Through this piece, we draw upon critical race theory and Collins's Afrocentric feminist epistemology to highlight the importance of storytelling as a knowledge validation system in Black women's language. We illuminate and analyze a dialogic performance of two Black female literacy scholars in a coffee house "sipping tea," sharing stories about their joint triumphs and challenges with teaching through equity-based pedagogies. The article takes its political and poetical inspiration from this dialogic performance placed in the center of the article. The dialogue is meant to enliven and represent the Afrocentric feminist discourse patterns that undergird our relationships with one another as Black sister scholars as well as our relationships to our classroom teaching and research. We offer discussions of literacy research and theory, personal experience/ethos, linguistic knowledge, and critique of racism. Our article has implications for strengthening the academy's understanding of Black female bodies/language in White university spaces still hell-bent on not welcoming/ employing either.
Code-switching and code-meshing pedagogies, though they are two vastly different approaches, do not consider that some features of African American Verbal Tradition (AVT) are and/or have become rhetorically effective mainstream communication structures in academic writing. This article explores how teaching language/dialect difference in majority white school settings, using contrastive-analysis techniques such as code switching may have highly negative effects on African American Language (AAL) speakers. Code-switching maintains that AAL and other “non-standard” language varieties are only appropriate for use in the home or social settings. Thus, as an alternative to code-switching pedagogical practices, the author introduces a comparative approach that may be applied across all minority language groups. This technique highlights African and African American contributions to standardized American written communication structures and demonstrates the value of AVT in academic settings. In the accompanying lesson plan, students are invited to think about how the English language, as a field, is constantly evolving and changing in our diverse, ever-widening international community; they are then given opportunities to use various writing instruction pedagogies to articulate theories, histories, methods, and practices.
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