Schenectady Synecdoche

I think that making your convictions explicit is an important part in a course like the one you have described here. It means that thoughts matter and it opens the door for productive engagement and disagreement.

"Middle class"? If their middle-class students, I'm from working poor, and I don't think that's the case. So, I just wanted to object to your class structure, in that sense :).

I would most definitely suggest Bartholomae's "Inventing the University." It has pushed my students beyond what they thought they could understand, it is written for teachers (so it opens some interesting rhetorical assumptions), and it deals explicitly with the language that is expected in college writing (and who is expecting it). It opens great conversations for my classes about style and voice and how they intersect with mechanics and grammar. I might also suggest excerpts from Appalachian or southern writers as most of these students are from the north and, thanks to our beloved president, associate southern dialects with ignorance/stupidity :). Also you might find some of those dialect memes online and make a game of language, and then drop the hammer on how white/middle-class the bias in most of those memes is.

These are great suggestions—thanks!

Two possibilities -
1) Eli Clare's Exile and Pride, which involves gay identity and working class identity and disability identity and environmental activism in under 150 pp. I have about six copies still on my shelf in the office to give out because it's such a great introduction to complex issues at the just-out-of-high-school level. My daughter and I read it together and found it to be a great discussion/thought provoker. One of the good things about it is that Eli refuses to get into simple, condemnatory us-them talk - instead, she acknowledges the complexity of human relationships and the economic and cultural forces that shape people's stances. But in clear, everyday language.

And it's a quick read.

Suggestion two: Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Divide, by Toma's Mario Kalmar

Check it out - as introductions to literacy and linguistics go, this one is a fairly interesting story as well as being a definite kick in the pants of everything you might think is true about how spoken language and orthography are linked through "correct" spelling and rules!

Basically, Kalmar was doing research and bumped into a group of undocumented workers who negotiated a set of "under the table" literacy classes, then hijacked the classes by collectively creating a new orthography for English in exactly the way missionary-linguists created an orthography for their grandparents' Indio languages. Dig it.

Denise, there's a really awesome review of this book IN SPANGLISH on the Amazon site - here's a sample:
"The silences que Kalmar interpreta in his manifesto son aquellos silencios que dejan atrás lo clandestino para sumergirse en lo legítimo. The migrant workers yearned for legitimacy. En esa mesa redonda in which students and teachers investigaban diversos modos de encaminarse a la comunicación, existió the possibility that silence would be pricked and made to transform itself into something dynamic and resilient, en algo que puediese reintegrar y redefinir a la comunidad" (These words from a review by John Hernandez, at ).

M has some promising materials from transgender studies on the linguistic construction of binary gender. This is going to be one bitchin course.