Purpose: Rooted in Black Language, the authors introduce the "culture flex" as a practice of engaging in social justice work. Social justice is necessary to carry out the vision of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association: effective communication as an accessible, achievable human right for all. The purpose of this tutorial is to…

Ideologies of language and race are deeply connected in the United States. Language practices associated with racially marginalized communities, such as African American Language (AAL) or Spanglish, are often heavily stigmatized. Such stigma is not grounded in empirical research on language, but rather in "raciolinguistic ideologies"…

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…

In this conceptual paper, we argue that many episodes of the so-called culture wars of the 1990s in the U.S. can be better understood as attacks on Blackness, a contention that critical race theory illuminates. To substantiate this claim, we recast key societal episodes through a Black perspective that unfolded in both formal and informal…

This article examines African American rhetorical feature use in the secondary literacy classroom. It explores the historical evolution and pedagogical implications of incorporating African American rhetorical features into classroom writing instruction. The article discusses the historical evolution of African American Language and its position…

Critical scholarship has collectively challenged multilingual spaces as operating under a Latinx/Anglo dualism that excludes the knowledge, voices, and experiences of young Black children. Therefore, we must reimagine multilingual spaces that are not only inclusive of Black languages and literacies; but also see them as vital resources that…

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…