Changing Education One Story at a Time

Abstract

Higher education, traditionally founded on white epistemologies and philosophies, promotes Standard Language Ideology resulting in a linguistic hierarchy in which white English is the benchmark expected in the classroom while other varieties of English occupy a lower position in this hierarchy. The language we speak shapes how we perceive and navigate through the world since “language is a carrier of culture” (Ngugi wa Tiong’o). As such, enforcing a Standard Language Ideology mutes and undervalues the socio-cultural and linguistic traditions of Peoples of Colour and pushes them to the margins. According to Paulo Freire, the aim of education is to free people, not enslave them. The raison d'etre driving my dissertation is to foreground rather than elide the lived experiences of BIPOC speakers and writers of World Englishes, to critique mainstream writing pedagogies that participate in that elision, and to theorise a translingual and code-meshing pedagogy that provides safe and open spaces for the identities, languages, epistemologies, and discourses of BIPOC to prevail in North American writing classrooms and writing centres. I do this by demonstrating my own indoctrination into whiteness and its effects on me as student, writing teacher and writing program administrator. I also trace my journey of decolonising of self which encompasses my ongoing efforts to foreground and amplify voices of People of Colour in education especially in first year composition demonstrating a commitment to adopting a trans- epistemic and translingual philosophy of education. I conclude with a call to all peoples of colour to start telling our complex stories to counter the single story being told in education and offer some suggestions for future opportunities and research inspired by this dissertation.