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Learning Community
Fall PLC: Language Stories — Centering Students' Linguistic Capital in our Classrooms
with Bronwyn LaMay, PhD, and SJSU MAT candidate Vanessa Nguyen
“I still remember my first day of preschool and the mix of confusion and nervousness that I felt as I stepped into the classroom, holding tight onto my mom’s hand. I watched as my teacher approached the two of us with a welcoming smile on her face, and as she crouched down to my height, she asked me a question. In that moment, I remember feeling a strong sense of relief because I understood what she was asking me. So I responded with one of the phrases my mom had taught me: “Hi, my name is Vanessa.’”
— Written by Vanessa Nguyen, our co-facilitator, in her language story as a San José State undergraduate
We serve a multilingual community. Yet students can internalize the stigma that their linguistic identity is a deficit rather than a learning asset. When students consider their relationships to language in the context of writing by authors like Amy Tan, bell hooks, or Julia Alvarez, their response is often along the lines of, I didn’t realize I had a language story. But now I know I do.
In this workshop we will consider the deep nature of our students’ relationships to language – and our own – from a storied and theoretical perspective. Drawing from a framework of culturally sustaining pedagogy and raciolinguistics, we will define “language stories” as our lived experiences of navigating family, community, culture, society, and school spaces within the politics of language. From a writing perspective, we will explore strategies for facilitating genre-blended pieces that ask students to wrap their stories in a theoretical lens, centralizing their experience within our academic curriculum. We will also consider how linguistic privilege and bias shape our relationship to language – including Standard English – in academic spaces.
You will have the option to write your language story – a story you might choose to share with your own students – over the course of several weeks. As we consider how we navigate our worlds through languaging practices, we will consider how writing in multilingual classrooms can invite students’ languages – all of them – to be alive.
About the
Instructors
Bronwyn LaMay
Faculty Director
Bronwyn has been a teacher, instructional coach, and administrator for over 20 years in the Bay Area. She has taught middle and high school in Oakland, Hayward, East Side Union, East Palo Alto, and Santa Clara. She has her PhD from Stanford in English and Literacy Curriculum, her MA from Mills College in Educational Leadership, and her BA in English from UCLA. A few years ago, she published what began as a literacy curriculum that she co-created with her students; it revolved around their self-narratives on the topic of love. The book, Personal Narrative, Revised: Writing Love and Agency in the High School Classroom, was awarded NCTE’s David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English for 2017. Bronwyn currently lectures in the Departments of English and Teacher Education at San José State, and has worked with the Writing Project as a teacher consultant and participant for many years prior to becoming a director.
Vanessa Nguyen
Vanessa Nguyen is an MAT candidate at San Jose State University (SJSU). She earned her bachelor's degree in English from SJSU in 2024 and is currently pursuing her teaching credential in English Language Arts alongside her master's degree. A lifelong lover of literature, Vanessa looks forward to sharing her passion for reading and writing with her future students. When she's not in the classroom, Vanessa can be found exploring bookstores, trying new restaurants, playing the piano or guitar, or spending time with her family and friends.
Fall 2025
PLC
WHO
Secondary teachers in grades 7 - 12. Free for everyone. You can also purchase (up to) 3 units from San José State University for university credits that will fulfill expectations towards progress along teachers’ salary schedules.
WHEN
Tuesdays, 4:30 PM - 5:45 PM – October 28, November 4, November 18, December 2
WHERE
Online
COST
FREE
If participants would like to receive units, it will be $200 per unit (up to 3 units).
Language Stories—Centering Students' Linguistic Capital in our Classrooms
Join our teacher-led Professional Learning Community (PLC) to extend your growth, self-reflection, and earn graduate college credit.
We invite all teachers from across the globe to participate in our Professional Learning Communities. As such, we will be holding our fall 2025 PLC series online. All educators have an option of enrolling for up to 3 units from San Jose State University for an additional $200 per unit (in-state or out-of-state), which will require additional written work on the application of ideas in the classroom.
Session 1:
Vanessa, whose words lead the overview, will join us as we define “language stories” through the voices of students whose writing embodies unique and shared perspectives on how they navigate the role of language in their lives. Working through a lens of cultural capital and raciolinguistics, we will consider why students’ language stories are valuable for them to write and us to know. How can students centralize their lived experiences within an academic curriculum to build self-empathy along with critical awareness on the politics of language? We will end with optional writing time: What is your language story?
Session 2:
“Lately I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as ‘broken’ or ‘fractured’ English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than ‘broken’ as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness.”
— Amy Tan, “Mother Tongue”
Drawing from Tom Newkirk’s conceptualization of narrative in Minds Made for Stories – How We Really Read and Write Informational and Persuasive Texts, we will explore why narrative and analytical writing are hybrids, and how their purposeful intersection can support students in developing writers’ voice, identity, and position. We will explore strategies for engaging students in genre-blended writing that asks them to wrap their language stories in a theoretical lens, inviting them to connect with authors like Amy Tan, Julia Alvarez, and Trevor Noah, whose stories can serve as anchor texts, and to consider how their individual experiences are part of a larger narrative.
Session 3:
“...a child with five different present tenses comes to school to be faced with books that are less than his own language. And then to be told things about this language, which is him, that are sometimes permanently damaging. He may never know the etymology of Africanisms of his language, not even that ‘hip’ is a real word or ‘the dozens’ meant something. This is a really cruel fallout of racism.”
— Toni Morrison
“I speak the language of my oppressor better than the language of my culture. Of course, there is power in that.”
— 10th Grade Student, Sunnyvale
How might our students experience our messaging of Standard English and academic language? Touching on writings by June Jordan and bell hooks, we will consider how every major language of the world can be characterized by a standard-nonstandard dichotomy, and identify why all varieties of English, whether standard or non-standard, are systematic and rule- governed. None are, in linguist John Baugh’s words, “a set of slang words or a random set of grammatical mistakes, but a well-formed set of rules of grammar and pronunciation that is capable of conveying complex logic and reasoning” (Baugh, 2000, p. 59). What is vernacular, and how does it differ from slang? What is valuable about the lingo of a region? And how might our students explore a blend of Englishes and vernaculars and lingos – as well as their relationship to Standard English – through their language stories?
Session 4:
We will spend this final session writing, reflecting, and sharing our own language stories.