Empowering Linguistic Diversity: Theory Into Practice in Multilingual Writing Classrooms

Classroom injustices can include requiring students only to speak English, devaluing previous learning, or assessment that privileges monolingualism. By not taking for granted the linguistic repertoire of multilingual students and positioning linguistic justice as reflective of concerns of social justice, questioning the path of justice, how injustice informs and shapes justice, and considering “justice as an imperative” (Tuck & Yang, 2020, p. 11), this chapter demonstrates application of theory “through stories of change and attempted change” (Porter et al. 2000, p. 631). Researchers have also noted that promoting students’ “multilingual practices and cultural and linguistic identities” requires “planned and strategic engagement” (Van Viegen & Zappa-Hollman (2020, pp. 183-84) to avoid being viewed as “problematic” (Shin & Sterzuk, 2019, p. 149) or “slowing students’ English learning” (Burton & Rajendram, 2019, p. 40). In the context of World Englishes and the lived experiences of multilingual Canadian students (see Huo, 2020), we argue such strategic change is overdue. Therefore, we listened to instructor interviews and join our participants in exploring strategies to both promote linguistic justice in the writing classroom and further the literature on Canadian multilingual pedagogy. Through this process, we move from a focus on linguistically and culturally responsive pedagogy toward sustaining and revitalizing pedagogy, concluding with initial strategies for classroom application which we invite our readers to pursue. We note that our focus in this chapter is on non-Indigenous students; we strongly believe that linguistic justice practices have important implications for Indigenous students and classrooms, but we also believe that residential school legacies require separate and in-depth discussions and applications of linguistic justice. We support and align our work with that of researchers and advocates such as Armstrong (2022), Battiste and Bouvier (2013), Brunette-Debassige et al. (2022) and Lee and McCarty (2014), who are undertaking this work, and encourage readers to consult resources in this area.

Institutional Context

The course on which our case study is based evolved from considerable institutional history and discussion. Administratively, the course’s position within the institution and various degree requirements required careful consideration. On a course design level, developing calls for linguistic justice and culturally responsive pedagogy that validates students’ backgrounds and experiences, which were relatively new to the campus and faculty, needed to be incorporated into existing curricular structures. The narrative of those curricular and administrative processes that follows grounds our case study in a specific context. We recognize that such contexts will vary and that readers will need to carefully negotiate their own institutional histories, structures and discourses; we hope, however, that, in addition to explaining the circumstances for our study, offering this narrative provides a useful example of the ex/changes currently occurring in Canadian institutions and offers some guidance for the application of linguistic justice and culturally responsive pedagogy in these developing contexts. Indeed, before we can turn to classroom praxis, the administrative processes that place students into categories and classrooms based on race and linguistic “ability” must be interrogated and revised (Shapiro & Watson, 2022, p. 294).