Thread by @nelsonlflores

I was first introduced to Cummins’ work in my teacher education program. It provided the first justification I have ever seen for bilingual education and was hugely important in my professional trajectory. I would have never predicted that years later I would be debating him.

https://twitter.com/nelsonlflores/status/1366464915461066752

That said, the BICS/CALP dichotomy always rubbed be the wrong way. I remember pushing back against the description of certain language practices as “basic” and was told he didn’t mean it literally. I was like how did he mean it then?

But it was when I became a classroom teacher that I began to see the real harm of the dichotomy. I worked with students classified as “long term English learners” who I found myself describing as lacking academic language in either English or Spanish. I saw my job as to fix them.

While I saw my job as fixing them, my students ended up fixing me. Their fluid use of English and Spanish on a daily basis made me begin to further question BICS/CALP which is what eventually motivated me to pursue a doctorate to understand what was going on here.

As part of my doctoral work I found out that BICS and CALP were not Cummins original terms. The original term was actually semilingualism defined as failure to develop native capacities in any language because of cultural deprivation. That would have been nice to know earlier.

I came with this revelation while @DrJonathanRosa came with his linguistic anthropology and somehow we ended up coming up with “Undoing Appropriateness,” where we first introduced the concept of raciolinguistic ideologies. We had no idea how much it would take off.

Cummins work was cited a few times in that article but wasn’t central to the argument. So a year later while we were minding our business hoping this article would help pave our way to tenure we were surprised by an email we received from him with a 30 page takedown of our work.

Being a pretenured professor in bilingual education, this email was worrying. How might a published critique of my work by one of the most prominent scholars in the field impact my tenure review? In hindsight it helped if anything but I could not predict that at the time.

We sent a carefully crafted response that reiterated the points we sought to make in the article and where we felt he misrepresented our argument. When the article came out saw no evidence that he tried to more accurately represent our view. He was disagreeing with a strawman.

The worst part was that many in the field thought Cummins was trying to engage with and amplify our work when, in fact, he was misrepresenting it to position himself as the defender of Latinx students and their teachers. That is, he was trying to defend me from myself.

Cummins has since gone on the conference circuit to spread his gospel of how we are so disconnected from real classrooms and can’t answer basic questions for teachers as if we are not literally in classrooms all of the time and even publishing about it.

What I refuse to do is accept Cummins’ framing of the debate. He can continue to suggest a raciolinguistic perspective has no implications for educators and researchers and I will keep talking to the many educators and researchers who disagree with him.

I don’t write for Jim Cummins. I write for the many emerging scholars who have found a space for themselves in academia through a raciolinguistic perspective and the many educators who find inspiration in it for challenging deficit perspectives.

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