About

Project and Collaboration

Disinventing Old English is a large-scale collaborative project that brings together scholars of Old English language and literature,  historical linguistics, and second-language acquisition in order to reshape the way in which “Old English” is named, conceptualized, and taught in academic settings. A [series of multi-year workshops-newpage]  that take up questions of Old English pedagogy in its multiple forms has yielded four interlocking projects that each reimagine the contours of Old English study in academic and para-academic spaces – and possibly beyond.

What does it mean to “disinvent” a language?

As its title indicates, the emphasis of Disinventing Old English is on the process of “disinventing”: of shedding intellectual, philosophical, and affective modes of knowledge praxis that keep this language “old,” addled, anchored to–and an anchor for–a progress narrative of old-middle-modern English historical linguistics and the colonial, racial, and gender politics that continue to subtend this academic subfield. [footnote1]

Why “disinvent”?

This emphasis on disinventing allows us to reimagine the field as a non-insular learning community that extends beyond higher education and its institutions. Traditional Old English pedagogy—which revolves around noun and verb paradigm memorization; dense (sometimes unhelpfully so) grammatical explanations; constant and, at times, lengthy translation activities; and an aesthetics of cognitive rigor that values difficulty for difficulty’s sake—is based in outmoded nineteenth and early-twentieth century Latin and Greek models of language learning. This model reinforces a sense of cultural exceptionalism that tells students these “dead” languages are only for the elite, with little to no purpose beyond signaling elitism. We know, however, as scholars, teachers, and students of Old English and other languages that the language classroom is much more than that. Language classrooms, indeed Old English classrooms more than most, are places of aliveness, imagination, collaboration, learning and unlearning. [footnote 2] Disinventing Old English is a process through which we can harness the best of this world-building potential to foreground the many skills language learning produces alongside their impact outside the classroom.

What the project will produce:

Disinventing Old English responds to this need for a radically-restructured pedagogy by collaboratively confronting and rethinking outdated models of Old English education. Thus the end goal is to create new inclusive and anticolonial culturally-driven language-learning materials for twenty-first century students. 

We have two projects currently in progress:  

1. A series of Companion Essays that explore key issues in Old English pedagogy, language, and literature.
2. An open-access Old English Textbook and companion Workbook that emphasize digital storytelling and media as components of the learning process.

Footnotes

[footnote1]: Applied linguists Makoni and Pennycook argue that the discipline of linguistics, the creation of language-learning pedagogies, and the modern concept of “language” itself “are inventions” which occur simultaneously with the invention of the nineteenth–century nation and European colonialism.[2] Following Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs,[3] Makoni and Pennycook theorize that unmooring languages from the colonial imaginary requires “strategies of disinvention and reconstruction,” which include changes to the name given to a language; its grammars, dictionaries, and edited texts; and the ways in which scholars conceptualize linguistic and dialectal difference.[4]

[footnote 2] Here we draw inspiration from Indigenous language scholars who resist notions of “language death,” preferring instead to understand some languages as dormant or sleeping. See, Baldwin, D., et al. “Surviving the Sixth Extinction: American Indian Strategies for Life in the New World.” After Extinction, 2018, pp. 201–33; Davis, Jenny L. “Resisting Rhetorics of Language Endangerment: Reclamation through Indigenous Language Survivance.” Language Documentation and Description, vol. 14, 2017, pp. 37–58; Leonard, Wesley. “Challenging ‘Extinction’ through Modern Miami Language Practices.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 35, no. 2, Jan. 2011, pp. 135–60. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.35.2.f3r173r46m261844.