Social (in)justice and the deficit foundations of oracy

Cushing, Ian ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1752-1411 (2024) Social (in)justice and the deficit foundations of oracy. Oxford Review of Education. ISSN 0305-4985

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Abstract

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 workingclass 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. Firstly, I examine the language ideological foundations of how oracy was first theorised in 1960s academic scholarship, showing how it was informed by a flawed theory of language rooted in deficit and dichotomous framings which essentialised working-class, disabled, and racialised children as producing less legitimate language than their wealthier, able-bodied, and white peers. Secondly, I show how the contemporary oracy agenda relies on a flawed theory of change in its assumptions that social justice can be unlocked by marginalised children making tweaks to their language. I argue that this theory of change frames social justice as a matter of individualised remediation and thus obscures the structural dimensions of inequality. I show how these logics are embedded in purportedly progressive academic scholarship and guises of charitable benevolence. I call for new visions of language education rooted in radical, transformative justice.