Chapter 6: Fostering Equity Curriculum and Pedagogy: Educating Students with Dialectical Variations

This chapter describes the significance of educating for diversity, provides information on dialectical variations, discusses important variables in distinguishing language differences from language disorders, and describes strategies for teaching students with dialectical variations of standard American English. Given today’s increasingly diverse society, it is imperative that educators employ curriculum and pedagogy that effectively and knowledgeably strengthen and address the needs of nonstandard American English-speaking students in their classrooms. Teaching students with dialectical variations is an intentional process of understanding, validating, and incorporating the social, cultural, and economic heterogeneity present in our society into our classrooms and schools. It implies creating an awareness and respect for these issues and meaningfully integrating them within our curriculum and pedagogy.