RES 5535: Race, Class, and Gender in Literacy Research (summer 2010)

In the summer of 2002, after I learned I been hired to teach pre-kindergarten for the upcoming school year, I called the school to which I would be moving and a lady answered the phone. From the way she spoke, I wasn’t sure if she was African-American or Caucasian. She was well-spoken, from which I made the assumption that she was Caucasian, but there was a particular cadence to her voice that suggested she might be African-American. When she found out who I was, she told me that she thought she was going to be my assistant. This caused me to really wonder about her race because I had never really worked closely with someone of another race.

As it turns out, we have worked together for eight years now and we are good friends. Over the years, we have discussed those initial impressions from that phone call and she has told me that I am not the only person who has had a hard time telling her race over the phone. Like Michelle Obama, she said she has been told that she knows how to speak like a white person. She has told me that she learned that it was important to learn how to speak with standard English by her mother, like Dowdy was instructed by her mom.

As we have worked together over the years, we have become more comfortable with one another and we talk like friends, meaning that our language when speaking to one another is not as formal as it once was. In front of the students, she will use standard English, but when they are not around, she will sometimes slip into the language she uses around her family, such as saying, “You trippin’!” or “He ain’t got no sense!” As for me, when talking with my assistant, I will sometimes use words common to gay culture such as “Fabulous!” or I will say something with a lisp, which is stereotypically gay. When we see someone from our respective cultures behaving or talking in a stereotypical way, we look at each other and simply say, “My people, my people” with a shake of the head. We automatically know what the other means.

I strongly identified with what Dowdy was saying when she spoke of “assuming the best mask ever fabricated: the mask of language” (p. 9). Like Dowdy, I invented a character, the good student, and did all I could by excelling in school. Even though I did not like speaking in front of groups, I learned to do it well when it was required and I learned to read and write well. I controlled my behavior so as not to tarnish my image. As Dowdy states, I was trying to survive. I did not want to let others know of my alternative identity as a gay person, for fear that it would be my undoing. If I could keep up this character I had developed, I thought things would be fine.

As a kindergarten teacher from 1992 - 2001, I warmly welcomed students from other countries for whom English was not their mother tongue. It did not bother me that these students were not able to express themselves in standard English because I knew that they had not had the opportunities to speak this new language. For my African-American students, however, I must admit that I had a hard time understanding their use of non-standard English. This is not to say that I expected kindergartners to speak perfect English, but I was puzzled by the use of verb tenses, lack of verbs, and other “quirks” that I thought they should know better than to use when speaking. Unlike those coming from other countries, these students had grown up in English-speaking households. What I failed to realize was that these students were “echoing” the language being spoken in their homes and neighborhoods, the language spoken by family, friends, and neighbors. With this language, as Delpit states, the students were able to “revel in the rhythms and cadences of connection” (p. 37). And, at the age of five, these students were not really concerned about what others thought because they had, in most instances, always been in an environment in which they were surrounded by others using this same type of language. At this age, I don't think they were really concerned about "code-switching" either, because it had not really been an issue for them.

When I started teaching pre-kindergarten, my student population increasingly consisted of African-American students and I began to see how the students were “echoing” the language of their parents because I had increased exposure to these parents due to the fact that the parents had to bring their children to school and sign them in. Since I saw the parents much more often, I had more conversations with them and saw how their children’s speech patterns and language were often a reflection of their own.

In my first year of pre-kindergarten, I had to take some workshops dealing with literacy for young children and one thing I remember balking at was when the instructor said we should use the words the children say when they dictated stories to me. I cringed at the thought of writing something like, “Me and him is going to the store,” and then hanging it on the wall of my classroom for others to see. (In fact, just seeing the green squiggly line under the word “is” in the previous sentence, indicating there is a grammar error, is about to drive me crazy!) It is still hard for me to do this, but I at least make an effort to say the sentence in standard English for the child to hear, sometimes in a questioning format, such as “So, you’re saying that you and Bryce are going to the store?” I see this as an attempt to honor the child’s spoken language while exposing him/her to standard English.

Over the years, I have taken some classes to learn Spanish. While I am not able to say I am fluent in speaking the language, I can at least make an attempt at doing so and I can usually make sense of something that is written in Spanish. I will often try to convey a bit of information in Spanish to my Hispanic parents and students. I believe showing this respect for their home language and showing that I struggle with their language opens up these individuals to being more willing to attempt to communicate with me in English, a point made by Baker in her article.

Clyde Rice