Concetta A. Williams - What I Learned and What I Learnt: Teaching English While Honoring Language and Culture at a Predominantly Black Institution

i What I Learned and
What I Learnt

ii About the Critical Black Pedagogy in Education Series

The Critical Black Pedagogy in Education Series highlights issues related to the education of Black students. The series offers a wide range of scholarly research that is thought-provoking and stimulating. It is designed to enhance the knowledge and skills of pre-service teachers, practicing teachers, administrators, school board members, and higher education employees as well as those concerned with the plight of Black education. A wide range of topics from K12 and higher education are covered in the series relative to Black education. The series is theoretically driven by constructs found in cultural studies, critical pedagogy, multicultural education, critical race theory, and critical White studies. It is hoped that the series will generate renewed activism to uproot the social injustices that impact Black students.

Other Books in the Critical Black Pedagogy in Education Series

Multicultural Education for Educational Leaders: Critical Race Theory and Antiracist Perspectives , edited by Abul Pitre, Tawannah G. Allen, and Esrom Pitre

Education Leadership and Louis Farrakhan , by Abul Pitre

Living the Legacy of African American Education: A Model for University and School Engagement , edited by Sheryl J. Croft, Tiffany D. Pogue, and Vanessa Siddle Walker

iii What I Learned and What I Learnt

Teaching English While Honoring Language and Culture at a Predominantly Black Institution

Concetta A. Williams

Lydia Brown Magras

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

iv Published by Rowman & Littlefield

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom

Copyright 2019 by Concetta A. Williams and Lydia Brown Magras

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging -in-Publication Data Available

ISBN 9781475839388 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781475839395 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781475839401 (electronic)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

v We dedicate this book to all our students for their fierce desire to learn and their unflagging efforts to master this thing called college English.

Concetta Williams, EdD, and Lydia Magras, PhD

vii Contents

Abul Pitre

ix Foreword

What I Learned and What I Learnt: Teaching English While Honoring Language and Culture at a Predominantly Black Institution is a very timely book considering the widespread discourse around educating Black students. It fits the Critical Black Pedagogy in Education Series by capturing the key elements of the series, which entails historical reflection to improve contemporary educational concerns.

This unique book explores language, literacy, and culture to offer a counternarrative to the deficit thinking that has caused educators to set low expectations for Black students. Exploring the rhetoric of acting White, the authors detail the deeper meaning behind the phrase, arguing that contrary to the propaganda that Black people do not value education, the slogan acting White implies looking down on me or treating me like I have been treated by White people.

Touching on subjects such as the Ebonics debate and teacher expectations, the book offers a pathway for educators to develop instructional materials that meet the needs of Black students. Moreover, the book includes historical data that is often overlooked in the education of Black students as it relates to language, literacy, and culture. It clearly demonstrates that the education of Black students should be studied in a historical context that explores the impact of slavery on language and literacy development. It surmises how the lived experiences of Blacks in the United States are deeply connected to the politics of education.

The education of Black people has always been a concern for Americas ruling elite, causing them to spend millions of dollars crafting an educational agenda for Blacks in the United States. Historically, the state of Black education has been at the center of American life. When the first Blacks arrived in the Americas to be made slaves, a process of miseducation was systematized x into the very fabric of American life. Newly arrived Blacks were dehumanized and forced through a process that has been described by a conspicuous slave owner named Willie Lynch as a breaking process: Hence the horse and the nigger must be broken; that is, break them from one form of mental life to anotherkeep the body and take the mind (Hassan-El, 1999, p. 14). This horrendous process of breaking Blacks from one form of mental life to another included an elaborate educational system that was designed to kill the creative Black mind.

Elijah Muhammad called this a process that made Black people blind, deaf, and dumbmeaning the minds of Black people were taken from them. He proclaimed, Back when our fathers were brought here and put into slavery 400 years ago, 300 [of] which they served as servitude slaves, they taught our people everything against themselves (quoted in Pitre, 2015, p. 12). Woodson (2008) similarly decried, Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority. The thought of inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and almost in every book he studies (p. 2).

Today, Black education seems to be at a crossroads. With the passing of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the U.S. Department of Educations Race to the Top, schools that serve a large majority of Black children have been under the scrutiny of politicians who vigilantly proclaim the need to improve schools while not realizing that these schools were never intended to educate or educe the divine powers within Black people. Watkins (2001) posits that after the Civil War, schools for Black peopleparticularly those in the Southwere designed by wealthy philanthropists. These philanthropists designed seventy-five years of education for blacks (pp. 4142). Seventy-five years from 1865 brings us to 1940. One has to consider the historical impact of seventy-five years of scripted education and its influence on the present state of Black education.

Presently, schools are still controlled by an elite ruling class that has the resources to shape educational policy (Spring, 2011). Woodson (2008) saw this as a problem in his day and argued, The education of the Negroes, then, the most important thing in the uplift of Negroes, is almost entirely in the hands of those who have enslaved them and now segregate them (p. 22). Here, Woodson cogently argues for historical understanding: To point out merely the defects as they appear today will be of little benefit to the present and future generations. These things must be viewed in their historic setting. The conditions of today have been determined by what has taken place in the past (p. 9). Watkins (2001) summarizes that white architects of black education... carefully selected and sponsored knowledge, which contributed to obedience, subservience, and political docility (p. 40). Historical knowledge is essential to understanding the plight of Black education.