I’m seeking interns/independent study (1-4 credits) students for the spring for three specific yet interrelated projects. Please contact me directly at acharityhudley@wm.edu or the graduate students on each project if you are interested. I will have office hours on Wednesdays from 3-5 starting January 25 if you are interested in finding out more!

Details about each project follow.

Prof. Anne H. Charity Hudley
Associate Professor of Education, English, and Linguistics
William and Mary Professor of Community Studies
Co-Director, William & Mary Scholars Undergraduate Research Experience (WMSURE)

Opportunity #1
Book Research Assistants

When author Toni Morrison gave a Nobel Lecture after accepting a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, she chose to focus on how language is essential to humanity. “We die. That may be the meaning of life,” Morrison said. “But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives” (“Nobel lecture,” para 21).

Building on Morrison’s themes, our book, “We Do Language”: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom, presents specific strategies and models for the greater integration and application of language variation-related concepts, skills, and strategies in the secondary English classroom. The book draws on and extends the generalized concepts of Prof. Charity Hudley and Prof. Christine Mallinson’s first book, Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools, by presenting even further contextualization for the need to integrate linguistically-informed pedagogy into secondary English classrooms. The true strength of the book are the vignettes and materials that in-service secondary English educators have developed and shared with us through interviews, focus groups, and other correspondence; these vignettes and materials will directly attest to the value of infusing language variation into secondary English classrooms.

Interns will help gather and organize material from English Educators and participate in workshops with educators in conjunction with the Capstone English Academy: http://education.wm.edu/centers/sli/surn/Capstone/index.php

Graduate Students: April Lawrence (adlawrence@wm.edu) and Kerri Mahoney (krmahoney@email.wm.edu), doctoral students in curriculum and instruction (Secondary English) at the W&M School of Education

Opportunity #2
NSF Collaborative Research: Assessing the Results of Sociolinguistic Engagement with K-12 STEM Education in Maryland and Virginia Public and Independent Schools

Prof. Anne Charity Hudley (W&M) and Prof. Christine Mallinson (UMBC), have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study how cultural and social language patterns affect learning and student assessment in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) classrooms.

Charity Hudley and Mallinson will receive $171,928 over a three-year period to work with 60 K-12 educators in Baltimore, Hampton Roads and Richmond. We will assess educators’ knowledge of and their responses to language variation, particularly among African-American students. The two researchers will also work with participants to create linguistically informed materials for classroom use.

NSF award notice: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1050938

Interns will help gather and organize material from STEM Educators and participate in workshops with educators. We will also work with STEM students this summer in conjunction with The Center for Gifted Education.

Graduate Students: Darlene Dockery (dddockery@email.wm.edu), doctoral student in Gifted Education at the W&M School of Education, and Inte’a DeShields (idesh1@umbc.edu), doctoral student in Literacy, Language, and Culture at UMBC.

Read more here: http://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2011/professor-receives-nsf-grant-to-study-language-patterns-in-stem-classrooms-123.php

Opportunity #3
NSF Neighborhood Moves and Sociolinguistic Mobility

Professor Anne H. Charity Hudley is a consultant to an NSF, NBER, and NORC funded project that is analyzing how relocating to low-poverty housing affects speech patterns of low-income families who previously lived in high poverty areas. The data is from a Department of Housing and Urban Development program and is a unique opportunity for linguists, sociologists, economists, and public policy makers who don’t often have the opportunity to study such a large-scale, randomized, geographically diverse sample population. This project has important social justice implications concerning the impacts of discriminatory housing practices and educational opportunities. Come be a part of this important work! Interns will be analyzing speech samples from project participants and conducting sociolinguistic analysis on the speech materials.

NSF award notice: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1125795&WT.z_pims_id=5369

Graduate Students:
Brittany McLaughlin (britm@babel.ling.upenn.edu), doctoral student in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Kerry Casey (klcase@email.wm.edu), Masters Student in Public policy at W&M.

My colleague Christine Mallinson and I are pleased to announce that we have received a three-year research grant from the National Science Foundation to study the ways in which language plays a role in the educational challenges that often affect culturally and linguistically diverse students in STEM classrooms. Our goal is to work with teachers to figure out what challenges are being faced in terms of language for their math and science students and what resources teachers and students need to be able to face those challenges.

During the grant, “Assessing the Results of Sociolinguistic Engagement with K-12 STEM Education in Maryland and Virginia Public and Independent Schools,” we will work with K-12 STEM educators in the Baltimore and Richmond areas to collect data on how these educators learn from professional development workshops on language variation and integrate pedagogy and assessment techniques into their classroom. Our research also provides immediate practical application to educators’ pedagogy and practice in the form of educator workshops, teacher designed readings, and a website for educators that ensures that the research outcomes of our project are broadly disseminated.  Read the UMBC press release about the grant. And, read the William & Mary press release about the grant.

The Department of English, The School of Education, and the Programs in Africana, Community, and Women’s Studies at the College of William and Mary would like to cordially invite you to a book launch for Anne Charity Hudley’s new book Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools on Thursday, December 9th from 4-7 pm at the College of William and Mary in Blow Hall Room 201, 262 Richmond Road Williamsburg, VA 23187. The contact phone number is (757) 221-3930. Directions to campus may be found at: http://www.wm.edu/about/visiting/directions/index.php.

All are welcome and an invitational flyer may be downloaded here. Please share with others who might be interested, especially K-12 teachers and parents.

Charity Hudley Mallinson Book Launch Poster

I am so honored to be given this award today.

Well y’all know when you give a preacher an award they’re gonna preach (ain’t that right Rev. Dr. Hurte?), so when you give a professor an award, she gone profess a bit.

My handout is coming around, and I want to talk a little bit this evening about images.

So in honor of this image award, I want to share with you some images of images.

Anybody who has had class with me knows that definitions of words only start with the trite definitions found dictionary, so for our case of images, I’ve been thinking of dictionary definitions and then what goes beyond.

What’d I find in the Oxford English Dictionary?

Images
2. b. A visible appearance; a manifestation of a figure; an apparition.
3. a. A visual representation or counterpart of an object or scene, formed through the interaction of rays of light with a mirror, lens, etc., usually by reflection or refraction.

In Merriam-Webster?

Images

5 a (1): a mental picture or impression of something (2): amental conception held in common by members of a group and symbolic of a basic attitude and orientation

Lets go with a mix of these definitions a while so we can expand on them.

Leslie Dallas McClennon Sr.

Here is an image of my grandfather Leslie Dallas McClennon, Sr. He passed away before I was born, so all I have of him are images of images. In this particular image, he’s accepting an NAACP lifetime membership plaque for Mt. Zion Church, where he served as the treasurer. What an image of a man who was an orphan, raised by the local preacher and then went on to Shaw and Howard Universities and became an early African-American director of a Boys Club and then one of the first integrated YMCAs all the while studying education and serving youth.

The next image is that of an article than ran in the Richmond, Washington, and Baltimore Afro-American in January of 1973 about my other grandfather who believed that civic engagement was the key to African-American success. He raised seven sons while doing the work listed in the article.

These are images of strong men with strong families. Remember those images and negotiate other images of everyday African-American men with them. Now here are some living images for you. My immediate family has joined me today. My brother and his wife and my three nieces regret they couldn’t be here today-they were here all last week and flew back to Boston just on Friday.

My husband’s here, my mom, my dad here, my sister, my brother-in-law, and my nephew Carter.

Why are we all here? Because we’re all in this together.

My dad grew up 35 miles up route 5 from here. As a young boy he used to ride right past this college. The beautiful brick walls didn’t just frame the school, they served to keep people out. The Virginia government used to pay bright African-Americans to leave the state. They sent him to Meharry Medical School in Nashville, most likely hoping he would stay out. He didn’t. He came on back.

My mother is really wicked smart. She was selected from students around the south at age 16 to go do the very important job of integrating Vanderbilt University.

They met up out there in Tennessee, went up to Columbia in New York came back this way and started a medical practice and helped to revolutionize access to health care for minorities in this area. My favorite image of them is in the Richmond Magazine Top Docs issue as a medical mega couple and my mother’s jacket has butterflies all over it. Every time I think the next big thing is too daunting, I just keep those images of triumph in my head.

I only had a few days notice here and organization of paper is not my strong point, so when I find it, I’ll put the image on my website.

Hudleys in the New York Times. Photo by Eric Dobbs.

My favorite images of myself follow-with my husband Chris Hudley in the New York Times-my darling husband- the All-State football star and Army recruit turned child psychologist. Consummate class cupcake baker and the ultimate example of love triumphing over place, race, class, and time. When you’re sad and some silly girl or boy has done you wrong take a look at that image, and keep your eyes on the prize.

Renee Charity Price and Anne Charity Hudley at the African American Women’s Language Conference at the University of Texas-San Antonio

The next image is of my sister and me hard at work on a panel on African-American women’s language where we presented on the language of African-American girls-I have hundreds of favorite photos of my little sister, but this one is my favorite in particular because we are doing our thing. Renee is the chair of history department at St. Catherine’s School in Richmond where we attended. She understands the value of planting accurate historical images in girls’ minds at a time when their worldview is being formed.

So what about our own worldviews? The definition of images I like best relates to worldviews and is from the  root of the word- it comes through Middle English, from Anglo-French imaginer, from Latin imaginari, from imagine-, imago image-to imagine

So as my last set of images, I’d like to share with you what I imagine based on my first full year here teaching at William
and Mary:

I’ll keep the image simple so that you can see yourself and your friends and family coming up behind you in it:

Couple it with the amazing images of students that you’ve seen tonight here:

Images of all kinds of girls and boys growing up in places like Denbigh, Charles City, and New Kent, who don’t think twice about coming to William and Mary for College just like the conversations that the St. Catherine’s girls I went to school with used to have…

It’ll be so routine: Where are you going to College? William and Mary? Oh, that’s awesome, me too!

That student shouldn’t have to think twice about then coming here majoring in anything-English, Geology, Biology, Government, doing well, writing a thesis and graduating with honors then heading off to a graduate school to get them to the next level.

For my last image, I turn to the words of Nikki Giovanni -because as an English and Linguistics professor, words run through my mind- constant images in my head and because Prof. Giovanni is my hero-because Prof. Giovanni returned near her home to teach, she was there to help our fellow Virginia University heal from its darkest hour – and in that hour they turned not only to the physicians, engineers, and politicians but also to a poet- which is something I think about every day – that the pen is truly more mighty than the sword, or the gun, or the shattered dream -and also because tonight I am truly proud.

A HIGHER LEVEL OF POETRY

There is really only one thing to say to young writers:

Know who you are writing for and to.

I know I write for my Grandmother and the women of The Garden Club and the women of The Book Club and the women of The Missionary Society and the women who are the Usher Board and the women who cook for the Special Sundays and the women who cleaned the pastor’s house when his wife was in the hospital and all the women who picketed Rich’s Department Store and all the women who sacrificed to send money to Montgomery and especially all the women who cried when Emmett’s body was raised from the river and all the women who decried THIS could not and should not happen again.

Because knowing who you want to be proud of you can make all the difference in the world.

Not at all that I don’t want others to read my poems or essays. I really would like everyone to read or to hear me but I cannot really know what that will mean so I’ll just stick to what I do know.

I want my Grandmother and her friends to look back at my work and be pleased. I want the women who endured slavery and the black laws and all the dreams down the drain because their husbands were riddled with bullets and their sons were lynched and they knew that had to stand because if they didn’t stand then all that death was in vain. So I know only one thing:

It is important to know who you want to be proud of you.

And then you can know that you have done all you can do. And you can be proud of your work.

-Nikki Giovanni

Thank you.

The first year of the Community Studies minor is coming to a wonderful close.

I hope that y’all can come to our big end of the year community engagement events so that you can see all that is in store for next year!

The Engaged Scholarship Academic Symposium will be held Wednesday, April 21st from 2:00-5:00 p.m. in Blow Hall 201. During this event, students will present their posters outlining their community engagement and scholarship work from the past year.

The annual Celebration of Service will follow the symposium. It will be held at the Kimball Theater at 7:00 p.m. The celebration is a lively event with entertainment, slide shows, and student awards.

William and Mary Linguists made quite an impact at the word of the year and decade elections. See the Washington Post video for more!

Happy New Year!

I’m writing from the Hilton Baltimore, where today I’m co-leading an American Dialect Society’s panel entitled “Cultivating Socially Minded Linguists: Service Learning and Engaged Scholarship in Linguistics and Education.”

I’m also honored to serve as an Undergraduate Program Representative to the Linguistic Society of America’s Committee on Linguistics in Higher Education. I will attend the committee’s annual meeting tomorrow morning.

Prof. Jack Martin will be presenting at an invited symposium entitled “Invited Symposium: Documentary Linguistics: Retrospective and Prospective” tomorrow with his co-researchers from the Coushatta Native American Tribe.

Kira Allman, ’13, was selected to give a paper entitled “Undergraduate Linguistics from the Undergraduate Perspective: One Approach to Interdisciplinarity” on a panel on Interdisciplinarity and Current Trends in Undergraduate Linguistics Education that is sponsored by the Undergraduate Programs Advisory Committee/Linguistics in Higher Education Committee.

Robert Staubs ’08 will be presenting a paper entitled “Learning hidden structure with a log-linear model of grammar” with his research group at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Wish us luck!

The first class of Introduction to Community Studies students  ended the semester very well and their final papers and project plans definitely exceeded all of our expectations, reminding me of the great Thomas Edison quote:

“If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.”

Our two December graduates will both be keeping the Community Studies spirit going past graduation:

Sam Fein-Helfman will be teaching English and photography to students at an orphanage in Guatemala! Support her efforts through her stunning website at:

http://www.sfienhelfman.com/

Rachel Granata has been awarded $500 of unrestricted money from the Delta Kappa Gamma grants in aid scholarship fund  to be used for her preservice teacher workshop project this spring! Be on the lookout for notices about the date and time. Rachel has also been accepted into W&M’s Graduate School of Education!

Three members of the class have been chosen as William and Mary Spring Break Branch Out Field Trip Leaders!

Teach for America
Charlotte, NC
We will be working with students in the classroom as well as identifying and discussing the inequalities that currently exist in American education and educational reform. Site Leaders:  Anna Dausman (acdausman@wm.edu), Allison Anoll (apanol@wm.edu)

Teach For America
Gaston, NC
We will be working with a local school in Gaston helping to teach classes and grade assignments.  In addition, we will be interacting with students during their free periods and will learn about the inequalities plaguing the American education system.
Site Leaders:  Blair Smith (besmith@wm.edu), Brittney Calloway (bacalloway@wm.edu)

for more information see:
http://www.wm.edu/offices/oces/communityengagement/branchout/domestic/currentsbses/index.php

Anna Dausman has helped to make a summer course on Swahili language and culture a reality. Anna and I will work with Prof. Martin Shanguhyia of the History Department and undergraduate James Wamugi who are both fluent speakers of Swahili. If you are interested in taking the course, let us know!

Swahili Language & Culture – 31110 – ENGL 464 – 01 & AFST 306 – 01
Associated Term: Summer 2010, 3 credits; 4-6pm Tuesday and Thursdays in Washington 301 from June 1-July 2nd
Instructors: Anne Harper Charity Hudley and Martin Shanguhyia; teaching assistants: Anna Dausman and James Wamugi.
This course will examine the language and culture of Swahili speaking communities. Participants will conduct directed reading and research on selected topics including but not limited to the linguistic history, sociopolitical ramifications, and literary legacy of the development and spread of Swahili. Students will work with fluent speakers of Swahili to learn beginning speaking, reading, and writing skills. The course will have a focus on engagement and scholarship in communities where Swahili is spoken.

Our Sharpe Scholars Kiara Savage and Alice Yeh stunned the crowds last Wednesday night at the CMST 100 presentations. While the other four seminars presented in groups of about 15, Kira and Alice held their own and shared a well-thought out overview of the class and their projects with the rest of their CMST 100 classmates.

Samanthe Tiver did an amazing job as a peer fellow for CMST 250 will serve as the peer fellow for CMST 351 this spring. Samanthe has been so dedicated to CMST 351 that she started helping me plan the course last year and we’re excited for it’s launch on January 20th!

I have been invited to write a chapter entitled “Linguistics and Social Activism” for the new Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Several students are serving as research assistants on the chapter and we look forward to bringing our innovative brand of linguistics and outreach into the canon of sociolinguistics!

I was invited and visited Virginia Tech, North Carolina State, and the University of Texas at Arlington to talk speak about our program in the past year.

On January 7, 2010, I will co-lead a panel at the American Dialect Society Conference in Baltimore Maryland entitled: “Cultivating Socially Minded Linguists: Service Learning and Engaged Scholarship in Linguistics and Education.” Many CMST and Linguistics students have joined in the panel effort!

For more information see: http://www.americandialect.org/

Congratulations to all of the students and look out for more updates on accolades as we’re just getting started!

Congratulations to Kira Allmann, William and Mary’s latest Rhodes Scholar!

http://www.rhodesscholar.org/press

From the press release:

“Kira C. Allman, Williamsburg, is a senior at the College of William and Mary, with majors in government and linguistics. She has also studied Arabic at the Al-Akhawayn University in Morocco, and architecture and art history at the University of St. Andrews. Kira teaches in the Williamsburg public schools, and is active in college committees and societies. At Oxford, she intends to do the M.Phil. in modern middle eastern studies.”

Kira is scheduled to speak at the Linguistics Society of America conference on Friday Jan 8 at 2:30 on “Undergraduate linguistics from the undergraduate perspective: One approach to interdisciplinarity.”

http://lsadc.org/info/preliminary-program-2010.cfm#friday-afternoon

For her project in my Language Attitudes  research seminar, Kira designed training models to help local white parents who are fostering African-American children better understand African-American language and culture.

Kira is a model example of a citizen and a scholar.

Next Wednesday we will officially launch the new minor in Community Studies! The Community Studies minor is designed to complement any academic major and will support students in their integration of community-based research and activities into their academic plans of study. I have been appointed the inaugural William and Mary Professor of Community Studies and will first teach Introduction to Community Studies (CMST 250) on the theme of African-American English. In CMST 250, we will examine hypothesis about the history and emergence of African-American English and explore the relationship of African-American English to linguistic theory, educational praxis, American culture, and racial inequality. Students in the course will participate in yearlong mentoring or tutoring programs that facilitate a direct engagement model of research. Students will also be supported by the new Office of Engagement and Community Scholarship and a host of community partners and both instructional and professional faculty who are committed to the development of our students as active citizens and scholars.

Also this fall, Prof. Monica Griffin will teach Community Studies 350 Critical Engagement in Context on the theme of social and cultural literacy. CMST 350 will survey a range of critical theories and perspectives about civic engagement, including philosophies of citizenship, organizational structure and efficacy, social justice and inequality, and social movements. All first year Sharpe Scholars will take the jointly taught CMST 100 The College and the Community. CMST 100 introduces Sharpe Scholars to Williamsburg, especially its history and prominent social issues that its citizens confront. CMST 100 introduces students to the various ethical, practical, and theoretical aspects of civic participation, and provides them with the skills to carry out academically grounded, community-based projects.

In the spring, I will teach Community Studies 351 Methods in Community-Based Research on the theme of  “The Language of Engagement.” This course will survey a variety of community-based participatory research methods, including survey research, individual and focus group interviewing, ethnographic field methods, and documentary activism around the objective-based topics of “reading for change, writing for change, speaking for change, and asking for change.”

The students in the first Community Studies courses exude their personal and collective dedication to community-based scholarship. The development of the minor has truly been a community effort and I can’t wait for class to start. As the semester unfolds, we will share more about our adventures with you all!

More about Community Studies:
http://www.wm.edu/as/charlescenter/interdisciplinary/structured/communitystudies/

More about the Office of Engagement and Community Scholarship:
http://www.wm.edu/offices/osvs/

More about the Sharpe Scholars Program:
http://www.wm.edu/as/charlescenter/scholars/sharpe/