At the start of the pandemic, a lot of talk occurred about reimagining education, especially since the inception of schooling in America is not built for Black children. Research has examined the violence against Black children in schools, not to mention the double pandemic that they are experiencing with COVID-19 and the country's history of…

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the harmful effects of native speakerism in English language teaching, including how perceptions of native speaker status are deeply intertwined with race and national identity. Recently, scholars have begun to investigate how teacher training programs might push back on native speakerism by…

This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard,…

As racial tensions and reports of violence have become prominent in news and social media, U.S. society has been responding, struggling, and changing. This complex political and social situation can be particularly confusing for international students studying at U.S. universities. English language teachers are especially well positioned to create…

As social justice-oriented teachers and teacher educators, it can seem as if we are fighting a losing battle against neoliberal education policies designed to disrupt and dismantle our field. In this article we draw upon traditions of critical race theory, counterstorying, and critical hope to examine the complex realities of contemporary teacher…

Reading and reflecting upon ethnically unfamiliar literature can provide opportunities for teacher candidates to critically examine assumptions of self and other relative to racial, cultural, and linguistic identities. However, ethnically unfamiliar literatures can be difficult for readers to understand and appreciate due to the aesthetics they…

Given the prevalence of popular media in the lives of young children today, early childhood teacher education stands to benefit from fostering critical media literacy practices. Through the use of critical media literary practices, early childhood teacher educators can facilitate a process whereby preservice teachers learn how to critically…

This essay explores Black male literacy practices as institutional critique at a large Midwestern land grant university. Through documenting a student's process of reinstatement at his university, I demonstrate how vernacular perspectives, language, and networking strategies are used for developing self-efficacy and critical literacies. Black…

The dialects that college students speak represent a type of diversity that can influence many elements of their experiences in college, including academic experiences. In this study, we examined the influence of speaking a stigmatized dialect on academic experiences for White and African American students (both male and female) from rural…

Speakers of stigmatized varieties are often judged as less educated and less competent than speakers of prestigious varieties. This can have profound effects on speakers' academic achievement and language assessment in schools. Linguists' efforts to destigmatize AAVE have included providing commentary in media outlets, publishing scholarly works,…

The 1974 Conference on College Composition and Communication's (CCCC) resolution declaring "Students' Right to Their Own Language" (SRTOL) defends the rights of students and all other writers to use different varieties of English (see Committee on CCCC Language Statement, 1974). In addition, the 1988 CCCC adoption of the National…

This study investigates how the attitudes of 60 Korean university students towards five varieties of English are affected by the identification of the speaker's nationality and ethnicity. The study employed both a verbal guise technique and questions eliciting overt beliefs and preferences related to learning English. While the majority of the…

Grounded in literature on the miseducation of students whose native varieties of English differ most noticeably from the standard academic variety (Delpit 2006; Labov 1972a; Rickford 1999; Smitherman 1999; Wolfram, Adger, and Christian 1999; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 2006), this dissertation examines the links between the sociolinguistic…

This study explores the epistemology present in hip-hop music and its reflection in the writing of one African American student in a postsecondary transitional English class. An integration of hip-hop and academic literacy practices in the student's essay challenges the supremacy of a "standard" academic English and deficit perspectives about…

As my colleagues have indicated, the thrill and value of qualitative assessment is that it let us loose to speak and dig into the questions that we had to keep silenced during rubric-based assessment. It allowed us to value our many questions about student writing and pedagogy. As we voiced our questions and discussed them vigorously we began to…