Begun in 2019, the DLP connects Fordham students and New York City high school students with professors from around the country who have written academic articles about the politics of language and how it can be used to exclude or empower. Working in teams, the students and professors created new versions accessible to readers at the high school level.

“We’re becoming a multilingual, multicultural society as we speak, and we think that students have a right to have access to academic tools that help them think critically about the ways they’re taught language,” said Ayala Fader, Ph.D., professor of anthropology and founding director of the DLP and Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology, at the website launch.

Held at the Lincoln Center campus, it brought together the Fordham students and high schoolers with the DLP’s leadership for the debut of the website where their work will be housed. Also present were DLP co-organizers from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and other universities, as well as a UMass student participant.

Changing Ideas About Language

Grants from the Spencer Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation funded the project, enabling collaborations like a three-day workshop last summer.

The teams produced 12 plain-language versions of the professors’ articles. One of them has been uploaded to the site. Titled “Speech or Silence?,” it’s an adaptation of academic writing by Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Ph.D., a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and DLP participant, about language used by children who are undocumented immigrants. 

The other 11 adapted articles produced by the teams will be uploaded this summer. Over the next few years, the center will hold workshops for New York City high school students and teachers to help them put the articles to use in their classrooms and in their lives, as well as workshops to help other academic authors adapt their articles for high schoolers, said the DLP’s co-director, Johanna Quinn, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology.

Nicolle Jimenez, soon to graduate from Harvest Collegiate High School in Manhattan, enjoyed working with the academic authors and looking at language in new ways. “You don’t really think about these things” on your own, she said, referring to how language “plays a part in your life and how you can help change these ideas of language and create something new out of it.”

Unlocking Doors with the Liberal Arts

Her teammate Ashira Fischer, FCLC ’24, who studied anthropology and acting at Fordham, said the program is “unlocking a whole lot of doors for everybody.”

“The scholars get to re-understand their article in a new way, and make sure it hits a wider audience,” and the high school students get exposure to college-level work, she said.

DLP co-director Britta Ingebretson, Ph.D., an assistant professor in Fordham’s languages and cultures department, said it was “immensely rewarding” to take part in the project and “to be cognizant of how much work and effort goes into making writing simple.”

“They’re writing for the academic audience, but what about us high school students?” asked Suvanni Oates, a high schooler from Bronxdale High School who is an intern for the project. “What about us students who can’t receive that message that they’re trying to send in that way?” 

From June 14 through 16, Fordham welcomed 12 scholar-authors from multiple universities alongside local New York City high school students and Fordham undergraduates for a writing workshop where they could all learn from each other. 

Creating New Articles—and TikTok Videos

“High school students were introduced to undergraduates [and they are]working with linguistic anthropologists, our authors. We prepared student teams to each read one author’s paper and give feedback on what they understood, what they didn’t understand, what spoke to them,” said Ayala Fader, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Fordham and founding director of both the Demystifying Language Project and Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology, which is launching next year. 

During the workshop, held at the Lincoln Center campus, teams of undergrads and high school students worked with their author to “transpose” previously published articles into two-page digital pieces in language teens can understand. Students even spent a day making TikToks that conveyed the main messages of the articles.

“To hear [the authors’]perspective and actually work with them in person, that was the cool part,” said one of the Bronxdale high schoolers, Athalia McCormack.

The resulting 12 papers will be published as a multimedia open educational resource on the website for Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology.

“Our long-term goals include housing these 12 digital pieces on an interactive website that will be free to use,” said Fader. “We hope that this is going to be a resource for high school teachers to use in existing curricula and also for high school students to experiment with social science, especially linguistic anthropology, which is not part of most curricula in NYC public schools.” 

Fordham Students See the Impact

Sitara Vaidy, who graduated from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in May with a psychology and sociology major, was one of the Fordham students working on the project. She said the workshop “allowed the high school students to better understand the significance of fields such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, etc., and the interesting and important work that they produce.”

Theater and anthropology major Ashira Fischer-Wachspress, FCLC ’23, who also worked with the teams, said she appreciated the justice aspect of the work.

“I am very grateful for the opportunity to have met so many fascinating, driven people working for social justice,” she said. 

Expanding into Communities

The DLP is also planning to use the short articles in a summer institute for high school students, where they will study language and power in their own communities. The following summer they plan to host a teacher-training institute. 

“By demystifying students’ own experiences with language, the DLP strives to create a grounded, hands-on, potentially life-changing set of social justice tools for high school students and teachers and the faculty and undergraduates who collaborate with them,” Fader said.  

The DLP has been externally supported by a Spencer Conference Grant and a Wenner-Gren Workshop Grant. Internal support comes from an Arts and Sciences Dean’s Challenge Grant and Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, who hosted the pilot project in 2019, and will be collaborating on future programs. Fordham members of the organizing committee include Johanna Quinn, Ph.D. (sociology); Britta Ingebretson, Ph.D. (MLL); and Crystal Colombini, Ph.D. (the Writing Center), who were joined by Mike Mena, Ph.D. (Brooklyn College); Justin Coles, Ph.D. (UMass); Lynnette Arnold, Ph.D. (UMass); Bambi Schieffelin, Ph.D. (NYU), and high school teacher Scott Storm (Harvest Collegiate).