Barbara A. Sasso
Rationale
I teach at Wilbur Cross High School, a large comprehensive high school in New Haven, Connecticut. According the most recent account in U.S. News and World Report, demographically, 80 percent of our students are economically disadvantaged. Around 50 percent of the students are Hispanic and 35 percent are African American.
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In 2014, only about 56 percent of our male students graduated after four years, compared to a school average of 65 percent and to a state average of 88 percent.
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It is interesting to note that the State of Connecticut does not aggregate the data specifically for minority males, but according to a report by the Schott Foundation for Public Education, in 2012, only 58.3 percent of African American males graduated from high schools in Connecticut.
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While creating this unit, I had in mind minority students who are often disengaged from academics. However, parts of it can be adapted for students of all academic levels, and used in schools where the majority is not minority. In fact, examining the incredible artistic contributions African Americans and other immigrant populations made to the English language would be a good lesson for everyone. The unit suggests other texts for you to modify lessons to better suit your own classroom needs.
Recent news is filled with accounts of unarmed black males, many of them teenagers, who were killed by police officers or others. The names read like a somber list of tragic casualties: Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Jordan Davis, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott and Freddie Gray. Anger and desperation fomented by racism come back to haunt the community. In April of 2014, one of our students was killed in a drive-by shooting in front of his home. The boy was a 16-year-old African American. This tragedy hit our students very hard, although such losses are mournfully not uncommon. At the boy’s wake, I made a quiet promise to myself to continue to work to help change the negative self-image and desolation that many African American males bear. One purpose of this unit is to work towards reaffirmation of the artistic beauty and power of language in minority groups, particularly African American and Hispanic – and to enlighten students to be wary of negative images and lyrics that do
no
t represent who they are.
I believe that teachers have a responsibility to address issues beyond the classroom and, while revealing uncomfortable images and texts that historically have been used to mock black culture might be challenging for teachers, exposing this as racism and teaching students to appreciate the beauty and variety that dialect provides artistically is important to counter these negative and racist tracts. It is difficult to talk about race, to have a frank discussion about unpleasant words, about violence, about racism and negative images of male and female sexuality. But if we believe that we are
in parentis loco
, than we must not shrink from these difficult conversations with our students. (Note: The Latin phrase is particularly amusing for the Hispanic kids in class.)
As English teachers, we walk the language-cultural line every day. Standard English is “white” English to the ears of many of my urban students. It is the language of the elite, and forms a barrier to prosperity as formidable as any Eliza Doolittle faced. The linguistic-cultural line that shapes a story about crisis of identity in George Bernard Shaw’s
Pygmalion
, is not a new story but it is still very relevant. The elite language is not the mother tongue of many of my students. Beyond being uncomfortable to use, it is pretentious and worse: Students resist code-switching because it is akin to being a traitor to one’s own tribe to “sound white.”
While certainly we need to teach Standard English, we also need to be careful in explaining
why
a standard form is necessary. We also need to teach that non-standard English is the living part of any language, and it a constant spring of dynamic expressiveness. Without it, any language is doomed.
This unit will strive to show students the necessity of using dialect to depict characters in literature, and the need of using authentic, creative, living language in modern poetry and spoken word. In her book, “
Dialect and Dichotomy: Literary Representations of African American Speech
, Lisa Cohen Minnick argues that written representations of African American dialect is “inextricably intertwined with racial attitudes and issues that help to define the American experience and, by extension, the national literature.”
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While it is important for literary critics to consider the artistic use of dialect, it is more important for students to celebrate how dialect conveys characters affected by time and place, and be able to discern between racist and artistic representations. Difficult and probably uncomfortable class discussions about language and racism will be encouraged.
Assignments for this unit include: 1) Learning the history of the English language to illustrate that all languages evolve and that language is power. 2) Analyzing images to explore the history of racism. 3) Examining literary works that use dialect artistically and creating rubrics to assess artistic values in dialect. 4) Examining examples of non-standard English in song, poetry and spoken word to assess their emotional, personal or cultural probity. 5) Using this information to write a formal synthesis paper. 6) Creating a performance piece or video.