The Power of Talk

How Words Change Our Lives

Felecia M. Briscoe, Gilberto Arriaza, Rosemary C. Henze

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781452272405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Leadership nella didattica

This enlightening book helps educators use everyday language to create more equitable school environments, and offers exercises that strengthen communication and leadership skills.

CHAPTER ONE

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The Power of Language

A Medium for Promoting Social Justice and Equity

In this chapter, we explain the grounding ideas of this book, including key concepts such as social justice, language of possibility, and others; we hope to establish a shared understanding of these ideas and concepts and their associated words. This is especially important because many of these terms vary in their interpretation. Our intent is to be as transparent as possible with meanings and to model what we advocate throughout the book.

IN WHAT WAYS IS LANGUAGE A TRANSFORMATIVE FORCE IN SOCIETY?

For reflection: To what extent are you aware of your language use in everyday interactions? Do you monitor yourself carefully, or do you speak spontaneously? What factors in the social situation tend to make you monitor your language more?

The idea that language can be a “trigger for broader social change”¹ has been around for a long time. Yet surprisingly, it rarely shows up in preparation and inservice programs for teachers and educational leaders. In this book, we place this idea at the very center of what educators in a democratic society do on an everyday basis. Every day, proactive educators try to make their educational institutions healthy, positive environments that challenge all students to develop their skills, knowledge, and ability to relate positively to others. They also attempt to right the effects of past injustices and to intervene in present ones. None of these actions would be possible without language. Educators use language to communicate their expectations of students, faculty, and parents; to discuss policies, praise people, propose changes in curriculum, indicate that they are listening, carry out disciplinary action, and for a host of other actions. Whether spoken, written, or signed, language is the medium through which educational leaders make their intentions known to others. Everyone who plays a formal or informal leadership role in education—including teachers, principals, school board members, community leaders—uses language as a medium for their actions; however, when speaking spontaneously, we usually don’t have time to think carefully about how we say things. We just hope that our words come out more or less they way we intended.

Yet by moving toward a greater awareness of language, we can in fact use language to embody changes we believe in. Language embodies a potential for change when it is linked to larger social forces. In the United States, changes in the names of ethnoracial groups co-occurred with civil rights action and a movement away from a classification system based on skin color (black, yellow, brown, white) that was used to justify a social hierarchy based on race; “African American,” “Asian American,” and other ethnoracial labels became part of everyday discourse in the 1960s along with demands for equal rights and recognition. The shift in language from Black to African American was significant because it moved from an emphasis on skin color (a racialized feature) to a dual emphasis on origin (African) and current nationality (U.S. American).² As a society of mostly immigrants, we now have available language that tells us something about people’s ancestry, a more meaningful piece of information than skin color, which in any so-called racial group always ranged along a broad continuum anyway. It is also helpful to include American because a visiting professional from Korea may have little in common with a third- or fourth-generation Korean American.

The case of Guatemala’s Maya people also illustrates this point. When European explorers in 1492 mistakenly thought they had landed in India, they dubbed the local people they encountered “Indians.” This label not only connoted the wrong continent but was also used as a derogatory, demeaning name to distinguish those claiming European lineage (who tend to be of lighter complexion) from those of more indigenous heritage (who tend to be of darker complexion). In the 1980s, the indigenous people of Guatemala began to systematically assert the right for a name disassociated with such baggage. The struggle to adopt the name Maya was linked to a broader struggle for basic civil and political rights. Currently, the use of Maya for people of indigenous heritage has become widespread in that country, and at the same time, the Maya have claimed other rights.³

1. The Relationship Between Language and Thought

For reflection: Think of a time when you realized that you saw the world differently from someone who spoke a different first language than you. What was the difference? Do you think your first language was involved in structuring these different ways of thinking? How much freedom do we have to think outside of the structures and words our first language provides?

To understand how changing language shapes our thinking, we need to go back a bit in history to consider the claim made in the 1940s by Edward Sapir, a linguist, and Benjamin Whorf, a fire insurance salesman who was a student of Sapir’s. They developed the idea that the language we use actually determines the way we think.⁴ What they meant is that speakers of different languages actually think differently, due to the differences in the way languages express actions, things, and so on. For example, the Hopi language, unlike English, expresses many concepts related to nature as movements (actions) rather than static entities. In Hopi, one cannot talk about a wave as a thing; one can only talk about the motion it produces, using a verb that roughly translates in English as “waving.” Sapir and Whorf’s theoretical claim was that underlying structural and semantic differences among languages lay down certain thought patterns early in childhood. Hopi speakers, they claimed, are likely to think more in terms of action and motion than English speakers—who for their part tend to think more in terms of things.

This claim that our language determines our thought patterns became known as the “strong form” of Sapir and Whorf’s hypothesis, and it led to the corollary that people are like prisoners of their language. They cannot ever really acquire the thinking patterns of another language.⁵ But as you might imagine, there were many challenges to this claim, in part because people can and do acquire other languages and in many instances do learn to think in the new language. In multilingual societies, it is normal to speak more than two languages from early childhood onward. Paraguay is one of many such cases. There, inhabitants speak Spanish and Guarani languages nationally, as well as a local variety of Spanish that is mixed with Guarani, even though the indigenous Guarani people no longer exist as a distinctive community. If language absolutely determined the way we think, we wouldn’t be able to translate from one language to another. Granted, there will always be concepts which are difficult or even impossible to translate. But by and large, professional translators do a remarkable job.

Most linguists these days accept a modified version of Sapir and Whorf’s theoretical claim. Instead of saying that our primary language determines the way we think, the modified version says that our primary language (or languages, in the case of childhood bilinguals) shapes or influences the way we think.

2. Language Reflects Existing Cultural and Physical Realities

For reflection: In what ways does your school categorize students? Do all schools you know of use the same categorization system as yours? Are different systems used by students versus faculty and staff? How can you explain the differences in categorization, if any?

Most of us can readily accept the notion that language reflects (or expresses) our cultural and physical reality. After all, one of the functions of language is to enable us to talk about the things of our world and the actions we perform in it. So, for example, if it is important for us to distinguish among different types of rocks, our language develops ways to express those distinctions. We can talk about differences that reflect the substance of the rock, such as granite versus marble; the size and shape of the rock, such as pebbles versus boulders; and so on. Eskimo languages make, for instance, fine distinctions among many different kinds of snow, obviously reflecting the need for people in the arctic environment to describe distinctions that make a difference in hunting prospects, travel conditions, and other activities that are contingent on the weather. Such distinctions would not be so important to people living in a warm, urban environment; therefore, a more limited number of snow words are adequate.⁶

In a school environment, we have words not only for the things that are important in that environment—such as desks, whiteboards, and computers—but also for classifications of people such as students, teachers, administrators, and so on. Many of these seem natural—they have been ingrained in us since childhood, so much so that it is difficult to think about schools without these categories of objects and people.

3. Language Also Constructs Our Cultural Realities

It is somewhat more difficult to accept the notion that we construct our world through language. In other words, language doesn’t just reflect or express what is already there, like the kinds of rocks or snow in our environment. It also enables us to create categories, labels, and relationships that are different from the ones used by people in other cultures—or even people who to a large degree share our culture!

We see this variation when we look at kinship systems around the world. In English, the word uncle denotes any of a number of different relationships. An uncle can be the father’s brother, the mother’s brother, the husband of the father’s sister, the husband of the mother’s sister, and even sometimes an unrelated person like “Uncle Sam.” It’s not that English speakers can’t express or understand these differences—obviously, we just did! But it took us longer; we had to use more words to say it. In Chinese and many other languages, each of these specific relationships has its own special term. In most Latin American societies, on the other hand, an uncle or aunt can simply be an intimate, close friend to the father or mother. This type of uncle or aunt has somewhat less moral responsibility toward the niece or nephew than blood-related uncles and aunts.

Why does this variation exist? Anthropologists argue that in Chinese, different roles, responsibilities, and privileges are accorded to different types of “uncles.” Therefore, it’s important to make the specific relationship overt, and what better way than to give each relationship its own label? An English speaker raised without this particular kinship system can understand the basic relationships in terms of biological lineage and whether the relationship is on the father’s or the mother’s side. But the same English speaker, unless it has been spelled out, will not understand the system of roles, responsibilities, and privileges associated with each of the terms for uncle that the Chinese speaker grew up with. In sum, the English language concept of “uncle” doesn’t map exactly onto the Chinese concept.

How does this relate to constructing our world through language? The example from different kinship systems demonstrates that when it comes to social relationships, cultures vary in the ways they classify family members. This variation tells us that there is nothing fixed about the way we classify relatives. It is only through custom and tradition that kinship terms become fixed in their meaning. When we travel or live in another culture, we come to realize that these meanings are only customary in our own culture, and the shifting nature of language and its connection to “reality” becomes evident.

We’ve established so far that the language we use shapes or influences how we think about the world. But so far, we’ve been talking about very different languages, like Hopi versus English, Spanish versus Guarani, and Chinese versus English.

4. Making Changes Within the Same Language

For reflection: What happens if we make small adjustments in the words we use to communicate with people who share our language? Have you ever tried to change the way you refer to certain groups of people? How did it work out? Did you feel the change better reflected your intentions? Or were you just doing it to be “politically correct”?

Here, we consider three examples:

1. Getting rid of gender bias: In the 1960s, feminists began to encourage writers to use nonsexist language. Among other changes, writers were urged to stop using the masculine pronoun he as the generic pronoun (when they really mean he or she). Instead, they started consciously using she or he (alternating the masculine and feminine pronouns, or using they instead) because they wanted to signify that the male pronoun was not automatically privileged as a default for signifying both men and women; they wanted their language to reflect women’s agency and participation in all spheres of life.

At the time, many people thought that this small shift in language use by a few individuals couldn’t possibly change anything; it seemed so trivial. Even today, there are people who think these changes are just “window dressing.” But looking at this situation more carefully, one can argue that this is exactly the sort of change that did develop into something broader. Making the English language less male-centered was part of a broad social movement. This little change was connected to lots of other little as well as bigger changes; people such as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and many others were working hard to advance women’s economic and political power in the United States and other countries. Doing so involved not only empowering women; it also meant calling attention to the subtle ways in which we assume male privilege, and language was one very tangible ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1. The Power of Language: A Medium for Promoting Social Justice and Equity
• 2. Becoming Effective in Using Critical Language Awareness
• 3. Avoiding Othering: Practicing Including
• 4. Disrupting Prejudice: A Communicative Approach
• 5. Exceptionalizing or Democratizing?
• 6. Recognizing and Revising Stratifying Discourse
• 7. Contesting Deficit Labels
• 8. Conclusion: The Power of Talk
• References
• Index