Words Have Power: Language and Control In Education

Words Have Power:

Language and Control In Education 

The acquisition of language in spoken or written form provides a fundamental connection to an individuals social world. This connection can sometimes be recognized through regional accents, dialects and languages. The readings this week focus on some of the languages and dialects spoken by students in American schools, other than Standard English. 

In Lomawaima and McCarty's text When Tribal Sovereignty Challenges Democracy: American Indian Education and the Democratic Ideal, the authors establish an understanding of an educational framework based on diversity, democracy, and sovereignty based on the critical pedagogies of Friere and Giroux. As Lomawaima and McCarty so eloquently stated, "These words...are not simple abstractions or lexical tags. They carry whole domains of human experience...they are built of the backs of human lives, human stories, and personal, individual reality." (p. 284) In their examination of "the struggle between tribal aspirations and federal constraints on American Indian education," (p. 282) Lomawaima and McCarty begin with the colonization of Native American children through educational removals that placed them into boarding houses beginning in the late nineteenth century. Meant to "civilize" Native American children and assimilate them into an appropriate social status within the white-controlled world, education in the boarding school was highly racialized and forbade the usage of native languages and religion.Traditional Native crafts were acceptable, as they provided a form of vocational training that allowed for economic engagement. These examples support the authors' argument of the policy regarding American Indian education as a series of attempts by the federal government to support or suppress the various aspects of Native American life it considers safe vs those it considers dangerous. 

                                             THE AMERICAN INDIAN: GOVERNMENT EDUCATION

Lomawaima and McCarty move on the discuss the value of sovereignty in education, pointing to the success of Native American students enrolled in community-controlled schools. Students enrolled in bilingual education outscored those in English only curricula, and reported higher levels of confidence, pride, interest in learning, and retention. Perhaps more important than the testing outcomes of students is the survival of Native languages in the face of the historic atrocities by the federal government in its attempt to colonize or exterminate entire nations of indigenous people. The ability of Native Americans to retain their own languages allows them to retain the sovereignty of self-determination against the dominant culture.

Similarly, Alexandria Neason's article How Hawaiian Came Back From the Dead examines the resurgence of indigenous language in educational settings in post-colonial Hawaii, and the conflict that results from dual concerns for maintaining a traditionally marginalized culture while retaining the ability to benefit from engagement within the dominant cultural economy through the use of English language. The struggle of traditional language versus English language is shared through stories of parents Like Samuel, forbidding the native language when his son Herring Kekualike Kalua skipped schooling in English. The generational repercussions of this linguistic trauma are evident when we are introduced to his daughter Kamomi, who never learned the native language, and expresses regret when discussing her inability to fully experience the hula, "Without understanding the Hawaiian-language words and chants tied to it, dancing hula is like memorizing a song in a foreign language." That regret led to support of her daughter's desire to receive a Hawaiian language education that embraced all aspects of traditional Hawaiian culture, while simultaneously worrying about her daughter's economic future. 

The final reading, What Should Teachers Do, written by Lisa Delpit, considers what the appropriate response to student usage of Ebonics in the classroom educators should express. Like the previous authors, Delpit underscores the importance of cultural identity tied to linguistics and the inherent oppression such cultural identity and language receives from the dominant majority, again with a recognition that deviation from the dominant dialect leads to negative economic outcomes. Delpit provides readers with the example of a valuable exercise used with her (presumably cultural majority) students that shows how second language acquisition creates obstacles to thought formulation and expression of thought, which allows future teachers to consider the perspective of their students. (p. 32) I think the most salient point of Delpit's article is that educators should not confuse new language acquisition with reading comprehension, perfectly summing this concept up, "...the teacher proceeding to correct the student's Ebonics-influenced pronunciations and grammar while ignoring the fact that the student had to have comprehended the sentence in order to translate it into her own language (emphasis added)." (p. 37)

Ultimately I believe there are several concepts to be extracted from these readings, starting with ideas of meaning-making. Words have meanings, and words have power. The usage of words informs how individuals perceive, and are perceived. We see through the readings, and historically, how the colonization of marginalized people is not just restricted to their bodies, but also their minds, intent on changing the very ways in which they think. How colonized people thought/think has/is influenced/controlled by the dominant/oppressive culture, by law or other less official methods. And as we have heard from the marginalized people themselves, an ability to express through their linguistic preference affords them agency and self-determination, a more true meaning of what that individual is trying to express.