Facebook reminded me of the time I assigned a reading from Gloria Anzaldua and a monolingual white teacher candidate told me she didn't understand any of it. I told her she were lying & insisted that she understood the message but didn't like Anzaldua's refusal to accommodate her
We looked through a paragraph of the text together and it turns out that I was right and that the student DID understand the message. So she HAD been lying about not understanding any of it. I asked what she thought that was about and she was like
We then explored her discomfort with the text. How had this discomfort shaped her sense that she didn't understand any of it? Had any other text elicited this type of discomfort from her before? What might have been Anzaldua's intent in crafting the text in the way that she did?
The conversation ended with another student noting that this discomfort is precisely how racialized students feel on a daily basis when trying to make sense of texts that they are given in school that normalize whiteness and monolingualism.
