Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education
Date of this Version
2021
Citation
Published in Critical Storytelling: Multilingual Immigrants in the United States, edited by Luis Javier Pentón Herrera and Ethan Tính Trịnh. 2021. Critical Storytelling Series, Volume 5, pp. 3–8.
Abstract
This poem is a recreation of conversational interviews with five immigrant background adolescent African girls (Pendo, Furaha, Amani, Faraja, and Neema), all names are pseudonyms. In those interviews, the girls continuously shared how important their names are for them and the challenges they encountered with teachers and peers mispronouncing their names. One student mentioned taking time to teach her teachers, but was often told, “It’s just a name.” Weird gazes on her teachers’ faces are the best pronunciation she had received. This free verse poem speaks to the relationship between students’ individual names and identities, biases—which are often based on language hierarchies and power—in learning names, the peer pressure some parents and teens have to get anglicized names in order to belong, and the position some students find themselves in, whether resisting or conforming, whether with support from others or not. This piece, therefore, is a request to all educators to realize that students’ names are not just labels or registration numbers. They carry a deeper meaning—of identity, lineage, history—which we are all tasked to honor and appreciate.
Included in
Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons
Comments
Copyright © 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Used by permission