Throughout the semester, my papers have discussed common misconceptions among the public about the legitimacies of nonstandard dialects, particularly those of AAVE. For my last paper/project, I intend to do the same. To do this, I have chosen four different genres that will each portray ways in which the majority of the miseducated public views AAVE. By showing how blatantly naïve the public is about AAVE through the use of four different medium, I am hoping to highlight the need for change and indirectly show viewers how to change their attitudes about AAVE.
The first genre is an editorial magazine feature similar to those found in popular magazines such as Glamour or Teen Vogue. The page layout will consist of two columns, and have pictures, a title, and a bolded attention grabbing quote. The article will be broken down into several subheadings, such as: “Unfair Education”, in which statistics explain dated teaching practices that often provide an unfair education for AAVE speaking students; “Past Failures”, in which prior attempts to undo these oppressions have failed; and “Positive Future”, which offers strategies for readers to help ease the controversy of integrating AAVE into the classroom.
The second of my multigenre projects is to construct an unfairly graded paper submitted by an AAVE speaking student. It will be a handwritten essay with common latent AAVE rhetorical features and also more noticeable grammatical features that are often graded as “incorrect” or “sloppy” by many teachers. I’ll include unconstructive and degrading comments marked by the teacher (in red pen of course) on one copy. Another copy will be provided with constructive and encouraging comments that the teacher should write in order to successfully fulfill the student’s learning quota.
The third genre (and the one I am most excited to construct) is a mock facebook template showing an inbox conversation between two friends discussing AAVE. One friend will be complaining how annoying it is when they hear AAVE spoken in public. The other friend will try to defend AAVE by explaining things she has read/learned about in her Ebonics class and therefore changing her friend’s mind about the legitimacies of AAVE.
The fourth and final genre I have chosen to help educate the public about the equality of AAVE to any other dialect is to create a collage showing African Americans society deems as sophisticated and who also practice AAVE. By doing this, I am hoping to clear the foolish notion among many people that just because a person speaks AAVE that he or she is uneducated or of low status.
