Week 11: Race, language, identity

While reading “Becoming Black” by Ibrahim, I learned more about how students identify with cultural and linguistic influences and how that affects their learning. One quote I found very interesting was,  “Because language is never neutral, learning it cannot and should not be either.” We have discussed about the many diverse students and languages we will have in our classrooms, which implies that we need to teach to these differences. Ibrahim’s proposal is that rap, hip-hop and Black popular culture in general are curriculum sites where learning takes place and identities are formed. By using rap as a tool to teach, this would tie together the student’s investment in learning a specific marginalized language. I believe that rap and hip-hop would be more a site of critique than Ibrahim’s idea of a site of hope because it does not seem very appropriate for a class setting. I understand that it will help link the students’ world and identity with their language, but perhaps there are better ways of doing this. But in thinking this, I have caught myself valorizing my own language and giving it more legitimacy than Black English. This relates back to our class discussion on what makes Standard English and how we should value other forms of English in the classroom. I like the ESL pedagogy of engaging one’s identity and investment into their learning, but in my own classroom, I would maybe include other authentic texts that relate to the students or make sure the rap lyrics were appropriate. 

I thought the article “Cultural Stereotypes” by Kumar was very interesting and problematized the cultural stereotypes that exist in TESOL, specifically with Asian students. Many times we may find ourselves stereotyping and as teachers, we should look to the reasons of why we are doing this. I found myself relating to Kumar’s idea that stereotyping helps us reduce an unmanageable and unknown reality of our diverse students into a more manageable label. I think it can be overwhelming to be unfamiliar of your students’ backgrounds, which makes stereotyping an easy thing to fall back on. We should be critically aware of this and make sure not to generalize because there are many components that make up one’s identity. I found this quote about stereotyping to be very true: “People everywhere practice it, knowingly or unknowingly. It is an all-pervasive phenomenon that affects gender, class, race, language, religion, nationality, and ethnicity. We stereotype others, and others stereotype us.” 

Kubota and Lin’s article titled “Race, Culture, and Identities in Second Language Education” gave a basic overview of these key terms. There is no concrete way to define race, culture, and identity, which is what we have been learning throughout this semester.