ABSTRACT
This chapter is a reflection on the authors’ experience in coteaching an outreach program with Latinx youth in a local teen center. The authors discuss the challenges that arose from the mismatch between an unstructured youth-led space and instructors’ expectations of a regulated, normative classroom environment with the affordances of a traditional schooling site. Even in a linguistics outreach program which aimed to follow tenets of culturally sustaining pedagogy, youth participants ultimately viewed the instructors as restricting their agency. Because of local norms of youth freedom in the space, students were able to exercise their agency to push back against participation requirements. The authors, a Latino man and a white woman, additionally reflect on how they were racially perceived by students, particularly through students’ metalinguistic commentary about the instructors’ linguistic varieties, including comments that academic language sounded “white” and “boring” and that the second author’s speech did not match the students’ notions of linguistically and phenotypically “authentic” Latinx identity. The chapter demonstrates that teachers’ reflexive analysis both of their own positionality and of their expectations for educational settings, especially in situations of student resistance, can be a productive tool for pedagogical improvement.
