by Sue Weinstein
Almost exactly four years ago, I published the essay “To Code-Switch or Not to Code-Switch: Wrangling Linguistic Politics in the Interest of Students” on the Ethical ELA website. At the time, we were almost exactly one year into the COVID-19 shutdown. I was teaching classes online and having appropriately distanced porch and backyard visits with students, colleagues, and friends. The graduate seminar that I discussed in the essay, “Critical Literacies and Social Justice Pedagogy,” was an exciting element of my work at the time, allowing me to share some of the core concepts of New Literacy Studies, my primary research field, while also exploring important recent work related to languages, literacy, and learning.
When I submitted the essay to Sarah (Donovan, amazing teacher, creator of Ethical ELA, and a fellow PhD alum of the University of Illinois at Chicago), we had a conversation that was challenging and has stayed with me. Sarah raised concerns about the term “code-switching” and whether I might use more current and nuanced concepts such as translanguaging or code-meshing. Translanguaging is a concept that comes out of bilingual/multilingual education; put simply, it is an action that “includes simultaneous use of two or more languages; engaging everyone in conversation whether they are familiar with all of the languages represented or not” (Marrero-Colón, 2021). Translanguaging pedagogy
means that the teacher is aware that the linguistic capabilities of the students go much further than classroom language practices. The teacher knows that he/she can tap into the students’ knowledge base and capabilities as a resource, and that the students’ home language practices can be used to further learning. (Marrero-Colón, 2021)
Code-meshing is the subject of the 2014 book Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy. In it, co-authors Vershawn Ashanti Young, Rusty Barrett, Y’Shanda Young Rivera, and Kim Brian Lovejoy suggest that code-switching as a concept and a pedagogy reinforces the segregation of language systems even as it has been used to push back against the perceived supremacy of a single linguistic code. They suggest code-meshing as a more accurate representation of how speakers of multiple dialects (AKA most everyone) use language by “Combining two or more dialects, language systems, and/or communication modes to effectively write and speak within the multiple domains of society” (Young, Barrett, Rivera, & Lovejoy, 2014).
My initial reaction to Sarah’s challenge was defensive. I claimed to be knowledgeable about the intersection of language practices, pedagogy, and social justice, yet I had only passing familiarity with these terms and didn’t feel confident in using them. I worried that educating myself enough to revise my essay away from the concept of code-switching would require time I didn’t have and I wondered if it might be better to withdraw my post entirely. Ultimately, Sarah decided to publish my essay in its original form, but I knew I needed to explore my defensiveness and what it revealed to me about myself.
Readers of this essay are likely all too familiar with the difficulties of balancing the many, and often competing, demands of teaching, research, administration, community engagement, and personal life. In the midst of these things, I had fallen off when it came to reading the work of fellow educators and researchers unless it was directly relevant to my current projects or classes. My focus in recent years was on my community partnership with Humanities Amped, a Baton Rouge nonprofit rooted in critical literacies and pedagogies that was navigating the challenges that come with working with and in public schools and shifting its practices in the midst of the pandemic.
My research on youth spoken word poetry had drawn to a close with the publication of my book, The Room Is on Fire: The History, Practice, and Pedagogy of Youth Spoken Word Poetry, in 2019. I was struggling to move forward with new work after more than a decade immersed in youth poetry. I had long felt burnt out by the demands of advising my English department’s secondary education concentration, a task that had once been deeply rewarding but had become increasingly complicated given constant state mandates, the difficulties of navigating multiple university units, and the frustrations of this extremely heavy “service” assignment that seemed entirely out of balance with the service my colleagues were expected to do.
And, of course, there was the pandemic, which revealed so much about our country’s unreasonable demands on teachers and schools and was causing many to leave the profession. This last brought up latent internal conflicts I had about preparing undergraduates to teach middle and high school English Language Arts given the profound lack of support – monetary, institutional, and otherwise – that I saw all around me in Louisiana schools (but which did not only exist in Louisiana schools).
Given this last, I had distanced myself from the field of English Education that had been such a source of professional community for me throughout my career. These and other things surely contributed to my reaction to Sarah’s perfectly reasonable question about the usefulness of code-switching as the grounding concept for my Ethical ELA essay. As I revisit this essay four years on, I am largely happy with it while I am also grateful for the further learning and self-reflection it generated for me.
Works Cited
Marrero-Colón, M.B. (2021). “CAL Commentary: Translanguaging: Theory, Concept, Practice, Stance… or All of the Above?” Center for Applied Linguistics.
Young V.A., Barrett, R., Young Rivera, Y., & Lovejoy, K.B. (2014). Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy. Teachers College Press.
Weinstein, S. (2019). The Room Is on Fire: The History, Practice, and Pedagogy of Youth Spoken Word Poetry. State University of New York Press.
Wow! Thank you for sharing this. What a vulnerable experience to share of going back to published writing from years ago. It is interesting how some of our past ideas and beliefs can evolve over time from more experience or research. Thank you for sharing this topic, also. I work in a school where we have multiple languages. Often times encourage my students to consider bringing that culture into their classroom discussions or to use it in their writing and learning. Whatever it takes to get them to lean into their own voices and know their voices have meaning and power and a place in this world. It is still a very new concept for the students to feel like they can do that, and that they can do that openly. I have many that will collaborate using two or more languages, but then still feel nervous in presenting their ideas to me or the class in anything other than English. The school is also in the middle of growing a school library, and of all the books others have suggested as titles to include in our library, I am the only one that has requested for these titles to not only be available in English, but also in the first languages of our students.