Destabilizing Teachers’ Language Ideologies: A Genealogy of Grammar in U.S. Schools

• In Event: Critical Approaches to Studying Language Ideologies: Race, Power, and Resistance

Abstract

This genealogy of grammar teaching in U.S. schools seeks to uncover why standard language ideologies are so difficult to deconstruct. We work from a theory of change that suggests making invisible norms visible facilitates their undoing. Further, laying bare the historical origins of those norms removes their mystique, reducing their hold on the imagination as the solitary possibility for how things are. Articulating the historical mechanisms that crafted present understandings destabilizes normative thinking. By analyzing the text and context of 18th and 19th century grammar texts we seek to destabilize the unquestioned norm of standardized English, and in turn to erode the foundation on which teachers’ standard language ideologies are built.

Authors

• Mike Metz, University of Missouri

• Kelly Leavitt, University of Missouri