“There's No Way This Isn't Racist”: White Women Teachers and the Raciolinguistic Ideologies of Teaching Code‐Switching

Abstract

This paper analyzes data from a Participatory Action Research project with four White women teachers who work in U.S. secondary schools that serve predominately students of color. This critical analysis examines the consequences of the White women teachers’ racialized identities for the language practices, language teaching, and racialized language ideologies in their classrooms. In particular, this paper focuses on the teachers’ relationships to teaching their students of color to “code‐switch” to English language practices deemed “standard.” This paper uses the White teachers’ relationships to teaching code‐switching to their students of color as a prism through which to explicate the entangling of race and language in classrooms.

Troubling Practice: Exploring the Relationship Between Whiteness and Practice-Based Teacher Education in Considering a Raciolinguicized Teacher Subjectivity

“…For instance, Rosa (2019) explicitly explored the profound consequences of teachers’—and school administrators’—raciolinguicized identities for their relationships with students, their teaching, and the school and classroom communities that they imagine and create. In our own collaborations with teacher education colleagues, we also work to explicitly engage the consequences of our raciolinguicized subjectivities—the interplay between race and standardized language ideologies, for instance (Daniels, 2018; Peercy, Sharkey, Baecher, Motha, & Varghese, in press; Snyder, Park, Varghese, & Daniels, 2019).…”

“…Grossman and McDonald argued that such core practices for culturally relevant instruction would “ameliorate the achievement gap” (p. 188). Moreover, it is difficult to ignore that most of the scholars involved in developing practice-based teacher education—as well as most teacher candidates—are White and therefore inadvertently produce and reinscribe Whiteness and standardized English through the practices and classroom norms they imagine and into which they project themselves (Daniels, 2018; Snyder et al, 2019).…”

“…The subjectivities of White teachers who speak—and more importantly, are heard—as standardized English speakers are uniquely protected and normalized in conversations about discrete teaching practices (Daniels, 2018; Haddix, 2016; Sleeter, 2001, 2017; Souto-Manning & Cheruvu, 2016). Whiteness is positioned as benign and neutral—and framed as irrelevant to the practices a teacher might take up.…”

Conversational adaptation in children and teens with autism: Differences in talkativeness across contexts

“…It is critical that future studies with very large samples be conducted with racially diverse participants and confederates to examine potential ways in which conversational adaptation in ASC may differ by race or enculturation. Indeed, a significant literature on “linguistic code‐switching” suggests that non‐white individuals in Western samples may have greater experience with behavioral adjustment than individuals from non‐minority backgrounds due to the inequitable requirements of functioning within predominantly white majority institutions (Daniels, 2018; Hibbler, 2020; Koch et al, 2001).…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2018: Signifying Movement

“…They also situate the problem of the co‐naturalization of language and race within the broader historical conditions of modernity and colonialism to connect insights deriving from US‐based research on race and language with struggles against white supremacy taking place all over the world. This critique of raciolinguistic ideologies has been applied productively in educational contexts in the United States, with various studies actively tracing the discursive and semiotic processes by which linguistic practices of nonwhite students come to be racialized through a tightly structured network of raciolinguistic ideologies, institutional conditions, and teachers’ practices (Daniels ; Flores, Lewis, and Phuong ; Rosa ). Other studies look at mediatized contexts to tackle how the normativity of whiteness in US culture comes to be reproduced, circulated, and contested.…”