Lecture Notes: Language, Power, and Social Justice

Introduction

• Language has the power to uphold or disrupt social injustices.
• Language is intertwined with history, culture, and memory.
• How language is policed in communities and classrooms is tied to racism and colonialism.

Personal Experience

• Speaker's encounter with a woman who called her "articulate" as a young Black woman.
  • Offense taken due to implications about intellectual capacity based on language.
• This incident influenced the speaker's research and first TED talk.

Story: The Man and the Lion

• A metaphor for dominant narratives and who controls them.
• Importance of questioning the authors of societal narratives.

Language, Race, and Power

• Explores contradictions in language practices valued in certain contexts but not in institutional settings.
• Example: McDonald's "I'm loving it" uses African American English (AAE) features like consonant variation.
• Example: TV show "Modern Family" uses AAE features like copula absence.

Historical Context

• Reference to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's "Decolonizing the Mind."
  • Colonial Kenya: Language of classroom and community diverged post-colonization.
  • Language used as a tool of spiritual subjugation.

Liberation Literacies

• Understanding the historical context helps address current educational practices that erase cultural identities.
• Language as a site of cultural struggle.

Paradigm Principles for Liberation Literacies

Principle 1: Awareness

• Critical awareness of one's own social identities and language practices.

Principle 2: Agency and Access

• Recognizing the value of diverse language practices and the spaces they provide access to.

Principle 3: Actualization

• Continuous opportunities to express diverse ways of knowing in institutional spaces.
• Importance of disrupting traditional formats (e.g., using TED talks vs. five-paragraph essays).

Principle 4: Achievement

• Rigorous standards for students and institutions to assess diversity and equity.
• Example: Integration of hip-hop literacies in research to transform engagement.

Principle 5: Alteration and Action

• Institutions must adapt to accommodate diverse ways of knowing.
• Reimagine teaching and learning environments (e.g., using the democratic space of a hip-hop cypher).

Conclusion

• Story of learning to ride a bike as a metaphor for finding balance in oneself to achieve balance in larger tasks.
• Calls for a paradigm shift beginning with personal critical awareness to enact social justice in the world.

Key Takeaways

• Institutions need to incorporate diverse linguistic and cultural practices, not just tolerate them.
• Liberation literacies seek to integrate marginalized voices in educational and social structures.