Fifty years after Adrienne Rich (1979) posed this problem and fifty years after the release of the 1974 SRTOL resolution, the answer is still unclear. What we do know, is that our current “best” practices are not working for our students of color. Educators love to wield the phrase “best practices'' in discussing curricular strategies; another educational mot du jour is “antiracism.” All instructors, myself included, want to believe our pedagogies are built on “antiracist best practices,” but more often than not this claim is more virtue signaling than reality. Think about it: how can our practices ever be “best” or “antiracist,” when they are curbed by race-neutral curricula and outcomes that prioritize and legitimate Eurocentric epistemological perspectives and Standard Written English? Inoue (2015) says it best:
“no matter what antiracist motives a teacher may have…we all work within conditions and systems that have branded some languages as less communicative, less articulate, less than the dominant discourse. No matter who we are, we always struggle against antiracist systems in the academy'' (p. 33). |
As long as systemic racism prevails in higher education, so will white supremacy, sustained inequities, and deficit models for understanding linguistic difference.
While existing published literature advocates for antiracist writing pedagogy, much of this research has focused on the deconstruction of race and the production of whiteness in the writing classroom to which the easy “band-aid” response has been the diversification of texts. This is necessary and important work. However, as a writing instructor ever aware of her whiteness in a community college classroom of predominantly students of color and non-native speakers, I cannot help but balk at the ways I am doing a disservice to my students in “educating” them. Teaching my students to unlearn their languages is not only an erasure of their linguistic capital, it is also an act of violence against their cultural wealth. In short, it is a racist, xenophobic, and illogical practice that counters linguistic theory and antiracist pedagogy. |
CODA:
BREAK THE RULES TO LEARN
This project is a call to embrace linguistic diversity starting with Black Vernacular English. Until we can take the step to de-privilege SWE in writing classes, I see little hope for eliminating whiteness across the curriculum and even less hope in combating the racist assumptions endemic in higher education. If language is power, identity, resistance, and cultural capital, then prohibiting students the right to use their own language in the classroom is to disempower them through forced assimilation while devaluing their families, their communities, and their identities. It is also to silence them when it is, should be, and must be our mission as educators to empower their voices.
Until the “rules” of college composition change, I will not be bothering my students with lesson plans built on Picasso’s “learn the rules to break them'' mantra. Instead, I will enlist one of the artist’s other famous aphorisms as a way to make them think about the inherent linguistic prejudices they have faced and continue to face, even in my classroom: “Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.” After all, what could be for our students, for the college writing classroom, for higher education, and for the world, HAS to be better than what is right now.
Until the “rules” of college composition change, I will not be bothering my students with lesson plans built on Picasso’s “learn the rules to break them'' mantra. Instead, I will enlist one of the artist’s other famous aphorisms as a way to make them think about the inherent linguistic prejudices they have faced and continue to face, even in my classroom: “Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.” After all, what could be for our students, for the college writing classroom, for higher education, and for the world, HAS to be better than what is right now.