Being Linguistically Dexterous in Restrictive Times

• In Event: Where Do We Go From Here? Reimaging Educational Contexts in the Era of '45

Abstract

Speaking or hearing a language other than English in public should be a normalized experience in the U.S. multicultural and multilingual context, particularly in densely populated urban contexts. However, anti-immigrant and xenophobic narratives bolstered by the Trump Administration have emboldened supporters whose actions express their discomfort and disdain of the “other” (Patel, 2018). As a result, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in discriminatory actions toward racialized and minoritized people in the United States, including youth of color in schools (Williams, 2018), who are heard speaking their home and/or community languages. As researchers and practitioners, we are concerned with how these experiences affect youth of color in our schools, specifically within literacy-learning contexts where for decades we have urged practitioners to leverage and sustain the communicative practices of non-dominant youth in schools.

We argue that while we must continue circulating messages to treat youth languages as resources for learning, we must simultaneously consider what it means for youth of color to be heard speaking languages other than English within schools and other “white” public spaces (Page & Thomas, 1994) given the physical and material consequences of being heard speaking differently (Flores & Rosa, 2015). We draw on the notion of white public spaces (Page & Thomas, 1994) to consider how classrooms themselves, even those absent of white people, can represent white public spaces where racialized and minoritized youth become highly surveilled, monitored, and expected to perform in ways that support white sensitivities (Hill, 2008). Since language mediates educational interactions in schools (Wortham & Reyes, 2011), and is central to how we perform these expectations, we must attend to ruptures in expected norms, specifically when youth of color are deemed unteachable or not capable of learning based on their linguistic abilities. We will consider how a culturally sustaining pedagogical perspective (Paris & Alim, 2017) must prepare minoritized youth for being read and heard as racialized beings in our current sociopolitical context.

Drawing on widely publicized youth created social media artifacts that document language discrimination, we make a case for purposeful and meaningful ways to sustain youth multilingual literacies for a researcher and teacher education audience. We must turn our attention to the work youth of color are already doing to make the racializing and minoritizing experiences in schools clear for the larger public given the viral nature of youth digital artifacts documenting discriminatory experiences in schools. Additionally, through teacher interviews, we examine teachers’ perspectives of how they are processing/understanding the current events taken toward minoritized people for speaking a language other than English. We also analyze how teachers might engage youth in discussions related to the discriminatory events of linguicism in addition to how teachers utilize their position as educators to support youth as a way to re-imagine the future sociopolitical contexts. Lastly, this paper contributes to the call for literacy educators and researchers to recognize the discriminatory experiences of youth of color rooted in colonizing and oppressive actions that continue to be upheld in white public spaces.

Authors

• Danny C. Martinez, University of California - Davis

• Javier Rojo, University of California - Davis

• Rubén A. González, Stanford University