Creating Inclusiveness: A Cultural and Linguistic Stance

Linda Christensen's article touched on many important subjects, including the use of “The Linguistic Tea Party.” I really enjoy the idea of having students critically engaged in an exciting activity that will get them interested in a specific topic, while also teaching them an important lesson. In the case of the Tea Party, the students get to feel exactly what their personal character felt; whether it be shame, humiliation, loss of language, or what have you, the students themselves get to express what happened to their character. I think that allowing students to read work from all different languages is extremely important. There is no better way to oppress a certain culture or language than to leave it out entirely. Maybe a good way to bring in languages and writings into the classroom is to not only encourage students to write in their mother tongue or home language, but have them express what that language and culture is so that the teacher can pick literature that pertains to their students.

Some challenges with bringing inclusivity into the classroom is the lack of resources teachers may have, or lack of literature from certain languages or cultures that teachers can't get their hands on. It might be difficult to bring literature in from cultures that don't have as many writings or don't pertain to the course material in any way. A way to get around this is like I said before, letting the students write in their language and share their culture, and maybe even share their literature with the class so that their identity is known. Christensen's article deepens my fear for leaving students out. One of my biggest wants as a teacher is to bring inclusivity and bridge the gap between students that some might feel is there. Whether the gap is between wealth, class, gender, race, etc., I want to help bridge it as much as I can because I know how it is to feel like an outsider due to reasons I couldn't control; I don't want any of my students feeling that way [complex sentence: dependent clause first, followed by a comma and the independent clause for emphasis]. The article really makes me think deeply about the culture in every single person and how there is so much more going on in life-in the world-that we don't even know about and can't even begin to understand. It's not until we literally take a step inside these people's shoes that we can only begin to dip into the feelings and anguish they felt as they had their identity ripped from them. I can only imagine some students feeling this way as well when they read American author after American author, never seeing someone from their native home.

I think this article helped me imagine what I want to do with my project. The article got me really interested in the idea of privilege and oppression; I just can't believe class power gives people the right to steal someone's identity and force a new identity upon them. I think this gives me the urge for my project to explore the idea of class and privilege as it relates to language, specifically code-switching. The idea that people have to switch their natural languages to fit the social norm and hold jobs is just amazing to me. I can see both sides of language and power-some languages do sound more educated, smart, and therefore business-like-but that may just be because I was born and raised into this society that values a certain language over another.