Language, power and schooling

ABSTRACT

Ian Cushing’s ‘Standards, Stigma, Surveillance: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and England’s Schools’ draws on raciolinguistic theory to offer a detailed and compelling critique of language policies and teaching practices in contemporary urban schools in England. It argues that ‘minoritised’ pupils and teachers are consistently positioned in deficit and that schools have always been sites where language is used as a sorting mechanism in the reproduction of social strata within racialised capitalism. The research offers interesting case study material demonstrating this, as well as offering useful alternative histories and practices of resistance within schooling. However, this review raises some questions about the way raciolinguistic theory frames the roles, relationships, methodology and pedagogy within this research. It goes on to discuss wider questions about ‘theory’ in relation to classroom research and to suggest that dominant assumptions about and hierarchies around the categories of theory and practice need to be questioned.

KEYWORDS:

• Language
• power
• raciolinguistics
• resistance

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gill Anderson

Gill Anderson taught English in London secondary schools and colleges for 15 years and has worked in teacher education in school and university settings since 2003. She is interested in all aspects of learning in English, and particularly in teacher development and the relationships between reading, writing and talk in classroom learning.