Is code switching a useful tool for your cultural knapsack or an act of cultural colonization?
Coming into this week’s reading, I was familiar with the concept code switching because I have studied it in sociology courses. It is also the name of a podcast I listen to regularly. I linked to an episode below in which the hosts discuss what it means to speak ‘standard american english’ through a sociopolitical lens. Before reading the article, Nah We Straight by Vershawn Ashanti Young, I had really only considered code switching as a useful tool for one’s cultural knapsack. Afterall, we are expected to use different registers in response to our social setting. We don’t speak to our friends the way we speak to our co-workers. We adjust our language and tone to be perceived as professional at work. I had only considered that people of color have a greater degree of modification because of the cultural value placed on sounding white. Whiteness is perceived as normal and a standard of correctness. W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness in which one has to present different selves for different settings means to, “always look at one’s self through the eyes of others (Young, 2009, p.51).” Looking at the world this way places the onus of action onto POC. It asks them finds ways to cope with racial inequities rather than interrogating the source of the inequity itself. Young states that code switching seeks to transform the double consciousness into a solution to racial discrimination (Young, 2009). Rather than asking why we place a greater value on “talking white”, we ask those that don’t to please learn how.
What I hadn’t considered is that expecting students to code switch is akin to asking them to leave part of themselves at the door of the classroom. It implicitly sends a message that the language they are switching off is inferior to the one that gets used in school. The author makes the point that code switching is really language conversion (Young, 2009). Code switching is not about making room for multiply speaking styles in one space. It is about dropping one in favor of another. Young proposes code meshing as a more inclusive concept that accepts many speaking styles as legitimate. I feel like this distinction is useful to note for classroom practices.
The example of Rachel the elementary educator in Code switching: Tools of Language and Culture Transform Dialectically Diverse Classroom, irritated me. I felt that she understood what the child was asking in the opening vignette. She did not like the way he had asked his question about why she taught math in the afternoon, so she feigned confusion in an attempt to get him to say it her way. While I understand that we have state standards to consider, we cannot just discount cultural and knowledge stores students bring into the classroom because it seems incorrect to our sensibilities.
The authors go on to argue that code switching is a tool that can help students understand language and appropriate uses based on social setting. While I do agree with that to some extent, I think coming from a code meshing perspective is a more effective culturally sustaining method. I think you can welcome multiple speaking styles and still get kids to think about the issues of setting and appropriate language. Imposing an expectation that students code switch to standard American English is a culturally colonizing practice. It is another manifestation of privilege in which the dominant culture is held as a standard of measuring success. As stated by Young, when black students are asked to give up their variety of speaking the, “students are simultaneously required to recognize the superiority of standard English and people associated with it (Young, 2009, p.55).”
Questions to consider:
-What can we do as teachers to teach that, the semantics and rhetoric of AAE are comparable/combinable with features of standard english (Young, 2009, p.71)?”
-What does it mean to replace code switching with code meshing? Is code meshing culturally relevant pedagogy?
-How is code switching different for white people than for people of color?
-How can we respect/honor the language patterns of our students while also teaching them to meet state standards which may not value them?
The example of Rachel the elementary educator in Code switching: Tools of Language and Culture Transform Dialectically Diverse Classroom, irritated me. I felt that she understood what the child was asking in the opening vignette. She did not like the way he had asked his question about why she taught math in the afternoon, so she feigned confusion in an attempt to get him to say it her way. While I understand that we have state standards to consider, we cannot just discount cultural and knowledge stores students bring into the classroom because it seems incorrect to our sensibilities.
The authors go on to argue that code switching is a tool that can help students understand language and appropriate uses based on social setting. While I do agree with that to some extent, I think coming from a code meshing perspective is a more effective culturally sustaining method. I think you can welcome multiple speaking styles and still get kids to think about the issues of setting and appropriate language. Imposing an expectation that students code switch to standard American English is a culturally colonizing practice. It is another manifestation of privilege in which the dominant culture is held as a standard of measuring success. As stated by Young, when black students are asked to give up their variety of speaking the, “students are simultaneously required to recognize the superiority of standard English and people associated with it (Young, 2009, p.55).”
Questions to consider:
-What can we do as teachers to teach that, the semantics and rhetoric of AAE are comparable/combinable with features of standard english (Young, 2009, p.71)?”
-What does it mean to replace code switching with code meshing? Is code meshing culturally relevant pedagogy?
-How is code switching different for white people than for people of color?
-How can we respect/honor the language patterns of our students while also teaching them to meet state standards which may not value them?
References
Young, V. A. (2009). " Nah, We Straight": An Argument Against Code Switching. JAC, 49-76.
Wheeler, R. S., & Swords, R. (2004). Codeswitching: Tools of language and culture transform the dialectally diverse classroom. LANGUAGE ARTS., 81(6), 470-480.
National Public Radio (Aug. 8th, 2108) Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=636442508
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ReplyDeleteGreat post, Amber. You brought up a lot of important ideas about the implications of code switching. Americans have the expectation that people will always change to accommodate them. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a family friend who had just returned from a three-week trip to London and Paris. Instead of talking about all the sights she saw, the food she ate, or anything positive, she complained about the rudeness of the people she met. I was blown away by what she considered rude—the people she talked to on the street in Paris didn’t speak English and couldn’t give her directions, the museum guards couldn’t understand the questions she asked, people had too strong of accents for her to understand. From my impression, if anyone was being rude, it was probably her.
ReplyDeleteCode switching is similar. White Americans expect people of color to accommodate to our ways of speaking and acting without contemplating what we are asking them to give up in the process. Coming back to the cultural knapsack metaphor, SAE is a weightless tool in my knapsack. I carry around the privilege of having my way of speech normalized. However, SAE may be a heavy weight in the knapsack of people of color. If their success came with the cost leaving part of themselves behind, they may feel the weight of speaking ‘correctly’ very acutely.
Thanks Rachel. I agree with your assessment. Code switching is yet another manifestation of privilege that is easy to overlook if it does not personally affect you.
DeleteGreat post Amber! You bring up a lot of points that are the overarching themes of these articles. I feel like your last paragraph is something I would have written word for word. Code switching has it's benefit's, but that's not really the point. The point is that code switching still values SAE more, even though it still values other dialects and languages. Code meshing allows all speaking styles to be seen as legitimate, rather than code switching which still inherently values SAE.
ReplyDeleteI really like your first question, which Young brought up on page 71. My degree is in English Linguistics, and in many, if not all of my classes we discussed AAE. As a diverse class, with speakers of SAE and AAE, we broke down every aspect of grammatically correct sentences of AAE and SAE, and often compared them. We broke them down phonetically, semantically, syntactically. They're very similar, and as Young says on page 71-72 "This way the rhetorical force of students' written work and oral fluency will come from a combination of the two, not from translating one to another, but from allowing them both to mingle together with vim and vigor." This is code meshing, which shows the similarity in dialects and also values them both at the same time.
Thank you for sharing, Will. Language is fluid and ever-changing. If you can understand the meaning conveyed by one's language, what need is there to decide if it is right or wrong? I had never considered code switching problematic before reading this article. Code meshing is more in line with culturally sustaining pedagogy. I think the distinction between the two is important to remember once we are in classrooms with students with a variety of speaking styles.
DeleteCode switching for white people asks far less than code switching for POC. I generally reference this type of code switching to my husband (a tattoo artist with rather colorful language) by saying "know your audience". Basically, if his audience is our young niece and nephew, it's probably good to NOT cuss a lot. If his audience is a potential client, he speaks more professionally. If his audience is a group of friends, he is more allowed to talk in whatever way he feels. Interestingly, I feel that this is how code switching was described in Wheeler & Swords' article - basically, switch it up according to what you are doing and who you are around. However, my husband doesn't have his race to contend with while "knowing his audience". He can speak incorrectly and doesn't lose his job or isn't held back because of it. Whereas POC don't have that same grace extended to them, as we saw in Young's example of the black woman who was interviewed to teach freshman writing, but wasn't hired because she said something grammatically incorrect. This just reveals that "race is the biggest culprit, not the...grammar" (Young, p. 70).
ReplyDeleteSo, my main question (which is very similar to your last question) is how do we teach grammatical standards while still challenging the status quo and validating our students' diversity (in language)? How do we hack this? I liked the idea of "contrastive analysis" (in Wheeler & Swords' article) and the examples they provided, but do you think that is this an act of cultural colonization?
Priscilla, thanks for sharing. I appreciate that you brought up the example of the woman making one grammar "mistake" and how it cost her a job. I didn't really touch on that though I thought about it while reading. No one speaks SAE in the sense that we all misspeak at some point but the consequences depend on how much privilege you have. as the author states the, "judgement of badness is sociopolitical (Young, 2009, p. 474)."
DeletePriscilla I completely resonate with your comment. First and foremost when Young wrote about the black woman who wasn't hired because of here grammar mistake it brought to mind something I think about when we discuss the practice of bringing a student's home language into the classroom. It's the idea of resumes when applying for a job. I have had it drilled into my head that your resume can have absolutely no mistakes (grammatically or language wise) if you expect someone to even ask you in for an interview. This runs in the same thread of needing to speak "professionally" ie Standard American English in an interview. If we know this is what a good portion of the work force is expecting from their applicants then we know that there is some importance to making sure our students have the capability to use Standard American English is the situations. It would be nice to think that employers would begin to become more aware that the use of code meshing doesn't keep the applicant from being a suitable choice for the position but unfortunately that just isn't a reality of our society. Which brings us back to the question that it seems almost all of us have and Amber posed, "How can we respect/honor the language patterns of our students while also teaching them to meet state standards which may not value them?"
DeleteVery poignant post Amber! All of the questions you pose for us at the end are incredibly important and ones that I was asking myself the entire time I was reading these articles. The trouble is, I am at a loss for how to approach the question of state standards because while I would like to fight off the reality that they exist, I can't. I definitely understand the argument for code meshing in the classroom and I support that, and I hope that I can be an effective teacher in this regard to make my students comfortable with however they speak or write. But then am I setting them up for failure by not addressing things that they will be tested on? I can't help but remember the podcast we listened to last week when Angela Watson said that "the rules for how to talk and behave have never been the same for people of color and white people," and that it's up to us as white people to rise up and call out the injustices and not fall into complacency. I like how Vershawn Ashanti Young dove into dialects and accents in the argument for code meshing when he says that "dialects are part and parcel of standard English and standard English has strong elements in dialects" (Young, 2009, pg 61). Because I think that its important to point out the difference in the way a white child with a thick Appalachian accent, for example, struggles with standard English and how they are perceived as opposed to a black child using AAE. "To clarify, if from a linguistic perspective, we accept that black and white Englishes are different dialects, even if complimentary and compatible, then the familiar linguistic concept of accent helps explain why substituting one version of English for another may be impossible and why code meshing is inevitable" (Young, 2009, pg. 62). I think this is a very important point to make in favor of approaching code meshing instead of code switching, but I think I still have many questions about how this looks in practice in the classrooms.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Emma. While the way I think about code switching has changed, I thought the
DeleteWheeler article offered a useful application in the classroom. She had the children essentially practice saying things in different ways. This is similar to Priscilla asking her husband to consider the audience. I think there is room to accept a variety of speaking styles while emphasizing how we want to communicate to a particular audience.
Amber, I also found the instance in the "Codeswitching: Tools of Language and Culture Transform the Dialectally Diverse Classroom" where the teacher, Mrs. Swords, kept asking the student "Why do I what?" incredibly frustrating. It is beyond clear that she understood what the student was trying to say, but to make a point she kept drawing the interaction out. I completely understand how that could shut a student down from wanting to ask further questions because they feel embarrassed. I used to get embarrassed if my teacher just missed something I said and I had to repeat the question in front of the whole class I would immediately start second guessing myself was that dumb? Did it not make sense? Did I get something wrong? If my teacher asked me to repeat myself three times I would have completely shut down.
ReplyDeleteThere is definitely a place for a students home language in the classroom. As we've learned in a few our classes now when student's feel invested in their education because they see their interests and personal culture reflected in the lessons, assignments, and activities they are much more likely to be engaged with the materials. However, I too wonder how we balance this inclusion, which we know is of extreme importance, with the state standards and being successful in the society we live in? I can't even imagine how difficult finding this balance will be and what that practice will actually look like in the classroom. I just know that there is a need for both in our student's education.
Thanks Lauren, I thought the Wheeler article offered an acceptable method of asking the kids to code switch. She let the kids chose the type of language characters would use in the story. That puts different speaking styles on the same level and gives them to opportunity to choose which one works best for their intended audience.
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