Tasha Austin PhD [she]

Spencer Small grant team - T. Austin, D. James & A. Raysor smile for Zoom photo

"Thank you for submitting your proposal, “They is me!”: Redefining ‘Traditional’ Students Through Narratives of Black World Language Teachers, for presentation at the 2026 American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference. We are pleased to inform you that your submission has been selected for inclusion in the conference program as an individual paper. As a reminder, you submitted this proposal for the following conference: Chicago: March 21-24 2026 This year we received more than 2400 proposals for consideration. Decisions were reached after an extensive review process involving 54 strand coordinators, 647 peer reviewers, and the conference organizing committee. Due to the limitations placed on us by scheduling and space, the acceptance rate for submissions was quite competitive. So, warm congratulations! Look for more information after November 6, 2025."

Indescribably proud to lead this team! @spencerfoundation.bsky.social study on Black WL teachers accepted to AAAL 2026 in Chicago!

Aminah Raysor & @queendomteaching.bsky.social are brilliant emerging scholars. Let's hear it for them!👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿
#TeacherEducation #LanguageEducation #BlackWorldLanguaging

The difference between good and bad languaging is the evaluator’s knowledge of said practice’s history and context

Reminder from your friendly neighborhood educational linguist:

#CheckYourself #YourSlipIsShowing #BlackWorldLanguaging
#AcademicChatter

Thanks to the brilliant editors and to Erin Kearney for collaborating on this with me.

DM for a copy!

#AcademicChatter #WorldLanguages #Interculturality #TeacherPreparation #BeyondCurriculum #PedagogicalInnovation #InstructionalDesign

increasing the likelihood of sustained interest and robust cultural representation in WL instruction.

We know that Black and marginalized learners in US WLs are framed as neither home nor target cultures. WLTs have the power to change that through design and pedagogy choices!

Having just returned from 🇪🇸 after 18yrs away, I am ever more affirmed in our need for perspective-making in WLs.

WL educators can lighten the burden of acknowledging, centering and validating the experiences of those multiply marginalized /2

Holding the handbook of research in world language instruction smiling

Chapter 17: Perspective Making and Its Potential in Intercultural Learning - book open to the first page of the co-authored chapter by Erin Kearney and Tasha Austin

Our chapter on perspective-making is out! I just received my copy of the handbook of research in world language instruction and couldn’t be more excited! /1

From Mutual Aid to Hood Utopias: A Testimony on Black Communal Care By Saint Trey Wooden Before I ever learned the word mutual aid, I knew what it meant to be fed by grief that did not ask for language.  After my mother died, the world did not stop, but the bl…

thank you Dr. Bettina Love for sharing this healing in the form of a blog post.

iansamag.com/2025/08/04/f...

we got this, Black folks... and those w Black politics. we are the revolution❤️🖤💚 #CBCE25

Limited capital: a genealogy of culturelessness in (language) teacher education Black youth as ‘struggling students’ is a persistent narrative in the contemporary U.S. psyche, both preceded by and markedly displayed through the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk , which reflected code...

www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

/fin fin

I’m glad she had me show up on paper the way I do verbally. In my full stature - talkin my shit. Go read #TheMessage by Ta-nihisi Coates, Free Pal*stine and Free the good brother Chris Smalls.

/fin

Today, this brave brother from Jersey is being held captive for standing on business and trying to feed Pal*stinians who are being g*nocided with our tax dollars. 👁️DF, KKK, or whatever determined he should be the sole activist to be brutalized in this way. Go figure.

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Whether in classrooms or within corporations, through the metaphors of capital(s) vis-à-vis a framework of culturelessness, we can understand why Bezos’ attempt to highlight how Smalls does not assimilate was meant to mark him as lacking various capitals and to then portray him as an untrustworthy threat. Chris Smalls was deemed “inarticulate” and “not smart” (Reed 2020) because boundaries are drawn around language in the precise places they are drawn around personhood. In contrast, I argue that Smalls, like many of our Black youth in language education spaces, is the embodiment of progressive liberatory possibilities and that a divestment from Black cultures constitutes a net loss for humanity as it tethers intellectual capacity to whiteness. The peril of working within antiBlack, culture-centric, “capitals” frameworks is that of unwittingly wasting our efforts by allowing racism to distract us (Morrison 1975). These logics demand we disprove that Black students are somehow less evolved (Flores 2013) when we should instead be occupied with addressing and countering antiBlackness (Austin 2022b; Austin and Hsieh 2021) in language education. I do not suggest that Black students be recognized as having more or different culture/capital, but rather that culture as capital be problematized altogether. Leonardo (2012) warns, “The appeal for different forms of cultural capital is a distinctly racial argument following the lead of multiculturalism, whether intended or not” (p. 442), and I have demonstrated a steady discursive reflection of market logics used to portray Black and Indigenous populations as disproportionate consumers of state resources. Former education secretary Betsy DeVos cited A Nation at Risk as recently as 2019 in support of school choice giving credence to neoliberal logics that suggest each individual climb out of their abnormal subject positions rather than simply “coasting through life” (NCEE 1983, p. 9). Whether identifying the responsibility as th…

I later connected his advocacy to the failure of *linguistic capital* metaphor arguing that not only was Smalls’ languaging *not* unintelligent, said accusations were a smokescreen for just how dangerous Black leadership that is unapologetically Black culturally is to a dehumanizing system

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I don’t know if Cuban link and Nike Air Max-wearing Christian (Chris) Smalls ever wanted to become a teacher, but he probably would’ve failed the licensure exam. It’s a bold claim, I know, but as an ex-aspiring rapper from Jersey, Smalls reminds me of the swaggy classmate you’d see kicked out and hanging with the security guard midday – everyday. Laced with much more than fronts, fitteds and durags, he has that upright ‘my moms ain’t raise no fools’ posture and boasts an exquisite linguistic repertoire which apparently only pales in comparison to his visionary leadership. If the notion of Chris conjures up caricatures of violence and street life, you too may have suffered a miseducation (Woodson 1933) the likes of which Smalls’ fellow Jerseyhead, L. Boogie, felt compelled to center in her own lyrical brilliance. Still, rather than being valued as an ideal candidate for modeling and instructing young learners, Chris would’ve likely been discounted as a potential teacher. Even Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, dismissed his capacity, calling him “inarticulate” and “not smart” (Reed 2020). Turns out, Smalls’ is smart—smart enough to lead the unionization of one of the most fiscally successful companies in modern history, right from his workplace at the Staten Island Amazon location. Who wouldn’t want Chris Smalls, someone with the capacity to both enrapture Gen Z and parlay with Bernie Sanders, teaching and leading the next generation of students?

My description to her featured Chris Smalls and the way Bezos maligned him for his use of Black languaging characterizing him as “not smart” when in reality, his brilliance allowed for him to unionize the behemoth that is Amazon

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The edTPA (Educative Teacher Preparation Assessment) obscures this racialized sense of ownership by unmarking (Mena and García 2021) academic language as a racialized register. The maintenance of white supremacy through commodifying terms like “social,” “linguistic,” and “cultural capital” (Melamed 2006), solidifies racial hierarchies by offering to the ‘unintelligible’ Black student whose access is necessarily limited to capitals of a lesser value, two options: either attempt intelligibility for the white perceiving subject (Rosa and Flores 2017), or accept pathologization (Nair et al. 2023; Privette 2021). The fundamental understanding of the capital metaphor reproduces the image of the culturally-bereft subhuman (Wynter 2003) Black student who must be given white language (Fanon 1967) and culture (Kynard 2013) or ways of being to interrupt their burdening of a benevolent nation. This pursuit of social uplift, which is cast as either the responsibility of the learners or teachers (Kynard 2013) depending upon the (con)text, counterintuitively positions Black students as valueless and perpetual consumers of more quantity and quality capital—a euphemism for humanness or whiteness (Wynter 2003). The representation of Black students in particular as receptacles for white mainstream language and culture does not reveal that the ability to occupy white subject positions or to derive social benefits from said positions directly violates the logics of the capital metaphor. Fanon cautions that “[t]he colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards” (1967, p. 18), thereby rendering Black students in U.S. schools as cultureless and their cultural ways of being as commodifiable entities disembodied from the people who perform them (Smalls 2020). This continued denial of Black humanity (Shange 2020) is evidenced by the unmarking (Mena and García 2021) of white mainstream English (Smitherman 1998) through ra…

It drew on popular academic and policy texts that undergird assessments which punish Black and racially minoritized groups who don’t traffic in yt mainstream English by gatekeeping them out of the teaching profession and especially language education

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The paper was about how the *capitals* metaphor will always perpetuate antiBlackness in that Black bodies in the U.S. formation never ceased being ‘property’ and thus, property cannot *own* property

/2

When my 2023 paper was undergoing revisions, my mentor asked me why my verbal description of it to her was different from what I’d written

/1

one of my favorite eps! feels like so long ago - evergreen relevancy! thanks for posting @wardasworld.bsky.social 💜🙏🏿📿

45-year-old Venus Williams becomes the oldest woman since Martina Navratilova to win a singles match apnews.com/article/venu...

🙏🏿📿📿📿

In 2025 let’s stop using the word denigrate to denote a reduction in value. De-nigr-ate traces its roots to the act of making something blacker. In no world, and particularly not the modern one, does Blackness reduce value. Blackness in fact constitutes the overwhelming value of the world in culture, ideas, art, what the lands that Black people steward/ed yield, and more. Next time you want a synonym for reducing value, consider: colonize or gentrify.

a public service announcement from your friendly neighborhood educational linguist. don't facilitate antiBlackness through thoughtless discourses! #LanguageMatters #Etymology #TheBlackerTheBetter #EncodingHierarchy #AcademicChatter

“The Negro in a tight place is a genius”: Black language teachers and the (re)making of [B]lack jobs Tasha Austin https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0677-5061 Abstract This chapter discusses the need for Black language scholars particularly in the role of educational linguists. It details the author’s introduction to the field and describes the vantage point of those multiply marginalized as uniquely valuable to educational linguistics. The author then introduces the raciolinguistic genealogical methodology (Flores, 2021) followed by its application in a brief study on the naturalized discourse of the Black language/teacher shortage. In taking a genealogical perspective on the discourse of Black teacher shortages, the study outlines the material distribution of both land and monies through the first and second Morrill Acts becoming the model for stratified U.S. (higher) education. Finally, the chapter concludes with an invitation for more Black/Indigenous language scholars to engage in educational linguistics to unsettle recurring discourses around “Black jobs,” who is deserving of liberal arts, (and thus, language-rich) educational opportunities, and other pressing issues in education research.

Denaturalizing the ‘Black teacher shortage’ In the tradition of Black scholars who wielded their knowledge of language and linguistics as critical resistance against anti-Black societal forces, this raciolinguistic genealogy denaturalizes discourses around the Black language/teacher shortage. It does so through drawing on literature that outlines the present-day absence of Black language/teachers (Anya & Randolph, 2019; NCES, 2025b) and connects it to programmatic misalignment that has both historically and contemporarily pushed Black advanced language learners out of their studies (Schoener III & McKenzie, 2016; Johnson, 2019; Austin, 2022). By tracing the preparation of Black teachers as funded by local and federal governmental apparatuses in the U.S., the data rather reflect a systematic denial to Black and Indigenous learners of what is considered a liberal arts education while converting their very bodies (and Indigenous land) into capital for the state.

This chapter presents a raciolinguistic genealogy of Black language/teacher education demonstrating my assertion that educational linguistics is apt for those whose experiences most acutely reflect the shortcomings of society– particularly through the apparatus of schooling as an institution. Folks at the intersections of Black, queer, poor, women and disabled groups (among others) should be overrepresented among educational linguists not only because of their being framed as “problems” within dominant society (Du Bois, 2015), but because of our position on the margins which imbues us with perspectives often invisible to the majoritized group/s (Crenshaw, 1994; Collins, 2006). Of note, teacher education replicates some of the same challenges as linguistics– it is disproportionately valuable to peripheralized groups for the potential leverage it offers in shaping the ideologies of future generations, yet remains statistically least accessible to them (Austin & Anya, 2024; Austin, 2023; Charity-Hudley, 2023; Allen et al., 2017; Milner, 2010; Sleeter, 2001). To better understand the under-realized value of Black teachers (of language, specifically) and the apparatuses that stifle their entry to the ranks, I will take a raciolinguistic genealogical approach to denaturalizing how who is suited for leisure has been racialized as white while those suited for labor has been racialized as Black in U.S. higher education. I will first highlight the intersections between the two disciplines, teacher education and linguistics, then unpack my application of the critical educational linguistics methodology that befits the analysis –raciolinguistic genealogy (Flores, 2021), and finally present the findings of my analysis of language teacher education and its relationship to “[b]lack jobs” in the modern U.S. formation.

The Black language/teacher shortage when narrated within the larger discourse of US higher education, does not reflect shortage, but rather, refusal.

So proud of this handbook chapter & sharing as I think the value of it cannot afford to be delayed. Reach out for more info!

#TeacherEd #LanguageEd

when a school has challenges w bullying they may look n2

staff
policies
students
communities

rarely do they interrogate materials

if the 'scramble for Africa,' 'manifest destiny' & 'we're all immigrants' predominate in lessons, the kids are demonstrating proficiency

bullying is your curriculum.

nothing more concerning than work (with robust institutional support, no less) that focuses on the existence, proliferation and proficiency of a language while

never...

not once...

centering the well-being of the *people* and *communities* who use the language.

“In this new regime, academic freedom is a liability. Expertise is viewed as arrogance. Critical thinking is rebranded as subversion. The result is a hollow university, one that looks real from the outside but is dead on the inside.”

educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2025/05/13/t...

With this understood, it is no longer sufficient to view the question of African speaking European languages as a function of cognitive skills, physical age, approximation to whites relationship to specific tasks and so forth. Admittedly, these are issues to consider, but none go to the heart of the matter. The real question is not how difficult was it for Africans to learn English words? Rather the truly important queries are, what did it mean to the African to hear and at some point repeat words associated with this captures? What did it signify to the African to be expected to learn an embrace concepts which further concretized his condition of social death? What was it like to have the world renamed, redefined and reimagined for him? Sober reflection leads to the conclusion that the African understood the political nature of his predicament. And in that setting, he also understood that this new language was profoundly political. It stands to reason that he would respond in kind. (Gomez, 1998, p.171)

may my contribution to research always be encouraging folks to ask better questions. #LanguageEd #WorldLanguages #TeacherEd #BlackLinguisticReparations #EdLinguistics #Multilingualism #SLA #Academic

💓

University of Wisconsin Madison: 18th Annual Second Language Acquisition Student Symposium Keynote Speaker: Dr. Tasha Austin Labor, Leisure and Language: Towards world languages for Black linguistic reparations The present climate of U.S. public education has placed the access to a general course of study in the public discourse at levels unseen in recent decades. This discourse centers on the privatization of K-12 schooling, the policing of federal funds with regard to education research, and the place of nationalism in compliance measures tied to federal resources. World language (WL) education access, however, has not been prevalent in these discourses at the same levels unless attention is directed to the years preceding the 2025 presidential election. The replacement of liberal arts with vocational-oriented programming, WLs with computer science or artificial intelligence-driven instruction, and the elimination of full departments of WLs have steadily taken place prior to the larger sweeping changes of the past months. How has the steady divestment from WL study and the diminishing expectation of a liberal arts education set the stage for the present attempt at overhauling U.S. public education? This talk will explore the genealogical implications of those discursively framed as worthy of language study since the colonial era (e.g. propertied white men) of the formation of the U.S. It will trace the framing of those suited for leisure as opposed to those suited for labor (e.g. enslaved/liberated African[s] Americans) and the ways in which both public and private funding has been distributed along racialized lines. Further, it will trace these discourses to the current era of executive orders and normalized elitist conceptions of WL study. Finally, it will conclude with recommendations for WLs as a site for Black Linguistic Reparations (Austin & Anya, 2024) through ...

#LanguageEd #TeacherEd #WorldLanguages #EdLinguistics #TeacherPreparation #BlackWorldLanguaging #Raciolinguistics #Genealogies

Grateful for this opportunity and looking forward to communing with the good folks at UW Madison!

Title: “Black children are gifted at learning languages – that’s why I could do TBLT”: inclusive Blackness as a pathway for TBLT innovation Abstract: This paper presents a case study of a Black Spanish-language teacher and her 4th-grade students using Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) six years after a teacher-training program. We describe the program and the teacher’s understanding of tasks and TBLT. Using a bottom-up approach, we then explore the teacher and students’ implementation of TBLT six years later in a socioeconomically resilient 4th-grade classroom in Miami, Florida, where 95 % of the students are Black. Task-as-process was assessed with classroom observations, handouts, task outcomes, and interviews. Findings revealed that the teacher continued using TBLT, highlighting both its opportunities and challenges. Opportunities were driven by her beliefs, reliance on “Black students’ linguistic gifts,” and access to sample tasks...

so proud of this collaborative work! here's @melissabaralt.bsky.social @clemonsaris.bsky.social & my study on TBLT Spanish instruction with young learners. the possibilities for WL teaching are endless when Black cultural value is assumed❤️🖤💚
www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi... [dm us for copies]

ACTFL research SIG early career award webinar Friday, April 4th at 1pm CST. Dr. Tasha Austin (University at Buffalo) Oral Histories of Black World Language Professionals. ACTFL members can register at MyACTFL

Join me for a research talk this Friday April 4 at 2pm EST via webinar

Thanks to the Spencer Foundation, and to my brilliant team, Dr. Michele Foster, Dawnavyn M. James and Aminah Raysor for making this possible!

#TeacherEducation #WorldLanguages #BlackWorldLanguaging #LanguageEducation

We need to tread eugenics with the seriousness we treat the most vile forms of bigotry because eugenics is what turns those bigotries into action items.

yess!

so exicted to engage with @drpatriannsmith.bsky.social , Dr. Shondel Nero, Dr. Lakeya Afolalu all facilitated by @proferandolph.bsky.social

more details here: www.aaal.org/2025-austin-...

hope y'all will come through!