COOK FAMILY WRITING PROGRAM

Scholars of language and writing argue that language and its modes, varieties, genres, and rhetorical strategies are always shifting, flexible, and contested. Thus, sociolinguistic diversity—differences across and within spoken and written languages and dialects—is inevitable. This seminar will explore the ways in which language difference is situated in current discourses, considering language in written, spoken, and signed forms. We will disrupt monolingual ideologies that infiltrate those discourses, focusing on the ways in which difference in language is an asset to individuals, cultures, and institutions. The course will consider how our sociolinguistic diversity sustains us, how we can sustain sociolinguistic diversity, and how we can create more equity and inclusion around language differences in a variety of social contexts. Students will formulate and consider their own questions about sociolinguistic diversity, equity, and inclusion in papers and presentations. Students of all sociolinguistic backgrounds are welcome to take this seminar, and our course design will provide direct benefits to students who identify as international, multilingual, and/or native speakers of non-mainstream Englishes. 

Where are you from? What does your hometown look like, sound like, feel like? This is a crash course in learning how to write about places, partly by way of surveying American regionalism, a genre often criticized for its narrow focus on local histories, cultural manners, and peoples of particular places and geographies rather than on larger national themes. Instead of isolating our readings of regional works, we will place texts focusing on three different regions of the United States in conversation with one another. We will study the South through Alice Dunbar-Nelson, New England through Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Great Plains through Zitkála-Šá. Using Digital Humanities tools such as StoryMap and ArcGIS we will build visual, digital maps tracing and connecting our readings of regionalist works. We will expand our map, potentially beyond the borders of the United States, by experimenting with our own regional writing, critically reflecting not only on the places where we are from or have come to love, but also on the Chicago/Northwestern region where we currently reside. (No prior training in digital tools nor skills in storymaking are required for this course).​