Empowering students

"Educators must understand fully the broader meaning of the use of students' language as a requisite for their empowerment" (377)
I think that what they are trying to say here is that we are constantly devaluing kids native languages by always saying they are wrong and correcting them with "proper" English. My co-op is always doing this to the kids in my class but she has never talked about what the difference is or that what they are saying isn't wrong, but isn't right in certain situations .In one of my other classes we are reading a book about grammar by Constance Weaver. In her book she talks about an activity that you can do with the kids in your classroom to help show them that it is not that they are wrong, but that for certain situations standard English is the correct thing to use. The activity talks about using formal and informal speech in order to show kids when it is appropriate to use standard English. In the activity she even incorporates a grammar lesson in Ebonics. I think that even by learning that the way they are speaking at home or with their friends isn't wrong and has its own grammatical rules and patterns, it will make it easier to understand that by teaching standard English we are not trying to say that their home language is wrong, but that there is a certain place for it and a certain place for using standard English.
I don’t think that the way that my cooperating teacher is trying to break her students of standard English grammatical errors would work for anything. When they say something wrong she just says, “you mean…” and then makes them say it the “proper” way. The thing is that the next day or even 20 min later they ask the same thing over again and she does the same thing as well. All she is really doing is telling them that their way of saying something is wrong and that only standard English is right. You think it would be obvious that this was not working with them.