Ian Cushing
Biographic Data
| ID | 738356 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ian Cushing |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ian |
| FAMILY NAME | Cushing |
| SIGNATURE | CUSHING I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brunel University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1752-1411 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 84 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Imagining and anticipating institutional linguistic justice in schools
Linguistic justice as a named concept in applied linguistics and related fields receives a growing amount of scholarly attention, especially concerning educational contexts. Yet use of the term often relies on theories of change which frame pedagogical interventions and diversity training as a solution for achieving linguistic justice, typically overlooking the need for structural and institutional transformation. Here, I draw on the speculative …
An oracy framework for England’s schools: Linguistic justice edition
It is September 2028. All schools in England have just started teaching the new national curriculum. As part of this, they are adhering to guidance contained within a new oracy framework, named as a core recommendation of the 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review Final Report. In this article we project into the future to offer a vision and an edition of what an oracy framework can look, feel, and sound like when it is anchored in and attentive t…
Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy
Oracy is a hot topic in England's education landscape, increasingly deployed as part of a bipartisan theory of social justice which claims that improved abilities in spoken language can afford working-class and racialised children a route out of the economic and racial inequalities they experience. In this article, I reject these logics, making two main arguments. First, I examine the language ideological foundations of how oracy was first theori…
The sound of misbehaviour: Deficit thinking and language policing in school discipline policies
What does ‘misbehaviour’ sound like? This article answers this question by analysing 563 behaviour policies from the 34 largest multi-academy trusts in England, contextualising this within a long history of deficit thinking which perceives marginalised families as lacking adequate language and discipline. Combining insights from anti-deficit perspectives and language ideologies, I interrogate the co-construction of ‘good language’ and ‘good behav…
These reforms have teeth’: The affective dimensions of teacher education policy enactment
The affective dimensions of education policy enactment have often received less attention in the research literature, especially regarding teacher education policy. This article reports on a study of the affective responses of university‐based teacher educators in England to the significant initial teacher education reforms of 2019–2022: the Core Content Framework and the Market Review, and the associated inspection regime. Using data from focus …
Follow the Word Gap: The Social Life of a Deficit Concept
This article uses a ‘follow the thing’ methodology to trace the trajectory of the so‐called word gap from its original conception in 1990s US academic knowledge production through to a teacher education programme and three schools in the north of England, in the mid‐2020s. It focuses on one teacher's first encounters, reproduction, and ultimately rejection of the word gap. Far from an individual narrative, I use this example to tell a broader sto…
A response to Brown
This rebuttal to my work is coming from a different perspective about language, race, and social justice.In response, I focus on how the rebuttal fails to address the core critique I have of the tiered vocabulary framework: that its very origins lie in deficit perceptions of working-class Black children and their alleged linguistic inferiority.I show how the rebuttal mischaracterises genealogical work and a raciolinguistic perspective, and instea…
Tiered vocabulary and raciolinguistic discourses of deficit: From academic scholarship to education policy
Tiered vocabulary is a pervasive concept in academic scholarship, education policy, and schools. It involves placing individual words into hierarchically arranged tiers, based on their apparent simplicity, sophistication, utility, and complexity, with these categorisations used to determine which words carry value in the classroom. In this article I conduct a genealogy of tiered vocabulary and argue that it is a raciolinguistic ideology which fra…
An anti-racist English education
In this conceptual article we offer a vision and a manifesto for an anti-racist English education, focusing particularly on language. Locating our work with anti-racist efforts in the UK, we conduct a brief historical reflection of these efforts, before turning our attention to the current politico-economic context and making a case for the urgent need for English teachers and teacher educators to commit to anti-racism within their work. We then …
Race, language and (In)equality
“I know that it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can sh
Where two worlds meet: Language policing in mainstream and complementary schools in England
We compare language policing in two educational contexts in England: mainstream schools and complementary schools. We draw on a varied dataset (policy documents, in-class observations, interviews) collected from mainstream schools and Greek complementary schools in London. We find similarities in how the two types of schools control, regulate, monitor and suppress the language of school students. Both settings hierarchise standardised and non-sta…
Teachers Challenging Language Discrimination in England’s Schools: A Typology of Resistance
Recent media coverage and academic scholarship has repeatedly demonstrated that language discrimination is embedded and normalised in England's schools. We consider language discrimination as a structural phenomenon underpinned by language ideologies which frame the language practices of racialised and working-class communities as deficient. In this article we report on project where we worked closely with a group of teachers who identified as cr…
The knowledge-rich project, coloniality, and the preservation of whiteness in schools: A raciolinguistic perspective
Since the early 2010s, education policy in England has been shaped by so-called knowledge-rich ideologies of curriculum design, built around a purportedly essential body of knowledge which all children must be taught if they are to succeed in school and experience upward social mobility. The knowledge-rich project is underpinned by a colonial, missionary and conservative narrative that the homes of working class and racially marginalised families…
Spring 2024 Special Edition (Vol. 58, Issue 1) Race, language and (in)equality
Language has always played a central part in the crafting and maintenance of racial inequalities in English education. Building on long histories of anti-racist work and activism, scholars have hig
Word rich or word poor? Deficit discourses, raciolinguistic ideologies and the resurgence of the ‘word gap’ in England’s education policy
Educational linguists across England and the USA have long critiqued deficit-based language ideologies in schools, yet since the early 2010s, these have enjoyed a marked resurgence in England’s education policy as evident in discourses, funding, and pedagogical materials related to the so-called ‘word gap.’ This article conceptualizes the word gap as a realization of raciolinguistic ideologies in which the language practices of racialized, low-in…
Sonic Surveillance in the School: Visual Representations of Language Policing
Challenging anti-Black linguistic racism in schools amidst the ‘what works’ agenda
Education policy in England’s schools is driven by the ‘what works’ agenda, characterised by interventions claiming to be scientifically objective and evidence-led. In this article I show how what works interventions reproduce anti-Black linguistic racism because to be perceived as someone who is ‘working’, racialised children must assimilate their language practices towards idealised whiteness. I present case studies of two teachers working in l…
Miss, can you speak English?”: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language oppression in initial teacher education
Racism is pervasive within the lives of racially minoritised pre-service teachers in England, but little work has explored how perceptions about language feature here. Based on interviews and workshops with 26 racially minoritised pre-service teachers, I describe their experiences of language oppression whilst on school experience placements, where they were instructed by mentors to modify, flatten, and completely abandon their ways of talking if…
Una perspectiva raciolingüística desde el Reino Unido
En 2023, me invitaron a dar una charla sobre el resurgimiento del pensamiento deficitario en las escuelas de Inglaterra y cómo las políticas educativas contemporáneas reproducen ideologías raciolingüísticas, las cuales enmarcan las prácticas lingüísticas de les niñes racializades y de clase trabajadora como si estuvieran sufriendo de carencias debilitantes. Después de la charla, un profesor blanco comentó que el pensamiento deficitario trataba má…
A raciolinguistic perspective from the United Kingdom
In 2023, I was invited to give a talk on the resurgence of deficit thinking in England's schools, and how contemporary education policies reproduce raciolinguistic ideologies which frame the language practices of working-class and racialised children as suffering from debilitating absences. After my talk, a White male professor commented that this was more about class than race, and that sociolinguistic scholarship focusing on race risked downpla…
The (white) ears of Ofsted: A raciolinguistic perspective on the listening practices of the schools inspectorate
England has had a schools inspectorate since 1839, first in the form of Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI), and since 1992, in the form of the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted). The inspectorate, a workforce made up of a majority of white inspectors, conduct regular inspections of all state schools in England, producing reports which comment on various aspects of educational provision, including teachers' an…
Exploring primary and secondary students’ experiences of grammar teaching and testing in England
This article reports on data generated from focus groups held with primary and secondary school students in which they were asked about experiences of grammar teaching and testing in the context of post-2010 reforms in England. Data from these focus groups were triangulated with a bricolage of other data, including fieldnotes, teacher surveys, pedagogical materials and government-produced policy documents. Our findings show that, in spite of diff…
Policy Mechanisms of the Standard Language Ideology in England’s Education System
This article examines textual traces of the standard language ideology within current education policy in England, focusing on post-2010 reforms which are characterised by a (re)shift towards conservatism, discipline, and standards. Using tools and methods from critical stylistics and the critical discourse analysis of language policy, I interrogate a number of mechanisms which textually reinforce and reproduce the standard language ideology: cur…
Language, discipline and ‘teaching like a champion’
This article presents an analysis of various language policy mechanisms currently circulating in secondary schools in England, with a particular focus on those that intermingle ‘language’, ‘standard English’ and ‘discipline’. Although the connections between language, ideology and behaviour are well established within critical educational linguistics, this has not been explored in relation to current education policy in England, which is characte…
(Issue 3) Special Issue: Grammar in schools: politics, policies and pedagogies
Grammar in schools has a long and complex history associated with a broad range of policies and pedagogies, and typically bound up with politics and top-down interventions. Recent debates have focu
Say it like the Queen’: The standard language ideology and language policy making in English primary schools
This article presents an analysis of the standard language ideology within a corpus of school-designed language policy documents from 264 primary schools in England. It examines the processes by which standard language ideological concepts (e.g. ‘Standard English’, ‘correctness’, ‘hegemony’) get textually manifested in school policies, and how these are intertextually and interdiscursively shaped by the broader educational policy context that tea…
The (white) ears of Ofsted: A raciolinguistic perspective on the listening practices of the schools inspectorate
England has had a schools inspectorate since 1839, first in the form of Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI), and since 1992, in the form of the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted). The inspectorate, a workforce made up of a majority of white inspectors, conduct regular inspections of all state schools in England, producing reports which comment on various aspects of educational provision, including teachers' an…
The policy and policing of language in schools
This study investigates cases of language 'policing' as educational language policies, and the way that these are represented across different policy levels. Focusing on UK schools and using discursive approaches to language policy as a theoretical framework, I critically examine the motivations and justifications that institutions provide for designing and implementing policies whereby nonstandardised forms are 'banned', and how these are report…
Challenging anti-Black linguistic racism in schools amidst the ‘what works’ agenda
Education policy in England’s schools is driven by the ‘what works’ agenda, characterised by interventions claiming to be scientifically objective and evidence-led. In this article I show how what works interventions reproduce anti-Black linguistic racism because to be perceived as someone who is ‘working’, racialised children must assimilate their language practices towards idealised whiteness. I present case studies of two teachers working in l…
Miss, can you speak English?”: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language oppression in initial teacher education
Racism is pervasive within the lives of racially minoritised pre-service teachers in England, but little work has explored how perceptions about language feature here. Based on interviews and workshops with 26 racially minoritised pre-service teachers, I describe their experiences of language oppression whilst on school experience placements, where they were instructed by mentors to modify, flatten, and completely abandon their ways of talking if…
Language, discipline and ‘teaching like a champion’
This article presents an analysis of various language policy mechanisms currently circulating in secondary schools in England, with a particular focus on those that intermingle ‘language’, ‘standard English’ and ‘discipline’. Although the connections between language, ideology and behaviour are well established within critical educational linguistics, this has not been explored in relation to current education policy in England, which is characte…
Grammar tests, de facto policy and pedagogical coercion in England’s primary schools
Since their introduction by the Conservative government in 2013, primary school children in England have taken a mandated grammar, punctuation and spelling assessment, which places an emphasis on decontextualised, standardised English and the identification of traditional grammatical terminology. Despite some concise criticisms from educational linguists, there remains no detailed and critical investigation into the nature of the tests, their eff…
Power, policing, and language policy mechanisms in schools: A response to Hudson
This discussion is a response to Richard Hudson's response to my article, ‘The policy and policing of language in schools’ (Cushing 2019). Hudson argues that current education policy in England generally rejects and avoids prescriptivism and sets out to illustrate this in reference to a number of policy documents. As in my original article, I conceive of language policy as p/Political and one way in which language ideologies get turned into pract…
Teachers Challenging Language Discrimination in England’s Schools: A Typology of Resistance
Recent media coverage and academic scholarship has repeatedly demonstrated that language discrimination is embedded and normalised in England's schools. We consider language discrimination as a structural phenomenon underpinned by language ideologies which frame the language practices of racialised and working-class communities as deficient. In this article we report on project where we worked closely with a group of teachers who identified as cr…
Sonic Surveillance in the School: Visual Representations of Language Policing
A raciolinguistic perspective from the United Kingdom
In 2023, I was invited to give a talk on the resurgence of deficit thinking in England's schools, and how contemporary education policies reproduce raciolinguistic ideologies which frame the language practices of working-class and racialised children as suffering from debilitating absences. After my talk, a White male professor commented that this was more about class than race, and that sociolinguistic scholarship focusing on race risked downpla…
Policy Mechanisms of the Standard Language Ideology in England’s Education System
This article examines textual traces of the standard language ideology within current education policy in England, focusing on post-2010 reforms which are characterised by a (re)shift towards conservatism, discipline, and standards. Using tools and methods from critical stylistics and the critical discourse analysis of language policy, I interrogate a number of mechanisms which textually reinforce and reproduce the standard language ideology: cur…
Resources not rulebooks: Metaphors for grammar in teachers’ metalinguistic discourse
This paper explores the way that teachers use metaphors to think and talk about grammar and what this means for classroom practice. It does so by employing conceptual metaphor theory to analyse teachers’ metalinguistic discourse, focusing particularly on construals of grammar and grammar teaching. Based on a series of interviews with 24 UK-based secondary school English teachers, the findings suggest that teachers make extensive use of metaphor, …
(Issue 3) Special Issue: Grammar in schools: politics, policies and pedagogies
Grammar in schools has a long and complex history associated with a broad range of policies and pedagogies, and typically bound up with politics and top-down interventions. Recent debates have focu
Grammar tests, de facto policy and pedagogical coercion in England’s primary schools
Since their introduction by the Conservative government in 2013, primary school children in England have taken a mandated grammar, punctuation and spelling assessment, which places an emphasis on decontextualised, standardised English and the identification of traditional grammatical terminology. Despite some concise criticisms from educational linguists, there remains no detailed and critical investigation into the nature of the tests, their eff…
Say it like the Queen’: The standard language ideology and language policy making in English primary schools
This article presents an analysis of the standard language ideology within a corpus of school-designed language policy documents from 264 primary schools in England. It examines the processes by which standard language ideological concepts (e.g. ‘Standard English’, ‘correctness’, ‘hegemony’) get textually manifested in school policies, and how these are intertextually and interdiscursively shaped by the broader educational policy context that tea…
Power, policing, and language policy mechanisms in schools: A response to Hudson
This discussion is a response to Richard Hudson's response to my article, ‘The policy and policing of language in schools’ (Cushing 2019). Hudson argues that current education policy in England generally rejects and avoids prescriptivism and sets out to illustrate this in reference to a number of policy documents. As in my original article, I conceive of language policy as p/Political and one way in which language ideologies get turned into pract…
Language Rights and Social Justice in the Classroom
Review Article| November 01 2020 Language Rights and Social Justice in the Classroom Critical Language Pedagogy: Interrogating Language, Dialects, and Power in Teacher Education By Godley, Amanda J.; Reaser, JeffreyNew York: Peter Lang, 2018. Pp. xix + 173. ISBN 978-1-4331-5303-7; $120 (pbk $43; ebk $43) Ian Cushing Ian Cushing Brunel University London Ian Cushing is a lecturer in education at Brunel University London, with teaching and research …
The policy and policing of language in schools
This study investigates cases of language 'policing' as educational language policies, and the way that these are represented across different policy levels. Focusing on UK schools and using discursive approaches to language policy as a theoretical framework, I critically examine the motivations and justifications that institutions provide for designing and implementing policies whereby nonstandardised forms are 'banned', and how these are report…
Exploring primary and secondary students’ experiences of grammar teaching and testing in England
This article reports on data generated from focus groups held with primary and secondary school students in which they were asked about experiences of grammar teaching and testing in the context of post-2010 reforms in England. Data from these focus groups were triangulated with a bricolage of other data, including fieldnotes, teacher surveys, pedagogical materials and government-produced policy documents. Our findings show that, in spite of diff…
Policy Mechanisms of the Standard Language Ideology in England’s Education System
This article examines textual traces of the standard language ideology within current education policy in England, focusing on post-2010 reforms which are characterised by a (re)shift towards conservatism, discipline, and standards. Using tools and methods from critical stylistics and the critical discourse analysis of language policy, I interrogate a number of mechanisms which textually reinforce and reproduce the standard language ideology: cur…
Language, discipline and ‘teaching like a champion’
This article presents an analysis of various language policy mechanisms currently circulating in secondary schools in England, with a particular focus on those that intermingle ‘language’, ‘standard English’ and ‘discipline’. Although the connections between language, ideology and behaviour are well established within critical educational linguistics, this has not been explored in relation to current education policy in England, which is characte…
The knowledge-rich project, coloniality, and the preservation of whiteness in schools: A raciolinguistic perspective
Since the early 2010s, education policy in England has been shaped by so-called knowledge-rich ideologies of curriculum design, built around a purportedly essential body of knowledge which all children must be taught if they are to succeed in school and experience upward social mobility. The knowledge-rich project is underpinned by a colonial, missionary and conservative narrative that the homes of working class and racially marginalised families…
Spring 2024 Special Edition (Vol. 58, Issue 1) Race, language and (in)equality
Language has always played a central part in the crafting and maintenance of racial inequalities in English education. Building on long histories of anti-racist work and activism, scholars have hig
Word rich or word poor? Deficit discourses, raciolinguistic ideologies and the resurgence of the ‘word gap’ in England’s education policy
Educational linguists across England and the USA have long critiqued deficit-based language ideologies in schools, yet since the early 2010s, these have enjoyed a marked resurgence in England’s education policy as evident in discourses, funding, and pedagogical materials related to the so-called ‘word gap.’ This article conceptualizes the word gap as a realization of raciolinguistic ideologies in which the language practices of racialized, low-in…
Sonic Surveillance in the School: Visual Representations of Language Policing
Challenging anti-Black linguistic racism in schools amidst the ‘what works’ agenda
Education policy in England’s schools is driven by the ‘what works’ agenda, characterised by interventions claiming to be scientifically objective and evidence-led. In this article I show how what works interventions reproduce anti-Black linguistic racism because to be perceived as someone who is ‘working’, racialised children must assimilate their language practices towards idealised whiteness. I present case studies of two teachers working in l…
Miss, can you speak English?”: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language oppression in initial teacher education
Racism is pervasive within the lives of racially minoritised pre-service teachers in England, but little work has explored how perceptions about language feature here. Based on interviews and workshops with 26 racially minoritised pre-service teachers, I describe their experiences of language oppression whilst on school experience placements, where they were instructed by mentors to modify, flatten, and completely abandon their ways of talking if…
Una perspectiva raciolingüística desde el Reino Unido
En 2023, me invitaron a dar una charla sobre el resurgimiento del pensamiento deficitario en las escuelas de Inglaterra y cómo las políticas educativas contemporáneas reproducen ideologías raciolingüísticas, las cuales enmarcan las prácticas lingüísticas de les niñes racializades y de clase trabajadora como si estuvieran sufriendo de carencias debilitantes. Después de la charla, un profesor blanco comentó que el pensamiento deficitario trataba má…
A raciolinguistic perspective from the United Kingdom
In 2023, I was invited to give a talk on the resurgence of deficit thinking in England's schools, and how contemporary education policies reproduce raciolinguistic ideologies which frame the language practices of working-class and racialised children as suffering from debilitating absences. After my talk, a White male professor commented that this was more about class than race, and that sociolinguistic scholarship focusing on race risked downpla…
The (white) ears of Ofsted: A raciolinguistic perspective on the listening practices of the schools inspectorate
England has had a schools inspectorate since 1839, first in the form of Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI), and since 1992, in the form of the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted). The inspectorate, a workforce made up of a majority of white inspectors, conduct regular inspections of all state schools in England, producing reports which comment on various aspects of educational provision, including teachers' an…
A response to Brown
This rebuttal to my work is coming from a different perspective about language, race, and social justice.In response, I focus on how the rebuttal fails to address the core critique I have of the tiered vocabulary framework: that its very origins lie in deficit perceptions of working-class Black children and their alleged linguistic inferiority.I show how the rebuttal mischaracterises genealogical work and a raciolinguistic perspective, and instea…
Tiered vocabulary and raciolinguistic discourses of deficit: From academic scholarship to education policy
Tiered vocabulary is a pervasive concept in academic scholarship, education policy, and schools. It involves placing individual words into hierarchically arranged tiers, based on their apparent simplicity, sophistication, utility, and complexity, with these categorisations used to determine which words carry value in the classroom. In this article I conduct a genealogy of tiered vocabulary and argue that it is a raciolinguistic ideology which fra…
An anti-racist English education
In this conceptual article we offer a vision and a manifesto for an anti-racist English education, focusing particularly on language. Locating our work with anti-racist efforts in the UK, we conduct a brief historical reflection of these efforts, before turning our attention to the current politico-economic context and making a case for the urgent need for English teachers and teacher educators to commit to anti-racism within their work. We then …
Race, language and (In)equality
“I know that it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can sh
Where two worlds meet: Language policing in mainstream and complementary schools in England
We compare language policing in two educational contexts in England: mainstream schools and complementary schools. We draw on a varied dataset (policy documents, in-class observations, interviews) collected from mainstream schools and Greek complementary schools in London. We find similarities in how the two types of schools control, regulate, monitor and suppress the language of school students. Both settings hierarchise standardised and non-sta…
Teachers Challenging Language Discrimination in England’s Schools: A Typology of Resistance
Recent media coverage and academic scholarship has repeatedly demonstrated that language discrimination is embedded and normalised in England's schools. We consider language discrimination as a structural phenomenon underpinned by language ideologies which frame the language practices of racialised and working-class communities as deficient. In this article we report on project where we worked closely with a group of teachers who identified as cr…
Multilingual Education and Policy (28 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Pedagogy (20 works) · Linguistics (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · Second Language Learning and Teaching (15 works) · Ideology (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (12 works) · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning (11 works)