8: Cultivating Critical Awareness: Affordances of a Transraciolinguistic Approach

Continued contradictions between what educators hope to see in literacy education and what they do increasingly create challenges for those who wish to be responsive to the long-standing linguistic, racial, and cultural diversity that exists across the globe. Addressing this impasse, calls have extended to focus beyond responsiveness to diversity, inviting as a precursor, a more intentional focus on the self. Such calls argue for a simultaneous emphasis on critical multilingual, critical multicultural and critical multiracial awareness, in tandem, as a basis for educators to embrace assets emerging from students’ literate strengths presented in and beyond classrooms. In doing so, they invite literacy teachers and educators to first focus on the self by engaging with their own critical multilingual, critical multicultural, and critical multiracial awareness before looking outward to focus on responsiveness across diverse classrooms. This chapter responds to these calls by using insights from Black immigrant literacy educators to describe the affordances of a transraciolinguistic approach for clarifying their critical multicultural, critical multiracial, and critical multilingual awareness. Implications for literacy teachers and educators who wish to use a transraciolinguistic approach in conjunction with critical awareness via practical, informal, and reflexive tools are presented.