Teaira McMurtry, Ph.D.
Teaira McMurtry, PhD, a Milwaukee native, has served 12 years at Milwaukee Public Schools as a high school English teacher, literacy coach, and district administrator. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Secondary English Education at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. McMurtry also teaches educational leadership courses centered on equity at Alverno College. Her work focuses on humanizing pedagogies that place students’ native language at the epicenter of instruction, fostering cultural maintenance, empowerment, and success of African American students. Thus, she urges educators to critically reflect on their acceptance or rejection of students' rich linguistic capital and equips teachers (in and preservice) with the knowledge, attitudes, and approaches to cultivate language as a tool to empower students.
Thursday, January 26, 2023 | 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM (CT)
"What It Look Like": Becoming (and Supporting) Arbiters of Black Linguistic Justice
“It’s the thing that black people love so much—the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them…” -Toni Morrison (1981)
Black Language consistently contours Mainstream American English. You’ll notice this by steaming your favorite TV series, listening to your preferred podcast or radio station, or scrolling through your desired social media site. Black Language resounds everywhere; it is both admired and mocked. While popularized and promulgated through various forms of media, Black language has never been given the respect it deserves. Accordingly, educational settings have consistently ignored the linguistic wealth of Black learners by disregarding the way they embody language as informal, diminishing it as simply slang or street talk, and relegating it to be spoken only at home. Decades of research to date have demonstrated (a) how traditional ELA instruction disservices (and even harms) Black language natives, and (b) how instructional valorization of the standardized White American dialect (commonly referred to as Academic English) is detrimental and limiting to all students. This is exponentially problematic given that the Revised Wisconsin ELA Standards (2020, p.55) call for students to be able to:
Demonstrate an understanding of how language functions in different cultures and contexts
Apply this knowledge to meet communicative goals when composing, creating, and speaking, and to comprehend more fully when reading and listening.
Be able to justify intentional language and convention choices and explain how those choices differ for culture and context. revised WI ELA standards
These equity-oriented, anchoring standards listed above demonstrate that the use of standardized forms of English is not always contextually appropriate and, hence, it is necessary for all students—but Black learners in particular—to draw upon their linguistic capital to demonstrate mastery of the anchor standards. And, they should be able to do so stylistically (i.e., linguistically flex in their speaking and writing). Thus, both the shifting linguistic landscape of our society and the revised standards call for teachers to embrace and actuate artful language instruction that is anti-racist.
But how?
Representing and building on the research that shows how artful and antiracist language instruction looks in today’s classroom, this session will touch on the what, but will focus on the how. During this session, participants will (a) be shown authentic examples of how this kind of instruction translates across K-12 classrooms, (b) glean and develop ideas to start, sustain, or support anti-racist language instruction, and (c) will leave the session armed with a wealth of resources to actuate Black linguistic justice.
