Some argue that supporting minoritized students' "academic language" (AL) development fosters equity in education. Others contend that AL is hegemonic, and that attempts to teach it perpetuate inequities across racial, ethnic, social class, immigrant, and related sociocultural and linguistic student differences. In this article, we frame…

This article addresses the importance of supporting specific language practices of emergent bilingual students in classroom settings that are tied to the development of disciplinary knowledge. The author focuses on explanatory talk support in teaching by contingent responding and encouraging children to make meaning of mathematics concepts and…

In this article, we show how close attention to language throughout a socio-scientific investigation supports upper elementary Arabic-speaking students to learn English while participating in valued disciplinary practices in science. Engagement in reading and writing with a focus on language also enables them to bring critical perspectives to the…

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…

The definitions of "academic language" available to teachers and teacher educators often invoke generalized assumptions about the supposed gap between complex, discipline-specific forms of language and the everyday language of Latina/o/x students. In this article, we advance an alternative hypothesis -- that Latina/o/x students boast…

Among the many approaches proposed for closing opportunity and achievement gaps is supporting student's academic language development. Often, however, instructional approaches that are more familiar to teachers, such as helping students learn new vocabulary, are prioritized over more complex and less familiar explorations into disciplinary…

In this article, I argue that academic language is a raciolinguistic ideology that frames racialized students as linguistically deficient and in need of remediation. I propose language architecture as an alternative framing of language that can serve as a point of entry for resisting these raciolinguistic ideologies in both research and practice.…

Although there is now a good deal of research on whether, when, and how to teach Academic Language (AL), we still have a limited understanding of the various ways and reasons we might teach AL to refugee-background students enrolled in U.S. schools--and how to do so without devaluing their existing repertoires, resources, and lived experiences. A…

This article synthesizes multiple studies that we have conducted on language and literacy practices among Latinx siblings at home, and identifies implications for teaching. Examples from micro-ethnographic discourse analyses provide rich vignettes of sibling interactions within Mexican and Central American immigrant households to illustrate how…

Working to combat, speak back to, and shift discourses concerning issues of genders, sexuality/ies, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and 2-spirit (LGBTQ2) identities in school classrooms and curriculum, this article highlights the capacity in building more inclusive elementary classroom spaces through tinkering in teacher education.…

This article presents the findings from a national study on the experiences of educators with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) topics in elementary schools and recommendations for practice based in our experiences as classroom teachers and teacher educators. Using responses to open-ended questions that were part of a…

This article proposes a reflective process to increase awareness of heteronormativity in student-teacher and student-student interactions. I used 3 theoretical lenses -- queer, feminist, and intersectional -- to identify and analyze how gender, sex, and sexuality norms influenced interactions in an after-school reading club. This research site was…

In this article, a teacher educator and a New York City elementary public school teacher share insights from a yearlong collaboration whereby they worked together to interrupt normative pedagogical practices regarding gender, sexuality, and interrelated identities within the context of a second-grade classroom. Bridging the typical disconnect…

The heterogendered cultural discourse that privileges heterosexuality and normalizes sexual and gender binaries damages the science knowledge and opportunities to engage in science learning that children experience in elementary school science. This article analyzes a typical science lesson on crayfish to show how the heterogendered obsession with…

This article provides insights into what is possible when a bilingual teacher education program provides support for teachers who want to discuss lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) topics in their classrooms. This study is set in Southern Arizona, a bilingual, multicultural community in predominantly Mexican American…