In the wake of racial violence in urban schools and society, we question, "Can the field of urban education love blackness and Black lives unconditionally and as preconditions to humanity? What does it look like to (re)imagine urban classrooms as sites of love? As educators, how might we utilize a pedagogy of love as an embodied practice that…

High-stakes testing can be a major hurdle for individuals who know the material well, but have trouble understanding the language of the test. Many people have difficulty understanding test questions when the wording of the question is different from the language variation typically used by the test-taker. This research builds on prior research…

Teaching reading to children whose language differs from the oral language of the classroom and from the linguistic structure of academic text adds an additional layer of complexity to reading instruction. There is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that language variation impacts reading, spelling, and writing in predictable ways. In…

Many African American children make use of African American English (AAE) in their everyday lives, and face academic barriers when introduced to Standard American English (SAE) in the classroom. Research has shown that students who can adapt and use SAE for academic purposes demonstrate significantly better test scores than their less adaptable…

It is the purpose of this paper to describe how the identification of linguistic differences in Black English helped eradicate the language barrier in a rural Georgia classroom and enhanced the communication between the teacher and the students.

This study used data from questionnaires completed by teachers employed in North Carolina schools (N = 370) to determine if teachers felt that non-school-related or school-related factors served as barriers that limited the number of African American male children from participating in gifted programs. The majority of the teachers taught 3rd- to…

For scholars of literacy and educational linguistics, the years 2004 and beyond have given them cause to not only revisit racial issues 50 years after "Brown v. Board of Education," but also to revisit 25 years of language and racial politics since "the Martin Luther King Black English case." This chapter discusses what needs…