Developing Racial Literacy in College English Classrooms: Hands-On Strategies to Decenter Whiteness and "Native" English Speakerness

• In Event: Vice-Presidential Session. The Pursuit of Truth "Turnt Up": Considerations for Advancing Racial Literacy Beyond This Space and Time

Abstract

As languages shuttle across different languages, they are not simply touring around distinct linguistic features (Gonzales, 2018; Zhang-Wu, 2021). Instead, they are navigating unequal powers as a result of nation-state and colonial governmentality (Alim et al., 2016; Alim & Smitherman, 2012; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). Because language is a socially constructed concept with its history deeply rooted in colonialism, unequal power relations, and racism (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007; Mignolo, 2009), any discussion of racial literacy must go hand in hand with language and languaging.
While linguistic diversity is a lived reality in American classrooms, individuals are very often “suppressed by monolingual ideologies and monotopic hermeneutics” (Mignolo, 2000, p. 228). From a raciolinguistics perspective (Flores & Rosa, 2015), which approaches language issues from the critical aspect of race, such monolingual ideologies are often deeply associated with whiteness and “white language supremacy” (Inoue, 2019, p. 352) and therefore must be explicitly debunked in academic literacy practices (Ayash, 2016). One key component in raciolinguistics (Flores & Rosa, 2015, 2019) is the concept of white gaze and white listening subjects. According to Flores and Rosa (2015), during multilingual students’ daily communication, they are constantly compared against “standard” English dominated by whiteness and dehumanized as linguistically deficient. While substantial research has been conducted to understand multilingual students’ racialized languaging experiences from a raciolinguistic perspective (e.g., Smith, 2019), there is a lack of scholarship which focuses on educating monolingual, white people about the concept of white gaze and white listening subjects in order to develop their racial literacy.

To fill this void in research, I draw upon raciolinguistics (Flores & Rosa, 2015, 2019) to analyze multilingual and multimodal data collected from classroom-based research, which include students’ papers on their migration history self-inventory, teaching journals and students’ cultural, racial and linguistic self-portrait, in order to introduce two activities that could be used in college English classrooms to decenter whiteness and native English speakerness. My research-based and practitioner-oriented presentation exclusively focuses on hands-on teaching strategies for college English classrooms, a context often home to many future English teachers in K–12 settings yet one that has often been disproportionally represented by whiteness, elitism, and native-English-speakerness. These activities are particularly helpful in instructional contexts dominated by whiteness and monolingualism. Through discussions on raciolinguistics, research into family histories, as well as a linguistic portrait exercise, students from various cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds are invited to engage in critical reflections of their own identities and to raise their racial literacy awareness. It is hoped that by taking these small steps in everyday pedagogical practices to decenter whiteness and shake the zero point of English (Migolo, 2009) by challenging “native” English speakerness (Flores & Aneja, 2017), we move one step further in promoting racial literacy from a language perspective and advocating for culturally, racially, and linguistically minoritized students.

Author

• Qianqian Zhang-Wu, Northeastern University
  Presenting Author