|
Sunyung Song
|
From A.R.Shearer
I am very grateful for the Twitter account @TESOLBiMulti, and by extension the TESOL Bi-Multilingual community in myTESOL. Multilinguals, Bilingualism, Translanguaging, and native speaker models were all ideas and topics which were only touched upon during my MA TESOL studies. I was fortunate enough to have Professor Elka Todeva discuss and encourage translanguaging and multilingualism as foundations for teaching, which sparked my interest and curiosity in such models. I began following @TESOLBiMulti because I was looking for access to resources for further exploration and study. I was also in search of the opportunity to attend talks and find nuggets of knowledge to ruminate on until I was ready for new material. I had found what I was looking for and I was fortunate enough to stumble into individuals, like Clara Vaz Bauler, who encouraged and collaborated with me in our participation in the TESOL Bi-Multilingual community.
I process slowly and sometimes think on things for months, so I was incredibly grateful that the conversations hosted by @TESOLBiMulti were spread-out events, allowing me the ability to think, interact, observe, and inquire further. The digital community that grew with each critical dialogue has become a beacon of knowledge and wealth of resources. I am fairly new to digital spaces and, though everyone in the community intimidates me, their confidence, assuredness, and their fountain of knowledge has been a huge motivation and inspiration. I am forever grateful for this sharing of knowledge from which I was able to consume, grow, and inquire. In this digital space I could feel the mixing, concocting, and bubbling over of communal ideas, the seeds of radical thought, and feel the breezes of collective movement.
With this growing knowledge comes additional self-reflection. I am grateful for the opportunity to be an editor on this newsletter because it has allowed me the ability to re-evaluate what editing can mean. I am still learning and, of course, during this process I failed many times. However, as a participant in this community, I have a duty to share with you my failures and successes so, like those who've shared their knowledge with me, I too can pass on what I know and have learned.
While editing, I was fully aware of the fact that I do not know all the varieties of English and, therefore, to impose what I deemed “correct” was just me perpetuating systemic racism and linguistic discrimination. I am not sure yet if going through and adding an “s” here or an “at” there, and maybe adding a comma or deleting one out, was still a form of furthering discrimination. At the time, I viewed these “simple” editing acts as making something presentable but realized this was from a western English-speaking standard. Of course this then leads to the questions of “presentable for who?” and “by whose standards are we measuring presentability?” So, I failed in some respects but I was successful in other ways.
Instead of restructuring a sentence by deleting the author’s words with my own or making suggestions to authors of what I deemed acceptable English and its usage, I highlighted sentences and tagged them for discussions between Clara, SunYung, and myself. I did this because I acknowledged that, as someone from a different linguistic and cultural background, I wasn’t a true peer reviewer or editor of the authors in this winter newsletter. Because of this, the best solution I could see was to change how I read and interpreted the text. By highlighting the text and discussing it later with Clara and SunYung, it helped me as a reader to gain a deeper insight into the authors’ ideas from their unique perspective because I changed how I read.
As you read the articles in this issue and you find yourself questioning the syntax or phrasing of a sentence. Know that this was intentional. Our aim is to encourage you to change how you read. I also encourage you to evaluate the process of editing, how you edit, how we ask others to edit, how we expect others to edit in unspoken ways, and question why we do this. Though these were all our own original thoughts and feelings about how best to edit, the beautiful thing about collaboratively working on this newsletter was that Clara Vaz Bauler was able to connect these feelings and thoughts and share with us editors how they echoed the same ideals and thoughts of scholar Vijay Ramjattan.
I hope that, as you read through these glimpses into the past season of the TESOL Bi-Multilingual community via @TESOLBiMulti, you are inspired and prompted to ruminate on your own thinking and practices. I hope you can fail and learn as I have.
From SunYung Song
Dear Bi-Multilingual Education Interest Section community and all readers,
2021 was a fruitful and productive year in our B-MEIS IS community in that we were able to create a number of exciting opportunities to bring the B-MEIS community together and dig deeper into many important issues that we truly care about. Particularly, we supported and celebrated our professional community through a series of webinars and Twitter chats that encouraged dialogues on bi-multilingualism, race, language(ing), and identity. These webinars and Twitter chats provided us with free, personal access to professionals and peers in the TESOL field. I am very grateful to those who shared their personal experiences and insightful perspectives with the B-MEIS community through these social media tools.
This special issue of the B-MEIS Bilingual Basics newsletter invited four authors who hosted the webinars and Twitter chats. Three of the webinars hosted by Kirti Kapur, Cynthia Carvajal, and Linh Phung were expanded into feature articles. Each of these authors presents unique perspectives on sustainable and collaborative ways to challenge and resist forms of inequity, discrimination, and whiteness and to support bi-multilingualism, world Englishes, and educational equity. For example, Kapur’s article addresses how world Englishes represent diversity, contexts, and cultures. In addition, the feature article by Carvajal presents an NYSED-funded project that allows educational stakeholders to learn about restrictive immigration policies and educational inequality. Moreover, the article by Phung discusses a project in which virtual exchange using Discord supported English learners in improving English speaking skills through engagement in real-time oral communication activities. The last feature article comes from Tasha Austin’s Twitter chat that focused on countering antiBlack racism in language education. Her article discusses how the use of the Twitter chat enabled language educators to engage in reflective discussions on manifestations of antiBlackness and possible approaches to countering antiBlackness in various instantiations.
These feature articles written by the multilingual authors may include different varieties of English that differ from Standard Written English (SWE). As the editors of this special issue, we respect and value each individual multilingual author’s writing style and language varieties which are the reflections of rich, sophisticated, and local worldviews.
I express my gratitude to the authors of the articles published here and to all B-MEIS community members who engaged in supporting bi-multilingual learners through the webinars and Twitter chats. I sincerely hope that our readers enjoy the special issue of the B-MEIS’s Bilingual Basics newsletter and that this special issue will serve as a stimulus for educators and students to continue to have meaningful discussions in their contexts.
A.R.Shearer holds an MA TESOL from The New School and is currently interested in exploring the intersection of ELT and ocean science.
Sunyung Song currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Education at Athens State University in the U.S. She has more than 15 years of teaching experience in the areas of TESOL and ESL. She has focused on preparing K-12 mainstream and ESL teachers to better support English English learners. Her research interests include K-12 teacher education, bilingual/multilingual education, second language academic literacy, and ESL family engagement. |
