Composition Forum 44, Summer 2020
http://compositionforum.com/issue/44/

Engaging the Perpetual ‘But’: Rachael’s Story

Rachael Shapiro

While teaching a course on writing pedagogy for pre-service pre-K—5th grade teachers who are also literacy studies majors, I hope to foster in students critical reflection on the power and consequence of language and literacy. Through reading selections like Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, June Jordan’s Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan, and Rosina Lippi-Green’s English with an Accent, I hope to situate the teaching of writing within its larger history and context of racism and inequality. The central writing task at the conclusion of this unit asks my students to compose a teaching philosophy that describes how they will work with diverse writers in their own classrooms. For many students, their philosophy statements address how they’ll attend to universal design, offer individuated or differentiated instruction, or include picture books and other materials that represent racial and linguistic diversity in their curriculum. More overtly political philosophies have taken “tacit English-Only policies” (Horner and Trimbur) to task, suggesting that they will encourage students to use their home languages in discussion and freewriting scenarios. Recently, however, one white student wrote that she would protect her students of color from the harms of standardized English by not correcting their grammar.

While I was certainly excited to see the degree to which this student had come to understand the violence that standard language ideology carries for students of color and speakers of non-standard varieties of English or other languages, I became immediately concerned for the moment when she might one day submit this document or one like it as part of her application materials to become a teacher in a local public school district. How would a public elementary school administrator react to such a statement? I was faced with a conundrum: should I celebrate the student’s advocacy for linguistic justice, fallout be damned? Or should I intervene and encourage her to temper her statement and advocate for language diversity in less risky and controversial ways?

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