Shifting Practices to Empower Teachers and Students: Putting the “Critical” in Language Awareness

Introduction: Awareness

“In books, [the young] are meeting extremely compelling images of life that will undoubtedly influence the crystallization of their ultimate attitudes, whether of acceptance or rejection” (Rosenblatt, 1968, p. 20). As the racial, cultural, religious, class, gender, and sexual orientation demographics of classrooms continue to change, literature’s pivotal role in helping students develop and understand their identities cannot be overlooked. As a result, teachers need to recognize, understand, and legitimize their students’ cultural and linguistic diversities.

In classroom spaces for students of all ages, teachers should be creating opportunities that support students in making personal connections between stories and their own lived experiences, while teachers pose questions about society that challenge the existing hegemony. Defined by McLaren (2015), hegemony is the “maintenance of domination not by the sheer exercise of force but primarily through consensual social practices, social forms, and social structures produced in specific sites such as the church, the state, the school …” (p. 140). One strategy to help students question society’s current status quo is using critical language awareness pedagogy, which Shapiro (2022) defines as “an approach to language and literacy education that focuses on the intersections of language, identity, power, and privilege, with the goal of promoting self-reflection, social justice, and rhetorical agency” (p. 4). The thinking is that once students are aware of dominant language ideologies, they can understand the social, political, and ideological underpinnings of language and actively challenge the structures of inequity, all while growing academically.

This chapter will discuss the current state of critical language awareness pedagogy and the shortcomings in implementation practices. The central argument is that schools and teachers have yet to fully embrace a critical language awareness stance. The chapter’s mission is to highlight that while the use of pedagogical practices such as student discourse in classrooms has increased, it does not go far enough. In particular, it fails to take a critical stance toward language itself, a stance that would not only build an awareness of the power of language, but ultimately, use language to challenge that very power and the inequities it reinforces. Unpacking the relationship between language and power then is also essential to this work.

The hidden messages in curricula (including but not limited to textual representations of people’s lives) shape students’ perceptions of themselves, the world, and their own roles, including the notion of maintaining the status quo (Allen, 1997; Bazemore-Bertrand, 2020; Hawkman et al, 2022; Leland et al, 2017). Critical theorists recognize these hidden messages as the non-neutral language that “in the form of discourse, serves as a form of regulation and domination” (Kincheloe, 2008). However, asset-based pedagogies—which take a strengths-based view of students, particularly culturally and linguistically diverse students—offer an alternative (López, 2017). Culturally relevant pedagogy, for example, was created as “a way for students to maintain their cultural integrity while succeeding academically” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 476), empowering students “intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (Ladson-Billings, 1994, p. 16-17).