The insistence of “standardize” or “academic” language in today’s classrooms operates as a site of antiblackness. In schools, many Black students learn that the ways they use language in speaking and writing are not academic and require correction. Knowing the messages that Black students at West, a local high school where the author is professor in residence, receive about their writing, the author was conflicted by the writing instruction that she witnessed and participated in while preparing students to write for the upcoming standardized writing assessment. That being said, the purpose of this paper is to examine the writing ecology at West, what we got right and where we missed the mark.
For this qualitative study, the author considers her and other teachers’ approaches to teaching writing, thinking and discussion with Black writers while developing practices and skills to help them write effectively for standardized assessments like the ACT.
Findings reveal a writing ecology that simultaneously constrained and supported its students – where Black writers’ metalinguistic sophistication, collective meaning-making and boundary-crossing rhetorical practices constituted rigorous intellectual work the ecology could not recognize or measure.
Rather than offering Blackademic discourse as an addition to existing academic frameworks, the author argues it is a way of seeing what was always already there.
