Eight years ago Alison Crump dreamed up this class blog when she taught Educational Sociolinguistics in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE), McGill University…then, leaving the site of her (stellar) doctoral work behind her, Alison moved on to other things and left it first to me and then to DISE colleague Caroline Riches to carry on the blogging tradition in this course. We continued the blog in 2019, 2020 and 2022; the results are below—all one has to do is scroll down. I’m delighted to once more be at the Educational Sociolinguistics helm for a term, and hope both our graduate student bloggers and their reading audience will enjoy the ongoing journey.
I encourage readers also to explore the BILD/LIDA blog that our research community started in 2014, and our Journal of Belonging, Identity, Language and Diversity (J-BILD), also dreamed up by original Senior Managing Editor Alison Crump and her co-editor and erstwhile fellow DISE doctoral researcher Lauren Halcomb-Smith; Alison and Lauren launched the journal in 2017 (yes, two recently graduated PhDs can launch a successful open-access online journal!). These three online locations—the journal, the BILD/LIDA blog and this class blog—are all excellent sources of current thinking, arguing, theorizing, speculating and general learned merrymaking about the ways people interact with each other through language as they attempt to get along in society. Speakers trip over each other a lot, as you know if you live mostly in English in Quebec; they tread on each others’ linguistic toes, they help each other up, they stumble on together—and, every so often, they manage to dance.
