Where I am and Where I Want to Go

I am a prospective English Language Arts Teacher. I would ideally teach ELA at the high school or middle school level. One area of interest in this field is the subject of linguistic equity and the work many are taking on to undo a legacy of prescriptive harmful literacy education practices that systematically devalue some codes of English while propping up White American Vernacular English as the standard. I am interested in what I can do as a White educator who plans to work in classrooms where I can expect a wealth of linguistic diversity to practice and hopefully undo some of the harmful legacy of ELA classes. I took a class a couple of semesters ago that explored some of these ideas in the abstract, but I am interested in taking this further to explore what embracing a culture of linguistic equity in the classroom looks like in practice. We have already briefly touched on some of the culturally responsive practices educators use to incorporate linguistically diverse readings into class curriculum, but I am very interested in the ways that educators use some of these strategies in the instruction of student writing. There’s this image many of us have of turning in a paper, maybe it was a draft or maybe it was the final edit, only to have it returned covered in red ink. This “red ink” approach to teaching writing, where grammar is an inflexible doctrine that must be abided by, is not something I am interested in recreating in my classroom. Language is beautiful and powerful because it is communicative and because it is fluid. Teachers cannot attest to appreciating or loving the ability that writing has to uniquely capture the human experience if we expect our students to shed any semblance of honesty or familiarity when shaping their thoughts and feelings in text. I am interested in how teachers approach grading and guiding student writing in this regard, and how we can move away from red ink and prescribed grammar while maintaining challenge and rigor through a range of writing contexts and functions. While doing some preliminary research on this subject, I found several academic articles and resources that I feel will help in my investigation of this subject.

Dismantling anti-black linguistic racism in English language arts classrooms: Toward an anti-racist black language pedagogy

Teachers’ development of a socially-stigmatized dialect

Bidialectal African American Adolescents’ Beliefs About Spoken Language Expectations in English Classrooms

Leaving behind the “Learning Loss”: Loving and Learning from the Ways Students Talk, Write, and Draw Right Now

Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Teaching Critical Language Awareness: The Importance of Valuing Student Knowledge

The Effect of High School Socioeconomic, Racial, and Linguistic Segregation on Academic Performance and School Behaviors