Tasha Austin PhD [she]
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profeaustin.bsky.social
Tasha Austin PhD [she]
@profeaustin.bsky.social
97 followers 150 following 48 posts
Assistant Prof Teacher Ed| Multilingualism| Language Education
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#BlackWorldLanguaging #EducationalLinguistics #LanguageEducation #TeacherEd #Racialization #Culture
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profeaustin.bsky.social
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
August 21, 2025 at 7:12 PM
profeaustin.bsky.social
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!
August 21, 2025 at 7:12 PM
profeaustin.bsky.social
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
August 21, 2025 at 7:12 PM
profeaustin.bsky.social
www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

/fin fin
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
July 31, 2025 at 1:30 AM
profeaustin.bsky.social
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
July 31, 2025 at 1:28 AM
profeaustin.bsky.social
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.

/6
July 31, 2025 at 1:26 AM
profeaustin.bsky.social
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

/5
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…
July 31, 2025 at 1:23 AM
profeaustin.bsky.social
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

/4
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?
July 31, 2025 at 1:20 AM
profeaustin.bsky.social
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

/3
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…
July 31, 2025 at 1:19 AM
profeaustin.bsky.social
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
July 31, 2025 at 1:17 AM
profeaustin.bsky.social
one of my favorite eps! feels like so long ago - evergreen relevancy! thanks for posting @wardasworld.bsky.social 💜🙏🏿📿
July 25, 2025 at 1:06 AM
profeaustin.bsky.social
🙏🏿📿📿📿
July 23, 2025 at 12:31 PM
profeaustin.bsky.social
💓
April 19, 2025 at 4:55 AM