Accompanying as accomplices: Pedagogies for community engaged learning in sociocultural linguistics

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AbstractAs a field, sociocultural linguistics has a long legacy of public scholarship that has worked to counter linguistic prejudices and inequalities perpetuated through language. Today, current community engagement within sociocultural linguistics increasingly takes a collaborative approach that includes students. In this article, I therefore explore how the field prepares both students and faculty for this work. In particular, I focus on courses with a service learning component, suggesting that these constitute key spaces for developing the commitments and capacities necessary for engaged work that advances sociolinguistic justice. I highlight the insights of existing scholarship on service learning in linguistics before turning to a more detailed discussion of pedagogical practice, drawing on current critical pedagogy literature that emphasize the importance of language and culture. Synthesizing two social movement perspectives, I propose a pedagogical framework that supports faculty and students in learning to accompany as an accomplice. I demonstrate the application of this model by discussing specific pedagogical strategies enacted in a community engaged course I taught on Language and Migration at a university in the United States. Ultimately, I suggest that developing social justice pedagogies is a crucial endeavor if we are to counter the ways that language has been used to justify inequalities and motivate violence towards racialized communities, both in the past and in the present.