Dispelling the Myth of Mimicry as a Measure of Success with Tasha Austin

Episode Summary:
What kind of world does your teaching create? In this episode, Tasha Austin gives all educators food for thought to ponder this question. She challenges us to think about how separated communities inside the school building could be more diversified and inclusive environments that lend equal support to all learners. Tasha unpacks the idea of the “mimicry” of a standardized version of English, and takes apart the premise that there is one form of any language that is better than another. How can educators "design spaces of learning" that can elevate knowledge about the importance of using language across various situations instead of seeing mimicry as the only overarching end goal? This is just one of the burning questions we dive into in this episode!
 
RBERNing Questions for this Episode:
1- When teaching educators, how do you suggest they implement the value of various Englishes in their classroom settings?

2- How can educators "design spaces of learning" that can elevate knowledge about the importance of using language across various situations instead of seeing mimicry as the only overarching end goal?

3- What is the most important focus when educating ENL teachers on how to best educate minoritized language populations? 

Guest Bio:
Tasha Austin is an assistant professor of teacher education, language education and multilingualism. She was the Teacher Education Special Interest Group Representative for New Jersey Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages-New Jersey Bilingual Educators (NJTESOL-NJBE) and co-created and hosted their "Critical Conversations" YouTube series. Her research uses Critical Race Theory and Black feminist epistemologies through a raciolinguistic perspective to qualitatively examine language, identity and power, and the ways in which anti-Blackness emerges in language education and (language) teacher preparation. Through her purposeful enactment of critical consciousness and engaged pedagogies, her praxis seeks to effect meaningful change in the field of language education and within teacher education more broadly.

Resources:
Twitter: @ProfeAustin
University Profile:
https://ed.buffalo.edu/about/directory/faculty/profile.html?uid=tashaaus

Publications
https://www.languagemagazine.com/2023/06/05/are-we-cultural-and-linguistic-surrogates

Austin, T., & Kearney, E. (2022). Teacher Recruitment, Preparation and Support: Choosing Community in Moments of Possibility. The Language Educator.

Austin, T. (2022). A Hard Time Seeing the Relevance: Race and Discourse Identity in (Language) Teacher Preparation. International Journal of Literacy, Culture and Language Education.

Austin, T. (2022). Linguistic Imperialism: Countering AntiBlack Racism in World Language Teacher Preparation. Journal for Multicultural Education.

Other Media
Webinar:  https://youtu.be/_dCRpu82KHA
Critical Conversations Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRUQpkydy9VzTtVoieyKUN4IPNaY0JyuO

To find out more about Mid-State RBERN at OCM BOCES' services, listen to season 1 of the show with host Collette Farone-Goodwin, or to receive CTLE credit for listening to episodes, click here: https://midstaterbern.org/

Transcript

Tasha: [00:00:00] I've personally grown to model and embody authentic languaging as best I can in the preparation of language teachers. For example, I police my own English much less than I used to when I was grappling with higher levels of internalized anti-Blackness, which is always painful to admit, but you know, we're socialized to believe and tell ourselves that there's a proper English and that particularly for Black and minoritized students, using it will help them progress economically, right?​

Yasmeen: Welcome to RBERNing Questions, a professional learning podcast where we answer your most compelling questions about [00:01:00] teaching, serving, and supporting multilingual learners. I'm your host, Yasmeen Coaxum, and through our talks, I look forward to bringing the methods, philosophies, and stories behind teaching multilingual learners to light.

Let's get into the show. Tasha Austin is an assistant professor of Teacher Education, Language Education, and Multilingualism. She is the outgoing Teacher Education Special Interest Group representative for New Jersey Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, New Jersey Bilingual Educators, and she co-created and hosted their Critical Conversations YouTube series.

Her research uses Critical Race Theory and Black feminist epistemologies through a ratio linguistic perspective to qualitatively examine language, identity, and power, and the ways in which anti-Blackness emerges in language education. and language teacher [00:02:00] preparation. Through her purposeful enactment of critical consciousness and engaged pedagogies, her praxis seeks to effect meaningful change in the field of language education and within teacher education 

more broadly. We are thrilled to have her on RBERNing Questions today to talk about the value of various Englishes, dive into the notion of mimicry, and to highlight the criticality of allowing our multilingual learners agency in how they use language. 

 So, hello, Dr. Austin. I am so thrilled to have you on our RBERNing Questions today.

Our RBERNing questions podcast today. And, um, I must say that, we of course were, talking back and forth via email, right? And so I'm one of those [00:03:00] people that pays attention from top to bottom when I'm reading someone's email, and I saw this really awesome quote here from Bell Hooks, right,

in your signature that says, as a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another's voices and recognizing one another's presence, and I loved that. It really struck me when I read it, and I feel like this is a big part of what we'll be discussing in today's conversation, because as educators, we have to foster this interest and this attention to a variety of voices,

and really, tune into the individuals in our classrooms that come together to really create the presence or the environment in our educational spaces, and so with that, let's start [00:04:00] from the beginning. So I'd really love to know what actually inspired you to become an educator of ELLs. 

Tasha: Firstly, Yasmeen, thank you so much for having me.

Like our chance encounters from shared webinar space to the TESOL conference, it's just always been a joy to run into you and to just exchange looks or embraces and just encouragement, so thank you for having me. Aw, 

Yasmeen: thank you so much. The feeling is completely mutual. Okay. 

Tasha: For sure. It's funny because my, my years in the classroom, I was a Spanish teacher, and in my preparation, we were always offered, encouraged, marketed, that we could also do what was called ESL in my program,

and it always felt odd to me because it felt like it was, offered as like a, a marketability thing, like you can do another thing and then you're more likely to be hired. And so I shied away from it, right? and it's very interesting that in my own. K 12 years, I ended up working with what's considered to be [00:05:00] ENL, ESL communities anyway, because I worked, I taught in Jersey City and Hoboken in New Jersey, and both of those are extremely linguistically, ethnically diverse enclaves, wherein students in your class oftentimes were newcomers, even in a Spanish classroom setting.

And so the only way that I could teach those students well was to work with the ENL, the ESL practitioners and to sit with them and to say, "What can I learn about these young people and their home countries and their communities and their languages and things of that nature?", and so I spent the whole time working as a part of a team

to make sense of the best ways to design the types of environments that Bell Hooks is talking about, and it's only been in the past six and a half ish years that I transitioned to higher ed, and then I had the potential, or rather the capacity, the opportunity [00:06:00] to work directly with ENL professionals and ESL professionals and to prepare them to do that work in K 12 spaces.

And I grew up in those spaces. these are folks that were like my best friends, my, what they say, play cousins, right? they're family at this point because folks who, they themselves were first generation migrants or what some folks call immigrants. we all live in the same communities and, end up intermarrying and all types of stuff.

So I feel like it's, full circle for me, just engaging with the same beautiful, rich kind of complex tapestry of languages and cultures that I've always known. 

Yasmeen: Okay, so I'm just going to take it back a little bit because you said you were a Spanish teacher, right? So how did that kind of come about? Your interest in, like studying Spanish and I just want to also note that, you said something in 

one of the webinars that I [00:07:00] watched, which was, it was a little bit disturbing. You said something, about being told that you couldn't study a higher level of Spanish. And so now that you say you actually were a Spanish teacher, I would really like to understand, first of all, In what crazy world were you told that you couldn't study this higher level of Spanish, and then how did that then, evolve into you actually teaching Spanish?

Just a little background. 

Tasha: Yeah. yeah, so the abbreviated version is like this kind of ubiquitous anti-Blackness that we see pop up in various kind of institutional settings from, the criminal justice system to the healthcare system is pervasive in education as well, and so I had a beautiful multicultural tapestry of a community that I came from, but there was very sharp and jarring separation at the school door, right?

So you'd walk Into the school and they would send the quote [00:08:00] unquote bilinguals to a specific wing of the school, the quote unquote special needs students to a certain level of the school, right? They would separate folks in a very, jarring and like distinct way to ensure that even though we had this incredible diversity, we really were not intermixing much within the school.

And so for me, not being categorized as someone who was bilingual, not being categorized as someone who supposedly had special needs, I went into general education classes and we had our world language requirements, and so the community that I was raised in had extreme, linguistic diversity it's absolutely beautiful.

And so I heard Spanish all the time, like from the stores to in the streets, it just inescapable in the best way. And so I was studying Spanish, but you needed a minimum of two years. I didn't want the minimum, right? I loved it. I wanted to continue. I had a near perfect average. but when I went to my counselor,

and I said, okay, I'm ready for [00:09:00] Spanish three, you know, I have like a 98 average, he said, you're not a native, so you can't take that, and that was the end, I didn't get to go beyond Spanish two in high school, and so my personal history with language learning has been fighting, right?

Fighting to, once I got to college, to get into the Spanish language classes because the, entrance exam focused on the Castilian variety of Spanish, right? Oh, 

Yasmeen: wow. 

Tasha: Yeah. So the imperial varieties are always given, this kind of prestige over the ways that vast communities that are right here, local, are actually using the language every day,

and the test focused on un Coche, talking about la gente, el coche, estoy el otro, and for me, a coche was a baby carriage, right? Around the Caribbean, Spanish speakers, I was raised around, but they were using, like a Spaniard Castilian variety of which they meant car. So I didn't do well on the entrance exam and they made me start all over at the [00:10:00] college level.

And working my way up through Spanish again, I wanted to go to study abroad and, I was told you can't, you don't have a high enough level. So I had to put up a whole presentation fully in Spanish to the dean and petition the dean to study abroad and, it was, fight after fight.

So I did eventually become a Spanish teacher and working in those communities, I had too much personal firsthand experience to ever believe that there were certain kinds of Spanishes or certain kinds of Englishes that were better than others because I lived in these communities, I used these languaging practices and they were beyond functional.

My peers were going with their parents to work out legal paperwork and hospital bills, at very young ages. Clearly, what they could do with language was the most that could be asked, regardless of, maybe what school assessments might've said. And so I think that really pushed me to have a critical [00:11:00] lens on what language is and how it functions since the outset.

But that's my personal journey, like the abridged version of how I ended up being a Spanish teacher. 

Yasmeen: Wow, and this whole idea of the kind of blended, this kind of utopian blending that the U. S. is supposed to pride itself on, it's really sadly evident that, as you mentioned, and, in the web, one of the webinars that I looked at that the US is still a very segregated society. Now you're talking about years ago I suppose right at the outset of your language educational experience.

However, yes, it's still very obvious that everyone is definitely living in a racialized society, and your, description about the Spanishes, right? There's so much [00:12:00] parallelism between what you just said and views of different Englishes, right? So I really want to dive into that in terms of

when you, because your current role right now is as a teacher educator, correct? Okay, so when you are teaching educators, how do you suggest that they implement the value of various Englishes in their classroom settings so that, you know, it doesn't end up with this situation of the dominant, the quote unquote dominant form of English that is supposed to just provide this blanket success, I want to say?

Tasha: Yeah. And I'm glad that you, shared that question with me because again, it proceeds out of my experiences, and of course I study now and I'm constantly reading. It's my job as a scholar, but prior to reading and finding it in the [00:13:00] literature, it was my own experiences that really framed what I understood about language.

And so I've personally grown to model and embody authentic languaging as best I can in the preparation of language teachers. For example, I police my own English much less than I used to when I was grappling with higher levels of internalized anti-Blackness, which is always painful to admit, but you know, we're socialized to believe and tell ourselves that there's a proper English and that particularly for Black and minoritized students, using it will help them progress economically, right?

But as April Baker Bell teaches us, that couldn't be farther from the truth, right? Trayvon Martin pled for his life in perfect English, as did Eric Gardner, so it not using my own authentic language practice, it actually caused more harm than good in preparing teachers. I remember I once got evaluations back, [00:14:00] from teaching a course and that said, "For someone so focused on social justice, you sure used 'you guys' a lot, which misgenders nonbinary students," right?

And I never forgot that because I say y'all, like and when I'm just talking and being myself, I say y'all, 

Yasmeen: but I 

Tasha: stopped saying y'all, right, because I was trying to sound whiter, in my preparation of teachers, and y'all, like many Indigenous and Africanized varieties of English, is not gendered. So I doubly failed myself, right?

Like, myself, right? Using like this westernized kind of form. And I harmed my students in doing that. So the best way, I think, to demonstrate the value of language varieties and various Englishes is to model it. which takes reflection and work. And I think about, Michel DeGraff, who's over at MIT. He has this, linguistic autobiography activity, which helps folks unearth their own relationship to language, including English.

And it [00:15:00] asks that, students identify and share specific details, personal, socioeconomic factors that may have shaped their language patterns and their feelings and attitudes towards those patterns. And they need to include biographical data like. place of birth, where you grew up, languages and language attitudes you've been exposed to, relevant events, the way that they're remembered, how they've influenced, challenged, affirmed their identity in some like decisive or memorable fashion.

And it requires that they trace some of their family history. So parents, siblings, relatives, caretakers, acquaintances, peers whose speech and linguistic varieties have influenced their own in some ways. So it starts with the self. So undergoing that type of reflexive, what Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz calls archaeological work can help us think about tailoring those kinds of opportunities for K 12 and ENL students.[00:16:00] 

Yasmeen: Wow, and what you were just talking about, such a kind of powerful personal experience to go through, and then, to shape how you progressed going forward in terms of your use of language, and I think that it's, that's a really bold step. that definitely, I think, especially, as a Black woman, it's very, it can be very scary because again, your whole life, you've been like told speak this way.

It's not this, it's this, it's not ain't or whatever it 

Tasha: is. All the things. 

Yasmeen: Yeah, and I love that you said "policed" police your language. And you asked a very provocative, question, right? So let me just tell the listeners what webinar I'm even talking about because I've mentioned it quite a few times.

So, um, the title of the [00:17:00] webinar was, "We Been Off That: Mimicry, Agency, and Politics in Critical Language Awareness." And first, I really love that title. And I know, off that, this is from a Jay Z song, isn't it? Off that, the song Off That, which I love. Really awesome beat. anyhow, yeah. And so, I mean, what you were talking about, this idea, it really focuses on the idea of mimicry and, noticing that really mimicry isn't enough anyway,

and how we can as you said, model different styles of English, different ways of speaking to normalize it, right? 

Tasha: That's right. 

Yasmeen: So back to the question that you asked your audience, during this webinar, you said, what could it mean to present opportunities to multilingual and racialized students to have agency, right?

Which is part [00:18:00] of your title here, mimicry agency, right? To have agency. And how they want to communicate and for what purposes they wanted to be agentive in the ways that they use language. So I would like for you to answer this. What do you see as being a result of this type of reality where students are actually afforded these types of opportunities?

Tasha: Yeah, that's like the freedom dreaming part of it, right? Because at least for me, and I know this isn't the case for everyone, I talk to folks and I have serious FOMO from folks who have gone through these caring and uplifting and affirming kind of educative processes. That's not been my, that's not my, that's not my testimony, right?

It is a, it is an act of freedom. Freedom dreaming to think, what would it look like for, racially minoritized and multilingual youth to be in spaces where they're making the decisions about the [00:19:00] purposes of the language practices in which they'll engage. I've not seen it often.

And so I gave the anecdote during the webinar, about being at the international school, and seeing how those young people who were in groups. of students who, maybe a group of four or five, representing three or four different, languages, religions, cultures, parts of the world, and who didn't necessarily all, try to tailor the way that they expressed their speeches.

They were running for, senior government. They didn't try to, cater what they were saying to a flattened, imagined, white, middle class, monolingual audience. They looked at who was in the room, which was their peers, about a hundred international students from around the world, various backgrounds, religions, languages.

I'm telling you, the only thing they shared is their love of hip hop. Okay. They were all in the room getting down, having a great time, but it was beautiful to see them get up there and give speeches based [00:20:00] on their own goals. They wanted to win the election. They recognized who was in the room and they were using rhetoric strategically, to build arguments around a desired goal that no one outlined for them.

They had some stipulations, right? Their group itself had to be composed of folks from different, different backgrounds and different languages, which I thought was brilliant on behalf of the teachers there. So in my mind, like that is a sketch and a skeleton of what it could be. It could mean that the last group I talked about in that webinar, the speech is delivered multilingually.

That could be their own goal, right? That when they are acquiring or learning English and various Englishes, Maybe they're not using it when and how we think they might, because they have different goals. Maybe they will take it and use it in the job application or when they're, out and about and they need to engage with folks who are using English.

But in every setting, all the time, [00:21:00] and in a very specific way, by whose goals and for whose purposes? Just seeing that in that tells me that if we were to relinquish the notion that there is a flattened, singular, imagined audience that everybody wants to, communicate with, right? Which, strangely enough, doesn't exist, right?

Because there is no even flattened, audience. singular white middle class monolingual audience, right? Folks, everybody has a diversity of thought. So even that is imagined. But it shows me the very tangible realities of students feeling capable, feeling, the ability to self actualize, feeling agentive when we

let them be a part of designing their own goals, right? And trust them to carry on the same kind of practices that they do outside of the school once they come inside. 

Yasmeen: Okay. I think one of the most [00:22:00] powerful words, there have been a lot of powerful statements today, but I think that one of the most powerful words that you used was goals, okay, designing goals.

And, it's very important for educators to pay attention to that I think, to what are the ultimate goals instead of assuming, having this inherent assumption that everyone has, as you pointed out, this mimicry goal. Speaking of designing something that is going to really speak to their students,

how would you suggest that educators design these spaces of learning, that can elevate knowledge about the importance of using languages across various situations instead of just seeing mimicry as the only overarching kind of end goal. Now, I know you answered it a bit by talking [00:23:00] about this idea of modeling, right?

But are there other kind of ways that they can maybe build something into their lessons that will highlight, the importance of these different uses of languages and the agency that, the different uses, can be displayed in? 

Tasha: Yeah, there's, brilliant work out there by Dr.

Shondel Nero, who's out of, NYU, who's a teacher educator. Her background is in creolization, and she does these brilliant study abroad trips to the Dominican Republic where she takes teacher educators for an immersion in the Dominican Republic because of the, very high population of Dominican students that those teachers will come to work with, and she wants them to see what it feels like to be the ones who are being tested on their Spanish level language proficiency the moment they touch down, and to see how Dominican students in their families, in their own context, how do they [00:24:00] engage with one another?

How do they language? And, just to flip the paradigm in terms of power dynamics, but going back just to the phrase of spaces of learning, that term, that phrase is seems small. But it's really precise and it's an important distinction when we're talking about instruction, like it's not just the pedagogy, it's a space and it's by design.

So in that talk, the, "We Been Off That" talk, I'm drawing on April Baker Bell's "Linguistic Justice", who, she pulls from Carmen Kynard's Vernacular Insurrections and Geneva Smitherman's "Talking and Testifying", but it's all to unpack the depth of knowledge that has been born of the Black freedom struggles in the U.S., which prove time and time again that mimicking specific language practices and ways of being in order to be treated as fully human does not work. So I uplift the Black experience because it's a harbinger for so many racially minoritized ENL students since, if you're comparing, it's after more than [00:25:00] 16 generations in the U.S. as scholars and the president and world renowned art and literary giants, this prevailing knowledge that somehow African American English is somehow broken is still discursively treated as, as fact And so I feel like Jonathan Rosa put it really eloquently in his book, and I, I have this quote that I go back to, he says, "For LatinXs designated as ELLs in US schools, there's an implication that there's a language barrier that has to be overcome in order for them to become legitimate participants and members of the nation,

but millions of US born and, or raised LatinXs who identify as bilingual English dominant or monolingual English users, still experience profound forms of inequality in education, housing, healthcare, criminal justice, electoral politics," which is clearly demonstrating that, the language is not what's going to make the difference.

And he goes on to highlight that there's countless other racialized minorities, or minoritized groups, rather, [00:26:00] like African Americans and Native Americans who face profound forms of structural inequality, despite their identification as monolingual English users. So I pull on his brilliance because when I'm thinking about what do we do in the environment so that, young people can think of, what do I want to do with the language?

And so that they can see themselves as, goal setters and agentive. We have to disabuse ourselves first of the myths that academic English mastery, whatever academic English is, will somehow upend centuries of systemic racism and inequity, right? So the learning environment this looks like refutes the excuse of a language barrier in favor of practices we know work like desegregation, or sound second language acquisition and educational theory and instructional supports.

If we acknowledge that separating out ENL students and lowering our expectations of [00:27:00] them 

Yasmeen: deprives 

Tasha: them of cognitive and social constructivist opportunities, so ones that call for heterogeneous language grouping and shared experiential and multimodal learning, respectively, we'll stop placing them apart from the general education population and create shared opportunities for them to bring their knowledges and languages to the learning space.

In thinking about second language acquisition theory, if we really acknowledge that there's a silent period and that there's an affective filter, and we need to think about ways to create comprehensible input, then we're not going to expect newcomer students to, have productive language output prior to sufficient, rich, and varied input coming from these varieties of English that we need to be exposing them to, right?

And then putting that into play with low stakes, peer to peer [00:28:00] opportunities to use those Englishes, right? And if I go back to what I described for you, there would never be quote unquote bilingual students who would be exposed to Black Englishes in my school, because the Black kids were segregated in one space, the quote unquote bilingual kids were segregated into another space, and then the high tracked students, which tended to be white, right?

Were tracked elsewhere. So there wasn't this heterogeneous language grouping. We kept folks in their own pockets. And so they weren't exposed to various Englishes or manipulatives and multi modal communicative routines, which drew from rich language practices from ENL communities. So the end goal when we're talking about designing these spaces is one that's co-formulated by and responsive to the aims of the students and their communities. 

Yasmeen: There's so much from what you just said, as usual, but I guess what stood out to me the most was this [00:29:00] idea of low stakes, as well as bringing people together, right? Stopping it with this separation, with lower expectations. This really spoke to me because I was in this same system of tracking, right?

Tracking the honors versus the not honors. That's basically how it worked, at the school that I attended, and so, um, providing low stakes opportunities, I think that this, this really stands out to me. So could you give an example of, like what would be a low stakes, opportunity for someone to practice language?

Tasha: For sure. again, if I think about Shondel Nero, she sends folks into their own communities to conduct these linguistic investigations, right? So how cool would it be to like, then send, students back into their communities and to document language practice, right? So I'm not standing over their shoulders, telling them right, wrong, this, it doesn't [00:30:00] count as language.

That's not correct, right, they're literally documenting like, how does my grandmom talk? And, what is it like when I go to the corner store and what are those exchanges like? And then they're coming together with folks who are different than them linguistically, right back into that heterogeneous class to compare notes. And looking at what do practices of language look like in the world?

Like this is a sociolinguistic kind of approach to recognizing that language already is right. We don't have to prescribe rules, and then folks study the rules and then they produce language. It's never been that. We simply need to describe language as it already occurs, and so that, for example, where part of it is occurring in the class, right?

But even that is low stakes because you're working in these groups with your peers, right? I'm not standing over your shoulder. but in which the community itself becomes, the curriculum. The community becomes the text that we're reading. That's [00:31:00] very low stakes, because frankly, based on, demographics of teacher educators and teachers compared to the larger community, the wealth of critical language awareness is actually coming from the community rather than those of us who are teachers and teacher educators.

So elevating those analytic practices that they've got to use every day to get on the bus, to go to the store, to, get on the phone for their parents and grandparents, they can bring that critical lens into the classroom, right? And then we all become co-learners together. That, for example, would offer very low stakes

to study language as it exists. 

Yasmeen: Community becomes the curriculum. I just wanted to repeat that because I think that's very important. The community becomes the curriculum. Okay.so what do you think, we've talked about a few different ideas, right? So what do you think is the most important focus, when you're educating ENL [00:32:00] teachers on how to really best educate minoritized language populations?

Tasha: Yeah, it's so challenging when we like try to rank importance or practices just because every context is so unique. And so I try to do it, I try to zoom out in terms of thinking of importance. So it's more about, maybe some dispositional or theoretical kind of, considerations so that the more applied and practical implementation can be more localized and responsive.

So I would think like, instead of thinking like how to educate minoritized communities, I'm thinking more like general how, how do we teach students well? Like how do all we teach students, all students well? And I don't mean to diminish, like the distinct treatment, of minoritized communities and the ways that they have to prepare to face a different world than that of their white middle class counterparts.

But I do want to be cautious, like not [00:33:00] to reinforce this kind of missions oriented approach, to teaching those kids. When I say missions, I'm thinking about, like, how missionaries as part of a larger colonial power structure would often, come into a space, and sometimes having mastered the Indigenous language, which also gives us a peek into why learning language isn't enough to change minds, but they would demand that those local communities change their ways of being or risk having resources withheld.

Right, or even worse as a result. So the colonized, were no less human than the missionaries, but it was the disproportionate power and punishment in the colonial order that meant the indigenous needed something that the colonizers had. And as a result, they were coerced into changing who they were

in order to access those resources. So my research, especially the paper that I shared with you, "A Hard Time Seeing the Relevance", the one where teacher educators were outlining their [00:34:00] challenges with applying like cultural sustaining pedagogies and translanguaging. Those teacher educators revealed that the power dynamics that I'm talking about in terms of this missions oriented approach, those power dynamics aren't always clear to them as bilingual educators who identify with white dominant middle class populations because they perceive themselves as not having race.

or culture, right? They see that as those people, and they believe that they're offering a neutral English to help minoritized K 12 students in their communities access resources through assimilation. So my focus becomes on how to help educators realize that racialization as a process impacts 

everyone, right? White is a race. whiteness itself was created through centuries of dominations and policies that enforce it, so my focus in my work is helping teachers unpack [00:35:00] their own relationship to race and power, how they're harmed by it, how they perpetuate it, and how little that has to do with objective measures of English communication.

So their practice can become less of a missions approach to helping those kids and more of a mutually beneficial, humanizing, learning opportunity, which can better reflect a globalized and a linguistically and culturally diverse world. That's the world we live in. 

Yasmeen: I really love how your answer to that question basically tied back to what we discussed previously in terms of separation and just ending that and just realizing that the more that we embrace the differences and bring them all together to the same stage, the more everyone will [00:36:00] really benefit, right?

Okay. For 

Tasha: sure. 

Yasmeen: So you talked about, one of your articles. I would like to give our listeners an opportunity to hear where they can find more of your work or if you have any upcoming projects or publications that you'd like to make us aware of? 

Tasha: Yeah. so I mean that webinar that we're referencing, it's on YouTube.

so it's under TESOL the bilingual and multilingual, special interest groups, so it's called TESOL B-MEIS, and so if you just look into the TESOL B-MEIS YouTube page, you'll see that, my talk is on there. "We Been Off That". I like to offer the public resources because the paper that I shared with you is behind a paywall, unfortunately, but of course if folks like, hit me up on Twitter @ProfeAustin, or email me at my Buffalo, email address, I'm happy to share it with them directly.

I'm trying to think of what else is not. behind a paywall, and there is an [00:37:00] article that I have coming out in Language Magazine, where I'm really trying to encourage folks to think about cultural and linguistic, like surrogacy. So it's asking us what is our relationship, not just to the students that we're working with, but to the languages that we're instructing in, right?

So that makes us think about, for example, myself as someone who learned Spanish in a classroom, and then comes to teach folks who have grown up using Spanish. So what is my responsibility then as someone who needs to be humble when facing folks who bring a wealth of cultural background experience and then I'm someone who learned it in a classroom and then is set up as, the authority in a space.

So I really am hoping to spark good conversation around our relationship to the kind of colonial patterns that empower some and disenfranchise others from language teaching. so that'll be a public resource in Language Magazine. It should be coming out in a [00:38:00] few weeks. 

Yasmeen: Oh, excellent. Okay.

Okay, great. So I am going to ask one final question that I like to ask all of our podcast participants. So, "What burning question should today's educators consider in order to improve their service to the ELL community?" 

Tasha: Yeah, I looked at that question and I was like, oh man, it's so hard to like distill.

But you know what, I always think of it in terms of the power of our words and the power of our teaching, and so I asked myself this question, "What kind of world does my teaching create?" Um, I love that! Yeah, because I think about we're either contributing to challenging or improving the world as it is, and so what kind of world does my teaching create helps me to think about the impact of my teaching on the young people in front of me.

So I hope that's one that folks can [00:39:00] chew on. 

Yasmeen: Definitely. I was actually writing that down because I would like to think about that in my teaching practice. I think that's a fantastic question. Okay. All right. thank you so much for your time today, Dr. Austin. Thank you. for having me.

It has been a real pleasure speaking to you today. And, we'll be looking forward to that article coming out and to many of your talks to come. 

Tasha: Yay. All right. Thank you so much, Yasmeen. I appreciate you. 

Yasmeen: Thank you for tuning in to RBERNing Questions, produced by Mid-State RBERN at OCM BOCES. If you would like to learn more about today's guest or any of the resources we discussed, please visit Mid-State RBERN's webpage at ocmboces.org. That's OCM [00:40:00] boces.org. Join us next time where we hope to answer more of your burning questions.