Writing and Power Workshop Series
Humphreys, Sara, Loren Gaudet, Jason Collins, and Natalie Boldt
Fall 2024

Endorsement

In June, 2025, members of the Canadian Association for Studies in Discourse and Writing / Association canadienne de rédactologie voted to endorse this statement. CASDW/ACR respectfully acknowledges the intellectual and community work done by the authors of this statement and the contributors they acknowledge. In no way does CASDW/ACR want to pose as author of this document: authorship and credit remains with the original authors and contributors.

Statement

This statement is informed by the assumption that language, power, and action are interconnected. Instructors, support staff, scholars, and administrators of writing provided the knowledge to compose this statement, which reflects the context of what is now called Canada. The goals of this statement are:

• to increase understanding about how power operates in, around, and through language;
• to identify the power of students’ languaging practices;
• to recognize the power of writing centre staff, administrators, managers and writing instructors to build on students’ languaging practices and the need to increase capacity to uplift them;
• to spark continued conversation about the need for linguistic access and equity, in our scholarship, support work, and teaching;
• and to cultivate more conscientious, responsible, and socially just ways to engage with language, language use, and student needs.

With these goals in mind, we have divided this statement into two main sections. The first, Concepts of Belonging, Identity, Citational Justice, and Accessibility, outlines principles of language and languaging as a dynamic process always connected to identities, cultures, action, and power. Based on primary data gathered at the SSHRC-funded Writing & Power Workshop series held virtually in fall 2024, combined with current research in linguistics, composing, and rhetoric, this section provides insight into the historical and current state of academic writing (including multimodal composing) in what is now called Canada. This section also provides insight into, and sets the foundation for, our thinking about the connections among language, power, and action. The second section, Recommendations for Praxis for Writing Support and Writing Instructors, provides evidence-based guidelines for writing centre staff, instructors, administrators, and researchers. Thus, this statement serves not only as an explanation of principles but also as a heuristic for more justice- centred practices.

Concepts of Belonging, Identity, Citational Justice, and Accessibility

1. Language is inherently connected to action and to power.

Slavery, discrimination, racist government policies and practices, and colonial genocide have a long history in what is now called Canada. Language has been used as a tool of violence, death, and genocide and has justified many atrocities within what is now called Canada, such as residential schools, slavery, Chinese Head Tax, Japanese Internment, Komagata Maru incident, and anti-immigration policies. Resistance has come in the form of narratives and voices from these communities that need more space in writing classrooms and support environments.

2. Languaging is inherently connected to our identities and cultures.

We use language to index our values, identities, and community memberships (e.g., racial, ethnic, linguistic, professional, and other sociocultural identities and relations). But beyond spoken word or alphabetic text, we make meaning and perform our identities through our bodies (e.g., sign language, gesture, movement, eye gaze) and other symbolic and performative resources (e.g., clothing, hair, makeup). Also importantly, because we use our language to construct, negotiate, and make sense of meaning, identities, and power, language is also embodied action – we do things through and with language. For instance, marching, as in protest, does not begin until someone communicates (through their walking, chanting, and holding the placard or other signs), followed by uptake by others. In other words, composing takes on many forms and is not simply restricted to writing.

In what is now called Canada, language use in postsecondary contexts is often indexed as white front-facing, meaning that those who identify as white expect institutions to reflect their understanding of language. In order for marginalized and colonized student populations to be comfortable in academic spaces, they need to see themselves represented in their instructors, leaders, scholarship, citational practice, course materials, and writing centre staff.

3. Language-in-use (or Discourse) involves negotiation, often within asymmetrical power relations.

Language is tied to who is doing language and what that doing means given the sociocultural, political, and historical context. We often change the way we use language, depending on the situation, including, but not limited to, who we are talking to, what relation we have with that person, what we want to accomplish, and how we want to come across. In other words, the rhetorical situation informs such negotiation, which is shaped by the power dynamics of those involved and the larger power structure. Those with less perceived social and cultural power and/or privilege may be expected to defer to the norms of more privileged groups.

Language use in post secondary contexts often privileges, and even requires, normalized whiteness, and many students must compromise their voices, and even their ways of knowing, in these asymmetrical power relations. It is crucial that students be able to use their voices and tell their stories, and this requires those in positions of power to support students use their own voices.

4. Language is alive and always changing.

This means language is fluid and heterogeneous with multiple norms and is always shaped by the particular historical and political context. The use of they as a singular pronoun has increased in recent years in large part because nonbinary and trans people have fought for this usage in contexts of social power. Now, they as a singular pronoun is recognized by the OED, the Government of Canada and many provincial governments. We, as language users, take up, experiment with, and change language through our daily use, yet the power of standardization still remains as a dominant force, guiding and shaping how language use is perceived and evaluated.

However, institutional structure makes change difficult, and when it does happen, it happens slowly. Writing centre staff, instructors, and administrators must continue to advocate for change and continue to push for rethinking and reassessing our language-use, our curricular requirements, our assessments, and how these forms of language use can not only better reflect the historical contexts, but also change the historical contexts in which we find ourselves. To do this important work, writing centre staff and instructors need adequate support and security, as many people in these positions experience precarity and overwork.

5. Language is always an incomplete representation of reality.

Since the interpretation of symbols is contextual, there is no such thing as perfect representation through language, which is why there is always something “lost in translation” when working across languages, dialects, and/or registers. For this reason, consultation with marginalized and colonized populations is encouraged and in certain contexts, required.

For example, instructors and writing centre support staff might assume that Indigenous students are comfortable with standard western assessment and grading practice. However, such assessment and grading praxis is often colonial in nature, furthering the goals of SAE. Therefore, implementing alternative grading in consultation with students is key to serving marginalized and colonized student populations.

Recommendations for Praxis for Writing Support and Writing Instructors

I. Goals, Outcomes, and Expectations

II. Content (topics, materials, assignments)

• Include representation of diverse linguistic identities, communities, and everyday experiences in course materials and assignments.
• Promote a critical view of language and power (i.e., Critical Language Awareness), including a deep understanding of the harmful role that prescriptivism/standard language ideology can play at school and in society.
• Adopt a broad view of literacy that includes visual, multimodal, embodied, and other non-alphabetic ways of knowing.
• Teach and encourage use of rhetorical text/social (reading/listening) engagement skills, with close attention to inclusion/exclusion and other power dynamics.
• Create and sustain opportunities for students to draw on their full linguistic repertoires, including a range of varieties/dialects, codes, styles, and modalities, including those that have historically been stigmatized/marginalized in the academy. This includes opportunities for code-meshing/translanguaging.
• Design assignments that encourage students to make informed linguistic choices and to take rhetorical risks. Pair these assignments with evaluative practices that privilege these decisions.
• Be transparent about the assumptions and expectations for course activities and assignments, using accessible language and examples.

III. Feedback, Grading, and Assessment

• Align feedback/grading practices with a commitment to linguistic and social justice (i.e., recognize that simply changing course content is not enough).
• Prioritize equity through transparency in rubrics, labour-based/accessible grading, and other similar assessment tools and practices.
• Recognize that feedback is relational and not (just) transactional and use feedback to strengthen relationships with and among students, and to promote peer engagement and self-assessment among writers.
• Orient feedback/assessment practices in a commitment to student agency, cultural rhetorical sovereignty, and growth, rather than a deficiency model—especially when it comes to students from linguistically marginalized backgrounds.

Programmatic and Institutional Actions

I. Programmatic Decisions

• Bring a critical lens, informed by the core concepts outlined above, to programmatic and institutional conversations about professional standards, accreditation, course evaluations, and learning outcomes.
• Invite students from a variety of backgrounds into the process of crafting language-related policies, curricula, and assessment decisions so as to better meet student needs and goals.
• Promote co-curricular and extracurricular opportunities that integrate and draw on linguistic diversity and cultivate critical language awareness for the entire academic community.

II. Institutional Policies and Resources

• For programs/institutions that offer special course sections, policies, or resources for multilingual (and/or multidialectal) writers: Make sure these offerings are asset-based and integrative, rather than remedial or punitive in nature.
• Design faculty development and outreach initiatives that promote critical engagement with linguistic diversity, tied to other institutional commitments to UNDRIP, Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) antiracism, global citizenship, etc.
• Recruit, support, and retain faculty, staff, and administrators from diverse linguistic/dialectical/cultural backgrounds, and use evaluation and promotion criteria and procedures that value linguistic justice and equity work.
• Gather feedback and other data about the experiences, needs, and goals of students and faculty/staff from linguistically marginalized backgrounds, in order to inform decision making.
• Practice accessible and inclusive language use in the classroom, across the campus, and in the larger community.
• Offer resources and incentives for faculty/staff engagement in language learning and professional development opportunities (e.g., anti-oppression workshops).

III. Scholarship: Take active steps to make scholarship more accessible.

• Model inclusive, accessible language with students, colleagues, and community members.
• Seek out publication venues that are publicly available (e.g., open-access journals, institutional repositories) where possible.
• Advocate for valuing a variety of publication types in review and promotion, including grey literature (such as syllabi, internal poster presentations, course redesign materials, multimodal work, public and popular genres)
• Recognize and reward community-based, multilingual, multimodal, and multidialectal scholarship.
• Promote linguistic equity in scholarly editing and peer review practices.

Notes

1. We would like to acknowledge and bring attention to the work of scholars who have come before us. Please see the work shared through CASDW, DW/R, CWCA/ACCR. We would like to thank SSHRC and all the participants and interviewees for contributing their wisdom and resources.

2. See, for example, Section 5.6 in Why Write: A Guide for Students in Canada, the University of Victoria’s Transgender Archive, and the Government of Canada’s guidelines for inclusive language use.

Acknowledgements

We have drawn from the open access position statement on Language, Power and Action published by the Conference on College Communication and Composition. We revised the statement to better reflect the context of what is now called Canada and include knowledge based on the workshop interviews, discussions and materials. We are indebted to the work of the task force responsible for the Language, Power and Action Statement. The members of this task force included: Yavanna Brownlee, Eunjeong Lee, Ana Milena, Ribero, Shawna Shapiro, and Soha Youssef.