When many people hear the term "English learner" they think of somebody who recently arrived to the US who speaks little to no English. But most ELs were born in the US and feel more comfortable in English, especially in academic settings. So what exactly makes them ELs? Similarly, when people hear “English language proficiency assessment" they think of an assessment of the ability to communicate in English. But ELP assessments are assessing whether students are able to engage in grade level listening, speaking, reading and writing tasks.

People often use Latinx as an label with presumed connection to Spanish. But what actually connects Latinxs is US colonialism and imperialism layered onto existing settler colonial societies built by enslaved people. We need better tools for making sense of these complexities. Of course the most obvious problem with conflating Latinidad with Spanish is that there are two other colonial languages of Latin America (French and Portuguese) as well as the hundreds of Indigenous languages and Creoles. US born Latinxs also often prefer English.

So much education research is ahistorical and unreflective with no critical interrogation of where dominant concepts used to shape the types of questions posed and solutions offered come from. This is a huge problem since so many of these concepts stem from colonial logics. This is why a genealogical perspective that treats all discourse as situated and as inheriting specific geopolitical histories and understands power being about which situated discourse becomes universalized as a stand in for all of humanity is crucial.

The racial bias loop in academic hiring:

1.) Frame a faculty position in a way that get mostly white applicants

2.) Invite one “diverse candidate” for a campus visit

3.) Hire a white candidate who is a “better fit”

4.) Lament why your faculty is so white

5.) Rinse and repeat A major way to ensure that your applicant pool remains mostly white is to insist that your school needs X disciplinary perspective, which is never actually true. It is just a legacy of the old white dude club who created disciplinary boundaries in ways that protect their status.

People often ask how they can use their privilege for good. The answer is you can't. A more productive starting point may be to ask what you can do to ensure that you no longer have these privileges. Using white privilege in the name of anti-racism reinforces white supremacy. Using male privilege in the name of gender equity reinforces patriarchy. Using cis-het privilege in the name of queer rights reinforces heteronormativity. And the list goes on.

Jim Cummins has a new book organized around a critique of translanguaging and a raciolinguistic perspective. I am not going to link to it but I would never have predicted that this is where the discomfort that I experienced when I first read him as an undergrad would lead me 😅 Cummins and I will never agree because we are coming from completely different epistemological orientations and begin from a completely different locus of enunciation. Basically he assumes his normative white locus of enunciation is objective and I don’t so we are at an impasse.

So in addition to the hatred of Latinx from the Brotinos who insist that Latino is already gender neutral are people who hate Latinx because they say everybody should be using Latine instead. Prescriptivist impositions is never the path to liberation though. The idea that one term should be the only correct way of describing a large and diverse group of people with different nationalities, social classes, religions, phenotypes, gender identities etc. (which is true for literally every ethnoracial category) is misguided at best.

Researchers committed to making the case that “academic language” is more complex than “social language” are actually committed to making the case for their own intellectual superiority over people from low-income communities of color that most of them are too scared to enter. Because these researchers have never been in low income communities of color they describe their homes as “lacking a strong foundation in academic language” not based on any empirical data but just based on what feels right to them.

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?

Over the years I have confronted a great deal of academic gaslighting from scholars in the field who constantly tried to get me to second guess myself. Some examples of this academic gaslighting are included in this thread of receipts: 1.) Scholars who insisted that "we already know that" when I sought to bring attention to how white supremacy shapes the concepts used to describe the language practices of racialized communities despite having never written the words white supremacy in any of their scholarship.

It is interesting to see how comfortable many white liberals have become with Lisa Delpit's work since the 1990s when it caused many white tears. They often cite her in defense of the importance of teaching POC the codes of power. Yet, this was only one part of her argument. Delpit’s main point was that white progressive educators were systematically silencing the voices of Black educators. In particular, she examined the ways that the race evasive discourse of progressive education ignored the racialized realities of BIPOC.

On the one hand, we need research WITH communities as opposed to ON communities

On the other hand, we need research ON researchers as opposed to WITH researchers.

They both decenter hegemonic modes of knowledge production in ways that are essential for imagining new futures. The first I associate with qualitative methods such as PAR, feminist ethnography and/or critical race counternarratives. The second with genealogical methods connected to various traditions including poststructuralism, postcolonialism and/or critical race studies.

We need both.

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

What does it mean to speak a language perfectly?

It means having high social status.

What does it mean to not speak a language perfectly?

It means having low social status.

This is not about language. It is about social status.

https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1200654934431195137

I understand the impetus around making claims about the systematicity of code-switching and think it was important political intervention in its moment. But I think it has outlived its utility. People break these supposed rules all of the time and that is just fine.

So much of the research on so-called heritage speakers of Spanish is built on the premise that these students need to be taught the “prestige” form of Spanish. But this premise is primarily curriculum driven rather than based on the actual needs of these learners. Most heritage speakers take Spanish classes with the end goal of being more connected to their families and cultures and because they want to use their bilingualism to help people. In contrast, most Spanish classes assume the end goal to be the ability to read Don Quixote.

Academic language is a raciolinguistic ideology that frames affluent white language practices as inherently academic and low-income racialized language practices as inherently non-academic.

But there's more. The whole idea of academic language is a colonial discourse While educational linguists have typically focused their attention on the prescriptivist imposition of standardized national languages, another aspect of the rise of nation-state/colonial governmentality relates to the rise of the language of the human sciences.

Conceptualizations of academic language in educational linguistics are raciolinguistic ideologies that serves to frame the home language practices of racialized communities as inherently non-academic and in need of remediation. Cognitive framings of academic language as reflected in the (in)famous BICS/CALP dichotomy have their origins in discourses of semilingualism that suggested that minoritized bi/multilingual people were uniquely at risk of failing to develop full proficiency in any language.

The Founding Fathers were white nationalist terrorists.

Until we reckon with that fact we will never be able to move forward. Let’s break this apart a bit.

The Founding Fathers were nationalists in that they wanted to create a new nation independent from Great Britain.

They were also all white men—not by accident but by design. They wanted to create a white nation.

I have met many Latinxs who are reluctant to claim they're bilingual because they feel like their Spanish is not good enough despite using it everyday.

In contrast, I have met many white people who claim they're bilingual because they took a few years of high school Spanish. From personal experience, I decided not to become a bilingual teacher because I felt that my "academic Spanish" was not good enough to teach in Spanish. And then I saw some of the white people teaching in bilingual classrooms and was like

I have seen people citing this article that was published a year ago and feel like I need to set the record straight on a few things. Despite what the abstract suggests this is primarily an attempted critique my work with @DrJonathanRosa. IMO he misunderstood the argument. The author suggests that we are making the argument that teachers who rely on additive based approaches to language education are racist. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. But that isn't our argument. In fact, that isn't even the theory of race and racism that we are using.

Academic gaslighting is often used by academics from privileged backgrounds work to maintain their privilege by getting academics from marginalized backgrounds to question their research that seeks to bring attention to this marginalization. A prime example of academic gaslighting used by white senior is to insist that scholars of color bringing attention to issues of white supremacy are contributing “nothing new.” Don’t believe them for a second.