The linguistics program “Educating the Educated: A University-Wide Language Diversity Initiative,” holds events and workshops to expose issues of language-based inequality and create an inclusive campus environment for students. 

The program was awarded the grand gold medal for excellence from the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, which was the highest award of the category.

There are several different categories of awards, such as diversity programming and financial support awards listed on the NASPA awards page. Each of the gold winners is asked to present at NASPA’s annual conference.

“When people hear about the program, everyone resonates, right? Everyone speaks something, everyone, even though some folks don’t think they speak with a dialect, everyone does,” said Audrey Jaeger, one of the co-directors of Educating the Educated and professor of higher education and alumni distinguished graduate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership.

A lot of internal collaboration between departments in NC State happens in support of Educating the Educated, with partners at the Division of Academic and Student Affairs, the Center for Student Leadership, Ethics and Public Service, the Office for Institutional Equity and Diversity and connections in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, according to Stephany Dunstan, one of the co-directors of Educating the Educated and associate director of the Office of Assessment.

“The first time I spoke up in a faculty meeting, someone made fun of how I talked, or someone was jokingly talking about my accent, and then I stopped speaking up,” Jaeger said. “So we want to better understand that process not just as an undergraduate student but how that affects your general engagement and your sense of comfortability throughout the experience.”

Dunstan presented the idea of having a student ambassador program so that students on campus can have a peer-to-peer experience, and students may be more receptive to other students, according to Jaeger.

“It’s not just from linguistics, so we have student ambassadors from education and some student ambassadors from CHASS and other places — but they serve as a means to increase our breadth in terms of where we can go across campus and who we can connect to in terms of our depth, so they can relate to students’ concerns more so than we can,” Jaeger said. 

The student ambassadors for Educating the Educated have now become a student organization known as the Language Diversity Ambassadors at NC State. The ambassadors receive trainings for the language diversity workshops they facilitate and trainings to learn what kinds of questions the audience may ask, according to Jaeger. 

“Right now it’s mostly graduate and undergraduate students who have some kind of background in linguistics, either they’re minoring or majoring, but now that we’re a student organization, we really want to emphasize that we’re open to anyone who’s interested in learning more about issues of language and social justice,” Dunstan said. 

The program has also been reaching out on Alternative Spring Break trips to teach language diversity curriculum to high school and middle school students in social studies classes in North Carolina, according to Dunstan. 

“We also talk about issues of language and social justice, so language ideologies and how it can impact how we view other people and interact with others, so it’s a really fun trip to get to interact with high school students,” Dunstan said.  

A similar trip has been going on for about 20 years where Walt Wolfram, one of the co-directors of Educating the Educated and a distinguished professor of English, takes students out to Ocracoke to teach also teach about these topics. Students also had the opportunity to visit a Cherokee immersion school in North Carolina.

These Alternative Spring Break experiences help the ambassadors and members of the program learn more about the importance and value of language in its diverse forms.

“Everything is taught in Cherokee,” Dunstan said. “They learn from birth to sixth grade right now — the students there do math, science, history, everything in Cherokee. Cherokee is a dying language, and this is a really strong, important revitalization effort. So our students got to go and do observations in the school there to, one, learn more about what an immersion school environment looks like, and two, to see this really unique moment in time and this really incredible kind of grassroots movement that is really successful so far, and it kind of drives home the powerful connection between language and culture and identity.”

Dunstan and Jaeger are working on the second phase of the program that is based on Dunstan’s dissertation research focused on students and how they are feeling and their sense of belonging, according to Jaeger. Focus on faculty is now also increasing in the program.

Other colleges are adopting similar programs and are free to use materials from Educating the Educated.

“We would love to be in a place where there are discussions of diversity of language, and it is automatically built in, that it’s not a novelty or kind of a one-off, ‘Oh, isn’t that interesting to think about,’” Dunstan said. “That it’s really woven into all of the discussions about diversity because it reflects and is so inexplicably tied into other parts of who we are and how we relate with each other.”

Even though some folks don’t think they speak with a dialect, everyone does.”