Ian Cushing

Using Young Adult fiction to interrogate raciolinguistic ideologies in schools

This talk reports on a UK Literacy Association funded study which is working with young readers to explore the use of fictional texts to interrogate raciolinguistic ideologies and language discrimination in schools. I draw on data generated from workshops where young students read and responded to Front Desk, a 2018 novel by the Chinese writer Kelly Yang, which centres around a young immigrant girl who is the target of systemic language discrimination. I describe how literary texts serve as an entry point into examining the pervasive, intersectional, institutional and systemic nature of language discrimination, focusing on how schools can be hostile spaces for speakers deemed to not conform with ‘standard’ language practices amidst raciolinguistic ideologies which construct racialised speakers as inferior, deficient and sub-human. I show how students used Front Desk and the workshops as a space for (a) describing the surveillance, stigmatisation and erasure of their own language practices through tracing raciolinguistic contours between fictional and real worlds, (b) interrogating the raciolinguistic ideologies and punitive listening practices of white authoritative subjects, and (c) conceptualising language discrimination as intersectional and institutional. Finally, I show a series of award-winning images designed by an illustrator who was commissioned as part of the project. These images depict the nature of racialised language discrimination in educational spaces, and are now being used in schools in order to facilitate critical conversations with young people around identity, race, power and linguistic surveillance.