grammar and racism

Today, I observed a class for preservice teachers. I'm considering applying to teach this class next year, so I've hung out in there a few times, re-familiarizing myself with the material from a teacher's perspective. It's a course that I took while doing my undergrad, and I really enjoyed it (it helped that I had an awesome teacher who helped me understand the necessity of social justice in the classroom...thanks, P.Brady!)

In the class today, two students had to teach grammar in context (as opposed to grammar in isolation). They handed out copies of a text excerpt; the passage was a dialogue between two characters: one spoke in AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) and the other was a white character who spoke with a Southern accent (the text was written somewhat phonetically). The students explained that there were a lot of "mistakes" in this text and that our task was to "correct" them.

I was horrified. First, there's the slightly-weird fact that we were being asked to correct a published author's (Charlotte Perkins Gilman's) stylistic choice. I guess I can let that slide -- as long as there was a discussion of style that went along with the lesson. Second, and more importantly, we were being tasked with "correcting" AAVE. I almost could have been ok with this lesson if we were asked to "translate" the AAVE to "Standard English" (a term I'm not entirely comfortable, but will use for the sake of this post). Perhaps we could have discussed the style and talked about what was lost and gained by reading the text in AAVE vs. SE.

But none of these discussions occurred. We were supposed to view the AAVE as wrong English and fix it.

I asked the instructor, while the students were working on their "corrections" how she was going to address this situation. She said that they work a lot on issues of sensitivity and diversity in the spring semester, so she would deal with it then. Also, this was the students' first experiences teaching, and it was supposed to be a safe space to screw up and not get slammed for it, so she didn't want to make them feel awful. Both of these reasons are totally valid, and strategically, I support her. But damn, it was REALLY hard to keep my mouth shut during this lesson.

If someone actually did this lesson in a classroom, especially a classroom with students who grew up speaking AAVE, it could have traumatizing impacts on the kids. They would think that AAVE is just bad English. There was no discussion of the grammar system of AAVE, the legitimacy of it as a dialect, or it's ties to culture. Can you imagine how damaging that could be to a child? Indirectly, you're telling them that the way they and their family and maybe even their whole community speak is wrong, bad, and in need of fixing. Dang.