ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the language ideologies of high school teachers participating in an outreach program in California, School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society. It focuses on two main ideologies of appropriateness that emerged from the teachers’ reflections on student language. The first of these, the ideology of formality, sees racialized linguistic varieties like Chicanx English as inappropriate for educational contexts due to their perception as inherently less formal. In the second, the ideology of worth, minoritized varieties are seen as inappropriate for school because they are believed not to convey the content of students’ messages in a way that will be perceived as intelligent and important by others. By espousing these ideologies, educational institutions nominally move beyond positioning minoritized varieties as “bad” and “broken.” This change, however, only serves to camouflage the continuing discriminatory nature of such ideologies. This chapter therefore argues that it is not enough to recognize student language as legitimate outside of the classroom; the educational institution must instead recognize the ideology of appropriateness as a reification of “standard” English and as a form of colorblind discourse that provides legitimacy to modern-day deficit-oriented ideologies.
