10 Sample Syllabus 1: Translating Identity
Our first Sample Syllabus is an excellent choice if you are thinking of developing a course where you want students to to gain a more critical understanding of how language is used in identity formation and its role in creating and sustaining communities that they interact with and/or are a part of themselves. In the syllabus materials developed by Melissa Texidor (Language and Rhetoric, PhD Student) you’ll notice that she has centered her course on the theme of language, power, and identity with an emphasis on how these three factors are interconnected. Students who have taken the course have developed research topics within the class such as: the perpetuation of linguistic bias within large language models (LLM), the censorship of marginalized communities on social media platforms, the connections between topical language policies and linguistic discrimination, the appropriation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a harmful marketing strategy, and much more. Due to the broad themes of this course it lends itself well to many topics if you wish to narrow it down. No matter the specific topic though this course encourages students to reflect on the communities that matter to them.
Considering this, each assignment sequence is designed to assist students in exploring the discourses happening in the communities they are members of and investigating topics and issues that they have stakes in. In Melissa’s class, the first assignment sequence is geared towards grounding the students in various understandings of community and language by being exposed to dialects and registers that they may not initially be familiar with. Students are then tasked with identifying their roles in their own communities and assessing the various modes of discourse that circulate within those groups through a genre analysis. This is to prepare them for autoethnographic writing in which they will observe, engage with, and analyze a specific cultural group, community, or social practice. The goal is to develop a deep understanding of how people in a specific language or discourse community create meaning within their particular contexts and reflect on the broader social and cultural patterns that emerge from these meaning-making practices.
In the second assignment sequence, students have the option to continue focusing on their own community or shift their focus to a topical issue from another community that they are interested in investigating further. They begin this sequence by performing a genre translation in which student select an existing language policy (national, institutional, or organizational) and transform it into a new genre for an appropriate audience. Students explore the various perspectives on the issue the policy is targeting through a research-informed bibliography in order to develop their own multimodal project. The goal is for students to explore a different way to participate in the same conversations they’ve been having about language, identity, and power by creating a research informed text that will reach a specific audience.
You’re welcome to take up any of Melissa’s activities and exercises below and there are many ways you can adapt or personalize this syllabus if you wish to do so. If you would prefer to narrow down the themes of this class to provide more guidelines for your students, you can identify specific types of communities you would like for them to engage in and investigate (online communities, communities at UW, linguistic communities, etc.). Likewise, if you’d like to limit the mediums that students utilize for major project 2 to develop a more specific prompt or rubric, you can surely change this to have all students work on either one singular genre (e.g. podcast) or a concise list of couple of genres.
