Blog 6

 Hi Everyone, 

For this week's blog, I want to mention Kinloch's reading, "Revisiting the Promise of Students' Right to Their Own Language: Pedagogical Strategies," because I found her essay truly profound and inspiring! I was pleasantly surprised because I felt like in reading this, she understood me! A lot of the experiences she mentioned, such as speaking Black English, Spanglish, and its socioeconomic precursors and its academic implications, were very reminiscent of my literacy narrative! I was fine in NYC, but once I left and started college, things drastically changed. Codeswitching became a harsh reality, and though I did not mind it at first, it grew increasingly irritating to have to do it so often. I loved that Kinloch made it crucial to understand the language/literacy/dialect associated with her students' demographic. In my two-fold notes, I wrote, "She gives me Freedom Writers vibes, and I honestly love it! Look at how successful her students were because they were allowed to find academic literacy through understanding their own voice first,"  in reaction to her quote saying, "While my composition students can in fact read Standard English, many of them were initially reluctant to engage in discussions for fear that linguistic (in)competence in Standard English would measure their success or failure. In thinking about my students' fear, I recall Henry Giroux's argument that "the discourse of standards represents part of the truth about ourselves as a nation in that it has often been evoked in order to legitimate elitism, racism, and privileges for the few." (Kinloch 108) It was fascinating to read this piece because she gave me so many valuable nuggets on engaging with students like me to encourage their reaching their best potential. There were plenty of teachers that did not know how to deal with students like me, and quite frankly, if that's how I learned, I would probably deal with students like me in the same way that did not serve me because it's muscle memory not because its effective. I need to learn how to educate students like me as well. She reminds me a lot of my 6th-grade teacher, which I mentioned in my notes because she, too, was concerned with making the classroom a safe space where students can find their academic voice through their home community voice. She had us read Langston Hughes and examine a rap song like Kinloch mentions. We examined 2Pac's "Brenda's Got a Baby." I remember we read Walter Dean Myer’s book Fast Sam, Cool Clyde in Stuff, which was very much written in an older version of our Bronx voices. Not to mention it took place in 116^th street in Harlem where I would go to high school not too long after! All in all, I really did enjoy this reading. Honeslty, when Kinloc says, "Over the next few weeks, we decided to focus more on how students should have a right to their own language and how the class- room can serve as a place where such a right is interrogated for meaning in the larger public sphere, it sounds like an impossible dream because though her tactics are fantastic and her heart is pure, I do not have much hope in this country. (Kinloch 92) Her outlook seems too utopian for this world, but at least following in her footsteps, I can make a difference one class at a time.