Upending Colonial Harm in ELA

Due February 3, 2020

What assumptions about students, learning, and English education undergird your school’s required curriculum and/or and assessments? To what extent do these assumptions reflect the “colonial legacies” explored by de los Rios et. al. (2019) in the assigned reading?

What readings, activities, and/or lesson plans might you use or have you used that might “upend colonial practices” in education?

In your response, please remember to view the rubric. A brief overview:

  1. Approximately 200-250 words
  2. Specific reference to the assigned reading.
  3. Description of lesson idea, activity, resource, and/or mentor text. Please include a link to the resource when possible!

 

 

15 thoughts on “Upending Colonial Harm in ELA”

  1. Hi all, you can post your responses as comments under my original post. You are NOT required to reply to another classmate (though of course you are welcome to! Also, please note that you won’t see your comment right away after you hit publish, as I need to “approve” it first. But once you hit “submit” it will be saved on the site for my review.

  2. In my current school, in correlation with the ELA department, there are a plethora of assumptions that correlate to their performance. As my school is a very data-driven school, my administration is constantly “grouping” students based on race, and using this to justify their high/low performance. For example, Asian students at my school are likely to perform much higher than black students at my school—simply due to quantitative data collection. The data does not take anything else into account other than race and grades on several types of examinations (comprehension assessments, state exams, etc).

    The school is also very anti-multilingual ELA classrooms. Allowing students to write or read in another language, to them, is “counterproductive.” They find it to be “not helpful” to “ALL” students, therefore it’s not something that should be utilized. If it can’t help “the majority,” or reach “everyone,” my admin frown upon it.

    Additionally, the curriculums that are in place in the ELA department before coming into this school simply grazed the conversations of “colonization, enslavement, and anti-Blackness,” like de los Rios mentions, but does not dive into it enough for students to discuss, grasp, or understand any meaning. Therefore, I have reconstructed the unit (specifically on TKAM) because these are conversations inherently important in today’s society. Speaking about colonization, enslavement, and anti-Blackness is at the core of TKAM and skipping over it is a disservice to students overall.

    To start off, I began discussing where bias comes from and how bias is a social construct from families and friends we grow up around. I used a TEDTalk to bridge the gap between myself and my students.

    https://www.ted.com/talks/verna_myers_how_to_overcome_our_biases_walk_boldly_toward_them

  3. Although my school does not have a required or scripted curriculum, the administration promotes teaching styles and approaches that reinforce colonial assumptions about students and how/why they learn. Being in a single-gender school, the English department tailors its texts to ones that are often popular among students. However, the text selections perpetuate assumptions like “students in our school are only interested in stories concerning friendships or romance” and “students will only succeed if they read canonical works.” This is a challenging approach; in some ways, I have noticed that my students are interested in stories that relate to their current experiences, and that they need to be familiar with canonical texts to keep up in a college lecture hall. In other ways, these assumptions produce gatekeeper ELA classrooms, limiting the stories that my students interact with and significantly impacting their worldview (de los Rios et al., 2019). While I need to follow my department’s (and school’s) standards, I do try to encourage the practice of using a critical lens and gathering multiple sides of a story, which often transforms characters into much rounder figures that my students are more interested in. Two texts that my students are always interested in that promote alternative perspectives are “How to Write About Africa” (an essay by Binyavanga Wainaina) and “A Small Needful Fact” (a poem by Ross Gay). In his essay, Wainaina dismantles stereotypes about Africa, using humor and imagery to make readers feel uncomfortable in their assumptions about a place they know little about. Gay’s poem is best read aloud, as its form helps tell a story about Eric Garner and his legacy. During our initial reading of the poem, my students are often confused; after researching Eric Garner’s passing, the performance of the poem becomes extremely powerful and sparks some really interesting conversations about the stories that are told to us via media outlets.

    Texts:
    “How to Write About Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina: https://granta.com/how-to-write-about-africa/
    “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay: https://poets.org/poem/small-needful-fact

  4. During my student teaching practicum, I noted alarming assumptions made about students, especially those of the Caribbean and African diasporas: that standard English prevailed, their native vernaculars were undermined – and students had to present themselves in ways that conformed to perpetuated colonial ideas of what “academic” English is perceived as in schools now. This resulted in students becoming discouraged to participate, and disengaging with traditionally canonical texts that did not reflect their experiences, but further contributed to standardized ideas of English.

    De los Rios et al. (2019) describes the “standard” of English set during colonial times, leading to linguistic erasure of Indigenous groups, and further reinforced centuries after through American colonial expansion. As the author notes, these students are now seen as “linguistically deviant,” wherein there is an emphasis on speaking a standard version of English that is determined to be the “academic” language (de los Rios et al., 2019).

    “Code” switching of language, as de los Rios et al. (2019) writes, has been encouraged in institutions, but this has resulted in students’ “home” language or vernaculars taking lesser importance in educational contexts thereby deeming them less academically equipped. Enforcing this “code” preserves a dangerous colonial narrative that actively erases and confines linguistic and cultural diversity while embracing problematic notions of academic success.

    Countering these colonial legacies is reminiscent of the ideas bell hooks (1994) presents to educators in Teaching to Transgress. She suggests that differing vernaculars and ways of speaking in the classroom “forges a space for alternative cultural production … different ways of thinking and knowing that [are] crucial to creating a counter-hegemonic worldview” (hooks, 1994, p. 172). As teachers, we should allow vernacular and language to co-exist in the classroom, establishing a sense of solidarity among our students and peers through open discussion and multimodal activities, including song and poetry as avenues to English expression. Rather than erasure, we should, as hooks suggests, use “not understanding what someone says as a space to learn (p. 172).

    De los Rios et al. offers hope in a time of diminishing and harmful colonial narratives, and reflected in the words of bell hooks, we instructors must embrace a “call for the acknowledgement and celebration of diverse voices, and consequently of diverse language and speech [which will] necessarily disrupt the primacy of standard English” (hooks, 1994, p. 173).

    Reference:
    hooks, bell. (1994). Language: Teaching new worlds/new words. Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY: Routledge. Retrieved from http://sites.utexas.edu/lsjcs/files/2018/02/Teaching-to-Transcend.pdf

  5. In the school that I am currently teaching in, there is a strict curriculum that we follow, that has a strong focus on writing strategies and ‘incorporation’ on writers of color. The major flaw within this system is that most of the writers that the students are learning about are not authors or characters these students could relate to. While they are stories on Native Americans and Spanish adolescents, the students in my class cannot relate to their socioeconomic status or the experiences that they share because it is foreign to them. In the school’s attempt to be culturally relevant, they are simply trying to include literature from writers of color to fill the gap of cultural inclusiveness. The assessments that follow are based on students’ connection with the characters and building text-to-self connections within the stories. Almost all of my students struggle to come up with any type of connection with the characters because of the differences within their culture, or experiences in their daily lives. This ideology goes back to de los Rios’ article, in which it states “ethnic studies approaches to ELA are not simply about the inclusion of literature by writers of color or the celebration that people of color also have/had “heroes and ‘great civilizations”. Including all of these writers of color may be culturally inclusive to some populations, but it should not be the basis of a diverse ELA curriculum within a public school in New York City.

    Since the curriculum is strictly reinforced by my administration, I have placed secondary resources within my classrooms and have delivered different forms of content through learning stations that include writers that the students may relate to, especially in the form of poetry. I have also begun a novel study within my classroom that takes place once a week, in which students vote on the book that we will be reading every month and is inclusive to their needs. Some of the books that we have already completed are, House on Mango Street, Cuba 15, and The Tequila Worm.

    “BRAVO! : Poems About Amazing Hispanics”: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780805098761

  6. The core texts at my school are very white and very male. Anchor texts for 11th grade are The Crucible, The Great Gatsby, In the Time of the Butterflies (selected by a student vote,) and Macbeth. For the 12th grade, students read The Stranger, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Othello. We are encouraged to follow a pacing calendar so all students are covering the same texts at roughly the same time. Outside of that, I have a lot of freedom about what I want to focus on and what non-fiction texts I want to use to support those ideas. I try to infuse the fictional works with current events, social justice and anything that can make these works more relatable to my students. Last year, when I taught “When I was Puerto Rican,” we spent almost a week discussing a NY Times article on Lin Manuel Miranda and the struggles he faced with his identity as a Latinx student going to Hunter High School. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/theater/hamilton-puerto-rico-lin-manuel-miranda.html?searchResultPosition=4

    Many of my students are recent immigrants who speak a non-English language at home. I have found that the biggest predictor of how a student will perform is not their level of English-speaking when they arrive but rather the rigor of their education before they came to the U.S.. I also have a handful of students that most likely have undiagnosed learning disabilities that were not recognized due to their language differences. I provide students with alternate language versions of the text when available, Google translated versions of the text, and texts with expanded glossaries as scaffolds. Their goal is ultimately to read and write in English.

    Students are minoritized by not only the texts that they are assigned but also by the notion that they must pass the English Regents in order to graduate. With other Regents exams, students who have special needs accommodations may be given the option of having an exam read to them. ENL students may have exams read to them in their home language or be provided with a translated text. However, these options are not available for the English Regents as it is supposed to be a test of their ability to read and write in English. This makes this *required* exam unpassable for some students.

    The notion of restorative justice is a powerful one. Teaching students that “race is a social construction, while racism is embedded in the US political economy; when they interrogate multiple conceptions of justice (Tuck & Yang,2018) and, with their students, ask“justice for whom?”; and when they attend to the power of language in shaping our biases and commitment.” This should be a goal for all educators. And it truly can be a doorway for students to actually relate to and engage with texts.

  7. In the school where I currently teach, the ELA teachers follow a set curriculum but are able to supplement the curriculum with videos, supplemental texts, and other resources. In the 8th grade, the students started the year with Lord of the Flies. As much as we tried to make this relevant, many students could not make a connection to the text or did not see how the lessons in the book could be relevant to their own lives. I feel that as a school, there is an attempt to include authors and characters of different backgrounds however, these different characters are not necessarily ones that the students can relate to in their daily lives or experiences. In the classes that I have taught, the student population is a mix of Asian, white, and Spanish students. While my school tries to include texts that represent different cultures and characters of different backgrounds (I Am Malala for example), the students cannot relate to the experiences of the characters because it is far removed and very different from their own lives.
    While all teachers must follow the curriculum, my co-teachers and I try our best to include supplemental texts and videos to make the core text more relevant. While teaching Lord of the Flies, we assigned a mask project which asked the students to define their inner and outer selves (what others see and who they really feel they are), we asked the students to make a connection to LOTF by asking them to make a connection to one of the characters (either a similarity or difference). The students found this engaging and a good way to connect more closely with the characters. We also brought into the unit, the question of good vs. evil and asked the students what makes someone evil as well as what makes good people different from so-called evil people. We read an article that discussed the “D-factor” which talks about sadists, narcissists, and psychopaths and had them relate this article to Lord of the Flies. The main focus of the assignment was to relate the lines “The beast in all of us” and “Mankind’s essential illness” to the article and align the article to a character in the text (Jack or Ralph). The students found this interesting and also something that they could relate to because they see it in the media and in movies.
    In general, I feel that my school does not know how to address differences in culture, religion, or language in the classroom. In one of my self-contained classes, we allow one of the students to translate work if we did not provide him with a translated worksheet but I know that it would not be accepted if I allowed him to write in his native language. The school steers away from multilingual classrooms where students would speak more than one language and I find that that makes instruction more difficult for everyone. This relates to Rios statement about “hierarchizing English as superior to local languages’ (2019, 3). The administration does not feel that all languages have equal power to English and thus, even in ESL classrooms there is a push to write and read in English exclusively. I feel that it is important for students to learn and write in English but I do not feel that suppressing their native language or dialogue is the best way to approach this. I feel that we should underline the significance of students’ languages and dialogues and find a way to incorporate them into the classroom.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6211439/Study-finds-psychopaths-narcissists-sadists-share-dark-core-personality.html

  8. De Los Rios et. al (2019) writes that “Ethnic studies approaches to ELA are not simply about the inclusion of literature by writers of color or the celebration that people of color also have/had ‘heroes’ and ‘great’ civilizations’ (p.5). Within our school curriculum, while the traditional canon is taught—our teachers strive to make cultural connections in everyday lessons. I often will acknowledge the differences in race between myself and my students because It is my personal belief that if I don’t acknowledge it, there’s a weird elephant in the room.

    As we move into the end of the school year in my school, there is a movement in the English Language Arts department to eliminate two books from our Eighth grade curriculum: The first is The Fault in Our Stars, which I agree is not a book that should be taught to the population of students I work with. The second, To Kill a Mockingbird. Mockingbird is incredibly difficult to teach due to the language the book possesses, but also during the time of year in spring—it creates more frustration for teachers and students than actual dive into the source material and issues the book presents. I don’t believe we should get rid of Mockingbird because the approach I take is how did these barriers created in the book originate. Students initial reaction is because of racism but Mockingbird specifically presents That book presents many ideas to force those discussions—whether it’s Jim Crow (black and white), The Radley family (religion), Dolphus Raymond, The Ewells—those conversations can help explore why American society is constructed the way it is. That may not challenge why we are reading a book about racism written by a white person, or acknowledge how voices of color are silenced by the curriculum as Del Rios(2019) presents, but it does explore the questions of who is considered privileged and who is considered underprivileged and what contributes to this process.

    A specific activity to help bridge these ideas of class and the advantaged vs. the disadvantaged, is in the form of journal writing. One of my favorite lessons that I have developed is to have the students write two journal entries from the perspective of Tom Robinson during his trial and Boo Radley at the beginning of the novel. I ask students to write their thoughts about how each character would feel about how the town views them individually. Afterwards, I ask students to examine their writing and consider what contributes to the isolation of both of these characters. Through that discussion we find interesting conclusions based on student response.

  9. I acknowledge the privilege that I have to be able to teach in a school that requires almost nothing of me in terms of mandated examinations or curriculum. I have almost complete curricular and textual freedom to determine what and how students learn. I am lucky in this regard, but I use my own educational experience to inform the biases and assumptions made about students and about fact when creating learning experiences for my own students. I recall that all of the authors I was taught in high school English classes were written by dead white people. I recall the assumption that everyone on Earth spoke English and that learning multiple languages was more of a show of academic force than a necessity to effectively communicate with others. These assumptions privilege English-speaking and Eurocentric ways of knowing and reinforce Britain’s aim in colonialism to begin with: “to civilize the world” (de los Rios 2). Anyone that does not comply is uncivilized and uneducated.
    One thing that I do every semester to attempt to upend these colonial legacies within education is to teach Jamila Lysicott’s “Three Ways to Speak English.” Nothing causes me physical pain like a student referring to the way they speak as “broken English.” We view Lysicott’s TED talk multiple times and discuss any implicit biases we have about others’ use of language before agreeing to ban the term from our classroom. ELL students are able and encouraged to read and respond to the text in English and in their home language. This ties in neatly with de los Rios, et al recommendation for expanded ethnic studies programs. I seek to incorporate as many stories by marginalized individuals as possible, and as often as possible these are written in dialect to honor those dialects as true, unbroken English. Using this technique has definitely contributed to the deep relationships I have with students and helps to foster relationships between students as well (Sleeter 17).
    Reference: https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/84024 Sleeter, Christine E “The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies”

  10. Students falling through the cracks in our curriculum is an enormous concern of mine. I actively attack any stigma posed against any and all of my students that would negatively affect them. The article “upending Colonial Harm” discussed the disparities endured by minorities within Anerica, “We recognize that how students of color do school in ELA contexts often mark and stigmatize them as ‘types of students'”. It is exactly this stigma that I believe has been responsible for holding back so many students from achieving their true potential.

    A huge problem which the article talks about but does not directly state seems to be the standards. If the educational standards are actually written under the control of white supremacy, how should those standards be rewritten? What would they look like?

    Language and education has been historically weaponized to oppress populations. In a world in which social mobility has only a few centuries of practice, the denial of teaching populations to read and write maintained power in the hands of the powerful. Even the Bible was held under the seldom spoken Latin language to, potentially, maintain a hierarical position until 1611.

    The debate really seems to come down to standards. Ending Jim Crow and other systemic tools of segregation required a measure to ensure that there is an equal standard applied to all students to ensure we push all of our students to achieve and never place them in the category of the “other.” While these methods have absolutely created a stigma around groups of people, I believe the heart of the problem is treating individuals according to their group of people, which was the entire basis of colonialism.

    While there are many dialects used in our classrooms, South American, African American, and the incredibly overlooked Appalacian dialects have been deemed outside of the standard.

    My school has a diverse and yet open curriculum. I see more opportunities to reach my students than I did in California. My lessons would reflect the cultures of as many of my students as possible while also exposing them to different experiences and intellectual diversity to allow them an opportunity to grow and develop as a well rounded individual. I would play to the strengths of my students and design a curriculum that maintained the standards while allowing students to convey them in different ways, including song, technology and poetry.

  11. Perhaps the most alarming belief held by my schools’ educators is that they have done the work and completely moved beyond their implicit biases and are now fully able to educate our students in a way that would not cause harm. They operate under the cloak of being culturally relevant and proclaim to be a school community which effectively uses restorative justice practices.

    The 7th/8th English teacher has been teaching for 13 years and seems to interpret culturally relevant to mean literature with characters of color so that students can identify with them paired with very low expectations.The article makes the comment that “Ethnic Studies approaches to ELA are not simply about the inclusion of literature by writers of color or the celebration that people of color also have/had “heroes and ‘great’ civilizations” (5). While his inclusion of writers of color can be seen as commendable, to me it reads as pacification or doing the absolute bare minimum. There is no discussion of the assumptions made about black youth or their elders in the texts that are chosen for the students to read. Most days it seems as though there is no intentionality. His targets in the classroom are closer aligned to having students be compliant than ensuring that they learn.

    Being a special education teacher and not a content lead is hard for me this year but watching his practices make me want to delve further into alternative modes of assessment that might allow for students to express what they know in ways that will privilege their ways of communicating and showcase their ability to understand and even critique a text. I might do this by allowing them to remix a text or respond via video as most of my students are aspiring Youtubers.

  12. The last school I taught at had a semi-set curriculum which was created by an outside consultant that would regularly meet with the head of the English department or aka the English coach. Ironically, the curriculum wasn’t doing the students any justice and often it wasn’t common core aligned. The head of the department would clash with this individual because the curriculum was lacking. In my opinion it disregarded the student population at hand and naturally assumed that by reading a book by a Latino/a that it was culturally sustaining but that it would also engage the students. The other assumption that was made by this person was that the curriculum had to be dumbed down to the point that the learning objectives were simplistic in nature and lacked any real rigor because this person believed the students weren’t capable meeting of the standards.
    It was interesting to see that most of the pushback that the English coach received came not from the principal but from this white man who had created this curriculum. I had had a conversation with the coach who happened to express this sentiment with me. And so how this relates to the De Rios article is this idea that the big decisions in education that influence or are related to minoritized groups are created by individuals that aren’t minorities or apart of a marginalized group.
    I don’t necessarily know what activities I would do that would upend this colonial framework. But I think that I would focus on incorporating texts that aren’t really from the cannon and that I would allow for students to have discussions that revolve around topics such as decolonization. If the curriculum was set, I would still try to subvert it by implementing supplemental texts. And lastly, I would allow students to express their feelings about this topic through some sort of poetry/spoken word/ or even fiction writing.

  13. The article brings up many interesting ideas about what “colonial” language is? There is no doubt that there is an ideal way to speak that is taught in schools. I too have said on multiple occasions not to speak as if you are with friends or in the streets. However, that was more in reference to when students cursed or used inappropriate language. In terms of their normal speak, I have never tried to call students out ion that, unless it appeared in their writing. The issue here is that fact that we are in a sense trying to take their language away. For these students, the “hood” way they speak or “slang” is the only way many have communicated throughout their lives. Suddenly trying to get them to speak differently is difficult for them. Los Rios mentions that there is an ideology among schools of labeling certain speak as “sophisticated” or “uneducated”. However, these students are still able to get across complex idea through the way they speak. Though it may not be traditional academic speak, the thought and meaning behind what they are saying still exists. Rather than try to inhibit their words, adapting lessons to meet their needs would be more beneficial to the talents of these kids. Incorporation spoken work workshops where students convey an idea from a text through lyrics and song writing. Creating song lyrics or hip hop verses. It would also be interesting to see how students can restructure old text into their modern way of speaking. AN idea mentioned in the class where students can rewrite an old tale in a more modern fashion and having them incorporate “slang” would give students more creativity and empower their identities more.

  14. Being required to follow a curriculum that is almost exclusively focused on the alignment between content and learning standards is difficult to work with, particularly in a struggling high school that is itself located in an area of the South Bronx that has seen its fair share of problems that can be traced to systematic inequality and racist tendencies that afflict bodies of color. Within the context of English and the use of “colonial” English (or “proper” English), these difficulties manifest themselves in the ELA curriculum through the robotic method of teaching that is recommended for classroom teachers to implement in preparation for the ELA Regents. Students are then grouped into different categories based on their perceived “mastery” of English which essentially means that they will be able to score high on the Regents exam. What this means for the rest of the students is heartbreaking and an academic tragedy.

    Students who fail to meet the standards and expectations, which are heavily influenced to this day by Euro-centric ideologies, are viewed in a more dismissive and low-performing manner. When thinking about and discussing the impact that this has on historically marginalized students, the narrative for how students are perceived is even worse. ELA classrooms, while viewed as “universally teachable, are heavily racialized through “do’s” and “don’ts” that inhibit and “other” bodies of color whom have struggled with the results of British linguistic imperialism (de los Rios 3).

    In order to combat this level of imperialistic English, I’ve had to take a position in my school in which I teach a text or lesson that I believe are of the most benefit to helping my students heal from a Euro-centric ELA Curriculum and ask for forgiveness later. There are moments where I’m unable to do such a task however, so I must find alternative ways to ensure that students are able to sustain and build up their current language skills. Code switching is another skill that my students must learn to develop in order to navigate through different environments and situations and, due to a systematically inequitable era, people who might view their ability to speak and comprehend English as less than.

  15. Assumptions about students, learning, and English education that undergird my school’s required curriculum includes the belief that my students speak English as a first language, are only interested in works written by white men, and are reading at home. My school has a, roughly, 50-50 student population, where students are either white or Hispanic. Of the Hispanic student population, a majority of the students were either born outside of America, or speak Spanish as a first language. As such, the school’s curriculum leaves little room to accommodate their language demands, and can lead students to “fend” for themselves in a sense. Though we have a program that accommodates these language demands, many teachers do not provide further support for students. Furthermore, our curriculum also believes students are interested in works written merely by white men, as these are the only books we carry. While I try to incorporate supplemental texts by writers of color, it is difficult to get students interested in a book where they cannot relate to the author. The last assumption that undergird’s my school’s required curriculum includes the belief that my students are reading at home to improve their literary comprehension skills.

    These assumptions are rooted in colonial legacies that are ignorant towards diversity. De los Ríos furthers the need to move away from these legacies, stating the need to “…acknowledg[e] ELA classrooms as sites of ongoing racialization, ELA educators must also understand the historical contours of harm inflicted by outfield and recognize how these legacies continue to impact our classrooms and students” (de los Ríos 2). One activity I have used in the classroom to “upend colonial practices” in education includes provide assignment instructions in multiple languages, giving students assignments where they are able to write in their native language, and providing multiple opportunities for students to share experiences outside of the classroom—to get to know them better.

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