by Jacqueline Mallais
This week on Instagram @TEACHFORTHECULTURE posted “you could have ‘perfect english’ and still be ineffective in reaching and teaching the youth you are trying to reach.” Thousands responded to the post and the hashtags #CantColonizeTheseSounds! #EmbraceWhomYouAreAndTheLanguageThatComesWithThat #AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) #Patois and #theirlanguage. The discussion surrounding the post was passionate and clear that the ideas of language and power are a very real issue in education today.
Linguistic prestige is directly related to power and all that it implies and these educators were highly aware of the consequences language-use choice had on their students. Some mentioned how their students opened up more and participated more when their teacher went “island” as they called it, because it made them feel like they were a part of a social group that valued them and the language they spoke. Some mentioned that teachers in certain districts would be fired for using “substandard” English. And still others spoke of a guilt when they accidentally code-switched in front of students.
The language of the dominant social group clearly carries prestige. I never more clearly understood this than when I followed the thread and found myself listening to Jamila Lyiscott’s Ted Talk titled 3 Ways To Speak English. In four minutes, she explains that the status of a language is what you can do with it and we need to not only be aware of this but change the way we think about and value different language variations and code switching.
With a snap election at play here in Canada last week, the topic of code switching brought to mind an interesting commentary on how politicians code switch. The discussion was from our last election four years ago and it was about how Jagmeet Singh was an expert at code switching and how it worked to his advantage. He is able to authentically relate to a wide range of voters of different ages and different backgrounds. He never comes off as sounding performative. South of the border, Barrack Obama did the same. He is able to customize his word choice and register moving easily between discourse on policy and greeting basketball coaches, sounding both authentic and relatable. These politicians are able to do this so effectively because it is truly who they are. Anyone else attempting these switches just sound disingenuous. We see here just how connected the languages we speak are connected with our identities and how they wield power.
In further following comments on the Instagram post, Dr. April Baker-Bell is mentioned along with her book Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, and Pedagogy. I am now eagerly awaiting my Amazon package. The book has been lauded as an invaluable resource for everyone in education today. I can’t wait to look into and put into practice more antiracist language pedagogies. Learning about and being aware of language variations and their value is imperative for all teachers. Deciding what to do with them is the challenge. What do we do with a variation? https://clpe.org.uk/poetryline/poems/what-do-we-do-variation
