If you are listening to critical scholars like Jamila Lyiscott, David Kirkland, and April Baker-Bell (just to name a few) and their conversations about race and linguistic justice, then it is 100% clear that if we as educators need to decenter academic language, aka White Mainstream English, ASAP! 

From a linguistic standpoint, cultural, informal, or multimodal discourses are just as effective for communicating and the power of WME is socially constructed—but our school spaces are constantly reproducing academic language as the language of power. To make our schools more equitable places, we must address what Baker-Bell calls Anti-Black Linguistic Racism, which is “linguistic violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization that Black Language-speakers experience in schools and in everyday life.” This is especially important to address for emerging teachers in teacher education programs, which are often situated in institutions of higher education where WME is the default. 

Inspired by Kirkland’s work redefining what teaching English can look like, one way that I work with my emerging teachers to collaboratively decenter WME is through informal participatory digital spaces such as social media, wikis, or business platforms. Not only do students often have a frame of reference for participating in digital spaces using various cultural dialects or more informal discourses, but digital platforms often have built-in features supporting multimodality, such as ways to embed gifs, link memes, search for hashtags, or respond with emojis. Such platforms (I use Slack) are especially relevant right now as many of us are searching for ways to supplement reduced synchronous learning time with asynchronous participation options!

However, just because those features exist doesn’t mean that emerging teachers will use them in liberatory ways. In my experience teaching in a private university, many emerging teachers are nervous or hesitant to let go of academic language, even in gradeless classrooms like mine. Despite my reassurance that moving away from WME is a valued communal goal, I hear students expressing worries about meeting university expectations or impressing me. I am even more concerned when emerging teachers say they believe WME is superior for learning or that they can’t imagine using dialects other than WME in schools. Such beliefs can lead to perpetrating linguistic violence against students of color in their future classrooms. 

As a white educator, I myself have to continually examine my own beliefs and privileges, working to decenter them for the wellbeing of my linguistically diverse students. I am committed to helping emerging teachers do the work to examine their own linguistic beliefs as well.

Here are some practical ways that I encourage shifting participation from WME to other dialects and discourses, particularly in digital participatory spaces:

Explicitly address reasons for decentering academic language

Coming from teaching in middle and high schools where WME was not the default, I underestimated how difficult it would be for the emerging teachers I worked with to shift away from academic language. It makes sense. Entrance into universities is quite literally linked with students’ ability to successfully use WME, and the students I teach are often proud of the academic repertoires they have developed. Because WME has so much power in educational spaces, I found that opening up space for emerging teachers to bring in their own dialects or to be playful with multimodality was often not compelling enough for them to leave WME behind. It perplexed me that students would complain about the length and formal language people were using and then continue to use it themselves. “Academic” postings were contagious, as long academic posts spawned longer academic responses. 

Unless we talk explicitly about power, language, and the harm that WME can do, WME will continue taking over our spaces.

Model using other dialects and modalities

Something I realized was that my strategic participation in practicing what I preached could help students to feel more comfortable disrupting WME. I purposely enter my students’ conversations by using informal language in short postings, responding to student comments with gifs or memes, and integrating hashtags that I or my students have created or from larger digital conversations (e.g. #blacklivesmatter, #literacies). 

One of the hardest things for me was to practice stepping away from WME in my instructions and assignments. Even with a strong commitment to decentering academic language, it takes continual attention and effort to make sure I am not just reproducing how I myself have learned to communicate in academic spaces and instead bring in other discourses and modalities. For example, this was a snippet from my original assignment for our digital participatory discussions:

Given the importance of actively discussing and applying instructional approaches in this course, you are expected to attend each class and engage in deep discussion of the issues raised by the assignment readings. Thoughtful preparation is particularly important because the class discussions and activities will be designed to extend, critique, and supplement—rather than summarize—the ideas in the readings. Your participation will be evaluated based on the rubric included in below, which includes both in-class participation and virtual weekly discussions on our Slack channel. 

Not only was I modeling the WME language I was asking students not to use, I was emphasizing that students were being evaluated and implying that their postings would be assessed based on so-called objective standards, an impulse that aligns with white supremacy culture. After reflecting on how my language and evaluation practices were shaping the space, I updated the assignment to this:

Each week we'll be sharing our thoughts and questions informally on Slack before class. These channels are here for you to dive into the readings & course ideas, make mistakes and get messy—so please think of this as a generative space that belongs to YOU! I encourage you to use this space to share related ideas (through links), to play with language (including informal words/abbreviations & hashtags to make points or track key concepts) and modalities (emojis, pictures, gifs), and most of all to have fun learning!

#ManyHeadsAreBetterThanOne #ManyDialectsAreBetterThanOne #ManyModesAreBetterThanOne #somepeopledontbelieveme #guysiamserioushere #pleasehavefun

Use synchronous discussions to evaluate asynchronous conversations

This point is key! Even though emerging teachers might begin by using WME when posting, in synchronous conversations there is space to reflect on how this language makes them feel and to see the effects of their language on other learners. Every time I ask students to reflect on what is going well and what could go better, students share that long academic posts are hard to follow and feel intimidating, and that the language can keep them from asking questions or expressing confusion. I suggest leading emerging teachers through critical discourse analysis of their own language practices in these online participatory spaces, guiding them to examine our own classroom discourse practices. 

Which discourses “win out” (have more power) and why? What are the consequences of this for our linguistically diverse students? This helps them to make implicit beliefs explicit and to reflect on how they might collectively change their participation. These conversations also give you as the instructor the chance to explicitly validate and lift up the brilliance and depth of cultural dialects or informal and multimodal discourses. 

In my experience and context, shifting away from privileging academic language in shared classroom spaces is not easy. In order to make it work, I have to be continually reflecting on my own participation and beliefs as well as guiding classroom reflection and explicitly addressing problematic ideologies. We as a class have to unlearn how we communicate with each other in educational spaces and be vulnerable in sharing other ways of communicating that we might not usually use in a classroom. However, this work is worth it! When I see emerging teachers reflecting on how they or their peers have been oppressed by WME and take steps to shift how they engage in our class’s discourses, I know they are learning something liberatory about language. 

Karis Jones is a teacher educator at New York University and studies literacies, learning and power across spaces. This year through a Public Humanities Fellowship, Karis is supporting the non-profit New City Kids in expanding their literacy programs for underserved children, teens and families through building on youths’ fandom literacies and developing their presence in larger fandom discourses. You can follow her on Twitter @Karis_M_Jones.