Guest Lecture: Shawna Shapiro, Critical Language Awareness

Faculty, staff, and students are welcome to attend Shawna Shapiro’s public lecture on Critical Language Awareness.

We know that there are expectations related to Standard Written English and that those expectations can privilege writers who conform to those standards and disadvantage those multilingual or multidialectal students who are in the process of acquiring fluency in SWE. Less familiar to many of us in higher ed is the field of Critical Language Awareness and the value of CLA pedagogy to act as a bridge between the pragmatic push to conform to expectations and the progressive choice to resist. CLA pedagogy encourages a “both/and” approach, intended to promote each student’s rhetorical agency.

Shawna Shapiro, author of Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom, is the leading scholar in this relatively new area of scholarship, and we are excited that she can bring to our campus ways of thinking about  linguistic inclusivity, linguistic identity, and authentic storytelling, all of which are important to how we frame “belonging” at St. Olaf.