Hi Hillary!
I really appreciate the question you pose about what the classroom may look like in a world where teachers abandoned the myth of "academic language" and instead built off of the diverse repertoire of linguistic practices that students come into school with. This question reminded me of an activity we did in my Literacies and Social Identities class that I took last fall. In this activity, we were given two pieces of writing from upper-elementary-aged children. One piece was written in AAVE, and the other was written in what is often considered to be "school language." We were then asked to say what we noticed about each piece of writing. After we all gave our answers, we were told that both of the writing samples were written by the same student. While our class identified strengths in both pieces, the strengths we highlighted were different for each one, even though they were by the same child. For me, this emphasized that different ways of languaging allow writers to emphasize different things. Yet when teachers demand that only an imaginary, “single, pure” form of language be used in the classroom, they restrict those possibilities. It shuts students out from expressing themselves in all the ways they can and robs them of opportunities to explore their ideas and identities to their fullest extent. Although I don’t know exactly what a classroom without the concept of “academic language” would look like, because that idea is so deeply entrenched in our educational system, I imagine it would be a space where students could grow, think, and express themselves in ways that we often don't allow them to in the current educational climate.
I really appreciate the question you pose about what the classroom may look like in a world where teachers abandoned the myth of "academic language" and instead built off of the diverse repertoire of linguistic practices that students come into school with. This question reminded me of an activity we did in my Literacies and Social Identities class that I took last fall. In this activity, we were given two pieces of writing from upper-elementary-aged children. One piece was written in AAVE, and the other was written in what is often considered to be "school language." We were then asked to say what we noticed about each piece of writing. After we all gave our answers, we were told that both of the writing samples were written by the same student. While our class identified strengths in both pieces, the strengths we highlighted were different for each one, even though they were by the same child. For me, this emphasized that different ways of languaging allow writers to emphasize different things. Yet when teachers demand that only an imaginary, “single, pure” form of language be used in the classroom, they restrict those possibilities. It shuts students out from expressing themselves in all the ways they can and robs them of opportunities to explore their ideas and identities to their fullest extent. Although I don’t know exactly what a classroom without the concept of “academic language” would look like, because that idea is so deeply entrenched in our educational system, I imagine it would be a space where students could grow, think, and express themselves in ways that we often don't allow them to in the current educational climate.
Thank you for this response, Hillary! I'm glad it gave me an opportunity to think about this experience I had in another one of my Swat classes and relate it to what we're learning now :)