Chapter 5: Reconstructing the Academic in Academic Language: Radically Listening to Hidden Worlds of Knowledge Building

This conceptual essay discusses the benefits of the practice of “radical listening” to help developing teachers explore and understand the ways in which their students engage in knowledge building. Critical literacy scholars have long noted the invisibility of student knowledge through a variety of white supremacist, English-dominant practices that include color-neutral curricula and assessments as well as privileged notions of academic language (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Radical listening is an active counter-position to such dominant notions of knowledge, hence enabling educators to see into the “discursive void” (Arya, 2022) of multilingual educational contexts in order to trace and more effectively integrate students’ linguistic, cultural, and experiential funds of knowledge. We apply this radical listening approach to two “hidden worlds” of knowledge building. First, we provide examples of language produced by professional, formally trained scientists in the field engaging in disciplinary practices and ideas that debunk rigid, hegemonic expectations of what “academic language” looks like. Second, we guide readers through an artifactual tour of a community-based literacy (CBL) initiative wherein elementary school students from a Latinx/Chicanx community are positioned as knowledgeable co-researchers as they work alongside undergraduate education minors in a place-based, critical literacy program. As part of this tour, we will share examples of the creative entrepreneurship and complex literacies students engage in and teachers can learn from when they adopt a stance of radical listening.