The classroom is a place for all students of different backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities, languages, class, and environments. In the English classroom, the members come together in one physical space to learn how to create meaning from language and how to communicate articulately through language. The results of this sort of diverse classroom is not what is expected; instead of students taking charge and strengthening the skills of their own language and identity, they must conform to the standards that portray an identity associated with Standard Written English. One important goal of this type of classroom is to be inclusive—to make everyone feel welcomed rather than be an outsider to allow knowledge to flourish. Certain challenges arise regarding the different identities especially when a student needs to leave behind his first language when thinking of the English classroom’s end product: a formal academic essay written in Standard Written English. This is especially true in the schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District where a third of the district’s student population is comprised of English leaners (Jones) and eighty percent either live at or below the poverty line (“Shortchanging L.A. Unified Students”). Many try to accomplish creating an inclusive classroom but may not succeed because the classroom acts as a space enforcing certain ideals. In a population that is diverse in language, culture, and class, the English classroom cannot be inclusive as the ideal suggests but is rather exclusive because the class that is to prepare these students for real-world situations focuses on academic discourse, academic English or Standard Written English, as the goal.
Educational institutions work through academic language—the language used in the classroom to create a universal and objective method to assess student learning. The intent is to create a clear goal, one that everyone can understand, work towards, and finally achieve. “Academic Language,” an article published on The Glossary of Education Reform, provides a deeper look into the type of discourse implemented in LAUSD. Academic language, synonymous to SWE, is the dialect that “allow[s] students to acquire knowledge and academic skills while also successfully navigating school policies, assignments, expectations, and cultural norms” (“Academic Language”). For those students whom English is the first language and can function adequately or even highly in conversational English, academic English for purposes of the classroom setting is the next step to their critical thinking and analysis development. On the other hand, those students whose first languages are different from English, have to master conversational English, to function appropriately with the teacher and other students in the classroom, as they master academic English to succeed in the classroom; the English learners have an extra challenge that the native English speakers do not have, thus put at a disadvantage. Many of these students are also exposed to academic language that is not fully correct; for example, parents of students who are Latino SWE is complex with special focus and emphasis must be paid attention to grammar, morphology, and syntax. The article explains the complexity of academic language, as there is no formal definition. The complexity comes due to the ambiguous nature of the language and the multilayered language: academic language “also demands that students acquire proficiency in different linguistic systems or contextual language” in addition to the standards they learn in language classes they must met.
Gloria Anzaldua explores the hybrid identity of herself and many others as not being a part of one but of many resulting in a dual consciousness. Chapter 7 of her book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, explores the duality of individuals who gather parts of their identities from different groups. Anzaldua believes that “The mestiza’s dual or multiple personality is plagued by psychic restlessness” (2099), which speaks to the classroom environment where many students encounter the same obstacles. Each student is a new mestiza, a being created from multiple beings, and has to navigate his way through the classroom while carrying a multitude of different interpretations and views, which can be very difficult when trying to attain success of the end goal. Anzaldua beautifully explains the process classroom, now as a new mestiza, must explore:
La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes. (Anzaldua 2100)
There is a certain way of thinking reflective of the Western world, which puts SWE on a pedestal. The new mesitza-classroom needs to reflect the needs of its new mestiza-students; the classroom needs to be reflective of all types of thinking, which are derived from different identities, which includes different languages. If the classroom has an end goal only reflecting SWE, then the new mestiza-student cannot succeed at the level he/she needs to in order to feel comfortable in the classroom, and to do well outside of school. The new mestiza has “a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode (Anzaldua 2100). The student is isolated in a classroom that should be inclusive of all modes but in reality it does not function as so.
The pool of students within the English classrooms carries with it a variety of voices that crave to be accepted as is. Jacqueline Jones Royster discusses her experience with her voice in “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own,” and the effects that isolation and misinterpretation had on her. Royster is an African American female adult who is encompassed of a hybrid identity which includes carrying with her several voices. Influenced by Homi K. Bhabha, Royster believes that “genius emerges from hybridity” (563) which is why the English classroom should embrace hybridity through multiple dialects of English rather than succumbing to academic English as the goal. As a result of culture diversity and postcolonialism, Royster believes that hybrid people “move with dexterity across cultural boundaries, to make themselves comfortable, and to make sense amid the chaos of difference” (563). In a sense, these people become interdisciplinary and can have real world application skills. The English classroom is a space that elevates language and should be inclusive of all languages so that the students can feel comfortable. Royster dwells on an experience where she learned to treat the gift of having multiple dialects or language as a value, “I speak, but I can not be heard. Worse, I am heard but I am not believed. Worse yet, I speak but I am not deemed believable” (Royster 562). She comes to this realization and then embraces her multiple voices, ones she dubs all as authentic to her own identity (563). If students in the English classroom are being driven to only produce work in one language, then an unfortunate implication is that they are being stripped of their authenticity and molded into a superficial self. And this isn’t only apparent in the English classrooms across LAUSD: “Through more rigorous instruction and increased support, officials say that English leaners and students who struggle with standard English can acquire the language skills needed to tackle” the rest of their core classes in order to graduate and move on in the world (Jones). The goal of education is to learn from each other, to “exchange perspectives, negotiate meaning, and create understanding” among different people and Royster’s immediacy sits in how to create an interdisciplinary system for English teachers to cooperate and work together in hopes of creating an inclusive classroom.
Several have tried to come up with solutions on how to transform the exclusive English classroom into an inclusive one through the medium of language. While Royster speaks to why this change should take place, Peter Elbow offers his own strategies he has implemented in the classroom environment as possible solutions in “Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond ‘Mistakes,’ ‘Bad English,’ and ‘Wrong Language’”. Although the strategies can work to make the students feel more included and welcomed the classroom, in the end, they are forced to adhere to the standards once more. Elbow explains that he wants to empower his students by being all encompassing of the multitude dialects his students present but at the same time has an obligation to give them “access to the written language of power and prestige,” (641) which speaks to poststructuralist, Michel Foucault’s, The Order of Discourse. In the text, Foucault illustrates the power given to the subject who articulates the discourse placed at the top of the temporal hierarchy. Right now, the power rests with academic language which is why Elbow wants to give his students the opportunity to enter the conversation. The language a student communicates in, feels comfortable in, and creates meaning out of can be viewed as the discourse he decides to immerse himself in; it is the discourse he uses to define himself. Once a certain discourse “is no longer precious and desirable… it is no longer the one linked to the exercise of power” (Foucault 1462), therefore, once a student must leave his true self-defining discourse, he loses his power. The exclusivity of the classroom does this to the students and while some teachers implement inclusivity on the community level of the classroom, the students still must conform to the standards of which the teacher has no control in isolation to other teachers.
The English room, because of the outside forces that define how students should work and what they should work toward as well as how teachers should operate as well as what they should teach, works as a space of surveillance. In his book, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault rebuilds the “carceral” as a physical space to a psychological space of monitoring via fear of punishment and serving to control behavior by means of power. The idea of the carceral derives from old institutions that punished deviants in the form of a prison system or a crazy house. He emphasizes that schools are one of the very many institutions that control its subjects both in a physical space and psychological space (1494). The classroom works as a carceral in that it judges the teachers and students by deciding what discourse is best for them, and giving that discourse, of academic language, the only power rather than distributing power to several. The teacher works as the authoritarian, the one who monitors the children although he may not do so happily, as in the case with Elbow. If one strays from the ultimate goal of attaining academic language, Standard Written English, regardless of how miniscule this defiant act would appear, it would haunt the school and bring with it disciplinary actions (1495). For this, being labeled as a “deviant” and thus treated as an outsider is why the classroom seems that it will forever remain exclusive.
The unfortunate nature of the English classroom lends itself to why many students feel they do not belong in that setting. As a result of not belonging, students feel that reading and writing—literacy—is too difficult for them. Anzaldua does have some advice on how to break the classroom as a carceral and be inclusive of all people from different backgrounds: “The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended” (2101). Now the question remains as to how students can break out of this system.
Works Cited
"Academic Language." The Glossary of Education Reform. Great Schools Partnership, 29 Aug. 2013. Web. 10 May 2014.
Anzaldua, Gloria. “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” .” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010. 2098-2109. Print.
Elbow, Peter. “Inviting the Mother Toungue: Beyond ‘Mistakes,” ‘Bad English,’ and ‘Wrong Language.’” Cross Talk in Comp Theory. Ed. Victor Villanueva and Kristen L. Arola. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2011. 641-672. Print.
Foucault, Michel. “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010. 1490-1502. Print.
Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 1460-1470. Print.
Jones, Barbara. "LAUSD English Learners To Move Faster Into Mainstream Classes." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 25 Nov. 2012. Web. 11 May 2014.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “When The First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” Cross Talk in Comp Theory. Ed. Victor Villanueva and Kristen L. Arola. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2011. 555-566. Print.
“Shortchanging L.A. Unified Students--$200 Million at Stake.” Los Angeles Unified School District. Los Angeles Unified School District, n.d.. Web. 12 May 2014.
Educational institutions work through academic language—the language used in the classroom to create a universal and objective method to assess student learning. The intent is to create a clear goal, one that everyone can understand, work towards, and finally achieve. “Academic Language,” an article published on The Glossary of Education Reform, provides a deeper look into the type of discourse implemented in LAUSD. Academic language, synonymous to SWE, is the dialect that “allow[s] students to acquire knowledge and academic skills while also successfully navigating school policies, assignments, expectations, and cultural norms” (“Academic Language”). For those students whom English is the first language and can function adequately or even highly in conversational English, academic English for purposes of the classroom setting is the next step to their critical thinking and analysis development. On the other hand, those students whose first languages are different from English, have to master conversational English, to function appropriately with the teacher and other students in the classroom, as they master academic English to succeed in the classroom; the English learners have an extra challenge that the native English speakers do not have, thus put at a disadvantage. Many of these students are also exposed to academic language that is not fully correct; for example, parents of students who are Latino SWE is complex with special focus and emphasis must be paid attention to grammar, morphology, and syntax. The article explains the complexity of academic language, as there is no formal definition. The complexity comes due to the ambiguous nature of the language and the multilayered language: academic language “also demands that students acquire proficiency in different linguistic systems or contextual language” in addition to the standards they learn in language classes they must met.
Gloria Anzaldua explores the hybrid identity of herself and many others as not being a part of one but of many resulting in a dual consciousness. Chapter 7 of her book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, explores the duality of individuals who gather parts of their identities from different groups. Anzaldua believes that “The mestiza’s dual or multiple personality is plagued by psychic restlessness” (2099), which speaks to the classroom environment where many students encounter the same obstacles. Each student is a new mestiza, a being created from multiple beings, and has to navigate his way through the classroom while carrying a multitude of different interpretations and views, which can be very difficult when trying to attain success of the end goal. Anzaldua beautifully explains the process classroom, now as a new mestiza, must explore:
La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes. (Anzaldua 2100)
There is a certain way of thinking reflective of the Western world, which puts SWE on a pedestal. The new mesitza-classroom needs to reflect the needs of its new mestiza-students; the classroom needs to be reflective of all types of thinking, which are derived from different identities, which includes different languages. If the classroom has an end goal only reflecting SWE, then the new mestiza-student cannot succeed at the level he/she needs to in order to feel comfortable in the classroom, and to do well outside of school. The new mestiza has “a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode (Anzaldua 2100). The student is isolated in a classroom that should be inclusive of all modes but in reality it does not function as so.
The pool of students within the English classrooms carries with it a variety of voices that crave to be accepted as is. Jacqueline Jones Royster discusses her experience with her voice in “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own,” and the effects that isolation and misinterpretation had on her. Royster is an African American female adult who is encompassed of a hybrid identity which includes carrying with her several voices. Influenced by Homi K. Bhabha, Royster believes that “genius emerges from hybridity” (563) which is why the English classroom should embrace hybridity through multiple dialects of English rather than succumbing to academic English as the goal. As a result of culture diversity and postcolonialism, Royster believes that hybrid people “move with dexterity across cultural boundaries, to make themselves comfortable, and to make sense amid the chaos of difference” (563). In a sense, these people become interdisciplinary and can have real world application skills. The English classroom is a space that elevates language and should be inclusive of all languages so that the students can feel comfortable. Royster dwells on an experience where she learned to treat the gift of having multiple dialects or language as a value, “I speak, but I can not be heard. Worse, I am heard but I am not believed. Worse yet, I speak but I am not deemed believable” (Royster 562). She comes to this realization and then embraces her multiple voices, ones she dubs all as authentic to her own identity (563). If students in the English classroom are being driven to only produce work in one language, then an unfortunate implication is that they are being stripped of their authenticity and molded into a superficial self. And this isn’t only apparent in the English classrooms across LAUSD: “Through more rigorous instruction and increased support, officials say that English leaners and students who struggle with standard English can acquire the language skills needed to tackle” the rest of their core classes in order to graduate and move on in the world (Jones). The goal of education is to learn from each other, to “exchange perspectives, negotiate meaning, and create understanding” among different people and Royster’s immediacy sits in how to create an interdisciplinary system for English teachers to cooperate and work together in hopes of creating an inclusive classroom.
Several have tried to come up with solutions on how to transform the exclusive English classroom into an inclusive one through the medium of language. While Royster speaks to why this change should take place, Peter Elbow offers his own strategies he has implemented in the classroom environment as possible solutions in “Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond ‘Mistakes,’ ‘Bad English,’ and ‘Wrong Language’”. Although the strategies can work to make the students feel more included and welcomed the classroom, in the end, they are forced to adhere to the standards once more. Elbow explains that he wants to empower his students by being all encompassing of the multitude dialects his students present but at the same time has an obligation to give them “access to the written language of power and prestige,” (641) which speaks to poststructuralist, Michel Foucault’s, The Order of Discourse. In the text, Foucault illustrates the power given to the subject who articulates the discourse placed at the top of the temporal hierarchy. Right now, the power rests with academic language which is why Elbow wants to give his students the opportunity to enter the conversation. The language a student communicates in, feels comfortable in, and creates meaning out of can be viewed as the discourse he decides to immerse himself in; it is the discourse he uses to define himself. Once a certain discourse “is no longer precious and desirable… it is no longer the one linked to the exercise of power” (Foucault 1462), therefore, once a student must leave his true self-defining discourse, he loses his power. The exclusivity of the classroom does this to the students and while some teachers implement inclusivity on the community level of the classroom, the students still must conform to the standards of which the teacher has no control in isolation to other teachers.
The English room, because of the outside forces that define how students should work and what they should work toward as well as how teachers should operate as well as what they should teach, works as a space of surveillance. In his book, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault rebuilds the “carceral” as a physical space to a psychological space of monitoring via fear of punishment and serving to control behavior by means of power. The idea of the carceral derives from old institutions that punished deviants in the form of a prison system or a crazy house. He emphasizes that schools are one of the very many institutions that control its subjects both in a physical space and psychological space (1494). The classroom works as a carceral in that it judges the teachers and students by deciding what discourse is best for them, and giving that discourse, of academic language, the only power rather than distributing power to several. The teacher works as the authoritarian, the one who monitors the children although he may not do so happily, as in the case with Elbow. If one strays from the ultimate goal of attaining academic language, Standard Written English, regardless of how miniscule this defiant act would appear, it would haunt the school and bring with it disciplinary actions (1495). For this, being labeled as a “deviant” and thus treated as an outsider is why the classroom seems that it will forever remain exclusive.
The unfortunate nature of the English classroom lends itself to why many students feel they do not belong in that setting. As a result of not belonging, students feel that reading and writing—literacy—is too difficult for them. Anzaldua does have some advice on how to break the classroom as a carceral and be inclusive of all people from different backgrounds: “The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended” (2101). Now the question remains as to how students can break out of this system.
Works Cited
"Academic Language." The Glossary of Education Reform. Great Schools Partnership, 29 Aug. 2013. Web. 10 May 2014.
Anzaldua, Gloria. “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” .” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010. 2098-2109. Print.
Elbow, Peter. “Inviting the Mother Toungue: Beyond ‘Mistakes,” ‘Bad English,’ and ‘Wrong Language.’” Cross Talk in Comp Theory. Ed. Victor Villanueva and Kristen L. Arola. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2011. 641-672. Print.
Foucault, Michel. “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010. 1490-1502. Print.
Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 1460-1470. Print.
Jones, Barbara. "LAUSD English Learners To Move Faster Into Mainstream Classes." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 25 Nov. 2012. Web. 11 May 2014.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “When The First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” Cross Talk in Comp Theory. Ed. Victor Villanueva and Kristen L. Arola. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2011. 555-566. Print.
“Shortchanging L.A. Unified Students--$200 Million at Stake.” Los Angeles Unified School District. Los Angeles Unified School District, n.d.. Web. 12 May 2014.