This essay examines a Brooklyn College-based research collective that placed African American languages and cultures at the center of the composition curriculum. Recovering such pedagogies challenges the perception of the CCCC's 1974 "Students' Right to Their Own Language" resolution as a progressive theory divorced from the everyday…

A teacher's developing awareness of his college students' dependence on jargon as the expression of their culture is portrayed with the aid of quotations from Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Parallels are drawn between Prufrock's attitudes and student language in the classroom. (AF)