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.
