Baker-Bell did not respond to an email from The College Fix inquiring whether she believes it is ever appropriate for professors to insist students use standard English or if she believes doing so is always an inherent act of bigotry.
At the workshop, which was co-sponsored by NIU’s English Graduate Student Association, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Faculty Academy on Cultural Competence and Equity, Baker-Bell spent roughly 30 minutes lecturing about the historical roots of black language in slavery, made the argument that black English syntactically qualifies as its own language, and discussed different pedagogical approaches to black English speakers, prior to distributing the workbook.
The first half of the workbook provided participants with multiple exercises to give them the “opportunity to think through how [they] might be complicit in the reproduction of anti-Black racism and anti-Black linguistic racism through curricula, language instruction, pedagogies, practices, and language policies,” as well as how they can “move toward an antiracist approach to language pedagogy.”