“We Can Do This in Our Classes, but What about Students in Other Classes and Out in the World?”: How Educators Imagine Code-Meshers and Their Audiences

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study investigates the attitudes of educators of different race, class, linguistic, political, and disciplinary backgrounds at a large, urban, public university to code-meshed Black English in academic texts. This research draws on surveys as well as interviews gauging how educators responded to the idea of code-meshing not only in principle but also in practice, by analyzing their response to authentic intentionally code-meshed texts by unnamed Black English users. By noting patterned responses that emerged among subsets, we were able to notice how the seemingly “objective” act of imagining the authors and audiences for these code-meshed texts was in fact deeply personal, informed by respondents’ intersectional identities, language ideologies, and lived experiences, informing in turn how they would advise student writers who choose to code-mesh in their academic writing.