(Re)Active Praxis: Valuing Linguistic Diversity: Transforming the Teaching of Grammar for Rural Preservice Secondary English Teachers

This essay examines how I reconfigured a required applied grammar course taken by preservice teachers at the university where I teach. Because a significant number of the preservice teachers I work with come from and will teach in rural areas in the southern Appalachian region, the course redesign aimed to increase their confidence in their own language abilities and prepare them for the linguistic diversity they will find in their future classrooms. Drawing on research by linguists, especially Black English scholars, and using a combination of systemic functional linguistics and linguistic pragmatics, I explore how and why I transformed a traditionally taught grammar course to one that values linguistic plurality.