The Skin That We Speak Analysis

In the article “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan cogitates about how her mother’s spoken English is compared to the Standard English language. Tan believes that language is not only a tool of communication, but also a sociological tool of measuring self worth. She’d always loved language, but never had she appeared expressive and rhetoric in front of her mother, due to the fact that her immigrant mother could not speak the Standard English language, but rather a “broken” English language. She discloses that between her mother, the outside world, and herself, only three languages exist: “broken” English (as her mother speaks to her), “simple” (as she speaks to her mother), and “watered down” (as she translates her mother’s tangled up broken English to

Furthermore, another question someone may ask is, “What makes Latinos different from African American students that also live in poor districts with little resources”? First of all, it is important to recognize that it is true that African American students also live in impoverished communities and attend lowly funded schools. However, the difference is that there is a language barrier that disadvantages both parents and students. When students are enrolled into school, the first question school officials ask is “What is the child’s first spoken language”? This question automatically categorizes that student.

Video Reflection: This presentation introduces META (Multicultural Education, Training and Advocacy) co- director Peter Roos, who argues in favor of the Educational rights of the Minority Children. He begins by explaining the history of Bilingual programs in the United States and the influence the Civil Rights Movement had in Education. An example of this influence was the case Brown vs the Board of Education, where African Americans sought the desegregation of schools.

One teacher Kozol interviewed at a school where 95 percent of the students were either black, asian, hispanic or native american, told him “not with bitterness but wistfully--of seeing clusters of white parents and their children each morning on the corner of a street close to the school, waiting for a bus that took the children to a predominately white school”. (p.203)

In the book, Other People’s Children, author Lisa Delpit does and excellent job compiling her experiences as a black educator through various essays and responses. It is though these essays and responses that Delpit tries to educate the American educator on the diversities we see in the classroom. She makes it known throughout the book that we need to make sure all students receive the same educational opportunities regardless of cultural background, race, or ethnicity. One thing that really stood out to me in this book was that she suggests that we appreciate linguistic diversity in the classroom. Stating that some student’s don’t have access to the “politically popular dialect form” also known as “Standard English”, and these particular

Dan French and Warren Simmons’s Education Week article titled “Colorblind Education is the ‘Wrong Response’” describes how teachers have neglected to inform themselves and embrace the different racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds of their students. French and Simmons argue against teachers taking a “colorblind” approach in classrooms. This “colorblind” approach involves teachers ignoring the racial and ethnic differences in the classroom in order to stimulate racial tranquility. According to French and Simmons, this ultimately causes “students of color, their experiences, and their perspectives to become “invisible” in the classroom”. Teachers should take more initiative towards exploring their student’s cultural backgrounds in order to

Even though these successful schools produce great students many children, majority African American and Hispanic, are being left behind. In Maya Angelou’s

Ann Arbor School District, it is failure upon school systems to not acknowledge and recognize student’s first language and create an education to fit their needs, but yet this dilemma remains. The question remains, what can school systems do to create the most beneficial form of education for African Americans who speak Ebonics in a way that does not take from their first language, but builds off of this so that these students will understand when they must code switch into SE, or academic language. Code switching is the mental process of understanding when it is necessary or most beneficial to oneself to change speech to fit certain scenarios; such as, informal v informal speech, or in this case Ebonics v academic language. “Consciously modifying speech to slip from one culture to another” (Haddock, 2008). Teachers must teach students when and how they should code switch; additionally, teachers should teach students speaking Ebonics through certain approaches, using culturally relevant literature, and above all being an accommodating, engaging, and knowledgeable

The documentary The Skin We’re In explores the severity of anti-black racism in Canada. It chronicles Desmond Cole’s journey to spread awareness regarding the issue. I found the video to be very powerful and educational although it was very biased. The Skin We’re

Mrs. Moore’s Interview I began Mrs. Moore’s interview with the first background question, tell me about your educational experiences in school. Mrs. Moore’s response was: Upon first entering school as a kinder student I remember being overcome with fear of strangers that impaled my senses with new sights, smells, and sounds. It was terrifying and it took months to learn to tolerate and years to become develop some level of comfort. It took about three years to really began to understand the instructional language of my Anglo teachers, as I learned to translate what seemed to be a variation of the language spoken in my African American home. I was hyper sensitive to those in authority trying to discern if he/

In David Troutt’s essay “Defining Who We Are in Society”, Troutt argues that language directly displays to others our level of intelligence, and that “as a culture, the greatest benefits go to those who write and speak in standard English, ways identified by most of us as “white,” specifically middle-class white” (Troutt 718). He argues that condemning the use of Ebonics by blacks opens up opportunities for discrimination and even racism. In specific contexts, people may talk however they please, but to discourage the mainstreaming of proper, Standard English for all Americans, regardless of race, puts groups such as the black community at a disadvantage from the start. Most colleges or well-paying jobs are not going to hire someone that does not speak what society has deemed professional Standard English. As tough as that is, it requires us as a whole to teach and educate at a higher level, and hold all students, no matter their color or creed, at the same

The Power of Language James Baldwin’s idea of language being the “key to one’s identity” is a correct assessment. The manner in which a person speaks or what they say often acts as a highway leading directly to private information that creates their identity. This can reveal to a person’s audience their level of education, level of confidence, and how they may fit in with those surrounding them. With taking these factors into consideration, it can be understood that your language defines who you are.

Boundaries of people’s language abilities can limit their possibilities and their quality of life. Benjamin Whorf, a well-known linguist, suggested the Whorf Hypothesis, which states, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” This quotation points to the fact that without language, people are deprived of some of life’s greatest of even most basic experiences. Someone who does not possess knowledge of a foreign language, her own language, or capacity for that language will have limits on her potential. From meeting a person of a different nationality to sitting in Spanish class, people who do not have an understanding of a foreign language will be trapped in the barriers between languages.

In accordance with Hymes’ (1974) call for an ethnographically grounded approach to the study of language in use, educational anthropologists conducted ethnographies of communication in order to examine the gap between the different "ways with words" (Heath, 1983) that children from different race, class, and cultural backgrounds learn in their communities, the types of communicative practices and participation structures that are valued in most classroom contexts, and the consequences of such "mismatches" for youth who are not from "mainstream" backgrounds. In this investigation, the close analysis of linguistic data was accompanied with extensive participant observation, with questions of surrounding context and culture emphasized and

The Language Culture and Society programme provides us with strong theoretical and interdisciplinary foundation for the study of a range of educational practices across the human lifespan and in a range of theoretical and methodological perspective is brought to bear on studies that explore the nature of literate practices, democracy and civic engagement and participation in social life. The programme focuses on relationships between education school and the dynamics and changing structures of language, culture, and society. It examines connection between broader, social, cultural, linguistic, historical, aesthetic and political factors in education and the local context in which these issues take place. It has long been recognized that language is an essential and important part of a given culture and that the impact of culture upon a given language is something intrinsic and indispensible. Language is a social phenomenon.