Black Students’ Linguistic Agency: An Evidence-Based Guide for Instructors and Students

hannah franz is the program associate for graduate advisement at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. in educational leadership from the College of William and Mary, an M.S.Ed. in reading/writing/literacy from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. in linguistics from North Carolina State University. She is a coauthor of The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and Beyond College (Teachers College Press, 2017), with Anne Charity Hudley and Cheryl Dickter. Email: hfranz@jkcf.org.

anne harper charity hudley is professor of education at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and professor of African and African American studies and linguistics, by courtesy. Her most recent book is Talking College: Making Space for Black Language Practices in Higher Education (Teachers College Press, 2022), with Christine Mallinson and Mary Bucholtz. Email: acharityhudley@stanford.edu.

angela rowell graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a B.A. in media studies and a minor in English. She is currently pursuing a M.S. in speech, language, and hearing sciences at San Francisco State University. Her involvement with the Students’ Right to Their Own Writing project aligns with her goal of learning how to uplift the language, voices, communication systems, and stories of Black students. Email: angelaarowell@gmail.com.

sierra j. johnson is a linguistics major at College of William and Mary. Her main academic interests involve language variation, language attitudes, and how they intersect with the societal constructs of race, ethnicity, and culture as well as their impact on how individuals are viewed within certain social spaces. She is passionate about this project because she advocates for increasing visibility concerning nonstandard dialects. Email: sjjohnson02@email.wm.edu.

marie tano is a Ph.D. student in linguistics at Stanford University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in cognitive science from Pomona College, with a double minor in linguistics and Africana studies. Although she specializes in sociolinguistics, she is especially interested in applying computational and psycholinguistic approaches to the question of what it means to “sound Black” as well as understanding how language is used to perform gender and sexuality. Email: mtano@stanford.edu.

michelle petty grue is an assistant teaching professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, teaching in the Writing Program and the College of Creative Studies. She enjoys teaching the diverse student population at UCSB. Her research draws on Black feminist, digital, and African American rhetorics as well as critical race/antiracist education theories to investigate diversity issues in academia. Her current research project is a digital and rhetorical analysis of Instagram-hosted, Person of Color community-formed digital archives. Email: mgrue@ucsb.edu.