In this interview, Kelby Gibson, a Writing and Rhetoric PhD student, discusses her dissertation “And it Really Has Changed My Perspective on Language as a Whole”: Students’ Perceptions of Linguistic Justice in the First-Year Writing Classroom. We also discuss how she’s gotten involved around campus and her experience as the Writing and Rhetoric representative for the Graduate and Professional Student Association.
Tell us a little bit about your dissertation.
My dissertation is primarily on students’ perceptions of linguistic justice, looking at research on linguistic justice (using that term broadly), and how there’s not a lot of scholarship that does really include students.
There is a very clear-cut argument for linguistic justice that has existed for decades that I don’t think necessarily needs some other type of justification for it. I still think that having students’ voices in that conversation is important. I don’t think that they’ve been overlooked on purpose; I think just that’s where the conversation and argument has almost stagnated in the field.
There’s also a unique opportunity in doing this at GMU with our composition program that has spent a lot of time working on a statement on linguistic justice and crowdsourcing, revisiting, and putting forth this statement that is meant to represent the program’s values and our approach to teaching. The program also has been providing faculty development for teaching multilingual writers, of which we have many, alongside building up resources for faculty to use and doing curriculum revisions where we are incorporating language awareness more directly into the curriculum of the course.
GMU’s composition program also presents this unique opportunity to study [student perceptions of linguistic justice] because I had a large participant pool. I could go to several instructors who were doing this work in one way or another in their classes and have a lot of participants available to me, which might not be the case at other institutions. We just have taken a larger programmatic approach to this work.
What conclusions are you drawing from your study?
I have a very simple but important argument, which is that our students do believe it’s really important to be talking about linguistic justice and language differences in their writing class. They’re connecting it to rhetorical awareness, and they really see how deeply language is connected to identity and their own identities. I think a lot of what it can boil down to is it creates a sense of belonging in academia, almost. You’re here, and now I’m telling you that your language is valid in this space, and your peers are validating that.
There’s the other part of the argument, which is very similar to my personal approach, and therefore the approach I would argue for more people to do, which is that I think linguistic justice should be taught as a concept in writing, specifically in required writing courses, including first-year writing. Just as much as the rhetorical situation has a well-earned place and will forever be a part of writing instruction, I think linguistic justice should have that as well. I think it is, again, a core concept.
What classes or research experiences, or just experiences in general, led you to your topic or approach?
It would be hard to point to the individual ones because there are so many little pieces. As I was saying in the beginning, there’s so many things that brought it about, and so many pieces of the puzzle.
In my teaching assistantship interview with Dr. Courtney Adams Wooten, I mentioned that I did alternative grading, or contract grading, and she followed up with me later about working on a faculty workgroup that was doing alternative grading work for the program. I mean, that alone helped me build a lot of important relationships that were going to be really necessary eventually. For example, working with Prof. Carlos Chism, who is very involved in American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and has also been involved in bits and pieces of the programmatic linguistic justice work.
I don’t want to leave anyone out. There were a lot of people there that I connected with that really helped begin to build this work: Dr. Anna Habib, who has done a lot of work on the composition program’s linguistic justice statement and is the Associate Director for Composition who works with multilingual writers; Dr. McKinley Green, who taught research methods where I proposed the beginnings of this project; and Dr. Susan Lawrence, who I took a writing center class with and got to see how knowledgeable she is on coding and working with data in general.
I’ve also helped the program design and run a larger-scale survey on contract grading for a few semesters in a row. Learning the ins and outs of the IRB, designing the survey, working with other people to put it together, and then running it was really good experience because the only way to get familiar with these systems is to try them over and over and over again.
What are some of your proudest accomplishments while here at Mason or some cool things you've done outside your dissertation?
Early on, I got to work with other students to start GMU’s chapter of Rhetoric Society of America (RSA). I was really happy to be a part of something that was helping connect PhD students and giving them a place to talk about their interests. The program is, I’m sure, going to continue to go through changes as it grows and figures out what it’s doing and where it’s going, but I hope it stays. I’m proud we began that work.
Then, I would say the curriculum committee work I did is maybe the thing I’m most proud of.
Not to get on my soapbox, but I can’t emphasize enough that it’s important to get involved with people as much as you can. If you let people know you want opportunities in this program, they will give them to you and help you find them. When they say, “Oh, we need to do this curriculum committee work. You know who I think would really like to do that?” They’ll think of you. That’s how I got a lot of the opportunities I had, because I verbalized to people what I was interested in and the types of work I wanted to do.
Also, you’ve been the Writing and Rhetoric representative for the Graduate and Professional Student Association (GAPSA). What has that been like?
GAPSA is like the graduate student government. It doesn’t get as much power as the undergraduate student government in certain ways, but the president of GAPSA does always get a non-voting seat on the Board of Visitors. They get to go to those meetings and add commentary and input and opinion. That’s obviously the bigger side of it, if you want to be in the officer positions, but every graduate program gets to have one representative. There’s a few meetings a year. We talk about grad students’ concerns, what’s going on, and try to get at least one thing done a year.
One thing that has been part of conversations this year is the parental leave policy that the institution has been working on. While that one’s not being voted on by GAPSA, it was brought to GAPSA to get feedback and input. I think that’s really great because it helps provide graduate students with the pay that they need when they need to take parental leave. So, being in a place to have those conversations and give feedback is just really important.
Also, if you are an active member of GAPSA, which generally means the GAPSA representatives, when you apply for the Graduate Student Travel Fund, you can get extra money, so there’s a perk to it.
Thinking ahead, what’s next for you after graduation?
I’m in the middle of chaos. I’m gone the rest of the week for a job interview, and I had a Zoom interview today. I want to stay in academia; I love teaching, I love research, I really like admin work.
The academic job market is, as many other people have said, a second job. It’s a lot of time and energy, but you still get to do really cool things. Surprisingly, I’ve really enjoyed getting to do teaching demonstrations during on-campus interviews. It’s usually been with the actual students of that university, and it’s so cool to get thrown into this classroom and have different students that you’ve never met before and work with them.
I also want to continue/expand my dissertation research. That’s kind of the plan for now. I’m not going to make any big promises on what that’s going to look like, but I’m really hoping to continue it.
What’s something fun you’ve done during the PhD program?
There’s definitely been a few things. There was a minute where, once a month or every few months, a few of us got together to do some tabletop roleplaying games. That was really fun because when all of us are together as PhD students we kind of default to a lot of conversations about work, about class, and about academia. I think doing the tabletop roleplaying game gave us a place to be together where it was almost impossible to talk about those things. You start to get into the game, and you have to be in the game.
Also, selfishly, I hosted at my apartment, which was nice because I got to have people come over and then leave. I didn’t have to go anywhere. I obviously had to do some work to host, but I think hosting may have more pros than cons.