NCTE “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” And Teaching

A couple of semesters ago, I taught an upper-level multicultural American literature course. Each of the students in this course were education majors, so as I prepared the syllabus, I was thinking about texts that would help them think about their own pedagogy in the classroom. With this thought in mind, I added texts such as Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “When the first voice you hear is not your own,” Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue,” and Richard Rodriguez’s “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Child.” I had students construct the reading schedule, and they decided to save these texts for the end of the semester so they could bring their accumulated knowledge that they learned to help them think about pedagogy. Along with the above texts, I also assigned the NCTE’s 1974 statement Students’ Right to Their Own Language. We began with the NCTE’s statement, and the committee’s discussion of the statement presented students with some overarching pedagogical issues that I want them to consider over the course of the semester.

The NCTE’s statement arose during an important historical moment in regard to higher education with the introduction of Black studies departments in 1968 and discussions of the literary canon. The NCTE’s statement speaks to these moments, and the committee, in their discussion of the statement, point out the importance of students being able…