“Our historical languages…represent cultural maps, social lifelines to the ancients—linguistic guides to ways of knowing and ways of being. College and university language programs (WPA, WAC, writing centers, first-year writing programs, service learning, distance learning, technical and professional writing programs, and the like) nationwide need to be advocated of the ethnolinguistic diversity within and beyond the academy” (Kells 210, emphasis mine).
Needless to say, I like how Kells thinks. I, too, “like…[the] emphasis on the idea of movement, migration, transition” (204) when we talk about language, writing, and interactions between people. Thinking of the ship metaphor again, it pushes the idea of how dynamic the location, interaction, and medium of communication can be. Even more, though, I think that Kells’ piece brings up many of the points we’ve been discussing throughout the semester and argues for action rather than affirmation. For example, when she mentions that President Obama (as a Senator) promoted bilingualism, opponents made a logical fallacy: Bilingualism does not translate to being “un-American” (205). Instead, Kells furthers this idea through the explanation that language and literacy become a vehicle through which people can obtain certain “alienable human rights” (206). Here, language and literacy are imbued with agency. However, it is people who imbue them with agency in the first place!
This got me thinking about our earlier discussions of Dunkin Donuts and Chloe’s “don’t be a jackass” rule. When Kells states “Global literacy in and of itself is not enough—we need a cultural ecology ethic that promotes social justice,” I think she is referring to many of the ideas that we came back to: the Dunkin Donuts interaction was more about people not language. It was about how people act toward one another and how language, maybe even unknowingly, factors into that. For me, and I think for Kells, “social justice” necessitates people coming together in both formal and informal ways to promote equality or understanding, at least. She argues that change can come from “institutionalizing advocacy beyond the college composition classroom” as well as within it (210).
I think that what struck me most about this article was when Kells makes a shift toward action. For instance, although I knew when “Students Rights to their Own Language” came out, I didn’t realize that almost 40 years have passed! I must say, it pushed me a bit further down the “depressed/sun-shiny” scale. Anyway, what she does in this moment is argue that we need to act. NOW. We need to push beyond teaching rhetoric and DO RHETORIC—in the various forms she states in the first quotation I used. When I thought about service-learning as a possibility for translingualism (thanks for the correction, Chris), I didn’t see the exigency that Kells discusses. But her final sentence is haunting: “These are our enduring challenges as educators of an endangered generation” (211). Placing our generation in this position of being “endangered” is heart-wrenching for me, and it makes me think that we need to act now. We, as students, as teachers, as people who aren’t jackasses, need to do what we can to promote social justice through linguistic diversity. I think Kells piece functions as a call to action. Now, I just have to figure out where to start…
