Historically, language instruction involving Black Language (BL) assumes a goal of eradication, particularly in school-sanctioned literacy practices. Language arts education for Black students must be liberatory, that is, antiracist and artful. The opportunities for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers to create, augment, and change the course of…

In this article, co-authors Brian Mooney, Joniesha Hickson, Aaleah Oliver, and Jahvel Pierce discuss language, race, and education with author April Baker-Bell. Speaking from their perspectives as teachers, scholars, researchers, poets, spiritual leaders, and cultural workers, their experiences address the importance of sustaining a Black…

Approaches to teaching critical language awareness are gaining traction in urban schools with culturally and linguistically complex student populations; however, what teachers need to know to enact these pedagogies is not well understood. Using a lens of pedagogical content knowledge for critical language teaching, this study examines what happens…

This study explores a psychosocial concept coined by the author referred to as "Urban Critical Literacy" (UCL). UCL is an emergent four-step strategy employed by five African American young men as they navigated their cultural worlds of home and school in an urban setting. Critical literacy is the theoretical conceptual framework that…

This study investigates the learning of linguistic structures associated with African American English (AAE) among four non-AAE-speaking teachers of AAE-speaking students. It considers implicit and explicit learning/development of a second dialect in two novel ways. First, it focuses on the understanding of a socially-stigmatized dialect by…

This article addresses teachers' uptake of Black and Latina/o youth linguistic repertoires within the official space of an English Language Arts (ELA) classroom and how youth respond to corrective feedback that is focused on the form of their messages, rather than their function. Corrective feedback offered by one Latina teacher indexed larger…

African American English has a rich oral tradition, with identifiable features across all 5 systems of language--phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. This is an investigation of the extent to which pragmatic features of African American oral storytelling traditions are apparent in the written stories of African American…

The purpose of this study was to examine how a White teacher (Gina) responded to African American Language (AAL) in ways that situated students as valuable members of a high school English classroom. This 5-month qualitative study in a 10th grade classroom drew from positioning theory and discourse analysis to make sense of classroom interactions…

This article responds to two long-standing dilemmas that limit the effectiveness of language education for students who speak and write in African American Language (AAL): (1) the gap between theory and research on AAL and classroom practice, and (2) the need for critical language pedagogies. This article presents the effectiveness of a critical…

The field of literacy studies has seen decades of calls for scholarship and instruction that address issues of dialect diversity, identity, and power but few empirical studies that document students' engagement in classroom activities designed to address these issues. The goal of this article is to describe how three bidialectal African American…

This article describes the perspectives of bidialectal African American adolescents--adolescents who speak both African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Standard English--on spoken language expectations in their English classes. Previous research has demonstrated that many teachers hold negative views of AAVE, but existing scholarship has…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

Finding a way to integrate authentic learning experiences and explicit instruction is essential if teachers are to adapt to the current policy environment while at the same time acknowledging the rights of students to determine their own goals for literacy learning. Toward this end, the author presents a case study of one student's development as…

The concept of "revoicing" has recently received a substantial amount of attention within the mathematics education community. One of the primary purposes of revoicing is to promote a deeper conceptual understanding of mathematics by positioning students in relation to one another, thereby facilitating student debate and mathematical…

The use of African American vernacular English among a group of secondary school students who participated in a digital media course as part of a pre-college summer enrichment program is examined. The study has highlighted the utility and importance of creating socially and culturally relevant spaces for technology teaching and learning and also…