Reinscribing and Resisting Racialized Language Hierarchies in a Middle School Bilingual Personal Narrative Writing Workshop

• In Event: Translating Theory to Practice: Pedagogies of Raciolinguistics in the Classroom

Abstract

What do the personal narratives and writing processes of Latinx middle school students in an English as New Language classroom, reveal about students’ linguistic practices and their understandings of racialized language hierarchies? This paper details the stories of bilingual sixth graders and how they told them, focusing on how their language practices—as seen through storytelling—at times reinscribe a racialized hierarchy of language while at other times disrupt them. These tensions are revealed in a classroom where a bilingual pedagogy encourages these writers to tell stories using features from their entire linguistic repertoire.

In this paper, using translanguaging theory (García & Li Wei, 2013) to understand the language ecology of a bilingual classroom, I analyze how students’ personal narrative writing helps “create, reflect, and challenge” language hierarchies (Creese & Blackledge, 2010) as well as help teachers understand the impact of such hierarchies on students’ lives. The literature on raciolinguistics allows educators to problematize both the experiences of language minoritized youth and the discussions around these students, who are often viewed from a deficit perspective (Alim & Smitherman, 2012; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Alim, Rickford, Ball, 2016).

This paper uses data from an ethnographic study of a bilingual Spanish-English sixth-grade personal narrative writing unit, focusing on the stories of four students and the conversations around bilingual writing. The bilingual writing partnerships, mentor texts, writing pieces and pedagogy, were methods of resistance in this ENL classroom. Data sources included students' writing pieces, observational notes, field notes, interviews with four students and the classroom teacher, and audio recordings of the writing workshop sessions, where students discussed their writing with writing partners, small groups, and their writing teacher. This data comes from participant observation during the five-week unit to understand how students constructed personal narratives that build on their cultural and linguistic resources.

The data revealed that disrupting racialized language hierarchies in pedagogy and storytelling allowed students to tell their stories of displacement and hope. Also, the data show language practices as central in students’ relationships with family members, schooling, and their role in society. Finally, the students’ writing, conversations with writing partners, and discussions of their writing during interviews, reveal tensions within students’ understandings of linguistic practices. For some, drafting in Spanish was a liberating practice, a way for them to “desahogarse” and release their feelings. thers would refuse to write in Spanish or experience shame when reading their writing out loud in Spanish , especially when their writing included regional (and often racialized) varieties of Spanish from the Dominican Republic. The findings illustrate a need for culturally sustaining pedagogies that consider a raciolinguistic framework (Moll, 1986; Paris & Alim, 2017), highlighting bilingual students’ language brokering (Orellana, 2009) and unpacking tensions around students’ feelings about their own languages, situating them in relations of power (Walsh, 1991).

Author

• Carla Espana, Hunter College