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A couple of years ago, I worked in the writing center with a student on a paper about her identity development. She received high marks for content but lost points for writing. As I read her paper, two things struck me: first, she had grown up in Boston, but her parents were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At home, she spoke Lingala, which she hid from her friends after she was mocked. Second, many of her sentences were indecipherable. She wrote, for example, "I didn't have an indistinguishable surface hair from different females in my class and they wouldn't converse with me or simply give me disposition since I didn't seem as though them."

After a decade of working in writing centers, I knew to ask, "Did you use the thesaurus to write this?" And she told me that, in an effort to sound academic, she had used the thesaurus for every single sentence in this essay about her own identity development. Teachers had told her not to write like she speaks but to translate her Black vernacular English (BVE) into standard academic English (SAE). I suspect that most of us would feel a flash of rage if we heard the insults slung at her for speaking Lingala, but many of us would also mark her down for writing in BVE. Why?

I spent decades operating with this cognitive dissonance. As a white, middle-class English professor, I've corrected a lot of sentences and made a lot of assumptions about people's intelligence based on how they speak and write. As a Ph.D. candidate in English, I began to recognize the pain linguistic racism inflicts thanks to Gloria Anzaldúa, Amy Tan and James Baldwin, but somehow their work never caused me to question my approach to student papers.

But now, on my predominantly white campus, I regularly hear stories of linguistic prejudice perpetrated primarily against students, staff and faculty of color. It's not just speakers of BVE; multilingual students have told me that if they are talking with a peer in their native language, they switch to English as soon as they enter an academic building. When one student explained to her professor that her sentences tended to be long because she is a native Spanish speaker, the professor responded, "You are not in Puerto Rico anymore." Two Spanish-speaking students told me that their high school guidance counselors told them that they wouldn't be able to succeed in college. (They have.) Many of these students have come to my writing center demoralized by papers covered with ink, marked with low grades and scrawled with directives to "go to the writing center."

But we must teach students to write standard academic English, and we must mark them down if they do not meet those expectations -- otherwise, they will not succeed in the real world, right? That is the traditional argument in favor of requiring all students to write in standard academic English in the classroom. Renowned literary scholar and public intellectual Stanley Fish defends this stance, explaining that it's wonderful that people speak multiple languages and dialects, but the classroom is the place to learn to communicate in SAE.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, transdisciplinary scholar Vershawn Ashanti Young rejects standard language ideology as racist, arguing that we should invite students to weave multiple dialects. He calls this "code-meshing." Responding to the argument that learning standard academic English will protect students of color from prejudice, Young writes, "But dont nobody's language, dialect, or style make them 'vulnerable to prejudice.' It's ATTITUDES. It be the way folks with some power perceive other people's language. Like the way some view, say, Black English when used in school or at work. Black English dont make it own-self oppressed." According to Young, if we value Black vernacular English and other dialects, we can shift racist attitudes rather than reinforce them.

A middle stance involves teaching students to communicate in standard academic English without degrading their dialect or home language by providing students with opportunities to use their dialects and languages in an academic setting and by exposing the power structures at work.

Ten years ago, I would have taken Fish's approach and worked with the Congolese American student to revise her paper to meet the expectations of standard academic English. I would have identified "patterns of error," focusing on grammatical issues that impeded meaning. I did not know then that the majority of linguists agree that all dialects are created equally, so I would have authoritatively taught her the "correct" subject-verb agreement without acknowledging that Black vernacular English has its own, equally legitimate grammar rules.

Instead, I took a Young-inspired approach with this student. First, I talked with her about the devaluing of her languages, both Lingala and BVE. Second, I emailed the professor and asked if the student could rewrite the paper in BVE. I attached Young's "Should Writers Use They Own English," where he advances a sophisticated academic argument, all while code-meshing. The professor agreed that it would be appropriate if the student wrote in BVE "given the nature of this particular assignment on identity." This professor took a step toward combating linguistic prejudice, but what else can we as faculty members do?

1. Ask students about their language backgrounds. Many professors ask students to share information about themselves at the beginning of the semester by way of a survey. It is also worth asking students: "What languages or dialects did you grow up speaking at home? What languages and dialects did you learn in school? Have you ever been mocked or degraded for how you speak or write? Would you like feedback on your grammar?" Ask all students rather than singling students out.

2. Assess students on what you are actually teaching them. Many professors feel as if they are not doing their jobs if they don't mark students down for not writing in standard academic English, or they fear that they are misleading students and not preparing them for "the real world." But when we assess for standard academic English, we are putting multilingual and multidialectal students at a distinct disadvantage. Asao B. Inoue argues that we should grade so that "every student, no matter where they come from or how they speak or write, can have access to the entire range of final course grades possible." So don't penalize students for not writing in SAE and consider implementing grading contracts that value labor, effort and process rather than quality, standardization and product.

3. Provide students opportunities to write in their own voice. For example, in the writing center, we invite students to freewrite in their native language. In my courses, I ask students to write for public audiences. Public discourse provides more opportunity for diverse dialects and code-meshing, and students can present rich academic research and advance sophisticated arguments to broad audiences.

4. Don't view students who are learning English or who speak/write in Black vernacular English as a problem that needs fixing. Students are often made to feel as if their linguistic and dialectical diversity is a liability in an academic space, but speaking multiple languages is a strength, and BVE is not inferior to standard academic English. Many institutions send mixed messages: we want to be more diverse, yet we grumble that students "can't write" when they don't conform to academe's expectations. We promote diversity, yet the way we assess students values homogeny.

5. Work harder to understand students who are multilingual/multidialectal both in writing and orally. Ask questions in the margins when you don't understand a students' writing and avoid feedback such as "awk" or "unclear." When it comes to oral participation, don't rush students, don't correct them and don't finish their sentences unless they ask for help. Create group guidelines for discussion in class so that everyone listens generously.

6. Ask yourself what is making the writing unclear to you. Be aware that patterns of academic discourse in the United States are not the norm. Once when I told a Russian student that I couldn't find her argument in the introduction, she told me that explicitly stating one's argument would insult the reader. Relatedly, students come to the classroom with two opposing responses when I assign Young's "Should Writers Use They Own English?": "That was so fun to read" or "That was so hard to read." When they say it was hard, I ask, "For whom? Why?" Young's essay is a harder read for students who grew up in predominantly white communities. I ask those students to consider what it would be like for them to be expected to read and write in Black vernacular English only.

7. Add a syllabus statement that values linguistic diversity. For example: "Diverse languages and dialects are welcome in this classroom. As we communicate with one another, keep in mind that the reader/listener should work as hard as the writer/speaker in the communication process. This means that we will listen patiently, work to understand one another, seek out clarification when necessary and avoid finishing each other's sentences or correcting grammatical errors unless invited to do so."

8. Design discipline-appropriate approaches to combating linguistic prejudice. A Spanish professor I work with adjusted his curriculum when he recognized that he was valuing Spain's dialect above Puerto Rico's. A communications professor encourages her students to write blog posts in their native dialects. A music professor integrates songs with diverse dialects and invites students in the class and outside experts to discuss those dialects.

9. Learn about linguistic bias and its impact. Check out Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster and John Trimbur's "Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach"; April Baker-Bell's Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy; and John R. Rickford and Sharese King's "Language and Linguistics on Trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel (and Other Vernacular Speakers) in the Courtroom and Beyond." If we purposefully immerse ourselves in these theories and approaches, our pedagogy will inevitably evolve.

10. Raise awareness about linguistic prejudice on your campus. An urban planning student in my class read Young's article and responded this way: "As an aspiring urban planner, both my classes and personal interests have brought me to many public meetings where I listen to predominantly white planners discuss their plans for predominantly black or Hispanic communities. Before [this] class, I would've dismissed many of the communities' concerns because they didn't sound intellectual." By reading Young once, this student learned to separate dialects from intelligence.

It is not enough to create room for dialectical diversity in the classroom; we must also combat linguistic prejudice by revealing it. You can do a range of things, including showing short videos, such as these TED Talks by Jamila Lyiscott and Karen Leung. You can assign " Respect AAVE" by Nicole Cardoza. You can organize a screening of Talking Black in America or invite a multilingual/multidialectal panel of students, faculty and staff to share their experiences.

The 1974 College on Composition and Communication statement on Students' Right to Their Own Language acknowledged that "rejecting one's native dialect is to some extent a rejection of one's culture." It is time that we take concrete steps to create a learning environment that values diverse languages and dialects. In taking those steps, we teach our students to listen more actively and communicate in a world where people speak and write in so many different Englishes. And we begin to dismantle the white supremacy that our academic institutions too often perpetuate.

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How professors can and should combat linguistic prejudice in their classes (opinion)

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It's time for us as faculty members to recognize and combat our prejudices when it comes to how our students speak and write, argues Catherine Savini.

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From the canon to hiring practices to the classroom, we would be speaking about an entirely different field of English language teaching (ELT) if Whiteness were no longer centered, and although we are years of hard work away from this possibility, any calls for radical change are well served by pointing toward a possible future, and as such it is valuable to entertain the idea. As a rare Black voice in the field, I (Gerald) have spent much of this year speaking on the goal of decentering Whiteness in ELT, basing my presentations on an article I had published last spring (Gerald, 2020). Though it was conceptualized months earlier, its release just after the beginning of the ongoing racial justice uprising was such that it sparked a necessary and long overdue conversation in our field. As we are now approaching the one-year anniversary of George Floyd's murder, it is fitting that I offer a continuation to an article that gained prominence in the language education space because of a long-overdue reckoning with racial injustice in the field spurred by last spring and summer's uprising.

The article discusses how, much like in broader educational structures, Whiteness is centered in the teaching of the English language, and the ELT field serves as an arm of racist and capitalist oppression while claiming it as a force for positive change, with detrimental implications for students and educators of color. It suggests that language teaching-of all settler colonial languages, but of English in particular-needs to come to terms with the impact of its centering of Whiteness while taking substantive steps away from the status quo. This includes bringing an examination of racism and Whiteness into language teacher training programs, rejecting the White-centric canon, and, especially, encouraging all White language teachers to examine their own Whiteness and how it affects their teaching.

As discussions have developed across the field throughout the summer and fall, many have asked what ELT might actually look like if the article's argument were to succeed, i.e., what would ELT look like after Whiteness had been decentered? I did not, however, want to merely share my own opinion of how this future might look, and I consulted with two trusted colleagues-Scott Stillar and Dr. Vijay A. Ramjattan-with whom I had spoken on the topic at length. My own focus is specifically on Whiteness in language teaching, whereas Stillar researches the intersections of language ideologies and Whiteness within post-secondary language-learning spaces, and Ramjattan pursues research concerning the aesthetic dimensions of race and Whiteness in (language-teaching) labor. The following is our collaboration in envisioning a post-Whiteness ELT, which we hope to live to see. We have broken our re-conceptualization into three articles on three related topics, which are as follows:
Classrooms
Training and labor
The industry

This article represents the first of a three-part series, with subsequent work to be published later this year.

A brief terminology note: Whiteness and White supremacy are used somewhat interchangeably in this essay, because the concept of Whiteness "is a colonially constituted construct, and thus implicitly indexes White supremacy" (Hesse, 2016, p. 2).

Re-Envisioning Classrooms

As a point of entry, we can begin by re-envisioning the classroom and our ways of teaching the language. In doing so, it is crucial that we first dismiss linguistic prescriptivism (i.e., the idea that grammar and language should be corrected and regulated) in lieu of a more robust perspective that privileges the cataloguing and acceptance of language sans power-dominant judgements of the linguistic forms from which language acts derive (i.e., descriptivism). By this point, many of us in the language field would agree that prescriptivism is harmful and tied very distinctly to Whiteness and capitalism in education, a remnant of what some have called linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992). Suggestions are often made that we should focus merely on descriptivism, as it is less harmful, but this fight is now decades old. We think that we need to go a step further and actually propose what can be described as counterprescriptivism.

In a post-Whiteness version of ELT, racialized students should be empowered and encouraged to challenge their White teachers if and when they are told the way they are using the language is incorrect. Meaning-making is ultimately a negotiation of power, and if a student can convey the meaning they seek, they should be able to assert their intent in the face of possible correction. This would be a deeply post-structural way to approach language teaching, but part of dismantling Whiteness is dissolving artificial and coercive hierarchies, and sharing corrective power between both teachers and students is one valuable way to ensure Whiteness remains decentered. In the following sections, we provide select snapshots of what counterprescriptivism might look like.

Unstandardizing English

The language we use to refer to ourselves and our industry also has an impact on our racialized constituents. We do not, in fact, teach "Standard" English, but standardized English, an imagined form of English that has been constructed as the normative means of communication in order to further the ends of imposing White supremacy as the standard norm (Bonfiglio, 2002). A simple change would be to stop framing standardized English as the only desirable form of the language, and one way to cause this shift is to be direct about what we're teaching. If we began to call ourselves "standardized English teachers," we would then have the choice to consciously teach not just the language but also the features of its standardization and the decisions behind why certain types of languaging are valued more highly than others. We could also choose not to teach standardized English and instead teach the varieties surrounding a school's location, comparing the equally valuable differences. For example, a school near where Gerald lives in New York could teach the New York versions of African-American English and Dominican English.

This would not inherently destroy standardized English but would relegate it to a decentered role within the larger ecosystem of the field while elevating other forms of the language. With these changes made, our vision of the post-Whiteness ELT classroom moves closer to a possible realization of empowerment, rather than the current submission to power-normative ways of being. In such a space, imposition of monolingual principles that enforce strict adherence to White-normative language forms are confronted and rejected in favor of students being encouraged to use the entirety of their translingual and cultural resources to aid in the learning process. In doing so, ideologies that tether Whiteness to a standardized form of the English language are recognized as nothing more than attempts to standardize Whiteness itself, and students are well served by being aware of these forms but not by being forced to measure themselves against their own oppressors.

Rethinking Intelligibility

If teachers do in fact decide to teach different varieties of English, this would then allow for relaxed expectations regarding how students should use the language. Taking the example of pronunciation, it is important to appreciate the bodily labor that students must perform to adhere to the sonic dimensions of Whiteness. While racialized students may have to train their lips, tongues, teeth, etc., to articulate unfamiliar phonemes found in standardized Englishes of the global north, they may also need to train their ears to distinguish these Englishes from "improper-sounding" ones found in their own communities and elsewhere (Sekimoto and Brown, 2016). However, if students learn the varieties of English of where they live, they will come to know that "deficient-sounding" features of pronunciation are actually common and thus do not need to be changed in order to ensure successful oral communication. Moreover, to avoid the temptation to emulate hegemonic types of speech accents, students need to focus on critical listening. By focusing on developing their listening, students would appreciate that certain racialized accents are not inherently unintelligible, but rather are made unintelligible by ears conditioned by ideologies of White supremacy.

Depending on one's vantage point, classrooms could be classified as either the most or least impactful part of the type of systemic change our field needs-most in the sense that, no matter what happens in the broader industry, if our pedagogy remains the same, most students will hardly notice a difference; least in the sense that a pedagogy that decenters Whiteness is necessarily disempowered in a field that continues to perpetuate the same hierarchies, which is precisely what any language teacher pushing against current restraints might be feeling today. We do hope that more members of our field choose to join those who are working against the structures that have long remained in place, but in order to support anyone who makes that important choice, we need to substantively shift the power within the broader industry itself. Accordingly, in the next part of our series, set to debut later this summer, we will tackle training and labor and the ways in which an ELT field fully divested from Whiteness would better serve its workers. Stay tuned...

References

Bonfiglio, T. P. (2002). Race and the Rise of Standard American. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gerald, J. P. B. (2020). "Worth the Risk: Towards decentring whiteness in English language teaching." BC TEAL Journal, 5(1), 44-54. https://doi.org/10.14288/bctj.v5i1.345
Hesse, B. (2016). "Counter-Racial Formation Theory." In Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation, P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods (eds.), vii-x. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford.
Sekimoto, S., and Brown, C. (2016). "A Phenomenology of the Racialized Tongue: Embodiment, language, and the bodies that speak." Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 5(2), 101-122. doi: 10.1525/dcqr.2016.5.2.101

J. P. B. Gerald is an education doctoral student at CUNY-Hunter College whose scholarship focuses on language teaching, racism, and Whiteness. You can find his public scholarship at jpbgerald.com and his excessive Twitter opinions @JPBGerald.

Scott Stillar is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation research investigates the ideological intersections of standardized American English and whiteness within English language education spaces.

Vijay A. Ramjattan received his PhD in Adult Education & Community Development from the University of Toronto. His research interests pertain to the intersections of language, race, and work(place learning). He often talks about these interests on Twitter: @Vijay_Ramjattan

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From the canon to hiring practices to the classroom, we would be speaking about an entirely different field of English language teaching (ELT) if Whiteness were no longer centered, and although we are years of hard work away from this possibility, any calls for radical change are well served by pointing toward a possible future, [...]

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The work of CUNY-IIE is firmly grounded in a set of principles, all of which reflect several overlapping themes that inform our thinking and our work. One of our primary goals is to learn about and understand the experience of migration, from the point of view of immigrants themselves. We seek also to be cognizant of the history of this country, which was founded with lofty ideals but in reality was built on the twin pillars of slavery and the dispossession of Native peoples. Confronting some of these ideas may feel uncomfortable at times, but we believe that discomfort is often a necessary part of learning for all of us. Lastly, as part of our goals to act and advocate, these principles address stances that educators can take as we all strive to center our shared humanity and build toward equitable policies and educational opportunities for all.

Black Immigrant Lives Matter. CUNY-IIE stands in solidarity with all those fighting for equality and justice in the Black Lives Matter movement. It is therefore important to approach this work with that sense of solidarity in mind. Although black immigrants make up the smallest percentage of immigrants in the United States, they are more likely to be targeted for deportation. By centering the lives and experiences of those who are most vulnerable, we can advocate for equality for everyone.

No one is illegal on stolen land. We believe that no person should be defined in terms of their immigration status, and we are opposed to the dehumanization of anyone through the use of the term 'illegal'. This notion is further complicated by the history of colonization in the United States. New York State resides on lands stolen from Native people : Lenape, Haudenosaunee, Mohican, Abenaki, Erie, Canarsie, Rockaway, Algonquin, Merrick, Massepequas, Matinecock, Nissaquogues, Setaukets, Corchaug, Secatogue, Unkechaug, Shinnecock, Montaukett, and Mannansett.

We are not all immigrants. The fabric of the US includes not only immigrants, but also the Native Americans whose land was stolen in the creation of this country, as well as the descendants of enslaved people who were brought to this land against their will. We refrain from statements like "we are all immigrants" and "this nation was built by immigrants," because this further invisibilizes the Native people and lived realities of slavery and the Black experience in the United States.

The immigrant experience exists beyond the Latinx narrative. The rhetoric on immigrant rights in the United States often centers Latinx communities, and specifically the Mexican experience. In fact, the immigrant experience in the US encompasses many countries, races, and ethnicities. As we seek to advocate for equitable opportunities for all immigrants in the New York context, it is vitally important to recognize and make space for immigrants outside the Latinx diaspora.

Immigrants and students labeled as "English Language Learners" are not interchangeable. Approximately half of all multilingual learners in New York are US-born, many of whom grow up in multilingual homes and require additional support to learn English via bilingual education or English as a New Language (ENL) programs. In addition, many immigrants arrive from English-speaking countries and/or are already bilingual. Ideally, all students - and especially those who speak a home language other than English - will be given the opportunity to become bilingual and biliterate in school. It is important that we not conflate the two distinct (though overlapping) categories of students who are immigrant-origin with students who are categorized as English Language Learners.

The immigration experience is complicated. Reasons for migrating to the US vary among individuals and families, but leaving one's home, family, language and culture is often traumatic. And even though some immigrants come to the US for economic opportunity, financial issues may continue to be a challenge for new immigrants. Nevertheless, mainstream rhetoric upholds the narrative that immigrants are happier to be in the US than in their home country. This perception is reinforced by messages extolling assimilation and patriotism. However, in addition to other challenges, immigrants are often treated like second-class citizens or denied citizenship altogether; immigrants also experience violent laws and policing practices that often make the US a hostile space for immigrants.

Migration can be traumatic. Our work recognizes that the experience of migration through militarized borders can be difficult and painful. While there is a vibrant Migration is Beautiful movement often symbolized with the imagery of a butterfly, we must recognize that students' and community members' experiences with migration may have been traumatic. We wish to understand and recognize these experiences by incorporating mental health resources and socioemotional support in our work.

Xenophobia is systemic. Anti-immigrant discourse has blamed immigrants for a broken economy, failing schools, and for overwhelmed medical resources. Research has continually shown that immigrants don't have a negative impact on any of these services. In fact, immigrants often provide a positive impact, both socially and economically. Immigrants are vilified because xenophobia, much like racism, is a systemic issue in the US. As a result, immigrant students often have less economic mobility, attend under- resourced schools, and are provided with fewer social services.

Teaching through translanguaging is central. We believe the home language practices of immigrant-origin students, which include different languages and varieties, are a strength that must be a part of their education. Translanguaging pedagogy, which deliberately integrates flexible language practices into education, allows for students' voices and learning opportunities across programs, content areas and levels. All instruction should draw on students' many linguistic resources, regardless of whether they have been labeled as English Language Learners.

We aim to move beyond allyship to working as accomplices. Our work seeks to provide opportunities for educators to engage as allies, and to move from ally work to accomplice work. An ally engages in activism by standing with an individual or group in a marginalized community; an accomplice focuses on dismantling the structures that oppress that individual or group-and such work will be directed by the stakeholders in the marginalized group. As we continue to educate ourselves and others, our work seeks to develop allyship while also addressing and changing structures that impact immigrant students and communities.

Authored by Cynthia Nayeli Carvajal, Ph.D.

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The work of CUNY-IIE is firmly grounded in a set of principles, all of which reflect several overlapping themes that inform our thinking and our work. One of our primary goals is to learn about and understand the experience of migration, from the point of view of immigrants themselves.

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Last summer, Triangle Investigations, a New York-based HR consultancy, examined allegations of accent discrimination at a global non-profit organisation. An Ethiopian-accented staff member had reported that his colleagues frequently interrupted him during Zoom calls, commented on the unintelligibility of his English and excluded him from meetings. He became self-conscious during the meetings that he was able to attend, and ended up using the chat feature instead of speaking up, says Kia Roberts, Triangle's founder and principal.

When Roberts and her team looked into the matter, they found that the allegations had substance, and that employees of colour had been treated differently; they were being spoken to disrespectfully, as if they weren't competent to hold their positions, and their opinions and suggestions weren't being taken seriously. The investigation ultimately led the non-profit to introduce employee training and periodic HR check-ins to try and remedy the issue.

Of course, this case of linguistic discrimination wasn't an isolated episode. Globally, more people are using English than ever, and it's a dominant language in business, science and government. English is constantly evolving, because of the diverse ways different nations and groups use it. Yet instead of embracing this linguistic diversity, we still rank particular types of English higher than others - which means that both native and non-native speakers who differ from what's considered 'standard' can find themselves judged, marginalised and even penalised for the way their English sounds.

Not every type of linguistic discrimination is intentional; many people who think they're being inclusive don't understand that their inherent biases are pushing them to make judgements they don't even know they're making. Yet no matter what's driving these kinds of incidents, workers feel lasting, often demoralising, effects. And, as these kinds of situations continue - especially when companies don't recognise or stop them - things can get worse for workers, as they're side-lined or flat-out excluded in the workplace.

As the globe becomes even more connected in a remote-work world, the ability for workers to be able to speak to each other effectively and respectfully is imperative. So, how do we end linguistic discrimination - and create a more inclusive, functional use of language to benefit native and non-native speakers alike?

Speakers from some multilingual countries are thought to use less 'legitimate' forms of English than others (Credit: Getty Images)

Covert or overt
Globally, non-native speakers of English outnumber native speakers three to one, although defining the term 'native English speaker' is complicated. The term usually refers to anyone who speaks English from early childhood, as their first language. But many children grow up learning multiple languages simultaneously - for instance, if their parents are from different places, or if a nation has several official languages.

A particular status is attached to English that sounds as if it comes from countries that are wealthy, majority white and mostly monolingual. According to this limited view, multilingual countries like Nigeria and Singapore have less 'legitimate' and desirable forms of English (even though English is an official language in both). Globally, the most respected types of English are varieties such as British, American and Australian, says Sender Dovchin, a sociolinguist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

Within any country, certain forms of English bring fewer benefits. To give just one example from the US, African-American English remains misunderstood and discriminated against. And on an international level, certain types of speakers face judgements based on perceptions of their nationality or race, rather than their actual communication skills. "When English is spoken by some Europeans, including for example French-, German-, Italian-accented English, they can be considered really cute, sophisticated, stylish and so forth," explains Dovchin. But, she adds, English spoken by Asians, Africans or Middle Easterners may be viewed as challenging and unpleasant.

This linguistic stereotyping applies even when those Asians, Africans or Middle Easterners are in fact native speakers of English. Just seeing an Asian face makes some Americans consider that speaker's English to be hard to understand, regardless of how they actually speak or where they were born. I was born in the US, hold a UK passport and have an English degree, but like many other people of Asian descent, I've had the surreal experience of people complimenting my English fluency.

These perceptions feed into linguistic racism, or racism based on accent, dialect and speech patterns. The overt form of linguistic racism can involve deliberate belittling or shaming, such as "ethnic-accent bullying" that occurs despite someone's actual English proficiency. Or it can be more covert, like the unwitting social exclusion of people with foreign-accented English, or a seemingly well-intended compliment toward an Asian American's English.

These examples show that it may not be obvious to the perpetrators what they're doing, because there are a number of subtle psychological mechanisms at play. Cognitively, it takes more work to understand a less familiar accent. The extra brainpower involved, as well as warmer feelings toward members of one's own group, can lead to negative attitudes toward a person speaking a different type of English. Overall, it's common to assume that non-native speakers are less truthful, less intelligent and less competent; psychology studies suggest that people attach less credibility to statements spoken in a foreign accent.

These subtle mechanisms feed into behaviours that can impact negatively on people speaking different forms of English. I've been guilty of this in practice. I've found myself gravitating to colleagues I can easily banter with (so that I don't have to explain or replace Americanisms like 'inside baseball' or British terms like 'take the piss'). I've edited away Indian English expressions in reports, like 'upgradation', without wondering why I treat 'upgrading' as the better term. And in bouts of impatience during work conversations, I've spoken over or finished the sentences of colleagues who are more hesitant.

Not every type of linguistic racism is intentional, but judgements are pervasive due to our inherent biases (Credit: Getty Images)

This type of bias can take a significant psychological toll. Dovchin's research shows that many people who are shamed or excluded because of their language develop inferiority complexes, and start to believe that they're actually less intelligent. Lots of multilingual people report being fairly confident in their English-language skills in their home countries, then losing their confidence due to the way they're treated in English-first countries.

At worst, linguistic racism can lead to deprivation in education, employment, health and housing. In the workplace, people with certain accents can be openly harassed (like a Puerto Rican call centre worker who was told by a customer, "your stupid accent makes me sick"), or excluded from specific opportunities (like a Pakistani transport worker in London whose manager kept him out of conference calls).

The discrimination might also mean that certain people don't even get through the door. For instance, Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, which directs seed funding to start-ups, has openly admitted that the programme is biased against applicants with strong foreign accents. In an interview with business publication Inc., he speculated that "it could be that anyone with half a brain would realise you're going to be more successful if you speak idiomatic English, so they must just be clueless if they haven't gotten rid of their strong accent". An outcry followed these comments, but Graham was unrepentant, writing "you can't make it be work to understand you". This is a classic expression of native-speaker privilege: the minority of global English speakers demanding that the majority change.
How to chip away at linguistic racism
Linguistic racism needs to be tackled head on, both at a corporate and individual level. "If we wait for it to happen organically, it will never happen," believes Dovchin.

First, organisations need to be strategic about having ongoing conversations about linguistic diversity as a type of diversity, educating staff about how language-related biases affect communications and opportunities and incorporating this into policies.

But, on an individual level, speakers of English as a first language can make their English more accessible. They can slow down, and avoid inside jokes and idioms, for instance. They can talk less in meetings to give more space to non-native speakers, while also allowing non-native speakers to chair meetings and set the tone for communications. They can also pay attention to body language and improve their listening skills - for instance, by seeking out popular culture featuring varied groups of people, and thus varied ways of communicating. With greater exposure, the brain becomes better at understanding differently accented speech. Overall, everyone can become more aware of language-related biases.

Suresh Canagarajah, a linguist at Pennsylvania State University, US, says that given how transnational work has become, we all need to get better at communicating with people speaking all kinds of English. "You can't afford to say 'I don't understand Chinglish or I don't understand Indian English', because you're going to lose out on that market." This certainly applies to hiring decisions; highly qualified candidates may be overlooked if they trigger a hiring manager's biases about less prestigious types of English. There, says Canagarajah, "You're focusing on the wrong thing, and maybe losing on a lot of expertise."

Yet even if companies and individuals do what they can to level the playing field, another option is to change our ideas about what constitutes 'good' English. In many workplace settings, it would make more sense to focus on effective communication rather than flowery prose or slangy chat. In functional settings, someone who is adept at understanding varied types of English is actually a better communicator than a person who can only understand their own form, whether it's considered native or not.

I've been reflecting a lot on the extent to which my career depends on my privilege as a so-called native English speaker. To teach English in Romania, I wasn't required to have any teaching qualifications; simply being American was enough. To be hired to write and edit publications, my primary asset has been my familiarity with the kind of English that carries global cachet.

The very least that I, and others like me, can do with this privilege is to become aware of its effects and reduce the ways that we contribute to it. Individual acts of thoughtfulness can't dismantle the structures of power that keep North American and Western European English dominant. But they can help cultivate an appreciation of English in all its diversity.

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The pervasive problem of 'linguistic racism'

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Not everyone who speaks English is treated the same way. What happens when accent discrimination creeps in to our conscious and unconscious - and what do we do about our biases?

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When we encourage students to follow Chicago-style or APA-style writing, aren't we asking them to adhere to a standardized practice?

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The body keeps track of trauma. When I started a tenure track position and learned that I would be responsible for teaching the course English Language: Grammar and Usage in the English Education Department, my body began to ache in the way it did when I was 17. In the way it did during my first few weeks in a required course called African Diaspora in the World at Spelman College. My body remembered how it felt when my Spelman sister referred to my voice as "ghetto" (see Video 1). Hearing the title of the course I would be teaching reminded me viscerally of the pivotal moment when I understood my grammar, language, and accent marked me as a cultural outsider. In the Video 1, I explain how I was nearly silent for three years, unwilling to talk in class unless I absolutely had to, out of a fear of being seen as less than others based on my grammar and language.

Video 1 First Experience With Grammar

My body still remembers the energy it took to keep my hand down when one of my professors, Dr. Michelle Hite, asked if anyone had any questions. Dr. Hite was later key in my process of finding my voice, as she validated my presence at Spelman College. She identified the beauty in my "mother tongue" (Tan,1990) and described the linguistic violence (Baker-Bell, 2020) I experienced.

Unfortunately, Dr. Hite's affirmation only went so far. When I began full-time student teaching in a high school English Language Arts department, my Black cooperating teacher insisted I had to make sure my "subjects and verbs" agreed when I spoke to students. All the confidence I gained with Dr. Hite slipped away. To have anti-Black linguistic violence enacted upon me by a Black woman tasked with mentoring me was deeply traumatic. I was traumatized into code switching to ensure that my language and grammar matched my mentor's expectations. Even worse, I turned around and enacted anti-Black linguistic violence in my classroom as an English Language Arts high school teacher.

I demanded my students use white Mainstream English (wME; Baker-Bell, 2020) when speaking or writing for class. I consistently corrected them when they used Black English, when their subjects and verbs did not agree, and when they used their mother tongue (Tan, 1990).

What I did not realize at the time was that I was enacting anti-Black violence and trauma upon my students. Now, as I continue to unpack my own personal experiences as a Black woman and educator through the archeology of self (Sealey-Ruiz, 2018), I am better equipped to articulate the impact of anti-Blackness, internalized anti-Blackness, and anti-Blackness in English education programs. This experience has led me to the work of exploring the impact of centering Blackness in English Education programs. I saw this work as my moral responsibility, given the harm I enacted upon my Black students as a high school English language arts (ELA) teacher. I want to make sure that the pattern of anti-Black violence that began long before I arrived at Spelman College is not carried forward by the students I teach in English Education programs.

To be as purposeful and strategic as possible, I designed a study focused on using technology as a pedagogical tool in a language and grammar course to center Blackness in an English Education teacher preparation program. I used two questions to shape my thinking and research:

1. What does centering Blackness in an English Education language and grammar course look like in theory (Black theorists and ways of knowing) and practice (pedagogical tools, specifically, technology)?

2. In what ways does centering Blackness in an English Education language and grammar course increase students' criticality of anti-Blackness in English Education and K-12 classrooms?

Background on Word Choice and Context in This Study

Blackness

When using the word Blackness, I am thinking of Johnson (2019) who defined Blackness as an embodied experience that is connected to Black people's culture, race, ethnicity, language, literacy, relation, and humanity. Dumas and ross (2016) described Blackness as an act of self and collective care and position it as a source of resistance.

Johnson (2019) said that that Blackness is not monolithic but multifaceted - dynamic and fluid, intertwined with joy, struggle, hope, love, pain, and light. It is a source of genius (Muhammad, 2020). Blackness is symbolic of the fight for liberation from oppression, racism, xenophobia, linguistic violence, economic justice, white supremacy, and patriarchy (Johnson, 2019). During this time of two pandemics (racism and COVID-19), Black people continue to shout "Black Lives Matter" because of white society's disdain and mistreatment of Blackness and Black humanity.

Criticality

When I consider students' criticality, I am referencing a step toward social change and transformation that is linked to the ideals of liberation, security, and protection as articulated by Muhammad (2020). Building on her earlier work, Muhammad offered criticality as a way to increase students' ability to read, write, and think in ways of understanding, power, privilege, social justice, and oppression of populations who have been historically marginalized.

Most importantly, by developing students' criticality educators can better humanize practices inside and outside of the classroom. My study demonstrates that Black liberation is action orientated, requiring educators to shift beyond merely talking about the changes that must be made to demonstrate that Black Lives Matter.

Framework for Being, Teaching and Learning

I created the Framework of Being, Learning, and Teaching (FBLT; Figure 1) as an organizing structure for my pedagogy during my first year as a professor of professional practice in 2017. I have used this framework in all of the courses I have taught, including the most recent, English Language: Grammar and Usage,in 2020.

Figure 1 Framework for Being, Learning, and Teaching

My preservice teachers eagerly asked me about best strategies or for tools to fill their toolbox for teaching Black students. Each time a student asked I got the sense they thought Black children needed fixing, and I had the magic wand as a Black professor. The FBLT allowed me to move the focus away from me and Black children to the preservice teachers themselves.

This shift was necessary because, in my experience, they overlooked the necessary step of unpacking themselves before thinking about teaching. Multiple ways of thinking about how to approach the classroom have been identified, including culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012). I noticed that many educators revered these pedagogical practices as magic bullets, without clearly understanding their role in implementing them.

At the same time, many educators positioned these practices as a reflection of students' deficits, rather than seeing the assets that exist in Black and Brown communities (Bertrand & Porcher, 2020). The FBLT framework allows current and future educators to engage in a continuous process; the work begins with self and continues through reflection. It is meant to prompt daily conscious choices about the ways educators show up in the world while exploring the beauty, genius (Muhammad, 2020), and complexities of their students and their communities. It encourages thoughtful implementation of best practices for teaching and learning with and for students by supporting reflection on the impact of the efforts.

FBLT has four elements building on the existing work of Black scholars and my own experiences as a teacher educator: archeology of self (Sealey-Ruiz, 2018), exploration of assets and conditions (Love, 2019) of students and their communities, centering Blackness in culturally sustaining pedagogical practices (Paris, 2012), and critical reflection (Emdin, 2016).

The Archeology of Self

I first learned about Sealey-Ruiz's (2018) archeology of self during my first year as a professor of professional practice. She defines the archeology of self as a deep excavation and exploration of beliefs, biases, and ideas that shape how people engage in the work (Sealey-Ruiz, 2020). It is rooted in racial literacy, in which those who use the process can engage in necessary reflection about their racial beliefs and practices (Sealey-Ruiz, 2020). More specifically, Sealey-Ruiz (2013) defines racial literacy as "a skill and practice in which individuals are able to probe the existence of racism and examine the effects of race and institutionalized systems on their experiences and representations in US society" (p. 386). Racial literacy requires self-reflection, along with moral, political, and cultural decisions about how teachers can be catalysts for societal changes (Sealey-Ruiz, 2011). Sealey-Ruiz (2020) explored how racial literacy can be sustained through the archeology of self.

While I was already implementing opportunities for students to explore their identities in the courses I taught, the archeology of self concept gave me more precise language and led to my creation of FBLT. The self-work in this framework, also known as "being," has to be the foundation of learning and teaching. If left unpacked and unexplored, it has the power to negatively impact the lives of students (Sealey-Ruiz, 2018).

The archeological dig is imperative because the preservice teachers cannot understand the communities of others until they know who they are (Howard, 1999). What happens in most English Education programs is a focus on pedagogical strategies, with limited reflection from preservice teachers about how they will be interacting with those strategies. Furthermore, surface level conversations are held about the importance of developing relationships with students that they teach, but no concrete information is discussed about how to do it.

Exploration of Assets and Conditions of Students and Communities

Once students have begun the journey of unpacking self, they are introduced to the importance of exploring the assets and conditions of their future students and communities. This aspect of the framework is referred to as learning. Focusing on the assets of students and communities of color is imperative, because many white cisgender monolingual students have negative perceptions of students and communities of color (Bertrand & Porcher, 2020).

Although we discuss students and communities of color, I specifically focus on Black students and their communities. Wynter-Hoyte and Smith (2020) argued that anti-Blackness violence in schooling impacts white students, because they receive messages of Black inferiority, omission, and inaccurate historical representations and develop negative attitudes about Blackness. Through purposefully curated assignments, students explore the beauty and genius (Muhammad, 2020) of students and communities of color. Students also explore the conditions that are systematic in society and schools that contribute to the conditions of communities of color. With understanding that students enter classrooms with funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1991), not in need of saving, but cultivating the genius (Muhammad, 2020) of who they are, they are then ready for exploring cultural pedagogical strategies that center Blackness.

Centering Blackness in Cultural Pedagogical Strategies

After students have explored the assets and conditions of people of color and their communities, then students engage in pedagogical practices that center Blackness in culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and culturally sustaining pedagogical practices (Paris, 2012). This element of the framework is known as teaching. With this framework, the students now have a lens of their own experiences and the experiences of people of color to guide their practices of centering Blackness in pedagogical practices. I model culturally relevant and sustaining strategies in my own teaching and have students reflect on ways that they can use these strategies in their future classrooms.

Critical Reflection

The final component of the FBLT is ongoing, critical reflection. This critical reflection requires me and the students to reflect upon what is going well in the course and what can be improved. Students are expected to continue this reflection in their personal lives. During class, I stress the importance of expanding beyond the classroom to personal accountability in not enacting anti-Blackness in their personal lives. This work occurs through course reflections and cogenerative dialogues (Emdin, 2016).

Course Setting

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of talk of reimagining K-12 and teacher education as a system that centers Blackness, especially since the inception of schooling in America is not built for Black children (Warren & Coles, 2020). As a Black scholar-practitioner, I was hopeful for the future of education and teacher education. However, when I received the course syllabi for the English Language: Grammar and Usage course, it included practices that made me less hopeful and the syllabi enforced anti-Blackness. To shift from talking about it to being about it, I used pedagogical technology tools to unpack, interrogate and reimagine the content of the course.

I surveyed students before the course began, and the students boasted about their wME grammar and language skills. They expressed that they wanted to get even better by focusing on learning rules of wME and grammar to increase their professional writing and speaking skills. They also wanted to learn best strategies for correcting and teaching their future students.

Based on their responses, it was evident that students were not aware of diverse grammars, nor were they aware of the assets of diverse grammars, as evidenced by their desire to learn to correct students. Furthermore, it was evident that until students unpacked and understood their own identity, they would have difficulty seeing and interrogating the violence of enforcing wME (Baker-Bell, 2020) in K-12 and English Education programs.

Nonetheless, I knew the work had to begin. Black children's freedom in schools could not wait. In the redesigned course, students would be expected to unpack and interrogate their experiences with grammar and language, explore the assets and conditions of diverse grammars and languages, and reimagine grammar and language instruction in K-12 ELA classrooms and English Education programs.

Participants

All participant data were collected from the preservice teachers enrolled in a required course in the English Education and Elementary Teacher Education licensure program. Data were collected during the fall 2020 semester. All preservice teachers enrolled in the course were required to complete the assignments described in the data collection. When they completed the assignments, they were given multiple opportunities to engage in metacognition about their responses, offer reflections on the assignments, and make adjustments to demonstrate their new learning. Participation in this study was completely voluntary and not evaluative. The class included 31 students, and 21 students were teacher education students. Twenty-nine of the students identified as white and two identified as Asian.

Methodology

This study used Self-Study in Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP), a type of practitioner inquiry undertaken by teacher educators with the dual purpose of improving their practice while also acknowledging their role in teaching and learning in the larger project of preparing high-quality teachers to teach with the goal of equity for all students (Sharkey, 2018). Self-study is a methodology for exploring professional practice (Appleget et al., 2020).

I used the five elements of self-study outlined by La Boskey (2004) to shape my study: self-initiated and focused, improvement aimed, interactive, qualitatively collected data sources, and validity based on trustworthiness of results. I selected this approach because it is an inquiry approach well-suited to exploring the challenges of effectively teaching teachers about equity, diversity, and social justice (Kitchen, 2020).

In addition, S-STEP has made a meaningful contribution to the scholarship of teacher education pedagogies and practices (Loughran, 2014; Sharkey, 2018; Zeichner, 2007). The structure allowed me to act as a participant, teacher educator, and researcher (Appleget et al., 2020). By taking on multiple identities, I hoped to grow and reflect on the design, implementation of pedagogical technology tools, and engagement of preservice teachers in the English Language: Grammar and Usage course. In doing the work of self-study, I learned about myself, my strengths, my challenges of enacting linguistic justice in a language and grammar usage course and worked alongside my students to determine solutions to improve English Education and K-12 ELA teaching of grammar and language that does not enact anti-Black linguistic violence (Hernandez-Saca et al., 2020).

Data Collection and Data Sources

I collected a large pool of qualitative data over the course of the semester. Sources included reflective memos about the course, student course assignments, student comments, student engagement, and reflections (see Table 1). I built a routine for ongoing and recursive data analysis throughout the semester, focused on inductively generated codes (Saldaña, 2015; Strauss & Corbin, 1998).

Table 1 Data Sources and Number of Data Sources

Reflective Memos: A memo was written after each week of classes. The class met twice a week.

12

Student Course Assignments: Analyzed course assignments of teacher education students only.

1. Twitter Chats

2. Analysis Essays

3. PhotoVoice Project

3. Cycle of Socialization

4. Exploring the Assets of Diverse Languages

5. Linguistic Demands

Twitter Chats (189 tweets)

Analysis Essays (21)

PhotoVoice Projects (21)

Cycle of Socialization (21)

Exploring Assets of Diverse Languages (5 groups of students)

Linguistic Demands (5 groups of students)

Student Comments & Engagement: Notes taken from our 12 course meetings.

24

Reflections: Students provide reflective feedback during each class period. Students also provided two google forms with reflective feedback.

Weekly Feedback: 12

Mid-semester Feedback: 24

End of Year Feedback: 16

Data Coding

The assignments listed in Table 2 were included in the data analysis. Data analysis included three rounds of coding. The first round of coding focused on the specific technology elements of the course that allowed me as the instructor to center Blackness. In this round of coding, I searched specifically for technology programs and pedagogical tools that I utilized throughout the course, such as Padlet, Twitter, Jamboard, Podcast, TikTok, Screencast, and Photovoice.

Table 2 Course Assignments and Details

Twitter Chat

Three times throughout the semester, students are expected to engage in the #TeacherEduMatters chat on the assigned dates. The purpose of the chat is to discuss the course content, learning and reflections with classmates and other educators around the world.

Analysis Paper

In five pages, double spaced, respond to the prompt: Reimagine an English Language Arts classroom grammar course, specifically the instruction of grammar and its usage, that does enact linguistic violence and anti-Blackness. Ensure to use at least five of the readings from the course to support your response.

PhotoVoice Project

The purpose of this project is to engage students in reflective practice using photovoice (a visual method) to analyze diverse (racially and culturally) English language, grammar, usage and instruction. The project will include three distinct components: 1) exploration of self and identity; known as the archaeology of self (Sealey-Ruiz, 2018) in relation to grammar, 2) exploration of the lived experiences (Rose, 2018), assets (Love, 2019) and grammar of diverse students and communities; and 3) the ways that diverse grammar should be taught and used in classrooms and society. Students will utilize and capture photos of themselves, communities, and students to explore and reflect about diverse English language, grammar, usage and instruction. Students will display their photos and reflections on Padlet throughout the semester. Then students will summarize their photos and reflections in a five-minute documentary.

Classwork/Homework Assignments

1. Cycle of Socialization.
2. Exploring the Assets of Diverse Languages.
3. Linguistic Demands.

The second round of coding aimed to narrow in on students' responses in the course to the specific elements that centered Blackness in theories and pedagogical practices. The third round focused on students' criticality in their responses to the specific elements of the course that centered Blackness in theories and pedagogical practices. During this round of coding, I focused specifically on words that students used, such as social change, change, transformation, freedom, and liberation. After the three rounds of coding, the data were grouped based on the research questions.

Findings

My primary goal when teaching the course was to center Blackness, and decenter wME. The purpose of my study was to document the impact of my pedagogical decisions and tools.

Research Question 1: Centering Blackness in Theory and Practice

For the first research question, I focused on capturing the impact of centering Blackness in theory and practice. I found that centering Blackness in theory and practice involved course text selection, use of Black language, and technological strategies.

Centering Blackness in the Course Text Selection

When I was assigned the course to teach, the trauma that I felt due to my own personal experiences with grammar and language in English Education intensified when I read through the syllabus prepared by the other professors in the program. The document made it clear the course had centered learning about and applying wME. Readings and activities included different perspectives on a variety of languages but the syllabus indicated no clear expectation for students to learn about the rules and elements of those languages.

Meanwhile, no consideration was given to diverse languages and students' future teaching practice. Most importantly, the syllabi indicated that students would learn the history of grammar and language through the eyes of whiteness (European colonizers' account), also described as "the white gaze" (Morrison, 1994; Wynter-Hote & Smith, 2020).

Readings for the course focused on students learning the rules of wME, and nonwhite authors were added as supplements and on the margins. On the surface, and to the previous professors, it likely seemed inclusive; however, it implied that Black authors' work cannot stand alone as knowledge unless it is coupled with white authors' work. Teacher educators must understand that choosing Eurocentric texts that omit the lived realities of Black people or misrepresent the multiple ways of being Black, leads to anti-Blackness and the devaluation of Black life. It is a form of anti-Blackness and racial violence (Johnson, 2018). It is not an issue in only this course, as it is present in most courses that attempt to focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (Bertrand & Porcher, 2020).

My first move was to center the course around a single text, Dr. April Baker-Bell's (2020) Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity and Pedagogy. By doing so, I would shift the history of learning grammar and language from the white gaze to the Black gaze (Morrison, 1994; Porcher & Bertrand, 2020). Johnson et al. (2017) argued that using texts from Black radical tradition opposes Eurocentric dominant schooling practices, which are generally organized around the words and thoughts of white people.

Furthermore, Black radical tradition is often at odds with European thought and has to reimagine a collective sense of community to combat European state violence (Johnson et al., 2017). Centering Blackness in the course text selection was only the beginning. I also centered Blackness in my own language.

Professor as the Pedagogy: Centering Blackness in My Language

Baker-Bell (2020) opens her book with the following:

If y'all actually believe that using "standard English" will dismantle white supremacy, then you not paying attention! If we, as teachers, truly believe that code-switching will dismantle white supremacy, we have a problem. If we honestly believe that code-switching will save Black people's lives, then we really ain't paying attention to what's happening in the world. Eric Garner was choked to death by a police officer while saying "I cannot breathe." Wouldn't you consider "I cannot breathe" "standard English" syntax? (p. ix)

This single paragraph captured gaps in my own personal experiences. From her, I learned about the history and elements of Black English. I learned Black English from my family and community, but I never knew it had a formalized structure or was considered a form of English and not just a dialect or vernacular until reading Baker-Bell (2020). Not a single professor in my English Education teacher education program exposed me to or taught me the history, rules, and elements of Black English. I was never given the formal academic support to think about the personal cost of code-switching, which meant my white classmates did not get support to think about the impact on their students.

The more I grapple with my emotions and trauma about my own experiences in English Education and with grammar, the clearer it becomes that code-switching causes trauma for Black people, especially in formal education settings. Black educators and children are encouraged to turn off aspects of who they are, that are deemed unprofessional, "ghetto," or inappropriate. I internalized a belief that my language and grammar was inferior, and as such, I had to become someone else to be accepted.

I made the decision to provide explicit examples of what this looks like in the English language, so my students could be more thoughtful about their own word choice. As an example, the Western world has intentionally made everything black symbolize all that is evil and bad (e.g., black sheep, blacklist, Black Death, and black devil). Most symbols and words that are associated with white symbolize purity and cleanliness (e.g., white as snow, little white lie, and that's very white of you). For this reason, the language used to describe Black bodies derives from disdain, disrespect, and devaluation of Black people (Johnson et al., 2017).

However, this issue is not only about words. As Dr. Baker-Bell (2020) indicated, this idea of speaking wME does not save Black adults and children from anti-Black violence. In an effort to heal from the trauma, I decided to teach using my mother's tongue (Tan, 1990) to decentralize wME and dismantle anti-Blackness in the English Language: Grammar and Usage course.

When creating TikTok and screencasts on wME concepts for my students, I was purposeful with my own language patterns. For example, I taught the students the difference between phrases and clauses (see Video 2). I used the word "y'all" throughout the video, as it is a common word that is used in Black English. Furthermore, I used elements of Black English that go beyond word choice through my inflections and cadence and movements in my body and hands. Smitherman and Smitherman-Donaldson (1986), described this as "talkin' & testifyin.'" Not only do Black people verbally talk and testify, but we also communicate with and through our bodies (Johnson 2019). I intentionally made the choice not to code switch in front of my students and to show them the beauty of Black English.

Video 2 Phrases and Clauses TikTok

I not only utilized my mother tongue when introducing the students to concepts, but in preparing them for the wME exams, using Jamboard and screencasts (see Video 3) that are mandated by the English Education program.

Video 3 Direct Objects Screencast

Another example of how wME is centered in grammar and language English Education courses is that the department mandates that students take exams focused on wME, but the students are not required to learn about other forms of grammar and language. Professors are left to deem them important or integrate them as a supplement to what is apparently superior knowledge. Furthermore, this practice continues to erase other languages and grammars. The students found that the TikTok and screencast were helpful in their understanding of wME; however, they did not comment on my Black English language use until I structured an assignment that required them to.

I designed an activity that required students to analyze the language and grammar heard on an episode of podcast "Black Gaze" (see Video 4), which another Black woman (Dr. Shamaine Bertrand) and I host. The structure of the activity allowed me to observe without intervening, and I heard students describe our language as "unprofessional." They wondered if we would speak the same if we were in the presence of white people or in a professional setting.

Video 4 Black Gaze Podcast Snippet

I was prepared to hear such things but hearing their opinions about my language, and the language of Black people, left me feeling hypervisible and added to the spirit murdering (Love, 2019) and abuse Black faculty experience in white dominated spaces (Fujiwara & Roshanravan, 2018). This activity was the most challenging to facilitate, as it added to the trauma of people dehumanizing Black people, our language, and more specifically, my friend's and my voices, hearts, and experiences. Their perspectives of the language use in the podcast serves as an example of the symbolic violence that transpires in classrooms where students and educators hold dehumanizing assumptions about the history, culture, and language of Black people (Johnson et al., 2017).

This experience demonstrated that Black language is disruptive to, or unwelcome in, academic spaces. People who speak Black English are constantly attacked as they are linguistically profiled, as my students profiled us for speaking the language of comfort, home, family, heritage, and friendship (Weldon, 2000). Despite decades of research that documents Black English as historic, literary, and rule governed (Alim & Smitherman, 2012; Baker-Bell, 2020), English Education courses participate in linguicide, or the killing of a language (Boutte, 2016), in programs. They do not require teacher education students to learn about Black Language, nor teach it to their students. Instead, it is viewed as slang, incorrect, or broken English, and Black people's intelligence is questioned when they speak it (Wynter-Hote & Smith, 2020).

Through my purposeful use of Black language, I was able to demonstrate that we all understand one another, and there is no need to police language and create unnecessary barriers in the teaching of language and grammar. Although I can repeat this message in my instruction, students must come to their own understanding of how grammar and language should be taught in K-12 classrooms. I was able to help them expand their own understanding through the strategic use of apps and websites.

Technology as a Pedagogical Tool

Many of the students entered the course eager to learn the rules of wME grammar through workbook assignments and writing essays, which reflects what Jones and Okun (2001) described as the "worship of the written word," an element of white supremacy. I intentionally utilized technology such as a PhotoVoice project and minidocumentary that pushed students to interrogate their understanding of wME and diverse languages rather than relying on the written word.

I used Jamboard to represent visually their perspectives and Twitter as a form of communication, collaboration, and discussion that allowed students to communicate in their mother tongue as opposed to a formalized discussion board. Researchers and educational practitioners have agreed that technology can be harnessed as a pedagogical tool both to assist and expand student learning capabilities and develop multiple literacies (Buckley-Marudas & Martin, 2020; Leu et al., 2009; Smith, 2017; Vu et al., 2019).

PhotoVoice and Minidocumentary. The students interrogated their wME grammar experiences, perceptions of people of color grammars and usage, and reimagined how grammar should be taught and applied in K-12 ELA classrooms and English Education programs. Although we discussed people of color grammars and usage, we specifically zoned in on Black English. The students reflected using PhotoVoice (Bazemore-Bertrand & Handsfield, 2019; Wang & Burris, 1997; Zenkov et al., 2014) and created a minidocumentary to demonstrate how their perceptions changed about wME grammar throughout the course.

PhotoVoice is a visual method used to assist adult educators in connecting their prior school experiences to their current attitudes and behaviors toward teaching (Bazemore-Bertrand & Handsfield, 2019). It is the use of photography, reflection, and discussion as tools for social change. Within the PhotoVoice assignment, students captured photographs and engaged in written, audio, and visual reflection using the Padlet, based on the questions posed (Figure 2). PhotoVoice is an example of multimodal learning, as it utilizes video, audio, sound elements as unique modes of communication and ways to interpret physical and virtual worlds, the relationships between people, and how they experience certain spaces (Buckley-Marudas & Martin, 2020).

Figure 2 PhotoVoice Reflection Questions in Padlet

The reflection questions examined the ethical, social, mental, physical, and political consequences of enacting linguistic violence in English Education programs and K-12 ELA classrooms. This critical reflection brought commonly held beliefs about grammar and language into question (Sydnor et al., 2020). The PhotoVoice assignment created tension and cognitive dissonance for the students related to their unwillingness at the beginning of the course to confront the conflict between their purported beliefs about grammar and language. The students demonstrated their reflections and how their perspectives of grammar and language changed throughout the course, by creating a minidocumentary to present to the class. This assignment was also an opportunity to dismantle white supremacy within the course, as opposed to the students merely writing a paper about it.

JamBoard. The PhotoVoice project required students to reflect on grammar and language. They were given scaffolded assignments throughout the course that provided more opportunities to dig deeper about their own personal experiences, their perceptions, and what reimagining grammar and language instruction in K-12 ELA classrooms and the English Education program would look like. Due to the virtual environment, students worked collaboratively through these topics using Jamboard, a Google app. Users can sketch their ideas using images, notes, sticky notes, pens, and text. Four course assignments provided the opportunity for the students to dig deeper into these topics using Jamboard: Cycle of Socialization, Perceptions of People of Color, Reimagining Grammar and Language Instruction, and Linguistic Demands (Baker-Bell & Kynard, 2020).

Cycle of Socialization: Archeology of Self. The cycle of socialization assignment pushed students to explore the ways in which they have been socialized to center wME. In the PhotoVoice reflection the students barely scratched the surface about their personal experiences with grammar and language but were able to go deeper on the JamBoard task (Figure 3). This assignment is an example of Sealey-Ruiz's (2018) archeological dig, in which students had to begin the course with the work of unpacking their own identity and experiences with grammar and language as, without it, they would not be able to identify how they have enacted or perpetuated anti-Blackness linguistic violence within their own lives.

Figure 3 Student Sample of Cycle of Socialization

Perceptions of Diverse Grammars and Languages.Once students were able to begin the journey of interrogating their own identities and experiences with grammar, language, anti-Blackness and linguistic violence, they were ready to explore the assets of diverse grammars and languages and the conditions created in ELA and English Education classrooms and society at large that enact linguistic violence. Students dug deeper into this element of the course in a collaborative assignment using Jamboard.

Students were asked to listen to the excerpt from the Black Gaze podcast, and write down what they noticed and wondered about the language of the cohosts. The students characterized the language and grammar as informal and racialized (Figure 4). In this context I was able to convey to students that their perceptions of Black English reflected a deficit perspective (Figure 5).

Figure 4 Student Analysis of Black Gaze Podcast Cohosts' Language and Grammar

Figure 5 Deficit Perspectives of Black Gaze Cohost's Language and Grammar

Reimagining Grammar and Language Instruction. Once students started the journey of interrogating their own experiences with grammar, language and anti-Blackness and exploring diverse grammars and languages, they started to reimagine grammar and language instruction in English Education programs and K-12 ELA classrooms. Students used Jamboard to visualize linguistic justice in English classrooms. One assignment simply asked them to reimagine what linguistic justice would look like in action (Figure 6).

Figure 6 Student Sample: Reimagining Grammar and Language in English Education Programs and K-12 Classrooms

Students were expected to begin this reimagination based on the texts we read throughout the course. Once they tapped into their own imagination, they were exposed to the linguistic demands (Baker-Bell & Kynard, 2020; Figure 7). The purpose of these assignments was to move from just talking about linguistic justice to envisioning what it would look like in action, informed by voices of Black people talking and writing about the demands for linguistic justice.
Figure 7 Baker-Bell and Kynard (2020) Linguistic Justice Demands Student Analysis

Twitter Chats

Many educators in the 21st century use various forms of technology and social media as part of their daily teaching practices and as part of their personal lives (Adjapong et al., 2018). However, many teacher education programs have struggled to incorporate it as a teaching practice or learning tool. Some are holding on to learning management systems designed for the ease of the instructor rather than the benefit of student learning.

For the past 3 years, I have facilitated Twitter chats using the hashtag #TeacherEduMatters, because of the opportunities for enhanced relationships within classes. Twitter chats provide a virtual space for engagement and reflection (Krutka et al., 2014), the opportunity to summarize key points (Kruta & Damico, 2020), and support and collaborative learning (Voorn & Kommers, 2013). Twitter chats also provide the opportunity for mentoring (Curran & Chatel, 2013), developing teacher identities (Carpenter et al., 2017), and even challenging preservice teachers to interrogate their positionalities (Cook & Bissonnette, 2016).

More specifically, in our Twitter chats, the students were given the opportunity to collaborate with preservice teachers and faculty members at Illinois State University and Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. Utilizing Twitter as a discussion tool expanded students' interrogation of language, grammar, and anti-Blackness beyond the students in the course.

Students were expected to create Twitter accounts for the course to engage in the Twitter chats. They were positive about the potential of professional Twitter use but sometimes struggled with the mechanics and knowledge required for Twitter chat participation (as also noted by Hsieh, 2017). Twitter was a challenge because, although students were familiar with the technology being used, the use as a pedagogical tool is characteristically different from personal use. Using technology resourcefully throughout the teaching processes allows preservice teachers to use their personal technologies for a continuous transition into the classroom (Buckley-Marudas & Martin, 2020). Centering Blackness through the text selection, in my language, and through pedagogical tools impacted students' criticality of anti-Blackness in English Education and K-12 schools.

Research Question 2: Students' Criticality of Anti-Blackness in English Education & K-12 Classrooms

In answer to Research Question 2, I found that students' criticality was increased by the four following key themes:

Disruption

I had accepted that my students would be uncomfortable by my purposeful efforts to disrupt the norm of whiteness in education. In teacher education programs, whiteness is reflected in the lack of faculty of color, lack of students of color, curricula, teaching and assessment practices, teacher-student interactions, decision-making, and more, like the consistent privileging of the interests, values, accomplishments, histories, and more of whites (Harris et al., 2020). While the texts I used served to center Blackness in the written word, my presence as their professor, a Black woman, disrupted their mental models of home, school, and college as all white spaces.

Many of the students indicated in assignments, discussions, and reflections that they had never had a Black teacher or professor and that what I was asking them to do was different than anything they had experienced before. Using Jamboard, students completed a cycle of socialization for their experiences with grammar, language, and anti-Blackness. I explicitly asked them to identify if all of their teachers were white like them and spoke like them. Their responses indicated that simply by being their professor and redesigning the syllabus, I had disrupted the overwhelming whiteness of their formal educational experiences (see Figure 8).

Figure 8 Course Jamboard Assignment: Cycle of Socialization

To maintain the disruption, I made a purposeful decision to center their PhotoVoice assignment on Blackness and asked them to address the following question: "What do you know about the home grammar(s) and language of Black and Brown people/students? Where do you see the language and grammar(s) of Black and Brown people used?" Not a single student mentioned a personal relationship with a Black or Brown person. None of them were able to pull on the experience of being inside a Black or Brown family's home. They all drew from the media or stereotypes for their answer.

As a follow-up question I asked, "Do you have any personal experiences with Black and Brown people?" (see Figure 9) The answer was again, a resounding, "No." Cognitively, I recognized that non-Black students with limited personal experiences with Black people will develop negative perceptions of Black people. Emotionally, it was a reminder of my own trauma, to recognize their negative perceptions (Porcher, 2020). In some cases, it was clear that by interacting with me, they were having sustained direct and personal interactions with a Black woman for the first time in their lives.

Figure 9 PhotoVoice Reflection

In addition to organizing the course around one particular text, I used the FBLT framework to organize the flow of activities. I carefully curated a PhotoVoice reflection to ensure students would engage in their own archeology of the self. The centering of Blackness in the language and grammar course was a deliberate disruption to their norm of the dominance of whiteness. It was clear the students were not aware of anti-Blackness and the way it shows up in language and grammar. A Black professor centering a text written by a Black author disrupted the dominance of whiteness and raised students' awareness of anti-Blackness in language and grammar and instruction.

My students were too young to remember the debate about Ebonics in the 1980s and 1990s. Due to the dominance of whiteness in their schools and communities, most were unaware of anti-Blackness in language and grammar instruction. The students stated in classroom and Twitter discussions that they spoke wME because that is what their parents told them was correct and the standard.

By designing the course to define and highlight anti-Blackness in wME as well as the richness of Black English, their mental models changed (see Figure 10). A student observed in a course paper, "If a Black student that speaks Black Language with family and friends every day can be unaware of their internalized Anti-Black Linguistic Racism, then one can only imagine how clueless white students are about racism and linguistic violence in the classroom, let alone society at large." The course raised their awareness, specifically the integration of technology as a pedagogical tool, of wME as a form of linguistic violence and anti-Blackness.

Figure 10 Student Twitter Response

Interrogation

Students experienced cognitive dissonance as they realized the mandate of wME in classrooms and society was a form of anti-Blackness and linguistic violence. They struggled to reckon with the fact that their parents, teachers, and English Education program had taught them to enact harm upon others. Throughout their PhotoVoice assignments, I consistently questioned their use of language to describe diverse language as informal, ghetto, broken, or slang (see Figure 11).

Figure 11 Questioning to Push Students to Interrogate Knowledge

The questioning forced them to think deeper about the labels they used to describe diverse grammars and language, which elevated wME as the standard. Students shared these sentiments in their analysis essays. For example, "It wasn't until taking this course and being asked 'what is "academic language,'" or 'what does "professional" mean' that I realized I didn't know as much as I liked to think I did."

The students learned these negative perceptions of Black language and grammar in church, extracurricular activities, play, and school via experiences and curriculum that overwhelmingly featured white characters, white-dominated events, and white centric texts (as found by Miller, 2005). Through the assignments students were consistently asked to interrogate the role of white dominance in shaping the only life that they have known. The questioning also increased their criticality. It was not enough for the students only to discuss and analyze language, grammar, and anti-Blackness in English Education programs and K-12 ELA classrooms, but to move toward linguistic justice. They understood the work did not stop at the interrogation and were propelled to action.

The course was designed for students to reimagine the ways in which grammar and language could be taught in the English Education program and K-12 schools that does not enact linguistic violence. Simply put, as future teachers, how would they enact linguistic justice in their personal lives and as future educators? This theme and step are imperative, as with 400+ years of enslavement of Black people, it is time to shift from required texts, task forces, and committees to consciousness, activism, actions and policies that will dismantle anti-Blackness (Johnson, 2018).

In the assignments, discussions, and activities, the students identified actions that they could take to address anti-Blackness and linguistic violence. This aspect of the course was most impactful and joyous for me, as the students could shift from only talking about anti-Black linguistic violence to understanding their power in dismantling these systems in ELA K-12 classrooms and English Education programs. Some examples students discussed in their analysis essays are stated in the appendix. Students utilized the texts from the course and pedagogical technology tools to propel into action as future teachers.

Discussion and Implications

Centering Blackness in an English Education course is possible. It needs to be stated plainly that this centering is hard work for everyone involved, especially the professor, especially if the professor is a Black woman, as it requires pulling teacher education away from Eurocentric frameworks and centering Blackness. Moving from talking about reimagining English Education to action is personal for me. The trauma I felt, as described in the opening, is one of many, but sadly not uncommon.

To structure the course so that it ameliorated and prevented future harms to children, I had to be thoughtful about each move and decision. English Education programs must consider the racial fatigue and spirit-murdering (Love, 2019) from teaching language and grammar courses where Blackness is typically invisible (e.g., in content, curriculum, and pedagogy) yet hypervisible (e.g., in wME), as well as begin to consider instructional practices that actively stand against the physical and symbolic violence perpetrated against Black bodies (Johnson 2018). I was expected to teach and not see myself or my culture reflected in what the previous professors considered knowledge, not to mention my hypervisibility as the only Black person in our virtual classroom focused on teaching wME.

In the discussion for reimagining education, it has been acknowledged that children are being miseducated. It is up to teacher educators to facilitate teaching and learning experiences that provide the opportunity for preservice teachers to unlearn and undo the dominant narratives that include distorted beliefs about Blackness and false beliefs about the purity of whiteness (Johnson, 2019), before they enter the classroom and enact further violence and harm.

With this in mind, the following are some implications for teacher educators to utilize technology as a pedagogical tool to enact linguistic justice within English Education by centering Blackness. Thus, while I attend in many ways to the Eurocentric parameters of American Psychological Association requirements for professional papers, in the following section I use words and concepts from Black culture, including Black English (Wynter-Hote & Smith, 2020), to frame how teacher educators can center Blackness.

Pull up. Many of the students discussed that I was the only faculty member that exposed them to anti-Blackness, or told them the truth about grammar and language. Black people cannot be the only people doing this work. Active participation in this work must be a goal for all English Education teacher educators.

Tell the truth, shame the devil. Teacher educators must explicitly teach the truth about the history of ELA content and the current relationship between literacy, language, race, and education by expanding the concept of literacies (Johnson, 2019).

Decolonize your syllabus. Adding Black folx to the syllabus is not enough. Get us off the margins and center our text, art, media texts, theorists, and pedagogical practices. Don't treat us as passive subjects but help students apply the knowledge found in our texts.

It's the tech for me. The students' creativity and criticality increased when I not only centered Blackness, but I provided opportunities for students to express themselves using different modalities. Worshipping the written word is an element of white supremacy. Continue to stay abreast of technology that is used in K-12 classrooms, and use it in your course. How do teacher educator prepare preservice teachers for future classrooms but do not mirror the K-12 classrooms? Make it make sense!

Centering Blackness in English Education programs requires soul work (Johnson, 2017). Soul work requires me to dig deep and do introspective work about who I am as a Black faculty member, how I show up in white dominated spaces, and even how I share my thoughts and research in articles like this. Furthermore, it reminds me of my moral responsibility to demonstrate that Black Lives Matter, not just say it. I bring my whole self (ves) to this space because I know what happens when teacher educators do not do this work. We enact harm upon our preservice teachers. Then our preservice teachers enter the classroom and perpetuate anti-Black violence. They police Black children for just being Black children.

All around the world, people are marching and advocating for the humanity of Black lives. For many Black Americans, this is a day of reckoning, but we also understand, based on history, that marching is just the beginning. We need and must have actual policy changes that accompany our words. Doing our part in English Education to center the lives, experiences, cultures, and work of Black people in our programs as the foundation will demonstrate that Black Lives Matter, in action.

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Appendix
Student Reimagination of Language and Grammar Instruction

Student 1

In order to create a truly inclusive classroom that does not enact linguistic violence, educators cannot stop at decentering whiteness. They must actively incorporate diverse grammars and authors, as well as texts in different languages, into the curriculum. When students see themselves and their language(s) represented in their schoolwork, it makes them feel confident, capable, and encourages them to dream bigger.

Student 2

However, the onus is not entirely on educators. As a student in the modern world, I have been given the unique opportunity to learn, grow, and cultivate knowledge from anyone, anywhere, at any time. I have the choice to remain in my comfort zone and ignore uncomfortable topics, or I can choose to be educated on something bigger than myself and use that knowledge to help those that do not have the privilege of choice. It is not enough to sit back and blame society in the name of "setting kids up for success."

Student 3

First, it is necessary to explore "grammar" as a concept. This process will begin with the students' reflections of what grammar is to them. They will clearly outline their beliefs about English, grammar, and usage. Throughout this process, I will challenge their beliefs by continuing to ask for further explanations. Students will also be encouraged to challenge their peers using the same process. The most important question during this process will be "why?" With this, I hope that students begin to recognize the ideas about language that they have been socialized to believe and the systems in the US that affect and are affected by language beliefs.

Student 4

As such, the next unit of my reimagined ELA classroom will focus on the development of various grammars, beginning with White mainstream English. Through this process, students will learn that the development of standardized grammar was largely rooted in classism and White supremacy. Furthermore, they will discover that most of the language rules they were socialized to believe are arbitrary. To continue, students will learn about the development of diverse grammars as well. This will not only hold other grammars to the same regard as mainstream grammar in order to center the culture of all students, but it will also provide information that is crucial for understanding the importance of other grammars and developing anti-racist learners. For example, students will learn that Black English is a "rule-based language" that slaves, after being separated from those that shared their mother tongue, were able to develop with pieces of their native languages in order to communicate with each other (The Guide for White Women).

Student 5

First, the class as a whole must agree to give anyone and everyone the right to speak freely. Students should not feel stress due to the use of their mother tongue, attempts at utilizing White mainstream grammar, or translanguaging. By allowing students that speak minoritized English grammars to implement their native tongue, they are able to focus on the meaning behind their words in order to promote greater expression and in-depth discussion, while also fostering positive cultural identities by legitimizing the language that is associated with their home cultures (Christensen)

Student 6

To start, classrooms, whether K-12 or at the University level, must understand and teach the histories of diverse grammars, such as Black Language. Many people, including speakers of Black Language, are unaware of its origin and significance.

Student 7

Teachers should try to explore as many diverse languages as possible; this can be done through a unit where students are encouraged to explore different languages and/or dialects, such as Chicano English, Spanglish, Chinglish, Appalachian English, Cajun English, etc, and research their mechanics so that they may share what they have learned with the class.

Student 8

One way to combat linguistic violence in a English Language Arts classroom is to use a translanguaging stance. A translanguaging stance is a teacher's belief that bilingual students have one holistic language repertoire (Garcia, 2017). In other words, a teacher who holds a translanguaging stance uses aspects of all languages a student speaks to assist them in their learning. Teachers with this belief view bilingualism as a tool and as a benefit in the learning process, not as a deficit. In a translanguaging English Language Arts classroom, students can not only read books by Black authors, but books that include Black Language. Students are also allowed to submit formal assignments using Black Language. A classroom that utilizes a translanguaging approach is different from a classroom that prioritizes code switching because a code-switching classroom deems Black Language inappropriate in certain situations, whereas a translanguaging classroom uses all languages at all times.

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Don't Talk About It, Be About It: Centering Blackness in a Grammar and Language English Education Course

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The body keeps track of trauma. When I started a tenure track position and learned that I would be responsible for teaching the course English Language: Grammar and Usage in the English Education Department, my body began to ache in the way it did when I was 17.

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How do you affirm identity(ies) through exploration of ideologies? 

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How do you affirm identity(ies) through exploration of ideologies? 

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Its a wonderful way to recognize multicultural horizons around the world, provides complexity in explaining phenomena and thought processes some times, and provide in addition a multicolored way of verbal expression and writing! 

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Its a wonderful way to recognize multicultural horizons around the world, provides complexity in explaining phenomena and thought processes some times, and provide in addition a multicolored way of verbal expression and writing! 

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I try to pick some texts like "Mother Tongue," etc. at the start of my introductory writing class that gets my students to think about the different ways we can think about language in society 

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I try to pick some texts like "Mother Tongue," etc. at the start of my introductory writing class that gets my students to think about the different ways we can think about language in society 

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With a lot of first generation students, I find discussions about "coding" especially interesting. Those who are native bilingual generally have a lot to say about this. 

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With a lot of first generation students, I find discussions about "coding" especially interesting. Those who are native bilingual generally have a lot to say about this. 

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Lots of valuable considerations to adopt. I will be looking more closely at assignments. Thank you.

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Lots of valuable considerations to adopt. I will be looking more closely at assignments. Thank you.

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Matt- question about feedback to the paragraph where student was working ideas out and prof feedback that you said would likely lead to them deleting. What about “You have lots of good ideas  to think through. Let’s talk.”? Or what do you suggest?

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The issue I struggle with is how you present some of these ideas to students in a clear and concise way during a semester. In a lot of ways, we are making them rethink things they have been taught--or indoctrinated with-- since grammar school 

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The issue I struggle with is how you present some of these ideas to students in a clear and concise way during a semester. In a lot of ways, we are making them rethink things they have been taught--or indoctrinated with-- since grammar school 

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I'm struggling a bit with segments of the presentation. Comments on a paper are attached to student AND faculty bodies. You seem to be presenting student reactions in a vacuum.

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I'm struggling a bit with segments of the presentation. Comments on a paper are attached to student AND faculty bodies. You seem to be presenting student reactions in a vacuum.

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Entry 28

To really understand what White language supremacy is exactly, and how we might decenter and counter it in our classrooms, we have to understand what the habits of White language, or HOWL, are. Their use and circulation is an important aspect of White language supremacy. HOWL can be used as a heuristic to help students identify these habits and critique them as they decide what they wish to take on as their own habits of language.

All people have habits of language, ways of seeing, saying, and judging things, ideas, and other people. These habits afford our ways with words. They also, when understood from a thirty thousand foot view, constitute the dominant rhetorical moves that are considered appropriate or preferred in any given context. That is, when we pan back and look at the long view of history and the wide view of who controls language practices in schools, universities, professions, and disciplines, this long and wide view of language habits reveals that elite, White, masculine habits of language are the standards of correctness and appropriateness, of "clarity," of the "logical," and are considered what "audiences want." But from another view, they are correct and appropriate and clear and logical because they are what elite, White masculine people in charge have wanted.

Geneva Smitherman, a groundbreaking and important Black scholar, a linguist, a University Distinguished Professor Emerita and the Co-Founder of the African American and African Studies program at Michigan State University, has published several books on the ways that Black people in the U.S. language. Her work is vital if you want to understand, for instance, habits of Black English language ( note 181). From her extensive work, it's clear that Black English is just as rule-governed and logical as the dominant White English is, yet it also shares deep structures with other Englishes (as discussed in post 27). I want to emphasize at this point that having habits of language and judgement, even ones from White racial groups, is not a problem. We need our habits of language. That's how all language works. It's when one group's habits get used as the standard by which all other people are judged, regardless of their own habits or their goals as students or people.

To complicate this, some of a person's habits of language, or the way they language in the world, are idiosyncratic and hybrid. I, for instance, like using the word "judgement" not "judgment." I like the first better because it leaves the "e" in the noun, which keeps the associated meanings that I see in the noun "judge" and the verb "to judge." It reminds me that any judgement is made by a judge in the world who has a particular subject position, a particular orientation, and is a product of a subjective act of judging. That is, judgement comes from a judge who judges. There are no judgements that just appear or exist in the world. Judgements are the products of people who do things with language.

I should make clear that the habits of White language below should not be used as essential, or in a way that may reify Whiteness as some static, monolithic construct in the way people act, speak, read, or think. Whiteness is a dynamic category of experience in the world, just as Blackness and Brownness are -- it's phenomenological, and paradoxical at times. There are many ways to be and language Whiteness, just as there are for Blackness, or Latine-ness, etc., in part because these are racial dimensions that indirectly influence the ways we come to our languaging ( note 182). So these habits can change historically and are in flux, just as all of our identities are.

These habits, however, are a part of racist discourse, so are historical in origin, and a set of social structures that can often be difficult to discern or notice. Understanding them critically and using them in your own antiracist orientation is not about eliminating them. It's about asking a few hard, brave questions about your own habits of language and how they circulate in your classroom -- how do you use them against students? The goal in these brave questions is to develop ways to use them in consciously antiracist ways. These questions can help a teacher shape their antiracist orientation toward their own HOWLing through brave, inner work. It takes time though. Again, it's brave, ongoing work we all must do.

How do I already use habits of White language (HOWL) in my teaching and judgements of students' languaging? How do I enforce my habits of White language on my students in ways that may create or reify my own language habits as universally correct? How does standard language ideology (SLI) operate in my classroom or in my grading practices and assignments?

How does HOWL make up what happens in my classroom and how I arrange students', their language performances, my assessments, activities, texts, etc.? How might I be more self-conscious about my HOWLing at students? How might I contextualize, historicize, and racially politicize my habits of language when I practice them or offer them to students?

How do I not use my habits of White language against my students, but use them with my students? How do I allow everyone's habits of language to circulate and create critical juxtapositions in the classroom, in assignments, and in responses to language?

Because they are a part of our systems, training, and school, HOWL are a part of all of us. The six habits that make up HOWL constitute paradoxes in our language in school and society. For instance, language diversity exists in the world, yet we need some agreements about language in order to communicate and understand each other. Forcing all students to language like you, or in one dominant way, both offers students ways to succeed like you and oppresses some more than others because of where they come from and how their languaging will be judged in the future by others. That is, your students cannot actually language in the world like you, just as you cannot do so like them, and this fact is more important as our subjectivities get farther apart, as we share few aspects of our social identities, such as race, gender, sexual orientation, ability and disability, or neurodiversity. A teacher might ask: What are the deep structures of English that we all share and what are the unimportant surface structures? This may help us discern where our HOWLing begins to oppress and devalue others' languaging.

So think of the six habits below as historical embodiments of an orientation to the world, making the first habit (an unseen, naturalized orientation to the world) most central and necessary for any instance of HOWLing to be White language supremacy. The test of a habit or disposition as White supremacist, then, is in how it is used or deployed in the classroom, how it circulates, and what it produces both in terms of power relations and outcomes in students. Is the habit used as a standard for everyone? What orientation or position in the world and to language do your habits of language assume? Is that orientation really shared by all? What uneven effects or outcomes does your habits of language create in your classroom? What do your habits produce when you circulate them in your classroom?

Often White language supremacy can be noticed in how HOWLing tends to reinforce, reproduce, or support conditions or outcomes that conform to the characteristics of "White supremacy culture" that Tema Okun has discussed ( note 183).

Again, paradoxes will always exist. Contradictions are common in White supremacist systems because no one really wants White supremacy or racism as outcomes in the systems we live in, but that's how the systems have been made. That's what they reproduce. Racism is good for the health of the system, even as it is bad for the people in that system. Your classroom is not inherently made to be a racially fair or equitable place. So when you circulate habits of language in racially fair and equitable ways, it is counter to the already White supremacist culture. It likely will feel wrong at first, or like you aren't doing your job. You will produce paradoxes or systemic contradictions ( note 184).

Unseen, Naturalized Orientation to the World -- This is an orientation, a starting point, of one's body in time and space that makes certain things reachable. It assumes, or takes as universal, its own proximities or capabilities to act and do things that are inherited through one's shared space. It can be understood as an "oxymoronic haunting," leaving things unsaid or unstated for those in the classroom to fill in ( note 185). It is often stated or understood as "clear only if know" (or COIK) ( note 186). The authority figure knows precisely and assumes everyone else does too. When a teacher, writer, or authority embodies this habit, they often do not realize it, assuming that everyone has access to the things, language, concepts, histories, and logics that they do. In this way, the classroom, or an ideal paper, or an expected language performance becomes an extension of the White body, its habits, and its languaging in such a way that it is hard to distinguish it as an orientation, body, or space in the classroom. It's just, for instance, a standard that is both associated with but understood as separate from, Whiteness and White bodies ( note 187).

Hyperindividualism -- This is a stance or judgement that primarily values self-determination and autonomy as most important or most valued. It often centers or assumes values of the self as an individual, self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and self-control, which tends to also support logics like "survival of the fitness," "free and open markets," and competition as proving grounds for discovering the best or most ideal. It can appeal to ideals of universal truths and knowledge that come from inside the individual. This personal insight is often understood as universal insight. The logic is that everyone is the same because we are all the same inside, while also holding on to the importance and primacy of the individual, even the individual as the exception. Individual rights and privacy are often most important and construct the common good or what is best in society or groups. Thus the best outcome of a class or an assignment or activity is something personal, a personal grade, a personal insight or learning, a better draft, but not a benefit to the community, group, or class as a whole. In this way, the point of society, school, the classroom and its activities is to serve the interests and growth of the individual, not the community ( note 188).

Stance of Neutrality, Objectivity, and Apoliticality -- This is an orientation that assumes or invokes a voice (and body), or its own discourse, as neutral and apolitical, as non-racial and non-gendered. This is often voiced in the style of a "god-trick," which is a universal vantage or viewpoint by which to know something else in a nonpolitical or purely objective way. It is a view that is outside the person speaking or expressing the ideas. Often, this stance also manifests as an urge toward universalism, or a one-size-fits-all mentality. Facts are just facts, not created or manufactured by people or processes or language. Contexts and histories are deemphasized or ignored. Ideas, from this orientation, can be outside of the people who articulate them. A rubric or set of language expectations in a classroom is assumed to be apolitical, outside of the gendered and racialized people who made it or use it (and the racialized and classed groups and places those people come from) ( note 189).

Individualized, Rational, Controlled Self -- This is a stance or orientation in which the person is conceived of as an individual who is primarily rational, self-conscious, self-controlled, and self-determined. One's own conscience guides the individual. Sight (ocularity) is the primary way to identify the truth or to understand something (i.e. seeing is proof; seeing is understanding; seeing is believing). This makes social and cultural factors into external constraints to the individual, which must always be ignored or overcome. Meaningful issues and questions always lie within the rational self. Individuals have problems, making solutions individually-based. Thus, both success and failure are individual in nature. In a classroom, failure is individual and often seen as weakness or confirmation of inadequacy, or a lack of control. Personal control of one's self, body, and voice are important because it shows that the student or teacher is in control and rational. Often part of self control is the ability to continually work and stay busy, or be industrious and productive in approved (or predefined) ways within the system or classroom ( note 190).

Rule-Governed, Contractual Relationships -- This habit focuses on the individual in a contractual relationship with other individuals, either formally or tacitly, that tends to be understood as benefiting the individuals in the contract, not the whole community or group. This can be seen in syllabi as one kind of assumed social and educational contract that is dictated by those in power (teachers and schools) for the assumed benefit of individual students. Additionally, a focus on or value in "informed consent" (often confirmed in writing) is important. Ideal relationships are understood to negotiate individual needs, individual rights, which are apolitical and universal. Meanwhile, socially-oriented values and questions are less important and often understood as inherently political (and therefore bad or less preferable). There is an importance attached to laws, rules, fairness as sameness and consistency, so fair classrooms are understood to be ones that treat every individual exactly the same regardless of who they are, how they got there, where they came from, or what their individual circumstances are for learning. Very little, if any, emphasis is given to interconnectedness with others, relatedness, or feelings in classroom arrangements, activities, and relationships. Individuals, whether they are students or teachers, keep difficulties and problems to themselves because the important thing is the contractual agreement made, which is about consistent (the same for everyone) policy ( note 191).

Clarity, Order, and Control -- This habit focuses on reason, order, and control as guiding principles for understanding and judgement, as well as documents and instances of languaging. Thinking and anti-sensuality are primary and opposed to feelings and emotions. Logical insight, the rational, order (often linear), and objectivity are valued most and opposed to the subjective and emotional. Rigor, order, clarity, and consistency are all valued highly and tightly prescribed, often using a dominant standardized English language that comes from a White, middle- to upper-class group of people. Thinking, rationality, and knowledge are understood as apolitical, unraced, and can be objectively displayed. Words, ideas, and language itself are disembodied, or extracted, from the people and their material and emotional contexts from which the language was created or exists. Language can be separated from those who offer it. There is limited value given to sensual experiences, considerations of the body, sensations, and feelings. A belief in scientific method, discovery, and knowledge is often primary, as is a reliance on deductive logics. Other logics that often distinguish this habit in classrooms are those that emphasize usefulness or unity and pragmatic outcomes, all of which are predefined for students by authorities, such as the teacher ( note 192).
This blog is offered for free in order to engage language and literacy teachers of all levels in antiracist work and dialogue. The hope is that it will help raise enough money to do more substantial and ongoing antiracist work by funding the Asao and Kelly Inoue Antiracist Teaching Endowment, housed at Oregon State University. Read more about the endowment on my endowment page. Please consider donating to the endowment. Thank you for your help and engagement.

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Blogbook -- The Habits of White Language (HOWL)

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Entry 28 To really understand what White language supremacy is exactly, and how we might decenter and counter it in our classrooms, we have to understand what the habits of White language, or HOWL, are. Their use and circulation is an important aspect of White language supremacy.

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It's summer and that means Mama Nawal plods around the house during the day discovering bits and pieces of kid creations. Life is a tad bit slower, without the bustle of the school year schedule with four children.

There are journals with invisible ink, complete with lock and key. Eliana turned ten and I helped her practice opening the tiny lock on the notebook her Khaleh sent as a gift.

There are flip books with little drawings, arguing characters and fart jokes, with plenty of BAM, WHAMs and POWs peppered throughout. Ehsan envisions superhero duels.

And then there's Ezzy's drawings of school busses and cartoonish cats, rocket ships or people - with a few feeling words like MAD and HAPPY labeled too.

These kids and their secret writing lives reveal a desire for expression that transcends teacher directive. They write because they want to; they choose precisely why and when. As classroom educators, we don't often have the liberty of giving students completely free reign, but their motivations- not fueled by any literacy-coach mama move on my part- signals an innate desire to compose.

WHEN DOES WRITING FEEL RIGHT?

When I'm designing professional learning experiences for teachers, I often reset by asking them to mull over times when writing felt right. When did it feel cathartic? When did writing have purpose? When did writing fuel your desire to share more, or seek support, or learn something new?

More often than not, the collaborative lists include some combination of the following when:

I could choose my topic

Peers gave me meaningful feedback

I shared with a wider audience

I picked the form or genre of expression

I accomplished something I needed to communicate

Nobody else saw it but me; I wasn't embarrassed to write my true feelings

I read examples of writing I appreciated

Someone helped me make my writing better

My writing led me to new discoveries

Jamboard from a recent professional learning session.

Holding these truths at the center helps me remember what is important. When writers feel empowered to write for their own personal catharsis, it matters. When writers know they will have the opportunity to strengthen their writing alongside peers, it matters. When writers have greater degrees of choice around topic and genre, it matters. And when, at times, there's a wider audience for writing, beyond classroom walls or the teacher's eyes alone, there is often deeper motivation.

TEXTS THAT SPRINGBOARD CATHARTIC WRITING

When I was a child I began writing journals when I was angry or confused about the world around me. It was my way of making sense of the bullies in school, the push and pull of being a first generation immigrant's daughter as I navigated the rules of my family with dissimilar traditions of my peers. Those stacks and stacks of journals now live in a crate in my aunt's basement in Pittsburgh.

While every child won't find friendship on the blank page, writing teachers can craft the space to allow it.

Mentors in and out of the classroom guide our writing. They show us what's possible, inspire us, and excite us about what creations we can compose. Here are several texts that I've used in classrooms to springboard cathartic writing, selected to cultivate authentic writing lives in our students as we lay the groundwork for workshop early in the year.

In My Heart: A Book of Feelings by Jo Witek

Ruby Finds a Worry by Tom Percival

Bravo Anjali by Sheetal Sheth

My Heart by Corinna Lukyen

Way Past Jealous by Hallee Adelman

La Catrina - Emotions - Emociones by Patty Rodriguez

Grumpy Monkey by Suzanne Lang

Visiting Feelings by Lauren Rubenstein

These picture books support the idea that writers can feel a wide range of emotions and write about them as part of the classroom experience. Students need not always write in a specific genre towards a goal of a final polished piece but instead, educators might offer once-weekly space for students to journal about their emotions. I tuck this into independent work options on Wednesdays or Fridays while I circulate individually to confer with writers who are working on the genre process piece.

Bravo Anjali by Sheetal Sheth, illustrated by Lucia Soto, comes out from Mango and Marigold Press on September 14th!

IN PURSUIT OF BALANCE

I know, as classroom teachers, we can't do it all. When I talk about the balanced literacy framework, I draw parallels between healthy eating: I don't expect my children to eat all the right fruits and vegetables each and every day (Some days they eat fried food; some days they might have too much dessert). But are we ensuring our children have a balanced diet- and a holistic approach to writing- across a week, a month? Are students having ample opportunities to choose their mode of expression, write for greater audiences or solely for themselves, select their topics of interest, partner with peers, and receive meaningful feedback from their teachers over time? As we move into a new school year, let's think across the year holistically.

Let's make writing feel right.

Note: for your adult hearts, you might be inspired by writer Kaveh Akbar's drawings of poems, which depict poetic illustrations of his feelings for his most recent work, Pilgrim Bell. How might we incorporate visual storytelling into our classrooms, too?

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When Writing Feels Right: Exalting Choice and Purpose in Workshop

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When writers feel empowered to write for their own personal catharsis, it matters. When writers know they will have the opportunity to strengthen their writing alongside peers, it matters. When writers have greater degrees of choice around topic and genre, it matters. And when, at times, there's a wider audience for writing, beyond classroom walls...

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Where and when are you resisting language ideologies? What spaces are you creating for linguistic diversity and creativity?

Syllabus
Activities
Assessments
Relationships

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Ive been thinking a lot about rubrics and how they can be liberating if carefully constructed, and marginalizing if done poorly (the more common route, I think). I try to do rubric co-construction in my courses, or at least have a session during which students can sound off on/ approve of the rubric.

I wonder if this works to "center" their voices/ experiences?

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I will use the idea of writing a letter to a friend

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Students won't believe we want them to write in passionate, authentic ways unless we give them such writing to read in our syllabus.

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I would like to integrate more types of media, such as podcasts, rather than strictly assigning readings. Even better, if the media can relate to the readings, this will give the students multiple ways to think about the topic. 

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I would like to integrate more types of media, such as podcasts, rather than strictly assigning readings. Even better, if the media can relate to the readings, this will give the students multiple ways to think about the topic. 

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I am including this in my syllabus and slides.

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I am including this in my syllabus and slides.

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Providing multiple modes of demonstrating knowledge i.e. writing a paper, powerpoint presentation with voice over, developing a tik toc video, Giving an oral presentation, etc.

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Providing multiple modes of demonstrating knowledge i.e. writing a paper, powerpoint presentation with voice over, developing a tik toc video, Giving an oral presentation, etc.