Tatiana Schlote-Bonne Week 4

Students in my GEL class are reading Heavy by Kiese Laymon and we were discussing a chapter in which the narrator and his friends hanging out in middle school, and one of my students said, "It's hard to read the dialogue because they don't talk normal." I almost groaned but didn't. Instead, I calmly said, "You know, let's discuss that thought for a moment" and then went on a lecture about how when we say things like "this way of speaking is or isn't normal we end up otherizing groups of people and saying that our own version of English is what's normal, and that's not okay." Later, a student in the class, who's Black, emailed me and we talked about this incident, how white students can easily and unknowingly invalidate, erase, and outcast people of color in the classroom. We discussed the importance of inclusivity in the classroom. All this is to say that I do agree with the CCCC statement, and that following some rule of "standard English" invalidates and outcasts students from marginalized groups. 
Regarding where I stand on the controversy of teaching standard English--unless language is incoherent or fundamentally flawed, I don't think it needs to be "fixed." I look for the message and effort I see them putting into their writing. 

Comments

  1. Jose Di PaolaSeptember 23, 2020 at 12:11 PM

    That's a great example; I'm glad you took the opportunity to talk to the class and it's even better that you could communicate with a student who reached out to you. It's interesting that the statement "They don't talk normal" is exactly the kind of rhetoric the student was complaining about. It shows the cognitive dissonance that our idea of proper English is often not the lingua franca we actually use.

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