Disrupting Colonial Practices: Advancing a Restorative English Education

• In Event: Transforming Justice Through Teaching and Learning for the Public Good

Abstract

Beyond acknowledging English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms as sites of ongoing racialization (Authors, 2019; Winn, 2013, 2018), ELA educators must also understand the historical contours of harm inflicted by our field and recognize how these legacies continue to impact our classrooms and students. We address Winn’s (2018) recent call for literacy educators to take up the urgent question: How might we teach English Language Arts (ELA) in the context of “hyper incarceration” (Rodriguez, 2016) and the ongoing criminalization of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Brown, trans, queer, differently abled, undocumented, and Asian Pacific Islander and Muslim bodies (Winn, 2018)? In this proposal, we work toward re-imagining ELA as a space to disrupt and stop the systematic dehumanization of bodies of color and all marginalized people (Winn, 2018). This conceptual paper represents a response to Winn's (2013) call to (re)imagine ELA education as a tool that repairs centuries-long harm emerging from and perpetuated by English education onto racially and linguistically minoritized US communities. Toward this end, we examine the historical colonizing force of traditional ELA education and the stigmatization often perpetuated against racially and linguistically minoritized students by normative models and methods of schooling in the United States. Calling on their own empirical research and teaching experiences, the authors promote transformative and humanizing literacy pedagogies and practices aimed at advancing a “restorative English education” (Winn, 2013). Areas of connection include examining our field’s colonial past, addressing white nationalism and linguistic hegemony in our classrooms, recognizing students’ lives and languaging practices as resources, centering race and ethnic studies in ELA curricula, and drawing on translanguaging and translingualism as a strength for students’ literacy learning. We end with a call to ELA teachers and researchers to continue to reimagine and advance ways of reading, writing, and thinking about literature, literacy, and language that are healing, justice-oriented, and transformative.

Authors

• Cati V. de los Rios, University of California - Berkeley

• Danny C. Martinez, University of California - Davis

• Adam D. Musser, University of California - Davis

• Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco

• Patricia D. Quijada Cerecer, University of California - Davis