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Equity and justice, particularly raciolinguistic justice, continue to be at the forefront of my reflexive practice and my work as a practitioner-scholar-activist in postsecondary literacy and learning. Over the past several months I have been working to answer three questions:

What does raciolinguistically just postsecondary literacy look like on a practical level?

How do we make our ideologies on raciolinguistic justice actionable in the classroom?

How might we redesign instruction to prepare students for the current state of postsecondary literacy, while also working toward more equitable and just literacy ideologies and practices?

Through my own critical and reflexive practice, I have developed a framework that answers these questions and that provides a roadmap for enacting raciolinguistic justice in our classrooms. The framework for raciolinguistically just literacy instruction that follows allows instructors to break free from the current state of postsecondary literacy instruction where they are trapped by “the language of power” and the obligation to teach and hold students to its standards. This framework addresses the needs of both faculty and students and reimagines postsecondary literacy instruction to be equitable, just, and full of joy–making the goal of raciolinguistic justice accessible and actionable. Thus, freeing students and teachers to navigate diverse linguistic spaces with confidence and authenticity.

While I am pleased to be able to release a fully fleshed out framework, this is a work in progress. My goal is to work with postsecondary literacy and learning professionals to do classroom testing to further refine this framework. I am also working with a publisher to make available educational products and resources that support literacy and learning professionals in implementing this framework. Finally, I am putting together a series of training and professional development workshops, based on this framework, to be released in the coming months. I am so excited for this ongoing work and the role it will play in promoting equity and justice in postsecondary literacy and learning.

During our recent live web conversation on curriculum violence, I posed the question: If we could break free from our colonized, white language supremacist paradigm, what would be our goals for literacy instruction?

As we all struggled to think beyond our current realities, such beautiful ideas emerged. One participant envisioned literacy instruction where there is grace in learning from each other’s communication styles, strategies, and meanings. Another envisioned literacy instruction as focusing on exploration and learning. There was also discussion of literacy instruction as celebrating what people bring to various linguistic situations, students learning to enjoy reading, and students being resilient thinkers, learners, and communicators. The common sentiments in all of the responses were students having freedom to use language in diverse ways, students being free to truly express themselves, and students enjoying reading, writing, and thinking.

Critical Language Awareness and Linguistic Dexterity make students cognizant of the situational and political dimensions of language, and allow students to appreciate and leverage their full linguistic milieus.

While these answers made me excited, they also made me sad and frustrated. If unfettered by the power and politics of so-called “standard English”, the participants expressed literacy goals and pedagogy that are full of joy, creativity, and confidence. Instead, in the current state of postsecondary literacy instruction we are trapped by “the language of power” and our obligation to teach and hold students to its standards. As literacy professionals, we are forced to choose between instruction that reflects the ideals of equity, justice, and joy and making sure that students are prepared for the inequitable, unjust, joyless “real world”. While we desperately want to help our students and while we desperately want to change the linguistic landscape of academia, out of expedience and/or guilty obligation, we get sucked into the abyss of white language supremacy.

But it does not have to be this way. There is a way forward; indeed, there is a way to freedom. We can rethink, reimagine, and redesign literacy instruction to be equitable, just, and full of joy. We can do this by reorienting our work to focus on building our students’ (and our own) critical language awareness (CLA) so that they (and we) can exercise the linguistic dexterity (LDx) required to function in an unjust system, while simultaneously changing that system for the better. CLA and LDx make students cognizant of the situational and political dimensions of language, and allow students to appreciate and leverage their full linguistic milieus. Thus, freeing students to navigate diverse linguistic spaces with confidence and authenticity, and without apology.

As was discussed in my last post, despite our best intentions, we too often perpetuate curricular structures that inflict psychological and ultimately academic harm on BIPOC students. We could even go so far as to say that while BIPOC students bear the brunt of this harm, curriculum violence has a negative impact on all students, faculty, and institutions as a whole. While any educator would agree that curriculum violence must be stopped, the question remains: What practical steps must we take to break this cycle?

This is a question with which so many of us have been grappling for quite some time. In my own quest towards equitable and just literacy instruction, I have been working on a framework for what I am calling nonviolent literacy instruction. Inspired by work on antiracist education and linguistic justice, and drawing on the philosophies of nonviolence, this framework for nonviolent literacy instruction focuses on both the dispositions and the curricular, pedagogical, and assessment structures necessary for ending the current cycle of curriculum violence in postsecondary literacy. Over the next several months, the focus of this blog and our live web conversations will be presenting and unpacking this framework for nonviolent literacy instruction.

As postsecondary literacy professionals, we have to be willing to continually reflect on our linguistic ideologies and how they shape and are shaped by our racialized experiences within and outside of academia.

The more we work towards equity and justice, we become keenly aware that it all starts from within. As postsecondary literacy professionals, we have to be willing to continually reflect on our linguistic ideologies and how they shape and are shaped by our racialized experiences within and outside of academia. We have to be willing to acknowledge that we too are products of violent literacy curricula and that our ideas, teaching, and practice of literacy are tainted by our own experiences as students within a violent system. It is at this point of acknowledgement and awareness where we can start the process of unlearning or decolonization that will free us to rethink, reimagine, and redesign our work with students.

Thus, nonviolent literacy instruction requires a commitment to reflexivity. Defined as the act of examining our feelings, reactions, and motives and how these influence what we do or think in a given situation, reflexivity must be a perpetual habit of mind; it must be a disposition that drives our work.

Jones (2020) explains that “curriculum violence occurs when educators and curriculum writers have constructed a set of lessons that damage or otherwise adversely affect students intellectually and emotionally” (p. 48). She further explains that curriculum violence is not contingent upon intentions, as intentionality is not a prerequisite for racism or harmful teaching. Despite good intentions, we can be complicit in this violence. Inoue (2019) illuminates this contradiction between good intentions and the perpetuation of curriculum violence explaining that, while we believe that students have a right to their own language and we claim to embrace our students’ linguistic diversity, we continue to uphold standards and classroom practices that work against them. Curriculum violence is present in postsecondary literacy from the propagation of “standard English”, to glorification of linear thinking as “clear” thinking, down to course materials that reinforce the invisibility of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (Young, 2020). 

Curriculum violence is present in postsecondary literacy from the propagation of “standard English”, to glorification of linear thinking as “clear” thinking, down to course materials that reinforce the invisibility of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

While theory, research, and conscience urge us otherwise, the disconnect between good intentions and our curricular and pedagogical choices persists. Antia and Dyers (2019) explain that the vestiges of colonization and the subsequent power imbalances “continue to exist in [our] minds, lives, languages, dreams, imaginations, and epistemologies” (p. 91). In other words, the inability to enact our good intentions through meaningful curricular redesign is largely due to our inability to remove our colonized gaze. Decoloniality challenges this gaze by exposing the “asymmetrical power relations inherent in the conditions with which much contemporary disciplinary knowledge is constituted and mediated” (Antia & Dyers, 2019, p. 91). Likewise, Afrofuturism provides a lens through which the past, present, and future can be re-imagined in ways that counter the oppression of colonization (Barber, Anderson, Dery, & Thomas, 2018; Becker, 2019; Grue, 2020).

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Works Cited

Antia, B. & Dyers, C. (2019). De-alienating the academy: Multilingual teaching as a decolonial pedagogy. Linguistics and Education, 51, 91-100.

Barber, T. E., Anderson, R., Dery, M., & Thomas, S. R. (2018). 25 Years of Afrofuturism and Black speculative thought: Roundtable with Tiffany E. Barber, Reynaldo Anderson, Mark Dery, and Sheree Renée Thomas. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 39, 134-144.

Becker, D. (2019). Afrofuturism and decolonisation: Using Black Panther as methodology. Image & Text: A Journal for Design, 33(1), 1-21.

Grue, M. N. P. (2020). An Afrofuturistic vehicle for literacy instruction. Journal of College Reading and Learning, 50(1), 33-44.

Inoue, A. B. (2019). How do we language so people stop killing each other, or what do we do about white language supremacy? Transcript of 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication Annual Convention keynote address. Retrieved from  https://docs.google.com/document/d/11ACklcUmqGvTzCMPlETChBwS-Ic3t2BOLi13u8IUEp4/edit [Google Scholar]

Jones, S. P. (2020). Ending curriculum violence. Teaching Tolerance, 64, 47-50.

Young, V. A. (2020). Black lives matter in academic spaces: Three lessons for critical literacy. Journal of College Reading and Learning, 50(1), 5-18.