Journey to Acceptance: Challenging Assumptions and Rejecting Linguicism
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P93-C5
2025-09-29
254
Journey to Acceptance: Challenging Assumptions and Rejecting Linguicism
Learning to write Chinese characters in her art class provided Evelyn with an opportunity to interact with people who she had resented. The interpersonal space that she and her Cantonese-speaking classmates created through their work together challenged some of the assumptions that she had been holding. Evelyn found out that "It wasn't like I thought. People were willing to help you." And she valued her classmates' interest in her project: "Even though my Chinese, my Chinese characters are not going to earn me an award, they did help me communicate and learn from other people in the class."
While Evelyn's identity work had just begun ("My feelings have not changed about where I am at right now. I am still in the middle"), she did feel that she had moved forward in her journey to self-acceptance. She was "learning to enjoy the advantages" and "accept the disadvantages" of her current subject position, a position that was powerfully described in her poem "Chinese Canadians,". Evelyn also was planning to take a course in Chinese at university, which will make new discourse repertoires available to her. From these new repertoires, Evelyn will continue to make sense of her relationships to others and continue to construct her identity and identifications with others.
Working on her art piece, Journey to Acceptance, also provided Evelyn with an opportunity to reject some of the linguicism she had internalized. This work is essential for developing the multilingual pride Gloria Anzaldua writes about and an important part of learning how to enjoy the advantages and accept the disadvantages of being "in the middle."
Although Evelyn uses the metaphor "in the middle" to describe her Canadian-born, Chinese subject positioning, Carmen Luke and Allan Luke have argued that "between two cultures" theorizations do not adequately account for the "hybridity" and "multiply situated character" of diasporic identities.1 Instead, they suggest that the metaphor of "third space" used by cultural theorist Homi Bhabha allows teachers and researchers to better understand the situations in which students like Evelyn find themselves.2 Quoting Homi Bhabha, Luke and Luke describe the notions of hybridity and third space in the following way:
... hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity is the "third space" which enables other positions to emerge ... the importance of hybridity is that it bears the traces of those feelings and practices which inform it, just like a translation, so that hybridity puts together the traces of certain other meanings or discourses. It does not give them the authority of being prior in the sense of being original: they are prior only in the sense of being anterior. The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.3
Homi Bhabha's metaphor of "third space" is very helpful in thinking about Evelyn's situation. Evelyn does not speak English like an Anglo-Canadian, nor does she speak or write Chinese like her Hong Kong-born, Chinese classmates. Instead, her linguistic and cultural identities are developing within a "third space," one that bears traces of both Anglo-Canadian and Chinese legacies. Importantly, as Luke and Luke explain, Evelyn's hybrid identity and identifications change through contact with different people and places. The contact Evelyn had with classmates from Hong Kong in her art classroom was particularly important as it challenged some of the negative assumptions she had held about classmates from Hong Kong and allowed her to reject the linguicism she had internalized regarding the Chinese language.
Researchers working in other multilingual communities in North America have also noted the need for young people to engage with their negative feelings about language use. For example, in a study of language and ethnic identity among Puerto Ricans in the United States, researcher Maria Zavala showed how destructive ideas about Spanish speakers in schools could lead to students feeling ashamed about being bilingual.4 To illustrate, this is what Margarita, one of the young women participating in Zavala's study, told her about bilingual life in her own school:
In school, there were stereotypes about the bilingual students, big time. [Since] they don't speak "the" language, they don't belong here. That's number one. Number two, they were dumb, no matter what... Everyone said "that bilingual person," but they didn't realize that bilingual means they speak two languages. To them bilingual was not a good thing. There was a horrible stigma attached to them and I think I fell in the trap sometimes of saying "those bilingual people" just because that was what I was hearing all around me.5
The bilingual students in Margarita's school were vilified as dumb. In the face of this blatant linguicism, a common coping strategy was to avoid the use of Spanish in public. Christina, another student interviewed by Zavala, told her, I remember pretending I didn't know how to speak Spanish. You know, if you pretended that you were that American, then maybe you would get accepted by the White kids. I remember trying not to speak Spanish or speaking it with an [English] accent.6
Interestingly, when Christina, the high-school student in Maria Zavala's study who had avoided speaking Spanish, enrolled in college, she began to "'reclaim" the language.
I've been reading a lot of literature written by Latinos lately, some Puerto Ri can history. Before [college] I didn't even know it existed. Now I'm reading and writing more and more in Spanish and I'm using it more in conversations with other Puerto Ricans ... My kids are going to speak Spanish and they're going to speak it loud. They're not going to go with the whispering stuff. As a matter of fact, if a White person comes by, we're going to speak it even louder. I am going to ingrain that in them, that you need to be proud of that.7
The rejection of linguicism and the reclaiming of Spanish in college— where she began to engage with new discourses represented in Latino literature and Puerto Rican history—resulted in Christina being able to envision a new set of language practices to pass on to her children. She had moved from feeling shame about speaking Spanish to pride.
Given the importance that rejecting linguicism has for students like Evelyn and Christina, educators need to think about how they and their students might challenge negative messages associated with languages other than English. In the pedagogical discussion that follows, I reflect on what we can learn from Christina's work in college and the antiracist work that Ms. Edgars and Evelyn undertook together.
1 See C. Luke and A. Luke (1999).
2 For a discussion of the concept of third space, see Chow (1990, 1993) and Bhabba (1994).
3 See C. Luke and A. Luke (1999, p. 234).
4 See Zavala (2000). Zavala's work was part of study undertaken by C. Suarez-Orozco and M. Suarez-Orozco (1995).
5 See Zavala (2000).
6 See Zavala (2000).
7 See Zavala (2000).
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