Linguistic justice is to recognize every way of communication (or language) equally, which ties back to a lot of topics we have discussed throughout the semester, such as deficit view, raciolinguistic ideologies, translanguaging, ect. As Professor Phuong and Venegas argued in their article, linguistic and disability justice should not be fixed, but rather should be projects informed by the marginalized communities. It is really thought-provoking to think about justice as a notion without a universal definition or criteria. Thinking of rights-based approaches and policies designed to deal with one of the many facets of systemic oppressions, it does make sense that we should not treat people as independent labels. Instead, educators and policymakers need to view the students as people that experience the intersectionality of hundreds of thousands of "labels," which are interconnected with one another. This complicated dynamics makes it harder for educators and policymakers to serve for the students.
Valente's and Baker-Bell's papers provide vivid examples of how educators could facilitate linguistic and disability justice in educational settings. Valente shows an example of how the teacher integrates LSF with spoken French. It is surprising to see how the teacher could translanguage between sign language and spoken language. This also (potentially) sheds light on how linguistic repertoire is not limited to spoken languages. This practice also transforms the traditional practices that isolate deaf students from their hearing peers by meaningfully engaging those two groups of students. This also reminds us that providing equal educational resources does not ensure educational equality.
Baker-Bell shows the possibility of affirming AAE to African American students by retailing its history. It is really important to affirm the language to the people who speak it. It is also inspiring for me to see that Baker-Bell did not stop in the ivory tower, but brings those theories into practices and actions. I also thought a lot when I was reading that the students wrote letters to policymakers. Because the article by Professor Phuong and Venegas somehow made me realize that there's no perfect policies and thus making one policy would cause some new problems, which makes it feel like policies are useless. However, I then recognized that it is impossible to not have any policies, so all we can do is to make the policymakers more informed and thus improve the policies so that they can take account of more situations and serve for more people's interests.