The Raciolinguistic Embodiment of a Black Teacher Hearing Black Language Speakers in an Elementary Classroom

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 3:45 pm - Gold 1
  In Roundtable Session: Healing and Honoring: Black Teachers' Practices Across Time

Abstract

In this study, I employ ethnographic case study methodology to illuminate how a Black elementary teacher leverages her bilingualism in Black Language to hear her Black students. Drawing on classrooms observations and interviews, I utilized Teacher Embodiment as Lived Pedagogy (Author, 2021) and raciolinguistic perspectives (Rosa & Flores, 2017) as analytic frames to understand how Yvette’s (pseudonym) racial and linguistic life experiences were part and parcel to her pedagogy. Yvette’s lived experiences from her Black motherhood permeated into how she heard Black Language speakers in her classroom. This paper theorizes how diversifying the teacher workforce with Black teachers may ameliorate the bottleneck of realizing culturally sustaining pedagogies in classrooms.

Author

• Alice Y. Lee, University of California - Riverside