On Response: Raciolinguistic Justice and Responding to Student Writing
By Shane A. Wood and Emily K. Suh
Copy edited by Samantha Maloney. Designed by Mike Palmquist.
In On Response: Raciolinguistic Justice and Responding to Student Writing, Shane A. Wood and Emily K. Suh provide a theoretical and pedagogical framework for understanding response as a raciolinguistically just practice. Wood and Suh describe how raciolinguistics and response can bring together writing studies, literacy studies, and developmental literacy, and they explain how raciolinguistic justice extends antiracist writing assessment practices, critical language awareness, and culturally sustaining pedagogies.
Drawing on think-aloud interviews, Wood and Suh highlight instructor and student experiences with feedback at two Hispanic-Serving Institutions. The result is a justice-oriented framework that allows response to become a tool for critical self-reflexivity and listening, one that affirms students’ voices, the potential of co-constructed assessment, the values of multiple literacies, and the challenges posed by monolinguistic norms and deficit approaches to language. By inviting students to utilize their languages and dialects to disrupt systems of power, the authors acknowledge, affirm, and advocate for linguistic diversity; encourage self-reflection and collaboration; and invite conversations about the co-naturalization of race and language.
Shane A. Wood is Associate Professor and Director of First-Year Composition at the University of Central Florida, where he teaches first-year writing and a graduate course on teaching college composition. He oversees curriculum, program assessment, professional development, and justice-oriented initiatives in UCF’s writing program, which serves over 6,500 students annually. His teaching and research interests include writing assessment, writing program administration, multimodality, and composition theory and pedagogy. He is the author of Teachers Talking Writing: Perspectives on Places, Pedagogies, and Programs (NCTE/WAC Clearinghouse, 2023) and the host of Pedagogue, recipient of the 2021 Kairos John Lovas Award and 2019 Computers & Composition Michelle Kendrick Outstanding Digital Production Award.
Emily K. Suh is Associate Professor of Postsecondary Student Success and Integrated Reading and Writing Coordinator at Texas State University. She earned her PhD in Education Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Previously, she taught developmental English and literacy as well as adult English as a Second Language courses at the two-year college level. These experiences continue to shape her teaching, scholarship, and professional service. Her work seeks to create more just learning environments that empower students to leverage their linguistic and cultural knowledge to learn and communicate in an increasingly diverse world. Her work has appeared in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Journal of College Reading and Learning, and College English. She is also coauthor of STEM SMART Parenting: A Practical Guide for Nurturing Innovative Thinkers (Bloomsbury). Her work has been honored with the Emergent Scholar Award (International Society for Language Studies) and the American Association for Applied Linguistics Dissertation Award.
Publication Information:
Wood, Shane A., & Emily K. Suh. (2026). On Response: Raciolinguistic Justice and Responding to Student Writing. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2026.3002
Series Editors: Rich Rice, Texas Tech University, and J. Michael Rifenburg, University of North Georgia
This book is available in whole and in part in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). It will also be available in a low-cost print edition from our publishing partner, the University Press of Colorado .
