What Exactly Has Race Got to Do With a Nice Field Like Literacy Studies?

• In Event: Critical Literacy for Racial Justice: Cultivating Equity Through Intersectionality

Abstract

The main question I am asking in this presentation is: How and why race plays a role in literacy studies, namely learning a second language, more specifically learning English as a Second Language? To answer this question, I am advancing three theoretical arguments. First, race works exactly like a language. That is, race has its own grammar, syntax, morphology and phonology. Second, indeed race is language which we speak on a daily basis. We speak race in and through the way in which we dress, walk, do our hair, make-up, etc. If this is the case, third, then race is directly related to second language learning. To show case my theoretical arguments, I will discuss two critical ethnographic research projects I conducted in two high schools in Ontario, Canada, I will show how a group of second language learners, exclusively continental Africans, speak Blackness; that is, how Blackness influences heavily (if not determines) their second language acquisition. This process of speaking Blackness begins with an encounter with the ‘language of race’ which they are not familiar with when they first arrive in Canada. Basically, they ‘discover’ their own Blackness, I will argue, and this discovery engenders what I am calling a semiotic of identity where they become Black. This semiotic of becoming directs where second language learners invest their identities, which in turn influences the pleasure of what they learn and how they learn it. I am asking, in conclusion: pedagogically what do we do with this semiotic of becoming in a nice field like literacy studies? A substantial conclusion in answering this pedagogical question is, there is a need to move from literacy studies to critical literacy studies as endorsed by the Literacy Research Association (2016).

Author

• Awad Ibrahim, University of Ottawa