On the Case: Preparing Critical Antiracist First-Year Writing Instructors and Combating Linguicism in Predominately African American Language–Speaking Classrooms

• In Event: Decolonizing the "Critical": Working With Stakeholders to Dismantle Whiteness in Qualitative Education Research

Abstract

Purpose. Within the scholarship on decolonial methodologies, researchers are attending to how anti-colonial research methods are viable, reliable, and vital for analyzing textual data collected from research conducted with racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse students (Patel, 2016). Engaging in anti-racist writing assessment ecologies has been one way to analyze the lived linguistic realities emerging from students’ textual data (Inoue, 2015).

Building from these perspectives, I explore how anti-racist writing assessment ecologies offer a new way of describing the written discourse of racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse students––a way that honors, preserves, and respects their lived linguistic experiences. I ask: what can we, as critical educators, learn from stakeholders such as AAL-speaking students, and specifically, what can we learn about students’ lived linguistics realities from their pre/post-essays?

Framework. As an African American woman researcher, I employ anti-colonial analytical methods when assessing textual data from racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse students. I subscribe to racial methodologies (Inoue, 2015) which uses informed theories of race to account for various racial formations that encompass text and talk. Racial methodologies account for ethnicity and class-based contexts and use this knowledge as a way of acknowledging and describing ways of comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world. In addition to racial methodologies, this study subscribes to a humanizing methodological stance (Paris & Winn, 2014), explicitly centering students’ ways of knowing.

Methods and data sources. I share key findings (via cases) from a recent humanizing qualitative inquiry (Paris & Winn, 2014) on equity-oriented writing pedagogy that used an anti-racist writing assessment ecology to assess pre- and post essays collected from several African American Language (AAL)-speaking students (n=16) in pre-freshman English classrooms. Data was analyzed at three levels: open coding (Dyson & Genishi, 2005); holistic, selective, and detailed coding (van Manen, 1990); and the Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2013).

Results/Significance. Findings highlight AAL-speaking students’ linguistic assets, and underscore the need for new anti-racist writing assessment ecologies. These ecologies require that researchers undertake a conscious intellectual shift to reframing how we analyze and describe the lived linguistic realities emerging from racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse students’ textual data. These new ecologies have the potential to further dismantle “traditional research" inextricably linked with European colonialism and White racial hegemony.

Author

• Shenika Hankerson, University of Maryland - College Park