This article seeks to explore the complexities of Black subjectivities as written and illustrated by comic book creators of color who wrestle with the enigmatic qualities of blackness as they write within and beyond racial imaginaries and social realities. I call these works "critical race comics" to highlight their explicit engagement…

This article analyzes several online performances from the Black Lives Matter movement for the ways they utilize and blend standard academic literacies and African American rhetoric. These performances are discussed as pedagogies of possibility that meet and exceed the common core standards. This talk also points up the crucial roles that racial…

Through this piece, we draw upon critical race theory and Collins's Afrocentric feminist epistemology to highlight the importance of storytelling as a knowledge validation system in Black women's language. We illuminate and analyze a dialogic performance of two Black female literacy scholars in a coffee house "sipping tea," sharing…

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…

This article focuses on the development and experiences of two African American Language speakers who are on the precipice of biliteracy and bilingualism. Using a composite counterstory that integrates samples of the girls' language during daily routines as a critical race theoretical analytic tool, we examine their language virtuosity as…

Multilingualism is an international fact of life and increasing in the United States. Multilingual families are exceedingly diverse, and policies relevant to them should take this into account. The quantity and quality of a child's exposure to responsive conversation spoken by fluent adults predicts both monolingual and multilingual language and…

This article argues that mid-1970s discourses of literacy crisis prompted a problematic shift toward color-blind ideologies of language and literacy within both disciplinary and institutional discussions of writing instruction for "high-risk" minority students. It further argues that this shift has continuing import for contemporary…

The purpose of this study was to examine how classroom conversations about diverse dialects of English can provide a useful foundation for critical language and literacy instruction for students who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and other stigmatized dialects. This article describes a weeklong unit on language variety that…

The purpose of this study was to examine the language ideologies--the assumptions about the nature of language, language variation, and language learning--reflected in a widespread daily editing activity often known as Daily Oral Language or Daily Language Practice. Through a yearlong ethnographic study of grammar instruction in three urban,…

Literacy education in Jamaica lacks an officially accepted policy and methodology for teaching creole speakers. This has led to a low literacy level across the population. The distinctive features of Jamaican Creole are highlighted in this article in order to give theoretical and pedagogical insights to literacy teachers. (VM)

A study focused attention on the academic personas acquired by two AAVE-oriented (African American Vernacular English) beginning writers as reflected by their speech in informal settings and the style they employed in academic tasks. The study explores the degree to which literacy experiences (home and school) affect students' lives. It was guided…

Via a Speak Aloud and Write protocol methodology, this study investigated the characteristics of the wording formulation process of a select group of 7 African American students in freshman composition who claimed nonstandard features were active at least 30% to 40% of the time while they composed their papers. Control of rhetorical context was…