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Multicultural and culturally sustaining approaches to education help educators act on two essential concepts: that each student is unique and that uniqueness is central to the academic and social development of every student. Language is a key aspect of this uniqueness, and because language is integral to culture and identity, understanding language variation and diversity is critical to education equity. All educators need knowledge and tools to honor and value students' (and their families' and communities') language differences and variations, to understand and address any language-related challenges students may face, and to support students' academic, social, and emotional development. Efforts to help all students achieve their highest potential are incomplete without an understanding that linguistic discrimination, inseparable from racial discrimination, has historically limited African Americans' access to opportunities afforded other citizens. This article focuses on linguistic variations specific to African American English and ways educators can actively and creatively support Black students.

Through teaching and research, the authors have seen the magnificent ways that Black people use language to connect people, families, and communities across the Black diaspora. When students come to school using African American English, they know that many of their relatives, friends, and neighbors speak like them. They may also know that many of their educators do not use this variety of English. The message that African American students may internalize is that educators expect them to learn a new way of communicating--and that it may be at odds with their home language and culture. Parents and caregivers may need to advocate for their children by connecting with key educators and community members--including guidance counselors, learning specialists, administrators, teachers, and doctors. Through advocacy, students' needs can be met by working together to ensure that support and resources are fully available for all Black students. This article focuses on four key educational situations where advocacy may be particularly important: (1) building reading and literacy skills; (2) accessing speech, language, and hearing services; (3) developing individualized education plans; and (4) identifying support for gifted and talented students.

Underrepresented students have less knowledge of research experiences available on campus and are less likely to feel supported by faculty than represented students. To address these issues and increase the number of underrepresented undergraduate researchers, faculty at the College of William & Mary created the William & Mary Scholars Undergraduate Research Experience (WMSURE). Community-based and participatory research methods were used to work with students in developing research questions and in collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data about their academic and personal experiences. This led to the development of academic and research advising services, workshops, faculty education, and research funding to support underrepresented students. This article evaluates the program. Results suggest that the WMSURE program has increased research opportunities and feelings of support on campus.

Professional development on issues of language and culture is often separate from professional development on issues related to STEM education, resulting in linguistic and cultural gaps in K-12 STEM pedagogy and practice. To address this issue, we have designed a model of professional development in which we work with educators to build cultural and linguistic competence and to disseminate information about how educators view the relevance of language, communication, and culture to STEM teaching and learning. We describe the design and facilitation of our model of culturally and linguistically responsive professional development, grounded in theories of multicultural education and culturally supportive teaching, through professional development workshops to 60 K-12 STEM educators from schools in Maryland and Virginia that serve African American students. Participants noted that culturally and linguistically responsive approaches had yet to permeate their K-12 STEM settings, which they identified as a critical challenge to effectively teaching and engaging African-American students. Based on pre-surveys, workshops were tailored to participants' stated needs for information on literacy (e.g., disciplinary literacies and discipline-specific jargon), cultural conflict and mismatch (e.g., student-teacher miscommunication), and linguistic bias in student assessment (e.g., test design). Educators shared feedback via post-workshop surveys, and a subset of 28 participants completed in-depth interviews and a focus group. Results indicate the need for further implementation of professional development such as ours that address linguistic and cultural issues, tailored for K-12 STEM educators. Although participants in this study enumerated several challenges to meeting this need, they also identified opportunities for collaborative solutions that draw upon teacher expertise and are integrated with curricula across content areas.

In response to the lack of culturally sustaining pedagogies for Black students in linguistics, we created an online Introduction to Linguistics course designed as part of a specially funded research program that serves Black undergraduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as well as Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). In recognition of the fact that conventional introductory linguistics courses often alienate Black students, the course was designed to center Black language and culture in every lesson. We describe the rationale for and implementation of the course, as well as the impact of the model on students and instructors. The course's Black-centered content as well as its online synchronous and asynchronous teaching model can be adapted for other teaching contexts as a way to recruit Black students into linguistics and to offer linguistics courses to students at universities, especially HBCUs, that do not have linguistics programs. The work is particularly relevant as linguists seek to be inclusive in their teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic and work toward the greater inclusion of Black people in every aspect of linguistics due to the heightened awareness of anti-Blackness in higher education and specifically in language studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including ethical collaboration in language documentation research; the exclusion of Indigenous scholars from linguistics; and requests of linguists to abandon white-supremacist conceptualizations.

This article builds on the Linguistic Society of America's Statement on Race to argue that linguistics urgently needs an interdisciplinarily informed theoretical engagement with race and racism. To be adequate, a linguistic theory of race must incorporate the perspectives of linguistic researchers of different methodological approaches and racial backgrounds and must also draw on theories of race in neighboring fields, including anthropology, sociology, and psychology, as well as speech and hearing sciences, composition and literacy studies, education, and critical interdisciplinary race studies. The lack of comprehensive and up-to-date theoretical, analytical, and political understandings of race within linguistics not only weakens research by erasing, marginalizing, and misrepresenting racially minoritized groups, but it also diminishes the impact of the entire field by devaluing and excluding the intellectual contributions of researchers of color, whose work on this topic is rarely welcome within linguistics departments. The article therefore argues for a rethinking of both linguistic scholarship and linguistics as a discipline in more racially inclusive and socially just terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how linguists (more specifically, linguists from the U.S. South) view their responsibility to advance educational equality and justice. Drawing upon insights learned from working with inclusive groups of Southern K-12 educators, the authors call upon linguists to broaden their focus and extend their engagement efforts from K-12 to the sphere of higher education. African American, Latinx, Native American, and Asian American students and faculty are particularly underrepresented in linguistics departments. These disparities require linguists to think more deeply about what linguistics is, who it is for, and who it benefits so that they might develop strategies and models for social change. This article provides theoretical discussion on these issues and offers practical strategies that linguists can use to address underrepresentation, broaden participation, and promote inclusive student achievement in higher education. With their disciplinary insights into communication, culture, educational equity, and linguistic justice, linguists--particularly Southern linguists--are well positioned to contribute to educational justice in ways that benefit our discipline, speakers, communities, and academia at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This article furthers the conversation about how speech-language pathologists (SLPs) can incorporate an understanding of language variation as they provide services to multicultural populations--particularly African Americans, a population that disproportionately receives speech-language pathology services yet is underrepresented within the speechlanguage pathology community. We call for moving beyond discussions of linguistic difference versus deficit that tend to largely focus on strategies to avoid penalizing dialect speakers and moving toward investigations of other cultural, social, and linguistic considerations that hold immediate and practical importance. In addition, we share insights and recommendations from 2 SLPs with training in sociolinguistics who draw upon an understanding of language variation, particularly African American English (AAE), in their work. Conclusions: There are a number of methods that SLPs can use in their practices that incorporate knowledge about AAE to empower African American clientele. To further benefit this population, there must be an increase in the percentage of SLPs who speak and use AAE and the percentage who apply sociolinguistic understandings of language variation to assessment and intervention. More research is needed that explores SLPs' experiences working with clientele who speak AAE and other varieties-notably, how they perceive and understand AAE and how this impacts their practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As sociolinguistic research has revealed, language variation can have concrete implications in the classroom. Students who speak nonstandardized varieties of a given language may face linguistic hurdles at school, and neither students nor teachers leave their language patterns at the door when they enter their classrooms. Accordingly, there is a need for scholars to work closely with educators to explore the real-world educational implications of language differences. This audio feature collects the voices and insights from 14 pre- and in-service teachers from a range of grade levels and content areas in Virginia and Maryland who have worked with sociolinguists in week-long professional development workshops. Teachers discuss how learning about language variation positively affected their teaching practices and their relationships with their students and how they have gained the information and confidence to be able to work more effectively with culturally and linguistically diverse students in their classrooms. They also share creative and insightful strategies and practices that they have used in their classrooms to engage with their students and to support linguistically informed teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]