (EAE) and its influence in learning situations, my research addresses three key questions: 1. How are AAL and EAE used in the within an HBU writing center? How do the uses of AAL and EAE reflect linguistic push-pull (LPP)? 2. How does the intersection of AAL and EAE support or erode the writing center’s learning goals as well as the student's and or tutor's perceptions of his or her learning goals? 3. What does this intersection of multiple language practices reveal about the benefits and challenges of implementing multilingual teaching in a HBU writing center? In addressing these questions, this study will provide a closer look into the language interactions between tutors and tutees in hopes to understand the language negotiations among African

American writers. In addition, this study resists the urge to prescribe a singular writing and speech pattern for all African Americans in HBU writing centers because all black speech acts are not AAL. Finally, this study also acknowledges that all speech acts are not evidenced in writing. For these reasons, this study seeks to understand the negotiations between marked EAE and AAL communicative features, acknowledging that there may be identifiable breakdowns in verbal and written speech in both EAE and AAL usage. By enriching our understanding of these shifts in language choices in a HBU writing center, we have the opportunity to develop best writing center practices or tutor education as it relates to AAL speakers and writers. This study situates itself not only in the exigencies of SRTOL but also in my personal experiences as a former student, tutor, and administrator in the selected site. That personal investment is perhaps best illustrated through one student’s response to what I mistakenly considered a successful tutoring session in a historically black university writing center during my tenure as one of its administrators. Student J entered the Writing Resource Center, hereafter WRC or Center, eager to tackle the revisions suggested by his professor. As the invested educator she was, she had walked him down the flight of stairs to the Center’s small room with its accordion-styled dividers. We greeted the student-professor pair with optimism and presented the standard folder with the contract that strongly encouraged writers to improve their craft with concentrated assistance with perfecting their writing. His smile reached across his narrow, caramel face as he straddled the chair across the oblong table we shared and initiated the conference. After skimming the instructor’s brief comments, I agreed that Student J approached the assignment with a nuanced and fresh perspective, which he demonstrated amply in the first few moments of the session, but some of his word choices, sentence structure, and organization did not follow Edited American English (EAE), or academic writing, as expected by the teacher—and most probably most instructors. Much like many of my former clients and staff in the Center, he was fluent in AAL, defined as an Africanized version of American English (Smitherman, Word 3) but less proficient in EAE organizational logic. So while Student J used complex sentence structures, these complexities at times resulted in a mixed construction or the occasional run-on sentence. Additionally, he occasionally provided more detail than necessary, and he would create new verbs or nouns to suit his purposes. To his credit, he had a knack for using figurative language and rhythmic language: his words rolled off the tongue and into the soul. But he struggled with the required EAE. Drawing on our Center's procedures for working

2 with a client’s essay, I had Student J read his essay aloud, while I asked questions like: “What did you mean when you said___?” and “This part of your essay is a little unclear to me; can you tell me what you meant without reading the essay to me?” My goal was to help him retain the virtues of his essay while moving the draft closer to tightly organized EAE revision. As we worked together, he hesitantly acknowledged his tendency to write how he spoke, offering this as if he were at confessional sharing a sin. But, instead of becoming excited about the essay's growing clarity, Student J gradually lost his initial enthusiasm. Instead, he became increasingly irritable when I queried him about his linguistic choices. He protested that delaying his point to the end of his sentence or the end of the paragraph was a deliberate writing choice of which he was proud. And he objected to what he called revising his voice out of his essay. Then, as his body slumped to the right of the chair, his right hand propping his drooping face, defeated, he asked in despair and with agitation, “Ain’t that what I said?” Fearing I was losing him, I changed tactics. Instead of continuing to use Edited American English, I responded to his question in kind: “But that ain’t what you wrote.” With that simple gesture of linguistic camaraderie, I showed my respect for the nuances of his expressions and reengaged him in our joint task, never realizing that, in the process of crafting what I thought was a successful session, I was reinforcing what sociolinguist Geneva Smitherman calls the linguistic push-pull of language so many African American students experience in the classroom and in the writing center. My shift in style represents more than a dialectic variation, a term used to describe the degree of difference between grammars: my exchange with Student J moves beyond the comparison of EAE and AAL grammars into the psychological impact of the constant comparison between those grammars. Smitherman posits that this constant shifting between EAE and AAL reveals an inward fragmentation of a people from an outward source. Specifically, linguistic push-pull is the inward linguistic fragmentation African Americans face, similar to W. E. B Du Bois’s double consciousness theory, resulting in an emotional ambivalence tied to racism in America. The consequence of privileging EAE over AAL is an inflexible society, and unfortunately, the same results can be said of our composition classrooms and writing centers. When Student J protested when I was revising his voice out of his essay, when he drooped in defeat, he not only resisted my primary focus on EAE in our session. I propose that he was also resisting systems that have taught him that his voice did not count. It was as if he were silently

3 asking me what’s wrong with how I say things? and even more devastating what’s wrong with me? It is was in that moment that I realized that in questioning his language, I was questioning his identity and the value of that identity. Elaine Richardson shares a similar experience in the introduction of her first book, African American Literacies. She frames her book-length study around a similar personal experience as an AAL learner in a composition classroom, focusing on the marginalizing she felt from a white male composition instructor who did not consider her cultural background when assessing her writing as subpar. He questioned her use of creative descriptor of roaches—“nocturnal insects”—which left her feeling humiliated (1). His impatience with her language difference led him to shuffle Richardson to the writing center where her frustration intensified, as the tutors remained baffled by her non-standardized language choices. Similar to my initial inability to decode Student J as an AAL learner, Richardson shares a defining moment in her undergraduate career when her non-black professor and tutors were also unable to identify or appreciate her use of AAL. She contemplates the reasons for the graduate tutors’ inability to understand her “plain and simple” writing style until she realized the expectation resulted in compromising her language, culture, and history (2). Their negative attitudes towards her writing was more surprising than her need to revise her, for her experience in her home space had already prepared her for “style shifting”—she realized her success relied on her ability to “Whitenize” her papers (2)—but she was ill-equipped for their limited knowledge about and pejorative predisposition towards African American discourse. Additionally, she was underprepared for the inflexibility of the writing tutors who could not understand her intentions. While she does not disclose the race of those tutors, she does disclose the race of the tutor who became her advocate: her tutor, named A in the text, was a black woman (2). Richardson’s disclosure of A’s race implies that the other tutors were white and uninformed, arguing for a need to educate dominant culture groups about the harm of the lack of linguistic diversity. The breakdown in the tutoring session with Student J both supports and expands Richardson’s justification for linguistic diversity because he and I were supposed to understand each other. In an academic space where pride in black heritage and culture is lauded, I was unable to see a variation of black linguistic heritage in front of me because initially my academic literacies overshadowed Student J’s chance to see himself in his writing, to see himself in this academic space (Richardson 2). By unknowingly imposing a monolingual language

4 pedagogy, I was discrediting the rich language resources he brought with him to the task of writing and speaking. Nor is Student J an isolated product of this linguistic push-pull. Equally troubling, his response to me had been at times my response to professors who “corrected” my speech and writing to the extent that I could not recognize my voice or identity in the final product. Prior to my encounter with Student "J,” I, too, had long grown despondent to the effect of those corrections on my morale. Drawing a comparison among the three scholars, Jackie Grutsch McKinney situates the social and cognitive aspects of narrative theory in composition studies through the shared James Berlin’s notion of grand narratives, claiming that the narratives we share about our organizations are our attempts to describe these organizations detail. Similar to the way that McKinney’s scholarship “takes a small piece of the grand narrative (writing centers are comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go and get one-to-one tutoring on their writing) under consideration in order to discuss how piece by piece the narrative is more of a representation and simultaneously a misrepresentation of writing center work” (6, emphasis original), my dissertation turns our gaze towards the threads of the “grand narrative” that overshadows the always already alternative narrative of the historically black university writing center. This turn enables us to take a detour from this grand narrative, which McKinney describes as “a cloth woven from various strings and strands appearing as a whole,” and like her, “pull at one strand at a time, not to dismantle it entirely but to show how uneasily it unravels under pressure” (6). In other words, this dissertation calls for a deliberate turn, a refocusing of the attention towards students who often are not at the helm of conversations concerning multilingualism when they arguably should be. I will be addressing my research questions through a descriptive case study of student-tutor interactions at one HBCU writing center: the Writing Resource Center at Florida A&M University (FAMU). Through a close analysis of the verbal communication4 between the tutor and tutee, I provide evidence-based data concerning the tutoring approaches for both tutors and tutees who self-identify as AAL learners. This data aids in providing an alternative narrative of the writing center experiences with AAL learners from AAL tutors, an approach not often considered in SRTOL scholarship. For this reason, I posit that this study is best viewed through an Afrocentric worldview in order to understand linguistic push-pull and the contention surrounding AAL’s existence and the need to understand. Staci Perryman-Clark provides a justification I find most appropriate for this

5 study, which notes the mention of African and African American worldviews in rhetoric and composition scholarship, the former being defined as “the guiding principles and values that determine how Africans respond to life and interact with the universe” (Alkebulan 34 qtd. in Perryman-Clark 9) and the latter being defined as “the knowledge that Black folks have about how to negotiate Blackness in everyday situations” (Richardson 27 qtd. in Perryman-Clark 9). Student J's experiences, my own, as well as those of countless other students I encountered in this historically black university are all situated at the heart of this study, a project that examines the language practices of African American students in a historically black university writing center. Our tutoring session highlights the expectation of EAE as the privileged language, a de facto dismissal of the rich language diversity Student J carries with him into an act of communication. One of the central aspects of this narrative of Student J is that it has no ending. Our interaction cannot be summarized with a refined conclusion where tutor and tutee fully understood each other. In fact, the messiness of this session took years for me to understand as unresolved, one that merited a scholarly unraveling. In describing the language interactions in this historically black university writing center, I discovered a system of communication that negotiates, both knowingly and unknowingly, the university’s history of enduring systemically prejudiced educational systems. As a result, the language interaction is crucial to the type of engagement within the session because it peers into the important differences this learning environment offers to its institution and the field. Furthermore, this study’s results provide a response to the original question raised by SRTOL demonstrating what a historically black university’s writing center has done to support students with varying language habits. While this study does not address their socio-economic backgrounds, it does reveal varying beliefs surrounding the participants’ ambivalent relationship with academic discourse and AAL, which become a form of storytelling of an alternative narrative. Jacqueline Jones Royster’s theory of subjectivity as terministic screen aids in the justification for my use of personal narrative as a foundation for this study. Royster posits that “subject position as terministic screen in cross-boundary discourse” (29) provides a deeper analysis through the various lenses that influence our attitudes towards our identities and the ways we view authority. Royster makes the case, an argument that can be viewed through an Afrocentric worldview,5 including DuBois’s concept of double-consciousness, that this analysis of the subject position through personal accounts “supports the sense of rhetoric, composition,

6 and literacy studies as a field of study that embraces the imperative to understand truths and consequences of language more usefully” (29-30), and, similarly, this dissertation echoes these sentiments by using a personal encounter as a means of understanding. Using this narrative reveals the dynamism of this particular writing center while pointing us towards the narratives of other writing centers, such as one located on a historically black university campus, that provide assistance not only with student writing but also with being successful beyond the classroom, a primary aim of these institutions. Providing an inside perspective of a HBU writing center demonstrates how this site fits within the larger writing center narratives of tutors helping students improve as writers and yet simultaneously how it lies within the margins of this larger narrative because of its history with preparing its students to adjust in a society that has systemically marked them as inferior because of the color of their skin. As Royster’s use of personal narratives as research resembles tenets of an Afrocentric Worldview, McKinney reminds us that “the writing center is a cloth woven from various strands and strings to appear as whole.” (6). McKinney builds upon Philip Eubanks understanding of narrative theory, which extends beyond an ancillary function to “extraordinary texts” to one that sees the social and cognitive purpose of narratives (10). She also emphasizes this systematic structuring of narratives operate as Jean-Francois Lyotard describes master narrative in the sense that “the powerful yet often invisible narratives that work to explain how disparate pieces fit into a cohesive whole” (11). McKinney’s re-centering writing center scholarship towards the messiness of using personal narratives as rigorous scholarship also anchors this study. Carmen Montecinos’s argument against using master narratives aligns with McKinney’s argument, in the sense that: The use of a master narrative to represent a group is bound to provide a very narrow depiction of what it means to be Mexican-American, African-American, White, and so . . . A master narrative essentializes and wipes out the complexities and richness of a group’s cultural life . . . A monovocal account will engender not only stereotyping but also curricular choices that result in representations in which fellow members represented cannot recognize themselves. (293-94 qtd. in Solórzano and Yosso 27) Montecino’s reasons for resisting a master narrative speak directly to the justification for this study. In my use of case study methodology to interview, observe, and provide textual analyses

7 through an African American worldview, I am providing an alternative narrative of the writing center practices of AAL learners—a group of learners who often exist in the shadows of writing center and composition studies—that broadens the perspectives of this population to the wider society while simultaneously providing a representation of tutoring and learning that the participants can recognize. In short, Royster's, McKinney's, and Montecino's arguments become especially critical in discussing the importance of increased research in ethnic-specific writing spaces often omitted from the grand narratives of writing center and composition scholarship. Conjoining Royster, McKinney, and Montecino’s arguments for using narratives as storytelling not only provides insight into matters of ethnic experiences and the importance of alternative writing center narratives, but also aids in justifying why viewing AAL learners as multilinguals is dynamic. By comparing the experiences of multilingualism among widely accepted bi- and multilingual learners to the experiences of AAL learners, we can understand how their experiences overlap. For instance, Ben Rafoth provides a similar argument as Miguel, a multilingual tutor, deliberately engages shifts from EAE to Spanish in order to better engage his multilingual tutee. In short, when the tutor recognizes the tutee is struggling to articulate herself in English, he begins speaking to her in Spanish. As a result, the tutor noted a contrast in the student’s behavior once he shifted from English to Spanish because “she became very agitated” when they used English in the session (21). Miguel’s session is similar to my experience with Student J in that we both led with conventional U.S. language usage and allowed our students to resist our use of dominant discourse as a means of generative discussion. As a result, we both identified a shared language between us and our clients, in Miguel’s case, Spanish, and my case, AAL. The tutee’s emotive response heightens the importance of multilingual scholarship toward the affective experiences of the multilingual learners, illustrating a similar process of frustration when acquiring academic literacies, which is evidenced by the increased volume of multilingual scholarship within writing center studies. What has yet to occur in writing center scholarship is an increased study of AAL learners and their affective responses to the language acquisition of academic literacies, and even further, how the HBCU writing centers have been contributing to the development of these AAL learners. Vershawn Ashanti Young notes these instances of vacillating between two languages or language varieties as code-switching. Young finds that maintaining the integrity of the many languages a student engages describes how multilingual students engage their languages but does

8 not reflect the ways educators teach code-switching. On the contrary, students are discouraged to preserve the integrity of their home languages. Code-switching advocates, especially those in the classroom, promote language substation (“Nah We Straight” 50). In its place, Young proffers code meshing, or the “blending dos idiomas or copping enough Standard English to really make yo’ AAE be Da Bomb” (50). His example of meshing Spanish and English adequately exemplifies the co-existence of both language systems in writing, and is undergirded by a central part of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theoretical work. Anzaldúa, in general, blends all of her languages and cultural idioms together as a means of expressing all of her identities. She also arguably recreates the double consciousness resulting from cultural and racial prejudices. Conversely, Young’s example of AAE does not fully illustrate the typical meshing of AAL learners in many college composition courses. AAL learners use the language on a continuum based on their socialization with the language. Some AAL features are evident in the sentence structure, but other features are in how the user makes meaning. These features together have consistently been considered, as Jeanne M. Powers notes, as a language-as-problem orientation (82), as she suggests several orientations that affords a deeper understanding of the language needs of English Language Learners (ELL) in school settings. Of the several assumptions, language-as-right orientation punctuates the motivations behind the code-switching debates and aligns directly with the SRTOL efforts.6 What follows are operational terms essential for understanding the influence of linguistic push-pull and the tutor-tutee multilingual language interactions between self-identified learners in a historically black university writing center. Afterwards, I discuss the role of SRTOL in supporting AAL learners as multi-dialectal while simultaneously making the case for AAL learners as multilingual and, as a result, an example of language difference. Next, I situate this language difference within writing center studies. And lastly, I situate writing centers and AAL learners within the context of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). It is with this logic that I make the argument for the exigence of this study.

Operational Terms

The interdisciplinarity inherent in this dissertation requires a discussion of the operational terms I use to frame this study; therefore, this section provides a gloss of monolingualism,

9 multilingualism, Edited American English, and African American Language, situating each more fully in the scholarship in Chapter 2.

Monolingualism

Monolingualism is the practice of using one language. In isolation, being monolingual is not problematic, but monolingualism poses an issue when monolingualism is upheld in an increasingly diverse space. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas makes the argument against monolingualism in terms of what maintaining individualistic and societal monolinguism implies: For an individual, monolingualism almost inevitably means monoculturalism and monoculism, being able to see things with one pair of glasses only and having a poorly developed capacity to see things from another person’s or group’s point of view . . . For a country, monolingualism in the majority of the cases means that all the minorities are oppressed and their linguistic human rights are violated. (“Multilingualism” 42, emphasis original) For Skutnabb-Kangas, monolingualism is loosely defined as one who “'knows'” one language (41), but she questions the stability of this definition. In short, her use of quotation marks around the term knows suggests her desire to draw attention to the complexity of this term that may otherwise be overlooked and deemed automatically understood, and therefore, easily defined. In order to grasp the detriment of monolingualism in the advancement and application of SRTOL, it is important to understand the history of English Only policies in the U.S. and their effect on the educational system. Monolingualism and the dominance of English also involves monolingualism and the dominance of EAE, as my experiences with Student J demonstrates. Adrian Blackledge describes linguist Ralph D. Grillo’s explanation of the twentieth century political relationship between language and nationhood since that nationality is determined linguistically. In other words, American citizenship is characterized through the achievement of proficiency in English, which began the language and literacy testing of immigrants seeking U.S. citizenship (Blackledge 32). Historically, African Americans have been limited from achieving nationhood in terms of these standards. Terrance G. Wiley explains there was a substantial amount of African people in the U.S. during the colonial periods, yet their cultural and linguist diversity were not deemed significant because they “had been subjected to involuntary

10 incorporation and forced to use oral English, while suppressing their own African tongues. They were simultaneously also prohibited from acquiring English literacy (Weinberg). Nevertheless, there is evidence of the linguistic diversity that African peoples brought with them as well as, in some cases of the literacy in languages other than English among the newly enslaved” (8). While there is no consensus on whether AAL is a language or a dialect of English, AAL is a type of language difference that has been negatively affected by policies supported by monolinguistic ideology, which is the staunch belief that “clarity, logic, and unity depend upon the adoption of a monoglot standard variety” (Blackledge 27), and SRTOL aims to draw attention towards this language inequity.

Bilingualism/Multilingualism

Bilingualism and multilingualism are far more complex concepts than their names suggest in that scholars use bilingualism as a foundational definition of multilingualism (Barnes; Valdés; Waters) because of the limited research findings of the phenomenon of multilingualism (Barnes 9). Second Language Acquisition scholars argue the need for new paradigms in research studies about multilingual learners that arguably apply to AAL learners in composition studies, one of which calls for a renegotiation of the definition of multilingualism (Valdés; Kramsch). As a scholar with the composing practices of multilinguals at the epicenter of his scholarship, Suresh Canagarajah pushes towards an expanded definition of multilinguals, one that moves away from defining multilinguals in terms of monolingualist purviews as the traditional understanding of multilingualism does. Canagarajah’s article, “Lingua Franca English, Multilingual Communities, and Language Acquisitions” focuses on Lingua Franca English (LFE) learners and users and the language acquisition of non-Western communities, this literature extends the queries SLA began. Specifically, LFE is the English variety used among those whose first language is not English (Canagarajah; Seidlhoffer), and Canagarajah draws attention to the questions SLA focuses on in relationship to LFE learners, two of the categories which intersect and simultaneously underpin SRTOL and students of color: determinism versus agency, or “Are language learning and use orchestrated primarily by the individual even when they occur through interaction? Or do communication and acquisition take place in collaboration with others, through active negotiation, as an intersubjective practice?”; and purity versus

11 hybridity, or “Are languages separated from each other, even at the most abstract level of grammatical form? And how do they associate with other symbol systems and modalities of communication?” (Canagarajah 923). Similarly, the nature of this study supports the question of determinism versus agency by describing the language interactions among an atypical multilingual group in a university setting often omitted from studies on multilingualism. Additionally, the questions concerning purity versus hybridity could be arguably found in SRTOL surrounding language varieties. This need for a paradigm shift is shared by other composition scholars with global literacies interests. In their 2011 opinion essay, “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach," Bruce Horner et al. argues for a more equitable approach to understanding language difference, which align with the aims of this study. The authors are responding to the prevailing belief that “heterogeneity in language impedes communication and meaning” (303) and offers a translingual approach, which “sees difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening” (303). This approach aligns with the way in which I am using ML in my study, for the translingual approach involves reading with reduced biases and having respect for perceived difference (304). In short, the translingual approach has a more explicit correlation to nonbiased reading of language difference, such as AAL learners who negotiate the differences between AAL and EAE.

EAE and Academic Literacies

Edited American English (EAE) is the preferred language variety for academic writing (Bartholomae; Beauvais; Blackledge) and is used in this study to describe the English language adapted for academic discourse. More commonly recognized as Standard English or more pedestrianly speaking “proper” or “good” English, EAE is the term I use because “edited” infers an inherent ideology, one that is at once forgotten when “standard” is used and the colloquial “proper” or “good” adjectives illustrate the pejorative implications of the use of “standard.” As with any ideology, it “always carries with it strong social endorsements, so that what we take to exist, to have value, and to be possible seems necessary, normal and inevitable—in the nature of things” (Berlin 479). This normative view of standardized language affects academic literacies,

12 or the methods of reading and writing. It is EAE that shapes writing assessments and compositionists have already begun to reimagine how EAE could marginalize non-sanctioned literacy practices, ranging from the need for multicultural rubrics (Anson; Balester; Inoue and Poe) to the need for consideration of the African American English learner7 and the strategies of upholding SRTOL while teaching EAE at Spelman, an all-female private historically black university (Jordan). Therefore, if the premise of EAE is that it is the normal and the only way to communicate effectively, other languages, language varieties, and literacies are at risk of not being folded into societal and academic normative behaviors which frame grand narratives about the writing students and their writing. To this end, what this study does is to dislodge our fixation on the dominance of this language as the only means of effective communication. When referring to EAE in this study, the reference is also meant to address and redress the disproportionate attention placed on the language’s ability to teach. SRTOL critiques this dominance and calls for a bi-dialectal approach, one that embraces the student’s home language while teaching students EAE. This approach is contested by many opponents suggesting the resolution does not acknowledge that EAE is a language construction and thus not a representation of any one group’s home language (Smith; Zorn). However, the main objective of this study is to provide a deeper understanding of the language negotiations of an academic space with potentially higher instances of non-dominant speech acts and describe how they make sense of the expectation of EAE. Consequently, EAE is not meant to be discredited as a useful means of communication within the academic setting or in what Smitherman calls the language of wider use, for that matter.

AAL and African American Literacies When I refer to African American Language, expressed as AAL throughout this study, I am referring to the language system of African Americans that has its roots in African languages. Close kin to AAL is African American literacies, which for this study, leans heavily on Elaine Richardson’s notion that African Americans traditionally have reading and writing skills that are drawn from the same African languages as AAL and literacy curriculum, as it stands, tends to oppose these literacies through normalizing academic literacies (“Background” 8). Richardson provides the academic essay as genre of writing that is assumed neutral and urges to place this genre of writing, along with other academic discourses, in the social, political, and cultural

13 context of the students who engage them (8). Understanding African American literacies, then, provides more understanding of AAL and its external challenges. In addition to AAL’s external challenges, the continuum of beliefs among AAL proponents pose as internal challenges. To define AAL is to take a position on its validity, and a central part of defining AAL is naming AAL. For instance, Perryman-Clark uses Ebonics, the most highly criticized term gaining public recognition during the Oakland School Board decision in 1996,8 synonymously with AAL. Perryman-Clark’s definition of Ebonics, “the language derived from Africans’ transport during the African Holocaust” (Afrocentric 14) anchors the definition of this study. For this study, I acknowledge the various names for this language. A long-standing argument surrounding the nature of AAL is based on whether it is an independent language or a dialect of English. From a purely linguistic perspective, the question of the autonomy of AAVE poses the same difficulties that concepts like “language” and “dialect” have always posed (Winford 28). Editors of Black Linguistics: Language, Society, and Politics in Africa and the Americas, Sinfree B. Makoni, Geneva Smitherman, Arnetha Ball, and Arthur K. Spears borrow G. Tucker Childs’s term Black Languages, which is a construction of the “pidgins and creoles in Africa and the Caribbean; African American (Vernacular) English [AAVE] in the U.S. (also known as US Ebonics, African American Language, Black English); standardized and non-standardized African languages; and ‘vehicular’ languages emerging in urban African centers” (2). Many AAL users may not even have a name to describe their language, but this absence of naming is typical of communities (3-4). Donald Winford describes the challenges of labeling AAL: This is an area of frequent conflict that reflects, once more, deep-seated differences between linguists and non-linguists (including myself) refer to the vernacular of African Americans as “AAVE.” More recently the term “Ebonics” has gained popularity, at least in the media, for whom it has become an object more of derision than of objective discussion. African Americans in general use neither of these labels, preferring to say that they speak English, while recognizing that they have a distinct way of using the English that they speak. If pressed, like Trinidadians, some might say they speak “bad English” or “street talk” or “slang,” none of which is a linguistically valid label. (27) In sum, the primary issue remains that societal opinions about languages and dialects prevail over linguistic views. “Dialects and languages are sociocultural constructs, and the boundaries

14 between them are not definable in purely linguistic terms” (Winford 28). Therefore, the choice to label African American discourse is as much a political one as it is a linguistic concern and speaks to my decisions for using AAL in this study: I believe this label could gain the attention of writing center scholars and practitioners so that they can consider the importance of the affective dynamism of these learners in the academy, the systemic issues of race and racism associated with these language learners, especially in composition classrooms and writing centers, and the range of adaptive approaches they have developed for themselves. Charles Debose argues against African American discourse as being a derivative of English, and thus opposes the use of “English” when naming this language variety. In part, my synthesis of the varying names ascribed to African American speech patterns aligns with Staci Perryman-Clark’s: “[a]lthough many sociolinguists, compositionists, and educators often use the term Ebonics as a synonym for Black English (BE), African American Vernacular English (AAVE), or Black English Vernacular (BEV), I prefer the terms Ebonics and African American language (AAL) because I believe that both terms highlight Africa’s presence in the origins of black American language” (15). I do not use Ebonics because it carries a negative connotation since the Oakland School Board decision.9 Sociolinguist Lisa Green agrees that there is a difference between Ebonics and BE, AAVE, and BEV because the latter argues for the language to be a derivative of English and denies any roots in West African languages (77 qtd. in Perryman-Clark 15), as Debose argues. Ebonics, however, was created to specifically draw parallels between the language of African descendants in the U.S. and West African languages. This parallel between the adapted language of African descendants—African Americans—and West African languages undergirds the argument for considering AAL learners who also grapple with speaking and writing EAE on varying degrees multilingual learners in this study. While linguists acknowledge these shifts as markers of multilingualism, many are widely conditioned to devalue AAL and its users, assessing these users as deficient users of Edited American English. Since this tenacious belief has been embedded in the fabric of our society, it has made a lasting impression on its users, causing AAL learners to both appreciate and denigrate their language. Though the discourse used throughout SRTOL refers to dialects, the title of the resolution gives credence to the students’ right to their own language. This ambivalence is also found in this dissertation. While there are times AAL and EAE will be referred to as language varieties,

15 suggesting they are variations of the same language system, I also refer to them as separate languages. Marcyliena Morgan situates this ambivalence in the dynamism of language ideologies, “mirrors and tools that probe, reflect, refract, subvert and exalt social and cultural production, reproduction and representation” (37). For Morgan, this practice is rooted in cultural practice and shaped by societal views. This notion becomes important when considering all stigmatized languages because it exposes the racial and class politics surrounding the attitudes towards them in society as well as the academy. Moreover, Morgan purports that “African American language ideology is not based on an autonomous psychological subject or Cartesian notion of duality of self that is separate from society. Rather, African American language ideology is based on interaction of the mind/body and social world and language/mind/culture mosaic” (37). Making this distinction in this project is essential since many of the negative attitudes and subsequent language policies concerning AAL stem from the erroneous logic that students who use AAL are biologically predisposed to intellectual inferiority, thus making them incapable of learning “proper English.” The challenges facing AAL provides a nuanced perspective of AAL learners as multilingual learners in the context of an equally dynamic learning environment, the same HBU writing center where I met Student J. As a result, this study adds to the body of knowledge of writing center scholar an understanding of how AAL tutors and clients enact SRTOL despite the prevalence of linguistic push pull.

Students’ Rights to Their Own Language

In all, this dissertation responds to both the spirit of the SRTOL and the call for more research by exploring the nature of multilingual interactions in a writing center, a site dedicated to the development of students’ writing expertise. More specifically, this dissertation explores in depth the intersection of African American Language (AAL) and EAE at a writing center serving the needs of writing students enrolled in a historically Black college or university (HBCU).10 Central to my experiences with Student J is the effort and the need to shift from a monolingual to a multilingual orientation in writing centers. Composition studies has a long history of recognizing the importance of language variety, as evidenced by SRTOL. However, the field continues to struggle with the goals of the SRTOL, especially as manifested in the ongoing prevalence of monolingual teaching and the classroom dominance of Edited American 16

English (EAE). Recently, scholars have renewed calls for more multilingual research designed to facilitate multilingual teaching and the goals of the SRTOL (Horner, NeCamp, and Donahue 1). Prompted by prevailing monolingual classroom practices in the face of a rapidly increasing multilingual society—and consequently, multilingual students—Valerie Kinloch returns composition instructors to the continued work required to implement SRTOL, suggesting composition instructors reconsider the promises of SRTOL in a modern-day context, making classroom pedagogy receptive to language difference. Other disciplines have also taken English-Only ideology to task in lieu of our increasingly diverse societies and classrooms. Linguistics, for instance, has revisited the need for challenging English-only curriculum, a strategic policy designed to reinforce the superiority of the English language among competing languages (García; Lee & Wright; Wiley). However, monolingual extends beyond competing international languages; it includes competing domestic language, including the tension between AAL and EAE. In order to fully understand my correlation between SRTOL and composition, one must understand that students’ language rights have always been enmeshed in students' civil rights. In his essay, “An Extended View of ‘Students’ Rights,’” Keith Gilyard establishes the interwoven issues of race, advocacy, SRTOL: “the 131-word resolution advocating students’ right to their own language reflected the 1960s and 1970s political activism on college campuses, inside professional humanities and social sciences organizations, and within the culture at large. With African Americans in their historical role as lead metaphor—if not always as leading people— the ‘Students’ Right’ resolution was very much a manifestation of Civil Rights and Black Power impulses. Indeed, no one writes extensively about ‘Students’ Right’ without devoting explicit attention to race or ethnicity” (93). Carmen Kynard makes a similar correlation between civil rights and language rights, particularly for African American students. Drawing on Stephen Parks’ Class Politics, Kynard focuses in on his chapter, “Black Power/Black English,” which parallels the efforts of the Black Panther Party and other African American cultural markers with the language adopted to progress the civil rights’ efforts during 1960s and 1970s. Her scholarship signifies on Parks’ work in an effort to “place Black Language, Black Power, the history of a Black Radical Tradition—and thereby, Smitherman’s work—inside of a position where African American vernacular cultures, critical literacy, and full-scale battles against structured racism and class oppression function coterminously” (232). Therefore, matters of race

17 and activism are embedded in the discussions of SRTOL. Issues of race and black activism have functioned as catalysts for advocacy for AAL learners, as well as other non-dominant language users in the composition classroom. While the push to sustain an inclusive composition classroom pedagogy for change, there remains a delayed advocacy for linguistic advocacy for AAL learners in university writing centers.

Writing Centers: Sites of Language Difference

The prevalence of language difference within writing centers, as well as their history of collaboration with composition classrooms heighten the need to study the rarity of sustained efforts to enact equitable pedagogies that promote linguistic diversity similar to the composition classrooms. Writing centers are important sites of language difference research and important sites for enacting the goals of SRTOL because these spaces are understood as supportive, supplemental learning spaces working in conjunction with the writing classroom while simultaneously being sites of negotiating linguistic and cultural differences. Eric H. Hobson, writing center theorist, states that “[w]riting centers, like the writing across the curriculum (WAC) and writing in the discipline (WID) programs with which they frequently collaborate, offer writers an environment and activity that can differ significantly from that found in many writing classes” (165). This difference is significant to note because, as Hobson highlights, the increased prevalence of writing centers in various academic learning sites ranging from primary to graduate levels indicates that the work that happens in these spaces demands further theorizing (165). Furthermore, Anis Bawarshi and Stephanie Pelkowski argue that “the writing center stands as the most accessible and visible place of remediation within the university… [and is] mainly a place of acculturation,” thus making it “‘a contact zone,’ a place in which different discourses grapple with each other and are negotiated” (42) Language difference in writing center studies is primarily focused on international students, which mimics the shift in U.S. higher learning towards a more diverse student corpus. Rafoth admonishes tutors to learn multiple languages to enhance pedagogical skills, suggesting “[p]eople who live and work among multiple languages acquire skills for gauging when and how to move between languages, and they learn a greater variety of the expectations people have for different kinds of conversational interaction” (20). And yet many of the AAL learners who

18 would benefit from the same careful, alternative, and adaptive learning strategies are often assessed as learning disabled and not for the complex learning in which they engage. This disparity, while justifiable to some degree because of the widely accepted status of language of many of the international resident multilingual students, arguably has a great deal to do with negative predisposed attitudes towards African American students and learning. Consequently, this dissertation study includes research revealing the history of this marginalization in the school setting, a byproduct of the history of the enslavement and systemic oppression of African Americans. Given these factors and the limited range of discussion in a classroom, the writing center is the ideal place for taking a closer look and the coping strategies and agentive practices these students engage in a one-to-one setting.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Their Writing Centers

Issues concerning diversity in writing center scholarship has and continues to be explored in university settings where the demographic has shifted to include more marginalized races (Cook-Gumperz; DiPardo; Grimm), but none of them include HBCUs. However, these universities share a similar history as that of writing centers, in the sense that, by their mere existence, they are counterculture, yet this shared history is often overlooked in writing center studies. These constructed educational communities were oftentimes forged together to spite discriminatory laws and such as Jim Crow,11 which were intended to ensure blacks as a permanent underclass (Thomson 96). With the assistance of local churches, some governmental assistance,12 and community fundraising, HBCUs became the epicenter for the academic and social development of blacks. Earl S. Richardson, president emeritus and distinguished university professor of Morgan State, notes that “few academic administrators and an even smaller segment of the general population understand the significance of the distinction between HBCUs and TWIs as well as those individuals who have had experiences at HBCUs either as a student, professional, employee, parent, and/or past president” (Foreword, Richardson, xi). Though other institutional types have distinguished themselves, Carmen Kynard and Robert Eddy define HBCUs in terms of Perry’s definition, stating that these sites are “’intentional educational communities’ that have served as ‘counterhegemonic figured communities’ on the American educational landscape” (Perry, Steele, and Hilliard 92 qtd. in Kynard and Eddy W25).

HBCU supporters, graduates, and other constituents will attest to distinct, observable patterns of behavior at the heart of any given historically black campus because these schools carry the legacy of the uplifting of the African American community as a whole. These institutions received this designation as a result of the amended Higher Education Act of 1965, which defines them as “any accredited institution of higher education founded prior to 1964 whose primary mission was, and continues to be, the education of Black Americans” (Brown II, “Declining Significance of Historically Black Colleges” 5). While HBCUs vary in many ways, they share “their historic responsibility as the primary providers of postsecondary education for Black Americans in a social environment of racial discrimination” (Brown II 5) with at least six specified goals: (a) Maintaining the Black historical and cultural tradition (and cultural influences emanating from the Black community”; (b) providing leadership for the Black community through the important social role of college administrators, scholars, and students in community affairs; (c) providing an economic center in the Black community (for example, HBCUs often have the largest institutional budget in the Black community); (d) providing Black role models who interpret the way in which social, political, and economic dynamics impact Black people; (e)providing college graduates with a unique competence to address issues and concerns across minority and majority populations; and (f) producing Black graduates for specialized research, institutional training, and information dissemination for Black and other minority communities. (5) Students typically understand that their professors are to be addressed by the title “doctor,” even if it was not the appropriate identifier. Beverly J. Moss in A Community Text Arises posits that “shared cultural knowledge (or understanding, including norms, ideology, and artifacts) contributes significantly to the roles and expectations of participants, intertextual relations, and just about everything else in this [African American churches] institution. That is, there are expectations and shared experiences that dictate ‘the way we act’ and ‘what we recognize as acceptable behavior…’” (8-9), an aspect often overlooked in composition classrooms and writing centers alike.

There is little to no research done on HBCUs and their writing centers. Despite this fact, my study argues that HBCU writing centers, in particular, are ideal sites because they, like Hispanic Serving Institutions and Tribal Colleges, were created out of the inequalities in society writ large. Therefore, these institutions have had the dual responsibility of teaching students how to be successful academically and socially, which includes knowing how to negotiate between EAE and other language varieties (Jordan; Redd). I am careful not to homogenize black colleges because they are no more ubiquitous than black people, or any people for that matter. Although they are similar to predominantly white institutions in many ways, their historical traditions and their levels and types of support make them distinct. Michelle J. Nealy uses this metaphor to compare HBCUs and historically white institutions: “When traditionally white institutions catch a cold, HBCUs catch pneumonia” (18). Like many other institutions of higher learning, “black colleges reflect the diversity that is so characteristic of the United States’ postsecondary education system” (Brown and Freeman xii). This constant comparison of HBCUs to traditionally white institutions (TWIs), the latter representing the superior model, reinforces stereotypes of inadequacy in the former. This dissertation includes participants, those who self-identify as African American, who recognize the expectation to navigate the varying terrains of academic discourse and the cost of misunderstanding these expectations because these students misreading the rhetorical situation is dire. While predominantly white institutions have students of color sharing similar experiences, I selected a writing center on a HBCU campus because, historically, these campuses 13 were designed to socialize students into their professions, as well as society at large. Linguistic push-pull is not restricted African American students attending any particular institution. HBCUs, however, were founded to redress the racism in the American educational system and yet the curriculum and pedagogies developed within these spaces are often omitted from all scholarship, including writing center studies. M. Christopher Brown II and Kassie Freeman concur in that “HBCUs continue to be devalued and misjudged, and the label of inferiority continues to be misapplied to African American students and historically black institutions alike” (xi). However, “HBCUs have a long-standing tradition of preparing their students for social, economic, and political success,” according to Brown and Freeman (xii). Therefore, the paucity of literacy studies in spaces, such as HBCU campuses, seems to be counterproductive to the desire to provide current, best practices in regards to literacy studies and

21 overall scholarship in the academy concerning these marginalized voices. It is this marginal inclusion of African American scholarship about African American learners that bolsters Montecino’s claim of the detriment of persistent master narratives within academic spaces: “A monovocal account will engender not only stereotyping but also curricular choices that result in representations in which fellow members represented cannot recognize themselves” (294 qtd. in Solórzano and Yosso 27). To this end and in the spirit of SRTOL, this dissertation angles the writing center scholarship towards the contributions of HBCUs and their writing centers to the field. How, then, does that push-pull manifest itself in writing tutorials and what might writing centers do to foster writing improvement while respecting students right to their own language? In the midst of increased professionalization of writing center theory, more tutors have the opportunity to participate in continued professional training. Writing center conferences such as the National Peer Writing Center Conference and the regional and international writing center conferences are preparing tutors and administration alike to provide best practices for the literacy needs of diverse audiences. Psychologist and learning theorist Richard G. Tiberius “stress[es] the quality of the interpersonal relationship between tutor and student” (Murphy and Sherwood 9) increases the effectiveness of the session. Developing this “interpersonal relationship” yields “reciprocal learning” that results in tutors having “to break through psychological barriers that might otherwise impede collaboration” (9) may not fit all institutional writing center spaces. Without assessing the needs of HBCU writing center spaces, writing center studies cannot appropriately develop pedagogies that address their needs, and writing center anthologies will continue to omit the pedagogies HBCU writing centers have developed in the nooks and crevices of the field. Answers to the questions posed in this dissertation will provide a fine-grained description of multilingual interactions within a single site dedicated to the development of writing expertise, thereby contributing to our understanding of the challenges inherent to enacting multilingual pedagogy and honoring students' right to their own language within the university writ large and writing centers, more narrowly.14 By learning more about the dynamism of multilingual interactions, this project will provide insights into instituting tutoring practices that value the language varieties students bring with them into the writing centers and classrooms. In addition, it will offer insight into, what sociolinguist Smitherman calls a linguistic push-pull. Smitherman

22 likens this negotiation to Du Bois’s theory of double-consciousness, which describes the fragmented identities African Americans developed in response to judging themselves through the prejudiced lens of dominant culture in the U.S. Similarly, Smitherman argues that black people are inwardly torn linguistically between identifying with EAE and AAL, and this struggle causes the writer to both love and hate AAL simultaneously (Word from the Mother 5). While she refers specifically to the development of Black English, this linguistic negotiation occurs among all writers when their language and culture have been historically marginalized, a situation which applies to the multilingual writing center as well. Therefore, this linguistic push- pull needs to be incorporated in writing center and composition studies in order to adequately answer the SRTOL call. While this chapter described the little to no discussion of the multilingualism of AAL learners, the next chapter, the literature review, situates the problem in composition studies by reviewing the intersecting conversations surrounding multilingualism in education, linguistics, second language, English as second language studies, and sociolinguistics to identify existing strategies for redressing issues of monolingualism as they create language policies, curricula, and awareness of prejudices against language differences. An example of such policies is evidenced in the role SRTOL plays in these disciplines. This chapter also addresses the controversial debates over the legitimacy of SRTOL, the rewards and risks of implementing its standards, and whether or not those standards are attainable. These conversations are discussed in the context of the HBCUs and its writing centers in order to express the importance for this study. The goals for the next chapter are two-fold: to extend our awareness of the multilingualism—which for this study represents the ability for the speaker to have varying proficiencies of multiple languages simultaneously15 --AAL learners in practice and to describe why this awareness is particularly important for writing center scholarship. Broadening this definition in composition studies, specifically in writing center studies, allows me to “analyze the ways members of [AAL learners] communities to their speech [and by extension, their writing], so that we do not rely exclusively on outside analytical categories” (Makoni et al. 3) instead of learning how the community self-identifies.

CHAPTER TWO

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

I’m a trilingual orator. Sometimes I’m consistent with my language now I switch it up so I don’t bore later. Sometimes I fight back two tongues while I use the other one in the classroom and when I mistakenly mix them up I feel crazy like I’m cooking in the bathroom. I know. But I had to borrow your language because mines was stolen. But you can’t expect me to speak your history wholly while mines was broken, These words are spoken by someone who is simply fed up with the Eurocentric ideals of this season and the reason I speak a composite version of your language is because mines was raped away along with my history. I speak broken English so the profuse gashes can remind us that our current state is not a mystery. I’m so tired of the negative images that are driving my people mad so unless you seen it rob a bank, stop calling my hair bad. I’m so sick of this nonsensical racial disparity, so don’t call it “good” unless your hair is known for donating to charity as has been raped away from our people. How can you expect me to treat our imprint on your language as anything less than equal? Let there be no confusion, let there be no hesitation. This is not promotion of ignorance. This is a linguistic celebration. That’s why I put trilingual on my last job application. I can help to diversify your consumer market is all I wanted them to know, and when they call me for the interview, I’d be more than happy to show that I can say “What’s good?” “Whata gwan?” and of course “Hello.” Because I’m articulate. Jamila Lyiscott, "Broken English” I begin this chapter with an extended excerpt of Jamila Lyiscott’s spoken word poem because its content specifically provides a common sentiment held by black students like Student J and others in a historically black university, and it more broadly provides a framework for the needed discussions of African American Language learners as multilingual, multiliterate learners. Anchoring these conversations in the scholarship concerning Students’ Rights to their Own Language (SRTOL), this chapter reviews the literature across disciplines ranging from

24 sociolinguists to rhetoric and composition studies to provide a the context for and highlight the necessity of this project. A spoken word essayist and self-proclaimed “tri-tongued orator,” Lyiscott performs the above essay “Broken English” as a TED talk, providing a brief history of the polemical topic of race and language in the U.S. to audiences who gather for intellectual conversations about diverse ideas. An adjunct professor at Long Island University, where she teaches on adult and adolescent literacy, and an advanced doctoral candidate and adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College where she centers her scholarship and teaching around the African Diaspora, Lyiscott uses her rhythmic oration to demonstrate her linguistic diversity as a black woman in the United States. And each stanza seems to be a reiteration of a collective linguistic duality, one that embodies the challenges faced by many blacks in American, like Student J, while simultaneously celebrating the brilliance of linguistic survival. She begins the poem with a retort to a woman’s amazement, only described as “a baffled lady,” at her ability to speak Edited American English with precise articulation. Yet Lyiscott spends the remainder of the poem is “a linguistic celebration” as she meshes the codes of “street talk,” African American English (AAE),16 and Jamaican patois,17 making a rhetorical argument for the rule-based structure of African American Language (AAL) despite the negative views held about AAL.

Issues with Monolingualism

These negative views are entrenched in a history of English-only policies in the U.S. Monolingualism in the United States has not only impacted African American students and students of African descent but also other minorities in the United States. Both populations have experienced monumental marginalization as a result of English-Only policies in the U.S. Teresa L. McCarty and Sheilah E. Nichols argue the pervasiveness of this discrimination against minorities through the single efforts of language education to eradicate “indigenous and other minoritized mother tongues” despite the gains language education has seen in the U.S. and throughout the world (107). Jeanne M. Powers redresses the legal trajectory of monolingualism on minority students. Powers, referencing John D. Skrentsky, posits that “[l]anguage and race are not interchangeable, but the legal framework for language rights in the United States was an extension of civil rights era politics aimed at addressing racial discrimination ” (81-82; see also

Gilyard). Skrentsky’s 2002 text, The Minority Rights Revolution, chronicles the benefits diverse minorities (Latinos, women, disabled) received as a result of black social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, which Skrentsky calls the minority rights revolution. Specifically, he notes that a “curious aspect of this minority rights revolution is that the 1960s recognition of the right to be free from discrimination was not just an American phenomenon” (3). Skrentsky situates these strivings towards equality in the U.S. to global strides towards the same nondiscriminatory rights: “[t]hat is, the United States was anything but alone in its recognition of minority rights” (3). Consequently, affording U.S. citizens the right to use their various languages has a history of being equated with their civil rights. Hence, Skrentsky posits a causal relationship between the enforcement of English-only policies and the perceived violation of minorities’ right to language difference. Skrentsky notes that this correlation between the civil and language rights for African Americans students in the 1960s and 1970s was the catalyst for a global fight for language rights. As a result, there should be an increased need to draw more parallels between the language interactions of multilingual and AAL students, and this study aims to aid in redressing this disconnect by refocusing multilingual writing efforts towards African American student writers negotiating in the writing the socio-political and socio-lingual challenges center that result from their language differences.

Opposes Linguistic Diversity

The general relevance of this study is rooted in the belief that one’s language is intertwined with one’s identity; therefore, the privileging of English-only policies in the U.S. discriminates against the identities of the increasingly linguistically diverse population. The focus of this study on AAL tutors and tutees makes a more specific case for re-examining the impact of privileging EAE to the detriment of AAL in academic spaces that claim to assist all learners: writing centers. As stated in the previous paragraph (see McCarthy and Nichols), to continue teaching or tutoring through the lens of EAE is to practice discrimination of minorities and indigenous people and their languages. Therefore, the perseverance of AAL and other marginalized languages exist in the presence of monolingualism as a form of resistance, as a marker of people who, like the narrator in the epigraph, choose to have a “linguistic celebration” of their linguistic identities despite the discrimination they experience because of the language

26 they speak. Paulo Freire speaks to this interconnectedness of language and identity: “language variations (female language, ethnic language, dialects) are intimately interconnected with, coincide with, and express identity” (185 qtd. in Smitherman, “Black English/Ebonics” 30) and Frantz Fanon, African-French psychiatrist, ascribed to the ideal that “every dialect, every language, is a way of thinking. To speak means to assume a culture” (qtd. in Smitherman, “Black English/Ebonics” 37). Despite the linguistic celebration Lyiscott describes in the epigraph, however, this pressure to maintain home language and culture while adapting to EAE is an example of linguistic push-pull, which has the potential to negatively affect the students’ self-esteem. In fact, the conclusion of this excerpt, “Because I’m articulate,” is the phrase Lyiscott uses in the beginning of this work as she acknowledges that a confused woman marvels that she is articulate. Lyiscott proceeds to then use her poetry to critique the embedded racial and linguistic prejudices tied to this initial praise of Lyiscott’s ability to speak EAE well. Jacqueline Jones Royster shares a similar experience in her essay, “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own.” Royster, also a black academic, wrote the essay to “examine closely moments of personal challenge that seem to have import for cross-boundary discourse” (29). Royster’s concept of cross-boundary discourse, the miscommunication between writer and reader or speaker and audience during polemic discussions, is anchored in her belief that one’s various voices are situated in their various subject positions. In other words, she offers subjectivity as a terministic screen, a means of analytically reading the various contexts of one’s subjectivity, to allow for better strategies of talking across polemic boundaries, such as voice and identity given the misinterpretation she experienced when a white women affirms Royster’s use of AAL during a presentation as Royster’s authentic voice and EAE as a performance. Similar to the epigraph, Royster uses the experience to demonstrate her ownership of all of her subject positions—no one position being subordinate to the other. While Royster’s encounter with the well-meaning participant and colleague appeared to be a linguistic celebration, the participant’s perceived authority in determining and ranking Royster’s use of her AAL as her only authentic self, whereas Royster saw herself as a multi-voiced subject who values all of her voices equally. Elaine Richardson offers a study that provides some of the language needed to talk and listen across differences as Royster suggests. In African American Literacies, Richardson emphasizes the significance of incorporating African American centered pedagogy in writing

27 classrooms after conducting an experimental study on a class she designed that specifically focuses on AAL speech and writing. Richardson argues for this study on the premise that “the literacy education that most American students consume won’t allow them to understand that African American language is more than grammar. It is a total system of living. It is a discourse” (15). Subscribing to James Gee’s definition of discourse communities, Richardson defines African American discourse as “a system of ‘behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing that are accepted as instantiations of particular roles . . . by specific groups of people” (Gee viii, qtd. in Richardson 16).18 In doing so, she identifies patterns that linguists had classified as legitimate speech constructs in her students’ writing. What she means by this is that African Americans have developed a systematic means of surviving, including their communicative practices, which aid in their endurance of the injustices within and without the educational systems. In other words, “one option for school success for African American students lies in enduring the system and avoiding or masking vernacular literacies” (16). Richardson’s definition of these literacies anchors the reading and writing of African American students in social processes intermingling individual actions with cultural processes (16; Street). The linguistic celebration Lyiscott describes, then, acts as “vernacular resistance arts and cultural productions that are created to carve out free spaces in oppressive locations such as the classroom” (16), which is also a part Richardson’s definition of African American literacies and should arguably be extended to find other safe spaces created within academic settings such as writing centers, especially those writing centers located on historically black university campuses, the focus of this project.

Oppresses African American Literacies and AAL

A part of this struggle revolves around the misunderstandings and misrecognitions of African American literacy and language practices in America. For this work, I conjoin literacy with composition similarly as Carmen Kynard does in Vernacular Insurrections: “For compositionists who have always consciously linked their theory and practices to critical literacy, critical pedagogy, and interrogations of education’s maintenance of structured inequalities, broader works related played a role (scholars such as Berlin, Bizzell, Brandt, Canagarajah, Cushman, Gilyard, Olson, Royster, and Shor)” (7). While much of the scholarship

28 on literacy is couched in K-12, Kynard situates her work in higher education, much like other composition scholars with interdisciplinary research interests (7). This disposition affords this study a richer scholarship given the harried and polemical scholarship surround African Americans, their language, and learning environments historically devoted to their advancement. Wrestling with the slippery task of defining literacy has not only been relegated to compositionists; in fact, this study relies on Shirley W. Logan’s intersection of literacy and rhetorical education. Logan acknowledges the ways literacy education and rhetorical education are often used interchangeably, so she provides a useful means for defining literacy in terms of rhetoric: “Literacy is, in the broader term, the ground upon which rhetorical education develops. Some manifestations of literacy, then, are implicated in one’s rhetorical abilities. With this definition of literacy and rhetorical education, we can admit the experiences of such rhetors as Sojourner Truth into consideration, though conventional definitions would classify her as illiterate” (4). Just as Logan’s definition makes room for nonstandard rhetor Sojourner Truth, her definition could also make affordances for the multilingual African American students in this study in the sense that, like Truth, they are in fact invoking African American discourse that exists beyond EAE and its meaning-making systems. Monolingualism, however, prohibits writing center scholarship from recognizing AAL and African American literacies in the context of the Afrocentric worldview from which it is derived. This prohibition creates unintended learning barriers, reifies an assumed deficiency model, and aligns with the critiques of African American lived experiences. Despite the lingering effects of monolingualism, cultural groups such as African Americans have continued to hone a literacy practice founded upon their dynamism of AAL. It is first important to note that literacy has a history of being reduced to one’s ability to read and write alphabetic texts despite the dynamic literacy practices that we see within community- driven campaigns for education, as evidenced among enslaved Africans and their descendants (see Anderson and Logan above). However, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole urged scholars to reach for a more nuanced understanding of literacy as a result of their study of the Vai people. Shirley Brice Heath’s extensive ethnography provides an intimate perspective of the impact home literacies have on academic spaces, which is echoed by Beverly Moss: “literacy is defined in context” (4). To this end, this study aims to identify and describe African American multilingual learners in the context of a HBU writing center to potentially reveal the dynamic

29 language practices among this understudied group and thereby redress the oppression of monolingualism. The history of racism in country has affected how the country has viewed the peculiar contexts for which enslaved Africans acquired the English language, which has led to its skewed perspective of African American literacy achievements as evidenced in the inaccuracy of extant documents. Primarily, the U.S. Census has historically measured literacy inaccurately due to its pervasively racist means of quantifying African American literacy practices. For example, in 1787, the 3/5 Compromise was enacted, which counted Blacks as 3/5 of a person for tax and voting purposes. Therefore, this national disregard of Black people included the sweeping disregard of their literacies and language practices. For this reason, Geneva Smitherman’s overview of black dialect dating back to 1619 becomes crucial to understanding the language diversity among descendants of enslaved Africans (Talkin and Testifyin 5). Since extant records indicate that twenty slaves arrived with the Dutch people (5), Smitherman underscores the language acquisition challenges among those Africans as they communicated with the Dutch people, suggesting a closer examination of the ways in which the literacy patterns within African American communities have evolved outside of the gaze of a national record that disregarded African American literate and language practices. Another example of this misrepresentation occurs in the 1900 Federal Census (the Twelfth Census) where the total numbers of both black and white illiterate school age children (10-21 years) are inaccurate. The reported total of black illiterate children in Table 57 of that census is reported as 64,816, and the reported total of white illiterate children is 19,184, which comes to a total of 84,000. The census reported the total as being 84,285 (74). One could accredit these conflated numbers to the high rate of human error. However, Smitherman argues that these documents perpetuate the disparity in our educational system. Whether human error or systemic racism, many scholars—particularly Smitherman, Richardson, and Kynard—echo the frustration Lyiscott expresses in the epigraph, a frustration that points to the need for a systematic approach to the specific language needs of students who are impacted by these injustices, and my study works to add to that body of knowledge. Contemporary African American literacy is reflective of a community of people who created a community-driven campaign for “universal education” that is reflected in the history of HBCUs (Anderson 4; Butchart 4). With an attempt to implement this plan during Reconstruction, slaves envisioned gaining the ability to read and write as a means of liberation.

This notion of literacy as liberation was not a new concept to them. Scholars, such as Logan, have indicated that there were other sites of rhetorical education for enslaved blacks long before they ever were able to establish a school. For instance, Logan identifies several sites of rhetorical education, which she defines “as involving the act of communicating or receiving information through writing, speaking, reading, or listening” (4): free-floating literacy, or “settings in which various levels of literacy and their attendant rhetorical skills were acquired and developed, [which] include white-sponsored slave missions and initiatives emerging from within communities of the enslaved” (6). This history of self-empowerment is a byproduct of the unique relationship of enslaved Africans in the U.S. and informs the shaping of the language often used by their descendants such as those who encountered the Dutch in Smitherman’s study. The key is to investigate if there are students in the HBCU who self-identify as using AAL and African American literacy practices. Meanwhile, Marcyliena Morgan bridges the witty verbal play African American children develop to the adult manifestations of these intricate verbal discourses to the conversational signifying, or the inclusion of “culturally marked signs which can be objects, certain statements, significant persons, etc.” (275). As an illustration of this, she shares a conversation between two adult African American males where one of the males attempted to secure the trust of the other by repeating the phrase, “You can trust me.” Morgan posits that this phrase is one of many ingrained in the minds of African American youth as one to distrust. More specifically, she states that African American children are taught to be skeptical of people in authority and those who have yet to prove themselves. For these reasons, HBCUs can be seen as a site rife with cultural, historical, and verbal constructions with educators who actively engage AAL learners. However, Jordan reminds us that many African American students and their instructors at HBCUs can be unaware of the dynamic language mixtures in operation because AAL has historically been perceived as a deficiency. Therefore, Jordan claims, “[w]e can help students by understanding their attitudes towards AAE and our own; engaging them in dialogue about language diversity through readings and writing; helping them identify unfamiliar EAE conventions and then modeling those conventions, while also honoring the language of their heritage” (108). Furthermore, in one study of African American students’ writings, Arnetha Ball “noticed formulaic patterns of repetition, intimate dialogue with the reader, storytelling as a transitional device, and popular African American idioms” (Ball qtd. in Redd 79). Other

31 common identifiers within African American speech are as follows: “redundancy, preaching, folk sayings, wordplay, word coining, image making, indirection, alliteration, and rhyme” (Ball qtd. in Redd “Keepin’ It Real” 79). A monolingual approach, then, does not account for these African American oral and written traditions; moreover, the prevalence of a monolingual approach instills a sense of error within the African American student who uses these patterns thereby continuing to their oppression. Other scholars have begun to theorize the complex language patterns found in African American speech and writing. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., literary scholar, creates a genealogical and linguistic pastiche of the remains of African American roots, arguing for a connection between West African and Caribbean threads of history that can be traced back to African American language patterns. For Gates, these claims can shed light on the undertheorized literary trends within African American literature. In short, he argues for this highly theoretical look at African oral traditions, which by nature are non-Western epistemologies, in hopes to see the systematic evolution of a people’s language despite political and linguistic oppression. Morgan also makes a case for the dynamism within African American speech communities. Morgan explains this dynamism as being “constructed by its historical, political, cultural, and social life” (77). Morgan also demonstrates how these “language features and verbal repertoires occur within a cultural framework based on African and African-American speech community, especially its youth” (77). She provides examples of the ways African American youth cultivate their language dexterity while playing among their peers. Examples she provides of such interaction, which she calls language play, include signifying, playing the dozens, and instigating. Morgan’s definition of language play is evident in the epigraph. While it is important to note that the poet does not overtly self-identify as African American, black, or any other ethnicity, her implicit self-identification constitutes her as an AAL learner. Therefore, Morgan’s definition of language play further clarifies Lyiscott’s essay in that Lyiscott employs signifying, sounding, and repetition, which are a selection of distinct African American rhetorical tools (Ampadu; Smitherman; Williams). Evidence of these tools in operation are as follows: “But I had to borrow your language because mine’s was stolen;” “These words are spoken by someone who is simply fed up with the eurocentric ideals of this season and the reason I speak a composite version of your language is because mines was raped away long with my history;” and the refrain “I’m articulate,” respectively. Thus, Lyiscott signal her ethnicity implicitly through signifying19 on both common

AAL syntactical, morphological, structures and shared responses to those same responses. So despite the efforts of monolingualism to diminish the value of alternative languages, including AAL, members of the African American community have developed methods of resisting that oppression. Notwithstanding, persistent monolingual practices deeply and covertly affect African American language users, hindering to varying degrees the successful integration of AAL and academic literacies (Perryman-Clark).

Promotes Linguistic Push-Pull

Lyiscott’s poetic declarations echo the sentiments of language scholars across the disciplines: African American language is playfully dynamic and rhetorically nuanced—a deviation from the error-laden philosophy of a monolinguistic approach that intentionally and unintentionally aligned AAL with misguided EAE. For AAL learners who are also experiencing the typical challenges of composing in new academic genres, these monolinguistic views promote linguistic push-pull. Morgan, for instance, emphasizes the importance of African American Language among African American people, regardless of their affiliation with the controversial existence of AAL. Morgan purports, Whether they celebrate or criticize it, it is the evidence of what they have been through. The speaker who relies on its most vernacular form represents his or her social world and the encroachments of racism and class inequities. The successful adult who claims an allegiance to standard, ‘good’ speech uses language as proof that the escape from racism is successful and over. The teenager who confronts and confounds the world with language games and verbal usage that celebrates the dialect is recognizing its power. And the college student and computer specialist who uses elite speech when working and AAE when theorizing and plotting to overtake the world evokes home. African American English is part and parcel of social, cultural and political survival. It is about ideas, art, ideology, love and memory. (7) Morgan’s explanation of African Americans' complex relationship with African American Language20 epitomizes what I describe as the language interaction among an ethnic-centered writing center. Specifically, Morgan’s layered explanation of the uses of AAL parallels the varied

33 and complicated functions in the epigraph. Morgan explicitly marks the cross-generational purposes for protecting AAL. And Lyiscott covertly walks the listener through the history of the African American lived experience in the U.S. and the linguistic aftermath of this existence, one that echoes Richardson’s survival literacies (see Richardson above). The concentrated population of writing consultants and students in a HBCU writing center functions in a dimension of multilingualism through the multiple tongues they speak, and in an effort to understand the dynamism of AAL learners’ literacy acts, as well as the impact of linguistic push-pull on their learning, this study focuses on a writing center staff in the ethnic-specific writing community to facilitate learning among this population of learners marginally discussed in composition and writing studies. Studying the language interactions between African American tutors and tutees in a historically black university writing center provides an interior glance at the negotiations particular to African Americans enacting linguistic push-pull, a necessary exploration given the non-existent scholarship on multilingual education in this site. However, understanding the importance of researching the multilingual nature of language among black students in a historically black writing center requires a historical overview of not only the language difference in this space, but also the social and political forces that impact the ways language differences are cultivated in historically black institutions. In Chris Anson’s extensive literature review of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), he questions the absence of racial and ethnic diversity in disciplinary scholarship despite the accessibility of scholarship on various communities and discourses from scholars such as Geneva Smitherman, Gloria Anzaldúa, Min-Zhan Lu, and Suresh Canagarajah (17). Framing this invisibility of race and ethnicity through Catherine Prendergast’s 1998 hallmark critical race theory article, “Race: The Absence of Presence,” Chris Anson draws attention to the disconnect between the copious resources stored in WAC clearing houses, as well as print and online portals, and the number of those resources that focus on racial and ethnic diversity (17). He continues to note that this invisibility of race also appears in various resources scholars use to produce the scholarship used to affirm composition studies’ disciplinarity: “With some notable exceptions . . . the invisibility of race and diversity is itself undiscerned even in most of the historical publications that forecast certain futures or propose new directions for WAC” (18). While Anson speaks specifically about this absence of presence in WAC, his extension of Prendergast’s same argument about composition studies reiterates the effects of monolingualism, promoting linguistic push-pull within students of color.

This point is evidenced in a point Anson makes regarding Prendergast’s argument about the disparity between the ways composition scholars center cultural groups at the heart of their studies without studying these students’ composing processes: “Instead race becomes subsumed into the powerful tropes of ‘basic writer,’ ‘stranger to the academy, or the trope of the generalized, marginalized ‘other.’”21 These labels prevent both student and instructor from learning more about languages, such as AAL, and instead promote the use of remedial labels for those who use it. Therefore, AAL learners are more likely to be convinced of the deficiency of their language in academia because their experiences have conditioned them to believe that these language differences equate “basic” and thus deficient. Anson’s solution is to move towards a more transparent conversation and curriculum that includes the effects of race; in addition, he considers the composition classroom as the ideal site to discuss the influence of race because of WAC’s individualistic pedagogy (23). With faculty training, Anson proffers that this individualistic pedagogy should recognize “[p]ractices of discursive socialization are always about identity,” but he simultaneously acknowledges that “composition scholarship in this area—crucial to advances in WAC—focuses on students as a generalized construct, not as individuals who bring specific histories, experiences, and ‘vernacular literacies’ to their learning” (23). To this end, more research on the composing practices of students of color is necessary due to limited writing center scholarship about the impact of this absence presence—especially research focusing on those students of color attending institutions historically dedicated to the concerns of said students, such as historically black colleges or universities, and this absence does a disservice to these students and those who are dedicated to educating them. This need to focus in on the lived experiences of students of color in the academic setting, the composition classrooms and support sites such as writing centers, are at the heart of this chapter’s epigraph. Lyiscott’s insistence on her trilingualism being residue of chattel slavery in the African diaspora and the U.S. underscores what scholars in other disciplines have readily identified. Linguists and sociolinguists have studies discussing the African American Language as dialectal variations and shifts. Students of color have been at the heart of these conversations, but these studies have been questioned by scholars of color because the scholars and their scholarship remained distant from the students of color. For example, Joseph L. Dillard identifies the significance of tracing a “historical explanation” of Black English because “for virtually no other variety can there have been so many explanations lacking legitimate bases consistent with

35 linguistic relativism” (91). In other words, Dillard argues that the dominant scholarship and research by nonwhite scholars remained founded in prevailing assumptions that lacked linguistic substance. More discussion about the racist attitudes and myths about Black English, especially concerning the “thick lips” explanation can be found in Dillard’s book, Black English, a seminal text that makes one of the first attempts to chart the linguistic history of Black English. The author notes various stereotypical explanations widely circulated about Black English, rooted in the tumultuous history of physical and verbal violence this group of people have experienced in the U.S. One such racist rationale for Black English is the “thick lips” explanation, which promoted a belief that the full lips characteristic of some black people prohibit them from speaking Edited American English. White linguists interested in studying Black English fell under scrutiny because of the pervasiveness of the pejorative theories circulating about the mythical correlation between the physiology of black people and their language. This unsupported correlation helped establish the linguistic push-pull that has become some commonplace not only in the classroom, but also in wider society. This linguistic double-consciousness was reinforced, then, by science and positivist views, despite linguistic rebuttals. Dillard offers a list of linguists who have since debunked these views, all within the same decade these theories surfaced, but he still argues that “there lurks one more rationalization of deficit origin . . . protein deficiency” (91). He posits the “premature psychological explanations probably motivated the long-time insistence upon phonological change as the causative factor” (91). In this quote, Dillard unmasks the false scientific research used to explain why African Americans were perceived as inferior intellectually and linguistically: due to a “protein deficiency” and psychological deficiencies that directly affected African Americans pronunciation of the English language, such as pronouncing words th as d. Given the enmeshment of the pervasive scientific and psychological biases against African Americans, the internalization of these deleterious attitudes are far reaching and need to be considered in the composing processes of black students since these scientific rationalizations of deficiency has substantiated fallacious ideals that have shaped the negative attitudes identified in linguistic push-pull. Doing so could offset the fortified systems of oppression that prohibit positive attitudes towards the linguistic dexterity of African American students as displayed in Lyiscott’s opening essay. Instead of acknowledging and celebrating AAL students’ ability to

36 negotiate not only the demands of learning EAE but also a history of treatment as inferior beings incapable and disinterested in learning EAE, AAL learners, especially young African American males, are often too quickly labeled with learning deficiencies or behavior challenges.

Obscures Alternative Worldviews

While oppressing African American literacies and language and promoting linguistic push-pull, monolingual views, in turn, obscures worldviews that fall outside of dominant western ideologies. However, embracing methodologies and pedagogies that perceive African American Language and culture in a light other than something erroneous, extracurricular, and sans intellectual rigor requires an understanding of the connections between AAL and African American culture and further supports viewing AAL learners negotiating EAE as multilingual learners whose language contributions add value to the writing process and collaborative writing center practices. Molefi Kete Asanti makes the case for the interconnectedness between African American orality and the history of African Americans in the United States. A large part of this history in the Americas is one riddled with a history of oppression physically and educationally: “Having to defend our humanity, to agitate for minimal rights, and to soothe the raw emotions of mistreated fellows” (Asanti 16). These defenses occurred despite African Americans being forbidden by law to read or assemble in most states. Asanti argues that “the African in America early cultivated the natural fascination with nommo, the word, and demonstrated a singular appreciation for the subtleties, pleasures, and potentials of the spoken word” (16). The power of the nommo, or the spoken word, is one of the threads Asanti purports as a connection between African American and an African worldview, and arguably a way of life. The manifestation of this black discourse in America is one that resists European norms. Specifically, this power of the word in the context of marginalized existence in the U.S. is one that constantly speaks against the U.S. slavery experience (Asanti 17; Morgan; Smitherman). Asanti notes that, while black orators have adopted classical rhetoric, the evidence of black oral traditions were best represented in black churches: “Carter B. Woodson, understood the significant contributions of African American oral traditions most clearly, as indicated in his 1925 work Negro Orators and Their Orations” (17). Asanti presents the anthropological research among the Dogon people of

Mali in 1947 that provides insight into some of the deep structure of African languages and culture that Asanti argues can be found in African American culture. Connecting African languages to AAL is one of the primary arguments for establishing its place as a language that requires a writing curricular approach that moves beyond an error-ridden assessment of AAL learners. On the contrary, this information undergirds the “linguistic celebration” described in the epigraph, one that promotes the survival of African language and literacy traditions despite systemic linguistic push-pull. An African American worldview becomes more easily discernible with methodologies that focus on them. For instance, Gloria Ladson-Billings coined a term—culturally relevant pedagogy (159)—that “argue[s] for its centrality in the academic success of African American and other children who have not been well served by our nation's public schools” (159). Ladson-Billings describes culturally relevant pedagogy as a pedagogy devoted to “collective empowerment,” a slight deviation from its contemporary, critical pedagogy, which focuses on individual empowerment (160). This critical pedagogy draws attention the socioeconomic, racial, and gendered learning contexts of the student. April Baker-Bell uses critical language pedagogy framework, another methodology that includes an African American worldview, to redress the gap between theory and classroom practice as it relates to AAL in education. Her study contributes to corpus of knowledge about the detrimental impact of marginalizing AAL on its users’ identities. In some ways, Lyiscott’s childhood experiences expressed in the epigraph are the embodiment of Baker-Bell’s study, the latter depicting the strain the disregard of language difference brings in academic settings. Meanwhile, Ladson-Billings’ Afrocentric pedagogy responds to the deficiency model often applied to students of color based on their language difference. The worldview has yet to be studied in the context of African American writing practices in an HBU writing center context, an omission and corrective to monolingualism afforded by this study.

Obscures Similarities between AAL and Multilinguals (MLs)

Monolingualism also does not afford those with similar language challenges any common ground as evidenced in the civil rights court cases of the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, the plight of AAL learners is similar to that of those who speak multiple recognized languages, especially when one of the languages is EAE. Smitherman’s role in two political actions

38 concerning the recognizing of AAL learners as multilingual and providing adequate instruction with this awareness—chief advocate and expert witness for the parents and children in the Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children, et. al., v Ann Arbor School District Board (12) and one of the original writers of the 1974 SRTOL resolution—has arguably secured AAL writers as multilingual learners. The King v. Ann Arbor case, also referred to as the “Black English Case,” resulted in a federal ruling that “established the legitimacy of African American Language/“Black English” within a legal framework and mandated the Ann Arbor District teach these students standard English” (Smitherman, “Word”12). The prevailing belief concerning African American students was that they did not have the capacity to learn Standard English, resulting in these students being disproportionately labeled as having learning disabilities or behavioral problems. This case occurred on the heels of SRTOL, where Smitherman and other black scholars decided to write a resolution for the edification of students of color, especially African Americans, because African American students were featured in research by non-black scholars who interpreted black discourse as unintelligible and elementary while bypassing the dynamic sociocultural and linguistic characteristics specific to their experiences in the U.S. educational system (Dillard; Haskins and Butts). In support of a similarity between the traditional multilinguals and AAL learners is that a similar case for language rights around the same time. Specifically, the most well-known case, Lau v. Nichols (1974), benefited from being couched in a time of federal cases of desegregation (Powers 87, 88). During the late 1960s, “federal agencies and courts began to directly address the needs of ELLs” (Powers 87). Prior to the case, some Mexican Americans lobbied for the well-known Brown v. Board of Education case of 1964, which declared separate public educational facilities for black and white students unconstitutional, to be extended toward Mexican American students (87). Therefore, Lau, is a case raised by Chinese American students who were not experiencing the same educational opportunities because of their language difference. In other words, “district officials used language to rationalize racially discriminatory practices” (89).22 In addition to a shared legal plight, AAL learners are arguably multilingual similar to English Language learners. For example, Guadalupe Valdés of the Linguistic Society of America posits a notable departure from linguists’ traditional, narrow definition multilingualism,23 one that only recognizes bilinguals as individuals who have mastered two languages to a broader, more inclusive definition: “a common human condition that makes it possible for an individual

39 to function, at some level, in more than one language” (“Multilingualism” 1). The definition presents language acquisition as a continuum of proficiency, including learners in this definition who may speak one language more fluently than their “mother tongue.” This continuum is, for this study, is extended to the process of language acquisition AAL learners experience when shifting in and out of AAL and EAE. Valdés suggests that the only means to make valuable comparisons between bilingual and multilingual learners is to give attention “to the differences and similarities in terms of number of key dimensions such as age of acquisition of the second language, circumstances in which the two languages are used, patterns of use of the two languages in the surrounding community, level of formal education received in each language, [and] a degree of proficiency” (“Multilingualism” 1). Though this study does not attend to all of the concepts Valdés highlights, it does aim to describe patterns of AAL and EAE in an academic setting scarcely discussed in writing center studies. While AAL learners and recognized ML learners share similar history of linguistic oppression, especially when learning EAE, AAL learners arguably are more closely related to Resident ML learners. Paul Kei Matsuda, in “International and U.S. Resident ESL Writers Cannot Be Taught in the Same Class,” explains the nuances among the various multilingual composers that are often oversimplified in the composition classroom. Matsuda is responding to the myth espoused verbally in one teacher’s query and covertly in many teachers’ belief system. He identifies key differences between the two groups: 1) Resident ESL students, for which he describes as immigrant, bilingual minority, ear learning, and generation 1.5 students; and 2) international students, for which he describes as typically are eye learners (161). Matsuda’s point for comparing the two groups was to mark the often overlooked distinctions that set resident ESL students apart from international students in important but nuanced ways. This distinction, Matsuda argues, is important in ways that are important for the influx in multilingual students in college classrooms, making it difficult to address their needs without further study (160). In the same way, this dissertation parses out AAL writers as resident multilingual writers whose learning and writing behaviors require further study to ensure best practices are implemented. Another key point Matsuda makes is the way present ESL scholarship does not meet the needs of resident ESL students in writing classrooms because of prevailing assumptions about this population, such as “have been educated in U.S. schools for at least several years, learned English through informal spoken interactions, are fluent in informal spoken English, have limited

40 metalinguistic knowledge of English, transfer oral features into writing (e.g., spelling errors, colloquialisms), are aware of U.S. youth culture, show strong integrative motivation, are resistant to being grouped with international students, may have limited first language, or L1, literacy, may have had their education interrupted, and may self-identify as fully bilingual or even native English speakers” (162). Matsuda’s inclusive definition of resident U.S. multilingualism arguably can be parlayed into ways to understand AAL learners, an underlying current in this dissertation study. More to this point, I draw a connection to their experiences with resident ESL students in that many AAL can identify with some combination of the list of identifiable markers ascribed to many resident ESL, or multilingual (ML) for this study, students considering that AAL learners are arguably multilingual minorities (see endnote 8). By including African Americans in the scholarship of ML learners, African American ML learners in this writing center can benefit from the best practices made available to second language (L2) learners. The more global benefits from this scholarly pursuit are the establishment and sustained support of equitable and necessary support for transitioning students from all linguistically disenfranchised groups. The problem lies in the design of the ESL courses, as Matsuda addresses: these courses cater to international students’ needs primarily. According to Matsuda, this course design is the result of the minimal presence of resident ESL students during the increased matriculation of international students in the early twentieth century. Universities saw and rapid incline in the resident ESL student around the same time they saw an incline in enrollment of students of color—during the 1960s and 1970s open enrollment (163). Around the same time, universities saw an increase in students of color, as well as working class students. As a result, educators were making adjustments to make teaching approaches to accommodate ELL students while AAL learners were, and still are, placed in basic and remedial writing courses without considering AAL features (Lamos). Again, Valdés also argues that more people in the world are multilingual than monolingual, asserting monolingualism to be characteristic of only a small population of the world. Yet the writing classroom and much of U.S. education still function as though it were a monolingual society. Smitherman provides an example of this dichotomy using AAL as an example of a language neglected in academic institutions and an example of the result of monolingual views. In Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans, she implies that the misdiagnosis of AAL as a prevailing deficiency among African Americans is a result of

41 monolingual purviews in the U.S. As a means of teasing out some of the factors that make AAL a language, Smitherman explains that “[t]he roots of African American speech lie in the counter language, the resistance discourse, that was created as a communication system unintelligible to speakers of the dominant master class . . . Even though AAL words may look like English, the meanings and the linguistic and social rules for using these words are totally different from English” (4). Thus, Smitherman’s description of AAL aligns with Valdés’s broader definition of multilingualism in that she sees AAL learners operating on a continuum of proficiency in their second language, EAE. Smitherman anchors this claim of AAL being a language separate from EAE on her political involvement with the 1979 ruling of the King v. Ann Arbor case, a federal ruling that argued for the language rights of AAL learners’ home language in similar ways that case for bilingual and multilingual students in the U.S. have argued and won. Despite this legal gain, monolingual teaching and tutoring strategies remain a thorn in the side of progressive implementation of AAL strategies. To learners speaking AAL and EAE, it may prove beneficial for them and their teachers—and tutors— to understand multilingualism and situate the relevant conversations that align it with AAL and EAE in terms of linguistic push-pull and composition studies’ forty year struggle to realize some of its more polemical demands. Suresh Canagarajah, in his essay “Multilingual Strategies of Negotiating English from Conversation to Writing,” provides six strategies multilinguals employ to reconcile language difference and the implied subordination of said language difference, all of which align with AAL learners and embodies the spirit of SRTOL: 1) retaining their linguistic distinctiveness in social encounters, 2) co-constructing intersubjective norms for communication, 3) communicating through hybrid codes, 4) consensus-oriented and supportive, 5) exploiting ecology for meaning making, and the 6) interconnecting language use and language learning. Multilinguals students, according to Canagarajah’s research, are predisposed to accept language difference given their subject positions often as other. In short, “[t]hey don’t expect commonalities in form or convention” (17) when conversing with persons outside of their language and cultural groups. As a result, they instantly learn to co-construct their norms (17-18). These new norms are “what emerges as this co-constructed medium may not have a self-contained or rigid system unique to a language. Instead, the medium is a mixture of many different items” (18-19). This new structure allows for fluid communication and expands the learning of all communicators involved. This fluidity also

42 promotes a consensus-oriented, supportive group that leads to less agonistic behaviors and stronger communication (19). Using Canagarajah’s multilingual strategies as a tool for better understanding multilingualism in an ethnic-specific writing center, including AAL learner language differences,24 helps demonstrate the dynamism occurring in this space, particularly the points of departure from the inherent qualities of the translingual approach, which “sees difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading and listening” (Horner et al. 303). Bruce Horner, Min- Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur team together on this opinion essay because they felt there was a need to extend the SRTOL resolution to “differences within and across all languages” (304). For these scholars, implementing this approach undermines the normalization of monolingualism, which “teaches language users to assume and demand that others accept as correct and conform to a single set of practices” (312) while simultaneously installing the vantage point that “teaches language users to assume and expect that each new instance of language use brings the need and opportunity to develop new ways of using language, and to draw on a range of language resources” (312). In short, “the aim should be to honor their linguistic ingenuity and to encourage other innovative strategies—not to reify a set of forms that supposedly have intrinsic power” (307). The intrinsic power refers to EAE, and often works adversely towards AAL learners in composing contexts. Consequently, their endorsement of the translingual approach challenges compositionists to “move beyond an additive notion of multilingualism (307). Horner et al. are, in essence, making the same case: the increased language difference in U.S. academies is a byproduct of the increased diversity of composition classrooms and writing centers, and the responsible means of meeting these diverse learners’ needs is to sustain conversations and engage in research that remains open and empathic to language diversity.

Students’ Right to Their Own Language: One Solution to Issues of Monolingualism

Students Rights to Their Own Language (SRTOL) was created to begin the process of validating language diversity by redressing the entrenched negative attitudes towards students of color, such as African American Language learners, in the writing classroom. In 1974, a group of

43 composition scholars of color posed an important question that English professors still have yet to answer cohesively: “What should the schools do about the language habits of students who come from a wide variety of social economic and cultural backgrounds?”(SRTOL). Initiated in the fall of 1971 by the officers of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the language policy committee began a year-long journey to meticulously outline a resolution that responded to the existing questions about concerning the shifting academic landscape. As one of the originators of the document, Smitherman situates SRTOL within the social and academic transformations for which the resolution existed: At the time of SRTOL’s ratification, many colleges offered open admissions programs—physical manifestation of the rebalancing of modernity through a postmodern project undertaken to foster greater equity in American education. These programs altered the linguistic landscape of many colleges and universities, and as a result, many colleges and universities were forced to deal with populations of students with which they had never before dealt. These new students were linguistically different from the traditional college student at the time. (“Understanding the Complexities” 3, emphasis original) While this linguistic difference Smitherman references represented poor students of all racial backgrounds as well as students of color who had been hindered from pursuing higher degrees, many of the students targeted as inferior were African Americans. Consequently, the resolution focused on the teacher’s role in ensuring students of all linguistic backgrounds have the opportunity to learn and compose in their own language. Founded on the claims that the language practices of students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds are far more diverse than teachers understood, the creators of the resolution emphasize that “[t]he training of most English teachers has concentrated on the appreciation and analysis of literature, rather than on an understanding of the nature of language, and many teachers are, in consequence, forced to take a position on an aspect of their discipline about which they have little real information” (Perryman-Clark, Kirkland, and Jackson 21). The shift in the academic landscape Smitherman recalls speaks to traditionally white institutions (TWIs), but there is no account for the shifts on HBCU campuses. This absence of current empirical data could be attributed to HBCUs only representing approximately three percent of American universities, making these universities and their learning programs unlikely

44 to be a part of national studies25 (Ward et al. 31). However, HBCUs still remain top producers of black scholars and professionals, making understanding this unique experience worth learning about. In the process of understanding the preservation of cultural history and commitment to social uplift, a study of the composing processes on a HBCU campus expands the corpus of knowledge in composition and writing center studies, as this study illuminates. Understanding the 1996 Oakland school board resolution (OSB) further clarifies the resurgence of focused attention on the implementation of SRTOL in school settings where there are large populations of African American students. Blake argues that OSB resulted in pejorative arguments over the language policy that helped African American students obtain fluency in both Edited American English and AAL because school is a “cultural battleground” (129). To this end, Blake’s tying OSB to SRTOL points towards the reason these two attempts to acknowledge the language difference of some African American students in academic settings resulted in this cultural battleground, or many open displays of public shaming. Blake’s argument supports the need for a sustained effort to make sure SRTOL is applied: Whether we consider achievement on standardized tests, special educational services, drop-out rates or graduation rates, a strong relationship exists between linguistic, social, racial, and cultural differences and measures of educational quality. Positive relationships typically associate White, middle/upper-class privilege and its characteristics with greater characteristics, and academic success, while negative relationships usually signal associations between non-White, working-class statuses, their linguistic and cultural characteristics, and academic under-performance. This historical persistence of these relationships, and the pervasive legislative and social refusal to engage in genuine, pragmatic dialogue about their redress, represent the codification of cultural, linguistic and racial inequity in the United States. (129) Other scholars acknowledge that this question is not new, but they also acknowledge the necessity to shift composition pedagogy to reflect the shift in the academic landscape. For instance, as Keith Gilyard and Elaine Richardson note, SRTOL is not representative of a ubiquitous ideology or school of thought: “While some originators and subsequent advocates have been content simply to articulate and promote goals of bidialectism and assimilation, other central figures, such as Geneva Smitherman, have embraced a greater activism” (38-39). The

45 authors underscore Smitherman’s sentiment about bidialectism, which describes the language usage that encourages embracing EAE while preserving the student’s home language. By necessity, this shift in pedagogy overlaps in writing centers. Tara Fenwick reminds us that “[p]edagogy is inherently audacious. But in the practices of educators it presumes to invade people’s lives and minds in the name of hope: hope for a better world, hope for more meaningful existence” (9). This audacious pedagogy can arguably reach its ideal potential in writing center studies. Warnock and Warnock argue for a more meaningful existence in writing center pedagogy through the lens of Paulo Freire’s liberatory pedagogy (Coogan 21). They forecast the best writing center pedagogy as one that deviates from the prescribed, rigid teacher-student relationships and ventures into true revision: revision of self. Warnock and Warnock, ultimately, urge instructors to see themselves as humanely as possible—as writers with diverse, vulnerable writing processes in order to help students find agency in the revision process. Shifting towards and sustaining this level of vulnerability for all of the writing centers’ patrons, including AAL learners, are only two examples of the aims of SRTOL pushing against the limitations of monolingualism. Although SRTOL has received praise for its efforts, it also has been critiqued for what it lacks (Gilyard and Richardson; Holmes). Among those critiquing SRTOL’s implementation has been Smitherman herself. In her 1999 article, “CCCC’s Role in the Struggle for Language Rights,” Smitherman acknowledges the strengths of SRTOL as an instigator of wider recognition of the challenges of marginalized languages and their users while “promoting language diversity” and opening a factual discussion on ways to instruct non-traditional students (359). At the same time, she critiques the ways efforts to implement SRTOL have been undermined because “the mood of CCCC, like the mood of America, seemed to have shifted from change and promise to stagnation and dreams deferred” (365). Since then, scholars have written about the limitations of the resolution and its lack of specificity for classroom application (Kinloch; Lamos; Parks). Staci Perryman-Clark, in “African American Language, Rhetoric, and Students’ Writing: New Directions for SRTOL,” “extends SRTOL as a framework for helping college writing students understand the ways that they can make purposeful and strategic choices about language practices in the composition classroom” (470).26 She argues that SRTOL applied to African American students “can contribute to student success in that classroom” (471). In her study, she provides examples of how composition instructors can affirm SRTOL while teaching

SRTOL, a response to the concerns of the resolution’s opponents and proponents alike (470-72). This study contributes to composition studies and what it excludes; that is, it is an explicit example of the intentional intersection of AAL use among African American student and their composition classroom using case study methodology. However, this watershed study does not include the experiences of African American AAL learners in the HBCU context, particularly HBCU writing centers. Another important result of Perryman-Clark’s findings is the possibility that “composition has not completely come to terms with how to affirm SRTOL in pedagogical practices” (474), a problem her study attempts to resolve with practical examples of ways to successfully support AAL in a HWCU classroom. In the end, the spirit of SRTOL to support multilingual writers has been more widely embraced, but the letter of these goals has yet to be fully realized, especially for many African Americans. While SRTOL aims for language inclusivity may not be fully realized in wider society (Alim and Smitherman; Bucholtz), language inclusivity is arguably evident in the liberatory education modeled by African Americans. A little less than a decade later, Joyce E. King (1991) reveals the need for a paradigmatic shift towards liberatory pedagogy that counters the tacit acceptance of racial injustices she calls “dyconscious racism” (133). King’s pedagogy calls for an active awareness of the inherent, implicit racism embedded in pedagogies that touted its multiculturalism, a shared theme in SRTOL. The same year, Ana Marie Villegas also decries the tacit acceptance of racial injustices in classroom curriculum. Her culturally responsive pedagogy is meant to remedy the observable language miscommunications between dominant and “minority” groups. Villegas notes the disparity in the treatment of students placed in low- performing classrooms, usually students of color. Labeling and linguistic marginalization typify the negative results of such cultural divisions. In addition to the disparities in language differences, Villegas reports that “[m]arked differences exist also in the curriculum used in high- and low-level groups” (4). She provides three ethnographic studies as examples of these curricular miscommunications due to ethnic dissonance. The first example is Shirley Brice Heath’s class- and race-based observations, and the second study highlighted the silences of American Indian students. Heath’s observations of the ethnic dissonance between African American students and their white teachers in a working-class community revealed that these African American students were not being engaged in practical ways that mirrored their lived experiences. To this point, these African American students were inaccurately assessed as

47 lacking critical thinking skills simply because the classroom activities and discussions misaligned with the varied ways they experiences literacy in their home spaces. Meanwhile, many of the white peers had experiences that aligned with the classroom expectations. Similarly, the Native American students in Philips’ study revealed that these students’ reticence was often misclassified as a deficiency. In the third study, Sarah Michaels’s study underscores this same ethnic dissonance, and ultimately the privilege associated with dominant literacy practices, in the classroom pedagogy of an urban first grade classroom. White students’ “topic-centered” narratives were privileged over the “topic-associated” African American students’ “implicitly associated” narrative strategies (Villegas 8-9; Michaels 428-29). Michaels’ observation led her to query the African American students about their narrative strategies, and she learned that they consistently provided logical explanations for their narrative approach (9).27 In short, these instances embody the purpose for SRTOL in that they create an exigence for a classroom curriculum that considers the language and literacy practices that students bring to the classroom as an aid—not a deficit—to learning. As a result, SRTOL creates a place in classroom instruction to consider ways race, class, and culture, countering the tenacity of a monolingual pedagogy. SRTOL, in this sense, reduces the instances of linguistic push-pull, which creates a systematic shift in AAL that borrows from traditions that collide with EAE literate practices. Mike Rose makes a similar observation in a composition classroom nearly a decade later. In his collaborative essay, “‘This Wooden Shack Place’: The Logic of an Unconventional Reading,” Robert, one of his students in his remedial writing composition course, demonstrates an alternative reading of a poem that is informed by his cultural upbringing. Robert’s response grates against Rose’s unchallenged interpretation, a point that Rose eventually acknowledges and adjusts. In the end, Rose realizes how the student and teacher could have benefited from a more culturally relevant pedagogy (see Ladson-Billings), which is one of the benefits of an instructor’s pedagogy that responds to the SRTOL.

SRTOL in HBCUs

SRTOL proponents and opponents have wrestled with its practical application and many who undertaken the challenge of providing approachable classroom strategies have centered on African American students (Kinloch; Kynard), but few have focused on students in HBCUs. For

48 instance, Staci Perryman-Clark’s practical application of SRTOL through an Afrocentric pedagogy that empowers all writers has proven to be productive in her writing instruction within traditionally white institution (TWI), but this same juxtaposition of African American student learners’ needs, not to the exclusion of their multilingual needs, has been an implicit feature of the HBCU curricular design (Jarratt), which speaks to the pre-existing importance of a resolution such as SRTOL to all marginalized voices, but particularly those within black communities and learning institutions devoted to educating them.28 A more contemporary glance at the vibrancy of SRTOL in the HBCU is evidenced in Zandra L. Jordan’s “Students’ Right, African American English, and Writing Assessment.” Here Jordan “considers the implications of Students’ Right for classroom writing assessment at HBCUs,” an undertaking that has been sparsely explored in composition studies (98). Her essay includes an overview of the scholarship developed post-SRTOL, yet its strength is its location within the historically black institution. Jordan, an alumnus of and professor at Spelman College, a historically black women’s university, identifies with this space because she understands the nature and challenge of these institutions include the fact that “they admit promising students who might be denied access elsewhere” (100). She clarifies this statement, by stating “[t]his is not to say that HBCUs are always a last resort. For many students, they are a first choice because African American students expect to receive more personal care at HBCUs than at predominantly white institutions” (100), yet the HBCUs still “want their students to produce in speech and writing the Edited American English valued in academe and business settings . . . The HBCU composition classroom with its mixture of Black southern, Midwestern, and northern dialects, as well as Afro-Latino, Jamaican, West African, and other influences, is undeniably diverse, but largely overlooked in the scholarship on language diversity and writing assessment” (101). As Jordan highlights the always already diverse classrooms in HBCUs, her observations of this particular classroom underscores the essence of SRTOL already at play in the instructional practices of these unique institutions. Susan C. Jarratt provides a more implicit correlation between the HBCU pedagogical practices and its African American student. Jarratt draws this conclusion after she uses archival research about the preeminent HBCUs of the nineteenth century— Atlanta, Fisk, and Howard Universities— and to gain insight about their commitment to classical education during a period that historically white institutions were parting ways from this form of education (138). While

49 she does not find student assignments, she does find publications from student writers who actively discussed issues of racism and the ways that racist ideology negatively affected the heart of HBCUs. These students passionately used Greek and Latin to discuss matters that immediately affected African Americans (137). Their devotion to social and racial uplift was intimately woven into the fabric of the institutions, and Jarratt used these publications to describe the counterpublic these student authors created despite the era in which they lived. Jarratt explains the limitations and benefits by drawing parallels between these few student writers and the wider student population: “it is still difficult to recapture how these various opinions and positions filtered into the classrooms and consciousness of students as a group, they at least provide evidence of an ongoing discussion about the curriculum in relation to human and social experience” (147). To further extend Jarratt’s analysis, this essay provides a partial insight into how HBCUs’ commitment to classical education while upholding its African ancestry could create a unique experience with linguistic push-pull not experienced at HWCUs, and in turn, a curriculum that prepares students to use EAE and AAL.29

SRTOL and Linguistic Diversity at HBCUs

Though the determination of African Americans to be self-taught and self-governed during and post-U.S. slavery is well documented (see Anderson; Williams), finding documents capturing AAL and EAE in student compositions is rare. However, composition scholars have uncovered archival research that helps uncover some of the early black literacy and language contributions to the writing classroom. Susan C. Jarratt’s archival research does not explicitly address HBCUs linguistic diversity, whereas Jordan’s essay speaks directly to the various black student population from different parts of the world. Marybeth Gasman, Valerie Lundy-Wagner, Tafaya Ranson, and Nelson Brown II support this diversity, noting that much of HBCU undergraduates “consist[sic] of foreign nationals as well as other American racial and ethnic groups” (31; Hill; U.S. Department of Education; Willie), a fact that runs contrary to legal assumptions that HBCUs as institutions upholding segregation (see Knight v. Alabama, Gasman et al. 17-18). On the contrary, these institutions have great knowledge of language difference that reinforces the need for and goals of SRTOL.

This diversity of the HBCU classroom can be traced to the founding of HBCUs during the post-Civil War as a result of the second Morrill Act of 1890 (Gasman et al. 6).30 Even during the Reconstruction era,31 African Americans were the forerunners of education for all people. During this time, “[m]any post-slavery developments provided ex-slaves with compelling reasons to become literate. The uses and abuses of written labor contracts made it worthwhile to be able to read, write, and cipher. Frequently, planters designed labor contracts in ways that would confuse and entrap the ex-slaves” (Anderson 18). Despite adversity, they initiated the first campaign among the native southerners for universal education (18). This context of the HBCUs' emergence has resulted in “the express purpose of educating African Americans” (Gasman et al. 2) despite funding constraints, instability in university administration, and traditional— sometimes caustic—curricular views concerning the historically Black colleges or universities. A byproduct of this purpose of educating African Americans has been the long-overlooked collisions of language varieties that this dissertation is exploring as AAL and EAE are negotiated within these intentional educational communities. In other words, [t]he racial and ethnic makeups of our classrooms and institutions have not resulted from historical or contemporary political coincidences, and, as such, HWCUs and HBCUs, even after accounting for the varied institution types . . . varieties that run across both HWCUs and HBCUs, have considerably different histories in how they have defined who the college student is, should be, and can be. (Kynard and Eddy W26). HBCUs have historically provided educational opportunities to students of color, as well as other marginalized populations, based on their learning potential and not solely on ability to masterfully navigate academic literacies. This consideration is evidenced in the “African American Diaspor[ic]” (Fort 15) lens by which teaching and learning occur in these spaces. However, there are curricular challenges to HBCUs that lead students to composing solely in AAL because they do not have adequate experience with EAE. The first of the two challenges is the achievement gap between African American students and white students in K- 12 (Fort 1) and the second is “the Cult of Cultural Deprivation” (Fort 1), which is the decision of the 1960s and 1970s to categorize U.S. minorities and poor whites as “culturally deprived” (3). Despite the scholarship countering these broad beliefs, the idea that these groups of students were void of culture became a key influence in the literature about the aptitude of African

American students (3-4). Edward Fort, a former HBCU president, defines this achievement gap in terms of literacy. More pointedly, Fort anchors this achievement gap as captured by Walt Williams, an economics professor at George Mason University. According to the National Assessment of Education Progress Reports, “by 1998 only 2 percent of African American eighth graders in Michigan were proficient in reading versus 34 percent for their Caucasian counterparts” (Fort 2). These “twin challenges” implicitly speak to the ambivalence towards AAL at HBCUs, as wells the various enactments of SRTOL. This ambivalence is part and parcel fueling Fort’s frustration with the perception that black students do not have the intellectual acumen that has given some teachers permission not to teach these students. For this reason, Fort’s curricular suggestions are motivated by the learning needs of African American students, a form of SRTOL. In all, HBCUs enroll students from different parts of the world as well as students who speak AAL—the latter group often classified as underprepared for their limited familiarity with EAE—making them an unexpected site of linguistic diversity. The emphasis on the linguistic differences at a HBCU as opposed to a HWCU stems from the distinct differences in these institutions origins. Carmen Kynard and Robert Eddy explain the difference between these institutional types as one framed by the history of their establishments. HBCUs were established as a result of segregation laws that used the legalized prejudices to produce a social justice agenda. Kynard and Eddy note the benefit of these institutions is that they have been able to rewrite ideas of race, access, and “educational equality in ways HWCUs “still struggle to participate in,” including a shared fate (W25). Debunking the myth that HBCUs are monoliths and monolingual, Kynard and Eddy “upset the general tendency to categorize the only salient difference between HBCUs and HWCUs as one where students have checked different Race boxes on their applications” (W25). This assumption of HBCUs as a monolith speaks to undue assumptions about the aptitude of students. The authors plainly state their purpose was to “interrogate how and why [their] literacy theory and practice in [their] current classrooms at HWCUs have been fundamentally shaped by the past and present record of HBCUs” (W25). Though their article draws from their personal experiences, their critical reflections of their teaching experiences at HBCUs important for this study. One particular contribution to this study is their distinction between HBCUs and other institutional types with relatively large populations of blacks, such as open admission schools and schools “that had large numbers of culturally or

52 ethnically diverse students since the advent of the freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s” (W26). Making this distinction prevents the contributions and concerns particular to HBCUs from being conflated with other institutional contributions or concerns. Kynard and Eddy bolster this notion with their emphasis on the label “historical” in the institutions’ general category: “While such institutions do serve racially and economically subordinated students, these sites do not represent a hundred-year history of consciously seeking and educating students of color . . . HWCUs surely cannot be disregarded; however, HWCUs do not represent the same impact, despite a greater proliferation of endowments and resources”32 (W26-W27). From Kynard and Eddy’s personal and profession experiences at HBCUs, this study gains insight into the distinct pedagogical practices, one that this study argues is linked to an African American worldview (see Asanti above, 13-14) and the spirit of SRTOL. Their summation of these experiences result in their belief that “a shared fate of mutual survival in the academy and beyond has been foregrounded in HBCUs such that pedagogy, mentoring, and interracial and intercultural communication take on critical meanings” (W27). These critical meanings of “interracial and intercultural communication” arguably include the under-studied nuances of AAL students’ learning experiences in the HBCU context. It is important to note that the critical pedagogies Kynard and Eddy mention have historically been inclusive of all students, a characteristic of an African/African American worldview (see Asanti above, 13-14; see also Perryman-Clark endnote, ii). To that end, they look at their experiences at HBCUs as being able to inform their teaching at HWCUs as opposed to viewing these learning sites as subpar, a common plight of black culture and spaces (W25). Considering the heightened probability of AAL learners and other language varieties within the HBCU has led M. Christopher Brown II and Kassie Freeman to write, “HBCUs continue to be devalued and misjudged, and the label of inferiority continues to be misapplied to African American students and historically Black institutions alike” (xi) due to the system racism in the U.S. educational system. EAE and AAL, however, are integral to the social fabric of HBCUs (see Gee above, 17). Beverly J. Moss in A Community Text Arises, posits that “shared cultural knowledge (or understanding, including norms, ideology, and artifacts) contributes significantly to the roles and expectations of participants, intertextual relations, and just about everything else in this [African American churches] institution. That is, there are expectations and shared experiences that dictate ‘the way we act’ and ‘what we recognize as acceptable

53 behavior'” (8-9). Constantly trying to equip their students with an education, “a promised land where Black people are seen as fully human by whites—even by the racist whites who first consigned Blacks to the status of subhuman slaves” (Williams, “Forward,” xiii), the challenges that these institutions have and continue to face stem from generations of overt and covert injustices, injustices that have often surfaced in terms of the denial of students’ rights to their own languages.

HBCUs and Linguistic Push-Pull

In her article, “Keepin’ It Real: Delivering College Composition at an HBCU,” Teresa Redd provides an example of the range of common multilingual interests within these institutional types. She notes that writing as liberation is embedded in African American history, citing Frederick Douglass, Thomas Jones, Ida B. Wells, and many others (73). Redd makes the case that this rich, African American heritage is not limited to an oral tradition, but enriched by both an oral and written tradition. In fact, she makes parallels between writing behaviors among present African American youth and African customs. This oral tradition is rooted in African customs, worldview, and language systems that are not often recognized even by the users. Nevertheless, this African worldview frames AAL and African American rhetorical practices in ways that are often misconstrued as grammar errors or bad English, references to EAE. Societal views are negative towards those who draw parallels between African American’s history of subjugation in the U.S. and the residual effects of this oppression—including linguistic oppression, as emphasized in Lyiscott’s spoken word piece in the beginning of this chapter. With society’s ambiguous relationship with black culture and language, many African Americans remain ambivalent about AAL, reinforcing the simultaneous celebration and ridicule of AAL and its users—the essence of linguistic push-pull. While Redd provides a broad catalyst for linguistic push-pull within the HBCU composition classroom, Susanna Horn frames her conversation around language difference among African American students at HBCUs in a way that provides a tableau of linguistic push- pull in a writing session. In her chapter, “Fostering Spontaneous Dialect Shift in the Writing of African-American Students,” Horn reminds writing center practitioners to conscientiously engage African American students in writing conferences beyond the common product-based

54 emphasis on sentence-level correctness. Instead, she admonishes us to support these students in beyond a reductionist approach without neglecting sentence-level concerns, further arguing that “[o]ur first and foremost aim is to help students concentrate on the content of their writing so that they are better able to write a piece that has significant meaning for themselves and for their readers” (103).33 Just as there is merit to the proposed methodology Horn presents, there is also the temptation to oversimplify the nuance and dynamism involved in understanding AAL student learners at HBCUs. One possible cause for this oversimplification is the categorizing of AAL as a dialect instead of identifying the continuum of AAL that extends beyond sentence-level language difference to oratorical and rhetorical patterns that inform both oral and written patterns (Smitherman, African American Language). While Horn includes African American students in her tutoring strategies, she does not avoid the trappings of a deficiency model: For speakers of African-American dialect, demonstrating linguistic competence in academic settings can mean taking extra time during editing to make a conscious switch from the spoken dialect to the written code. Tutors must remember that such competence already exists in many university students and that waiting until the editing stage before commenting on dialect concerns is imperative; once the student is sure about content, many dialect-associated errors are spontaneously eliminated from subsequent drafts” (103). Horn advocates for African American dialect users34 at the same time her speech implies EAE is the more competent language. In other words, Horn suggests that any form aside from EAE and its linear structure does not demonstrate competency. Having this attitude towards AAL learners reinforces the deficiency of AAL, making it difficult for AAL learners to acknowledge or accept this language for as credible (Baker-Bell). As a result her study does not fully engage the spirit of SRTOL. Instead, Horn limits AAL to surface level errors, thus privileging EAE as the only way to write. Horn does advocate for African American students language acquisition of EAE, which she terms as the written code. She promotes a delay of teaching code switching to EAE until the editing phase, arguing “that editing be kept the final step in composing maintains ‘students’ right to their own language,’ as urged by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (Committee on CCCC Language Statement 1974), and reinforces the importance of teaching the language of wider communication, as Geneva Smitherman has

55 recently reminded us (1987)” (103). Again, this strategy does give special consideration to a particular part of AAL learners who are often omitted from language strategies; this approach upholds linguistic push-pull and thus only enacts part of SRTOL. Horn closes with a proposition that appeals more to the spirit of SRTOL, arguing that writing center staff should allow students to become better writers instead of merely focusing on producing better writing, a mantra familiar to many writing centers as a central call made by Stephen North his 1984 essay, “The Idea of a Writing Center.” While this mantra has become an unrelenting motif in the grand narrative of writing center methodologies, viewing this call through the experiences of AAL learners has not. Though Horn does not always view AAL beyond a deficiency model, she does make a case for affect towards AAL writers that is often missing in the literature. Another crucial point to note is that this writing center is located at the University of Akron, not an HBCU. Therefore, this argument should be extended towards a writing center community with its history of meeting the needs of African American students with a higher possibility of being AAL learners. At the heart of Horn’s argument echoes the concerns that “...policies focused on language restriction have often been aligned with economic and political agendas to discriminate against racial and national-origin ethnic groups. Thus, the similarities among linguicism, racism, and other in humanities need to consider the relationships among them” (Wiley 19). As suggested above, Horn’s identifying the need for language rights in HWCU writing centers have implications for how this linguistic push-pull plays out in HBCU writing centers.35 Gasman et al. notes that scholars have yet to make “the characterization of the HBCU college environment a primary focal point” despite proponents’ anecdotal praises of the environment’s uniqueness” (38). Historically, black people were considered intellectually inferior, especially by southern white communities, and these widely held beliefs justified a history of financial support. This lack of financial support placed an undue burden on these institutions to teach with sparse materials. (Young, “Black Colleges and Universities” 42). Despite these financial and societal challenges, HBCUs have maintained a reverence for African American culture, many of them requiring some African American history course for freshmen. Similarly, many of the literature courses with African American culture as a central theme. As explained in the chapter 1, one of the primary goals of HBCUs includes the producing graduates who are able to address societal concerns that speak to concerns among the African American community as well as concerns

56 affecting the wider community. The construction of the social and academic thrust of HBCUs includes its verbal dynamism; therefore, HBCU faculty, as well as their support programs like HBCUs writing centers, contend with the challenges of supporting, teaching, and modeling this rich linguistic history as well as indulge in its rewards.

SRTOL and HBCU Writing Centers

Writing Centers & HBCUs

HBCUs and writing centers share a kinship that is easily overlooked. Both have a history of marginality within academia and both have remained open sites for language diversity (see Kynard and Eddy above, 26-29). Specifically, writing centers have an extensive history of targeting and striving to meet all students’ composition needs in and across disciplines. Writing centers share a common goal with HBCUs: assisting their tutees in becoming stronger writers. According to Elizabeth Bouquet, they also share a common history. In the mid-1980s, administrators began to publish about the difficult yet rewarding work they had been doing with little support and much less support from their universities and those who seemed to understand the work the least: English department faculty. Stephen North’s “Idea of a Writing Center” remains one of the most discussed and referenced articles in writing center theoretical frameworks. He argues for an overall understanding and appreciation for the research done in writing centers—an argument that in many ways is still valid. However, these commonly anthologized narratives of writing center scholarship rarely focus on the ways HBCU writing centers attend to their diverse language learners, including AAL learners. This absence of presence of HBCU writing center practices in the scholarship (see Anson above) poses as a threat to fair treatment in the spirit of SRTOL, especially in the increased globalization of writing classrooms and the writing centers that support them (see Horner et al. above). Consequently, focusing on the role of a peer tutor in an HBU writing center can offer untapped scholarship about language diversity. In “The Process of Tutoring: Connecting Theory and Practice,” Kenneth Bruffee admits that he hopes that a closer examination of peer tutoring practices will revolutionize teaching practices. More specifically, he states, “writing always has its roots deep in the acquired ability to carry on the social symbiotic exchange we call

57 conversation” (210). Thus, peer tutoring—despite the location or clientele—according to Bruffee, is the ideal space for both tutors and tutees to engage in such academic discussions about the complexities of writing. However, Carol Severino reminds us that “all teachers and tutors [emphasis added] consciously or subconsciously, have a stance toward response [emphasis original] to all writing,” (336), which, in the case of my study consists of AAL and EAE. Severino continues by stating that the tutors’ position is determined by “complex factors, “which include their experiences with writing in their home language, the demands of the writing program for which their couched, and the writers’ expressed linguistic and academic needs (336). In Murphy’s perspective, “the tutor must respond to various personality and learning styles and be sensitive to differences in gender, age, ethnicity, cultural and educational backgrounds, and attitudes toward writing” (9) without passing judgment. However, Nancy Effington Wilson’s recent study records “a clear bias against AAL” among HWCU faculty members and tutor attitudes towards students writers (178). Wilson argues that these negative responses to student writing “stem from an assumption that an AAL speaker/writer lacks intelligence” (178). Though Wilson acknowledges that this assumption is “unfounded,” it does not prohibit some of her survey participants from holding these views and thus affecting the formation of interpersonal relationships in the tutoring situation. Ironically, Wilson finds the participants more forgiving when they perceive the AAL writing as a result of an English Language Learner (ELL) acquiring EAE as a second language: “The language used to discuss the ELL markers and the language used to discuss the AAL markers is profound—the survey participants expressed distaste and even disdain towards AAL, whereas they were understanding and compassionate towards ELL” (186). To better understand the stark difference in perceptions between these groups, Wilson uses Ogbu’s hypothesis “that voluntary minorities (represented by the ELL sentences) and involuntary minorities (represented by the AAL sentences) perceive language differently” (187). In short, immigrants do not necessarily feel the need to negate their native language and identity in the same ways nonimmigrant minorities do (187). Wilson does not disclose her institution or its type, yet her home institution consists of a student population of over forty percent ethnic minorities, which are largely Hispanic students. Her research is an example of how the benefits of heightened awareness about multilingual students, including AAL learners, can benefit writing center

58 studies because her study reveals prevailing myths and opens a conversation for solutions, all of which embodies the spirit of the SRTOL resolution. As Marilyn Cooper states, “students and tutors who are outside mainstream culture [which expressly includes African American discourse] are usually more aware of the way language coerces them” (102). Nancy Welch reflects on her writing center experiences with marginalized writers in a Writing Center Journal article: my work in the writing center at a large public university has also introduced me to students who arrive at the center already aware, sometimes painfully so, that their meanings are contested and that their words are populated with competing, contradictory voices…Even alone, these students write with and against a cacophony of voices, collaborating not with another person but with the Otherness of their words. (4) In short, both Cooper’s assessment of the ways the dominance of mainstream culture—arguably read as “hegemonic society”—undercuts the agency of students from non-dominant groups and Welch’s personal account as a tutor with this group of students align with many of the experiences of African American students, especially those whose home language is AAL. The challenge for writing center studies and practitioners becomes the need to seek an understanding of these students’ writing experiences to better understand how to assist them in learning EAE without devaluing their home language. Nancy Grimm argues that this session and many of the writing centers are shaped by an ideology of individualism “that races writing center practice, making it inhospitable to students who are not white” (76). This ideology is problematic because “[i]ndividual performance still remains the primary site for evaluation and/or remediation” (81), and promotes a monolingual ideology that does not support the spirit of SRTOL. Perhaps the absence of HBCU writing center scholarship is a result of the field’s existing ambivalence towards race. Rebecca Day Babcock, Kellye Manning, and Travis Rogers, in A Synthesis of Qualitative Studies of Writing Center Tutoring: 1983-2006, provide a synthesis of the frequency “race” factored into a tutoring session, in which they concluded that marked identities were more readily identifiable than non-marked identities. There are two instances of AAL noted, the first an example of a student using African American Rhetoric and the second using “Black English” (15). Though Babcock et al.’s qualitative study is intended to theorize, and therefore provide distilled perspectives on how writing center scholars order the work they do, this limited discussion about AAL does not begin to include the nuances of the students or

59 tutors who use it rhetorically (Perryman-Clark) or any insights into how attending an HBCU might affect the theory about race and identity. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice, Anne Ellen Geller, Michele Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Caroll, and Elizabeth H. Bouquet dedicate their final chapter to the institutional racism within writing centers, offering insight into the prevailing negative attitudes surrounding AAL (see Horn above, 32-33; Johnson; Wilson). While they acknowledge their positions of privilege as white women, they also acknowledge their responsibility to engage in discussions about race in writing centers because “what draws folks to writing center work is our individual and collective investment in being careful, caring, and reflective in teaching and talking with students about their writing. To begin to realize and account for the possibility that racism is woven into that identity too, wound through even those practices that we hope are expressions of our most dearly-held principles, is to experience profound dislocation” (95). The authors preemptively remind writing center practitioners that writing centers are not exempt from everyday racism and that focusing on racism “does not invalidate that which is the heart of our work in writing centers—the principles and commitments to responsive practices” (95). One of the setbacks to advancing SRTOL is the invisibility of race in composition and writing studies; therefore, a conscious effort must be made to consider the ways race impacts composing practices, particularly among students of color in the U.S. Geller, Eodice, Condon, Caroll, and Bouquet also acknowledge this absence of culturally responsive pedagogy directed towards the needs of racialized groups: “Our own profession has done little to date to complicate tutors’ or our own understanding of racism in relation to our individual and professional identities, our teaching and tutoring work, or our institutions” (96). Though they recognize the zeitgeist of some of the publications, these authors highlight the commonsensical writing in tutoring textbooks and training materials intended to prepare workers for a multivocal space. Their analyses are based on their experiences in an institution that received praise in the Princeton Review for being among the most homogenous campuses (94). And, by homogenous, they are referring to predominantly white, an issue they express in terms of racism entrenched in institutional frameworks. These historical institutions of color do not have the option of ignoring race, and thus their writing centers must address those concerns every day, a point these women make (90). However, there are little to no canonical textbooks or

60 training manuals that address this difference, a sharp contrast to the non-native speakers’ manuals and paradigmatic shifts in writing center instruction. While valuing AAL as a language in this space aligns with a writing center's mission of empowering individual writers, it also raises other questions for the staff in regard to empowering the student to meet a “standard” language expectation. Other risks include marginalizing students within a similar cultural group who do not espouse the same linguistic or cultural values. Since Anis Bawarshi and Stephanie Pelkowski argue that “the wriing center stands as the most accessible and visible place of remediation within the university . . . [and is] mainly a place of acculturation,” thus making it a “‘contact zone,’ a place in which different discourses grapple with each other and are negotiated” (42); the HBCU writing center is uniquely anchored in language but extends into worldviews, regardless of the students’ awareness of this cultural phenomena. Karen Keaton-Jackson, Associate Professor of English and Director of the University Writing Studio and Writing Program at North Carolina Central University (NCCU), defines the disparities between state-funded HBCUs and state-funded HWCUs (para. 3-6) while situating her center in familiar writing center narratives, ranging from its obscure physical locations to need to parlay her then new role as director into the position a “hustler” (para. 6, 8), the latter being the exigence of the article. Keaton-Jackson provides a brief but poignant anecdote that explains the different responsibilities tenure-track HBCU faculty experience in comparison to their counterparts at a state-funded HWCU: “While teaching, research, and service are the major components of our functions, like most HBCUs, teaching takes precedence. Tenure/tenure-track faculty members at UNC-Chapel Hill may teach a lighter load with research as a higher priority” (para. 4) while teachers at NCCU would have to accomplish demanding research without comparable course release (para. 4). This narrative points towards the importance HBCU writing centers in supporting college composition at HBCUs, making these writing centers important sites for study of African American student learners and an example of SRTOL enacted in an HBCU writing center. One of Keaton-Jackson’s strategies was to collaborate with other faculty members and community organizations, which is a strategy shared by Beth Bir and Carmen Christopher. In their 2003 article, “Training Writing to Recognize Dialectal Difference,” Bir and Christopher surveyed students at Fayetteville State University, an HBCU, and North Carolina State

University, an HWCU. Bir and Christopher’s acknowledgement of the need for a flexible writing center pedagogy when assisting tutees vacillating between their home languages and academic discourse is an important recognition for AAL students and embodies the essence of the concerns of the 1974 resolution. SRTOL outlines, “[t]he explanation of what a dialect is becomes difficult when we recognize that dialects are developed in response to many kinds of communication needs” (23). This study aims to reveal that not all of those needs are rooted in some deficiency of the AAL students: in turn, the need may be that the AAL student needs a writing consultantto consider alternative ways of knowing. Their results revealed that the African American students attending both institutional types felt comfortable with language difference but were highly motivated to learn more about EAE (5). They also provide a gloss of the tutor strategies for tutoring students, including “dialect is not a matter of choice: people speak the language they hear” (5). In general, the authors conclude: Students speaking nonstandard dialects have a difficult task in becoming comfortable with the language that is required for most projects in academic and business worlds. Writing centers can assist them much more efficiently and positively than we currently are able to, simply by adding to our training a bit of basic information about dialect and a lot of sensitivity to the issues that accompany it. (5) This collaboration provides insight into the opinions of HBCUs and African American students at HWCUs about their home languages, but it is the only one of its kind. Frank Griffin also provides an alternative HBCU writing center narrative. Griffin, in his article “The Business of Business Writing Centers,” provides a rhetorical analysis of a specialized writing center for business students at his HBCU. His article discusses linguistic push-pull in a rhetorical context. More specifically, he argues that [at] the same time, the writing center consultant is working with students who represent African-American culture, although their struggles to ‘align’ their voices ‘with the dominant discourse’ seem as much a product of their youth as their subculture. Pratt's suggestion that the dominated discourse group defines itself in terms of the dominant group has even more interesting implications for African- American business students, at least for those who are marginalized from standard English both as students and as minorities. These same students, who in their peer

discourse community might embrace the mantra ‘Fight the Power,’ simultaneously send resumes to Fortune 500 companies and Big Five accounting firms. They constantly envision themselves with one foot in the world of African-American students and one in the corporate world. (Griffin, para. 13) For Griffin, then, a key motivator for acquiring EAE is the post-graduation rhetorical situation, although that situation may directly conflict with the students’ desire to assimilate into business environments dominated by EAE. As Jarratt notes, the history of HBCUs attests to teachers and students alike actively engaging in overtly redressing social injustices and by default indirectly affecting changes in language disparities. Writing centers also have been spaces used to redress social injustices on a smaller scale, assisting writing instructors in realizing multilingual and bilingual students in their language acquisition. In other words, the writing center can provide a more intimate space to discuss individualized writing needs. Though writing center scholarship on multingualism has made major contributions to composition studies (Harris; Rafoth), writing centers still struggle with their perceived marginality within composition studies (McKinney). In some ways, the HBCU writing center shares a similar path because HBCU writing centers arguably represent the culture of its institution; therefore, like HBCUs, it can be inferred that their writing centers have much to contribute to a writing center theory and practice that has provided much latitude to HWCU. Conducting more research, such as my study, is the most effective way to learn the potential contributions of HBCU writing centers, as this study sets out to do. Good writing center practices, regardless of the institutional type, suggest that writing center practitioners should pay close attention to the language barriers and history that may prohibit a productive consultation. Psychologist and learning theorist Richard G. Tiberius “stress[es] the quality of the interpersonal relationship between tutor and student” (Murphy and Sherwood 9) increases the effectiveness of the session. Some writing centers have found that developing the “interpersonal relationship” that Christina Murphy suggests is necessary for successful tutoring challenging because the majority of the tutees rarely recognized the ways their home languages impacted their writings. Murphy explains that the interpersonal relationship is needed in order to create an environment that yields “reciprocal learning,” resulting in tutors having “to break through psychological barriers that might otherwise impede collaboration” (9). Again, there is little writing center scholarship that points to the ways these

63 grand narratives work within the HBCU writing center context and how those practices affect the AAL student writers who potentially use the space (see Fort above, 27), and my study adds to this body of knowledge. To that end, this dissertation observes these language interactions in an under-researched institution and its writing center to better understand the cultural practices among AAL learners and tutors. In essence, my project urges us to “contemplate the potential outcomes of a persistent, distinctive world view for African American children in mainstream settings” (129). Composition’s inability to affirm SRTOL (see Perryman-Clark above, 22) parallels society’s inability to affirm HBCUs, despite HBCUs historical contributions to higher education (see Kynard and Eddy above, 26-29). More specifically, this study argues that this recalibration of African American world views might already be in operation within this HBU writing center. For these reasons, my next chapter includes the methodology of the study I conducted of an HBU writing center.

CHAPTER THREE

METHODOLOGY

In essence, even a cursory examination of the variety and amount of evidence that has been collected across the disciplines reveals that there is a tradition of belief in Black scholarship— that, despite the efforts of the slave culture to dismantle and disintegrate African lives and belief systems, remnants and resonances of this belief remain… --Jacqueline Jones Royster,Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women, 84-85 In an effort to gain insight into the ethnic-specific writing space of a writing center in a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) features the multilingualism of its African American tutors and tutees, particularly those who use AAL and EAE, and the dynamism involved in enacting the Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) for those who self- identify as AAL learners, this chapter briefly situates the feasibility of case study methodology within, first, the context of my research questions, then within the broader cultural and social context of the participants and more narrowly within rhetoric and composition studies, after which the chapter includes the description of the study that details the site for data collection of the study. In sum, this chapter overviews the suitability of case study methodology, situates this methodology within rhetoric and composition, noting the limited recognition of African American contributions. HBCU case studies follow this section as evidence of this methodology’s continued relevance to answering questions such as those undertaken in this study. From there, I explain how I used case study methodology to answer the research questions concerning these interactions tutors and tutees in the FAMU WRC. Since this study hinges upon the intersecting points of AAL and EAE in the two types of writing center sessions (referred and non-referred), I describe how I interpret the interviews, observations, field notes, and writing samples as applicable. To better understand the intersection of AAL and EAE and its influence in learning situations, this research addresses three key questions: 1. How are AAL and EAE used in the sessions? How do the uses of AAL and EAE reflect Linguistic Push-Pull (LPP)?

2. How do the intersections of AAL and EAE support or erode the WRC’s learning goals, as well as the student’s and/or tutor’s perceptions of his/her learning? 3. What do these intersections reveal about the benefits and challenges of using multilingual teaching in an HBU writing center?

Answering these questions offers insight into the double-consciousness, or the linguistic push- pull, these participants experience as a byproduct of the systemic racism in the U.S. and the gains achieved despite various linguistic prejudices against AAL. As Chapter 1 indicates, answering these questions also provides a fine-grained description of multilingual interactions within a single site dedicated to the development of writing expertise, thereby contributing an alternative research narrative of multilingual pedagogy and honoring students' right to their own language within universities at large and writing centers more narrowly. By learning more about the dynamism of multilingual interactions, this project offers insight into instituting tutoring practices that value the language varieties students bring with them into the writing centers thereby honoring the spirit and goals of SRTOL. Case Study Approach Because this dissertation extends the definition of multilingualism to include AAL learners, a necessary extension for writing center practices, I believe that studying these multilingual interactions in a writing center on a historically black university through case study methodology provides the best approach to understand the pre-existing tutoring interactions of those dedicated to the needs of students who have a greater chance of engaging in this language practice. The common belief among case study researchers to allow the case to “tell its own story” is an essential motivator for using case study research for this project (Stake 239). This methodology borrows from ethnography in its reliance on the interpretive study, which “seek[s] out emic meanings held by people within the case” (Stake 239-40). In the same spirit, this is framed around emic meanings, or an insider's analysis the research site under study. The case study approach is also apropos for this dissertation because of this study’s intrinsic and instrumental qualities. Robert Stake defines intrinsic case studies as the study of a case in order to learn more about its uniqueness while the instrumental case studies subordinates the case in order to understand another phenomenon. Meanwhile, an instrumental case studies approach subordinates the uniqueness of the case in order to focus on a thick description of particular issues (Grandy; Stake). The nature of the questions in this study have intrinsic and

66 instrumental qualities, particularly because in this study “the case is secondary interest; it plays a supportive role, facilitating our understanding or something else” (Grandy para. 3): the stigmatization associated with language difference. Specifically gleaning from Robert Stake's definition of singular case studies, at times the focus of this study is on the HBCU writing center, which would be considered a singular, intrinsic case. At other times, however, the site becomes secondary to the issue, and thus an instrumental case study since AAL and EAE strategies being conjoined within the same session as an act of multilingualism. What I mean by this is that my study is an instrumental case study in the sense that Stake defines it as a study that “is undertaken because, first and last, one wants better understanding of this particular case” (121). This definition in isolation seems to describe my exigences for the study, which is to describe the verbal and nonverbal language interactions of AAL learners in a HBU writing center. For Stake, the sole purpose of the intrinsic single case is to understand “an intrinsic interest” in a particular subject, person, or idea (122-23). In that regard, using case study methodology provided a systematic approach for studying my intrinsic interest in the historically black university writing center, and by extension, the intrinsic interest in HBCUs and their historical structural and curricular influences on support centers such as writing centers. Meanwhile, this study is anchored in its instrumental interests in language interactions of self-identified AAL learners who are negotiating academic writing demands, at times, overshadowed the influences of the HBU writing center. Ronald W. Scholz and Olaf Tietje echo these sentiments, suggesting that most case study research is chosen in research fields where the biographic, authentic, and historic dynamics and perspectives of real, social or natural systems are considered (4), such as the use of AAL and EAE in the tutorial sessions. Moreover, they posit this approach is “an appropriate approach to real, complex, current problems that cannot be treated simply by one of the known analytic methods, such as experiment, proof, or survey” (5). Therefore, Stake's definition of instrumental single case studies defines it as “a particular case is examined mainly to provide insight into an issue or to redraw a generalization” (123) embodies the evolution of this study more than the intrinsic case, although, there is some practicality in focusing on the particular case intrinsically. In brief, this study is part and parcel instrumental case because I address and redress the stigma surrounding AAL learners. The fundamental understanding that “the stories of such [HBCUs] schools need to be told and not simply to represent the experiences of once-neglected

67 communities or to satisfy a historical injustice but to offer a more nuanced and representative picture of the past” (Gold ix), and by extension HBCU writing centers, drives my motivation for the site and the sources. Stake does include the caveat that “there is no hard-and-fast line distinguishing intrinsic case study from instrumental, but rather a zone of combined purpose” (123). For this reason, this study typifies an amalgamation of case studies in the sense that this study focuses on the language interactions of Non-Referred (NON) and Referred (REF) participants36—categories classifying clients in the research site for this study—making this an intrinsic case study, but the impetus for selecting this research site is that it is on an HBU campus. According to Robert K. Yin, case studies “can communicate research-based information about a phenomenon to a variety of nonspecialists” (131), making the case study approach useful for sharing findings to broad and diverse audiences. Patricia A. Duff explains that regardless of the type of case, the “methodological principles and priorities are basically the same. The individual case is usually selected for study on the basis of specific psychological, biological, sociocultural, institutional, or linguistic attributes (32). Duff continues to identify some of the benefits of case study methodology as being a resource of “depth of analysis, and readability” when thoroughly and accurately done, and this depth is the result of the thick descriptions of the cases as well as the triangulation of perspectives and artifacts (43; Stake; Yin).The selection of this site, then, implies an underlying question this study seeks to understand is the impact of systemic racism and language prejudices have on this institution’s tutor and tutee language interaction. In short, the case study approach is ideal for this study as this methodology provides a contextualized knowledge of the language diversity of multilingual students on a historically marginalized campus. Furthermore, the wide-spread use of case studies in rhetoric and composition studies, writing center studies, and studies from HBCUs ratifies case study methodology as disciplinarily valid.37 Composition Studies Case Studies In order to contextualize the use of case study approach for this research project, this section focuses on the complicated history and significance of case study within the field of rhetoric and composition. Seminal studies such as Janet Emig’s The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders inspired other new scholarship in the field (North 197; Voss 278). As the first landmark study of student writing processes, Emig uses case study methodology to capture the

68 writing processes of eight seniors of six Chicago area high schools (North; Voss). Emig’s study “was the first significant study of student composing processes, giving impetus to the consciousness of writing as process that prevails in today’s composition theory and pedagogy” (Voss 278), which contributed a shift in methodology from the prevailing quantitative methodologies of the time (Smagorinsky). An unexpected contribution of this inaugural study was her development of what Ralph Voss describes as “science consciousness” in writing research (279). In short, Voss commended Emig for recognizing the benefits of adapting scientific methods to composition because of their ability to provide “a more precise knowledge” (279). Emig’s contributions, however, have not escaped criticism. While Voss, in his essay, “Janet Emig’s The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders: A Reassessment,” credits Emig as a pioneer of applying a “science consciousness” (279) methodology to the study of student writing processes in composition studies, he also concludes that her implications appear “too forceful, too sweeping as generalizations after a study of only eight students” (278). He does attribute the acclaim of her adaptation of case study methodology, one that has enjoyed a long- time presence in social science and educational fields (279), to the prominence and privilege of science in this society. In The Making of Knowledge in Composition, North, too, outlines a primary benefit of the “Clinical Approach” is that it is an accessible point of entry to research and allows the researcher to “paint full portraits” of the participants (205). These full portraits provide the context for understanding the complexities of the participants and researchers' context, a component of case study methodology in composition that has become the epicenter of ethical research. Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater describes this gradual role of reflective approach adapted from disciplines such as anthropology, feminist theory, and phenomenology (118). She uses her case study as an example of the need for qualitative research methods that consider the contexts of both researcher and participants instead of privileging the objective research approach as was prevalent in composition studies around the early 1980s (118). Noting how she neglects to "include [her] own subjective reactions to these students' writings," Chiseri-Strater regrets that she "reserved no space to describe the researcher-informant relationship" (118). This failure to integrate research-informant subjectivities follows the tradition North refers to when describing Emig's study or Clinicians in general undergirdsthe my decision to craft a highly collaborative approach inherent in this study where I research with my participants as opposed to research on them (Fleischer), making the case study the ideal approach

69 for acknowledging the presence and influence of the researcher in the natural environment in the most ethical way. Other rhetoric and composition scholars have challenged the ethics of the use of case study methodology while offering solutions to the issue. In their 1996 edited collection, Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy, Peter Mortensen and Gesa E. Kirsch chronicle the growing prevalence of case study methodology in the field as marked by the increased number of case study approaches used in dissertations and scholarly publications. While they see it as positive shift because composition scholars "strive[d] to enrich our understanding of literacy in its myriad cultural contexts" ("Introduction" xix), they also call for a more ethical approach to its practice. Unlike Chriseri-Strater, Mortensen and Kirsch are hesitant to credit the benefits of adopting an interdisciplinary approach to qualitative research methodology such as case study approach because those disciplines do not view writing in the same terms as composition scholars (xix-xx). However, Mortensen and Kirsch agree with Chiseri-Strater in that reflective research is paramount especially for qualitative approaches such as case study because "we have to recognize how hierarchies and inequalities (marked by gender, race, class, social groupings, and more) are transferred onto and reproduced within participant- researcher relations" (xxi-xxii). This attention to the interdisciplinary differences while adapting case study methodology demonstrates the importance of accuracy and ethical treatment of participants in composition studies. This study speaks to the importance of qualitative research that reflects the contributions of HBCUs to composition studies and the writing processes of black students, and “[t]his learning and teaching happening on these campuses are conspicuously in the margins of the larger rhetoric and composition narratives, and what prevails are references to the needs of African American students [that] are folded into a discourse of deprivation . . . The literature is reflective of a generalized perception that African American culture is not a useful rubric for addressing the needs of African American learners, and thus, that African American culture is delegitimized the classroom” (Ladson-Billings 206). In that regard, the context of African American contributions, as well as institutions historically designed to educate them become of particular interest. Cindy Johanek claims that “Current debates about research methods have often focused on where and how researchers view reality and evidence. Because we debate the value of evidence—rather than the contexts from which we gain that evidence—the rift between

70 different kinds of researchers has resulted in stereotypes” (28). Johanek zeroes in on the metadiscourse surrounding debates similar to North’s. Like Johanek, this dissertation is as invested in the context of the evidence as much as the value of the evidence. Scholars in the field have taken note of this absence and attempted to redress this omission. Keith Gilyard also notes the omission of HBCUs’ contribution to the field by acknowledging W.E.B. Dubois’s belief that HBCUs were meant “to produce students who ‘. . . can help the world know what it ought to want done and thus by doing the world’s work well may invent better work for a better world’” (Du Bois, “Education and Work” 68, qtd. in Gilyard “African American” 629). DuBois’s speech points to DuBois’s belief that the world could gain knowledge from the black students educated at HBCUs. To that end, Gilyard highlights DuBois’s argument that the “Black experience should be at the center of curriculums for Black students” including “research-based, ‘scientific teaching’ of writing to adults” (DuBois “The Future Function” 147, qtd. in Gilyard “African American” 629). DuBois’s comment signifies the frame of thought surrounding HBCUs and suggests HBCU English faculty made notable contributions to the field with their discussions about black student learning in these marginalized learning environments. For example, Hallie Quinn Brown was “the most notable African American college language educator” (Gilyard 628) and was attributed with including a “degree of linguistic and cultural sensitivity” in her freshmen English and elocution courses (628). Brown’s shifting her stance on eradicating AAL to a more inclusive linguistic approach speaks to the common shifts that are best expressed through case study methods. As an extension of the existing contributions of African Americans and HBCUs to rhetoric and composition studies, I conducted this case study. More specifically, I selected the case study research because “it draws attention to the question of what specially can be learned about the single case” (Denzin and Lincoln 120). Therefore, the following section reviews the case studies of historically black universities, noting how composition studies would benefit from a case study about the language interactions of multilingual African American students in a historically black university writing center. Writing Center Case Studies Writing center studies has a history of narrativizing through case study research because of its ability to depict a “transformative narratives” (Newkirk) that garners an authority of endured experiences. These transformative narratives range from describing the institutional

71 situatedness of a center to describing the interiority of discourse communities. Through the analysis the case studies in writing center and applied linguistics, this section describes how case studies help present broad and specific writing center narratives of literacy and language learning occurring in these spaces. Joyce A. Kinkead and Jeanette G. Harris argue that case study methodology affords writing center scholars and practitioners the opportunity to understand writing centers in terms of their complexities instead of the common abstractions for which they are often described (xv). For the authors, providing their collection of twelve case studies provides “detailed descriptions of how each one came into being and how it functions” (xv). These descriptions allow for a deep contextualization of each writing center and its home institution, notwithstanding each center’s story of triumph despite the specific obstacles (xv). To discuss context in writing centers is to discuss not only the center’s institution, but it also includes the smaller concepts germane to writing centers such as programmatic or departmental distinctions (xv). Case study methodology, as the authors suggest, reveal how these contexts work for or against the writing centers’ aims. Muriel Harris, in her essay, “Writing Center Administration: Making Local, Institutional Knowledge in Our Writing Centers,” reminds us that “[t]o a degree even greater than is the case with composition programs, writing centers are—and must be—shaped to fit their particularized surroundings” (76). This note supports her discussion of case study methodology in terms of its strengths and limitations, which she mostly accomplishes through the analysis of. Kinkead and. Harris’s Writing Centers in Context: Twelve Case Studies. Harris argues that “given the varieties of structures of educational institutions at all levels, at least 12 more models could easily be added to Kinkead and Harris’ book” (76). Harris’s comment highlights the benefits of using case study methodology to add to the writing center narratives. To wit, this study represents one of the many other writing center case studies Kinkead and Harris omit from their book. Notwithstanding, writing center studies has embraced case study methodology as a central means of explain the contexts for which they work. Case study methodology is also a common research approach for writing center studies because it helps contextualize the diverse students writing centers serve. Anne DiPardo provides a thick description of Fannie, a Native American student, and her process of negotiating cultural and language difference in tutoring session while navigating academic discourses. In her highly anthologized study, “’Whispers of Coming and Going’: Lessons from Fannie,” DiPardo indexes

Fannie’s experiences in order for writing center scholars “to understand the social and linguistic challenges which inform [non-Anglo students’] struggles with writing” (233). Writing centers are central to addressing these subjectivities that often exist and thrive in contact zones as noted in the first chapter, and DiPardo notes that writing center tutors are “[o]ften placed on the front lines of efforts to provide respectful, insightful attention to these students’ diverse struggles with academic discourse” (233). In that regard, case study methodology allows for the careful consideration of the students’ narratives that often are overlooked. As DiPardo’s case study demonstrates language difference of the student and the complex subject positions of tutors in the advancement of this contextualized knowledge, applied linguistics has gained prominence (Duff 36). Earlier cases were localized more narrowly than writing center studies in that “[m]any of the prevailing models and hypotheses in SLA [second language acquisition] were founded on a small number of well-documented studies from the first wave of case studies of language learners in the 1970s and 1980s . . . [m]any of [these] early case study participants were either the researchers themselves or their friends and relatives” (Duff 36- 37). This same approach is evidenced in composition studies as two pivotal case studies recognized in literacy studies, Glenda L Bissex’s Gnys at work: A Child Learns to Read and Write in 1980 and Marcia Baghban’s Our Daughter Learns to Read and Write in 1984. These case studies, similar to those in SLA, demonstrated the benefit of cases of providing contextualized knowledge of writing development, a process that had been heavily informed by the cognitive approach as a result of Linda Flower and John Hayes’ study in the 1970s. Peter Smagorinsky points to these two longitudinal case studies as pivotal to composition studies in particular due to their recognition that writing is “best thought of as a set of culturally based discursive practices rather than as merely a set of cognitive skills (21; see also Grover and Englert). Though these case studies are not SLA cases, they both demonstrate the process of language development and the ways this process evolves and how it should be taught. Bissex’s study, however, provides an account of language difference in that Paul, Bissex’s subject and son, created word formations that resisted EAE that more closely aligns with the dynamism in SLA cases. In the end, case studies in the writing center studies mirror the gradual shift from a positivistic influence towards a more interdisciplinary approach in composition studies. Specifically the case study approach illustrates the complexities writing centers experience in the

73 context of their home institutions, despite the instinct to generalize writing center practices (Harris). Using this methodological approach in writing center studies also has allowed researchers to be more reflective in their subject positions within their scholarship, proving that this approach effectively contextualizes the writing center as an institution within an institution, but it also contextualizes positionality, language use, and other dynamism occurring on a microscopic level in each center, all elements important to my study. HBCU Case Studies Given the propensity for case studies to contextualize knowledge of writing centers, and by extension their home institutions, this section provides examples of case studies in HBCUs, drawing attention to points of convergence and divergence between the example cases and my own study. The HBCU case studies highlight this approach to describe the nuanced learning experiences in learning environments historically earmarked and constructed for African American students and teachers—one of the many institutions of higher learning often omitted from anthologized studies (see Muriel Harris above). For instance, Elaine Ross-Thomas and Charles E. Bryant present a description of the mentoring occurring in Southern University and A & M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana “from 1990-1992. The two-model program utilized campus personnel and community professionals as mentors. The Mentor/Protégé relationship positively “influenced the retention rate, probation rate and cumulative average of both first-year students and probationary students enrolled in the Mentoring Program” (70). The authors recognize the increased method of planned mentoring in order to improve the social and scholastic outcome of “white-collar workers in a corporate environment, professors in an academic environment and Black students in a predominantly White environment” (70), as well as “an integral part of gifted education, being adopted to facilitate the learning of gifted students” (70). What Ross-Thomas and Bryant find missing from the body of scholarship is an HBCU perspective, a shared realization at the epicenter of this dissertation. Consequently, the case study approach affords HBCUs an opportunity to provide contextualized knowledge about alternative approaches to learning and research that seeks solutions for institution-specific issues that are inadequately addressed by the existing body of knowledge for their specific student population: Southern University’s need to increase retention rates (71). Southern University’s is not specific to their institution, however. HBCUs are constantly seeking ways to reduce retention challenges resulting from the achievement gap between black and white students as discussed in the first

74 chapter (Fort 6). Therefore, the case study methodology increases the body of knowledge of the unique institutional concerns. Ross-Thomas and Bryant’s case study not only reveals layered challenges this HBCU faces, which can arguably be extended to represent most challenges HBCUs face, but it also reveals the successful solutions derived. For instance, the researchers implemented two models, the Preventive and Clinical Models, the former relied on a random selection of freshmen while the latter relied on served all level of students who were placed on academic probation as a result of their inability to successfully transition in the University (71). This bipartite model indirectly resembles the mission of the research site, which has a primary focus to support the Office of Retention and underclassmen successfully assimilate into academic literacies, although the approach does not explicitly follow the Preventive or Clinical Models. The results of Ross- Thomas and Bryant’s study reveal, however, how these students’ “underprepared” label does not adequately describe all of the challenges they face. For instance, many of these students could not benefit from the Clinical Model because their low grade point averages removed financial assistance as an option for re-enrollment (72). The Preventive Model participants during the 1990-1991 academic year, on the other hand, benefited from the program, which helped them transition more smoothly from secondary school to college better than freshman nonparticipants, according to Ross-Thomas and Bryant (73). Having these results suggests, then, the significance of mentoring among black students in a HBCU, using mentoring models that reflect one of the many roles of writing center tutors. How much more could be gained from using a descriptive case studies of black students at HBCUs in other mentoring models, such as peer tutoring, the focus of my study? Laura Perna, Valerie Lundy-Wagner, Noah D. Drezner, Marybeth Gasman, Susan Yoon, Enakshi Bose, and Shannon Gary’s 2009 case study focusing on the experiences of African American women in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields provides another example of the usefulness of case study methodology for understanding contextualized knowledge in HBCUs. This case study is significant for its recognition of institutional characteristics, policies, and belief systems specific to Spelman College, as well as other HBCUs. For example, the researchers outline the compounded racial/ethnic barriers between African American women and their preparation for STEM fields during their pre- college readiness. Whether it is their low or non-enrollment in general or Advanced Placement or

International Baccalaureate calculus or it is the barrier of racially and ethnically biased standardized text, women of color—particularly African American women—have entered STEM fields in low numbers (3). However, they note the significance of self-efficacy, or the belief that one can accomplish a task, as an essential for students in STEM, especially for students of color and women (4). They found that “colleges and universities that serve predominantly Black populations and/or women appear to be disproportionately effective in promoting the educational attainment of these groups overall, and in STEM fields in particular (5). The results were that Spelman implemented several policies and practices that reinforced the self-efficacy the participants needed to offset the anticipated racial and ethnic barriers African American women face in STEM fields: the cooperative rather than competitive peer culture, the efforts of faculty to actively encourage and promote students’ success, the availability and use of academic supports, and the availability of undergraduate research opportunities” (8). This peer culture echoes shared characteristic of HBCUs broadly, despite their diversity (see chapter 2). African American Worldview and Case Studies While my questions warrant the use of case study methodology and while the composition studies and writing center studies validates case study methodology as appropriate for my discipline, I bring to case studies an African American world view. Understanding select African American scholars’ methodology reveals this study’s methodological exigence and points toward the importance of its data collection and analytic methods. Jacqueline Jones Royster, in “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own,” explains her research approach through an African American worldview that coincides with my research approach. Two pivotal points she makes in this essay are that, like black literary scholar Barbara Christian suggests, African Americans “theorize ‘in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking’” (qtd. in Royster 35). In other words, a central part of methodological approaches by and of black scholars occurs within the dynamism of the language play within black discourse. Though all methodologies tell stories, case studies privilege the often marginalized and historically racialized contexts many African Americans find themselves, especially within U.S. higher learning. The second pivotal African American scholarly research method from Royster that informs this research study stems from her discussion of W.E.B. DuBois’s concept of double consciousness. As defined in chapter 1, double-consciousness is the sense that African

Americans are constantly negotiating two personas: the one that they have of themselves and the one that society has created for them. Royster uses DuBois’s work to explain her role as researcher of African American scholarship in a way that provides a useful subject position for this dissertation: “Leaving then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater soul” (DuBois 1, qtd. in Royster 34). Royster interprets DuBois’s meaning to be that he chose to function as one who “straddle[d] boundaries with the intent of shedding light, a light that that has the potential of being useful to people on both sides of the veil” (34). Moreover, Royster implies that this veil in DuBois’s iconic text is one that drives the African American experience in the U.S. to the margins when she says: I’ve accepted the idea that what I call my “home place” is a cultural community that exists still quite significantly beyond the confines of a well-insulated community that we call “mainstream.” And that between this world and the one that I call home, systems of insulation impede the vision and narrow the ability to recognize human potential and to understand human history both microscopically and telescopically. (34) This veil, then, represents —for Royster, DuBois, and me—the racial barriers that cloak the prevailing cultural dissonance hidden in systemic and institutional racism. Specifically, Royster’s adaptation of DuBois’s framework to aid in her identify and interpret academic and nonacademic discourse as participants in both communities. This framework informed my reasons for using Geneva Smitherman’s definition of linguistic push-pull to describe the ways AAL learners’ ambivalence towards their use of the language, a byproduct of dominant culture’s conditioning wider society to associate this language system with a lack of education and EAE with superior education (Makoni et al. 7-8). The adaptability of case study methodology allows for the inclusion of these culturally-specific frameworks in my study. In short, a distillation of Royster’s experimentalist research approach, which allows her to critically utilize personal prejudices, aligns with thick descriptions of phenomena afforded by case studies. Stephen North confirms this connection, defining case studies as an driven by the ideas that the world has a logical order outside of how humans exist in it and searches for these ordered phenomena in its natural habitat (Making of Knowledge 146). This nuanced discussion of the personal experience parlays into North’s definition of the case study approach, which, “for all

77 their influence, the Clinicians have so far been reluctant to fully recognize the power of their method for what it is, and so have not claimed any substantial methodological authority of their own” (Making of Knowledge 199). North refers to the fluidity of Clinicians within composition studies use methods, as they use a pastiche of approaches from other methodologies. This inter- methodological approach, however, is a value for my project because case studies adapt to the dynamic contexts. This flexibility allowed me to investigate forces at work within a single setting (Eisenhardt 534) through asking about how the language interactions occur among the AAL language users and what contributes to this phenomenon (Yin). Jacqueline Royster and Jean C. Williams note the misconstrued concept of equating African Americans with deficiency and illiteracy while drawing attention toward the absence of HBCUs in the field’s accounts of African American contributions (570), positing that “[narratives of composition] have simultaneously directed our analytical gaze selectively, casting, therefore, both light and shadow across the historical terrain” (581). The authors reference Mina Shaughnessey’s landmark text, Errors and Expectations, arguing that the text is commonly misinterpreted by conflating race and class distinctions in the text. Specifically, they argue that “[s]peaking a language or variety of English other than standard English appears to be much more a contributing factor to Shaughnessy’s characterization of basic writers than does race” (571). This distinction is crucial to note in the history of the field because basic writers courses predate the open enrollment of students of color in HWCUs, making the conflation of basic writing with students of color inaccurate (571). Nevertheless, this misguided perspective persists, but dynamic qualitative methods such as case study methodology help to counter these views. Framed by an African American world view, my use of a case study methodology not only positioned the participants as shared contributors in the analytical process, but this research approach proved best for real-world contexts. Since this study’s questions seek to provide insight into the embodied complexities of the tutor/tutee relationship in this ethnic-specific writing center, I chose to use the case study because this approach permitted me to “investigate a contemporary problem within its real-life context” (Scholz and Tietje 2). In essence, this approach allowed me to study the use and purpose for using African American discourse alongside academic discourse and the ways communication is enhanced and/or hindered by code switching and code-meshing within the context of its users—a historically black university

78 writing center. As a result, I have provided a thick description through multiple methods such as field notes, video, observations, and writing samples where available. I wanted to know how systemically and historically oppressed racial groups in an ethnic-specific writing space communicated in the various sessions provided. Case Application Given that cases are bounded and integrated systems, this study was designed to describe the language interactions between African American tutors and tutees who self-identify as AAL learners. I looked for oral and written patterns in both tutor and tutee communication to indicate instances of and motivations for fluctuating in use of AAL and EAE during an hour-long tutorial. In particular, this study offers dynamic perspectives about language learning in HBCUs from the student and tutors’ perspective. By searching for these patterns, the study purposes to contribute to the limited body of knowledge about AAL learners in an HBCU writing center, as neither HBCUs nor HBCU writing centers are found in many of the studies concerning multilingual learners. This absence can be attributed to the fact that HBCUs only consist of approximately three percent of the American posteducation system (Gasman et al. 31). This study redresses that absence. Overview of Study Design Involving five tutorials, this study included an initial interview with the researcher, a one- to-one conference between the tutor and tutee, and a cued recall interview between the researcher and each participant. Student drafts with tutor comments where applicable were included in the data set along with field notes, transcriptions of video recordings of the one-to-one tutorial session. For the tutees, most of the initial interview occurred prior to their one-to-one tutorials with their tutors. The researcher conducted the initial interviews with the tutor, however, over the course of several weeks during their scheduled work hours. Tutors were solicited through email and face-to-face meetings. All participants agreed to be video recorded throughout the study on- site during regular operating hours. The tutors and researcher sat adjacent to one another as to include our interaction on camera for further analysis. For the one-to-one session, however, I sat far enough away from the tutor and tutee to record my observations and to tend to any technical challenges without interrupting the tutoring session. The cued recall interview, which is a practice steeped in education, psychology, and linguistics (DiPardo; Fanshel and Moss; Kagan, Krathwohl, and Miller; Gumperz) to “elicit participants’ retrospective impressions of

[videotaped] social interactions or verbal performances” (DiPardo 168), occurred as the final session. The researcher coded the transcripts to reflect the phonemic spelling of the participants' oral interaction, reflecting AAL and EAE usage in the session. The transcriptions also include the nonverbal contributions to or commentary on the ongoing oral conversation Then, these transcripts were divided into units based on the four research questions and the three instances of communication for both AAL and EAE: verbal and written. The Site The site for this qualitative study consisted of the writing center serving the students at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), one of the largest HBCUs in the country. Founded as the State Normal College on October 3, 1887, FAMU has historically had a student population of nearly 13,000 students from the U.S. and more than seventy countries, ranging from the Caribbean and South America to Africa and Asia. This land-grant institution has received several national recognitions as a leading institution in the 2014 U.S. News & World Reports “Best National Universities” and is recognized as the best historically black colleges or universities in the 2015 U.S. News & World Reports. FAMU has also been recognized by the Princeton Review in 1997 as the “College of the Year” and more recently as one of Princeton Review’s “Best of the Southeast” for its quality education at affordable costs. FAMU leads in its unique programming and its partnership with the community. One example of this is its leadership in viticulture through its Center for Viticulture and Small Fruit Research. Pairing research with community development, this Center researches grape genetics and breeding organic to the region and hosts the annual community affair, The Grape Harvest Festival, for all to enjoy and learn about their findings. The university also is home to The Center for Plasma Science and Technology, or CePaST, a leading plasma research center in the state of Florida. The collaborative research of students, faculty, and researchers have yielded innovative applications and approaches to theoretical, experimental, and computational plasma. Equally important to the culture of FAMU is the diverse educational and recreational clubs and organizations that foster a fictive kinship among the student body.38 These characteristics provide a glimpse of the diversity and sense of community cultivated throughout the university, one that feeds into and bolsters its writing center, the FAMU Writing Resource Center (WRC). I selected the FAMU WRC because of its proximity and my experience as an alumna of the university and five years’ experience as a former administrator, tutor, and coordinator in the

WRC. During my tenure (2004-2009), I tutored many students who struggled with positive self- esteem due to negative perceptions of their usage of AAL in their speech and/or writing. While my previous and extensive work in this writing center provides a high level of ethos, it also poses a few a concerns. Much of this site’s activity happens in the middle of the center, barring the card swipe access at the front desk. Therefore, conducting interviews, taking field notes, and performing observations were challenging, especially because of the high volume of traffic in this one location. The FAMU WRC not only conducts one-to-one tutorials in this space, but they also conduct focus groups, or small group workshops on particular subjects, as well as large group workshops on various subjects ranging from addressing literary narratives to subject-verb agreement. Thus, it is a high traffic area. The site was opened as late as 7:00 pm on some nights and 4:30 pm on other nights, making their services available for students after the close of business. Students were taking advantage of this availability, as they would swipe into the WRC for independent study time or to check out a textbook from one of their classes. This site also served as a social space for staff and faculty, separately and collectively. While the WRC serves as a hub for faculty to hold office hours, grade papers, or conduct online research, some faculty also convene in the FAMU WRC to fraternize with the staff between classes or to schedule workshop presentations. The students also fraternize with the staff in between their classes, even if they are not visiting the WRC for tutorial assistance. They visit former tutors and staff to share updates pertaining to matters relating to both writing and matters outside the scope of academia. The same is true of former tutors. It is not uncommon for former staffers, myself included, to visit FAMU WRC events or stop by to visit the director and tutors. The FAMU WRC’s welcoming open door policy embodies the southern charm of its location and exhibits the familial fictive kinships characteristic within an African American worldview. Its writing center, the FAMU WRC, has been in operation since fall 2004 after Dr. Genyne Boston (past English Department Chair) and Dr. Veronica A. Yon, associate professor of English and current WRC Director, co-wrote a grant to reopen the closed writing center. Once awarded, they immediately began recruiting their most qualified students in their upper level English courses, totaling four students: two Pharmacy majors and two English majors. At the time of the study, the writing center staff consisted of one Administrative Assistant, one Curriculum Coordinator, as well as six undergraduate, two volunteer student assistants, and three professional tutors. Of the tutors, few were English majors: one of six undergraduate tutors was

81 an English major and one of three professional tutors holds a degree in English. Two of the undergraduate tutors majored in Business Administration and one in Biological Sciences. The remaining two professional tutors earned degrees in Journalism (with a Master’s in Public Administration) and Public Relations. The administrative and tutorial staff were paid based on their level of degrees. Undergraduate tutors were classified under other personnel and services (OPS) and the administrative team was salaried. Professional tutors held at least a bachelor’s degree. The FAMU WRC has experienced significant organizational shifts over the past year as it is under the Office of University Retention and the College of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities. Now the WRC is a part of the newly formed Academic Success Institute (ASI), the byproduct of collaboration among the Offices of Title III Programs, Student Affairs, Retention, and the campus’s academic support programs (Yon 19). While the WRC offers a variety of services including focus groups and workshops, the focus of this project is the thirty-minute and one-hour long individual tutorials. One of its new offerings includes tutoring for developmental writing and reading students. Participants Through an IRB-approved process (see Appendix A), all self-identified African American tutors, including writing center administrators, were invited to participate in the study. Written permission from writing center tutees and tutors to video tape two different types of sessions: those classified as 1) Non-Referred students (NON) and 2) Referred (REF) because these designations are germane to the FAMU WRC. Tutees classified as NON voluntarily attend tutorial sessions and those visits are not reported as a part of a class grade. REF participants, however, have been referred by a professor for a select number of hours for the term and may have target areas of improvement that determines the focus of the tutorials. During the initial interview, some tutees stated whether they were required to visit the WRC for class credit, which classifies them as REF. Since the study had more NON participants—those who voluntarily visit the FAMU WRC—REF participants were recruited verbally and via an IRB-approved email script once the staff identified potential participants. In the end, five tutor participants,39 as well as four NON and two REF tutee participants were recruited through email solicitation and in- person requests. Of the nine staff members, three staff members agreed to participate: one black

82 man, Matthius,40 and two black women, Maya41 and Rita,42 respectively. The tutees included, John, Jessica, Leslie, Celest, and Meredith.43 Tutors Matthius was a graduating senior majoring in English with aspirations to become a music producer. He also held seniority among the tutors participating in the study since he had worked in the FAMU WRC for three years. As a result, many of the newer tutors sought his expertise. An aspiring music artist, Matthius takes pride in his use of AAL within and outside academic spaces such as the FAMU WRC, referring to it as commerce English, and simultaneously, he is equally confident in his verbal and written EAE. Matthius is often referred to as an “old soul,” being that he leads his sessions with wisdom. At times the staff made affectionate jokes with him his about how he will act when he is a father, and much of his persona exemplifies hip hop and African American culture. He accredits his insight on his affirmed opinions of AAL to a course he had taken with a former professor in the English department who infused hip hop literacies in his instruction. He admits that he struggles at times with the conflicting demand for his presentations and tutoring prowess while being critiqued for his AAL in the “Ivory Tower.” By the time I began my study, Matthius and a few other tutors, had already presented at a local conference about the role of AAL in their tutorial sessions and sought my help for scholarship. Since he tutors four of my six tutorials, his attitudes about language, identity, and writing inform a significant part of this study. Twenty-four-year-old Maya worked in the site for approximately two years and offers another layer of diversity to this study. She identifies as African American and Venezuelan, yet she does not speak Spanish fluently but does speak Spanish with her mother. Of the tutors in this study, Maya was adamant about the correctness of EAE, a stark contrast to Matthius’s attitude about EAE. She was unsure of the ways her language choices would impact her future goals because she had not decided her long-term career plans. However, she does want aim to use “standard English” to foster a professional persona in the FAMU WRC and admits that she works to speak it at home also. However, her best laid plans are often thwarted by her then fiancé with his “Georgia slang” and her “Spanglish.” She was a 2012 alumnus of FAMU, holding a BA in English at the time of the study and wedded her fiancé towards the end of the study. They had a child a year prior who is affectionately entertained by most of the tutors; the one-year-old

83 spends time in the WRC since Maya’s husband works in the same building. Her role as a nurturing mother crossovers into her official and unofficial roles in the FAMU WRC. Rita was 18 and a first-year student from Alabama. Her use of three and four syllable words in her southern accent offers a different narrative of the type of student and tutor at this university. At the time of project, Rita was one of the few freshmen hired in the WRC and her scholastic achievements along with her warm personality secured her position. Her rank as a National Achievement semi-finalist at one of the nation’s top high schools, Loveless Academic Magnet Program or LAMP High School, and her distinction as a Distinguished Scholar Awardee demonstrated her ability to shoulder the responsibility of tutoring and mentoring in the WRC while getting acclimated to the university experience. Rita found the FAMU WRC to be a home away from home because of the friendships and mentoring from the professional and senior tutors. She created such a home space in the WRC that she drew her friends into the space, one of which she convinced to participate in the study. Tutees The tutees in this study include five tutees in total. John was an18-year-old Nigerian male student wrestler from Tampa, Florida, majoring in biochemistry pre-medicine desiring to attend medical school. John responded to an email solicitation for participation in this this study because, as he laughingly joked, he want to receive royalties for his contribution. His snarky personality is supported by his ambitions to be successful in college and “make a lot of money.” He is indifferent about language difference and feels that there are “other things to worry about.” Although he had only visited the FAMU WRC once prior to this study, he felt comfortable with the tutors, particularly Matthius, because they were knowledgeable about teachers and could guide him through his coursework. He feels the more challenging adjustment for him in college was not related to language difference but adapting to writing standards, especially in regards to research papers. Jessica was a Jamaican-American first-year 19-year-old female student majoring in political science/pre-law desiring to attend a top law school. For Jessica, there is a clear distinction between home languages and academic languages. Her lines of demarcation between home and professional language correlate to EAE being associated with profitability and AAL being associated with family, and for her both were valuable.

Leslie, 18, was also a freshman and majoring in behavioral psychology with aspirations of attending law school and ultimately working for the FBI. She was encouraged to participate in the study by Rita, her friend. She attributes her AAL to her upbringing in Atlanta, Georgia, where she says “we don’t pronounce all our words,” and Apalachicola a city with a population of less than 5,000 people. She also makes a distinction between her AAL and the “educated” speech she uses in school. Leslie does emphasize the importance of maintaining her home language because of its strong ties to her upbringing. The last of the NON participants, Celest, 22, was a senior English education major with goals of becoming a superintendent or principal. As a pre-service teacher who has already had some classroom experience. She also offers a different perspective, being highly confident in her verbal and written abilities. She leads with EAE in her home and academic lives, as well as her workplace since she works a part-time job in an office environment. As for the REF participants, Meredith, a 23 year-old Tacoma, Washington native, was a transfer student from Savannah State beginning her last year as a history major with a concentration in African history. Her academic interests include pursuit of a doctorate in either ancient African history or Egyptology. Meredith was passionate about learning about her African ancestry and teaching others, as well. She transferred to FAMU from an HBCU in Georgia for a more rigorous program and the opportunity to continue learning about African American people, an opportunity she felt would not be afforded to her previous predominantly white institution. Her professional aspiration to redress the sparse African American history courses worldwide make her an interesting participant for this study, as she was drawn to the study because of its focus on African Americans and her academic interests. As a former supervisor in this site, many of the tutors responded to me as an authority figure regardless of my status as a researcher even though I was never their supervisor. The respect they have for me was the result of my past contributions in the writing center, as well as the familial-like bond I shared with the director and other administrators. I feared that any professional tutor or peer tutors still working in the Center when I observed them might have felt uncomfortable working with me, perhaps even avoiding certain black features because they felt I am not their only audience. The tutees, however, appeared to respect me based on my position as academic. As I met with each of them, they expressed their desire to pursue their professional

85 goals, feeling inspired by my doctoral candidacy as an alumnus from FAMU. They also seemed to perceive me as a language specialist who would help them understand their use of language. The next section describes my data collection process in terms of the phases of this study: interview, videotaping/transcribing/field notes, cued recall interview, and texts with notes. Along with my description of the texts, I describe the kinds of assignments students were working on and the nature of the help they found at the WRC. Data Collection The data was collected over the period of seven months.44 The initial interviews (see Appendix B) were scheduled using the FAMU WRC’s online scheduler, WCOnline45 during the beginning of Spring 2015. Though the interviews were anticipated to last at least an hour, no initial interview lasted more than thirty minutes, the average being fifteen-minute sessions. During this time, participants had a chance to read, review, and sign their informed consent and video release forms.46 Using initial interviews allowed participants to narrate their experiences with AAL and EAE with minimal research bias influencing their opinions. Once the participants were given an opportunity to ask clarifying questions, the brief interview included demographic questions in the first section that allowed them to share information about their age, school classification, hometown, and all the languages they speak. They were asked questions about their knowledge of AAL and EAE, as well as their attitudes toward these languages, their future goals, and the importance of these languages to achieving those goals. The second section of questions focused on how they use the languages they identified outside and within academic spaces, asking them how important it was for them to maintain these languages. The last section asked them to consider their levels of comfort with using their language difference in the FAMU WRC. At the conclusion of the brief interview, the participants scheduled their hour-long session (See Appendix A). Therefore, the second step in the study I negotiated with the participants in varying degrees but mainly during the third phase, the stimulated recall interview, proved to be our most collaborative moment. The tools I used to answer my questions are direct observation, videotaping, examining student texts, and interviews. Direct observation allowed me to describe the nature of these interactions before, during, and after the sessions. Specifically, direct observation enhanced the tutor-tutee responses in the videos because participants would often shift from a relaxed, jovial exchange, which often include banter, African American adages, and counsel of personal affairs

86 to a focused, methodical session. I was unable to remain an outsider because of the nature of my relationship with the staff since I worked there for over five years as both a tutor and administrator. However, the benefits of my history with this site made creating a rapport with my participants easier because of my participation within the community. Though the participants adapted their level of engagement once the session began, the nature of the WRC did not always make those same adjustments. This exchange helped frame the context of the level of verbal and nonverbal language systems in operation. Videotaping the initial and cued recall interviews added to the details captured in the direct observations, and the collection of the students’ texts allowed me to compare the students’ verbal and written responses. Tutors opened their sessions with greetings and they asked questions about the purpose of the session, even if they read the tutee’s purpose for the session on WCOnline prior to the session. I sat near the session, usually at a neighboring table, in order to observe the verbal and nonverbal communication between the tutor and tutee. The sessions were video recorded using both a FLIP video camera and a 15-inch Toshiba Satellite laptop, interchangeably. Locating a discrete place for either device posed a challenge since the FAMU WRC is essentially one large room.47 Some of the desks are circular and flushed against the parameter of the room are approximately twenty desktop computers on rectangular-shaped tables. Underneath these tables are the outlets needed for maintaining a charge for the laptop. The FLIP video camera, however, needed to be charged through the USB port of a desktop. Accommodating the differing technological needs of the selected equipment posed a challenge for conducting the research because one FLIP video camera was not sufficient for conducting concurrent interviews or observations. Also, this device required a tripod which often had to be setup farther away from the actual session, which resulted in it recording the neighboring sessions or other activities more clearly than the selected tutorials. The limited range of the mic also made transcribing challenging. Using the tripod also increased the odds of excluding important nonverbal communication. Angling the camera on the tripod helped offset some of the exclusions, but it often included tutees and tutors not involved in the study which resulted in my anecdotal use of nonverbal communication in this study. The laptop screen was often too small for the type of maneuvering needed to allow full range of motion. Another challenge involved acclimating nonparticipants to the equipment. Faculty, staff, and students who were not a part of the study frequently failed to recognize the camera or follow the camera’s line of sight, resulting in

87 students asking me questions because they have mistaken me as a staff member and faculty engaging me in conversations when I was taking field notes and performing direct observations. These sessions ranged from 30-60 minutes and occurred from November through April 2014. The third data collection method involved the video cued recall interviews, also referred to as video stimulated recall interview (SRI) in this study, which were scheduled via WCOnline once steps one and two were completed. SRI privileged the participants’ perspective of their language usage and nonverbal communicative behaviors identified (DiPardo, “Stimulated Recall”). Aligning with Nga Thanh Nguyen, Amanda McFadden, Donna Tangen, and Denise Beutel’s definition of SRIs, this study used the method as a means for “subjects [to] view a video sequence of their behavior and . . . reflect on their decision-making processes” (1). According to these researchers, this reflection is intended to reduce researcher biases and increase validity (2; see also DiPardo 167). Nguyen et al. offer several suggestions for researchers to minimize compromising SRIs: creating interview protocols (See Appendix A) and building a rapport with the participants. For these reasons, it was paramount that this study be established based on a personal relationship with the participants that was initiated from their recruitment through our initial video-recorded interview, as well as my scheduling and recording of their one-to-one tutorial.48 During this time, each participant viewed the recorded tutorial where I guided them towards language interactions that represented shifts in verbal and nonverbal languages to better understand the motives behind the interactions. At this time, the participants were asked questions to explain why they chose to use either AAL or EAE. If the participants reviewed an essay in the session, the researcher identified possible instances of AAL and EAE only when the participant and researcher agreed on motivations language interactions. Then, I created an interview protocol that mirrored the initial interview protocol, with the only adjustment being that the modification for viewing the video. Data Analysis: Coding Scheme The data were analyzed through several steps, the first of which involved multiple transcription processes. These additional steps revealed that this was a scaffolded study yielding more salient information as the participants gained more familiarity with answering and responding to questions. Initially, I endeavored to transcribe all of the video recordings given that all phases of this project was recorded. However, I realized that the first phase of this study,

88 the initial interview, did not require transcribing but could actually be summarized from the recordings considering their brevity. This brevity resulted from a combination of my desire to obtain an organic response from the participants during the second iteration of the study. It also could be attributed to the participants’ limited amount of time discussing language difference, especially as it related to distinguishing differences between AAL and EAE and their use of it. Christopher Joseph Jenks makes an argument for selective transcribing processes in Transcribing Talk and Interaction: Issues in the Representations of Communication Data, positing that the researcher’s careful selection of relevant data for transcription increases the influence of the transcriptions. This selection is therefore “transformational” (3). Jenks informs us that when transcribing talk and communication, sometimes transcriptions are erroneously privileged above data recordings, but also note the fundamental benefits of selecting the most salient data to transcribe assists the data recordings by rendering “details of talks and interaction that are often overlooked by the naked eye (and/or ear)” (5). The video recordings of the tutorial and stimulated recall interviews (see Appendix C), however, required transcriptions because the close analysis of the tutorial directly answers the research questions and the cued recall interviews offers the participants’ reflection and interpretation of their verbal and nonverbal communication. My approach to transcribing the two phases varied slightly. For the one-to-one tutorials, I transcribed them on a continuum between open and closed transcriptions, which Jenks describes as a transcribing process where “no a priori assumptions are made with regard to what features of talk and interaction are important” (12) for open transcription and “transcribing talk and interaction according to predetermined investigatory aims” (12) for closed transcriptions. Open transcripts require every feature be transcribed, which is the approach I took for the tutorials because I wanted to remain open to the language interaction (or inaction) between the tutor and tutee in terms of linguistic push-pull. For this reason, I also chose to transcribe using “eye dialect,” risking the potential of reinforcing stigmatization associated with AAL (Bucholtz 1455; Jenks 20). Specifically, I used what Jenks describes as “vernacularization” in the non-standard usage of the language though using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is recognized as the technically and scientifically reliable format because most readers of this study are not trained to read IPA (20). (See Appendix D). The cued recall interview transcriptions, however, were closed transcripts because I only transcribed moments that appeared to add value to the study. For instance, moments when

89 participants agreed or disagreed with my interpretation of their verbal or nonverbal communication were important to tease out from the data recordings. Some of the transcriptions were completed in situ, or in the original moment of the stimulated recall interviews. After transcribing my data recordings, I developed codes by dividing the transcripts of the tutorials into the three primary stages—introduction (INTRO), teaching (TEACH), and conclusion (CON)—which was based on Jo Mackiewicz and Isabelle Kramer Thompson’s study in Talk about Writing: The Tutoring Strategies of Experienced Center Tutors. Within each stage of the session, the tutor-tutee exchange was coded for instances of LPP, in which I used anecdotal interpretations of nonverbal cues to divulge verbal codes. This approach was a shift from my original intent to code for each portion of the transcript by dividing them into sections identifying grammatical and non-grammatical EAE and AAL markers in terms of voice, writing, and gesture. I anticipated EAE markers would be coded for utterances that demonstrated evidence of subject-verb agreement in speech (voice) and writing using these units of analyses: EAE-vSVA and EAE-wSVA, respectively. Similarly, AAL markers such as “He walk” and the absence of the possessive –s, as in “I went to Kendra house.” The EAE equivalent is “He walks” and “I went to Kendra’s house,” respectively.49 This approach did not lead to the most salient data, so I focused on the pragmatics of the sessions, which allowed me to interpret the literal and implied meanings. The last step was to use the information to code for the answers to the questions of this study in order to determine who is using EAE and AAL, when, and to what extent? For instance, I coded for the question, Who uses AAL? Who uses EAE? (See Appendix D.) In all, this approach revealed the need for a slight departure from Smitherman’s definition of LPP to a more nuanced definition that includes different motivations for using AAL and EAE. The transcription process along with the coding scheme provided rich material for data analysis about the language interactions of multilingual learners in the FAMU WRC, of which the next chapter describes, analyzes, and interprets in greater detail. Specifically, deviating from attempting to systematize the tutor’s shifts among between AAL and EAE resulted in Matthius presenting a more dominant and forthcoming position in the tutorials, reiterating a hierarchy of knowledge while Rita and Maya renegotiated authority with their female tutees, Leslie and Meredith, respectively. Regardless of their shifts use of authority, however, tutors and tutees alike shared a common goal towards academic literacies. Their methodology for achieving

90 academic literacies, however, differed and included various techniques that embody aspects of African and African American worldview. However, only Matthius recognized this infusion of African American worldview and EAE as an intentional practice. Maya did not recognize her choices as outrightly being an amalgamation of AAL and EAE, though she emphasized her commitment to the inclusion of Afrocentric themes as essential. Rita, being the least experienced in tutoring in this center and learning in this institution, overall, was the least clear about her use of AAL and EAE in her tutorial. Similar to Rita, almost all of the participants lacked awareness of their shifts between the languages. More important to this study, however, is the analysis of the impact of LPP on tutor-tutee interactions, yielding an alternative interpretation of amotivation and AAL tutors and learners in this HBU writing center.

CHAPTER FOUR

ANALYSIS

Black English is not exactly a linguistic buffalo; as children, most of the thirty-five million Afro Americans living here depend on this language for our discovery of the world. But then we approach our maturity inside a larger social body that will not support our efforts to become anything other than the clones of those who are neither our mothers nor our fathers. We begin to grow up in a house where every true mirror shows us the face of somebody who does not belong there, whose walk and whose talk will never look or sound "right," because that house was meant to shelter a family that is alien and hostile to us. As we learn our way around this environment, either we hide our original word habits, or we completely surrender our own voice, hoping to please those who will never respect anyone different from themselves: Black English is not exactly a linguistic buffalo, but we should understand its status as an endangered species, as a perishing, irreplaceable system of community intelligence, or we should expect its extinction, and, along with that, the extinguishing of much that constitutes our own proud, and singular, identity. June Jordan, “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan,” 160

June Jordan opens her essay with the above excerpt comparing Black English—through the use of negation (“Black English is not a buffalo”), signifying that the treatment of AAL is comparable to the near extinction of the buffalo. In short, Jordan uses this negation in this illogical comparison between AAL and buffalos—two popular objects uncommonly compared— to signify that they indeed share similarities. Specifically, by juxtaposing the commonly recognized endangered status of buffalos with AAL, Jordan immediately realigns predetermined ideas of linguistic deficiencies associated with AAL towards a more empathic call to preserve this language system. Moreover, Jordan distills the linguistic push-pull resulting from the social hunting of AAL: But then we approach our maturity inside a larger social body that will not support our efforts to become anything other than the clones of those who are

neither our mothers nor our fathers. As we learn our way around this environment, either we hide our original word habits, or we completely surrender our own voice, hoping to please those who will never respect anyone different from themselves… (160-161) Jordan extends this negation into a metaphor of the AAL’s shared endangered status when she describes African American’s inaugural linguistic interaction with wider society, a linguistic rite of passage, that establishes the double consciousness found in many African Americans. The most important element of her epigraph is her marking the result of the constant learning occurring for AAL learners even after they come into “maturity:” "As we learn our way around this environment, either we hide our original word habits, or we completely surrender our own voice, hoping to please those who will never respect anyone different from themselves” (161). It is this range of results, somewhere between the eradication of to the surrender of AAL, this chapter finds its participants anchored. Though the ends seem the same—the use of EAE—the means to the ends—the process—is of note in this study. Despite the impending extinction Jordan expresses, this chapter reveals a kind of preservation—a metamorphosis even—of the vibrancy and “irreplaceable system of community intelligence” of AAL within the FAMU WRC. Chapter One details my central experience w ith Student J that led me to this study, one that made me reconsider the impact of linguistic push-pull that has become an intricate part of the American tapestry on the language practices of African American students. And reflecting on on Student J’s experience made me consider how tutoring in a space that often engaged in the vibrant AAL, a language that is almost as equally contested as much as it used, had provided me with a choice that I had not considered: I could actually use AAL to meet my student where he was; I could actually invoke our shared cultural knowledge without considering it a deficiency, but, instead, use it to make learning relevant for Student J and in turn for myself. My personal struggle with actively including AAL in this session and Student J’s frustration with my insistence upon revising his ideas into more “standard” prose reminded me of writing center scholarship addressing the challenges with removing agency from traditionally recognized multilingual learners. This chapter details more specifically the dynamic and unconventional definition of multilinguals such as Student J by closely examining how AAL and EAE interconnect within the FAMU WRC, a historically black university writing center. Moreover, this chapter details the

93 language choices of tutors and students, addressing how linguistic push-pull influences the learning and teaching in these sessions. This chapter is organized by the answers to this study’s questions. Specifically, Patterns of Linguistic Push Pull details how tutors and tutees used AAL and EAE, and to what end. Afterwards, Learning Goals and Contexts describes how the use of language in these sessions supported or eroded the WRC or participants’ learning goals, particularly in the context of tutor and tutee (a)motivation. The last section addresses the benefits and hindrances of perceiving AAL writers as multilingual writers as in the context of this study.

Patterns of Linguistic Push Pull In order to answer the question, “How is AAL and EAE used in the session? How do the uses of AAL and EAE reflect linguistic push-pull?” This section describes two patterns that are byproducts of the various uses of AAL and EAE in each of the tutorials. Linguistic push-pull (LPP), as defined in chapter one, is the term Geneva Smitherman coined in the 1970s that builds on W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness and is meant to describe the dueling positive and negative attitudes towards one’s own language. In common to all of the tutorials, is the protocol of introduction, teaching, and conclusion, as is common to most writing centers. Although each session differs based on the tutor-tutee mediated goals, this structure includes an introduction, teaching, and conclusion. This process represents the structure that is a central part of the grand narrative of writing center studies and thus represents dominant discourse in the same ways that EAE represents dominant ideologies. As a result, this structure does not always align with the African American worldview where its beliefs are the progeny of the traditional African worldview that “[t]he universe moves in a rhythmical and cyclical fashion as opposed to linear progression” (Smitherman, “How I Got Ovuh,” 201). Therefore, I discuss those speech events and writing units that represent the “rhythmical and cyclical fashion” Smitherman describes, given the design of the tutorials. What follows are the ways in which LPP manifested in the data, which is interpreted through these African American Rhetorical traditions: signifying, narrativizing, and indirection. Claudia Mitchell-Kernan’s definition of signifying, or “[t]he black concept . . . [that] incorporates essentially a folk notion that dictionary entries for words are not always sufficient for interpreting meanings or messages, or that meaning goes beyond such interpretations” (311), coupled with Geneva Smitherman’s definition of playful word usage meant to make for play. Narrativizing can be defined as the “everyday

94 conversational talk [that] may be rendered as a story” (Smitherman, Talkin That Talk, 275). Lastly, indirection is defined as “the power of suggestion and innuendo” and “gives black raps their convoluted style, that is , the rapper will start with a point, then proceed to meander all around it; he may return, circular fashion, to the point, but he typically does not proceed in a straight, linear, point-by-point progression” (Smitherman, Talkin That Talk, 220). Each of these features resulted in one of two rhetorical ends: bonding (or cultural membership) or work. I use the term bonding to depict the fictive kinships created or developed during the tutorial and work to define the focus on the task at hand. It is impossible to concretize moments of bonding outside of the work or goals of tutorials given the nature of writing conferences; however, for this study, I create these arbitrary divides in order to create a linguistic tableau of the dynamic language interactions and negotiations occurring in this study. As a result, I zeroed in on these three features as a means of interpreting instances of linguistic push-pull though more AAL rhetorical features appear in this study. Signifying manifested at various points during each tutorial, and it served different ends. For all of the tutors, signifying occurred throughout the session, but signifying remained significant during the teaching portion for all tutors. Meanwhile, signifying manifested more prominently during the introduction and early stages of teaching for the tutees. For instance, Matthius uses AAL to bond with John, while he uses both AAL and EAE in his interactions with John for the purpose of work in Matthius and John’s session. When taking a closer look at the occurrences in this session, the exchange between Matthius and John, as well as the surrounding conversations in the WRC at random moments demonstrate the AAL-informed teaching and learning that occurs in this location, despite its EAE focus. With participants he worked with before, he initiated the session with AALvSIG50 while he remained formal and distant with participants he met for the first time. Prime examples of these instances manifested in his sessions with John and Celest. For instance, though he had only worked with John once before, he felt comfortable with him: “A’ight. So I know you—you already remember me and I remember you, so you already know how this goes, right?” Though Matthius opens this session with his spiel about the completing the WRC’s contract: “Wanna go ahead and start of by filling this out—the contract—you already familiar with it,” Matthius uses signifyin’ in response to John’s nonchalant attitude toward English and this study:

John: I am . . . here to help her out. I don’t have any paper to work. I pretty much took care of my English credits last semester. Matthius: Look at you. In this exchange, Matthius does not literally want John to look at himself nor does he want to look at him literally. Instead, using AAL allows for Matthius to sarcastically congratulate John while implying that John has more to learn. As Mitchell-Kernan states, “[l]abeling a particular utterance ‘signifying’ involves the recognition and attribution of some implicit content or function which is potentially obscured by the surface content or function . . . A precondition for the application of ‘signifying’ to some speech act is the assumption that the meaning decoded was consciously and purposely formulated at the encoding stage” (312); consequently, I conclude that Matthius’s of the phrase “Look at you” was meant to signify John’s limited understanding of what he yet does not know about English, writing, or language. The paralinguistic events surrounding the speech event—Matthius eyeballed John before speaking and smirked giving his response—also justify the implication of signifying here and represents a manifestation of LPP in John. While he performs a persona that strongly dislikes English and writing, he stressed that he would “Neeevvvver teach English.” Meanwhile, he demonstrated regret when he used AAL, noting that he learned AAL when he immigrated to the U.S. and was disappointed during the stimulated recall when I pointed out his AAL utterances: John: I think I got influenced when I came to America because I did go to a private school. We spoke British English, cuz we got colonized by Great Britain. So we speak British English, so I don’t use “tryna” and stuff like that… John simultaneously realizes that his private school in Nigeria taught British English because the country was colonized, but he remained disappointed that he used nonstandard verb constructs in sentences. Another part of this session that lies just outside of this study involves the gendered bonding that occurred not only between Matthius and John, as in when Matthius called John a “lil jit” for only turning 18, but also the male-bonding that occurred among John, Matthius, and Mike. The range of their conversation, from body issues to sexuality within sports, mimicked those discussed in barbershops and other male-gendered spaces (Nunley; Young). The fact that they created this space in a writing center and English department staffed and managed by

96 mostly women—common among most writing centers and English departments—deserves further attention in another study. Matthius and Celest’s session also depicted other instances of linguistic push-pull revealed through instances of AALvSIG which resulted in both bonding and working. Unlike John, Celest had never visited the FAMU WRC in all of her four years at the university. Like John, she prides herself in her proficiency in EAE. She expressed this language form to be particularly important for her goals of becoming an English teacher. Nevertheless, Matthius shared a senior-level English course with him and his use of signifying during the introduction strengthened their bond, particularly when he asked her if she had already started working on their professor’s essay: “You ain’t start workin on ______’s paper?” His choice to signify here using AAL syntax and AALvSIG reveals that he is not actually wanting to know if she started the paper but instead he is signaling that he knows that she did not start the paper even though she should have. This comment is not interpreted as a condemning statement for a number of reasons, but the main signal is his comment that follows after she does not properly read it as a joke: “I cain’t say nuttin’! I ain’t started workin’ on it, either, so you good.” In his use of AAL syntactically—he omits the be verb form in his last clause—and rhetorically through signifying, Matthius bonded with Celest despite her stiff body language and use of EAEvSVA. Matthius also bonded with Celest at the start of the teaching portion of the tutorial with the playful comment, “Ooh, this papuh kinda thick!” This statement is another example of signifying since Matthius is not referring to the literal density of the paper. His chuckle that followed this statement suggest that his statement should be interpreted as “Why did you bring this long paper for me to read?” Celest properly interpreted his code because her immediate response was laughter, and she shifted her upper body forward signaling they had connected over her essay in that moment. On the other hand, Celest used signifying to signal her displeasure with Matthius’s critique of her work. Specifically, he demonstrated similar aims as identified by Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood during the “textual dimension,” which is the equivalent to the teaching phase of the tutorials in this study: “to assist students in making long-term improvements in their writing” (19). He demonstrates this by acknowledging and describing at length the strengths of her essay by repeating her thesis statement and demonstrated his ability to grasp her key concepts just from reading the first half. One point he highlighted, her ability to present her analysis in a chronological order, demonstrated the celebration of EAE, but I posit

97 that his pointing towards her weaknesses—minor as he claimed they were—exposed evidence of LPP, thus creating tension while working. While Matthius’s goal was to help her address these “weaknesses” such as “minor grammatical errors, you know proofreading errors” which led to his lesson on sentence structure in terms of a struggle she identified during the introduction as the difference between writing clinically and writing creatively. Her creative expression, she confessed, seemed to override her need to write objectively. Examples of AALvNARR and AALvSIG patterns in John’s interactions can be seen when he discussed his experiences with his English teachers and his asking Matthius about his experiences in English courses at FAMU and his questioning other demographic information about his tutor. His retelling of his experiences with his English teachers, both whom he described as grading “mean,” after he linked his least successful English course grade with his experiences in the WRC: “So I come here and y’all were like ‘It’s a good paper.’ And she grades it and . . . she doesn’t grade on quality.” This particular type of narrativizing Mitchell-Kernan defines as marking, “the individuation of character through the use of direct quotation” (327). Perhaps one of the most compelling instances of AALvNARR occurred during Rita and Leslie’s session, a dialogued that unmasked instances of linguistic push-pull based on class differences. Rita and Leslie were freshmen at the time of the study, Rita arriving to FAMU as a Distinguished Scholar and receiving top merits from the private school she attended, and Leslie who boasted of graduating with college credits from a high school in Appalachicola, a small fishing town in Florida. Though Rita explained her limited knowledge of resume writing, she drew on her personal examples, but Leslie resisted Rita’s narratives. For instance, Rita tried to explain that how college resumes are formatted traditionally, Rita: …the thing about college resumes is that they don’t like ‘em to be longer than a page— Leslie: Do I put resume and qualifications? . . . Rita: I didn’t really title mine when I did mine, though— Leslie: Can I do it like this? Rita: So I don’t know if you have to title it— Leslie: Permanent address and university address?

Rita: That’s what I’ve normally seen, that’s more normal lookin’ to me. I mean, that’s how do it now. That’s more modern.” This abbreviated transcript of the their conversation does not fully capture the ways in which Leslie’s speech and body language ignored Rita’s narratives of “correctness” in terms of resume writing. While Rita’s limited experience with teaching resume writing contributed to Leslie’s focus on aspects of the resume that did not align with Rita’s or include Rita’s narratives, she continued to seek her opinion. Another example of narrativizing occurred during the teaching portion of the tutorial, but Leslie used it instead. Specifically, they were disagreeing with each other about the activities that belong under “skills and strengths.” Since Leslie was brainstorming for the resume she was going to write to solicit a summer internship with a law firm in her hometown, she had specific ideas about what belonged in under that section and how it should look. At the same token, Leslie also had an idea of what her internship would consist of. When Rita suggested Leslie have a narrative arc, Leslie reminded Rita she wasn’t writing an essay and that her internship would be in a small town: But you also have to realize this is a small town, so basically the same this…we don’t really have like jobs that you would consider that you can put on your resume that would fit a law firm, no wud I’m sayin’? Cuz most of the jobs like the ice cream shop, workin’ at the restaurant, tha’s how our town is, we don’t have like uh big town, ‘lachicola not a big town… In this moment Rita embodied the push towards larger towns, larger industry, and all that represented fast-paced “big city” living that Leslie desired. The other significant moments that led to this speech manifested when Rita corrected Leslie’s use of “managerial” and “honor cords” using EAE. In both instances, Leslie understood those moments as Rita’s attempt to appear better than her, a point revealed during the stimulated recall interview by both participants. John did not leave this hierarchy unchallenged as he repeatedly resisted Matthius’s teaching with covert resistance. Another example of AALvSIG was his use his SAT scores. John felt confident that he was a strong writer who did not need to complete the diagnostic essay Matthius required because he “did …get a 9 out of 12 SAT writing” and he earned a 78 out of 100 on his diagnostic exam for his ENC 1102 course. John’s choice to share both scores without being asked about them, suggests that his mentioning of them is not random but holds

99 significance. Similar to choice to initiate the conversation about D.C., John uses AAL within the sentence structure of EAE to convey a coded meaning to Matthius. Additionally, John offered this information after Matthius explained that he wanted in the essay: So why don’t you tell me within the next ten minutes what your birthday means. I mean, like, what do you hope to achieve in future birthdays, what this birthday mean, or maybe certain birthdays hadn’t hit yet that you look forward to, a’ight? So we gonna take the next ten minutes—and I want you to just write [hand gestures] about that, you know? Don’t think about about anything else. And then after, we gonna read back through it and look at it together, a’ight? Though John is poised to write—hovering over his paper with his writing utensil in hand—his response to Matthius’s rhetorical question in AAL, a’ight?, was to share his SAT writing scores. A comment that is meant to appear innocent, John signified through indirection (Mitchell- Kernan). In a literal read of his statement, he would appear randomly mentioning a comment. However, a closer read of his statement reveals another meaning that demonstrates the African American rhetorical devices of indirection and signifying in that John juxtaposed his scores with Matthius’s directives to suggest the futility of an essay about his birthday. Meanwhile, Matthius signified with what may appear to be an innocent response in a literal interpretation: “Did you? Well this shouldn’t be nothin’ for you.” Similar to John’s AALvNARR example of talking about his teachers and grades, both Matthius’s series of questions and John’s SAT score response reveal their vying for the power to determine how the session should go. Specifically, Matthius’s list of questions point to his skepticism about John’s ability to complete the writing task their conversation moments before: Matthius: I want you to take the next ten minutes to sit back and reflect on your 18th birthday. What makes this birthday different than the others? What do you look forward to doing the rest of your birthday? ‘cause it ain’t over. It’s four o’clock. You still got [indecipherable]. John: I mean, I’m not going out. I’m just buying shoes online, maybe, and do some ebay. This conversation, without Matthius’s list of questions and John’s reference to his SAT scores, this passage seems to only have a literal meaning. Placing this excerpt in the context of the

100 conversation about the essay and SAT scores, however, reveals how Matthius uses AALvSIG more fluently in his diction and style, while John uses AALvSIG and AALvNARR rhetorically while retaining EAEvSVA mostly. This repetition signifies a point of playful tension. Though Matthius, for instance, sets out to continue in a direct line of progression in the session, John takes detours, a characteristic of indirection. Claudia Mitchell-Kernan defines this form of signifying as “a way of encoding messages of meanings . . . [that] may occur in a variety of discourse” (309). Some of those detours were John’s intentional diversion from writing and focusing on English while others were his method of completing the task at hand. Using storytelling or narrativizing, an African American rhetorical tradition (Hurston; Mitchell-Kernan; Smitherman; Williams), John created opportunities for storytelling when they were not obvious. For instance, an example of John’s storytelling that diverted Matthius’s linear approach occurred while John was writing. Within these AAL narrative events, “power functions as a process of resistance to the naturalization of conventions and reproduce or rework canonical expectations” (Williams 419). When John asked Matthius about Matthius’s hometown, John created a divergence from the assignment at hand, resisting the expected linear process of the tutoring session. But once Matthius mentioned “Virginia Beach, Virginia” and “DMV,” John did began his story about his recent trip to D.C. and breaking from writing: John: I went to D.C. last year for a trip. Matthius: Word. You liked it? John: Yeah, I-we stayed like, I mean, we were like, D.C.: most people don’t know it’s in Virginia. Technically, it’s in Virginia. So we stayed like fifteen minutes out and it was fun. Since this example occurred during the introduction phase of the session, Matthius and John are negotiating power through AAL. While Matthius has clearly established the agenda for the session: writing a short essay, John’s detouring exemplifies signifying. Once John shared his experience, he resumed writing his essay. In that moment, John used this form of African American tradition to bond with his tutor, as well as a coping mechanism for writing so long. Matthius chose to co-create the narration by inviting more details: “Thas what’s up. What did y’all do?” This query inspired John to discuss in detail his disappointment about his D.C. trip, revealing his ethnicity—he is Nigerian—denied him access to visit the White House freely, a luxury that differentiated Matthius and John, a point that requires further investigation.

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Matthius’s use of AALvSIG in his diction and style mostly consistent throughout the session, he led more than half of the session with AALvSIG. Some examples include his exchange with John after they completed the mandatory tutee folders. Smitherman’s description of the traditional African worldview colludes Western worldviews (see above), which co-exist in this writing center, particularly as it is seen in Matthius’s indulgences in the extraneous narratives and John’s consistent use of these verbal traditions to distract Matthius. While John used AAL to interrupt the linear structure of the session, a structure drawing on EAE structure, the grammar teaching portion revealed the ways the culture of this WRC invites circular conversations and diversions. John’s continued narrations of his teachers serve to provide a shared sense of commiserating, but Matthius redirected the conversation to John’s improved punctuation as noted by his former English teachers: John: So, I come here and y’all were like “It’s a good paper.” And she grades it and like the thing she doesn’t grade on quality; she grades on punctuation… Matthius: Yeah, I know…she is certainly an example of sometimes when it’s gonna hurt us throughout life. Period. John: Yeah— Matthius: No’ being able to wri’e cer’ain ways, you know wudImean. You said she was tough on punctuation? John: Yeah— Matthius: You can bes’ believe when you write that research essay, the way she was coming for you— John: Yeah— Matthius: punctuation’s gonna be a issue big den. Johh: Yeah… This exchange illustrates a number of instances of AAL and EAE occurring simultaneously, ranging from the phonological structures in John and Matthius’s speech patterns to the African American verbal traditions (Williams) in the speech event. For instance, Matthius did not often enunciate the consonants at the end of his words (LeMoine) and he also enunciated th voiced dipthongs as d, a common mark of AAL grammar. He also used the commonplace phrasal verb bes’ believe which in EAE would be enunciated best believe. Adding the bes’ to the believe

102 signals to the trained ear that what follows matters more than the listener may assume and often ignoring the warning would prove to be detrimental. Matthius’s rhythmic, tonal expression of the commonplace phrase also signals the importance of this phrase based on how he emphasizes each syllable; “was coming for you” and “wudImean” are other commonplace phrases. I chose to use eye dialect to represent not only Matthius’s diction but also the rate of his delivery, both carry deeper meanings that deserve further study. At the same time, Matthius uses EAE-vSVA when he redirects John’s focus: “she is certainly an example of…” Rhetorically, Matthius uses the word Period not simply as a punctuation marker but as a means of signifying the significance of his previous statement. Another example of the overlapping of AAL and EAE in the session: Matthius: Before we end this session, before we wrap up, I wanna at least leave wi’chu somethin’ tha’chu can take wi’chu, somethin’ you can have. You already tol’ me some of the areas you need to work on: punctuation. John: Yeah— Again, Matthius’s speech patterns reflected here represent both the dropping of his consonants as well as the tempo. What cannot be represented in this sample is the Matthius’s rhythmic movement of his head, the nodding acting to underscore the words he says, a common practice for him. He also used steady eye contact or eyeballing (Hudson) when he wanted to emphasize a point, demonstrating Matthius’s shift from African American Worldview that relished in free time to a linear, point-by-point progression with the accompanying EAEvSVA to emphasize it. To wit, Matthius used sentences such as “Let’s define that as our subject” and “Our complete thought show two things” when prior to this moment he indulged in John’s circular indirection. Regardless of the language patterns, the tutors and tutees cocreated sessions that served their rhetorical purposes. Taken together, the tutors and tutees appeared to have a shared acceptance of EAE in its broader sense. Said differently, the participants seemed to equally value EAE as an end goal for their tutorials, making EAE the dominant language used in written communication. The path towards EAE, however, were negotiated differently in each session where tutors and tutees co- constructed the terms of language usage. Matthius and Rita demonstrated more notable verbal shifts between AAL and EAE, whereas Maya tended to use more African American rhetorical

103 shifts in her speech. Tutees vacillated between AAL and EAE for different purposed discussed later in this chapter. Learning Goals and Contexts This section analyzes the linguistic intersection of AAL and EAE within the sessions in the FAMU WRC that embody the larger intersection of dominant practices within writing center studies and the alternative practices supported in this HBU writing center. It does so to answer the second question of my dissertation: How do the intersections of AAL and EAE support or erode the WRC’s learning goals, as well as the student’s and/or tutor’s perceptions of his/her learning? The interpretation of these data depicts how LPP supports, and at times erodes, the expectation of learning in the WRC. More specifically, this chapter demonstrates how LPP affects motivation in the two primary types of sessions offered in the WRC: essay and grammar tutorial. I begin with an overview of the learning goals of the FAMU WRC for these sessions, situating those goals within institutional and societal contexts. To determine how the intersections of AAL and EAE support or erode the FAMU WRC’s learning goals as well as the students’ or tutors’ perceptions of their learning—the purpose of my second research question—we have to consider the WRC’s institutional and societal situatedness and the ways this situatedness diverges from and converges with the grand narratives upheld in writing center studies. In her book, Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers, Jackie Grutsch McKinney identifies the benefits and consequences of upholding a grand narratives, her point being that our centers contradict ourselves because “when we narrate normal and abnormal tutoring scenarios we reveal our unease with working with a vast variety of students” (70). What more does this say about “non-traditional” tutoring sites when students whose entire learning experience is situated in their otherness do not find themselves in the handbooks and anthologies they are meant to emulate? Such is the exigence for my second question. The FAMU WRC is a site in the sense that its foundation is located in the current- traditional pedagogy as is the broader pedagogical leanings of the university writ large. Smagorinsky proffers one of the issues with current-traditionalist rhetoric, an approach teaching, “lay in the 18th-century mentalist assumption that there are general principles, true of all people, that allow writers to take fully formed ideas introspectively from memory and transfer them to the page” (254). Sharon Crowley is one of the many scholars who opposes this rhetoric because

104 the current-traditionalist rhetoric does not consider the social role of community in the writing process (149). In the same instance, the WRC infuses a process pedagogy, an approach to writing that developed in opposition to the error-driven current-traditionalist approach that encourages multiple drafting and revisions (Murray; Tobin), and brokers both its current- traditionalist foundation and the WRC’s attempt to present the widely used writing center practices into their philosophy. As a result, the WRC holds various types of tutorials, including small focus group and large workshops targeting grammar and writing strategies, but the two types of sessions of interest in this study are their essay and grammar tutorials. The learning goals of the FAMU WRC for the essay and grammar sessions are defined in their manual and handbook, which borrows extensively from Jeff Brooks, “The Minimalist Tutor” article—one that does not, unfortunately, take into full consideration the needs of a learning space such as the FAMU WRC. An example of a key to best tutoring practices for a writing center includes tutors’ restricting themselves from marking on the students’ essays and ensuring that they sit near their tutees to facilitate bonding. The second edition of the FAMU WRC Writing Consultant Manual & Handbook, equates the tutor’s proximity to the tutee to creating a “place [clients] can come to be nurtured and to grow” by demonstrating that the tutor is a “supporter of [the student’s] writing process” (22), one of Brook’s claims. This manual also describes the various functions of the essay session, integrating syntax and grammar instruction within the essay session. The guidelines provided are not meant to be prescriptive, but suggestive. What seems standardized is the pacing of the session, for the handbook states that sessions should include a balance of praise and critique without condescending feedback; in addition, the and tutors should attend to verbal and nonverbal communication, with the handbook admonishing tutors to avoid sounding or looking impatient (24-25). This learning goal does not always align with the execution of the tutorial, however. To clarify, during the teaching section of each tutorial, the tutors in my study signified their lesson. For example, Matthius signified, though in different ways, in each of his sessions. With John, he signified playful when he was bonding with John, but he also signified when he wanted John to focus on working. Rita used indirection during times when she wanted Leslie to focus on standard resume writing techniques. Other strategies such as using a pencil as opposed to a red pen, avoiding marking on the student’s text, asking the writer to read challenging parts of their text, and encouraging students to read their text aloud in order to catch their proofreading errors,

105 are some of the strategies dictated in the manual (25). The tutor is then urged to synthesize or summarize key elements of the session before guiding the tutee towards their next steps. The learning goals for grammar tutorials resemble those David Gold’s overview of poet and professor of HBCU Wiley College. Gold notes how Melvin Tolson’s integrated pedagogy included a combination of “the rigorous, disciplinary instruction in logic, prescriptive grammar, and usage of current-traditional rhetoric with a social-epistemic understanding of—and explicit faith in—the power of language to effect radical and progressive social change” (31-32). These goals drive the process of the tutorial in the FAMU WRC. Their manual outlines the process of LAW, or "learn, apply and write," which stands as the guiding principle of these tutorials. While in the essay tutorial students are assumed to be knowledgeable of material, students are presumed to be unlearned in the grammar tutorial: “You must assume your clients do not know anything about the subject, so teach them what they need to know” (26). Therefore, the first step is to teach the grammar rules according to EAE, although this is implied rather than explicitly stated. Although there was only one grammar session included within the study—Matthius and John—each session in this study included a grammar lesson within the essay tutorial. Embedding those grammar lessons within the essay tutorials carried over in four out of five tutorials, with Rita's lessons more genre-centric as they focused on the conventions of resume writing. Once the tutee explains what he or she has learned, he or she then applies that learning through the completion of worksheets or easy exercises that can help both the tutor and tutee see if the tutee retained the new information. The last step in this process is to have the student write a paragraph incorporating the new grammar rule. Such an approach to grammar fall within what Andrea Lunsford calls the “Center as Storehouse” and Laura Fitzgerald and Melissa Ianetta call the “Storehouse Writing Center,” sites that function as hubs of information and focus on developing literacy skills through isolation of drills (71). Depicting writing center theory through the metaphor of storehouse derives from Lunsford’s highly anthologized article, “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center,” where she complicates the vaguely-used term collaboration. Lunsford posits that “collaboration as an embodiment of this theory of knowledge poses a distinct threat to one particular idea of a writing center . . . ‘The Center as Storehouse’” it often “operates as an information station . . . prescribing and handing out skills and strategies to individual learners” (71). This storehouse metaphor aligns with current traditionalist pedagogies, which support

106 learning “inductively . . . and that prioritize the correction of local error” (29), an approach historically found in HBCUs, which characterizes the learning aims of FAMU and its writing center. Lunsford hesitantly critiqued these types of centers admitting that she helped establish one prior to her shift in ideas, one that occurred in the midst of shifting times for writing center studies in that Stephen North’s “An Idea of a Writing Center” became a flagship essay detailing a process of tutoring, one that focused on improving the student writing and not merely the student’s text, a signature of the Storehouse Writing Center. Fitzgerald and Ianetta cautions tutors against drawing swift conclusions about said writing centers, however, agreeing with Lunsford’s testament of the positive work the Storehouse Writing Centers accomplish. Fitzgerald and Ianetta posit that ascribing to the philosophy that the Storehouse Writing Centers conclusively represent the “bad old days” is the failure to understand how these writing centers effectively respond to their institutional literacy contexts (29), the FAMU WRC being a prime example. These values held within HBCUs are rooted in their struggle for educational rights in the U.S. despite their limited exposure to these same rights. It would be fair to conclude, then, that understanding the FAMU WRC’s ambivalent alignment with EAE and AAL result from a history of struggle for literacy in the U.S. as exemplified, for instance, by Talladega College, yet they broker the current-traditionalist and process pedagogies through AAL. Juan Williams, Dwayne Ashley, and Shawn Rhea describe this historically black college as one that only five percent of its teachers could in fact read despite its label as a college. Yet they upheld a commonly shared belief in racial and social uplift by returning to their communities to teach their families what they learned, even though “well-intentioned teachers with limited abilities had, through no fault of their own, passed along poor grammar and reading skills to large groups of students” (71). Williams, Ashley, and Rhea do not explain their meaning of poor grammar nor do they provide examples, but the mentioning of the need to ensure the “proper” instruction (71) for black communities post-slavery echoes in the ways these institutions still function—with one eye on social uplift and the other of social critique. Cecilia D. Shelton and Emily E. Howson recognize the challenge presented their HBCU in North Carolina and attempt to counter the traditional paradigm by introducing a code-meshing pedagogy, a philosophy they introduced to their teachers and writing center mentors. Code- meshing as a pedagogical approach for Shelton and Howson seems to be the best way to disrupt the authority of EAE “in concert with the other unique elements of code-meshing pedagogy” to

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“open a space for alternative paradigms to enter” (4). This approach affords space for both AAL and EAE to exist in home and academic spaces and is meant to undo racism. Their aims led them to positioning mentors to situate themselves within the classroom to facilitate discussions and thinking using AAL since an instructor was unsuccessful in challenging the linguistic push-pull embedded in the fibers of HBCU writing pedagogies. Despite the "storehouse" orientation of the handbook's guideline and overt emphasis on EAE, FAMU WRC enacts a similar approach where tutors in this study take ownership of the learning of each student, similar to the instructors during the founding of Talladega College. And like those instructors, and the faculty that encourage their students to visit the WRC, these tutors wrestle with the linguistic push-pull in order to achieve proficiency in academic literacies through the lens of AAL. Therefore, the FAMU WRC’s commitment to EAE for their learning goals remains a staunch view, but the tutors and tutees negotiate the terms of the deliverables through AAL. This linguistic push-pull is evident in three patterns. Reticence as (A)Motivation The first pattern details instances of reticence as amotivation through Meredith’s verbal response patterns in her tutorial with Maya. I argue that these moments of reticence do not derail the tutorial because Maya recognizes her reticence and uses rhetorical traditions within AAL to motivate Meredith to accomplish her short-term learning goal, which is to traverse through her professor’s essay critiques for her next revision. Though this section focuses on Meredith, I believe Celest’s explanation of her perception of teacher’s responsibilities outlines the consensus of the participants, especially the tutors, in this study: As a teacher [and tutor], it’s your responsibility to help your students differentiate from social communication and academic language. So …I guess in trying to reach out to your students or just trying to—you want them to be engaged initially. And then you can help them grow once you’ve got them engaged. But you don’t want them to feel as if they’re just –I don’t know the right word—but like they’re wrong. You don’t want to discourage them by pointing out to them their flaws. . . So you don’t want to hinder the language learning process by pointing out the flaws. Her wrestling to find the appropriate words was the byproduct of LPP because she is attempting to exact her speech in a certain way that performs intelligence and erases evidence of what might

108 be considered colloquial speech, another common occurrence among the participants in this study. Natalie DeCheck claims that tutors who share common interests with tutees, such as those described above, motivate tutees to improve their writing in a session (337). DeCheck purports motivation as being “one of the greatest tools for acquiring new skills and knowledge” (337) and urges more scholarship to investigate its usefulness, including it in tutor education as an empowering tool. She details three types of motivation in her case study: amotivation, or the lack of motivation; extrinsic motivation, or the external factors including people, regulations, or ideas; and intrinisic motivation implies that the person is driven internally because she finds pleasure in the activity (339); however, I isolate the instances of amotivation in this study— reticence, verbal resistance, nonlinear direction—to illustrate the results of LPP. While DeCheck’s research concerning the influence of tutor-tutee connection on the writer’s motivation speak specifically to some of the tutorials in my study, DeCheck’s claim does not consider the diversity of learning aims of writing centers nor the shifting roles of tutors in non-dominant writing centers like the FAMU WRC. My data incorporates that important aspect, especially in regards to LPP. DeCheck’s use of Vassilis Barkoukis, Haralambos Tsorbatzoudis, George Grouios, and Georgios Sideridis’s taxonomy of amotivation elaborate on the four factors of amotivation that reflect the tutees in the study and aid in understanding the linguistic push pull manifested in the bonding and teaching but in partial ways. Specifically, she describes amotivation being the result of the student’s feeling incapable of completing a task. Meredith’s self-talk throughout the teaching and even her silence at the start of the teaching session illustrate moments where her insecurities about the revisions required for her essay should have resulted in an eroding of her goals, but Maya bonded with Meredith demonstrating a vested interest despite their tension in the onset of their session. To support this idea, Meredith explained that she stops talking when she’s unsure; she even provided a classroom example after pointing me to a moment that mirrored her waning motivation during her tutorial: “If they tell us to read something in class, I go ahead and read the whole passage first before everyone else is done reading their parts because I don’t wanna stumble. If I’m unsure, I won’t talk.” For Meredith, negotiating language usage comes at a high stake, and her reticence suggests that past experiences have taught her that there is an issue with her language choices. So her language motivation is some combination of

109 intrinsic and extrinsic, as she describes those past offenses, what they taught her about her linguistic identity, and the role the FAMU WRC plays in it all: Researcher: What motivates your language choices in a tutoring session? Meredith: Learning better grammar cuz me coming from the south, we talk a certain way so coming here people not understanding what I’m saying, or they’re like “oh my god you’re talking so loooong” so it’s long and drawn out, so it’s different for me to adapt to different cultures…so the writing center kinda gave me a general consensus and was like “listen, let’s go back to proper grammar. Maya seems to be intrinsically motivated by her commitment to empowering black students, and particularly Meredith: Maya: The way we talk about ourselves as AFAM, we’re often putting limitations on ourselves. And so I always want to make sure that— and I’ve always said that my biggest thing with tutoring is making people feel good about themselves. I always want to make sure that people are confident in who they are as black people. Maya characterized Meredith as feeling “overwhelmed” and “frustrated” with writing in her discipline and felt motivated and capable of helping her because Maya helped her then fiancée with his graduate research essays. Furthermore, she knew Meredith’s professor personally. Taken together, Maya’s passion for literacy singularly applied to the acquiring of academic literacies despite her use of AAL with her friends. She admittedly felt “bad” for correcting a student outside of the WRC once she learned that AAL was rule-based: “When I speak to clients, I avoid African American Vernacular English. And I have even…corrected…people. Outside the Center. Well, I had to … apologize. I did it and then I realized what I was doing and I felt bad. But then…he thanked me, which was interesting.” In all, Meredith and Maya’s session epitomizes DeCheck’s claims, but they do so on their own terms: through a meshing of AAL and EAE, despite their limited knowledge about all of AAL’s features. Participation in black communities, the South, and FAMU were sufficient for them to feel as though they knew AAL. And those terms helped Maya point Meredith towards the academic literacies she needed and the WRC supports.

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Since black students learn to cope with linguistic push-pull at varying degrees (Richardson 16), as illustrated in the previous example, this study does reveal that though student writers verbally demonstrate the LPP, this double-voicedness exists within their writing and at times conflicts with their writing goals and encourages amotivation. Returning to Meredith, she expressed a concern for how her use of AAL reflected in her writing: I’m used to talking a certain way and I really didn’t project that in my paper, so I had to listen to her [Maya] and say ‘talk how you exactly talk,’ so I didn’t wanna sound how people say ‘too proper’ in my paper, but I don’t always speak as proper so she said talk exactly how you would say this so that it’s coming from you and not something else. To further explain, Meredith felt as though there was no room for her home language in her academic essay, but she was limited in her understanding of how to translate her ideas based on the genre conventions expressed by her professor. It was important for Meredith to have a rubric so that she could follow a specified plan for writing before she attempted it. David Bartholomae describes students like Meredith, novice writers performing expectations of a system that is far more explicit about its expectations than its guidelines. In short, Meredith’s writing experience was exactly how Bartholomae described it: “Every time a student sits down to write for us, [s]he has to invent university for the occasion—invent the university . . .[S]he has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do . . .” (4), and he argues that “writers who can successfully manipulate an audience (or, to use a less pointed language, writers who can accommodate their motives to their readers' expectations) are writers who can both imagine and write from a position of privilege” (9). If we accept Bartholomae’s claims, Meredith’s invention of the ideal historiographical essay on the closing of the FAMU hospital left her somewhere between her passion for her discipline and her unclear understanding of her audience or its expectations of her until she received an abundance of annotations from her professor. In writing, all of her verbal AAL markers did not translate into her writing. In this instance, though her history professor is an African American man, he reflects her LPP but not in the traditional since of the term. Instead, LPP is better described as a frustration between translating AAL into EAE and vice versa. This variation of LPP, then, leads to her amotivation. For this reason, being able to identify instances of this variation of LPP is not only important in verbal interactions, but also in the written form. For example, in her speech, she did not always

111 enunciate her ends of her words, especially those ending with consonant sounds, such as “had,” but in her writing, she spelled her words in as they are recognized in EAE. However, LPP manifests in her writing in her misuse of narrativizing and signifying among other AAL features, which derail her learning when she wrote it two years prior and becomes the reason her professor required her to attend the WRC as a part of her grade. She continues to write about the contextual history surrounding the making of the FAMU because she found it to be significant, whereas her professor cut significant portions of this information. The situation she invented privileged the building story of the making of a university and the role the hospital played in the university’s development. Her instances of signifying appear intermittently throughout her essay, however, and but are hidden under her overuse of narrativizing. As a result of her arrangement, these features work against her writing goals in her earlier drafts of this essay. Some examples of signifying are as follows: “Just as whites had their own schools, FAMU had to, make its own designed school of study”… “The building of the FAMC hospital is becoming a revolutionary statement for the city of Tallahassee. In so many ways African Americans were establishing monumental businesses that would improve the community. The FAMC hospital would become a landmark for African American progress in Tallahassee and nationally”, “It becomes increasing obvious that developing a hospital at FAMC would be wise and profitable for population growth in Tallahassee, Florida”, “Segregation and desegregation would eventually become the downfall of the hospital”, and “This would make the community reconsider their thought of who they put into office if they did not uphold their contracts with the city.” Her imbalanced use of AAL markers is not meant to suggest that the use of AAL in writing erodes the writer’s perception about their learning because recent studies reveal the benefits of incorporating AAL in the composition classroom (Perryman-Clark). From these excerpts, I argue that Meredith signals her disapproval of the closing of the university’s hospital through signifying. Bonnie J. Williams, in her dissertation, created a chart of African American Verbal Traditions (AVT) to assess African American student writing, demonstrating how students can and do use verbal traditions such as signifying, narrativizing, call and response, to name a few, in conjunction with dominant language practices (See Appendix D). Williams, in her chart, that signifying is often used in narrative arrangement. In the end, Meredith’s use of AAL rhetorical markers in her essay appear to derail her learning goals. Resistance as (A)Motivation

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Though Jessica and Celest brought essays to their sessions that were already graded by their professors for which they earned above average grades, they too experienced moments in their session when LPP produces tutee amotivation through African American verbal traditions. In both cases, Matthius challenged their perceptions of their good writing oftentimes missing their initial, nonverbal resistance. Denise Troutman attributes this blind spot to the oversaturation of emphasis of the linguistic patterns of European and African American men. She pointedly concludes that while there is a similarity between “European American women’s language” and what she calls African American Women’s Language (AAWL), Troutman concludes that the differences are worth further investigation (212), to which I concur. More accurately, I argue that Troutman’s AAWL provides a fine-grained definition of signifying and indirection, terms usually defined in terms of men. This distinction is important to note because they characterize Matthius’s misreadingss of Jessica's and Celest's temperaments. Jessica uses assertiveness, which by Troutman’s definition, does not differ extensively from the boldness attributed to African American men (219). Building upon Houston Stanback’s claims, Troutman determines this assertiveness results from “African American women’s work in public spheres,” which explains they “must curtail their outspokenness as a result of community standards, which only allow assertiveness to a certain point for women” (219). Specifically, Troutman’s definition of capping, a part of her taxonomy of assertiveness, is a highly skilled “verbal weapon” that uses a “formal manner of speaking” (221). As Troutman posits, I too posit that this form of AAWL is best understood when interpreted because of its reliance on tonal semantics. This instance of AAWL, an extension of AAL, becomes particularly noticeable when Jessica interrupts Matthius after he spends over seven minutes reading and marking her essay. It was his line of questioning about the pronouns, mentioned above as a byproduct of their working moments that triggers Jessica’s assertiveness (219). Instead of remaining on the receiving end the questions, she takes control of the session by asking Matthius pointed questions about how she actually used pronouns in her essay in contrast to the broad, circular questions he asked her regarding her knowledge of pronouns. Matthius, in turn, maintains a “stoic” look to “evoke neutrality.” Repeating this example signifies the importance of verbal resistance as an aspect of amotivation in this writing center because resistance, at the onset, counters the tutor’s goal to assist the student and the tutee’s goal to receive help. I posit that resistance as amotivation is a common, though temporary, feature within a tutor-tutee relationship negotiating LPP such as Matthius’s

113 sessions with Jessica and Celest. While Jessica exhibited capping, Celest used latching, another part of the taxonomy of assertiveness. Latching involves many of the same attributes as capping, but it is a more calculated response in interchanges. As Troutman clarifies, latching is “a turn- taking mechanism which occurs at the end of a conversational partner’s speaking turn, avoiding an interruption or overlapping of a conversational partner’s speech” (219), in order to settle a matter or “set[sic] the record straight” (219). Celest “set the record straight” once as she quietly waited for him to complete his thought before reiterating multiple times over the course of the tutorial that her “errors” were the result of unforeseen circumstances. Considered together, these verbal features of AAWL, AAL by extension, represent resistance as amotivation, but this resistance does not completely erode the session because the tutor eventually reads the AAL and responds with the same language, diffusing the situation AAL. Upholding the overall objectives of the WRC, Matthius sought and found patterns of “errors” that he addressed in his session, and both tutees remarked on how surprised they were at his suggestions. Jessica noted that she was surprised that he marked so much on her essay though she earned an A on it while Celest managed to remind Matthius that she still earned a B despite strained conditions. Nevertheless, they both remained in the session; Jessica even noted “I was kinda sur-prised of all the stuff I was doing that I didn’t know . . . like misusing pronouns.” Her response is unexpected because her session with Matthius deviates from the welcoming strategies DeCheck offers. Jessica resists the learning of pronouns initially because Matthius begins narrativizing, teaching her about pronouns broadly while she does not see the benefit of the lesson, as DeCheck describes. However, Matthius intensifies his approach with tonal semantics, or the artful variation of vocal tones to make meaning (Smitherman), instead of folding into her frustration. In her reflection, Jessica explained: “He was just underlining a lot. I was like, ‘What did I do?’ I thought it was a bad essay for a minute.” Despite the cultural dissonance between them when Matthius began reading quietly to Jessica’s dismay and Matthius’s performance of AAL, Jessica left the session feeling informed and supported, which provides another example of how her resistance as amotivation subsided once she negotiated LPP in her verbal interaction with Matthius. Though Jessica shared other markers that signaled as errors, such as the use of vague pronouns, which are common to all writers from time to time, Jessica demonstrates a pattern of narrativizing in their writing that seems to support her learning goals. For example, Jessica uses narrativizing in her plot summary in a way that allows her to

114 minimize LPP in terms of frustration in translation: “Alternately, Othello will listen to Iago; when Iago tells Othello that he sees Cassio wiping his beard with the handkerchief Othello gave to his wife Desdomona in act three . . .” As Jessica employs competent academic literacies, she does so through African American verbal traditions. Jessica, in the end, was successful in achieving meeting the learning goals of the writing center, as well as her own by permitting the tutor to teach her lessons about writing she did not recognize on her own. Below are analyses of Jessica and Celest’s essay. These essays include AAL in ways the student and tutee do not recognize but demonstrate successful uses of AAL to manage LPP and support their learning. I posit that focusing on these features in a systematic way, better supports motivation even in the face of LPP which potentially leads to resistance as amotivation. Analysis: Jessica’s Essay Jessica’s character analysis of Othello opens with markers of signifying in the first sentence: “Ancient Iago, that master mind of Othello, tricks everyone into believing he is honest and true, little do the characters know that their world is about to be flipped upside down.” The underlined portions represent the markers of signifying, which requires the reader to “read between the lines.” It often works in tandem with indirection, and in this case, Jessica uses that to signal how effective he was at deceiving others. In addition, Jessica uses master mind to describe Iago when she could have simply stated that Iago was a trickster, but she emphasized with an appositive that boasts of Iago’s craftiness. Another example of signifying in Jessica’s writing occurs in her topic sentence of the second paragraph on her second page: “Iago’s use of props and perfect timing are essential in Othello, because without these thoughtful schemes and use of words Othello wouldn’t be a tragedy.” Again, Jessica uses subject-verb agreement standard to EAE usage, but her arrangement of the sentence suggests a “matter-of-fact” tone that is not explicitly stated. Though her lesson pronouns represented an instance of frustration with EAE, a marker of LPP in this study, her vague use of pronouns in her oral session did not overshadow her nuanced use of AAL features such as signifying and narrativizing. This is not to say that her use of vague pronouns is not a feature of AAL and thus a potential marker of LPP, the tutor did not discuss her use of vague pronouns in terms of AAL and its features but in terms of EAE and its grammatical structure. Of interest for future study is the fact that he delivers this lesson using AAL rhetorical strategies. Analysis: Celest’s Essay

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Celest’s essay also was a character analysis for a senior English seminar in which she used signifying marking LPP in her writing. Her focus on the feminism in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening included signifying that reflected aspects of Celest’s life: “The initial role for a woman during this time was to be a wife and mother in addition to being a nurturer, support system and teacher. A woman’s stance in society was more domestic than anything and defined by a man ultimately.” This passage arguably includes instances of signifying because the underlined passages complete each other. Said another way, Celest’s list of the initial roles were domesticated positions, all of which were still defined by man. Given her feminist lens, she signals to the reader that women’s roles should not be defined by man ultimately—because there was no foreseeable way outside of patriarchy even though that was a widely accepted view. In this instance, signifying helps her to add flair to her writing. This example of signifying parallels with her personal life because Celest mentioned she was unable to present the essay she wanted to present to her professor and in this study because she was juggling working thirty-plus hours a week with school and other personal matters, particularly her preparation for her teaching internship she discussed with Matthius at the start of their session. When asked about her writing process, Celest commented: That’s a trait I have in my writing . . . I want to build you up, and I build up, and I guess, [make you] appreciate what I have to say. I want to give you that background, and I guess that perspective. That’s something I’m noticing now that we’re really diving into my writing style. Her participation in the session made her more acutely aware of the writing strategies she does well, as well as instances of LPP indicated by her positive comment on the way Matthius made her feel confident about areas of writing she did not feel confident about prior to the session. Her positive perception of the session despite her initial amotivation enacted in her resistance suggests that Matthius’s persistence through his use of AAL and EAE mitigated her frustrations. Thus, his response to Jessica and Celest’s essays suggests that he aligned with both their perceived learning goals and the WRC’s ultimate goal of improving the student writer’s voice. Diversions as (A)motivation The previous sections covered amotivation through reticence and resistance within an essay session as it relates to learning goals and to tutee-tutor perceptions; in turn, this section returns to Matthius and John’s session to discuss diversions as a form of (a)motivation. More

116 specifically, diversion relates to amotivation and affects learning goals in the sense that students who appear amotivational, as is the case with John, could be enacting (a)motivational traits that can be converted into motivation through recognition of and engagement in shared cultural practices. In this case, the shared cultural practice involved using AAL in speech, as well as deploying African American rhetorical tools. Analysis: John’s Grammar Session This part of the session included an additional conversation with another tutor, Mike, about being a part of the FAMU wrestling team. As I address early, Mike sits near Matthius and John and overhears John mention the FAMU wrestling team, which encourages him to ask John in which division he wrestled: Mike: I used to wrestle that’s why I asked. John: Heavy weight. I got fat. [all laugh] John: Cuz, I was 220 comin’ out of high school. I was ripped! And then I came to college and— Mike: That’s what happened to you? [chuckles] … John: I didn’t work out. [playing with cellphone while Matthius writes on whiteboard.] Honestly, I ate a lot of crappy food. … Mike: Why don’t you go to practice? John: I just don’t go. … Mike: That’s the thing about wrestling. If you say you’re gonna do it, you gotta do it. Matthius: That’s the thing about everythan’ in life! [chuckle] Their conversation, though unintentional, accurately portrays the various ways perceived diversions are transformed into teachable moments, as Matthius participated in and eventually used the discussion about athletics to reiterate the importance of improving writing. Smitherman explains the significance of sharing wisdom from the elders within a traditional African worldview, and by extension an African American worldview, as seen in this moment. This

117 excerpt epitomizes the diversion resulting from LPP in that they have created what Vorris Nunley describes as a male-centric hush harbor in the center of a writing center that with mostly women. Matthius characterizes his tutoring motivation as “getting the work done. In the instances where it’s mixed, and you see, I guess, different sides of me, I guess that’s me trying to convey that ‘Yes, we still have work to do, but we both are humans’” by which he can use AAL to accomplish this. He admits that “AAL can be abrasive to foreigners, but I think when you ease the way it’s put on somebody, it definitely is a language that gets straight to the point about things.” Matthius paralleled this redirection towards John’s improvement of writing to John’s verbalization of grammar rules. Since teaching grammar is a significant aim of the learning in the FAMU WRC, Matthius confidently led with grammar as his instruction while echoing the sentiment of this writing center as expressed in their manual: “You must assume your clients do not know anything about the subject, so teach them what they need to know” (26). Therefore, Matthius talks directly to John, poignantly asking John to synthesize new information, recall prior knowledge, and apply the new knowledge in new contexts. The rate in which Matthius does this contrasts with the relaxed, droll diversion Matthius allow John to lead. Taken together, LPP would ostensibly appear to affect motivation negatively given the ways in which Meredith, Jessica, Celest, and John respond to their sessions, but in actuality neither reticence, resistance, nor diversions thwarted the overall aim of the writing center in helping each writer develop not only in the primary context of the academy but extending beyond those spaces. It appears that EAE is still the dominant language in this space as the grammar and writing goals do not explicitly and formally detail AAL or its features rhetorically. Therefore, the FAMU WRC, just as the HBCUs before it, uphold their current traditional values while allowing the writing center sessions and the site to function as a linguistic liminal space for student writers providing academic sage in this writing process. In short, a "storehouse" can work to help achieve learning goals at an HBCU when leavened with AAL.

Benefits of AAL as Multilingualism My final section extends the insights of my previous two to address my third research question: What do these intersections reveal about the benefits and challenges of using multilingual teaching in an HBU writing center? As previously indicated, in total, the

118 intersections of AAL and EAE in all of their forms reveal that one of the key benefits of using multilingual teaching in this HBU writing center is that it increases the individual and collective valuation of culture and writing. Virginia H. Young reminds us that “[a] writing center . . . is traditionally staffed by individuals who are unusually accepting of students, however ‘standard’ their writing happens to be, perhaps because of their own marginal status within the university” (43), and for the WRC, the tutors appear to motivate their tutees from this shared space of marginality contextualized by racial identity, which is anchored in social uplift. This sense of social responsibility among the tutors complicate the “notions of a pure ‘student-centeredness’ [that] do not recognize the day-to-day influences on writing in college” (Lerner 35). This section, then discusses the benefits, as well as the challenges, of tutoring AAL and EAE in the FAMU WRC in terms of both individual and collective valuation of culture, as well as the challenges of relegating AAL as the de facto language and African American Worldview as de facto pedagogical framework. I will begin with a brief review of the argument in this study that pins AAL and EAE as multilingualism. Then I discuss the benefits of this multilingual teaching and close with said challenges of the same. As argued in chapters one and two, AAL learners who also are EAE learners experience linguistic push-pull that mirrors that of multilingual learners to the extent that this study considers these students multilingual. Given African American’s history of racism in the U.S. and policies that reinforce the linguistic oppression of African Americans, they are least likely to recognize AAL as a language. Sociolinguists and compositionists are polarized about the topic, situating themselves somewhere between viewing AAL as a nonstandardized, defunct variety of English and a rule-based language system with West African lineage. Siding with AAL as nonstandard English has a negative connotation and has only reified prevailing negative societal views about African Americans, especially in educational settings. However, scholars have worked to demonstrate—even celebrate—the contributions of black language and culture in wider society and within academia, particularly in composition (see Gilyard, chapter two). Vershawn Ashanti Young suggests scholars and students code mesh in order to demonstrate appreciation for all languages, including AAL, in academic and home spaces. Lesley A. Rex draws on three classroom experiences where teachers and students positively mesh language in ways that positively influences and constructs “social relationships, personal identity, and academic knowledge” (275). Jenny Cook-Gumperz describes how, “in spite of changes in

119 pedagogical theory and intent, minority students as writers do not get met on their own terms, either as college students or as speakers of a minority language or of dialects. Rather they become viewed as reentering and underprepared students” (336). This position on AAL writers typically results in improper placement and an oversimplification of the obstacles they face navigating academic terrain. Cook-Gumperz “argue[s] that the linguistic and cognitive processes necessary to produce this text [narratives] are much more complex than some influential current theories of composition allow and that an understanding of what some of these complexities are will begin to provide an explanation of why adult students fail to learn” (337).

Benefits: Individual Valuation of Language and Culture One of the primary benefits of multilingual teaching in this HBU writing center brought to light by my data analysis consists of the individual valuation of language and culture. Young, advocate for the cross-pollination of AAL and EAE in home and academic settings, argues that Students be told that vernacular language should be reserved for the playground with friends or at a picnic with neighbors, and that standard English be used by professionals at work, in academic writing, and when communicating with important officials. (“Should Writers Use They Own English?” 69) Young demonstrates the code-meshing of which he is a proponent in this excerpt to signify the ability for various features of AAL to exist in academic writing, thus undercutting a common myth about AAL’s inappropriateness in academic settings—the point he wants to emphasize. This viewpoint resounded in the cued-recall interviews, as well as throughout the data collection process, as tutors and tutees alike described LPP in terms of professional and home languages. Concurrently, Young notes that “the colloquial language of two white, middle-aged professionals, which appears in two of our nations’ most highly regarded newspapers, prove this ain’t so” (69). He points us to William Labov’s findings in the 1970s concerning black students who use AAL, concluding that these black, working-class students, “in many ways . . . are more effective narrators, reasoners, and debaters than many middle-class [white] speakers, who temporize, qualify, and lost their argument in a mass of irrelevant detail” (Graff 37 qtd. in Young 71). Most of the tutees in my study manifested a similar appreciation for AAL, situating their individual language usage within African American culture.

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Perhaps Leslie is a prime example of the benefits of multilingual teaching in the WRC especially in terms of her recognition of AAL as an extension of her culture. Prior to this study, she had visited the WRC for recreational purposes: to spend time with her friend and tutor, Rita. Therefore, her perceptions at the beginning of this study, though revealing, only are projections of how she imagined she would use language in the WRC as opposed to how she uses it in, per se, a classroom setting or outside of a school-setting all together. So when asked about her view of AAL in school, she explained: In school, I try to speak more ‘educated’ but at home I would just like slip—in Atlanta, you know, they don’t pronounce all their words. I don’t go that that far and say ‘crib me,’[?] but like I say ‘finna’ and all that kinda stuff but I try tuh refrain from that like when I’m in school. Initially, Leslie believed is firm strictures between home and school languages, privileging “educated” speech, which was her way of describing EAE, as the most preferred and the most beneficial while relegating AAL to syntactical shifts, such as the transposing “finna” with the EAE verb form “going to,” a common feature of both AAL and Southern dialects. When probed further, Leslie unpacks her meaning of the differentiation: I think like for some stuff—for somebody to take you seriously, you have to speak in a certain way—like you can’t say ‘finna’ or you can’t say ‘I’m fixin’ to go somewhere’ and somebody take you seriously. It might slip, they might notice it, but on a professional level, people want somebody that speak at a more educated level. Reflecting the very bifurcation Young seeks to challenge, Leslie's initial orientation to LPP indicated her desire to protect home language and isolate it to her "home"; this means she struggled with with seeing AAL as valuable for academic spaces. Thus, she disregarded the value of her home culture in those spaces as well. . You don’t wanna lose whatchu been raised with, but at the same time you don’t want to be so caught into whatchu been raised with that you can’t do like more professional stuff. I think [it’s] very important, that’s why you’ll hear me talk to my friends and they’ll say ‘You speak so hood!” and I’m like, but when I get to other people, I’m like ‘Hi, how are you doing?” stuff like that.

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Leslie further clarifies her valuation of AAL in terms of the limited examples perfectly reflects the issues Jamila Lyiscott addresses in the epilogue in the second chapter: students with language differences, especially those who see AAL as an extension of their home life and representative of their cultural value system, are often forced into multilingualism—having to interpret the rhetorical situation that calls for a language foreign to them—in order to offset myths of EAE’s linguistic superiority as well as the actuality of its “culture of power” as Lisa Delpit argues. Leslie’s explanation of her unrecognized experiences with LPP, but more so her innate appreciation of AAL as a mark of a familial inheritance epitomizes June Jordan’s urging to protect this language. Leslie’s AAL usage is still highly vulnerable as she negotiates to what extent she should value those choices outside of her personal relationships. This narrow view of the flexibility of AAL might be a result of her limited exposure to explicit language instruction in terms of AAL. Susan Cushman recognizes, like many of the tutors and tutees at all HBCUs, but particularly in the FAMU WRC, that “[m]any institutional influences entered into the daily lives of inner city residents and required considerable effort and time to negotiate” (223). In Leslie’s tutorial session, she tries to teach Rita, her tutor, about some of the fundamental differences she experienced in her rural upbringing, not realizing that she also was needing that time to negotiate language difference between her lived experiences By the end of the study, however, Leslie has a slightly different perspective on language that suggests she gained a greater sense of confidence, an individual valuation of the benefits of speaking AAL and maintaining her speech: Um, I feel like there’s nothing wrong with it [AAL]. I think we’re [she and her tutor] different in a way, but it shouldn’t take away from what we know and what was, not given to us, but like what our ancestors had been doing forever. Because we’re like losing the purity of our like African American heritage . . . we’re starting to fall short of like what we used to do . . . by society, not white society, but American society. Ronald Jackson describes Leslie’s epiphany as the power of negotiating identities within the margins of academic spaces. Jackson concludes: The link between naming identities and identifying antecedent realities has transformative potential because of the power we have as African Americans to

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reshape and recenter our intellectual legacies and to legitimatize our experiences without waiting for the discipline to do it for us or without assimilating to ‘mainstream’ disciplinary trajectories as though we do not belong to the mainstream. Meanwhile, as we renegotiate our cultural contracts with the discipline, we must be ever mindful of how we arrived at our present state and condition. The cultural contracts paradigm facilitates understanding of how we can strategically transform our peripheralized positioning and identities. (252-53) Leslie's reflection about AAL and her use of it during the cued recall interview also mirrors what Marsha Houston call celebration, one of the three perspectives of black women’s talk. In her qualitative research on “how middle class and aspiring middle class African American women view their communication styles in relation to those of African American men and white women and men,” (158), Houston explains that “[m]ost of the respondents (107) resisted and transcended stereotypic perceptions of black women’s talk to offer alternative descriptions that spoke to the self-affirming interpersonal qualities that they considered central to their communication styles” (161). In a similar way, Leslie celebrates her use of AAL, situating her language usage into a linguistic lineage of African American ancestry, despite the LPP that pins her language usage to a binary. It would appear, then, that focusing on her language usage with minimal direct questions led to her individual valuation of her language and culture, a beneficial outgrowth of multilingual teaching in the FAMU WRC. While Leslie’s shift towards individual valuation of black culture and language is more noticeable in ways that Meredith’s is not, this difference might be attributed in part to Meredith’s high valuation of black language and culture at the start of the study, which is noted by Meredith’s goals to pursue her doctorate in history or a similar field in order to share her passion, and this quote further describes her investment in African American culture: For speakers of minority dialects or languages, acceptance of another set of grammatical paradigms, rhetorical practices, and usage conventions is not simply a replacement of some practices by others. It is a process that demands a shift of basic social assumptions which often requires deep emotional commitment and involvement on the part of the language user. In many ways these demands are similar to those of the initial language acquisition process. In both processes what is achieved is not only technical communicative competence but also the

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construction of a social self inextricably linked to the rhetoric and aesthetic of one's own language practices. (338) Meredith’s interaction during the tutorial, a session that exhibits the teaching of multiple languages in the WRC, is an example of this blend of identity and language for Meredith. To further explain, Meredith struggles throughout the session with understanding the different “grammatical paradigms, rhetorical practices, and usage conventions” her professor expected from her in her historiographical essay. As Cook-Gumperz details, Meredith’s process demanded “a shift of basic social assumptions which often require[d] deep emotional commitment and involvement on the part of the language user” (338). For Meredith, having Maya, her tutor, there to help interpret and navigate this linguistic shift made the session beneficial to her. The nuanced tutoring Maya included resembles the strategies Fitzgerald and Ianetta describe when referring to traditional multilingual writers: “working through a multilingual writer’s text might involve additional subtleties” (123) as they draw on Paul Kei Matsuda and Michelle Cox’s suggestions for working with multilingual writers: “the tutor try reading aloud, with the writer following along and noticing when the tutor has difficulty, adds missing words, or changes the words, as well as when the reading goes smoothly” (123). Maya asked questions and read the essay aloud once she realized Meredith stopped reading it orally. And at times when reading Meredith’s text aloud proved less productive because the ideas did not cohere yet, Maya did as Matsuda and Cox suggested: “if the number of errors prevents the tutor from reading aloud without stumbling too often, it may be more effective for the tutor to read silently, focusing on sorting through meaning” (47). This approach was fitting for Meredith given that she expressed that her upbringing in Georgia caused her language choices to be influenced by Gullah people, those who remnants of their African languages creolized with English, suggesting another nuance in her speech and possibly her writing. Cook-Gumperz posits that there is a correlation between the two that is overlooked in AAL writing: Linguists argue that theoretical traditions tend to focus on either spoken or written language varieties in a mutually exclusive way, so that the linguistic problems that the individual encounters in making the transition from speaking to writing have not been properly addressed . . . More recently scholars have begun to suggest that the original sharp division is questionable. Both oral and written usage, while building on the same syntactic and semantic resources, form a single

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continuum with gradations of different stylistic and pragmatic options . . . However while sociolinguistics has been able to encourage educational researchers to explore the social realities of multilingualism and multidialectalism as spoken codes, where written language is concerned research paradigms that are less sensitive to cultural difference continue to be more influential. (337-78) It is important to note that some compositionists found that educating African American students improved their overall writing, especially when including African American verbal traditions (Baker-Bell; Kinloch; Perryman-Clark; Williams). Taken together, Meredith personally benefits from Maya’s attentiveness in her tutorial, a level of focus that treats Meredith’s language acquisition of EAE with similar care that is suggested for traditional multilingual writers. Okay. Wait. Where's the merge of identity and language? Where's Meredith's benefit and her recognition of that benefit? It seems you got sidetracked with HOW Maya tutors rather than providing evidence of Meredith benefiting.

Benefits: Collective Valuation of Language and Culture I am because we are is an African philosophy that encapsulates the increased collective valuation of language and culture as a result of multilingual teaching. While traditional African American world view values the individual, it is only within the communal context, making the collective valuation of African American culture a notable benefit of multilingual teaching in this HBU writing center. As David Kirkland explains, “The language of Black people starts with community and the parade of proverbs handed down through the ages from one oral messenger to the next” (Kirkland, A Search Past, 47). James Baldwin roots this collective voice in black culture in U.S. chattel slavery, arguing that Black English is the creation of the black diaspora. Blacks came to the United States chained together, but from different tribes: Neither could speak the other’s language. If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world’s history, had been able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as it did. . . it is within this unprecedented tabernacle that black English began to be formed. This was not, merely . . . the adoption of a foreign tongue, but an alchemy that transformed ancient elements into a new language: A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the

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language are dictated by what the language must convey. (para. 7, emphasis original) For Baldwin, it was too “late in the day to attempt to penalize black people for having created a language that permits the nation its own glimpse of reality” (para. 8). Matthius carries the heart of the argument for the benefit of multilingual teaching in the FAMU WRC because he has maintained a collective vantage point from throughout this study, and I will comment of his vantage point at length in this section. In each of his tutorials, Matthius often made references to a collective “we” and when asked about it at the end of the study, as discussed earlier in the chapter, he correlated it to his reminder to himself and his tutee that, beyond the work that must be done, they must also remember to connect because they are human. This philosophy embodies the African philosophy of I am because we were, suggesting that his use of that first person plural pronoun potentially connects with the tutee in multiple ways, yielding a more productive session overall. Matthius provided an overview of his tutoring philosophy that reveals his deep connection to a collective black consciousness: From a professional point of view, I wanna show the students who come in here that you don’t have to look a certain way, you don’t have to speak a certain way, to be professional or to be intelligent. So I think that’s something very important because as a child I felt like that was something that I was constantly bombarded with—with these images, with these models of how to look, of how to act, of how to talk. And my thing is it shouldn’t matter how you look, how you act, how you talk, as long as whatchu sayin’ is worthwhile, as long as whatchu sayin is beneficial to somebody. And you know whatchu talkin bout. I take a lot of pride in knowing what I’m talking about in regards to writing, and I don’t care how I express that as long as that message gets there. So I’m not self-conscious about that at all, and that’s something that I do consciously to show clients that you can still be . . .very well learned and very versed in writing, in grammar, and things that are not necessarily considered, I guess, “popular.” This extended excerpt from Matthius’s describes how central the collective conscious is for him. While he began his initial interview focusing on himself, as was the nature of the questions, he did not take long to include his perception of his contribution to wider society, in general, and his

126 tutees, specifically. An example of this occurs in his shift from his personal experiences to a broader, shared experience. As he reflects on his childhood and the restrictions others placed on his expression of style and voice, he meshes those experiences to represent what he suggests is a common phenomenon among African Americans. His resistance towards this kind of social sanctioning reflects his cultural pride despite his lifelong experiences unsolicited lessons of self- hate. While Matthius's use of collective language and his philosophy of tutoring both underscore his belief in the collective valuation of African American culture, he attention to the musicality of his language also emphasizes that collective appreciation although on a less explicit level. David Kirkland’s description of the musicality hidden within black men’s language speaks to Matthius’s affinity for using his musicality as a vehicle to teach and to treasure African American culture, a pattern Kirkland argues is an important part of a collective black male identity: [t]he point is that many languages, including ancestral African languages, have influenced the sound of Black males. Hence, they have never been chained to English. Rather, throughout history they have adapted to the needs and circumstances of their situations, creating a music and melody with their words” (59). This musicality can be found in Matthius’s session as his tonal semantics reveal his affinity for AAL, a central part of writing center covert methodology. It is no surprise that he ascribes to AAL because of his desire to be a professional musical artist. In fact he states that his professional goals as a musician directly speak to his reasons for becoming a tutor and an English major: “to not only get better with identifying [his] own feelings and articulating [his] own perspectives and opinions on things, but also to connect [his] own feelings and [his] own perspectives with people from the past who’ve also used writing as a venue to express themself.” Matthius’s need to evoke ancestry in his music and writing supports his affinity for collective harmony because at the end of the day, he believes that By me using my home language and oftentimes their home language…immediately puts them at ease. It breaks down the paradigm. . . and immediately puts them into the setting where I’m just another student, just

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another brotha . . . who’s tryna progress like you. Tryna get better everyday like you, and that’s what we’re here to do. Even as Matthius explains his caveat that his students need to realize the differences—not in a hierarchical way—between orality and written languages while in college, he still maintained the power of AAL to unify and support a collective cause. While Matthius’s allegiance to a collective voice is apparent, Maya offers a more complex picture of a tutor who fosters—and experiences—collective appreciation for her home culture. In contrast with Matthius, Maya indicated that she purposefully spoke “standard English” at home and at work though “slang,” “Spanglish,” and “Georgia slang” would show up in her language from time to time at the start of the study. She explained that it was not important for her to maintain these home languages because her goal was “to be professional” and she did not feel comfortable with using her home language at her place of employment because she was intentional about helping students eradicate AAL from their vocabulary. From Maya’s initial interview, one might assume that she had no desire to be associated with African American culture despite her three years of tutoring in an HBU writing center. However, during the process of this study, Maya’s passion for African American culture became more apparent, as this excerpt from her cued recall interview reveals: The way we talk about ourselves as African Americans, we’re oftentimes putting limitations on ourselves. And I’ve always said that my biggest thing with tutoring is making people feel good about themselves, so I always wanna make sure people are confident in who they are as black people. Important about this comment is Maya's emphasis on making sure "people are confident in who they are as black people," a goal that resonates with a collective appreciation of African American culture. Maya's goal reflects the challenges faced by African American women in navigating the angst of LPP. Marsha Houston notes that “African American women not only encounter negative coding and an urge to assimilate in dominant cultural contexts. Members of marginalized groups do not develop speaking norms and values in isolation from those of the dominant group; thus some African Americans who recognize pragmatic reasons for not conforming to dominant cultural norms nevertheless valorize those norms as ideal behaviors” (160). Considering Houston’s note, Maya existed in a place where she saw her role as tutor to valorize EAE as idealistic behaviors and the expected goal of all AAL learners. Once she was

128 informed more about AAL, however, she regretted her role as one who not only valorized but often enforced EAE as the ideal for all AAL learners; she even began to reflect on the validation she received from a recipient of her “correcting” his language usage. By the end of the study, a shift in attitude emerged, as she began to vocalize a collective valuation of culture that was not apparent during the initial interview. This collective conscious may even have been present throughout the entire study as Maya drew on this collective consciousness during her tutorial. For example, it emerges when she asserted to Meredith that blacks were only limited in terms of external oppression; “we can do whatever we want, right?” This turn in the session signaled a type of teaching of cultural consciousness through AAL that I argue is also a significant benefit of multilingual education in this writing center—for both tutor and tutee.

Challenges with Multilingual Teaching While there are a number of benefits to multilingual teaching in an HBU writing center, there are certain challenges to formal implementation of a pedagogy centering on AAL instruction, in general. I offer two: the mistaken belief that the HBCU constitutes the site of "ideal blackness" and the question of who teaches. Barbara Gordon's experiences illuminate one such challenge: the concept of the HBCU as "ideal blackness." As a white women teaching AAL, Gordon recounts in the 2011 anthology, Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change that she was met with opposition. Despite her extensive linguistic research and references to widely recognized scholarship on AAL, Gordon experience resistance from the people for whom she was advocating, who not only reject her culturally-relevant pedagogical approach, but to also accused her racist behavior, accusing her of withholding proper education from African American and other students of color. Here is an excerpt of the scathing email she received after circulating a flyer about the features of AAL: Don’t teach racism, or demeaning attitudes to people that come to help others. How dare you try to set blacks back in such a way? Is it okay for poor white trash, such as yourself, to use those phrases? Is it all right for the leading dependents of governmental welfare (white women) to use certain phrases? You are obviously unaware of the hundreds of black universities and colleges that you could utilize

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if you would like to further your knowledge of what is acceptable FOR A BLACK PERSON. Gordon deduces that this unmarked note she received under her office door possibly came from a colleague given the “negative energy discharging through these words” (273) and might not necessarily be the same response to the participants in this study,51 but a formalized teaching of AAL in the WRC arguably would garner some backlash. To be clear, this venom is neither ill- placed nor is it unfounded; blacks in academia have a history of being ill-educated at the hands of prejudice teachers and white liberalism alike. In fact, apathetic white teachers who chose to label AAL students as learning disabled to avoid teaching them is the apex of the King case (see Smitherman, chapter two). In the same breath, the fact that this person proffered “black universities” as the model for proper black behavior—which in this instance does not include AAL in formal spaces—confirms the challenges inherent in this form of multilingual teaching in an HBU. The author of this note signifies that HBCUs uphold and model the ideal black identity, one that is free from the AAL Gordon wanted to teach. This argument speaks to the social responsibility for racial uplift discussed in chapter three. Associated with this challenge is the concern that black students would receive formal instruction in AAL that would support existing notions of deficiency among African Americans. David E. Kirkland and Austin Jackson make a profound declaration that speaks to the power of formal AAL training and the challenges inherent in the absence of this instruction: Formal training in AAL grammar (syntax, semantics, phonology, and pragmatics) would help teachers develop respect for AAL as another and equally viable systemic and robust means of interpersonal communication. . . However, by merely requiring training for teachers in AAL and by not mandating that teachers teach students the history of AAL, its legitimacy, and possible application in their classrooms and in their students’ lives. . . (136) To extend this proclamation to tutors in this WRC, teaching them AAL would also help them develop a respect for or a greater respect for AAL as an effective and meaningful method of communication in their tutorials. But this goal is obstructed if the same education is not shared with the students that visit their WRC or the teachers that create the assignments across the disciplines. This is the challenge posed by multilingual teaching of AAL. Glimpses to this effect are seen in all of the participants’ cued-recall interviews to some degree. As an example, John

130 distances himself from AAL and clings to his British English training, despite his tying that education to the colonizing of his home country, Nigeria. Such response speaks volumes for both the need and the challenge of formal AAL training. Finally, a second challenge uncovered by my study concerns who will teach AAL. Rita’s reflection of her tutorial session underscores the exigence of this challenge. Though she thought of AAL in a positive light—she notes that “I feel like it’s one step forward for African American people. . . It breaks down a lot of barriers of what we think is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’”—she also found herself questioning her use of it and its wider use: I’m learning to speak in a different way because I think a lot of times African American language you have an understood type of thing, and people might not always understand the ‘understood.’ So I wouldn’t say I was 100% clear. Again, Rita felt that “AAL helps with relatability…breaking down…makes more at ease,” but she felt that its use heightened the probability of being so coded, so systematic that its intentional use would further complicate communication. As a result, she makes language choices based on how well she knows the students, as well as the student’s responses. Her overall concern with its use is that “on the flip side, because you feel at ease you might not take heed to all the things, all the tools, and advice that is being sent your way. You might not take it as serious. As seriously as you should.” This challenge poses a problem for tutor identity, an identity already fraught with shifting and often tenuous power dynamics (Carino; Denny). One of those shifting identities is that many of the tutors, like Rita, are student writers, also, AAL writers, to be specific. This means that they have to learn in a short amount of time, depending on how long they are employed in the space, the rules of engagement with a language that they have had little time formally training such as they have had with EAE, an unfortunate byproduct of societal prejudices. In the end, Rita, as well as the other tutors and their tutees, know all too well that “[w]hen you’re in here [WRC] and you’re tutoring, it is more informal, but you still gotta convey formal ideas.” In sum, then, we need a concluding sentence or two! A Place for the Linguistic Buffalo: A Few Concluding Thoughts In consideration of all that has been discussed in this chapter, the results point us to the FAMU WRC as a home for AAL, even if it is a tent, as tutor and tutee exemplify multilingual education in practice, I return to June Jordan’s words in the epilogue of this chapter. Though Shelton and Howson describe code-meshing as a relatively new pedagogy, this study points to

131 the possibility that code-meshing has been around for much longer, pitching its tent in hush harbors and writing centers that wrestle with the masking of their identity, culture, and agency in order to assimilate into a culture, a house that “was meant to shelter a family that is alien and hostile to us” (160). However, like Baldwin confirms, “We, the blacks, are in trouble, certainly, but we are not doomed, and we are not inarticulate because we are not compelled to defend a morality that we know to be a lie” (para. 9). This lie, according to Baldwin, is that AAL does not exist. It is the acceptance of AAL as a language, one that benefits not only its users but non-black students, secures its longevity.

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CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION

African American rhetorics and knowledges can be understood through a rhetorical method that is concerned with what circulates as Black, but is not limited to Black bodies, while avoiding becoming mired in the quicksand of authenticity. Vorris Nunley, Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric, 27

Vorris Nunley’s quotation underscores the motivation behind this project and frames its trajectory. This selected passage implies two significant points that are fundamental to understanding the exigence for this dissertation: firstly, African Americans have a shared, complex language and cultural system that require nuanced approaches to understand them, and, secondly, locating self in this system does not necessarily pin one to a monolithic conflation of that black language and culture. Situating this epigraph within the context of Nunley’s argument makes its connection and Nunley’s overall argument clearer. Nunley argues that there is a codified language system existing in "hush harbors," spaces where African Americans engage in their own discourse free of the monitoring of dominant culture (23-24). It is within these spaces that a hush harbor rhetoric develops, and those AAL writers who are typically considered “unsanctioned” become authorities of their own discourse using their own methodologies (28). Nunley argues, then, that we need to adopt pathos-driven listening, “the attempt to hear and interpret from the cultural, epistemic, and normative assumptions of the performer, rhetor, or group producing the performance” (153). I enacted pathos-driven listening to hear the language differences among the tutor-tutee relationships in the FAMU WRC, a space that is arguably a hush harbor to the extent that it is “a repository of African American knowledge, life and culture, style, politics, and being that remain important to African Americans” at this institution (25, emphasis original). Therefore, describing the tutor-tutee multilingual interactions of this HBU writing center aligns this research with the 1974 Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) resolution and provides insight into the language negotiations, or the linguistic push-

133 pull (LPP), of African American writers. To this point, SRTOL has called for teachers to recognize that students, including African American students, have a right to communicate in their home languages without having their language differences equated to a lack of effort or intelligence. But Nunley’s African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric compels compositionists to listen actively for the ways in which AAL writers, who are the focus of this dissertation, enact their rights to their use of EAE and AAL on their own terms, in the harbors of academic spaces, such the FAMU WRC. Pathos-driven listening led me to a renewed investment in the participants of this study. Though I began this journey reflecting on my experiences with Student J, this dissertation pointed me towards the heart of this research: my eight participants and their language negotiations within the historical context of HBCUs and writing centers. As I listened for the ways the tutors and tutees negotiate EAE and AAL in the terms of their cultural identity, I gained a greater appreciation for students’ and tutors’ rights to their own language and means of achieving their learning goals despite their traversing a historically prejudiced educational system in a site that has emerged to battle racial injustice and foster racial uplift. It was in this study that the tutors became more than proponents of a Storehouse Writing Center, fully engaging in lessons of skills and drills while interweaving AAL as an investment in improving the process of student writing. Through field notes, interviews, and observations, I was able to piece together the narratives of the tutees and tutors, such as Matthius, who is acutely aware of and confident in his uses of AAL and EAE as a means of getting work done while connecting to the shared human experiences. Pathos-driven listening allows us to move beyond pigeon-holing his use these languages as a mistake meant to be edited by the strictures of monolinguistic views and hear how his approach to tutoring is for bonding and working functions as an extension of his philosophy of life, which speaks to the value this dissertation adds to composition and writing center studies. This nuanced rhetorical listening (Ratcliffe) also allows us to resist labeling Maya as solely a prescriptive grammar enthusiast or Rita’s first tutorial riddled with obstacles common to all inexperienced tutors. Instead, it causes us to see Maya and Rita through their negotiating of their tutee’s LPP along with their own, seeing how this study initiates their process towards a critical awareness of the ways they and their tutees use language to achieve mutual learning goals. These narratives revealed AAL as rhetorical strategies in their writing and speech in ways

134 they had not recognized because they had been inundated with ideologies that construct AAL as a deficient communicative practice that needed to be corrected and is only relegated to recreational activities. Yet they found themselves freely mediating their quest to master EAE using AAL even in their writing. These narratives legitimize the aims of SRTOL but move beyond the original position of the resolution which was to argue for teachers to grant rights for students using “nonstandard dialects” to be perceived as intelligent despite their use of the syntax of AAL, which remains a true statement in Meredith’s case. Instead, these narratives reveal that the tutees in my study found ways to negotiate their frustrations with the LPP in which they exist through tutors who valorize their LPP experiences. My attempt to understand this case and its participants were driven by three questions related to the multilingual interactions of these participants and how they worked through the challenges of interacting through multilingual teaching and learning. Specifically, in the first question, I asked: How are AAL and EAE used in the sessions? How do the uses of AAL and EAE reflect LPP? My results indicated the dominant patterns emerging at the junction of AAL and EAE in these five tutoring sessions. I extended AAL and EAE to include African American Verbal Traditions such as signifying and linearity, respectively. In the end, these patterns revealed the various ways tutors and tutees mediated their language interactions at these intersections for two rhetorical ends: bonding or working. Including within the discussions SRTOL the ways in which nonstandardized languages are embodied and enacted further justifies the significance of rallying behind the SRTOL aims. At the same time, it demonstrates how LPP is institutionalized and requires a heightened focus on the ways to effect systematic and systemic changes.. By answering my second question—how do the intersections of AAL and EAE support or erode the WRC’s learning goals, as well as the student’s and/or tutor’s perceptions of his/her learning?—I deepened my understanding of the language interactions within this writing center by considering how these intersections aligned with the learning goals and outcomes of the site itself, as outlined in its manual, and with the writers’ and tutors’ perceptions of the learning happening in the tutorial. Modifying Natalie DeCheck’s use of amotivation, her explanation of the apathetic tutee, I saw that amotivation resulting from LPP occurred in three ways, (a)motivation as reticence, (a)motivation as resistance, and (a)motivation as diversion. I used parentheses around the a to suggest the temporary state of the derailment of the writer’s learning

135 goals each act of amotivation caused. It was my hope that using this concept would deter the assumption that AAL was a distraction from the overall learning goals of the WRC, as well as of the tutors and tutees. In summary, Meredith demonstrated reticence as (a)motivation, an explanation confirmed in her cued-recall interview, which points to the significance of culturally significant silences. Her essay revealed instances where her intersection of AAL and EAE derailed her learning goals, so it was essential that Maya negotiate her language choice with Meredith in order to ensure Meredith understood how to translate her AAL usage into the EAE her professor required. Meanwhile, Jessica and Celest represented resistance as (a)motivation in the instances of their frustration with the places Matthius chose to intersect AAL and EAE to foster his learning goals for them: a benefit of this study and a contribution to our understanding of SRTOL in this context. Their responses resembled assertive behaviors noted in Troutman’s taxonomy of African American Women’s Language, capping and latching. This form of amotivation occurred early in the session, permitting Matthius to read their assertiveness and recalibrate the focus of the session towards their essays. I analyzed their essays noting where their AAL intersected with EAE but supported their learning goals for their personal goals. Matthius noted similar patterns of wordiness and mixed sentence constructions that might speak to other AAL features that might pose a challenge in other writing situations. It is important to note that understanding AAWL—and AAL for that matter—involves a systematic cataloging of the nonverbal cues, also. Therefore, study’s anecdotal attention to nonverbal communicative practices is key because AAL is not limited to verbal exchanges. Kenneth R. Johnson describes some patterns of nonverbal communication within the black community (39). His two hypotheses are as follows: 1) black nonverbal communication, similar to Black dialect, “has a different base of development from other varieties of American English," (40) and 2) “The isolation of the Black population from other Americans produced some differences in nonverbal communication patterns within Black culture” (40). Johnson focuses on Ray Birdwhistell’s kinesics, a term Birdwhistell uses to “refer to how people send messages with their bodies through movement, expressions, gestures, etc.” (40). According to Birdwhistell, learned forms of behavior are not found everywhere, and as a result, this study does not mean to suggest that all gestures marked as a form of AAL expression are common among all AAL users. Instead, this study does suggest that these nonverbal forms of communication, much like verbal AAL communicative expressions, are outgrowths of a system of socioeconomic means of

136 communicating (see Richardson above) and are evident enough to punctuate or characterize as African American mannerisms, for example the rolling of the eyes (Smitherman Talkin). This research points towards the importance of understanding black kinesics for a fuller and nuanced description of multilingual learners in a writing center, especially those who engage in linguistic push-pull. The last type of (a)motivation, diversion, manifests in John’s negotiating more global definitions of AAL and EAE. A better explanation of this point is that John’s use of diversion represented traditional African principles that value nonlinear approaches, whereas Matthius practiced the linear structure as is preferred protocol of the WRC. Despite John’s playful nature in this session, I resisted the urge to dismiss it as an empty, solely disruptive interaction. Instead, inspired by pathos-driven listening, I viewed it in terms of LPP, concluding that John’s use of AAL did not erode the overall learning goals of the WRC or Matthius’s learning goals for John. To reiterate, these instances of amotivation were not permanent but transient, and I propose that transience is due to the shared experiences with LPP. Sharing the linguistic push-push between tutor and tutee enabled the participants to push beyond amotivation. Therefore, understanding how LPP supports or erodes writers’ and tutors’ perception of learning moves us closer to understand how to uphold the spirit of SRTOL even in writing centers with current-traditionalist views. I answered the last question, What do these intersections reveal about the benefits and challenges of using multilingual teaching in an HBU writing center?, by describing those benefits in terms of individual and collective valuation of language and culture. More specifically, this valuation manifested for some participants in a deep sense of social responsibility, an example of their collective valuation of black culture. In answering this question, I also attended to three challenges: AAL instruction as a threat to “ideal blackness” in HBCUs, finding strategies for reversing the negative impact of the deficit model associated with AAL, and identifying tutors to formally teach AAL in rhetorically nuanced ways. I submit that this study reveals ways that tutors in the FAMU WRC complicate this ideal in productive ways, modeling ways they become a good example of negotiating SRTOL in these hush harbors. In sum, this study provides us with an extension of multilingualism that considers the dynamic communicative practices of AAL and EAE writers through their experiences with LPP that mimic the language acquisition traditional multilingual experience (Cook-Gumperz).

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Moreover, this study demonstrates not only that AAL is dynamic, but it also informs us of its importance as a medium of instruction and reminds us that AAL, as with all languages, embodies a way of life. This study also nuances the many uses of a marginalized language within a historically marginalized institutional type—HBCUs—turning our attention towards what they both offer writing studies and composition studies. In regards to LPP, I found it difficult to use it as a lens for reading the experiences of the participants in this project because Smitherman defines this term in binary terms. Instead of residing in the strictures of understanding LPP as either the love or hate of AAL, I deconstructed its meaning to better described my participants’ experiences to include in its meaning the frustration or the playfulness displayed through any range of African American cultural practices in direct or indirect response to systemically racist institutions, including educational institutions. This project revealed my need to build on Smitherman’s definition in order to better depict the aftermath and productivity discovered in the margins of AAL and EAE or any liminal space. That's the payoff for the study, as well as the STROL. Limitations Any study brings with it an array of limitations, but those limitations yield great potential for greater insight. This study is no different: in fact, the strengths outweigh this study’s limitations. As much as this study provides productive ways to view SRTOL, language difference, and motivation in an HBU writing center, it is also partial in the ways that all narratives must be. This study focuses only on a single site with only eight participants, and therein lies both its value and its limitation. It provides a rich, thick description of LPP within the context of five tutorials, but I am restricted in the degree to which I can generalize beyond the confines of those narrative. With a sample this small, this study might potentially be disregarded as only an academic exercise rather than embraced for the thought-provoking study it is. This study because of its limited sample points to the need for more narratives that narratives that can imagine marginalized voices being the source for a solution and not a problem to be solved. That said, this dissertation marks the foray into scholarship pointing to new ways to see and combat old problems. To accumulate those additional narratives, I would need to extend this study to the various contexts that different HBCU writing centers offer which would necessitate a closer look at this subject position of the types of HBCUs. Said another way, I would need to expand this study this boutique study to other public HBCUs in the U.S. Given the

138 findings of my current project, expanding this study to gender-specific institutions such as Spelman, an all-women’s college, and Morehouse, its all-male affiliate college. This dissertation only broaches the ways gender functions within AAL as I attempt to catalogue the rhetorical ways the African American women perform African American Women’s language in response to LPP. Another limitation of this study is my decision to conflate African American, Caribbean, and African cultures. In this dissertation, I commented on Awad El Karim M. Ibrahim’s observation that at a time when North American Blackness is governed by how it is negatively located in a race-conscious society, what does it mean for a Black ESL learner to acquire Black English as a second language (BESL)? In other words, what symbolic, cultural, pedagogical, and identity investments would learners have in locating themselves politically and racially at the margin of representation? (131). Ibrahim’s series of questions seem more appropriate for John, as he is Nigerian but self- identified as African American in this study. In a slightly different vein, Jessica revealed that her mother was Jamaican, but she identified as African American; the same is true of Maya as she is Venezuelan and African American. Focusing on cultural differences in this data set might very well have yielded an even more nuanced picture of LPP in terms of both its constitution and its role in writing center work. Perhaps one of the primary limitations, which I also see as a strength, is my participation in this group: these tutors are not merely my participants but a central part of my family. Though I was no longer employed at the FAMU WRC when they were hired, I hold an honorific position in this space driven by a familial bond with the director. She represents our academic “mother” while I am one of the many writing center “children.” Such participation limited my ability to play the part of the distant researcher in that space. I recognize I would not share the same familial bond that I have with the FAMU WRC given my ten-year history with the space and its administrators. However, I also believe that those emotional bonds were the very ones that afforded me special insight into the site, the tutors, and the tutees. As Nunley reminds us, pathos can be a strength, not a limitation. Directions for Future Study

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Just as Kenneth Burke points us toward the fact that every selection is in fact a de- selection, I recognize that my selection to conduct a boutique study to gain a thick description of a small sample size within this HBU writing at once is a de-selection of any number of potential focuses. I see this de-selection, however, as a productive one that leads to meaningful implications—or directions— for future research, and to look towards those new paths, I propose two primary implications for future study. The first direction leads to an expansion of the research sites. This direction would take two stops: other public HBCUs and private, gender- specific HBCUS. N. Joyce Payne informs us that of the 108 HBCUs in the U.S., nine of them, FAMU being one, “enroll nearly 80 percent of all students attending HBCUs . . . produc[ing] the largest share of professionals in the field of engineering, business, mathematics, computer sciences, environmental sciences, nursing, teaching, and journalism,” they and rank “among the top one hundred universities producing African American doctorates” (16), which makes HBCUs vital contributors to the fabric of innovation and education of American society. This experience, as Payne concludes, suggests that these sites function as “a fertile source of talent and [garner an] expertise contributing significantly to improving the quality of life for millions of American enslaved by the brute force of racism and poverty” (16). Given these universities accomplishments despite the backdrop of oppression, extending this research to include their practices would only enrich our body of knowledge. The second stop would be towards private, gender-specific HBCUs. While public HBCUs toggled between a liberal arts and vocational curricula, private HBCUs had a curricula almost exclusively devoted to subjects such as the classics, Latin, and Greek (Robinson 52), but more important for composition and writing studies is their history as being “essentially the only place where Blacks and Whites could meet on common ground” as late as the 1940s (Robison 54). Knowing this makes them a site for understanding antiracist practices that writing center studies, as well as composition studies, aims to understand better (Greenfield and Rowan; Grimm). Another argument for these private HBCUs, particularly those that are gender-specific, is that the results for this study have strong implications for inter-gendered versus intra-gendered tutoring. A prime example for its relevance within composition studies is Donalee Rubin’s argument that there is a correlation between gender and the ways we read texts. Considering the importance of gender in the context of all- women and all-men colleges would only deepen our understanding of the ways our multiple identities inform our writing and tutoring practices.

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The second turn on the path to new research directions for this study point towards the power of better understanding black tutor-tutee conflations of black identities both in HBCUs and traditionally white institutions. For instance, my sample size and my decision to narrow the differentiation between the cultural nuances among the participants potentially resembles a shifting identity phenomenon worth investigation of ways students and tutors reconcile the interstices of national identity, such as Caribbean and African nations, and the performance of black culture in HBCU writing centers. Another potential outgrowth of this dissertation study is a study focusing on the role of nonverbal response patterns, specifically the way in which silences are rhetorically situated within culture. For example, almost all of the participants used body language rhythmically, as though dancing—Rita was the only participant who actually hummed, rocked, and sang her words while she tutored, in ways that speak to Robert Farris Thompson’s seminal article, “An Aesthetic of Cool: West African Dance.” Thompson argues that “West African dances . . . are nonverbal formulations of philosophies of beauty and ethics; and they furnish a means of comprehending a pervasive strand of contemporary American culture” (72). Cheryl Glenn opens Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence with a claim that purports these meaning-making silences are as empowering as speech (Glenn xi). She also argues that, though the field has widened its perspective for “other” voices, it has yet to address as a discipline the transformative power of the unspoken (153). What remains underexplored are the ways in which persons directly or indirectly informed by non-Westernized worldviews use these deliberate silences daily as tools for rhetorical purposes. Kermit Campbell argues for the inclusion of the other rhetorical strategies Glenn recommends for a shift in the field. He posits that teachers need to examine the AAL rhetorical strategies of signifying as referenced in Henry Louis Gates’ The Signifying Monkey and the Signifying Monkey oral tales to evaluate the written rhetorical narratives of African American students informed by this discourse. Campbell believes that signifying or for Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Signifyin’, “is so deeply embedded in the everyday lives of African American people” thus it is “an attitude or stance toward humanity or toward life itself” (464). He states, “signifying as derived from the Signifying Monkey tales means the use of certain discourse forms not only to put down or poke fun at someone but categorically to debunk an individual’s or community’s self-imposed status of power” (465). This debunking in the storyteller’s “affirmation of self” (465). This affirmation of self makes room for those silences Meredith’s silence, suggesting there is room for my definition of selective aphasia, a

141 term meant to define these cultural groups’ shift from being silenced to using silence rhetorically and has implications for further understanding of the reticence as amotivation results in this study. Considering the implications of the study of the nonverbal response patterns of AAL tutors and student writers has the potential to contribute not only to writing studies but also tutor education. Writing center spaces foster a sense of community and family, allowing students and staff to collaborate on the student’s specified writing goals. This collaborative environment arguably encourages low-stakes communicative practices (Bruffee; Lunsford and Lunsford), which includes nonverbal communication. Tutors are often trained to be attentive to the mental and physical state of the student, including remaining aware of the student’s body language, so that the student and tutor can benefit from the exchange (Bruffee). However, tutors must learn to be culturally sensitive to the ways verbal and nonverbal communication is culturally situated, which requires a great deal of Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening and Nunley’s pathos-driven hearing. Taken together, Glenn, Kermit, and Thompson could only help us better understand to what extent nonverbal response patterns, including movement, adds depth to an already dynamic language such as AAL and LPP. In sum, the questions I have asked and answered in this dissertation have consequences that extend beyond the theory and practices that attempt to hold, and at times, suppress them. In turn, these consequences embrace the bodies, utterances, silences, frustrations, and celebration of a people. It is fair to say, then, that neglecting LPP would mean to overlook the rich contributions of AAL writers and tutors who wrestle for their language rights on their own terms. Moreover, answering these questions return me to the impetus of this project, my session with Student J. It is after much reflection that I see how our language interaction and the adjustment I eventually made that recognized the value of our shared language—AAL—was a crucial turning point in that session, but that adjustment was accidental because I had attempted to see EAE as the only effective means of communicative practices within a tutorial.

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APPENDIX A

APPROVAL LETTERS

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DIVISION OF RESEARCH TELEPHONE: (850) 412-5246 OFFICE OF ANIMAL WELFARE AND RESEARCH INTEGRITY FAX: (850) 412-5012

DATE: April 16, 2014

TO: Veronica Yon, Ph.D. FROM: Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University IRB

PROJECT TITLE: [563357-2] Language in the Center: A Case Study of Multilingual Learners in a Historically Black University Writing Center REFERENCE #: 014-16 SUBMISSION TYPE: Amendment/Modification

ACTION: APPROVED APPROVAL DATE: April 11, 2014 EXPIRATION DATE: April 11, 2015 REVIEW TYPE: Expedited Review

Thank you for your submission of FAMU IRB Application materials for this project. The FAMU IRB has APPROVED your submission. This approval is based on an appropriate risk/benefit ratio and a project design wherein the risks have been minimized. All research must be conducted in accordance with this approved submission. This submission has received Expedited Review based on applicable federal regulations. Please remember that informed consent is a process beginning with a description of the project and insurance of participant understanding followed by a signed Informed consent must continue

144 throughout the project via a dialogue between the researcher and research participant. Federal regulations require that each participant receives a copy of the consent document. Please note that any revision to previously approved materials must be approved by this committee prior to initiation. Please use the appropriate revision forms for this procedure. All UNANTICIPATED PROBLEMS involving risks to subjects or others (UPIRSOs) and SERIOUS and UNEXPECTED adverse events must be reported promptly to this office. Please use the appropriate reporting forms for this procedure. All FDA and sponsor reporting requirements should also be followed. All NON-COMPLIANCE issues or COMPLAINTS regarding this project must be reported promptly to this office. This project has been determined to be a Minimal Risk project. Based on the risks, this project requires continuing review by this committee on an annual basis. Please use the appropriate forms for this procedure. Your documentation for continuing review must be received with sufficient time for review and continued approval before the expiration date of April 11, 2015.

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Please note that all research records must be retained for a minimum of three years after the completion of the project. If you have any questions, please contact the IRB Office at 850-412-5246 or [email protected]. Please include your project title and reference number in all correspondence with this committee. Florida A&M University has an Assurance on file with the Office of Human Research Protection. Assurance No.: FWA00005391.

This letter has been electronically signed in accordance with all applicable regulations, and a copy is retained within Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University IRB's records.

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APPENDIX B

INITIAL INTERVIEW

INITIAL INTERVIEW PROTOCOL Learning in the FAMU Writing Resource Center Interviews Client Interview Questions

A. Demographic Information (Warm up)

1. Please tell me who you are: include name, age, where you’re from, home language.

2. How long have you been enrolled at FAMU?

3. How long have you been a client in the WRC?

4. What are your educational goals and aspirations?

B. Language Variety Outside of the Academy

1. Do you speak differently away from school (called “home language”) as you do in school? If so, why do you speak differently?

2. How important is it for you to maintain this way of speaking?

C. Language Variety in the Academy

1. How do you adapt to speaking and writing when you are at school?

2. How difficult is it for you to make these adjustments? Do you think you need to make any adjustments?

D. Language Variety in the Writing Center

1. How comfortable do you feel using your home language in the writing center?

Probes: How do the tutors help you feel comfortable in your session?

2. How do you get your tutor to help you understand the differences between your home language and your school language?

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Tutoring in the FAMU Writing Resource Center Interviews

Tutor Interview Questions

A. Demographic Information (Warm up)

1. Please tell me who you are: include name, age, where you’re from, home language.

2. How long have you been enrolled at FAMU? (if applicable)

3. How long have you been a tutor in the WRC? Please describe other job responsibilities, if applicable.

4. What are your professional goals and aspirations?

5. How important is your language choices in reaching these goals and aspirations?

B. Language Variety Outside of the Academy

1. Do you speak differently away from school (called “home language”) as you do in school? If so, why do you speak differently? Please provide examples.

2. How important is it for you to maintain your home language? Your academic (“professional”) language?

C. Language Variety in the Academy

1. How do you adapt to speaking and writing when you in the writing center?

2. How difficult is it for you to make these adjustments? Do you think you need to make any adjustments? Please explain.

D. Language Variety in the Writing Center

1. How comfortable do you feel using your home language in the writing center?

Probes: How do your clients respond to your home language in a session?

2. How do you get your clients to understand the differences between their home language and their academic or professional language?

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APPENDIX C

CUED-RECALL INTERVIEW

Tutoring in the FAMU Writing Resource Center Interviews Tutor-Cued Recall Interview Questions

1. How familiar are you with AAL? EAE?

2. If I told you researchers say AAL is a legitimate language variety, dating back to African languages, how would you feel about your choices?

3. If I told you EAE has the same legitimacy as AAL as a language variety, how would you feel about your choices?

4. How confident do you feel that your language choices helped you communicate effectively with your client? Please explain.

5. If you choose to use AAL in academic settings, how does it help you tutor? How does it hinder tutoring?

6. How does your tutoring in this writing center help guide your language choices in a school setting?

7. What motivates your language choices in a tutoring session?

8. Have you ever felt misunderstood in a tutoring session? How did you resolve it?

Learning in the FAMU Writing Resource Center Interviews

Client-Cued Recall Interview Questions

1. How familiar are you with AAL? EAE?

2. If I told you researchers say AAL is a legitimate language variety, dating back to African languages, how would you feel about your choices?

3. If I told you EAE has the same legitimacy as AAL as a language variety, how would you feel about your choices?

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4. How confident do you feel that your language choices helped you communicate effectively with your tutor? Please explain.

5. If you choose to use AAL in academic settings, how does it help you learn? How does it hinder learning?

6. How does your use of the writing center help with your language choices in a school setting?

7. What motivates your language choices in a tutoring session?

8. Have you ever felt misunderstood in a tutoring session? How did you resolve it?

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APPENDIX D

SAMPLE CODING

AAL [EAE OR SIGNIFYIN’ NARRATIVIZING PERFORMANCE AAL?] (sounding and (“a characteristic (“a special kind of indirection) feature of general communicative event black discursive in which there is a practices, or when particular relationship ‘everyday among stylized conversational talk material, performer, may be rendered as a and audience” Foster story’ Smitherman, 333)—Denise QUESTION 1 Talkin That Talk, Troutman 218 275) TO WHAT END? MATTHIUS: pg. 3 MATTHIUS: his MATTHIUS: threw BONDING [DC], p. 8-10 [with style of explanation is the pen to illustrate Mike]; a form of active verbs with p. 2--Celest [so you narrativizing in this John, also the ain’t stat workin’ on study paralleling integrity ___’s papuh? I can’t RITA: during with improving say nuttin’! I ain’t introduction, random writing [honoring started workin’ on it, talking about fatigue commitment to eithuh, so you good]; and wrestling=honoring […ooh this kinda MAYA: commitment to thick..] aal; JOHN: improve writing], MAYA: JESSICA: RITA: JOHN: pps. 3, 8-10 LESLIE: when she MAYA: JESSICA: quit the modeling JOHN: CELEST: [p. 2 Am I troupe JESSICA: supposed to be in the

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camera?—EAEvSVA MEREDITH: during CELEST: Performs & AALvSIG] conclusion when she her definition of LESLIE: discusses her LESLIE: performs MEREDITH: her definition of internship MEREDITH: WORKING MATTHIUS: pg. 4 MATTHIUS: MATTHIUS: [with john]; p. 3-4 RITA: her school RITA: Celest [Alrigh’, I read experiences, her MAYA: half of it, but so far resume experiences JOHN: I’ve gotten an idea of MAYA: JESSICA: some of the strengths JOHN: CELEST: and weaknesses of JESSICA: LESLIE: this essay(3) LESLIE: internship, MEREDITH: EAEvSVA] [Thatchu work experiences did in four hours, on MEREDITH: retells top of that!] moments (marking) RITA: MAYA:

JOHN: JESSICA: LESLIE: MEREDITH:

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APPENDIX E

INFORMED CONSENT FORM

INFORMED CONSENT Language in the Center: A Case Study of the Multilingual Learning in a Historically Black University Writing Center

Title of Study: Language in the Center: A Case Study of the Multilingual Learning in a Historically Black University Writing Center

Principal Investigator: Department: English, Florida A&M University Address: Phone: Email:

Co-Investigator: Department: Address: Phone: Email: Purpose: The purpose of this study is to describe the nuanced language usage of multilingual students, ages 18 and older, who use both Edited American English (EAE), also recognized as Standard English or academic writing, and African American Language (AAL), or a style of speaking English words with an Africanized grammatical and rhetorical pattern, in a historically Black university writing center. As a participant in this study, you will be asked to meet with a tutor/tutee for three (4) hour-long sessions while I record your interactions. These sessions will occur during the Writing Resource Center’s regular hours of operation.

Benefits/Risk of the Study: This study will provide participants with a greater awareness of their language usage and overall communication style. This increased awareness can lead to productive and improved learning strategies and writing center approaches. As a participant of this study, however, you may experience minimal risks in recalling negative writing experiences. You may even feel as though this study is designed to privilege one language style over another, which can make you feel as though your participation in this study will obstruct your learning goals. However, participation in this study will help you recognize and appreciate various language usages for their appropriate contexts. It is important for you to also know that videotaping may make you more uncomfortable than audiotaping; therefore, I will be more than willing to talk to you about your concerns. If you prefer, we can audiotape you, instead. You may also decline to answer any or all questions and you may terminate your involvement at any time if you choose.

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Compensation: Participation in this study is completely voluntary and will include no monetary compensation. Required students will not receive any additional credit than allotted during a typical writing center session.

Confidentiality: Your identity will be kept confidential. Your name will not be published in any form in this study. All demographic material will be contained on a password safe file and in a locked office. A code will be used by the investigators to identify participants in this study. With your permission, segments of the recordings will only be used for scholarly conferences and training purposes. Freedom to Withdraw: You are under no obligation to participate in this study and may withdraw at any time. This study does not reflect any of the ideas of the institution site where data is collected. You will not be refused any type of services if you refuse to participate in this study.

Summary: The findings of this study will be published at a later date. Upon request and at no cost, results can be provided for you.

Voluntary Consent: I understand that my tutoring session will be videotaped, and I will be asked to attend two (2) one-hour-long sessions over the course of two months. I will also be interviewed at the initial session and at the last session.

Questions/Concerns: Should you have any questions about the research or any related matters, please contact the Co•Investigator, Kendra Mitchell, at ______or ______.

Participant’s Rights: I understand that by signing this consent form or completing an interview, I am giving consent to participate in this study.

Participant’s Signature: ______Date: ______

Co-Investigator’s Signature: ______Date: - ______

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NOTES

1 In this study, I use HBCUs to refer to these colleges in general and historically black university or HBU to refer to the specificities of the institution.

2 I have chosen to use the term African American in this study to reflect the subjects of the language under study, African American Language, noting that at times I use “African American” and “black” interchangeably.

3 Some features of this language variety include structural, phonological, and morphological shifts. Geneva Smitherman defines it as “a style of speaking English words with Black flava— with Africanized semantic, grammatical, pronunciation, and rhetorical patterns” (Word 3).

4 Though this study focuses on verbal communication, nonverbal communication is prevalent in this study but is not coded systematically. Future research will focus on this nonverbal communication in a systematic way.

5 This juxtaposition of Royster and Afrocentric worldview is not necessarily in step with her Afrafeminist approach expressed in her research of the literacy and social engagement of African American women in the 19th century (See Traces of A Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women for details). However, there are tenets of her research that align with Afrocentricity, despite the Afrocentric worldview’s predilection towards black men.

6 It is important to note that while this dissertation includes some instances of code-switching, it does not focus on this phenomenon.

7 African American English, for Zandra Jordan, is a dialect of English, whereas AAL is considered a language in this study. Regardless of the different labels, Jordan and I are speaking of the same student population. 8 John Baugh states that “[m]ost people had never heard of Ebonics before December 18, 1996” because that was the day “the Oakland school board passed a resolution declaring Ebonics to be the official language of African American students within that district” (iv). 9 The Oakland School Board was a pivotal decision in language policy because it demonstrated hostility towards any language policy for AAL learners in the public school system. 10 HBCU is used here to represent the collective unit of historically Black institutions. HBU, however, is used to represent the specific site.

12 U.S. Congress established The Freedmen’s Bureau, or The U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, in 1865 by to provide relief to poor whites and freed blacks in the South during the Reconstruction era. This support was not without its problems. Those HBCUs with support from the Freedmen’s Bureau were forced to use the government’s curriculum, which often lacked rigor and reinforced racist ideology. 13 I will provide more information about HBCUs that will explain why they are germane to this study of AAL learners as multilingual and the conversation.

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14 For this study, questions of gender and sexuality are not explicitly addressed in order to provide the most object description of the interaction between the client and the consultant. However, any patterns related to gender or sexuality that arises will be discussed in the analysis of the data.

15 This definition, as Guadalupe Valdés purports on the Linguistic Society of America’s webpage, is the shifting and more inclusive definition of multilingualism I use to undergird this study. Valdés also notes that there are varying registers of this definition that are not a part of this scope of this project.

16 African American English is used synonymously with African American Language in much of the scholarship despite the noted differences between the two in Chapter One. While my study strategically uses African American Language to signal AAL learners as multilingual, some references that depict AAL may use AAE, Ebonics, or Black English as a label, depending upon the scholar’s position on the dialect versus language debate.

17 Her self-identification with a shared history of trans-Atlantic slavery and Caribbean identify is significant for this study as many students in my study conflate their Caribbean American identities with African American identities. Therefore, her poem arguably describes a common lived experience of AAL learners.

18 Lisa Delpit, in “The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse,” critiques the implications inherent in Gee’s notion of discourse communities, positing Gee’s definition suggests that students who speak home languages cannot be “overtly” taught EAE, for example. By this she interprets his meaning as being that AAL learners, for instance, “can only [sic] acquire[sic] [dominant discourses] by enculturation in the home or ‘apprenticeship’ into social practices” (154). She holds that in order to access cultural power and access to other aspects of society connected to dominant discourse, which is to be read as EAE, they [must have access to the social practices related to that discourse” (154). Her other issue with Gee’s description of the difficulties of acquiring new literacy practices is especially difficult for women and minorities (154-55). Both arguments for Delpit represent “a dangerous determinism” (154) that restricts these groups in a lower class system. It is important that neither Elaine Richardson nor I am ascribing to Delpit’s critiques.

19 The use of signification in this sentence refers to African American rhetorical tools as defined by sociolinguist Geneva Smitherman in Talkin’ That Talk. Other African American rhetorical tools identified in this poem are sounding, narrativizing, and repetition. Vorris Nunley’s Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric, Lena Ampadu’s [get full title of her article on repetition] emphasize the vast use of African American rhetorical tools that are also at play in this poem. These rhetorical tools play a significant role in interpretation of Student J’s verbal and nonverbal responses, as well as students in this study.

20 African American English and African American Language are often used interchangeably, which is the case in Morgan’s text. In this study, however, African American Language is the preferred usage. 155

21 Words in single quotes are from Prendergast (36 qtd. in Anson 20)

22 Powers’ argument of the influence of the Bilingual Education Association as “a language policy aimed at supporting and encouraging schools to create or expand programs and change their instructional practices to support ELL students” (89) parallel to the Black English case. To this end, there are parallels between AAL and ELL learners in their academic pursuits and the prejudices both groups have had and continue to overcome.

23 Valdés views bilingualism as a part of multilingualism. Therefore, in this study, I use bilingualism as a part of multilingualism as well.

24 It is important to note that not all students at HBCUs, or the students that visit their writing centers by extension, speak English as their first language. While this form of multilingualism is fascinating and often missing in the writing center scholarship, AAL learners are the focus of this study primarily because of the tensions surrounding AAL’s status as a language and the effect that tension has on the students.

25 As of 2014, President Obama launched a White House Initiative for empirical data on HBCUs, calling for contemporary scholarship represented proven pedagogical practices occurring on these campuses. For more information, see at http://www.ed.gov/edblogs/whhbcu/.

26 Despite Perryman-Clark’s focus on African American students who use AAL, she acknowledges the implied inclusiveness of SRTOL.

27 Though this citation refers to Villegas’s report, Michaels’s ethnographic case study speaks to the undercurrent of this study. Specifically, Michaels finds that not only do African American first graders in this class lead with topic associations, but black girls “were far more likely to use a ‘topic associating’ style” (429). It also important to note that Michaels borrowed from Fred Erickson and John Gumperz’s notion of key situations, referring to those “‘gatekeeping’ encounters that determine access to occupation, official redress, and educational opportunities” (424). Michaels argues that within these encounters “group specific differences in discourse strategies or style can assume great importance because misunderstanding frequently results in denial of access to some social opportunity” (424-25).

28 In 2001, Horner raised questions about the breadth of SRTOL, arguing that “That same tacit privileging of English Only accounts for the absence of any discussion of languages other than English in SRTOL. Both the Resolution and the Background Statement to the Resolution use ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ interchangeably, but they do so not to challenge the distinctions between language and dialects but because their focus is strictly on dialect differences within English: that is, by ‘language,’ they by and large mean ‘dialect’ and, more specifically, refer to dialects of English. This elision of other languages, and the speakers of other languages, is evident even in their attempt to account for the different levels of prestige associated with particular language varieties. . . . The statement presents a history and account of language use in the United States that denies this nation’s longstanding and continuing multilingual tradition and the diverse national origins of its immigrants. . . (Horner 742-43). While SRTOL emphasizes 156

dialect shifts within the English language, which is an important privilege since it is often overlooked, the role of capitalism in the appropriation of black culture—including AAL—is highly profitable and offers a fictive kinship for students of color (Ibrahim 144) around the world. In Hip Hop Literacies, Richardson discusses how Germans have adopted black culture. Within Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Awad El Karim M. Ibrahim, speaks to this challenge. Also considering 20th century black sociologist, WEB DuBois concern with the pathology of racism in the U.S. (he declares the issue we face is the issue of the color-line), Ibrahim argues that second language learners are constantly appropriating cultures due to the mediated identity formations presented them, especially as it relates to Hip Hop culture—a culture with a marked African American origin. Moreover, he argues that a part of this identity formation includes “becoming Black” (137), which “is deployed to talk about the subject- formation project (i.e., the process and the space within which subjectivity is formed) that is produced in and simultaneously is produced by the process of language learning, namely learning BESL [Black English as a second language]” (137). Ibrahim’s study of BESL becomes important for this study because the students include international students who potentially experience this identity formation because of the appropriation of African American culture. Further, Ibrahim’s questions about what it means for non-African Americans to identify with African American Language has not fully been discussed in SLA (139). These are questions of interest wherever African American and non-African American groups interact, but these questions are heightened at HBCUs given its historical investment in students of color from various parts of the world.

29 Heather Andrea Williams in Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom notes how freed men and women were torn between wanting to establish, oversee, and teach in black-owned schools but struggled to gain the social, political, and economical support needed to remain open (77, 80-83). She specifically recalls instances in Tallahassee and Appalachicola, where black men wrote letters to petition the American Missionary Association for financial support and formally educated black teachers, respectively (82-86). These requests reveal the level of linguistic push-pull towards black language and literacy in a society that actively barricaded the upward mobility of African Americans because of race. For example, one educator states in the same sentence that “the prejudices of the white people are also a drawback to us” but also requests that “[i]f we had one white teacher of experience to aid us . . . we would be greatly benefited” (101). Even still, many of these underfunded schools were populated by black teachers who had varying degrees of literacy. Thurston Chase, Superintendent of Education for Florida, notes that even the less formally educated teachers were needed because they were less expensive and eager to teach the students white instructors did not want to teach (103). In all, knowing this early history provides insight into the range of beliefs about AAL and EAE in historically black institutions.

30 On July 15, 2015, President Elmira Mangum was “one of six land-grant university presidents selected to testify before the [House] Committee [on Agriculture]” concerning the Second Morrill Act, where she successfully provided evidence of Florida A&M University’s contribution to the state’s agricultural research and its projected research if granted the once pending 3,800 acres in Brooksville, Florida. “Elmira Mangum in Washington.” WCTV News Release. www.wctv.tv/home/headlines/FAMU-President-Elmira-Mangum--315570231.html. 15 July 2015. 157

31 Ronald E. Butchart notes that historians “noticed that Reconstruction did not commence at the conclusion of the American Civil War or with the first congressional movement to deal with the defeated Confederacy. Reconstruction was initiated, haltingly and with contradictory methods, in the early days of war as the army, the federal government, and voluntary agencies came in contact with the human object of war: the slave, the black American, the ‘contraband of war’” (xi). This complexity, along with the complexity of the Freedman’s Bureau, the government agency established to help establish HBCUs, reveal the controversy surrounding the literacy of African Americans, and their subsequent expressions of that literacy, as he argues that “[b]lack uses of schooling and literacy were often at odds with the purposes, and beyond the control, of whites” (xiii). For more information, see Butchart, Ronald E. Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 1862-1875. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Print

32 Kynard and Eddy note that it was not until 1970 that HWCUs and HBCUs werehad the comparable numbers of African American student, yet “HBCUs still conferred more degrees to African Americans” (W27). It is important to note that HBCUs were first established in the early-to-mid 1800s.

33 Horn makes a valid point, but it is a point that is not without contention. Lisa Delpit believes that there is a culture of power that white teachers should teach African American students instead of following a model that does not reveal the inherent power in the use of dominant discourse, especially in the school setting.

34 Horn’s use of African-American dialect will be used to be the equivalent of AAL in this study.

35 Rosina Lippi-Green confirms that AAL speakers are not relegated to African Americans or a socioeconomic status (186).

36 Though I began my project with these distinctions, they proved to be minimally significant.

37 The case studies discussed in the HBCU section are not meant to suggest that these studies are focused on HBCUs only, but they are case studies used by scholars from various disciplines.

38 Details about FAMU can be found on its homepage: http://www.famu.edu/index.cfm?AboutFAMU.

39 Only three tutor participants are represented in this study because only the other two tutee participants did have tutee participants scheduled with them due to scheduling conflicts.

40 Matthius is the fictitious name selected by Tutor 1 because he has always liked the name.

41 Maya is the fictitious name selected by Tutor 2 because she loves Maya Angelou.

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42 Rita is the fictitious name selected by Tutor 3 based on her admiration of Rita Ora, a bold, young British pop star and actress.

43 Since I decided to create fictitious names after the study was completed, I created fictitious names for the students.

44 I began recruiting participants in September 2014, but the initial interviews did not begin until January 2015.

45 The administrative staff added me onto the scheduler too early and students outside my study would accidentally make appointments with me intending to meet with actual tutors. Through a series of trial and error, we discovered changing the color of the limited scheduled time, as well as making me an administrator on the scheduler, reduced scheduling errors. Students in my study were guided through their scheduling process since they were required to work with a participating tutor. Any student who scheduled an appointment with me in error was removed and notified, or rescheduled and notified through an automatic email from the director.

46 As stipulated by IRB, all participants were provided with the option to participate through audio recording only, but all selected to be videotaped.

47 Depending on how busy the WRC was by the time I arrived to the site, I would have to sit in certain places that were not near a power cord when using my laptop. The benefit of using the FLIP Camera was its ability to charge via a USB port. The challenge, however, was that recharging it lasted for approximately three hours. As a result, I often could not schedule multiple sessions in one day.

48 Anne DiPardo situates SRIs in composition, noting its use has been primarily used to capture the cognitive process as they compose with Mike Rose’s seminal studies of writer’s block (168).

49 All descriptions for AAL are taken from African American Vernacular English by John R. Rickford, 1999, pages 4-7. Rickford uses Ralph Fasold’s examples, which are found in Tense Marking in Black English: A Linguistic and Social Analysis. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics. 1972; Elizabeth Dayton. “Grammatical Categories of the Verb in African American Vernacular English.” PhD dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. UMI Dissertation Service, Ann Arbor Michigan; and Lisa A. Green. “Aspect and predicate phrases in African American English.” In Mufwene, Rickford, Bailey, and Baugh (eds), 37-68.

50 See Chapter Three for the coding scheme in its entirety.

51 At the time of the study, however, the WRC had a couple non-black tutors and one white administrator.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Kendra L. Mitchell received the Bachelor of Arts in English from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) in 2006 and the Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Composition from the Florida State University (FSU) in 2012. She was awarded a 2015-16 Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship at the University of Pretoria at Groenkloof. She served as an English Teaching Assistant in the Department of English at FSU and an adjunct at FAMU. She also served as the board president for Literacy Volunteers of Leon County.

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