Students bring cultural and linguistic richness to the English Language Arts classroom in the form of English language diversity; that being said, English Language Arts (ELA) education has traditionally privileged Standard American English (*SAE) and its related white culture rather than embrace the aforementioned diversity. With calls for more…

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…

This essay explores the teaching and learning of Black British literature in UK secondary schools with reference to texts that now appear on GCSE English Literature specifications. It seeks to reveal some of the issues that may arise when teaching texts that deal with race and racism while emphasising the role of racial literacy in facilitating…

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…

While adolescent foundational skills interventions can be critical levers for reading improvement, district leaders, teachers, and researchers must make complex decisions about how to evaluate their effectiveness in context. In this discussion article, we explore three issues and tensions we experienced during a 2-year research-practice…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the range of teacher perceptions and implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in South Carolina public schools. A transcendental phenomenological approach was used to explore the following research questions. RQ1: Which CRP practices do secondary ELA teachers in public schools in…

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…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to share my personal memories and emotions of my experience as an African American, a Woman of Color, teacher-peer, teacher-researcher, student and a colonized standard American English speaker, situated in English classrooms as white teachers teach African American literature from a white gaze. I concur with…

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…

Historically, middle grade schools doled out the harshest and most exclusionary discipline to adolescent African American males. African American males were routed along school to prison pathways at rates higher than African American females and their peers from other racial backgrounds. National conversations about exclusionary discipline…

This article investigates how playwriting served three middle school Black girls within a larger practitioner research study seeking to better understand the literate practices of girls of color. It delves into the ways that playwriting provided the girls in an afterschool writing club opportunities to explore both their knowledge and ways of…

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…

In this article, the author historicizes the argument about Black Language in the classroom to contextualize the contemporary linguistic inequities that Black students experience in English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Next, the author describes "anti-black linguistic racism" and interrogates the notion of academic language. Following…

Michèle was hurrying to class. How, she thought, could she offer the students in her African American English in Society and Schools class a method of understanding, comparing, and abstracting the studies they had been reading in class? The heuristic described in this study evolved from a desire to capture aspects of several seminal studies that…