As Puente practitioners, we acknowledge that practices which deny us our rights to our own language/es in writing are damaging, racist, and assimilationist practices that uphold whiteness (*). We understand that rejection of one’s language is a rejection of one’s culture, and by extension a rejection of the individual. While education in Standard American Edited English (one of many Englishes) has value, we live and teach in a multi-ethnic nation, and cannot continue to privilege SAEE. Other Englishes, translanguaging, code-meshing, and dialects have a place in academia and the “real” world. For these reasons, we must engage in ongoing professional development that: puts respect on the different Englishes spoken by our students, familiarizes us with grammatical constructions that are a result of other languages, and acknowledges that we can never be fully qualified to assess constructions that have so many generational and regional variations. In practice, this means receiving student work with care and prioritizing students’ voices, stylistic choices, and intention in their writing. We must revise writing assessment and evaluation processes to be anti-racist. As we continue our own education of language varieties, our assessment practices should invite and honor the sonics of our students in scholarly writing, celebrate their effective and innovative language constructions, and guide them towards clarity of their message. 

*Sources:  https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness &https://www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/preserve/museums/files/White_Supremacy_Culture.pdf