Chapter 6: White Teacher Educators, Black Teacher Candidates, and African American Language: Ideating Paradoxical Readings of African American Language in Teacher Education

In this chapter, we engage in multiple readings of teaching and learning about African American Language (AAL) with/as White teacher educators working with White, Black, and Latinx students in an undergraduate teacher education program. We focus first on the radical intentions embedded within the fight to have AAL recognized as a legitimate language of students in U.S. schools. Next, we trouble AAL as (possibly/potentially) essentialist. Drawing from the voiced experiences of Black students in our program who rejected the concept as derogatory, we consider how the teaching of AAL (particularly as White teacher educators in a majority Black city and school system) can function to construct the speech practices of Black students as backward, other, and alien all while recentering Whiteness. Finally, we ideate on the paradoxical nature of AAL as simultaneously legitimizing and othering the linguistic practices of Black students within the conditioning logics of White supremacy and capitalism.