Suhanthie Motha

Racializing ESOL Teacher Identities in U.S. K-12 Public Schools.

Through a year-long critical feminist ethnography, this article examines the challenges faced by beginning K – 12 ESOL teachers in the United States as they grappled with the signifi cance of their own racial identities in the process of negotiating the inherent racialization of ESOL in their language teaching contexts. I foreground the signifi cance of race in the teaching, language, and identities of four K – 12 public school teachers; three White and one Korean American, whose orientations were specifi cally antiracist. The study examined the implications of teachers’ privileged status as native speakers of standard English, a raced category, within an institutional culture that underscored the supremacy of both Whiteness and native speaker status. The study found the teachers’ practice to be complexifi ed by their attentiveness to their own and their students’ racial identities and by their consciousness of the situatedness of their practice within a broader sociopolitical context. The fi ndings also illustrated the ways in which the teachers negotiated spaces in which they could challenge the silent privilege accorded to Standard American English by problematizing school policies surrounding World English and African American Vernacular English. Implications for theory, practice of teaching English to speakers of other languages, teacher education, and professional development are discussed. So I got the book Counting in Korea. … On the cover, there’s a picture of a [boy wearing a] traditional Korean outfi t. All the kids looked at it and said: “He looks like you.” So he looked at it and said: “He’s stinky! Stinky boy.” And he pushed it away.

Women Faculty of Color in TESOL: Theorizing Our Lived Experiences

Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. (Lorde, 1984a, p. 112)

Decolonizing ESOL: Negotiating Linguistic Power in U.S. Public School Classrooms.

The year-long study that was the context for this article explored the complicated relationship among the shaping of ESOL as a school construct, the historical legacy of colonialism, and the contemporary influence of globalizing forces on the teaching of English worldwide and the lives of multilingual students enrolled in ESOL. In the context of a year-long critical feminist ethnography of four first-year teachers, this data-driven exploration examines each of three interconnected colonialist manifestations within the schools of the study: (1) an embracing of the supremacy of English over other languages, related to the dominance within school walls of a monolingual model of identity; (2) an investment in keeping Self and Other dichotomous, reflected in a construction of the school category of ESOL as Other and deficit; and (3) the promotion of a White, NES, American norm and the consequent marginalization of ethnic minority, NNES, and immigrant status.

Rewriting dominant narratives of the academy: women faculty of color and identity management

Abstract Drawing on Delgado and Yosso’s counterstory, Yosso’s community cultural wealth, and Alsup’s borderland discourses, the authors, who are women of color academics, use narratives from their lives to discuss the ways in which they draw on resources in managing and reconfiguring their multiple identities within the academy. These include identities of scholars, mentors, teachers, community members, mothers, and partners. They suggest that rather than merely being socialized into cultural reproduction, as much of the literature oriented toward women of color advises them to do in order to become successful, they seek to actually engage in transforming their roles and that of the academy by consciously and repeatedly making present and visible facets of identity that have previously been more-or-less absent in higher education. By presenting these counter-narratives the authors attempt to engage with ways of self-positioning that are, especially for women of color in academia, not frequently discussed or presented.