PEDAGOGICAL DISCUSSION: ON REJECTING LINGUICISM

Thinking about what Evelyn was able to do in Leslie Edgars' classroom provides us with an idea of what teachers working in other multilingual, multiracial communities might do to prepare themselves for work in schools where issues of language, identity, and discrimination need to be worked through every day.

First, it is clear that teachers need to develop their own critical literacy skills and learn to recognize the discriminatory discourses with which their students might be struggling.¹ These struggles can provoke strong emotions—disgrace, embarrassment, and resentment—that might be worked on in a class project. Such projects are not difficult to imagine in art, language, and social science classes in which activities such as journal writing, painting, drawing, clay work, poetry, playwriting, multicultural literature, and ethnic studies, such as Puerto Rican history can easily become part of the core curriculum. They are more difficult to imagine in math and science classrooms. Yet, innovation is possible in all classrooms.

One of Leslie Edgars' colleagues, who was teaching biology in a school like Northside, asked his students to write a children's book on one of the topics that they had been studying together. He felt that if the students could explain the digestive system or the respiratory system to younger children, they would understand the concepts themselves. Students who paired up with someone who could translate the book into a second language to create a bilingual book received bonus marks. With this one project, the biology teacher accomplished several things. By assigning bonus marks to the use of languages other than English in the project, he increased their status and the status of those speakers who used the other languages as a first language. The project also provided an opportunity for students from a variety of backgrounds to work together across linguistic differences in pursuit of a common project and common goal. For students struggling with the kind of anti-immigrant discourses Evelyn was working through, such an opportunity might produce moments where discriminatory assumptions can be challenged and linguicism resisted.²

¹ The concept of critical literacy emerged from radical educational theory in the 1970s. Brazilian educator Paul Freire (1970) used the term to refer to the ability to use language as a means for articulating a transformative (e.g., antidiscriminatory) political analysis and agenda. For Freire, "reading the word" meant "reading the world," and developing a critical analysis of an economic, social, and political order. This could be achieved through a "dialogic," pedagogical approach that encourages learners to become teachers of marginalized experience. The dialogue between Leslie Edgars and Evelyn Yeung, which began as a result of Evelyn's writing in her art journal, is an application of this approach. Rather than using language as a means for beginning a transformative journey, however, Evelyn uses painting. For further discussion of critical literacy, see the review by Allan Luke (1997).

² For a good resource on how educators can raise the status of languages other than English in their classroom and provide their students with opportunities to work across linguistic differences, see Coehlo (1998).

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