When Language Intersects with Race and Culture

The room was quiet.

In our staff development session, we had just watched a short video [2] about the best way to instruct our students in speaking Standard English. The teacher in the video explained to her students that they would be practicing the “language of the job interview.”

My school director asked, “How did people feel about that?”

Opinions ranged on the tone and word choice to use, but we all agreed: it is imperative that we help teach our students how to speak in a professional situation.

I’ve had a tricky relationship with this part of education since I started teaching in Louisiana in 2008. My interdisciplinary degree (a pet project and evidence of the very liberal college [3] I attended) is called “The Social Art of Language.” It sought to answer the question of how much the language we use influences, and is influenced by, our identity. Teaching that first year, I often felt like I was stripping a student of his unique identity, forcing him to sound like someone else.

Lisa Delpit, author of Other People’s Children [4] and many other thoughtful writings about race and education [5], makes the argument that our inclination to tip-toe around the standard-grammar issue is detrimental to our students. In her article, “Silenced Dialogue,” Delpit mentions that white teachers often hesitate to correct their students’ grammatical mistakes as if they are insulting their culture. The majority of black teachers and parents she has spoken to, however, advocate for Standard English to be taught in schools.

Code-switching, or the concurrent use of more than one language, is an important skill for our students. We need to teach our rationale from the beginning of the year. I designed a short code-switching PowerPoint [6] presentation for each of the middle-school homerooms. This allowed us to explain why we ask students to speak Standard English in school. It also gave us a structure to explicitly say that the language we use with our friends and families is not wrong. It also gave students the opportunity to be involved in the discussion about why it’s useful to switch codes.

It will certainly be an ongoing discussion, but already seems like a good strategic move. Staff members feel more comfortable correcting students’ speech, and most of our students understand why they do that. We’re a long way from dismantling the biases that treat our students’ speech as inferior, but talking explicitly about the relationship of language and power has helped empower our students, just by involving them in the conversation.

Craven is a social and emotional interventionist in Louisiana