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Language Rights in the Classroom: The Languaging Practices and Counternarrative Production of Black Youth

Sat, April 9, 12:25 to 1:55pm, Marriott Marquis, Floor: Level Two, Marquis Salon 16

Abstract

In this final presentation, I highlight the significant role of language in teaching and learning, especially in work that involves Black youth and their teachers in urban contexts. I take up the concepts of languaging and counternarrative production to emphasize the importance of educators supporting the languaging practices and rights of Black youth. For the purposes of this presentation, languaging refers to the myriad communicative strategies Black youth employ to voice their perspectives as they navigate sociocultural environments that are structured by racism. I argue that languaging can result in a disruption of deficit-oriented perspectives about Black youth that continue to dominate across cultures in the United States, and that too often lead to such tragedies as the murders of Aiyana Jones (Detroit, MI, 2010) and Tamir Rice (Cleveland, OH, 2014). As this presentation will demonstrate, when Black youth language their experiences, they often produce counternarratives—the intentional use of narratives to resist normalized, or White-middle class, practices, expectations, and ways of being that get imposed on them. Here, I define counternarratives as stories that resist racist ideologies that dominate discourses and social practices in the United States. These important stories support the establishment of what McLaren and Hammer (2007) refer to as “communities of resistance, counter-public spheres, and oppositional pedagogies that can resist dominant forms of meaning by offering new channels of communication” (p. 134).

In supporting students’ languaging practices inside classrooms, I argue that educators can make good on the promise of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution. My argument is guided by the following questions: What are some of the ways Black youth language their experiences with racism, inequity, and marginalization? How can teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers create learning environments for Black students to produce counternarratives through languaging their experiences? To answer these questions, I frame languaging as a strategy of counternarrative production through which Black youth can assert agency and critique racism. Then, I examine three examples of injustices experienced by Black youth: Rachel Jeantel, witness in the George Zimmerman murder trial; the Black Student Forum of Boston College; and Rendell Buckhalter, a Black male high school graduate from the U.S. Midwest. These examples allow me to: (1) Suggest ways for educators to create learning environments that encourage Black youth to language their experiences and produce counternarratives; and (2) Clarify how such work speaks to the unfilled promise of language rights for Black students as articulated in the SRTOL resolution.

References:

McLaren, P., & Hammer, R. (2007). Media knowledges, warrior citizenry, and postmodern literacies. In D. Macedo & S.R. Steinberg (Eds.), Media literacy: A reader (pp. 116-139). New York: Peter Lang.

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