ELA as English Language Abolition: Toward a Pedagogy of Communicative Belonging

Abstract

AbstractRacialized notions of language and literacy are harmful to children in U.S. schools, and English Language Arts is a primary site whereby white supremacist language ideologies are enacted and justified, being most harmful to Black, Indigenous, and other students of Color. The authors—Mariana Souto‐Manning, Danny C. Martinez, and Adam D. Musser—former ELA teachers and current university‐based educators committed to the pursuit of justice, are motivated by the questions What can we do? and What should we do? in response to this harm. This conceptual article briefly traces the history of harm embedded in ELA classrooms before theorizing a debordering of English Language Arts and advancing a healing pedagogy for communicative belonging. Guided by the restorative justice principles of harms, needs, and obligations, it engages quilting as metaphor and process. Through quilting, the authors inquire into the harms of ELA as a disciplinary project rooted in exclusion, anti‐Blackness, and colonialism. Undertaking reparative caring and attending to Black, Indigenous, and other students of Color often unaccounted for in education reforms, Souto‐Manning, Martinez, and Musser advance ELA as English Language Abolition, seeking to abolish tokens of diversity in ELA classrooms and create spaces for true belonging via collaborative, future‐oriented work. Ultimately, while recognizing that the future imaginings of communicative belonging are part of a utopian project that imagines learning ecologies freed from and free of colonial and white logics, this article forwards a healing pedagogy of communicative belonging, offering the potential to abolish the harms long perpetrated in ELA classrooms by dominant conceptualizations of ELA.