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Fascinating quesiton Mai! Briefly reflecting on this in my teaching, I'd say that my (righteous) indignation/anger over discrimination rings hollow to my students...unless it is preceded by genuine interest in the structures of the language variety and respect for its speakers. One of the questions I ask myself is how much emotion to bring to the classroom. I wonder if students are more receptive to new and challenging ideas if they are simply and dispassionately noted as observations. Or do students think I don't really care if I take the dispassionate approach? Steve ________________________ Steve Hartman Keiser, Ph.D. English Department. Linguistics. Marquette University From: Variationist List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Kuha, Mai Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2016 3:23 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Is our starting point anger or compassion? Hello everyone, I hope your summer is unfolding wonderfully! At a meditation retreat I attended this past week, the observation came up that often people who work hard on helping others are ultimately motivated by anger, rather than compassion. I would like to understand how this applies to our lives as sociolinguists. Many of us want to address social injustice in our work, or at least situate our work with respect to it. Is our motivation more about indignation over the discrimination speakers of nonstandard varieties or minority languages experience, or is it more about positive feelings towards those communities of speakers? How, if at all, might our motivation shape our teaching and research? I'm not sure whether this topic is relevant enough to VAR-L or not, but we could take the discussion off-list, if anyone is interested in discussing. Mai -- Mai Kuha Department of English Ball State University ________________________________ The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics. To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.jiscmail.ac.uk_cgi-2Dbin_webadmin-3FSUBED1-3DVAR-2DL-26A-3D1&d=DQMFAw&c=S1d2Gs1Y1NQV8Lx35_Qi5FnTH2uYWyh_OhOS94IqYCo&r=gi2WuwuzEXcaOal7As4Js59KVKAqCiFtYN99UtvqzUU&m=7pio_WMISkCXbcb_NK_eQwb4HKDJJNNor3YDpme8XMM&s=jV_-eBt-gqiPXczuka61ajKHb9Jltu7tuQYr_KMNzYE&e=> ######################################################################## The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics. To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to: [log in to unmask] To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1