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.
