paired with “Three Ways to Speak English”

Looking to the poet’s work as a social scientist, this activity is designed as an in-class exploration of the idea underlying “Three Ways to Speak English” that can supplement a discussion of the poem itself.

Introduction

ET: Jamila Lyiscott’s poem “Three Ways to Speak English” is a powerful spoken-word poem, rich in its own right. Beyond being a poet, Lyiscott is a social scientist and professor of Social Justice Education at UMass Amherst. Her research concerns the intersections of language, race, and power, which can certainly be expressed through poetry. Poetry’s attention to language, image, and performance makes for an emotional and forceful message. Looking at those same ideas in her other TEDTalk, where she explains her liberation literacies principles that lead her guidelines for educators, lets students consider the practicalities and particularities of how education functions to empower and disempower specific groups.

While “Three Ways to Speak English” is full of powerful images of colonialism’s effects on a people that remain to this day in normalized language discrimination, it can be easy for students to identify and commiserate with the sentiment without acknowledging its specific place in their daily lives. Lyiscott’s “Why English Class Is Silencing Students of Color” can help students determine how the education system they are a product of enacts that violence on them in how it approaches teaching English and normalizing language practices.

Guide

Listen: The Theories Behind the Poem

Lyiscott also created another TEDTalk “Why English Class Is Silencing Students of Color”. Listen to the sections, pausing at the designated marks below, and either write silently or discuss as a class initial responses to the questions for that section.

• Introduction (0-3:10): language, race, and power and their intersections are what Lyiscott studies as a social scientist. After she describes why she performed “Three Ways to Speak English,” she shares a story about animals debating who is dominant, which closes with a human claiming their global strength with an image of a human defeating a lion. The lion then asks the question, “But who drew that picture?” How do you relate that question to the privileging of standard English?
• Language, Race, and Power AND Modern Family (3:11-6:47): Why is the power of multilingualism stripped away by institutions that claim to value diversity? Why use phrases like McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” and Modern Family’s “She Crazy” but still correct those “grammar mistakes” in the classroom?
• Language of Subjugation (6:48-9:24): Lyiscott recounts the words of writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o on the use of the classroom to continue the work of the military in colonizing a country such that “language was the means of spiritual subjugation.” Why should a school accept the legitimacy of a non-standard language? Why doesn’t it? What does this imply about who can safely speak? Who has a legitimate voice?
• Language of Power (9:25-12:36): Paradigms are maps that we use to reconstruct reality. We’ve kept at the center of many institutions, including educational ones, the white-centric paradigms that existed during slavery. Think of how your English classes up to this point have gone. What seems the paradigm around which language is taught and valued?

In the second half of the TEDTalk, Lyiscott recounts five principles of liberation literacies: awareness, agency and access, actualization, achievement, alternation and action. Listen to each section marked below with a timestamp and standout quotation. Define each principle in a sentence in your own words. Do you think your educational experience has helped you in realizing any of these principles? Blocked you from realizing these principles? How?

• Critical Awareness (12:37-13:54): “It’s not just a random awareness, but an awareness of the social identities that we each navigate”
• Agency and Access (13:55-15:04): “Once you become aware [that your language has power] then you say ‘what kind of agency or access exists for me in the world?’”
• Actualization (15:05-16:29): “This disrupts the traditional notions of what it means to read and write in this world. What it means to inscribe yourself in the narrative of history beyond the five-paragraph essay, is to go up and speak from the power of my voice”
• Achievement (16:30-19:14): “It takes a lot more work to be fully invested in who you are, what you have to say than to perform school for somebody who is imposing a structure on you”
• Alternation (19:15-22:05): “If we do not have socially just practices in ourselves, here in the silence, then it is impossible to have social justice in our world”

Reflect: Institutional Accommodation

Lyiscott accentuates how educational institutions have to change and adapt to affirm the students in the room. In a page, how would your school need to change to accommodate you so you felt legitimate and safe to speak on your terms?