Rice University Workshop on Raciolinguistics and Language Teaching
Tracy Quan
Tracy Quan is an Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics at University of Colorado, Boulder. Her main areas of research include Spanish as an additional and heritage language, identities and language ideologies, study abroad, and critical pedagogies. She has published in Foreign Language Annals, L2 Journal, and Modern Language Journal, as well as various edited volumes. She is also co-editor of the book, Heritage speakers of Spanish and study abroad (2021, Routledge).
Eva Michelle Wheeler
Eva Michelle Wheeler is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Black Studies at Providence College. Her work in sociocultural linguistics positions language as a lens for the interdisciplinary analysis of complex social constructs such as race, beauty, cultural otherness, and diasporic positionalities. She has published in journals such as The Black Scholar, Sociolinguistic Studies, International Review of Qualitative Research, Diálogo de la Lengua, and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, in addition to chapters in edited volumes published in the U.S. and internationally. Through her methodology-driven research in diverse social, cultural, geographic, and linguistic settings, she seeks to examine social phenomena in new ways and to give a voice in academic literature to underrepresented voices.
Language, Race, and Power in Language Education
“I look very Dominican so people would approach me on the street and speak to me in Spanish” (Marc, African American learner of Spanish in New York City, from Menard Warwick, 2022, p. 55).
“I will always be treated as the stupid Chinese girl who can’t seem to grasp anything, while the white person (forgive my lack of being PC) will always receive the round of applause for simply saying nihao (‘hello’)” (Meryl, Chinese American learning Mandarin in China, from Jing-Schmidt et al., 2016, pp. 806-7).
“I remember sitting in my seventh-grade French class and not having any idea why I was there. I did not know any French people, and nothing around me suggested I ever would. France was a rock rotating in another galaxy, around another sun, in another sky that I would never cross. Why, precisely, was I sitting in this classroom?” (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me)
These vignettes illustrate how language and race are constantly interacting to impact language learning. In this workshop, we draw on raciolinguistics–the study of the co-naturalization of language and race (Alim et al., 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2019)–to unpack how our pedagogical practices, curriculum, and materials may contribute to racialized beliefs about languages and their users. For instance, what racio- and ethnolinguistic assumptions do we make about speakers of the target language (TL) that we teach? Who do we portray or imagine to be the students of the TL? Who is missing from these portrayals and why? How are our attitudes towards certain language varieties and linguistic practices shaped by an individual’s phenotype and other external characteristics? How are we preparing our students for the ways in which race and power are enacted through language in local and TL communities? How does this all impact our students’ personal, academic, and linguistic trajectories?
In order to explore these questions, we first discuss what raciolinguistics as an interdisciplinary area of study aims to exemplify and achieve within education. Second, we will examine research that unpacks the consequences of the entanglement of language and race and illustrate how supposedly “race-neutral” language education in fact promotes Whiteness, anti-Blackness, and racism. We define language education broadly to include the teaching of a second, additional, foreign, or heritage language. Third, we will learn about critical language awareness and antiracist pedagogy as possible approaches from which to reframe our teaching, taking into consideration our respective TLs, institutions, and geographic contexts. Throughout, we make space for individual and collective reflection, discussion, and sharing as we aim to reimagine a more racially-just language education.
At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Describe the goals of raciolinguistics as it pertains to language pedagogy
- Identify and analyze research and scholarly work that exposes the consequences of co-naturalizing language and race in educational contexts
- Identify pedagogical opportunities and resources as well as begin to implement strategies for addressing issues of race and power in the language classroom