The statement that resonated most with me from the readings
this week follows Ibrahim's discussion of language use as a method of
identification and belonging for the African students in his study. He states,
on page 365, that "one invests where one sees oneself mirrored." I
was immediately troubled by the statement. The question for me became: If I am
not a mirror of my students, in appearance, cultural or socioeconomic background,
language variety, or otherwise (of course, there are dozens of categorizations
that separate me from any one of my students), how will they become invested in
me and, by extension, the course?
Ibrahim uses this concept of mirroring as part of a larger
call to action, asking teachers to "First, identify the different sites in
which our students invest their identities and desires, and, second, develop
materials that engage our students’ raced, classed gendered, sexualized, and
abled identities” (366). This allowed me to then read his "where one sees
oneself mirrored" as a request that students see themselves represented in
my pedagogy, my assignments, and the day-to-day teaching of the class. This is
somewhat of a relief, in that it takes some of the burden off of me to be a
hip-hop scholar or a fluent speaker of AAE or any other variety of English I
might encounter in the classroom. At the same time, there has to be room in my
pedagogy to allow for students to teach me what they know, what their practices
are, what they see in the world that feels relevant to them, and what they
could be opened up to based on their backgrounds and experiences.
This is where I see the "critical awareness"
discussed in Alim to be so important. Asking students to do ethnographies and
other projects in which they have to pay attention to their language, something
to which they may not be accustomed regardless of how "standard"
their English is, seems like it could be a revelatory experience for both them
and me. It might also help navigate some of the difficult territory that I
envisioned getting into when we spoke about the Matsuda and Matsuda article and
the notion of "teaching the non-dominant forms." If I’m not “teaching”
it, but I’m learning it based on their research (as Ibrahim says, according to
a Freireian model), I don’t see how it could be oppressive to students who
reject non-standard English or to those who speak a non-standard variety.
With
this in mind, it seems to me that part of cultivating that awareness has to include asking students about the
influences on their language that exist beyond the family, their peers, and the
classroom. It has to move into a discussion of popular culture and the movies,
music, websites, etc. that affect their ideas about what should and shouldn’t
be said and what constitutes cool/weird/uncool, modern/outdated language. If we deny popular culture in language
learning, we’re denying the tremendous effect it has on our students’ lives,
identities, and relationships. As Pennycook (quoting Grossberg) states in
Chapter 5: “Popular culture is implicated in the ‘multilayered, fragmented
collection of meanings, values, and ideas that we both inherit and construct
and which largely define our taken-for-granted interpretations of the world’”
(81). If students are already doing this “tak[ing]-for-granted,” asking them to
be more observant and critical about the language they're hearing and speaking seems appropriate.
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