Tasha Austin PhD [she]

@profeaustin.bsky.social

115 Followers 159 Following

Assistant Prof Teacher Ed| Multilingualism| Language Education views mine #EducationalLinguistics #LanguageEducation #TeacherEd El Barrio Mío/My Neighborhood - Out Now! https://www.authorhouse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/381070-el-barrio-mio

Image of first page of peer reviewed article: Pearls before swine: an Nkwaethnographic exploration of the language and labor of Black women scholars Authors: Tasha Austin & Warda Farah Abstract: Within the modern era, Black women have been positioned as silent laborers unworthy of just compensation for their work. This positioning reflects broader western formations that thrive on Black women depicted as takers rather than contributors to society even when they are experts and professionals in their fields. Still, the navigation and understanding of the value of Black women’s intellectual labor has yet to be explored for the way it is digitally mediated and languaged through storytelling.This nkwaethnographic study reveals how the co-authors navigate suspicions about our legitimate contributions towards co-constructed community knowledges within the white-dominated contexts in which we find ourselves. Our thematic analysis revealed that our personal, cultural and professional language expertise allowed us to leverage various linguistic modalities to bear witness to one another’s realities, invite community in lieu of isolation, and dare to emerge as authentic cultural beings across time and space. Introductory paragraph: We, Tasha and Warda, connected over social media more than three years ago, finding value in one another’s critical language approaches within our respective academic fields of world language teacher preparation and speech and language pathology (SLP). Our posts expressed different perspectives on having an ethical commitment to Black and minoritized languagers within spaces dominated by white supremacy. We sustained our connection through a series of public and private conversations that revealed a transatlantic rhythm between the United States and the United Kingdom– one of resistance to commodification regarding the labor of Black women whose work is the pursuit of linguistic justice. We were both instructing at the higher education level, but n…
Purple binding and orange array of colors on cover of 'Revolutionary Possibilities in Black World Languaging" by Tasha Austin. Pictured - artwork of two Black women facing one another against a sunset colored background. Publisher - palgrave macmillan
Spring 2026 Webinar Series: From Cultural Capital to Culture as Praxis in World Language Education Tasha Austin PhD Monday April 27 2026 5pm-6pm CST This webinar focuses on the need to denaturalize various 'capitals' which frame an economic approach to world language teaching. The webinar is based on the article by Dr. Tasha Austin titled Limited capital: A genealogy of culturelessness in (language) teacher education. The abstract for the article is included: 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 coded language encouraging a return to the pre-Civil Rights United States. This framing positioned Black students as culprits for the ills of U.S. schooling - a continuation of a history of educational policy that discursively enforces the need to defend society against 'subhuman' populations. Placing the 1983 policy report in conversation with Zwiers' Building Academic Language: Meeting Common Core Standards Across Disciplines (2013) via raciolinguistic genealogy, I problematize the ways in which texts like these reinforce discourses of Black cultures and languages as subhuman, deviant threats to U.S. society ACTFL 'Language Connects' Critical & Social Justice Approaches and African American Students SIG
AERA2026 Flyer reads: "I'm presenting" with conference dates and presenter information. April 8-12 in Los Angeles, CA. Presenter Tasha Austin 4/11 [Roundtable: co-author] Mathematics Ability as Property: Examining Mathematics Reform as a Racial Project Through Raciolinguistic Genealogy (Marriott Ground Floor Gold 2) 4/12 [Symposium: chair/presenter] Where in the World are World Languages? (Marriott 2nd Floor Platinum A)
Flyer of Dr. Austin reads "presenting at the 2026 convention & expo Dr. Tasha Austin. Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages international association. "Critical Collaborative Reflection, linguistic landscapes & material culture in teacher preparation." Wednesday March 25th, 1:00pm-1:45pm.
Flyer for AAAL 2026 Dr. Tasha Austin pictured with names of research presentations: (1) “They is Me!”: Redefining ‘Traditional’ Students through Narratives of Black World Language Teachers. [Tuesday, March 24 9:10-9:40am] (2) Leisure vs. Labor: A Raciolinguistic Genealogy on the Decline of World Language Study [Tuesday, March 24 11:20-11:50am]
Racial Justice in Multilingual Education: A New Open-Access Journal on Race, Language and Education. I've joined the RJME Review Board! Check it out at rjme.org! 1-Read and Share 2-Submit Your Work 3-Ask me Your Questions
Piscataway Public LIbrary AFrican American Read-in February 2026 Tasha Austin pictured alongside bilingual children's book 'El Barrio Mío/My Neighborhood"
Webinar Zoom boxes with webinar presenters, moderators and participants
Title of slide: Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space (2023) [Image of documentary on Zora Neale Hurston 'Claiming A Space'] Text of slide: What do you see as the challenges of being a cultural insider/outsider? How might funding produce a conflict of interest in one’s work? What is the role of linguistic fidelity in qualitative work? How do time spent, dis/honesty and compensation impact ethnography? Other?
Culture eminently eludes any form of simplification. When the colonized intellectual writing for his people uses the past he must do so with the intention of opening up the future, of spurring them into action and fostering hope. -Fanon (1961)
Dr. Betina Hsieh & Dr. Tasha Austin hug after doctoral hooding
Spencer Small grant team - T. Austin, D. James & A. Raysor smile for Zoom photo
The difference between good and bad languaging is the evaluator’s knowledge of said practice’s history and context
Holding the handbook of research in world language instruction smiling
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 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?
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…
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.
“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.
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)
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 ...
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...
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
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