“That’s Just How We Talk”: The Affordances and Constraints of Profanity Used by Black and Latina/o Youth in an English Language Arts High School Classroom

• In Event: Transgressive Language Practices: Taboos, Boundaries, and Linguistic Agency in the Classroom

Abstract

The languages spoken by Black and Latina/o youth in schools are often monitored to ensure their alignment with dominant ways of “doing school” (Gutiérrez, Morales & Martínez, 2009). In English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms, teachers are responsible for socializing youth into dominant ways of speaking, and often do so at the expense of eliminating and stigmatizing non-standard languages. This can create classroom environments where teachers may correct, and monitor non-standard speech (Alim, 2005), including the implementation of rules that prohibit youth from using profanity.

From an ethnographic perspective, this paper will detail the ways in which youth utilized profanity in ELA classrooms to make sense of academic content. While sociocultural researchers call on practitioners to treat the full linguistic repertoires of non-dominant youth as a tool for learning, few studies address the tensions that arise for teachers when profanity is used by youth, particularly Black and Latina/o youth who are consistently monitored. A discussion of the possible affordances and constraints of leveraging the profanity used by youth is taken up here, by looking towards a Critical Language Awareness framework to engage youth in understanding larger ideological perspectives on use of profanity (Alim, 2005).

This paper draws on sociocultural perspectives on language that view the everyday communicative activities of individuals as a central mediating force for learning and development (Cole, 1996, 1998). Informed by the Ethnography of Communication tradition of research (Gumperz & Hymes, 1972), this paper recognizes that individuals draw on a range of languages, their varieties and registers to communicate culturally appropriate and meaningful messages.

Research reported is part of a larger year-long ethnographic study that seeks to understand the interethnic sociolinguistic landscape (Paris, 2009) of Willow High School, an urban high school attended by Black and Latina/o youth. This study is situated in four ELA classrooms.

I draw on data gathered through classroom observations of Black and Latina/o youth participating in both official and unofficial classroom interactions (Gutiérrez, Rymes & Larson, 1995). These data include ethnographic fieldnotes, audio-recordings of four ELA classrooms, and participant retrospection (Rampton, 1995) interviews with student participants.

Findings suggest that Black and Latina/o youth in the study use a range of languages to communicate meaning, including utterances sprinkled with profanity. Data of Black and Latina/o youths’ communicative interactions provided evidence of these youths’ linguistic dexterity (Paris, 2009), which included style shifting (Alim, 2005), code-switching (Zentella, 1997), as well as content knowledge in both official and unofficial classroom spaces (Gutiérrez et al., 1995). These data also suggest that students made sense of literary concepts, similar to those reported by Lee’s (2007) participants in her cultural modeling research.

While sociocultural researchers urge practitioners and researchers to build on, leverage, and treat the full linguistic resources of non-dominant youth as a resource, few address what to do when youth deploy varieties of language that include profanity. This work contributes to a sociocultural perspective of addressing conflict and tension in learning activities as a means of expanding the learning opportunities for non-dominant youth (Gutiérrez et al., 2009).

Author

• Danny C. Martinez, University of California - Davis