Toward an antiracist genre pedagogy: Considerations for a North American context

Abstract

Abstract This article combines principles from critical race theory and genre pedagogy to show how K–12 English language teachers can engage in antiracist genre‐based literacy instruction. Genre pedagogy has become increasingly popular in North America as an approach to supporting multilingual students’ literacy development. However, genres of schooling are often treated as ideologically neutral and not related to the structural racism that permeates North American schools. As a result, genre pedagogy is implemented in ways that reproduce dominant practices and reinforce deficit perspectives of multilingual students of color. Therefore, we propose principles for an antiracist genre pedagogy that (1) teaches community countertexts alongside dominant ones, (2) identifies ideologies and knowledge structures in each, (3) increases focus on interpersonal meanings to analyze racializing dimensions of texts, (4) promotes remixing genres for antiracist purposes, and (5) destabilizes the white measuring stick used to evaluate “appropriate” classroom language use. By combining functional methods with radical goals, we take seriously Ladson‐Billings’s (2014) call for remixing pedagogies in ways that benefit and empower students who have been disserved by dominant schooling ideologies—in this article, multilingual students of color.

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