Language Variety and Pedagogy: Teaching Dialect via Literature

This presentation will highlight several classroom activities designed to teach both language variety and local literary, cultural, and racial history. The materials shared are part of a larger curricular supplement created for grades K-12 and currently used in the Meigs County Ohio schools. These materials detail the story of James Edwin Campbell, a 19th century African-American writer from the region who wrote in both standard English as well as in the dialect of his people and his region. The theme of this year’s conference: Voices from the Misty Mountains: Diversity and Unity... challenges us to view Appalachia from a fresh perspective and to examine its role as a creative, dynamic force. James Edwin Campbell’s story and his body of work, while first demonstrating that the region’s creative forces have been at work - sometimes in obscurity - for over a century, are the perfect illustrations of these themes in the ways that they demonstrate Campbell’s unique place in African-American/Appalachian regional history. We believe Campbell’s work emerges from a very unique place – a unique geographic place – southern Ohio, Appalachia, working class, small river town- a unique personal place – a biracial, small town boy with access to a stellar, non-segregated education in the 1880s - and an important linguistic/cultural place – Appalachian and African-American. As a result, our curriculum is designed to engage local students, as well as their teachers, their families and their communities, in celebrating a part of their history while developing relevant skills and understandings for today