As the culminating week of our educating emergent bilinguals class and the final week of readings, I am once again reminded of the educators role in the lives of emergent bilinguals. As shown in Baker-Bell’s reading, it is very important for emergent bilinguals to gain a critical consciousness about the relationships between language, race, and power. Initially, the class was deeply rooted in anti black linguistic racism because of the environment that they were raised in. They were reprimanded from speaking AAVE in school. They were also made to believe that ebonics was just slang and anyone who used AAVE was less intelligent. However, through Antiracist Black Pedagogy, the students were able to gain a deeper understanding of ebonics. The students learned about the history of resistance within the language and understood the power dynamics and racism behind the devaluation of AAVE. Through this new knowledge students were able to dismantle the ingrained anti black linguistic racism in their own minds and gain pride about their black language. This reading shows how important educators and their pedagogy is in shaping the minds of their students. Therefore, I agree with the Garcia reading and the Phuong & Venegas reading that educators should either come from the community/ share the identities of their students or they put in the effort to gain a deeper understanding of their students and their communities (through talking with families, community engagement, etc). By building that relationship of trust and understanding, educators can have a deeper impact on students while doing good instead of harm.
We also see the importance of having teachers that deeply understand their students and their struggles in the Valente reading where the lead teacher of the LSF class, Vanessa, is deaf and uses LSF (French Sign Language). As mentioned in the reading, throughout the entire interaction between the two students (one deaf and one hearing) and Vanessa, they are situated in a way that the deaf student is able to clearly see the signs, making sure they are included in the conversation. Vanessa also made the hearing student apologize to the deaf student in LSF, holding LSF in the same standard as spoken French. This also reminds me of what we were discussing in class about how the teacher's actions are not only a model for the students that they are directly interacting with in the moment but also students that are observing them. I also really liked the fact that the reading emphasized the importance of the mundanity of the situation. Although these types of interactions should be mundane and everyday, in our current education system that interaction usually wouldn’t happen.
I also found the signposts that Garcia had at the end of the chapter to be especially helpful as it highlights not only advice for teachers, but also the work that advocates, policymakers, and researchers can do. Although in this class we mainly focus on the changes that educators can make in their classroom to best educate emergent bilinguals, it is not only the responsibility of teachers and some things are out of the teacher’s hands. By giving advice to all these people, we can all work together on improving emergent bilingual education. While we are working towards improving, we also need to keep in mind what was discussed in Phuong & Venegas’ reading. There is no one correct way of linguistic justice as all students are different with different identities and intersectionalities.
Thank you Rebecca. I have been confused by the concept of justice as a project for a while. However, after reading your last sentence of the response, I suddenly understood a bit more. It is true that we cannot look different identities separately. Just because of the interconnected nature of students' identities, there is no single approach to justice. Similarly, as a way to justice, education should also be case-by-case.