The Lion and the Unicorn

The narrative erasure of the experiences of black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) communities in the United States is a form of violence that scholar activists have highlighted in their research. This erasure is evident in mainstream history books, novels, television, and film, but academics and artists are pushing back with works that feature BIPOC history and stories. This pushback materialized in children's and young adult literature scholarship in various ways, among them two influential frameworks: Rudine Sims Bishop's metaphor of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors to discuss diverse content; and Corinne Duyvis's #OwnVoices hashtag to draw attention to diverse authorship and content. In Latino/a Children's and Young Adult Writers on the Art of Storytelling, Frederick Luis Aldama claims that "making children's and young adult literature by and about Latinos visible and available to young readers is in some measure a form of social justice" (5). The college classroom can be a space to center marginalized populations, but its location within an institution predicated upon exclusion and privilege presents a broad range of challenges. What decolonial, antiracist strategies can we use when we encounter absences and gaps in prestigious and seemingly neutral places?

When I taught literature courses for the first time during fall 2018 and spring 2019 at the University of Texas at Austin, I found a simple yet powerful way for undergraduate students to interrogate inclusion and exclusion at the most basic level: an activity I called "The Urban OED." As literature-based writing courses, Mexican American Literature and Culture and Banned Books and Novel Ideas are meant to introduce undergraduates to the conventions of academic writing. Specifically, these literature courses are designed to prepare students for upper-level English classes. Effective use of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is one of the basic research tools my students needed to learn, but according to the OED editors some [End Page 325] words do not exist or do not merit detailed entries tracking their development within its massive database. I realized the limits of the OED in contextualizing some of the words that might come up given my courses' emphasis on young people of color in children's and young adult literature; therefore, I adapted a dictionary research activity to include the OED, the Dictionary of American Regional English, and mainstream dictionaries Merriam-Webster and Urban Dictionary. My students and I had to look beyond the field's most prestigious and comprehensive dictionary, but we ended up learning a valuable lesson because moving between paywall-protected and crowd-sourced dictionaries functioned as meta-commentary on access and epistemologies of power.

The original worksheet, its authorship unknown to me as it was shared alongside other assignment examples for new instructors to use, outlined a step-by-step deep dive into a word's meaning starting with students' definition of the term and then using the OED to learn the word's etymology, any differences in usage depending on its part of speech, and how its meaning has changed (or not) over time. In my modified version, students had to research the word in the OED and two additional dictionaries and compare the information found in each source. I offered the following questions as prompts for their word analysis. If the word has various connotations, does each dictionary mention them? How thorough is the definition? Are there any gaps? The first time I did this activity, the conversation that followed about which terms are recorded and how they are described was very generative, but I realized I could improve on it so our whole group discussion could hone in on ideas of inclusion and exclusion right away. My second time teaching this dictionary activity, we looked up "ableism" as a group before their independent work began to model the activity and illustrate the need for research outside the OED.

The OED defines ableism as "Discrimination in favour of able-bodied people; prejudice against or disregard of the needs of disabled people" and includes four quotations dating back to 1981. The Merriam-Webster (MW) online dictionary says it means "discrimination or prejudice against individuals...