ABSTRACT
The chapter explores how ideologies of language, race, and (dis)ability are materialized in and through everyday classroom talk. Drawing on ethnographic and interactional data from two different urban schools, it examines how received social categories are imposed, inscribed, and reified as students of color are positioned as particular kinds of learners and particular kinds of people. It invokes the construct of languaging to highlight these students’ agency in negotiating, contesting, and disrupting these identities as they interact with their peers within the context of language and literacy learning. Drawing on and combining theoretical insights from scholarship on languaging relations, a raciolinguistic perspective, and disability critical race studies, the chapter examines classroom interactions involving an African American boy identified as “Learning Disabled” in a fifth-grade ESL classroom and a Filipino boy positioned as “struggling” in a multi-age Spanish-English dual-language classroom, focusing on how particular identities emerge for them within this institutional context.
