Both Vershawn Ashanti Young and Suresh Canagarajah advocate the validity of code meshing. They argue that code meshing is not only legitimate, but actually enhances our language. Young argues that code switching re-inscribes segregationist principles, whereas code meshing reflects the heterogeneity of actual speech. Forcing students to code switch holds them to an artificial linguistic standard, while allowing them to code mesh lets them express themselves in language natural to them.
Yet, while one might want to allow students the freedom to code mesh, one also has the responsibility to prepare students to write fluently for audiences who might not accept code meshing as legitimate. What kinds of writing assignments would both teach students how to deploy standard English and allow them to experiment with code meshing? In “Toward a Rhetoric of Translingual Writing,” Canagarajah discusses a course built around a “serially drafted and peer-reviewed literacy autobiography” (8). While Canagarajah did not instruct her to do so, one student did not code mesh in her first draft, but did so to varying degrees in subsequent drafts. It might be useful to explicitly ask students to go through this process: one might ask them to initially avoid code meshing, but then encourage them to do so in later drafts. As they receive feedback from their peers, students can develop a sense of how others interpret their code meshing.
I like the way you elaborate Canagarajah’s assignment so that one of its explicit objectives is to foreground the various codes/registers students might employ in a rhetorical situation. At the same time, you acknowledge and help students to think about one of the central questions that comes with classroom projects that seek to define and explore code meshing: what does it mean to call one code “standard” and how is such a standard “enforced”?
The difference with Canagarajah’s assignment and the way that you propose is that he does not ask students to withhold an English, that was the student’s choice at first. It should not be the teacher’s/your choice. If you conduct any assignment that asks students to hold back their Englishes that is the segregationist model that privileges one racialized version of English over another, and makes the classroom and your pedagogy a conduit for linguistic prejudice.
Vershawn
Hey Vershawn,
I think students should learn to assess the cost/benefit of code meshing in various rhetorical situations. Code meshing in a grant application, for instance, involves more risk (the readers of the application may interpret this as a lack of linguistic fluency) than code meshing in a memoir. I do not want to privilege one version of English over another, but rather hope to help students understand the rhetorical implications of choosing to code mesh or choosing not to code mesh. I only propose asking students to re-write a piece in different ways, using varying degrees of code meshing, to help students see that they have a wide range of options for approaching any rhetorical task.
Josh
Josh, your approach is right, as far as I am concerned. In an academic writing class, if one is to introduce code-meshing, one ought to talk about how one analyzes its rhetorical effectiveness, when deploying such a tactic proves beneficial or not. Audience is key, here, you’re right. Having students produce examples in order to to do this rhetorical exercise is not code for your linguistic colonialism. Don’t be played into this deconstructive, de-centering, anti-exclusionary (but really authoritarian) rhetoric. Young is an ideologue and a performer first and a sociolinguist second.