2022 Spring – Culturally Responsive Teaching

Session 1: 3/25/22

Report: Our first meeting of the semester was a bit different than past meetings where we would do a read reading from the assigned book and discuss it. Instead, we worked through a linguistic exercise on a feature of Appalachian Vernacular English from a chapter called “Vernacular Dialects of English” by Walt Wolfram that is in the volume “Languages and dialects in the US,” edited by Marianna Di Paola and Arthur K. Spears (2014, Routledge). In the exercise Wolfram walks us through data and a series of questions about Appalachian “A-prefixing.” Working through the data led to us thinking about our intuitions about language and the about the rule-based nature of all languages and dialects. We didn’t have time to get to a second exercise on African American English, so we will continue on this next time.

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Session 2: 4/08/22

Report: As mentioned above, in this session we worked through an exercise on African American English from the same Wolfram chapter we discussed last time. Once again we checked our linguistic intuitions, which were not often clear. Again, we saw that different varieties of English have different features and rules. In this session and the last, doing the exercises led to interesting discussions about “appropriateness” of language and of how to approach teaching the so-called “standard” language in classrooms, and of code-switching. We once again spent some time discussing how best to incorporate/include linguistic diversity in the classroom. Next time we will jump back into Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice, reviewing Chapter 4. For this discussion I would like everyone to pick one of the “Black Language Artifacts” discussed in the chapter and and think about how you can use it in your classroom.

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Session 3: 4/29/22

Report: In this session we revisited Baker-Bell Chapter 4, which we had a preliminary discussion about last semester. Chapter 4 is rich with ideas for implementing Antiracist Black Language pedagogy and we shared ways that we have been implementing these ideas in our classrooms and discussed other possible ideas to try out.. This led to some good discussions, including an interesting tangent on how we might think of applying the lessons from Baker-Bell in the context of an Art classroom.

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Session 4: 5/20/22

In our final session this semester we read chapter 5, which focused on composite character counterstories of Baker-Bell’s students showing their development of Black Linguistic Consciousness through the Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy that she implemented in their classroom. We discussed the complex relationship the students had with their language, and the different levels of change different students had. Overall the students’ critical language consciousness was raised. We also returned to chapter 4 to revisit some of the discussions we had last session, and finished the semester off discussing things we may want to do moving forward to next semester. We’re looking forward to continuing the conversation!

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