AAL

Paris and Kirkland in the essay “The Consciousness of the Verbal Artist” say that “teacher educators, for our part, must become conversant in the complex linguistic and ethnic identity work of vernacular literacies” (191), as if to do so is such a simple task.  I am not African-American and I do not know AAL well enough to be able to teach it.  Although I do agree that it is important to teach all vernaculars and not to represent Dominant American English as the only legitimate way of speaking, I also do not feel comfortable being the authority on African American Language.  I might be oversensitive, but I worry a little bit about cultural appropriation if I were to teach it.  The way that I would feel more comfortable teaching it, however, seems problematic.  Paris and Kirkland talk about teaching Their Eyes Were Watching God, or The Color Purple, and about extending the classroom into communities of color to learn more about AAL.  While I think this would be better than me or another outsider teaching it, I think that this poses the problem of creating an “other.” A literacy class would probably focus most of the year and in most of the writings on DAE and then have a unit on AAL, which I do not think truly represents it as a viable and legitimate way of writing.  Just as in social studies African American history should not be separate from just “history,” neither should African American Language be separate from Language in general.