"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” muses one of Shakespeare’s most well-known protagonists in a play that most of my 11th grade students read as 9th graders. Though I don’t know how many of them remember this famed line in Romeo and Juliet, I’m willing to bet—based on past reactions to Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders (2020)—that many of my juniors would agree with Juliet’s dismissal of the importance of names.
Brought into my district’s English 11 curriculum by a colleague who sought to diversify our reading list, World of Wonders exists as a series of extended metaphors in which poet and essayist Nezhukumatathil links facets of her identity to the appreciation she has for the natural world around her. In the 2020 essay collection, Nezhukumatathil explores her American upbringing as the daughter of Indian and Filipino immigrants, the connections she has to her family’s homelands, a lifetime of microaggressions, and more.
In this unit, students untangle the thematic ideas that weave the book’s essays together, and in my first year with this text, I observed how my students wrestled with the pronunciation and spelling of the author’s name when speaking or writing about her. Throughout my second year of teaching World of Wonders, I began to see how practicing the pronunciation and spelling of our author’s full name in class was a basic courtesy, a sign of respect for her and her work that few of my students seemed capable of demonstrating. It wasn’t until my third year with the book, as classes continued staring at Nezhukumatathil’s name on the front cover as they might a strange lifeform, that I couldn’t help but wonder if this specific instance of disregarding respect for a name was indicative of a bigger issue that persisted in my classroom, our school, or the world at large. After all, if a student can’t—or won’t—make space for someone’s name, how can they begin to make space for that person’s full humanity, lived experience, and right to belong?
Unanticipated Resistance to an Unfamiliar Author
The MetroWest Massachusetts school district in which I teach serves a student body that is approximately 83 percent white, a stark contrast to my former district whose student demographics were far less homogeneous at 45 percent Hispanic, 34 percent white, and 14 percent African American. When I moved to my current district, this shift in racial and ethnic student identities was reflected in the class rosters I printed on my first day, as almost all of the names were ones that I, a white American who speaks only English, had seen all my life and could pronounce correctly without a second thought. The Charlies and Aidans and Isabellas and Madisons in my district have probably never had their names mispronounced at our predominantly white institution (PWI), and I suspect that they do not often meet peers whose names give them pause.
Still, I hadn’t anticipated the resistance I would meet when I insisted that students use Nezhukumatathil’s name as we read and discussed World of Wonders. My classes had no problem with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s name or August Wilson’s name, and they picked up Jon Krakauer’s name quickly enough. But the majority of my juniors were unwilling to attempt the pronunciation of the Indian surname, referring to the best-selling author by her first name (as if they were her friends), “Nez,” or simply “she.”
Author and historian Blair Imani contends that “making the effort to learn how to pronounce other people’s names properly is a great way to show that we respect and care about them” (2021). If learning how to pronounce other people’s names is a sign of respect for their identity and humanity, then what does it reveal when someone refuses to make that effort? How might it affect someone to have their name repeatedly mispronounced, ignored, or dismissed? And what happens to a person’s sense of belonging in a space where their name—and by extension, their identity—is not recognized?
Nezhukumatathil may never know that my students hadn’t made the effort to learn her name, but I knew that failing to practice this simple act of respecting a person’s name spoke volumes—not just about their perception of others, but about how they would be perceived, and who they were becoming.
A Pattern Beyond Literary Discussions
I began to realize that this wasn’t just about one author’s name—it echoed a broader pattern. What did it mean for my students with non-Eurocentric names to see their peers stumble over, avoid, or refuse to engage with unfamiliar names? What message did that send about whose identities are acknowledged and respected? Though statistically a small population, I do have students with given names and/or surnames that are uncommon at our PWI. For example, in my first year there, I had a male student with a Hindu first name. When I asked him how to pronounce it, he responded with only the first syllable, shortening his name so it would sound more Eurocentric. For this student, using a shortened version of his name was a way for him to navigate a school culture where belonging can hinge on how easy a name is for white peers to pronounce.
I had another student who went by a name that differed from that which I had listed. Though she wrote her given name of Hispanic origin at the top of every assignment, she introduced herself using an Americanized version of the name. “Which do you prefer?” I asked her. She told me that she didn’t have a preference, that the nickname was easier. Easier for whom, I wondered? I chose to use her birth name, with the intention of signaling that her full identity was welcome in my classroom—particularly in light of research showing that when educators mock or change their students’ names, it can drastically impact students’ perceptions of their culture and identity for many years (Kohli & Solórzano, 2012).
On the first day of school last year, I discovered that our learning management system had replaced many students’ given names with nicknames submitted by their guardians. One student--a multilingual learner with limited English proficiency—struggled to find her seat because she didn’t recognize the Americanized nickname listed in the seating chart. Even after correcting her name in our records, I still hear classmates and colleagues mispronounce it, reshaping it to sound more familiar and “American.”
How might it affect someone to have their name repeatedly mispronounced, ignored, or dismissed?
When I consider these anecdotes together, a troubling pattern emerges: Name mispronunciation—and the lack of effort to self-correct mistakes—has become so normalized that some students have come to accept less than they deserve in terms of basic courtesy and recognition. Why is that? Is it because they don’t feel comfortable correcting peers and authority figures? Is it because they don’t want to “other” themselves by drawing attention to their less-than-common names at our PWI? While my students may not consciously connect their treatment of Nezhukumatathil’s name to the experiences of their own classmates, the pattern speaks volumes—and its consequences reach far beyond the pages of our classroom texts.
I don’t believe my students’ general reluctance, or in some cases, outright refusal, to say Nezhukumatathil’s name stems from a place of malice. But I do worry about the harm it causes: not only to those whose names go unspoken or mispronounced, but to the students themselves who may never learn how something as seemingly simple as saying a name correctly can affirm another person’s identity and sense of belonging. Recognizing this, I revised the introduction to my World of Wonders unit to better emphasize the importance of correct name pronunciation, hoping that this adjustment would lead to a greater sense of belonging for all the students in my classroom.
Intentional Revision as a First Step to Change
Prior to assigning the essay collection, I started the unit with an independent writing activity that required students to reflect on their names. Questions like “Does your name mean anything?”, “What does your name mean to you?”, “Do you like your name?”, and “Is there a story about where your name comes from?” guided individual reflections before students were paired together for a broader discussion about the importance of names and identities and the necessity of correctly referring to people the way they wish to be referred to. I was impressed with the resulting conversation in which students voluntarily shared personal stories about having their names mispronounced or having nicknames thrust upon them without their approval.
The lesson continued with a viewing of Gerardo Ochoa’s “Getting It Right; Why Pronouncing Names Correctly Matters” TED Talk. Ochoa, an equity-driven higher education executive, emphasizes the harm that can occur when native English speakers mispronounce or disregard linguistically diverse names (TED, 2019). While watching the video, students took note of the solutions that Ochoa offers for learning unfamiliar—seemingly difficult to pronounce—names to validate people’s identities.
I also showed my students a video clip from a 2017 event at which Uzoamaka Aduba spoke about growing up in New England with few other Nigerian-American families around. The actress shared with audiences how, as a child, she once asked her mother if she could adopt Zoey as a moniker, explaining that no one at school could pronounce her name. Aduba’s mother denied the request, saying “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoevsky, then they can learn to say Uzoamaka” (OloriSupergal TV, 2017). I used this bit of sagacity to remind my juniors that like Aduba’s childhood classmates, they could take the same principles of learning names like Mercutio and Montague during freshman English and apply them to learning our next author’s name.
The effect of this lesson ended up inspiring a significant change in the way my students referred to Nezhukumatathil (and connected to her essays) compared to previous years. Their willingness to attempt her name’s pronunciation, even when it didn’t come easily, resulted in demonstrated success for most. Though the observation of her full name is just one small part of ameliorating a situation whose effects range far and wide, it served as a meaningful entry point into conversations about respect, identity, and conditions that help all students feel a sense of belonging.
Improving School Culture Requires More
As I consider the lesson that I’ve come to refer to as my “‘What’s in a name?’ introduction,” I can’t help but feel like it is merely a drop in the bucket. Our students deserve educators who have the knowledge needed to affirm students’ identities and who have access to professional development on culturally sustaining practices. They need teachers who can model social norms and implement bystander intervention strategies that help them recognize, address, and disrupt moments of disrespect in real time.
A TED Talk and a self-reflective freewrite won’t transform the culture of belonging in my school, nor will the poster I made to display the phonetic pronunciation of Nezhukumatathil’s name (nih-zook-uh-muh-tah-teel) ensure that all of my students have their identities validated and respected. Improving an institution’s culture for learners requires much more than one lesson, much more than one teacher’s commitment to overusing a name just to increase his students’ exposure to it. But students hearing their names pronounced correctly—maybe for the first time ever in a classroom—is a decent first step to increasing the sense of belonging that our students need.
